HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

MEDIEVAL URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 335dedicated, in fact, to analyzing without reticence and with irony theprocess of the ascension to the urban signoria of Obizzo II d’Este(ca. 1264) and in deprecating the negative consequences not onlyfor the communal liberty of his patria but also and above all for theeconomic and social fortunes of the populus of Ferrara, at the lastsacrificed to the rising commercial penetration of Venice. 42The historiographical scope of Riccobaldo is entirely concentratedon his city of Ferrara and, although both he and Rolandino wrote insimilar chronological and spatial contexts, unlike Rolandino, Riccobaldodoes not consider the logic of the political marshalling of factions(Guelphs and Ghibellines, philo-papal or philo-imperial), concentratinginstead on the values of autonomy, liberty, and utility of communalurban society—those virtues, in fact, which would have hadto work together in an affirmation of the ‘bonum commune’. Theiter of composition of the Chronica, written in a lively and discursiveLatin, outside of the traditional municipal annalistic schemes, canrepresent in a certain sense the phases of the historiographical maturationof Riccobaldo: from expressions of antiquarian erudition toforms of lucid political reflection on the recent historical experienceof the Ferrarese world; in a secular vision; and pragmatic both ofthe past and the present. This makes him a remarkable and precociousinterpreter of urban historiography between the thirteenth andthe fourteenth centuries. 43The political and institutional evolution of regimes of communalautonomy from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, with thediminution of forms of pluralism both within the city and in its externalconnections, began not rarely to favor the marginalization ofchroniclers—from positions univocally or largely representative of theurban consciousness, to minority and dissonant attitudes, if not42Chronica parva Ferrariensis, ed. Zanella, 184–93.43His rich and varied production remained hidden for a long time, not identifiedand in part undervalued, and only came slowly to light during the eighteenth century,above all through the efforts of L. A. Muratori. In the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies it remained almost exclusively the field of study of local scholars,and only in the last decades, amidst a sustained series of research, articles and criticaleditions, has his peculiar and unique character been adequately re-evaluatedin the context of late medieval urban historiography, contemporary with the transitionbetween commune and urban signoria. See Zanella (1991), 176–79. We cannotignore here those quite valid contributions, especially on Riccobaldo’s writingsof a universalistic character, offered in the last decade in Ricobaldi Ferrariensis,Compendium Romanae Historiae, ed. A. T. Hankey, 2 vols. (Rome, 1984).