2

MILAN

Milan is our starting-point in this sequence of case studies. Not because it was the first commune fully to develop (Pisa and Genoa have the best claims to that); not, as we shall amply see, because it was typical; but it was powerful and influential in central northern Italy (in the region now called Lombardy, and indeed farther afield), and held the attention of contemporary observers, as also of the historians of the last century and more. Recent historians have, indeed, often seen it as typical; we therefore have to understand how its development did work if we want to call that into question. The city is also a good place to start from in terms of its evidence. It has a relatively rich documentation, and also has several local histories in the century we are looking at: two from the 1070s, by Arnolfo and the anonymous author known as Landolfo Seniore, which recount the uprisings against Archbishop Ariberto da Intimiano (1018–45) and the activities of the purist popular religious movement of the period 1057–75 known as the Pataria—they are very hostile to the Pataria, but we also have pro-Patarene texts which show local knowledge—and then one from the 1130s, that of Landolfo of S. Paolo already cited. The younger Landolfo relates the travails of his uncle Liprando, a survivor of the Patarene movement of the previous generation, and then of himself, deprived unjustly (he says) of his church, inside a framing of archbishops and their own, often insurmountable, problems.1 These histories allow a narrative characterisation of the development of the various strands of what would become the commune which, in its main lines, is not controversial. Let us first look at the overall development of Milan and its government, first archiepiscopal, then communal, in the century 1050–1150, and then, in the second part of the chapter, focus on who its consuls were and how their social composition changed. For, in a world of considerable informality of governmental structures, exactly who directed them and for what purpose become particularly important. In Milan, as in most other cities, it was the practices of that informal period which would frame how any given commune actually did develop when it finally institutionalised itself.

Milan had always been the largest and one of the dominant cities of the Kingdom of Italy. It had been a major political centre since the Roman empire, and was, although not on a significant river, a road-centre for transalpine traffic, and a major entrepôt for exchange between the Alpine foothills (a large-scale producer of iron and wool) and the great route of the river Po, thirty miles to its south. These were the bases of an industrial development in cloth and metal in and around the city which was moving fast by the twelfth century.2 Milan far outmatched the old capital of the Kingdom, Pavia, its southern neighbour and enemy, and it was also the seat of the archbishopric for most of the Po plain; the archbishops of Milan—almost all from capitaneal families—were very powerful and rich, and had steadily displaced the counts of Milan (last documented in 1045) as the de facto rulers of the city.³ Its large size and growing wealth also meant that it was the focus for a particularly active and complex urban aristocracy, of the capitanei and valvassores mentioned in chapter 1, and it was hard to rule peacefully—between 1050 and 1150, indeed, in the context of the internal troubles referred to above (and there were plenty of others), five archbishops were deposed. In that context, it was necessary to do one’s best to seek a wide base of support if one was to rule the city successfully.

Archbishop Ariberto in the 1030s rode the tide of trouble between the different strata of his military vassals and the intervention of the emperor Conrad II. In the early 1040s, however, he faced an uprising of the ‘citizens’, cives, who in this context have been interpreted by a succession of scholars since Cinzio Violante, I am sure rightly, as not the urban populace as a whole, but rather a militarised élite stratum of rentier, commercial, and judicial figures.4 After the civic revolt, the agreement of 1045 gave to the cives a greater transactional power, with mutual oaths sworn, and a recognition that they had a role in the election of archbishops. Ariberto, according to the chronicler Arnolfo, had been elected in 1018 in consultation with the maiores of the city; but his successor, Guido da Velate, was elected in 1045, Landolfo Seniore says, with the involvement of an ‘assembly [collectio] of all the citizens’, and that wider tradition of election continued into Landolfo of S. Paolo’s time—the nobilis multitudo and the populus in 1097 (two groups of citizens on different sides); or the nobiles and viri, in front of the populus, in 1102.⁵ It is hard to know how wide this participation was, or how important it was—in 1097, at least, the fixers of the election apparently took the trouble to win over the populus, which indicates that, however socially restricted, it had some real role—but we can take an élite dominance on each of these occasions pretty much for granted as well. All the same, the Milanese laity, even if only its aristocratic strata, had long been a player in archiepiscopal elections, and, with that élite more widely based, it continued to be one.

This was the backdrop to the unrest of the period of the Pataria in 1057–75. This was a genuine bottom-up religious movement, focussed on the two moral panics most characteristic of the eleventh century, worries about buying clerical office (simony) and worries about the effect of married clergy on the efficacy of the sacraments. These concerns had an impact on plenty of cities—and, of course, on the papacy as well—but it is in Milan that they most clearly seem have been borne along by a wider lay popular movement, one which, as Bob Moore among others has stressed, was well-acquainted with the commercial role of money, and was less willing than were previous generations to regard giving money in return for office as a morally neutral exchange of gifts. (Patarene hostility to clerical marriage was however much more controversial in Milan, where the tradition of married clergy had a long history, as Landolfo Seniore, in particular, protested.) The Pataria came to focus on the election of Archbishop Guido, which they held to be simoniac—apparently because he had been chosen by the emperor Henry III from outside the list of candidates agreed inside the city—and tensions rose sharply. In Rome, after some hesitation, support for the Pataria became clear once Alexander II became pope in 1061, for he, as Anselmo da Baggio, was from a Milanese capitaneal family and had been a keen supporter of ‘reform’ before he left the city in 1056; Hildebrand, his right-hand man, was even keener, both as archdeacon in Rome and, from 1073, as Pope Gregory VII. After 1066, the Pataria were led by a lay capitaneus, Erlembaldo, who was regarded as an imposing figure even by his opponent Landolfo Seniore; he had a great deal of support in Milan, at every level of society, élites and non-élites alike. In 1073–75, when neither of two rival archbishops after Guido’s death managed to establish himself in Milan, Erlembaldo ruled the city more or less on his own, until a fire damaged the city in 1075 and a revolt led by aristocrats resulted in Erlembaldo’s death in battle inside the city, apparently at the hand of the capitaneus Arnaldo da Rhò, and the rapid eclipse of Patarene power.6

It seems to me, as to most historians, that the Pataria was an essentially religious operation. Exactly how its development fitted into the history of political legitimisation in the mid-eleventh century remains to be determined in full; I will not focus on it here, however. It is certainly (as noted in the last chapter) important that Erlembaldo and his party swore together a iuramentum commune, which was often an oath sworn for the moment, but at one point, in 1071, seems to be a wider constitutive oath; that tells us about the considerable solidity of sworn collective action by then. All the same, although the survivors of the Pataria continued to have some purchase in Milan until the 1100s, it did not have much to do with the history of the commune as it developed in the twelfth century.⁷ The Milanesi seem to have felt burnt by the whole affair, and in the next quarter century were internally quiet, under less contested archbishops, as well as being for the most part on the side of the emperor. Although the Pataria had support from all social levels, as probably did its opponents as well, its actual suppression seems to have been in effect a victory for the capitanei, whose members again filled the office of archbishop, and other senior clerical posts: Archbishop Anselmo III da Rhò (1086–93) was indeed from the family of Erlembaldo’s killer.

Documents in the period after 1080 which list the composition of the main figures in the last Milanese placita (the last known is from 1093) and the archbishop’s court show us a mixed élite in the city and around the archbishop. It was both aristocratic and judicial in composition: the vicecomites or Visconti, the da Landriano, the da Rhò, the da Melegnano, the da Baggio, all families who are elsewhere described as capitaneal; and a smaller set of iudices et missi, whose legal expertise was recognised by an official imperial title and whose local political position was central—above all, three frequently recurring figures, Alberto, the patriotically named Mediolano Ottone, and Ambrogio Pagano. Of the aristocrats, Arialdo da Melegnano is particularly visible in these documents as a political coordinator, and he must have had a central role.8 Then, in 1097, a Cremona document shows us a formal agreement after a land dispute (we cannot tell whether it went to a placitum or not) which was made in Milan in consulatu civium, ‘in the consulate of the citizens’, for the first time. This was witnessed by an array of members of prominent families, including Arialdo da Melegnano again, Wifredo da Pusterla, and Anselmo Fanti, all of whom are known to have been capitanei, by Pagano Stampa, who was from a family of vassals of the monastery of S. Ambrogio, so was certainly aristocratic too, as well as by the three iudices, but now the group also included Pagano and Nazario Gambari, from a family which was not aristocratic but would be active in the city later in the twelfth century.⁹ We cannot tell whether these names were or included people called consuls in 1097, but the same sort of people seem to be associated with the consulatus as we find in archiepiscopal documents, with, now, the addition of some prominent cives.

