NEW APPROACHES TO LATE MEDIEVAL COURT RECORDS Between Courtoom and Castello: A Tuscan Dispute’s Social and Procedural Profile

The role of institutions and judicial procedure in conflict resolution is a significant theme in recent scholarship on the later medieval Italian communes. It is usually difficult, however, to trace these themes in their broader social context, especially in rural communities. This article demonstrates judicial procedure’s role in a conflict between the notary Andrea and the magnate Bartolomeo in the parish of Latera during the 1340s. Its evidentiary basis consists of civic tribunals’ procedural registers, notarial cartularies, and legislation. The article excavates the relationship between institutional procedures, social networks, and local conflict on the eve of the Black Death.


Introduction
The notary Andrea, a resident of Latera, in northeastern Tuscany, must have been exasperated on May 12, 1347, as he initiated a lawsuit against his neighbor Bartolomeo Pulci, scion of one of the elite Florentine lineages prescribed as magnates (EOG.81.26 v ). This was the third time since 1343 that Andrea appeared in the records of Florence's Executor of the Ordinances of Justice. In 1343-4, he had denounced Bartolomeo for assaulting him and his brothers, Piero and Guido, in 1343 (EOG.1.52 r ).
The Executor's criminal court appears to have initially prosecuted Bartolomeo, and then reversed course. By March 1344, Andrea was under investigation for fraudulent denunciation (EOG.1.52 r ). Unable to produce guarantors (fideiussores), he was imprisoned. His initial sentence was confirmed upon his confession. Andrea was confined to Le Stinche, the communal prison. When he could not make a defense, he was sentenced to a 300-lire fine (EOG.5.23 r -24 r ).
By 1347 Andrea was ready to resume his quarrel with Bartolomeo, with an accusation for land theft that he filed in the Executor's civil court (EOG.81.26 v ). He seems to have incurred no penalty for his previous conviction: the current Executor's judge allowed him to proceed. His accusation asserted rightful possession of the land in question, which demonstrated the secondary fact of illegal seizure. This claim began a trial in which Bartolomeo's lawyer, Stefano, countered Andrea's claims with an attempt to undermine Andrea's self-representation (EOG.81.32 r -35 r ). The lawsuit breaks off abruptly after both parties registered their witness lists (EOG.81.43 v ).
This case study uses records in Florence's State Archives to examine a rural community's fractious elites and their engagement with a civic tribunal. It addresses the following questions: What prompted Andrea's actions, and what support did he find among his kinfolk? What prompted the Executor to deem Andrea's denunciation fraudulent? Why might a lawsuit have made sense when denunciation failed? How did Andrea and his foe attempt to prove their versions of reality in this lawsuit? What does the case imply for the relationship between judicial institutions and social life in the later Middle Ages? The argument developed below is twofold. I argue that the case study demonstrates the practical relevance of the civic tribunals and their procedures to residents of Florentine Tuscany, despite a traditional view that public justice's ambit was constricted, its focus confined to repression, and its subjects disengaged from their judicial duties/rights during the later fourteenth century (e.g. Cohn, 1999: 138-9, 171;Manikowska, 1988: 538-9). In dialogue with recent scholarship emphasizing institutions' responsiveness to social needs, it underlines the continuing centrality of a given civic tribunal at different sequences of the same fraught relationship (Roberts, 2018: 4-5). The dispute between Andrea and the Pulci family moved in and out of the Executor's court, but also within the court's multiple venues. It suggests the need to revisit some assumptions regarding the function of public justice in relation to rural society. This underlines the importance of the political aspect of rural Italy's relationship with city-based states in the late Middle Ages (Cohn, 1999: 14-17).
I would like to expand upon this through a close look at how a local disagreement filtered through multiple judicial procedures, and by looking at its local context. The dispute demonstrates the role of Florentine justice as a tactical resource in rural disputes. The case study was chosen because surviving documentation, although limited, enables analysis of how trial sequences fit in users' social life. 1 The Executor's court operated through inquisitorial and accusatorial procedures, with important modifications (see also, on Bolognese analogues, Blanshei, 2018: 55-82). Operators such as Andrea and Bartolomeo were aware of these options, making the tribunal's surviving documentation an invaluable source for the social history of rural Tuscany and the Florentine state, although modern historians have primarily used this material for information on the magnates (Klapisch-Zuber, 2006;Lansing, 2010;Caduff, 1993).
