The Mountains and the City
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The Mountains and the City The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages
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The Mountains and the City
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The Mountains and the City The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages
C.
J. WICKHAM
CLARENDON PRESS · OX FORD 1988
Oxford University Press, Wahon Stru t, Oxford OXz. 6DP Oxford Ntw York TorontC/ Delhi &mbay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling jaya SingapCire Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Capt Town Melbourne Auckland
and a.ssociattd companies in &irut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia OxfC/rd is a trade lfl4f'k of Oxford University Press PublisMd in tM Urriled States by Oxford University Press, New York (Q c . ). WuJtham, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form C/r by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or o!Mrwise, without tM prior permissiC/n Cif OxfCird University Press Bri~sh
Librlll'y Catawguing in PublicatiC/n Data
Wickham, Chris Tht mC/untains and /M city: the Tu scan Apptnnines in tht early Middle Ages. 1. Tuscany (Italy)-HistCiry 2 . Italy -History-476-1268 I. Title 945' .503 DG737-32 ISBN o-I~Zt966-o Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wickham, Cl1ris, 195oThe mountains and the city. Bibliography: p . Includes imkx. 1. Garfagnana (ltaly)-History. 2. Garfagnana (Italy) - Soda/ conditions. J. Garfagnana (ltaly)- Economic conditions. 4· CaseminCI Valley (ltaly)-History. 5· Casenlino Valley (ltaly)-Social conditions. 6. CastntinCI Valley (Italy)-Economic conditions. I. Title. DG97s.G;N53 t988 945' -53 87-t8572 ISBN o-t~zt966--o Procm ed by The Oxford Text System Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd., Gui/4ford and King's Lynn
Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the following people, who read this book in one of its versions, as a whole or in large part: W endy Davies, Jean Pierre Delumeau, Philip Jones, and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. Cecilia Angeli, Steven Bassett, Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, Giovanni Cherubini, Michael Collins and Victoria Kinghorn, Trevor Dean, James and Lisa Fentress, Riccardo Francovich, Vito Fumagalli, Philip Grierson, Rodney 'Hilton, Richard Holt, Franca Leverotti, Christine Meek, Massimo Montanari, Janet Nelson, Mario Nobili, Duane Osheim, Paolo Pirillo, Gabriella Rossetti, Simon Stoddart, Marco Tangheroni also helped me very greatly with advice, insight and information. So did many others, whom I have not named; I have been pursuing these researches for some time now, and have received assistance and support from a wide variety of people; I would like to thank them all. The British Academy, through its Small Grants Fund, aided much of the original research for the book; the University of Birmingham helped to finance subsequent archival work and typing. The Dipartimento di Medievistica at the University ofPisa kindly allowed me to use the transcriptions of Lucchese documents contained in tesi di laurea there. Rosaleen Darlington efficiently typed the text. And, last but not least, Don Giuseppe Ghilarducci of the Archivio Arcivescovile di Lucca and Don Silvano Pieri of the Archivio Capitolare di Arezzo were very helpful in my researches; I am grateful to them and their staff, as well as to the staff of the Archivi di Stato of Florence, Lucca, and Arezzo. Without them, the difficulties of writing this book would have been far greater. This is the English edition of the book; an Italian edition, without the historiographical introduction, is to be published shortly. Abbreviations for primary sources are listed in the course of the section on Principal Collections on pp. ix- xii; all other works, primary or secondary, are cited by short title in footnotes, and are listed in full in the Bibliography.
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Contents Principal Collections of Primary Material, and Abbreviations Introduction to the English Edition General Introduction I.
.
IX Xlll
l
THE GARFAGNANA, 7QO-I200
Geography and Historical Ecology 1 , 2. Village Elites and Patterns of Property-owning in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries 3· The Economic Structure of Landed Estates and their Development, 8oo-rooo 4· The Lords of the Garfagnana and the World of the City, Tenth to Twelfth C enturies s. Towards and Beyond the Rural Commune
13
I.
n.
THE CASENTINO IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
6. 7.
Geography and Historical Ecology ll The Distribution of Landownership and the Cycles of Gift-giving 8. Estates and Tenants 9. The Social Circles of the Middle Archiano Valley xo. Signori and Castelli: The Crystallization of the Aristocracy I I. Myth and Reality of Feudalism in the Countryside, III.
GENERAL CONCLUSION
Poverty and Freedom in the Mountains; Ludovico Ariosto as Anthropologist
Maps Bibliography Index
40 68
90 134 IS I Is 3 I
So
221
238 269 307
IOSQ-I200
I2.
IS
34S 347
38I 392 411
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Principal Collections of Primary Material, and Abbreviations LUCCA
Archivio arcivescovile (AAL): published to 1000, reasonably accurately, by D. Barsocchini in Memorie e documenti per servire all'istoria della citta e stato di Lucca v, pts. 2, 3 (Lucca, 1837-41), henceforth cited as Barsocchini with document number. Barsoccbini registers some documents edited earlier by F. Bertini, in Memorie e documenti iv (Lucca, 1818-36); I will follow Barsocchini's numbering for these, but Bertini was a far worse editor, and I have checked all his texts from the original, together with doubtful readings in Barsocchini. Some texts only edited by Bertini in Memorie e documenti iv, pt. 2 and its appendix will be cited as Bertini, Supplemento and Appendice. Documents before 774 are edited by L. Schiaparelli in Codice diplomatico longobardo i and ii (Rome, 1929-33), which I will cite as Schiaparelli with document number in preference to Barsocchini. After 1000, AAL is unedited, and I shall cite its charters by their fondo numbers. (There are four fondi: +, + +, *, and A.) For 9911003 and 1023--73. however, there are tesi di laurea of the Dipartimento di Medievistica, University of Pisa which transcribe the charters very competently, and which I will cite when I have used them: C. Angdoni for 991-1003 (196-1), L. Marchini for 1023--9 (1966--7), G. Mennucci for 103o-4 (1964-5), E. lsola for 103 5-40 (1964- 5), M. G. Nesti for 1041- 4 (1967-8), M. G. Pianezzi for 1045-50 (1967-8), P. Bertocchini for 1051-5 (1969--70), L. Gemignani for 1056--73 (1956--7); relatori (supervisors): 0. Bertolini for Angeloni and Gernignani, C. Violante for the others. Episcopal inventories are edited by P. Guidi and E. Pellegrinetti in Inventari del vescovato delta cattedrale e di altre chiese di Lucca (Rome, 1921) (cited as Guidi-Pellegrinetti with number); but the two ninth-century 'polyptychs' are re-edited by M. Luzzati in A.Castagnetti et al. (eds.), Inventari altomedievali di tem, coloni e redditi (Rome, 1979), pp. 207- 46, and I will cite them as lnventario I and 11, with page references as in Luzzati.
X
Primary Material, a.nd Abbreviations
Archivio capitolare (ACL): fully registered up to 1200 in P. Guidi and 0. Parenti (eds.), Regesto del Capitolo di Lucca, 3 vols. (Rome, 1910), cited henceforth as RCL; very little for the Garfagnana, and nothing before 1000 (the Lucchese canonica evidently got no Garfagnana land when it split off from the cathedral). Archivio di Stato (ASL): documents mostly registered up to I I 50 by G. degli Azzi Vitelleschi, in Reale archivio di stato in Luaa. Regesti l.i, l.ii (Lucca, I903- 11) (cited as Azzi)- very little for the Garfagnana. There is, however, some unpublished material in the ASL diplomatico, fondo Guinigi and (for the late twelfth century) the fondi of S. Giustina, S. Ponziano and Tarpea (cited as ASL Guinigi, S. Giustina, etc.) D. Pacchi. Ricerche storiche sulla provincia della Garfagnana (Modena, 1785) (cited as Pacchi) gives tolerable editions for many lost documents. M. Lupo Gentile (ed.), 11 regesto del Codice Pelavicino (Genoa, 1912) (cited as CP) is the basic collection of documents for the Lunigiana up to 1300.
FLORENCE
Archivio di stato (ASF): diplomatico: the fondo Camaldoli is published in register up to 1250 by L. Schiaparelli, F. Baldasseroni, E. Lasinio in Regesto di Camaldoli; 4 vols. (Rome, 1907-22) (cited as RC); it contains the Prataglia and Camaldoli archives. Selected documents are edited by G. B. Mittarelli and A. Costadoni, Annates Camaldulenses ordinis S. Benedicti, 9 vols. (Venice, 1755--?J)(cited as A C); vols. i- v up to 1350. I have checked enough of these documents to be sure that RC normally registers all that is useful, and important sections are transcribed in full (for some gaps, see below, chapter 7, n. 3); this is fortunate, for it is impractical, given the current situation in the archive, to check 6oo documents in anything less than several months. The fondi of S. Trinita di Poppi (ex-Strumi) and Passerini (cited as ASF S. Trinita, Passerini) comprise the unedited Strumi archive. The latter are mostly private documents, closely associated with those more dearly indicated as from Strumi, acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by Luigi Passerini. (See also below, ACA Struini.) A few Strumi documents regarding the Guidi were edited by G. Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum iii (Florence, 1737), pp. 146--'7; vii, pt. 8 ( = Historiae siculae Laur. Bonincontri ii, Florence, 1739), pp. 315-52. There are also some in F. Soldani, Historia Monasterii S. Michaelis de Passiniano i (Lucca, 1741), pp. no-17. I shall · cite Lami, who publishes all those in Soldani.
