“Accountability” is a two-edged sword. It assumes the existence and the presence of a political, economic, and social hierarchy of some sort whereby an official or a body of officials is called to account to a superior for an office held and discharged, or for taxes collected (or not collected), or for corruption rooted out, or for instructions obeyed and carried out, etc.
This collection of eleven papers, plus the editor’s introduction, embraces a wide sweep of both levels and forms of political, economic, and social accountability across a good swathe of late medieval Europe. The papers reflect a widespread interest in the topic, judging by the institutional range of the scholar/participants at the conference whence the papers originated (University of Bucharest, June 2023). [1] Except for two papers on France, the major hereditary monarchies of the day are largely ignored in these closely read case studies. Mostly we look at cities and units of government within them, along with some Italian efforts at expansion and efforts to establish a commercial empire. And in keeping with this focus, the authors offer credentials of affiliation with universities and research projects in Bucharest, Warsaw, and Salerno as well as Rome, Padua, and Florence among the various home bases.
Though the papers center around a common theme, they do not point to any single conclusion or path of institutional development, and given that each paper goes its own way, there is neither a general bibliography nor an index, though there is an abundance of footnotes pointing to much recent work on medieval “accountability.”
Each paper is very much a separate and independent case study. Marie Dejoux takes us to the question of “accountability or culpability” and the throne of France. Royal officials owed loyalty to their king and—at the same time—could be expected to be held to a level of honesty regarding revenues passing through their hands on their way up the bureaucratic ladder. As in a number of subsequent papers, there is a look at the methods of bookkeeping: how accounts were recorded, verified, and maintained. Royal officials stood the risk of becoming scapegoats between the people and their king, though the creation of the office of baillis in 1190 was meant to close the gaps and clarify the methods of bookkeeping and accounting. Armand Jamme looks at some “private ledgers” of Peter Boyer, a paper chamberlain to several popes in the 1370s. Based on his recent discovery of some notebooks and personal accounts, Jamme explores Boyer as one who loaned money while also having to worry about repaying what he had borrowed. Methods of accounting and the depiction of some ledger pages illuminate the complications that seem a regular aspect of delving into the world of money, whether it was Boyer’s or the pope’s.
Serena Galasso turns to private and gendered financial records in late medieval Florence. The fate of the dowry that Costanza Bartolo brought to her marriage, and that as a widow she proceeded to donate to four daughters in exchange for an annuity, can be followed thanks to the preservation of household and legal documents from Florence. And thanks to the preservation of letters from a number of upper-class women, we can follow efforts to “negotiate accountability with their husbands,” with fraud and dishonest bookkeeping regular players in the game. Alessandro Silvestri takes us to a larger stage: accounting and corruption in the fifteenth-century kingdom of Sicily. The problem that confronted virtually all royal servants touching the collection of revenue was that of “All Sicilian officers, operating in localities...marked by multiple vertical relations of accountability.” The magna curia rationum functioned as both the highest judicial court and the kingdom’s main accounting body. Direct and indirect taxation, loans, inaccurate accounts, cheating on licenses for exports of grain, all were roads to corruption that could lead to a jail sentence. Family networks and limited literacy at the level of local officials were hardly a boon to the exchequer of a king who always needed more and more because he was almost always at war with powerful neighbors.
Francois Otchakovsky-Laurens looks at municipal accountability in fourteenth-century Marseilles. Much focus is on how an account of office and the collection of money from taxes were investigated and assessed when a term of office ended. These investigations were key links in the chain of municipal government: in one fourteen-year span, 272 councilors were called to account, and 260 other councilors were elected to verify their reports. The fight against fraud and corruption was a major issue, methods of accounting a vital part of the tale. Dana-Silvia Caciur-Andreeescu looks at how comparable issues were dealt with in the Venetian colony of Dalmatia on the Adriatic. Here the Count, who would be held responsible for the colony’s financial returns, had to balance an established “local administrative autonomy” and the oversight of his Venetian masters when his term of office ended. It was a slippery game: inspectors from Venice could be sent to check up on the count and local affairs. Oversight of an empire was a complicated task.
Following the pointer of imperialism and would-be empire, Alesandro Flavio Dumitrascu turns to the Venetian and Genoese trading colonies on the Black Sea. Though there were differences between how the two cities oversaw their officials and how seriously complaints from the citizenry were taken, such issues as tax collection, honest bookkeeping, and the turnover of officials were comparable. Genoa sems to have done a better job of oversight, but its outposts were of greater importance to the home city than were those of Venice. Emanuele Carletti turns to financial management in the mendicant orders as hierarchy and the role of money and property eventually raised questions about the mendicants’ raison d'être and their original ideas about their role in society. Alms and charity had to yield to harsh realities and eventually the friars developed innovative methods of accounting, to the extent that secular government looked to them for leads. Marco Conti takes us back to Italy, investigating taxation, public debt, and municipal revenues in Bologna, with a specific focus on the gabellieri, the collectors of indirect taxes. Innovative registers from 1334 helped verify the accounts, though tax evasion remained a serious problem. Anna Pomierny-Wasinska looks at how carefully Florence measured real property that was up for sale, given its value and the important role such transactions played in the city’s finances. Trained officials assessed both property boundaries and the worth of what was under dispute. Paola Pinelli concludes the collection by looking at how artisans and small merchants played a role in the economic life of Tuscan cities. Money was everyone’s business: nineteen different crafts, including soap makers and junk dealers, figure in the accounts of Prato. The spread of literacy and the very early days of double-entry bookkeeping created records that shed light on economic activity below the level of what town government usually preserved for itself and for us.
Each paper is a case study unto itself. Taken together, they bring home the endless struggle—at virtually every level of society and government—between those with some money and those above who presumably had a claim to a share of it. Though the papers never refer to each other, they do highlight the universal nature of the problems they cover. Accountability was to be found at all levels, virtually everywhere, and tracking its many forms and episodes is a useful pathway to focus on the question of “how the Middle Ages really worked.”
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Note:
1. Conference and publication funded by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Digitization.