3

PISA

The 1110s were a difficult and uncertain time throughout the fragmenting Kingdom of Italy, and indeed beyond, as we saw for Milan and shall see again for Rome; but not in Pisa. Indeed, as it seems, the Pisans were having fun. On the sixth of August 1113, Pisa’s lucky day, three hundred ships sailed out of the port of Pisa, on a raiding expedition to the Balearic Islands, which were then under Muslim rule. This was not itself unusual for Pisa; across the whole of the previous century the city had run such raids once every fifteen years or so. This was a large expedition, however—although definitely Pisan-led, other cities of Tuscany took part in it, and it soon had support from Catalonia and Languedoc as well—and also a long one, for it took two years, not a few weeks; and, not least, it was also enthusiastically written up soon after the event, not just in Pisan annals and short poetic texts as were the other raids, but also in a very long poem in heavily Virgilian hexameters, the Liber Maiorichinus, the Book of Mallorca, a third of the length of the Aeneid itself. This text shows very clearly how heroic the Pisans thought they were, how strong in resolve, how martial, how well-led, by their twelve consuls, their archbishop, and their viscount. The stress on the consuls is indeed much greater than on the archbishop and viscount, a point we shall come back to; but what is equally striking is the stress on very many other Pisans too: dozens of them are named in the battle scenes, with their father’s name as well, so that even we can often identify them, and contemporaries must usually have been able to do so. It almost seems as if the author (anonymous, but possibly a cleric named Enrico) might have invited people to make a contribution so as to be included, as with the yellow pages of a phone-book. But, however they were chosen, they convey very strongly the sense of a victorious collective enterprise: not aristocrats together with commoners, or not explicitly so, but all male Pisans together, the Pisan cives or populus, devoted to destroying their enemies (or, if you prefer, victims) and taking their treasure.1

Milan in the 1110s, as we saw in the last chapter, was also run by the archbishop and consuls, and we have analogous poetic texts from Lombardy as well, at least from Como and Bergamo. Whatever divided Italian cities in this period, they were going through many similar social and political processes, and reacting to them in some similar ways. But all the same, the experience Pisa had of the slow development of the city commune was very different from that of Milan. Milan’s commune, for a start, although it developed early by Italian standards, did not begin to institutionalise itself until the 1130s; but Pisa had one of the earliest established communes of all, together with Genoa, with the years around 1110 being the most likely period for its crystallisation—as the Balearic campaign itself shows, but not only that—and the first references to men called ‘consuls’ in the city going back to the 1080s. This cannot be a mere chance of the documentation; too many different sorts of source give us the same sorts of evidence here, as we shall see later. Pisan historians have, for the last century and more, been transfixed by this, and have engaged in a good deal of research on the wide period of the origin of the commune, the century 1050–1150; the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were, after all, the high point in Pisan history, and Pisa University is a large and active one. There is good-quality work on our period as a result, some very recent, and it is much more comprehensive than that on Milan—nearly every élite family has a detailed study, for example; I will use them heavily here.2 Oddly, however, the early twelfth century lacks a full study, and certainly deserves another look.

Pisa was a rather smaller city than Milan, but it was both on the Mediterranean coast and on the river Arno, and the port of Pisa was the main funnel for goods into Tuscany from the outside by the end of the tenth century; commerce was sufficiently important in the city by the twelfth century that evidence for it sometimes intrudes even into the land transactions which are, here as elsewhere, our most substantial source for the period.³ The Pisan diocese was also relatively small, and much of it was the marshland of the Arno delta; local agriculture was rich, but its acreage was not enormous. The Pisans could have moved against their urban neighbours, as the Milanesi did at the expense of the cities around them, and they certainly engaged in border wars with Lucca, their nearest rival, throughout much of the twelfth century; but the two were fairly evenly matched, and the Pisans could not easily have copied the Milanese delight in destroying their neighbours. They did expand their territory, quite substantially, but above all into less populated inland and coastal regions which were outside the control of other cities. By contrast, however, Pisans had an interest in the sea which soon developed well beyond simply having a port.

The early eleventh-century western Mediterranean had an active commercial network, based on the sea-routes between southern Spain, Sicily, and Tunisia and extending from there east to Egypt, always the Mediterranean commercial powerhouse.⁴ It was therefore focussed on the Muslim-ruled Mediterranean, and Pisa was for long rather marginal to it. So the Arno city began, every so often, simply to raid the rich cities of the Muslim world; the size and ferocity of the Pisan fleet was sufficient to overmaster urban centres which were not expecting such systematic assaults. In 1005, the Pisans attacked Reggio Calabria, in 1015–16 Arab bridgeheads in Sardinia, in 1034 Bona (modern Annaba in Algeria), in 1064 Palermo, in 1087 Mahdīya and Zawīla in Tunisia, in 1092 Tortosa in Spain (a rare defeat), in 1098 east to Palestine as part of the First Crusade, then the Balearic Islands in 1113–15.5 Like the Vikings, or the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, the Pisans were here focussed on booty; but merchants and pirates were always hard to distinguish in the medieval world. The historian Goffredo Malaterra, writing in late eleventh-century southern Italy, indeed saw the 1064 Palermo campaign as simply a violent mercantile operation, by Pisans who were ‘normally dedicated more to commercial gain than warlike exercises’—an illuminating phrase, not least because it is by no means intended as a compliment. In effect, in fact, what the Pisans did with their intermittent eleventh-century raiding was to establish a sufficient respect and fear of them as military players that they could become more fully a part of the pre-existing network of commercial relations in the western Mediterranean, a network which then extended eastwards with the First Crusade, and was institutionalised in the twelfth century in Pisan trading agreements from Morocco via the Byzantine empire to Syria.⁶ Parallel to this was also their establishment of what slowly turned unto a small maritime empire, on the islands of Corsica and (later on) Sardinia; the bishop of Pisa indeed became an archbishop after 1092 because Pope Urban II put Corsica under his jurisdiction.⁷ They were matched in all of this step by step, for almost identical reasons, by the Genoese, sometimes their allies but also, structurally, their rivals and enemies. But the Genoese did not document their early activities with the detail and brio that the Pisans did.8

In the 1060s, the Pisans began to build their stupendous new cathedral, that white marble extravaganza, innovative in a dozen ways, which is still there today, along with its oddly angled bell-tower. The left side of the façade of the cathedral is studded with inscriptions, dating from the broad period 1070–1150. These inscriptions include some epitaphs—three for the main cathedral architect, Buscheto (documented 1104–10), one of which compares him favourably to Ulysses and Daedalus—but also two poems about Pisan victories: the just-listed sequence of heroic (to Pisans) sackings of islands and cities, the booty from which indeed in large part explicitly paid for the building of the church. This commemoration in stone of bold military operations, and its close association with such an innovative and ambitious architectural project, has no parallels anywhere in this period. It clearly conveys civic pride in a very general sense; and the cives are regularly featured in the texts: maiores, medii, and minores, rich and poor alike, as the epigraphic poem on the sack of Palermo says.⁹

The Pisans were indeed not short of civic pride in any way. The classical comparisons already mentioned for Buscheto had plenty of parallels in other things the Pisans did and said. They compared themselves to ancient Rome on numerous occasions—Pisa was Roma altera, the second Rome, as one mid-twelfth-century poem says, copied into the Liber Maiorichinus manuscript; an inscription formerly on the Porta Aurea, the city’s river-gate, referred to Pisa as the ‘general ornament of empire’, i.e. that of Rome.¹⁰ There are other such comparisons in the Liber Maiorichinus itself.11 A slightly earlier text, the Carmen in victoria Pisanorum, a bloodthirsty poem about the Mahdīya campaign of 1087, starts ‘I renew the memory of the ancient Romans’, and refers to the fall of Carthage (and also Troy), as well as paralleling the Pisans to Old Testament heroes such as Gideon and the Maccabees.¹² That poem itself survives in a fascinating miscellany dated to 1119 called the Liber Guidonis, compiled by a certain Guido of Pisa who may have risen to become a cardinal in the next decade, which attests to a true obsession with ancient Rome, in that much of the rest of the texts of the miscellany is about it: classical histories of Troy (seen as a proto-Rome), Paul the Deacon’s Historia Romana, and one of the earliest descriptions of the surviving classical buildings of the eternal city. Rome here is a metaphor for the confident and ‘belligerent’ Pisa of the 1110s.¹³ This would reach its culmination in 1155 when the Pisans decided to create their own Romanist law-code, the double Constitutum legis and usus, which was entrusted to constitutores or sapientes, local legal experts, in a carefully planned five-year process which ended with the first of the two codes coming into force on 1 January 1161, and the other shortly after. The Constitutum usus proudly states that the Pisans had mostly lived by Roman law ‘for a long time’, a multis retro temporibus, a statement which, as earlier documentary sources show, was totally false, but one which was a preparation for the fullest reception of classical Roman law into any part of twelfth-century Latin Europe. The Pisans’ absorption of Roman law was rapid and complex, and also not always obviously useful for the conduct of their daily business; it must have been part, and the most committed part, of this constant reiteration of Roman-ness by Pisan texts—one which certainly has parallels in the classicising trends of other cities, but one which the Pisans were self-satisfied enough to carry through to the end.14

