The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages

The Mountains and the City

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The Mountains and the City The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages

C.

J. WICKHAM

CLARENDON PRESS · OX FORD 1988

Oxford University Press, Wahon Stru t, Oxford OXz. 6DP Oxford Ntw York TorontC/ Delhi &mbay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling jaya SingapCire Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Capt Town Melbourne Auckland

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Librlll'y Catawguing in PublicatiC/n Data

Wickham, Chris Tht mC/untains and /M city: the Tu scan Apptnnines in tht early Middle Ages. 1. Tuscany (Italy)-HistCiry 2 . Italy -History-476-1268 I. Title 945' .503 DG737-32 ISBN o-I~Zt966-o Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wickham, Cl1ris, 195oThe mountains and the city. Bibliography: p . Includes imkx. 1. Garfagnana (ltaly)-History. 2. Garfagnana (Italy) - Soda/ conditions. J. Garfagnana (ltaly)- Economic conditions. 4· CaseminCI Valley (ltaly)-History. 5· Casenlino Valley (ltaly)-Social conditions. 6. CastntinCI Valley (Italy)-Economic conditions. I. Title. DG97s.G;N53 t988 945' -53 87-t8572 ISBN o-t~zt966--o Procm ed by The Oxford Text System Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd., Gui/4ford and King's Lynn

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the following people, who read this book in one of its versions, as a whole or in large part: W endy Davies, Jean Pierre Delumeau, Philip Jones, and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. Cecilia Angeli, Steven Bassett, Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, Giovanni Cherubini, Michael Collins and Victoria Kinghorn, Trevor Dean, James and Lisa Fentress, Riccardo Francovich, Vito Fumagalli, Philip Grierson, Rodney 'Hilton, Richard Holt, Franca Leverotti, Christine Meek, Massimo Montanari, Janet Nelson, Mario Nobili, Duane Osheim, Paolo Pirillo, Gabriella Rossetti, Simon Stoddart, Marco Tangheroni also helped me very greatly with advice, insight and information. So did many others, whom I have not named; I have been pursuing these researches for some time now, and have received assistance and support from a wide variety of people; I would like to thank them all. The British Academy, through its Small Grants Fund, aided much of the original research for the book; the University of Birmingham helped to finance subsequent archival work and typing. The Dipartimento di Medievistica at the University ofPisa kindly allowed me to use the transcriptions of Lucchese documents contained in tesi di laurea there. Rosaleen Darlington efficiently typed the text. And, last but not least, Don Giuseppe Ghilarducci of the Archivio Arcivescovile di Lucca and Don Silvano Pieri of the Archivio Capitolare di Arezzo were very helpful in my researches; I am grateful to them and their staff, as well as to the staff of the Archivi di Stato of Florence, Lucca, and Arezzo. Without them, the difficulties of writing this book would have been far greater. This is the English edition of the book; an Italian edition, without the historiographical introduction, is to be published shortly. Abbreviations for primary sources are listed in the course of the section on Principal Collections on pp. ix- xii; all other works, primary or secondary, are cited by short title in footnotes, and are listed in full in the Bibliography.

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Contents Principal Collections of Primary Material, and Abbreviations Introduction to the English Edition General Introduction I.

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IX Xlll

l

THE GARFAGNANA, 7QO-I200

Geography and Historical Ecology 1 , 2. Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries 3· The Economic Structure of Landed Estates and their Development, 8oo-rooo 4· The Lords of the Garfagnana and the World of the City, Tenth to Twelfth C enturies s. Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

13

I.

n.

THE CASENTINO IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

6. 7.

Geography and Historical Ecology ll The Distribution of Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving 8. Estates and Tenants 9. The Social Circles of the Middle Archiano Valley xo. Signori and Castelli: The Crystallization of the Aristocracy I I. Myth and Reality of Feudalism in the Countryside, III.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

Poverty and Freedom in the Mountains; Ludovico Ariosto as Anthropologist

Maps Bibliography Index

40 68

90 134 IS I Is 3 I

So

221

238 269 307

IOSQ-I200

I2.

IS

34S 347

38I 392 411

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Principal Collections of Primary Material, and Abbreviations LUCCA

Archivio arcivescovile (AAL): published to 1000, reasonably accurately, by D. Barsocchini in Memorie e documenti per servire all'istoria della citta e stato di Lucca v, pts. 2, 3 (Lucca, 1837-41), henceforth cited as Barsocchini with document number. Barsoccbini registers some documents edited earlier by F. Bertini, in Memorie e documenti iv (Lucca, 1818-36); I will follow Barsocchini's numbering for these, but Bertini was a far worse editor, and I have checked all his texts from the original, together with doubtful readings in Barsocchini. Some texts only edited by Bertini in Memorie e documenti iv, pt. 2 and its appendix will be cited as Bertini, Supplemento and Appendice. Documents before 774 are edited by L. Schiaparelli in Codice diplomatico longobardo i and ii (Rome, 1929-33), which I will cite as Schiaparelli with document number in preference to Barsocchini. After 1000, AAL is unedited, and I shall cite its charters by their fondo numbers. (There are four fondi: +, + +, *, and A.) For 9911003 and 1023--73. however, there are tesi di laurea of the Dipartimento di Medievistica, University of Pisa which transcribe the charters very competently, and which I will cite when I have used them: C. Angdoni for 991-1003 (196<>-1), L. Marchini for 1023--9 (1966--7), G. Mennucci for 103o-4 (1964-5), E. lsola for 103 5-40 (1964- 5), M. G. Nesti for 1041- 4 (1967-8), M. G. Pianezzi for 1045-50 (1967-8), P. Bertocchini for 1051-5 (1969--70), L. Gemignani for 1056--73 (1956--7); relatori (supervisors): 0. Bertolini for Angeloni and Gernignani, C. Violante for the others. Episcopal inventories are edited by P. Guidi and E. Pellegrinetti in Inventari del vescovato delta cattedrale e di altre chiese di Lucca (Rome, 1921) (cited as Guidi-Pellegrinetti with number); but the two ninth-century 'polyptychs' are re-edited by M. Luzzati in A.Castagnetti et al. (eds.), Inventari altomedievali di tem, coloni e redditi (Rome, 1979), pp. 207- 46, and I will cite them as lnventario I and 11, with page references as in Luzzati.

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Primary Material, a.nd Abbreviations

Archivio capitolare (ACL): fully registered up to 1200 in P. Guidi and 0. Parenti (eds.), Regesto del Capitolo di Lucca, 3 vols. (Rome, 1910), cited henceforth as RCL; very little for the Garfagnana, and nothing before 1000 (the Lucchese canonica evidently got no Garfagnana land when it split off from the cathedral). Archivio di Stato (ASL): documents mostly registered up to I I 50 by G. degli Azzi Vitelleschi, in Reale archivio di stato in Luaa. Regesti l.i, l.ii (Lucca, I903- 11) (cited as Azzi)- very little for the Garfagnana. There is, however, some unpublished material in the ASL diplomatico, fondo Guinigi and (for the late twelfth century) the fondi of S. Giustina, S. Ponziano and Tarpea (cited as ASL Guinigi, S. Giustina, etc.) D. Pacchi. Ricerche storiche sulla provincia della Garfagnana (Modena, 1785) (cited as Pacchi) gives tolerable editions for many lost documents. M. Lupo Gentile (ed.), 11 regesto del Codice Pelavicino (Genoa, 1912) (cited as CP) is the basic collection of documents for the Lunigiana up to 1300.

FLORENCE

Archivio di stato (ASF): diplomatico: the fondo Camaldoli is published in register up to 1250 by L. Schiaparelli, F. Baldasseroni, E. Lasinio in Regesto di Camaldoli; 4 vols. (Rome, 1907-22) (cited as RC); it contains the Prataglia and Camaldoli archives. Selected documents are edited by G. B. Mittarelli and A. Costadoni, Annates Camaldulenses ordinis S. Benedicti, 9 vols. (Venice, 1755--?J)(cited as A C); vols. i- v up to 1350. I have checked enough of these documents to be sure that RC normally registers all that is useful, and important sections are transcribed in full (for some gaps, see below, chapter 7, n. 3); this is fortunate, for it is impractical, given the current situation in the archive, to check 6oo documents in anything less than several months. The fondi of S. Trinita di Poppi (ex-Strumi) and Passerini (cited as ASF S. Trinita, Passerini) comprise the unedited Strumi archive. The latter are mostly private documents, closely associated with those more dearly indicated as from Strumi, acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by Luigi Passerini. (See also below, ACA Struini.) A few Strumi documents regarding the Guidi were edited by G. Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum iii (Florence, 1737), pp. 146--'7; vii, pt. 8 ( = Historiae siculae Laur. Bonincontri ii, Florence, 1739), pp. 315-52. There are also some in F. Soldani, Historia Monasterii S. Michaelis de Passiniano i (Lucca, 1741), pp. no-17. I shall · cite Lami, who publishes all those in Soldani.

Primary Material, and Abbreviations

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Some relevant material is also to be found in the fondi ofVaUombrosa and Pratovecchio (cited as ASF Vallombrosa, Pratovecchio). A few Fiesole privileges listing Casentino churches are published in G. Lami (ed.), Sanctae ecclesiae Florentinae monumenta i (Florence, 1758). ASF Catasto contains the 1427 Catasto (census) records for the lands of the Florentine Republic, which included all the Casentino except the Guidi signoria of Poppi and the Ubertini signoria of Chitignano. ASF Capitoli contain, among much else, medieval transcripts of various Casentinese documents from the I 1 8os to the fifteenth century; most are registered in l capitoli del comune di Firenze. lnventario e regesto, 2 vols. (Florence, 1866-93) (cited as Reg. Cap.), covering Capitoli i- xvi, although I have used one from 1187, unedited, in Capitoli xxiv.

AREZZO

Archivio capitolare (ACA): Fondo S. Fiora (SF): the archives of the monastery of SS. Fiora e Lucilla, the source of most of the Casentino documents still in Arezzo. Fondo Capitolo (Cap.): the archives of the canonica. Fondo S. Maria in Gradi (SMG): only one eleventh-century document for the Casentino. Fondo Strumi (Strumi): a small collection of Strumi documents separated at some point from the main body of the monastery's archive. SF, Cap., and SMG have eighteenth-century MS catalogues in ACA, of varying quality, which sometimes register documents since lost. That for SF is the major one relevant here: G. M. Scarmagli, Monasterii SSVV Florae et Lucillae synopsis monumentorum (c.1748). Scarmagli has a slightly different numbering for SF from that in the fondo itself; I have used the latter. Most charters relating to the early bishops of Arezzo, and very many others up to the mid-fourteenth century, appear in U. Pasqui (ed.), Documenti per la storia della citta di Arezzo nel medio evo, 3 vols. (Florence, 1899-1937) (cited as Pasqui). Other standard editions are: Manaresi C. Manaresi (ed.). I placiti del 'Regnum Italiae', 3 vols. (Rome, 1955-6o).

MGH, Dip.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Diplomata, with name of emperor. For full citations, see Bibliography.

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Xll

.

MGH, SS Rat. Dec.

Primary Material, and Abbreviations Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores. M . Giusti and P. Guicli (eds.), Rationes decimarum Italiae nei secoli XIII e XIV. Tuscia ii: Le decime degli anni J2951J04 (Rome, 1942), the second and fuller series of papal tithe registers for Tuscany.

The new year was reckoned very variously, and often inconsistendy, in Tuscany; the year' I 100' could begin, in our dating, at any time between zs March 1099 (as in Pisa) and 25 March I too (as in Florence). I have converted the dates of unpublished documents into those of the modem year beginning on the first of January, when such dates are mentioned in the text. Where they only appear in the footnotes, however, I have left them, for the date marked on the document is that under which it is registered in the archives; 'correcting' the date would only serve to make my references impossible to check.

Introduction to the English Edition

POINI'S OF REFERENCE: SOME CURRENT ISSUES IN ITALIAN MEDIEVAL HISTORY

It is not entirely obvious why a book written in English by an English historian should have a specially written English-language introduction. But this book is not only about Italy; it is also written as far as I can manage inside the framework of interpretation and argument currently adopted by Italian historians. I have written from an Italian perspective partly to make my contribution fit into a historiography that is, and should be, dominated by Italians; but above all because (not surprisingly) the sorts of thing Italians currently argue about are much more relevant to an understanding of the history of early medieval Tuscany, the subject of this book, than are the issues that seem of primary importance in many other countries. Not that an outside view can never contribute anything to a 'national' historiography; many of the most important ideas in Italian interpretations of the Middle Ages came from elsewhere, from Germany or (since the Second World War, above all) from France. I doubt, however, that there is such a thing as an 'English' or (still less) a 'British' historical interpretative schema to set against German Reichsgeschichte or the french regional these; the most I have tried to contribute as a non-Italian is a certain unavoidable distance from my material, and a neutrality vis-a-vis some of the historical themes most characteristic of Italy, the rise and fall of the city communes and the like. The rest comes from Italian historians themselves, and these historians are still little read in Britain; it is their views that need some introduction. This is best effected by a brief discussion of some characteristic Italian historiographical interests. These will include the fall of the Carolingian state, the signoria (essentially, private jurisdiction,

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not only over tenants but over the whole of the local rural population-the French seigneurie banale), 1 and the appearance of casdes in Italy (incastellamento); not only are these important ways into understanding how Italians think about the past, but they are also leitmotivs of this particular book. The second section of the introduction is less historiographical: in it, I will describe Tuscany and its place in early medieval Italian history, an essential background to a study of two small parts of that region, and something of which knowledge could certainly not be assumed outside Italy or, perhaps, outside Tuscany itself I have written the main text of the book with the intention of making it comprehensible to non-experts in my field; but I hope this introduction will make some of its concerns less elliptic. Italian history-writing has its own obsessions. The city-state, as I have already implied, is one. Cities were genuinely very important in Italian history, but the concern in Italy for their study has to do with a sense of the past which goes well beyond strict historical criteria. The Italians are not unique in having such touchstones, of course; the equally clear obsession of so many English historians with central government is a similar characteristic. In both cases, they are dealing with one of the major phenomena, that are seen, by generations of intellectual and political elites, . as legitimating the historical development of their respective countries: in the English case, the phenomenon of the longest-lasting nation-state of the Western world; in the Italian, that of the Renaissance. But at least one could say that their in~erest in city-states frees Italians from the type of damaging concern that the Germans, for instance, have often shown with the end of the Reich as failure; this is one development that the former can fe~ detached from, for the Renaissance certainly depended for its success on Italian local autonomies. Cities are not, however, my own principal concern; this is a book about the countryside. The presence of the city. in the tide 1

For a fuller definition of the signoria, see below, pp. 105- 8. The neatest introduction is Violante, 'Signoria "territoriale" ', The word is more often used on its own than is the case with its counterpart seigneurie in French, for, despite various sub-types · (fondiaria, territoriale, and so on), it is normally regarded as having to do with justice and other quasi-public rights--it is not generally used, unlike its German or French analogues, for simple landlordship as well. ('Signoria' is also, of course, used to denote the family despotisms over late medieval cities. The semantic link between the two meanings is obvious, but in this book I shall only use the term to mean local rural lordship.)

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xv

of the book is explained above all by the fact that the existence of the city profoundly conditioned the social structures of even the remotest parts of the countryside in all periods of the history of northern Tuscany, as I hope to show. Italians have not neglected rural history, above all not in the pre-communal period: the centuries before 1 100 that are the major focus of my text. This is partly, at least in recent years, the result of the growth of sophisticated agrarian history in Italian universities. But the history of the early medieval countryside also has a place in a far older historical tradition, which itself links into an urban-orientated historiography: that of 'feudal decentralization', between the decline of the Carolingian state at the start of the tenth century and the appearance of the city communes two centuries later. It is inside this decentralized world that the signoria and the process of incastellamento fit, and it is because of their place in such a historical sequence that they have been objects of particular interest to scholars. In order to understand them, then, it is best to start out with the historical sequence itself; this will show most dearly both the traditional framework of interpretation of the eighth to twelfth centuries and how it has been modified in the last couple of decades. 2 The five centuries between 700 and 1200 have often been seen in Italy as a cycle of time, of coherent political power lost and then regained. The first two centuries of the period were the great days of the Lombard and then (after Charlemagne's conquest in 774) Carolingian kingdom, centred on northern Italy and Tuscany. They have been seen as a period of order, under the Lombard king Liutprand (712- 44), Charlemagne himself (774814), and his most significant successor, Louis 11 (85<>-75). They have also been characterized, quite rightly, as a period of injustice and of decline for the substantial stratum of free owners, above all in the ninth century. But the background even for these discussions is a general acceptance that the Lombard-Carolingian political system, for all its defects, worked reasonably well inside its own limits: as a functioning structure of public power, firmly 2 Surveys of Italian history in the period 7oo-t2oo in English can conveniently be found in Wickham, Early Medieval Italy; Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy; Waley, Italian City-republics. By far the best social and political discussion of the whole period, however, is Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, a republication of his contribution to the Einaudi Storia d'ltalia ii (Turin, 1974).

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based on the cities of Italy, that was strong enough to bring political rewards to kings and their subordinates, dukes and (later) counts. Official position in this world, whether lay or ecclesiastical, conveyed status in itself, irrespective of the personal (private) resources of its holder; injustice was a stable result of the exercise of public power, rather than a random product of feudal anarchy. I would broadly accept this picture, although I would certainly stress the randomness already present in the system in, for example, the exercise of personal power already visible in many actions of officials from the national or local aristocracy. One might also reasonably wonder how much effect the rules of national politics in Carolingian or post-Carolingian Europe ever had at the most local level, individual villages or landed estates; but it is certainly the case, as we shall see in Chapter 2 of this book, that this essentially urban world of public activity and power was, at the least, not immeasurably distant from the social world of one mountain valley in Tuscany. The tenth and eleventh centuries have been seen as the opposite of the ninth: as a period of political collapse. The coherence of the Italian kingdom broke down after Louis ll's death, first slowly and then, after 900 or so, fast: the most obvious steps in this process were the civil wars of the 8905 and 92os; the hundred-odd diplomas of the 900S and 910s in which Berengar I (888-924) began to hand out the lands and rights of the Crown to the Church and to private persons; and the crises of 945 and 962, when Kings Hugh (926-47) and Berengar ll (95o-62), faced with attack by rivals from across the Alps, found that their political and military support simply faded away-the Italian political elite no longer had enough interest in kings even to bother with civil war. Thereafter, the Italian state, reduced to an appendage of the German empire by Otto I (962-73), maintained political stability for over a century at the expense of most of its relevance to the daily life of the cities and the countryside of the Po plain and Tuscany. . Of these two centuries, the tenth has often been regarded as the 'feudal age' par excellence, with private links of dependence pitched successfully against the structure of public power; the eleventh as a period of structural confusion, but also of the slow recomposition of political power around bishops and their cities,

Introduction to the English Edition

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represented by the urban revolts of the first half of the century, and the religious disturbances associated with the spiritual reforms of the second half. The political confusion of these 200 years was real enough, and in northern Italy (less so in Tuscany, as we shall see) it may broadly be possible to pose the tenth century as a period of dissolution against the eleventh as one of slow political reorganization on a smaller scale. But even this, taken on its own, is over-simplification; and the rest of the picture is certainly misleading. Strictly 'feudal' (i.e. feudo-vassalic) ties were relatively unimportant before the mid-eleventh century. More important, to see the situation as the pitting of private against public power is to misunderstand it. It is likely that even the Carolingian political elites often saw the state in terms of a local, city-centred politics, rather than as a hierarchy stretching up to the capital at Pavia; as a result, even when the power of the king dissolved, local public institutions could continue to exist. Indeed, freed after the mid-tenth century from close involvement with the kings, even some of the institutions of central government continued to operate, most notably in the judicial and financial spheres; Berengar 11, for all his political weakness, may have been richer than any contemporary king in Latin Europe. Another symbolic date is 1024, when the Pavesi burnt the royal palace, and expelled it from their walls; but the kingdom of Italy continued to exist in the world of law, and the political culture of the Italian elites, although by now entirely focused on their own cities, remained legal-minded enough to recognize the claims of Frederick Barbarossa as late as the u6os and indeed, in some cases, those of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century emperors as well. And although private power, based on land and loyalty, was certainly dominant in Italy by 1000, its contours remained publicly defmed for another century: being a count rather than a private landowner still mattered. Perhaps the best example of the point is Olderico Manfredi, marquis of Turin, who in 1001 gave himself an immunity on his own private lands from the juridical or political intervention of the marquis, who was himself: the common identity of the holders of both public and private power is clear, but so is the continuing separability of the two.s None the less, it was in 3

Sergi, 'Feudalizzazione ne) regno italico', pp. 253- 4.

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this arena that signorial rights, which involved a fusion of public and private, were beginning to crystallize. The standard picture of the twelfth century is in effect as a resolution of the trajectories. and the problems of the eleventh. The civil disorder of the Cremonese revolts of the IOJOS, or of the Pataria in Milan from the 1050s to the I070S, come to be seen in retrospect as a groping towards the new order of communal government; when the institutions of the city communes are established, we see, if not stability, at least instability with rules, inside the 'natural' units of Italian political power, the cities and their rural territories or contadi. Cities .are thus, with this newfound autonomy, given the opportunity to become the commercial and industrial entrepots and world cultural centres of the late Middle Ages. The only people who reject this new order (once bishops become resigned to a new, diminished place inside the communal framework) are the 'feudal' aristocracy of the countryside, whom the cities have to conquer or absorb, across the twelfth century and beyond. It is this picture that was perhaps, before recent work on the subject, in most need of a systematic critique of all its elements. Regardless of the modern symbolism of the origin of the commune, in fact-and regardless even of the real importance of the appearance of autonomous urban constitutions-the twelfth century in most of central and northern Italy saw a further decline, in some fields an eclipse, of public power. Feudo-vassalic relationships spread in the countryside; public judicial institutions were fmally replaced by private territorial (signorial) courts and by informal arbitrations and compromises in the still inchoate arena of communal jurisdictions. The 'rural' aristocracy that the cities had to englobe were very often based in the city itself; their local powers, which the communes sometimes took centuries to reclaim, had often been acquired as late as 1 roo. The communes did not simply have to reclaim power; they often had to rebuild it from scratch, out of a network of informal relationships that were rather more similar to those of contemporary France and Germany than to the rough but effective public framework of the ninth century in Italy. The only common feature in the political structure of Italy from the beginning to the end of our period-not an unimportant one by any means, however- was the city itself, which in the most urbanized parts of the kingdom

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(eastern Piemonte, Lombardy, the western Veneto, Emilia, northem Tuscany) remained the major focus for political and indeed economic activity inside the constantly changing patterns of the eighth to twelfth centuries. In what sense it acted as a focus will be one of the principal themes of the book. I have counterposed in this discussion a broadly characterized 'traditional' view of the development of Italy and a viewpoint based on more recent historical interpretations. But it should be evident that they have many features in common- most notably the stress on the central importance of the relationship between the city and the countryside, and of the nature, the legal definition, of political power. It is in this context that the precise nature of the signoria has been important to Italian historians ever since the beginning of the century. The sort of power that was found in the countryside in, say, the early twelfth century has often, as I have already said, been seen as the antithesis of the sort of power that was found in the cities in all periods: in the latter, public institutions; in the former, private, signorial lordship. The 'reconquest' of the contado by each city was thus seen in the same light as the equally traditional (and equally spurious) view of Henry II of England reclaiming a centralized judicial system from the courts of his feudal barons: as a victory of public over private. By and large, the weight of recent Italian historiography has not so much denied this opposition as altered its terms; private relationships did not only exist in the countryside but also in the city, in the eleventh, twelfth, maybe thirteenth centuries; urban power in the countryside was expressed by a very variegated pattern of political and legal structures, old and new, private and public, and even in the late Middle Ages (at least outside Tuscany) was characterized by a remarkable profusion of classic 'feudal' bonds.4 The exact nature of the signoria, therefore, can become a key to the nature of political power at every level in society. . . 4

For the late Middle Ages, see for example Chittolini, Formazione dello state regionale. The recognition that cities could be a major venue of feudal relationships is one of the reasons why some historians (significantly, often non-Italians) stress that Italy's history, however urban, was not as unlike that north of the Alps as is often thought: most notable recent expositions of this view have been Jones, 'Leggenda della borghesia'; Keller, Adelsh.errschqfi, esp. pp. 376-85. See also the important summary article by Bordone, 'Tema cittadino e "ritomo alia terra" ', which tries, among other things, to refute this argument, not wholly successfully.

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Interest in the signoria is not confined to Italy. There is a large body of writing in both German and French on the subject, and, leaving aside terminological disagreements, Land- (or Bann-) herrschaft and seigneurie banale are foci ofhistoriographical interest in Germany and France just as their synonym is south of the Alps. Indeed, Georges Duby's popularization of the latter term, and his concern to put it at the forefront of his analysis of Macon in 1953, had a profound effect on the Italians. 5 English historians, by contrast, have been relatively little affected by these discussions. This partly derives from the very real differences between England and the Continent, for the English kings genuinely did keep most levels of justice in the hands of themselves and their officials, restricting private justice largely to the arena oflandlordly powers over servile tenan~gneurial (signorial) rights never contributed more than a minor part of lordly incomes, in sharp contrast to the situation in France.6 (It also, unfortunately, partly derives from the unpreparedness of many English historians until fairly recently to read much 'foreign'-language history at all, a tradition that is by now, it seems, on the decline, and about time too. English-speaking historians should all by now at least know what the term seigneurie banale means, I hope.) But the particular nature of the Italian interest in the subject can best be seen by a comparison with the context in which the seigneurie banale is seen in France; for even if French historians have dominated the subject, Italian historians have been by no means entirely dependent on French insights. In France, the issue of the seigneurie is very frequently seen as part and parcel of the development of'feudalism'. Historians .who follow (to put it very crudely) Marc Bloch's view that 'feudal society' included a wide network of relationships, not just those of vassal homage and the fief ('feudo-vassalic' relationships), have regarded the seigneurie as part of that network. Not everyone would go so far as Jean-Pierre Poly, who stated in a conference in Rome in 1978 that the privatization of judicial powers in 5 Duby, Region m&onn4ise, pp. 173-90; see also the syntheses in Boutruche, Stigneurie et fiodaliu i, pp. II4- 26; ii, pp. US-40; Fossier, Enfance dt rEurope, pp. 401- 22. For Duby's influence in Italy, see for example Tabacco, 'Fief et seigneurie', pp. 204~. e A neat conspectus of the differences can be found in Hilton, CLw Conflict, pp. 227-38; cf. id., English Peasantry, pp. 2.31- 8, for the financial weight of seigneurial obligations in England at their height, around 1300.

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the south of France meant that southern feodalite was at least as 'complete' as that of the north, and, even more bravely, that ' Most historians admit today that the central phenomenon of feodalite is the establishment of the seigneurie banale'. But even those who fiercely deny any dependence of one of the concepts on the other find it natural to associate them. Robert Boutruche, for example, whose defmition ofjeodalite is certainly restricted to feudo-vassalic links, found himself writing a general book in which these links lay side by side with those of the seigneurie (landlordship and banal lordship alike): '(feodalite) could not have lasted without the material base which the seigneurie furnished it with'.7 One can see why the connection is made; fiefs and seigneuries banales are both manifestations of the general tendency for private relationships to infiltrate and replace public ones in the post-Carolingian centuries, and in France, where public power was genuinely very weak, the association of the two has come to be a shorthand that means the functioning of society as a whole, rather than just the personal relationships of an aristocratic elite. This association has, however, also partly perpetuated the old obsession with the boundaries of feudalism, what is feudal and what is not, and not least because one by one the French local studies from Macon onwards have shown how late 'feudovassalic' relationships themselves actually were almost nowhere in Europe, indeed, did they become the dominant schemata for the characterization of aristocratic political dependence before 1050 at the earliest.S In 1ltaly, at least in recent years, this line of approach is very rarely taken. Giovan.t'li Tabacco and Cinzio Violante, the two historians who currently dominate the discipline, have both explicitly denied that fiefs and signorie are necessarily related, and indeed the former dedicated an entire article in 1969 to the liquidation of the fuzzy uses of the adjective feudale current in Italy in the first two-thirds of the century. (Feudalesimo, the only translation of 'feudalism', barely exists in Italian.) In Italy, in fact, the restriction of the term 'feudal' to fiefs, vassalage, and contractual relationships is regarded as normal, and it is not an 7

Poly, in Structures floda/es, pp. 46-7, 57; Boutruche, Seigneurie et feodalite i, p. 8. (Feodalisme is a different word; it explicitly links feodalite and the seignturie-cf. for instance Toubert in Structures floda/es, p. 3, citing Hilton.) 8 Cf. the critical survey by Cammarosano, 'Strutture feudali', pp. 837-51.

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issue about which anyone today argues very much. 9 This is for several linked reasons. Italy had no Bloch to give the concept of 'feudal society' a powerful definition, as a historical (rather than a rhetorical) organizing device; the world of 'feudalism' has less resonance for Italians anyway (the French preoccupation with it is not unlike the Italian preoccupation with the city-state). Defining feudal relationships exclusively in terms of legal criteria comes more easily to Italian historians, too; Italian medieval history was long dominated by legal historians, and Tabacco and Violante, like many of their colleagues and pupils, are still concerned to place social relationships very precisely inside a legal framework. But this certainly dpes pot derive from a suspicion of broad social analysis as Bloch practised it; current schools of Italian history-writing are interested in a very wide-ranging social history. Political culture in medieval Italy was genuinely structured, very explicitly, by legal rules, more than in most parts of Europe. And this point itself brings us to the context in which the signoria, divorced from the fief, is understood in Italy; for the survival of these legal rules is the survival of a framework of public law. In Italy, feudo-vassalic bonds were not only as late as in France but they never anywhere (outside the Norman kingdom) came to structure even aristocratic dependence, and still less the organization ofpolitical power in general. Thus, the seigneurie in France is seen in .apposition to feodalite, the political trimr1ph of private relationships; but the signoria in Italy is seen in apposition to the public and, even though the two concepts are no l~nger taken as identical, to the city. Public power was not strong in the Italy of the twelfth· century, but the notion of the public was; it could never entirely disappear in a complex organism like city society, and it was, too, preserved by a long-lasting urban elite of lawyers. The signoria was by npw divided from public law by a boundary-publi~ law, that is to say, now had a limit beyond which it could not formally go; but, conversely, the formal setting-out of that boundary, the growing . tightness of legal Tabacco, ' Fief et seigneurie'; id., 'Allodialita del potere'; Violante, e.g. in Structures ftodales, pp. 239-40. In this book I will follow Italian usage and use ' feudal' to mean ' feudo-vassalic' in the strict sense. Elsewhere, \ prefer to use the word in its Marxist sense, but this covers all western European societies in the period we are looking at, and is thus not much use here as an exact category. 9

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definition, increasingly contributed to defme signorial rights themselves, which were thus englobed ever more clearly by the public world again. Politics, and even the practice oflaw, were a great deal more informal in the twelfth century than legal theorists liked, or admitted. But the ground rules of politics were structured by a set of legal principles which remained rooted in the past, and in the urban tradition. The signoria in Italy can therefore be seen not only as the reflex of de facto lordship, but also as a representation of the legal and political structures of the whole of society. The signoria did not represent 'the country', nor public power 'the city', but nevertheless, as we shall see later in this book, the coherence (and economic weight) of signorial powers in the countryside can in practice be used as a good prima-facie indicator of the extent and limits of urban hegemony there. The counterposition of signoria and city is not merely the traditional legitimation for the victory of the commune; it helps us to understand how real historical processes actually worked. Feudalism and the signoria have been seen, everywhere in Europe, in terms of the appearance of casdes; and so also in Italy. But in Italy, particularly in the last two decades, the issue of this appearance (incastellamento), above all in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has suddenly come to the forefront of historical attention. This is partly due to the increasingly detailed interest taken in the crystallization of local power in northern Italy in the ambit of the signoria, which led to a closer analysis of the castle as its most obvious outward manifestation, as in the work of Fasoli, Violante, or Rossetti; and partly to the appearance in 1973 of Pierre Toubert's monumental work on medieval Lazio. 10 Toubert's book has often been taken as the most effective irruption of French (i.e. Annaliste) historical method on the medieval Italian scene since the appearance of Duby's book on Macon, and not wrongly; but not in the fields of study I have just been discussing- Les Structures du Latium medieval is in reality a far from orthodox member of the school of Bloch and Du by, uninterested as the book is in many of the major preoccUpations of the French regional monographs, such as the structure of the aristocracy. The real impact of the book has, rather, lain in its Fasoli, 'Feudo e castello', with references to her previous work; Violante, 'Una famiglia feudale'; Rossetti, 'Signorie di castello'; Toubert, Latium. lO

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explicit concern for 'histoire totale', a historical framework in which everything is interrelated. not only political organization and the exploitation of the peasantry, but also economic geography and peasant production. This project goes back to Bloch too, of course; but it has very seldom been carried through as successfully as Toubert did. He saw that a book of this kind needed a focus, an integrating element; and he chose the castle for this purpose. It was a brilliant intuition. Above all because, in Lazio, the process of inc~stellamento did not involve, as normally in northern Europe, the simple appearance of mottes and other small fortifications at the edge of urban and rural settlements, but the fortification of the settlements themselves; and, where settlement was scattered, as had been normal in Lazio, the reorganization of the entire pattern into fortified nuclei, usually on hilltops. The fortified settlement encapsulated not only a political but an economic break; by studying incastellamento as a system, one could come to an understanding of all levels of society at once. Toubert's image of incastellamento has come to have a profound impact on Italian understanding of the social and political changes of the centuries after 900. This is not because the process was exactly the same elsewhere in Italy: far from it, for much settlement elsewhere was already concentrated, 11 and, where it was not, the builders of new fortifications did not by any means manage (or try) to persuade the rural population to come and live inside them. But the issue of the effect on social and economic life of the appearance of fortifications is now everywhere recognized as crucial; Aldo Settia's major recent book on incastellamento in northern Italy, now the basic synthesis for the Po plain, though owing much of its interpretative framework to the socio-political and legal historians of the north, explicitly acknowledges the relevance of Toubert's work for Settia's understanding of the process of incastellamento. 12 As I use the words 'concentrated' and 'concentration' throughout this book instead of the commoner geographical terms 'nucleated' and 'nucleation'; the former lend themselves more easily to modification ('relatively concentrated', etc.), and the latter in their Italian forms tend to give the impression of continuously built-up housing (as, for example, in the surviving late medieval centres of rural Tuscany), a phenomenon certainly absent in the early medieval countryside. 12 Settia, CtJstelli e villllggi, p. 11 . 11

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will be seen in what follows, the same is true for me. I will consistently use the Italian word 'castello' rather than 'castle' in this book, precisely because of the issues raised by Toubert's models. 'Castello' in modern Italian, in fact, spans the whole range of possible fortifications, from single defensive towers through the residences oflords to substantial defended settlements; it covers the whole range of defensive structures brought into being by the multiform process known as 'incastellamento', thus upholding the essential cohesion of the process, no matter how various its effects. These effects, were, however, clearly very various indeed. I have discussed elsewhere, at some length, the extent of this variability in south-<:entral Italy, the wide mountainous lands between Siena in the north and Naples and Puglia in the south.l3 It is possible to identify different patterns of settlement change not only from region to region or diocese to diocese but (where the documentation lets us) from village to village. I would draw a broad distinction between 'socio-economic' and 'socio-political' aspects of these changes. Socio-economic changes included land clearance, the restructuring of patterns of property-owning, the concentration of services (smiths, potters, weavers) in the new fortified centres in the context of the slow economic growth of the tenth- and eleventh-century countryside; socio-political changes included political decentralization, the development of signorial rights, the crystal1ization of the new military aristocracy, and the growing interest in direct local political control on the part of at least some rural lords. All these changes varied in their intensity from place to place, when they took place at all (land clearance was not much of an option in the long-occupied south-facing hill-slopes of northern Tuscany, for example, nor was local political control where signorie were weak and landownership ·was totally fragmented); the impact of incastellamento and its associated · settlement changes varied accordingly. The appearance of fortifications cannot, it must be recognized, simply be interpreted as representing political change, and that of settlement-concentration as economic change; the Wickham, 11 problema delrincastellamento (an English version of part of this is 'The te"a of San Vincenzo al Voltumo in the 8th to 12th centuries: the historical framework', in R. Hodges and J. Mitchell (eds.), San Vincenzo a/ Volturno: The archaeology, art and territory of an early medieval monastery (Oxford, 19Ss). pp. 227- ss). 13

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success of lords in Lazio and Molise, say, in getting a whole rural population to live in their castelli has a political element too, that of control (an ambiguous one, though, one should note: a militarized peasantry sitting behind a set of fortifications was not always easy to control, as Montecassino found in the eleventh century). Indeed, as I have argued for Lazio, and shall argue in the context of the Casentino, the success or failure of attempts to enclose a rural population inside such fortifications can in itself often be seen as an index of the variations in the local political power of landowners. The purpose of this discussion of castelli is to show that the way in which the appearance of castles is currently analysed in Italy is rather different from equivalent analyses in much of northern Europe. Castelli are an effective integrating device in Italy, because their full impact on settlement involves change on more levels than just the political; they are an index of more than just the appearance of 'feudal' society. Indeed, not only do castelli work as an integrating device for 'total' historians; settlement change itself does so too. In northern Europe, once villages came to fit into the highly structured collective economy of the three-field system or the other elaborate systems of agricultural exploitation recorded by generations of geographers in Germany, they rarely changed their basic form, at least until the Agricultural Revolution. Settlements in Mediterranean Europe are rarely so structured; their coherence, which can be great, is less often linked to a long-standing pattern of agrarian organization. They can, therefore, more easily change in pattern, and do; both political and economic changes can be sufficient to alter any form of settlement in Italy, and both, often at frequent intervals, have done so. Settlement studies (both archaeological and historical) and the chasing of castelli are certainly fashionable; but they are · or can be closely integrated into the main themes of historical interpretation. They have, too, the advantage of locating historical changes on the ground, where, after all, in a world almost entirely devoted to agriculture, most of them took place. It is in this context that the issue of settlement in its various aspects will appear over and over again in this book, too; its changes, and even its stability, can be discussed both socio-economically and socio-politically, as we shall see.l4 14 Below, pp. 37-9, IIS- I9, Z92- Jo6.

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These discussions have not been intended as a full characterization of all the dominant trends in current Italian historical thinking, even those directed to early medieval history; they do not, indeed, even refer to more than a fraction of the current writing on the signoria or the castello. (I discuss more in the text, when I deal in more detail with how these categories fit my own empirical research.) I have been concerned, rather, to indicate some aspects of the intellectual framework in which I have posed this book, those which involve presuppositions most specific to Italian history-writing and least familiar to an English-speaking audience. Others I have tried to explain as I go along; I hope I have not missed too many.

EARLY MEDIEVAL TUSCANY: SOME BACKGROUND

Tuscany was, from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, one of the most clearly defmed regions of the kingdom of Italy. We must look at its political framework in a little detail, since it is the region this book is dealing with, and since the course of its political history had more than a minor effect on the social patterns of the two mountain valleys, the Garfagnana above Lucca and the Casentino above Arezzo, that are the focus of the book as a whole (see Map I). · Before 774, Tuscia was already one of the three principal sections of the Lombard kingdom north of Rome, covering more or less the whole of the modern region of Tuscany and some of north-west Lazio, with its principal centre at Lucca. Exactly what political function it had is unclear, but it had a clear territorial identity; even though the March of Tuscany of the ninth to twelfth centuries was not its direct descendant, it came to occupy roughly the same area and take the same name. And it did not take long for the march to coalesce, in the decades after Soo. The counts of Lucca began in those years slowly to accumulate other countships in the northern half of Tuscany, and began by the middle of the century to entitle themselves marchio. Adalbert I and Adalbert 11 (846--915), the strongest of them, were marquises in, rather than of, Tuscany; but under them the line of cities from Florence to the sea came to have a common and distinct development, which was extended to

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Arezzo and Siena, and much of _the south as well, in the later tenth century, The centre of the march remained at Lucca, dominant in all probability as a result of its importance as the key to communications over the Appennines to Pavia, and enriched by the resources of a fertile agricultural plain set at the outlet from the mountains of the River Serchio. 1 5 The political and economic core of Tuscany was in the north, in the Amo valley and its tributaries (counting the Serchio, which ~till Bowed into the Amo at Pisa throughout our period). The valleys south of Siena were marginal, in this period as in all others since the second century AD, and were probably little inhabited. The chain of plain-lands in the river valleys below Arezzo were the most fertile and the most populous when they were habitable, immediately around Lucca and Arezzo for instance; but many of them were marsh, like much of the Aorence-Pistoia plain, and the whole of the Amo delta around Pisa save for the narrow line of the road eastwards. Demographically more important in our period were the low hills north and south of these plains, the southern slopes of the Appennines and the wider hill-country of the Chianti and the Valdelsa- Valdera, some of which were more fully exploited for agriculture than they are today. Small wonder that the great cities, with the exception of Lucca and the sea-orientated Pisa, lay on or against the hills.l6 Florence is nowadays thought of as the 'natural' centre of Tuscany; even the few historians who, like Davidsohn at the beginning of the century, have discussed its rise to importance have seen this in terms of it taking its rightful position in the region from Lucca, the old political centre, and Pisa, the newer (eleventh- and twelfth-century) commercial one.17 But this future was far from obvious in our period. Before the beginning Keller, 'Marca di Tuscia', pp. nS- 33, with bibliography. 1 6 These generalizations must remain summary at the moment, for we lack systematic agrarian studies, with the notable exception of Conti, Formazione i, for the Fiorentino (in particular, the middle Chianti) in the eleventh century. For a good general survey, focused however on the late Middle Ages, when conditions were rather different, see Pinto, TosCJma, pp. 3--92. For the . Appennines themselves, see Chs. 1 and 6 below. 17 Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze i-despite its antiquity (it dates from 1896) it is stiJI the best political history of Tuscany in the years 1000 to 1200, although the studies in Atti del so Congresso replace it for the eighth to tenth centuries. 1&

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of the clearance of the Florentine plain, and the development of the low Appennine pass over to Bologna, Florence was an isolated backwater. Even after these developments, by IIOO, say, it is still far from clear why it should have been more favourably placed either agriculturally or commercially than Lucca or Pisa, which dominated respectively the main land-route through Tuscany (by now, as the via Francigena to Rome, even more important than in the eighth century) and one of the major sea-routes of Europe. Florence's history before the thirteenth century has yet to receive a modern•study, but it should not be thought that a book dealing with the hinterlands of Lucca and Arezzo, on either side of it, is wilfully leaving out the Prince of Denmark; Lucca was beyond doubt, before 1050 at the very earliest, in political, economic, and demographic terms the most important of the cities of the region, rivalled only by Pisa. Florence (like Siena) may well only have emerged from the level of prosperous second-rank centres such as Arezzo around 1200.

Adalbert 11 was a contemporary of Berengar I, and was the only one of the three marquises in Italy in 888 not to try for the throne; he kept out of the civil wars and confusion of the first half of Berengar's reign. It was probably in large part as a result of this that Tuscany saw very little of the slide into particularism that characterized the tenth-century Po plain. Even after Adalbert's death in 915, when Berengar and then Hugh began to intervene in Tuscan affairs, overthrowing Adalbert's family and appointing counts in rivalry to the marquis, Tuscany did not lose its cohesion entirely .18 Royal diplomas are scarce in the region in the tenth century except in the Aretino and the south, which were still politically separate from the march; castelli were still rare apart from the foundations of the bishop of Lucca, and were certainly not yet the normal part of local landed power that they had become by 950 in northern Italy, thanks to Berengar's cessions and those of his successors. When the power of the marquis slowly re-established itself under King Hugh's son Hubert and in particular his grandson Marquis Hugh (969-1001), it had to recognize the existence of other comital Keller, 'Marca di Tuscia', pp. 132-6; Nobili, 'Famiglie marchionali', pp. 93-9; Schwarzmaier, 'Societa e istituzioni: Lucca', pp. 149--56; id., Lucca, pp. 318-22. 18

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families, the Guidi, Cadolingi, Gherardeschi, and Aldobrandeschi, but the march was more dearly defined in institutional terms and more geographically extended than before. Marquis Hugb may not have been as politically dominant as Adalbert, but his power was as public as that of Adalbert: be controlled judicial tribunals, minting rights, and an army; he was the dominant benefactor to the Tuscan Church as marquis, not as a member of a great aristocratic family. In Tuscany, state power had not yet broken down; it had been devolved to the level of the regional state.l9 Hugh's death in 1001 produced another crisis in marchesal power, but this too wa~ only temporary. When, in 1027-8, Boniface of Canossa (1027- 52) was made marquis by Conrad 11, the power of the march was re-established, and continued for most of the nine decades up to the death of his daughter, the 'countess' Matilda (1076-IIIS). The Canossa had a chancery modelled on that of the Empire, and right up to the end, longer than almost anywhere else in Italy, they maintained the tradition of great ceremonial court cases (placita) inherited from the Carolingian world. They had to, for they had almost no land in Tuscany other than the slowly declining fiScal lands that went with the march, their own traditional landed power-base being in Emilia, on the other side of the Appennines; if the public traditions of the march were to vanish, they would be rendered powerless in. Tuscany.20 They carried on the traditions of the State, indeed, longer than anyone else in the Italian kingdom; Henry IV in the north had quite other things to worry about. But the pattern of power of the eleventh century was not quite the same as that of Hugh's era. The Canossa were rather less solidly implanted in the cities than were Hugh and his predecessors. The marquises were sometimes in Florence, more rarely in Lucca, but often, when in Tuscany, in their rural stronghold of Marturi (modem Poggibonsi). More important than their residence, however, was their politics. Boniface was suspicious of the urban elites of Lucca, and brought new families of judges from northern Italy to counter them; his successors ·Falce, Marchese Ugo; Nobili, 'Famiglie marchionali', pp. 99-101; Kun:e, 'Monasteri e nohilta', pp. 351-9. 20 Nobili, ' Dominazioni marchionali', pp. 243-6; Bertolini, 'Bonifacio'; Overmann, Matilde, register and pp. 204- 10. 19

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linked themselves with the greater noble families of the region, such as the Guidi, the Cadolingi, and the Porcaresi, rather than with the cities, which they sought to control from the outside. Lucca was certainly hostile to Boniface in return, and, w ith Pisa, openly supported Henry IV against Matilda and Gregory VII; the two cities got extensive charters of liberties in return in 1081. In Arezzo, the marquises rarely appeared at all, and the bishop took effective control of the city, calling himself count by the 1050s. 21 The Canossa in Tuscany wete a little like the Ottonians in the whole kingdom in the previous century, maintaining the structure of their state with military forces from over the mountains; in the end, in both cases, their ideological hegemony was contested, with increasing violence. If in 1024 the inhabitants of Pavia, the capital of Italy, expelled the royal palace from the city, the Lucchesi, inhabitants of the Tuscan capital, did the same in 1081 for the marquise. When Matilda died in I II5, the march coexisted not only with counts and other substantial aristocrats with their own power-bases, but with the newly established city communes. In Tuscany there was, in effect, no break between the Carolingian world and the age of the communes; one gave way directly to the other. This book is not about political history, and the history of the shift from a marchesal to an urban politics is anyway extremely obscure the issue is, amazingly, almost unstudied. But the survival of the march in Tuscany did have profound effects on the orientation of the aristocracy, as we shall see in Chapter 4· It was also, in that context, a major cause of a feature of Tuscan rural society that will be of considerable relevance to us, the relative weakness in most of the region of signorial power-structures and feudo-vassalic relationships, a weakness that indeed outlasted our period, and was an important element in the political contrasts between Tuscany and the Po plain as late as the Renaissance. 2 2 But it must also be borne in mind that the political relationship that mattered to most people in Tuscany, as in the lands of the Po plain, was that between the local city and its own countryside, however varying in its nature and 21

Schwanmaier, Luua, pp. 259-60, 322-3; Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', pp. 578-83. 22 Cammarosano, 'Feudo e proprieta'; Chittolini, Formaz ione de/lo stato regionale, e.g. pp. 322- 4.

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strength. Even with a still powerful Matilda breathing down their necks, the cities of Tuscany developed their first communal institutions across exactly the same time-scale as those of the north, and indeed did much the same things with them. At most, it is possible though it remains to be proved-that the background of the march allowed most Tuscan cities to establish hegemony over their contadi in the twelfth century more easily than could their trans-Appennine neighbours. But the issue lies outside the remit of this book.

NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY

I have extensively used several standard terms used by Italian historians, most of which I have kept in roman rather than italic type, on the grounds that too much italic for normal parts of a technical vocabulary is irritating to the reader. I give a meaning in the text for signoria (pp. 105-8), castello and incastellamento (pp. xxili-v), consorteria (Chapter 9, n. 10), mezzadria (p. 33), appoderamento (p. 23 1), and the usage 'ff. Berardi' and the like for names of families (Chapter 7, n. 34). For the German terms Grosslibell and Mittellibell (from the Latin libellus, a written lease), seep. 16 and Chapter I, n. 3· The pieve (Lat. plebs) was one of the principal elements of medieval Italian ecclesiastical organization; it was the major subdivision of the diocese, based on the pieval church at its centre. Its priest was known as a pievano (plebanus). Pievi could have any number of subordinate churches in their territories, from one to thirty or more. They were, however, the only churches at which baptisms could be performed, and they were the centres to which tithes were due, until they were superseded, not without difficulty, by a parish system across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (They had some relationship and similarity to minsters in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England.) See further below, pp. 32-3, 171- 3. Other technical terms, principally those I have left in Latin, will be explained as we go on. As to names, I have consistently translated the names of kings, emperors, popes, and marquises into English, while putting into Italian those of counts, bishops, saints, and everyone else (thus Pietro di Giovanni means Peter son ofJohn, throughout). When

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Pope Alexander II is the same man as Bishop Anselmo I of Lucca, this may look odd; but no system is perfect, and this one, at least, looks the least odd to me. The names of places are less trouble, for in Tuscany only Firenze (Florence) has a currently used English form; but it may be worth noting that the territories of the various cities each have a name in Italian, mostly corresponding to the adjectival form of the city, and I use these throughout-the Lunigiana and the Lucchesia (irreg.), and the Pisano, Pistoiese, Fiorentino, Fiesolano, Aretino, and Senese. Italicized place-names are in the original Latin; I use them only when there is no current form or when the place cannot be identified.

BLANK PAGE

General Introduction This book is about local history. Local histories are often regarded by historians as not fully respectable; they can too often consist of the evaluation or celebration of the history of a single locality- whether a village, or a city, or a river valley- without regard for general historical issues; as pure empiricism, even antiquarianism, for its own sake. But at least such works have a sense of place, a quality often lacking in professional history-writing. And they force us to recognize that all historical frameworks are inevitably rooted in local realities. In much historical literature, individual places appear merely as examples in some unfolding historical process, whether the history of feudal relationships, or of the structure of landed estates, or of the institutions of the Church, or of the origins of capitalism. But all such processes are assembled out of, or extrapolated from, a mass of individual experiences, of the men and women who are the real subjects of history; and the experiences of these men and women were structured first and foremost by the local environments they lived in, whether villages or cities or river valleys. History begins in these places, before it can be extended to Tuscany, or Italy, or Europe. In this sense, all history is local history. We must understand the specific histories of these environments-in their relationship to geography, local economic patterns, and the ecological bases of subsistence (their archaeology, in the fullest sense) as much as in their relationship to changes in local politics and in the ground rules for the construction of social hierarchies-before we go any further. It is not my intention, however, to raise a banner for empiricism. Six accounts of the separate historical development of Lucca, Pisa, Pistoia, Florence, Arezzo, and Siena do not, when put together like so many potatoes, produce an urban history of Tuscany. Still less do the individual histories of a thousand villages constitute a history of the countryside. And, of course, even the most empirical analyses presuppose theories about

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general developments-sometimes the very theories that future syntheses based on that empirical work will reject. Local studies cannot ignore explicit generalization, for otherwise there will be a break between analysis and synthesis that will, in the end, invalidate both. What local analysis entails, rather, is more sophisticated generalization, rooted in a better understanding of the myriad differences in the elements constitutive of a general development, without which that general development cannot be understood. Most historians, of course, recognize the foregoing. But they do not always practise it. One reason is obvious, particularly in the world of medieval history-still more that of early medieval history: there is too little information about individual places to allow us to proceed from the ground upwards, and what information exists is often dauntingly difficult to use. Another is equally clear to historians of later periods: the procedure is inipractical. The framework I have delineated is not markedly dissimilar from that of the great regional syntheses of the Annalistes; they always, as a point of honour, begin with geography, the indissoluble base for all subsequent analysis. But even a regional survey consists of very many local histories put together, not just one or two. Due weight to local difference will make one's conclusions more subtle, but also infmitely more complicated. If a regional these averages 1,000 pages without detailed local analyses, how long would it be with those analyses included: Les Paysans de Languedoc with every section as long as Le Carnaval de Romans? But there are, none the less, a number of classic analyses, even of medieval rural societies, that do give due weight to local identity but still direct themselves outward, towards wider generalization. In Tuscany, Johan Plesner achieved this for Passignano in the 1930s; more recently, in 1965, Elio Conti did it- often with rather different results- for nearby Poggialvento. 1 Each chose a single village and took apart its economic and, above all, its social structure, with an eye to its significance for the development of society in the Fiorentino as a whole in, respectively, the thirteenth and the eleventh centuries. One can, Plesner, Emigrazione dalla campagna; Conti, Formazione i ; for an earlier period in Lombardy, see Rossetti, Cologno M onzese. 1

General Introduction

3 indeed, looking at these books, get an idea of what needs to be done. It is inside such a framework of analysis that this book is situated: above all, it is concerned with social structures, with the interrelationships of people living and working face to face within individual communities, and with the wider implications of such interrelationships. I have chosen two mountain valleys in the Tuscan Appennines for such a study, taken through the early Middle Ages and up to the eleventh to twelfth centuries. A whole mountain valley, still more two, may seem to be well outside the framework that I have just outlined, for it is obviously a congeries of different localities; but a discussion of a valley does, at least in principle, allow the development of just such a local history as I have described. It is small enough for the history of each settlement in it- in so far as this is known- to be individually comprehensible, while still participating in the complex development of the valley as a whole; as a result, the contribution of a local history to a regional history can actually be understood. In fact, wide differences in surviving documentation automatically select certain villages as samples for closer analysis, with others, in their different ways, serving as controls; a statistician would be unhappy with this selection procedure, but nothing can be done about it- it is at least convenient. But, most important of all, a mountain valley lends itself particularly easily to local analysis with a geographical edge. The varying constraints of geography are very much more obviously important in the mountainswithout them, indeed, no convincing historical analysis is possible. The impact of geography on mountain society is great, but it is also varied; no two mountain valleys are the same. The Garfagnana and the Casentino, the two valleys discussed in this book, are certainly very different from each other. The former is in many respects more 'mountainous', with uncultivable land often rising straight up from the valley roads, with narrow side-valleys running through gorges up to high pasture, and with the impassable cliffs of the Alpi Apuane barring it from all sight or smell of the sea on the other side picturesque to our eyes, but appalling to medieval writers, doubtless typical, in this case at least, of most people of the time. The Casentino is a gentler valley; its bills are mostly tree-covered rather than bare

4

General Introduction

and rocky; the valley ·of the Arno and those of many of its tributaries are wide-bottomed and relatively fertile. But the two are alike in several ways. They are well documented, by early medieval standards (the Garfagnana with 220 documents before I Ioo, the Casentino with 650). They both open out onto cities, Lucca and Arezzo respectively. They are both valleys with a considerable identity and cohesion, with their own names; but none the less they are, and were, relatively closely tied into the social and political world of the line of great Tuscan cities running from Arezzo down to the sea. The contrasts implied by this last statement are with mountain areas in most of the rest ofltaly. True, most of the cities of the Po plain also sit at the ends of valleys, whether Alpine or Appennine, and, during times (like the early Middle Ages) when far less of the plain was cultivated than we could easily imagine now, city dwellers were involved with the lower valleys and slopes of the mountains quite as much as they were with the plains. But the valleys of the north are long. Aosta and Trento and the Valtellina have traditionally enjoyed considerable autonomy in relation to the lowlands. Lesser valleys may have been administratively more subject to the cities of the plain, but they are mostly ill-documented, at least in the early Middle Ages. This prevents us from studying them, in effect, but it also acts as a rough indicator of the lack of relationship they too had with their cities, for cities were the normal centres of document-writing. Further south, in the central and southern Appennines, the mountains filled the peninsula, blocking any chance that the urban societies of the coasts might make a real impact on the barren interior. The Tuscan valleys, on the other hand, were shorter and more accessible: not one extends above • its city more than So km by road. Although often large valleys, with real centres, they did not present an impossible challenge to the urban society of the Middle Ages, even of the early Middle Ages. It is in fact a major contention of this book that they were quite as integrated into a socio-political world focused on the city in the early Middle Ages as they would be later; . sometimes more so. Mountain societies are rather different from those of the plains. A historical model based on such societies might, therefore, seem of doubtful r~levance outside its geographical environment.

General Introduction

5 Indeed, l started my work on the Appennines with that presupposition; in such a vein l produced two studies on the central Appennines that stressed very heavily their geographical particularity, and I intended to fit this Tuscan study very much into a mountain-orientated framework. 2 My expectations of the Tuscan Appennines changed during my researches, however, as I became more aware of the real strength of Lucca and Arezzo as foci for social relationships in their territories, even in the mountains. One can indeed say that the processes through which this strength was felt are of general relevance, not least because they act as a limiting case for all city-country interaction. We can start from extremely localized analyses, therefore, and arrive, at least in principle, at generalizations that have interest and importance well beyond single mountain valleys. But I shall also aim at generalizations that have validity for the mountains as an object of analysis in their own right. How my conclusions derived from central Appennine societies fit the very different environment of the Tosco-Emilian ranges will become clearer • as we go on. Two preoccupations underlie this book, therefore. First, the problem of how small-scale rural, local society worked in the early Middle Ages, beneath the better-known worlds of city, court, and Church. This society is normally seen through the frameworks of estate management, judicial powers, and pastoral care used by elites to control their inferiors, for these frameworks are by far the most clearly evidenced throughout the Middle Ages. In medieval, even early medieval, Italy, however, there is sometimes sufficient documentation to allow us to attempt an analysis from below. The early medieval village and its social structures are in some ways strikingly informal, contrasting with the carefully constructed patterns of political power in Carolingian Europe; we often find ourselves looking at a series of social networks or circles, Kreise as the Germans would call them, rather than defined social or geographical territories. Only with the breakdown of national and regional political structures did those of smaller units come into focus, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, say, with the establishment of castelli and signorie, and the appearance of rural communes: society became, 2

Wickham, Societa degli Appennini; id., 11 problema dell'incastellamento.

6

•

General Introduction

not just better documented, but more explicit. In this book I propose to look at the less formal world that preceded these developments, so that in the end we may understand what its crystallization into new 'signorial' structures might really mean. History from below before the twelfth century has a fairly narrow documentary base private charters, principally gifts to the Church, sales and leases; we will not be able to write another Montaillou from them. But gift, sale, and lease of land are representations of social and economic relationships, and it is these that we can use to get an idea of how different local societies worked. We will certainly fmd informality, but we will also find some firm patterns that were to continue with little change, to underpin the more signorial world of the twelfth century onwards.a Balanced against this problematic is the issue of the nature of mountain society. Femand Braudel taught us that the geographical logic of the mountain world determines a different way of life and social orientation from those obtaining on the plains. And so, often, it does. But geography, like grace, works through people, and people have their own ideas about the nattire of geographical constraints, ideas that are not necessarily ours. 4 Our imagery of a specifically mountain society and economy is very largely a product of the great age of commercial pastoralism of the late medieval and early modern periods, a period of exceptional economic integration, through exchange, of mountain and plain. This economic integration was far less in earlier periods, and, as a consequence, the economic contrasts s An obvious analogy is the crystallization of aristocratic family strucrures as the Carolingian state disintegrated, for which see, classically, Scbmid, 'Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht'; Duby, Hommes et structures, pp. 395- 422. The sharpness of their empirical contrasts can be challenged, however, along the lines of Leyser, 'German Aristocracy', pp. JZ-9, 48-53, or Violante, 'Quelques caracteristiques des structures familiales'. In fact, I suspect that the same is true of both family structures and geographical territorialization: that the explicitness of their boundaries is new, but their internal structures are far older, and change relatively little. A recent and stimulating general analysis of European social development along these lines is Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities. 4 Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World i, pp. 25- 53. For comments on geographical determinism in medieval Italy, see Sergi, Potere e terriwrio, pp. 19-24; on the geography of perception, Comba, 'Jl territorio . VJSSuto . '. come spano

General Introduction

7

between mountain and plain were less as well. But the slow development of economic links between the two was a different process from that of the flux and reflux of socio-political domination; it is an irony of history that Lucca had more direct political control over the Garfagnana in the ninth century, when economic links up the valley were few, than it had in the early thirteenth, when the city merchants were coming to dominate the mountain economy. I shall try in what follows to explain how this could happen, and what in practice it actually meant. The socio-economic consequences of living in a mountain environment are not, then, necessarily to be read off automatically from its geography. But how much effect being in the mountains has on these societies is a question that will occur and recur, as it did in my book on Valva in the Abruzzo, an environment much more 'mountainous' in most of its aspects than any of the Tuscan valleys, even if not always in ways expected. Mountain societies are at least easier to define; they are physically bounded in obvious ways. They have greater possibilities for the development of silvo-pastoral economic systems, such as those in the late medieval Tosco-Ernilian Appennines described for us by Giovanni Cherubini. 5 They are often societies with extreme socio-economic structures, either remarkably undifferentiated and relatively egalitarian, or extremely highly differentiated and unequal, lacking the balance of more urbanized societies. These features are not by any means universal; as we shall see, our Tuscan examples do not fit that pattern at all in our period. But even though geographical determinism does not lay down the lines of necessary, or even natural, development, geography does none the less provide a major element in the logic of the situation, through which the social perception of an environment is transferred to action. Like te<;:hnology, or the prevailing relations of production, geography acts as a constraint, a tendency; if it does not determine particular paths, it at least makes them more likely. If mountain societies do not seem to reflect their geographical location at all, then there is a problem that has to be explained. The Tuscan mountains in the early Middle Ages were in many ways strikingly similar to the plains. 0

Esp. in Cherubini, 'La societ:i dell'Appennino settentrionale (secoli XIIIXV)' in Signori, contadini, bC'rghesi, pp. 121-42; ibid., pp. 99-116; id., ' "Civilta" del castagno'; id., 'Paesaggio agrario'.

8

General Introduction

They were ·less diverse, one could even say less remote, than they would be later, and we have to see why. Only then can we begin to come to grips with how they came to be different by the end of the Middle Ages, when they came to be so closely associated with an economy based on sheep and chestnuts, in the. world of the 'civilta del castagno' . The Garfagnana and the Casentino are among the great quaternary basins of the north Tuscan Appennines, along with the Lunigiana, the Mugello, and the Val Tiberina. All these basins are large enough to allow, at least in principle, the appearance of some relatively homogeneous and inward-looking society that is worth describing as such by the historian. Only the first two of these have any son of adequate documentation for the period before 1 Ioo; comparisons with the other valleys are thus hard to make. None the less, I will at times parallel and contrast the Garfagnana with its western neighbour the Lunigiana, where a reasonably consistent pattern of documentation is just beginning to appear in the eleventh century; the clearest comparison w,ith the Casentino, apart from its sister valley, is the· zone studied by Elio Conti, around Poggialvento in the Chianti, not in the mountains but fairly isolated, and offering a very similar sort of evidence. The documentation for the Garfagnana and for the Casentino in our period is contrasted in two major respects. The first is their respective time-scales. The early medieval record for the Garfagnana consists of some 220 documents more or less evenly spaced in time between 723 and the 1060s; thereafter, we see a sudden drop in the number of documents, with less than forty more references until 1200, and little more than fifty among the thousands of Lucchese documents for the thirteenth. The Casentino texts are very differently arrayed; there is in effect no material at all until 1000 except for a few royal grants, and then a sudden wealth: 650 documents for the eleventh century alone, and a steady stream in the next centuries. If the paucity of the Garfagnana evidence for the twelfth century tempts easy generalization, the very volume of that for the Casentino makes some gesture beyond I 100 inevitable; the twelfth century, then, will be covered, in less detail, as a coda to both sections.

General Introduction

9

The second contrast is the origin of this evidence. The Garfagnana documents are nearly all from the archiepiscopal archive in Lucca, until just before the end of the thirteenth century; they were collected there early, and they mostly involve the bishops and the cathedral church as actors. Over 8o per cent of those from the Casentino are, by contrast, from the archives of three valley monasteries, Prataglia, Camaldoli. and Strumi, and only very much smaller numbers come from the Arezzo canonica (the cathedral chapter) and from the monastery of SS. Fiora e Lucilla, the Badia Aretina; the episcopal archive of Arezzo is lost. The details of these collections are better discussed in the context of the valleys themselves, but some differences in their composition can mislead the historian, and need to be signalled. One could almost say that the sets of evidence for the Garfagnana and for the Casentino are photographic negatives of each other, in the omnipresence of the episcopal church in the one and its near-total absence (apart from episcopal gifts to monasteries) in the other. Superficially, the Garfagnana seems like an episcopally dominated valley, the Casentino like a world apart, entirely unurbanized and independent of the city. Both of these impressions are misleading, particularly the latter. We can see after a while how the charters for the Garfagnana constantly deal with a few specific villages, leaving gaping holes in the valley geography that must have been filled by local owners, very much more tenuously linked to the city. In the Casentino, on the other hand, the bishop of Arezzo, and his cathedral church, S. Donato, the major absentees from our material, soon appear as a phantom presence: direct or indirect evidence shows the bishop as owner of a number of enormous blocs of mountain land and forest, and his extensive capillary ownership inside settled areas is shown by the number of properties whose bounds touch on the terra S. Dqnat~in some well-documented areas, over a half of all recorded bounded properties. The hegemony of the bishop and, more generally, of the city of Arezzo over the Casentino is certainly less clear than that of Lucca over the Garfagnana; but it is all the more striking in that it is evidenced in a very wide range of ways from a body of material that has no direct link with the city at all, the documents from the valley monasteries. We must recognize, on the other hand, that it was in neither case a

IO

General Introduction

hegemony based entirely on landowning; indeed, both valleys have probably always shown a predominance of peasant and near-peasant proprietors. How the relationship between bishops and city on the one hand and local owners on the other actually worked, we shall see as we proceed. The difference between the origins of the evidence for the two valleys also explains the contrast in time-scales. Episcopal documents survive in most places for earlier centuries than is the case for other ecclesiastical institutions, where documents survive at all. Monastic collections tend to start when the monasteries themselves were founded, or began to accumulate gifts: in the eighth century for a few of the great monastic houses of the kingdom of Italy, Farfa or S. Ambrogio di Milano or (in Tuscany) Monte Amiata; more often, above all in Tuscany, in the second wave of foundations and gift-giving that began in the last years of the tenth century and continued, for most institutions, until the early twelfth. 6 This second wave was the context for all the documentation for the monasteries based on, or owning land in, the Casentino (there was none founded in the Garfagnana). The sudden appearance of documents in much of Tuscany around 1000 has sometimes been seen as a reflex, not of ecclesiastical gift-giving, but of the spread of charter-making itself. Elio Conti concluded that the absence of earlier documents from the Fiorentino-and he could equally have added the Aretino-meant that it was only at that time that written documentation became at all generalized in the countryside. But the early sequence of Lucchese private documents, incorporated into the episcopal archive in or..soon after the eighth century, together with the continuity of documentation in the remote fastnesses of the Anrlata, make such an argument less plausible. A better explanation is that derived from the patterns of private documentation we have. People only began seriously to give land to the churches and monasteries of north-east Tuscany in the years after IOoo-the years, indeed, when most of them were actually founded. And one can easily observe from any group of documents that the private secular transactions for a The pattern is most clearly set out for Tuscany in Kune, 'Monasteri e nobilci'. 6

General Introduction

I I

given area incorporated in collections that ended up in the archives of the church very rarely pre-date by more than a generation the documents of gift for the same area to the church, often demonstrably for the same land as the earlier private transactions. Most likely, after the acquired land (conquisitum) of one generation had become the inherited land (hereditas) of the next, and the land was held continuously for the thirty-year period required by law for prima-facie possession, documents were less necessary and tended to be lost. We should not, then, expect documents greatly to pre-date the years of extensive gift-giving to the churches who kept them. And in north-east Tuscany, where episcopal archives are all fragmentary, this means the early eleventh century. 7 As a result of the foregoing arguments, the differences in nature and time-scale between our sets of documents become less important. The rise and fall of Garfagnana documentation, as we will see, reflect in certain ways the flux of urban involvement with the mountains. The sharp rise and constant presence of that for the Casentino, however, shows something quite different: the local status and internal organization of newly founded local monasteries. If we had the Arezzo episcopal archive, and if there had been monasteries in the Garfagnana, the evidence might have levelled out at once. A final observation should be made about the structure of this book. The reader might conclude from the resolution of these two contrasts that the evidence for the Casentino could actually be said to fill the gaps in that for the Garfagnana: the latter being based on urban, rather than local documentation, and weakest in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the former exactly the reverse. There is some truth in this. I shall, on occasion, discuss the eleventh-century Casentino as in some sense the successor to the eighth- and tenth-century Garfagnana; many Conti, Formaz ione i, p. 140. For the patterns in the Casentino, see below, pp. 190-4. It is worth adding that the first private Casentino document is RC 2 for 915, a full eighty years before the next; it has clearly survived on its own by chance, but it is a marriage transaction, and such ttansactions were by no means the first to enter the written record. Eleventh-century documents, when they appear, are also very consistent in their formulae (unlike the first documents for the Lucchesia, from the eighth cenrury); this too argues against their being a new phenomenon. 7

12

General Introduction

of the processes on.Jy adumbrated in the Lucchese valley work themselves out after 1000, with better documentation, .in the Aretine valley. And indeed, some of them can be picked up in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries in the Garfagnana again. Of course, one has to be careful when playing with the evidence in this way; there were major differences between the two areas, differences which I shall emphasize when necessary. But the real differences between my two discussions are in reality not so much empirical as structural. The evidence from the Garfagnana that I have used covers a great arc of time: 400 or soo years, with some gestures across a greater span than that, right into the sixteenth century. It allows one to analyse the outward shape of social change, as it develops over a long period. That from the Casentino, by contrast, I have selected for a rather shorter period, covering, for most of my discussions, no more than a century; although I have certainly not ignored the progression of time, my attention has been focused on patterns that can be analysed as a single synchronic group. Only an analysis of this kind, based on relatively full material, can tell us about the content of social interaction and, in the end, about the content of social change itself: about what effect the framework of change actually had on people. In this sense, then, my analyses of the valleys are intended to fit together in a precise relationship, that between an analysis of form and an analysis of content. It is my hope that this relationship may work dialectically: that is to say, that our comprehension of each may be mutually enhanced by bearing in mind the other, the consciousness of change in the Garfagnana illuminating the understanding of the content of social interaction in the Casentino, and vice versa. This may be a crabwise way of analysing social processes; but with evidence like this, what else can we do?

PART I

The Garfagnana,

•

70o- I 200

BLANK PAGE

I

Geography and Historical Ecology I

Lucchese documents begin before 700, earlier than those of any other major archive in Italy save Ravenna, and they are unmatched in quantity by those of any other archive before 1000. It is not surprising, therefore, that records for the Garfagnana begin in the 720s. But the very extensiveness of the Lucca archives emphasizes how well Garfagnana documents survived in the city. Thirty eighth-century documents have Garfagnana material, 8o ninth-century, and 65 tenth-centurya constant 10 per cent or so of the surviving Lucchese charters for each century; only in the eleventh does the percentage fall, to 3 per cent (so documents), and in the twelfth to I per cent (30 documents). 1 Ten per cent for the eighth to tenth centuries is a lot for one mountain valley, in an area like the medieval Lucchesia where the city had so wide and rich a hinterland, stretching south well beyond the Arno; the Lucchese Garfagnana was little more than 10 per cent of the surface area of the whole diocese, mountains included, and its population must have been far less than that. (The upper third of the Garfagnana was not technically Lucchese, for it was part of the diocese of Luni; de facto, however, it fell into Lucca's orbit, and its surviving documents- under a fifth of the total ended up in Lucca.) This is not chance survival; the penetration ofLucca into the mountains was extensive and early. And if it suffered a setback in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries with the brief efflorescence of the so-called 'conti rurali', this was only temporary; late medieval Lucca, like the early medieval city, was also in substantial control of its mountains, until the Este of Modena and Ferrara seized most of them in the years following 1429. Some of the 1 10;

Figures for the Lucchese archives until 1100 in Schwarzmaier, Lucca, p. for the twelfth century, my own calculations.

16

The Garfagnana, 70()-1200

developments that run up to that point will be briefly considered at the end of Part I.2 We must distinguish between different levels and aspects of this penetration, for the political and socio-economic structures of Lucca-and, indeed, of the Garfagnana evolved across time. We must always, too, recognize the existence of the absent, the social patterns that fell outside Lucca's orbit and were therefore not documented. Grosso modo, our evidence falls into four types, which illuminate several of these levels in turn. From 720 to 865 we have evidence for small and medium proprietors and their local and extra-local activities, particularly their relationship with the bishop. From 790 to 96o we have a considerable array of leases, mosdy episcopal leases to cultivators, which shed light on the presence in the Garfagnana of the estate patterns of the Lucchesia as a whole. From 940 to 1020 these give way to Grosslibelle, Endres's term for the leases of whole estates and pievi to the Lucchese (generally urban) aristocracy. 3 From 1020 onwards, we have a more fragmentary array of evidence, more similar in its heterogeneity to that of the eighth century, though dealing, from now until well into the twelfth century, almost exclusively with the affairs of the aristocracy. Such a pattern of evidence is common in other parts of the Lucchesia, and indeed elsewhere. I will argue against the theory that the fall-off in reference to small owners in the ninth century and the dominance of the evidence by leaseholding aristocrats after 950 represent a The starting-point for the historiography of the early medieval Lucchesia is Schwarzmaier, Lucca. Other essential references are: Osheim, Italian Lordship; Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari'; de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', the basic narrative history of the valley; and Angelini, Pieve toscana, a frrst-rate local and ecclesiastical history of Pieve Fosciana. (Angelini, Storia longobarda in Garfagnana, reached me too late to be incorporated in my analyses; in general, where we are in disagreement I maintain my own positions.) See Repetti, Dizionario della Toscana, for other local historical discussions. The maps that cover the Garfagnana are lstituto geografico militare (henceforth IGM), Carta d' ltalia, fogli 96, 97 at I : 100 ooo (both physical and geological) and I : 25 000. 3 Endres, 'Kirchengut im Bistum Lucca', pp. 241, 267--'71. I will use the word Grosslibell, and Endres's other term for a lease to a non-cultivator, Miue/libell (a lease of a tenant house to a small owner, often himself a cultivator, that gives him the right to take rent from the tenants in place: ibid., pp. 2713, 290-2), extensively. For further definitions, see Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', p. 70 (the neatest), and Kotel'nikova, Mondo contadino, pp. 242- 4. 2

Geography and Historical Ecology l

17

permanent decline in the status and independence of the landowning peasantry; the difference, in my view, lies above all in changes in the social position of the Church. What this means, however, we will see in more detail later. For now, it is enough to emphasize that the pattern of evidence does not in any way set the Garfagnana in a separate category from the local societies of the Lucca plain: the documented social development of the Garfagnana ran along the same lines as that outside the mountains. On the other hand, it is more than likely that some of the types of activities that the city archives do not record were more specific to the mountains. The Garfagnana, in its way, was quite a centre of communications. A branch of what would become the via Francigena, the main road from France to Rome, already ran through it in the Roman period, from the Cisa Pass, by way of Pontremoli and Fivizzano in the Lunigiana, down to Lucca; for a while, in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, this was the only link between northern Italy and Tuscany, and it remained important ever after. Whereas the Casentino had monasteries, founded deliberately in remote areas, the Garfagnana (at least from the twelfth century) had hospitals, for pilgrims, coming over from the Lunigiana, and across the minor Appennine passes from Reggio and Modena. Lucchese interest and involvement in the valley was certainly linked to its roads, not only because of their intrinsic importance, but because the early political importance of Lucca itself was very closely tied into its control of the north Tuscan road system. 4 And one aspect of this must be emphasized straight away: very few of the villages of the early medieval Garfagnana were more than a few kilometres from one of the two roads threading up the valley on each side of the Serchio. There were few settlements of the Garfagnana that can usefully be regarded as significantly more remote than others; indeed, even the villages furthest from the main valley basin, like V allico or Careggine or Gorfigliano, could be closely linked to the society of the Garfagnana at large (and, through episcopal landowning, even to the city) from the start. What is the Garfagnana? Broadly, it is the basin in the upper reaches of the river Serchio, where the valley widens out above 4

General observations: Schneider, Reichsverwaltung, pp. 27-65; for hospitals, Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 59-'60; id., San Pellegrino dell' Alpe.

18

The Garfagnana, 70tr-1200

the gorges of the middle Serchio valley and the Val di Lima. In the early Middle Ages the name was restricted to the upper third of this valley basin, the Garfagriana Lunense, the fines (territory) of Carfaniana, with its centre at the castello de Carfaniana, Castelvecchio above Piazza al Serchio; this was the part of the valley subject to the diocese of Luni, which extended into the Garfagnana from the Lunigiana to the north-west. The fines was so called in apposition to Castelnuovo and its fines, which extended from the diocesan frontier down the valley at least to Loppia. (For all place-names see Maps 2-3 .) Fedor Schneider thought that these two contrasting fines represented the sixth-century Byzantine-Lombard frontier, and this may be true, although an early seventh-century Lombard cemetery is recorded at Piazza, ex hypothesi on the Byzantine side. Either way they fit the pattern of early rural administrative territories found elsewhere in the Lombard kingdom. The terminology survived for some time, although what administrative reality it had is unclear; Castelnuovo, however, had its own notaries in the mid-ninth century, and thus, presumably, at least some informal autonomy.5 The two fines are last recorded in the mid-tenth century; the name Garfagnana thereafter changed its meaning. By the late twelfth century, as imperial and papal documents make clear, it covered the whole valley of the Serchio from its sources right down to Borgo · a Mozzano and Diecimo, thus breaking the diocesan boundary; and it remained as a territory, formally or Schneider, Reichsverwaltung, pp. 45-57. Documents: Barsocchini 239, 25 I, 256, 266, 275, 293, 398, 429, 438--9, 492, 534, 560, 593, 624-6, 667, 815, 926, III2, 1127, 1382. For the Piazza cemetery, see von Hessen, Secondo contributo, pp. 47- 50. For notaries in Castelnuovo, see Barsocchini 667 (a.849) for Rachimpaldo, also scribe of two of the nine ninth-century charters recorded as written in the valley, and not of any Lucca charter. Only a small percentage ofGarfagnana charters were not registered in Lucca, however, at least nominally (cf. below, pp. 216-17, for the Casentino); of these, some are the work of standard urban scribes, even though other scribes seem to have been locaL See, for parallels to the valley fines, the discussion of the fines Castellana and other territories of the eighth and ninth centuries in Fumagalli, 'Un territorio piacentino'; id., 'Citti e distretti minori'; id., 'L'amministrazione periferica'. On the Garfagnana, note also the interesting but often inaccurate Santini, 'Formazione territoriale'. The castello of Carfaniana became Castelvecchio between 983 (Barsocchini 1539-40) and 1110 or II79 (Pacchi 8 or II; see below, Ch. 4, n. 16). 5

Geography and Historical Ecology I

19

informally constituted, with these bounds, up to the fifteenth century. The occupation of Barga by the Florentines in 1341 and the invasion of the upper valley by the Este in 1429 complicated the matter, and the boundary of the valley became rather less clearly defined; in the end, the final extent of the Garfagnana Estense, extending down to Vallico on the right of the Serchio but excluding Barga and the 'Barghigiana' on the left, became the circondario of the Garfagnana, the 'seventeen communes' of the turn of the present century. I will use, however, a more geographically orientated definition; for the purposes of this book, the Garfagnana will be the whole valley basin of the Serchio above the Serchio-Lima confluence, covering the five medieval pievi of Piazza, Careggine, Pieve Fosciana, Gallicano, and Loppia. This Garfagnana has a visible unity on the map, which can be perceived on the ground; of the late medieval territory it excludes only the area around Bagni, Borgo a Mozzano, and Diecimo, rather more closely tied into the affairs of the plain. It was probably also the bloc formed by the fines Carfaniana and Castronovo of the eighth to tenth centuries, but this fact is no more than coincidental, except in so far as-as is quite likely-the two fines had their origins in rough geographical units too.& The Garfagnana basin is further defined by the Alpi Apuane, the range of mountains that separates it from the sea. They are a series of steep marble and limestone peaks, a smaller version of the Dolomites and nearly as popular with alpinists; on the (rare) occasions when they are not cloud-covered, they make a spectacular backdrop to any topographical work in the valley. This definition is partly geological: it is behind the Apuane barrier that the valley was formed before the Serchio broke through to the Lucca plain. But it also derives from the impassability of the range. Its terrain is harsh; it would only seem natural to professional shepherds, who, as we shall see, were rare in the period, and, later still, to the quarry-men. There was no established route across the high passes to the Versilia See Santini, 'Formazione territoriale', and de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', passim for the late Middle Ages; for the nineteenth century, Ratfaelli, Descrizione della Gaifagnana. For a basic description of the Garfagnana, Raffaelli is the best guide; for its economic geography and excellent photographs, see Bortoli, Garfagnana. &

20

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

coast; to reach the sea, one had to go round, down to the plain or up across the pass at the valley top and through the Lunigiana. In the early Middle Ages, no document so much as mentions the Apuane; they were a conceptual blank, an absence on the map. But they contributed markedly to the separateness of the valley. Even now, they hem it in, with the help of the looming, tree-covered bulk of the main Appennine ridge on the other side. Looking down from them, it is easy to see the valley as a whole. Easier than from the ground, indeed, for the valley basin is divided into three, with short breaks between them where the sides of the valley come near to meeting. But these smaller basins share a common identity, thanks to the Apuane, and, notwithstanding the complex and various political divisions of the past, always have done. The upper valley is particularly clearly bounded. Castelvecchio, at its foot, sits on the top of a curious lava plug, through which stream the Serchio and its major upper tributary in two gorges. Castelvecchio is and has always been the real geographical focus for the upper valley: the several narrow valleys that constitute the upper Garfagnana all converge on this one spot, and it is indeed almost impossible to pass from one to another, still less to pass down to the middle and lower valley, without going through Castelvecchio and the settlements behind it, Sala and Piazza al Serchio. It is thus no surprise that the medieval civil territory of the upper valley, its pieve (S. Pietro di Castello, between Castelvecchio and the modern settlement at Piazza), and most of the local landed estates were all centred there. 7 We have some fifty charters for the area. Below Castelvecchio the valley opens out slowly into the Castelnuovo basin, punctuated only by a smaller lava plug overlooking what is now Poggio (the medieval Rogiana), which in fact marks the Luni-Lucca boundary. Here, in the middle valley, the landscape is almost mild; the predominant rock is sandstone on both. sides of the valley, only giving way to the limestone of the Apuane above the level of habitation. At its 7

Castelvecchio has since the late Middle Ages been replaced as a settlement by the complex of Piazza (the pieve) and Sala (the centre of the episcopal estate); see below, Ch. 3, n. 20. The foundations of the pieve have recently been uncovered in building work for the local Scuola Media: see Ciampoltrini, 'Scavo dei resti della "pieve vecchia" ' .

Geography and Historical Ecology I

21

widest point, on an alluvial terrace above the river, there is a small fertile plain around Pieve Fosciana, the pieve for most of the middle valley. It is from this plain that the largest proportion of our documentation comes, nearly seventy documents, a third of all our material; the middle valley as a whole furnishes about half. Castelnuovo itself sits close to the southern edge of this plain, just across the river, at the top of a five-kilometre gorge, and thus dominates the routes down to Lucca; it was always the principal political centre of this part of the valley, except in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries when it was supplanted by Castiglione, above Pieve Fosciana to the north. Below the gorge, there is less regularity. The lower valley is also wide, and less well defined. It rises quite steeply on the right-hand side, above Gallicano; rather more gently on the left, where a series of terraces lift the valley slowly up to a run of narrow spurs, the loci of many of the major settlements (Barga, Coreglia, Tereglio). No one place dominates this part of the valley, although Barga has long been the largest population centre. The lower valley is not well-documented in our period; its sixty-odd charters are in fact almost all from three villages, Cascio, Bolognana, and Vallico, and many important centres, like Loppia, Barga and Gallicano, have virtually none at all. Why this might be we will see later (pp. 59-62). The Garfagnana lies in a different climatic zone from most of Tuscany. There are almost no olives there. (They start at once in the sharp descent to the Lunigiana beyond the pass at the top of the valley; the climate is better there, and the difference is widely recognized locally.) Up to the middle of the present century, the valley has been a focus for the 'civilta del castagno': chestnut flour was a basic staple here, often more important than grain. Otherwise, the valley has been a centre for pastoralism, with annual transhumance of sheep to every part of the sea-coast from La Spezia to Grosseto. As late as 1900 a few high villages subsisted on a diet very largely restricted to animal products and chestnuts. But the agricultural differences between the Garfagnana and the plains were rather less in our period, despite the I,7 55 mm. annual rainfall for Castelnuovo, and the winter snows. We can see this most clearly in the renders in the ninth-century episcopal leases and inventories for the Lucchesia, which are

22

The Garfagnana,

70~1 zoo

quite informative about crops and animals until rents turn entirely to money after 900 or so. 8 The most distinctive feature of the ninth-century Garfagnana with respect to the rest of the Lucchesia was in grain-crops: the Garfagnana did not grow much wheat. This will not be surprising to north Italian historians, for recent work in the Po plain has stressed the early medieval dominance of rye there, in an almost central European manner; but in Tuscany wheat was the standard. Not in the Garfagnana, however: here, as in the north, rye was by far the commonest crop, almost matching wheat, barley, millet, panic, and emmer put together; indeed, most of the references to 'inferior' grains for the whole Lucchesia come from the Garfagnana. 9 Apart from this, however, the Garfagnana produced a range of products easily inside lowland norms. Wine was common. Even olives appear a few times: one lease, from the bishop's estate at Cascio in 850, requires (among other things) half the olives produced; to this we may add the twelve forma olive in Castiglione given to the local church of S. Pietro in 723 in our earliest charter from the valley, an oliveto in the same locality mentioned in 77 I, and the olives listed among renders from the. pieve of Gallicano (which included Cascio) in 997· Cascio is now one of the very few oil-producing villages in the valley, and Castiglione lies on open south-facing slopes: one cannot say that the Garfagnini were ignoring geographical logic. None the less, it is significant that in the eighth to tenth centuries Figures for rainfall from Barbieri, Toscana, p. soo. Resources, commune by commune, schematically in Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnan.a, esp. pp. 386, 48o-1, 527- 8, 553- 4. C(, for the early modem period, Martinelli, 'Agricoltura in Garfagnana'; Rombaldi, 'Comurtici appenniniche'. There are also some useful notes in Targioni-Tozzetti, Rel.azioni d'alcuni viaggi v, pp. 317- 408, 461-74. After 904 the only rents in kind are in the Bolognana leases (below, n. 20), and in an early eleventh-century inventory for the produce owed from pievi, AAL + + K8s for Corfino (Guidi-Pellegrinetti 3). 9 'Inferior' grains (i.e. other than wheat) in the Garfagnana: Barsocchini 398, 438-9, 492, 558, lnventario I, p. 218, U, pp. 229, 234-s. Elsewhere: Barsocchini 318, 351, 478, 638, 846. Cf. Martinelli, 'Agricoltura in Garfagnana', p. 39· Contrast Montanari, Alirnentazione contadina, pp. 109-49; and also Pinto, Toscana, pp. 108- 17, who stresses the predominance of millet over wheat in the fourteenth-century Lucchesia, by contrast to the Fiorentino-Senese--the cultivation of wheat nuy actually have declined in the Lucchesia after the ninth century. 8

Geography and Historical Ecology I

23

they were growing olives where they could; in this respect they were certainly at one with the c~tural norms of the plains. 10 When we get into the arena of the silvo-pastoral economy, similar patterns appear. There has been so much written recently about chestnuts that it is hardly necessary to say more than that the Garfagnana fits firmly into the now accepted picture: that chestnuts are a cash crop, seldom introduced as a systematic cultivation-that is to say, whole chestnut forests instead of single trees scattered across mixed forest- until the later Middle Ages; I would guess this pattern to be a response to a rising population, and to the turning over of marginal cultivated land to commercial pasturing, land that would have been necessary for subsistence cultivation had the mountain dwellers continued to rely on cereals. Actually, the incidence of chestnuts in our ninth-century documents for the Garfagnana is even less than that elsewhere; as Andreolli shows, the only cultivator leases that require rents in chestnuts (six in over 200 leases) come from the slopes above the V ersilian coast and the hills overlooking the Lucca plain (especially Villa Basilica). There were certainly chestnut trees in the Garfagnana, as the fragmentary Lucchese episcopal inventories from the late ninth century show: a silva castanietas in Molazzana, another above Nicciano, and chestnut rents from Colle and Careggine; but they were hardly a major feature of the manorial economy. Nor was there even much other woodland in our documents, despite its omnipresence in the valley; it was either not in private hands, or not systematically exploited, or both. The change may not have begun until the twelfth century (below, pp. 137- 41). 11 10

Schiaparelli 3 I. 2 so; Barsocchini 676, 1718 (one might add soS for F/abbiatici, but this need not be Flabbio near Castiglione; there are other similar toponyms in the Lucchesia). For modern Cascio, I have drawn on Raffaelli, Descrizione del/a Garfagnana, pp. 16o-1 (cf. 75-6), and personal observation. 11 Chestnut rents listed in Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. 92-IJ3, and discussed in id., 'Formule di pertinenza'. Inventory references are lnventario I, p. 217, ll, pp. 235, 240, 245. For the spread of chestnuts in the Garfagnana now, see Raffaelli, Descrizione del/a Gaifagnana, passim. See, more generally, Bonnuccelli, 'Castagno nella Lucchesia'; some comments in Targioni-Tozzetti, Relazioni ·d' alcuni viaggi vi, pp. 44 f.; Cherubini, ' "Civilt:l" del castagno'; Montanari, Alimentazione contadina, pp. 37-43, 296-301; Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 316-zo; and an instructive parallel from the Rhone valley, Pine, 'Chitaignerie vivaraise', a reference I owe to the kindness of Peter Jones.

The Gaifagnana, 70o-1zoo

Pastoralism is better evidenced. There are a fair number of animals referred to in our leases and inventories: above all sheep, which with their products, cheese and woollen doth, were frequently required of tenants as exenia, additional offerings to lords. Something like a half of all ninth-century Lucchese references to animals come from here. (Most of the rest come from other areas of mountain and hill country in the Lucchesia and down the Tuscan coast.) What importance did they have in the local economy, however? The animals were, as far as we can tell from casual references, relatively expensive; this may well indicate that ftocks tended to be small. We cannot say much more than that about sizes. But the specifically pastoral economy of the Garfagnana, even if rather larger than in the plains of the Lucchesia, cannot have been more than one part of the economy of the episcopal estates there: animals were normally required together with rent in cereals and wine.l 2 And they must have been pastured locally even in winter, which would certainly have reduced the size of the flocks. We cannot show much evidence for transhumance in the Garfagnana in our period; and it would only be the introduction of systematic transhumance between the mountain and the coasts that would allow the real extension of the pastoral economy of the valley. I have discussed elsewhere the origin of transhumance as an economic system in medieval Europe, and I will return to it when we look at the Casentino, whose silvo-pastoral development is not quite the same as that of the Lucchese mountains (pp. 16770). At this point we will just look at the bare data for the Garfagnana. There is in fact one explicit citation of transhumance in the Lucchesia, a reference supposedly dating from 7 54 and certainly at least pre-dating 1 100, to horses and cows from the 12 Animal rents listed in Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. 84-5, 92-113, with lnventario I, pp. 217-18, 11, pp. 231, 234--(), 240. AndreoUi, p. II 8 for prices of pigs and sheep. The pig prices are similar to those of northern Italy in Montanari, Alimentazione contadina, pp. 238-9, but the sheep prices are higher than in the north (ibid., pp. 246-7), even though there were probably fewer sheep in the Po plain. I translate sacchos and variants as woollen cloth; the word can refer to items of cloth or clothing, or bags. Of the villages with early medieval documentation, Gorfigliano is set furthest into the mountains, with the worst land--even now, despite the decline in transhumance, almost entirely pasture; in the ninth century, its rents were about evenly in rye and sheep: Barsocchini 438, 492; lnventario I, p. 218, 11, p. 235.

Geography and Historical Ecology I Versilian side of the Apuane, which are to winter I so km down the coast in the Val di Cornia. There is no mention of sheep, the classic objects of later transhumance; but the long-distance infrastructure was evidently there. We could also assume it when W alfonso di Prandulo of Carfanian" sold land in the Val di Cornia to the bishop in 796, for such a spread of landowning is decidedly unusual among lay landowners, and is even more unusual in the Garfagnana. These isolated references are not, however, sufficient to testify to the existence (or continuity from Roman times) of transhumance as an economic system; they show that owners of single properties which are at both ends of a possible transhumance route were at least capable of exploiting the fact, but no more. When references to transhumance as a system appear, they are quite different-whole ftocks of sheep, turmas pecorum de Carfagnana, feeding in the S. Rossore forest near Pisa in I 1 56 and on the pastures of the bishop of Luni near Brugnato in 1 I97; frequent references to Garfagnana animals and pasture in the Maremma Massetana in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here, the practice of the long-distance wintering of animals has become institutionalized. But there is no reason to see extensive transhumance from the Garfagnana before nso; the arrival of a systematically organized silvopastoral economy in the valley in the twelfth century is, indeed, a real sign of economic development, on a level with the vast expansion of olive-growing and the introduction of mulberries in the hills just north of Lucca in the later Middle Ages. 13 If we return to the eighth and ninth centuries, the picture is rather different. We have rents in kind, predominantly in rye, wine, and sheep. Is this likely to have been characteristic of what Transhumance: Schiaparelli 116, at p. 3 5 I; Barsocchini 257. (Pierre Toubert points out to me that the former is an interpolation; but it must anyway date from the eleventh century, the date of the copy, at the latest.) For the twelfth century, see Bonaini, Dip/omi pisani, p. 23 for 1156; Maragone, Annates pisani, p. SS for I 172 (1 173 stile pisano); CP 410 for I 197. Cf. Schneider, Reichsverwaltung, p. 146 n; Ceccarelli Lemut, 'Scarlino', pp. 72 f. ; Nobili, 'Mappe catastali'; Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. so-8. For the rise of transhumance and the regional economy, see Ch. 6, n. 18. Late medieval economic differences between mountain and plain: Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 291- 320; Pinto, Toscana, pp. 3-67. Some short-distance transhumance continued in the Garfagnana: Targioni-Tozzetti, Relazioni d' alcuni viaggi v, IS

pp. 464-5.

26

The Garfagnana, 70lr-I200

was actually grown and raised in the valley, as opposed to what the bishop needed from his estates? In view of the haphazard way land came to the Church, at least" the types of land from which the bishop took his rents should be typical of privately owned property (much pasture and woodland was doubtless not private, but the animals were): demesnes may conceivably have produced different products, but demesnes were few in the Garfagnana (below, pp. 76-7). Montanari has emphasized the strongly silvo-pastoral aspect of _the settled rural economy of the early medieval Po plain; grain had to be supplemented by the resources of the forests for the peasantry to survive.14 Northern Tuscany was in general considerably more orientated towards grain, but for the Garfagnana Montanari's model certainly holds. None the less, in view of the later overwhelming dominance of the pastoral economy in the valley, the relative absence of it in the ninth century is striking. Landlords would have wanted wheat and oil if they could get them, and in the Garfagnana they evidently could not; the same is true for the absence of animals in rents from the Lucca plain, given that animal rents were desirable in order to satisfy the meat-eating predilections of the aristocracy. But if the mountains were the chief source for animals for the episcopal table, they did not render as many as they might. A maximum of two sheep a year, and sometimes only one sheep every five years, normal leasehold requirements for the tenant families of the valley, is not a lot of sheep, and trivial when compared to the great Hocks of a few centuries later; indeed, most organized pastoral economies would be evidenced by rents in wool predominating over those in the sheep themselves. Nor can we show that landowners exploited the woodland more than spasmodically. The woods, always extensive in these mountains, were as yet a casual resource, above all for the peasantry, even if the latter, as is likely, regarded their products as necessary for survival. The Garfagnana remained a poorer version of the Lucca plain, with a greater silvo-pastoral orientation, but the same range of agrarian products. Doubtless the differences led to economic exchange between the mountains and the plain, but the real integration of the valley into the economy of the Lucchesia was yet to come. 14

Montanari, Alimentazione contadina, esp. pp.

166-218.

Geography and Historical Ecology I

27

The early medieval Garfagnana was, and remained, a very traditional society, with less economic flexibility than elsewhere. We can see this most clearly in what we know of its land market. Evidence from the Lucchesia for the structure of landholdings conforms to a common norm for early medieval (and later) lowland Italy: land was very highly fragmented. Estates, even those of peasant proprietors, even tenant holdings, were widely scattered. Sales and gifts were as often as not of single fields and groups of fields; laQ.d-parcels could easily pass from one unit of exploitation to another. Leases, too, are sometimes found for single fields, or groups of them. This all points to a very considerable variability and flexibility in exploitation, and to some form of 'land market'. In the Garfagnana, however, our evidence does not at any period conform to this patt~m. Our documents tell us little about individual fields; they concern the sale, gift, or (above all) lease of whole units of exploitation, casae et res (massariciae), the single tenant-holdings usually called mansi by historians. There are very few citations, less than twenty, of isolated land-parcels among the innumerable references to casae massariciae in the Garfagnana, and half of them are visibly fragments of broken-down demesne (below, pp. 73- 5). Casae massariciae could get divided, and the houses on them could disappear, as we shall see, but as units they were almost never broken up. As a result, Garfagnana documents very seldom mention land boundaries; a casa et res was probably a collection of land, scattered all the way across a village territory, and 'the house (i.e. holding] ruled by Auriperto massario' and the like would have been sufficient for identification inside any given village. 15 It should be noted that this absence of bounds and concentration on single units is not a difference in local formularies; most Garfagnana charters were registered in Lucca and written by Lucchese notaries. It must reflect a difference in the social conditions prevailing in the Garfagnana. We must conclude, in other words, that units of exploitation in the valley tended throughout our period to be seen as a 16 For single land-parcels, see Schiaparelli 31, 74, 250; BarsocciUni 181, 239, 558, 741, 1350, 1356, 1439, 1539, 1725; lnventario 11, pp. 236, 238, 244; AAL + +S4o (early eleventh century, Guidi-Pellegrinetti, p. 12), +B78 (a.ror5), + +K15 (a.1033, Mehnucci 39). For boundaries, see Barsocchini 181, 741, 815, 1356, 1725; AAL + + Kr 5·

28

The Garfagmma,

70o-1200

whole, giving little opportunity for the leasing or alienation of land-parcels piecemeal; only when demesne farming came to break down in the late ninth century did some ex-demesne land come to be seen as independent from whole exploitationunits. Most of our evidence for the foregoing comes from leases for estates in ecclesiastical ownership; it does not self-evidently cast light on lay property-owning, above all not on that of the small peasantry. But there are enough gifts to the Church of similar units in the eighth and early ninth century by lay owners to indicate that the same pattern would hold for them. When, in 1033, we encounter an exchange of two pieces of land in Castiglione for five pieces in Fosciana, all with bounds, we realize almost with a shock the range of information, normal in other parts of Italy, that we have been rnissing.16 This text certainly indicates to us that units of exploitation in the valley were not solid blocs, any more than they were elsewhere. But, whether among lay or ecclesiastical owners, the attitude implied by the· 1033 document, that land-parcels could be split off from units of exploitation, is almost unparallelled elsewhere in the valley. This was not a flexible world. Parts of the Casentino, as we shall see (p. 205), show a similar lack of property division, but that does not necessarily mean that we are looking here at a particularly 'mountain' phenomenon; most of the latter valley had a very fragmented pattern of exploitation indeed, with a constant circulation of land-parcels. None the less, there is no doubt that in this respect the Garfagnana, at least; was a much quieter place than elsewhere in the Lucchesia, or beyond. Evidence of economic change, even across the four centuries 7oo-IIoo, is equally slight. We could conclude from the references, mostly in our ninth- and tenth-century leases, to divided and shared tenant-holdings, that the population of the valley was rising. The same assumption niight be made when we find requirements in leases for incoming tenants to build houses on empty properties (casa levare et claudere seo coperirethe formula is common in the Lucchesia). When new tenants move into houses that they have not inherited, they are often described as already living in the villages where their new 16

AAL + +K15 (Mennucci 39).

• Geography and Historical Ecology I

29

holdings are, and look as if they are younger sons moving out of their fathers' tenancies, into the houses of tenants dead without heirs. The building of new tenant-houses would then represent the same process, this time in situations where there are no spare casae massariciae. This suggests that the tenant population is going up. We do in fact have two leases, one for an unbuilt house, where the tenant's father is still alive and consents to the lease, since his son 'has no inheritance from his father' (nulla de eius genitori meo hereditatem abere videor): the most likely explanation for this is indeed that the father is a tenant and will be succeeded on his own land by another son. What is harder to say is where these empty properties, res without the casae, came from. It would be logical to see them as being split off from other tenant-holdings, and often, into the tenth century, off from demesne. (Res on its own is found in other charters, leased out to tenants who live elsewhere: in this case they are clearly gaining extra land to exploit, which hints at surplus family labour in itself.)l7 But there is another possibility, which is explicit in a number of cases: a res without a casa is a tenant-holding where the casa has fallen down. In these instances we find the phrase Jundamentum et casalino in qua fuit casa, presumably while the casa is still a memory. Twice such a ruin is the locus for the (re)building of a casa, but there are a number of other references to casalini, all of which are held by tenants presumably living elsewhere. There is not much doubt that houses must have fallen down rather easily, even important ones (four references to casalini are actually for the abandoned centres of estates, curiessee below, pp. 73-5). This is not surprising, given the flimsy nature of the houses found in early medieval excavations in the Lunigiana just across the mountains. The house-building we see may, then, simply have kept pace with house collapse (there 17

For divided and shared houses, see Schiaparelli 134, 250; Busocchini 433, 617- 18, 660, 714- 15, 756, 1036, 1078, 1088, 1095, 1143, 1213, 1221, 1247, 1319. For house-building, see Barsocchini 158, 558, 593, 1036, 1078, 1099, II43, 1382. For sons not inheriting, see Barsocchini 763 (a.863), 1099 (a.907)indications that tenants, at least, were not encouraged to divide their inheritance. For res leased on its own, see Barsocchini 398, 433, 518, 676, 701, 800, 1094; cf. below, pp. 252-4.

30

The Gaifagnana, 70o-1zoo

are twice as many references to the latter as to the former), and may not so often show global population expansion at al1.18 This neutral picture for expansion is confirmed by the evidence for land clearance: there is not a sign of it before the eleventh century. Even debbio, marginal slash-and-burn, is only rarely attested in our texts, despite its frequency in the modem Garfagnana (none the less, it is frequently found elsewhere in the diocese, particularly in the middle Serchio valley; it probably characterized the Garfagnana then as now.)1 9 In 1029, however, we have a clear indication of something beginning to happen; in this year, Bishop Giovanni 11 issued a set of clearance leases for small areas of forest above Bolognana, in the lower valley, to turn them into vineyards: the first eight that survive are for the same day, 24 October, and there follow half a dozen more between 1029 and 1o66. These leases were uniform, requiring 2 saume of wine per modius of land, normally after five years. In total, 30 modii are leased in our surviving texts, and the references in the documents indicate that there were at least as many again: this would come to at most some So ha, however, and quite possibly very much less. Not a vast area, then, and on extremely bad, north-facing land; but the involvement of Giovanni 11 does fit with that of Gherardo II in Palaia in the Valdera in 998 and For ruined houses, see Barsocchini 926 (curtis), 1099, 1185, 1377, 1382, 1538, 1551 (curtis), 1652 (curtis), 1698, 1702; AAL +H49 (a.IOOI, Angdoni 138), +L14 (a.1014), +E87 (a.1022); RCL 194 (a.1044), Azzi i.121 (a.1045, church and curtis). They all post-date 88o. In Barsocchini 926, the curtis centre has been replaced by a capantUJ, a hut. Casalino elsewhere tends to mean 'courtyard complex' (Niermeyer, Lexicon minus, p. I 50), or else 'building plot', but there is no doubt about the explicit overtones of 'ruin' in these texts. For comments, see Conti, Formazione i, p. I 19; Settia, 'Pievi e cappelle', p. 471, who puts the phenomenon into a different context, with which I would not fully agree. For house-building techniques in the Lunigiana, see Ferrando Cabona and Crusi, lnsediamento in Lunigiana, pp. 90-1; Ward-Perkins, 'Two Byzantine Houses'; see above all, for a general context, Galetti, 'Casa contadina', pp. 8- 17. 19 For tkbbio in the Garfagnana, see Azzi i.121 (a.1045). Elsewhere in the diocese: see Scbiaparelli 117- 18; Barsoccbini 694 (Granaiola at the Lima confluence), 957, 1226, 1252, 1263, 1391, 1495; cf. Sereni, Terra nuova e buoi rossi, pp. 3- 100. There is also some evidence in the Garfagnana charters of enclosures being extended, representing a certain concern for land improvement: Barsocchini 297, 491, 763. 18

Geography and Historical Ecology I

31

of Anselmo I in the lower Val Freddana just north-west of Lucca in xo68-72, both of whom set in motion similar small-scale but systematic clearance projects. Something was moving in the eleventh-century Lucchesia, even if we only have occasional shafts of light on it. But these projects were decided from above; we cannot trace any similar peasant initiatives. The peasantry, at least of the mountains, may have recognized that economic development of any use to them would come with the exploitation of the silvo-pastoral economy, not with vineyards on north-facing mountainsides, and, a century later, would begin to act accordingly. Here, at least, the evidence for the Casentino will go some way towards providing a possible model and parallel (below, pp. 167--70).20 To close this section. let us look at settlement patterns. Settlement studies is a popular field at the moment, thanks to the interest of archaeologists and to the pioneering research of historians like Pierre Toubert and Aldo Settia, but it is not just modish: it sheds light, even if not in a direct or simplistic way, on real social relationships. Not that it is easy in the case of the Garfagnana. There has been no archaeological research in the area on this subject (although there has been some study of the nearest parts of the Lunigiana).21 And our documentary material, For Bolognana leases, see AAL *M87-9, *M91- 3, + 10, + 17 (aU 1029), *M90 (a.IOJO), *F29, *M94 (a.IOJI), *M86 (a. Io3J), *EIS (a.1057), +F97 (a.ro66}, ed. Marchini 65~2, Mennucci 2, r8, 22, 40, Gemignani 13, 163. Only the last three break the uniformity, and then only in detail Their location seems to be south-east of Bolognana, if they are aU in the same rough area, for the Lmneto of *F29 and *M86 is probably related to Casale Lama on the IGM t : 25 ooo map (97 ID SO). lt is the only part of the slopes above the village to have vines now. For parallels, see Arrighi, 'La bonifica di .Alessandro 11 papa' (the documents for this are in Gemignani, 181- 211 et seq.; cf. list in Barsocchini, 'Vescovi lucchesi', p. 299); Andreolli, 'Coloninazione e incastellamento'; id., Uomini nel medioevo, pp. 135- 49. 2I Toubert, Latium, esp. pp. 303-68; Settia, Casulli e villaggi, esp. pp. 24786; cf. Wickham, Il problema delrincastellamento, for bibliography. For the archaeologists, see excavations published and listed in Archeologia medievale. For the Lunigiana, see Ferrando Cabona and Crusi, Insediamento in Lunigiana, and Lusuardi Siena, 'Esempio lunigianese'; cf. also Formentini, 'Pieve di Venelia'; Ambrosi, 'Casola Lunigiana'; Formentini, 'Pieve di S. Lorenzo'; and other articles on standmg buildings in the Giornale storico della Lunigiana. In the Garfagnana, there is another summary article, Ambrosi, 'Valle superiore del Serchio'; the inadequacy of archaeological work in the valley is also well 20

32

The

Gaifagnana~ 70~1200

which as we have seen is prone to refer to properties simply as casa et res massaricw in loco X, does not make for promising settlement analysis. The Garfagnana has no recorded history . before 723, and nothing more than trivial archaeological material. It is not useful to speculate on its socio-economic, or even its politico-religious, structures before that date, without extensive archaeological research, and I iliall not do so. The five pievi of the valley perhaps mostly date from as early as the eighth century, though only that of Pieve Fosciana (then S. Cassiano di Basilica) is described as such before the tenth (that of Piazza not reliably until the twelfth), and the pieve of Rogiana, later Careggine, very small and with a clear air of having been cut otf from Pieve Fosciana, was probably fairly recently established at the time of its first mention in 923. The pievi of the valley are never given any particular institutional role in the surviving documents; they are not even iudicariae, as some of the pievi of the Lucca plain are by the late eleventh century (but what this may mean is not itself clear, as we will see in the case of the Casentino, pp. 171 f.). The relevance of the pievi here is that the four that comprised the Garfagnana Lucchese, like most other pievi in the Lucchesia, were leased out to aristocrats, together with their tithes, in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries (see below, Chapter 4), and that these leases are very concerned to list the subsidiary settlements (villae) for each pieve: those for the Garfagnana constitute the first reasonably full list of settlements for the middle and lower valley. The initial leases for these fout pievi date from 952--97, with some later copies which. add a few extra villae. . In all, 104 villae are listed: 26 for Loppia, 23 for Gallicano, 52 for Fosciana, and 3 for Rogiana (see Map 3). Of these, 73 can be traced, mostly in surviving village settlements and isolated houses; and few modem villages of any size are not listed in the texts. We do not have a systematic parallel to them in the Garfagnana Lunense until the Rationes Decimarum ofthe late Middle Ages, but it is reassuring to find that chance references from the period before 1 100 record all but a handful of modem village names even there, and only one or two reasonably illustrated by the descriptions of Roman sites in Mencacci and Zecchini, Lucca romana, pp. 22Q--9.

