ABSTRACT

An introductory word is perhaps required on the background to the topic treated in this paper. In my view, some form of oligarchy was inevitable within any city-republic. The only apparent constitutional alternative was the rule of an individual, a ‘lord’, but recent research has tended to emphasize the crucial role of the party, or adherents, within an apparently tyrannical regime. An investigation of the methods of election to office employed within medieval Italian communes is thus an investigation of the constitutional procedures of an oligarchy. These ‘cities’ (each seat of a bishopric was a civitas) were normally, by modern standards, not very populous, and it has been suggested that in 1300 only 26 communities in northern and central Italy had a total number of inhabitants exceeding 20,000. Within these centres the minority which played a politically active role would have been known to all, or at least to the other residents of their own region (the ‘third’, ‘quarter’, ‘fifth’, and so on). Ambition must be assumed as an element common to the citizens of these places, but this will have been assessed in different ways according to contrasting viewpoints. As the thirteenth-century chronicler of Asti saw things, the thieving adherents – the latroncoli – of the popolo gathered in assemblies and tried to achieve appointment to offices within the commune ‘in order to gain hold of the commune’s revenues’. Yet what appeared to hostile opinion as selfish ambition contained a strong element of self-defence. Those who did not hold office had no say in the commune’s fiscal measures, and hence they would be more heavily taxed.