Demonstrates how the evolution of food policy went hand-in-hand with political developments in medieval Tuscan city-states
Feeding the Medieval Italian Commune explores food security in medieval Italy through the political economy of grain in Tuscany, one of the most prosperous, populated, and culturally significant areas of later medieval Europe. George W. Dameron shows how the Tuscan city-states, between 1100 and 1350, strove and struggled to provide their urban populations with sufficient grain. By 1350, the major communes-Florence, Siena, Lucca, Pistoia, Arezzo, San Gimignano, and Pisa-had developed food provisioning strategies and magistracies, many of them permanent, to feed their urban populations and to help stabilize and legitimize their governing regimes.
Dameron shows how the evolution of food policy went hand-in-hand with political developments and pressures in the Tuscan communes over the course of these centuries, locating four significant turning points in urban grain provisioning strategies that coincided with four crucial moments in Tuscan social and political history. Each city-state followed its own pathway to maintain grain security; Dameron's comparative approach reveals how geographical factors, catastrophic weather events, political factionalism, and wars between city-states were also factors that shaped access to grain and other foodstuffs. From Florence's rise to political and economic dominance, facilitated by the city-state's unparalleled and privileged access to grain in the thirteenth century, to the outbreak of the Black Death, as plague spread through grain imports in the mid-fourteenth century, Dameron reveals the role that grain played in determining the divergent political trajectories of the Tuscan communes.
Placing the history of grain provisioning within the context of the evolving republican governments of the communes and the particular pressures they faced, Feeding the Medieval Italian Commune uncovers a new story of urban food policies and the politics, economy, and culture of pre-modern Tuscany.
