Legal Plunder by Daniel Lord Smail

Author:Daniel Lord Smail [Smail, Daniel Lord]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674737280
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Expenses associated with a predation of 6 lire 10 soldi in coin, Lucca, August 133879

For the datia, 1 soldo 4 denari

For the crier-sergeant’s travel expenses (via nunptii), 1 soldo 2 denari

For the report of predation, 1 soldo

For this acknowledgment, 1 soldo

The datia listed in these expenses was surprisingly low, close to %. The total cost of the predation came to 4 soldi 6 denari, or 3.45 percent of the value of the coins seized. A sense of the fees associated with the plundering and auctioning of goods can also be garnered from the more thorough entries that characterize the records of the Court of the Rebels and the Banished. Here, the fees collected by the notaries, sergeants, and porters in nine cases varied considerably, from 2 to 18 percent, with a median of 5.6 percent.80 There are two reasons for the higher fees associated with plundering the goods of rebels: first, the cases generated more paperwork than did ordinary predation; second, the auction itself cost money, adding to the costs.

One of the important features of this system is that the plunder itself, once seized, almost never made an appearance in court. There are the rare exceptions. In a case from 1335 where a debtor contested the validity of the creditor’s claims, the creditor was ordered to bring an article of clothing that had already been given to him back to the court, where it was entrusted to the notary for safekeeping.81 But this counterexample aside, the process of plunder, at least from the point of view of the court, was conducted almost entirely in the shadows, creating a possibility for fraud that was not lost upon some of the more unscrupulous crier-sergeants hired by the Lucchese courts. In 1334, an inquest was carried out against a crier-sergeant of the court of the Podestà. According to the resulting sentence, he had plundered a widow of a sheet 8 arms in length valued at 25 soldi and held on to it, refusing to restore it to her; in addition, he extracted 5 soldi for himself.82 An even more vivid case involved Cholestro di Parma, a crier-sergeant attached not to the court system per se but instead to one of the city’s tax farms.83 Fraudulently declaring that he possessed a commission to pursue an act of debt collection given to him by the owner of the farm, he seized a woman’s medley tunic worth 4 lire, and after this went on to commit “many, many, many predations against many, many, many citizens and residents of the Sei Miglia, seizing many things,” none of which he subsequently consigned to the Chamber of Pledges associated with the farm. Cholestro, prudently, declined to respond to the summons and ran away. The very next page records a similar case of fraud by two men passing themselves off as crier-sergeants who managed to extract four double-bed mattresses lined with woolen cloth in indigo and green, eight pairs of sheets, four indigo cushions, garments, and two pairs of cattle.84

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