The countryside of Florence and Lucca during the High Middle Ages (11th - 13th centuries). A study on land management and its change

This thesis examines the history of land management in the countryside of Florence and Lucca during the central medieval period (1000-1250). In particular, it analyses in depth the decades from c. 1180 to c. 1230, a phase that was marked by an overall transformation of estate-management forms, due to the political and economic context of that time. The thesis is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 is divided into two main sections: the first one discusses the history of historiography, and stresses that the forms of land management in Tuscany during the central Middle Ages have been relatively less studied in comparison to the early and late Middle Ages; the second one outlines the political history of Lucca and Florence between the 11th and the 13th centuries. Chapter 2 sets out the two historical processes (indeed, the two main conceptual tools) that constitute the background to the rest of the thesis: first, it describes the early medieval manorial system (sistema curtense) in the countryside of Lucca and Florence; second, it examines the characteristics of the signorial mutation over the 11th and the 12th centuries, when local powers replaced the political authority of the marquises of Tuscia (the ancient name for Tuscany). Chapters 3 and 4 present a series of case-studies that are relevant to the history of land management in the Fiorentino and the Lucchesia. They show that a radical change was taking place from the 1180s onwards; in the Fiorentino corvée-work was abolished, whereas in the Lucchesia fixed rents in kind were increased substantially. Chapter 5 proposes an explanation for this process of change, which, moreover, can be linked to the development of sharecropping holdings (mezzadria poderale) around Florence in the late Middle Ages, and to the absence of a similar development around Lucca over the same period.