ABSTRACT
The study of taxation is crucial for the full understanding of the medieval polities’ nature and operation, whether they were realms, cities, or feudal lordships. However, scholarship has often pushed its study into the background of the academic investigation, analysing taxation in the context of various economic and political investigations, but rarely as an object of research per se. This chapter instead examines the emergence and development of taxation in Southern Italy and Sicily from 1100 to 1500. On the one hand, it discusses the establishment of the early fiscal systems in the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and their following transformations under the Swabian and the Angevin dynasties. On the other hand, by adopting a comparative approach, it analyses the organisation of taxation in the later Middle Ages, when the Southern Italian mainland and Sicily – the two Kingdoms of Sicily – became two distinct polities, respectively under the Angevin and the Catalan-Aragonese dynasty. In so doing, this chapter focuses on both the central and the territorial level, examining a broad spectrum of themes, including the organisation of direct collections of money, the crucial role the indirect tolls and levies’ revenues, and the distribution of the fiscal burden among the realms’ subjects.
