The mountains and the city: the Tuscan Appennines in the early Middle Ages 9780198219668

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Principal Collections of Primary Material, and Abbreviations (page ix)
Introduction to the English Edition (page xiii)
General Introduction (page 1)
I. THE GARFAGNANA, 700-1200 (page 13)
1. Geography and Historical Ecology I (page 15)
2. Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (page 40)
3. The Economic Structure of Landed Estates and their Development 800-1000 (page 68)
4. The Lords of the Garfagnana and the World of the City Tenth to Twelfth Centuries (page 90)
5. Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune (page 134)
II. THE CASENTINO IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY (page 151)
6. Geography and Historical Ecology II (page 153)
7. The Distribution of Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving (page 180)
8. Estates and Tenants (page 221)
9. The Social Circles of the Middle Archiano Valley (page 238)
10. Signori and Castelli: The Crystallization of the Aristocracy (page 269)
11. Myth and Reality of Feudalism in the Countryside 1050-1200 (page 307)
III. GENERAL CONCLUSION (page 345)
12. Poverty and Freedom in the Mountains; Ludovico Ariosto as Anthropologist (page 347)
Maps (page 381)
Bibliography (page 392)
Index (page 411)

Citation preview

The Mountains and the City

BLANK PAGE

The Mountains and

the City

The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages

C.J. WICKHAM

CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD 1988

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in

Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York

© C. J. Wickham, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wickham, Chris The mountains and the city: the Tuscan . Appennines in the early Middle Ages. 1. Tuscany (Italy)—History 2. Italy —History—476—1268

I. Title

945° .503 DG737.22 ISBN 0—-19-821966—-0

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wickham, Chris, 1950- |

The mountains and the city. Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Garfagnana (Italy)—History. 2. Garfagnana (Italy) —Social conditions. 3. Garfagnana (Italy)—Economic conditions. 4. Casentino Valley (Italy)—History. 5. Casentino Valley (Italy)—Social conditions. 6. Casentino Valley (Italy)—-Economic conditions.

I. Title. DG975.G3N53 1988 945° .53 87-18572

: ISBN o—19~-821966—0 Processed by The Oxford Text System Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn

Acknowledgements

Iam most grateful to the following people, who read this book

in one of its versions, as a whole or in large part: Wendy 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 of Pisa 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—xu; 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 1X

Introduction to the English Edition xii

General Introduction I I. THE GARFAGNANA, 700-1200 13

1. Geography and Historical Ecology 1 1S 2. Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning in

the Eighth and Ninth Centuries 40 3. The Economic Structure of Landed Estates and their Development, 800—1000 68 4. The Lords of the Garfagnana and the World of the | City, Tenth to Twelfth Centuries gO 5s. Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune 134 Il. THE CASENTINO IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY 1§1

6. Geography and Historical Ecology 153

of Gift-giving 180 8. Estates and Tenants 221

7. The Distribution of Landownership and the Cycles

9g. The Social Circles of the Middle Archiano Valley 238 10. Signori and Castelli: The Crystallization of the

Aristocracy 269

1050-1200 307

11. Myth and Reality of Feudalism in the Countryside,

III. GENERAL CONCLUSION | 345

Maps 381 Bibliography 392 Index All 12. Poverty and Freedom in the Mountains; Ludovico

Ariosto as Anthropologist 347

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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. Barsocchini 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

11 (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. Angeloni for 991—1003 (1960-1), L. Marchini for 1023—9 (1966-7), G. Mennucci

for 1030-4 (1964-5), E. Isola for 1035-40 (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): O. Bertolini for Angeloni and Gemignani, C. Violante

for the others. Episcopal inventories are edited by P. Guidi and E. Pellegrinetti in Inventari del vescovato della 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 terre, coloni e redditi

(Rome, 1979), pp. 207-46, and I will cite them as Inventario I and II, with page references as in Luzzati.

x Primary Material, and Abbreviations Archivio capitolare (ACL): fully registered up to 1200 in P. Guidi and O. 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 1150 by G. degli Azzi Vitelleschi, in Reale archivio di stato in Lucca. Regesti 1.1,

Iii (Lucca, 1903-11) (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.), I] 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, Annales Camaldulenses ordinis S. Benedicti, 9 vols. (Venice, 1755-73) (cited as AC); 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 600 documents in anything less than several months. The fondi of S. Trinita di Poppi (ex-Strum1) and Passerini (cited as ASF S. Trinita, Passerini) comprise the unedited Strumi archive. The latter are mostly private documents, closely associated with those more clearly indicated as from Strumi, acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by Luigi Passerini. (See also below, ACA Strumi.) A few Strumi documents regarding the Guidi were edited by G. Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum ii (Florence, 1737), pp. 146—7; vil, 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. 110-17. I shall

cite Lami, who publishes all those in Soldani. |

Primary Material, and Abbreviations x1 Some relevant material is also to be found in the fondi of Vallombrosa 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 1180s to the fifteenth century; most are registered in I capitoli del comune di Firenze. Inventario e regesto, 2 vols. (Florence, 1866—93) (cited as Reg. Cap.), covering Capitol i-xvi, although I have used one from 1187, unedited, in Capitoli xxiv.

AREZZO

Archivio capitolare (AC A):

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 (Strum): 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 Pasqu)). ,

Other standard editions are:

Manares1 C. Manaresi (ed.). I placiti del “Regnum Italiae’, 3 vols. (Rome, 1955-60).

