This study set out to explore the role of government police power in the life of the Italian communes, and how and why that police power burgeoned over the course of the thirteenth century. Three points should be clear by now. First, by hiring foreign officials to patrol their streets, the communes’ citizens greatly enhanced their criminal courts’ capacity to enforce impersonal rules and, more fundamentally, to coerce citizens as subjects. Second, the police activity of the foreign rectores was part of a preventive turn in public justice, built on a profusion of new legislation aimed at correcting or removing threats to the public good. Third, in the Italian communes, this preventive turn came during—and appears in part to have been a product of—a moment of growing political participation and instability. This conclusion will discuss the implications of each of these points for future studies of police, medieval justice, and state formation.

On the first point, the evident scope of the communes’ police power will, I hope, make it harder for historians of police to overlook the Middle Ages as the epoch when police supposedly did not exist. For decades, the historiography of police—especially Anglo-American scholarship—has been dominated by the “state monopolization thesis,” the idea that in the nineteenth century the state took control of criminal justice through police forces, ending a prior era in which criminal justice depended primarily on the participation of ordinary people in the community. Although some scholars have challenged this state-centric model, the basic “newness” of the police forces of the 1800s—and the supposed ineffectuality of the police forces that predated them—has gone largely unchallenged. Yet much of what was supposedly novel about the professional police forces of the 1800s—that they were centrally directed, bureaucratically controlled, and publicly funded—aptly describes what was novel about the podestà’s familia in the 1200s. This is not to imply that northern Italy's berrovarii were just like London's bobbies, or that one can draw a straight line from the berrovarii to the carabinieri.