We need to pause here, however, and consider what the word consulatus could have meant. It clearly indicates that Milan now used the term consul, although it does not appear again in any other text for twenty years, until 1117. The word was previously used in Rome and then, in the 1080s, in Pisa (see below, pp. 77–78, 83, 129), but early uses of consul there simply referred to members of urban élites, and certainly not yet regularly rotating city rulers as developed in the twelfth century; it is entirely likely that Milan borrowed the word (most plausibly via Genoa, which had close links with both Pisa and Milan) to mean, initially, something just as generic. That Milan had done this by 1097 is indeed not surprising; already two important rural centres (or small towns) in the wider hinterland of Milan, Biandrate and Chiavenna, had prominent men called consules in this period, in 1093 and 1097 respectively.10 But a consulatus is something else as well, and arguably more important: it is a collectivity of people, an assembly (and also the place where such a collectivity met). As such, it looks back to the assemblies (then sometimes called collectio) of the 1040s, and to the oath-based groupings of the Pataria, but the phrase in 1097 indicates that such an assembly was by now a more formalised and more regular occasion. It is also striking that in the immediately following years, 1098–1100, we have two texts—one surviving in an inscription, the other in a later copy—in each of which Archbishop Anselmo IV da Bovisio, who had been elected in 1097, founds a market and gives it toll exemptions with comuni conscilio tocius civitatis, ‘the common counsel of the whole city’, such consilium in the second text being given in a conventus, another word for assembly.¹¹ Such an assembly appears in Landolfo of S. Paolo’s narrative too: in his text for 1103 it is called a concio, and in 1117 an arengo, as we shall see in a moment. This multiplicity of names implies that we should not put too much weight on the implications of the single term consulatus, but it certainly shows that the city’s assembly was by now an organised body: happy to act closely with the archbishop, and with a demonstrably aristocratic element in 1097, but probably meeting autonomously, and also fairly often.

Urban assemblies can be tracked back to the ninth century; cities, or their élites, wished to express their will in public in every period, and this was a good way of doing it. Such assemblies had some parallels to the judicial assemblies of the placita, for obvious reasons, but they did not have the formalised public role that placita did; in particular, even if dominated by urban élites in practice, they were as yet ad hoc, not part of the public political hierarchy of the Kingdom of Italy, and were not headed or called by counts or missi or other royal/imperial representatives.12 They appear only occasionally, and particularly at times of crisis, as the 1040s surely were. But from the late 1090s in Milan they appear much more often; and their practical powers in the next decade or two became ever clearer, as we shall see in a moment. To repeat, the role of the assembly to ratify a settlement in 1097 implies that its role was by now in some way formalised. Why then? It was a decade of apparent calm in the city for the most part; whether or not the assembly (let alone its shadowy consular leaders) was the result of ‘compromise’, in Milan it seems to have appeared in a period of renewed and uncontested hierarchy inside the city, around traditional authorities—archbishops and their senior clergy and vassals, in particular. Milan itself was stable then, that is to say. Anselmo IV indeed took the youth of Milan on crusade in 1100, in a notably unsuccessful expedition which he did not return from, but which included members of all earlier factions, even Patarene families. But the wider context of 1097 in Italy was still one of continued civil war and political uncertainty; and it is not chance that the placitum tradition had by now ended in the city. In the absence of public judicial assemblies, the city’s own gatherings gained more of a formal status in their place, and, increasingly, definable powers as well, as a defensive measure we can indeed say, even if in an environment when archiepiscopal authority was not any more—and not yet—in dispute. This is important. Not as a step towards ‘the commune’, for only a few elements of the ideal type I characterised in the last chapter are as yet visible here, and indeed the institutionalisation of the powers of ruling consuls was a much later process, as we shall see; but as a sign of a new local structuring of urban political action, in a period in which the wider institutions of the Kingdom were in increasing disarray.13

Once we get into the twelfth century, Landolfo of S. Paolo begins to give us some detailed accounts of major moments in the city’s history, in most of which he was either an eyewitness or else informed soon after by eyewitnesses, notably the fall of Archbishop Grosolano in 1111 and that of Anselmo V da Pusterla in 1135. These deserve some discussion, because they give important—even if, as we shall see, problematic—information about how Milan’s lay community, and the consuls as part of it, actually operated in the city by now.

Grosolano, who was, atypically, not from Milan (he had been bishop of Savona in Liguria), was not a much-loved figure in the city, and soon after his election in 1102 he was attacked by Landolfo’s uncle Liprando for simony: a rhetorical charge which Landolfo does not even try to substantiate, but which resulted in an ordeal by fire in 1103 to justify it, which Liprando performed successfully. Landolfo writes this up in great detail and it has some prominence in the historiography as a result, but Grosolano had solid support from the clerical hierarchy and the pope, and this attempt to depose him went nowhere.¹⁴ Landolfo claims several times that Liprando had massive popular backing; we can doubt that. But it is certainly significant that the ordeal was in the end organised by the concio populi, the ‘assembly of the people’. That assembly was here acting separately from the archbishop, and not obviously to his advantage; and its regularity and potential independence slowly increased from here on. In 1117, Archbishop Giordano used the arengo to considerable effect, as we saw at the start of this book; in 1118, the contio militum et civium was the body which began the great war with Como (Giordano is here said by Landolfo to have ‘inflamed it to do revenge’ after the death of a Milanese capitaneus at Como’s hands, but the archbishop apparently could not start a war on his own); in 1128 the contio cleri et populi decided that Anselmo V should crown Conrad, rival to the German king Lothar III, as king of Italy; in 1135 the popularis contio was the venue for the beginning of the overthrow of Anselmo, in part precisely because of that coronation, in which senior clerics spoke against him, turning the meeting, and the consuls agreed to take further action.15 It is clear that this assembly by now, in the first third of the twelfth century, had a membership which could include both aristocrats and clergy; it is however, here as elsewhere, far from clear whether it included more than a minority of the inhabitants of the city, except in 1117, when it explicitly included women. But it is also important that these citations are all from a single work written in the 1130s (the word concio/contio does not, for example, appear in Milanese documents in this period), and that Landolfo, far from a neutral observer, wrote a carefully structured text; all we can really say is that in the 1130s he saw an apparently fairly loose and wide form of assembly politics as being a normal way for the inhabitants of Milan to express themselves politically, including in the presence of prominent clerics and lay leaders. I will come back to that.

Grosolano hung on in 1103, then; but he fell quite easily eight years later, when floods hit the city and he, although absent in Jerusalem, was blamed for them. A carefully constituted group of eighteen clerics and laity (all of the latter and many of the former apparently aristocrats; some are attested later as consuls), evenly divided between supporters and opponents of the archbishop, agreed to meet on the last day of 1111 to determine whether Grosolano was rightly archbishop; they in the end all decided that he was not, apparently on the grounds that he was still bishop of Savona, and elected Giordano instead. This can easily be seen as the political community getting rid of an embarrassment, with some despatch; it turned out more muddily, though, for Grosolano attempted a comeback on his return to Italy in 1113 and there was a battle between his supporters and his opponents in which numerous people were killed—clearly the former archbishop was not friendless, and (Landolfo says) only Giordano’s victory in a parallel war of bribery got Grosolano out of the city (he later appealed to the pope, without success). Here, though, the body which voted against Grosolano was by no means a contio; it was an ad hoc and self-selected group of city leaders.

