A bold new history of the rise of the medieval Italian commune Amid
the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose
in the cities of northern and central Italy. Sleepwalking into a New
World takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came
about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most
important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world.
Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three
cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant
backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the
elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first
nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that
they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that
the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern
sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to
make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes
emerged, governed by consular elites "chosen by the people," and
subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other,
yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to
defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of
Legnano in 1176. Sleepwalking into a New World reveals how the
development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in
the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400865826
Publisert
2014
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter