Francesco Petrarca, De Remeaiis Utriusque Fortunae Libri duo. Rotterdam: Ex Officina Arnoldi Leers, 1649. Reproduced from original held by Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries of Notre Dame.
Lactantius (Lucius Caelius Firmianus, c. 250-c. 325), a Christian apologist and rhetorician, is best known for The Divine Institutes, one of the earliest Latin attempts at systematic theology. Although he was considered a heretic by some during the Middle Ages, his prose style was admired by Renaissance humanists, who considered him a "Christian Cicero."
Lactantius was born in Roman Africa and studied there under Arnobius. A pagan by birth, he eventually converted to Christianity, although the date of his conversion is not known. The emperor Diocletian brought Lactantius to Nicomedia to teach rhetoric, but the advent of the Diocletian persecution in 303 effectively forced him to retire from teaching, and he left Nicomedia in 305 or 306. Around 317, the emperor Constantine I appointed Lactantius tutor to his eldest son, Crispus, and Lactantius took up residence at the imperial court in Trier. The date of Lactantius's death is unknown.
Lactantius's major surviving works were all written between 303 and 315. In The Workmanship of God (303—304), the nature of the human body is used to demonstrate divine providence. The Divine Institutes (304-311), Lactantius's masterwork, is an attack on paganism and a defense of Christianity. It is noteworthy for its attempt to place Christianity in a context that would have been familiar to Lactantius's contemporaries through the use of Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and other pagan authors. The Wrath of God (313-314) argues that anger and kindness are necessary parts of God's nature. In The Deaths of the Persecutors (314—315), Lactantius interprets the eventual fate of those who persecuted Christians as evidence of God's righteous vengeance. Lactantius also prepared an Epitome of the Divine Institutes (c. 320) and wrote an allegorical poem, The Phoenix (date uncertain). His letters and a number of early works have been lost.
See also Constantine the Great
STEPHEN A. ALLEN
Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 19, 27.
Heck, Eberhard, and Antonie Wlosok, eds. Epitome divinarum institutionem. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1994.
Ingremeau, Christiane, ed. La colère de Dieu. Sources Chrétiennes, 289. Paris: Cerf, 1982.
Monat, Pierre, ed. Institutions divines. Sources Chrétiennes, 204-205, 326, 337, 377. Paris: Cerf, 1973-1992.
Moreau, J., ed. De la mort des persecuteurs. Sources Chrétiennes, 39. Paris: Cerf, 1954.
Perrin, Michel, ed. L'ouvrage du Dieu createur. Sources Chrétiennes, 213-214. Paris: Cerf, 1974.
Blakeney, Edward Henry, ed. and trans. Lactantius's Epitome institutionum divinarurn: Epitome of the Divine Institutes. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1950.
Creed, J. L., ed. and trans. De mortibus persecutorum. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
McDonald, Mary Francis, trans. Lactantius: The Divine Institutes, Books 1—7. Fathers of the Church, 49. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1964.
—, trans. Lactantius: The Minor Works. Fathers of the Church, 54. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965.
Bryce, Jackson. "Lactantius's De ave phoenice and the Religious Policy of Constantine the Great." Studio. Patristica, 19, 1989, pp. 13-19.
Christensen, A. S. Lactantius the Historian: An Analysis of the De mortibus persecutorum. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1980.
Digeser, Elizabeth DePalma. "Lactantius and Constantine's Letter to Aries: Dating the Divine Institutes." Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2, 1994, pp. 33-52.
Hallman, Joseph M. "The Mutability of God: Tertullian to Lactantius." Theological Studies, 42, 1981, pp. 373-393.
Heffernan, Carol Falvo. The Phoenix at the Fountain: Images of Women and Eternity in Lactantius's Carmen de ave phoenice and the Old English Phoenix. London: Associated University Press, 1988; Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.
McGuckin, Paul. "The Christology of Lactantius." Studia Patristica, 17, 1982, 813-820.
Nicholson, Oliver. "Flight from Persecution as Imitation of Christ: Lactantius's Divine Institutes 4:18, 1-2." Journal of Theological Studies, 40, 1989, pp. 48-65.
Ogilvie, Robert Maxwell. The Library of Lactantius. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Roots, Peter A. "The De opificio Dei: The Workmanship of God and Lactantius." Classical Quarterly, 81, 1987, 466-486.
Stevenson, J. "The Life and Literary Activity of Lactantius." Studio. Patristica, 1, 1957, pp. 661-677.
—. "Aspects of the Relations between Lactantius and the Classics." Studia Patristica, 4, 1961, pp. 497-503.
Lais became a particularly popular genre at the end of the twelfth century (1160-1170), with a collection of lais in octosyllabic couplets (Guigemar, Fresne, Bisclavret, Lanval, Deus Amanz, Yonec, Laiistic, Milun, Cbaitivel, Chievrefoil, Eliduc) by the Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France, who was also the author of 102 fables and of Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, which was translated from Latin.
The lai belongs to the tradition of the matière de Bretagne, and judging from what Marie de France says in the prologue (verse 41) to her collection, the word lai (Laid in Old Irish) refers to a melody for which she had written verses. The word covers narrative (in the case of Marie de France) as well as lyric compositions, which can be divided into three main types: the lai-descort, grand lai, and Arthurian lai.
Marie de France's collection is the first important medieval work written and signed by a woman. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, numerous anonymous lais were also produced—Melion, Doon, Désiré, Graelent, and Guingamor—all of which shared the theme of secret love between a knight and a fairy creature. Another group of lais— Tydorel, Tyolet, Espine—shared the theme of an encounter with a supernatural knight. Less closely related to the matière de Bretagne are the lais produced during the thirteenth century, which all appear to be characterized by love stories: Lai de I'ombre, by Jean Renart; Lai d'Aristate, by Henri d'Andeli; Lai de I'oiseleP, Lai d'amours; Lai de I'èspervier, and Lai du conseil.
The original Old French word lai occurs in several Italian medieval texts and is translated as "sonnet"—for instance, in Tristano veneto and, during the fourteenth century, in La Tavola Ritonda o I'istoria di Tristano. However, it is also rendered as "song" and "lamentation" (Tristano veneto; Tristano riccardiano; Dante, Inferno, 5.46; Dante, Purgatorio, 9.13), without the meaning of poetry set to music. However, lai is generally given with the meaning "lamentation," and only in Meliadus does the word keep its original meaning.
Traces of various narrative mm have been found in the Decameron: Laüstic in 5.4; Yonec in 4.2; and Fresne in 10.10. Finally, Decameron 4.9 is reminiscent of Lai of Eliduc and Lai of the Ignauré, also known as Lai du prisonnier. Traces of certain lais have also been found in Italian cantari. Levi (1914) noted parallels between the Lai of Fresne and the cantare Gibello. The theme of secret love between a knight and a fairy creature, found in Lai of Lanval, appears in three Italian cantari of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Bel Gherardino, Ponzela Gaia, and Liombruno.
In spite of recent contributions, Neri's observation (in 1946) that the impact of Marie de France's Lais on Italian literature was still largely unexplored still holds true and can be extended to the genre in general.
See also Arthurian Material in Italy; Cantare; Tristan
ROBERTA MOROSINI
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 2 vols., ed. V. Branca. Turin: Einaudi, 1992.
Die Lais der Marie de France, ed. K. Warnke. Halle: Bibliotheca Normannica, 1925.
Maria di Francia. Lais, ed. G. Angeli. Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1992.
Ponzela Gaia: Cantare dialettale inedito del sec. XIV, ed. G. Varanini. Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1957.
Tobin, Prudence M. O., ed. Les Lais anonymes des Xlle et XJIIe siècles. Geneva: Droz, 1976.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.
The Lais of Marie de France, trans, and intro. G. S. Burgess and K. Busby. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986.
Lattstic, Les Deus amanz, Chevrefoil, Lanval and Eliduc. (A Rhymed Translation.) The Honeysuckle and the Hazel Tree: Medieval Stories of Men and Women, trans, and intro. P. Terry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Avalle, D'Arco Silvio. "Fra mito e fiaba, l'ospite misterioso.' Travaux de Linguistique et de Litterature, 16(1), 1978, pp. 33-44. (Also in Dal mito alia letteratura e ritorno. Milan: Saggiatore, 1990, pp. 161-173.)
Bendinelli Predelli, Maria. "Storia delle storie di Lanval." Quaderni d'ltalianistica, 6(1), 1985, pp. 1-30.
—. Alle origini del Bel Gherurdino. Florence: Olschki, 1990.
Burgess, Glyn S. Marie de France: An Analytical Bibliography. Research Bibliographies and Checklists, 21. London: Grant and Cutler, 1977. (Supplement 1, 1986, covers the period 1975-1984; Supplement 2, 1997, covers 1984-1995.)
—. The Old French Narrative Lay: An Analytical Bibliography. Cambridge: Brewer, 1995.
Le Cygne, Bulletin of International Marie de France Society. (Provides an extensive bibliography; see especially bibliographical note by G. S. Burgess, "Marie de France's Le Fresne," Le Cygne, 2, 1996, pp. 41-47.)
Delcorno Branca, Daniela. Boccaccio e le storie di re Artú. Bologna: I! Mulino, 1991.
Foulet, Lucien. "Marie de France and les lais bretons." Zeitschrifi fur Romanische Philologie, 29, 1905, pp. 19-56, 293-322.
Gardner, Edmund G. The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature. London and New York: Dent-Dutton, 1930. (Reprint, New York: Octagon, 1971.)
Levi, E. I cantari leggendari del popolo italiano nei secoli XIV e XV. Turin: Loescher, 1914.
Levi, Ezio. Fiore di leggende: Cantari antichi, cantari leggendari. Bari: Laterza, 1914.
Mickel, E. J., Jr., Marie de France. New York: Twayne, 1974. (See bibliography.)
Neri, Ferdinando, "La voce lai nei testi italiani." In Maria di Francia: I Lais, ed. F. Neri. Torino: Chiantore, 1946, pp. 399-419.
Payen, Jean-Charles. Le lai narratif. Turnhout: Brepols, 1975.
Picone, Michelangelo. "Alle fonti del Decameron-. II caso di Frate Alberto." In La parola ritrovata: Fonti e analisi letteraria, ed. Costanzo Di Girolamo and I. Paccagnella. Palermo: Sellerio, 1982, pp. 99-117.
Lambert (d. 899) succeeded his father, Guy of Spoleto, as king of Italy and emperor in a challenge to Berengar I in 894. He had been associated with Guy since Guy's own imperial coronation in 891. Lambert's reign was brief (894-899) and troubled. He was young at his accession and depended on the support of his mother, Ageltrude, a daughter of Adelchis, the prince of Benevento. The intent of his rule was serious, as is indicated by a diet held at Ravenna, where he issued a series of laws aimed at protecting the church and curbing the pretensions of overly mighty subjects. His legislation was the last issued by the kings of Italy before Otto I. Lambert died, without heirs, in a hunting accident in 899.
See also Berengar I of Friuli; Spoleto
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Fasoli, Gina. I re d'ltalia (888-962). Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1949.
Poupardin, Rene. "The Carolingian Kingdoms (877-918)." In Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.
Lancelot was one of the most famous and morally upstanding members of King Arthur's court at Camelot. The legends of his feats and of his love for Queen Guinevere were made famous in the twelfth century by French poets, most notably by Chrétien de Troyes in his Chevalier de la charette. Although Lancelot's adulterous love for King Arthur's wife made him unable to secure possession of the Holy Grail, Lancelot provided the medieval imagination with an enduring model of chivalrous behavior. Unlike the legend of Tristan and Isolde, which is somewhat more erotic, that of Lancelot is characterized by nobility of character and constancy of affection. From the many allusions in learned as well as popular culture (such as the cantari) to episodes of the Arthurian cycle involving Lancelot, we may assume that his story was well known and much appreciated.
Reflections of the idealized figure of Lancelot appear early in Italian literature. There are about a dozen extant Italian translations of the Old French Lancelot dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Lancelot also appears in Tristano Ricciardiano (c. 1272-1300) and the famous Tuvalu ritonda (c. 1325-1350). In the anonymous Novellino, three short tales exalt Lancelot's reputation as a knight (28 and 45) and a faithful lover (82). He was celebrated in the courtly poetry of the thirteenth century by Guittone d'Arezzo (Ben aggia ormai la fede e I'amor meo), Folgòre da San Gimignano (Alia brigata nobile e cortese), Brunetto Latini (Tesoretto, verse 40), and the anonymous author of Mare amoroso (verse 33). Lancelot's immutable devotion to Guinevere was easily assimilated into the poetic patterns of the nascent dolce stil nuovo, which made great use of similes and metaphors that depended on the readers' familiarity with Lancelot's adventures and character.
The most famous literary use of Lancelot in the Italian Middle Ages is, of course, Dante's. In the celebrated fifth canto of Inferno, Francesca recounts her reading of "Gallehault," the section of Lancelot du lac in which Lancelot and Guinevere exchange their first kiss (verses 127-137). The earliest commentators on the Comedy saw in this episode a moral condemnation of the Arthurian romances; it is certain that by the end of the fourteenth century, Dante's epic poem was considered a more lofty literary subject than Lancelot's adventures (see Sacchetti's Trecentonovelle, 114). In Dante's Convivio (4.28.7-8), Lancelot is evoked not for his chivalry or fidelity, but for his religious conversion.
See also Arthurian Material in Italy, Sacchetti, Franco; Tristan
MICHAEL PAPIO
Delcorno Branca, Daniela. "Romanzi arturiani." In Enciclopedia dantesca, Vol. 4. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1973, pp. 1028-1030.
—. Boccaccio e le storie di re Artù. Bologna: II Mulino, 1991.
—. "Tradizione italiana dei testi arturiani: Note sul Lancelot." Medioevo Romanzo, 17(2), 1992, pp. 215-250.
Gardner, Edmund. The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature. New York: Dutton, 1930.
Griffiths, Evans Thomas, ed. Li chantari di Lancellotto. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
Malavasi, Giuseppe. La materia poetica del ciclo brettone in Italia. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1901.
A simple fact explains why tenurial practices in medieval Italy were so complex: land was essential to the existence of everyone, of whatever status. Men who controlled much land had power over those who controlled little or no land, the powerless. But "control" and "ownership" took many forms—individual, communal, institutional, kin-based, feudal—and all these levels could operate around one land parcel at one moment. It is no wonder that historians find tenure an awkward though fascinating matter.
Most medieval documents have not preserved much information about customary practices concerning land tenure; as a result, many texts may describe untypical situations. Most information appears in legal codes and charters, but both pose problems. In the laws of all periods, most passages discussing tenure refer to unusual and awkward tenurial situations, such as those caused by family disputes, widowhood, and entry into the church—particular cases that had been presented to the ruler or rulers for a decision. Such laws were not necessarily relevant to the way property rights functioned and developed in the wider world. Furthermore, there is little evidence that sophisticated late Roman distinctions between types of ownership, expressed in an almost obsessive desire to define terms, survived in medieval property law before the twelfth century. The late Roman potestas and dominium occur in medieval laws and charters only as vague terms for "power" rather than as precise sorts of tenure, and it is likely that the late Roman distinction between "the right and the fact of control over a thing" (Levy 1951) was blurred because medieval state mechanisms for enforcing such niceties were not very effective. Romans soon learned that the technicalities of ownership often mattered little in the face of "barbarian" force.
The hundreds of thousands of charters surviving from medieval Italy seem to convey more "real" information than the laws because these charters represent the principal documentary form in which rights of tenure were written down. They include records of gifts, bequests, sales, and purchases, but also contracts of rent and render. Because the charters were most concerned with recording transmission of tenure, rather than defining that tenure precisely, it is not always clear from them what the terms of the tenure were. Even so, they provide the best chance of understanding land tenure.
The gap between the laws and the charters is sometimes usefully bridged by records of court proceedings, known as placita, involving instances of disputed land tenure. These reveal that tenurial rights seemingly fixed by laws or in charters could be challenged successfully in court, with reference to the testimony of local witnesses concerning customary practice. However, from the ninth century on, effective possession of a plot of land or a landed estate came increasingly to be associated with possession of a valid charter record concerning the transmission of the property to the current holder. To make the transaction legally valid, the alienator had to be the owner of the property involved (in Latin, the auctor) at the time the agreement, as recorded in the charter, was drawn up. This may seem obvious—and it is tacitly assumed in most charters dealing with the transfer of rights over property—but it was nonetheless vital, as the few cases where such rights are disputed between two or more parties demonstrate. Challenges could be brought in court against ostensible owners on exactly this point, and the documents that record these occasions come closest to revealing what ownership was thought to mean in practice. If an accused individual was not the auctor of a property at the time of alienation or transfer, the resulting transaction would be deemed invalid. This may seem vague to us, with our very precisely defined concepts of ownership: clearly, it did not necessarily encompass outright ownership. An auctor was merely the person most entitled to alienate a particular property. But did the quality of being auctor require possession too? Or a period of residence? Could it be inherited? In the absence of explicit discussions in the texts, it is hard to be sure; and the fact that the issue could be raised in court cases suggests that nonexperts may have been confused too, as well as trying their luck.
Probably it was most desirable to hold land in outright ownership, as this gave the individual powers of totally free alienation; but for most of the Middle Ages such powers were rare, being confined more or less to kings or those associated with kings. Other individuals could and did own land, but they seem mostly to have been invested with powers over property by the extended kin group in a sort of loose communal ownership. This pattern was particularly common among the Lombards and was very tenacious thereafter in Italy; one thinks of the consorterie of the late medieval towns. Such "ownership" gave household heads considerable political, as well as economic, power but nonetheless put great constraints on alienability, for which the consent of all or some of the kin group was usually necessary. The possessor of this property right—the most considerable tenure to which most free males could aspire—was usually expressed as auctor, a term that often seems to have meant "alienator" rather than "owner," as it conferred some ability to dispose of land rather than the exclusive right to do so. So auctor seems to have included current notions of ownership and alienation, depending on the circumstances. Most family land was transmitted through the generations by inheritance practices that conflicted with the ability of the head of the household to do as he liked. But the need for the kin to consent to alienation was not the same as real ownership in common: subordinate household members had little say in this, as in most other important decisions.
Ownership conditional on the consent of kin was merely one type—a common and long-lasting type—of land tenure. Complementing it were a variety of leases (libelli), long or short (up to thirty years); other forms of renting; benefice arrangements (beneficium); and temporary ownership or use (ususfructus). All these were initially granted out to the possessor for a limited time span, and some were feudo-vassalic in character. Not until the central Middle Ages did these tenures take on hereditary forms, often against the wishes of the original grantors. Thus, land held by these means came to take on some of the character of inherited family land.
The most straightforward transmission of property was by inheritance, at least notionally. Although inheritance practices do not get full treatment in laws and charters, it seems to have been usual throughout the medieval period for property to pass within the kin group from father to children, especially males, without many problems. Primogeniture, transmission to the eldest son alone, was slow to develop in Italy, where partible inheritance remained more common, as many local studies have shown. How or if such customs were regulated in the earlier period we cannot know in the absence of relevant documentation. Wills granting property to sons were rare because they were unnecessary. More often we have wills concerning daughters, widows, and sisters. The testamentum was in a sense a theoretical expression of bequest, a record of what its author thought desirable after his death, of what should happen to his property in an explicit way, sometimes but not always made with pious intent. It was necessary in such a context to be clear about which rights were being devolved, and to whom, in order to avoid, as far as possible, post obitum disagreements within the extended kin group.
From such testaments it is possible to learn a great deal about inheritance practice insofar as it concerned women and churches, whose interests were often very much opposed to those of local families; but it must be stressed that the information in them is not typical of how inheritance operated in earlier medieval societies. Occasionally there are incidental references to men who had inherited land from fathers, uncles, or brothers, much the most typical custom. Overwhelmingly, most inheritance was from father to sons. Further, this society probably assumed that men could defend their own property, whereas women and their kin would benefit from having their "rights" set down in a charter to guard against challenges from the husband or his children. Similarly, it. was easier to intimidate a woman, and so persuade her to part with her property.
Women—as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—predominate in charters dealing with heritable property because they represented the easiest means by which family property could pass out of family control, either by marriage, by remarriage, or by entry into a religious community. They also had crucial power over reproduction within the family. On marrying, women received gifts of land from their fathers and husbands; and although documents recording formal divisions of family property at the time of marriage do not usually survive until the later Middle Ages, the law codes are clear on what the customary portions may have been: widows could not hold more than a quarter of their husbands' properties, for example. In spite of all this, the chances that women had to inherit and to control property were not great.
Transmission of property by inheritance was only one of the methods by which property passed from person to person in medieval Italian society. In times of war or other unrest, some people came to possess property as a result of theft, forcible confiscation, and other techniques unnoticed in charters. But charters, because they were instruments recording property transmissions, are an important source of material concerning the gift and sale of land described in formulaic terms using phrases such as dono and trado ac cedo, which reveal little about the actual processes of transfer. Sometimes sales or gifts were followed up with a vestitura, which recorded a ceremony on-site that involved walking the bounds of the property, transfer per columna de casa (touching the entrance of the house) or picking up the soil, de terra atramentate. These events represented the transfer of property rights at its most public and provide a reminder that charters alone were not always enough to ensure that a transaction gained the approbation of local worthies.
It is unclear how important these methods of tenurial transfer were in comparison with customary inheritance. Alienation by such methods certainly left more room for individual choice, even if it remains unlikely that family property could be alienated outside of the kin group by such means. It may be that in the eighth and ninth centuries the charters, which were hardly veiy numerous at that point in most places, were indeed recording types of alienation which were not yet common. But it is necessary to be cautious here, for even though we have documentation that deals primarily with the church, there are many instances of property being bought and sold by laymen alone. Some historians have argued there was a market in land at given times in given places, especially in the vicinity of the northern cities such as Milan and Pavia, during the later Middle Ages. It might be the case that in some places there existed a real market in land—land being bought and sold as a commodity—a process which was disrupting traditional tenurial patterns. However, we have to be careful about this, too, because we know that many transactions which appear to fall into this category were conditioned by other relationships, social or political, between buyers and sellers.
Much of this discussion has had a theoretical slant because written texts can easily convey a false sense of the powers that men had over land if formulas are treated too literally. The placita demonstrate clearly that charters could very often be ignored, that there were people who did not believe them, who confiscated land by force and who persisted in denying claims to ownership for long periods. In this type of society, tenure guaranteed in writing was not so very secure. By the fourteenth century many of these earlier medieval uncertainties had no doubt disappeared, but even then it is important to be aware that what a text may imply may never have happened.
See also Agriculture; Law: Roman; Lombard Law
ROSS BALZARETTI
The Institutes of Justinian, trans. J. B. Moyle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1896.
The Lombard Laws, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.
Andreolli, Bruno. "Ad conquestum faciendum: Un contributo per lo studio dei contratti agrari altomedievali." Rivista di Storia dell'Agricoltura, 18(1), 1978, pp. 109-136.
Bernhardt, J. W. "Servitium regis and Monastic Property in Early Medieval Germany." Viator, 18, 1987, pp. 53-87.
Duby, Georges, and Jacques Le Gofif, eds. Famille et parenté dans TOccident médiéval: Actes du Colloque de Paris (6-8 juin 1974). Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1977.
Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Herlihy, David. "Land, Family, and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200." Traditio, 18, 1962, pp. 82-120.
Jones, Philip J. "Medieval Agrarian Society in Its Prime: Italy." In Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, ed. M. Postan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 340-431.
Leicht, Pier S. Scritti vari di storia del diritto italiano, 2 vols. Milan: A. Giuffre, 1943-1949.
Levy, Ernst. West Roman Vulgar Law: The Law of Property. Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1951.
Luzzatto, Gino. "Changes in Italian Agrarian Economy from the Fall of Carolingians to the Beginning of the Eleventh Century." In Early Medieval Society, ed. Silvia Thrupp. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, pp. 206-218.
Miller, Maureen C. "Donors, Their Gifts, and Religious Innovation in Medieval Verona." Speculum, 66, 1991, pp. 27-42.
Mor, Carlo Guido. Scritti di storia giuridica altomedievale. Pisa: Pacini, 1977.
Tabacco, Giovanni. "L'allodialità del potere nel medioevo." Studi Medievali, Series 3(11), 1970, pp. 565-615.
Wickham, Chris. "Land Disputes and Their Social Framework in Lombard-Carolingian Italy, 700-900." In The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 105-121.
—. "Vendite di terra e mercato della terra in Toscana nel secolo XI." Quaderni Storici, 65, 1987, pp. 355-377.
—. The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Francesco Landini (c. 1325-2 September 1397) was a composer, organist, singer, instrument maker, and poet of the second generation of the Italian Trecento. He may have been born in Fiesole or Florence and was the son of the painter Jacopo Del Casentino (d. 1349), a cofounder of the Florentine guild of painters, Landini lost his sight after having smallpox as a child; as a result, he turned to music with a passion. He mastered several instruments, including the organ; worked as an organ builder, organ tuner, and instrument maker; and played, sang, and wrote poetry. As a scholar, he is recorded as following the teachings of William of Ockham, and he was knowledgeable in many areas of astrology, philosophy, and ethics. Landini was very active in religious and political events. His musical works indicate that he spent some time in northern Italy before 1370, probably in Venice. He was organist at the monastery of Santa Trinita in 1361; and from 1365 until his death he was capellanus at the church of San Lorenzo. His acquaintances included the Florentine chancellor of state and humanist Coluccio Salutati and the composer Andreas de Florentia. In 1379 and 1387, Landini was involved in building organs at the church of Santa Annunziata and at the cathedral of Florence. Giovanni da Prato, in Il paradiso degli Alberti (1389), a narrative poetic account of Florence, portrays Landini as an active musician and humanist, taking part in extensive philosophical and political conversations as well as singing and playing the organ. Landini died in Florence, in the church of San Lorenzo; his tombstone was discovered in Prato in the nineteenth century. A picture of Landini can be seen on folio 121v of the Squarcialupi Codex (I-Fl 87). His fame continued well into the fifteenth century. The French musicologist Fetis rediscovered Landini's music in 1827.
Not only was Landini a very prolific composer, but the survival of his musical works attests to his popularity and importance. His extant works represent almost a quarter of the entire known repertoire of secular Trecento music. One hundred fifty-four works can be definitely attributed to Landini: ninety ballate for two voices, forty-two ballate for three voices, eight ballate that survive in two-part and three-part versions, one French virelai, nine madrigals for two or three voices, one three-voice canonic madrigal, and one caccia. Works of doubtful authenticity include two or three ballate for two voices, and four motets with fragmentary single voices. More than 145 works by Landini are contained in the Squarcialupi Codex.
Landini's musical style is mulcifaceted; he wrote works ranging from simple dances to complex isorhythmic and canonic pieces. His compositional technique is often described as a synthesis of French and Italian musical influences. The melodic inventiveness of Landini's music is readily apparent. A special musical cadence—which musicologists call the Landini cadence—appears frequently in his music; it is recognizable at the end of phrases as a leaping upward by an interval of a third. Landini's music points toward the polyphonic imitation in fifteenth-century early Renaissance music.
See also Ars Nova; Squarcialupi Codex
BRADFORD LEE EDEN
The Works of Francesco Lanaini, ed. Leonard Ellinwood. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1939. (2nd ed., 1945; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970.)
The Works of Francesco Landini, ed. Leo Schrade. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 4. Monaco: Éditions de l'OiseauLyre, 1958.
Ellinwood, Leonard. "Francesco Landini and His Music." Musical Quarterly, 22, 1936, pp. 190ff.
Fischer, Kurt von. "On the Technique, Origin, and Evolution of Italian Trecento Music." Musical Quarterly, 47, 1963, pp. 4Iff.
"Landini, Francesco." In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 10, pp. 428-434.
The troubadour Lanfranc Cigala (d. 1258), a jurisconsult and councillor of the Genoese republic, appears in documents in 1235, 1239, 1240, and 1257; in 1241 he served as ambassador of Genoa to Raymond Berenger V of Provence.
Lanfranc's poetry consists of eight early love poems (written in the 1230s), four cansos in honor of the Virgin, two crusade songs, and eighteen poems on various other topics. Among these eighteen is a vehement sirventes (poem of blame) against Marquis Boniface II of Monferrat (the nephew of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's patron and friend), because of his continual maneuvering between the emperor and the pope. When, in 1245, Boniface again adhered to the party of Emperor Frederick II, Lanfranc (whose city, Genoa, was allied with the pope) accused Boniface of heresy, perjury, accepting bribes, and worse. During the same period (1244-1245), Lanfranc composed a crusade song admonishing the kings of France and England, the Germans and the Spaniards, the count of Provence, and even the pope to take up the cross; in the second envoi he turns to Frederick II: "Emperor, remember to lend your help, because God, thanks to whom every king reigns, asks it of you, and make peace here and succor there, since death does not spare emperors.'' Lanfranc's call would be answered a few years later by Saint Louis.
At one time Lanfranc celebrated his lady's smile—the sweet smile that brings joi e alegria e vol amoros ("joy and cheerfulness and amorous will")—and indeed was the best troubadour ever to sing of women's smiling lips. His cult of the ideal woman made him a precursor of the dolce stil miovo. Eventually, however, all that was gone, with nothing left except bitterness. Lan franc then sang of and invoked only Mary, the lady of ladies, who represented for him the supreme feminine ideal.
See also Dolce Stil Nuovo; Italian Troubadours; Raimbaut de Vaqueiras
HANS-ERICH KELLER
Bertoni, Giulio. "Lanfranco Cigala." In I trovatori d'ltalia. Modena: U. Orlandini, 1915, pp. 94—100. (Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974.)
Branciforti, Francesco, ed. II canzoniere di Lanfranc Cigala. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1954.
de Riquer, Martin. Los trovadores: Historia literaria y textos. Barcelona: Planeta, 1975, pp. 1359-1369.
Ferrero, Giuseppe G. I trovatori d'ltalia (Sordello-Lanfranc Cigala), 2 vols. Turin: Tirrenia, 1967.
Mannucci, Francesco L. "Di Lanfranco Cigala e della scuola trovadorica genovese." Giornale Storico e Letterario della Liguria, 7, 1906, pp. 1-30.
The innovative lyric poet Paolo Lanfranchi (fl. second half of the thirteenth century) was born in Pistoia. We have few facts about his life. It appears that he was in Bologna on at least two occasions—in 1282 and again in 1283—and there is evidence that between the years 1283 and 1285 he resided at the court of King Peter III of Aragon. Six years later, as a penalty for stabbing a fellow citizen, he was exiled from Pistoia; and in 1295 he is reported to have been in Bologna once again.
Lanfranchi composed eight extant sonnets, including one in Occitan addressed to Peter III. Of his seven sonnets in Italian, two treat the theme of the wheel of fortune and five are concerned with the vicissitudes of love. The sonnets present a series of events that could, with a certain degree of imagination, be viewed as a small "canzoniere" in which the poet relates amorous adventures occurring in a dreamlike state. On awakening from this idyllic state and finding himself confronted with harsh reality, the poet vows to become a heretic (a Patarine). Stylistically, Lanfranchi's sonnets are in the Siculo-Tuscan tradition. His sonnet in the langue d'oc (Valenz senher, reis dels Aragones) celebrates the life and deeds of Peter III and may be considered a sort of encomium, perhaps composed in the final days of Peter's life.
See also Italian Troubadours; Occitan Language in Italy
CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
De Riquer, Martin, ed. Los trovadores: Historia literaria y textos, 3 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1975-1983.
Kleinhenz, Christopher. "Esegesi del sonetto provenzale di Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia." Studi e Problemi di Critica Testuale, 2, 1971, pp. 29-39.
—. "The Interrupted Dream of Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia." Italica, 49, 1972, pp. 187-201.
—. "A Trio of Sonnets in Occitan: A Lyrical Duet and an Historic Solo." Tenso, 13(2), 1998, pp. 33-49.
Savino, Giancarlo. "II piccolo canzoniere di Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia." Filologia e Critica, 7, 1982, pp. 68-95.
Zaccagnini, Guido, ed. I rimatori pistoiesi dei secoli XIII e XIV. Pistoia: Sinibuldiana, 1907.
Zaccagnini, Guido. "Studi e ricerche di antica storia letteraria pistoiese, Parte 1, Rimatori e prosatori dal sec. XIII al XV." Bollettino Storico Pistoiese, 12, 1910, pp. 33-57.
—. "Per la storia letteraria del Duecento: Notizie biografiche ed appunti dagli Archivi Bolognesi." II Libro e la Starnpa, n.s., 6, 1912, pp. 113-160.
Zaccagnini, Guido, and Amos Parducci, eds. Rimatori siculo-toscani del Dugento: Serie prima, pistoiesi-lucchesi-pisani. Bari: Laterza, 1915.
In reference to the Middle Ages, we must first speak of Italian languages, rather than any single Italian language. Romance-language historians generally accept that in the early Middle Ages, the linguistic character of Romance-speaking Europe can be described as a web of cognate dialects directly descended from Latin, with mutual comprehension decreasing as distance between them increased. Eventually, and for different reasons in each area, individual dialects would be selected for refinement and promotion to the status of standard language for both literary purposes and practical affairs, but this process would not take root in Italy until after the medieval period, and the language now labeled "Italian" would not be the language of the majority of inhabitants of the peninsula until well into the twentieth century. The linguistic landscape of medieval Italy consisted of Latin as superordinate for written purposes, with local Romance as the spoken medium in ordinary communication.
It was once common to view the Romance descendants as beginning to emerge from the Latin parent during or even after the reign of Charlemagne (800—814), when attention is first paid to writing direct representations of the common spoken language. It is now recognized, however, that what emerged were texts, not the vernacular languages themselves. The first manifestation of writing in a Romance tongue in which orthographic conventions, syntax, morphology, and phonological structures are clearly intended to represent popular speech—the northern French Serments de Strasbourg—is from 842. The language used is fully emancipated from Latin, and comparison of the earliest texts from throughout the geographical continuum of Romance Europe shows that most local features which today distinguish one Romance language from another were already well developed. A lack of documentation precludes identification of the period of incipience of most changes, but they must have arisen much earlier than the texts in question, as is evident from the general observation that change in a language is typically a slow process.
It is safe to assume from both modern and historical evidence that during the early Middle Ages the Italian peninsula was characterized by a collection of local languages generally quite similar to those of today—with the obvious exception that no intrusions from a supraregional vernacular standard would have been found, since such a language did not yet exist. With this background, it is clear that the concept of the "birth" of Italian, in the sense of linguistic generation, is an infelicitous metaphor. Florentine, which would supply the linguistic base for an eventual national language, was, at the millennium, one of the innumerable spoken dialects of the Romance area, the natural development of popular Latin in one location.
The standard languages of Europe are in each instance a result of selection or one local variety as a means of written communication, accompanied by the establishment of orthographic and grammatical norms. The case of what would become known as Italian is unique among the major Romance languages in that the preeminence of Florentine was based on the literary success of its first writers, rather than on the political prominence of its most influential speakers. Although the prestige of Florentine would later be reinforced considerably by the hegemony of Florence as a center of power and culture, the initial selection of the dialect as a linguistic model is attributable to the fact that medieval Florentine was the native language of Dante Alighieri, and that the norm he set in linguistic matters was easily approximated by the Tuscans Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose native speech forms were quite similar to those of Florentine.
It should be noted, however, that the written code has never been a truly faithful representation of Florentine speech in all its detail. The written language of Tre corone is an idealization on a Florentine base and thus is Florentine, or at least central Tuscan, in essence, but it is consciously purged of local features judged to be displeasing. Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia (1.13), made it quite clear that he felt that neither Florentine nor any other Tuscan variety was a fit vehicle for literary expression. From today's perspective his pronouncements are frustratingly vague in their lack of detail, but he ridicules Florentines, Pisans, Aretines, Sienese, and Lucchese for their speech, and although he judges that the Florentines Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo Gianni, and Cino da Pistoia from nearby Pistoia, managed to turn out excellent volgare, they are exceptional. Their success, in fact, is due to the distance they placed between their genuine Tuscan and the language of their poetry. Hoi polloi and even most of the lettered are possessed of turpiloquio. In Dante's view, Guittone d'Arezzo, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Gallo Pisano, and Brunetto Fiorentino use language which he describes as not curial but municipal; thus their production cannot serve as a model for the volgare illustre which Dante seeks to establish.
To a certain extent, Dante did not follow his own prescription to establish the volgare as a language identifiable with no particular place, but rather as an amalgam of the best features of Italian speech types; in the end, he used the language he knew best. On the other hand, while it is not a true koine, the language of his Commedia, Vita nuova, and so on is definitely conventional and relieved of many local traits, quite likely not the Florentine of Dante's own everyday speech, and certainly not faithful to the speech of the people.
The details are missing—perhaps they were to have been presented in Book 3 of De vulgari eloquentia, which was either lost or never written—but a few facts concerning what Dante disapproved of are known, and others can be surmised. We can expect no phonetic detail, on rwo grounds. First, such detail is simply not part of a phonemic orthographic system, which the medieval Italian system was. Second, and less tautologically, low-level phonetic detail is all but universally missing from literary production of the time, for aesthetic reasons. Dante was breaking ground by composing in the vernacular, but his sentiments were conservative. Although his mention of phonetics is quite brief, and (as is to be expected) somewhat entangled in a discussion of orthography, he states outright that colloquial registers are to be avoided. The language of literature must be illustre, must be made to shine; and to shine it must be raised to a sublime level:
When we say illustre, we mean something that illuminates and shines in its luminescence. . . . And the vernacular we are speaking of is raised to the level of sublime by learning and by power, and in turn exalts its users with honor and glory.
(De vulgari eloquentia, 1.17)
To be made illustre, the vernacular requires a good bit of polish:
We see it made sublime by learning in that it is purged of the Italians' crude words, of confused constructions, of defective pronunciations, of rustic accent; it is rendered noble, fluent, perfect, and elegant, as Cino da Pistoia and his friend [i.e., Dante himself] do in their poetry.
(De vulgari eloquentia, 1.17)
Dante has firm ideas regarding word choice, and in this realm he is fairly explicit (De vulgari eloquetitia, 2.7). The elements of vocabulary can be childish, womanish, or mannish; and among the elements in the last category it is possible to distinguish country from urban. All but urban terms are to be avoided. Children's expressions such as mamma and babbo are not worthy of consideration; women's words are too soft; country terms are too crude. Even once the list is reduced to the manly and urbane, care must be taken to use only those words which are well groomed, or truly noble, not those whose substance goes up in smoke on reflection. Words consisting of three syllables or thereabouts are preferable, although there are two types of exceptions; certain unavoidable monosyllables are, of course, acceptable, such as sù, no, me, te, se, a, e, i, o, u'(from the Latin ubi); also admissible are the worthy ornate words, which (although incorporating what Dante feels are harsh phonic features such as aspiration or geminate liquids, containing unpleasant stress,
or
in principle excessively long) mix successfully with well-groomed terms to produce a harmonious effect: terra, honore, speranza, gravitate, alleviato, impossibilità, impossibilitate, beneventuratissimo, inanimatissimamente, disavventuratissimamente, sovramagnificentissirnamente.
Although Dante found it impossible to live up to these standards in practice, it is clear that his writings do not reflect casual speech. Even with the relaxation in these strict constraints, which was inevitable in the production of vernacular verse, his purpose was lofty, and we hazard little in assuming that his works are unlikely to contain attempts at phonetic representation of popular speech. Thus, for example, although we cannot date the origin of the fricativization known today as the gorgia toscana (e.g. [la hasa] "the house"), we should not be surprised to find no sign of it in Dante's works; and it is to be expected that he generally avoided popular distortions such as [sk] for etymological/st/ (crischiano, "Christian"). We can assume that his lexical choices tended to exclude anything he deemed ignoble, and though we have no direct statements on the matter, the restriction on monosyllables unless they were unavoidable may well signal intentional avoidance of such typical Florentine details as clitic subject pronouns. In sum, the poet's noble purpose and his considered judgment conspired to forge a linguistic code at some remove from genuine speech, yet it cannot be denied that the Commedia and other of Dante's vernacular works are most certainly written in language identifiable as being of a Florentine type.
The success of the Florentine model was such that, for all but the most rustic of speakers, numerous competing local forms elsewhere in Tuscany would eventually be ousted in favor of its prestigious norms. Ogni supplanted ogne ("each"); mila replaced milia ("thousands"); the vocalism that marked first-person plural subjects by verb class (-amo, -emo, -imo) gave way to -iamo. An interesting case of ongoing grammatical change in the Middle Ages is found in the fate of the masculine definite article. The Latin demonstrative illu and its inflected forms seem to have developed first into a compact quadripartite inventory lo, li, la, le. The first of these has two forms, however: lo following consonants (fossilized in today's per lo meno), and the reduced form [1], which is possible, though not absolutely required, following vowels. At this stage, lo is dominant: per lo sole, lo sole, ove lo sole-ove [/J sole. By Dante's time a third variant has arisen, with the addition of prothetic [i] to the form [1], though Dante is comfortable with both il and simple [1]: ha fatto il sol tragitto (Inferno, 34.105) and temperava il novo giorno (Purgatory, 28.3) alongside e 'I sol montava (Inferno, 1.38) and avvegna che sia 7 mondo (Paradiso, 20.60). It should be noted that the modern transcription 'l is somewhat controversial at this point. Before full incorporation of il it is misleading, as it suggests reduction of il rather than of lo, and we cannot be absolutely certain that Dante's e 'I sol montava represents aphaerisized il rather than a remnant of apocopated lo. A second ongoing change that shows up in texts toward the end of the 1200s is a shift in the order of clustered clitic pronouns from the type lo mi to me lo. The enclitic possessive, now relegated to speech south of Tuscany, appears to be on its last legs during this period: Florentine mógliema ("my wife") and càsasa ("his house," "her house"); Sienese fratelma ("my brother") and cognátoma ("my brother-in-law").
Further settling and selection of variants would follow from the late Middle Ages onward. Beginning in the 1500s—although presaged tangentially by Leonardo Bruni's muddled pronouncements on the origin of the vernacular and its relation to Latin— debate would rage over the character of the vernacular to be used. Known as the questione della lingua, this multifaceted mix of logical argument and impassioned polemic pitted supporters of Tuscan against more catholic anti-Tuscans; archaists longing for the glories of Tre corone against those who argued for more contemporary usage. In the end—notwithstanding foreign borrowings, penetrations from Latin, and acceptance of local forms from outside Tuscany—the language that is now known as Italian remained firmly Tuscan, specifically Florentine, in its essence.
See also Dante Alignieri; Latin Language; Ritmo Cassinese; Ritmo di Sant'Alessio; Sardinian Language,* Texts, Early Italian: Placiti Cassinesi; Texts, Early Italian: Ritmo Lau renziano
THOMAS CRAVENS
Beccaria, Gian Luigi. Italiano: Antico e nuovo. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.
Bruni, Francesco, L'italiano: Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura. Turin: UTET, 1984.
Castellani, Arrigo. I testi più antichi. Bologna: Pàtron, 1980.
Maiden, Martin. A Linguistic History of Italian. London: Longman, 1995.
Migliorini, Bruno. Storia della lingua italiana. Florence: Sansoni, I960.
Vincent, Nigel. "Italian." In The Romance Languages, ed. Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 279-313.