The word only appears in Landolfo’s account here to describe Grosolano’s faction, not any form of general assembly, unlike during Anselmo V’s fall in 1135.16 I would resist the idea that this marks a change between 1111 and 1135, with the concio becoming more central; again, it is important to stress that we are dealing with a single text; but we can say at least that, for all Landolfo’s interest in assemblies, he did not need to invoke them every time something important happened in the city.

And the same is true for consuls, in fact even more so. Landolfo says at one point, proudly, that he was an epistolarum dictactor, a letter-drafter, for the consuls, but they are far from prominent in his narrative. As Keller has remarked, they above all appear when Landolfo is going to a series of tribunals to try to get his church back, as in 1117. Twice he refers to them as the archbishop’s consuls (suis consulibus), even if, conversely, they are among the political figures who bring Anselmo V down. Although plenty of lay figures appear as political players in Landolfo’s account, he only mentions two consuls by name, both from the capitaneal da Rhò family. At the end of his history, in 1136, he actually got a hearing about his church from Lothar III, now emperor, but all Lothar did was refer the case to the consuls of the city, and the one who took it on was Arnaldo da Rhò, grandson of Erlembaldo’s killer, whose family had got Landolfo out of the church in the first place: so no joy there.17 That is the closest to any kind of consular protagonism that we get. Landolfo was a consular officer, and beyond that a member of an oppositional family with no connection to the city’s traditional leadership (his relatives cannot be tracked in documents, even if they fought for the city quite often according to Landolfo, so may genuinely not have been prominent¹⁸), who had little sympathy with aristocrats; he might have been expected to talk up an autonomous city government, but he did not. For all the public separation of powers in 1117 (above, p. 1), it would be easy to conclude, on the basis of our main narrative source, that the consuls were indeed nothing more than ordinary members of the aristocracy, with strong ties to the archbishop, and only occasionally active as independent political protagonists: apart from the assembly, not much of the communal ideal type is visible here. But we should not simply accept Landolfo’s imagery. We are all now much more distrustful of sources than that, and it is also pretty clear that Landolfo of S. Paolo, notwithstanding the title of his ‘History of the city of Milan’ recorded in the earliest, early fifteenth-century, manuscript, was writing above all a history of the Milanese church and its archbishops (including of his uncle and himself, both clerics as they were), and not of Milan’s lay politics—even of its wars, which are the basic meat of urban histories and annals, but which, significantly, only appear as asides in his text. A letter casually surviving in a letter-collection of the 1130s indeed shows the consules Mediolanensium et universus populus writing to a lay lord to request military help against Cremona in, probably, 1132; consuls were clearly fronting the political actions of the city by now, which, joined to their rotation in office and their link to the concio, brings all the elements of the ideal type into view.19 It is thus better to regard Landolfo as only a single and partial witness, to be set against other data as needs be. Conversely, it is at least important to remember that it was possible for a writer who, however unsuccessfully, appears as a player in urban and ecclesiastical politics in his own right (all the archbishops knew him personally), and who was also directly involved in the consulate, not to see the emerging commune as more than minimally centre stage.

Let us therefore turn to the documents of the commune itself. The first text which mentions and names consuls dates to 1117; the second to 1130. Both are atypical, and I will come back to them. There then follows a continuous series of consular judgements in legal disputes, starting in 1138 and reaching twenty in number already by 1150 (over two hundred by 1200), and covering nearly every year from then on—with the exception of the period 1163–66, after Barbarossa had the city destroyed in 1162 and its inhabitants temporarily exiled (the Milanesi reversed both, rapidly, after 1167, and Barbarossa lost the war only nine years later). These consular judgements from 1138 onwards are highly standardised; 1138 is thus unlikely to be the first one, and indeed Landolfo’s case in 1136 implies that it was not. They consist of a set of consuls who hear a dispute, usually in a specified public place, which stabilises soon enough in the Broletto, near the cathedrals (see map 2), in front of what is already called in 1138 the domus consulatus; with then one of them—usually a iudex—pronouncing sentence with the agreement, concordia, of the others.²⁰ They also have audiences who are listed as witnesses, often made up of past and future consuls, who are numerous until the 1170s. These disputes generally concerned rural land, and often feudal and signorial rights as well; the jurisdiction of the consuls may not have spread everywhere in the diocese, but it certainly, given the origins of the parties to these disputes, could reach a long way out already by the 1140s.²¹ They represent a regular and solid set of cases. They survive in a wide variety of Milanese archives, and sometimes in those of other cities too. The formulae for these texts do not say that Milanese consuls, unlike those for some cities, are ‘elected’ by the populus, but they are clearly autonomous figures. The texts have been edited since 1919 as a group, almost the only set of consular texts for any city to have their own publication, and have thus influenced everyone very considerably—as has the editor Cesare Manaresi’s authoritative but highly institutional introduction.²² When Hagen Keller says that communes became organised bodies in the 1120s–30s, he is largely thinking of this set of texts, and one can see why.

Where there is more room for doubt is in the earlier two cases, in 1117–30, and some associated documents. The 1117 text, discussed at the start of this book, is not at all like later consular sentences; it is in fact in the format of a temporarily revived eleventh-century placitum assembly, with the archbishop as the president, the legal authority, and the consuls doing the judging in the arengo—in effect, in the role taken in the eleventh century by imperial iudices. Placita had otherwise ended in most of Lombardy (they only by now survived intermittently, particularly in the Veneto²³), so this procedure was a copy of a former judicial assembly, not its continuation. But, in that context, the significant novelty of this case is not only the consuls and the arengo, even though both clearly have a visible identity by now (the 1117 judgement was to be ‘recorded [inbreviare] in their consularia’, so the consuls had record-keeping too), but also, and much more, the absence of any imperial figure: it is as if Milan was by now presented as the archbishop’s to rule, with the consuls as ‘his’ officials.²⁴ In the 1130 text, there is no archbishop, but, as Paolo Grillo remarks, Anselmo V was running into trouble then; here, one consul pronounces sentence (actually, he confirms a sentence already given by the bishop of Bergamo in a case inside that city’s territory, so bishops are not absent here either), and a large number of other consuls (twenty-two in all) confirm. This, apart from the length of the list of consuls, fits later judgements; but we can easily see this text as in some sense midway between archiepiscopal and consular power. The 1130 text is, however, central to historians, because it is absolutely the only consular document ever to say that some consuls were capitanei, some were valvassores, and some were cives. Keller sees this as the tip of an iceberg, and argues that it is a guide to the fact that consuls were regularly chosen from all three strata, as Otto of Freising explicitly claimed in the 1150s; Grillo, among others, doubts that and stresses its one-off nature. We cannot, it must be recognised, easily tell, as it is unique—although this three-fold political representation turns up quite casually in Landolfo of S. Paolo too.²⁵ There are, conversely, no signs at all that by the 1140s there was any tripartite division in our consular lists, and, as we shall see, it is not very likely. But it is certainly demonstrably the case that some later consuls were aristocratic and some not. I will come back to this, for it seems to me more important than arguing about typicality here, and the balance between different social origins for consuls was also variable in practice, in significant ways.

