A Roman Commune thread? Is it my birthday
already?
Is there some way that the Commune of Rome of the 12th century survives? It had the support of the HRE initially, could it have continued longterm? I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject as the most I've read is the wiki page, but I would suspect not. The Catholic church had much too much power in that time, though could there have been a pope to reject temporal power at that time? Anybody know any more?
So the first thing is that the answer to your question depends substantially on what you mean by "the Commune of Rome." Wikipedia suggests that the commune was one contiguous entity, but that's not really the case - the Commune was more like a movement, which waxed and waned, changed its objectives, politics, and leaders, and at times even ceased to exist only to be resurrected again.
I think it's possible to divide the Commune into three "phases." The first is that which starts with the creation of the Senate as Innocent II is on his deathbed in 1143, continues with the elevation of Giordano Pierleoni as the Patrician of Rome, and ends in 1145 with Pierleoni's fall from power and the Commune's subjection to Eugene III. The second is what you might call the "Arnoldist phase," starting with the arrival of Arnold of Brescia in 1145 and continuing until the coronation of Frederick Barbarossa and Arnold's death in 1155. The third and longest-lasting phase was a sort of "phase of accommodation," less radical than the previous two, from 1155 until the 1190s, in which the "communal" government was more pro-papal and less revolutionary, and whose "senate" was gradually reduced to a handful of men (and in the end it was a "senate" of one man, not terribly different from the
praefectus urbi who had come before).
The political changes between these phases are enough to give you whiplash. During the first phase, the Romans were bitter opponents of papal domination and managed to give Lucius II the dubious distinction of being the only pope in history to die of a wound sustained in battle. In the second, they added to this some amount of religious dissent (although it's hard to say how different their beliefs really were, if at all) and an odd sort of cargo-cult Classicism. Yet in the third phase, we find a Roman army led by Oddone Frangipani, the very same man who had assisted Lucius in his failed attempt to destroy the commune, attacking an
imperial army at Tusculum (and suffering one of the most lopsidedly crushing defeats of the 12th century).
I doubt that at any point the Roman Commune "had the support of the HRE." Surely not
initially, when the rebellion was proclaimed, because that was the result of the Pope not bowing to the local interests of the Roman people and their elites and had nothing to do with imperial politics. The commune wasn't really "pro-imperial" in a meaningful sense until the second, Arnoldist phase, and as that phase ended with Barbarossa getting the imperial crown from the Pope, butchering Romans in the streets, and executing Arnold of Brescia, I think it's safe to say that their pro-imperial sentiment was not reciprocated by the emperor. They did previously appeal to Conrad III for protection, but then so did the Pope, and it didn't matter either way since Conrad died in 1152 before he could make the journey.
The Commune's aims (at least in its first two "revolutionary" guises) were very difficult to achieve. What they wanted was not all that odd - an autonomous communal government like that of Milan or the other inland communes of (northern) Italy. The problem was that such communes generally took shape by either stealing the powers of the local bishop or co-opting him into the government, and Rome's bishop was the Pope, who would have to either surrender his rule over Rome or meekly submit to share his sovereign rights with a bunch of petty Roman lords. It was, frankly, never going to happen; all the Pope had to do was flee the city and set up shop elsewhere, which is exactly what Lucius and Eugene did. If the Pope is going to be divested of his temporal power at this point, someone will have to make him, and the Romans can't do it.
The Romans, particularly in the Arnoldist phase, imagined that the emperor would be their salvation, but this was never a very realistic hope. If you have to choose between being the friend of the Pope and the friend of some rebels in Rome and their semi-heretical hairshirt-wearing preacher, you'd be smart to choose the former and Frederick did exactly that. Rome has nothing to offer the emperor which he can't get from the Pope, and until the schism of 1159 and the subsequent Imperial-Papal war there was no reason that he should recognize the Commune as anything other than a bunch of arrogant upstarts.
One could argue that the Roman commune suffered from being just a bit too early. They appealed to the emperor at a time when the pope and emperor were largely in accord; the relationship between Frederick and Adrian didn't really start going downhill until the Papacy nakedly betrayed the emperor in the Treaty of Benevento in 1156, a year after Arnold's death, and a full breach didn't come until Adrian's death in 1159 and the disputed papal election that followed. Perhaps Frederick, at that point, regretted treating the Romans (and Arnold) so poorly, but there was nothing to be done about it; that ship had sailed, and from there on the commune took an increasingly pro-Papal stance in opposition to neighboring communes with imperial sympathies.
If you want a Roman commune in the model of its early, revolutionary form to succeed, it's probably better to wait until the Pope and the Emperor are already at each others' throats. An emperor-elect thirsty for the crown is not the guy you want as an ally against the only man in Christendom who can give him that crown. If you wait, however, you risk not having a Roman Commune at all, as the rebellion occurred under very specific circumstances. There's also a potential paradox at work here in that Frederick, who we are positing as a champion of Roman civic liberty, was elsewhere an inveterate
enemy of communal government, preferring to install podestas and enforce his claims to imperial "regalia" to the absolute maximum as if Italy were just another German province. Even if he decides that the Romans would be useful allies against the Pope, is he going to endorse their senate and other retrograde republican institutions or is he going to find someone like Pierleoni and make him
patricius or
iudex palatinus or some other title which basically translates to "my loyal dictator in Rome?"