1. In the late Middle Ages the political experience of the free cities of north-central Italy – and Perugia among them – constituted an extraordinary laboratory of civil coexistence and of original institutional dynamics.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiographical narrative, which set the virtues of those experiences of government against the vices of the seigneurial powers that supplanted them (in some cases in continuity with the oligarchic dominance that marked the twilight of the forms of civic-republican power), may perhaps have indulged in excessive pedagogical emphasis[1], yet it brought into focus objective historical facts, characteristic of that phase of Italian civic life: respect for individual liberties, the promotion and governance of the common good (understood as the interest and prosperity of the entire civitas), the sovereignty of majority rule in collegial procedures[2], justice administered under the aegis of legality; and not least, the openness to the political participation of the lower classes, whose rise the seigneurial ‘tyrannies’ were called upon to contain. A rise – I like to stress this – that among its chosen channels, besides the productive economy, had selected and privileged culture: in the golden age of the university Studia, which coincides with that of the ‘city-States’[3], the doctrinal opinio communis on the prevalence of the dignitas of knowledge over nobility of blood had unquestionably helped to promote the participation of the popular forces in the life of the community[4].
Certainly, the medieval civic Communes, which drew strength and autonomy from the Peace of Constance (1183), taking on as one the physiognomy of republican and law-governed orders, cannot appear to us – who have behind us the bourgeois Revolutions, the Declarations of rights, the ‘liberal’ and ‘social’ constitutional Charters – as a true model of an inclusive and democratic society, since their constitutional framework nonetheless rested on the inequality of individual and corporate status. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that this piece of ‘national’ political history generated institutional values and practices which only centuries later would receive recognition and translation into standards of legal and political civilization. I have in mind the pages of Carlo Cattaneo (and, still earlier, those of the Genevan Sismonde de Sismondi), who precisely from the experience of the civic republics of the Italian Middle Ages had unwound the red thread leading to the ideals of our Risorgimento[5].

2. That universe of institutional values was, moreover, already present in the consciousness and the imagination of contemporaries. The fourteenth-century pages speak plainly: if the communal regime rested on the participation of citizens, on the elective principle, on the rotation of those who governed and on public debate, the seigneurial one fed on discretionary power and on arbitrary, lifelong authority[6]. The antagonism between the two opposing visions of coexistence and of the relationship between power and society was irreducible: on the one hand, liberty exercised in observance of the law; on the other, authority legibus soluta; on the one hand the common good, on the other personal interest; on the one hand legality, on the other abuse and corruption; on the one hand the republic, on the other tyranny.
The antithesis was already so deeply carved into the consciousness and the lucid imagination of medieval men as to yield the powerful iconographic representations we all know. The most emblematic of these is the secular pictorial cycle of Good and Bad Government (1338-39) executed by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Sala della Pace of the town hall of Siena, where the governing college of the Nine met[7]. In the gigantic, striking symbolism frescoed by the Sienese painter on the three walls of that palace, the negative allegory of misgovernment is embodied by the Devil enthroned, surrounded by the vices of public power – Cruelty, Discord, War, Fraud, Wrath, Avarice – and set against its political countervalue: the Commune civitatis/bonum commune (the identity of noun and adjective conveys well the identification between the communal instance and the interest of public power, between “bonum commune” and the “bonum” of the Commune), represented by divine Wisdom, Justice (to whose cord the Commune is bound), Peace, Concord, Generosity, the cardinal and theological Virtues.
The drastic semantic antithesis states plainly that the possible modes of government are two: one directed towards the common good, the other towards tyranny. The translation of this alternative into the language of law is equally clear-cut: political virtue is identified with legality; political vice with the arbitrary exercise of public power. Political virtue is wholly absorbed into a new maiestas, which is no longer that of the Prince, but of the Law: of the law, be it understood, as the expression of the collegial, assembly-based, ‘general’ will; of the law, which presupposes a diffuse and shared sovereignty. Political vice lies entirely in its opposite: in the injustice that stems from the illegality of the abusive conduct of public power.
The didactic function of these iconographic representations was direct, it spoke from the walls of the palace, because it sought to inspire and guide towards what is right the conduct of those who governed, in the very space within which they took decisions for the community. A didactic function analogous to that which, in the centuries of the modern age, would be performed by the paintings hung in the halls of the courts of justice of Flanders, displayed there to warn the public at trials of the consequences of crimes and the judges of the consequences of their most pernicious corruption: let the terrifying Judgement of Cambyses by Gérard David (1498) stand for all, today held in the Groeningemuseum of Bruges and recently at the centre of the fascinating exhibition entitled “The Art of Law”[8].