Primary Material, and Abbreviations
.
Xl
Some relevant material is also to be found in the fondi ofVaUombrosa and Pratovecchio (cited as ASF Vallombrosa, Pratovecchio). A few Fiesole privileges listing Casentino churches are published in G. Lami (ed.), Sanctae ecclesiae Florentinae monumenta i (Florence, 1758). ASF Catasto contains the 1427 Catasto (census) records for the lands of the Florentine Republic, which included all the Casentino except the Guidi signoria of Poppi and the Ubertini signoria of Chitignano. ASF Capitoli contain, among much else, medieval transcripts of various Casentinese documents from the I 1 8os to the fifteenth century; most are registered in l capitoli del comune di Firenze. lnventario e regesto, 2 vols. (Florence, 1866-93) (cited as Reg. Cap.), covering Capitoli i- xvi, although I have used one from 1187, unedited, in Capitoli xxiv.
AREZZO
Archivio capitolare (ACA): Fondo S. Fiora (SF): the archives of the monastery of SS. Fiora e Lucilla, the source of most of the Casentino documents still in Arezzo. Fondo Capitolo (Cap.): the archives of the canonica. Fondo S. Maria in Gradi (SMG): only one eleventh-century document for the Casentino. Fondo Strumi (Strumi): a small collection of Strumi documents separated at some point from the main body of the monastery's archive. SF, Cap., and SMG have eighteenth-century MS catalogues in ACA, of varying quality, which sometimes register documents since lost. That for SF is the major one relevant here: G. M. Scarmagli, Monasterii SSVV Florae et Lucillae synopsis monumentorum (c.1748). Scarmagli has a slightly different numbering for SF from that in the fondo itself; I have used the latter. Most charters relating to the early bishops of Arezzo, and very many others up to the mid-fourteenth century, appear in U. Pasqui (ed.), Documenti per la storia della citta di Arezzo nel medio evo, 3 vols. (Florence, 1899-1937) (cited as Pasqui). Other standard editions are: Manaresi C. Manaresi (ed.). I placiti del 'Regnum Italiae', 3 vols. (Rome, 1955-6o).
MGH, Dip.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Diplomata, with name of emperor. For full citations, see Bibliography.
..
Xll
.
MGH, SS Rat. Dec.
Primary Material, and Abbreviations Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores. M . Giusti and P. Guicli (eds.), Rationes decimarum Italiae nei secoli XIII e XIV. Tuscia ii: Le decime degli anni J2951J04 (Rome, 1942), the second and fuller series of papal tithe registers for Tuscany.
The new year was reckoned very variously, and often inconsistendy, in Tuscany; the year' I 100' could begin, in our dating, at any time between zs March 1099 (as in Pisa) and 25 March I too (as in Florence). I have converted the dates of unpublished documents into those of the modem year beginning on the first of January, when such dates are mentioned in the text. Where they only appear in the footnotes, however, I have left them, for the date marked on the document is that under which it is registered in the archives; 'correcting' the date would only serve to make my references impossible to check.
Introduction to the English Edition
POINI'S OF REFERENCE: SOME CURRENT ISSUES IN ITALIAN MEDIEVAL HISTORY
It is not entirely obvious why a book written in English by an English historian should have a specially written English-language introduction. But this book is not only about Italy; it is also written as far as I can manage inside the framework of interpretation and argument currently adopted by Italian historians. I have written from an Italian perspective partly to make my contribution fit into a historiography that is, and should be, dominated by Italians; but above all because (not surprisingly) the sorts of thing Italians currently argue about are much more relevant to an understanding of the history of early medieval Tuscany, the subject of this book, than are the issues that seem of primary importance in many other countries. Not that an outside view can never contribute anything to a 'national' historiography; many of the most important ideas in Italian interpretations of the Middle Ages came from elsewhere, from Germany or (since the Second World War, above all) from France. I doubt, however, that there is such a thing as an 'English' or (still less) a 'British' historical interpretative schema to set against German Reichsgeschichte or the french regional these; the most I have tried to contribute as a non-Italian is a certain unavoidable distance from my material, and a neutrality vis-a-vis some of the historical themes most characteristic of Italy, the rise and fall of the city communes and the like. The rest comes from Italian historians themselves, and these historians are still little read in Britain; it is their views that need some introduction. This is best effected by a brief discussion of some characteristic Italian historiographical interests. These will include the fall of the Carolingian state, the signoria (essentially, private jurisdiction,
•
XIV
Introduction to the English Edition
not only over tenants but over the whole of the local rural population-the French seigneurie banale), 1 and the appearance of casdes in Italy (incastellamento); not only are these important ways into understanding how Italians think about the past, but they are also leitmotivs of this particular book. The second section of the introduction is less historiographical: in it, I will describe Tuscany and its place in early medieval Italian history, an essential background to a study of two small parts of that region, and something of which knowledge could certainly not be assumed outside Italy or, perhaps, outside Tuscany itself I have written the main text of the book with the intention of making it comprehensible to non-experts in my field; but I hope this introduction will make some of its concerns less elliptic. Italian history-writing has its own obsessions. The city-state, as I have already implied, is one. Cities were genuinely very important in Italian history, but the concern in Italy for their study has to do with a sense of the past which goes well beyond strict historical criteria. The Italians are not unique in having such touchstones, of course; the equally clear obsession of so many English historians with central government is a similar characteristic. In both cases, they are dealing with one of the major phenomena, that are seen, by generations of intellectual and political elites, . as legitimating the historical development of their respective countries: in the English case, the phenomenon of the longest-lasting nation-state of the Western world; in the Italian, that of the Renaissance. But at least one could say that their in~erest in city-states frees Italians from the type of damaging concern that the Germans, for instance, have often shown with the end of the Reich as failure; this is one development that the former can fe~ detached from, for the Renaissance certainly depended for its success on Italian local autonomies. Cities are not, however, my own principal concern; this is a book about the countryside. The presence of the city. in the tide 1
For a fuller definition of the signoria, see below, pp. 105- 8. The neatest introduction is Violante, 'Signoria "territoriale" ', The word is more often used on its own than is the case with its counterpart seigneurie in French, for, despite various sub-types · (fondiaria, territoriale, and so on), it is normally regarded as having to do with justice and other quasi-public rights--it is not generally used, unlike its German or French analogues, for simple landlordship as well. ('Signoria' is also, of course, used to denote the family despotisms over late medieval cities. The semantic link between the two meanings is obvious, but in this book I shall only use the term to mean local rural lordship.)
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 1 100 that are the major focus of my text. This is partly, at least in recent years, the result of the growth of sophisticated agrarian history in Italian universities. But the history of the early medieval countryside also has a place in a far older historical tradition, which itself links into an urban-orientated historiography: that of 'feudal decentralization', between the decline of the Carolingian state at the start of the tenth century and the appearance of the city communes two centuries later. It is inside this decentralized world that the signoria and the process of incastellamento fit, and it is because of their place in such a historical sequence that they have been objects of particular interest to scholars. In order to understand them, then, it is best to start out with the historical sequence itself; this will show most dearly both the traditional framework of interpretation of the eighth to twelfth centuries and how it has been modified in the last couple of decades. 2 The five centuries between 700 and 1200 have often been seen in Italy as a cycle of time, of coherent political power lost and then regained. The first two centuries of the period were the great days of the Lombard and then (after Charlemagne's conquest in 774) Carolingian kingdom, centred on northern Italy and Tuscany. They have been seen as a period of order, under the Lombard king Liutprand (712- 44), Charlemagne himself (774814), and his most significant successor, Louis 11 (85-75). They have also been characterized, quite rightly, as a period of injustice and of decline for the substantial stratum of free owners, above all in the ninth century. But the background even for these discussions is a general acceptance that the Lombard-Carolingian political system, for all its defects, worked reasonably well inside its own limits: as a functioning structure of public power, firmly 2 Surveys of Italian history in the period 7oo-t2oo in English can conveniently be found in Wickham, Early Medieval Italy; Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy; Waley, Italian City-republics. By far the best social and political discussion of the whole period, however, is Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, a republication of his contribution to the Einaudi Storia d'ltalia ii (Turin, 1974).
