The chart on p. 315 shows a steady rise in so-called representative governments to ninety per cent and then a small dropping off to 80 per cent by 1500. Generally after 1500 city life in northern Italy became stagnant and most cities came under foreign rule, e.g. Milan under Spanish rule. The word commune is used of the governments in the Italian city states which emerged in the eleventh century. The cities gradually eased out the power of the Church so that commune governments were largely secular, with magistrates and the communal buildings being built apart from the Church (an excellent example is Siena). Certainly one can equate representative government with secularism, not with the continuing influence of the Church. The cities were mutually antagonistic so Henrich’s idea of a ‘collective brain’ extending between cities is imaginary. Many cities fell under one person rule so there was generally, with some exceptions, a decline in representative government after 1350, nothing like the line shown on the chart on p,315. Of course one cannot evaluate Henrich’s argument when he does not provide a definition of ‘representative government’. Each in northern Italy evolved its own- in Venice participation in government was confined to those of noble birth- is this a representative government or not?
Generally, I cannot find any evidence that Henrich knows of the history of individual city-states. If he had, he could not have generalised in the way he did.
As you can imagine as a historian who leads tours round these very cities, I get annoyed when someone does not know anything about their history but makes grand generalised and misleading statements about it!!
To show that the rise of ‘representative government’, in northern Italy at least, was NOT consistent, I am giving you the Encyclopedia Britannica introductory paragraph under: Signoria, (Italian: “lordship”), in the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states, a government run by a signore (lord, or despot) that replaced republican institutions either by force or by agreement. It was the characteristic form of government in Italy from the middle of the 13th century until the beginning of the 16th century.
So please ignore any of Henrich’s charts, as on p.315, which show a consistent rise in representative government. As further research (Including the full article of the above) will show there were so many political problems in the representative governments of the communes that many cities relapsed into one man rule. This is 101 level history for those of us who have to write about these cities or lead tours to them!
And again, Henrich seems to believe that ‘representative government ’ appears quite early (forty per cent of cities by 1100 according to his chart). I refer him to Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking into a New World, The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton University press, 2015) p.68. ‘Pisa had one of the earliest established communes of all, together with Genoa, with the years around 1100 being the most likely period for its crystallisation..’
The growth of these city port cities (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi) were as a result of the reviving trade in the Mediterranean. There is no reason to link them to Catholic marriage policies!
′ From J. SCHULZ (2019) ‘Kin networks and Institutional development’ ( the article cited for the chart). ′ This analysis supports the hypothesis that the Church’s incest legislation fostered the formation of communes. Areas in which bishops were active in incest legislation are associated with a higher probability of cities being communes.”
This is a complete disregard of sophisticated study of why the communes emerged. These cities became wealthy as a result of trade and loot. (There is an inscription on Pisa’s cathedral saying that it was loot from raids on Arabs that financed it.) One reason why Pisa was able to develop communal government in 1100 was because the bishop had gone off on the First Crusade (1099 sees the taking of Jerusalem) and so was not in the city to stop them. There is no problem about Schulz putting the two together but surely, before going into print (with Henrich following him), he should have asked whether there was any literature about the rise of communes. My bible on this is Philip Jones’ The Italian City- State , From Commune to Signoria, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 - Jones deals at exhaustive length with the economic factors- so Schulz/Henrich needs to be conversant with this work so that they are at least aware they are challenging decades of sophisticated scholarship on the rise of communes- but, sadly, there is no sign that they are even aware of it. (And Henrich has all the expertise on his Harvard doorstep!)
In his recent acclaimed book The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, Greg Woolf writes that ‘the Roman urban apogee was located sometime in the early third century.’ (This was also the moment when one there is a genuine Roman collective brain as the cities were all part of the same peaceful empire, same architectural features, and well connected with roads.) While we know from Pompeii that local politics was very vibrant in AD 79, we don’t know how vibrant they were in 250 AD when Henrich’s chart begins. Certainly more than zero. I would guess that forty per cent of the cities still had some kind of representative government. So let’s start the left hand side of the chart with that figure.
There was a steady decline into the collapse of Roman towns in the fifth/sixth centuries. So probably no or very few urban areas had ‘representative government’ from then to the emergence of commune government in northern Italy in 1100. So a long period of zero representation.
We would then have a period of ‘representative (communal) governments’ for say two hundred years but gradually these governments would be supplanted by the signori, one family rule, so after 1300 there were be a steady decline of representative governments on the chart until 1500- and if the chart had gone further the decline would have become steeper.
This is only for the Roman west and then just northern Italy. The chart might be more complicated if the cities of northern Europe had been included.
