Vendetta al tramonto (Italian Edition)

IMG_20160718_202252_large.jpg - Picture of La Pirata 2 la Vendetta, Cagliari

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This term meant treason to God, the worst offense against Christian society. Heretics were those who, while keeping the outward appearance of Christian religion, pursued false opinions from a desire for human approval, earthly reward, or worldly pleasures. This conta- mination, this infection from which true believers had to protect themselves, threa- tened the very foundation of the Church, papal authority, and Guelph and popular communes. The idea of contamination and infection comes from the early Middle Ages: Following the Scriptures, Gregory teaches in the same treatise that Christians are only wayfarers on this earth viator, peregrinus , on their way to their true — that is, heavenly — homeland Moralia, XXXIV, 3, 6.

Moralia, VI, 16, Alienation is essentially a failure to love God and a refusal to adhere to the order which he has given; it is something very evil and to be avoided at all costs, as evi- denced in Gerhart B. Heresy in the society of the communes was not a simple matter of religious belief, but became a part of the power struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghi- bellines. In case of imprisonment, this would have automatically led to the death sentence and the destruction of his goods. Popular forces now conflicted with the nobility, tar- geting the wealth and social behavior of the traditional urban and rural aristocracy.

The popolo was authorized to discredit the mag- nates; it used the metaphor of the wolf and the lamb, identifying wolves as aggressive, ferocious and rapacious animals that cor- rupted the sacred space of the city-state.

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Because of their social be- havior and inability to respect the good and peaceful state of the city, magnates could be banished from public offices. Through this campaign of discrediting, the new regime of the rich merchants de- veloped a political ideology of justice based on social contrast, dis- criminating against all those who had controlled the state from the beginning of its communal political life.

This campaign against the magnates legitimized for the popolo this form of social abuse. La Nuova Italia, , pp. Western Europe, 14thth Centuries, ed. Every form of repression implies the mutual acceptance, by members of a community, of the legitimization of the office which is doing the repressing. The city was always understood to be a community circumscribed within its own physical and institutional space. Like pilgrims, those who were forced outside their homeland were pushed and pulled across a world as changeable as their own condition. Those who suffered political exclusion were the result of individual or group negation of the dominant order, the ac- cepted norms of coexistence with the laws in force.

People forced into exile lived far from their own soil or their own land, beyond the confines of their homeland. The widespread practice of push- ing rivals and enemies to the edges of society was meant to force them outside their consciousness and sacred life30 fig. A city was a defined physical space, usually marked out by city walls, which in its aggregation of structures contrasted with the sur- rounding countryside devoted to farming.

It was also a legal space, a place where certain statutes applied, certain legal privileges per- tained, and certain jurisdictional rights were exercised. It was fur- 28 Charles T. Mauro Pagliai Editore, , pp. In addition, it was an idea, a place identified by a name and symbols that elicited a sensibili- ty manifested as civic virtue. The city was a mystic body, a place that made possible a politicized community of people, who shared the same values respecting its sacred laws. Cities became places where they should — but did not — test their moral attitude or learn to subordinate self- ishness and pride to the so-called Common Good bonum com- mune.

The ex- periment of the communal city-states bound forever the idea of the urban space to the idea of Pythagorean harmony, to the earthly form of the music of the spheres. Being an enemy of this harmo- ny, promoted and developed by communal values, was understood to be a clear violation of natural as well as civic law, so that city governments were authorized to prevent and punish wrongdoers by means of criminal justice. The sacredness of the city space was counterbalanced by the constantly recurring phenomenon of the 31 All those who were considered enemies of the bonum commune could be per- secuted by the community itself.

All those who committed crimes associated with the holding of public office, with intrigues and sedition against the commune and with debt legitimized the community to persecute them. Every citizen belonged to a state which could prosecute its political enemies, with the aim of compensation, securing reparation of an economic sort fine or of a physical nature death sentence. Those who were considered enemies of the community could be likened to those sentenced for crimes. The denial of civic status sanctioned by statutory regulations was so far- reaching in such cases that if someone who was subject to a ban for political offences was murdered while in prison by one of his fellow prisoners, the crime was allowed to go unpunished.

Many sentences provide further evidence of the harsh treatment reserved for traitors to the state: Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion, pp. New political landscapes were al- ways the expression of oligarchic divisions which caused civil bat- tles and violence. Marginalization of political opponents became a constant form of repression in city-states. During the thirteenth century, and for extended periods of time in the two centuries that followed, violence and repression were a part of everyday life and public psychology.

This miniature reveals the social tension caused by the denial of power between socioeconomic groups in Florence. A few years later Easter , chroniclers explain the birth of Guelfs and Ghibellines. Miniature from the Cronica of Giovanni Villani, mid-fourteenth century.