Geography and Historical Ecology I

33

documented places cannot be identified at all. There is a clear continuity here.22 To decide what it means requires more caution. There is a similar continuity in the thicker documentation for the Casentino, even though the latter lacks systematic lists of settlements. As I shall argue, in neither valley were the habitation patterns very greatly affected by the first major social development that often led to medieval settlement change, the process of incastellamento of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Furthermore, both valleys lay largely outside the areas of Tuscany dominated by the mezzadria (the classic late medieval share-cropping contract that gave 50 per cent to the landlord) which, through the slow establishment of single blocs of tenanted land (poden) with isolated farms, encouraged the dispersal of settlement in much of the Arno valley and the hills to its south in the fourteenth century and later.23 None the less, this . common continuity says nothing about the type of settlement present in each; as we shall see, the patterns in the Casentino were not at all similar to those in the Garfagnana. One point that can be taken at once from the pieve lists is that the number of village settlements in the valley was, and remained, pretty high. Nowadays, the Garfagnana consists of The basic analysis of Lucchese pievi is Nanni, Parrocchia. For lists of villae, see Barsocchini 1350, 1652, 1699, AAL +B78 (a.1015), +B98 (a.1019), A17 (a.1o62) for Fosciana; Barsocchini 1538, 1697 for Loppia; 1718 for Gallicano; 1700 for Rogiana. Later lists: Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 52-3, 139, correcting Pacchi 10, for Fosciana in 1168; Rat. Dec. 4216--69, 4283-4 (a.1302); Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 141-2 for the fifteenth century. See also the lists of early fourteenth-century communes in de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 7o-2, and Pacchi 46, 47. For the pieve of Piazza, see Pistarino, Pievi della diocesi di Luni, pp. n-19, 30, So f., 102 f.; Pacchi 8 (see Ch. 4, n. 16); MGH, Dip. Friderici I 430 (a.1164). Iudicariae in the Lucca plain: see Nanni, Pa"occhia, p. 64 n, with the addition of Barsocchini 1458 (a-975), AAL + + A34 (a.1073). 23 See ]ones, 'Manor to Mezzadria', pp. 232-~ Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 152- 8 (with R. Francovich); Klapisch, 'Mezzadria e insediamenti rurali'; for Tuscany in a wider Italian context, see Comba, 'Dispersione deU'habitat' and 'Assetto insediativo moderno'; for the effect on toponyms, see Conti, Formazione i, pp. 74-{). The most recent of these works, and much current work in progress in Florence, cast considerable doubt, however, on the nature of the causal relationship between mezzadria and dispersed settlement; final conclusions are not currently possible in this field. Cf. below, Ch. I I, n. 40. 22

34

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

some I 10 settlements in the area of these lists, which include under 200 km• of cultivated land: less than 2 km• as an average resource for each settlement, leaving aside the mountains, which were less systematically exploited in the tenth century than later. Even in the late nineteenth century, at their height, three-quarters of the settlements had less than 400 inhabitants; in the tenth q:ntury, many of them must have been insignificant. These centres tend now to be focused on a small nucleus, sometimes walled, sometimes more open, with a certain dispersal of rural population across the territory of the village, varying from minimal in most of the upper valley to over half of the total population in parts of the middle and lower valley. The valley tends towards a concentrated form of settlement, that is to say; particularly in the upper valley, but quite noticeably everywhere, especially by contrast with northern Tuscany in general, where a very great dispersal of settlement is now the norm.24 This pattern was probably already characteristic of the valley in the • early Middle Ages. These villae (or, as they are called outside the pieve lists, loci; sometimes vici) have very few micro-toponyms in any of our documents; and even fewer of the latter are associated with houses, which would indicate some rural dispersaf. The predominant type of settlement looks like one of a spread of small centres, not tightly nucleated, but with a substantial proportion of the population living in each centre. This is a pattern that has also been proposed for the early medieval Lunigiana and for the Florentine part of the Chianti hilJs. In the Lunigiana, at least, excavation indicates that it may be Roman, too, even though the centres themselves have largely changed. But we must not assume from these isolated parallels any particular Tuscan tradition of settlement. The Lucca plain was heavily dispersed in its settlement pattern throughout our period; so, as we shall see, was the Casentino. And the pre-medieval origins of any of the patterns in Tuscany outside the ~:elatively well-studied Lunigiana are as yet totally obscure. We cannot, in fact, make any useful generalizations about the 24

Raffaelli, Descriz ione delta Garfagnana is the best guide to modem setdements, and includes the 1871 census. For 1971 census and information on rates of dispersal, ISTAT, 1 I ° Censimento generak ili.9, pp. 13...Z7. For settlement geography in the late Middle Ages, della Capanna, 'sguardo alle condi2ioni geografiche'.

Geography and Historical Ecology I

35

settlement history of diff'erent parts of Tuscany as yet; the basic work has simply not been done. 25 The degree of dispersal around the centres of the early medieval Garfagnana certainly varied. Some of our bestdocumented villages, like Campori, or Cascio, or Vallico, have almost no micro-toponyms at all, and can be regarded as relatively concentrated. Others, like Castiglione and Fosciana, have at least some documented scatter of habitation. Castiglione, for example, although now perched on a shallow spur (as, indeed, it always was in part, for its church is referred to as early as 723), has eighth-century tenant-houses marked as in Perocclo, which elsewhere is described as ad rivo, 'on the stream' ; in 1021, still more explicidy, we find a house in the village described as prope mulerna, 'near the mill', presumably on the torrent 150 m below. This shows some dispersal, certainly, but Castiglione must have had a real centre as well; Castellione as a toponym, even though not an explicit indicator of standing fortifications, at least indicates some sort of focusing and even defensibility.26 Fosciana, however, is the clearest instance of a dispersed setdement. The modern village, Pieve Fosciana, is now clustered around the church, the old pieve, in a roughly rectangular pattern. This pattern is in fact probably early modern in its present form, but even the clustering is not necessarily ancient. The early medieval church may have been relatively isolated: its demesne land formed a solid bloc of land by the church in 952. Some houses in the area are marked prope plebe, 'near the pieve', indicating that this is not a self-evident ascription, 25

For the Lunigiana, see Ferrando Cabona and Crusi, lnsediamento in Lunigian4, pp. 90-3, 105-7, 159; Lusuar:di Siena, 'Esempio lunigianese'; for the Chianti, Conti, Form4zione i, pp. 29-33. (Conri supposes such concentration to be relative, with houses not necessarily touching; Barsocchini 561, for Campori, would bear this out, for here, in a comparatively concentrated settlement, a house and its land form a single bloc protecred by a hedge.) For the Lucca plain, see Wickham, 'Settlement Problems'. For differences in settlement patterns across small acreas, cf. observations in Wickham, 'lncastellamento ed i suoi destini'. For the current situation in Tuscan archaeology, see Francovich and Gelichi, 'Insediamento sparso e insediamento accentrato'; Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 145-'74 (with R. Francovich) is the introductory analysis for the late Middle Ages. See below pp. 174-9, for the Casentino. 26 Schiaparelli 31, 250; AAL +E27 (a.1022, mod. daring 1021), + +K15 (a.1033. Mennucci 39).

The Garfagnana,

70o-1200

others are ad rivo, ad porcile, a piscina, supra lago (a lake with hot springs half a kilometre to the east of the pieve), and so on. There was a rural church, too, S. Giorgio, to the south-east. Pieve Fosciana is the centre of the largest area of open Bat land in the Garfagnana; early medieval Fosciana seems to have been scattered all the way across it. Indeed, the Piano di Fosciana seems to have been the locus for two settlements, not one, Fosciana and Basilica, distinguished in our texts but intricately confused: sometimes a text will mention houses in each, indicating that they are separate settlements, but the church, for example, is ascribed to both at various times (as well as to Barginne, convincingly identified by Angelini as the territory closest to the church). I have argued elsewhere that such a confusion of names is a good a priori indicator of very dispersed settlement. Only after the twelfth century did Fosciana come to be the only name used, probably in the context of a slow but steady concentration ofsettlement into the area of the modem nucleus. 27 Fosciana{Basilica was probably atypical of the Garfagnana in its dispersal, and eventually came to fall into line, for unclear reasons. How much local variation there was in general in the valley cannot be seen from the documents, but there must have been some--Campori, Castiglione, and Fosciana, ranging between relatively concentrated and extremely dispersed, are, after all only 2 km apart. None the less, it is likely that the Garfagnana of the eighth to tenth centuries did in general conform to the pattern of small centres with some dispersal that I have described. It is consequently easier to pin people down in the valley than in many parts of the Lucchesia where settlement was more dispersed. In our documents, people are described as inhabitants de loco X with greater frequency than in many parts of the diocese: it may be that people were identified more with their' localities. A sense of community is not restricted to areas 27

For the demesne, see Barsocchini 1350; for tenant-houses, see Barsocchini xogo, 1143, u8s, 1187, 1652; AAL + +Kxs (Mennucci 39). For discussion, see Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 8- 17, who nicely distinguishes between the place-names. There is a very clear aerial photograph in Bortoli, Garfagnana, p. 23; IGM, 96 11 NE for explication. For the lake, Raffaelli, Descrizicme delta Garfagnana, pp. 244 f., 2621f. For parallels, see Wickham, 'Settlement Problems'. What did not cause the concentration of Fosciana's settlement pattern was incastellamento; it was perhaps the only major settlement in the whole valley never to have a castello. Cf. below, p. I 18.

Geography and Historical Ecology I

37

of concentrated settlement, as we will see in the Casentino, but it is certainly easier to create in such areas. It would have been useful when the valley went over more to pastoralism, with a resultant emphasis on collective activity, in later centuries. And it is worth noting that some of the earliest rural communes of the Lucchesia would be found in the Garfagnana (below, pp. 138- 41). 28 As I said, incastellamento (the appearance of a network of fortified centres, here as elsewhere in the tenth to twelfth centuries) had little effect on this pattern either. There are two major reasons for this. The first is that, in a zone with an already concentrated settlement pattern, incastellamento very generally meant the simple building of defences around the village, or around part of it (usually an estate-centre), or at the least on its edge: castelli, that is, fitted into an already defined sociogeographical network. Very few of the castelli of the late tenth to twelfth centuries in the Garfagnana were new settlements; any new foundations were above all political or military centres, and seldom survived the Middle Ages.29 The second reason is the fact that the impact of incastellamento on settlement is the reflex of its importance as an economic as much as a political phenomenon. I have argued elsewhere that the socio-economic role of castelli in central-southern Italy, the area of the peninsula where there was the most obvious break in settlement pattern as a result of the introduction of castelli, is a phenomenon closely related to the organization of land clearance and the maintenance of coherent proprietorial power over wide areas. In the Garfagnana, as we have seen, clearance was not extensive; and few villages Cf. Wickham, 11 problema de/l'incastellamento, pp. 83-93. For pastoralism in its relationship to collective activity and communal solidarity (and feuding), see Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 320-41. 21! For background, see Settia, Caste/li e villaggi, pp. 254 If.; id., 'Sviluppo degli abitati rurali', pp. 157-63 ; cf. Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. 749· Castelli apparently created ex novo were: Cellabaroti, just outside Castelnuovo, a private fortification perhaps only inhabited by the family (AAL +C22, a.1045, Pianezzi II); Verrucchio, above Castiglione (Barsocchini 1795, for the 1070s); Verrucole, San Donnino below it, and San Michele, all close to Castelvecchio (MGH, Dip. Conradi II 83, a.1027, and Pacchi 11, a.II79-Cf. Ch. 3, n. 20). The last two survived the Middle Ages as villages. For other castelli, see below, pp. 117- 19. 28

The Garfagnana, 70q-1zoo can be shown to have been under the control of a single proprietor. The opportunities for lords to create new settlements and organize their occupation were not widely present in our area, nor would they have had much point. There were plenty of castelli in the valley; by 1400, they constituted nearly half the settlements there. But they had no impact on the socio-economic structures we have been looking at. The castelli were just the old settlements, or the estate centres in the old settlements, with fortifications. It is doubtful even that incastellamento had any effect on the dispersed settlement between the old centres. Campori was a concentrated site, and had a castello early, by 957-this may not be unconnected to the fact that it was probably all owned by the bishop (below, pp. 48-9). But the fortifications did not enclose the whole village, none the less: in 986 the settlement is characterized as castello . . . in iamdicto loco Campulo, ... cum omnibus casis infra se et supra se, 'both inside and above the castello'.30 Castiglione provides an even clearer example from the next century. It had a lay castello by 1033, which was associated with a curtis (estate). This estate certainly did not include all the property-owning in the locality. Even less, however, did the castello include all the settlement: the 1033 text reveals several houses in its vicinity, including a very early reference to a rural tower-house, belonging to the bishop (casa solarita seo turre super se abentes ad petre et a calcina seo arena constructa elevata esse), just outside the eastello and its moat (carbonaria). This must have been mutual political provocation; but the point that is important here is that the castello transparently failed to enclose all the houses in the village. Nor is there any reason to suppose it did so subsequently. I would not wish to claim that dispersed settlement in the Garfagnana countryside was as fixed as the villages were; dispersed settlement is often unstable, and tends, when it is distributed between centres, to increase and decrease in intensity, often frequently, across the centuries, as the nature of economic exploitation changes. (There are clear examples of such an oscillation, for example, in some areas of the Molise:) There is not enough evidence to study phenomena of this kind in the Garfagnana before 1300, and I doubt that it would be so For Campori, see Barsocchini 1377, I6o9.

Geography and Historical Ecology I

39

easier later; but incastellamento visibly contributed nothing to such changes. Castelli were, in fact, a socio-political development in our valley-as indeed in most of northern Tuscany- and little else. They will be discussed further in that context in Chapters 4 and Io.31 The foregoing discussions are all necessary prolegomena to any social history of the Garfagnana. Some of them are specific to the valley. Settlement was probably more concentrated than elsewhere in the Lucchesia; the land market was quieter; there was less wheat and more stock-raising. Other features, however, were distinctly normal in the Lucchesia as a whole, such as house-building, and the slight impact of castelli. Indeed, many of the features that we shall be looking at in later chapters-the survival of small and medium landowners, the structure of estates, the large-scale leases to aristocrats of the tenth centurywill have some very clear analogues in the plains of Lucca and beyond. At this point, the problem of speci£city of the Garfagnana as a mountain valley will dissolve into the problem of how to construct a local study of any given part of the Lucchesia. But such a consequence will not be entirely negative; if it is true that the early medieval Lucchesia was so homogeneous that what is said for San Miniato on the other side of the Arno turns out to be true for Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, then a discovery of some importance will have been made, which will have to be explained. In what follows, the specificities of the Garfagnana-many of them only to be expected, although in themselves interesting- will be balanced against those features that are less specific, and often less expected. For Castiglione, see + +Krs (Mennucci 39); for carbonaria and its meanings, see Francovich, Castel/i del contado .fiorentino, p . s6. For fourteenthcentury castelli, see map in della Capanna, 'sguardo alle condizioni geografiche', p. 6o8. For the Molise, see Hodges and Wickham, 'Settlement Change in the Val Bifemo'. 3l

2

,

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries

Gundualdo clericus, later presbiter, of Campori in the Garfagnana was not in his lifetime a man of great importance, although he may have thought he was. But he did preserve the charters recording his property dealings, and eight of them have survived, dating from 7 4o-84; he is, as a result, probably the bestdocumented private landowner in eighth-century Italy, and we know a substantial amount about his affairs and those of his family. The documents that make up his family archive probably survived as the archive of Gundualdo's proprietary church, S. Maria di Campori, which his heirs kept control of (under the dominium of the bishop) for 200 years, until at least 948; they shed light not only on the family but on Campori itself, which is, similarly, the best-evidenced village in the early medieval valley. In a search for village elites, the 'Gundualdi', as I shall call them, and Campori are the obvious places to start. Campori, as we have seen, was probably a more or less concentrated settlement from the beginning. There is certainly not room for anything more than a small cluster of houses on its modem site, on the narrow summit of a slope rising steeply up from the Fosciana plain, overlooking a stream valley. S. Maria has been on this spot since at least the eleventh century, for architectonic details in the church date from then, and there is no reason to imagine it has moved since 761, the date of its first document. The early medieval settlement was doubtless built in its vicinity, and so was the tenth-century castello, which :is we have seen included at least some of the pre-existing settlement. Exactly where the castello was placed, however, cannot now be seen; there is no trace of it in the modem

Village Elite5 and Patterns of Property-owning

41

disgregated pattern of houses. Modem Campori is not large, and is in decline in 1871 it only had 180 inhabitants in 18 houses, and today (1971) only 132. It is a depressing place, and probably was in the eighth century, too; but at least it was more important then, as we shall see. 1 Gundualdo's family are well documented, and the evidence for them is mosdy fairly typical of that for other people documented at the same time. They provide in many ways a type-example of the fortunes of a medium landowning family of the Lombard-Carolingian period. Gundualdo's own ancestry is unknown, but he and his two brothers Sunualdo and Mauro came from Campori, and his major links and interests were there. In 740 he bought a vineyard and some arable in Trassilico across the Serchio for 25. from a eo-villager. In 759 he bought from Guduino and Udulfo the house in Campori where they lived, for 10s.; presumably they became his tenants. By 761 S. Maria had been founded by Gundualdo and his brothers, and had itself became a focus for property accumulation; in that year Blanco and his son surrendered their house in Campori and all their property to the church. In 764 we depart a litde from the typical, with a court case; Gundualdo was the defendant against a charge brought against him by Luciperto, rector of S. Cassiano in Basilica, the Fosciana pieve a kilometre away. It appears that Gundualdo was Luciperto's predecessor at S. Cassiano, and had left (to run S. Maria?), taking with him a tenant-house in Campori which he had bought for 205. while at S. Cassiano. Luciperto accused him of using golden altar crosses for this transaction, that is to say, church funds; Gundualdo showed that the document of sale referred specifically to money, by implication his own money, and was cleared. In 776 Gundualdo is back in Campori as a private landlord, issuing his first lease to a hereditary tenant in the village; in 784 he is explicidy priest of S. Maria, and in that role exchanges tenant-houses in two so far unidentified localities with another local landowner, Odolperto. Gundualdo's proprietary control of S. Maria is 1

For population, see Raffaelli, Descrizione deTLl Garfagnana, p. 319; ISTAT, 11 ° Censimento generale iii.9, p. 18. Campori's boundaries may have spread down into the Fosciana plain: Angelini, Pieve toscana, p. 16. (Angelini, ibid., p. 22 f., identifies an eighth-century castello here, too, but the reference is to Castelnuovo.) It was not tightly nucleated; see Ch. I, n. 25.

42

The Garfagnana, 70o-Jzoo

clarified by two charters of 773 and 780. . In the first he gives the church to the bishop, keeping usufruct for himself and two nephews in return for Is. per annum; in the second he gives all his own property, tam casas sundriales [demesne) vel massaricias, to the church, except for half of the house he lives in, which goes to his brother Mauro (who lives there too and owns the other half), and except for two tenant-houses, in Castiglione and Ciciana (just outside Castiglione). The church is now to be in the hands of his nephews (now three, two of them different from those listed in 773) and their heirs, as long as they pay their IS. to the bishop; the family is to control ordinations and live on the spot, and the bishop has the church's defensio, its legal guardianship. 2 This information is pretty solid and consistent; before we go on, let us see what can be made of it. Gundualdo rather obviously dominated Campori. His family must have already been significant landowners for him to have so many solidi in hand to buy out his neighbours; by the end of his life (which cannot have long post-dated 784) his family may well have already become the overwhelming force in the village. They were not, however, yet the sole landowners. Fillari of Campori gave his lands to S. Cassiano in Basilica in 796; he may have handed them over to the pieve, S. Maria's probable rival since the altar cross affair, to protect himself and his still-landowning sons from Gundualdo's family. Odolperto's son, Odolsindo, still owned land in Campori as late as 822, when he sold a tenant-house to Gundualdo's great-nephews, for the sizable sum of 45s.; and one of the latter bought a house from a third owner some time before 839. S. Cassiano had a couple of tenant-houses by 837-9, as leases show, and then or soon after accumulated the six or seven that belonged to it in the later tenth century. The other landowning families of the village do not otherwise appear in our documents at all; we can say no more about them than what has just been set out, although as tenants they may reappear in the episcopal inventories of the end of the century. But it is difficult to believe that there were many owners in Campori 11 See Schiaparelli 74, 134, xso, 18:1. (the court case), z8s; Banoccbini 158, 179, 199. For the court case, cf. also Wickham, 'Economic and Social

Institutions', pp. Z7-8. Ciciana is identified by Angelini, Pieve toscana, p.

20.

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

43

that remained outside the orbit of S. Maria and S. Cassiano. We know of at least twenty houses in the village by the tenth century; perhaps two-thirds of them had come into the hands of Gundualdo's family or their church by 850, and S. Cassiano had picked up the rest. But there cannot have been many more houses in Campori than that. The village's maximum agricultural reseau does not exceed 100 ha, which on its own could certainly not have easily fed more than twenty families (cf below, p. 251). Campori lies at the foot of an extensive area of woods and pastures, but, as I have already argued, these were as yet not exploited systematically; they will certainly have added to the resources available to the village, but will not yet have transformed them. There cannot have been enough undocumented local inhabitants to invalidate the picture I have drawn, of a village dominated by one family and, eventually, by two churches. In this respect, however, as we shall see, Campori was by no means typical of the valley.3 Gundualdo's own eventual property of at least nine houses, including those of his church, puts him into the top twenty or so documented Tuscan landowners of the eighth century. This does not, however, mean all that much; we could not regard him as more than a medium landowner. (For a definition, see below, p. 55.) He owned demesne land, but he did not even call his properties an estate (curtis); they were just referred to as a casa (below, p. 77). And his interests were strictly local. His furthest known property was less than 15 km away, still in the Garfagnana, and the overwhelming bulk of his properties--and those of this heirs- lay in Cam pori itself. This concentration was a secure power-base, large enough to intimidate his immediate neighbours. The fact that he (and to a lesser extent his brothers) gave all his property to the family church must fit into this framework; S. Maria was the crystallization of the power and status of the family in their village, and indeed the excuse for persuading neighbours to surrender even. more land, often by 3 Barso"hini 256, 449. 534. ss8, s6o, I088; lnventario u, pp. 228-g (which must be for the S. Maria estate, for some of the eleven tenant groups listed are the recipients of surviving leases, e.g. lldiperto, as in Barsocchini 929, for the same rent). For the tenth-century S. Cassiano estate, Barsocchini IJSO, 1652; AAL + B78 (a. IOIS), A17 (a. 1062); for that of S. Maria, Barsocchini 16oc); AAL + + Nz6 (a. 1014).

t

The 'Gvndvllldi' ofC8mpori Mauro' 761-84

1

Aurlperto

1 qdt Lucipralldo 821 .

•'

AuriPerto

I

Gunduaklo pllr.' 74()-84

rector, S.Mn ob.s.p.

~opbr.' Ropputa qd 839

I

873, qd.917

Rach~oc1:

m

,qd. 004

•

1

Pascali c1.· 780 .. ..... .. .. . .. . .. .. . .. ... ... .. :

804______

Sundo ~o _________

qd.873 . LuqJrando

Sunuak!o • 761

Roffridop«.'

rect:~

RopPaJdo c. 890

:2~.

Fluri

I

qd.l849

-.&....---_,,

,..,

----rector, ""'qd.884 S.Mifia

Andrea •

848-9

I Rach~rando'

I l'!ando/CiRo •

948

948

Noltllf. qd. quondam ldead by this date) • Controlling interest il 5. Maria pbr. presbitBr cl. clericus

I Gundolprandol

Key.

Sundo 845

Ostripelto'

848-9, 88490, qd.905

Ostrlluso' 848-9

I Andrea

certain or very possible

905

Martino

905, qd.927?

..

Fuscilrlo

b'kely

---- documented Unk,

. •

927 nature unclear

~ 0 s., ~

~

:

I

Gundo'948

1

0 :

qd.845

948

I

0 •••• •

Cosperto

884-90. qd.

Leone = lusta

937-67

780

• • • • • • 0 0 • • • 0 . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .

' ' Rachiprando pbr. • ' , , 848-9.

qd.884

lld~o---- - - - - - - - - - - -

I Oominico/Baruntio.

: .

Gundl

Ratchis pbr' ob.s.~

ob.s.p.

~c~.·

~

i

•

Pietro •

848-9, 884-90

!~

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning 45 outright gift to the church- a rather explicit concession to menace if it had been to a lay owner, as well as being doubtfully legal in Lombard law. Gundualdo ruled the village still, but as its priest instead of its major landowner. It was to rule in this quasi-patrimonial sense, I would guess, that he gave up his post in charge of the nominally more powerful public church, the pieve of S. Cassiano; though there was evidently also bad blood involved in his relations with the latter. Gundualdo's private church made him the leading figure in his village. But the foundation of a private church in the eighth century, even though most were foci of private secular power, tended very generally to result in a donation of that church to the bishop. This was not necessarily a consequence of personal religiosity, but it does genuinely seem to have reflected a widespread spiritual belief that the logical conclusion of church or monastic foundation was donation to the bishop. On the one hand, then, people founded such churches knowing that they would not long keep full control over them. On the other hand, the voluntary nature of such gifts puts the emphasis on another motive, probably ·indissoluble from the first: the desire to seek the political support of the bishop, as a patron, in local rivalries. Such a desire obviously varied according to the local situation; but it was common enough in the Lucchesia. It is doubtless because of this mixture of motives that it is rare for such cessions to result in the total loss of control over the church by the kin of the founder. The Gundualdi certainly kept control in Campori. Gundualdo did not appear to see his gift to the bishop as a cession of real power at all-indeed, although in 773 he nominally ceded the church to the bishop outright, by 780 the latter only had defensio. Gundualdo's heirs were to control the church, its estate, and its ordinations, the important things, and they still did in 948. Concession to the bishop of dominium eminens is here acting simply as a regularization procedure. But the consequences did not all run one way. The following century shows the slow expansion of episcopal power in Campori, largely as a result of this foot in the door, and largely at the expense of the Gundualdi family.4 4

For discussion of foundation patterns, see feine, 'Eigenkirchenrecht'; Kurze, 'Monasteri e nobilt3' ; Wickham, 'Economic and Social Institutions', pp. Z3-6. The exact eleventh-century analogue is the tendency of monastic

46

The Garfagnana,

70~1200

Cosperto or Cospulo, one of Gundualdo's nephews, perhaps the oldest, probably ruled the church after his uncle's death, and was himself succeeded by his sons. He and his sons were mostly presbiteri, and his brothers all clerici; they evidently regarded their church as in some sense a vocation. But the principle of giving to the bishop was by now established, and our ninth-century evidence shows the Gundualdi doing this rather than giving to their own church. Gundualdo's brother Mauro gave his house directly to the bishop, and his grandson, Luciprando di Auriperto, is found in 821 leasing it as a tied cultivator. (Probably Luciprando's own grandson is the Luciprando di Auriperto, later referred to by the contemptuous diminutive, Luciprandulo, who made a similar lease in 873.) Similarly, Sundo di Gospulo gave all his possessions to the bishop in 804; a homonym; Sundo di Cosperto, sold all his, for 6os., in 845. The consequences of this tendency we will see in a moment. Exactly how all the Gundualdi were related is not at all an easy question. There were, for instance, a lot of people described as filius quondam Cosperti/ Cospuli between 804 and 884; they cannot all have been brothers, but they were evidently closely related-some of them, probably the later ones, must have been cousins or second cousins. The genealogical table might look like the one here, though some of the links are, of course, conjectural. 5 Cosperto presbiter's other sons are, at least initially, visible as expanding landowners, for they bought, for a high price, a tenant-house in 822. But one of them, Rotfrido, and a probable kinsman Ropperto, gave property (all of Roffrido's; one house of Ropperto's) to the bishop in 839, receiving back in perpetual precaria the house where both of them already lived, which they seem to have been leasing from the bishop. (It is difficult to tell what advantage they got from changing from lease to precaria, for they still paid rent, ud. per annum.) Neither of them lost founders, after a couple of generations, to give their monastery to Vallombrosa or Camaldoli, reserving ius patronatus--cf. Kune, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', p. 408; below, Ch. 7, n. 25. Gundualdo's personal influence got him charter witnesses from as far as the Lucca plain, incidentally: thus Barsocchini 158 for Brancoli. 5 For a complete li5t of Campori documents, 785~85, see Barsocchini 256, 315, 442, 449, 534, ,S,S8, ,S6o-l, 002, 619, 661- 2, 668, 756, 833, 929, 1088, Il79, UIJ, IZZI, 1225, 1Z47, 1319, 1325-{), 1334, IJSO, 1367, 1377; lnventario D, pp. 228~. For Grossllbelle, see n. 3·

'

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

47 their independence as a result of this, for Ropperto still had land, and Roffrido was probably already rector of S. Maria, a post he certainly held in 849; but the cathedral was clearly steadily increasing its influence. Indeed, Ropperto in 844 sold a second tenant-house to the bishop, getting it back on lease. 6 The last appearance of the family as landowners is in 848--9, in a most instructive sequence of events. Rachiprando and Andrea di Gundi had illegally occupied land that their closest kinsman (propinquior parens) Ratchis had given to S. Maria di Campori in 831 . They claimed it was their inheritance when the case was brought to court in 848, but the church had the charter of gift, and they were forced to return the land. Ratchis, like his brother Roffrido, had in fact given his whole property to the church, a gift presumably to take effect after his death, which must have occurred shortly before 848. At least the gift was to the family church, this time; but the reactions of Ratchis's kin- 1 would guess his nephews-shows that many of the family were by now opposed to the general trend of ninth-century developments. Rachiprando and Andrea lost in court; a few weeks later they and their cousins, Ostriperto and his brothers, sold all their property to the bishop for the smallish sum of 40s. This may seem like a further slippage, but it was reversed the following spring, when the bishop leased back not only all this property but also half the property Ratchis had given to S. Maria, for a total rent of 12d.; and he added, too, a quarter of the church itself and its estate, to take effect after the death of the present rector Roffrido, when Rachiprando would take over as his successor, for an extra payment of 12d. (the same sum that Gundualdo was paying in 780 for the whole church). Many of the characteristic social changes of the ninth century are here encapsulated in a few texts. A family protests at the amount of its property that is getting out of its hands, and is prosecuted; but its loss of the suit is eased by the sort of compromise that lies behind very many court cases of the period- the family gets (some of) the contested land in return for becoming tenants of the bishop. We should note that it was the bishop who initiated the court case (Roffrido does not appear), and that the bishop seems to have had no difficulty in disposing of S. Maria's land 8

Barsocchini 449, S6o-I (cf. SS8),

6o2 .

The Garfagnana, JOt>-1200 to get the final result; part of the protest may have derived from the fact that the Gundualdi felt their own church slipping out of their control. The compromise here may simply be Rachiprando's certainty of succession as priest, with the right to usufruct of part of the estate. The family maintained its social, and even perhaps its economic, position. But it did so at the expense of losing outright ownership of its lands. Its members are, henceforth, only documented as tenants, and some of them, at least in lesser branches of the family, were already tied cultivators. In the sixty years or so since Gundualdo's death, all the lands of his family had come into the hands of the bishop. 7 The family were not finished yet, as a glance at the genealogical table will show. They still held a quarter of the church, and the rectors were still their kin. The least that can be said henceforth is that their local status was very complicated. Ildiperto, for example, was a cultivator in 884 and in the episcopal inventory of the 89os, but his sons in 948 still controlled a portion (probably an eighth) of S. Maria, with rights over its priest and its tenants. This mixture between the obligation of direct cultivation and rights over other tenants was henceforth characteristic ofCampori leases, above all for members of the Gundualdi family. The bishop had taken over the whole village, through his al?sorption of lay lands, his partial control over S. Maria, and his rights over the other properties in Campori, which were owned by the episcopal church of S. Cassiano; all its inhabitants were probably episcopal leaseholders by 900. But this came to mean simply that social hierarchies all had to be expressed through lease. The Gundualdi held cultivator leases and Mittellibelle, and also seem to have been the principal beneficiaries of an ill-studied type of lease in between these two, in which men leased from the church a tenancy already cultivated by others, but had to live on the property alongside their dependents, presumably to assist (or oversee?) them.s In these various ways they were 7 Batsocchini 661 ( = Manaresi 52), 662, 668. For the most clearly studied

parallel, in, however, a different political environment, see Rossetti, Cologno Monze~. pp. 101- 40. For the compromise procedure, cf. Wickham, 'Land · Disputes', pp. 12o-2. 8 For later Gundualdi, see Barsocchini 929, 1088, 1213, 1221, 1225, 1325 (c£ 1319), 1334. For Mittellibelle, see Ch. I, n. 3· For intermediate leases, cf. Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. ns-16, and below, p. 236.

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

49

maintaining themselves as the superior family in the village. The differences between the leases may derive simply from the variations across time of the position of individual family members-after all, it was a large family, and may have made up a good third of the population of the village at some points; it is scarcely surprising that some of its members were cultivators. The sort of social position that resulted is best represented by Dominico qui et Baruntio, a tenant of the bishop in five charters of 937-57, and holder of the other eighth of S. Maria: Oominico was required to live on some of his leased land, as well as to provide tenants elsewhere; despite his powers over the church, he is likely to have been a direct cultivator, even if certainly a prosperous one. We cannot prove Dominico was a Gundualdi, although he was probably the leading inhabitant of Cam pori by the mid-tenth century; he could have bought his share of the church from them. But he well represents the social position that the Gundualdi must have had since the mid-ninth century: prosperous village leaders and patrons, while at the same time being peasants holding leases from the bishop. And the Gundualdi still held a share of S. Maria; with or without Dominico, they had persisted as the local Campori elite for over two centuries.9 It would be possible to trace this sort of small-scale elite through the ninth- and tenth-century leases of a number of villages in the Lucchesia outside the Garfagnana; no more. easily than has been possible here, but with a similar cumulative effect of detail. The small and medium village landowners of the Lombard period had, in nearly all cases that we can document, become episcopal tenants by the late ninth century. (A rare example where they are documented as landowners is the famous instance of the proprietary church of S. Michele di Brancoli, in the bands of the same family between 782 and 939 or even 1020.) 10 Surviving landowners, were, of course, less clearly For Dominico, see Barsocchini 1247, 1319, 1326, 1367, 1377. 10 For Brancoli, see Feine, ' Eigenkirchenrecht', pp. 76-8, for references; cf. Violante, 'Quelques caracterisriques des structures familiales', p. 90. Both regard the sequence as stopping in 996, but Manaresi 305 shows the 996 owners still in possession in 1020. (The next texts for the church known to me, Berrini, Supplemmto II I for 1097 and AAL +F62 for II II, cannot be linked to the sequence.) For the weakening of small landowners in the Carolingian period, see, for example, Rossetti, as n. 7; Fumagalli, 'Le modifiche politico-istituzionali in ltalia'. 9

so

The Garfagnana, 701)-1200

attested precisely because they had not given their land to the church-we will see the point illustrated in the context of the Garfagnana in a moment; but let us look first at what can be said in general about this new stratum of tenants. The first thing is that these small owners are not the only group to begin to hold leases across the ninth and tenth centuries. The diocesan aristocracy is another: most of the notables of the Lucchesia, at least by 1000, derived the bulk of their power from ecclesiastical property and lordship, held on lease. Even the regional aristocracy, the great families of Tuscany and the Italian kingdom, had much land on lease and in benefice, from Church and State. This was not a fall in their status from the position of landownership, on which aristocrats based their power in, say, 750; it was a change in the nature of status, rendered necessary by the vast expansion of ecclesiastical landowning, and by changes, in particular across the tenth century, in the way the kings (in Tuscany, the marquises) devolved power. Leases became as acceptable as allodial land for the self-definition of the aristocracy by 1000, all over Italy.ll We cannot extend this parallel to the village elites of the Lucchesia without any modification; for a start, the transference to leases at the local level was in effect complete before 900, and the changes in the structure of the state would in any case have little effect on them; but there are some similarities. Gundualdo may well have aspired to the ranks of the diocesan aristocracy, but his heirs did not-in the 890s inventory of the lands given in benefice to episcopal vassals, they appear as mere cultivators. They had lost their lands, and their independence outside the confines of the village, to the bishop. But they remained the village elite, a position nominally in the gift of the bishop, but almost certainly self-perpetuating: almost all of the fourteen Campori leases between 86o and 960 are to these · people. They had lost status, but they had not lost local power, which came to be confirmed on them by episcopal leases, most typically Mittellibelle, as surely as, on a larger scale, it did on aristocrats. They, like the aristocracy, had entered the bishop's clientele. And they survived as long as our documents do. 11 For general discussions, see e.g. Keller, Adelshmsch'!ft, pp. JO•- .v.; Wickham, &rly Meditvalltaly, pp. 14o-4.

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

51

Dominico's last lease sees us through to the next age, for one of the houses in 957 is infra castello. The next text for Campori, from 986, is a Grosslibell to an aristocrat, for S. Maria, eight tenant-houses, and the whole castello. The aristocracy had taken over Campori; episcopal cultivator leases and Mittellibelle stop abruptly. Indeed, the village is rarely documented again, at least before 1 JOO. But there is no reason to think that the Gundualdi or their successors stopped as well; tenant elites would continue to exist. Indeed, they would, as we shall see in the case of Vallico, come to underpin the rural commune, when it appeared (below, pp. 119-20). And the tenant elites of this kind must have characterized most of the villages that came piecemeal into the hands of the church, all over the Lucchesia, and beyond. Not, however, those rather more numerous villages that did not, as we shall see. To this intricate series of developments we only have fragmentary analogues elsewhere in the valley. Our documents for Basilica/ Fosciana show some landowners independent of the pieve of S. Cassiano. One of these, Luccio of Fosciana, alienated a substantial estate to the owners of S. Pietro di Castiglione before 77 I. Another, Domniperto di Autperto (fl. 796-821), became pievano of S. Cassiano, and gave the church tenant-houses in Basilica and its environs in 819. He seems to have been succeeded by two brothers, Teutperto (fl. 837) and Pietro (fl. 839-52) di Rasperto; these were also local landowners, for Pietro in his first will of 849 listed properties of his in Castelnuovo, 2 km from Fosciana, and Sassi a little to its south. Here, then, as in Campori, local landowners controlled the church, which, although public (i.e. episcopal), doubtless confirmed them as members of the local elite in a similar way. It must, indeed, have done more; for the pieve had been since the reign of Charlemagne the locus of the collection of tithe, which Carolingian legislation enacted should stay under the control of the pievano, and not-at least in theory-of the bishop (cf. below, pp. 94-5). The office of pievano must, then, have come in the ninth century to convey considerable economic power and political importance in its own right, and may have been much sought after; control of the pieve at Fosciana by local landowners can be seen as the

52

The Garfagnana, 70C>-1200

rural analogue to the control of the cathedral church of Lucca by the diocesan aristocracy .12 It is in this context that the activities of Pietro di Rasperto are best seen, for he was in the centre of a network of owners stretching right across the middle Garfagnana and beyond. In documents of 844-52, Pietro acted as executor for at least two of these, from Castelnuovo and Sassi (as well as two others from the Lucca plain with property in Sassi), and five others, from Castelnuovo, Pao, and Massa (both to the north-west of Castiglione) acted as executors for him. Executors in this period were supposed to dispose of the goods of the dead man, for his soul, but could choose their time of doing so without restrictionthey could, in other words, keep it as long as they liked. Giving land to executors was thus virtually a form of simple alienation, and some of the lands Pietro willed for his own soul had in fact come to him in his capacity as executor, as land to alienate for the souls of others. This practice was probably part of the normal procedures for building up a friendship and support network in the valley, as far as we can see among people of equal social position, medium landowners. And it shows us that the ending of lay landownership visible in Campori in the mid-century was far from complete elsewhere in the middle Garfagnana in 8so. We know about Pietro's circuit of friendship because much of the property in these charters ended up in the hands of his own church, S. Cassiano; but except for Pietro himself and one of the Castelnuovo owners, Luciperto, the owners concerned were only ceding small parts of their land. Nor do we find them elsewhere; they clearly stayed out of the circuit of the two churches upon whose charters we are relying above all, S. Cassiano and S. Maria di Campori. This is important. Of course, they might have been swallowed up within a couple of decades by expanding churches elsewhere in the valley whose documents do not survive, but I do not think so. Let us look at Castelnuovo itself to see the point more clearly. 12 .

Schiaparelli 250 (Luccio); Barsocchini 256, 275, 425, 439 (Domniperto}, 534 (Teutperto), 558, 6o9, 667, 689-90 (Pietro}. Barsocchini 69o, registering Bertini, Appendice 47, is incomplete, and misses out one of the Sassi landowners cited in Barsocchini 6o9-See AAL +C29 and *B78 (duplicates). For tithes, see Boyd, Tithes and Parishes, pp. 43- 5; Violante, 'Strlitture organizzative', pp. 1072-4, 1082-4. For parallels to the Campori and Basilica elites, dominated by clerics, see Contj, Formazione i, pp. I s6--00.

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

53

Castelnuovo di Garfagnana was a castrum and centre of a fines in the eighth century, and still an administrative centre in the ninth. It must have been a public castello, with a direct link to the State, and was probably associated with fiscal land. This would not necessarily have made it in itself an important population centre, but it certainly had inhabitants. It had at least three churches, an unusually high number for a rural settlement; and a S. Cassiano lease of 872 indicates that it was built up outside its walls and across the river to what was then called fora porta or Furporta (the area of the later castello of Cellabaroti, now the suburb of S. Lucia). So it may not be altogether surprising that Pietro di Rasperto's charters, which seem to call on the medium landowners of the middle valley at large, focus above all on inhabitants of Castelnuovo. They were perhaps what soon would be called the boni homines of the valleyone was a notary-just the people most advantageous to have in one's friendship network. We do not know much about Castelnuovo after this, but we do know who owned its churches: S. Cassiano held S. Pietro (the later parish church, in the castello) and S. Giusto, and the city monastery of S. Ponziano held S. Michele. These might have been expected to soak up Castelnuovo's lay landowning if any church did, given the tendency of eighth- and ninth-century donors to give locally. Yet S. Cassiano, many of whose documents we have, seems to have preserved no trace of gifts to the Castelnuovo churches. And when S. Ponziano leased out S. Michele and its estate in 923 and again in 1045, the rent it asked, 2s., is well toward the bottom end of the rent scale for leases of whole estates in that period; it is indeed likely, from the phraseology of these charters, that S. Michele's estate was fairly small. There is no reason to think that any of these churches were major loci of gift-giving. And without that, there is no reason to doubt the survival of the Castelnuovo landowners, particularly as giftgiving to churches anywhere in the Lucchesia is very rare after the mid-ninth century. Some possible reasons for this survival we will see shortly .13 Schneider, Reichsverwa/Jung, pp. 64 f.; see Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 9IZ for context. Schiaparelli 169, Barsocchini 667, 689, 792 for inhabitants, 815 for fora porta (cf. Raffaelli, Descrizione del/a Garfagnana, p. 8). For churches, see Barsocchini II98 and Azxi i.121 for S. Michele; Barsocchini 1652 for the others. The latter text seems to indicate that there were only four churches directly subject to S. Cassiano in the entire pieve in 991: two in Castelnuovo, 13

54

The Garfagnana, 70tr-1200

The situation was different in Basilica/Fosciana, where S. Cassiano dominated. Here, as in Campori, the ninth-century lay landowners of the village are documented for the last time in a court case. The rector of S. Cassiano in April 865 accused Audiprando of Basilica of illegally occupying houses that belonged to the church. Audiprando claimed that he had been given them by charter by the late Eriprando. Eriprando was a local owner who in fact must have died only about a week previously, for in the same month he had given to S. Cassiano tenant-properties in Castelnuovo that his father had bought from a plains landowner. But Audiprando's charter, when he produced it at court, revealed that Eriprando had got the houses from Audiprando himself: a fairly transparent and phoney (per conludium) cession and recession of property to enable Audiprando to appear to hold the land independently of the church. The church got its land, as churches always do; Audiprando reappears as a tenant for it in 867. The church may well have owned the great bulk of the land on the Fosciana plain henceforth; it certainly had at least fifteen tenant-houses and more in the late tenth century. (Even here, none the less, small owners survived, as we can see in one eleventh-century text.) 14 But it is perhaps Eriprando who is the most significant figure in this account: a donor to S. Cassiano (but only of some of his property}, he was none the less prepared to connive in defrauding the church. Eriprando's detachment from ecclesiastical interests may not be chance; he was the last donor to the church in our Garfagnana charters until the very different world of the eleventh century. Gifts to the church were by now drying up all over the Lucchesia. They had already been getting rarer, indeed, since the 82os; and after Eriprando's charter, there are less than twenty charters of gift in the 650 Lucchese charters for the next hundred years. The first cycle of gift-giving to churches in the Lucchesia (and in most of the rest of north-central Italy), which had begun in the early eighth century, had come to an end. one at Magnano, and one at Flabio near Castiglione. This further reinforces the impression of Castelnuovo as a centre of political importance. 14 For Eriprando and Audiprando, see Barsocchini 772,774 ( = Manaresi 70), 795· For tenant-houses on the plain, see 1652, AAL +B78 (a.tots). A17 (a.Io62). For small owners, see AAL + +K15 (a.IOH, Mennucci 39). Other • large owners held there as well: AAL + + S40 (Guidi-Pellegrinetti, p. 12), and the papal registers cited in n. 20.

•

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

55

Exactly how such cycles worked is at present far from dear. I have proposed elsewhere that one of the roots of the end of generosity to the church is a change in attitude to the church itself, now so very much richer and, besides, since Charlemagne, taking compulsory tithe for the first time, a development that involved a vast and (to others) unwelcome increase in its power and wealth. I would guess, now, that the exact motors for such a fall-off were more complex, and probably fairly similar to those of the second cycle, of the eleventh century, which I will discuss in the context of the Casentino (below, pp. 264- 8). But, at any rate, the Garfagnana seems to have followed the same trajectory as the rest of the Lucchesia; we should not expect any significant gift-giving to any church to have taken place after the 86os, and not much for some time before. Landowners who still had their lands in the 8sos and 86os probably kept themthe church, at any rate, would not get them. In Campori, there were no lay landowners left by then; at Castelnuovo, however, and doubtless elsewhere in the middle valley, small and medium owners seem to have survived. IS I have hitherto been referring to 'small' owners and ' medium' owners. I would define these, summarily, as peasant proprietors with little more than a single holding, and owners of a small number of tenant-houses; medium owners may have cultivated some of their own land as well, but did not necessarily do so. How common was each among the landowners of the Garfagnana? If those who chose to give and sell lands to the church were typical, both categories certainly existed widely. Ownercultivators included Guduino and Udulfo of Campori (759), Blanco of Campori (761), Autulo of Torrite (772), and Fillari of Campori (796). But most of the figures we have so far looked at were medium landowners- the Gundualdi at their height, Odolperto of Cam pori, several successive rectors of S. Cassiano, the Castelnuovo owners of the 84os. To this group we may add the nun Godiperga, whose gift to the bishop of her property in Vallico south of Gallicano in 781 was the core of the episcopal estate there in the ninth century, and still, indeed, the twelfth. 15 For the end of the cycle, see Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, pp. 108--9;

Boyd, Tithes and Parishes, pp. 36-46 for the impact of the introduction of tithe. Stormer, Froher Adel, pp. 374- 81 has discussed a similar process in Bavaria.

The Garfagnana, 70o-1zoo She seems, like the Gundualdi, to have controlled much of her village, and nothing beyond it. I would guess that few landowners living in the valley were better off than these.16 Only two local lay owners are recorded with larger estates in the Garfagnana. Both of them were from the upper valley, the Garfagnana Lunense; interestingly, both, though outside the diocese, seem to have regarded themselves as part of the orbit ofLucca rather than of the (admittedly moribund) city ofLuni. Toto ofVitoio was one of these: he founded the proprietary church of S. Pietro there in 795 (with reversion to the bishop ofLucca) and gave it half his property, which consisted of a curtis in Vitoio and at least fourteen tenant-houses scattered elsewhere across the upper Garfagnana; not so very large, but at least twice Gundualdo's land. Walprando di Prandulo was the other. He left his lands to executors, who sold them to Bishop Giovanni I ofLucca in 793; these were based on a demesne centre (sala) at Sarzano, which by antonomasia came to be called Sala, now part of Piazza al Serchio, by 883, and included a very scattered demesne and ten tenant-houses, all similarly in the upper valley. But Walprando's family were richer than that, and owned more extensively, too; his brother Pietro inherited from him an estate at S. Cipriano di Codiponte in the Lunigiana, and we need not doubt that the W alfonso di Prandulo de Carfaniana (i.e. Castelvecchio, just above Sala) who sold 45s. worth of lands to Bishop Giovanni in the Val di Cornia in the Maremma in 796 was another brother.17 These were quite sizeable owners. Even Gundualdo, with his demesne land, never regarded his property as a curtis or sala, a real 'estate'. No landowners of similar size are recorded further down the valley until below Diecimo; in view of the high number ofdocuments we have for the middle Garfagnana, there may well not have been any there, at least. This is not to say that no other substantial lay landowning is recorded for the Garfagnana. There is some, but it is all associated with owners from Lucca and its immediate environs. Lucchesi owned single houses in Barga, Treppignana, Castelnuovo, and Sassi. And, more important, Bishop Peredeo and his family 16

For small owners, see Schiaparelli 134, 150, 266, Barsocchini 256. (I assume here and elsewhere that a document that mentions or does not mention dependent tenant-houses means what it says. The equation is seldom misleading.) For medium owners, see above, nn. 21-3, ~ . 12, with Barsocchini 182. 17 For large owners, see Barsocchini 2J9 (cf. 926), 251, 257, 266.

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

57

owned an estate at Careggine, with a proprietary church, S. Pietro, which the cathedral gained in 778; the episcopal estate at Nicciano seems to have come to the church in 803 from a landowner from Moriano north of Lucca; and an estate at Cascio was willed to the cathedral by Bishop Pietro I via his executors in 834. 18 The last three properties are well documented in the ninth century through episcopal leases; with the Campori, Basilica, Sala, and Vallico estates, they make up almost all of our documentation between 850 and 950. The significance of this we will return to, after having looked at the one plains group about which we can say more, the landowners around S. Pietro di Castiglione. S. Pietro was a proprietary church on a classic Lucchese pattern. It was founded in 723 by two brothers, Aurinando and Gudifrido, cum consilio seo licentia of Bishop Talesperiano of Lucca. Half of it came through Donni, Aurinando's second brother, to Teutperto of Placule, a suburb of Lucca; Teutperto, one of the most important urban landowners of the period and father of Bishop Giovanni I, sold this half to Anucardo, brother of a goldsmith, and therefore most likely also from the city. Anucardo owned the whole church by 768, and gave it to the urban church of S. Colombano, which is later found appointing a rector, in return for I8d. rent, in 801. Teutperto's family maintained a link with the church, however, for in 771 his brother Perforeo gave it a substantial property, partly in the Garfagnana, together with his own person (though he had second thoughts about that, and took it back in a text dated three weeks later). 19 Castiglione is little documented after 801. Its eighth-century evidence is, however, most illuminating, for it shows a series of urban landowners regarding their church as if it were a local property, instead of so km away, up a mountain-valley. S. Pietro had closer links with Lucca than with Scbiaparelli n6, p. 348 (a Pisan owner), 127, I 54; Barsocchini 170, 248, 312, szS, 667, 689, 772. 19 Schiaparelli 31, 89, 219, zso-1; Barsocchini 297. Angelini has doubte4 that this Castiglione lay in the Garfagnana, as it was so closely linked to Lucca, but his caution is excessive: the church dedication is right, it is associated with other places in the valley in these texts, and there is no satisfactory alternative location. See Angelini, Pitve toscana, pp. 9-10, and 'Castiglione nell'alto medioevo'. l8

ss

The Gaifagnana, 70tr1200

its own surroundings; no local owner is recorded as giving it property. And this gives a context to the other Garfagnana properties owned by Lucchesi: the valley was as normal a place for city 4wellers to own land as was the Lucca plain or the Arno valley. The Garfagnana had its own local owners, and some of them, particularly in the upper valley, were substantial. But even in the eighth century, before the vast growth of Church landowning, mostly by urban institutions, that characterized the later half of that century and the beginning of the next, some of the largest lay owners were already Lucchesi. The valley in one respect had a clear individual identity in this period: very few of its local owners owned land outside it, and they mostly gravitated around their own local churches. But this urban landowning of the eighth century, increasingly supplemented by the steady growth of episcopal influence, shows us that, from the point of view of the city, the Garfagnana, even the part outside the diocese, can be regarded as already integrated into and encompassed by the social and political frameworks of Lucchese control. Even when the bishop relinquished most of his properties to aristocrats in the tenth and eleventh centuries, these frameworks, as we shall see, would persist. Before I sum up the preceding arguments, we should look at what can be said of the balance of landowning in the valley as a whole, before 950, say. I have been focusiQg on lay landowners, but we do have information about some other ecclesiastical estates, and fragmentary indications about the fisc; these must be looked at at least briefly to set my discussions in context. (For what follows, see Maps 4- 5.) The middle valley can be dismissed quickly. We have seen what information can be obtained about the network of lay landowning and its relationship to local churches. Campori in 950 was probably all in the hands of episcopally controlled churches, S. Maria and S. Cassiano; so was much of Basilica/ Fosciana and, further up the valley, Careggine. S. Cassiano owned very widely across the middle valley, it should be added, with one or two tenants in sixteen separate centres (the only larger groupings were in Basilica, Campori, and Flabio between Campori and Castiglione), as late tenth-century leases of the

' Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

59

pieve tell us: witness of ad hoc small-scale gift-giving, doubdess from before 850. One or two of the plains churches owned property too--S. Maria di Sesto Moriano, for example, had a demesne in Castiglione. There were also, by the early eleventh century, a scatter of properties belonging to the monastery of S. Salvatore a Sesto, on the lago di Bientina. The other substantial owner, perhaps surprisingly, was the papacy, which held property by the early eleventh century all over the middle and upper valley, at sixteen localities in the former and ten to twenty in the latter. Its main centres in the middle valley were Ceserana and Castiglione. How and when the pope got such extensive lands is entirely unclear; I shall guess, for reasons we will see in a moment, at some form of fiscal origin, possibly eked out, as with S. Cassiano, by small gifts from local owners. The other place with fiscal associations was of course, Castelnuovo. There are a lot of blanks on our map of the middle valley still; I would guess that they were filled in with small and medium owners. 20 The lower valley is more of a problem. For a start, there is very little evidence for it at all before 1000--or even I2oooutside a handful of localities, less than for the narrow valleys below it, and far less than for the middle Garfagnana. That is to say, the tendency for the cathedral and other urban churches, the sources of our evidence, to accumulate land in this area was unusually low. The bishop got estates in Cascio and V allico, and held a scatter of land and tenant-houses in seven or eight other localities. Other urban churches held land in Cascio (two separate estates) and a handful of tenant-houses elsewhere. Even the local pieval churches failed in any sense to match S. Cassiano; Gallicano's lands are not listed in the lease of 997 for the pieve, but seem to be only moderate in size; Loppia's, listed in a lease of 98 3, amount to a demesne and ten tenant-houses, mosdy in For urban church landowning in the middle valley, see Barsocchini 297, 433, 491, 508, 763, 959, 1039, 1087. For S. Cassiano, seen. 3· S. Salvatore a Sesto: MGH, Dip. Heinrlci I1 425 (a. 1020), Ccmradi II So (a.1027). For papal landowning, see Deusdedit, Collectio canonum pt. ili, eh. 149 (pp. 316-17) for the earliest text (c. xoSs-6); for the fullest (c. 1192), Cencius, Liber censuum i, pp. 347- S. The original registers are of John XV and Gregory V (9S5-99), and ' Benedict', most likely VIII or IX (1012-46). 20

6o

The Garfagnana, JOD-1200

Loppia itself. Whoever owned the rest of the lower Garfagnana was not notably generous to the Church. 2 1 To get at possible solutions to this, we must go later in time. Mter 1000 we know more about lay lords in the area, but we cannot use this as proof of early ownership; the Grosslibelle of the later tenth century may well have brought them in, But we do also begin to get some information about fiscal land, the land held publicly by the king and his subordinates. There are no directly documented royal cessions of land in the Garfagnana at any time during our period (they are rare enough anywhere in Tuscany), but some oblique references to fiscal gifts, especially by marquises and counts, can be found. Barga is the clearest example. A Count Gherardo, probably from the Lucchese and south Tuscan family of the Aldobrandeschi, leased the curte and castello of S. Vito di Barga to the bishop of Lucca in 996. The castello must have been the core of the modern town. S. Vito was also claimed by S. Ponziano di Lucca, supposedly as a result of a gift by Willa, mother of Marquis Hugh (d. 1001), as an imperial confirmation of 998 shows. And Countess Matilda of Tuscany (d. I I Is) had rights there, too, for Frederick Barbarossa in n8s singled out Barga from other Garfagnana centres when he gave it a diploma confirming its customs as they had been held in Matilda's time; by 1220 Pope Honorius Ill was disposing of rights over Barga as part of the lands the popes had inherited from her, along with Castiglione, Ceserana, Coreglia, and Ghivizzano. All these examples might be explained away individually as instances of the private property-owning of major aristocrats (Matilda's .distant ancestors, for example, were For episcopal land in the lower valley, see Barsocchini 182, 237(?), 528, 79Z, I08I, I 38I, 1439; lnventario I, p. ZI7; n, P· ZZ9. Barsocchini I38 I (cf. ro81, and AAL +f49, a.roor, Angeloni pp. 72-1- 4) is for eight tenant-houses in Casco Balbo, which was in the pieve of Loppia (see Barsocchini 1538}, and is thus a different place to Cascio. Angelini, Pievt toscana, p. u n, guesses it is modem Castelvecchio Pascoli, which is certainly in the right area, and is not attested under the name Castdvecchio in our period. The issue is not merely topographical; the bloc was the largest property directly controlled by the bishop in the pieve. The episcopal demesne of Caterana in Inventario ll, p. 2.38 may possibly be Cateriani below Coreglia, as the editor guesses, but I doubt ic; it is not recorded in the pieve lists. For other Lucchese churches owning land, see Barsocchini 32-1, 454, 614, 6z8, 733, 1078, 1115, and the S. Salvatore diplomas cited in n. 20. 21

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

61

supposed to have come from the Lucchesia); but the thread that connects them all is the fisc. Barga's sudden importance in the eleventh to twelfth centuries, and ever after, despite almost no previous documentation, is likely to have derived from a long association with public power. In 1048 we have another document that fits in with this pattern, as well: in it, Uberto di Rodilando (cf. below, p. 104) ceded to two executors a mass of land stretching across the diocese, but including portions of castelli in the lower Garfagnana, at Ansugo, Lucignana, Coreglia, Barga, and Ceserana. The association of the last three have just been seen to be Matildine; it seems quite likely that Uberto got them from the fisc. The popes, too, had since about 1000 held estates in the Matildine centres of Ceserana and Castiglione. These links are even more circumstantial, but they all point in the same direction as did the Barga evidence. Barga, Ceserana, Coreglia, and Castiglione were all important late medieval centres in the valley . None of them are well documented before 1000; indeed, apart from Castiglione, they are barely mentioned. But suddenly they all begin to appear in the eleventh century, an age when the fisc was beginning to divest itself of property everywhere (even if it was rather less generous in the Lucchesia than elsewhere-cf. p . 1 12). I would guess that these are places where the State had held land from early on.22 In mountain areas, the State is generally assumed by historians to have been a very substantial landowner, from Roman times onwards. Indeed, in the Abruzzo and.neighbouring regions, many mountain valleys were entirely fiscally owned. In Tuscany it was certainly different. In the Casentino, as we shall see (pp. 18 1-4), large-scale fiscal landowning was restricted to the tops of the side valleys, to marginal areas, that is to say; elsewhere, the State (at least 22 For Barga, see Schiaparelli r r6, p. 348, Barsocchini 248 for early references; see Barsocchini 1712 for Gherardo (Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 21.5- 16 regards him with some caution as a Gherardeschi rather than an

Aldobrandeschi, but Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, the expert on the former family, has persuaded me otherwise); 1085 and 1647 ( = MGH, Dip. Ottonis Ill 269) for S. Ponziano (1085 is certainly forged, but Otto's diploma seems to have an authentic base); and Pacchi 12, 13 for Barbarossa. See Theiner, Codex diplomaticus i, n. 99, p. 62 for Honorius (cf. Overmann, MaJilde, pp. 26-8); the papal cession was in the run-up to Pope Gregory IX's take-over of the whole valley in 1227-40, and must be seen in that context--see de Stefaoi, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 37- .52. For Uberto, see RCL 227.

62

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

after 900 or so) owned the occasional centre, much like any private landowner. In the Garfagnana we can say nothing about who owned marginal land (although some very marginal centres, like Gorfigliano at one of the sources of the Serchio, were certainly private). But the only area of the valley that shows much indication of extensive fiscal properties is the lower part, the 'Barghigiana'. Further up, Ceserana, Castelnuovo, perhaps Castiglione, and PiazzafCastelvecchio (Carfanuma) are the major centres with probable fiscal interest, but one cannot say that there is much evidence for it, and in these last three there was certainly a lot of private landowning as well. These patterns are of more than antiquarian interest, for they may help us with our gap in documentation in the lower valley. The difference in evidence between the lower and the middle valley, as I have observed, derives simply from the fact that more people gave to churches that ended up in the lands of the bishop in the latter than in the former. We have seen, too, that Gundualdo of Campori's cessions to the bishop, and those of his family, fit with a desire to enter the episcopal clientele. I think it likely that the fiscal power-centres ofthe lower valley (royal centres in the eighth to ninth centuries, marchesal in the ninth to eleventh) provided local landowners with an alternative pole of attraction, an alternative clientele to that of the bishop. It was not so socially advantageous to give land to the church in this area; the piety of the inhabitants was doubdess expressed in other ways. Certainly the kings and marquises themselves never gave much land to the cathedral ofLucca in any period, in striking contrast to private owners in the Lucchesia, and to their own activities elsewhere. In a similar manner, it may have been the political backing of the public administrative centre ofCastelnuovo that allowed its landowning inhabitants to think twice before being generous to the expanding religious centre ofS. Cassiano di Basilica, as well. 23 For fiscal references for the whole valley, see Schneider, Reichsverwaltung, pp. 48-9, zz8; cf. below, Ch. 4, n. 33. It is possible that the upper reaches of some of the Serchio tributaries were publicly owned, particularly at the top of the valley, in the Lunense, where noble families like the Dalli eventually appeared, closely linked to the Obertenghi marquises; the latter were certainly interested in the valleys just the other side of the Appennines. (Cf. Nobili, 'Dominazioni marchionali', pp. 24o-1.) For the Abruzzo, see Wickham, SocietJ degli Appennini, pp. z6-8 and nn. It was perhaps to counterbalance the fiscal presence in the lower valley that the bishops leased their church and estate of S. Pietro di Fomoli, just below the Garfagnana at the Lima conBuence, very 28

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

63

The upper valley presents problems of a different kind. It has a fair number of surviving documents: gifts to the church (mostly to the bishop}, episcopal cultivator leases, and tenth- and eleventh-<:entury leases to aristocrats, just like those in Campori or Fosciana. We begin with a few cessions of large properties, in the late eighth/early ninth century, cessions we have already looked at: Walprando of Carfaniana's Sala estate, Toto's estate at Vitoio, the Nicciano estate. AU three came into the bishop's hands; and every one of the surviving leases of the ninth century can be shown to be for land in one of them. As the tenth century moved on, and the manorial system broke down in the Lucchesia (see below, Chapter 3), the three tended to become more confused; but part of the Sala estate ended up by the 88os in the hands of Cunimundo di Cunimundo, and was inherited piecemeal by his heirs, who were an important part of the aristocratic strata of the tenth-century Lucchese countryside; the Vitoio estate was leased in the 98os to the family that became known as the lords of Careggine; and Nicciano went to their cousins (see pp. 99-100). A fourth episcopal estate, with a very similar distribution of lands to that of Sala, is first heard of in the 890s, already under the control of a certain Willeramo; most of it also ended up a century later in the hands of the Careggine. The papal properties in the upper Garfagnana of c.Iooo also show a distribution parallel to the Sala estate and to that of Willeramo; all three, in particular, included sizeable properties in Gorfigliano in the heart of the Alpi Apuane, one of the least alluring agrarian centres in the entire valley. It is reasonable to guess that Willeramo's estate was an~ther gift to the bishop, of a single property, perhaps by a kinsman of W alprando of Carfaniana, as the distribution of property is so similar; and that these two, leased out separately to urban aristocrats in the late ninth century, had been sufficiently confused to get split in the late tenth century into three, one of which ended up in the hands of the pope. (See Map 4.)24 early to lay owners; first of all to the only proprietor in the Barga area to enter the episcopal patronage network (Banocchini 47o-1, a. Szs), and then to perhaps the most inftuentiallandowning family in the ninth- century diocese (see Ch. 4, n. 11). 24 For the Saia estate and its transformations, see Banocchini 2.39, 382., 398, 42.9, 438, 492., 926, u68, 1539-40, 1716, 1719; Inventario I, p. 2. 18; MGH,

64

The Garfagnana, 70D-1200

There are plenty of alternative ways of interpreting the detail of this evidence. But the point I want to make does not depend on any particular one of them .. The fact is that all these leases, even the apparently extensive ones to aristocrats from the late ninth century onwards, have a very narrow tenurial base, three or• four estates, which were in the hands of the Church as a result of the largesse of a few late eighth-century large landowners. Almost no documented land in the upper valley comes from any other source. Yet, even though these landowners had extremely widespread estates, at least inside the upper valley, we could scarcely claim that they represented the bulk of loFal landowning, or even typical landowning: apart from about four centres, the foci of the estates, the total holdings of these properties amounted to only two or three tenant-houses per vi.lliige, scarcely enough to dominate even the low population that one might guess at for the upper valley. Small or medium owners in this part of the Garfagnana once again kept determinedly out of the sphere of influence of the bishops of Lucca, and their aristocratic successors. Even the strong twelfthand thirteenth-century signorie that were particularly typical of the Garfagnana Lunense relied on signorial rights more than landowning. Below and beyond these great estates, the independent peasantry survived, as we shall see in Chapter s.25 The Garfagnana charters of the eighth and ninth centuries show, as charters do everywhere in Italy, the slow expansion of ecclesiastical landowning. In this valley, that expansion tended to be in favour of city churches, above all the cathedral, but also in the Dip. Conradi II 83 (a.t027); AAL + +B8z (a. 1o63); cf. Ch. 3, n. 20. For the Vitoio estate, see Barsocchini 251, 266, 741, 1703; ASL Guinigi 4 (21 June

98o); AAL + +P6o (a.10t9); Manaresi 348 (a.1038). For the Nicciano estate, see below, Ch. J. nn. 7, 8. For Willeramo's estate, see lnventario U, pp. 2346; Barsocchini 1702; AAL *M15 (a.rox9). For papal properties, see references cited in n. 20; their lands in 'castello de Culjiniano' may, however, have been in Carfaniana (Castelvecchio) rather than in Cur.filiano .(Gorfigliano). For other land in the upper vaUey, see Barsocchini 293, 1II2, and forS. Salvatore's land, see refs. cited in n. 20. The marquises had land centred (presumably) on Castelvecchio, for Muratori, Antichita estensi i, pp. 21o-2 (a.88o) and Barsocchini ti73 (berween 887 and 915) show them ceding tithes of land in Carfaniana to the Church, but how large it was is unknown. For signorial rights after uoo, see de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 8sII6, and below, pp. u8-26. 25

' Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

6s

direction of a few local churches, S. Maria di Cam pori, S. Cassiano di Basilica, and S. Pietro di Vitoio, all of which were at least partially dependent on the bishop. The end of this expansion, in the early ninth century, is sometimes associated with the weakening, maybe even the collapse, of small free owners, particularly Lombards, in the face of the harsher realities of Frankish rule under the Carolingian Empire. 26 We have seen how, at least in Cam pori and in part, perhaps, in Fosciana, the success of the church did indeed overwhelm the lay landowners of the area; Campori. with a whole array ofsmall and medium owners in 7 so, had none in 8so. But the model is none the less a misleading one in our valley, and there are several reasons why. First of all, the social distribution of landowners who gave gifts to the church does not fit the pattern. Landowners of all sorts are attested in our documents; but there are actually, outside the Campori material, very few donors who look like owner-cultivators. The great mass of property given to the church was given by medium and large landowners: medium owners in the middle valley, large owners in the upper. Small owners may perhaps have been deterred from giving portions of their property in the way that larger owners did by the fact that land-parcels were very seldom divided off units of exploitation in the Garfagnana (above, pp. 27- 8); but the fact is that they did not give much land at all. The only exception to this seems to be in Campori itself, but this was as a result of the entrepreneurial pressure of the Gundualdi, not of any outside power. The class of people that ceded its lands most evidently in our texts was the medium landowner range, and there is no sign that they did so through economic constraint or political coercion. Most of them, as we have seen in the case of Castelnuovo, gave to the church only a proportion of their lands. I would reckon that this is because such a proportion was sufficient for most of such owners to become associated with the bishop and the power structures of the city, for such gifts were very often associated with entry into the episcopal clientele. We will see an equivalent procedure amply documented for the monasteries of the Casentino in Chapters 7 and 9. For free owners iri Italy, seen. xo for references, together with the classic discussion by Giovanni Tabacco, Liberi del re. 28

66

The Garfagnana,

J0()-1200

In Campori the pattern was somewhat different, even for medium owners. Here gift-giving by the latter seems, rather uncharacteristically for the Garfagnana, to have upset the whole balance of property-ownership in the village. The dominant family, in order to enter the bishop's clientele, eventually ceded its entire property to the church. But this was not as a result of coercion either. It must have seemed to the Gundualdi of political advantage to associate themselves so closely to the bishop, and, if they were • wrong, they were not wholly wrong. The Gundualdi were playing for higher stakes than most of their social group; they wanted episcopal backing for their dominance over an entire village as a stable elite. And however unimpressive this elite may have looked from the outside, it remained as such for at least two centuries. When we think of the 'decline of the free' in the Carolingian world, we often see the problem in terms of the extension of the manorial system, even of glebe serfdom; here, the process is not like that at all. Even the free that did decline in the Garfagnana were very often precisely those people who were least likely to lose their eventual liberty, or even independence: they were the village elites, and they often remained so. There is no doubt that small owners were genuinely on the defensive in the late eighth and ninth centuries. In many· places in northern and central Italy, peasant proprietors can be found ceding land to the church, and getting it back on lease; they may well have ceded land to laymen too. But here we are in the mountains, far from ecclesiastical-and even lay- power-centres. Here, as I have said, it is the gaps in our evidence that are striking. Not the absence of evidence for all but a few privileged centres of largely episcopal landowning--that is hardly an unusual feature of the period, which is anyway mostly rather less well documented than this; but rather the fact that almost nothing in our evidence cannot be traced back to the documented medium and large donors of 7 so-8 so. It could indeed be said that the absorption of many of the medium owners of the valley into the episcopal clientele made virtually no difference to the tenurial structure of the valley; their tenants remained tenants, but now had two levels of exploiters instead of one. These apparently major social changes made, in reality, curiously little difference to the local power-structures of the Garfagnana.

' Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning

67

The social patterns of the Garfagnana that we can see are thus only a small part of what must have in reality existed there. There is no particular reason, in the eighth and ninth centuries, to assume that great and even medium landowners were ever fully dominant in the valley. It is, in fact, likely that the close early association of the valley elites with Lucca helped the survival of small owners, for there were fewer local powers with sufficient interest in a not terribly rich, rather marginal edge of the urban power network to take the trouble to establish local dominance. Powerful men were more interested in competition for power in the city. The major threat to local independence thus lay with small local powers like the Gundualdi themselves; even they are unlikely to have had analogues with similar effectiveness in every village. Indeed, more typical may have been the stable network of small and medium ownership in the middle valley focused on the pievani of Pieve Fosciana; this network certainly survived the ninth century. The point is an important one; it is the demonstration that the ' mountain-ness' of the Garfagnana was of significance even in the ninth century, one of the most urbanocentric of periods of the Middle Ages in Italy. The first period that signorial power, the power of the plains, can be shown to have affected the Garfagnini en masse was when the bishops leased out their rights to tithe in the late tenth century; suddenly, dozens of settlements, with nothing except fragmentary documentation in previous centuries, leap into our evidence. But the developments described in this section, and indeed the next, had until that point passed them by. 27 27 Cf. Wickham, Societ4 degli Appennini, pp. 42-4; below Ch. S and

Conclusion. For parallels elsewhere in Carolingian Europe to this characterization oflandowning peasants, see Davies, Small Worlds; Staab, Gesel/schaft am Mittelrhein, pp. 26 I- 8o.

•

3

The Economic Structure of Landed Estates and their Development 8oo-1ooo

By 850 the bishop of Lucca controlled a number of estates in the Garfagnana, with economic structures of varying degrees of coherence. Some he controlled directly, such as those at Nicciano, Careggine, Campori, Cascio, and Vallico; some he controlled through rural pievi like S. Cassiano in Basilica; some he controlled through his private powers over urban churches. Increasingly, however, these distinctions would cease to be important. The Nicciano and Campori estates, wilike those of the public pievi, were focused on churches in the private possession of the bishops, but the latter never .drew any very sharp distinctions between the public churches and their private churches-they often issued standard leases even to pievani for their pievi. And, during the ninth century, the bishops asserted ever tighter control over all their churches; they increasingly took the place of their rectors and pievani as the lessors of tenant-houses, and sometimes even ceased to mention the church that nominally controlled the land. We know the names of no rectors of S. Cassiano between 867 and 952, though we have many documents for the S. Cassiano estates. S. Maria di Sesto, one of the pievi on the Lucca plain, does not appear as the direct lessor for any of its Garfagnana lands after 827; S. Quirico di Nicciano never does. 1 The ninth-century bishops ofLucca seem to have been fairly conscious territorial organizers and even centralizers. They took care that the obligations of private justice that they, as landowners, could exact from their tenants from at least the early ninth century 1

For episcopal control of churches, see Violante, 'Strutture organizzative', pp. 1087 tf.; Angelini, Pitve toscana, pp. 28--9. For general episcopal leasing policie.s, cf. Ottavini, 'Ordinamento agrario del contado lucchese'.

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8o
69

should be performed not on the estate but in the city.2 They had to try to centralize; there were too many decentralizing tendencies to confront. And in the Garfagnana it was these latter tendencies that won. The first general survey of episcopal land in the Garfagnana was an inventory of the 890s, of land given away in benefice to lay aristocrats; the second set of detailed evidence comes in the great series of Grosslibelle of 94o-1020, in which the Lucchese aristocracy extended and stabilized their control over very large parts of the bishop's total landed property. These allow us to measure the internal structures of these estates at two separate points in time, but they are points at which the bishop's control over them was in clear, and often permanent, decline. Such internal structures were very various, too; this was not something the bishop managed to regularize very easily. We shall look at four examples. The Vallico estate seems to have been the earliest to come under full episcopal control; it seems, too, to have been the simplest in structure. In 78 I the nun Godiperga of Vallibo gave the house where she lived to Lucca cathedral. Vallibo, sometimes Vallivo or Vallibus, is modern Vallico on a tributary of the Serchio in the lower Garfagnana. Since the eleventh century it has been divided into two, Vallico di Sopra and di Sotto; the signs are that the former is the primary settlement. The 781 charter is badly damaged, but doubtless included a reference to tenant-houses among Godiperga's properties, for ten episcopal leases survive for the period 823-907 for houses there; these must have been, for the most part at least, from Godiperga's inheritance. It was a stable village; we can often trace the same houses from tenant to tenant. In the episcopal inventory of the 890s, the V allico lands enfeoffed to Willerado Calvo come to eight tenant-plots, owing 145. and 4d., and eight houses is quite consistent with our previous picture of the estate. Italy did have great estates organized on classical manorial lines, with tenants The typical phrase found in most cultivator leases is ad mandato vestro venire debeamus (hie Luca) legem et iustiliam faciendum tantum or variants (in Mittellibelle, the lessee is to send his tenants in a similar way, and also in one early Grosslibell, Barsocchini 926, a.88z-later, aristocratic tenants kept judicial power in their own hands). The iustitia concerned is manorial justice, perhaps with the full extent of later 'low' justice; in Barsocchini 439 (a.821) it is already associated with the verb distringere (see below, pp. lOS, 3 IS). 2

70

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

performing substantial amounts of labour-service on a lord's demesne, most particularly on the Po plain. Godiperga's estate however, was certainly not one of these; no tenant in Vallico, either in the leases or the inventory, ever paid anything other than a money-rent. Godiperga's own house may very well have become a tenant-plot. The V allico 'estate' had no organizational identity at all. a The Vallico tenants all seem to have been free libellarii, the holders of written leases (libelli), on the surface fairly homogeneous. But one of them, Teufuso di Teudulo, who appears in two charters of 854-5 , has a certain interest. Teufuso seems to have been an ordinary cultivator, but he also held three houses on a Mittellibell, with cultivators dependent on him, like many of the Gundualdi in Campori; some of the cultivators seem to have been his own kin. One could prosper with leases, even if only for a time Teufuso's nephew Ostripaldo was a simple cultivator in one of these houses by 881. But there is no sign that Teufuso's family was a hereditary local elite, like the Gundualdi were. One could guess that surplus labour in one generation of a tenant family had here increased the resources available to it to the point that its bead could assume a middleman position in local society, which was then lost when division between too many heirs in the end dissipated these resources; Chayanov has produced useful models for the process.4 It was the flexibility of money-rents that produced possibilities of this kind, and this is why we can see it early in Vallico, as indeed in Campori, where money-rents were similarly dominant from at least the 82os. The implications we will see at the end of the chapter. Teufuso's family remain visible in these leases, henceforth as cultivators, right up to our last two leases in 907, these two being the only ones that post-date the inventory of the 8C)Os. The next time V allico is documented is in a Grosslibell of 984 to Gherardo levita (a future bishop) and his wife; the number Barsocchini 182 (Vallibo is my reading from the MS, AAL *D59, a.781), 457, 463 (the only evidence of any other owners in Vallico), 617-18, 710, 714- 15, 865, 881, 1099, IJIO; lnventario U, p. 237. For settlement split, see n. 5· 4 For Teufuso and Ostripaldo, see Barsocchini 710, 714, 881. Cf. Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. II5- I6; Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy, pp. sJ68. 3

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8o
7I

of tenant-houses has risen to twelve, but most of them are ascribed to tenants who are already dead- the church evidently no longer kept records for the estate. The village reappears in the 1070s, under lay control, and in I 122, when the bishop bought half of it back (pp. I 19-20). Shifts in ownership along these lines would be common in the Garfagnana. 5 The Cascio estate was slightly more complex. The land of the village has been described as the most fertile in the valley, and its location is also of considerable strategic importancee-Cascio was the victim of numerous wars between I 170 and 1945· It is not surprising, then, that three separate Lucchese churches had estates here, the cathedral, S. Michele in Foro, and S. Ponziano (the latter held Cascio's own church, S. Stefano, by 908, and indeed kept it until the fourteenth century). The episcopal estate, however, is the only one internally documented in our period, in ten leases between 843 and 903. These are less homogeneous than those of Vallico: all except one include wine in the rent, all except two money; six have pastoral exenia (compulsory gifts) in addition, and four require labour-service. The services required in these four are varied; three are for ten weeks a year-a fairly substantial amount, at least by Garfagnana standards--and one for three weeks. They do not, however, show the existence of demesne in Cascio, for three of them, all from 845, state that service should be performed ad curte vestra in loco Nicciano, or in Lucca, or indeed elsewhere. This does not mean that Cascio was part of the estate of Nicciano, either; it is just that Nicciano was the bishop's most organized estate in the Garfagnana under his direct control in the 84os, and when it needed extra workers they could be taken from some way away- in this case, some 20 km, for Nicciano is above Piazza. Cascio evidently had no demesne of its own. The same patterns crop up in the inventory, where Cascio is part of the extensive benefice of Cunimundo, with ten tenant groups; five still owe For references to Vallico after 90?, see Barsocchini 1594, 1800; AAL AB12, 18-20 (a.1072-4), which distinguish between Valivo and Valivo de Supto, the latter, the lower village, by implication being the secondary settlement; by 112o-2 the curtis and casteUo lay in Valivo de Supra (AAL +K13, a.1120; AE29, + + D40, + F8, a. II 22)- the castello was evidently founded in a pre--existing upper village rather than, as often happens, above a pre--existing lower village. 5

72

The Garfagnana,

70t>-12oo

ten or (once) three weeks' labour, although it presumably no longer went to Nicciano, for Nicciano did not appear in the text, and ·thus almost certainly did not belong to Cunimundo. Here, again, the close homology between the inventory and the leases indicate that all.the tenants of the estate were free libellarii~ for the inventory presumably listed all the tenants of the episcopal estate, nine in all (a tenth is a tenant of S. Michele in Foro)-one of the tenants appears in both a lease (for 867) and the inventory; with an identical rent. But the estate that thus appears is no more coherently organized into a manorial pattern than Vallico-in view of the tendency of its tenants to be drawn off to cultivate elsewhere, perhaps less. Cascio was valuable land, but its episcopal estate, at least, was only a collection of tenants. The bishop seems to have lost Cascio in the tenth century; after the last cultivator lease, of 903, he is barely mentioned with any land there again. In the thirteenth century, the next century with any serious documentation, S. Ponziano was the only · substantial landowner.6 To give an idea of what more organized estates looked like in the Garfagnana, let us look at two: Nicciano and Basilica. S. Quirico di Nicciano and its estate came to the bishop of Lucca in 803. It was in a real sense a private church belonging to the bishop, for it was actually outside the diocese, in the Garfagnana Lunense. But diocesan boundaries mattered little in this case; right from the start, the Nicciano estate also possessed an array of lands down the valley, especially a little group of houses in the lower Garfagnana, around Gragno and Bolognana, that even included demesne. Tenants from the Val di Lima, even further away, owed labour-service to the estate, in one case a week per month, 'wherever it is useful' (udque vobis autilitas fuerit), perhaps either in Gragno or on the demesne at Nicciano itself, where, as we have seen, tenants from Cascio could also be required to work. Nicciano was the most organized estate directly ruled by 6

Raifaelli, Dtscrizione del/4 Garfagmma, pp. r6o f.; for estates, see Barsocchini 528, 6z8, 1115. For leases, see 593, 624-6, 676, 701, 8oo, 961, 997, xo66, Inventario U, p. 231. (The rent in Barsocchini Soo matches the equivalent inventory reference, except that the latter does not mention the exenia due in the fonner; this is consistent practice in the inventory.) .A later fragment of episcopal land is cited in AAL +L14 (a.roi4). For larer history, see .Angelini, 'Cascio'.

Economic Structure of Landed Estates,

80()-1000

73

the bishop in the Garfagnana, and had both demesne and tenant-lands at both ends of the valley; it is not surprising that it was used as the focus for other manorial organizations there. Not that we know much about the estate centre itself: only one lease, for 826, is actually for an inhabitant of Nicciano (he owed labour-service, too), and the estate does not appear in the inventories. It need not have been very large, as we will see in a moment. But it was a real episcopal centre. The bishop stayed there in 853, for he issued a charter there. And it was one of the few episcopal properties in the valley (apart from the pievi) not to be given out as a benefice in the 89os; the bishop still controlled it in the 98os. As a result, when he did lease it away, between 983 and 1016, its structure was more exactly described than most. 7 In 983 Bishop Teudegrimo leased to Gherardo di Cunerado qui et Cunitio the fundamento et casalino (i.e. ruin, as we have seen] in qua fuit casa et curte domnicata in Nicciano (excluding some of the demesne meadows) with the church of S. Quirico, and eleven tenant-houses, mostly in the Lucca plain, only one of them being in Nicciano itself. In 984 the lease was altered, and Gherardo found himself leasing only half the estate and church, with some more demesne fragments and two tenanthouses in Nicciano; it is this version that was repeated for his 7

Barsocchini 312, 321, 479, 624-6, 658, 66o, 702. The equation of S. Quirico in loco Aniciano or Nicciano (clearly identical, from 624-6) with Nicciano in the Garfagnana is not entirely conclusive. A church by that name is listed as in Moriano in the Lucca plain in the 1070s (AAL +Kt6, badly edited in Bertini, Appendice 84), and the tenth-century charters for the S. Quirico estate refer to it as having dependencies in the Moriano area; conversely, the location of the estate in the Garfagnana (dependencies there in the ninth and early eleventh centuries) is no more than circumstantial. But the Moriano church was consistently called S. Quirico in Licciano after noo (e.g. AAL *H46, a.II3I, and Rat. Dec. 3993). If we regard the +Kr6 reference as a misspelling (easier than the postulation of a sound shift from 'n' to '1'), then links to the Moriano area are never any more than circumstantial either, despite the extensive documentation for Moriano itself. (The tenant-houses of the S. Quirico estate certainly shifted from century to century.) furthermore, if S. Quirico were in Moriano, its consistent leasing-out to aristocrats in the tenth and eleventh century (seen. 8) would sit oddly with the bishop's successful claim in +Kr6 that NiccianofLicciano was under his own jurisdiction. I have taken Nicciano to be in the Garfagnana, then, if with caution; my general arguments do not depend on its location.

74

The Gaifagnana, 70D-1200

son in 1016 and for his grandsons in 1o62. The other half of the church was leased away in 998 to Grimaldo diacono, apparently its rector, who got with it one tenant-house and a garden, both in Nicciano. Another tenant-house in Nicciano and some demesne arable and meadow are listed in a breve of lands belonging to two members of another aristocratic family dating from c. 1000; and two vineyards, with yet another house, appear in a lease of 1014, which conveyed to Gherardo's nephew Guido ecclesiastical rights over S. Quirico and tithes of two subsidiary villages (a quite uncanonical gift; these should have belonged to Luni). It is clear that the demesne and immediate tenancies of the ruined curtis had been broken up; but there does not seem to have been a lot of it- four houses and a handful of casually mentioned demesne fragments do not add up to much. Even the curtis of Nicciano, centre of episcopal manorial organisation in the Garfagnana, was hardly modelled on the monastic estates of the Po plain. s S. Cassiano in Basilica had a clearer identity than any of the foregoing. The bishop took over its leasmg by the mid-ninth century, as he did elsewhere, but did not give it away in benefice: pievi were mostly, for the moment at least, a rather different matter from other estates. We have seen that the church and its rectors had a position of some political and (as tithe-takers) economic importance in the local politics of the middle Garfagnana-inside, that is, the bounds of the pieve; all S. Cassiano's known property in the ninth and tenth centuries lay inside its pieval territory-in strong contrast, as we have seen, to the lands of S. Quirico di Nicciano. S. Cassiano accumulated much land in the century 77o-870, and we can see the church leasing it out in fifteen leases for the period up to 919. They are for rents in kind and money until 840, but after that only in money; only two, from 799 and 839, specify labour-service, and that not at a high level (five weeks a year). But there was certainly demesne in Basilica, even if nowhere else: it still existed there, in a solid bloc (insimul amembratas), in 9 52.9 8 Barsocchini 1551. rss•. 1725; AAL +LI4 (a.IOI4). +4 (a.JOI6), + +S40 (after 1000, Guidi-Pellegrinetti, p. 12), + P79 (a. Io62). lnventario 0, p. 244 includes a fragment of demesne at Cassu super Aniciano, probably already detached from the estate. 9 For gifts to S. Cassiano, see Schiaparelli 266, Barsocchini 256, 6o9, 667,

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8oo-1ooo

75

What happened to S. Cassiano's estate in the later tenth century replicates the fate of that of Nicciano very closely. It was leased out along with its tithes, in a Grosslibell of 952, to two members of what would become the Cellabarottani family (below, p. 102), and in 991 and 1015, in two halves, to their sons. The differences between the two generations of lease are indicative. In 952, as we have just seen, there was a demesne bloc around the casa domnicata cum cum, and then land and tenant-houses in seventeen places, covering nearly every one of the places for which there were leases in the ninth century. The 991 and 1015 leases almost exactly copy this pattern of landholding; but the curtis centre in 991 is, like that of Nicciano, by now in ruins, and, instead of the solid bloc of land in Basilica, there are now sixteen tenant-houses. The conclusion is clear: between 952 and 991 the demesne was definitively divided into tenant-plots. The dating is precise, and also, perhaps, somewhat late, for virtually no other demesne is mentioned anywhere in the Garfagnana after 9QO--the reason is probably the unusual coherence of S. Cassiano's large block of demesne, vast for the area, if sixteen tenants could be given lands from it. The process was by now complete; after demesnes were divided into tenancies, all that remained in the valley to show their former existence was the occasional unattached fragment of land.lO It is not my purpose here to write an extensive contribution to the ever increasing literature on the manorial system (the sistema curtense) in Italy. The Garfagnana was a backwater of the Lucchesia, of minor interest to the owners of its episcopal estates; its overall development would barely merit a footnote in a general history. But we have seen a definite variability in the four estates characterized here, and there are implications in this variability, not just for manorial history, but for the history of the inhabitants of the valley as well, who are undocumented 689-90, 772. For leases: 275 (angaria) , 439 (a vast rent, mostly in kind) , 53~ ss8 (angaria), 795. 815, 1035, 1088, 1090, 1094-S, ll4J, II68, n8s, II87. For demesne in 952, see 1350. The tenant-houses, unlike those for Nicciano, remained stable right up to the tenth-century Grosslibelle: see n. 10. lO Barsocchini 1350, 1652 (and again, AAL A17, a.1o62); AAL +B78 (a.1015). The only dememe cited in the valley after 952 is that for Loppia (Barsocchini 1538, a.983). For demesne fragments elsewhere, see Barsocchini 1198, 1268.

The Garfagnana, 70<1-1200 outside these leases between the 86os and the eleventh century. The eighth- and ninth-century Lucchesia, like inost of the rest ofLombard-Carolingian Italy, and many other places in :Europe, was a world of bipartite estates, with demesnes and tenant-units connected together, more or less organically, by labour-service owed by tenants on the demesne. Demesnes were generally smaller in Tuscany than on the great ecclesiastical estates of northern Italy, to say nothing of those of northern Europe, but they existed nevertheless; labour-service was sometimes (not always) less pressing, but was still required. Andreolli has remarked that there seems to have been more labour-service demanded in Tuscany than the smallish demesnes ought to have needed, and has emphasized the role of such labour as a symboland a practical reality--of control over men. This indeed seems likely, and has the merit of stressing the role of the sistema curtense as a instrument of political power quite as much as an expression of rational economic mana.gement: landowners in the eighth and ninth centuries were more interested in power over people than in disinterested moves to increase the efficient extraction of surplus, or-perhaps better--could not have differentiated between the two. In the end, however, the bipartite estate broke down, at a speed varying from estate to estate in some as early as the ninth century, in some as late as the eleventh, or later. Money-rents took over, in almost all Italy, at least for a time; new patterns of organization appeared. I want here to look briefly at two aspects of this process: first, the coherence of estates and the decline of demesne, a well-known phenomenon but in many ways problematic; second, the implications of an economic system based entirely or almost entirely on money-rents for local social differentiation.ll I have already stressed that demesne was not a substantial proportion of the estates in the Garfagnana that we know about. If we go beyond those I have mentioned, and attempt to total The most recent general introductions are Andreolli and Montanari, Azienda curtense (e.g. p. 148 for Tuscany); Toubert, 'Sistema curtense'; both have references to previous bibliography. For Tuscany, see Jones, 'Manor to Mezzadria'. For Lucca, see Endres, 'Kirchengut im Bistum Lucca\ )ones, 'Italian Estate'; Andreolli, 'Contratri agrari' (esp. pp. 119-Z4-, 134-5, for weakness of demesne and variability in estate structUres); id., 'Evoluzione dei patti colonici' (esp. pp. 36, 40 for labour-service as a symbol). 11

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 80o-1ooo

77

all references to it, we will not end up with much more. Five curtes in the valley are known to have had demesne; there must have been many others, but these are the only ones we can discuss. They were those of Nicciano, S. Cassiano, Sala, Vitoio, and the pieve of Loppia; to them we should add the demesne attached to the casae of Gundualdo of Campori, Luccio of Fosciana, S. Pietro di Careggine, and perhaps the property in Castiglione belonging to the lowland pieve of S. Maria di Sesto--there is presumably a hierarchy of importance between curtis and casa here, though it is far from defined. There were also a certain number of fragments of uncultivated demesne, which are mentioned casually in texts even before the beginnings of breakdown in the tenth century, at Sassi in 827 or at Castiglione in 863, permanently part of the responsibilities of the holders of particular tenant-houses. This list also covers all the places for which we have references to labour-service in our leases and inventories. It is unlikely that much of this demesne was large. We know, as we have seen, that S. Cassiano's at Basilica was quite substantial; that at Vitoio was sufficiently coherent even to have a hedge or wall around it. But the Nicciano estate centre may not have been particularly large at all. And nor, in the Garfagnana, was labour-service particularly important. If we take our leases before 870, which rough date marks a precipitous drop in corvee requirements in Lucchese leases, we will find that under half require any labour-service at all, and only one of these, for Castiglione in 863, requires as much as two days a week, which would normally be taken as high; most require less than a day, and some as little as two or three weeks a year (the calculations are usually expressed in terms of weeks a year-the high season weeks, of course; Andreolli contrasts this with elsewhere in the Lucchesia, where days a week are commoner, noting that the distance between tenant-plots and demesne in the Garfagnana makes day-service impraCtical) .12 12 For curtes (first references), see Barsocchini 239, 266, 624 (321?), 1350, 1538. For casae, etc., see Schiaparelli 250, Barsocchini 179, 491, 620, 763. For Vitoio's hedge, see Barsoccbini 266. For labour, see Barsocchini 158, 275, 438, 479, 492, soB, 558, 620, 624-<>. 658, 763 (Castiglione in 863), 8oo; lnvent11rio I, p. · 218; 11, pp. 231, 235; cf. Andreolli, 'Contratci agrari', pp. Il?-20, 133-s.

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200 On their own these figures do not mean much. Montanari has shown that labour-services in leases in northern Italy, where the polyptychs can show massive corvee requirements, are equally low. Written leases were only for free tenants, and many tenants were unfree; besides, the polyptychs themselves demonstrate striking differences between the labour requirements of different levels of even free tenants. Social differences on many of the estates of northern Italy were encapsulated in differing requirements for labour. It is, however, far from clear that this was always the case in Tuscany. It is certainly true that in the Lucchese inventories of the late ninth century, redditales, rent-payers, are often distinguished from angariales, labour-givers: one of our Sala estates is an explicit instance. But the patterns do not entirely correspond with, for instance, the distinction between a tenant with a charter and an (often unfree) tenant without. IS Let us look at the issue through the Garfagnana evidence. No lease for the valley mentions labour-service after 867. That does not mean that labour ceased to exist; it is mentioned in the episcopal inventories, which list all tenants, free and unfree. But even there, only a quarter of the tenants from the Garfagnana owe service, almost all at Sala and at Cascio, and not one owes more than about a day per week. Demesne agriculture in the valley, as early as the 890s, was relatively unimportant. And in fact, as we have seen for V allico and Cascio, in many estates the inventories so closely fit the leases that we can conclude that most tenants there were already free leaseholders; at the very least, tenants without charters did not owe different services from libellarii. The inventory may simply have recorded the last tenants to owe labour. Only on the Sala estates-and probably at Basilica, where demesne lasted for a long time yet, but all our written leases are for money after 84o--may there have been any permanent structural difference between leaseholders, not owing labour, and customary or unfree angariales. Elsewhere, surviving leases are probably a good guide to the structure of estates. And that means that, on all but a few estates, labour-service had disappeared by 900· This fits the patterns Andreolli has Montanari, 'Corvee nei contratti ag:rari'; Pasquali. 'Corvee nei polittici italiani'; in general, Luzzatto, Servi sulle grandi propritt4. For Lucca, see Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. 128-34· 18

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8oo-1ooo

79

drawn from the broad statistics of the Lucchese leases in general, where corvees were rather higher in the mid-ninth century than in our valley, but where they stop entirely after 907; we are into an age of money-rents, perhaps more precociously, as Jones proposed in 1957, than anywhere else in Italy. As we have seen, estate centres fell into ruin at Nicciano and, by the end of the tenth century, even at Basilica. As early as 883, this had happened on one of the Sala estates. Demesne fragments began to be found as ad hoc additions to tenancies all over the valley. Between 870 and 96<>, the manorial system in the Garfagnana disappeared.14 The end, or, if you like, the ' crisis' of the manorial system has been very widely discussed, in every country and every context; it is one of those phenomena that cannot any longer be seen in a fresh light. Explanations for it inter-cut very substantially; we would have to employ a matrix of tendencies that operated individually and as an ensemble, with different intensities in different places, if we wanted to elucidate it fully. One such is the 'irrationality' of the fixity of labour-service on a bipartite curtis in a world of ever-changing, fractionated properties, or, in more recent variants, the 'rationalization' represented by the partition of demesne into tenancies in a period of land clearance and demographic growth. We can also witness the growth of a need by lords for rents in cash, in an age of steadily extending luxury commerce, and, indeed, an increasing availability and usefulness of money (this model is also particularly common in northern Europe, where demesnes lasted much longer and the appearance of money-rents coincides with the even more notable commercial upturn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). We must recognize, too, the fact that the structure of power was changing; personal unfreedom, the basic presupposition underpinning the control over men expressed through labour-service, was ceasing to exist; in its place were Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. t 19-20; id., 'Evoluzione dei patti colonici', pp. 39-44; Endres, 'Kirchengut im Bistum Lucca', pp. 256-00, for the episcopate;Jones, 'Italian Estate', pp. 25- 31, for the canonica; Kotel'nikova, Mondo contadino, pp. 26-64, for the eleventh century onwards. Some surviving angaria can, however, be found on a very small scale in the early eleventh· century: Rocchini, ' Esempio di elaboruione dei dati', pp. 159-60; and, on lay estates, even in the twelfth: Jones, 'Italian Estate', p. 25 n. For ruined curtes, see Barsoccbini 926, 1551, 1652; Azzi i.121. 14

So

The Garfagnana,

70€>-1200

new forms of political subjection, signorial or 'banal' forms, as the judicial rights of landownership slowly developed and, in the tenth century, the break-up of public power began, extending private political control over a much wider range of people. As the curtis was replaced by the castello, political power obtained a new organizational base. The castello often had a market, too, which was given importance by the fact that the fortifications were often the focus of more than one unit of property-owning; the commercial exchange of the market rendered labour-service still more out of date. As signorialization got under way, and more and niore land was ceded to lay aristocrats, the physical basis of demesnes was often fragmented even further, their economic logic further undermined. When we put all these trends together, who could doubt that the bipartite estate was doomed to vanish?l5 I do not wish to oppose such a sophisticated network of explanations. But what does need to be opposed is the teleology that seems very often to be present in the minds of historians, the inevitability of the collapse of the system. It did, of course, collapse. But landowners chose to let it do so; what we see is the cumulative weight of such choices, rather than any extra-human guiding tendency; as we shall see in Chapter 8, in the Casentino, a valley certainly in some ways less 'developed' than elsewhere, but, equally, participating in some measure in all the developments just outlined, labour-service was not infrequent in the twelfth century, and still survived, if vestigially, in the sixteenth.l6 In the Lucchesia, by contrast, the eclipse of labourservice and of the demesne-tenure opposition is remarkably precocious-it was nearly complete by 900, leaving only trivial traces to linger on into the twelfth century; but the matrix of developments that I have set out as causes for the crisis of the manor were rather less precocious in their appearance and internal interaction in that territory: the 'causes', that is to say, often appeared after the 'effect'. The bishop of Lucca may have lost 15 See, variously, Violante, Socit ta milanese, pp. 9 1-8, and Fumagalli, Colom e signori, pp. 31- 49; Andreolli and Montanari, Azienda curten.se, pp. 201- 13; Toubert, 'Sistema curtense', pp. 26-30, 41- 3, 61- 3. For northern parallels, the classic survey is Duby, Rural Economy, esp. pp. 206-39, 264-70. 16 On tdeology, c£ the analogous arguments sometimes made about incastellamento: Wickham, ll problema de/rincastdlamento, pp. 51-2, 79-83.

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8oo-1ooo

8I

his more marginal estates to vassals by 900, but he kept control of his richest lands in the plains until well into the tenth century; yet all of these, their overall framework of control unchanged, ceased to become bipartite estates and turned into simple collections of tenant-plots. I would agree with Andreolli that the tenth century was, indeed, a period of stabilization in Lucchese estate organization, with a growing equalization of rents; by and large, the end of cultivator leases in the Garfagnana in 900-20, which affected both the estates the bishop kept and those he alienated as benefices, usually shows that the terms of leases had ceased to change, and that libelli could thus be inherited, and is not in itself an indicator that episcopal control over these estates was lost. (Campori, the sole valley centre to show leases up to the 950s, we will come back to in a moment.) And far from the tenth-century Lucchesia (still less the ninth) being precocious in the growth of signorial relationships, the new patterns of territorial power, it was relatively 'backward'; indeed, by north Italian standards, all Tuscany lagged behind in this respect, ~d the Lucchesia was slow even according to Tuscan norms, scarcely showing any fully coherent signorial patterns until after 1 100. It can hardly be reckoned that money-rents represent signorial relationships here as early as 900; and it certainly cannot be that such relationships explain the early collapse of labour-service.l7 So where do we put the emphasis, inside the matrix, to explain the development of the Lucchesia--or even, less ambitiously, the Garfagnana? One element in the growth of money-rents may simply be the chance circumstance that Lucca had a mint, which after 8oo or so was the only one in Tuscany; money was more easily available in its hinterland. Certainly we cannot see money-rents as in themselves unequivocal indicators of relative commercial development; if so, one would find it hard to explain why V allico, high up on the side of one of the Serchio's least entiting tributaries, was one of the only Lucchese estates where no rents were ever demanded except in money; Vallico was hardly the cutting edge of any new mercantilism. 17

See Andreolli, 'Contratti agrari', pp. 133- 5; id., 'Evoluzione dei patti colonici', pp. 4o-3. On the lateness of the signoria, see below, pp. 112- 21, contra Andreolli, 'Evoluzione dei patti colonici', pp. 44-<>. who himself shows some uneasiness about the argument.

82

The Gaifagnana, 70o-12oo

But if Vallico is seen as an ordinary disgregated, originally lay, estate, fairly typical, perhaps, of many estates without demesne that are not usually documented, its early use of money may simply be explained by the local availability ofLucchese coinage. This presence of money is one consideration, though it is not enough on its own. Another, perhaps more useful, is the early appearance of castelli on the bishop of Lucca's estates in the decades after 900. Castelli do not by themselves bring signorial rights: that is to say, the simple addition of fortifications to an estate centre does not by any means always entail a new pattern of organization or socio-political control; we cannot trace judicial tights in the context of these castelli, in fact, until well after 1050. Instead, what the bishop of Lucca in the 9QOS-920S was doing was underpinning and emphasizing his proprietorial power: these castelli, more than many, were simply developments out of curtes. And the aspect of curtes that they developed was their role as rent-collection centres: it is this form of exploitation, more simplified .than that of the manor, that the early castelli were crystallizing. Episcopal castelli were, in fact, the end of a process that we can see taking shape across the ·previous half-century: of standardization and simplification. IS At this point we should look again at the Garfagnana, for the evidence from there emphasizes the extreme variability of the real agrarian relationships brought under the umbrella of the sistema curtense. Vallico ·had no demesne; Nicciano had some, spread out over a wide area; Basilica had a lot, all concentrated in one spot. These contrasts were emblematic of the mixture of different estate structures that came into the hands of the bishop between 7 50 and 8so. Reorganization was impractical; simplification was the only way in which a bishop, faced with a variety of already fully exploited estates, could keep some sort of control over them. The slow breakdown of the bipartite estate on episcopal property must have been in part a response to this problem; rather than systematically organizing estates like Vallico into 'true' manors, bishops let 'true' manors break down For Pietro 11 and his castelli, see n. 21. For curtis to castello, Andreolli and Montanari, Azienda curttnse, pp. I9Q-I; Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 16876, 2.56-8. For Garfagnana examples, see Barsocchini J7IZ; MGH, Dip. Conradi 11 83; RCL 227; AAL *H83ab (Gemignani 7S-15), and below, pp. 116-18. Cf. pp. 2.93-302. for Casentino parallels. 18

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, Boo-1000

83

to the level of estates like Vallico. This is not an argument about the inevitable breakdown of the manor on fractionated landland had always been fractionated. It is, rather, a result of the fact that this land all came under the control of a single owner, the bishop, and was therefore a result of the choice, conscious or half-conscious, of the episcopal administration. It is indeed quite likely that estates still held by small and medium lay owners changed their various structures very much more slowly, not by any means by 900; corvees on their lands, probably always small-scale where they existed, may sometimes have lasted much longer.l9 This levelling of structure, together with the centralization of episcopal manorial jurisdictions in the city, are likely to have been the major changes experienced by tenants as a result of the passing of their lands into the hands of the bishop. And the bishop was the first to build castelli. Not that all castelli fit exactly with former demesne centres-two of the Garfagnana pievi, for instance, solid demesne foci though they were, never got them; but many did. This at least is a development that is well recognized: castelli, founded in old settlements, simply englobed the estate centres there, as shown by the increasingly common formula castellum et curtis--such a continuity being a major reason why castelli made so little difference to the agrarian landscape. Still, even then, outside some of his major centres, the bishop did always not replace manors directly with castelli. The manor on the lands of the bishop of Lucca frequently vanished into a void, of curtis centres, randomly arranged, reduced to collecting centres for rents, derived from (by now) wholly permanent leases. The Sala estate, on lease to lay aristocrats, perhaps illustrates the problem best. By 883 its demesne centre was ruined and its estates had lost any organizational coherence; and so it remained throughout the tenth century. The refocusing of the estate was secured by the building of a cluster oflay castelli inside a radius of a couple of kilometres For reorganization and its problems, see Toubert, Latium, pp. 332, 33948; Wickham, 11 problema dell'incaste/lamento, pp. 59-"00. A major target here is the theory of the manorial system as conscious planning, as, for example, in Cipolla's classic short survey, 'Questioni aperte sui sistema economico dell'alto medio evo'. For the lowest common denominator in organization, cf. Andreolli and Montanari, Azienda curtense, p. 203. 19

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200 of Sala; but the earliest of these is not documented until 997, and none of then can have been founded much earlier than xooo. 2 0 One can hardly be blamed for feeling uneasy at the explanations normally offered for the end of the manor, when in the Lucchesia it so dearly disappears into nothing, with no new organizing procedures on many estates for a century. But without new evidence or a completely new set of interpretations, we can get no further. To bring this discussion back into social history, the main focus of my analysis, I will conclude with a point about estateS based on money-rent, like Vallico and, after 821, S. Maria di Campori. Money-rent is often seen as a levelling of social differentiation in a village no more troublesome distinctions between free and unfree, libellarifredditales and massariijangariales, or even, in landowner-dominated villages such as the two mentioned here, peasant proprietor and tenant. And so it is. But it is in these two villages, none the less, that social differentiation is clearest in the leases. In Campori, we have seen that the bishop took over a village with very clear pre-existing social divisions, and that his leases just transferred these divisions from landowning to tenancy; a village elite stayed an elite as tenants just as they had done as proprietors. In Vallico we seem to have a different 20 For Sala, Barsocchini 926, 1719, and MGH, Dip. Conradi I1 83 are the

basic texrs. The history of Sala, looked at over a wider time-span, also serves to stress further the complexity of the interrelationship between estate organization and incastellamento. In the eighth and ninth centuries, it was a centre for a lay, later episcopal, estate, overlooked by the early public castrum of Carfaniana. In the late ninth and tenth centuries, as noted in the text, the manorial organization of Sala broke up and its constituent parts fragmented, to re-form eventually by the early eleventh century around lay castelli; Caifaniana is no longer mentioned. In the twelfth century, however, the estate, or part of it, came back into the hands of the bishop, and beolme known as curtis de Sala again; the private castelli, though continuing to exist, were used as a basis from which to refound Caifaniana, now called Castelvecchio, as a private castello, under the joint control of the bishop and two lay families. (It was, none the less, the private castelli, notably San Donnino and San Michele, that survived the middle ages; Castelvecchio is today long abandoned.) The constant moving inwards and outwards between Castelvecchio and the outer castelli is in some sense an indicator of oscillations in political power, which at least partly match the oscillations in the coherence of the Sala estate; but the fit is by no means exact. See Ch. 2, n. 54, Ch. J, n. 24. Ch. 4, nn. 16, 45 for references.