Lapo Gianni (fl. c. 1300), a poer of the stil novo tradition, has been tentatively identified as Lapo di Gianni Ricevuti, a judge and notary who appears in Florentine documents from 1298 to 1328, although there are a number of other very plausible candidates. The whole of Lapo's extant poetry consists of eleven ballads, three complete canzoni, one partial canzone, and a beautiful double sonnet, composed in the Provencal plazer style {Amor, eo chero mia donna in domìno). Lapo belonged to a small circle of friends that included Dante Alighieri, Guido Cavalcanti, and Cino da Pistoia. Dante mentions Lapo affectionately in Guido, i' vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io (Rime, 52) and, even more significantly, counts him among those who knew best how to attain excellence in the vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia, 1.13.3).
Lapo's poetry displays an authentic psychological interest in the nature and origin of love, but a somewhat loose adherence to the principal tenets of the stil novo so clear in the work of Dante and Cavalcanti. In Lapo's verses, love can both torment and soothe its victim, without causing the more profound psychological anguish and despair present in Cavalcanti (e.g., in Eo sono Amor, cheper mia libertate). The nobility of the heart that induces a lover to dedicate himself to his lady produces in itself an interior joy that, regardless of the accompanying distress, provides an agreeable source of solace. Thus, the suffering of the lover can never reduce him to the same misery that is common in the poetry of the other stilnovisti. Though Lapo's language is unpretentious and his tone occasionally seems excessively optimistic (as in Q'uest'angela, chepar di ciel venuta), these characteristics do not diminish the artistic quality of his poetry.
See also Cavalcanti, Guido; Cino da Pistoia; Dante Alighieri; Dolce Stil Nuovo
MICHAEL PAPIO
Bertelli, Italo. "Lapo Gianni". In Poeti del dolce stil novo. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1963, pp. 117-168. (Also published as Impegno stilistico e inventivo nell'opera di Lapo Gianni. Milan: Bignami, 1984.)
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. Poeti del Duecento, Vol. 2. Milan: Ricciardi, 1960. pp. 569-603.
Gorni, Guglielmo. II nodo della lingua e il verbo d'amore. Florence: Olschki, 1981, pp. 71-124.
Lamma, Ernesto. "Lapo Gianni (Contributo alia storia letteraria del secolo XIII)." II Propugnatore, 18, 1885, pp. 3-105.
See Councils, Ecclesiastical
As most of Italy slipped out of the Roman empire during the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ, the majority language of the peninsula and its associated islands remained Latin. This Indo-European tongue had been spread by succeeding polities centered on Rome, first throughout much of Italy and later more widely in the western Mediterranean basin and beyond. By the end of the tenth century, with a few exceptions (some German-speaking Alpine areas; the Greek-speaking parts of today's Calabria, Basilicata, and Apulia; and Sicily, still partly Greek and now increasingly Arab), the majority language of Italy was one or another form of Romance: Italian for most of this area, and Sardinian, Occitan, Franco-Provencal, and varieties of Rhaeto-Romance in some peripheral regions. These tongues, like the other Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, French, and Romanian), developed out of a Latin that itself was far from uniform. In one sense, they are all varieties of Latin, a language that in this view (which de-emphasizes major perceived differences between Latin and Romance) is today spoken by nearly a quarter of the world's population.
The language we call medieval Latin was a continuation of the formal written Latin of the empire. This written Latin had become somewhat different from spoken forms of the language by the first century after Christ, and diverged even more noticeably by late antiquity, as the spoken language underwent increasing phonological and morphosyntactical change. These developments continued during the early Middle Ages. Although the divergence was largely due to the conservatism of the written language, that language was not entirely static.
In particular, the written Latin of late antiquity (part of the late Latin out of which both Romance and medieval Latin evolved) existed in several registers that differed in style, vocabulary, and syntax. Writing destined for popular audiences was by design closer to ordinary speech than were elite literary or governmental texts, and thus tended to be more open to new or newly common morphological and syntactical practices. Also, the spread of Christianity during the third century, and its preferential treatment by the Roman state during the fourth century, brought into being a specifically Christian literature with new terms (including many words imported from the first international Christian language, Greek) and new meanings for older terms. All these departures from the prevailing classical standard may be found in the Vulgate version of the Bible and in other texts that came to have a formative influence on Latin in the Italian Middle Ages.
The extent of literacy (in its various senses) in Italy during late antiquity is a matter of opinion. However, the higher literacy necessary to sustain literary culture seems to have declined toward the end of this period; it certainly fell off drastically during the upheavals of the sixth century. Thereafter, written Latin was perpetuated in extended or literary forms chiefly by, and usually for, educated elites within the church. Evidence from sources such as charters suggests that there was also a broader functionally literate population—that is, people with lower levels of literacy. The surviving Latin of the early Italian Middle Ages is primarily ecclesiastical, legal, and administrative; but it includes writings in other fields (e.g., grammar and medicine) where traditions of learning persisted or were soon revived. Like almost all medieval Latin, it shows considerable lexical innovation caused by altered circumstances. Prominent among these were changes in social and political institutions, contact with other languages (especially Old High German in its Lombard form), and developments in trade and technology.
Stylistically, medieval Latin is usually a simplified version of the middle and lower registers of its late antique predecessors; in literary texts, imitations of and developments from older high-style writing also occur. Syntactically, it reproduces, with modifications, the norms prescribed by grammarians of late antiquity. Orthographically, there is considerable variation, as mechanisms of standardization were in general not strong. But the broad-scale phonological changes that were already under way during late antiquity (e.g., the loss of quantitative vowel distinctions) also gave rise to some fairly standard departures from previously accepted spellings, as well as to fundamental changes in rhythmic prose and verse (both became accentual rather than quantitative). These innovations continued to characterize most forms of Latin throughout the medieval period.
With the economic revitalization and population growth of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came a general increase in learning in western Europe. A spoken Latin based on written texts (whose pronunciation had been standardized in Frankish territories by the Carolingian reforms of the late eighth century and early ninth century) became widely diffused among educated people (who were now more numerous) and was promoted by the church of Rome as its medium of oral communication, both liturgically and internationally. Although the differentiation between Latin and Romance was effectively complete (or, in the view of some, soon would be), Latin was in most cases still the more prestigious language for anything that had to be written. A lay public that could read Latin developed gradually among professions such as notaries, and lay schoolmasters who taught more than formulaic Latin literacy began to compete with their monastic and clerical counterparts. As universities were formed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their official language of administration and instruction was also Latin.
New, more specialized forms of medieval Latin based in different disciplines (e.g., law and medicine) also came into being. The discipline of letters proper (gramrnatica) fostered a style of usage based on the study and imitation of a wider range of ancient texts than had hitherto been used in Latin education. (There had been an earlier movement in this direction under Charlemagne, but it was more limited and produced few lasting results in Italy.) Latin of this sort, including some quantitative verse, continued to be taught and written throughout the Middle Ages and was read by such figures as Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati, who in the fourteenth century promoted the more rigorous return to ancient Latin modes of expression that characterizes Renaissance humanism.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there evolved yet another form of medieval Latin, based on theology and philosophy: scholastic Latin. Thomas Aquinas and other Italians were to have a hand in shaping this new scientific idiom in its mature stages. Once its conventions were understood, scholastic Latin conveyed complex intellectual argument with a brevity and precision surpassing the perceived capacities of more traditional Latin discourse. It developed as the special vehicle of Christian Aristotelianism, rapidly permeated other disciplines, and became dominant in the universities, where it lasted well into the early modern period.
During the thirteenth century, an increase in urban populations, together with the existence of several universities, brought Italy to its greatest extent of higher literacy in Latin since antiquity. Latin—as the language of public record (for the most part), of canon and civil law, of theology, and of general intellectual discourse—was thought essential for the growing number of lay professionals and, in some places, for merchants. It was also a requirement for the new body of preachers who were expected to mediate between the written wisdom of the church and a general public largely ignorant of the learned language. Vernacular literacy also gained ground during this century and the next, and as this occurred Latin ceased to be the language of public law and secular administration. However, by the mid-fourteenth century Latin was still the primary language of the liturgy, of learning, of some forms of official record, and of diplomacy between governments. It also continued to serve as an international lingua franca—much as English does today, except that, unlike English, it was no one's native tongue. These uses were to outlast the Middle Ages.
See also Latin Literature; Petrarca, Francesco; Scholasticism; Thomas Aquinas, Saint
JOHN B. DILLON
Arnaldi, Francesco, Pasquale Smiraglia, et al. Latinitatis Italicae Medii Aevi Lexicon (saec. V ex.-saec. XI in.). Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001.
Mantello, F. A. C., and A. G. Rigg, eds. Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996.
Riche, Pierre. Education and Culture in the Barbarian West: From the Sixth through the Eighth Century, trans. John J. Contreni. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976, pp. 1-176, 336-352,399-421.
Rigg, A. G. "Latin Language." In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Vol. 7. New York: Scribner, 1982-1989. pp. 350-359.
Wright, Roger, ed. Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
The Latin-language literature of medieval Italy is extensive. It was centuries older than its Italian-language counterpart and was stilil being added to as the medieval period ended. Indeed, for all of this time, Latin was Italy's principal literary language. Even in the fourteenth century, when Italian was increasingly being used for literature, Latin retained its cachet as the language of tradition, permanence, prestige, and—to the extent that this mattered—comprehensibility abroad. The literature created in Latin encompassed, across a wide variety of genres (including some now thought of as nonliterary), writings whose qualifies were considered valuable and distinct from the qualities of ordinary pragmatic discourse. Because forms of Latin literature were taught as part of grammar and rhetoric, pertinent contributions in these allied disciplines are also included even when, as is often the case, they are themselves stylistically routine. Latin was international; it was used in many places besides Italy, and texts written in Latin could circulate widely. Thus, especially in the case fi anonymous works, the ascription of an Italian origin is sometimes no more than probable. There is also uncertainty regarding dating and authorship. Titles could change and were often not auctorial: those in use today are frequently the choices or creations of modern scholars. Many texts are only incompletely preserved, and many (including some notable enough to mention here) have as yet no modern critical edition.
In late Roman antiquity (approximately from the crises of the third century to those of the sixth), literary styles and forms were transmitted across generations by processes of teaching and imitation that favored earlier written texts above the changing oral language. Beginning in the sixth century—which saw both the eastern Roman (Byzantine) war against the Goths and the Lombard invasion—and continuing into the eighth, economic conditions and overall levels of education in Italy were unfavorable to significant literary creation in any idiom, let alone in Latin, whose exemplars diverged considerably from current speech practices. However, at the start of this period, there were still some classically trained ancient-Latin authors. Among them were prominent figures from the Gothic kingdom, such as Ennodius (d. 521), an ecclesiastical poet and prose writer who was probably born in southern Gaul but was active mostly in northern Italy; the statesman and philosopher Boethius (d. 525 or 526); Cassiodorus (died c. 580), a high government official who later became a monastic; the elegiac poet Maximian (early sixth century); the hagiographer Eugippius (d. after 532); and the epic poet Arator (d. after 543).
The last writers of note in this tradition suggest the changes that were then under way. Venantius Fortunatus (c. 535—early 600s) inaugurated a long tradition of kalians who were active as authors wholly or mainly outside Italy. In 566, he moved to Merovingian Gaul, where he produced a sizable body of polished secular and religious verse, as well as hagiographic and other prose; at his death, he was bishop of Poitiers. The line of ancient poets writing in Italy seems to end with Marcus, the author, at Monte Cassino, of an elegy praising Saint Benedict (c. 570). Pope Gregory the Great (c. 535 or 540-604) wrote (in a much lower stylistic register than Venantius) biblical commentaries, sermons, numerous prose letters, and the largely hagiographic Dialogues. The undemanding syntax and edifying content of these works made them popular in monastic circles for a long time. An even humbler, but well written, work is an account by "Anonymus Placentinus" ("Anonymous of Placentia," i.e., Piacenza) of a tour to the Holy Land and Egypt undertaken by a group of pilgrims from the author's city shortly before its fall to the Lombards in 570. Diverse as they were in education and attainments, none of these authors had immediate successors. A rupture had taken place and, from a literary standpoint at least, the Italian Middle Ages had begun.
From the seventh century through the twelfth, Latin literature was created and transmitted chiefly in monasteries and in urban episcopal centers. Its forms were usually derived, either directly or through more recent intermediaries, from ancient Christian writings available for imitation. Some non-Christian authors were also read and occasionally imitated. In addition to biblical commentary, sermons, letters, and hagiography, there were liturgical and other devotional texts; monastic, episcopal, and city chronicles; and narrative histories exemplifying divine providence. Educational needs gave rise to treatises in grammar and in other arts. There were also praises of cities and rulers, personal and civic lyrics, mnemonic verses, and displayed writings of a literary nature (e.g., verse inscriptions on the exterior of buildings or at burial sites inside a church). These forms and practices remained in use throughout the Middle Ages. Verse could be either "rhythmical" (accentual) or "metrical" (quantitative); both systems were inherited from antiquity, but metrical verse was more difficult to master because of an absence of spoken quantitative vowel distinctions. Accentual verse was ordinarily of the accentual-syllabic variety. Accentual templates of quantitative verse forms were also used. Most liturgical and other sung verse was accentual.
Little remains of medieval Latin literature during its infancy in the late sixth century and the seventh. From Rome, starting in the sixth century and continuing until at least 707, we have a series of brief papal epitaphs in verse, the longest being that for Gregory the Great. From Lombard centers in the north, we have a noteworthy letter from John—the patriarch of Aquileia—to King Agilulf (605 or 607) and an epitaph in fourteen elegiac distichs for the bishop of Como, Agrippinus (d. 620). The founder of Bobbio, the Irishman Columban (died c. 615), wrote, during his Italian period, an elaborate letter and quite possibly two rhythmical poems and the thirteen sermons attributed to him. Not much later came Jonas of Bobbio (Jonas of Susa, c. 600-after 665), the biographer of Columban and his early successors, also active in Burgundy. Formal letters of some artistry, all having to do with monotheletism and preserved in the acts of the sixth ecumenical council, were sent to Constantinople in 679 by the synod of Milan under the leadership of its archbishop, Mansuetus (this letter is sometimes ascribed to Damian, the future bishop of Pavia); and in 680 by Pope Agatho and by Agatho and the synod of Rome. Also from Rome are an epitaph in verse for the Anglo-Saxon king Caedwalla (d. 689) and the seventh-century lives in the papal chronicle Liber pontificalis. At the end of the seventh century, the monk Stephen composed for the Lombard king Cunincpert an awkward but linguistically interesting poem on the synod of Pavia (698). Some hagiographic texts (e.g., Audelaus's Life of Saint Fortunatus of Spoleto) could also be from these centuries; others that appear to originate in this period exist only in somewhat later versions.
Several literary authors of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries are prominent. Ambrose Autpert (d. 784)—who was born in Provence but was active at San Vincenzo al Volturno from c. 740—was a biblical commentator, spiritual writer, and local historian and hagiographer. Paul the Deacon (c. 720-c. 799) was one of the leading figures of the Carolingian educational reform and, during his retirement at Monte Cassino, the historian of the Lombards. Two other figures at the Carolingian court were the poet and grammarian Peter of Pisa (d. before 799) and the theologian and poet Paulinus of Aquileia (d. 802). Agnellus of Ravenna (c. 805-c. 855) was a historian. Anastasius Bibliothecarius (died c. 879), a papal secretary and translator, was the principal author of Pope Nicholas I s eloquent and forceful letters to Constantinople. A late ninth-century poet named Johannes composed a rhythmical version of the popular biblical parody Cena Cypriani (Cyprian's Dinner); Johannes is usually, though not certainly, identified with the Roman writer John the Deacon (Johannes Hymmonides, c. 825-880 or 882), the biographer of Gregory the Great. A Campanian poet, Eugenius Vulgarius (late ninth century-early tenth century), is notable for his figure poems and for his command of an unusually wide range of lyric verse forms. Two prose satirists and ecclesiastical authors are Atto of Vercelli (died c. 960 or 965) and Rather of Verona (c. 887—974). Rather was born and died in Lotharingia, but spent most of his career in Verona, as his name implies. Liudprand of Cremona (Liutprand, c. 920-after 971) was a gifted political writer and propagandist.
Francesco Petrarca, De Remeaiis Utriusque Fortunae Libri duo. Rotterdam: Ex Officina Arnoldi Leers, 1649. Reproduced from original held by Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries of Notre Dame.
There are other writers as well from the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Coronatus was the author of the prose Life of Saint Zeno of Verona (late eighth century). Alderic of Benevento (fl. c. 830) was a poet. The Veronese archdeacon Pacificus (d. 844) was a scribe and poet. Three figures were associated with Monte Cassino during the ninth century: the grammarian and poet Hilderic or Ilderic (possibly two people of the same name), the abbot and poet Berthar (d. 883), and the historian and poet Erchempert (d. after 888). Two Neapolitan hagiographers were John the Deacon (late ninth century-early tenth century) and Peter the Subdeacon (fl. c. 919 c. 970). The Salernitan abbot John the Italian (Johannes Italus, Giovanni Romano; fl. c. 942) was the author of a Life of Saint Odo of Cluny. The scholar Gunzo (sometimes equated with Gunzo of Novara, one of Atto of Vercelli's correspondents), in 965 or shortly afterward, wrote a long, literarily informed letter of justification on a point of grammar to the monks of Reichenau in southern Germany. The writer known as Benedict of Mount Soracte (or of San Andrea) produced a chronicle (late 960s-early 970s) that is ungrammatical but notable for its narrative of Charlemagne in the east and its concluding lament for Rome, sacked by soldiers of Otto I.
Significant anonymous prose literature from this period includes the following works: a Life of Saint Syrus of Pavia (c. early eighth century); lives from the eighth- and ninth-century portions of Liber pontificalis; a Life of Saint Gaudentius of No-vara (mid-eighth century to early ninth); the first Life of Saint Barbatus of Benevento (ninth century); a longer Life of Barbatus (late ninth century); a Translation of Saint Athanasius of Naples (whose modern ascription to the translator Guarimpot is uncertain); a Life of Saint Marinus of San Marino (ninth or early tenth century); Chronicon Salernitanum (left unfinished c. 975), covering more than two centuries in the history of the southern Lombard principalities; and a Venetian Translation of Saint Mark (usually thought to be from the tenth century, though it has also been assigned to the eleventh).
Noteworthy instances of anonymous verse from these centuries include the following: a fair number of epitaphs, some of exceptional quality (later eighth century onward); descriptive poems on Milan (early eighth century) and on Verona (between c. 796 and c. 805); a rhythmical Life of Saint Zeno of Verona and a technically similar poem on the nativity, Audite omnes versum verum magnum (late eighth century); poems celebrating King Pepin's defeat of the Avars (796) and lamenting the death of Charlemagne (814); "alphabetical" poems on the destruction of Aquileia (c. early ninth century, dubiously attributed to Paulinus of Aquileia), against its restoration (mid-ninth century), and on Abbot Bobulenus of Bobbio (ninth or tenth century); some of the hymns in the central Italian collection once known as Hymnarius Severinianus (compiled in the late ninth or very early tenth century, and with a few later additions); Carmina Mutinensia, three poems of civic defense from Modena, including an impressive song for the watch on the city walls (late ninth century); Larnentum refugae cuiusdam, the plaint of a monk who has left Bobbio for Verona and wishes to return (late ninth or early tenth century); a sapphic ode to Bishop Adalard of Verona (875-915); the epic poem Gesta Berengarii imperatoris (Deeds of the Emperor Berengar, early tenth century); and Carmen in assumptione sanctae Mariae (Poem on the Assumption of the Holy Mary), composed for the Roman festivities of the year 1000.
Probably tenth-century, but possibly later, are a metrical Translation (to Benevento) of Saint Mercurius, an epitaph in verse for Abbot Aligern of Monte Cassino (d. 986), and the lyrics O Roma nobilis and 0 admirabile Veneris idolum. Two works are dated to c. 1000: the ballad Foebus abierat and a Roman Life of Saint Adalbert of Prague. Spanning the later tenth century and the early eleventh are a number of verse epitaphs from Rome, the Venetian chronicler usually identified as John the Deacon (d. after 1017), and the epistolographer and occasional poet Leo of Vercelli (d. 1026). (An epistolographer is a writer of letters—one of the most characteristic genres of medieval Latin literature.)
Eleventh-century authors and texts of note include the following: the musicologist Guido of Arezzo (c. 992-after 1033); the poet and prose writer Peter Damian (c. 1007—1072); the poem Euge benigne and other lyrics from the papal schola cantorum in Rome (some of these may be earlier); the anonymous sermon on the transit of Saint Constantius of Capri (early eleventh century); the so-called rhythmical Life of Hadrian III from Nonantola (c. mid-eleventh century), in metrical Leonine hexameters; the writer on rhetoric Anselm of Besate (fl. 1046-1054); the lexicographer Papias; Chronicon Novaliciense (Chronicle of Novcllesa, completed c. 1055), an imaginative and highly literary work; the historian Arnulf of Milan (c. 1000-after 1076); Historia Mediolanensis (Milanese History, consisting of three books) by "L." (often referred to as Landulf senior, fl. c. 1076); the imperial polemicist Benzo of Alba (d. 1089 or 1090); the hagiographers Andrew of Strumi (Andrew of Parma, fl. c. 1075—c. 1092) and John ofLodi (c. 1040-1105); Heu, male te cupimus! and Sub vespere Troianis menibus (c. later eleventh century), two verse laments for the Trojan hero Hector; Versus Eporedienses (Verses from Ivrea, c. 1080), an amatory poem sometimes ascribed to one Wido (Guido, the putative author of brief hymns in honor of saints); the poet, canonist, and writer on metrics Deusdedit (a French cardinal active in Rome; d. 1098/ 99); five prayers and the sermon De cantata {On Charity) by Anselm of Lucca (d. 1086); the bible commentator and spiritual writer John of Mantua (fl. c. 1082); a prose Life of Anselm of Lucca by the priest "B." (1086-1087, formerly ascribed to a canon named Bardo); Carmen in victoriam Pisanorum, a poem recounting a successful raid by Pisans and others on the North African port of Mahdia in 1087; and narratives of the translationof Saint Nicholas of Myra by Nicephorus of Bari (1087) and John the Archdeacon (c. 1088).
An important center at this time was the great abbey of Monte Cassino. Among its authors during the eleventh century and the early twelfth century were the following: the poets and hagiographers Lawrence of Amalfi (Laurentius of Monte Cassino, died c. 1050) and Guaifer (Waifer, later eleventh century); the historian and poet Amatus of Monte Cassino (born c. 1010); the poet and medical writer Alfanus of Salerno (Alphanus, d. 1085); the abbot and hagiographer Desiderius (later Pope Victor III, d. 1087); the rhetorician, hagiographer, and poet Alberic of Monte Cassino (c. 1030-before 1106); the hagiographer and prose stylist John of Gaeta (later Pope Gelasius II, c. 1062-1119); and the chronicler and hagiographer Leo Marsicanus (Leo of Ostia, d. 1115). Tropes (small supplementary musical and verbal compositions) in Cassinese liturgical manuscripts of this period are unusual in their frequent and often elegant use of classical verse forms.
Other figures and works also possibly or certainly span these centuries. William of Apulia and Geoffrey Malaterra (both fl. 1090s) were, respectively, the epic poet and the foremost prose historian of the Norman conquest of the south. Adelfer ofTrani and others recorded the life and miracles of Saint Nicholas the Pilgrim (d. 1094). Rangerius of Lucca (d. 1112) and Donizo of Canossa (d. after 1135) were poets. Gregory of Catino (c. 1060-after 1130) was the chronicler of Farfa. Bruno of Segni (c. 1050-1123) was a theologian and homilist; his supposed authorship of the hymn Quis est qui pulsat is at best uncertain. Roughly contemporary works are Novus Avianus (New Avianus, verse fables), by a writer from Asti; a versified office from Venice for Saint Euphemia and her companions; the Translation of Saint Bartholomew from Lipari to Benevento by the priest and monk Martin; and the Beneventan Life of Leo IX, addressed to a venerable father, Landulf.
Liturgical drama, a genre characterized by local variations within larger conventions widely followed in Latin Christendom, is first recorded in Italy in the eleventh century. Its initial and most common manifestations are tropes or trope-like ritual texts involving small dramatic performances. Well-known examples with versions from Italy as well as abroad are the Easter and Nativity dialogues Quem queritis [in sepulcbrolin presepe]. A related sequence (a liturgical song with internal responsions), Quem queritis mulieres, is probably of Beneventan origin. In the twelfth century longer forms also occur. From Sicily during the Norman period we have possibly the earliest surviving versions of the Easter play Peregrinus, as well as a version of the Epiphany play of Herod (Officium stelle). More ambitious works are the lengthy Monte Cassino Passion Play (mid-twelfth century, with one section in Italian), which is the first known drama on this subject in medieval western Europe; and the Greater Carmina Burana Passion Play (c. 1180, with many verses in German), which is now thought to come probably from Bressanone (Brixen) in the south Tirol. Another liturgical development during these two centuries was that the sequence, originally rhythmical prose or prose with some snippets of verse, was standardized as a rhymed verse form. Early verse sequences of Italian authorship are anonymous local additions to an international repertoire—for example, those in the Ravenna graduals of the eleventh century and early twelfth century and in the Liber ordinarius of the cathedral of Florence (compiled c. 1180).
Nondramatic literary authors and texts clearly of the earlier twelfth century include the following: a poem on the captivity of Paschal II (Dum floret verno tempore, 1111); Archbishop Landulf II ofBenevento (d. 1119), who wrote a metrical Passion of Saint Mercurius and a narrative sermon for the vigil of the Twelve Brothers; a Passion of saints Flora and Lucilla, in prose and verse, thought to have come from the monastery of that name near Arezzo; Adalbert of Samaria (fl c. 1113), who was the early master of the dictamen or ars dictaminis ("art of letter-writing," a practical rhetoric); Liber Pergaminus, a laudatory poem on his native city by the grammarian and translator Moses of Bergamo (Mosè de Brolo, Mose del Brolo; d. after 1135, perhaps after 1156); Liber Maiolichinns (or Maiorichinus), an epic poem celebrating the Pisan expedition against Muslim-ruled Majorca in 1114-1115 and assigned either to the unknown Lawrence of Verona or to a local cleric, Henry of Pisa; Abbot-Bishop Maurice of Catania, who was the author of the Translation of Saint Agatha from Constantinople (1126) and probably of the verse epitaph for his predecessor, Abbot-Bishop Ansger; Carmen de hello Mediolanensium adversus Comenses or Liber Cumarum, a brief epic on the war between Milan and Como written after the destruction of Como in 1127; Chronieon Vulturnense (Chronicle of [San Vincenzo al] Volturno, 1124-1130) by the monk John; Abbot Peter II of Santissima Trinita at Venosa, who wrote Vitae quatuor priorum abbatum Cavensium (Lives of the First Four Abbots of La Cava, c. 1140, formerly assigned to his predecessor Hugh of Venosa); the hagiographer Atto of Pistoia (d. 1153); and the historians Alexander of Telese (d. before 1143) and Falco of Benevento (c. 1072-c. 1144).
The Genoese chronicler Caffaro (1080 or 1081-1166) and the Cassinese hagiographer and chronicler Peter the Deacon (c. 1107—c. 1158) were active well into the mid-twelfth century. Grapbia aureae urbis Romae (Writing of the Golden City of Rome) has been ascribed to Peter the Deacon; this work is a classicizing revision of the inventive guidebook Mirabilia urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome, before 1144) in one of its early versions. The following are from the mid-twelfth century and a little beyond: Benincasa's Life of Saint Rayner of Pisa (c. 1160-1164, in very vernacular Latin); a rewritten Life of Saint Bassian of Lodi (c. 1163, in origin probably a tenth-century text); the rhythmical L'lanctus Evandri de morte Pallantis (Encinder's Lament for the Death of I'alias, undated and perhaps earlier than 1163), which was based on an event in Virgil's Aeneid, a poem on the translation of Saint Bartholomew from Benevento to Rome (Militis alma Dei translatio Bartholomaei, c. 1157-c. 1170); two poems arising from Frederick I Barbarossa's campaigns in Lombardy (the dialogue De destructione civitatis Mediolanensis lamenting his punitive devastation of Milan in 1162, and the proimperial epic Carmen de gestis Frederici I. imperatoris in Lombardia, thought to have been written between 1162 and 1166); a history of contemporary Lodi by Otto and Acerbus Morena and their anonymous continuator (1153-1168); the papal historian and biographer Boso (d. after 1177); John Berard, the chronicler of San Clemente di Casauria (fl. c. 1175—c. 1180); Romuald Guarna (Romuald of Salerno; d. 1181), the putative author of medieval Italy's first universal chronicle; and the Sicilian historian Hugo Falcandus (fl. c. 1170—c. 1190).
Figures and works from the final decades of the twelfth century include: the poets Godfrey of Viterbo (c. 1125—after 1202) and Henry of Settimello (fl. 1193); a metrical fable collection, Avianus Venetus (Avianus of Venice); the Bolognese master Geoffrey (Gaufredus; sometimes identified with the Englishman Geoffrey of Vinsauf), whose dictaminal treatise Summa de arte dictandi is enlivened by sections in first-rate quantitative verse; De Ierosolima a Saladino capta (On Jerusalem Taken by Saladin), a poem associated with the abbey of Nonantola that recounts events of the Third Crusade; a variously titled longer work chiefly on the siege of Acre (1189-1191) during the Third Crusade, ascribed to a Florentine named Monachus who was later the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem; a rhythmical "hymn" on the victory of the Brescians at the battle of Rudiano (1191); the monk Alexander's chronicle of San Bartolomeo di Carpineto (finished 1194/95); the theologian and mystic Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202); and Enverard of Verona, known for the introductory sections of his otherwise rather dull Liber de divisionibus paludis comunis Verone (Book on the Divisions of the Marshland of the Commune of Verona, 1199).
There were a number of essentially twelfth-century writers whose literary activity probably or certainly extended into the thirteenth century. They include the following: the poet Peter of Eboli (d. 1219 or 1220); the theologian Lothar of the Conti of Segni (later Pope Innocent III, 1160 or 1161-1216); the jurist and bishop Bernard of Pavia (d. 1213), who wrote a Life of his sainted predecessor in that see, Bishop Lanfranc (d. 1198); the grammarian, lexicographer, and theologian Uguccione of Pisa (Hugutio, d. 1210); and the Cistercian spiritual writer Oglerio or Ogerio of Trino (or of Lucedio, c. 1136—1214). Parts of Oglerio's De laudibus sanctae Dei genetricis (On the Praises of the Holy Mother of God) were soon attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux and circulated with Bernard's works under the title Planctus Mariae (Mary's Lament). A number of hagiographic texts from Sardinia are also eleventh- or twelfth-century, though their precise dating remains elusive. Of particular note are a Life of Saint George of Suelli (twelfth century), the poem Christe patris verbum qui regnum rite supernum in honor of Saint Saturnus (Saturninus) of Cagliari, and the Passion of Saint Antiochus of the Sulcis in prose and verse.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy, more people than ever before were literate in Latin; accordingly, there were numerous significant authors who wrote in Latin. Major contributions were made by members of the new mendicant orders. Liturgical compilations of this period (and later) preserve a considerable quantity of anonymous religious poetry of Italian origin, some of it antedating the thirteenth century. The sequence underwent further development and was no longer exclusively liturgical in application. For the first time since antiquity, there were a substantial number of laypeople, especially judges, among Italy's Latin writers. There was a tendency toward works of great length, sometimes encyclopedic. The scholastics' drier, more "scientific" style of argumentation made great inroads into such traditionally literary forms as the treatise and the sermon,
With the thirteenth century came an outpouring of important spiritual literature in which Franciscans were especially prominent. To Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182-1226) are ascribed a few rhythmical poems and other Latin writings with genuine poetic flavor. Clare of Assisi (1193 or 1394—1253) is considered the author of four Latin letters of somewhat similar quality, but just how far secretaries may have had a hand inshaping these is not easy to determine. Thomas of Celano (c. 1190-1260) wrote two Lives of Francis and Miracles of the Blessed Francis. The great sequence Dies irae is also conventionally assigned to Thomas. Another sequence, Stabat mater, has often been attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone of Todi (c. 1230-1306), who is better known today as a poet in Italian. However, both attributions are suspect: the poems are of unknown provenance, and each seems earlier than its supposed author. The theologians Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274), also a Franciscan, and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), a Dominican, spent much of their lives outside Italy; they either certainly (Bonaventure) or very probably (Thomas) wrote distinguished religious verse. Bonaventure's literary talent is also clear in prose writings such as his Journey of the Mind to God and his two official Legends of Francis. (The term legenda, often used in titles, means "profitable reading matter.")
Other instances of thirteenth-century spiritual writing, broadly defined, are as follows: the devotional poetry of the Benedictine abbot Gregory of Monte Sacro (c. 1190-c. 1245), who was also the author of a major encyclopedic poem; the sermons of Anthony of Padua, the second major Franciscan saint (who was born and trained in Portugal and was active in Italy 1222-1224, c. 1227—1231); the first Life (Legenda 'Assidua") of Anthony, written at Padua in 1232 or shortly afterward; the anonymous dialogue Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty (of uncertain date and perhaps not of Italian origin, though it has usually been thought so); the rhymed offices for Saint Geminian of Modena and for the Translation of Saint Agatha to Catania (also undated); the bull of canonization for Clare (1255); the hymns in honor of Clare ascribed to Pope Alexander IV (Rinaldo of the Conti of Segni, d. 1261); a prose Legend of Clare commissioned by Alexander (this is often ascribed to Thomas of Celano); a closely contemporary Legend of Clare in verse; the visionary epic Anticerberus of the Franciscan Bongiovanni of Cavriana (11. c. 1240); the ascetic poem De recte vivendi doctrina (Doctrine of Correct Living); the hagiographic collections of the Dominican Bartholomew of Trent (died c. 1250 or 1255); the Golden Legend and the sermons of the Dominican jacobus da Voragine (James of Varazze, Jacopo de Vara gine, c. 1226-1298); an Augustinian Life (c. 1257) of Bona of Pisa; Stimulus amoris (Prick of Love) by the Franciscan Jacopo da Milano (James of Milan, late thirteenth century); the Liber ojfciorum (Book of Offices) of the Milanese hymnographer Origo Scaccabarozzi (d. 1293, Franciscan); and the Sermons of the Vallombrosan abbess and mystic Humility of Faenza (c. 1226-1310).
Among thirteenth-century poets on secular subjects are two writers of elegiac comedy: Richard of Venosa (fl. 1228-1229) and James of Benevento (mid-thirteenth century). James was also the author of a didactic poem, Carmina moralia (Moral Verses). His Milanese contemporary Ardighino (Bellino) Bissolo left three such edifying productions. Another moralizing work is the fable collection Novus Esopus (New Aesop) by an otherwise unknown Baldo. Probably also from this century, but not certainly Italian, is an early version (in some 300 lines) of a well known medical poem, Regimen sanitatis Salerni (Salerno's Rule of Health). Historical and civic poets include Quilichino of Spoleto (fl. 1236-1237), Urso of Genoa (fl. 1225—1245), Orfino of Lodi (c. 1195-c. 1251), Eustace of Matera (fl. 1270), Boniface of Verona (d. after 1293), and Stefanardo ofVimercate (d. 1297). The work of the occasional poet Bonaiuto of Casentino (fl. 1292—1300) is varied.
The following are notable instances of rhythmical verse for secular ends: De colloquio celebrato ab imperatore cum Cremonensibus et Parmensibus et Papiensibus in loco Burgt Sancti Dompnini (305 lines), on Frederick II's northern Italian campaign of 1226, transmitted in the Annates Placentini CAnnals of Piacenza) of Giovanni Codagnello (died c. 1235); longer poems by Gerardo Maurisio of Vicenza and the notary Thadeus in Gerardo's chronicle of the brothers Ezzelino and Alberico da Romano (c. 1237); three so-called Carmina triumpbalia celebrating Parma's destruction of the newly founded city of Victoria (1248); Carmen de Ambrosio grarnmatico, a colleague's extended lament for a Bolognese schoolmaster (after 1248); and Morando of Padua's jocular Vinum dulce gloriosutn praising wine and excommunicating water (c. mid-thirteenth century).
Formal Latin prose composition in medieval Italy reached a zenith during the thirteenth century. The following figures were prominent in this regard: the imperial protonotary Pier della Vigna (Petrus de Vinea, c. 1190-1249); his less famous contemporaries Terrisio of Atina (like many dictatores, also a poet in rhythmical verse) and Nicholas of Rocca (d. after 1256), who were both professors at the newly founded University of Naples; and the papal diplomat, dictaminal writer, epistolographer, and religious poet Thomas of Capua (d. 1239). Significant examples of works by others include the following: model speeches in a manual on city governance, Oculuspastoralis (The Shepherd's Eye, c. 1222—c. 1239); an epistolary contest (1260) between the papal notaries Jordan ofTerracina and John of Capua; Cronica in factis et circa facta Marchie Trivixane (Chronicles on and about the Doings of the Trevisan March), by Rolandino of Padua (1200-1276), which is laden with letters and speeches; a revised version (between 1266 and 1293) of Matthew of Amalfi's early thirteenth-century Translation of Saint Andrew from Constantinople; and a highly oratorical account by Thadeus of Naples, written at Messina in 1291, of the fall of the crusader capital Acre in the same year. Four major dictaminal writers who spent at least part of their careers at the University of Bologna (the leading center for the study of ars dictaminis) were Boncompagno of Signa (c. 1170-c. 1241), also the author of a history of the siege of Ancona in 1173; Bene of Florence (d. before 1242); Guido Faba (c. 1190—c. 1250); and Bono of Lucca (d. 1279). The Fleming James of Dinant composed his Ars arengandi (Art of Preaching) and a series of dictaminal works while he was active in Italy from c. 1280 to c. 1300.
Other thirteenth-century prose writers include: the southern historians Niccolò Jamsilla (or the author of the history that goes under this name, d. after 1258), Bartholomew of Neocastro (d. 1294 or 1295), and Saba Malaspina (d. 1297 or 1298); the chroniclers Tolosano of Faenza (d. 1226), Richard of San Germano (d. 1243 or 1244), and Salimbene of Parma (Salim-bene de Adam, b. 1221); the unknown author of the papal biography Gesta Innocentii III (fl. c. 1209—1215); the moralist Albertano of Brescia (d. after 1253); the eulogist Nicholas of Bari (fl. c. 1231 — 1248); the early ethnographer of the Mongols, John of Piano Carpini (d. 1252); the moralizing biographer of emperors and popes, Thomas of Pavia (died c. 1280); and the grammarian and lexicographer Giovanni Balbi (John of Genoa, d. 1298). Sometime between 1230 and 1255 William of Padua wrote, for the abbot of Lagrasse in southern France, Gesta Karoli Magni ad Carcassonam et Narbonam (Deeds of Charlemagne at Carcassonne and Narbonne), in which an account of the founding of his abbey is encompassed in a narrative history drawn from the material of vernacular epics. In 1287 Guido delle Colonne (c. 1215—c. 1290, called Guido de Columnis by those who doubt that he was the vernacular poet of this name) finished his long and influential Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy), which drew on a well-known French romance. In 1300 or slightly earlier, the preacher Jacopo de Cessolis (James of Cessole, d. after 1321) completed Libellus de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scacborum, a moral allegory organized around the game of chess that came to be widely read.
Works and writers spanning the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries include the following: Bonvesin de la Riva (c. 1245-c. 1314), a vernacular poet whose best-known works in Latin are a eulogistic prose account of Milan (his home city), De magnalibus Mediolani (1288), and a didactic poem, De vita scholastica (On Scholastic Life, shortly after 1303); the Book of Angela of Foligno, consisting of Arnaldo of Foligno's Memorial of Angela—completed in 1296—and other texts added after her death in 1309; Giunta Bevegnati's Legend of Margaret of Cortona (d. 1297), completed in 1311; and the Opus metricum of Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi (c. 1260-1341), a long hexameter poem on popes Celestine V and Boniface VIII begun in the early 1290s and finished in 1315. Roughly contemporary are the great majority of the thirty-five or thirty-six Latin poems transmitted along with the Italian verse of "Anonimo Genovese" ("Anonymous of Genoa," late thirteenth century—early fourteenth century). Most of these would seem to be "Anonimo's" own work, although one is a lyric usually assigned to the Frenchman Philip the Chancellor (d. 1226) and another is also attested to elsewhere.
From the late thirteenth century (perhaps) and the earlier fourteenth century come sequences using or adapting the ballata rhyme scheme. These pieces often are called Latin laude, but their relationship to the Italian lauda is tenuous. The best-known are the thirteen songs for the nativity or for the Virgin recorded in a fourteenth-century antiphonary from Bobbio. One of these, Vernans rosa, is better preserved elsewhere and has been thought to be central Italian in origin; another, Missus baiulus, is notably dramatic. An important tradition of liturgical drama is represented by offices from Padua for the Annunciation and the Purification (later thirteenth century) and—from Cividale and from Aquileia or its vicinity—by an office for the Annunciation, a long Planctus Mariae, and the longest version of the widely disseminated lament Flete, fideles anime (fourteenth century). Also from the fourteenth century is Officium quarti militis {Office of the Fourth Soldier), the surviving portion of an elaborate drama from Sulmona on the Passion and the Resurrection,
The literature of the early fourteenth century resembles that of the thirteenth century in many ways. In 1303 and 1304, dictaminal manuals were written by Giovanni di Bonandrea (d. 1321) at Bologna and by Bichilino of Spello at Padua. In 1305, the Spiritual Franciscan Ubertino of Casale (d. after 1335) put together his partly apocalyptic Arbor vite crucifixe Jesu (Tree of Life of the Crucified Jesus), a theological and political work with literary passages. Between 1304 and 1309, Pietro Crescenzi (died c. 1320) finished his Liber ruralium commodorum (Book of Rural Goods), a comprehensive agricultural handbook notable for the understated artistry of its expository prose. Dante Alighieri (1265—1321) was mainly a vernacular poet, but during the first two decades of the fourteenth century he wrote Latin treatises and prose letters in established styles. From at least 1311 to at least 1320, Giovanni de Matociis (John the Mansionary, d. after 1336) wrote biographical histories of the early popes and of the Roman emperors down to Louis the Pious. From 1318 to 1323, William of Tocco drafted and then revised a biography of Thomas Aquinas commissioned in support of Thomas's canonization. In 1330, William of Solagna gave written form to an oral account by the Franciscan missionary Odoric of Pordenone of his journeys in the Middle East and the Far East. The papal scriptor (scribe) Opicino de Canistris (1296-c. 1351), in exile at Avignon, wrote a well-regarded description of his home city of Pavia; Opicino was also the author of curious and sometimes marginally literary private texts and drawings. Between 1327 and 1340, an anonymous Celestinian recast earlier, more prosaic, but also more immediate, lives of Celestine V into a prose and verse biography of studied elegance and possibly broader geographic appeal.
