Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (91 page)

The initial transition to self-government after 1080 saw the establishment of consular regimes in which individuals were enfeoffed with lordly rights on behalf of the commune, for example in Asti and Milan. Consuls were drawn from the urban elite and were often already vassals of the local bishop or count, making the transfer of power easier since they were men whom the lord trusted. Consular government had spread to many Italian cities by 1130 and was adopted north of the Alps around 1200, for example in Cologne, Lübeck and Utrecht.
⁶⁸

Consuls were soon counterbalanced by broader-based councils to stop what Napoleon, as consul of the French Republic, would do much later when he made himself dictator. A two-tier system emerged as the basic form of councils both sides of the Alps. Government was headed by a senior council (
Rat
) of 12 members or multiples thereof, led by one or often two mayors simultaneously as a further check on personal rule. Members served fixed periods, usually with a prohibition on an immediate second term, and assumed the functions previously performed by the consul or the lord’s steward. The second tier was intended to control the first and consisted of a much larger citizens’ assembly.

Italian and German Cities Compared

The process of emancipation accelerated under the Staufers, coinciding with feudalization and thus forming part of a more general development of autonomous management of more clearly defined local jurisdictions. However, the specific form of emancipation took different directions in Germany and Italy thanks to the interaction of these countries with imperial politics, as well as their social and economic conditions. Whereas Italian towns pre-dated the Empire, most of those north of the Alps were not founded until after 1120 and were consequently much more closely tied to lordly jurisdictions precisely at the time when these were being redefined along feudal lines. This highlighted some specific instances of the process of German civic emancipation. Some towns owed their freedoms to the privileges granted to attract their first inhabitants as settlers, such as Freiburg in the Breisgau. In other cases, lords lost control, because their jurisdiction was over the land where the town was built, not the houses within
it. Although the inhabitants initially paid ground rent, the value of their buildings soon outstripped that of the land. It became impossible for the lord to recover the ground, because he could not compensate the inhabitants for their ‘improvements’ to it. This helped establish the rule that residence in a town for a year and a day made a person free, greatly encouraging further immigration.
⁶⁹

The larger Italian and German towns shared a common experience as episcopal seats, and hence their connection to the imperial church and its accommodation of emperors touring the Empire. In Italy this accelerated the transfer of regalia to major cities as the Staufers hoped to secure these against often pro-papal bishops from the 1150s. Frederick Barbarossa received 2,000 silver marks annually from the Lombard League cities in the late twelfth century.
⁷⁰
Commutation of royal regalia into taxation or sale transformed a relationship based on protection and subordination into a more commercial arrangement. Renewed imperial weakness with the civil war between 1198 and 1214 provided more opportunities to wring concessions, while the dense urban landscape made it hard for either of the contending kings to find a firm footing in northern Italy. One consequence was that most cities escaped from the obligation to continue paying regular taxes.

Another was that the emperor’s efforts to win allies accelerated the differentiation amongst Italian cities as the larger ones increasingly dominated their smaller neighbours. Whereas in Germany towns generally fought against the influence of princes, large Italian centres like Milan, Cremona, Florence and Siena competed to assert influence not only over their own hinterlands, but over smaller towns further afield. This helps explain the volatility of north Italian politics, as cities changed sides, while leagues formed and fragmented depending on the prevailing military balance and the arrival and departure of imperial armies. Larger cities also benefited from the collapse of land prices following the Black Death when their citizens were able to buy more land and rights in the
contado
(the region surrounding a city). Thus, political centralization and the extension of a city’s political control over its hinterland served many of its inhabitants’ economic interests by protecting their investments and increasing the favourable trade relations with surrounding small towns and villages. By the late fourteenth century, Siena’s citizens owned over 70 per cent of the land around their city. Venice and Genoa were exceptional in enjoying secure, protected
locations with good access to the sea, allowing them to refrain initially from competition for land, and instead engage in long-distance trade with their eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea partners.
⁷¹

Many German episcopal towns also acquired self-government in the twelfth century, but their bishops still controlled their hinterlands, unlike in Italy, where these had already passed under civic jurisdiction. Well served by ministeriales, German bishops had no need to enfeoff richer townsmen as mediate vassals. Moreover, the German episcopate retained closer ties to the emperor. The Staufers and their immediate successors had no need to turn to burgher lawyers like the French kings, because the imperial church continued to supply literate clergy for royal service. The proportion of non-nobles as recipients of royal charters rose only from 2 per cent in the twelfth century to 10 per cent by about 1250. Having temporarily favoured some cities in the early thirteenth century, the Staufers swung more consistently behind lay and spiritual princes with their general charters in 1220 and 1231.
⁷²
Thereafter, the bishops of Würzburg, Bamberg, Passau and Halberstadt reasserted more direct authority over their towns, stunting their economies in the process.

This explains the growing division between territorial towns and those that the Staufers had developed on their own lands, which ultimately became imperial cities (
civitae imperialis
, or
Reichsstädte
). Episcopal towns only acquired the lesser status of ‘free’, obliging their bishop, sometimes after considerable violence, to move to a palace outside their walls.
⁷³
This promoted the development of some smaller towns as episcopal residences, for example Bruchsal (for Speyer), Brühl (for Cologne), Eutin (for Lübeck) and Meersburg (for Konstanz). Bishops retained legally protected compounds in their episcopal towns, these themselves often leading to tension, and explaining why these towns played a prominent role in the German civic leagues of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (see
pp. 570–79
). Cologne managed to secure full immediacy as an imperial city in 1288, though its shut-out archbishop continued to contest this for some time. The situation remained fluid into the later fifteenth century, because monarchs frequently pawned imperial cities, some of which slid under princely jurisdiction, such as Dortmund and Regensburg, until their status was stabilized through imperial reform and representation in the Reichstag.

