ABSTRACT
Though the coniuratio was one of the most essential patterns of European medieval constitutional realities, one might argue that there were no fully fleshed conspiracy theories until the Renaissance. Indeed, the coniuratio, the Latin term for the making of reciprocal oaths, was the founding act of communities and medieval cities by which a not yet formally integrated social group was forged into a legally constituted corporation; a city, basically, was nothing more than the coniuratio of its citizens (Oexle 1985; Bader, Dilcher 1999: 366–87). As coniurare – i.e. conjuring – was pointing to the socially binding power between people with common goals before any constituted commonwealth, coniurationes are found in many other medieval contexts and particularly within then constituted cities; people could even go back to that original form of establishing social binding as a means to oppose the constituted institutions. In fact, parts of the population could separate themselves from the rest or from the elite and even conjure against each other, forming conjurations in competition for power behind the same city walls. The fazioni and congiure of late medieval Italian city states were in the end nothing more than this reciprocal enactment of the founding principle of cities within and against the city itself (Guidi 1992; Villard 2008). The emergence of modern conspiracism was an urban phenomenon intrinsically linked, from the beginning, with germs of local forms of a public sphere (fama, rumore) and was certainly the medieval seedbed for the modern conception of conspiracy theory (Crouzet-Pavan 1997: 223–55). This double-bind semantics of con-iuratio was mirrored by the same positive and negative double semantics of the con-spiratio: in Ciceronian language, ‘being of one mind or spirit’ could imply the ‘con-spiratio’ between two or several philosophical friends.
