Le fonti diplomatistiche per la storia fiorentina dei secoli XI e XII: una visione d'insieme

As a whole, Florentine diplomatistic documentation provides us with a representation of the city and its territories from the 1000s to the 1200s. Analysis of this documentation allows us to break down this representation into several key component parts: 1) the nature and geographical collocation of the producers/conservators of such documents; 2) the geographical and chronological distribution of the documents themselves; 3) the typological differentiation within the documentation as a whole. Such an investigation reveals various abrupt changes that occurred between the end of the 11th century and the end of the 12th, including: 1) A reduction in the number of documents produced in earliest decades of the 12th century (in all likelihood due to the diffusion of the practice of notary 'imbreviatura'); 2) the great diffusion of the ‘breve’, or ‘brief’, alongside the ‘charta’, or ‘charter’ in the early 12th century; 3) the explosion in sales contracts in the latter half of the 12th century, particularly in the city itself. These changes were not limited to the Florentine context, and, in my opinion, were not caused exclusively by the juridical/documentary culture of the notaries, but were also influenced by the economic situation of the time. Accurate inter-disciplinary investigation will be needed to shed light on these issues.