The Pervasiveness of Lordship (Italy, 1050–1500)

Abstract The impact of medieval lordship on the society it dominated has not received the attention it deserves. This article stresses the need to look at lordship from the bottom up, making an effort to understand how much and in which ways lordship weighed on the life of subjects, by developing the notion of its ‘pervasiveness’. Such a concept is arguably the most effective if we want to evaluate how seigneurial power was more, or less, able and willing to deeply influence the people subject to it. It highlights that in the world of lordship there was a disconnect (or at least potentially) between political power and socio-economic domination. Which factors enabled lordships to become pervasive, and which lords, from which regions, were best equipped with these characteristics? Using the influential French historiographical framework as a starting point, the article considers as case studies a set of signorie in several Italian regions. It highlights the differences between the great territorial lordships of the counts of the Kingdom of Sicily, the barons of Rome and the lords of Lombardy, on the one side, and the innumerable knightly lordships at a lower level on the other. The use of pervasiveness helps us to re-conceptualize lordship itself with different criteria.