Vatican Library, Chigi Manuscript, fol. Giotto di Bondone b. This is the tenth of the twenty-eight scenes of Legend of Saint Francis. During the civil war in Arezzo, St. Francis saw demons over the city. He called upon a brother of his order, Sylvester, to drive them out. The picture area is dominated by the architecture of the city, which is divided from the rest of the world by a crack in the earth, and by the towering church building.

Giotto portrays the saint deep in prayer in front of the latter. His strength seems to pass to Brother Sylvester, who raises his hand commandingly in the direction of the city of towers. Thereupon the demons flee, and the citizens can return to their business in peace — they can already be seen at the city gates. Master seated at desk with a book. Pupils, some tonsured, seated before him. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Shelfmark: Sassetta represents Saint Francis gazing upward on the three mendicant Virtues of Chastity a white-clad winged personification holding a lily , Obedience bearing a yoke , and Poverty wearing a patched gown.

The Ecstasy of St Francis detail. Tempera on wood, x cm — Villa I Tatti, Settignano detail. Last Judgment detail Florence, 18 January First folio of the Ordinamenta Iustitiae Ordinances of Justice. The Ordinances of Justice are an official work by means of which the political power of the mercantile and entrepreneurial middle class was consolidated and the reins of power passed into the hands of the seven major guilds.

Domenico di Michelino b. In Domenico di Michelino represents the three kingdoms as follows: Purgatory in the centre background; Hell at left; the heavenly City at right. For my part, however, I do not intend here to examine sce- narios of destruction, plunder, raids, killing, and dismembered bodies; these are not the aspects I want to emphasize. This perspective, besides being un- convincing from the anthropological standpoint, would be pro- foundly anachronistic in terms of conflicts in general, and even more so for the wars of the Italian communes, in which the two dimensions appeared more or less indivisible.

However, his observations on the dimension of ritual violence are still valid: Grasset, , es- pecially p. On the still-lively debate on the nature and function of the rituals that, since the s, Max Gluckman and Victor W. Aldine Publishing Company, ; Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure London: Il des- tino dei rituali. PUF, , pp.

Episodi di Xena - Principessa guerriera (seconda stagione)

Discours et gestes de paix pen- dant la guerre de Cent Ans Paris: S, Anger, June Paris: RITUALS OF WAR IN ITALY 83 brought out how in the sieges of enemy cities the degree of mate- rial destruction, often emphasized in the reports of chroniclers, did not always correspond with the facts, and in this sense he has un- derlined the importance of psychological pressure, which could, to a certain extent, substitute for destructive force. Albin Michel, , especially pp. Settia, Rapine, assedi, battaglie. La guerra nel medioevo Rome and Bari: Laterza, , pp.

Electa, , pp. To be sure, from this standpoint as well, we cannot ig- nore the writings and sensibilities of the chroniclers who, in har- mony with the choices made by the winners, establish the code of insult and ensure that the event will be remembered, taking an ac- tive part in the construction of the ritual. As we shall see, howev- er, this choice is above all the expression of the particular sub- stratum of conflict which, in the polycentric fabric of the world of the communes, constitutes an intrinsic element of civic patriotism 5 Richard C. Temps modernes, 96 , p. Pacini Edi- tore , pp.

De la pratique sociale au rituel politique, ed. PUPS, , pp. The first evidence of these rituals appears in Tuscan chronicles starting in the first decades of the thirteenth century, in keeping with the rise of the polarization of the two parties of the Guelphs and Ghibellines in Florentine sources of the late s. Multigrafica, , p. Zanichelli, , p. Set- tia, Rapine, assedi, battaglie, p. Accompanying all this was the mockery by boys, whose aggressiveness soon passed from verbal insults to phys- ical violence.

But the boys — as the chronicle makes clear — were sent away and the threat thus defused. C, XXIX , pp. Ponte alle Grazie, , pp. These six towns- men who, at the end of the long siege of , went barefoot in their shirts with ropes around their necks to meet the victorious king of England in order to hand over to him the keys of the city — as Jean-Marie Moeglin has demonstrated — were not protagonists of the heroic act of collective sacrifice represented in the monu- ment by Rodin, but performers of a codified gesture of humilia- tion and penitence comparable to that of the amende honorable testified from as early as the eleventh century: Certainly, like the burghers of Calais, they were pardoned, but the price to pay in any case was the loss of the honor and dignity of their office, a sort of symbol- ic death that struck a blow to the heart of their system of identity values, delegitimizing also the authority of the Commune.

Nonetheless, compared to the humiliation of the rope around the neck, this ritual, like the others created within the sphere of the conflicts between Italian cities, presented rather different elements; in this context, it was the victorious enemy who imposed on the losers an ignominious practice, the implementation of which did not in any way interrupt the cycle of revenge. On the contrary, the sequence of reciprocal insults was fed by perennial remembrance of the dishonor undergone.

