Zealots of Justice: Coercive Officials in Late Medieval Italy

Abstract

This dissertation considers how, between about 1200 and 1350, cities in the upper half of the Italian peninsula experimented with a new kind of official whose primary task was coercion. There is a rich scholarship on institutions of public justice in the self-governing “communes” of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, but little of it has engaged with the coercive apparatus that served the courts and their users. It was easily the most sophisticated in Europe since the fall of the western Roman Empire. Italy’s coercive officials originated as messengers—comparable to process servers in the modern American legal system—in the years around 1200. But as communal courts sponsored new procedures that enabled creditors to swiftly recover debts, court messengers were tasked with coercive services for which creditors could pay—namely, the seizure of debtors’ property or, if necessary, the arrest and incarceration of debtors themselves. The earliest coercive officials, although known by different terms from city to city, closely resembled one another by the end of the thirteenth century. I call this prototypical coercive official a “sergeant.” Sergeants had their analogues elsewhere in the medieval Mediterranean, even in northern Europe, but the surpassingly rich archives of a few Italian cities make it possible to study sergeants at a near-ethnographic level of detail. I use one such city in western Tuscany, Lucca, as my central case study. Drawing upon the tools of institutional history, prosopography, anthropology, and social network analysis, I seek to explain why coercive officialdom took an especially brutal turn in Lucca, and possibly other cities like it, in the decades after 1300. Chapter 1 examines the legislative compendia, or “statutes,” that defined coercive officialdom in sixty-five Italian cities between about 1175 and 1360. These reveal how the office became increasingly brutal as it responded to the demands of creditors and communal administrations. Chapter 2 turns to the case of Lucca, concentrating on the 1330s and early 1340s. Here, we can see how the dictates of the office could be tempered by the social environment in which sergeants—called “heralds” (nuntii) in Lucca, as in other Tuscan cities—were embedded. However, the Lucchese evidence also reveals how the technology of coercive officialdom could directly serve the state. In Lucca, the exaction of taxes, fines, and other debts owed to the commune itself was not left to sergeants, but to officials called “retainers” (familiares). I use digital techniques to study the social networks that formed among sergeants, retainers, and the sureties they presented for office, showing that these two communities of coercive officialdom experienced the city around them in fundamentally divergent ways. Retainers, unlike sergeants, were largely excluded from Lucchese society and free to be shaped into “zealots of justice,” to use the memorable expression that one retainer applied to himself and his colleagues. In practice, “zeal” often meant brutality. Chapter 3 delves into the world of retainers and their culture of brutality, which I argue was fostered by the institutions they served. Indeed, even as the Lucchese commune made a show of condemning the worst of this brutality, a regime of impunity prevailed. Chapter 4 shifts perspective and considers the resistance that brutality engendered, especially in Lucca’s countryside. Examining a decade of resistance, from 1334 to 1344, I show that the Lucchese commune authorized techniques of coercion that evoked the predatory tactics of marauding armies. Brutality of this kind often met with collective, organized resistance. While this dissertation charts the intensification of state-sponsored violence in the cities of late medieval Italy, it also shows that the trend toward brutality was far from inevitable or sustainable.