5 Questions for Paolo Broggio

By Manfred Sing

Paolo Broggio is Professor for Early Modern History at Roma Tre University. In December 2025 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the IEG, where he worked on a new project on the question of purity in the Atlantic World in the 16th and 17th centuries. His new book, “Criminal Justice and Peace-Making in Early Modern Italy. Governing Hatred, c. 1500–1700,” in which he re-examines the role of peace agreements in early modern justice, was recently published by Boydell and Brewer, a publisher specialising in historical works. We asked Paolo Broggio five questions about his new study.

1. What was the initial impulse to explore this particular topic? Was there a moment during your research that particularly resonated with you?

The idea for this book has deep roots, going back to the research conducted for my undergraduate and doctoral theses, in which I examined, among other issues, the role of pacification and social mediation played by the Catholic clergy (and the Jesuits in particular) within evangelization missions in the Iberian Peninsula and the New World. As the years passed and my research progressed, I became increasingly aware that peace constituted a central concept not only in pastoral practice and religious thought, but also in the very functioning of criminal justice in the early modern period—an era in which the public criminal trial was far from having assumed the form familiar to us today, as heirs of the nineteenth-century liberal-bourgeois world. In premodern Europe, the restoration of social equilibrium was regarded as far more important than the mere punishment of the offender; the machinery of justice did not operate impersonally and adhered to criteria that were the natural product of a hierarchical, estate-based society.

“In the premodern period ‘Hatred’ was understood as something distinct from enmity and was therefore addressed through different conceptual and practical frameworks.”

2. What do “criminal justice” and “peace-making” mean in the title of your work? How does one „govern hatred“? Can you briefly explain the terms and why you use them?

The error we often commit—and one that, until not long ago, was also common among specialists in the history of justice—is to project onto the Ancien Régime past the same conceptions and operational criteria that characterize modern judicial systems, themselves the product of eighteenth-century legal rationalism, revolutionary experiences, and Napoleonic reforms. The statist paradigm, as well as the models of the “civilizing process” proposed by Norbert Elias and that of “Sozialdisziplinierung” proposed by Gerhard Oestreich,¹ have weighed heavily on our interpretations of the decline of interpersonal violence and of the process through which so-called judicial modernity came to be established.

The advent of modernity in the field of justice has usually been identified with the full triumph of the inquisitorial, ex officio procedure over the accusatorial one, and more generally with the emergence of a public and mandatory criminal process at the expense of “privatistic” systems of conflict resolution, which have therefore been regarded as survivals or residues of the medieval past. What I have sought to demonstrate, however, is that peace-making was by no means a purely “private” phenomenon, and that throughout the early modern period public authorities made extensive use of it in an effort to exert internal control over traditional community-based mechanisms for overcoming social conflict. My contention is that there is no principled incompatibility between processes of modernization and recourse to so-called “private peaces” (peace agreements, or peace pacts).

One of the findings of the research concerns precisely the definition of “hatred,” which in the premodern period was understood as something distinct from enmity and was therefore addressed through different conceptual and practical frameworks. Enmity was a notion strongly marked by political connotations, insofar as competition for the control of local power was structured around the friend/enemy dichotomy. Hatred, although not confined to the realm of purely human passions, constituted a liminal domain between individual conscience and social behavior; for this reason, it became a privileged field of intervention both for judicial institutions and for ecclesiastical personnel, particularly confessors.

3. What surprised you? Did your view of the topic change in the course of your research?

What struck me particularly in the course of the research was to realize that peace-making, when examined from the perspective of judicial institutions, often lacks spontaneity, despite the fact that legal doctrine traditionally distinguished peace agreements from the “sicurtà di non offendere” (sureties of non-offense) precisely on the basis of the absence of coercion of the will, which was regarded as a constitutive element of peace. The outcome of a peace was a written agreement, signed before a public notary, whose operative clauses emphasized above all the spontaneity of the act and the alleged religious motivation underlying the decision to reconcile. We know, however, that in practice social actors were subjected to extremely strong pressures by judicial authorities to ensure that their conflicts were resolved in this manner—pressures that could take the form of imprisonment or even the dispatch of soldiers or law enforcement officers to the property of those involved in the criminal events.

