I

First, the lease of the oxen: before 1348, the lessee was often responsible for providing or purchasing the draught animals.5 G. Pinto and P. Pirillo, Il contratto di mezzadria nella Toscana medievale, vol. 1, Contado di Siena XIII–1348 (Florence, 1987), pp. 43–56, at p. 55; Muzzi and Nenci, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 92–9. After 1348, sharecroppers asked to pay only half of this cost or, alternatively, required the lessor to buy the oxen ‘at his own risk’, without sharing with the lessee the cost of purchasing the animals.6 Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 131–56, at p. 151. A pair of oxen was generally replaced every four to five years in late medieval Tuscany. See Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans, pp. 118–20. Likewise, sharecroppers frequently asked the lessors to pay for seed.7 See Pinto and Pirillo, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 43–56, at p. 55; Muzzi and Nenci, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 92–9; Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 131–56, at p. 151. Another type of demand involved loans to run the mezzadria landholding: after 1348, lessees refused to pay old debts and requested further loans. By doing so they probably aimed to increase their buying power on the commodity market while simultaneously reducing their liability for capital inputs such as oxen and sowing seed.8 See Piccinni, ‘L’evoluzione della rendita’, pp. 57–95. In addition, sharecroppers sold their labour as seasonal wage workers to profit from high wages. Finally, the scarcity of labour supply led sharecroppers to concentrate on the best land available, while poorer land was abandoned.9 Such concentration probably led to a rise in land productivity in the long run: ibid. To sum up, as many lessors complained, ‘almost all the harvest was taken’ by the lessees, reducing landowners’ profit.

In order to counteract these threats, ‘severe laws’ and ‘good deliberation’ were immediately approved by the city councils of Florence and Siena. In September 1348 the major Sienese assembly enacted a series of laws ‘against tenants, sharecroppers and labourers’.10 Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria, document XIV (1348). The measures adopted were not reported, but they all aimed to fight the ‘ferocious, inhuman and ungrateful purpose’ shown by rural workers and to remove their ability ‘to plan or to put in practice anything damaging [to] city-dwellers and rural landowners’.11 Ibid. The greed for money of Florentine servants and labourers after the Black Death is noted also by Giovanni Boccaccio: see V. Branca (ed.), Giovanni Boccaccio. Decameron (Turin, 1956), p. 9. The motivation behind these measures was the desire to protect and advance landownership among Sienese city dwellers.12 This process never stopped in the Sienese territory, even in time of crisis: for instance, in 1348, the volume of property transactions reached 55,000 florins and was mainly land purchases by city-dwellers. See A. Bacciu, Per una analisi prosopografica della società senese: lo spoglio della Gabella dei contratti del 1348 (Siena, 2013), pp. 18–20.

In Florence, only one year after the epidemics, in August 1349, a committee was ordered to write new laws to control sharecroppers and rural wage labourers.13 ASFi, Provvisioni, 36, fol. 154v (25 August 1349). Previously, the commune had briefly attempted to control the wages of the lower and marginal strata of the city’s labourers. Furthermore, it never tried to limit the hyper-inflated prices for food and basic commodities as French and English governments did.14 In this regard, Cohn argues for the severity of Florentine laws in comparison with these countries. See Cohn, ‘After the Black Death’, 463–7. The measures against rural workers, according to the deliberations of the commune, were aimed specifically at dealing with the abandonment of landholdings by sharecroppers.15 ASFi, Provvisioni, 36, f. 154v (25 August 1349). The motivation of a law of 1355 states that ‘because the land that remains inhabited and uncultivated is a serious damage to the [city-dwellers’] possession and against the good and the peace in the city’. See ASFi, Provvisioni, 42, fols 114v–115r (21 August 1355). Florentine landlords feared this trend would raise rural wages further, increase costly competition among lessors and thus reduce their rate of profit from the land. As a consequence, Florentine city councils explicitly forbade rural workers from either withdrawing from any share-contract or from cultivating any land they had taken in lease without the approval of their lessors for the next three years.16 ASFi, Provvisioni, 36, fol. 154v (25 August 1349). The fine levied was a hundred lire, a sum ‘well beyond the wherewithal of the wealthiest peasants in second half of the fourteenth century’.17 Cohn, ‘After the Black Death’, 468.