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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 ll's death, first slowly and then, after 900 or so, fast: the most obvious steps in this process were the civil wars of the 8905 and 92os; the hundred-odd diplomas of the 900S and 910s in which Berengar I (888-924) began to hand out the lands and rights of the Crown to the Church and to private persons; and the crises of 945 and 962, when Kings Hugh (926-47) and Berengar ll (95o-62), faced with attack by rivals from across the Alps, found that their political and military support simply faded away-the Italian political elite no longer had enough interest in kings even to bother with civil war. Thereafter, the Italian state, reduced to an appendage of the German empire by Otto I (962-73), maintained political stability for over a century at the expense of most of its relevance to the daily life of the cities and the countryside of the Po plain and Tuscany. . Of these two centuries, the tenth has often been regarded as the 'feudal age' par excellence, with private links of dependence pitched successfully against the structure of public power; the eleventh as a period of structural confusion, but also of the slow recomposition of political power around bishops and their cities,
Introduction to the English Edition
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xvu
represented by the urban revolts of the first half of the century, and the religious disturbances associated with the spiritual reforms of the second half. The political confusion of these 200 years was real enough, and in northern Italy (less so in Tuscany, as we shall see) it may broadly be possible to pose the tenth century as a period of dissolution against the eleventh as one of slow political reorganization on a smaller scale. But even this, taken on its own, is over-simplification; and the rest of the picture is certainly misleading. Strictly 'feudal' (i.e. feudo-vassalic) ties were relatively unimportant before the mid-eleventh century. More important, to see the situation as the pitting of private against public power is to misunderstand it. It is likely that even the Carolingian political elites often saw the state in terms of a local, city-centred politics, rather than as a hierarchy stretching up to the capital at Pavia; as a result, even when the power of the king dissolved, local public institutions could continue to exist. Indeed, freed after the mid-tenth century from close involvement with the kings, even some of the institutions of central government continued to operate, most notably in the judicial and financial spheres; Berengar 11, for all his political weakness, may have been richer than any contemporary king in Latin Europe. Another symbolic date is 1024, when the Pavesi burnt the royal palace, and expelled it from their walls; but the kingdom of Italy continued to exist in the world of law, and the political culture of the Italian elites, although by now entirely focused on their own cities, remained legal-minded enough to recognize the claims of Frederick Barbarossa as late as the u6os and indeed, in some cases, those of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century emperors as well. And although private power, based on land and loyalty, was certainly dominant in Italy by 1000, its contours remained publicly defmed for another century: being a count rather than a private landowner still mattered. Perhaps the best example of the point is Olderico Manfredi, marquis of Turin, who in 1001 gave himself an immunity on his own private lands from the juridical or political intervention of the marquis, who was himself: the common identity of the holders of both public and private power is clear, but so is the continuing separability of the two.s None the less, it was in 3
Sergi, 'Feudalizzazione ne) regno italico', pp. 253- 4.
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this arena that signorial rights, which involved a fusion of public and private, were beginning to crystallize. The standard picture of the twelfth century is in effect as a resolution of the trajectories. and the problems of the eleventh. The civil disorder of the Cremonese revolts of the IOJOS, or of the Pataria in Milan from the 1050s to the I070S, come to be seen in retrospect as a groping towards the new order of communal government; when the institutions of the city communes are established, we see, if not stability, at least instability with rules, inside the 'natural' units of Italian political power, the cities and their rural territories or contadi. Cities .are thus, with this newfound autonomy, given the opportunity to become the commercial and industrial entrepots and world cultural centres of the late Middle Ages. The only people who reject this new order (once bishops become resigned to a new, diminished place inside the communal framework) are the 'feudal' aristocracy of the countryside, whom the cities have to conquer or absorb, across the twelfth century and beyond. It is this picture that was perhaps, before recent work on the subject, in most need of a systematic critique of all its elements. Regardless of the modern symbolism of the origin of the commune, in fact-and regardless even of the real importance of the appearance of autonomous urban constitutions-the twelfth century in most of central and northern Italy saw a further decline, in some fields an eclipse, of public power. Feudo-vassalic relationships spread in the countryside; public judicial institutions were fmally replaced by private territorial (signorial) courts and by informal arbitrations and compromises in the still inchoate arena of communal jurisdictions. The 'rural' aristocracy that the cities had to englobe were very often based in the city itself; their local powers, which the communes sometimes took centuries to reclaim, had often been acquired as late as 1 roo. The communes did not simply have to reclaim power; they often had to rebuild it from scratch, out of a network of informal relationships that were rather more similar to those of contemporary France and Germany than to the rough but effective public framework of the ninth century in Italy. The only common feature in the political structure of Italy from the beginning to the end of our period-not an unimportant one by any means, however- was the city itself, which in the most urbanized parts of the kingdom
Introduction to the English Edition
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(eastern Piemonte, Lombardy, the western Veneto, Emilia, northem Tuscany) remained the major focus for political and indeed economic activity inside the constantly changing patterns of the eighth to twelfth centuries. In what sense it acted as a focus will be one of the principal themes of the book. I have counterposed in this discussion a broadly characterized 'traditional' view of the development of Italy and a viewpoint based on more recent historical interpretations. But it should be evident that they have many features in common- most notably the stress on the central importance of the relationship between the city and the countryside, and of the nature, the legal definition, of political power. It is in this context that the precise nature of the signoria has been important to Italian historians ever since the beginning of the century. The sort of power that was found in the countryside in, say, the early twelfth century has often, as I have already said, been seen as the antithesis of the sort of power that was found in the cities in all periods: in the latter, public institutions; in the former, private, signorial lordship. The 'reconquest' of the contado by each city was thus seen in the same light as the equally traditional (and equally spurious) view of Henry II of England reclaiming a centralized judicial system from the courts of his feudal barons: as a victory of public over private. By and large, the weight of recent Italian historiography has not so much denied this opposition as altered its terms; private relationships did not only exist in the countryside but also in the city, in the eleventh, twelfth, maybe thirteenth centuries; urban power in the countryside was expressed by a very variegated pattern of political and legal structures, old and new, private and public, and even in the late Middle Ages (at least outside Tuscany) was characterized by a remarkable profusion of classic 'feudal' bonds.4 The exact nature of the signoria, therefore, can become a key to the nature of political power at every level in society. . . 4
For the late Middle Ages, see for example Chittolini, Formazione dello state regionale. The recognition that cities could be a major venue of feudal relationships is one of the reasons why some historians (significantly, often non-Italians) stress that Italy's history, however urban, was not as unlike that north of the Alps as is often thought: most notable recent expositions of this view have been Jones, 'Leggenda della borghesia'; Keller, Adelsh.errschqfi, esp. pp. 376-85. See also the important summary article by Bordone, 'Tema cittadino e "ritomo alia terra" ', which tries, among other things, to refute this argument, not wholly successfully.
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Interest in the signoria is not confined to Italy. There is a large body of writing in both German and French on the subject, and, leaving aside terminological disagreements, Land- (or Bann-) herrschaft and seigneurie banale are foci ofhistoriographical interest in Germany and France just as their synonym is south of the Alps. Indeed, Georges Duby's popularization of the latter term, and his concern to put it at the forefront of his analysis of Macon in 1953, had a profound effect on the Italians. 5 English historians, by contrast, have been relatively little affected by these discussions. This partly derives from the very real differences between England and the Continent, for the English kings genuinely did keep most levels of justice in the hands of themselves and their officials, restricting private justice largely to the arena oflandlordly powers over servile tenan~gneurial (signorial) rights never contributed more than a minor part of lordly incomes, in sharp contrast to the situation in France.6 (It also, unfortunately, partly derives from the unpreparedness of many English historians until fairly recently to read much 'foreign'-language history at all, a tradition that is by now, it seems, on the decline, and about time too. English-speaking historians should all by now at least know what the term seigneurie banale means, I hope.) But the particular nature of the Italian interest in the subject can best be seen by a comparison with the context in which the seigneurie banale is seen in France; for even if French historians have dominated the subject, Italian historians have been by no means entirely dependent on French insights. In France, the issue of the seigneurie is very frequently seen as part and parcel of the development of'feudalism'. Historians .who follow (to put it very crudely) Marc Bloch's view that 'feudal society' included a wide network of relationships, not just those of vassal homage and the fief ('feudo-vassalic' relationships), have regarded the seigneurie as part of that network. Not everyone would go so far as Jean-Pierre Poly, who stated in a conference in Rome in 1978 that the privatization of judicial powers in 5 Duby, Region m&onn4ise, pp. 173-90; see also the syntheses in Boutruche, Stigneurie et fiodaliu i, pp. II4- 26; ii, pp. US-40; Fossier, Enfance dt rEurope, pp. 401- 22. For Duby's influence in Italy, see for example Tabacco, 'Fief et seigneurie', pp. 204~. e A neat conspectus of the differences can be found in Hilton, CLw Conflict, pp. 227-38; cf. id., English Peasantry, pp. 2.31- 8, for the financial weight of seigneurial obligations in England at their height, around 1300.