Map 2. Milan, c. 1100

What to me is equally important, however, is that these are not the only recorded disputes in the period. Four others are canon-law cases, which were ended by the archbishop, in each case in the presence not just of clergy but also of laymen who must in some way have been part of his court, his fideles or vassals. The lists of these men have many overlaps with the consular lists of 1117 and 1130. Two other disputes are what could be called ‘quasi-consular’, in that they are agreements confirmed by large bodies of important men who do not call themselves consuls, and the overlaps are here great as well. The second of these, from 1129, set in the publico arengo of Milan, still fronts the archbishop (although he was already in trouble in that year), who receives lands and rights previously held illegally by rural lords, but also cites an earlier legal decision by the consuls; one might regard the (highly aristocratic) witness-list as consisting of the consuls of that year, but the text definitely does not say so, and they could equally well be the archbishop’s men—if, indeed, there was any concrete difference.26 After 1130 there are fewer of these archiepiscopal judgements (although they continue, throughout the century, again in canon-law cases²⁷), but earlier, in the 1110s and 1120s, the image of a consular world virtually folded into the archbishop’s personal entourage, which can be extracted from Landolfo of S. Paolo, does seem to make some sense in the documentation at our disposal. The consuls before the 1130s did have some formal role, if Landolfo wrote letters for them; and already in 1117 they also kept records, as we have just seen.²⁸ All the same, the rather more institutionalised commune of the years after 1138 marks a break from that, and potentially quite an important one.

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If we are to get further in our understanding of how the commune of Milan developed, we will have to look, as I stressed earlier, not at governmental structures, but at people, at exactly who it was that was politically active in the city in each period; that is to say, with respect to what I have just been discussing, who the public figures in our documents, whether archiepiscopal, quasi-consular, or consular, actually were. A detailed prosopography of all of them cannot be set out here; I will take a few typical examples and track them through, framed by some very basic statistics. I will draw a simple distinction of before and after the first ‘regular’ consular case in 1138, for the figures are different for each, and will also stop in 1150, my endpoint for these analyses—although I will follow some important individual figures until the end of their documentation.

The first thing that is clear is that the public world before 1138 was indeed very largely aristocratic. In the 1117 text, out of eighteen or nineteen consuls, a maximum of four were not visibly aristocrats; in 1130, out of twenty-three, only five were non-aristocratic cives. Most of the non-aristocrats turn up in the archbishop’s documents too, and it is in fact interesting that the big archiepiscopal occasions often include, at the end of lists, rather more people who cannot be identified elsewhere than do the early consular documents—the archbishop was the focus of a wide civic aggregation; but the top names in these lists are again overwhelmingly aristocratic.29 From 1138 onwards, however, the pattern changes substantially. There are no obvious aristocrats at all in the 1138 consular lists; in 1140 and 1141 they return, but the percentage has dropped to 50 percent. All told, of the consuls documented between 1138 and 1150, under 40 percent were aristocratic, as far as we can tell, a percentage which falls further if we count each office-holding stint, as many consuls held office several times.³⁰ Of non-aristocrats, by contrast, a high percentage were iudices et missi, legal experts with an imperial title, and these legal experts were by far the commonest examples of consuls who served several times: in some years, indeed, a majority of the consuls were iudices. So what happened between 1130 and 1138 is both that the percentage of aristocrats who held consular office dropped substantially and that legal experts came abruptly into the foreground. We saw iudices as active in the placita of the eleventh century, and also in the 1097 text which mentions the consulatus, so there was a continuity there, which in at least one case is probably a genealogical continuity as well, as we shall see. But legal experts are almost absent from the consular texts of 1117–30, and also from the archiepiscopal documents of the same period: they were not part of the aristocratic early years of the commune, even though they were so important in the 1140s—and in every succeeding decade. All this seems to me to confirm a break from previous practice, and indeed potentially quite a sharp break; but it occurred in the 1130s, not earlier—the decade in which the commune became more of an institution, and apparently also less of a spin-off of the archbishop’s own entourage, for the archbishop is, equally, much less prominent from this moment on in city government.

The other thing that is worth noting after the 1130s is what happened to the aristocracy. Up to 1130, we see a wide range of urban aristocratic—especially capitaneal—families, both around the archbishop and in the early consular documents. Only the most rural aristocratic families (such as the da Carcano and the da Besate) do not figure in these texts, or indeed in most other Milanese documents from the early and mid-twelfth century. Some of the urban aristocratic families continued to be consuls afterwards too: the da Rhò, the da Porta Romana, the da Settala, the da Soresina, the Visconti, the Burri, the Crivelli.31 But there are also several, equally urban, aristocratic families whom we can track attached to the archbishop, but not to the commune, at least after 1130: the da Landriano (no consuls until 1155), the da Pusterla (no consuls between 1117 and 1179), the da Melegnano (no consuls till 1181), the Stampa (no consuls till 1193), the Pozzobonelli (no consuls till 1198), the da Tenebiago, the Avvocati, and the Fanti (after 1130, never consuls again).32 The Avvocati, who provided a consul in 1130 but not afterwards, kept their role as the archbishops’ advocates, which was presumably enough for them to be important in the city without needing other offices, and also their tithe fiefs and signorial rights around Rosate in the south-west of the diocese, although they were less powerful there in the second half of the twelfth century than in the first.³³ The da Landriano are very prominent in all our early twelfth-century materials for Milan, and indeed earlier, although they were not actually consuls in 1117–30; later, by the 1170s, they are very visible in city politics again as well (indeed, two members of the family were rectors of the Lombard League, the urban alliance against Barbarossa, in that decade). But they for the most part dropped out in the formative years of the commune, and presumably (among other things) concentrated on the development of their rural signoria in Villamaggiore in the southern Milanese, where they can be seen as lords in several twelfth-century texts.³⁴ The Stampa were less powerful (they were vassals of S. Ambrogio, as we have seen, but we cannot find them with signorial rights), but we can see them active in land transactions, in particular in Quinto de Stampis south of the city (it is Quinto de’ Stampi still today), where they must really have been dominant.³⁵ These three can stand as type-examples of families who did not need the commune, particularly after it crystallised as a body in the 1130s; the da Landriano came back into the communal orbit once there was a political structure which was solid enough to be interesting in its own right, but the others did not even do that.

I have already suggested that aristocrats might not necessarily have wanted to be part of an élite which simply ruled its inferiors rather than of the traditional hierarchies which looked to emperors and bishops; here are clear Milanese examples of it. It would be nice to be able to propose that richer or more signorial families kept out of the commune, whereas less rich ones did not, but our documentation is not good enough to do that (it privileges land, not commercial activity, as all early document collections do, which does not help assessments of urban wealth, and also tells us less about land held in fief, which was common in the Milanese, than we would like). Such a division by wealth is not inconceivable, and we shall see some examples of it in Pisa in the next chapter; but in Milan, actually, none even of these non-consular families stand out as being seriously rich by the standards of Italy’s leading aristocrats, and indeed no urban capitaneal family can be shown to have had more than one or two castles; large sets of castles were restricted to rural families such as the da Besate.36 All we can say is that a non-communal choice was certainly possible for political players in Milan—and, given Milan’s prominence and the relatively early crystallisation of its communal structures, plus the considerable military aggression associated with it, which we shall come on to, we could say: even in Milan. So the Milanese commune of the 1120s might well have been an extension of the archbishop’s entourage, but the commune of the 1140s was fuller of legal experts than it was of aristocrats, and many aristocrats by now avoided it. This shows that there was indeed something new and different going on by the 1140s; and it was that commune, not its predecessor, which determined how the city’s government would develop in the future.

Let us look at some of the families which actually did provide consuls, so that we can see the sort of people the city had to deal with in the years after 1138. I will single out seven, two aristocratic, one possibly more commercial in orientation, and four judicial, for a brief analysis; they will give us an idea of the range. This sort of family reconstruction, however summary, is also essential if we want to gain any sense of what they actually thought they were doing.