But ‘civic pride’ is also a fairly vague term. What it meant in concrete—perhaps institutional, and certainly political—terms is another matter; and what Pisans meant by it in the twelfth century was not by any means necessarily the same as they had meant in the eleventh. The marquis of Tuscany was dominant in Pisa until the mid-1070s at the earliest, for example, and the city’s autonomy cannot yet be assumed. The Pisans raided abroad for their own benefit, but usually with the encouragement, and perhaps sometimes at the request, of other powers: the pope and the powerful marquise of Tuscany Matilda for the Mahdīya campaign, and maybe already pope and marquis for the Palermo campaign; certainly pope and archbishop for the First Crusade (Pisa’s first archbishop Daiberto, who led the joint Pisan-Genoese expedition in 1098, also became the first Latin patriarch of Jerusalem); fifteen years later, the archbishop accompanied the Pisans on the Balearic campaign and the pope sent his legate and a flag, which was assigned its own consular standard-bearer, although that campaign was certainly a city initiative.¹⁵ The constant reiteration in our sources of the use made of the booty thus gained to build the cathedral also attests to a religious edge to this raiding, even if crusading imagery is not as pervasive in these texts as historians often say.¹⁶ The cathedral’s building campaign was itself by the 1090s incorporated institutionally into its own body, the Opera of the cathedral, whose lay administrators or operarii, under archiepiscopal control, were as prominent as consuls in some of our early twelfth-century documents;¹⁷ indeed, the bishop/archbishop of Pisa was equally prominent in many of our sources, as we shall see.

Given all this, Pisan armies abroad are not an inevitable sign of a move towards lay and civic independence. Indeed, our eleventh-century texts simply praise the Arno city as a civitas, as all urban praise texts had done in the early middle ages, which does not in itself show that Pisa was acting as an autonomous body. The most one can say is that, to be able to organise such large expeditions abroad, the Pisans must have been able to operate as an effective and coherent collectivity already in the third quarter of the eleventh century, no matter on whose behalf they acted. The same is true for the expensive building of the cathedral, entrusted, as we have just seen, in large part to lay operarii. That was of great importance when the Pisans did develop their own urban autonomy, which they did in as unplanned a way as did the Milanesi. We cannot say that the Pisan raids prefigured the city commune, nor that the commune was the natural result of the ‘private organisation of ship-owners and sea merchants’, in Gioacchino Volpe’s famous phrase at the opening of his history of the city;18 all the same, when the Pisan leadership sleepwalked into the commune, they found that quite a lot of the work had already been done.

To get a sense of how the commune developed, we need to look at the political history of the city across the century we are focussing on—here shortened to the period between around 1060 and 1130, for after that there is no doubt of the stability of the Pisan commune—a history which is, fortunately, illuminated by some unusual documents, as unusual in their own way as Pisa’s war poetry; then, as with Milan, we will look at exactly who the consuls of Pisa were, for here too we can understand much more about what the city’s leaders thought they were doing if we see what sorts of background they had. We have no writings from Pisan consuls themselves, unfortunately, at least until the city’s Annals were written by Bernardo Maragone, a second-rank official and magistrate, from the 1150s onwards;19 but the hunting of family affiliations here is illuminating in itself, as I hope to show.

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Pisa in the 1060s and 1070s was firmly under the rule of the marquis of Tuscany Gottefredo (d. 1069) and then his widow and ruling marquise, the ducatrix (or comitissa, or marchionissa) Beatrice, and then her daughter Matilda. Tuscany was the part of the Kingdom of Italy whose eleventh-century political structure was the most solid, and the most traditional in format (far more so than it was in Milan), with political life dominated by the marchesal entourage, and the public assembly of the placitum law-court very visible in our evidence, into the 1070s in most places. Half a dozen surviving placita show this system in operation in Pisa, where the marquises were often based in this period; they were standard events, and widely attended by members of Pisa’s urban élite.²⁰ This is our starting-point, then; and it is one which was never at any point visibly contested by the Pisans. The city had no traditions similar to the urban uprisings which studded the history of Milan, and, actually, even the civil war period of the 1080s–90s only brought a brief period of tension in Pisa, perhaps restricted to the later 1080s as we shall see, and then no major internal trouble again for at least sixty and perhaps a hundred years:²¹ and that tension was not visibly one between social strata either, unlike often in Milan. Matilda, when she succeeded to the March of Tuscany at the age of thirty at her mother Beatrice’s death in 1076, had less traction in her early years; she never visibly came inside the walls of the city of Pisa, for example, and she shared her judicial role with her viscount of Pisa Ugo II in the only Pisan placitum for her, in 1077.22 But she also showed herself to be a willing patron of the Pisan church, and gave the cathedral a large set of estates in the same year, on condition that the cathedral chapter maintained a regular canonical life—a standard element of the package of ecclesiastical ‘reform’ in the period, of which Matilda was a committed supporter.²³

Once the wars broke out after 1080 between the emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, Henry deposed Matilda from her March in 1081. When he entered Lucca and Pisa in that year, giving each of them major privileges, the Pisans switched to a pro-imperial position. But after he left central Italy in 1084 they returned to Matilda, and were certainly allied again with her and her popes by 1087.²⁴ Marchesal authority was thus not ended by Henry’s acts, but it certainly took a considerable hit—Henry did not appoint a new marquis at all, and Matilda, although she remained very powerful and active in northern Italy, did not reappear in Tuscany for fifteen years. All the same, the wars had less direct effect on Pisa than on many cities; Lucca had two bishops for some time, but Pisa’s pro-Gregorian bishop Gerardo does not seem to have been under threat in the 1080s. Pisa did have more than one family of viscounts, and the imperial-supported family is more prominent in the 1080s, but Matilda’s vicecomital family was back by 1087 (Ugo II was romantically killed on the Mahdīya campaign), without rivalries between the two families being obvious in our sources for later decades.²⁵ The Pisans made sure to have some of Henry’s specific gifts of property confirmed by Matilda later, as with the castle of Pappiana, a major marchesal centre, which Henry had given to the cathedral in 1089, in his last Pisan act, and Matilda gave again in 1103; and otherwise they sat out the war.26

Henry IV’s 1081 diploma to the Pisans has always been seen as a founding charter by historians of the communal movement, and it is certainly the case that the Pisans benefited greatly from its terms, especially in trading privileges. The sentence in it which says that the Pisans could veto any future marquis, as represented by twelve men elected in an assembly, colloquium, called by ringing bells, is now accepted to be a later interpolation into the text (it survives only as a copy of the 1130s), which rids it of its status as a potentially communal charter. Conversely, the document still refers to the communis consensus of the cives, which was needed for anyone wishing to pull down houses in the city, to the Pisan consuetudines de mari, ‘sea customs’, which the emperor recognised, and to a newly legitimised local control over common lands, which were economically very important around Pisa, set in the Arno marshes as it was (not least for timber for ship-building, as we shall see). The city existed as a collectivity, then: it consisted of the ‘faithful citizens’, undifferentiated by social group, to whom Henry addressed his diploma.²⁷

This, to modern Pisan historians, goes rather well with the first-ever reference to Italian city consuls. This is a document of 1080–85 (probably 1080–81) in which one of the Sardinian rulers, Mariano I iudice or king of Torres, frees his Pisan ‘friends’, ammicos (this is a nominative; the document is in the Sard language) from all trading tolls and gives them judicial privileges, ‘for the honour of Bishop Gelardu [Gerardo], viscount Ocu [Ugo], and all the consuls, consolos, of Pisa’. The ammicos are then listed; they are from the leading families visible in the marchesal placita, and their heirs will often become consuls of the city commune. This document has successfully withstood attempts to declare it a forgery, but, notwithstanding that, it too is less clearly part of the ‘move to the commune’ than people often claim. It does not by any means show that consuls were at that point the city’s formal rulers, or indeed that the word consolos denoted any official position; it seems simply to mean members of the city’s élite, and is in this context a synonym of the ammicos.28 This is no less the case with the poem on the Mahdīya campaign, which features two Pisans called principales consules and two called cives nobiles, acting together as military leaders: these men are all or mostly again from the same group of leading families, and we cannot distinguish here between the consules and the nobiles. We cannot, indeed, track any formal lay leadership in the city in the 1080s; even the viscounts are not so prominent in our texts that we could be sure of their directive role (Ugo II gets killed in 1087, but he does not obviously lead the Pisan forces).²⁹ We have a sense of a body of prominent citizens acting collectively, but that is all.

Bishop Gerardo died in 1085 and was not replaced for four years (for the Pisans, an episcopal vacancy was doubtless less bad than rival bishops), and maybe Viscount Ugo’s death created a vacuum too, for his son Ugo III was a child. It was probably in this period, with hot civil war in Italy between two popes, Clement III and (from 1088) Urban II, that political relationships inside the city reached their most difficult point. The Pisan triumphal narratives do not allow themselves the rhetorical space to say so (they are snide about the Genoese and the Lucchesi, but not about fellow-Pisans), so we could not catch tensions from them, but two documents from 1090–92, both surviving as originals, tell us more. In 1089, Daiberto was chosen as bishop: a clever choice, for he had been consecrated priest by a pro-imperial bishop in Germany but then had switched to the Gregorian side and was now enthusiastically backed by Pope Urban.30 In around 1090 (certainly before 1092, for Daiberto is not yet archbishop), he appears in one of these texts as an arbiter over a major civic issue: the height of tower-houses in the city.

