A Broken Kinship. The Fogliano of Reggio Emilia

The family of the Fogliano of Reggio Emilia is an interesting case study in the context of research relating to seigneurial kinship groups and their mechanisms. The lineage ruled over what was most likely the largest lordship in the region, and its members played a leading role in events on the chessboards of both the city of Reggio Emilia and the surrounding countryside. However, such a powerful family was not as united as one might expect, and the divisions that pitted individual domini or entire branches of the lineage against each other occasionally reached levels of extreme violence. Nevertheless, these deep fractures did not affect kinship development, which only started to wane during the 1420s, when the Este gained an increasingly strong grasp on the region. The issue of divisions among the lords has not yet seen a specific thematization: with this paper is therefore proposed to frame, on the one hand, the reasons that led to the development and the definition of the fractures between the Fogliano; on the other hand, it is necessary to outline the reasons that allowed the family to thrive from the end of the 13th century to the beginning of the 15th century, with the aim of better understanding the segmentation mechanisms and the regulatory systems within a noble kin group.