ITALIAN OR MEDIAEVAL SIENA

THE QUALITY ABOUT THE risen Siena of the eighth century, communicating itself immediately and with clearness in the few notices of the time, is, that the milieu of the town is no longer Roman, but mediaeval and Lombard. For this reason we must, if we would understand the beginnings of Siena’s third and triumphant epoch—the epoch with which this book is to deal —possess ourselves, at least in outline, of the political and administrative history of the Lombard kingdom.

When, in the spring of the year 568, the Lombards under their king Alboin crossed the Julian Alps, they had no difficulty in effecting a foothold in the valley of the Po. The emperor at Constantinople was represented in his province of Italy by an official called an exarch, whose seat was at Ravenna. The exarch made little resistance, and the Italian natives, calling themselves, as members of the empire, Romans, though really a mixture of many races, reduced under the long Latin rule to a common type, were too unmanned and broken by the interminable succession of previous invasions and recent pestilence and famine to render their ruler any effective help. Moreover, this latest multitude “which the populous North poured from her frozen loins,” was, if we are to believe contemporary evidence, the most terrible of all the Barbarian hosts which fate had let loose upon poor Italy. Their fierce manners and savage aspect, unrelieved by any softening influences of civilization, struck a cold fear through the hearts of the effete Romans. Especially did the delicate, clean-shaven natives single out for notice and aversion the savage masses of hair and beard adorning their enemies, characteristic features to which this rugged folk owes its name of Langobards, that is, Longbeards. They soon dominated the north with the exception of Venetia, the Ravennese, and Genoa, maritime districts which were not reducible without a fleet, and presently pushed southward over the Apennines through Tuscany to Spoleto and Benevento. In the south, too, the maritime districts with their strong ports of Bari, Tarento, Otranto, and Naples, withstood the onset of the strangers, who had neither ships nor any knowledge of the sea. Likewise, Rome, energetically defended by its spiritual rulers—above all, by the great Pope Gregory—maintained its independence.

The equilibrium thus established between invaders and defenders determined the history of Italy throughout the two centuries of the Lombard dominion. The fragments of the empire north and south, ruled by the exarch at Ravenna and held together to a certain extent by the spiritual prestige of the pope, resisted with all their might the further progress of the Lombards, who for their part, possessed approximately of two-thirds of the peninsula, were naturally desirous to disembarrass themselves entirely of their struggling enemies and to complete their conquest. In the long run the scales inclined in favor of the Lombards. Every new sovereign continued to push out his boundaries by making some small acquisition from the emperor and his exarch, until it became plain that the unity of Italy under Lombard auspices was inevitable. Disconsolate over the impending peril, the pope made appeal after appeal to the great folk of the Franks across the Alps to come to his assistance. But we are anticipating. For the present we note with interest that Tuscany was part of the Lombard kingdom almost from the first, having been occupied as early as the year 570, in the days of Alboin.

The rule of the conquerors, especially in its early stages, was of the most primitive order. Paul, son of Warnefrid, a literary Lombard of the eighth century, has told us almost everything we know about it. He relates that his forbears, on their first coming into Italy, ruthlessly murdered the great Roman landowners, and made the rest of the inhabitants tributary by exacting a payment of one-third of the produce of the fields. They came for booty and its division must have been their main, if not their only, concern. Inevitably, however, and almost from the first day, the need would make itself felt for some kind of government. Without a trace of reverence for the Roman name the Barbarians began to organize their administration along lines which appealed to their greed of possession and which were not too remote from their experience. Then it was that the distinctive features of the Roman administration, in so far as any had survived the storms of the last generations, were swept into oblivion. The leading features of that system were, it is generally agreed, the municipal senate or curia, which performed the service of a local government, and the Roman law, which bound all the parts of the wide empire together under a common system of justice. It used to be maintained that Roman curia and Roman law disappeared indeed from sight in the Lombard period, but somehow eked out a hunted and subterranean existence until, after many years, they experienced a glorious rebirth in the Italian communes of the twelfth century. These communes, according to this view, mark not only the happy appearance of political liberty in the world after the intolerable anarchy of feudal times, but specifically denote the rebirth of the Roman municipal constitution, which, never destroyed, had merely dropped into a long winter’s sleep. We may now safely declare this opinion chimerical. The Lombards were enemies; they were complete masters of the situation; they knew no compromise. There is no evidence that they suffered any government but that which they authorized, and which they could comprehend and utilize for their selfish purposes. But there is evidence that the awful times were beginning to work their own remedy by means of certain voluntary associations not contemplated in the official Lombard arrangements.

The growth of voluntary associations, involving the gradual recovery by the downtrodden Italians of self-government, at first, of course, on a very modest basis, may be presented in the following general terms. The monarchy of Alboin did after a while, with the cessation of plunder, bring comparative peace, peace brought new life, and life in its busy, irrepressible fashion led to new forms of social organization. In the Lombard period we may see how men deprived of the fruits of civilization, separated violently from the institutions on which they had leaned, thrust back almost into the state of nature, take their first timid steps toward social regrouping along entirely simple and natural lines. In these humble measures, assuming the form of agreements among neighbors for adjusting quarrels, for repairing roads and water conduits, and for other matters of immediate interest to a small circle, scholars are now agreed to seek for the germs of the great free communes, which shed their incomparable light over the later Middle Age. An idle quarrel this, the general reader may be tempted to interpose. As long as the cities achieved their freedom and used it for some noble end, what can it matter if they owed it entirely to themselves or received it as a heritage from imperial Rome ? But surely it is not pedantry, it is an instinctive sympathy with youth and force, which gives us pleasure in the knowledge that the Italian liberty of the Middle Age was not a successful copy or revival of extinct Roman forms, but a healthy, spontaneous, and original product, cultivated through silent or almost silent centuries from a seed sown at a time when to outward seeming the end of the world was at hand. I have broached a great question here, though I am not able to follow it further at this point. It is impossible to write about any Italian commune without giving attention to the controversy, as old as the modern science of history, concerning the origin of the town liberties. I have indicated broadly the direction and implication of the most recent studies in the field. In a later chapter, when the specific question of the liberties of Siena is before us, I shall return to this issue, which is possessed, as a long line of brilliant names testifies, of the most persistent fascination. For the present I shall take up the thread of the Lombard administration.

The power of the Lombard king depended largely on his character and personal equipment. When he was a man of force and daring he made his will felt to the uttermost corners of his realm; when he was weak or a child, the agents who represented him in the provinces became practically independent. These representatives were of two kinds, dukes and gastalds, the dignity of duke being the higher distinction and conferring a semi-independent position. A gastald was more definitely the appointee of the king, sent out on the king’s business and removable at the will of his master. Duke and gastald alike made their homes in the cities, not because they preferred them to the country—a thing unlikely in view of the keen passion of the German peoples generally for the open air—but because experience would teach that the cities were the convenient and necessary centres of administration for a given district. In Tuscany gastalds prevailed, an indication that the king kept his hand more firmly on this province; and indeed rebellion, so constant and distressing a phenomenon of Lombard history, seems to have been relatively infrequent within the boundaries of Tuscany. In the early eighth century Siena had a gastald of the name of Taipert, during whose rule we get our first lively glimpse of the town since the cloud of darkness which descended upon it in the later stages of imperial Rome. No Tuscan city of the time introduces itself to our attention with an incident of equally bold relief. At the hand of authentic documents we can recover the details of a...