Divenire comunità.
Comuni rurali, poteri locali, identità sociali e territoriali in Valtellina e nella montagna lombarda nel tardo medioevo
English summary
This work focuses on Valtellina and – using a comparative approach – on other Prealpine and Alpine areas in Lombardy. It examines the period between the beginning of the 1300s and the mid–1500s which saw the decline of the city–state and the rise of the territorial state.
The specific object of enquiry is the rural community: its institutions, resources, groups of élite, and relations with the local seigneurial powers, city and state. Alongside the rural community itself, we analyze other institutional and socially active subjects with which it was in competition and interacted: the Ghuelph and Ghibelline factions, the nobles and citizens, patrilineal kinships and neighborhoods.
Part One of the volume explores the relationship between the rural communes on the one hand, and the local lords with their groups of loyal followers on the other, as well as the gradual breakdown of seigneurial authority. Particularly in Valtellina in the 15th and 16th centuries, the commune successfully imposed its political thinking and language of social identity on the leading local aristocrats. The lords, whose jurisdictional prerogatives had already been curtailed during the communal era, maintained a role in the territorial state by fulfilling the function of political mediators between the centre and peripheral areas, including on behalf of their old subjects. However, by the end of the Middle Ages, they were economically weakened, their role as mediators was threatened by the more prominent members of the local communities who were increasingly more inclined to withdraw from their patronage, and they had ceased to play a strong role in public life due to the undermining of their nepotistic networks. These factors combined led them to become integrated into – at times of their own accord and at times unwillingly – the institution of the commune. This entailed giving up their traditional privileges and recognizing themselves for the first time as «uomini del comune».
Part Two looks at the internal structure and composition of the local community. Up to the early 1300s, Valtellina society had operated on the basis of rigid segregation of the social strata (citizens, nobles, (rustici or vicini [peasantry]); the rural commune at that time was a class–based institution, insofar as it was an organism of self–government that applied exclusively to the vicini. Subsequently the nobles and citizens established new forms of dominance by giving up their separate fiscal and jurisdictional status and joining the commune along with the vicini. The outcomes varied from place to place: in some cases, equal standing was attained between the institutionalized groups of nobles and vicini; in the more dynamic communities the overall restructuring of the nobility led to the complete dissolving of the existing social order and the formation of new elites that were composite in make up. In the latter scenario, similarly to the developments in the cities of the Po Valley during the 15th and 16 centuries, unequal access to institutional roles, naming order and titles of rank in written documents marked out families and individuals who, without attempting to reintroduce the rigid juridical organization of the social orders, now claimed membership of privileged groups within the community.
Part Three addresses the role of kinship in the commune. Between the 12th and 14th centuries in the mountain valleys of Lombardy as in many other rural areas, patrilineal descent became a key criterion for defining who was to be recognized as kin, even amongst the humbler social classes. When the kinship group attained social recognition and a stable identity, denoted by the surname, the agnatic family was publicly instated as the basic unit of the community, with the right to a defined part in the dividing out of institutional roles and in the formation of groups of representatives. In some specific local contexts, the rise to power of the agnatic descent groups seriously threatened the unity of the commune (with regard to its fiscal and judicial responsibilities and control of resources), reinstated as the key institutional framework only in the mid–1400s and only on condition that it took the form of a sort of federation of kinship groups.
Part Four examines the contrada or vicinato (neighborhood), the sub–communal unit of residence that in the late Middle Ages improved its institutional status, culminating in its recognition as another of the basic components making up the commune. Similarly to the kinship groups, the contrade came to hold rights to elect community representatives, as well as specified shares in community resources, a role in the management of the churches and so on.
Part Six analyzes the position of the Alpine valleys within the territorial state and the key role played by the valley and lake communities in the relations between local societies and central authorities. These broader communities were federations of rural communes, which held assemblies and had decision–making powers, even drawing up their own statutes and nominating their own agents: by the early 1500s such "communities of communes" as they are termed in the sources, had definitively replaced the local lords and the factions, their leadership based on their role as the prince’s interlocutors, ambassadors for the territory and government of the «paese» (land).
Finally, in Part Six we set out to identify generalizable processes, while taking into account the peculiar motives of the case in hand, by comparing Valtellina – subject to the most in–depth analytical analysis – with the nearby communities of Valcamonica, Ossola Superiore, the Sottoceneri (southern Ticino), and the lowlands and city of Como.
