Subjectivity of Cities and Churches

Let us briefly follow this interesting parallelism. Having established the analo­gy between city and church, Roland can present the city as a subject of rights to both persons and things; he can argue about the will of the city and also consider the representation of its personality as city.

As for the administration of the goods of a city, Roland finds a strong argu­ment for his contention that every city should be considered a res publica in the very words of Justinian’s Code, whose title 11.31 reads de administratione rerum publicarum (pluralised in a way to imply applicability to many cities of the Empire, than just the city of Rome). Despite this, Pillius had summarised the title without stressing the public character of the city, and the Gloss of Ac- cursius, some years later, had also interpreted the same passage as referring to Rome. Pillius rather likened the administrator of the cities to a kind of negotio­rum gestor, someone who, in Roman law, took care of the business of someone else.4³ Therefore, the government of a city is not considered by Pillius as a pub­lic one, but judged by the same standards of a management of wealth of any private subject.

Roland comes to the topic in a different way. He starts by confirming that the goods of a civitas have to be considered as public goods, because they be­long to the universitas, which gives to those goods a particular legal status, close to that of the church’s goods. Such goods can be sold only in a very par­ticular cases, that is when the public interest justifies an alienation; and just as the bishop swears to protect the wealth of his church, so must the public administrator swear, touching the holy gospel, not to alienate goods of the city without the consent of the res publica.^{[474] [475] [476] [477] Now, Ernst Kantorowicz, who based his study on royal practice, has masterfully shown the influence of the tradi­tion of the episcopal oath on the inalienability of the public domain?5 This influence is now justified by the theory of Roland, where we find a broader use of the parallelism between public and ecclesiastical goods.}

The notion of consilium rei publice is also of considerable importance.

The rich summa of Roland offers many other interesting points on the paral­lel between city and church. One final passage on the position of the municipal officers is worth considering. For this Tuscan lawyer they were as important as imperial functionaries and, what is particularly interesting, as clerics of a kind:

I believe that the office of the [members of the curia] is strongly recom­mended, because they serve the city and the Empire, and doing so they lift the citizens from a heavy burden. Therefore, to use an admirable im­age of order, we believe that the two swords walk keeping the same pace, so that like the church has its regular canons, so the city has its own de­voted clerks [conversi] which we call properly curiales, so that they should serve the church in the divine praise, and these devote their compliance to the secular needs of the cities. And both are tied by a personal condi­tion that is so heavy that they cannot leave their status, as I have said before.^[478]

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