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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2013
At the beginning of the Principate, Italy, which had been extended to the Alps by the incorporation of Cisalpine Gaul in 42 b.c., was essentially a land of selfgoverning urban communities that exercised authority over an adjacent country district. By the third century, when earlier differences in the legal status of these communities had been largely abolished, the title most commonly applied to them was civitas, although older terminology did not pass entirely out of use: Cassiodorus, for example, twice uses municipium. For the attached country district the usual name was territorium, defined by the second-century jurist Pomponius as universitas agrorum intra fines cuiusqu civitatis. The Christian church adopted the existing Roman civil circumscriptions as the basis of its territorial organisation, so that in ecclesiastical texts civitas came to have the special sense of ‘diocesan see’: in this sense it is common in the Act a of sixthcentury councils. Despite a steady decline in civic autonomy in the later Imperial period, the city and its territory continued to be the basic unit of secular administration. In the fifth century the title of iudex was not yet accorded to any official connected with the city, and this was still so after the Ostrogothic occupation of Italy and the establishment of comites Gothorum.
1 Chilver, G. E. F., Cisalpine Gaul, Oxford, 1941, pp. 8 ffGoogle Scholar.
2 Abbott, F. F. and Johnson, A. C., Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, Princeton, 1926Google Scholar, provides a good general account. Still of interest is Hegel, C., Gesch. der Städteverfassung von It., Leipzig, 1847Google Scholar, who treats the Roman period rather as a prelude to the medieval.
3 Variae (MGH. AA., XII), III 9 of Estinum (? corr. Sestinum, Sestino, although there is no other evidence that it was still autonomous at this date); V 14 of the towns of Savia. For changes in the meaning of civitas v. Kornemann's article in PW., Suppl. I, cc. 300 ff. and Thes. Ling. Lat., III, 1937, cc. 1229 ffGoogle Scholar.
4 Quoted, Digesta lust., L. 16, 239Google Scholar.
5 Thes., III, c. 1233. Cf. Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc., III 19.
6 Liebenam, W., Städteverwaltung in römischen Kaiserrekhe, Leipzig, 1900, pp. 476 ff.Google Scholar; Abbott and Johnson, op. cit., ch. 14.
7 Mommsen, Th., Ges. Schr., VI (Hist. Schr., III), Berlin, 1910, pp. 438 ff.Google Scholar, 470; Stein, , Histoire du Bas-Empire, II, Paris, etc., 1949, pp. 121 fGoogle Scholar. The Ostrogothic iudex was a Provincial official.
8 Described HL., II 9, 32. The place of the duces in the social organisation of the Lombards before and after 568 is the subject of an illuminating study by Bognetti, G. P., ‘L'influsso delle istituzioni militari romane sulle istituzioni longobarde del sec. VI’, Atti del Congresso int. di diritto rom. e di st. del dir., Verona, 1948, IV, Milan, 1953, pp. 167 ffGoogle Scholar.
9 See esp. Bognetti, , ‘II gastaldato longobardo e i giudicati di Adaloaldo, Arioaldo e Bertarido nella lite fra Parma e Piacenza’, Studi in onore di A. Solmi, II, Milan, 1940, pp. 139 ff.Google Scholar; cf. Mor, C. G., ‘I gastaldi con potere ducale’, Atti dell Congresso int. di Studi Longobardi, 1951, Spoleto, 1952, pp. 409 ffGoogle Scholar.
10 See the Edict of Liutprand, esp. cc. 25 ff.
11 I hope to demonstrate this process elsewhere. The passage referred to is in MGH. SS., I p. 16, s.a. 774.
12 BM.2 597, Codice Diplomatico Veronese, ed. V. Fainelli, I, Venice (R. Dep. St. Pat.), 1940, n. 117 appears to use comitatus in an Italian context already in 817; but the passage in which it occurs is almost certainly the result of a later interpolation. An even earlier reference to a comitatus in Italy may be found in a Sesto document of ?805: but I have suggested below, p. 155, that the wording owes something to a later copyist and cannot be relied on.
13 Typical examples will be discussed in connection with the counties of Milan, Parma, and others. The starting-point here is still Schneider, Entstehung, chs. I, II, although he erred in supposing that all early medieval castra had a fines associated with them.
14 E.g. MGH. Cap. I n. 102.
15 Sch., Cod. Dip. n. 17 of 714, n. 20 of 715; a good account of the whole dispute in Schneider, Reichsverw., pp. 39 ff.
16 Details in Bognetti ‘II gastaldato’.
17 As, for example, in the Municipi e Colonie volumes published by the Istituto di Studi Romani, and to a lesser extent elsewhere.
