Plebeian Italian Republics

What if during the Middle Ages plebeian elements had been successfully been in charge of Venice, Genua, Pisa, Florence (maybe even a successfully Rome Commune or other Republican approaches)? This can be done either by revolution or evolution. It can be also backed by patrician nobility deciding to go plebeian for for political strategy reasons.How would the Medival world react to plebeian City states ? Could a plebeian patriotic philosophy manifest in that era ?
 
What if during the Middle Ages plebeian elements had been successfully been in charge of Venice, Genua, Pisa, Florence (maybe even a successfully Rome Commune or other Republican approaches)? This can be done either by revolution or evolution. It can be also backed by patrician nobility deciding to go plebeian for for political strategy reasons.How would the Medival world react to plebeian City states ? Could a plebeian patriotic philosophy manifest in that era ?

How are these states funding themselves? Because the answer to that question drastically changed the situation on the ground.
 
Long story short, the demographic make-up of lower urban classes for most of the Middle-Ages prevents them to have a solidified and maintained influence. For instance, their low demographic self-renewal implied regular migration from countryside, their poverty (in a large enough urban center, you can consider 30to 40% of the city to be made of indigents). Note that the increasing popular part of the cities is a consequence of a nobiliar/patrician build-up, trough their capacity to organize it including architecturally around their houses and semi-public expansion (such as closed courtyards), something the lack of economic power and the lack of preceding political power simply prevents for popular classes taken as a whole.
It doesn't help that a large part of low classes in cities was working outside the walls, on fields they didn't owned.

Eventually, the most "plebeian" outlook you could have would be municipal republics being dominated by middle-classes, as in artisans, owners of small property, intellectuals, etc. Arguably their numbers and power grew out of the XIIth century's changes as well, especially after the XIIIth, and the conflict between "populus, minores" and the upper classes generally involve them a lot and allowed the former to gain some power but generally thanks to factional rivality among the upper classes or even trough the support of the aristocratic power (such as the Counts of Toulouse taking the right to choose consuls being supported by medii, or the French king supporting from afar peripheral autonomies).
The reliance over a greater hegemonic power isn't a good indicator of their potential.

One could argue that entities and revolts such as the Comune of Rome could point that urban middle-classes had chances to weight in the political structuration, but again the differenciation between middle and upper classes isn't obvious politically, and still had to rely on a greater support.I'd rather have @Carp 's opinion on this, tough.
 
Well , I though of them as trading cities still but with alternate social dynamics and political participation/ representation.

Then they're not going to be plebian cities with much wealth or a long life span. The Patricians will be the ones providing the money for the treasury almost exclusively, while the masses decide how it's going to be spent which is not a receipe for financial responsibility or institutional maintenance (For example funding the kind of navy that helps maintain commercial supremacy). I fully expect to see the governments facing frequent bouts of bankrupacies and losing their trading positions out of that irreliability to be swallowed up by emerging national polities much earlier than iotl
 
One could argue that entities and revolts such as the Comune of Rome could point that urban middle-classes had chances to weight in the political structuration, but again the differenciation between middle and upper classes isn't obvious politically, and still had to rely on a greater support.I'd rather have @Carp 's opinion on this, tough.

In Rome, at least, there was a fairly clear (although not absolute) differentiation between the nobiles or "true" aristocracy and what Chris Wickham terms the "medium elite," which is as good a phrase as any. These were the local elites of Rome's regiones and the key players in the Roman Senate. Although many of them were tradesmen of one kind or another (butchers, masons, smiths, etc.) what tended to define the "medium elite" was a diversification into agriculture via leasing ecclesiastical and monastic land, and the accumulation of various administrative offices in the Church (notaries, judges, various kinds of stewards). A member of this class had no allodial estates or "fiefs" properly so called, but they clearly could live comfortably on a diverse income derived from some mixture of trades, rents, agricultural production, and administrative fees. They were an armed class as well, possessing weapons and armor and composing the city's militia, and owned fortified or tower houses of their own.

This class of people existed in other cities (although the size of the Roman bureaucracy meant that they were rather more numerous than elsewhere), but what seems to have been different in Rome is that instead of allying up, they allied down. Whereas in other communes such upper-middle class citizens tended to aspire to the aristocracy and to some degree merged with them, excluding the orders beneath, the Roman upper-middle class considered the aristocracy to be its enemy and tended to look for allies from their lessers among the "middle class" properly so called. In Rome, the economy was dominated by the Church - note that both of the means of advancement to the "medium elite" I mentioned came through the Church, either by leasing its land or holding offices in its administration. But while the Church administration was staffed by this upper-middle class, it was ruled by a curial-aristocratic club, families of the nobiles who occupied both lay and ecclesiastical posts at the top of the hierarchy. The totality of the Church's economic dominion and the iron grip which the aristocracy exerted on the Church and its high offices created a situation where the medium elite's ambitions were frustrated, causing them to see the aristocracy as an enemy to be overthrown rather than a social club to rise into.

Accordingly, the initial rebellion and establishment of the commune was directed against the curial-aristocratic alliance that held the commanding heights of political and economic power. They usurped the Pope's regalia in the city and claimed it for the Senate, abolished the office of the urban prefect (generally an aristocrat appointed as the city's administrator by the Pope), and tore down the towers and palaces of the aristocrats (termed the nobiles and potentes urbes) and high-ranking clergymen. They were not opposed to the church as an institution - they derived much of their benefits and livelihoods from it - but wished to control it themselves and remove the parasitic aristocratic elite at the top. One could look at the Commune, particularly in its original intent, as an effort by what you might call the "upper-middle class" to advance from merely staffing the Church bureaucracy to actually controlling that administration and its considerable revenues directly.

As mentioned, this leading class of the Commune looked for support and assistance from below - not to the truly lower classes like common laborers, but to the fringes of the medium elite and lesser artisans and tradesmen who represented the main body of the "middle class" as you might call it. But these men were not the motive force of the revolt, and probably could not have been. In the first place, the medium elite was already an armed (and armored) military body. Additionally, their grievances against the curial-aristocratic order were more acute, because they already moved within the Church administration as its estate managers, renters, and bureaucrats; they understood how the aristocratic elite controlled the wealth of the Church, could personally resent their dominance, and could credibly contemplate overthrowing them. Lower artisans and tradesmen with no presence in the Church structure either as renters or administrators were not in the same position to either be aggrieved by or seize the power of the bishops and aristocrats. It may be this larger body of the "middle class" - or even lower orders than this - which was subsequently motivated by political Arnoldism some years later; Arnold was said to be influential in the public assemblies, and to have stirred up a "rustic mob without aristocrats or elites."

So here, at least, you sort of have an example of a "patricianate" going "plebian," but with qualifiers - the class which led the Commune was not a true patricianate but an aspiring upper-middle class, and the "plebians" they allied with were not laborers, peasants, or indigents but the lower orders of the middle class. This example may be difficult to repeat, however, because it appears to have been unique to Rome and its curious political and economic situation. Rome had a fairly numerous, well-educated, and well-armed administrative upper-middle class which found itself locked out of power by an impenetrable aristocratic oligarchy, and this condition can't be found everywhere.
 
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