Introduction

On July 2, 1293, the notary Redolfo da Guercio went through the city of Bologna searching for anyone contravening the statutes under his remit. Redolfo was in charge of the fango office, which broadly speaking oversaw the commune's infrastructure, sanitation, and public spaces. He was a foreign official—part of the podestà's retinue, which local elites hired to administer justice for a term of six months—and took two of the podestà's soldiers (berrovarii) with him on patrol. Recording the occasion in his official register, Redolfo listed a number of the statutory violations he looked for. Some of them concerned what Mary Douglas, in her classic adage, would call “matter out of place”: physical obstructions in the piazzas and city streets, and waste dumped in the piazza and other “prohibited places.” Others had to do with behaviours out of place: butchers slaughtering animals where it was prohibited, pedlars (tricoli) selling unregulated foodstuffs, and gamblers playing outside of designated gaming areas. Still others concerned persons who, according to the civic statutes, had no place at all within the city walls. These included lepers, the blind, and those who pretended to be such, as well as charlatans, purse-cutters, amputees, soothsayers, and “other persons who beg falsely.” Over the next six months, Redolfo went on to compile a register filled with “discoveries” (inventiones) of apparent violations: gamblers playing on the stairs of the communal palace, residents dumping water from their balconies, stationers skinning animals to make parchment under their porticoes, stray pigs roaming the streets, taverns serving wine in measures that did not conform to the communal standard, and porticoes not high enough to allow people on horseback to pass underneath. Redolfo even investigated reports that three blind men were living with their families in the parish of San Giuliano, on the edge of town. Far from exceptional, Redolfo's activities would have seemed perfectly ordinary to local residents. He stood among the first in a long line of fango notaries in Bologna who compiled registers of their discoveries, which survive in abundance from 1285. Moreover, officials who oversaw roads, sanitation, and urban well-being were a staple feature of municipal government across and beyond Italy by the later thirteenth century. As such, they served as de facto police forces well before the modern era, when historians tend to locate their rise.