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

xi Primary Material, and Abbreviations MGH, SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores.

Rat. Dec. M. Giusti and P. Guidi (eds.), Rationes decimarum Italiae nei secoli XIII e XIV. Tuscia 11: Le decime degli anni 1295—

1304 (Rome, 1942), the second and fuller series of papal tithe registers for Tuscany. The new year was reckoned very variously, and often inconsistently, in Tuscany; the year ‘1100’ could begin, in our dating, at any time between 25 March 1099 (as in Pisa) and 25 March 1100 (as in Florence). I have converted the dates of unpublished documents into those of the modern 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

POINTS 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 thése; 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,

X1V Introduction to the English Edition not only over tenants but over the whole of the local rural population—the French seigneurie banale),! and the appearance of castles

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 élites, 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 interest 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 feel 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 title 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.)

Introduction to the English Edition 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 1100 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 clearly both the traditional framework of interpretation of the eighth to twelfth centuries and how it has been modified in the last couple of decades. 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 II (850-75). 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 7o0o~1200 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 politica]

discussion of the whole period, however, is Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, a republication of his contribution to the Einaudi Storia d@’ Italia ii (Turin, 1974).

XVI Introduction to the English Edition 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 II’s death, first slowly | and then, after 900 or so, fast: the most obvious steps in this process were the civil wars of the 890s and 920s; the hundred-odd

diplomas of the 900s and g1os 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 II (950-62), faced with attack by rivals from across the Alps, found that their political and military support simply faded away—the Italian political élite 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

Tuscany. |

daily life of the cities and the countryside of the Po plain and 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 XVil 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 élites 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 II, 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 élites, although by now entirely focused on their own cities, remained legal-minded enough to recognize the claims of Frederick Barbarossa as late as the 1160s 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 defined 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 1oo1 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 1s clear, but so is the continuing separability of the two.? None the less, it was in 3 Sergi, ‘Feudalizzazione nel regno italico’, pp. 253-4.

XViil Introduction to the English Edition 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 1030s, or of the Pataria in Milan from the 1050s to the 1070s, 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 finally 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 1100. 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

Introduction to the English Edition X1X (eastern Piemonte, Lombardy, the western Veneto, Emilia, northern 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.* 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 stato regionale. The recognition that cities could be a major venue of feudal relationships 1s 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, Adelsherrschaft, esp.

pp. 376-85. See also the important summary article by Bordone, ‘Tema cittadino e “‘ritorno alla terra” ’, which tries, among other things, to refute this argument, not wholly successfully.

XX Introduction to the English Edition | 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 of historiographical 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.® 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 of landlordly powers

over servile tenants—seigneurial (signorial) rights never contributed more than a minor part of lordly incomes, in sharp contrast to the situation in France.$ (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, Région mdconnaise, pp. 173-90; see also the syntheses in Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité i, pp. 114-26; 1, pp. 125-40; Fossier, Enfance de I’ Europe,

pp. 401-22. For Duby’s influence in Italy, see for example Tabacco, ‘Fief et seigneurie’, pp. 204-6. 8 A neat conspectus of the differences can be found in Hilton, Class Conflict,

pp. 227-38; cf. id., English Peasantry, pp. 231-8, for the financial weight of seigneurial obligations in England at their height, around 1300.

Introduction to the English Edition XX1 the south of France meant that southern féodalité was at least as

‘complete’ as that of the north, and, even more bravely, that ‘Most historians admit today that the central phenomenon of feéodalité 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 definition of féodalité 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): ‘[féodalité] could not have lasted without the material base which the seigneurie furnished it

with’.” 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 élite.

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 - 10§0 at the earliest.8 InAtaly, at least in recent years, this line of approach is very rarely taken. Giovanni 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 hquidation 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 féodales, pp. 46-7, 57; Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité

i, p. 8. (Féodalisme is a different word; it explicitly links feodalité and the seigneurie—cf. for instance Toubert in Structures féodales, p. 3, citing Hilton.) 8 Cf. the critical survey by Cammarosano, ‘Strutture feudali’, pp. 837—51.

Xx Introduction to the English Edition issue about which anyone today argues very much.? 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 does not 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

public law. :

the signoria, divorced from the fief, is understood in Italy; for the

survival of these legal rules is the survival of a framework of 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 of political power in general. Thus, the seigneurie in France is seen in apposition to féodalité, the political triumph of private relationships; but the signoria in Italy is seen in apposition

to the public and, even though the two concepts are no longer 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 élite of lawyers. The signoria was by now divided from public law by a —

boundary—public 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 féodales, pp. 239-40. In this book I will follow Italian usage and use ‘feudal’ to mean “feudo-vassalic’ in the strict sense. Elsewhere, I 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.

Introduction to the English Edition XXill definition, increasingly contributed to define signorial rights themselves, which were thus englobed ever more clearly by the public world again. Politics, and even the practice of law, 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 1s 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 castles; 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.!°

Toubert’s book has often been taken as the most effective irruption of French (i.e. Annaliste) historical method on the me-

dieval 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 médiéval is in reality

a far from orthodox member of the school of Bloch and Duby, 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 10 Fasoli, ‘Feudo e castello’, with references to her previous work; Violante, ‘Una famiglia feudale’; Rossetti, “‘Signorie di castello’; Toubert, Latium.

