What was the real nature of medieval lordship in southern Italy? What
can this region and its history bring to the great European debates on
feudalism and aristocratic powers, their structures and evolution, and
their social and economic impact? What contribution can the Kingdom of
Sicily make to studies of the relationships between sovereigns,
nobilities and peasant societies? And can the study of seigneurial
powers and rural societies reshape the old arguments regarding the
economic backwardness of the Mezzogiorno (the South of Italy) and the
central role of its monarchy? This book offers the first systematic
analysis of lordship in southern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, under the Norman, Staufen and early Angevin kings. It offers
new interpretations of the powers of the nobility, and of rural
societies and royal policy. It reveals the complexity of interactions
between the king, nobles and peasants, and how they occurred and were
expressed through laws and violence, feudal relations and economic
investments, debates on freedom and serfdom, and the exploitation of
people and natural resources. In these interactions a leading role is
played by peasant societies - with previously unsuspected levels of
dynamism - to set against that of the kings, who were determined to curb
aristocratic powers, and of the nobles who were obliged to adapt their
lordship in response to powerful rural societies and crown policies.
What emerges is a hitherto unseen Mezzogiorno, vital and complex, whose
study allows a deeper understanding not only of the affairs of the South
but of many other regions of Europe.
