Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy Siena 1260 1330 Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues Full Chapter

Confession and Criminal Justice in Late
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Luisa Zanetti Domingues
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Confession and Criminal Justice

in Late Medieval Italy
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The Oxford Historical Monographs series publishes some of the best
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Confession and
Criminal Justice in Late
Medieval Italy
Siena, 1260–1330
LIDIA LUISA ZANETTI DOMINGUES
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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Acknowledgements
As this book is the result of my doctoral research, I would like to thank first
of all Chris Wickham, my supervisor, for the unceasing support (from an
academic but also personal point of view) he gave me. As all graduate
students know, a good supervisor is fundamental for a doctorate to be a
positive, enriching experience, and I could not have asked for any better.
Paolo Grillo has been a patient reader and a constant provider of good
advice. Together with Rinaldo Comba, he has helped me discover the
complex and fascinating world of the Italian communes, and I owe both
of them much gratitude for this. Other academics that have mentored me in
different capacities, and who I would like to thank are: Michele Pellegrini,
Philip Booth, Ian Forrest, Gervase Rosser, John Blair, John Arnold, Bernard
Gowers, Frances Andrews, Piroska Nagy, and Hannah Skoda. I have been
very lucky to receive the support of so many great scholars. The opportun-
ities I had to work at the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford
and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities really helped me see the
broader value of the Humanities. Conversations with Lorenzo Caravaggi,
Lorenzo Tabarrini, and Alberto Luongo have been very helpful in shaping
and refining my ideas. Finally, I am very grateful for the financial support of
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, of the Scatcherd European
Scholarship of the University of Oxford, of the Past and Present Society,
and of the Institute of Historical Research.
This research allowed me to spend much time in Siena, which ‘cor magis
tibi pandit’. This welcoming spirit is particularly true for the employees of
the Archivio di Stato di Siena, who taught me how to use archival sources
and made me feel at home there. When I think of Siena my thoughts go also
to my grandmother Elsa, of Sienese descent. She would have been very
happy to know her granddaughter got to study her ancestors, as I am sure
she is from where she is now.
Academic research does not stop life from happening, and without the
support of affectionate friends and family I would not be where I am now.
My friends Irina Mattioli, Fosco Dipoppa, Micol Rotondo, Erika de Vivo,
Ida Amlesù, and Isabella Cavaliere always supported me through hard times,
and I will always be thankful for this. I would also like to thank David Swan,
vi 
Aversa Sheldon, Robert Cranage-Jones, Andrew Small, and Oliver Ford. My

sister Laura has been nothing but supportive and patient with me. A special
thanks also to Guglielmo, who is part of the family, too. Moreover, in Oxford
I was lucky enough to find a ‘gruppo potentissimo’ of bright young scholars,
who have become my safety net in the ups and downs of postgraduate life.
I thank in particular Davide Massimo, the best flatmate, and Jonathan
Krause, my supportive and brilliant partner.
This book is dedicated to my parents Luisa and Marcos, for their trust,
understanding, and unconditional love.
Contents
Note on Dates and Translations ix

Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. Competing Models for Approaching Violence and Conflict
and their Points of Contact 26
2. Emotions, Virtues, and Vices in the Sienese Reflection on
Violence and its Remedies 65
3. Models of Emotionality in Action in Religious and Lay
Sources on Criminal Justice 76
4. Defining the Complex Relationship between Mercy, Justice,
and Revenge 101
5. Communal Legislation and the Pursuit of Divine Justice 122
6. The Development of Criminal Justice in Siena and the
Influence of Religious Ideas 153
Conclusion 202
Bibliography 211
Index 237
Note on Dates and Translations
In Siena the year began on 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, rather
than on 1 January. In both the main body of the text and the footnotes, all
dates have been adjusted to the modern calendar: hence, 17 January 1272
more senensi is rendered as 17 January 1273.
All translations from primary and secondary sources are mine, unless
otherwise indicated. Place names are given in their modern Italian form, but
when available, standard English translations have been adopted (e.g.
Florence, not Firenze). Similarly, Latin personal names are transposed into
modern Italian, except in the case of famous personalities for whom
Anglicized translations or Latin denominations exist (e.g. Anselm of
Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas).
Abbreviations
AASS Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, Societé des Bollandistes, 68
vols, 1643–1925
AFH Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, Rome, 1908–
AFP Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, Rome, 1931–
ASS Siena, Archivio di Stato
BCI Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati
BS Bibliotheca Sanctorum, Pontificia Università lateranense. Istituto Giovanni
XXIII, 12 vols plus 3 appendices, Rome, 1961–2013
BSSP Bullettino senese di storia patria, Siena, 1894–
DBI Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana,
Rome, 1960–
PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols, 1844–55
Introduction
1. Why do we React to Violence the Way we do?
Late medieval people reacted to violent or criminal acts differently from us,
in ways that sometimes we find astonishing and hard to understand. In a
painting by Stefano di Giovanni ‘Sassetta’, kept at the Louvre, for instance,
the blessed Ranieri da Sansepolcro miraculously liberates all the inmates of a
Florentine prison, regardless of their innocence or guilt. This is not an
isolated case: the Virgin Mary saves numerous criminals from execution in
collections of Marian miracles such as that of Gauthier de Coincy; according
to his Vita, St Thomas of Cantiloupe intervened in the hanging of a Welsh
brigand to save his life.¹ These behaviours contrast with the idea, quite
widespread nowadays, that only innocents convicted unjustly deserve to be
saved from punishment, but guilty people need on the contrary to make
amends. At the same time, in contrast with our general distaste for revenge,
seen as something opposed to real justice, vendetta was an important part of
late medieval culture: in communal Italy, the origins of political factions
such as the Guelfs and the Ghibellines were often traced back to feuds
between families.² Why that was the case in what is generally seen as a
profoundly religious society, even though (as will be seen) the Church
vocally opposed this practice, is another aspect of their civilization we
struggle to understand.
The Italian commune of Siena provides unique insights for the historian
seeking to understand ‘why late medieval people reacted to violence the way
they did’, the central question of this book. The variety of discourses on
criminal justice in Siena in the period c.1260–1330 will be described and
analysed through an in-depth examination of local sources of lay and
religious origin. This city offers an incredible and, so far, underutilized
wealth of sources about violent crime for a period that witnessed important
innovations in the domains of criminal justice and pastoral care. This is
¹ On Thomas of Cantiloupe see Bartlett, The Hanged Man. (I use short titles throughout for
reasons of space. Full citations will be found in the Bibliography.)
² Faini, ‘Il convito fiorentino del 1216’.
Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: Siena, 1260–1330. Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues,
Oxford University Press. © Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844866.003.0001
2        
particularly important for the methodology of the present analysis. This

book proposes that reforms of criminal justice in the Italian communes can
be seen as complex decisions designed to achieve a variety of aims, including
not only retribution or political negotiation, but also penance and moral
reintegration. The relative importance of each of these aims, and their
variation over time and in relation to historical change, thus become central
in the investigation, as does the analysis of which groups or individuals
favoured certain discourses over others. Siena has, in this respect, the
advantage of offering an abundance of sources that until recently have not
been considered suitable for studying violent crime: that is, pastoral texts
such as sermons and hagiographies. Their use allows this analysis to uncover
previously underestimated aims of Italian criminal justice, based on a
discourse heavily influenced by the innovations in medieval spirituality
that culminated in the thirteenth century. As a result, a penitential discourse
on criminal justice will be proposed as coexisting alongside the other ones
based on revenge or on notions of public order revealed by previous
scholarship. This addition can help clarify the extent to which churchmen
and laypeople were aware of the contrast between the pervasiveness of
Christian education about peace and penance, and the equally pervasive
nature of what has been called a ‘culture of revenge’.³ By doing so, this book
follows the footsteps of recent approaches that have tried to bridge the gaps
between lay and religious sources in their treatment of the themes of
violence and crime, whilst developing further discursive interweaving of
spiritual and secular approaches.
Through a deeper understanding of a well-documented case such as that
of Siena, this book contributes to the advancement of the history of violence,
conflict, and crime in late medieval Italy and Europe more generally: as seen
in the examples mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction, similar
puzzling behaviours characterize the reactions to violence of medieval
Italians, French, and English. At the same time, the study of the means in
which the late medieval Sienese conceived of violent crime and the ways to
deal with it could offer some food for thought on what it is that prompts and
has prompted humanity to respond in a variety of ways to violent acts
throughout our history.
Violent crime seems indeed to exert and have exerted a special fascination
on people of all ages and social classes. The persistent success of crime
³ Gonthier, ‘Faire la paix: un devoir ou un delit?’; Rossi, ‘Polisemia di un concetto: la pace nel
basso medioevo’, p. 12.
 3
novels and TV series and the ongoing popular debates about what should be
the appropriate aims of punishment are all good contemporary examples.⁴ It
is therefore not surprising that research on conflict, and in particular its sub-
category of revenge, has been central in the last century in the fields both of
history and of the social sciences, but the pictures presented have been far
from uniform.⁵ Revenge and conflict seem to have become, in scholarly
constructions, the topics of choice to reflect on broader questions about
identity and modernity. Scholars have asked for instance whether we should
see, as many of us do, vengefulness as a residue of a pre-modern and
barbaric mindset to be eliminated, or rather as an ineradicable aspect of
human nature that derives from the way our species evolved. They have
pondered whether conflict and violence are always synonymous with dis-
order and disruption, or constructive forces within society, too. Given the
high cultural significance of such issues, it is understandable how, despite
the quantity of new syntheses produced on the topic, research in this field
seems to be inexhaustible.⁶
Have we always reacted to violence the way we do nowadays, and if not,
what prompted changes in our attitudes throughout history? These ques-
tions are underpinned by the debate on the relative roles of nature and
nurture (or culture) in understanding human characteristics, a fundamental
issue the Humanities and the Social Science have been grappling with in the
last few decades.⁷ Both evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists
have produced scholarly work aiming to answer this question, and histor-
ians have been inspired by their conclusions. Therefore, we find historical
works subscribing to either evolutionist or constructivist approaches, that is,
studies that attribute a greater importance to either biological or cultural
⁴ This feature has given rise to an autonomous area of research within the field of cultural
studies. For an introduction see Young, The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect.
⁵ Peristiany (ed.), Honor and Shame and Davis, ‘Honour and Politics in Pisticci’, are the
classics on the idea of honour as a Mediterranean value; Pertile, Storia del diritto penale, p. 14
and the works he cites have seen vendetta as a Germanic institution; medievalists have
interpreted vendetta as part of an aristocratic ethos (on this see below, n. 14); whereas Miller,
‘Lower Class Culture’, has connected revenge to social marginality.
⁶ The bibliography is too vast to provide a complete list. Among the most recent and
influential contributions to the study of conflict and revenge in the Middle Ages see the
collective volumes respectively by Brown and Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe;
Barthélemy, Bougard, and Le Jan (eds), La Vengeance, 400–1200; Throop and Hyams (eds),
Vengeance in the Middle Ages; and the collection of sources by Smail and Gibson, Vengeance in
Medieval Europe. For a more exhaustive bibliography see also Zorzi, ‘I conflitti nell’Italia
comunale’.
⁷ Mazurel, ‘De la psychologie des profondeurs à l’histoire des sentiments’, p. 38.
4        
factors in explaining human behaviour.⁸ At the same time, other scholars

have suggested that this dichotomy has not proved particularly helpful in
advancing our knowledge, and that it is time to rethink it and possibly
overcome it. History, of course, has a peculiarly diachronic perspective.
As such, it can provide models for the study of social phenomena that
offer a middle ground between fully constructivist and fully evolutionist
approaches, in order to advance our understanding of what has been called
the ‘biocultural brain’.⁹ If we recognize the inextricable link between cultural
and biological factors in human behaviours, the onus on historians is even
greater to account for their variation through time.
2. Lessons on Violent Crime from Medieval Studies
Medieval studies have contributed to such debates at least since the 1970s
when, thanks to the influence of legal anthropology, the field partially moved
away from an approach to the study of violent conflict centred on institu-
tions. The focus shifted to the interpersonal relationships, behaviours, and
values of the parties involved, and the variety of formal and informal
practices of conflict and its resolution.¹⁰ These studies have suggested that
in medieval times conflict and revenge were used strategically to achieve a
variety of goals, and that extrajudicial or infrajudicial practices of conflict
and peace-making were always engaged in a dialectical relationship with the
official legal culture.¹¹
This shift seems however to have encountered some resistance among
scholars of the late medieval Italian communes, as these polities were
interpreted by many historians as forerunners of modern states, in which
⁸ See e.g. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, for an example of the work of a historian
deeply influenced by an evolutionist approach.
⁹ A seminal work in the criticism of fully constructivist and fully evolutionist approaches is
Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings. For a recent discussion of this approach based on the idea of
a ‘biocultural brain’ see Boddice, The History of Emotions, chs 1 and 6.
¹⁰ The institution-based approach had its forerunner in Elias, The Civilising Process.
Fundamental for the shift to a practice-based one was Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and
Processes. The difference between the two will be further discussed in Chapter 1.
¹¹ In this case, too, it is possible to offer only some examples of this copious production: for
instance, Cheyette, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’; White, ‘Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium’;
Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements; Geary, ‘Vivre en conflit dans une France sans État’;
Wickham, Legge, pratiche e conflitti. For additional bibliography refer to Brown and Górecki,
‘What Conflict Means’, in Brown and Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe.
 5
political life was strongly institutionalized.¹² Violence and factional conflict

