Representing Space in an Italian City Chronicle
Zusammenfassung: Dieser Artikel trägt dazu bei, die Wahrnehmung des Territoriums in Norditalien im Spätmittelalter zu untersuchen. Das Chronicon Parmense berichtet im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert von Ereignissen, die sich in der Region Parma ereigneten. Dabei werden eine Reihe von Techniken der Beschreibung verwendet und räumliche Markierungen wie Flüsse und Straßen genutzt, um Ereignisse zu lokalisieren, insbesondere militärische Aktivitäten, Überschwemmungen und andere Naturkatastrophen.
Abstract: This paper contributes to the study of the perception of territory in northern Italy in the later Middle Ages. The Chronicon Parmense describes events in the region of Parma in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries using a range of descriptive techniques and spatial markers like rivers and roads to locate events, especially military activity and floods and other natural disasters.
1. Introduction
The question of territory and the spatial nature of the late medieval Italian city states and signories has been much discussed in recent years. Scholars have clarified the legal and jurisdictional nature of boundaries, the spatial components of political practices, and the nature of territoriality.[1] Studies of the representations of these territories, however, lags a bit behind. There are several discussions of the regional maps that survive from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century northern Italy[2] and studies of geographical thinking in the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.[3] There has been, however, somewhat less attention given to the representation of space and territory in the more ordinary works that reflect the cultures and interests of the Italian cities.[4] There are several genres to consider, including saints’ lives and city descriptions, but I will focus here on one of the many chronicles that survive from the northern Italian cities of the later Middle Ages: the Chronicon Parmense. This chronicle treats the history of Parma from 1038 to the 1330s, but covers the period from the 1280s to the end in more depth and detail. The anonymous author may have been a notary or a judge in Parma who had access to earlier (and now lost) records of the earlier period.[5]
As a work that recorded the events of interest to the governing elites of the city, the chronicle described and memorialized the military actions, natural emergencies, and intersections with higher level power politics that affected Parma. It offers us a chance to see a set of approaches to describing the territory of the city, informed by (but not quite the same as) the working documents like tax and property records that underpinned the governance of Italian city-states. We see what is highlighted, what is recorded, what is omitted, as the author tries to record succinctly the key happenings of his city, placed in time by the chronological sequence of the work and dating phrases in the text, and located in space by a variety of jurisdictional and place names, locutions, and geographical features that would have allowed a reader to map events onto their own mental representation of the places that together made up Parma’s hinterland and surroundings.
At first sight, the Chronicon Parmense appears to represent space through movement in a series of brief itineraries. A second glance shows that the author also relied heavily on the administrative entities (city, district, bishopric) that would be familiar to participants in civic government to state concisely the territories in question. Occasionally, the local story is connected to a bigger regional or even peninsular story by means of regional descriptors like Lombardy and Tuscany and occasionally Ytalia.[6] Mostly, however, the rapid fire of names of cities and towns presumes a largely local readership who would be familiar with the places and topography around Parma and who would bring their own experiences of the territory to their reading of the chronicle. Some events, however, prompted the author to include more than just a route from point a to point b. When the author describes an event in terms that go beyond a mere route, he is generally attempting to show the wide-spread impact of the events. These exceptions to the author’s usual tersely itinerary-based approach to local spaces seem to be prompted most importantly by unusually severe weather events like storms and floods where there is a desire to emphasize the widespread nature of the havoc. Military events that impacted large proportions of the population receive similar treatment. In essence, the chronicle signaled the degree of disruption by applying a wider variety of descriptors of location and place.
2. Itineraries
The Chronicon Parmense depicts space most often in terms of the active movement of men and horses, heading out from the city and other centers to enact violence in the countryside or against surrounding castles, territories, and cities. Their movement implies a linear path, so the places named in the course of their movement are end points and intermediate points that indicate the route. People move up to (usque ad) a city or its walls; up to this bridge; up to that river.