Tower-houses for urban élite families were a new development in Italian cities in the later eleventh century, and were regarded as a symbol of potential civic discord and unrest everywhere, for they were certainly defensible (some still survive in Pisa from this period, so we can see it for ourselves), and their tops were excellent locations for ballistas and the like; the bishop says in the text that the ‘ancient plague of pride’ has led to homicide, perjury, incest, and the destruction of houses, which is too generic to tell us much about what was going on, but is at least a marker of trouble—as indeed does the fact that he has been called upon to do such an arbitration in the first place. Daiberto enacts that no future tower should be more than thirty-six brachia (sixty-nine feet) in height—a figure taken straight from Henry IV’s diploma of 1081—and he names the towers which should not be surpassed in height in the future, two north of the Arno, one to the south (two of the towers were those of the future Baldovinaschi and Sismondi families). Only two lay towers (those of Viscount Ugo III from the marquisal vicecomital family, whose family had earned the city’s formal protection after his father’s death, and Pietro di Albizo of the future Casapieri family) and one church campanile, which were already higher, could remain, and in each case no-one could in future go up to the top.³¹

The naming of important citizens is interesting, and once again they match those of city leaders in other sources. But what is most interesting about this text is the city decision-making which it invokes, and also does not invoke. On one level it is not so surprising that Daiberto was the arbiter, and not any lay figure, for if there was tension it was between lay élites; but, anyway, he says he has been advised by sociis viris strenuis et sapientibus, ‘vigorous and wise associates’, who are listed and are indeed from those lay élites, including some of the owners of the towers he names, and also Viscount Pietro, from the family of imperial viscounts—this being a hint that the tension was in part, as already proposed, between pro- and anti-imperial alignments. He does not say they are consuls, however, and consuls do not appear in the document. What does, on the other hand, several times, is the commune colloquium civitatis, ‘the common assembly of the city’, to which anyone can complain about illegal tower activity; this assembly can make exceptions by its commune consilium, ‘common discussion’, if they are for the ‘common utility of the city’, although, if they are not, the populus will take action against infractions. There also appears a formal oath to keep this arbitration, which everyone (we assume every male) over the age of fifteen in the city and its suburbs must swear to, and so must all future fifteen-year-olds. This arbitration was sufficiently important that it was itself sworn to by later consuls, as part of the basic set of laws and customs of the city, as we find from the texts of such oaths in the 1160s; but it is nonetheless not a consular text.32 Rather, it is the establishment of an oath-backed agreement, by a bishop and his sapientes, which—this is the document’s clear implication—has been called for by the ‘common assembly’ and its leaders, and which looks to that assembly for its execution in the future. The assembly has taken on more of a formal role than the one which it had in 1081, a decade earlier, indeed a locally central one, even if it has had to call in the bishop to sort tension out.

The second document is rural, and dates to the end of 1091 or the start of 1092. It relates the bad behaviour in the Valdiserchio, in the delta some five miles north of the city, of a group of lords called the longubardi Pisani—longubardus or lambardus being a Tuscan term for small military aristocrat (it has some parallel to capitaneus in the north, although it is a rarer word)—who have introduced ‘evil customs’, malae consuetudines, which evidently include forced guard duty in castles, money for wood rights and pasturing on common land, and the taking of grain and linen: in other words typical signorial rights, exactions which were markers of private lordship (and also called ‘evil customs’) everywhere in Europe. But this is to the disadvantage not only to the locals but also to ‘some Pisan citizens’, so they meet together to resolve it. They elect five or six consules de Pisanis, and several boni homines from the Valdiserchio, to resolve the issue, and the signorial rights are for the most part abolished forthwith. This is then ratified by the longubardi Pisani themselves, all named, and then the Pisan populus confirms it ‘by common agreement’, and Bishop Daiberto backs it up with an anathema.

These signorial rights were doubtless very new indeed. They are hardly attested in Tuscany earlier, and a similar document of complaint to the city a decade later—to the cathedral, the consuls, and ‘the whole Pisan populus’—by the inhabitants of the small village of Casciavola, against the lords of San Casciano (one of the longubardi Pisani families), gives a date for them. That text says explicitly that Marquise Beatrice had previously prevented the lords from acting in this way by a legal judgement, but then ‘all power lost its strength and justice was dead and perished in our land’, and the da San Casciano behaved worse than ever—that is to say, in the 1080s–90s, which are thus presented here as a period of confusion and injustice. Here, as in the Valdiserchio, it is important to add, the Pisans did indeed put a stop to such lordly aggression, for the area around Pisa was almost devoid of signorial rights thereafter: the city had no intention of allowing rivals to its own jurisdiction, and acted far more determinedly here than (for example) Milan did. But its task in the Valdiserchio was made easier by the fact that the longubardi were, in fact, all themselves from city families, and indeed from many of the same élite families whose names we see in other texts, including (to name only one) Viscount Pietro; and also that the consules de Pisanis named here, who decided against them, were in some instances—again including Pietro—explicitly the same people too: they ruled against themselves, that is to say. As consules, and as city-dwellers, it was evidently in their interests to judge against their own accumulation of rural power; it was better to rule the countryside as a stable part of an urban élite than as a local lord. This must have been all the more true in that the individual longubardi families evidently could not gain such rights in the Valdiserchio on their own. In an area where very many influential people owned land, they had to operate as a sort of collective, which was not a strong basis for signorial coercion. The city was a much better venue for that.33

Now: we have more consuls here. In the Casciavola case, which dates to around 1100, the un-named consuls do seem to be the lay leaders of the city in some way, as they will, much more clearly, in a group of texts from 1109 onwards, as we shall see in a moment. This is less clear in the Valdiserchio case. In part, it hangs on an ambiguity in the text: when the people at the meeting ‘elect consuls of the Pisans’, are they choosing ad hoc representatives called consuls to arbitrate this particular dispute, or are they choosing from among consuls, who already exist as city rulers? One might think at this point that, in the end, whether there are ‘real’ consuls in Pisa only in 1100/1109 or else already in 1092 (and thus demonstrably earlier than all other cities—let alone in 1080–81, with the Sardinian document) is not one of the crucial historical questions. I would agree in part, but the important point is a different one; in fact it is three related points. One is what the word consul meant in this period; one is how Pisa as a city was actually organised; and one is who ran it and what they thought they were doing. All three are more interesting than arguing about single documents, even if we have needed a relatively detailed exposition of several single documents to get an idea of what the issues are. Let us look at them in turn.

In the 1080s, or 1090s, what does using the word consul mean? We certainly cannot assume that it meant a fully autonomous city ruler when the Pisans used it for the first time in 1080 or so (and there is no doubt that they did so first in the Kingdom of Italy); it meant that by 1150 everywhere, but it cannot have done so when there was as yet nothing autonomous for them to rule—and if the Sardinian citation of consolos predates 1081, the word dates from a time when Matilda’s power was still untroubled by war. In that period, the word consul was certainly known to have once meant an annually changing city leader in ancient Rome, but it was most often used figuratively in narratives across Europe to mean any form of non-royal ruler—dukes or counts (such as William of Normandy before 1066) were called consules often enough;34 and, in Italy, the city where it was most consistently used at that time was Rome, where it had meant any member of the traditional aristocracy of Rome in the tenth century (usually in the form consul et dux), and in the eleventh it meant in particular a member of the Tuscolani family, the city’s rulers until the 1040s, and major dealers thereafter as well.³⁵

Pisa had quite close links with the city of Rome in the century after 1050. This is shown, for example, by the habit of many of Pisa’s judicial establishment to call themselves iudices sacri Lateranensis palatii, judges of the Lateran palace in Rome, throughout our period; I would indeed argue that the Arno city’s later Roman-law commitment involved substantial borrowing from Rome’s own twelfth-century judicial practice too.36 I would make the same argument about the borrowing of the word consul: it was used to mean city leader in the most prestigious, and still probably the largest, Italian city, and that was good enough for Pisans whose desire to be Roman (at least, ancient Roman) we have amply seen. So the Pisans first used this contemporary Roman term to mean leader in quite a general sense, as in the Sardinian document and the Mahdīya poem (if it is as early as this), and by 1092 they happily used it to mean any prominent and publicly active person—for that is the minimum meaning of the term in the Valdiserchio document. Other cities picked up that usage from them quite quickly, as we have seen in the case of Milan’s consulatus, documented from 1097 (above, p. 26). The word ‘consul’ was then available in people’s vocabulary, ready to shift meaning and to become the technical term for city-chosen rulers: once such rulers came to exist. That is explicit for the first time in a Genoese document of 1098, which lists Amico Brusco qui tunc erat civitatis consul, ‘who was then consul of the city’, as giving consilium in an informal dispute; to use ‘consul’ as a title in this way strongly implies some form of rotating city leadership.³⁷ This may well therefore be a terminus ante quem for Pisa too, if my argument about the genealogy of the term, from Rome through Pisa, is accepted; the Arno city’s consuls might perhaps have become in some sense urban rulers by the mid-1090s, that is to say, which also fits the reference to them in the Casciavola case. But we cannot get any earlier than that; and, in general, we absolutely cannot assume that, every time we see the term consul in the eleventh century (or indeed, in other cities, in the early twelfth), we have any of the institutions of the commune set up before our eyes. I am here fully in agreement with Mauro Ronzani, who out of current authors argues this point most forcefully for Pisa; indeed, as we have seen (p. 15), Lucca and Arezzo, also Tuscan cities, have other early references to consules which substantially predate the city commune in any of its other manifestations. So what we have to do is to try to track when the term actually does change meaning, and clearly comes to denote—to repeat my formulation of an ideal-type commune in the first chapter—a regularly rotating set of magistracies, chosen or at least validated by a conscious urban collectivity, with a de facto autonomy of action for the city and its magistrates, including in warfare and justice, and eventually taxation and legislation. It is not only hard, but impossible, to track the moment of the shift exactly,38 but at least we can say that few of these elements (only the collectivity and the warfare) are visible in Pisa before 1100.

