A Long Day in Monte Rotondo: The Politics of Jeopardy in a Village Uprising (1558)

One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.