ALESSANDRO SILVESTRI
I
n 1414, king Ferdinand I of Aragon (1412-1416) of the new Castilian dy-nasty of the Trastámaras informed his ambassadors (ambaxiatores, later called viceroys) in Sicily – who ruled the island on his behalf – as well as his Sicilian officers and subjects, of the appointment of Juan Sanches de Salvarierra in the new role of conservator maior regis patrimonii (henceforth:conservator), with the main task of preserving and defending the royal patri-mony of the island.1 The decision to appoint Salvatierra was not accidental, for
1 On the office of conservator of the kingdom of Sicily, see A.BAVIERA ALBANESE,
“L’istituzione dell’ufficio di conservatore del real patrimonio e gli organi finanziari del regno di Sicilia nel sec. XV”, in: ID., Scritti Minori (Soveria Mannelli, 1958; reprint), pp. 1-107; P.
CORRAO, Governare un regno: Potere, società e istituzioni in Sicilia fra trecento e quattrocento (Naples, 1991), pp. 364-380; A.SILVESTRI, “Ruling from afar: Government and information management in late medieval Sicily”, Journal of Medieval History 42.3 (2016), pp. 357-381; ID., L’amministrazione del regno di Sicilia: Cancelleria, apparati finanziari e strumenti di governo nel tardo medioevo (Rome, 2018), pp. 171-196 and 349-392. Among the many letters attesting
...
Accounts and Accountability in Late Medieval Europe: Records, Procedures, and Socio-Political Impact, ed. Ionuþ EPURESCU-PASCOVICI, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 50 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2020), pp. 115-143.
DOI <10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.120740>
he had already operated in the kingdom of Castile as a contador mayor de hacienda, the officer on which the new Sicilian conservator was modelled, to the extent that the king himself ordered Salvatierra to organise the finances of the kingdom of Sicily “a la manera de Castella”.2 Salvatierra’s widely ac-knowledged technical and practical skills in managing finances and accounts were not, however, the only reasons that led to his appointment as conservator.
Ferdinand I of Aragon held in high regard the accountability Juan Sanches de Salvarierra had shown in his previous services. The devastating conditions that had affected the royal patrimony of Sicily as a result of an interregnum and a two-year civil war (1410-1412) demanded the appointment of a trustworthy man fully capable of managing finances and reviewing accounts – in essence, an officer unrelated to the local political society and willing to do anything to reorganise and defend the royal patrimony of a distant, disobedient dominion such as Sicily, and therefore ideal for enforcing the monarchs’ orders and deci-sions for the government of the island.3
In this regard, the letter Juan Sanches de Salvatierra sent to king Ferdinand in relation to his appointment as a conservator of Sicily is exemplary, as it vividly attests the personal relationship of trust between the king and his Castilian officer. Despite Salvatierra’s intention of going back to Castile after the siege of the city of Balaguer against the rebel Jaime de Urgel – the latter had opposed the election of Ferdinand as king of Aragon – he wrote to the monarch that:
to that [request], my lord, I could not say no, letting you know that […] although I am wealthy enough to support myself, for your service I would have gone not only to Sicily, but to the end of the world and, to serve you, I would have left be-hind my wife and offspring and everything I have […] And my lord, I came here with my wife, leaving all that was mine: homeland, offspring, relatives, and goods, spending great amounts of money and travelling by land and sea […] leaving the
the appointment of Salvatierra, see those transcribed in Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó (henceforth:
ACA), Real Cancillería (henceforth: RC), Registros (henceforth: Reg.), n. 2428, ff. 27v-31v, which are all dated 6 May 1414.
2 CORRAO, Governare, p. 365: “in the manner of Castile” (all the translations into English are mine, unless otherwise stated).
