HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

MEDIEVAL URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 331afflicted with external and internal conflicts, clearly conscious of civicsolidarity between clergy and laymen, bishop and commune, underthe protection of unfailing divine providence. The communal militiaof Faenza in Tolosano’s Chronicon figures almost as a sort of militiaChristi, animated by a crusading spirit against the rival armies ofImola, Forli, and, especially, Ravenna; a militia that must ultimatelyachieve success. In his narration, which is not especially linear, wecannot be surprised at his departures from strictly municipal eventsto regional ones or at his digressions on themes of great generalimportance (crusades, war between the Lombard communes and theemperor, etc.), since these correspond almost always to his strategyof bringing the attention of the reader to the prestigious position ofhis patria, in the present as in the past. 30Without doubt the circumstances of imperial Hohenstaufen dominationin the lands of the ‘regnum Italie’ from the middle of thetwelfth century until the 1250s contributed to the fermentation ofcivic consciousness in a strongly ideological/political sense and startedto threaten the most rigidly municipalist positions, also because oftheir ever more pressing involvement with the recurrent competitionbetween the universal powers of the papacy and empire. But evenin light of the renewed federalist experience of the ‘Societas Lombardie,Marchie Trivixane et Romandiole’, conditions were never such asto promote a super-civic historiography of true regional breadth. 31It seems that there were other, and diverse, influences that, on thispath of inter-city organization, promoted individual urban communitiesand, in a phase of increasing maturation of relations betweenurban centers, followed from the spread of the figure of the foreignpodestà, from the extension of the phenomenon of political exile,and from other conditions connected with this. Changes in chroniclewriting did take place, albeit partially and late, above all in theregion of the Veneto, which was influenced, perhaps in a determinantmeasure, by the formation and expansion of despotic powers—30On these aspects of Tolosano’s works, see Vasina (1995), 87–104, esp. 89–91,96–99. The fate of his Chronicon has been noteworthy, as a whole, and almost uninterruptedin the course of the modern era, and not only in Faventine culture: theworks of Tolosano came to light in the late eighteenth century in the context ofecclesiastical scholarship, and detailed analytical studies have subsequently beenmade from the late nineteenth century up to today. See Vasina (1991), 119–21.31A significant part of this annalistic production is published in MGH, SS, vols.18 and 19; one should still mention, in this context, the work by Martini (1970).