Reframing the “Documentary Revolution” in Medieval Italy
2023; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/725192
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeReframing the "Documentary Revolution" in Medieval ItalyMaureen C. MillerMaureen C. MillerPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIn the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the clerics of the congregation of San Salvatore in Naples were preparing a petition, or maybe a legal defense, regarding their taxes. Someone from the congregation appears to have been delegated to research and to document their exemption from a tax called the collecta, or as historian Hiroshi Takayama termed it, "the notorious collecta." Imposts identified with this fearsome appellation first appear under the twelfth-century Norman kings of southern Italy as infrequent, extraordinary levies. Frederick II, that stupor mundi of the thirteenth century, made them annual and developed both rates and systems of collection that even the papacy considered excessive.1 The notes of our late nineteenth-century researcher on San Salvatore's exemptions from this tax survive today in a cardboard box at the Archivio Storico Diocesano in Naples.2 They are certainly not notable as monuments to tax resistance, which had been developed into a fine art in the peninsula long before. But our nineteenth-century researcher's consultation of volumes containing copies of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documents does merit notice. From his notes, it appears that these collections of the congregation's documents included sources from as early as the year 1213. For now, I want to call to your attention the fact that these volumes were drawn up in southern Italy; were created by an ecclesiastical institution; and were archived, conserved, and consulted until at least the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Sadly, like many historical sources for medieval southern Italy, they did not survive the Second World War.The fact that ecclesiastical registers were being created in southern Italy from at least the early thirteenth century and archived for future use is significant because it undermines claims for the exceptionally innovative, even "revolutionary," documentary sophistication of the city-republics of northern Italy whose history dominates narratives of the Italian Middle Ages. There are two persistent obstacles to understanding the phenomenon of documentary change in medieval Italy. First is the tendency for historians to focus either on secular institutions or on ecclesiastical institutions. Second is an even more deeply engrained tradition of writing the histories of southern Italy and of north-central Italy separately. Both these inherited conventions certainly support excellent and richly textured local studies. But they are inadequate for capturing and addressing complex, widely experienced historical transformations. Each generation of scholars, of course, innovates and contributes to the growth of knowledge within the frameworks and pressing issues of its era. This is at least one good reason for cross-generational dialogue.Luckily, many of us are privileged to have this kind of dialogue frequently. As I near the end of my teaching career, the many years of discussion that I have been having with my students are bearing particularly stimulating fruit in my research. Here, another obstructive academic convention surfaces, and that is the tendency to see research and teaching as separate, and competing, spheres. For most of my career, I have been better at sharing my research with my students than I have been at letting their questions influence it. Fortunately, repeating courses in a regular rotation allows some of their persistent queries to sink in, even if slowly. They have finally emboldened me to venture out of some of the academic frameworks that I inherited from an earlier generation of scholars.I. QuestionsLet me begin, then, with those student questions and the background to their genesis. At the very dawn of my career, I dreamed of teaching what I considered to be my field: medieval Italy. For the first decade, it remained but a dream: my teaching life was dominated by sections of Western Civilization and a medieval survey. When I could offer a seminar, I was encouraged to focus on topics of broad interest (e.g., the Crusades) which would ensure a decent enrollment in a small college of 1,600 students. Halfway through the second decade of my career, thanks to a great department chair—George Mason University's Jack Censer—I finally got the chance to teach an upper-division course on medieval Italy. As is probably common, I reproduced in the syllabus what I had encountered as "medieval Italy" in graduate school, where I studied with an eminent historian: my Doktorvater, David Herlihy. The medieval Italy he researched and taught was northern Italy, the part of the peninsula that gave birth to the urban republics called communes and which is now the wealthiest region within it.3Herlihy's motives for focusing on northern Italy were those of a social historian. A Byzantinist well into his doctorate, he was a late convert to the study of communal Italy. What appealed to him enough to change course was the voluminous documentation—the tens of thousands of notarial documents—that were produced and conserved in the cities of northern Italy. This copious documentation allowed him to write the kind of social history that illumined the lives of marginalized historical actors, particularly women.4 He and other medievalists of his generation responded to the inequities then being challenged in their society, bringing new questions to long-appreciated works and seeking new approaches, sources, and methods to undermine a very partial version of the Middle Ages. In the case of Italian studies, the allure of this bounty of sources for northern Italy during the Middle Ages certainly continues to be a factor in its dominance in both research and general narratives.But there are also other