18 Notably those concerned with ‘rural communes’ and the emergence of new contadi. Schneider alone has recognised the importance of relating the discussion of these problems to the topographical evidence.
19 An example, not certainly of the Carolingian period, will be discussed when I come to deal with Verona.
20 Particularly after 832 (MGH. Cap. II n. 201 c. 13), the limitation of the sphere of activity of a notary to a single county is probably to be assumed: but it seems better to test this hypothesis against the evidence assembled from other sources in this study.
21 An example (?unique) will be cited in connection with Ceneda.
22 Since it begs the question whether counts are not found acting on extraordinary commissions outside their own counties.
23 It will be shown that this accounts for the medieval boundary between Arezzo and Citta di Castello.
24 This was to transform, for example, the boundary of Piacenza against Pavia.
25 The decision given in favour of Arezzo in the early eighth century was reversed in 850.
26 An example recording the Iulium Carnicum–Bellunum boundary is quoted below.
27 I refer especially to those of Prof. P. Fraccaro of Pavia. The best brief account of centuriation will be found in Bradford, J. S. P., ‘A technique for the study of centuriation’, Antiquity, XXI, 1947, pp. 197 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much additional material will be provided by Mr. Bradford's forthcoming Ancient Landscapes in Europe and Asia.
28 Examples of all these will be cited in connection with Verona.
29 Mommsen, in CIL. V p. 933Google Scholar; cf. Grenier, A., Manuel d'Archéologie Gallo-Romaine, pt. 2, Paris, 1934, pp. 82 ffGoogle Scholar. I owe this last reference to the kindness of Mr. R. G. Goodchild.
30 ‘The occasions on which a man is buried in the territory of an alien town are too numerous’: Chilver, p. 47; but of the three examples he quotes, two (those involving Brescia and Verona) are anomalous only because Chilver appears to have located them wrongly on the map, and the third, affecting Acqui, is within the very irregular medieval diocesan boundary of that town.
31 Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, I, ed. Thulin, , Leipzig (Teubner), 1913, p. 74Google Scholar; cf. pp. 88–9.
32 When records were made of the papal tithes collected diocese by diocese. All that survive are being published by the Vatican under the general title of Rationes Decimarum Italiae. Those relating to Venetia et Histria, Aemilia, Tuscia, and Umbria have been published as Studi e Test, vols. 96, 60, 58 + 98, and 161–2 respectively, 1932–52.
33 Venetia is not a term in normal English usage like Lombardy, Tuscany, etc., but is employed by geographers for that part of Italy (1939 frontiers) that lies east of the upper Adige and lake Garda and north of the Po and the (Istrian) Carso. The Venetia of Pliny, Nat. Hist. III 126Google Scholar (sc. ‘land of the Veneti’) was evidently rather smaller; when adopted as a Regional name (not certainly documented before Severus, L' Année Épigraphique, 1911, n. 7 + 1914 n. 248, but probably much older) it was applied to an area that certainly extended west of Garda. Here it is used as a convenient rendering of the modern Italian le (Tre) Veneze, viz. Venezia Tridentina, Veneto, and Venezia Giulia—including therefore the Istrian peninsula, although this has no warrant in past usage (except as an ellipsis of Venetia et Histria).
34 According to Degani, E. in Nuovo Archivio Veneto, n.s., XIV, 1907, pp. 32, 307Google Scholar, he figures in unpublished Sesto documents (A. St. Venice: ser. S. Maria de Sexto) of the period May 808-February 809: but my own notes on these documents do not give the name of the abbot.
35 This may be seen by comparing the three relevant passages:
36 I have marked on my Map I those that seem to me most likely to be of pre-medieval date.
37 As was pointed out to me by Rev. H. Boone Porter.
38 DB. I n. 33 grants the aquam nomine Natissum que infenus Anfora cognominatur … hactenus pertinentem de gastaldato Anpliano. At the present day the Canale Anfora leaves the Fiume di Terzo above the point at Which the latter joins the Fiume Natissa. For attempts to reconstruct the earlier pattern of the main water-courses in the vicinity of Aquileia see esp. Brusin, G., Gil Scavi di Aquileia, Udine, 1934, pp. 37 ffGoogle Scholar. and the recent summary of this and earlier studies by Rigo, R., ‘Sul percorso dell-Isonzo’, Aquileia Nostra, XXIV–XXV, 1953–1954, cc. 13 ffGoogle Scholar.