were seen as residues of previous political cultures that the new communal
elites tried to curb by all possible means. This was seen as particularly true
for the Popolo, a heterogeneous political movement composed of sworn
groups of artisans, merchants, and other people who had managed to
achieve economic success in the cities but were not included in the trad-
itional governing classes, and who came to power in the second half of the
thirteenth century.¹³ The cult of honour and the practice of feuding con-
nected to it were therefore associated with the military and aristocratic ethos
of the magnati, the civic aristocracy that had traditionally ruled the com-
munes until the accession of the Popolo, and whose exclusion from the
principal institutional offices had been one of the main elements of the
political programme of the latter.¹⁴
From the 1990s, however, a series of works by Andrea Zorzi and others
have transformed this paradigm. They have exposed the fact that a scholarly
reliance on chronicles was partially responsible for the association of mag-
nates with revenge. This type of source was the typical repository of the
popular legitimizing rhetoric about the violence of civic aristocracy, and the
consequent necessity of their exclusion from politics to protect peace and
the ‘common good’.¹⁵ An analysis of a wider variety of archival sources has
shown, on the contrary, that the resolution of conflicts through the use of
private violence was an ordinary phenomenon, diffused among every social
class.¹⁶ In addition, Zorzi has demonstrated that the idea that revenge was
the appropriate response to violence or other offences enacted by inimici
(enemies) against oneself or one’s circle of amici—that is, those to which one
was connected by solidarity or family ties—was a fundamental part of the
¹² Zorzi, ‘I conflitti nell’Italia comunale’, pp. 7–8. For an example of this approach see
Ascheri, ‘Beyond the Commune’.
¹³ For a recent overview of studies on the Popolo, see Poloni, Potere al Popolo.
¹⁴ On revenge as an attribute of the magnati see e.g. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates,
pp. 164ff., pp. 184ff. (Lansing later revised her position in the article ‘Magnate Violence
Revisited’); Maire-Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens, pp. 307–35. On the exclusionary politics of
popular governments see Milani, L’esclusione dal comune. On the persisting influence of the
magnati on communal politics, even after their exclusion, for instance through the practice of
judicial professions, see Menzinger, Giuristi e politica nei comuni di popolo.
¹⁵ Zorzi, ‘Politica e giustizia a Firenze’; Faini, ‘Il convito fiorentino del 1216’.
¹⁶ Waley, ‘A Blood Feud with a Happy Ending’; Zorzi, ‘Ius erat in armis’; Zorzi, ‘Politica e
giustizia a Firenze’; Zorzi, ‘Conflits et pratiques infrajudiciaires’; Zorzi, La trasformazione di un
quadro politico; most of the essays included in the collection Conflitti, paci e vendette nell’Italia
comunale present examples of feuds that involved members of the Popolo and analyse the
dynamics of conflicts within the popular milieu.
6        
civic pedagogy of the Italian commune.¹⁷ As an instance of this widespread

‘culture of revenge’, publicly insulting those who renounced the right to
exert their revenge on enemies was a defamatory practice common among
members of all social classes.¹⁸ Additionally, scholars belonging to this
historiographical school have proposed that this ‘culture of revenge’ was
not disruptive of the social order. In their opinion the practice of feuding, as
suggested by anthropologist Max Gluckman for the African Nuer society,
actually had an ordering function on human relations, since it prompted the
parties involved to create alliance networks.¹⁹ Revenge could therefore be at
the origin of processes of social inclusion that ultimately limited violence
within society.²⁰ For this reason Zorzi and his school claim that revenge
between families and individuals was legitimized by communal legislation,
which did not ban this practice but limited itself to setting boundaries to the
action of avengers, in order to avoid the escalation of conflicts.²¹
Whilst some aspects of this reconstruction are now widely accepted by the
scholarly community (e.g. the idea that vendetta was not an exclusively
aristocratic practice), criticism was soon voiced. Trevor Dean has been one
of the most vocal opponents of the possibility of extending this reconstruc-
tion, mostly based on Florentine sources, to communal Italy as a whole.²²
According to Dean, the permissive nature of the Florentine legislation on
revenge depended on the republican nature of the city’s political regime; in
the majority of the other Italian city-states signorial regimes arose in the
second half of the thirteenth century, and the attempt by the signori to
control more strictly the legitimate forms of violence within society led to a
ban on revenge. Moreover, Dean argued that vendetta narratives in late
medieval and early modern chroniclers were highly formulaic and should be
seen as ‘purposeful means of remembering and explaining disputes’, not
objective descriptions of a ‘culture of revenge’ in which actors perceived a
real and unavoidable obligation to respond to each offence with retaliation.²³
The possibility of selectively remembering past wrongs, which in some cases
happened to previous generations, as deserving a retaliatory reaction from
¹⁷ Zorzi, ‘La cultura della vendetta’.

¹⁸ Onori, ‘Pace privata e regolamentazione della vendetta in Valdinievole’.
¹⁹ Gluckman, ‘The Peace in the Feud’. ²⁰ Zorzi, ‘Ius erat in armis’, p. 615.
²¹ A selection of recent works in which this position has been maintained include Guarisco, Il
conflitto attraverso le norme; Zorzi, ‘Pluralismo giudiziario e documentazione’; Zorzi,
‘Legitimation and Legal Sanction of Vendetta’; Zorzi, ‘The Notion and the Practices of
Vindicta’.
²² Dean, ‘Marriage and Mutilation’, pp. 6–7; Dean, ‘Violence, Vendetta and Peacemaking’.
²³ Dean, ‘Marriage and Mutilation’, p. 31.
 7
living kinsmen was also presented as an argument for reconsidering the idea
of feud as a practice that kept the peace.²⁴ Doubts about the legality of
revenge across north Italian cities have recently been reiterated by Glenn
Kumhera, who has seen this feature as a Tuscan specificity.²⁵ Since Tuscany
was characterized in the late Middle Ages by either the persistence of
republican regimes or the rise of ‘weaker’ signorie than the rest of communal
Italy, his theory is in partial agreement with Dean’s.²⁶ Despite the wealth of
research on conflict and revenge in Europe and Italy, therefore, there are still
open issues about the nature of these practices and their conceptualization
in the Italian communes. Studies on different polities have led to different
results, something which calls for an expansion of the number of case
studies, in order to understand which variables played a role in determining
local and regional differences.
The debate on the legality of revenge is linked in current historiography to
another open question, that of the evolution of criminal justice in Europe
from the thirteenth century onwards.²⁷ The main trends observed for this
period include first of all the gradual and never totally achieved passage from
an accusatorial procedural system (in which legal actions had to be initiated
by the victim of a crime) to an inquisitorial one (in which the procedure
could be started ex officio by a judge on the basis of the public knowledge
that a crime had been committed; the judge thus proceeded to collect proofs
through an investigation, the inquisitio).²⁸ Secondly, historians have noticed
a process of ‘publicization’ of criminal justice in late thirteenth-century
Europe, that is, the rise of the idea that crimes should not be seen any
more as private matters between the parties involved and their kin, but as
actions that damaged the whole community.²⁹ The rallying cry for this
expanding role of the government in the prosecution of crime was the
phrase, which originated in canon law and was popularized in legal and
²⁴ Ibid., p. 35. Trevor Dean has not been the only historian who expressed doubts about
applying Gluckman’s theory to the context of medieval Europe: other examples include Miller,
‘Choosing the Avenger’; White, ‘Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine’. For more
information on this debate see Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, p. 49.
²⁵ Kumhera, The Benefits of Peace, p. 12.
²⁶ A recent reassessment of the signorial phenomenon in late medieval Tuscany, which
however does not deny its peculiarities completely, can be found in Zorzi (ed.), Le signorie
cittadine in Toscana.
²⁷ For a recent overview of the studies on crime in late medieval Europe see Dean, Crime in
Medieval Europe.
²⁸ On these two procedural models see Rousseaux, ‘Initiative particulière et poursuite
d’office’.
²⁹ Sbriccoli, ‘Vidi communiter observari’; Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, pp. 5ff.
8        
political documents from the thirteenth century, ‘publice interest ne

maleficia remaneant impunita’ (it is of public interest that crimes are not
left unpunished).³⁰ Consequences of this process included a change in the
attitudes towards the aims of criminal justice, now more focused on pun-
ishing offenders than on mediating between parties, the introduction
of harsher physical punishments, the expansion of judicial torture as a
means of collecting proofs, and the criminalization of a wider spectrum of
behaviours.³¹ Publicization of criminal justice and the passage to an inquisi-
torial model had in some cases similar effects, since the inquisitorial model
emphasized the role of the judge at the expense of that of the parties, but
modern historiography has been careful not to conflate them into one. The
effects of the publicization of criminal justice, for instance, could be felt also
in accusatorial trials.³² It is necessary therefore to avoid seeing the passage
from accusatorial to inquisitorial procedure as a linear one and interpreting
it in a teleological way as a reflection of the evolution of polities into modern
states.³³
Despite these important nuances, the transformations of the second half
of the thirteenth century might still be interpreted as something that trig-
gered a change in social perceptions of revenge.³⁴ The legitimacy of private
vendetta was based, as seen above, on the idea that offences bestowed a right
to retaliation principally, if not exclusively, upon the aggrieved party. Courts
were only one of the possible fora in which they could seek their satisfaction.
The new principle of ‘public interest’ in criminal actions, on the contrary,
asserted the primacy of the community in dealing with offences over
considerations of personal or factional honour. Hence Sarah Rubin
Blanshei described a passage from a ‘personalized, modified-vendetta system
of criminal justice’ to a ‘depersonalized’ and ‘public or community-oriented’
one.³⁵ In the Italian communes, moreover, these transformations in the
system of criminal justice have been associated once more with the political
ascent of the Popolo. A central idea in the rhetoric of this group, which has
³⁰ Fraher, ‘The Theoretical Justification for the New Criminal Law’.

³¹ Becker, ‘Changing Patterns of Violence and Justice’; Sbriccoli, ‘Tormentum idest torquere
mentem’; Sbriccoli, ‘Vidi communiter observari’; Zorzi, ‘La pena di morte in Italia’, p. 52.
³² Sbriccoli, ‘Vidi communiter observari’, p. 233.
³³ Vallerani, Il sistema giudiziario del Comune di Perugia; Vallerani, Medieval Public Justice,
pp. 1–2.
³⁴ Dean, ‘Violence, Vendetta and Peacemaking’, p. 1.
³⁵ Rubin Blanshei, ‘Crime and Law Enforcement’, p. 121. For an example of the same trend
towards impersonality in the English criminal legislation from the thirteenth century see
Beckerman, ‘Adding Insult to Iniuria’.
 9
been the subject of careful analysis by Enrico Artifoni, was that of presenting
itself not as yet another faction or sworn group among the many present in
communal society, but as a stronghold of general interests.³⁶ A conception
of crime as a public matter could thus clearly appeal to it. Various scholars
have argued that this attitude was not pure propaganda, since the medium
and lower strata of the Popolo were genuinely affected by the aggressive
behaviour of more powerful members of society, and were not able to defend
themselves without the intervention of the government, something which
situated them among the main promoters of reforms of criminal justice.³⁷
Despite these important achievements, there is still no consensus about
the degree to which these ideological proclamations, and even the changes
in the legislation of the Italian communes which they triggered, affected
the day-to-day administration of criminal justice in the cities. Vallerani
and Zorzi, for instance, have argued that the new judicial policies still did
not have as their primary aim the punishment of offenders, as they claimed,
but rather the legitimization of new, still unstable political regimes and
the negotiation of penalties to strengthen social consensus.³⁸ This is
why, notwithstanding the systematic spread of harsher penalties in the
statutes, capital punishment remained a relatively rare occurrence in
Italian towns, and the system of criminal justice could be manipulated to
be either more lenient or harsh depending on the relationship of the accused
with the political elite.³⁹ These observations have helped historians realize
how the development of criminal justice from the second half of the
thirteenth century was a complex process that cannot be simplified as having
just a single cause and trajectory. Comparisons between cities have shown
that, although the general trends described so far apply to communal Italy as
a whole, local differences in the implementation of judicial policies are far
from negligible. Whilst some cities (like Bologna) saw a precocious rise in
the rates of inquisitorial trials and executions, and converted in their official
documents to a language strongly influenced by concepts of criminal deter-
rence and an ideology centred on the peace and common good of the
community, others (like Savona) continued to allow greater space to
³⁶ Artifoni, ‘Preistorie del bene comune’, p. 71.