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, Soo--1 ooo

85

phenomenon, a family rising through successful leasing, and then perhaps falling again, but certainly continuing to leave considerable trace in the documents. The survival of Campori leases through to the 950s, unique among the Garfagnana estates, probably expressed this differentiation, too: the Campori elite, in view of the complexity and the variability of its social position, could not be pinned to permanent libelli, not needing renewal, at any point before the bishop leased off the whole estate and ceased to keep its cultivator leases. These social distinctions were much more subtle and dynamic than those expressed through different types of rent; they were a product of the flexibility and independence produced by rents in money, themselves a recognition that the tenant had complete control of the organization of his land, as long as he could sell his produce.Such a flexibility, the chance for lucky tenants to rise in the internal hierarchy of the village, existed here despite the solidity and apparent unbreakability of tenant-plots; elsewhere in Tuscany, where tenants could rent extra property a field at a time, it must have been even less difficult. Every village must have had its elite, of course; most such elites, as I have proposed, were still composed of small and medium landowners. But they existed even in villages totally under the control of external owners, and the victory of money-rents will have allowed tenant elites to establish themselves everywhere as power-groups reflecting real social relationships inside villages rather than social categories arbitrarily imposed from outside. It is these groups, whether proprietors or tenants, that would produce the rural commune in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; indeed, Vallico, with a commune by 1 122, is by nearly half a century the most precociously documented example in the valley, although it almost certainly consisted entirely of tenants (cf. below, pp. 11920). However vaguely characterized and impermanent suchelites may appear to be, they could be powerful, and, in the end, their local influence would develop a concrete institutional base. I have used the second of the two Lucchese inventories, from the 890s, and the Grosslibelle of the later tenth century, as slices through a changing continuum of estate structures. But, as I said at the start of this chapter, they each represent stages in the dissolution of the proprietorial control of the bishops. The

86

The Garfagnana, 70Q-1200

inventory of the 890s is a list- itself probably incomplete of twenty-seven benefic~ to various Lucchese notables; it includes the great bulk of our Church properties in the Garfagnana. The bishops made another inventory, probably earlier, at some point in the later ninth century, ofland apparently not enfeoffed away; it includes only one property in the Garfagnana, the Carfaniana estate, which looks as if it is at least some of the Sala estate that Bishop Giovanni I got in 793; but this was itself ceded away, on lease, in 883 either the earlier inventory pre-dates 883, probably by some years, or the estate was split up. The only episcopal estates not included in either are Vitoio and Nicciano, and the estates of the pievi. The likely source of the inventory of benefices is Bishop Pietro II (896--933), who was in other respects the active defender of Church lands. He appears as a slightly pathetic opponent of some of the plains nobles, as shown by a court case of 897, listing lands usurped by 56 families- the defendants did not even bother to come to court; but it was he who initiated incastellamento in the Lucchesia, setting up after 905 many of the key castelli, such as S. Maria a Monte and Moriano, that remained the centre of the proprietorial (and, later, judicial) power of the bishops for centuries. The inventory of benefices may show him cutting his losses- the greater part of them came from outside the plain of Lucca, the heartland of episcopal power; benefices were certainly not necessarily rentfree, either, and the process may have parallels in the leasing of marginal estates by abbots of Farfa and S. Vincenzo al Voltumo in order to pay for the incastellamento of their core properties. (We must remember, however, that the inventory is incomplete.) What a benefice really meant in terms of power is actually far from certain; it may not yet have carried the local power and stability that a Grosslibell did, as we shall see (pp. 97-8). But the benefices of the 890s were certainly not going to turn directly into the leases of the tenth century. Although some of the 890s vassals were clearly ancestors of the great lessees of a century later, they did not generally hold land in the same places; the families may have been stable, but the benefices were not. 2 1 21

Inventario I, p. 218 for Carfaniona; the 883 lease is Barsocchini 926. (If they are for the same property, there must be a lapse of time between them, for the former has a functioning demesne, and in the latter the demesne centre is in ruins.) For Pietto, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 1oo-3; RanaUo, 'Bishops

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, 8o
87

The Grosslibelle were more permanent. They mostly date from 980 to 1020, though there are a handful of earlier leases, and some later confirmations in the ro6os. Sala was leased off in 883, with renewals to later generations in 939, 983 (two), 99(1, 1063; the Fosciana estate and the pieve with its tithes in 952, 991, 1015, 1o62; Vitoio in 980, thereafter making up part of the heterogeneous Careggine estates, established in eight leases from 995 and 1019; Nicciano in 983 , 984, 998, 1014, 1016, 1o62; Loppia and its pieve in 983 and 994; Vallico in 984; Campori in 986 and 1014; half Gallicano and its pieve, apparently abortively, in 997. All the major estates except Cascio (which had probably already gone) are included, and in most of these texts they are described in some detail (although the confirmations often repeat them word for word, down to the names of the tenants). But the striking novelty is the inclusion of the pievi and their tithes, perhaps the major single episcopal resource, in such leasing out. Although a lot of pievi appear as benefices in the inventory of the 890s, probably only a part of their properties was involved in their cession as benefices, and none of them was from the Garfagnana. The lease of a pieve in the tenth century was on a far larger sc:;ale, and generally covered all or most of its economic resources. 22 The bishops leased their resources away throughout the diocese, in the Garfagnana and outside it; other bishops- and abbots-did the same elsewhere as well, for we are in the age of the affirmation of new strata of the aristocracy all over Italy, very largely at the expense of ecclesiastical property. It is increasingly clear, none the less, that the bishops of Lucca were driven to this recourse rather more fully than many of their colleagues-we will see the bishop of Arezzo doing it far less of Lucca', pp. 723-6. For the Placitum, see Manaresi 102. (At least one of the estates 'l<>st' in it, Fibbialla with Pieve a Elici in the Versilia, was leased to the same man in 892 (Barsocchini 980) and also enfeoffed to him in Inventario U, pp. 231- 2. The link between these separate processes needs further analysis. Cf. below, pp. 97- 8.) For leasing in central Italy, see Toubert, Latium, pp. 521-7; Wickham, 11 problema detrincastellamento, pp. 45-6. 22 Barsocchini 926, u68, 1350, 1381, 1538- 40, 1551 , 1584, 1594, 16o9, 1652, 1697-1703, 1716, 1718 (but see 1719), 1725; ASL Guinigi 4 (21 June 980); AAL + +N26, +L14 (a.1014), +:878 (a.IOIS). +4 (a.Ioi6), +B98, + +P6o, *M15 (a.IOI9), +P79, A17 (a.ro62), + +B82 (a.1o63). For context, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 241-4.

88

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

generally (below, pp. 318-20). In part, they were establishing their own kin; in part they were trying to create a new military and even administrative power-base. But in large part they were driven to it because of their relative political weakness in the city and the diocese, despite their vast estates, for Lucca was the political centre of the marquis of Tuscany, one of the last really strong lay powers in the kingdom. The context and consequences of this we will see in the next section. For our purposes here, the result is simple: as soon as we get a good look at these estates, they vanish from our documentation. The economic development of landed property in the Garfagnana cannot, as a result, be studied for something like 200 years. The documents surviving in the archiepiscopal archive in Lucca, which I have looked at up to I 300, together with Duane Osheim's valuable survey of episcopal landowning in the diocese between the eleventh century and c. 1400, allow us to get some idea of what the bishops owned in the Garfagnana in, say, the thirteenth century, so that we can see how much continuity of landowning there was from 900 or so. There was not a great deal. It is clear, to start off with, that the eleventh-century charters we have, themselves not numerous, show the bishop active only in extremely restricted areas-a couple of houses in Castiglione in 1021 and 1033, and the hill slope above Bolognana, are all the instances we have. He did begin to get gifts again from the faithful: a quarter of the castello of Cellabaroti just outside Castelnuovo in 1045; a quarter of the castello of Castiglione and an eighth of that of Gallicano in 1001; some property in Vallico in 1072-4- not much, however, and the last of these, perhaps the last two, ex-episcopal anyway. The Gallicano castello overlooked a pieve that after 997 was apparently kept in episcopal hands, for in the I070S Pope Alexander n issued a bull listing the property that the bishop of Lucca (who was in fact hirnself-Anselmo I) could not: alienate; this included the pieve of Gallicano, as one of the few in the whole diocese still directly dependent on the bishop. In the Garfagnana, the bull also lists land in the elusive Cerignana, and the castello of Verrucchio above Castiglione; nothing else. 2 3 As a Garfagnana 23

Osheim, Italian Lordship, pp. 55-9· Episcopal activities: AAL +E87 (a.1022., mod. dating 102.1), + +K15 (a.IOJJ, Mennucci 39); for Bolognana, see Ch. I, n. 20. For gifts, see AAL +Czz (a.1045, Pianezzi 11), +C84

Economic Structure of Landed Estates, Soo-1000

89

landowner, the bishop had to start again. In the twelfth century, he regained part of Vallico and of Sala, now both focused on castelli; it cannot be by chance that both had been episcopal, but we cannot see any direct continuity. In the thirteenth, apart from these two, Castiglione and Verrucchio, the bishop controlled Cardoso below V allico, and had by now regained considerable control over the leasing out of tithes. But, henceforth, episcopal influence over the valley was almost entirely ecclesiastical. The estates leased away in the decades around 1000 for the most part never returned. In the internal affairs of the Garfagnana, the major part played by the bishop in the years 75o-1ooo had ended. 24 (a.Io6I) with *H83ab (a.1o61, Gemignani 75--6), ABx8 (a.1072), AB12, 19, 20 (a.1074); Barsocchini 1795 for the buU (later bulls mostly just repeat itsee Violante, ' Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 658 f.) . 24 For Vallico, see Ch. 4, n. 39. For Sala, see MGH, Dip. Friderici I 430 '(a. I 164); AAL + + Q6 (a. I 179, Pacchi I 1-a very inaccurate edition), and below, p. 124; Seghieri, 'Piazza e Sala' surveys its history as an episcopal property. For Cardoso, see AAL AD36 (a.1283). For Verrucchio and Castiglione, see MGH, Dip. Friderici I 430; AAL + +145 (a.1214, 1252), + +Dss. *F2o, *A92 (a.1227), + +019 (a.1230), + +A29 (a.1237), *A59 (a.1244), + +044 (a.1262), + +A26 (a.1263). For tithes, see Cb. 4, n. 43· For the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Church, see generally Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 39-78. .

4

The Lords of the Garfagnana and the World of the City Tenth to Twelfth Centuries ' Early medieval cities, even in Italy, were unimpressive places. As more and more urban sites are dug by archaeologists, the fact becomes ever clearer. Some cities were totally abandoned; although the vast majority survived, at least in central-northern Italy, even in these we can often see how some areas were turned to agricultural use, showing how the population had declined inside the Roman walls. Settled parts of cities, too, would have looked grim to Roman eyes, showing as they did the unadventurous re-use of decaying Roman buildings, and very often a return to construction in wood with, at the most, some use of stone foundations. Some would go further on this evidence, following an old argument: these cities were barely urban at all in any economic sense; the city was ruralized. and no longer the centre for rural life in general; the city-country distinction, in other words, had broken down. I have argued against this elsewhere; cities in the Po plain and in Tuscany were real social and economic foci, even (or especially) in the eighth to eleventh centuries-not least Lucca, with its seventy-seven documented urban churches and its extramural suburbs. 1 No adequate excavation has yet taken place in Lucca, but the distribution of churches argues against any contraction in the land area of the city. Even Lucca will not have looked like a Roman-style political focus in any architectural sense; it must For a recent archaeological conspectus, See W ard-Perkins, 'Citcl altomedievale'; see further, La Rocca Hudson, '"Dark Ages" a Verona'. Work·is moving on fast, however, especially in Lombardy and the Veneto: see the annual Schede, edited by S. Nepoti and S. Gelichi in Archeologia medievale. For Lucca, see Belli Barsali, 'Topografia di Lucca'; ead., 'Problemi della topogra.fia di Lucca'; cf. Wickham. Early Medieval Italy, pp. SQ-92. l

The Lords of the Garfagnana

91

have been a dilapidated stage for tl)e social and political drama of the period. None the less, it was still the centre of its county and diocese, indeed of the developing march of Tuscany, and that meant a great deal. Only archaeology will be able in the end to tell us about one of the major aspects of Lucca's position, its economic control of its territory as a regional market and centre for pottery-making and cloth-weaving, an aspect of Lucchese life that is badly served by our documents. Lucca certainly had an active market, and artisans; I have already argued, however, that the local specializations that tied the Garfagnana to Lucca and other cities, above all in silvo-pastoral products, were barely developed before the twelfth century (pp. 24- 5), and it is likely that only then did Lucca dominate its territory as a centre of exchange. In other respects, none the less, Lucca in the eighth to tenth centuriesand. indeed, later- was a real focus, both in socio-political and socio-economic terms, owing to the presence there of most of the major landowners, secular and ecclesiastical, of the diocese. Much of the agricultural surplus product of the Lucchesia thus flowed directly into the city. And Lucca was a political centre of sufficient dimensions to attract the interest of even those local elites who were not urban-dwelling; they all wished to enter the urban patronage networks, of duke/marquis or bishop, and perhaps even of lesser urban churches and aristocrats. We have seen in Chapter 2 the effect that such concerns had on the local elites of the Garfagnana, or on some of them at least; even right inside the Appennines, on the edge of the diocese, the pull of the city was strong, fully integrating city and country. The question that must be posed is whether the Garfagnana was as fully integrated as other parts of the diocese into the city's network. Its partial administrative autonomy (the middle valley with its own fines, the upper valley part of the diocese/ county of Luni) is one reason why we should wonder. And, as we have seen, the valley had its own social identity in the eighth and ninth centuries; indeed, despite the very considerable inroads made by episcopal landowning and patronage into the Garfagnana, many substantial areas of the valley remained almost completely undocumented, a prima-facie indication of the lack of impact the bishop's power network had on them. We must be prepared to balance the considerable influence of Lucca on

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200 92 its territory against the autonomous identity of the Garfagnana as a region. In this chapter, we will see the valley very much from the outside: in terms, in effect, of structures of power imposed from the city or from the diocese as a whole. We will return to the issue of the specificity of the valley in the next chapter, when we look at the patterns of local cohesion in the eleventh- and twelfth-century valley, or at least at such patterns as can be dimly discerned in the ever lessening documentation. There is another balance that we need to aim at: it lies in the issue of the changing structures of political power. The problem of the nature of political power in Italy from 900 onwards, and how it changed, has always concerned historians, but in the past two decades or so it has been discussed with ever greater sophistication, by Tabacco, Violante, Keller, and many others.2 We now have a far more articulated sense than we had before of how terms like 'feudalization', signorialization', 'territorialization' can be used to illuminate the immense complexities of real power relationships. And other writers, such as Toubert and Settia, have shown how the problematic of 'incastellamento' fits into the matrix too. 3 The resultant framework of interpretation is extremely effective as an overall model, even if it is itself by now so complex that it is hard to keep it all in one's head at the same time for more than ten minutes. But seeing how it operates in different areas is very much another matter; for these developments are never exactly the same from place to place, once the (perhaps spurious) homogeneity of the Lombard-Carolingian political world is abandoned. that is to say after 900 or so. In this chapter I will describe some of the particularities of the tenth- to twelfth-century Lucchesia, through the specific experience of the Garfagnana; in later chapters, we will see how the eleventh- and twelfth-century Casentino and, perhaps, the Aretino in general have a somewhat different experience. We will thus at the very least have an empirical 2 See Tabacco, Egemonie sodali pp. 156-65, 189-218, 236-75; id., 'Fief et seigneurie'; Keller, Adelshemchaft, pp. 303- 85; Violante, 'Signoria "ter-

ritoriale" ', for the most recent statement of his views. See also, among many, Rossetti, 'Signorie di castello'; Fumagalli, Terra e societa; the contributions of Tabacco, Bordone, Sergi to Structuresflodales, pp. 21g-61; and Cammarosano's review of the latter, 'Strutture feudali'. a Toubert, Latium, pp. 303- 549; Settia, Castelli e villaggi, passim.

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demonstration of two different routes for political change across the post-Carolingian centuries. The problem ofbalance, however, is not this; it is relatively easy to compare two empirical examples. Rather, it lies in a relation I have already discussed, that between form and content. I wish to argue that the increasingly clear boundaries of political power-whether between different geographical territories, social, or political (signorial, communal) or ecclesiastical as they may be, or between different social strata-boundaries which are, quite rightly, such a major feature of our imagery for social change in the period, can in reality obscure a considerable continuity in the content of socio-political interaction. I will pursue this argument across both parts of the book. We will look at it to some extent in this chapter and the following; but the evidence for the Garfagnana is sufficient only to allow us to doubt that changes in how power is defined are in themselves enough to characterize the complexity of the period-a fact that to most historians will already be obvious.4 As a result, an analysis of the Garfagnana after 850 is not so much a local study, as a model for how a local study could be constructed. But it is a model that will be essential when we come to look at the Casentino, for that valley, or some parts of it, are well enough documented from 1000 onwards for us to look at these changing patterns of social relations and political power from below; and it is only when we look at society from below that we can see its real outline. One major element in the construction of local power from the Carolingian period onwards was tithe. Cinzio Violante has most fully brought out what we know of its development in Italy. He shows that ninth-century rules laid down that tithe was to remain with the pievano of each pieve, and was not to go to the bishop, even though from the 84os the bishop was given formal responsibility to authorize its expenditure. Indeed, it was not until the mid-eleventh century that the Church was formally to approve the principle that three-quarters of the tithe was the bishop's to dispose of, although bishops in reality must have controlled it for longer than that. The issue is an important one for us for one major reason: tithe was a very substantial part 4

Cf Rossetti, 'Signorie di castello', p. 308.

The Garfagnana, 70(}-1200 94 of the agricultural surplus. It was a literal tenth. In the thirteenth-century Milanese, at least (we have no explicit evidence for anywhere earlier), it was collected from nearly every item of agrarian produce, and was calculated, apparently, before the setting aside of seed-corn for the next year-although tenants paid it on the produce left after rent was paid.5 These are rates that compare with those of the Roman land-tax in the last throes of its sixth-century collection in Gaul, the rates that Gregory of Tours so roundly condemned as extortionate. In areas where landlordship was not totally dominant, tithe could surpass rent and signorial dues as part of surplus extraction. It did, from the fourteenth century, in Montaillou in the Pyrenees; and in the Garfagnana it may well have been from the start the biggest percentage of surplus extracted from a village as a whole. 6 The remarkable effect that Charlemagne's introduction of compulsory tithe must have had has seldom been fully appreciated. It was probably the single act he undertook in the Italian kingdom that had most effect on its inhabitants. It may well, as I have noted (p. 55), have been one of the reasons why gift-giving to the Church died away. But it also added a firm element to the structure of rural power; the institutions, or the people, that had control of tithe had a base which they could use to try to achieve a te"itorial control over the countryside, defmed by the slowly forming boundaries of pievi. Even where, as often in the Garfagnana; local powers were unwilling to enter the episcopal clientele, they still had to pay tithe. 7 Nominally, tithe went to the pieve. And the position of pievano was, in consequence, something that families of local notables thought it worthwhile to obtain, as we have seen (p. 51). But the de facto power of the bishop was immense, and is particularly dear in the Lucchese documents; across the ninth century, the bishop increasingly disposed of Church property Violante, 'Strutture organizzative', pp. 1072-8~ id., 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 689-91; Boyd, Tithes and Parishes, pp. 87-103, 115- 28, 204-5. 6 Lot, lmp8tfoncier, pp. 83- 118; cf. Wickham, 'Other Transition', pp. 2 1-2; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 39-50. 7 Boyd, Tithes and Parishes, pp. 36-46 is the fullest discussion of the introduction of tithe and its problems. Pieval boundaries in the Lucca plain were already defined by tithe-paying by 892, as a dispute shows: Barsocchini 982. 3

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without even going through the pievano, and one must assume that he had similar powers over other parts of the pievano's responsibilities. Whether or not tithe was still paid locally-and the fragmentary indices seem to indicate that it was-the political structures that it reinforced were those of episcopal power and authority, going further still to emphasize the importance of urban institutions in ninth-century rural life. It is thus not surprising that the late tenth-century Grosslibelle of pieval revenues, above all tithe, even if in the beginning generally issued by pievani, were after 970 normally given out by the bishop himself. They were in large part his own power and resources that the bishop was leasing away, just as they would be the keys to local political power, henceforth, for the families who received them.s We must recognize, on the other hand, that this was a structure of surplus-extraction, and hence power, that was imposed on the countryside from outside. This part of the insertion of the Garfagnini into the political patterns that looked to the city was no choice of theirs. And the aristocratic families that replaced the bishop and the pievano as rulers of the tithe were, similarly, implanted in the valley from without. In the Garfagnana, the Grosslibelle of Church lands and tithes to the aristocracy mark the last period until well into the thirteenth century that we can regard as in any sense welldocumented. There are thirty-six of these leases, dating from between 883 and 1o63, but three-quarters of them are for the period 98o-Iozo, and make up virtually all the evidence for that period. When they stop, the Garfagnana in effect drops out of our documentation; there are barely as many texts again that mention the valley before 1200. We can thus say quite a lot abput the early family history of what appear to be the ancestors of the lords of the medieval Garfagnana, but the next two hundred years of their doings in the valley are almost wholly obscure. Their early historians, like Pacchi and Cianelli, filled in the gaps with guesswork, and intelligent guesswork at that. Hansmartin . Schwarzmaier showed, however, in his big book on Lucca, that such activity is largely fruidess: pardy because guessing is too risky in a world where the same names recur from family to family; still more, because analysis of this kind 8 Violante, 'Strutture organizzative', pp.I098-It07.

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presupposes that the families of 1000 already ruled their later territories as definable and localized signorie, which they did not-genealogical continuities; that is to ·say, even when they can be established, can hide major social discontinuities. Schwarzmaier has set out very clearly the scattered nature of the aristocratic holdings listed in the Grosslibelle, and their impermanence, in that properties once leased out did not by any means always stay with the same family. Not that family links, 'Yhere they can be established, do not matter at all; they are an essential element in our understanding of the nature and extent of social stability, both aristocratic and non-aristocratic. But the family groupings· of the Lucchese aristocracy continued to shift their foci across the wide lands of the diocese for a long time to come; their genealogical history, however important, is on its own no guide at all to the changing structures of aristocratic power. It is these structures that we will look at more closely from our Garfagnana evidence, and from the standpoint of the valley itself. Schwarzmaier has traced the history of most of. the major families that concern us with as much accuracy as is practicable up to the point where, in his reconstruction, they began to crystallize into more clearly defined signorie a change he tends to date in the mid-eleventh century, with the building of castelli and monasteries by the rural nobility in apposition to the nascent commune. It is not my purpose here to quarrel with his genealogical reconstructions, which for these families are normally acceptable; rather, I will use them to look at the local activities of the aristocracy, and how and when these activities changed.9 Exactly how the aristocracy can be defmed in the tenth and eleventh centuries is a difficult issue. I will discuss it more fully in the context of the evidence from the Casentino in Chapter ro. But in the Garfagnana, at least, even if what 'being aristocratic' meant is not yet fully clear, who was aristocratic is not in doubt: it was the group of families that held from the bishop and, rather more obscurely, those linked to the marquis. If there were any others, we cannot see their traces-there may just possibly have been some families with local ancestors and allodial property Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 226-32. for methodology; major fumilies. 9

188-9r. 222-41

for

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97 among the nobiles and cattani of the twelfth-century valley, but their trajectory is entirely invisible. The families that held from the bishop, by contrast, certainly came in from outside, and were in origin predominantly urban-based. Some already held benefices in the valley in the 89os; the majority, however, only appeared in the tenth century. The only major family to have a continuous local base, even going as far back as the ninth century, was that of Cunimundo di Cunimundo, which we will look at in some detail, as a sample of the general development of the period (a large sample, in fact; the 'Cunimundinghi', together with the rival family of Conrado qui et Cunitio, furnish some two-thirds of our Grosslibelle). Cunimundo is the second of the vassals in the inventory of benefices of the 890s. Most of the land he held is not in the Garfagnana. The Cascio estate is, and the church of S. Pietro di Fomoli is on the very edge of the valley , at the Serchio-Lima confluence; but he also held at Terricciola south of the Amo, at Lunata in the Lucca plain, and in a number of villages around Pieve a Elici and Camaiore, over towards the V ersilian coast. Most of these continued to be bases for the episcopal leases that his descendants held. The interplay between benefice and lease was not a simple one. One estate that Cunimundo already held on lease from at least 883, that of Sala beside Piazza al Serchio, the first Grosslibell we have, is not listed in the inventory, thus seeming to show that leases and benefices were kept separate. The same Cunimundo took out another lease in 907 of the lands in the upper valley he had previously held from S. Frediano di Lucca in benefice. These data would tend to support a contrast that many historians have recently stressed between the two types of holding, the benefice being more informal and more precarious than the lease, until Conrad II's edict of 1037 regularized concessions in benefice and made them heritable.lO But the Fornoli church Cunimundo had in benefice in the 89os had been in the hands of his family since 858 (and, more intermittently, since the 83os}, always on lease, and it remained part of the 'Cunimundinghi' lease network over the next two centuries. Much the same is true of his Pieve a Elici estate. I For Cunimundo, see Inventario 11, pp. 23 1- 2; Barsocchini 926, II 12. See, in general, Brancoli Busdraghi, Feudc lombardo; Nobili, 'Vassalli su terra monastica' . lO

The Garfagnana, 70b-1200 would myself see benefices and leases (i.e. Grosslibelle) as more or less interchangeable in the Lucchesia; and their recipients were certainly often episcopal vassals. But this does not necessarily mean that benefices were permanent; even leases changed hands rather more often than their professed perpetuality would indicate.ll Cunimundo's family was more stable than many. Most of its tiinth-century holdings visibly remained in the family until at least 1000-even Cascio, an apparent exception, is not documented at all after the early tenth century, and was certainly lost to the bishop; the 'Cunimundinghi' may well have kept this too. But they were by no means restricted to the Garfagnana. Indeed, the tenth century shows the family increasing the scale of its holdings all over the diocese. In the Garfagnana, the Fomoli estate remained in the family, and so did that at Sala, although in the period between 883 and 1027 the focus of the latter slowly moved from the abandoned demesne centre of Sala itself to the castelli of Verrucole, San Donnino, and maybe Godigliano (see pp. 83-4, 117). To these, Inghifrido di Cunimundo added an estate at Casco Balbo in 957, and his son Gherardo, a future bishop, the V allico estate in 984; the family also had scattered lands in Pedona near Loppia, Basilica, and Nicciano by 1000. But family land was even more substantial elsewhere; to the ninth-century centres, Cunimundo's heirs added land at Diecimo below Fornoli, Lammari in the plain, and, above all, in and around Marlia, where they controlled the pieve of S. Pancrazio. This total spread they still held in 1027, when Benzo, Cunimundo's great-grandson, gave his portions of the whole range of properties held by the family to his newly founded monastery of S. Michele in Foro in the centre of Lucca, a foundation that very dearly shows the continuing urban focus of Benzo's interests; and also in 1063, when Benzo' s distant cousins renewed a lease for portions of S. Pancrazio, Pieve a Elici, and the old 11

Cf. the discussion (Violante, Cammarosano, Brancoli Busdraghi) in Nobilta e ceti dirigenti, pp. 101- 4, all of which presupposes a contrast between benefices and leases (although Violante himself recognized the interconnection in 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 664~). For Fomoli before 900, see Barsocchini 47o-1, 496, 544. 694, 702, 744· For Pieve a Elici, see Ch. J, n. 21.

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Sala estate. Thereafter the leases give out, and the family becomes harder to trace.l2 The other major family to lease episcopal lands in the Garfagnana was that of the heirs of Conrado qui et Cunitio (d. before 96o) di Fraolmo. Fraolmo's own father Fraolmo had been an episcopal vassal of the 890s, but not for land in the valley, and, indeed, for very little land that his heirs continued to hold. Two of Conrado's five sons, however, Gherardo and Fraolmo, did take leases for the valley. Gherardo di Conrado, together with his son Gherardo qui et Morecto, held portions of the Nicciano estate, as did the latter's cousin Guido di Sisenando (or Sisemundo). This side of the family held vast lands across the Lucchesia-Moriano and Montemagno for Guido's descendants; Lucca, Massarosa, the Valdinievole, and the Valdamo for those of Gherardo Morecto. They are not recorded in the Garfagnana, however, after 1o62.18 The sons of Conrado Cunitio do seem to have acquired separate spheres of influence earlier than did the 'Cunimundinghi'-as did Conrado's brothers, themselves ancestors of other families. The interests of most of Conrado Cunitio's sons were only briefly linked to the valley, if at all. But one of them, Fraolmo, established a more permanent base for his own heirs. This Fraolmo is only known from one charter, from 980, in which he leased the estate of S. Maria di Vitoio; but his two sons, Alberico/Albitio and Winigildo/Winitio, in five charters of 995 (and another three in 1019 at Alberico's death), leased what could be seen as a classic base for the establishment of a signoria: the tithes for the small pieve of Rogiana (now Poggio}, fl.eshed out with three neighbouring villae carved off the pieve of Fosciana; the Vitoio estate renewed; the estate of S. Martino di Careggine; and twenty-one other tenant-houses in the middle and upper valleys. This bloc of rights was focused on Careggine, 12 For the family and general reference to its land, see Scbwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 2.22-7. In the Garfagnana, see Barsocchini 926, 1268, IJ8I, 1439, 153940, 1594, 1716, 1718-19; AAL ++S40 (after 1000, Guidi- Pellegrinetti, p. 12), + + B82 (a. 1o63, probably for the grandsons of the Banocchini 1716 lessor), + + K61, *B36 (a. 1027, Marchini 4o-1), confirmed by MGH, Dip. Conradi II 83. For Casco Balbo, see Ch. 2, n 21. 13 For the family, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 235- 41. For charters, see Barsocchini 1551, 1584- 5; AAL +L14 (a.1014), +4 (a.IOI6), +P79 (a.1o62), not all consistent between themselves.

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The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

most of them lying inside a range of 4 or 5 km from there; and two of the charters have later notes on their backs ascribing the lands to the domini de Carecini, the lords of Careggine of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Dorsal notes of this kind, as Schwarzmaier notes, are often inaccurate, and indeed one of these, on the 980 charter, which includes a brief genealogical table, gets much of it wrong; but we need not doubt the accuracy of the claim that the Careggine were the heirs of Alberico and WinigildofWinitio. Indeed, the great bulk of these charters are so concentrated in one area that the family may have already been in the process of establishing some form of lordship by 1000. But even this branch had Lucchese links. Two of the charters I have just cited, from 980 and 995, come from the Guinigi archive, and that archive has a striking number of eleventh- and twelfth-century charters for the city and its surroundings associated with people again called Winitio or Guinizo, not in itself that common as a name; after 1 127 the family is already called Guinigiana or Guinigi. The early Careggine, in other words, look as if they are at least collateral ancestors of the impeccably urban Guinigi, ultimately the lords of early fifteenth-century Lucca. Why else would the Guinigi have kept their charters? Perhaps, though, a branch of the family soon developed into the Careggine proper- there are no eleventh- or twelfth-century charters for the Garfagnana in that archive. 14 · These two sprawling families dominate our material. It is dear that Schwarzmaier is quite right to stress the spread of their landowning, even in the family of Conrado Cunitio, divided comparatively early into rough spheres of interest. 1 5 It is equally striking that their power-bases, at least in the Garfagnana, were above all estates, ordinary landed property. We have so far had reference only to one pieve, Rogiana, by far the smallest of the 14

Barsocchini 1699-1703; ASL Guinigi 4 (21 June 980, with dorsal note-see photo in Violante, 'Quelques caracteristiques des structures familiales', plate at end); AAL +B98 (with dorsal note), + +P6o, *M15 (all 1019). See comments by D. Corsi in lnventario. Archivio di stato vi, pp. 357-8. Careggine is first mentioned as having lords in xo8s, in a Luni document (CP 223). It must be in the context of the lordship that the pieve of RogiaM moved to Careggine; cf. Angelini, Pieve toscana, pp. 54--6. I:> Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 239-41; cf. AndreoUi, Uomini nel medioevo, pp. 79-91.

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five valley pievi. Two more of the pievi can be dismissed quickly: that of Gallicano, which is the only one in the valley that the bishop kept (after an abor'tive lease of half of it to Sisemundo di Sisemundo, himself associated with the 'Cunimundinghi', in 997), and that of Piazza, which is in the diocese of Luni, and which therefore lay outside the developments described here. (A charter of I 110 linked its tithes to the de' Nobili family, one of the major later valley lords, and claimed that they derived from a cession of 983, thus making the bishop of Luni follow a similar time-scale of leasing to his colleagues in Lucca; the text is, however, almost certainly a forgery.) 16 The other major absentee so far is much mention of castelli. The 'Cunimundinghi' established two or three on their Sala estate network, but that is all. Their absence is not necessarily in itself significant, for they were rarely the objects of episcopal leases (only one Grosslibell mentions a castello, that of Campori), and episcopal leases form the bulk of our evidence in this period; indeed, castelli appear in chance references, particularly after 1000, often enough to indicate that they must already by then have been common. Nevertheless, the importance of castelli on their own should not be over-stressed as an indication of change in the nature of aristocratic power. We will look at this issue through the consideration of two further families, the lessors of the other two pievi, of Fosciana and Loppia; for these two pose for us the problem of local powers in the clearest manner. l6 See Barsocchini 1718-19 for Gallicano. 1719 is an exceptionally enigmatic text, but in it Sisemundo is associated with a Cunirnundo di Sigbifrido, of the

castello of Gorfigliano; the names and location fit the 'Cunimundinghi'. Sisemundo's family is also linked circumstantially with the latter in documents discussed in Schwarzmaier, 'Kloster St. Georg', pp. 151- 3. Sisemundo held elsewhere, too, including in Cappiano in the Valdinievole, and the Vallebuia across the Serchio from Lucca. For Piazza, see the documents edited by Micotti, Descrittione cronologica del/a Garfagnana, pp. 164-6 (one of them is also printed in Pacchi 8 and in Barsocchini, 'Vescovi lucchesi', pp. 405-6 n.). These texts purport to record a gift by Count Ugolinello di Superbo di Armanno de nobilibus de domo .filiorum Guidi of the tithes of Piazza to the pievano in 1 I 10, and the confirmation by Matilda of the same gift. The texts, in the de'Nobili archive when their editors saw it, are not in that archive in ASL. The form of the family name is of a thirteenth-century type, rather than earlier; some of the personal names and formulae are late, too. Further, gifts to pievani are very much a late thirteenth-century practice. l think the texts are intelligent thirteenth-century forgeries.

102

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

The pieve of S. Cassiano in Basilica, Pieve Fosciana, was the first in the valley to have its tithes and lands leased out, in 952, to Gottifrido di Gottifrido and the infant Teuperto di Cristina. Their sons and heirs renewed the lease, or their portions of it, in three other texts, going up to 1o62. Teuperto and his son also got their hands on the neighbouring Campori estate and its early episcopal castello, as leases of 986 and 1014 show. This is quite a compact group, of two largish estates, one with a castello, one with a rich pieve, and nothing else in the valley- it is even more compact than the Careggine leases. It represents the stable bloc of power that the bishop had built up in the middle valley during the eighth and ninth centuries, integrated territorially by the extraction of tithe. It is thus not surprising to find the family apparently turning this power into a lordship with a firmer structure; a text of 1045 shows Rodolfo di Gherardo, one of the lessors of the pieve in 1o62, in control of a private castello, Cellabaroti. This castello was well placed. It was very near to the above estates, and was situated on a strategic spot, just across the river from Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, close to the modem Castelnuovo railway station. It was the centre for the Cellabarottani family of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, presumably in some way Rodolfo's heirs; like the Careggine, this family were even picking up a local surname. But it would be wrong to use even this to demonstrate a localization of family interests. For one, the 1045 document, which is a cession of a quarter of the castello to the bishop, makes no reference to any rights other than proprietorial ones; the castello is, at least in theory, just an addition to a network of landowning. For another, this family was no more restricted to the valley than the others we have seen. Teuperto leased half of the church of S. Giorgio in Lucca in 986, and his son added S. Giorgio di Brancoli to this in 1014. Rodolfo's wife owned in Tempagnano near Lucca in the Iosos and I06os, and his descendants held in the plain in 1 140; there was Cellabarottinga land in the city in 1146; another Rodolfo di Cellabarotta owned a house there before 1166. This signoria had dearly not been fully localized in the Garfagnana in the eleventh century, and maybe not in the mid-twelfth either.l? 17 Barsocchini IJSO, 16o9, 1652; AAL + +N.z6 (a.IOI4), +B78 (a.xoxs), A17 (a.1o62). (+ +Nz6lnsftudum domincrum de Cellabarotti as a dorsal note,

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The pieve of Loppia is a much more difficult problem. We have so far looked at episcopal leases of lands and tithes in areas that the bishops fully controlled, particularly the middle valley, and those parts of the upper valley in which the bishop was influential. Loppia, however, though a large pieve, with twenty-six villae in one of the richest parts of the valley, had only a small estate attached to it, and lay in the part of the lower valley where the bishop was weakest and the fisc was probably strongest. The links between the major lay figures in this area are much more fragmentary than those we have seen up to now. Giovanni di Rodilando and his son Rodilando leased the pieve in 98 3 and 994· To whom they were related is wholly obscure. The antiquarian historians linked them to Rodilando di Cunimundo of the 'Cunimundinghi' on the one side and, on the other, to the eleventh- to thirteenth-century Rolandinghi of Loppia, who were by then the principal family in the area, and held an array of rights there, including tithe. Schwarzmaier has doubted the first of these links, noting that the two families owned in totally different areas; he may well be right, but whether he is right or not is less important than the fact that the histories of the two are wholly different-they were socially, even if not genealogically, separate. It is more probable that the Rolandinghi were genuinely the heirs ofGiovanni and Rodilando; certainly this was thought so in the thirteenth century, for both the tenth-century tithe leases have dorsal notes from that period claiming the fact. But tithe was an essentially external surplus-extraction system. Although important for local power and its continuity, as we have just seen for Fosciana, it could not on its own create it. The Rolandinghi needed local centres of power as well. In this light, a rather more significant candidate at least for collateral ancestor of the Rolandinghi is Uberto di but A17, to confuse the unwary, says de feudo Gerardingorum.) For Teuperto in Lucca and Brancoli, see Barsocchini r6o8; AAL +A 19, + + Q33 (a. 1014). S. Giorgio in Lucca was not the monastery founded in 1056 and given to Montecassino: see Schwarzmaier, ' Kloster St. Georg', p. 150. Schwarzmaier, Lucca, p. 132, says that Teuperto was also ordained priest at nearby Migliano (Barsocchini 12.82, 1405), but the dates do not match; the Migliano of the latter texts was anyway in the Valdera. For Rodolfo di Cellabaroti, see AAL +C22 (a.1045, Pianezri u)-c£, for the Cellabarottani, Raffaelli, Destrizione dtlla Gaifagna~ta, pp. ~; Angelini, Pievt toscana, pp. 42- 3 n; RCL 2.74, 32.5, 346, 353, 939-40, 12.47; Azzi ii.s74-

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Rodilando, who in 1048 willed to executors for his soul his portions of five castelli near Loppia, Ansugo, Lucignana, Coreglia, Barga, and Ceserana. As I have noted, Uberto almost certainly got these from the fisc. IS All these associations, whether plausible or not, are totally circumstantial, and depend heavily on the recurrence of the name Rodilando, which is itself not uncommon as a name. It cannot ever be shown that Giovanni, still less Uberto, was really an ancestor of the Rolandinghi. But whether they were or not, they are useful for us here, for with their help we can construct an ideal type of what were the possible bases for twelfth- and thirteenth-century signorial power. A family holds the pieve of Loppia, rich enough but politically isolated. To create a firm political base, however, the family also needed the sort of rights that men like Uberto were coming to have in eleventh-century Italy: castelli and their estates, with signorial rights, that only kings and marquises had the right to give. All of these were needed, in fact, to construct effective local signorie in the centuries after I 100; and indeed, the thirteenth-century Rolandinghi, by then based largely in castelli such as Uberto's Lucignana, explicitly called themselves de Loppia, even though Loppia itself was never ' a castello: the fiscal and ecclesiastical elements, on this model, would alike be essential .for their position.l9 Now, in fact , it is far from clear that the Rolandinghi ever really had all these elements. Uberto does not actually mention signorial rights in his will; and, as we shall see, the thirteenth-century Rolandinghi may not have been as dominant in the area as they are often said to be (below, pp. 122- 3). But had they had them, they would have been the most firmly based aristocratic family in the valley. In particular, no family in the valley can be seen with both tithes and signorial rights. The Rolandinghi call our attention, that is to say, to the precise problem of what effective See BatSQcchini 1538, 1697 (1698 for Cerignana has a similar dorsal note, but its lessor lldeberto di Berto cannot be linked with anyone); RCL 2"27 for Uberto. Cf. Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. r~. 227; Cianelli, 'Conti rurali', pp. t6o-5. Uberto owned very widely in the Lucchesia, and was based in the castello of Puctiostorli in the Valdamo; he was not a valley lord. But the Rolandinghi would own widely, too: see n. sr. l9 AAL + +D.s8 (a.U77), +K.s3 (a.1281); de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana' p. I I I n. for the family in Lucignana. IS

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local power actually could have been. And at this point we must look at the historiography of the signoria. The problem of the origins of the local signorial powers that can be seen clearly in most of Italy in the twelfth century is highly complex. We have long got beyond the counterposition between Vaccari, who saw the signoria largely as a development of the judicial rights already associated with much private landowning in the Carolingian period, and Schneider, who saw it as the devolution of public rights in the context of the break-up of the state. Indeed, neither Vaccari nor Schneider was in reality so simplistic; but the opposition between the two is useful to enable us to define as clearly as possible the two major alternative routes along which developed the powers and responsibilities of a twelfth-century signoria (in French, 'seigneurie banale'). Signorie were very various, but their classic form was a territory in which a lord held judicial rights (districtus, derived from distringere, to coerce or punish) over all the inhabitants, whether his tenants or not; he owed them military protection, and they in return owed loyalty {fidelitas), military and quasi-military dues and services, judicial dues, and other financial obligations to him. Not all signorie were 'territorial', in the sense that one person held all the signorial powers over a defined territory; such powers were often restricted to the lord's own properties, which could be geographically very dispersed. None the less, the concept of the signorial territory had clearly taken shape by the twelfth century, everywhere in central-northern Italy. Its core was the devolution of judicial powers, and it is that which is usually the most visible in our documentation; but it was the totality of rights, including those directly derived from landholding and tithe-taking, that built up the possibility of effective local power, dominatus loci.20 20 Vaccari, Tmitorialita, pp. 6-14, 45-64; Schneider, Entstehung von Burg, pp. 264- 325, although Plesner, Bmigrazione dall4 campagna, pp. 7CF-9 makes

Schneider's point most forcefully (and schematically) in the Tuscan context. (The debate is Europe-wide; cf. Fossier, Enfance de /'Europe, pp. 401 f. for a brief comment.) For the nature of signorial rights, see Vaccari, Tmitorialita, pp. 149-53; Cammarosano, Campagne nell'eta comuMie, pp. 17-24; Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, pp. 24o-5; Violante, 'S. Dionigi di Milano', pp. 764-6; id., 'Ta1amona', pp. 745-9; id., 'Signoria "territoria]e" ', pp. 337- 41 ; Keller, Adelshemchtift, pp. 147-96; Soldi Rondanini, '"Signoria rurale" '.Of the north

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The trend of the historiography has been to separate out the differing elements in this process ever more clearly. One element that can be left aside straightaway is the role of 'feudal', that is to say feudo-vassalic, elements in the localization of political power. A succession of scholars have argued that the benefice in Italy, at least until Coruad ll's edict of 1037, was as a general rule too precarious to be the base for local political power, and that royal grants were most typically grants of perpetual (allodial) property-owning; that there was no difference in the range of privileges granted out in benefice, lease, or outright gift; that, in particular, 'feudal' possession did not carry more signorial rights than 'non-feudal' possession did. The problem offeudalism was, instead, essentially one of the changing relationships between different levels of the aristocracy, and between them and what remained of the state. But even on that level, vassalage hardly created a coherent hierarchy anywhere in Italy before the late eleventh century, and in Tuscany, less 'feudalized' than most of the north, not until the twelfth century, if then. 21 I will come back to the question of feudal imagery in the context of the Casentino, where it was more highly developed than in the Garfagnana, and where the evidence allows us to look at the issue of how far feudo-vassalic relationships spread downwards into the peasantry; it is only this issue that makes the problem of the nature of feudal relationships important to my study at all (below, pp. JII- 12). In the Garfagnana, the question is irrelevant; But the dissolution of large-scale public power and the territorialization of private, signorial, power is another matter. Historians of Italy, when they are forced to choose, tend these days to follow Vaccari rather than Schneider, though they paint a very much more nuanced picture. Kings in their tenth-century cessions can now be seen legitimating and gready extending the private justice already present in most lay and (above all) Italian local nudies, perhaps the best detailed discussion is Ripanti, 'Casale Monferrato'; the classic is Romeo, 'Origgio'. The best international survey is now Fossier, Enfance de rEuropt, pp. 374-422 (weak on Italy, however: pp. 392-3); the clamc here is Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 224-31. at See references cited in nn. ro, 20; Tabacco, 'Orientamenti feudali'; id., 'Allodialita del potere'; Keller, Adelshmsthaft, esp. pp. 342.-63;jarnut, &rgamo, pp. .llS-JI; Camnurosano, 'Feudo e propriera'.

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ecclesiastical landowning, thus allowing the wide powers of counts to become broken up and increasingly devolved to smaller-scale lordships. These lordships were not, however, simply a political reflex of landownership, but extended beyond the lands that their possessors held as landowners (or tenants on Grosslibell or benefice) to the lands of other landholders, through the build-up of networks of judicial. military, and financial rights. It is in this context that one can see why the signoria was so often far from territorially coherent. The heterogeneity of the paths by which public and quasi-public powers over land and people came under the personal control of lords ensured that many signorie merely consisted of overlapping sets of claims to rights at different levels, shared out, as likely as not, between rival powers inside a given area. This fragmentation of powers was essentially the consequence of the generalized fragmentation of landholding, for no one owner could easily exclude others from any given territory. Even where signorie did form territorial units, the presence of other powerful landowners inside their boundaries ensured that complete local hegemony by their holders was never common.22 It has been observed more than once that this framework characterizes very clearly the way the state breaks down, and the relationship that local power structures have to wider political patterns, but that we do not anywhere have the evidence that enables us to see the signoria actually forming. Indeed, even its constituent elements are usually visible only at the moment when it begins to be contested, from the later twelfth century onwards.23 It is, further, obvious that the 'signoria', like 'feudalism', is a modem ideal type; there is little point wasting ink arguing whether this particular network of relationships is more 'fully' signorial than that. But the issue of what possible previous networks of power the signoria could derive from is ~

Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, pp. 196-204, 24o-5; Keller, Adelshmsch4Jt, pp. 14'7-96; Ripanti, 'Casale Monferrato', pp. 132- 8; Romeo, 'Origgio', pp. 3556o. Violante (as n. 20) and Keller show how, in northern Italy at least, the principle of a single districtus for a defined territory, whatever its real content, was very dear by the twelfth century. 23 Cammarosano, Campagne nelreta comunale, p. 17; Keller, Adelshmsch4ft, pp. 163- 4. It would probably be equally true to say that the signoria became clearer as it came to be more tightly defined in law, in the context of the increasing legal definition of all politics in the twelfth century.

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important, for it helps us to understand what happened in specific areas. We know that everywhere was different, even if often only slightly different. But unless we trace twelfth-century power-structures in any given place some way towards their local origins, our analyses of their variations run the risk of banality. In general, the signoria had both public and private roots; but the balance varied from place to place. And twelfth-century variations in the nature, outward form, and coherence of signorial power are not chance; they are the results of the independent development ofdifferent parts ofltaly across at least two centuries, these developments themselves reflecting real differences in local social structures. Although we have many sophisticated general analyses of the signoria, and many excellent local studies, fewer people are concerned to look (or guess) at the reasons why such local differences existed, in terms of a wider framework of interpretation.2 4 It is very likely that we do not yet know the material well enough fully to work out these reasons-this is certainly true of Tuscany; but it is worth trying nevertheless. For the Lucchesia, we have to start with the episcopal leases of the late tenth and early eleventh century, above all those of pievi. What did one of these leases offer? The first thing, of course, was land. The estates involved in our Garfagnana cessions could be substantial; the future Celabarottani, with the Basilica and Campori estates, were particularly well endowed. The recipients of these leases paid rent, which was not in itself trivial-between ss. and 20s. was normal-and was initially, as we can see from the first renewals, regularly exacted. 25 But these sums were certainly small when compared to the value of the 24

The most effective attempt at regional generalization for Tuscany is Cammarosano's short article, 'Feudo e proprieti', although I disagree with some of it. Regional differences across Europe are nicely analysed in Fossier, as n. zo. Two local studies that discuss issues like these are Rossetti, Cologno Monzese; ead., 'Signorie di castello'. 2 5 The late tenth-century bishops renewed leases regularly, as did Grirnizzo (IOI4-Z7), to a slighdy lesser extent Anselmo I (1056--72, Pope Alexander 11). and even Anselmo n (1073- So), committed reformer though he was. One might wonder whether the distinct absence of renewals under Giovanni 11 (1027-56) and Anselmo U's successors was a result of relative political weakness as much -as religious scruple. Contrast the leases of the central Appennines, virtual alienations with high entry 6nes-Toubert, Latium , pp. 521-7; entry fines were not required in these Lucchese texts.

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estates themselves, which, at least in some single villages (in Campori or Fosciana or Careggine) were already sufficient to be the basis for real political power. And simple possession of ecclesiastical estates already carried some judicial powers. Ninthand tenth-century leases to cultivators required the lessors to attend court in Lucca; Grosslibelle, for the most part, conspicuously did not. (Those for Sala are the only exception; these reserved judicial powers for the bishop up to 983, although not thereafter.) We can assume that the judicial rights inherent in simple property-owning, at least when associated with immunities- the settlement of minor disputes over movables or leased land, the punishment of some crimes of violence, the apprehension of thieves-was transferred en bloc to the aristocratic lessors of this land.26 Tithe was the other element of the leases. I have already stressed the purely monetary importance of this perquisite: a tenth of the gross produce of between six and thirty villages must have outweighed the revenues of all but the largest estates. Tithe, too, was the only fully territorialized render due from the peasantry. The power to exact tithe for one's private benefit from all the inhabitants of a given area carries with it an obvious and inevitable element of privatization of power in general. It may allow one the political space to subject the poor and even neutralize rivals; it may, indeed, allow one to develop other elements of one's personal power into power over a given territory. Pievi were a social and economic focus for a family, too, that could give it some staying power; it is not surprising that the three families that held pievi in the Garfagnana in 1000 are three particularly likely candidates for some genealogical continuity into the surnamed noble houses of 120o--the Cellabarottani for Fosciana, the Careggine for RogianafCareggine, the Rolandinghi for Loppia. Similarly, the association of pievi with the capitaneal aristocracy of Milan is well known, and even rendered normative by the twelfth century Libri Jeudorum. But See Vaccari, Ttrritorialita, pp. 56--<>2, and Drew, ' Immunity in Carolingian Italy', for the norms of legal immunities. The content of proprietorial justice is less clear, but texts elsewhere like Porro Lambertenghi, Codex diplomaticus l.Angobardiae, n. 249 (a.870), for S. Ambrogio di Milano, may indicate that proprietorial control could be extensive. More work needs to be done on this. See further, for the Casentino, below, p. 317. 26

110

The Garfagnana, 70tr12oo

Violante concluded after close study that pieval leases involved no juridical or institutional rights on their own, either in Lucca or Milan. 27 Tithes were a major integrative element for signorial power, but even they did not create signorial territories on their own; it would have been bard for a full dominatus loci to be established on the basis of tithes alone. Devolved public rights were necessary as well, that is to say; and it is this that presents problems in the Lucchesia. The real particularity about Lucca was the strength of the State. The city was in effect the capital of the march of Tuscany. The power of the marquis in Tuscany in the tenth and eleventh centuries probably never reached the height that it had under Adalbert ll (886-9IS), and there were .two points of particular weakness, the mid-tenth and the early eleventh centuries, when temporary political crises enabled the kings, on one side, and local aristocratic families, on the other, to extend their influence in the march. But under Marquis Hugh (969-IOOI), and Boniface, Beatrice, and Matilda of Canossa (1027-IIIS), the marquises made a serious attempt to establish some form of effective public organization at least in northern Tuscany, an attempt more coherent than that made anywhere else in the Italian kingdom, even, by now, by the kings. And, while in much of Tuscany they had to compete with new comital families set up in the mid-tenth century, or with the effective political independence of the bishop of Arezzo, in Lucca they were supreme. The viscount of Lucca was no more than another member of the local landed aristocracy with lands scattered across the diocese. Marchesal government remained firm in the Lucchesia, at least until the Lucchesi expelled it from their city in 1081, in a gesture closely parallelling the burning of the royal palace in Pavia in 1024; even then, Matilda's grand court sessions (placita), which had always been peripatetic, did not cease.28 We are used to the empty rhetoric of attempts at establishing national and regional public power in tenth- and eleventh-century Italy (and, indeed, most other places in continental Europe); such Viobnte, 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 666-8, 717-21. 28 For the marquis, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 185- .1.49, 322- 33; Keller, 'Marca di Tuscia'; Nobili, 'Famiglie marchionali'. But we lack an adequate analysis of the Canossa in Tuscany. For viscounts, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. Ill-18. 27

The Lords of the Garfagnana

Ill

power never looked as coherent as that on the ground. But the consequences of the attempt in the Lucchesia were considerable. The first concerned the power of the bishop. The bishop of Lucca was rich, by any standards, in the ninth century. But already he had less power in his city than most bishops; across the century, his bureaucracy was slowly cut out from the organization of justice and even, for the most part, from the notariate; the new urban official families were principally dependants of the marquis. 29 The great series of leases of the late tenth century and on were made from a position of political weakness, not strength. The families concerned kept their links with the bishop, but he could not use them politically; by and large, he simply lost his land. The bishops of Arezzo, who really were powerful, as we shall see, did nothing of the kind (below, pp. 318- zo); and the archbishops of Milan, although they enfeoffed away tithes, thereby created a body of military support that backed up their aspirations to being the strongest power in , Lombardy. But the bishop of Lucca did not even have the strength to assert himself in the confusion after Marquis Hugh's death; indeed, the period 1002-13 is characterized by a temporary drop in the output of episcopal records to virtually zero, a gap with few parallels in the steady sequence of documents from 700 onwards, and episcopal influence probably followed the same path. Much of the move towards the commune at the end of the century, too, scarcely involved the bishops at all. They were an important force, but they operated as a private, not a public, power, perhaps more than any other bishop of commensurate wealth in the kingdom. And as a result, one thing that the bishops of Lucca certainly never had to give away was public jurisdiction. The marquises had it to give away, of course. Indeed, in much of Tuscany it could be taken from them whether they liked it or not. But the Lucchesia, at least, was theirs. We do not, it is true, know much about marchesal patronage. We will see in a moment that Lucchese aristocrats certainly benefited from it. But we have nothing to equate with the remarkable run of royal diplomas from Berengar I onwards that handed out proprietorial Keller, 'Gerichtsort', pp. 5- 28, 6o-6; id., 'Marca di Tusda', pp. r23--7; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 275-93. 311

I 12

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

and juridical rights like chocolates to every church in the north. The kings made very few cessions in Tuscany, except in the Aretino (see pp. 181-4); but the marquises did not make many more. We need not doubt that, had they given to churches, particularly to those in Lucca, we would know; such diplomas were worth keeping. But we have only a handful of such texts, from 8oo right up to the twelfth century, mostly associated with Hugh's monastic foundations in the late tenth. Whether successful or unsuccessful, the marquises differed from the kings in their conception of the currency of politics. This fact alone, however, must alter our conception of the process of socio-political change. The model for the territorialization of political power in the north, even when the stress is laid on the slow development of the signoria from the network of property-ownership, takes for granted the steady surrender by the kings of substantial portions of their public power. We cannot assume this in Tuscany before the late eleventh century. And, even though we must doubt the capacity of the marquises to prevent such losses in much of their territory, to the Aldobrandeschi or the Gherardeschi or the Guidi, we cannot assume such weakness outside the areas where great families such as these were dominant. We have to proceed case by case. Schwarzmaier does not discuss signorie much. Local power does not lie within his brief; he is more concerned, when he discusses the localization of his noble families, to discuss the growth of political foci such as the castello and the private monastery (and, indeed, the pieve) as bases for new identities, rather than for powers over determinate populations.so But he would have got little encouragement from the documents: they are almost devoid of information about signorial rights. The largest bloc of lay documents from the eleventh-century Lucchesia, the liquidation of the patrimony of the first family of lords of Porcari in the eastern Lucca plain in 1039-43, which lists all the lands, powers, and castelli of the family (the first cession alone like most of the others, it is to the church of Lucca-lists I 57 tenant-houses and .43 . other locations for property), is totally silent on the subject. Now, it may be that this is simply a formulaic tradition; but formulaic tradition in itself 30

Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp.

241-61.

The Lords of the Garfagnana

II3 means something. Signorial rights, even if they existed, were not yet important enough to get into notarial formularies, anywhere in the Lucchesia. Only from the late eleventh century and, particularly, in the twelfth would things change, as we shall see, but even then not consistently; indeed, a text for Porcari from 1 130, very similar in its scope to those of a century before, is equally devoid of any form of signorial reference.31 This is particularly striking by comparison with the diocese of Luni, whose territory extended into the Garfagnana itself. The Lunigiana is far less extensively documented than anywhere in the Lucchesia; there are only seven tenth-century texts and eleven from the eleventh century in the Codice Pelavicino, the main documentary source for the area, perhaps I per cent of the equivalent documents for Lucca. But they constantly mention signorial rights. So, in 1039, the bishop of Luni can promise to remit nearly all his signorial rights over the castello ofTrebbiano in favour of its castellans: he will not exact any malum usum, or the fodrum, or anything else unjust as long as it is contested inside a month, unless in legitimate defence of his rights; he has no powers inside the castello at all except by express agreement. The eleventh-century Lucchese leases are never anything like this. But the Lunigiana was not in the march of Tuscany, and its own marquises, the Obertenghi, were as yet territorially weak. The bishop of Luni was a great signorial lord, with steadily increasing rights of comitaljurisdiction in the Lunigiana. The bishop of Lucca was not. He had rights of justice on his own land, but he never gained Lunense-style territorial rights. And I would propose that the same was true of the lay aristocracy. The lords of Porcari were not any ordinary family; they were one of the greatest lay families of the early eleventhcentury Lucchesia, descended from one of the brothers of Conrado Cunitio and closely linked to the marquis; indeed, the family had actually bought much of Porcari from the marquis himself, in 952.82 The marquis did not, however, sell them For Porcari, see AAL + +D38, *K69-7o, + +G7z, + +G75 (all 1039, Isola 58, 6o-3), *Bzz (a.to4o, Isohl 83), +L53, *K7r, + +047, + +K91 (all 1043, Nesti 46-7, 52- 3). Cf. Seghieri, 'Porcari'. For the 1130 text, see RCL 870. 32 See CP 488 for Trebbiano; cf. 267 (a.1Q96). See Volpe, Toscana medioevale, pp. 331- 42 for discussion. For Porcari, see Barsocchini 1347. 31

1 14

The Garfagnana, 70tr1zoo

anything except land in 952; any signorial powers would have to be constructed by the Porcaresi themselves. And whatever de facto powers the Porcaresi had in their castelli by the I030S, these had not crystallized into any structure of power that was even worth mentioning in cessions of the whole range of their properties. Although things would change in the twelfth century, even then they would not change as far or as fast as they did in the Lunigiana, as we shall see. Aristocratic families did get control of fiscal land, however, whether the marquis intended to grant it or not. In the absence of documents for marchesal cessions to laymen (the 952 Porcari sale having almost no parallels at all), this is something that we can only pick up from dose documentary analysis. Let us return to the Garfagnana to do so. The great families of the diocese do occasionally appear in the eleventh century as holders or owners of land in the valley that the bishop almost certainly never gave them. The first family of lords of Porcari had part of the castello and curtis of Castiglione in 1040. The second family, which succeeded them in a very similar array of properties, either by direct sale from their predecessors or by sale{Iease from the bishop, also had part of Castiglione in 1061, and had added part of the castello ofGallicano. The viscount ofLucca owned around Castiglione and Fosciana in 1033, as a chance land-sale shows us. Uberto di Rodilando, as we have seen, had picked up a set of castelli in and around Barga by 1048. And the probable ancestors of the thirteenth-century Gherardinghi held Gragno below Barga by 1085. Most of these could well be fiscal, that is marchesal, cessions. In particular, the Barga area was almost certainly a major fiscal area; Castiglione, too, had public links; and the latter's castello, above all, cannot have been an episcopal cession, for the bishop in 1033 had a tower there, built just outside the walls, transparently in opposition to the owners of the castello. But other documented fiscal land in the valley seems to have remained public property. Matilda apparently kept to herself much of the public power associated with centres like Barga and Castiglione; and Castelnuovo, the strategic centre of the valley, does not seem ever to have entered private hands. We could guess that these references are at least an approach towards a reasonably full picture of fiscal cessions in the Garfagnana. They are for a substantial percentage of known

.......

The Lords of the GarfagMna

II

5

marchesalland. though they distinctly do not include the major centre of the area. They involve, as well, rather more castelli than we have seen up to now. But even these castelli are not visibly attached to signorial rights. We still cannot show that the marquis gave these away.33 We cannot construct an entire analysis on absences, even if they are significant when contrasted with presences in neighbouring areas. The absence of references to the signoria in the eleventhcentury Lucchesia could even be chance, though I do not think so; but we cannot get any further with eleventh-century material alone. To make the particularity of the Lucchesia clearer, we must proceed into the twelfth century, where something can be said about the nature of signorial power in the diocese. And this is best done through the development of the castello. I have been deliberately avoiding the issue of incastellamento so far in this chapter. Castelli are still too often seen as the 'natural' foci of signorie, indeed, as signifying in themselves the onset of local territorial powers. This is certainly not the case. Signorie could be constructed around any centre, not just castelli, as Violante, among others, has stressed; and Settia and Keller have shown how late is the automatic association between castello and districtus, even in the north: it was rare before the late eleventh century.3 4 In Tuscany, the date would be similar, even in more signorial areas like the Aretino (below, pp. 314-17), and certainly in the Lucchesia. Castelli are, on the other hand, one of the most useful indicators of the way all kinds of social process developed in the central Middle Ages, as recent work has made clear, the precise effect that their appearance had on any given society is as For Casriglione owners, see AAL + +K1.5 (a. 1033, Mennucci 39) for the viscount (cf. also Barsocchini 1356); *B:u (a. 1040, !sola 83) for the first Porcaresi family, *H83ab (a.Io6I, Gemignani 75-6) for the second. On the difference between the two, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 109-12, 233-6; AAL + +G73-4. + +C19 (a.1o64, Gemignani 134-6) for the leasefbenefice of Porcari to the second family from the bishop. See Pacchi 7 (a. I xos), with de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', p. 107 n., for twelfth- and thirteenth-century landowning of the second Porcaresi family in the Garfagnana. For Uberto, see RCL 1.:1.7; for Gragno, see below, n. 41; for fiscal land, see above, pp. 6o-2 84 Violante, 'Signoria "territoriale" ', pp. 33.5-6; Settia, Castelll e vil14ggi, pp. 168-76; Keller, AdelshmsdMft, pp. 156-9; Cusin, 'Castello medioevale', pp. 512 f., already saw the point in 1939.

. .... ~ ..

~

.....

II6

The Garfagnana, 70t>-1200

a useful guide to how that . society worked. The fact that incastellamento in the Garfagnana did not, for example, change the pattern of settlement, as we have seen (pp. 37-9), is a good prima-facie indicator of the relatively uncontrolled nature of economic change in the tenth- and eleventh-century countryside. The appearance of castelli in the valley, as elsewhere in the Lucchesia, and as elsewhere in Tuscany, tells us more about changes in the structure of power than about economic development. Exactly how this worked we will see most clearly in the Casentino, with its excellent eleventh-century documentation; incastellamento was a very similar, even if not totally identical, process there (below, pp. 292- 3o6). But what we know about the Garfagnana will serve very adequately as a guide to our major concern of the moment, the origin of the signoria. For castelli can tell us something about the signoria; it is at least true that if there were ever any signorie in the valley, the castelli would, in large part, crystallise around them. The appearance of castelli in Tuscany did not automatically bring with it socio-political ch.anges, unlike, for example, in south-central Italy; but the pattern of castelli is itself a remarkably good guide to the changes that did take place. 35 Any castello, unless it is actually built by the .fisc (something we cannot show for any Garfagnana castello after 75o--although we might guess at it for Barga), represents to some degree the privatization, even the localization, of political power. The .first episcopal castelli in the Lucchesia were built in the early tenth century to safeguard the bishop's proprietorial power, and with some success, too; the major episcopal castelli in the plains, above all Moriano and S. Maria a Monte, were never lost. But such a safeguard shows at least that some personal security, even in the last years of Adalbert II, had to be linked to one's capacity to defend oneself- to the growing, though still informal, privatization of defence. And even though the bishop had a strategically intelligent network of castelli, we cannot wholly see them as a strengthening of centralized control; incastellamento meant some form of devolution of powers. So, for example, the Campori leases to cultivators, which overlap with the For south-central Italy, see Toubert, Latium, pp. 303-68; cf. Wickham, 'Incastellamento ed i suoi destini'; the classic account is Cusin, ' Castello medioevale'. 35

The Lords of the Garfagnana

II7

foundation of the castello there, require the tenants concerned to go to perform justice in the bishop's court in Lucca up to 948; the final three leases, however, for 95Q-7, drop the requirement. This is most coherently explained by the appearance of the castello, which had certainly been built by 957; once the castello was founded, justice was to be performed locally, even before judicial rights were ceded away to the aristocracy.36 Private castelli were later. Settia has recently noticed one near Sovigliana in the Valdera as early as 939, but otherwise the earliest known in the diocese is Collecchio, also in the Valdera, dating from before 976. Porcari was not yet a castello in 952; it must have been founded by its owners as a private fortification between then and 1039, with or without the permission of the marquis {at least without his written permission, which would probably have survived). But even the Porcari castello, as we have seen, is best understood as a patrimonial defensive centre, developed out of the curtis there, rather than, as yet, as a focus for a signoria. In the Garfagnana, private castelli are first mentioned in 997, with the 'Cunimundinghi' fortification at Gorfigliano (possibly shared with the pope); between then and li20 there appear eleven others, as against one new episcopal fortification (Verrucchio above Castiglione). Of these twelv~ private castelli, four (Gorfigliano, Verrucole, San Donnino, V allico) were built on land leased, at least originally, from the bishop, and six (Castiglione, Ansugo, Lucignana, Coregha, Ceserana, Gragno) may possibly have been built on land granted by the fisc, though that is very largely guesswork. We cannot even guess at the origins of Cellabaroti (1045) and Gallicano (xo6I); they are in areas where the bishop had once been influential, but we must not rule out, here and elsewhere, the strong possibility that the lords concerned had bought or extorted the land from other lay owners--land, like local power, could be obtained by other ways than devolution from on high. 37 36

For Campori, see Barsocchini 1326, 1334, 1367, 1377. For Barga as originally public, see 1712, and above, pp. 6o f. 3? For Valdera castelli, see Barsocchini 1263 (cf. Settia, Castelli e villaggi, p. 490), 1478. For the earliest references to valley castelli, see Barsocchini 1377 (a.957, Campori), 1712 (a.996, Barga), 1719 (a.997, Gorfigliano; see Ch. 2, n. 24 for the pope), 1795 (c.1072, Verrucchio); MGH, Dip. Conradi II 83 (a.1027, Verrucole, San Donnino); AAL + + K I 5 (a.1033, Mennucci 39, Castiglione), + C22 (a. 1045, Pianezzi 11, Cellabarot1}, *H83ab (a. I06I, Gemignani 75--
118

The Garfagnana, 70o-1zoo

These castelli were not the centres of signorial power from the first, but they were certainly the foci of private defence of property rights, if not of outright aggression. The episcopal tower-house outside Castiglione in 1033, fortified to an unheardof degree of sophistication for the period, presumably as a response to the need for such 'defence', itself makes the point clear enough. This became a necessary feature of local life. With the exception of Pieve Fosciana, centre of a rich ecclesiastical territory, no setclement in the valley maintained its importance through the central Middle Ages without a castello. And castelli were, in the end, associated with signorial rights. The earliest evidence is for Vallico in 1122, then for 1170 in Gragno, and, outside the diocese, I 179 in Sala; only in the thirteenth century does it begin to be extensive. The late date of most of this material is not, however, important, given the near-absence of any evidence for the valley from the Io6os to 1200. What can as yet be said for the Lucchesia as a whole, which has not been systematically studied at all in this period, would lead one to associate the change grosso modo with the slow breakdown of marchesal power after 1081, through the banning of the marchesal palace from the city, the constant civil disturbances associated with the Investiture Dispute, and the death of Matilda herself in 1i I.S: the Lucchesia, that is, could simply be said to be undergoing the political disgregation that had already begun in the north nearly two centuries before, with the same result-the creation of a complex set of levels of power in the countryside, which then themselves have to be unravelled. But how the process actually worked is not so simple, as a brief discussion of the issue in the context of our valley will show. This discussion certainly has to be restricted to the Garfagnana, for we are now so clearly entering an age of political decentralization that parallels from the rest of the Lucchesia, even when they have been analysed, can no longer be assumed to be useful. 38 Gallicano), +K13 (a.1120, Vallico); RCL 227 (a.1048, Ansugo, Lucignana, Coreglia, Ceserana), 487 (uoss, Gragno). San Michde, long associated with San Donnino (Pacchi u, a. 1179-Gf. Ch. 3, n. 20), may be the latter's contemporary. Careggine ought to be early, too, but is not documented as a castello befote the thirteenth century. See Maps 4-s. 38 For Castiglione, see the quotation cited above, p. JS. The first reference to castello jurisdictions is episcopal: Bertini, Appetulice 84 (between 1075 and ro8o); but the first texts for the Lucchesia that show coherent signorial rights,

The Lords of the Gaifagnana

119

In May I 122, Guido di Mascara sold a quarter of his curtis at Vallico di Sopra and Vallico di Sotto to the bishop, and the same proportion of the castello in Vallico di Sopra (called also Sala), with the districtum seu placitum (private judicial powers) that he had in the curtis and castello, all for zoos. The next day, the men of Vallico each swore an oath of fidelity to the bishop and his local vassal Raineri di Alluccio, the text of which survives; the oath specified that each man should avoid various forms of political disloyalty, and that he should defend the castello. The bishop split his portion of the property and its rights with Raineri, and they swore mutual oaths as well. These procedures are quite normal for twelfth-century Tuscany, as far as they go; it is quite clear that a framework of judicial and political powers and rights already existed in Vallico by 1122. So did a social solidarity among its inhabitants, even though they were all tenants, that was crystallizing into a rural commune, the first we can see in the valley (cf. below, pp. 138-40). But what did these signorial powers actually amount to? They were not, at least, a dominant proportion of episcopal returns from the village. This we can guess from what we know of the rest of the Vallico property, most of which Guido had sold without signorial rights to three widows in I I zo; in late May and June I I 22 the widows sold part of this, making up a further quarter of the castello and estate, to the bishop, again without signorial rights, for a total sum of 36os. The bishop paid rather more to them than he had to Guido, even though the second set of cessions were of proprietorial rights only.39 already being used in a framework of political confrontation between lords, are RCL 562, 564~ (a.1099) for the canonica's centre of Massarosa in the Versilia and the lay castello of Montemagno nearby. Cf. Dinelli, 'Signoria ecclesiastica', pp. 202-17, taken up again in id., 'Origine della "iura" del capitolo'. The rights confirmed in these texts are already similar in type and phraseology to those in the Luni documents cited in n. 32; the Versilia may have been developing along lines similar to the neighbouring diocese (cf. also Ch.s, n.8). 39 AAL +K13 (a.tuo), AE29, + +S90, + +D40 (the oath; copies +H3o, +I92), +N17, ++R95, +F8 (all II22). The episcopal half is confirmed in MGH, Dip. Friderici I 430 (a.II64). We do not know for how much money Guido sold his half portion of the castello in II20, for +K13 is at that point too abraded to read, even under ultraviolet. Who Guido di Mascaro was we similarly do not know, but he was apparently holding at least some of the castello from the Lucchese church of S. Giu~tina. The lords of Fondagno held

120

The Garfagnana,

J0()-1200

We cannot work out the full background to these events, but a running theme is that the estate itself seems to have been the basic element of local control, districtus and placitum decidedly secondary. This impression would be confirmed by a document of I 197, which lists rights the bishop had in his half of the Vallico estate. It consis~ed of money-rents above all, from twelve groups of tenants. Only five of the twelve owed guadia et amasciamentum et placitum, military and juridical obligations. These twelve tenant-groups cannot have been the whole population, and it is thus possible that such obligations were owed by other inhabitants who were not tenants, but it is far from clear that there were any- both ninth-century and thirteenth-century material indicates that the two villages of Vallico formed a relatively compact estate; it is most likely that other inhabitants were tenants too, though not included on this list. There is no reason, on the other hand, .to think that those on the list were other than typical of such tenants; and their signorial obligations were minor. These rights did not all go to the bishop, in fact; by 1197 the commune of Vallico di Sopra held half of them, the bishop a quarter, and a lay family, probably Raineri's heirs, the other quarter. But, even allowing for that, the fact that rent from landed property seems to have been the dominant economic return from Vallico. In the thirteenth century, too, despite the exaction of repeated oaths of loyalty from the members of the commune, now numbering some fifty adult males from both villages, in 1238 and 1262 and perhaps 1267, the principal interest of the bishop was again in rents, as several leases, often to groups of up to twenty, testify.40 The major element of the episcopal signoria over Vallico was political loyalty, focused on the defence of the castello in Vallico di Sopra. This was the minimum that the occupation of a castello

is

some ofVallico di Sotto, too: Barsocchini 1800 with AAL AB18- 2o (a. I072-4), AB I (a. t 127), all cessions to the bishop. The castello of Sa la must not be confused with that at Sala beside Piazza al Serchio. 40

AAL AE48 (a.u97), +C24 (a.1227), +Mu, + +A29 (a.1238), +C75, + +Dss. + +L79 (all 1262), +C32 (a.1264), + +Q63 (a.1267). In + +Dss (a.1293), the tithes of Vallico were also leased out, to private persons, for w.- probably as much as or more than the total rent from the two villages. (Note that the Porcaresi also claimed some signorial rights in Vallico di Sotto in the thirteenth century, despite all these oaths: de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', p. 108.)

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required of its inhabitants in the twelfth century. In fact, any wider political organization in the area seems to have been devolved to the emerging commune. And it involved little obvious economic advantage for the bishop at all. This point recurs in our evidence from Gragno in I 170. Gragno was a castello and, by now, commune under the signoria of the Gherardinghi (cf. below, pp. 138-9). The canonica of Lucca had obtained a portion of the castello in 1085, and in I 170 (and again, with less detail, in II85) exacted an oath of fidelity from its populus, which expressed the signorial supremacy of the church over the inhabitants, saving the rights of the Gherardinghi. Here, we do not know how much rent the canonica got from its lands in Gragno; there was certainly an estate there as part of the castello cession (the canonica leased it back to the Gherardinghi; that family evidently retained real control there). But we do know how much the church got from its signorial rights: six stai of chestnuts, somewhere between 30 and 1 so kg. It may have been to some political advantage for the canonica to have a signoria in Gragno, but it was certainly not massively remunerative. 41 The Vallico and Gragno evidence on its own is not prolix, but it does indicate that, whatever the political content of the more signorial world of the twelfth-century Garfagnana Lucchese, the major element in returns to the powerful was still land. If we wish to discover more about the power structures of the period, however, we must pursue the issue into the thirteenth century. This will bring us well outside the main period of our interest, but it is worth doing so, at least briefly. This is partly because the documentation is better after 1200; the issues appear more clearly. But the main value of a discussion 9f the thirteenth century lies in the contrast that reappears in that period between the Lucchese and the Lunense parts of the valley, which will allow us to see how the patterns of power developed differently in the two dioceses. This contrast will in turn give us a clearer understanding of the eleventh- and twelfth-century developments that are here our main concern. In the thirteenth century, episcopal documents for the Garfagnana Lucchese show us a very similar world to that we have 41

RCL 487, 1027, II79. 1278. 128 1, 1293. 1524, 1547. 1550.

122

The Garfagnana, 70tr-12oo

just looked at. The language of signorial power continues, through repeated oaths of loyalty to the bishop, above all from Vallico, and from Verrucchio and Castiglione, the late medieval episcopal bases in the middle valley. But the money coming into the bishop's treasury is always expressed in terms of land-rent; districtual rights are not a major element in episcopal renders at all. 42 There is only one new development: after 1250 we begin once again to be able to discuss tithe. The bishops of Lucca must have regained some of their former control of tithes, and Bishops Enrico I and Paganello (1257--67, 1274-1300) began to lease them out again. Immediately, the scale of tithe as a resource becomes once again evident; the leases of the tithes of individual parishes (parishes had by now begun to substitute for pievi as units) were for sizable sums, from ss. up to 445· Most of these leases were to the local parish priest, who thus gained control of his own tithes, though in return for a substantial rent; some were to the local rural commune. But Paganello also leased to aristocrats, principally the lords of Careggine and the Rolandinghi of Lop pia, who were, significantly, two of the three families who had first leased tithes from the bishop three hundred years before. The Rolandinghi leases we have are still predominantly for the pieve of Loppia, and they describe the family tithes there as an antiquo feudo from the bishop. But in one of the leases, from 1277, we discover they had at some point been replaced in some of the territory by members of other noble families, the Montemagno, the Corvaia, the Cellabarottani. The Rolandinghi are put back in the lease; but henceforth they are to share with these others, and the bishop is to mediate any problems that may arise.43 We do not know much about the local power of the Rolandinghi. As we have seen, one reconstruction of their origins For Vallico, see n. 40; for Verrucchio and Castiglione oaths and rents, see Ch. J, n. 24; for other rents: AAL *C79 (a. 1248, Castelnuovo), and cf. n. 45 for the rather different case of Sala. · 43 for tithes, see AAL + +D58 (a.1277; edited by Cianelli in ' Conti rurali', pp. 163- 4), +P90 (a.1277), +K53 (a.1281) for the Rolandinghi. For other tithe leases, see above all the enormous roll + + D58: aa. 1258 for Campori, 1259 Colle, 1262 Gragno, 1271 Borio, 1277 Trassilico, 1278 Rontano, 128o Vemi, 1293 Vallico, with *At6 (a.u8o, Careggine), *A3o (a. 1299, Calomim). Cf., for subsequent ecclesiastical development, Angelini, Pievi e chiese minori; Tangheroni, 'Vita religiosa', reviewing Angelini. 4l!

The Lords of the Garfagnana

123 • gives them a number of ftscal castelli by the 1040s. But their long association with Loppia underlines, in all likelihood, the crucial importance for them of the control of tithe, and the informal territorial powers associated with it. It is notable, then, in this context, that these thirteenth-century tithe leases are as devoid as those of the tenth century of any explicit reference to signorial powers. If the Rolandinghi did hold a signoria of some kind in the Loppia area based largely on tithes, as is quite likely, it must have been extremely informal. And if they could lose some of it to members of other families, perhaps at the will of the bishop, it may not even have been very stable. The Rolandinghi were certainly very powerful in the Garfagnana; but the coherence of their signoria may well have been overrated by historians. Landowning and tithe continued, then, to be the core of political power for the Church, and the families most closely associated with it, although signorial rights are certainly sometimes to be found. Some of the other lay families had more. The Porcaresi had considerable signorial rights over Trassilico; we know this because they sold them, together with their lands there, to the local rural commune in 1274. The Gherardinghi, too, had substantial rights in Bargecchia, Sillico, and Capraia just east of Pieve Fosciana in the 126os and 128os. 44 There certainly were signorial powers, of whatever origin (legal or illegal, public or private), available in the Garfagnana Lucchese in the thirteenth century to the families who wished to wield them. We cannot look at these powers in detail; the social and political context they assume is too far from that we are concerned with in this book. But it is worth coming this far at least, however sketchily, for the reason I have already noted: the comparison that it allows us to make between the Lucchese part of the valley and the upper valley, the Garfagnana Lunense. We only have one document for the twelfth-century upper valley, an agreement of II79 between the bishop and two noble families, Conemundo and U golinello of Castelvecchio, and the See references in Cianelli, 'Conti rurali', pp. 122--7, and de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 99-108. The tithe of Trassilico, however, belonged to the shadowy lords of Perpoli: AAL + +Ds8 (a.1277); see also Kehr, 'Papsturkunden', pp. 434 f. They were too insignificant to be listed in any of the imperial privileges for the Garfagnana (cit. n. 49). 44

124

The Garfagnana, 70o-1200

counts of Lavagna in the Lunigiana, concerning the rights the two families held in fief from the bishop in Castelvecchio and the curtis of Sala. It looks as if the Sala estate had been re-formed by the bishop f'rom the more disgregated leased lands of the 'Cunimundinghi', who were probably Conemundo and Ugolinello's ancestors (cf below, p. 128). Castelvecchio, the old public castrum of the upper valley, seems similarly to have been refounded privately as the political focus for the estate, out of the curtibus illarum terrarum et castrorum, ex quibus Castrumvetus aedificatum est, in particular the castelli of San Donnino and San Michele, the former of which was the main local centre of the 'Cunimundinghi' in the 1020s. This text, in other words, represents the twelfth-century version of the tenth-century Sala leases to the 'Cunimundinghi' with, somehow, the addition of the Lavagna counts. But the context is entirely military. The text is about the fitting out of armies (we are, it is true, in the middle of the Lucchese wars to control the valley) and about restrictions on the building of towers inside the castello. It is not about rent or any other proprietorial rights. And the thirteenth-century documents for Castelvecchio/Sala, of which there are half a dozen in the episcopal archive, are just the same. There are also leases, for Livignano on the Sala estate; but only in the fourteenth century, by which time effective signorial power in the valley had been more or less extinguished, did land leases come to predominate again. The contrast with the documents for Vallico is clear.45 The Gherardinghi documents for the upper valley show similar contrasts. The signorial control of the family over Bargecchia and its neighbours-still more Gragno--was quite overshadowed by the extent of their rights in the upper valley, where by the later thirteenth century they had a compact territorial lordship, covering eight communes between Castelvecchio and the Lucchese boundary, centred on Verrucole, an ex-'Cunimundinghi' castello above San Donnino. The scope of their rights, the degree to which they could intervene in the 45 AAL + +Q6 (a.1179; Pacchi 11), +P39 (a.Izo~ copy + +b4), +H22 (a.1238), + +044 (a.1262), A95 (a.1278; copy AMI} give the thirteenth-century picture; for leases, +Cz (a.1255). +Cx6 (a.u62). For the 135os, there are a duster ofleases, with oaths, *E62, +Cz7, +H68, + +R96, + +R48.

The Lords of the Garfagnana

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affairs of these eight communes, was vast; just enumerating them resulted in one of the longest single documents I have ever seen, dating from 1271- an eighteenth-century transcript of it contains thirty-one pages. The text is really a set of communal statutes, but the Gherardinghi take their cut of all fines and the lordship of the family is everywhere emphasized, along with the military service due them from the men of the villages; cumulatively, this signoria brought substantial economic returns, and real social and political power, over a large and coherent territory. The cohesion of this power may explain the fact that the Gherardinghi were powerful even inside the diocese ofLucca, in the Bargecchia area; for the powers of the family there, though less than those around Verrucole, were greater than that involved in any other signoria we know about for the Lucchese parts of the valley. Other than that partial exception, however, the Lucca- Luni border as late as the thirteenth century represented a real cultural contrast. There is nothing remotely like this I 27 I text for anywhere in the Garfagnana Lucchese, where, indeed, similar communal legislation was codified in 1287 as part of the public legal system of the city. 4 6 No matter how far sections of the middle and lower valley had developed towards the classic signoria, nothing in those parts of the valley could match the strength and coherence, the political importance, of signorial rights in the upper valley. In the late thirteenth century, signorial powers in the newly forming State of Lucca, which included the upper valley , were about to disappear. (This may indeed be a major reason why we find out about them at that point.) But the thirteenth century, like the eleventh, is characterized in particular by a contrast between the dioceses ofLucca and Luni. In the eleventh century, signorial terminology was absent in the former, and very much present in the latter. In the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, The communal text is AAL *V64 (a.1272, mod. dating 1271); the eighteenth-century MS transcript is catalogued as *VSs. See also *V 43 (a.uss). Other Gherarclinghi texts do not survive, but they were seen and edited by Anselmo Micotti in the seventeenth century: Descrittione crorwlogica della GaifagnaM, pp. 73-86. Pacchi 31, 34 offers precis of two of them. See de Stefani, 'Comuni cli Garfagnana', pp. 99-104 for the latter texts (he did not know that of 1271), and for Gherardinghi landowning and signorial rights elsewhere, down to the plain. For the 1287 codification, see Ch. 5, n. ro. 46

126

The Garfagnana, 70o-120o

however, the contrast becomes much more one of the intensity of signorial (in particular, judicial and military) powers: far less great in the Lucchesia, and economically and politically subordinate to landowning and tithe-taking; overwhelmingly important in the lordships of the Garfagnana Lunense. As Nobili has shown, the Lunigiana itself by the twelfth to thirteenth centuries was a region where political power was above all signorial and, indeed, feudo-vassalic, on a pattern much more reminiscent of northern France than any of the more urbanized areas ofTuscany.47 The Garfagnana Lunense was by 1250 under Lucchese control; but very much the same rules applied. And their presence there points up their relative absence in the traditionally Lucchese parts of the valley. By the standards of the diocese of Luni, very similar to our valley in its geography, the signoria in the Garfagnana Lucchese, even at its height, was weak. We can trace this weakness back a long way. Schwarzmaier was, after all, particularly concerned to point up the incoherence and instability of tenth- and eleventh-century lordship in the Lucchesia. But even he regarded the period after 1000 as one of slowly developing Burghmschaft, lordship focused on castelli. The unity of the diocese, which was expressed in the ninth century by the wide landowning of the bishop, and in the late tenth by the shifting and fragmented leases that characterized the greater aristocratic families, was, in this picture, broken after the middle of the eleventh. The aristocracy began to abandon the city to its own devices; they took little part in the foundation of the commune. Instead, they came to focus on their castelli, exploiting the signorial rights that were increasingly attached to them.48 But we have just seen that in one corner of the Lucchesia, however outlying, signorial rights were never necessarily as important as have been believed. Is there in reality any reason to think that the territorial cohesion of the Lucchesia broke down at all? One traditional reason relates explicitly to the Garfagnana: it is the wars that the Lucchesi fought to take the valley, beginning 47 48

Nohili, 'Famiglie signorili di Lunigiana'. Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 249-61.

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in 1170, and continuing, on and otf, for nearly a century. It has seemed obvious that if the valley had to be conquered, then it cannot have been part of a coherent Lucchese territory. In both Pisan and Lucchese chronicles, the Garfanienses, the capitanei or cattani of the Garfagnana, are seen as often as not siding with the Pisans against the Lucchesi; most of them swore a formal treaty with Pisa in 1168, along with the lords of the Versilia, one of the other territorially distinct fragments of the Lucchesia, and it was against them that the Lucchesi fought after 1170. Frederick Barbarossa gave them privileges against the Lucchesi in u85, including administrative autonomy covering for the first time the whole valley, the Lunense and Lucchese parts together. 49 The Garfagnana may have already been regarded as autonomous by its non-aristocratic inhabitants, as we shall see in Chapter 5, and this privilege may reftect the fact; but what the Lucchesi, and Barbarossa, were interested in were its noble families and how the latter saw their own political role is rather less dear. I will, therefore, finish this chapter with a discussion of the structure and land-owning of these families in the twelfth century. If this structure had not changed as much as Schwarzmaier believed, if, that is, aristocratic families were not ever fully localized in different parts of the Lucchesia, then the contrast between the land around the city· and the Garfagnana in the years after 1 170 may not have been quite as clear-cut as it is often thought to have been. Barbarossa's diploma to the Garfagnana gives a famous list of local noble families: the lords of Doraio (probably the Dalli), the Gragnana, the Gherardinghi of Verrucole, the filii Guidi of Villa, the Bacciano, the Careggine, the Cellabarottani, the Rolandinghi, the Sotfredinghi and the Porcaresi. The list is roughly topographically organized, from the top of the valley downwards; it is a vade-mecum of the political geography of the twelfthand thirteenth-century Garfagnana. We have already met some of the families. Of the others, the Dalli and Gragnana in the upper valley were dependants of the Malaspina, the marquises Pacchi 12 (a.u8s); cf. the very similar 24 (a.1242). For the chronicles, see Maragone, Annales pisani, pp. 13, z8, 47, sz (aa.uso, IIS9. 1169, II72 stilt pisano); Tholomei lucensis annales, pp. 68-70, 98, 292-6 (aa. t169-'73, 1209). Cf Santini, 'Formazione territoriale'; de Stefani, 'Comuni di Gatfagnaru', pp. 13-29; Tirelli, 'Lucca nella seconda meta del s. XII', pp. 163- 4, 191. 49

128

The Garfagnan,a, 70o-1zoo

of the Lunigiana, and, as far as we can see from the thin documentation, were part of the heavily signorialized political structure of the diocese of Luni. The Bacciano were kin to the Careggine. The filii Guidi were by 1 179 the family that held Sala, the old 'Cunimundinghi' centre, from the bishop; the name Colemundo (Cunimundo) recurred in the family, and Villa, near • Castiglione, came to be called Villa Collemandina; it is most likely that their ancestors had been the 'Cunimundinghi', though we cannot establish it for certain. By the thirteenth century they were also known as the de' Nobili. The Soffredinghi (of Anchiano, just south of the Garfagnana as I have defined it) may have been their kin, although their power-bases had changed once more from that which the tenth- and eleventh-century ~unimundinghi' had. Indeed, the continuity of the propertyholding of all these families from the tenth century onwards was not great anywhere. Only the families leasing tithe, the Careggine and Cellabarottani, and maybe the Rolandinghi, seem to have remained firmly based on their tenth-century holdings in the valley, in fact. 50 These families constituted the Garfanienses of the late twelfth century. If, however, we try to tie them down more specifically to power-bases in the valley, a problem arises. We have already seen that the Cellabarottani, a small family with a strong valley base, owned in Lucca and the plain up to the middle of the twelfth century at least (p. 102). The Rolandinghi appear as owners all over the eleventh- and twelfth-century plain, up to 50 km from their centre at Loppia; terra Rolandinga and the oo For the Dalli, Gragnana,jilii Guidi, see de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 85-96. For the succession of the latter to the 'Cunimundinghi' (see nn. I 1- 1.2.) to be plausible, the falsity of Pacchi 8 would have to be accepted, as in n. 16. For the Gherardinghi and Soffredinghi, see Cianelli, 'Conti rurali', pp. 152-6o, 177-81; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 22~. Schwarzmaier argues that the Rolandinghi and the Gherardinghi were not, as Cianelli thought, descendants of Cunimundo (although in my view a case could be made for the third family in Cianelli's genealogies, the Soffredinghi). In fact, the thirteenth-century universitas Gherardingorum seems to have been a vast consorteria including members of other families, such as the Careggine and the Gragnana: see Pacchi 31, 34 (cf. n. 46). In this case, fatnily membership is not even necessarily determined by direct descent; a purely genealogical approach to family structure is thus peculiarly useless. Cf. below, pp. 278-9, for the Ubertini in the Aretino, a similar instance.

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property of specific family members are recorded at least ten times before 12<>0-in Lucca there was even a curtis Rolandinga. In the thirteenth century they supplied a bishop, Enrico I. The Soffredinghi and Gherardinghi are documented in the plain almost as often. 51 In all three cases, given our ignorance about the individual members of the families, such figures are based above all on the casual occurrence of family names in documents; landowning by the family when the surname is not mentioned was almost certainly commoner. The pattern is clearest of all in the case of the lords of Porcari. We have seen that they did indeed hold in the Garfagnana, and one of the first bases of the second Porcaresi family (post I06o) was at Corsena in the V al di Lima, near enough to be counted as the Garfagnana in the twelfth century. But the Porcaresi were, in all probability, the greatest plains landowners of all, throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their landowning covered every part of the diocese throughout the period, and indeed beyond, up to the Genovesato. Nor is there any sign that it was divided territorially at any time, until as late as 1258. The family produced a bishop, too, Paganello, as well as a whole series of podesta for the commune ofLucca, from as early as II87.s2 If this family formed part of the capitanei of the Garfagnana, what then was the Garfagnana? 1 conclude from all this that the localization of the noble families of the Lucchesia, whether inside the Garfagnana or elsewhere, never really took place. The patterns Schwarzmaier describes for 1000 were still there in 1100, and even 1200. Some things certainly did happen. Castelli and, increasingly, rural monasteries did give to these families a new possibility for a For the Rolandinghi, see Barsocchini 1742; AAL +F39 (a.1070, Gemignani 237), +K57, + +091 (a.Io8s); Azzi i.u8, 170, ii.xoo, 483; RCL 671, 707, 1099, 1387, 1449· Schwarzmaier doubts that these are all the same family (Lucca, p. 107), but RCL 1099 (a. I153), at least, explicitly says that the family are from the Garfagnana. For the Soffredinghi, see RCL 1338, 1424, 1433; Azzi ii. 144, 178; Maragone, Annales pisani, pp. to, 13; Tholomei lucensis annates, pp. 71, 76, 97- 8. For the Gherardinghi, see RCL 325, 671, 707, 1387, 1425; Azzi ii. 551 , and de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 103-5 n. 62 De Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 105-8; Tirelli, 'Lucca nella seconda meti del s. Xil', p. 163; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 2.33-6; cf. nn. 33 and 53· 5t

IJO

The Garfagnana,

70~1200

rural ideological focus. Family consciousness had certainly become more clearly defined by the eleventh century at the latest, for it is from then that surnames begin to appear; and a lot of them, perhaps a half, both in the Garfagnana and in the Lucchesia at large, are named from a castello rather than from a family clan (Celabarottani as against Rolandinghi). Schwarzmaier sees this focusing on castelli as being in part a response to the growing territorial power of the city as an institution, in which these families had no stake. This is true as well, up to a point. Direct involvement by the great landowning families in the early commune was cenainly slight (Tirelli notes that the Porcaresi were podesta in Florence as well as Lucca, and active in Pisa; they saw urban power very much from the outside). And at some of the earliest points of political friction between rival city communes,- we fmd some of the strongest signorial areas, such as Vaccoli, Ripafratta, and Massarosa on the Pisan frontier. Schwarzmaier knows that the families held land in Lucca, but he can dismiss it as 'overnight accommodation' (Absteigequartier); it does not, of itself, prove an urban orientation for the family concerned. Even though all this is so, however, it does not explain the whole phenomenon. The formal patterns of power were beginning to crysta11ize out, but the real content of political power remained unchanged. The lords of Vaccoli may have been centred above all on Vaccoli; but, if so, it is they who were the exceptions.53 The norm was Rolandinghi or Porcaresi-style landowning, a spread across the diocese, including the city. The Lucchesia was always territorially coherent, even by Italian standards. (The Pisano was as well, as was Keller's Milanese; barely less so, as we shall see, was the Aretinop. 279; the pattern may be commoner than is often reckoned. 54 Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 249-61; Tirelli, 'Lucca nella seconda met.i del s. XII', pp. 184-6, 192 for the Porcaresi. (The Porcaresi had been the closest Tuscan jtSSOciates of Matilda-d: Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 234 f.-and were thus probably politically opposed to the commune at first. They were thus the most likely family to get signorial powers from her, too.) One frontier area, between Lucca and Pistoia, that remained relatively unaffected by signorial power structures, unlike Vaccoli and the others, was the Valdinievole: see Wickham, 'Valdinievole'. 64 Rossetti, 'Pisa, Volterra, Populonia', pp. 32
The Lords of the Garfagnana

131

But, in Tuscany, apparent counter-examples are the Fiorentino and the Senese.) Some of the great landowning families had little to do with the internal politics of the city, and sometimes formally opposed it. But they certainly did not favour the break-up of the diocese into local signorie. They could not afford it; most of them would lose far more than they gained. The aristocracy may have resisted the commune, but they could not resist the logic of the maintenance of a spatially coherent diocese. And that diocese had only one centre, whether in terms of communications, or economics, or politics: Lucca. The centralizing politics of the commune could, in the end, scarcely lose. It took the Florentines, however strong, until the fourteenth century to subjugate the Guidi, simply because the Guidi were local signori par excellence (over a vast area, it is true, but on the edges of dioceses, not across them). The Lucchesi, by contrast, took the Garfagnana in four years, 1 17o-3, and would have held it thenceforth had it not been for continual outside interference; even then, they re-established their hegemony inside a couple of years each time the outside force (Barbarossa, Otto IV, Gregory IX, Frederick 11) went away. The autonomy of the Garfagnana remained, but it was very much subordinated to the Lucchese polity, right up to the conquest of its northern half by the Este in and after 1429-30.55 It is in this light that we can see why the signorie of the Garfagnana Lucchese were so weak. Tabacco remarks that one of the reasons why signorie cannot be read straight off from landowning was political will: the varying level of the desire of the lords concerned for autonomy. It was never in the interest of the lords of the middle and lower Garfagnana to be autonomous in this way. The weakness of the signorial powers in the area cannot simply be explained like that, it is true. There was a highly complex network of such powers in the territorial orbit of Milan, even though their holders were focused on city politics even more firmly than those of Lucca. We shall see ' Feudo e propriecl'. See Keller, Adelsherrschajt, pp. 68-83, for Milan. An obvious northern counter-example is Asti: Bordone, Citta e territorio, e.g. pp. 165-6, 382- 4. Bordone generalizes the Milan-Asti opposition for Piemonte and discusses reasons for it in • "Civitas nobilis et antiqua" ', pp. 34-44. r.r. For the Lucchese wars see Davidson, Storia di Firenze i, pp. 764-70; de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 13-68.

132

The Garfagnana, 70l'-1ZOO

something similar in the case of the Casentino (below, pp. 27982). But, given the inability of the bishop of Lucca to concede signorial powers, and the unwillingness of the marquis to do so, the territorial cohesion of the Lucchesia created by these wide spreads of landholding in itself helps to explain why there was less point in Lucchese lords seizing (or constructing) such rights for themselves. It is for this reason that the Lucchesia remained, in great part at least, one of the least signorialized areas in Italy. 66 And so it stayed. The 'designorialization' of the contado from the late thirteenth century was swift: there were already few feudal families by 1300, mostly in the Garfagnana Lunense; after 1380 or so, even the sigporie in the upper reaches of the Garfagnana had been abolished. The families all urbanized themselves. One can, indeed, thereafter write the political history of Lucca almost without reference to geography-:-a comforting, and unusual, experience for an Italian historian. 57 The Garfagnana was in these respects entirely typical of the diocese of Lucca. Indeed, it was closer to the orbit of the city than some areas of the diocese, for the Lucchesia eventually lost its eastern edge to the Pistoiesi and Aorentines, and the south to the Pisans. But these losses were largely as a result of the competition of other cities. The history of the Garfagnana, on the other hand, is a demonstration of the power of the city over the countryside, right out to its geographical extremities. The valley may not have been perceived as part of the city's orbit, it is true. Urban chronicles in both Lucca and Pisa identified the 56 Tabacco, Bgemonie sociali, p. 200; cf. Keller, AdelsherrsChaft, pp. 156--75. The major exceptions to this weakness in the Lucchesia were the three ecclesiastical lordships, the iura of the bishop (Osheim, Italian Lordship), that of the canonica (Oinelli, 'Signoria ecclesiastica', esp. pp. 217-24, 252-8, 26s70), and the. signoria of S. Salvatore a Sesto (Onori, S. Salvatore a Sesto, esp. pp. 81-6, 95- 108). These were by the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries territorial signorie with 'high' justice. But they were atypical, at least as it seems at present; there are good reasons why churches with long-standing immun.itarian jurisdictions should have had wider signorial rights ~ lay lordships. The two strongest were urban churches, and thus did not contribute to the political break-up of the diocese; they lasted until the eighteenth century, englobed in the State of Lucca. 6 7 De Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 1 u-17; for the late fourteenth century, s}lowing a politics that, though troubled, is by now dominated by the life of the city, see Meek, Luaa 1369-1400; pp. 59, I<X>-5, 131, 35o-1 for the Gu&gnana.

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city's strongest opponents as the Garfanienses and Versilienses. But this is best seen as the creation by city-dwellers of antitypes to themselves; from the city's standpoint, it would be logical for its staunchest enemies to be the most rustic of countrydwellers, those furthest away, even though such an identification pulled in the lowland-based, politically far-flung lords of Porcari. 58 But in the end, indeed very soon, such a distinction made no sense at all, even subjectively. Despite its geography, the Garfagnana Lucchese was not in political terms structurally different from elsewhere. Its aristocracy may have been marginally more localized; it was physically harder to occupy; it had enough local identity for Frederick I to be able to give it formal institutional autonomy. But the diocese was still a whole, and remained such. For the aristocracy, determined in this by the initial politics of their progenitors, bishop and marquis, geography did not count. Lords over the Garfagnana they may have been; lords from the Garfagnana they were not. See references in n. 49· The best example, however, of such an association of ideas is perhaps Maragone, in the Anna/es pisani, p. 10 (a.1 I 37), where he describes Vorno as being in the Garfagnana; Vorno is in fact south of Lucca, on . the Pisan border, and its lords, although important rural figures, and dangerous to the Lucchesi, had impeccably urban origins and no Garfagnana links at all. 68

5

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

The local weakness of the lords of the Garfagnana Lucchese was both a cause and a consequence of their outsider status. The tenth-century aristocratic families were centred on the city, as episcopal landowning had been two centuries before. The landed base of both was the same: the network of properties that were the price of an early association with the city of a substantial proportion of the valley elites of the eighth and ninth centuries. The bishop in 850 or so must have been the largest landowner in the valley; the lay families of the late tenth century and onwards, with their episcopal properties and their rights to tithe over dozens of villages of independent owners, must have been, collectively and even singly, politically unrivalled in their territories. This fact alone might have been sufficient for some of them to turn themselves into independent valley lords, had they wished to, with nothing in their way except some risk of marchesal hostility; lords took greater risks than this elsewhere in Italy, in their usurpations of land from smaller owners, and of rights from bishops and counts. But the establishment of a strong local lordship normally required more involvement in the locality, more identification with it, than Lucchese aristocrats with their widespread interests were prepared to give. As a result, the range of villages that are well documented in the eighth and ninth centuries, Sala or Careggine, Castiglione or Cascio, Pieve Fosciana or Vallico, continue to be those with the most continuous material right into the thirteenth. Before 1250, apart from one or two places iike Gragno and Barga, which had been in the orbit of the fisc until 1000 or so arid only after that got into the hands of private owners, there is not a single village with more than fragmentary documentation that comes into our record after the early gifts to the Church dry up around 8so. Documented landholding in the valley barely extended in 400 years. The Porcaresi were simply not interested in expanding

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

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their holdings to build up giant territorial blocs like those of the Aldobrandeschi in the far south of Tuscany or the Guidi in the Romagna. The Gherardinghi were, rather more; and, indeed, on the Lunense side of the diocesan border the pattern may have been somewhat different. But we must conclude that the Lucchese families, at least, for all their local powers, never penetrated beyond the surface of valley society. In my discussion of local power in Valva in Abruzzo in the early medieval period, I proposed that mountain environments tend to encourage extreme socio-political solutions, semiindependent free peasantries (the Braudelian model for the mountains), or dominating territorial lordships; partly because of the absence of mediating power-structures, like the pullulation of fragmented properties of different sizes that one normally gets around cities. 1 The Garfagnana was certainly mountainous enough for the model to be applicable; indeed, as we shall see, by 1 soo the model fully applied- the sixteenth century was one where virtually no one except peasants owned land in the mountains. But we cannot say this of our period. Early medieval bishops and lay aristocrats never got near to dominating the valley, or at least not its Lucchese sections. We must assume that the pattern of small and medium owners recorded in the eighth and ninth centuries persisted, above all in the undocumented parts of the valley that made up the bulk of its inhabited area. We have one eleventh-century text that makes this explicit, an exchange from 1033 that mentions owners on field-boundaries of lands in Fosciana and Castiglione: land of Viscount Raineri rubs shoulders with that of Bishop Giovanni, of Bonaldo Dario (who also may have been well off, for his land is mentioned six times), and of Bonio the smith-the whole range of landowning social strata in the one text; if it is unique, it is only so because so few Garfagnana documents mention boundaries.2 The network of ownership must have been as complex as around any city, this complexity being in itself the structural analogue, as we have seen, to the fact that the politics of land and power in the Garfagnana were played out virtually as if they took place under the walls of Lucca. But the Garfagnini themselves, the small and 1 Wickham, Sodeta degli Appennini, pp. 43- 4,103- 4· 2 AAL + +K15 (a.IOJ3, Mennucci 39).

The Garfagnana,

70~1200

medium owners of the villages, were not necessarily the same as their counterparts outside Lucca, even if they were preserved by the same political processes. The differences between mountain and plain lie here. The problem about such differences, however, is precisely that these sections, the numerically dominant sections, of valley society are undocumented. This at least tells us something, however. Between the 86os and the 1020s we know little of local society anywhere in the Lucchesia. But at the end of that period the landowners of the diocese began to give land to the Church again. St1ddenly, all types of owner, from peasants up to leaseholding aristocrats, reappear in our documents in their hundreds, either giving to the bishop (and the rural churches he still controlled), or the canonica or, increasingly, the urban churches whose charters ended up in the Archivio di Stato. A few of the aristocrats added portions of castelli in the Garfagnana to their gifts, as we have seen. But of the Garfagnini themselves there is barely a sign. Gifts of this kind stop abrupdy as one goes up the Serchio from the Lucca ·plain. The total number of documented gifts to the Church from smaller owners in the Garfagnana in the 200 years after 1000 comes to five. 3 Whatever else they were, the owners of the valley were totally outside the cultural network that underpinned Church patronage in this period. Indeed, they were more outside it than they had been in the eighth and ninth centuries. They may have been more generous to local churches, but their exclusion, or self-exclusion, from the city-orientated patronage dominant in the diocese is significant, none the less. That differences in Church patronage do carry a socio-political content is something we will amply see in the Casentino in the same period (below, pp. 256-68). The inhabitants of the Garfagnana were moving into a different world; It may be this sense of difference that underpins the sense in the city chronicles that the Garfanienses were their emblematic opponents; the population of the valley, even if not its aristocrats, were no longer the same as the people of the plains. Other things, too, were certainly happening in these obscure centuries, that would leave .the Garfagnana profoundly different 3

RCL 194 (a.1044), 328 (1o65)-even these two may be petty nobles; ASL S. Giovanni, II Nov. 1181; Tarpea, 2 Jan. 1199, 7 Feb. 1199.