XXIV Introduction to the English Edition 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 incastellamento 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," 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.!*% As 11 T 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, Castelli e villaggi, p. 11.

Introduction to the English Edition | XXV 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 of lords 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-central Italy, the wide mountainous lands between Siena in the north and Naples and Puglia in the south.13 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 crystallization 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 13 Wickham, II! problema dell incastellamento (an English version of part of this is “The terra of San Vincenzo al Volturno in the 8th to 12th centuries: the historical framework’, in R. Hodges and J. Mitchell (eds.), San Vincenzo al Volturno: The archaeology, art and territory of an early medieval monastery (Oxford,

1985), pp. 227-58).

XXV1 Introduction to the English Edition 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.14 14 Below, pp. 37-9, II5—I9, 292-306.

Introduction to the English Edition XXV1 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. (1 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 | 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 defined 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 1).

- 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 800. 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 II (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

XXVIll Introduction to the English Edition 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.!® The political and economic core of Tuscany was in the north,

in the Arno valley and its tributaries (counting the Serchio, which still flowed into the Arno 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 Florence—Pistoia plain, and the whole of the Arno 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.16

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.!” But this future was far from obvious in our period. Before the beginning 15° Keller, ‘Marca di Tuscia’, pp. 118-33, with bibliography.

16 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, Toscana, 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 still the best political history of Tuscany in the years 1000 to 1200, although the studies in Atti del 5° Congresso replace it for the eighth to tenth centuries.

Introduction to the English Edition XX1X 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 1100, 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 II 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 18 Keller, ‘Marca di Tuscia’, pp. 132-6; Nobili, ‘Famiglie marchionall’, pp. 93-9; Schwarzmaier, ‘Societa e istituzioni: Lucca’, pp. 149-56; id., Lucca, pp. 318-22.

XXX Introduction to the English Edition families, the Guidi, Cadolingi, Gherardeschi, and Aldobrandeschi,

but the march was more clearly defined in institutional terms and more geographically extended than before. Marquis Hugh may not have been as politically dominant as Adalbert, but his power was as public as that of Adalbert: he 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.19

Hugh’s death in 1001 produced another crisis in marchesal power, but this too was only temporary. When, in 1027-8, Boniface of Canossa (1027-52) was made marquis by Conrad II,

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 (1076-1115). 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.2° 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 (modern Poggibonsi). More important than their residence, however, was their politics. Boniface was suspicious of the urban élites of Lucca, and brought new families

of judges from northern Italy to counter them; his successors 19 Falce, Marchese Ugo; Nobili, ‘Famiglie marchionali’, pp. 99-101; Kurze, ‘Monasteri e nobilta’, pp. 351-9. 20 Nobili, ‘Dominazioni marchionali’, pp. 243-6; Bertolini, ‘Bonifacio’;

Overmann, Matilde, register and pp. 204-10. ,

Introduction to the English Edition XXX] 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, with 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 1115, 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 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 Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 259-60, 322-3; Delumeau, ‘Exercice de la justice’, pp. 578-83. 22, Cammarosano, ‘Feudo e proprieta’; Chittolini, Formazione dello stato regionale, e.g. pp. 322-4.

XXX Introduction to the English Edition 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. xxiii-v), consorteria (Chapter 9, n. 10), mezzadria (p. 33), appoderamento (p. 231), 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), see p. 16 and Chapter 1, 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 of John, throughout). When

Introduction to the English Edition XXX111 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

2 General Introduction 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 impractical. 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 infinitely more

complicated. If a regional thése 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.!

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, 1 Plesner, Emigrazione dalla campagna; Conti, Formazione i; for an earlier period in Lombardy, see Rossetti, Cologno Monzese.

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 1s 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 mountains—

without 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 hills are mostly tree-covered rather than bare

4 General Introduction and rocky; the valley of the Amo 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 1100, 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 of Italy. 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 80 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 relevance outside its geographical environment.

General Introduction 5 Indeed, I started my work on the Appennines with that presupposition; in such a vein I 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.* 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 élites 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., Il 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 find 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.® :

Balanced against this problematic is the issue of the nature of

mountain society. Fernand 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 nature 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 3 An obvious analogy is the crystallization of aristocratic family structures as the Carolingian state disintegrated, for which see, classically, Schmid, “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. 32-9, 48-53, or Violante, “Quelques caractéristiques 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

territorio, pp. 19-24; on the geography of perception, Comba, ‘Il territorio come spazio vissuto’.

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-Emilian Appennines described for us by

Giovanni Cherubini.® 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 technology, 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. ° Esp. in Cherubini, ‘La societa dell’Appennino settentrionale (secoli XIII-— XV)’ in Signori, contadini, borghesi, 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 sort of adequate documentation for the period before 1100; 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 with 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 1100 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 80 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. Donati—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

10 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 Amiata, 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 1000—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 6 The pattern is most clearly set out for Tuscany in Kurze, ‘Monasteri e nobilta’.

General Introduction Il 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.’

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, Formazione 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 transactions 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 century); this too argues against their being a new phenomenon.

I2 General Introduction of the processes only 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 | 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 500 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, 700-1200

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

tooo. 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 docurnents survived in the city. Thirty eighth-century documents have Garfagnana material, 80 ninth-century, and 65 tenth-century— a 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 (s0 documents), and in the twelfth to 1 per cent (30 documents).! 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 of Lucca 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 Figures for the Lucchese archives until 1100 in Schwarzmaier, Lucca, p. 10; for the twelfth century, my own calculations.