The da Rhò were a clearly capitaneal family who committed fully to the consulate. As we have seen, they played an active part in the movement against the Pataria, and provided an archbishop, in the eleventh century; they were associated with later archbishops in the 1120s, and they were (among other, more important, things) enemies of Landolfo of S. Paolo. They remained active archiepiscopal vassals after 1130 as well, and close to the cathedral church; in 1149–50 Anselmo da Rhò was a deacon of the cathedral and Arderico da Rhò was its advocate. They held tithes in fief in Arnate, Varano, and Ternate in the north-west of the diocese, well past their political centre at Rhò, quite far out in fact, although the (scarce) attestations to their landholding show them in the city too (see map 3). But Arnaldo da Rhò was consul in 1130, 1136, and 1140, Giovanni in c. 1134 and 1150, and Ottone in 1143, 1145, and 1154; and, in general, the family was very active as witnesses to urban transactions of all kinds across the same period. This family, similar in many ways to the da Landriano, was by no means as cautious about a consular and urban public commitment.³⁷

The Burri family was even more visible. Malastreva, son of Eriprando Burro, was the only person to be as active in the earliest commune (consul in 1117 and 1130—when he was a valvassor—and in the archbishop’s entourage in between) as he was in the commune of the 1140s, for he was consul three times in the latter decade, while remaining close to the archbishop, as a document for 1148 attests. In that text, he is named alongside Gigo Burro, who was himself a consul five times between 1140 and 1151; a third family member, Anselmo Burro, was consul in 1144, and the family remained active in the consulate in the 1170s and onwards—in the next century, indeed, they were also frequently podestà for other cities. So there is no doubt about the Burri family’s commitment to the commune, however close they were to the archbishop too. The range of landholding which this very extensive family had is also visible: they had some in Villamaggiore in the far south of the diocese (as did many influential Milanesi, possibly all in fief from the da Landriano), in Melegnano not far away, in Gudo to the south-west of the city, in Magnago to the north-west, and in the city itself, as well as some tithes (but no documented signorial rights) at Vimercate to the east (see again map 3). This spread is wide, covering nearly half the diocese, which would certainly help to explain their involvement with the city, at the centre of the web. The data are too fragmentary for us to get a sense of a scale here, but Ottone di Amedeo Burro could afford a dowry of £40 in 1121, a figure which is well above average. Prosperous landowners with an urban base and considerable public ambition: we might imagine that they used their wealth for commercial purposes, although it has to be said that this is not very visible later, in the richer commercial documentation of the thirteenth century. Either way, however, they stand as the archetype of aristocratic consuls, and if they and the da Rhò had been typical of consuls in the 1140s, they would have shown a notable continuity with the previous generation. But they were not.³⁸

Map 3. The territory of Milan, c. 1100

Non-aristocratic and non-judicial families who provided consuls are much harder to trace, and this fact is significant; they may well have sometimes held less land, and they certainly rather less often witnessed the sort of charters which ended up in ecclesiastical archives. They may have sometimes gained prominence through commercial activity, although we cannot simply assume that; it may well be that we are dealing with smaller-scale rentiers here as often as with a stratum of merchants and workshop-owners. If we do find evidence for any of them, this might simply show atypicality, too. But we can at least, thanks to research by Livia Fasola, say something about the Scaccabarozzi family, a family which produced two consuls, Guilielmo in 1150 and 1155, and Giordano in 1157. This was a family which went over to Frederick Barbarossa after he destroyed Milan in 1162—and indeed even before; Giordano is called proditor, ‘traitor’, by the Milan Annals—and never became consuls again. It was a family of prosperous landowners, particularly active in the city, but also owning land both in the far south of the Milanese and the far north-east. They had no tithes or signorial rights, important signs of aristocratic identity, but did later acquire fiefs, and they may well have matched some of the lesser aristocratic families in the scale of their landholding. Very unusually, the Scaccabarozzi are directly attested in commercial activity, for in 1143 they leased from the cathedral church a pristinum, a bread-oven, in Cinque Vie, a city quarter. An at least occasional commercial investment might be what marked out people defined as cives, as opposed to aristocrats, but, again, we would be unwise to assume that automatically; more important in my view is that, when we can see the landed resources of leading cives, they could be substantial and wide-ranging.39 What we are in fact looking at here is a second stratum of the urban élite, one less rich and certainly less signorial than the leading capitanei, even if for a time as involved in consular politics as the da Rhò and the Burri were. In this second stratum we could probably also put some of the families of valvassores who have relatively little impact on our documents, and so were probably less rich than the Burri; this was a stratum defined by wealth, not military-aristocratic status.

Very different, however, were the judicial consuls. Let us here start with Gualterio iudex and missus, consul three times between 1138 and 1142. He may have died soon after, for he was a professional iudex already in 1109, when he guaranteed the land sales of two under-age owners, as Milanese custom required; he was then said to be son of Ariprando iudex. Ariprando iudex and missus is equally attested in a public role, consistently, between 1095 and 1115; he was in his turn son of Pagano iudex, who must be the Ambrogio Pagano we have already met, a notarial and then a major judicial figure between 1069 and 1114 (by when he must have been very old). These genealogical links are not certain, for Ariprando is a common name, but they are very likely; they also allow one to speculate that the later Ariprando iudex who was consul four times between 1147 and 1162 might have been the next generation along (he went over to Barbarossa after 1162 as well).40 Here we have the continuity of judicial involvement in the public world of the city which is invoked by those who think that nothing changed much with the commune, even if it is far from clear that lawmen thought the same in each generation, and members of this family are also notably absent from public documents in the formative years of the consulate. But the other striking thing is that, for all the frequency of citation of the first three generations in texts, they are not once referred to as landowners in any shape or form. They were, apparently, a purely judicial family. Iudices were often from families of high status in the eleventh century, and could have substantial lands in many cases. There were counter-examples even then, and by the early decades of the twelfth legal experts in many cities tended not to be in the ranks of major landowners. This family was clearly one of the counter-examples: even their eleventh-century forebear Ambrogio Pagano, who ran placita in the 1080s and was present in the first consular document of 1097, cannot be seen as active in land transactions in any documentary collection.41 Whether or not judicial roles were remunerative enough to make a career out of on their own, it is at least clear that this family’s prominence was not linked to landed wealth.

Stefanardo iudex and missus appears as a consul in 1138 too, and then four more times up to 1149, but was younger than Gualterio. His hinterland is clear; he was from the rising small town of Vimercate, where he is attested with land from 1133; between 1150 and 1153 he left Milan and retired back to Vimercate, where he was a land dealer (as iudex de Vicomercato de civitate Mediolani) and also active in judicial roles, until his death after 1183, by when he must have been around eighty; his family remained there after that, and never supplied consuls again—even if they did not abandon an attachment to Milan, for the Stefanardi family still referred to themselves as being from the city in 1211, and their descendants had a city base too.⁴² Why Stefanardo himself gave up on a Milanese career is unknown, but he was certainly prominent in Vimercate afterwards, thanks in large part, one assumes, to the prestige of his past history. We can at least in this case (thanks to the survival of Vimercate’s church archive) say roughly what his economic resources were based on: the small scale of his transactions (a few fields at a time) makes it hard to see him more than as a medium owner, for all his success as a city figure.