³⁷ Vallerani, ‘I processi accusatori a Bologna’, pp. 765ff; Poloni, Potere al Popolo, pp. 28–9.
³⁸ Vallerani, Medieval Public Justice, p. 72; among Zorzi’s most recent works on the topic see
Zorzi, ‘Negoziazione penale’; Zorzi, ‘La pena di morte in Italia’.
³⁹ Blanshei, ‘Crime and Law Enforcement’; Zorzi, ‘La pena di morte in Italia’, p. 53. However,
see Cohn, ‘Repression of Popular Revolt’, for a different take on the frequency of capital
punishments in late medieval Italy.
10        
accusations and compositions.⁴⁰ The reasons for these differences have not
been investigated in depth, since research has tended to focus on single case
studies; even when scholars have attempted a comparative approach the
methodology of comparing only a few cities has led to conclusions that
cannot always be extended to other realities.⁴¹
To solve these complex issues, an expansion of the number of case studies
and the use of new methodological approaches would certainly be of great
importance. The choice of Siena as a case study for developing this approach
stems exactly from the desire to expand the set of cities that have been
investigated in studies of crime and conflict in communal Italy, in which
Florence and Bologna have so far had the central role. As argued by Lansing,
the study of a variety of cities can contribute to redefining what constituted
‘typicality’ in late medieval communes, for which paradigms are often
created on the basis of heavily studied, ‘famous’ cities.⁴² The stimulus to
adopt a new methodology comes on the other hand from works on violence
and crime in late medieval France. They have shown the fruitfulness of
approaches in which the idea of finding univocal meanings to practices and
behaviours related to conflict and criminality is challenged in favour of a
multi-layered reading.⁴³ Such readings suggested that within a society there
were a variety of vocabularies and discourses on violence and crime that
originated from different sources but were generally used in combination
with each other. Therefore, in the case of revenge people could understand
the element of social negotiation involved, but still worry about its potential
⁴⁰ Rubin Blanshei, ‘Criminal Justice in Medieval Perugia and Bologna’ (comparing Bologna
and Perugia); Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (comparing Bologna and Savona).
⁴¹ Rubin Blanshei, ‘Criminal Justice in Medieval Perugia and Bologna’, pp. 269–75, links the
greater receptivity of Bologna to the Popolo-inspired reforms of criminal justice to the strong
factionalism of the city’s political life and to the greater inclusion of judges and notaries trained
in Roman law in the ruling class. These two factors however do not seem to fully explain the
characteristics of the system of criminal justice in other Italian cities. Florence, for instance, a
city known for its exacerbated factionalism, did not follow the Bolognese model until much
later, as shown by Zorzi in Giustizia e società a Firenze in età comunale. This probably depends
on the fact that Florence had a legal system based on Lombard, and not Roman, law (on the
differences between them see Wickham, Legge, pratiche e conflitti, pp. 196–226). However, as
shown by Menzinger, Giuristi e politica nei comuni di popolo, in popular regimes—including
Bologna—jurists were normally identified as members of the magnati and therefore sometimes
regarded as possible opponents of the Popolo’s judicial reforms.
⁴² Lansing, Passion and Order, p. 9. This is not to say, of course, that there are no studies on
other cities: see e.g. Ruggiero, ‘Law and Punishment in Early Renaissance Venice’; Perani,
‘Pluralità nella giustizia pubblica duecentesca’, on Pavia; Graziotti, Giustizia penale a San
Gimignano. For reasons of space it is not possible to provide a full list here.
⁴³ Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice, pp. 206ff.; Skoda, Medieval Violence, ‘Conclusion’.
 11
destructive effect on the community.⁴⁴ In order to implement such a meth-

odological proposal, however, it is necessary to develop a model in which the
main characteristics of these discourses are outlined (bearing in mind that
separating them completely from one another is an abstraction, however
useful) and the sources are analysed to assess to what extent they are
conflicting or complementary. Such a project requires an analysis of all the
possible sources of different discourses on crime, violence, and conflict,
including in particular those which have generally not been integrated into
studies of legal systems and practices because of too rigid a conception of the
boundaries between disciplines.
Christian spirituality is a case in point here. The religious significance of
some of the central concepts of the new ideology of a ‘publicized’ criminal
justice, such as peace, concord, and common good, has been recognized by
many of the scholars mentioned so far, although this has often been seen as
an essentially instrumental borrowing.⁴⁵ Previous research has clearly
shown that the period starting from the end of the twelfth century, and in
particular after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), was characterized by a
‘pastoral turn’of the Church.⁴⁶ That is, the pastoral action of the clergy
obtained for the first time primacy over contemplative activities within the
Church, and initiatives such as the creation of new religious orders devoted
to pastoral care, the increase in public preaching, or the development of
confraternities for laypeople were undertaken.⁴⁷ All these initiatives were
meant to respond to and encourage the laity’s desire for an increased
participation in religious life, and for a spirituality more adapted to the
needs of a more urbanized, economically vital, and socially mobile society.
In this context, peace became a central theme in the spirituality of late
medieval Europe, and in particular the Italian communes; something which,
given the unstable nature of power structures in these socially mobile
⁴⁴ Skoda, Medieval Violence, p. 234.

⁴⁵ On the use of religious concepts in legal reforms as instrumental, see Zorzi, ‘Bien com-
mun’. Zorzi has recently revised his position in his research on the effective role of the
Dominican Order in shaping the political imaginary of the Italian communes. His view of the
role of theology also in shaping conceptions of justice in the Italian cities has become more
positive: see for instance Zorzi, ‘The Notion and the Practices of Vindicta’, pp. 134ff.
⁴⁶ Vauchez, ‘Présentation’; Bériou, ‘Autour du Latran IV’; more recently Il Lateranense IV: le
ragioni di un concilio.
⁴⁷ On the Mendicant orders and pastoral activity in urban contexts see Little, ‘Religious
Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe’ (although his views on economic thought
should be revised in the light of Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana); on sermons see Bériou, ‘Les
Sermons latins après 1200’; on confraternities see Gazzini (ed.), Studi confraternali.
12        
societies, and their consequently high level of conflict, is not surprising.

A number of works devoted to analysing religious ideas and practices of
peace in late medieval Europe have appeared in the last decades, which have
highlighted how peace was a ‘polysemic’ and ‘polycentric’ concept in late
medieval society, reflecting the variegated influences that contributed to
creating its different definitions.⁴⁸ These also included, naturally, the pres-
sure exerted by local communities to see their dreams of peace and justice
come true, visible at least from the eleventh century with the movement of
the Peace of God.⁴⁹ The main popular religious movements of thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century Italy, starting from the magna devotio (Great
Devotion) of 1233, are now seen primarily as peace movements, where the
role of preachers was that of propagandizing ideas of an orderly civic society
in which concord, charity, and justice would reign forever.⁵⁰ The pacifying
effect of popular movements could act in synergy with the legislative action
of the Popolo, as is the case for the Flagellant movement of Perugia in 1260.⁵¹
There the Popolo, which had just gained power, actively promoted this
religious movement and echoed its theologically charged language in its
new legislation against violent crimes. A comparison between the coeval
statutes (ordinamenta) of the city and the hagiography of the founder of the
Flagellant movement, Ranieri Fasani, has shown similarities in the vocabu-
lary used, which reflect a conscious intention of the Popolo to take inspir-
ation from Flagellant ideas. Historians have therefore stressed the ‘ordering
function’ of religious conceptions of peace with respect to urban societies.⁵²
At the same time, however, it must be stressed that the religious preaching of
peace should not be interpreted simply as an attempt to legitimize shaky
power structures. Sometimes Christian peace could be destabilizing: as
stressed by Raimondo Michetti, for example, the peace preached by the
friars was not completely in accord with that promoted in peace agreements
issued by communal notaries.⁵³
⁴⁸ These collections are Pace e guerra nel basso medioevo; Dessì (ed.), Prêcher la paix et
discipliner la société; La pace tra realtà e utopia. For a more detailed description of the
shortcomings of previous historiography see Rossi, ‘Polisemia di un concetto: la pace nel
basso medioevo’, pp. 9–34.
⁴⁹ A. Vauchez, ‘La Paix dans les mouvements religieux populaires’.
⁵⁰ A. Thompson, Revival Preachers and Politics; Guarisco, Il conflitto attraverso le norme,
pp. 151–97; Jansen, Penance and Peace, ch. 2. For previous works on the Alleluja movement see
Rossi, ‘Polisemia di un concetto: la pace nel basso medioevo’, p. 39 n. 37.
⁵¹ Vallerani, ‘Mouvements de paix dans une commune de popolo’.
⁵² Dessì, ‘Pratiques de la parole de paix’.
⁵³ Ibid., p. 248; Michetti, ‘François d’Assise et la paix revelée’.
 13
Peace, moreover, cannot be separated from penance in thirteenth-century

spirituality, as appears very clearly in the link established by communal
preachers between the ‘internal peace’ that springs from confession and the
‘external peace’ of harmonious social relationships.⁵⁴ Many works have
highlighted how peace movements made use of penitential language and
practices (e.g. flagellation) to try and create a new society in which enmities
were forsaken.⁵⁵ In the past few years researchers have made another step
forward by combining these types of study and sources with an analysis of
peace-making vocabularies and practices in the criminal justice system of
the Italian city-states, and showing the influence of penitential spirituality
on the legal culture of the communes.⁵⁶ By adopting this perspective
scholars have started to bridge the gap between religious history and
socio-political and legal history, thus addressing some of the debates still
open in the study of late medieval crime and conflict. Katherine Jansen’s
analysis of Florentine peace contracts from the period 1257–1343, in par-
ticular, has shown that the kiss of peace, a ritual gesture crucial in the
structure of the medieval mass, was featured in the overwhelming majority
of the documents. This is a clear example of how visions of civic peace
derived from a coalescence of interconnected discourses, promoted by a
variety of religious and lay actors. Jansen does not completely clarify what
the relationship between the centuries-old practice of the osculum pacis and
the new penitential spirituality was. The seminal nature of works such as
Jansen’s nevertheless paves the way for more research in this new area.
Penance and peace were also inextricably linked to the concept of justice.
It is not by chance that confession was described by churchmen as the
‘internal forum’ or ‘tribunal of penance’ that worked alongside the ‘external
forum’ represented by ecclesiastical courts as a means to dispense justice.⁵⁷
In this period metaphors used by the clergy to describe confession saw a shift
from the traditional semantic field of medicine (confession as ‘medicine for
the soul’) to that of justice (confession as the ‘tribunal of the soul’), at the
same moment as judicial confession became more important in the law of
⁵⁴ Bériou, ‘Le Sermon sur la paix’. See also Chapter 1, 30.

⁵⁵ E.g. the works of Vallerani, Michetti, Bériou, Thompson, and Jansen mentioned in this
paragraph.
⁵⁶ Kumhera, The Benefits of Peace; Jansen, Penance and Peace. These are not the absolute first
attempts to combine religious and lay sources in the study of conflict and crime; but previous
works on the Italian communes that adopted a similar approach (among which those men-
tioned in the previous paragraphs) had a more limited scope.
⁵⁷ Goering, ‘The Internal Forum’.
14        
proof.⁵⁸ This connection has been suggested by several scholars, but the
focus of studies combining lay and religious sources on conflict and peace-
making has been generally limited to practices of dispute settlement.⁵⁹
I expand the scope of this comparison here by exploring how penitential
ideals could inform not only peace-making activity, but also a broader
reflection on the aims of justice and punishment, the legitimacy of the use
of violence by governments or individuals, and the duties incumbent on
both as part of a civic community that defined itself as Christian. This
constituted a third paradigm in the Italian communes of criminal justice
in addition to the ‘culture of revenge’ and the ideology of public order, and
the bearers of this conception based on penitential spirituality were an
effective ‘pressure group’ whose importance has often been underestimated.
In order to make such a claim, however, it is necessary to specify what the
nature of late medieval penance was, an issue still subject to debate.⁶⁰ The
Fourth Lateran Council, with its canon Omnis utriusque sexus, which made
annual auricular confession mandatory for all Christians, has long been
considered the turning point of a process of interiorization and privatization
of penance linked to twelfth-century theological developments.⁶¹ A sector of
the historiography has however called for a revision of this paradigm by
highlighting the importance that practices of public humiliation and satis-
faction of one’s neighbours continued to have until the end of the Middle
Ages.⁶² In response to this, recent work on inquisitorial depositions has
convincingly suggested that a shift in laypeople’s proneness to reflect pub-
licly on their own subjectivity did occur in the thirteenth century, as a
consequence of the Church’s pastoral programme centred around the
importance of auricular confession.⁶³ Works on conflict and peace-making
in the Italian communes have highlighted the importance of penitential
spirituality, but have not generally engaged with the issue of what penance
⁵⁸ Bériou, ‘La Confession dans les écrits théologiques et pastoraux’, contra Chiffoleau, ‘Sur la
pratique et la conjoncture de l’aveu judiciaire’, who argued that the Inquisition brought about a
commingling of sacramental and judicial confession only from the 1320s. On the late medieval
law of proof see Fraher, ‘Conviction According to Conscience’.
⁵⁹ Cardini, ‘La pace come tregua di una guerra continua’, pp. 1–2; Niccoli, ‘Postfazione’,
pp. 288–9; Jansen, Penance and Peace, p. 4.
⁶⁰ For a summary see Biller, ‘Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction’.
⁶¹ Tentler, Sin and Confession; Bériou, ‘Autour du Latran IV’.
⁶² Bossy, ‘Moral Arithmetics: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’; Mansfield, The
Humiliation of Sinners; a middle ground is represented by Campbell, ‘Theologies of
Reconciliation in 13th Century England’, who argues for a coexistence of various theologies
of reconciliation in the thirteenth century.
⁶³ Arnold, Inquisition and Power.
 15
meant. Such an analysis would be very useful to clarify the meaning of late
medieval concepts of public and private, something which would also be
beneficial, as seen above, for the study of the evolution of criminal justice.
3. Siena, 1260–1330: An Outline of its Political, Social,

and Religious Context
The context in which this investigation is set can be reconstructed on the

basis of works on various aspects of late medieval Sienese society that have
contributed to updating our global vision of this city.⁶⁴ My research starts
from 1260, a year which is still considered by contemporary Sienese as the
apex of their political influence. In that year the commune, Ghibelline and
governed since the 1230s by a combination of populares and the great
bankers who had made Siena ‘the southernmost capital of the commercial
revolution of the Middle Ages’, defeated Guelf Florence, its rival, in the
battle of Montaperti.⁶⁵ The road to hegemony over Tuscany seemed to be
paved, but soon the consequences of the economic costs of this military
victory (achieved through an alliance with the king of Sicily, Manfred) and
the reaction of the pope shifted the balance.⁶⁶ In 1262 Urban IV excommu-
nicated the city and forbade the repayment of debts to its bankers. For this
reason, many leading banking families decided to leave Siena and withdraw
to Radicofani, where the Sienese Guelf faction was created in 1263. These
bankers actively supported the military campaign of Charles of Anjou, the
papal candidate for the Sicilian kingdom, against Manfred, who was
defeated in 1266. Urban IV tried to negotiate the passage of Siena to
Guelfism but the government of the Twenty-Four (so called because of the
number of its main officials, as was typical of Sienese regimes), despite a new
excommunication (1267), stayed loyal to Ghibellinism. Its new champion,
Conradin of Hohenstaufen, Manfred’s nephew, was however eventually
defeated by Charles of Anjou in 1268. The final defeat of Ghibelline Siena
happened in 1269 in Colle Val d’Elsa against Angevin and Florentine forces.
⁶⁴ Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune; Waley, Siena and the Sienese; Piccinni (ed.),
Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi. For a discussion of earlier twentieth-century histories of Siena
see Redon, L'Espace d'une cité, p. 14.
⁶⁵ Jones, Economia e società nell’Italia medievale, p. 27: ‘la capitale più meridionale della
rivoluzione commerciale’; for the context of the battle of Montaperti see Sestan, ‘Siena avanti
Montaperti’; Balestracci, La battaglia di Montaperti.
⁶⁶ For a brief reconstruction of the whole period considered here see Martini, ‘Siena da
Montaperti alla Caduta dei Nove’.
16        
It was only in 1270, though, that Siena formally submitted to Charles,

