Commons and Dynamics of Power in Medieval Southern Europe

This article presents a comparative analysis of the commons in two broad regions of medieval southern Europe: northern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula’s Duero Plateau. Recent scholarship on different regions of northern Europe has highlighted the centrality of common lands to both agrosystems and the organization of communities, drawing on the economic theories of Elinor Ostrom and generally focusing on the early modern period. It has also suggested a contrast between resilient communities in northern Europe, where the presence of stable commons helped absorb social inequality, and those of southern Europe, where less solid commons supposedly resulted in lower cohesion among communities. Our longue-durée comparative study of these two regions shows, however, that commons existed in southern Europe from the early medieval period on. It also reveals how they evolved and adapted throughout the High and late Middle Ages, in tandem with the documentary practices that recorded them. This resilience took different forms in each of the areas studied, reflecting the influence of a range of different factors across southern Europe. The commons endured because they were part of a “moral economy” of collective use, which, in constant dialogue with notions of property and ownership, helped forge lasting identities in both rural and urban contexts and on different scales.