was often elected from outside, so as not to be partisan to neighborhood family disputes. But an outsider could not maintain custom and would lean increasingly on Roman and church-inspired formalisms. The necessary alliances of different interests within a city made associations between cities a natural extension of politics. Cities often formed leagues in defence against alliances of nobility. Many were temporary, such as the Lombard League of the independent communes of Northern Italy, whose sole purpose was to push out the German King Frederick Barbarossa in the 12th century. Other alliances, such as the 2nd Rhenish League and the Swiss Confederation, aimed for more permanent mutual support against the taxes and controls of Kings, Emperors and Barons. Most significant medieval history can be seen freshly as the actions of alliances, and it is in this context which we can first see awareness of the problems with territorial centralization. When King John was forced by a league of rebel Barons to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, the point was unrelated to modem democracy, and was instead the maintenance of local authorities against the King’s abusive centralizing tendencies. Local control was maintained through an alliance against the center. Kings and Emperors were often elected positions, or treated as such, and the A gallery passing over the Ponte Vecchio in Florence acted as a secret passage from the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace for the autocratic Medici family. In the 16th and 17th centuries many cities in Europe were disciplined forcefully and relentlessly as state power grew. Long before the Magna Carta, it was considered the duty of those just below an abusive leader to rise up and reassert fair practice. The charter was one of hundreds of like documents intending to record common custom, in an age where writing things down was becoming more important. Magna Carta was just one written example of the commonly accepted responsibility of people lower in the hierarchy to keep those above from evading their collective responsibilities. Cooperative associations were both pervasive and manifold in medieval times. In Bologna, a town where many teachers and students gathered as early as the 11th century, students felt cheated by both teachers who did not cover much ground and by townspeople who overcharged for lodging, clothing, food and books. The students formed a union, modeled after the guilds, and hence the name Universitas, University, meaning “all of us” - a medieval alliance still with us today in greatly modified form. In the 14th century many large scale alliances and interests became formalized. The Church, nobles and patricians formed estate committees to check the King’s power within government. Demands for structural reform arose, even demands to be freed from the hierarchy. Switzerland is of course a prime example. In France in the 1350’s Etienne Marcel tried to unite merchants, artisans and the peasants of the Jacquerie rebellions through the 3rd estate, an assembly meant to represent everyone neither noble nor clerical. His attempt to create a union against the King and nobility is of the same trend as Wat Tyler’s successful British peasant revolt in 1381, and Cola di Rienzi’s insurgent government in Rome in 1347. Cola called for an Italian confederation of communes, and 25 Guelf towns sent him representatives. As trade increased and cities grew, monarchs tried whenever possible to tax their wealth, setting the economy of the cities against the territorial state. Many, such as the free cities within the Hapsburg Empire and their various leagues, resisted and maintained commercially supported independence for centuries. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Page 37
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