readmitted the Guelf families, and banned the most active Ghibellines.
The new regimes, the Thirty-Six and later the Fifteen, were Guelf and
mercantile, and excluded from the main offices both artisans and magnates,
a list of whose families was drawn in 1277. Recent works seem to suggest
that many powerful Ghibelline families declined in the second half of the
thirteenth century, but the great merchant-bankers who had constituted
the nucleus of the Sienese Guelf party managed to maintain a central role
in political decisions, notwithstanding their exclusion as magnates.⁶⁷
Additionally, numerous attempts at pacification with the Ghibelline exiles
were pursued by the government, the most famous being the peace agree-
ment concluded in 1280 under the mediation of Cardinal Latino
Malabranca, in which many Ghibellines were readmitted and the Guelf
and Ghibelline partes were abolished. This pacification did not achieve a
long-lasting elimination of factions in Siena, but it is a sign of a more general
conciliatory attitude displayed by its governments, which seem to have
taken very seriously the ideas of civic concord and threats posed to it by
factionalism.⁶⁸ This is evident by the fact that Guelfism never became as
central in the definition of civic identity in Siena as it did in Florence, and
no conflicts originating from further subdivisions into Black and White
took place.⁶⁹
The exclusion of the magnates from the main political offices was not
accompanied by legislation that limited their judicial rights, as happened in
cities like Bologna. Members of the civic aristocracy could still access
positions of power through the diocesan chapter, financial and military
offices, and the General Council.⁷⁰ Mediation between parties and an ideol-
ogy of civic peace and common good characterized even more strongly the
following regime of the Nine, in which an elite of merchants who defined
themselves as ‘mezzana gente’ (middling class) controlled the government,
again excluding magnates and artisans. This unusually long-lived regime
(1289–1355) has been seen as a ‘golden age’ for Siena, because its stability
⁶⁷ Giorgi, ‘Il conflitto magnati/popolani nelle campagne’, p. 151; Raveggi, ‘Siena nell’Italia dei
guelfi e dei ghibellini’, p. 47.
⁶⁸ Raveggi, ‘Siena nell’Italia dei guelfi e dei ghibellini’, p. 58 n. 88; Mucciarelli, ‘Il traghetta-
mento dei mercatores’, p. 85; Zorzi and Moscadelli, ‘Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi’, pp. 270–1.
⁶⁹ Zorzi and Moscadelli, ‘Fedeltà ghibellina, affari guelfi’.
⁷⁰ On the role of the magnate Malavolti family as an ‘episcopal dynasty’ see Nardi, ‘Istituzioni
ecclesiastiche e governo della chiesa locale’; Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, p. 79.
 17
allowed the flourishing of art and architecture.⁷¹ Historians nowadays tend

to have a more nuanced view of the regime, which certainly granted a
prolonged period of stability to the city, but whose capacity to innovate to
overcome social struggles declined from the 1330s.⁷² Revolts, among which
the most dangerous was that of 1318 (with the joint participation of magnati
families guided by the Tolomei, the butchers’ guild, and the lower classes),
had taken place already in the first decades of the regime of the Nine. Only in
the late 1330s, however, did serious rebellions pave the way to the creation of
a new regime in which different factions, called monti, governed in
coalition.⁷³
From the religious point of view, recent work has confirmed the excep-
tional liveliness of Sienese spiritual experiences in the landscape of late
medieval Europe, in terms of new cults, confraternities, hospitals, and
other religious experiences.⁷⁴ Siena was famous for its hospital of Santa
Maria della Scala, a spiritual institution offering poor relief linked to the
city’s cathedral, which in the late thirteenth century counted more than a
hundred fratres and sorores (mostly lay penitents) and branches in at least
six other dioceses.⁷⁵ It is possibly in Siena that the first confraternity of
laudesi (laypeople devoted to singing songs of religious praise) was born in
the 1260s, under the influence of the Dominican preacher Ambrogio
Sansedoni, one of the main religious figures analysed in this book.⁷⁶ From
Siena, the confraternity would then have spread across central Italy, another
proof of the prestige of Sienese spiritual initiatives. Moreover, between the
thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries Siena saw a flourishing of new saints’
cults, most of them connected to the Mendicant orders, to a degree possibly
unparalleled in any other city in Western Europe.⁷⁷ As in most other Italian
communes, this period is characterized from a spiritual point of view by the
⁷¹ This was the view of Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, in contrast with the previous
idea of a decadence of Siena between the thirteenth and the fourteenth century expressed by
Zdekauer, Il mercante senese del Dugento, p. 69.
⁷² Piccinni, ‘Il sistema senese del credito’.
⁷³ Wainwright, ‘Conflict and Popular Government in 14th Century Siena’.
⁷⁴ On which see the contributions in Benvenuti and Piatti (eds), Beata civitas.
⁷⁵ Pellegrini, La comunità ospedaliera di Santa Maria della Scala, pp. 54–5; Piccinni and
Vigni, ‘Modelli di assistenza ospedaliera tra Medioevo ed età moderna’.
⁷⁶ Varanini, ‘Ambrogio Sansedoni fondatore dei laudesi’.
⁷⁷ To draw up a list of the nineteen new Sienese cults from this period I have consulted
Goodich, Vita perfecta, pp. 218–41, and BS. For an overview of Sienese sainthood in this period
see Bartolomei Romagnoli, ‘Pier Pettinaio e i modelli di santità’, and Bartolomei Romagnoli, ‘Lo
spazio simbolico: politica della santità e agiografia a Siena’. For a complete list of venerated
people from Siena in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with references to BS, see Redon,
18        
pre-eminence of friars and lay penitents (often connected to the former) in

establishing innovative initiatives. In this book, therefore, Franciscan and
Dominican friars and lay members of confraternities or founders of hos-
pitals will feature prominently as the main bearers of religiously inspired
conceptions of criminal justice.
This should not hide of course the fact that the Sienese religious landscape
was much more variegated, with the presence of other religious institutions
such as traditional and reformed Benedictine monasteries (among which we
must remember the Cistercian Abbey of San Galgano in Chiusdino, from
which the commune had the tradition of selecting a monk as treasurer).⁷⁸
Tuscany and the territory of Siena, moreover, were known in this period for
the presence of numerous hermits, female and male: the nature of their
spirituality, however, left them at the margins of political debates.⁷⁹ It is
difficult to advance conclusions about the involvement of the secular clergy
in the diffusion of the ideas of peace, penance, and justice discussed in the
following chapters. They neither feature in many of the sources examined
here nor have been the subject of other systematic studies for this period.
Previous studies for fourteenth-century Tuscany, however, have shown that
they actively participated in confraternities: if this was true also for Siena,
then their position in the debates about criminal justice could be assimilated
with that of lay penitents.⁸⁰ As for their heads, the bishops of Siena, it can be
on the contrary positively affirmed that they tended to encourage the
initiatives of friars and lay penitents: this is particularly true for the
Dominican Tommaso Fusconi and his successor Bernardo di Bonzio, who
were bishops from 1253 to 1280.⁸¹ A number of documents they released
show their support for, and willingness to help organize, these pastoral
endeavours.
Although some aspects of the history of the Sienese Church as a whole
remain unclear for this period,⁸² the framework of relations between the
Mendicant orders, the penitents, and the commune has been set out
L’Espace d’une cité, p. 263 n. 345. To study the textual tradition for these cults I have also used
the online databases Bibliotheca Hagiografica Latina Manuscripta (<http://bhlms.fltr.ucl.ac.be>,
21 May 2018) and Mirabile (<http://www.mirabileweb.it/p_agiografico.aspx>, 21 May 2018).
⁷⁸ On this abbey and its founder see Cardini, San Galgano e la spada nella roccia.
⁷⁹ Gianni (ed.), Santità ed eremitismo nella Toscana medievale.
⁸⁰ De La Roncière, Les confréries à Florence, pp. 298–315.
⁸¹ M. C. Rossi, ‘Vescovi e confraternite’, pp. 151–2.
⁸² Pellegrini, ‘La Chiesa di Siena nella transizione dal ghibellinismo al guelfismo’. On the
Sienese church before 1250 see Pellegrini, Chiesa e città: uomini, comunità e istituzioni.
 19
clearly.⁸³ As was the case for many other Italian communes, the government
offered support of various types to religious institutions, in exchange for
which the Mendicants provided spiritual assistance and even administrative
services, although the latter tended to be reserved to lay penitents, who
offered a ‘contributo . . . numericamente importantissimo e non ancora
esaminato con chiarezza’.⁸⁴ The influence of the Mendicant orders on the
government of Siena was also highlighted by how the friars managed to
reverse the decision, taken in 1328 because of the turmoil caused by the
Italian expedition of Emperor Louis IV, to suspend the subsidies for the
feasts of the local saints associated with these orders.⁸⁵ It should also be
noted that the public cults and private devotions studied in this work seem
to correspond to the religious framework of the overwhelming majority of
the Sienese: although the study of heresy in Siena has never been systematic,
previous analyses have indicated that heretics were not frequent in the city;
the religious sources analysed here support this, by focusing only sporadic-
ally on heresy.⁸⁶
4. Sources and Themes
This book, then, aims to combine testimonies of Christian spirituality and

more traditional political and legal sources to reflect on late medieval
criminal justice. Hagiography will therefore feature prominently. The
themes of conflict and peace-making are important in most of the hagiog-
raphies preserved for this period, which fits with studies suggesting that in
the thirteenth century a new type of ‘peace-maker saint’ emerged as a model
for Christian audiences.⁸⁷ Hagiographies have been indicated as promising
sources by various scholars of conflict, but so far they have not featured
prominently in any extensive study of this sort.⁸⁸ Late medieval hagiography
tends to place an increasing emphasis on the life of the saint, now placed
⁸³ Szabò-Bechstein, ‘Sul carattere dei legami tra gli Ordini mendicanti, la confraternita laica
dei penitenti e il comune di Siena’.
⁸⁴ Szabò-Bechstein, ‘Sul carattere dei legami tra gli Ordini mendicanti, la confraternita laica
dei penitenti e il comune di Siena’, p. 746.
⁸⁵ Vauchez, ‘La Commune de Sienne, les ordres mendiants et le culte des saints’.
⁸⁶ Severino, ‘Note sull’eresia a Siena fra i secoli XIII e XIV’; Benedetti, ‘La documentazione
inquisitoriale a Siena nel Medioevo’.
⁸⁷ Dessì, ‘Pratiques de la parole de paix’, p. 254.
⁸⁸ Rossi, ‘Polisemia di un concetto: la pace nel basso medioevo’, p. 27; Zorzi, ‘I conflitti
nell’Italia comunale’, pp. 18–19, advocates more generally an expansion of the use of narrative
sources in the study of conflict.
20        
more firmly in its social context, rather than on miraculous manifestations.⁸⁹

Moreover, recent research has suggested that hagiographical discourse is
present also in other literary genres, in particular those that have normative
aims, since sainthood was often perceived as setting norms for individuals
and communities.⁹⁰ This makes saints’ lives particularly appropriate as
sources for a study on different norms and models of regulation of conflict
and crime. The book will focus on three dossiers of local, non-canonized
saints that offer the most extensive information about hagiographical rep-
resentations of crime and conflict in Siena for this period. The first is the lay
penitent Andrea Gallerani (d. 1251), a member of a magnati family who
founded the hospital of the Misericordia (mercy) after repenting for having
committed a homicide.⁹¹ The second, Ambrogio Sansedoni (1220–86), was a
famed Dominican preacher coming from an aristocratic family known for
its Ghibelline sympathies.⁹² His preaching skills and reputation for sanctity
led the Sienese government to choose him as a mediator between the city
and the papacy in 1266 and 1273, when he convinced Pope Gregory X to
finally withdraw his interdict on Siena.⁹³ His hagiographical dossier, con-
sisting of two versions of his life (here referred to as Vita and Summarium
virtutum) and a collection of miracles, is an extraordinarily rich corpus.⁹⁴
Although the Vita (whose earliest extant version is a sixteenth-century
transcription) might contain some spurious material, the dossier proves to
⁸⁹ Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge, pp. 583ff.
⁹⁰ Isaïa and Granier (eds), Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin.
⁹¹ His life is preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript: Siena, BCI, K.VII.2, Legenda beati
Andree Senensis, c. 158vff. The text is edited in AASS Martii, III, Vita per supparis aevi
scriptorem (henceforth Vita A.G.). An English translation is available in Webb, Saints and
Cities, pp. 141–59. Later authors, mentioned in Vita A.G., col. 50, claimed that his homicide was
a reaction to blasphemy, in order to justify his actions. See also Zarrilli, ‘Gallerani, Andrea’.
⁹² On Ambrogio and his family see Redon, ‘Costruire una famiglia nel Medioevo’; Redon,
‘Un culte civique ou familial’, pp. 202–5; Redon, ‘Le Père du bienheureux, Bonatacca Tacche’.
All these essays are now collected in Redon, Una famiglia, un santo, una città: Ambrogio
Sansedoni e Siena. See also Pellegrini, ‘Sansedoni, Ambrogio’.
⁹³ For this reason, the saint enjoyed an immediate popularity. Just over a year after Ambrogio
Sansedoni’s death the signoria decided to build a tomb for him ‘ad laudem et reverentiam divini
nominis et corporis Beati Ambrosii’: ASS, CG 33, f. 64r, 21/05/1287. Later in the same year the
government allocated 500 l. to the construction of a chapel dedicated to him in the Dominican
church of Camporegio: ASS, CG 34, f. 8v, 19/07/1287.
⁹⁴ AASS Martii, III, Vita quam conscripserunt Fr. Gisbertus, Alexandrinus; Recuperatus de
Petramala, Aretinus; Aldobrandinus Paparonus, Oldradus Bis-dominus, Senenses, Ordinis
Prædicatorum, de mandato D. Honorij IV Pontificis Maximi (henceforth Vita A.S.); AASS
Martii, III, Summarium virtutum et miracula edita a Fr. Ricupero Aretino (henceforth
Summarium). The transcription is based on the manuscript Siena, BCI, Ms. T.IV.6. I have
also taken into account a Bolognese manuscript presenting a slightly different version of the
text, discussed in Laurent, ‘Un legendier dominicain peu connu’. The miracles can be found in
ASS, Patrimonio Resti, San Domenico in Camporegio.
 21
be an overall trustworthy source.⁹⁵ Our third unofficial saint is Pietro