Jean-Marie Moeglin, Les bourgeois de Calais. Essai sur un mythe historique Paris: Al- bin Michel, , especially pp. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: CISAM, , pp. Just three years after the bloody battle of Meloria, in , an ex- pedition from Genoa led to a new success at Porto Pisano, and on that occasion the victorious Genoese minted coins deriding their rival. Not even Genoa the Proud, the city that in , a few months earlier than Florence, had minted its genovi- no, was exempt from the ritual of ridicule: Zanichelli, , pp.

In this fight, which ended two years later with the defeat of the Pisans at Cascina,28 the two traditional enemies exchanged a long string of acrid ritual insults. Lorenzo de Monacis, Chronicon de rebus Venetis ab U. Seicento anni per la costruzione di uno Stato, Turin: UTET, , pp. Valtancoli Montazio ed altri, 2 vol. Seuil, , pp. Vecchiarelli, , pp. Alberto Bruschi, , especially pp. The affront consisted first of all of the very act of minting a coin, a specific attribute of sovereignty that reflected im- perial dignity as well as being a means par excellence for transmit- ting a memory.

As the years passed, the derision of adversaries was reinforced by im- ages of heraldic animals, and the act of domination as well was col- ored with the hues of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. In conformity with the emergence of the two parties in the life of Florence, and later of Tuscany, and the spread of imperial, pa- pal and later especially Angevin propaganda, both the Guelph and the Ghibelline cities utilized the syntax of heraldic bestiary and an increasingly sophisticated constellation of rituals of public deni- gration of their adversaries.

Eagles, lions, and foxes connoted the language of insult, like many other characteristic aspects of local identity. Within the span of a century the Tuscan communes that identified themselves as Guelphs or Ghibellines took possession of their symbolic apparatus and inserted it into a language of ridicule that was ever richer and more refined. Rusconi, , p. Cambiagi, , VI, pp. It was undoubtedly in the overall framework of the intense ri- valries among the principal communes of Tuscany that the rituals of siege, first and foremost that of minting coins for spite, were ear- ly formalized and assiduously practiced, taking on over the years increasingly theatrical and ironic forms.

The races, run before the gates of the besieged city or on the battlefield, constituted a sort of symbolic reversal of the traditional equestrian games that, starting in the thirteenth century, were organized to celebrate important events, both religious and civic, in the history of the communes. Giostre, tornei e giochi nel Medioevo Rome and Bari: Lucca, defeated in by the Pisan army, was ridiculed not only by the minting of coins and the chivalrous ceremony of the dubbing of numerous knights, but also by the running of a race and a mock battle called mazzascudo.

Starting in the second half of the thirteenth century, defama- tory races aimed against the people under siege became a frequent practice in the military campaigns of the Tuscan armies and mul- tiplied especially in the course of the fourteenth century, spread- ing also outside Tuscany. Above and beyond the context of the fights among the communes of Tuscany, Villani recalls the three races that were run in by the lord of Mantua and Modena, Rainaldo Bonacolsi, known as Passerino, and his allies near Bologna.

Roncioni, Delle istorie pisane, X, If the taste and sensibility of the chroniclers surely had an influence on the wide resonance of these gestures of scorn in the context of the Tuscan communes, other motives also have to be taken into consideration. In order to understand their proliferation, we must keep in mind the particularly intense conflictive nature of this re- gion, where a large number of important towns tried to construct a solid territorial base and affirm the supremacy of their city.

Be- sides, as Giovanni Cherubini has efficaciously demonstrated,47 these conflictual traits went beyond merely economic and politi- cal interests, involving also elements of prestige. More in general, for an orientation, also bibliographical, on the dimension of conflict in the society of the com- munes, see at least: Idem, Cavaliers et citoyens; Crouzet-Pavan, Enfers et paradis, es- pecially pp.

Pacini Editore, , pp. Before concluding I would like to dwell for a minute on the shared value which, above and beyond the different possible interpreta- tions and recondite meanings of the symbolic language of these cer- emonial practices, characterizes these representations in general, that is to say the open desire to give the battle a memorable di- mension, capable of extrapolating the event from the ordinary con- text of war and making it exceptional.

In effect, in the dynamic of the incessant fights among the cities of Tuscany, these gestures of clear humiliation served to put the finishing touches not only on major battles like Montaperti, Meloria or Campaldino, but also much more limited military skirmishes such as the siege of the lit- tle town of Asciano by the Lucchese. If the rit- ual thus manages to circumscribe the violence within forms of spectacle which are less dangerous than the use of destructive force, expressing its deeper and more complex meaning, it nonetheless can portend future acts of ritual revenge that will be carried out symmetrically by whoever is the winner the next time.

Gallimard, , p. Thus it was impossible to forget the offense that had been re- ceived. Humiliation is done first and foremost to be seen, then im- mediately understood, and finally remembered as an event worthy of remembrance. The battlefield becomes a theater where the pres- ence of an audience is indispensable. And in fact, the dimension of spectacle, an aspect that could not have escaped contemporary observers, pervades more or less markedly all these rituals of de- rision.