How Pisa as a city was organised in 1090 seems clear enough from Daiberto’s arbitration on the towers, as we have seen: it was run by a collective assembly—here called a colloquium, but identical to the concio or arengo of northern Italy, and indeed the word concio occurs occasionally in Pisa.³⁹ It was like the consulatus or conventus or concio which appears at the end of the same decade in Milan, then, but it is more visible than is Milan’s assembly in its early years. It was the assembly of the populus or cives, and there is never a hint in Pisa that this citizen collectivity was divided into aristocrats and others, unlike in Milan; nor indeed did it yet have any formalised leaders. There can be no doubt that it was in practice dominated by the same set of ten to fifteen families which appear in all our sources for our entire century (including in Daiberto’s arbitration) as Pisa’s leaders, as well as, at a military level, by the wider militia of horsemen which, as we have seen, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur has described for all of north-central Italy—for Pisans of all social levels participated in its maritime wars, cavalry and footsoldiers alike, but horsemen are mentioned as being of particular prominence in our poetic narratives, as when the consul Lamberto di Uberto in the Balearic war of 1113–15 is made dux equitum, leader of the cavalry.40 But these dominating groups had no established presence yet. Even if the 1092 consuls were ‘real’ city leaders, they certainly did not control the dispute-settlement procedures outlined in the Valdiserchio text, which are depicted as very informal indeed; even if rotating leaders had developed before the Genoese example from 1098, what they actually did remains obscure for another decade and more. And it is also hard to be sure that the assembly was a necessary sign of real autonomy for the city around 1090, as opposed to being simply the growing formalisation of an ad hoc body which had always existed for local affairs (and the organisation of campaigns)—as the references to collective agreement in Henry IV’s diploma would indicate. One could best see it as simply gaining coherence to fill a particular power-vacuum, one which affected even Pisa during the civil wars, for Matilda, as I have already indicated, made no appearance in Tuscany between 1081 and 1096, and Pisa had no bishop either for four years in the 1080s—as also between when Daiberto left for the East in 1098 and his death in 1105 (his successor Pietro first appears in 1106⁴¹). The colloquium was thus prominent around 1090 because it had had to formalise itself to deal with the absence of both; as in Milan (p. 28), it was a defensive reaction to the absence of traditional hierarchies.

This picture of the formalisation of a city assembly in a period of a vacuum of power is part of the established argument that city communes themselves were defensive reactions to the civil war period in Italy. From now on, indeed, one can find such assemblies over most of north-central Italy.42 But an assembly is not the same as a commune. One could, in particular, develop an active civic assembly and still be loyal in principle to a traditional ruler, as we have already seen for the relationship between Milan’s early assembly and the archbishop. In the case of Pisa, the archbishop, as he now was, was much less dominant than in Milan (I will come back to that), but Matilda was still potentially powerful in Tuscany; and she eventually came back to the Pisa area in 1100, issuing several charters to the cathedral and other churches (and to one layman, of the future Orlandi, one of the longubardi Pisani families) before her death in 1115.⁴³ Would that have had an effect on Pisa? Matilda’s twelfth-century presence in Tuscany might be said to have prevented Lucca from developing in a communal direction before her death—Lucca’s first consuls are documented only in 1119, and are first seen representing the city in 1120.⁴⁴ In Pisa we cannot say that, however; for the last years of Matilda are indeed those in which we can see the commune appear in a much more organised form. Let us look at its signs.

Pisa’s consuls first appear as real city representatives in 1109, in a set of documents in which a signorial family, the descendants of the tenth-century counts of Pisa, sold off two of their castles to the city of Pisa, here in the form of Archbishop Pietro and four consules Pisani, who are clearly here acting together for the city. This is followed by several parallel documents from 1110 in which the lords of Ripafratta ceded control of their castle to the city, a particularly important act because, although the family was by now associated with Pisa, their castle was a strategic centre inside the diocese of Lucca, with which city the Pisans had recently fought and won a war; here the castle is formally granted to the archbishop, but the political assurances which are attached are to the archbishop, the operarii of the cathedral, and the Pisan consuls, and the latter represent, for the first time (indeed, for probably only the second time in Italy), the commune Pisane civitatis, a noun not an adjective, ‘the commune of the city of Pisa’.45 These consuls were associated with the city’s assembly and in some sense responsible to it, as is clear in our sources already in 1111;⁴⁶ all the same, they operate by now autonomously, as city leaders, and, increasingly, rulers.

This mix of protagonists appears quite often in the next years. One instance is when in 1114 the count of Barcelona made a formal alliance with the Pisan populus (or exercitus, army) for the Balearic war, who were represented by the twelve consuls of the city, and the document for it was prepared by the ‘chancellor (cancellarius) of the Pisan consuls’—here the archbishop was less central, even though the text says that Pope Paschal II had put him at the head of the army, but he counter-signed as well; another is when in 1116 the new (and much weaker) marquis of Tuscany Rabodo pledged the castle of Bientina to Archbishop Pietro and to the iudex and operarius Ildebrando, with four consuls witnessing the document; another is when in 1120 the same Ildebrando, in that year not only operarius but also consul, sold the castle of Livorno, which Matilda had given to the Opera in 1103, to the archbishop, again with other consuls witnessing. But, inside that political mix, with archbishop, operarii, and consuls all active in the city’s name, the core structure was coming more and more to be consular—once the latter appear in 1109, they are suddenly everywhere. Already in 1111, the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos made a trade agreement with the Pisan people, the first we have that survives, and here they are represented by the consuls (hypatoi) of Pisa, and not the archbishop at all. The fact that the consuls have a chancellor in 1114 is another sign (by 1126 there is also a scribe of the Pisan respublica); so is the presence of consuls in acts of cession of castles to the cathedral, in effect to ratify the cessions, which are notably frequent in these years.47 So, above all, is another document, from 1 January 1112, in which the consuls ran a court case about land of the cathedral which was held illegally, and got the holder to concede it to the archbishop, for not only is this almost the first Italian document in which the consuls of a city are seen running justice on their own (it is preceded only by a handful of Genoese texts: below, p. 164), but the text is also the only one from any city at all in which consuls use a placitum format, clearly in this case showing a claim to the public traditions of the past: here the consuls and populus meet and discuss the case in the ‘forum of the city of Pisa, which is called the court of the marquis’, and make their ‘decree’ by common agreement. The solidity of consular authority by now, and its association with the city’s assembly, is further emphasised by a document of the previous day, in which one of the consuls, in a document witnessed by many of the others, cedes in a different dispute with the archbishop, in the same court of the marquis, in the Pisan colloquium, ‘in the time of the consolatus of the consuls of the Pisan association [societas]’.⁴⁸

This pattern, established by 1112, continued. The growing centrality of the communal polity is clearly shown in a later text, of 1126, in which Archbishop Ruggero sold the estate of Pappiana (another Matildine cession to the church, as we have seen) to the cathedral canons, again an entirely ecclesiastical financial transaction, and one done for the benefit (causa) of the cathedral, but also one which Ruggero says he is doing ‘for the peace and quiet of the common Pisan populus’, and one which is done with the ‘advice of the consuls and sapientes, both iudices and jurists, of the city of Pisa, and the whole Pisan populus’.49 By 1138, communal judges were ‘given by the consuls and the whole populus to end disputes and controversies both public and private’. Not all Pisan land disputes went to the consuls yet; in our documents, private arbitrations outnumber consular decisions until the 1150s. The institutionalisation process in the Arno city was not fully complete until the creation of the two Constituta at the end of that decade, in fact. All the same, the structures were set up for situations like the great assembly of 1153, in which the consuls, ‘in the public contio’ (also called a parlamentum), acting for ‘the commune of the city [which] we must love with intimate charity and carefully preserve the ruling of its honour’, abolished residual vicecomital rights, expelled Viscount Alberto (son of Ugo III) and his family from the city, and deprived his supporters of ‘public office’ for a decade.⁵⁰ The system had by now been in place for forty years.

