The Medieval Communes: Conceived in Liberty

Conceived in Liberty: The Medieval Communes of Europe


by Guglielmo Piombini

This article was translated by Bernardo Ferrero, from the original Italian.


The Omnipresent Law of Escalating Power: As True as the Law of Gravity


From the dawn of the earliest civilizations to our present days political power has shown, everywhere, a centralizing tendency. Power, in fact, tends toward perpetual expansion defeating or absorbing all weaker subjects that it encounters on the way. By feeding itself with its own victories, the strongest power always becomes stronger. This is the reason why historically, within the realm of politics, concentration of power has been the rule, while the dispersion of power the exception. During antiquity this self-feeding logic of power has nearly always prevailed. If one excludes those who have remained at a primitive stage of development, for thousands of years the great majority of people lived within vast centralized reigns, which were politically despotic and economically stagnant. The first empires arose in the land of Mesopotamia more than 6,000 years ago, and then extended to every other continent: The Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Russian, Arabian, Ottoman, Indian, Chinese, Mongol, Incas and Aztec. Among the few luminous exceptions that the ancient world provided were the mercantile cities of Phoenicia and the Polis of ancient Greece.

Even the West had an experience which was analogous to the societies of the ancient orient. Starting from the third century A.D. the political economy of the Roman Empire, which in the two preceding centuries had adopted a more laissez faire approach, became, due to the increasing pressures coming from its military engagements, always more bureaucratic and fiscally encroaching. If the empire would not have fallen it would have probably smothered for who-knows-how-many years — under its bureaucratic apparatus — the cultural and technological progress of Europe, just like those despotic regimes had been able to do in Asia.

The crumbling of the western part of the empire, however, offered the people of Europe the extraordinary opportunity of edifying a new civilization on the ashes of Rome. In this sense, the end of the old civilization, in light of how things were unfolding, was a lucky event for it freed the peoples of Europe from the despotic machine that had chained the economy and societies of the eastern world, thereby warding off a destiny of oppression and stagnation. Europe enjoyed then a lengthy period characterized by the absence of a centralized power: every attempt to reinstall an empire, beginning with Charlemagne and following with the Germanic emperors, failed. This lack of unity enabled extensive, small-scale experimentation and unleashed creative competition among hundreds of independent political entities.

Feudal Anarchy

The most visible trait of the feudal system, born out of the break-up of the empire, was the dispersion of public power. The feudal society was a society that lacked a central authority, and for this reason scholars do not hesitate to talk about “feudal anarchy.” The feudal society was, however, a military-aristocratic society, characterized by low intensity yet continuous conflicts between lords, and as such its spirit and institutions shared very few classical liberal or libertarian traits. In a system based on the subjugation of the peasant to the lord, on serfdom, on a closed economy and on a limited range of exchanges, it is not easy to find wide spaces of liberty. In spite of these facts, Feudalism offered, nonetheless, certain peculiar characteristics which in the long run would play a significant preparatory role for the development of Capitalism in Europe.

At first sight the difference between the powers of an imperial functionary and the authority of a feudal lord would seem minimal, since the governed face subjection in both cases. The differences however were noteworthy because the imperial functionary was only a small part of a huge centralized machine, while the feudal lord was at best a “little despot,” representative of a power which was largely autonomous, surrounded by many other lords with powers similar to his: each of whom was jealous of his own prerogatives. The Germanic heritage of feudalism had, in this way, introduced the idea of individual independence, and its implications were to be seen in the predominance of private property over public property, personal life over collective life, family over society.

The feudal system therefore contained within itself the seeds of its own evolution. Unlike the despotic system, feudalism was structured in a way that made the liberation of society and the economy possible. As a consequence, European society was able to liberate itself from the feudal grip, while the oriental societies, with the only exception of Japan, never managed to free themselves from the bureaucratic cage in which despotic power had enclosed them.

The Medieval Communes: Conceived in Liberty

The commune was born out of a private and voluntary association among citizens, based on the bond of an oath (in latin Conjuratio). The initiative of these citizens replaced, in fights that lasted even hundreds of years, the authority of the feudatory or Bishop. The liberation of the cities from the dominion of feudalism was the result of a general insurrection across Europe, of a real war declared by the inhabitants of the boroughs against their lords. In Italy, Spain, Germany, Flanders, Holland, France, England, the inhabitants began to fortify their own boroughs and in this way they subtracted themselves from the dominion of their lords, beginning to reconstruct society from the bottom up. In Italy the propitious opportunity that the cities were able to grasp was rendered possible by the long investiture contest between political and religious power. This conflict represented a turning point because the communal movement would not have been able to grow had there been no division and struggle between the Papacy and the Empire. Their rivalry created a favorable situation for the emancipation of the cities: the little David’s, the citizen’s militia, defeated the powerful Goliaths, the formidable institutions of the emperors and the lords. The sense of independence and the strength that the communes emanated prevented, after the 11th century, the growth of a political body able to concentrate power both at the national and supranational level. The law of escalating power — a rare historical fact indeed — had been challenged and defeated.

In this way some non-feudal islands — the free cities — emerged amidst a feudal sea. The cities became real oases of liberty as they enabled a marvellous process of emancipation of the exploited from the feudal dominion. “City air makes you free” was a dictum of German descent which was very diffused in the high middle ages precisely because the medieval city became an irresistible pole of attraction for serfs who wanted to escape from their lords, for merchants and artisans who wanted to trade and produce freely, and also for those impoverished knights who sought to improve their social conditions. The city offered protection, liberty, earning opportunities and a strong sense of belonging, strengthened by the permanent fight against the lords in which all inhabitants participated. These cities could then be referred to as the first fatherlands of the west, their patriotism being far more spontaneous than that established in the following centuries with the first nation-states, which was most frequently imposed from the top down.

Nothing of the kind had ever occurred in Europe just as in the rest of the world. Outside of Europe, in fact, cities were “bricked encampments” lacking any type of political or economic autonomy: merchants and artisans worked only to satisfy the needs of the governing classes. Marco Polo, during a visit to the middle kingdom, remained impressed from the fact that Chinese cities, unlike their multifarious counterparts in Europe, were all identical to one another and architecturally squared off. This structure served the governing class ideally for it favored the control of the center over the city: in Asia, accordingly, the peasant who escaped from the countryside had no opportunity of obtaining freedom by seeking refuge in the city (as instead was customary in the West) because the cities were bureaucratic entities, presided upon by the imperial army.

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