The conflict between Emperor Frederick II and the papacy in the middle of thirteenth-century Italy ended when Frederick died in 1250. But throughout northern and central Italy, warfare raged and the citizens of the autonomous Italian cities struggled for power. Old sources of political authority were displaced or corrupted. From 1250 to 1310 no emperor entered Italy. The popes remained important political figures, but some thought they made more war than peace. In this dissertation, I analyze how Italian intellectuals thought about how to restore political order in this situation. In my analysis I concentrate on chronicle sources, and I argue that these texts serve as sources for understanding practical political thinking in this era. This is the central methodological claim of this dissertation. By analyzing these chronicles as sources of political thought, I have been able to show that contemporaries responded to the chaotic political situation of the later thirteenth century by using different intellectual frameworks and concepts inherited from disparate traditions. Previous historians of political thought have missed these authors because they focused on other kinds of texts as their central sources. While some of the chroniclers I study advocated solutions pertinent to their own cities, others prescribed transformative reformations in the spheres of ethics, politics, and religion for all Italians. As an organizing motif of the dissertation, useful for reconstructing and situating these arguments, I particularly focus on how these authors thought about the role of the papacy in a potential restoration of political order, and I describe how their thinking about this role inflected their general visions of politics. I track a gradient of views of the papacy: some authors thought a closer identification with the papacy might help make peace in a particular city, while others thought the popes made warfare more common. In this way I show that thirteenth-century chroniclers debated the authority of the papacy in ways that medieval historians normally associate with the history of the fourteenth century. Through this dissertation, I contribute to scholarly debates on the papal monarchy, republicanism, and the history of political thought.