ABSTRACT
Cities are at the heart of European history–or certainly were in the late Middle Ages, in particular in Italy. In the early middle ages, Italian cities were important centres for the preservation of culture. The concept of 'city-state' cloaks problems of substance, the foremost of which is the need to accustom ourselves to view the commune as an entity endowed with legal personality well before the word 'state' and the university theory of legal persons had been properly formulated. The 'city-state' was a particular species within the broader genus 'commune' whose right to its name, a term hallowed by long-established historiographical custom. Like the 'regnum', the commune operated and was the possessor of public and private rights comfortably in advance of the emergence in the thirteenth century of the idea of the 'persona ficta'. The twelfth-century commune-in-arms was a kind of sworn association or informal movement with aspirations to the exercise of public power.
