‘Pacta servanda sunt’

Guelphism/Ghibellinism was not the only political culture that enjoyed success all across the domain. In the second half of the fifteenth century, assisted by the advent of a dynasty with a legitimacy based on fairly shaky ground, the pacts of submission between the duke and the territorial bodies increasingly became the foundation upon which the new Sforza state was based. The contractualist culture adopted by the communities also played a part here, with the latter determined to confer an authentically constitutional significance on those agreements. While the prince tended to include them in the sphere of Visconti tradition, thus attributing a gracious (and therefore revocable) character to the concessions, the subjects tended to bind them to argumentation of a contractual kind (e.g. the remuneration of a service, a fidelity deserving of recompense, the inveterate observance of a practice followed by former dukes, etc.).