Hospitalitas II: The changing meaning of Hospitalitas

The hospitalitas / metatum of the later roman Empire was the obligation imposed on private individuals to make available temporarily, for short periods of time, portions of their urban property or rural buildings in order to lodge members of the imperial bureaucracy or soldiers and officers of the roman army on the move. The division of the property between host and guest was by shares of one third. Hospitalitas was aimed to secure the right to ownership of the Roman citizen: from a legal point of view it was the opposite of expropriation and confiscation. Sources about stable and long-term settlements of barbarians during the Fifth Century AD show settlements characterized by the division of roman properties by shares of one third (tertiae). The historical analysis of these settlements suggests that, where there was negotiation between barbarian groups and the imperial authorities, or directly with roman landowners, the barbarians obtained percentages of property, including farmlands, that evoked the shares of temporary occupation that the Roman administration reserved for the ancient institution of the hospitalitas/metatum. The settlement on third-party shares of land is documented only in the settlements of the Burgundians, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. The institution of hospitalitas made it possible to identify the original ownership of the allocated land.