Lombards, Franks and the two churches

The Lombard kingdom and the castrum of Bellinzona

The Lombards entered Italy in 568 and within a few years controlled the Po plain and the Alpine approaches to it. The territory of today's Ticino became part of their kingdom, whose capital was Pavia, a city on the same Ticino river that flows through Bellinzona. The first written reference to Bellinzona comes from this period. Gregory of Tours, describing a Frankish expedition against the Lombards in 590, mentions a castrum called Bilitio whose garrison resisted the invaders. The passage shows that the fortified hill at the junction of the valleys was already regarded as a key to northern Italy.¹

Lombard rule left traces in law and in the social order. The Edict of King Rothari of 643, the first written codification of Lombard law, contains two chapters on the magistri commacini, master builders whose liability for accidents on building sites the edict regulated. Their fees were fixed in later Lombard legislation of the time of King Liutprand.² The origin of the name remains disputed. Some scholars derive it from Como and its lake, others from a word for scaffolding or for associated craftsmen. The chapters nonetheless attest a class of specialized builders in the Lombard kingdom whose later successors, the maestri from the lakes of Lugano and Como, would carry their skills across Europe. Their story, which has an important financial side in the form of remittances and village capital, is told in Chapter A.III.³

Totone of Campione and the Milanese enclave

A single document from the last years of the Lombard kingdom explains one of the oddities of the modern map. In 777 a landowner named Totone, living at Campione on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano, bequeathed his property to the church of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan. From that bequest the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio derived a lordship over Campione that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century.⁴ Because Campione belonged to a Milanese church, it did not follow the rest of the lakeshore when the Confederates took Lugano in the early sixteenth century. It remained Milanese and later Italian. Campione d'Italia is today an Italian municipality entirely surrounded by Swiss territory and Lake Lugano, with a customs and tax status that has changed several times since Italy's accession to the European customs union. Its casino was for decades one of the peculiarities of the regional economy (see Chapter H.I).⁵

The Campione case illustrates a rule that holds for the whole medieval period. Property rights together with the jurisdictional rights attached to them could outlive changes of sovereignty for centuries because they were recorded in writing and held by corporate bodies that did not die. A Milanese monastery could keep a village on a Swiss lake because its title was older than the Confederate conquest and because the conquerors had no interest in reopening it. Modern practitioners who deal with Italian-held real estate in Ticino, or with foundations and trusts whose assets straddle the border, encounter the same principle in a different form: a well-documented title travels better than a political arrangement.

Notes

1. Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem X.3; DSS, art. "Bellinzona (comune)" (above), on the Frankish expedition of 590 and the first mention of the place as ad Bilitionem. ↩
2. Edictum Rothari, cc. 144–145; Treccani, Enciclopedia Italiana, art. "Comacini, maestri", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/maestri-comacini_(Enciclopedia-Italiana)/, which refers to the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand as the legislation dealing with these builders. ↩
3. Treccani, Enciclopedia Italiana, art. "Comacini, maestri" (above), noting the view that the name is a generic designation for masons. The migration of builders is treated in Chapter A.III. ↩
4. DSS, art. "Ticino (cantone)" (above), on Totone's bequest of 777 to the church of Sant'Ambrogio; the testament is published in the Codice diplomatico longobardo. ↩
5. Wikipedia, "Campione d'Italia", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campione_d%27Italia (consulted as a last resort), on the entry into the EU customs territory on 1 January 2020 under Council Directive (EU) 2019/475; the customs provision itself is Regulation (EU) 2019/474 of the European Parliament and of the Council. See Chapter H.I. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.