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137

when a scattered documentation reappears again in the late thirteenth century. For it is in this period that the silvo-pastoral economy of the Lucchese mountains first began to develop. We saw that the ninth-century economy of the valley was simply a materially poorer, only marginally more mountain productorientated, version of the economy of the plains (pp. 21-6). By the late thirteenth century, however, the silvo-pastoral economy of the later medieval and modem periods was already dominant. In outside sources, references to Garfagnana sheep begin around r 150, and are extensive in the thirteenth century. The later thirteenth-century texts for the valley bear this out. When, in 1 306, the mayor of Barga sold common-rights of the village, characterized as erbaticum, pasturam, erbam et fenum . . . alpium comunis Barga et boschorum de alpibus ... et silvatarum domesticarum et castaneorum hominum de Barga, that is to say pasture, mountain meadow, and woodland, there is no doubt that he was selling a share of the major economic resource of the community. The Gherardinghi communes, similarly, showed in their 1271 statutes a considerable concern for the renting of their pasture-lands to shepherds and for fmes for improper use, and this would become one of the standard themes of the statutes that succeeded them. By now, most villages in the valley will have become largely dependent on wood and pasture as resources, and most of those that are documented more than fleetingly, Vallico or Gragno or Castiglione, show some indication of the fact in their records. Barga, and maybe other valley centres, came to have some commercial importance, as exchange with the lowlands increased.4 The Garfagnana had begun to be integrated into the economy, even if not the society, of the Lucchesia as a whole. The economic impact this had on Lucca could doubtless be documented, extending the general line of argument of de la Ronciere's work on Florence, although no one has as yet done so. 5 But the course of the change-over in the mountains can 4

For outside sources, see Ch. I, n. IJ. For Barga, see Prunai, 'Pergamene di Barga', i, 3 (artisans in IZS9) , s (a.13o6); RCL 1532 (a.u8s, artisan in Lucca). For the Gherardinghi, see AAL *V64 (a.1272, mod. dating 1271). For other silvo-pastoral references, see AAL +C75, + +Ds8, + +L79 (a.1262, Vallico), *C79 (a.1248, Castelnuovo), + +019 (a.1230) and + +044 (a.1262, artisans) for Castig)ione. For Gragno, see n. 7. ~ For the regional economy, see Ch. 6, n. 18. There is some discussion of the wool industry in the thirteenth-century city ofLucca, but without reference

138

The Garfagnana, 70c-1zoo

only be guessed at; we have no evidence at all. I will discuss in the second part of the book how the course of the similar shift in the thirteenth-century Casentino is likely to have run (p. r6z70), although we must recognize that the effect of the growth of the silvo-pastoral economy on Garfagnana society cannot automatically be read off from the experience of its sister valley. There is only one context in which the effect of these economic changes in the Garfagnana can be discussed at all, in even the most mediated way: in the development of the rural commune. We do, indeed, have a little evidence for this, starting in the twelfth century. There are problems about such a correlation, as we shall see; but it is the only way into an understanding of the developments of the period. Berengo, writing on the Lucchesia in the sixteenth century, has shown how differently organized the rural communes of the mountains were from those of the plain. On the plain, such communes had little precise economic function; agricultural life was relatively individualistic, and there were few communal lands. In the mountains, the commune was the social, economic, and political focus of the population that made it up; it ran the pastures that were its major economic resource, and control over it was the basis of long-term ineradicable conflict among its factions, conflict that was set aside only when the commune faced the necessity, or had the opportunity, of dispute with its neighbours. 6 It is in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this contrast began. The second commune to be documented in the valley, Gragno, makes the point clear. We know about the commune of Gragno because of a collective oath sworn to the canonica in Lucca in April 1170 by the consules and totus populus of the castello. The canonica only held a portion of the village; the rest was under the control of the Gherardinghi and their own consul, with whose consent and in whose presence the oath was sworn. The return the people of Gragno gave to the canonica in recognition of its signorial to the origin of the raw materials: Bini, Lucchtsi a Vtmzia i, pp. 15-40; Bongi,

'Mercatura dei Lucchesi', pp. 451--7; Blomquist, 'Drapers of Lucca', the most senous. e Berengo, Nobili e metC41lti, pp. 3Z<>-56; cf. Nobili, 'Mappe catastali come fonte'; Quaini, Per la storia del paesaggio, especially the warning notes on pp. 14-17.

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

139

rights was in chestnuts (cf. above, p. 121), an explicit demonstration of silvo-pastoral involvement; and the canonica obligated itself to defend not only the castello also, but, in particular, the Monte Gragnanese, in which the men of Gragno evidently had a special interest. Indeed, in August of the same year the men of Gragno seem to have doubled their chestnut prestation in return for a specific commitment on the part of the canonica to defend the hill, this time without any direct Gherardinghi involvement. Monte Gragno was not just any hill; it was an important ,chestnut and pastoral resource, on the hill-slope opposite Gragno on the other side of the Serchio, above Gallicano. And the men of Gragno, in laying claim to it, and getting the explicit support of at least one of their lords for the claim, were certainly already participating in a long-running dispute with Gallicano over it, which we can see in later evidence: in 1256 a temporary break in the conflict produced a treaty between Gallicano and Barga (which had absorbed Gragno), which survives; and in 1513 the movement of flocks onto Monte Gragno by the Gallicanesi in despite of Barga caused the men of Barga to respond with enthusiastic violence. Here, then, the appearance of the commune of Gragno precisely coincides with the appearance of systematic collective co-operation, and with inter-village opposition, in the arena of the silvo-pastoral economy.' We cannot, of course, conclude from this that collective economic activity was the cause of the commune of Gragno or, for that matter, that the latter was the cause of the former; only that the inhabitants of the castello were beginning to develop their silvo-pastoral activities at the same time as their previous, probably less explicitly characterized, collective arrangements were beginning to form into a commune, in the years before 1 170. But there is no doubt that the economic and political aspects of collective activity strongly conditioned each other. We cannot show any explicit references to woods or animals in our early texts for the commune of V allico, doubtless already 7 For Gragno, see Ch. 4, n. 41; RCL IZ78, u8t are the oaths. Cf. de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 19 f. For Monte Gragno, see ibid., p. 264; Memorialt di ]acopq Mannl, pp. 89-9<>. An exact parallel as an early commune with a specific silvan orientation is Villa Basilica in the Valdinievole, with consuls by 1143, perhaps even uo4: see Wickham, ' Valdinievole'.

140

The Garfagnana, JOo-1200

in existence when its inhabitants offered their collective oath to the bishop in I 122, and explicitly documented in 1197 (it is not until 1262 that Vallico texts mention sheep and chestnuts, though by then they are dearly of great importance); and the twelfth century equally sees communes with clear territorial boundaries appearing in the Lucca plain and elsewhere, totally outside the mountain socio-economic network.s The appearance of the rural commune corresponded to political and social changes quite independent of economic development; to the sharpening of signorial rights, to the example of the city, and, perhaps above all, to the growing importance and explicitness of territorial identity that underpinned all local society once the State had abandoned its all-embracing Carolingian form, and that was thus responsible for the growing coherence of the boundaries of signoria and commune alike. 9 But it is probably not by chance that the appallingly scarce documentation of the twelfth-century Garfagnana produces references to seven rural communes; they s For Vallico, see Ch. 4, nn. 39-40. For Lucchese communes, see Osheim, Italian Lordship, pp. 58-69 for those documented in AAL. Even very active early communes, like Montopoli and Santa Maria a Monte in the twelfth century (Osheim, Italian Lordship, pp. 6o f.), or Pescia in 12.02 (ASF Comune di Pescia, July 1202), or Fibbialla in the Versilia in 1204 (Dinelli, 'Signoria ecdesiastica', pp. 246-52, and id., 'Fibbialla'), appear to have been primarily orientated towards collective political/legal, not economic, activity. The fact that Montopoli and Santa Maria a Monte were important early befits large borghi near trade routes (cf. also, for Montecatini, Wickham, 'Valdinievole'). Fibbialla is in the Versilia, which was relatively signorialized, and its commune certainly emerged in that context, as did that of Massarosa (Dinelli, 'Signoria ecdesiastica', pp. 225-65). The communes of the Lunigiana, even more signorialized than the Versilia, where incastellamento had an explicit political content and local territorial consciousness appeared early, were similarly precocious-as in the collective political action of CP 488 (a.1039) and 267 (a.1092), and the fully developed costitutiones for Nicola and Ortonovo of 1237 (CP 298). See Volpe, Toscana medioevale, pp. 397- 421; Schneider, Entstehung von Burg, pp. 272-9; Nobili, 'Mappe catastali come fonte'; and, above all, id., 'Famiglie signorili di Lunigiana', pp. 242-9. But the overall patterns of development in these parts of Tuscany are too complex to follow at present. I intend to publish a study of the origins of some of the rural communes of the Lucca plain in the near future. 9 For general comments, see, for a beginning, Tabacco, Egt monie sociali, pp. 249-56; Violante, 'Signoria "territoriale"', pp. 339-42; Plesner, Emigrazione d41/a campagna, pp. 77-9. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, pp. IOI-54. and, classically, Hilton, Bondmen made free , pp. 70-95, produce some illuminating models for the whole of Europe. See further below, Ch. n .

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune are given more prommence in our evidence than communes are in most places in the diocese before 1200. The growing economic importance of the silvo-pastoral arena in the valley strengthened the socio-political developments that would produce, in the end, communes everywhere. These developments may indeed sometimes have been speeded up in the moUntains; but even if not, they certainly produced firmer and more consistent results than elsewhere. Already by the thirteenth century, woodland and pasture were solidly under the control of the institutions of the Garfagnana communes, and the two appear together insistently from now on. Boundary disputes were by now common, too. Communal rights were generalized in the valley by the time of the appearance of the general statutes for the Garfagnana, the Constitutiones maleficorum of 1287. Berengo's world was, by now, fully formed.lO Some of these valley communes were already free, i.e. not under the signorial control of any lord, when we first hear of them. Barga is the dearest case, for in 1 18 s its consuls and people got a diploma from Frederick Barbarossa that confirmed their consuetudines bona et iura as their predecessors had held them under Matilda; fiscal links may also underlie the independence of Castiglione, Fosciana, Ceserana, and Coreglia, also attested in that year, and Ghivizzano, added to them by 1220. Their freedom was not necessarily typical of valley communes-it certainly was not for Gragno or Vallico, nor yet the signorially dominated communes of the Gherardinghi lands of the upper valley. But it returns us to the argument set out at the start of this chapter: the survival and, by the end of the twelfth century, renewed importance of local owners everywhere in the Garfagnana. The men of Barga cert.ainly included landowners living locally who possessed land as far away as Lucca. Even the Gherardinghi statutes for their Verrucole signoria show that the men in their subject communities were in large part owners of land and, in particular, animals.ll One could go further: there is relatively For communal interest in the silvo-pastoral economy, see AAL + +019 (a.I2JO, Verrucchio), *V64 (a.1272, Gherardinghi); Prunai, 'Pergamene di Barga', I, n. 5 (a.13o6), with de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnaoa', p. 264 for Barga. For 1287 statutes, see Coni, '"Constitutiones maleficiorum" '; de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 66-70, 261. 11 Pacchi u, 13 (a.uSs); cf. de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. :n, 10

142

The Garfagnana, 70D-1200

little substantial evidence for large-scale landowning by either ecclesiastical or lay lords. The bishop owned much of V allico, Cardoso, and an estate at Sala at the top of the valley, as well as scattered land elsewhere, particularly in and around Castiglione. The Gherardinghi did own lands, including much pasture, in Verrucole, as they did at Bargecchia, the other focus for their signorial rights, and indeed at Gragno. 12 But there is no sign, even in the thirteenth century, when there is more evidence, that large-scale landowning was more than a minor part of the ownership patterns of the valley. This aspect of Garfagnana society had, that is, not changed significandy all the way through from the eighth century. It is against this background that signorial rights themselves in the end came to be lifted. De Stefani shows how the late thirteenth century saw the liquidation, spontaneous or forced, of the signorie of the Porcaresi and the Gherardinghi, and how those families that held onto their rights up to the 1 370s had them abolished in that decade by Lucca. Tithe, too, was out of the hands of lords by the mid-fourteenth century. Some of the fourteenth-century valley lords fled to the Lunigiana, as did the Antelminelli of Coreglia (a new creation of the time of Castruccio, the early fourteenth-century lord of Lucca); others, like some of the Dalli, were happy to transfer themselves to the city. They did not automatically lose their lands; but if, as I have proposed, aristocratic landowning in the valley was already relatively small-scale, this will not have left them with much.l3 At any rate, the tenurial involvement of the aristocracy in the valley must have disappeared not long after the end of their 37· For free communes in general, see de Stefani, ibid., pp. 74- 84. For Barghigiani in Lucca, see RCL 1532, 1812. For Gherardinghi statutes, see AAL *V64 (a.1272). For episcopal land, see Ch. J, n. 24. For Gherardinghi, see references in de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 103-s n., with AAL *V64. 13 De Stefani. 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 76-81, IOJ-17, rsr-68. (Lay lords in Sala lasted longer than he implies, however-see. for instance, AAL *E62, a.1350; and the bishop kept rights there for centuries-see Seghieri, 'Piazza e Sala'.) For parallels, see Jones, 'Leggenda della borghesia', pp. 291308. For the .oollapse of the aristocracy and its relationship to the silvo-pastoral economy, cf. also Angelini. Piwe touaM, p. 133; id., Piwi e chiest minori, pp. 71-3, although he attributes the development of the pastoral economy above all to the Blade Death, which is far too late. 12

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

143

signorial powers. It is likely that this was because the only effective wealth of the Garfagnana would henceforth be in its woodland and pastures, which tended not to be held privately; after the end of signorial rule by the valley aristocracy they would thus remain under the control of the rural communes, that is to say the local inhabitants. If this is so, then the growing economic differentiation of the valley was a direct cause of the end of aristocratic power there. It is certain, at any rate, that, from the late fourteenth century, the aristocracy retreated from the valley, now so totally economically different from the plain. An early fifteenth-century estimo for over a hundred owners in Pieve Fosciana indicates that outsiders, foren£es, owned almost no land there, and out of thirteen ecclesiastical owners only one, with a tiny property, was from outside the pieve; only three owners bad properties worth over 30 lire. In Castiglione in 1443-by then an embattled Lucchese stronghold, entirely surrounded by the lands of the Estensi-the range was larger, up to over £1,000, and one-third of the 18o-odd owners (although none of the large ones) were forenses; but even £1,000 was not so large a holding-the second largest, of £820, which is representative of the larger properties, consisted only of three tenant houses, seven fields, two meadows, and two vineyards; the only atypical feature in this example is the absence of chestnut forest, which nearly everyone else held. These societies were overwhelmingly composed of peasant proprietors, as indeed they still are. Aristocrats bad vanished, or were reduced to poverty. A late survivor of the de' Nobili family in Castiglione was in 1458 given patronage over the hospital of S. Pellegrino in Alpe, the owner of the largest property in 1443 (the de' Nobili themselves do not appear in the estimo), but the family soon departed to Lucca. Anselmo Micotti, who wrote a capable manuscript history of the valley in 1671, listed the survivors: the only remaining noble families were the de' Nobili of San Michele and a family in Pieve Fosciana claiming descent from the Gherardinghi, by now very poor. 'Ma che e stabile nel mondo? E che non divora il tempo?' wrote Micotti, with a certain sententiousness: the traditions of the Garfagnana aristocracy were, by now, virtually forgotten. 14 14

ASL Estimi 133 for Fosciana, 139 for Castiglione in 1443 (it also contains

a sixteenth-century copy of extracts from estimi of 1392, 1412, 1427, 1492);

144

The Garfagnana, 70o-12oo

This last, brief discussion is only based on secondary and unsystematic primary study. The social and economic history of the Garfagnana after 1250 or so remains to be written, from whatever can be gleaned from the largely untouched notarial registers of Lucca; its only certain feature is its total difference from anything that can be said for the early Middle Ages. The only period thereafter when the social structures of the valley are easily accessible without a great deal more primary research is the triennium 1522- 5, when Ludovico Ariosto was commissario in the upper and middle valley for the Este, for his 1 so-odd letters to the duke of Ferrara, and to Lucca and Florence, the other states ruling in the valley, have survived and are published. This material is so rich that it deserves a section to itself, and I will discuss it in the Conclusion (below, pp. 3C)(r-8o}; it only needs to be said here that it totally confirms the impression of a society dominated by small peasant owners, heavily pastoralist in its economic activity, that I have just delineated. But the justification for having discussed the late medieval development of the Garfagnana, no matter how brieBy, is that its retrospective illumination makes the picture I have drawn of the period up to the end of the twelfth century stand out better. The social history of the Garfagnana in the Middle Ages takes on two different forms, depending on whether one looks at it from the top down or from the bottom up. From the top down, the historical trajectory is a full cycle. We start with a valley dominated by local owners, small and medium, and we finish with them, too; indeed, from the fifteenth century, sniall owners were an even higher proportion of the Garfagnana population than they had been 700 years before. But the intervening period had seen the local supremacy first of the bishop of Lucca, and then of a number of aristocratic families, more or less (mostly less) rooted in the valley. The beginning of the cycle was caused by the fact that the· small and medium owners of the middle valley, and the large owners of the ' upper valley, were open to r 39, pp. 15, 22 for the two largest properties. For de' Nobili rights in S. Pellegrino, see Angelini, Pieve toscana, p. 129; Rafi"aelli, Descriziont della Garfagnana, pp. 309-16 (they still existed in his time). for l~ter nobles, see Micotti, Descriuione cronologica della Garfagnana, pp. 87-8, 166; Bertacchi, Descriziont istorica della Garfagnana, pp. 43 f., 81 f. For modem property distribution, see Bortoli, Garfagnana, pp. 36--7 and passim.

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

145

the influence of the city, and, in particular, the clientele network of the bishop (and probably the duke/count/marquis of Lucca, too, but this was not necessarily linked to cessions of land). The establishment of episcopal influence in the valley was the consequence of the political hegemony that Lucca had in its diocese, a hegemony that was probably characteristic of most cities in the Lombard-Carolingian period, reinforced by the new power produced by compulsory tithe from the late eighth century on: but this influence itself resulted in a considerable network of landownership, which the bishop and his dependent churches had aquired by 8so, and which would go further to crystallize local episcopal authority. The bishop was not, however, strong enough to be entirely dominant in Lucca, in particular against the marquis, and so, from the late ninth century onward, he ceded most of these powers to lay families, who established themselves on long-term leases all over the diocese, as the dominant aristocracy of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. I have argued that these aristocrats never fully localized themselves in the Garfagnana, with the exception of those dependent on the Obertenghi (later, Malaspina) marquises of the Lunigiana in the Garfagnana Lunense; that their landowning never became on its own dominant in the valley, and that, largely because of the spread of their powers across the whole of the Lucchesia, they never established fully-fledged signorie either. One might almost argue that aristocratic power was an optical illusion, a product of city orientated sources; but the fact that lords never established their local power as fully as they might is not so much because they were not locally influential, but above all because it was not in their interests to have the diocese break up, thus causing the loss of the diocese-wide powers that they had already acquired. The families of the Garfagnana Lunense, by contrast, operated in a different political world, which more easily permitted the establishment of signorial power, and this they did. (Interestingly, some of the families, notably the Gherardinghi, had a base in each of these two worlds, and behaved slightly differently in each.) ln the end, all these families lost their signorial rights. Lucca's victory over local signorie was doubtless facilitated by their weakness, and the involvement in the city of the lords concerned, although it should be noted that even in the Lunigiana it became increasingly

The Garfagnana, 70o-120o difficult for lesser signorie to continue to exist in the face of the extending territorial power of the marquis in the late thirteenth century onwards; everywhere in Tuscany, after 1250 or so, the processes of local territorialization of the last three centuries were being put into reverse. 15 But, in any case, after 1250 the hegemony of Lucca throughout the Garfagnana, even in the upper valley, became even greater, not permitting any rival political forces to survive; the aristocracy faded away, with barely any lands still left in their possession. By the time the Este came into the valley in December 1429, the political supremacy of the city over the valley peasantry was complete and unmediated, except by the rural communes run by the peasants themselves. Very little of this characterization is specific to the Garfagnana or even to the mountains; it is a description of the socio-political changes found everywhere in the diocese of Lucca, even those parts of the diocese that ended up under Pisa or Florence or Pistoia, with the substitution of the name of the city at the appropriate place. The rural owners of every part of t\le eighthand ninth-century diocese dealt with the bishop in the way the Garfagnini did. Similarly, the organization by the bishop of his local landowning in the ninth and tenth centuries was just like that in his lands everywhere else. Later on, the 'capitanei of the Garfagnana and the Versilia' were not only typical of the twelfth-century aristocratic families of the diocese that did not yet fully recognize the hegemony of Lucca, but actually defined those families. The only real difference between the Garfagnana and elsewhere is that the retreat of the tide of signorial powers in the valley in the late Middle Ages left, not a network of rich, profit-orientated private landowners, focused on the urban market and urban political life, as in the plain, but a myriad of peasant pastoralists, to whom all civic norms and values were culturally foreign. But it is at this point that we must acknowledge that the hegemony of the city, and the value of the history of the Garfagnana as a demonstration of the enduring hegemony of an urban-focused political network even at its extremities, is 1~

Nobili, 'Famiglie signorili di Lunigiana', pp. .263- 4. For the complexities of the revene territorialization of the late Middle Ages, see, however Chittolini, FDm~~~Zicmt dello st4to regiotu~le, pp. ix- xxix, 292-3 sz.

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

147

only a part of the local reality. The rest we must look at from below. From the standpoint of the inhabitants of the valley, looking upwards, so to speak, the cycle of political power that I described resolves itself into one element of total continuity and one element of radical discontinuity. The element of total continuity is in the small and medium landowning classes of the eighth century, which continued, one need not doubt, all the way across the period Sso-1250, when they are scarcely documented, into the late Middle Ages. In 1200, say, above all in the upper valley, they may have been subjected to rather more private lordship than at the beginning or at the end of the Middle Ages, but that is all. And I have already noted (pp. 48-50) that even the total reduction of owners to tenants in a village, which could happen, as in Campori, still left them potentially socially independent, under their own local elites. In this relative autonomy of the valley inhabitants, the Garfagnana is certainly uncharacteristic of the rest of the diocese, where private landownership, even if so fragmented as to leave some space for landowning peasants, and to give much space to local collective organization from the twelfth century on, was or became strong and remunerative i.e. oppressive. And this independence of the valley, even in the eighth and ninth centuries, is certainly a product of the fact that we are dealing with the mountains; landed estates were not only fragmented in the mountains, as they were in the plains, but they were a long way from the city. The element of discontinuity lay in the economic development of the valley. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Garfagnana was in economic terms merely a poorer version of the plain, with a less active land-market, less wheat, and more stock raising. It was barely integrated into the regional economy of the city, which, I would guess, covered little more than the plains of the diocese, down to and including Pisa. The hegemony of Lucca in that period was above all political and social, testimony to the survival of Roman political practice into the LombardCarolingian world. Conversely, at the low point of that hegemony, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the economic advances of the time laid the basis for an integration at a different level between city and mountains, based on pastoralism. A

The Garfagnana, 70t:r-1200 silvo-pastoral economic system came to dominate the valley by the late twelfth century. This was a product of the city-centred market economy, and thus simply constituted the local analogue to the specialization of the plain and its surrounding hills in cash crops such as olives and mulberries; but it brought with it a much more profound set of changes on the social and cultural levels. The economic integration of the Garfagnana with the cities- Pisa and Florence as well as Lucca-forced the Garfagnini into an alien world, based on chestnuts instead of grain, on communally owned pastures alongside individually owned land (and, indeed, flocks): the world of the mountain civilization of Braudel. The cities cont{olled this through their control over the commercial outlets of the system; it was the peasantry, however, who ran it. There was, in particular, no scope for the aristocracy or the Church to run it, once signorial control over the all-important, collectively owned woods and pastures was relaxed or abolished. It is here that the role of the rural commune was to become dominant, more or less as soon as it appeared in the twelfth century; like the castello vis-a-vis the signoria, the commune may not have been the product of the silvo-pastoral economy, but it was its most typical institution and its most effective focus. Thus it was, paradoxically, that the rising importance of the urban economy completed the retreat of the private political powers that most fully carried urban social and cultural (civic) values and· an urban political orientation into .the mountains. But the political victory of the city as an instittition was itself borne on the back of this economic dominance, for, as the private powers retreated, so the peasantry of the Garfagnana was left under full Lucchese control, unmediated by anyone in between. The evidence for the history of the medieval Garfagnana is only really generous in the period 75o-8so, and it is only then that we can see a living local society in operation, one that I have discussed here principally in Chapter 2. Thereafter, until the notarial registers begin, the material we have is fragmentary. It is enough for us to construct a game of shifting patterns, of geometrical imagery: a framework of interpretation. What was actually happening on the ground to make these processes work very largely escapes us, above all in the crucial eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the centuries when the Carolingian world

Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune

149

dissolved into the world of communes, when the local horizons of all Italian societies, no matter how small, became territorially defined, creating a complex web of local rights and powers that it would take the cities centuries to undo. But the establishment of such a framework, across a long arc of time, is important. It is necessary, so as to give us an interpretative perspective that will help us to make sense of the history of our second valley, the Casentino, in precisely these centuries; for the evidence from the Casentino is sufficiently rich to allow us to see what lies behind the framework, in all its complexity. At the end, I hope, not just the form of these changes will be clear, b~t the content as well.

PART II

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

6

Geography and Historical Ecology II

The history of the Garfagnana becomes very much harder to write from the early eleventh century onwards, as the quantity and quality of our documentation abruptly falls away. Just the opposite is true in the Casentino: its history is impenetrably hidden before 1000 or so, but then, thanks to the monastic archives of the valley, certain areas in it and certain aspects of its society become very clear indeed, and continue to be so without a break thereafter. I have already indicated (p. 11) why the documents for the Casentino should only begin then; there is little point in speculating about the earlier history of the valley, as there is such a very limited amount we can say about it. The year 1000 will, in this section of the book, serve as a sort of baseline; the patterns that can be found then will be taken as my starting-point. Similarly, to keep this book to a manageable size, I will stop at 1 100 or so, pursuing my analysis further into the twelfth century only for certain topics. But this choice in itself implies a contrast to my previous section: whereas the history of the Garfagnana in the early Middle Ages is inescapably one of change across time, the eleventh-century Casentino can be taken as a single period, in many respects (not, of course, all) a homogeneous slice through time. And any comparisons between the two valleys will of course have to reckon with the fact that the early medieval evidence for the two is, in large part, not contemporary but consecutive. Whereas the small and medium owners of the Garfagnana gave to the Church in the eighth and early ninth centuries, those of the Casentino preferred the eleventh and early twelfth. The nature of the gifts in the latter was, as a result, in some ways different. But they were very extensive: they survive in their hundreds, and detailed discussions of local society and the processes of gift-giving are

154

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

possible as a result, discussions which illuminate the Garfagnana, too. I listed the range of documentary sources for the valley in the introduction; their distribution is best seen in a table of the numbers of documents mentioning land in the Casentino by decade. The temporal distribution of this evidence is clearly uneven; what this means will be discussed in Chapter 7. It is also rather unevenly distributed geographically; we can say a great deal about some zones inside the Casentino, and almost nothing about others (see Maps 7-9, for names). The bestdocumented area by far is the Archiano valley, the tributary of the Amo that can be followed up from Bibbiena, the modem centre of the Casentino and its major town, to Prataglia and Camaldoli, the monasteries that produced most of our texts (Prataglia was given to Camaldoli in the mid-twelfth century and its archive came with it; RC includes both). In particular, over half the RC doCuments for the Casentino, nearly 280 charters, deal with the eight villages inside a 1. 5 km radius of the pieve of S. Maria di Partina, halfway up the Archiano-Freggina, Rode, Ventrina, Sexta, Monte, Partina, Contra and Soci- which I shall henceforth often call the 'middle Archiano', or the 'Partina area'. The rest of the Archiano and the tributaries on either side of it, the Sova and Corsolone, furnish another I 50 or so, almost all from Prataglia/Camaldoli. The area downstream from Bibbiena, the lower Casentino, has about the same number, mostly from villages close to the Amo; about half of these, particularly at the southern end, are from the archives of churches in the city of Arezzo. Across the Arno from Bibbiena, for the territory of the pieve of Buiano, there survive nearly sixty documents, mostly from the monastery of Strumi; finally, only fifty or so texts deal with the upper two-fifths of the valley, the Casentino Fiesolano above modem Poppi, again almost all from Strumi.l This coverage is obviously very variable, and inside these broad groups it is even more so; it is also very roughly divided into spheres of ecclesiastical influence, the north and west going to Strumi, the north-east to Camaldoli and Prataglia, and the For the sources, see above, pp. x- xi. The local figures sum to more than my totals, for some documents list lands in more than one zone. 1

Documents for the early medieval Casentino

Archives

Dates

Total 1001- 101 I- 102 1- 1031- IO..p- 1051- lo61- 1071- 1081- 10919-IO

cc.

10

20

30

40

so

6o

70

So

90

Total (uor- (nsx-

IIOO

II C.

so)

1200)

RC (Regesto di Camaldol1)

4

21

30

so

77

61

32

32

43

88

34

468

(240)

(97)

Strumi (plus 3 does. from Fiesole) Arezzo churches

2

2

3

9

9

4

3

9

s

28

14

86

(47)

(17)

10

I

20

17

17

4

I

7

8

9

4

88

TOTAL

16

24

52

7S

IOJ

69

]6

47

s6

125

52

643

•

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century far south to the Aretine churches--not a surprising division, given the location of the churches concerned, but covering, as we shall see, a significant variety of patronage networks. In one respect, none the less, it appears to be reliable, and it is important: the charters as we have them · do genuinely seem to represent the full extent ·of the interest of the churches who kept them. The archives of the valley monasteries, in particular, seem from their internal coherence to be unusually complete: when documents refer to preceding texts, we usually have the text referred to, either as an original or, in the case of some Camaldoli documents, in the abbreviated form recorded in later registers. Most gifts to the monasteries seem to have been documented, and a high proportion of these texts survive: good enough, when speaking about monastic affairs, to argue from silence with some confidence.2 Most of our 650 documents are gifts or sales to the Church (the two are not easy to tell apart, for many gifts involved a counter-gift from the Church, which could be sizeable), though there are over a hundred private transactions between laymen, mostly from the first half of the century; there are only about a hundred leases (almost all from churches to cultivators}, a rather smaller proportion than in the Garfagnananot many ecclesiastical tenants in the Casentino had written leases at all. Most of these documents are bare and formulaic, and often refer to very small pieces of land indeed; at first sight it often seems difficult to extrapolate patterns of any historical significance from them. But the middle Archiano, at least, is richly documented, and we can regard ourselves as well-informed about many aspects of its society; perhaps even as much as we are about the Poggialvento area in the central Chianti, which Elio Conti studied, and incomparably better than anywhere else in eleventh-century Tuscany outside, perhaps, one or two villages For an account of the history of the Camaldoli archive and its various registers, see RC iv, pp. vii-xxvi. The thirteenth-century register lists about half the surviving documents (another, from 1698; lists them all). Sales or gifts listed in the earlier register but not surviving are very often duplicated by surviving repromissiones (promises by principals to keep the terms of the agreement)--evidently some 'unnecessary' documents were thrown away after registration. The history of the Strumi archive is far less stable, and there has been more opportunity for loss, but there is a very close match between leases of monastic land and preceding alienations to the monastery, which indicates that both very largely survive. 2

•

Geography and Historical Ecology II

157

on the Lucca plain. Here, we can look at a local society, at life on the small scale, and get something useful out of it. And Conti's pioneering study will be a parallel to which I will often turn in what follows. 3 The Casentino, like the Garfagnana, extends not so much away from the lowlands of Tuscany as alongside them; in both cases their western flanks are boundaries between the basin of the mountain valley itself and the lowlands, the Arno just above Florence and the coastal plain north of Viareggio respectively. This has not stopped routes going through the Garfagnana from Lucca, even Rome, over to Lombardy; but it has made the Casentino something of a backwater. There is no reason for a Florentine to climb up from Pontassieve to Consuma and down into the valley, except as a way into the valley itself; there are more direct passes into the Romagna, and to reach Arezzo one does not need to cross passes at all. At best, the Casentino is the quickest (not the only) way to get from Arezzo to Forli or Ravenna, across the Passo dei Mandrioli above Badia Prataglia: not a major route either in medieval times or today. The result is that the valley appears now to be more remote than it is-Bibbiena, with s,ooo inhabitants, only 33 km from Arezzo and under 6o from Aorence, enjoys more social autonomy and self-identity than many Tuscan towns five times its size. But it must be seen that the Casentino is and always has been quite accessible f
The Casentino in the Eleventh Century eastern side of the valley have often been closely linked across the Appennine watershed to Bagno di Romagna and Verghereto. The Guidi counts could rule both in the upper Ca5entino and in the Montagna Forlivese for four centuries without any recorded logistic difficulty. The rock of the valley is mostly marls and days, the slopes seldom as abrupt as in the Garfagnana: the predominant land-use seems, away from the fertile valley-bottoms, to be woodland some 40 per cent of the whole land area since the 1830s, and probably more in the late Middle Ages. In actual fact, however, this is rather less than the remarkable percentage of 64 per cent for the modem Garfagnana; the Casentino has very much more cultivable land in it. 4 The Garfagnana in its human geography can be thought of as a continuous double line of villages, safely above the river Serchio on each of its banks; side-valleys are rarely significant except as routes to pasture-land. The Casentino is more complex than that. Its core is a single wideish basin, extending from Stia to Bibbieoa, with the Amo mooing through it; wide at the mouth and including the valley of the Archiano as well, as far as Partina; narrower in the upper reaches, and distinctly colder in winter. But the side-valleys are important too, both those, like the Solano and Archiano, that run into this basin, and those, like the Corsolone or the Soliggine, that give onto the Amo below Bibbiena. They have long carried their full weight of the valley's population, only losing this position since the Second World War-the largest falls in population in the Casentino since 1951 have been in the side-valleys, often in favour of centres in the valley-bottom like Bibbiena and Soci; a fatal combination of modem communications and the decline in Lavoratti, Casentino, gives the general picture, with IGM, Carta geologica tfltalia, foglio 107. For the trees, Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario', pp. 59-66. For the Garfagnana contrast, see Bortoli, Garfagnana, pp. 177--94· Kurze, 'Nobilta toscana e nobilta aretina', pp. 263-4, stresses, but in my view overstates, the early political importance of the Passo dei Mandrioli. Apart from the Guidi (see below, pp. 197-9), only one lay owner in the eleventh-<entury Casentino owned lands across the pass (RC 232, 235). lt was a trade route, though, on a small scale: cf. below, p. 272. For later Appennine traffic, see Cherubini, Comunita dtlr Appennino, pp. 67-'79; id., 'Paesaggio agrario', pp.76-8I. 4

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pastoral farming. s This succession of side-valleys gives continuity to the whole upper reach of the Arno above Arezzo. The 'Casentino' is, as a consequence, less clearly delineated than the Garfagnana, and nor has it had any sharply defined historical identity: where to draw its lower boundary is almost arbitrary. The modern Casentino is variously described as just the Bibbiena basin, or the whole Arno valley above Arezzo, or some area in between. I have taken my researches downstream to the line of the Salutio valley, about 10 km south ofBibbiena, partly because it is about there that the quality of the land begins to improve, to a level that only the most favoured parts of the Casentino proper achieve, with vines and olives stretching up all the hill slopes as they do above Arezzo or Florence; partly because it is roughly at this point that the documentation changes, becoming associated more and more closely with the churches of the city of Arezzo and with the urban and urban-oriented 'capitaneal' aristocracy of the precommunal and communal periods. (As we shall see, however, the latter were by no means absent in our area.) The Casentino, like the Garfagnana, can conveniently be divided into three: an upper section above Strumi, a middle section above Bibbiena, and a lower section between Bibbiena and Vogognano. The division between the middle and upper valleys corresponds with the diocesan boundary between Arezzo and Fiesole, for the diocese of Fiesole, like that of Luni, extended over the watershed and some way down the valley; a further parallel with our other area of study is that in the early Middle Ages it was only this upper portion, the Casentino Fiesolano, that was referred to as Casentino. The boundary lay right across the middle of the main valley basin, with no geographical logic to it at all, but it was felt, in some way, to have a certain sociological reality; and, although the upper valley covers some 40 per cent of the Casentino as I have defined it, it gives us less than 10 per cent of our documents (see below, pp. 202- 3). The lower valley is more obviously geographically separate, for the Arno valley below Bibbiena becomes abruptly narrower, sometimes almost a gorge, and the side-valleys become more s Compare Lavoratti, Casentinc, pp. generate iii.9, pp. 73- 84.

114- 21,

with ISTAT,

H°

Censimento

I6o

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

important as a result. None of the three had real social and political foci in our period, with the probable exception of Bibbiena, then as now the centre of .the valley; we only hear about the p:ievi, nine in all, as points of reference. They were rarely important settlements in their own right, however. The context and significance of this we will see at the end of the chapter. Two of the tributaries of the Arno, the Archiano and the Corsolone, carry between them over half our documentation, and deserve a slightly closer description (see Map 8). The Archiano valley begins with a rich arable plain around Soci, with low hills on either side of it (Bibbiena is on one of these), slowly increasing in height; the valley itself narrows abruptly at Partina and cultivation soon stops; the river divides a couple of kilometres further up, with branches leading to Camaldoli and Prataglia respectively, in what is now a vast protected coniferous forest. The Corsolone valley starts at the bottom with a small group of quiet villages in a mixed area of forest and vineyards, below Bibbiena to the east, then abruptly curves into a gorge; when it widens out at the top, one comes out into what is now one of the largest areas of open pasture remaining in the whole valley, focused on Biforco and Corezzo (most of the rest of the pastoral area is at the very top of the Casentino, above Montemignaio and Stia). These valleys will constantly recur in what follows. The Partina area will be more precisely characterized later (pp. 238-40). Let us now survey what can be said about the exploitation of the land in our valley, along lines we have already explored for the Garfagnana. Out of all historical periods, it is the late medieval Casentino that comes alive most clearly, in the work ofPhilip Jones on the Camaldoli estates, and, more recently, the agrarian researches of Giovanni Cherubini. 6 Its silvo-pastoral character was then, and later, almost as heavily emphasized as that of the Lucchese valley. Once again, this is far less true of the early Middle Ages. Not that it is easy to build up a picture .o f the agrarian continuum of the eleventh century. There are hundreds of references to land-parcels in our documents, but Jones, 'Camaldoli'; Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. uz-.p.; id., 'Moggiona 1382'; id., 'Paesa.ggio agrario'. 6

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only a small percentage give any impression of what was cultivated on them-mostly, land is just terra, sown with grain as likely as not, but how often, and with what grain, we can rarely tell; and, although we have a hundred-odd leases, only a dozen mention rents in anything other than money. Some things can none the less be said. As with the Garfagnana, no oil is recorded in the valley; it barely appears even in formulae. The few references to grain-crops mention wheat, but invariably together, and on equal terms, with spelt (only once is rye, the major Garfagnana crop, mentioned); the grain grown in the valley in general could well have reflected this balance. There was, however, plenty of wine it figures prominently in formulae (properties tend to be referred to generically as terra cum casa et vinea and the like), and vineyards are explicitly referred to some fifty times. The references bunch on the Archiano plain and the hills overlooking it, and at Gello in a sheltered corner of the middle Corsolone, and thus seem to respect some sort of geographical logic; some were fenced or walled (in clausura), or held in demesne, hinting already at specialization. (This was not entirely unreasonable for a mountain valley; late medieval Casentinese wine was regarded as of high quality.) 7 So far, then, this is more or less as expected, and very similar to the Garfagnana. In the Casentino, however, one important feature is a relatively large number of references to wood. There was always forest in both valleys, of course; but in the Garfagnana there is barely any reference to it before the late twelfth century. Not so here. There are about sixty citations in our documents of individual blocs of private woodland, forestum, silva, or terra inculta et boscaria, with a distribution neatly contrasting with that for vines-none for Soci, for instance, but a lot for the villages above Partina and for Corezzo. There were probably more woods than today-there was certainly woodland in the lower 7

For grain, see RC 40, so-r, 57. 402; ACA SF 22 (3.992), 64 (a. IOII), 154 (a. IOJO); ASF Passerini Apr. 1085. For vineyards in c/ausura, see RC 102, 108, 148, 292, 334 (AC ii.Ili; Pasqui 196); in demesne, see also RC 224, 433 (AC ii.164); ACA Cap. 135 (a.1046; ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373). For late medieval wine, see Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario', pp. 61 ( Olives are actually rarely referred to in the central Tuscan hills, either, before the late twelfth century: see Conti, Formazione i, p. 146 n.; Cammarosano, Berardenghi, p. 33--specialist olivetl may as yet have been restricted to the northern Tuscan plains and south-facing hill-slopes.

162

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century.

Archiano plain, around the river, for example, an area that is today cleared; and, conversely, there are few instances of land cultivated then that are not now, in strong contrast to Conti's Poggialvento, an agricultural area in the eleventh century now turned to woods. By all appearances, if one went up most of tae bills above the Archiano, one simply came into trees. And Prataglia and Camaldoli were both founded in the middle of thick forest; ther~fter, nearly all the woodland in the mountains, mostly episcopal demesne, came slowly into monastic possession across the century (reserving, in at least one case, hunting rights to the bishop).s The isolation of the forest was a major attraction for the monks, of course, especially for Romualdo, whose hermitage was the core of the Camaldoli monastic complex; charters wax lyrical about the feri montes, and neither monastery has ever been in any sense a significant centre of land clearance and reclamation, the supposed trait of early medieval monasticism. But there is in some parts of the Casentino some hint of specialization in types of tree: most ·of the numerous references to woodland in Monte and V entrina, the highest villages in the Partina area, are to oak-forest, querceto and cerreto; by contrast, in the western valleys of the pieve of Socana in the lower Casentino, above Castel Focognano, we almost always find chestnut-forest. This difference between oak and chestnut survives as a rough contrast between the productive deciduous forests of the east and the west of the valley; that it can already be seen in the eleventh century may be our frrst sign that silviculture was a recognized part of the Casentino economy, even if most woodland was doubtless still regarded as a wilderness resource. 9 It is the pastoral economy that is badly documented in the Casentino in the eleventh century. There were a few pigs, not ,surprising with so much oak-wood, but the numbers of references Conti, Formazione i, pp. 145-7. For woodland, see RC 473, su- s. Some of the medieval pastures in the valley are now tree plantations: see, for instance, p. 165. For woods used for hunting, see RC 471 (Pasqui 256); Pasqui 474, p. 14S· 11 For feri montes, see RC 86 (AC ii. p. 9; Pasqui 127). For oak-wood, see RC 102, 122. 144. 183, 2S I , 2S9, 263, 269, 51?-20, 522, 572, 579, 592, S98; ACA Strumi 2 (Apr. 1029). For chestnut-woods, see RC 120, 137-8, z8o (AC ii.78), 484, 579; ACA SF 163-4 (a.103 1). For silviculture in the Val di Sieve, see ASF S. Trinici 1129. 8

Geography and Historical Ecology ll are still low-the occasional citation of shoulders of pork as oblia (the local term for exenia, extra recognitive gifts) in Strumi leases, and one reference to a pig-rent commuted to money in a Corezzo lease of 1016. Sheep appear in the same text, but otherwise only indirectly- a rent in cheese from Lamiano above Buiano (a large quantity, thirty whole cheeses), and, most unusually, a penal sanction in wool from Quorle nearby. There were of course many more animals than this in the valley; there must always have been a mixed agro-pastoral economy there. Animals appear in formulae, and flocks and herds are explicitly attested at or near Vallombrosa just over the Pratomagno watershed. But they do not leave anything of the impression in the evidence that sheep above all, and to a lesser extent cows, would leave in another three centuries or so. Nor were there many pastures alienated in our texts: only half a dozen before uoo. One might argue that the upper valley, the core of late medieval pastoralism, is badly documented in our period; but Corezzo, and the lands closest to the Camaldoli forest, almost as important pastorally in later years, are certainly well attested. One might also argue that pasture is not often private land, but the same is true for forest; moreover, the bishop's mountains are always described as woods, not pasture; and communal land, which is sometimes documented, seems usually to have been cultivated. Even the land at Metaleto, at nearly 900 metres on the fringe of the Camaldoli forest, a major late medieval pasture area-it is now a thick fir plantation- was, when given away in small parcels around 1100, usually described as arable land; only later in the twelfth century was it automatically characterized as pasture, prato. Had we more leases with rent in kind, as we have for the eighth- and ninth-century Garfagnana, we might have more evidence for animals; but even that would be unlikely to change the fact that, on the face of it, the pastoral economy of the eleventh-century Casentino was rather less developed than the silvan one.IO 10 For animals, see RC 40, 33 I (AC ii. Io8); ASF S. Trinici Apr. 1086, Jan. 1099. I lOO; Andrea ofStrumi, Vita Iohannis Guallmti, 20, 37. 52- S, ss (MGH, xxx. 2, pp. 1085, 1088, 1091- 2). For pastures, see RC 53, 197, 244, 286, 492, 6oo. For Metaleto arable, see RC 350, 633, 658, 685, 687; pasture, see 659, 804, 901, 1071, I JOI, 1328. C£ nearby Asqua, silva in RC 1052, 1055, but pasture in the late Middle Ages: Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 180 f.; RC iv, p. xvi

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century The contrast with the late Middle Ages ·is as striking as in the Garfagnana, and is rather clearer, thanks above all to the works of Cherubini. There was certainly less dependence on the silvo-pastoral economy in the Aretine valley; the extensive Camaldoli records are largely concerned with .grain and wine, always dominant in the lands. between Poppi, Bibbiena, and Soci. But chestnuts were a major feature of the economy, above all in the west and south, in the Teggina and Rassina valleys, complete with famous local varieties; Casentino wood was important exchange resource, much of it consciously organized by Camaldoli, and was a basis for much of the local artisanate; and Casentino herdsmen ran the transhumance routes to the Maremma Grossetana, the south Tuscan coast, on almost the same scale as those from the Garfagnana did further north. Animals had always been kept, but now they were often kept for outsiders too, and flocks of sheep and herds of cows could be very large, above all those of the Guidi and the mountain monasteries. Animals appear everywhere in the texts, and in the 1427 Catasto, in many high mountain villages, they were of greater value than the land itself.ll In this picture, the major difference from the eleventh century lies in the importance of animals. The forest is exploited in ways that can already be seen faintly in eleventh-century texts; but there is no hint that the pastor.al economy was organized to anything approaching this extent. Cherubini tends to regard transhumance as immemorial, Roman at least, and there is some evidence of a fragmentary continuity through the early medieval period in the Garfagnana (p. 25). But, as we saw there, the mere existence of routes does not point to a whole economic system; and the fact is that transhumance has not yet been documented for the Casentino before the late fourteenth century, and even substantial numbers of animals are not attested before the mid-thirteenth. In the Garfagnana, transhumance as a system was under way by I I 50, and fully established by the thirteenth century; not so here. But we do have a little more evidence for the crucial period of change-over in the Casentino than we do in the Garfagnana. What follows is a rough characterization of the process.

an

]ones, 'Camaldoli', passim; Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario\ pp. 58-'78; id., Comunit4 dell' Appennino, pp. 173-7 for the Catasto. 11

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The Casentino in the eleventh century was already two centuries ahead of our agrarian evidence from the Garfagnana, and it shows: in the beginnings of some specialization in types of tree, and the slow localization of specialist vineyards in favourable areas. There is even a little land clearance, as there was in the eleventh-century Lucchesia as well: an early lease from S. Fiora di Arezzo for land near its Casentino centre at Sarna, from 992, requires a tenant to build a house on his plot and ad cultum reducere; and two episcopal confirmations to Prataglia, from 1008 and 1065, show steady, if probably small-scale, forest clearance for arable land immediately south of the monastery. Economic advance, once again, was not going to come from clearing mountain-land; but these examples do show some movement.l2 The presence of mills shows it too. In the eleventh-century Casentino, there were already a striking number of them. Before I I2 5, nine are mentioned on a single 5 km stretch of the Archiano, five on the Arno south of Bibbiena, and one on the Soliggine. In the rest of the twelfth century there are another eight in the Camaldoli documents, including one at Frassineta, at the very top of the Corsolone valley, and the monks in I 1 54 were given imperial permission to build an aqueduct to improve the water supply to their mills.l3 This is an impressive array for a single mountain valley, or, to be more precise, one small part of a mountain valley. It is made more so by the considerable insecurity of the river-banks on which they were put. The woods of the lower Archiano probably indicate an area consistently liable to flooding; it is an area notably devoid of documentation, unlike the middle valley, and may well have been little settled. 12

ACA SF 22 (a. 992); RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92), 334 (AC ii. tu; Pasqui 196). Cf. the clearance by the bishop of Arezzo in Bagno di Romagna as early as 872: Pasqui 41. la For Archiano mills before z125, see RC 19, so, 145, t6o, 204, 225, 435, 510, 68o, 787-8, 801-2, 861. For others, and later references, see ACA SF 197 (a.1034); RC 30, 270 (AC ii.75; Pasqui 178), 761, 798, 905 , 908, 1035, 1112 (MGH, Dip. Friderici I 90, a.1154), 1144, II9J, 1270, 1298. The general conspectus by Marc Bloch, 'Moulin a eau', has still not been superseded. The basic introduction for northern Italy is now Chiappa Mauri, 'Mulini ad acqua', esp. pp. 1- 38. For Tuscany, see Osheim, Italian Lordship, pp. 90-3; Muendel, 'Mills in the Florentine Countryside'; Wickham, ' Valdinievole'; the g_Teatest concentrations were on the northern plains, against the edge of the hills.

166

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

This instability is emphasized further by the fact that below Partina, in the Soci plain, although there are quite a number of eleventh-century instances of cultivated land touching the Archiano itself, the great bulk of the place-names used to describe them, including those for the mills, are lost. This is rare in the Casentino; as we shall see, such names tend to survive in most places. Here, the movement of the river must have destroyed them. Mills indeed must have been in effect the first settlements (even now there are very few) on the most recent alluvial terraces of the Archiano valley, which were only recently established in the eleventh century, if indeed they were yet fully stabilized. The foundation and renewal of these buildings must have been even then visibly going to be a continuous obligation.l4 Such a concern for mills is a very obvious sign of economic development. The same may be said of the markets at Soci (in existence by 1090) and Bibbiena (in existence by 1 149), the former of which may have been deliberately set up to exploit mercantile opportunities. So may be the increasing documentation of smiths in the valley, which is perhaps even an indication that its iron deposits were beginning to be exploited, although faber can simply mean 'artisan', and the iron itself is only documented from the fourteenth century .15 Otherwise, it might be more accurate to speak of economic activity, rather than development. The 'land-market', for example, which was 14 For lost toponyms on the Archiano, see RC 15, 19, 5o-1, 112, 145, 100, 228, 387, 416, 763, 8os, 862, 937, for Balina, Campo Serbcli, Campo Vezanisi, Putidella. On the Arno, almost all references to the river as a property boundary come from the narrows below Bibbiena, where the banks slope up and the Amo cannot move. Upstream, however, in the broad plain below Poppi, it certainly could move; so, for example, ASP S. Trinita Nov. 1094 (ed. Lami, Delici~ truditorum iii, pp. 146-7), for a dead arm of the river below Stromi. In the thirteenth century, land here was often referred to as alri.s()la and with similar phrases (thanks to Giovanni Cherubini for showing me unpublished work on this subject). For alluvial terraces, see Galligani, 'Paleosuoli e terraz:ri fluviali'; cf. comments in Stoddart, 'Archaeological Survey', pp. 509, 522. 15 For markets, see RC 559-60, 7os, to6J. For Soci, see below, p. 273· For smiths, see RC IIJ, 227, 280 (AC ii.78), 358, 533. 001, 652; ASF S. Trinita, Jan. 1038, Apr. 1092; cf. Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 138-9 for iron. Smiths, in a documentation dominated by land transactions, naturally only appear as tenants, small owners, and witnesses. See also ACA SF oo (a. 1011) for a marmoraio (stone-cutter) acting as a witness; RC .286 fOr a sartc (tailor) owning an estate.

Geography and Historical Ecology II clearly attested in most of the Casentino (much as in Conti's Poggialvento), through the transference of often minute landparcels between laymen on an enormous scale, does not in my view tell us much about economic rationalization (below, pp. 23 1-3); but the constant movement ofland certainly contrasts with the somnolence of the Garfagnana, where tenant-units remained intact, as far as we can see, throughout the period. This sense of dynamism is not weakened, either, by the fact that money was very rarely used for these transactions until the late eleventh century at the very earliest, and was not dominant even in the twelfth (it seems to have only been common for rents); the fact is that Arezzo and its territory were alike dependent on coins from outside, largely from Lucca, normally the only Tuscan mint, and they were only easily available from the end of the century .16 But I doubt that the presence or absence of money had much effect on rural (as against urban) transactions; much of rural economic life has hardly been dependent on the physical presence of coin until very recendy. It is in this context of a relatively open economy that we should understand the rise of pastoralism. Not that this rise was fast. The prati of Metaleto are almost the first indicator; and twelfth-century material is in general miserly with references. In 1 160, or thereabouts, Prataglia was troubled with systematic attacks from Rolandino and his son Gibello, hostile milites, probably from an old local family of petty notables. The list of their misdeeds will be looked at in full later (pp. 326-7); it For rents, see Ch. 8, nn. 7, 9, 10-landlords would, of course, have been the first to need money. Sales were usually for money-values expressed in mobilia or argento et mobilia. The remarkably standardized 'prices' for sales (20s., 30s. , lOOs.) must largely derive from the fact that the real transaction was in movables-cf. Conti, Formazione i, pp. 105 f.; Wickham, Societa degll Appennini, pp. 114 n., 123 n. Greater variability begins only when money is explicitly cited, from the 108os. Pledges are often for movables, with repayment in money: RC 181 (AC ii.37), 288, 4o6; it is possible that the repayment was thought of as belonging to the same category as rent. References to money in the valley increase sharply in 1077 (RC 416). The exactness of the date is due to the notarial practice of Ddebrando notarlus, henceforth writer of most of the RC documents for four decades; none the less, c.Io8o is about right for the city of Arezzo, from the texts I have seen, and thus probably for the Casentino as well. Explicit references to Lucchese denarii, or ruczi, before 1077= RC 288, 365, 411 (AC ii.152)-but is hlango in 355 therefore some other currency? Cf. Cammarosano, Berardenghi, pp. 335-9 for parallels and for ruzii. !6

168

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

included attacks on many of Prataglia's estates and a full-scale siege ofFrassineta, one of the monastery's villages. The inhabitants of the latter did not dare to go to till the fields or to the woods; they were robbed of tools on the way, and of flour when they went to the mill. The invaders burnt houses and the mill, and took ten oxen. At Prataglia they burnt a hay-barn and an ox-stall; at Ventrina they burnt fifteen houses, as well as taking ten oxen and eighteen pigs, destroying wheat and vineyards, and pouring away over 2,000 litres of wine. Frassineta and Prataglia would soon be core pastoral territories, but what we see here is a mixed economy, clearly orientated towards agriculture. Ten oxen is not that large a haul from a thriving village whose inhabitants are all hiding; and there are no sheep at all. Fifty years later, in 1216, we have another account of the small-scale doings in the valley, in a series of very detailed testimonies given to an inquest on Camaldoli's independence from the bishop of Arezzo. Here, the evidence shows more animals; but once again, they are cattle. The Guidi took all the cows that Camaldoli had in alpibus during a dispute with the monastery, and it took a complex negotiation with the bishop to get them back. The men of Marciano went on raiding parties to the Romagna and took · over thirty Camaldoli cattle, before the bishop forced their return. The cattle-raid seems by 1216 to be established as a major weapon in local disputes. The Guidi used it with some enthusiasm for over a century.l? The thirteenth century is the first to show any signs of the pastoral economy we might expect in the valley. A couple of decades after the Camaldoli inquest, references pick up. One of the Guidi left 4,600 sheep and goats in a will of 1239. Fulling.;.mills begin to appear in Strumi documents. By the 126os Prataglia and the episcopate both had large flocks, although even then the Camaldoli archives are not very explicit on the subject until the fourteenth century and later. It is certainly true that the sort of 17

For herdsmen and animals; see· RC 1018, 1164; cf. Pasqui 474, p. 145· For Rolandino (Orlandino in the text), see RC 1193; for the Guidi and the Marcianesi, see Pasqui 474, pp. 139, 144-6; cf. Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario', pp. 68-g. The actual date of the Guidi raid was probably 1213, as two letters of Innocent 10 show: AC iv.198, and p. 231. The Guidi also taunted the monks by parading players (histriones) and whores (mulierculae) in front of the monastic gates. A long way to come for a bit of fun!

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evidence we have, above all land transactions, tends to under-state the pastoral element in an economy; but even so, it is from such documents that late medieval pastoralism is attested. I conclude that it is only in the thirteenth century that pastoral specialization in the Casentino began to take off. We have seen some signs of economic movement in the eleventh-century valley, principally directed towards silviculture and, indeed, agriculture. This early 'croissance' will certainly have facilitated the slow move towards animals which began a century later. But pastoralism was in fact initially, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, associated with cattle, a result, I would guess, above all of a concern to provide meat and leather for Arezzo, and perhaps for Florence. It may have been cattle that first opened up the transhumance routes to the coast. The late development of a sheep economy by contrast with that in the Garfagnana is probably the result of two factors: the greater accessibility of the Garfagnana from the coast, making transhumance easier; and the more developed economies of Lucca and Pisa, the main outlets of that valley, by comparison with Arezzo, which, although a major political centre for its contado, was never a productive centre on the scale of the others. Florence, too, was close to the Casentino; but that city, although regionally dominant as a textile centre by the end of the thirteenth century, was not yet ahead of Pisa at the end of the twelfth, and was as yet content to take wool from the Garfagnana when it bought locally. There was no stimulus to push the Casentino, so much further than other Tuscan valleys from adequate winter pastures, into keeping sheep (nor, indeed, into its own small-scale commercial textile production) until well into the thirteenth century. 18 For the thirteenth-century Casentino, see Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze i, p. II 57; Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 18o-2; Cherubini, Comunita dell' Appennino, p. 51 n., and pers. comm. for Strumi fulling-rnills (the earliest documented in the valley are for 1163-MGH, Dip. Friderici l 406); Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario', pp. 78-9 for textiles. For textiles and the regional economy, the historian has to reconstruct a picture from works that only glance at it: Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze i, pp. 1166-?0, I 178- Ss; id., Forschungen i, pp. [ s.z7; Doren, Wollentuchindustrie, pp. I 3-37, 59-61; Hoshino, Arte del/a lano, pp. 38-41, 66-7; and, more directly, Herlihy, Pisa, pp. 134--{)1, who stresses the dominance ofleather-working over cloth before the mid-thirteenth century (an argument important for the balance between cattle and sheep in the pastoral 18

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Exactly what impact the developing clothing industries of Pisa and Florence actually had on local economic patterns is far from dear. There is no point in looking at the expansion of any of the specialist economies in the countryside without investigating their possible outlets, and not enough work has been done on their interrelationship. The speculative model that I have set out is only designed to fit what is currently known. It would be instructive to pursue the whole question of the circumstances in which there appeared an integrated region~ economy, such as is' generally reckoned to exist, at least in some form, by the fifteenth century; of the circumstances, indeed, in which it was possible. But the late medieval prosperity of the by now largely silvo-pastoral Casentino was a spin-off of such an economy; the remarkable sophistication and scale of capillary commercial activity in the Casentino and neighbouring valleys in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that Cherubini brings out so well, existed, not despite the silvo-pastoral dominance in the area, but because of it. 19 To conclude, let us look at settlement geography, and at the institutional framework in which it was inextricably embedded. I have already said that the upper 40 per cent of the valley, in this period the only area as yet known as the Casentino, was part of the diocese of Fiesole, in secular terms the county of Florence and Fiesole; the rest was in the diocese and county of Arezzo. The boundary was clearly defined; two charters mention it explicitly. What differentiated this valley from the Garfagnana was the importance of more local divisions, which were firmly economy); ]ones, 'Storia economica', pp. 1736-8; de la Ronciere, Florence. Centre economique regional, pp. 78o-833, II29-56, not discussing the impact of the city on the regional economy, but a base for a future understanding of fourteenth-century regional exchange; Pint9, Toscana, pp. 14<>-55, 166-204, now the basic survey of the growth of regional specialisations in food . production, c. 13oo-1 500. 19 Malanima, 'Origini di un'economia regionale', a stimulating summary article, is the only work known to me (thanks to the kindness ofTrevor Dean) that confronts the problem of when a Tuscan economic region formed, and why it focused on Aorence. For the general issue of pastoralism and exchange, cf. Wickham, 'Pastoralism and Underdevelopment'. For some parallels, see Abel, Deutuhen Landwirtshaft, pp. 96-100, 113-16; Dyer, Wanviclcshire Farming. For Appennine commerce, see Cherubini, as cited in n. •·

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based on pievi. In this, in fact, the valley was entirely typical of the whole eastern part of Tuscany, Arezzo, Florence, and Fiesole above all. Nearly every charter from the eleventh century that listed individual localities named the pieve in which each was placed; each pieve indeed apparently had an exact boundary, which was generally recognized. This greatly helps the modem scholar to locate place-names, of course, but one doubts that this is the reason why the pieve was included with such regularity. Not surprisingly, it has often been proposed that the pieve here had a secular function as well, presumably judicial-administrative in some sense. The term usually used for the pieve as a geographical unit is territorium, but iudicaria is common too, and the latter has an obvious judicial flavour (it is a word also sometimes used for county). If the pieve was a judicialadministrative unit, it would also explain why private castelli, when they appeared, would be less often ascribed to given pievi (although this was certainly not consistent}, for castelli increasingly bad their own jurisdictions; and why, with the slow extension of private jurisdiction in general, pievi slowly broke down as topographical denotations into the thirteenth century.20 I find such arguments plausible in principle, at least for the post-Carolingian period. The problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever for what the content of this local secular jurisdiction might have been. Nor do I know of any for any of the numerous parallel instances across north-central Italy, except for the special case of the Romagna, the old Byzantine exarcbate. The valley had a certain de facto autonomy, with local notaries and boni homines who settled affairs independently of the cities (below, For the diocesanfcomital boundary, see RC ll7, 239. The former gives te"a Florentina as a boundary for Bucena in the V al di Sova; Schneider (Entstehung von Burg, p. 95 n.) thought this was common land, which is of course possible, but it is more likely simply to be the comital boundary, which anyway it has to be as well. For Casenrino as the upper valley, see esp. RC 280 (AC ii.78), 563, 569 (AC iii.78); ASF Passerini Dec. 1024. Its 40% of the valley contained a high proportion of unsetded land. For pieval boundaries, see for example RC 3A, for the care with which Florina, on the BuianoSocana boundary, is marked as in both (elsewhere, land in the village is generally on the Buiano side, e.g. RC 5, 7, 38, 104); inconsistencies are in fact rare. For pievi as iudicariae, see e.g. RC II6, 12.0, 196, 230. As markers, they are slighdy rarer in the Casentino Fiesolano, where public institutions could have been weaker. 20

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The Casetitino in the Eleventh Century

pp. 21,5-'-18), but these cannot be tied down to pievi. Formal judicial procedure was never, at the levels for which there is any evidence, local. Small-scale criminal justice ('basse justice') might be the most obvious candidate for such localization; but its officials are invisible in our evidence. As administrative units, the pievi had a phantom existence. But they were none the less important as political (and, of course, spiritual) foci; public occasions, including the redaction of documents, often took place at the churches, perhaps because, as we will see in a moment, there were so few real settlement centres. And the boundaries of pievi do seem to have sometimes been the boundaries for certain sorts of informal social and social- religious relationships, as we will also see (pp. 206-7). These informal features are not enough to create a reality for a iudicaria, but they may explain at least why the pievi were sufficiently important to act as an identification marker, at least in our valley; they had meaning, even if not content, as territorial divisions. (For the pievi closest to, say, Arezzo, however- those more fully in the city orbit, that is-such an argument would work rather less weU.) 2 1 The Casentino Fiesolano had four pievi: Stia, Montemignaio, Romena, and what is now Strada, then S. Martino di Vado or Tertinule. Romena was already the seat of a comital family, a particularly obscure one, however (p. 201). The Aretine pievi for the valley were five, Partina, Bibbiena, Buiano, Socana, and S. Eleuterio in Piano (now Salutio), with the addition of Vogognano at the extreme southern boundary of our region, documented as a pieve up to 1078, but apparently absorbed into S. Eleuterio by 1084.22 For their rough boundaries, which are 21

For pievi as foci, see e.g. RC 202, 230, 497, 529, 535, 540, 572, 589. Cf. Ch. I, n. 22 for iudicaf'iae in the Lucchesia, where they were certainly only territorial divisions. See Violante, 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 666-8, and 718-19 on the absence of a public jurisdiction based on the Aretine pieve of Creti in 1090. See Castagnetti, Organizzazione del territorio rurale, pp. 51- 4, 105~. I9Q2, 218-31, for the north; in the Romagna, there is fragmentary evidence for a secular territory corresponding to the pieve. A north European parallel to plebes with some secular reality can be found in Brittany: see Davies, 'Priests and Rural Communities', developed in her St114ll Worlds. 22 The Fiesole pievi are first fully listed in two papal bulls, in Lami, Florentinae monumenta i, pp. 215- 17, of II03 and 1134, but all except Montemignaio are already attested, and the latter is in an undocumented area. The Aretine pievi are all extensively documented in RC and elsewhere. For Vogognano as pieve, see ACA Cap. 82 (a.1025), SF 144 (a.1029), Cap. 102

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only fully clear by I 300 but do not seem to have changed significantly since 1100, see Map 6. All the Aretine pievi are documented by the I020s, and I will use them throughout as terms of geographical reference, rather as our notaries did. Pievi are of uncertain antiquity; it is unlikely that they often represent any pre-medieval territorial realities, and even less likely that we will ever be able to say much about what such a connection might mean. It is none the less worth signalling that S. Maria di Buiano is built on a Roman villa rustica, and that S. Antonino di Socana actually overlies an Etruscan temple. Some sort of continuity, at least ideological (there could easily have been a break in settlement) is implied by these and a number of other similar examples in the Aretino. It may genuinely be that the pieval churches are sometimes fairly early. Fatucchi has remarked that all of them lie on or near what could reasonably be taken to be a Roman road network. But the social or institutional content of this is totally irrecoverable; we simply do not know anything about the realities of the valley before 1000 or so. Not even archaeology will fill the gap, here. The recent field-survey of parts of the Casentino (including much of the Archiano valley) directed by Simon Stoddart found no identifiable medieval pottery before the fourteenth century. It is evident that the Casentinesi did not use fine wares; they may indeed have used wood rather than pottery for their utensils (apart, presumably, from those for cooking). Even if not, it will be a long time before we have datable sequences of medieval coarse-wares, without which archaeology in the area will be of little help for our present purposes. 23 (a.1033, ed. Pasqui 154), 135 (a. 1046, ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373), 197 (a.1o63), 224 (a.1070), 266 (a.r078); in I084 (RC 483), however, it is a dependent church. ln Rat. Dec. 2218, it is ecclesia vel plebes, as are Montefatucchio and Vezzano, Rat. Dec. 2.152., 2.189; all three are subordinate to other pievi. The final pieval pattern of IJOZ is in Rat. Dec. 982- IOJI, 1040-3, ZI5o-zz6, 2231- 59· 23 On the problem of pievi, see Violante, 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 65o-1; Ca.stagnetti, Organizzazione del tmitorio rurale, pp. 7-42; Settia, 'Pievi e cappelle', pp. 462.--'7; Brogiolo, ' Esempio gardesano'; Lusuardi Siena, 'Esempio lunigianese'. for the Aretino, see Fatucchi's contribution to the discussion of the latter two papers at the Spoleto conference, Settimane di studio xxviii, pp. 335-6, with id., 'Strade romane nel Casentino', and Plesner, Rivoluzione stradale, pp. 2.7- 8 and passim; but the theory of Roman origins is too schematic to survive the criticisms of, for instance, Castagnetti. The pievi are described

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This absence of field-survey evidence is particularly unfortunate, of course, for settlement studies. But the eleventh-century documents are, luckily, expansive on the subject. We have no lists of villae, as we had in the Garfagnana; but we certainly have reference to ;ts many separate settlements as we did there, and more. A typical document identifies land on four geographical levels: the county, the pieve, the casale, and the avocabulum or vocabulum (locus is sometimes used for one or other of the last two}. Not all these appear in every text, but only the last is at all commonly omitted. The casale was evidently the · settlement and its territory, the basic 'village' unit; the avocabulum the micro-toponym, usually a name for a field or set of fields. Most casalia can still be identified, though many are now single farmsteads; so can the occasional avocabulum, though this is exceptional. Casalia in the Casentino were not concentrated settlements. The widespread use of avocabula shows this immediately, for houses regularly appear in them, in sharp contrast to most of the Garfagnana. In the middle Archiano, the extensive documentation makes the fact particularly explicit. In the casale of Contra, seven separate avocabula have documented settlement, and all the other villages of the area have at least one similar example. Perhaps the only village in the Partina area with any tendency at all to concentration in the eleventh century was Monte, the best documented of all--of its twenty-five or so micro-toponyms only two, apparently the most important, are recorded with houses, and one of these, Musileo (modem La Mausolea, evidently an 'erudite' restoration of the original Latin word), became an independent casale by the late xo8os, as we shall see in a moment; Monte may, then, have had one major centre and two subsidiary ones. Outside this area, the evidence is less full, but the same pattern is found: houses in avocabula are found, for example, in Fameta, Candolesi, and Camenza in the Archiano valley; to the north, probably Vado; to the south, Campi, Fontechiara, Casalecchio, Castel Focognano, Nibbiano, and. above all, Omina in the pieve of S. Eleuterio (see Map 8). Contra and Omina, in particular, scarcely seem to have centres and photographed in Bracco, Architettura e scultura romanica; cf. Fatucchi, Corpus tklla scultura altomedievale ix, pp. 9z-3 for Socana. For archaeology, see Stoddart, 'Archaeological Survey', p. 519.

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at all; their estate centres and churches seem to be dispersed as randomly as their peasant households. 2 4 This was an extreme; at the other end, we have the evident early population centre of Bibbiena (although even Bibbiena did not yet have all its population living in one spot). Most casalia will probably have had areas of increased settlement density, sometimes vaguely agglomerated, at their centre. But nuclei were fragmented; there was a high percentage of isolated farmsteads. Nor were pievi normally significant centres of population. The eleventh-century Casentino as a whole lies well towards the dispersed end of the scale of Tuscan settlement. And, in this respect like the Garfagnana, the growth of castelli did not for some centuries make any significant alternation to this pattem.2 S But these casalia, unlike many dispersed settlements, were discrete units. There is remarkably little confusion between them in our texts, given their degree of dispersal. They show a certain social solidarity (pp. 21o-11). The terminology of village identification shows some sign of breakdown in the twelfth century, but the villages did not, and nor, in a sense, did they ever: every casale with more than fragmentary documentation can be identified on IGM or local catastal maps, with the exception of Nibbiano in the Soliggine valley and Florina and Tegiano across the Arno from Bibbiena. What gave them stability? One answer, by now, must be the church. Churches are a common social focus for dispersed settlement, and most of our villages seem to have had churches, either public or private; those that did not often got them in the course of the eleventh century. At the time of the Rationes Decimarum lists of the late thirteenth century, there were 16o in the area of our nine pievi. This religious identity must often have been fairly recent (Soci's church was only founded in 1058); it is difficult to say what could have preceded it. Casalia could also certainly have common For the etymology of La Mausolea, see Pieri, Toponomasti€4 del/a Valle tf Arno, p. 349. For Contn dispersal, see RC 35 (AC i. 90; Pasqui 102), 94, n8, 125-6, 152 (AC ii.29), 179, 184, 503, 505, 535, 731; for Ornina dispersal, see references in Ch. 7, n. 34· 25 For Bibbiena, see Ch. 7, n. 1 I (the centre was the episcopal curtisfcastellum, not the pieve, which was half a kilometre.distant). For isolated pievi, see Settia, 'Pievi e cappetle', pp. 466--7; and Pasqui 41. 24

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land, another potential focus for local cohesion. We have references to it for six villages. But these references are not sufficient as a basis for .a common socio-economic identity, either: they are almost all ordinary land-parcels, dispersed between private properties. They are certainly not our image of Italian village common land, which tends now to consist of blocs of marginal land associated with communal silvo-pastoral resources; in our period, however, the hills above our villages were generally explicitly owned by the fisc and the Church, leaving as yet little space for local villages to have more than informal use-rights there. 26 I would propose that what we see in the eleventh century is the beginning of a slow process of territorial definition. We do not know how discrete casalia were before xooo; they may well have been more confused, earlier on, as dispersed settlement commonly was on the Lucca plain. With the appearance of a church in each village, it became easier to tell which settlement one belonged ·to. By the end of the century in the pieve of Partina, some villages began to have identifiable boundaries, along the lines of the new territoria castri (below, p. 336). And, indeed, the slow growth of signorial jurisdiction, helped by the Church, was probably a major element in the formalization of village identity. Villages began in the late twelfth century to quarrel about boundaries, backed, at least initially, by lords. Common lands became more important, with the growth of the silvo-pastoral economy. Rural communes eventually appear in the valley. And, in the context of all these processes, above all the last two, we can detect in the later Middle Ages a slow concentration of settlement itself. The Casentino today has a settlement pattern very much like the Garfagnana, of a network of small focused centres containing about half the population, the rest being dispersed across tiny nodules of houses. This is a pattern already visible in the 1427 Catasto, and, a little earlier, in a I 385 Florentine inspection of Aretine castelli, most of which had substantial populations by then. The Casentino was one of the few areas in Tuscany where the population was becoming concentra.ted between, say, 1200 and 1500, a time of crisis for 26 For common land, see RC 10, 28, 44, 106, 473, 513, 947· A parallel for churches as social foci for.dispersed settlement is P. M.Jones, ' Parish, Seigneurie and the Community' .

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population centres in many other parts of the region, culminating eventually in the most extreme dispersal in most of the areas dominated by the mezzadria. I will come back to the issue of these processes at the end of my Casentino section, for, although strictly outside the temporal scope of the book, they are important. It is enough here to emphasize that this late settlement concentration had no direct relationship with incastellamento; the castelli of the tenth to twelfth centuries, as usual in Tuscany, had little effect on the then heavily dispersed settlement of the valley (below, pp. 297-304, 339-40).27

This was all very much in the future in the eleventh century. In order to see the complexity of the patterns that underlay geographical identification in that age, let us look at two examples, La Mausolea below Monte and Silva or La Silva above Camenza Gust north of Bibbiena), both of which, although dependent on another settlement, had pretensions to being independent casalia. La Mausolea appears as an avocabulum of Monte in 1030, already with houses in it, and, one may guess, with slightly greater independence than other avocabula, in that it was on the Archiano plain, on the road between Soci and Partina (indeed, between Arezzo and Forli) , rather than on the hill-slopes climbing up to Camaldoli behind, as the rest of Monte was and is. By 1086 it had become a casale in its own right, and would never be regarded as subject to Monte thereafter. It is first described as independent in the context of a series of sales there by Ongano di Lamberto and, later, by his brother Candolfo and associates, of portions of oak-wood to Camaldoli. Ongano and his brother were prominent local owners, Ongano in particular leading an active public life for over filly years (below, pp. 248-9); they owned all over the Partina area (only 3 km in diameter, remember, but most people were more restricted in 21

For the Lucca plain, see Wickham, 'Settlement Problems'. For village boundaries, see RC 434, 563, 569 (the process is earlier and, I suspect, different in Buiano: ASF S. Trinita, 8 June 992 (ed. Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum vii.8, pp. 316 f.), 1085, Mar.. 1086, Jan. I ri4). For the first documented boundary dispute, see ASF Capitoli xxiv, If. 197b-8a (dated 1187; but the indiction should be v not xv-it is a late copy, though). For late medieval concentration, see Ch. li, n. 40. For the modern settlement pattern, see Lavoratti, Casentino, pp. 125-50.

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their holdings than that). But Ongano in 1084-6 is revealed as living in La Mausolea, for he had a house (mansio) there, in front of which several of his sales were enacted. 28 I would guess that it was the growing importance of a local family that changed the status of the settlement from avocabulum to casale. We cannot tdl if this required any major changes in local organizationmaybe La Mausolea never had any common land, for example, and it certainly never had a church in the medieval period. The whole process looks fairly informal. But it was permanent, none the less. Silva was less successful in its separation from Camenza. As a casale, it was the seat of a private church, S. Michele, most of which Prataglia obtained in a series of gifts between 1038 and 1051. But no owner ever had property in Silva without associated property in Camenza, although the reverse is not true; in addition, Silva is sometimes simply described as an avocabulum of its neighbour, and, indeed, once, in 103 5, the church is baldly identified as being in casale Caminza. Silva seems to have been an avocabulum that came to be regarded as more or less independent when it became the site of a private church. But such recognition was in this case not consistent, and was eventually withdrawn; the next reference to the church is in 1222, by which time it is simply de Camenza. The pattern is, none the less, as informal as it was for La Mausolea. And this is in my view significant. Villages in the eleventh century could be told apart, but they had not yet acquired full institutional status; they can best be seen as social and conceptual networks, arbitrary geographical divisions in a relatively uniform framework of dispersed settlement, which could be altered if the main lines of the social relationships in a particular area altered sufficiently, even if the settlement pattern did not. Such alterations did not happen very often, but the potentiality was there. It is 28

RC 105, 231, 481-2, 519-20, 522, 572, 590, 592, 598, etc. La Mausolea's

strategic position on the main road (which does not now run through it, but obviously-from the map and personal observation-did so until the building of the seventeenth-century villa on the old line) caused it to become, eventually, a major Camaldoli demesne centre Qones, ' Camaldoli', pp. 178 f.), which, on a smaller scale, it still is.

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this structured informality that would slowly change, becoming less flexible in the process, over the next two centuries. 29 29 For Silva, see RC 153, 168 (AC ii.35), r69, 2ro (AC ii.49), 222, 238 (AC ii.61), 257, 262 (AC ii.72). Prataglia did not get the whole church in surviving

documents, but had it by 1222 (RC 1702). Camenza is not on the lGM maps, but can be found on the catastal map of the Comune of Bibbiena. Silva cannot be precisely placed, but is most likely to have been up the Camenza ridge, nearer the woods. For decreasing flexibility, see below, pp. 335--{).

7 The Distribution of Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving Much of the Casentino section of this book is concerned with the affairs of the small and medium owners of the eleventh-century valley. (As in the Garfagnana, I will use 'small owner' to mean a peasant proprietor, who cultivates all or most of his own land, even if he may lease the odd field out to a tenant, or be a tenant himself for parts of his holding; a 'medium owner' is a landowner with a handful of tenants, just enough, perhaps, to allow him not to have to work his own land, although he may still participate in such work, at, for example, the harvest.) These lesser owners, indeed, form a great part of our documentation. But unless we put them in their context, we cannot understand them; and that means reconstructing the landowning patterns of the larger owners, who owned the land around the smaller holdings, as exactly as we can. Such is the purpose of most of the present chapter. I propose to look, in turn, at the lands of the largest owners in the valley, the fisc (the State: the king and the marquis), the bishops, the monasteries of Prataglia and Camaldoli, and the conti Guidi; I will then go on to discuss how the patterns of ownership in two sections of the valley differ, and what these differences suggest about why people alienated land to the Church in the eleventh century. Neither set of discussions stands entirely on its own; each is in large part scene-setting for my analyses of the middle Archiano in Chapters 9 and 10. Both discussions will, furthermore, involve the exposition of a fair amount of detail, not in itself especially fascinating to the outsider. They are, none the less, necessary for an understanding of the political-geographical framework of the Casentino in the eleventh century. I hope that readers will bear with me; those who prefer to take my characterizations of the

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landowning patterns of the valley on trust, however, could perhaps begin on page 210. Most of what we know about large landowning in our valley, like everything else, comes from gifts to the three great valley monasteries- Strumi, founded by the Guidi family shortly before 992, Prataglia, founded by Bishop Elmperto of Arezzo before 1001, and Camaldoli, established as a hermitage by Romualdo of Ravenna shortly before his death, soon after 1023, and patronized by the bishops and others from 1027 onwards. 1 Extrapolating back with due care, we can reconstruct the major areas of great landownership in the valley before this gift-giving started, so that we can see how the proprietorial bases of the monasteries were established. In the late tenth century, the major owners in the upper Arno were the fisc, the bishop of Arezzo, and, in the Casentino Fiesolano, the conti Guidi, always the most important lay family in the valley. (The bishop of Fiesole must have owned land there too, but this is almost entirely undocumented.) It is in fact very likely, as we shall see, that much of the land of all these powers had once been public (fiscal), but the moment of transfer can barely be seen; we have t~ treat them separately. The fisc is the least clear: partly because the documents that record its gifts stretch across two centuries, thus denying us a neat chronological reference point; partly because who the fisc actually represents is less clear in Arezzo than, say, in Lucca, the stronghold of the dukes/marquises of Tuscany from 820 or so. It was the kings who gave land in the ninth- and tenth-century Aretino, where the marquises were never very strong, and in fact the kings, particularly Hugh (926--47), gave more land than the marquises usually did precisely to build up alternative powers to the marquis in eastern Tuscany. Later on, as part of the same process, the bishop of Arezzo gained comital powers as well, and called himself episcopus et comes during the period 105oSee n. I z for bibliography. None of the foundation charters for these monasteries survive; see Kurze, '"Griindung" des Klosters Manuri', pp. zso4· Selvamonda was the other major monastery, founded by lay nobles in the far south of the valley in the early eleventh century and eventually coming to Camaldoli: see Tabacco, 'Espansione monastica', pp. 78- 81. Its documents are lost, with serious results for our knowledge of the south of the valley. 1

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I I 50;

most of the fiscal land remaining in the diocese eventually devolved, illegally or legally, to the bishop.2 This can get confusing; but we can work out some patterns none the less. And in the Casentino, the bishop's property, even that which he got from the fisc, mostly pre-dates 1000. The first area where we fmd the kings in is the upper Corsolone valley; in 875 Charles the Bald gave the estate (curtis) of Aioli, with its dependency Corezzo, to the bishop of Arezzo. (They were lands he had received from Adalbert I of Tu~cany, it is true, together with the nearby curtis of Biforco, but Adalbert must have himself had them originally from the fisc. See Map 10(A).) Aioli had reverted to the king by 943, for part of it was granted to King Hugh's .fidelis Bemardo; it was fiscal again by 967, however, for Aioli and the whole upper valley, the forestum de Corezo, was in that year given by Otto I to his own fide/is, Gausfredo di Ildebrando. Gausfredo received a whole bloc of fiscally owned mountain-land, in fact, for he got most of two other valley-heads contiguous with Corezzo, Chitignano in the Val di Rassina and theforesto de Tribleo (Trivio), which included the whole head-waters of the Tiber, as well as a generous array of estates in the lowlands. But he lasted no longer than Bern;udo, at least on the Corsolone. Countess Gemma, daughter of Cadalo, had a curtis in Corezzo by IOI6, probably as a result of an unrecorded fiscal grant to the Cadolingi counts. Biforco had another substantial lay owner living there by 1051, Ugo di Pietro. And Montefatucchio, a kilometre from Biforco and For the bishop of Fiesole, the only reference to land known to me is cited in Mosiici, 'Abbazia di S. Godenzo', pp. 178- 83, together with the estates of the pievi in the papal bulls, cited in Ch. 6, n. 22, but there must have been more. The bishop of Aorence certainly owned there: see Lami, FIMentinae monumenta i, pp. 43-5. For general discussion of fiscal land, see Schneider, Reichsverwaltung, pp. 26o, 28<>-9. Fiscal land is not the same as common land, contra e.g. Schneider, Bntstehung von Burg, pp. 95--9; most fiscal estates were run like any other estate. The exception may be the foresta of the upper valleys (see n. 3), where it is possible that a more complex relationship between State control and peasant 'landownership' may have existed, as in the gualdi of the central Appennines (cf. Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. zs- 38); there were certainly a lot of small owners in the former forestum de Corezo by the IOIOS- l020S (MGH, Dip. Ottonis I 352 (RC 3), RC 44, 46, SJ, 59, 81, 91- 2, 96-7, ete). for Hugh's politics, see Delumeau, 'Equilibri di potere', pp. 91- 4. 2

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83

equally inside the bounds of the forestum de Corezo, was, with Chitignano, episcopal by 1008.3 The upper Corsolone was thus a large bloc of land under the control of the fisc in the ninth and tenth centuries, capable of being granted and then reclaimed. After 1000, however, the kings do not reappear. The Cadolingi vanish from the sources, but this time they were not succeeded by the fisc; by 1038 Prataglia had demesne in Corezzo, perhaps a Cadolingi donation. There are also independent small proprietors documented there in the eleventh century, who may perhaps be seen as newly free of fiscal suzerainty. The kings still held the castle (rocca) of Vezzano above Chitignano in the Val di Rassina (though this was in episcopal hands before 1052), and quite probably the natural stronghold of Chiusi (della Verna), close to Vezzano, which is otherwise unaccountably undocumented in private charters until 1 1 19. A fiscal association lingered elsewhere in the area, too, for Montefatucchio was later used by the bishop as a fief for his viscounts, as Bishop Girolamo explained when he ceded it to Prataglia in 1147.4 Even in 967, the year of Otto's gift to Gausfrido, the major part of the fiscal land of the Casentino Aretino may have .already been in the hands of the bishop. It is notable that royal gifts are on a far smaller scale outside the area we have just looked at: King Hugh gave land on Monte Ferentino, a wooded hill east of Bibbiena, to S. Fiora di Arezzo in 933; res in Carda and Cerreto, above Castel Focognano, went to Bernardo in 943, these not Tessier, Actes de Charles le Chauve, n. 383 (a.875), with ii, pp. 359-00, in preference to MGH, Dip. Karoli Ill 12, with Anhang 2; Schiaparelli, Dip. Ugo e Lotario n. 72 (a.943); MGH, Dip. Ottonis I 352 (a.967; RC 3); RC 12 (a.1oo8; AC i.79; Pasqui 92), 40 (a. 1016), 264 (a.to.s 1; AC ii.74). Aioli is written as Agialta, Aialta, Arialta, Arole, Agiole, and Agiola; there is no doubt that tney are all the same place. RC 3 omits the bounds of Corezzo, a rare omission (for other faults of RC, see Kurze, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', p. 408; the register also leaves out dorsal notes, pace RC i, p. x). Kurze, 'Nobilcl toscana e nobilta aretina', pp. 261-2, discusses Gausfredo. For the Cadolingi connection, cf. Pescaglini Monti, 'Nobilta e istituzioni ecclesiastiche'. 4 For Corezzo demesne, see RC 180. For small owners, see n . 2. For Vezzano, see MGH, Dip. Heinrici Ill 292, but a curtis de la rocca de Ve~no remained in or came into the hands of the Marchiones family and the lords of Anghiari: RC 669 (nos; AC iii.127). For Chiusi, see RC 8to; for Montefatucchio, RC 1043 (AC iii.285). Note that Montefatucchio and Vezzano both claimed to be pievi in 1302: above, Ch. 6, n. 22. 3

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century even being an independent estate, but a dependency of Capolona, the fiscal centre 10 km north of Arezzo; ten tenant-houses in the Archiano valley went to Prataglia by 1002 and 1020. This small scale contrasts markedly not only with the Corsolone gifts, but with the land that Hugh gave away around Arezzo to the city churches; it looks as if there was already not much fiscal land left in the Aretine part of the valley by his reign. In the Fiesolano, it is harder to say. The Guidi, who held land there by 1000 at the latest, were Hugh's proteges above all (they did not prosper under the Ottonians), and may well have got their estates from him, even if these were not yet so very many; the counts of Romena, who held Romena itself and two or three very high Arno valley-heads under Monte Falterona by I 100 (below, p. 201) must have got their land from some king, too. It looks as if all the barren uplands at the heads of the tributaries of the Arno in the Casentino had at some time belonged to the fisc. But outside Corezzo, Vezzano, and one or two places on the ill-documented Fiesole side, it was probably mostly gone by 950, and the following fifty years saw the ceding away of almost all the rest. 5 The bishops took over a substantial portion of this marginal land. Apart from the Corsolone and Rassina properties, they held by 967 the broad forest lands, less cultivated than those of Corezzo, at the head of the Archiano and above the Sova valleys, for they are cited as owners on the boundaries of Gausfredo's cession. They also held Bagno di Romagna over the watershed, episcopal since before 871, and Moggiona, the curticella at the head of the Sova,. which was the only Casentino property Bishop Pietro I granted to his new canonica in circa 840. Put together, all this constituted a continuous bloc of over 100 km•, even if For cessions, see Schiaparelli, Dip. Ugo e Lotario 32 (a.933), 72 (a.943); MGH, Dip. Ottonis Ill 423 (RC 6), Dip. Heinrici I1 435 (RC 58), imperial confirmations of leases made by Marquis Hugh of Tuscany. For the Guidi, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 197-202; cf. Curradi, 'Conti Guidi'. Berengar 11 patronized them too, confirming six of their properties in 96<>, one of them in the Casentino: Schiaparelli, Dip. Berengario Il 13. Two fiscal curtes of 'Casentino', somewhere in the upper valley, are documented in MGH, Dip. Ottonis Ill 218 (a.996), a cession to S. Pietro in Ciel d'Oro at Pavia, and the donation by Charlemagne to Nonantola in Dip. Karoli I 312; where these were is entirely unclear. The latter is a twelfth-century forgery; what rruth it has, even for that period, is irrecoverable. 5

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it was then, as now, mostly trees. Most of it, however, the bishops granted away piecemeal, between 1000 and 1084, to Prataglia and Camaldoli, both of which were founded there. (See Map IO(B).) The gifts to the monasteries present insoluble topographical and topological problems, as the natural features on their boundaries have usually changed their names, and the identifiable ones are put in the wrong order; but broadly they allow us to divide the mountains and forest between Corezzo and the Fiesole border into six or seven blocs of episcopal land, five of which came into monastic possession in the eleventh century, leaving, as far as can be seen, only the hill just east of Camaldoli and the forest (later pasture) of Asqua to the west over the mountain in the hands of the bishop. Even Asqua was given or enfeotfed to laymen, and mostly came to Camaldoli, via local notable families, by 1200.6 It is not surprising that the bishops ceded all this away; having founded a monastery, and patronized a hermitage, right in the middle of a large tract of barren, still unexploited, forest, it was only logical to hand the forest over to these institutions. With their other, richer lands, however, they were less generous. As we lack the episcopal archive itself, which would shed direct light on these estates, we mostly have to make do with incidental references to them; there are enough of these, none the less, to show that such lands were very extensive. Our first guide is a charter from 1008, in which Bishop Elmperto gave his major gift to Prataglia; in this text, apart from a series of tenant-houses (mansi) given to the monastery outright, the bishop granted a ninth of the produce from seven estates (curtes): Montefatucchio and Chitignano, which I have already mentioned; Vivarium (outside the Casentino, probably near Anghiari); Marciano (already a castellum), Bibbiena, Orgi in the Fiesolano, and Socana. The bishop never gave these up. The first three were fiscal gifts; Pasqui 30 (a.840), 41 (a.871); gifts to Prataglia in RC 12 (AC i.79, Pasqui 92), 334 (AC ti. 1II, Pasqui 196), 477 (AC iii.30, Pasqui 26o); to Camaldoli in 86 (AC ii, p. 9, Pasqui 124), MGH, Dip. Heinrici III r8o (RC 239), RC 471 (Pasqui 256); cf. 1301 (a.1193). For Asqua, see n. 10. But the hill above CamaJdoli was kept very firmly by the bishop: see Pasqui 473, pp. 132 f. The southern edge of this bloc belonged to small owners, with land clustered in particular in Metaleto above Moggiona and in Atocia, close to Serravalle: RC 237, 244. 488-9, 6oo, and references cited inCh. 6, n. 10, Ch. 1r, n. 17. 6

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Orgi had come to the Church from Bishop Everardo (c.9()o86), son of Marquis Boniface of Spoleto; Socana and perhaps Bibbiena were probably old episcopal property, linked to the pievi there (the bishop owned in Buiano, too). Orgi was large, for Elmperto took 10 tenant-houses from it for Prataglia without threatening its survival. But it was Marciano and Bibbiena that were the real power centres for the bishop. Marciano we will look at it in a twelfth-century context, for it is then that its political importance become explicit; it produced, too, a family of local milites. Bibbiena I will discuss in a moment.7 Outside these curtes, the bishop had a number of other estates called mansi cum casis or just mansi, an unusual and confusing usage, which is largely restricted to episcopal land (the mansus of Ventrina, after it came to Prataglia, was called curtis), and probably means that the estate was small: there were mansi in Ventrina, Luccioli in Monte, Candolesi, and Camprena, all ~ the Archiano valley, and at Agna in the Val di Sova and Pezza in the Val di Corsolone. All except Pezza were eventually ceded to the monasteries. The bishop may also have had other largish nuclei in the V al di Sova, for tenths of produce in some villae (settlements) in the area went to Camaldoli in 1037; and he certainly controlled, as we shall see, an array of capillary landowning right across the Archiano valley, and also in the valley above Socana, where he had some rights in the castello ofCastel Focognano. The bishop had a scatter of land everywhere in his diocese; but in the Casentino Aretino the most concentrated scatters were in the Archiano and Sova valleys, overlooked by Bibbiena and Marciano. In the pieve of Buiano, in particular, and parts of the south, he may have held fairly little.s 7

RC 12 (a.xoo8; AC i.79; Pasqui 92). For Orgi's origin, see MGH, Dip. Ouonis Ill 295 (a.998). For Socana as pieve, see ACA SF 140 (a.1028; ed. Pasqui 131). For Marciano as curtis, see RC Io6, 368 (AC ii.133), 706 (AC ili.153; Pasqui 300). For Buiano property (one tenant-house), see ACA SF 168 (a. 103 I). 8 For mansi as estates, see RC 16 (AC i.8r; Pasqui 96), 27 (Pasqui 99), 86 (AC ii, p. 9; Pasqui 127, for Agna-compare RC 166 (AC ii.32; Pasqui 156), where the term has its normal meaning of tenant-house), 586, 6o1, and two owned privately, 346, 366. (Mansio is also a common term for the houses of notables: e.g. RC 481-2, 763 (AC ili.169).) For other properties, see RC 166; ACA SF 366 (a.1076; ed. Pasqui 222), 408 (a. xo87) for Caste! Focognano; the bishop also held rights in the castelli of Montecchio near Bibbiena (RC 252)

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This pattern may be borne in mind when looking at the list of documented episcopal gifts in the valley: at around twenty-five in the eleventh century (ten to Prataglia, seven to Camaldoli, the rest to S. Fiora and the canonica), they look generous enough, and as they include all the land of the valley-tops, and several estates, like Ventrina and Agna, they might even seem to be unwise. But in fact they barely touch the basic elements of episcopal power and landowning. The bishop pared tenanthouses off his estates to give to the monasteries: two in Pezza, and another couple from its dependency Fognano, in 1oo8; one in Marciano, and two and a half in Contra, probably its dependency, between 1008 and 1071, and so on. One particularly clear text for Legnaio, just above Contra, in 1033 lists four pieces of land belonging to Prataglia; their boundaries show that they were each contiguous to episcopal land, averaging two sides each; it looks as if the bishop in some of his estates, in this case Marciano, had cut off a piece of every field to give to his monastery. But he did not give Marciano itself. (When the bishops, oppressed by debt, were forced to cede some powers there to Prataglia in the mid-twelfth century, they very soon got them back.) And if, in 1009, Bishop Elmperto gave the Ventrina estate, the real importance of this is shown by what followed. It turned out that the bishop, without thinking, had granted it to Prataglia even though it was the benefice of the vicedominus Venerando; in IOII , faced with uproar and the abbot's pleas for help, Elmperto's successor Wilielmo took a tenant-house outside Arezzo and another hectare or so of land, belonging to Prataglia, and got Venerando to accept this in exchange for Ventrina. Ventrina was a key to the territorial expansion of Prataglia, far more important to her than suburban property; but the scale of the property Venerando accepted shows something of the resources of Ventrina. Agna, too, which was as important to the infant Camaldoli as Ventrina was to Prataglia,. seems only to have consisted of a church, some demesne, and three tenant-houses. 9 and Soci (below, Ch. 10, n. 6). He had also held the villa of Banzena, given to the canonica before 1010: MGH, Dip. Heinrici li 436 (a.1020; Pasqui 110); it soon became the base for an important small noble family (below, pp. 26972). 9 For tenant-houses pared off, see RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92), 35 (AC i.90;

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century .

To counter the list of land the bishop gave away, then, there is also a. list that can be made of land that he did not give away: not only his major estate centres, but also other property that crops up in boundary clauses, such as the. ones for Legnaio mentioned above .. Such references are strikingly frequent. In the middle and lower Archiano valley, out of some 140 land-parcels with bounds, initially lay-owned for the most part, that are mentioned in our texts, ftfty.,.five bordered on episcopal landover a third, evenly distributed over all the villages, though rising to 6o per cent in Contra and Camenza, the villages closest to the estate centres of Marciano and Bibbiena. The proportion is lower elsewhere, though the statistics are too small to be worth much; only the Soliggine valley above Socana shows any particular concentration, and there are otherwise few such references at all south of Bibbiena. .But the Archiano valley is of most importance for us, for here the figures are relatively firmly based, and it is anyway the area we will look at most closely later. Exactly how much the bishop did own there cannot be reliably guessed at from these figures, taken from across a century, but it may well have been over a quarter of the Archiano valley; episcopal landowning, probably dependent on his two estate centres, was extensive and capillary, and his political inBuence must have been an important factor among local landowners. The effects of this on them · we will see in Chapter 9; it must be noted in passing, however, that the Partina area, in particular, is also that in which we find by far the greatest number of references to people holding land from the bishop who are themselves free to give (or lease) this land to the Church-fairly independent tenants, that is; feudal tenants, in all likelihood. The bishop did not just have tenant-cultivators in the Partina area, but also a clientele. This too is something we shall return to (pp. 284-5).10 We know nothing whatever about the internal organization of the episcopal estates, for we have no leases. But we can say Pasqui 102), 75 (AC i.n3; Pasqui I17), 82 (AC i.127; Pasqui 124), 356 (AC ii.123; Pasqui 198), 368 (AC ii133). For land in Legnaio, see RC 125. For Ventrina, see RC 16 (AC i.81; Pasqui 96), 27 (Pasqui 99). For Agna, see RC 86 (AC ii, p. 9; Pasqui 127), 166 (AC ii.3;; Pasqui 156). Figures from RC. For episcopal leases as donations, see RC 3 1, 56-7, 159, 226, 302, 350, 423, 481-2, 487, 494-6, 527, ss9-6o. s&6 for the Partina area; 485, 556, 6o1, ACA SF 408 (a.xo87) elsewhere. IO

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something about Bibbiena, which has left a certain shadow in our sources. It was a pieve; the bishop gave small portions of the tithe from it, a rare cession of tithe for this valley, to Camaldoli and S. Fiora (below, p. 319). How independent the pievano was is unclear--Teuzo plevitaneo ceded property to Prataglia in 1010 for xoos., a reasonably substantial sum, but whether it was his own or the church's is uncertain; other references to pieval property show it being granted away by the bishop. But the curtis there was certainly separate from the pieve in the eleventh century, and under full episcopal control, run for him by a caswldio. The estate was of considerable political importance. The bishop's entourage came there in 1041 to judge a case between Prataglia and the Banzena family. Its measures were adopted as the principal standard measures in the Casentino Aretino. It appeared with increasing frequency as a place where charters were written, even though these did not in any way concern Bibbiena or its inhabitants. The curtis and, after 1084, the castrum (probably a simple development of the curtis, and certainly in a different place from the pieve) became a central place in its own right, with other landowners living there; and the castrum, almost from its first reference, was a genuine population centre with private habitations, the first such example in the Casentino. It already had a foro, presumably a market, by 1149. No other centre matched this degree of activity in the valley in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Bibbiena was probably by far the largest settlement there by 1100 at the latest. The episcopal curtis had a ninth of its produce ceded to Prataglia in 1008, and in 1053 the percentage (ofitsfrugibusgrano et annona

vino et pomis atque de feno, et redditu de molendino suo domnicato, seu de animalibus) was increased to a fifth; but the bishop's generosity stopped thete; Bibbiena's estate and castello remained under his control. It had its own milites in the twelfth centuryin Prataglia's complaint to the bishop of the I I 6os, the men who seized monastic land in Camenza were vestri homines de Biblena-but episcopal power there was not ceded to them; in the early thirteenth century the castrum was visited by the bishop often, and was regarded by him as one of his major centres. 11 For the pieve, see RC 24 (a.roro), ACA SF 366 (a.1076, ed. Pasqui 222); but cf. the later influence of the pievano in RC 1858 (a.1227) and Pasqui 535 (a.1240). Teuzo casta/dio de BibltmJ, i.e. of the episcopal estate, witnesses 11

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The Casentinc in the Eleventh Century

The bishop thus continued to keep full control over what was already becoming, had already become, the major centre of the valley. Bibbiena was his political and economic stronghold, probably even more than Marciano. And, with both at his back, the scattered nature of the subsidiary episcopal lands up the Archiano valley would have been, not a weakness, but a further strength. The bishop remained a major power in the Casentino, and exercised his power directly, rather than mediated by any secular notables. The two monasteries that benefited most from episcopal patronage, Prataglia and Camaldoli, were closely linked to the bishops; so much so that for a long time their territorial expansion, far from weakening the bishop's position, actually extended it. Wilhelm Kurze has called Prataglia an ' "Eigenkloster" [private monastery] of the bishops of Arezzo', and he is certainly right in this; even Camaldoli, as Tabacco has shown, served as an adjunct to the development of episcopal power in the diocese until well into the twelfth century. Camaldoli's history cannot, of course, be simply reduced to this: it was a major focus of eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform, and a genuine spiritual centre from the earliest days of the hermitage and continued to be so rather longer than most cenobitic or monastic institutions. 12 But these are not characteristics that had as much impact among the inhabitants of the Prataglia charters in RC III, 121, 156, 159, 189. For the court case, see RC 202; for measures, see e.g. RC 5o-1, 492; for charter-writing, see Pasqui 77 (a.979), RC 230, 456, 530, 567, 632. for references to curtis and castello. For the casalt and castrum of Bibbiena as centres for other owners, see RC 153 (a.1035), 476 (a.xo84)--the second reference to the castello after 456 for the previous year; but cf. below, Ch. 10, n. 26. For the forum, see 1o63 (a.l149; cf. also the mercatale of 1993, a.1233). For episcopal gifts, see RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92), 270 (AC ii.75; Pasqui 178). For twelfth- and thirteenth-cenwry politics, see RC II93. Pasqui 474, p. 139· The complex settlement history of Bibbiena has been sorted out by Farucchi, 'Origini di Bibbiena', pp. 408 f., 415-19; he shows in particular that the pieve was below the curlisfcastrum, and only moved up inside it in perhaps, the eleventh century. (Cf. also id., Corpus della scultura altomedievale ix, pp. 8 1- 4.) See Kurze, 'Campus Malduli'; id., 'Geschichte Camaldolis'; id., 'Monasteri e nobilta', p. 358 for quotation; Tabacco, 'Fondazione di Camaldoli'; id., 'Romualdo di Ravenna'; id., 'Espansione monastica'. In the last of these, Tabacco makes useful distinctions betwee* the attitudes of different bishops to 12

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Casentino as they did outside. Camaldoli had local spiritual prestige, as we shall see; it was in large part for that reason that people gave lands to it. But this was not different in kind from the more traditional spiritual--and political-status of the Benedictines in Prataglia; indeed, for a long time, the local prestige of Prataglia was rather greater. Let us look at how and from whom they obtained their local lands. An immediate impression of the relationship between the two monasteries and how it changed is given in a table by Kurze. The two were founded some twenty-five years apart (before 1002 and before 1027), and the pattern of gifts to a large extent reflects this. The high point of gift-giving to Prataglia was in the I020S- I030S, but even though it dropped thereafter, it was not surpassed by Camaldoli until the 1o6os-indeed, taking the gifts from inside the valley itself, not until the 1070s. The great decades for local gifts to Camaldoli were the 108os and 11 10s; after 1120, gifts to Camaldoli became fewer, too.lS But if one looks only at the Casentino charters for the two monasteries, and distinguishes between various kinds of cession, the impression becomes more nuanced. The link between the monastery of Prataglia and the proprietorial power of the bishop was made explicit in Elmperto's first major gift, of 1008, with its cession of ninths of the produce of his major Casentino estates. Private owners responded almost at once, usually with small gifts of parcels of land: Rodolfo di Righiza (who claimed, curiously, to have founded the monastery himself) in Florina, and other donors in Nibbiano and Fameta; and one vendor, the pievano of Bibbiena, all in xoo8-xo; ten other private gifts and seven sales were added by 1020, from all over the pieve of Partina.l4 This early matching of gifts and the monasteries, esp. pp. 82-7. Note that Camaldoli was founded as a hermitage, with the Benedictine Rule prohibited; only later did its dependency Fontebuona, a little below the hermitage, turn into the monastery that dominates the valley today ('Romualdo di Ravenna', pp. II7 f.). I will often call it a monastery for convenience, however. 13 Kune, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', pp. 402- 3. 14 RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92}, 13, 22 (AC i.83, for Rodolfo}, 23-4, 28, 39, 41, 43-51, 54-5, 57· Who Rodolfo was is entirely unclear; he is not attested elsewhere. The bishop may have been persuading his entourage to give gifts to supplement his foundation (cf. below, p. 259), thus giving them reason to claim involvement in that foundation; the ff. Berardi probably claimed similar

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

sales in alienatio~s to a monastery was common enough: it was the result of monastic concern to prime its pumps, paying to build up landed property and social prestige, before others responded with gifts. In the case of Prataglia, the practice was less necessary than for many. Already in the I02os there were thirty-three private gifts from within the valley, many of them of large properties, and only one sale; in the IOJOS, thirty-two gifts and four sales. The distribution of these cessions was spread all over the pievi of Partina and Socana (rather fewer from that of Bibbiena, and almost none from Buiano and the Fiesolano), with concentrations in Ventrina, Freggina, Contra and Camenza in the Archiano valley, Corezzo, and, in Socana, Omina. With the exception of this last, these remained the major foci of generosity to the monastery even when the number of gifts dropped after 1050. By the 108os, however, more or less only people in Ventrina and Contra alienated land to Prataglia at all, and even this ceased after 1090: Prataglia's documents become very infrequent henceforth. and the monastery clearly went into decline. Between I 144 and I I 57 Bishop Girolamo ceded it to Camaldoli.l5 The trajectory of Camaldoli's cycle was distinctly flatter: it took longer to start, and lasted longer. Between I030 and 1070 there were only sixteen gifts from the entire Casentino, and these were balanced by twelve sales. In the 1070s the number of gifts rose slightly, to ten for the decade; only in the 1080s did it increase to twenty-nine, still matched by eighteen sales; a pattern of this kind persisted until cessions to Camaldoli began to lessen in the II20s. A good third of the land Camaldoli received from lay owners in the century 103o-1130 it visibly paid for; and the trend to donate land to the hermitage was far slower than it had been for Prataglia. This was not, on the other hand, an indication that Camaldoli's spiritual status was principally recognized elsewhere: it was not until the 106os that it received much outside the valley, although then outside interest rapidly developed-towards the end of the century Camaldoli rights in the 10405 (below, pp. 269-?o). Figures for 'sales' include exchanges, and gifts with sizeable counter gifts. · 15 Figures all from RC. For the cession to Cam
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received a wealth oflarge gifts, particularly of private monasteries, right across Tuscany and in Sardinia. (Prataglia, it may be noted, received less than a dozen properties outside the Casentino in the whole period.) The lean years before 1070 are interesting to us in another way, however: nearly every one of the private alienations to the monastery in the valley in that period are from one village, Monte. Why Monte is not totally clear; land in Monte was not a major part of the early episcopal gifts to the hermitage. There was a church there by 1040 belonging to Camaldoli, and the village was only a few kilometres away from the monastery, close enough to be in its sphere of influence; but no closer than several others, not all of which had been absorbed into Prataglia's orbit. But, whatever the reason for this distribution, it was certainly not chance. Camaldoli was buying nearly as much land as it was getting in gifts in these early decades; if it was above all the Montesi who chose to give land to the hermitage, the hermitage was equally choosing to buy land there and almost nowhere else. Camaldoli was simply not concerned, unlike most monastic houses, to build up extensive landed property and links of clientele outside a single village; and, beyond Monte, the hermitage of Romualdo was as yet virtually unrecognized by outsiders. This restriction of interest must he a reflex of Camaldoli's early spiritual choices. But we also discover quite a lot about Monte as a result, as we will see.16 From 1070 onwards, this changed. Gifts and sales to Camaldoli began to come in from all over the Casentino, in patterns much more characteristic of the great Benedictine houses. The major centres of such alienations were Monte, Partina, and Soci in the middle Archiano; the major absences, among our welldocumented villages, were Ventrina, Freggina, Contra, and Corezzo. With very few exceptions, the centres that had given land to Prataglia were not generous to Camaldoli; one could in effect see the rise of gift-giving to the latter as simply the extension of its sphere of influence into villages that had never granted much to Prataglia. (see Map Io(B).) This is important, for two reasons. First, it shows us that Prataglia's decline and l6 Figures all from RC. For the church in Monte, see RC 191; cf. 373 (AC ii. I 37). For the expansion of Camaldoli properues, see maps in Kune, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', pp. 414- 15.

