ABSTRACT
Although much thought on government was transmitted from the early Middle Ages, real political literature was first seen in the thirteenth century. Italians were especially good at it because they had the strongest lay professions and, living in both republics and monarchies, were inspired to compare constitutions more than others. Dreaming of a unified Europe in 1306, the French judge Peter Dubois complained that the Empire had been wrecked by the German princes and especially the Italian urban republics. Ptolemy's republics were communities of citizens and, although heavy with religious overtones, citizenship could be casual. Magistracy differed in monarchy and republics. Ferrara was one of the few larger Lombard towns to have evolved the new magistracy, the basis of the later principate, from the old office of the podesta. Elected podestas had appeared when the then aristocratic republics had recently broken free from imperial power. Some Italian republics did not evolve into principates, but into stable oligarchies.