I argued for Milan that the earliest city consuls were essentially part of the archbishop’s entourage and power-structure, and that the commune did not gain institutional autonomy until the consuls became less often aristocrats and more often judicial experts, and moved away from that archiepiscopal politics, in the 1130s. In Pisa, the archbishop was a central figure in these early decades of consular activity as well; but the situation was different, and the consuls appear as separate from him from the start. We see the archbishop accumulating castles in a whole set of documents in the 1110s and later, enough for him to end up as by far the largest landowner in the diocese of Pisa, and also the only lord with significant sets of signorial rights in the countryside. Volpe saw him as fronting for the commune here, in a period when the consuls and the commune had no legal identity, which he saw as a situation continuing right up to 1162, when Frederick Barbarossa recognised the city’s government; but that is both less and more than what he was doing. These castles stably remained in archiepiscopal hands, and they were not cessions to the commune; but, conversely, Volpe was also wrong to suppose that the commune had, or claimed, no legal identity or public role, for the 1112 consular placitum already clearly shows otherwise.51 By contrast, the archbishop of Pisa, public figure or no, is not seen judging a civil dispute after the arbitration over the towers; he was also happy to seek an arbitration in a rural dispute from an ex-consul by the early 1120s.⁵²

When consuls appear in archiepiscopal transactions, one could, it is true, see them as being as much in the archbishop’s entourage, as ratifiers of the acts, as we did in Milan. After all, many members of consular families are documented as archiepiscopal fideles and/or feudal dependants; Ildebrando iudex and operarius, and in 1118–21 ‘now by the grace of God consul of the city of Pisa’, is also very likely to have been introduced into the consulate by his patron Archbishop Pietro, evidently an influential figure. When the commune developed its own standardised judicial system, from 1135 onwards, the first surviving document for it refers to the magistrates as ‘iudices elected by Archbishop Uberto of the Pisans and by the consuls and the whole populus’, which is a clear indication of archiepiscopal protagonism—even if we have just seen that the second such case in 1138, and later ones too, just mention the consuls and populus.⁵³ The archbishops remained active players in the city thereafter, too. But they were not patrons of consuls in any systematic way; the consular families did not owe most of their prosperity to archiepiscopal leases;54 and, indeed, the great landed wealth of the archbishops by 1150 was to a substantial extent gained after the commune was established, not before. The fact is that episcopal power in most of Tuscany had never been great, if one compares it with that of many north Italian cities. Up to around 1080, the marquis in Tuscany had had too firm a control over its political structures, in both city and country, much firmer than almost any lay office-holder did in the north. The bishop of Lucca, for example, in 850 a far larger landowner than his Pisan counterpart, leased away most of his properties and rights over tithe to major Lucchese city families in the next century, as bishops did, but then found that he could not get most of them back, and that these had turned into effective alienations; he did not have the political clout to make good his property rights.⁵⁵ After ‘all power lost its strength’ in Tuscany, as the men of Casciavola said about the 1080s, bishops had the opportunity to gain a new centrality; and we see the archbishops of Pisa doing their best to take it up (as also, later, did some bishops of Lucca). But bishops had to begin from the same standing start as did the lay citizens, and were not in a position to dominate urban political structures, as they crystallised, without considerable lay support and consent. Pisan archbishops were also not usually from the major city families, unlike in Milan, so could not lay claim to pre-existing networks of élite support.⁵⁶ They were allies of the commune, not its patrons, and certainly not, as in part in Milan, its progenitors.

This situation is actually already clear in the Liber Maiorichinus. Even though we might expect its clerical author to write up the role of the archbishop on the Balearic expedition, he in fact appears relatively seldom. That the pope had put him in command is hardly visible in the text; all we find him doing is preaching or exhorting the army, on a few occasions, and he is far from the only person who does that. It is the consuls who are throughout in the foreground, Dodone di Teperto ‘famous, born for war’, and so on—as well as Viscount Ugo III, and Pietro di Albizo, the main private citizen who is flagged in the text (more often indeed than Ugo), who is ‘adorning the Pisan cives with the image of probity’.57 As was noted at the start of this chapter, the Liber is aiming to create the image of a Pisan collectivity which is essentially lay and led by the twelve consuls, most of them named on several occasions, who ran the whole campaign—and who, it is almost unnecessary to say, came from the same set of families as did all other Pisan leaders.

Pisa’s commune was thus fully in charge of the city by the 1110s, with its consuls running the political cessions of castles by 1110, a treaty with Byzantium by 1111, justice by 1112, and warfare by 1113. The wide range of this authority might make us conclude that the consular régime had already come to be established rather earlier, which gives some support to my cautious proposal of the mid-1090s for the appearance of ruling consuls, but, conversely, we need to remember that a similar range of documentation does not show any signs whatsoever of an active régime of this kind in the years before 1109, and the powers of the consuls must only have become established bit by bit. It has again to be recognised that we will never know exactly when they appeared in this new guise; I will come back to this in a moment. It is however not necessary to push, improbably, the establishment of all the elements of a fully autonomous and organised commune of Pisa back to the 1090s to have it be the front-runner here; Milan’s commune did not show similar levels of organisation until the 1130s, and nor did any other, with the exception of Genoa, the pacing of whose early commune is almost identical to that of the Arno city.58 It is necessary to say that the appearance in 1135 in Pisa of more regular communal judicial magistrates is much less precocious; many cities had developed consular justice by the 1130s, as we have seen (p. 17), and Genoa, the first in this respect, had walked this path already by 1110 at the latest. The 1130s were the key moment of institutionalisation of most of the early communes, that is to say. But this simply means that other cities soon caught up; Pisa was still the precursor. I have not chosen to discuss it first, for Milan’s development has been more central to Italian historiography, so it was useful to start there, and Milan, dominant as it was in its region, is also unlikely to have been influenced more than terminologically by the experience of a city which was some way away and very different. But Pisa was not influenced in any way at all by anyone else; whatever it was doing—that is to say, whatever its leaders thought they were doing—they thought it up themselves.

We can see fairly clearly what happened in Pisa, at least around 1090 and then after 1109, and I am not the only person to set this process out, as my notes clearly show. But why is a rather different matter, and I want to spend the rest of this chapter considering just that. To many analysts of the early commune of Pisa, including some who are writing today, there is no problem here; the city commune was a development waiting to happen, implicitly indeed a wholly positive one, and it is a waste of time to spend too much effort unpicking its uncertain path when the end result is so obvious. But when we are dealing with something as potentially momentous as the abandonment of traditional hierarchies of government, and the development (among other things) of concepts of popular election or choice (the word electio means both) of city rulers, then—again, as we have seen for Milan—we are dealing with a change which was not automatic, at all; and it is fair to propose that absolutely no-one in Pisa in 1075, say, would have had any idea of what direction city government would have moved in by 1115, forty years later—in a world in which the stability and relative peace of the March of Tuscany had also virtually disappeared, at Matilda’s death at the very latest, so that these rapidly changing city governments thus also had to deal with long periods of local (i.e. not just maritime) war. What people thought was going on in Pisa at each intervening step, in 1080, 1090, 1100, 1110, and whether they realised anything had changed, would have to be looked at entirely without hindsight as a result. We cannot, with the evidence which survives (most of which I have already set out), answer the question at that level of detail; but we can get a little further if we look at who the families of city leaders actually were and what sorts of resources they had, for that will help us gain a sense of their political choices.

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We can clear away some general themes at the outset. The first essential point is one that has already been mentioned: Pisa’s military experiences cannot have hurt. It was used to planning war already by the mid- to late eleventh century, and on a much larger scale than most other cities had to deal with until the wars between individual cities developed considerably in seriousness from the 1120s onwards. It must also be added, as a second point, that the economic importance of the large amount of non-agricultural land in the Arno delta was very great and, even though much of this was owned by lay families or churches (who doubtless largely got it from the marquis), there were also wide areas of common land, which was run by the city, as we can see from the communal officials tasked to do so in the later twelfth century; common land and collective organisation go together, as historians of rural communes know, and Pisa probably had more common land than any other major Italian city except those around the mouth of the river Po.59 For both these reasons, some collective decision-making has to have long been normal inside the walls of Pisa, and it was not contested (this was not like the civic uprisings of Milan, which got more systematic across the middle third of the eleventh century, but were always, by definition, controversial in the city); war in Pisa, in particular, was a collective and probably widely supported operation from the start, and had (in the building of the cathedral) a considerable collective result as well.