16 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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 960 we have a considerable array of leases, mostly 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.? 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 2 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 first-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 Istituto geografico militare (henceforth IGM), Carta d'Italia, fogli 96, 97 at 1: 100000 (both physical and geological) and I : 25 O00.

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, Mittellibell (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. 271— 3, 290-2), extensively. For further definitions, see Andreolli, “Contratti agrari’, p. 70 (the neatest), and Kotel’nikova, Mondo contadino, pp. 242-4.

Geography and Historical Ecology I 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 Pontremolli 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.* 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 Vallico

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, 700—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 Garfagnana 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.? 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, 251, 256, 266, 275, 2903, 398, 429, 438-9, 492, 534, 560, 593, 624-6, 667, 815, 926, II12, 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 of Garfagnana 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., “Citta e distretti minori’; id., ‘L’ammunistrazione 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 1179 (Pacchi 8 or II; see below, Ch. 4, n. 16).

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 1s 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 6 See Santini, ‘Formazione territoriale’, and de Stefani, ‘Comuni di Garfagnana’, passim for the late Middle Ages; for the nineteenth century, Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnana. 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, 700-1200 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.’ 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 * 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 1,755 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, 700-1200 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.? 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 771, 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 8 Figures for rainfall from Barbieri, Toscana, p. 500. Resources, commune by commune, schematically in Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnana, esp. pp.

386, 480-1, 527-8, 553-4. Cf., for the early modern period, Martinelli, ‘Agricoltura in Garfagnana’; Rombaldi, ‘Comunita appenniniche’. There are also some useful notes in Targioni-Tozzetti, Relazioni 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 + +K85 for Corfino (Guidi—Pellegrinetti 3). 9 ‘Inferior’ grains (ie. other than wheat) in the Garfagnana: Barsocchini

398, 438-9, 492, 558, Inventario I, p. 218, Il, pp. 229, 234-5. Elsewhere: Barsocchini 318, 351, 478, 638, 846. Cf. Martinelli, ‘Agricoltura in Garfagnana’, p. 39. Contrast Montanari, Alimentazione 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 may actually have declined in the Lucchesia after the ninth century.

Geography and Historical Ecology I 23 they were growing olives where they could; in this respect they were certainly at one with the cultural norms of the plains.1° 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 Versilian 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).14 10 Schiaparelli 31, 250; Barsocchini 676, 1718 (one might add 508 for Flabbiatici, 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 della Garfagnana, pp. 160-1 (cf. 75-6), and personal observation.

11 Chestnut rents listed in Andreolli, ‘Contratti agrari’, pp. 92-113, and discussed in id., ‘Formule di pertinenza’. Inventory references are Inventario I,

p. 217, Il, pp. 235, 240, 245. For the spread of chestnuts in the Garfagnana now, see Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnana, passim. See, more generally, Bonnuccelli, ‘Castagno nella Lucchesia’; some comments in Targioni-Tozzetti,

Relazioni dalcuni viaggi vi, pp. 44f.; Cherubini, ‘ “Civilta’’ del castagno’; Montanari, Alimentazione contadina, pp. 37-43, 296-301; Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 316-20; and an instructive parallel from the Rhone valley, Pitte, ‘Chataignerie vivaraise’, a reference I owe to the kindness of Peter Jones.

24 The Garfagnana, 700—1200 , ' 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 cloth, 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 flocks 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.!# 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. 167—

70). 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 754 and certainly at least pre-dating 1100, to horses and cows from the 12 Animal rents listed in Andreolli, ‘Contratti agrari’, pp. 84-5, 92-113, with Inventario 1, pp. 217-18, Il, pp. 231, 234-6, 240. Andreolli, p. 118 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; Inventario I, p. 218, II, p. 235.

Geography and Historical Ecology I 25 Versilian side of the Apuane, which are to winter 150 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

Walfonso di Prandulo of Carfaniana 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 flocks of sheep, turmas pecorum de Carfagnana, feeding in the S. Rossore forest near Pisa in 1156 and on the pastures of the bishop of Luni near Brugnato in 1197; 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 1s no reason to see extensive transhumance from the Garfagnana before 1150; 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.!8 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 13 Transhumance: Schiaparelli 116, at p. 351; 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, Diplomi pisani, p. 23 for 1156; Maragone, Annales pisani, p. §§ for 1172 (1173 stile pisano); CP 410 for 1197. Cf. Schneider,

Reichsverwaltung, p. 146 n; Ceccarelli Lemut, ‘Scarlino’, pp. 72 f.; Nobili, ‘Mappe catastali’; Wickham, Societa degli Appennini, pp. 50-8. 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, pp. 464-5.

26 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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.!4 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 flocks 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; land-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 pattern. 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.!° 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 15 For single land-parcels, see Schiaparelli 31, 74, 250; Barsocchini 181, 239, $58, 741, 1350, 1356, 1439, 1539, 1725; Inventario Il, pp. 236, 238, 244; AAL + +840 (early eleventh century, Guidi—Pellegrinetti, p. 12), +B78 (a.1015), ++Kr1rs5 (a.1033, Mennucci 39). For boundaries, see Barsocchini 181, 741, 815, 1356, 1725; AAL ++K15.