•

194

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

Camaldoli's rise, which have often been taken to be related and are certainly superficially matched (apart from . a suspicious hiatus in the 1050s and IQ6os), were in reality almost entirely unconnected phenomena; Prataglia's rise and fall had to do with the relationship, political, economic, and spiritual, of the monastery with its own villages, not with competition from her sister institution five kilometres over the hill, which when P~;ataglia 's star began to wane was still almost unknown. Second, because the tight geographical definition of this gift-giving, the mutually exclusive choices made by inhabitants of given villages about which monastery to patronize shows that villages linked themselves to given spiritual centres as, in some sense, communities, rather than as individuals. This is an issue that we will come back to. Even inside the gift-giving to each monastery, cyclic patterns can be seen. Gifts to Camaldoli in the Archiano valley, particularly from Monte, fell off sharply after 1125 or so, to be replaced (on a smaller scale) by two areas with very little sign of such interest before 1090, the Arcena area below Bibbiena and the upper Sova valley, the latter of which was almost the sole mainstay of the monastery in the leaner years after 1 I so. Whatever stimulus persuaded the inhabitants of Soci and Partina to give lands to Camaldoli in 1080 and onwards switched into action with a quarter-century's delay in the Val di Sova, and lasted correspondingly longer. We cannot say why the mechanism worked according to a different timing in each village; we never have enough information. But the time difference between the cycles at least shows that the answer has to be sought locally, in the internal relationships of each village.17 The existence of these cycles of gift-giving has been often noticed, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group phenomenon, and generic explanations have often been offered for them. Spiritual revivals are a common justification for the ,beginning of gift-giving; the spiritual decline of the institution concerned, or sometimes the economic collapse of the gift-giving class, are frequently adduced as explanations for its end. I noted earlier (p. 55) some other very generalized explanations for the 17

For geographical distributions, the index in RC iv, s.v. the names of each village under their various spellings, is a good guide, if not quite complete.

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end of the first great cycle in northern Italy and Tuscany in the early ninth century. The second cycle, that of the eleventh century, is harder to explain. A spiritual revival is all very well as a general characterization of the state of mind of Marquis Hugh of Tuscany and some of his fideles, the major monastic founders of c.xooo.l8 But in the decades around uoo, in the middle of the Investiture Dispute, which, at least in our region, is when donations to these new monasteries begin to fall off, such a retreat in spiritual commitment-so generalized that it looks like a rout- is harder to believe. In the case of Strumi, as we will see in a moment, the cycle actually begins to end in the very period of the supposed spiritual zenith of the monastery, the later 1o8os, when it was absorbed into the Vallombrosan congregation. Paolo Cammarosano is the only person to have confronted this problem, in the context of examples from the FiorentinoSenese; he has produced an explanation in terms of formulaic change. In his area, the end of the cycle is represented by a tendency for gifts to the Church to become sales, and he proposes that this is simply a change in notarial practice; only around I 100 do notaries develop a tendency to make explicit in charters the price (or counter-gift) that monasteries probably in reality already paid for the 'donations' of the eleventh century. It is of course always to be borne in mind that charters may not mean what they say; the obvious instance is the proposals made by Cinzio Violante and Gabriella Rossetti that some sales and donations to the Church in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Milanese may in reality represent concealed loans. 19 It is my Kurze, 'Monasteri e nobilta', pp. 3s1-62 for the spiritual revival and its social context. 19 Cammarosano, Berardenghi, pp. 1 11- 23 , developing Conti, Formazione i, pp. 161- 2 for formulae (but note the reservations of Nobili, reviewing Cammarosano in Bell. stor. pisano xlviii ( 1979), pp. r68-70). For concealed loans, see Violante, 'Prets sur gage foncier'; id., 'Prestiti dissimulati'; Rossetti, 'Motivi economico-sociali e religiosi'. The argument is most likely to have general application in areas close to major commercial centres, where, indeed, the eleventh-<:entury obsession with simony shows that counter-gifts had already begun to lose their symbolic aspects in the context of the growing importance of commodity exchange; a stimulating discussion of this issue is Moore, ' Family, Community and Cult', pp. 65--9. Majnoni, Coltibuono, pp. I 8-22 develops another idea of Conti's (Formazione i, pp. 162- 3), that gifts could be a way of escaping public dues, but I suspect that in the eleventh 18

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century impression, however, that the Casentino charters can for the most part genuinely be taken at their face . value. Pledges of property in retrirn for loans were certainly common, but they had a space in the formularies available; launegilds and merita, counter-gifts, are specified frequently enough for us to be able to see which are merely a symbolic closing of a transaction, and which a real 'price', in some sense turning a ' gift' into a sale.20 Our charters are, that is to say, more explicit than those discussed by Cammarosano. And, as we have seen, sales are actually commonest at the start of our cycles, rather than at the end; Cammarosano's explanations, however valid for the Seriese, 'do not work in the Casentino. One could go further. It does not seem to me necessary to explain away the end of cycles of gift-giving; they are common everywhere. None of the great churches and monasteries of Italy managed to maintain a continuous run of gifts across the early medieval centuries, and even less a continuous run from the same places. No matter what the spiritual status of an institution, or how it changed, ordinary donors faded away after a period of time, sometimes a generation or so, sometimes thre:e-erarely more (Cammarosano's major example, the monastery of Fontebona, with at least five, was fairly unusual). Indeed, I suspect that the precise nature and extent of the religious commitments of each establishment made little difference to anyone outside a narrow band of well-informed aristocrats and clerics, and (by the eleventh century) city-dwellers. We would certainly be unwise to expect small and medium rural landowners, peasants for the most part, especially those closest to our Castntino monasteries who make up the bulk of our donors, necessarily to have the same attitude to these houses as did social groups closer to the reform movements, or even to have the same concept of the relationship between society and the spiritual. century these were not high (and abbeys with immunities may anyway have collected them themselves). 20

For pledges, see RC 181 (AC ii.37), 288, 365, 4o6, 470 (AC iii.28; Pasqui 255), 541, 568, 624, ACA Strumi, June 1056. Their place in the formularies is uneasy, however; the texts are expressed as normal alienations, with eschatocols that show that they are really pledges. For merita, compare, for example, RC 352- 3 with 186-7. For the whole issue of merita, the best study is Garzell~ ' "Moneta sostituiva" '.

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As I have already said, the construction of these cycles can only be understood locally, in the context of the social relationships of different groups of donors; in our area, this means village by village. I will come back to the issue later, when we have looked at some examples (pp. 2Io-15, 264-8). By I 120 or so, Prataglia and Camaldoli had acquired very great quantities of land, enough to rival the bishop locally, and of course each other. The bishop was still entrenched in Marciano and Bibbiena and their Archiano valley-lands; his other major centres were the middle Corsolone, around Pezza and Montefatucchio, and Castel Focognano. Prataglia had its forest, strong representation in half the Archiano villages, Ventrina, Freggina, and Contra, and in the upper Corsolone, and a generous sprinkling over much of the rest of the valley. Camaldoli, probably by now the largest owner in the valley, had another forest tract and then much land in Monte, Partina, Soci, and Camprena in the Archiano, Arcena and Casalecchio opposite Bibbiena, and, increasingly, the Val di Sova. Camaldoli and Prataglia had quite separate spheres of influence, but they interpenetrated to a considerable extent; the bishop's overlapped with both. It could have been a recipe for political disaster, but records of disputes between them are few, and none occur before the late twelfth century.2 1 The local interests of the three institutions evidently did not conflict; they seem to have achieved, and maintained, a sort of political compact, to keep their relative powers balanced. The lives of local inhabitants, above all of the Archiano valley, were lived out inside this framework. Indeed, precisely because of this balance of power, they survived as free owners for a long time. How they saw the framework, and what effect it had on them, we shall see later. For now, it may simply be noted that a precondition for such harmony was a relative lack of development of the phenomenon that traditionally led to more exclusive claims, the territorial signoria. To finish this characterization of the great owners of the valley, let us look at the early history of the Guidi. The Guidi were the major lay family in the Casentino, and their popular association with the valley, particularly the upper valley, is close. For later disputes, see above all Pasqui 473- 4 (a. against Camaldoli, below, Cb. 11, n. 18. 2l

1216),

and, for Prataglia

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century They were in the twelfth century one of the most powerful families in Italy; with possessions stretching from the Pistoiese into the Romagna, and even in the tenth, when they began their history, were among the most powerful in Tuscany. The relationship of the ecclesiastical owners of the valley with the Guidi would not be as harmonious as their negotiations with each other, largely because of the signorial politics of that family. But it would not be until the twelfth century that their interests would come into conflict. Emesto Sestan has pointed out that the Casentino was for the Guidi the last and least of their power centres, until they were forced into the valley as a result of the attrition of their properties elsewhere by the city communes; and so it certainly was as late as I 164, when a diploma of Frederick Barbarossa, giving them an array of immunities, obligingly lists all their possessions: the twenty-six or so Casentino properties formed less than 10 per cent of the total Guidi holdings, and were, furthermore, listed at the end. But even these were not necessarily obtained early. We can best see this through the involvement of the Guidi with Strumi, their proprietary monastery, for it was the centre that kept most of their locally surviving documents, as well as most of the private documents for the whole north-west half of the valley, the Fiesolano and the pieve of Buiano.22 The Guidi are only documented in a dozen places in the Casentino in the eleventh century. Half of these references derive from a gift by Guido 11 to Strumi in 1029 of tenths of produce from his estates; we may guess that, as with Elmperto's gift to Prataglia of episcopal ninths, the estates represent the core of Guidi power at the time. They were Strumi itself, Porciano, Vado, Cetica, Lonnano, and Casentino, this last perhaps in the Stia area, a later Guidi centre. Other contemporary references to their land fit into this framework: Tennano above Strumi, Stia, Papiano; by I 116 they also had an estate at Soci with land in the V al di Sova. Apart from Sod and some lands at Fontechiara below Bibbiena, these are all in the Fiesolano or (in the case of Strumi) less than a kilometre from the diocesan boundary; the Guidi were not an Aretine power in the eleventh century, and 22 Sestan, 'Conti Guidi'; MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462 (ii, p. 371, lines 16-21). For the family in the tenth century, see Curradi, 'Conti Guidi'; for the

eleventh, Milo, 'Political Opportunism'.

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

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are not attested in any other local documents at all before the I09Qs. 2 3

This pattern of landowning is also very similar to that obtained across the years by Strumi. Strumi was founded before 992 by Tegrimo 11, Guido ll's father, and, even if relatively few of its documents are from the Guidi themselves, its whole history was overshadowed by their inBuence. The family after all still had a curtis at Strumi itself, already a castello in 1029; and when in the later twelfth century the Guidi moved their local centre to their recently founded castello at Poppi, they soon moved the monastery too. Private cessions to the monastery took a long time to pick up, with only a handful before the 106os; it was only under Abbot Natale (1o63-86/9) that they increased notably, with forty-one in those years, nine-tenths of them gifts, nearly half of which came from 1085-6 alone. Half of these cessions came from the pieve of Buiano, principally from Quorle and Tennano in the Scopone valley above Strumi and from Casole and Vanna further south in the Val di Teggina; the others came from Papiano and V ado in the upper Casentino, Fontechiara, and, outside the valley, the hill-slopes east of Pontassieve, around Falgano and Nipozzano. All of these except Casole/Vanna were places where the Guidi already owned land, and many of them, such as Nipozzano, were major strongholds of the family. 24 It ASF S. Trinicl, 8 June 992 (ed. Lami, Deliciae eruditorum vii.8, pp. 316 f.), Mar. 1029 (ed. ibid., vii.8, pp. 327--9), confirmed by Passerini, Mar. 1048; S. Trinita, Feb. roBs. Nov. 1094 (ed. ibid., ill, pp. 146-'7), Apr. 1100 (ed. ibid., vii.8, pp. 333 f.), II3I (ed. ibid., vii.8, pp. 33S f.); ACA Strumi, July 1092; RC 638, 678, 707, 789. Lonnano dates back to at least 96o (Schiaparelli, Dip. Berengario Il 13); Cetica had been seized from the Badia Fiorentina (Schiaparelli, Carte di S. Maria in Firenze 66, a. 1o66}. For all this and what follows, see Map 1o(.A). 24 The foundauon charter is lost; the foundation is referred to in ASF S. Trinicl, 6 Nov. 1017 (ed. Lami, Deliciae eruditorum, vii.8, pp. 320-2). The Guidi showed a certain detachment llis-.1-vis their monastery when they disposed of their own Strumi estate, one should note: they gave a rrumsus there to S. Fiora (ACA SF 330, a.1070, ed. Pasqui 201), and Camaldoli had an estate there too, doubtless a Guidi cession (ASF S. Trinicl, Sept. 1073). For the move to Poppi, the only published discussion is Tarani, S. Fedele di Poppi, pp. 1219; it was complete by May 1197 (ASF S. Trinicl, s.a.). For the complete run of gifts, see ASF S. Trinicl, passim. Strumi also held a church in Florence, given in 1034 and lost, clearly illegally, by 1070: Schiaparelli, Carte di S. MtUia in Firenze 38--9, so-r, 69-71, 73. 29

200

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

would be tempting to ascribe such gifts simply to the local power and influence of the Guidi and their concern to 'persuade' others to become benefactors of their monastery; tempting, but excessive. Most of the donors were visibly substantial owners, not so easily subject to the cruder forms of pressure. Genuine spiritual motives must explain, in particular, the flood of gifts of 1085-6. But the Guidi cannot be separated from the process. It is probably best to formulate it like this: that the patronage network of the Guidi was such that when people, particularly notables, in the Guidi clientele wished to give their land to the Church, their religious impulses were directed along the lines of their secular political links-indeed, the two would not necessarily have been separable. And, apart from the villages in the Val di Teggina (where the Guidi did own estates in 1164, but not necessarily before), the attraction of the monastery, whether wholly or partly spirituaL was not felt elsewhere at all. Shortly before 1089, Guido IV gave Strumi to Vallombrosa, itself by then quite closely linked to the Guidi. This made no difference to the family's control, as the twelfth:-century history of the monastery shows (they would presumably have reserved their patronatus in the donation charter, but it is lost), but it did bring in one of the major Vallombrosan theorists, Andrea of Parma (henceforth 'of Strumi'), as abbot. Andrea had been an activist and publicist in Milan for the early Pataria, and wrote the life of Giovanni Gualberto, Vallombrosa's founder. During his abbatiate, however (xo86/9-II00/5), the number of gifts to Strumi abruptly dropped, and only picked up again, on a somewhat lower level, in the 1 uos- II 30s. We can scarcely blame this on the Vallombrosani; the Guidi still controlled the abbey, after all, and gave gifts themselves. We must assume that the cycles of gift-giving in the villages associated with Strumi had already slackened off; the enthusiasm of the mid- Io8os seems to have. exhausted local generosity for a generation. 25 Sixty per. 25

The latest date of the Vallombrosa transference is provided by Andrea's own appointment, between April I086 and January 1089 (ASF S. Triniti, s.a.); the latter document refers to it explicitly. For papal confirmation, see Migne, Pat. /at. cli, cc.322- 4 (a.IQ90). For Andrea as writer and abbot, see Boesch Gajano, 'Storia e tradizione vallombrosane', pp. ~181 and 112- 13. As abbot, Andrea leased Strumi land in the Val di Sieve to Vallombrosa (ASF Vallombrosa, May 1094), but the latter does not seem to have taken advantage of its position at Strumi to pick up land in the Casentino; its sphere remained

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

20 I

.J

cent of the alienations to Strumi over tl)e whole century are of estates, not the single land-plots or tenant-houses that dominate in the Camaldoli archive; Strumi was thus accumulating more and faster in each locality than Prataglia or Camaldoli would with a similar number of cessions. Strumi ended up with a firm bas~ in a few areas-Nipozzano, Papiano, V ado, the Scopone and Teggina valleys-but it never broke out of them; twelfth-century cessions are still restricted to these places. Guidi expansion in the twelfth century did not bring in new patronage zones for the monastery- possibly because by then they had new foundations to be interested in, Pratovecchio and Rosano, ruled by female members of the Guidi themselves. 26 The Guidi dominated the Casentino Fiesolano by the thirteenth century; virtually the entire area was inside their signoria. Not yet in I 100, however; for a start, they were not the only comical family there. Not that we know very much about the counts of Romena. They appear in a set of documents for their monastery of S. Maria, in 1055 described as being in Sprugnano, though moved by the 1090s to the comital curtis of Poppiena; this monastery they ceded at the end of the century to Camaldoli, reserving their ius patronatus. Their land, and that of their monastery, was spread across the highest valley-heads of the Casentino, as well as at Romena and around Pratovecchio; it may well be they who were the original royal representatives in the upper valley, rather than the Guidi. I would guess, indeed, separate. Andrea, it should be noted, was opposed to some types of gift-giving, particularly by entrants into monastic life: Vita Iohannis Gualberti, 44 (MGH, SS. xxx.2, p. 1089). For Vallombrosa links with the Gu.idi and others, see Majnoni, Coltibucmo, pp. Is f., though cf. also Milo, 'Political Opportunism', pp. 213-1 s. it is interesting to note how many charters transferring private monasteries to independent monastic congregations are lost-other examples are those of the Berardenghi monastery of Fontebona and of Prataglia, both given to Camaldoli, which are first known in confirmations (RC 607, 717 (AC iii.157), 1123 (AC iii.321)). Could this be because the reservation of private ius patronatus in the texts (cf. Cammarosano, Berardenghi pp. So-4; Kurze, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', p. 408) was inconvenient or embarrassing to the new mother houses? 26 The only new area of gift-giving to Strumi in the twelfth century was Arcena, possibly as a result of Ubertini patronage: ASF S. Trinita, Sept. I 132, May 1134, 5 Jan. 1!40, June r172, Aug. II89. For other Gu.idi monasteries, see ASF Pratovecchio, 28 Apr .. II34 (ed. RC 936, AC iii.229), 2 May II34. 7 Feb. ll37 (ed. RC 953, AC iii.240); Passerini, 'Una monaca del XII secolo'.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

that the origins of the Guidi signorial dominance in the Casentino Fiesolano lie with the Romena as much as with the older Guidi estates themselves. The Romena are not heard of after I IOO; by the mid-twelfth century, it is the Guidi who are recorded as controlling their old power centres. Romena and its curtis were in the hands of the Guidi by 1164, and the origins of the Guidi nunnery at Pratovecchio lie, somewhat obscurely, in a refoundation by the Camaldolesi of nearby Poppiena in I I 34, at Guidi request. (This was for Guido VI's infant sister Sofia, who would herself control Guidi politics in the second half of the century.) Only with this take-over of Romena land and interests by the Guidi, then, was the latter family fully entrenched in the upper valley. 27 Apart from the Romena, we know little about the inhabitants of the upper valley. At Papiano, there were a family of imperial judges, Rodolfo (fl. 1024), his son Rodolfo Cantaro (fi. I063), and his son Rolando (fi. I086) and their brothers and sons, and perhaps collaterals, who shared a curtis, a private church and, by I I08, part of the castello there; between IOI7 and 1 I08 much of this ended up in the hands of Strumi. This family must have been part of the Guidi clientele, for their landowning, here, at V ado, and around Nipozzano, was all in Guidi strongholdsthey may well have been feudal dependants of the counts. Besides them, we know of a scatter of other large owners, one or two medium owners in Papiano and V ado, and, through some Strumi leases, of tenants on the monastery's estate in Vado. Small owners, however, do not appear in any numbers until a run of twelfth-century documents associated with Poppiena, now separate from Pratovecchio and fully in Camaldoli's hands. 2 8 This 27 For Romena, see RC 280, 618-20, 6:22 (AC ii.78, iii. 104, 105, and p. 77), with Kuue, 'Geschichte Camaldolis', p. 408 n. It was rare for COWlts to have local ascriptions in the eleventh century; the Romena must have been very locally focused. For genealogy, see Delumeau. 'Equilibri di potere', p. 109, who proposes a link with the Guidi; this would at least explain the latter's tako-over of their lands. For Sofia, see Passerini, 'Una monaca del XII secolo', passim. For later Guidi domination, see Reg. Cap. vi.6, 13, 62-90; viii. 1; ix.SII-99. zs For Papiano owners, see ASF S. Trinici, Dec. 1017 (ed. Lami, Dtliciae eruditorum vii.S, pp. 324-6), June 1003, Feb. 1o86 (cf. June 1086), Jan. 11o6, Feb. noS; Passerini, Dec. 1024, Mar. 1084, Mar. 1091, Sept. 1095, May IIIJ; ACA Strumi, Sept. 1070, July 1092; RC 232 (a.1046). For Vado, see ASF

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

203

is significant. The Poppiena charters show that it is not the case that there were no small or medium owners in the Casentino Fiesolano. But they did not give to monasteries on the Aretine side of the diocesan boundary: not to Camaldoli, with its hundreds of small cessions starting as soon as the border was crossed, nor to Strumi, with its extensive patronage in the Fiesolano from the Guidi and their connections. The diocesan boundary marked a caesura in the social structure of the valley. The social networks north of it may possibly have worked much the same way as those in the middle and lower valleys, being different only in that they were directed towards lay rather than ecclesiastical patrons, and with, most likely, a rather greater reliance on 'feudal' relationships, as I have proposed for the Guidi entourage; but we can say nothing about them. In the twelfth century the Guidi expanded fast, largely thanks to the Romena lands. By 1164 they held, in the upper valley, in Romena, Castel Castagnaio, Porciano, Papiano, Stia, Lonnano, Battifolle, and Cetica: the commanding positions of the Fiesolano, the bases of the future signoria. (Cf. Map xo(A).) They were unmatched in Buiano, too; they held Poppi, a major future focus for the family, but not documented before I I 50; the pieval church of Buiano, one of the only pievi in the diocese to drop out of the hands of the bishop of Arezzo; and three castelli, including the comenditia (protection) of the strategic castello of Fronzola, as well as other lands. But there was also Guidi property in other parts of the valley, most notably land in Corezzo, half the castello of Ragginopoli, a quarter of that of Montecchio, and the commenditia et placitum of Moggiona.29 This last is significant, for we know that this claim by the Guidi was contested, with justification, by Camaldoli. The Guidi in I 164 were, to some extent, trying it on; they may not have had full Passerini, Mar. 1042, May ro82, Feb. 1084, May 1089. For other large owners, see MGH, Dip. Ottonis Ill 295, RC rz (AC i.79, Pasqui 92), 629. For Camaldoli ruling Poppiena direct, see RC 954, 970, 1o62, 11I9, u82, II96, 1220, 1314, 1354. There are also a Jew textS associated with Lon~.~no, an isolated curia of Camaldoli: RC 903, ro8o, 1090, nos, 1149, 1331. 29 MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462. For Poppi in 1150, see RC ro66. Buiano and Fronzola belonged to the monastery of Capolona near Arezzo, whose commmditia et wardia the Guidi obtained between IJ61 and 1164 (cf. RC 331 (AC ii.1o8), MGH, Dip. Friderici I 335). For Moggiona, see below, pp. 32l-3.

204

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

rights to others of these properties, too. Claims to signorial rights would characterize much of the pressure the Guidi would henceforth put on Camaldoli and other Aretine powers; we are moving into the twelfth century; times were changing. But the impact of the Guidi on these more southern and eastern parts of the valley also shows that their power- base was shifting. Poppi would have been on the very fringe of Guidi ownership in the valley in Ioso; in I I so and henceforth it was one of its strategic centres. How this developed, and what effect the Guidi signoria had in the Aretino, will be looked at when we have a clearer idea of what a signoria in the Casentino actually was (pp. 321-4). So far, I have been restricting my discussions to the major landowners of the valley, as a necessary framework for the understanding of local relationships. These were, however, far from being the only owners, or even owners of the bulk of the land. I have already discussed this proposition, not in itself surprising, with relation to the Garfagnana (pp. 58-67); in the Casentino we can see it documented very clearly. Through our eleventh-century documents, in fact, for all their formulaic bareness, we can work out a set of patterns of landownership that can be quite complex, and that vary intricately from village to village. Needless to say, in so doing we run the risk of taking the documents as typical of local owners in general, rather than of local owners who happened to give land to a selection of ecclesiastical institutions; but it is possible to go some way to counter this risk by focusing attention on the process, and pattern of distribution, of such gift-giving itself. Often, as we have seen in the Fiesolano, these patterns show that documented landowners are atypical-usually, however, not irremediably. It is possible, in fact, to build up a pointillist picture, by taking .the valley zone by zone, of the sorts of landowning in existence in different parts of the valley, and of the complex relationship each zone, each village, had with different churches; this is the only way that the social structures of the valley can be clarified in our period. · . What is not practicable, on the other hind, is to discuss here the documented history of every village in the Casentino. They have their divergences, and these are often important, but to set

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these out, document by document, would strain the patience of both reader and writer. We will look in this section at only two areas, each fairly briefiy: the pieve of Buiano, and the village of Ornina. Each of these has its particularities. But they have been chosen principally because they shed light, by similarity or contrast, on the middle Archiano valley, the area for which we are best informed, and which will form the focus of Chapter 9 and most of Chapter 10. We cannot generalize about the society of the Casentino until we recognize the considerable diversities inside it. The material for the pieve of Buiano is interesting in two respects: for the light it sheds on the type of property owned there, and for its geographical distribution. I have already remarked that 6o per cent of the cessions to Strumi were of estates rather than tenant-houses or land-parcels. In the pieve of Buiano itself, the percentage is lower, but land-parcels are still very rare. In some villages, such as Quorle above Strumi, .there are a number of private sales preceding alienations to the monastery, and in these, too, plots of land are uncommon. In the eastern and southern Casentino, land was very highly fragmented, and very commonly alienated on its own; tenantunits were often only arbitrary recompositions of such fragments (below, pp. 231-5). In Buiano, however-and I suspect that the same is true of much of the Casentino Fiesolano-we see a pattern much more like that of the Garfagnana, of units of exploitation (res) that were very rarely divided. There was, as I have noted (p. 27), less scope under these circumstances for the operation of the land market, although the inhabitants of the pieve certainly bought and sold land. It is also, however, quite likely that in much of the pieve the only people that owned land were medium landowners with several tenants each, making it easier to give the monastery whole holdings as gifts. In some villages, at least (Quorle and Casole, most notably), the quantity of documents we have, fifteen to twenty each, all or almost all demonstrably for this social category, makes such an assertion plausible. The category of small owner, owner-cultivator, seems to be almost entirely absent; the only inhabitants were medium landlords and tenants. The pieve of Buiano was probably rather more socially differentiated than most of the valley. And it was

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century certainly more stable, at least in the sense that there was less scope for the rapid transference of land.so The second peculiarity of the pieve is that the evidence for it stops sharply at its borders. It is dear that the southern edge of the pieve, in particular, ran through a continuum of dispersed settlement, divided at best by a low mountain ridge, and sometimes not even that. But there is only a handful of examples of owners from beyond its boundaries giving to Strumi, even though there were gifts of land right up to the edge of the pieve. Similarly, almost the only cessions from inside the pieve to Prataglia and Camaldoli came from two villages, Florina and Tegiano, right opposite Bibbiena on the edge of the pieve of Socana; S. Fiora di Arezzo, whose interests in Caste! Focognano in Socana came very close to Casole in the Val di Teggina, got almost nothing at all from the latter or its neighbouring villages.31 We can draw two conclusions from this. First, that local loyalties, to this or that church, could often be linked to pieval territoriesa fact that makes the equally clear break at the diocesan boundary less surprising, too. Second, a precondition for the first, that Buiano landowners, even though they could be substantial, very seldom owned land outside the pieve. Without this, it is impossible that Strumi could have picked up so little land in Partina and Socana from its local donors. Buiano was probably somewhat exceptional in this sharp boundary; certainly people could own land in, say, Partina and Bibbiena at the same time. 30

For Quorle, see ASF Passerini, Mar. 1029, 1035, July 1038, O ct. 1048 (cf. ACA Strumi, Oct. 1048), June 1059; S. Trinita, May xon, Apr. toss. Feb. to64, July to65, May 1078, Feb. to81, Jan. 1083, Mar. toSs, Apr. 1086, Jan. 1089, Apr. IQ98, June 1113, Dec. 1113, I Feb. l iiS, Mar li4I, Jan. ns6, June n89. For Casole and nearby Vanna, see 'Passerini, Feb. tOI9, Apr. roSs; S. Trinita, Feb. to69, Apr. 1085. May toSs, Aug. 1085, toSs, Mar. 1086, June UI J , Jan. II I4, Mar. 1115, May nrs, June III8, July 1124, Apr. 1133· 31 For Tegiano and Florina, see MGH, Dip. Ottonis Ill 423 (RC 6), RC 22 (AC i.83), 38, 104, 235, 238 (AC ij.6t), 257, 346, 719 (AC ili. 159). Tegiano was pr~umably near the river Teggina, and also dose (too close?) to the !uno, for it had common land on the Arno's far side, in the Ar chiano valley (RC 515). Its properties are usually dependent on ~tates in the Archiano, too. Florina's location is visible from RC 3A (see Map 8; cf. Ch. 6, n. 20); its involvement with Prataglia is perhaps the consequence of the early link between Rodolfo di Righi.za and the monastery (RC 22; see n. 14). For other non-Strumi landowning in Buiano, see ACA SF ISO (a.ro29), 168 (a.I03I), RC 331 (AC ii. ro8), and references inn. 24.

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But in fact most landowning everywhere in the valley, however fragmented, was extremely localized; ownership across pieval boundaries, although possible~ was nowhere very common, except for major owners. Localization of this kind gives some support to the idea of the pieve as an identifiable unit, at least at an informal level (above, pp. 171-2). Not all of Buiano responded to the lure of Strumi-quite a lot of the middle of the pieve is very badly documented; but almost none of its inhabitants felt any pull towards Prataglia and Camaldoli.32 The southern third of the Casentino, the pievi of Socana and S. Eleuterio, has very patchy evidence, with small isolated nuclei of material, representing the sudden appearance of local interest in donation to some church or other-the involvement of the local elite of Castel Focognano with S. Fiora, contrasted by the general preference of their near neighbours at Nibbiano for Prataglia. for example. 33 The monasteries, except the undocumented Selvamonda, were all fairly far from these areas, so the occasional nature of this interest is not surprising (although its very existence contrasts with the isolation of gift-giving in Buiano). Nor is its disappearance, which was frequently sudden; gift-giving often petered out after a generation. The clearest example of this is Ornina, on the northern slope of the Salutio valley, then as now a heavily dispersed settlement extending up to the hill crest overlooking Castel Focognano (both its eleventh-century churches, S. Maria and S. Lorenzo, lay on or near the ridge), which, indeed, shows such a pattern to a marked degree. Badly documented areas in the pieve include the whole central bloc of land around Fronzola, in which Capolona had some land (RC 331), and the upper Teggina valley above Ortignano, undocumented until the 1 I 6os (MGH, Dip. Fridtrici I 335, 406). . 33 The elites here were the owners of parts of the castelli of Castel Focognano and Nibbiano. Those of the former also came to control parts of the latter, thus producing a split in donations in Nibbimw-the more local family giving to Prataglia, the Focognanesi to S. Fiora. The main documents are: ACA SF 25 (a.994, ed. Pasqu'i 78), 5o-3, 56--00, 63 (all IOII), 97 (a.1020), 136 (a.1028), 151 (a.1029, ed. Pasqui 138), 161 (a.1031), 197 (a.1034), 366 (a.1076, ed. Pasqui 222); RC 13, 14, )2, 138, 282. Nibbiano is now lost, although it still existed in 1302 (Rat. Dec. 2255); it was on the Soliggine (ACA SF 190, a.1034), and a linked setdement, Casa nDvola (SF 190, 197, a.1034, 202, a.1039), also on the Soliggine, with a mill, is now Ca8anova, marked below Castel Focognano on the latter's modem catastal map: see Map 8. 32

208

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

Omina comes into our surviving documents in 1027, with a gift by Boso di Boniza to Prataglia. He followed this up with six other gifts including a private church, S. Lorenzo (with his brother Leone) and his own dwelling-house (which he leased back), as well as a sale and a pledge, all to Prataglia, in the seven years 1027- 34; another brother, Bemo presbiter, gave his whole property in two gifts of 1027 and 1037. A series of linked gifts by kinsmen and neighbours make up a total of fifteen documents for the village, all of them from the years 1027-·P, all involving Prataglia. Even though Omina as a settlement was dispersed (six houses are mentioned, in six separate avocabula), the documented landowners of the village, donors and non-donors alike, were extraordinarily tight-knit, all witnessing each other's charters and o~ning contiguously with each other. Boso and his two brothers were probably the principal owners in Omina, for they owned its private church (S. Maria was presumably episcopal), but they cannot be shown to have had more than a handful of tenant-houses each-Bemo certainly had three, but probably not more. Omina as a village had external links before Boso's dealings with Prataglia-some ecclesiastical lands owned by the bishop, Selvamonda and the Nibbiano church, together with one or two lay owners from the Val di Soliggine over the hill, appear in property boundaries- but their infrequency relative to the Omina owners makes it unlikely that any of them owned widely there. The village seems to have been the centre for a tight-knit group of small and medium owners (and the tenants of the latter, making up perhaps no more than half the village), with few links to other localities at all.34 We cannot tell why Boso chose to link himself to Prataglia. The nature of his relationship was evidently complex, and the pledge and, conceivably, the lease may show that he was in debt to the monastery- though simple economic difficulties will not explain why he chose that monastery, relatively far from the village, and not, say, Selvamonda (Prataglia got almost no land 34 RC 87--9. 101, 108, 120, 13o-2, 135, 137, 141, rs8, 161, I!)(). Of the churches, S. Maria (is8) still lies on the ridge; S. Lorenzo (88--9, 1250) was in the avocabulum of Munte, presumably on or near the top. I use 'ff. Bonitie' (i.e. filii Bonitie, the children of Boniza) and the like as convenient labels for families, following Delumeau; the practice corresponds to at least occasional eleventh-century usage.

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from anyone else as far away as Ornina), and economic problems do not explain away most of the gifts. But one thing is clear: the enthusiasm with which the ff. Bonitie gave lands to Prataglia did not rub off very profoundly on their immediate kin, friends, and neighbours. Their involvement with the monastery persuaded a few to emulate them (a third of the charters are for people other than the brothers themselves), but only while their own involvement in the monastery lasted; when the ff. Bonitie stopped, everyone stopped. Indeed, the situation of Prataglia became so completely static that when we next hear of Ornina, in a lease by Prataglia of twelve pieces of land from 1186/7, almost all of these twelve can be identified exactly with lands given in the charters of 1027- 41. These, comprising about half the isolated land-plots of the 1030s (together with the church, but excluding the tenant-houses), had not even in the meantime been unified into a single tenurial unit: the whole set was, as it were, frozen in time.35 Ornina is typical of our documentation from the south of the valley in its more or less chance nature, its short time-span, and its association with the choice of a single family , the leading family of a village. Where it is atypical is in its relative lack of social differentiation. Other donors, closer to the Arno, such as the langobardi de Tulliano who took land at Santa Mama from S. Fiora and then gave it back in 1072, or Rodolfo di Ongano, a vassal of the bishop, who became a Camaldoli monk in 1084, bringing with him a lot of land in V alenzano and V ogognano, or the owner of the castello of Lorenzano, who gave it and its estate to Camaldoli in 1 1I I -I 2, were more obviously members of the lesser aristocracy. As at the other end of the valley, in the Fiesolano, the only people to link themselves to monasteries so far away were the local elites. And here, close to the strongholds of capitaneal power between Subbiano and Arezzo, such elites were more obviously aristocratic than in the middle Archiano or in Ornina. We are also moving much closer to Arezzo's urban orbit itself; south of Vogognano, we start getting documents for the canonica and the urban pieve of S. Maria in Gradi; the real centres of Aretine ecclesiastical landowning and documentation 85

RC

1250.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

begin. 86 The fact that the lay aristocracy had more influence in this southern area than in the Archiano valley, although they certainly existed in the latter, is probably explicable through the local importance of Church landowning on the Archiano. But the fact that aristocratic power did not extend to Omina, only two kilometres up a side-valley from Tulliano, emphasizes the arbitrary nature of local social structures. There is no visible geographical or institutional logic behind the relative social differentiation found in Buiano or its relative absence in Omina; or behind the power, or weakness, of the aristocracy from place to place. But we can at least note the apparent stability of differing structures in each area. Across the eleventh and even the twelfth century, despite the expansion of ecclesiastical land and the growing feudalization of social and political terminology, small and medium landowners, where they existed, survived. The implications of this are considerable, as we shall see in later chapters. I have been discussing these documents as evidence for landownership; but it can equally be said that they are not so much about patterns of landowning, as about patterns of gift-giving to monasteries. I argued above that gift-giving to the Church tended to go in cycles, and proposed that the reasons for this are most likely to be found in the social relationships present in each locality. Having looked at a few examples of the process, we can now go further. Different villages made different choices as to which ecclesiastical institution to give land to. Two areas in the pieve of Buiano chose Strumi; a patchwork of villages in the Archiano valley chose either Prataglia or Camaldoli; Caste! Focognano in the pieve of Socana chose S. Fiora, the Badia Aretina. Very few villages began by patronizing one monastery and ended up with another (Camenza, which switched from For Santa Mama, see ACA SF p.b (c.tooo; ed. Pasqui 201 n.), 330 (c. uno; ed. Pasqui 201), 344- s. 348 (a.1072), 354 (a.1073). For Rodolfo di Ongano, see RC 400, 410, 411 (AC ii.152), 483 (AC iii.JJ), 485 (AC iii.J.J; Pasqui 261), 537, 538 (AC iii.6s). For Lorenzano, see RC 723- 4, 727 (AC iii.16o), 749 (AC ili.164), 750, 772. For the canonica and S. Maria, see ACA Cap. 77 (a.1024), 82 (a.1025), 102 (a.1033, ed. Pasqui 154), 135 (a.1046, ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373), 197 (a.IOOJ), 224 (a. 1070), 244 (a. 1004-7), 266 (a. 1078), SMG 19 (a.1o82). In MGH, Dip. Fritkrici I 412 (a.n63), Moggiona and Calbenzano are the only properties listed as being held by the canonica in the valley. 36

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

2I1

Prataglia to Camaldoli, is the only major example) ; only one in the whole valley, Nibbiano in the IOIOS- I030S, has material showing substantial gifts to two monasteries at once, Prataglia and S. Fiora. This statement hangs, of course, on the assumption that a representative sample of documents survives in these archives, but I have already shown why I think this is an assumption we can make (above, p. 156). It also hangs on the presupposition that other, lost, Church archives-those of the bishop, of Selvamonda, of local churches everywhere would not have upset these balances.37 But local churches, at least, were probably minor recipients of eleventh-century gifts; they are rarely mentioned owning land on land-boundaries, and may have not had much impact on the valley as landowners at all. Episcopal landowning, on the other hand, may, as in the Archiano valley, have been entirely separate from these oppositions. It may in many cases be old, too, perhaps sometimes dating back to private gifts of the eighth and ninth centuries; and there are other reasons why we can probably leave episcopal relationships aside, as being different in type (below, pp. 284- 5). Particular villages, then, really do seem to have chosen to orientate themselves towards one monastery rather than another. Choices of this kind were also discontinuous, and by no means uniform in time. In Freggina and V entrina, people began to give to Prataglia in the IOIOs; in Freggina, the cycle lasted until the 1040s, in V entrina until the 1080s. In Ornina, Prataglia got all its land in 1027- 41 . Camaldoli got most of its land in Sod between the 1070s and the 1110s; in the upper Val di Sova between the IIIOs and the II9Qs. Vanna and Casole mostly restricted their generosity to Strurni to the zo8os, with a revival in I II 5-3 5. There must have been long periods in each village when no one alienated any land to any church at all-indeed, if there were not, church ownership would have risen to a far higher level than it in fact did. And one can go further: in each village the people who gave land to the Church tended to come from specific social groups. In the Fiesolano and in the south of the valley, gift-giving was dominated by large landowners. Conversely, in Arcena south of Bibbiena, where we have good For Camenza, see e.g. RC 168-9, 209, 210 (AC ii.49), 213, etc.; 404, 456, 507, 545, etc. For Nibbimw, see n. J3. Selvamonda land only appears in boundaries in Nibbiano and Omina: RC 87, ACA SF 167 (a. 103 1), 190 (a.1034). 37

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

documentation for gifts by small owners right through the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the major local owner of the early eleventh century, Pietro di Liutardo, a iudex (judge) from a city-orientated consorteria of small nobles, gave almost no land to any monastery.38 Very few villages show cessions to the Church running across the whole local social spectrum; there were always particular social groups who chose to stay out of the process, and not cede land · to any church at all. Such a claim may seem uncertain on evidence cited so far, but we will see it amply documented from the middle Archiano (pp. 26o-4)· It is possible to see cessions, above all gifts, to the church as evidence of straightforward religiosity, the individualistic desire to save one's soul through gifts, according to the dictates of Christian writings from at least Salvian onwards, and of especial importance in the eleventh century, an era of religious ferment. This certainly fits some of our gifts, above all those of the childless at the end of their lives. But I would hate to have to propose that the inhabitants of Freggina only began to feel this urge in 1010 and stopped again in 1050. General discussions of lay spirituality cannot be used to explain this sort of very localized process with such chronological leaps from place to place. On the other hand, a crudely materialist response does not work either. If people are simply reacting to socio-economic pressure, falling into debt and pledging or selling their property, or responding to the economic coercion of local powers by ceding ownership of their land, then it is difficult to see why such cycles would stop at all. It may well be true that some gifts hide sales and loans, just as it is certainly true that some gifts were leased back to the donor, with, perhaps, extra lands added; but the fact that gifts are not always disinterested, while at least potentially explaining away the fact that people want to cede their land to the church, does not explain why so many people .in village X want to sell land to Camaldoli in 1080 but so few of them. in 1130. One cannot, anyway, separate economic . .

.

.

For Pietro di Liutardo giving land, see RC 64- On land-boundaries, 30, 79 (in the city), 95, 102, u6, 139, ACA SF 142 (a.xo28), 203 (a.1035), 2II (a.IOJ8, as witness); heirs in RC 214 (a.1044), 467, 623. For comment, see Delumeau, .'Exercice de la justice', pp. 5.74 n., 597 n. 38

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

2 I3

from religi«;>us motivations as easily as that.39 Even the pay-off of extortionate interest to an avaricious religious house may well be thought to help to save one's immortal soul; it may be the only comfort one has. The real problem is exactly what sort of religious motivations lay behind gift-giving in the eleventh century. We cannot say very much about the field of 'popular religion' in the eleventh century Casentino from documents such as these, formulaic and devoid of personal expression as they are. But it must be understood that, despite their individual and family aspect, the broad lines of 'normal' religious practice tend in most societies to work together with, rather than against, the prevailing social structure. If we look carefully at the patterns of gift-giving to churches from individual localities, the differences between them can be often seen in terms that would make sense in the secular world as patronage relationships. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of gifts to Strumi (pp. 199-200), they may actually run alongside secular clientele links. The link to the church can here be seen as the religious element of a clientelar chain, rather in the way that the choice of which rural shrine to pray at in some southern European communities today is tied into which village and which network of patronage a person belongs to. In directly religious terms, what donors received in return from Prataglia and Camaldoli is not entirely obvious, although it is at least evident that one aspect, heavenly reward, was explicitly seen in terms of a counter-gift (meritum) in a simple gift-exchange, as in the late eleventh-century formula of meritum ... centuplum (i.e. in heaven), or, as once in 1106, 'a hundred-fold and eternal life, which is better'. But I doubt that the distinction between this sort of meritum, and the symbolic counter-gift of a gold ring or a cloak, or even the pecuniary counter-gift of a sum of money, that looks so much like a sale or even sometimes extortion to us, was to them particularly clear. Sales themselves could represent a multitude of social and family relationships, as we shall see in Chapter 9; they could probably represent spiritual relationships, too. And all these elements, when expressing relationships between unequals (as between a small owner and Prataglia), can be subsumed into the concept of patronage, in 39

Cf. Rossetti, 'Motivi economico-sociali e religiosi', p. 388.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

its widest sense; in this context one could call it, fairly crudely but usefully, 'spiritual pattonage' .40 Patronage takes many forms. It can be exploitative the exigent or unruly client, the domineering or grasping patron. It can bring mutual benefit, spiritual or pecuniary or both. But it always exists in a social context, and cannot be understood without that; hence, for example, the fact that modem relations of patronage can have such a very different content in, say, a university in northern Italy, a government department in Rome, and a construction site in Palermo, even though each may have a very similar formal structure. We have already seen in the eighth-century Garfagnana Gundualdo of Campori achieve and stabilize his control over his village (at the expense of his landownership), thanks to his private church and the patronage of the bishop of Lucca. But no one in any of our documented Casentino villages achieved a similar dominance, as far as we can see, or even tried to; here, the content was different. In the Casentino, in fact, patronage was used to support factional groups inside villages. The process could begin for chance reasons- perhaps by a spiritually motivated gift to a given institution by a locally prominent donor-but then could spread via the friendship network of that donor, coming to define membership of the stratum to which he belonged. It would then continue for as long as such a patronage relationship reinforced, rather than undermined, the oppositions inside the village that were its origin; when each family had established the sort of social link it sought, or when the increase in monastic power 40

for shrines, see Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley, e.g. pp. 61-78. For meritum centuplum see RC 329, 6ot, 684 (a. uo6) , etc.; much of the phraseology comes from Matt. 19.29. For the symbolism of meritum, see Garzella, ' " Moneta sostituiva" '. Romualdo had been at the centre of all sorts of spiritual patronage relationships while he was alive, too, mostly aristocratic and royal: Peter Damiani, Vita Romualdi, passim; cf. also the clients of Nilus of Rossano in Calabria, coming to his cell door to seek advice and favours: Vita S. Nili, cc. 47-52, 57-9 (Migne, Pat. graec. cxx, cc.88-96). See, for the general issue of saints and patronage, the classic article by Brown, ' Rise and Function of the Holy Man'. White, 'Setdement of Disputes', pp. 302- 3, makes an important point about disputes over property given to the Church in eleventh-century western France: kinsmen were often prepared to come to terms in such disputes because they wanted, not so much the return of the land, but inclusion in the spiritual patronage relationships between the Church and the original donor.

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changed the local balance, the process would tend to stop, and it did so in most places well before monastic landowning came to dominate locally. Such a complex sequence as this can only be set out with the fullest of evidence, of a kind that we have only for the Partina area, and I will come back to it in that context. But it can be noted here that to achieve cycles of this kind, sometimes very short, the institution concerned need not have been any grander than the proprietary monastery of some small noble family; I would guess that the major test of spirituality required would have been its preparedness to say prayers for the dead. Indeed, Camaldoli's early asceticism may actually have inhibited the process-hence its slight impact on the valley outside Monte for half a century. The religious attitudes underlying this are irrecoverable, and were doubtless extremely complex; the social attitudes, however, are easier to unpick. The model certainly makes it easier to understand why it is that gift-giving so often respected boundaries, of the village, pieve, diocesefcontado, for these were the boundaries of social action for everyone except the aristocracy (and even for some of them); here again, it is in its social context that gift-giving is best understood. The complexities of gift-giving that I have just set out could well, in their basic structures, be found anywhere; they were not a peculiarly mountain phenomenon. In many ways, the documentation for at least some parts of the eleventh-century Casentino makes it into a model usable for understanding the social patterns of Italy as a whole, quite as much as of the Tuscan Appennines. In what ways it is typical and in what atypical is a question I will return to, particularly in the Conclusion. Here, however, in the context of this discussion of valley landowning, we must look at a more precise problem: that of the social autonomy of the valley in the eleventh century, in particular vis-a-vis Arezzo. How much independence did the Casentino Aretino have from the city, in all aspects of its life? And how did this compare with the Garfagnana in the same period? In many respects, the Casentino did not look to the city at all-in administration, for example. The pievi may or may not have been independent judicial territories (above, pp. 171- 2); but the valley certainly had its local administrative experts. This

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

is clearest in the case of local notaries. Most charters from the Casentino until 1077 state that they were written 'in Arezzo', but this was certainly at most nominal; internal indications show that they were normally written in the valley. When, in 1032, a document excuses the absence of one of the witnesses to a land-transaction in Corezzo because he was ill and could not come to Prataglia, the process becomes clear; a cession to the monastery was performed on the spot, and then witnesses and scribe travelled to Prataglia to set out the charter, which is none the less styled Aritio. And the notaries of the documents were local. Two-thirds of the eleventh-century documents for the Casentino in the Camaldoli archive were written by just four notaries, Ugo (IOo8- 2J), Actio (IOII-55), Teuzo (1059-81) and Ildebrando (1077-1121); in the times of Actio and Ildebrando, in particular, almost all of.the RC charters were written by one scribe. 41 These four do not appear as writing RC documents outside the valley, or in the Arezzo documents in Pasqui's collection; they were scribes, above all, for the Casentino. A_ctio and Ildebrando wrote a few documents for Strumi too; but Strumi for the most part had its own local notaries. Buiano once more shows itself to be a territory with its own social identity; otherwise, however, our scribes wrote documents for both monasteries and for private lay transactions, all across. Partina and Bibbiena and most of Socana. Ildebrando, fortunately for us, abandoned the habit of styling his documents 'Arezzo', and for the rest of the century all our documents are precisely located: sometimes in places of local importance like Camaldoh or Bibbiena, very often at Poggiolo, where an important family or witnesses lived (below, p. 261), but also in almost every other known settlement, at least in the Archiano valley.42 41

See RC 121 for Corezzo. RC iv, pp. 203- 1 2 contains a useful index to notaries, which I have taken as in general reliable. Except, at least, for lldebrando; the five notaries listed in RC under this name in the late eleventh century are certainly no more than four, for comparison of the documents shows that Ildebrando 'active 1077- 81' is the same as the scribe 'active I081Il 2I'. This latter is the major valley scribe of his time, and can be clearly distinguished from contemporaries of the same name writing documents closer to Arezzo. The Partina focus of the RC scribes for the valley is shown by cancelled errors in the documents: Archiano for Corsolone in RC 412 (TeU2o) and 534 (lldebrando, uncorrected); Partina for Buiano in 686 (IIdebrando). 42 For Actio in Strumi, see ACA Strumi, Apr. 10 29, ASF S. Trinita, Jan.

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

217

The notaries were kept pretty busy in the valley; 1t 1s thus not particularly remarkable to find them as local owners in our documents. Leone notarius (scribe in 1005) held land in Farneta near Soci in 1010; Baldoino and his brother Giovanni (scribes IOOJ-12) sold land in Partina in 1022. Actio owned land in the episcopal centre of Marciano in IOJO, and sometimes brought his own sons in to witness charters in the 1030s. lldebrando is not certainly documented; Betto iudex, on the other hand, scribe of a handful of charters in the 1040s, was one of the largest landowners in the middle valley .43 Such a haul of references is not only to be expected, but actually rather meagre; it does not even include any gifts to the monasteries that employed them so often. This, however, as we shall see (pp. 26o-4) , is not as surprising as it might seem; notaries were major representatives of the stratum of boni homines, local notables with an independent legal status and responsibility (as witnesses, for example), and in the Archiano valley, at least, this stratum kept its distance from the monastic clienteles. The apparent absence of lldebrando as an actor from any documented transactions, despite his scribal responsibility for nearly 200 others, is thus not suspicious; it is, however, certainly significant. Formal judicial procedures normally took place in Arezzo (although the bishop's vicedominus came up to Bibbiena to hear a case in 1041). But for less formal ones, leading more often to compromise than to legal decision, it was not necessary to go to the city. Indeed, there were some iudices, like Betto, who lived locally; but in fact most legal settlements were organized or ratified by local boni homines, who in this respect had 1038; for lldebrando: S. Trinici, Jan. 1083, Apr. 1092, 22 May 1093, Jan. 1I14, Passerini, May 1 111 (1 have checked the hands); also, perhaps, ACA SF 450 (a.1099). Strumi's major notaries in the valley were, however, Ugo (105984), Amerigo (1084- 11o6) and Azo (1085-99); Gotio (1068- 86) for its Sieve properties. They were generally explicitly located at Strumi itself. S. Fiora documents were generally registered at Arezzo, although there were a few at Sarna, its major political centre in the valley (ACA SF 92, a.1019, 451, a.1099). 4 3 Leone as scribe in RC 9; witness in 7, 11, 23; owner in 23. For Baldoino and Giovanni, see 65; for Actio as owner, see 106; for Actio or his sons as witnesses, see 47- 8, 148, 178, 208. For Betto, see 16o, 228, 232; and below, p. 245· An lldebrando notarius owned an estate at Vogognano in the far south of the Ca.sentino in RC 537, 538 (AC iii.65)-cf. 548; but this is probably one of the non-valley scribes.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

considerable informal. local authority. 44 This sort of legalpolitical self-sufficiency was probably not restricted to the Casentino, but the geographical boundaries of the valley would have ensured a greater coherence in this local pattern of authority than necessarily existed in other parts of the Aretino. Notaries and legal settlements together point to the same conclusion: even if the Casentino Aretino was not formally independent from Arezzo, as a set of territorial pievi or, still less, as an autonomous unit, none the less in informal terms, in the major activities of daily life, most of the important things that went on in the valley had little to do with the city at all. At this point we might look back at our Garfagnana parallel, and reckon that the Casentino was rather less influenced by Arezzo than the Garfagnana was by Lucca. After all, the new eleventh-century aristocra~es of the Garfagnana were urban in origin, and orientated towards the power-politics of the whole Lucchesia (above, Chapter 4), even though local landowfiing and the local pievi had been ceded to them by the bishop. In the Casentino, there were fewer urban aristocrats as landowners, but, instead, at least in the upper valley, we find the Guidi and the Romena, classic rural counts; and we have, in addition, all our material for the middle valley, an intensely local society looking less to Arezzo than to the monasteries, and to the economic and political focus that was Bibbiena. But this, although true in itself, would be exaggerated as a general description of the socio-political environment of the valley. The bishop of Arezzo was extremely powerful still. He had not in any sense surrendered the powers over lands and pievi that his Lucchese colleague had leased away. He called himself count, after 1052. There were as yet no independent lay signorie in the Casentino Aretino; when the bishop wished to intervene there, he had a free hand up to the Fiesolan/Florentine border. Prataglia was his; and even Camaldoli had no immunity from the bishop until after n88. The Guidi, perhaps balanced by the Romena as long as the latter existed, were still restricted to the upper valley, For the formal case, see RC 202. For settlements ratified in the valley, see 248 (AC ii.67), 256, 387, 466, 6oS (AC iii.98; Pasqui 286)-cf., in general, Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice'. For other judges, see RC 255 , 259, and the Papiano owners inn. 28. For the twelfth cenrury, see below, Ch. 11, n. 14. 44

Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving

219

with the trivial exception of Strum) itself. 4 5 It is at least clear that the valley was split into two halves, with potentially rather different societies in each. The Casentino Aretino, however, if we wish to speak of practical activity, must be seen as a zone of the county/diocese that was very much left to itself, but was none the less exposed to episcopal influence whenever the bishops wished to exercise it. Indeed, to some extent it lacked the more independent small aristocratic families (capitanei, lambarda} that, in areas closer to the city, were often capable of stopping the bishop from exercising his power. On this level, then, the Aretine part of the valley could certainly be seen as dependent on the city~ differently based dependence than that for the Garfagnana, but equally strong. Nor would this greatly change in the more signorial world of the twelfth century, though the terms of reference certainly did, as we shall see in Chapter 1 1. Finally, it should be stressed that, in this respect, both valleys were really quite unlike Conti's Poggialvento. That centre, although not geographically remote (it is no farther from Florence than Socana in the south of the Casentino is from Arezzo, or Ghivizzano at the bottom of the Garfagnana is from Lucca), had in effect no point of contact with Florence at all; neither bishop nor any city church owned land there; in the infinity of local lay owners, only one seems to have been a Florentine. The contrast with the Garfagnana is total. As for the Casentino, not only are some lay Aretines documented owning in the valley, even north of Socana, but some valley owners had lands in and around the city; and, of course, the political and proprietorial weight of tlie bishop on his own would ensure that communications between the city and the mountains would be more than trivial. Conti's central Tuscan hill-country was far less part of the urban orbit than were the mountain-lands above both Lucca and Arezzo. In these contrasts, the politics of landowning runs right across all geographical presuppositions. To reconstruct the effects of geography here, we will have to 4~

For Camaldoli immunities, see Cherubini, 'Aspetti della proprieta', pp. 36-7, n. 104. The Guidi: pace Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', p. 584, who emphasizes the Guidi claims in Moggiona. The development of Guidi signorial powers in the Aretino is in fact twelfth-century: below, pp. J2 I-4.

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move back a step in abstraction, in the concluding sections to this book. 46 Conti, Formaziom i, p. 170. For urban and plains owners in the Casentino, see above, nn. 36 (for canonica charters) and 38 (Pietro di Liutardo). For valley owners with land in and around Arezzo, see RC 79, I6o, 232, 366. 46

8

Estates and Tenants

In the Garfagnana, for a hundred-year period (85<>-950} our documents told us about nothing except estate organization. Those for the eleventh-century Casentino, however, are much more generous with information about small and medium landowners than about tenants and the structure of estates. We have some sixty cultivator leases-a considerable number, even if not as many as for the Garfagnana- but they are not susceptible to detailed analysis; most are standard leases with rents in money. The sort of agrarian regime they involve is worth looking at, however; it is a necessary underpinning for much of the landowning that I discuss elsewhere. And there are still not so many discussions of eleventh-century Tuscan estates. 1 The decline of the sistema curtense in the Lucchesia was by 1000 more or less complete. Demesnes had ceased to exist; curtis centres were in ruins; labour-service was rare (perhaps restricted to lay estates) and trivial; money was the overwhelmingly dominant rent exacted until the twelfth century. If the same pattern was in existence in the Casentino, then we ought to be able to discuss differences between it and the ninth- and tenth-century Lucchese valley simply in terms of two successive systems of exploitation. And so, on the surface, it was: two-thirds of our sixty leases are for money alone, and this rises to three-quarters when we include, as we should, those which demand money plus an oblia of a shoulder of meat or two hens. 2 But the pattern of our leases is not, unlike in the Lucchesia, a 1

Jones, 'Italian Estate', with points io 'Manor to Mezzadria' and 'Camaldoli'; Conti, Form11zione i, pp. I25-43; Kotel'nikova, Mondo contadino e citta; Cammarosano, Berardenghi, pp. 34-61 are the major ones known to me. 2 For leases, see nn. 7, 9, 10. Figures for leases exclude Grosslibel/e and Miuellibelle, where they can be identified, and leases to the Church; all these are for rents in money. For oblie, see p. 163.

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reliable indicator for customary tenants without written leases. Philip jones and Elio Conti have shown that in eastern Tuscany the decline of the manor tended to be rather slower than it was around Lucca. Here, demesnes, though fragmented, survived; as did labour-service, though it tended to be light. In the Fiorentino and Aretino the old division between libellarii (tenants holding written leases) and customary tenants, irrelevant by now in the Lucchesia, had stabilized, to reappear again in the twelfth century when customary terms came more and more to be written down.3 We cannot generalize about 'eastern' Tuscany any more than we can about Tuscany; but this model does largely work for the· Casentino. (Indeed, Jones based his analysis largely on Camaldoli material, from later centuries.) But there were local contrasts as well, as we shall see. We will look first at these issues, essentially ones of estate management, at least as the sources pose them, and then, more briefly, at the socio-economic environment of the tenants themselves. Let us start with demesne. The terminology of the curtis certainly still existed in the valley; the word itself was the commonest one for estate, and churches and some of the larger lay owners bad many of th(m. Their centres were as often as not still called casa et curtis domnicata, just as they would have been in eighth- and ninth-century documents, and these were clearly still important for the organization of the estate. They were sometimes situated in clausurae, enclosures, which with their fences or hedges (even, sometimes, walls), must have been in many ways identical to the curtis et castellum pattern now slowly coming in, though they were certainly more common than castelli ever would be. (This is, indeed, an aspect of the appearance of castelli that needs further study.)4 Demesne was still often held in hand; many texts explicitly distinguish between land held in demesne and land rented out to tenants. It was Jones, 'Italian Estate', pp. JO £; Conti, Formazione i, pp. 125- 33· 4 For clausurae and demesnes, see RC 71, 102, 110, 123, 266, 292, 503, SJS, A SF S. Trinita, May 1071. (Clausurae around houses are common also: see RC 183, 212- 13, 234.) For use of walls, see RC IIS, 144. For clausurae to castdli, cf. comments in Settia, Castelli e vill4ggi, pp. 256-7. The issue has long been recognized in northern Europe; see, for example, Hermbrodt, Der Husterknupp, pp. 14-72; Davison, 'Origins of the Casde in England'; Berisford, 'Goltho Manor', references I owe to Steven Bassett. 3

Estates and Temmts usually in small blocs, however, sometimes as little as single fields-hardly an organic structure. And there is clear evidence that demesne-holding was on the wane; there are a lot of early eleventh-century instances of land described as demesne in the process of being rented out to tenants. But although demesne was becoming less important, it did not cease to exist; references to leased demesne become very rare after 1040, but unleased demesne crops up in the Camaldoli documents, on two or three of the monastery's estates, into the late thirteenth centuryindeed, on the Moggiona estate, labour-service continued, as a recognitive obligation, right up to 1500. One could propose that the decay of demesne ceased arowtd the middle of the eleventh century, stabilizing at a low level. 5 Demesne was sometimes woodland, which did not need cultivation, and sometimes vineyard, which may have been taken care of by specialists, but usually it was simple arable land; we need to know who cultivated it, and what this meant for agrarian organization. Functioning demesne is referred to in every part of the Casentino. It was particularly common, however, in the south; in the Partina area, by contrast, it was relatively rare, although there was a lot in one village, Contra, the closest village to the episcopal estate centre of Marciano.6 The overall contrast between the Partina area and the south is something that can be developed, as we shall see. And it is a contrast that was largely independent of ownership, too; we cannot, in most of the valley, see much difference between ecclesiastical and lay estates. But we cannot argue away demesne for any part of the valley; even in the Partina area, someone must have done the work on the few demesnes of the Prataglia and Camaldoli estates. 5

For demesne clearly distinguished from tenure, see RC so-t, 106, 153, 1.2.4, 376, 384 (AC ii.141), ACA Cap. 135 (a.to46, ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373). For leases of demesne to tenants, see RC 94, 12.3, 12.7, 1-57/64, 18o, 355· Tenures were also sometimes reconverted into demesne: see RC 46, 107 (Pasqui 142), 147. (107, and also 59, seem to show collective groups of massarli, perhaps groups of ex-servile freedmen-cf. Salvioli, 'Consortes e colliberti', pp. 18699; Bloch, '"Colliberti" '.) Late, i.e. post-1050, examples of demesne also include RC 331 (AC ii.1o8), 503, 535, 713, 12.31. After 1200, see Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 171, 178-9. 6 For the south, see ACA SF s.s. 58 (a.ron), 92 (a.I019), 151 (a.1029, ed. Pasqui 138), 348 (a.1073), Cap. 135 (a.1046, ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373), 2.44 (a. 1004, first text on roll). For Contra and environs, see RC 94, 1o6, 170, 215, 266, 368 (AC ii.l3J), 503, 535·

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

Before we come back to this, let us look at the leases. They offer us a fairly homogeneous picture. Those for Strumi are the best organized: the twelve eleventh-century cultivator leases for the widely spread curtis Strumi all require rents exclusively in money (and, occasionally, oblie), and most of them require this money on the saint's day of Strumi's patron, S. Fedele (28 October). The degree of mo~etarization and quasi-ritual standardization is striking. Strumi ·only had one centre for the whole Casentino, absorbing all the lands of its estate at V ado and extending up to Papiano: only for some of its Sieve properties did it have a separate centre, at Ferrano (with a rent day at Christmas): The pattern looks, on the face of it, entirely post-manorial, very like the Lucchese canonica estate described by Jones; there is certainly no space for demesne farming in these leases. But we may begin to worry about this homogeneity when we realise that over half of the leases were made for land that came to Strumi very recently, often given by the lessee; only a few can be shown to be for hereditary tenants, most in Strumi's old centre at V ado. 7 Strumi did have a homogeneous stratum of libellarii, lease-holding cultivators, and the fact that it included tenants from Strumi's Vado lands shows that the classic manor was not dominant there; but we must recognize that we can say almost nothing at all about the tenants on the lay estates so frequently given to the monastery. The only charter of gift to Strumi (or to any of the valley houses) that lists the component parts of estates, a text from 1o63, barely mentions demesne for the Casentino properties it covers, at Papiano and V ado. The impression of the weakness of manorial organization given by this document is reinforced by the fact that the four lay-issued cultivator leases we have for the Casentino Fiesolano are all for money. These might make us conclude that the Strumi pattern was common in the upper Casentino. But the only surviving lay lease for the pieve of Buiano, a renewal for a tenant-house in V;mna in 1085, requires 24 staia of grain (perhaps 200 kg, in spelt and wheat), two solidi, oblie, and a day a week For the curti.s Strumi, see ASF S. Trinita, 6 Apr. 1031, Mar. 1034, Dec. 1038, July 1065, Aug. Io68, Aug. 1083, Feb. 1092, Jan. 1099, Aug. 1099, uoo; Passerini, June 1059; and RC 273 (a.1053), a Strumi charter mixed in by accident with ASF Camaldoli. For Ferrano, see ASF S. Trinita, Jan. 1004, Feb. 1073. For parallels, see Jones, 'Italian Estate', pp. 25-9. 7

Estates and Tenants

225

corvee-work: an enormous rent for a single tenancy, and surely atypical, but something that forces us to be careful. s Camaldoli kept very few cultivator leases for the Casentino: only one or two in the eleventh century, and only five even in the twelfth; not until the thirteenth century does the organization of its valley properties become clear. Prataglia kept more: twenty-six from the eleventh century, mostly for the period 102o-40, the period when most gifts came to the monastery. As with Strumi, Prataglia's written leases seem to be associated with recent acquisitions; in half the known cases they were issued to the donor himself, and in others to tenants owning land elsewhere. It is not surprising that there are no later leases for Prataglia: once a lease was made, as long as its terms were not altered, it rarely needed to be renewed; and tenants on Prataglia's newly acquired estates, again as with those of Strumi, doubtless mostly had no leases at all. Rents were in money, except for four: three rents in grain from Soci, and one in money, wine, and labour (two days a month), from Nibbiano.9 They were less systematized than those for Strumi, in the sense that, whereas Strumi rents had to be paid on the same day of the year, those from Prataglia merely had to be paid in the same month as the lease, i.e. annually from the date of the transaction. We cannot trace the pattern of Prataglia's curtes as easily as those for Strumi, for they are less often specified as rent-collection centres; but three of them, Prataglia itself, Ventrina, and Aioli below Corezzo, were places where tenants were obliged to come not only to pay rent, but also for iustitia, monastic private justice; these were probably the major centres of monastic estate management. All three were episcopal gifts; we cannot tell if the private estates given to the monastery were all absorbed into 8 For the Papiano cession, see ASF S. Trinicl, June 1003. For lay Fiesolano

leases, see Passerini, Dec. 1024, July 1038, Feb. 1084, Sept. 1095. For Vanna, see Passerini, Apr. 1085 (recte probably 1084); size of staio from Conti's calculations for the eleventh-century Fiorentino, Formazione i, p. 102. 9 For Camaldoli cultivator leases to 1200, see RC 417 (?), 46o, 861, 868, 871, 921, 1194; see Jones, 'Camaldoli', for after 1200. For Prataglia to IIoo, see RC 5o-2, 6o, 84, 94. 105-6, 123, 126-'7, 129, 131, 150, 154, 165, x8o, 1845, 189, 229, 254, 259, 274(?), 276(?), 420. Those that are clearly not for land recently given to the monastery {165, 184, 229, 420) seem to be newly made agreements, rather than renewals of former leases. For kind, see so-1, 84, 185 (cf. 402, an episcopal lease for Bibbiena).

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

them, but we might doubt it- as we shall see, the curtis de VentritUJ, at least, was not used as an organizing mechanism even in Ventrina itself. They may not, then, have had as important a centralizing role as the curtis of Strumi had for Strumi. But leases are less of a guide for Prataglia than they are even for Strumi. Prataglia had demesnes; however small these were, they were cert.ainly worked, and not by the stratum of libellarii. It is indeed transparent in our Prataglia evidence that this last was a privileged stratum, ex-landowning or (more often) still landowning; the monastery's clients, certainly, but maintaining a certain independence from monastic control, even though they were peasant cultivators. The lay leases surviving in the Camaldoli archive, almost all for the Partina area, are for the same stratum of people, too. These tenants crop up in other texts as landowners; indeed, five texts are for one person, Pietro di Giovanni, who was certainly a small to medium owner (below, pp. 242- 5); all his leases are for money. There is only one lay lease not for money among the Camaldoli documents, in fact: a lease of 1016 by the Cadolingi countess Gemma for a rent in kind owed to her curtis in Corezzo; the lease includes private justice, too, the only lay lease to do so, and must have been issued to a member of a more dependent stratum of cultivator.lO Thus far, then, we can agree that the presence or absence of a written lease could represent a major difference in the status of tenants in this part of Tuscany in the eleventh century. Libellarii were pretty independent, and as likely as not landowners too; the rest of the tenant class, the vast majority, were on customary leases, and tend to be referred to as massarii (or, in an old formula that twice reappears in the 10405, angariali and tributali)-very rarely do people explicitly identified as massarii get libelli. But whether this status difference necessarily meant a difference in obligations is as yet less clear. In the twelfth century, .the monastery ofPassignano (whose documents for Poggialvento Conti was studying) began to write down such customary leases; there are some contracts surviving, and an inventory of rents, 10 For justice 'to Prataglia, see RC so-2, 6o, 94. lOS, 129, ISO, IS4. I6S; to Ventrina, 100, Io6, 126-7; to Aioli, IZJ. (See Ch. II, n. 10 for other examples.) See RC 40 for Gemma. For other RC lay leases, all except one in the pieve of Partina, see RC 172, 178, 183, 197, 204 (all to Pietro), 226, 2SI, 3SS. 422, 492, 497, sss, with ASF Passerini, Feb. 1030 for the Val di Sova.

Estates and Tenants

227

which Conti summarized in his book. These show that customary tenants tended to owe money with an oblia, and, more rarely, other prestations in kind; but also, usually, angaria, labour-service. Most of the latter was recognitive, a couple of days or a week a year, even if one tenant group owed 103 days, two days a week, a heavy burden by the standards of the twelfth century in Italy. Camaldoli and Prataglia did not yet record custom systematically, even in the twelfth century, but for the Casentino we do have two inventories from the castello of Lorenzano, on the Amo 5 km south of Socana, for some time after 1 I I I, inventories of an estate consisting of tenant-houses spread over an area up to 8 km from the centre. These are very similar to Conti's texts. There are 34 rents listed in these two documents. Twenty-one require money, 22 oblie, I8 rent in kind. Only 8 require corvees, rather fewer than at Passignano, but they are in general higher, varying between one day every three weeks and one day a week: these are real obligations, not just recognitive, but they are only required of a small minority. 11 This pattern is the first clear evidence we have for the obligations of customary tenants in the Casentino. The first point to be made is that it fits what else we know about the lower valley. Rent in kind was quite common in leases for the southern C:tsentino in the eleventh century, commoner than money; it is found in documents from three separate churches. Labour is less frequent, but does crop up in one text, Prataglia's Nibbiano lease. The Lorenzano inventories show that it could be fairly heavy; and the relatively high number of chance references to demesne in the south, combined with this, probably indicate a higher than average survival of the practice of demesne labour, even though the obligation to perform it was not universal.12 It seems that the whole of the lower valley was in this respect more For angariali etc., see RC 210 (AC ii.49), 2.32. See RC 365 for a rnasarius with a libellus. Cf. Kotel'nikova, Mcndo contadino e citta, pp. 2.4o-65; jones, 'Italian Estate', pp. 23- 5; id., 'Manor to Mezzadria', pp. 21o-11; Conti, Forrnazione i, pp. 125-33. For the Passignano inventory, see ibid., pp. 277- 82; for those of Lorenzano, see RC 724. 7 so. RC dates them 111 1 and 11 12, as they are attached to documents of these dates, but they could well be later; three tenants are duplicated, but owe very different rents in each, and one could therefore be some time later than the other. . 12 ACA SF 22 (a.992), 64 (a. 1011), 143 (a.1029), I 54 (a.IOJO), 163 (a. 103 1), 164 (a.I03I), Cap. 244 (first two texts on roll, uo64), RC IJI, 185. 11

228

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

traditionalist than the middle and upper valley; not only did demesne still exist, but even in libelli rents had not gone over entirely to money in 1 100, the pattern that would, in the next cycle of economic advance, begin already to be replaced by kind-rents again in other parts ofTuscany in the twelfth century. Here, if anywhere, the sistema curtense kept a tenuous hold. What the Lorenzano inventory shows most clearly, however, is that, in that area, libellarii owed a range of obligations not so different from those of customary tenants, even if, doubdess, in general lighter. This may have been the case in the middle valley as well. Here, as we have seen, we have only a few leases mentioning rent in kind, and all the rest rent in money. But even massarii need not have owed obligations that were very different from this. In the early twelfth century, a couple of Camaldoli documents mention corvee-work, at a recognitive level (six and twelve days per year), and this certainly existed among customary tenants in the later thirteenth century and onwards on some Camaldoli estates in the Archiano and Sova valleys, on an equally small scale. Corvees were doubtless, therefore, a common feature of customary tenure in our period, too; but it is likely that very few tenants in the middle valley owed labour-service that was anything more than symbolic. 13 Labour-service still defined a difference between the two strata of tenants, but did not necessarily constitute a major obligation in itself. Demesnes must often have been very small, and were perhaps sometimes only kept in being for recognitive purposes, as symbols of lordship; where they were lay-owned, by small and medium landowners, they are indeed very likely to have been cultivated directly by the owner. All that remained of the manor even if it was not, in a sense, a small remnant-was tenninology. The eleventh-century Casentino was in its economic structure fairly traditionalist by the standards of the Garfagnana, and of the Lucchesia in general, but it ran much closer . to the norms for the Fiorentino-Senese, on the Passignano estates and elsewhere. The bipartite estate continued to exist as an organizing concept, with a certain reality in the south of the valley. There RC 708, 859 (a. I no, nzs);Jones, ' Italian Estate', p. 30 n.; id., 'Camaldoli' , p. I7I for later references. 13

Estates and Tenants

229

was a clear status distinction between libellarii and massarii, even if this distinction was no longer necessarily represented by a great difference in types of rent; we are not yet at the stage found in the Garfagnana already in the ninth century (pp. 84- 5), where rent was evened out into a standard pattern of moneyrents, due from everyone, which could then be used to create much more subtle distinctions between individual tenants. (We will find in the next chapter, however, that in the Casentino such subtle distinctions could certainly exist among small owners.) Over the next century or so, however, the Casentino would begin to fall behind developments in the Fiorentino-Senese, and, as Kotel'nikova has argued, the urbanized areas of Tuscany in general. Rents were predominantly in money in the valley until after 1250, whereas the change back to kind started by 1050 in the Lucchesia, around I I so in the Senese, and only a little later at Poggialvento. Conti's evidence shows how at virtually every point in time a description of the socio-economic pattern in Poggialvento is only a slice through a complex progression of changes; in the Casentino, at this level, little seems to change in a century and a half, say 1050-1200, or even longer. Why this should be so cannot be fully explained without looking at the regional economy of Tuscany, as it differed in each contado, for the return to kind is inextricably mixed with the growth of the urban market, its predominant rationale being that it allowed landlords rather than peasants to profit from urban demand; the detail of such a growth in demand has not, however, been looked at systematically anywhere. 14 But one final point can be made here, to underpin my argument about economic immdbility: the monasteries, in particular Prataglia and Camaldoli, were in our period strikingly uninterested in economic reorganization of any kind. An example of this is Prataglia's curtis de Ventrina, the centre of its property-holding in the middle Archiano. It was given to 14

Kotel'nikova, Mondo contadino e citta, pp. 26-141, is the basic regional srudy, but further local anaJysis is needed to confirm and check her conclusions. See Jones, 'ltaJian Estate', pp. 27 f.; id., 'Camaldoli', pp. 171-5; Conti, Formazione i, pp. 273-90 (my use of Conti's figures differs from that of Kotel'nikova); Cammarosano, Berardenghi, pp. so-4. For an exhaustive ~urvey of the specifically fourteenth-century urban market, see de la Ronciere, Florenu. Centre economique regional, much of whlch is now transmuted into id .• Prix et salaires aFlorence.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

the monastery, as we have seen, by Bishop Elmperto in 1009, and was of vital importance to the monks in Prataglia's early years, important enough for land beside the city to be sacrificed in order to keep it uncontested (above, pp. 187). It was not large at the start, and only three tenants are named in Elmperto's chatter, but it had lands spread down the Archiano to below Sod. In leases of 1029-33, rents were due to it from a further four other places in the Panina area and in the Val di Sova, all certain or probable recent gifts to the monastery; these show the curtis growing in imponance, and its probable administrator (castaldio) Pietro di Giovanni is first documented in these years as one of the notables of the area (pp. 242-4). But even as a simple rent-collection centre, the curtis did not absorb all Prataglia's acquisitions; a lot of land in the Partina area given and then leased out in the period up to 1035, including some . within a kilometre of the curtis, owed rents and justice directly to Prataglia.lo The monastery seems to have been extraordinarily ad hoc in its organizing procedures, building up a confused overlay of territorial networks with no serious attempts at co-ordination. Nor was it any more systematic elsewhere we have already seen that Prataglia's land-plots in Ornina 25 km away remained territorially disunited over a period of I 50 years (p. 209). This lack of interest in organization is a characteristic of the territorial activities of Prataglia and Camaldoli in general. Despite their extensive land accumulation, particularly in the Partina area, neither of them consistently attempted to build up units of propeny larger than the single fields or collections of fields they characteristically received; sales to Carnaldoli, which made up ahnost half its properties, very rarely show more than chance acquisition either, even though the monastery presumably had more choice over the lands it bought. With few exceptions, the land market was as haphazard when it involved monasteries as it was between lay owners.l6 Not, of course, that we would For the gift, see RC 16 (AC i.81, Pasqui 96), 27 (Pasqui 99). For land dependent on the curtis, see 100, 1o6, 126-7; cf. 420. For land not dependent on it: so-I, 94, lOS, ISO (cf. 146), IS4 (cf. 144). (After I03S. Prataglia texts rarely mention curtts.) 16 What 'more than chance acquisition' actually is is far from clear, of course. That land-boundaries in the Partina area often mention monastic land 15

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expect appoderamento (the systematic build-up of single blocs of land) in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sense; but slightly more economic awareness can be found in some of the other great owners of the period- the Canossa, the monasteries of central Italy, even the bishops ofLucca. Economic reorganization in the eleventh century, however, usually had some link to the organization of land clearance; and Prataglia and Camaldoli not only did not dear their forests, but barely exploited them at all. The growing importance of signorial dues, the other major change of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, also seems to have affected at least Camaldoli's property extremely marginally, as we shall see (p. 317). It was not until the thirteenth century that things would change: the upland economy was beginning to specialize; Camaldoli began towards the end of the century to buy up lands systematically in Soci; monastic properties were finally arranged into discrete estates.l7 In the eleventh century, however, and even in the twelfth, the evolution of economic organization occurred according to dynamics independent of the choices of these landowners, and, as far as we can see, of any others. from the point of view of cultivators, this incoherence may not have seemed very important. Once the corvees of the manorial estate ceased to weigh on their activities, and as long as their rents did not change, their preoccupations were likely to focus on their own units of exploitation. But these were themselves incoherent enough. At this point, one cannot escape the debate on the dissolution of the mansus, the hypothetical traditional unit of tenant exploitation, particularly in the arguments of Conti and his successors, for this is hitherto the only sort of analysis is scarcely surprising, given the amount of property Prataglia and Camaldoli had there. Only a handful of texts show them acquiring land touching their own property on more than two boundaries: RC 91-2, 96, 278, 503 for Prataglia, 490, 543- 4, 561 for Camaldoli. See also ACA SF 183 (a. 1033), 202 (a.1039) forS. Fiora; IZ2 (a.1025), RC 203, 475, 493 for laymen. Camaldoli's earliest moves were to build up property in its cU!usurae: RC 191 and 207 for Monte (but still incomplete in 1168: RC 1166); 1299 for Soci. 17 See Jones, 'Camaldoli', p. 169 for Soci; id., 'Manor to Mezzadria', pp. zo8-12, 227-32 for appoderamento in general. For reorganization elsewhere in Italy, see FumagaUi, Adalbtrto-AJto, pp. 4-29; Toubert, Latium, pp. 321-38, 487-91; Wickham, 11 probltma delrinc.astellamento, pp. 59"--60.

232

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

that has given some form to the endless interchange of bits of land and houses recorded in the documents. Conti showed how in Poggialvento the unit of the mansus (or its equivalents-res, sors et res, casa et res were commoner than mansus in the Casentino, and covered units both of tenancy and of small landownership) gradually ceased to appear in the documents as the eleventh century went on, being replaced first by fractions of mansi, and then simply by land-parcels. Cammarosano has shown a similar pattern in the northern Senese here, mansi persisted as whole units alongside fractions until about 1130, but then disappeared in their turn. Tenants thereafter explicitly had a series of fragmented land-parcels, constantly changing; though these are increasingly given a name, tenimentum (after c.uoo, podere), these latter were just courtesy terms for the changing arrays of land-parcels, and were defined less by toponyms than by the holder of the array at any given time. But both these authors show that mansus itself had at best been a courtesy title for a fragmented group of land-parcels; it expressed an ideal, the tenant-plot stably associated with a particular toponym, probably with a particular curtis, that may never have existed and certainly did not by IOOo-the eleventh-century 'dissolution' was, then, principally a dissolution of formulae. IS The broad lines of this argument are valid for the Casentino, just as much as for the Chianti hills. The constant movement of fragmented land so well described by Conti, which across a century resembles nothing more structured than the patterns of light on a pond that are created by a slight breeze, must be a constant in most of eleventh-century Tuscany. (We have seen exceptions, though, in the Garfagnana and in the pieve of Buiano: above, pp. 27-8, 207.) It was created by the 'land market', which, in effect, took off from the fragmentation implicit in most systems of partible inheritance. Conti remarked on the irrationality of this constant circulation, but it was not intended to be 'rational', in the sense of systematically directed towards economic improvement {the English term 'land market' is here beyond doubt misleading); the exchange of land above Conti, Formazione i, pp. 133-43, 182-8; Cammarosano, Buardenghi, pp. 34- 43. The dissolution was later in northern Italy: see Cherubini, 'Campagne italiane', p. 342· 18

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all represented a system of constantly changing social relationships between kinsmen and neighbours, not a series of failed attempts to reorganize property-holding (cf. also below, pp. 254- 5). 19 In this social sense, the land market was a different sort of organizing principle to the mansus, for the latter concept represented peasant society above all in terms of the relationship between tenants and their landlords; the former did so in terms of that between proprietor and proprietor. And the land market had a direct effect on the mansus, too, for landowners constantly alienated bits of land exploited by their tenants to other people, thus ensuring that the lands comprising any one mansus were always in flux. But both sets of principles could certainly co-exist. Conti saw the dissolution of the mansus as in part a product of the appearance of written documentation, for the concept was too cumbersome to survive. I have already expressed doubt that documents really did only appear in the Fiorentino in 1000 (p. 10). In fact, however, in the Casentino people seem to have been more detached about their use of casa et res and sors et res. Right from the start of our documentation, in the first decade of the eleventh century, land-parcels, isolated from whole units of exploitation, predominate in the texts. They form the largest category of transaction in every decade of the century; there are nearly twice as many of them as there are casae et res, units of tenancy and of small ownership. And if we look at the latter, we discover that even these were far from unified: some are whole units, or divisions thereof, but others seem simply to be isolated plots of land that happen to have a house on themterra cum casa is almost as common as casa et te"a. And what constitutes res is often equally chancy. Leases in the eleventh century are often not for already defined units of tenant exploitation, but for chance collections of land given by a pious donor. Eight of the Prataglia leases are for such collections of land, and require the building of a house inside the year: here, we can see the invention of a tenant-unit out of groups of land-parcels formerly subject to some other unit of exploitation. (By contrast, Strumi leases, to the old, probably territorially stable estates in V ado and the V al di Sieve, required rebuilding (reconciliandum) of houses that were already there, a process we l9

For the land market, see Conti, Formazione i , pp.

I 42, 18o, 212-15.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

have already seen in the Garfagnana.) Indeed, tenant-units did not necessarily have houses; the leases show this often enough, and so do two documents of 1046 for the lands of Betto iudex of Freggina, the second of which is the more explicit, referring to his tenancies, 'both those properties with occupied houses and huts on them, . . . and those which, without houses and possessions, are held by anyone' (tam eas res que cum casis super

se atque teguriis residentibus ... quamque eas que sine casis et cespitibus ab eodem per aliquem detente fuerant): a unique formula, but precisely for that reason probably exact.20 It should already be clear that in the Casentino, as at Poggialvento, the casa et res Umansus) was not predominant as an organizing concept at any time in the eleventh century, and was simply applied to the normal changing collections of land in the hands of any given cultivator. But the Casentinesi never saw any reason to cease to use it, when it was relevant. When tenant-units are referred to at any time in the eleventh century, they are recognized to be single units. And they never cease to have a geographical ascription, presumably the location of the house of the cultivator; the tenant does not l?ecome the sole feature that defmes the unit, even though his name is usually an element in its identification-thus, in io85, ipsa terra et re ... in

casale Ventrina, sicut recta et tenuta est per Sigolo filio Berti et per nepotes suos et ubicumque inventa fuerit. Such phrases could come from any part of the eleventh century in the Casentino. In the twelfth, when tenimentum and podere came in as new terms for tenant-unit, as they did elsewhere, they were used in the same manner. Leases still tend to show tenant-units, in principle linked to specific localities; a libellus of 1152 ceded integrum illud

tenimentum de clusura quod dicitur Bocina, . . . in avocabulo Bocina vel per alia loca. But alienations, on the other hand, were by nQw almost all of parcels of land, not of tenant-holdings. The · 20 For terra cum casa, see e.g. RC 23, 105, 1 u-12, 1 sz (AC ii.29). The Berardenghi area studied by Cammarosano shows a similar preponderance of land-parcels over mmui from the start: Beratdenghi, pp. 36-8. For house-building, see RC 5
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concept of the unit of tenure attached broadly to a geographical area none the less never ceased to exist, even if its relevance to much agrarian activity had very greatly declined. 21 It is not altogether surprising that the mansus problem has become a focus of attention for those studying the eleventh- and twelfth-century Tuscan countryside; it is in many ways the closest we can come to tenants in a documentation so dominated by the formulae of land transactions. Certainly we get little direct impression of attitudes to land-tenure, of, for example, how imponant the difference between being an owner and being a tenant (or being both, as was probably the commonest) actually was. Could we perhaps say that leases were regarded as demeaning, since a 1037 lease for Farneta west of Soci refers to the censo et servitiio et penam libelli? even libelli, after all, though for an upper stratum of tenants, tended to involve residence requirements and private justice, and this one certainly did.22 Interpretative transformations of this sort, however, rely on arguments that are decidedly circular. It may be that it was the position of small owner that our Farneta lessees feared, or were thought to fear, to lose; they would not have been unreasonable if they did. At the very least, tenants had staying power. They were all, as far as we can see, free (there is little or no hint of legal subjection in any documents mentioning tenancy; slaves as chattels were occasionally bought and sold, but they were clearly domestic servants and specialists), even if tied to their lands; in fact the close association between a tenant and his land could actually increase his independence when his landlord alienated 21 Quotations from RC 494, I08J. Tenimentum fmt appears in RC in 1084: RC 470 (AC ili.:z8; Pasqui :zss); in Strumi in ASF S. Trinita, 1 Sept. 1115; cf. Conti, Formaziont i, pp. 163- 4. S. Trinici, June 1003, with its long lists of l'lf4nsi, gives each one a tenant and nearly every one a toponym; the tenant has gained importance as an identification marker, but the mansus terminology is intact. (Contrast the devendw:entury Garfagnana Grosslibdle, where only the mansus is important, the tenant's name often being lost; above, p. 87. But in the Garfagnana, with so small a land market, tenant--units could survive for much longer.) In the Casentino, twelfth-century leases show great variability, but are almost all for tenant-holdings rather than land-parcels, unlike the majority of the contemporary leases listed by Conti (Formaziont i, pp. 27J-'J, 286-90): RC 713, 859, 86t, 868, 871, 954. 970, 10'77, 1083, u8:z, 1194. 112 RC x6s.

The Casen.tino in the Elev~th Century some of it. Guido masarius di Morula held a clausura in Arcena per libellum from Nero qui et Urso di Gizone in 1071; when Nero/Urso gave only half of it to Camaldoli (he gave the other half in pledge, but only temporarily), Guido continued to cultivate both. And there are many examples where land split between brothers and -individually alienated is still cultivated by the same tenants; only the rent can have been divided. 2 3 These procedures tended to weaken the link between the tenant and his lord, for the ownership of the land was continuously changing; even massarii were not necessarily particularly subject tenants. Libellarii had still more de facto independence. Some had such full control of their holdings that they could alienate rights to them to the Church; these were, in general, probably feudal tenants (below, p. 284) . Some had enough spare money or movables (perhaps from other landowning, but not necessarily) to buy out their leased lands, permanently, or for a single lifetime. There are leases for land that hover uneasily between the cultivator lease and the Mittellibell, as in Campori in the Garfagnana (p. 48), leases where another tenant is still in place, but where the libellarius is apparently expected to cultivate as well. Tenure did not involve a series of clearly defined social strata, of landowners, feudal tenants, lease-holding cultivators, customary tenants; it was a continuum. Not only was it always impossible to draw precise lines across the continuum (and still less so now that servile status had probably virtually disappeared), but the same person at various times or in different places held land at different positions in the continuum. 24 We thus must conclude with a contradiction. On the one hand, landowners, even small owners, must in many crucial See RC 365 for Guido; for other divisions, see .JSJ, 176, 181,- 481- 2. with 487, etc. For chattel slavery, see RC 28, 41,_245, .(iCA Cap. 77 (a.1024), Pa~qui 263. Slaves were expensive, .and thus doubtless specialists; in RC 245, they came with ienitiio (i.e. gynaecaeo) et serviliio et ministerio, and were prqbably textile workers. Note also the numerous cooks and other slaves in the famous lists from S. Fiora, ACA SF 455--6 (ed. Pasqui .293), from c.1o8o--one was a penal slave from Sama. 24 For buying ou.t leases, see e.g. RC 271, 376 (<;f. perhapst for the same man, 259, 315, 381- if so, he was no mere tenant-cultiv.ator). for quasi-Mittellibelle, see RC 126, 129, 273, ASF S. Trinita, Apr. I CJ9Z. For all these points, see Conti, Formazione i, pp. 174-81. 23

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respects have been superior to those (who might in economic terms be quite well off) restricted to the servitiio et penam of tenancy. On the other, few or no owners did not hold some of their land on lease, and quite a number of tenants would have had at least a small amount of land that they held outright. We cannot be exact about the relative numbers involved in the context of the second statement, and we certainly cannot demonstrate the first from our documents; but they are constants in medieval Italy, and must not be forgotten: the first as a warning against generalization (and facile egalitarianism), the second as a comfort. Despite the large number of documents at our disposition for the eleventh-century Casentino, we really know very little about tenants as such, apart from lists of their names. Landowners are what our documents tell us most about; when some of them become tenants, or bold extra land by lease, this is usually only incidental to our knowledge. For one area, however, we have so much material about the landowning inhabitants that we can begin to generalize about the whole population with some confidence: the Partina area. What can be said about this small territory will be the core of the next two chapters.

9

The Social Circles of the Middle Archiano Valley

If you travel up the Amo into the Casentino, and turn right below Bibbiena. _you will find yourself on a short stretch of plain, the Bat lands (in the Middle Ages, they were marshlands) at the lower end of the Archiano. (See Map 9 for all that follows.) Go on a little and you will reach Soci, the modem centre of the Archiano valley, sprawling westward and southward out of the medieval castello, prosperous with new building and light industry. Soci was the largest centre on the Archiano already in 1427; now, with 2,500 inhabitants, it is the second largest settlement in the Casentino after Bibbiena, bigger than the rest of the Archiano settlements put together.l In the eleventh century, however, as we shall see, the population balance was heavily weighted in favour of the hill-slopes just above it, and Soci itself was a small settlement, not yet crystallized into a castello. It is worth making a mental journey up the valley, so as to visualize this contrast in environments- the plain, overlooked by hill-slop~. with the mountains of Camaldoli behind them all. Going north out of Soci, the plain begins to rise, and it narrows sharply after a I9Jometre, beside the seventeenth-century Camaldoli villa at La Mausolea. The low hills that have lain on either side of the plain siuce Bibbiena turn into steeper, vine-clad slopes, leading, on the western side of the valley, up to the forest of Camaldoli; Monte, now the two small settlements of S. Martino a Monte, sits 250 m up the western slope, on a probably old hill-road direct to the monastery. Following the road on the 1

Raw figures for 1427 are in Conti, Formazicne ili.2 p. 316; Klapisch, Carta del popolamento, pp. 41 f.; for 1971, ISTAT, JJ° Censimento generate iii.9, pp. 75, 82.

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plain, after another half-kilometre we reach the pieve of Partina, or, to be more exact, the farmhouse of Casale La Pieve--the nave now forms part of the farm building. 2 The plain here is so narrow that the ex-church lies only a couple of hundred metres from Podere Contra, on the opposite side of the Archiano. Contra is reduced, too, this single house being almost all that is left of the large eleventh-century village (casale) of Contra, lying under the hills that run close to the Archiano's eastern bank. The modem settlement of Partina is a little further up, under the eleventh-century casteUo (the present fortifications appear to date from the nineteenth). Here the plain has definitely stopped; what remains is a steep river-valley, wooded on the eastern side, terraced and cultivated promiscuously on the western side, which rises up to Freggina, the next hillside settlement along from Monte. Shortly after Freggina, the wood closes in on the west; the last farm is V entrina, another remnant of an early medieval settlement, and then almost all cultivation stops. We are entering the forest lands of Camaldoli and Badia Prataglia; above Ventrina the only agricultural settlement is Serravalle, founded as a castello in the late twelfth century. It is from this area, from Soci to Ventrina, that our largest concentration of documents, some 280, comes. But in the eleventh century the settlement pattern was somewhat different. Ventrina, right on the edge of possible cultivation- upstream, the land is so steep that the soil falls off it- was a substantial settlement, with a major estate centre. Freggina shared its geographical reseau with another settlement, Rode, perhaps slightly to its west. Where modem Partina is, there was the village of Sexta, which must have been absorbed by the castello of Partina soon after the latter's foundation, just above the village, before 1095 (Sexta, at any rate, never appears again, and its church, S. Pietro, is S. Pietro Partine by I 134).3 Monte is 2 Bracco, Architettura e scultura romanica, pp. 17 ff. 3 The last Sexta reference (with S. Pietro), is RC so6. Castello de Partina appears in RC 584, with S. Pietro in 937; cf. 986 (AC ill. 254), 1270, 2387. (The modem church is S. Biagio; it is post-medieval.) Sexta can be located, for it included land beside the Archiano (RC 452) and the rio Seste (RC Ss, 144). The latter must be the modem Rimaggio, for it ran, as the Rimaggio does, beside Castricani (see Map 9; location from local informants), which was an avocabulum of Sexta (RC 144. 167).

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century much smaller than it was in the eleventh century, but is still in the same place across the Rima.ggio torrent (rio Seste) from Freggina; its avocabula .gave it a much wider territory, however, stretching up to Metaleto by Camaldoli and down to La Mausolea. Partina, presumably then close to the pieve, may not have been very large; nor was Soci, little evidenced before its castello is frrst mentioned, in 1079. Contra, however, on the opposite side of the river, was certainly substantial then; it stretched along the lower slopes of the hills, from Legnaio, opposite modem Partina, nearly down to Poggiolo, opposite Soci. Above it were the episcopal castello of Marciano and, to the south, the later lay castello of Gressa, but these did not belong to the same social network as the other villages, and have little documentation. We must recognize at the outset how small this area is. Excluding mountain land, we are looking at a circle 3 km across; perhaps 8 km• of arable in all. From Soci to Ventrina or from Contra to Monte is forty-five minutes' walk, nothing for a peasant if no conceptual boundaries are crossed. But, despite the fact that settlement in the area was generally dispersed, eight distinct villages existed there in the eleventh century, nine with La Mausolea (above p. 177), with very little confusion between them. What created the boundaries used here, then? To an extent, one can draw lines between the settlements based on geographical divisions; steep and wooded stream valleys separate Freggina from Monte on one side and Ventrina on the other; a dear opposition between hill and plain distinguishes Freggina from Sexta and (less consistently, perhaps) Monte from Partina. But these geographical distinctions do not 'naturally' create reseaux for villages; many villages in Italy have ten or a hundred times as much rural territory, criss-crossed by such divisions. To understand what made these separate requires further thought. If we go too far into causal problems of this kind, of course, we risk totally losing ourselves in speculation. But there are some correlations that can be made. One relates to the churches. The Partina area had a lot of churches. Freggina and Rode had only one between them, S. Felicita, but Monte had two, S. Maria and S. Martino; Sexta had S. Pietro, Partina S. Maria (the pieve), Contra S. Giorgio, Soci S. Niccolo. (Ventrina alone of the major villages had no documented church at all- its focus

The Middle Archiano Valley may have been its curtis.) Of the churches, only S. Felicita and S. Maria di Monte were private (the latter was Camaldoli's from the start; some of the former came piecemeal from its lay owners to Prataglia); the rest were dependencies of the pieve, under the control of the bishop. How old they were we do not know, except for the Soci church, which was consecrated in 1058; some could date from the eighth to ninth centuries. I have already suggested (p. 175) that it may be that the clarity of distinction between each village may not actually pre-date the appearance of churches in them as foci; Freggina and Rode, which shared a geographical territory and a church, were not surprisingly, then, the only settlements we can see interpenetrating, and may not have been wholly distinguishable. 4 But an ultimate origin of the social differentiation between each of these settlements could well be the range of ownership of their inhabitants; remarkably few people in the middle Archiano owned much land outside the territory of the settlement in which they lived. The tiny geographical scale of landowning must have underpinned the equally small scale of local identity- as well as itself being reinforced by the latter. And the boundaries of identity were certainly sharpening. In the Garfagnana of the eighth and ninth centuries, opposition to a local family linked with one church seems to have been sometimes expressed through gift-giving to another (p. 42). In the Casentino in the eleventh century, this was no longer the case; people in Freggina, when they gave to the Church at all, only (or almost only) gave to Prataglia, people in Monte only (or almost only) to Camaldoli. Villages could be very internally split, as we shall see, but they did not let these oppositions extend to letting two monasteries compete for their allegiance. A certain identity existed, then, for each of the settlements we will be discussing; a certain crystallizing process was already in operation. Social circles, roughly geographically arranged, were turning into real communities (c£ below, pp. 335-40). For first references to churches, see S. Felicita, R C liS, 146; S. Maria di Monte, 191 , 204, 425 (cf. 373, AC ii.137); S. Martino, 85 1 (a.II24, but it will probably have been eleventh-century; being an episcopal church, it is only mentioned by chance); S. Pietro, see previous n.- in RC 986 (a.1141, AC iii.254) it was in the patronatus of the Ubertini; S. Giorgio, RC 503 (the bishop gave it to Prataglia in 11 24: RC 8so (AC iii.205; Pasqui 319)); S. Niccolo, 291 (AC ii.89). For Freggina and Rode linked, see 149, 232, 235, 240. 4

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century To see how these networks operated, let us look in detail at some examples of local people and their affairs. Not all the lay landowners in these villages were local, even though they could be important locally--such people, members and future members of the petty nobility, will be looked at in the next chapter. Here, we will look exclusively at small and medium landowners. As far as can be ascertained, all the people I discuss were based in the Partina area, and were rarely active anywhere else. The first and perhaps the best example of a local man is the castaldio Pietro di Giovanni, active in 1025- 50. 5 Of what Pietro was castaldio is never explicitly said, but he was active above all in Freggina/ Rode and Ventrina, and was in the clientele of Prataglia from the first; I would guess that he was the administrator of the monastic curtis at Ventrina. His relationship to Prataglia can be seen by his position as a charter witness: his nearly forty appearances as a witness between 1025 and 1046 were all for monastic charters, and he appeared in almost half Prataglia's documents for the period. Once, he acted as Prataglia's legal representative; he must have been a bonus homo of a certain standing (below, p. 259). But his principal interest for us lies in the thirteen texts in which he is a participant in his own right, from the years 103 1- 46. In most of these he is acquiring land. He bought land in Rode from Amico di Grimaldo, a member of a prominent local consorteria, for 30s. in 103 1, and another piece for the same price in 1041; in 1038 he bought out holdings in Freggina of the ff. Benzi, a rising almost-noble family (below, 5 Pietro's active career can be seen in RC ll.S, 172, 174, 178, 182-3, 1978, 204, 217, 232, 235; cf. 254, 263 (the tf. Lamberti), 269. As witness, his career runs between 8o and 238 (AC ii.6t); in 149 (a. 103.5) he is Prataglia's

representative. He cannot be the Pietro di Giovanni of the Monte sequence of 83, 105, uo, t19, as by the last text that Pietro is already dead; nor, in all probability, the homonym in 251, 338-9, 352-3, another Monte owner of similar standing. There are, however, fewer Pietro di Giovannis in the period than one might think. RC 149, 171 each have two witnesseS, Pietro castaldio and Pietro di Giovanni, the latter of which may be the second Monte owner, if it is not an error (compare 359, a doubled Farolfo di Lamberto-see n. 9). But the transactions lj have described can only be the work of one man, usually explicitly called Petrus castaldio filius qucndam Iohannis. Pietro, like Teuzo castaldio of Bibbiena (see Ch. 7, n. 11), though not a major owner, had an important public role; both were more important than estate managers elsewhere Oones, 'Italian Estate', p. 27; cf. id., ' Cama1doli', p. 171)-see, however, n. 7·

The Middle Archiano Valley

243

p. 275), for up to about 2oos. But he also took leases of land from laym~n: several land-plots in Freggina for a total of 3d. per annum, and a tenant-plot with an abandoned house in Ventrina for 6d. in 1038; another plot in Freggina for xd. in 1041; a third of the mill at Ventrina for 3d. in 1042. We.do not have any Prataglia leases for Pietro, but he had some, for he is mentioned in later years as a former tenant of land in Ventrina. He sold land to the monastery, too (land in Rode, for 30s. in 1042). Prataglia can in one case be seen acting, somehow, as Pietro's patron, when in 105 I the ff. Lamberti of La Mausolea (pp. 177, 248) sold land in Ventrina to the monastery ~according to the agreement (line) which the abbot has made with the brothers about Pietro the castaldio'. The ff. Lamberti were not visibly Pietro's kin or associates, so it is the abbot that must be acting for him. He does not reappear in the texts, and was by now probably dead, but whether this charter relates, for example, to a redistribution of his leaseholdings or, more dramatically, to a penal settlement over his death is unknowable. Pietro was not, as far as we can see, a major monastic donor, but his documents must have reached the Church along with a lost gift. On the other hand, he was not childless; much of his land must have gone to his son Giovanni. Giovanni was not part of the monastery's clientele. He contested Prataglia's possession of the Ventrina mill in 1085, and was bought off; if other references are to the same people, then Giovanni and his two brothers gave and leased land in and above Freggina to Camaldoli, almost the only land in the village ceded to Carnaldoli, in 108 5-97- if these are Pietro's kin, then the Prataglia link had finally come to an end, and acrimoniously. 6 With the best will possible, one could not see Pietro di Giovanni as a prominent owner. His transactions almost never involve houses. It cannot be that he cultivated all of his land himself, but it must be emphasized that we can only suppose this because of the quantity of his surviving transactions, not because of their type; his leases could be ordinary cultivator leases, and references to him as a former landholder are expressed through formulae normally used of tenant cultivators. I would RC s10, and perhaps 488-9, 6oo. Other Freggina gifts to Camaldoli do not appear until the twelfth century: see 748, 8os, 896. 6

244

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

guess that he was a strictly average, small to medium peasant owner with few tenants, exceptional only in that he was Prataglia's local administrator and representative. We certainly should not think that he was using his monastic links to gain political position: men like Amico and the ff Benzi were rather richer and more influential than he. His transactions appear totally typical of the local 'land market', and as a group give important indications of its scale (small but active) and nature (private leases may well have been as important a way of alienating the use of land as outright sales). Pietro disbursed at least 300s. in money equivalents in. fifteen years, and in addition committed himself to paying 14d. a year-the financial scale of the leases being so far below that of the sales that we might well guess at undocumented entry-fines. He will probably have sold land, too, although only one of his sales, to Prataglia, survives. But his interests remained strictly local. 7 On only one occasion did Pietro venture outside the two square kilometres of these transactions: when he bought all the posses§ions of the dying Betto iudex for loos. in 1046, a property based in Freggina/ Rode, to be sure, but extending widely in the Casentino, over the pass to Bagno di Romagna, and down the Arno nearly to Arezzo. 1oos. is a very small sum to pay for lands on this scale there must have been personal bonds between the two; and Pietro did not keep it long. Two months later, in fact , be gave the whole estate to Prataglia, as he had received it. s This may well have been according to the agreement with Betto, Pietro acting in effect as his executor; but it may equally have reflected Pietro's unwillingness at the end of his life to extend his responsibilities. If Pietro was indeed offered the opportunity to rise into the next stratum of society, he did not take it. No one is as fully documented as Pietro di Giovanni in the Archiano charters~ and no one else will be discussed at such length, but other family groups offer useful parallels and contrasts. 7

Cf. para1Iels in Conti, Formazione i, pp. 155-6, 163-7; Wickham, Societa degli Appeimini, pp. 92 f( Contrast the gastald Giacomo Berruto, whose management of the canonical estate at Quarto d' Asti in Piemonte around I 200 brought wea1th and considerable loca1 prestige for him and his family: Balda, ' Quarto d' Asti', pp. !)6-xoo. 8 RC 232, 235· The formulae make it clear that Pietro was not here simply acting as Prataglia's representative.

