This book, long-expected and long in the making, has been very much worth waiting for. Since the early 1990s Ross Balzaretti has produced a steady flow of writings on early medieval Italy, on north-Italian legal and social arrangements, on the cult of St Ambrose at Milan and its hinterland, and on the regional economies of the northern parts of the peninsula. Combining close-to-the-ground archival researches with a rigorously theorised commitment to gender studies, Balzaretti has acquired both a profound sense of the humanity of the early medieval people who inhabit the book, and a keen appreciation of the eighteenth-century Italian Enlightenment savants who brought eighth-century charters to light. In a beguiling entrée to the book, Balzaretti traces the enigmatic story of the peasant woman Anstruda of Limonta (pp. 29–38). Near the book's end, he uses recent archaeological finds to recover methods of land-management, drainage and flood prevention (pp. 495–500). This reader turned the final pages with a twinge of regret at leaving Milan and the religious community of St Ambrose, the city's hinterland and the local lay communities who inhabited the landscapes of the Valtellina and the one hundred known properties between Lakes Maggiore and Como, c. 1000 (where the most excellent of the many excellent maps is to be found). Throughout, and key to the book's structure, is the maintenance of a kind of equilibrium – but at the same time, a tension – between ‘monks and society’.
Part i, ‘Small and Large Worlds’, covering roughly one half of the book, begins with charters and their interpretation. The eighth-century case of Anstruda is a revealing microhistory which turns out to have large implications for the status of Lombard women more generally. The charter evidence for the village of Campione, making up 10 per cent of the total, is particularly valuable. When Charlemagne took over Lombard Italy in 773–4, and Milan and its region were integrated into his empire, micro- and macro-level materials connected. The charters of Sant'Ambrogio make possible the construction of a history of Sant'Ambrogio's lands. Chapter ii, ‘Interpretation’, examines the flourishing of Ambrose's cult under Frankish patronage, especially during the archiepiscopate of Angilbert ii (824–59), who commissioned a gilded altar-cover with panels depicting scenes from the lives of Christ and of Ambrose: replete with 4,379 gemstones, it is still on show in the church today. Given the often dubious written material available, Balzaretti engages with it critically, and subjects the evidence for Ambrosian xenodochia to similar treatment.
In Chapter iii, backtracking neatly to provide a very substantial account of Milan in late antiquity (pp. 113–66), Balzaretti explores the developing relationship between city and countryside, ‘in which the monastic community of Sant'Ambrogio was well placed to play an increasingly significant role’ (p. 166). The chapter ends with the penetrating observation that ‘a monastery was eventually founded alongside [Sant'Ambrogio] by a family – the Carolingians – for whom monastic communities were an important means of spiritual salvation and earthly power’.
Chapter iv deals at length with patrons and charters (pp. 167–236): fortuitously, the earliest of the authentic, complete Sant'Ambrogio charters extant is that of Anstruda, whence started the flow of eighth-century gifts to Sant’Ambrogio in 721 and ended with Charlemagne's diploma of 790 following the take-over of the Lombard kingdom in 773–4. Between are tantalising glimpses of local patrons before 780, and the founding in the mid-780s, by Archbishop Peter, of a monastery headed by Abbot Benedict, a priest, in the 780s. Balzaretti shrewdly comments that the community's pastoral role would have ‘attracted potential donors’ (p. 182). The chronicler Andrew of Bergamo recorded two bits of dialogue both dating to 834, one between Archbishop Angilbert ii and the Emperor Lothar, the other between the archbishop and the Emperor Louis (p. 197): Balzaretti might perhaps have made even more of exchanges which offer information on political as well as institutional history at a critical moment. Not only do prosopographical probings reveal between the mid-830s and the early 840s some interesting links among royal vassals and members of the royal family, but they suggest how Sant'Ambrogio and its monks worked and networked to create a political community across the city (of Milan).
In chapter v, ‘Cityscape’ (pp. 237–87), Balzaretti gets to grips with much newly accessible material on economic history. His very carefully nuanced treatment of the evidence brings in archaeology (while stressing its severe stratigraphic problems) as well as documents (while stressing the urban character of Milan). After the fifth century, the city's economic role changed and the ‘local region became its lifeblood, its immediate hinterland grew in importance, and the horizons of its inhabitants became directed at a region which they came to think of as Milanese’. From 796 onwards, negotiatores (a term covering merchants, traders, dealers and shopkeepers) are more often attested, and women, though less well evidenced, appear in cash transactions in the ninth and centuries. Numbers of churchmen thus engaged suggest their increasing importance in connections between city and countryside (pp. 239–45).
