The Day the Emperor Became Podestà: Negotiating Legitimacy in a Fourteenth-Century Commune

This essay argues that forms and practices of communal urban government functioned as an institutional framework for the legitimization of imperial authority throughout the cities of central Italy during the first half of the fourteenth century. Historians have typically understood the use of the title of imperial vicar in Italy during the reigns of Emperor Henry VII and Ludwig IV as a turning point for the development of seignorial regimes in the cities of northern and central Italy. In contrast, this essay emphasizes the processes of negotiations between the urban elites of Todi and Emperor Ludwig IV of Bavaria in order to show how competing groups within the city employed complex and often contradictory forms and discourses of political authority in their relations with supra-urban systems of authority, like the papacy and the empire. Drawing from mostly unpublished archival material such as official correspondence, Riformanze, and inquisition records, this paper shows how the appointment of Emperor Ludwig IV as podestà and the acceptance of an imperial vicar in his stead was the result of a concerted effort to preserve the monopoly that Todi's urban elites exercised on municipal institutions. In so doing, this essay contributes to recent debates about the development of urban seignorial regimes throughout Italy, arguing that the establishment of imperial vicariates was not an attempt to thwart municipal institutions but that those institutions maintained a central role in the processes of political legitimation.