28 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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, Wwe 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 missing.1® 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

700-1100, 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 might be made when we find requirements in leases for incoming tenants to build houses on empty properties (casa levare et claudere seo coperire—

the 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 1s 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 1s 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.)!” 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 fundamentum 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, curtes—

see 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 1” For divided and shared houses, see Schiaparelli 134, 250; Barsocchini 433,

617-18, 660, 714-15, 756, 1036, 1078, 1088, 1095, 1143, I213, 1221, 1247, 1319. For house-building, see Barsocchini 158, 558, 593, 1036, 1078, 1099, 1143, 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 Garfagnana, 700-1200 are twice as many references to the latter as to the former),

and may not so often show global population expansion at all.48

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 modern 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.)!9 In 1029, however,

we have a clear indication of something beginning to happen; in this year, Bishop Giovanni II 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 1066. 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 80 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 II does fit with that of Gherardo II in Palaia in the Valdera in 998 and 18 For ruined houses, see Barsocchini 926 (curtis), 1099, 1185, 1377, 1382, 1538, 1551 (curtis), 1652 (curtis), 1698, 1702; AAL +H4g9 (a.1001, Angeloni 138), +L14 (a.1014), +E87 (a.1022); RCL 194 (a.1044), Azzi 1.121 (a.1045, church and curtis). They all post-date 880. In Barsocchini 926, the curtis centre

has been replaced by a capanna, a hut. Casalino elsewhere tends to mean ‘courtyard complex’ (Niermeyer, Lexicon minus, p. 150), 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. 119; 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, Insediamento 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 debbio in the Garfagnana, see Azzi 1.121 (a.1045). Elsewhere in the

diocese: see Schiaparelli 117-18; Barsocchini 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.

|

Geography and Historical Ecology I 31 of Anselmo I in the lower Val Freddana just north-west of Lucca in 1068—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).?°

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).2! And our documentary material, 20 For Bolognana leases, see AAL *M87—9, *MgiI-—3, +10, +17 (all 1029),

*Mogo (a.1030), *F29, *Mgq (a.1031), *M86 (a.1033), *E15 (a.1057), +F97 (a.1066), ed. Marchini 65—72, Mennucci 2, 18, 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 all in the same rough area, for the Lameto of *F29 and *M86 is probably related to Casale Lama on the

IGM 1:25 000 map (97 III SO). It is the only part of the slopes above the village to have vines now. For parallels, see Arrighi, ‘La bonifica di Alessandro

II papa’ (the documents for this are in Gemignani, 181-211 et seq.; cf. list in Barsocchini, ‘Vescovi lucchesi’, p. 299); Andreolli, “Colonizzazione e incastellamento’; id., Uomini nel medioevo, pp. 135—49. 21 Toubert, Latium, esp. pp. 303-68; Settia, Castelli e villaggi, esp. pp. 247—

86; cf. Wickham, II problema dell’incastellamento, 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 standing 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

32 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 which as we have seen is prone to refer to properties simply as casa et res massaricia 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 shall 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 off 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 four 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 modern 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 of the late Middle Ages, but it is reassuring to find that chance references

from the period before 1100 record all but a handful of modern

village names even there, and only one or two reasonably illustrated by the descriptions of Roman sites in Mencacci and Zecchini, Lucca romana, pp. 220-9.

Geography and Historical Ecology I 33 documented places cannot be identified at all. There is a clear continuity here.2¢

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 (poderi) 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.28 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 22 The basic analysis of Lucchese pievi is Nanni, Parrocchia. For lists of villae, see Barsocchini 1350, 1652, 1699, AAL +B78 (a.1015), +Bg8 (a.1019), A17 (a.1062) 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. 70-2, and Pacchi 46, 47. For the pieve of Piazza, see Pistarino, Pievi della diacesi di Luni, pp. 11-19, 30, 80f., 102 f.; Pacchi 8 (see Ch. 4, n. 16); MGH, Dip. Friderici I 430 (a.1164). Iudicariae in the Lucca plain: see Nanni, Parrocchia, p. 64 n, with the addition of Barsocchini 1458 (a.975), AAL + +A34 (a.1073). 23 See Jones, ‘Manor to Mezzadria’, pp. 232-4; 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 dell’habitat’ and “Assetto insediativo moderno’; for the effect on toponyms, see Conti, Formazione i, pp. 74-6. 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. 11, n. 40.

34 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 some I10 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 century, 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.?4 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 dispersal. 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 hills. 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 relatively well-studied Lunigiana are as yet totally obscure. We cannot, in fact, make any useful generalizations about the 24 Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnana is the best guide to modern settlements, and includes the 1871 census. For 1971 census and information on rates of dispersal, ISTAT, 11° Censimento generale 111.9, pp. 13-27. For settlement

geography in the late Middle Ages, della Capanna, ‘sguardo alle condizioni geografiche’.

Geography and Historical Ecology I 35 settlement history of different parts of Tuscany as yet; the basic work has simply not been done.?°

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 explicitly, 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.2° Fosciana, however, is the clearest instance of a dispersed settlement. 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, Insediamento in Lunigiana, pp. 90-3, 105—7, 159; Lusuardi Siena, ‘Esempio lunigianese’; for the

Chianti, Conti, Formazione i, pp. 29-33. (Conti supposes such concentration

to be relative, with houses not necessarily touching; Barsocchini $61, for Campori, would bear this out, for here, in a comparatively concentrated settlement, a house and its land form a single bloc protected by a hedge.) For

the Lucca plain, see Wickham, ‘Settlement Problems’. For differences in settlement patterns across small acreas, cf. observations in Wickham, ‘Incastellamento 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. dating 1021), + +K15 (a.1033, Mennucci 39).