Oberto dall’Orto was similar as well. He was consul seven times between 1140 and 1158, and then, after a break, twice in 1169–71; his son Anselmo was consul three times in 1155–62. Anselmo, too, joined Barbarossa after that, and was not consul again, but it is significant that this family did not face eclipse, for Oberto was important enough to be recalled to serve after the city was rebuilt. Again, we cannot trace Oberto’s family in our land documents, except as witnesses (an earlier Anselmo was a land-measurer for the monastery of Chiaravalle in 1139, but this is our only clear reference to a wider activity).43 But both Oberto—called vir sapiens by the German chronicler Vincent of Prague and also in his death entry in the cathedral necrology in 1175—and Anselmo appear, uniquely, as authors of short legal text-books which still survive, showing that both were trained in Roman law; indeed, Oberto’s texts, about the law of fiefs, are in the form of letters to Anselmo while he was away studying, probably in the 1140s. This latter study was almost certainly in Bologna, for one of Anselmo’s own law tracts says that he had been there; but Oberto, whose title of iudex et missus is initially attached to King Lothar III (so he got the title between Lothar’s accession in 1125 and Oberto’s own first appearance in 1131), must have himself trained in the early 1120s or indeed earlier, when Bologna was much less prominent. Peter Classen thinks he was trained in Milan itself; Pavia is a possible alternative, for its legal teaching was well-established in the eleventh century.⁴⁴ But Oberto’s work shows us that the legal training available to him, and thus presumably his contemporaries also, must have already been complex in the 1120s at the latest, wherever it was based. We shall come back to this later, as these texts are important for us, but they are relevant here as a marker of the depth of legal knowledge in the city, one which might well have meant that being a iudex et missus was also remunerative: it is reasonable, then, to see Oberto as on Stefanardo’s level in terms of resources. It was knowledge which was valued outside the city too. Oberto had so much prestige that he was called on to arbitrate a boundary dispute between the communes of Verona and Ferrara in 1151 on his own—a remarkable prominence for a single lawyer; furthermore, a Verona text of 1147 shows six Milanese legal experts, including Oberto and Stefanardo (flanked by four non-judicial Milanesi, including Malastreva Burro and a member of the da Rhò family), called in to give a highly Romanist consilium, legal opinion, during a dispute about feudal law.45

Girardo Cagapisto was in Verona in 1147 too, and he was the most active consul of the entire period we are dealing with here, with as many as fourteen stints as consul between 1141 and 1180—almost as many as he could have had, given that consuls seem not to have served for two successive years, and given the break in consuls in 1163–66—and was a representative of the city at the great peacemaking meeting in Venice in 1177 after the Lombard cities’ victory over Barbarossa the year before. He too was an expert in Roman and feudal law, for he calls himself causidicus, jurist, and his name is cited together with Oberto’s as constant points of reference in the basic text of feudal law (partially drawing on Oberto’s letters), the Libri or Consuetudines feudorum. He was evidently a close colleague of Oberto, even if they often served in alternate years, and they were together as consuls in 1154, active protagonists in the first stand-off between Milan and Barbarossa. (This did not go well; they guided the German army out of the richer areas of the Milanese, the army ran short of supplies, and Barbarossa destroyed the Milanese castle of Rosate in reprisal—the Milanesi, alarmed, responded by destroying Girardo’s own house, and he did not serve again as consul until 1160, by when relations with the emperor had broken down, the biggest gap in his career.) We can say rather more about the Cagapisto family than about that of other iudices.

Girardo was certainly its most successful family member, and was visible elsewhere in the city, as some of the other Milanese iudices were not; his heirs, who can be tracked into the next century, carried on his legal expertise, and were notaries as well. In 1188, after his death, the city consuls divided some of his land among his three sons, and the text lists the places where they were located, four in number, west and east of the city (a respectable range, even if we cannot be sure of the scale here); other citations of the family before that add references to urban land and rural land in a couple more places, including some tithes in Bruzzano, slightly farther south, which they bought in 1135 and ceded back to the Milanese church of S. Eusebio in 1151 (see map 3). The tithes were not enough to make the family aristocratic, but are certainly signs of prosperity; so is a land acquisition by Girardo north-west of the city in 1170 from the da Baggio for £110, although that turned into a legal battle subsequently, won by Girardo. We could see the Cagapisto as a reasonably well-off medium rentier family. Girardo may possibly have been better off than Stefanardo, whose landholding was more restricted; but the range between the two may be a guide to the economic level of these other judicial families as well.⁴⁶ These families did not make it in economic terms even into the second stratum of the élite, which included families like the Scaccabarozzi; it is best to see them as a third level, one which I will call the ‘medium élite’. We shall meet this stratum again when we look at Pisa, and especially Rome.

Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more.47 The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-.⁴⁸ But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office.49 Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side.⁵⁰ But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.⁵¹

To sum up here: the Milanese commune after 1138 had aristocrats involved in it, to be sure, but they were in a minority; and its most recurrently active members, some with goliardic names, were all judicial experts, with relatively few resources. This certainly fits the fact that far and away the best-documented activity its consuls engaged in was judging court cases. Justice and internal peace were explicitly important virtues in this period. Mosè del Brolo, a noted city intellectual in nearby Bergamo, wrote a poem called the Liber Pergaminus in praise of his city around 1120 in which his only reference to what must have been consuls (twelve viri sancti, changing annually) focussed on their day-and-night engagement with law and justice, which created so great a peace in the city that there did not need to be tower-houses there. All the same, it has to be added that this cannot by any means have been all that consuls did: for cities also fought wars (Mosè said the consuls trained Bergamo’s youth in fighting, too), in particular, in Milan’s case, against Como between 1118 and 1127, Pavia and Cremona in 1129 and 1136, Cremona again in 1137–38, Pavia again in 1154–55, and of course against Barbarossa after 1158. The Como poem on its losing war with Milan makes it clear that iudices were among the combatants.52 Legal experts did not seem inappropriate for war, it is clear; they had swords as well as robes. And it is even clearer that they did not seem inappropriate ambassadors, including in difficult negotiations, as with Oberto dall’Orto and Girardo Cagapisto in front of Barbarossa in 1154—Oberto was indeed praised not only for his wisdom but for his eloquence in a second meeting with Barbarossa at Roncaglia in 1158 (in both Latin and Italian; evidently this was no longer to be taken for granted among the laity) by Vincent of Prague.⁵³

Judicial expertise was thus essential for consular government, and not inconsistent with fighting; and the latter brought iudices closer to the aristocracy again. I have been dividing the city’s leadership into three economic strata, with the top level holding lands in a wide variety of localities, including tithes held in fief and up to a couple of castles, roughly corresponding to the military aristocracy; some valvassores nonetheless operated at a second level, together with leading cives, with no castles and less land; judicial experts tended, for their part, to come from the next level down again, the ‘medium élite’, with rather fewer (even if not trivial) landed resources. These distinctions mattered, and had parallels elsewhere, as we shall see in later chapters. On the other hand, this was not an enormously wide economic spectrum, for, even if aristocrats certainly had much more land than legal experts, such landholding was never visibly very extensive in the case of city-dwellers: in Milan and its territory, only rural families had the large collections of castles which were the normal prerequisite for aristocratic status elsewhere in Europe. Inside the city, aristocrats (especially capitanei) were the only holders of castles, but these rarely appear in our sources for the families; they were most of the holders of signorial rights,54 although seldom in more than a couple of villages; they were most of the holders of fiefs of tithes, but here some clearly non-aristocratic families like the second-level Scaccabarozzi and the third-level Cagapisto could buy them too. Furthermore, we find both aristocrats and non-aristocrats with the same sort of landholding structure: whether larger or smaller, it was fragmented, scattered across much of the Milanese, and also almost never, in our documents, consisted of whole estates. This parallelism is important for our understanding of the lack of obvious tension between the strata of the Milanese landowning élites. (It also gives a further context to Otto of Freising’s distaste: indeed, none of Milan’s aristocrats may have seemed like ‘real’ aristocrats to him; all of them were too urban, and, overall, not rich enough, to be fully taken into consideration.) On the basis of Milanese material, indeed, Maire Vigueur is quite right to refer to the ‘honest’ landed patrimony of consuls; and he is almost certain to be right that what we are seeing here is in some sense a single group, members of what he calls the mounted militia, and, indeed, that this commonality of social standing was—at least after the 1130s—more important than the traditional division between milites and cives, let alone between capitanei and valvassores, which has made Milan’s commune seem unusually aristocratic to many scholars.

