Strade e territori ai confini del Monferrato nella prima età moderna

Despite a flurry of recent research, no comprehensive attempt has yet been made to describe the southern portion of the Spanish Road with a breadth of view comparable to Geoffrey Parker’s classic work on the road’s northern reaches. This article aims to provide a glimpse of the control over flows of goods and people along one of the road’s main southern branches that straddled the borderlands between the rival Savoyard domains and those of the Montferrat during the late sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. Specifically, the focus of this study is on the holdings of the Counts of Cocconato, the large, corporate kin grouping of the Radicatis, who claimed lordship as well as semi-sovereign prerogatives of Imperial jurisdiction on an important commercial corridor wedged between the larger, fledgling state formations through an array of interlinked communities and landholdings. We draw on extensive original archival materials produced by both Savoyard and Montferrat authorities in tangled, drawn out jurisdictional controversies on supremacy over this strategic area to describe the means of effective control exerted on important flows of trade by the Radicatis, who were long capable of effectively levying tolls, patrolling the road’s myriad byways, and acting as brokers in the conflicts of attrition between their larger, threatening neighbors.