Lordship, Reform, and the Development of Civil Society in Medieval Italy: The Bishopric of Orvieto, 1100-1250 (review)

The assassination of Pietro Parenzo, the patrician Roman Podestà of Orvieto, on 20 May 1199 was a watershed in the political and ecclesiastical development of medieval Orvieto, though each of the protagonists in the running of the city saw it from a different perspective. The 'official' line was recorded in the Passio Beati Pietro Parentii Martiris, written by Maestro Giovanni, at the time a canon of the cathedral but by 1211 its bishop. Not surprisingly, he proclaimed Pietro's death a sacrifice for the cause of religious orthodoxy and the established political order; and he invoked the martyrdom both to heal the strained relations between bishop, commune and papacy, and to provide a timely warning to the papacy not to test Orvieto's allegiance too far. Above all, however, it was an opportunity to reconfirm the paramount authority of the bishop in the Orvietan state.

Although the commune, which over the previous half century had rapidly developed into an independent and self-confident institution with its own jurisdictional standing, was happy to owe religious allegiance to the pope it was determined to give no ground in its claims to the lands strategically placed along the Via Francigena which were seen as being vital for its economic well-being and its prestige. The papacy, for its part, had been pursuing an aggressive policy of territorial reclamation in its attempt to reassert temporal authority over central Italy, and refused to concede an inch to the upstart commune – indeed, to allow no possible misunderstanding, Innocent III continued to place Orvieto under interdict in his largely futile attempts to exact submission, and he adamantly refused the citizens' petition to make Pietro a saint. The dissident forces Pietro had been brought in to stamp out – the heretics and the pro-imperial urban elites – suffered a heavy blow but neither group was scotched. The Cathars remained a presence in Orvieto for another 60 years and the antipapal forces (deceptively subsumed within the heretical party by Giovanni), remained strong enough to take on the papal forces a decade and a half later.

Giovanni's objective of restoring the harmony that had existed 50 years before between bishopric, commune and papacy was destined to be no more than a vain hope because things had moved so irrevocably forward over that period. Most importantly, political and economic power had moved from the country to the city, new men under a new mandate wielded power and they were disinclined to relinquish it – over the second half of the twelfth century the city-state had been born and it was in robust good health.

Central to the argument of this book is the question of the role of the office of bishop in the formation of this new political entity and in the establishment of a civil society. In challenging the prevailing historiographical tendency to ignore or diminish the role of institutions, David Foote argues that they are 'mechanisms that regulate the competition for power', and, in the Orvietan context, the bishopric in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries was 'the place where Orvietans contested and negotiated the political and religious ideals that would shape the community' (p. 2).

The bishopric was the dominant institution to emerge following the collapse of the authority of the Carolingian state and, according to Foote, it provided two vital and very practical elements for the emerging commune – its territory and its administrative process. The first five chapters explore the ways in which the bishopric became the conduit through which the lands of the Orvietan contado were extended and secured as communal patrimony thereby providing the essential economic and political base around which a new order could then coalesce. The remaining chapters examine the role of juridical and administrative procedures and personnel, first established under the bishopric, to delineate...