Such activities also lead us to think of proper bodies for deliberation and execution: the conventus ante ecclesiam of the edict, which has a special peace , that is, it is protected from perturbers with far more serious penalties; or the asamblatorium , as a Milanese map of 879 calls the public forum, in front of the cathedral. These are rudimentary city assemblies, organ of the internal administration of the urban universitas , which have the authority to issue praecepta , as the count and the bishop issued them, have their own notary distinct from the notarius domini regis and from the notarius ecclesiae or episcopi, which is mentioned in sources of the century. IX, keep their decisions in written documents. Among other things, they rule on the acceptance of strangers into citizenship.
All this, in the century. X, does not fall but is perfected, as the various functions of city life are unified under the bishop, and the city grows in population, activity, free initiatives, and the meetings, conventus and colloquia become numerous (Pisa 1084), the commune consilium civitatis (Milan 1098), the consulatus , a word that here and there begins to indicate the meetings and the place of the same (Milan 1097), and which is similar to the other which then indicated the men delegated by the assembly, the consules. And this, in one form or another, in the north as well as in the south, where not only the military and landed aristocracy hints at supplanting the Byzantine duce and then also the indigenous duke in the functions of government, but ceti, omnes homines de civitate , maiores mediani et minores or cunctus populus witnessing important acts of government, committing oneself to the present and future citizen community, etc. All this, with some precedence in order of time, especially in the Byzantine provinces. In short, the city has a more or less rudimentary but its own organization, within the increasingly weak and evanescent framework of public power and as an aid to power itself, especially its fiscal functions: an organization that also has its topographical members, that is the neighborhoods, each in correspondence with a door, each with a certain sector of walls to defend and maintain, a certain ideal share of common land to be enjoyed, certain tasks and responsibilities. Which could also be, as has been argued, the very structure of the ancient Italian city, including Rome,
In the century X, according to topschoolsintheusa, the changes and progress in the social structure of the Italian populations became more rapid. The dark internal work began to come out. The same political upheavals, the confiscations and the assignment of assets and benefits from one lord to another, the usurpations of the seculars to the detriment of the ecclesiastics, the raids of Hungarians and Saracens, the ruin of many monasteries, were resolved in food for new social forces, ascending from lower classes. Many freeings of servants, due to the growing difficulty of keeping them tied to the gleba. Much rise of small people of servile condition, through the service on horseback, the clerics, the low offices of Curtense, marriage with women of free status (hence free children, since filius matrem sequitur), the robberies of manor property in time of episcopal vacation, of monastic disorders, of ruin of noble families. Many lands cultivated, especially by the churches. Great preference given to simple farmers and free men by the churches themselves in granting land. Extensive construction of castles that served to protect the land and the settlers from the assaults of the Hungarians or from the feudal guerrilla, but which also represented the multiplication of the branches of the noble families, the rise of the minor feudal classes in front of the major ones, the effort of organization and of empowerment of men and of the earth. And then they had a strong influence on social and economic life. The castles meant a tiny aristocracy of castellans; peasants hired to defend the walls and use weapons, in short, the military organization of the people; contractual and written relations between organic nuclei of free men and the lord, and impulse given to the new associative life; concentration and absolute increase of people in and near the walled places, due to the greater protection that was offered to them and to the new activities that developed, while the small family and Curtense industries were expiring. The royal concession of the market to castles is very frequent: often accompanied by the concession to remove towers and walls. And the result was many tiny new cities, with the same somewhat complex social structure. The rural population broke or loosened the iron bond with the great land tenure and slowly dissolved it here and there, putting itself through the castle and the local market in some contact with the city. They cannot be separated, around 1000, the socio-economic movement of the Italian countryside and the rebirth of the old cities. They too are now growing in inhabitants: and the rise of parishes between the century is proof of this. IX and X, each with its minister and its religious services, where previously only the parish or cathedral church performed them; the construction of a more solid and vast walled enclosure than many cities already in the century. X undertake and others more in the XI. The cities were beginning to make some lively calls felt to the surrounding populations; they became the seat or the moral center, the meeting place of the minor nobility, made up largely of vassals and emphyteutes of the bishop and ecclesiastical bodies, of their officials for the temporal, vice-committees, vicedomini, lawyers, gonfaloniers, etc. Some, originating from the city, others from the countryside, but they too were increasingly oriented towards the city, of which they were becoming the greatest driving force. Behind them, but already with their own physiognomy, the real citizens, i cives , the bourgeoisie, equally linked to land tenure, but already aimed at new activities, later foundation of all its material and spiritual life.