The Middle Archiano Valley

245

One example is the ff Farolfi, the family of Farolfo di Teuzo, boni homines for Prataglia over three generations.9 Farolfo witnessed Prataglia charters in 1011-3 I and one or two private ones as well; his brother Raineri did likewise in IOI4- 16, his sons Lamberto and Betto in 1019-23, and finally, his grandson Farolfo di Lamberto, the most active of the group, in 102o-57. Only the last two of these appear as actors in charters, however. Farolfo di Lamberto bought a house and a fair amount of land in Freggina and Rode in 1047, and more land between Freggina and Sexta in 1058; ·in ro69, old and presumably childless, he surrendered all his property in Rode and elsewhere to Prataglia, including tenant-houses. Farolfo may perhaps have had more land than Pietro di Giovanni, although we know less about it. But his interests were even less geographically extended than Pietro's: they barely stretched at all outside one village. It was only Betto who broke out of this pattern of locally-owning boni homines. He vanishes from the Prataglia witness lists after 1023, and is not heard of again until 1037, when he bought part of one of the Archiano mills, probably near Sexta, and a piece of land near Arezzo, from Amico di Grimaldo. By 1042 he was a iudex imperatoris, and wrote several local charters, mosdy for Camaldoli, over the next year or so; in 1044 he bought more land on the Archiano from the ff. Ursi, who, like Amico, had had dealings with Pietro di Giovanni too. Then, in 1046, on his death-bed, he sold his lands to Pietro, as we have already seen: by now they included several complete estates and stretched beyond the Casentino, even if their core remained in Rode and Freggina. Betto's career can only be guessed at, but the guess is an easy enough one: he left the valley to train as a notary and judge in the city, almost certainly Arezzo, and returned when successful; perhaps intermittendy at first, but more permanently in the last four years of his life. Despite these wider horizons, 9

See Ch. 7, n. 34 for the terminology 'tf. Farolfi', etc. Farolfo di Teuzo witnesses between RC 28 and 117. For Raineri di Teuzo, see 37, 41; for Betto di Farolfo, between 45 and 72; for Lambeno di Farolfo, 45, 49; for Farolfo di Lamberto, between 53 and 286. Betto is the scribe of 205--7, 212, 221 (not 248 (AC ii.67), pace RC iv, p. 204; it dates from after his death), and acts in r6o, 228, 232. Farolfo di Lamberto acts in 240, 289, 359. For the issue of how far witnessing necessarily implies a clientelar relationship to a monastery, see below, pp. 26o-3.

246

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

his landowning was predominantly local, Freggina, Legnaio, and Corezzo being the major centres, even if it did go further as well: Betto remained a local man, with firm local social links. But we can easily conclude that he would not have got this far if he had remained, like his nephew Farolfo or his friend Pietro di Giovanni, in the monastic clientele. A third group of Freggina/Rode notables are those centred on the private church of S. Felicita. We know of two owners of the church, both of whom ceded portions of it to Prataglia in 1035. Farizo di Grimaldo and Lamberto di Alberto. Farizo was the brother of Amico, some of whose transactions we · have already seen, and who was presumably a eo-owner of the church. If so, though, Amico may not have given his portion to Prataglia, for he is not recorded as a donor to the church at all (he sold Camaldoli a property in Monte in 1038 for sos., but that is all), and never appears as a charter witness. Lamberto di Alberto appears in quite a number of charters as a donor or vendor, of land that ended up in the hands of Farolfo di Lamberto, Betto's nephew, or else Prataglia itself, land once again mostly in Freggina or Sexta. Farizo, Amico, Lamberto, and three or four other men, also monastic donors, were all linked by ties of common property, and were probably kin; they witnessed each others' charters, as well. As owners, they were more like Betto than the others we have just looked at-they had lands near Arezzo, and between them controlled several estates. But they still seem to belong in the same social network as Pietro di Giovanni and Farolfo di Lamberto, with whom they negotiated, and they too were based above all in Freggina/Rode. All these people together must have constituted more or less the whole leading stratum living in those settlements in the first half of the eleventh century. (But not necessarily a dominant elite; the other · landowners in Freggina who make frequent appearances in our texts, usually in charter boundaries, the ff. Guillelmi/ff Benzi of ¥-onte, overshadowed them as a local power, and behaved very differently, as we shall see: pp. 262, 274-6.) Out of this leading Freggina group, the S. Felicita consorteria was rather less closely associated with Prataglia than the others. Some of them, notably Farizo, were prepared to witness Prataglia charters on occasion, althougl) his brother Amico did not even do that. It is likely enough that their greater span of ownership could

The Middle Archiano Valley

247 allow them a detachment that people more restricted to the Freggina area, close to the cores of Prataglia's landowning, did not have. None the less, quite a lot of S. Felicita came to the monastery in 1035· 10 Let us now move westwards one kilometre, to Monte, to extend our sampling in this stratum of owners to Camaldoli's sphere of influence. The Montesi gave a lot of land to Camaldoli over the eleventh century, but the village had rather more owners than Freggina (which must have been a smaller settlement), and few of them gave more than a small portion of their properties. The ff. Winitii and their kin were one exception, three of this consorteria giving 'all' their property to the hermitage in 1042 and 1051; but even then, the son of one of these donors, Domenico di Vivenzo di Guinizo, bad land himself in full ownership (as well as on lease) in 1o66-89; the family were not quite ceding all their independence to Camaldoli. This group may very well have been very small owners, and were certainly cultivators: they had no tenants, and they were themselves Camaldoli's tenants for some land: almost all their own land lay in two avocabula of Monte, too. They very rarely appear as charter witnesses for the monastery, though they do witness each other's documents. They may have wished to keep what distance they could, fearing absorption, with good reason; but they may also have been simply too insignificant for Camaldoli to value them as witnesses.ll Documents for Camaldoli do draw sharper distinctions between donors to the Church and witnesses for its transactions than do those for Prataglia. If the ff. Winitii are an example of donors from Monte, more generous than many, then Lanfrido di Sofrido, from the end of the century, is a good instance of a local witness; he witnessed fourteen surviving charters between 1083 and I I 14. Lanfrido was based in Monte, and was a medium landowner, with tenants; this we discover from a gift to lO For S. Felicita, see RC 146, 149-50. Cf., for its owners and their close kin: IIS, 125, 145, I6o, 176, 181 (AC ii.37), 182, 198, 2.31, 2.37. Their kinship

network is unclear, and probably includes links by marriage; such networks I will term 'consonerie', following Italian usage. 11 RC 176, 206-7, 224- 5, 229, 242, 251, 2.6o, 292, 294, 335, 340, 352- 3, 46o, 543- 4, 579, mostly for the avocabula of Lanina and Brunlisi, micro-toponyms barely recorded in any other context.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century Camaldoli, from r 109, his only one, but one of all his lands. This cession, however, was neither the gift by a childless man for his soul nor the commendation by a declining peasant owner of his entire property; Lanfrido and his son got all his lands back on lease in I IIO for a tiny, recognitive rent (six [days of] manualis opere per year, doubtless not destined to be performed by Lanfrido).1 2 Like Gundualdo of Campori in the eighth-century Garfagnana (above, pp. 40-4), Lanfrido was a man of local importance seeking to formalize his membership of the monastic clientele; despite the fact that he became a monastic tenant, he may well have had a more independent position than, say, Pietro di Giovanni had had with Prataglia. But all the same, he was actually rather closer to the monastery than were most of Camaldoli's boni homines; they tended to own lands a little further away, in Partina and Soci, and usually gave to the hermitage very little property indeed, as we shall see (pp. 26o-4). Despite the number of charters we have for Monte, we can rarely identify consistent members of the hermitage's clientele in the village; this contrasts with the close links that Prataglia had with its clients in Freggina. This may, however, be a contrast in time as much as in geography, Camaldoli's gifts coming from rather later in the century than those to Prataglia (see below, pp. 267- 8). A third instance from Monte is a family of some local influence, probably more than that of Lanfrido, and of greater complexity: Ongano, Candolfo, and Guillielmo di Lamberto and their kin, a prosperous family of boni homines living (at least in Ongano's case see p. 177) at La Mausolea, and witnessing charters for both Prataglia and Camaldoli for three long-lived generations, 1029-1145. If we restrict ourselves strictly to gifts, Ongano's generation were less generous than any of the examples so far mentioned in this chapter, but they did have links with both monasteries, which were expressed through sales of land, in Ventrina to Prataglia, and in MontefLa Mausolea to Carnaldoli. They probably owned as much in Ventrina as they did in Monte, judging from references in charter boundaries; it is interesting that the geographical limits of monastic spheres of influence led to a sharp difference in orientation from one village 12

Witness: between RC w and 759· Active participant in 640,

702,

708.

The Middle Archiano Valley

249

The ff. Lamberti and their kin

Taiberto ? 1007-
I

Larnbetto 1029-&,qd.1061

I

I

Brando 1043-7

I

ss. Ongano 1033-86, qd.1094

~

1094-1149

Candolfo 1052-94

I

Aberto 1094-1131

Guiflielmo 1051-2

Teutio

I

I BemardoJBritto

1046-7

1033-53

I

I

Ferollo di Briltolo 107&-1105

I Rodollo 1082-5

I

ss. Note. qd. quondam (dead by this date)

ss. Sons

to another even inside the lands of a single family. This double link probably allowed them a greater degree of detachment from the monasteries than Lanfrido, although they were loyal witnesses to both; so would the fact that they were also tenants/vassals of the bishop (below, p. 284). Although they sold rather than gave land, they alienated a fair amount; but they were still well enough off in the next generation for Alberto di Candolfo and Saracino di Ongano to cede whole estates (all their property in each case) to the Church in 113 1 and 1149 respectively. Alberto's base was Marciano, and he gave it to Prataglia; Saracino's base was Partina, and he gave it to Camaldoli. The choice of monastery was again determined by the geographical location of each estate, but the foci of the family had evidently moved southwards. This shift, at least in the case of Alberto, was very probably a result of further episcopal patronage.13 All the families we have so far looked at, except the ff. Winitii, were in an upper stratum of the local population, medium or prosperous small owners, mostly clients of the monasteries, and sometimes of the bishop. Not many families who were richer For Lamberco di Taiberto and brothers, see RC 29(?), 103, 122, 171, 174(?), 197(?), 216, 231, 237, 240, 271. (Taiberto could be any number of people, but is not impossibly Taiberto di Donnello, as in 11, 37, 77, 84.) Ongano: acting in 249, 263, 481-2, 519-20; witness, between 122 and 487. Candolfo: actor, 263, 487, sso-r, 572; witness, between 268 and 497· Guillie1mo: 263, 268. Cousins are also recorded in 349, 421, 448, 503- 4, 5089, 590, 592, 598, 677. Saracino: actor, I06o, witness, 572 to 1027. Alberto: 18

57Z, 918.

2SO

The

Cas~ntino

in the Eleventh Century

and more influential than they owned in Freggina and Monte. The internal relationships of this stratum were complex; the ff. Grimaldi negotiated with Farolfo di Lamberto and Pietro di Giovanni; Ongano and Cmdolfo di Lamberto certainly had something, positive or negative, to do with Pietro di Giovanni too. So were their external links; some, like the ff. Lamberti, had several patrons to choose from. In this respect they contrasted sharply with the stratum above them, of medium to large owners, men like the tf Guillelmijff. Benzi, who had little personal relationship either with them or with the monasteries; this is significant, as we shall see when we look at patterns of clientship. Before we do so, however, it is necessary to look at the villages as wholes. The evidence for the Partina area, unlike that for most places, covers far more people than a few leading families, even if fitfully; we can often make guesses at a local social structure, which differed quite sharply from village to village. We cannot, of course, calculate the population of our eleventh-century villages. But some of those in the middle Archiano must have been quite large for the period. In our Monte charters (over eighty for the century) some ISO heads of household are mentioned one way or another, between landlords and tenants, which could work out at 2oo-2 so people in any one generation. This is a useful figure only in the context of at least two large assumptions: that the charters mention at least one member of every household, and that all the people shown working or owning in Monte actually lived there. The latter is certainly given some prima-facie plausibility by the fact that Montesi do not so very often appear in neighbouring villages, or vice versa; as for the former, although we cannot be at all certain that our coverage is complete, the number of documents is at least quite extensive. Perhaps the best we can say is, first, that the errors in these two assumptions would tend to cancel each other out, and, second, that 2oo-250 is in the right order of magnitude. It is certainly high: in 1833, there were only I2S people in the village, and in 1971 only thirty-seven.14 This is as exact a picture as we can draw, anywhere in the valley. But Freggina, even though smaller than Monte in the 14

Repetti, Dizicmario cklla Toscana iii, p. 324; ISTAT, iii.9. p. 82.

1J°

Censimento generale

The Middle Archiauo Valley

251

eleventh century, must have had more people than the sixty-nine it had in 1971, and Ventrina and Contra today only have a couple of poderi each in their old territories; these other hill margins certainly, like Monte, had far more population in the eleventh century than they have had since 1500. By contrast, Partina and Soci, the main villages on the plain, though both political centres (both had castelli built between 1050 and 1 zoo, and Partina had the pieve), appear very much more rarely, and could well, at least before the building of the castelli, have been small; the distribution of setdement was weighted very much more towards the hill-slopes in the eleventh century than at any time in the modem period. This may very well have meant over-population: in Monte, the 2 so ha area that is the maximum agricultural reseau for the village only gives something like an average of s ha per family on my figures, no more than an absolute minimum for subsistance, even allowing for considerable exploitation of woodland resources, and the lands in Monte were certainly unevenly distributed. Freggina and V entrina, though smaller, had much smaller agricultural territories, and the same is almost certainly true for them too.l5 But the level of population did, on the other hand, allow for relationships in the hillside villages of some complexity. A comparison between Monte and Contra will show the point clearly. Quite a lot of lay landowners owned estates at Monte. One of these, the ff. Guillelmi/ff. Benzi, was by far the largest, along with two further owners, the bishop, and, steadily increasing, Camaldoli itself. These three must have dominated the village. A quarter of all known properties touched on episcopal land; a third touched lands of the ff. Guillelrni. And the stratum of medium owners was also quite substantial; seven or eight separate families, as far as I can judge, owned estates with tenant houses on them. The greater part of the Montesi must, then, have been tenants. There may well have been rather fewer owner-cultivators than in many villages. Here, one certainly cannot be too ISTAT, ibid., p. 75 for Freggina and Ventrina (now counted under Freggina), whose total agricultural reseau does not exceed 150 ha. Compare Conti, Formazione i, pp. uo-4 for similar levels of over- population in the eleventh-century Chianti, and Montanari, Alimentazione contadina, pp. 179211, with Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. 39-40 for the figures. l l>

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century schematic; we have already seen one instance of ownercultivators, the ff: Winitii, and many of the gifts to Camaldoli of isolated plots of land may have been from others. But it looks, none the less, as if the hierarchy in Monte was fairly highly articulated. · Such a conclusion is a normal one, of course, in the medieval period. But more common in our documents for the middle Archiano is a much more flattened hierarchy, with local elites barely more than peasant cultivators, and with most landowners also holding down leases themselves, as at Freggina. And the dangers of assuming such a conclusion a priori are particularly obvious when we come to Contra. I have not mentioned any prominent families in Contra so far; the reason is that, in a documentation of some sixty charters, none can be seen. Contra lay just under the bishop's castello of Marciano, and he was the largest owner there by far (nearly 6o per cent of properties with bounds there touch on episcopal land); Prataglia followed some way behind. There were a few lay outside owners, but they do not make much impact on the material. 16 But the Church did not overwhelm the local society of Contra; there was a substantial landowning stratum, consisting entirely of small owners; none can be shown to have more than one tenant house, and many are tenant cultivators as well. The best-documented Contra owners are difficult to sort into a coherent set of family groups, but they seem to be largely, if obscurely, related, with the same names tending to recur-Leone, Teuzo, Vivenzo; it may be best to see them as one large and loose consorteria, present in our Contra texts all through the period of their occurrence, c.IoxoII20. But inside the consorteria, the group that is clearest is one of three brothers, Liuzo, Pietro, and Bonizo di Leone (fl. 101365); it is these that we will look at in detail, to see the scale of activity of such people.l7 Liuzo and Pietro are first documented fairly modestly in 1013, as tenants of the bishop, holding between them half of a house-plot that the bishop was giving to Prataglia; in 1014, Two lay estates are RC 366, 457 (the pievano of Partina). 17 For the If. Leoni, see RC 35 (AC i.90; Pasqui 102), 37, 125-
The Middle Archiano Valley

253

however, they bought land, for 30s., along with their brother Bonizo. This mixture of lease and sale is maintained in several texts from the period after 1033. In 1033, Pietro exchanged a third portion of a house with Prataglia for four pieces of land, and also leased land from Prataglia abutting onto property he owned with his brothers; in 1038, the three brothers bought a piece ofland from a notary for 30s. and, later in the year, Liuzo and Bonizo leased a house from Prataglia-this text is a complex one, for it requires Bonizo, but not Liuzo, to live in the house as a tied cultivator, with rights to most of the property in return for paying most of the rent. But the intervention of the family in the land market did not cease: in 1043 Bonizo bought a land-plot for 30s., and then sold nearly half his property in the village to a priest for 6os.; in 1044 he took a lease for two plots of land, and bought land in Soci (the first reference to land outside Contra) for 30s.; in 1052 he bought land again, for 6s. Bonizo is the only one of the three recorded after IOJ8, but he, at least, lived a long time, with over fifty years of active life; he is documented as late as 1o65, giving some of his property, now including land in Partina, to Prataglia. This pattern of documentation is in its individual elements quite typical-we have seen something very similar for Pietro di Giov~-but it builds up into a rather different picture. There can be no doubt that the ff. Leoni were on a lower social level than Pietro: they were certainly cultivators, and could quite possibly have cultivated all their land; Bonizo was after 1038, at least in theory, a tied tenant. Neither Liuzo or Pietro di Leone is ever recorded as a charter witness, and Bonizo only twice, this too indicating relative insignificance. But they were clearly independent owners, participating with enthusiasm in the land market; Bonizo sold half his property in 1043, something that in an isolated charter one might take as proof of the declining position of a small owner, but which in Bonizo's case seems simply to . have provided him with the resource to buy land in Soci (he may have sold land that he had inherited from his brothers, who were probably dead by now- maybe he could not cultivate it all). Neither Bonizo nor anyone else seems to have benefited dramatically from these transactions. Bonizo had about the same resources at the end of his life that he and his brothers had had at the start, and these were not great: in 1043

254

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

his combined properties were worth little more than 120s. in toto, whereas Pietro di Giovanni in one year, 1038, could pay out zoos. at once for a set of transactions. IS Bonizo was probably typical of the landowning/half-landowning stratum in Contra, however; we can, at least, trace no one who was visibly better off. A sense of the inconsequentiality of land transactions is a common experience among agrarian historians, and normally one that we try to break through. But in eleventh-century Contra, this inconsequentiality seems to have been an abiding feature, an object of historical analysis in itself. The scale of transactions was certainly remarkably small in the village, down to plots of land of 6o or 100 m•. Leases for such lands, for tiny rents, do not belong to any visible logic of economic dependence, and nor, in this context, does Prataglia's buying and selling belong to a logic of territorial accumulation. 19 These alienations, not only the sales but the leases as well, only make sense as expressions of a complex series of neighbourly social relations, more or less between equals: despite Prataglia's considerable economic resources, and the very small scale of the landowning of the men of Contra, we cannot say that the monastic intervention in their land transactions was any different from that of any other local owner-Prataglia cannot be seen gaining ground at all. We should remember that episcopal landowning in Contra was large, large enough, perhaps, to deprive the monastery of the local power it needed to turn its local associates into real dependants; and the bishop himself was, perhaps, not sufficiently involved in local Casentino politics to try to expand his own land or lordship there. What the monastery seems to have done, as a result, is act as a sort of breathing-space for the Contresi, maybe selling or leasing land to expanding families, and taking it back when they contracted. It may have been only in return for such services that Prataglia could regard them as its clients, if it even managed that. 18

But prices are not necessarily simple indicators: some estates had remarkably low values (they include RC 195, 232, 524). Prices must have been partially determined by social relationships. . 19 Good examples of random alienations are the sequence froq~. 1052-4 around Prataglia's clausura in Contra, RC 266 (doublet 276), 274- 5, which certainly have nothing to do with accumulation.

The Middle Archiano Valley

255 These land transactions were doubtless not the most interesting things that the inhabitants of the middle Archiano did with their lives. But their importance, and their all-pervasiveness, cannot be overemphasized. They are crucial for understanding eleventhcentury rural society. We can, if we try, assimilate them into something approaching the needs of the peasant life-cycle, a la Chayanov. But it should also be remarked (at least for the benefit of that school of English historians who currently believe that peasants do not buy and sell land at all) that these peasants were capable of ending up at the end of their lives with entirely different sets of property from those they started out with, with what appears to be total detachment. We are dealing with a very flexible society, among quasi-tenant cultivators in the Contra consorteria as much as among small to medium owners like Pietro di Giovanni or Ongano di Lamberto. We should not try to assimilate their activities to our images of economic rationality (nor blame them when we cannot); instead, we should recognize that the intricate complexity of their transactions represents an equally complex array of social relationships, recoverable only in outline.20 We are very far indeed from the mythical closed economy of the manorial estate. And such social links could underpin two things, not always in contradiction: a sense of collective identity among all local inhabitants, created by this framework for social interaction; and an array of factional oppositions, defined by presences and absences in the framework. We cannot explain why it was that the lay owners in Monte and Contra were so different, why social differentiation was so much greater in the former than in the latter. Contra was not more remote than Monte; even leaving aside the lack of meaning remoteness has in a zone only 3 km across, Contra sat exactly between the episcopal curtis and castello of Marciano and the emergent lay castello of Partina, only I km from each. Of Chayanov, Theory of Peasanl Economy, p. 68. (This whole argument is opposed to that of Macfarlane, English Individualism, esp. pp. 12- )2., 123-30. Did Italian cultivators only begin to be 'peasantS' with the extension of the mezzadria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?) Conti, as Ch. 8, n. 19, is the basic discussion of the land market, though even he criticizes it for its irrationality. The issue here is the 'embeddedness' of the economy in society, for which see Polanyi, 'Economy as Instituted Process', as the classic account. For further discussion of the issue, see Wickham, 'Vendite di terra e mercato della terra'. 20

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century course, there was a lot of episcopal and monastic land in Contra; although the lay landowners in that village were generally peasant cultivators, as high a proportion of Contra's inhabitan~s may have been tenants as in Monte. The major difference between them probably lay in the heavy interpenetration between the small owner and the tenant strata in Contra, that is to say, i.ti the substantial flatness of the social hierarchy there. The fact of these differences emphasizes once again how diverse village societies could be; not only across the Casentino (or the Aretino) as a whole, but even inside tiny, reasonably homogeneous areas. We should, however, regard ourselves lucky that the particularities of Contra allow us a brief glimpse of the activities of owner-cultivators; this is something that is very rare for the period, even in well-documented areas. 21 Hitherto, I have been analyzing the social structures of the middle Archiano in fairly descriptive terms. If we want to see these structures working, we must try to understand what people were trying to achieve in the activities that are described in our documentation, taking into account the fact that our texts give most attention to those sectors of activity that have something to do with the Church. First, let us see how different strata in each village were defined by different relationships to the Church; this will lead to the problem of what changes the growing influence of the monasteries produced in them. I have already posed the question of why people alienate land to the Church in the context of the Casentino as a whole, using the concept of 'spiritual patronage', in which not only . are religious motives (gift-giving for the forgiveness of sins, or in return for prayers to the dead) eo-present with socio-economic motives, but are to the participants indistinguishable (above, pp. 212- 15). Very litde alienation will have been exclusively religious (the giving of all one's property by the old and childless-some twenty examples across the century-or the rarer cession of oneself to the monastery as a monk), but almost all will have had a religious elc;:ment, a fact that will be taken as read in what 21 For other discussions, see Conti, Formazione i, pp. 155-6, 163-7; Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. 86-100; see also Ch. 2, n. 27. A good parallel for

the activitie$ of richer local srrata, medium owners and upwards, is Bonnassie, 'Une famille de la campagne barcelonaise'.

The Middle Archiano Valley

257

follows. In the Partina area, however, one can separate out some of the socio-economic elements with slightly greater ease than elsewhere. The poorer gave to, and leased from, the Church to survive, and maybe rise; the richer did it to prosper, and to factionalize. And the pattern of factions can be dimly discerned in our material. It is often said that the poor, when pressed beyond the limit of survival. cede, sell, or pledge ('commend') their lands to the Church (and, indeed, to lay lords), and only get them back as tenants: for them, dealing with their superiors is a sheer necessity. But, in fact, we cannot see this pattern very commonly in our documents at all. People did give land to the Church and leased it back, like Lanfrido di Sofrido of Monte, but they were not by any means always at the edge of survival. The small free owner, when giving to the Church, much more often gave a single land-plot, more as a bare recognition of superiority than as a cession of independence. The men of Contra are the most detached of our small owners, certainly, but they are not unparalleled elsewhere. It may .well be that such small cessions were in return for a preparedness by a monastery to help the donors in the future, but what price the Church exacted from men under pressure cannot normally be seen. It is quite likely, however, as in the case of the Garfagnana, that, with the complexity of possible mutual support in some of these villages, the subjection of small owners was rarer than is often reckoned; they were certainly still common in the late Middle Ages. The ff. Winitii of Monte (p. 247) are perhaps one instance of the process, but even there it was incomplete, for the family still owned land at the end of our documentation. We also have the example of the ff. Liuzeberti, five brothers with a small property in Ventrina (which included, however, at least one tenant-house). The family in three charters of 103o-so gave little portions of land to Prataglia, and then, in an undated breve of about the I06os, three surviving members of the family tried unsuccessfully to get one of them back; this might seem like the attempts of a group of small owners to subtract itself from dependence on the monastery. But even here such an interpretation is far from certain; the breve shows that the monastic representatives (vicaria) in the dispute included the monk Leone di Liuzeberto, one of the original brothers, clearly now in a position of some authority.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century It looks, in fact, rather more as if one member of the family had properly established himself in the monastery, and one only; and that, having failed to enter into the monastic clientele, the others reacted against it.22 None of these very small ownersneither the ff. Winitii nor the tf Liuzeberti, nor the Contra consorteria-are regular witnesses to monastic documents; we are dealing with a social group of decided insignificance; but even they could, Ul\der certain circumstances, become recognized members of a monastic clientele. It may be that such a pattern was genuinely commoner than commendation. But relatively little monastic land in reality came from this stratum, the lowest stratum of owners that we can trace. At the next level, gift-giving to monasteries could be more unequivocally useful, for it could be associated with full participation in the monastic clientele of boni homines, witnesses to charters, and participators in public acts; this is the social level that is most clearly attested in the Partina area. Bonus homo is not, in fact, a common term in these documents, but it is used when recording the witnesses ratifying informal legal decisions and agreements. In general, I will use it with a certain vagueness of ascription that seems to fit the wide category of people who had public responsibilities of these kinds at various times. Any free man could witness a document, but monasteries tended to prefer witnesses from a pool of men of reasonable standing, medium owners and upwards. Smaller owners tend only to be found witnessing lay charters, usually for kinsmen; as I have said, those that we can pin down rarely sign more than once or twice for Prataglia and Camaldoli. Delumeau has remarked that the more important the occasion, the higher the status of the witnesses, and the use of the term bonus homo varies accordinglyboni homines in Arezzo ~ere major aristocrats, rather a different category from men like Pietro di Giovanni. 28 But as witnesses for local monastic documents, particularly for Prataglia, we can clearly identify a stratum of medium owners, men of a certain economic standin·g , with a few tenants perhaps, but rarely more, ranging from Pietro di Giovanni at one end to some of the 22 RC II2, 171, z;o, 387. Cf., perhaps, 157 (AC ii.JI) with 164, and 466, for other disputes. 23 Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', p. ;66. FoT /wni homines in the eleventh-century Casentino, see e.g. RC 248 (AC ii.67), 256.

The Middle Archiano Valley

259

owners of S. Felicita in Freggina, or Lanfrido di Sofrido at the other. These men were local monastic representatives, and perhaps benefited from monastic support locally, as Pietro di Giovanni may have done against the ff. Lamberti (p. 243); they were donors as well. This was a position that was worth having. The monasteries were concerned to build up a network of local support, in which they could be accepted and, slowly, expand; and in the Partma area they evidently succeeded. They were prepared to furnish patronage and a local public position as monastic boni homines in return. This, I think, was by no means guaranteed without monastic support, particularly for people like Pietro di Giovanni, who were defmitely at the lower end of this spectrum of ownership. At the upper end, conversely, men like Amico di Grimaldo (although not his brother) felt little need to be close to the monastery at all; it may have had less to offer him. But the cost to each family was not great; there were few that gave more than a small proportion of their land, except among the childless. The monasteries certainly did expand; but they took decades to begin to make real inroads on local power networks. We will look at what happened then in a moment. ·A slightly separated sub-group at this social level were small to medium owners who held land, tenant-plots and the like, from the bishop by lease or fief (cf. below, p. 284). We know this because they had enough control over these episcopal leases to alienate them, by gift or, frequently, lease, to the monasteries. Such men, the ff. Lamberti of La Mausolea for example, were not necessarily any better off than the ff. Farolfi of Freggina or the S. Felicita owners, but were clients of the bishop, and so could act as monastic boni homines with greater detachment, and indeed could alienate less land to the valley houses. But they had monastic links, none the less. It is indeed notable that in some villages in Prataglia's orbit, in particular Contra and Sexta, the first private cessions to the monastery in the IOIOs were just such leased lands; Prataglia was of course episcopal, and the bishop may well have desired to encourage his local clients to grant lands to his new foundation, so as to set off gift-giving by others. (If so, it seems to have worked- widespread

200

The Casentin<J in the Eleventh Century

cessions to Prataglia began in all the local villages at once in 1019-20.)24

The next category of people is crucial to our analysis, but is much more enigmatic, even though its members appear often enough in our sources. They are a group of charter witnesses who are very active as such, without being monastic donors. The notaries of the pievi of Partina and Bibbiena are instances of this, with hundreds of documents to their names, but barely a single one in which they acted directly (above, p. 217). Rodolfo di Guido of Partina is a more explicit example of the problem: witness in twenty-nine charters for Prataglia and Camaldoli in 1041- 88, he never gave either of them a square metre of land, although he had much-his land appears in property boundaries many times, notably in Partina and La Mausolea, and once he is cited as an episcopal tenant in Marciano. He must have been · a larger owner than anyone we have so far looked at, judging from his spread of owning; but only once, in 1090, at the end of his life, does he appear as an actor, making a private lease-cthis land at least came to some monastery (for otherwise we would not have the text), but not from Rodolfo. And there is Raineri di Ghiberto, even more obscure, witness as he is sixteen times, mostly for Camaldoli, in the period I08S- II20, sometimes accompanied by his sons too, but never a principal in any charter, Raineri, too, must have been of some local importance, for, although his property is rather more rarely attested (it is all in Soci), he was in 1 1 r6 a dependant of the Guidi. 25 It is evident that this category of men did not for most or all of their lives feel bound to the monasteries.in any personal sense. What they were was independent local notables, used by the monasteries as witnesses not because they were in monastic clierlteles, but because they were important in their own right, as substantial landowners and men with a recognized public position. They doubtless witnessed everyone's chatters, in fact, not just those of the Church. This is clearest in my last example from the category, the ff. Pagani. Tagizo di Pagano wim.essed charters for Camaldoli, but also for Prataglia, Strumi, and lay 24 RC 31, 45, 48-9, SS· Cf. Ch. 7, n. 14, for possible consequences. 2s Rodolfo: witnessing, between RC 201 and 535; actor, 555; property boundaries, 368 (AC ii.IJ3), 461, 498, 509-10, 522, 54I. Raineri: witnessing, between 491 and 822; land, 541, 639, 789 (a Guidi tenure).

The Middle Archiano Valley

261

owners, twenty-three times between 1077 and 1095, without ever giving land to anyone in surviving texts. His brother Bemardo the priest was also active (five times, 1073- 11 16), and his son Rolando ofPoggiolo (ten times, I09Q-I 1 16). As witnesses, this family were clearly regarded as a mainstay of the valley for several decades: the bulk of the documents in which they participated were actually written at their house (mansio) in Poggiolo, which seems to have been an isolated settlement, including no other habitation; during the period of their witnessing, 1077-1 I 14, it is only documented in such contexts, and only when they were actually present. Bemardo and Rolando gave Camaldoli one plot of land in 11o6--not much. But then suddenly, at the end of the sequence, the evidence changes gear: in 1 I 14, Rolando took in lease and fief Prataglia's portion of the castello of Soci, and in 1 I 19 he and Bemardo (now archipresbiter, pievano, of the pieve of Partina) renounced their claims over land formerly held by the noble family known as the tf. Feralmi, previously lords (among other places) of Soci, as we shall see (below, pp. 272-4). The ff. Pagani were not members of this family, however; they never appear with the ff. Feralmi, and the latter are, with one or two exceptions, rather rarely found participating in the boni homines network of the Archiano valley-just as there were people too insignificant to witness charters, there were also people too eminent. 2 6 But it was Tagizo: witnessing, between RC 416 and 577, with ASF S. Trinita, 22 May 1093· Bemardo: between RC 379 and 792. Rolando: between 556 and 786. As actors: 683-4, 763 (AC iii.169), 814. For Poggiolo as a location, see 417, 422, 424, 443-4, 472- 3, soo-t, 522, 524, 527, 541, 55o-r, 555-6, 650, 652, 7II- 13, 763 (AC iii. r69), ASF S. Trinita, 22 May 1093, all as Poio. (Poio, 'Hill', is a common enough name: there was another as close as Bibbiena. But Poggiolo fits the references best, and is certainly the Pogio of RC 2345--cf. also 1833-4 for Podium Rigoli.) RC 417, 473, 55o-1, 555 , 652, 712 do not have visible members of the ff. Pagani; the common denominator here is another family of non-donor boni homines, tbe ff. Ardingoli, witnesses across at least four generations in thirty charters, from 1036 to I 112, but only documented as alienating land in three texts. Of these, RC 592 and 692 are for tiny plots; the only substantial cession is 524 (a.to86), when Rodolfo and Lamberto di Ardingolo, with their mother, sell all their property in Poio and nearby Marena to Carnaldoli. One would guess that the family owned in Poio as a~nes of the ff. Pagani. In the last text it would appear that their maternal uncle was Ugo di Minuto, probably a collateral of the tf. Feralmi, and the only member of the latter to be a local witness (below, p. 274): a distant link between the 26

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

262

The ff. Pagani and their kin

Giasollo

I

Lambelto 1l I

Bemardo 107a-1119

I Rolando

,....,_ _ _ Ardingo.......... (~

1~

1~1119

Loidsol Ptl1lna

I

Tagizo 1077-95

i

I?

ltalia

107~

1ROa1dilo } see Ch.11,n.28

e

Glbello .

""jo

1043-77

Bello

1~7

=

Righildar-• . ~-~Ugo

1086

Rodollo 1~

:If.~

see ch.10,n.7

L.amberto 1086-1112

Rigol(-lo)

109"6-1108

R
towards the social position of the tf. Feralmi that Rolando and his uncle were aiming, for holders of castelli were part of the lesser military aristocracy. If we move any further up the social scale, we will find ourselves involved without question in the strata of the petty aristocracy. There was, as we shall see, for a long time no precise difference between aristocrats and non-aristocrats (pp. 283-92); but, once we get past a certain point into what could be called the aristocracy, the neatness of the oppositions we have just seen tends to break down. The ff. Feralmi were more generous to the Church than were the richer boni homines stratum, giving portions of Soci to Camaldoli at the end of the century, even if they rarely witnessed Camaldoli's charters. The tf. Guillelmi, however, certainly the largest landowners living in the Partina area and the Val di Sova, behaved rather more like Rodolfo di Guido and the tf. Pagani, giving very little to the Church, participating very seldom in the land market, and not even witnessing documents. The latter fact may already distinguish J them from the ff. Pagani, but the pattern was reversed in the 108os, when one of their descent groups, which was just beginning to emerge as the Ubertini, one of the greatest families of the Aretino, can be seen both giving to Camaldoli and ff. Pagani and that family can then just about be constructed, but across two probably affinal links. (Note also that the tf. Ardingoli, along with Rodolfo di Guido, the aristocratic tr. Guillelmi, and the tr. Lamberti, have shares in the same oak-wood in La Mawoiea: RC 519-20, 522, 572, 592, 598. These cannot all be kin; 572. hints at the cotrect explanation, that the bishop has granted land to all these notables.)

The Middle Archiano Valley

263

occasionally, acting as its witnesses (below, pp. 276--7). The relationships between the aristocratic families of the valley and the monasteries varied as their individual politics changed; in this case, perhaps, the monasteries were more of a threat to the tf. Guillelmi, who had their hands above all on the territories in which the Church was to expand, than they would be to their descendants the Ubertini, whose field of action was coming to be the whole of the Aretino. This we will look at again in the next chapter, for it takes us out of our present framework of argument. But the tf. Guillelmi, at least up to 1080 or so, can be added to Rodolfo di Guido, the ff. Pagani, and the social group they represented, as people with an important local position who had strikingly litde connection with the valley monasteries that are the source of our evidence. It is clear that Rodolfo di Guido and the tf. Pagani were more independent than the smaller boni homines who did act as donors to the monasteries. They were richer, too, say with tens of tenants rather than three or four; they were, without doubt, the most influential non-aristocratic landowners in the Archiano valley. They tended to live slighdy further down the valley, on the plain between Partina and Bibbiena, rather than on the hill-slopes, though this may be chance. They were also a phenomenon of the end of the eleventh century more than of the beginning: that is to say, regular witnesses to charters of the 1080s and 1090s were more likely to be substantial owners and less likely to give land to the Church than regular witnesses of the 1020s and IOJOs- what this may mean we will see in a moment. But they have another characteristic, too, and it is important: men in this stratum did not just fail to engage in transactions with the monasteries; they did not engage in transactions with anyone else who did, either. Men of the IOJOS like the owners of S. Felicita di Freggina are cited in many documents that are not direct gifts to the Church; land they sold or leased to other laymen ended up in the hands ofPrataglia and Camaldoli, with its attached documents, often some time later. They were not only donors, but part of a social network of donors and potential donors, linked together by the complexities of the local land market. Rodolfo di Guido and Raineri di Ghiberto and Tagizo di Pagano were not; the land market stopped on the edge of the stratum that they represented.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century Rodolfo is cited with relation to one piece of land that eventually came to Camaldoli; Raineri and Tagizo not at all. This absence, too, is true of the small aristocracy, the 1f Guillelmi and their .like. Men in these leading strata, the Hites of the Archiano valley, quite simply had very little social relationship with men in the groups of donors we have looked at hitherto. It seems appropriate to see this absence of relationship as the opposition of factions. We have two groups of boni homines, the one consisting of a few of the most independent members of the local elite and even some petty aristocrats, the other more extensive but consisting above all of small and medium owners, rather less infiuential, in other words; and these two have nothing to do with each other, even though their zone of operation was the same tiny area of eight square kilometres.· This is not a light matter in a rural society, foF in such societies land transactions are always of the greatest social importance; friends do not behave in this way. Only one of these groups, furthermore, the less elevated, gave or sold land to the monasteries, and shows any signs of being in the monastic patronage network. I would conclude that the political context in which monastic patronage and backing was useful to clienteles in Freggina and Monte, men like most of the consorteria of S. Felicita, and the ff. Lamberti of La Mausolea, was precisely when measuring up to their more powerful neighbours, the ff. Pagani or, indeed, the ff. Guillelmi, whose pretensions to local power were potentially or actually threatening to those weaker than them. Factional rivalry is the best way of describing this opposition, for (apart perhaps from the 1f Guillelmi) we are dealing with people, who, however unevenly matched, were nominal social equals as free men with public responsibilities- urban factions, too, normally had their roots in similar imbalances. We cannot say anything about the sense of identity that each side had, or even about their hostilities; we are dealing with eleventh-century evidence, which tells us nothing about such matters. (For more explicit enmities in later centuries, see below, pp. 324--9, 366-80.) We can, however, see an array of powers set out on each side; the poorer strata backed by monasteries, in opposition to the richer strata, who may well have had theit: patrons too--'-the bishop, sometimes, or the Guidi-although they did not by any means always need them for their local political activity.

The Middle Archiano Valley

26,5

In the Partina area, then, monasteries were not brought in to crystallize local dominance, but to counter the influence of others. This was not how it always happened; lower down the Casentino, it was elites who gave land to Prataglia and Camaldoli and probably got back some useful support even if just a certain status as spiritual patrons-in return (above, pp. 207-10). And, of course, in Campori in the Garfagnana, (pp. 42- 4), cessions to the Church (the bishop, at that time) had been an integral part of the establishment of the Gundualdi as a dominant elite. We need not assume that monasteries had a disinterested desire to support the weak; they reacted to the social attitudes of local notables themselves. We might guess that the patterns of the Partina area were partially a result of the suspicion, or caution, of the tf. Guillelmi with regard to the valley houses; the ff. Guillelmi did not link themselves with the Church, so their opponents did. But, however it derived, association with Prataglia and Camaldoli acts as a litmus test for the social stratifications and mutual antagonisms of an entire society. Oppositions of this kind, expressed through differences in ecclesiastical gift-giving, were probably characteristic of the whole ofltaly in the eleventh century. If we can rarely see it in much detail in the countryside, we should not be surprised, given the sort of material we normally have; even here in the Casentino, the evidence is fragmentary enough. But the social framework inside which such oppositions existed is rather clearer, in all its extraordinary complexity. In these villages, we cannot divide the population simply into the basic medieval social strata/classes, landlords and peasants, or even aristocrats, nonnoble landowners, owner-cultivators, and tenants. These strata, although fundamental for social differentiation, were mediated by a multir:ude of social levels connecting and dividing rural society from small aristocrat to customary tenant, represented !Jy how much land a man owned and how much he held on lease; whether he rultivated all or some of it, or whether some or all of it was leased out to tenants; how many ecclesiastical (and maybe lay) clienteles he was in, and at what level; how many and what sort of charters he witnessed; how widespread his landowning was, and whether-as we shall see it included any signorial rights or military obligations; there must have been others too, which we cannot pin down. Not that any of the \

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

266

owners in this chapter owned very widely, not even the ff. Guillelmi, at least at the start; one of the major characteristics of the Archiano owners is the tightness of their links with their locality. This tightness probably reinforced village consciousness, but it will also have helped to maintain the myriad of social differences that separated family from family. It was this kaleidoscope of differentiation that resolved itself into the broad social groups that we have seen coexisting in opposition to each other, in a process that is only on the surface paradoxicalsimilar patterns can be used to construct the many-levelled but generally bipolar rivalries, normally expressed directly through political antagonism, that exist in regions like the Molise and Basilicata today. The coexistence of these intercutting levels with the factional antagonisms that makes this material so interesting was also remarkably stable. This is striking-partly because its stability continued across a period of continuous proprietorial accumulation by the valley monasteries; partly, also, because the middle Archiano is a not especially important part of a not especially important mountain valley; just the sort ofenvironment that frequently leads to the eventual dominance of some form of independent local power, once given a free run in the area. But the Casentino Aretino contained few powers that were looking ·for such dominance; the city was a permanent social focus for most forces of more than local importance. And in the middle Archiano-indeed, in most parts of the valley-such a variety of powers held land that a balance, adequate for the survival of small and medium landowners, was maintained. We return, in other words, to a leitmotif of this book: these mountain valleys exhibit rather few characteristics specific to 'mountain society'. I will come back to the point at the end.27 All the same, people gave to the Church. It is in differential gift-giving that we can see these social oppositions most clearly. But how much effect did the gift-giving itself have on the local social balance? One need not doubt that the monasteries sought to exploit potential or actual oppositions in the villages, as they extended their landowning outside the forest territories they had 21

Compare Wickbam, Societa dtgli Apptnnini, pp. 43-4; cf. below,

pp. 357-()5.

The Middle Archiano Valley been given by the bishops. It was advantageous to be in the monastic clientele, as a support against opponents and as a status-giving position in itself, and it did not cost much: a few pieces of land or a tenant-house every generation, perhaps-not much for a prosperous family. Monastic land, none the less, slowly expanded; by the 1050s in Freggina, the Io8os in Contra, the 1 1 IOS in Monte, it was locally very extensive. But, with this new presence of monastic property in its own right, the power balances that underlay factional differences, and thus monastic expansion, changed. Prataglia in Freggina in the 1050s was no longer an outside force that the ff. Grimaldi of S. Felicita could rely on against the tf. Guillelmi and, maybe, the bishop; it was getting to be the largest owner in the village. It may, as a result, have become locally more advantageous for the ff. Grimaldi to align themselves, instead, with the ff. Guillelmi. And, as they did so, they would have broken their links with Prataglia, ceased to give land to the Church, and dropped out of the sources. Monastic expansion thus came to a stop. At this point I am building a picture that is entirely hypothetical, of course. We certainly have evidence for many more people than those I have been able to discuss in this chapter, but this evidence does not become more explicit anywhere. (It would be particularly useful to see how the tf. Guillelmi, say, constructed their own clienteles in the eleventh century; but insights into lay society outside the monastic field of interest are almost impossible to obtain: c£ below, pp. 3 I 1- 12.) But a change in balance Qf this type is in my view the only way that allows us usefully to understand the end of gift-giving cycles. And it can also be used to explain their difference in periodicity: social structures varied from village to village, and as a result it would take varying periods of time for even the same rate of accumulation of monastic land to have an effect on the different power relationships in each locality. The fact that the monasteries did not gain a controlling position in any of the villages in this age is a logical consequence of such a model, rather than a curious irony; alienations to the Church would normally stop before the social patterns that produced them were terminally undermined. And the growing distance of local people from the monasteries may also explain the increasing tendency of the latter to use boni homines from non-donor families, like Rodolfo

268

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

di Guido and the ff. Pagani, as regular charter witnesses towards the end of the eleventh century; fewer people were prepared to be part of monastic clienteles. The cosy relationship between Prataglia and Pietro di Giovanni had been replaced by a more formal witneSsing framework. Donors themselves had decreasingly dose clientelar relationships with the monasteries. And by 1120, at least in the middle Archiano, . there would be no donors at all. These patterns give a certain dynamic to the sort of evidence we have for the eleventh century. But it must be recognized that they do not yet represent much in the way of social change, except for the simple fact that churches owned more land in 1120 that they did in 1000. Indeed, the closer we look at gift-giving to the Church, the less it appears under most circumstances to provide any motor for structural change at all.28 This stability does not seem to me illusory. If we want to look for real shifts in the structures of power, we will have to look at the greater families of the Archiano and elsewhere, to try to pin down changes in the definition of the aristocracy; and we must then step back a bit, into the framework of the Casentino as a whole, and look at the growth of signorial relationships, into the twelfth century and beyond. Such is the programme of the next two chapters. But it will be my contention that even these developments, though very visible, did not gready affect the balances we have just seen, or how these balances (or factions) were constructed, or even their personnel, the small and medium owners of the Casentino. At the core of social change in the central medieval centuries, these groups had a continuing, long-lasting stability. 28

So also Wickham, Societa degli Appennini pp. 94--(), for a. very similar pattern in a village in Valva. Contrast the pattern around Farfa, where gift-giving to an isolated and powerful monastery, perhaps under coercion, undermined whole social strata: Toubert, Latium, pp. 487-91.

IO

Signori and Castelli The Crystallization of the Aristocracy There were not many really great noble families anywhere in the Aretino. The Guidi, whose early history we have already looked at, were the only ones whose holdings impinged on the Casentino. But there was a very extensive array of middling aristocrats, the capitanei of the diocese (in the Aretino, as elsewhere in Tuscany, often called longobardi or lambardi), the ancestors of the families that would dominate the medieval commune, such as the Tarlati and the Ubertini. Jean Pierre Delumeau's work on Arezzo will, when it is completed, clarify these family groups properly; I owe to his help many of the genealogical patterns that underlie what follows. Here, however, I am only concerned with their importance in the Casentino, and it is exclusively in that context that I will discuss them. In the eleventh century, three such families played a relatively important role in our documentation: the ff. Berardi of Banzena and Partina; the ff. Feralmi of Subbiano and, in the Casentino, Soci; and the complex of families beginning with the ff. Guillelmi and ff. Benzi in the eleventh century, and gradually developing into the Ubertini in the twelfth; this latter family can be associated, at least as far as local castelli were concerned, above all with Ragginopoli. Even these families, however, are far from dominant in our material, and I will argue that they were, at best, first among equals in the valley. There were other lay castelli and other families, particularly in the Casentino Fiesolano and on the southern edge of the valley, towards Subbiano and Arezzo; but these three are the most clearly documented, and the issue of the structure and social role of the aristocracy is best seen through them. The ff. Berardi first appear as such in a court case of 1041 , held in Bibbiena by members of the bishop's household. Raineri and Ugo di Berardo were cited by the abbot of Prataglia as

270

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

contesting land given to the monastery in Frassineta in the upper Corsolone valley. Prata.glia had the charters to prove its case (one of them, RC 97 of 1028, survives), but the ff. Berardi showed a considerable reluctance to concede; the case was only ended through mediation by their mother's brother, Bucco di Ardimanno, of the . Carpineto family. Raineri and Ugo then ceded their claims, for the souls of their parents, 'which lie at rest in the above-named monastery'; the implication is that they received the land back in some form. In 1048 there was new trouble, a 'a great dispute' (lis magna) between the men of the tf. Berardi and the men of Prataglia, with 'reciprocal reprisal, · very great depredations, and the burning of houses'. This time, they came to terms independendy of the courts, at Aioli, further down the Corsolone, where both sides had land. Both the ff. Berardi (now including a third brother, Guido) and the abbot came; the brothers brought their milites with them, the abbot his clientes. The terms were clear enough: the ff. Berardi agreed that any one of them could take his lands to Prataglia if he became a monk there, and they kept the right to be buried in the monastery, like their parents, if they died locally. These are not contentious enough issues for all that disturbance, but what else was decided is not recorded; it is quite possible, though, that the ff. Berardi were trying nothing less than to take control of the monastery itself, so close over the hill to their lands in the upper Corsolone, and that this agreement was an admission of failure. Mter this, the tension dropped. In 1050, a series of exchanges in the same valley concluded a dispute between the same parties about part of the tithe of Pezza, but the scale had clearly lessened; the issue does not surface again in our sources.l The father of the three brothers, Berardo, must have had a dose association with Prataglia, if he was buried there, and there is no reason to doubt that he was the Berardo di Guido who gave land to Prataglia in Frassineta in 1023, and also owned in Corezzo and Aioli in the next decade; the places fit exacdy with 1 RC 202, 248 (AC ii.67), 256. For Aioli land held by both sides, see 123, 140. For the terminology 'If. Berardi', etc., see Ch. 7, n. 34- For Bucco di Ardimanno, see Del~eau, 'Lombards de Carpineto', p. 76. For burials, cf. Settia, 'Pievi e cappelle', p. 456. lt is possible that the ff. Berardi, as episcopal vassals and donors, thought they had the same relationship to Prataglia as had Rodolfo di Righiza: see above, Ch. 7, n. 14.

Signori and Castelli

271

the local interests of his sons.. The evident importance of the family is emphasized by Berardo's marriage into the powerful Carpineto family, and a citation of his sons Raineri and Guido in Io68 as de Banzena shows how: they held the castello of Banzena. They were, that is, themselves a capitaneal family, with their own milites, the closest such family to Prataglia. But their failure to capitalize on this closeness pushed them out of that monastery's orbit altogether; the Banzinenses of the next century gave almost exclusively to Camaldoli. In a gift of III4 Raineri's son Guelfo gave to the latter parts of the castelli of Banzena, Serra, and Gello, indicating a spread oflocal ownership, based on castelli, dominating the middle Corsolone valley. 2 The influence of the ff. Berardi was not restricted to the Corsolone. Ormanno di Raineri, for example, documented from 1095 to I 114, was an episcopal vicedominus; Delumeau has commented on the general importance of the family in Aretine politics. Much of the landed base for their urban politics does, however, seem to have been in the Casentino. Ormanno and his brothers controlled the castello of Partina, and maybe Liema as well, along with a branch of the future Ubertini; these two are up to 15 km from the Corsolone centres mentioned above. Between I095 and I I I 5 they gave their portions of Partina to Camaldoli, but they probably still owned in the Archiano valley; at any rate, their probable cousin, Raineri di Ugo, eo-owner in Partina, also held at the top of the valley, close to Prataglia. Raineri was a witness for Camaldoli, on occasion, and seems to have been the man whose cessions to the latter persuaded other members of the family to follow suit.3 With these cessions, 2

For Berardo di Guido, see RC 74, 8 r, 96, 140; for his sons, see 121; see 356 for de Banzena. Banzena had belonged to the Aretine canonica: see MGH, Dip. Heinrici li 436. For the twelfth century, see RC 759 (AC iii.r68), 773, I 173 (AC iv.2.4). 3 For Ormanno di Raineri and his brothers, and Raineri di Ugo, see RC 584, 586, 6or, 621 (AC iii.65; Pasqui 291), 624 (AC iii.1o7), 665, 693 (AC iii.144), 7o6 (AC iii.153; Pasqui 300), 709, 721, 759 (AC iii.r68), 778, 780, 8o7, 895, 1048; cf. Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', pp. 578-80; id., 'Lombards de Carpineto', p. 77· Ormanno and his brothers are highly likely to be sons of Raineri di Berardo of the 10405 court cases, but this is not fully proven; the key text, RC 759, is only a circumstantial link between Ormanno and Raineri's certain son Guelfo. For genealogies, see Delumeau's forthcoming general book on Arezzo.

272

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

however, the ff. Berardi retreat from our evidence; their involvement with the valley monasteries ended here. The ff Berardi are the first clear instance of a local noble family with links to our monasteries. They were probably socially dominant in one area, the middle Corsolone valley, where Banzena itself is located, and it is worth noting that this is an area with relatively little documentation after about 1050, when the family ceased to dispute with Prataglia; their dominance there may have discouraged others from links with the monasteries. Elsewhere, however, even in the Archiano valley, where they had rights over castelli, they had to balance their social influence against that of many other powers. One of these was the ff. Feralrni, one of the most prominent of the families of capitanei of the Amo valley in the 20 km between Arezzo and the Casentino, the 'longobardi di Subbiano' as Pasqui called them: they certainly held Subbiano, and extensively in the pievi south of there, and west towards Montevarchi, too, across a range of over 30 km.4 Their relevance for us is that they held, and almost certainly founded, the castello of Soci. Soci is in the middle Archiano, but has not been much mentioned in the foregoing; it is indeed little evidenced before the mid-eleventh century. The casale Soci appears occasionally in the earliest period, but no more often than the casale Piscaria, a separate settlement absorbed into Soci later in the century; there seem, that is, to have been two smallish groupings of habitation before 1050 in the later village territory. Then, in 1058, the Soci church was consecrated; in the I070S the casale appears more and more often; in 1079 the castello is first documented, and from then to the end of the 1 I 20s the settlement is mentioned more than thirty times in our texts. Soci's church, S. Niccolo, was inside the castello, which therefore presumably pre-dates 1058, but almost certainly not by much. The ff. Feralmi may not themselves have held in the area on a large scale before the 1050s, in fact. But when they did, they located their new castrum et curtis not on a hill, like most other castelli, but in the middle of the plain, exactly on top of the road up the Archiano and into the Romagna, doubtless to control the mercantile traffic See generally RC 433 (AC ii.r64); ACA SF 76 (a.ro79; ed. Pasqui 233, Manaresi 454), ACA Cap. 283 (a.ro8o; ed. Pasqui 242). 4

Signori and Castelli

273

that passed. And it was as an economic centre that the castello prospered; there was a platea inside it, probably for a market, by 1090. 5 The ff. Feralmi did not own Soci: they held the castello (including the church) on lease and in fief from the bishop. Their own charters do not often admit the fact, but episcopal confirmations make it quite clear. The episcopal Church may well not have ceded them exclusive rights, either; other prominent people held in the territory of the casale, including the conti Guidi, and some indeed held land in the castello. And, although Soci was useful to the ff. Feralmi, it was not essential. The family had, for the most part, little land as far up the Arno as this; it was on the margin of their interests. As a result they slowly ceded Soci away, mostly to Camaldoli. This was not consistent policy, at least at the start; the first gifts, by Raineri di Fuscheri and his wife Berta, were contested in 1079 by their kin. But they continued, on a small scale, from then on; and in I 109 Bernardino di Feralmo di Corbizo, one of the major members of the family, sold his portion of the castello to Camaldoli for £34, a sale that was confirmed by his sons when they became adults, by the bishop, and, significantly, the Guidi (the Guidi had got land off Feralmo, and he was vassal to them as well as to the bishop). We know Prataglia had a portion of the castello, too, obtained we do not know how, for it was enfeoffed to Rolando di Tagizo of Poggiolo in I I 14 (above, p. 261); but Prataglia ceded all its rights over Soci to Camaldoli in 1126. By 1154, an imperial confirmation assumes that Camaldoli held the whole castrum, even if not yet all property inside it; by now, the monastery held it in full ownership, thanks to episcopal cessions of feudal rights. Camaldoli held Soci until 1298, when the Guidi levered it temporarily out of monastic hands (below, p. 323); in the thirteenth century and, indeed, later, it was one of the major political and tenurial centres for the monastery. 6 5

For Sod and Piscaria before 10.50, see RC 39, 48, 50, .58, 78, 84, 227, 268. For the church, see 291 (AC ii89), 558, 559 (AC iii.71), 56o, 589, 705. For the castello, see 433 (AC ii.164), 434, 438 (cf. Pasqui 242), 518, 594, 638, etc. For the platea, see 559-6<>, 705. 6 For Soci as a fief, see RC 439, 559 (AC iii.71), 567 (AC iii.77; Pasqui 282), 682 (AC iii.138; Pasqui 297), 791 (AC iii.178; Pasqui 312). For other

274

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

The ff. Feralmi as a family played litde part in the political history of the Casentino. Only one of their number, Ugo di Minuto, is documented more than fleetingly outside Soci. Ugo was apparendy kin to Raineri di Fuscheri and gave his portion of the castello in 1079 in the context of Raineri's gift; but he also bought land in Contra, owned in Monte, and held a range of properties, perhaps from the bishop~ in the lower Archiano valley. He may have been from a minor or collateral branch of the family; he is not recorded in the Subbiano area. He, more than any of the other people discussed in this chapter, was a regular charter witness, appearing eighteen times between 1076 and 1085.7 Individuals from the aristocracy could find their way downwards into the stratum of local boni homines. But Ugo's presence in local charters poiq,_ts up the near-absence of the rest of the ff. Feralmi; these men had no strong local involvement, and certainly took few steps to reinforce their local power. After their abandonment of Soci, they are not recorded as holding in the Casentino again. The most problematic of the three families is the ff. Guillelmi/ ff. Benzi, the family that partially gave rise to the Ubertini: most problematic for its complexity and obscurity, although also by far the most important of the three in its local property-owning. This family needs to be discussed in detail; not solely because of its intrinsic importance, but because it is only by looking at it carefully that we can understand how the influence of such a family was constructed at a local level. The tf. Guillelmi first appear as a ubiquitous family of propertyowners in the Partina area. Guilielmo and Griffone di Guillielmo are documented in 101 1- 19; in the 1020s to ro8os the family is referred to as the nepotes Willielmi; in the 106os to 1110s as the Guilelminga--on the surface a dearly defined consortial descent group, whose process of defmition we can pin down. They owners in the area before I 100, see e.g. 438, 440, 466, 594, 638. For the I 109 cession and confirmations, see 705, 707, 791, 842 (AC iii.199), 1023. For the f[ Feralmi and the Guidi, see 707, 814; cf. Delumeau, 'Commune d'Arezzo', n. 31. For Prataglia, see 763 (AC iii.169), 882, but see also 1338. For Frederick's confirmation, see MGH, Dip. Fridtrici I 90 (RC 1112, ignoring emendations). For the thirteenth century, see ]ones, 'Camaldoh'. 7

For family land elsewhere in the Archiano, see RC lo6, rs6, 278, 291 (AC ii.89), 310. For Ugo di Minuto, see 36o, 379, 424, 434, 52-4; witness between 405 (AC ii.rso) and sts.

Signori and Castelli

275

appear on property-boundaries in Ventrina, Freggina, Monte, Partina, Contra, Soci, several places in the Val di Sova, and in Casole in the pieve of Buiano, some fifty times in the century of their documentation. They must have owned a good part of Monte and Ventrina, at least; but their property-holding, although great, seems to have been fairly restricted, rarely extending beyond the middle Archiano and middle-upper Sova valleys. They appear only in incidental references, never as actors. They are once referred to as donors to Prataglia, in 1020, of two land-plots in and near Soci; never again do they appear as such, as donors or even witnesses.8 This description seems straightforward enough, if enigmatic; but there are complications. The ff. Benzi at first look like a separate family, and a more clearly documented one. They were four brothers, Rolando, Boso, Ugo, and Corbizo. The first three, with Corbizo's sons, appear selling land in Freggina (to Pietro di Giovanni the castaldio) in 1038, and in Monte in 1045. Rolando and Boso bought half of the castello of Montecchio south-east of Bibbiena in 1049 for 400s. The family are recorded as owners on boundaries some ten times over the next century, rather less often than the ff. Guillelmi, but in the same areas; the same process of definition takes place, the filii Bentii becoming the BentiingafBenzinga, and if we look further, to the lands of the tf. Corbitii, the descendents of Corbizo di Benzo, we can see these coming to be known as the Corbizinga, too. Three times, this land is referred to as Benzinga (or Corbizinga) et Guilelminga: the ff. Guillelmi and ff. Benzi were eo-owners at the very least. But one is led inescapably to the conclusion that they were actually the same family, the Benzinga being a sub-family of the Guilelminga just as the Corbizinga were of the Benzinga. (Guilielmo remained a popular name throughout these transformations.) We can thus superimpose the property network of the tf. Benzi on that of the tf. Guillelmi: really powerful local owners, who were buying their way into castello-owning by 1049 at the latest. Ugo di Benzo, in fact, must have already been at this social level when, before 1047, he married the daughter of a 8 For Guilielmo and Griffone, see RC 28-9, 47- 51 (5o-1 as donors). Nepctes Willitlmi, sixteen times, between Ss and 379· Guiltlminga: about twenty times, between 340 and 747. For ownership in Monte, see p. 251.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century Count Guido, perhaps even the second Guidi count of that name.9 · The activities of the ff. Benzi show that the family was not as totally detached from the Church as the references to the ff. Guillelmi on their own would make us think. Prataglia got land from them in 1047, somewhat uneasily; Camaldoli in 1061. The family were, just about, prepared to recognize that the monasteries existed. But these references, set against the sheer scale of the land the family had locally, merely serve to emphasize the caution-indeed, as I have argued (pp. 262- 5), hostilitywith which its members regarded the growing power of the Church. They conspicuously failed to. participate in the mass of alienation to the two monasteries in their villages, Monte, Freggina, Ventrina, in the first eight decades of the century. Nor were they any more part of the witness network for Prataglia and Camaldoli than either of our previous two families.lO This only changed, and even then only partially, when the family underwent a second transformation, in the years after 1080. In 1096 Ugo and Uberto di Guilelmo gave to Camaldoli a set of properties, amounting to an estate, that they held in Monte, that had come to them per commandatione aut per districto: they were evidently episcopal vassals, with some local signorial rights. With these two, especially the second, our documentation opens out. They were the sons of Guilelmo di Boso di Benzo, of the ff. Benzi, and they and their uncles had begun to establish some relationship with Camaldoli, selling or giving little bits of land over the last fifteen years, particularly in the Val di Sova. Some of these texts were written at the castello of Ragginopoli, on the Sova 2 km west of Monte, itself first mentioned in 1-081 in the first of the cessions; and Ragginopoli continued thereafter to be commonly cited in connection with Uberto (also called Ubertino) di Guilelmo and his descendants. It was evidently their private castello. Uberto/Ubertino was reasonably active in 9 For the ff. Benzi, see RC 174, 182, 23o-1, 232, and in next n.; on boun
643, 651, 747· 990 shows land de domo Corbizinga controlled by the Ubertini. For Ugo di Benzo and the Guidi, see 241. 1 For gifts, see RC 241 (a. 1047; it could be the resolution of a dispute), 254, 306. As witnesses, the family appear once only- Rolando di Benzo in

°

117.

Signori and Castelli

277

our documentation in the next decades. He and his brother were, for the frrst time in this family, sometimes charter witnesses. He had military duties too, presumably in the bishop's entourage; he pledged half his estate at Agna in the Sova valley to Camaldoli in I I I I for £30, 'since I have been captured, and do not have the goods (pecuniam) with which I may redeem myself',. doubtless in Henry V's siege and sack of Arezzo in that year. Ubertino was, indeed, again for the frrst time in the family, plainly active on a large scale outside the Casentino. He owned in the Chianti, where he transferred his share of the castello of Maloclevello to his cousin Raineri di Guido in 11 I 5. Raineri was himself a substantial owner in the Chianti, with a number of castelli that slowly came into the hands of the local monastery of Coltibuono. And Ubertino's sons accumulated more lands in the Chianti and the Valdamo in the I140s and onwards. We are, in fact, now dealing with the Ubertini, one of the greatest families of twelfthand thirteenth-century Arezzo.ll When, and how, this family changes in scale is impossible to pin down. It is quite likely, although it cannot be proved, that the growing attention its members paid to Camaldoli after 1080 already reflects a growing involvement in other parts of the diocese, probably under the patronage of the bishop, that led them to view the monastery with more detachment, and therefore with more favour. But the Ubertini cannot all be traced back to the descendants of Boso di Benzo: they made up a complex consorteria, and not all of them need have been related in the male line (Raineri di Guido may have been one who was not); some of thein may only have been connected through marriage alliances. Linked family groups stretched from close to Florence right down to Arezzo, focused above all on the Valdarno Aretino. The three sons of Ubertino di Guilelmo surrendered some of their Casentino property in I 141, in return for a great part of Camaldoli's lands in the Valdamo; the transaction reflects the changing locus of their interests, a change 11 For Ugo and Uberto in 1096, see RC 586; cf. 442.• 452, 528-9, S76-?. for gifts after 1081·. For the Agna pledge, see 729; cf. Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze i, pp. 543- 5, 754-6. For Maloclevello, see Pagliai, Reg. di Coltibuono, nn. 288, 442; cf., for Raineri, 320, 366-?, 370, 372. For a sketchy genealogical table, see p. 278 (thanks to Jean Pierre Delumeau for much help; he is not

responsible for my particular interpretations).

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

Guiliefmo

(Qd. 1011

I GuWielmo 1011

I

...•

Beilzo

qd. 1001

Rokmo 1001-61

t Lords of

MontecchiO

Ugo = Adalascia. cl. of 1038-45 Count Guido

qd. 1047

Griffone 1011

A.

{Guile!;}. Boso 1038-49

Corblzo

qd. 1038

r--104-7----.,......1.---.------. Rail\eri;..l -1'-ugo..-1_Guifielmo........, . I

Bei1zo 1061

. 1038 ~

Alberto 1081

Guilelmo

Coltlizinga

1062

I

~!no 1095-1124 T~

1115-41

I

~

1141-56

further represented by the fact that they drop out of the Camaldoli documents again. They continued to hold on a considerable scale in the Casentino, none the less, and here, too, they were inextricably linked with other castello-based family groups who cannot be put in a simple genealogical relationship with them. One of the families originally controlling Partina and Liema. the ff. Ildebrandi, are an instance; although possession of Partina might on the face of it link them to the Banzena, Albertino di Ildebrando in II 15 held lands stretching all the way across to the Valdamo and the Chianti, often in the same places as Ubertini land, and it was to the sons of Ubertino that he ceded his portion of Partina. Another are the 'lords of Ragginopoli', Musseto di Griffolo (6. IIII- 41) and his kin: they were clearly associated with the Ubertini, as is not surprising for people based on one of the family's first castelli, but cannot be explicitly demonstrated either to be the fariilly's direct kin (indeed, their names were mostly different) or to be holding the castello as their vassals. The lords ofRagginopoli may even have

Signori and Castelli

279

been vassals of the Guidi; at any rate, the latter claimed half the castello in 1164. The Ubertini kept the rest, however.12 These two instances can serve as examples of the indications that the Ubertini started out less as an agnatic kin group than as a consorteria. Different family nuclei, themselves often formed from fragmenting agnatic groups like the tf. Guillelmi/tf. Benzi, recomposed to form a single clan, which henceforth took on a family identity in its own right. (Interestingly, another fragment of the ff. Benzi, the descendants of Rolando di Benzo, who held on to Montecchio, do not seem to have joined the Ubertini; they remained as the homines de Monteclo, petty local feudatories.) But the Ubertini themselves maintained a loose structure for a long time, based on a widely extended geographical framework, inside which the branches of the family moved about with considerable detachment. The pattern thus produced is strikingly similar to that of Schwarzmaier's Lucchesia, carried on into an age of surnames and castelli-owning, in the same way as I have tried to demonstrate for the Lucchesia itself (pp. 126-3 1); twelfth-century families, in the Lucchesia and the Aretino alike, maintained a wide spread of landholding, and were not focused on signorial power over single districts. And the corollary, in my view, would be the same: the city in each case remained the focus for the rural aristocracy in its diocese. Indeed, in the Aretine case there is no doubt about the matter; the capitanei never ceased to be involved in urban politics. But the structure of landowning, even taken on its own, would have made such a focus inevitable.13 12 For the If. Ubertini in IJ4I, see RC 984. 986, 990. For later history, see, with caution, Lazzeri, Guglielmino Ubertini, pp. I s- 24. For the If. lldebrandi, see RC 776 for Albertino's wide holdings; 984, 102~ for him and his nephews in Partina (his niece's husband Rolandino di Rolando kept his share: see p. 327). For the lords of IUgginopoli, see 729, 901, 926, 990, 1027, 1193, 1266, 1290, etc. They were vassals of the Ubertini for some of their land, however: see 986. In the 1 16os they were associates of members of the topmost non-aristocratic stratum: p. 326. For the Guidi, see MGH, Dip. Friderici I 46i 18 For Montecchio, see RC 252, 452, 6o1, 649, 713, 716, 796, 822, I08+ For capitanei and Arezzo, see Oelumeau, 'Lombards de Carpineto', pp. 98-9. For loose consorterie, see ibid., pp. 68--9; cf. Violante, 'Quelques caracteristiques des structures familiales', pp. n8- 25, with references to previous work. The fact that the crystallization of aristocratic family structures in Italy was so often based not on lineages, as in the work of Schmid and Ouby (see above, General Introduction, n. 3), but on broad family groupings, linked by marriage, just

280

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

The development of the Ubertini in an Aretine political framework is not my concern here: But the implications of this development for the nature of power in the Casentino is. The core of the Ubertini, UbertofUbertino and his kin, were in origin Casentinese; only after the 1080s does the wider consorteria begin to be documented. The family began as rich boni homines in the middle Archiano and the Sova valleys; as episcopal vassals, they gradually extended in size and influence through the eleventh century, obtaining half the castello of Montecchio by 1049 and founding Ragginopoli by 1081. Towards the end of the century, they built up a network of kin, affines and consortes, which brought in parts of the castelli of Liema and Partina and, far more important, access to a vast arena in the west of the Aretino and the Fiesolano;· they became the Ubertini. They never lost a Casentino base, none the less. Their subsequent tenurial history there is highly complex, but we may note here that in 1223 they held portions, at least, of the castelli of Ragginopoli, Corezzo, Serravalle, Partina and others, with real signorial powers; in the mid-fourteenth century they controlled a similar range of castelli, even though most of them were different (Montefatucchio, Serravalle, Gressa, Banzena, Marciano); indeed, in the fifteenth, one of the last centres of signorial rights anywhere in the Florentine Republic was another Ubertini property in the Casentino, the castello of Chitignano. As lords in the valley, they were only matched by the Guidi, with whom, indeed, they contested control of many of these casteUi.l4 This continuing interest in the Casentino is impressive; but it is superficial. The Ubertini never kept firm roots as a valley family. Their lands and castelli did not stay permanently in their hands, but constantly changed. Chitignano, their last base, cannot as families had been linked in the Carolingian world, is one of the things that makes one wonder how much family srructures ever really changed, above all in areas such as otine, where diocesan/comital territories remained coherent. 14

For 1223, see RC 1734 (they already held Coreuo by n87= see below, p. 332). They had lands near Camaldoli by 1216 (Pasqui 474, pp. 132 f.), which they probably gained late in the twelfth century, when they got their rights in Serravalle (below, Ch. I I, n. 17). The Guidi had taken over most of this network of land and rights by 1250: see Ch. II, n. 22. For the fourteenth century, see Pasqui 857, a.IJ8s. For the first reference to Chitignano, see Lazzeri, Guglielmino Ubertini, p. 23; the castello and its signoria is the object of a study by Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 201-18.

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be shown to be theirs before 1268. They were an urban power, with lands that happened to be in the Casentino. They were, that is to say, quite unlike the Guidi, who after 1200 were more and more restricted to the Casentino and its neighbouring valleys over the Appennine watershed. The Guidi rarely lost castelli they took over, except as they were steadily pushed back by the Florentines; they created a real territorial signoria in the upper valley, as we shall see (pp. 323-4). The Ubertini did nothing approaching that. Their urban focus, in effect, took them away from the carefully organized local politics that was necessary to create such power. Signorial rights were important to them, not to create local power-bases, but as a part of their resources for a politics that extended across the whole diocese. In this respect, as well, the Aretino was as coherent a unit as the Lucchesia, and its mountain extremities no less so than the plains.l5 The implications of this for power at the local level are best seen, once again, in the context of the middle Archiano. At the end of the eleventh century Ugo and Uberto/Ubertino di Guilelmo and their kin owned perhaps a third of Monte, and the brothers had been granted some form of districtus there, probably based on and certainly strengthened by their nearby castello of Ragginopoli. But they did not, as far as we can see, try to turn their influence there into direct power over the village; members of the other social strata of Monte carried on their political strategies without discernible change, often, in all probability, directed against Ugo and Ubertino's own family. There is no more reason to think that the ff. Feralmi were stronger in Soci, either. This lack of direct power, even in families as locally rich as these, is something that must be stressed. And there is no sign that the situation was to change. It is, indeed, difficult to see any of the eleventh-century aristocratic families we have looked at in this chapter building up any sort of dominance over settlements (at least those with any independent owners at all) of the type that would, elsewhere in Tuscany, turn into firm signorie in the twelfth century (cf. The Val Tiberina, geographically separate from the Amo basin, was more of a signorial centre, particularly in the case of Anghiari: cf. Modigliani, 'Anghiari nel XIII secolo'; Barbolani di Montauto, 'Signorie e comuni rurali'. Even the Tiber lords, however, gravitated to the city- the Tarlati, one of the major urban families, had their rural bases there. 16

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below, pp. 33o-2). The only exception might be the Banzena in the middle Corsolone. It is not the case that direct dominance of individual localities by small lords was in any way impossible or even difficult in the years around I 100. Some of the settlements nearer Arezzo were largely controlled, both tenurially and politically, by the local aristocracy, not to speak of some of the emerging Guidi centres at the top of the valley. There is, however, a specific explanation for what prevented such dominance in the middle valley, above all on the Archiano: the obstacle to local power represented by the high and increasing proportion of episcopal and monastic land in every village. Some of this was certainly leased and enfeoffed out to the local aristocracy, thus extending rather than diminishing their influence, but not all, or even most. As a result; the aristocratic families were not, at least on the Archiano, in a position to distl.lrb the factional balances I described in the last chapter. They must have participated in the factions, and links of dependence focused on them doubtless structured much local activity; but their participation did not necessarily lead to the victory of the side they represented. Nor did their presence in itself lessen the importance placed on the public arena. The boni homines that participated in, and sometimes ran, local disputes will have often been their dependents, but their presence was not determined by such dependence.l6 The aristocracy, that is, merely added another stratum to the structures of rural society. And even in the twelfth century, when the public arena became increasingly weak and signorial power became more explicit, this may not have changed so very greatly, as we shall see in the next chapter. In the Casentino, the Archiano valley was not a wholly typical area in its local balance of power. It is usually areas closer to cities, and not all of them, that show a pattern of this kind. But some of the rest of the valley must have been very similarly constructed (cf. pp. 208-12), not to speak of the Aretino at large. Indeed, one could go further: there were thousands of villages, scattered across the whole of north-central Italy, where individual lords were not in a position to control the whole community. The boni homines in the three Banzena dispute settlements, for instance (see n. 1), particularly the first two, come from the normal array of public witnesses of the pievi of Partina and Bibbiena. HI

Signori and Castelli In villages like these, enjoying relative tenurial independence, one could expect differences in stratification and factional rivalry to be a norm. We are used to such patterns in the city, where they represented, very explicitly, one of the driving forces behind the move to the communes; but they existed in the countryside as well, with, arguably, some of the same results. The social patterns of the Archiano may well represent a model that can be generalized very widely .17 I have stressed similarities between the overall political structures of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Lucchesia and Aretino. But in one respect they were profoundly different. The Lucchese aristocracy came from the city, and formed its strongest · local bases above all around episcopal land and episcopal tithe; Aretine aristocrats, even if they had urban links as early as the documents go, essentially began as local owners. This is partly another result of the contrast in evidence between the two dioceses, Lucchese documents for a long time coming principally from the episcopal archive, Aretine documents almost never. But the contrast is at least in part a real one. Above all, it can be shown that the bishop of Arezzo did not cede lands and tithes anything like as extensively as did his Lucchese colleague (pp. 87, 3 18- 19). As a result, even though the Lucchese aristocracy of course owned land, and had done, in many cases, for centuries, that land was not, in the new conditions of the eleventh century, as overridingly important for their defmition as aristocrats as it was for the Aretines. In my discussion of their activities in the Garfagnana, it was not necessary to define the term 'aristocrat'; the social group concerned was dearly separable from the previous inhabitants of the valley. But the problem of definition is a real one in the Aretino. I have consistently distinguished in this chapter and the last between the aristocracy and the strata of richer free landowners immediately beneath them. On what basis can one make any such distinction? For instance, to take the most clearly documented case, did the ff. Guillelmi enter the aristocracy to become the Ubertini, or had they always been 17

The evidence presented by Plesner (Emigrazione dalla campagna) and Conti (Formazione i) shows that one could in principle find similar patterns in the Chianti. I intend to analyse further examples in the Lucca plain in a forthcoming study.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century different from their neighbours, up there under the forests of the Appennine watershed? If the latter, what difference was there, and did it change? The distinction certainly did not lie in the holding of episcopal land. Even though we do not have collections of episcopal documents, those we have from other archives show that all kinds of people held from the bishop in the eleventh century. In the Archiano valley, episcopal leaseholders included, among many others, in rough descending order of importance, Ubertino di Guilielmo, the 1f. Feralmi, the 1f. Lamberti of La Mausolea, and the small consorteria of Contra. 18 This list consists only of landqwners with sufficient rights over their leased lands to allow them to donate those lands to monasteries; owners, that is to say, holding by totally different terms than did episcopal tenant cultivators. Even then, it covers the whole range oflandowning, from the regionally important to the locally insignificant, right down to people on the edge of full tenurial dependence. Bishops of Arezzo did not restrict their patronage to the top of the landowning classes. Even the men of Contra may already have been called episcopal 'vassals', and their leases 'fiefs'; feudal terminology is a rare feature of our eleventh-century documents, but when it came in, in the twelfth, it could certainly extend to people like them (below, p. 312). It was, at any rate, possible to have a direct relationship with the bishop across the full range of social levels in existence among the free owners of the Casentino. One might presume that the opportunity to rise in the episcopal clientele was closely linked to the social position with which each family began; it was the largest locally owning family, the ff. Guillelmi, that was given the opportunity by the bishop to become the Ubertini, not the men of Contra. But, none the less, the availability of episcopal patronage at all these social levels points to an early relative homogeneity of the free strata of society; the bishop had similar sorts of relationships with each stratum, and was certainly capable of helping any given group to move from one stratum to the next. I defined these strata in terms of their dramatically differing relationships with Prataglia and Camaldoli. But, as noted earlier (p. 197), although these two monasteries had differing spheres of influence, 18

See, respectively, RC 586, 439, 481-2, 302. Cf. Ch. 7, n. 10.

• Signori and Castelli

that of the bishop overlapped with both. And we can now see that episcopal patronage was of a different kind from that of the monasteries. It was concentrated, as far we can see, on the ceding of property, rather than on receiving it, even though these cessions were never on the scale of those in Lucca; and, instead of defining the differences between social strata, it obscured them again, in patronage that was, at first sight, undifferentiated in type from top to bottom. The existence of this social continuum has important implications. The issue of the changing definition of the Italian aristocracy in the tenth to twelfth centuries is an old one. It has always been linked closely with that of the nature of the signoria, which I characterized briefly in the context of the Garfagnana (above, pp. 105-8). It has not been discussed as much as the signoria, however, and certainly not as closely. It has, of course, been discussed outside Italy, very extensively indeed; but although the definition of the aristocracy was ever-changing in France and Germany, the differences between nobles and non-nobles were generally greater than in Italy, thus making the focus of the arguments rather easier. 19 In Italy, the best recent discussion is that in Hagen Keller's big book on northern Italy, principally focused on Milan. Keller, too, was working on an area where the divisions inside the aristocracy and between them and the rustici were more explicit than they were in many other places in Italy. None the less, his unusually sharp-edged discussions have a wider relevance. Keller argues that the nature of the division between aristocrat and non-aristocrat radically changed between the Carolingian period and the twelfth century. In the former, aristocratic status was ill defmed, but essentially characterized a restricted group of great landowners and officials, close to the kings. As the public persona of the State broke down and links of dependence became more important, however, the upper ranks of the free landowners militarized themselves, gained fiefs from the older leading families and the Church, and became part of a new stratum, explicitly defined, called valvassores, secundi milites, and Fossier, Enfance de !'Europe, pp. 964-'79. gives a somewhat despairing summary of the infmitely various discussions; see further the collection edited by Reuter, Medieval Nobility. The most relevant analysis for England is Harvey, 'Knight's Fee'. 19

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the like; the notion of the aristocracy expanded to include them. Their near neighbours at a slightly lower level, however, excluded from this, lost power, influence, and military responsibility, and became increasingly subject to signorial authority, as mere freemen. Keller places the moment of crystallization of this new stratification in the context of the development of 'three orders' theory in the early to middle eleventh century; by I roo the process was almost complete. But it was a process of social redefinition, as much as of social change. It was not so much the increasing power of secundi milites that brought them into the aristocracy; it was the concept of the aristocracy that extended to cover them, becoming more dearly bounded as it did so, its new definition now essentially depending on militarization and local political position. Now, Milanese society was certainly, as I said, unusually elaborated. Jam ut, working on Bergamo, found no such process: Bergamo was certainly a . far less militarized society, with less use of feudo-vassalic terminology; Jarnut is unhappy about a strict separation between nobiles and non-noble inside a wide 'ceto superiore' or 'upper stratum'. And in the eleventh-century Aretino, more military a society than many in Tuscany, nobilis was rare, denoting, certainly, the capitaneal stratum of the aristocracy, but not as a technical term; bonus homo, however, could characterize almost any level of free or aristocratic society. The growth of a military stratum occurred at different times; in Tuscany as a whole the process was certainly later, sometimes by as much as a century, than in the north. Nevertheless, I would agree with Keller that the period covering, say, the years gso-uso did indeed see a change in the terms by which an aristocrat could be characterized. The question is, once again, how this really worked on the ground. 20 Casentinese documentation is only a part of that of the Aretino in general, a fact that matters more when considering these issues than in most of the contexts we have looked at so far. It is, Keller, Adelshemchajt, pp. 342-'79 (cf. Tabacco's review in Riv. stor. italiana xciii (1981), pp. 852--5); Keller, 'Militia'; Jamut, Bergamc, pp. 198-200, 214- 31. For further variability in the north, see Bordone, ' "Civitas nobilis et antiqua" ', pp. 36-44. For nobiles in Arezzo, see Delumeau, ' Equilibri di potere', p. 100. Keller's analyses are built on a long tradition of twentieth-century German and Italian scholarship; the essential background text for Italy is Volpe, 'Lambardi e Romani'. 20

·Signori and Castelli furthermore, almost devoid of the great formal placita that are one of the clearest means for the historian to assess the ordering of aristocratic society in most of Italy in our period. What follows is therefore a set of provisional comments, based. above all on the families we have looked at hitherto, with the addition of a few others rather less clearly documented. It seems to me that the increasing definition of the aristocracy in our valley is best seen as a set of continuing processes of crystallization, above all around castelli. The first laymen associated with castelli were the pan-Tuscan aristocratic families of the tenth century-in particular, in the Casentino, the Guidi. Then, at various times in the eleventh century, the capitaneal families of the Aretino begin to appear, nearly every one already had at least one castello by the time the family is first documented. In the twelfth century, lesser families appear in castelli as well, with some of the trappings of the aristocracy, above all their military pretensions.21 There can never have been any doubt about the noble status of the Guidi, and they need not be dealt with here. The twelfth century petty milites I will come to in the next chapter (pp. 324-9), for they cannot be understood without much more discussion; I will argue in a moment, however, that they are not usefully describable as 'aristocratic' at all. It is the association of the second group, the capitanei and those immediately below them, with castelli that must be looked at first, and it will be the basis of the rest of this chapter. There is little problem about how we define the tf. Berardi of Banzena. They probably held the castello of Banzena by the 1040s at the latest, and certainly had milites among their dependants by then.22 They represent a classic militarized small aristocratic family, and were operative on a diocesan scale, from almost the beginning of our possible documentation. The same is true of the tf. Feralmi. The tf. Guillelmi are a slighdy more complicated matter. They were large owners in a fairly restricted 21

This has obvious parallels with the different periods of crystallization of different levels of aristocratic family identity in France: see Duby, 'Structures familiales aristocratiques', bearing in mind the comments in n. 13. 22 RC Z48 (AC ii.67). Who these militts were we cannot tell; some were doubtless militarized boni homiiUS, others low-status professionals, like the maStUUlerii of Anghiari.in RC 666 (AC iii.u6); cf.; for thirteenth-century Sarna, Tabacco, 'Nobilta e potere', pp. 1- 5.

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The Casentinc in the Eleventh Century

area well before they bought their way into their first castello; none the less, the difference in scale between these origins and their importance as the Ubertini by 1 150 may make their expansion simply seem like a rise into aristocratic status. Their position as aristocrats, however, did not derive from the rapid increase of family power at the end of the eleventh century; it came before, from the 1040s onward, with the first castelli they obtained. The tf. Guillelmi were already by 1000 or so on a different level from the other inhabitants of Monte and Ventrina, and would soon 'be married, indeed, into a comital family; but they were still part of a continuum of free owners rising without a break, Carolingian style, right up into the ranks of the powerful, a continuum expressed, as we have seen, by the personal links any free owner could have with the bishop. It was their castelli that ftrst broke this local continuum, and made them different in type from their weaker neighbours. Another point must be made about the ff. Guillelmi, however; among their own social stratum, they were relative newcomers to the world of castelli. Already in the decades around 1000, other families elsewhere in the Aretino, with the same local status as the ff. Guillelrni, were coming to focus themselves on castelli, and were expanding their relationships with the bishop and the greater lay lords. It was this that signalled the appearance in .the Aretino of the wider definitions of aristocratic status, based not on high office but on militarization and private links of dependence, that Keller has pin-pointed so dearly in the Milanese; by obtaining castelli, the capitaneal families became aristocratic. Slowly, indeed, this opportunity became an imperative; the sense that explicit military associations meant an increasingly elevated and defined social status, a natural one in an age where military obligation was rapidly becoming a social privilege, linked with direct personal dependence on the great, made it increasingly necessary for all families with such claims to establish themselves in castelli as soon as they had the opportunity. 23 It is in this context that we must understand the gradual change of the social position of the tf. Guillelmi, powerful even before their twelfth-century expansion, but relatively remote from the political world of Arezzo. They built castelli 23

Cf. Settia, Castelli e villaggi, e.g. pp. 399-406.

Signori and Castelli some decades later than their peers, but they were not for that reason 'less aristocratic' than the tf. Feralmi; they merely continued to act according to an older definition of status for longer. To generalize: before the introduction of castelli, the issue of whether families like the tf. Guillelmi were 'aristocratic', in contemporary terms, was meaningless; if we wish to use the term, we have to use our own criteria. It is incastellamento that acts as the first indication of a dear distinction of type between families who controlled castelli and families who did not. The · former did not necessarily change their real position in society when they obtained castelli, however; they just took up a different set of cultural definitions of what was seen as constituting the social hierarchy and the boundaries of social groups. Keller sees the crystallization of the 'new' aristocracy as the creation of a real, increasingly fixed, social division between valvassores and the unmilitarized free. It is this which cannot be carried without question into the Aretino. The new defmitions of the aristocracy were important, and transformed the ways in which such families could act politically, at the diocesan level and in the city. Episcopal vassalage doubtless changed in content as a result. But as I have said, what effect this had on the local position of families is far less clear. The tf. Guillelmi cannot be seen acting differently for a generation after they got their first castello in 1049. Rolando di Tagizo of Poggiolo took a lease of part of the castello of Soci in I I I4, transparently aiming at the lower rungs of the new aristocracy; this certainly did result in dramatic changes in the way his family behaved (pp. 326-8), but they cannot be seen as more powerful as a result. Castelli were not yet the automatic foci for signorie in the Aretino, but, even when they were, into the twelfth century, the main lines of social relationships did not necessarily change. Indeed, far from the growth of the military ordo separating the nobility from the prosperous free a separation Keller is concerned to stress, and that is taken as totally normal in twelfth-century France or Germany or England-the twelfth century in the Aretino shows the constant extension of military power to lower strata of landowners-Rolando di Tagizo is, indeed, an early example of the proeess. If this is so, then, what did define the 'new' aristocracy in the Aretino? To answer the question, we must look again at the

The Casentino.in the Eleventh Century · issues raised by Keller. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the regnum Italicum had broken up, and public power was weakening even inside the relatively politically coherent county of Arezzo (see below, pp. 309-11); public position by itself could no longer create an elite. In much of northern Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, tire identity of the aristocracy came to be dependent on self-image, rather than ·on the legitimation of the state; the links of dependence that characterized the political world of aristocrats, together with their own local powers, allods, fiefs, castelli, and signorial rights, came together to create a series of well-defined military strata, whose definition itself came to characterize aristocratic status. It is this sharpness of definition that was lacking in our area. And that is significant. The links of dependence and the local powers were there, as in the Po plain, but not the ordo militum. Or, to be more exact. the ordo militum did not form a wall between aristocratic and 'free'; it was something the 'free' could continue to aspire to, throughout the twelfth century and .indeed later. We have, then, to construct our own definitions of aristocracy in the Aretino, in the absence of consistent eleventh- and twelfth-century criteria; indeed, the concept 'aristocracy' itself stands revealed, more visibly than usual, as just another modern category like feudalism and the signoria, with which we try to order the apparent confusion of the past. I suspect, in fact, that any useful defmition of the aristocracy must change from context to context rather more radically than is often recognized. Prom the standpoint of Arezzo, 'aristocratic' could reasonably be taken as describing those landed powers of diocesan importance that had direct links, of dependence, equality, or hostility, with the bishop. (Inside the purvi.ew of a more strictly urban politics the definitio~ would probably be different, but the issue does not concern us.) In the countryside, however, more local criteria must be paramount. In the Casentino, I would characterize as the local aristocracy those families who held independent local power. Once again, local power can best be recognized through looking at the network of castelli: independent local power was represented not so much by the terms on which one. held a castello, but by whether one had effective control over it. The ff. Feralmi held Soci in fief, rather than outright, but their de facto control was complete; they were aristocratic. Conversely,

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Rolando di Tagizo, despite his claims in Soci, was always someone's dependant there, whether of the ff. Feralmi or of Prataglia; he had military status, just as he had public position as a bonus homo, but no more. Indeed, his son and grandson, as we will see (pp. 326-8}, failed totally to establish themselves as holders of an independent signoria. Military activity did not make Rolando, for all his pretensions, different from the non-military families of boni homines that were still his neighbours; no caesura separated him from them.24 There was no sharp break between him and the men who did control Soci, either; in this respect, too, there were still no unbridgeable gaps in the gradations of status in the valley. But in the military arena Rolando could not act as an independent political force; and it is here, in my view, that the division between 'aristocratic' and 'non-aristocratic' most usefully lies. I have been discussing status in terms of castelh, for castelli certainly served to represent the new political framework when they appeared. But they were only a guide to the distribution of power; they did not themselves create it. The fact is that what mattered for the construction of local power remained what it had always been: the ownership or leasing of land. The holding of castelli and signorial rights, of military/aristocratic status, came to transform the behaviour of the families that held them, and the discourse of politics changed with it, as we shall see in the next chapter. But even signorial rights, which did bring an increase in local power with them, remained a minor feature of the political structures of the Casentino (below, pp. 315- 17). The content of local power and influence remained defined by land, in the Casentino as in the Lucchesia. It is because of this that the ff. Guillelmi appear so little changed when they began to acquire castelli; they already had the landed base for the local political influence they exercised. Similarly, some of the smaller castello-holding families seem to have been only a little more prominent as landowners than any substantial family of boni homines; they were part of the aristocracy, but they 24

Rolando and his f.amily had a similar social and economic position to Keller's valvassorts around Varese (Keller, Adelsherrschafi, pp. 83-103); but they were f.ar less distinct from the non-military free than their northern peers seem to have been (ibid., pp. 103-23).

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century remained relatively unimportant, castelli or no. 2 5 And their successors in the military arena in the twelfth century were the boni homines themselves; the fact that the castelli they were associated with, Soci and Partina and Marciano, were controlled by others, thus denying them independent power, is itself only a reflection of the fact that their proprietorial position, too, was unchanged. The gradations between the strata of the medium landowners of the Archiano, which as we have seen were very complex, resolved themselves in a more military world into differences in time: between 1000 and I 150, nearly every generation saw a new stratum of owners make a claim to military status. The new boundaries of aristocratic identity, never, however, succeeded in asserting themselves over the kaleidoscope of differentiation and interconnection that we have seen characterizing the social circles of the Archiano (pp. 2647). The complexities of a politics based on land changed their form, but not, in the last analysis, their content.

My intention in making these points is in part to demystify the importance of castelli as political foci. This may seem paradoxical, since I have been stressing their importance for the definition of a whole social group, but the paradox is only apparent. As in the Garfagnana and, more widely, the Lucchesia, castelli in the Casentino were political symbols rather than, at least at the start, political power centres in their own right. In this respect, however, the Casentino may be unlike the rest of the Aretino; This is one of the propositions that is most difficult to make with certainty, however, without having looked at the evidence for the whole diocese. The lords of the castello of Gressa, for example, insignificant though they seem in the Casentino material (RC 334, 374, 423, 434, 440, 575, 649, 68o, 847-8, 939, lZSJ, 1288), were kin to major capitaneal groups elsewhere in the diocese Oean Pierte Delumeau, pers. comm.). The lords of Gello, too, owners on a small scale in the Val di Corsolone (RC 44, 53, 54, 59, 280(?), 333), shared names with a prominent family from Nasciano in the Valdichiana south of Arezzo (107, 593, 710, etc.). But in neither case did the castelli bring them any local prominence; nor did it for the lords of Montecchio, notwithstanding their kinship with the Ubertini. In the last two cases, indeed, these genealogical links, possible or certain, with more important families probably hide a social break; the families are best understood as small local notables, rather than as kin to the diocesan aristocracy. 25

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there, as in other parts of eastern and central Tuscany, incastellamento may have caused more important changes than it did in our valley. To understand all this, we must look at the castelli themselves: first, at the chronological patterns of castle-building, which have a clear relationship to the processes of aristocratic definition that I have discussed; second, at their importance as concrete objects for the society and economy of the valley. Who built castelli, then, and when? These are often answers we cannot give for certain. The first explicit reference to the foundation of a castello in the valley is as late as 1188. Lay foundation and ownership may be exaggerated by our sources, since lay families often appear to be full owners of castelli which other, chance, references reveal to be held on lease or in fief from the bishop. Many castelli, too, are only known about at all through much later references, or are only cited as centres for the writing of documents. But we can get somewhere, nevertheless. Broadly, the castelli of the valley fall into three chronological periods, and their nature varies accordingly. Six castelli are described as such in texts that pre-date 1050: Sarna (c.980), Marciano (1oo8), Nibbiano (IOII) , Castel Focognano (1028), Strurni (1029) , and Montecchio (1049). A further eight are documented later, but there is good reason to believe that they too are early: Vezzano (1052), Castel Castagnaio (I06J), Fronzola and Gello (1065), Bibbiena (1084), Banzena (JI14), Chiusi (III9) , and Romena (II64).26 We cannot date 26

See Maps 7-8. Earliest citations are: Sarna: ACA SF 455 (dated to c.98o by counting generations; ed. Pasqui 293); Marciano: RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92); Nibbiano: ACA SF 57; Castel Focognano: SF 136 (but see below); Strumi: ASF S. Trinita, Mar. 1029 (ed. Lami, Deliciae eruditorum vii.8, pp. 327-9); Montecchio: RC 252; Vezzano: MGH, Dip. Heinrici II1 292 (cf. RC 669); Castel Castagnaio: ASF S. Trinici, June 1003 (its context is totally obscure, but it was probably a Romena castello, from RC 280 (a. ross; AC ii.78); it was Guidi property by II64); Fronzola: RC 331 (AC ii.108); Gello: RC 333 (AC ii.109, already split between heirs at its first citation); Bibbiena: RC 456 (but see below); Banzena: RC 759 (AC ili.168; see n. 2 for earlier associations; it must post-date 1020, however, for it is a villa in MGH, Dip. Heinrici li 436); Chiusi: RC 810; Romena: MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462 (the phrase is Romena cum curte sua, without explicit reference to a castello, but it is normally only castelli that are associated with such a formula). Vezzano, Chiusi (see p. 183), and, particularly, Romena (see p. 202) are likely to be early as· a result of their position as public power centres. Porciano should perhaps be added

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

the foundation of any of these, but many of them probably go back to 1000 or so, and some certainly earlier. Of the group, at least Vezzano and probably Chiusi were royal. Strumi, maybe Caste! Castagnaio, and Romena were held outright by the Guidi and the Romena, almost certainly as fiscal cessions to counts, though we do not know if the building of the castelli pre-dated such cessions. The bishops owned Marciano and Bibbiena, and parts of Castel Focognano and Montecchio; it is most likely that they had founded the last two and then ceded them to lay families, outright or in .fief, something we know that they were prepared to do in the surviving episcopal share of Castel Focognano. They kept control of Marciano and Bibbiena, however. S. Fiora, the Badia Aretina, held Sama, and it, too, never lost control there; Fronzola belonged to the abbey of Capolona; Banzena as a villa was in the hands of the Aretine canonica in 1020, so the lords of Banzena probably held at least the site of the castelio and perhaps the castello itself from the canons. The only two that seem to have been private lay foundations were Nibbiano and Gello, both held by smallish families. The second set of castelli are those .first documented in the last quarter of the eleventh century, and are in each case probably not founded much earlier than their first reference. They are largely from the Partina area: Gressa (1078), Soci (1079), Ragginopoli (1081), Partina and Liema (1095); but we could also add Papiano (1091), Moggiona (I 107), Tegiano and Lorenzano (1111), Serra and Riosecco (I114).27 In each of these to the list of early Guidi castelli, since it was one of their earliest major centres,

and is a castello et burgo in ASF S. Trinici, 1 Sept. 1115 (a reference I owe to Francesca Bosman), but earlier texts do not mention the castello. The castelli of Bibbiena and Castel Focognano are both first recorded as casale Castello, in the Bibbiena case seventy years before the castrum is documented as such: RC 24 (a.Ioio), 107 (Pasqui 142), 139 for Bibbiena; ACA SF 52- 3, 56, 70, 97 (a.IOII-lO), and, after roz8, 151 (a.IOl9, ed. Pasqui 138), 163- 4 (a.I03I), 191 (a.IOJ.(), 218 (a.1039) for Caste} Focognano; cf. also RC 280 (a.1055) for casale Castello Castagnaio (The Bibbiena identification is circumstantial, the others are certain.) Does this mean that the sense that castelli were a different sort of settlement was not yet generalized in the valley? 27

Earliest citations: RC 423 (Gressa), 43 3 (Soci: AC ii. I6.(), 442 (Ragginopoli), 584 (Partina and Lierna), 689 (Moggiona), 719 (Tegiano: AC iii.159; cf. RC 739, AC iii.I62), 7l3 (Lorenzano), 759 (Serra: AC ili.x68), ASF Passerini, Mar. 1091 (Papiano), S. Trinici, Jan. III4 (Riosecco). There are

Signori and Castelli

295

cases, the castello was founded in an area previously documented as being one of open settlement, and in many cases, despite a wealth of previous documentation in the area (for we now have half a century of documents at our disposal), the names are new. The implications of this I will come back to later. These castelli are mostly lay, the possessions of capitaneal and petty aristocratic families, though the bishop was involved as feudal lord of Soci and Tegiano, probably Gressa, and perhaps others; only Moggiona was founded by a church (the canonica) as a castello designed to remain under ecclesiastical control. Subsequent castelli seem also to have been lay; the number slowly climbs from 1075 on, with jumps in the late eleventh century and the IIIOs, up to the late twelfth century and further, when property lists for the Guidi and Ubertini show them to be controlling a wide range of castelli in places hitherto unmentioned as such (though these castelli are usually in previously documented settlements}. These developments cannot be dealt with systematically here, but, generalizing, one could say that after 1120 or so, a third set of castelli begins, above all associated with what were by then the two most important families in the valley, the Guidi and the Ubertini. 28 As in the Lucchesia, castello-building began with institutional powers (there the bishop, here the fisc and the great churches); only later waves of incastellamento were initiated by private lay families. Fedor Schneider would have seized on this difference, in particular in the Aretine valley, as a proof of his contention that castelli were originally public. But the bishop of Arezzo was not yet count when he built his castelli; he, like his Lucchese counterpart, and like the other Aretine churches, built his fortifications as private centres, as foci of proprietorial powerMarciano, Bibbiena, and Sama were the estate centres of the bishop and of S. Fiora, just as Moriano was for the bishop of Lucca in the early tenth century. (And Sama and Marciano, first referred to in our very earliest texts, may well, for all we know, go back to a similar period.) We should not, then, be surprised other early twelfth-century castelli, above all on the southern fringe of the valley, all apparently lay, but we can say nothing about their background or ongms. 28 Major lists of later castelli are MGH, Dip. Friderid I 462 for the Guidi; RC 1734 for the Ubertini.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century that this early set of references is as it is: it is the socio-political reflection of large landowning in a period when the territorialization of power is coming for the first time to be expressed through the formal control of private institutions rather than the informal control of public ones. 29 Marciano and Bibbiena are important as castelli, at least at first, merely because the curtes of Marciano and Bibbiena are important: landed power . . 1s pnor. The relationship that the successive waves of castelli have to the slow crystallization of the aristocracy is not direct, but is fairly straightforward. Put simply, the capitaneal families tended to base themselves on ecclesiastical castelli, often founded at the beginning of the century, which they held in lease/fief, but had full control over. They then, in some cases (as with the ff. Berardi and ff. Guillelmi), built their own fortifications elsewhere, which often (as in the case of Ragginopoli for the ff. Guillelmi) became their preferred centres. The second wave of foundations corresponds largely to this latter process; it was also, however, a period where smaller lords, like those of Lorenzano, established a position in the new aristocratic hierarchy as well. The third wave represents a period where landed power and castelli have become, at least for the aristocracy, inseparable; all major lay estates henceforth would have fortifications attached. It could be argued that the second period of incastellamento was qualitatively different from the first and third, as one where castelli did represent a real increase in power for their founders: as the foci for widespread piecemeal landowning, and as the justification for the acquisition of signorial rights, which in the case of some of the late eleventh-century castelli were associated with them right from the start, and which were certainly important to their possessors. SQ But the issue of the real importance even of these castelli cannot be separated from their 29 Schneider, Entstehung vcn Burg, e.g. p. 272; cf. above, pp. I 16-17, for

Lucca. (Actually, public powers had a narrow start on the bishop in that area, too: see Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 59, 490 for Aulla in the Lunigiana.) For the slow privatization of power, see, e.g., Vaccari, Territorialita; Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, pp. 189-206; Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. r6r-76, all concenttai:ing on the nonh, where, it must be remembered, private castelli began over a century earlier than in most of Tuscany. 30 Cf. Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 168-76; for the signoria in the Aretino, see Ch. ll .

Signori and Castelli

297 role as economic centres, and it is to this role that we must turn. Many of our second-period centres are in the middle Archiano, the area of our best documentation, and I will base my arguments on them. The area immediately around Partina bad three castelli by 1100, Partina itself, Soci, and Marciano. Widen the circle by a couple of kilometres, and Gressa, Ragginopoli, and Lierna can be added. Of these six, only Marciano can be shown to be early; the other five probably date from between 1050 and 1090. There are some 300 texts for this area in the years IOSD-1200; in them, only Marciano and Soci are mentioned more than a dozen times.31 Indeed, such numbers, small though they are by local standards for all the castelli except Soci, actually over-state the importance of these centres in the documented life of the period; most of them refer to the castelli only as the place of origin of men acting in some public capacity, or as places where charters were written every reference to both Ragginopoli and Gressa is of one or other type. References to property in or around Marciano, Gressa, Ragginopoli, and Lierna is rare or unknown. This is a startling absence in an area as well-documented as this; let us look at some explanations. The first is that the owners/holders of these four castelli fitted into one or more of the categories, which we have explored, of people who were not generous to monasteries. Of this there can be no doubt. We have seen much of the lack of enthusiasm of the ff. Guillelmi/Ubertini for the cession of the lands they had in Monte; there is no reason to expect that they would have been more forthcoming in Ragginopoli. The lords of Gressa certainly were not. Even the bishop, generous both to Prataglia and Camaldoli, usually avoided any cessions in his major Archiano estate centre, Marciano. This pattern is clear, at least. It is not a full answer, however. The ff. Guillelmi owned massively in Monte, but other owners gave lands to the Church there, generously and often, across the eleventh century. Not at Ragginopoli, though. Nor did the latter become any more often cited when the small owners of the Sova valley, where the castello is situated, began to give to Camaldoli in the twelfth century. Ragginopoli does not seem to have had an agricultural 31

See RC iv, index, s.vv. for rough guides.

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

territory, of the kind that is denoted by references to terra qui est posita in casale Monte and the like. (It did have, or obtain, a judicial, districtual territory, but this clearly included the lands of other villages.) One is led to the conclusion that Ragginopoli must have been founded in the territory of some other casale, perhaps indeed that of Monte; the same may well be true of Liema and Gressa. Even Marciano, which is occasionally (as a casale) mentioned as having a defined agricultural territory, probably had a very small one, for it appears rarely enough, despite being contiguous to that of the well-documented Contra.32 So much is certain. But the absence of references goes further. There can have been no independent owners in these four castelli, for it is scarcely credible that there should have been such people in them independent of the major controlling families without our hearing something about it. Had Lierna, say, been a substantial settlement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with other owners, we might expect, even if not charters from them, at least references to their land abutting on that of donors to the Church; but even the chance references to these centres that the texts do give us can universally be attached to members of the families that are known to have controlled them. These castelli, then, were essentially aristocratic residences, like those described by Conti for the eleventh-century Fiorentino, their inhabitants restricted to the families of their owners and their immediate entourage, with the addition, perhaps, of the dependents of the curtis attached to each-although even these may have been few, at least outside the major episcopal estate centre of Marciano, given the incoherence of manorial organization by this time. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that the permanent entourages of these lords were much larger; they doubtless had milites, as did the Banzena in the 1040s or the men of Partina in the I I 6os, but none of these necessarily lived on the spot. The exception is, again, Marciano, which certainly had episcopal milites and clients living there, and perhaps others too, or at any rate did by 1200 or so; but even Marciano was probably until the thirteenth century rather smaller than, say, its immediate as For the agricultural territory of Marciano, see RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 9Z), 35 (AC i.90; Pasqui roz), 1o6, 368 (AC ii. IJJ), 758, 86o. For the districtus of Gressa and Ragginopoli, see 434, 563, 1734; cf. below, Ch. n, n. 11.

