The Lands of Saint Mary. The Economic Bases of the Hospital of Santa Maria dei Battuti. Treviso, 15th-16th Century

Abstract

The article is a first chapter of a larger inquiry on the economic relationship between a big late medieval hospital and the tenants who worked its lands, in the context of a study on the lease and land markets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It focusses on problems such as the growth of the rural estate of the hospital Santa Maria dei Battuti in Treviso between the fourteenth and sixteenth century, the accounting and use of the income from the land, the payment of the rents. The sources analysed for this purpose are lease registers, account books and, in particular, a register recording possessions and tenants written as late as 1567-1569, but reconstructing in detail the history of a part of the hospital's estate from the beginning of the fifteenth century. The examples of two villages, Nervesa and Paese in the district of Treviso, show that the gap between the rents owed and the rents really paid was not as large as to seriously put to trouble the hospital's economy. A remarkable flexibility allowed to convert monetary rents in other goods – either in products for consumption and sale or in handiwork, to which also the tenant's female relatives contributed –, a flexibility which could point to the fact that the hospital gave access to a system of interrelated markets (of products, labor, capital and land).

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