Officials and fiscal lands. The imperial presence in Italy (c. 1050-1150)

This paper aims to analyse the forms, instruments and effectiveness of imperial power in Italy between the 11th and 12th centuries. The starting point is the early decades of the 11th century, marked by a significant rift between the Empire and the Italian high aristocracy, which was busy consolidating its power on a strictly local basis. This distancing is expressed both in the impossibility for emperors to replace Italian marquises (whose power was entirely dynastic) and in the lack of interest of Italian aristocrats in intervening in the election of kings, as had been the case in the early 11th century. However, the imperial history between the 11th and 12th centuries cannot be interpreted in simplistic terms as a continuous and inevitable decline: Italian churches and nobles regularly addressed the Empire to obtain benefits and diplomas, the effectiveness of which appears to have been concrete; at the same time, the aristocracy seems to have articulated its own behaviour, between those who limited themselves to formal loyalty to the emperor and those who made this loyalty an effective political practice.