36 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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 flat 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 of settlement into the area of the modern nucleus.** 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 1090, 1143, 1185, 1187, 1652; AAL ++K15 (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 II NE for explication. For the lake, Raffaelli, Descrizione della Garfagnana, pp. 244 f., 262 ff. 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. 118.

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.2® 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 28 Cf. Wickham, I/ problema dell’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. 29 For background, see Settia, Castelli e villaggi, pp. 254 ff.; 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 11); Verrucchio, above Castiglione (Barsocchini 1795, for the

1070s); Verrucole, San Donnino below it, and San Michele, all close to Castelvecchio (MGH, Dip. Conradi IT 83, a.1027, and Pacchi 11, a.1179—cf.

Ch. 3, n. 20). The last two survived the Middle Ages as villages. For other castelli, see below, pp. 117-19.

38 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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’.2®

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 castello 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 stibsequently. 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 30 For Campori, see Barsocchini 1377, 1609.

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.3! 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 century— will have some very clear analogues in the plains of Lucca and

beyond. At this point, the problem of specificity 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. 31 For Castiglione, see ++K1s (Mennucci 39); for carbonaria and _ its meanings, see Francovich, Castelli del contado fiorentino, p. 56. For fourteenthcentury castelli, see map in della Capanna, ‘sguardo alle condizioni geografiche’, p. 608. For the Molise, see Hodges and Wickham, ‘Settlement Change in the Val Biferno’.

: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 740-84; 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 élites, 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 modern 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

as 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 modern

Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning 41 disgregated pattern of houses. Modern 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 1t was more important then, as we shall see.! Gundualdo’s family are well documented, and the evidence

for them is mostly 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 2s. from a co-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 little 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 20s. 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 explicitly 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 della 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. 1, n. 25.

42 The Garfagnana, 700-1200 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 1s. 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.?

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 455.; 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

dificult to believe that there were many owners in Campori 2 See Schiaparelli 74, 134, 150, 182 (the court case), 285; Barsocchini 158,

179, 199. For the court case, cf. also Wickham, ‘Economic and Social Institutions’, pp. 27-8. 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 réseau 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.? 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 Campor 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 Barsocchini 256, 449, $34, 558, 560, 1088; Inventario II, pp. 228-9 (which

must be for the S. Maria estate, for some of the eleven tenant groups listed are the recipients of surviving leases, e.g. Ildiperto, as in Barsocchini 929, for the same rent). For the tenth-century S. Cassiano estate, Barsocchini 1350, 1652; AAL +B78 (a.1015), A17 (a.1062); for that of S. Maria, Barsocchini 1609; AAL + +N26 (a.1014).

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Porcari (LU), Porcaresi 112-15, 117, religious issues Xvi, 44, 190-7, 200—

120, 123, 127-30, 133-4, 142 I, 212-1§, 224, 256-7, 265, 305,

Porciano (AR) 198, 203, 293-4 321, 376

, Prataglia, mon. (AR) 9, 153-344 repromissiones 156

passim, 350, 356, 362-3 Rhone, r. 23

Pratale (AR) 324 Rimaggio, r. 239-40 Pratomagno 157, 163 Riosecco (AR) 294 Pratovecchio, mon. (AR) 201, 202 Ripafratta (PI) 130

precaria 46, 325; see also fief roads, communications 17, 157, 173,

private churches and monasteries 178

40-8, 56-8, 72, 178, 190, 193, Rode (AR) 154, 239-46; see also

198-202, 208, 240-1, 247-8, 270 Freggina

7 424 Index | Rodilando di Cunimundo 103 San Donnino (LU) 37, 84, 98, 117—

Rodilando di Giovanni 103 18, 124, 370-1, 377-8 Rodolfo di Ardingolo 261—2 San Gimignano (SI) 301

Rodolfo Cantaro di Rodolfo of San Michele (LU) 37, 84, 118, 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 260, S. Rossore (PI) 25

262—4, 267-8, 312, 325 Santa Mama (AR) 209, 321 Rodolfo di Ongano 209-10 S. Maria a Monte (PI) 86, 117, 140 Rodolfo index of Papiano 202 S. Eleuterio, pieve, see Plano Rodolfo di Righiza 191, 206, 270 S. Vincenzo al Volturno 86, 306

Roffrido di Cosperto, Pr. 46-7 Saracino di Ongano 249

Rogerio of Partina 328 Sardinia 193

Rogiana (Poggio, LU) 20, 32-3, 99- Sarna (AR) 165, 217, 234, 293-5, 300,

100, 109 314, 320, 331-2

Rolandinghi 103-5, 109, 122-3,. sarto 166

127-30 Sassi (LU) $I-2, 56, 77, 371

Rolandino di Rolando of Partina Schneider, Fedor 18, 105-6, 295 167-8, 279, 326-8, 332, 334, Schwarzmaier, Hansmartin 95-6,

377 100, 103, I12, 126~7, 130, 279

Rolando di Benzo 275-6, 279 Scopone, r. 199, 201 , Rolando di Rodolfo of Papiano 202 __ seigneurie banale, see signoria Rolando di Tagizo of Poggiolo 261— Selvamonda, mon. (AR) 181, 207-8,

