Town and country: economy and institutions in late medieval Italy
W Krrhile relations between town and country have been a central theme of W Italian historiography since the mid sixteenth century,2 their social and economic features have been studied in their own right only from the i89os. Since then, two main lines of interpretation have emerged.3 Initially, historians of the 'economico-juridical' school4 put forward the view that the expansion of the north-central Italian communes between the mid twelfth century and the thirteenth transformed town-country relations. Communes subordinated the rural hinterland (contado) to their economic and jurisdictional authority in the interests of the urban population and of the commercial bourgeoisie; the passage of powers from feudal to urban lordship meant for the peasantry a sharp loss of judicial and economic freedoms. While this view has since been considerably extended and refined,5 it is generally accepted that the city states of central and northern Italy did exploit the countryside through inequitable rates of taxation, regulations restricting most trade and industry to the ruling town, compulsory labour services, and (increasingly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) judicial support for citizens' claims over their rural tenants.6 This view was challenged by Fiumi, who on the basis of thirteenthand early fourteenth-century Florentine evidence, argued that communal rule was of major benefit to the countryside.7 While Fiumi's defence of economic