In 1334, James of Acqui was writing his Chronicon imaginis mundi, a universal chronicle known both as the earliest surviving biography of the traveler Marco Polo and as a reworking of folkloric and other legendary material. Someone—probably Petrarch's teacher Convenevole of Prato—composed a largely poetical miscellany, the so-called Regia carmina (Royal Verses), between perhaps 1320 and early 1338, but suspended work during most of the papacy of John XXII (1316-1334); Regia carmina was dedicated to the lord of Prato, Robert of Anjou, king of mainland Sicily. Between 1337 and 1340, Nicolò Speciale (Speziale, d. before 1343) produced a long history of insular Sicily from the Sicilian Vespers to the death of Frederick III. In 1340, Duccio (di Amadore) of Prato completed his Cincturale, a poem in 423 elegiac distichs celebrating a local relic, the "belt of the blessed Virgin"; and Boncore of Santa Vittoria finished his Novus liber hymnorum ac orationum, a versatile but pedestrian array of nonliturgical hymns (including a noteworthy amplification of the Dies irae) and other poems in hymnic measures that he had written, or in some cases collected, as a cleric at Saint Peter's in Rome. From 1338 until shortly before his death in 1348, Simone Fidati (Simon of Cascia) composed his monumental De gestis Domini Salvatoris, a fifteen-book life of Christ replete with gospel commentary; Simone was also the author of Latin sermons and of other writings in Latin and Italian. Chronicle histories of differing literary character were written by Guglielmo Cortusi (c. 1285-after 1360) and by Dominic of Grav ina (c. 1310-after 1350). Some of the letters of the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo (d. 1354) have literary merit.
A concurrent development was the literature of humanism, a body of writing noted for its increasingly meticulous adoption of closely observed ancient literary forms and classical modes of Latin expression, coupled with a more general interest in aspects of antiquity. Its earliest phase, which goes back to the Paduan judge and poet Lovato Lovati (c. 1240-1309), begins with stylistically classicizing verse by writers of traditional prose. Typical in this respect are Pace of Ferrara (fl. 1299-1304) and Giovanni del Virgilio (d. after 1325), who were poets and commentators on Latin school authors. Together with Dante, Giovanni also revived the bucolic eclogue in hexameters, a literary form not known to have been practiced in Italy since the first century. Two early humanists who were considered important in their time but whose works have since largely perished are the poet Benvenuto Campesani ofVicenza (c. 1253-1323) and the epistolographer and satirist Geri of Arezzo (c. 1270-after 1339). The Compendium moralium notabilium (Précis of Things Morally Noteworthy) of Jeremy of Montagnone (d. 1320 or 1321), a collection of excerpts, marked a major step in literary history; it is stylistically unremarkable, but it distinguishes systematically between ancient and medieval authors, and Jeremy, like many humanists, focused on literature as a vehicle of moral and ethical authority.
The Ecerinis of the poet arid literary theorist Albertino Mus-sato (1261-1329), the preeminent second-generation humanist, attempts both the meters and the manner of Senecan tragedy. Albertino's several histories use a Latin prose modeled on classical style. Such prose was also written, in one fashion or another, by the historian and poet Ferreto Ferreti (d. 1337), the orator and papal secretary Zanobi of Strada (c. 1312-1361), and the papal scriptor and Roman antiquary Giovanni Cavallini (d. 1349). Other early manifestations of this movement are the grammatical writings of Bartholomew of San Concordio (the Dominican Bartholomew of Pisa, d. 1347), who preferred classical orthography; and the historical poems in epic verse by Castellano of Bassano (d. after 1332), James of Piacenza (died c. 1349), and Ranieri Granchi (Raynerius de Grancis, d. after 1356).
The most prolific fourteenth-century humanist was Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374), who in a vast body of Latin texts attempted, with varying success, to write like the ancients; an emphasis on moral reform accompanies this stylistic choice. Especially noteworthy are his collection of brief dialogues Remedies for Fortune Good Mid Bad, the consolatory dialogue Secretum, the Book without Name (a collection of scathing letters on life at the papal court in Avignon), and an extensive personal correspondence both in prose and in verse. Also important are his unfinished epic poem Africa (on the exploits of the ancient Roman conqueror of Carthage, Scipio Africanus) and his Latin eclogues; his early comedy Philostratus's Philology is lost. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) wrote classicizing poems and prose letters in Latin. But his chief accomplishments in this literature lie in the learned treatise Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, with its defense of poetry; and in the morally attuned biographical collections On the Fates of Famous Men and On Famous Women.
Younger humanist contemporaries of Petrarch and Boccaccio include the following: Antonio de Gaio or del Gaio of Legnago (c. 1350—1384), who was an epistolographer and the author of brief biographical portraits; the musician and poet Francesco Landini (c. 1325—1997), who delended Ockham's logic; the historian and literary commentator Benvenuto of Imola (d. 1387 or 1388); the poet and literary commentator Peter of Moglio (Pietro della Retorica, d. 1383); the poets Moggio Moggi (c. 1330-after 1388), Domenico Silvestri (born c. 1335), and Giovanni Quatrario (1336—1402); the Florentine chancellor, epistolographer, and mythographer Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406); and the epistolographer and moralist Giovanni Conversini of Ravenna (1343-1408). Provisionally, Carmen medicate (Medical Poem, some 240 hexameters with a prefatory prose letter) may be placed in this period. It is supposedly by one Crispus, who is otherwise unknown and may be fictitious; at one time he was incorrectly identified with an eighth-century archbishop of Milan. Though the issues of its date and tone have not been fully resolved, Carmen medicale could be, as has been argued, a fourteenth-century parody drawing on ancient and medieval collections of remedies in verse.
The now widespread literary use of Italian and the onset of the new, philologically informed humanism together heralded the demise of older, typically medieval styles of Latin literature. For a while, though, these older styles retained their vitality, particularly in the religious orders. The very popular and influential manual Meditations on the Life of Christ, ascribed to the Franciscan John (Johannes) de Caulibus, is now thought to have been written sometime between the mid-1340s and the mid-13605. In 1360 the Augustinian Bono Stoppani of Como finished his collection of prose fables moralized for preaching, Fabule rnistice declarate. From at least 1353 to at least 1361, Michael of Piazza (who is thought to have been a Franciscan) was writing an oratorically colored chronicle of mid-century insular Sicily. In 1366 the Dominican Raymond of Capua (Raimundus de Vineis, c. 1330-1399) completed his Legend of Agnes of Montepulciano. Although a relatively recent attempt to credit Raymond with the sequence Vernans rosa is unpersuasive, he was the author of a very traditionally crafted office for the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. His masterwork, the Legend of Catherine of Siena, was finished in 1395. The Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa (Bartolomeo da Rinonico, died c. 1401) is famous for his Conformity of the Life of the Blessed Francis to the Life of the Lord Jesus, composed between c. 1385 and 1390 and often called the Book of Conformities. Bartholomew was active as early as the 1370s; his other surviving work includes two collections of sermons and a Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the latter completed in 1382. Not until the fifteenth century would humanistic Latin challenge established practices in liturgical poetry, homiletics, and spiritual biography.
See also Boccaccio, Giovanni; Humanism and Protohumanism; Latin Language; Petrarca, Francesco
JOHN B. DILLON
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The lauda (plural, laude)—also spelled laude (plural, laudi)—is a canticle or hymn of praise. Either a musical-literary or a purely literary form, the lauda is a nonliturgical devotional song, usually in praise of the Virgin Mary, Christ, or the saints, although in the Renaissance, laude with secular themes were also composed. Etymologically, the term lauda is believed to have derived from the praise psalms in the Vulgate, which are replete with variants of the verb laudare ("to praise").
The prehistory of the lauda is controversial, with experts having diverse agendas, and thus offering different interpretations. It is likely, however, that originally the lauda was a paraliturgical rhythm (ritmo) in Latin. Still, the most famous lande were written in the Italian vernacular, primarily by persons whose identities are unknown. The medieval lauda functioned either as a sung prayer (of joy or penance) or as a sung homily. The early, complex history of the lauda is closely linked to the growth of lay religious practice.
Some scholars consider the most illustrious vernacular lauda to be Laudes creaturarum ("Praises of God's Creatures"), also known as Cantico delle creature ("Canticle of the Creatures") or Cantico del Frate Sole ("Canticle of Brother Sun"), composed in 1224 or 122.5 by Saint Francis of Assisi (1182—1226). The Cantico, a simple but profoundly moving hymn of praise written in the Umbrian dialect, thanks God for, or through, all elements of creation, which Francis refers to as members of his family. Thus, Francis praises God for Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Mother Earth, and—significantly—Sister Earthly Death, da la quale nulla homo vivente po scappare ("from which no living person can escape"). Francis wrote his hymn of praise in assonanced verse, which calls to mind the performance of liturgical chants.
An episode that took place in 1233 greatly influenced the evolution of the vernacular lauda. The chronicles of Salimbene and Riccardo da San Germano tell us that during this so-called "year of the hallelujah" (anno dell'alleluia) the Franciscans and their fellow mendicants, the Dominicans, led great processions of psalm singers along the highways of Umbria. The official purpose of these marches was to call for peace between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, and between the Lombard communes and the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II. As the demonstrators marched, they intoned laude in the Umbrian dialect, some of whose words have been recorded in the above-mentioned chronicles.
Inspired by this unprecedented display of religious ardor, men and women organized lay confraternities, which subsequently spread like wildfire, first through Umbria and then beyond. The purpose of these companies was to draw the laity back to orthodoxy and away from heretically-leaning movements. One important confraternity that was created in 1233, as a direct outgrowth of the participation of its members in the religious marches of that year, was the Florentine Servi or Serviti della Beata Vergine (Servants of Mary). During these years, the lauda repertoire was irregular in form and related thematically to Marian devotion. The confraternities themselves existed in a preinstitutional form, functioning on the streets in an ad hoc manner.
The year 1260 marks another critical moment in the history of the lauda. Joachim of Fiore had promoted the belief that this year marked the end of the world and the coming of the empire or kingdom of the Holy Spirit. In 1258, the friar and mystic Ranieri Fasani—motivated by this belief, which was shared by many—left his remote hermitage and came to Perugia to help its citizens prepare for the last judgment. To this end, Fasani founded the confraternity of Disciplinati di Gesù Cristo and begged his fellow Christians—men, women, and children—to glorify God publicly through song, to repent, and to purge themselves of sin through weeping and self-flagellation. Other hermits joined Fasani in leading processions of flagellants, and soon the roads and towns of Umbria, and subsequently those of contiguous regions, were reverberating with the laments of the disciplinati (also called flagellanti or battutt). The flagellant movement soon spread to other parts of Italy and beyond—to Provence, Burgundy, Germany, and Poland.
In the wake of this movement, more confraternities of disciplinati were formed; in Perugia alone perhaps more than forty existed during this period. The salient point with regard to the development of the lauda is that around 1267 the disciplinati began to accompany their self-flagellation with, in Salimbene's words, laudes divinas ad honorern Dei et beatae Marine Virginis—i.e., the chanting of songs of praise to God and the Madonna. Later, the laude of the disciplinati—whose primary purpose was to imitate the suffering of Christ—also focused on darker themes, such as earthly evils, penance, disease, dying, and death.
Another type of lay confraternity, the laudese (plural, laudesi), also came into existence after 1260. The laudesi were confraternities of deeply religious men (and sometimes women) who sought to express their piety by assisting at mass (sometimes on a daily basis) and through confession, good works, and the singing of laude. The themes of their laude are praises of Mary, Christ, and the saints. Many laudesi were formed primarily between 1270 and 1290 in Florence, one of the largest and richest cities of Europe. The influential presence in Florence of the mendicant friars (both Dominicans and Franciscans) also stimulated the growth of these companies.
The laudesi and the disciplinati were either newly formed or derived from previously existing Marian companies. Although both the laudesi and the disciplinati were institutions that grew out of mendicant spirituality, the laudesi focused primarily on praise and the disciplinati focused primarily on penance. Another distinction between the laudesi and the disciplinati is that the actions of the laudesi tended to be public, whereas the meetings of the disciplinati, in keeping with their penitential purpose, were held mostly in private. Additionally, the members of the disciplinati tended to be upper-class males, whereas the membership of the laudesi was more heterogeneous and included people of the mercantile and lower classes.
Apparently, at this point in the history of the lauda, the form of the secular ballad was adopted for what the contemporary chronicler Salimbene called laudes divinas ad honorem Dei et beatae Mariae Virginis. The stanza was sung by a soloist or group and the refrain by a chorus. By adopting the secidar ballad form, the religious lauda actively—and successfully—competed with its secular counterpart for the attention of the public.
The two ballad forms that were adopted in this period were the ballata maggiore, which consisted of seven- and eight-syllable lines (settenari and ottonari), alternating with hendecasyllables (the rhyme scheme of the refrain being abbx and that of the strophe ababbccx); and the zagialesca strophe of ancient Hispano-Arabic origin, which consisted of a quatrain having the same rhyme throughout—i.e., aaax, bbbx, etc. The ballata maggiore form of the vernacular lauda may have been introduced by Guittone d'Arezzo (c. 1230-1294). Although Guittone wrote complex and abstruse love poetry in his youth, later in life he joined the Cavalieri di Santa Maria (Knights of Blessed Mary) or Frati Gaudenti ("jovial friars"). At this point he began to compose religious laude in the vernacular, which were more successful than his secular poetry. The zagialesca form of the lauda may have been introduced by a certain Garzo or by the early Franciscan mystic and poet Jacopone da Todi. Garzo is identified with the notary Garzo dell'Incisa di Valdarno, the paternal great-grandfather of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374); four of Garzo's laude are preserved in the famous collection of laude known as Laudario cortonese, which dates from approximately 1270-1280.
Of the known writers of vernacular laude, Jacopone da Todi (Jacopo dei Benedetti, c. 1230-1306) is the most famous and most prolific. His laudario—which is personal and intended for the use of the order, not collective and for the use of the confra-ternities—consists of more than 100 highly emotional poems of great power and originality, written in the Umbrian dialect. They express tremendously contrasting subjects and moods: vehement asceticism and self-humiliation, enraged criticism of other sinners, embittered satire, and mystical ecstacy. Jacopone's most important laude are O iubelo del core; Senno me par e cortesia; Povertade ennamorata; Plange la Chesia, plange e dolora; 0 femmene, guardate a le mortal'ferute; Quefarai, Pier dalMorrone?; Que farai, fra Iacovone?; O papa Bonijazio; Quando t'aliegre, omo d'altura; Donna de Paradiso; Omo, mittete a pensare-, Frate Ranaldo, do' si' andato?; and Sopr'onne lengtia Amore. Jacopone is also the reputed author of the Latin sequence Stabat mater dolorosa.
In sum, more than 200 laudari—collections of laude—have preserved many individual laude, the majority of which are anonymous. For the most part, these collections are organized according to the liturgical calendar (i.e., the calendar of proper feast days) and date from a fairly late period in the tradition. The oldest laudari come from Perugia, Assisi, Arezzo, Borgo San Sepolcro, Gubbio, and Fabriano. Two laudari are unique in that they preserve the musical notation: the thirteenth-century Cortona laudari (Cortona, Biblioteca del Comune; MS 91), discovered in 1876; and the fourteenth-century codex Magiabe chiana (Mgl), Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, manuscript II I 122 (Banco Rati 18). In both manuscripts the music is monophonic and closely linked to the syllabic stress of the text. Some of the most important laude in the Cortona collection are Venite a laudare; Ave, Vergene gaudente; Alta Trinità beata; Oimè lasso e freddo lo mio core-, Chi vol lo rnondo d&prezzare, and Amor dolze senza pare.
Another important aspect of the laudari is the fact that they document the evolution of the lauda from a lyric to a dramatic genre. The dramatic lauda contains monologues or dialogues among a number of characters and is the nucleus of the Italian miracle or mystery play, the sacra rappresentazione. The most famous example of the dramatic lauda is Jacopone da Todi's Donna de Paradiso ("Lady of Paradise"), also referred to as Pianto delta Madonna ("Lament of the Madonna"), which relates in touchingly simple language the passion of Christ. This lauda consists entirely of dialogue, with no descriptive or narrative discourse. The dramatic laude were presented first in churches, then in porticos, and finally outdoors in city squares, with or without elementary sets. Typical themes were episodes from the gospels, the last judgment, saints' lives, and so on; the aim of the dramatic lauda was to educate a largely illiterate public in these aspects of the faith.
The lauda continued to flourish in the fourteenth century in the hands of such authors as Ugo Panziera da Prato (1265-1330), Bianco di Sand da Siena (c. 1350-1410), and Giovanni Dominici (c. 1357—1419). The genre throve again in the fifteenth century, and it was during this period that the polyphonic lauda developed. Nevertheless, during the fifteenth century the prevalent form was the literary lauda, written by professional men of letters such as Feo Belcari (1410-1484), Girolamo Benivieni (1453-1542), Lorenzo dei Medici (1449-1492), and Leonardo Giustinian (1388—1446). In their laude, these authors characteristically used the ottava rirna of the chivalrous epic popular at the time to treat ancient subjects in a folkloristic manner, also introducing fantastic or realistic elements. The poems of the fiery religious reformer and Dominican Iriar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) were very different; they seem to have been inspired by an authentic furor divinus, although they conformed stylistically to the Belcarian model. Musically, the lauda of the sixteenth century represents an important step in the development of the oratorio. The laudari of the secular Congregazione dell'Oratorio, founded by Saint Philip Neri (d. 1595), have fortunately survived. The lauda remained an important element of Italian devotional life until the nineteenth century.
See also Guittone d'Arezzo; Italian Literature: Religious; Italian Poetry: Lyric; Italian Prosody; Jacopone da Todi
V. LOUISE KATAINEN
Contini, Gianfranco. 'Laude." In Poeti del Duecento, Vol. 2. Milan: Ricciardi, 1960, pp. 7-166.
Liuzzi, Fernando. La lauda e i primordi della melodia italiana, 2 vols. Rome: Liberia dello Stato, 1934.
Varanini, Giorgio, Luigi Banfi, and Anna Ceruti, eds. Laude cortonesi dal secolo XLII al XV, 4 vols. Florence: Leo Olschki, 1981-1985.
Underhill, Evelyn. Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic—1228-1306: A Spiritual Biography. New York: Books for Libraries, 1972.
Hughes, Serge, and Elizabeth Hughes. Jacopone da Todi: The Lauds. New York: Paulist, 1982.
Barr, Cyrilla. The Monophomc Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the Late Middle Ages, Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988.
Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 175-177.
Milson, John. "Lauda spirituale." In The New Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Denis Arnold. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 1051.
Stevens, John, and William F. Prizer. "Lauda spirituale." In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, Vol. 10. London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 538-543.
Wilson, Blake. Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Laude: Medieval Italian Songs, dir. Thomas Binidey. Indiana University Early Music Institute. Focus, 912. 1991.
Laude di Sancta Maria: Veillée de chants de devotion dans lltalie des Communes La Reverdie. Arcana, A34. 1994.
Canon law is the legal system developed by the medieval Christian church and still maintained in some branches of the Christian tradition today. The term "canon" stems from a Greek root meaning "rule" or "measure" and was used from a very early period to describe the rules and regulations of the Christian community. The canons covered a broad range of topics: e.g., they detailed the rights and obligations of clerics, monks, and laypeople; prescribed the proper conduct of liturgical observances; regulated morality and personal conduct; established norms for marriage and family life; and dealt with church property and other economic issues.
The canons stemmed from many sources. A few were drawn from the scriptures; others were enacted by church councils—especially the general or ecumenical councils, which served as legislative bodies for the entire church; and still others were established by local councils and synods, which framed rules for particular regions but whose canons might be adopted elsewhere, outside the place where they originated. The decisions of bishops—particularly the bishops of Rome, who often intervened to resolve disputes in the churches of other bishops—frequently acquired the force of law and were treated as authoritative precedents in determining similar cases.
Since the sources of canon law were so numerous and so varied, from an early period bishops and other church authorities who faced concrete problems or disputes turned for guidance to collections of canons drawn up for that purpose. The earliest such collection, Didache, or Doctrina duodecim Apostolorum, dates from the late first century or the early second century. This brief collection of moral precepts, liturgical rules, and regulations for the conduct of church business was soon followed by numerous other collections, such as Didascalia apostolorum and the Apostolic Tradition ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome, which supplemented and amplified earlier prescriptions.
Among the numerous collections of canonical rules from the fifth and sixth centuries, the church in Gaul produced Statuta. ecclesiae antiqua and the Aries Collection; Spain yielded a set of canons that constituted the core of the somewhat later collection known as Hispana; and in Italy the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus (fl. c. 497-526) compiled the set of canons known as Dionysiana, perhaps at the command, and probably with the encouragement, of the papacy. Dionysiana became the nucleus of several later canonical collections, the most influential of which was Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana, which Pope Hadrian I sent to Charlemagne as an authoritative statement of the canons recognized by the church of Rome.
During the Carolingian period, several collections incorporating forged canons also appeared. The most famous is the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, produced in northern France in the mid- ninth century. These canons were apparently the work of reformers who hoped to bolster the case for their programs by cloaking them in the guise of letters by early popes and decrees from councils and synods of bygone days. Although a few contemporaries suspected that all was not quite right with these productions, they passed for centuries as authentic, and canonists of later generations often relied on them as guides to the discipline and doctrine of the early church.
Between the late sixth century and the mid-eleventh century, another kind of canonical literature became prominent: the penitentials. These manuals were designed to guide confessors in dealing with moral offenses. Penitentials prescribed the acts of reparation and devotion that their authors deemed suitable both as punishment and as remedies for the sins committed by the penitents who consulted them. The penitentials thus served both a spiritual and a punitive role. As spiritual manuals, they suggested to confessors the kinds of devotional exercises that seemed appropriate for different sins; in their punitive aspect they were something like sentencing manuals that indicated the punishments merited by various offenses.
Penitentials originated in Ireland, and the earliest was ascribed to Finnian—probably Finnian of Clonard (d. 549), or perhaps Finnian of Moville (d. 579). Other Irish penitentials soon appeared, notably those of Columbanus (d. 615) and Cummean (d. 662). They were followed by further penitentials of Anglo-Saxon origin, such as those of Theodore of Canterbury (c. 602-690), Bede (672 or 673-735), and Egbert of York (d. 766); authors on the continent began to produce similar works somewhat later. Only a few penitentials, notably the Bobbio Penitential and the Penitential of Monte Cassino, originated in Italy, where this type of literature seems not to have been as popular as it became in northern Europe.
Among the dozens of canonical collections that survived from the ninth century, Collectio Anselmo dedicata, compiled by a northern Italian cleric toward the end of that century, was particularly influential. The eleventh-century church reform movement stimulated the study of canon law, and reform-minded clerics during the eleventh century produced a flood of new canonical writings. Especially important were the Decreturn of Bishop Burchard of Worms (written between 1008 and 1012); the Collection in Five Books, which circulated widely in Italy; the Collectio canonum of Anselm of Lucca (written c. 1083); and Bonizo of Sutri's Liber de vita Christiana (which dates from the pontificate of Urban II, 1088—1099). Also during the 1090s, Bishop Ivo of Chartres (c. 1040—1115) compiled further canonical collections; his Panormia, a relatively brief, convenient, and well-arranged compendium, became a widely used canonical manual.
About 1140, a Bolognese canonist named Gratian completed an epoch-making work that he called Concordia discordantium canonum, although later generations usually called it Decretum Gratiani (Gratian's Decretum). Gratian's work soon became the standard textbook of canon law in the western church, and it remained the foundation for the study of canon law among Roman Catholics until the codification of the law in the twentieth century (the code of Benedict XV appeared in 1917; it was superseded by the code of John Paul II in 1983).
Gratian's book differed from earlier canonical collections in several important ways. It was, for one thing, more comprehensive than its predecessors. Even more important, Gratian not only reproduced the rules enunciated by earlier authorities, but he also analyzed the sources and distinguished carefully between them, so as to resolve their contradictions and differences. Gratian thus provided his readers with rational guidance through the forest of regulations that had accumulated during more than 1,000 years of Christian rule-making and legislation. This made his book an indispensable tool for teaching the law, and it also gave judges and other ecclesiastical officials guidelines for analyzing legal problems, so that they could differentiate between similar situations and find the most appropriate rules to apply to the cases that came before them. Gratian's work also enabled church officials to conduct their business with greater certainty, because his guidelines gave them a reasonable basis for anticipating the legal results of their actions and policies. His book, while far from perfect, gave bishops and other officials, judges, lawyers, and ordinary litigants a more secure starting point than they had previously had for conducting their business and dealing with matters that concerned the institutional church.
The scope of Gratian's work was very broad. He dealt, of course, with the structure and organization of the church itself, and he defined the powers of various church officers and the limits beyond which they could not legally go. He described in considerable detail the rights and obligations of clerics, monks, and nuns in their relations with one another and with the laity. Gratian also dealt with the law concerning church buildings and ecclesiastical revenues, with tithes and other exactions that the church imposed on the faithful, and with the norms for the proper management of the church's property. He devoted some space at the beginning of his work to theoretical questions concerning foundations of law and the relationship of canon law to other categories of law—human, natural, and divine. But the greater part of his book dealt with more immediate and practical issues. Naturally, he gave attention to technical problems of procedure and the limits of the jurisdiction of courts and officials at various levels of the church's hierarchy. A quite substantial part of Gratian's work dealt with marriage, divorce, and family law—matters of special concern to the laity—while other major sections treated problems related to wills and testaments, war and violence, penance for sins, usury, simony, and criminal offenses, which concerned both laymen and clerics. The concluding section dealt with the sacramental law of the church: times and places for saying mass, conferring holy orders, baptizing children and converts, anointing the sick, and related topics.
The Decretum Gratiani quickly became the leading textbook in the schools where canon law was taught, and it contributed substantially to the growth and maturation of canon law as an academic discipline during the second half of the twelfth century. As law teachers composed lectures on the Decretum and devised exercises to train the student in the intricacies of applying the law that he learned from Gratian to the problems he would face in real life, they spawned several new genres of legal literature. Systematic commentaries on Gratian's text often took the form of the Summa decretorum, of which the earliest example was the one written before 1148 by Paucapalea. This was soon followed by numerous other canonistic summae, such as those of Rolandus and Rufinus; the anonymous Summa Parisiensis; and above all the great Summa of Huguccio (completed c. 1188), which was widely popular. Brief notes on the meaning and application of particular words and phrases in Gratian's text took the form of glosses; and shortly after the beginning of the thirteenth century a German canonist who taught at Bologna, Johannes Teutonicus, compiled a massive gloss apparatus that covered the whole of the Decretum. This Glossa ordinaria, or standard exposition of Gratian's text, was completed by 1216 and was revised by Bartholomew of Brescia c. 1245. Other academic expositors drilled law students through quaestiones—formal debates on legal issues that arose from cases, real or imaginary—and the quaestio likewise soon became a standard genre of the rapidly growing legal literature.
Gratian's book not only provided church judges with a firm basis for dealing with all these matters, but it also encouraged litigants to bring their disputes before ecclesiastical courts for resolution. The result was a surge of business in the canonical courts, as well as a need for new law to deal with contingencies where existing legislation did not apply or where existing remedies seemed unsatisfactory. In consequence, a flood of new rules materialized in the closing decades of the twelfth century and continued during most of the thirteenth century. This in turn vastly enlarged the scope of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and greatly increased the power and importance of canon law.
Some of the new law was the work of general councils, such as the Third Lateran Council (1179), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the First Council of Lyon (1245), and the Second Council of Lyon (1274). Much more of the new law, however, originated with the popes and took the form of decretal letters—letters in which the pope enunciated a decision in a particular case and, at the same time, set forth a rule of law applicable to all other cases which were of the same type or in which the same issues arose. Decretals were in some ways rather similar to decisions of the Supreme Court in the legal system of the United States.
Systematic collections of decretals had begun to appear by the closing decades of the twelfth century, and they soon became a subject of academic exposition and analysis in the faculties of canon law. The expositors of the new law are known as decretalists, in contrast to writers on Gratian's book, who were known as decretists. Decretalist writers adapted the literary forms that the decretists had developed to the study of the new law and spawned their own Summae decretalium, glosses, and quaestiones. In 1230 Pope Gregory IX (r, 1227—1241), who had himself been trained as a canon lawyer, commissioned an eminent CataIan scholar, Raymond of Penyafort (c. 1180 or 1185-1275), to compile a collection of the new law since Gratian's time. In 1234, when Raymond had completed the task, the pope formally published this collection, known as the Decretals of Gregory IX, or alternatively as Liber Extra, and dispatched a copy to the faculties of canon law at Bologna and Paris, with orders that it be taught as an official lawbook, alongside the work of Gratian.
The Liber Extra thus joined Gratian's Decretum as one of the two central texts for the training of canon lawyers. Like the Decretum, the Liber Extra also became a subject of glosses, lectures, summae, quaestiones, and commentaries of various kinds that academic canonists produced as a by-product of their teaching.
The making of new law did not cease with the publication of Liber Extra. Popes continued to issue decretals, councils continued to adopt legislation, and canonists continued to compile unofficial collections of new laws to supplement the established texts. In 1298 Pope Boniface VIII issued a further official collection to be appended to the Liber Extra as its Liber Sextus (Sixth Book). In 1317 Pope John XXII added to the growing body of canon law a further official collection, known as the Constitutiones Clementis V (Clementine Constitutions, or the Clementines) because it comprised principally decrees of Pope Clement V, together with the decrees of the Council of Vienne (1311-1312). Both the Liber Sextus and the Clementines immediately joined their predecessors in the legal curriculum. Zenzelinus de Cassanis compiled another brief, unofficial collection c. 1355—Extravagantes Johannis papae XXLL—and this too soon augmented the course of studies. At the very end of the fifteenth century, printers began to add a further private collection, Extravagantes communes, compiled by Jean Chappuis, to the standard batteries of canonical texts that they published. This addition was formally recognized in 1582, when Gregory XIII included it in the official Roman edition of the Corpus iuris canonici.
One weakness of early medieval canon law was that it had no well-defined procedures and no effective array of courts to implement its prescriptions. True, bishops from the time of Constantine (d. 337) enjoyed the right to judge offenses against the canons and to impose penalties enforceable by public authorities; and under the late Roman empire they adapted for their own use some elements of the procedures current in the civil courts. However, when the political fabric of the western empire began to crumble in the late fourth and fifth centuries, church courts had to accommodate themselves to the new polity of the west; and in the process they gradually assimilated practices—such as compurgation and the ordeal—that were current among the Germanic settlers with whom they now had to deal.
A specifically ecclesiastical procedural system and court structure gradually began to emerge toward the end of the twelfth century. At the apex of the hierarchy of church courts were the papal courts in Rome. Until the beginning of the thirteenth century, the popes often presided in person and spent a large fraction of their time dealing with judicial business. Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198—1216), however, the popes began to delegate all but a few critical cases to members of their entourage. By the mid-thirteenth century, more or less full-time judges and a battery of specialized tribunals had begun to appear at the Roman curia. The Audientia litterarum contradictarum dealt with claims to church offices and benefices; the Rota handled much of the papacy's matrimonial jurisdiction, as well as much other contentious litigation; the Camera dealt with financial disputes; and the Penitentiary concerned itself with indulgences, dispensations, and other types of cases involving the pope's spiritual jurisdiction.
Likewise, bishops in the late twelfth century and the early thirteenth century began to appoint officials-principal, commissary judges, and other officers to handle most of their judicial business. At the local level, the court of the archdeacon dealt with many routine complaints and the less serious disputes that litigants brought to church courts for resolution.
At about the same time, canonical procedure began to become more sophisticated and increasingly complex. The procedures that emerged in the ecclesiastical courts were modeled on late Roman cognitio extraordinaria and became in turn the model for the procedural system of the ius commune that was used by the end of the Middle Ages in civil courts throughout Italy, and indeed throughout most of continental Europe. This system in turn set the procedural pattern followed by civil law courts in Italy and elsewhere in the continent to this day.
See also Canon Law Collections and Ordinary Glosses; Gratian; Uguccione da Pisa
JAMES A. BRUNDAGE
Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols., ed. Emil Friedberg. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879. (Reprint, Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959.)
Monumenta iuris canonici. Series A, Corpus glossatorum; Series B, Corpus collectionum; Series C, Subsidia. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1965-.
Quellen zur Geschichte des römisch-kanonischen Prozesses im Mittelalter, 5 vols., ed. Ludwig Wahrmund. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1905-1931.
Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law. Series 1, 16 vols., New York, 1955-1970. Series 2, Berkeley, Calif., 1971—.
Clarence Smith, J. A. Medieval Law Teachers and Writers, Civilian and Canonist. University of Ottawa, Publications of the Faculty of Law, Monographs, 9. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975.
Coing, Helmut, ed. Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, Vol. 1, Mittelalter (1100-1500). Munich: Beck, 1973.
Dictionnaire de droit canonique, 7 vols., ed. R. Naz. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1935-1965.
Fournier, Paul, and Gabriel LeBras. Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident depuis les fausses decretales jusqu 'au Décret de Gratien, 2 vols. Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1931-1932. (Reprint, Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1972.)
Fuhrmann, Horst. Einfluss und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fdlschungen, von ihrem Auftrachtung bis in die neuere Zeit, 3 vols. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften, 24. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1972-1974.
García y García, António. História del derecho canonico, Vol. 1, El primer milenio. Salamanca, 1967.
Gaudemet, Jean. Les sources du droit de I'église en Occident du lie au Vile siécle. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, Éditions du CNRS, 1985.
Kuttner, Stephan G. Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140-1234): Prodromus corporis glossarum. Studi e Testi, 71. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1937.
Stickler, Alphonso M. Historia iuris canonici latini institutiones academicae. Turin: Libraria Pontif, Athenaei Salesiani, 1950.
Van Hove, Alphonse. Prolegomena ad Codicem iuris canonici, 2nd ed. Malines: H. Dessain, 1945.
Criminal law in medieval Italy varied by region and period, retaining elements from each historical development. Law went through an Ostrogothic-Byzantine period (480—740); a Lombard period (586-800); a period of a kingdom of Italy, with underlying feudal and customary law (800-1100); and a communal statutory and ius commune period (1100—1450). Law in Italy was often substantially affected by developments in ecclesiastical law, which sometimes followed and sometimes anticipated developments in civil law, or Roman law. Venetian law was outside the system of Roman law and therefore differed from the law of other northern and central Italian city-states. Southern Italy was often a political unit separate from the kingdom of Italy (the northern and central parts) and was affected by different legal influences.
The barbarian invasions of the western empire brought the Ostrogoths under Theodoric to Italy, where they set up a kingdom with their capital at Ravenna. Ostrogothic law was similar to other Germanic laws. However, Theodoric saw himself as vicar of the Byzantines, or the leader of the west. He redacted the Edict, consisting mainly of criminal law and procedure, for the Roman and Ostrogothic populations c. 500. Lawlessness was rife in this kingdom, and the settling of the warlike tribes was a challenge to the nascent kingships, as was corruption in judicial offices. The Edict was a thoroughly Roman law enactment, taken from the Sententiae of Paulus, earlier Roman codes (such as the Gregorian and Hermogenian codes), and the Theodosian code. It established the Theodosian code as the primary Roman law code used in the west in the early Middle Ages. Whatever was covered in the Edict was governed by this Roman law for Ostrogoths and Romans; and whatever was not covered was governed by the custom of each people separately.
The Byzantines reasserted their power in Italy militarily by defeating the Ostrogoths in destructive wars conducted from 533 to 555 by the eastern emperor, Justinian, through his able generals Belisarius and Narses. The laws of the Ostrogoths appear to have been abolished, and the Ostrogoths were required to pledge obedience to imperial law. The Byzantines ruled through tribuni, who were nominal appointees of the Byzantine viceroy, the exarch of Ravenna, but were really major landowners who possessed great local power that became hereditary. During this period the great Justinianic code was promulgated, but it was little used in either the east or the west. In the east, it was replaced in 740. The barbarian west did not achieve the level of sophistication necessary to make use of this skilled piece of legislation and judicial thinking. Only the Institutes, the simplified part redacted as a textbook for the law school, and abridgements of the Codex, the decrees of emperors before Justinian, were used. The Germanic people, when they redacted laws for the Roman population, used mainly the Theodosian code. The real impact of the Justinianic code was felt in the revival of Roman law in the twelfth century. The Byzantines were driven out of northern and central Italy in 751.
When the Lombards invaded Italy in 568, taking over two-thirds of the country, they were filling a power vacuum left by the destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom at the hands of the Byzantines and the subsequent inability of the Byzantines to hold the northern and central parts from a distance. The Lombards' customs remained more purely Teutonic than those of other tribes, because the Lombards had migrated into the empire later (from southern Jutland) and had had only limited contact with the Roman world before migrating. In fact, they were one of the last tribes to migrate, reaching Lombardy in 568 after renouncing Odin and becoming Aiian Christians. They did not become Catholic until 618. Both Romans and Lombards lived under Germanic constitutional law, with some Roman personal law, until the mid-eighth century, when they were conquered by the Franks. The oldest Lombard code is the Edict of Rothari (643), which sought to preserve premigration customs. Additions to this code were made by Rothari's successors Grimbald (688), Liutprand (Luitprand, 712), Ratchis (745), and Aistulph (749). Liutprand made Lombard law conform to church law and instituted reforms based on Roman law.
The Germanic peoples had their own institutions and laws, which were very different from Roman law and were concerned with the vendetta, group (familial) liability, and the personality of the law (as opposed to territoriality). After contact with the empire, Germanic law was profoundly influenced by both Roman law and Christianity. Christianity introduced ideas of personal liability and intent, based on the model of individual accountability for sins. Contact with the empire solidified political structures where there had been none, other than the popular assembly, and created kingships—albeit weak ones—which after Charlemagne acquired additional validity from a perception that they had been established by divine will as well as by popular acclamation. Roman law brought a stronger monarchical figure who could legislate. The Christian idea that the king and the state had a duty to uphold the order and morals of the people was put into effect. Even the act of writing down custom in the form of statutes was a response to Roman written law. The main subject of these ordinances was Germanic criminal law.
The vendetta was the primary legal institution of the Germanic peoples because it required no state to enforce the law: crime—especially a personal offense—was seen as a strictly private matter between two families. When the tribes settled and began farming, such private warfare became disruptive, and thus unsuitable, and the kings attempted to control it and to find other institutions to deal with crimes. These attempts were often seen by the disputants as unjust interference. The law also resided in the people—their usages, their morals, and their common sense—through longtime practice. Thus no one, not even the king, could legislate—but everyone, especially the old and venerable, could declare law. Old law was more valid than new law in the customary system. Even the king was subject to the law. In practice, this situation changed as the influence of Christianity made monarchy more elevated and more independent. The Lombard codes were distinct from ail the other Germanic codes in being strongly monarchical instead of popular. The monarchical character of the law was the key to its successful blending with Roman law, and thus to its longevity when other Germanic codes were forgotten.
Vendetta occurred when a person from one clan offended a member of another clan, perhaps wounding or killing him. All the members of the offended family would then seek to kill or wound any member of the offending family. This was group action, because each clan conceived of itself as a "spirit pool" and felt that, as a practical matter, its own protection depended on maintaining its numerical strength. To kill a member of a clan was to diminish its spirit pool and to hurt all its members. This sense of group liability carried over into the time of compurgators, when a defendant's proof in court depended on the number of witnesses, largely family members, that he could summon to attest to his character. Efforts to control the vendetta were aimed not at disallowing it, but simply at limiting it, in deference to the honor and ethics of the clans. Revenge could not be taken on an entire clan but was restricted to the principal party—the offender—who could then himself be offended with impunity. Also, a scale of compositions, or money payments, was devised whereby one clan paid the other clan not to carry out the vendetta. A pecuniary compensation called a wergeld was substituted for the blood feud. The victim, or the victim's family, could either retaliate or accept money from the culprit, the amount usually being determined by the crime committed, the status of the culprit, and the status of the victim. The right to compensation was equal to the obligation of retaliation or payment. The compensation consisted of the capital, or manwyrd, which restored the value of the man (or property) destroyed; the faida, an equivalent sum to pay the opposed party for giving up its right to retaliation for the crime; and a payment to the state for breaking the peace.
Most of the barbarian tribes had pecuniary punishments by the time of the written laws; in fact, the written laws consisted mainly of levels of payments by class and crime. Crimes were increasingly considered breaches of the public peace, and therefore a responsibility of the state. In Lombard law, the vendetta remained vigorous for an extended period, leading Rothari to raise the amount of the compensations in an effort to make them more attractive, judicial proceedings supervised by the state became more and more obligatory. Charlemagne established the principle that those who did not come to court when summoned lost all their property. Among the Salian Franks, property could not be seized without the intervention of a judge.
The attempt to restrict the vendetta caused some breakdown in the kin group. Retaliation was commuted to money, and no one was needed to carry out the vendetta, so the difference between active and passive loyalty began to disappear. Each person was treated individually before the law, not in the context of his family, so whole family was no longer held reponsible for the crimes of one of its members. The Burgundian code observed, "In such cases let all know this must be observed carefully, that the relatives of the man killed must recognize that no one can be pursued except the killer; because just as we have ordered the criminals to be destroyed, so we will suffer the innocent to sustain no injury." The idea of a family spirit pool was also being destroyed by the Christian idea that everyone is accountable for his own actions before God.
The change in the understanding of crime from being a private matter to being a public matter was by no means complete during the Germanic period. In Lombard law 74 of Rothari, the king encouraged judicial proceedings because they were more durable, but he actually forbade vendetta only in cases of involuntary murder or involuntary damage—the law went on to say that the vendetta was allowed in every other case. This distinction between voluntary and involuntary crime was not Germanic, but Roman and Christian; previously, the vendetta had been exercised in cases of involuntary as well as voluntary offenses. However, the law that a person caught in the commission of a crime did not need a trial was a borrowing from Roman law. For some crimes, it was established that the culprit would be given in slavery to the offended party, who then would serve as a substitute for incarceration by the state. The state's resources for hunting down criminals were extremely limited, and the responsibility for apprehending criminals was incumbent on everyone in society. The reporting of crimes was mandatory, and all strangers were looked on with great suspicion. Considerable self-help remained allowable; for instance, a man who caught his wife in the act of adultery could kill both parties.
German courts usually lacked good evidence pertaining to crimes. The institution of oath-takers, or compurgators, was a Germanic means of determining cases and deciding culpability. Compurgation was the practice whereby a defendant's innocence, or the truth of a plaintiff's claim, was determined not on the basis of objective evidence but by summoning a sufficient number of oath-takers to swear to his good character. Swearing an oath was a sacred duty (a false oath-taker would fear the wrath of God) and showed a significant committment to the defendant, as well as to the obligation of the vendetta. Oathtaking was an original German institution that was adopted and used by the Roman population. As German law became regularized, so did the institution of oath-taking. A set number of oath takers were required for specific crimes: for instance, six of the defendant's kin chosen by the pursuer plus five more free men, chosen by these seven. Severe penalties were exacted for false oaths; thus external coercion was replacing moral suasion. The oath was a set formula, and if the swearer faltered in saying it, the trial was over: God had interceded to prevent the person from saying the oath. The church co-opted the oath, in that the swearing took place in church or on a relic instead of on the customary arms.
