Fiscus. Fiscal Estate in Medieval Italy: Continuity and Change (9th – 12th Centuries)

The project focused on the fiscal assets and the revenues of public powers in the early and high Middle Ages, by exploring the relationship between religious and political institutions on the hand, and the structures of the Kingdom of Italy in the post-Carolingian age on the other. In particular, the project investigated the relationship between the status of the fiscal estates granted to lay and ecclesiastical elites in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the continuity of a public dimension associated with the ownership of those estates. Moreover, the project broadened the explorations of the economic foundations of public powers by adopting a long-term perspective – ninth to twelfth centuries – and by taking into account the entire Italian peninsula, focusing on three key issues: the problem of documentary evidence for the study of fiscal estates; the history of the fiscal patrimony and its development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and the legacy of early medieval fiscal estates in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.