Par- allel to this, in the evolution of the clashes between communes, the need became increasingly impelling to transmit a political message capable of publicizing the image of the commune and its strength. In this sense, these rites of siege, with their strong symbolic con- tent complementing the actual fighting, appeared as crucial ele- ments for the resolution of the military conflict, as manifestations of the sovereignty of the popular regimes, capable of annihilating the enemy by the mere use of a ritual game. Fayard, , pp. In German-speaking lands alone, over one-thousand Jewish communities were eradicated.

This paper will not consider all forms of mass violence but in- stead will concentrate on persecution and punishment of popular rebels from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, principally in Italy. It will argue that examples of mass massacre and special and cruel forms of punishment meted out to rebels were rare, before ca.

With the development of early Renaissance territorial states in the late fourteenth century and more so with early modern states north of the Alps in the sixteenth century, cruelty of state repression with new rituals of brutality spread from the punishment of a handful of leaders to the mass execution of fifty or more, and to the wholesale destruction of subject population by the mid-fifteenth century and into the early modern period — the massacre of innocents in sacks of cities in northern France and the Low Countries.

Sociogenetische und Psycho- genetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. Verlag Haus zum Falken, With the brutal repression of the Jacquerie in northern France in June , chronicles such as Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart reveled in their re-telling of the butchering of towns- men and peasants by chivalrous knights as their victims took flight through fields and woods: These men-at-arms then charged and killed them like swine, one on top of the other. Immediately after the quelling of the Jacques and the merchants of Paris under Etienne Marcel, the dauphin Charles issued record numbers of letters of pardon, many of these, to knights who had taken the law into their own hands and had killed peasants in their villages.

Because of their excess- es, these noblemen now faced penalties imposed on them by the crown. Turning to Italy, other late medieval exceptions are striking. The execution of Fra Dolcino and possibly the mass destruction of his followers in the mountains above Biella Novara in make grisly reading: Manchester University Press, , p.

The first is the Flo- rentine Tumulto dei Ciompi, whose radical wing and third revo- lutionary guild, the popolo di Dio, was defeated in early Septem- ber , followed a year and a half later by the rest of the work- ers-artisans government, that of the Arti Minori, in January Harvard University Press, , p.

Una pagina di storia del proletariato operaio [] Florence: Sansoni, , p. Ac- cording to Cronaca senese di Donato di Neri, p. No Florentine chronicle or judicial record confirms this claim. Guasti, , p. Firenze, giugno-agosto Siena: Il Ponte Ed- itore, , p. But while some were sentenced for life, others were exiled for only a year.

For both, unfortunately, our on- sance Europe London and New York: Arnold and Oxford University Press, , p. The Johns Hopkins University Press, , p. Princeton University Press, , p. Firenze University Press, , p. For some rea- son, Zorzi cites the eighteenth-century Muratori edition of the Rerum Italicarum Scrip- tores instead of the more critical twentieth-century one edited by Lisini and Iacomet- ti; see below.

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No governmental or ju- dicial records survive for it. Their second, better- known revolt, almost a year later in July , was rare among the revolts of late medieval Europe in that it arose not only over rights but specially over wages: The following day the Bruco armed and marched to the Palace of the Senator, threatening to burn it down if the three were not released. With their allies, the Bruco stormed the palace, killed several officers, freed their three comrades, hurled insults against the ruling parties Monti of the Dodici and the Nove, and attacked the Palace of the Salimbeni.

In this struggle, the Monte of the Dodici along with others with lances and crossbows invaded the neigh- borhood of the Bruco — Ovile — torched eight houses, chased women with their children in their arms screaming, and stole or broke to pieces the looms of workers. But the battle did not end here.

A grain shortage had afflicted Siena in the previous year; see Ivi, p. The former ruling party of the Dodici, not the Bruco, were the big losers: And on 12 August it adjudged its condemnations: The chronicler con- tinued with a long list of lesser fines descending from 50 to 25 lire, of whom not a single person was identified from Ovile, or of the Bruco; nor was any wool worker mentioned. Instead, city-state govern- ments of the fourteenth century usually limited executions to a few leaders and without horrific forms of torture and punishment to accompany theaters of executions followed by the humiliation of bodily parts.

Inevitably, the latter were sentenced to be hanged. And no quartering of bodies before or af- ter execution with ritualistic placement and humiliation of bod- ily parts in selected symbolic places followed. In addition, this volume contains twenty-two cases from the Offices of the Gabelle, in which several hundred more were sentenced to small fines or absolved. Typographia Societatis Palatinae, , col. In a popular uprising in Ferrara seized the Marchese Azzo and through their rough justice dragged him tied to the tail of horse through the city to the place of execution Chronicon es- tense cum additamentis usque ad annum , ed.

Two men were apprehended, one from Scor- giano near the problematic and shifting border between Florence and Siena and the other from Staggia, which had been within the Florentine contado since Ciuto alone was sentenced to hang and with no accompanying spe- cial rituals of brutality. Yet when the Milanese state finally suppressed the popular government led by Bussolari after four years of rebel rule and reintegrated the city into Milanese control, we learn of no executions, mass exiles, or massacres of the inno- cent. Not even its leader was tortured or executed.