factors behind historians' preoccupation with the northern half of the Italian peninsula. Over the nineteenth century, as Italy forged a nation-state, the history of the northern city republics provided both a successful example of victory over external domination and a forum for debating alternatives to monarchy as a structure of governance. In contrast to southern Italy's continuous subordination to foreigners from the twelfth into the nineteenth century, the northern city republics famously allied with one another and defeated Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1176. For nineteenth-century Italian historians, this made the autonomous city the "ideal principle" (principio ideale) of Italian history and an intense focus of research.5 Through analyses of communal political development, particularly across the thirteenth century when elite dominance of the commune was contested, Italian historians also debated the merits of oligarchic and democratic governance. In these narratives, the northern city-republics provided monitory examples: they were failed experiments in democracy in which the passions of the masses inevitably led to tyranny.6 As the discipline of history professionalized, the continuing salience of such debates and the rich documentation available to fuel them established the dominance of research on the northern city republics within narratives of the Middle Ages, a pattern reinforced with the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946.7 Thus, an emphasis on Italy's northern past was deeply rooted by the time I encountered the history of "medieval Italy" as a master's student in 1982. Looking back now, I realize that I never questioned this geographical discrimination: my enthusiasm for the socially and politically progressive agenda of David Herlihy's research propelled me headlong into northern Italy's archival riches.But, my students asked, what about the South? There were myriad forms of this basic question raised across the two decades of teaching my survey of medieval Italy. Were there also communes in the South? Was there a commercial revolution in the South? Did the South have universities like Bologna and Padua? Was poetry written in the South's vernacular similar to Dante's dolce stil nuovo? These were all excellent questions that my doctoral training and previous research had not well prepared me to answer. And why were they asking? Mostly because many of them knew that they had Italian ancestors who had emigrated to the United States, and most of those forebearers did not come from the North. They came from the South.8 Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Italians emigrated to the United States, the great majority from impoverished villages in Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, and Basilicata. From the unification of Italy in the 1860s to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, close to five million peasants, over a third of the South's population, left crushing poverty in their homeland to seek work in North America.9 Work they found, but also hostility. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, southern Italians were considered undesirable immigrants. Although descendants of these Italian immigrants are today considered White, their first-generation forebearers were described as "swarthy," lazy, innately criminal, and "as bad as Negroes."10The prejudices southern Italians faced in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, however, were not new to them; many of their northern Italian fellow citizens also considered them barbarous savages. As early as the sixteenth century, Counter-Reformation missionaries likened Calabrians to animals and dubbed the region "our Indies."11 Modern positivism further essentialized a north-south polarity in Italy. A racialized opposition between an Aryan ethnicity in the peninsula's north—characterized by a northern physique, morality, and civic-mindedness—and a "barbarous" Mediterranean ethnicity in the South—marked by weakness and an inclination toward immorality and criminality—was widely disseminated in the late nineteenth century. In this period, national debates within Italy were dominated by a constellation of issues that came to be known as the "Southern Question" (questione meridionale)—that is, what were the causes of the South's "backwardness" and how might they be solved? Many different causes—economic, political, social, and cultural—occupied Italian intellectuals from the publication of Pasquale Villari's elucidation of the problem in his Lettere meridionali of 1875, and some of his concerns continue to be relevant.12 Economic aspects of Italy's Southern Question, in fact, remain urgent, particularly in the wake of the 2008 global recession: in 2019, the population of the South had a per capita income of only fifty-six percent of that of the northern and central parts of Italy. Sadly, not only economic aspects of the Southern Question remain relevant: northerners' racist views of southern Italians prominent among nineteenth-century intellectuals gained renewed political potency in the 1980s with the rise of the right-wing, originally separatist, Lega Nord—now discreetly rebranded as simply the Lega.13In the Middle Ages, however, the South was certainly neither poor nor backward. This is a major reason why so many other Europeans invaded it and dominated it, beginning with the Normans in the eleventh century and continuing with the Angevins, Aragonese, Spanish Hapsburgs, and Spanish Bourbons into the nineteenth century. Scholars have intensively explored and debated the impact of the South's medieval monarchs and their institutions on the later fortunes of the region's economy, and Frederick II's regularization and generalization of the collecta tax has come under particular scrutiny.14 But despite the continuing salience of the Southern Question in Italian politics, the history of the South remains under-represented in narrations of Italy's medieval history.When my students asked their various versions