I would indeed push this point further: Milan is well-known for being the type-example of an aristocratic commune, but actually, it was almost the opposite. In its opening decade or two, it certainly was aristocrat-dominated, but after the 1130s the consuls who take centre stage for the rest of the century were not aristocrats, but members of the third level of the urban élite (or of Maire Vigueur’s militia), by no means particularly important in landed terms, and also outside the archiepiscopal entourage which had dominated the city hitherto. It is not possible to refigure Milan’s crystallising commune as a radical undermining of aristocratic power, however; that would go too far the other way. There were, even in the years of hegemony of Oberto, Girardo, and their successors, more aristocrats among Milan’s consuls than there were in most cities, as we shall see in chapter 5. It is clear, indeed, that—even if plenty of urban aristocrats did keep out of the early commune, showing that political homogeneity in the city was not total—the city’s aristocracy, taken as a whole, was not opposed in principle to the local influence of the judicial families; that something linked them together. Put another way, the economic and status differences that did exist between aristocrats and jurists did not stop them from all being accepted as political players in Milan. But this creates a further problem of explanation. We cannot simply take for granted that city aristocrats and jurists formed a single political or military community; for they demonstrably did not in other cities, including in my other two case studies, Pisa and Rome. Why at least some aristocratic families such as the da Rhò, with a long tradition of political activism in favour of the status quo and a continuing closeness to the cathedral, were happy to participate in such a single community in Milan needs more discussion; and here we need to come back to the issue of culture.

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We do not have any contemporary narrative sources for Milan between the end of Landolfo’s chronicle in 1136 and the start of the Milanese Annals in 1154, which depicts a consular régime going it heroically alone against Barbarossa, until the disaster of 1162 and the revival thereafter.55 It will be clear that I see the intervening period as the crucial moment of change, when the Milanesi developed a communal structure which was indeed new, and was by now partially dominated by men who had far fewer links to the traditional hierarchies which still persisted in Milan, the archbishop’s entourage, the cathedral chapter, the vassalic network of the ordines. Whether this means they were also more ‘civic’ in their self-image, as Italian historiography often stresses, seems to me a misleading problem; the best example of a novel civic sensibility which I have so far been able to offer is Caca- names, and what I take away from all recent scholarship on the Milanesi and other Italians at war is that military values, far from being ‘aristocratic’ and thus opposed to the vita civile of later fame, were not just necessary, given all the local wars just mentioned, but one of the major markers of civic identity itself. A clear demonstration of this indeed comes from exactly this period, even if not precisely from Milan: it is the Liber Cumanus, an anonymous 2030-line poem about the heroic defence of Como against Milan in the war of 1118–27. This text has not been studied much, partly because its length and poetic diction have put off military historians, and partly because its relentless focus on the joys, horrors, and stratagems of what must have been the closest the early twelfth century came to total war has put off literary scholars. Here, the Comaschi are, precisely, the cives, all of them, fighting both on horseback and on foot; the Milanesi are mostly hostes, the enemy. The poem does, once, mention consuls as the leaders of the war from Como’s side, but they are called proceres, aristocrats, rather more often, and the collectivity is seen as consisting of the whole city rather than any hierarchy, whether feudo-vassalic or consular.56 This is not a text which will tell us much about the move to a consular régime, then, whether consciously or unconsciously, unlike some of the parallel Pisan poems which will be discussed in the next chapter. But it certainly tells us that civic and military values were in this context absolutely unitary: including in the fact that someone who was transparently a direct participant in the war—and perhaps a layman, for Christian imagery is virtually absent from the text—had a full control over the rules of poetry. I shall not be claiming any different ‘civic’ sensibility from this for anywhere in Italy, indeed. But what it was that the Milanese consular élite did think they were doing as they led the city away from the archbishop’s court and towards a largely judicially led set of mid-century political structures is not something we can sidestep. So here let us look more closely at what Oberto dall’Orto and his son wrote; for these are the only known texts from the pen of any of our consuls, and they deserve some attention in their own right—and as works by consuls, not just as contributions to the development of law, which is the context in which they have mostly been studied.

We have to recognise from the start that Oberto and Anselmo wrote law tracts, not musings about politics; what they thought about the consular office or communal identity was not part of their chosen remit in the least. Anselmo is the easier to deal with, for he essentially wrote Roman law—a tract on initial actions in cases, and a (very short and less Romanist) tract on forms of leasing. The latter at least has some link to contemporary leasing activities; the former, however, had particularly little resonance in Milan, where Lombard law and legal procedure remained dominant, and Roman law, even if—evidently—it was studied by legal experts, and also was a recognised resource for judges (as we shall see for Oberto in a moment), was not explicitly cited in consular judgements. This contradiction has long been known; Antonio Padoa Schioppa and Peter Classen developed the point thirty years ago, when they showed (thanks in part to the evidence of the Verona judgement) that there was much more Romanist knowledge in Milan than the consular sentences would allow one to think; Anselmo is simply the best example of that.57 Whether he regarded his Bolognese training as simply a legal qualification, or whether it underpinned his wider conceptualisation of how law worked, cannot be said from these texts, although we should not discount the latter: in the next generation, Rolando di Guamignano of Lucca, a highly trained jurist who had a long career as a public official in a city which, like Milan, did not follow Roman law, wrote a detailed commentary on part of the Digest, the very size of which (over five hundred pages in the new edition) implies that he saw the principles of Roman law as potentially relevant in a non-Roman city.⁵⁸ The density of legal culture is anyway very clear here.

Oberto’s two letters are more unusual in that they deal with feudal law; they in fact became core sections of the later Libri feudorum, and are almost the only sections ascribed to a named author. They are intelligent and practical guides from an experienced magistrate, who refers to himself at the start as frequently judging disputes in Milan—i.e. as a consul—and, in the second letter, as being too busy to write because he is ‘often busy with the care of our respublica, and held [up] by many disputes of private persons, and other impediments of innumerable things’.59 They set out rules for feudal investiture, for the alienation and inheritance of fiefs, for disputing between lords and vassals, and for the situations in which fiefs might be confiscated. They do so in a constant mental framework taken from Roman law, with verbal echoes of Justinian’s Corpus iuris, occasional direct citations of it, and references to Titius and Sempronius, the John Doe and Richard Roe of Roman law, although not to any of the cuter distinctions of subsequent Romanist law tracts. They also refer to the long-established tradition of Lombard law, and to slightly earlier tracts on feudal law. Oberto at the start remarks that, although cases are (by implication in Milan) sometimes decided by Lombard, sometimes by Roman, and sometimes by customary law, and customary law is different from place to place, he at least wishes to set out how it works in Milan, with respect to feudal law, in which Roman law does not ‘extend its force enough to defeat usus or mores’, local customs. This phrase has often been used to show Oberto’s exaltation of Milanese customary law over Roman law, but that is not what he means; he is explicitly talking about the law of fiefs here, which Roman law indeed does not cover, given that fiefs had not been invented yet in the sixth century.⁶⁰ Rather, Oberto is trying to elevate feudal law to the level of Roman law, a task in which he (and the authors of the rest of the text) succeeded, for the Libri feudorum became a standard addition to the Corpus iuris thereafter, and also the basis for all later medieval understanding of how feudal law worked—as well as, on a more local level, a core element in Milan’s own customary laws, when they were written down in 1216.61

One can thus see these letters as Oberto trying to create more system in his normative arsenal: Lombard and Roman law are both stable written corpora, but feudal law is not, and it should be. This seems to reflect his practical experience as a judge of disputes—and as a judge of feudal disputes too, which did indeed come to the consular court with a certain regularity.⁶² But there is another way of looking at these texts: when an experienced and educated consul and judge in Milan, from an urban and non-aristocratic background, wanted to fill gaps in the legal systems at his disposal, what he focussed on was the law of fiefs, which was rarely of relevance to more than the few families who were part of the military ordines. Indeed, he tells us much more about feudal relationships in the Milanese than does any other source at all, even if we exclude from his text (and I am not sure that we should) the famous section in which he explains what the difference is between capitanei and valvassores—which is, whether accurate or not, the only such explanation surviving anywhere.⁶³ So, what is a ‘civic’, Roman-law-trained consul doing in the 1140s? He is thinking about the feudal world.