Instead he was sentenced to be kept at another Augustinian convent, this one at Vercelli, where he presumably died of natural causes in From the chronicle, however, it is not clear whether this man was a popular rebel or in the employ of the Florentines.

Vendetta al tramonto

Cambridge University Press, , p. Note di storia fiorentina Florence: To cite but a few examples: Tied in chains, he was hanged with eight of his associates. Long- man, , pp. Edmonston and Douglas, , pp. Printed by George W. Jones, , p. The chronicler remarked that the spectacle of his execution had the effect of quieting the crowds. For conspiracy and the murder of the Duke of Gloucester in , the rebel Hall who appears from his testimony before Parliament as someone who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time was charged by Parliament with falsehood and treason and in the same day drawn a distance of two English leagues by horses that left his body ripped open.

Longman, , II, p. Boydell Press, , p. English Historical Society Publications, , p. Albani, a Johanne Amundesham, monacho, ut videtur, conscripti A. Longman, , I, p. These rebels were not of the city but from villages and towns such as Gaenna in the Val di Chi- ana and Anghiari both previously in the contado of Arezzo , San Miniato, Montecatini, and the outlying mountainous zones of the Casentino and the Alpi fiorentine.

Suddenly, Florentine judges created new and crueler rit- uals of humiliation, torture, and execution for rebels, both com- moners and those from the old feudal elites. Boydell Press, , pp. Longman, , 3 vols. Of these, sixty-three were condemned to death — thirty-three by beheading, twenty-eight by hanging and two by cremation. These records describe no special ceremonies or rit- uals that tortured or humiliated the condemned as they were marched to the scaffolds: The much shorter Capitano del Popolo records for this semester condemned more to death: See also Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Ox- ford University Press, , pp.

If the seasonal rates and the other half of the Florentine quarters were comparable, this would mean condemnations of execution, or over three-and-a-half times as many as The actual rates of executions were with- out doubt higher still. First, as Umberto Dorini argued in the ear- ly twentieth century, the rates of those condemned who were ac- tually executed climbed steadily upwards from the earliest records of the mids to the s, and Andrea Zorzi has argued that this upward trend continued to climb into the early modern peri- od.

Yet, only a fragment of these records survive from the late fourteenth and ear- ly fifteenth centuries, and where they do, the summary character of these records often obscures the particular nature of the crimes 40 ASF, Esecutore degli ordinamenti, no. The records extend from early February Flo- rentine style to April. Domenico Corsi Editore, , p. Finally, the population of Florence and its contado in the s was about half that of its pre-plague population. In- stead of decline, per capita executions from to the late four- teenth century in Florence would have then increased seven- to eight-fold.

To be sure, the tribunals record several revolts, in which numbers of rebels were condemned to death; however, these three months were not exceptional in the history of popular revolt in the territory or city of Florence. Peasants and Rebel- lion, Cambridge: In the three-month period for the quarters of Santo Spirito and Santa Croce alone, eighty-two rebels in eleven separate cases were sen- tenced to these forms of torture. Only in two cases were they ex- tended to those condemned for other crimes, in both cases homi- cide.

The penalties in- cluded amputations of tongues, ears, noses, hands, feet, the brand- ing with the insignia of the Florentine state on foreheads, all with processions of public floggings and donned with clothing and sym- bols to engender public humiliation.

He was also fined lire. At the place of justice and as- sembled before crowds, his penis was to be sliced in four, each slice then burnt with a red-hot iron. The practice of wrap- ping rebels in pincers or iron claws on tortured processions to the gallows continued, but now the vicariate courts of the early fifteenth century added new features: In four rebels armed with swords and other weapons attacked officers of the Florentine Guelph party at Montecatini. For their execution a round ditch two braccia deep about five feet was to be dug at the place of justice in Montecatini. As at San Miniato in , the rebels were to be lowered head first into the ditches and then buried alive.

Four rebels from the ex-contado of Pisa, who had held secret meetings and conspired to overthrow Florentine rule in Pisa, were con- demned to be dragged to the place of justice in Pisa, where they were to be buried alive in ditches specially dug for their execution. Also, see Ivi, no. Certainly the Florentine records show no such trend from the earliest surviving judicial records of the mids to the rise of the Medici in , after which the records of the vicariate tribunals in the Florentine ter- ritory no longer survive.

Perhaps the trend is analogous to that of post-Enlightenment European states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: In other places, Zorzi cites the records of the Libro dei giustiziati of the Florentine confraternity of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio although to secondary materials and not to the original in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence.