Pettinaio, a comb maker and Franciscan tertiary who, after a relatively
turbulent youth, got married and started living a saintly life, volunteering
in local hospitals with a group of other lay penitents.⁹⁶ The principal source
on his life is a Vita originally written in Latin by the Franciscan Pietro da
Monterone in 1333, and lost in a fire in the sixteenth century. There are two
extant Italian translations of this text: the first was made by the Augustinian
Serafino Ferri in 1508 and is the basis of the only available printed version of
this text; the second was produced by the Franciscan Dionisio Pulinari in
1541 and is still unpublished.⁹⁷ Although the complex transmission of this
text might suggest the possibility of later revisions and additions, a com-
parison with other available sources for Pietro’s activity indicates that the
Vita is reliable.⁹⁸
Homiletic sources will also have an important role in this analysis.
Although medieval preaching has a tendency to be ‘intentionally anonym-
ous and repetitive’,⁹⁹ it has been demonstrated that, despite the constraints
imposed by liturgy, preachers had a certain degree of freedom in the choice
of topics for their weekly homily.¹⁰⁰ Sermons rarely mention current events
openly, because the regulations issued by religious orders prevented
preachers from discussing political matters too directly, and the focus of
the friars was not political but ethical.¹⁰¹ This is however not a good reason
⁹⁵ On chronological contradictions in this text see also De Fraja, ‘L’insegnamento della

teologia a Roma’, pp. 185–7.
⁹⁶ Pellegrini, ‘Pietro Pettinaio’.
⁹⁷ P. da Montarone, Vita del B. Pietro Pettinajo sanese del terz’ordine di San Francesco
volgarizzata da una leggenda latina del 1333 per F. Serafino Ferri Agostiniano da Lecceto l’anno
1508, corretta e riordinata con annotazioni ed aggiunte dal Padre Maestro de Angelis Minor
Conventuale, Siena 1802 (henceforth Vita P.P.). An English translation can again be found in
Webb, Saints and Cities, pp. 191–241. On Dionisio Pulinari’s translation see Cenci, ‘S. Pietro
Pettinaio presentato da fr. Bindo da Siena’, pp. 202–3. I have not consulted this manuscript, kept
in Giaccherino, Biblioteca Comunale Forteguerriana.
⁹⁸ Webb, Saints and Cities, p. 191. Of a different opinion is Thompson, Cities of God,
pp. 82–3, who believes that ‘the adoption of Pietro into the Franciscan family was post-mortem
wishful thinking’. Thirteenth-century sermons by Bindo Scremi (on which see below) prove by
comparison the reliability of his Vita: Cenci, ‘S. Pietro Pettinaio presentato da un predicatore
senese contemporaneo’, n. 1.2; Cenci, ‘S. Pietro Pettinaio presentato da fr. Bindo da Siena’.
Other documents that add details to this idea are ASS, Diplomatico, Archivio Generale dei
Contratti, 23/04/1284 and ASS, CG 38, f. 64r, 18/12/1289.
⁹⁹ Delcorno, ‘Medieval Preaching in Italy (1200–1500)’, p. 487.
¹⁰⁰ Hanska, ‘Reconstructing the Mental Calendar of Medieval Preaching’. The liturgy of
thirteenth-century Mendicants is described in O’Carrol, ‘Lectionary for the Proper of the Year
in the Dominican and Franciscan Rites’.
¹⁰¹ Iannella, Giordano da Pisa, p. 17.
22        
to dismiss a collection as useless for studying the society in which it was

produced, since it was a commonplace of late medieval preaching that the
choice of topics by preachers had to resonate with the specific conditions of
the audience they were addressing.¹⁰² Siena offers for this period two
unpublished collections of sermones de tempore attributed to local preachers,
a unique circumstance for a thirteenth-century Italian city. The first is a
collection attributed to the same Ambrogio Sansedoni venerated by the
Sienese as a saint, as we have seen, and it consists of sixty-seven sermons
de tempore (for Sundays and main feasts).¹⁰³ A reference to Thomas
Aquinas’ exposition of the Credo, written by the theologian after a preaching
campaign in Naples during Lent 1273, represents a terminus post quem for
the composition of Ambrogio’s work, which therefore reflects his pastoral
activity in the last phase of his life (1273–86), a period in which he resided
almost exclusively in Siena.¹⁰⁴ The second compilation is attributed with
reasonable certainty to a Sienese Franciscan who was also connected to the
hagiographical landscape of the city: the previously mentioned (see note 98
above) Bindo Scremi who wrote a sermon to commemorate the death of
Pietro Pettinaio, and who was active in the 1280s–1300s.¹⁰⁵ This is only a
partial collection, consisting of twenty-seven sermons, and its manuscript
source is a miscellany of Tuscan preachers surviving in the Vatican, dating
to the early fourteenth century.¹⁰⁶
Sources produced by Sienese communal institutions are rich for the
period 1260–1330, too, even though they differ from the ones that have
been used in studies on Bologna and Florence. Very few instrumenta pacis
(peace agreements) or court records survive in Siena for this period.¹⁰⁷ The
¹⁰² This concept is vividly represented in a fourteenth-century novella by Sacchetti, Il

Trecentonovelle, Novella C, in which a preacher is reminded of the uselessness of preaching
against usury in front of an audience of poor people, who surely would not have money to lend.
¹⁰³ Siena, BCI, Ms. T.IV.7, Sermones fratris Ambrosii Senensis ordinis Fratrum Predicatorum
(henceforth Sermones A). On this collection and the reliability of their attribution to Ambrogio
see Kaeppeli, ‘Le prediche del b. Ambrogio Sansedoni’; Bataillon, ‘La predicazione dei religiosi
mendicanti’.
¹⁰⁴ Kaeppeli, ‘Le prediche del b. Ambrogio Sansedoni’, pp. 10–11.
¹⁰⁵ Cenci, ‘San Pietro Pettinaio presentato da fr. Bindo da Siena’, pp. 189–91.
¹⁰⁶ Città del Vaticano, Ms. Vat. Lat. 7697, ff.1r–63r (henceforth Sermones B). For a prelim-
inary study of this collection see Bataillon, ‘Les Sermons du Franciscain Bindo da Siena’. Bindo
wrote also sermones quadragesimales and de festis sanctorum: for more information on existing
and lost sources see ibid. and Cenci, ‘San Pietro Pettinaio presentato da fr. Bindo da Siena’,
pp. 191ff.
¹⁰⁷ These are analysed in the unpublished doctoral thesis by Kumhera, Making Peace in
Medieval Siena.
 23
methodological problems posed by the collections Podestà and Capitano del

Popolo, which contain the scarce records from judicial offices preserved for
this period, will be discussed in Chapter 6, in which the day-to-day reality of
the Sienese administration of criminal justice will be analysed. In the same
chapter I will describe some alternative sources that Siena can offer to
scholars of conflict and crime, such as lists of condemnations, spread
throughout this period, and two extremely rich collections of early
fourteenth-century petitions for amnesty (1,439 documents in total).
Another important source for this book has been the Consiglio Generale,
consisting of volumes of minutes of the main political assembly of the city,
extant with some gaps from 1249 onwards.¹⁰⁸ The volumes have the import-
ant characteristic of not limiting themselves to presenting the items of the
daily agenda and the final resolutions (as similar collections, such as the
Bolognese Riformagioni, do), but of reporting debates and disagreements
between the speakers as well, something which allows us to gauge the variety
of attitudes towards crime and violence present among the political elite at
any given time.¹⁰⁹ Additionally, Siena, like other Italian communes, offers a
variety of late medieval chronicles, which however date to the fourteenth
century at the earliest and are generally preserved in later, early modern
manuscripts.¹¹⁰ Sienese chronicles are generally considered to be reliable,
but they possibly contain interpolations added by later scribes, and for this
reason have to be used in conjunction with archival sources.¹¹¹
Finaly, Siena is renowned for its set of more than twenty volumes of
statutes surviving for this period, with a peak in the 1280s and 1290s.¹¹² Of
this wealth of sources, many of which are unpublished and some incom-
plete, I have chosen to analyse four, as the most complete specimens from
the main political phases experienced by the city: the statutes of the year
¹⁰⁸ For a description of how these meetings operated see Redon, ‘Le Conseil général de la
commune de Sienne’.
¹⁰⁹ Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, p. 74, maintains however that these sources hide
internal disagreements among the ruling class.
¹¹⁰ The only one quoted in this book is Anonymous, ‘Cronaca senese’.
¹¹¹ For more details and bibliography see Redon, L’Espace d’une cité, pp. 56–9.
¹¹² Mondolfo, ‘La legislazione statutaria senese dal 1262 al 1310’, p. 255. On the high output
of the Sienese legislators, see also Ascheri, ‘Gli statuti delle città italiane e il caso di Siena’,
pp. 82–3. In Siena minor revisions to the statutes, as opposed to the redaction of completely new
ones, happened moreover every year: Redon, ‘Le Conseil general de la commune de Sienne’,
p. 182. For fragments of statutes preceding the period analysed here (dealing exclusively with
civil legislation) see Mecacci, ‘Un frammento palinsesto’; and Banchi, ‘Il Breve degli Officiali del
Comune di Siena’.
24        
1262,¹¹³ those of 1274–9;¹¹⁴ those of 1287,¹¹⁵ and lastly the Costituto volgare
of 1309–10, a vernacular translation with great significance in terms of the
Popolo-centred political ideology expressed by the Nine.¹¹⁶
In order to bring together these different types of sources, which are rarely
combined, the contents of this book have been organized thematically. Every
chapter will focus on an important facet of the development of criminal
justice in late medieval Italy and the influence of religion on it by making use
of various types of sources at the same time. In the first chapter the three
models for approaching crime and violence (‘culture of revenge’, ideology of
public order, and penitential spirituality) coexisting in Siena in the period
1260–1330 will be described, and differences and similarities between them
will be analysed. The commonality of their language will be analysed to
demonstrate the discursive interweaving of the different models. However, it
will be also underlined that, although models could overlap, and the lay
government tended to borrow concepts and ideas from Mendicant elabor-
ations in order to promote peace and public order, the ultimate goals and
visions of different social actors were and remained partially different.
Chapter 2 will build on this by investigating how these different visions of
society translated themselves into the representation and promotion of
different virtues, behaviours, and emotions as the appropriate reactions to
offences and violence. In Chapter 3 attention will be paid to the way
religious people presented emotions and Christian virtues as strategic tools
to ensure the positive conclusion of a conflict, and it will be argued that such
a ‘practical’ model of behaviour presented by the Mendicants was at least in
part appropriated by the Sienese government in the language of the legisla-
tion. Chapters 4 and 5 will respectively focus on religious and lay ideas of
mercy, revenge, and justice in normative texts (hagiographies and sermons
¹¹³ Zdekauer, ‘Il frammento degli ultimi due libri’ (based on ASS, Statuti della città di Siena 2,
henceforth Statuti 2). In disagreement with this reconstruction is however Mondolfo, ‘La
legislazione statutaria senese dal 1262 al 1310’, p. 236.
¹¹⁴ ASS, Statuti della città di Siena 3 (henceforth Statuti 3). Mondolfo (‘L’ultima parte del
constituto senese del 1262 ricostruita dalla riforma successiva’) has edited the last part of their
fifth distinctio arguing that the similarities between Statuti 2 and 3 would allow a reconstruction
of the missing parts of the older codex. However, differences between the surviving parts of
Statuti 2 and the corresponding norms of Statuti 3 (e.g. in the case of the punishment for
homicide, which will be examined in Chapter 5), weaken his claim greatly.
¹¹⁵ ASS, Statuti della città di Siena 5 (henceforth Statuti 5).
¹¹⁶ The text of these statutes, which correspond to the manuscripts ASS, Statuti della città di
Siena 19–20 (the fifth distinction is in the second volume), is edited in Lisini, Il Costituto del
comune di Siena, volgarizzato nel MCCCIX–MCCCX (henceforth Costituto volgare). On the
political significance of this translation see Neri, ‘Culture et politique à Sienne au début du XIVe
siècle: le statut en langue vulgaire de 1309–1310’.
 25
in one case and statutes in the other). Their comparison will challenge the
idea, expressed by some scholars, that communal justice was essentially
vengeful in nature, by showing that, just like religious conceptions of justice,
lay justice was also a polysemic concept that encompassed ideas both of
revenge and mercy. This analysis will also show how communal elites made
use of religious ideas on divine justice in ways that were different from the
original intents of their bearers, for example to legitimize a higher degree of
judicial violence by establishing parallels between divine and communal
revenge. This highlights how religious elaborations on crime and violence
were not just passively received by laypeople, but transformed to serve their
own purposes. A final sixth chapter will aim to check the practical influence
of these theoretical elaborations in sources such as petitions, minutes of
assemblies, and court records. It will suggest that, even though the values of
the ‘culture of revenge’ were still central in the education of late medieval
Sienese, as suggested by previous scholars, ‘private’ revenge between indi-
viduals or families was not legalized, even though ‘public’ revenge could be
legitimized by making reference to religious concepts. It will also provide
examples of how religious people directly influenced the Sienese to make
space for mercy in the judicial system of the city, especially for the benefit of
poorer citizens: such examples show, it will be argued, that references to
religious principles by communal governments were not entirely instru-
mental, but the result of an effective dissemination of ideas by friars and
pious laymen.
1
Competing Models for Approaching
Violence and Conflict and their Points
of Contact
Reflection on violence and violent conflict has been central in Christian

thought since its very beginning, but the positions expressed by theologians
and ecclesiastical hierarchies have varied considerably throughout the cen-
turies. The integral pacifism of some early Fathers of the Church, who
forbade the use of violence even in the case of self-defence, was for instance
soon abandoned in favour of more nuanced attitudes.¹ Specific Christian
attitudes towards revenge might at first sight appear more straightforward,
since the precept expressed for instance in Romans 12:19 (‘Vengeance is
mine, I will repay, says the Lord’) explicitly establishes it as an attribute
reserved to God only. This led to a tradition in Christian theology of
considering revenge carried out by humans mostly as a manifestation of
the sin of pride. However, things were always more complicated than that,
since definitions of the modalities through which God would perform his
revenge, in particular whether he would carry it out only in person or also
through his creatures, has been subject to considerable variations. Thanks to
their narrative nature, saints’ lives provide a vantage point on these shifts.
Early Irish hagiography, for instance, offers numerous examples of effective
cursing performed by saints against offenders guilty of defying divine
authority: scholars have spoken of a ‘vindictive cast of mind of the Celtic
saints’, a vengeful attitude clearly justified by the hagiographers by present-
ing the holy men as vehicles of God’s own revenge.² Punitive miracles of this
type are common in the hagiography of some centuries and areas of Western
and Eastern Christianity, whereas they tend to be rare in others.³
¹ Cacitti, ‘Il cristianesimo primitivo di fronte al problema della guerra’.