of "what about the South?" they prompted me to integrate the history of southern Italy into my course, which I have delighted in doing by slowly revising and incorporating the histories of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman-Hohenstaufen Italy into this upper-division survey. Their questions, indeed, have provided the analytical framework for the present version, which is a comparative history of north, south, and central—that is, papal—Italy interrogating both similarities and differences in the cultures and political institutions of these regions. It is a much better course now. I learned a lot in the process, and their questions also helped me begin to question the framework still applied to the medieval history of the Italian peninsula. Why are the histories of north and south treated separately? More important, why are they not treated equally? To give just one ready example, the volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covering the thirteenth century devoted four chapters, totaling eighty-five pages, to northern Italy while southern Italy is covered in twenty-four pages.15 It is certainly true that the historical experiences of North and South have been very different, that the quantity of surviving sources for the two regions is unequal, and that the linguistic demands of mastering the complete body of sources for much of the medieval south are greater. All these factors figure into the separate but unequal historical treatment of the peninsula's two halves. But studying the South and overcoming this imbalance also requires us to study the North in different ways.II. The Révolution documentaireIn 2014 I began researching the changing material forms of Italian documents in the Central Middle Ages, particularly what appears to be a leap from dependence upon single-sheet parchments, also called notarial documents or charters, to the widespread use of what are called "registers." This capacious term is used to designate parchment booklets or books that varied considerably in form and content. In its earliest usage, a regestum or registrum was a collection of letters and memorials, but the registers of the thirteenth century can also be collections of lists. While the earliest register of the see of Mantua, like some early communal registers, is comprised chiefly of lists of lands held in various locales, the first registers of the Benedictine monastic community at Cava de' Tirreni near Salerno are lists of incomes reckoned either in coin or in measures of agriculture products.16 Collected copies of documents, which in northern Europe are usually called cartularies, are in Italy frequently identified and discussed as registers, such as the Regestum farfense compiled at the Abbey of Farfa at the end of the eleventh century. The Libri iurium, or books of rights, that emerged in the Italian city-states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were also collections of documents relating to the lands and rights claimed by these communal governments as well as the treaties they made with other communities and rulers.17 Not all these collections, however, are entirely comprised of copies. Some begin with summaries or copies of earlier documents and then systematically add originals in chronological sequence, while others deftly intermingle both copies and originals.18 Formats also vary widely: some registers are pocket-sized while others are gigantic. Some were bound as codices in the medieval period, while others survived as unbound parchment gatherings into the twentieth century. What all of them have in common is that they relate to lands, incomes, and rights, and assist in their defense, collection, or exercise. For this reason, they are also called administrative registers or codices. Materially, medieval Italian registers are systems of redacting data or documents in parchment notebooks, or gatherings, called quaterni, which are often bound into codices. What intrigued me about this change in the archives of ecclesiastical institutions was that the kinds of documents initially redacted did not change: their single-sheet parchments overwhelmingly record donations of property, exchanges of property, and leases of property, and their early registers record the exact same types of transactions. So why change the form?Looking to the secondary literature on this phenomenon of documentary change in Italy brought both frustration and clarity. Most oft-cited was an essay by a leading historian, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, who has made enormous contributions to the study of the Italian Middle Ages.19 Entitled "Révolution documentaire et révolution scripturaire: Le cas de l'Italie médiévale," the piece appeared in the venerable journal Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes in 1995.20 It argued that the change from administration via single-sheet parchments to administration via notebooks (quaterni) and codices constituted a "documentary revolution." Maire Vigueur's manifesto generally identified the revolution's makers as the leaders and notaries of the city-republics of northern Italy, but specifically those of the thirteenth-century movement within these city-states known as the Popolo. This movement called the Popolo hardly represented all the people, although in cities where the social status of its leadership can be known to any degree, it was somewhat less aristocratic than the consular elite that had solidified its power over the early decades of the commune's existence.21 These Popolo movements did pursue more equitable policies of tax assessment and collection, and they also undertook public works projects like the construction of aqueducts to bring fresh water to the urban center, of infrastructure for grain provisioning, of public plazas and roads, and of cathedrals.22 Maire Vigueur insisted that even if some innovations in documentary forms were fostered over the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by the early hyper-elite commune and its temporary chief executives