LA GESTIONE DEI BENI PUBBLICI NEL DUCATO DI BENEVENTO FRA ARCHEOLOGIA E FONTI SCRITTE

The Management of Fiscal Estates in the Duchy of Benevento: Insights from Archaeology and Written Sources. By the mid-8th century, the estates of the Lombard dukes of Benevento were extensive, and we have a relatively detailed understanding of their types and distribution, with areas of varying density across the territory. The aim of this article is to propose a hypothesis about the management of ducal lands, comparing the sparse evidence from written sources with archaeological data from Faragola, in northern Apulia, which in the Early Middle Ages was part of a large ducal estate known as the gaio Fecline. Faragola appears to have functioned as a key node in a network connecting different environments, social strata, and spatial contexts: a service center and a hub for the collection of goods, which served and coordinated an extensive estate dotted with condome, the individual productive units attested in written sources (including also in the gaio Fecline) and sometimes grouped into curtes. Faragola was likely one of these curtes. It hosted several dozen families; it served as an administrative center for scattered farming units in the surrounding area, inhabited by communities occupying sites that had been villas, farms, and vici in Late Antiquity; and it acted as a collection point for goods largely destined for consumption elsewhere, while also specializing in the production of tools. The archaeological evidence from Faragola and the Carapelle Valley allows us to overcome some of the structural limitations of written documentation for southern Italy in the 8th-9th centuries. At Faragola, we can “see” one of the managerial centers that ducal charters merely evoke without ever describing, capturing instead its internal complexity and high degree of centralization.