La disciplina contrattata.
Vescovi e vassalli tra Como e le Alpi nel tardo Medioevo.
English summary
Recent ground–breaking research has revolutionized the study of political practices, shifting the focus from centres that produce norms and control mechanisms to subjects and their initiatives. A similar approach may be brought to bear on the analysis of ecclesiastic governance in its various forms, by placing less emphasis on the increasing efficiency of the Church in administering its property or the introduction of stricter discplinary measures, and greater emphasis on the tensions surrounding the negotiation of these norms, their manipulation by the social actors and their adaptation to specific local contexts.
The managment of Church assets, owned by secular or regular institutions but conceded to third parties, provided a fertile arena for interaction between clergy and laymen, whose intense relationship was marked by both conflict and compromise. This complex dialogue is the central focus of the enquiry into the bishop’s property in the Diocese of Como in the 14th and 15th centuries. The bishopric owned castles, lands, pasturegrounds, woodlands, tithes and tolls throughout the whole diocese, which were conceded as fiefs or leased to all the leading city and country families.
In the 15th century, the bishops and their vicars set out to make the diocesan administration system more efficient: they demanded stricter observance of feudal customs, developed a more reliable method of collecting rents, and made major changes to record–keeping practices so that the diocese could better exploit key information pertaining to the management of its property; they also extended the jurisdiction of the diocesan court, which had previously only operated on a sporadic basis, to include all disputes regarding Church assets, thereby exercising tighter judicial control over the holders of Church property.
However the fact that the diocese began to be administered more efficiently in the 1400s and that this was a first step towards the reorganization of Church property that took place on a vast scale in the modern era, is to be viewed as part of a more complex transformation. The relationship between Church authorities and the holders of its wealth and assets was – and remained – assymetrical, biased in favour of the lease–holders and particularly of the vassals, who continued to view the diocese as a dispenser of readily available resources, both material and symbolic. Thus, the changes that took place in the 1300s and 1400s were mainly driven by the strategies and actions deployed by city and rural families, patricians living in the towns, and communities, with a view to gaining access to these resources.
In the first place, the control mechanisms introduced by the bishops were often ambiguous in effect, given that the social actors were able to get control of them to the extent of altering their meaning, and – at a certain remove from the city and the scrutiny of the Church authorities – adapting them to accomodate values and goals that were quite different to those originally intended. The ties of feudal law, which on the one hand helped the bishops to demand more compliant behaviour from the holders of Church property, on the other hand provided the vassals with a language that they could use to forge a stronger definition of the aristocratic ideology of agnatic cohesion and genealogical continuity. For example, the restriction of the right of succession to the fiefdom to the vassal’s male descendents and the consequent exclusion of female heirs (which became customary in the 14th century) was promoted by the bishops in order to increase their chances of repossession but also served to codify, amongst the aristocratic families, a representation of lineage that emarginated women in terms of both property rights and family memory. Even the more central role taken on by the diocesan court, which began to intervene more frequently and on a more systematic basis in the 1400s, was a dualistic phenomenon: on the one hand, it provided the bishops with a means of exercising greater control over the holders of Church property; on the other hand it further augmented the number of legal routes available to subjects within a judicial context that was already highly pluralistic. The disciplinary function of the court intended by the diocesan leadership was subverted to some degree by the instrumental use made of it by noble families engaged in legal disputes, with the effect of transforming it into yet another arena for aristocractic conflict.
Furthermore the bishops’ initiatives could not, or were not intended to, constrain the great freedom of the holders of Church property to manage it as they pleased: the vassals’ and tenants’ rights over the properties in their possession were virtually untouchable, preventing the bishops from using the resources of the diocese as they wished to benefit their relatives, clients, etc.. For this reason, in the many changes of hands from old to new holders of diocesan lands and tithes, it is not possible to trace the fortunes of men with Church and political connections, who thanks to their influence at the bishop’s palace and at court would have been well–placed to gain possession of the riches of the diocese (as occurred in other parts of Lombardy and in Veneto). On the contrary, in the particular case of the diocese of Como, developments regarding Church property were determined, rather than by the bishops’ plans and their nepotistic designs, by social and political changes taking place at a deeper and more underground level.
First, the buying and selling of feudal rights underwent a radical shift in the late medieval period bringing about an overall redistribution of wealth. The crisis of the 14th century and the political transformations of the 15th century had weakened the ancient rural nobility and – differently to the rest of Northern Italy – led to a reduction in the property holdings of the urban oligarchy in the rural districts. The Valtellina, Valchiavenna, Lario and Ticino areas saw the rise of authentically local entrepreneurial classes, who were increasingly well–represented amongst the ranks of the diocesan vassals: the purchasers of the property rights being sold off by the city and valley aristocrats were the rural communes, who mainly invested in pasturelands and rights to collect tithes, and families and individuals from outside of the traditionally privileged classes (in some cases recent immigrants from other rural areas). The last–mentioned category, who had typically made their wealth through moneylending, livestock–raising and small trading, and who were able to attain socially prestigious positions by entering the notarial profession, joining the ranks of the patricians in the Alpine towns and taking on official community duties, also invested in ploughlands, vineyards, woodlands, houses and other of the bishop’s assets. Thus the relationship between Como and the surrounding territory began to take a very different form to the political and economic dominance of the cities that characterized the classical Po Valley model; at the same time society in the alpine valleys of Lombardy acquired the trait that would continue to distinguish it for a long time thereafter: an independent and largely community–based use of local resources that blocked the penetration of external, and particularly urban, capital.
At a different level to that of economic strategy, we may identify other sources of dynamism – contributing to the renewal of the class of the bishops’ vassals and the redistribution of feudal rights – in the area of political activism, mediated by membership of factions, and in the practices typifying aristocratic conflict. The competition between Ghuelf and Gibelline families or, more frequently, between families of the same political allegiance, led to sudden and sometimes traumatic transfers of patrimonial assets, including the diocesan fiefs. Furthermore, relations between the Church of Como and the men and families heading up the rival factions were ongoing and varied in nature. In exceptional circumstances (in the years preceding the consolidation of Visconti rule and during the crisis into which the state of Milan was plunged by the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti), the factions were able to unite, via solid nepotistic networks, prelates with strong political loyalties and sectors of both urban and rural society; thus certain families expanded their fortunes thanks to feudal concessions rewarding their allegiance to a faction. However, even during less exceptional periods, those who held the reins of power in local society tended to opportunistically seek the legitimization of the bishopric for their property settlements and holding rights. An example is the strategy deployed by Antonio Beccaria, leader of the Ghuelfs in Valtellina, who having been dispossessed of a castle by the Duke of Milan, managed to regain right of possession by alternative means, receiving the same building as a feudal gift from the bishopric in 1437; this illustrates how the initiatives of the diocesan authorities, like those of all the lay and ecclesiastic centres of power, were subject to local and instrumental manipulation by the social actors active in the outlying areas of the territory.
Translation: Clare O’Sullivan
