The Town

The terms Town and Commune are normally only used to present and describe the birth of new social formations and economic models, which are juxtaposed with previous patterns of settlement. Thus we are presented with examples of cities/towns inhabited solely by the bourgeoisie (in which as if by magic the urban aristocracy re-emerges a few centuries later), urban struggles which are only ever explained in terms of economic and class conflict, the Commune in opposition to feudal authority.
While in Northern and Central Europe, towns were often "bourgeois islands in a feudal sea", on the contrary, in Southern France and Northern Italy the towns had never lost their political and social centrality (as residences of Longobard dukes and Frankish counts) and they had a highly articulated social structure. There could be found merchants, notaries and craftsmen, but also landowners, urban lords, representatives of the rural nobility and bishop's vassals, and the interweaving of their business interests was very tightly meshed. Many of them were engaged in various activities and the vicinity of towers to shops is a concrete sign of such close-knittedness. Many Communes were of aristocratic origin and town disputes were above all the result of the power struggle among various factions (including the Ciompi uprising). The Commune (Florence and its Order of Justice, for example) did not aim to vanquish a particular class, but rather to contain and curb the power excesses of the great noble families, bringing them within the power framework of the communal organisation's public character . It would thus be incorrect to emphasise anti-feudal htmlects of the Commune: feudal links were greatly employed to find satisfactory ways of dealing with the Empire or the local bishop or with powerful landowners supposedly under the Commune's jurisdiction. It is precisely the social articulation of the town, along with the public conception of power adopted by its organisations that allows us to understand the significance and evolution of the communal institutions.