For example, the podestà of Parma “rode up to the river Taro” to confront a potential threat.[7] A group allied with Guide della Torre of Milan “rode across the district of Piacenza and were up to the gates of Piacenza.”[8] Occasionally there is some indication of the specific road or route traveled but mostly it is left implicit, with just the arrival points as indicators for an audience who must have known the roads in question. The actions described in the countryside around the cities move people and horses and goods up to a series of markers (rivers, city gates, bridges) that function both as boundaries within the landscape and as narrative check points, given that bridges and river crossings were fraught with danger and city gates placed limits on raiding, requiring much more complex siege warfare to cross.[9]
Complimenting the activity of these descriptions, the chronicler localizes actions by placing them within the framework of the city’s district or the diocese. Agricultural successes and failures are tied to the lands of the district or to the diocese: in 1320, “everywhere wheat, spelt, and flax” were growing in the district of Parma, the land was “more fertile” than it had been in recent memory, but (in the same passage) the bean crop failed in the greater part of the diocese.[10] The exception to a shortage of fish during Lent were the “small fish that were captured with nets in the canals in the district of Parma.”[11] As we have seen above, military raiders ride across the district of a city (super districtum) to seize animals.[12] “All the other rivers of the diocese” flood.[13] Many animals die in the diocese of Parma and “throughout all of Lombardy.”[14] Luca Zenobi has described a “well-established territorial culture” in which the close relationship of jurisdiction and territory “had come to frame the way in which all contemporaries, and not just the jurists, conceived space politically.”[15] In the Chronicon Parmense, naming the district or the diocese becomes a verbally efficient technique for identifying the spaces of the city’s activities and influence, despite the fact that the city’s district and the bishopric would not have been fully contiguous and homogeneous expanses of land.[16]
3. Extent
Attempts to express larger scales of human activities during moments of stress use similar approaches to generate a sense of spatial completeness, but add multiple descriptors and multiple approaches to emphasize the wide-spread nature of the events. To bring home the extent of one flood, the author focuses on the people of the countryside fleeing the waters to take refuge in Parma.[17] They come “indifferenter” from the district of Parma beyond the river Enzo; indifferenter is an important modifier because it implies that the author’s normal habit would be to tell us the specific places that they came from. He goes on to say that they are coming from both above and below the “road,” which in Parma means the via Aemilia, the old Roman road running along the southern bank of the river Po. And he further specifies that people are coming from “this side” (the Parma side) of the river Enzo up to the river Taro. Using the locations of the rivers and the road further delineated the spaces that were affected by the floods and echoed the key sub-divisions of the district.[18] At the same time, this way of expressing space also emphasizes area and extent since it takes two rivers as boundaries and refers to effects on all the space between them. The unusual thoroughness of this description with its multiple parts and multiple approaches suggests that flooding, by moving outside of the itinerary- or route-based experience of human travel, forced the author to expand on his usual approach to locating events.[19]
Another circumstance that prompted through-going attempts to express a totality of an area was warfare. In 1325 the city of Parma was attacked by Azo Visconti. After a catalog of people and animals seized and houses and places burned, the author describes how the people of the countryside sought shelter in the city:
The entire diocese of Parma beyond the Parma River above and below the road [the via Aemilia] was abandoned and even above [the road] up to the river Enza all who could fled and escaped to the city with their things, their animals, and their persons.[20]
Rivers, roads, jurisdictions, and names of regions are all tools that can be used to set up the spatial parameters of action in the text. Expressions like above or below the road and the occasional use of a cardinal direction (sero, meridies) pin the action to specific points in the landscape.[21] Other phrases make a different point: omnia and indifferenter refer to all the people (or goods or animals) in an area and help to emphasize that all of a given area was impacted by the events.[22] Above all, however, the divisions of the territory of the city show how the road and rivers, used to express subdivisions of the district, created a kind of grid to overlay mentally onto the lands around Parma. The torrenti (Enzo, Taro) running down from the Apennines to join the Po provided the author with a framework for delineating the spaces of the actions of his world.[23] Rivers (and an important Roman road) provided a vocabulary and a diagram of spatial relationships, which could then be enhanced and made emphatic with a toolkit of geographical language.
* It is a great pleasure to return in this paper to discussions of space and rivers which have animated a number of insightful conversations with Dr. Sabine von Heusinger over a long and valued friendship.
[1] For an overview of this rich scholarship, see Luca Zenobi, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy: Milan, Venice & their Territories, Oxford 2023; Luca Zenobi, Beyond the State: Community and Territory-Making in Late Medieval Italy, in: Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet, Amsterdam 2022, pp. 53–80.
[2] For northern Italian maps, see especially Nathalie Bouloux, Trois cartes territoriales de Brescia, in: Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes. Journal of medieval and humanistic studies 21 (2011), pp. 103–18; and Nathalie Bouloux, Culture géographique et représentation du territoire au Moyen Âge: Quelques propositions, in: De l’Espace Aux Territoires. La territorialité des processus sociaux et culturels au Moyen Âge, ed. by S. Boissellier (Culture et Société Médiévales 19), Turnhout 2010, pp. 89–112.