This law was regularly re-enacted until 1363.18 See ASFi, Provvisioni, 40, fols 27r–27v (3 December 1352); 43, fol. 146v (12 September 1356); 46, fol. 101r (22 February 1358); fols 71v–72r (2 December 1363). In 1352, however, new measures were introduced.19 ASFi, Provvisioni, 40, fols 27r–27v (3 December 1352). First, landlords were entitled to sue their lessees if they were not working or if they damaged land taken in lease or left it uncultivated. Moreover, any such lawsuit should be reported to the Florentine officials in charge of grain provisioning. In this way, the daily conflicts between lessors and lessee were removed from court officials in rural communities. This measure can also be considered a major step in the development of the mezzadria system: it claimed for the city the economic, political and judicial management of sharecropping. For the same reason Sienese city councils moved to bring into the city all legal disputes between rural communities and city dwellers concerning the limits of commons and private properties in 1446.20 Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria, document XLIV (1446).

In addition, new regulations were made concerning the micro-economy of this system, the detailed clauses of the mezzadria contract.21 ASFi, Provvisioni, 40, fols 27r–27v (3 December 1352). The target was a series of payment in kind, such as a certain amount of pork, capons and eggs, that the lessee had to provide by contract to compensate the landlords for the use of the stables, garden and services of the mezzadria farm.22 See Pinto and Pirillo, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 43–56; Muzzi and Nenci, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 92–9; Piccinni, Il contratto di mezzadria, pp. 131–56. The sharecroppers’ refusal to pay for these services may have indirectly challenged the property rights of the landlords. Moreover, pig breeding and poultry were probably profitable for sharecroppers in times of high price inflation.23 See G. Piccinni, ‘Le donne nella mezzadria toscana delle origini’, in Cortonesi and Piccinni, Medioevo delle campagne, pp. 153–203; Tognetti, ‘Prezzi e salari’, 275–300. The law of 1352 compelled the lessee to deliver to the landlord half of the pork, capons and eggs produced up to a certain quantity.

Few years later, in 1355, a series of new laws blamed ill-defined ‘peasants’ for damaging Florentine real estates and for threatening tenants.24 See ASFi, Provvisioni, 42, fols 114v–115r (21 August 1355); 42, fols 161r–161v (9 December 1355). Those responsible were defined as rebels and outlaws and were apparently mainly targeting properties of Florentine craftsmen, widows and orphans. Similar attacks had been reported before the Black Death as a consequence of the tensions raised by city dwellers’ land purchases, which led to the impoverishment of rural inhabitants and communities in the Florentine territory.25 One can consider them as a reaction to the progressive levelling down of rural social layers. See ASFi, Provvisioni, 35, fols 94v–95r (22 January 1347). Behind the rhetoric, these new accusations show the failure of the measures adopted up to that point.26 See the quote from Matteo Villani above.

The new laws approved in that year, once again, attempted to ensure the cultivation of city dwellers’ landholdings. The laws ordered rural communities to take abandoned properties in lease in order to protect and cultivate them. Specific attention, moreover, was given to costly perennial crops such as fruit trees and vines, in which city dwellers concentrated most of their investment.27 Regarding landlords’ investment in cash crops and new plantation see C. M. De La Roncière, Un changeur florentin du Trecento: Lippo di Fede del Sega, 1285 env.–1363 env. (Paris, 1973), pp. 120–36. All the members of these communities as well as their heirs and the local officials were required to guarantee the rental fee demanded by the landlords. A committee composed of both city dwellers and rural inhabitants was created to establish the amount to be paid in cases of disagreement.28 This interpretation of the deliberation differs from that proposed by Cohn, ‘After the Black Death’, 468.

Despite the Florentine measures approved between 1348 and 1363 being described as ‘the most repressive labour laws enacted anywhere in post-plague Europe’, their effectiveness when it came to the tug-of-war between lessors and lessee was probably low, as suggested by the increasing severity of the constant re-enactments.29 See ibid., 468–9, where it is suggested that ‘such severity may well reflect an unreality about these laws’. The same may be suggested for the law approved by Siena in 1348.30 See Piccinni, ‘La politica agraria’, pp. 240–1. Both policies seemingly focused on curbing the claims of sharecroppers and tenants rather than those of wage labourers. This was because mezzadria and tenancy were channelling most land investment from the city, while the direct management of farms using rural wage labour played a lesser role in Tuscan agriculture.