Reframing the “Documentary Revolution” in Medieval Italy

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the clerics of the congregation of San Salvatore in Naples were preparing a petition, or maybe a legal defense, regarding their taxes. Someone from the congregation appears to have been delegated to research and to document their exemption from a tax called the collecta, or as historianHiroshi Takayama termed it, “the notorious collecta.” Imposts identified with this fearsome appellation first appear under the twelfth-century Norman kings of southern Italy as infrequent, extraordinary levies. Frederick II, that stupor mundi of the thirteenth century,made themannual and developed both rates and systems of collection that even the papacy considered excessive. The notes of our late nineteenthcentury researcher on San Salvatore’s exemptions from this tax survive today in a cardboard box at the Archivio Storico Diocesano in Naples. They are certainly