We come full circle here. Oberto was not part of the archbishop’s entourage, nor, as far as we know, did he hold any fiefs; and I do not think it would be too much to suppose that he was very happy about an environment in which it was legally trained men like him who ran the commune and not (or not only) those from the feudal/signorial world; but all the same, when he sought to put his mark on law, it was that world which was his main concern. Bureaucrats in the Third Reich had the concept of ‘working towards the Führer’, trying to get inside his supposed mind-set;64 Oberto could be seen, with no more than a little exaggeration, as ‘working towards the aristocracy’. Oberto’s lifetime political practice took Milan away from traditional hierarchies; furthermore, he (unlike his son) was sufficiently opposed to Frederick Barbarossa to be recalled as a consul when Milan was rebuilt after 1167, and we need not doubt that had he still been alive he would have been with Girardo Cagapisto in Venice in 1177. But in his thought-world, those traditional hierarchies took centre stage. When, earlier, Barbarossa used Roman law to justify his claims to sovereignty at Roncaglia in 1158, and the consuls of the Italian cities conceded his right to do so,⁶⁵ Oberto (who was a consul in that year, and present at Roncaglia), given both his Romanist training and his thought-world, must have been particularly easy to convince—at least before the war between the emperor and Milan showed him what that sovereignty meant in practice. This sharp opposition between practice and thought sums up what I mean by sleepwalking (above, p. 20). Oberto was (along with his peers) taking his city in a profoundly new direction, but his mind was elsewhere. And that contradiction—or, perhaps better, the fact that it was not perceived as one, as far as we can tell—also allows us to see that the fact that Milan’s commune developed into a structure which was no longer aristocratic-dominated matters less than one might expect: it was run by people who were very often not from that world, and who in many ways worked against it, but they identified with it all the same. The aristocrats who kept out of the commune after 1138 were presumably only too aware of that new direction, but the acceptance of it by the da Rhò and the Burri, and, over all, the absence of conflict about it in a city which had had its full share of internal turbulence, may well be because the aristocratic strata were also aware of Oberto’s thought-world.

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Milan’s government in 1150 was quite different from that of the eleventh century in many ways. I have stressed the 1130s as the turning-point, and it is not only the prosopography of later consuls that makes it so; Milan’s new governing structures became fully established in that period as well. Up to the 1090s, as we have seen, justice in the city was still run through placita, assemblies which, although given their legitimacy by large turnouts, and certainly choreographed by judicial experts (including the consul Gualterio’s probable grandfather), were called by superior powers and shot through with aristocratic representation. Placita then ended, even if their top-down patterning was still attached to the archbishop’s entourage. But by now, from the 1090s, there were also civic assemblies, the meetings of the concio, whose public participation was very wide, as it seems, and whose aggregation was almost certainly based on collective oaths of a type which had appeared in the city in the troubles of the middle decades of the eleventh century. Such assemblies were an old tradition too, but they were more regular and increasingly formalised now, in reaction to the weakening of public power, and they seem to have been both bottom-up deliberative groupings (not dependent on or looking to a superior power, that is to say; the archbishop did not call them, but went to them) and groupings with relatively little social exclusion (we cannot tell if they included the urban poor, and they may not have done so very often, but women, normally excluded from the very male politics of Italian cities, were at least part of the collective grouping of 1117, according to Landolfo of S. Paolo).66 It was a concio, again according to Landolfo, which decided on the Como war in 1118, the most momentous decision of that decade, and another concio which brought down Anselmo V in 1135.

It was thus Milan’s assembly which first developed a new formal structure, as a defensive reaction against the political and institutional crisis of the Kingdom of Italy; but this was only one element of the ideal-type commune as I have characterised it. Autonomous consular power developed later, and not necessarily as a defence against political breakdown, for it did so with respect to an archbishop who was clearly still powerful: although we cannot track direct conflict between the archbishop (and his entourage) and the consuls of the late 1130s and onwards, there was a structural opposition between them, which I have tried to characterise. All the same, it was the concio which acted as the alternative legitimisation for that newly developing consular practice, which, however élitist that practice in reality was, was for the first time separate from the power of the archbishop. Consular judgements did not adopt the older placitum tradition; even though they for long had many witnesses, which marks a form of continued collective basis for consular authority, that basis was the concio by now, and did not have roots in the hierarchies of the past. The consuls were, furthermore, no longer overwhelmingly aristocratic and more often from the ‘medium élite’, and the latter looked to that wider city community more than they did to the archiepiscopal hierarchy. Nor did they look to the archbishop’s hierarchy ever again, and when the rest of the Milanese aristocracy came back to communal politics later in the century, they did it on consular terms, not their own. But it does also have to be said that the consulate took a long time to develop the same formalised power that placita had provided. To abandon the placitum tradition was to a large extent a retreat, at least in the initial decades when the legitimacy of the powers of the commune remained inchoate; and when consular power, and communal identity, gained a public standing and a formality in its own right, in the 1140s and onwards, the older tradition of the placitum was no longer relevant, and the institutions which embodied power had to be new. This novelty was not lessened by the fact that the whole of the rest of consular history was devoted to making any popular power less real: the consular élite was wider than the aristocracy, but the militia of horsemen was still only 10–15 percent of the population (indeed, perhaps less than that in Milan) and it wished to remain that way. In the end, after our period, the concio would be replaced by narrower collective bodies, or else turn back into a top-down ceremonial assembly.67

Milan, then, was, if not radical, at least a mixture of radical and conservative. Its commune first started to develop in a world in which archbishops had a very great transactional power, and its first leaders were part of the archiepiscopal entourage, as well as being, for the most part, from aristocratic families which had ruled the city constantly for a hundred years and more, including when the Pataria were powerful. It is indeed quite possible that it shifted in a judicial direction simply because the archbishop recognised that ‘his’ consuls were going to need to run court cases, and perhaps he thought that they could be left to do that, while the traditional hierarchy ran the rest of the city. I would guess that what may have begun to undermine that comfortable continuity, already in the 1120s, was the Como war, for that war, unlike its predecessors, was a long-lasting and bloody affair which exhausted both sides, and required a much more total organisation of the military resources of Milan to win—and indeed of its financial resources, for it is the context for the first documented attempt at a land-tax in the Comasco, of a type which would not be generalised in peacetime for another generation, which is likely to have been matched in Milan too.68 That war could only be won by the militia in Maire Vigueur’s sense, which certainly included the judicial stratum, and will further have legitimised their role as city rulers; and it was that war which was the template for those of the future, in the 1130s and later. But, however it happened, the increasingly formalised body of the 1140s had a quite different complexion from that of the 1120s, and one which pointed in a different political direction. The archbishop lost centrality, and half the urban aristocracy dropped out as well; the most frequent consuls—who became the city’s ambassadors to Barbarossa—were not only judicially trained, but also had relatively restricted landed patrimonies. Conversely, notwithstanding this, if Oberto dall’Orto is any guide, it is far from clear that the consuls were fully aware of these major changes as a break; for the direction of their thoughts was bound up with the aristocratic world as well. I say ‘thoughts’, not ‘values’. In fact, all the signs are that the range of prickly honour-based values which marked the aristocratic world marked all types of city leader as well; a popular distaste for rural oppression and élite bad-boy city rampaging, which is occasionally seen at the end of the twelfth century and was at the core of anti-magnate legislation later in the thirteenth, is not documented in any visible way in our period.⁶⁹ This will have made the mixture of radical and conservative still easier to manage. But thoughts are arguably more important here. That they worked in a different way from the practical politics of the early to mid-twelfth century in Milan is clear, at least to me; and it is that difference that I want to stress. But I also want to stress that thought-worlds and practices are both important: not least when people act without really knowing what they are doing, with Minerva’s owl flying out at dusk, as it usually does.

The question now is how typical Milan was; so next we will test what I have proposed on Pisa. Pisa was a very different city, very focussed on the sea, and with a long-standing tradition of maritime aggression already by 1100; but its sources are rich in the same kind of way as those of Milan, and in some senses still richer, as we shall now see.