Principat, communauté et individu au bas Moyen Âge. Cultures politiques dans l’État de Milan
pubblicato in «Médiévales», 57 (2009), pp. 93–111
English summary
This paper concludes our enquiry into a series of key questions including: whether it is possible for the collectivity to make decisions, undertake actions and express itself; and how a community – which clearly cannot carry out certain actions, such as speaking – nonetheless attributes them to itself when it delegates representatives to carry them out on its behalf.
These are clearly quite general issues, with far–reaching juridical, philosophical and anthropological implications. It may be debated at a number of levels whether action is only individual or also collective, and therefore whether the community is really a subject with agency or merely a space for the initiatives of individuals. Furthermore the relations between representatives and represented far transcend the simple external delegation relationship, familiar to us thanks to the rational categories of modern law, to embrace far deeper and more complex forms of mutual assimilation that are a prerequisite for total identification between the community and the individuals charged with acting on its behalf.
These issues have been addressed in reference to a particular context in which they emerge in a specific and peculiar fashion: the dukedom of Milan in the 15th century, within the framework of the broader changes affecting the whole of Northern Italy. The 12th and 13th centuries saw a flourishing of different forms of urban and rural self–government in these regions, alongside – from the late 1200s onwards – seigneurial rule. The outcome of these developments was an extraordinary encounter over the 14th and 15th centuries between diverse political cultures: the tradition of the communes, with its values of participation and highly formalized institutional and juridic managment of public life; versus the tendency of the princes to adopt arbitrary, “extra–legal” and extraordinary practices of government, denounced by the communities as “contrary to the form” of local laws and established privileges (§ 1).
This counterpoint of different languages has been reconstructed on the basis of urban and rural statutes, notarial documents registered by the community chanceries and above all by the operative documents of the Sforza goverments, that is to say, the richly varied political corrispondence that has been conserved from late 15th century Lombardy. The instructions and commands sent by the prince to the outlying parts of his territory, the reports of his officials, the petitions of the communities, the letters sent by the communities themselves or by local noteworthies (principali) not alone provide a wealth of sources enabling us to reconstruct the range of positions that informed public debate in the regional state. They also represented a new departure in the sphere of Italian public written documents which had immediate political impact and deserves a comment in its own right: the letter form, as a ductile instrument that could accomodate an infinite range of contents within a flexible documentary framework (in contrast with the rigidity of form imposed for example by notarial documents), was the precise reflection of, and medium par excellence for, practices of government that were designed to go beyond the limits of the “form” traditionally accepted as legitimate. (§ 2).
This perspective leads us to revisit a classical hypothesis: that the most centralized powers of the Italian Renaissance waged cultural and political war on the communities (especially non–urban communities), promoting social distinctions within them and legitimizing the political protagonism of the individual. There is in fact evidence to suggest that, by assuming the various members of the community to be fixed into different social categories – some gentlemen, others peasants (villani), some principali, others common people (minimi) – the Milanese authorities produced a framework of values that socially and politically undermined the collectivity as such and promoted the formation within the community of privileged elites. In the context of the “extra–legal” government mentioned above, local politicians, even when acting in the name of the community, were treated (rewarded or punished) as individuals operating within the sphere of personal power («licet se batizano la comunità, tamen se resolveno & concludeno in alchuni») (§ 3).
This meant that the community could be attacked on at least two fronts: its own local political structures (§§ 4–5) and its access, as a community, to the prince (§ 6). Public community life, especially the key event of the public assembly, was negatively branded as dominated by negative passions mortifying the expression of individual “will”, by actual sins (envy, anger, pride) (§ 4), and by the disorderly behaviour typical of the villano and incompatible with the courtly behavioural codes of the Renaissance (§ 5). Furthermore the prince, who in the course of the 15th century increasingly chose to be inaccessible surrounding himself by the secrecy of his councils and archives, denied his subjects’ expectation of direct contact with him and thereby the ideal of “transparent” access to the powerful that was part of the tradition of the communes, by only engaging in dialogue with select and socially high–ranking delegations from the local bodies (§ 6).
However, the local communities did not passively accept this aggressive onslaught on their status as political–institutional subjects, themselves intervening in the debate that at its highest level of abstraction regarded the very nature of the community and the relations between it and the individuals making it up. The value of unity, the assembly’s capacity to express itself as “one voice”, and the bond – rhetorically elevated to the status of total identification – between the community and its ambassadors, were the arguments used in the letters sent from the peripheral areas to the centre of the prince’s domain to defend the key role of the collectivity as opposed to that of its individual members no matter how high–ranking (§ 7).
Translation: Clare O’Sullivan
