From village borders to political borders. The Friuli area in the late Middle Ages

Abstract

This paper carries out a preliminary analysis on the processes of boundary definition in the Friuli area in the 13th-14th centuries, starting from a wide scrutiny of published and unpublished documents. The survey led to the individuation of two phases that seem to have partially different characteristics. In the first period, between the 13th and the 14th centuries, disputes mainly concern the definition of boundaries between village communities, and seem mainly to have aimed at affirming a collective identity and at stating the territorial ambit of a community in opposition to neighbouring communities. A later phase, since the third decade of the 15th century, shows an increasing amount of boundary disputes in general, and chiefly of the ones between communities and lords. This seems to be connected on one side to the consequences of decades of wars, epidemics, devastations and neglect of the cultivated lands that had upset the settlement framework of the countryside, and on the other side to the changes in institutional suzerainty and to the breaking out of the construction of territorial jurisdictions by the lords. The problem of boundary limits thus acquires in this period a different connotation, including also border disputes against those formations subjected to a different territorial suzerainty: we discuss here a peculiar and very significant event, concerning the boundary limits between Pordenone and Zoppola. The large amount of documents about the processes analysed for the period we are dealing with in this paper allows us to draw some conclusions on the role of jurists and witnesses in the field of processes for boundary disputes.