The plain and accurate title of this volume does not do justice to the thoughtful, fresh and comprehensive look it actually brings on a series of long-established and rooted debates in Italian and European medieval historiography, mostly regarding the causes and consequences of the socio-economic transformations occurred during the central Middle Ages. In particular, the so-called incastellamento and the seigniorial mutation (or feudal revolution), the evolution from curtis (manor) to mezzadria (sharecropping), the rationale behind agrarian contract choice and land management, the impact of urban-driven land and credit market, tax burden and inflation on the late-twelfth century rural society. All these themes are addressed by Lorenzo Tabarrini – as a result of his PhD dissertation at Oxford University as well as of further revisions at the Université libre de Bruxelles and at the University of Bologna – through a meticulous primary-source-based study of the estate management and landlord-peasant/landowner-tenant relations in Tuscany, more specifically in the Fiorentino and the Lucchesia between 1000 and 1250.
By mobilising some of the most extensive ecclesiastical and notarial archives available for that period and area – such as those of the Badia a Settimo nearby Florence, Badia a Passignano in the Chianti region and the canons of S. Martino, the monastery of S. Ponziano and the protocols of Ciabatto in Lucca – the author sheds light on a long-lasting historiographical grey zone between ‘two strong interpretative frameworks,’ (p. 7) the ‘sistema curtense’ and the late medieval and early modern Tuscan mezzadria. In fact, Tabarrini makes a rigorous analysis of deeds of donations, inventories of seigniorial dues, list of debtors, tenancy agreements, legal disputes, and mezzadria contracts – just to name some of the main types of sources used – providing new detailed evidence of the inner working and adaptation of the central-medieval manorial structures and of their actors – abbots, canons, citizens, unfree and free tenants – in a period of profound socio-political and economic changes. Consequently, Tabarrini is able to revise, correct and integrate the work of renowned scholars of medieval Tuscany such as Elio Conti, Philip Jones, Ljubov Kotel'nikova, Johan Plesner and, more recently, Simone Collavini, Maria Elena Cortese and Enrico Faini.
In this regard, the author rejects any monocausal explanation to describe socio-economic changes in Tuscan rural society during the central Middle Ages. Conversely, he combines ‘a long-term perspective with a close look at more circumscribed periods of time, in which economic transformation appear to have been fast-paced’ (p. 198), namely the years 1180–1230. In this period, the real focus of the book, new factors emerged to propel ‘substantial socio-economic changes’ such as the ‘almost constant warfare’ (p. 198) and the consequent increase of city communes military budget and administration, the inflationary trend firstly driven by debasement and then harshened by the famine of 1181–1182, the urban-driven taxation of the countryside, the general demographic expansion, the increasing indebtedness of lordships and ecclesiastical institutions. All these elements, by interplaying with ‘preexisting proprietorial patterns and ecological factors’ (p. 183), generated regionally and locally different outcomes such as the transformation of manorial estates in different forms, such as fixed-rent or share leases. In this regard, the volume offers a detailed look on the set of responses provided by seigniorial lords, religious institutions, citizens but also peasants to the complexity and contingency of the end of the twelfth century. This set of responses, furthermore, had long-term consequences for the agrarian structure of the Lucchesia and the Fiorentino; in the conclusion, the author suggests the environmental and institutional path-dependency of some specific forms (or even the absence) of Tuscan mezzadria, well rooted in the events observed between 1180–1230.
The book, written with a calm and well-reasoned tone which constantly guides the reader throughout the different issues discussed in the volume, is organised in three chapters, along with an introduction and a general conclusion. Twelve accurate maps by Taylor Zaneri show the places studied in the volume. In the introduction, after a short overview of the debates on medieval economic growth and its relationship with agrarian economy, the author analyses the cornerstones of the literature on estate management in Tuscany and describes the socio-political context of Florence and Lucca in the second half of the twelfth century. This is presented as the main and general trigger of the changes observed across rural society in the following chapters. The first chapter serves also as an additional introduction by framing and discussing the differences between Lucca and Florence in the ‘sistema curtense’ between 700–1150, the seigniorial mutation of the eleventh and twelfth century and the unfree tenancy after 1100. In fact, ‘signorial powers appear to have been more oppressive in the Fiorentino […] than in Lucchesia’ thanks to the ‘enduring influence of manorial patterns around Florence’ (p. 53). The evolution of estate management in the Fiorentino and the Lucchesia is then analysed in the two main chapters of the book. Each chapter is introduced by a detailed discussion of the geography, historical ecology and demography of the territory, of the evidence of the inflationary trends of land prices for the period 1180–1230 (the author has added a table of benchmark prices for land around Lucca over the period 1201–1230), of the institutions and the sources chosen. In particular, Tabarrini shows in the second chapter that the Florentine ecclesiastical institution ‘that enjoyed the most substantial signorial powers’ renounced the related labour duties ‘in order to increase their extraction of the agricultural surplus’ (p. 116) by demanding fixed rents in wheat, but also mixed cropping of cereals and polyculture through sharecropping. The author shows a completely different situation in the third chapter: in the Sei Miglia around Lucca the weakness of the pre-existing manorial system did not provide the landlords with a powerful bargaining chip such as corvée work. ‘Landowners could only endeavour to heighten individual rents’ following a ‘more obscure’ process at ‘slower pace’ than that recorded nearby Florence, opting ‘in most cases, for fixed rent in kind, very much like the Florentine ones’ (p. 182). Indeed, ‘share tenures and early mezzadria were regarded as temporary and emergency solution’ in frontier territories struck by warfare or more suitable for mixed cropping (p. 182). In the conclusion, the author summarises the main steps of his argument integrating the results of his analyses at a local level within the broader picture of the socio-economic transformations of the central Middle Ages, in order to explain their mechanisms as well as the rationale of early Tuscan mezzadria. In this regard, the insights provided by Tabarrini also result of great interest for the study of sharecropping on a general level.
