Estate Management around Florence and Lucca 1000-1250

Abstract This book describes the forms of estate management, and the way they changed, around Florence and Lucca during the central Middle Ages. It is based mainly on the notarial charters preserved in the ecclesiastical archives of both cities dating to the period 1000–1250, with a focus on the years between c. 1180 and c. 1230—which were characterized by a process of overall economic growth. The Florentine and Lucchese countryside are worth comparing, as they are believed to have had very different historical trajectories. The so-called manorial system (sistema curtense in Italian) is believed to have ceased to exist in the Lucchesia around the beginning of the tenth century, whereas in the Fiorentino its disappearance can be dated to the early thirteenth century. Similarly, the Florentine countryside is generally regarded as the birthplace of a particular type of sharecropping tenure, the mezzadria poderale, which spread over much of central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and would later become an essential component of Italian agrarian identity. On the contrary, the mezzadria poderale is thought to have never developed at any point in the history of medieval and early modern Lucchesia. Thus, the book sets out to examine the transformations of estate management around both cities over the central Middle Ages in their own right; that is to say, by detaching those transformations from any teleological view, and by placing them within the economic and socio-political context of the period 1000–1250.