THE MEDIEVAL INHERITANCE

‘It has been the achievement of the Italians’, wrote Poggio Bracciolini in his De nohilitate, ‘to spread to all other nations a proper understanding of humanitas, virtus and the whole art and science of living a communal life’. There is much truth in Poggio's seemingly extravagant boast. If we wish to understand the origins and development of Renaissance political thought, we must certainly focus our main attention on the city-states of the Regnum Italicum and the forms of political literature to which they gave rise.

The revival of Roman law

By the time Poggio was writing in the 1440s, the Italian city-states had already enjoyed a long and distinguished history. They first began to establish themselves as independent communes around the year 1100, and by the end of the twelfth century most of them had adopted an elective system of government centred on an official known as the podestà, so-called because he was invested with supreme power or potestas in the administration of the community's affairs. At the same time they began to evolve a new and distinctive form of political literature, a literature of advice-books devoted to explaining the duties of a podestà and how best to discharge them. The earliest known example is the anonymous Ocuius pastoralis of 1242, the doctrines of which were later expanded by Giovanni da Viterbo in his De regimine civitatum and Brunetto Latini in his Livres dou trésor, an encyclopaedic work of the 1260s which ends with a discussion of ‘The government of cities’.