Trials by battle, ordeal, and torture were used as alternatives to compurgation; that is, if no oath-takers were available, there would be trial by battle or ordeal. The ordeal was originally a pagan practice in which the offender was sacrificed to appease the gods. This too was co-opted by Christianity, so that the ordeal became a trial decided by God. The main ordeals were the cross, boiling water, and a hot iron. (In the ordeal of a hot iron, a defendant would be made to carry a red-hot metal bar a certain distance; his hands would then be bandaged for a week and then unwrapped. If the wound had festered, the defendant was judged guilty; if it had healed, he was judged innocent.) By the time of Rothari, faith in the ordeal and battle had diminished considerably; and Rothari himself believed that these measures should not be used in important matters. In the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Pope Innocent III forbade the clergy to participate in trials by ordeal. Torture was typically used only against slaves, who could be put to torture in order to extract information or a confession. However, if a reasonable amount of evidence had been presented against a freedman, he too could be tortured to obtain a confession. Whereas the Edict of Rothari of 643 used irrational proofs such as judicial duels and compurgation, the codes of Liutprand (713-744) and Ratchis (744-756) also instituted some rational proofs, such as witnesses, inquests, and written documents.
Charlemagne decisively defeated the Lombards and ended the independent Lombard kingdom in 774. From then until 1100, law in Italy was formulated from the Lombard laws and Carolingian capitularies, and a legal school developed at Pavia in the tenth and eleventh centuries expounded these two sources. In 802, Charlemagne allowed each tribe subject to the Carolingians to retain its personal law, but he exercised the capitularies as territorial law over all the people. Throughout this period, northern-central Italy was organized in the kingdom of Italy, with its capital at Pavia. The king of Italy was usually also the Holy Roman emperor, as Charlemagne was. There was some centralization in the kingdom of Italy, with a royal law court at Pavia and state courts in many cities. The jurists of Pavia codified the law, making it a more coherent system; certain state institutions survived; and some knowledge of law and procedure seems to have been common.
However, it is a mistake to exaggerate the uniformity of the law. Local customs continued to be an important source of law, especially in areas remote from the state courts. The period from 800 to 1100 was also the period of feudalism in Italy; courts came under the supervision of local counts, who were great landowners. These counts had been empowered as representatives of the Carolingian government, and when the Carolingian central administration disintegrated they were left with land, military strength, and administrative and judicial powers. Feudalism faded much faster in Italy than elsewhere, because there were some administrative survivals in the cities; thus there was a basis for the nascent communes during the economic revival that began in the tenth century, and feudal law was ignored during the first phase of formation of the law school at Bologna. Nevertheless, feudal law was being studied at Bologna by the twelfth century, because it remained in practice in many places. In the 1150s, Obertus de Orto wrote Libri feudorum, which was based on imperial legislation in the kingdom of Italy, decisions by feudal courts, Lombard customs, and extracts from the writings of the school of Pavia, recognizing that much custom was still in practice. Feudal law blended very well with Germanic customs and clan ethics and helped perpetuate them. Feudal law mainly concerned itself with land, but it also treated crimes; in criminal law, feudalism perpetuated Germanic customs. We should also note that bishops, who were often great landowners, had legal and administative powers, not because of ecclesiastical jurisdiction but because of a lack of state powers.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, an economic upswing caused by technological improvements, better agricultural techniques, and an increase in population led to the resettlement of cities in Italy. This stimulated the creation of two kinds of law. One kind, necessitated by the growth of the cities, took the form of the collection and writing of custom and municipal law—the statutes. The other kind took the form of production of the ius commune and included a revival of Roman law associated with the University of Bologna. Statute law and ius commune were closely linked and interacted continually in the formation of legal judgments.
Ius commune was a fusion of Roman, canon, and feudal law that formed a common jurisprudence in Europe from 1100 to 1800. The Florentine Digest, a sixth-century copy of the Digest of Justinian, was found in Pisa by the twelfth century and was stolen by the Florentines in 1406. This revival of Roman law affected criminal law mostly by introducing inquisitorial procedures, rather than by changing the actual substance of criminal laws. William Durantis wrote an important book on criminal procedure, Speculum Iudiciale (Mirror of Procedure;, and Albertus Gandinus wrote one on evidence and procedure, Tractatus Maleficorum (Treatise on Crimes). The commentator Angelo Aretino wrote another Tractatus Maleficorum, which was arranged according to the order of a trial and represented the final accommodation of Roman law to practice.
In many of the northern and central Italian city-states, the court systems were headed by the podestà and the capitano del popolo (captain of the people). The various city-states were similar in this regard because many of them had experienced similar communal movements in which various segments of the population, sometimes including the guilds, banded together to form the government. Administration of the cities often passed from the bishops to groups of consuls, who later chose the podestà as their head. Originally, the executive officials had both executive and judicial powers; but as admininstration and law became increasingly complex, each acquired its own officials. The podestà and the capitano lost their executive powers and became strictly judicial officials. Because factionalism and the arrogance of certain families were the salient problems of the nascent communes, the podestà and capitano of a city-state had to be foreigners—that is, from another Italian city-state—so that they would be objective. This requirement evolved into a system in which foreign rectors—that is, the podestà and the capitano—traveled trom city to city bringing with them their own judicial officials, including civil judges, criminal judges, a police chief, law enforcement officials, and pages. This cadre of officials would spend a few weeks reading the statutes of the city and then began their work.
During the late medieval period in Italy, the criminal law systems of the various states adopted inquisitorial procedure as their trial method. In this method, the court system conducted most of the trial; either all the proceedings—initiating, gathering information, compelling witnesses, weighing evidence, sentencing, and executing sentences—or all except initiation. The court system conducted investigations to establish objective substantive facts and had the power to initiate and prosecute cases ex officio. This state control of trials was new, and it was possible only because of the growth and increasingly public nature of the communal governments: in the early fourteenth century, fiscal exigencies led the communes to terminate many privileges, immunities, and usurpations, changing many aspects of government from private to public.
Earlier, accusation—whereby the accuser named the defendant and provided the evidence—had been the principal method of bringing crimes to the attention of the court system and initiating cases. Even after inquisition became common, accusation continued for a while to be the ordinary and favored way to initiate a case. However, an accuser who did not prove his case had to pay all court fees, fines, and a set fee for every day that the defendant spent in prison, and by the late Middle Ages these liabilities tended to drive would-be accusers from the courts. At first, in cases initiated by accusation, the judge acted only as an orchestrator of the trial, with the two litigants doing all the work themselves, almost as if the case were a private matter. Gradually, though, court systems became more interested in ensuring that crimes coming to their attention through accusation were properly and fully prosecuted. As a result, accusation-initiated cases were increasingly handled like inquisition initiated cases. There was still some deference to the private nature of accusation, in that before the case could be initiated ex officio the judge was required to ask the logical accusers to make allegations. However, public initiation came to be permitted for all serious crimes. Court officials thus had greater responsibility over the conduct of all parts of the trial, and this new independence from private accusers encouraged the transition of crime from a private to a public matter.
Likewise, in the proof stage of the trial, inquisitorial procedure fostered the development of methods of independent investigation, such as sending out routine police forces with appointed rounds, gathering information and attaching witnesses at the scene of a crime, and compelling those witnesses to appear in court. Some of these independent means of collecting information involved hearsay and torture. Hearsay was the collecting of information concerning a crime from people who had no direct knowledge of it, but merely attested to what had been rumored in a neighborhood and in public places. Hearsay could initiate cases, and it could also provide proof when individuals came forward in sufficient numbers to constitute an inditium, a piece of prior evidence or proof that allowed torture. Apparently, hearsay was considered an almost necessary component in trying crimes of a public nature or serious crimes. Public fame was also used in the ecclesiastical courts and was a significant mechanism in a great variety of court cases. Pope Innocent III adapted the Roman law equivalent of hearsay, akin to notorium, to its much more useful medieval form. Today, hearsay evidence is deprecated, but before modern technology for gathering and analyzing evidence had been developed, the neighborhood was undoubtedly considered a valuable source of information—often the only source. Torture was frequently applied to exact confessions; inditia (prior information) was sometimes but not always required for torture. Torture became important and desirable because the ius commune set a high standard of proof for a conviction: two eyewitnesses or confession. In reality, in order to convict anyone at all, various strategies were adopted, such as the addition of partial proof. (In Venice, a half-proved crime was punished with a half-penalty.) Also, defendants were convicted in absentia if they were contumacious—that is, if they had fled instead of appearing in court. This was a departure from the ius commune, which forbade conviction in absentia.
Criminal cases could, then, be initiated through private accusation, denunciation by minor judicial officials, hearsay, or ex officio by judges and foreign rectors. Cases that were initiated ex officio could be crimes interrupted in flagranti—i.e., in the act of commission—or any other crimes of which the rectors gained knowledge. In such cases, reports by law-enforcement officials became increasingly important, and these officials served as witnesses in the courts. Sometimes when the culprit was unknown, a general inquest was set up concerning the crime; this inquest turned into a specific inquest when a defendant was named. In all cases, a great deal of the information probably came from the logical accusers, even if they were reluctant to take on the liabilities of accusation.
Once a case was initiated, the defendant was cited three times, as specified by the ius commune; either at his home (if he had one) or at the parish church and in public piclzze if he had no home. Citation was seen as part of divine law; therefore, it was difficult to omit this step and proceed directly to an arrest, despite the fact that citation gave defendants plenty of time to leave town, as they frequently did. Defendants, innocent or guilty, were likely to flee a court system in which judicial torture was used. From the statements of private accusers, logical accusers who did not accuse, hearsay accusers, witnesses to the crime, and police reports, a document of accusation or inquisition was redacted. When cited, the defendant was expected to come to court to respond to the charge as expressed in this document. He could respond to the citation in one of four ways: deny the charge, confess, pose an exception, or flee. If he came to court to deny or confess, and if the crime was a serious one entailing corporal punishment, he was detained in prison. But if the crime entailed only a pecuniary penalty and if he provided oath-swearers, he could be released.
There were several kinds of exceptions that the defendant could pose: dilatory exceptions, which only delayed the trial; exceptions that changed the severity of the charge; and exceptions that put the whole proceeding aside and stopped the trial. One kind of dilatory exception was brought by another person: a claim that the defendant was out of town and could not respond to the citation until he returned. An exception affecting the severity of the crime might, for example, be a claim that the crime had not been committed at night, and thus was not subject to the double penalty of nighttime crimes; or that the crime had not been committed near a church or public piazza, and thus was not subject to the double penalty of place. Another such exemption involved a claim that an assault had not left a lasting scar or had not disabled a limb; doctors would then be sent to investigate. An exception that put the trial aside might involve a claim that an instrument of peace had been drawn up between the victim and the defendant; private peaces were allowed to abrogate public trials, for the sake of conflict resolution. Another claim of this nature was that the victim had not paid his taxes and so should not be protected by law; still another was that the accuser could not bring a case on his own because he was not emancipated from his father. If the defendant never came to court at all, he could be exiled. This meant that after a certain period of time had elapsed he was declared contumacious and, therefore, guilty (being declared contumacious was considered the same as a confession). If the crime was serious, a person who had been exiled could be offended by anyone with impunity; if an exiled person was captured, he was delivered to the court.
A defendant who came to court could confess or deny rather than pose an exception, A confession was sometimes motivated by an incentive such as a reduced fine, but confessions might also be extracted by torture. Judges found it desirable to exact a confession because this was considered clear proof. The decisions of judges were reviewed in a process called syndication, and some portion of a judge's salary was witheld if he did not adhere to the law. Therefore, judges were concerned with condemning only with sufficient proof, and torture became very important. A defendant who confessed under torture had to repeat the confession at the bench in order for it to be valid. These confessions were said to have been given spontaneously, even though they were exacted through torture. Accusers could also be tortured to make them retract false accusations, and witnesses could be tortured to make them admit that they had given false testimony.
If a defendant came to court to deny his guilt, the denial started a process called a contested litigation. The defense and prosecution were then given a short period to prepare their cases. The prosecution created a new document, much more conservative and exact, called a capitula, which stated what the prosecution actually intended to prove. At first, interrogations were based very strictly on these capitula, but gradually the judge acquired greater latitude to ask other questions he considered pertinent. After the examination of the witnesses, both parties made their allegations before the judge. For most crimes, a set amount of proof was necessary to condemn; but in practice, proofs varied and some combinations of proofs were usual. The amount of proof necessary was based not only on the seriousness of the crime, but also on other factors, such as the difficulty of acquiring proof or the desire of the court system to convict. Thus, less proof was required for crimes of a secretive nature, such as sodomy, and for crimes in which a conviction was desired, such as political crimes.
Condemnation or absolution had to be reached within twenty-five days from the response. Judges and rectors usually conferred to decide cases. Penalties could be either corporal or pecuniary. Most penalties were pecuniary, but if the culprit could not pay he was imprisoned until he completed payment. Those who could not pay in the first place rarely could pay after they were imprisoned. However, after several years, criminals who had been in prison for nonpayment were released as oblations, offerings to God. These oblations were a necessary part of the system, because otherwise the prisons would keep filling up and would never empty.
Venice developed very differently from the other Italian city-states because it had been founded during the barbaric period, when the social fabric was disintegrating. Moreover, it never had a feudal class, because it had no mainland, or terra firma, possessions until the fifteenth century (although it did have landed possessions abroad); it never went through a communal period; and it never gave much political power to its guilds. Venice consciously rejected Roman law in order to thwart imperial aspirations aimed at limiting its independence and extending imperial jurisdiction and regalian rights. Venice used ius proprium, or Venetian custom, in its courts. Customary law in Venice at first borrowed much from surviving Roman law; but by the time the Venetians collected their statutes in the early thirteenth century, Roman law had been purged. Venice was never part of the traveling podestà system; rather, the Venetians judged cases in councils that had judicial and executive authority, such as the Council of Forty. As a consequence of the serrata of 1297—which limited membership in the major council to certain aristocratic families—the government and the court system, including both the policing bodies and the judicial officials, were dominated by aristocrats. In 1310, the Council of Ten was added to the traditional court system. Its purpose was to prevent conspiracies and try political crimes. In 1320, "the Ten" got its own police force; thereafter it could proceed from arrest to execution without external checks if the case was a threat to security. The Ten accepted autonomous accusations.
The first redaction of criminal law was the short but important Promissio, a section of Doge Iacopo Tiepolo's statute compilation of 1232. It consisted partly of a scale of severe sanctions for theft. Venetian law was generally characterized by the greater arbitrium, or discretion, given to the judge. Judges had important powers of discretion to decide cases by analogy and to use their own common sense instead of following principles in the writings of jurists. Cases were often initiated by a querela, an accusation not burdened by the usual heavy liabilities. Torture was frequently used in the proceedings. Self-help was encouraged by rewards for bringing in or killing exiled persons.
The avogadori were advocates for the state, public prosecutors who presented cases before the Council of Forty. The avogaria was entirely manned by amateur nobles who gained experience of the law through practice. This office usually fell to the highest nobles. Originally, the avogadori were defenders of the fisc (treasure) and protectors of the goods and rights of the state. As crimes came to be seen as offenses against the state, the avogadori gained criminal jurisdiction. A law of 1289 stated that because the avogadori were often targets of private vendettas, they were permitted to bear arms. The avogadori could receive cases from the Council of Forty or from the policing groups—the cinque alia pace and the signori di notte. After the avogadori received an accusation, they initiated an investigation that mainly involved taking testimony from the witnesses and the defendant. The defendant was usually interrogated by an avogadore in the presence of the council. Judicial torture was often used. The evidence was compiled by the avogadori in the intromissio, the statement of the prosecution's case. The intromissio was presented in front of one of the councils, usually the Forty, accompanied by an oral debate between the avogadori and the defendant's lawyer. Then the council voted on guilt or innocence. Penalties could be suggested by the avogadori, the doge, or the council, but the actual penalty was decided by the council.
Because southern Italy was under Byzantine control for a long period, it was very familiar with the Justinianic code and the codes of emperors Leo III (r. 717—740), Basil I (r. 867—886), and Leo VT (r. 886-912). The manuscript of the Digest known as the Florentine came from southern Italy. In the late eleventh century, various Norman bands conquered parts of the south from the Byzantines, Muslims, and Lombards. In 1130 Roger II consolidated these pieces into the kingdom of Sicily, including both Naples and Sicily. The cities in this region had been using their own customs in their courts, and they petitioned for this privilege in their treaties of surrender. Although Roger II agreed, he violated these treaties and forced judges to rule according to the laws of the kingdom, the assisae. He created the justiciarship, which linked royal and local government, and began royal legislation with the assizes of Ariano in 1140. However, cities such as Bari retained customary usage and redacted their customs, one part being based on Roman law and one on Lombard law. The legal traditions of the south were affected by Lombard law, Byzantine law, Norman law, feudal law, canon law, and the Roman law at Bologna. Southern jurists were interested in both the revival of law centered in Pavia and the revival of Roman law in Bologna.
Frederick II began to rule Sicily in 1220, repressing local freedom and autonomy and promulgating the Liber Augusta lis or Liber Constitutionum of 1231. In this compilation, Frederick mandated that royal law be followed first; then, failing this, municipal customs; and finally, failing that, ius commune. Frederick tried to impose peace on a violent society. He compelled the attendance of plaintiff and defendant in court. The Constitutions gave a privileged place to the nobility: higher penalties were attached to offenses against nobles, and greater weight was given to oaths taken by nobles, especially in cases involving debt. In southern Italy the barons were adamant in their wish to be permitted a trial by peers. Underneath royal legislation there always remained a layer of custom and municipal, Roman, and feudal law.
See also Crime and Punishment; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Law: Roman; Lombard Law; Venice
LAURA IKINS STERN
Belomo, Manlio. The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
The Liber Augusta!is or Constitutions of Melfi, trans, and intro. James M. Powell. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1971.
Fertile, Antonio. Storia del diritto italiano dalla caduta dell'impero alia codificazione, 2nd ed., 6 vols. Turin: UTET, 1892-1902.
Robinson, O. F., T. D. Fergus, and W. M. Gordon, An Introduction to European Legal History. Abingdon: Professional Books, 1985.
Ruggiero, Guido. Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
Stern, Laura Ikins. The Criminal Imiv System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
See Lombard Law
LAW: ROMAN
Roman law was the system of law developed in ancient Rome and subsequently revived during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Medieval Roman law, together with canon law, became the ancestor of the civil law systems still used on the European continent today.
During its classical period (between c. A.D. 100 and 250) ancient Roman law reached a level of sophistication and precision unmatched anywhere in antiquity and not often rivaled since. Its achievements were primarily intellectual rather than institutional, growing principally from the analytical insights of jurists, whose work informed subsequent innovations by legislators.
In the period following the Germanic invasions of the western Roman empire during the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ, Roman law gradually ceased to be taught systematically, although courts that dealt with disputes among the descendants of the old Roman population of the west continued to use simplified Roman law principles and procedures for centuries after Roman political power had vanished from the west. Meanwhile, in the eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire, Emperor Justinian I (r. 527—565) engaged in a monumental effort to bring order into the enormous mass of law that the Roman state had produced over the course of a millennium and more. In 528, Justinian appointed a commission to review the accumulated mass of Roman legislation and purge it of obsolete and inconsistent material. Although the commissioners produced a codified collection of statutes about eighteen months later, Justinian was not entirely satisfied with their work, and in 530 he appointed a fresh codification commission, headed by a scholarly and energetic jurist named Tribonian. Within just three years Tribonian and his fellow commissioners reviewed and reduced to manageable proportions the enormous mass of Roman juristic commentaries and pronouncements. This second commission presented the emperor in 533 with the Digest, or Pandects, a vast anthology of fifty books containing excerpts drawn from a whole library of juristic treatises and commentaries, arranged and cataloged by topics for easy reference. Justinian officially promulgated the Digest and directed his judges henceforth to use its doctrines as the official guide to the interpretation and application of the law. In 534 the commission presented Justinian with a revised codification of the statutory law in twelve books, replacing the earlier anthology, and the emperor at once abrogated all earlier statutes and officially promulgated the new collection under the title Codex Justinianus (the Code). This new Code thus included all Roman legislative enactments that were still effective in Justinian's time, and it remained the fundamental statute book of the Byzantine state for nearly 1,000 years.
Tribonian and his assistants also produced in 533 an introductory textbook, the Institutes, as a guide to the law contained in the Digest and the Code. This Institutes was in effect a revised and updated version of a classic Roman law textbook, the Institutes of Gaius, which had long been used as an elementary introduction to legal studies.
Lawmaking did not, of course, stop dead in 534 with the promulgation of the second version of the Code. Justinian himself created numerous new laws, and these laws, together with those of his immediate successors, were compiled as a supplement to the Code not long after his death. The supplementary collection, known as the Novels (or Novellae leges), soon came to be accepted as an integral part of the revised Roman law and was studied in Byzantine law schools, together with the Digest, Code, and Institutes, as the core of the legal curriculum.
These developments made little immediate impression in the west. There, Justinian's codification was known only in those few scattered areas, mainly in Lombardy and the region around Ravenna, that remained subject to Byzantine rule. Elsewhere, Roman law was known and used during the early Middle Ages only in simplified and vulgarized texts, many of them derived from an earlier experiment in codification, the Codex Theodosianus (438). Knowledge of Roman law never entirely disappeared in the west, and a few writers throughout the early medieval period occasionally showed some slight acquaintance with Roman legal texts; but the work of the jurists, the most sophisticated and creative component of Roman law, remained virtually unknown until the mid-eleventh century.
Then, under circumstances that are still not fully understood, there occurred a sudden revival of interest in and knowledge about the doctrines of the classical jurists. One solitary manuscript of Justinian's Digest, written late in the sixth century (and now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence), was somehow rediscovered by judges and teachers of law in Italy. One of the men involved was an otherwise obscure judge named Pepo, who cited passages from the Digest in decisions that he handed down in the 1070s. Another, and more significant, figure in the juristic revival was a law teacher named Irnerius (Guarnerius, c. 1055-c. 1130). Irnerius was employed at various times as a judge and legal adviser by both Countess Matilda of Tuscany and the German king and emperor Henry V (1086-1125). Of greater lasting importance was Irnerius's work as a teacher and writer. Irnerius taught Roman law at Bologna and was apparently familiar with the entire text of Justinian's codification. He is credited with the authorship of numerous glosses—explanations and commentaries on individual words and passages scattered throughout the text of Justinian's codification—which he apparently read and commented on systematically with his students. It was especially significant for the development of a revived Roman legal science that Irnerius introduced his pupils to the Digest—the most difficult, but in many ways also the most important, part of the codified Roman law—since it was from the Digest that both he and his students learned to use the analytical tools that classical lawyers had devised to construct a coherent intellectual system out of the rules, regulations, and procedures that she law furnished.
Irnerius was evidently an inspired and inspiring teacher, able to imbue his students with a lively interest in the law both as a tool for the orderly management of practical matters and as an intellectual instrument for the investigation and analysis of government, transactions between people, and the institutions of public and private life. The best-known of Irnerius's students were the "four doctors"—Martinus Gosia (died c. 1160), Bulg-arus de Bulgarinis (d, 1166), Hugo de Porta Ravennate (died c. 1166 or 1171), and Jacobus de Porta Ravennate (d. 1178)—who advised Frederick Barbarossa in his negotiations with the Lombard cities at the Diet of Roncaglia (1158) and obtained from the emperor privileges for themselves and for the law students they taught at Bologna. These "doctors," like their master, taught law as well as practiced it and helped train a third generation of jurists in the intricacies of Roman jurisprudence. The pupils of Irnerius's pupils included such talented lawyers as Rogerius (died c. 1170), Johannes Bassianus (died c. 1190), Placentinus (d. 1192), and Vacarius (d. 1198). Thus, by the end of the twelfth century a tradition of legal studies and teaching centered on Roman texts had become established at Bologna, where indeed it has continued to the present day. The fourth generation of law students at Bologna included one of the greatest medieval Romanists, Azo (d. 1220), whose Summa on Justinian's Code became a classic of medieval legal literature and continued to be studied and cited for centuries. In the following generation, one of Azo's students, Accursius (d. 1263), compiled from the scattered writings of his predecessors a standard commentary, the Glossa ordinaria, on the entire body of Roman law as codified by Justinian. This Glossa ordinaria became a staple of the legal curriculum, not only at Bologna but also at the other centers of juristic studies that had begun to spring up elsewhere in Italy and France in imitation of the Bolognese law school.
The Roman law texts that these teachers expounded to their students were difficult to grasp: despite the efforts of Tribonian and the other codification commissioners, the texts were often inconsistent with one another, and their meaning was frequently obscure. This was especially true of the Digest, where authors who dealt with the same topic had sometimes written about the law at different stages in its development, with results that could be very confusing indeed. The Code also presents numerous difficulties, and even the Institutes, which was designed to explain the basic rules and assumptions that underlay the other texts, did not always succeed in articulating them clearly or unequivocally. Medieval expositors of Roman law, especially during the first three generations following the revival, accordingly spent a great deal of effort attempting to clarify the meaning of enigmatic texts, reconciling inconsistencies between them and identifying principles that would link disparate texts with one another. Once some of these basic problems had been dealt with, later generations of jurists in the medieval law faculties were more inclined to concentrate on identifying ways in which the ancient texts and principles could be applied or adapted to current problems in their own societies.
Tne questions that most interested medieval glossators and commentators on Roman law were typically problems of private law and centered on relationships between individuals, rather than on public law issues concerning the powers and organization of government. They were intrigued by the conceptual and practical problems that arose from the ownership and transfer of property, as well as the rights and limitations that attended its possession. Contractual relationships, partnerships, and associations furnished them with further intriguing problems, as did commercial transactions, for which they found instructive and useful models in the ancient texts. Personal status likewise raised important and perplexing issues, for which the ancient texts required significant adaptation. Roman jurists were much concerned, for example, with slavery, which was not especially common in medieval Italy, but whose principles could be selectively adapted to deal with and explain the rights and obligations of serfs, bondsmen, and indentured servants, who were much more numerous. Likewise, medieval law teachers sought to adapt Roman procedures for resolving disputes to situations in their own societies and to frame rules for litigation and arbitration that were consistent with the ancient models but responsive to contemporary needs.
Bolognese jurists arid their counterparts elsewhere (most of whom received their legal training at Bologna) accordingly applied devices and techniques used by contemporary rhetoricians in order to resolve conflicts and inconsistencies between their ancient texts and the realities of medieval Italian life. The most characteristic of these devices was the dialectical distinction, which the jurists used to isolate basic, underlying principles from the mass of Roman laws that dealt with the changing and variable details of ancient social problems. Once a jurist had identified a general rule to his satisfaction, he then sought to apply it to problems and situations current in his own society. Legal analysis, as medieval jurists practiced it, thus involved both a search for the durable principles of the ancient Roman legal system and an effort to fit the realities of contemporary life to those principles. The study of law, as they conceived it, was thus both a speculative science concerned with defining the essential principles of an orderly, stable, and fair society and a practical science that sought ways to apply those principles to concrete problems and situations in everyday life.
Given the speculative character of the medieval study of Roman law, it is scarcely surprising to find that writers and teachers often differed from one another on important issues both of principle and of application. Medieval law teachers characteristically analyzed for their students not only the content of the ancient texts but also the differing views about them current among their contemporaries, and they described the probable consequences of adopting one view or another. The medieval law student accordingly learned by precept and example how to analyze conflicts of opinion and how to resolve opposing views of a problem. It was due to these skills, as much as to their detailed knowledge of legal rules and techniques, that men trained in law were considered useful, and eventually indispensable, advisers and counselors by medieval rulers, ecclesiastical administrators, and merchants.
This in turn made the study of law a profitable enterprise. As early as the twelfth century, John of Salisbury complained that students were deserting the liberal arts for the lucrative science of the law, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux advised Pope Eugene III to take a whip and drive the Roman lawyers from his court, as Christ had driven the money changers from the temple. By the thirteenth century, however, men trained in Roman and canon law were not only advisers to church officials and secular rulers, but they were beginning to receive appointments to positions of power and authority in large numbers in their own right, as bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes. Men trained in law increasingly dominated the church in Italy and elsewhere during the High and later Middle Ages, and legal skills were also becoming an essential qualification for governors, podestas, and other high-ranking officers of civil administration. Contemporaries often complained about these developments: theologians lamented an ascendency of law over their own discipline, and social critics denounced the delays and expense that, they claimed, greedy lawyers introduced into the legal process in order to fatten their own profits. But neither the harshest critics nor the most ingenious divines could burke the fact that the knowledge and analytical skills of trained lawyers were becoming indispensable in dealing with the realities of increasingly urban and commercial societies.
Italian legal scholarship dominated the writing and teaching of law from the revival of the study of Roman law in the time of Irnerius to the rise of humanist jurisprudence in the sixteenth century. The early generations of learned civilians (as writers and teachers of Roman civil law were often called) focused on the problems of understanding the meaning of the Roman texts, exploring relationships between different parts of the texts, and identifying the principles on which classical jurisprudence had worked. The early civilians characteristically wrote in the form of glosses—brief explanations and references often placed in the margin of the text on which they were commenting, so that text and commentary could be read side by side. Hence these early civilians are sometimes referred to as glossators.
Later civilians, after the generation of Accursius, cast their legal writings in different forms. They produced commentaries—voluminous expositions that usually followed the order of a text but were written and studied separately from it. The commentaries usually focused primarily on the application and adaptation of Roman law to current problems and concerns. Legal writers in the later Middle Ages also produced numerous monographs, which treated a single type of problem or a single branch of the law in exhaustive detail, and consilia, which were formal opinions on the law applicable to a specific case or situation. Major Italian writers among the civilians of this period included Odofredus (d. 1265), Cino da Pistoia (1270-1336), Baldo degli Ubaldi of Perugia (1327-1400), Paolo di Castro (d. after 1441), and Alessandro Tartagni (d. 1477). The greatest was generally reckoned to be Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1313-1157), whose magisterial Commentary strongly influenced all subsequent legal writers in the Italian tradition down to the nineteenth century.
The Italian style of jurisprudence (mos italicus) was challenged in the sixteenth century by the new humanist jurisprudence, cultivated particularly by French writers and accordingly known as the French style, or mos gallicus. Writers in the new French style scorned the practical and applied concerns of their Italian rivals. The French jurists concentrated instead on using Roman legal texts as tools for historical investigation that would enable them to understand more accurately the society and civilization of the ancient world, rather than as tools for the fair and orderly management of contemporary issues and problems. Despite the great prestige and popularity that mos gallicus achieved in the early modern period, writers in the Italian style of jurisprudence continued to flourish and to exert considerable influence on the practice of law down to the period of the French Revolution.
See also Bartolus of Sassoferrato; Bologna; Cino da Pistoia; Glossa Ordinaria: Roman Law; Irnerius; Justinian I; Law: Canon; Universities
JAMES A. BRUNDAGE
BuckJand, W. W. A Textbook of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian, 3rd ed., ed. Peter Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
Clarence Smith, J. A. Medieval Law Teachers and Writers, Civilian and Canonist. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975.
Coing, Helmut, ed. Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschiehte, Vol. 1, Mittelalter. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973.
Fried, Johannes. Die Entstehung des Juristenstandes im 12. Jahrbundert: Zur sozialen Stellung und politische Bedeutung gelehrter Juristen in Bologna und Modena. Forschungen zur Neueren Privatrechtsgeschichte, 21. Cologne: Bohlaus, 1974.
Honoré, Tony. Tribonian. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Kantorowicz, Hermann, and W. W. Buckland. Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law: Neudy Discovered Writings of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938.
Kantorowicz, Hermann, and Beryl Smalley. "An English Theologian's View of Roman Law: Pepo, Irnerius, Ralph Niger." Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1, 1941, pp. 237-251. (Reprinted in Hermann Kantorowicz. Rechtshistorische Schriften, ed. Gerhard Immel and Helmut Coing. Karlsruhe: C. F. Miiller, 1970, pp. 231-244.)
Nicholas, Barry. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. (Reprint, 1975.)
Savigny, Friedrich Carl von. Geschichte des romischen Rechts im Mitteklter, 7 vols. Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1815-1831. (Reprint, Bad Homburg: Hermann Centner, 1961.)
Spagnesi, Enrico. Wernerius Bononiensis iudex: La figura storied d'Irnerio. Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere "La Colombaria." Studi, 16. Florence: Leo S, Olschki, 1970.
Legenda aurea was the most famous medieval anthology of readings about the saints and major festivals of the church. It was originally compiled in Latin by the Dominican friar Jacobus da Voragine (Jacopo da Varazze), probably during the 1260s, and entitled merely Legenda sanctorum—i.e., "material to be read about saints." Evidently, it was designed as a reference book for students and preachers of Jacobus's own religious order, though it eventually reached a much broader audience. Jacobus originated little if any of the material; rather, he borrowed selectively from earlier legendaries and works of church history, choosing memorable stories and useful information that he abridged according to his own priorities and arranged in some 180 chapters, following the order of the liturgical year.
The Legenda had two Dominican forerunners and models: Abbreviatio in gestis et miraculis sanctorum, by Jean de Mailly; and Epilogus in gesta sanctorum, by Bartholomew of Trent. They had obviously achieved some currency; about twenty manuscripts of each have survived. But these earlier abridged legendaries were completely overshadowed by the great success of Jacobus's book. The Legenda, which soon acquired the honorific adjective aurea ("golden"), survives in more than 900 Latin manuscripts, many augmented with chapters on additional saints. Jacobus's book also gave rise to numerous translations and adaptations in medieval vernaculars, and its popularity lasted more than 200 years. In the late fifteenth century it was still in such demand that it became a best-seller for the new printing industry, which issued at least eighty-seven Latin editions and sixty nine vernacular editions between 1470 and 1500.
In the sixteenth century, the status of the Legenda fell dramatically. Strict Protestants considered it idolatrous because it promoted the cult of saints and images, and it was also attacked by prominent Catholic scholars such as Juan Luis Vives, Georg Witzel, and Melchior Cano, who objected both to its Latin style and to its content, which they found less trustworthy than older sources on saints and church history. By 1600 the book's reputation had sunk so low that it tarnished the very word legend, which came to mean an unreliable story. Virtually no one published the Legenda again until the nineteenth century, when antiquarians revived and promoted it as a forgotten medieval classic.
Scholarly study of the Legenda was rare until the 1980s, when three books appeared in quick succession: a major literary-critical analysis by Boureau (1984); a more historical study by Reames (1985), the present author, who attempted to understand the Renaissance reaction against Jacobus's book by defining its particular theological and political biases; and the proceedings of an international symposium (Dunn-Lardeau 1986) at which some twenty additional scholars described their own research on the Latin Legenda or its vernacular offshoots. More important publications followed in the 1990s, including such essential research tools as Fleith's inventory (1991) of surviving Latin manuscripts, Maggioni's study (1995) of manuscript variants, the first reliable translation into modern English, and the first critical edition of the Latin text. As shown by the proceedings of a symposium in Geneva in 1999 (Fleith and Morenzoni 2001), research continues on many aspects of the book and its influence.
See also Jacobus da Voragine; Saints' Lives: Italian Hagiography in the Vernacular
SHERRY L. REAMES
Jacobus da Voragine. Legenda aurea, vulgo Historia lombardica dicta, 3rd ed., ed. Theodor Graesse. Breslau: Koebner, 1890. (Photographic reprint, Osnabrück: Zeller, 1969. This work, despite errors, was the best Latin edition available until 1998.)
—. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Complete, accurate English translation, though based on Graesse's faulty text of the Latin.)
—. (Iacopo da Varazze.) Legenda aurea, 2 vols., ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni. Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998. (See also 2nd ed., with text also on CD-ROM. Florence: SISMEL, Galluzzo, 1999. Critical edition based primarily on Italian manuscripts from Jacobus's lifetime in order to approximate his final intentions.)
Bertini Guidetti, Stefania, ed. Il Paradiso e la terra: Iacopo da Varazze e il suo tempo. Atti del Convegno Internazioriale (Varazze, 24-26 September 1998). Florence: SISMEL, Galluzzo, 2001. (Papers, mostly in Italian, from a symposium on Jacobus's life and works, including three specifically on Legenda aurea.)
Boureau, Alain. La Légende dorée: Le système narratif de Jacques de Voragine [d.] 1298. Paris: Cerf, 1984.
Dunn-Lardeau, Brenda, ed. Legenda Aurea: Sept siècles de diffusion. Actes du Colloque International sur "La Legenda aurea: Texte latin et branches vernaculaires," Cahiers d'Etudes Mediévales, Cahier Spécial 2. Montreal: Bellarmin; Paris: J. Vrin, 1986. (Papers in French and English from an international symposium in Montreal.)
—, ed. Legenda aurea—La légende dorée (Xllle-XVe s.). Actes du Congrès International de Perpignan (Séances "Nouvelles recherches sur la Legenda aurea'), Le Moyen Français, 32. Montreal: Ceres, 1993. (Papers, nearly all in French, from an international symposium of 1990.)
Fleith, Barbara. Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der lateinischen Legenda aurea. Subsidia Hagiographica, 72. Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes, 1991.
Fleith, Barbara, and Franco Morenzoni, eds. De la sainteté à I'bagiograpbie: Genèse et usage de la Légende dorée. Geneva: Droz, 2001. (Papers in French and Italian from an international symposium in Geneva in 1999.)
Kaeppeli, Thomas. Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum medii aevi. Vol. 2, Rome: Ad S. Sabinae, 1975, pp. 348-359. Vol. 4, Rome: Istituto storico Domenicano, 1993, pp. 139—140. (Vol. 1 provides a bibliography to 1973; Vol. 2, completed by Emilio Panella, provides updates since 1973.)
Maggioni, Giovanni Paolo. Ricerche sulla composizione e sulla trasmissione della Legenda aurea. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sulFAlto Medioevo, 1995.
Reames, Sherry L. The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
In January 1176, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa's negotiations with the Lombard League of northern Italian communes and Pope Alexander III broke down. Frederick decided to create a giant pincer that would militarily isolate the leading city of Milan from the Lombard League. His marshal, Christian of Mainz, would advance northward from Apulia, while an army of German knights would gather near Lake Como and press southward to join an army of loyal Pavians around Milan. Frederick's forces—though they were infamously abandoned at Chiavenna by Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony—would be considerable. For its part, the Lombard League had been injured by the loss of several cities, but its rectors quickly assembled an army in Milan with contingents from several member communes.
On 29 May, some 1,200 horsemen and assorted infantry units accompanied the Milanese carroccio (standard-bearing cart) northward to thwart Frederick before he could link up with the Pavians south of Milan. Seven hundred cavalrymen of the Lombard League attacked a vanguard of some 300 imperial horsemen near Legnano, about 18 miles (24 kilometers) north of Milan. Frederick and 2,000 cavalrymen came to the rescue of the vanguard, and the imperial assault was soon unleashed along the length of the League's line. The fighting then centered on the Milanese carroccio, which was stoutly defended by pikemen and the Company of Death, men sworn to die sooner than accept defeat. Frederick himself charged the carroccio and went down in the melee. Many German lords had also fallen, and the German troops, disheartened by the apparent loss of Frederick, broke off and fled. Many were slaughtered in the pursuit, and the imperial baggage train was sacked.
Frederick, however, was only wounded. He limped into Pavia and began to sue for a settlement. Through the peace of Venice (1177) he obtained a six-year armistice with the Lombard League (ratified by the peace of Constance, 1183); and under the peace of Anagni he agreed to recognize the legitimacy (since 1159) of Pope Alexander III and of the city of Alessandria. In Italy, Frederick thus lost imperial dominance but gained political stability through a shift to feudal overlordship.
See also Alexander III, Pope; Carroccio; Constance, Peace of; Frederick I Barbarossa; Lombard Leagues; Milan
JOSEPH P. BYRNE
Gilterbock, Ferdinand. Ancora Legnano! Milan: Hoepli, 1901.
Munz, Peter. Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Savorini, Vittorio. I comuni, I'impero, ed il papato alia battaglia di Legnano. Milan: F. Vallardi, 1876.
Testa, Giovanni Battista. History of the War of Frederick I against the Communes of Lombardy. London: Smith, Elder, 1877.
See Orlandi di Pistoia, Lemmo
Pope Leo I (saint; c. 400—461, r. 440—461) was calied "the Great." He was an able and energetic pope, dedicated to promoting the primacy of the bishopric of Rome and combating heresy. He was both admired by his contemporaries and revered in later centuries. Leo's vigorous leadership in Rome, and in the church as a whole, helped lay the foundations for the spiritual and temporal authority of the medieval papacy. His surviving sermons (ninety-six) and letters (143) are important sources for the history of the early medieval church.
Very little is known about Leo's early life. His parents were probably Tuscan, and he may have been born in Rome. He was an archdeacon under popes Celestine I and Sixtus III, and an influential adviser to both of them. His reputation appears to have spread beyond Rome: in 430, Bishop Cyril of Alexandria sought Leo's support in an attempt to prevent Jerusalem from being made a patriarchate. At the time of his election to the papacy, in August 440, Leo was in Gaul on a diplomatic mission for the imperial court. He returned to Rome and was consecrated on 29 September.
As pope, Leo considered himself the heir not only to Saint Peter's bishopric but to Peter's universal authority over the entire church. In describing the scope of his authority, Leo introduced the concept of "plenitude of power": the pope's fullness of power in religious matters, as opposed to the partial power of other bishops. Although Leo's claims were not readily accepted in the east, he was able to obtain an imperial rescript from Valentinian III confirming his authority over the western portion of the empire. Leo exercised his power most actively in Italy, intervening in local dioceses to settle disputes and enforce uniform practices. His advice and decisions were also sought by the bishops of Spain and Africa, despite the traditional autonomy of the latter. Leo also took, pains to maintain the papal vicariate in Illyricum in the southern Balkan peninsula, although that territory was in fact part of the eastern empire. In Gaul, Leo came into conflict with Bishop Hilarius of Aries, who appeared inclined to act independently of Rome. Leo confined Hilarius to his diocese and later divided authority over the Gallic bishoprics between Aries and Vienne.
Leo was an ardent opponent of heresy, a concern which was evident even before his election to the papacy. He was involved in the events that led to the condemnation of Nestorianism by Celestine I in 430, and he encouraged Sixtus III to reject an appeal by the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum. In 445, Leo persuaded the secular government to revive earlier legislation against the Manichees, and in 447 he advised the Spanish bishops on combating Priscillianism. He also preached against all these heresies, as well as against remnants of Roman paganism. His greatest success as a promoter of orthodoxy, however, was in a debate surrounding the teachings of Eutyches. Eutyches was an eastern abbot who had been condemned and deposed by Bishop Flavian of Constantinople in 448 for teaching Monophysitism—the belief that Christ's divine nature had completely absorbed his human nature at the incarnation. Eutyches appealed to Rome, but Leo upheld his condemnation in a letter to Flavian. In this letter, generally called the Tome, Leo set forth the orthodox position that divine and human nature coexisted in Christ, inseparable but distinct and unmixed. Despite this agreement between the patriarchs of Constantinople and Rome, the Byzantine emperor, Theodosius II, convened a council to settle the matter. The council, which met in Ephesus in August 449, spurned Leo's letter, upheld Eutyches's teachings, and condemned Flavian. Leo in turn rejected the council, describing it as a latrocinium ("violent robbery") and calling for a new council. Theodosius's successor, Marcian, summoned such a council in 451. Meeting at Chalcedon, this Fourth Ecumenical Council accepted Leo's Tome as presenting the orthodox teaching on Christ's natures and once again condemned Eutyches.
