page_title: Oath of Pontida
section_title: Contemporary sources
hierarchical_section_title: Oath of Pontida / History / Contemporary sources
caption_attribution_description: English: Oath of Pontida (Giuseppe Mazza, 1851) Italiano: Giuramento di Pontida (Giuseppe Mazza, 1851)
context_page_description: The oath of Pontida, according to tradition, would have been a ceremony that would have sanctioned on 7 April 1167, in the abbey of Pontida, near Bergamo, in Italy, the birth of the Lombard League, or of a military alliance between the municipalities of Milan, Lodi, Ferrara, Piacenza and Parma aimed at the armed struggle against the Holy Roman Empire by Frederick Barbarossa.
  The oath of Pontida does not appear on contemporary documents, being mentioned for the first time in 1505, then three and a half centuries after the traditional date of 7 April 1167.
context_section_description: The event is questioned by historians, given that in the contemporary chronicles written between 1152 and 1189, no Pontida oath is cited. Its first mention is in fact late, since it appears on a document dated 1505.
  However, contemporary sources cite the fact that the municipalities of the Lombard League had signed pacts to counter Barbarossa's hegemony by helping each other. Most of these writings, however, argue the event in a rather vague way, without describing the details: neither the locations nor the precise dates of the signing of the pacts are mentioned. On the Piacentina chronicle, regarding the agreement reached for the rebuilding of Milan, we can read:
  [...] Anno Domini 1167. All the cities of Lombardy and the March, except Pavia, agreed to rebuild Milan, which was destroyed by the emperor Frederick. [...]
  — Piacentina chronicle
  The most precise contemporary historical sources tell of at least three oaths among the municipalities of the Lombard League: the first, signed between the end of February and the beginning of March 1167 between Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona and Mantua and known as the "Bergamo oath "; the second, also signed by Milan in March 1167, which joined the four cities in the just mentioned oath; the third, also signed by Lodi in May of the same year, which became part of the previously mentioned coalition, formed by Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Mantua and Milan.
  Considering the date of 7 April 1167, we can therefore state that the oath of Pontida, even if it was actually signed, was not the constitution of the Lombard League, since at least two previous oaths are cited on historical documents.
caption: The oath of Pontida in a 1851 painting by Giuseppe Mazza
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