PRATICHE CANCELLERESCHE, ARCHIVI E STRUMENTI DI GOVERNO NELLA SICILIA DI ETÀ BASSOMEDIEVALE (1412-1442)

In 1412, with the advent of Trastamara dynasty on the throne of Aragon, the Kingdom of Sicily, while maintaining a formal institutional independence, was finally incorporated in the possessions of the Crown. The island then became a focal instrument of foreign policy of Alfonso the Magnanimous and, consequently, the natural economic and military base for the conquest of Naples. Just like what was occurring in the Italian peninsula, it became necessary to develop new instruments of government to respond to all those social, political and economic factors that had affected the island. Primarily, it was provided to a more precise definition of the relationship with the Iberian motherland, that, within a few years, took the form of a system of government at a distance. From an institutional point of view, the political leader of the island was outlined on the figure of the viceroy: they were chosen by the king and were equipped with a delegated power. The documentary solution, a true summary of this relation, was found instead in the creation of a chancery instrument that was named lictera exequtoria. This kind of letter allowed the sovereign to intervene personally, but through the mediation of the institutional apparatus of the island, on the distribution of the royal favor towards his subjects of the Kingdom. The complexity of the Italian territorial states of the 15th century, highlighted by the presence of many authorities in competition with each other, pushed the rulers to come to an agreement between the parties involved. The outcome, in the case of Sicily, was the direct involvement of the local ruling classes, both those from the old feudal aristocracy and those emerging from the towns, in the government of the island, as well as in the distribution of the economic and political resources in favor of all those who showed their support for the policies of the Magnanimous. It was a natural consequence, therefore, a greater attention to the institutional apparatus of the State that, at this stage, must be considered as a real focus of that political mediation that was necessary to the rulers for the consensus-building, within the composite societies of the late Middle-Ages, around their policies. On the one hand, since the arrival of Fernando of Antequera on the throne of the Crown of Aragon, but with major emphasis during the long reign of his successor, it was clear the role that the financial administration would have for the government of the island. It was not simply a strengthening of the control practices on the accounts of pecuniary offices of the Kingdom, brought about the growing economic needs of the monarchy, but a complex process driven by the kings of Aragon. The aim was indeed to lay the financial structures of the island under a closer political control, focusing on the figure of the sovereign the last terminal of the distribution of resources among its supporters and Sicilian subjects. The establishment of the new office of the Conservator regii patrimonii, taken directly from the Castilian reality, arose from the need to introduce in the island a financial body that was closely linked to the sovereign by fidelity ties and that was equipped with a wide range of skills to control the receipt and the distribution of the royal income. All the financial grants which concerned the public property had in fact to obtain the approval of the Conservator who initiated the regular bureaucratic process and that, in the meantime and thanks to all information collected, was also able to prepare budgets that gave to the king a useful tool for a more rational and precise location of the resources. On the other hand, instead, the intervention of the king went to the administration tout court of the island, that, compared to the financial one, was not marked by any obvious reformer intervention, if not from some occasional readjustments that changed the internal balance anyway. The Secretariat was in fact placed in the same level of the scribanie of the Protonotaro and of the Magistri Racionales – the Royal Chancery, without jurisdiction over the document drafting, had become the supreme record body of the Kingdom – becoming the tool by which the rulers were able to unhinge the natural administrative practice. They could in fact speed the execution of the orders and of the warrants because of the unofficial and wide intervention capacity of the Secretaries who could imperatively intervene in any area of the administration as a consequence of a direct order of the King or of his islander deputies. The overlapping of different chancery traditions within the Sicilian institutional apparatus caused the development of innovative governance tools that took shape of writing practice, record standards and filing systems of the documents, according to the new demands of the rulers. About the lictera exequtoria, whose we concisely said before, it’s here enough to say that it became a basic instrument by means of which the King, despite the mediation of the Viceroy, was able to give execution to the privilegia and to the lictere patentes written by its secretaries. So he actually intervened on the promotion and cooptation of Sicilian officers at every level of the administration they were. The control action carried out on the officer body is also inferable from the innovative record systems that were prepared in Sicily in the first half of the fifteenth century. They allowed in fact the sovereign to be able to carry out a perpetual monitoring of the activity of the islander officers, as one can clearly deduce, for example, by the libri quictacionum and the libri castrorum of the Conservatoria’s office. Within the latter, in fact, the most innovative record systems were developed. They, apparently related only to the financial matters, were instead characterized by a series of ‘political functions’ that allowed the Aragonese sovereign to increase his control over the Sicilian kingdom. The coeval processes of centralization of the administration of Sicily and of concentration of the archives at the Hosterium of Palermo are a further sign of the bureaucratic rationalization which characterized the action of the kings of Aragon. Since the compromise of Caspe (1412), in fact, they were involved in a series of interventions on the Sicilian institutions that aimed to find out appropriate instruments to govern the new needs of government, because of all the economic, political and social changes that were involving all the Italian territorial states of the fifteenth century.