Cities of God: The Italian Communes at War

Abstract

To believe that a political community might justly go to war in defence of its legitimate interests was a necessity of daily life to the city states of northern and central Italy from the twelfth century onwards. This belief as such was of course hardly confined to them among medieval European societies, but there are certain features of the Italian experience of war which, taken with the character of the cities themselves, contributed significantly to the emergence and formulation of those secular attitudes to political life which are so often regarded as typical of renaissance culture. The Italian cities lived close to the papacy, which claimed the authority to identify the enemies of the Church and to declare on them wars which were not merely just but holy. Insofar as the enemies of the Church proved to be Italians, or to be operating on Italian soil, those cities which allied themselves with the papacy could acquire the tincture of holiness for wars that were essentially fought in pursuance of local interests. There could be little doubt, for example, that the immediate cause of the great battle of Montaperti, fought on 4 September 1260 between the guelfs of Tuscany, headed by the Florentines, and the Sienese, aided by Florentine ghibelline exiles and by German troops of Manfred of Sicily, was the territorial rivalry of Florence and Siena in southern Tuscany, and most immediately of all the struggle for control of the little town of Montalcino. Manfred and his allies, like Lewis of Bavaria and his ally the Lucchese tyrant Castruccio Castracani, another local enemy of Florence, two generations later, were however the enemies of the Church, and thus Florence’s war-effort was sanctified.