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Acciaiuoli
Leading Florentine mercantile and banking family during the 14th and 15th c., who assumed a major role in the republic's political life, beginning with the support of the signoria of ...
Bardi
A family of Florentine merchant bankers who in the late thirteenth century established branches in Italian city-states, England, Flanders, and France. In the early fourteenth century they were the ...
Bergamo
Situated in the present-day Italian region of Lombardy, the city of Bergamo lies close to the Alpine foothills. During Lombard rule (568/9–774), it was the site of an important duchy ...
Bologna
N. Italy. In the Middle Ages its university (founded in the 12th cent.) was the chief centre in Europe for the study of canon and civil law.
Borgia
The family name of Rodrigo Borgia (1431–1503), later Pope Alexander VI, and his illegitimate children Cesare (c. 1476–1507) and Lucrezia (1480–1519); their traditional reputation was for ruthless ...
Brescia
A fortified city and episcopal see in Lombardy. In 1426 Brescia passed from the Visconti family to Venice, to which it belonged until 1797. In February 1512, during the Wars ...
Carrara family
A family whose members ruled Padua from 1318 to 1388 and, after a two-year interregnum during which the city was held by Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, from 1390 to ...
commune
(in Europe) A medieval western European town which had acquired specific privileges by purchase or force. The privileges might include a charter of liberties, freedom to elect councils, ...
condottieri
(Italian condotta, ‘contract’) The leader of a medieval mercenary band of soldiers. Mercenaries flourished in the climate of economic prosperity and inter-municipal warfare of 14th- and 15th-century ...
da Romano family
One of the leading families of northeast Italy between the 12th and the 13th centuries. It took its name from the district of Romano, between Vicenza and Treviso, but most ...
Della Scala
An extremely influential Ghibelline political dynasty that controlled the city-state of Verona from 1277 to 1387. During the early 1200s, the della Scala (or Scaliger) family steadily grew more ...
della Torre family
Struggled against the Visconti for the hegemony over Milan between the second half of the 13th century and 1311. Between 1259 and 1277 it took control of the city, where ...
despotism and tyranny
The ‘tyrant’ was the antithesis of the good ruler. Given the assumption that rulership operated within a moral framework, a monarch who acted for his/her own benefit rather than the ...
Este
Italian family, rulers of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio from the late 13th century until 1598, when Ferrara was annexed by the papacy, and thereafter of Modena and Reggio until 1796, when the family ...
Ferrara
Italian city of uncertain origin located in the east of the Po valley. In the 6th century Ferrara was controlled by the exarchate of Ravenna and in the 8th century ...
feudalism
[De]A strictly hierarchical political and economic system in which land is granted in return for military or labour services.
Giovanni Conversino
(1343–1408),schoolmaster, humanist, and statesman, was born in Buda, where his father was physician to King Louis of Hungary, but raised in Ravenna. Educated in Ferrara and at the Universities ...
Giovanni Sercambi
(1348–1424), Italian novella writer and historian.Many of his Novelle (Novellas, 1390–1402) borrow from popular genres such as fabliaux, anecdotes, oral poetry, and fairy tales. Fairy-tale motifs are ...
lordship and town
The central MA can be considered a turning point for the organizational systems of towns and the relations with their lords.1. Towns after the Roman Empire2. The ‘communal movement’3. ‘Communal ...
Malatesta
The Malatesta were a family of landlords and soldiers from the Romagna. They established a lordship (signoria) in Rimini in 1296, and extended their rule in the Romagna. Although temporal ...