Thank you for your critique of and insights about what I find to be a remarkable and provocative, though far from perfect, work by Henrich. On a quick read of Schulz (2019), the reference Henrich uses for Fig. 9.6 on p. 315, it appears that the data for that figure come from the Iberian Peninsula, the Carolingian Empire, and Roman Britain. That is, the communes and city-states of Italy are only a small component of the entire dataset. Perhaps this fact explains why your observations and conclusions are at variance with Henrich’s. From your comments, one might conclude that what the Italian peninsula received a “dose” of was Rome, rather than the Church, and so its data would have been less relevant for Schulz and Henrich’s immediate thesis—though could address a different thesis, perhaps involving how an “inoculation” with a dose of Rome leads to immunity against subsequent “infection” by the Church. Other of your comments make me suspect that the Church was, to a degree, “Rome by other means,” those other means largely excluding force of arms. Again, thanks for bringing your expertise to bear on this fairly enormous subject.
Thanks for your comment, nels. Sorry I did not see them earlier. The chart on p. 315 is chronological. so while the cities of Roman Europe (including the Iberian peninsula) were lively politically, they were in decay by the fifth century- but there has to be some sort of ‘plus’ representative government in Roman areas before then (e.g. search ‘Pompeii politics’). So after the Roman collapse the main urban areas are the Arab cities and it is only slowly that urban life in Europe revives. (The shortlived (770-843 AD) Carolingian empire was not urban- rather the centres of power were the court and monasteries.) Chris Wickham sees the first representative governments in northern Italy as c.1100. It is hard to know how Schulz choose his cities (I am longing to get to a university library to check his sources!) but he seems to assume that once a city is marked as having a town council it remains in the chart as a representative government from then on (so a steady line UPWARDS as new cities come in). Yet we know that many of the most prosperous Italian cities fell under one family rule after c.1300 so his chart should then start going DOWNWARDS as representative governments are lost for this prosperous region.
After the banning of pagan cults in the 390s by the Roman emperor Theodosius, the Catholic church was the only institutional religion in town and it is still with us so ANY development in European society correlates with its existence (as do cold winters). Henrich’ error is to suggest that the Church caused these developments when there are perfectly good historical reasons (mostly economic) for the revival of European cities in the Middle Ages.At the very least he should have challenged conventional historical explanations to sustain his thesis but I wonder if he is even aware of them.
One day he will be challenged for his view that the church broke up kinship groups as, being unaware of the Roman ban on cousin marriages and their individual landholdings, he does not realise that intensive kinship had been broken up centuries before his start date of 400 AD. I am amazed that it has not been already done.
The chart on p. 315 shows a steady rise in so-called representative governments to ninety per cent and then a small dropping off to 80 per cent by 1500. Generally after 1500 city life in northern Italy became stagnant and most cities came under foreign rule, e.g. Milan under Spanish rule. The word commune is used of the governments in the Italian city states which emerged in the eleventh century. The cities gradually eased out the power of the Church so that commune governments were largely secular, with magistrates and the communal buildings being built apart from the Church (an excellent example is Siena). Certainly one can equate representative government with secularism, not with the continuing influence of the Church. The cities were mutually antagonistic so Henrich’s idea of a ‘collective brain’ extending between cities is imaginary. Many cities fell under one person rule so there was generally, with some exceptions, a decline in representative government after 1350, nothing like the line shown on the chart on p,315. Of course one cannot evaluate Henrich’s argument when he does not provide a definition of ‘representative government’. Each in northern Italy evolved its own- in Venice participation in government was confined to those of noble birth- is this a representative government or not?
Generally, I cannot find any evidence that Henrich knows of the history of individual city-states. If he had, he could not have generalised in the way he did.
As you can imagine as a historian who leads tours round these very cities, I get annoyed when someone does not know anything about their history but makes grand generalised and misleading statements about it!!
To show that the rise of ‘representative government’, in northern Italy at least, was NOT consistent, I am giving you the Encyclopedia Britannica introductory paragraph under: Signoria, (Italian: “lordship”), in the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states, a government run by a signore (lord, or despot) that replaced republican institutions either by force or by agreement. It was the characteristic form of government in Italy from the middle of the 13th century until the beginning of the 16th century.
So please ignore any of Henrich’s charts, as on p.315, which show a consistent rise in representative government. As further research (Including the full article of the above) will show there were so many political problems in the representative governments of the communes that many cities relapsed into one man rule. This is 101 level history for those of us who have to write about these cities or lead tours to them!
And again, Henrich seems to believe that ‘representative government ’ appears quite early (forty per cent of cities by 1100 according to his chart). I refer him to Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking into a New World, The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton University press, 2015) p.68. ‘Pisa had one of the earliest established communes of all, together with Genoa, with the years around 1100 being the most likely period for its crystallisation..’
The growth of these city port cities (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi) were as a result of the reviving trade in the Mediterranean. There is no reason to link them to Catholic marriage policies!
