HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

342 AUGUSTO VASINAwith titles attached presumably not by their authors but by manuscriptand printing traditions and which, thus, do not really signifytheir orientation and contents but only the fact that they had hadphysical presence in this or that city. Besides, such works, by notrevealing any sign of the personality of their authors, seem to have acharacter that is prevalently compilatory, fragmentary, heterogeneous,and with frequent usually anonymous additions, which weakens thecontinuity of the narrative web and the sense of a coherent expositoryscope, if ever it existed.Often the continuators of base-texts adapt themselves to traditionalhistoriographical criteria and, although working in general after 1000,do not seem to have removed themselves from early medieval schemes,thus collectively giving life to monotonous, if not uniform, narrations,inadequate to give a sense of development and change in urbanlife. 63 It is not an accident, in this context, that such texts arose primarilyfrom ecclesiastical surroundings and were the work of clerics—canons, monks, or friars—who were more interested in the continuumof the property of their institutions than in the changes of urban lifeas understood in the full harmony of its component parts. It was,in other words, a strongly corporate spirit, of which no correspondingexpression is found among the urban laity, among the mercantileand artisan classes, or above all among the so-called bourgeoisie ofofficials ( judges, notaries, etc.), which was less advanced politicallyand culturally than in the cities of the ‘regnum Italie’ and, further,not successful at finding the spaces of liberty and autonomy thatappeared much earlier in the communal cities of the Italian world.In fact, the middle classes in the transalpine cities were not numerousor articulate: the experts of law and the intellectuals usually werebound to the ecclesiastical curiae; merchants and artisans were indeedunited in hanse and gilde, sometimes organized in a dense network ofintercity relations, but often these were conditioned by the circumstantialcity-territorial connections of the external powers of bishops,lords, and feudatories of the countryside, who through their internaland external conflicts heavily burdened the urban compages, longcontrolling and delaying movements toward autonomy. Almost never,however, do the chroniclers of the transalpine cities in the later63We are clearly dealing with remarks of a general character that will be subjectbelow to particular evidence in the consideration of individual narrative texts.