Noble & Most Ancient: Catalogues of City Foundation in Fourteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Civic foundation legends were ubiquitous in medieval Italy, invented and repeated by those cities’ medieval inhabitants to augment civic honor and social prestige. Historians have traditionally dismissed accounts such as Hercules’ founding of Florence or the Trojans’ foundation of Genoa as simple medieval credulity, but recent attention to origin myths as expressions of social identity has brought the genre into new focus. Scholars have most often investigated such legends at a specific time and place; the present essay takes a broader approach in focusing on five catalogues of civic origins assembled in the first half of the fourteenth century by the authors Riccobaldo da Ferrara, Benzo d’Alessandria, Armannino da Bologna, Guglielmo da Pastrengo, and Giovanni Villani. These catalogues demonstrate not only the variety of ways that individual authors and scribes assessed and organized the available data, but also how they shared ideas as participants in late medieval Italy’s wide-ranging intellectual networks.