(1.1.) The city-commune and its archives

During the 13^th and 14^th centuries, Bologna was organized in two parallel structures: the commune, presided over by the podestà, was structured in various councils to which all the citizens residing in the city, enrolled in the tax and military lists, had access; and the popolo, presided over by the capitano del popolo, structured in colleges (such as the anziani e consoli) and other councils (such as the consiglio del popolo) to which citizens enrolled in the guilds and arms societies (voluntary neighbourhood associations) had access (Tamba 2018). The two magistrates were foreign officials, called from another city to govern Bologna for six months. They were assisted by a group, the curia, consisting of several judges who presided over the courts and other offices, notaries who wrote documents, and berrovieri, guards at their command. At the end of their service, their work was subject to audit, and only if they were successful were they paid the money due to them (Gaulin, 2000). Also because of the need to verify their work the establishment of the rule of these foreign officials coincided with a new desire to preserve scriptures in the register, the so-called «scriptural revolution» (Maire Vigueur, 1995).

To preserve writings and to copy records filed at the request of citizens in Bologna there was the camera actorum, divided into a room of the commune and a room of the popolo. Each of the two repositories was equipped with cabinets (armaria), shelving (schaffe), chests (casse), sacks and other containers designed to store the documents (Giansante, Tamba & Tura, 2006).

In order to control the transmission of records from the offices to the camera actorum, delivery minutes called designations («descriptions») describing the deposited records were drawn up at the end of each term of office of a foreign magistrate. Sometimes, these were copied into a register, a kind of summary inventory of the documents.

(1.2.) The 1324 inventory: origin and description

The Liber seu memoriale omnium librorum et scripturarum repertorum et repertarum in camara actorum populi² («Book or register of all the books and writings found in the archives of the popolo») constitutes a more complex operation that does not merely record the existing records but attests to a rearrangement aimed at giving the material found a more coherent and rational arrangement.

On August 8, 1324, the consiglio del popolo decided to provide for a general rearrangement of the archives of the capitano del popolo, whose activity was exposed by Blanshei (2010). The records of the offices had not been deposited for five years; there was a lack of space to store them, and there was no list of the documents. The council entrusted the magistracy of the difensori dell’avere, the officials in charge of controlling and defending municipal property, with the task of overcoming these problems.³ Empowered by this resolution, the difensori dell’avere appointed two notaries (Tomaso domini Carnelvari and Egidio Zambeccari) with the task of drawing up this list, the Liber seu memoriale.

As a result of a recent restoration, the paper manuscript is currently protected by a parchment cover measuring 450×320 mm and two unnumbered guard sheets placed at the beginning and end of the register. On the recto of the first guard sheet, the reference number «I/4» and the indication «Armarium populi (consistenza al 1324) documenti dal 1281 al 1308» have been written in recent years in pencil. The manuscript measures about 420×310×20 mm and consists of a single fascicle formed by 25 bifolios which have a bell-shaped watermark. The blanks turn out to be ff. 1r-v, 3v, 5r and 9r. The initial leaf originally served as a guard sheet and is the only one wholly unoccupied by writing. It is possible that what has been preserved may be only the first part of a larger project. This would explain why the descriptions transcribed in the extant book each go as far back as the year 1308, while the rearrangement of the papers and the inventory date back to 1324. The manuscript consists of 50 ff. and has recently been foliated with pencil in the upper right margin of the recto of each paper with Arabic numerals, progressing from 1 to 50. Between ff. 34v and ff. 35r there is a flyleaf of paper preserved, containing an archival description: the paper is marked as «34/bis».

(1.3.) The 1324 inventory structure and relevance

Unlike the inventories preserved for the earlier period, in the Liber seu memoriale the logical structure coincides with the material organization, an indicator of an ordering project providing the context of the creation of this instrument of description. Indeed, the fifty-four series described in it correspond to as many mandates of individual capitani del popolo during the twenty-seven semesters of the period from 1281 to 1308, and to as many casse («chests») marked by Roman numerals between I and LIV. For each series, an initial note shows, on the left, the number of the chest that holds its records and, in the center, the name of the captain, the year and the semester of the mandate (Figure 1).

This is followed, for each series, by descriptions of the archival units it contains. These are mostly libri («books») with an average of about fifteen items per series/case.These descriptions are arranged in three columns so that three pieces of information about each individual description can be arranged side by side: On the right, there is the archival reference code, expressed by one letter following the order of the alphabet. The letters used are arranged in the following order: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, y, z, 7, 9 (the two «Tironian» tachygraphic symbols for «et» and «con»), + (a symbol in the form of a cross). On the left we read the traces of several inspections of the archives, which took place at different times, following the publication of the 1324 inventory. They are expressed with the initials of the inspecting notaries who wrote the signs «g», «p», and (capital) «L».