This was a system designed to prevent violence and to forestall the resumption of acts of revenge; for this very reason, sureties of non-offense had to be “reciprocal,” affecting both aggressors and victims alike, and they were also valid with respect to potential aggression against relatives, up to the third degree of kinship. The system thus mirrored the very mechanisms of vengeance, which were themselves grounded in kinship ties, and for this reason its stability was highly fragile. Peace agreements were systematically violated, as were sureties of non-offense. Consequently, central authorities were repeatedly compelled to intervene in order to centralize control over these practices, since social actors could be tempted to exploit a temporary state of peace with their adversaries in order to carry out acts of revenge more easily.

4. What kind of story do you tell in your book? Is there a happy ending?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this genuine system of violence control, essentially aimed at prevention, lay in the linkage between the recourse to legal instruments designed to constrain the freedom of action of individuals naturally inclined toward acts of vengeance and the imposition of binding financial obligations upon those same individuals and their kinship networks. Peace was primarily connected to the “sicurtà di non offendere”, a measure issued by a judge by which the parties undertook not to offend their enemies again. This undertaking, however, had to be guaranteed by a monetary surety, and thus by a guarantor chosen from among the agnates of the kin group. Should the surety be “broken,” the guarantor would be compelled to pay the amount of the bond into the public treasury. These sums were so substantial that communities came to regard such sureties as disguised confiscations. The only way to seek the annulment of the “sicurtà” was to reach a peace agreement with the opposing party, and from this perspective the action of ecclesiastical personnel proved to be of fundamental importance, since the forgiveness of wrongs suffered was a prerequisite for the conclusion of peace, and such forgiveness was in turn a necessary condition for the granting of absolution by the confessor. At the moment of sacramental confession, the confessor was required to demand of the penitent forgiveness of enemies both in conscience—“in his heart”—and in outward manifestations of benevolence and reconciliation toward them. The result was therefore a system situated midway between conscience and judicial court.

As already noted, this relationship was intimate both in terms of the connection between the penitential (internal) forum and the contentious (external) forum, and with regard to the developments of Christian thought, grounded in solid New Testament roots. To this end, I have analysed a number of authors whom I consider particularly significant. Certain passages of Scripture, especially in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, highlight Christ’s teaching not only of the obligation incumbent upon Christians to forgive the wrongs inflicted by their enemies, but also of the preference for informal modes of dispute resolution over the initiation of judicial proceedings. The precept of “correctio fraternal” alone is insufficient to explain this asserted preference for peace-making; yet, when considered in conjunction with various passages from the Pauline epistles and with the commentary on the Gospels found, for example, in the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom, it reveals the existence of a coherent system of Christian thought that affirmed the desirability of forms of conflict resolution extraneous to purely sanctioning and punitive criteria, even though the legitimacy and utility of the latter were never called into question.

This book does not narrate a story from which a happy ending can be drawn. The stories—impossible to reconstruct except through microscopic fragments—might appear as an endless series of happy endings, insofar as they concern bloody conflicts that culminate in reconciliation. The aim of the book is precisely to demystify this official narrative, since there existed a veritable system that exerted pressure on, and compelled, social actors to make peace under the threat of severe sanctions, including pecuniary and spiritual ones.

“Hatred is not merely a human passion; it is the outcome of specific social dynamics, often structured along gendered lines.”

5. What do you hope readers will take away from reading the book? Do you have a favourite anecdote?

My hope is that readers may draw inspiration from phenomena and dynamics that may appear distant and alien to the contemporary world, in order to better understand the roots of the systems through which every society seeks to preserve social equilibria and to govern conflict, enmity, and hatred. We are well aware of the extent to which hatred is an integral part of our everyday experience, not only in cases of interreligious and interethnic conflicts or of conventional warfare. Hatred is not merely a human passion; it is the outcome of specific social dynamics, often structured along gendered lines (as in the case of violence against women or conjugal conflict). In this regard, the book partially reconstructs the story of a married couple from the outskirts of Rome, in which the woman was a habitual victim of her husband’s violence and who were persuaded by a religious figure to make peace in church with her husband. The limited documentation available, however, suggests that while the woman consented to the religious peace, at the same time she did not renounce the judicial complaint she had filed against her husband. The story unfortunately ends tragically, as the husband—making a desperate attempt to induce his wife to withdraw her complaint—attacked her, stabbing her in the head. Peace agreements were often ephemeral, insincere, extracted through various forms of pressure, and ultimately ineffective; yet despite this, Ancien Régime societies regarded them as an indispensable means of governing “ordinary” violence.

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Manfred Sing is research coordinator at the IEG.

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Header image: © Università degli studi Roma Tre.

Appendix

1. Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, UK/Cambridge, USA 1994; Gerhard Oestreich: Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 55, 3 (1968): 329–347. ↩︎

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