The northern Italian cities were communes, sworn associations of free men who, like other town residents, began in the twelfth century to seek political and economic independence from local nobles. The local nobles frequently moved into the cities, marrying the daughters of rich commercial families and starting their own businesses. This merger of the northern Italian nobility and the commercial elite created a powerful oligarchy, a small group that ruled the city and surrounding countryside. Yet because of rivalries among competing powerful families within this oligarchy, Italian communes were often politically unstable.

Unrest from below exacerbated the instability. Merchant elites made citizenship in the communes dependent on a property qualification, years of residence within the city, and social connections. Only a tiny percentage of the male population possessed these qualifications and thus could hold political office. The common people, called the popolo, were disenfranchised and heavily taxed, and they bitterly resented their exclusion from power. Throughout most of the thirteenth century, in city after city, the popolo used armed force to take over the city governments. Republican government — in which political power theoretically resides in the people and is exercised by their chosen representatives — was sometimes established in numerous Italian cities. These victories of the popolo proved temporary, however, because they could not establish civil order within their cities. Merchant oligarchies reasserted their power and sometimes brought in powerful military leaders to establish order. These military leaders, called condottieri (kahn-duh-TYER-ee; singular condottiero), sometimes took over political power once they had supplanted the existing government.

Many cities in Italy became signori (seen-YOHR-ee), in which one man ruled and handed down the right to rule to his son. Some signori kept the institutions of communal government in place, but these had no actual power. As a practical matter, there wasn’t much difference between oligarchic regimes and signori.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the signori in many cities and the most powerful merchant oligarchs in others transformed their households into courts. Courtly culture afforded signori and oligarchs the opportunity to display and assert their wealth and power. They built magnificent palaces in the centers of cities and required all political business to be done there. Ceremonies connected with family births, baptisms, marriages, and funerals offered occasions for magnificent pageantry and elaborate ritual. Cities welcomed rulers who were visiting with magnificent entrance parades. Rulers of nation-states later copied and adapted all these aspects of Italian courts.