A Segmented Tax System. Communities, Lordships, and Monarchy in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Naples

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press 

Series: Clio. Essays in History, Archaeology and Art History

Pages: 673

Language: Italian

Abstract: Between 1481 and 1485, King Ferrante of Aragon undertook a fiscal reform that challenged the prerogatives of both the feudal lords and the communes of the Kingdom of Naples. Historiography has paid little attention to this project, despite its direct connection to the uprisings that broke out shortly afterwards. This book takes that reform as a starting point to examine the transformations that occurred in the material constitution of the kingdom during the late Middle Ages, while also considering developments in other parts of Italy. During this period, lordship in Southern Italy consolidated key aspects of its institutional profile, while a new actor—the commune—began to assert its own claims over local government.Tax systems provide a privileged lens through which to explore these processes within the institutional framework of the kingdom, leading to a hypothesis that diverges from more state-centred interpretations: namely, that this very segmentation—with the broadly conceived constitutional limits it imposed on royal discretion, on the speculations of supra-local elites, and on the concentration of capital in the hands of local elites—helped to shape the geography of economic growth and the distribution of power in a kingdom that was both polycentric and increasingly polarised around Naples.