² The expression comes from Little, ‘Anger in Monastic Curses’, p. 28; see also Davies, ‘Anger
and the Celtic Saint’.
³ Sigal, ‘Un aspect du culte des saints: le châtiment divin aux XIe et XIIe siècles’; Bozóky, ‘Les
Miracles de châtiment au haut Moyen Âge’; Klaniczay, ‘Miracoli di punizione e malefizia’.
Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: Siena, 1260–1330. Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues,
Oxford University Press. © Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844866.003.0002
       27
The tolerance of the ecclesiastical milieu to the vengefulness of lay elites

did not remain unvaried in the Middle Ages, either. Dominique Barthélémy
argued that eleventh-century French vitae allowed lay aristocratic characters
to express their vengefulness and pugnacity, seen as positive values by the
members of their social class.⁴ Only then would they eventually capitulate to
the higher claims of the saintly protagonists they were disrespecting with
their violent behaviour. This form of respect for elite conceptions of violence
does not, however, seem to have been always present in the agenda of later
hagiographers.
It is obvious from this cursory review that attitudes expressed by ecclesi-
astical sources towards violence and revenge have always been deeply
influenced by the cultural and socio-political context in which they were
produced, and must therefore be analysed by taking this broader setting into
account. It is also evident that Christian intellectuals did not simply aim to
mirror social perceptions of violence in their works. They strove also to
influence them in turn, in order to offer solutions to the problems that
conflict posed for their community, and convince its members to live
according to the virtues and values the Church supported. It will therefore
not be surprising that the theme of conflict, and in particular of factional
revenge, had a fundamental role in thirteenth-century Sienese religious
sources, suggesting that the problem of interpersonal violence was one of
the main concerns of spiritual leaders in the city. Intraurban factional war, as
seen, was both a central worry of popular governments and one of the main
points of action of the Mendicant orders in the Italian communes.
In order to analyse what these sources can tell us about the specific way
thirteenth-century Sienese friars and pious laymen addressed problems
related to interpersonal violence, though, one has to go beyond the obser-
vation that these texts openly condemned revenge on the basis of Romans
12:19.⁵ It is necessary to explore the specific situations the authors imagined
their characters involved in, the reactions they found appropriate and tried
to elicit in their audience, and what language and metaphors they used to
create a coherent framework for the interpretation of violence, crime, and
revenge in their society. Here I argue that the redefinition of the sacrament
of penance occurring after the Fourth Lateran Council was central in the
⁴ Barthélémy, Chevaliers et miracles, in particular p. 5.

⁵ A few examples can be found in Vita A.S., col. 191; Summarium, col. 211; Vita P.P., p. 69;
Sermones A, f. 20r.
28        
creation of a model, or a discourse, for construing violent conflict and crimes

linked to interpersonal violence by Sienese religious actors.
In this model, hagiography, preaching, and the pastoral activities carried
out by such personalities (including the administration of the sacrament of
penance itself) were a means to promote a set of moral duties arising from
membership of the Christian community. These included a complete rejec-
tion of the idea that single individuals or associations based on kin, faction,
etc. could be legitimate vehicles of divine revenge. This idea, persistently
promoted by religious people, clashed with the opinion, equally pervasive in
communal society, that male citizens had a duty to avenge affronts made
against them. This tension between radically different obligations was pre-
sent in the minds of both Mendicant friars and laymen, who were thus
confronted with moral dilemmas as to whether to make their behaviour in a
dispute conform to one or to the other. In hagiographies, saints performed
the important function of providing through their miracles a way of solving
conflicts while avoiding permanent loss of reputation, as well as eliminating
the sense of anxiety deriving from the dilemma. The role of these episodes
was not limited to presenting exceptional supernatural interventions,
though: the action of religious people in Siena seems to have been directed
at promoting a greater space for concepts such as mercy, repentance, and
guilt in the ordinary citizenry’s responses to violence and crime. This
penitential approach to such issues is distinctive enough from the other
main paradigms through which criminal justice was perceived in late medi-
eval Italy, that is, the ‘culture of revenge’ and the ‘ideology of public order’,
to be considered as a proper third model that coexisted alongside them.
A selection of excerpts taken from Sienese religious sources will show the
importance of penitential spirituality in the treatment of situations of violent
conflict and bring out the main implications of this model. It will then be
possible to examine the extent to which this third discourse had an influence
on lay society, and in particular its political elites, in what ways, and why.
1. A Penitential Conception of Criminal Justice
In the life of Pietro Pettinaio, the section devoted to the effectiveness of the
saint’s prayers and prophetic spirit includes a miracle that offers an excellent
starting point to explore religious views of conflict in late medieval Siena. It
is the story of a certain Mino, who, having been injured by an enemy and
feeling greatly offended, ‘at the prompting of the devil’ (‘per diabolica
       29
suggestione’), decides to kill the enemy; but before doing so he goes to

church ‘to see the Elevation of the Host and commend himself to it’.⁶ The
saint is praying there too and, thanks to a divine revelation, discovers Mino’s
plan. Pietro then confronts him, telling him that God’s advice, which he had
requested by commending himself to the Corpus Domini, was to forgive the
offence:
Know that this morning, as you commended yourself to Christ the Saviour
while seeing his body, he is giving you this counsel.⁷
The man recognizes in Pietro’s admonition a miracle and an aid from

God linked to his commendation, therefore he repents and goes home ‘con
molta pace e quiete di animo’ (with much peace and tranquillity of the
soul).⁸ Mino’s behaviour allows us an interpretation that reads his act of
devotion not as a request for sanction for his vengeful intent, but for advice:
this is strongly implied by the expressions used in the Italian text, consiglio
(advice) and—as Mino says later when commenting on the miracle—soc-
correre (to help),⁹ which remind us of the technical socio-legal expression
‘consilium et auxilium’ (advice and help). In thirteenth-century Italy this
formulation referred, in contexts of conflict, to the practice of resorting to
friends’ and relatives’ advice in order to decide how to deal with offences, as
well as to the help they would offer in such dealings.¹⁰ The fact that the
hagiographer decides to present Mino in this manner is already an aspect
worth dwelling on: Mino’s decision to ask for God’s advice immediately
hints at a certain degree of uncertainty in his opinion that revenge would be
the best solution to adopt in response to an affront. Enrico Artifoni high-
lights how, in Italian moralistic treatises from the thirteenth century, the
practice of requiring a consilium, central in the communal model of society,
is indeed always associated to a res dubia, a situation of uncertainty.¹¹ The
⁶ Vita P.P., pp. 61–2: ‘per vedere levare il Corpus Domini e a quello raccomandarsi’. The
episode is translated in Webb, Saints and Cities, pp. 216–17. My translations are based on
Webb’s, whose text however skips parts of the Italian version that in some cases are crucial for
my arguments, and which therefore I integrate with my own translations.
⁷ Vita P.P., p. 63: ‘Sappi, che questa mattina raccomandandoti tu al Salvatore Cristo, vedendo
il corpo suo: egli ti da questo consiglio’; compare with Webb, Saints and Cities, p. 217.
⁸ Vita P.P., p. 64.
⁹ Ibid.: ‘per li meriti suoi così presto soccorrendomi’ (helping me so promptly through his
merits).
¹⁰ Zorzi, ‘La cultura della vendetta’, p. 141 and 145; Zorzi, La trasformazione di un quadro
politico, p. 134.
¹¹ Artifoni, ‘Tra etica e professionalità politica’, p. 413.
30        
most famous case is Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii

(1246). This work centres, too, on the problem of the appropriate reaction to
affronts, an issue that appears to have been widely discussed in late medieval
Italy. Pietro’s hagiographer seems to present it as a deeply felt moral
dilemma between social expectations prompting to revenge, and knowledge
of God’s injunction to forgiveness. On one hand the loss of individual and
group reputation was at stake, on the other hand there was the risk of
damnation and potentially of a divine punishment already in this life. As
other examples will confirm, this is not a single example, but a precise
narrative strategy employed by the Sienese Mendicants.
The hagiographer therefore describes the conflict taking place in this
excerpt as a dual issue: it is both external, that is, a conflict between Mino
and his enemy, and internal, between different inclinations deeply embed-
ded in Mino’s mindset. The solution proposed by Pietro, repentance, settles
both types of dispute and has peace as its outcome. Peace was obviously the
desired conclusion of a conflict according to both secular and religious
intellectuals. Pax or concordia was the technical term for the document,
written by a notary at the demand of the parties implicated in a feud, which
was deemed to put a permanent end to it, to the point that the transgressor
of the terms of such a document would be severely prosecuted by communal
authorities, including those of Siena.¹² In late thirteenth-century Italian
preaching (examples include the works of Federico Visconti, archbishop of
Pisa, and Giordano of Pisa, active in Florence), the term pax often had a
more complex, threefold definition: internal peace was the state of tranquil-
lity of the conscience that derives from penance, whereas external peace was
the social and political outcome of the decision to end conflicts; eternal
peace, finally, was the desired condition of the soul in the afterlife.¹³ These
different facets were seen as intertwined, not only by religious thinkers,
but also by the parties involved in disputes of various kinds, who might
ask notaries to include references to penitential spirituality in peace
agreements.¹⁴ As highlighted by the expression ‘with much peace and
¹² The literature on the topic is extensive: the most recent works are Kumhera, The Benefits of
Peace, and Jansen, Peace and Penance.
¹³ Bériou, ‘Le Sermon sur la paix’, p. 361; Iannella, ‘La Paix dans la prédication du dominicain
Giordano de Pise’, pp. 367–82. This classification of peace is echoed also in Sermones A, f. 4r,
‘quia nihil est pax exterior nisi sit pax interior’ (since there is no external peace if internal peace
is not there).
¹⁴ Sensi, ‘Le paci private nella predicazione’; Rovigo, ‘Le paci private: motivazioni religiose
nelle fonti veronesi’.
       31
tranquillity of the soul’, the internal conflict must be resolved by creating

internal peace through repentance in order also to end the external one. The
penitential conversion of Mino is in this case so powerful that he asks Pietro
if he can join him in his charitable activities as one of his companions. This
suggests that Mino should be identified as the carpenter Mino Luglioli,
indicated in the Life as a member of Pietro’s circle of religious laymen.¹⁵
In this episode, repentance is therefore indicated by the hagiographer as the
appropriate response to affronts. How applicable was this conception to
Sienese spirituality more broadly, though? And what did the author mean by
repentance or penance, exactly? The analysis of a few other excerpts will
help clarify these aspects.
One of these excerpts is an episode of the Life of Ambrogio Sansedoni,
featuring a duel between the inimici Cherubino de Francheriis from Gaeta
and Salimbergo de Rosellis from Arezzo, and set in all likelihood in Siena
shortly after the saint’s death.¹⁶ This is a clearer example of the socialized
nature of conflict in the thirteenth century, and therefore of the importance
of considering the constraints deriving from social ‘obligations, expectations
and reciprocations’ and the ‘exigencies of interaction’ in analysing the
behavioural choices of individuals in this period.¹⁷ Before the duel
Cherubino, who is devoted to the recently dead Dominican preacher (and
thus must have heard Ambrogio’s sermons against revenge, described at
various points of the Life),¹⁸ has a mass celebrated in the church of San
Domenico in Siena to commend himself, just like Mino, to God and to the
Blessed Ambrogio. That this commendatio has the same meaning as that
described in the last episode becomes clear from the behaviour of Cherubino
during the duel. The religious inclination of the man, in fact, becomes
evident also from his frequent invocation of divine help during the duel,
which he manages to win. When his adversary is already lying on the ground
at his mercy, however, instead of finishing him off,
He started to cry with much humility: I forgive you, Salimbergo, and

declare myself defeated.¹⁹
¹⁵ Vita P.P., p. 18. ¹⁶ Vita A.S., col. 199.