A section on ‘Neighbours, homes and gardens’ (pp. 245–56) captures ‘a clear sense of neighbourliness’ arising from proximity: the people ‘lived somewhere in Milan’, and ‘markers of various sorts were a necessary part of effective social life’. As compared with Rome, archaeological evidence for homes in Milan is scant, though there it becomes more plentiful later in the ninth century when the two wills of Archbishop Anspert (868–81) detail ‘two-storey houses and halls, mills [or bakeries] … and all those buildings there … within this city of Milan near the public forum called the assemblatorio’, and there are ‘spaces, courtyards, gardens, wells, enclosures, and ponds’. Some buildings were termed ‘public’, as, for instance, a mint. Urban churches proliferated in Milan, and their rural properties are documented in the later ninth and tenth centuries (Map 4). Less well documented are other monasteries and nunneries. Concluding part i, Balzaretti qualifies claims made by Richard Hodges for still-flourishing old Roman cities with literate cultures undergoing ‘long-term transformations’ (pp. 286–7). Milan, in Balzaretti's view, ‘was never an entity divorced from the surrounding region which both shaped it and [was] shaped by it’, and ‘cityness’ was ‘a product of these profound ecological rhythms’. Readers might find such concepts puzzlingly hard to unlock, had they not been given keys to the muniments-room and the charter-dossiers. The rural history of medieval northern Italy and ‘how cultivation was organised in the best-evidenced villages’ (p. 294) now lie open to modern researchers.
Part ii – the heart and soul of the book – consists of four chapters (vi–ix), split into sections on a number of different villages (Campione, Gnignano and Cologno, Valtellina, Limonza and Inzago). The book's subtitle, ‘monks and society’, comes into its own when ‘the progressive involvement‘ of the Sant'Ambrogio community with different villages and their denizens is subtly traced and an essential part of what the Belgian economic historian J.-P. Devroey has termed the ‘rationality of monastic thinking’ is brought into view. Matching the analytical finesse of the book's argument, the quality and value of the maps is exceptionally high.
The comparative cases of Gnignano and Collogno illustrate how ‘a monastic institution was able to fit in with existing tenurial patterns … The monastery thus helped to connect transnational lay elites with local notables’ (pp. 391–2). At Limonta and Inzago monastic strategies became enmeshed with those of families (pp. 468–70). Chapter ix ends with renewed stress on the importance of charters in the construction of relationships of power:
it has to be more than simple coincidence that the moment when a castrum appeared in Inzago in 971 is exactly the point when this dossier effectively ends … The forces which caused such fortifications to appear … were never going to be constrained by those in society who tried to play by the legal rules which charters had come to represent. It was pointless to document the building of a castle with a charter as at the time bricks and mortar spoke more loudly than any parchment. Parchments, however, had the last laugh, surviving to tell their stories long after castles had perished. (p. 473).
Balzaretti proves himself a master of style as well as substance.
Early medieval monasteries … were institutions which facilitated micro-connections between people and places … Some of these activities obviously had spiritual motivations … Charters, however, are not the best source evidence for spiritual concerns. They are a much better source for transactions that we now term ‘economic’. (p. 480).
Part iii rounds off the book by focusing on ‘the connectivity which such transactions brought about within the region around Milan’ and
how the activities of the monks of Sant'Ambrogio helped to form a hinterland for Milan which was differently constituted from the earlier hinterland of Roman times based on an empire-wide system of exchange. Charters … both constituted and documented … this distinctive ecosystem, and the microanalysis of charters … is essential to understand how urban territories were formed and sustained, and thus how urban life came to be so important both in Milan and across much of the Italian peninsula.
Excavations at Comacchio ‘inform answers to microlevel questions’ (p. 482). Balzaretti puts his fingers on both questions and answers. Can ‘a meaningful connection between rural hinterlands and long-distance trade’ be demonstrated for this region or not? How far did abbots show a level of rationality involved in building up monastic holdings? How important was peasant productivity in connecting rural hinterlands and long-distance trade?
There's now much evidence for the use of credit, the charging of interest, the control of markets and of urban consumption, and the activities of laypeople in land management and transfers of surpluses, in water control, drainage and flood protection, and productive industries, including a coherent economic support system for such religious purposes as oil and lights (pp. 522–5). Whether ruminating on chestnuts or cheese, land or water, Balzaretti eschews simplicity. His magnificent book ends on a decisive up-beat, and a perfectly-pitched note of political, social and economic complexity.
