Nature, politics, and nobility in late medieval Italy. Bartolus de Saxoferrato’s Tractatus de Dignitatibus and its exceptions

Abstract

In late medieval Italy it was possible to be subjects “by nature”, citizens by nature, princes by nature, members of a party by nature; was it also possible to be noble by nature? This paper seeks to address this question starting from the so-called treaty on nobility written by Bartolus de Saxoferrato (Tractatus de dignitatibus), which gained vast popularity all over Europe for centuries. After taking into account the state of the art, the essay outlines the contents of the treaty: Bartolus sharply claimed that nobility depended on the Princes’ voluntas (section 2), thus inferring that no natural nobility could exist unless intentionally created by those who exerted political power (section 3). The roots of Bartolus’ thought on nobility are then examined (namely, besides the Codex, thirteenth-century ‘popular’ Italy, with its anti-magnate legislation), as well as the practical application of these principles in the late medieval period, by highlighting how the argument of the De dignitatibus matched with the evolution of noble identity in various parts of Italy, especially in Florence, Bologna, and Venice (section 4). Finally, section 5 deals with the exceptions to this model, not exclusively prior to Bartolus (Aristotle, Dante), but above all contemporaneous with him. The paper scrutinizes the cases of Milan and other cities (communes in Piedmont, from Asti to Turin) where nobility was still conceived as a natural, rather than political, fact in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.