Social Control and Political Conflicts in the Popular Communes of Northern and Central Italy between the End of the Thirteenth and the Beginning of the Fourteenth Century

The period between 1280 and 1320 was crucial for the so-called "popular communes" of northern and central Italy, especially Florence, Bologna, Perugia, Pisa, Lucca, Siena. During this phase, the ruling groups, composed of influential international merchants, attempted to radically change the nature and structure of popular armed society and arts, which were, in origin, spontaneous organizations, to turn them into instruments to control citizens, and to diffuse the founding "values" of popular ideology: moderation, restraint of violence, repression of subversive and, broadly speaking,  antisocial behaviour. Instruments, in short, to diffuse a model of citizen "educated" in politics. The same phase, however, was characterized by a veritable explosion of political conflicts of various kinds. They were produced by the emergence of organized political movements claiming a different distribution of political power among the components of the urban society. The social base of these movements consisted of the heterogeneous "middle class" composed of merchants of secondary importance, small textile entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and artisans. These movements, however, developed just inside popular armed societies and arts, and these associations provided them with an organizational structure. Most of all, the movements adopted those same watchwords, languages and discourses that the ruling groups tried to impose through the transformation of popular societies and arts into instruments of social control. In many ways, then, we can say that the conflicts that exploded between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century were the paradoxical expression of the success of the operation of diffusion of popular values and "indoctrination" of citizens through associations.