A third point is however this: although I have stressed the formalisation of the city’s assembly as a defensive reaction to a crisis in traditional government in the 1080s, one certainly made easier by the sort of collective experience I have just mentioned, the move from that assembly to a city government based on rulers chosen or ratified by that assembly is—as we have seen for Milan—not necessarily the product of the same process. To repeat, we do not actually know exactly when regular consuls appeared, holding at least some of the civic powers we can see attached to them in the 1110s; it may have been, as I have suggested, the mid-1090s; but all we can really say is that it was between 1090 and 1109. We can also say that it was probably a faster development than in Milan, where the first documentation of a consulatus in 1097, and thus of an assembly including men called consuls, seems to have been at least three decades before the development of autonomous powers by the successors of those consuls; this probably indicates that the Pisan process was smoother, and less opposed by powerful people, than in Milan. Ronzani tends in his discussions, quite logically, to look for later moments of crisis here to explain the early ruling consuls, and so offers a slightly later dating than I have; perhaps the consuls appeared when there was no bishop in Pisa, in 1098–1106; perhaps they extended their powers because Matilda’s last years were ones of relative weakness—perhaps, indeed, their extension of powers is itself a demonstration of that weakness.60 It is at least not in doubt that the crystallisation of the authority of Pisa’s consuls happened without any reference to Matilda; she is not even mentioned, for example, in the Liber Maiorichinus—the March of Tuscany is simply absent from it—and it is also the case that she liquidated most of her landholding in and around the city in her major cessions of 1100–1103, and never appears as a protagonist in the Pisano again, unlike, for example, around Florence.⁶¹ But it is also possible that this is the result of the Pisans cutting her out of their politics, not simply reacting to her absence; as we shall see later, we cannot assume that a direct reaction to political crisis explains everything about the crystallisation of consular power.⁶²

At least one element of the period, on the other hand, really is clear: the stability of Pisa’s ruling élite. Of the 144 consuls documented between 1109 and 1150, 89 came from just sixteen families, nearly two-thirds. Of these families, twelve are already documented as attending the marchesal placita of 1063–77.⁶³ That is a notable continuity. It indicates that the Pisan élite were successful in ruling whatever system came their way; Pisan political power was simply not contested in the same way as it was in Milan. This was not the continuity of ‘compromise’, which has been seen as a key to communal origins (above, p. 9); there was no need for compromise here—and even if this élite briefly divided between pro-Henry and pro-Matilda families in the 1080s, each side got back together again by 1090, without the need to compromise on anything except the heights of tower-houses. But who were this élite? Fortunately, a generation of Pisan students have devoted their undergraduate theses to exactly this issue, the reconstruction of consular families, under the guidance of some of the University’s leading historians, so we can give an answer to that.

The first thing to say here is that in Pisa, as in Milan, there were half a dozen important families who were not particularly interested in consular office. They were in every case castle-owning families, and we could well see them, once again, as families which saw themselves in some way as too important for the commune, until well after our period ends. This is all the more likely in that most of them seem to have lived in the city much of the time; unlike for Milan, purely rural lords were almost non-existent here. Two of them (the da Caprona and the Ebriaci) were also among the longubardi Pisani, and thus had close links with other city leaders.64 But they were far from indifferent to the city: indeed, this group also included some originally non-Pisan families, the da Ripafratta and, above all, the Gherardeschi, hugely powerful rural counts of inland Tuscany, a branch of whom chose to move to the city by the 1110s, and got more and more involved in city affairs as the twelfth century moved on, attesting to a genuine urban pull for them; the Gherardeschi in fact ended up as major figures in the commune of the next century. This set of families anyway did not contain any significant opponents of the commune and of city power over its contado.⁶⁵

A second set of prominent families are more important for us, as they were very interested in consular office from the beginning to the end. They included the Visconti families, for sure, as also other longubardi families, the Gualandi, Orlandi, and da San Casciano/Lanfranchi; and also, equally prominent, the Sismondi, Dodi/Gaetani, and Casapieri. (Two centuries later, Dante immortalised in his Inferno the Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi as the emblematic Pisan families.)66 We could, as I implied earlier, see the longubardi families of 1092 as in status terms the Pisan equivalent of Milan’s aristocratic capitanei, and they do appear acting together later in the twelfth century as well,⁶⁷ but it would then be necessary to say at once that, unlike in Milan, absolutely no distinction is otherwise visible between them and other major city leaders, and the word longubardi never appears again for them in any text; I shall come back to the question of what resources underpinned such possible parallels. We can then set all these against a third set, families which appear more intermittently in leading positions, the Casalei or the Erizi or the Marignani, or else gained prominence and consular office later, such as the de Curte or the Anfossi or the Federici.⁶⁸ We will look briefly at five sample families from this consular group, four from the second set and one from the third, so as to get a sense of their resources and activities, and more briefly still at a few others; but we need to recognise from the start that—as in Milan—the major Pisan families were by no means economically homogeneous, even though they had for the most part acted together since the 1060s and sometimes before. Their very dishomogeneity shows the force of collective political action in the city, but it also makes that collectivity more necessary to explain.

First, the Visconti. For some time, this family, or set of three families, seem to have had it both ways, with consular office very common across all the branches (sometimes there were two at once, and in the Balearic war there were three consuls, plus Viscount Ugo III as a separate figurehead), but every male family member nevertheless calling himself vicecomes in texts; the family of Ugo III (the least consular of the three) had one family member called a vicecomes maior, whom we might see as the ‘real’ viscount, until that branch was dramatically expelled from public office—and all the other vicecomites lost their residual public powers—in 1153. The families, taken together, were very substantial landowners, particularly in the Valdiserchio north of the city, and also in the city itself, although they—and this is typical of the Pisan consular families when considered as a whole—had no castles, or signorial rights after the arbitration of 1092 and their landholding was also very fragmented (see map 5). They had some archiepiscopal leases and were the archbishop’s fideles, but such leases were far less prominent than the lands they owned outright. It was not until the thirteenth century that the Visconti became major rural lords, and that was in Sardinia, after wars of conquest there; even then they simply used those lands to support a century-long battle with the Gherardeschi to dominate the city.⁶⁹

The Sismondi had some similarities to this pattern, but also some contrasts. They were both iudices and landowners in the early eleventh century and included a marchesal castaldio or administrator, Pandolfo Contulino; they appeared in the placita as a matter of course. They are also very visible in the years around 1090; Sismondo di Contulino was a military leader, called consul, in the Mahdīya poem, and his brother Guinizo’s tower was one of those mentioned in Daiberto’s arbitration in 1090. Enrico di Guinizo was one of the consuls in the Balearic war, and is much written up in the Liber Maiorichinus, being called Cinithoniades and Sigimundiades, pseudo-classical epithets taken from his father’s and uncle’s names; he and his kin were consuls thereafter very often indeed. They moved directly, that is to say, from being major marchesal figures to being major consular figures. Like the Visconti, they owned in both the city and the countryside—in their case in particular at Fasciano in the Valdarno east of the city. But they were not simply urban rentiers. They had a greater interest than usual in Pisa in castles; they had temporarily controlled part of a castle, at Nugola, in the mid-eleventh century (as other judicial families of that period also did) and they bought a lease of part of the major strategic castle of Livorno, not far from Nugola, from the archbishop’s tenants there in 1146. This would not have led to significant rural lordship (Livorno was right beside Pisa’s main port, slightly south of the city, and was always kept tight hold of in political terms), but the sale certainly showed Sismondi landholding ambition. Conversely, however, they can be argued equally easily, even if on the basis of more implicit evidence, to have been involved in commerce, for they held a lot of land in the commercial heart of the city—in its southern suburb of Kinzica, along the river edge on both banks, and around Pisa’s oldest bridge (see map 4)—and by 1184 were money-lenders to the commune. We would not go far wrong if we saw the Sismondi as being one of the two or three richest landowning families in the city, along with the Visconti and probably the Gualandi; and, more than either of these two, their interests can be tracked in many directions.⁷⁰

The Dodi had a similar public role: they are visible in the placita; they were consuls from 1109 onwards, often; they were also close to the archbishop in the early twelfth century; Dodone di Teperto (or Tepertiades) is the most prominent consul of all in the Liber Maiorichinus. Later in the century, they were frequent ambassadors for the commune, they often appear as witnesses to public acts in Sardinia, and they were keen supporters of Pisa’s involvement in the Sicilian campaigns of Henry VI in the 1190s. But, unlike the last two, they are not so visible as landowners. Their only substantial landholding was west of the city, in a set of marshy areas running from north to south, between Pisa and the sea, which they began to build up in lease in the 1050s and soon held in full property (see map 5), together with patronage over an important monastery, S. Vito, on the western edge of the city. On the other hand, to own here was itself significant. Pisa’s military strength was in its ships, and to build them the citizens needed timber. The Liber Maiorichinus has a grandiloquent passage in which it claims that to build the galleys for the Balearic war the Pisans stripped of their wood the whole of Corsica, the Lunigiana in the mountains of northwest Tuscany, the Mugello valley above Florence, and the seacoast of Lucca. The forested coastal dunes (tomboli) of Pisa itself were jealously guarded by the cathedral canons, who extracted rents from (among others) the city’s galeioti, galleymen, when they needed wood for ship-building, reinforced by violent silvani or forest-wardens, as a court case of 1155 tells us. We do not need much hypothesis, then, to suppose that the lands on the edge of the next lagoon, behind the tomboli, where the Dodi owned, held similar opportunities; the Dodi, out of all Pisa’s major families, can be proposed as particularly associated with ships. And this, and/or the commerce which was consequent on ship-building, made the Dodi rich even in the absence of a lot of land: already by the 1160s, they were frequently money-lenders to the commune, sometimes of very large sums. The long-term stability of their public roles thus becomes easier to explain.⁷¹