Nonetheless, imperial patronage enabled many German towns to achieve their primary goal of safe access to the outside world for trade and food. They had less incentive to conquer or acquire territory, unlike in Italy, where around 25 cities each controlled at least 1,000 square kilometres, with Florence possessing 12,000 square kilometres by 1400, while Venice amassed nearly three times that across 1339–1428. By contrast, only Nuremberg came close, with 1,650 square kilometres, while Ulm had 930 square kilometres and all other German towns only 100 square kilometres or less.
⁷⁴
Despite the disparity in size between Italian and German towns, the process of asserting dominance broadly followed a similar pattern. Economic influence generally preceded political control, but was always assisted by manipulation of lordly jurisdictions and other legal privileges. For example, Nuremberg bought the castle and jurisdictions of its former imperial castellan in 1427, and within 15 years controlled 442 dependent villages and hamlets.
⁷⁵
Townsfolk also used their self-government to assert lordship over their hinterland. Affluent Italian citizens exploited their control of consular positions and city councils after 1200 to raise resources and build roads, canals and new suburbs, thus further revising relations with the countryside in their favour. They also extended credit to surrounding peasants and lords, thereby establishing an ‘informal empire’ similar to that created by nineteenth-century European financiers in Latin America, North Africa and Asia. All this was generally followed by establishing the right to name or confirm village officials and to levy taxes and recruits.

German towns did this on a smaller scale, for example extending influence by granting citizenship to people living outside their walls to create networks of dependants to rival those of the lords. The princes persuaded the emperor to prohibit these so-called ‘false citizens’ (
cives falsi
, or
Pfahlbürger
) in 1231, though the ban had to be renewed in 1356. The generally sparser rural population made territorial acquisition a less attractive proposition in Germany, where it could often be controlled commercially instead, for example by persuading the surrounding area to adopt the city’s currency and weights and measures. Rather than control space, German towns concentrated on securing access routes, for example buying castles guarding important roads or river crossings.

The Growth of Oligarchy

Italian, Burgundian and German cities shared the same tendency towards oligarchy, which was also manifest in villages to a lesser degree. The communal slogan was freedom, not equality. Freedoms were acquired as ‘immunities’, meaning exemptions from lordly exactions and jurisdictions. The commune emerged as a collective, corporate ‘lord’. Its members were personally free, but only through their association with a specific community. Their freedoms vanished if they emigrated or were expelled. Status was guarded jealously, and citizens had little incentive to extend it to others outside, except as a means of extending their own security and economic dominance. For example, in 1256–7 Bologna paid 379 masters to renounce jurisdiction over 6,000 of its inhabitants, who had to pay new taxes to the city instead.
⁷⁶
Access to citizenship remained closely controlled by each city’s council, just as equivalent bodies restricted the franchise in villages. The authorities in power remained concerned for their community’s viability, and tried to exclude those who it was felt exhausted communal resources such as meadows. This often provided another source of friction with lords, who sometimes promoted the interests of the poor or landless as a useful pool of cheap labour, whereas richer inhabitants feared them as a potential burden. Urban populations were thus highly stratified, consisting of a group of enfranchised citizens, who did not necessarily form the majority, together with an intermediary layer of tolerated ‘residents’ without full privileges, and a proletariat with few rights. All three groups were further divided, for example between established families and newcomers.

Cologne’s government was already in the hands of the ‘guild of the rich’ (
Richerzeche
) by the 1130s.
⁷⁷
Oligarchy emerged ‘naturally’ through the growing complexity and volume of business that communal institutions had to handle. Office-holding had become time-consuming and often difficult by the twelfth century, obliging towns to revise their constitutions and allow longer terms of office. Their administrations became divided between lower functionaries who were now paid and higher posts that remained honorific, supposedly in line with the public ideal of self-sacrifice, but in practice a way of restricting them to men of means. Cooption increasingly replaced direct election in selecting
councillors, partly because those in power saw their friends as ‘safe pairs of hands’, but also to discourage populism, which so often led to violence, especially in Italy. Growing social stratification and economic diversification encouraged faction and ‘party’ interests during the thirteenth century.
⁷⁸
Rival groups competed for power, attempting to exclude their rivals if they held it. Florence contained 150 fortified towers in 1200, reflecting the sense of anxiety amidst often bloody violence and vendettas. In part, the greater strife in Italian towns derived from the larger number of nobles holding property both inside their walls and outside in the contado, who transferred their feuds to civic politics. German nobles had fewer economic or political interests in towns and their urban mansions remained unfortified. However, the violence also reflected the more advanced state of Italian communal development where the stakes were often higher, as well as the greater distance from external agencies who might mediate or defuse tension, such as the emperor and imperial courts.

The trend towards oligarchy in Italian and German towns was periodically checked by popular revolts in the late thirteenth century and again during the fourteenth. Constitutions were rewritten to widen participation, especially through guilds as new corporate interest groups. Oligarchy generally soon returned, because towns remained legally as well as economically stratified, and their enfranchised population generally refused to extend citizenship to residents or the proletariat. There was little further change after the mid-sixteenth century, with most German and Swiss towns now controlled by a few families related by kinship and business interests. By the end of the eighteenth century, only 250 families in Bern were still eligible for senior public office, while just 13 held half the seats on Zürich’s city council. The pattern was generally repeated in the countryside: 29 peasants in one Swabian village held 143 public offices between them around 1580. Wealth, rank and power had become concentrated in the hands of small elites whose cooperation was sought by lords and princes.
⁷⁹