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This Episode:
/u/alvisefalier discusses medieval communes, a term for a complicated and heterogeneous system of local rule in the 11th through 13th centuries. The focus is on the city of Milan, and northern Italy in particular, under the dominion of the Holy Roman Empire, but with a distinct political and cultural difference from that entity. In this conversation we trace the development of the communal system in Milan from the end of Charlemagne up through the end of the system with the establishment of the Duchy of Milan by the Visconti dynasty. Issues of Italian disunity, with local identification taking precedence over a singular national identity are discussed. (68min)
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Coming up next episode: //u/sunshine_bag looks at the intersection of Italian Fascism, Football, and Nationalism.
Previous Episodes and Discussion
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You mentioned something sort of early in the episode about the Mediterranean basin being fully urbanized (I'm probably not getting that quite right). Would you mind explaining that a bit more and how it might play into this period?
Hi everyone!
I'm very very sorry to not have done this earlier, as fate would have it I'm more busy than expected this weekend, getting ready for grad school! I promise I'll get to any and all questions that are posted.
A bit about myself: I'm a full-blooded Venetian, but I've been living in Milan for little over half a decade now. Because of my parents' work, I lived in the United States for several years, which accounts for my accent. As can be gathered from the podcast, I got into Italian Urban History somewhat unconventionally, although it's now become my primary passion. I'm an economic historian by training (my graduation thesis was on the international expansion of the US media companies from the birth of the film industry to the present day; basically the history of the Hollywood film industry!)
I'll get everyone started by posting some source material for anyone who'd like to look into this topic more:
Lauro Martines characterizes communal rule as a fusion of groups fundamental incapable being fused, and you can read about that here.
The "glue" holding these groups together was fundamentally the urban clergy, whose role is examined in this series of papers, which unfortunately do cut out two hundred years of fascinating Italian history
And, well, if you absolutely promise not to swarm his University of Milan profile, this paper (in Italian) by Roberto Bellosta goes into a lot of depth with regards to urban society in Milan in this period.
So Milan seems to have been rather powerful economically and socially in the Middle Ages, therefore, why didn't they expand holdings into the Mediterranean or other overseas territories such as the way Venice did.
I'm going to kick off the discussion with a couple questions for /u/alvisefalier I had while editing the show:
Could you go into a bit more detail about the Della Torre and the Visconti rivalry? We had to gloss over it a bit towards the end, but it sounds like a fascinating bit of political intrigue.
One of the things that struck me while going through the episode was how your perspective as an economic historian shone through. Could you comment a bit on how you approach history through that lens and speculate a but on how we could have covered this topic through a different historical lens?
Special thanks to /u/40kfreak, Eric Hacke, Will Raybould, Elm, Charles-Eric Lemelin, Andrew Stead, William Ryan, Stuart Gorman, Bill Rubin, Sarah Gilbert, Mark Katerberg, Vlad, and Max M. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon. And thanks to all our new supporters as well!
And a big big thanks to /u/alvisefalier for being such a wonderful guest on the show!