Signori and Castelli

299

neighbour Contra. The significance of these centres was political, not demographic; indeed, in a purely demographic sense, they were trivial.33 It is worth recalling at this point that Ragginopoli, Lierna, and Gressa were new place-names, additions to the pre-existing settlement network. But the fact that their early history gives no indication that they had any effect on the (dispersed) settlement pattern at all is in itself a demonstration of the lack of moment of these castelli. It may well be that their appearance could not even be identified archaeologically. As I have noted, a curtis in clausura in 1050 may not have been very different in physical form from a castellum in 1100; if Ragginopoli was in the territory of the casale of Monte, it might actually have been the original curtis of the ff. Guillelmi under a different name, with at best an extra gate-tower.34 Not even the tenurial structure of the estate will have significantly changed. And, once the Ubertini owned a range of castelli, some of them may not have been regularly inhabited at all, apart from by a bailiff and maybe a couple of guards. Partina and Soci were founded as castelli in existing population centres, and are thus apparently different in type from Ragginopoli and the others, the new foundations. But they cannot, in reality, have been all that dissimilar; these two, that is to say, like the others, were simply small additions to a network of continuing dispersed settlement. The castelli of Partina and Soci certainly developed out of curtes situated in the casalia from which they were named. But this, too, as we have just seen, may well have been true of Ragginopoli; the only difference was that the castello of Partina was named after its village, and that of Ragginopoli was not. And Partina and Soci were no more prone to englobe the settlement of the rest of their territories, at least at first . Soci was a relatively small settlement as a casale, and perhaps relatively focused (it had no recorded micro-toponyms), but we can find explicit references to houses surviving outside the walls of the castrum, at least in the eleventh Conti, Formazione i, pp. 49 f., IQ9-I x. For the curtis of Marciano, see RC 31, 9o6 (AC iii.zzo; Pasqui p6), 918, 1043 (AC iii.z8s; Pasqui 353). For milites, see above, n. z.z; below, pp. 324-6. 34 See above, p. zzz. Essential reading for the development from curtis to castellum: Senia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 256-8; cf. Ch. 3, n. 18. 33

300

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

century. In the end, largely perhaps as a result of their strategic positions on the road to the Romagna, the castelli of Partina and Soci did develop as population centres, and may have been coming to replace open settkment on the middle Archiano plain by 1200. But even then, the bulk of the population of the area seems still to have been ~attered across the . hill-slopes above them. Soci may have been incastellated; Monte, Freggina, Contra were not. The population of the Partina area in 1200 was certainly still mostly made up of people living in open, highly dispersed settlements. lncastellamento as a population movement had so far had very little effect on the zone. 35 Outside the Archiano area, we can be less precise. A few early castelli, Bibbiena, Strumi, Sarna, were of evident political and (at least in the case of Bibbiena) demographic importance. As · for the others, it is noticeable that fairly few of those castelli that were visibly founded as new settlements or pelitical centres gained lasting importance anywhere. Serravalle (the best-documented) was one, Poppi (the most spectacular) another; it may be significant that both date from the twelfth century, not the eleventh, and it is certainly relevant that they should . have been associated with really major powers, the bishop and the Guidi.36 The majority of important castelli, however, very evidently derived from pre--existing open settlements, like Caste! Focognano in the eleventh century, or Moggiona (whose castello had twenty-eight familiae by 1187} and Corezzo in the twelfth. The forqter certainly never fully .absorbed its surrounding settlements into it; here, as in the Partit.ta area, the castello was simply an addition to a continuing dispersed settlement pattem.37 The other two are today quite closely concentrated settlements, For Soci, see RC 440, 466. Partina, thanks to its castello, encomp~d ~e territory of Stxta, however, and possibly its population; above, p. 239. 36 For Serravalle, see RC 1264. Poppi is first recorded in uso (RC ro66); it was already an important centre by 1200, and in th.e thirteenth century the Guidi began to build most of _its surviving monumental buildings. 37 For Caste! Focognano, see ACA SF 25 (a.994, ed. Pasqui 78), 70 (a.IOI2), m (a. toio), 154 (a.IOJO), 218 (a.I039)-the other setdements, such as Cerreto and Callita; still exist (see Map 8). The castello had sixty 'men'--adults?-in 1385 (Pasqui 859). For Moggiona, see ACA Cap. 13 (c._84o; ed. Pasqui 30), ACA Cap. 129, RC 6o8 (AC iii.98; Pasqui 286), 689 (AC iii.140; Pasqui 298), · 1247. Corezzo: casalt in eleventh. and early twelfth centuries (RC iv, index, s.v.); castello by RC I734 (a.1223 ). 3o

Signori and Castelli

301

as is indeed Castel Focognano, amid its scatter of outlying houses; but the concentration is not a product of the period we are looking at. When it derives from we shall see later (pp. 34o-1). We have only one set of texts that describe a castello in any detail, those of 1 11 1-12 for castello Rio Zoparelli quod vocatur Lcrentiano, Lorenzano in the far south of the valley. But they are highly illuminating. They distinguish between the castello et curte in general and, in particular, the corona . . . castelli sicut circumdatum est per fossas et muros cum casis et ecclesia S. Nicholai que in eo sunt, i.e. solumodo sumitatem et pinnam ipsius castelli from the church upwards. This castello was not small; it looks as if one could be in some sense inside it but outside its main fortifications (themselves inhabited), perhaps in what would elsewhere be called a borgo; it was this outer section that seems to have corresponded to the old casalefcurte of the eleventh century. But Lorenzano did not absorb the dependent population of its curtis into the castello. Our texts list thirty-nine tenures dependent on the estate; only one is attached to Lorenzano itself, the others spreading for kilometres in every direction. The curtis must have remained an administrative centre, rather than a major population focus. It is unlikely, then, that the casis of the inner castello represent a large number of inhabitants either. Indeed, as a population centre, it would not have any lasting success. It is significant that it is Lorenzano's older, probably pre-castral church, S. Vitale iuxta Arnum, that is the only one listed in the papal tax-lists of the late thirteenth century; S. Niccolo in the castello has already gone. The place today has barely a dozen inhabitants. Lorenzano, like Ragginopoli, had a negligible effect on the landscape. ss By 1200, most of the major centres of the Casentino had castelli. Probably all the political centres of the valley, with the significant exceptions of Camaldoli and Prataglia themselves, were fortified; most of the major demographic centres were, too, though there was certainly a whole range of exceptions here, such as Monte and Freggina on the Archiano, Sparena and Bucena on the Sova, Cetica and Omina elsewhere. Nevertheless, although settlement concentration continued into the late Middle ss For the castello, see RC 723- 4., 727 (AC ill. 16o), 728, 749 (AC ili.164), 750. For S. Vitale, see 772, 952 (AC ili.242); Rat. Dec. 2219. Cf. Repetti, Dizumario del/a Toscana ii, p. 807.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

Ages, so few of the significant settlements of the early eleventh century have ceased to exist today in some form that we· must conclude that the impact of incastellamento did not produce any settlement break. (The one clear exception, Serravalle, which absorbed the population from the isolated and marginal settlement of Atocia, is very late 1188-and is anomalous for other reasons: see p. 320.) Even the castelli that there were did not absorb into them the population of the settlements in which they were built. The Casentino had its share of lords; but these lords, even if they had wished to put everyone into castelli along the lines of the dramatic changes produced by incastellamento in much of south-central Italy, evidently failed to do so. I have discussed elsewhere the issue of what incastellamento is, and have distinguished between castelli as fortifications, centres of judicial territories, and population centres. As we shall see (p. 315), there were in the Casentino a few judicial territories not ascribed to castelli, and it is very likely that there were some castelli without territories, but we can consider the first two together, as socio-political phenomena, as opposed to those reflecting socio-economic relationships. The strict demographic importance of castelli in the pre-thirteenth-century Casentino was dearly small. Of course, they had some. Soci is a good example, an important population centre by uso; significantly, it had a market. It may well be that the major economic role of castelli in the Casentino would, in the end, be commercial, like the great fortified borghi of central Tuscany, S. Gimignano or Castelfiorentino or Montecatini. 1-Jow far, however, were castelli centres of agricultural reorganization? We are used to this role for castelli, thanks to Toubert's work on Lazio, and Settia has shown that even in the north-although the patterns vary very much across quite short time-spans-castelli could be major economic centres, expressed above all by the at least temporary aggregation of populations.39 In the Casentino, the economic importance of incastellamento even in these terms has to be recognized as slight. Castelli in the Aretine valley were in most cases merely fortifications of previous estate centres, curtes. Their economic importance derived from this. With few Toubert, Latium, pp. 321- 38; Wickham, Il problema tklfincastellamento; Settia, CasteUi e villaggi, pp. 258~8, 3II- IS. For S. Gimignano, see Fiumi, San Gimignano, pp. 28- n 1. 39

Signori and Castelli

303

exceptions, castelli which had not been curtes were insignificant. But even those that had a history of being an estate centre did not gain greater economic importance by getting fortifications. People did not inhabit most of the castelli of the valley in the eleventh or twelfth centuries to any significant extent, certainly not so as to alter the balance of settlement patterns at all; this demographic importance is a good guide to the economic role of the castelli concerned. And the issue has a political significance as well. Incastellamento in its economic sense, the concentration of settlement, is most clearly visible in south-central Italy, south of, say, Siena. But, in those regions where it is most evident, it is equally clear that the significance of such concentration is not just economic. Concentrated settlements denoted political control. This is very clear in those few areas totally controlled by single owners, who could coerce their tenants into the new castelli; but even outside such areas, the building of a castello represented a claim for control, which was crystallized when people began to move into it. The content of such control varied, covering now the strengthening of links of patronage and clientele, now the establishment of signorial rights over non-tenants, now the development of landlordly power over tenants; we can fmd all three in most areas. The rhetoric of power expressed in such settlement shifts can certainly be seen further north; Settia has discussed it for the Po plain. 40 In the Casentino, however, we do not get any such shifts at all. I think this is politically important; that is to say, the demographic insignificance of most castelli, as late as 1200, tells us about political power as well. The Ubertini never became full signori in Monte; by the same token, their castello at Ragginopoli remained a minor population centre. This pattern, extended across the Casentino, gives a further underlining to my contention that aristocratic control in the valley was relatively weak. If we knew more about castelli in the valley, or indeed elsewhere if, that is to say, we had a representative sample of Wickham, 11 problema delfincastellamtttto, esp. pp. 64-6; Settia, CasteUi e villaggi, pp. 331-6. A classic instance of the rhetoric of power in twelfth-century Aquitaine is described in Clemens, 'Duras'. One could not, however, look much further away for parallels; north European castles had a very different relationship to settlement. 40

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

archaeological studies (something that is no longer inconceivable, even if it is still a long way off}-we would find that the amount of micro-regional variation we had to contend with would be so great as to threaten any models as simple as this. Indeed, even documentary analysis can identify exceptions easily enough, as we have seen. It does, however, seem to me that in Italy, other things being equal, where a prevalently dispersed settlement pattern has privately controlled castelli added to it, the effect of the castelli on that pattern varies according to the local power of the individual landowners concerned. In Tuscany, which had a very roughly consistent political and social structute, comprising, that is to say, a set of areas in which one can make roughly the same assumptions about how power was understood and practised, I would certainly regard such a statement as potentially predictive.41 Very little of the middle and lower Casentino visibly went over to concentrated settlement before I 200; and when. in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the castelli of the valley did become real settlement centres, the social conten was quite different, as we shall see (pp. 339-40). One might well expect, however, a greater demographic importance for the eleventh- and twelfth-century Guidi castelli of the upper valley, as the family gradually extended its power; the same must be true elsewhere in the Aretino, and in many parts of the FiorentinofFiesolano, where aristocrats were visibly stronger. (By contrast, in the Lucca plain, settlement, castelli or no, remained totally dispersed. )4 2 This is something that only future historical and archaeological research will establish. But it seems to me useful as a basic indicator, if no more, of the extent of aristocratic local power, and an issue worth pursuing elsewhere. What we are left with when analysing the castelli of the Casentino is symbolism. A rhetoric of local political power is 41

This is, however, a point where the Casentino no longer serves as a parallel fot the Garfagnana; in areas like the latter, or the Chianti hills, where open settlements were already relatively concentrated (above, J>P· n-s). the model does not work. lt would also have to be adjusted considerably to fit other regions, such as Lombardy or Lazio. 42 Francovich. Castelli del contado .fiorentino, is the basic regional starting point; see Wickham, 'Settlement Problems', for Lucca. In the Monte Amiata region in the far south of Tuscanr., the replacement of' a dispersed settlement pattern by a network of large fortified centres conversely indicates strong local aristocratic hegemony: see Wickham, 'Paesaggi sepolti'.

Signori and Castelli

305

symbolic, of course. But the symbolism of these castelli was, almost exclusively, in the realm of claims for political status, in the developing arena of military aristocratic identity, rather than in that of control over others. Castelli brought a place in the new military aristocracy, a focus for family identity. They did, of course, also bring political and economic power of another type, in the form of signorial rights, in the twelfth century, as we shall see in the next chapter, but in the Casentino this power was not deeply rooted and, indeed, the continuing unimportance of castelli as population centres shows it. The newly developing link between castelli and aristocratic status was, then, above all a cultural phenomenon, and is best analysed in that context. It is therefore interesting that incastellamento was a later process in the Casentino than it was in the areas closer to Arezzo. Only the greatest families, together with the Church, put up castelli in our valley before 1040, at a time when the capitanei of the lands around the city were already based on them. The ff. Guillelmi/Ubertini, in particular, were later in focusing their position around castelli than almost any other family at their social level. One could, that is to say, even see castelli as a cultural model coming from the city; if so, probably originating from the bishop and his immediate entourage, themselves the builders of so many of the earliest fortifications.43 I have emphasized the urban orientation of the aristocracy already. But this pattern warns us, once again, against making any assumptions about the localization of aristocratic power. The crystallization represented by incastellamento did not represent a decentralization of power into autonomous· signorial territories, any more than it did in the Lucchesia (pp. 11 5- 32). Local identity and regional/urban orientation were not inconsistent; they reinforced each other. Incastellamento was not yet, or ever, essential for local power in the Casentino. Most strikingly, it was not pursued by Camaldoli. The hermitage was certainly ready enough to receive Soci and Partina in bits, and many other centres outside the valley, most notably Anghiari; but, apart from this, it seems to For capitanei and castelli, see Delumeau, ' Equilibri di potere', pp. 1oo-4, and pers. comm. Cf. Duby, Hommes et structures, pp. 299-308 for the diJfusion of cultural models; Settia, 'Torri e case forti', for a close, in some ways identical, later analogy. 48

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

have been remarkably uninterested in castelli for their own sake, rather than just as constructions that happened to have been added to the estate centres it was obtaining. Camaldoli pursued this non-military policy into later centuries; it did not even enfeoff land away to milites. It is instructive to note that this practice worked; Camaldoli kept its lands with less trouble than many more 'feudal', more politically active monasteries. Its spiritual status may have helped it in this; equally, the Casentino may, despite its own troubles, have been a less threatening place than much of twelfth- and thirteenth-century ltaly.44 But the ability of monasteries to avoid the rhetoric of incastellamento altogether must have been made possible above all by the relative economic and political unimportance of most of the castelli of the valley. Those that came into monastic hands were enough for their needs. Nevertheless, if these castelli did not have some political meaning, then they would have had no point at all. The political and military symbolism they carried was important for what was crystallizing into the lay aristocracy. And, as the structures of power changed, they carried an increasing load: they were the natural foci for the territorialization and signorialization that can be seen in the twelfth-century valley, and they helped it to expand. The feudal and signorial veneer that spread across the Casentino after 1100 was largely associated with castelli. In the final chapter, we must look at what these new political patterns really meant. For Camaldoli's survival, seejones, 'Camaldoli'; Cherubini, 'Aspetti della proprieta', pp. Io-JZ. Contrast the sad fate of S. Vincenzo al Voltumo, in the south, which tried a similar non-military strategy: Wickham, 11 problema dell' incastellamento, pp. 41- 5. But Camaldoli did not have to deal with the Normans. 44

II

Myth and Reality of Feudalism in the Countryside 105o-1200

The two proceeding chapters focused on two eleventh-century developments whose existence is well known: the slow expansion of Church landowning and the slow crystallization of the petty aristocracy. But my delineation of these two developments has been intended to show that they are not quite what they are often assumed to be. Church landowning expanded through the interplay of local oppositions inside villages, as a result of the way these oppositions balanced out; it ceased when these balances changed. The aristocracy can indeed be said to be defined more clearly in the early twelfth century than in the early eleventh, with their new castelli and more explicit military role, but their landowning and even their local power were not necessarily more extensive than they had been. Neither development, that is to say, had as much effect on local power relationships as might be expected. Such relationships however, cannot be disentangled from the problem of the change in the nature of public power itself in this period, and thus from the issues of feudalism and the signoria- that is to say, the growth of private political patterns. The privatization of political power not only had its local equivalent in valley politics, but, more generally, had a direct bearing on a problem of considerable importance for this study: the reasons for the survival of peasant landowners across the ocean of political change in the centuries after 1000. Such owners survived the Middle Ages in much of Tuscany, and elsewhere, but in very varying degrees: almost totally in the Garfagnana, as we have seen; barely at all around Florence or Siena. In areas relatively far from cities, peasant owners in

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general survived better. 1 Their persistence there, however, should not be taken as obvious and self-explanatory; there were threats in the mountains too. The varying context of their persistence is thus itself a good guide to the nature of local social structures. In the Casentino, the issue can best be understood through an analysis of the signoria. I shall be counterposing the terms 'feudal' and 'signorial' in what follows in a technical sense, as I did in my discussion of the Garfagnana. This follows current Italian usage, by which 'feudal' characterizes the private, military-orientated links of dependence, typically expressed through vassalage and the fief, that reinforced and partially replaced the public (originally Lombard-Carolingian) network of official and military responsibility; and 'signorial' is used to denote the local political control that became possible as public power, above all over justice, devolved more ancl more formally to private lordship (see above, pp. 105- 8). The two cannot easily be separated in practice, for they are two aspects of the one process, but they are not found developing at the same speed, and can usefully be kept analytically distinct. ' Feudalization' , in particular, can often be merely terminological, as fideles become vassi, and leases become feuda held on the same terms. It does not necessarily always even appear at this level; feudal terms were relatively rare in many parts of Tuscany. But even when only present at the level of terminology, words like feu dum point to one of the major developments of tenth- to thirteenth-century Italy, the tendency of all public power to become at least partially privatized, whether through allodial or feudal cessions, or, indeed, as was often the case, in contexts where there were no such cessions at all. The appearance of feudal terminology is For late medieval peasant landowners in Tweany, see, for example, Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 73- 8, 278-89, 467- soo; Herlihy, 'Santa Maria lmpruneta', pp. 256-9, 275 (a dramatic drop outside Florence, IJOQ-1427); Pinto, Toscana, pp. 157-61, 207-23 and references cited. For the Floi:entine contado in the sixteenth century, the figures in Conri, Formaz ione iii.2, pp. 395- 411, give an overall picture; 'peasant' property owning in the Casentino, at .59.3% of total property (p. 407) was among the highest anywhere in the contado; the lowest percentages were around Florence and in the northern Chianti. But the 'contadini' of these figures cannot be understood simply as cultivators; they included everyone, rich or poor, who did. not have Florenrine citizenship (ibid., p. IJ). 1

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itself very often only a cultural change; but it represents the completion, or near-completion, of a real shift in the nature of political power. 2 In this context, let us start by looking briefly at the changing power of the bishop of Arezzo as the eleventh century moved into the twelfth. We have already seen (pp. 184-90) how strong the bishop was in the eleventh-century Aretino. He already controlled the county in practice by 1000, and from 1052 called himself episcopus et comes. He continued to be strong into the next century; even though he lost control of the city of Arezzo to the urban commune by the 1150s, the bishop remained a considerable power in city and county alike well into the thirteenth century.a In the eleventh century, this power was formal; it was represented, even before 1052, by episcopal control over the procedures of justice, above all in the public lawcourt, the placitum. This formality, however, came to break down. Bishops (like counts elsewhere) were only powerful where they had other resources to back up their institutional position, and in Arezzo these resources, principally tithe and episcopal landowning, were never lost. As time went on, however, it was the bishop's control over these resources, and the personal hegemony that resulted, that came to be more important than his public powers. The absence of any institutional rival to the bishop of Arezzo was certainly extremely important, for it was the direct cause of the fact that he had no need to grant away his resources to his supporters on any scale, unlike his colleague in Lucca; Aretine bishops in the twelfth century were still very powerful and rich, in most parts of their diocese, in a way that Lucchese bishops had not been since 950, or even earlier (above, pp. 85-9). This power was lessened neither by monastic expansion nor by the rise of the capitaneal aristocracy. But the public power-structures that seemed to delineate episcopal power as late as 1052 had begun to break up. Delumeau has shown how the Aretine placita of the eleventh century began to be replaced by informal compromises, arbitrations, and cessions of rights in front of boni 2

Cf. the works ofGiovanni Tabacco, esp. 'Allodialiti del potere', pp. 6osIS; 'Fief et seigneurie', pp. 212- 17. 3 See Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', pp. 571- 85; id., 'Commune d' Arezzo', now the basic account of the origin of the commune of Arezzo; Lazzeri, Guglielmino Umbertini.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

homines. The bishop himself, after the I070S, came to transfer his concern for justice froin the public tribunals (not themselves necessarily by then very effective) to these informal definitiones, over which he increasingly presided himself; when this transference took place, Aretine placita abruptly stopped, for they were no longer relevant even to the person whose power they represented. But episcopal presidency over arbitration derived its meaning rather more from the authority of the bishop as the greatest territorial lord than it did from his public role as count. Compromise could still be backed up by the comital militia, but what this latter increasingly explicitly meant was the bishop's own armed men, his fideles, men with private links to him. 4 It is in this way that private relationships all over Italy infiltrated and sometimes replaced public ones, in a long-lasting process culminating in the twelfth century; it is indeed only in the twelfth century that explicitly feudal relationships are at all common in most of the north Italian and Tuscan countryside. The process is relatively well documented, and has been widely discussed. 5 Here, only two points need to be stressed. First, that 'feudalization' did not necessarily mean that episcopal power lessened. The bishop of Luni, nearly as dominant in his diocese as his Aretine counterpart, already operated in an entirely privatized, largely feudal, framework of power relationships well before 1100 (c£ p. 113). If public power was always in reality based very largely on local territorial power and private links of dependence, then if the bishop of Arezzo kept hold of these, he could dominate a 'feudal' order as easily as he could a 'Carolingian' one. The second point follows therefrom: even the nature of power, based as it always was on local relationships, did not necessarily in all respects change. The only real political changes at the local level were in the arena of control over justice, the establishment of signorial rights. All over Italy, in fact, the establishment of private power was less a matter of feudo-vassalic or other military relationships than of the signoria. The final demise of the public placitum at the end ·of the eleventh 4

See Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', passim; see pp. 581- 4 for temporary episcopal weakness in the late eleventh century, and pp. 6or- s for informal setdements. 5 See Ch. 4, nn. 2 , 20, 2.1.

Feudalism in the Countryside,

105o-1200

3I I

century marked an important step towards the formalization of proprietorial and, increasingly, territorialfdistrictual justice, focused on the 'new' aristocratic families and their castelli. It is in this arena that the holders of local power can be increasingly identified. In such an arena, the processes of political action are more explicit, too; as a result, we can analyse them far more accurately in the twelfth century than we could in the more public political world of the eleventh. This explicitness is above all in the language of power, which was at once more feudal and more signorial; as I have noted, we cannot easily separate the elements out, and in what follows I shall not always attempt to. Although the two concepts are not the same, they both express developmental processes that are inextricably linked. If we look at twelfth-century documents from the Casentino, it is immediately visible how much more 'feudal' their terminology is than it had been in the eleventh. In the eleventh century, we do find references to episcopal beneficia, granted to fideles, in theory revocable but sometimes with difficulty, and once described as in perpetuo iure-in IOII, too, well before Conrad ll's Constitutio de feudis stabilized the legal position of benefices. The alienable leases that the bishops issued to members of all the strata of free owners, from peasants to aristocrats (pp. 284-5) are, however, far more widely attested; these were real leases, for rent, even if, as is likely, they were available above all to episcopalfideles. These were themselves probably in practice the model for benefices, much as in Lucca. 6 How the relationship of fidelitas actually worked in this period is far from clear. We have a rare example of a private charter for it in 1052, a document preserved at Camaldoli, between Giovanni presbiter di Giovanni and Guido di Rofrido; it is not precisely located, but Guido appears as a bonus homo in a Bibbiena court case in 1041, and the scribe is local, so the context must be Casentinese. Giovanni promises Guido, for a 20s. counter-gift (launegild), to be his fidelis, to obey and advise him, not to betray him for money or make judicial claims against his entourage, and to help him keep his property. There is no land involved, or 6 For perpetual benefice, see RC 27 (Pasqui 99). Revocability is clear in ACA SF 366 (a.1076; ed. Pasqui 222). Other references include RC 12 (AC i. 79; Pasqui 92), 384 (AC ii.141), ACA SF 137 (a.1o28; ed. Pasqui 130). Cf. above, pp. 97-8, for Lucca.

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

military service; Giovanni is Guido's client rather than his vassal. Guido was not in any sense a prominent local figure; he was probably on the same sort of level as Rodolfo di Guido and his colleagues (above, pp. 26o-2). It is likely, none the. less, that clientelar relationships of the kind I have discussed in the last two chapters, between the ff. Guillelmi, or even the monasteries, and their dependants, were rather like this; it is only the fact that it was recorded in a document that makes this relationship unusual. It goes a long way to uphold the idea of the informality of the patterns of eleventh-century political support. 7 Fideles could and did get land, however, above all from the bishop. And, from the xo8os on, such land is more and more often calledfeudum. Feudal terminology slowly came to permeate all the relationships expr~sed in our documents. The episcopal lease of Sod to the ff. Feralmi is called a livello up to 1090, but a feudum by uo6 and thereafter. By II42, peasant leases could be called feuda. In 1 167 a feudum of 8 denarii held from Prataglia seems just to be a loan of money. Conversely, allodium comes in for the frrst time as a term for outright possession-although when we find such possession glossed, in a 1094 charter for S. Fiora, as inrevocabile feodum, we must recognize that the terminology was stillfairly weakly rooted. These changes are, as I said, only semantic. It is indeed uncertain that any feuda were purely or even largely military tenures in the Casentino in the twelfth century. 8 But the cultural shift that is represented in the appearance of these words is one towards the greater formalization of private relationships, well beyond the simple terms of Giovanni and Guido's agreement of 1052. Social attitudes to dependence and local power were changing. This is visible above all in the increasing clarity of the nature of episcopal power in the bishop's own castelli. We do not know how far his control over them had ever resulted from his public (comital) position rather than from his private landowning; 7

RC 265; for Guido as witness, see 202. Monasteries have clientes in 248 (a. 1048; AC ii.67), but jideles in 331 (a. ro6s; AC ii.ro8). 8 For Soci, see RC 559 (AC iii-71), 56o, 567 (AC iii.77), 682 (AC iii.t38; Pasqui 297), 791 (AC iii. 178; Pasqui 3 IZ). For the first peasant feudum, see 994; cf. jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 169 tf., and below, n. 32· For a loan as feudum, see RC u6o. For allodium, see first in 793 (a. I I 17; Pasqui 3 t 3); but cf. the perpetual benefice in n. 6, and the inrevocabile feodum in ACA SF 436.

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313

in the eleventh century, in fact, we can say nothing about this control at all, for the simple reason that it was never granted away. In the twelfth century, however, more and more of its elements became explicit, as such control became seen less and less as a bloc of authority, and more and more as a collection of separable and alienable political, military and judicial rights. Whatever their various origins, these by I IOO were resolving themselves more and more dearly onto the centres of the bishop's proprietorial power, either traditional ones like the castelli of Marciano and Bibbiena, or newer ones like the recently built bridge over the Arno at Arcena. Marciano is the best example of this. It was a major episcopal proprietorial centre throughout the eleventh century; its principal church, S. Donato, was, significantly, dedicated to the same saint as the cathedral itself. Indeed, it remained such a centre throughout the following century, and beyond. But the nest of signorial powers associated with it consisted, increasingly, of differentiated rights and obligations. In I 110, Bishop Gregorio released Camaldoli from the guagite (public guard-duty obligations, or their monetary equivalent) owed by the hermitage at Marciano, and the albergaria and usum (hospitality obligations and customary dues) from certain other monastic lands. Rather less like straightforward pious gifts were the next episcopal cessions there, however. In I 124 and 1130, Bishops Guido and Buiano ceded to Prataglia two sets of rights that together constituted virtual total control in the castello: the church, the estate, the castle tower, and half the money owed to the castellan by people entering it, in return requiring the abbot to defend it against enemies. Episcopal rights were not extinguished by this; the ius ospitandi inside the castello was, Guido said, inalienable, and he reserved it; at most, as Buiano put it, the abbot was quasi secundus post eum there. Buiano's cession was, it seems, in return for a loan of £6o-the bishops, that is to say, were forced to these procedures by severe financial difficulties. Furthermore, as soon as they could, they got Marciano back, getting Prataglia in 1147 to exchange most of it for the vescontadum et quardiam of the out-of-the-way castello of Montefatucchio. But the piecemeal nature of these cessions is clear; indeed, Prataglia kept control of the castle tower until after the I x6os. Equally evident is the ambiguous position of Marciano. The castello had long

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The Casentino in the Eleventh Century

been episcopal, well before the bishop came to be count; but it was explicidy as count that Buiano ceded his package of rights, summarized as the custodiam turris . . . et vicecomitatum et castaldionatum, the responsibilities of the abbot as castellan and viscount and estate manager, public and private together. It is clear that the comital power of the bishop has meant, quite simply, that the public obligations due by others to him as count have, as in the case of Camaldoli's guagite, resolved themselves direcdy on a private episcopal castello; the old private powers and the new public ones in practice had totally fused, even if they could still be differentiated conceptually, and despite the fact that as a set of powers they could be broken up. 9 Inside this shifting framework, powers over justice altered rather more. Not all local justice had ever been totally under the control of public powers, of course. Every major ecclesiastical estate had long had its immunity; early eleventh-century monastic leases regularly assume monastic control of small-scale justice. In the case of S. Fiora, this was already focused on the castello at Sama by the late tenth century: the monks penally enslaved a certain Lupolo there for theft, as he could not pay compensation, and Lupolo's descendants were still S. Fiora's slaves a century later. Strumi's judicial role seems to be expressed in a charter of 1056, in which Bonatto di Teudicci pledges his property to the monastery in return for 20s., on condition that he does not again commit adultery, or commit theft, arson, or homicide: a sort of suspended sentence.lO (This last requirement is remarkable, and may indicate the growing importance of such proprietorial jurisdictions, but need not show that Strumi actually had powers over homicide still less that Bonatto had already committed 9 See RC 706 (AC iii. IS3; Pasqui 3oo-cf RC 793 (Pasqui 313) for Arcena,

with Fatucchi, 'Strade romane nel Casentino', pp. 256 f.), Sso (AC ili.zos; Pasqui 319), 9o6 (AC iii.220; Pasqui 326), 1043 (AC iii.285; Pasqui 353). For Prataglia keeping the castle tower, see II93· For guagite (=guait4) and other terms, see Vaccari, Territorialita, pp. Ioo-4; Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. I ss61. Usus, due from Camaldoli up to IIIO, might have been a new exaction; it certainly was for Moggiona (cf. p. 322). But in this case it is unlikely; dues would always have been due to the bishop as count. Note that none of these texts use specifically feudal terminology. lO For Lupolo, see ACA SF 455 (ed. Pasqui 293, who dates it c.uoo; c.xo8o is better, using Pasqui 240 as a guide), cf. SF 73 (a. tOIJ). For Bonatto, see ACA Strumi, June 1056.

Feudalism in the Countryside, 105o-12oo

315

it.) In the late eleventh century, however, private justice was clearly extended in a signorial direction, as castelli begin to appear with districtus, judicial territories, under the control of the 'new' aristocracy. What this expressed in this period is far from clear; albergariis and usibus are associated with Soci in II23, but the judicial rights involved may not have at first been much greater than they had been under older proprietorial jurisdictions. Details only begin to be recorded in the thirteenth century, in a rather different socio-political context; they certainly could include high justice in some cases by then. The major change at the start may simply have been the fact that the districtus of castelli was or became territorial, rather than remaining restricted to the scattered lands of a single proprietor. A text of 1091 refers to the districtual boundaries of Ragginopoli and Bibbiena and, it seems, Candolesi; thereafter, spread over the next century, districtus is referred to for Moggiona, Partina, Soci, Frassineta, Omina, Corezzo, and Serravalle.ll Candolesi, Omina, and Frassineta were not castelli: the territorialiZation of the Casentino not only did not require heavily populated castelli (above, pp. 297-302), but castelli themselves could be dispensed with. None the less, private justice, generally in the hands of the holders of castelli, did slowly come to cover the whole valley, not just the great estates of the Church. By the fourteenth century, the valley came to be defined simply as a congeries of judicial territories. 'L'espace est clos.'12 For Soci, see RC 842 (AC iii.199). For thirteenth-century signorial rights in Camaldoli, see Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 169 f for a list. They included jurisdiction over homicide: Pasqui 473 (a.I2I6), p. 125. For general details, see Vaccari, Terrilorialita, pp. 149-53· Cf. Keller, Adelsherrschaft, pp. 161 ff., for the extension of proprietorial jurisdiction to whole territories in Lombardy, a few decades before our first references in the Casentino. For dlstrictus, see RC 563 for Ragginopoli, etc. (cf. 1734. a.1223), 586 for Monte (Ragginopoli again? See p. 298), 6o8 (AC iii.98, Pasqui 286) for Moggiona, 842 for Soci, 986 (AC iii.ZS4) for Partina (cf 1112, AC iii.307), 1193 for Frassineta, 1250 for Omina, 136o for Serravalle, ASF Capitoli xxiv, f. 197b (a.ll87) for Frassineta and Corezzo. Frassineta is a villa at the time of the ftrst reference to it as a signorial centre, but a castello by r243 (RC 2276). 12 Quotation from Touben, Latium, p. 338. The agreements marking Florence's fourteenth-century absorption of the communes of the upper valley show the network of signorial territories most dearly: Reg. Cap. vi. 6, r 3, 6290, viii. I, ix. 88-99. 11

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The appearance of such signorie around I 100 coincides in date with the same developments in the Lucchesia (above, pp. I Is~ 20), and is due, in general, to the same causes: the final breakdown-late by Italian standards, in both cases-of the public framework of the local (in practice, diocesan) state. In the Casentino, however, the devolution of signorial rights was more explicit than in much of the Lucchesia; signorial territories were more identifiable, right from the start, much as they appear in studies of Lombardy or Piemonte. A major reason for this difference must have been the dominance of the bishop of Arezzo as a public as well as a private figure, and the greater clarity of the political structure of the Aretino that resulted; when the political framework of the diocese fragmented, it could do so in more clearly defmed blocs. But what effect did the appearance of signorie really have, and at whose expense were they formed? The force of signorial rights in everyday life varied very greatly from place to place. They do not appear very often at all in the twelfth-century Camaldoli documents for the Casentino; I have already cited every one I have seen. Even if we were to add every reference to castelli to these explicit citations, we would still have only a few dozen to add to the handful. This is in strong contrast to the heavy weight given to feudal and signorial rights in the Anghiari documents that are also found in the Camaldoli register, not to speak of parts of the Po plain. We saw in the Garfagnana that sharp variations in the degree of signorialization could occur across relatively short distances; the same was certainly true of the Aretino. It is likely also that, as in the case of the Garfagnana Lunense, the upper valley of the Casentino, an isolated part of the relatively politically incoherent diocese of Fiesole, was rather more under the control of territorial powers based on signorie above all in the areas dominated by the Guidi, whose signorial interests are well documented. Even in the upper Casentino, however, small landowners continued to exist; Guidi expansion was at the expense far more of public powers than of private landowning, as we shall see. In the middle and lower valleys, the Camaldoli documents are clear: the major concern of charter-makers across the century was the alienation or leasing of parcels of land; signorial rights were of occasional interest only. And, although Camaldoli could use the judicial powers that it picked up, the

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revenues it received from its signorial rights are referred to far less often than its rents, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alike; even though the former cannot be exactly quantified, they certainly received far less attention than the latter. The Lorenzano estate surveys of I 111- 12, although the estate was based on a castello, make no reference to any form of signorial renders, either.l3 The Casentino Aretino, despite its districtual territories, thus seems after all to have been in a situation analogous to that in the Garfagnana Lucchese, where signorial rights tended to be fairly restricted; in both cases rents from landowning dominate our documentation. What effect signorial rights had on local society could not be established in the Garfagnana, as there was not enough evidence. In the Casentino there is rather more; I will draw conclusions from it later in this chapter (pp. no-s). But it is worth emphasizing for now that nowhere in the valley, whatever signorial rights there were, seems to have experienced a breakdown of small-scale landowning. The extension of districtus was of course, in a formal sense, at the expense of the count of Arezzo, that is to say the bishop: the coherence of the Aretino as a territorial unit was systematically undermined by the appearance of such private jurisdictions. We can see something of this in twelfth-century legal disputes from the Casentino. Even in the eleventh century, disputes did not involve the bishop all that often, it is true, but in the twelfth he cannot be seen at all: in this part of the Aretino, cases came to be totally under the control of local boni homines and small castello-based notables. On the other hand, Prataglia still thought it worthwhile to appeal to the bishop in the 116os when she was under attack from the local aristocracy (below, pp. 324-7), and many of the strongholds of the valley, most notably Marciano for Camaldoli, see the implications ofJones, 'Camaldoli'. For Lorenzano surveys, see RC 724. 750. for Anghiari, see RC 666 (AC iii.u6), 672 (AC iii.133), 673, 997, 1041, ro6g, 1094- 5, 1146. The Guidi signoria has not been studied, but may have been much like that in the monastic territory of Trivio (Cherubini, Comunita delr Appennino, pp. 81- 1 J 4). There was doubtless nowhere in Tuscany--or Italy?- where 'seigneurie banale' would actually predominate over 'seigneurie domaniale' as a proportion of renders, as Duby has claimed for the French lands: Duby, Region maconnaise, pp. 254--61; id., Rural Economy, pp. 224- 31; Bonnassie, Catalogne, pp. 575--610. 13

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and Bibbiena. remained under direct episcopal control.14 The continuance of the effective rural hegemony of the bishops was not lessened by their loss of direct control over justice and local military obligations. And one basic resource was never given up: tithe. We saw in the chapters on the Garfagnana how the bishop of Lucca surrendered most of his control over tithe in the tenth century, which subsequently became a major element in the power of aristocrats. The bishop of Arezzo, with his more advantageous political position, did not have to be anything like as generous; tithe was not an element in the signorie of any of the capitanei that occupied the Amo valley from Arezzo up to the Casentino. In fact, tithe · rights are rarely evidenced in our documents at all, although this relative absence is obscured by the common local habit of granting tenths (decimae, decimationes) of the produce of given estates to monasteries. Bishop Tedaldo granted Prataglia immunity from tithe on all its property in 1030; Camaldoli may not have had such a full immunity so early, but it did have rights to tithe elsewhere: the commercial tithes from the city of Arezzo in 1033, and a percentage of all the tithes raised in the pievi of Partina, Bibbiena, and Buiano by 106o. This was still exacted in the thirteenth century, although the pievani of the time were unwilling to pay it; even when reduced by compromise, the total amount due, some 2,000 kg of grain, was still substantial.1 5 But these cessions were small-scale. For eleventh century formal disputes, see RC 27 ( Pasqui 99), 202, 433 (AC ii.164; Pasqui 233), ACA Cap. 135 (a.xo46; ed. Pasqui 169, Manaresi 373), SF 350 ( a.1073; ed. Pasqui 209), 376 (a.1079; ed. Manaresi 454), mostly held in Arezzo; conttast the valley dispute setdements cited in Ch. 7, n. «· For the twelfth century, see RC 689 (AC ili.140; Pasqui 298), 847, 1027, to62, 1o67, 1084, 1118-19, 1220, 1270, 13 to, 1341-2. For Prataglia's appeal to the bishop, see II93· Cf. Delumeau, 'Exercice de la justice', pp. 6o1- 5, for context. The only documented dispute resolved in a signorial court in the twelfth century is ASF S. Trinita, May 1152 for the curia of the Guidi in Poppi. 15 For tenths of produce, see RC 12 (AC i.79; Pasqui 92), 270 (AC ii.75; Pasqui 178), 331 (AC ii.Io8), 384 (AC ii.141), ASF S. Trinit3, Mar. 1029 (ed. Lami, Dt/iciae eruditorum vii. 8, pp. 327-9), Sept. 1073- For partial tithe immunities and cessions, see RC 86 (ACli.9; Pasqui 127), 109 (ACii. 18; Pasqui 143), 124 (ACii.23; Pasqui 153), t66 (ACii.)2; Pasqui I 56), 682 (AClii.IJ8; Pasqui 297), 1725 (AClv.250), 1751 (ACiv.26o), 1789, 1917, 2177, ACv.73 (a.1257). For the disputes over pieval percentages in the thirteenth century, see RC 1777 (Partina), 1858 (Bibbiena), 1901 (Buiano); see, in general, 14

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We do not, of course, have the episcopal charters that might show substantial grants to laymen; we only have one explicit example of a layman holding tithe, in fact, in a grant made by Bishop Costantino to S. Fiora in 1076, of an eighth of the revenues of two pievi, Bibbiena and Maiano, north-west of Arezzo, including a sixteenth and an eighth respectively of the tithes, which Costantino says he had given in benefice to Ugo di Goccio, and has now just received back. This at least shows that the Aretine bishops were prepared to cede tithe; but the scale is very small, and the cessions (at least to laymen) temporary. When, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we begin to hear more about the powers of local pievani, in Bibbiena and Partina, tithe collection is something they still control unreservedly, under regulation from the episcopal curia. Buiano looks at fmt like a different matter; ill-documented in all periods, the plebs de Buiano appears as a Guidi possession in Barbarossa's 1164 confirmation. But even this is only an exception that proves the rule; Barbarossa gave it to the monastery of Capolona, over the head of the bishop, in 1161, and it came, along with Capolona itself, under Guidi control inside the next three years. There is no reason to think that the bishop willingly acquiesced in this cession; and, apart from it, there is no reason to imagine extensive alienations to laymen of tithe in this part of the diocese.l6 The continuing episcopal control over tithe is a useful demonstration of the continuity of episcopal power in the countryside in the twelfth and, indeed, thirteenth centuries. Such power was, on the face of it, more restricted than in the eleventh century, with the crystallization of private signorial rights, and, Constable, Monastic Tithes, pp. 71, 201- 37; Jones, 'Camaldoli' , p. 170. !6 For eleventh-century laymen holding tithe, see ACA SF 366 (a.1076; ed. Pasqui 222), pombJy RC 2.56, 410, and for the Fiesolano, ASF S. Trinicl, Nov. 1092; see also, for Creti in the southern Aretino, Pasqui 7.79 (c.IQ90), with Violante, 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 717-18-it, too, was a special case. For Buiano, see MGH, Dip. Friderici I 335, 462 (but contrast RC 1901). More on tithe divisions in Arezzo can be found in ACA Cap. 188-9 (a.1o6o; ed. Pasqui I 89), and the remarkable account of the late deventh century in the Historia custodum aretinorum, ed. Hofmeister. The powers of the pievani of Bibbiena and elsewhere are very clear in AC iii.JIO (a.nss), Pasqui SJ.S (a.1240), and the tithe disputes cited inn. 15. For episcopal control, see Pasqui 476 (a.ux6), pp. 139, 142.

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indeed, the slow undermining of episcopal authority in the city of Arezzo at the hands of the commune. But it continued to be very great; the major change was that its outlines and limits were more clearly delineated. A good representation of this can be found in the episcopal foundation in I I 88 of the castello of Serravalle between Prataglia and Camaldoli, the only documented foundation we have for a Casentinese castello. Serravalle was founded on episcopal land, on which its future inhabitants were to build an~ fortify the castello; the bishop retained private dominium. and public power (i.e. full signorial rights of all kinds), and the responsibility for collecting the imperial fodrum; he promised never to alienate it or enfeoff it away, and in particular not its castle tower. But he had to promise these things to a consortium of local notables, the abbot of Prataglia, Giuseppe and Lotario of Marciano, and Pietro di Berardo, who eo-owned Atocla or Tocli, the nearby village whose inhabitants were to be transferred bodily into Serravalle to build and fortify it. Prataglia was to keep the new church of Serravalle, as it had held that of Tocli. The bishop kept full powers; but these notables were the guarantors for their maintenance.17 Episcopal power, that is to say, coexisted much more explicitly with local powers than it had a century before. And it is this political explicitness that is, more than anything else, the product of the development of feudal/signorial power, and, behind that, the crystallization, in a more explicitly military environment, of the aristocracy: for these developments were above all in the arena of politics, and were concerned with the division of political spoils.

In the eleventh century, as we saw in Chapter 7, the greatest local powers in the Casentino, Camaldoli, Prataglia, and, in the 17

For episcopal propertt in general, especially in the thirteenth century, see Cherubini, 'Aspetti della propriecl' , p. 9 and references cited (this article • is by far the best discusSion of the thirteenth-century Aretine contado). For Serravalle, see RC 1264 (cf. ll93 for Tocl1), 136o; Pasqui 474, p. 145. Serravalle is one of only two Centres in the valley known to have been totally owned by single proprietors, the other being Sama (cf. pp. 293, 331). ln the case of SerravaJJe, this must be largely because of its marginal position, on the edge of the episcopal/monastic forests-although Atocia earlier bad some fragmented private landowning (RC 153, 177, 295 (AC ii.91), 307, 310). The Ubertirti had signorial powers in Serraville later (RC 1734), ptesumably from the bishop, notwithstanding the lattet's promises not to alienate them.

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Fiesolano, the Guidi were in expansion: but they managed to maintain separate spheres of influence without discernible friction, either between themselves or with the bishop. In the twelfth century, the monasteries, particularly Prataglia, ceased to expand, and began to run into difficulties; tension increased, clashes began to appear. When Bishop Girolamo gave Prataglia to Camaldoli in 1 154/7, these dashes became institutionalized, and at regular intervals thereafter, at the election of each new abbot ofPrataglia, the latter tried to free itself from this relationship. Tension also developed between Camaldoli and the bishops, culminating in a vast series of court proceedings in 1216, when the bishop made a concerted attempt to assert his dominion over the monastery .18 And this was the background to a growing series of problems between churches and the lay aristocracy. These had not been absent in the eleventh century, particularly in Prataglia's disputes with the ff. Berardi of Banzena in the 104os, but in the twelfth century the newest small military families and many of the larger older ones {most obviously, once more, the Guidi) were still expanding, often at the expense of monastic powers. It would be impractical to pursue all of these developments, and I will restrict myself to three: the expansion of the Guidi, the affairs of Marciano, and the attacks on Prataglia in the I 16os. Through these, and through some of the political presuppositions of the 1216 Camaldoli hearings, we can establish an idea of the new framework for the operation of local political practice. We saw, in an earlier section {pp. 197- 202) , how the Guidi slowly developed, most visibly in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, to become the dominant power in the Casentino Fiesolano. One can add that it was in the early to mid-twelfth century that their power in the Tuscan plains first began to be contested, a process that was to turn them more and more into archetypal mountain lords. In the Casentino Fiesolano, as noted earlier, there was more scope for the development of full-scale territorial lordship than in the Casentino Aretino; the Guidi, that is to say, had plenty of political space for expansion and consolidation, and held extensive signorial rights in twenty-odd Prataglia was given to Camaldoli by RC I 123 (AC iii.321). For tension between the two, see ·1249, 1583, r8o6, r8ro-I3, AC iv, p. 292, v.69, 123. For Camaldoli vs. the bishop, see most of RC I s8r- x6or; above all, Pasqui 473-4 (a.ur6). 18

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villages there up to the late fourteenth century. But the I I64 Guidi diploma shows them with much land and rights in the Aretino as well, stretching right down the Amo to Lorenzano and Santa Mama, well beyond their old power-base in the diocese at Strumi. 19 And this brought them into competition for the first time with Camaldoli and the other ecclesiastical landowners of the south of the valley. · This is most visible in the affairs of Moggiona, the estate of the Aretine canonica at the top of the Sova valley, on the edge of both the Fies~la.no and the Camaldoli heartland. In I098 Guido IV formally renounced all his claims to placitum vel distriaum there, and promised to exact no more malum usum or malam consuetudinem, against a large sanction. The imagery of malus usus has a long history in the establishment of new private exactions in Europe, and it crops up sporadically in the twelfth-century Cmntino too; it is clear that the Guidi had simply been trying, in the context of the signorialization of the late eleventh-century Aretino, to pick up judicial and other signorial rights in a strategically convenient centre, rights they doubtless already possessed in many places in the Fiesolano and the Romagna. Nor, despite the I098 case, were they as yet unsuccessfuL In 1107, Guido V Guerra again renounced the estate of Moggiona and promised to do no more damage there. But in 114.6, Guido VI's renunciation of all his exactione.s et omnem usum iu.stum et iniustum in Moggiona was in return for a 40s. annual donative; and in I 164, the Guidi diploma baldly announced possession of commenditia et placitum de Moiona. lt is clear that, in practice, the Guidi were obtaining signorial rights here, at least in the form of an annual pay-off by the owners. 20 This diploma, however, is the last reference to the Guidi in 19

MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462; see Map ro (A). The twdfth-century Guidi are discussed in Pa~rini. 'Una monaca del XII secolo'; Sestan, ' Conti Guidi'; Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze i. passim; Santini, 'Studi sull'antica costituzione'. ' For the fourteenth-century, see Ch. 7, n. 27. 20 The canonica owned land in Moggiona from 840 (ACA Cap. 13; ed. Pasqui 30); they still claimed it in 1163 (MGH, Dip. Friderici I 412). For the Guidi, see RC 6o8 (AC iii.98; Pasqui 286), 689 (AC ili.140; Pasqui 298), 1034 (AC iii.28o), MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462. For other mali usus in the Casentino, .See RC 810, 842 (AC iii.199), 1048; cf. above, n. 9, and Conti, Formazione i, pp. 216-17, 282- ;. A useful parallel is Magnou-Nortier, 'Mauvaises coutumes', with bibliography.

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Moggiona. By I 164, in fact, its legal owners were no longer the canonica, for in 1 I 30 the canons had sold the whole estate to Camaldoli, to pay off their debts. They tried to get it back in 1176, but that was a bad time for the canons, with their land under threat elsewhere; they had to cede in this and other disputes that year to get support from Arezzo and the Camaldolesi. And the latter were in a better position to resist the Guidi, being so much closer. We need not doubt that it is as a direct result of this that the Guidi are not attested here again. Moggiona became a key monastic centre. In I 382, when the village recognized the sovereignty of Florence, it was still in the Camaldolese signoria.2 1 This discussion shows, more than anything else, how much fjfort was involved in turning occasional illegal exactions into a de facto signoria against determined opponents. The Guidi were more involved in the valley than many, and did not shrink from violence; they perpetuated more than one outrage in the late twelfth century and onward against Camaldoli. Even they were not always successful; others with less of a valley interest would have found it rather harder. None the less, the prevailing Guidi interest in signorial rights, and their consistent presence and long-term political involvement in the mountains, did enable them to expand their influence slowly. They claimed to hold half the ca.stello of Ragginopoli in 1164, for instance, sharing it with the Ubertini; they obtained rights in Partina as well by 1200 or so. And, although the Ubertini were still in 1223 in control of shares of their major valley castelli, Ragginopoli, Serravalle, Partina, and Corezzo, it was in the end the Guidi that picked them up, or at least the signorial rights associated with the estates there; we can see this in a text of 1257, where they came to terms over their signorial powers in these castelli with the expanding commune of Arezzo. In 1298 they even took Soci from Camaldoli, after it was damaged in a small war, although the monks got it back in 13 59-'6<>, in the context of the fourteenth-century Florentine conquest. We cannot look at all this in detail; the proprietorial and signorial changes of the two centuries after 1200 were complex. But, in general, the expansion of the Guidi was expressed above all in the take-over 21 For Moggiona under Camaldoli, see RC 912 (Pasqui 327), 913 (AC iii. 223; Pasqui 328), Pasqui 383- 4 (cf. 381- 2), RC 1247; Cherubini, 'Moggiona 1)82'.

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of signora! rights. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Aretine signoria of the Guidi, based on Poppi, covered the whole of the Sova valley below Moggiona, and this territory was indeed recognized as a rump signoria by the Florentines, almost the only one left (apart from the Ubertini castello of Chitignano) in the Florentine Republic, right up to 1440. But in this precise area were several estates, in Bucena, Sparena, Pratale, Monte, that were all continuously under the control of Camaldoli, with no Guidi interference at all. The break between signoria and landowning is nowhere clearer. 22 The Guidi were only the greatest of the _families who took advantage of the wider range of opportunities available with the fragmentation of judicial rights. It was not, however, the capitanei, with their urban interests, who followed them in the valley, but lesser notables stilL The lords of Marciano were one such group. We have already seen that Marciano was a major episcopal centre, except briefty in the 1 I20S- 40S, when it was mostly in Prataglia's hands. It may have been this brief interregnum, however, that allowed the appearance on the scene of an inftuential family based on Marciano itself In c.II6o Prataglia appealed to the bishop against a series of malefactores, including Giuseppe of Marciano, who occupied several of the monastery's properties, in Contra, Socana, and Tocli; and held the central tower of Marciano, still under Prataglia's control, against the monastery. In a later part of the same text, he had become the monastery's pessimo persecutore, 'who violently invades our possessions every day, and seizes them for his own uses', in Aioli, Candolesi, and Socana: these centres are up to 20 km apart, quite a geographical range by the standards of the Casentino. And Giuseppe remained after these episodes a For Guidi outrages, see Ch. 6, n. 17. For Ragginopoli, see MGH, Dip. Friderici I 462; RC 231~ Repetti, Dizionario della Toscana iv, p. 720 (a.1254). For Partina c. 1200, see Pasqui 474. p. 145· for the Ubertini succeeded by the Guidi, see RC 1734; Pasqui 6o3 (cf. 657, 795-6; the Ubertini kept SerravaJle, though-see 859). For the Guidi and others in Soci, see RC 707, Pasqui 615 (a.126o), AC v.194- 5, with pp. 221, 228-9 (a.1297- 8); Jones, 'CamaJdoli', pp. 170, 173; Reg. Cap. vi. 86-9<> for 1359-6o. (Camaldoli held in Partina, too: see Cherubini, 'Aspetti della propriecl', p. 19; Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 172, 174.) For the Guidi after 1200, see Sestan, 'Conti Guidi'; for the 1440 cession, see Reg. Cap. ix. 88, 99· For CamaJdoli in the Val di Sova, see Jones, 'Camaldoli', passim. 22

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personality of some local significance. He was one of the participants, with his brother, in the foundation of Serravalle in u88; in the II8os, both can be found as monastic witnesses elsewhere, too. In I 190, Giuseppe acted as a judge and arbiter between Camaldoli and a local opponent, dividing a series of rentals between them; here, in particular, his local importance is more or less formally recognized. Giuseppe's heirs are often documented in the thirteenth-century Camaldoli charters, as tenants, landowners, or boni homines of Marciano, and so are others, not so obviously related. The castello was expanding in population. Its eleventh-century inhabitants were probably rather few; but by 1243 thirty-two male Marcianesi swore that they held lands from Prataglia in precaria, in effect as a consortial group. The family , or group of families, clearly persisted. 23 The bishop did not lose control of Marciano. When, as related in the 1216 court cases, two of the Marcianesi, episcopal.fideles, kidnapped a servant of the Camaldolesi, the vicedominus of the bishop came there and threatened one of them with imprisonment in Jundo turris de Marciano, unless the prisoner was returned. 24 (The bishop had evidently got the tower back.) The Marcianesi did not, then, turn themselves into a local castello-holding aristocratic family in an ex-ecclesiastical castello like the lords of Banzena and Soci discussed in Chapter 10. Instead, they remained a group of medium landholders: not cultivators, but holding much or most of their land on lease. Who Giuseppe ofMarciano's own ancestors were is entirely obscure; but he was in effect acting, in the period after 1160, just like one of the most influential boni homines of the eleventh century, such as Rodolfo di Guido and Tagizo di Pagano (pp. 26o-4). Like them, he witnessed charters; like them, he expressed a considerable social distance from the monasteries in some of his actions, even though he was doubtless, as his heirs certainly were, a monastic tenant for some of his properties. But the political framework was different now. Political violence was restricted in the eleventh century to the capitanei; boni homines like Rodolfo di Guido did . See n. 9 for Prataglia in Marciano. For Giuseppe and other Marcianesi, mostly related, see RC 1193, 1253, 1264, 1270, 1274, 1303, with, for the thirteenth century, 2297; for other later references, see RC iv, index, s.v. Marciano, and n. 24· 24 Pasqui 47 4, p. I 45· 23

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not engage in it, unless perhaps as part of an aristocratic entourage. Giuseppe could do it on his own. And, as a single judge/arbiter in 1190, he was more authoritative than any of his predecessors, even if the arena, judicial dispute and compromise, was a classic one for a man of his social stratum. It was as temporary controller of the turris of Marciano, presumably held from Prataglia and the bishop, that Giuseppe could fill this, essentially political, role. Such a politics was not available before the twelfth century. The Prataglia plea of c.116o does not, however, concern itself more than marginally with Giuseppe of Marciano, pessimo persecutore or no. He appears in a subsidiary list of malefactors, along with Martinozo ofRagginopoli, Ugitto of Montefatucchio, the lombardis of Camprena, and the men of Bibbiena, all of whom have seized tracts of monastic land. All these came, in all likelihood, from the same lesser military stratum as Giuseppe-at most, Martinozo was from a minor branch of the Ubertini (above p. 278). Even the word lombardi, which a century earlier would have been restricted to the capitaneal aristocracy, has dropped a social stratum, as military power extended lower and lower.25 But the principal malefactors were, in reality, OrlandinofRolandino di Rolando and his son Gibello, apparently from Partina, and their misdeeds were described at length; they serve best to characterize the group as a whole. These two burned down the monastic castle and church itself, stealing reliquaries and the bell, and, later, pushed down the chapter wall and sacked the dormitory. They occupied all of the monastic estate in Corezzo, and in V entrina and Freggina stole land, burnt houses, raided cattle and pigs, wantonly destroyed large quantities of wheat and wine, killed a conversus, cut down vineyards. In Frassineta they systematically terrorized the community: In Frass1neta, who could describe how much ill they did to our men? Violently, like Pharaoh to the sons of Israel, they subjugated our men to their service and coerced them to become their commendati; they inflicted so much oppression that our men wearied of life and discussed whether to leave their lands. They did not dare to go out to till the fields or to the forest; if they were found outside the village they were despoiled and deprived of their tools; if observed going to the mill or 2:1

RC 1193. Cf., classically, Volpe, 'Lambardi e Romani', pp. z69-78.

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returning they were relieved of their burdens. Their wives were visited daily at home by Orlandino's archers, and they were distressed with menaces and terrors, so as to hand over the little they had. When they bad to make bread beneath the cinders, they fled to the church, and there secretly prepared the flour, then ran back home, and took it half-baked from the embers to hide under the bench before the robbers should return. The latter, not content with all this, when entering houses, plundered them at will. They even cruelly seized the clothes from the hands of the women who were taking them to wash. In that village, among many other things, they burnt four houses, six huts and a mill, and drove off ten oxen, and wounded two of our conversi with swords.

Later, Gibello returned with his nephew and sacked Frassineta again, took over tenant-houses and an ox, and did other daily misdeeds. They may have done more yet, but the text is incomplete. 26 The late eleventh and twelfth century in Tuscany saw a number of accounts of this kind, although only this one approaches the detail of the well-known 'polittico delle malefatte' compiled by the bishop of Reggio Emilia around 1040. 2? It is dear, in this case, that the depredations of Rolandino and his family in Frassineta were systematic, and what they were aiming at seems dearly indicated at the start of the passage: the establishment of a signoria there at Prataglia's expense. That this was ultimately unsuccessful we know from other documents, from the u8os onwards, in which Prataglia's signorial rights are unquestioned (below, p. 332). But Rolandino's aims can best be understood when we look at his own family, about which we know more than we do about Giuseppe of Marciano. Rolandino appears as early as 1 128- 30, renouncing, with his wife Italia, his claims to the portion of the castello ofPartina ceded to Camaldoli by the ff. Berardi. In 1145 other portions of Partina are sold by RC 1193· h may well have been as a military centre for these outrages that there was built the castrum ()Tlandini, right at the top of the mountain, referred to as on Frassineta's boundary in n87 (ASF Capitoli xxiv, f. 197b). 2 7 For Reggio, see, most recently, Andreolli and Montanari, Azienda curttnse, 24

pp. l05-I3 and references cited. Among parallels in northern Tuscany are ACA SF 330 (c.1070; ed. Pasqui 201) for S. Fiora; Majnoni, Coltibuono, pp. 149-SO (a.1171, pretty small scale stuff) for Coltibuono; for the Pisano, see Volpe, 'Lambardi e Romani', pp. 273 f., and Rossetti, 'Pisa, Volterra, Populonia', pp. 321--9. In general, see Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 174--6.

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the sons of Ugo di lldobrando, linked to the Ubertini, 'except the pledge [for a dowry?] which Rolandino has', doubtless through Italia, herself daughter of Ugo. And this link with Partina was maintained; Gibello's sons and grandsons are de Partinil, and appear in numerous thirteenth-century documents. But this does not mean that Rolandino and his family were aristocrats. Rolandino was almost certainly the son of Rolando di Tagizo, who we saw as the heir to the f[ Pagani, a rich family of boni homines, clutching at the edge of the aristocracy through a lease of part of the castello of Soci (pp. 261, 291). Rolandino and his heirs maintained this position, through his marriage into a cadet branch of the Ubertini, holding part of Partina; but they did not get beyond it. Rolandino may in some way have been acting as a client of the Ubertini in the I I6o outrages-he had the help of 'other men' from Liema, another Ubertini stronghold; he is most likely, however, to have been trying to gain an independent signorial position for himself. Either way he failed. The family's position in Partina cannot have been independent of the great powers who held most of the estate and the signoria of the castello, Camaldoli, the Ubertini, the Guidi. The thirteenth-century documents for Gibello's sons and grandsons show them just as donors and vendors of small properties in the Archiano and Sova valleys to Camaldoli, and, more rarely, as witnesses. In 1249 his great-grandsons Benintende and Rogerio, along with a wide variety of petty local notables, declared themselves to be the homines et .fideles of the hermitage. Allowing for changes in terminology, the ff. Paganijff. Gibelli had barely changed their social position in eight generations. 28 What Prataglia's plea tells us about, therefore, is about the political behaviour of the topmost level of the non-aristocratic free. The social position of the ff. Pagani in the eleventh century was associated entirely, as far as we can see, with their role as boni homines, above all with witnessing charters. Rolando and Rolandino explicitly entered into a more military sphere, but can never be seen acting with any success independently of the aristocratic holders of castelli; their heirs were vassals of Carnaldoli, and witnessed charters again. It is likely that the ancestors 28 See RC 895, 910, 1009, roz6-'7, 1052, ross for Rolandino; for the tf. Gibelli, see IZ49, 1483, 1497, 1562., 1627, 1663, 1677, 1700, 1705, 1741, 1755, 1794, r8o4- 5, 2035, 2103, 2342-3, 2387 (a.l249).

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of Giuseppe of Marciano were from a similar social level. What the association with castelli and the availability of armed men gave them was not aristocratic status, but an ability to operate politically, most obviously against the Church, in a wide area, certainly wider than their own landholding, covering the whole of the middle Casentino and beyond. The arena of informal politics, political violence above all, had extended from the regional and capitaneal aristocracy to include them. The plea may indeed just show the factional oppositions that I outlined for the eleventh century (pp. 264- 8) turning into violent action in this new arena. It was in the procedures of politics that the twelfth-century military/signorial world registered its greatest changes.29 It would be inappropriate here to follow in more detail the development of twelfth-century socio-political relationships in the middle Casentino. But some idea of the changes in political action and, above all, language can be caught by the narratives in the 1216 hearings over Camaldoli's independence from the bishop, which cover a period from the u8os to the I2IOS. We find ourselves in a world of lords (domini), the Guidi in Poppi and Partina, the Camaldolesi in Soci, the bishop in Bibbiena and Marciano. Does Camaldoli, the judges ask, have jurisdiction in crimes of violence and homicide over its monks, or over other clerics or laity? The witness does not know; although he was in Soci once while the conversus Omodeo was in prison in the tower for the murder of a monastic official, he did not see the crime or the sentence. We have seen already that the bishop's officials could threaten such imprisonment to the men of Marciano; this, at least, can be seen as local power in practice. Another witness recounts how, when Count Guido VII (Guido Guerra Ill) believed that his sister's treasure was being held at Camaldoli (witness could not say whether rightly or not), he took monastic cattle in reprisal. The monks appealed to the bishop, saying 'We come to you as our lord', to get the cattle back. The bishop called the pievano of Bibbiena, and said to Not every bonus homo of the twelfth century was militarized in this way, however; in the twelfth and indeed thirteenth centuries, most appear in the same public and quasi-public contexts that they had done in the eleventh. Our documentation for all three centuries is, however, not orientated towards military activity, and probably understates it for the whole period. 29

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him: 'Go to Count Guido, for I cannot send him a better messenger than you, for he loves you, and ask him on my behalf, as if you were asking for the castello of Bibbiena or for something special of mine, that he for my love restore to the Camaldolesi the cattle he had carried off. ' The whole terminology is that of political negotiation between lords. There is barely a mention anywhere of public law. Indeed, the bishop's side in these hearings, in its claims that Camaldoli was episcopal, seems often to have been simply trying to accumulate instances where the monks called the bishop dominus in front of witnesses.so Political relationships, whether friendly or unfriendly, had become almost totally informal, at least at the level of the holders of local power. But, as a corollary, the local parameters of power, castelli and districtus, were much more formal: districtual boundaries were dear; links of dependence were more closely defined than a century earlier. The consequenc~s of this we will . see m a moment. Let us return to the question of what effect signorial powers and the new local politics of the twelfth century had on the ordinary inhabitants of the Casentino. One simple answer, leaving aside the travails of the inhabitants of Frassineta and the many other villages that suffered the same fate, is: not much. In the Garfagnana, where twelfth-century evidence is extremely thin, it was none the less possible for us to see that territorial signorie came and went in the valley, leaving an independent peasantry behind after them as before. In the Casentino, we can see something, even if elliptically, of the content of local social relationships, and we can conclude from our evidence that, even at its height, the signoria did not by any means control or even affect them all. The complexity of local society, that we have seen exemplified above all in the Camaldoli documents for the eleventh-century Archiano valley, continued through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there. Similarly, despite the growing Ubertini and, later, Guidi signoria in the Val di Sova, its 30

See Pasqui 473, p. 125, 474, pp. 139, 145 and passim; cf., for general comments, Delameau, 'Memoire des gens d'Arezzo et de Sienne' . The terminology of political dominance is already present when the abbot of Prataglia is called qu4Si secundus to the bishop in Marciano in I 1 30: see above, p. 313. Cf. Tabacco, 'Nobilta e potere', pp. 3- 5.

Feudalism in the Countryside,

331 inhabitants operated in their twelfth-century cessions to Camaldoli just as those on the Archiano had in the eleventh: with apparendy total independence, in a social context determined by local balances and oppositions, rather than by any formal link to lords. 31 And these balances persisted: at the highest level, between the interpenetrating fragmented estates of churches and aristocrats; at a lower level, between different levels of boni homines and small free owners. Signorial powers did produce some changes, of course. At the level of the tenant population, signorial domination was represented by the 'feudalization' of peasant obligations to lords, particularly as the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth. This is the aspect of signorial power that has been most studied, and the Casentino certainly fits into the pattern laid down by Cammarosano and others: by the thirteenth century, control over tenant lands became linked in the documents to lordship over men. But the appearance of oaths ofjidelitas and hominagium among tenants, even if, as is often argued, it represented a return to a quasi-servile position for them, does not mean that the effect of signorial powers on small owners was the same. When S. Fiora in 1238 claimed the property and children of one of its military entourage, Ughetto of Sama (the monastic stronghold in the Casentino), an essential argument in its favour was the absence of any allodial land in Sama; monastic claims of full signorial control over Ughetto's family were dependent on his local origin being entirely inside the tenant stratum.32 But Sarna is one of the only two villages in the valley (the other being Serravalle) where we know that lords owned all the land, and in no other reasonably well-attested centre is it even likely; surviving owners maintained a much greater independence. It is true that the Archiano, our best-documented area, may not have been fully typical in the degree of its tenurial fragmentation; the effective political control of the Banzena in their strongholds in l05D-l200

RC iv, index, s.v. Sparena, Bucena, Sa/a, Agna. 32 For control over tenants, see Conti, Formazione i, pp. 216-17, z8z-s; Cammarosano, Berardenghi, pp. 54-61; id., Campagne nell'eta ccmunale, pp. 6r74; Kellcr, Adelsherrschaft, pp. 175-87; for one local example out of many, see Cherubini, Comunita delr Appennino, pp. 8 r-x 14. For Ughctto, see Pasqui 527; Tabacco, 'Nobilta e potere', pp. 1-5. Compare Plesner, Bmigrazione da/la campagna, pp. 97- IOJ, for independence and dependence in Passignano, c.1200. 31 See

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the middle Corsolone, or of the Guidi in their major estate centres, must have been rather more substantial. An illustration of effective signorial power of this kind is a document of I 187, which shows a boundary dispute between Prataglia and the Ubertini, lords respectively of Frassineta and Corezzo in the upper Corsolone: here, the opposition between two villages has already become, quite simply, the opposition between their lords. Frassineta by now very largely (although by no means totally) consisted of Prataglia's tenants; it is not surprising that the monastery's signorial dominance was great there after Rolandino and Gibello were fought off, at least. Tenurial power led to effective signorial dominance, if the landowner and the lord were the same. But the converse is not true. We cannot show that signorial dominance led to tenurial expansion, anywhere in the valley; even where it was very great, as in the Guidi lands in the Fiesolano, other landowners persisted; and, where there were a lot of other owners, .the local lord remained unable to exercise effective local control. Tenants may possibly have. been effectively subject to signorial power; owners, however weak, were far less so. 33 I am counterposing in this discussion two different aspects of the effect of the signoria. One is the power of lords to exact dues and service from, and to exercise judicial powers over, a local population, both of tenants and owners; this certainly existed in the Casentino, in Sama arid in the Archiano villages alike. The second, studied far less often than the first, is the real local control that resulted; the power of the lord to affect the everyday activities of the populatio~ inside his districtus. This control, I would argue, was based far less on signorial rights than on the pre-existing property-owning of the lord concerned. It is thus not at all surprising that th~ Archiano documents, showing as they do a balance of landowning still .maintained inside the crystallizing signorie of Ragginopoli, Marciano, Soci, Partina, show so little signorial influence so little that their 33

The complexity of Banzena power is shown in RC 2273-
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lords did not even, up to 1200, manage to make most of these castelli into population centres. But the interesting thing about the growth of both secular and ecclesiastical powers in the twelfth century and, indeed, the thirteenth is that they are associated far more with the extension of signorial rights than of property-owning; lords did not use their authority over peasant owners to appropriate peasant land. This is above all true of the Guidi, signorial mountain lords par excelletue; it is least true of Camaldoli, whose interest in exploiting a signorial politics remained relatively slight (even if it happily used the powers it had, as with its castello at Soci- cf. above, p. 329), and who maintained a rather greater interest than other powers in gaining land. Even Camaldoli, however, was not consistent in its proprietorial accumulation; despite buying up much land in Soci, it never controlled the whole village even there. It is likely, indeed, that the proprietorial expansion of the monastery still remained for the most part inside the ambit of the cycles and tense equilibria that we have already seen for the eleventh century; Camaldoli, then, did not undermine the patterns of local society any more than the Guidi did. The result was that peasant landowning survived everywhere, to become fully apparent again in the fifteenth century, after the Florentine abolition of most signorial rights: above all in the Catasto of 1427. 34

It is in this way that we can understand best how an independent peasantry persisted in our valley across the central Middle Ages, an era of violence and aristocratic assertion though it was. It is not that rural society remained entirely static, locked into its traditional rivalries, though these certainly persisted; but rather that the political advance of the aristocracy, one of the major aspects of the social dynamism of the period, was predominantly over the heads of the peasantry, in the arena of signorial rights. In a fragmenting public world, signorial rights were, in general, easier to obtain than land. The expropriation 34

For Camaldoli's land acquisitions and non-signorial interests, see Cherubini, 'Aspetti della proprieta, pp. zo- 12 and nn.; Jones, 'Camaldoli', p. 169 for Soci. It took dues, however: see above, n. I 1. For peasant landowning in the thirteenth century, see Cherubini, 'Aspetti della proprieci' , p. to. For the Catasto and later, see Conti, Formazione iii. 2, pp. 315, 317, 382- 3; cf. 407; and cf. above, n. I .

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of public powers, one could even say, made the effort of the expropriation of the peasantry less necessary. As a consequence, such signorial expansion allowed a landowning peasantry, rich and poor, to survive, with its own local social concerns; signorial rights, even if onerous (which they may not have been, as we have seen, at least for Camaldoli), did not directly affect their day-to-day activity. At most, the signorial arena became one where the more ambitious oflocal owners, Giuseppe ofMarciano or Rolandino of Partina, could try for local authority on their own behalf. But, in the end, what this meant was merely that the topmost local stratum became more militarized, not that local power radically changed. As in the case of the Garfagnana, when signorie were abolished at the end of the fourteenth century, the Casentino was revealed again as a predominantly peasant society. Villages where tenants were the major proportion of the rural population were to be found predominantly on the Camaldoli estates. I emphasized in the context of the Garfagnana, and indeed of the Lucchesia in general, that one major reason why the signoria was always weak there was that the local aristocracy remained orientated towards city society. This is likely to have often been the case in the Aretino, too. We cannot generalize too incautiously, for the work has not yet been done for most of the latter diocese. (In the Val Tiberina, for example, signorial rights were certainly very coherent from very early on, as in the case of Anghiari, even though lords there were no less involved in urban politics than were the Ubertini.) And there were certainly structural contrasts between the two diocesesthe greater importance of tithe in the Lucchesia, and probably the lesSer importance of military burdens than in the Aretino, in the construction of local lordship-that cannot be analysed without a fuller understanding of urban society, in Lucca and Arezzo alike. But it is significant that it is above all the Guidi, who were becoming more. and more marginal to the urban world of Tuscany, who expanded their signorial lordship in the Casentino with most enthusiasm, and not the capitaneal aristocracy, the Ubertini or the Banzena. We have seen the same contrast between the Lucchese and Lunense parts of the Garfagnana. Urban aristocrats could, of course, happily coerce local peasantries and the local church, and did so, throughout

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Italy; we need not imagine that urban civilization put them above such activities.35 But their political interests were not so much bound up with establishing local power as were those of the Guidi, or the Gherardinghi of the upper Garfagnana. As a result both of this greater urban interest and of the continuing tenacity of the structures of local society, the signorial powers of Casentino lords failed to undermine that local society, or, outside their major estate centres, to have a significant impact on it at all. We cannot see how the structures of local society developed in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Garfagnana; but it is likely that a similar set of processes took place there as well. The end result was, at any rate, the same: the appearance in the late Middle Ages of a relatively undifferentiated peasant world. Local society in the Casentino in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did in some respects reflect the social changes emanating from the city and characterizing the diocese as a whole; but the process was far more complex than the issue of signorial power on its own. I remarked in the General Introduction that, in the twelfth century or so, the new signorial world was characterized by a much more explicit, more formal, social and geographical territorialization than rural society had known before that. This can certainly be discerned in the Casentino. It has many aspects. We have seen (pp. 174-9, 24o-1) that already in the eleventh century a certain crystallizing process had begun in the valley; casalia, that is to say villages and their territories, no matter how dispersed the settlements, had clear boundaries, sometimes covering very small areas indeed. The importance of these boundaries continued to increase. In the twelfth century two aspects of territorialization imposed themselves at the same time, with increasing clarity: the village units and the new districtual territories, the latter mostly centred on castelli. These had various social bases; for the former, the traditional relationships between local owners were always important, coupled with some communal lands and, by 1 roo at the latest, local churches; for the latter, the core was justice and other signorial powers. The For coercion, c£ Rossetti, 'Pisa, Volterra, Populonia', pp. 321--9; see Ch. n. 1 5 for the Val Tiberina.

35 10,

The Casentino in the Eleventh Century growing importance of local churches and private justice struck against the coherence of the only pre-existing territories of the valley, the local pievi; although pievani continued to be important throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, above all through their continuing control of tithe, the pieval territories were less and less commonly used as points of reference by the I220S-I230S.36

Only the pievi were, however, in any sense public territorial divisions; casalia and te"itoria castri represented the formalization of hitherto much more informal social relationships. The latter two did not necessarily coincide; each of the districtus of the middle Archiano, for example, contained several villages. But where they did, the resultant units could be very coherent indeed: it is not chance that our first boundary dispute in the valley, that between Frassineta and Corezzo in II87, was one between villages which were also signorial territories in their own right. Here, the shifting patterns of eleventh-century local solidarity and dissensus have crystallized into something solid and definable; the county/diocese and its subdivisions have been replaced by territorial units that reflect local, not public relationships. The thirteenth century lies well beyond the boundaries of this study; nor have I made any systematic analysis even of the Camaldoli material for the period, not to speak of the rapidly expanding documentation that can be found in other collections. But it is worth noting here, from a reading of the Camaldoli register, that early thirteenth-century documents continue these developments very clearly. Local territorial identity is more and more evident; participants in charters state their place of origin more often, and certain obvious local political leaders like pievani and, increasingly, the rectors of village churches become very apparent. The association of local identity with the signoria and with the village church is increasingly explicit. Only one thing is lacking, and it is an interesting and surprising absence: the rural commune. For, of course, what I have been describing is exactly the set of social developments that underpin the appearance of the commune, all over Italy: local oppositions and 36

Perhaps the neatest discussions of territorialization are those of Violante, summed up in his article 'Signoria "territoriale" '.

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solidarities slowly crystallizing around certain conceptual or physical nuclei, castelli or villages or signorie or local churches. In Anghiari, substantial political and signorial centre as it was, there was a commune by I 147. In the Casentino, however, the earliest reference I have found to a commune is Banzena in 1244, then Frassineta in 1252; only after that do the references pile up--1257 for Liema, Ragginopoli, Partina, Corezzo; the 126os for Soci and Moggiona.37 And, although private transactions do not often mention communal institutions anywhere in Italy, the numerous courtcases, arbitrations, agreements, and collective oaths in the half-century previous to these appearances ought to have produced some references to communes, had they been in existence much before the mid-thirteenth century: the Prataglia pleas of c.II6o, the Frassineta case of u87, the foundation of Serravalle in 1188, and the 1216 cases are all classic examples of such texts, and there are many others. We have to conclude that, before the 1240s at the earliest, rural communes were either non-existent or of extremely limited importance in the middle Casentino, the area of the Camaldoli charters. The appearance of the communes of the valley can be most closely associated with the signoria. The communes that I have listed were all the centres of signorial territories, and seem to correspond to the distridus of each centre (the frrst reference of all, to Banzena, relates to the attempts of two outlying villae, Pezza and Fognano, to extricate themselves from the communal/ districtual control of the central castello). And indeed, although the difference is only that of a decade or so, it may be worth noting that the communes of the Corsolone, where signoril'-ewhether of the ff. Berardi or of Prataglia- were relatively coherent, appear before those of the Archiano, where signorial 37

For Anghiari, see RC 1041, 1095 (cf. Modigliani, 'Anghiari nel XDI secolo' ; for rhe origin of rhe commune, ibid., p. 234). For Banzena, see RC 2312<-13. For Frassineta, see AC v, p. 12; Cherubini, 'Aspetti della proprieci', p.28; 1257: Pasqui 6o3. For Soci and Moggiona, see Jones. 'Camaldoli', p. 170; Cherubini, 'Moggiona 1382'; AC v, p. 221. In 1252 Frassineta already had an annual podesta, and in 1257 Ragginopoli and the others had annual syndici and a complex political organization; they cannot have been totally new, even if, as was normal, the institutions were borrowed from elsewhere. For later communal statutes, see Reg. Cap. , as n. u ; Cherubini, 'Moggiona 1382'; id., Signori, contadini, borghesi, pp. 201-tS. Cf., for rhe Garfagnana, Ch. 4, n. 46, Ch. 5, nn. 8, 10.

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power was certainly weaker. But why they only appear in the mid-thirteenth century, and not before, cannot at this stage be more than guessed at. Certainly the signoria was an important conditioner of communal identity, here as elsewhere in Italy; it would appear, too, that communal institutions in the valley were an outgrowth of the structures of the signoria, rather than, as is the case in other parts of Italy, created principally to oppose signorial power.ss But that is not in itself surprising, given the limited role of signorial power itself in the middle Casentino; in many ways, one could see both signoria and commune as the institutional frames of reference of the increasing coherence and formalization of local territorial identity for the population of the valley. And the discovery that communes reflect signorial power is not in itself going to explain why they appeared then, rather than earlier, or indeed later. In fact, we cannot even really say as yet whether such a development was early or late by Tuscan standards (still less Aretine ones), for systematic research has not been done. At best, we can cite earlier examples: in much of the Senese, for instance, a network of communes was in place by 1200 or so; Lucchese communes, too, were common by then, although not universal, and in some parts of the Lucchesia, including the Garfagnana, they date back to at least the 1 120s-in the Garfagnana, they are prominent in our appalling twelfth-century documentation. 39 But, although the date of the Casentinese communes cannot yet be explained, it does correlate with two other developments, and in neither case may this be chance. The .first of these developments is the growth of the silvopastoral economy in the valley. I discussed its date in an earlier chapter (pp. 167-9}, and emphasized that it was rather later in the Casentino than in the Garfagnana; whereas in the latter valley transhumance was fully under way by 1150, we cannot propose a real pastoral economy in the former until well into the thirteenth century. But it is interesting that in the Casentino, as earlier in the Garfagnana, rural communes began to crystallize just when a pastoral economy was getting organized. The See references in Ch. s, n. 9 for arguments along the same lines as mine. I propose to return to this subject elsewhere. 39 For Lucca, see above, pp. 138-41. For Siena, see Cammarosano, 'Campagne senesi', pp. 153-oo; Redon, Uomini e comunita, pp. 97-223. 38

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Corsolone was not merely more signorial than the Archiano; it was also more pastoral. As in the case of the Garfagnana (p. 139), this economic change cannot be seen as the cause of the appearance of communes; but it may at least have served as a catalyst for a set of social and political relationships that had been capable of formalizing collective identities for some time. The organization of collective (above all, silvo-pastoral) economic activities was, after all, one of the major functions of communes. The second was a change in settlement pattern, that can be seen taking shape for the first time in the thirteenth century. I have stressed the unimportance of the castelli of the middle Casentino in demographic, and by extension, political terms in the context of the scattered settlement of the valley at any time until 1200 or so. Lords did not have the power to force or entice people into these castelli when their signorie were being established. But. after 1200, these same centres slowly expanded. Soci and Bibbiena were already market centres; but other castelli began to develop as well. Marciano, Ragginopoli, and Liema can be seen increasing their area or absorbing population from open settlements in the first half of the thirteenth century; Soci, too, was still expanding. And they would continue to do so; the partial introduction of the mezzadria by Camaldoli may have led to the break-up of some of the open casalia in Camaldoli's lands, like Contra or Monte, with surviving local owners converging more and more in Soci, Partina, and Marciano, which by the time of the first Catasto were clearly the dominant centres on the Archiano. This slow concentration of population has its origins, as far as can yet be seen, less in the power of the signoria itself, than in the growing sense of coherence and local identity of the inhabitants of the territories focused on the signorial centre. And this meant, above all, the expansion and affirmation of the local elite, the boni homines of the eleventh century or the milites of the twelfth, for it is they who can be seen as the most characteristic inhabitants of these castelli; we have already seen this in the case of both Marciano and Partina (pp. 324-8). 4° It is the affirmation of this elite, even if inside the For slow expansion of castelli, see RC I4II-I2, 2124 (Ragginopoli), 1555 (Lierna), z626, 1938, 2297 (Marciano), 2250, 226o (Soci). Ventrina, Freggina, and Contra had not yet declined in the thirteenth century (e.g. 2361), but only Freggina makes any impression in the 1427 Catasto; ASP Catasto 159, 40

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geographical boundaries of the signoria, that these newly populated castelli represent, not the political power of their lords; and it was this elite, once crystallized, that created the rural commune. The concentration of the local elite into single settlement-units can thus be seen as the material analogue of the process that underlies the rural commune itself. This would work as a provisional, very broad framework for the appearance of the commune in the Casentino. That it could not be extended outside the valley is clear, from the simple fact that the Casentino is one of the few places in Tuscany where settlement has been seen in the process of concentration in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. We cannot get further than that at this point. But such an analysis does serve to emphasize the importance of the slow territorialization of local identity in the valley; and this, too, would be given a powerful focus with the development of an organized silvo-pastoral element in the local economy. The Casentino, like the Garfagnana, was a classic instance of a 'mountain society' by the late Middle Ages. How far was it so pp. 6r8-8o8, shows settlement in this pan of the Archiano otherwise by now largely focused in the casteUi of Partina, Marciano, and Gressa (cf also Pasqui 859, a.r385, and, for general comment, Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario', pp. 88--92). Contrast the crisis of concentrated settlement in late medieval Tuscany as a whole; see references in Ch. I, n. 23. This is normally linked to the mezzadria and to appoderamento, the pattern of consolidated landholding characteristically associated with it. In the Casenrino there was some mezzadria Oones, 'Camaldoli, pp. 175-'7, 182), but it did not necessarily affect settlement; early poderi were old demesne farms, and could be rughly fragmented even in the sixteenth century Oones, 'Camaldoli', p. 176, n. I for Contra). Conri's figures, too, show how fragmented land was in the early sixteenth-century Casentino, more than anywhere else in the Florentine contado except the Valdambra in the south-eastern Chianti (though his criteria for fragmentation, it must be noted, are not the same as mine): Formazione iii. 2, pp. 345--94, esp. 367-8, 382- 3. But the growth of settlement by small owners in Marciano may have been combined with the appoderamento of the tenant-lands of Contra to leave the latter with only a handful of dispersed tenant-houses; in this case, late medieval appoderamento may actually have been facilitated by the concentration of settlement elsewhere. This latter concentration, the expansion of settlements like Marciano led by the local elite, contrasts very clearly with the emigration of local notables to the city recorded for thirteenth-century Passignano (Piesner, Emigrazione dalla campagna, pp. 129-51). Thirteenthcentury Arezzo did not, of course, have the drawing power of Florence. But which was more typical?

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before? I have stressed individual parallels and contrasts with the Garfagnana, as a model for the social and economic development of a valley in medieval Tuscany; to conclude, Jet us see how the Casentino fits that model as a whole. One point has to be made at once: the greater part of our documentation for the Casentino comes from one area in its centre, the Archiano valley, which is probably that part of the valley as a whole which is most similar in a strict ecological sense to the world of the plains. Camaldoli documents, focused on this area as they are, never give predominant attention to the silvo-pastoral economy, even in the fifteenth century, when elsewhere in the Casentino it was certainly flourishing. 41 But in all other respects it would be my contention that the Archiano is and was typical of the society and economy of the valley, even if it was at the end of the spectrum of local socio-economic types closest to those of the plain. Overall, it is the Archiano evidence that shows us most dearly how local society worked, and it is possible, from other more fragmentary indications, to extent the insights one gains from this area to other parts of the Casentino. In the Garfagnana, it was possible to produce a picture of a great arc of time, covering nearly a millennium, in which an aristocracy came and went, an independent peasantry survived, and an economic structure radically altered, under the impact of a newly coherent, urban-based, regional economic system. In the Casentino, because we have no documentation at all before 1000, and too much from the thirteenth century onwards, I have not attempted to replicate this arc; but if we step back from the material and look at it as a whole, the same patterns can be seen. In 1000, it is true, there was a fair amount of large landowning, fiscal and episcopal; nor did all of this entirely go away at the end of the Middle Ages, above all in the parts of the middle valley dominated by the Camaldoli estate in this respect, too, the middle Casentino was more like the plains than other parts of the valley. But outside the Camaldoli lands the cycle can be seen as clearly as in the Garfagnana. In neither case was the expansion of aristocratic power the one-way process that it is in some socio-economic circumstances, in mountains and plains 41

See Jones, 'Camaldoli', pp. 175- 82; Cherubini, 'Paesaggio agrario'.

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alike; indeed, aristocratic power did not by itself fundamentally alter the patterns and balances of free owners in either valley. But the documentation for the Casentino is rich enough for us to go beyond this formal pattern, to the content of local social structure. I have tried to analyse the reality of social relationships in the valley before and during the major moments of change: the moment of the crystallization of the local aristocracy and, more sketchily, that of the appearance of pastoralism as an economic system. I have tried to show that local society was not altered in the nature, the content, of its social interaction by these changes; but rather that they affected the outer framework of that interaction, formalizing it and giving it a territorial identity. The appearance of the silvo-pastoral economy would further formalize it, and indeed, make it more tense, more violent, for the force and therefore tension-of collective bonds was far more important in a pastoral economy: we will see the point emphasized most sharply in my discussion of Ariosto's Garfagnana in the Conclusion. But the content of local interaction stayed the same; the rivalries and equilibria between local social groups were the keys to society in the eleventh-century Casentino, as in the eighth- and sixteenthcentury Garfagnana. Would this have been the same outside the mountains? Yes and no. The eleventh-century Casentino was, like the Garfagnana earlier, merely a poorer and slighdy more isolated version of the economy and society of the plains. It could be argued that the patterns of local factions simply replicated those to be found elsewhere in Tuscany, although at present, in the absence of any serious discussions of the issue, I should perhaps better say that such factions could serve as a model for any future analysis elsewhere in Tuscany. At most, being in the mountains resUlted in a relative remoteness from city life; but even then, as we have seen (pp. 218-20), the Casentino was rather less remote from Arezzo than the middle of the Chianti was from Florence. The resQlt of studying a mountain society and economy in the eleventh century is a realization that socio-economic differences in that period do not relate at all exacdy to geographical ones. But even that realization is in itself significant. It constitutes a statement less about the unimportance of geographical differences than about the importance of the city as a potential focus for

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much of even local social life. Arezzo was a point of integration for the politics and society of the eleventh-century Casentino Aretino; it was that political dominance, above all represented by the power of the bishop, that brought mountain and plain together. T he Casentino Fiesolano, on the other hand, outside this orbit, was already developing in a more autonomous manner. This relative autonomy did not mean that the social structures of the Fiesolano were yet different from those of the Aretino; but the isolation of the upper valley, in geographical terms from Fiesole and in political terms from Arezzo, meant that future social development there would obey mountain rules: local balances of power were, outside the urban orbit, impossible to maintain. The cycle of aristocratic power was sharpest in the Fiesolano, which ended up more or less entirely under the dominance of the Guidi by I 200 or so, but then, at the end of the Middle Ages, returned to being a zone of almost totally independent peasantry. Even in the Casentino Aretino, the importance of the urban orbit had its limits. Although the Archiano valley was intimately linked to all the sets of political relationships, public, ecclesiastical and aristocratic, that looked to the city, via patterns ofland-tenure and personal dependence, it was at the margin of each network. After the ff. Berardi ceased to look towards the valley monasteries, and after the ff. Guillelmi expanded their outlook towards the diocesan politics of the Ubertini, there were no aristocratic families with a local interest; henceforth all the great landowners of the middle Casentino were absentee, and/or looked principally to Arezzo for their political orientation, except for the monasteries themselves. The valley was not yet socio-economically distinct from the lowlands around Arez:zo; but it was poorer and more distant from the city, and thus of less interest to the landowners whose land and political networks structured its society. As a result, the smaller local owners, whose equilibria were kept in being by that network, were more socially autonomous than their equals were closer to the city. They were closer to Arezzo than their contemporaries in the Chianti hills were to Florence; but their relative social distance from the city, by Aretine standards, was certainly a result of their location in the mountains. The point is most neatly summed up by the fact that so few Casentinesi outside the southern fringe of the valley gave land

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to urban churches; their generosity to the Church was all locally directed, to Prataglia and Camaldoli and Strumi. The factions we have looked at in the Archiano valley must have had their analogues elsewhere in the Aretino, but they are likely to have been more independent from the aristocracy than elsewhere; the impact of the aristocracy on Archiano society was relatively minor. This relative social distance from the landed elites, although balanced by the undeniable local influence of the valley monasteries, would eventually contribute to the slow retreat of the aristocracy in the middle Casentino, as well as in the Fiesolano. In the fifteenth century, the only major owner left there was Camaldoli. Here, too, a mountain society eventually triumphed in part. The importance of mountain geography for the definition of boundaries was relevant in the Aretino, too. The small scale of much of the social interaction we have seen links in quite clearly to the physical divisions between the tributaries of the upper Arno, the Corsolone, the Archiano, and the Sova. These differences would ipcrease when the economy changed, for the resources for each area became more specialized: pasture for the upper Corsolone, wood for the upper Archiano, agriculture for the lower Archiano, and so on. And this basic economic change, although, in the Casentino as in the Garfagnana, the product of an ever more integrated, urban-based regional economy, would bring the valley ever more closely into the frame of reference of Braudel's 'mountain civilization'. None the less, the roots of this civilization, the social relationships intrinsic . to it, were present in the society of the eleventh-century Casentino as well.

PART Ill

Gener al Concl usion

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Poverty and Freedom in the Mountains Ludovico Ariosto as Anthropologist Not enough work has yet been done to allow us to understand properly the workings of small-scale societies in medieval Europe. Only with the fourteenth century do studies of local social relationships, whether urban or rural, become at all common, and even then not common enough. Earlier, such discussions as exist are not much more than signal beams, shafts of light in the darkness, that we can at best use to pick our way by. We cannot get anywhere near synthesis, yet; how far individual societies were part of wider wholes cannot yet be seen. This book is about Tuscan rural societies; Tuscan rural society, at any time before 1300, is not a topic about which very much can so far be said. But it has been my intention to show that local studies, however small the areas they cover, can be the bases for wide hypotheses, that can be tested in the light of further work. I have not found it easy to write a book about two areas at once, but the writing of it has certainly forced me to compare their social structures in a more or less systematic manner, as, perhaps, a social anthropologist would do, and thus to formulate hypotheses of this kind. It is, indeed, only through such comparisons that one can come to have views on whether one's research areas are typical or atypical-the first step from the study of societies to the study of society.l The two valleys I have looked at were sometimes very similar, and sometimes differed greatly in their historical development. My approach to each of them has varied, too. My discussions of the Garfagnana have, in general, been posed explicitly in terms of the issue of the typicality of its history in the context of that of the Lucchesia as a whole. Those for the Casentino Conti, Formazione i, pp. 192- 210 recognizes the issue of comparison, and follows it up in the context of the Fiorentino. 1

General Conclusion have been focused on a slightly different problem: the workings of local social structures in themselves, analysed as closely as possible. Let us look at what sorts of contrasting patterns have been found as a result. In the first section of this Conclusion, we will look at the general problem of how small-scale societies worked; we will then go on to the other principal concern of the book, the nature of mountain society and its relationship to the city. The main focus of this book has been the society of the village. Sometimes this has been a society of tenants, their stratification .traced through the differing terms of ecclesiastical leases; but most of my analysis has been concentrated on small and medium landowners--owner-cultivators and landlords with no more than a few tenants: on what would elsewhere in early medieval Europe be sometimes called the 'free peasantry' These owners are themselves largely visible through the land they gave to churches; but I have argued that, except for special cases like Campori in the eighth- and ninth-century Garfagnana (where a family, in effect, surrendered all its land to the bishop in exchange for support as the permanent village elite), these owners rarely ceded more than a fraction of their land away. The most that one could say is that documented landowners generally had precise social and religious relationships with a particular church; the church gained ground at their expense, but seldom threatened their existence. Villages with high percentages of small and medium owners must have been very common in early medieval Tuscany, judging by the characteristic patterns of almost every cartulary and charter collection I have ever seen; I would reckon-although this certainly remains to be demonstratedthat they outnumbered villages all or mostly owned by great landowners, whether ecclesiastical or secular And common they remained, for a long time; it was probably not until after 1300 that such smaller owners generally lost ground to larger estates, above all in the great mezzadria areas around Florence and Siena. We cannot easily generalize about the social structure of these relatively independent villages, however; not only because we do not have sufficient studies, but also because those that have been studied, in this book and elsewhere, were themselves so far from homogeneous. Monte and Contra, two centres barely a kilometre apart in the middle Casentino, had considerably 0

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differing patterns of ownership in the eleventh century. The former was controlled by large to medium owners, with few owner-cultivators; the latter, by contrast, had few or no inhabitants at all who did not cultivate the bulk of the land they owned. Social relationships inside each village were correspondingly diverse. And if we want to go further in our analyses, we run into a further difficulty, one of evidence. By pre-thirteenth-century Tuscan standards, my documentation is good, especially in the Casentino, but it is very limited in type; far too much about the workings of society can never be discovered from heavily formulaic documents of sale, gift, or lease of land. The nature of the sources has forced me to focus on particular sorts of social relationship, those that have some reflection in the transfer of land. I have singled out three of these in particular as relevant to my discussions, in that they are issues that have particular resonance in rural society generally: local patronage and the structure of factions; the nature of political power; and the changing patterns of territorial identity. These relationships certainly varied from area to area, even village to village; but if we are careful about the terms which we use to make comparisons, we can begin to construct generalizations about small-scale societies from the bottom up: this is how, allowing for local differences, patronage and power worked in eight villages in the middle Casentino; this is how they tended to operate in the valley as a whole; this is the slightly different way the model works when applied to the Garfagnana, and so on. With care, and with some imagination, we could begin to construct statements that had some truth for Tuscany in general. And, in my view, this procedure, however complex, is the only valid way of achieving generalizations of that kind: no unity can be understood without first apprehending the differences within it. Villages in Italy were rarely ruled by an easy consensus; they were (and are) normally the loci of deep-rooted oppositions. These may have had their origins in family relationships and rivalries; but they generally spread across other social networks, to encompass all village members, thus becoming factions in more, or less, stable form. Not that consensus and collective decision were set aside. They were carefully assumed by enough late medieval rural statutes, for example, for us to have to

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recognize their ideological force; and this ideology was given some rationale by the need for such communes to present a solid front to the outside world, whether other villages or lords or the ever more intrusive State.2 But the need for consensus in itself indicates the fear of the consequences of disagreement; in their internal life, villages were generally divided. Indeed, the more socially and economically important the collective activity of the village, the more there was to fight over, and the more tense internal relationships were. Such divisions were not necessarily along class lines. There was more likely to be class solidarity in villages consisting entirely of tenants, where economic divisions were clear, than in the relatively independent villages we have been looking at. In the latter, most people owned at least some of their own land, and even the division between landowner and tenant was unclear, the tenants of one owner often being the landlords of others; the borders between exploiters and exploited were often blurred nearly to invisibility. But these villages were not communities of equals, even setting aside the substantial stratum of non-landowning tenants, further divided by varying degrees of tenurial dependence. Where factional opposition exists, any other lines of tension will become subsumed into it; and, as in cities in the same period, the factions we have seen in operation in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Casentino do seem to have been defmed by socio-economic differences. Different sets of social strata were thus aligned on different sides; rough economic equals, linked by bonds of co-operation and probably also marriage, stayed together, but were themselves linked to other groups, whether richer or poorer, by relationships of patronage. The oppositions inside the Casentino villages can be seen most clearly through two relatively well-documented processes. The first is the operation of the 'land market', which seems to have been a social activity as much as an economic one, largely directed towards the cementing of links between relative equals. The second is the alienation of land to the local monasteries, which constitutes, as I have argued, our clearest evidence for the 2

See Reynolds, Kingdcms and Communities, pp. IOI- S4, for this and other

problems of community identity, although she over-stresses, it seems to me, the force of consensus and the extent of popular consent to the typical forms of medieval government.

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patterns of local clienteles. The latter is the more fully evidenced, and I have discussed it at greater length. It can be shown that the alienations to Prataglia and Camaldoli were from specific social strata in each village, and that other strata did not cede land to the monasteries at all. Whether the relatively rich or the relatively poor linked themselves to a monastery in an individual village was largely a matter of chance; but once one group did, others would choose not to. These contrasts must be those of local oppositions, coming to be structured by monastic patronage. Lesser strata doubtless associated themselves with the Church as a defence against local elites, who, in many of the eleventh-century middle Casentino villages, included the richest locally-owning family, the ff. Guillelmi, the core of the future aristocratic family of the Ubertini. Elsewhere, however, an association with the Church was as likely to be the prerogative of the local elites themselves, seeking an outside confirmation for their own power. This was often enough true in other parts of the Casentino, the south and those parts of the north dominated by the clientele network of the Guidi; we have also seen it in the eighth- and ninth-century Garfagnana. It should be stressed that the gap of time between the eighth and the eleventh centuries is not as problematic for the establishment of such comparisons as one might think, for each was the major period of one of the two cycles of early medieval alienations to churches, not only in Tuscany but in much of the rest of Italy, and the patterns of gift-giving were in each case largely alike. (It is the tenth century that causes problems, for then, in the absence of extensive alienations, how villages organized themselves socially in Tuscany is in effect invisible.) Conversely, the homogeneity of the patterns of gift-giving in two separate centuries and in two separate dioceses is a strong argument in favour of the conclusion that the way factions worked in the villages that I have looked at may well characterize much of early medieval Tuscany, at least in villages of small owners. This is one hypothesis that needs further attention. The clientelar patterns bring us to the second of my interests here, the nature of local political power. Churches achieved local influence and wealth as a result of their clienteles, but rarely, in our villages, local dominance. They were, after all, only linked to a part of each village. Other inhabitants may have lud

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sufficient local standing to act themselves as a counterweight to ecclesiastical influence; if not, they probably associated themselves with the aristocracy, whether urban or plains-based, as usually in the Garfagnana, or valley-dwelling, as was sometimes the case in the Casentino. How much direct power aristocrats themselves had is not entirely dear, for we rarely have a documentation particularly closely linked t~ them; but an aristocracy, almost by definition, is at least influential enough to leave a trace even in evidence focused on other social groups, and we can say something about them. They held a lot of land, even if it was generally spread widely, and they had, and were prepared to use, armed men, the essential base of all effective local power. In the Garfagnana, they often gained rights to local tithe, which allowed the establishment of political influence over other owners, not just over tenants; and, from the eleventh century in both valleys- perhaps more in the Casentino than in the Garfagnana- they began to obtain signorial rights, most particularly over justice, which further reinforced their landowning, and extended their power over increasingly defined local territories. Even this, however, did not necessarily lead to aristocratic dominance over village society. It did in some places, in the upper valleys of both the Garfagnana and the Casentino; in the former, the Gherardinghi and probably the Dalli held a stable hegemony over a few villages for a couple of centuries in the central Middle Ages; in the latter valley, virtually the whole upper third of the Amo basin was a single signoria, in the hands of the Guidi, between the early twelfth and the late fourteenth century. But each valley was split between two dioceses, the upper valleys being isolated corners of the territorially incoherent dioceses of Luni and Fiesole, the lower being controlled by the important cities of Lucca a:nd Arezzo. The political weight of these latter centres was such that the diocesan aristocracy could never wholly abandon them. Single aristocratic families (or family groupings) held land and signorial rights over wide areas; they were dominant because of a breadth of political influence that established them on a diocesan scale. The corollary was that they were less often dominant in individual localities. I have argued that landowning, rather than signorial rights, was the key to local control; but there is no reason to suppose that many

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villages in either valley were ever wholly or mostly owned by single aristocrats, any more than they were by the Church. Nor did aristocrats need such ownership; it was diocesan and urban power they wanted, far more than the control of individual villages; it was not necessary for them to put in the considerable effort required to turn tenurial power into the direct domination of local life, either through the patronage network or by armed force. And such an effort was indeed considerable, not only because of the possibility of village resistance, but also, perhaps above all, because of the interest of one's local rivals; we have seen the point made most clearly in the long-drawn-out but ultimately unsuccessful attempt made by the Guidi to establish a signoria in Moggiona (above, pp. 322- 3}. Thus the aristocracy, like the Church, however powerful as a whole, rarely came to control the social structures of the villages we have been looking at; they merely added another stratum to those already existing in the villages, another element to complicate the factional network. The importance of the cities of Lucca and Arezzo is a constant element in the history of both our valleys at all periods from the eighth century, at the latest, onwards, and needs some discussion here. The aristocracy of the two dioceses remained very visibly orientated towards the cities throughout our period. This may not be so surprising for Lucca, the major centre of pre-twelfth-century Tuscany; Arezzo, on the other hand, was just a second-rank provincial town, with at most more political autonomy from Lucca and the marquises then many. If even Arezzo could dominate its diocese, right up to its mountain extremities, then one could argue that urban society was always dominant in the northern half of Tuscany. I have suggested that it may well be Florence that was the exception among the Amo cities of the period in having so little influence in its diocese before the late twelfth century, following Conti's discussion of the absence of urban owning in the eleventh-century Chianti. 3 If this is so, then it is an intriguing and probably significant paradox that Florence, of all the major cities, had the greatest s Conti, Formazione i, p. 170. Plesner, it should be noted, aheady argued for the coherence of !he Fiorentino, along similar lines to mine for Lucca: Emigrazione dalla campagna, pp. II4- 19. I do not think he is right though; more work needs to be done here.

General Conclusion 354 social separation between city and countryside before its sudden rise to regional supremacy in the century and a half after I 1 so. Exactly what characterizes the relationship between city and countryside is, of course, highly complex. It is likely that the strictly economic interdependence between cities and their territories was not so very great before the twelfth century. The itiunediate hinterland of cities was enough to feed them before then, and the impact of urban economic needs beyond that would have been largely restricted to the estates of the great urban landowners, secular and ecclesiastical; the major economic role of the city for its diocese as a whole was probably only as a market centre, for relative luxuries, at least until the great expansion of the crafts after 1200. But in political and ideological terms, the dominance of the cities over their dioceses was far older. In Lucca at least (we do not have the documentation for other cities) it already-or still existed in the eighth century; in other cities it was certainly present when documents begin, . usually in the eleventh. The political hegemony of both Lucca and Arezzo as cities was closely associated with the ideological hegemony of their bishops. Thus an early illustration of Lucchese influence is the acceptance by eighth-century notables, all over · the diocese, including its mountain fringe, that it was natural for their own private churches to end up in the hands of the bishop, either through reversion clauses in the original foundation or by subsequent gift (above, p. 44). The whole association between patronage, status-seeking, and gifts to the Church was, right from the start, focused on the city. And this early focusing was the direct cause of the slow extension of episcopal landowning in the Garfagnana that was itself the basis for the later episcopal (urban) dominance there, and that was the origin of the great cycle of rising and then falling aristocratic power in the valley, discussed at the end of the first part of this book (pp. 144-50). Nor is this association between episcopal and urban dominance arbitrary; the two were tightly linked from the start in Lucca, through the long monopoly of the episcopal office by the urban aristocracy. The political structure of Lucca was coherently focused right from the earliest parchment documents surviving in medieval Italy. And it never broke down; even at its lowest point of political influence, around I 100, the city was still the

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major centre of the diocese, largely a result, then as earlier, of the landowning patterns of both Church and aristocracy. It is an important aspect of my arguments that these phenomena are all related: that, despite the local influence of bishop, monasteries, and lay aristocrats, the relative social independence of most of the villages I have studied can be directly associated with the relative importance to landowners of a diocesan politics, and the relative unimportance to them, for the establishment of their overall social and political position, of the possibilities of local control. The son of political fragmentation of a county or diocese into coherent signorial blocs, inside each of which a lord was supreme over tenants and owners alike, the model that Georges Duby has made famous for much of France, did not occur in the Lucchesia and the Aretino. 4 But there were changes in the exercise of power in eleventh- and twelfth-century Tuscany nevenheless. Signorial rights, however economically marginal, did come to be controlled by private persons; the aristocracy, however urban, did build castelli all over the countryside, which came to have defined territories; the public framework of the Carolingian state, however quickly reassembled by the city communes, did at last temporarily break down. What effect did these changes have at the level of the village? I would argue that the principal changes in village social structures corresponding to these developments were formal: the outward shaping of social relationships altered, rather than their content. Outside landowners were certainly more powerful in villages once they had acquired signorial rights over them, for instance; the structures of patronage and clientele became more important, too, and, as a result of the growth of 'feudal' terminology, a great deal more formalized. Power relationships were probably a great deal clearer. Hierarchies were, for that matter, themselves more clearly characterized: the division between aristocratic and non-aristocratic was far more explicit than it had ever been before, as military activity came to be seen as characterizing an elite instead of defming the obligations of all free men. I have argued (pp. 289-92) that in reality the line was still blurred, as local notables took on the trappings of aristocracy without being able to turn themselves into independent powers in their own right; but the existence of the 4

e.g. Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 224- 3r; cf above, Ch. n, n. r3.