3. The doctrinal tradition that sustained the practice of the bonum commune kept to the wake of a body of thought long-standing and already more than solid by the time of its reworking and its adaptation to the political universe of the Italian Middle Ages. From Aristotle’s Politics and through the filter of Gregory the Great, for whom it was already clear that a tyrant is one who does not govern according to law (“qui in communi re publica non iure principatur”), Thomas Aquinas, in the second half of the thirteenth century, had derived the notion of tyranny as power exercised not for the common good but for the tyrant’s own interest; and from this notion, now extended to every form of government, not only the monarchical, he had drawn the corollary of the legitimacy of the right of resistance, provided that it did not harm the majority.
The abuse of power, unjust and corrupt government, had thus already been singled out by philosophers and theologians as the cause of the loss of those precious and shared civic virtues, which took shape in the laboratory of the Commune and which the popular assemblies carved into the Statutes, the vivid annual agenda of civic life[9].

4. Of those virtues, at the full development of the governments of the Popolo, it is now the jurists who make themselves the guardians.
It is Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1313/14-1357/58), apostle of the civilis sapientia[10], for fifteen years professor of civil law at Perugia, his second homeland, who brings into focus, in the cycle of political treatises published in the last years of his life – in particular in the triptych composed of the treatises on the political parties (de guelphis et gebellinis), on the government of the civitas (de regimine civitatis) and on tyranny (de tyranno): three texts brought back to light in 1983 by the editions of Diego Quaglioni[11] – the theme of the legality/illegality of power.
In the treatise on tyranny, the apex of his legal-political reflection, Bartolo translates the anti-tyrannical philosophical and theological tradition into well-carved juridical analyses and images. He describes and classifies the phenomenology of the forms of subversion of power, distinguishing the overt tyranny, which may derive either from the lack or from the abuse of a legitimate juridical title to the exercise of power, from the hidden tyranny, so called because it is the exercise either of a de facto power, unconnected to any office, or of a power ‘veiled’ by an office to which no power is joined. The veiled tyrant (“qui sub quodam velamine non iure principatur in civitate”) is an original and evocative Bartolian coinage, which would not be slow to be absorbed by later thought (not, however, by the De tyranno [1400] of Coluccio Salutati)[12].
But Bartolo does not confine himself to describing and classifying: he also indicates the juridical remedies against the pathologies of political power. His law-bound reaction against the new modes of exercising power of the seigneurial regimes echoes the anti-tyrannical invectives of Dante Alighieri[13] and openly confesses his inclination for the democratic forms of government realized by the governments of the Popolo, at Perugia as in other Italian cities by then on the way to their decline. The bitter concluding reflection on the natural tendency of power towards arbitrariness and abuse (power, for Bartolo, is always exposed to the temptations of private interest, to corruption and hence to injustice; and injustice is the negation of ius, which is the discipline of the good and the equitable) makes him painfully convinced of the ineradicability of the seed of tyranny, of the perennial temptation to the selfish deviation of power. In his vision, the imperfection of human communities is symmetrical to the natural imperfection of bodies:

Propter quod sciendum est, quod sicut raro reperitur unus homo sanus per omnia, quin in corpore aliquid patiatur defectus; ita raro reperitur aliquod regimen, in quo simpliciter ad bonum publicum attendatur et in quo aliquid tyrannidis non sit. Magis enim esset divinum quam humanum, si illi qui principantur nullo modo commodum proprium, sed communem utilitatem respicerent. Illud tamen dicimus bonum regimen et non tyrannicum, in quo plus prevalet communis utilitas et publica, quam propria regentis; illud vero tyrannicum, in quo propria utilitas plus attenditur.
For this reason it must be understood that, just as one rarely finds a single individual healthy in every respect without his suffering some bodily defect, so too one rarely finds any government that aims exclusively at the common good and in which there is not a shred of tyranny. It would be something more supernatural than human if those who govern were to look only to the common utility and in no way to their own. And yet we call good government, and not tyrannical, that in which the common and public interest prevails over the private interest of the ruler, and tyrannical that in which personal advantage predominates[14].

This final disenchantment, however, does not undermine what had by then become, thanks also to the decisive contribution of his own intelligence, the central paradigm of political discourse: the quality of governments can only be measured in relation to their capacity to tend to the common good[15].

5. The bilingual citation of Bartolo’s concluding passage is meant to signal that there now circulates, of the De tyranno, a timely and commendable Italian version with the Latin text facing, the six-handed work of a passionate magistrate of Sassoferrato birth, Dario Razzi (editor), of a historian of law and of political doctrines, and moreover a distinguished scholar of Bartolo’s work, Diego Quaglioni (already the text’s critical editor and author of the preface) and of the Latinist Attilio Turrioni (translator), who had already in the past successfully tried his hand at the language of the Umbrian statutory texts.
The Italian version of Bartolo’s treatise (the first of a series, which promises to be repeated with the other two political treatises already the object, in 1983, of Quaglioni’s critical editions) follows by thirty years the English translation prepared at Chicago by Julius Kirshner, and comes when the resistance to translating Latin legal texts may by now be said to be almost overcome here too. The translatability of normative texts is no longer a taboo (Justinian’s Digest has recently been retranslated into Italian); still less so is the translatability of doctrinal texts. Besides, the case for a vernacular rendering imposes itself: Latin readers in Italy grow ever fewer, and schooling in the language of Cicero has long ceased to be a mass phenomenon. The translation into Italian of a treatise written in the mid-fourteenth century in medieval Latin – and perhaps ‘thought’ by its author in the vernacular – does not, in short, constitute a crime of such grave lèse-majesté. No reason peremptorily prevented its translation (obviously keeping the text of Quaglioni’s 1983 edition facing, as has rightly been done), while not a few reasons justify it and, in the light of the result, make it something to be appreciated.

