Apparently there were up to 180(!) towers build in Bologna in the 12th and 13th century. (artist rendition)
The Two Towers are the most prominent ones that still stand today.
Did this trend really develop, just because rich people and guilds wanted to one-up one another and have the "biggest one"? Did they have no other purpose at all? Maybe in terms of personal security or defence?
It just seems like such a waste of money otherwise, doesn't it?
Presumably there is an element of prestige and keeping up with the Joneses, but we know the towers were used for security. Twelfth-century travel writer Benjamin of Tudela observed the similar situation in Genoa:
From Marseilles one can take ship and in four days reach Genoa...Each householder has a tower to his house, and at times of strife they fight from the tops of the towers with each other.
City chronicles give us more information about how exactly the towers were used in family-to-family fighting. In some cases, troops would hide in a tower,then burst into the street to accost (and probably murder) a passing member of a rival family. At least one of the many many many waves of interfamilial violence was triggered when people up in a tower threw down giant rocks onto the head of their target in the street, killing him.
I assume people knew to avoid certain streets, so I wonder if there was tower-trading or -renting or something going on.
It's my impression that they were both a prestige item as well as being a form of defense/security for patrician families. I don't know a ton about Bologna (although I was just there and climbed the less horrifyingly leaning of the two towers) but a similar situation was the case in medieval Florence, and probably other Italian city-states as well. The state of inter-family gang-style warfare portrayed in Romeo and Juliet is not really too far off the mark. Thirteenth and fourteenth century Florence was plagued with interfamily conflict that divided into two factions, first the Guelphs vs Ghibellines and then later the White Guelphs vs the Black Guelphs, with the conflict initially bubbling over into violence and murder when a young man of the Buondelmonte family refused a marriage that had been arranged for him and married another lady instead. Having seen some of these towers, I'm actually not really sure how they were used for family security because they're not really big enough to live in or anything, but everything I've read about the medieval period in Northern Italy backs up the notion that family towers were extremely numerous.
fyi, a recent discussion on the towers here; not explaining too much about the background/reasons, but you may find some leads or ask follow-up questions of the users