The overall change that took place in Valtellina over the three centuries was the shift from a society organized primarily around personal loyalties, client/patron relationships, kinship ties and class identity, to a society in which the most important type of political affiliation was territorial and local community membership. A range of factors – to be found within local society itself as well as the choices implemented by those governing the territory – explain this process.
The political and economic crisis of the rural lords prevented the leading local aristocrats from keeping their personal followers united; the latter naturally began to identify themselves more and more as jointly belonging to the rural commune rather than as sharing loyalty to the same patron.
The waning of urban influence in the 15th century weakened the loyalty that had previously kept the groups of citizens of Como resident in the contado (countryside) united and clear about their identity, pushing them to take part in the institutions of local self–government.
Economic development and social changes wore down the rigid barriers between the status of the nobles, citizens and vicini: many members of the new elites (including craftsmen, professionals and successful immigrants), who could not easily find a position for themselves within the traditional tripartite division of the social order, readily identified with the newer, more inclusive, form of community solidarity. Even the formerly privileged preferred to define themselves as "nobles of the commune", accepting the need to subordinate their social rank to the more fundamental belonging to the community.
Charitable practices centred on the vicinato or commune and the frequent foundation of new churches contributed to the institutional development of collectivities whose duties were growing apace in terms of the endowment of churches, support for the celebration of religious functions and the ritual distribution of food to the poor.
Public power, both in the era of the city–state and in that of the territorial state, displayed a preference for attributing responsibility for tax collection and military and peace–keeping duties to territorially–defined communities rather than to social groups of other kinds.
For all of these reasons, the numerous actors that in the 14th century had the power to act independently and incisively on the political scene (the rural commune, the local lords, the factions, the nobles and vicini, and even non–aristocratic kinship groups when well–established with many branches), were substituted by a stratified system of more united rural communities that in the 16th century began to occupy local public space, from the smallest space of the contrada to the largest space of the entire valley community (universitas vallis). The older formations either eventually faded out (such as the rival Guelph and Ghibelline factions) or repositioned themselves within the rural commune, in a further and subordinate expression of the same (as occurred with the kinship groups and social classes).
Broadening our perspective to consider the entire Alpine region in Lombardy yields the finding that other local communities took different developmental courses. In Valcamonica the aristocrats retained a stronger power base and the community/nobles dualism was not diminished by the incorporation of the latter into the former institution.
In the Sottoceneri, the lowlands of Como and Ossola Superiore the rural community actually became weaker during the late Middle Ages. Specifically, compared with other less robust forms of organization on the part of the "homines", in the Sottoceneri and Ossola the factions maintained a key public role. The lowlands, in contrast, saw the emergence of subjects normally excluded from the local institutions, such as women and youths, who had the opportunity to play a more significant role in the decision–making processes of the collectivity.
Finally, the City of Como acted as a container for a rich range of political associations that cannot be reduced to a single code of loyalty: the urban commune, district communities, factions, guilds and social classes.
The social transformation investigated in this research took place at a number of different levels, requiring different scales of observation.
First, developments at the institutional level were explored on the basis of legal documents and situated within a more general view of the entire Valtellina and Alpine region of Lombardy, particularly in relation to the communes’ structure and relations with public power.
Then there is a social level: matrimonial practices, the geography of property–holdings, the distribution of wealth, the development of the crafts, trading and financial sectors in the valley towns. This level was investigated via the in–depth analysis of specific case studies, individual rural communes that are well–documented, so as to reconstruct – via surviving fiscal and notarial documents – some overall local configurations and their connections with the political and social changes of the period.
A further level is that of the social representations that may be deduced from reflecting on local forms of societal cohabitation in the late Middle Ages. This part of the enquiry relied on analysis of the language used in the documents (status markers, notarial formulae denoting representative functions and collective action, the criteria determining the order in which names were listed in the written records of community council meetings).
The final level is that of the self–identification of individual subjects, of particular interest in the case of those who played influential political roles in their communes. The reconstruction of a series of biographies, based in particular on notarial documents and focused on the development of careers in public office and networks of individual relationships, pointed up a decisive turning point in the late–medieval rise of the rural communes, whereby these institutions not alone gained the power to condition the behaviour of individual from the outside (so to speak), but also became the very origin
Translation: Clare O’Sullivan
