Medieval communes in the European Middle Ages had sworn allegiances of mutual defense among
the citizens of a town or city.
They took many forms, and varied widely in organization and makeup.
Communes are first recorded in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, thereafter becoming
a widespread phenomenon.
They had the greater development in central-northern Italy, where they were real city-states based
on partial democracy, whereas in Germany they became free cities, independent from local
nobility.
Etymology The English and French word "commune" appears
in Latin records in various forms.
The classical Latin communio means an association.
In some cases the classical Latin commune was used to mean people with a common interest.
Ultimately, the roots are cum + munire, literally 'to wall together'.
More frequently the Low Latin communia was used from which the Romance commune was derived.
When independence of rule was won through violent uprising and overthrow, they were
often called conspiratio.
Origins During the 10th century in several parts of
Western Europe, peasants whether due to their knowledge of a special craft beyond the immediate
requirements of their isolated village, or merely a self-reliant spirit, began to gravitate
towards walled population centers.
In central and northern Italy, and in Provence and Septimania, most of the old Roman cities
had survived—even if grass grew in their streets—largely as administrative centers
for a diocese or for the local representative of a distant kingly or imperial power.
In the Low Countries, some new towns were founded upon long-distance trade, where the
staple was the woolen cloth-making industry.
The sites for these ab ovo towns, more often than not, were the fortified burghs of counts,
bishops or territorial abbots.
Such towns were also founded in the Rhineland.
Other towns were simply market villages, local centers of exchange.
Such townspeople needed physical protection from lawless nobles and bandits, part of the
motivation for gathering behind communal walls, but the struggle to establish their liberties,
the freedom to conduct and regulate their own affairs and security from arbitrary taxation
and harassment from the bishop, abbot, or count in whose jurisdiction these obscure
and ignoble social outsiders lay, was a long process of struggling to obtain charters that
guaranteed such basics as the right to hold a market.
Such charters were often purchased at exorbitant rates, or granted, not by the local power,
which was naturally jealous of prerogatives, but by the king or the emperor, who came thereby
to hope to enlist the towns as allies in the struggle to centralize power that was arising
in tandem with the rise of the communes.
"The burghers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were ruthlessly harassed, blackmailed, subjected
to oppressive taxes and humiliated.
This drove the bourgeois back upon their own resources, and it accounts for the intensely
corporate and excessively organized character of medieval cities."
The walled city represented protection from direct assault at the price of corporate interference
on the pettiest levels, but once a townsman left the city walls, he was at the mercy of
often violent and lawless nobles in the countryside.
Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection, each city
had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the city walls, and outside.
Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for turning the cities into self-governing
corporations.
Although in most cases the development of communes was connected with that of the cities,
there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that were formed to protect the
common interests of villagers.
Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at their heart, communes
were sworn allegiances of mutual defense.
When a commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an oath in a public
ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of trouble, and to maintain the peace
within the city proper.
What did it mean for a commune member to defend another?
If a commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call for help, as
it was unlikely anyone would arrive in time.
Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker, the threat of revenge
being a form of defense.
However, if the attacker was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle, the town commune could
not muster the forces to attack him directly.
Instead they might attack the noble's family, burn his crops, kill his serfs, or destroy
his orchards in retribution.
The commune movement started in the 10th century, with a few earlier ones like Forlì, and gained
strength in the 11th century in northern Italy which had the most urbanized population of
Europe at the time.
It then spread in the early 12th century to France, Germany and Spain and elsewhere.
The English state was already very centralized, so the communal movement mainly manifested
itself in parishes, craftsmen's and merchants' guilds and monasteries.
State officialdom expanded in England and France from the 12th century onwards, while
the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by communal coalitions of cities, knights, farmer republics,
prince-bishops and the large domains of the imperial lords.
Medieval Christianity Communes were very important for the medieval
Church according to John Bossy.
The word that Bossy uses is fraternity.
The Church had a main focus on establishing peace between the medieval states.
The main sins that had to be overcome to stop the killing, according to many theologians,
were pride, envy and wrath.
Communes could help bring peace, because people would cooperate instead of acting egoistically.
In many places, fraternities and guilds were formed before a parish was established.
They were formed by common people who imitated the way of life of the monks, without becoming
part of a monastical order.
Another method to establish peace was the confession.
Medieval confessions were of a somewhat different form from the modern-day practises in the
Catholic Church; confessions were not yet auricular.
Confession was instead held in public as opposed in the privacy of a confessional.
The main theme was expressing sins committed against neighbours.
Forgiveness was asked not merely from God and the Church, but also from one's neighbours.
The 15th century brought a positive view on individualism expressed in the humanist movement
of the Renaissance.
Rising commerce was the cause of this individualism.
Communalism has remained very popular within and without Christianity until this day.
