Patrons and defenders

by Diana Webb

Among the most interesting of civic saints' cults must be reckoned those of the city-states of Italy. From the moment in the twelfth century when, in many cities, an association of important citizens supplanted the bishop as the principal governing authority, through the period of self-governing communes, to the emergence by the end of the fourteenth century of despots, the patron saint played an important symbolic role in all phases of urban history. The city's rulers required demonstrations of obedience both from the inhabitants of the city itself and from the subject communities of the countryside, rendered annually at the patron's alter on his or her major feast-day; to make this demand was an indispensable part of the procedure of registering subject status, even if the new subject were itself a city of some size and standing. Other cults, however, clustered around the central cult of the patron. The urban 'pantheon' was, for example, frequently enlarged by the institution of the