Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usage
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Police Power in the Italian Communes
- 2 Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy
- 3 The Logic of Third-Party Policing
- 4 External Threats: Policing Out-Groups and Criminality
- 5 Internal Threats: Policing Violence and Enmity
- 6 The Social Impact of Third-Party Policing
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Index
4 - External Threats: Policing Out-Groups and Criminality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usage
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Police Power in the Italian Communes
- 2 Police Discretion and Personal Autonomy
- 3 The Logic of Third-Party Policing
- 4 External Threats: Policing Out-Groups and Criminality
- 5 Internal Threats: Policing Violence and Enmity
- 6 The Social Impact of Third-Party Policing
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 4 explains how the growth of police power in the communes followed logically from the criminology of the day. Communal regimes criminalized nocturnal travel, arms-bearing, and gambling in part because they understood those behaviors to be characteristic of men of ill repute, who also committed burglaries, assaults, and homicides. Whereas it was difficult to catch someone perpetrating a capital offense, it was relatively easy to catch someone prowling at night, carrying a knife, or playing a dice game. Thus, police patrols functioned as a dragnet. They not only disciplined individuals who broke the rules of public order but also aimed to catch felons and enemies of the commune whose very existence was anathema to the established order.
Keywords: corporal punishment, torture, deterrence, reputation, outlawry
Early one morning in July 1286, not long after the cathedral bell tolled daybreak, the familia discovered three men of Bologna—Bertolino, Bernabè, and a tailor named Giacomo the Mute—each carrying a knife. Besides the weapon, Giacomo had his clothes stuffed full of pears and other fruits. Two days later the podestà's judge, named Ugo, opened an inquest against the three men as “malefactors who are said to be robbers, thieves, assassins, and despoilers of the vineyards and orchards of the city of Bologna.” He questioned Bertolino accordingly: Do you go to vineyards by night to despoil them of grapes and fruits? Were you out at night to put ladders to the houses of the good men of the city of Bologna in order to steal from them? Were you carrying weapons in order to assassinate anyone? Are you an assassin? Bertolino confessed to carrying the knife, but he denied the rest of these allegations. Bernabè faced a similar battery of questions, but likewise denied being a thief or assassin.
The perceived link between thieves and the night is ancient, of course, and partially explains the judge's line of questioning. These defendants had apparently been out at night armed and, in at least one case, picking fruit in someone's orchard. However, the interrogation of another resident of Bologna named Franco—discovered bearing prohibited arms on the same day as the three wayfarers above, but during the daytime and without suspicious cargo—points to other factors at work.
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- Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228–1326 , pp. 173 - 216Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019