AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL ITALY

In medieval Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, farming practices were constrained by basic ecological facts that people found extremely hard to overcome. The uncultivated world of forest, marsh, and heath, although often feared as "wild," had to be exploited for all the food and building materials it could provide because the success of agriculture was very uncertain. Medieval farmers, like farmers in all premodern societies, found it difficult to cope with the almost randomly occurring "good years" and "bad years" for crops. Cultivation methods were often too rudimentary to produce much in the way of a surplus, and if any surplus could be accumulated, storage techniques were often inadequate to prevent rotting and insect damage. Climate was the most unpredictable natural element.

Abnormally low winter and summer temperatures (as in the cold period between a.d. 600 and 800) could have disastrous effects on even the most carefully tended crops, but comparatively warm times (as between 1000 and 1250) helped farmers to increase yields. Obvious regional differences in climate— as between Lombardy and Apulia—determined what crops could be attempted in the first place; but it is likely that microclimatic peculiarities, which are now becoming better understood as a result of archaeological investigations involving analyses of pollen and other plant remains, helped to define the agricultural character of a given area at a much more local level. Exploiting difficult terrain was also problematic, since it was hard to drain and dig large forested, marshy, or steep areas with hoes, spades, and very simple plows. The labor required was phenomenal; this explains why the vast majority of medieval people had to be agriculturists. Consequently, agricultural life was harsh and remained so between the millennium 400 and 1400, despite the changes in farming practices, technology, and economic organization that were taking place in Italy. (Real improvements in conditions had hardly taken place before the twentieth century.)

Still, agriculture was in many ways more richly diverse in medieval Italy than it had been in Roman times. This can be seen from the very wide variety of crops, many of which had not been cultivated in Italy in the Roman period. Most descriptions of medieval Italian agriculture stress, rightly, that its basis was cereals, vines, and olives, the classics of Mediterranean farming and diet. Cereals were widely grown, the choice of grain depending on the soil quality, terrain, rainfall, and so on. Predominantly, the farmers of the early Middle Ages grew the so called poorer cereals (barley, rye, oats, millet, and sorghum); but olives were also common—in fact, they were present almost everywhere.

Cereals, vines, and olives may have been the most characteristic crops, but many other plants, edible and nonedible, were raised. Of staples, the chestnut was particularly important in hilly regions, especially in the Appennines; it was not a "wild" plant but was carefully cultivated and highly valued. Vegetables and fruits are not mentioned so commonly in the historical sources, but that may be because their presence was taken for granted. Certainly orchards were prized, and they were common near the northern lakes, in Romagna and the Marches. New citrus fruits—lemons, bitter and sweet oranges—were introduced into southern Italy from the east in the later medieval period. Other new exotics, like sugarcane, also appeared at that time. Important plants grown for textiles and dyes included flax, hemp, madder, and woad in the north, and cotton and saffron in the south.

Stock raising has received rather less attention from historians than plant cultivation, but there can be little doubt that it had a crucial place in the medieval Italian economy. Animals provided fertilizer and energy for farming, both of which were in short supply from other sources. The commonest animals raised were pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle, supplemented by horses, asses, and poultry. Fish, too, were sometimes farmed. As with plants, techniques of animal husbandry varied across Italy. How animals were raised also seems to have depended on what products they were required for. According to the archaeologist Gillian Clark, evidence from many central Italian excavations indicates that dead animals were mainly used for meat and leather (primary use); that living animals were exploited for wool, hair, eggs, and milk (secondary use); and that stock-raising techniques varied accordingly (younger animals were intended for meat, older animals for wool and other products). Many farms seem to have kept a motley mixture of animals, but in the later Middle Ages specialized production of beef cattle began to become important in some areas, notably Farfa Abbey and the Arno valley in Tuscany, Apulia, and the lower Po plain. Animals were useful because their pastures were land that was often unsuitable for other purposes, but they could also be extremely labor-intensive when transhumance was involved—that is, when animals were taken on the great annual summer movements from plains to hills and back again. Transhumance was common in the Appennines, although not in the Alps. Apart from this movement, most Italian agriculture was suited to a sedentary settled existence and was organized accordingly.