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the south of France meant that southern feodalite was at least as 'complete' as that of the north, and, even more bravely, that ' Most historians admit today that the central phenomenon of feodalite is the establishment of the seigneurie banale'. But even those who fiercely deny any dependence of one of the concepts on the other find it natural to associate them. Robert Boutruche, for example, whose defmition ofjeodalite is certainly restricted to feudo-vassalic links, found himself writing a general book in which these links lay side by side with those of the seigneurie (landlordship and banal lordship alike): '(feodalite) could not have lasted without the material base which the seigneurie furnished it with'.7 One can see why the connection is made; fiefs and seigneuries banales are both manifestations of the general tendency for private relationships to infiltrate and replace public ones in the post-Carolingian centuries, and in France, where public power was genuinely very weak, the association of the two has come to be a shorthand that means the functioning of society as a whole, rather than just the personal relationships of an aristocratic elite. This association has, however, also partly perpetuated the old obsession with the boundaries of feudalism, what is feudal and what is not, and not least because one by one the French local studies from Macon onwards have shown how late 'feudovassalic' relationships themselves actually were almost nowhere in Europe, indeed, did they become the dominant schemata for the characterization of aristocratic political dependence before 1050 at the earliest.S In 1ltaly, at least in recent years, this line of approach is very rarely taken. Giovan.t'li Tabacco and Cinzio Violante, the two historians who currently dominate the discipline, have both explicitly denied that fiefs and signorie are necessarily related, and indeed the former dedicated an entire article in 1969 to the liquidation of the fuzzy uses of the adjective feudale current in Italy in the first two-thirds of the century. (Feudalesimo, the only translation of 'feudalism', barely exists in Italian.) In Italy, in fact, the restriction of the term 'feudal' to fiefs, vassalage, and contractual relationships is regarded as normal, and it is not an 7
Poly, in Structures floda/es, pp. 46-7, 57; Boutruche, Seigneurie et feodalite i, p. 8. (Feodalisme is a different word; it explicitly links feodalite and the seignturie-cf. for instance Toubert in Structures floda/es, p. 3, citing Hilton.) 8 Cf. the critical survey by Cammarosano, 'Strutture feudali', pp. 837-51.
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issue about which anyone today argues very much. 9 This is for several linked reasons. Italy had no Bloch to give the concept of 'feudal society' a powerful definition, as a historical (rather than a rhetorical) organizing device; the world of 'feudalism' has less resonance for Italians anyway (the French preoccupation with it is not unlike the Italian preoccupation with the city-state). Defining feudal relationships exclusively in terms of legal criteria comes more easily to Italian historians, too; Italian medieval history was long dominated by legal historians, and Tabacco and Violante, like many of their colleagues and pupils, are still concerned to place social relationships very precisely inside a legal framework. But this certainly dpes pot derive from a suspicion of broad social analysis as Bloch practised it; current schools of Italian history-writing are interested in a very wide-ranging social history. Political culture in medieval Italy was genuinely structured, very explicitly, by legal rules, more than in most parts of Europe. And this point itself brings us to the context in which the signoria, divorced from the fief, is understood in Italy; for the survival of these legal rules is the survival of a framework of public law. In Italy, feudo-vassalic bonds were not only as late as in France but they never anywhere (outside the Norman kingdom) came to structure even aristocratic dependence, and still less the organization ofpolitical power in general. Thus, the seigneurie in France is seen in .apposition to feodalite, the political trimr1ph of private relationships; but the signoria in Italy is seen in apposition to the public and, even though the two concepts are no l~nger taken as identical, to the city. Public power was not strong in the Italy of the twelfth· century, but the notion of the public was; it could never entirely disappear in a complex organism like city society, and it was, too, preserved by a long-lasting urban elite of lawyers. The signoria was by npw divided from public law by a boundary-publi~ law, that is to say, now had a limit beyond which it could not formally go; but, conversely, the formal setting-out of that boundary, the growing . tightness of legal Tabacco, ' Fief et seigneurie'; id., 'Allodialita del potere'; Violante, e.g. in Structures ftodales, pp. 239-40. In this book I will follow Italian usage and use ' feudal' to mean ' feudo-vassalic' in the strict sense. Elsewhere, \ prefer to use the word in its Marxist sense, but this covers all western European societies in the period we are looking at, and is thus not much use here as an exact category. 9
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definition, increasingly contributed to defme signorial rights themselves, which were thus englobed ever more clearly by the public world again. Politics, and even the practice oflaw, were a great deal more informal in the twelfth century than legal theorists liked, or admitted. But the ground rules of politics were structured by a set of legal principles which remained rooted in the past, and in the urban tradition. The signoria in Italy can therefore be seen not only as the reflex of de facto lordship, but also as a representation of the legal and political structures of the whole of society. The signoria did not represent 'the country', nor public power 'the city', but nevertheless, as we shall see later in this book, the coherence (and economic weight) of signorial powers in the countryside can in practice be used as a good prima-facie indicator of the extent and limits of urban hegemony there. The counterposition of signoria and city is not merely the traditional legitimation for the victory of the commune; it helps us to understand how real historical processes actually worked. Feudalism and the signoria have been seen, everywhere in Europe, in terms of the appearance of casdes; and so also in Italy. But in Italy, particularly in the last two decades, the issue of this appearance (incastellamento), above all in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has suddenly come to the forefront of historical attention. This is partly due to the increasingly detailed interest taken in the crystallization of local power in northern Italy in the ambit of the signoria, which led to a closer analysis of the castle as its most obvious outward manifestation, as in the work of Fasoli, Violante, or Rossetti; and partly to the appearance in 1973 of Pierre Toubert's monumental work on medieval Lazio. 10 Toubert's book has often been taken as the most effective irruption of French (i.e. Annaliste) historical method on the medieval Italian scene since the appearance of Duby's book on Macon, and not wrongly; but not in the fields of study I have just been discussing- Les Structures du Latium medieval is in reality a far from orthodox member of the school of Bloch and Du by, uninterested as the book is in many of the major preoccUpations of the French regional monographs, such as the structure of the aristocracy. The real impact of the book has, rather, lain in its Fasoli, 'Feudo e castello', with references to her previous work; Violante, 'Una famiglia feudale'; Rossetti, 'Signorie di castello'; Toubert, Latium. lO
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explicit concern for 'histoire totale', a historical framework in which everything is interrelated. not only political organization and the exploitation of the peasantry, but also economic geography and peasant production. This project goes back to Bloch too, of course; but it has very seldom been carried through as successfully as Toubert did. He saw that a book of this kind needed a focus, an integrating element; and he chose the castle for this purpose. It was a brilliant intuition. Above all because, in Lazio, the process of inc~stellamento did not involve, as normally in northern Europe, the simple appearance of mottes and other small fortifications at the edge of urban and rural settlements, but the fortification of the settlements themselves; and, where settlement was scattered, as had been normal in Lazio, the reorganization of the entire pattern into fortified nuclei, usually on hilltops. The fortified settlement encapsulated not only a political but an economic break; by studying incastellamento as a system, one could come to an understanding of all levels of society at once. Toubert's image of incastellamento has come to have a profound impact on Italian understanding of the social and political changes of the centuries after 900. This is not because the process was exactly the same elsewhere in Italy: far from it, for much settlement elsewhere was already concentrated, 11 and, where it was not, the builders of new fortifications did not by any means manage (or try) to persuade the rural population to come and live inside them. But the issue of the effect on social and economic life of the appearance of fortifications is now everywhere recognized as crucial; Aldo Settia's major recent book on incastellamento in northern Italy, now the basic synthesis for the Po plain, though owing much of its interpretative framework to the socio-political and legal historians of the north, explicitly acknowledges the relevance of Toubert's work for Settia's understanding of the process of incastellamento. 12 As I use the words 'concentrated' and 'concentration' throughout this book instead of the commoner geographical terms 'nucleated' and 'nucleation'; the former lend themselves more easily to modification ('relatively concentrated', etc.), and the latter in their Italian forms tend to give the impression of continuously built-up housing (as, for example, in the surviving late medieval centres of rural Tuscany), a phenomenon certainly absent in the early medieval countryside. 12 Settia, CtJstelli e villllggi, p. 11 . 11
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will be seen in what follows, the same is true for me. I will consistently use the Italian word 'castello' rather than 'castle' in this book, precisely because of the issues raised by Toubert's models. 'Castello' in modern Italian, in fact, spans the whole range of possible fortifications, from single defensive towers through the residences oflords to substantial defended settlements; it covers the whole range of defensive structures brought into being by the multiform process known as 'incastellamento', thus upholding the essential cohesion of the process, no matter how various its effects. These effects, were, however, clearly very various indeed. I have discussed elsewhere, at some length, the extent of this variability in south- Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 239-41; cf. AndreoUi, Uomini nel medioevo, pp. 79-91.
