Childhood

At the time of Desiderius, Duke of Tuscany around 750 AD (He later became the last Lombard King to rule before the Franks) the Lombards had been completely Romanized, in their ways, clothes, religion, even haircuts, although they still continued to form the military and aristocratic elite, a group considerably smaller compared to the old population who worked in the fields and the rest of the traditional crafts.

By 750 AD we have records of at least one church and one monastery dedicated to Saint Ansano, a Benedictine Monastery of St. Eugene (730) and explicit references of Sienese bishops who participate in Papal councils and intervene mainly to support claims against the Bishopric of Arezzo  over 19 border parishes between Chianti and Montepulciano that both wanted to control.

Aside from the bishop whose residence lay on the site where the future Duomo of Siena would be built (until 913), Siena was also the seat of two Lombard gastaldi (magistrates), a judge and a minister of finance. Right when the Lombards had finally managed to become the undisputed masters of the Italian peninsula and Desiderius had ousted the Byzantines from the north, things came upside down.

Summoned by the Pope, who wanted to secure the papal sovereignty against the encroachment of the Lombard King, the Franks of Charlemagne crossed the Alps in 773. In less than a year Charlemagne had become the Rex Langobardorum and Franks had assumed the role of the Lombards.

After Charlemagne’s coronation the Lombard magistrates were replaced by an Imperial Count (Conte) with the incoming Franks forming the new cast of nobles after intermingling with the existing Sienese aristocracy. Very soon the town became a hereditary fiefdom of one family (Rainier). With the break up of the Carolingian Empire, the bishop became the only undisputed authority of Siena.

He exercised his power with a council of noble consuls who secured the popular support by calling the people in front of the church to approve the proposals. From the beginning of the 10th century the Chapter of the Cathedral was linked to the common life with its Schola which handed down -mostly- ecclesiastical knowledge to the public through its teachers, the scholae priores. Among them a venerated saint of the Catholic Church, San Bruno di Segni who taught in Siena’s Cathedral after 1070 AD.

A few years earlier, in December 1058 Siena had become the epicenter of one of the most contentious papal elections in the history of the Catholic Church. A number of cardinals who opposed the election of Benedict X (4 April 1058) in favor of Cardinal Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII) were forced to flee Rome and hold a separate synod in Siena with the support of Gérard de Bourgogne, Bishop of Florence.

Miraculously enough the synod of Siena did not elect Cardinal Hildebrand as the “rightful Pope” but Gérard de Bourgogne himself who then took the name Nicholas II and managed to ascend on the Papal throne after a winning battle in early 1059.

Around that time (mid 11th century) the city started to grow out of its initial nucleus in Castelvecchio, on the top of the hill, while the college of Sienese clergymen, commonly known as canons established one of the oldest surviving hospitals in Europe, the Santa Maria della Scala (a name reference to its location, in front of the Duomo entrance steps) in order to cater for the pilgrims and other travelers that passed from the city on their way to Rome.