Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter

The clash between Pope Paul II ( 1464-1471) and Bologna was one of two opposed concepts of government and 'state'. Paul II held to a high concept of princely sovereignty, and to a vision of the papal temporal dominions as a genuinely co-ordinated territorial state, an enduring public; entity. Inevitably he clashed with the Commune of Bologna, second city of the Papal State, over which he aspired to more jurisdiction. The political vision of the Bolognese regime had a. local focus which precluded the sacrifice of independence in favour of integration into a wider entity, and sprang from a view of government as rightfully the private preserve of a restricted oligarchic group, from the 1440s consolidated in the magistracy of the 'Sixteen Reformers of the Regime of Liberty'. Paul II regarded the regime of the Sixteen as a 'tyranny', and declared that no such ty rannies should flourish 'under the mantle of St Peter'. But his intervention failed and, instead, Paul modified the constitution which gave the long-developing predominance of the Bentivoglio family an institutional basis. This 'signorial' regime aggravated the tension between collegiality and despotism and paved the way for the eventual destruction of the Bentivoglio dominance and later the fuller incorporation in the sixteenth century of Bologna into the Papal State.