Before the Normans by Kreutz Barbara M.;

Author:Kreutz, Barbara M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

7. The Late Tenth Century and South Italian Structures

IT IS TIME NOW TO MOVE FROM the particular (Amalfi and Salerno) to the general and to consider the south Italian scene as a whole as the tenth century drew to a close. This chapter will focus chiefly on the structures of the society, its institutions and patterns of behavior. Although evidence is far more profuse for some areas than others, it is possible to reach at least a few broad conclusions.

Growth or Development?

In the preceding chapter, the term “development” was on occasion used in relation to tenth-century Salerno and its economy. But as J. D. Gould has suggested, one should perhaps differentiate between “development” and “growth.” “Growth,” according to Gould, is the appropriate term for “a sustained increase in real per capita income”; “development” is best reserved for something broader and more auspicious: growth accompanied by sustained structural change.1 Gould was, of course, not discussing early medieval Europe, for which we have no way of measuring per capita income. And by “structural change” Gould chiefly meant economic diversification of a sort one could hardly expect in the tenth century. Nonetheless, Gould's distinction is provocative and it can be highly useful; we need only apply it in a manner more befitting a medieval model. For our purposes, “growth” must be translated as simply a sustained (if not per capita) increase in wealth, and for “structural change” we must look to the general structure of the society.

In Campania, in the latter half of the tenth century, we see no evidence of structural change in the sense of new societal configurations likely to underpin and promote long-term advance. Within the principality of Salerno, the rich simply got richer, the powerful more powerful. Neither there, nor in Benevento and Capua, nor at Naples, do we see a significant middle class emerging. Indeed our Salerno sample suggests that, if anything, the “middling class” suffered in the course of the tenth century. With dynasties now firmly established, the populus no longer played its historic role (however minimal) in the choice of leader. Small, independent landowners seem to have lost ground—literally. Furthermore, the church supplied no countervailing power; nowhere in Campania do we find bishops challenging the local rulers. Altogether, while the maiores were increasingly prosperous—“growth,” of a sort—the society was not exhibiting greater diversification. Rather the reverse.

Such a pattern was of course hardly uncommon in tenth-century Europe. Yet Campania had characteristics that may have made “development” particularly unlikely. In other parts of Europe, we often find correlation between economic improvement and the emerging of towns. In many cases, these towns gradually took on a life of their own, eventually creating a new force within their regions. But Campania already had its towns. Unimpressive though some were in comparison with the Roman era, nonetheless these towns had continuously served as focal points. Furthermore, the established order was urban-centered. Within each of the independent principalities and duchies, the ruler was based at, and governed from, the chief town or

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