He neither analyzes these records, nor seems to re- alize, as Samuel Y. Cornell University Press, , p. Instead, Zorzi assumes that this is the full set of executions. Not only do these lists of execu- tions not include all that took place in the city of Florence, to what extent did this city brotherhood travel to the far-flung vicariates of the Florentine district, places such as Anghiari, San Miniato, or Pisa, where, as we have seen, a disproportionate number of executions took place? Longman, , pp. At the same time, however, these states developed new forms of torture, cruelty, punishment, and repressive measures such as concentration camps to control the indigenous peoples of their outlaying and distant colonies.

Such new rituals of punishment and cruelty as seen in Flo- rence and its new territorial state were, however, only a prelude of worse to come with the development of larger territorial states and empires of the early modern period, particularly north of the Alps.

As early as the mid-fifteenth century, the new monarchs sacked cities that rose up against them. Brescia in , Prato and Pavia in , and Genoa in Again, an- ticipations of this trend come earlier from republican Florence and its control over new territories, and again the early s appear as the critical moment. In the peasants of Raggiolo in the Montagna, newly-incorporated into the Florentine state, conduct- ed secret meetings with their former feudal lords of Pietramala, be- seeching them to revolt against the harsh new taxes and control of the republican city-state.

Their repression, however, did not end with rounding up and trying a handful of rebel leaders. In- stead, the Florentines treated the villagers, women and children in- cluded, as a foreign enemy and worse: As a good example to the surrounding villages, the Florentines were more evil than they needed to be to show that they would do the same to others.

The victorious branch massacred six hundred or more of their peasantry, not counting those who had drowned, and captured two thousand. Yet this was not sufficient retribution for the Marchese of Ferrara. Their control and disciplining of larger populations and territories assumed new and more brutal forms of repression, violence, and punishment than medieval states, at least of the later Middle Ages, could muster, tolerate, or perhaps even imagine. Nonetheless, historians ought to get the record straight.

Lapi, , in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 27, part 2, pp. The cultural climate which preceded and accompanied the celebrations of the bicentenary of the French revolution already seemed to indicate a change of emphasis, par- ticularly in the writings of English-speaking historians such as William Doyle and Simone Schama.

Recently however, from 11 September on- wards, the change has become even more readily perceivable. If for a long time violence had been considered an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of political and social transformation, an ingrained element, so to speak, and therefore in some ways deemed as natural just as labor pains accompany labor, as Marx had so fa- mously put it so violence, having now freed itself of its ancillary role with respect to politics,1 has become a subject of study in its own right, as is proven by the publication of a number of studies,2 1 Hannah Arendt, On Violence London: Watson, Assaulting the Past.

To view this shift of perspective purely as a consequence of a change in the political and cultural climate, that is to say as a re- sult of the current supremacy of a revisionist and politically con- servative historiographic assessment which reverses the sign from positive to negative of the consolidated opinion on revolutions, would be missing the point. It is not just a question of whether these incidents should no longer be seen as steps in the glorious progressive march undertaken by western civilization but rather as senseless tragedies or at least tragic mistakes, the results of mis- understandings, ideological fanaticism and factional infighting.

All this has led to a far-reaching review of the historical opinion on the twentieth century, the peak of western civilization but also the pin- nacle of mass state violence. Cambridge University Press, ; Julius R. Wodarski, Handbook of Violence New York: There is therefore some merit to be found today, in light of the recent centrality of violence in the historiographic discourse, in re- considering the ways in which the historiography of the early mod- ern age has addressed the issue of popular violence over the last three decades.

This is what will be attempted in the pages that fol- low, which aim to turn the spotlight onto one of the most obvious limitations that can be encountered in the many historiographic ap- proaches, the tendency to project violence onto a rather ambigu- ous subject, the crowd in arms;9 it is a fairly opaque subject at best, which brings back once again the age-old question of the manip- ulation or control exerted over popular action and the subsequent feverish attempts to decipher the independent, and truly popular, codes that can be set apart from those pertaining to the more gen- eral culture.

The violence is thus inscribed in the register of 7 Gabrielle M. Forgetting how any discourse on vi- olence should instead take its cue from institutional and conven- tional practices, from the violent yet routine imposition of the so- cial norm. One of the most characteristic ways in which historiography of the early modern age has treated violence is the frequent recourse to the category of the rite of violence.

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Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Intanto una delle fanciulle che erano con Ileandra, Aria, racconta ai re Laocoonte e Biante di aver visto la principessa con un altro uomo, e i due sospendono immediatamente i preparativi per il matrimonio. Serpedonte torna dal padre e gli riferisce di essere stato sconfitto da Corilo; quando re Laocoonte decide di far giustiziare il giovane, il principe gli chiede di lasciarlo stare, in quanto Ileandra l'ha preferito a lui.

Inizialmente il giovane affronta con coraggio la pattuglia di soldati, ma quando sente il tintinnio della briglia del re, si impaurisce e si arrende. Lui e Olimpia vengono condannati a morte nonostante le suppliche della confusa Ileandra. Con una pietra fa suonare una campana, facendo tornare Corilo eroico; egli riesce a liberarsi e affronta Serpedonte e suo padre. Alla fine, segue la richiesta di Olimpia e libera Corilo dall'incantesimo. Ileandra e Serpedonte possono finalmente sposarsi, e a Corilo non resta altro che farsi confortare da Xena, tornata dagli amici.

