Fighting corruption in the Italian City-State: Perugian officers' end of term audit (sindacato) in the fourteenth century

While auditing practices for public officials existed in all the Italian peninsula during the communal era, they had nowhere as prominent a place, or better surviving records, as in the Italian city-states. In this chapter, the author shows that the regulation of sindacato, an end-of-term audit for urban officials, was of a kind with normative and literary discourses about accountability, good government and the common good, but argues that these cannot be seen in isolation from documentary evidence. Based on a detailed analysis of the rich judicial and administrative records from fourteenth-century Perugia, this chapter shows that the connection between accountability of office and political legitimacy implicit in the sindacato is less straightforward than commonly thought. Rather than a marker of transparent, participatory politics, the sindacato was a complex, inherently biased, often slow and ineffectual mechanism, which could conceal as much as it revealed about the administration of the city.