Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 132

The role of aristocratic power and its interrelationship with the State, on the one hand, and rural society, on the other, has often been situated at the centre of the long-standing debates around southern Italy’s perceived ‘otherness’, particularly in the Middle Ages and in relation to the development of central and northern Italy. A conventional picture which emphasizes the negative dominance of aristocratic authority and the concomitant lack of agency of medieval southern Italy’s rural communities undoubtedly requires rethinking as new evidence and interpretative models emerge. It is the sort of subject that needs a comprehensive and holistic assessment, and which Sandro Carocci’s book (which was first published by Viella in Italian in 2014 as Signorie di Mezzogiorno: Società rurali, poteri aristocratici e monarchia (XII–XIII secolo); the English edition includes an additional foreword by the author) attempts, very successfully indeed, to do so.

This is a quite monumental study (the main text runs to over 550 pages) which covers an array of interconnected subjects, although it must be noted that, for sound methodological reasons relating mostly to evidence types, the focus rests primarily on the South Italian mainland (but Carocci still offers intermittent and important analysis of developments on the island of Sicily). Carocci’s introduction lucidly frames the study and its historiography, carefully questioning and rejecting the traditional master narratives which have both mythologized the South Italian monarchy and which have focused on notions of ‘backwardness’. The titles of the book’s chapters (which are then divided by numerous sub-headings) offer the clearest insight into the range and ambition of Carocci’s study: ‘Before the Normans’, ‘The Normans: Change and Continuity’, ‘Monarchy and Feudalism’, ‘Kings and Lords’, ‘Nobility and Pre-eminence’, ‘Clientele and Submission’, ‘Villeins and Serfs’, ‘Seigneurial Justices’, ‘Worlds of Exaction’, ‘Economy, Lordship, the Rural World’, ‘Rural Societies and Aristocratic Lordship’. There is much thematic overlap and cross-referencing between these chapters, inevitable and necessary given the entangled and complex subject matter and evidence. It does mean though that this study requires careful, painstaking attention. One must regularly move back and forth across chapters to consolidate and clarify the argument as it develops and the sheer quantity of small, but important interpretations can sometimes be challenging. But Carocci is aware of this and expertly signposts and summarizes where possible to guide the reader and to situate a given chapter within the book’s most fundamental arguments.

But what are these key arguments? There are many and they are undoubtedly extremely important. Carocci includes a quite wonderful deconstruction of the Catalogus Baronum which demonstrates that in the South Italian monarchy’s formative years it was far from establishing a fixed set of feudal norms. Instead there was much experimentation and contingency and even royal opposition to ‘formalized serfdom’. Moreover, the monarchy’s presence created a ‘supralocal’ arena from which the State could mediate in disputes between lords and ‘subordinated communities’, often curbing aristocratic abuses. This situation simultaneously contributed to a trend which often made lords extraneous to peasant society. The lords were thus unable and/or unwilling to exert a significant level of what Carocci calls ‘pervasive controls’ (p. 53) and generally they extracted less resources from the rural world than many of their counterparts elsewhere in Italy and beyond. A picture of a much more dynamic rural world emerges, one in which we encounter a multitude of invariably fluid forms of dependence and clientele relationships, defined by a varied set of terms (affidati, angararii, franci, liberi, servi, villani and so on). Conversely, this also nurtured forms of pluralized and localized power which enabled local ‘notables’ to exert quite significant agency within village communities and, when necessary, to demonstrate effective forms of resistance to aristocratic power.

This foregoing summary cannot do full justice to the range and depth of Carocci’s interpretations, and a close reading of the author’s extended conclusion sets out clearly what he believes to be the study’s main contributions. For Carocci, ‘the South fluctuates between otherness and representativeness’ (p. 540); indeed his study shows numerous parallels and differences with other regions of medieval Europe and it consolidates the view established in other recent studies of medieval southern Italy that the region should not be interpreted through the prism of ‘backwardness’. Likewise, the Normans could paradoxically bring ‘continuity through change’ (pp. 89–94) and a dynamic rural world is presented with fluid and contingent connections with aristocratic and royal power. Carocci discerns the emergence of a new reality for the rural and aristocratic worlds in the post-1220 Staufen era, when Frederick II initiated administrative and legislative reforms (such as a general state tax, along with new definitions of clientele relations and of knighthood) which would change and eventually diminish the types of agency and autonomy available to rural communities. This trend would be consolidated and accentuated under the Angevins in the second half of the thirteenth century, such that, for Carocci, ‘the lordships of the Mezzogiorno were becoming more normal’, in other words increasingly less distinct from those elsewhere in Europe.

In short, Carocci’s study is a tour de force, though it is not without some minor problems: in places, the entanglement and complexity of evidence and interpretation can be hard to follow. But, setting this reservation aside, Carocci’s book should now stand as the seminal work on medieval South Italian aristocratic power and the rural world. It is a must-read and a quite astonishing achievement which re-shapes our understanding of the field.