Fiscal Policy in an Italian Commune: A Study of the Lucchese Gabella Maggiore, 1370-1410
Keywords: Italy
Lucca
Renaissance
Tariffs
Taxation
Tuscany

This thesis concerns the interrelationship of fiscal policy and political culturepresents an economic analysis of in late medieval Lucca in the context of its political culture and an evolving legislative traditiona. In the thirty years following Lucca’s emancipation from Pisa in 1369, the constituents of this nominally popular republic gradually accepted the hegemony of a single clan of silk merchants and international bankers, the Guinigi family. The evident acquiescence to disenfranchisement on the part of middle and upper class citizens flies in the face of assumptions about political struggle and honor exchange in the premodern Italian republics. In this study, I work towards a better understanding of the nature of this quiet revolution from the perspective of the city’s economic fortunes during that thirty-year period, as viewed through the records of its central customs house. To that end, I have focused on the documentary output of a single institution, the tax office called the court of the gabella maggiore. The gabella maggiore was the tariff on most goods entering or leaving the city; notaries working at the central clearing house registered manifests for every shipment that passed its threshold, the counterparts of the physical licenses issued to taxpayers for safe conduct. My approach relies on the rich survival of customs registers between 1373 and 1410, whose entries collectively provide a profile of urban commercial and industrial activity at the turn of the fifteenth century. By observing Lucchese commerce through through the lens of the city’s fiscal policy, which a topic has rightly received so much attention as a nexus of public and private interests in neighboring Florence and northern Italy in general, I aim to present a narrative that runs parallel to and informs the political history of the city in this period. The majority of the thesis, however, presents an institutional history of the gabella maggiore and a thorough analysis of three urban industries and the fiscal legislation designed to foster them. Ultimately, I have focused on a single institution, the tax office called the court of the gabella maggiore. The gabella maggiore was the tariff on most goods entering or leaving the city; notaries working at the central clearinghouse registered manifests for every shipment that passed its threshold, the counterparts of the physical licenses issued to taxpayers for safeconduct. My approach relies on the rich survival of customs registers between 1373 and 1410, whose entries collectively provide a profile of urban commercial and industrial activity at the turn of the fifteenth century. I fouound that this my material describes an ever-weakening market for local products, a picture completed by contemporary laments about failing businesses and poor fiscal health in the minutes of the city’s republican government. In the eyes of Lucca’s merchant-oligarchs, this economic decline threatened to destroy the precious independence of Lucca by fostering emigration, decreasing production, and consequently lowering the revenues of the customs tariff. The governing councils were often slow to respond to these threats because of constitutional obstacles and what I describe as a lack of confidence and consensus within the inner oligarchy. Operating under high pressure in an low-information environment that discouraged experimentation, the councilors more readily reacted to the advice of expert bureaucrats, including the chief magistrate of the gabella maggiore, and “invited” advisors not currently serving on the high councils. In the end, I argue suggest that there is may be only a short distancean informative link between theise informal modes of ceding authority and the formal devolution of the state upon Paolo Guinigi in 1400.