We know much about the Italian city states - the "communes" - of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But historians have focused on their political accomplishments to the exclusion of their religious life, going so far as to call them "purely secular contrivances." When religion is considered, the subjects are usually saints, heretics, theologians, and religious leaders, thereby ignoring the vast majority of those who lived in the communes. In "Cities of God", Augustine Thompson gives a voice to the forgotten majority - orthodox lay people and those who ministered to them. "Cities of God" is bold, revisionist history in the tradition of Eamon Duffy´s "Stripping of the Altars". Drawing on a wide repertoire of ecclesiastical and secular sources, from city statutes and chronicles to saints´ lives and architecture, Thompson recaptures the religious origins and texture of the Italian republics and allows their inhabitants a spiritual voice that we have never heard before.