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five valley pievi. Two more of the pievi can be dismissed quickly: that of Gallicano, which is the only one in the valley that the bishop kept (after an abor'tive lease of half of it to Sisemundo di Sisemundo, himself associated with the 'Cunimundinghi', in 997), and that of Piazza, which is in the diocese of Luni, and which therefore lay outside the developments described here. (A charter of I 110 linked its tithes to the de' Nobili family, one of the major later valley lords, and claimed that they derived from a cession of 983, thus making the bishop of Luni follow a similar time-scale of leasing to his colleagues in Lucca; the text is, however, almost certainly a forgery.) 16 The other major absentee so far is much mention of castelli. The 'Cunimundinghi' established two or three on their Sala estate network, but that is all. Their absence is not necessarily in itself significant, for they were rarely the objects of episcopal leases (only one Grosslibell mentions a castello, that of Campori), and episcopal leases form the bulk of our evidence in this period; indeed, castelli appear in chance references, particularly after 1000, often enough to indicate that they must already by then have been common. Nevertheless, the importance of castelli on their own should not be over-stressed as an indication of change in the nature of aristocratic power. We will look at this issue through the consideration of two further families, the lessors of the other two pievi, of Fosciana and Loppia; for these two pose for us the problem of local powers in the clearest manner. l6 See Barsocchini 1718-19 for Gallicano. 1719 is an exceptionally enigmatic text, but in it Sisemundo is associated with a Cunirnundo di Sigbifrido, of the
castello of Gorfigliano; the names and location fit the 'Cunimundinghi'. Sisemundo's family is also linked circumstantially with the latter in documents discussed in Schwarzmaier, 'Kloster St. Georg', pp. 151- 3. Sisemundo held elsewhere, too, including in Cappiano in the Valdinievole, and the Vallebuia across the Serchio from Lucca. For Piazza, see the documents edited by Micotti, Descrittione cronologica del/a Garfagnana, pp. 164-6 (one of them is also printed in Pacchi 8 and in Barsocchini, 'Vescovi lucchesi', pp. 405-6 n.). These texts purport to record a gift by Count Ugolinello di Superbo di Armanno de nobilibus de domo .filiorum Guidi of the tithes of Piazza to the pievano in 1 I 10, and the confirmation by Matilda of the same gift. The texts, in the de'Nobili archive when their editors saw it, are not in that archive in ASL. The form of the family name is of a thirteenth-century type, rather than earlier; some of the personal names and formulae are late, too. Further, gifts to pievani are very much a late thirteenth-century practice. l think the texts are intelligent thirteenth-century forgeries.
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The Garfagnana, 70o-1200
The pieve of S. Cassiano in Basilica, Pieve Fosciana, was the first in the valley to have its tithes and lands leased out, in 952, to Gottifrido di Gottifrido and the infant Teuperto di Cristina. Their sons and heirs renewed the lease, or their portions of it, in three other texts, going up to 1o62. Teuperto and his son also got their hands on the neighbouring Campori estate and its early episcopal castello, as leases of 986 and 1014 show. This is quite a compact group, of two largish estates, one with a castello, one with a rich pieve, and nothing else in the valley- it is even more compact than the Careggine leases. It represents the stable bloc of power that the bishop had built up in the middle valley during the eighth and ninth centuries, integrated territorially by the extraction of tithe. It is thus not surprising to find the family apparently turning this power into a lordship with a firmer structure; a text of 1045 shows Rodolfo di Gherardo, one of the lessors of the pieve in 1o62, in control of a private castello, Cellabaroti. This castello was well placed. It was very near to the above estates, and was situated on a strategic spot, just across the river from Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, close to the modem Castelnuovo railway station. It was the centre for the Cellabarottani family of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, presumably in some way Rodolfo's heirs; like the Careggine, this family were even picking up a local surname. But it would be wrong to use even this to demonstrate a localization of family interests. For one, the 1045 document, which is a cession of a quarter of the castello to the bishop, makes no reference to any rights other than proprietorial ones; the castello is, at least in theory, just an addition to a network of landowning. For another, this family was no more restricted to the valley than the others we have seen. Teuperto leased half of the church of S. Giorgio in Lucca in 986, and his son added S. Giorgio di Brancoli to this in 1014. Rodolfo's wife owned in Tempagnano near Lucca in the Iosos and I06os, and his descendants held in the plain in 1 140; there was Cellabarottinga land in the city in 1146; another Rodolfo di Cellabarotta owned a house there before 1166. This signoria had dearly not been fully localized in the Garfagnana in the eleventh century, and maybe not in the mid-twelfth either.l? 17 Barsocchini IJSO, 16o9, 1652; AAL + +N.z6 (a.IOI4), +B78 (a.xoxs), A17 (a.1o62). (+ +Nz6lnsftudum domincrum de Cellabarotti as a dorsal note,
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The pieve of Loppia is a much more difficult problem. We have so far looked at episcopal leases of lands and tithes in areas that the bishops fully controlled, particularly the middle valley, and those parts of the upper valley in which the bishop was influential. Loppia, however, though a large pieve, with twenty-six villae in one of the richest parts of the valley, had only a small estate attached to it, and lay in the part of the lower valley where the bishop was weakest and the fisc was probably strongest. The links between the major lay figures in this area are much more fragmentary than those we have seen up to now. Giovanni di Rodilando and his son Rodilando leased the pieve in 98 3 and 994· To whom they were related is wholly obscure. The antiquarian historians linked them to Rodilando di Cunimundo of the 'Cunimundinghi' on the one side and, on the other, to the eleventh- to thirteenth-century Rolandinghi of Loppia, who were by then the principal family in the area, and held an array of rights there, including tithe. Schwarzmaier has doubted the first of these links, noting that the two families owned in totally different areas; he may well be right, but whether he is right or not is less important than the fact that the histories of the two are wholly different-they were socially, even if not genealogically, separate. It is more probable that the Rolandinghi were genuinely the heirs ofGiovanni and Rodilando; certainly this was thought so in the thirteenth century, for both the tenth-century tithe leases have dorsal notes from that period claiming the fact. But tithe was an essentially external surplus-extraction system. Although important for local power and its continuity, as we have just seen for Fosciana, it could not on its own create it. The Rolandinghi needed local centres of power as well. In this light, a rather more significant candidate at least for collateral ancestor of the Rolandinghi is Uberto di but A17, to confuse the unwary, says de feudo Gerardingorum.) For Teuperto in Lucca and Brancoli, see Barsocchini r6o8; AAL +A 19, + + Q33 (a. 1014). S. Giorgio in Lucca was not the monastery founded in 1056 and given to Montecassino: see Schwarzmaier, ' Kloster St. Georg', p. 150. Schwarzmaier, Lucca, p. 132, says that Teuperto was also ordained priest at nearby Migliano (Barsocchini 12.82, 1405), but the dates do not match; the Migliano of the latter texts was anyway in the Valdera. For Rodolfo di Cellabaroti, see AAL +C22 (a.1045, Pianezri u)-c£, for the Cellabarottani, Raffaelli, Destrizione dtlla Gaifagna~ta, pp. ~; Angelini, Pievt toscana, pp. 42- 3 n; RCL 2.74, 32.5, 346, 353, 939-40, 12.47; Azzi ii.s74-
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70()-1200
Rodilando, who in 1048 willed to executors for his soul his portions of five castelli near Loppia, Ansugo, Lucignana, Coreglia, Barga, and Ceserana. As I have noted, Uberto almost certainly got these from the fisc. IS All these associations, whether plausible or not, are totally circumstantial, and depend heavily on the recurrence of the name Rodilando, which is itself not uncommon as a name. It cannot ever be shown that Giovanni, still less Uberto, was really an ancestor of the Rolandinghi. But whether they were or not, they are useful for us here, for with their help we can construct an ideal type of what were the possible bases for twelfth- and thirteenth-century signorial power. A family holds the pieve of Loppia, rich enough but politically isolated. To create a firm political base, however, the family also needed the sort of rights that men like Uberto were coming to have in eleventh-century Italy: castelli and their estates, with signorial rights, that only kings and marquises had the right to give. All of these were needed, in fact, to construct effective local signorie in the centuries after I 100; and indeed, the thirteenth-century Rolandinghi, by then based largely in castelli such as Uberto's Lucignana, explicitly called themselves de Loppia, even though Loppia itself was never ' a castello: the fiscal and ecclesiastical elements, on this model, would alike be essential .for their position.l9 Now, in fact , it is far from clear that the Rolandinghi ever really had all these elements. Uberto does not actually mention signorial rights in his will; and, as we shall see, the thirteenth-century Rolandinghi may not have been as dominant in the area as they are often said to be (below, pp. 122- 3). But had they had them, they would have been the most firmly based aristocratic family in the valley. In particular, no family in the valley can be seen with both tithes and signorial rights. The Rolandinghi call our attention, that is to say, to the precise problem of what effective See BatSQcchini 1538, 1697 (1698 for Cerignana has a similar dorsal note, but its lessor lldeberto di Berto cannot be linked with anyone); RCL 2"27 for Uberto. Cf. Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. r~. 227; Cianelli, 'Conti rurali', pp. t6o-5. Uberto owned very widely in the Lucchesia, and was based in the castello of Puctiostorli in the Valdamo; he was not a valley lord. But the Rolandinghi would own widely, too: see n. sr. l9 AAL + +D.s8 (a.U77), +K.s3 (a.1281); de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana' p. I I I n. for the family in Lucignana. IS
