<論説>八・九世紀トスカーナ地方南部の土地貸借文書 : 自由農民の没落をめぐって

Abstract

八・九世紀のイタリア北・中部では、自由身分の土地所有者が保有農民に転化していく動向が確認される。本稿では、これまで「古典荘園」の発展との関わりで論じられることの多かった自由人没落論を再検討すべく、モンテ・アミアータ修道院に伝来する土地貸借文書を素材として、その文書形式と契約内容とを検討した。その際に、ロワール河以北の場合とは異なり、領主・農民関係が文書を媒介として設定された点に留意した。その結果、以下のことが明らかになった。南トスカーナではランゴバルド期からカロリング初期にかけて、貧困のために土地財産を聖俗領主に売却して、これを請け戻すことを余儀なくされた自由人が増加した。これらの者は対等な法関係を装う文書を通して、重い賦役労働を課せられていった。そればかりか、領主の側からの戦略的な文書・貨幣・公権力の利用により、ロワール・ライン間地域の保有農民よりも過酷な入身的支配に服していったのである。

Eighth and ninth-century Italian documents show that the decline of the free peasants frorn landowners to tenants began in the Lombard age and intensified during the early Carolingian period. Italian historians, such as Vito Fumagalli and Bruno Andreolli, tend to connect this process with the expansion and rationalization of the manorial system, the sistema curtense, which was promoted by the Franks. Their argument, however, remains unproven. This paper reconsiders the process of the decline of the free peasantry, by investigating their legal, economic and social relationships with landlords, examining the forms and the contents of the written leases (libelli) of the monastery of Monte Amiata in the southern Tuscany. Attention is, in particular, paid to the fact that in Italy, as opposed to within the region between the Loire and the Rhine, the tenants' obligations to landlords, such as labour service or money rent, were, in many cases, fixed through written contracts. The conclusions are as follows : in eighth and early ninth-century southern Tuscany, more and more free peasants were forced to sell their lands and then lease them back because of poverty. The written leases, having the form of convenentia -- a bilateral contract based on mutual agreement, which constituted a legally equal relationship between lessors and lessees -- obliged the free ex-proprietors to fulfil, as tied-tenants, labour services as heavy as those performed by other lease-holding, hereditary tenants. Here one might assume that an ideal sistema curtense would be realised. However, it should be noted that the lease- holding tenants (libellarii) were driven into a much stronger personal dependence on the landlords than the tenants-cultivators on the northern part of the Alps. As with Ross Balzaretti's case of the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in early medieval Milan, there is, in the background of the social process, the strategic use of the written word (such as Plactium and lease) and the public institution (public law- court and local official), by both the monastery of Monte Amiata and by particular lay landlords of southern Tuscany. In addition, we need to consider the use of another device to bring free peasants under control: money, in other words, the purchase of lands from them and the imposition of fines defined in the fine-clause of lease. After all the landlords of the region tried not to create a standardised land-holding peasantry, but rather to exercise more coercive lordship over them through, above all, written leases of lands.