[3] To mention only a few of the many studies on space in the works of the three great literary figures of the Italian fourteenth century: Theodore J. Cachey, Cartographic Dante,in: Italica 87,3 (2010), pp. 325–54; Boccaccio geografo: Un Viaggio nel Mediterraneo tra le città, i giardini e il “mondo” di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Roberta Morosini (Storie del mondo 4), Firenze 2010; Paul James, Emotional Ambivalence across Times and Spaces: Mapping Petrarch’s Intersecting Worlds, in: Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26,1 (2014), pp. 81–104; Nathalie Bouloux, Encore quelques reflexions sur l’usage des cartes par Petrarque, in: Quaderns d’Italià 11 (2006), pp. 313–26.
[4] See Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet, Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Introduction, in: Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet, Amsterdam 2022, pp. 13–26, specifically at 20–22 for the importance of including representations and a variety of source types in the study of territoriality and for a useful definition of “territory” in pre-modern history.
[5] Chronicon Parmense ab anno MXXXVIII usque ad annum MCCCXXXVIII, ed. by G. Bonazzi (RIS2 9:9), Città di Castello 1902–04. On the Chronicon, see Valentina dell’Aprovitola, Chronicon Parmense, in: Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle online, ed. by G. Dunphy Leiden 2016. I would like to express my warm appreciation to Bard Swallow, now a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, for their skillful assistance in my preliminary exploration of this source.
[6] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 136 (Lombardy), p. 214 (Tuscany), p. 117 (Italia).
[7] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 101.
[8] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 89.
[9] Giampaolo Francesconi and Francesco Salvestrini, La scrittura del confine nell’Italia comunale. Modelli e funzioni, in: Frontiers in the Middle Ages, ed. by O. Merisalo, Turnhout 2006, pp. 197–221, p. 148 for geographical markers. For crossing rivers in war time, see Aldo A. Settia, Il Fiume in Guerra. L’Adda Come Ostacolo Militare (V–XIV Secolo), in: Studi Storici 40,2 (1999), pp. 487–512, especially at 488.
[10] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 220.
[11] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 229.
[12] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 224.
[13] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 32.
[14] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 164.
[15] Zenobi, Beyond the State (as n. 17), pp. 66–67.
[16] Zenobi describes “a territoriality which was fundamentally modular, composite, and non-exclusive” in his Borders and the Politics of Space (as n. 2), p. 43. He argues in Zenobi, Beyond the State (as n. 17), p. 56 that “jurisdictions could overlap and communities coexist; we should therefore expect territories, too, to overlap and coexist within the same society.”
[17] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 173 for the following account.
[18] Gian Maria Varanini, L’organizzazione del distretto cittadino nell’Italia padana dei secoli XIII-XIV (Marca Trevigiana, Lombardia, Emilia), in: L’organizzazione del territorio in Italia e Germania: Secoli XIII-XIV, ed. by Giorgio Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit (Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento. Quaderni, 37), Bologna 1994), pp. 133–235, specifically at 148. For flooding in this period, see Michele Campopiano, The Evolution of the Landscape and the Social and Political Organisation of Water Management: The Po Valley in the Middle Ages (Fifth to Fourteenth Centuries), in: Landscapes or Seascapes? The History of the Coastal Environment in the North Sea Area Reconsidered, ed. by Erik Thoen, Turnhout 2013, pp. 313–32, especially at 326.
[19] See also Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 217.
[20] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 177. For a similar passage, see p. 173.
[21] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 10, 26, 188 (sero); p. 33, 136, 248 (meridie).
[22] Chronicon Parmense (as n. 5), p. 152–153, 182, 194 (indifferenter); p. 73, 143, 173 (omnia).
[23] Bouloux, Culture géographique (as n. 3), p. 108.
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Empfohlene Zitierweise / Suggested Citation: Victoria M. Morse, Representing Space in an Italian City Chronicle, in: Von unbequemen Dominikanern, organisierten Handwerkern und gefertigten Dingen. Festschrift für Sabine von Heusinger zum 60. Geburtstag, hrsg. von Julia Bruch, Eva-Maria Cersovsky und Andreas Lehnertz (Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, Beihefte 5,2), S. 108–113, DOI: https://doi.org/10.26012/mittelalter-34564.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Julia Bruch, Eva-Maria Cersovsky und Andreas Lehnertz (20. Juni 2025). Representing Space in an Italian City Chronicle. Mittelalter. Abgerufen am 17. Juli 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/145ve
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