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Reviewed by:
  • The Lombard League 1167–1225
  • John Scholl
Gianluca Raccagni, The Lombard League 1167–1225, A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010) xiv + 231 pp.

Students of the Middle Ages are familiar with the Lombard League. It was an association of northern Italian communes that opposed, with some success, Emperors Frederick I and Frederick II, as they sought to impose their will on northern Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet although the main characters and events of these conflicts are well known, the League itself has received very little direct, scholarly attention. In fact, Gianluca Raccagni notes that “the last monograph devoted to it [the League] was published in 1866” (1). [End Page 259]

Raccagni seeks to fill this gap, by providing “the first broad assessment of the League” since the nineteenth century (3). He examines the creation of the League during the late 1160s, its structure and activities, and finally its evolution and eventual disappearance during the first part of the thirteenth century, when conflict with the emperor ebbed. He stops in 1225, just before the League was revived to counter the designs of Frederick II; he plans to complete the story in another monograph.

Alongside filling a historiographical lacuna, Raccagni also refutes the idea that the League was primarily a military alliance. He notes that this view of the League was shaped by nationalist ideology during the Risorgimento. Nineteenth-century Italian historians looked to the League and its conflict with the emperors as a model for Italy’s contemporary struggle for independence from the Austrian Empire. And they ignored evidence of the League between 1183 and 1225, because the League was not at war with the Empire. Subsequently, historians lost interest in the League and never reconsidered this approach. Raccagni takes a different tack. He does a close study of sources that show activities of the League both before and after the Peace of Constance in 1183. He reaches the following conclusion: “The Lombard League was not just a temporary military alliance … but an original regional association with a distinctive official name and a governing college with its own seal. Indeed, the study of the period between 1183 and 1226 shows that it survived during a time of peace with the empire that was at least as long as the contest fought against it”(5).

Chapter 1 discusses the setting for the rise of the League. Before the reign of Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperors were essentially absentee lords with very little real authority in northern Italy. Power was exercised on a local basis by lords and city communes. However, the political situation changed under Frederick I. With the benefit of more stability at home, he sought to reclaim imperial rights in northern Italy. This soon caused discontent among some of the communes and lords, but the emperor had the upper hand.

Chapter 2 begins with the formation of the Lombard League and follows its story up to the Peace of Constance in 1183. By 1167 most of Lombardy had turned against the emperor, and Cremona, formerly a key imperial ally, played a central role in gathering the malcontents, one city and lord at a time, into the society that became known as the Lombard League. At its height, the League could count most every commune and lord in Lombardy, and Frederick I was forced to abandon Italy. However, this period was short-lived. Some members, including Cremona, defected and formed an imperial party that supported the emperor’s return to northern Italy in 1174. The conflict was resolved only with the Peace of Constance in 1183, when the emperor granted major concessions and established peace with the League.

Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the organization and activities of the League. Here, Raccagni establishes his central argument: the League was much more than a military association. Its members agreed to a common set of rules and appointed a group of rectors as a “governing body” for the League (61). Alongside its military concerns, the League was designed to settle territorial disputes and promote peace among its members. It also fostered trade relations, restored [End Page 260] cities that had been...

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