Olimpia gli crede ciecamente, mentre Xena, conoscendo la reputazione di Eumeo, crede che sia davvero colpevole. Purtroppo viene scoperta e sta per essere linciata, quando Xena interviene; la guerriera ottiene il permesso di partire alla ricerca dell'evaso con Olimpia, e le due partono all'inseguimento di Melicerte. Trovatolo ai confini di una foresta, Olimpia lo avverte di fuggire e si frappone tra l'amico e Xena. La principessa guerriera riesce a superarla con un balzo e attacca il guerriero, ma le loro forze sono quasi pari.

Olimpia interviene e chiede a Xena di non riportare l'amico al villaggio, ma Melicerte si arrende. Confessa poi che quella notte era ubriaco, e quindi non ricorda nulla. Qui, riconosciuta l'arma, ha la prova dell'innocenza dell'amico: Racconta ai due che l'inverno scorso aveva salvato un uomo chiamato Elysha dallo stesso Admeto, e nella lotta quest'ultimo era rimasto colpito con la sua stessa spada. A cavallo, poi, il suo corpo era tornato al villaggio e Melicerte aveva solo estratto la spada dal suo corpo.

Capito cosa deve essere successo, la guerriera parte per liberarli. In prigione, Olimpia e Melicerte si dicono addio: I soldati vengono a prendere il guerriero, e Olimpia, ben decisa a essere l'ultimo viso che l'amico veda, guarda la morte di Melicerte dalla finestra della cella. Messo fuori gioco il giudice e gettatolo in prigione, Xena e Olimpia dicono addio al loro amico, deciso a riportare la pace nel villaggio, a cominciare dalla distruzione del patibolo. Xena e Olimpia giungono in un villaggio; mentre la guerriera si reca alla taverna, la giovane poetessa decide di fare compere al mercato.

Mentre si guarda attorno, viene aggredita da due uomini; fuggendo dopo averli sconfitti, viene catturata da un terzo uomo. I due iniziano a lottare, e nello scontro Xena rimane parzialmente accecata da un liquido contenente linfa di ortica. Alcesio viene avvertito da Lagos, uno dei suoi uomini, che Xena sta arrivando. Quando i due vengono attaccati da Lagos e dai suoi uomini, Xena libera Palemone per ottenere il suo aiuto: Xena lo incatena nuovamente: I due ripartono, diretti alla foresta, ma non vedendo dove va, Xena cade da una sporgenza che si affaccia su un fiume.

Olimpia comunque convince Euristeo a mostrarle la stanza di re Cleto. Il matrimonio fra Olimpia e il cadavere del re viene celebrato, mentre Xena e Palemone riescono a distrarre le guardie e a superare le mura; subito dopo la cerimonia, Olimpia e il corpo del re vengono sigillati in due sarcofagi separati. Mentre camminano su una spiaggia, Xena e Olimpia aiutano il coraggioso Ulisse, re di Itaca, a sconfiggere un gruppo di pirati.

Sconfitti i nemici, l'uomo spiega loro che i pirati hanno ricevuto da Nettuno, il dio del mare, la promessa di ottenere la sua isola come ricompensa se riusciranno a impedirgli di tornare a casa. Non appena Xena accetta di aiutarlo, il dio esce dalle acque e avverte la guerriera di starne fuori: I due rifiutano, e Nettuno li avvisa: Olimpia si traveste con una parrucca e un abito molto provocante; in questo modo riesce a distrarre i pirati e a permettere a Xena e a Ulisse di salire a bordo.

Fatta allontanare la nave, stordiscono i briganti e il trio salpa alla volta di Itaca. I due parlano del chakram, e Ulisse rivela che anche lui ha un'arma simile: Xena lega Ulisse all'albero maestro per non farlo attirare in trappola; ma quando il melodioso canto delle sirene comincia a sedurlo, con un enorme forza rompe le corde che lo legano.

Olimpia e Xena lottano contro di lui per evitare che si getti in mare, e ci riescono solo quando la principessa guerriera inizia a cantare per contrastare la voce delle sirene. Quella notte, Ulisse dice a Xena di essersi innamorato di lei e che vuole che diventi la sua regina quando raggiungeranno Itaca.

Olimpia e Xena parlano: Ulisse si traveste da contadino, mentre Xena e Olimpia da serve di corte; i tre si intrufolano a corte attraverso un passaggio sotterraneo. Dopo il fallimento dei pirati, Ulisse si fa avanti per provare a tendere l'arco: Xena e Olimpia sono sulla riva di un fiume a pescare, quando dalle acque spunta un guerriero ferito: Xena capisce subito che sono in grave pericolo; mentre altri corpi galleggiano nel fiume, degli uomini con le facce pitturate cercano di circondarle, ma le due riescono a fuggire.