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local power actually could have been. And at this point we must look at the historiography of the signoria. The problem of the origins of the local signorial powers that can be seen clearly in most of Italy in the twelfth century is highly complex. We have long got beyond the counterposition between Vaccari, who saw the signoria largely as a development of the judicial rights already associated with much private landowning in the Carolingian period, and Schneider, who saw it as the devolution of public rights in the context of the break-up of the state. Indeed, neither Vaccari nor Schneider was in reality so simplistic; but the opposition between the two is useful to enable us to define as clearly as possible the two major alternative routes along which developed the powers and responsibilities of a twelfth-century signoria (in French, 'seigneurie banale'). Signorie were very various, but their classic form was a territory in which a lord held judicial rights (districtus, derived from distringere, to coerce or punish) over all the inhabitants, whether his tenants or not; he owed them military protection, and they in return owed loyalty {fidelitas), military and quasi-military dues and services, judicial dues, and other financial obligations to him. Not all signorie were 'territorial', in the sense that one person held all the signorial powers over a defined territory; such powers were often restricted to the lord's own properties, which could be geographically very dispersed. None the less, the concept of the signorial territory had clearly taken shape by the twelfth century, everywhere in central-northern Italy. Its core was the devolution of judicial powers, and it is that which is usually the most visible in our documentation; but it was the totality of rights, including those directly derived from landholding and tithe-taking, that built up the possibility of effective local power, dominatus loci.20 20 Vaccari, Tmitorialita, pp. 6-14, 45-64; Schneider, Entstehung von Burg, pp. 264- 325, although Plesner, Bmigrazione dall4 campagna, pp. 7CF-9 makes
Schneider's point most forcefully (and schematically) in the Tuscan context. (The debate is Europe-wide; cf. Fossier, Enfance de /'Europe, pp. 401 f. for a brief comment.) For the nature of signorial rights, see Vaccari, Tmitorialita, pp. 149-53; Cammarosano, Campagne nell'eta comuMie, pp. 17-24; Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, pp. 24o-5; Violante, 'S. Dionigi di Milano', pp. 764-6; id., 'Ta1amona', pp. 745-9; id., 'Signoria "territoria]e" ', pp. 337- 41 ; Keller, Adelshemchtift, pp. 147-96; Soldi Rondanini, '"Signoria rurale" '.Of the north
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The Garfagnana, 70()-1200
The trend of the historiography has been to separate out the differing elements in this process ever more clearly. One element that can be left aside straightaway is the role of 'feudal', that is to say feudo-vassalic, elements in the localization of political power. A succession of scholars have argued that the benefice in Italy, at least until Coruad ll's edict of 1037, was as a general rule too precarious to be the base for local political power, and that royal grants were most typically grants of perpetual (allodial) property-owning; that there was no difference in the range of privileges granted out in benefice, lease, or outright gift; that, in particular, 'feudal' possession did not carry more signorial rights than 'non-feudal' possession did. The problem offeudalism was, instead, essentially one of the changing relationships between different levels of the aristocracy, and between them and what remained of the state. But even on that level, vassalage hardly created a coherent hierarchy anywhere in Italy before the late eleventh century, and in Tuscany, less 'feudalized' than most of the north, not until the twelfth century, if then. 21 I will come back to the question of feudal imagery in the context of the Casentino, where it was more highly developed than in the Garfagnana, and where the evidence allows us to look at the issue of how far feudo-vassalic relationships spread downwards into the peasantry; it is only this issue that makes the problem of the nature of feudal relationships important to my study at all (below, pp. JII- 12). In the Garfagnana, the question is irrelevant; But the dissolution of large-scale public power and the territorialization of private, signorial, power is another matter. Historians of Italy, when they are forced to choose, tend these days to follow Vaccari rather than Schneider, though they paint a very much more nuanced picture. Kings in their tenth-century cessions can now be seen legitimating and gready extending the private justice already present in most lay and (above all) Italian local nudies, perhaps the best detailed discussion is Ripanti, 'Casale Monferrato'; the classic is Romeo, 'Origgio'. The best international survey is now Fossier, Enfance de rEuropt, pp. 374-422 (weak on Italy, however: pp. 392-3); the clamc here is Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 224-31. at See references cited in nn. ro, 20; Tabacco, 'Orientamenti feudali'; id., 'Allodialita del potere'; Keller, Adelshmsthaft, esp. pp. 342.-63;jarnut, &rgamo, pp. .llS-JI; Camnurosano, 'Feudo e propriera'.
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ecclesiastical landowning, thus allowing the wide powers of counts to become broken up and increasingly devolved to smaller-scale lordships. These lordships were not, however, simply a political reflex of landownership, but extended beyond the lands that their possessors held as landowners (or tenants on Grosslibell or benefice) to the lands of other landholders, through the build-up of networks of judicial. military, and financial rights. It is in this context that one can see why the signoria was so often far from territorially coherent. The heterogeneity of the paths by which public and quasi-public powers over land and people came under the personal control of lords ensured that many signorie merely consisted of overlapping sets of claims to rights at different levels, shared out, as likely as not, between rival powers inside a given area. This fragmentation of powers was essentially the consequence of the generalized fragmentation of landholding, for no one owner could easily exclude others from any given territory. Even where signorie did form territorial units, the presence of other powerful landowners inside their boundaries ensured that complete local hegemony by their holders was never common.22 It has been observed more than once that this framework characterizes very clearly the way the state breaks down, and the relationship that local power structures have to wider political patterns, but that we do not anywhere have the evidence that enables us to see the signoria actually forming. Indeed, even its constituent elements are usually visible only at the moment when it begins to be contested, from the later twelfth century onwards.23 It is, further, obvious that the 'signoria', like 'feudalism', is a modem ideal type; there is little point wasting ink arguing whether this particular network of relationships is more 'fully' signorial than that. But the issue of what possible previous networks of power the signoria could derive from is ~
Tabacco, Egemonie sociali, pp. 196-204, 24o-5; Keller, Adelshmsch4Jt, pp. 14'7-96; Ripanti, 'Casale Monferrato', pp. 132- 8; Romeo, 'Origgio', pp. 3556o. Violante (as n. 20) and Keller show how, in northern Italy at least, the principle of a single districtus for a defined territory, whatever its real content, was very dear by the twelfth century. 23 Cammarosano, Campagne nelreta comunale, p. 17; Keller, Adelshmsch4ft, pp. 163- 4. It would probably be equally true to say that the signoria became clearer as it came to be more tightly defined in law, in the context of the increasing legal definition of all politics in the twelfth century.
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The Garfagnana, 70()-1200
important, for it helps us to understand what happened in specific areas. We know that everywhere was different, even if often only slightly different. But unless we trace twelfth-century power-structures in any given place some way towards their local origins, our analyses of their variations run the risk of banality. In general, the signoria had both public and private roots; but the balance varied from place to place. And twelfth-century variations in the nature, outward form, and coherence of signorial power are not chance; they are the results of the independent development ofdifferent parts ofltaly across at least two centuries, these developments themselves reflecting real differences in local social structures. Although we have many sophisticated general analyses of the signoria, and many excellent local studies, fewer people are concerned to look (or guess) at the reasons why such local differences existed, in terms of a wider framework of interpretation.2 4 It is very likely that we do not yet know the material well enough fully to work out these reasons-this is certainly true of Tuscany; but it is worth trying nevertheless. For the Lucchesia, we have to start with the episcopal leases of the late tenth and early eleventh century, above all those of pievi. What did one of these leases offer? The first thing, of course, was land. The estates involved in our Garfagnana cessions could be substantial; the future Celabarottani, with the Basilica and Campori estates, were particularly well endowed. The recipients of these leases paid rent, which was not in itself trivial-between ss. and 20s. was normal-and was initially, as we can see from the first renewals, regularly exacted. 25 But these sums were certainly small when compared to the value of the 24
The most effective attempt at regional generalization for Tuscany is Cammarosano's short article, 'Feudo e proprieti', although I disagree with some of it. Regional differences across Europe are nicely analysed in Fossier, as n. zo. Two local studies that discuss issues like these are Rossetti, Cologno Monzese; ead., 'Signorie di castello'. 2 5 The late tenth-century bishops renewed leases regularly, as did Grirnizzo (IOI4-Z7), to a slighdy lesser extent Anselmo I (1056--72, Pope Alexander 11). and even Anselmo n (1073- So), committed reformer though he was. One might wonder whether the distinct absence of renewals under Giovanni 11 (1027-56) and Anselmo U's successors was a result of relative political weakness as much -as religious scruple. Contrast the leases of the central Appennines, virtual alienations with high entry 6nes-Toubert, Latium , pp. 521-7; entry fines were not required in these Lucchese texts.
