Venice, and then the Adriatic, was the main route to Byzantium for the whole Medieval period, for anyone coming to the former eastern Roman empire from or through northern Italy. The geographical position of the sea makes that inevitable. The west–east sea route via Sicily worked for some Europeans, but only on a large scale after the Normans conquered the island from the Arabs in the late eleventh century and even then less prominently than the Adriatic did; the land route through Hungary, which had a border with Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, suited some armies, but it was never an easy passage; and the Danube was underused as a route for a long time. So the Adriatic had a major role as a path to the Byzantine empire in every Medieval century, and this book amply shows what sorts of roles it took, in the sometimes dramatically changing economic and political environments of nine centuries.

Introduction

Microhistory was perhaps the most significant original contribution by Italian historians to historiography since the Second World War. The main microhistorical texts were written between c.1975 and c.1995, with a particularly intense period of activity in the years around 1980. Many of its practitioners carried on writing in much the same vein afterwards, and many still do, but they now see this period as belonging in the (their) past; although the key principles of microhistory still seem fresh to me, it was their movement, so I guess they are right.

This chapter provides some reflections on microhistory, on its past as well as its (possible) future, with specific emphasis on the use of microhistory as a form of economic history. The chapter is divided in the following sections: first, an account of the origins and development of this microhistory is sketched, followed by an analysis of its aims and approach and of its limitations. The chapter continues with a study of the application of microhistory to economic history and concludes with some thoughts on possible future directions, including the use of microhistory to analyse the nature and logic of medieval economic organisation.

Origins and development

The intellectual focus of the movement was the Italian historical journal Quaderni storici, which published a number of explicitly microhistorical monographic issues between 1976 and 1987. As a whole, it was the work of a collectivity of left-wing historians, twenty or thirty in number, mostly early modernists, led – insofar as there were leaders – by Edoardo Grendi, Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. The movement broadened out from Quaderni storici when the publishing house Einaudi (based in Turin, like many of the leading microhistorians) founded a monograph series called Microstorie, edited by Ginzburg and Levi and Simona Cerutti, which published longer microhistorical works, many of which became historical classics; this, too, ran until the mid-1990s. Microhistory was a highly self-conscious movement, and its activists wrote several accounts of it, including the first three historians mentioned above; of others, I would single out commentaries by Jacques Revel, and the recent backwards look by Osvaldo Raggio, another of the main participants.

One of the crucial moments of social and political change in Western Europe has come to be seen as the years around the year 1000. Before it, we have the large, if crumbling, edifice of the Carolingian state, with its public structures, however rudimentary, and its interregional hierarchies of power. These hierarchies ultimately depended, it is true, on the landed wealth of kings, but they were firmly enough rooted in custom to allow considerable authority to be wielded by people who had royal favour, whether they themselves had local land or not. After it, the equation land=power was much more direct; power became limited by the number of armed men one could feed from one's land, and by one's capacity to control them once one had them there – considerable, if one was me duke of Normandy or (after a hiccup) the count of Barcelona; much less, if one was the count of Mâcon or the abbot of any one of a hundred miserable and newly impoverished monastic houses, menaced by the depredations of their armed neighbours and dependants. In recent years this shift has been theorized as the ‘feudal revolution’, and the early eleventh century, in particular, has been seen as a classic time of violence, as the new order set in, indeed took power by force; only in the late eleventh century, or perhaps in the twelfth, did this more small-scale and (above all) more military society begin to acquire its own rules: its own etiquette and ritual, but also an aristocratic moral code that came more and more to have the force of law, sufficient to marginalize the most uncontrollably violent members of the military elite and, in the end, to allow larger-scale political units to re-establish themselves on the basis of new rules.

There are about 150 court-cases surviving from the eighth- and ninth-century kingdom of Italy, mostly as originals, in archives throughout the kingdom. Most of them are formal placita, public hearings held by state officials. The fifteen or so others, so-called ‘informal’ cases, were heard under the aegis of unofficial judges which in our documents in practice always means the church. These are often indistinguishable from placita in their procedural norms, and can in large part be assimilated to the public judicial system – they show, that is, the church standing in for the state, rather than the church exercising private judicial powers over its own properties. We can thus use these cases, too, as examples of normal judicial procedures. Churches were the preservers of all the judicial documents we have, in fact, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe. We cannot help this, and it would be scarcely worth mentioning, except in that it explains why churches are almost invariably parties to the cases we have, and almost invariably win: there was no incentive to keep cases they lost. At least one can say that a wide range of churches kept placita; but this general ecclesiastical imbalance must be kept in mind during what follows.

Let us first look at a case of 847, which survives as an original in the archiepiscopal archive in Lucca.