Trovata una canoa, seminano i selvaggi grazie al chakram di Xena, con cui la guerriera buca la loro imbarcazione. Olimpia sente i feriti dell'Orda, i cui corpi giacciono fuori dalle porte della fortezza, invocare "kaltaka"; uno degli ateniesi, Garel, pensa che sia il loro dio della guerra. Xena parla con Menticle e Marzio, e scopre da loro che il loro comandante, Galapolo, era partito in cerca di aiuti, ma quegli aiuti non giungeranno mai: Mentre Xena fa rinascere in lei la spietata guerriera che era un tempo per distruggere l'Orda, Olimpia, costernata dal cambiamento dell'amica, si occupa dei feriti.

L'Orda arriva e i soldati iniziano una dura battaglia; Xena ne cattura uno, mentre gli altri si allontanano, e lo porta al forte per interrogarlo. La giovane capisce il significato di "kaltaka" quando il prigioniero indica la sua bisaccia: Credendo che sia in atto una tregua, i nemici si avvicinano per recuperare i loro feriti e i loro morti. Xena si scusa con Olimpia per come l'ha trattata, e le manda altri uomini per assisterla mentre cura i feriti. Marzio - ripresosi - e Menticle dicono a Xena e Olimpia che intendono abbandonare quei territori, e le due amiche riprendono i loro viaggi.

I suoi timori vengono confermati quando il capitano della nave naufragata si getta in acqua e viene barbaramente ucciso. Quando Xena fugge ai pirati e riesce a salire sulla galea di Cecrope, Beante, credendo che voglia impossessarsi del leggendario tesoro del marinaio, decide di inseguire la nave.

La nave di Beante intanto li ha raggiunti, e quando sta per iniziare la battaglia, il dio Nettuno emerge dalle acque: Le casse presenti nella stiva della nave si slacciano dai loro sostegni e, quando una sta per schiacciare Cecrope, uno dei suoi uomini e forse suo unico amico, Ifito, lo salva sacrificandosi, anche se sapeva che, essendo immortale, il marinaio non poteva morire.

Quando accetta, il dio fa cessare la tempesta e la galea si dirige verso il gorgo. Raggiuntolo, Xena si arrampica sulla guardina per trovare il modo di attraversarlo; da qui, vede la nave di Beante risucchiata dalla corrente e distrutta. Xena e Olimpia si trovano in un villaggio per proteggere le vergini di Hestia, minacciate dal signore della guerra Draco Xena e la giovane Olimpia , deciso a venderle come schiave a Ligasio, un mercante di schiavi; mentre camminano per le strade, parlano del potere dell'amore, ignare che Bliss sta volteggiando sulle loro teste e sta creando delle strane coppie.

Corilo raggiunge le due, intenzionato ad aiutarle contro Draco; quando questi arriva, Xena viene colpita da una freccia di Bliss e gli si getta tra le braccia, lasciando senza parole Olimpia e Corilo. Sebbene stupito, Draco inizia subito una battaglia con la principessa guerriera, ben intenzionata a non ferire l'uomo che ama.

Xena rivela agli stupiti Olimpia e Corilo che vuole aiutare Draco a cambiare per poi unirsi per difendere il bene. I due tornano al tempio per proteggere le guerriere mentre Xena va all'accampamento di Draco; qui chiede al guerriero di unirsi a lei per seguire il bene, ma Draco non ne vuole sapere. Draco cattura Olimpia e Corilo, poi entra nel tempio con i suoi uomini; quando trova una vergine, cerca di catturarla, ma lei oppone resistenza: Uscita dal tempio, Xena vede i due amici legati insieme ad un palo; lei li slega, proprio quando Olimpia viene colpita da una freccia di Bliss: Xena si allontana e sfida Draco a braccio di ferro, mentre Olimpia e Corilo si appartano e inventano una canzone su Corilo il Magnifico.

Mentre le due parlano, Draco fa suonare le campane del tempio e riesce a catturare tutte le vergini; Olimpia e Xena arrivano sul luogo. Olimpia lo respinge e si scatena una battaglia: Intuendo le mosse del guerriero, Xena libera l'amico e lo manda a cercare Cupido, dopo aver capito che potrebbe esserci lui dietro a tutto; poi libera Olimpia e tornano al villaggio. Quando Draco rifiuta di consegnargli Olimpia, i due cominciano a battersi. Olimpia mette in salvo le vergini in alcune grotte, ma sono inseguite dagli uomini di Draco.

Bliss le raggiunge e colpisce le vergini, che cominciano a inseguire i guerrieri. Intanto la battaglia tra Draco e Licasio si sposta al tempio, con Xena e Olimpia che li seguono. Corilo raggiunge la giovane e i due si abbracciano; improvvisamente arriva Cupido, che rimanda a casa il figlio Bliss e, imbarazzato, chiede scusa a Xena. Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera. Estratto da " https:

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