Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326 (Premodern Crime and Punishment)

Medieval states are widely assumed to have lacked police forces. Yet in the Italian city-republics, soldiers patrolled the streets daily in search of lawbreakers. Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326 is the first book to examine the emergence of urban policing in medieval Italy and its impact on city life. Focusing on Bologna in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Gregory Roberts shows how police forces gave teeth to the communes' many statutes through a range of patrol activities. Whether seeking outlaws in the countryside or nighttime serenaders in the streets, urban police forces pursued lawbreakers energetically and effectively. They charged hundreds of individuals each year with arms-bearing, gambling, and curfew violations, convicting many of them in the process. Roberts draws on a trove of unpublished evidence from judicial archives, rich with witness testimony, to paint a vivid picture of policing in daily life and the capacity of urban governments to coerce. Breaking new ground in the study of violence, justice, and state formation in the Middle Ages, Police Power in the Italian Communes sheds fresh light on the question of how ostensibly modern institutions emerge from premodern social orders. [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Frontmatter [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Table of Contents [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] List of Figures [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Acknowledgments [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] A Note on Usage [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Abbreviations [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Introduction [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] 1. Police Power in the Italian Communes [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] 2. Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] 3. The Logic of Third-Party Policing [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] 4. External Threats_ Policing Out-Groups and Criminality [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] 6. The Social Impact of Third-Party Policing [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Conclusion [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] About the author [Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326] Index Police are generally thought of as an invention of the modern state, yet policing in medieval Italy had much in common with modern law enforcement. Foreign soldiers - hired as such to ensure their impartiality in enforcing the statutes - patrolled the streets daily, patting down residents for prohibited weapons and raiding homes and taverns for illicit gambling, sometimes on the basis of concrete intelligence. 'Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326' is the first book to examine focus on how urban governments in medieval Italy one region policed their populations. Focusing mostly on numerous Bologna Bolognese records from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Roberts demonstrates how police patrols compelled hundreds of residents to appear in court each year and functioned as a political tool to control violence and disorder. Using largely unexplored archival sources, he paints a vivid picture of how city residents experienced police power in everyday life, and challenges both popular and scholarly assumptions about the role of policing in medieval society

A richly illustrated and comprehensive discussion of all the explicit pictorial references in Nabokov's oeuvre and their bearing on the major themes in his novels