There were many variations in the organization of agricultural production across Italy. It is likely that most agriculturalists lived on small holdings, in family units, often within the framework of a nucleated village settlement to form, in Pierre Toubert's phrase, a "complete peasant exploitation." These peasant farmers produced food for themselves and their families, and sometimes a surplus that was either sold or given as rent to a powerful local lord. The relationship between peasants and lords took differing forms. Often, it is hard for historians to characterize such a relationship with any precision, because contracts between cultivators and noncultivators were usually not written down in the period before about 1200. Therefore, it is extremely hard to know to what extent the secular or monastic owners of large estates actually determined what was produced there, or if the peasants were given a free hand so long as they produced a surplus with which to pay the owner. Italy, like many other regions in medieval Europe, can be said to have had a "manorial system" (a rough translation of the Italian sistema curtense), particularly between about 800 and 1000. Nowadays, historians emphasize that such estates were organized locally in many different ways and were not self-sufficient as commonly as had previously been thought. This was because the agricultural economy—with the possible exception of some (not all) particulary isolated mountain farms—was never static and was never removed from the wider ecological and economic systems of Italian society.

Toubert proposed a helpful typology of earlier medieval Italian estate structures that has become the standard framework for analyzing the organization of agricultural practice. Toubert suggests a threefold division of widely recognizable types:

"Pioneer" estates. These were pastoral and very often had no central demesne area (the part of the estate directly supervised by the owner's agent and farmed by slaves or semiservile workers and local peasants who worked there part-time as part of their "render" requirements).

More structured units, specializing in olive oil and wine, sometimes as cash crops for sale in local markets. Classic estates, based on cereal cultivation, on rich soils with highly developed demesne centers.

Examples of each type have been found by historians all over Italy during most periods. Toubert's discussion is valuable because it provides a reminder that a degree of specialization in production was evident in Italian practice from the early Middle Ages on. This seems to have been particularly true in two contexts: monastic estates, where abbots often demanded cash-crop production of oil and wine and caused some land to be opened up to agriculture for the first time; and farms near towns, where, increasingly in the later period, specialized market garden crops were grown for urban sale.

It is not always easy to imagine, from the surviving texts, what these estates actually looked like on the ground. However, certain general points can be made. The cultivated landscape in most places was a combination of open (terra aperta) and enclosed fields (clausurae), in close proximity to uncultivated land. The proportions at any given time and place are almost impossible to work out. However, one can generalize by saying that in the earlier period there were more open fields, which were sometimes communally owned and worked by the village, whereas from the twelfth century on more enclosed fields appeared, especially around Milan, as more owners fenced off plots from communal use. This development spread to the rest of Lombardy, Liguria, and Tuscany in the thirteenth century and a little later to Lazio and Campania. Most of these changes seem to have taken place veiy slowly, with a consequent gradual change in the appearance of the landscape. Occasionally, more obvious changes took place more rapidly. There was probably more land under cultivation in Italy during the medieval period than at any earlier time, and this was largely a result of a new combination of efforts by the peasants and pressure from the monasteries. Vito Fumagalli has found that the monasteries of Nonantola and Bobbio caused new areas of the lower Po plain to be opened up for agriculture by deforestation and drainage as early as the first half of the ninth century. Their abbots pursued this as a deliberate policy by issuing special libellus contracts to peasants requiring them to undertake clearance as part of their contractual relationship with the community. Terms such as novellae (new plots) and noviculta (newly cultivated) also appear in charters from elsewhere in the Po valley.

The farmers had little in the way of new technology to aid them in transforming the landscape. Most of their basic tools were ancient and did not change for centuries. The most important technological change was the increasingly widespread use of the water mill from about 1000 on. It made the milling of flour much more efficient, as did the later introduction of the windmill to Lombardy around 1300. New irrigation techniques borrowed from the Arabs aided the cultivation of rice and cotton in the south.

The study of medieval Italian agriculture is now entering a new phase with the increasing use of advanced archaeological techniques to analyze site data such as pollen, grain samples, animal bones, and farming implements, allowing a more precise picture of individual agricultural sites and their production in the medieval period. These new techniques are important because only through them can we determine how much of medieval practice was inherited from Rome and how much was true innovation. Perhaps even more exciting is "landscape archaeology." Landscape archaeology uses the field survey—pioneered in central Italy by teams from the British School at Rome—to analyze large areas and observe changes in land use and settlement patterns over a longer span of time than is possible with conventional historical methods. Notable among these surveys are those of south Etruria, the Biferno valley, and Farfa, which have given us more precise data than ever before about what was grown where.

Written by Ross Balzaretti in " Medieval Italy- An Enciclopedia", Routledge, New York, USA, 2004, editor Christopher Kleinhenz.Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.