Social order According to an English cleric of the late
10th century, society was composed of the three orders: those who fight, those who pray
and those who work.
In theory this was a balance between spiritual and secular peers, with the third order providing
labour for the other two.
The urban communes were a break in this order.
The Church and King both had mixed reactions to communes.
On the one hand, they agreed safety and protection from lawless nobles was in everyone's best
interest.
The communes intention was to keep the peace through the threat of revenge, and the Church
was sympathetic to the end result of peace.
However, the Church had their own ways to enforce peace, such as the Peace and Truce
of God movement, for example.
On the other hand, communes disrupted the order of medieval society; the methods the
commune used, eye for an eye, violence begets violence, were generally not acceptable to
Church or King.
Furthermore, there was a sense that communes threatened the medieval social order.
Only the noble lords were allowed by custom to fight, and ostensibly the merchant townspeople
were workers, not warriors.
As such, the nobility and the clergy sometimes accepted communes, but other times did not.
One of the most famous cases of a commune being suppressed and the resulting defiant
urban revolt occurred in the French town of Laon in 1112.
Rural communes The development of medieval rural communes
arose more from a need to collaborate to manage the commons than out of defensive needs.
In times of a weak central government, communes typically formed to ensure the safety on the
roads through their territory, to enable commerce.
Perhaps the most successful such medieval community was the one in the alpine valleys
north of the St. Gotthard Pass: it later resulted in the formation of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
The Swiss had numerous written acts of alliance, so-called Bundesbriefe: for each new canton
that joined the confederacy, a new contract was written.
Besides the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft, there were similar rural alpine communes in Tyrol,
but these were quenched by the House of Habsburg.
Other such rural communes developed in the Grisons, in the French Alps, in the Pyrenees,
in northern France, in northern Germany, and also in Sweden and Norway.
The colonization of the Walser also is related.
The southern medieval communes most probably were influenced by the Italian precedent,
but the northern ones may well have developed concurrently and independently from the Italian
ones.
Only very few of these medieval rural communes ever attained Reichsunmittelbarkeit, where
they would have been subject only to the king or emperor; most still remained subjects of
some more or less distant liege lord.
Evolution in Italy and decline in Europe During the 11th century in northern Italy
a new political and social structure emerged and the medieval communes developed to the
form of city states.
The civic culture which arose from this urbs was remarkable.
In most places where communes arose they were absorbed by the monarchical state as it emerged.
Almost uniquely, they survived in northern and central Italy to become independent and
powerful city-states.
The breakaway from their feudal overlords by these communes occurred in the late 12th
century and 13th century, during the Investiture Controversy between the Pope and the Holy
Roman Emperor: Milan led the Lombard cities against the Holy Roman Emperors and defeated
them, gaining independence.
Meanwhile the Republic of Venice, Pisa and Genoa were able to conquer their naval empires
on the Mediterranean sea.
Cities such as Parma, Ferrara, Verona, Padua, Lucca, Siena, Mantua and others were able
to create stable states at the expenses of their neighbors, some of which lasted until
modern times.
In southern and insular Italy, autonomous communes were rarer, Sassari in Sardinia being
one example.
In the Holy Roman Empire, the emperors always had to face struggles with other powerful
players: the land princes on the one hand, but also the cities and communes on the other
hand.
The emperors thus invariably fought political battles to strengthen their position and that
of the imperial monarchy.
In the Golden Bull of 1356, emperor Charles IV outlawed any conjurationes, confederationes,
and conspirationes, meaning in particular the city alliances, but also the rural communal
leagues that had sprung up.
Most Städtebünde were subsequently dissolved, sometimes forcibly, and where refounded, their
political influence was much reduced.
Nevertheless some of this communes were able to survive in Germany for centuries and became
almost independent city-states vassals to the Holy Roman Emperors.
See also Lombard League
Hanseatic League Communalism before 1800
Italian city-states Signoria
Free imperial city Footnotes
References and further reading Histories of specific communes are found under
the names of their cities or locales.
Cantor, Norman E. 1993.
The Civilization of the Middle Ages Jones, Philip.
1997.
The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria.
Lansing, Carol, 1992.
The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune.
Sella, Pietro, "The Statutes of the Commune of Bugelle" 1904.
14th-century statutes of a Piedmontese commune, express the nature of the commune in vivid
detail, productions of medieval society and the medieval personality.
Tobacco, Giovanni, 1989.
The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, 400-1400,translator,
Rosalind Brown Jensen Waley, Donald, 1969 etc.
The Italian City-Republics Guelph University, "The Urban Past: IV.
The Medieval City" A bibliography.
External links Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: "Medieval commune"
(Italian) Itinerari medievali: risorse per lo studio del Medioevo