The Lords of the Garfagnana
109
estates themselves, which, at least in some single villages (in Campori or Fosciana or Careggine) were already sufficient to be the basis for real political power. And simple possession of ecclesiastical estates already carried some judicial powers. Ninthand tenth-century leases to cultivators required the lessors to attend court in Lucca; Grosslibelle, for the most part, conspicuously did not. (Those for Sala are the only exception; these reserved judicial powers for the bishop up to 983, although not thereafter.) We can assume that the judicial rights inherent in simple property-owning, at least when associated with immunities- the settlement of minor disputes over movables or leased land, the punishment of some crimes of violence, the apprehension of thieves-was transferred en bloc to the aristocratic lessors of this land.26 Tithe was the other element of the leases. I have already stressed the purely monetary importance of this perquisite: a tenth of the gross produce of between six and thirty villages must have outweighed the revenues of all but the largest estates. Tithe, too, was the only fully territorialized render due from the peasantry. The power to exact tithe for one's private benefit from all the inhabitants of a given area carries with it an obvious and inevitable element of privatization of power in general. It may allow one the political space to subject the poor and even neutralize rivals; it may, indeed, allow one to develop other elements of one's personal power into power over a given territory. Pievi were a social and economic focus for a family, too, that could give it some staying power; it is not surprising that the three families that held pievi in the Garfagnana in 1000 are three particularly likely candidates for some genealogical continuity into the surnamed noble houses of 120o--the Cellabarottani for Fosciana, the Careggine for RogianafCareggine, the Rolandinghi for Loppia. Similarly, the association of pievi with the capitaneal aristocracy of Milan is well known, and even rendered normative by the twelfth century Libri Jeudorum. But See Vaccari, Ttrritorialita, pp. 56--2, and Drew, ' Immunity in Carolingian Italy', for the norms of legal immunities. The content of proprietorial justice is less clear, but texts elsewhere like Porro Lambertenghi, Codex diplomaticus l.Angobardiae, n. 249 (a.870), for S. Ambrogio di Milano, may indicate that proprietorial control could be extensive. More work needs to be done on this. See further, for the Casentino, below, p. 317. 26
110
The Garfagnana, 70tr12oo
Violante concluded after close study that pieval leases involved no juridical or institutional rights on their own, either in Lucca or Milan. 27 Tithes were a major integrative element for signorial power, but even they did not create signorial territories on their own; it would have been bard for a full dominatus loci to be established on the basis of tithes alone. Devolved public rights were necessary as well, that is to say; and it is this that presents problems in the Lucchesia. The real particularity about Lucca was the strength of the State. The city was in effect the capital of the march of Tuscany. The power of the marquis in Tuscany in the tenth and eleventh centuries probably never reached the height that it had under Adalbert ll (886-9IS), and there were .two points of particular weakness, the mid-tenth and the early eleventh centuries, when temporary political crises enabled the kings, on one side, and local aristocratic families, on the other, to extend their influence in the march. But under Marquis Hugh (969-IOOI), and Boniface, Beatrice, and Matilda of Canossa (1027-IIIS), the marquises made a serious attempt to establish some form of effective public organization at least in northern Tuscany, an attempt more coherent than that made anywhere else in the Italian kingdom, even, by now, by the kings. And, while in much of Tuscany they had to compete with new comital families set up in the mid-tenth century, or with the effective political independence of the bishop of Arezzo, in Lucca they were supreme. The viscount of Lucca was no more than another member of the local landed aristocracy with lands scattered across the diocese. Marchesal government remained firm in the Lucchesia, at least until the Lucchesi expelled it from their city in 1081, in a gesture closely parallelling the burning of the royal palace in Pavia in 1024; even then, Matilda's grand court sessions (placita), which had always been peripatetic, did not cease.28 We are used to the empty rhetoric of attempts at establishing national and regional public power in tenth- and eleventh-century Italy (and, indeed, most other places in continental Europe); such Viobnte, 'Pievi e parrocchie', pp. 666-8, 717-21. 28 For the marquis, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 185- .1.49, 322- 33; Keller, 'Marca di Tuscia'; Nobili, 'Famiglie marchionali'. But we lack an adequate analysis of the Canossa in Tuscany. For viscounts, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. Ill-18. 27
The Lords of the Garfagnana
Ill
power never looked as coherent as that on the ground. But the consequences of the attempt in the Lucchesia were considerable. The first concerned the power of the bishop. The bishop of Lucca was rich, by any standards, in the ninth century. But already he had less power in his city than most bishops; across the century, his bureaucracy was slowly cut out from the organization of justice and even, for the most part, from the notariate; the new urban official families were principally dependants of the marquis. 29 The great series of leases of the late tenth century and on were made from a position of political weakness, not strength. The families concerned kept their links with the bishop, but he could not use them politically; by and large, he simply lost his land. The bishops of Arezzo, who really were powerful, as we shall see, did nothing of the kind (below, pp. 318- zo); and the archbishops of Milan, although they enfeoffed away tithes, thereby created a body of military support that backed up their aspirations to being the strongest power in , Lombardy. But the bishop of Lucca did not even have the strength to assert himself in the confusion after Marquis Hugh's death; indeed, the period 1002-13 is characterized by a temporary drop in the output of episcopal records to virtually zero, a gap with few parallels in the steady sequence of documents from 700 onwards, and episcopal influence probably followed the same path. Much of the move towards the commune at the end of the century, too, scarcely involved the bishops at all. They were an important force, but they operated as a private, not a public, power, perhaps more than any other bishop of commensurate wealth in the kingdom. And as a result, one thing that the bishops of Lucca certainly never had to give away was public jurisdiction. The marquises had it to give away, of course. Indeed, in much of Tuscany it could be taken from them whether they liked it or not. But the Lucchesia, at least, was theirs. We do not, it is true, know much about marchesal patronage. We will see in a moment that Lucchese aristocrats certainly benefited from it. But we have nothing to equate with the remarkable run of royal diplomas from Berengar I onwards that handed out proprietorial Keller, 'Gerichtsort', pp. 5- 28, 6o-6; id., 'Marca di Tusda', pp. r23--7; Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 275-93. 311
I 12
The Garfagnana, 70o-1200
and juridical rights like chocolates to every church in the north. The kings made very few cessions in Tuscany, except in the Aretino (see pp. 181-4); but the marquises did not make many more. We need not doubt that, had they given to churches, particularly to those in Lucca, we would know; such diplomas were worth keeping. But we have only a handful of such texts, from 8oo right up to the twelfth century, mostly associated with Hugh's monastic foundations in the late tenth. Whether successful or unsuccessful, the marquises differed from the kings in their conception of the currency of politics. This fact alone, however, must alter our conception of the process of socio-political change. The model for the territorialization of political power in the north, even when the stress is laid on the slow development of the signoria from the network of property-ownership, takes for granted the steady surrender by the kings of substantial portions of their public power. We cannot assume this in Tuscany before the late eleventh century. And, even though we must doubt the capacity of the marquises to prevent such losses in much of their territory, to the Aldobrandeschi or the Gherardeschi or the Guidi, we cannot assume such weakness outside the areas where great families such as these were dominant. We have to proceed case by case. Schwarzmaier does not discuss signorie much. Local power does not lie within his brief; he is more concerned, when he discusses the localization of his noble families, to discuss the growth of political foci such as the castello and the private monastery (and, indeed, the pieve) as bases for new identities, rather than for powers over determinate populations.so But he would have got little encouragement from the documents: they are almost devoid of information about signorial rights. The largest bloc of lay documents from the eleventh-century Lucchesia, the liquidation of the patrimony of the first family of lords of Porcari in the eastern Lucca plain in 1039-43, which lists all the lands, powers, and castelli of the family (the first cession alone like most of the others, it is to the church of Lucca-lists I 57 tenant-houses and .43 . other locations for property), is totally silent on the subject. Now, it may be that this is simply a formulaic tradition; but formulaic tradition in itself 30
Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp.
241-61.
The Lords of the Garfagnana
II3 means something. Signorial rights, even if they existed, were not yet important enough to get into notarial formularies, anywhere in the Lucchesia. Only from the late eleventh century and, particularly, in the twelfth would things change, as we shall see, but even then not consistently; indeed, a text for Porcari from 1 130, very similar in its scope to those of a century before, is equally devoid of any form of signorial reference.31 This is particularly striking by comparison with the diocese of Luni, whose territory extended into the Garfagnana itself. The Lunigiana is far less extensively documented than anywhere in the Lucchesia; there are only seven tenth-century texts and eleven from the eleventh century in the Codice Pelavicino, the main documentary source for the area, perhaps I per cent of the equivalent documents for Lucca. But they constantly mention signorial rights. So, in 1039, the bishop of Luni can promise to remit nearly all his signorial rights over the castello ofTrebbiano in favour of its castellans: he will not exact any malum usum, or the fodrum, or anything else unjust as long as it is contested inside a month, unless in legitimate defence of his rights; he has no powers inside the castello at all except by express agreement. The eleventh-century Lucchese leases are never anything like this. But the Lunigiana was not in the march of Tuscany, and its own marquises, the Obertenghi, were as yet territorially weak. The bishop of Luni was a great signorial lord, with steadily increasing rights of comitaljurisdiction in the Lunigiana. The bishop of Lucca was not. He had rights of justice on his own land, but he never gained Lunense-style territorial rights. And I would propose that the same was true of the lay aristocracy. The lords of Porcari were not any ordinary family; they were one of the greatest lay families of the early eleventhcentury Lucchesia, descended from one of the brothers of Conrado Cunitio and closely linked to the marquis; indeed, the family had actually bought much of Porcari from the marquis himself, in 952.82 The marquis did not, however, sell them For Porcari, see AAL + +D38, *K69-7o, + +G7z, + +G75 (all 1039, Isola 58, 6o-3), *Bzz (a.to4o, Isohl 83), +L53, *K7r, + +047, + +K91 (all 1043, Nesti 46-7, 52- 3). Cf. Seghieri, 'Porcari'. For the 1130 text, see RCL 870. 32 See CP 488 for Trebbiano; cf. 267 (a.1Q96). See Volpe, Toscana medioevale, pp. 331- 42 for discussion. For Porcari, see Barsocchini 1347. 31
1 14
The Garfagnana, 70tr1zoo
anything except land in 952; any signorial powers would have to be constructed by the Porcaresi themselves. And whatever de facto powers the Porcaresi had in their castelli by the I030S, these had not crystallized into any structure of power that was even worth mentioning in cessions of the whole range of their properties. Although things would change in the twelfth century, even then they would not change as far or as fast as they did in the Lunigiana, as we shall see. Aristocratic families did get control of fiscal land, however, whether the marquis intended to grant it or not. In the absence of documents for marchesal cessions to laymen (the 952 Porcari sale having almost no parallels at all), this is something that we can only pick up from dose documentary analysis. Let us return to the Garfagnana to do so. The great families of the diocese do occasionally appear in the eleventh century as holders or owners of land in the valley that the bishop almost certainly never gave them. The first family of lords of Porcari had part of the castello and curtis of Castiglione in 1040. The second family, which succeeded them in a very similar array of properties, either by direct sale from their predecessors or by sale{Iease from the bishop, also had part of Castiglione in 1061, and had added part of the castello ofGallicano. The viscount ofLucca owned around Castiglione and Fosciana in 1033, as a chance land-sale shows us. Uberto di Rodilando, as we have seen, had picked up a set of castelli in and around Barga by 1048. And the probable ancestors of the thirteenth-century Gherardinghi held Gragno below Barga by 1085. Most of these could well be fiscal, that is marchesal, cessions. In particular, the Barga area was almost certainly a major fiscal area; Castiglione, too, had public links; and the latter's castello, above all, cannot have been an episcopal cession, for the bishop in 1033 had a tower there, built just outside the walls, transparently in opposition to the owners of the castello. But other documented fiscal land in the valley seems to have remained public property. Matilda apparently kept to herself much of the public power associated with centres like Barga and Castiglione; and Castelnuovo, the strategic centre of the valley, does not seem ever to have entered private hands. We could guess that these references are at least an approach towards a reasonably full picture of fiscal cessions in the Garfagnana. They are for a substantial percentage of known
.......
