Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 (review)

In this book, Castiglione investigates a collection of villages near Rome that constituted a princely enclave, Monte Libretto, within the Papal state. The Barberini family, originally Florentine, purchased these rural estates, in effect a stato, in 1644 for 1.16 million scudi. (How they obtained this fortune would make an interesting story not relevant to the purpose of this book.) The principal aim is to uncover the political life of the villagers, usually about 2,500 in number, as they used literacy, the papal bureaucracy, and the occasional paternalistic impulses of their lords to survive the Barberinis' need for income and the papacy's for taxes.

Castiglione produces some marvelous records to illuminate life in these villages. The Barberini lords were indefatigable correspondents who bombarded their local officials with letters and kept good archives. Even rarer, for a number of years in some of the villages, records of local communal meetings survive, providing important evidence of local government at its literal grassroots. Hence, this study provides a fresh glimpse at the early modern countryside in a part of Europe generally neglected in broader debates about rural life and agriculture.

Monte Libretto, in the mountainous Sabine country of Latium, provides the setting for Castiglione's extended look at political culture and how what she calls "adversarial literacy" shaped village ways of pushing back against the claims of Barberini lordship. All parties used the written word to foster their own interests, a dynamic probably going back to the dawn of literacy. Villagers and lords assumed that oral customs and documents formed a contract that all parties were bound to respect. The individual Barberini nobles emerge as distinctive characters, but Castiglione's emphasis is on what remains an amorphous mass of villagers. It is not entirely clear who these country people were. These villagers must have had different levels of wealth and education that shaped their political, social, and economic goals. Nor are enough details provided on the local ecology, crops, and animals, wild and domesticated, to permit a deduction about how these villagers made their living. Without a clearer sense of the social composition of these villages, their political culture becomes not much more than a vague desire to pay as little in rents and dues as possible, and to defend local customs in the face of perceived innovative lordly exactions.

Few local people emerge as distinct individuals with ideas and goals of their own. The local records seem to mask the village leaders—a wise policy since the Barberini would punish their opponents. Lords and popes needed more income from the countryside over the course of the eighteenth century, and in Rome itself the public debt and other investments provided the context in which agriculture did or did not pay. Even the villagers had choices, and it is not clear whether fairly stable population levels hide migration of the talented and ambitious to the big city or better rural prospects.

This book does not tie the political-culture questions to other mountainous regions of Europe where similar issues have been studied. Without a closer look at Barberini or village budgets, which may simply not exist, the local political culture that emerges seems detached from a broader context.