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Political Conflict in the Italian City States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Lauro Martines
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Extract

POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN ITALIAN CITY STATES WAS NOT FOR MEN who valued themselves more than they valued politics. The stakes were too high. Exile or loss of life and property were too often the penalties. The difficult legal circumstances which attended organized political opposition went back to the early commune, to the fervour of the civil struggles that began late in the 12th century. These were to affect the character of the opposition down to the 16th century. If the contenders in political strife sometimes expressed a readiness to compromise, they revealed, just as often, an inability to do so. And in critical times the desire for the physical elimination of political opponents easily emerged.

Major rivalries of the 11th and 12th centuries inadvertently favoured the rise of local government. The communes – rendered bolder in many cases by their quickening economies – profited from the conflicts between papacy and empire, between the emperor and the German princes, and between the episcopal and comital powers in Italy. As imperial authority waned, local groups all over north and central Italy pressed forward to take over the administration of their own affairs.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1968 , pp. 69 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1968

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References

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12 Though some students hold that the great feudal nobility seldom went into trade. Fiumi, op. cit.

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25 Although here too there were rivalries which scholars have often not emphasized enough.

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27 Lawyers, international merchants and bankers had already managed in many cases to work their way into the commune. At Genoa and Pisa the influence of the great mercantile and maritime interests had long been considerable.

28 Although actually the popolo had not previously held de jure a political share in the commune.

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33 Of the sort given to sixty years of Florentine history by N. Rubinstein, The Government of Florence Under the Medici (1434 to 1494), Oxford, 1966.

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