2, 273, 289, 291, 328, 377 211

Romagna 135, 157, 168, 171-2, 198, Serchio, r. xxviil, I7—21, 30, 41, 62,

272, 300, 321, 365 69, 81, 97, IOI, 136, 139, 158

Romans 25, 31, 34, 90, 94, 148, 173 serfs, servile xx, 66, 78-9, 223, 235—

Rome xx, xXXvli, 17, 157, 214 6, 331

Romena (AR) 172, 184, 201-3, 218, Serra (AR) 271, 294

293-4 Serravalle (AR) 185, 239, 280, 300,

Romualdo of Ravenna 162, 181, 302, 315, 320, 323-5, 331, 337

193, 214 Sestan, Ernesto 198

Rontano (LU) 122 Sesto, S. Salvatore a, mon. (LU) 59~-

Ropperto di Roppula 46-7 60, 132

Rosano, mon. (FI) 201 Sesto Moriano, pieve di S. Maria

Rossano 214 (LU) $9, 68, 77 Rossetti, Gabriella xxiii, 195 Settia, Aldo xxiv, 3I, 92, I15, I17, rye 22, 24, I6I , 302, 303

settlement, settlement patterns xxiv—

sacchos 24 XXV1, I7, 31-41, 69, 7I, 116,

Sala (LU) 20, 56-7, 63-4, 77-9, 83-4, 158, 170-9, 240, 294, 297-304,

86-7, 89, 97-9, IOI, 109, 118, 339-40 | 120, 124, 128, 134, 142 Sexta (AR) 154, 239-40, 245-6, 259,

Salutio, r. 159, 172, 207 300 Salvian 212 sheep 8, 21, 24-5, 138, 141, 143,

Sambuca (LU) 372 163—4

‘Sandonnini’ 377-8 shepherds 19, 138, 369

Index 425 Siena XXV, XXVli-xXx1x, I, 22, 131, de Stefani, Carlo 142

195-6, 228-9, 231, 303, 307, Stia (AR) 158, 160, 172, 198-9, 203

338, 348 Stoddart, Simon 173

signoria X1H—-XV, XVI—XXill, XXV, Strada (AR) 172; see also Vado

XXX1, §—6, 64, 80-2, 92-4, 96, Strumi, mon. (AR) 9, 154, 156, 159,

Q9-I00, 102-15, 118-26, 128, 163, 166, 168-9, 195, 198-203, 131-3, 140-3, 145-6, 148, 176, 20§~7, 210-11, 213, 216-17, 197-8, 203-4, 218-19, 231, 276, 219, 224-6, 233-5, 260, 293-4, 280-3, 285-6, 289-91, 296-8, 300, 314-15, 322, 343

303, 305, 310-38, 355-7; see Subbiano (AR) 209, 269, 272, 274 |

also districtus; justice; private Sundo di Cosperto 46

power Sundo di Gospulo 46

Sigolo di Berto of Ventrina 234 Sunualdo of Campori 41 Sillico (LU) 123

Silva (AR) 177-9 Tabacco, Giovanni xxi-xxil, 92, silvo-pastoral economy, see 131, 200

pastoralism Tagizo di Pagano 260-4, 325

Sisemundo di Sisemundo 101 Taiberto di Donnello 249

sistema curtense, see manorial system Talesperiano, Bp. of Lucca 57

slaves 235-6, 314 Tarlati 269, 281 smiths 135, 166 Tedaldo, Bp. of Arezzo 318

Socana, pieve di S. Antonino (AR) Teggina, r. 164, 199-201, 206~7 172-3, 185—6, 188, 219, 227, Tegiano (AR) 175, 206, 293—4 324 Tegrimo II, Ct. 199 territory of the pieve 162, 171, Tempagnano (LU) 102

192, 206-7, 217 Temporia 372

Soci (AR) 154, 158, 160-1, 164, 166, tenancy 48-51, 66-7, 84-5, 222-9,

175, 177, 186, 193-4, 197-9, 234-7, 331-2; see also libellarius; 211, 217, 224, 230-1, 235, 238, massarius 240-1, 248, 253, 260-2, 269, tenant-holdings, casae massariciae, 272-5, 281, 289-92, 294-5, 297, mansi, poderi, tenimenta 27-30,

299-300, 305, 308, 315, 323, 33, 85, 185-6, 209, 231-5 325, 328, 330, 332-3, 337, 339- tenimentum 232-5; see also 40, 361 tenant-holdings Soffredinghi 127-9 Tennano (AR) 198-9 Sofia, Countess, abb. of Rosano 202 ~=Tereglio (LU) 21

Solano, r. 158 Terricciola (PI) 97

Soliggine, r. 158, 165, 175, 188, territorialization, see boundaries

207-8 territorium, see boundaries; castelli; Sommocolonia (LU) 371 pieve Sova, r. 154, I7I, 184, 186, 194, Tertinole, see Vado

197-9, 211, 226, 228, 230, 262, Teudegrimo, Bp. of Lucca 73 275-7, 280, 297, 301, 322, 324, Teufuso di Teudulo of Vallico 70

328, 330, 344 Teuperto di Cristina 102-3

Sovigliana (PI) 117 Teutperto of Placule 57

Sparena (AR) 301, 324 Teutperto di Rasperto, pievano of spelt 161, 224 Basilica $1

