Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century by Chris Wickham

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Centuryby Chris Wickham Michele Campopiano Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century. By Chris Wickham. [ Lawrence Stone Lectures.] (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 305. ISBN 978-0-691-14828-1.) Based on Chris Wickham’s May 2013 Lawrence Stone Lectures, this volume is a study of how the commune—as a new and fundamentally autonomous form of government focused on annually changed consuls—came into existence in northern and central Italy in the twelfth century. This form of government seemed radically innovative to outsiders. One difficult issue confronted by Wickham is the definition of a commune, particularly because of the extreme variety of cases in central and northern Italy. Wickham defines an ideal type based on the following elements: a conscious urban collectivity, a regularly rotating set of magistracies, and a de facto autonomy of action for the city and its magistrates. Wickham’s approach to this theme is path-breaking in a number of ways. He specifically considers whether the development of this new form of government had programmatic and conscious aspects; as he writes, “what did they thinkthey were doing?” (p. 6, emphasis in original). Wickham has a deep knowledge of the previous literature in the [End Page 596]topic and an awareness of how this is linked to debates with broad ideological implications, such as the origins of Renaissance and of Republican forms of government and values (e.g., Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought[New York, 1978]). It is worth noting that the three cases he chooses are Milan, Pisa, and Rome. Whereas the first two cities are usually taken into account in the general narratives of the history of the Italian communes, the inclusion of Rome in the comparison is rather innovative. Rome also represents a clear case in which the new form of administration was developed as conscious opposition to previous forms of political hegemony in the city. Wickham’s work connects in particular to two important contributions to the origins of communes: Hagen Keller’s Adelsherrschaft und städtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien, 9. bis 12. Jahrhundert(Tübingen, 1979), and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur’s Cavaliers et citoyens(Paris, 2003). These two volumes have been crucial to the discussion of the nature of the ruling elites of the early communes. Based in particular on the evidence of Milan, Keller had argued that this elite was divided into defined strata ( ordines) led by the military aristocracy (pp. 11–12). Vigueur subsequently argued that the political core of the commune was the collectivity of mounted knights of every city, which extended beyond a small group of feudo-vassallic aristocrats (p. 13). Wickham refers instead to three levels of elites: a richer and usually more signorial first level, a second level that was prosperous but did not own castles, and a third level of “medium elite” with fewer properties (p. 191). This second level was more clearly associated with the consuls, the main magistracy of the communes, which would have also formed the core of Vigueur’s militia. Wickham links the development of the early commune to the vacuum of power created by the decline of the public role of the Kingdom of Italy, in particular of the tradition of placitathat was connected to it (p. 28). A similar vacuum can be found also in Rome, with the decline of Roman bureaucracy and public government (pp. 122–25). This argument connects thematically to previous works by Wickham, including his Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000(London, 1980), in which he stressed the public function of the Kingdom of Italy. This tradition was discontinued, but it also represented a model for later polities. The early assemblies of citizens that marked the early commune period were also, to a certain extent, a form of defensive reaction against the crisis of the kingdom (p. 195). Other factors contributed to the creation of political cohesion in different areas, such as the presence of common land to manage, or the necessity of creating a common...