The Lords of the GarfagMna
II
5
marchesalland. though they distinctly do not include the major centre of the area. They involve, as well, rather more castelli than we have seen up to now. But even these castelli are not visibly attached to signorial rights. We still cannot show that the marquis gave these away.33 We cannot construct an entire analysis on absences, even if they are significant when contrasted with presences in neighbouring areas. The absence of references to the signoria in the eleventhcentury Lucchesia could even be chance, though I do not think so; but we cannot get any further with eleventh-century material alone. To make the particularity of the Lucchesia clearer, we must proceed into the twelfth century, where something can be said about the nature of signorial power in the diocese. And this is best done through the development of the castello. I have been deliberately avoiding the issue of incastellamento so far in this chapter. Castelli are still too often seen as the 'natural' foci of signorie, indeed, as signifying in themselves the onset of local territorial powers. This is certainly not the case. Signorie could be constructed around any centre, not just castelli, as Violante, among others, has stressed; and Settia and Keller have shown how late is the automatic association between castello and districtus, even in the north: it was rare before the late eleventh century.3 4 In Tuscany, the date would be similar, even in more signorial areas like the Aretino (below, pp. 314-17), and certainly in the Lucchesia. Castelli are, on the other hand, one of the most useful indicators of the way all kinds of social process developed in the central Middle Ages, as recent work has made clear, the precise effect that their appearance had on any given society is as For Casriglione owners, see AAL + +K1.5 (a. 1033, Mennucci 39) for the viscount (cf. also Barsocchini 1356); *B:u (a. 1040, !sola 83) for the first Porcaresi family, *H83ab (a.Io6I, Gemignani 75-6) for the second. On the difference between the two, see Schwarzmaier, Lucca, pp. 109-12, 233-6; AAL + +G73-4. + +C19 (a.1o64, Gemignani 134-6) for the leasefbenefice of Porcari to the second family from the bishop. See Pacchi 7 (a. I xos), with de Stefani, 'Comuni di Garfagnana', p. 107 n., for twelfth- and thirteenth-century landowning of the second Porcaresi family in the Garfagnana. For Uberto, see RCL 1.:1.7; for Gragno, see below, n. 41; for fiscal land, see above, pp. 6o-2 84 Violante, 'Signoria "territoriale" ', pp. 33.5-6; Settia, Castelll e vil14ggi, pp. 168-76; Keller, AdelshmsdMft, pp. 156-9; Cusin, 'Castello medioevale', pp. 512 f., already saw the point in 1939.
. .... ~ ..
~
.....
II6
The Garfagnana, 70t>-1200
a useful guide to how that . society worked. The fact that incastellamento in the Garfagnana did not, for example, change the pattern of settlement, as we have seen (pp. 37-9), is a good prima-facie indicator of the relatively uncontrolled nature of economic change in the tenth- and eleventh-century countryside. The appearance of castelli in the valley, as elsewhere in the Lucchesia, and as elsewhere in Tuscany, tells us more about changes in the structure of power than about economic development. Exactly how this worked we will see most clearly in the Casentino, with its excellent eleventh-century documentation; incastellamento was a very similar, even if not totally identical, process there (below, pp. 292- 3o6). But what we know about the Garfagnana will serve very adequately as a guide to our major concern of the moment, the origin of the signoria. For castelli can tell us something about the signoria; it is at least true that if there were ever any signorie in the valley, the castelli would, in large part, crystallise around them. The appearance of castelli in Tuscany did not automatically bring with it socio-political ch.anges, unlike, for example, in south-central Italy; but the pattern of castelli is itself a remarkably good guide to the changes that did take place. 35 Any castello, unless it is actually built by the .fisc (something we cannot show for any Garfagnana castello after 75o--although we might guess at it for Barga), represents to some degree the privatization, even the localization, of political power. The .first episcopal castelli in the Lucchesia were built in the early tenth century to safeguard the bishop's proprietorial power, and with some success, too; the major episcopal castelli in the plains, above all Moriano and S. Maria a Monte, were never lost. But such a safeguard shows at least that some personal security, even in the last years of Adalbert II, had to be linked to one's capacity to defend oneself- to the growing, though still informal, privatization of defence. And even though the bishop had a strategically intelligent network of castelli, we cannot wholly see them as a strengthening of centralized control; incastellamento meant some form of devolution of powers. So, for example, the Campori leases to cultivators, which overlap with the For south-central Italy, see Toubert, Latium, pp. 303-68; cf. Wickham, 'Incastellamento ed i suoi destini'; the classic account is Cusin, ' Castello medioevale'. 35
The Lords of the Garfagnana
II7
foundation of the castello there, require the tenants concerned to go to perform justice in the bishop's court in Lucca up to 948; the final three leases, however, for 95Q-7, drop the requirement. This is most coherently explained by the appearance of the castello, which had certainly been built by 957; once the castello was founded, justice was to be performed locally, even before judicial rights were ceded away to the aristocracy.36 Private castelli were later. Settia has recently noticed one near Sovigliana in the Valdera as early as 939, but otherwise the earliest known in the diocese is Collecchio, also in the Valdera, dating from before 976. Porcari was not yet a castello in 952; it must have been founded by its owners as a private fortification between then and 1039, with or without the permission of the marquis {at least without his written permission, which would probably have survived). But even the Porcari castello, as we have seen, is best understood as a patrimonial defensive centre, developed out of the curtis there, rather than, as yet, as a focus for a signoria. In the Garfagnana, private castelli are first mentioned in 997, with the 'Cunimundinghi' fortification at Gorfigliano (possibly shared with the pope); between then and li20 there appear eleven others, as against one new episcopal fortification (Verrucchio above Castiglione). Of these twelv~ private castelli, four (Gorfigliano, Verrucole, San Donnino, V allico) were built on land leased, at least originally, from the bishop, and six (Castiglione, Ansugo, Lucignana, Coregha, Ceserana, Gragno) may possibly have been built on land granted by the fisc, though that is very largely guesswork. We cannot even guess at the origins of Cellabaroti (1045) and Gallicano (xo6I); they are in areas where the bishop had once been influential, but we must not rule out, here and elsewhere, the strong possibility that the lords concerned had bought or extorted the land from other lay owners--land, like local power, could be obtained by other ways than devolution from on high. 37 36
For Campori, see Barsocchini 1326, 1334, 1367, 1377. For Barga as originally public, see 1712, and above, pp. 6o f. 3? For Valdera castelli, see Barsocchini 1263 (cf. Settia, Castelli e villaggi, p. 490), 1478. For the earliest references to valley castelli, see Barsocchini 1377 (a.957, Campori), 1712 (a.996, Barga), 1719 (a.997, Gorfigliano; see Ch. 2, n. 24 for the pope), 1795 (c.1072, Verrucchio); MGH, Dip. Conradi II 83 (a.1027, Verrucole, San Donnino); AAL + + K I 5 (a.1033, Mennucci 39, Castiglione), + C22 (a. 1045, Pianezzi 11, Cellabarot1}, *H83ab (a. I06I, Gemignani 75--