Sprugnano, mon. (AR) 201 Teuzo, castaldio of Bibbiena 189, 242

426 Index

Teuzo, not. 216 Ugolinello di Superbo di Armanno, Teuzo, pievano of Bibbiena 189, 191 Ct. Io1 thirty-year rule 11 Ursi, ff., of Freggina 245 Tiber, r. 182, 281; see also Val USUS 313-15, 322; see also malus usus Tiberina Tirelli, Vito 130

tithes xxxil, 32, 51-2, 55, 64, 67, 74, | Vaccari, Pietro 105-6. 89, 93-5, 99, IOI-3, 105, 109— Vaccoli (LU) 130 II, 122-3, 128, 142, 145, 189, Vado, Tertinole (Strada, AR) 172, 174,

270, 283, 309, 318-19, 376 IQ8—Q, 201, 202, 224, 233

Tocli (Ar), see Atocla Vaghi (Lu) 369

Torrite (LU) 55 Valdambra 340

Toto of Vitoio 56, 63 Valdarno 99, 104, 277-8; see also

Toubert, Pierre xxili—xxv, 25, 31, Arno

92, 302 Valdelsa xxviii

transhumance 21, 24-5, 164, 169; see Valdera xxviii, 30, 103, 117

also pastoralism Valdichiana 292, 357 Trassilico (LU) 41, 122-3, 340, 378 Val di Cornia 25, 56 Trebbiano 113 Val di Corsolone, Lima, Rassina, Trento 4 Soliggine, Sova, Teggina, see Treppignana (LU) 56 Corsolone, Lima, etc. Trivio, mon. 182, 317 Valdinievole 99, IOI, 125 Tulliano (AR) 209-10 Val di Sieve 162, 200, 224, 233

Turin xvii Valenzano (AR) 209 Val Freddana 30

, Ubertini 128, 201, 241, 262-3, 269, Vallebuia (LU) 30-1, 101 271, 274-81, 283—4, 288, 292, Vallico, Vallico di Sopra, Vallico di

295, 297, 299, 303, 305, 320, Sotto (LU) 17, 19, 21, 35, SI,

, 323-4, 326-8, 330, 332, 334, 55-6, 59, 68-71, 78, 81-5, 87-9, 343, 351, 362-3; see also Benzi, 98, 117-22, 134, 137, 139, I4I—

ff.; Guillelmi, ff. 2, 369

Uberto/Ubertino di Guilelmo 276— Vallombrosa, mon. (FI) 46, 163, 195,

7, 280-1, 284 200—I

Uberto di Rodilando of Puctiostorli Valtellina 4

61, 103—4, I14—I5 Val Tiberina 8, 281, 334; see also

Udulfo of Campori 41, 55 Tiber

Ughetto of Sarna 331 Valva 7, 135, 268; see also Abruzzo Ugitto of Montefatucchio 326 valvassores 285, 291

Ugo, not. 216 Vanna (AR) 199, 206, 211, 224

Ugo, not. 217 Varese 291

Ugo di Benzo 275 vassals, fideles xx, xxi, 86, 97-9, 106, Ugo di Berardo 269-70 195, 209, 278-9, 284, 289, 307, Ugo di Guilelmo 276, 281 310-12, 325, 328; see also

Ugo di Goccio 318 feudalism; fief

Ugo di Ildebrando 328 Venerando, vicedominus 187 Ugo di Minuto 261-2, 274 Veneto xviii, 90 Ugo di Pietro of Biforco 182 Ventrina (AR) 154, 162, 168, 186—7, Ugolinello of Castelvecchio 123-4 192-3, 197, 211, 225-6, 229-30,

Index 427 234, 239-40, 242-3, 248, 251, Walfonso di Prandulo of Carfaniana

257, 275-6, 288, 326, 339 25, $6

Verghereto 158 Walprando di Prandulo 56, 63

Verni (LU) 122, 379-80 wars 71, 124, 126-7, 131, 277, 323; Verrucchio (LU) 37, 88-9, 117, 122 see also violence

141-2 whores 168

Verrucole (LU) 37, 98, 117, 124—-5, wheat 22, 26, 161, 224

Versilia 19, 23, 25, 87, 97, 119, 127, Wilielmo, Bp. of Arezzo 187

133, 140, 146 Willa of Tuscany 60

Vezzano (AR) 173, 183-4, 292-3 Willerado Calvo 69

via Francigena xxix, 17 Willeramo 63-4 Viareggio (LU) 157 wine, vineyards 24, 30-1, 41, 71,

Villa Basilica (LU) 23, 139 143, I61, 164-5, 168, 189, 223, Villa Collemandina (LU) 127-8 225 villages, see collective organizations; Winigildo/Winitio di Fraolmo 99—

élites; settlements 100

Violante, Cinzio xxi-xxiil, 92-3, Winitii, ff. 247, 249, 252, 257-8

115, 19§ witnesses 46, 208, 216-17, 242-0,

violence 139, 167-8, 270, 324-30, 253, 258-63, 267-8, 271, 274,

366—80; see also wars 276—~7, 282, 325

viscount II0, [14—15, 135, 183, 313— woodland 23, 26, 137, 139-41, 158,

14 160-2, 184-5, 223, 239 Vitoio (LU) 56, 63-5, 77, 86-7, 99 wool 163 Vivarium (AR) 185 World War II 158

Vogognano (AR) 159, 172, 209, 217 Vorno (LU) 133