The actual descriptions occupy the middle column, in the center of the paper, and are the most substantial section of text on the page. They diverge considerably in the degree of analyticity because they depend on sources on which the two Bolognese notaries who prepared the inventory could rely in 1324. They are usually summary descriptions that provide a variable set of elements (the subject matter, the presence of the blanket, the type of deeds it contains, the name of the notary redactor and sometimes the name of the judge responsible for its creation, or the number of papers).

In the same fonds, an older but undated inventory of the camera populi is preserved fragmentarily; however, it can be dated at the end of the thirteenth century, certainly after 1285.⁴ In this inventory it is possible to identify some of the same archival units described in the Liber seu memoriale. The interesting fact is that they often have references codes different from those they appear to have in 1324. The hypothesis that during the rearrangement carried out in 1324 the notaries in charge provided for the production of new references codes is supported by the analysis of the covers of several surviving registers, which show in different spaces of the cover two different letters corresponding to the descriptions in the two inventories. For example, register 27 of the actual series of the «Giudici del capitano del popolo»⁵, shows on the cover in the upper left-hand corner the letter H, which corresponds to the alphabetic reference it appears to have in the thirteenth-century inventory, while further down it shows the letter A, which is set next to its description in the Liber seu memoriale (Figure 2).⁶

The inventory of 1324 did not give a passive account of the existing arrangement by copying descriptions and references already available, but was the instrument for the creation of a new system in which the documents of each series – corresponding to the semester of a capitano del popolo and distinguished by a single case designated by a figure in Roman numerals – were identified using an exclusive, regularly progressive, alphabetical code, which, unlike the previous reference codes, could not give rise to misunderstandings and made each document correspond to only one possible identification code.

The innovative structure of this inventory constitutes an important step in the history of archival practices and prompts us to study it analytically, at the same time as an example of the way of thinking about an archive in medieval Bologna and as a testimony to the archival structure assumed by the camera populi in 1324.

(3.1.) General principles

The Camera Populi 1324 dataset is an analytical and augmented transcription of the Liber seu memoriale that intends give account of the listed documents and to reflect the rationale of this source. This is different from current online⁷ and press description tools, such as that of Montorsi and Scaccabarozzi (2011) or Archivio di Stato di Bologna (s.d. 1). These are organized according to a hierarchical tree structure with, at the highest level, the repository and, below, funds and series. The Liber seu memoriale considers the archive as the place that gives public faith to the documents it contains. Tancredi da Bologna’s ordo iudiciarius, written in Bologna at the beginning of the thirteenth century, tells that something can be considered public if it comes from a public closet or archives, such as the account book («dicitur publicum, quod de archivo seu armario publico producitur, liber scilicet rationum», as in Bergmann, 1842, p. 248) Consistent with this principle, it describes the camera populi in a topographical order, manifested by the chests corresponding to the various captains who succeeded one another over the years and, within each chest, by individual units characterized by the alphabetical reference that the register had acquired following its reorganization.

(3.2.) The Registri table

For each description of an archival unit in the Liber seu memoriale, a row of the Registri (i.e., books) table of the dataset was created, marked by a progressive numeric identification code (column «ID»). For each row, the information arranged in the columns was derived partially from the descriptions themselves, and partially, when possible, from the corresponding registers existing in the ASBo.

With the exception of Latin descriptions and headings, all the other information is in Italian (see Table 1 for translation). The descriptions of the archival units in the Liber seu memoriale have been transcribed in full in the column «Inventory description».⁸ From the descriptions, we took information about the chest number («Chest»), and the archival «Alphabetic reference». For the records that have not survived these descriptions are the only sources of information. This is why, for lost documents we also derived from the descriptions other data in other columns: «Record type», «Writing material», and, if present in the descriptions, the «Number of leaves in the description», and acts recorded in the document («Acts» column) and the names of the persons responsible involved in the production of the document (“Person(s) responsible» columns. By drawing up a scheme that could be applied to a large set of documents, these persons were divided into three types: the person «Responsible for the administrative process», in this case the capitano del popolo, the persons «Responsible for the documentary production», i.e., the captain’s judge or judges, and the persons «Responsible for documentary process», namely the material extenders, i.e., the notary or notaries. From the start and end dates of the mandate of the capitano del popolo were derived, in the absence of other information (i.e., for lost documents), the start and end dates of writing the document.

The work of identifying the records described by the Liber seu memoriale, carried out by Armando Antonelli, constituted the most challenging part of building the dataset and made it possible to integrate numerous other pieces of information in other columns of the Registri table. Four elements were taken into consideration to identify a register described with an archival unit currently present in the ASBothe three persons responsible for the document (capitano del popolo, judge and notary, and the alphabetic reference. If these four elements of identification coincided, the identification was marked as certa (i.e., certain) in the «Identification» column. In other cases, when one of the elements (e.g., notary’s name) did not match, the acts recorded, and the number of leaves were also considered. In the case where these other elements matched, the identification was qualified as incerta (i.e., uncertain).

