HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

338 AUGUSTO VASINAProceeding along the peninsula, it becomes ever more difficult,even in the late Middle Ages, to list authentic expressions of urbanhistoriography—incisive voices animated by the spirit of civic andcommunal consciousness—as lively and numerous as those alreadysingled out or capable of being singled out in the regions of the Poand Tuscany. The lands of the Anconetan March, of the Duchy ofSpoleto, and of the Duchy of Rome, subject to the pontifical monarchy,saw their civic autonomy weakened and the related manifestationsof local chronicle writing withered. 52 The city of Rome, however,provides one exception. Strong municipal demonstrations and socialand economic tensions developed, due to the deep vacuum whichhad been created in the city that had once been capital of the empire,then—in the course of the Middle Ages—of the papacy, and now—during the fourteenth century—was entirely deprived of its effectivenessand symbolic function as guide of Christianity, due to the transferof the popes to Avignon. The humiliation of the Romans at havinglost the exceptional inheritance of the capital city, and having lostalso the vital resources derived from the pilgrimage industry, re-animatedpolitical aspirations for recuperating their lost status. This theyattempted by means of the reaffirmation of the republican traditionof Rome in the context of a utopian design enlarged to the papacyand to the empire, which was led by the remarkable figure of aneducated Roman notary, Cola di Rienzo. He was the protagonist inhis city of a popular and anti-baronial movement that involved therevival of the Senate, 53 which has left a large echo in a really unusualnarrative text in the Roman historiographical tradition. That traditionhad been defined almost exclusively by the production of, andadditions to, the Libri pontificales of the church of Rome; by a production,that is, that was appropriate to universalistic norms, as infact was done, even if in more reduced measure, also in other greatecclesiastical centers of the peninsula, such as Milan and Ravenna,by means of the continuation of urban history on the schematic basestudies in the context of Florentine historiography and sometimes in specific relationto the figure and works of Dante Alighieri. See Porta (1995), 129, 133–34, andpassim.52Following the provisory count made for urban chronicle-writing of north-centralItaly, as in note 17, we can list works of urban historiography in the lands ofthe Papal States only in five cases in the Duchy of Rome and in only one case inthe Duchy of Spoleto.53On conditions in Rome in the fourteenth century, connected closely to thefigure of Cola di Rienzo, cf. Dupré (1952), passim.