Although Leo's Christology was received with respect at Chalcedon, his claims of papal primacy were not: one of the canons passed at the council, number 28, gave the see of Constantinople the same status as the see of Rome. As a result, Leo delayed his approval of the council; he waited until March 453 to endorse it, and even then he rejected canon 28, arguing that it contravened the canons of the Council of Nicaea. Although the Council of Chalcedon effectively ended the debate over Christ's nature in the west, Leo's successors were forced to contend with a resurgence of Monophysitism in the east.
Although Leo did maintain ties to the east after the Council of Chalcedon, even establishing a papal nuncio in Constantinople, most of his energy was devoted to events in the west. Italy suffered two major invasions during the 450s, and Leo took an active role in protecting the people of Rome. In 452 Leo met with Attila the Hun at Mantua and persuaded him to spare Rome and withdraw from Italy, When the Vandals attacked Rome in 455, Leo was able to persuade their leader, Gaiseric, to moderate their violence against the city. Leo's actions helped partially fill the power vacuum left by the ineffective western emperors and foreshadowed the wider social and political role that later popes would play in Rome and central Italy.
Pope Leo I. Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493, p. 136.
Leo was one of the most influential of the early popes. His declarations on papal authority, episcopal elections, and other topics were incorporated into medieval canon law. His statements on Christ's natures and person in the Tome became the standard for orthodox Christology, at least in the west. It should be noted, however, that Leo was not responsible for the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, which was probably compiled outside Rome in the sixth or seventh century. In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV declared Leo a doctor of the church. His feast is celebrated in the west on 10 November (formerly 11 April) and in the east on 18 February.
See also Attila the Hun; Councils, Ecclesiastical; Gaiseric the Vandal; Heresy and Religious Dissent; Monophysite Controversy; Valentinian III
STEPHEN A. ALLEN
Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 138-138A.
Patrologia Latina, Vols. 54-56.
Tarouca, Carlos da Silva, ed. 5. Leonis magni tomus ad Flavianum episcopum constantinopolitanum (Epistula XXVIII). Textus et Documenta, Series Theologica, 9. Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1932.
—, ed. Epistulae contra Eutychis haeresim. Textus et Documenta, Series Theologica 15, 20. Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1934-1935.
Feltoe, Charles Lett, trans. Select Letters and Sermons. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2(12). New York: Christian Literature, 1895. (Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964.)
Freeland, Jane P., and Agnes J. Conway, trans. Sermons. Fathers of the Church, 93. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
Hunt, Edmund, trans. Letters. Fathers of the Church, 34, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1957.
Barclift, Philip L. "Predestination and Divine Foreknowledge in the Sermons of Pope Leo the Great." Church History, 62, 1993, pp. 5-21.
Charles-Edwards, T. M. "Palladius, Prosper, and Leo the Great: Mission and Primatial Authority." In Saint Patrick, A. D. 493-1993, ed. David N. Dumvilie. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1993, pp. 1-12.
Jalland, T. G. The Life and Times of Saint Leo the Great. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1941.
James, N. W. "Leo the Great and Prosper of Aquitaine: A Fifth-Century Pope and His Adviser." Journal of Theological Studies, 44, 1993a, pp. 554-584.
—. "Was Leo the Great the Author of Liturgical Prayers?" Studia Patristica, 26, 1993b, pp. 35-40.
Kelly, J. N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Maier, Harry O. " 'Manichee!' Leo the Great and the Orthodox Panopticon ."Journal of Early Christian Studies, 4, 1996, pp. 441-460.
McGrade, Arthur Stephen. "Two Fifth-Century Conceptions of Papal Primacy." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 7, 1970, pp. 1-45.
Murphy, Francis X. "The Sermons of Pope Leo the Great: Content and Style." In Preaching in the Patristic Age, ed. David G. Hunter. New York: Paulist Press, 1989, pp. 183-197.
Ullman, Walter. "Leo I and the Theory of Papal Primacy." Journal of Theological Studies, 11, 1960, pp. 25—51.
Leo III (Conon; c. 680—741, r. 717—741) was a Byzantine—i.e., eastern Roman—emperor. In older works he was mistakenly called "the Isaurian," but research has now established that he was from Germanicea (modern Marash or Maraš in southeastern Turkey). His native tongue was Syriac or Arabic, and as regards religion he was most likely a Jacobite (Syrian Monophysite).
Conon probably changed his original name to the more "Roman" Leo and became religiously orthodox when he joined the Byzantine army. As a young man he became a protégé of Emperor Justinian II during Justinian's second reign (705-711), and he continued to rise during the short reigns of emperors Philippicus (711—713) and Anastasius II (713-715). When Theodosius III (715-717) deposed the latter, Leo marched on Constantinople to avenge Anastasius. With a large Arab land and naval force also approaching Constantinople, Theodosius voluntarily handed Leo the throne.
Leo's greatest achievement was to thwart the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717-718. Although the Arabs continued to be a threat, they never again endangered the existence of the empire. Also important was his promulgation of the Ecloga, the first Byzantine legal collection since the Corpus iuris civilis of Justinian I.
Leo's espousal of Iconoclasm, which condemned religious art, in 726 caused a revolt in those portions of Italy still under imperial control (Sicily had already shown signs of resistance early in Leo's reign). Tax increases imposed by Leo may also have been a factor in this revolt. Pope Gregory II—who lacked sufficient resources to withstand the Lombards and thus was still dependent on the Byzantines' military power—urged the Italians to exercise moderation, even though Leo (probably at about this time) removed parts of Illyricum from papal jurisdiction. Pope Gregory III, who was less conciliatory, also continued a limited cooperation with the empire; but by this time the popes were allies of the empire rather than its subjects. Leo may have caused some immigration to Italy from the empire's heartland, though this mainly occurred during the reign of his son. Refugees, many of them monks, augmented the existing Italo-Greek population—especially monastic communities—in Rome and central and southern Italy. Iconoclasm seems to have been little enforced in Byzantine Italy.
See also Arabs in Italy; Byzantine Empire; Iconoclasm; Lombards
MARTIN ARBAGI
Gouilknd, Jean. "Aux origines de l'iconoclasme: Le témoinage de Grègoire II." Travaux et Memoires, 3, 1968, pp. 243-367. (Greek text and French translation of two letters of Pope Gregory II to Leo III protesting Leo's Iconoclastic policies.)
Le liber pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne. Bibliothéque des Écoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome. Paris, 1955. (Not a new edition, but incorporates the editor's corrections, deletions, and emendations up to his death and thus supersedes earlier printings. The life of Gregory II in Liber pontificalis is the most important source for the effects of Leo Ill's policies in Italy. As of the present writing there was no English translation of Gregory l!"s biography or of any other from the Iconoclastic period.)
Nicephorus, Saint, Patriarch of Constantinople. Breviarium historicum (Short History), trans., with commentary, Cyril Mango. Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 10; Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, 13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990. (Short chronicle covering some of the same time as Theophanes. Nicephorus was an Iconophile patriarch of Constantinople, dismissed by Emperor Leo V.)
Santoro, Anthony, trans. Theophanes' Chronographia: A Chronicle of Eighth-Century Byzantium. Gorham, Me.: Heathersfield, 1982. (With maps; translates only the notices from 717 to 803, but these years included most of the Iconoclastic epoch.)
Theophanes. Chronographia, ed. Charles de Boor. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883-1885. (Reprint, 1963. Principal Greek source for Leo's reign, but badly informed and often confused on Italian affairs.)
—. Chronographia: The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor—Byzantine and Near Eastern History, A.D. 284—813, trans., with introduction and commentary, Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, with Geoffrey Greatrex. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Turtledove, Harry, trans. The Chronicle of Theophanes: An English Translation of Annus Mundi 6095—6305 (a.d. 602-813), with Introduction and Notes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Anastos, Milton V. "The Transfer of Illyricum, Calabria, and Sicily to the Jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 732-733." In Silloge Bizantina in Onore di Silvio Giuseppe Mercati. Rome, 1957, pp. 14-31.
—. "Leo Ill's Edict against the Images in the Year 726-727 and Italo-Byzantine Relations between 726 and 730." Byzantinischen Forschungen, 3, 1968, pp. 281-327.
Barnard, Leslie W. The Graeco-Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Controversy. Byzantina Neerlandica, 5. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
Gero, Stephen. Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Leo III, with Particular Attention to the Oriental Sources. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientorum, 384, Subsidia, 52. Louvain: Corpussco, 1977. (Source for Leo's early years, though occasionally mistaken on western matters.)
Hodgkin, Thomas. Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. 6, The Lombard Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916. (Classic account.)
Noble, Thomas F. X. The Republic of Saint Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. (Full bibliography through the early 1980s.)
Richards, Jeffrey. The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476—752. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
Pope Leo III (saint; d. 816, r. 26 December 795—18 June 816) was involved in a dramatic episode that began in April 799. The ambitious nephews of the previous pope, Hadrian (Adrian) I, and their supporters attacked Leo in Rome, attempting to tear out his tongue and blind him. Though injured, Leo recovered and fled to Charlemagne at Paderborn. In November 800, Charlemagne arrived at Rome to investigate the matter. The charges against Leo are murky, but he was acquitted. He had taken an oath to prove his innocence—whether voluntarily or not is also unclear.
Charlemagne remained in Rome after Leo's trial. On Christmas day 800, Leo III crowned his supporter as "Roman" emperor in Saint Peter's church. The meaning of this ceremony is disputed. Charlemagne was a Germanic tribal chief—albeit a powerful one—not truly a Roman emperor. It is likely that he wanted to receive the imperial title from the Byzantine (eastern Roman) emperor, not from Leo, because coronation by the pope implied that Charlemagne was dependent on the papacy.
Leo again visited Charlemagne beyond the Alps in 804, perhaps to discuss the imperial succession. After Charlemagne's death, new plots broke out against Leo, but he succeeded in suppressing them.
Some historians consider Leo III a pitiful weakling; others consider him a decisive and farsighted statesman. His pontificate was undoubtedly characterized by close cooperation with Charlemagne on both religious and secular matters. Leo, who was a generous benefactor and builder, was canonized in 1673.
See also Charlemagne; Holy Roman Empire
MARTIN ARBAGI
Bibliotbeca Remm Germanicarum, 6 vols., ed. Philip Jaffé. Berlin: Weidmann, 1864-1873. (Reprint, Aalen: Scientia, 1964.)
Böhmer, J. F. Regesta Imperii, 1, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern, 751-918. New ed., ed. E. Mühlbacher. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1908,
Einhard. Einhard's Life of Charlemagne: The Latin Text, ed. H. W. Garrod and R. B. Mowat. Oxford: Clarendon, 1915.
Leo III (Pope). Leonis III papae epistolae, ed. K. Hampe. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epp., 5. 1899, pp. 105-145.
Le liberpontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1955-1957.
Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2 vols., ed. Philipp Jaffé and Wilhelm Wattenbach. Lipsiae: Veit, 1885-1888. (Reprint, Graz: Akadeinische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956.)
Einhard. The Life of Charlemagne, trans. Sidney Painter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.
Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe. London and New York: Viking Penguin, 1969.
Van Wormer, Marc. "The Annales Regni Francorum: A Translation of the Years a.d. 741 to 814." MA thesis, University of Toledo, 1968. (Typescript.)
Hodgkin, Thomas. Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. 8, Frankish Empire, 774-814. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899.
Kleinclausz, Arthur Jean. I. empire carolingien: Ses origines et ses transformations. Paris: Hatchette, 1902.
Kreutz, Barbara. Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Wallach, Luitpold. Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolingian Age. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Pope Leo IV (saint; d. 855, r. January 847-July 855) had been cardinal priest of Santi Quattro Coronati and was famous for his oratory and his piety. Leo was one of the most assertive popes of his century. "Clever as a snake and innocent as a dove" (according to Liber pontificalis), determined to preserve Rome from hostile incursions and maintain the authority of the papacy, he molded ninth-century papal policy.
Christendom had been shocked by an Arab raid in August 846, when Saint Peter's and other sites outside the Aurelian walls were sacked. With financial help from Emperor Lothar I, who considered the Muslims a divine retribution for the empire's moral decadence, Leo organized the fortification of the suburb around Saint Peter's (finished by 853). The area became known as the "Leonine city," and its walls, modeled on Aurelian's third-century circuit, still stand. Leo also restored existing fortifications and churches in and around the city; planted an early-warning colony at the Tiber estuary; and in 854 inaugurated a new city, Leopolis, inland from Civitavecchia, which had been devastated. His ambitious building was encouraged when a Tyrrhenian coalition achieved a naval victory against Arab raiders in 849.
Leo's vision of the universal responsibilities of the bishop of Rome—a vision that is suggested by the range of his surviving correspondence—led him to confront Archbishop Hincmar of Reims. He cowed Hincmar, but not Anastasius, leader of a Roman clerical faction favoring subordination of the papacy to the empire. Anastasius, who was repeatedly excommunicated for canonical faults and was suspected of scheming to become pope, found refuge with Emperor Louis II. Leo intervened personally in places as far away as Ravenna to defend papal rights in the patrimony, which were endangered by insubordinate officials and clerics.
Leo's relations with Carolingian rulers were strained. He had been consecrated without the requisite imperial assent, and he tried to emancipate the papacy from Carolingian tutelage. But Leo was the first pope of his century to have an able imperial interlocutor—Louis II—resident in Italy, and this novelty affected his policies. Rumors that Leo planned an alliance with Byzantium brought Louis to Rome. After having reaffirmed the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingians, Leo died in July 855. The succession proved problematic. Leo's sanctity was upheld soon after his death, and Liber pontificalis lists his miracles.
See also Arabs in Italy; Frankish Kingdom; Rome
PAOLO SQUATRITI
Annales Bertiniani, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover, 1890. (Outsider's view.)
Flodoard. De Christi Triumphis apud Italiam, 11.12, ed. J. Migne. In Patrologia Latino., 135. Paris, 1853, cols. 814-815. (Indicates Leo's saintly status.)
Hincmar of Rheims. Epistulae, ed. E. Borels. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 8. Munich, 1978.
Hirsch-Gereuth, A. de, ed. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 5. Berlin, 1899, pp. 585-612. (Fragments of Leo's letters.)
Liber Pontificalis, Vol. 2, ed. Louis Duchesne. Paris, 1892, pp. 106-134. (Leo's biography.)
Mansi, J. Concilia, 14. Venice, 1769, pp. 853-1031. (Records councils held during Leo's pontificate and much other material.)
Prandl, A. "Un'iscrizione frammentaria di Leone IV recentemente scoperta." Archivio della Societá Romana di Storia Patria, 74, 1951, pp. 149-159. (Inscriptions affixed over the gates to the Leonine city, showing Leo's care for pilgrims.)
Duchesne, Louis. Les premiers temps de I'état pontifical. Paris: Fontemoing, 1911, chs. 12, 13.
Gibson, S., and Bryan Ward-Perkins. "The Surviving Remains of the Leonine Wall." Papers of the British School at Rome, 47, 1979, pp. 30-57; 51, 1983, pp. 222-239.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand. History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, Vol. 3, trans. Mrs. Gustavus W. Hamilton. London: G. Bell, 1903. (See Book 5, ch. 3.)
Hebbers, K. "Die Päpstin Johanna." Historisches Jahrbuch, 108, 1988, pp. 174-194.
Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City. Princeton, N.J,.' Princeton University Press, 1980.
Llewellyn, Peter. Rome in the Dark Ages. London: Faber, 1971.
Mann, Horace K. The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Vol. 2. London: Kegan Paul, 1906, pp. 258-307,
Riché, Pierre. Les Carolingiens: Une famille qui fit I'Europe. Paris: Hachette, 1983.
Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power. London: Methuen, 1955. (See especially ch. 6.)
Ward-Perkins, Bryan. From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy, a.d. 300-850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Pope Leo IX (Bruno of Egisheim, saint; 1002-1054, r, 1049-1054) was born to a noble family in what is now Alsace-Lorraine. He became a canon at Toul in 1017. Although he was a deacon, in 1026 he commanded troops on behalf of his kinsman Emperor Conrad II (r. 1024-1039). In 1027, he was chosen bishop of Toul, where he promoted reform in the monasteries under his influence, particularly at Moyenmoutier, Remiremont, and Saint Die.
In 1048, when Pope Damasus II died, Emperor Henry III (r. 1039-1056) promoted Bruno's election as Pope Leo IX. Bruno, who was at Worms when he was chosen, went to Rome dressed in pilgrim's garb and was canonically elected and enthroned there in 1049. In his entourage, he brought reformers to assist him, many of whom were from his home region of Lorraine. They included Frederick of Liège (later Pope Stephen IX), Hugh of Remiremont, Humbert of Moyenmoutier, Udo st Toul, Halinard of Lyons, and Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII). As opportunity permitted, he appointed them cardinal bishops or cardinal priests of the Roman church, thus gradually strengthening the position of the reformers. Traditionally, the cardinal bishops had been primarily liturgical figures, helping popes carry out the heavy burden of liturgy in Rome. Leo contributed to a process by which the cardinals became the chief assistants of the pope by using them as legates, officials, and advisers. Within a generation, the cardinal bishops—joined by the cardinal priests and cardinal deacons—had become a central organ of papal government. The more efficient governing structure helped to free the papacy from the long-standing control exercised by the Roman nobility and the German kings.
Since the tenth century, church reform had been stirring in several independent European centers, spurred by some monks, canons, bishops, and lay rulers, but their efforts were uncoordinated and spasmodic. Leo's accession to the papacy in 1049 had important consequences for the reform movements. Leo was an active member of the reform party, and during his pontificate he set the papacy on a new course of vigorously supporting, indeed leading, the reforms that were so prominent in the eleventh century. Leo's pontificate was energetic and focused on three main issues: the moral reform of the clergy, the protection of papal territory from the Normans in southern Italy, and the relations of the papacy with the Byzantine church.
Leo had an exalted concept of papal authority, but he was on amicable terms with his patron, the pious young German ruler Henry III, who also supported the moral reform of the clergy. Leo's reforms were directed primarily at the clergy and generally did not threaten the interests of lay rulers. Unlike his generally sedentary predecessors, Leo traveled widely in Italy, France, and Germany, and even as far east as Hungary; he spent only about six months of his pontificate in the city of Rome. Under Leo, the papacy—which for more than a century and a half had been a distant and relatively passive, though revered, institution—became a more active force in church affairs. Leo summoned about a dozen synods to condemn simony, clerical marriage, and other practices offensive to the reformers.
Since the early eleventh century, adventurers from Normandy had been invading southern Italy, seizing Saracen, Byzantine, Lombard, and papal territories. Leo hoped for an alliance of the papacy, the German empire, and the Byzantine empire to check the Normans' expansion. Before he could arrange such an alliance, he and his small band of troops were defeated by the Normans in June 1053 at Civitate, and he was held in honorable captivity for about six months. Leo's aggressive policy toward the Normans failed; when it proved impossible to dislodge the Normans, succeeding popes changed course and made alliances with them.
The revival of the papacy led to a growing insistence that all Christians, including those in the east, acknowledge the preeminent position of the pope within the church. Leo sent Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, one of the more radical reformers from Lorraine, as a papal legate to Constantinople to arrange an alliance with the Byzantines against the Normans. Humbert was an ardent supporter of papal claims to primacy over the entire church, and he insisted that the Byzantines acknowledge this primacy as well as papal territorial claims. Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople, was a committed opponent of papal authority, and a clash was inevitable. Humbert excommunicated Cerularius and his supporters on 16 July 1054, and in the same month Cerularius excommunicated the papal legates. The mutual excommunications opened a schism between the Roman and Byzantine churches that lasted until the twentieth century. Leo IX had already died, however, when this break with Constantinople occurred.
Leo was a pivotal figure in the history of the church. With his election, the reform party gained control of the papacy, and during his pontificate reformers solidified their position within it. He was an activist who won for the papacy a position of leadership in reform. Within two decades, Leo's proposals for the moral reform of the clergy had widened into an ambitious effort to free the church at every level from lay control—the so-called Gregorian reform, identified with Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085).
Leo IX died on 19 April 1054 and was buried in Saint Peter's basilica. He was canonized in 1087 by Pope Victor III.
See also Conrad II; Gregory VII, Pope; Humbert of Silva Candida; Normans
JOSEPH H. LYNCH
Acta sanctorum, 2. Paris, April 1865, pp. 646-673. (Wibert. Vita and two accounts of miracles.)
Patrologia Latina, 143. Paris, 1882, cols. 457-800. (Lives and letters.)
Poncelet, Albert. "Vie et miracles du Pape Saint Léon IX." Analecta Bollandiana, 25, 1906, pp. 258-297.
Blumeruhal, Uta-Renate. The Investiture Controversy: Church ana Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 64-105. (Originally published in German, 1982. Informed, brief account and biography placing Leo IX in his historical context.)
Mann, Horace K. The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages. London: Kegan Paul, 1925, Vol. 6, pp. 19-182. (Detailed though not historically critical account of Leo IX.)
Lewis (Louis, Ludwig, Emperor Louis IV; c. 1282 or 1287-1347) was the son of Duke Lewis II Wittelsbach of upper Bavaria and the Habsburg princess Mechthild. The younger Lewis defeated a Habsburg invasion of Wittelsbach territory at Gammels dorf in November 1313 and claimed victory in an irregular election for the German kingship against his cousin Frederick Habsburg in 1314. Lewis was crowned in Aachen—by an untraditional party, the archbishop of Cologne, and with bogus insig nia—on 25 November 1314. This dispute resulted in an eight-year war, which ended with Frederick's defeat on 28 September 1322 at Muehldorf, and his subsequent imprisonment.
Secure in his imperial claim, in 1323 Lewis sent his marshal, Berthold von Neiffen, to Italy to assert his authority there. Both the claim and this action angered the Avignonese pope John XXII, who had been supporting the Guelfs' efforts against the Ghibellines in Lombardy. Berthold aided the Milanese Visconti and the della Scala of Verona; John responded by charging Lewis with presuming powers and authority and aiding heretics (the Visconti), and demanded his presence in Avignon. Lewis defended his actions and authority, refused to attend the pope, and was excommunicated on 23 March 1324. On 11 July, John solemnly deposed Lewis, who decided that Italy and the imperial crown were the keys to outmaneuvering the irascible and hostile pope.
In January 1327, after two years of careful preparation in Germany, Lewis met with Ghibelline leaders in Trent. As Lewis proceeded toward Milan, Pope John demanded that he leave Italy and excommunicated several of Lewis's attendants, including the radical philosopher Marsilius of Padua. In Milan on 31 May, two excommunicated bishops crowned Lewis king of the Lombards. Dissatisfied with the rule of the Visconti in Milan, on 7 July Lewis deposed Galeazzo Visconti and imprisoned him and his brothers Marco and Luchino. Milan received a new government under an imperial vicar and made a "gift" of 50,000 gold florins to the king. Lewis also granted Castruccio Castracani control over Lucca, Luni, Pistoia, and Volterra, but denied him the lordship of Pisa.
Lewis entered Rome on 7 January 1328 and, probably under the influence of Marsilius, played grandly to the Roman people. On 17 January, two excommunicated bishops consecrated Lewis, and Sciarra Colonna, a representative of "the people," placed the diadem on his head. Lewis formally declared John a heretic and presumed to deprive him of all his ecclesiastical offices (14 April), and on 12 May Lewis himself crowned the Franciscan Pietro Rainucci as the antipope Nicholas V. According to the chronicler Villani, the new antipope recrowned Lewis emperor on 22 May. The Avignonese pope—John—again formally condemned the emperor and supported Castruccio's takeover of Pisa. Neapolitan Guelf troops captured Anagni and Ostia, near Rome, and on 4 August 1328 Lewis and his antipope left Rome in the midst of a jeering crowd.
Moving north, Lewis unsuccessfully attacked Grosseto but wisely avoided the Guelf stronghold of Florence. He returned to Pisa and ousted the Castracani from there and from Lucca. Lewis renewed his "sentence" on John and named Azzo Visconti vicar of Milan. Azzo soon turned on Lewis, who left Pisa (11 April 1329) to attack Milan. This attempt failed, and Lewis confirmed Azzo, although Azzo—along with the d'Este and the Pisans (who soon incarcerated the antipope, Nicholas)—supported John. The emperor then abandoned Nicholas but gave the vicariate of Mantua to Luigi Gonzaga in an attempt to strengthen the Lombard Ghibellines. December found Lewis in Trent, and in February 1330 he recrossed the Alps.
Although on at least two occasions Lewis threatened to return to Italy, he never did so. The emperor continued to struggle with the Avignonese popes and their allies the French kings, eventually supporting Edward III of England in the Hundred Years' War. Lewis died while hunting near Munich on 11 October 1347 and was buried in Munich, but his remains have since disappeared.
See also Castruccio Castracani; Ghibelline; Holy Roman Empire; Marsilio of Padua; Milan; Visconti Family
JOSEPH P. BYRNE
Waugh, W. T. Lewis the Bavarian." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Liber pontificalis—"pontifical book"—is the name now universally given to a series of papal biographies spanning the history of the see of Rome from Saint Peter to the fifteenth century. This name first appears in ninth-century manuscripts of the text, but it was little used until Duchesne (1886) adopted it in his celebrated critical edition. Originally, the list of popes' lives went by other names, if any: The Episcopal; the Catalogue, or Order, of the Popes; and Gesta (i.e., "achievements") of the Bishops of Rome.
Abbot Duchesne's Herculean toils made the first reliable text of Liber pontificalis available to scholars in the 1890s. Unlike earlier editors (the editio princeps dates to 1602), Duchesne examined a large number of manuscripts. Even Mommsen, whose incomplete edition (1898) appeared shortly after Duchesne's, said that he was only confirming the validity of Duchesne's readings. The assorted texts that are today considered "the Liber pontificalis" never circulated as a coherent book presenting an uninterrupted papal history until Duchesne's edition. The present Liber pontificalis is thus virtually Duchesne's creation.
Duchesne also initiated scholarly discourse on Liber pontificalis. The introduction to his edition remains an indispensable guide to the text. Duchesne's reconstruction of how the Liber was composed still holds the field, especially outside the German-speaking world (where Mommsen's early seventh-century date for the first redaction finds some favor). Following Duchesne, most students believe that the first redaction of the Liber was written just after 530 by someone with firsthand knowledge of the events described after 496. The compiler of c. 530 used older lists of pontificates, on which he embellished. His writing was a retort to the enemies of Pope Symmachus (d. 514), who had generated a papal history hostile to Symmachus (part of it survives as the "Laurentian fragment").
Whether a new papal biography was appended to the redaction of 530 at each pope's death thereafter is less certain; Mommsen thought not, suggesting that the custom of updating the Liber pontificalis after each pontificate caught on late in the seventh century. Arguments on the contemporaneity of the biographies between 530 and 687, and on the dating of later redactions, are inconclusive. They are complicated by the garbled manuscript tradition; this seems to bifurcate around 640, when a new edition of the text may have been divulged. From the pontificate of Conon (d. 687) to that ofStephen V (d. 891), contemporaries wrote the biographies, some of which (such as the life of Gregory II) circulated before the protagonists had died. After 891 only brief notices were written, generally not long after the death of the pope. In the twelfth century various authors added to Liber pontificalis, fleshing out the post-1073 biographies. The many continuations written in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were not "official" biographies by nameless papal bureaucrats; rather, their authors, whose identities are known, often were private researchers, tenuously connected with the papacy.
Between the sixth, and ninth centuries the Liber pontificalis was a living text, regularly updated and presenting an almost official account of papal affairs. However, some biographies are fuller and more reliable than others, and several ninth-century lives were left unfinished. In general, the anonymous compilers were familiar with the popes they described. These compilers were educated, well-informed Lateran officials, though not men of the highest rank with access to all the secrets of the patriarcbium. Their concerns were Roman and clerical; seldom do non-Roman or even secular Roman affairs receive notice in Liber pontificalis.
From the sixth century to the ninth, the sources of the successive biographers included eyewitness accounts and Lateran gossip, material which the writers integrated with the written sources also available to the later continuators or to the author of 530. Among the written sources were inscriptions, hagiography, liturgical and canonical texts, archival records, and account books. The biographers doctored their data, presenting a politically viable version of the popes' deeds in skillfully chosen words. The careful phrasing of certain biographies reveals that they were amended, sometimes heavily, after the original redaction, as political expediency dictated. Such correction was not always possible, however; the life of Benedict III (d. 858) contains information damaging to Anastasius, who worked on Liber pontificalis in the mid-ninth century and was hence well placed to alter the text. Anastasius's failure to amend the text indicates that by the mid-ninth century the diffusion of Liber pontificalis was swift enough to inhibit would-be censors.
The Latin of the biographers was restrained and standardized, but some added picturesque touches to the narrative and used a more colorful vocabulary. The authors of Liber pontificalis followed fairly rigid compositional rules during the period of its heyday (530-891) and even in the twelfth century. The recipe first used c. 530 became normative, so a proper papal biography proceeded with an orderly listing of each pope's name, number, family, origin, date and length of pontificate, special deeds, disciplinary decrees, patronage distributed, ordinations conferred, time of death, and burial place. The length of the subsequent vacancy also was recorded. The formulaic nature of the biographies did not prevent their compilers from including much individualized detail (though there was less such detail in the seventh century). These details permit the reconstruction not only of each pontificate's peculiarities, but also of Rome's economic, social, cultural, and topographical development; they also illuminate Roman politics during various otherwise murky periods. The original function of Liber pontificalis, instead, may have been as a reference manual of local church history, or as a textbook for neophyte officials within the Lateran. It was also used as an instrument of papal propaganda abroad.
Begun during the sixth -century revival of the classical genre of biographical series, the Liber pontificalis enjoyed great popularity throughout the Middle Ages, when the genre was less in vogue. Both Gregory of Tours and Bede seem to have known the text (or parts of it), but the wide diffusion of the Liber came only during the Carolingian age. Numerous Italian and European bishoprics then provided themselves with lists of episcopal biographies, loosely imitating the Roman model. None of these episcopal Gesta had the longevity of Liber pontificalis; they were composed once and for all and were not updated thereafter. The Gesta resembled the Liber in form and in their attempt to create the impression of an unbroken, continuous series of episcopates reaching back to apostolic times, linking the present to a glorious local past.
See also Chronicles; Papacy
PAOLO SQUATRITI
The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to A.D. 715, rev. ed., trans. Raymond Davis. Liverpool: University Press, 2000. (Includes the "Laurentian fragment" and pre-530 papal catalogs.)
The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis), trans. Louise Ropes Loomis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1916. (English translation to 590.)
Le Liber pontificalis: Texte, introduction, et commentaire, 2 vols., ed. L. Duchesne. Paris, 1886, 1892. (Reprint, with a third volume of Duchesne's later reflections and annotations and indexes by Cyrille Vogel. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1955-1957.)
Libri pontificalis pars prior, ed, T. Mommsen. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Gestorum Pontificum Romanorum. Berlin: Weidmann, 1898. (Up to 715. Reprint, 1982, with Mommsen's "Prolegomena," pp. vii-cxxxix.)
Liber pontificalis Prout Exstat in Codice Manuscripto Dertusensi, ed. J. March. Barcelona: Typis La Educacion, 1925. (New manuscript improving on earlier readings for 891-1130.)
Berschin, Walter. Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, Vol. 1. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1986, ch. 5.
Bertolini, O. "Il Liber Pontificalis." Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto Medioevo, 17, 1970, pp. 387-455.
Duchesne, Louis. Étude sur le Liber Pontificalis. Paris: Fontemoing, 1877.
—. "La nouvelle edition du Liber Pontificalis." Mélanges d'Areheologie e d'Histoire, 18, 1898, pp. 381-417. (With Duchesne's rebuttal of Mommsen's positions.)
Geertmann, Herman. More Veterum: Il Liber Pontificalis e gli edifici ecclesiastici di Roma nella tarda antickità e nell'alto medioevo. Groningen: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1975.
Noble, Thomas F. X. "A New Look at the Liber Pontificalis" Archivium Historiae Pontificiae, 23, 1985, pp. 347-358.
Poole, R. "The Liber Pontificalis." In Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery. Cambridge, 1915, pp. 166-170.
Richards, Jeffrey. The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476-752. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
Sot, Michel. Cesta Episcoporum: Gesta Abbatum. Turnholt: Brepols, 1981, chs. 2, 3.
Ullmann, Walter. A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1972, chs. 2, 3.
As the principal system by which knowledge is organized and transmitted through education, the liberal arts remain among the most durable contributions of antiquity to western civilization. The Greeks first delineated propaedeutic training designed to prepare the individual for participation and competition in a society where education provided an initiation to cultural ideals. Although components of a coherent body of knowledge intended to organize human experience of the world were to vary with time and place in Greco-Roman antiquity, the artes liberates would remain the philosophical core of the educated mind. The term ars (Greek tekne or techne) indicates that techniques or skills are associated with each area of cognition; it likewise implies an individual's ability to pursue activities of the mind liberated from physical labor and ignorance. Defined perhaps as early as Pythagoras, and subsequently refined by Dionysius Thrax, Varro, Boethius, and Cassiodorus, the artes were divided into two major groups: those concerning the acquisition, correct usage, and expression of language in oral and written communication; and those related to calculation and quantification. Grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic made up the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music made up the quadrivium.
Although the liberal arts in medieval Italy retained their Hellenistic formulation, their evolution differed—significantly in some instances—from that in other parts of Europe. As one of the final triumphs of Greek science, an grammaticae was naturally the first course on any curriculum. The earliest Latin treatise may be attributed to Varro; but the Ars Major and Minor of Donatus and the Institutiones grammaticae and Praeexercitamina of Priscian were most widely disseminated until the late twelfth century. In Martianus Capella's transitional De nuptiis Pbilologiae et Mercurii, acclaimed as the foundation of the medieval trivium and quadrivium, Lady Grammar carries an elaborate box containing the tools of her art, explaining that in the past her instruction was limited to reading and writing correctly, but she must now also teach textual comprehension and analysis. Claiming to share the latter two with philosophers and critics, Lady Grammar distinguishes between the active skills of reading and writing and the more contemplative nature of analysis and interpretation.
Medieval grammar, of considerably greater breadth and depth than its modern counterpart, began with instruction in letters, syllables, parts of speech, pronunciation, orthography, etymology, morphology, and syntax. In early Christianized Italy, a child's introduction to the liberal arts typically began around age seven, often, though not necessarily, under the direction of a cleric. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was more secular education in Italy than elsewhere. In a culture whose principal authority was "the Word" and "the Book," the liberal arts provided an introduction to the study of philosophy, considered the highest realm of human learning. Thus, grammar courses involved extensive experience with Christian texts. Lessons were frequently based on passages from scripture and proceeded from detailed examination of the littera to exegesis and exercises in composition. Essentially utilitarian in its methods, such pedagogical grammar is distinguished from the more scholarly approaches of speculative, theoretical grammar associated with modern linguistics and philosophy of language.
Questions concerning the propriety of exposing ingenuous minds to non-Christian anctores varied with time and place; the final resolution favoring inclusion followed the recovery and translation of Aristotelian texts, the significant influence of Arabic learning in Italy, and the Thomistic reconciliation of ideologically opposed cognitive systems. In Padua, the first of the pro touniversity studio, based on the Bolognese model, masters of grammar are in evidence from the early twelfth century. Rolandino—Padua's first major historian and a student of Buoncompagno da Siena—taught grammar and rhetoric from the establishment of the studium in 1222 for more than fifty years; in the period 1222-1350, more than thirty masters of grammar and rhetoric taught in Padua, where the more recent texts of Alexander da Villa Dei and Eberhard de Bethune were probably in use.
Ars rhetoricae (from the Greek orator') assumed a mastery of correct Latin usage; this discipline taught oral and written expression heightened in effectiveness by persuasive eloquence. A tripartite generic division (fourth century B.C.) remained in use: judicial, for forensic argumentation; deliberative, for determination of action where opposing options were under consideration; and epideictic-demonstrative, for expression of praise or blame. Although rhetoric flourished in Roman Italy with Cicero, the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Horace, and Quintilian, among others, its functions in medieval Italy were largely associated with the study of law, the ars dictaminis, arts of poetry, and ars praedicandi.
The Justinian codification of Roman law and the revision of law school curricula were early indications of the prominence of legal study in Italy from the founding of the first studium in Bologna (1135) to schools in Modena, Reggio, Vicenza, Arezzo, Vercelli, and Piacenza, among thirteenth-century sites in the region. Independent at their establishment, the faculties of law generally retained administrative autonomy from other arts faculties. For the genus iudiciale, rules prescribed most organizational aspects of legalistic discourse, beginning with Aristotle's five-part division: invention, disposition, diction, delivery, and memory.
Ars dictaminis played an important role in the development of Italian rhetoric. It developed within an ecclesiastical and political culture where elegant epistolary expression was highly regarded, and its early masters were Buoncompagno da Siena (c. 1165-c. 1235), Bene di Firenze ((1. 1220), and Guido Faba (c. 1190-c. 1240). Guido's Summa dictaminis is more practical than theoretical, offering a large selection of readily adaptable models on a variety of subjects. Such tracts typically focus on organization, the importance of lexical choices, levels of style, and types of ornamentation (colores rhetorici).
Whatever the context, an exordium should render the audience docile, i.e., teachable; it should also please and stir the emotions. The latter two methods of persuasion—pleasure and emotion—were controversial for Augustine and other Christian rhetoricians; in addition to extensive Augustinian discussion, Fulgentius's De continentia Virgiliana is among the first instruction manuals on Christian rhetoric. After his conversion, Augustine was to deplore his career as a professor of rhetoric, proposing modesty of style with an authorial and oratorical emphasis on substance; but Fulgentius represents another kind of early medieval rhetoric in his allegorization of the Aeneid as a narrative depicting the trajectory of human life. With John of Garland, Matthew of Vendome, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, treatises on the art of poetry became central to medieval rhetoric. Geoffrey, in Rome during the papacy of Innocent III, published his Poetria nova c. 1210. Central to the case for vernacular rhetoric is Dante's De vulgari eloquentia.
Wherever persuasive language is required, dialectic provides essential techniques for the structuring of argument. As the third art of the trivium significantly indebted to translatio studii, logic (and its derivative art, dialectic) became increasingly important in medieval Europe, especially in Paris following the recovery of the remaining texts of Aristotle's Organon. Boethius, who was central to the commentary tradition and the transmission of ancient texts, identifies dialectic as one branch of logic intended to produce probable, though not necessary, truth in problems and propositions. Applicable to all the other arts and to virtually any subject, the dialectical syllogism and quaestio became primary instruments of medieval disputatio. Aquinas honored dialectic as ars artium ("the art of arts"); his Summa theologiae is considered the culmination of the scholastic tradition, particularly where he offers a five-part proof of the existence of God. To the quodlibet whether the libera! arts should be taught relative to such worldly activities as commerce, Aquinas responds that the essentially spiritual nature of the arts must be respected by those who teach.
All die arts of the trivium are inextricably interrelated and are a preparation for the mathematically based quadrivium, whose four ways lead to comprehension of order in the universe (numerology is likewise related to medieval aesthetics). Ars arith- metica, unlike its modern counterpart, addressed primarily theoretical aspects of number, unity, equality, ratio, and proportion. Nonetheless, some instruction would be useful, if not necessary, to the merchant, artist, sculptor, and architect, and even the mason. Early Pythagorean concepts of arithmetic were maintained throughout the Middle Ages, with a distinction being made between arithmetic and arithmology, pertaining to mystical properties of numbers. According to the De arithmetica of Boethius:
It is prior to all not only because God, the creator of the massive structure of the world, considered this first discipline as the exemplar of His own thought, and established all things in accord with it; or that through numbers of an assigned order all things exhibiting the logic of their maker found concord; but . . . because whatever things are prior in nature, it is to these underlying elements that the posterior elements can be referred.
Addressing number theory, called "separable multitude," Boethian arithmetic developed a cognitive methodology that proceeded from number in itself to relativity between two numbers and, finally, between three numbers.
The recovery of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics stimulated research and teaching in disciplines applicable to medicine and law, whose Italian university faculties were known throughout the world. Also critical was the introduction of sources such as Al-Khwarizimi's Treatise on Calculation with Hindu Numerals, translated c. 1143; its computational system provided the basis of algorism, leading to the Italian treatises of Alexander Villa Dei and Sacrobosco in the following century. Sacrobosco's Algorismus vulgaris was the first text to introduce practical mathematics to the university curriculum; a commentary on it by Peter of Decia appeared in 1291 and remained in the standard arithmetic curriculum for centuries.
The court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen and the first university established by civil charter, which he founded in Naples, brought together scholars and translators from virtually every known cultural tradition. Treasures of Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindu knowledge were translated by men such as Burgundio of Pisa and James of Venice. Under Frederick's decree, a medical student was required to have three years of logic before concentrating on the mathematical sciences. A notable case is Thomas Aquinas, who began his study of liberal arts at Monte Cassino and later pursued logic and the natural science in Naples. By the thirteenth century, Greek mathematical tracts stimulated important work by Jordanus Nemorarius and Leonardo Fibonacci da Pisa, among the most outstanding mathematicians of the Middle Ages.
According to a mnemonic poem, Ar numerat while Ge ponderap. it literally, at least, measures the earth. Thus, Martianus Capella's Lady Geometry carries a ruler or compass in one hand and a globe in the other. Euclid and Archimedes remained primary sources throughout the medieval period, although no complete translations of Euclid were available until after 1150, and translations of Arabic texts contributed significantly to medieval geometry. In its most developed form, a geometrical proposition bears a more than passing resemblance to its dialectical counterpart: enunciation of the problem, statement and specification of the problem, construction of argument, proof, and conclusion. As a transmitter of Euclidean geometry, Varro remained the primary authority until Boethius and the late Latin encyclopedists Cassiodorus, Martianus, and Isidore; the translation by Campanus di Novara (thirteenth century) circulated widely. Hugh of Saint Victor's Practica geometriae differentiated between theoretical and practical approaches; Hugh then subdivided practical geometry into altimetria, measurement of height and depth; planimetria, measurement of plane surfaces; and cosmimetria, measurement of the world itself. The combined theories of Hugh and Dominicus Gundissalinus formulated three areas of geometry: theoretical-mathematical, taught in liberal arts schools using tracts by Jordanus Nemorarius; practical, likewise a school subject but used also for surveying and measuring; and constructive, useful in the building projects that proliferated in Italy from the eleventh century on. Among later medieval efforts to apply Euclidean geometry to philosophy, as well as to practical uses, Leonardo Fibonacci da Pisa should be noted.
Although astronomy had been rhe most highly developed of the sciences in Greece, it was of less interest to the more pragmatic Romans, and thus was transmitted to the Middle Ages incompletely and often incorrectly. Much of later medieval astronomy drew on Greek sources recovered through Arabic scholarship. Of Platonic theory, only the Timaeus survived. The Eu doxian theory of spheres was adapted and modified by Aristotle in his Metaphysics and On the Heavens. Fourth among major theorists for the Latin Middle Ages, Ptolemy of Alexander formulated the most widely recognized systemization of the ars astronomiae in his Almagestes, transmitted partially by Macrobius (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio), as well as by Calcidius (who was also a translator of and commentator on the Timaeus) and Martianus Capella. Partly owing to the praise of Copernicus, the eighth book of Martianus's De nuptiis was widely taught until c. 1000; it is of particular interest for its claim (not original) that the earth was not at the center of the sun's orbit.