3 On officers’ accountability, with particular reference to financial administration, see J.
SABAPATHY, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England (1170-1300) (Oxford, 2014) as well as – for the early modern world – J.SOLL, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations (London, 2014).
dowry I received with my wife so that her relatives allow me to bring her here [in Sicily].
a lo qual, senyor, yo nole pude disir de no, fasiendole entender [...] que yo avia bien de que me mantener, pero que non tansolament aquí en Siçilia, mas en cabo del mundo yria por su serviçio e dexaria muger e fyos e quanto avia por lo server [...] E senyor, yo por su serviçio pase aça con la dicha ma muger, dexada toda naturalesa de terra e fyos e parientes e bienes e con grandes despenses e trabajos asi por terra como por mar [...] dexado el dote que me avia a dar con la dicha muger por que consentisen sus parientes dexarmela traer aça.4
In substance, the letter shows that Juan Sanches de Salvatierra had sacrificed everything he possessed, including his homeland and family, in order to serve his sovereign. On the other hand, in the eyes of king Ferdinand, the financial accountability and expertise of Salvatierra – who was broadly known for “sa leyaltat en aquestes coses”5 – were the decisive qualities an officer needed to deal with a thorny affair such as the surveillance over the Sicilian royal patri-mony. Whereas in the other territories of the Crown the Aragonese monarchs only exercised a limited direct jurisdiction – in the fourteenth century, for instance, they directly controlled roughly 13% of Catalonia and 22% of its population6 – in Sicily their royal demesne included approximately 60% of the population and the main cities of the island.7 In substance, the Sicilian royal demesne was the larger and most profitable demesne among the Aragonese territories, to the extent that it would later prove crucial for sustaining the for-eign policy of Alfonso V of Aragon (1416-1458), known as the Magnanimous.
As I will discuss in this essay, Juan Sanches de Salvatierra was not merely appointed to the new position of conservator, but was tasked with the responsi-bility of establishing a brand new magistracy in Sicily. This magistracy needed to be adjusted to the century-old institutional apparatus of the kingdom, operat-ing in collaboration with the local financial office known as magna curia ratio-num (the ‘great court of accounts’, also known as curia magistrorum rationa-lum: the ‘court of the accounting masters’), and dealing with the demanding
4 CORRAO, Governare, p. 362.
5 SILVESTRI, L’amministrazione, p. 178: “his loyalty in those things”.
6 F.SABATÉ I CURULL, “Discurs i estratègies del poder reial a Catalunya al segle XIV”, Anuario de estudios medievales 25.2 (1995), pp. 617-646, at p. 633. In this regard, see also the reflections by S.R.EPSTEIN, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 383-387.
7 On the composition of the Sicilian royal demesne, see EPSTEIN, An Island, Chapter 2.
local elites of the realm. On the other hand, the establishment of the conserva-tor also resulted in the development of new technologies of information man-agement, which allowed the office’s staff to supervise attentively the financial administration of the island and its accounts, as well as to produce a budget of the anticipated revenues and expenses. Thanks to the interaction of record-keeping and bookrecord-keeping methods, the many series of books of the conservator became the practical tool through which this officer, to defend the royal patri-mony, exercised in practice his control over the growing amount of accounts and records produced by the various ‘monetary officers’ (officiales pecuniarii) of the island. By comparing the bookkeeping and auditing procedures used by the conservator and the magistri rationales, I will show that these two magis-tracies operated at different but intertwined levels of governance, respectively the financial planning and the accounts’ auditing of the kingdom of Sicily.
A Precarious Political Balance
In 1410, Martin I of Aragon (1396-1410) died without leaving legitimate heirs or giving any clear indication about his will. After a two-year interreg-num, in 1412 the delegates of the Iberian dominions of the Crown (the king-doms of Aragon and Valencia, and the county of Barcelona) met in Caspe and, having considered various possible candidates, elected Ferdinand de Antequera as the new king of Aragon. Grandson of Peter IV of Aragon (1336-1387), Ferdinand was a prominent member of the Castilian family of the Trastámaras and uncle of king John II of Castile (1406-1454), of whom he had been regent for some years.8 Once the new monarch defeated his opponents and finally took hold of power, he immediately moved his attention to the kingdom of Sicily, which in 1409 his predecessor Martin I of Aragon had inherited from his namesake son and heir Martin I of Sicily (1392-1409), who had suddenly died during a campaign in Sardinia. Although the latter’s wife, queen Blanche of Navarre, had legally acted as vicar of Sicily since 1408, a civil war between la reyna – as Blanche used to subscribe documents – and a faction headed by the magister iustitiarius Bernat Cabrera, the higher officer of the island, soon broke out; it lasted for about two years (1410-1412).9 The final success of the
8 On the so-called compromise of Caspe, see T.BISSON, The Medieval Crown of Aragon:
A Short History (Oxford, 1986), pp. 134-136.
