Status Updates From Sleepwalking Into a New Wor...

The families also spent a lot of money in Rome to show off their position... In the case of the Frangipane of Innocent II's time, on a leopard, which we know about because it 'strangled' an unfortunate woman in their household.

:(

In 1138 Anacletus died, and Innocent II took over the city with no real rival in sight, with full international support, and with revenge on his mind."

HAHA

"Hildebrand / Gregory VII was the last heir of the ancien régime, the Carolingian and post-Carolingian papacy, represented most recently by the Tuscolani."

I've never heard this framing before, and I love it.

The forested coastal dunes of Pisa itself were jealously guarded by the cathedral canons, who extracted rents from (among others) the city's galley-men, when they needed wood for ship-building, reinforced by violent 'silvani,' or forest-wardens.

Stealing this for a novel someday.

"The Constitutum usus proudly states that the Pisans had mostly lived by Roman law 'for a long time,' a statement which, as earlier documentary sources show, was totally false.

So what is a civic, Roman-trained consul doing in the 1140s? He is thinking about the feudal world... Oberto’s lifetime political practice took Milan away from traditional hierarchies… but in his thought-world, those traditional hierarchies took center stage. When earlier, Barbarossa used Roman law to justify his claims to sovereignty... Oberto must have been particularly easy to convince.

It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say, 'shit.' The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this.