¹⁷ As suggested by Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and Processes, p. 12. On the value of revenge
as a ‘pratica socializzata e pubbica’, see Zorzi, ‘I conflitti nell’Italia comunale’, p. 35.
¹⁸ See above, n. 5.
¹⁹ Vita A.S., col. 199: ‘magna cum humilitate clamare cœpit: Veniam tibi concedo,
Salimberge, victum me fateor.’
32        
Salimbergo, astonished, rises to kiss him with the kiss of peace and they are
both cured of their wounds thanks to a supernatural intervention.
Cherubino’s act of repentance can be described as a gesture of voluntary
humiliation that inverts the sense of the duel, whose aim was the opposite:
that of humiliating the inimicus through his physical annihilation. This
would annul in turn the humiliation derived from the offence that has to
be postulated as the starting point of the conflict, and on the nature of which
no information is unfortunately given. Scholars such as John Bossy and
Mary Mansfield have underlined the face-saving value of rituals of voluntary
humiliation.²⁰ In the light of the principle of ‘retributive compensation’,
according to which ‘human relations . . . were regulated by a calculus of debt
and satisfactions’ in every sphere of medieval life, voluntary humiliation as a
form of religious penance was a means of inverting the involuntary one to
which the loser of a conflict would be exposed, thus escaping its most
unpleasant consequences, such as death, physical harm, or permanent loss
of reputation.²¹ However, in this case Cherubino seems to be doing some-
thing rather different from trying to save his face. The hagiographer insists
on the fact that this behaviour is displayed by Cherubino when he could be
already considered the winner of the duel (‘cum iam victor existeret’).²²
Moreover his actions, instead of granting him material or immaterial bene-
fits, attract criticism from the audience because his choice of forgiveness
over revenge does not allow him to recover his honour. His amici, who
witness the scene, ask him for explanations of his conduct, which they are
ready to qualify as a display of pusillanimitas, cowardice. It is only when he
explains his behaviour as being the result of a command from the blessed
Ambrogio, who had appeared to him during the duel and had made
reference to the ‘great honour’ that Cherubino could expect from his actions,
that his circle recognizes the exceptionality of the circumstance and hails the
miracle.²³ His pious inclinations are however already present before the
saint’s apparition, which only seems to act as a justification for his switching
from the ‘secular’ logic to the ‘religious’, albeit a necessary one to obtain
social approval. In this case it is therefore not Cherubino’s gesture of
humiliation, but the miracle, which acquires a face-saving value. The hagi-
ographer even comments that ‘this entire episode was regarded as a great
²⁰ Bossy, Christianity in the West, pp. 5ff.; Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners,
pp. 265, 290.
²¹ Bossy, Christianity in the West, p. 5. ²² Vita A.S., col. 199.
²³ Ibid.: ‘Parce inimico tuo, & te victum appella; quia ad magnum tibi cedet honorem.’
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There is at least one white Negro in Africa. The man in the centre, who said both
his parents were as black as the women beside him, is pure Sudanese, yet he has
a fair skin, rosy cheeks, and flaxen hair.
Services at the Coptic Church at Khartum sometimes last five hours, while the
worshippers stand barefooted on the cold floors. The Copts, direct descendants of
the ancient Egyptians, have been Christians since St. Mark preached at
Alexandria.
“Do you see many changes in the condition of the natives since
the British occupation?”
“Yes. They are doing far better than in the past. They wear more
clothing, they have more wants, and are working to supply them.
Formerly many went naked, and as there was no security of property
and few wants, they had no incentives to save. When we came here
the taxes were levied at the will of the rulers, so the rich native was
sure to be persecuted. Now since the taxes are fairly levied, the
people are learning that their savings will be respected. They are
coming to have faith in us. Our first business was to make them
realize that we intended to treat them fairly and honestly, and I
believe we have succeeded. We had also to organize the country, so
that it might be able to pay the expenses of its government. We are
fast reaching that stage.”
“Is your native population increasing?”
“Very rapidly,” replied Sir Reginald. “I am surprised at the large
number of children that have been born since we took possession of
the Sudan. The provinces fairly swarm with little ones. During a
recent trip through Kordofan I carried a lot of small coin with me to
give to the children. The news of this travelled ahead, so as soon as
we approached a village we would be met by the babies in force.
Nearly every peasant woman came forward with a half dozen or
more little naked blacks and browns hanging about her, and the
children ran out of the tents as we passed on the way. The
Sudanese are naturally fond of children, especially so when times
are good and conditions settled as they are now. They want as many
children and grandchildren as the Lord will give them, and as most of
the men have two or three wives, it is not an uncommon thing for a
father to have several additions to his family per year.”
“Your Excellency has been travelling on camel back through
Kordofan. Is that country likely to be valuable in the future?”
“I do not see why it should not be,” replied the Governor-General.
“It is one of the stock-raising regions of this part of the world,
producing a great number of cattle and camels. Much of the meat
now used in Khartum comes from Kordofan, and camels are bred
there for use throughout the Libyan and Nubian deserts. The
southern half of the country, which is devoted to cattle, is inhabited
by stock-raising people. Every tribe has its herds, and many tribes
are nomadic, driving their stock from pasture to pasture. North of
latitude thirteen, where the camel country begins, one finds camels
by the thousands. That section seems to be especially adapted to
them.”
“What is the nature of the land west of Kordofan?”
“I suppose you mean Darfur. That country is a hilly land traversed
by a mountain range furnishing numerous streams. It is well
populated, and was for a long time a centre of the slave trade. The
natives there are comparatively quiet at present, although every now
and then a war breaks out between some of the tribes. This is true,
too, in Kordofan. The people are brave and proud, and they have
frequent vendettas.”
[1] Since this interview with Sir Reginald occurred he has

retired from office at the end of a lifetime spent in the Sudan. He
will always be considered one of the best authorities on that vast
and comparatively unknown region, and his views, especially
when expressed, as here, in the height of his activities, are of
perennial value.
CHAPTER XXII
WHY GENERAL GORDON HAD NO FEAR
One of my talks with Sir Francis Reginald Wingate was of a more

personal nature dealing with some of the events in which he was an
historic figure. I had asked His Excellency if he would not some day
write a new book on the Sudan. He wrote “Mahdism and the
Egyptian Sudan” some years ago; and a few years later published a
work entitled “Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp.” He also
translated and edited Slatin Pasha’s “Fire and Sword in the Sudan”
and for years his life has been a part of the history of the country and
his experiences such that no man living can tell about it better than
he. The Sirdar replied:
“I may write another book some day. I have kept notes of things
which I have observed and which have occurred from time to time,
and putting them together may give me occupation when I retire. At
present my chief interest is in the development of the country, and I
am too much occupied with that and with my duties here to find any
time for literary work.”
Afterward our conversation turned to the conditions which
prevailed here while the Mahdi was waging war against the English.
Sir Reginald, then General Wingate, was one of the officers in
command of the British troops and is full of vivid stories of those
terrible times. As we talked we were standing on the portico jutting
out from the second story of the government palace. We were
looking down the Nile and in plain view of the little island of Tuti over
the way. General Wingate went on to tell a story of General Gordon’s
bravery and absolute lack of fear:
“It was on this site that Gordon had his headquarters during a
siege of the Mahdi. He lived in a rough building with windows
opening toward that island, upon which the enemy had an
encampment. It was his custom of an evening to sit in his room
facing the river and write in his diary. The Mahdists saw his light and
shot at it again and again but, notwithstanding this, General Gordon
did not change his place for writing. His friends remonstrated and the
citizens of Khartum sent in a petition to him either to write in the back
of the house or to hide his light behind a screen. This petition was
brought in by a delegation from the town, which had assembled in
front of the headquarters awaiting an answer. As they stood there,
lights were put in every front window and they saw General Gordon
go from window to window making himself, as they thought, a fair
mark for the Dervishes on the island. At last he came out and
standing in the full blaze of the light said:
“‘Gentlemen, there is an old story that when the Lord made
mankind He did so with two great piles of material before Him. One
of the piles was composed of the clay of which man is made and the
other of the fear that often makes one less than a man. As the Lord
worked, He took up a handful of clay, shaped it into a human form,
and then sprinkled it over with a handful from the pile of fear. And so
He went on making man after man until at last He took up the stuff of
which He made me. There was plenty of clay for my body but when
He looked about for fear with which to sprinkle it, He found that the
pile of fear had all been used up, so the result is I do not know what
fear is.’”
In the dry Upper Nile valley piled-up grain awaits unprotected the boats which
will distribute it along the river. The provinces of Darfur and Kordofan alone can
produce enough dura to feed the entire Sudan.
No matter how far up the Nile or how deep in the desert they live, “backsheesh”
is the cry of the children of Egypt and the Sudan. Young and old alike have learned
the trick of asking a fee for posing.
British experiments in cotton culture in the Sudan have been most successful
and the quality of the product compares favourably with Egyptian varieties.
Irrigation projects under construction will shortly add 100,000 acres to the cotton-
growing area.
The chief public building in Khartum is the Sirdar’s palace, built by Kitchener on
the site of Gordon’s murder. Over it float British and Egyptian flags and two
sentries guard its door, one British, one Sudanese.
General Gordon’s bravery was far beyond that of other world

heroes. He fought here until the last. When the Arabs finally
overcame his troops and entered his palace, he sternly demanded of
them where their master was. They replied by plunging their spears
into his body. As he fell, they dragged him down the steps and cut off
his head to be sent to the Mahdi. His body was left to the mercy of
the fanatics, who rushed forward by thousands to dip their swords
and spears in his blood. They fairly cut it to pieces, and the blood,
which had stained the steps and walls of the palace, remained there
until the Khalifa decided to make that place a dwelling for his harem
and had it washed away.
The British have done all they could to carry out Gordon’s mission
in the Sudan; that is, to break up slavery. This region was once one
of the chief slave markets of the continent. The poor wretches were
brought by the thousands from Central Africa to Khartum and
Omdurman, and taken thence down to Egypt. Before the British rule
there were military stations in different parts of the country, which
became centres of the trade, and the White Nile was a famous slave
route. Later on the Arabs raided the natives of Central Africa and
sent up their captives to Khartum. The trade was somewhat checked
while Gordon ruled, but it broke out again under the Mahdi. When
the British took hold, Omdurman was one of the chief markets,
slaves being brought in in droves from all parts of the country. Since
then the buying and selling of the blacks has been stopped, as far as
possible, but it is still carried on in some of the provinces, and it will
be a long time before it can be absolutely eradicated. Sixty-seven
slave dealers were captured and tried not so long ago. Fifty-eight
were convicted, more than fifty receiving sentences of from one to
seven years each.
While I was at Asyut, Dr. Alexander, president of the Training
College there, told me how a poor Swiss boy broke up the slave
trade of Upper Egypt. Said he: “This incident occurred just before the
British occupation. The boy, whose name was Roth, got the idea that
it was his mission to aid in abolishing slavery, and that his field lay in
the Sudan. He had no money, but he worked his way to Alexandria
and thence up the Nile to Asyut, landing here without a cent. He
applied for work at the mission schools, telling us his plans, and we
finally arranged for him to teach French. While doing so he studied
Arabic and went out through the country to learn all he could about
slavery. He spent his vacations living with the people, travelling
about and visiting the villages. It was then contrary to law to sell
slaves in Egypt, but Roth learned that the trade was going on, and
that caravans were bringing them from the Sudan into Upper Egypt.
They were sent from here to Tunis and Tripoli and thence to
Constantinople. One day he came into the mission and said that a
big slave caravan was encamped outside Asyut, and that the men
hid their prisoners in caves during the day and sold them at night. He
begged me to go with him to the governor and demand that they be
punished. I did go, but was not able to do anything.
“After this,” continued Dr. Alexander, “Roth despaired somewhat,
but said he intended to go to Cairo to get the English consul-general
to help him. He did so and convinced the consul-general that his
story was true. The two demanded of Riaz Pasha, then foreign
minister, that the sale of slaves be stopped. Since Roth had the
English Government behind him, the Egyptian government had to
respect him. Giving him a company of two hundred soldiers, they
told him to go back to Asyut and capture the caravan. It was
probably their intention to notify the slave dealers in time, so they
could get away. But Roth defeated this move. He stopped his special
train outside the town, divided his company into two bands,
surrounded the caravan and took the traders and the sixty-seven
slaves they had with them. He brought the poor creatures here to the
mission school saying he wanted me to hold them as the Egyptians
would not dare to take them from under the American flag.
“Shortly after this there came a message from the governor of the
province ordering that the slaves be given up. The messengers were
backed by soldiers, but nevertheless I refused, declaring it was
impossible on account of the absence of Dr. Hogg, the
superintendent of the mission. The next day, when Dr. Hogg arrived,
the governor sent for him and abused him for not giving up the
slaves. Thereupon Dr. Hogg charged him with wanting to evade the
law, and told him that if Asyut had any respect for the law or had a
governor who was anything of a man, the caravan would have been
arrested sooner and the owners punished. He demanded that this be
done, and as a result the slave dealers and slaves were taken to
Cairo to be tried there. The government of Egypt, not daring to
whitewash the transaction, was forced to dismiss the governor and
punish the slave dealers. Roth was afterward appointed an agent of
the Egyptian government to keep down the slave trade. He came to
the Sudan and carried on his work there in connection with Gordon
and Slatin Pasha. Slatin speaks of him in his book entitled Fire and
Sword in the Sudan. He died while fighting the trade there.”
CHAPTER XXIII
OMDURMAN, STRONGHOLD OF THE MAHDI
One of the queerest cities I have ever visited is Omdurman, once