The connections between astronomy and other artes liberales made it of primary importance to many quadrivium scholars: to cite but two examples, a new genre of astronomical tract known as computus appeared in the seventh century to calculate the date of Easter; and the astrolabe, reintroduced through Arabic transmission, served for centuries to determine celestial altitude, tell time, and measure depth and height. A respected work on the astrolabe was written by Gilbert de Rheims, who became Pope Sylvester II and was known for his erudition in all seven arts. At the universities of Bologna and Padua, astronomy flourished, partly owing to Averroistic works such as the Expositio super theorica planetarum ofTaddeo da Parma (fourteenth century). Controversy arose concerning Pietro d'Abano, who had studied in Constantinople and Paris; in his Concililator and Luciditor he developed a philosophy of medicine linked to astrology, claiming that illnesses of the microcosmic human body cannot be adequately treated without reference to Ptolemaic cosmology.
Music—last in the canonic medieval configuration of the liberal arts—was conceived from early Pythagorean theory in terms of measurement and order (Plato had said that the soul of the universe is united by musical concord). For the Greeks, it was principally a techne of numerical laws, whose major divisions were harmonics and rhythm. Theorists until the Christianization of Italy reiterated similar concepts. In Boethius, music was defined as the science of skillful modulation involving reason and the senses; Augustine and virtually all subsequent medieval churchmen emphasized the unique ability of music to arouse emotion. A passage in Augustine's Confessions (10.33) expresses his ambivalence even toward music set to sacred texts: "I feel that by those holy words my mind is kindled more religiously and fervently to a flame of piety because I hear them sung than if they were not sung." In Martianus's De nuptiis, Lady Harmony demonstrates the dual capacities of music: she appeases the dissonance threatening the celebration and restores order by leading Mercury and Philology to the bedchamber.
The study of arithmetic and at least some acquaintance with geometry and astronomy were appropriate prerequisites for the medieval student; even a rapid overview of Martianus's text reveals the complexity of music theory as it entered the Middle Ages. For centuries, sckolae cantorum apparently assumed the principal tasks of teaching. The first official schools on record were established in Saint Gall and Metz. An indication that the more practical aspects of performance were worthy of consideration can be found in an important tract by Guido d'Arezzo (c. 990-1050), whose solmization system facilitated instruction in plainchant melodies. In the early fourteenth century, treatises by Johannes de Muris and Philippe de Vitry introduced an nova, which was later to influence Italian nuova musica. By 1324, the Avignonese papacy, concerned by the influence of this new music, issued a decree restricting the presentation of music in churches; this document has been seen as a stimulant to secular troubadour-trouvère compositions, which were already proliferating. Until the fifteenth century, Avignon was to remain the central source of liturgical polyphony.
See also Ars Nova; Buoncompagno da Signa; Cicero; Dante Alighieri; Education; Guido d'Arezzo; Guido Faba; Macrobius; Numerology; Pietro Abano; Universities
NANCY BRADLEY CROMEY
Hoppin, Richard II. Medieval Musk. New York and London: Norton, 1978.
Marrou, H. I. A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Murphv, James J. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Siraisi, Nancy G. Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua Before 1350. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973.
Stahl, William Harris, and Richard Johnson, with E. L. Burge, eds. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Wagner, David L., ed. The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
The Libri Carolini was the response of Charlemagne's court to the decisions of the Council of Nicaea (787), summoned by Empress Irene to legislate the end of Iconoclasm. Having received the council's acts in a Latin translation sent by Pope Hadrian I, whose legates had participated in the council, Charlemagne commanded Theodulf of Orleans, advised by others at court, to prepare a rebuttal. The treatise amassed an array of authorities to demonstrate that the council's position on the use of images represented dangerous doctrinal innovations and to define what tradition had established as orthodox teaching. Interspersed with the theological discussion was a wide-ranging polemic against the claims of the imperial office to define orthodoxy and the legitimacy of the council's ecumenical status without representation from the Frankish church. The Libri Carolini marked an important step in the growing consciousness at Charlemagne's court of the role of the Franks as God's chosen defenders of Christendom.
See also Charlemagne; Frankish Kingdom; Hadrian I, Pope; Iconoclasm
RICHARD E. SULLIVAN
Freeman, Ann. Theodulf of Orleans and the Libri Carolini." Speculum, 32, 1957, pp. 663-705.
—. "Further Studies in the Libri Carolini, I-II." Speculum, 40, 1965, pp. 203-289.
—. "Further Studies in the Libri Carolini, III." Speculum, 46, 1971, pp. 597-612.
carolini sive Caroli Magni Capitulare de Imaginibus, ed. Hubert Bastgen. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Concilia, 2, Supplement. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1924.
Wallach, Luitpold, Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolinrian Age. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 43-294.
The battle of Licosa took place in 846. Southern Italian states had begun employing Islamic mercenaries against each other in the 830s. These mercenaries often took to independent looting and kidnapping, creating permanent bases (ribat) on the Italian mainland. In the 840s the diminished threat from rival cities such as Benevento and Salerno, and an intensification of Muslim raids, enabled the dukes of Naples to form a coalition of states against the marauders. This "inspired alliance" (Vita Sancti Antonini) among Amalfi, Sorrento, Naples, and Gaeta sought to protect the shipping of the Tyrrhenian ports. In the spring of 846, a mopping-up operation directed at Muslim bases on the Campanian coast culminated in the allies' capturing the stronghold on the promontory of Licosa. The benefits for Campania proved transitory—after 851 the pirates returned to looting the divided south—but the league that Naples led at Licosa (and in other naval operations as late as 849) demonstrated the potential of the maritime city-states acting in unison, even without aid from the Byzantines.
See also Amalfi; Byzantine Empire; Naples
PAOLO SQUATRITI
Annates Bertiniani A.D. 846-847, ed. G. Pertz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, 1. Hannover, 1826, pp. 442-443. (Records a possibly retaliatory Arab raid on Rome immediately after the battle at Licosa.)
Chronicon Salernitanum, Vols. 72-90, ed. Ulla Westerbergh. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1956, pp. 71-91.
Chronica Sancti Benedicti Casinensis, Vols. 5-7, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum. Hannover, 1878, pp. 471-473.
Erchempert. Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum, Vols. 11-22, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum. Hannover, 1878, pp. 239-243.
John the Deacon. Gesta Episcoporum Neapolitanorum, Vols. 57-60, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum. Hannover, 1878, pp. 430-433.
Liberpontificalis, Vol. 2 (104.44—47), ed. L. Duchesne. Paris, 1892, pp. 99-101. (Mentions the allies' defense of Ostia in 849.)
Marsicanus, Leo. Chronica Monasteri Casinensis, Vol. 1 (21-30), ed. W. Wattenbach. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, 7. Hannover, 1846, pp. 596-601.
Vita Sancti Antonini Abbati Surrentini, 5, Acta sanctorum. Antwerp, 2 February 1658, pp. 791-793.
Cilento, Nicola. "Le incursioni saraceniche nell'ltalia meridionale." Archivio Stonco per le Province Napoletane, 38, 1959, pp. 109-122. (Reprinted in Italia meridionale longobarda. Milan: Ricciardi, 1966, pp. 175-189.)
Citarella, Armando. ' The Relations of Amalfi with the Arab World before the Crusades." Speculum, 43, 1967, pp. 299-312.
Duchesne, Louis. The Beginnings of the Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes, trans. Arnold Harris Mathew. London: Kegan Paul, 1903, ch. 12.
Gay, Jules. L'ltalie méridionale et I'empire Byzantin depuis I'avènement de Basile Ier jusqu'à la prise de Bari par les Normands (867—1071). Paris: Fontemoing, 1904, Book 1, ch. 3.
Lewis, Archibald R. Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean, A.D. 500-1000. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Merores, M. Gaeta im frühen Mittelalter. Gotha, 1911, ch. 1.
Schipa, Michelangelo. II mezzogiorno d'ltalia anteriormente alia monarchia, ducato di Napoli, e principato di Salerno. Bari: Laterza, 1923, ch. 5.
Schwarz, Ulrich. Amalfi irn friihen Mittelalter (9.—11. Jh.): Unters. zur Amalfitaner Überlieferung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978, ch. 2.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1000. London: Macmillan, 1981, ch. 6.
See Fustians
See Memini, Lippo
Lippo Pasci (or Paschi) de' Bardi (late thirteenth century-early fourteenth century) was a Florentine poet, and perhaps a musician, who wrote four sonnets (contained in the Vatican Codex Lat. 3214) and to whom Dante addressed a sonnet, Se Lippo atnic se' tu che mi leggi. Virtually nothing is known about Lippo's life, although he has been proposed (Di Benedetto 1941) as the possible author of the allegorical poems II Fiore (long attributed to Dante) and Intelligenza. On the basis of stylistic similarities, Lippo has also been identified as the anonymous "Amico di Dante" ("Friend of Dante"). From archival documents, we know that Lippo was active between 1292 and 1312 and died before 1332.
Lippo is best-known through the sonnet addressed directly to him by Dante. In this sonnet of correspondence, Dante refers to the accompanying stanza of an ode (probably Lo meo servente core) as a pulcella nuda ("unadorned maiden") which he is sending to Lippo in order that Lippo might "clothe it" (La rivesta). However, Dante's intention is unclear: he may want Lippo to set it to music, or to provide a commentary for it, or simply to copy it in more elegant handwriting. Recent philological criticism has argued that there is confusion between Lapo (Gianni) and Lippo in the textual tradition of Guido, i' vorrei che tu e Lapo [or Lippo] ed io, a well-known sonnet by Dante. If this is the case, major questions of interliterary relations in the late Duecento will have to be reconsidered and revised.
See also Cavalcanti, Guido; Dante Alighieri; Intelligenza; Lapo Gianni
CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Dante Alighieri. Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini. Turin: Einaudi, 1965.
Di Benedetto, Luigi, ed. Poemetti allegorico-didattici del secolo XIII. Bari: Laterza, 1941.
Gorni, Guglielmo. II nodo della lingua e il Verba d'Amore: Studi sit Dante e altri duecentisti. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1981.
Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., ed. Gianfranco Contini. Milan: Ricciardi, 1960.
More than perhaps any other European country, Italy was the home of rites and Uses in great number, some of them quite local and exhibiting considerable differences. Comparative studies of these different uses have barely begun, and no methodology for accomplishing the task has been established. Complicating the process, too, is our incomplete knowledge of many of the Uses known to have existed, even though some of them are of great importance. The gaps are unlikely to be filled, because either the books are lost or they are late and heavily Romanized to eliminate their idiosyncracies.
Certain kinds of books seem to have survived (perhaps for reasons other than liturgical), whereas those that could inform us more generally about liturgical texts and practices are scarce. This state of affairs is especially true before the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the drive to exert the influence of Rome and to establish some conformity of tradition grew in force. Evidence for liturgies before this time must often be gleaned principally from sacramentaries, ordines, gospel books, legendae, and specialized documents such as exultet rolls. Only in liturgies such as the Benevantan and Ambrosian do books of other kinds survive in greater quantities. Books for the mass, missals, and graduals and their prototypes are about twice as common as books for the offices.
Even in the later Middle Ages, liturgical books in Italy seem scarcer than those in England, France, and Germany, perhaps as a result of the humanists' disdain for all things medieval and of the suppression of ecclesiastical institutions—and perhaps also because the notoriously inaccurate or inadequate cataloging of liturgical books has hardly been addressed in Italy. In addition, surviving books of the later periods seem different in character from those elsewhere. Large books for the choir, chorali—often preserved, one imagines, only because of their beautiful art-work—exist in Italy (and to some extent in Spain) in much larger quantities than in more northern countries. A further difficulty lies in the often widely discrepant dates for some of the major sources of Italian liturgy, where differences of a hundred years or more are not uncommon. It is hard to know how to assess the importance of these obvious differences and defects in the source material.
The bibliography for most of the topics to be discussed is huge, often relatively dated, and usually quite specialized. The most recent work from which a synthesis can be extracted is musicological: some of the following summary is abstracted from Hiley (1993), which, although dealing with chant across Europe, makes possible to some extent the isolation of Italian trends and deals to some extent with nonmusical books, Hiley's work also contains a vast bibliography in which the important works are recorded. Other recent musicological work has also illuminated the problems of Old Roman and Roman usage, and of the Ambrosian and Benevantan rites. Many of the sources most easily accessible or best-known are chant books. Reliance on information oriented toward chant research is obviously no substitute for comprehensive evaluation, although each of the musical studies is careful to place its repertoire within the general liturgical context as far as possible.
This general survey of Italian medieval liturgy will address the topic from a variety of aspects and will begin with a chronological overview of the political developments, in which the role of Rome will be prominent. A review of the liturgical influences on Rome, including the role of the popes and papal rites, will then be discussed; following are briefer sections organized by geography.
For the first two centuries of the Christian era, the bishops of Rome were Greek-speaking, and Greek was the language of liturgy up to the fourth century. But "nothing survives of the Roman liturgy of the first five centuries.. . . There was considerable liturgical activity but we have no way of evaluating either its extent or its results" (Vogel 1986). From the fourth century on, with a few exceptions during Holy Week, the language was predominantly Latin, although in the seventh century the liturgy was again partly bilingual because eastern Christians were flocking to Rome (between 638 and 772, nine of the twenty-five popes were eastern). Eventually, the influence of the reforms of the Frankish church in the eighth and ninth centuries established Latin as the principal language.
The authority or Rome was variously circumscribed until the very late Middle Ages, often as a result of political rather than ecclesiastical circumstances. Byzantine rites held sway in the south. As a center in the early period, Rome was less important than Constantinople, or even than Milan or Ravenna—Ravenna being the capital of the Byzantine exarchate from 540 to 751. Except in the north, the writ of the bishop of Rome ran in much of the rest of the peninsula until the Lombard invasions of the late sixth and seventh centuries. The Lombards were in the south by 570, confining the Byzantines to Calabria and Sicily and isolating the coastal region from Rome to Naples. In the eighth century, the conquest of northern Italy and Ravenna by the Franks changed the political situation yet again, further diminishing the influence of Rome.
The period from the sixth century to the eleventh century was one of decadence and decline in which Roman traditions lost their power. The center of influence had moved to Gaul and Germany. During this period, the liturgy of the city of Rome and the papal court was systematized, and there was a gradual mixing of Prankish and Roman uses.
Several factors contributed to the recovery, beginning in the tenth century and more strongly in the eleventh century. The first was the introduction into Rome, almost certainly during one of several visits there by Emperor Otto I from 951-972, of the Roman-German Pontifical (liturgical book). This is said to be one of the major events in liturgical history. Other changes came about as a result of the foreign popes who were installed when Emperor Otto III was trying to the reform the papacy around the turn of the tenth century: Gregory V (r. 996-999) was German; Sylvester II (r. 999-1003), French. German clerics—from Augsburg, for instance—were appointed to Italian churches, especially in the north. Gregory V demanded a regular supply of liturgical books from the scriptorium at Reichenau: like the Roman-German Pontifical, these would have been German in character. Gregory VII is reported to have said Teutonicis concessum est regimen Ecclesiae nostrae.
Perhaps the most significant political change was a result of the Norman invasions of Sicily and the southern mainland in the eleventh century. The city of Bari was captured in 1071, and eventually the kingdom of Sicily controlled by the Normans extended up the peninsula and along the eastern coast beyond Rome. Although the liturgical implications for the region are by no means clear, it seems likely that the Normans' predilection for monastic patronage allowed Monte Cassino again to play a leading role in the renewal of Roman liturgical practice.
Eventually, Rome seized the initiative, trying to end German control of ecclesiastical affairs. Although its influence remained strong for some time, the Roman-German Pontifical eventually became an Ordo Romanus: it was adapted to Roman use, and unnecessary rituals such as royal coronations were removed, along with archaic rituals and the luxuriant overgrowth of German texts. This process was one of simplification in which the substance of the services was unchanged.
Evidence of a renewal of political authority came with the Lateran Council of 1123. But the first evidence of a distinctive liturgical authority appears only in the thirteenth century as a result of the reforms of Pope Innocent III (r. 1198—1216). The exile of the papacy in Avignon in the fourteenth century rendered Rome once again impotent as a liturgical center, until the fifteenth century.
In the broadest terms, some liturgical developments influencing Rome and the liturgy originated in the fifth century. Monastic communities of this period attached themselves to basilical churches such as the Lateran and Saint Peter's. These perhaps played a role in the formation of the rule of Saint Benedict. That rule, also influenced by earlier, less well-developed compilations, was put together in the early sixth century for the community of Benedict at Monte Cassino. It enables us to reconstruct fairly comprehensively monastic liturgies from that time. Nothing similar exists for secular liturgies until the seventh century, and as far as can be determined, the distinction between monastic and secular use was not clearly defined in Rome. But churches of Rome were staffed by monks in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Various popes during these centuries are credited with liturgical reforms or additions to the liturgy. Gelasius (r. 492-496) perhaps introduced the Kyrie to the mass; Symmachus (d. 514) perhaps added the Gloria. Gregory I (r. 590-604), although no longer credited with the composition or even the compilation of plainsong (both of which attributions are of much later date), was probably responsible for reorganizing liturgical administration and regulating liturgical use. Masses for the Thursdays of Lent were arranged during the pontificate of Gregory II (r. 715-731). Numerous other popes or abbots are said to have edited or ordered the cycle of chants for the church year. Apel (1958, 38-42) gives convenient tables summarizing papal reforms and documentary evidence up to the eighth century. Vogel (1986) has many useful tables showing the sources and their relationships.
Sacramentaries and Ordines give us glimpses of what the Roman liturgy was like in these centuries: although many were written for and used in Gaul and elsewhere, to some extent they represent Roman practice. The Sacramentary sent by Pope Hadrian I to Charlemagne between 784 and 791 is a book of masses celebrated by the pope in the Roman stational liturgy: the Sacramentary of Padua represents the presbyteral use at Saint Peter's basilica c. 670—680. Ordo Romanus I, of the early eighth century, is our earliest direct evidence for the papal mass in Rome. Later Sacramentaries and Ordines—hybrids modified in Gaul and Germany, which were often disorganized and inconsistent—provided the basis for German books subsequently taken back to Rome. Some of the best evidence for what was performed in Rome before the Ottoman reforms comes from the so-called Old Roman sources. These are a small group of manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth century that transmit Old Roman chant. The most likely explanation is that these sources represent the chant and texts sung in Rome up to the eleventh-century reforms: they lack the changes made by the Franks and transmit a more ornate form of chant. The current view is that they were written down as a result of pressures on the older rites caused by the Ottonian reforms. This Old Roman material was superseded, in the thirteenth century, by texts and chants organized and revised by the Franks and Germans—in musical terms this would be the chant often known as Gregorian chant.
The papal court was staffed by clerics who were preoccupied with administrative duties. The need for a liturgy less ornate that what had apparently been the case, and less ornate than what had come from the German pontificals, led to a thirteenth-century liturgy that was concise and brief. Under Pope Innocent III, papal and civil practices were reconciled and revisions of the mass and office for the papal chapel were undertaken. These revisions were carried out in close cooperation with the newly founded Franciscan order, and the missal and breviary prepared under Pope Honorius II (1216-1217) were officially adopted by the order. A further revision undertaken by the Franciscan Haymo of Faversham (1240-1244) essentially made the use of the Franciscans and the Roman Curia identical. Innocent III was also responsible for a revision of the Pontifical, of which various recensions were produced up to the fourteenth century. This book, however, was gradually replaced by the Pontifical of William of Durandus, c. 1293-1295.
Churches in Rome were brought into line, and nonconforming manuscripts were destroyed (this may be one reason for the paucity of books other than those of the Roman Curia). Outside Rome, churches were not so quick to adopt the new use of the Roman Curia. The Lateran basilica retained its own practices until the fourteenth century. But eventually almost all the other uses in Italy came to conform with Roman-Franciscan Use, some more quickly than others. Even monastic orders adapted it. The Celestines, founded c. 1250, took Roman Use for the mass while following Monte Cassino for the monastic office. The Olivetans, founded in 1319 near Siena, adopted it, and after the reform at Saint Giustina's in Padua in the early fifteenth century, other monasteries such as Subiaco (and houses outside Italy in Austria and Bavaria) followed suit. Not until the mid-fifteenth century had most places in Italy conformed, and not until the advent of printing was it possible for the use to become a more or less universal rite.
Liturgical practices in other places in Italy, and their relationship to uses in Rome, are poorly documented. Aquileia was a patriarchate in the sixth and seventh century with two bishoprics, at Grado and Cividale. Traces of its earlier liturgy are very faint; it is said to be similar to that of Milan. One gradual thought to have been for the Aquileian rite has now been tentatively reassigned to Venice. Sources from the later Middle Ages seem indistinguishable from those elsewhere in Europe. The rite was suppressed in 1594-1595. Of the Ravennese rite even less survives: a noted breviary of c. 1100 (now at Downside Abbey) has distinct Ravennese connections but has been little explored. The really distinctive practices of this rite probably disappeared after 754, when Ravenna fell to the Frankish conquest of northern Italy. Venice was formally subject to the eastern empire, and when the Franks failed to bring it into the western sphere its status became more independent (conflicts between the bishoprics of Aquileia allowed it to escape their domination, too). Soon after 810, a ducal chapel was built for the remains of the apostle Saint Mark, further enhancing the importance of Venice. This chapel became the private chapel of the doge. The rites were a mixture of ecclesiastical, political, and civil ceremonies, little known and, again, little explored. Discoveries made since about 1980 (reported by Cattin 1990-1992) may make it possible to reconstruct the liturgy of the later Middle Ages.
Of other places and institutions, little can be said. Verona was clearly a place where important liturgical sources were produced; Monza and Lucca were other centers from which books emanated, and the rites of Lucca are said to have influenced those of the papal curia. The use of the Sainte-Chapelle was ordained for Bari. Local cults, and especially local saints, were favored. Numerous houses flourished and probably had their own practices. In the late eleventh century and twelfth century, the Ca maldolese had cloisters in Tuscany and Sardinia. The Vallom-brosans were slightly more widespread in northern Italy. Irish foundations such as the one at Bobbio would no doubt have played some role in the distinctive liturgical life of the peninsula. Siena mixed civil and ecclesiastic ceremony in interesting ways.
Of the Ambrosian and Beneventan rites, however, we know more. Again, recent scholarship has focused on the edition and discussion of musical sources. The two rites were related politically and liturgically, and sometimes agree with each other against Rome; indeed, Benevantan practices were sometimes referred to as Ambrosian, as when Pope Stephen IX prohibited "Ambrosian" chant at Monte Cassino in 1058.
The Milanese rite, said to have been founded by Saint Ambrose (and thus called Ambrosian), was practiced in the archdiocese and has characteristics distinguishing it from Roman use, Similarities with Visigothic and Gallican uses have been suggested but are difficult to document; affinities with Byzantine liturgies have been discovered. Under threat from the Arians, Ambrose's church (according to Saint Augustine) sang "hymns and psalms . . . after the manner of oriental regions." Hymns were not a part of Roman use until the twelfth century—they were, however, a part of the monastic liturgy, and the Milanese rite was influenced strongly by monastic forms. Ambrose said that he followed Roman practice closely, but there was more ceremonial, and a wealth of less formal services such as processions (called psallendae) and stational offices. The chant is generally more florid. Although the political importance of Milan allowed it to remain independent of Rome, eventually what was unique in the liturgy was suppressed (c. 1386) when the two ancient cathedrals were destroyed and their services were adapted for the new duomo.
The Benevantan rite was closely associated with the Lombard influence in the south, although liturgical and political relationships with Milan (also under Lombard rule) are clear. The surviving manuscripts are nearly all late (again perhaps as the result of a desire to preserve a declining rite): many exultet rolls, a good many books for the mass, and fewer for the offices. When later contaminating material is removed, they disclose a rite whose structure is quite similar to Roman, but in which familiar texts are distributed in quite different ways and used for different functions. For the expert, this characteristic and the use of non-biblical texts signal a Beneventan source, and quite distinct (often stereotyped and more ornamental) melodic characteristics signal Beneventan chant. The rite flourished most strongly in the eighth century, when Benevento became a principality, avoiding entanglements with popes, the Franks, and Byzantium. But by the ninth century increasing contact with Rome, and the growing importance of the Norman influence—especially at Monte Cassino—caused the rite to decline. By the eleventh century it had been suppressed.
Avast number of monographs, articles, and editions of particular genres exist for each of the major topics, but for very few of those topics is there any general overview of the liturgy in its historical, ecclesiastical, and political context. The bibliography below, necessarily selective, includes material contributing to a general picture. General information may also be found in various dictionaries; as of the present writing, the Dictionary of the Middle Ages is the most comprehensive and most recent.
See also Ambrosian Chant; Aquilcia, Rite of; Bencventan Chant; Benevento; Gregorian Chant; Milan; Old Roman Chant; Ravenna; Venice; William Durandus
ANDREW HUGHES
Apel, Willi. Gregorian Chant. Bloomington: Indiana University-Press, 1958.
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols., ed. Joseph Strayer. New York: Scribner, 1989.
Hiley, David. Western Plainchant: A Handbook. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Tellenbach, Gerd. The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Vogel, Cyrille. Introduction aux sources de I'histoire du culte chrétien au moyen âge. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1966. (3rd ed., 1981. See also Cyrille Vogel. Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, trans, and ed. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen. Washington, D.C.: Pastoral, 1986.)
Andrieu, Michel. Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge. Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 11 (23—24, 28-29). Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense Administration, 1931-1961.
Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Medieval Papacy. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968. (Reprint, 1992.)
Cattin, Guilio. Musica e liturgia a San Marco: Testi e melodie per la liturgia delle ore dal XII al XVII secolo, 4 vols. Series 4, Collezione Speciale per la Musica Veneta. Venice: Edizioni Fondazione Levi, 1990-1992.
Kelly, Thomas. The Beneventan Chant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Levy, Kenneth. "Ravenna Rite (Music of)." In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie.
Magistretti, Marco, ed. Manuale Ambrosianum ex Codice saec. XI, 2 vols. Milan: Hoepli, 1904, 1905.
van Dijk, Stephen J. P. Sources of the Modern Roman Liturgy: The Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243-1307), 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1963.
—. The Ordinal of the Papal Court from Innocent III to Boniface VIII, and Related Documents. Spicilegium Friburgense, 22. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 1975. (Completed by Joan Hazelden Walker.)
Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949. (2nd ed., 1961.)
Liudprand (Liutprand, Liuzo; c. 920—972) was bishop of Cremona (961-972) and also a historian and diplomat. He was born in Pavia in northern Italy into a wealthy family who may have been either merchants or urban aristocrats. His father (who died young) and stepfather had served Hugh of Aries, king of Italy, as diplomats. Liudprand himself went to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine (eastern Roman) empire, in 949 during the reign of Constantine VII (called Porphorygenitus) on a mission for Hugh's successor, Berengar of Ivrea. Liudprand fell out with Berengar and went into exile at the court of Otto I, duke of Saxony. There, Liudprand met Recemund, bishop of Elvira in Muslim Spain, who suggested that Liudprand write a history of their time. The result was Antapodosis. Liudprand rose in Otto's favor, was granted the see of Cremona, and accompanied Otto on an expedition to Italy that resulted in Otto's coronation as emperor in February 962. Liudprand went on at least two missions to Constantinople on behalf of Otto: in 960 (when he seems not to have reached Constantinople); and in 968-969, during the reign of Nicephorus II Phocas, to arrange a marriage with a Byzantine princess for Otto's son, Otto II. The second embassy was a miserable failure, but later Nicephorus's successor, John I Tzimisces, did consent to a match between Otto II and Theophano. Liudprand probably went to Constantinople a fourth time in 972 (though he seems to have been reluctant to do so, possibly because of ill health) to help escort Theophano to the west; and apparently he died at some point during that trip.
Liudprand's principal works are Antapodosis (translated into English as Tit for Tat or The Book of Retribution); Relatio de legatio Constantinopolitana (Report on the Embassy to Constantinople), i.e., the embassy of 968—969; and Liber de rebus gestibus Ottonis (The Deeds of Otto), i.e., Otto I. Recent scholarship (Bischoff 1984) has also identified Liudprand as author of a sermon given at Easter c. 960.
Antapodosis is a gossipy history running from 887 to 949. It forms our principal guide to northern and central Italy during that confused period and contains much information on other areas: Germany, Burgundy, southern Italy, and the Byzantine empire—especially Constantinople. Antapodosis was written to show that the major figures in Italian politics of the first half of the tenth century whom Liudprand disliked—notably Berengar of Ivrea and his wife, Willa—eventually met bad ends. Though an excellent storyteller, Liudprand obviously does not pretend to be impartial.
Relatio is bitterly anti-Byzantine, It is often cited to show the growing estrangement of the Latin west from Byzantium but in fact demonstrates no such thing. Liudprand's tirades against the "Greeks" are a result of the hostile and demeaning treatment he received at the hands of Emperor Nicephorus. There is no trace of anti-Greek sentiment in Antapodosis, which gives a good-natured account of Liudprand's mission of 949. The fascinating narrative and Liudprand's caustic humor compensate for the whining tone of Relatio.
The Deeds of Otto is a record not of the great Saxon ruler's entire reign (Liudprand died a year before Otto), but of one incident: the deposition of Pope John XII by Otto in 963.
Despite his admiration for and devotion to Otto and the Saxons, Liudprand is a figure essentially centered on the Mediterranean. He claimed to know Greek and interlarded his work with Greek words (followed by their Latin translations). Although some scholars consider this merely a display of pedantry, most now believe that Liudprand did know the spoken Byzantine tongue of his day (which was closer to modern than to classical Greek), and perhaps some classical or koine Greek as well. Although Liudprand had the requisite education and social background for a diplomat, his effectiveness was vitiated by his explosive temper (amply demonstrated in Legatio) and his acerbic disposition (of which Antapodosis is a prime example). His urbane, witty, sarcastic, and occasionally ribald style makes him sound curiously modern, especially if one reads him in a good translation.
See also Byzantine Empire; Otto I; Otto II
MARTIN ARBAGI
Bischoff, Bernard. "Einer Osterpredigt Liudprands von Cremona (um 960)." In Anecdota novissima: Texte des vierten bis secbzehnten Jahrhunderts—Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, Vol. 7. Stuttgart, 1984, pp. 93-100. (First publication of the text of an Easter sermon by Liudprand, previously anonymous, c. 960.)
Liudprand of Cremona. Opera omnia Liudprandi Cremonensis, ed. Paolo Chiesa. Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis. Turnholti: Brepols, 1998.
Translatio Sanctae Hymeri, ed. Ferdinand Ughelli. Itala Sacra, 4. Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1592, cols. 797-798. (Includes a notice of Liudprand's death. Reprinted in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum, 3. Hannover and Leipzig: Hanische Buchhandlung, 1839, pp. 266-267, note 23.)
Relatio de Legatio Constantinopolitana, ed., trans., intro., and commentary by Brian Scott. Reading Medieval and Renaissance Texts. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993. (With textual notes.)
The Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans, and intro. F. A. Wright. Broadway Medieval Library. London: Routledge, 1930. (Classic English translation. Includes Translatio Hymeri but not the Easter Sermon. Wright substitutes French for the Greek words in the original, creating much the same effect.)
Halphen, Louis. "The Kingdom of Burgundy." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 6.
Hiestand, Rudolf. Byzanz und das Regnum italicum im 10. Jahrhundert. Geist und Werke zu Zeit. Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1964.
Koder, Johannes, and Thomas Weber. Liutprand von Cremona, in Konstantinopel. Herausgegeben von der Kommission fur Fühchristliche und Östkirchliche Kunst der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und vom Institut für Byzantinistik und Neograzistik der Universität Wien, 13. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1980. (Two brief monographs: one is on Liudprand's knowledge of Greek, with a glossary of all Greek words in his works; the second essay uses Liudprand as a source for the diet of the period in Byzantium and the west.)
Kreutz, Barbara. Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Leyser, Karl. "Ends and Means in Liudprand of Cremona." In Byzantium and the West, c. 850-c. 1200: Proceedings of the XVIII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, 30th March-1st April 1984, ed. J. D. Howard-Johnston. Amsterdam: Adolf Hakkert, 1988, pp. 119-143. (Survey in English of Liudprand's work that also summarizes scholarship.)
Lintzel, M. Studien über Liudprand von Cremona. Historische Studien, 3. 1933. (A standard monograph.)
Previté-Orton, Charles. "Italy in the Tenth Century." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 7.
Rentschler, Michael. Liudprand von Cremona: Eine Studie zum ost-westlichen Kulturgefdlle im Mittelalter. Frankfurter Wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 14. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981.
Sutherland, J. N. "The Idea of Revenge in Lombard Society in the Eighth and Tenth Centuries: The Cases of Paul the Deacon and Liudprand of Cremona." Speculum, 50, 1975, pp. 391—410. (Revenge is a major theme in Antapodosis.)
Liutprand (d. 744, r. 712-744) was a king of the Lombards. In 712, after having spent nearly ten years in exile from the Lombard court, Liutprand and his father Ansprand returned to Italy with backing from the Bavarians and overthrew Aripert II. Ansprand became king, but his death a few months later allowed Liutprand to claim the kingship. Liutprand then ruled until his own death.
Liutprand was the most successful of the Lombard kings. Although he had to spend the first part of his reign quelling internal resistance, he did succeed in bringing the rebellious dukes under control—a control that was even extended to the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which were traditionally virtually independent of the Lombard monarchy.
As king, Liutprand followed a policy of expanding his territory at the expense of imperial territory—and in opposition to the wishes of the papacy. The opportunity was provided by a growing rift between the empire and the popes that was due partly to the Byzantines' weakness and partly to the Iconoclastic controversy. The refusal of the papacy to accept Iconoclasm was related to its slowly developing policy of freeing itself from imperial control-and stepping into the political role of the empire in northern and central Italy.
Liutprand also continued the work of the earlier Lombard kings, Rothari and Grimoald, regarding legislation. During his reign he would add 153 laws to the Lombard code; these laws—which reflected an increasing influence of Roman law—emphasized the role of the state, modified inheritance practices, and recognized the validity of written testaments. With Liutprand, Lombard law began to lose many of its customary legal features and became a sophisticated social instrument.
During his later years, Liutprand associated himself in government with a nephew, Hildeprand, who succeeded him. However, Hildeprand was almost immediately overthrown by Ratchis of Friuli.
See also Iconoclasm; Lombard Law; Lombards; Ratchis; Rothari
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Hallenbeck, Jan T. Pavia and Rome: The Lombard Monarchy and the Papacy in the Eighth Century. Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1982.
Noble, Thomas F. X. The Republic of Saint Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.
Titus Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) was born in Padua. As a young man, he went to Rome, where he studied philosophy; at age thirty, he turned to historical pursuits. He was publicly honored and respected during his lifetime, and he encouraged the historical studies of Claudius, the future emperor.
Livy, Ab urbe condita. Lyon: Apud Antonium Vincentium, 1553. Reproduced from original held by Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries of Notre Dame.
Livy's lifework is Ab urbe condita libri, a history of Rome from its foundation to Livy's own time. The work has an annalistic structure, recounting the salient events in Roman history year by year. The history originally comprised 142 books, of which only 1 — 10 and 21—45 survive. The first ten books, called the "first decade," move from the mythic tale of Aeneas's flight from Troy to the third Samnite war (289 B.C.). Books 21—45—the third, fourth, and first half of the fifth decades—narrate Roman history from the second Punic war (218 B.C.) to the end of the war with Macedonia (167 B.C.). Other passages from the work are preserved in fragments and excerpts.
The loss of the bulk of Livy's work can be attributed both to its enormous size and to its subdivision into discrete sections of ten books each. These sections, the decades, were each transmitted separately, and no attempt to unite them was made until Petrarch's day. Also, although Livy's history was well-liked during his lifetime, Livy was not a standard school author during the Middle Ages, and the decline in his popularity contributed to the spotty transmission of his work. By the end of the ninth century there were only a few extant copies of the work. By the twelfth century there appears to have been a slightly greater circulation of parts of the history, and by the fourteenth century Livy's popularity surged, but the fourth decade remained extremely rare.
Dante demonstrates only a slight acquaintance with Livy, citing him merely in general terms. However, Livy stands as an authority on Roman history for Dante, who explicitly acknowledges his stature in Monarchia (2.3.6) and again in Inferno (28.12), describing him as Livïo . . . che non erra ("Livy who does not err").
Boccaccio was apparently familiar with Livy and may have prepared an extant Italian translation of the third and fourth decades that contributed to L,ivy's renewed popularity. It was Petrarch, however, who played the pivotal role in the preservation of the remaining books of Livy's history. Petrarch found manuscripts of the first, third, and fourth decades at Chartres; put together two separate textual traditions; emended and annotated the text in his own hand; and, for the first time since antiquity, put the thirty books together. (Books 41-45 were not found until 1527.) Petrarch placed Livy at the top of his list of favorite historians and used some episodes from Livy's history as the inspiration for sections of his own Africa. Thanks in part to Petrarch's philological intervention, Livy became an important source in the Italian Renaissance and a model for humanist historiography.
See also Boccaccio, Giovanni; Dante Alighieri; Petrarca, Francesco
JESSICA LEVENSTEIN
Briscoe, John. Books 41-45, rev. ed. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1986.
—. Books 31-40, 2 vols., rev. ed. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991.
Dorey, Thomas A. Books 21-25, 2 vols., rev. ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1971, 1976.
Loeb Classical Library. 15 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919-1967. (Various editors.)
McDonald, Alexander H. Books 31-35. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
Ogilvie, Robert M. Books 1-5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
Walsh, Patrick G, Books 26-30, 2 vols., rev. ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1982, 1986.
—. Books 36-40, 5 vols. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990-1996. (With translations.)
Weissenborn, Wilhelm, Moritz Miiller, and Wilhelm Heraeus. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1959. (Originally published 1887-1908.)
Briscoe, John. Books 31-37, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973, 1989.
Ogilvie, Robert M. Books 1—5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
Weissenborn, Wilhelm, and H. J. Miiller. Berlin: Weidmann, 1962-1963. (Originally published 1910.)
Livy, ed. Thomas A. Dorey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Luce, Torrey J. Livy: The Composition of His History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Martina, Antonio. "Livio." In Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols. Rome: Istituto dell' Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1978, Vol. 3, pp. 673-677.
Walsh, Patrick G. Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
The Lombard city of Lodi was founded in 89 B.C. as a Roman municipium with the name Laus Pompeia (Lodivecchio, west of the present Lodi, in the province of Milan) at the intersection of the Vercelli-Brescia and Milan-Cremona roads. The first documented bishop, Bassianus, was a contemporary of Saint Ambrose (339-397). The history of Lodi remains obscure for the Lombard and Prankish periods but becomes clearer after the year 1000. Lodi controlled the roads that connected Milan (Lombardy's major city) with Piacenza and Cremona and the lower course of the Lambro, by which the Milanese shipping traffic gained access to the Po. Lodi's important position in the transportation network of central Lombardy made the city an object of expansion efforts by the Milanese. In 1025 the German emperor Conrad II granted the archbishop of Milan the right of investiture for the bishop of Lodi. Just two years later, war broke out between Lodi and Milan when the archbishop attempted to make a Milanese cleric bishop of Lodi, Although it was set off by the archbishop's choice, this conflict may have resulted from a larger structural problem that became clearer as time passed. The archbishop's vassals acquired ever greater property in the territory of the Lodi diocese and thereby gradually revoked the right to legal and military access to these areas that the population of Lodi had enjoyed. The area along the lower course of the Lambro demonstrates the influence of such property transfers on Lodi's control of its contado (countryside) during the communal era.
During the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, Lodi's clerics remained skeptical of efforts by the papacy to renew religious life. Bishop Obizo (r. 1059—1083), however, seems to have been induced to join the reformers; thus, in 1093, the city formed a coalition with Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, and Matilda of Canossa to fight against Emperor Henry IV on the side of Henry's son Conrad. This coalition failed to protect Lodi from being destroyed in 1111 following a four-year war with Milan. Lodi's defeat resulted principally from the fact that a section of the nobility (capitani) and the bishop had joined the side of the Milanese. The victors demolished the city fortifications, drove the people into six unfortified villages (borghi), and cut off the transportation and trade opportunities of their conquered rival. Despite these efforts, the market of the largest village, Borgo Piacentino, soon regained its importance in the region. Concurrently, the inhabitants organized themselves into a commune, whose consuls are first mentioned in 1142. Although the city was able to regain a certain degree of independence, it remained influenced by Milan and had to provide both funding and troops for the campaigns of the Milanese against neighboring cities. In the early years of his reign, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa attempted to strengthen his claim to the Po valley. This policy raised hopes in Lodi that the emperor would help it achieve emancipation from the dominance of Milan. Similarly, from the emperor's perspective, Milan threatened his authority because it ruled the neighboring cities of Lodi, Tortona, and Como. Detailed information for these critical years in Lodi's history is found in the chronicle of Otto Morena and his successors. In the growing conflict between Frederick Barbarossa and Milan, Lodi increasingly allied itself with the emperor. In response, the Milanese exerted pressure on Lodi through higher taxes and oaths of allegiance before finally destroying it in 1158. This event brought an end to Lodi in its original location.
Shortly thereafter, Frederick Barbarossa established a new city, Lodi Nuovo, 31/2 miles (about 6 kilometers) east of its earlier site, on the banks of the Adda River. The new location allowed the city to be more easily fortified by a wall, which was begun in 1160. To maintain Lodi's integral place in the transportation network of Lombardy, the road from Milan to Piacenza was diverted through Lodi Nuovo. Lodi's situation on a navigable river flowing directly into the Po gave the city an attractive harbor. In addition, the city served as an important Lombard base for Frederick Barbarossa during the siege and destruction of the cities of Crema and Milan, and as an administrative center until his imperial organization collapsed in 1167. An imperial palace was built there, and in 1161 the antipope Victor IV held a synod there. The new city's religious and social continuity with Lodivecchio is indicated by the composition of the city magistrates and by the transfer of Saint Bassianus's relics to Lodi Nuovo in 1163. The empire's increasing exploitation of the Lombards provoked resistance, and in 1167 the Lega Lombarda, or Lombard League, a coalition of Lombard cities, was founded. After the rebuilding of Milan, the coalition forced Lodi to join it because, as an imperial fortress, the city threatened its supply line. Lodi, for its part, wanted to protect itself against expansion by the Milanese, and so it obtained contractual guarantees of its status as an independent city. The deposition of the earlier bishop who had been loyal to the emperor signaled a shift in the city's allegiance. Lodi remained on the side of the Lombard coalition until the peace of Constance in 1183.