Although most of the individual descriptions in the Liber seu memoriale were identified with single records currently in archives, the research revealed several more complex situations which required adaptations in the dataset. In some cases, a single book described by the 1324 inventory was found to be currently dismembered into several books. In this case the row of the Liber seu memoriale description has been repeated as many times as there are current corresponding registers, and in each of the repetitions the modern reference code of the corresponding register has been reported in «Reference code» column. This has also been reported in the «Notes» column. In other cases, different registers, which in the Liber seu memoriale appear distinct and described in different descriptions, were found to be bound together in one currently existing register. In these cases, the register was reported as aggregato (i.e., Sammelband) in the «Conservation status» column, and the leaves of the existing register that matched the corresponding description were indicated in the «Notes» column.

In still other cases we found records from the period covered by the Liber seu memoriale which, although they should in principle be inventoried in the chests corresponding to the capitano del popolo under whom they were produced, do not appear in the 1324 inventory. The identification code of these documents has a “p” before the number and in the «Identification» column they were indicated as assente (i.e., absent).

The identification of the corresponding existing registers made it possible to add other elements. The text of the Heading was transcribed in the «Heading» column, when possible, from a modern inventory of the Giudici del capitano del popolo series written by Montorsi and Scaccabarozzi (2011), otherwise directly from the register. In the «dimensions» column the dimensions of the short side («b»), of the long side («h») and of the thickness («p») are measured in millimetres (mm). In the «Number of leaves and white pages» column was reported the number of existing leaves («ff»), the number of unwritten faces of these leaves («bb»), and when present the number of single pieces of parchment or paper bound between the pages («ced»). The presence and the material of the cover were inserted in column «Cover». The «Foliation» was identified as modern, ancient, expressed in Roman or Arabic numbers. The date of the first and last act recorded was inserted in columns «First date» and «Last date»). In «Acts» column were mentioned the acts presented in the description, in columns tagged «Person(s) responsible» were added other persons responsible, especially notaries, not mentioned in the descriptions of the 1324 inventory.

Data on the life-cycle of the document were included in columns «Creation», «Deposit» and «Disposition», as in the associated «First» and «Last» «date(s)» columns. To create categories that would apply to other medieval documents, this life cycle was divided into three phases: creation, deposit, and disposition, all of which were connected to an office and dated. The office of the creation phase (when the document remained in the office where it was produced), was identified on the basis of the archival description of the 1324 inventory, the header of the actual register, or the title of the responsible person for documentation (the judge). The creation dates have been inferred from the first and last recorded act (in the case of an extant register), otherwise from the first and last recorded document in other books produced during the mandate of the responsible person for the administrative process (the capitano del popolo). In the next step, the document was transferred to a place of deposit. In the case of the documents in the dataset we know (from other inventories) that they were certainly transferred into the camera actorum but we are not certain that they were already in the camera populi. The dates of this phase were set after the last recorded act (the end date of the creation phase) and 1324, the date of the Liber seu memoriale. In the subsequent phase, the document was deposited in a final archive where it was to remain until its transfer to the ASBo where it remains today. That is why the dates are the year 1324 (the date of the inventory) and October 22, 1874, (the birthdate of ASBo).

The identified documents were eventually supplemented with data concerning the current archival reference, divided down into its various hierarchical levels: «Superfonds», «Fonds», «Series», «Subseries», «Storage unit» and «Reference code».

(3.2.) The Persone table

In the Registri table, the names of individuals occupying the «Responsible» columns are expressed using alphanumeric codes consisting of the letter N (for Name) and a progressive number. In the Persone («persons») table a row has been created for each of these alphanumeric codes («Person ID»). Each row corresponds to an individual mentioned in the descriptions of the Liber seu memoriale, in the heading of the registers or in both these sources. The names, for which the most common Latin form has been transcribed, have been divided into various elements that characterized the onomastic system in use in medieval Italy: «First name»; «Patronymic»; «Family name»; «Profession»; «Italian form of the family name»; «Place of origin»; «City-commune under whose jurisdiction the place of origin was located»; «Office(s)» held in the Liber seu memoriale and/or the extant registers.

(3.3.) The Curie table

In the Registri table, the curia in which each document was produced is indicated (in «ID Curia» column) by an alphanumeric code composed of the letters «ID» followed by a progressive number. In the Curie table, an equivalent number of rows has been created for each of these alphanumeric codes («Curia ID» column). Each row corresponds to the curia of an individual capitano del popolo governing a semester mentioned in the titles of the Liber seu memoriale or in the heading of the extant documents or in both (column B). For each curia, the date of the oldest act (column «First date») and the date of the most recent act (Column «Last date») present in one of the extant registers are provided. The following columns («ID Capitano del popolo»; «ID Judge(s)»; «ID Notary(es)») list all the individuals directly part of the curia, expressed by the identification codes of the Persone table. Using the same sources and the same codes, the final columns («Massaro del Comune»; «Ufficiale comunale»; «Podestà») list other persons who collaborated with the curia of the capitano del popolo but were not directly part of it, either because they were citizens of Bologna or because they were part of the curia of the other foreign magistrate, the podestà.