9 On the interregnum in Sicily, see CORRAO, Governare, pp. 133-156.
queen came at a heavy price. To obtain the support of the aristocracy, Blanche had granted local barons large parts of the royal demesne and had renounced important royal prerogatives – such as the administration of justice in the major fiefdoms – and significant revenues pertaining to the Sicilian Crown, thus worsening the already precarious conditions of the royal patrimony.10 At the same time, the central government of the realm had collapsed, to the extent that its officers aligned with one or another of the two factions.11 To govern the island, Blanche had increasingly relied on the small but trustworthy network of officers that already administered the queen’s chamber (camera reginalis), a large territory in the south-eastern part of the island under the direct control of the queen, with Syracuse as its main city.12
The precarious political balance and administrative chaos in which the island was immersed during the civil war seriously affected Sicilian finances, as significantly demonstrated by the case of the wealthy secretia of Palermo, to which both contenders sent orders to secure funding, as one can see by read-ing the secretia’s records concernread-ing the years 1410-1412.13 Whereas in June 1410, after stating that Blanche had lost her position, Bernat Cabrera ordered Nicolaus de Subtilis, secretus of Palermo (i.e. the head of the secretia) and all the other officers in charge of collecting revenues to assign their profits to Nardus de Calava, a clerk of the great court of accounts, in order to support his army,14 in October 1411, la reyna instructed Iohannes de Calatagirone, who had replaced the previous secretus, to transfer
tucti li introyti, renditi et proventi di quissa secretia […] a nissuna pirsuna oy officiali, si non a Manueli di Cassi, locutenenti di la nostra thesauraria, familiari et fideli nostru, comu officiali ordinatu supra zò.15
10 BAVIERA ALBANESE, “L’istituzione”, p. 5, and CORRAO, Governare, pp. 150-152.
11 SILVESTRI, L’amministrazione, p. 99, n. 20.
12 On Syracuse and the queen’s chamber, see C. Orlando, Una città per le regine: Istituzioni e società a Siracusa tra il XIII e il XV secolo (Caltanissetta and Rome, 2012).
13 The secretia dealt with the management of customs and duties in each town pertaining to royal demesne. Whereas the main urban centres of the island (Catania, Messina, and Palermo) had their autonomous secretie, the minor towns had instead their so-called vicesecretie, which depended from a central officer known as magister secretus.
14 Archivio di Stato di Palermo (henceforth: ASPa), Secrezia di Palermo (hencefort: SP), reg.
38, f. 48r-v, 24 Jun. 1410.
15 ASPa, SP, reg. 38, f. 63v, 20 Oct. 1411: “all the incomes, profits and revenues of that secretia […] to no person or officer, but only to our familiar and faithful Manueli di Cassi, lieutenant of our treasury, as the only officer in charge of that [task]”.
As soon as the ambaxiatores of king Ferdinand I of Aragon arrived in Sicily, they promoted the full restoration of the governmental apparatus of the realm. At the same time, they encouraged a broad but complex plan aimed at the revision of the various accounts produced by the central and territorial administrations of the island in the previous years. As attested by a number of records preserved today in the State Archives of Palermo, several monetary officers were ordered to send their quaterni (i.e. the books in which they tran-scribed their accounts), alongside all the other relevant supporting documents to the magistri rationales, so that the latter could compare the quaterni “cum eadem racione in archivo dicte magne curie racionum” and thus proceed with their formal auditing. For example, in the Summer of 1413, all the officers entrusted with the administration of the ports of the island were ordered to bring their accounts to Catania as soon as possible, so that the magister portulanus Gabriel Fanlo – who was responsible for all the ports of the realm – could close the accounts of the third indictional year (1409-1410) and submit them to the magistri rationales.16
Established in the course of the thirteenth century, the Sicilian magna curia rationum had become a permanent institution since the later Swabian age, being further developed under Angevin rule and during the fourteenth century, when it acquired a broad range of tasks. These included a prominent role in conducting the financial policy of the realm; the administration of jus-tice whenever it concerned contestations between the royal patrimony and private individuals; the sole authority in producing – through its own chancery and specialised personnel – documents and letters concerning revenues and expenses (such as payment mandates), which they transcribed in their own series of registers (registra); and the responsibility in auditing the accounts submitted by all those officers entrusted with the collection and expenditure of royal revenues.17 Unlike in the Crown of Aragon, where for a long time the
16 SILVESTRI, L’amministrazione, pp. 172-174: “with the accounts [preserved] in the archives of the mentioned magne curie rationum”.
