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In today's lecture, I will turn to the political or institutional structures of the communes as a whole

and how they were transformed from below by lay people who organized themselves

using the forms of the penitent communities and eventually overthrew the older aristocratic regimes

of the original city republics. This brought a major transformation of communal governance

in the mid-1200s, which is usually

referred to as the revolutions of the Popolo.

Popolo here means the common people as opposed to the humility and aristocracy.

This excluded, however, the marginal most day laborers and was intended, but it included well over half the adult male population.

But first, we need to understand what happened in the late 1100s and early 1,200s, after the Italian cities finally shook off German imperial control that existed

Dijure in the north of Italy since the Carolingians in the eight hundreds.

And they needed to do this in order to create the original communes.

As religious organizations in themselves, the communes remain, my work accepted,

largely unexplored. Scholars prefer to study them almost exclusively as the earliest examples

of non-imperally governed lay states in Italy. The government forms of the communes underwent great changes over time,

and that affected their religious texture as well. Every commune's history was unique,

but all shared similar stages of political development. That allows me to do something I hate to do.

I'm a splitter, not a joiner.

It allows me to make generalizations.

When cities ended imperial rule,

Republican but oligarchic regimes arose.

...