Introduction

In the fourteenth century the Italian peninsula was fragmented into medium-sized, small and very small political entities.

Within this panorama kingdoms and principalities could be found (both lay and ecclesiastical) that historiography generally labels as ‘feudal’, that is to say, as elsewhere in Europe, in which the political role of cities was weak and relations between lords and vassals and the rural nobility represented the principal forms of aggregation within a dominion. Within Italy, many examples of this typology existed: the Angevin kingdom, following the death of king Robert, was devastated by battles for succession that, for over a century, provided ample room for the ambitions of the barons and that led to a continuous redefining of the balance of local politics; Aragonese Sicily was also a stage for continuous conflict; the princely bishopric of Trent was progressively worn away by the ambitions of the Habsburgs, the advocati of the Tridentine church; the patriarchate of Aquileia had a parliament, mainly composed of lords and feudatories, with wide-ranging decision-making powers; the county of Savoy was a hereditary dominion that the counts, due also to dynastic continuity, began to organise into more centralised forms, heavily involving the rural aristocracies.