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This and my following three lectures will focus on the religious, that is the Catholic

Christian nature of the independent city republics known as the communes during their period of

flourishing, that is, from the late 1100s to the early 1300s. After 1300s, some Italian cities,

most famously, Florence and Venice, preserved Republican externals, but they were increasingly

dominated by powerful noble families, like the

Medici, or by the restricted economic oligarchies becoming republics only in name. But most

institutionally became signoria, that is small despotic states controlled by powerful noble families.

This change transformed to their culture

and reduced their religious element of that culture to what amounts to political window dressing.

I hope that all of you have finished reading the selections from J.K. Hyde's Little Classic, Society and Politics in

Medieval Italy, 1,000 to 1350. And I suspect, if you've been reading it, you've noticed

that he has virtually nothing to say about the religious life of the cities he is studying. So I will quote him.

The Italian communes were essentially secular contrivances, whose particularism flourished in spite of

universal religion and the claims of universal empire. Nonsense. The same view is true of another more recent classic

that I did not assign Philip Jones, the Italian city states, which dedicates four, yes, I said

four pages out of 710 to the religious life of the cities he is studying.

There are Italian nationalist and ideological reasons for the scholarly myopia,

but they are not of interest to us this week.

I will simply say that I have spent much of my long academic career attacking this approach

to high medieval Italy. And these lectures represent the fruits of that research. Nevertheless, if you

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