Fiscal Resources, the Regnum Italiae and an Empire in Crisis (1080-1130)

In recent years, analysis of the economic foundations of power in the early medieval kingdoms of western Europe has increasingly focused on fiscal assets. This is a wide-ranging and traditional topic of research, already present in works linked to an institutionalist conception of politics typical of the national-centric approach to the study of power of such nineteenth- and earlyt-wentieth- century European historians as Paul Darmstädter and Silvio Pivano. Various Italian historical contributions have examined fiscal assets between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Fiore's book belongs to this strand. One of his main chronological focuses is the fifty years between 1080 and 1130, the span of time that witnessed the definitive crisis of the traditional hierarchies and power systems that had been developing in the regnum Italiae since the time of Carolingian government.