Mexicali, 1 May 2018

Notes

[1] A. Zorzi, La questione della tirannide nell’Italia del Trecento, in Tiranni e tirannide nel Trecento italiano, ed. A. Zorzi, Rome, Viella, 2013, pp. 11-36 (pp. 12 ff.). On the literature concerning tyranny see ibid., pp. 235-252.

[2] E. Ruffini, I sistemi di deliberazione collettiva nel medioevo italiano (1927), in Id., La ragione dei più. Ricerche sulla storia del principio maggioritario, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1977, pp. 211-318; G. De Angelis, “Omnes simul aut quot plures habere potero”. Rappresentazioni delle collettività e decisioni a maggioranza nei Comuni italiani del XII secolo, in “Reti Medievali Rivista”, 12, 2 (2011).

[3] M. Ascheri, Le città-Stato, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006.

[4] F. Treggiari, “Doctoratus est dignitas”: la lezione di Bartolo, in Per la storia dell’Università di Perugia, ed. F. Treggiari, Bologna, Clueb, 2014, pp. 35-46.

[5] C. Cattaneo, La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane [1858], ed. G.A. Belloni, Florence, Vallecchi, 1931. On this “precious little book” and on Arrigo Solmi’s address of 1926 (L’unità fondamentale della storia italiana, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1927), which probably depends on it (cf. A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, Turin, Einaudi, 1974, p. 156), see F. Calasso, Gli ordinamenti giuridici del rinascimento medievale, Milan, Giuffrè, 1949, pp. 93-94.

[6] A. Zorzi, La questione della tirannide, cit., p. 17.

[7] The literature on the subject is rich: see at least the essays by R.M. Dessì and L. Pasquini in the volume Il bene comune: forme di governo e gerarchie sociali nel Basso Medioevo, Spoleto, Cisam, 2012.

[8] The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted, Tielt, Lannoo Publishers, 2016. This exhibition gathered, in more than a hundred paintings by Flemish artists, three centuries (1450-1750) of images of justice. Its sequel is now the exhibition Call for Justice. Art and Law in the Burgundian Low Countries, mounted in March 2018 at the Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen (on view until 24 June 2018).

[9] S. Caprioli, Una città nello specchio delle sue norme. Perugia milleduecentosettantanove, in Società e istituzioni dell’Italia comunale: l’esempio di Perugia (secoli XII-XIV), Perugia, Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria, 1988, pp. 367-445 (pp. 402, 421).

[10] D. Quaglioni, Civilis sapientia. Dottrine giuridiche e dottrine politiche fra medioevo ed età moderna, Rimini, Maggioli, 1989; F. Treggiari, La laurea del giurista. Le orazioni dottorali di Bartolo da Sassoferrato, in Lauree. Università e gradi accademici in Italia nel medioevo e nella prima età moderna, ed. A. Esposito, U. Longo, Bologna, Clueb, 2013, pp. 97-111.

[11] D. Quaglioni, Politica e diritto nel Trecento italiano. Il “De Tyranno” di Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1314-1357). Con l’edizione critica dei trattati “De Guelphis et Gebellinis”, “De Regimine civitatis” e “De Tyranno”, Florence, Olschki, 1983.

[12] B. Pio, Il tiranno velato fra teoria politica e realtà storica, in Tiranni e tirannide, cit., pp. 95-118 (p. 114); see also Id., “In superbos reges”: il tirannicidio in Boccaccio e nel pensiero politico del Trecento, in “Studi Storici”, 58 (2017), pp. 693-718.

[13] D. Quaglioni, “Quant tyranie sormonte, la justice est perdue”. Alle origini del paradigma giuridico del tiranno, in Tiranni e tirannide, cit., pp. 37-57 (pp. 48-50).

[14] Bartolo da Sassoferrato, Trattato sulla tirannide, ed. Dario Razzi, preface by Diego Quaglioni, translated by Attilio Turrioni, Foligno, Il Formichiere, 2017, pp. 122-125.

[15] E.I. Mineo, Necessità della tirannide. Governo autoritario e ideologia della comunità nella prima metà del Trecento, in Tiranni e tirannide, cit., pp. 59-75. For other aspects connected with the themes of the concordia civium and the bonus status of the city see F. Treggiari, La parabola del bene comune: ordine pubblico e milizie cittadine, in Il bene comune, cit., pp. 265-302.

Ferdinando Treggiari is full professor of History of Medieval and Modern Law at the University of Perugia and of Legal History at the LUISS University of Rome; he is Judge of Extraordinary Remedies and ‘Sapiens’ of the Court for the Trust and Fiduciary Relationships in the Republic of San Marino.