In the 1180s, Frederick Barbarossa altered his alliances, ending his previous ties with Pavia and Cremona and establishing ties with Milan and Piacenza. These events brought Lodi under renewed and growing pressure from the Milanese until a peace treaty of 1198 granted it autonomy within the Milanese alliance system. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Lodi was governed by apodestà, and its communes began to codify the laws (Statutes and Liber Iurium). In the early thirteenth century, the Sommariva (backed by Milan) were opposed by the Ghibelline Over-naghi in the city's internal political parties. In 1237, during a war between the reactivated Lombard League and Emperor Frederick II, Lodi released itself from its alliance with Milan; it remained allied with Frederick II until his death in 1250. However, in 1251, under the leadership of the Vistarini family and with support from the Milanese, the Guelfs united against the Degli Averzaghi family. In the internal power struggle for control of Milan between the Delia Torre and Visconti families, the Delia Torre were banished from Milan, and Lodi became their base until 1295. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Milan's domination of Lodi was briefly replaced by that of the signorie of the Vistarini and the papal legate Ismacoldo. In 1335, the city was integrated into the state of the Visconti. Only the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1402 brought a short intermission in Milan's control of Lodi.
The old cathedral of San Bassiano of Lodi Vecchio survives. However, medieval traces are more visible in the new city. Remains from the medieval fortifications of the cathedral of San Bassiano and the churches of Sant'Agnese, San Francesco, and San Lorenzo, in addition to such secular buildings as the Broletto, Palazzo Vistarini, and Ospedale Maggiore, are still in evidence.
See also Conrad II; Constance, Peace of; Delia Torre Family; Frederick I Barbarossa; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Lombard Leagues; Milan; Visconti Family
CHRISTOPH DARTMANN
Translated by Erica Gelser
Busch, Jorg W. Die Lodeser Statutenfragmente des 13. jahrhunderts: Zur Entwicklung kommunaler Rechtsaufzeichnung." In Statutencodices des 13, Jahrhunderts als Zeugen pragmatischer Schrifilichkeit: Die Handschriften von Como, Lodi, Novara, I'avia, und Voghera, ed. Hagen Keller and Jorg W. Busch. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1991, pp. 25-38.
Diocesi di Lodi, ed. Antonio Rimoldi, Adriano Caprioli, and Luciano Vaccaro. Brescia: La Scuola, 1989.
Lodi: La storia dalle origini al 1945, 3 vols. Lodi: Banca Popolare di Lodi, 1990.
Oppl, Ferdinand. "Federico Barbarossa e la citta di Lodi." Archivio Storico Lodigiano, 1987, pp. 5-47.
See Liberal Arts
Lombard law was introduced into Italy by the Lombards, a Germanic people who invaded the peninsula in 568 after the Byzantine-Gothic wars had brought the downfall of the Ostrogothic kingdom in 552. The previously unwritten laws of the Lombards were first codified by King Rothari in 643 in a law book known as Rothair's Edict, containing 388 titles. These laws were modified and supplemented by later Lombard kings, Grimoald issuing nine titles in 688; Liutprand, 153 titles between 713 and 735; Ratchis, fourteen titles in 745-746; and Aistulf, twenty-two titles in 750-755.
Lombard law never became the law of the entire Italian peninsula; it was confined to those portions under Lombard control: the main part of the kingdom centered in the Po valley (but not including the area around Ravenna and the Pentapolis), Friuli, and Tuscany, Farther south, the Lombards occupied the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. Although at the height of their power in the mid-eighth century the Lombards held a good part of the Italian peninsula, they never effectively controlled Ravenna and a narrow strip of territory stretching toward Rome, the area immediately around Rome itself, or Naples and the southern extremities of the peninsula. In all these regions, Roman law remained in force—basically, the law of the western Roman empire (based on the Theodosian code and other pre-J ustinianic writings) supplemented to varying degrees by Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis.
In the northern two-thirds of the Italian peninsula (to a line just south of Rome), Lombard law remained the law of the majority of the population following the overthrow of the Lombard kingdom by Charlemagne (a Frank) in 774. In this area (including the duchy of Spoleto, but not the other areas noted above), Lombard law remained dominant, but it was supplemented by a number of additional enactments or capitularies issued by the Carolingian and Italian kings of Italy (late eighth century to the tenth century) and the early German Roman emperors (late tenth century and early eleventh). Farther to the south in the duchy of Benevento, the original Lombard law remained in force but was supplemented by additional titles issued by the Beneventan princes Arichis and Adelchis in 774 and 866. Thus, from the late eighth century on, there were two slightly different versions of Lombard law in use in Italy.
The relationship between Lombard law and Roman law has aroused much controversy. Rothair's Edict is usually regarded as a compilation of nearly pure Germanic custom, and the influence of Roman law is held to have become stronger in the work of Liutprand and his successors. But although much of Rothair's Edict is basically Germanic, it is not without Roman influence. The desire to produce a written book of law (which the royal justices could consult in the course of their work) and even the emperor-like act of issuing laws were largely a product of Roman influence, and the Lombard kings employed notaries who were Roman or had been trained by Romans (the language of the laws is Latin).
The Lombard laws constitute one of the most important of the "barbarian" codes. Rothair's Edict is itself a more comprehensive code than any of the others except the Visigothic. It covers many categories of matters about which legal dispute might arise: personal offenses, damages to property, theft, marriage, inheritance, and public offenses such as breaking the peace. Such organized coverage reflects some influence of Roman law, although the actual content of the law (except in some areas—such as debts and contracts, transfers of land, and the use of written instruments—where there is Roman influence) is basically Germanic. The structure of the Lombard court was Roman (with a royal justice hearing the suit and announcing the verdict); but other procedure was basically Germanic, since the injured individual or his family was responsible for bringing the suit before the court, and there was still some recourse to self-help—although the laws specifically denied recourse to the blood feud if one had accepted the compensation provided by law. The methods of proof were also Germanic, based mainly on the use of compurgation, but occasionally involving trial by battle.
The later Lombard laws were issued in order to interpret or modify the provisions of Rothair's Edict, or in response to actual cases that had come before the courts. There is thus ample evidence that, for the Lombards, law was more than unchangeable custom and the king was the source not only of justice, but also of new law. In all these respects, the Lombards reflect the advanced legal culture of those among whom they settled and were ahead of the other Germanic barbarians (except perhaps the Visigoths).
The native Lombard laws and most of the Carolingian capitularies for Italy were issued from the capital city of Pavia, which early on became a center of culture and learning. Pavia remained a center of learning under the Carolingians, and—as the favored capital of the Carolingian and Italian kings of Italy—it retained its position as an important administrative and judicial center, just when, if ever, a "law school" was established at Pavia is unknown, but there is ample evidence of legal activity there from the large numbers of surviving charters that were issued at Pavia and from the placita or notitiae that record judicial activities in the palace there. By the late tenth century, this legal activity took on greater intensity with the appearance of a number of new texts. One of the most important of these was Liber Legis Langobardorum (also known as Liber Papiensis), which brought together the issues of the various Lombard kings and later Carolingian capitularies for Italy in a single organized text. By the early eleventh century, further work by the Pavian jurists had led to the development of two schools of legal thought: the antiqui, who favored a literal reading of the Lombard laws; and the moderni, who defended a more liberal interpretation of the laws and, where the Lombard law was silent or unclear, looked to Roman law for guidance. It is clear, then, that by the early to middle eleventh century, the Lombard jurists at Pavia were studying a form of Roman law.
Lombard law, interpreted by reference to Roman law, continued to be taught at Pavia, but increasingly the Lombard jurists at Pavia were challenged by masters teaching at Bologna. Evidently, it was at Bologna during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries that specialization set in: Lombard, Roman, and even canon law were established there as separate bodies of law. As the influence of Bologna spread, and because this influence was based on the teaching of Roman law, the teaching of Lombard law eventually declined and Roman law predominated.
See also Lombards
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Bluhme, Frederick. Leges Langobardorum. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Legurn, 4. Hannover, 1868.
Boretius, Alfred. Liber legis Langobardorum Papiensis. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Legum, 4. Hannover, 1868.
Drew, Katherine Fischer. The Lombard Laws. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.
Radding, Charles M. The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna 850-1150. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988,
Lombard League (Societas Lombardiae) is a label for any of several military and diplomatic alliances of northern Italian communes, confederated in 1164-1183 and 1226-1250 for the purpose of protecting their liberties in the face of threats—perceived or real—from their overlord, the Holy Roman emperor.
The earliest leagues developed in the wake of Frederick I Barbarossa's reduction of Milan in 1162. He left both friendly and hostile cities with imperial podestà—often Germans—who supplanted the consuls of the communal governments and often acted harshly, imposing high taxes, forced labor, and confiscations. The initial coalition of Padua, Treviso, Verona, and Vicenza was directed by Venice with the blessing of the Byzantines and the papacy. Pope Alexander III, whose legitimacy was not recognized by Frederick, was especially anxious to create and support an effective counterweight against imperial threats to his rule. In late 1166, Frederick returned to Italy; and on his march to Rome, where he intended to unseat Alexander, his armies ravaged the hinterlands of several city-states, thus drawing a second coalition—of Cremona, Bergamo, Mantua, and Brescia—into alliance with the earlier one. These were joined in April 1167 by Milan, at the League's first congress at Bergamo, where the coalition was given form and oaths of allegiance were sworn by the civic representatives (rectors). Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, Parma, and Piacenza joined later that year, and Lodi was forcibly enlisted. Como, Novara, Tortona, and the Romagna cities of Forli, Imola, Ravenna, and Rimini joined after Frederick's ignominious retreat to Germany in the spring of 1168.
League members recognized their place in the empire, but organized to protect their liberties and restrict their obligations to levels traditionally applied under earlier emperors. Their alliance was for fifty years, and no member was to accept a separate peace. Intercity fighting was banned, and people sympathetic to the empire in the cities were to be stripped of property and exiled. At its height, the League bound thirty-six cities and controlled Italy from Turin to the Adriatic. Members even built the new town of Alessandria, named for their pope and patron.
Frederick's campaign, begun in late 1174, splintered the coalition as it successfully disengaged Como, Piedmont, and the Romagna, but the League's great victory in 1176 at Legnano, near Milan, shattered Frederick's hopes and led him to a reconciliation with the pope and separate arrangements with Milan, Cremona, and Tortona. With the truce of Venice (August 1177), Frederick formally recognized Alexander and the League and granted amnesty for past resistance. In the absence of any galvanizing imperial threat, the cities reactivated their old rivalries, and the League dissolved with the peace of Constance in 1183.
Minor revivals of the League occurred in 1185 and against Henry VT in 1195, and vague fears of Frederick II induced a full-scale rebirth in Mantua in 1226. Alessandria, Bergamo, Bologna, Brescia, Crema, Faenza, Ferrara, Lodi, Mantua, Milan, Piacenza, Turin, Vercelli, the count of Biandrate, and the marquis of Montferrat sought aggressively to block imperial access to Italy and isolate the allies of the empire in Italy. This League was under both an imperial ban and a papal interdict, but it rarely transcended the members' own local rivalries. A military alliance between Ezzelino da Romano and Frederick revivified the flagging coalition and led to the major imperial victor)' at Cortenuova (27 November 1237). Never accepting defeat, the League continued to spar with Frederick until his death in 1250. In the course of defying imperial power, however, many city-states accepted the rule of powerful and effective despots, and the continuous friction between Gueif and Ghibelline heated intracity factionalism and intercity warfare.
See also Alessandria; Alexander III, Pope; Constance, Peace of; Ezzelino III da Romano; Frederick I Barbarossa; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Ghibelline; Guelfs; Holy Roman Empire; Legnano, Battle of; Milan
JOSEPH P. BYRNE
Bordone, Renato. "I comuni italiani nella prima Lega Lombarda. Confronto di modelli instituzionali in un'esperienza politica-diplomatica." Fortrdge und Forschungen, 33, 1987, pp. 45-61.
Butler, W. F. The Lombard Communes: A History of the Republics of North Italy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1969. (Originally published 1906.)
Fasoli, Gina. "La Lega lombarda: Antecedenti, formazione, struttura." In Scritti di storia medievale, ed. F. Bocchi et al. Bologna: La Fotocromo Emiliana, 1974, pp. 257-278.
—. "Federico II e la Lega lombarda: Linee di ricerca." Annali dell'Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, 2, 1978, pp. 39-74.
—. "Federico II e le città padane." In Politica e cultura nellltalia di Federico II, ed. Sergio Gensini. Pisa: Pacini, 1986, pp. 53-70.
Maurer, Helmut. Kommunale Bundnisse Oberitaliens und Oberdeutschlands im Vergleich. Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1987.
Munz, Peter. Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Popolo e stato in Italia nell'età di Federico Barbarossa: Alessandria e la Lega lombarda. Lurin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1970.
Vignati, Cesare. Storia diplomatica della Lega Lombarda, con XXV documenti inediti. Milan: P. Agnelli, 1866.
Voltmer, Ernst. "Formen und Möglichkeiten städtischer Bündnispolitik in Oberitalien nach dem Konstanzer Frieden: Der sogenannte Zweite Lombardenbund." Vorträge und Forschungen, 33,1987,97-116.
The Lombards were a Germanic people who moved into Italy in 568. In the late first century, Tacitus reported them as living in the area of the lower Elbe River; but over the centuries they drifted southward, and settled in Pannonia in the early sixth century. Throughout this early period, the Lombards were very much part of a world where Roman interests were involved, and their institutions had undoubtedly been influenced as a result. For example, the Lombards had come into contact with Christianity, and at least some of them were Catholic in the mid-sixth century, although Lombard leadership was Arian at the time of the Italian invasion; however, many Lombards probably remained heathen. Although most of the Lombards had become Catholic by the third quarter of the seventh century, religion seems never to have been a major factor in their political experience. Also as a result of contacts with the empire, some Lombards came to know Italy in the later stages of the Byzantine-Gothic wars through service in one of the mercenary units of the Byzantine army.
Lombard tradition traced the kingship back to a legendary past (as we know from the work of the eighth-century Lombard historian Paul the Deacon); but although many of their early kings had ties to a single family, the Lombards had not developed a fixed rule of hereditary succession—and they did not develop one in Italy. Alboin, son of Audoin, was the king who led the Lombards across the Julian Alps into northeastern Italy, where the first of the Lombard duchies, Friuli, was established and was bestowed on Gisulf (a nephew of Alboin's), who remained behind with chosen groups (fame) while the remainder of the Lombards continued west and south under Aiboin. Conquest was relatively easy. The long, drawn-out Byzantine-Gothic wars had devastated Italy, the new Byzantine rule with its heavy fiscal exactions was not loved, and the Byzantines' military attention had been diverted by threats from the east.
The main Lombard settlements were in Friuli and Trent, the Po valley (Pavia became the usual Lombard capital), western Emilia, and Tuscany; but perhaps as early as 571, splinter groups had pushed on southward and established the duchies of Spoleto (under Duke Faroald) and Benevento (under Duke Zotto). At the height of the Lombards' power (under King Liutprand, 712-744), a large part of the Italian peninsula (including Spoleto and Benevento) was under their direct control; but some parts of Italy always remained separate, under actual or nominal control by the Byzantines: Istria, the area around Ravenna and the Pentapolis, a strip of territory running southward from Ravenna toward and spreading out in the vicinity of the city of Rome, Naples and its territory, and the southernmost parts of the peninsula. The boundaries of all these regions shifted frequently as royal, ducal, imperial, and papal power waxed and waned. The situation was always unstable (one factor in this instability was the frequently elective nature of the Lombard kingship), and in the end it defeated the attempts of the Lombard rulers to unify the peninsula.
Despite this weakness, the Lombards established one of the most important of the "barbarian" kingdoms. They had the advantage, of course, of settling in Italy, which had been the heart of the western Roman empire. It is very hard to gauge the exact nature of this advantage, however, for it is impossible to know just how much of the Roman administrative structure remained through the turbulent last years of the Ostrogothic kingdom. At one time it was assumed that the Lombards were actually barbarous and had destroyed all traces of Roman institutions and freedom, but it is now apparent that no such thing happened—the charges against the Lombards were largely a result of the political hostility of the papacy. Roman city life survived under the Lombards, as did a class of Roman landholders, although the aristocracy seems to have been largely Lombard.
The Lombards' respect for things Roman is demonstrated principally by the most important written records left by a number of the Lombard kings (Rothari, Grimoald, Liutprand, Ratchis, and Aistulf): the Lombard laws. Roman influence is reflected in the act of royal legislation as well as in the acceptance of such Roman concepts as contracts, land transfers, and testaments, and the use of the Latin language. The Lombard laws also make it clear that persons of Roman descent enjoyed peace and security in the Lombard kingdom, as well as the right to continue to use Roman law (although we do not know just how Roman law was administered in the Lombard portions of Italy).
The Lombard court at Pavia became a center of legal as well as cultural activity. As early as the reign of Agilulf (590-616), Secundus of Nun from Trent resided at court and composed a chronicle history (now lost) of the Lombards. The laws were issued from Pavia, and in the mid-eighth century the historian Paul the Deacon lived at court there before moving to Benevento with his patroness, Adelperga (a daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius), whose husband had been appointed the new duke of Benevento. Although Pavia remained the capital of Lombard Italy after the Carolingian conquest in 774 and charters and court records dated from Pavia indicate a continued high level of education there, the court at Benevento in many ways succeeded to the cultural leadership of Italy in the late eighth and ninth centuries. The princes of Benevento retained the use of Lombard law and added to it on several occasions, developed an elaborate court ceremonial (influenced by Byzantine practice), provided for the construction of a number of important sacred buildings (also heavily influenced by Byzantium), and sponsored a scriptorium that produced the beautiful Beneventan script.
The Lombards' political domination would give way in northern and central Italy during the late eighth century and would gradually disintegrate in the south during the tenth century, but the Lombards left behind a priceless legal heritage, as well as the most urbanized geographic landscape in western Europe. In the cultural realm, they left a number of architectural monuments (few of which now survive) as well as educational centers in cities such as Pavia and Benevento, and in monasteries such as Nonantola and Monte Cassino.
See also Aistulf; Alboin; Benevento; Desiderius; Grimoald of Benevento, King; Liutprand; Lombard Law; Ostrogoths; Pavia; Ratchis; Rothari; SpoSeto
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Drew, Katherine F. The Lombard Laws. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.
Foulke, William Dudley. Paul the Deacon History of the Lombards. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Hallenbeck, Jan T. Pavia and Rome: The I^ombard Monarchy and the Papacy in the Eighth Century. Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1982.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.
The brothers Pietro Lorenzetti (c. 1280-1348) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c. 1290-1348) were Sienese painters; they represent two of the most radical and innovative forces in Trecento art. Pietro and Lorenzetti were probably pupils of Duccio, and they both enlarged on the study of narrative and pictorial realism common to Sienese and Florentine art at this time. Their art manifests an interesting admixture of the styles of both schools, combining Sienese sensitivity to color and line with Florentine monumentality.
Relatively few documents regarding the life or artistic activity of either Pietro or Ambrogio have come down to us. Although Lorenzo Ghiberti, in the first written account of Ambrogio, provides a long and enthusiastic discussion of his work (Commentarii, c. 1450), he never mentions Pietro in his survey of Sienese artists. Vasari (Lives, 1568) did not even realize that the two artists were brothers; he misidentifed one of them as Pietro Laurati. Reconstruction of their careers has understandably proved to be difficult, especially because some of their most celebrated compositions have been lost. Although the brothers worked quite independently of each another, some commissions appear to have been joint undertakings, and the intensity of each brother's exploration of pictorial realism suggests a greater degree of contact and collaboration between the two than we now suppose.
Pietro, traditionally considered the elder brother, has usually been overlooked in comparison with Ambrogio, who has a greater reputation for invention. However, Pietro's own brilliant technical innovation is shown as early as his first documented work, a polyptych painted for the high altar of the parish church of Santa Maria in Arezzo (1320). In one portion of the Arezzo Polyptych, the frame is treated as if it were contiguous with the architecture of the painted narrative, so that the pilasters and arches framing the Annunciation are seen as supporting elements for the front wall of Mary's chamber. The space of this room is seen logically as extending back from the supporting columns and arches on the surface, creating an illusion of a box of space extending beyond the frame. This was an advance in a direct line with the development of one-point perspective a century later, and it was an idea to which Pietro would subsequently return even more daringly. Analysis of Pietro's forms in the Arezzo Polyptych reveals a melange of stylistic sources influencing his art. In the central panel of the Madonna and Child especially, the Madonna exhibits a graceful sway and pattern indebted to Duccio; the pronounced twist of her neck recalls Giovanni Pisano's sculptures for the facade of the cathedral in Siena; and her firm support of the child's solidly rounded body echoes Giotto's massive forms.
Important pictorial features are found in Pietro's most extensive surviving work, the frescoes in the left transept of the lower basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. These narrate the Passion and Resurrection of Christ and the Stigmatization of Saint Francis; and there is an unusual section of trompe l'oeil depictions of chapel furnishings, including an unoccupied pew, a Active altarpiece, and a niche containing liturgical objects. These frescoes are undocumented, and their dating has provoked controversy, but most scholars place them c. 1320. Many scenes, such as the Entry into Jerusalem and the epic Crucifixion, continue the Sienese tradition of sensitivity to color and love of profusion, but they are characterized by an unprecedented wealth of observation. The Last Supper, for example, deftly juxtaposes three distinct types of light in a confrontation of the mundane and the divine. A remarkably detailed night sky, the first portrayal of its kind, meticulously differentiates the light of the moon, stars, and meteors streaking across the heavens above the structure containing the main scene. This natural light is contrasted with the artificial light of the hearth fire in the kitchen, which casts the first shadows in western art since antiquity. Both of these lights pale in relation to the floodlit interior of the supper chamber, which seems to be illuminated by the supernatural glory of Christ and his disciples. In another astonishing step toward realism, Pietro makes it clear that the narratives are to be understood as a sequence of stories unfolding over time; the moon, high over the pavilion in the Last Supper, is shown to be setting behind the Mount of Olives in the adjacent Arrest of Christ. Other frescoes in the left transept, such as the Deposition from the Cross and the Entombment, do away with all anecdotal detail to approach the monumental grandeur and dramatic tension of Giotto's narratives. The Deposition, in which Christ's broken body is ingeniously interlaced with the living, forms one of the most sustained images of grief in western art.
Three securely dated works succeeded the Assisi frescoes: the Carmine Altarpiece of 1327-1329 (Siena, Pinacoteca; New Haven, Yale Museum; Princeton, Princeton Museum), a polyptych made to celebrate the final approval of the Carmelite order by Pope John XXIII in 1326 for its Sienese church of San Nic-colo; the Uffizi Madonna and Child (Florence, Uffizi; signed and dated 1340); and the Birth of the Virgin (Siena, Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana; commissioned 1335, signed and dated 1342). This last altarpiece, made as part of a cycle of Marian altarpieces celebrating feasts of the Virgin surrounding Duccio's Maestà in the cathedral of Siena, returns to the integration of frame and painting seen in the Arezzo Polyptych of twenty two years earlier. Here the illusion of continuity is much more thorough. We seem to be peering into a miniature Gothic palace which is structurally supported by the columns and arches of the frame and from which the exterior walls have been removed (as in a dollhouse) to allow us to witness the events within. And although this work is technically a polyptych (the two lateral panels of saints originally flanking the Birth are now lost), there is none of cornpartmentalization traditionally seen in separate panels. The space of one panel is treated as continuous with that of the next; thus, the two panels on the right convey information concerning the same time and place, Mary's birthing chamber. To emphasize this, the figure of the woman bearing a fly whisk continues on either side of the vertical pier of the frame. Also gone is the traditional flattening backdrop of gold leaf signifying a sacred event. Instead, an opulently appointed interior, described in rich patterns from the vault to the floor tiles, defines a remarkably convincing illusion of spatial recession. In the left panel depicting Joachim and the herald, the setting suggests a vast structure beyond the two visible chambers, indicating Pietro's concern to construct a completely plausible world for his figures to inhabit.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (fl. c. 1311-1348), Allegory of Good Government. Fresco. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: © Scala/ Art Resource, N.Y.
Pietro worked, together with Ambrogio and Simone Martini, on a cycle of frescoes illustrating the life of the Virgin for the facade of the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. (These frescoes are now lost, but a recorded inscription bore the date 1335.) Pietro also worked alongside Ambrogio on a fresco cycle for the chapter hall of the monastery of San Francesco in Siena, of which a Crucifixion and a Resurrected Christ survive (possibly 1336). A Massacre of the Innocents from a fresco cycle in San Clemente ai Servi in Siena and an altarpiece depicting stories of the Life of the Blessed Humilitas (Florence, Uffizi) are two other works frequently attributed to Pietro.
Lorenzo Ghiberti considered Ambrogio Lorenzetci the greatest Sienese painter of the 1300s, surpassing even Simone Martini in ability and sophistication. A Madonna and Child from Vico LAbate (signed and dated 1319; Florence, Museo Arcivescovile del Cestello) is the earliest of only three dated works by Ambrogio. It shows the originality of the artist's concepts from the beginning of his career. Ambrogio's panel is based on a Byzantine type of the Virgin as the throne of God, and the rigidly frontal, iconic pose of the Madonna adheres closely to the archaic format. The sovereign detachment between mother and God, typically upright in front of the Madonna, has, however, here been replaced by a restless, squirming Christ child seeking his mother's attention. Both figures have the solidity and roundness of Giotto's paintings, and the throne is also presented as a spatially receding three-dimensional structure. This modernization of an ancient type in the latest Giottoesque idiom reveals Ambrogio's special understanding of the Florentines' achievement. In fact, Ambrogio worked periodically in Florence between 1318 and 1332, and he is listed in die registry of the Florentine painters guild in 1327. The Vico L'Abate panel is a prime example of the astonishing variety and inventiveness that both Pietro and Ambrogio brought to the theme of the Madonna and child. Both artists composed ceaseless variations on this popular devotional subject, but Ambrogio's Madonnas, especially, attained a level of iconographic and aesthetic sophistication that seems to belong more to the Renaissance, or even to the Baroque, than to the Trecento. A few of Ambrogio's groupings of the Madonna and child are shown as if responding to the viewer's presence, as in the Madonna del Latte (Siena, Palazzo Arcivescovile), in which the suckling child looks out at the viewer with intense curiosity; or the Rapolano Madonna (Siena, Pinacoteca), which portrays a Christ child so surprised and frightened by the attention coming from our direction that he crushes his pet goldfinch. This psychologizing of the mother's and the child's response to their surroundings reaches a climax in the Sant'Agostino Maestà in Siena (possibly 1339), the last surviving fragment of a fresco cycle illustrating episodes of the life of Saint Catherine of Alexandria for an Augustinian chapter house formerly adjacent to the church. The Maestà depicts Mary and Christ adored by saints who bear the attributes of their faith; these include some who were brutally martyred: Saint Bartholemew with his flayed skin, Saint Agatha with her breasts, and Saint Catherine with her severed head all kneel and present their tokens of faith to the child. This grisly spectacle strikes terror into the child, who staggers unsteadily backward in an attempt to escape—the most natural response a child could have.
Some of Ambrogio's patrons apparently felt that his daringly human interpretation of the divine breached the limits of decorum. The chapel of Monte Siepi in the rural abbey of San Gal gano near Siena was built to honor this Sienese saint and to commemorate a vision of the Madonna that Galgano had on this site. The surviving frescoes are fragmentary; but Ambrogio's original program for the chapel, c. 1336, included a depiction of Galgano's vision, portraying a procession of saints and angels on the side walls converging, along with the visitors inside the chapel, toward the Madonna enthroned as queen of heaven on the wall behind the altar. By portraying saints on the walls flanking the enthroned Madonna, Ambrogio involved the entire space of the chapel, surrounding the viewer with Galgano's vision—a bold experiment that anticipates the carefully coordinated chapel interiors of the seventeenth century. The complex iconographic program for the wall portrayed the Virgin's central role in the mystery of human redemption: she was shown both as the exalted queen of heaven at the top of the fresco and as the humble Virgin Annunciate at the bottom. As the discovery (in 1996) of the sinopie underlying the frescoes revealed, Ambrogio originally portrayed the Virgin of the annunciation cowering in utter terror before the angel, while the Maestà above showed her enthroned without the child, wearing a crown, and bearing worldly symbols of power—the orb and scepter—in her hands. Both of these unique images were suppressed shortly after completion of the frescoes: the trembling annunciate was painted over by another artist, who replaced her with a typical meekly accepting Madonna; and the empress was transformed into the more usual image of motherhood by placing the Christ child on her lap. Presumably, the patrons had been disturbed by Ambrogio's provocative interpretations and had subsequently commissioned something more conventional.
From 1337 to 1340, under commission from Siena's ruling Council of Nine, Ambrogio worked on the most important sur viving cycle of medieval secular decorations, the Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government, painted on three walls of the Sala della Pace (or Sala dei Nove), one of the ruling council's meeting rooms in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. This cycle is almost completely devoid of religious content; its complex philosophical underpinnings—along the lines of antique Aristotelian, Ciceronian, or more strictly medieval tracts—are still disputed. We may take comfort in the fact that even during the Trecento, visitors to the sala needed the learned interpretation of a guide in order to understand the extremely intricate allegorical message of the cycle. The fresco juxtaposes the elements of just and harmonious rule with the evil elements of tyranny, contrasting the effects of each form of rule on city and country. The mural is filled with visual puns (Harmony, for instance, is shown with a wood plane, smoothing out any unevenness) and references to the antique (the figure of Peace is derived from an antique Roman coin). In his depiction of the prosperous city, Ambrogio created an unparalleled catalog of the myriad activities of town life. Nothing else in medieval art prepares us for the panoramic landscape adjacent to the well-governed city, which is the first landscape since antiquity, and really the first "portrait" of a particular terrain—a glance out the window of this hall reveals the close affinity between the fresco and the Tuscan countryside surrounding Siena.
As noted above, Ambrogio collaborated with Pietro on (lost) frescoes for a hospital in Siena, and on frescoes for a Franciscan chapter house (the latter included a painting of a typhoon, since lost, that Ghiberti praised highly). Ambrogio also painted an altarpiece of the Presentation at the Temple and Purification of Mary (1342; Florence, Uffizi) for the same cycle in the cathedral at Siena for which Pietro executed his Birth of the Virgin. Like Pietro's work, Ambrogio's Presentation is startling for its sophisticated suggestion of space and light. Ambrogio's last signed and dated work is from 1344: an Annunciation (Siena, Pinacoteca) painted for the chamber of the tax magistrate in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. The moment of incarnation depicted here presents an interpretation of great theological subtlety, and the spatial construction of the panel shows the tile floor converging to a single vanishing point; this is the closest any Trecento painting comes to true one-point perspective.
Ambrogio and Pietro both evidently died of the plague in 1348; with their deaths, Siena's period of cultural ascendancy came to an end.
See also Painting: Fresco; Siena
GUSTAV MEDICUS
Borsook, Eve. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Florence: Sadea Sansoni, 1966.
Brandi, Cesare. Pietro Lorenzetti: Affreschi nella basilica irtferiore di Assist. Rome: Pirelli, 1957.
—. Pietro Lorenzetti. Rome: Edizioni Mediteranee, 1958.
Carli, Enzo. Pietro Lorenzetti, Milan: A. Martello, 1956.
—. I Lorenzetti. Milan: Fabbri, 1965.
—. La pittura senese del Trecento. Milan: Electa, 1981.
Cole, Bruce. Sienese Painting from Its Origins to the Fifteenth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
DeWald, Ernest T. Pietro Lorenzetti. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930.
Frugoni, Chiara. Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, trans. L. Pelletti. Florence: Scala, 1988.
Maginnis, Hayden B. J. "Pietro Lorenzetti: A Chronology." Art Bulletin, 66, 1984, pp. 183-211.
—. Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1997.
Norman, Diana. "'Love Justice, You Who Judge the Earth': The Paintings of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena." In Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400, Vol. 2, Case Studies, ed. Diana Norman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 145-167.
Offner, Richard. "Reflections on Ambrogio Lorenzetti." Gazette des Beaux Arts, 56, 1960, pp. 235-238.
Rowley, George. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958.
Rubinstein, Nicolai. "Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21, 1958, pp. 179-207.
Southard, Edna. The Frescoes in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, 1289-1359: Studies in Imageiy and Relations to Other Communal Palaces in Tuscany. New York: Garland, 1979.
—. "Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Frescoes in the Sala della Pace: A Change of Names." Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24, 1980, pp. 361-365.
Starn, Randolph, and Loren Partridge. "The Republican Regime of the Sala dei Nove in Siena, 1338-1340." In Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 11-59.
Volpe, Carlo. Pietro Lorenzetti. Milan: Electa, 1989.
Lorenzo da Firenze (d. December 1372 or January 1373) was a member of the second generation of Italian ars nova musicians and a contemporary of Francesco Landini, Andrea da Firenze, and Paolo da Firenze. Lorenzo was said to have been a canon of the church of San Lorenzo from 1348 to his death. We know that he was active as a teacher, and it has even been suggested that Landini was his pupil.
Some of Lorenzo's reported music has been lost; his relatively small extant output is mostly in the celebrated Squarcialupi Codex, which includes his portrait. There are one or two movements of the Latin mass, while his Italian secular pieces include five monophonic ballate, ten two-voice madrigals, and one three-voice caccia. The texts he set were by a number of important contemporary poets, including Franco Sacchetti and Boccaccio (one ballata and one madrigal). Lorenzo was a progressive and even experimental composer. His monophonic style is highly florid and virtuosic. In his part-writing, he uses a good bit of imitation, and the influence of the French ars nova style is evident in his introduction of isorhythmic techniques and his considerable chromaticism. In all, he ranks after only Jacopo da Bologna and Landini in importance among the Trecento masters.
See also Ars Nova; Landini, Francesco; Paolo da Firenze; Squarcialupi Codex
JOHN W. BARKER
Bonaventura, Arnaldo. "II Boccaccio e la musica." Rivista Musicale Italiana, 21, 1914, pp. 405—452.
Corsi, Giuseppe. Poesie musicali del Trecento. Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1970.
Gallo, F. Alberto. "Bilinguismo poetico e bilinguismo musicale nel madrigale trecentesco." In L'ars nova italiana del trecento IV: Certaldo 1975. Certaldo: Centro di Studi sull'Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, 1978, pp. 237-243.
Konigsglow, Annamarie von. Die italienischen Madrigalisten des Trecento. Wiirzburg: Triltsch, 1940.
Li Gotti, Ettore. La poesia musicale italiana del secolo XIV. Palermo: Palumbo, 1944.
Li Gotti, Ettore, and Nino Pirrotta. II Sacchetti e la tecnica musicale del trecento italiano. Florence, 1935.
Marrocco, William Thomas, ed. Italian Secular Music. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 7. Monaco: Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1971.
Pirrotta, Nino. "Lirica monodica trecentesca." Rassegna Musicale, 9, 1936, pp. 317-325.
—, ed. The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, Vol. 3. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 8 (3). Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1962.
Reese, Gustav. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: Norton, 1940.
Wolf, Johannes, ed. Der Squarcialupi-Codex, Pal. 87 der Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana zu Florenz. Lippstadt: Kistner and Siegel, 1955.
See Maitani, Lorenzo
See Moschi, Lorenzo
Loreto is the site of the great shrine of the Virgin, traditionally identified as her house in Nazareth, the scene of the annunciation. Legend has it that the house was transported in a series of miraculous stages from Nazareth to Tersatto (near Fiume), to Recanati, and finally to its present location in the period 1291-1294. Little serious credence was given to the tradition until the sixteenth century, and the community developing around the shrine was not constituted as a city until 1586.
JOHN W. BARKER AND CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Lothar I (Lothair I, 795-855, r. 817-855) was the eldest son of Louis "the Pious" and Louis's wife Ermengarde, and the grandson of Charlemagne. Lothar was made coemperor with his father in 817 and was crowned by Pope Paschal I in April 823.
Lothar I spent much of his life in almost constant strife with his brother Louis and half brother Charles "the Bald," the son of Louis the Pious and Louis's second wife, Judith. In the Battle of Fontenoy (25 June 841), Lothar was defeated by his younger siblings. After prolonged negotiations, the three brothers signed a treaty at Verdun in August 843, dividing Charlemagne's old empire among themselves. Charles the Bald received the western portion, which would later become France. Louis's share was the eastern section of the empire. Some historians discern the beginnings of modern Germany here, but this is disputed. Lothar received a long strip of territory between the two and the title of emperor. This strip of land, which included Burgundy and northern Italy, had neither geographical nor ethnic cohesion, and after Lothar I died it was subdivided among his sons. Lother's oldest son, Louis II, received northern Italy and the imperial title.
Lothar I has not been treated kindly by modern historians, who have regarded him as an undependable opportunist.
See also Charles the Bald, Emperor; Louis I the Pious; Louis II, Emperor; Verdun, Treaty of
MARTIN ARBAGI
Annates Laurissenses Majores, ed. G. H. Pertz. Monuments Germaniae Historica, 1. Hannover, 1826.
Annates regni Francorum, inde ab a. 741, usque ad a. 829 qui dicuntur Annales laurissenses maiores et Einbardi, ed. F, Kurze. Hannover: Hahn, 1895.
Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nitbard's Flistories, trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz, with Barbara Rogers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.
Nithard. Flistoriaruni libri quattuor, ed. G. H. Pertz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptorum, 2. Hannover: Hahn, 1829. (See also 3rd ed. Hannover: Hahn, 1956.)
Lothar (c. 920-950), the son of Hugh of Provence, was coruler of Italy with his father; but in 945 Hugh was overthrown by Berengar of Ivrea, grandson of the "emperor" Berengar. Hugh withdrew to his ancestral domains in Provence, leaving Lothar as nominal king of Italy. In fact, Lothar was a puppet of Berengar, who probably murdered him in 950. Lothar's chief importance is that he was the first husband of Adelaide of Burgundy, who later married Otto I (in 951). Adelaide and Lothar had a daughter, Emma, who married the Carolingian Lothair of France.
See also Adelaide; Liudprand of Cremona
JUDITH A. HAYS
Catalogus Region Langobardorum et Italicarum Lombardus. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum Saeculi VI—IX, 504-517. Hannover: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1878.
Liudprand (or Liutprand), Bishop of Cremona. Antapodosis. In Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, 3rd ed., ed. J. Becker. Scriptorum Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis Separatim Editi. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1915.
—. Antapodosis, or, Tit-for-Tat. In The Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans. F. A. Wright. Broadway Medieval Library. London: Routledge, 1930. (Lively and accurate but unannotated.)
Odilo. Epitaphium Adalheidae imperatricis auctore Odilone, ed. G. Pertz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum, 4. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1841. (Concentrates on Adelaide's career in Germany but gives some information on her brief marriage to Lothar II.)
Bouchard, Constance. The Bozonids, or, Rising to Power in the Late Carolingian Age." French Historical Studies, 15(3, spring), 1988, pp. 407-431. (Mainly social rather than traditional political or military history; this leads to a few minor errors which do not affect the author's thesis.)
Hiestand, Rudolf. Byzanz und das Regnum italicum im 10. Jahrhundert. Geist und Werke zu Zeit. Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1964.
Kreutz, Barbara. Italy before the Normans. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Previte-Orton, Charles. "Italy in the Tenth Century." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 7.
Louis I (778—840) succeeded his father, Charlemagne, as emperor in 814. During the first decade of his reign, Louis acted vigorously to give unity and cohesion to the somewhat ill-defined empire he had inherited. His program emphasized strengthening and purifying the church as the agency through which the Godordained emperor could shape the empire's diverse peoples into a unified society guided by Christian principles.
By the 820s, the thrust toward unity, increasingly dictated by aggressive clergymen, began to generate conflicts of interest. The focal point of discord was one of the key enactments of Louis's program of unification, the ordinatio imperii of 817, which provided that on Louis's death the office of emperor and lordship over the entire empire would go to his eldest son, Lothair, while his other sons, Pepin and Louis, would inherit small dependent subkingdoms in Aquitaine and Bavaria. The issue of the succession took on new complexity in 823, when a fourth son, Charles, was born to Louis and his second wife, Judith. At the urging of Judith and her supporters, Louis became ever more concerned with providing an inheritance for Charles, a policy that threatened the interests of his other sons as well as those dedicated to imperial unity.
These clashing interests turned the last years of Louis's reign into a series of crises, highlighted by revolts against him in 830 and 833 led by his elder sons. Although Louis survived these assaults, the issue of succession became more and more divisive. More important, the realm suffered deepening internal disorder and devastating attacks from formidable external enemies, especially Viking and Saracen attacks by sea. When Louis died in 840, his three surviving sons—Lothair, Louis, and Charles—stood poised for an armed struggle over the disposition of the empire that led to the treaty of Verdun of 843. Little survived of the dream of a unified Christian society, a cause that had inspired some of the major achievements of the Carolingian dynasty. Although Louis was called "the Pious" for his advocacy of that ideal, some of his contemporaries and many later historians placed on him much of the blame for its failure.
See also Charlemagne; Frankish Kingdom; Verdun, Treaty of
RICHARD E. SULLIVAN
Annates de Saint-Bertin, ed. Félix Grat et al. Société de l'Histoire de France, Série Anterieure à 1789, 470. Paris: C. Klinksieck, 1964, pp. 1-36.
Annates Fuldenses: Sive, Annates regni Francorum orientalis, ed. F. Kurze. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, SS Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1891 (Reprint, 1978, pp. 19-31.)
Capitularia regum Francorum, 2 vols., ed. Alfred Boretius and Victor Krause. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 2 (1-2). Hannover: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1883-1897, Vol. 1, pp. 261-450; Vol. 2, pp. 1-58.
Concilia aevi karolini, ed. Albert Werminghoff. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Concilia, 2 (1-2). Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1896, pp. 307-815.
Epistolae karolini aevi, Vol. 3, ed. Ernst Dümmler et al. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae, 5. Berlin: Weidmann, 1899.
Ermold le Noir, poème sur Louis le Pieitx, ed. and trans. Edmond Faral. Classiques de l'Histoire de France au Moyen Age, 14. Paris: Campion, 1931.
Thegani vita Hludowici Imperatoris, ed. Georg Pertz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, SS, 2. Hannover: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1829, pp. 585-604.
Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankisk Annals and Nithard's Histories, trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970, pp. 97-174.
Charlemagne's Cousins: Contemporary Lives of Adalard and Wala, trans. Allen Cabaniss. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1967. (Lives of two figures closely associated with Louis's career.)
Son of Charlemagne: A Contemporary Life of Louis the IHous, trans. Allen Cabaniss. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1961. (Life written by the "Astronomer.")
Ganshof, F. L. "Louis the Pious Reconsidered." History, 42, 1957, pp. 171-180.
Halphen, Louis. Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, trans. Giselle de Nie. Europe in the Middle Ages, Selected Studies, 3. Amsterdam, New York, and Oxford: North-Holland, 1977, pp. 155-212.
Handbook of Church History, Vol. 3, ed. Hubert Jedin and John Nolan, trans. Anselm Biggs. New York: Herder and Herder; London: Burns and Oates, 1969, pp. 103-125.
Simson, Bernhard. Jihrbiiiher des frdnkischen Reiches unter Ludwig dem Frommen, 2 vols. Leipzig: Duncker and Humlot, 1874-1876.
