Scrivere in guerra. I notai negli eserciti dell'Italia comunale (secoli XII-XIV)

Within the tradition of Diplomatic studies, since the most ancient contributions concerned with the history of documentation produced by central northern Italy cities, it is possible to point out that very little attention has been paid to the presence of the notaries and to the role of their deeds during military expeditions. The work here proposed aims, first of all, at conducting research into the roles played by the notaries within military organization, marking how they constantly worked together with capitani, costringitori and consiglieri of cities’ armies and saw about the regular registration of the shirkers, of the weapons, of foodstuffs sold to the troops. The second part of this paper will investigate in detail how the registrations were done: we’ll try to put in evidence the connexions between the forms and the functions of a kind of documentation surely ‘non-typical’, but that seems to represent a further, interesting point of view for observing a side until almost unknown of the so called “documentary revolution” and the topos of notarial omnipresence in Middle Ages Italy.