the capital of the Mahdi and to-day the great native commercial
centre of the Sudan. Omdurman stretches for more than six miles
along the Nile at the point where the Blue Nile flows in from the
distant Abyssinian hills. Opposite the city is Tuti Island, while beyond
the island on the farther bank of the White Nile is Khartum. Founded
by the Mahdi, or the Mohammedan Messiah, and the scene of the
most atrocious cruelties and extravagances of the Khalifa who
succeeded him, Omdurman once contained about one million of
African Sudanese. It was then a great military camp, composed of
one hundred thousand mud houses and inhabited by tribes from all
parts of the million square miles embraced in the realm of that
savage ruler. The Khalifa forced the people to come here to live that
he might have their services in time of war, allowing them to go
home only to cultivate and harvest their crops, which they were
obliged to bring back for sale. He made Omdurman his seat of
government, and he had his own residence here inside a great wall
of sun-dried brick which enclosed about sixty acres, and in which
was an open-air mosque of ten acres or more. Here he had his
palace and here he kept his four hundred wives. Just outside the city
he fought the great battle which ended in his downfall and the
destruction of his capital.
According to Mohammedan tradition, the Prophet said that there
would arise among the Faithful a sort of Messiah, or Mahdi, which
means in Arabic “he who is guided aright.” Mohammed Ahmed, later
known as the Mahdi, claimed to be such a leader, and so he founded
the empire which lasted until the Battle of Omdurman. He got the
people to believe he had been appointed Mahdi by God, and that he
had been taken by the Prophet himself into the presence of the
apostles and saints, and by them commanded to cleanse and purify
the Mohammedan religion.
He did anything, however, but practise what he preached. By the
Koran, smoking and drinking are strictly prohibited, and
extravagance is frowned upon, but in the height of his power the
Mahdi and his chiefs lived lives of the most horrible drunkenness,
extravagance, and vice. Mohammed Ahmed is described by Slatin
Pasha, who was for years a prisoner of the Mahdists in Omdurman,
as a tall, broad-shouldered, powerfully built man, with a black beard
and the usual three scars on each cheek. He had the V-shaped gap
between his two front teeth which the Sudanese consider a sign of
good luck and which is said to have been the cause of his popularity
among women. Their name for him was Abu Falja, “the man with the
separated teeth.” His beautifully washed woollen garments were
always scented with a mixture of musk, sandalwood, and attar of
roses. This perfume, which was known as the “odour of the Mahdi,”
was supposed to equal, if not surpass, that of the dwellers of
Paradise.
After the siege and capture of Khartum the people who had held
out against the Mahdists were put to the most unspeakable tortures,
all of them, that is, except the young women and girls. These were
reserved for the Mahdi’s harem. For weeks after the battle there
went on in his camp at Omdurman the business of choosing from the
fairest for his own establishment, while the ones he rejected were
turned over to his chief favourites and advisers. After Mohammed
Ahmed’s death, which occurred close on the heels of his victory, the
Khalifa had the Mahdi’s widows and all the women of his harem
imprisoned in a high-walled compound guarded by eunuchs. None
was allowed to marry or go out into the world again.
The Omdurman of the present, which is laid on practically the
same lines as that of the past, covers almost the same ground,
although it has much fewer people. During my trip of to-day I climbed
to the top of the old palace of the Khalifa, and took a look over the
city.
The houses stretch along the Nile for seven or eight miles, and the
water front is fringed with a thicket of boats. Some of the town is on
the main stream, and reaches out from the river in all directions. It is
a city of mud in every sense of the word. Of its many thousand
houses there are not a score which are of more than one story, and
you can count on your fingers the houses made of burnt brick. When
I first rode through it I asked my guide if the holes in the walls had
been made by cannon-balls at the time of the fighting. “Why, man,”
he replied, “those are the windows.” Most of the houses are flat
roofed, with drain pipes extending out over the street so that when it
rains the water pours down on the necks of the passers-by. The one-
story mud houses have mud walls about them, and the mud stores
face streets paved only with mud. The walls of the vast inclosure of
the Khalifa are made of mud bricks, while the houses inside, which
now form the quarters of the Anglo-Egyptian soldiers and officers,
are of sun-baked dirt.
The Khalifa was so afraid of being assassinated that he had all the
houses near his palace torn down, shut himself up in his walled
inclosure, and kept at his side a great bodyguard, to which he was
forever adding more soldiers. His special apartments in the palace
were considered the last word in luxury. They had beautiful curtains
and carpets of silk and actually boasted big brass beds with
mosquito nets, spoils from the European houses at Khartum.
Standing on the Khalifa’s palace, one can follow many of the
streets with one’s eye. Some of them are of great width, but the
majority are narrow and winding. The whole city, in fact, is a labyrinth
cut up by new avenues laid out by the British, with the holy buildings
and the Khalifa’s old government structures in the middle. But the
British are improving conditions in Omdurman, and have elaborate
plans for its development, including a fine park in the centre of the
city.
Each of the towns of the Sudan has a British official to rule it; but
under each such governor is a sub-governor who must be a native
Egyptian. This man is called the mamour and is the real executive as
far as carrying out the orders of the government is concerned. He
represents the natives, and understands all about them and their
ways. The mamour at Omdurman is an ex-cavalry officer of the army
of the Khedive who fought with the British in their wars against the
Khalifa. He speaks English well, and as he understands both Turkish
and Arabic, he was able to tell me all about the city as we went
through.
Being followers of the Prophet, the Bisharin consider a difference of fifty years in
ages no bar to matrimony. This girl wife probably spent a whole day in
straightening out her kinky hair with a mixture of grease and clay, and adorning it
with beads.
Omdurman, which once had a population of a million, is a strange city of mud.

The houses and stores are one-story flat-roofed buildings with drain pipes
extending out over the street that drip on the passers-by when it rains.
Within sight of the British and their civilization, the Sudanese blacks live
miserably, crowded into their burrow-like mud huts, possessing only a few pots
and bowls and the sheets of calico in which many of the women wrap themselves.
I came down the Blue Nile from Khartum in a skiff. The distance is
about five miles, but we had to tack back and forth all the way, so
that the trip took over two hours. The mamour met me on landing.
He had a good donkey for me, and we spent the whole day in going
through the city, making notes, and taking the photographs which
now lie before me.
The people are stranger than any I have ever seen so far in my
African travels. They come from all parts of the Sudan and represent
forty or fifty-odd tribes. Some of the faces are black, some are dark
brown, and others are a rich cream colour. One of the queerest men
I met during my journey was an African with a complexion as rosy as
that of a tow-headed American baby and hair quite as white. He was
a water carrier, dressed in a red cap and long gown. He had two
great cans on the ends of a pole which rested on his shoulder, and
was trotting through the streets carrying water from one of the wells
to his Sudanese customers. His feet and hands, which were bare,
were as white as my own. Stopping him, I made him lift his red fez to
see whether his hair was white from age. It was flaxen, however,
rather than silver, and he told me that his years numbered only
twenty-five. The mamour, talking with him in Arabic, learned that he
was a pure Sudanese, coming from one of the provinces near the
watershed of the Congo. He said that his parents were jet-black but
that many men of his colour lived in the region from whence he
came. I stood him up against the mud wall in the street with two
Sudanese women, each blacker than the ink with which this paper is
printed, and made their photographs. The man did not like this at
first, but when at the close I gave him a coin worth about twenty-five
cents he salaamed to the ground and went away happy.
I am surprised to see how many of these Sudanese have scars on
their faces and bodies. Nearly every other man I meet has the marks
of great gashes on his cheeks, forehead, or breast, and some of the
women are scarred so as to give the idea that terrible brutalities
have been perpetrated upon them. As a rule, however, these scars
have been self-inflicted. They are to show the tribe and family to
which their owners belong. The mamour tells me that every tribe has
its own special cut, and that he can tell just where a man comes from
by such marks. The scars are of all shapes. Sometimes a cheek will
have three parallel gashes, at another time you will notice that the
cuts are crossed, while at others they look like a Chinese puzzle.
The dress of the people is strange. Those of the better classes
wear long gowns, being clad not unlike the Egyptians. Many of the
poor are almost naked, and the boys and girls often go about with
only a belt of strings around the waist. The strings, which are like
tassels, fall to the middle of the thigh. Very small children wear
nothing whatever.
A number of the women wear no clothing above the waist, yet they
do not seem to feel that they are immodest. I saw one near the ferry
as I landed this morning. She was a good-looking girl about
eighteen, as black as oiled ebony, as straight as an arrow, and as
plump as a partridge. She was standing outside a mud hut shaking a
sieve containing sesame seed. She held the sieve with both hands
high up over her head so that the wind might blow away the chaff as
the seed fell to the ground. She was naked to the waist, and her
pose was almost exactly that of the famed “Vestal Virgin” in the
Corcoran Art Gallery at Washington.
Omdurman is the business centre of the Sudan. Goods are sent
from here to all parts of the country, and grain, gum arabic, ostrich
feathers, ivory, and native cotton are brought in for sale. The town
has one hundred restaurants, twenty coffee houses, and three
hundred wells. It has markets of various kinds, and there are long
streets of bazaars or stores in which each trade has its own section,
many of the articles sold being made on the spot. One of the most
interesting places is the woman’s market. This consists of a vast
number of mat tents or shelters under each of which a woman sits
with her wares piled about her. She may have vegetables, grain, or
fowls, or articles of native cloth and other things made by the people.
The women have the monopoly of the sales here. Men may come
and buy, but they cannot peddle anything within the women’s
precincts nor can they open stands there. I understand that the
women are shrewd traders. Their markets cover several acres and
were thronged with black and brown natives as the mamour and I
went through.
Not far from the market I came into the great ten-acre square upon
which centre the streets of the stores. There are a number of
restaurants facing it. In one corner there is a cattle market where
donkeys, camels, and horses are sold. The sales are under the
government, to the extent that an animal must be sold there if a good
title is to go with it. If the transfer is made elsewhere the terms of the
bargain may be questioned, so the traders come to the square to do
their buying and selling.
It is strange to have shops that sell money. I do not mean stock
exchanges or banks, but real stores with money on the counters,
stacked up in bundles, or laid away in piles on the shelves. That is
what they have in Omdurman. There are caravans going out from
here to all parts of north central Africa, and before one starts away it
must have the right currency for the journey. In financial matters
these people are not far from the Dark Ages. Many of the tribes do
not know what coinage means; they use neither copper, silver, nor
gold, and one of our dollars would be worth nothing to them. Among
many of the people brass wire and beads are the only currency.
Strange to say, every locality has its own style of beads, and its
favourite wire. If blue beads are popular you can buy nothing with
red ones, while if the people want beads of metal it is useless to offer
them glass.
In some sections cloth is used as money; in others salt is the
medium of exchange. The salt is moulded or cut out of the rocks in
sticks, and so many sticks will buy a cow or a camel. The owner of
one of the largest money stores of the Sudan is a Syrian, whose
shop is not far from the great market. He told me that he would be
glad to outfit me if I went into the wilds. I priced some of his beads.
Those made of amber were especially costly. He had one string of
amber lumps, five in number. Each bead was the size of a black
walnut, and he asked for the string the equivalent of about fifteen
American dollars. The string will be worn around some woman’s
bare waist, and may form the whole wardrobe of the maiden who
gets it.
Not far from this bead money establishment the mamour and I
entered the street of the silversmiths. This contains many shops in
which black men and boys are busy making the barbaric ornaments
of the Sudan. Jewellery is the savings bank of this region, and many
of the articles are of pure silver and pure gold. Some are very heavy.
I priced rings of silver worth five dollars apiece and handled a pair of
gold earrings which the jeweller said were worth sixty dollars. The
earrings were each as big around as a coffee cup, and about as
thick as a lead pencil at the place where they are fastened into the
ear. The man who had them for sale was barefooted, and wore a
long white gown and a cap of white cotton. His whole dress could not
have cost more than ten dollars. He was a black, and he had half-a-
dozen black boys and men working away in his shop. Each smith sat
on the ground before a little anvil about eight inches high and six
inches wide, and pounded at the silver or gold object he was making.
In another shop I saw them making silver anklets as thick as my
thumb, while in another they were turning out silver filigree work as
fine as any from Genoa or Bangkok. The mamour asked two of the

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Confession and Criminal Justice in Late

Medieval Italy: Siena, 1260-1330 Lidia

Confession and Criminal Justice

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

.  .  .  . 

Aversa Sheldon, Robert Cranage-Jones, Andrew Small, and Oliver Ford. My

Note on Dates and Translations ix

Note on Dates and Translations

1. Why do we React to Violence the Way we do?

2        

particularly important for the methodology of the present analysis. This

4        

factors in explaining human behaviour.⁸ At the same time, other scholars

2. Lessons on Violent Crime from Medieval Studies

political life was strongly institutionalized.¹² Violence and factional conﬂict

6        

civic pedagogy of the Italian commune.¹⁷ As an instance of this widespread

¹⁷ Zorzi, ‘La cultura della vendetta’.

8        

political documents from the thirteenth century, ‘publice interest ne

³⁰ Fraher, ‘The Theoretical Justiﬁcation for the New Criminal Law’.

³⁶ Artifoni, ‘Preistorie del bene comune’, p. 71.

10        

destructive effect on the community.⁴⁴ In order to implement such a meth-

⁴⁴ Skoda, Medieval Violence, p. 234.

12        

societies, and their consequently high level of conﬂict, is not surprising.

Peace, moreover, cannot be separated from penance in thirteenth-century

⁵⁴ Bériou, ‘Le Sermon sur la paix’. See also Chapter 1, 30.

14        

3. Siena, 1260–1330: An Outline of its Political, Social,

The context in which this investigation is set can be reconstructed on the

16        

It was only in 1270, though, that Siena formally submitted to Charles,

allowed the ﬂourishing of art and architecture.⁷¹ Historians nowadays tend

18        

pre-eminence of friars and lay penitents (often connected to the former) in

4. Sources and Themes

This book, then, aims to combine testimonies of Christian spirituality and

20        

more ﬁrmly in its social context, rather than on miraculous manifestations.⁸⁹

be an overall trustworthy source.⁹⁵ Our third unofﬁcial saint is Pietro

⁹⁵ On chronological contradictions in this text see also De Fraja, ‘L’insegnamento della

22        

to dismiss a collection as useless for studying the society in which it was

¹⁰² This concept is vividly represented in a fourteenth-century novella by Sacchetti, Il

methodological problems posed by the collections Podestà and Capitano del

24        

Reﬂection on violence and violent conﬂict has been central in Christian

¹ Cacitti, ‘Il cristianesimo primitivo di fronte al problema della guerra’.

       27

The tolerance of the ecclesiastical milieu to the vengefulness of lay elites

⁴ Barthélémy, Chevaliers et miracles, in particular p. 5.

28        

creation of a model, or a discourse, for construing violent conﬂict and crimes

1. A Penitential Conception of Criminal Justice

       29

suggestione’), decides to kill the enemy; but before doing so he goes to

The man recognizes in Pietro’s admonition a miracle and an aid from

30        

most famous case is Albertanus of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii

       31

tranquillity of the soul’, the internal conﬂict must be resolved by creating