Pasture customs, collective resources, and development of State structures in the Republic of Siena (15th century). Fruitful ground for an interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

The institution of Dogana dei Paschi in the Republic of Siena among the second half of fourteenth century and the first half of fifteenth century, similar in various aspects to the ones of the State of the Church and the Kingdom of Sicily, determined a reduction of the pastures of local communities and an intensification of territorial control of the central power, meaningful if read in the context of long period of the slow modern State’s birth. Nevertheless it is necessary to notice that Dogana’s pasture implied the typical medieval conception of coexisting separeted ownerships, with more rights that insisted on the same good, and the conception of demanium influenced by feudal law. So we must not imagine the territories included in Dogana as full properties and exclusive domains of the State, but as situations in which the usual interlacement of coexistent real rights was complicated by the graft of a further type of dominion, connected with the eminent one that was up to the holder of superior jurisdiction. From the point of view of the juridical base, the Dogana seems to lean not so much on new hegemonic State’s powers, how much on “extensive application” of principles of feudal law: in fact they were the vassals to have on their territories a dominium directum and a dominium utile on natural resources surpluses to the needs of local population, resources that they could also grant in enjoyment to strangers.