Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0068246200006930How to cite this article: P. J. Jones (1956). Florentine families and Florentine diaries in the fourteenth century.

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.

A detailed history, from the mid-thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, of an Italian state, Rimini, and its ruling family, the Malatesta. The Malatesta are best known, through the works of Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington Symonds and others, for their colourful contribution to the court life and culture of renaissance Italy. There are other sides to their history of at least comparable importance. By their representative status, as princes of middle rank, and by their unusually long tenure of power, the Malatesta are among the families most typical in all its stages of Italy's Age of Despots: in their acquisition and exercise of authority, their political career and personality, in the circumstances of their fall. At the same time, by their position as papal subjects, in Romagna and the March of Ancona, their progress is inseparable from the parallel history of government in the Papal State, first effectively founded in the same century as Maltesta rule and consolidated, two hundred years later, by the destruction of the Malatesta and other tyrants of central Italy. It is the purpose of this book to investigate in detail the origin, development and character of Maltesta government and the causes of its overthrow, against the background of changing relations between popes and despots, dynastic and papal signoria.

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