HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

MEDIEVAL URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 345relations of Lubeck, recorded as civitas Teotoniae, with the neighboringpotentates, especially with the king of Denmark. The narrativescope of the author tends to concentrate increasingly on the activepresence of the cives—of an urban laity, that is—defined by the productiveclasses and led by them to carve out spaces of autonomythat were to the disadvantage of the local clergy. For example, intheir conflict in 1299 with the local canons, the urban laity affirmedan urban consulate that seems to signal a strong stress on internaland external competitive connections, most evident in the first decadesof the fourteenth century, which provoked an interdict of long durationfrom the ecclesiastical authorities. The narration of the last partof the Annales seems to develop to a dramatic crescendo in whichunfavorable human events resound negatively in an uninterruptedsequence of natural calamities. 70In general terms, at least from the Ottonian age onward, transalpineurban chronicle-writing that developed in the later Middle Ages seemsto proceed from an institutional framework and, from the insertioninto that framework of local events in the surrounding territories, toa factual exposition of the local events that is ever more precise anduninterrupted from year to year. From such narrations, however, nosigns of an authentic urban consciousness, which would give a unitarysense to the text, emerge or are developed; this is a historiographicalevolution, therefore, different from that of the Italian area.It is indeed comprehensible if one considers that the territorial ecclesiasticalpowers (episcopal or monastic) and lay aristocratic-feudalones, as well as the centralizing powers of sovereigns, long took awayfrom the productive urban classes sufficient space to acquire truepolitical autonomy and an adequate level of relative community consciousnessin most of the cities, which were active on the culturaland more properly historiographical plane. This is true not only forthe few chronicles described above but also for those which will bebriefly illustrated below, even taking due recognition of inevitabletypological variations from center to center.The rich narrative production of the center of Colmar (France)presents characteristics that correspond in certain aspects to thoseindicated above and differ in others. It is made up of a series of70Annales Lubicenses, ed. Lappenberg, 411–29. This work, conserved in a fourteenthcentury manuscript, has had in the last two centuries a fortune circumscribedto two editions and to a few critical studies; see Potthast (1962–98), 2:299.