Much of the scholarship on rural Tuscany's relationship with urban centers has focused on the economic, particularly fiscal and demographic, aspects of this 1 I echo here Vallerani (2018: 36): 'Only by broadening…the documentary spectrum will we succeed in reconstructing the logic of the trial'.

Figliulo-Rosswurm: Between Courtoom and Castello 4
relationship, and its parasitic nature (Brown, 1982;Caferro, 1994;Conti, 2014;Fiumi, 1993). Scholars have recently moved beyond this paradigm, emphasizing instead sub-regional differentiation (Cohn, 1999: 16-21;Hewlett, 2008: 1-15). This article modifies our view of local communities' handling of urban communes by looking at the institutions of the Florentine state as a social relation, rather than instruments of repression or as externally-imposed administrative entities grafted onto communities (Cohn, 1999;Hewlett, 2008). Rather, public institutions served as the norm-based terrain upon which individuals, social classes, and small groups operated. The outcomes of conflicts recorded in judicial records resulted from the intersecting (in)actions and goals of court personnel, disputants, and extended networks. This is one episode in the tale of how communities past perceived and grappled with institutions intended to project the illusion of a power separate from the society around it, rather than arising from the clash between and within different social strata and their aims (Jessop, 2009: 128). 2 The article combines procedural and statutory material with notarial records to trace the parties in and out of court. Procedure, rather than an arcane apparatus autonomous from society, developed in tandem with it (Vallerani, 2018: 27-99).
This article investigates how the procedural mechanisms of the Executor's court translated the conflict into a series of claims, the discrepancies between Andrea's self-presentation, and what is reconstructable of his social standing. Limited in scope, the example of Latera indicates the value of further work in this direction. Case studies of conflicts' movement between communities and institutions reveal how individuals and networks tried to utilize public institutions' procedural apparatus. The Executor, established in June 1306, was unique to Florence and rooted in the struggle between the popolo and the magnates (Gualtieri, 2009: 236). The magnates were composed of the city's old military elite (Diacciati, 2011: 19-28). The popolo was the political coalition of elite financiers and merchants (popolo grasso) and their allies among the city's guild-organized merchants and artisans, and governed the city four times between 1250 and 1378 (Diacciati, 2011;Screpanti, 2008).
Originating in a reform of the city's popular militias, the office was staffed by non-Tuscans and closed to legal experts (iudex legista) and members of the civic militia (milites) (Gualtieri, 2009: 238). The Executor was charged with applying Florence's anti-magnate Ordinances of Justice (1293-5) and syndicating communal officials (Gualtieri, 2009: 237-43). The court's surviving documentation begins in 1343-44.
Previous records were destroyed following the Duke of Athens's July 1343 expulsion (De Vincentiis, 2003: 20).  Anonymous written denunciations produced most of the tribunal's criminal investigations. If they provided the requisite information, an ex officio inquest followed. Tamburagioni were required to specify the crime, its date and location, the victim, the offending party, and any witnesses (Caduff, 1993: 26). Any non-magnate There was no single model of inquisitorial procedure. Recent work has emphasized the continuities between inquisitorial modes of action and accusationbased procedure (Vallerani, 2018;Carraway Vitiello, 2016: 88-133). Professional jurists such as Alberto Gandino encountered resistance from civic authorities when they did try to impose inquisitorial procedure modelled on anti-heretical inquests upon communal tribunals (Vallerani, 2018: 40-41). Florence's denunciation system exemplifies this heterogeneity. The Florentines may have borrowed the idea of anonymous denunciations from Bologna: the latter used them in magnate status trials from the 1290s (Blanshei, 2010: 215-18). Denunciations triggered ex officio inquests, in which witness testimony provided the main evidence, as at Bologna (Blanshei, 2010: 184). Written denunciations were intended to reduce the danger inherent in making in-person accusations against magnates.
