Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Abstract

(preface xvi) the Florentice writer Matteo Bandello, looking back from his vantage point in the sixteenth century, imagined that an entire city could be filled with exiles from the past. My historian’s obligation, as I came to see it, was to populate that imaginary city, an Atlantis of exiles, with the histories of real people and the details of particular lives. [np] But how was an account of such a place, or what I began to think of as a “contrary commonwealth,” a mirror image of the Italian city-state, to be constructed? … Like citizenship, exile could be defined in strictly legal terms like citizenship and much else besides, it could not be reduced to the formulas of the lawyers and the legal historians.(1) In his book of etymologies Isidore of Seville traced the word _exsilium_ to deep and lasting roots. Exile was fundamentally a matter of location and defined positions in space: “Exile means, as it were, ‘outside the soil’—_extra solum_. For he who is ‘outside his own ground’ is called an exile. So, for example, those who return from the space ‘beyond the threshold’ to resume civic rights… which is to say, from beyond the boundaries of their homeland.” (fn2 on the dictionary entries)(8) Since Ovid portrayed his place of exile on the Black Sea as everything that Rome was not, Pontus seemed to him all the darker, colder, and more barbarous. But such contrasts did not always work to the exile’s disadvantage. Odysseus or Aeneas would have been lesser heroes at Penelope’s side or in Illium, and in a classical topos the exile gains citizenship of the world, with all its wonders, for being deprived of some small angle of space.(10) In medieval and Renaissance Italy the old and yet quite timeless contrasts between center and margin, fertility and barrenness, community and wilderness were repeated and renewed again and again.(17) The most faction-ridden communal institutions did claim to represent common interests and eventually challenged the separatist impulses of their own origins. As a result of one of those consolidating and centralizing phases which have come and gone in the history of Italy, the exiles of the fifteenth century were to have fewer options than their predecessors in the thirteenth. But whenever medieval or Renaissance exiles left some particular _partia_ behind, they still remained within the broad and deep patters of particularism in the Italian experience. [np] “Particular corps of interest can sanction a condition of fact; they cannot make it a condition of right.” [fn59] To transform exile into a “condition of right,” in Durkheim’s phrase, professor of law, lawyers, notaries, and magistrates had their work cut out for them in medieval and Renaissance Italy. There was no shortage of rules possible in principle or received by tradition; the problem, as always in the law, was which rules to apply. … Terminology and procedure varied from one text to another. Rules for exile could be, and had been, formulated in terms of different conceptions of society and politics. Lines of historical development were unclear, as they still are on many points, despite the best efforts of legal historians.(18) These chapters have little of that consistency and clarity for which it pleased the compliers, like most legislators, to congratulate themselves. Instead, ambiguities, contradictions, and anachronisms abounded in ways that only the most overawed medieval lawyers could have ignored.