Venice's Terraferma Expansion and the Negotiation of Territories in Late Medieval Italy (original) (raw)
[ITALIAN] Per gran parte d’Italia, la prima metà del Quattrocento fu un periodo di grandi trasformazioni. Mentre un numero sempre più ridotto di stati si espandeva su spazi sempre più vasti, gli interstizi che li dividevano furono progressivamente riempiti e gli stati stessi si trovarono ad affacciarsi l’uno sull’altro. Al nord, questo processo portò la repubblica di Venezia e il ducato di Milano a scontrarsi per il dominio sulla Lombardia orientale – specie le città e i territori di Bergamo, Bre- scia e Crema. Quando i Veneziani riuscirono finalmente a sottrarre queste zone al controllo dei Visconti, la frontiera fra i due domini fu spostata verso occidente e la geografia politica della regione fondalmentalmente ridisegnata. Non era che l’ultimo passo verso la costruzione dello stato veneziano di Terraferma. Il primo tassello di una vasta indagine sul tessuto spaziale dell’Italia tardomedievale, il pre- sente saggio considera le guerre e i processi di pacificazione attraverso cui Milano e Venezia negoziarono questi profondi cambiamenti. In questo contesto, l’articolo esamina i testi di trattati be noti (come quelli di Ferrara e Lodi) a fianco di una serie di fonti tratte degli archivi veneziani e milanesi. Così facendo, il saggio getta luce sui meccanismi attraverso cui i territori erano annessi e le frontiere spostate nell’Italia del tempo, e allo stesso tempo rivela la gamma di attori coinvolti, nonché le tecniche e i principi adottati durante i procedimenti. [ENGLISH] For much of Italy, the first half of the Quattrocento was a transformative period. As fewer and fewer states came to expand their dominions over larger and larger spaces, the interstices between them were eventually filled up and the polities of the peninsula put in direct competition with each other. In the north, this process brought the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan into conflict over eastern Lombardy – namely the cities and territories of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema. Once the Venetians were finally able to wrest these areas from the Visconti’s grasp, the frontier between two dominions was fundamentally shifted and the political geography of the region redesigned. It was but the final step towards the establishment of Venice’s Terraferma state. The initial product of a larger investigation into the spatial fabric of late medieval Italy, the present article considers the conflicts and peace-making efforts through which Milan and Venice negotiated these profound changes. It does so by examining the text of well-known treaties (such as those of Ferrara and Lodi) alongside several other records from both Milanese and Venetian archives. This is to shed light on the proceedings through which territories were annexed and frontiers moved in late medieval Italy, while also uncovering the range of actors involved, and the series of principles and techniques they adopted to accomplish their goals.
Related papers
Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy
Oxford University Press, 2023
Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.
The peace of Lodi was a highly symbolic treaty, stipulated among the duchy of Milan and the republic of Venice in April 1454. In the summer of 1454, a first league between Milan, Venice and Florence was signed in Venice. Over the autumn and with the participation of Pope Niccolò V and of Alfonso V, king of Aragon, Valencia, Naples and Sicily, the league became «universal». The Italian League has famously been seen as «the» treaty at the origin of the western grand narrative of the balance of power and the birth of permanent resident embassies. Actually, it was a coalescing moment in a continuous and complementary stream of negotiations on many geographical and political levels. The peace and the leagues were prepared and paralleled by clusters of very local pacts, and was continuously adapted to the ever-changing political circumstances. The chapter aims at analysing this phenomenon by focusing on the case-study represented by the duchy of Milan. In this perspective, the «treaty» becomes a binding moment in a broader and almost uninterrupted process of peacemaking, and peacemaking itself can be read as a grammar for mediating, negotiating and solving conflicts among powers, polities, and agencies of different nature and status.
Beyond the State: Community and Territory-Making in Late Medieval Italy
Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M. Damen and K. Overlaet, 2022
Textbooks on the Late Middle Ages often feature the same map: a colourful jigsaw showing the respective territories of European states. While the spatial dimension of these polities is now being reassessed, it is crucial to realise that territoriality was never the state’s exclusive domain. Communities of all shapes and sizes, from individual villages to federal associations, constructed territories of equally diverse forms and formats. Inspired by the reflection of contemporary jurists, this essay looks to challenge these assumptions by surveying different scales and processes of territory-making in late medieval Italy. In so doing, the essay seeks to shift the focus away from the supposed territory of the state and provide a more accurate picture of the spatial fabric of a late medieval society.
Renaissance and Reformation /Renaissance et Réforme , 2021
F. Luciani, and E. Migliario (eds.), Boundaries of Territories and Peoples in Roman Italy and Beyond, Edipuglia (Documenti e studi, 71), Bari, 2019
When studying the territory of the Roman communities, recognising the ancient rules used for establishing borders is of the utmost importance. Closely linked to this topic is also the question of which criteria may be used by modern scholars in order to identify – or at least suppose with a good degree of certainty – the boundaries of a land belonging to a particular community. Among these criteria, the possible identification of some pagi as witnesses of areas located at the borders of civic lands has rarely been taken into account. Through the analysis of some case studies from Italy and the Western Provinces, this paper aims to point out the widespread presence of territories belonging to pagi at the border between two or more communities.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
Italy and the Holy Land, I. The case of Venice [1986]
The Meeting of two Worlds: cultural exchange between East and West during the period of the crusades, Papers from a Symposium (Kalamazoo-Ann Arbor 1981, Kalamazoo, Mich. 1986) ed. by V.P. Goss, pp. 331-345., 1986