«Cum omnibus eorum cautelis, libris et scripturis». Charters of submission, accounts, statements and information networks in the dissolution of the Principality of Taranto (June 23, 1464 - February 20, 1465)

Abstract

The essay focuses on the system of current public records used in the principality of Taranto during the Orsini rule (first half of the 15th century). The research does not work directly on the surviving accounts or the legislative sources, but is based on the analysis of a peculiar source, produced in the crucial moment of the devolution of the principality to the crown after the death of the last prince of Taranto, Giovanni Antonio del Balzo Orsini (1463). In the late spring 1464 king Ferrante sent to the Salento an équipe of razionali of the Sommaria (the central financial office of the kingdom) to analyze and register all the practices and the passages of the devolution of the Tarentine principality through the inspection of the existing account books, in order to take control of the patrimonial, jurisdictional and financial resources of the principality. This operation produced a considerable amount of letters written by the razionali in a couple of months: these sources are the result of the interaction between the Neapolitan officers and the local political powers of the vanished principality, and allow us to get concretely and day by day into the inner mechanism of production and functioning of a whole documentary system. This system, when in use, offered an articulated map of the territory and its resources through the sophisticated elaboration of a multiple-level complex of accounts, inventories, local and central archives. At the same time, it elaborated what we can call a real, huge data-base both of men, places, revenues and of written records.