Emperor Louis II (Ludwig, c. 825—875) became king of Italy in 839 (crowned 844) and joint emperor in 850. He was the son of Lothair I and the great-grandson of Charlemagne. Louis became sole emperor and received Italy as his share of Lothair's domains on the latter's death in 855. Although Louis did obtain Provence when one of his brothers, Charles, died in 869, he had little influence outside Italy. Engilberga (Ingelberga, Engelberta), his wife, could be considered Louis's coruler. Louis faced two major problems during his reign: the depredations of the Saracens, especially in southern Italy; and turbulent local warlords.
Louis was more successful in dealing with the Saracens, who by this time had seized Sicily from the Byzantines and had also established themselves in southern Italy, with a permanent base at the city of Bari. In 846, a Muslim fleet was defeated off the Italian coast near Naples, but they took revenge by falling on the Vatican (which was then outside the city walls of Rome) and sacking the basilica of Saint Peter, one of Christendom's holiest shrines. Even before his father's death, Louis had had some military experience against the Saracens. He continued to wage war against them throughout his reign, with considerable success in 866 and 867, but was unable to follow up because he did not have a fleet. As a result of an alliance with the Byzantine emperor, Basil I, a small Byzantine fleet was sent to assist Louis. Strains developed in the alliance, however; the fleet withdrew; and an engagement between Louis's daughter Ermengarde and Basil's son Leo was broken off. Basil sent an insulting letter to Louis, deprecating Louis's imperial title. Basil's letter is lost, but Louis's reply—which tells scholars much about western political theory during this period—has been preserved. Much of this reply was probably written for Louis by Anastasius, who was the papal librarian and a prominent intellectual. Despite the withdrawal of the Byzantines' naval support, Louis was eventually able to reconquer Bari in February 871.
Louis's dealings with the Italian nobility were less impressive. In particular, the Lombard rulers of the south solicited his aid against the Saracens, but they were never willing to concede much in return. In an embarrassing episode soon after Louis's triumph at Bari, his nominal vassal, Adelchis, prince of Benevento, attacked and robbed him and imprisoned him for a month (August 871). Louis was released only after taking an oath never to return to the south. Well after Louis's death, the rebellious Italian nobles in the north and the south continued to be a problem for those trying to impose some centralized rule on the troubled peninsula.
Louis's relations with the popes were generally good, despite some friction when he championed his brother Lothar's divorce from Theutberga (Lothar wanted to marry his mistress, Waldrada). In 864, Louis marched on Rome to force Pope Nicholas I (r. 858—867) to assent to Lothar's divorce. The pope fled, but Louis fell ill. He took this as a sign from God that he was in the wrong, and was reconciled to Nicholas.
Historians have offered differing judgments of Louis II. Most agree that he and Engilberga had energy and ability but were overwhelmed by problems beyond their control. Their daughter Ermengarde eventually married Boso (or Bozo), who became king of Provence. Ermengarde and Boso's son was Louis III, "the Blind."
See also Arabs in Italy; Frankish Kingdom; Lombards; Louis the Blind, Emperor
MARTIN ARBAGI
Annates Bertiniani, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholorum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis Separatim Editi. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1883.
Chronica Sancti Benedicti Casinensis, ed. G. Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum Saeculi VI-IX, 467-488. Hannover, 1878.
Folz, Robert. The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila A. Ogilvie. London: Edward Arnold, 1969. (Includes selections from Louis II's letter to Basil 1; text is unaltered from the French, L'idée d'empire en Occident du Ve au XlVe Sièle. Paris, 1953.)
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae, 7, pp. 385-394. (Latin text of Louis II's letter to Basil I, ed. W. Henze with O. Vehsein.)
Receueil des actes des rois de Provence, 855-928, ed. René Poupardin and Maurice Prou. Paris, 1920. (Provencal legal documents, including those issued by Louis II, who was nominal ruler of the area from 869 to 875.)
Kreutz, Barbara. Italy before the Normans. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Poupardin, René. "The Carolingian Kingdoms (840-877)." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 2.
Louis III (the Blind, c. 880—928) was king of Provence (890-928) and Holy Roman emperor (901-905). Through his mother, he was descended from Charlemagne. In 900, Louis was invited by disgruntled nobles led by Adalbert of Ivrea to wrest the Lombard throne from Berengar of Friuli. He was temporarily successful and was actually crowned emperor in Rome. Later, he was captured and released after promising never to return to Italy. Louis nonetheless tried again in 905, with the support of another Adalbert, the marquis of Tuscany; and Adalbert's wife, Bertha. Berengar fled to Bavaria but returned and exacted a terrible revenge on Louis, who was captured and blinded. After Louis's incapacitation, his cousin Hugh administered Provence for him. Hugh became king on Louis's death.
See also Berengar I of Friuli; Lombards; Louis II, Emperor
MARTIN ARBAGI
Bohmer, J. F., ed. Regesta Imperii, Vol. 2, Part 5, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern, 751-918: Die Regesten des Regnum Italiae und der burgundischen Regna, new ed., ed. Herbert Zielinski. Cologne: Böhlau, 1991. (Supersedes the works by Schiaparelli and Poupardin.)
I diplomati italiani di Lodovico III e di Rodolfo II, ed. Luigi Schiaparelli. Rome, 1910. (This work and Poupardin's together give all the authentic legal documents issued by Louis in Provence and in Italy.)
Liudprand (or Liutprand), Bishop of Cremona. Antapodosis. In Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, 3rd ed, ed. J. Becker. Scriptorum Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis Separatim Editi. Hannover and Leipzig: Hahnische Buchhandlung, 1915.
—. Antapodosis, or, Tit-for-Tat. In The Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans. F. A. Wright. Broadway Medieval Library. London: Routledge, 1930. (Accurate and lively but unannotated.)
Receueil des actes des rois de Provence, 855-928, ed. René Poupardin and Maurice Prou. Paris, 1920. (Provencal legal documents issued during Louis's reign.)
Kreutz, Barbara. Italy before the Normans. Phiiadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Bouchard, Constance. "The Bosonids, or, Rising to Power in the Late Carolingian Age." French Historical Studies, 15(3, spring), 1988, pp. 407-431.
Hiestand, Rudolf. Byzanz und das Regnum italicum im 10. Jahrhundert. Geist und Werke zu Zeit. Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1964.
Previté-Orton, Charles. "Italy in the Tenth Century." In The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3, Germany and the Western Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, ch. 7.
If relative success in imitating ancient Latin style and an intense interest in discovering and editing ancient texts are major humanistic traits, then Lovato (1240 or 1241-1309) was the first humanist. He was born in Padua, the son of a notary, ser Rolando or Rolandino Lovati. Lovato began his own notarial career as early as 1257, and ten years later he entered the Paduan college of judges, whose members were eligible to hold judgeships in the communal government. Deeply patriotic, the young Lovato doubtless joined other leaders of the city in an effort to reestablish the communal character of Paduan life, suppressed during the twenty-two-year tyranny of Ezzelino da Romano, who was killed in 1259. From 1271 until 1307, Lovato held a number of judicial appointments, and on at least one occasion he served as podestà of a neighboring commune. As podestà of Vicenza in 1291-1292, he commissioned historical frescoes for the walls of its communal palace. He married Jacopina di Vincenzo da Solesino (c. 1268) and had at least one child.
Nothing is known of his schooling. The Paduan university, dosed by Ezzelino in 1237, did not reopen until 1261. Possibly Lovato studied privately with Rolandino da Padua, who was the learned author of a renowned history of Padua and a professor of grammar in the newly revived university, though no evidence exists to support the assumption. However, the richly allusive content and classicizing style of Lovato's earliest surviving poetry (1267-1268) reflect a thorough preparation in Latin grammar and poetic literature.
Northern and central Italy, which would be the site of later Italian humanism, produced almost no Latin poetry during the twelfth century, except for a few Latin epics such as the Gesta di Federigo I in Italia and, in the very last decade, the Elegia of Arrigo (Henry) da Settimello. Interest in ancient Latin literature, however, increased significantly in the first half of the thirteenth century; and in the middle decades of the century it inspired a number of poets in the northern cities who looked to ancient poetry as models. Lovato was the youngest, but without question the most successful, classicizing writer of the group. In particular, his epistolary poems, written between 1267—1268 and 1291-1292, embody a lyric quality foreign to previous poetry of the area and resonant of Ovid and Horace. A second, later body of poetry by Lovato—largely poems on contemporary issues and a debate over the merits of having children—is less classicizing in nature, perhaps because there were no ancient models for these genres. Among Lovato's writings are a lost poem on the Guelfs and Ghibellines at Padua and a Latin version of the story of Tristan and Isold, of which only fourteen lines survive. In his prose—in contrast with his poetry—Lovato seems to have made no effort to adapt his style to ancient models.
Tomb of Anterior, legendary founder of Padua Lovato "discovered" his remains and had them enshrined here. Lovato is buried next to this tomb. Photograph courtesy of Christopher Kleinhenz.
Lovato's poetry reflects an acquaintance with a wide range of ancient poets—some of them little known or unknown in the Middle Ages—such as Tibullus, Propertius, Lucretius, and Martial. Lovato also reintroduced Ovid's Ibis, Statius's Silvae, and Horace's Carmina. His manuscript of Seneca's Tragedies served as the fundamental text in the revival of those works, and his little essay on Seneca's complicated metric scheme in the plays was perhaps the first instance in the Middle Ages of an attempt to work out the meters used by a specific ancient author.
By Lovato's last years, Padua had become the center of a classicizing movement which found adherents in other cities of the Veneto, such as Pace da Ferrara and Benvenuto Campesani of Vicenza. Furthermore, as the enthusiasm for the new studies expanded during the next generation to Venice, Bologna, Arezzo, and distant Avignon, Albertino Mussato (1265-1329)—Lovato's principal disciple—continued to sustain Paduan leadership. Significantly, Lovato was the only European Latin poet since antiquity to receive Petrarch's praise.
See also Albertino Mussato; Humanism and Protohumanism; Latin Literature; Padua; Rolandino of Padua
RONALD WITT
Billanovich, Guido. "II preumaniesimo padovano." In Storia delta cultura veneta, Vol. 2, II Trecento. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1976, pp. 19-110.
Weiss, Roberto. The Dawn of Humanism: An Inaugural Lecture. London, 1947.
—. "Lovato Lovati (1241-1309)." Italian Studies, 6, 1951, pp. 3-28.
Marcus Annaeus Lucan (a.d. 39-65), a nephew of the younger Seneca, was born in Cordoba, Spain. After a Stoic education in Rome, he entered the court of Nero, where he was valued as a member of the emperor's inner circle. Lucan enjoyed many privileges at court; but for reasons that remain unknown—literary jealousy on Nero's part? the republican ideas expressed in Lucan's work?—his relationship with Nero abruptly soured. Lucan joined the conspiracy of Piso against the emperor, was discovered, and was ordered to take his own life. In April 65 he killed himself. He was not yet twenty-six.
The only work of Lucan's to survive, Pharsalia (also known as Bellum civile, the title found in ancient biographies of Lucan), is an epic poem in ten books of hexameters which was left unfinished at his death. The epic narrates the history of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and in so doing glorifies the ideals of ancient republican liberty. Pharsalia also introduced several controversial innovations to the epic genre: Lucan's epigrammatic style resembles oratory, his annalistic approach to narrative resembles history, and his plot's rejection of divine intervention disregards epic precedent by declining to displace responsibility for the events of the conflict. Perhaps most important, Lucan's poem violates epic convention by refusing to exalt the state and its military victories. Rather, Pharsalia roundly condemns civil war and denounces the moral indignities that accompanied Caesar's triumph and the new regime.
Lucan's popularity was ensured from early on. Beginning with Servius, Lucan's work was cited frequently by grammarians. It was copied in hundreds of manuscripts and was the subject of several long medieval commentaries. Valued as a repository of Roman history, geography, and natural science, Pharsalia was a fixture in medieval school curricula. Its use of epigrams and the rhetorical pathos of Lucan's narrative were of stylistic interest to the Middle Ages, and its digression into necromancy in Book 6 appealed to the medieval interest in witchcraft.
Lucan's work was translated into Italian as early as 1310 and enjoyed steady popularity throughout the Trecento. Lucan was very well known to Dante, who included him among the five great poets of the bella scold in Inferno 4 and ensconced him in the literary canon in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia. Dante's treatment of Lucan makes it clear that, despite his dependence on Pharsalia for many of his historical allusions, he considered Lucan a poet rather than a historian. Examples of Dante's debt to Lucan include his portrait of Cato in Purgatorio 1, his list of serpents in Inferno 24, and his references to Erichtho and Antaeus in Inferno 9 and Inferno 31, respectively. Petrarch, too, was indebted to Lucan; many episodes in his Africa owe their inspiration to the Pharsalia.
Lucan, De bello civili libri X. Lyon: Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1536. Reproduced from original held by Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries of Notre Dame.
See also Dante Alighieri; Petrarca, Francesco
JESSICA LEVENSTEIN
Bailey, David R. S. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1988.
Duff, James D., trans. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928.
Housman, Alfred E. Oxford: Blackwell, 1927.
Luck, Georg. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985.
Arnulfi Aurelianensis Glosule Super Lucanum, ed. Berthe M. Marti. Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 18. Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1958.
Getty, Robert J, Book 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
Postgate, John P. Book 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. (Revised by Oswald A. W. Dilke.)
Ahl, Frederick. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Johnson, Walter R. Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Masters, Jamie. Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Morforf, Mark P. O. The Poet Lucan: Studies in Rhetorical Epic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976.
Paratore, Ettore. "Lucano." In Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols., ed. Umberto Bosco. Rome: Istituto dell' Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1978, Vol. 3, pp. 697-702.
Wetherbee, Winthrop. " 'Poeta che mi guidi': Dante, Lucan, and Virgil." In Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg. Chicago, 111. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 131-148.
The Tuscan city of Lucca is situated at an altitude of only about 60 feet (19 meters) above sea level, some 15 miles (23 kilometers) from the coast and about the same distance from Pisa, with Florence about 45 miles (72 kilometers) to the east. It lies on the left bank of the Serchio River, which flows down from the mountainous Garfagnana to the north, in a fertile plain about 5 miles (7 or 8 kilometers) wide between the Pizzorne to the north and the Monte Pisano to the south.
The origins of Lucca are obscure, but archaeological evidence suggests that it began as a Ligurian settlement on the frontiers of Etruscan territory. It was first mentioned by Livy under the year 218 B.C. and was a Roman colonia in 180 B.C. and a municipium in 90—89 B.C. The first triumvirate was formed at the conference of Lucca in 56 B.C. Roman Lucca had baths, a forum, a theater within the walls, and an amphitheater outside them, built in the second century after Christ. Although Lucca was less important than the neighboring ports of Pisa and Luni or the regional capital, Florence, its territory extended to the province of Reggio, and arms manufacturing on some scale took place in Lucca during the fourth century after Christ.
The situation of Lucca under the Ostrogoths is obscure, but the Byzantines' attempts at reconquest met with strong resistance: Lucca held out for more than three months when it was besieged by Narses in 552. Restored Byzantine rule was short-lived, and the city had probably fallen to the Lombards by 570. There is more information for the Lombard period, thanks to a remarkably rich collection of early charters, some of them dating back to the seventh century, preserved in the ecclesiastical archives. Lucca seems to have prospered under the Lombards, as the center of the most important of the Lombard duchies in Tuscany, the seat of a royal palace, and a mint. The Lombard element in the population, including an upper class with large rural estates, remained important even after the establishment of Carolingian rule in the second half of the eighth century.
Little is known of the introduction of Christianity into Lucca, but a certain Maximus a Tuscia de Luca was among the bishops attending the council of Sardica in 343—344. It is difficult to date figures important in Lucchese legends, such as Paulinus, who is said to have been the first bishop and a martyr; or Frediano, who is credited with having diverted the Serchio away from Lucca by miraculous means, giving it an outlet to the sea separate from that of the Arno. Frediano is said to have been of Irish origin, and the traditional date for his death is 588, but scholarly opinion differs on whether he should be regarded as belonging to the Ostrogothic or Lombard period. The Lombards were at first Arian, and Lombard Lucca had Arian clergy, and perhaps bishops, as well as Catholic clergy; but after the Lombards were converted to Catholicism at the end of the seventh century, many churches were founded in Lucca and its territory, and churchmen seem to have been powerful in local affairs.
During the rule of the Carolingians, and later the Ottonians and Salians, Lucca came under the authority of local lay rulers, especially the marquesses of Tuscany, The most important of these were Boniface of Canossa and, after his death in 1052, his widow Beatrice and his daughter, best-known as Matilda, countess of Tuscany. In northern Italy, this period saw the general beginnings of the movement for reform of the church and the struggle between empire and papacy, as well the first stirrings of local initiatives and a sense of common interests, which were eventually to lead to the rise of the commune. In Lucca, as elsewhere, these different strands became intermingled.
Anselm da Baggio, who was bishop of Lucca from 1057 (later Pope Alexander II, r. 1061-1073), and his nephew and successor as bishop, Anselm II, strove to bring about a movement of moral, spiritual, and cultural revival; they were supported by Beatrice and later Matilda of Tuscany, but they were opposed by many of the Lucchese clergy and local inhabitants, who had the support of Emperor Henry IV. It was in this context that the Lucchese received an imperial privilege granting them special rights over an area extending 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the city and freedom of navigation on the Serchio River and along the coastline off Motrone. In 1119 the characteristic office of the early commune, the consulship, made its appearance, and there is evidence that Lucca already had major and minor councils by 1124.
In the twelfth century, Lucca was able to grow and increase the area over which it exercised control. In 1160, the last of the marquesses of Tuscany, Duke Guelf, ceded his rights over the city (and the 6 miles around it) in return for a large sum of money. Lucca was still under imperial authority and had to supply forces for military operations under Frederick I Barbarossa, but it also received imperial favors, such as the confirmation of the grant of Duke Guelf, the right to elect its own consuls, and a grant of exclusive minting rights. Imperial grants were still limited to a radius of 6 miles from the city, and local lords were confirmed as directly dependent on the empire, any submissions they had made to the commune being canceled. On the death of Henry VI in 1197, Lucca joined the first Tuscan League and was able to take advantage of the weakness of the empire to extend its control over a wider area, although this involved it in conflict with Pope Gregory IX regarding rival claims to the Garfagnana. This expansion was checked to some extent under Frederick II Hohenstaufen. The mid-thirteenth century saw Lucca in alliance with Florence, opposing Manfred, king of Sicily, and in 1266 supporting Charles of Anjou and what came to be known as the Guelf alliance in Tuscany. This brought Lucca prosperity and territorial gains, but in the last years of the century Lucca fell prey to factions, with the Blacks eventually defeating the Whites. A popular party came to power in 1308. The disorders and political corruption of this period were condemned by Dante and by the local chronicler Giovanni Sercambi, who names Bonturo Dati, Picchio Cacciaiuolo, and Ceccho dell'Erro; but Lucchese sources for this period are too fragmentary to provide a clear picture of the city's political life.
Cathedral of San Marti no, Lucca. Photograph courtesy of Christopher Kleinhenz.
Long before this, Lucca had begun to come into conflict with other communes, fighting a war with nearby Pisa as early as 1004. These rivalries became more serious as both cities sought to extend their authority over the surrounding rural area, resulting in a series of conflicts over territorial and navigational rights. In these instances Lucca could usually rely on the support of another rival of Pisa, the more distant commune of Genoa; in the thirteenth century, it could rely on the support of Florence.
Lucca's internal development mirrored that of other communes. The first podestà was elected in 1188 or 1189, and this office gradually replaced that of consul. At first, Lucchese were sometimes elected, but after 1228 the podestà was invariably from outside the city. Conflicts between nobles and the people are recorded in the early thirteenth century, and in 1261 the offices of captain of the people and anziani (elders) make their appearance, though it seems likely that they had been established soon after 1250, on the model of Florence. The full constitutional development of Lucca is seen most clearly in the statute of the commune of 1308, which was compiled shortly after the popular victory. It reveals a highly developed form of government with podestà, anziani, councils, and a full apparatus of civil and criminal jurisdiction.
Church of San Michele in Foro, Lucca. Photograph courtesy of Christopher Kleinhenz.
Soon afterward, Lucca began to face serious problems. First came the Italian expedition of Emperor Henry VII, who threatened the hold of Italian communes on the territory in the contado (countryside), which Lucca had usurped without any imperial grant. Lucca also had to face the enmity of Pisa, which hoped to take advantage of imperial authority to recover recent territorial losses. On Henry's death in 1313, Pisa found another champion in Uguccione della Faggiuola, a Ghibelline leader from the Massa Trabaia who had been the emperor's lieutenant in Genoa. Uguccione attempted both to strengthen his hold on Pisa and to expand the area under his control—campaigns that, with the aid of Lucchese White exiles, including Castruccio Castracani, culminated in the capture and sack of Lucca on 14 June 1314. Further expansion in Valdarno and Valdinevole was opposed by Florence, but in 1315 Uguccione and his forces won a major victory over the Florentines and their Neapolitan allies at Montecatini. In 1316 Uguccione lost control of Lucca to Castruccio, and Pisa regained its independence. Lucca reached its maximum territorial expansion and the height of its power under Castruccio, a vigorous warrior and wily diplomat whose achievements later attracted the admiration of Machiavelli. In 1325 Castruccio obtained the submission of Pistoia and defeated the Florentines and their allies at Altopascio. Lewis (Ludwig) of Bavaria, the emperor-elect, granted him the title of duke of Lucca, Pistoia, and other territories, and in return Castruccio played a prominent role at the imperial coronation ceremonies in Rome in 1328. Hastening back to Tuscany, where Pistoia had fallen to the Florentines, Castruccio succeeded in repelling his enemy and recovering control of the city, but he died soon afterward.
Lucca soon paid for its period of military glory under Castruccio, because his young sons were unable to retain his dominions. Over the next fourteen years the city fell into the hands of a series of outside rulers, including Gherardo Spinola da Lucolo, the Rossi brothers of Parma, and Mastino della Scala, who sold Lucca to Florence. But Lucca was already under siege by the Pisans, who forced its surrender in July 1342, thus beginning a twenty-seven-year period of Pisan rule. Although Lucca was allowed a measure of autonomy, its subjection incurred the presence of a Pisan garrison and Pisan control of Lucchese finances and external relations. The Lucchese never ceased to hope for the overthrow of Pisan rule, and finally, in 1369, they succeeded in inducing Emperor Charles IV to grant them independence. Lucca once more assumed its identity as an independent commune, and Lucchese sources from this period exude a sense of a new beginning. It was to prove decisive. Despite internal difficulties and further territorial losses, Lucca retained its independence until the time of Napoleon.
Lucca's economic life in the early Middle Ages was based on the rich agricultural land in the surrounding area and its position on Via Francigena, one of the main communication routes between Rome and northern Italy. Although the Serchio was subject to severe flooding, the Lucchese plain provided rich grain growing land. Vines and olives were cultivated on slightly higher land, and the lakes and woods were rich in fish and game. The mountainous Garfagnana provided pasture for sheep and goats and also timber. Fourteenth-century customs accounts indicate that timber—including ships' masts—was floated down the Serchio, and tens of thousands of transhumant animals passed through Lucchese territory.
Travelers and pilgrims were attracted to Lucca because of its position on Via Francigena and its possession of the Volto Santo ("holy visage" or "holy face"), a miraculous crucifix. Money changers set themselves up to serve the needs of pilgrims and travelers; their operations were concentrated in the area in front of the cathedral of San Martino. The oath required of money changers and spice dealers who operated there, dated 1111, can still be seen on the cathedral facade. It was probably sometime in the twelfth century that the manufacture of silk cloth, which would become Lucca's most important industry during the Middle Ages, began to develop. Lucca's role in silk manufacturing is somewhat surprising. Lucca did not apparently cultivate silk itself. The raw materials had to be imported, coming from as far away as the eastern Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, and even Cathay. Lucca was not a coastal city, and although it had access to the sea, it never developed an important merchant fleet, so that it had to rely on other ports, especially Genoa, for the supply of raw materials. The traditional explanation for the establishment of silk manufacture in Lucca is the immigration of Arab silk workers from Sicily during the years 1148—1150: the names and designs of some of the types of cloth clearly suggest Arab influence. But whatever its origins, the silk industry in Lucca reached the height of its development in the thirteenth century.
This early development of money changing and silk manufacturing encouraged the Lucchese to engage in commerce, to the point that they became prominent among Italian merchants in northern Europe. The Lucchese had had the right to navigate the Serchio River and the seacoast near the port of Motrone since 1081, and treaties with Genoa in 1126 and 1166 included commercial clauses. In 1181 the Lucchese engaged in a commercial treaty with Pisa for port rights there, as they did with Modena and Bologna, visiting the fairs of Parma and San Donnino free of tolls and taxes.
The greater availability of documentation in the thirteenth century, including the earliest Lucchese notarial records, makes it possible to speak with more certainty about Lucchese commercial and financial activities. Such activities were particularly significant in Genoa, both in commerce and in financial transactions connected with the fairs of Champagne. Lucchese traded at the fairs from the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not before, and were among the earliest Italian merchants to appear there. By the mid-thirteenth century they were sufficiently numerous to rent property in Provins jointly. Documents record their appearance at fairs in southern France—in Nimes, Beaucaire, and Montpellier as well as in Marseilles and other parts of Provence—by the 1260s and 1270s. Their activities spread to Paris and northern France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland, and they were active in England, Ireland, and Gascony under Henry III and Edward I, combining the collection and transfer of papal taxes with the import of Mediterranean goods and the export of northern wool and cloth. By the last decades of the century, Lucchese merchants and bankers were forming themselves into companies, and some of their members settled in Paris or London for a period of years, if not permanently, sometimes claiming rights of citizenship. They not only engaged in commerce and the supply of luxury goods to the court and nobility but also involved themselves in loan operations and royal finance, at times controlling the royal mint and administering the customs system. The dangers involved in this are shown by the fate of the largest of these companies, the Ricciardi, which collapsed when it was caught between the demands of the papacy, Philip IV, and Edward I after war broke out between France and England in 1294.
At the same time, there were economic difficulties in Lucca itself. Social and political disturbances repeatedly led to waves of emigration of merchants and silk workers. This resulted in the exportation of skills and trade secrets to Bologna, Genoa, Florence, and Venice, although there may have been some revival of economic activity under the strong rule of Castruccio Castracani and after some of the immigrants later returned under amnesty. Later invasions and wars combined with famines and the outbreak of plague in 1348 led to serious depopulation both in the city and in the surrounding contado. The earliest fragments of Lucchese customs accounts—for 1339 and 1351—show that silk exports were still sizable, but they fell off sharply in the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, despite significant immigration of craftsmen of various kinds, including silk workers, in the second half of the fourteenth century. By the 1380s the Lucchese were promoting the manufacture of woolen cloth to compensate for the decline of the silk industry. For much of the fourteenth century, Lucchese trading companies seem to have been small, but after 1369 there were also a number of companies with ten or more members, and branches had appeared in various European cities. Lucca also had organized communities abroad, capable of disciplining their members and pursuing a deliberate commercial policy, as well as providing financial and political support. Several Lucchese companies—such as the Guinigi, the Rapondi, and the Forteguerra—were of importance in Europe generally, acting as papal bankers and suppliers to the courts of France and Burgundy in the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth century.
Cultural activity in Lucca developed as early as the eighth century. An inscription of 767 records a school near the cathedral, one of whose masters, Deusdedit, subscribed to documents, and there was probably a scriptorium connected to the cathedral. A surviving manuscript, Codex 490 of the Biblioteca Capitolare, dates from the late eighth or early ninth century. This large composite work was written by forty or more different but related hands, which also show Visigothic and Irish influences. The manuscript includes a pen-and-wash drawing of the Good Shepherd, and one section of the manuscript provides instructions for preparing parchment, writing in gold pigment, and manufacturing various colors. The manuscript was not a luxury item but intended for use, and it seems to indicate an active scriptorium in Lucca itself. Large numbers of charters surviving from as early as the eighth and ninth centuries would also indicate the presence of scribes in Lucca.
The cathedral of Lucca also became the location of the Volto Santo ("holy face"), a carved wooden crucifix bearing a more than life-size figure of Christ dressed in a colobium, or sleeved tunic. The Volto Santo has been much discussed, because according to tradition it arrived in Lucca in the mid-eighth century whereas stylistic analogues place it no earlier than the twelfth or early thirteenth century. The legendary account given by Deacon Leboin stresses its miraculous properties and the claim that the figure was carved by Nicodemus and represented a real likeness of Christ. However that may be, there is historical evidence of the veneration of the Volto Santo as early as the late eleventh century: William II of England (d. 1100) is recorded as swearing by the "Holy Face of Lucca." There is good reason to believe that the present Volto Santo was substituted for the original image at some subsequent date.
The Volto Santo was to be of the greatest importance for Lucca's religious, artistic, economic, and political development. The feast of the Holy Cross (Santa Croce) on 14 September became the main local festival, and eventually the emblem of the commune—as well as of the Christian faith. The Volto Santo was portrayed on Lucchese coinage; villages of the Lucchese contado were obliged to send representatives to offer candles in the Santa Croce procession; and when Lucchese merchants established trading colonies abroad, these included a chapel dedicated to the Volto Santo.
The spiritual and economic revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was accompanied by an upsurge in both ecclesiastical and secular building. A new circle of walls was begun in the eleventh century, though it was not completed until the late twelfth century. Towers and tower-houses were also built, but this was above all a period of church building. Santa Maria Corteorlandini was begun in 1188, and San Michele in Foro belongs to the same period; Santa Maria Forisportam was built a little later. The rebuilding of the cathedral of San Martino was begun under Anselm da Baggio, and the facade was completed by the sculptor Guidetto da Como in 1204. The bishop's palace was completed in 1224. The establishment of the mendicant orders in Lucca brought new forms of religious devotion and gave a new impulse to ecclesiastical architecture. The Dominican church of San Romano was consecrated in 1281, although building work continued on other parts of the convent. The Dominican theologian and author of the Annals, Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca), taught there in 1287 and was the prior in 1288. Work was also proceeding on other Lucchese churches, such as Santa Maria Forisportam and Santi Simone e Giuda.
The cathedral of San Martino was also a cultural center, with a cathedral school that is frequently mentioned in eleventh- and twelfth-century documents and a scriptorium that produced at least some of the finely written and illuminated manuscripts mentioned in documents or surviving in Lucchese collections, although there is also evidence of ownership of manuscripts produced in other traditions. Some of these manuscripts had precious bindings with silver or gilt clasps. There is much evidence of goldsmiths active in Lucca in this period, producing church plate, altar furnishings, and sacred ornaments.
A group of citizens with literary interests emerged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The earliest distinctive literary personality is Bonagiunta Orbicciani, best-known for his appearance in Canto 24 of Dante's Purgatorio. In the fourteenth century, sources such as wills and letters indicate an interest in the acquisition and exchange of books among a wider group of citizens. Most of these books were connected with their professional activities as doctors and lawyers, but there was also an interest in classical and contemporary literature. The best-known Lucchese poet of the fourteenth century was ser Pietro Faitinelli, a notary and civic official whose political activities led to a period of exile. It was during his exile that he produced some of his most moving poetry. Giovanni Sercambi was an apothecary who combined business activities with political involvement as a supporter of the Guinigi, while also writing a collection of novelle and compiling a chronicle (Croniche). His chronicle is the most important source for the political history of fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century Lucca—as well as a vehicle for his intensely personal opinions and prejudices.
The tradition of painting in Lucca can be traced from the thirteenth century, when Berlinghiero Berlinghieri (c. 1180-c. 1236) and his sons Barone, Bonaventura, and Marco were active. Berlinghiero's origins and artistic affinities are uncertain—documentation is sparse, and there are difficulties in the attribution of surviving works—but a large painted crucifix (now in the Museo di Villa Guinigi in Lucca) bears an inscription recording Berlinghiero as the painter. A similar inscription identifies his son Bonaventura as the artist who painted the Saint Francis panel in the church of San Francesco in Pescia in 1235. Barone worked as a panel painter, and Marco is recorded as an illuminator of manuscripts and was active in Bologna as a fresco painter in the 1250s. The artistic tradition in Lucca may at first have been dominated by Christocentric devotion connected to the Volto Santo, but in the second half of the thirteenth century the foundation of a number of chapels testifies to the spread of the cult of the Virgin Mary, perhaps under the impulse of the Dominicans and other mendicant orders. The most prominent painter in Lucca in the late thirteenth century and the early fourteenth was Deodato Orlandi, whose works include depictions of the Madonna and child with saints, as well as painted crosses.
The political divisions and disorders of Lucca in the first hah of the fourteenth century may have discouraged major artistic commissions, although fortification projects and extensive renovation of private houses and churches in the city and contado continued unabated. The evidence of wills, especially after the black death in 1348, indicates that family tombs and chapels were built and that Marian devotion increased. Laymen, especially of the Lucchese merchant classes, were the main patrons of art during this period. Private commissions for tombs, altarpieces, frescoes, and church ornaments were frequent, whereas commissions from churches or monasteries were relatively few.
A number of Lucchese masters are documented in these decades, but most seem to have operated at a modest level and few emerge as distinctive artistic personalities. The most significant painter is Paoluccio Lazzarini, who had come into contact with the work of Florentine and, probably, Sienese artists while in exile with his father, also a painter, between 1314 and 1334. Paoluccio is first mentioned as an artist in 1341 and was the most active Lucchese painter of the mid-fourteenth century. His works included frescoes for the chapel of the anziani and an altarpiece for Santa Maria dei Servi, but he was often involved in disputes and was occasionally reduced to making designs for silk cloth. The recovery of Lucca's liberty in 1369 brought him greater professional opportunities and enabled him to carry out many important commissions for the commune and for private patrons until his death in 1385.
By this time there were other significant painters in Lucca, such as Angelo Puccinelli and Francesco Anguilla. Angelo Puccinelli, documented from 1379 to 1407, carried out important commissions for highly placed patrons and left a number of signed works. Francesco Anguilla, documented from 1384, engaged in all aspects of painting from designs for silks to decorating tabernacles and altarpieces, a number of which can be identified as his work. His long career, which lasted until 1444, connects medieval painting in Lucca with the developments of the early Renaissance.
See also Banks and Banking; Castruccio Castracani; Charles I of Anjou; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Gothic Wars; Guelfs; Lombards; Manfred; Matilda, Countess of Tuscany; Narses; Pisa; Silk in Italy
CHRISTINE MEEK
Lera, Guglidmo. Lucca, citta da scoprire: Guida completa a Lucca e alia sua provincia. Lucca: Testimone, 1980.
Mazzarosa, Antonio. Storia di Lucca dall'origine fino a tutto il 1817, 2nd ed., 2 vols. Lucca: Giuseppe Giusti, 1842.
Mancini, Augusto. Storia di Lucca. Florence: Sansoni, 1950.
Manselli, Raoul. "La repubblica di Lucca." In Storia d'Ltalia, Vol. 8(2). Torino: UTET, 1986, pp. 609-743. (Also published separately as La Repubblica di Lucca. Turin: UTET, 1986.)
Matraia, Giuseppe. Lucca nel Milleduecento. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1983 (Intro. Isa Belli Barsali. Originally published 1843.)
Pacchi, Domenico. Ricerche istoriche sulla provincia della Garfagnana. Modena: Societa Tipografica, 1785.
Tommasi, Girolamo. Sommario della storia di Lticca dall'anno MLV all'anno MDCC. Archivio Storico Italiano, 10. Florence: G. P. Vieusseux, 1847. (Reprint, Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1969.)
Benedetto, G. I rapporti tra Castruccio Castracani e la chiesa di Lucca." Annuario delta Biblioteca Civica di Massa, 1980, pp. 73-97.
Caforio, L. "II sacco di Lucca e il furto di S. Frediano e S. Romano." La Biblioteca delle Scuole Italiane, 17, 1905, pp. 201-203.
Cardini, F. "La società lucchese e la prima crociata." Actum Luce, 8, 1979, pp. 7-30.
Castruccio Castracani e il suo tempo. Lucca: Istituto Storico Lucchese, 1986.
Gorrini, G. "La politica di Lucca dal 1313 al 1345 e le sue relazioni con Giovanni XXII e Benedetto XII." In Miscellanea lucchese di studi storici e letterari in memoria di Salvatore Bongi. Lucca, 1931, pp. 131-138.
Green, Louis. "Society and Politics in Fourteenth-Century Lucca." Altro Polo, 4, 1982, pp. 29-50.
—. Castruccio Castracani: A Study on the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-Century Italian Despotism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
—.Lucca under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Italian Commune in Crisis (1328-1342). Quaderni di Rinascimento, 30, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995.
Lazzarini, Pietro. Storia delta Chiesa di Lucca, 3 vols. Lucca: Scuola Tipografica Artigianelli, 1968-1979.
Lucarelli, Giuliano. Castruccio Castracani degli Antelminelli. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1981.
Manselli, Raoul. "Lo sinodo lucchese di Enrico del Carretto." Italia Sacra, 15, 1970, pp. 198-246.
Meek, Christine E. Lucca 1369-1400: Politics and Society in an Early Renaissance City-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
—. The Commune of Lucca under Pisan Rule, 1342-1369. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1980.
Nanni, Luigi. La parrocchia studiata nei documenti lucchesi dei secoli VIII-XIII. Rome: Apud Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1948.
Osheim, Duane J. An Italian Lordship: The Bishopric of Lucca in the Late Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Sapori, A. Firenze e Castruccio: Tentativi di guerra economica." Atti delta R. Accademia Lucchese, n.s., 3, 1934, pp. 59-72.
Schwarzmaier, Hans-Martin. Lucca und das Reich bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur Sozialstruktur einer Herzogstadt in der Toskana. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1972.
Tirelli, V. "Sulla crisi istituzionale del comune di Lucca (1308-1312)." In Studi per Enrico Fiurni. Pisa: Pacini, 1979, pp. 317-360.
Winkler, Friedrich. Castruccio Castracani: Herzog von Lucca. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1897.
Bini, Telesforo. I lucchesi a Venezia: Alcuni studj sopra i secoli XIII e XIV. Lucca: Tip. di Felice Bertini, 1853-1856.
Blomquist, T. "The Drapers of Lucca and the Marketing of Cloth in the Mid-Thirteenth Century." Explorations in Economic History, 7(1-2), 1969, pp. 65-73.
—. "The Castracani Family of Thirteenth-Century Lucca." Speculum, 46, 1971a, pp. 459-476.
—. "Commercial Association in Thirteenth-Century Lucca." Business History Review, 45, 1971b, pp. 157-178.
—. "1 he Dawn of Banking in an Italian Commune: Thirteenth-Century Lucca." In The Dawn of Modern Banking. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Los Angeles. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 53-75
Green, L. "II commercio lucchese ai tempi di Castruccio Castracani." In Atti del primo convegno di studi castrucciani. Istituto Storico Lucchese, 1981, pp. 5-19.
Kaeuper, R.W. Bankers to the Croum: The Riccardi of Lucca and Edward I. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Lazzareschi, E. L'arte della seta in Lucca. Pescia, 1930.
Livi, G. "I mercanti di seta lucchesi a Bologna nei secoli XIII e XIV." Archivio Storico Italiano, Series 4(7), 1881, pp. 29—55.
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Molà, Luca. La comunità dei lucchesi a Venezia: Immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo Medioevo. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994.
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Baracchini, Clara, and Antonino Caleca. II duomo di Lucca. Lucca: Libreria Editrice Baroni, 1973.
Baracchini, Clara, Antonino Caleca, and Maria Teresa Filieri, eds. II Volto Santo: Storia e Culto. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1982. (Exhibition catalog.)
Belli Barsali, Isa. Guidu di Lucca, 2nd ed. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1970.
—, ed. IIpalazzo pubblico di Lucca. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1980.
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Concioni, Graziano, Claudio Ferri, and Giuseppe Ghilarducci. Arte e pittura nel medioevo lucchese. Lucca: Matteoni, 1994.
Garrison, E. B. "Toward a New History of Early Lucchese Painting." Art Bulletin, 33, 1951, pp. 11—31.
Lucca, il Volto Santo e la civiltà medioevale: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1984.
Paoli, Marco. Arte e committenza privata a Lucca nel Trecento e nel Quattrocento: Produzione artistica e cultura libraria. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1986.
Petrucci, Armando. "II codice n. 490 della Biblioteca Capitolare di Lucca: Un problema di storia della cultura medievale ancora da risolvere." Actum Luce, 2, 1973, pp. 159-175.
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I here are only sketchy details on the life of the Roman poet Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, after 90-middle 50s B.C.). His birthplace and social class are unknown. Jerome records that Lucretius was driven to madness by a love potion, but there is no evidence that Lucretius was insane, and it is likely that this claim was first made by Christians in an effort to undermine Lucretius's polemic against religion.
Lucretius's masterpiece, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), is a poem in six books of hexameters that sets forth the basic principles of Epicurean physics, anthropology, and cosmology. According to Epicurus and Lucretius, all things and beings consist of an aggregate of atoms joined together in different ways. This aggregate includes the soul, which naturally breaks down when the atoms that formed it disintegrate. Human knowledge of the soul's mortality thus makes religion unnecessary and potentially oppressive. Such assertions, which questioned the value of religious belief, proved to be controversial and consequently impeded the transmission of De rerum natura to the Middle Ages.
The text of Lucretius's poem was quoted by Isidore of Seville, was copied by scribes at Charlemagne's court, and was used by Hrabanus Maurus; but then it virtually disappeared from view until 1417. Although there are a few references to the poem in library catalogs and an Italian florilegium contains a line from Lucretius's work, De rerum natura seems to have been unknown to medieval readers. The protohumanist Lovato Lovati is sometimes said to have known of Lucretius, but the evidence is scant. Dante was not acquainted with Lucretius's poem, though his unfavorable opinion of Epicurean philosophy is attested to in Infemo 10, where Epicurus and the Epicureans are punished for their belief in the mortality of the soul, and by several passages in Convivio, where Epicureanism is explicitly condemned.
See also Dante Alighieri; Lovato dei Lovati
JESSICA LEVENSTEIN
Bailey, Cyril. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949. (3 vols, with commentary and translation.)
Latham, Ronald E. New York: Penguin, 1994. (Rev. John Godwin.)
Martin, Joseph. Leipzig: Teubner, 1963. (5th ed.)
Rouse, William H. D. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. (2nd ed., rev. Martin F. Smith. See also translation.)
Brown, P. Michael. Book 1. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1997.
Costa, Charles D. N. Book 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
Godwin, John. Book 4. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986.
—.Book 6. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1991.
Kenney, E. J. Book 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Leonard, William E., and Stanley B. Smith. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942.
Munro, Hugh A. J. Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1886. (4th ed., 3 vols.; with translation.)
Clay, Diskin. Lucretitis and Epicurus. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Hadzsits, George D. Lucretius and His Influence. New York: Longmans, Green, 1935.
Kenney, E. J. Lucretius, Greece, and Rome. New Surveys in the Classics, 11. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Martina, Antonio. "Lucrezio." In Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols., ed. Umberto Bosco. Rome: Istituto dell' Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970-1978, Vol. 3, pp. 723-725.
Segal, Charles. Lucretius on Death and Anxiety. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
West, David. The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. (Originally published 1969.)