Map 4. Pisa, c. 1100

Map 5. The territory of Pisa

This is even more the case for a fourth important family, the Casapieri, for they had very little land outside the city in this period (they owned above all in Foriporta to the east, which became part of the city when its walls were extended in the 1150s), but they were long prominent. The tower of Pietro di Albizo was another mentioned in Daiberto’s arbitration, and a second Pietro di Albizo, probably his nephew, was as we have seen exceptionally visible as a warrior in the Liber Maiorichinus, even though he was not a consul—he became that afterwards as well, all the same, four times in all, and so did many of his relatives. There is an interesting sequence in the poem which states that Pietro, for all his military prowess, was also an important mediator between the Pisans and the king of Mallorca in 1114–15, in dealings which put an eventual end to the war. This was because, after the Sardinia war of 1015–16 against ancestors of the king’s family, Pietro’s own ancestor Ildeberto Albizo had interceded with the emperor Henry II to get the captured son of the then king returned to his father; the kings had been close to the future Casapieri family ever since. We can hardly doubt from this account, whatever its truth value, that the Casapieri were regarded by others as being used to going, or sending ships, across the western Mediterranean for a long time by the 1110s. And indeed the layout of their lands was quite similar to that of the Sismondi, for they stretched along the river to the east of the main bridge, down to a river-bank monastery which they controlled; they also owned several shops in the market area by the 1180s, and not long after they had a fondaco or warehouse in the same area: they were even more explicitly attached to commerce that the families we have looked at hitherto, and in the thirteenth century controlled much of Pisa’s silk trade. They, like the Dodi, were ambassadors (including, significantly, to Mallorca); and one of their ships was captured and brought to Tunis in 1180. Casapieri wealth clearly came from commerce above all, and that was enough to push them up to the public level of the Visconti and others, or very nearly.72

The Marignani were not as prominent as the families discussed hitherto. Azzo di Marignano was a consul at least three times in the 1110s, but then there is a gap, and the family reappears in the 1150s, not as consuls, but as judges in the communal courts (as well as communal cancellarius for some years). Unlike in Milan, Pisan communal judges, once they appeared from the 1130s onwards, were not called consuls, and had a less elevated status; so the Marignani turned into a judicial rather than a consular family, with jurists (causidici) and notaries among its members on a regular basis. But in fact the family had been a judicial one for a long time. In the mid-eleventh century they were iudices and notaries for the marquises, and provided another marchesal castaldio; one of them, the notary and iudex Marignano di Leone, was one of the arbiters in the Valdiserchio in 1092, and his son Azzo, the consul, arbitrated for the archbishop in 1121. So the fact that his heirs are found as judicial specialists is hardly surprising; what might be more surprising is that they were ever consuls. I think that what we see here is a result of the slow shift in status of judicial specialists in the city—one which has parallels in Milan, and (as we shall see in the next chapter) Rome, and plenty of other cities as well. Iudices in the eleventh century were often from wealthy and powerful families, such as the Sismondi, but some families with less status deriving from their landholding could gain (usually via a notarial training) judicial expertise and thus political prominence in placita as well, as they certainly did in Milan. The Marignani had land in the city and, east of the city, in Fasciano, which was apparently their village of origin, although land there was certainly shared with other families, again including the Sismondi—who have indeed been proposed to be their relatives, although recent work convincingly doubts this. We never get any sense, however, that this land was substantial; and we also never get any sign, unlike with the Casapieri (to name only one), that they were active in maritime affairs or commerce. I would propose that what happened was that the judicial prominence of the family in the second third of the eleventh century, and perhaps also their genuine political competence, propelled them into the ranks of city leaders for another generation, as the commune was forming; but that after the 1110s they did not have the resources to continue in the city’s leadership. By then, judicially trained families were generally from less wealthy and powerful social strata, which fitted the economic position of the Marignani better; willingly or not, they moved into the richest stratum of judicial families rather than remaining in a poorer stratum of consular ones. But, all the same, at the moment of the crystallisation of the commune their legal experience would doubtless have helped to keep them at the centre; Azzo was certainly one of the most influential consuls during the Balearic war (he negotiated the treaty with the counts of Barcelona, for example), even if his heirs could not keep this position later.73

Now that we are at this less wealthy level of consuls, we usually have less data to play with, and I shall move faster. The Casalei family seem to be at this level, for, although they were present in placita in the eleventh century, they did not come to be consuls until the 1130s, and were at least as often communal judges later. They were another city family with only one real rural base, at Orticaia very close to Pisa to the east; like the Casapieri, they can however be proposed to have been active in commerce, for they appear in several Sardinian public documents, they co-held an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea from the archbishop, and their ancestor Leone de Babillonia had as his nickname, or his father’s nickname, the normal Pisan word for Cairo in Egypt. But they do not seem to have been as rich as the Casapieri, and certainly were not as prominent.⁷⁴ Very similar were the Anfossi, who were above all jurists and thus judges for the commune, with only two generations who made it to consul (although one of them, Alcherio di Anfosso in the later twelfth century, was certainly very visible in city government); they were also active ship-owners in the wars against Genoa in the same period.75 We can add the de Curte, who held only a few consular offices from the Balearic war onwards, until they reached a greater prominence in the 1170s. Their property was partly in the city, but also, and above all, in the marshlands to its west; their resource base was thus similar to that of the Dodi in their control of woodland, although on a smaller scale. Significantly, the violent silvani of the cathedral canons on the coastal tomboli included prominent members of this family, and one of them, Bruno, was a cathedral silvanus elsewhere, too. Their toughness may mark a less exalted social position, but Bruno’s son Ugo Paneporro was a consul in the 1170s for all that.⁷⁶

What do all these family biographies tell us? One thing must be obvious: we can say rather more about commerce in Pisa than we could in Milan. In the Lombard city, one has to squeeze the documents hard to find any hint at all of a commercial activity and an urban industry which must already have been of major importance; in Pisa, however, even though our documents overwhelmingly concern land, we can say a surprising amount about commercial and maritime activity, and guess a good deal more. This fills out our picture in helpful ways; we have a more rounded view about the sources of wealth of these families. It also shows us that, in Pisa, prominent families could have any kind of resource base as long as they had a lot of it; unusually for this period even in Italy—although we shall see some instances in Rome—one could be rich and influential (as Pietro di Albizo was) without any significant rural landowning at all. But it also shows us, and the point is important for what follows, that the scale of wealth of the consular élite in Pisa was not enormous, even by the relatively modest standards of Milan. None of the major families kept full control of a castle for very long. The da San Casciano did build one in San Casciano, but after the second time it was destroyed, before 1180, they did not try to rebuild it;77 the Sismondi only had portions of the castles of others; the Visconti, quite strikingly for a set of families with their standing in the traditional marchesal hierarchy, did not control any castles at all—at most they, all three families taken together, were primus inter pares in the city, which is one clear answer why they were never a plausible candidate for the city’s rulers on their own, in this age at least. We could put this another way: in Milan, we can see an aristocratic stratum with castles and signorial rights, and a second stratum of rich cives (plus a few valvassores) without, which sometimes opposed each other (as in the mid-eleventh century), but mostly cooperated later, including inside the commune; some of the first stratum stayed out of the consulate, but others were very active in it. In Pisan communal politics, however, we see only this second stratum, not the first, for the small set of signorial families, the equivalent of the Milanese first stratum but rather fewer in number, were hardly focussed on city politics at all in the early twelfth century.

The other significant point that we gain from these biographies is about the status of judicial expertise. In Milan, from the 1140s onwards, the commune was very largely run by iudices, who did not have much land but instead had considerable, and growing, juristic training: not only Oberto dell’Orto, but many of his colleagues as well. I characterised them as a ‘medium élite’, a third stratum of landowners, who nonetheless came to be accepted as prominent in the Lombard commune. In Pisa, this did not occur, at least after the brief period of centrality of Azzo di Marignano—which is also the period of the consular office of the iudex and operarius Ildebrando, the only significant consul in our period who cannot be tracked as a landowner at all. Third-level figures after Azzo are only occasional consuls in our period, up to 1150, as we have seen. And prominent judges in the 1130s and onwards, the men who ran the communal law-courts from 1135, and also the men who researched and wrote the city’s Constituta in the 1150s—men like Carpino and Nerbotto in the 1140s–50s, and Burgundio (documented 1136–93), the man who translated the Greek sections of the Digest into Latin—are, like Ildebrando, hardly attested as landowners; and by now they did not become consuls. These judges cannot even be said to be from the ‘medium élite’, at least in terms of their landed resources; they owed their prominence only to their judicial expertise. If, of their successors, Alcherio di Anfosso could be both a jurist and many times a consul later in the century, this is presumably because he was from a third-level ship-owning family; by contrast, the equally skilled Familiati family, who provided, in Bandino Familiati, a prominent jurist in Bologna itself, who were very often communal judges and minor officials but had decidedly more modest resources, only made it to the consulate once.78 It is clear, from all the Roman law which the Pisans adopted, that they very greatly respected (and needed) trained lawyers and judicial expertise. Such judicial experts were also evidently very committed to the commune, which gave them a status and a career structure which they would not have managed to gain on their own; it was in effect men like these who most clearly represented the commune in its day-to-day activity in the city, as middle managers do for all organisations. But this did not mean—unlike in Milan—that such people were part of the city’s leadership.

