Gouverner l'argent public

In late thirteenth-century Italy, war against the Este lords led to a financial crisis in Bologna that was to have repercussions for years to come. This study provides an overview of taxation in Bologna in the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries and describes the consequences of the surge in public spending for society, the institutional system, and documentary production. Bologna offers a very favourable field of study because of the wealth of documentation in its archives and a historiographical revival that has made it easy to contextualise the study of urban taxation. Thirteenth-century Bologna was one of the largest and most populous cities in medieval Europe. In institutional terms, it was like most of the communes of the Popolo, which were superseded by seigniorial experiments. A study of over two hundred registers of various kinds housed in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna has shown that it was public spending and the difficulty in overseeing it that were the real driving forces of change, that destabilised authority, forced the administration and institutions to evolve, and led to the creation of new instruments and a new rationale for record-keeping.