Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 151

In late medieval Italy, Tuscany represented the third most important region for transhumance, right after the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal State, and the first, in the case of Siena, whose pasturelands were managed by a communal institution – the Dogana dei Paschi di Siena. In his remarkable book, Davide Cristoferi presents a data-saturated analysis of the transformation of the Maremma from a depopulated and uncultivated landscape after the Black Death to Siena’s most profitable source of income in the early fifteenth century. The driving force behind this development was the Dogana dei Paschi of Siena, a communal institution that increasingly exercised monopoly control over the pastures and the access of transhumant herds from the Apennines to winter grazing in the Maremma.

The volume is structured into five chapters and an extensive appendix. After contextualizing Siena’s Dogana dei Paschi and the ‘realm’ of the Maremma against the crisis of the late Middle Ages, the author discusses the fragmentary source situation prior to the onset of the Dogana’s institutional preservation in 1419. Given this lack of institutional sources from 1353 to 1419, Cristoferi draws on a wide range of archival records from Siena, Florence, Prato, Orvieto, and Volterra. The rich documentation of Siena’s communal offices and magistrates in particular allows for a detailed examination of the institutional formation and financial performance of the Dogana. Moreover, it offers important new insights into the complex interactions between Sienese institutions, the pastoral economy, state-building processes, and the socio-economic transformations and redistributions following the crisis of 1348.

The first main chapter (pp. 21–90) reconstructs the development of the pastoral economy and transhumance in the Maremma and the institutional formation of the Dogana in light of the economic recession following the Black Death. In the long fourteenth century, Cristoferi identifies a multitude of crises – two floods, 22 famines, 14 epidemics, 13 wars and 50 passages of mercenary armies in Tuscany (p. 26) – that had devastating effects on the region’s economic and demographic capacities. Siena thus sought to compensate for its decreasing fiscal revenues by exploiting the untended arable and pasture lands of the Maremma. In 1353, the city council of Siena introduced the direct management of pastures by a new public office – from 1366 onwards called the Dogana dei Paschi – that licensed the access of transhumant herds to road networks and to common and private pasturelands in the Maremma against payment of a tariff based on species, herd size, and season. Examining its normative development, territorial expansion, and financial performance, Cristoferi underlines that Siena’s initiative to centralize the management of its Maremman pastures stood out due to its degree of pervasiveness compared to other European regions. While the economic relevance of pastoralism increased across late medieval Europe, the enactment of the first statute of the Dogana in 1419 led to a ‘complete re-organisation’ (p. 85) of access to and use of common pastures in the Maremma.

The second main chapter (pp. 91–143) examines the acquisition of common pastures and grazing rights from local communities and the increasing presence of foreign transhumant herds in the Maremma. Cristoferi elaborates four key strategies of either acquiring possession or appropriating and regulating the ius pascendi of common and private pastureland used to different degrees between 1300 and 1419: military/ political subjection (conquests, pacts, privileges), acquisition/expropriation of land and the associated rights of use, legislation, and jurisdiction. From 1353 onwards, Siena seized local rights to lease the use of pastures and limited the number of animals to be kept by the local population without paying for herbage. The commodification of commons and the allocation of grazing lands to the Dogana led to a significant loss of grazing areas for local working animals and to increased debt exposure and tax evasion by local communities. This not only caused large-scale competition between transhumant herds and local crops and livestock, but also the overexploitation and exhaustion of pastures. As the strain on arable and grazing resources increased, conflicts arose between local farmers and transhumant shepherds and between local communities and the Dogana.

The third main chapter (pp. 145–86) presents a synthetic analysis of the administrative organization and the financial performance of the Dogana of Siena, including a comparison with the papal Dogana del Patrimonio di S. Pietro. Cristoferi discusses the tasks, number, and salaries of a wide range of magistrates and officers working for the Dogana in Siena and the Maremma, among them livestock counters, scribes, officers controlling the payment of herbage (erbatico), and armed guards securing pastures and livestock while preventing fraud and damage. The cost of the latter’s salaries alone amounted to up to 1,000 fl. per year, prompting intervention by the General Council in 1356 and 1365 (p. 157). On the financial side, however, the Dogana benefited from its increasingly profitable management of transhumance. In the 45 financial years between 1353 and 1419, for which account books have been preserved, revenues from herbage, tolls, fines, and pasture rents, etc., came to 396,000 gold florins, whereas annual expenditures represented only 21% of its income (pp. 164–74). Compared to the papal Dogana, Siena licensed significantly fewer animals and still generated more income due to the higher pasture rents and herbage rates it demanded (8–8.5 fl. vs. 5–5.5 fl. per 100 sheep in 1419). Moreover, the two institutions differed in the development and extent of their monopoly claims on local pastures in the light of state-building processes in late medieval Italy (175–86).

The conclusion (pp. 187–201) discusses the exceptionality of the Dogana dei Paschi as a monopolist over common pastures in the ‘realm’ of Siena in the broader context of crises, socio-economic transformations, and state-building processes in late medieval Europe. The volume is supplemented by an extensive appendix which, in addition to three maps and seven diagrams, contains 20 comprehensive tables, amongst others on legal issues, collective resources, and officials, as well as on the revenues and expenditures of the Dogana (pp. 205–300). The book concludes with a list of archival sources, a bibliography, and indices of cited authors, persons, places, and central terms (pp. 301–42).

Cristoferi’s splendid monograph is a must-read for scholars of transhumant pastoralism and highly recommended for interdisciplinary readers interested in the great transformations of rural societies in late medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.