Abstract

The essay analyzes the central role of social control as the main means for exerting power in the Italian city-states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, focusing on a case-study: Siena during the age of the «Nine»: 1287-1355. Siena in fact offers an ideal workshop to understand the wealth and contradictions of a process that came to fruition between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. That very phenomenon, whose seeds were sown at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, was looking to create new political and social order along a progressive, and sometimes disorderly, growth of disciplinary initiatives and regulation.