La centralità della dimensione mediterranea nella costruzione dell'Europa medievale: circolazione e sistemi di relazioni

The expansion of the post-carolingian core in the Mediterranean area (Spain, Southern Italy, Sicily and Crusader kingdoms) is an outstanding point of the "making of Europe" (according to R. Bartlett), along with the achievement of a commercial hegemony on the Mediterranean routes by Western merchants. Nevertheless, historical researches and syntesis did not consider enough the role played by institutional compounds that unified a large part of the Mediterranean area under the same power. The history of the so-called Crown of Aragon is an example of the extent to wich political unification initiated strong trends of circulation of nobles, royal officiers and merchants between the dominions of the King of Aragon, from Iberian peninsula to Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, Greece. This circulation stimulated also the interchange of insitutional practices; among these, as to Sicily, are the Cortes, the office of Maestro Razionale, the Viceroy and other royal offices. Special importance has had the creation in the Sicilian kingdom of the office of Conservatore del Real Patrimonio, coming from the institutional structure of the kingdom of Castile. That involved also the transfer of castilian clerks in the island, bringing their own accounting methods and even their handwriting (the littera cortesana), used in that Sicilian office during decades.