1 Prime pagine ok.indd - accademia degli intronati

Introduction
MARY, SOVEREIGN OF SIENA, JESUS, KING
OF FLORENCE: SIEGE RELIGION AND THE
RITUAL SUBMISSION (1260-1637)
I
The ritual submission, which turned “gods” (Christ and/or His
mother) into earthly rulers, was a rare event. It belonged to a large family
of state crisis devotions; but it was reserved, as remedy of last resort, for
times of extreme “national” emergency; and, on current knowledge, it
was used by only four cities – Siena, Florence, Perugia, and Genoa. Its
heyday was the sixteenth century, when, owing to the foreign, French
and Spanish, invasions, such emergencies were not uncommon. But, it
was employed for the first time by the Sienese in 1260 and for the last
time by the Genoese, in its most elaborate form, in 1637. Siena was the
only city to use it more than once, on five separate occasions, in fact, the
final one in 1555. However, Genoa repeated its 1637 ceremony annually
for sixty years.
The ritual submission is an exotic topic. It was not only a statereligious
devotion – an area of Christian religious activity that historians
have overlooked – it was also a rare type of state-religious devotion, which
attempted, employing a ritual that is political in nature, to influence, to
the point of determining, divine behavior. This study has, therefore, some
basic tasks to perform: detail the submission’s ritual workings, explain
the strategy behind them, and, ultimately, demonstrate that preindustrial
governments did, actually, use religion in this aggressive, seemingly
irreligious way. It also provides a good supply of contextual information,
especially (as indicated by the title) in its broad coverage of the siege of