Cities of God

In the introduction to his 2005 book, Cities of God , Augustine Thompson complains that medievalists have paid too little attention to the religious lives of orthodox laymen: “Heretics, popes, theologians, Franciscans, and saints. Where is everyone else?”

His book studies the communes of medieval Italian cities partly to redress this imbalance, but it is also examines the religious character of those communes. This too is frequently denied or downplayed in the literature:

“in histories of the communes, religion remains oddly alient to the civic life. In Philip Jones’s recent 673-page study of the Italian city-states, the author dedicates a mere seventeen pages to their religious life – and these are mostly dedicated to conflicts over ecclesiastical and secular juridiction. The best short study of the communes available in English asserts: ‘The Italian communes . . . were essentially secular contrivances whose particularism flourished in spite of a universal religion and the claims of a universal empire.”

Thompson is blunt: “No, I do not think so. What this opposition of clerical and lay realms obscures is that the city was a single entity, however jurisdiction and government were divided. And its lay government, far from being ‘secularized’ by its separation from the cathedral and bishop, came to express and understand itself through ever more explicitly religious rhetoric and rituals. The communes were able to distance themselves from the medieval empire because they, like the empire, claimed a sacred legitimacy . . . . It was the cities’ war with the empire that encouraged their citizens to sacralize the commune. The cities exploited religious forms of organization, they sought legitimacy through the cult of patron saints, they conceptualized their time and space in sacred terms, and these religious realities in turn formed the people. The Italian city as a living religious entity deserves greater attention.”