known as Podestà, the term "revolution" was only justified in describing the more "rapid and radical" documentary changes "which accompanied the second great mutation of the communal regime, in which the Popolo substituted itself for the nobility in the principal functions of government."23Unsurprisingly, historians of the communes welcomed the notion of a "documentary revolution"; it further burnished their research specialization and underwrote a plethora of codicological studies and source editions.24 But some remained unconvinced by Maire Vigueur's narrow attribution of the revolution to the Popolo. Paolo Cammarosano, for example, took a much broader view. In his book Italia medievale, Cammarosano had sketched a long period of ecclesiastical hegemony in documentary production and conservation extending from late antiquity to the eleventh century and then, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, a quantitative explosion in the number of documents produced and a rapid multiplication of new typologies and forms of documentation as the Norman-Hohenstaufen kingdom developed in the South and the communes emerged in the North. These two new systems of power broke ecclesiastical archival dominance and initiated fundamental changes in the production and conservation of documents. Cammarosano himself acknowledged and discussed at length the continuing role of ecclesiastical institutions in documentary production and innovation, underscoring that "the change of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries was general, affecting the forms of private texts and of public documents, those of historical narrative and the same traditional forms of ecclesiastical institutions."25 Despite the admirable breadth of Cammarosano's study—note that it treated both north and south as well as both temporal and ecclesiastical institutions—work since Maire Vigueur's manifesto focused on the documentation of the communes. This scholarship has undermined Maire Vigueur's sharp distinction between early thirteenth-century registers (like the Libri iurium, or books of rights), which served chiefly to collect and safeguard documents, and later thirteenth-century registers (such as those containing the deliberations of councils or the ongoing records of judicial and fiscal administration), which he contended more directly enacted governance. The innovative character and governing force of some pre-Popolo registers has now been broadly recognized through detailed studies of the documentation of individual communes and of common genres such as the Libri finium or "boundary books" which enumerated, measured, and delimited public and private properties in the urban center and in its surrounding countryside. Particularly influential evidence for the novelty of pre-Popolo administrative registers has been published by Hagen Keller's project on "Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit," especially the findings of his volume on the redaction of communal statutes from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.26But was the "documentary revolution" in medieval Italy just a development within these temporal governments? Already two decades ago, Italian scholars had documented and studied some ecclesiastical registers.27 A few of these registers—such as the series of administrative codices compiled for the bishops of Trent from 1205, or those from the see of Mantua commencing in 1214—originated quite early in the thirteenth century, well before the first volumes surviving for many communes.28 Might the church have been the earliest revolutionary?Indeed, major dioceses in the peninsula did produce at least some registers before the millennium. The papacy had been keeping registers of correspondence, at least sporadically, from 354. We have Gregory the Great's late sixth- to early seventh-century register thanks to its survival on papyrus until the 880s when it was copied onto parchment. Some letters from Honorius I's seventh-century register were copied into the eleventh-century canonical collection of Cardinal Deusdedit, and other compilations of canons reference papal letters. But survival is sparse enough that one might wonder, as Veronika Unger has, whether the keeping of papal registers was continuous before Innocent III (r. 1198–1216). It bears noting that between Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) and Innocent III, only the last six years (876–82) of Pope John VIII's register survive and, of course, the famous register of Gregory VII (1073–85).29 Moreover, while the papacy was distinctive among ecclesiastical institutions in producing registers of correspondence, as early as the tenth century the see of Ravenna was creating registers of documents akin to those deemed revolutionary in the early thirteenth-century northern Italian city republics. Thirty-six papyrus folios survive of the Breviarium ecclesiae Ravennatis, compiled in 960–83, and the work was clearly more extensive. Organized topographically, it comprised registrations of charters relating to the see's properties and rights: it is a liber iurium produced over two centuries before a commune compiled one. Moreover, the survival within the archiepiscopal archive of two other eleventh-century parchment fragments, each labeled a breviarium and containing registrations in the same format as the tenth-century papyrus breviarium, suggests that such registers were being at least sporadically produced.30Indeed, if we look more closely at northern Italian cities where registers survive for ecclesiastical institutions as well as for communal governments, the earliest innovators were churches. In Orvieto, for example, the key leap from administration using single-leaf parchments to administration via registers occurred first in the bishop's court in 1211, next in the cathedral chapter in 1215, and finally in the urban communal government in 1220. In Città di Castello the cathedral chapter initiated registers first in 1192, the episcopal see in 1207, and finally the commune in 1221.31 Whether