Significant differences in demography, exchange networks, and culture characterized Florence's subject territories in the later Middle Ages (Cohn, 1999;Hewlett, 2008;Zorzi, 2008: 209-56 (Pirillo, 2006;Dameron, 2003). Here, recalcitrant rural lords and a prosperous upland peasantry resisted Florentine territorial encroachment well into the fifteenth century (Cherubini, 1968;Cohn, 1999). The uplands' relationship with Florence has usually been studied in terms of military vicissitudes and the impact of fiscal policies on local demography and fiscality (Brown, 1982;Cherubini, 1967;Cherubini, 1972;Fiumi, 1993;Cohn, 1999;Hewlett, 2008). When scholars have looked at the Tuscan mountains through the lens of the commune's judicial records, they have characterized Florentine activity here primarily in terms of violence (Cohn, 1999: 138-71;Hewlett, 2008: 43-74). Andrea's grandfather, Guido, and father, Ugo, were notaries (NA.195.141 r ). Ugo or Andrea relocated to Latera. I will return to their intertwinement with the local elites below, in the context of the dispute itself.

Procedure, Family, and Land: The Dispute
Andrea's notarial registers are lost, but he is attested from the late 1320s until 1347 (NA.10899.101 v ). Bartolomeo lived in Florence (EOG.1.52 r ), but his family possessed holdings in Latera 113r;141r;170v). Pulci elders acted in his name in documents from the 1330s (EOG.81.32r). Bartolomeo disappears from the record after 1347 (NA.14946.81v). I have uncovered no evidence of a relationship between the two before the 1343-44 denunciation-based inquest, although indirect evidence points, as I discuss below, to connections between Andrea's kinsmen and the Pulci.

Figliulo-Rosswurm: Between Courtoom and Castello 10
Without explaining the reversal, the court was using Andrea's fraudulent text as proof in uncovering the truth. Attention shifted from this mistake to the gravity of Andrea's crime and its inevitable punishment. Here, Gandino's stress on the link between truth and guilt emerges (Vallerani, 2012: 48). The ex officio inquisition revealed this truth, which lay in the individual. Andrea had suborned himself before God, even while deceiving the court initially (Kuehn, 2006(Kuehn, : 1059. Andrea's sin and crime, unjustly transferred to Bartolomeo, now was returned to its rightful bearer. Andrea's denunciation claimed that in November 1343, Bartolomeo and his followers attacked Andrea and his brothers, Piero and Guido, in S. Niccolò's piazza (EOG.1.52v). The scene is typical of magnate denunciations of the 1340s, portraying countryfolk as innocent victims of magnate oppression (Caduff, 1993: 30-40;Klapisch-Zuber, 2006: 40-46). No reason is given for the attack. It caused a great disturbance in Latera, as locals raised the hue and cry with parish church bells (EOG.1.52v; see also Manikowska, 1988: 537-8;Settia, 1997: 82-3;Müller, 2005: 30-8). The report did not include Andrea's brothers among the witnesses, nor do they appear in the tribunal's proceedings.
Andrea may have lodged the 1343 denunciation to take advantage of the atmosphere of hostility toward magnates following the July expulsion of the Duke of Athens and the subsequent magnates' Priorate. The Executor's court had been suspended during the Duke's lordship (1342-3), but was reinstated after his expulsion. According to the inquisition against Andrea, he had ordered his servant Brandaglia to deliver the denunciation to Florence, paying her two soldi in exchange, equivalent to one-tenth of a gold florin (EOG.1.52r;Dameron, 1991 The offense burdened Bartolomeo with injustice, violating the distributive principle at the heart of the judicial system. Andrea appeared in court the next day. Unable to produce guarantors (fideiussores), he confessed 'spontaneously' (EOG.1.54r). This indicates his associates' refusal to vouch for his personal reputation; these figures were crucial to verifying a person's trustworthiness in the civic courts (Vallerani, 2018: 33). He was imprisoned, with ten days to make a defense. On 11 April 1344, he reappeared in court for sentencing: evidently, prison had not changed his prospects (EOG.5.23r-24r).
