Condizionamenti politici e sociali nelle procedure di risoluzione dei conflitti nella Toscana occidentale tra età longobarda e carolingia

Throughout the archives of the former Regnum Italiae there are about 150 court-cases, the majority of them still surviving as originals. The number of conflicts and the reports of their settlement would be greater if we took into account the informal ones to which documents such as notitiae brevis, convenientiae or other kind of charters refer to. As elsewhere in Europe, Italian churches were the preservers of all the judicial acts we have and in which they almost invariably won; however, references to official dispute records have been preserved even in vanished private early medieval archives. Their existence proves that conflicts could be and often actually were settled through procedures such as bilateral negotiation, arbitration and compromise without going to an official court and evidence from Tuscany is discussed in the first part the article. In the second part it is argued that the ecclesiastical perspective we derive from documents such as notitiae placiti tends to distort our concerns and that many judgments that saw Lucca’s bishops win, appear tendentious if not even deceitful. Would our general impression still be the same if we also took into account those few disputes in which churches had to fight through sworn against written evidence? Should we expect in those court conflicts churches to lose their dispute since they were not able to produce written evidence? How did they manage to fulfill their purposes and to gain a favorable result even if they were “theoretically” the weaker part, since they had no written documents in their support? All these points through the well known notitia placiti written in Lucca in April 853, which shows that churches won disputes not only because they had at their the disposition documents already organized in archives from which the required evidence could be taken out and shown during the judgment, but because they were supported by and indeed were part of the political power that ruled Carolingian society.