′ From J. SCHULZ (2019) ‘Kin networks and Institutional development’ ( the article cited for the chart). ′ This analysis supports the hypothesis that the Church’s incest legislation fostered the formation of communes. Areas in which bishops were active in incest legislation are associated with a higher probability of cities being communes.”
This is a complete disregard of sophisticated study of why the communes emerged. These cities became wealthy as a result of trade and loot. (There is an inscription on Pisa’s cathedral saying that it was loot from raids on Arabs that financed it.) One reason why Pisa was able to develop communal government in 1100 was because the bishop had gone off on the First Crusade (1099 sees the taking of Jerusalem) and so was not in the city to stop them. There is no problem about Schulz putting the two together but surely, before going into print (with Henrich following him), he should have asked whether there was any literature about the rise of communes. My bible on this is Philip Jones’ The Italian City- State , From Commune to Signoria, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 - Jones deals at exhaustive length with the economic factors- so Schulz/Henrich needs to be conversant with this work so that they are at least aware they are challenging decades of sophisticated scholarship on the rise of communes- but, sadly, there is no sign that they are even aware of it. (And Henrich has all the expertise on his Harvard doorstep!)
Rewriting Henrich’s chart on p.315.
In his recent acclaimed book The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, Greg Woolf writes that ‘the Roman urban apogee was located sometime in the early third century.’ (This was also the moment when one there is a genuine Roman collective brain as the cities were all part of the same peaceful empire, same architectural features, and well connected with roads.) While we know from Pompeii that local politics was very vibrant in AD 79, we don’t know how vibrant they were in 250 AD when Henrich’s chart begins. Certainly more than zero. I would guess that forty per cent of the cities still had some kind of representative government. So let’s start the left hand side of the chart with that figure.
There was a steady decline into the collapse of Roman towns in the fifth/sixth centuries. So probably no or very few urban areas had ‘representative government’ from then to the emergence of commune government in northern Italy in 1100. So a long period of zero representation.
We would then have a period of ‘representative (communal) governments’ for say two hundred years but gradually these governments would be supplanted by the signori, one family rule, so after 1300 there were be a steady decline of representative governments on the chart until 1500- and if the chart had gone further the decline would have become steeper.
This is only for the Roman west and then just northern Italy. The chart might be more complicated if the cities of northern Europe had been included.
Thank you for your critique of and insights about what I find to be a remarkable and provocative, though far from perfect, work by Henrich. On a quick read of Schulz (2019), the reference Henrich uses for Fig. 9.6 on p. 315, it appears that the data for that figure come from the Iberian Peninsula, the Carolingian Empire, and Roman Britain. That is, the communes and city-states of Italy are only a small component of the entire dataset. Perhaps this fact explains why your observations and conclusions are at variance with Henrich’s. From your comments, one might conclude that what the Italian peninsula received a “dose” of was Rome, rather than the Church, and so its data would have been less relevant for Schulz and Henrich’s immediate thesis—though could address a different thesis, perhaps involving how an “inoculation” with a dose of Rome leads to immunity against subsequent “infection” by the Church. Other of your comments make me suspect that the Church was, to a degree, “Rome by other means,” those other means largely excluding force of arms. Again, thanks for bringing your expertise to bear on this fairly enormous subject.
Thanks for your comment, nels. Sorry I did not see them earlier. The chart on p. 315 is chronological. so while the cities of Roman Europe (including the Iberian peninsula) were lively politically, they were in decay by the fifth century- but there has to be some sort of ‘plus’ representative government in Roman areas before then (e.g. search ‘Pompeii politics’). So after the Roman collapse the main urban areas are the Arab cities and it is only slowly that urban life in Europe revives. (The shortlived (770-843 AD) Carolingian empire was not urban- rather the centres of power were the court and monasteries.) Chris Wickham sees the first representative governments in northern Italy as c.1100. It is hard to know how Schulz choose his cities (I am longing to get to a university library to check his sources!) but he seems to assume that once a city is marked as having a town council it remains in the chart as a representative government from then on (so a steady line UPWARDS as new cities come in). Yet we know that many of the most prosperous Italian cities fell under one family rule after c.1300 so his chart should then start going DOWNWARDS as representative governments are lost for this prosperous region.
After the banning of pagan cults in the 390s by the Roman emperor Theodosius, the Catholic church was the only institutional religion in town and it is still with us so ANY development in European society correlates with its existence (as do cold winters). Henrich’ error is to suggest that the Church caused these developments when there are perfectly good historical reasons (mostly economic) for the revival of European cities in the Middle Ages.At the very least he should have challenged conventional historical explanations to sustain his thesis but I wonder if he is even aware of them.
One day he will be challenged for his view that the church broke up kinship groups as, being unaware of the Roman ban on cousin marriages and their individual landholdings, he does not realise that intensive kinship had been broken up centuries before his start date of 400 AD. I am amazed that it has not been already done.