Andrea's punishment was a fine of one hundred lire. 9 Again, he could not produce an oath-helper, and was re-imprisoned. No record of payment appears in the Camera's 1344 Entrate (CdC.2-4). No explanation is given for the confession. It is unlikely he feared torture (tormentum); it is rarely mentioned in the Executor's records. When torture is mentioned in the Executor's records, usually it is invoked by denouncers as a way to force witnesses to speak against magnates (e.g., EOG.51,16r). As a notary, Andrea probably understood the hopelessness of his case. In the typology that Vallerani has identified in Gandino's work, Andrea's denunciation was certain proof, documentary evidence awaiting confirmation (Vallerani, 2012: 104).
The inquest's record does not record the process whereby the Executor's court realized its error in believing Andrea's apparently fraudulent claims. The tribunal's probative regime did not require this information, nor did its documentary standards. It is worth stating that there is no compelling reason to think that the denunciation was in fact fraudulent. Bartolomeo was denounced at least twice more during the 1340s, and was absolved in both inquests (EOG.6.18 r -18 v ; EOG.71.1r). The documentary void in this case requires skepticism regarding all parties' truth claims.

Figliulo-Rosswurm: Between Courtoom and Castello 12
Andrea had cited twelve witnesses. The charge against him included their names but no testimony. Since the register is complete, it is possible that the Executor deemed Andrea's denunciation false without an inquest. Perhaps the witnesses denounced him, instead of Bartolomeo. Andrea had gambled on his ability to adroitly manuever between his community and the Florentine courts, but likely miscalculated his neighbors' reaction. Testifying against Bartolomeo would have been a fraught act, aligning deponents against the Pulci lineage. One of the witnesses Andrea listed was Grasso di Guccio, a local lawyer who had been the victim of Pulci violence in October 1343 (EOG.21.37r-39v) and who appears as a witness in notarial documents drafted in Latera (NA.195.112 v ). An unnamed person denounced the assault, but Grasso himself denied it (EOG.21.38v-39r). The Executor's court deemed the denunciation fraudulent, and prosecuted the witnesses who had confirmed it for perjury (EOG.21.43r). That the Executor's court in both cases deemed the denunciations fraudulent underlined the futility of judicial action against the Pulci.
A tangled web linked Andrea, his assailants, and venerable local families. These ties, almost invisible in processual records, are reconstructable from notarial material.
Andrea's extended familial network failed to materialize at all throughout the dispute, as did his professional associates. Viewed in relation to the dispute, this network highlights Andrea's position in the western Mugello's sub-regional elite, and his apparent inability to translate dense local interconnectivity into effective judicial action.
The relative prosperity of Andrea's family can be inferred from its marriages. Andrea's father and grandfather were notaries. His father Guido had done well enough to marry Compiuta, a woman from a rural branch of the Magalotti (NA.195.141 r ). This was an old, illustrious family, which entered Florence's priorate, the highest governing body of the commune, in 1283, a year after its establishment (Repetti, 1849: 657;Gualtieri, 2009: 173-204  Later medieval Tuscany's ' excessive community' is in full evidence here (Weissman, 1989
Andrea's next move further attests to his relatively comfortable social position, despite the vicissitudes of 1343-44. He launched a civil lawsuit against Bartolomeo, indicating the resources to persist despite initial failure and imprisonment. Lawsuits were expensive, especially for the losing party, and were common tactical ploys in vendettas (Kuehn, 2009: 58). Peasants and sharecroppers, likely the majority of Latera's population, could not have drawn on such assets in court. Yet quarrelsome members of the rural elite considered it a good disputing tactic to misrepresent themselves as members of this stratum of 'those possessing less' (menopossenti) (EOG.122.11r). The distance between Andrea and his humbler neighbors underscores the importance of socioeconomic status in engaging with the popolo's institutions of justice.
After his unsuccessful denunciation, he simply adopted a different procedural path.
Perhaps Andrea considered it more likely that he could prove usurpation of land in a civil suit than assault and theft in the criminal courts. The Executor's court supervised the disputants' reconstruction of conflicting versions of the truth. May, the court supervised Andrea's presentation of his witnesses' names to Stefano for cross-examination. There is no further mention of the lawsuit. This fits a pattern identified elsewhere: a majority of accusatorial trials ended before witness testimony (Vallerani, 2012: 33;Vallerani, 1999).
