Competizione e collaborazione nelle esecuzioni testamentarie dell’Italia carolingia

During the Carolingian period some important documentary archives of central-northern Italy were characterized by the presence of a meaningful number of documents that were related to the execution of the last dispositions of dead people. It is a documentary novelty that can be traced especially in some geographical areas within determined spans of time that can be circumscribed to the central decades of the 9th century. Into these contexts there are numerous cases in which wills where executed by a small or large number of executors; moreover, those who executed the wills sometimes fulfilled their duties many years after the death of people and the compiling of the same wills. This article underlines the novelties that are related this juridical instrument and analyses, within the different documentary contexts of central-northern Italy, the links between the executors - dispensatores – and the dead persons, as well as the reasons that can be traced in relation to the episodes of collaboration and also of competition in executing the last wills of the dead persons both within the group of the dispensatores, and between those and the family members of the testator. More in particular, through the close description of some case-studies chosen because of their particular meaningfulness and as samples of different geographical areas and different social contexts, this article intends to show how the introduction of the key-figure of the dispensator modified the rules of competition and encouraged collaborations within the processes of will-executions.