at the level of the papacy or of a tiny Umbrian diocese like Città di Castello, the chronology of changing documentary forms sketches a broadly shared pattern: the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries mark a watershed. It may be a watershed only in the survival of registers, but it is definitely when both ecclesiastical and communal institutions seem to be not only producing but conserving registers. This is when relatively continuous series of administrative registers survive for both a wealthy see like Rome and a much poorer see like Città di Castello. The latter diocese continued to produce quaterni from 1207 into the fifteenth century that were later bound in ten huge volumes, and the cathedral chapter also continued to create registers after innovating its 1192 volume: the canons produced eleven more volumes over the thirteenth century and another dozen over the fourteenth.32 Even more impressive continuity is evident at Mantua, where the series of episcopal registers is continuous from 1214 into the early nineteenth century.33So, if this change from relying on single-sheet parchments to compiling registers was a "documentary revolution," it was not a revolution made by one political movement within the northern communes, nor was it even limited to the communes. Lots of institutions were making and archiving registers, and ecclesiastical ones appear to have been doing it first. I was tempted, at this point in my research, to write a short book establishing this point. But my students' classroom queries kept coming to mind: what about the South?III. Going SouthI set out to try to find out. Did a "documentary revolution" occur only in northern Italy or did the South have one too? Southern Italy is very different from the North, particularly from the ninth century on. The entire peninsula, of course, was deeply Romanized in antiquity, but the entrance of the Germanic peoples called the Lombards in 568 was a first major political and cultural rupture: they established a Lombard kingdom at Pavia in the North and two duchies: one in central Italy at Spoleto and the other further south centered at Benevento. The Carolingian conquest of northern and central Italy in 774 was a second rupture, and a third was the Arab conquest of Byzantine Sicily by the Aghlabid emirs of Ifriqiya (827–902). In sum, by roughly 850, northern and most of central Italy had been incorporated into the Carolingian empire, while southern Italy was divided into regions of Lombard, Byzantine, and Islamic rule.34 This political fragmentation was gradually overcome by the Norman conquest of the southern mainland and Sicily over the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The conquest created the kingdom that comes to be called the regno or, subsequently, the "Two Sicilies."35These differences are no reason not to consider the South when assessing documentary traditions in Italy.36 When the South is taken into consideration, the surviving evidence is clear: from the early Middle Ages, parts of southern Italy (namely, the deep South, Sicily and Calabria) were being administered by their Byzantine rulers using registers and by the Arab successors of those Byzantine rulers in Sicily using dafātir, administrative codices. The Islamic administration of Sicily likely maintained registers until the civil wars of the late Kalbid era of the 1040s, as Jeremy Johns has argued, and some land registers and lists of inhabitants did survive the conquest to be used by the Norman conquerors of the island in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.37Given this early medieval evidence for administration using registers in the South, one might object that there was no documentary revolution in Italy at all, just a huge developmental lag between the ancient civilizational continuity in Italy's Mediterranean south and the "dark ages" that descended on the northern and central portions of the Italian peninsula with the arrival of the Lombards. Research on administration in southern Italy, however, reveals some significant continuities at the level of royal fiscal documentation in Calabria and Sicily, but also indicates important discontinuities. Furthermore, at the local level, monasteries and some dioceses appear to begin producing registers in the early twelfth century, some similar in form to those created in northern ecclesiastical institutions but others quite different. In sum, the administrative sophistication that registers represent did exist significantly earlier in southern Italy than in the North, but there are also widespread changes occurring in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that are comparable to those heralded as revolutionary in the North.At the level of royal government, the evidence is quite fragmentary and complex, but some general observations are possible. First, there is no compelling evidence for the survival of Byzantine administration either in the Lombard duchies or in the Byzantine theme of Longobardia (which had a predominantly Latinate population).38 There is evidence that in Calabria, where Greek-speakers were in the majority, the Normans found existing Byzantine cadastral registers upon their arrival and used them, as well as the Greek personnel in charge of them, to draw up writs of transfer bestowing lands on their followers and allies. But Vera von Falkenhausen has concluded "that this system was neither regularly updated nor remained efficaciously functional."39 Second, as the Normans conquered Arab Sicily, they similarly availed themselves of the Arabic registers both of land boundaries and of villeins belonging to lands; their Arabic-proficient allies or servants referenced these registers and copied portions of them into the writs of transfer. Once the distribution of spoils was over, however, there is no evidence over the next two decades of Norman continuation of the Arabic system. There are no Arabic documents surviving from 1111 to 1130 and no evidence that any we
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