What explains this truncation? The parties may have reached an out-of-court agreement, although no notice is given of this. Accusation-based lawsuits in the Italian civic courts often served as pressure tactics for achieving a negotiated peace agreement (Kumhera, 2017;Palmer, 2014). Andrea and/or Bartolomeo's kinsmen may have pressured them into an arbitrated settlement, or they may have decided to settle rather than face the costs of a full trial. Admitting Bartolomeo was a magnate, Stefano denied that fama proved usurpation. Stefano asserted that Bartolomeo had possessed a title to the land since before 1342 (EOG.81.29v). 18 He then argued that publica fama would prove that Andrea was a comitatus popularus, a non-elite resident of Florence's countryside (EOG.81.38r). 19 The suit proceeded without reference to Andrea's previous conviction or any evident sense of personal rancor between the parties. The record is free of the vocabulary of anger and animosity identified as shaping lawsuits elsewhere (Smail, 2001: 90-126;Smail, 2003: 89-132

Conclusion
This article has reconstructed the conflicts of a social network as they moved between Florentine tribunals and Latera on the eve of the Black Death. It has emphasized the entwinement between a rural community and the city through judicial activity and economic exchanges, and the ability of countryfolk, properly placed, to try instrumentalizing judicial procedure. These efforts' outcome hinged on social relationships: the absence of Andrea's otherwise well-documented network from the dispute suggests that he was unable to convince others of his claims. This did not stop him from pursuing his quarrel via several procedural avenues, all within the same civic magistracy. That he was able to sue despite a previous condemnation points to the ambiguous place of publica fama in this dispute. Its legal weight was not automatic, even within the same magistracy's tribunals (Stern, 2000;Carraway Vitiello, 2016;Wickham, 2005 left aside the reputational question. If witness testimony did not invoke Andrea's prior denunciation as a fact per famam, there was no evidence. Since the suit appears to have ended before witness testimony, it was moot. The Executor's courts were only one theater for this conflict. Latera was the initial venue for the dispute, and its established hierarchies and relationships informed the parties' in-court behavior. The silence of Andrea's kinsmen throughout the dispute is deafening. They were active legally in the 1340s, just not in his dispute with the Pulci (e.g. NA.195.141r, 1413r, 144r). There is also the problem of missing documentation.
Andrea's own registers and those of his father are lost, as are the Executor's pre-1343 records. The silence of the Executor's records regarding its identification of Andrea's 1344 mendacity further limits analysis. The dispute's record ends as abruptly as it started.
What does this case suggest about the relationship between public justice and rural society and its problems in the later Middle Ages? Unlike Florence's fiscal system, public justice allowed Tuscans some room for maneuver (Cohn, 1999). Its procedures offered resources to those pursuing a grudge, provided they possessed the socioeconomic resources and network support that successful engagement with the courts required. In such a situation, evasion or resistance to state power was less appealing than engaging with it sensibly. Public justice made it possible to help one's friends and hurt one's enemies.
The case study also highlights some of the paradoxes of an explicitly ideological, partisan institution such as the Executor's court. Established by socially mobile urban merchants and professionals comparable to Andrea, it can be seen acting here to in effect protect the magnate Bartolomeo from a wronged member of the popolo, only to then allow this same popolano to pursue his grievances through a different procedural route.
Growing state intrusiveness into increasingly coherent and articulate communities was a central feature of later medieval Europe's history (Wickham, 2017: 255-57;Lantschner, 2015). Along with warfare and revenue-gathering, public justice was a core manifestation of this intrusiveness. In addition, the Italian city-states' civic Figliulo-Rosswurm: Between Courtoom and Castello 21 tribunals were theaters in which institutional authority interacted with networks of local power. The dialectic between them shaped outcomes in the courts. Missing the support of one's associates as guarantors and/or witnesses, even canny operators such as Andrea faced fines, imprisonment, and the loss of land when appealing to the courts. If, as a Calabrian proverb advises, 'he who lives honestly dies wretchedly' (chi ' ara diritto, muoia disperato), then instrumental mendacity required the support of one's friends and kinfolk.

Appendix: Andrea's documented extended kin network
These family trees are reconstructed from notarial and judicial sources cited in-text.
Where a patronymic or lineage name is lacking, notarial documents typically denoted a person by parish of origin (for example, 'Piero da Latera'), a practice I follow here.