Suchergebnisse

Historical ecology : from prehistoric to early medieval in the Ligurian Apennines -- Villas, villages and castra : from Roman to medieval settlement -- Regional identities : political and religious change -- Genoa : centre and periphery -- Vara Valley : at the margins? -- Epilogue: A Dark Age? -- Appendix: Key dates

The earliest coherent written documentation for Genoa in the early medieval period is from the latter part of the tenth century. Charters documenting the property transactions of several local churches (notably San Siro and Santo Stefano) reveal that the bishop and his clergy had property rights at the extremities of costal Liguria and in the interior. Fifty eight texts have survived between 916 and 1000 Synopsis, A Companion to Medieval Genoa (Brill, 2017) 3 and the first part of this chapter is devoted to their detailed analysis. This number is rather fewer than for comparable Italian urban centres and that fact needs to be explained. Nor has a substantial local historical narrative survived until the twelfth century, albeit more typical of wider Italian patterns.Some sense of local identities does emerge from short hagiographical narratives, especially one dealing with the translation of the bones of San Remo from that site to Genoa itself. There is also a sense of civic community within the famous diploma of Berengar II and Adalbert issued on 18 July 958. These meagre texts allow some conclusions to be reached about the social and political structure of the town in the tenth century but not before. Its economic functions are better understood from recent archaeological work on the port itself which covers a much longer historical time span and that will be summarised here. The chapter will conclude by arguing that taking the surviving evidence as a whole in the current state of knowledge Genoa's connections with the interior were at least as important for its historical development as the more celebrated connection with the sea. The narrative is neither one-dimensional nor uni-directional and it is likely, for example, that access to the sea via the port of Genoa was more important to the economic functioning of the Carolingian Empire than can be demonstrated from current evidence.

Hugh of Arles, King of Italy between 926 and 947, has come to be regarded as one of the more successful kings of Italy in the tenth century. The evidence of his charters supports this conclusion, showing how effectively he managed to insert members of his own Provençal family into the existing political fabric of northern Italy. Contemporary narrative sources tell the same story but as one of failure. For Rather of Verona, Liutprand of Cremona and even Flodoard of Reims, Hugh and his family were suspect and their sexual mores questionable. Their texts intervened in contemporary politics not simply as records of Hugh's inadequacies but as real political actors which helped to make that failure happen.

This paper deals with Milan, north‐west Italy, in the tenth century CE. It investigates the nature of property ownership and transfer, within the intramural circuit, in the suburbs and further afield. Its particular focus is on the property in which women dealt, both as members of religious communities and as wives and widows. The main conclusion is that women of all sorts and in many different sorts of situations owned far less property than men. The reasons for this pattern, which is common across western Europe in this period, remain obscure. It certainly has something to do with perceptions of female passivity prevalent in contemporary texts but it does not necessarily mean that some women could not have agency in other ways, notably as nuns with spiritual power.

This book is a history of Milan in the early medieval period. It investigates the political, social, and economic aspects of the transformation of the Roman world in one of its major centres. Its main theme is the role of monastic communities in this transformation. The book shows how successive generations of monks helped to change he social organisation of the city and much of its hinterland. This thesis challenges the views of earlier generations of scholars who downplayed the role of the monastery in the mechanisms of social change, in favour of a "new" mercantile class.