It follows that what made men plausible city leaders in Pisa was not so much expertise, as the prominence which was brought by wealth. Such wealth could come from commerce as well as land, for sure; but it had to be available for anyone who wanted to be an active member of the city’s ruling élite, and the more wealth one had, the more fully one was part of that élite. This may perhaps have been because élite membership in Pisa, unlike in any inland city, was associated with military and commercial protagonism abroad, for which one needed enough money to run ships; and it is likely that even the landowning families of the city who are not seen as commercially active in our period (such as the Visconti) at least invested in the ships of others. But this does not have to have been the reason; it may equally have been that the long-term stability of Pisa’s leading families, far greater than that of the wider political institutions they operated within, led to an assumption that aspiring new members had to be influential protagonists, in ways that only wealth brings, to be allowed to join, and that a relative lack of wealth (as in the case of the Marignani) would eventually lead to slipping out of the highest level of the élite altogether. This is guesswork; but we must at least recognise that wealth and power were very tightly connected in Pisa, even more than they were in Milan, and also that this connection was not, or not yet, contested in any way that our eleventh- or twelfth-century sources tell us about—even the violence of 1182, which was a real crisis, would be between the same élite families, not against them. And this was so even though Pisa as a commune was dominated by a far smaller group of families than that comprising the city’s mounted militia: twelve to fifteen families, from the second élite stratum almost exclusively. The popolo did not come early in Pisa, and its activities are not seen before the 1220s.79

We have to do, then, with a cohesive and economically defined urban élite in Pisa, wealthy by Pisan standards but not wealthy enough to compete with rural lords on a castle-holding level, and it was that élite, above all, which had to confront the problems of the end of the eleventh century and onwards. In the 1080s, in the civil war period, that élite may have split in two, and thus perhaps had less group protagonism, temporarily; the body that formalised itself to confront the power-vacuum was the city assembly, in which members of the élite, as army leaders and sapientes and consules, had a relatively informal leadership role. This was the situation which Bishop Daiberto found at his accession in 1089, and which he documented soon after in his tower arbitration. I doubt that Daiberto would have himself found it easy to establish a new centrality for the bishop/archbishop in any stable way; he had no local roots, and the cathedral was not yet as important a landowner as it would become—had the tower document not survived, we would barely have a sense of his Pisan activities at all.80 But anyway he also left town in 1098 on the First Crusade, and removed an episcopal role from Pisan political trajectories for several years.

In (say) the late 1090s, however, the leading families of Pisa, now probably a coherent group again, must have known that the city still had to be run. The archbishop was still there, but the city had never really focussed itself politically on the bishop and his court, and he would soon leave for Palestine. For centuries, the court of the marquis had been the city’s stable focus, and traditional urban hierarchies looked to her or him; but Matilda, although sometimes back in Tuscany by now, was certainly not there very often, and it was in these years that, as we have seen, she handed over her major strategic Pisan lands to the cathedral, and her palatium beside the walls of the city itself.⁸¹ Anyone in this situation had to improvise; one sign of this was an alliance, in the Pisa-Lucca war of 1104–10, between Pisa and the Alberti counts of Prato, from a part of Tuscany not hitherto part of the political horizon of the Pisans, and involving a family which fought Matilda herself in 1107. Whether this is the Pisans reacting to marchesal absence, or choosing to separate themselves from marchesal allegiance, matters less in this context; either way, they were reacting to a world which, although the major civil wars were by now over, was configured differently from the past. The new emperor Henry V, who made his own appearances in the 1110s, simply added to a political scene which was gaining steadily in complexity, and also, as can be seen, was turning quickly to periods of localised violence; he, like Matilda, had less effect on Pisa than on Lucca or Florence.82

This was not any longer a power-vacuum, but it was certainly one in which traditional hierarchies had lost their automatic attraction. In response to this and to the civil war before it, lords in the countryside, all through Tuscany, turned to constructing traditional hierarchies for themselves, local lordships based on newly defined signorial territories, even if in most of Tuscany (outside the underpopulated south and the eastern mountains) such lordships were fairly weak. Among them, on a small scale, were the former counts of Pisa.⁸³ But the élites most attached to the city of Pisa were not land-rich enough to do the same, as the half-hearted attempt at a collective signoria north of the city by the longubardi in the years before 1092 shows. So the city had to be their political focus; and, inside the city, the only body which had gained any structured, formalised identity was the urban assembly or colloquium. That was the body which the leading families found themselves most closely attached to, and which they recognised that they would have henceforth to deal with. It must have been in that context that their dominance of it was regularised by the beginnings of identifiable ruling offices, maybe in the mid-1090s, which by the end of the decade of the 1100s had begun to rotate, for longer or shorter periods, doubtless so as to include enough members of these families. That the office-holders were called consules simply reflected the standard terminology of the time for Pisan city leaders. The non-élite members of this assembly might have hardly felt any real change, since these same leaders, or their ancestors, had been the most powerful cives, including organising warfare with popular assent and support, for a long time; but it was a change, a major one, for all that. The newly regularised consuls perhaps saw their role as temporary, one which would only last until proper hierarchies re-established themselves. There are certainly signs of that in Genoa, whose political trajectory was very similar to that of Pisa, as we shall see in chapter 5. But they never did, and already by the 1110s the consuls were running a set of affairs—justice, war, diplomacy—which they were unlikely to wish to relinquish.

As we saw earlier (above, p. 12), Pierre Racine, working on Piacenza, called the earliest commune a ‘collective signoria’.⁸⁴ This phrase has not had fortune in Italy, because it seemed to indicate (and in Racine’s argument did indicate) that there was no difference between urban and rural power, which Italians were, rightly, quick to refute. But as a representation of the reaction to the problems of power in parts of Italy in and after 1100, it has its value; consuls in Pisa (although not yet in 1100 in most other cities, we must always remember) were indeed constructing their own power, just as rural lords were doing, bounding it and beginning to regularise it themselves, as a positive—and no longer defensive—response to the failings of the traditional hierarchies around them. This consular power was not fully formalised yet, and it would take decades for it to be so. Dispute settlement in Pisa, in particular, even though the consuls forcefully laid claim to it in 1112, was for the whole of the first half of the century as much based on agreed arbitration and negotiation, on ad hoc practices, as it was on consular justice, including after the latter began to be more regular in the 1130s.85 An informal commune could certainly be regarded as a temporary expedient. But as it steadily crystallised, it did so in relation to the citizen body as a whole, and not to any external legitimating power. The basis of its authority switched, and the consuls found that their sleepwalking, in Pisa as, not long after, in Milan, had taken them into a world where their legitimacy came from below, not from above.

In Milan, the citizen assembly and its consular leaders were initially only too happy to be close to a traditional aristocratic hierarchy which still existed there, focussed on a powerful archbishop. It was not until the 1130s that a break in its development appeared, with a new set of consular leaders who were in large part less linked to the archbishop and who took the commune in a new direction. In Pisa there was much less of a break: the hierarchies which the assembly and its leaders had to deal with were weaker, and who that leadership was was less contested. I argued that the post-1130s Milanese consuls, even those from judicial families, were still operating inside the thought-world of the feudal aristocracy of the city, and that this helped to explain why they were not fully aware of the implications of what they were doing, and also why the aristocracy did not resist this new political configuration. In Pisa, the situation was different, for that aristocratic world was weaker and further away; there were, for example, some fiefs in the Pisano, as already noted, but they did not loom as large as they did in Milan—out of over one hundred chapters in the earliest version of the two Pisan Constituta, the basic law of the city by the 1160s, only one concerned fiefs (even if a long one), and clearly the constitutores of the law-codes had not been ‘thinking towards’ fief-holders in any way parallel to the interests of Oberto dell’Orto.86 In Pisa, indeed, the ruling families had chosen urban power at least in part because rural power was unavailable to them; conversely, inside the city, if they could no longer rule a wider collectivity as part of a vertical hierarchy leading upwards to kings and marquises, then at least they could rule it—with less difficulty than in Milan—through the assent of its members, through horizontal and eventually bottom-up links.⁸⁷

As I said, this was a major change, even if, in part precisely because of that lack of difficulty, it took time for its full implications to become clear. And there are other reasons for the absence of clarity of the move to the commune in Pisa. The Liber Maiorichinus indeed shows us that Pisans did not see any major change, at least in the 1110s. The Pisan consuls are martial heroes in the poem, just as the traditional aristocratic leaders of the Chanson de Roland are; and the Pisan consuls in the Liber are also not differentiated in any significant way from their highly aristocratic allies from Languedoc and Catalonia. Not the consuls on their own, but ‘belligerent Pisa’ itself, was in effect a collective lord here, in an imagery of military legitimacy which had its roots well back in the past. The rulers of Montpellier and Barcelona may have seen a difference, but for the Pisans there was none. That blaze of pride, reinforced with every victorious campaign, and probably also every successful trading voyage, helped further to allow major changes to take place without any explicit recognition of them. This is further reinforced by the significant fact that even Pisa’s chronicler Bernardo Maragone—as we have seen, active at the next level down in the hierarchy from the consulate—retells Pisa’s history, in the half-century before his own career began in the 1150s, as one of the successes of ‘the Pisans’ or the ‘Pisan populus’: and not of its consuls, who make no appearance in the text at all until 1156.88 By then, the consuls, and the Pisans at large, knew full well that they were doing something new, and the ambition of the Constituta themselves, also begun in the 1150s, shows that. But it had been a slow process, and consciousness lagged behind practice for a long time.

Milan and Pisa cannot be described as typical, for no city was; but they do, certainly, at least delineate two important paths away from the failures of the Kingdom of Italy, and, for all their differences, they have plenty of things in common. My third example, Rome, brings this further into perspective; for it had not been part of the Kingdom at all, but for all that, although it has plenty of unique elements in its development too, it can be described and analysed in closely parallel ways to the two more northern cities.