General Conclusion 356 division, at least on the level of how society was understood, is undoubted. But this new clarity of definition of political relationships did not mean that the content of faction and clientship greatly changed. Land remained the key to local power, and single outside powers never gained enough of it to enable them to crush the independent activities of village owners. The oppositions visible inside the Archiano villages at the beginning of the eleventh century were still there at the beginning of the thirteenth. The new political patterns defined the oppositions more dearly; they did not absorb them. It was in this context, too, that we must understand the slow crystaliization of the territorial boundaries of community activity and identity. It is increasingly recognized that one of the most important differences between every aspect of European rural society in, say, 900 and 1200, is the greater formality of all sorts of boundaries in the latter year than in the former: the boundary of the aristocratic world itself, as we have just seen; the boundaries between different families, both aristocratic and non-aristocratic, . . which resulted in a new importance for lineage relationships and surnames, and which sharply reduced the independent activity of women; and the boundaries between village and village, that ensured for each a more coherent and explicit identity, which in Italy eventually crystallized into the organizational autonomy represented by the rural commune. These latter boundaries are m~ch more visible in the Casentino in 1000 than they had been in the Garfagnana in 8oo, and in both valleys they are more explicit still by 1200. The Casentino villages became, more and. more dearly, the major loci for local activity. Those of the middle Archiano valley, with their tiny territories of a square kilometre or so apiece, covered evenly by a dispersed settlement pattern, were already in 1000 entirely coherent social centres, with marked differences in political/religious orientation (towards Prataglia or towards Camaldoli). The transference of formal patterns of power from the ·level of the diocese to the level of the village (above, pp. 33s-6) had already begun. The building of churches, the establishment of the boundaries of signorie, which directed much public activity into the village (at least when, as was often the case, the signoria and the village had the same dimensions) and, later on, the growth of the (collectively .·

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controlled) silvo-pastoral economy all contributed to this territorial formalization. By the late twelfth century, we find village boundary disputes in both our valleys; the precise extent of these territories had evidently become important. The fmal ·crystallization, into the patterns of the rural commune, was about to take place. Villages all over Tuscany experienced this same slow focusing of territorial identity. It represented a real change in political patterns, too, as the appearance of the rural commune provided for the frrst time a firm structure of power for local elites to settle into and quarrel over, even in the plains, where, unlike in the mountains, communes did not derive economic weight from the increasingly important collective exploitation of woodland and pasture. But even these changes did not transform the social structures of the villages of small owners that are our principal concern. The commune, like the signoria, very largely represented a new formal framework for relationships inside villages that were much older. Factional oppositions sharpened, but did not change in type. The key to rural continuity was still the ownership of land; while peasants in half the villages of Tuscany were in large part proprietors, these transformations, immense though they may seem, only affected them externally. The real blow to rural autonomy would come, not with the establishment of the signoria, but with the renewed and far-reaching expansion of urban landowning from the late thirteenth century onwards. Only then would the still surviving peasant owners of our valleys cease to be in any sense characteristic of Tuscany. In the foregoing , I have described the villages I have been principally looking at in terms that could be generalized to fit Tuscany as a whole. If one reconstructs a framework of patronage linked in a certain way to the church at Campori in the Garfagnana, and one find a similar one in Lunata in the Lucca plain, or if one can show that factions in · the Archiano valley operate very similarly to those in the Valdichiana marshes running south from Arezzo, one cannot be blamed for thinking that the parallelisms may be exact, that the same social relationships apply in each. But there are problems in such a conclusion. Go and look at them, and one's certainties will weaken. Surely there must be differences between a scattered

General Conclusion but prosperous village in the rich river-mud of the Lucca plain, a few kilometres from the city, and a small huddle of houses at the bottom of a steep wooded hillslope, on the winding road up to the high pass over to Modena, its closest point of reference the by no means imposing valley centre of Castelnuovo? Travel around Tuscany, even just the northern plains and fertile hill margins, and the diversity one will find will make one wonder why it should be the case that anything is ever true of the region as a whole: or, rather, since there are ways in which diverse parts of Tuscany have a remarkably similar history, how this similarity could ever have come about. Geography in the raw presents problems for the social historian. There may be good reasons why two mountain villages, similarly placed, with similar communications and economic resources, may be very different: they may have different patterns of landowning, or, in our period, lords with a greater or lesser involvement in village affairs, or a multitude of other social or political or religious contrasts. But, whereas two mountain villages may not be alike, the odds seem, at least on the surface, far more against the likelihood that a village in the mountains and another in the plains should be structurally similar, for the latter will almost always have such a totally different relationship with its . envtronment. It was this geographical contrast between mountain and plain, so evident today, that persuaded me to undertake a study of the Appennines in the ftrst place, in Abruzzo and Molise and then, in this book, in Tuscany. It presents questions that, on early medieval evidence, are virtually unanswerable. But they must be confronted, above all in the early medieval period, for in that period, unlike later, Tuscany was not in any sense moulded into the regional economy that has created the environment we can ourselves observe, with its various pieces, however socio-economically diverse, interlocking with and reacting on each other.s In the early Middle Ages, that is to say, we cannot make any of the assumptions about mountain-plain relationships that we are used to reading back into the past from contemporary experience. None the less, unless we make some attempt at the See Malanima, 'Origini di un'economia regionale', pp. 265--9 for its slow and Late development. 5

•

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reconstruction of early medieval geographical rules, we will get nowhere in our attempts to decide under what circumstances the history of a single village can contribute to that of a wider area. The first, and major, respect in which mountain environments are different from those of the cultivated plains is economic. Not, however, in ways that are necessarily obvious. Mountain areas are poorer and more marginal than most plain-lands in the Mediterranean. But, in part as a result, they are much less stable in their agricultural activities than the plains are. The plain of Lucca has not changed very greatly in its physiognomy since the eighth century, if one sets aside the specialized vegetable farming and the light industry. The Garfagnana, however, has been economically transformed, twice, through the rise and the subsequent collapse of its chestnut and sheep-pasture economy, in the twelfth and twentieth centuries. The sense of immemoriality that one can persuade oneself to feel when looking at a technologically 'backward' society in the Mediterranean is particularly spurious in mountain ·regions, which as a result of their very marginality are peculiarly sensitive to commercial pressures, so far as to be capable of altering their very geography to fit them. 6 Mountain economic specialities, such as the wool production of the Tuscan and Abruzzese Appennines, are orientated to the market; they are not subsistence strategies. I have argued that the silvo-pastoral economy, although it is dearly linked with an autonomous cultural identity for mountain communities, entails systematic economic links with the plains, and indeed economic dominance by the plains. Plainsmen did not control the sheep production of the Garfagnana and Casentino itself, but they certainly controlled its outlets. Only at the very end of the period I have discussed, however-around I I so in the Garfagnana, around 1250 in the Casentino-did this economic system, and the mountain-plain economic integration it presupposed, actually appear. The silvo-pastoraf economy has been Such an imagery can be found in most accounts of mountains, including those written by professional historians. Even Braudel lent himself to such a reading in his mountain descriptions, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean WMld i, pp. 38-53, though he himself, expert on the lonF durte, knew better (e.g. pp. 101-2). 6

General Conclusion the end-point of my discussions, rather than their focus. What came before was rather different. The mountain economy of early medieval Tuscany was, indeed, the exact opposite of this pattern. It was a subsistence economy, dominated by mixed cultivation. It was very like that of the Tuscan plains, with at most fewer olives and more animals (though animals themselves were commoner on the plains than they would be later). The major difference between the two was perhaps simply that land in the mountains was less productive; otherwise, the types of resource of both mountain and plain in early medieval Tuscany were almost identical. Of course, such a similarity meant that there was relatively litde direct exchange between the two; but, conversely, this continuum of resources was the basis for a relative cultural homogeneity across each diocese, which helped each city to extend its hegemony into its mountain valleys. Indeed, in the arena of both political and cultural life, the cities were supreme, thanks to the bishop and the urban landowning classes, who owned extensively in each of our valleys. In this sense, too, the mountains were at one with the plains in the early Middle Ages, and (as later, but for different reasons) under their dominance. It is this network of associations, in fact, that makes it possible to postulate for that ·.period the similarities between plains and mountain villages that I discussed i.ti the first part of the Conclusion. The corollary, however, is that it is on these associations that such similarities depended. . I proposed, in the context of the Abruzzo, a set of models for mountain (or, at least, Appennine) societies: that they tend to be poorer, more clearly bounded, more dosed in on themselves than those of the plains; and that they tend to extreme solutions, favouring relatively simple social structures, either of unusual tenurial independence (the 'Braudel model' of a homogeneous society of peasant owners, poor but free)' or of unusually powerful lordship, with valley lords ruling unopposed over the dependent populace (the 'Count Dracula model', one might call it). Not all moun~ain societies are precisely like this, but their geographical .constraints at least create a situational logic that makes these patterns more likely; if they do not happen, we 7

Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, pp. 38- 41

General Conclusion should try to explain why.s Now, the similarities between mountain and plains societies in early medieval Tuscany were, as I said, exceptionally great. The Tuscan Appennines were certainly not at any extreme in tenurial terms, thanks to the intricacies of the landowning structures there. Small and medium owners were protected by a complex balance of landowning in both the Garfagnana and the Casentino, a complexity supposedly more characteristic of the hinterlands of cities than of up-<:ountry valleys. But this in itself points to the strikingly powerful influence of the urban, and in particular episcopal, political structure in both our valleys. I have several times stressed that this shows how they form a limiting case for early medieval Tuscan urban power: if the cities (or, at least, Lucca and Arezzo) could control mountain-land up to the limits of the diocesan boundary, to such an extent that the boundary itself marked a caesura within the societies of both valleys, then one can conclude that urban hegemony over each diocese was widely generalized. In this case, above all, mountain society acts as a mirror to that of the plains: one can see the lineaments of urban and lowland society reflected in the affairs of the inhabitants of Castelnuovo and Soci, and, indeed, one cannot understand the mountains at all until one recognizes the existence of that urban reflection. But this does not mean that my Abruzzese models are wholly inapplicable to the early medieval Tuscan Appennines. The unification of mountain and plain was not complete. Garfagnana landowners, in their gifts to urban churches in the eighth century, certainly responded to the cultural attraction of the city of Lucca, but that was the last time they did so. Thereafter, the lack of close economic integration between mountains and city meant that links between the two were restricted to the levels of politics and landownership, and, in particular, to the largely urban social groups that owned land in both mountains and plain. The impact of the city on the valley continued to be considerable, but it all came from the city's side; the fact that the revival of gift-giving to city churches in the eleventh century scarcely involved any inhabitants of the Garfagnana at all shows in itself how far its inhabitants had by then fallen out of the Lucchese cultural orbit. Similarly, in the Casentino, where we do have plenty of 8 Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. I r- 12, 43- 4, roo-s.

General Conclusion eleventh-century gift-giving, it is striking that only in the far south of the valley was it directed to urban rather than to valley institutions. A cultural gap was here beginning to emerge. Even from the standpoint of the city, the links were imperfect. Bishops and urban landowners certainly owned in the mountains; but, precisely because the mountains were merely a poorer version of the plains, they were the least regarded part of the urban resource network. It was largely Garfagnana land that ~e bishops of Lucca ceded to aristocrats first and most completely, and land on the Lucca plain that they kept hold of most tenaciously. As for the Casentino, the bishop of Arezzo had a free hand up to the diocesan boundary whenever he chose to exercise it, but we cannot actually see him doing so very often; his interventions were no more than the minimum necessary to protect his interests. The ff. Guillelmi, the valley's bestdocumented local landowning family in the eleventh century, left the Casentino when they gained the wide connections that were their basis as the Ubertini, and thereafter saw it as a minor part of their landed base. The Guidi, conversely, were forced into living in the upper valley only late, well into the twelfth century, as a result of the attrition of their richer lands elsewhere.9 Only the valley monasteries of Prataglia and Camaldoli were always based on, rather than owning in, the mountains; only they saw valley landowning as essential to their power. The political integration of the valleys into their dioceses was therefore both paradoxical and mcomplete. The extent of a large-scale but fragmented landowning by a variety of different owners in both the Garfagnana and the Casentino created a tenurial balance that inhibited the growth of coherent local lordships, just like around the cities. But the inhabitants of the valleys, abOve all medium and small owners, were thus preserved, even if by a city-orientated landowning structure, to behave as autonomously as they chose; they were not only in economic terms independent of the urban network, but also in political terms relatively neglected by urban interests. Outside forces certainly had the power to intervene in our valleys, as is made clear, for example, by the details of the 1216 Camaldoli hearings (above, p. 329); but, by and large, they did not do so. Both 9

Sestan, 'Conti Guidi', pp. 358-63.

General Conclusion valleys had their own political culture, with local notaries and local elites. These elites formed part of the clientelar network spreading out from the city, but they were in no sense dominated by the requirements of that network. This is certainly in contrast with the plains villages around both Lucca and Arezzo in the eleventh century, whose elites of smaller owners were far more closely linked to the clienteles of the city; they, at least, gave land to urban churches. We have a set of patterns for the early medieval mountains, then, that, although in almost all respects homologous with that of the plains, had a different content. Factions in the mountains were locally orientated, even if linked to the wider politics of the diocese; so indeed were those of the plains. But those of the mountains were more autonomous. The petty notables of the twelfth century in Marciano and Partina were clients of aristocrats, but their lords were absentee; they needed no one's permission to harass the lands of Camaldoli and Prataglia. Their immediate descendants were the core of the rural communes of the Casentino, and, more distantly, would doubtless have been the principal beneficiaries of the new economic opportunities and independent cultural world of the silvo-pastoral economy. When the latter appeared, however, the small and medium owners of the valley, even if preserved by the influence of the city, were beyond doubt turning into something new. As the city grew more distant, so the mountain rules I derived from my Abruzzo material become more visible. The lack of balance in a mountain society is very apparent in the upper valleys of both the Garfagnana and the Ca5entino, where aristocrats did gain an unchallenged hegemony in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Once the Guidi began to focus their attention on the acquiring of lands and, above all, signorial rights in the Casentino Fiesolano, there was no one there to stop them. Indeed, they began to extend their power into the Aretino, and picked up most of the rights of the Ubertini in the middle valley in the thirteenth century. By then, the complexity of the balance of power was breaking down there, too; it was probably only the solid network of Camaldolese estates that prevented the Guidi from becoming the lords of the whole of the Casentino. It is quite likely, on the other hand, that the Camaldolesi, with their vast landowning, could by then have established themselves

General Conclusion as lords of the Archiano valley much as the Guidi did further up the Arno; it may well have been only the indifference of the hermitage to the possibilities of such local political power that prevented it from doing so. The Archiano valley is fertile land; in economic terms it is close to lowland norms. But in terms of its socio-political framework it was as much part of the mountain environment as anywhere else in the Casentino, with high forest around it and the narrows below Bibbiena separating it from Arezzo; if it did not match the upper valley in its pull towards the signoria, this was more to do with the chance of Camaldoli's spiritual detachment than to its own agricultural prosperity. In the late Middle Ages, when the tide of signorial power receded in both valleys, the Archiano, thanks to the survival of Camaldoli's landed properties, remained an exception; elsewhere, however, both in the Casentino and the Garfagnana, the balance of power was upset again: the end of aristocratic rule was at least as total as its former victory. Peasant proprietors were left locally dominant, in a pattern that would prevail until the present day. And it was the experience of these small owners, structured by the silvo-pastoral economy, that would be the basis for the whole imagery of the ' mountain civilization' of the late medieval and modern Appennines. The mountains of the Italian peninsula are not, then, necessarily pastoral, necessarily independent of the plains, necessarily 'poor but free' as in the Braudelian model, or, conversely, necessarily particularly subject to lords. But they have an underlying structure that allows them to develop such tendencies, if the moment is appropriate. The Tuscan ·Appennines in the early medieval period were very dissimilar to the Abruzzese Appennines, but by the sixteenth century this dissimilarity had almost totally vanished. The latter were by then largely dominated by lords, unlike in Tuscany, but the same rules for local social structures were clearly working in each. ·Beneath the surface influence of the Tuscan cities, we can discern some of these rules in the early Middle Ages, too. It is true that mountain societies are generally relatively remote and poor, and that they have a certain minimum autonomy derivecJ simply from the lack of enthusiasm plainsmen have for going up into them; they were not more enticing in the early Middle Ages just because they were less strange than they would be later. Mountain societies

General Conclusion are always, then, distinguishable from those of the plains and generally, in both geographical and social terms, more closed in on themselves than plains societies will be. (Our valleys may always have had close links over the watershed with the upper valleys of Emilia and the Romagna, links which became in the late Middle Ages of considerable political and economic importance; but they were still socially separate from, and often hostile to, these kindred societies.) For all the influence of the cities on our valleys, an influence which structured the entire histories of both of them for centuries, we cannot entirely divorce these histories from those of mountains elsewhere. No 'Appennine society' may ever have existed in the early Middle Ages, but a matrix of social tendencies characteristic of the Appennines elsewhere can be delineated even in the Garfagnana and the Casentino, long the most urbanized of valleys.lO We are thus left with a balance. The history of our two valleys belongs to the Appennines as a whole as much as, but no more than, it does to Tuscany. The self-identity of the mountains and the political, social, economic, and cultural influence of the cities must be recognized as coexisting, at every stage in the history of the Tuscan Appennines, in opposition to each other. But one can go further: the interrelation of mountains and city can be seen as delineating, in reflection, the development of Tuscany as a whole. Not only can one not understand the mountains without recognizing the influence of the city, but one cannot understand the history of any Tuscan city without seeing it against the background of the mountains. The mountain slopes that hang over every Tuscan city from Arezzo down to Lucca hang over their past, civic culture or no, in equal measure. To conclude, let us look at a final concrete example, a micro-historical vignette, or, if you prefer, a bit of light relief after the foregoing resolutely structural discussion. It comes from the history of the Garfagnana at the very end of the cycle of aristocratic power that I have outlined, the sixteenth century, by which time the valley was once again dominated by a landowning peasantry. Its details will thus allow us to look back with hindsight on that cycle, and on some of the social 10

Cf. W ickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp.

II- I J.

General Conclusion relationships discussed in this Conclusion; we will be able, indeed, to get an idea of how far these relationships would change as time went on. On 7 February I 522, Ludovico Ariosto was nominated commissario of the Garfagnana Estense by the duke of Ferrara, Alfonso I. The Este parts of the Garfagnana, once the Ferrarese conquest of the 1430s was stabilized, covered some three-quarters of the valley, excluding only Barga, which was Florentine, the hills around Coreglia, which formed the northern edge of the State of Lucca, and a handful of Lucchese outposts in the middle and upper valley, notably Castiglione and Gorfigliano. In political terms, the Garfagnana was still a frontier, but the capital of the State that included it had moved from Lucca, so km down the valley to the south, to Ferrara, 200 km to the north-east over the .watershed, and far less accessible. Ariosto hated it, for the whole of his three-and-a-half-year stay; he felt helpless, with too few soldiers to control the local brigands, and constantly undermined by the ducal habit of pardoning malefactors in return for often-broken promises to live in peace in the future. But he wrote a lot about it: there survive over 1 so letters, mostly to the duke, explaining the events of the valley in detail. In so doing he was only following the normal procedure for commissari; but his accuracy and profusion of detail are unequalled by his predeceSsors and successors, who, furthermore, not having been poets as well, have not had the benefit of the careful publication of and commentary on their despatches that we have for Ariosto. Ariosto was and remained an outsider in the Garfagnana; but he came to know the valley, much as an anthropologist would today, and his observations remain, in their hostile impartiality, the best single source for the way local political power related to conflict. 11 The basic source for this section is Angelo Stella's 1965 edition of Ludovico Ariosto, Lettere, which I shall refer to by letter number. Sforza, Documenti intditi, edits some other relevant texts, including letters to and from some of Ariosto's predecessors. Most general discussion of Ariosto's term of office is appalling; the only three studies I have found to be useful are Campori, Notizie per la vita di Ariosto; Rombaldi, 'Ariosto commissario generale'; and Spaggiari, 'Carte relative al commissariato di Ariosto'. Berengo, Nobili e ~canti, esp. pp. 321-56, gives a marvellous survey of the Lucchese mountains in this period, which is fully valid for the Garfagnana Estense; see ibid., p. 347 n. for comments on other commissari. For local political narrative in the 11

..

General Conclusion Ariosto's major preoccupations were two: communal boundary disputes and brigandage. The latter will be at the centre of my discussions.1 2 It has always been the most noticeable feature of the poet's letters, and, indeed, the Ariostean picture of illegality and violence has often been used simply as a quarry for examples of mountain turbulence and brigandage at its most picturesque. But the society Ariosto describes is a living one; it is not he who romanticizes it. If we look at his material more closely, we can see how some of the structures of local support and opposition outlined in the rest of this book can be seen working. Ariosto was sent to the Garfagnana at a special time. The 1 )<>OS-15205 were among the least stable decades of Italian history, and the Ferraresi were heavily involved in the wars of the period. So was the Garfagnana; indeed, the Este lands there had briefly been under papal and Florentine control, which was only ended when the notables of Castelnuovo took the castle there by a ruse in December 1521 , two months before Ariosto's appointment. Much of the Este lands on the northern side of the watershed were still in papal hands; and the Emilian Appennines were largely under the control of Domenico di Amorotto, one of the fastest-rising brigands of the century, who had between 1512 and his death in 1523 acquired a number of offices and fiefs from the popes as the basis for his local power in the territory of Reggio. Ariosto was largely cut off from Ferrara, and the duke was too hard-pressed in money and manpower to give him much support; nor could he get it from the local inhabitants, who objected to paying for more soldiers out of their own pockets. 1S The tensions of the period could easily be seen as contributing to the continual violence of Ariosto's tenure; Domenico di Amorotto had several hundred men in the frignano, far more than the commissario had, and he and his Emilian allies and rivals often sent men to help out the period, see de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', pp. 203- 36. 12 I use the word ' brigand' instead of 'bandit' throughout this section (except where I discuss secondary works on bandits) simply to avoid confusion, for the Italian word bandito technically only means 'outlaw'. Ariosto certainly tends to use the word in its technical sense, though his generic banditi were not necessarily all outlaws. For brigands in the period in general, see Cherubini, 'Appunti sul brigantaggio'. 13 Lettere 64 is the clearest example.

368

General Conclusion

brigands and outlaws of the Garfagnana; Ariosto had to treat with him as an equa}.l4 The oppositions between the Italian states, too, had their exact analogue in the factions (parti) of the valley, which were called 'Italian' (i.e. pro-Florence and the papacy) and 'French' (i.e. pro-Ferrara and its French allies). But the relationship between the wars and the valley factions must not be exaggerated. Domenico's men were more interested in the high politics of the Emilian cities than in the thin pickings of the Tuscan mountains. And, inside the Garfagnana, the Italian faction was principally opposed to the French faction, not to rule from Ferrara; indeed, the ' French' were often to be found supporting the Florentines and the 'Italians' the Este, as the balances of factions inside the valley shifted. 15 Local opponents merely used the wider oppositions of the Italian Wars to orientate themselves, as the Guelfs and Ghibellines had done for centuries in the cities; they were reinforced, and often given excuses to fight, by these wider oppositions, but were not created by them. The real basis of village factions in the sixteenth century, as in the eleventh, was local. Berengo has bri11iantly described the situation in the Lucchese mountains, which still included the lower Garfagnana: it derived from conflicts over access to land. The same disagreements over pasture and its boundaries that gave rise to so many disputes between villages also poisoned the relationships between inhabitants inside each. Villages had rules about who had privileged access both to pasture and to the chestnut woods, respectively the major exchange resource and the major subsistence resource of each mountain community, and both for the most part under communal control. Villages whose economies were principally based on such resources were more socially coherent, more capable of opposing other villages as a single body; but the struggles for local offices in each of See Lettere ss. and cf. Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. s!)--Qo, 12o-1. For Emilian brigands, see for example Sforza, ibid., pp. 179-81; Lettere 64, and cf. 101. For Domenico di Amorotto, a convenient short account can be found in Rombaldi, 'Ariosto commissario generale', pp. 56-
General Conclusion

369

them were the more violent in consequence, for such positions determined the sharing-out of communal lands. The losers, and sometimes the winners, too, often fell foul of the law, and were outlawed. The distinction between such temporary outlaws and the semi-professional brigands used by the factions to pursue their aims was often very fine, and not strengthened by the fact that those in the villages who were shepherds needed always to be armed to protect their animals, whether up in the mountains or along the long roads to the Maremma.16 I have argued that the economies of the pre-thirteenth-century Garfagnana and Casentino were very different from those that succeeded them; that the 'mountain' society and economy that I have just delineated was a late medieval creation. And it is certainly true that the violence lamented by Ariosto or by his Lucchese counterparts cannot be seen in any of our early texts; even the troubles of the 1 I 6os and 1210s in the Casentino do not equal the daily violence recorded in Ariosto's letters. But I have also argued that the factional groups that took to arms after I 16o were structurally identical to those that can be traced in the more reticent eleventh-century material; oppositions of interest, essentially based on minor differences in economic position, patterned all social relationships from at least 1000 on. Factions were not, then, created by the pastoral and collective environment of the late Middle Ages. Their antagonisms were sharpened, and made more violent, by this environment (and further emphasized by the Italian Wars); they are thus clearer and easier to analyse. But once we get past the violence, we may be able to see patterns of opposition reproducing those many centuries older. There is, above all, one feature that links the sixteenth-century Garfagnana with both the eleventh-century Casentino and the Garfagnana itself at the start of its history in the eighth century: the absence of an effective local aristocracy capable of acting as the 'natural' rulers of villages and the 'natural' foci for such oppositions. This absence, relative or absolute, underpins the structural similarities between each of these societies. Elites in all three there were, but they were Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 321- 56; cf. also Rombaldi, ' Ariosto commissario generale', pp. 44 ff. For boundary disputes, see e.g. Lettere 70, 91, 99, and index s. v . Cardoso, Pietrasanta, Vagli, Vallico; also in Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 52- 4, 59, 65, 207- 10, 226, 26!H}, etc. l6

Genual Conclusion

370

small-scale and informal. And it is this informality that is one of the most striking features of the Ariostean material. In 1522-5, the parte italiana of Castelnuovo di Garfagnana and. in a more general sense, the whole valley, revolved around one Pierino Magnano. Pierino was an inhabitant of the borgo of Castelnuovo, although in I 522 he was to be. found, for greater sectirity, living with his wife, her sister, and the latter's husband Tommaso Micotti of Camporgiano, in Trassilico. (The two latter are some 25 km apart, respectively north and south of Castelnuovo.) A third sister had married the son of Bastiano Coiaio, also from Castelnuovo, and this little group ran much of the affairs of Ariosto's territory when he arrived; it is probably not by chance that Camporgiano, Castelnuovo, and Trassilico were the three Este administrative centres for the valley. What sort of wealth they had can be guessed from Pierino's and Tommaso's wives' house, which, though divided into two inside, had only one entrance: no mansion, dearly. When Pierino was called to Ferrara in September I 522 to account for himself, he was influential enough to have supporters there; but when Ariosto seized his movables in November of that year, they only amounted to smallish quantities of grain and wine the basic resources of no more than a rich peasant. 17 Tommaso was podesta of Trassilico most years, 'regarded as a respectable man (homo da bene) by comparison with the others living here', and could tide himself 'ser'-he was certainly literate; but he too was essentially a local informal boss. Ariosto concluded that his periodic re-election was systematically fixed by Pierino and Bastiano, and twice in his commissariate had it annulled for a time. 18 Pierino 's influence thus extended throughout the middle and lower Garfa.gnana. It may have been less above Camporgiano, however, where different dominant families are attested, notably the counts of San Donnino and their kin, although these, being equally 'Italian', certainly had relations with him. 17 Lettert 34. 42, J, 148. 18 See Lettere 34,

ss-6,

I6o; cf Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. JI7-I8, 141-

ss, 137, 139-40 for Ariosto's growing hostility to Micotti;

see also Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 56-7, 114-16, 141-2, 146-7, :2.46-8,

251, 253, 263-4, 318; Spaggiari, 'Carte relative al conunissariato di Ariosto', pp. 188-9<>.

General Conclusion

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The French faction is less in evidence over the valley as a whole. Its major leader, ser Frediano Ponticelli, had been murdered in 1520, and in Ariosto's letters only a few people were identified specifically as francesi-the priest of Sassi, Frediano's nephew, and most of that village were one group; the Madalena of San Donnino, as we shall see, were another.l9 There were beyond doubt many others, equally opposed to the Italians; it looks, however, as if the power network that linked the villages of the valley were structured by the latter faction, and that the local parties and the whole villages in dispute with members of the Italian network were less coherently grouped together. It was, in any case, the Italians, at least in the first half of Ariosto's tenure, who gave him more trouble, and about whom he tells us most. The Italians were involved with brigands, and it is this that brought Ariosto's greatest hostility. Their closest links were with the three sons of Pellegrino dal Sillico, two of whom lived together (again in their wives' house) in Ceserana, on one of the major roads up the valley, which they regularly raided. Ariosto found this out by September 1522, when he came upon a letter from Bastiano Coiaio to Moro dal Sillico about a mule stolen by one of Moro's men further up the valley. There was, however, a complex chain of relationships between the relatively 'clean' Bastiano and the professional killers and robbers. Moro himself was never unambiguously implicated by Ariosto in any serious act of violence. Although his brother Giuliano dal Sillico was an outlaw for the killing of ser Frediano Ponticelli, and, in 1523, for violent robbery against a priest from Pisa travelling up the valley road, the only charge against Moro that Ariosto could make stick was the reception of brigands and their money (and even that, as Ariosto's captain comfortably pointed out, was by no means certain; since the house was lived in by Giuliano as well, it was arguable that the makfactors were received by him). But it was Moro who was the co-ordinator of these brigands; he illegally controlled the fortress at Ceserana, and 'he is always at the heart of most of the violent crimes done in this province; now he was at San Pellegrino with the brigands of Barga and Sommocolonia [in Florentine territory, dominating 19

Lettere 41, rs6, r6o; cf. Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 48-50, 74-<>, r88.

372

General Concl1-1sion

the main road), now in the vicariate of Camporgiano with the brigands of Costa [from Pontecchio at the top of the upper valley], now with those of the Temporia [from the territory of Reggio Emilia}, such that it seemed to me he was the lord of the countryside of the Garfagnana'.20 More than anything else, Ariosto wanted to lay his hands on these men. Moro received a pardon from the duke, for a minor homicide, in November I 522, but Ariosto accumulated further evidence against him. He was arrested in April I 523 when he came . to see the commissario, and was kept prisoner for several months in the castle at Castelnuovo. Bastiano Coiaio's son smuggled a knife in to Moro in August, however, and he cut out the lock of the cell and fled. Called to Ferrara in November with his brother, he was given a free pardon by the duke again. Ariosto was furious at this, as have been those recent historians who see the poet as a 'modem' administrator thwarted by the duke's traditional clientelistic ways; it may, however, have been the duke who recognized the realities of his local power better. Moro, on the other hand, comes out of the business with a certain style, as the 'least bad' of the Ceserana brigands (so Ariosto said once) but also the boldest, always prepared to confront Ariosto himself and argue his own case. 21 Bastiano Coiaio did the rest of the arguing, and this Ariosto resented: his picture of Bastiano stresses the latter's hypocritical rhetoric, and casts him rather as a Camorra lawyer, protesting the innocence of his boys on TV and casting dQubt on the neutrality of the magistracy. In April I523, for example, Baldone dal Sillico, Moro's other brother, went with fifteen men to Camporgiano and cut up a local man, Margutte, for killing the village smith; he then stole two oxen in Sambuca on the way home. Subsequently, Bastiano came to Ariosto to explain that Baldone had only gone to Camporgiano to try and make peace between the tWo, not to assault anyone, and that he had let out the oxen merely to tease a boy. Ariosto disbelieved this profoundly, _a lthough it may not have been entirely false; Margutte, at least, was violent enough to ·be accused of killing 20 Letteie 41, 72, 92; the quotation is taken from 72. Bastiano was not above

being tough himself, as when he threatened a certain Pietro Morelli with a knife: see Sforza, Documenti inediti, p. 61 n. 21 Leuere 52, 72, 83, 108, 125-6, 136. For the description 'least bad', see 89.

General Conclusion

373

again in August, and a year later was associated with Battistino Magnano, one of the worst assassins of the valley. By then, and perhaps earlier, Battistino was a hit-man for the Italian faction, and it is not at all unlikely that in this initial episode Margutte himself was simply a faction member disciplined for getting out of line.22 It is very easy to adopt Ariosto's vocabulary, recognizable as it is to those with twentieth-century attitudes to violence, and see all these people as criminals. They certainly engaged in theft, murder, and, most commonly, extortion: on at least two occasions a victim only reported a theft to the commissario because he had been to the Coiaio household to negotiate the return of the goods and got nothing. 2 3 But it would be wrong to see them as socially divorced from the other inhabitants of the valley, as the Camorra is from (most of) Naples today. Ariosto constantly declared the inhabitants of Ceserana innocent of receiving brigands, even when fining them money for it, for they could not stop the SiUico brothers from doing as they pleased (nor could Ariosto, of course, even though Castelnuovo is only 5 km away: 'they are stronger in this region than I am'). But when Moro was in jail, no one came to denounce him, at least publicly. While the brigands were in Ceserana, at least Ceserana was safe from their attacks. When, however, in March 1524, Barga brigands did attack the village, its inhabitants came to Ariosto at once, who, indeed, expected the Sillico brothers to help repel the invaders.2 4 All studies of bandits emphasize the fact that if they do not have the support of the inhabitants of their locality, they are soon lost. Ariosto was persuaded not to bum the houses where brigands were to be found in Pontecchio, another major centre, because they alone formed half the village.25 'Normal' society interpenetrated wit1l temporary and 22 LetJere 72, and c£ 108, for Bastiano; compare Sfona, Documenti inediti,

p. 285 , where the Castelnuovo notables do indeed cast doubt on Ariosto's neutrality, in a letter to rhe duke. For Margutte's later career, see Lettere 107, 164; 156 (with Sfona, Documenti inediti, p. 311) for Battistino an d the Italian party (earlier, Battistino's active career seems to be above all as an independent robber and murderer: 30, 41, 64, IQ9-IO, 126, 136, 139-40, 158, etc.: in 126, he is in rhe pay of rhe duke). 23 Lettere 41, 52. 24 Lettere 72, 89 (source of quotation; cf. 47), 92, 143. 25 Lettere 64; c£ Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 347 ff.

374

General Conclusion

permanent brigandage. This was so above all because the factions, whose leaders employed brigands so often, were not just a few people, but, in the end, included everyone living inside the framework of village life. Such a relationship is emphasized by another point: the scale of this violence was very si:nall. Gangs of six were normal; fifty an outside and temporary maximum. Thefts of mules were the standard currency of Garfagnana low life; only travellers got robbed of more. 2 6 Moro, after all his ill-doing, was a poor man. He and his brothers had to delay their presence before the duke of Ferrara in November 1524, but Ariosto wrote a covering letter: 'it is through poverty and not having had the wherewithal to leave; which I certainly accept, because I know they are poor. Now that they have collected some of their chestnuts, which is the only small resource they have, they are coming.' This was no favouritism on Ariosto's part; the following day he sent on a note suggesting that they be punished as severely as possible.27 But poor they were. We have seen that Pierino Magnano himself was no more than prosperous. The highest that one could reach in Castelnuovo society was the position of small artisan, and even these were probably cultivators as well. Gianpiero Attolini, the leader of the 1521 pro-Ferrara rising in the town, had been rewarded by the duke with the lease of a smithy. He was a doctor of medicine, an important local notable, an associate of Pierino Magnano; Ariosto recommended him and his brothers for a ducal favour in May 1523, calling them 'reputed in Castelnuovo and in the whole Garfagnana as much hcmini da bene as any others there are'; the favour was one only previously granted to a family of locksmiths. These were the elite; there was no one else. There were only two doctors of law in the valley, and anyQne else trained in writing seems to have been professionally active only part-time. The population of the Garfagnana Estense otherwise consisted exclusively of peasants. 28 Lettere 101 (size of gangs); 41, 105, and Sforza, Documn~ti inediti, pp. 127- 8, 263- 4 (size of thefts). 27 LeUere us-Q. 28 For Attolini, see Lettere 81, and cf. 163; Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 79 n., 163, t88. Coiaio means 'tanner' in Italian. Magnano means 'locksmith', too, and indeed one of the two magnani of Lettert 81 was called Pierino; but Pierino Magnano was certainly a different person. The latter (and the apparendy unrelated Battistino) could equally have been named from the village of Magnano, 10 km from Castelnuovo. For dottori, see Lettere ss. 99· 26

General Conclusion

375

This fact should not by now occasion us surprise. Berengo, indeed, showed it for the whole sixteenth-century Lucchese countryside, mountain and plain. But in the lowlands there were major absentee (city-dwelling) landowners, who had considerable influence in rural life. In the Garfagnana, by contrast, as we ·have already seen (p. 1_43), the estimi show that already by 1400 only a minor proportion of land was owned by people living outside the valley, and even the richest landowners of the valley rarely had more land than they could cultivate themselves. But this absence of a non-peasant elite had an important result: it made local influence accessible to a wider range of people. Control over a faction was certainly a relatively stable way to have such influence, but it was not fully formalized, or permanent; and there were alternatives. We have seen that it was quite common for ordinary, relatively law-abiding peasants to become outlaws; anyone outlawed, with a weapon, could be a brigand for a time. And anyone who remained a brigand could, at a risk, construct local power for himself directly; such power was probably over a smaller area than that exercised by a faction leader, and usually lasted a rather shorter time, but it was very similar in type. Indeed, provided that a brigand survived, once he had his ducal pardon, and moved back into his village, his prestige may often have been sufficiently increased for him to be able to organize factions on his own behalf. People constantly argue about whether bandits are 'social' or not; about whether their local support derives from fear, or from the belief (or even the truth) that they rob the rich to give to the poor. It is at least dear that even 'social' bandits do not offer a real alternative to the inequalities of society, only an image of how it could work better; indeed, in reality, they tend everywhere to be protected by rural notables, and very often act simply as the armed and illegal wing of local faction fighting. None the less, a bandit raiding the estate of his patron's enemy may well dramatically distribute some of his booty among the inhabitants of the vicinity; the poor may very well identify with him, as their avenger, or at least as an individual sometimes prepared to right their wrongs. 2 9 The brigands of the Garfagnana The literature on this subject is endless. The basic text is Hobsbawm, &ndits; those other works that have been most helpful to me for one reason or another are Lewin, 'Social Banditry in Brazil'; Chandler, Lampiao; Fentress, Men of Honour. 29

376

General Conclusil>n

certainly do not look like this; they were not often in the business of righting wrongs. None the less, it was not just local notables like Bastiano Coiaio who protected them; it was the rural population in general. Ariosto could not get anyone to denounce Moro dal Sillico for brigandage, but this does not mean that he lacked informants; he had no trouble finding people willing to denounce Pierino Magnano for treason. There may well have been fewer people who hated Moro more than hated Pierino. ao If Moro dal Sillico was not a social bandit, then, it is quite simply because social bandits were not needed in the Garfagnana. The local notables were scarcely richer than anyone else, and private oppression was not perceived as being so great that brigandage could have been thought even in theory to have been against it. There was plenty of hatred, but it was directed against people perceived as relative equals. Indeed, the main local oppressor was probably Ariosto himself, representative of' the State, the only secular body that took away peasant surpluses in a systematic way, and with precious little result; but even Ariosto was not in a position to be sufficiently oppressive for brigandage to have been specifically directed against him, as it would often be against rural officials of later centuries. (By contrast, the only Lucchese brigand to operate on a large scale outside the mountains in this period, Miglietto of Camaiore, active in 1526, was indeed perceived as a protector of the poor: the Lucchese State was strong enough to provoke direct opposition to it, and, around Camaiore, there were rich and poor.)31 That brigands were in league with the elites of the Garfagnana did not, then, remove them from a wider social framework of reception and acceptance, For omerta for Moro, See Lettere 92; for the lack of it for Pierino and his friends, see 34, 16o. (In the latter, despite Ariosto's hostility to Pierino, the accusations go too far for him to believe.) Sl The patterns of enmity in the Garfagnana were not that dissimilar to those in the fourteenth-century Pyrenees (Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 34so), with the difference that there was less tension with the Church in the Garfagnana (though it still took tithe) and more with the State. The heresy of the Pyrenees could be seen in some respects as the structural analogue to the brigandage of the Garfagnana. For Miglietto, see Berengo, Nobili e rnercanti, PP· 35o-3. 30

General Conclusion

377

whether fearful or welcoming. The violence of such brigands shows that a relatively undifferentiated society like this was not fully egalitarian, and certainly not 'just' {it was, indeed, in the name of giustizia that Ariosto most opposed these men, and he genuinely meant by the word local equity, as well as the ducal peace). But such a society was not founded on inequality. Part of the violence of the period derived precisely from the fact that, with luck and ability, anyone reasonably prosperous could be as influential as Pierino Magnano, and both he and they knew it. Here, we are certainly dose to the preoccupations of Rolando di Tagizo of Poggiolo and his son Rolandino, in the twelfth-century Casentino {above, pp. 326-9). The point is very clear in the most serious outbreak of intra-village violence Ariosto had to cope with, the San Donnino feud, which reached its height in August 1523 with the murder of the young Count Carlo of San Donnino and his mother by Giovanni Madalena. The 'Sandonnini' were an influential family of that village, one of whose branches had in 1489 obtained a countship consisting of the village territory, with judicial powers, in fief from the Este, thanks to the elevation of one of them to the bishopric of Modena and then Lucca. The feud may have begun soon after; Giovanni's father Piero Madalena had been on sufficiently bad terms with Carlo's father Count Giovanni to be forced to sign a document promising not to attack the family, against payment of an enormous fine. Count Giovanni was murdered notwithstanding, in 1521, with {as it afterwards emerged) the connivance of the Madalena family. After the second murders, Giovanni Madalena sacked the Sandonnini house, stayed in the village unmolested, and 'paraded himself as heir' {to the countship?); he was clearly not regarded as a simple assassin by his neighbours. Even after Ariosto pursued him into Lucchese and then Florentine territory, he was suffic;iently sure of himself to return to San Donnino in November 1523. Thereafter, Giovanni was often to be found- though never taken- in the Lucchese enclave of Gorfigliano, where he left much of the property he had seized {Ariosto wrote often to the Lucchesi to get it sequestered, without success). He also involved himself, by now as a permanent outlaw, alongside other

378

General Conclusion

professional brigands, in an attempted Florentine invasion of the valley in 1524.32 . Factional feuds were normal in the sixteenth-century Garfagnana, and often murderous; but double and triple murders were not common. In San Donnino, however, faction had turned to uncontrolled killing; and it is easy to see why. The balance of French against Italian inside villages (the Madalena were French, the Sandonnini Italian) could involve hatred, attack, betrayal, but it was a balance; temporary upset could be reversed. But in giving a county, however, small, to the Sandonnini, the dukes of Feh:ara had upset the balance. The Sandonnini had always been local notables; other branches of the family can be seen in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries behaving just like Pierino Magnano and. Bastiano Coiaio. But to make one of their branches permanendy supreme, with formal judicial powers, destroyed the local cohesion that could allow San Donnino, when necessary, to act as a community. The Madalena ~ere made structurally inferior, and that they could not tolerate. Feud normally· presupposes a certain mutual respect, between roughly equal, and continuing, parties. The Madalena, however, had to eliminate the Sandonnini- if not the whole family, at least its comital branch-and did so. But the atypicality of these events in Ariosto's account goes further towards stressing the normality of the jockeying for position that went on elsewhere in the valley, violent certainly, but unremitting, and certainly lasting well beyond Ariosto's time.ss Ariosto understood how factions worked. He thought them, because of their involvement with brigands, illegal and unjust; For the whole sequence, see Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 12~, 220-4, 230, 234-5. 244, 2p-3, 255-6, z66-?; Letwe 47, r~ro, II4-15, 12~, 139-40, 150, 152, 156, 162-3, 168, 170, 176. Lettere 109 and us are the most important. For the creation of the countship, see Pacchi 52· 33 For the Sandonnini as small-scale notables, see Rombaldi, 'Ariosto commissario generate', pp. 43- 4, sr. Campori recognized the destabilizing dfect of the countship back in 1896: Notizie per la vita di Ariosto, pp. 91-6. For feud with rules, see Gluckman, Custom and Conflict, pp. 1-26; Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force. Other circumstances when the rules break down: see Fentress, Mtn of Horwur. Most of the major families of Ariosto's Garfagnana still existed in the r67os, when Anselmo Micotti was writing his history (Micotti, Descrittione cronologica deUa Garfagnana, pp. t~, 212- 17, no-r). Indeed, the latter was himself a male-line descendent of Tommaso Micotti of Trassilico (ibid., pp. 212- 14). 32

General ConclUsion

379

certainly more so than did the duke, who was more worried about whether they were seditious. Historians have tended to sympathize with Ariosto. But the poet's insistence on their illegitimacy betrays him in one crucial respect. In any community other than one as 'mountainous', as totally peasant-controlled as the Garfagnana, violence and injustice were not only as common as in the Lucchese valley, but more legitimate, because they were in the hands of the 'natural' bearers of arms, the aristocracy. This was perhaps no longer so clear in the Lucchese and Florentine lands, where landowners were urban and the countryside was, in principle, already the province of the State alone; but it was certainly the case in Emilia, Ariosto's own homeland and by now the political point of reference for the Garfagnana- here, ' feudal' rights did not only survive but were coming back. Domenico di Amorotto, ex-brigand and, indeed, ex-shepherd was, with reluctance, an acceptable figure to Ariosto; his violence was legitimated because he was a papal official and feudatory, a rightful leader of armed men. 3 4 But faction leaders and brigands less successful than Donienico lost out in Ariosto's eyes: not only because they were violent, but because they were peasants. The commissario did, none the less, sometimes recognize a legitimate role for brigands, not in these terms, but in something like them. When in December 1523 Ariosto was asked by the State of Lucca to arrest a Lucchese outlaw, Augustino di Piero Andrea da Verni, then living in Careggine, he did so. Ariosto related to the Lucchese government what occurred. Then after I had had him taken, our men of the commune of Careggine made me a great complaint, lamenting that they had bad him come to bring a certain peace into their commune, and he had come, not knowing of the [extradition) agreements between our two States, and for this they made request to me that I should release him . . . . How much the case against him matters I do not know; I would like to please everyone, although never against justice. But if I released him, and through this peace came to the commune of Careggine, this would be more useful than to punish him for the crimes he is charged with; so I pray you to be content for me to release him.ss 34 Cf. Chittolini, Formazi()ne dello st4lo regionale, pp. 257- So. For Ariosto and Domenico, see above, n. 14.

Lettere I 3I . The Lucchesi replied that they would consider clemency, but that they wanted him none the less: Sforza, Documenti inediti, pp. 242- 3. 36

General Conclusion This is of course pretty sophisticated for Ariosto, given his views on the law. What he was proposing that Au:gustino be left to do, however, was not only what Pierino Magnano did elsewhere, but also what · any aristocrat was supposed to do: to keep the peace, informally, through personal status, backed up by the threat of private violence. In the absence of clear social hierarchies, brigands in effect had as much right to dominate a village as anyone else, and might be more respected than many; for Ariosto to see the point even once shows that he was coming, towards the second year of his stay, to understand not just the structure but the values of mountain society. The eighth-century Garfagnana and the eleventh-century Casentino had more differentiated hierarchies than these. There were great landowners and an aristocracy in each. But, as we have seen, the aristocracy of the eleventh and the twelfth centuries were not able to dominate the societies of the Archiano valley in the Casentino. They did not control the procedures of faction fighting, which continued according to its own rules; at most, they were drawn on for aid by the local factions much as brigands would be later. The aristocracy may often have had less direct power in the Casentino than Augustine of Vemi had in Careggine. In a more pastoral, collectively orientated society such as the Garfagnana Estense, riven by external war, such factions feuded more obviously; btit they were constructed in the same way. The world of the sixteenth-century mountains that Ariosto describes, in its inward-looking detachment from any wider framework derived from the politics of the cities of the plain, with its local oppositions and local interests taking precedence over all else, is a world that we can see emerging from our eleventh- and twelfth-century sources as well. The mountains did belong to the city, and continued to do so; but the city could never fully encompass them. And, for all the devastation of our own century, nor has it yet.

Maps

MAP

1.

Northern Tuscany and the Tuscan Appennines

MAP

2.

The Lucchesia

MAP

3.

The Garfagnana: pieval territories

MAP

4·

The Garfagnana: the upper valley

MAP

5·

The Garfagnana: the lower valley

MAP

6.

The Casentino: pieval territories

MAP

7.

The Casentino: the upper valley

MAP

8.

The Casentino: the lower valley

MAP

9·

The middle Archiano

MAP 10.

Major landowners in the Casentino

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-----------------·--------------------------·---------------------=------------·------------------· ---------:.,:-_ -------~--

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MAP 2.

The Lucchesia


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MAP

8.

The Casentino: the lower valley

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oCAMENZA

The middle Archiano

Bibliography ABBREVIATIONS

AM ASI GSL MGH QF RSI

Archeologia medievale Archivio storico italiano Giornale storico de/la Lunigiana, Nuova Serie Monumenta germaniae historica Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken Rivista storica italiana

I.

PRlMARY SOURCES [PUBLISHED

1

A discussion of main sources with abbreviations can be found above, pp. ix- xi; it includes all unpublished material used in the book. This list includes all other sources used. They are listed under author or title if they are narratives of any kind; editor if they are collections of documents; MGH if they are imperial diplomata. ANDREA OF STRUMI, Vita lohannis Gualberti, ed. L. Baethgen, MGH, Scriptores xxx. 2 (Leipzig, 1934), Io8o-I 104. ARIOSTO, L., Lettere, ed. A. Stella (Milan, 1965). BARSOCCHINI, D., Memorie e documenti per servire all'istoria delta citta e stato di Lucca v, pts. 2- 3 (Lucca, 1837- 41). BERTINI, F., Memorie e documenti per servire all'istoria della citta e stato di Lucca iv (Lucca, 1818- 36). BONAINI, F. (ed.), Diplomi pisani e regesto delle carte pisane che si trovano a stampa (Florence, 1848-89). I Capitoli del comune di Firenze. lnventario e regesto, 2 vols. (Florence, J866-9J). CENCIUS CAMERARIUS, Le liber censuum de l'eglise romaine, ed. P. Fabre and L: Duchesne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1910). DAMIANI, P., Vita be~ti Romualdi, ed. G. Tabacco (Rome, 1957). DBGLI Azz1 VITELLESCHI, G. (ed.), Reale archivio di stato in Lucca. Regesti I. i, I. ii (Lucca, 1903- II). DBUSDBDIT, Collectio canonum, ed. P. Martinucci (Venice, 1869).

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393 GuJDI, P. (ed.), Rationes decimarum italiae! Tuscia, 2 vols. (Rome, 193242). --and PARENT!, 0. (eds.), Regesto del capitolo di Lucca, 4 vols. (Rome, 191o-39). - - and PELLEGRINETTI, E. (eds.), lnventari del vescovato della cattedrale e di altre chiese di Lucca (Rome, 1921). Historia custodum aretinorum, ed. A. Hofmeister, MGH, Scriptores xxx. 2 (Leipzig, 1934), 1468-82. KE.HR, P., 'Altere Papsturkunden in den papstlichen Registem',

Nachrichten der konigliche Gesellschaft der Wissenscha.ften zu Gottingen. Philologisch- historische Klasse 1902, 395-558. KuRZE, W. (ed.), Codex diplomaticus Amiatinus i (Tiibingen, 1974). LAMJ, G., Deliciae eruditorum iii (Florence, 1737), vii. 8 ( = Historiae siculae Laur. &mincontri ii, Florence, 1739). - - Sanctae ecclesiae Florentinae monumenta i (Florence, 1758). LuPO GENTILE, M. (ed.), I/ regesto del codice Pelavicino (Atti della societa ligure di storia patria xliv, Genoa, 1912). LuzzATI, M. (ed.), 'Vescovato di Lucca', in A. Castagnetti, M. Luzzati, G. Pasquali, and A. Vasina (eds.), [nventari altomedievali di terre, coloni e redditi (Rome, 1979), 207-46. MANARESJ, C. (ed.), I placiti del 'regnum Italiae', 3 vols. (Rome, I9556o). MARAGONE, B., Gli annales pisani, ed. M. Lupo Gentile, Rerum italicarum scriptores nova editio vi. 2 (Bologna, 193o-6).

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PACCHI, D., Ricerche storiche sulla provincia delta Garfagnana (Modena, 1785). PAGLIAI, L. (ed.), Regesto di Coltibuono (Rome, 1909). P A SQ u I, U. (ed.), Documenti per la storia de/la citta di Arezzo ne/ medio evo, 3 vols. (Florence, 1899-1937). PORRO LAMBERTENGHI, G. (ed.), Codex diplomaticus Langobardiae (Turin, 1873). PRUNAI, G., 'Le pergamene di Barga nel dipJomatico fiorentino ', in Lucca archivistica storica economica (Rome, 1973), 128-51. ScARMAGLI, G. M., Monasterii SSVV Florae et Lucillae synopsis monumentorum (MS c.1748, in the Archivio capitolare di Arezzo). SCHIAPARELLI, L. (ed.), Codice diplomatico longobardo i, ii (Rome, 1929-33). - - (ed.), I diplomi di Ugo e di Lotario, di Berengario II e di Adalberto (Rome, 1924). --,BALDASSERONI, F., and CJASCA, R. (eds.), Le carte del monastero di S. Maria in Firenze (Badia) i (Rome, 1913). - - - - ,and LASINIO, E. (eds.), Regesto di Camaldoli, 4 vols. (Rome, 1907-22). SPORZA, G., Documenti inediti per servire alia vita di Ludovico Ariosto (Monumenti di storia patria delle provincie modenesi xxii, Modena, 1926). SoLD ANI, F., Historia monasterii S. Michaelis de Passiniano i (Lucca, 1741). TESSIER, G. (ed.), Recueil des actes de Charles llle chauve, roi de France, 3 vols. (Paris, 1943-55). THEJNER, A. (ed.), Codex diplomaticus dominii temporalis S. Sedis i (Rome, 1861}. Tholomei lucensis annales, ed. B. Schmeidler, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum NS viii (2nd edn., Berlin, 1955). V ILLANI, G., Cronachefiorentine, ed. L. A. Muratori, Rerum ltalicarum Scriptores xiii (Milan, 1728), cc. 9-1002. Vita S. Nili iunioris, ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series graeca cxx (Paris, 188o), cc. r S-166.

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BLANK PAGE

Index Family-names of the form ff. (filii) Bonitie have been indexed 'Bonitie, ff. '. Settlements in Tuscany are located by the standard Italian abbreviations for · the modem provinces, AR, FI, LU, MS, PI, PT, SI, for Arc:uo, Aorence, Lucca, Massa, Pisa, Pistoia, Siena. Other abbreviations: mon. monastery; not. notary; P. pope. Abruzzo 7, 61, 63, 134, 351HS1, 363-4

1.00--1

Actio, not. z 16-17 Adalbert I, M. of Tuscany xxvii, 182

Adalbert 11, M. of Tuscany xxvii, xxix-xxx, I 10, 116 Agna (AR) 186-7, 1.77 agreements, private 47, Z17-18, 243. 270, 309-10, 317-18, ps45; see aho couns agriculture xxvi, xxviii-xxix, 22-3, 3o-1, 16o-1, 165--7; see aho estate management Aioli (AR) 18z-3, 2zs, 270, 324 albtrgari4 315, 317 Alberico qui et Albitio di fraolmo !)!r-100

Albertino di lldebrando 278-9 Alberto di Candolfo 249 Aldobrandeschi xx:ix, 6o-r, 112., 135 Alexander 11, P., see Anselmo I Alfonso I, duke of Ferrara 366-7, 371., 374, 378-9 Alpi Apuane 3, 19-20, 25, 63, 157

Alps xvi, xix, xx, 4 amasciamentum 120 Amerigo, not. 217 Amico di Grimaldo of Freggina 242, 1.44--'7, 2.SO, 259, Anchiano (w) 12.8 Andrea di Gundi 47

Andrea of Parma, abbot of Strumi

z67

Andreolli, Bruno 23, 76-8, 81 angaria, see labour-service angariales 78, 84, 226 Angelini, Lorenzo 36 Anghiari (All) 183, 185, z81, 305, 316-I7, 334, 337 Anrullistes xxiii, 2

Anselmo I, Bp. of Lucca 30, 88, 108 Anselmo U, Bp. of Lucca ro8 Ansugo (w) 61, 104, 117 Antelminelli 142 Anucardo S7 Aosu 4 Appennines xxviii-xxx, xxxii, 3-s, 7, 8, 17, 20, 63, 91, 108, 170, 182, .215, 281, .284, JSIHSI, 364-s. 367 apples I89 appoderamento 33, 231-2, 340 Aquitaine 303 Arcena (AR) 194, 197, 201, 211-1.2, 236, 313-14 archaeology xxvi, 1, 29, 3 I, 34, !)0-I, 173, 303-4 Archiano, r. t 54, I sS, t6o-2, 16$45, 173-4, 177, I So, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192-4, 197. 20$45, .209. 211, 216-17, 228-30, .238"""9, 241, 245, 250, 252, zss, 261, 264, 266, 268, 272, 274-5, 28o,

412

Index

282- 4, 292, 297-300, 328, 33Q3. 336-9. 341, 344. 356-7. 364, 380 Ardingoli, tf. 261-2 Arezzo xxvii-xxix, xxxi, r, 4, 5, 9-12, 87, 92, IIQ-12, 116, 129, 131, 153- 344 passim, 352- 5, 357, 361-5 canonica (cathedral chapter) 9, 190, 187, 2()9-10, 220, 271, 294. 32l-3 S. Fiora (SS. Fiora e Lucilla, the Badia Aretina) 9, 165, 183, 187, 189, 199, 206-7, 2()9-II, 217, · 231, 234-, 294- 5, 312, 314, 319, 327, 331 S. Maria in Gr.adi 209-10 Ariosto, Ludovico 14-5, 342, 366-80 aristocracy xvi, xviii, xxi-xxiii, xxv, xxxi, 16, so-r, 56-8, 63- 4, 878, 95- 1o6, 109, IJ 1-14, 117, 122-3, 126-36, 142-
Gros.slibtll . armtes, see wars Amo, r. xxviii, ~ 15 , 33, 39, . 58, 97. 154, 157-<>o, r6s-<>, 175, 184, · 2o6, 22-7, 238. 244, 273. 281, 301, 313, 318, 352, 364;·see also Valdamo · artisans xxv, 57, 91,. 135, 138, 166, 236. 374 Asqua (AR) 163, 185 Asti 131 Atocia, Tocli (AR) 185, 302, 320, 324 Attolini, Gianpiero, .of Castelnuovo 374 Audiprando of Basilica 54 Augustino di Piero Andrea of Verni 379-80 Aulla (MS) 2g6 Aurinando 57 Autulo of Torrite SS avocabula 174-8, 239, 247; see also setdement

Azo, not. 217 Bacciano (LU) 127-8 Badia Prataglia (AR) 157, 239; see also Prataglia Bagni di Lucca (tu) 19 Bagno di Romagna 158, r6s, 184, 244 baking, see cooks Baldoino, not. 217 Balina (AR) 166 bandits, social 373, 375-'7; see also brigands Bannhmschaft, see signoria Banzena (AR) 187, t 89, 269-'72, 280, 282, 287, 293-4. 298, 321, 325, 331- 2, 334. 337 Barga (LU) 19, 21, s6. 6o-3. 104, II4, II6, 134, 137, 139, 141, 366. 371, 373 Bargecchia (tu) 123- 5, 142 Barginne (w) 36; see also Fosciana Basilica (LU), see Fosciana Basilicata 266 Battifolle (AR) 203 Bavaria 55 Beatrice of Canossa, M . of Tuscany 110 Benedict VIII (or IX), P. 59 Benedictine Rule 191, 193 benefice, see fief Benintende of Partina 328 Benzi, tf. 242. 244, 25o-I, 26g, 274-9; see also Guillelmi, tf.; Ubertini . Benzo 98 Berardenghi 201, 234 ·· Berardi, tf., of Banzena 191, 269-'72, 287. 2g6, 321, 327, 337. 343 Berardo di Guido 27o-1 Berengar I, K. of Italy xvi, xxix, Ill

Berengar 11, K. of Italy xvi-xvii, · 184 Berengo, Marino 138, 141, 368, 374 Bergamo 286 Bemardino di Feralmo di Corbizo 273

Index

,

Bemardo, filklis of K. Hugh I 82-3 Bemardo di Pagano, pievano of Partina 261 Bemo di Boniza, Pr. 208 Berra, wife of Raineri di Fuscheri 273 Betto iudex di Farolfo of Freggina 217, 234. 244-6 Bibbiena (AR) I 54. 1 s?-00. 164, 166, 175. 177. 179. 183, 18,S-6, 18890. 194. 197- 8, 200, 211, 216I8, 225, 238, 242, 263, 269, 275, 293-6, JOO, 3 t I, 313, 3 I8, 32940, 339, 364 pieve di S. Ippolito, pievano 172, 186, 189-91, 3I8-I9, 329-30 territory of the pieve I 92, 200, 2I6, 26o, 282, 318 Bientina, lago di 59 Biforco (AR) 16o, 182 Black Death I42 Blanco ofCampori 41, SS Bloch, Marc xx, xxii-xxiv Bolognana (tu) 21-2, 3o-1, 72, 88 Bonaldo Dario I 3 s Bonatto di Teudicci 3 14- I 5 Boniface, M. of Spoleto 186 Boniface of Canossa, M. of Tuscany xxx-xxxi, 110 boni homines 53, 217-18, 242, 245, 248, 258-64, 274. 280, 282, 286-7, 291, Jlo-II, 317, 325, 328--9, 339 Bonio the smith I35 Bonitie, ff., of Ornina 208-9 Bonizo di Leone of Contra 252- 4 Borgo a Mozzano (tu) 18-19 Borio (tu) 122 Boso di Benzo 275, 277 Boso di Boniza of Omina 208- 19 boundaries, geographical and social s-6. 92- 3, I 12, 14o-2, 146, I49. 159. 171- J, 175--9. 203, 2o6-'J, 215, 24o-2, 286, 288--92, 302, 307, 315, 317, 330, 332, 335-8, 355-'7. 368-9 Boutruche, Robert xxi Brancoli (LU) 46, 49, 102-3

413

Braudel, Femand 6, I35, 148, 344, 359-00. 364 brigands 366--9, 371-80 Brittany 172 Brugnato 25 Brunlisi (AR) 247 Bucco di Ardimanno of Carpineto 270 Bucena (AR) 171, 234, 301, 324 Buiano, Bp. of Arezzo 3 13-14 Buiano (AR), pieve di S. Maria 163, 172- 3, 186, 203, 317- 18 territory of the pieve 154, 171, 177. 186, 192, 199, 203. 205-'7. 210, 216, 224, 232, 275, 318 Byzantines r8, 171

Cadolingi xxix, xxx, 182- 3, 226 Calabria 214 Calbenzano (AR) 210 Callita (AR) 300 Calornini (tu) 122 Camaiore (tu) 97, 376 Camaldoli, mon. (AR) 9, 46, 153- 343 passim, 351, 3 s6, 362-4 Camenza (AR) 174, 177--9, 188, 192, 210 Cammarosano, Paolo 195-6, 232, 331 Campi (AR) 174 Camporgiano (tu) 37o-2 Campori (tu) 35-6, 38, 4o-52, 54-5. 57- 8, 62-3, 6s-6. 68, 70, 11. 81, 84-5, 87, IOI-2, 108--9, II6-17, 122, 147. 214, 248. 265, 348 Campo Serboli (AR) 166 Campo Vezanisi (AR) 166 Camprena (AR) 186, 197, 326 Candolesi (AR) 174, 186, 324 Candolfo di Lambeno 177, 248- so Canossa xxx- xxxi, 230 capanna 30 capitanei, cattani, lambardi, longobardi 97. 109, 127, 129, 146, 159. 209, 219, 269, 271- 2, 279. 285--9. 295, 305, 309, 318, 324-6; see also aristocracy

Index Capolona, mon. (AR) 184, 203, 2.07, 2.94. 319 Cappiano (FI) 101 Capraia (LU) 123 Carda (AR) 183 Cardoso (LU) 89, 142., 369 Careggine (tu) 17, 19, 23, 32, s'J-8, 63. 68, 77. 87. 1)9-100, 102, 109, 118, 122, U7-8, 134, 379-Bo CaifaniaM (w) x8, 19, 25, s6, 62-4. 84, 86; set also Ca~telvecchio di Garfagnana Carlo, Ct. of San Donnino 377 Carolingian s xiii, xv-xvii. xxi. ""lOCXl...,.;· 6, 41, 51, ss. 65-'7, 76, 92-3, lOS, 140, 145, 148---9, z8o, 285, z88, 308, 310, 3SS Carpineto (AR) 27o-1 Cualecchio (AR) 174. 197 C4salia 174-8, 239, 335~. 339-40; set also settlement C4SIIlirtD 29-30; s« also homes C4S4I m4SSarid4, s« tenant-hold ings Casanova (AR) "J1Y7 Cascio (tu) 21-3, 35, 57, 59, .68, 71-2, 78. 87. 97-8, 134 Casco B.albo (tu) 6o, 98---9 Casentino xxvt-xxvii, 3-4, 8-u, 17, 18, 24. 28, 31-5, 37, ss. 61, 66, 80, 8.:1., 9::1;-), 96, Io6, 109, 116, 132, 136, 138, 149, ISJ-344 passim, 347-52, 356, 359, 361-s, 369. 377. 38o Cuole (AR) 199, 205~. 211, 27S Cassu (tu) 74 castaldio 189, 230; see also Pietro di Giovanni Caste! Castagnaio (All) 203, 293-4 Castel.fiorentino (FI) 302. Castel Focognano (All) 162., 174. 183, 186, 197, 206-7. 210, 293- 4. 300 CasttUartD, }ints 18 castelli xiii, xxili-xxvii, xxix, s. Js41, SI, S3. 6o, 82.- 4, 88-9, 96. 101-2, 104. 112-z1, 124, u6, 136, 148, I7S, 183, 189, 199, 20), 222, 2.3 9. 269, 271-3,

275-8, 28o, 287- 307, 3 14-IS, 327-9. 339-40 Castello, pieve di S. Pietro (LU) 20; set also Piazza al Serchio Castelnuovo di Garfagnana (tu) 1821, 37, 39, 41 , s r- s, s6, 59, 62, 6s. ss. 102, 114, 358, 36i, 367. 340. 372- 4 Castelvecch io di Garfagnana (LV) 18, 20, 37. s6, 62, 64, 84, 123-~~

also Carfattiatta Castelvecch io Pascoli (tu) 6o Castiglione (LU) 21- 3, .18, 35-9, 4.1, 52, 54. 57, S~2, 77, 88-9, 114- 15, I17- 18, U2, 1.18, 134-5, 137, 141- 3, 366 Castricani (AR) .139 Castruccio Castracani 14.1 Castrum Orlattdini (AR) 327 Catasto (census) of 14.17: 164. 176, 333. 339-40 Cattratta (LU) 6o Ctll4haroti (tu) 37, 53, 88, 102.-3, II7 Cellabarottani 75, 102-3, ro&--9, 122, 12.8- 30 Cerignana (LU) 88, 104 Cerreto (All) 183, 300 Ceserana (w) 5~.2., 104, 117, 141, 371-3 Cetica (AR) 198-9, 203, JOI Charlemagn e, Emp. xv, 94, 184 Charles the Bald, Emp. 182 Chayanov, A. V. 70, 255 cheese 24, 163 Cherubini, Giovanni 7, t6o, 164, 170 chestnuts, chestnut-wo ods 8, 21, 23, 121, 139-40, r.u. 148, 16z, 164 Chianti xxviii, 8, 34-s. 156, 232., Zjl , 277-8, 2.83, 308, )40, 34.2.-3· 353 Chitignano (AR) 182- 3, 185, z8o, 324 Chiusi (della Vema, AR) 182., .2.93- 4 chocolates 112 Cianelli, Antonio 95, uS

s•.

Index Ciciana (Lu) 42 circles, social. su info rma l social relationships Cisa Pass 17 city society, influence of the city . . .

..

lOV- XVI, XVII I-XV IX, XXU ,

xxvili-x.xxii, 4. 57-8 , 6s, 67. 90-2 , 95, 98, 100, I 11, Il!)- 33, IJS- 6, 14S-9. 172, 19S-6, 209 10, 218- 20, 229, 2 ss. 266, :1.79. 2S1- 3, 290, 319, 334 -s. 342- 3. 352- 5, 36o--3, 365 clausurt1, nt enclosures clot h 24, 169- ?o, 236 CIHiia Ptltlvicino I I 3 Cod ipon te, S. Cipr iano di (MS) 56 Coia io, Bastiano, of Cast elnu ovo 370'-4. 376, 37S CoDe (LU) 23, IZ2 Colkcch.io (PI) 117 coUective organizations xxv i, 137 41, 147. 194. 2.69. 335-40, 349 so. 356-7, 363-?o; sua&o com mon land; com mun es Col tibu ono, mon . (st) 277, 327 commtmlitit1 203, 276, 32.2., 326 com mer ce, mar kets xviii, xxv iiixxvbc:, 6, 7, 26, 79-So, 91, 137, 140, 146, 148. 158, 166, 170, 189, 195. 229, 272- J , 302,

359-00

commissari 144, 366; set also Ariosto com mon land. com mon rights 137 41, 148, 163, 175- 6, 1S2, nS- 9 com mun es, rura l 5, st , Ss. 11!)-ZI, IlJ, 125, 1)8- 43. 146, 148"""9. 336- 40 com mun es, urba n xiii, xv, xvil i. .. . .. XlOX , XXU- XXU I, XXX l-XX XU,

130'-I, 149 com mun icati ons, su road s concealed sales and loans 195- 6 Con emu ndo of Castelvecchio 123- 4 Con rad 11, Emp . xxx , 97, to6, 311 Con rado qui et Cun itio di Frao lmo 97. 99-1 00, 113 consorteria 128, 246-7, 252, 274- 5, 277-So; see also family structures JIJ,

41 5

Con.stitutio dt feudis 311 Constitutiones maltficiorum us, 141 consults 138- 9 Con sum a (Ft) 157 Con ti, Elio 2, 8, 10, t 56-7 , 162, 167' 219, 222, 226- 7. 229, 232- 3, 298. 340, 353 Con tra (.u) 154, 174- 5, 1S7-8, 1923, 197, 223, 239- 40, zs l-9, :1.67. :1.75, .2.84, 298-300, 324, 339- 40, 348 -9 cook s 236, 317 Cor bitii , ff. 27 S Cor bizo di Beru:o 275 Cor egli a (Antelminelli, LU) 21, 6o, 61, 104, 117, 141- 2, 366 Cor ezzo (.u) 15S, 16o--1, 163, t8zs. 192 -J, Z03, 216, 2ZS-6, 2.46, 270, z8o, JOO, 315, J,ZJ, 326, 332. 336 -7 Cor fino (LU) 22 Cor seru (tu) 129 Corsolon.e, r. 154. tSS, t6o- -t, 165, 182- 4, 186, 197, 216, 270'-I, 2S.2., .2.9.2., 332, 337- 9. 344 Cor vaia (LU) 122 Cos pert o/Co spul o di Sunualdo 46 Cos tant ino, Bp. of Arezzo 319 coun ter-g ift r56, I9S- 6, ZIJ- 14. JII cour ts, court-cases, public juris dict ion xviii , xx, xxx, 4 r, 47-8 , 54. 171- 2, 216-17, 282, 309- 10, 317-18, 325- 6 cow s 24, 163- 4. t68 Cre mon a xviii Cre ti (AR) 172, 319 cultivators, tied 46, 48, 235, 253; see also tenancy 'Cun imu ndin ghi' 97-9 , 103, 117, 124. 128; su also Nob ili, de'; Guidi, ff. Cun imu ndo di Cun imu ndo 63, 71- 2 9?-8 , 101 Cun imu ndo di Sighifrido 101 curtis, estate 2.9, 30, 37-8 , 43, 56, 70'84. 117, ll9, 124, 129, 175. IS2, rSs- 9. 22
Index curtis, estate (cont.): 298-9, 301- 3; see also demesne; estate management Dalli (LU) 62, 127-8, 142, 3 52 da1 Sillico, Baldone 372 dal Sillico, Giuliano 371 dal Sillico, Moro 37I-4, 376 dal Sillico, Pellegrino 371 Davidsohn, Robert xxviii debbio 30 ·

difensio, see ius palronatus de la Ronciere, Charles 137 Delumeau,Jean Pierre 157, 208,258, 269. 271, 277, 309 demesne 27-8, 35," 42-3, 71-84, 86, 161-2, 22<>-38; see also curtis Denmark xxix Diecimo (w) 18, 19, 56, 98 districtus 105, II 5, II!r20, 122, 275, 281, 298, 315, 317. 322, 332, 337; see also signoria documents, formulae, notaries 10, Il, 18, 27, 53. Ill, 113, 156, 167, 172, 215-16, 245. 26o, 297 Dolomites 19 Domenico di Amorotto 367- 8, 379 Domenico di Vivenzo di Guinizo of Monte 247 dominatus loci, see signoria Dominico qui et Baruntio di Leone of Campori 49, 51 Domniperto di Autperto, pievano of Basilica sr Donni 57 Dracula, Ct. 36o Duby, Georges xx, xxiii, 355 'economic rationality' 76, 79, 22!r33. 255 8ites, village 4<>-52, 66--7, 70, 84-5, 134. 147. 207-9. 246, 249-50, 252, 33!r40, 347-5I, 36lr74. 377-8; see also boni homines; landowners Elmperto, Bp. of Arezzo 18I, 185-7, I9I, 198, 230 Emilia xviii, xxx, 365, 367-8, 379

emmer 22 enclosures 30, 35, 77, I61, 222, 299 Endres, Robert 16 England xix, xx, xxxii, 285, 289 Enrico I, Bp. of Lucca 122, 129 Eriprando of Basilica 54 estate, see curtis estate .management s. 16, 26, 48-9, 68-89, 124, 2I!r30 Este 15, r9, 132, 143-4, 146, 366-8, 374. 380 estimi 143-4, 375 Etruscans 173 Everardo, Bp. of Arezzo 186 excavation, see archaeology executors 52, 56, 6 I, 244 exenia 24. 71-2, r63; see also oblia

jaber 166; see also artisans; smiths factions 212, 214-15, 264-8, 276, 281-3, 307. 329. 34!r53. 356, 368-80 Falgano (FI) 199 family structures, aristocratic 95-4S, 9!rlOO, 103, IQ9, 128, I 30, 274- 5, 277-8o, 292; see also anstocracy Farfa, mon. 10, 86, 268 Farizo di Grirnaldo of Freggina 246, 250, 267 Farneta (All.) 174, 191, 217, 235 Farolfi, ff., of Freggina 245-4S, 259 Farolfo di Lamberto of Freggina 24.5-4S, 250 Farolfo di Teuzo of Preggina 245 Fasoli, Gina xxiii Fatucchi, A. 17 3 Feralmi, t{ 261-2, 269, 272- 4, 281, 284, 287, 28!r91, JI2 Ferrano (FI) 224 Ferrara 15, I44, 366-8, 370, 372, 374. 378 feud 377- 8; see also violence feudalism xv-xxiii, xxvi, xxxi, 1, 92-J, 107, 126, 202-J, 273, 277. 285-6, 290, 295, 3o6, 308, JI<>II, 33 I; see also fief; vassals FibbiaUa (tu) 87, I40

Index .fo/tlitas 105, 119, 311-12., 331; set

•llso oaths; vassal.s fief, benefice xx-xxii, so, 69, 8r, 86-7.97-8, to6-7. Ill, 122, 124, 183. 188, 259. 262, 273. 284-5, 307, 3 II- U, 319-20; set also feudalism; prtcaritr, vassals Resole 154. 159, 17o-2, r8r-2, 184.s. 192, 198, 201-3, 209, 211, 218, 224-s. 269, 2So, 304, 316, 321-2, 332, 343- 4. JS2, 363 Fillari of Campori 42, SS fines 18, 19, 53, 91 fucal (public) land XXX, 59-63, 1034, I I I-12, I 14-17, I4I, I8o-4, 293-
417

Fraolmo 99 Fraolmo di Conrado qui et Cunitio 99 Fraolmo di Fraolmo 99 Frassineta (AR) 165, 168, 270, 31s. 326-7, ]30, J32, 336-7 Frederick 1 Barbarossa, Emp. xvii, 6o-t, 127, IJI, 13J, 141, 198, 273-4. 319 Frederick 11, Emp. 131 Freggina (AR) 154,192-3, 197,21112, 234. 239-48. 25o-2, 259. 263- 4. 267, 275-<>. Joo-1, 325, 339 church of S. Felicita 240, 246-7, 259. 26)-4. 267 Frignano 367-8 Fronzola (AR) 203, 207, 293- 4 Furport11 (tu) 53 Gallicano (LU) 19, 21-2, p - J, 56, 59. 87-8, 101, 104, 117, 139 Garfagnana xxvii, 3-4, 7-12, 15-149 passim, 153, 157-5 Germany xiii, xvi, xviii, xx, xxvi, 285, 289 Gherardeschi xxix, 61, 112 Gherarding hi 103, 114, 121, 124-5, 127-9. lJ.S, 137. 138, 141-3, 145. 335. 352 Gherardo 11, Bp. of Lucca JO, 70, 98 Gherardo, Ct. 6o, 61 Gherardo di Cunerado qui et Cunitio 73-4, 99

Index Gherardo qui et Morecto di Gherardo 99 Ghivizzano (LV) 6o, 141, 219 Giacomo Berruto 244 Gibello di Rolandino of Partina 1&,, 326-8, 332 gifts to the Church, cycles of 10, 54- s. 94, 136, 153-4, 191-7, 200-1, 204, 21o-1s, 259, 266-8, 333 Giovanni J, Bp. of Lucca 56-'7, 86 Giovanni D, Bp. of Lucca 30, 108, 135 Giovanni, brother of Baldoino 215 Giovanni, Ct. of San Donnino 377 Giovanni di Giovanni, Pr. 311- 12 Giovanni GuaJberto 200 Giovanni di Pietro of Freggina 243 Giovanni di Rodilando 103-4 Girolamo, Bp. of Arezzo 183, 192, 321

Giuseppe of Marciano 320, 324- 8, 334 Godiperga ss, 69-?o goldsmith 57 Gorfigliano (LV) 17, 24, 62- 4, 98, 101, 117. 366, 377 Gotio, not. 217 Gottifrido di Gottifrido 102 Gragnana (Lu) IZ7- 8 Gragno (LV} 72, II4-15, ll7-t8, 121-2, 124, 134. 137-8, 141-2 Gregorio, Bp. of Arezzo 313 Gregory V, P. 59 Gregory VD, P. xxxi Gregory IX, P. 61, 131 Gregory of Tours 9<4 Gressa (AR) z.o, 28o, 292, 294- 5, 297-9. 340 Griffone di Guillielmo 274 Grimaldi, ff., ue Amico and Farizo di Grimaldo Grimaldo diacono 74 Grimizzo, Bp. of Lucca 108 Grosseto 21 Grossl~ll,-e 16, SI, 53, 6o, 69-?o, ss_,, 95-103, 107, 109, 220, 235

guadia, guardia, quardia, wardia 120, 203, 313 guagitt 313-1-4 gualdi 182; see also forestum Gudifrido 57 Guduino of Campori 41, SS Guelfo di Raineri of Banzena 27 I Guelfi and Ghibellines 368 Guidi, Cts. xxix, xxx, 112, 131, 135, 158, 164, 168, 18o-1, 184, 197204, 218- 19, 26o, 264, 269, 273, 276, 279-82, 287, 294- s. 300, 304, 316, 318- 4, 328-35, 343, 351-3, 362-4 Guidi, ff. 101, 127-9; see also 'Cunimundinghi'; Nobili, de' Guido, Bp. of Arezzo 3 13 Guido JJ, Ct. 198-9, 276 Guido JV, Ct. 322 Guido V Guerra, Ct. 322 Guido VI Guerra 11, Ct. 202, zzz Guido VD Guerra UJ, Ct. 329-30 Guido di Berardo 270 Guido di Mascaro 119 Guido di Morula, masarius 236 Guido di Rofrido 3II- I2 Guido di Sisemundo{Sisenando 75, 99 Guilelmo di Boso di Benzo 276 Guilielmo di Guillielmo 274 Guillelmi, ff. 246, 25o-1, 262-7, 269, 274-9. 28]-4, 287-9. 296-7, 299, 305, 312, 343, JSI, 362; set ~rlso Benzi, ff.; Ubertini Guillielmo di Lamberto 248 Guinigi 100 GunduaJdi 4o-51, 55-
Index houses 28-3 0, 35-6 , 38, 43, 168, 174- s. rn. r86, 208, 233- 4. 243. 261, 327 Hub en. M. of Tusc any xxix: Hug h, K . of Italy x:vi, x:x:ix, t 81- 4 Hug h, M . of Tusc any x:x:ix , xxx , 6o, no- u, 184. 195 hun ting 162 ienit iw

(gynMcaeo) 236

igno ranc e xx llde ben o di Ben o 104 llde bran di, ff. 278 Udebrando, not. 167, 216- 17 Udip erto di Aur i of Cam pori 43, 48 inca stell ame nto x:iv-xv. x:xiii-xxvii, 33. 36-9 , 84, 86, 92, 11 S-18 , 140, rn. 289, 302- 6; s« also castelli info rma l social relationships, social circles 5-6, 93, In- 9, 241, 296, 311- 12, J2S)-JO, 369- 71, 375-'7 Ingh ifrid o di Cun imu ndo 98 Inno cent 111, P . 168 Inve stitu re Disp ute II8, 195 ltalia di Ugo 327 -8 Italian War s 367"""9 iudiuria 171 -2 ius patr<matus, tkfensio 42, 44, 2oo- 1, 241 iustitia, stt justi ce, priv ate Jam ut, Jorg 286 John XV , P. S9 ]one s, Pbil ip 79, r6o, 224 judg es, stt law yen juris dict ion, publ ic, set cour ts justi ce, priv ate, ove r tena nts 68-9, So, 83, IOj- 6, 109, 117, 225- 6, 230, 235 , Jll , JI4- IS; see also sign oria Keller, Hag en 92, ns, IJO, 285 -6, 289--62 Kote l'nik ova, L. A. 229 Kun e, Wil helm 190- 1

labo ur-s ervi ce 7o-4 , 76-8 4. 22o- 2, 224- s. 227- 8 LAm a (LU) Jl

La Mau sole a (AR) 174. 177 -8, 2]8, 240, 243 , 248, 259- 6o, 262, 264, 284 lambaT4/i, Lmgobmdi, see capit#M Lam bert i, ff. , of La Mausolea 243, 248 -50, 259, 262, 264, 284 Lam ben o di Alb eno 246 Lam bert o di Ard ingo lo 261- 2 Lam bert o di Faro lfo 24S Lam bcn o di Taib eno 249 Lam mar i (tu) 98 land clea ranc e x:xv, Jo-t , 37, 79. 165, 231 LuulMtTsdaaft, set sign oria 'lan d mar ket' 27-8, 166--7, 2os, 230, 232 -3, 244, 252- s. 262 land own en, sma ll and med ium x:v, 10, 16, 17, 40"--67. 83. 1]6, 1418, r8o, 18.2- 3, r8s. 202 -3, 205, 208, 241- 68, 303- 4, 317, 324- 9, 348- 51, 361 -3; StL also peas antr y defi nitio ns of ss. z8o land -tax 94 Lan frido di Sofr ido of Mon te .247-8, .257, 2S9 Lanir14 (All) 247 Larn iano (AR) 163 La Spezia 21 launegild, see coun ter-g ift Lavagna 12.4 law xx:ii-xxili, 44, un. us, 14o-1 lawy ers, judg es xxii, xxx, Ill, 202, 212, 217, :24S-6, 32S-6, 374 Lari o xxii i-xx v, x:xvii, 301, 303 leath er 169 -70 Lcg naio (All) 187- 8, .240, .246 Leone, not. 217 Leon e di Bon iu 208 Leon e di Liuz eben o .257-8 Leon i, ff., of Con tra 252- 4 Le Roy Ladurie, Emm anue l .2, 6 libtllarius 70, 72, 78, 84, 222, 224, 226, 2:28-g, 23 s libellus 70, 81, 226, 228, 235-6 libri feutlorum 109

Index

420

Licciano, S. Quirico in (LU) 73 Liema (AR) 271, 278, 280, 294, 2979, 328, 337. 339-40 life-cycle, of peasant family 70, 253, 255 Lima, r. 18, 19, 63, 72, 97, 129 Liutprand, K. of Italy xv Liuzeberti, If. 257- 8 Liuzo di Leone of Contra 252- 3 Livignano (LU) 124 Lombards, Lombard kingdom xv, xxvii, r8, 41, 44, 65, 76, 92, I45. I48, 308 . Lombardy xviii, 2, 90, I II, I 57, 304, 315-16 Lonnano (AR) 198--9, 203 Loppia (LU) 18, 19, 2I, 32- 3, 59, 75, 77. 87, 98, IOI, 103-4. 109, 122-3 lordship, see signoria Lorenzano (AR) 209-10, 227-8, 296, 301, 317, 322 Lotario of Monte 320 Louis 11, Emp. and K. of Italy xv, XVl

Lucca xxvii-xxxi, 1, 4, 5, 7--9, .11, 15-.149 passim, 157, 165, L67, 169, 176-7. 181, 2I4,· 218- 19, 222, 224, 228--9, 231, 279, 281, 283. 291--2, 295. 304~5. 309. 311, 316-18, 334, 338, 347, 352-5, 357--9, 36r-3, .J6s-6, 368--9, 374. 376-7. 379 canonica (cathedral· chapter) x, 121, 132, 136, 138, 224 S. Colombano 57 S. Frediano 97 S. Giorgio 102-3 S. Giorgio, mon. 103 S. Giustina t 19 S. Michele in Foro 71- 2, 98 S. Ponziano 53, 6o--1, 71-z · Luccioli (AR) 186 Luccio ofFosciana 51, 77 Lucignana (tu) 61, 104; ll7 Luciperto, pievano ofBasilica 41 Luciperto of Castelnuovo 52 Luciprando di Auriperro 46

Luciprando di Auripertulo 46 Lunata (LU) 97, 357 Luni 15, 17, zo, 25, 32, 56, 62, 64, 72, 74. 91, 100, 101, 113, 119, 121, 123-8, 132, 135, 14·5• 159, 3 Il' 316, 334. 352 Lunigiana 8, I?, 18, 21, 29-31, 34- 5, 56, 113, 124, 140, 145-6, 296 Lupolo of Sarna 314 Macon xx, xxi, xxiii Madalena, Giovanni and Piero, of San Donnino 371, 377-8 · Magnano (w) 54, 374 Magnano, Battistino 373-4 · Magnimo, Pierino 370, 374, 376-8, 380 Maiano (AR) 318 Malaspina 127, 145; ~e also Obertenghi · Maloclevello (st) zi1 malus usus u j, 322 manorial system, sistema airtense 66, 69-84, 220--9; ·see also curtis mansus, episcopal estate 186; see·also tenant-holdings · Marchiones 184. r86 march of Tuscany, see marquis Marciano (AR) 168, r8s- 8, 190, I97, 2"1.7, 223, 230, 249, 252, 2S5, 26o, 28o, 292--9, 313-14, 317, 321, 324..:0, 329-30, 332, 33940, 363 Maremma 25, s6, 163, )69 Marena (AR) 261 Margutte of Camporgiano . 372- 3 . markets, see commerce Marlia, pieve di S. Pancraz,io (w) 98 · marmoraio t66 ·· marquis, march, of Tuscany . xxviixxxii, 50, 6o--4, 96, 104, I Io18, .1 32-4, 145, I8o-z; see also fiscal land; Hugh; Matilda marriage transactions u, 275-'7, 327-8 Martinozo of Ragginopoli 326 Marturi (s1) xxx masnaderii 287

Index Massa (LU) 52 massarius 27, 84, 223, 226, 228-9, 236

Massarosa (Lu) 99, 119, 130, 140 Matilda of Canossa, M. of Tuscany xxx- xxxi, 6o, 61, 101, 110, 114, IJ8, 130,

l.op

Mauro of Campori 4 1-2, 46 meritum, see counter-gift Metaleto (AR) 163, 167, 185, 240 rmzzadria 35, 177, 255, 339-40 Micotti, Anselmo 143, 378 Micorti, Tommaso 370, 378 Migliano (LU, PI) 103 Miglietto of Camaiore 376 Milan xviii, 10, 94, 109-11, I3o-1, 195, 200, 284- 5, 287 S. Ambrogio 10,170 milites 189, 27o-1, 285--7, 290, 2989. 306, 326--9, 3 39 millet 22 mills 35, 165-6, 168, 189, 207, 243, 326--'7 fulling-mills 168-g

minsters xxxii mmt, see money Mittellibell, -e 16, 48,

so. 5 I, 70, 220,

236 mcbilia 167 Modena IS, 17, 358 Moggiona (AR) 184- 5, 203, 210, 223 , 294-s. 300, 323-4. 337, 353 Molazzana (Lu) 23 Molise xxvi, 38-9, 266, 358 money xxx, 69-'71, 74, 76, 78-9, 81-2, 84- 5, 167, 220-9, 312 Montagna Forlivese 158 Montaillou 94 Montanari, Massimo 26, 78 Monte (AR) 154, 162, 174, 177, 186, 193- 4, 197, 215, 23 I , 238-42, 246-52, 255--'7. 267, 274-6. 281, 288, 297- 8, 3oo-1, 303, 324, 339. 348-9 Monte Amiata 10, 304 Montecassino xxvi, 105 Montecatini (PT) 140, 302

421

Montecchio (AR) 186, 203, 275, 279So, 292- 4

Monte Falterona 184 Montefatucchio (AR) 173, 182-3, 185, 197, 28o, 313, 326 Monte Ferentino 18 3 Monte Gragno 139 Montemagno (LV) 99, 119, 122 Montemignaio (AR) 16o, 172 Montevarchi (AR) 272 Montopoli (PI) I 40 Morelli, Pietro 372 Moriano (LU) 57, 73. 86, 99, I 16, 295

Moro da1 Sillico, see da1 SiUico Mugello 8 mulberries 25, 148 Musseto di Griffolo of Ragginopoli 278

myths xiv, xxii, xxviii Naples xxv, 373 Nasciano (AR) 292 Natale, abb. of Strumi 199 Nero qui et Urso di Gizone 236 Nibbiano (AR) 174- 5. 191, 207- 8, 211, 225. 227, 293- 4 Nicciano (tu) 23, 57, 63- 4, 68, 71- 5, 77,79, 82, 86--'7,98-9 Nicola 140 Nilus of Rossano 214 Nipozzano (FI) 199, 201, 202 Nobili, de' 101 , 128, 143- 4; see also

'Cunimundingh'; Guidi, if. Nonantola, mon. 184 Normans xxii, 306 notaries, see documents oak I62, 177 oaths 105, 119-22, 138-9, 331 Obertenghi 62, Ir4, 146; see also Malaspina oblia 163, 220, 224, z27; see also exenia Odolperto of Cam pori 42, SS Odolsindo di Odolperto 42 Olderico Manfredi, M. of Turin xvu

422

Index

olives 21- 3, 25-6, 148, r6r Omodeo, e~mversus of Camaldoli 329 Ongano di Lambeno of La Mausolea 177-8, 248-50, 255 Orgi (AR) r8s-6 Orlandino, see Rolandino Ormanno di Raineri 27 I Omina (AR) 174- 5, 205, 207- 11, 230, 301, 3IS Ortignano (AR) 207 Orronovo 140 Osheim, Duane 88 Ostripaldo of Vallico 70 Ostripeno di Cosperro 47 Otto I, Emp. xvi, 182-3 Otto U, Emp. 6<>-I Ouo IV, Emp. 131 Ottonians xxxi, 184 Pacchi, Domenico 95 Paganello, Bp. of Lucca 122, 129 Pagani, ff. 26<>-4. 268, 328 Palaia (PI) 30 Palermo 214 paruc 22 paq (LU) 52 papacy 59-61, 63-4, 117, 367-8, 379 Papiano (All) 198-9, 201-3, 218, 224, 294 . parish xxxii, 53, Ill, 334 Parma 200 parti, see factions Panina_(.u) 154, 158, r6<>-2, 166! 174, 177, 188, 193- 4. 197, 215, 217, 22.3, 226, 230, _237, 239-40, 242, 248-9, 251, 253, 255, 257, 200, 2.62- 3, 265, 269. 271, 274s. 278-So, 292, 294, 297-300, 305, 315, 323, 326-8, 330, 332, 337, 339-40, 361; see also Archiano pieve di S. Maria 172, 238-40, 251, 318-19 territory of the pieve 176, 191- 2, 206, 216, 26o, 282, 318 Pasqui, U. 216 Passignano, m on. (fl) 2, 22.6-8, 331, 340

Passo dei Mandrioli I 57-8 pastoralism, silvo-pastoral economy 6-8, 2.3-6, 37, 71, 91, 137-.u, 148, 1,58-64, 167--'JO, 338-9, 359-6o, 368-9 pasture 137, 141, r6o, 163 Pataria xviii, 200 patronage 42, 44-6, so, 62, 65--'7, 136, 145. 191- J, 19<)-202, 200, 2o8- 15, 226, 243-9, 256-6o, 264- 8, 276--'J, 284-5, 303, 31112, .J28, 349-52 Pavia xvii, xxvili, xxxi, no, 184 peasantry xxiv, xxvi, 2.8, 66, 143-4, 146-8, 182, 265, 307- 8, 330, 332-,S, 348-5 I, 357, 36o, 3~4. 37o-8o; su also cultivators; landowners; serfs; settlements; tenancy Pedona (LU) 98 Peredeo, Bp. of Lucca 56 Perforeo 57 Ptrocclo (w) 3 S Perpoli (LU) 123 Pescia (PT) 140 Pezza (AR) 186--'7, I97, 270, 337 Pharaoh 325 Piazza a! Serchio (LV) 18-20, 32- 3, s6, 62, 71, 97, Ior, 120 Piemonte xviii, I3I, 244, 316 Pietrasanta (LU) 369 Pietro I, Bp. of Arezzo 184 Pietro I, Bp. of Lucca 57 Pietro 11, Bp. of Lucca 86 Pietro di Berardo 320 Pietro di Giovanni castaldio 226, 230, 242-6, 248, 250, 253-s. 258-9, 268, 275 Pietro di Giovanni of Monte 242 Pietro di Leone of Contr~ 252-3 Pietro iudex di Liutardo 212, 220 Pietro di Raspeno, pievano of Basilica 51- 3 pieve, pievano xxx:ii, 16, 32-5, 41, 44, 51-2, 59-6o, 68, 74, 87- 8, 93- 5, 98-I04, 108-10, Ill, 122, 171- 3, 189, 191, 203, 20)--'J, 216, 238-9. 261, 318-19, 336

Index Pieve a Elici (LU) 87, 97-8 Pieve Fosciana, see Fosciana pigs 24, 162-3, !68 Pisa xxvw-xxix, xxxi, I, 25, 127, 130, 132-3, 146, 148, 169-'70, 327, 371 Piscaria (All) 271 Pistoia xxviii, 1, 130, 132, 146, 198 pl4cihml XXX, 87, 110, 119-20, 203, 287, 309-10, 322; see also courtS Placule (LU) 57 Pl4no, pieve di S. Eleuterio in (All) 172, 174. 207 players 168 Plesner, Johan 2

private vs. public power xv- xxm, 105-II, 116, JI8, 123, 285-90, 296, 307-18, 333- 4; see also . . Signona proprietary churches, see private churches public land, see fiscal land Puctiostorli (Pr) 104

podne, see appotkramento;

Rachimpaldo, not. 18, 53 Rachiprando di Gundi, Pr. 47- 8 RagginopoJi (AR) 203, 269, 276, 278-81, 294, 296-9, 30I, 303, 315, 323, p6, 332, 337. 339-40 Raineri, Visc. of Lucca 135 Raineri di Alluccio 119-20 Raineri di Berardo 269-71 Raineri di Fuscheri 273-4 Raineri di Ghiberto 26o, 263-4 Raineri di Guido 277 Raineri di Teuzo 245 Raineri di Ugo 271 Rassina, r. 164, 182- 4 Ratchis di Cosperto 47 Rationes Decimarum 32, 175, 301 Ravenna 15, 157, 181 redditales 78, 84 Reggio Emilia 17, 327, 367, 372 regional economy 137-8, 147-8, 169-'70, 354. 358-6o religious issues xvi, 44, 190-7, 2ool, 212-1 s. 224, 256-7, 265, 305, 321, 376

tenant-holdings podest4 I 29-30, 337. 370 Poggialvento (R) 2, 8, 156, 162, 167, 219, 226, 229, 234 Poggibonsi (sr) xxx Poggio (LU), see Rogi4na Poggiolo (All) 216, 240, 261, 273, 289. 377 Poly, Jean-Pierre xx Pontassieve (PI) 1S7, 199 Pontecchio (LU) 372, 373 Ponticelli, ser Frediano 371-2 Pontremoli (MS) 17 Po plain xvi, xxiv, xxix, xxxi, 4, 22, 24, 26,76, 74. 90. 290,303,316 Poppi (AR) 154, 164, 166, 199, 2034, 300, 318, 324, 330 Poppiena, mon. (AR) 201-3 population xxviii-xxix, 15, 28-30, 34, 43, 53, 79, ISB-9, 234, 2So1, 300; see also settlements Porcari (tu), Porcaresi II2- IS, 117, 120, 123, 127- 30, 133-4, 142 Porciano (AR) 198, 203, 293-4 Prat4glia, mon. (AR) 9, 153-344 passim, 3so, 356, 362- 3 Pratale (AR) 324 Pratomagno 157, 163 Pratovecchio, mon. (AR) 201, 202 preCJJria 46, 325; see also fief private churches and monasteries 4o-8, 56-8, 72, 178, 190, 193. 198-202, 208, 24o-1, 247- 8, 270

Puglia XXV Put«kll4 (All) 166 Pyrenees 94, 376 Quarto d 'Asti 244 Quorle (All) 163, 199, 205-6

rtpromissiones I 56 RhOne, r. 23 Rimaggio, r. 239-40 Riosecco (AR) 294 Ripafratta (PI) 130 roads, communications 17, 157, 173, 178 Rotk (AR) 154, 239-46; see also Freggina

Index Rodilando di Cunimundo 103 . San Donnino (w) 37, 84, 98, II7Rodilando di Giovanni 103 18, 124, 37o-1, 377-8 Rodolfo di Ardingolo 261-2 San Gimignano (SI) 301 Rodolfo Cantaro di Rodolfo of San Michele (Lu) 37. 84, u8, 124, Papiano 202 143 Rodolfo of Cellabarotta 102 San Miniato (PI) 39 Rodolfo di Gherardo 102 S. Pellegrino in Alpe (LU) 143 Rodolfo di Guido of Partina 26o, S. Rossore (PI) 25 262- 4, 26']-8, 312., 325 Santa Mama (AR) 209, 321 Rodolfo di Ongano 209-10 S. Maria a Monte (PI) 86, 117, 140 Rodolfo iudex of Papiano 202 S. Eleuterio, pieve, see Piano Rodolfo di Righiza 191, 206, 270 S. Vincenzo al Voltumo 86, 3o6 Roffrido di Cosperto, Pr. 46-7 Saracino di Ongano 249 Rogerio of Partina 328 Sardinia 193 Rogiana (Poggio, LU) 20, 32-3, 99Sama (AR) 165, 217, 234, 293- 5, 300, 100, 109 314, 320, 331-2 Rolandinghi 103- 5, 109, 12.2- 3. sarto 166 127-30 Sassi (LU) 51- 2, 56, 77, 371 Rolandino di Rolando of Partina Schneider, Fedor 18, 105--9; 240, 294, 297- 304, 86-7, 89, 97-9, 101, 109, II8, 339-40 120, 124, 128, 134. 142 Sexta (AR) 154, 239-40, 245-
Index Siena xxv, xxvii-xxix, 1, 22, I 3 I, 195~, 228-9, 2JI, 303, 307, . 338, . 34S .. stgnona XIn- xv, xvn-xxm, xxv, xxxi, s-6, 64, So-2, 92-4, 96, 99-100, 102- I s. uS-26, us, 131-3, 14o-3, 14S-6, 14S, 176, I9']-S, 20J-4, ZIS-19, 231, 276. zSo-3, 28s-6, 2S9-91. 296-S. 303, 305, Jio-JS, 355-7; see also districtus; justice; private power Sigolo di Beno of Ventrina 234 Sillico (Lu) 123 Silva (AR) I77--9 silvo-pastoral economy, ree pastoralism Sisemundo di Sisemundo 101 sistema curtense, see manorial system slaves 235-6, 3I4 smiths 135, 166 Socana, pieve di S. Antonino (AR) 172-3, xSs-6, 1S8, 219, 227, 324 territory of the pieve 162, I71, 192, ~. 217 Soci (AR) 154, J sS, 16o-1, 164, 166, 175. 177. IS6, 193- 4. 197"--9. 2II, 2I7, 224, 23o-1, 23S, 238, 2~1 , 248, 2S3. 26o-z, 269, 272-5, 2S1, 2S9-92, 294- s. 297. 299-300, 305, 30S, 3 I 5, 323, 325, J2S, 3JO, 332- 3, 337, 33940, 361 Sotfredinghi I27"--9 Sofia, Countess, abb. of Rosano 202 Solano, r. I sS Soliggine, r. I sS, 165, I7 s. 188,

207-8 Sommocolonia (LU) 37I Sova, r . 154, I7I, 1S4, r86, 194, 197--9, 211, 226, 228, 230, 262, 27S-'7. 280, 297, 301, 322, 324, 328, 330, 344 Sovigliana (Pr) 117 Sparena (AR) 301, 324 spelt 161, 224 Sprugnano, mon. (AR) 201

de Stefani, Carlo 14.2 Stia (AR) I S8, 16o, 172, 198--9, 203 Stoddart, Simon 173 Strada (AR) 172; see also Vado Strumi, mon. (AR) 9, 154. I 56, I 59, I63, 166, 168--9, 195, 198-203, 205-7, Zlo-II, 213, 216-17, 219, 224-6, 233-5, 26o, 293- 4. 300, 314-1 s. 322, 343 Subbiano (AR) 209, 269, 272, 274 Sundo di Cospeno 46 Sundo di Gospulo 46 Sunualdo of Cam pori 41 Tabacco, Giovanni xxi- xxii, 92, 13 1, 200 Tagizo di Pagano 26o-4, 32S Taiberto di Donnello 249 Talesperiano, Bp. of Lucca 57 Tarlati 269, 28 I Tedaldo, Bp. of Arezzo 3 IS Teggina, r. I64, I99-20I, ~ Tegiano (AR) 175, 2o6, 293- 4 Tegrimo 11, Ct. 199 Tempagnano (LU) 102 Temporia 372 tenancy 4s-s z. 66-7. 84- 5. 222--9, 234-'7, 33 1-2; see also libellarius; massarius tenant-holdings, casae massariciae, mansi, poderi, tenimenta 27-30, 33, 85, 185~, 209, 231- 5 tenimentum 232- 5; see also tenant-holdings Tennano (AR) 198--9 Tereglio (LU) 21 Terricciola (Pr) 97 territorialization , see boundaries te"itorium, see boundaries; castelli; pteve Tertinole, see Vadc Teudegrimo, Bp. of Lucca 73 Teufuso di Teudulo of Vallico 70 Teuperto di Cristina I02- J Teutperto of Placule 57 Teutperto di Rasperto, pievano of Basilica SI Teuzo, castaldio of Bibbiena 189, 242

Index Teuzo, not. 2I6 Teuzo, pievano of Bibbiena 189, 191 thiny-year rule I 1 Tiber, r. 182, 281; see also 'val Tiberina Tirelli, Vito I 30 tithes xxxii, 32, 51-2, 55, 64, 67, 74, 89, 93-s. 99, Io1- 3, 105, 109u, 122- 3, uS, 142, 145, 189, 270, 283, 399. 318-19, 376 Tocli (AR), see Atocia Torrite (w) 55 Toto of Vitoio 56, 63 Toubert, Pierre xxiii-xxv, 25, 31, 92, 302 transhumance 21, 24- 5, 164, 169; set also pastoralism Trassilico (tu) 41, 122-3, 340, 378 Trebbiano II3 Trento 4 Treppignana (LU) 56 Trivio, mon. 18.2, 317 Tulliano (AR) 209-10 Turin xvii Ubertini 128, .201, .241, .262-3, .269, 271, 274-81, 283- 4. 288, .29.2, 295 • .297. 299, 303, 305, 320, 323- 4. 326-8, 330, 332, 334. 343, 351, 36.2-3; stt also Benzi, ff.; Guillelmi, ff. Uberto{Ubertino di Guilelmo 2767. 28o-l, 284 Uberto di Rodilando of Puctiostorli 61, 103-4., Il4-15 Udulfo of Campori 41, SS Ughetto of Sarna 33 I Ugitto of Montefatucchio 326 Ugo, not. .216 Ugo, not. 217 Ugo di Benzo 275 Ugo di Berardo 269-70 Ugo di Guilelmo .276, .281 Ugo di Goccio 318 Ugo di lldebrando 3.28 Ugo di Minuto .261-.2, 274 Ugo di Pietro of Biforco 182 Ugolinello of Castelvecchio 123-4

Ugolinello di Superbo di A.rmanno, Ct. 101 Ursi, if., of Freggina 245 usus 313-15, 3.22; see also malus usus

Vaccari, Pietro 105-6 Vaccol:i (w) I 30 Vado, Terlinole (Strada, AR) 17.2, 174, 19~. 201, .20.2, 224, 233 Vagli (tu) 369 Valdambra 340 Valdamo 99, 104. .277-8; see also A.mo Valdelsa xxviii Valdera xxviii, 30, 103, 117 Valdichiana .29.2, 357 Val di Comia 25, 56 Val di Corsolone, Lima, Rassina, Soliggine, Sova, Teggina, set Corsolone, Lima, etc. Valdinievole 99, 101, 1.25 Val di Sieve 162, .200, 2.24, 233 Valenzano (AR) .209 Val Freddana 30 Vallebuia (LU) 3o-1, 101 Vallico, Vallico di Sopra, Vallico di Sotto (w) 17, 19, zr, 35, 51, s5-6, 59, 68-7 x, 78, s1- 5. 87-9, 98, Il'T-2.2, 134. 137, 139. 1412, 369 Vallombrosa, mon. (FI) 46, 163, 195, 2oo-1 V altellina 4 Val Tiberina 8, 281, 334; set also Tiber Valva 7, 135, 268; see also A.bruzzo valvassores 285, 291 Vanna (A.R) 199, .206, .211, 2.24 Varese 291 vassals, fideles xx, xxi, 86, 97-9, 106, 195 • .209. 278-9, .284, 289, 307. 31o-12, 325, 328; see also feudalism; fief Venerando, vicedominus 187 Veneto xviii, 90 Ventrina (AR) 154. 162, 168, 186-7, 192-3, 197, 2ll, .225-6, 229-30,

Index 2J4, 239-40, 242- 3. 248, 251, 257. 275-6, 288, 326, 339 Verghereto 158 Verni (LU) 122, 379-80 Verrucchio (LU) 37, 88-9, t 17, 122 Verrucole (Lu) 37, 98, II7, 124- 5. 141- 2 Versilia 19, 23, 25, 87, 97, II9, 127, 133, 140, 146 Vezzano (AR) 173, 183-4, 292-3 via Francigena xxix, 17 Viareggio (Lu) 157 Villa Basilica (w) 23, 139 ViJla Collemandina (Lu) 127- 8 villages, see collective organizations; Bites; setdements Violante, Cinzio xxi-xxiii, 92- 3, II5, 195 violence 139, 167- 8, 270, 324- 30, 366-So; see also wars viscount no, 114- 15, 135, 183, 313-

1"

Vitoio (LU) 56, 63- 5, 77, 86-7, 99 Vivarium (AR) I 85 Vogognano (.u.) 159, 172, 209, 217 Vorno (LU) 133

427

W alfonso di Prandulo of Carfaniana 25, 56 Walprando di Prandulo 56, 63 wars 71 , 124, 126-7, 131, 277, 323; see also violence wheat 22, 26, 161, 224 whores 168 Wilielmo, Bp. of Arezzo 187 Willa of Tuscany 6o Willerado Calvo 69 Willeramo 63- 4 wine, vineyards 24, Je>--1, ••· 71, 143, r6r, 164- 5. r68, 189, 223 , 225

Winigildo/Winitio di Frao)mo 99IOO

Winitii, ff. 247, 249, 252, 257- 8 witnesses 46, 208, 216-17, 242-9, 253, 258-63, 267--8, 271, 274, 276-7. 282, 325 woodland 23, 26, 137, 139-41, 158, 16o-2, 184-5, 223, 239 wool 163 World War ll 158