Epilogue

Any investigator of the origins of a practice which began sporadically would do well to bear in mind the remark in Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics that one swallow does not make a summer. The high summer of the employment of religious in public office in the Italian cities does, nonetheless, appear to have been the second half of the thirteenth century and the early decades of the fourteenth. In many, though by no means all, cases, it was already a residual phenomenon by the mid 1300s. In the intervening decades, had you walked into one of the cities discussed here (and many others), you might well have encountered men wearing a religious habit in the tollbooth at the city gate, or in the main square, weighing salt, flour or perhaps silk cocoons. Others might have been found supervising work on roads, walls, water supply or bridges. And going inside the new buildings of government, you could well have met a brother of the Humiliati or a monk in the habit of the Cistercian order. He would probably be working with laymen at his side, and would be there at predictably regular times, counting, checking, writing and organising the registers and books of a government office.