17 On the magna curia rationum, see BAVIERA ALBANESE, “L’istituzione”, pp. 75-96; R.LI
DESTRI, Attività e documentazione della Magna Curia Rationum del Regno di Sicilia, nell’epoca di Alfonso il Magnanimo: Forme, procedimenti e protagonisti (unpublished doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Palermo, 2012); P.CORRAO, “I Maestri Razionali e le origini della magistratura contabile (secc. XIII-XV)”, in: Storia e attualità della Corte dei conti: Atti del convegno di studi, Palermo, 29 novembre 2012 (Palermo, 2013), pp. 31-46; A.SILVESTRI, “Too much to account for: The Crown of Aragon and the collapse in the auditing system in late-medieval Sicily”, Accounting History Review 30.2 (2020), online at: <https://doi.org/10.1080/
21552851.2020.1711528>. On the registri and the record-keeping system of the Sicilian
royal treasury was by far the main magistracy in charge of spending money – only a few agents, among them the protonotari and the escrivà de ració, could dispose of their revenues independently18 – in Sicily all the officers collecting royal revenues possessed the authority of spending their revenues on behalf of the monarchs, according to the payment mandates prepared by the magistri rationales.19 In addition to the revenues from royal collections, alienation of demesne properties and rights, and other minor revenues, the Sicilian treasurer thus only received the residual profits collected by the magister portulanus (who administered the ports of the realm), the magister secretus (who managed the vicesecretie), and the secreti of Catania, Messina, and Palermo, which enjoyed autonomous status.20
As a result of this highly fragmented system for the collection and expendi-ture of royal revenues, the verification of the accounts – which were usually due immediately after the conclusion of the administrative year, which ran from 1 September to 31 August – was a complicated affair for the magistri rationales. They not only had to audit the accounts submitted by the central magistracies, but also needed to conduct a number of checks on the revenues and expenditures at the local level by a network of officers who often adminis-tered superficially or even illegally the royal demesne and its resources.
The Establishment of the conservator maior regii patrimonii
Despite the existence of the magna curia rationum, an office specifically entrusted with the auditing of accounts, in 1414 king Ferdinand I of Aragon
administration, see A.SILVESTRI, “‘That register is the most ancient and useful of the kingdom’:
Recording, organizing, and retrieving information in the fifteenth-century Sicilian chancery”, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 49.2 (2018), pp. 307-332.
18 T.MONTAGUT I ESTRAGUÉS, El mestre racional a la Corona d’Aragó (1283-1419), 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1987), 1, pp. 328-337.
19 On the financial administration of the Crown of Aragon, see W.KÜCHLER, Les finances de la corona d’Aragó al segle XV: regnats d’Alfons V i Joan II (Valencia, 1983; reprint 1997), and G.NAVARRO ESPINACH and D. IGUAL LUIS, La Tesorerìa general y los banqueros de Alfonso V
el Magnánimo (Castellón de la Plana, 2002), as well as bibliography cited therein. As broadly discussed by those authors, from the 1420s onwards, the Aragonese monarchs also increasingly relied on a territorially-based system of payments, thus restricting the transfer of incomes to the central treasury.
20 On the financial administration of Sicily, see BAVIERA ALBANESE, “L’istituzione”;
CORRAO, Governare, pp. 341-380; and, with a focus on the fifteenth century, SILVESTRI, L’amministrazione, pp. 171-300.
opted for the establishment of the office of conservator, which was inspired by the contaduria mayor de hacienda, the principal financial magistracy of the kingdom of Castile.21 Sicilian scholarship misjudged that innovation, as they considered the introduction of the conservatoria (i.e. the office of the conser-vator) as just a needless and expensive intervention that led to the multiplica-tion of the officers operating in the same administrative sphere.22 It is true that during the first years of their cohabitation the conservator and the magistri rationales had a number of conflicts of jurisdiction, originating both from the intrusion of a foreign office in the century-old Sicilian institutional fabric and from the faulty initial definition of the conservator’s tasks and administrative boundaries. But it is also true that the creation of the conservatoria must be regarded as the most evident aspect of the broader reformation of the Sicilian governmental apparatus.23 That reorganisation – for which the Sicilian secre-tary Tudela left us a lucid initial plan24 – was marked by sudden accelerations, various administrative experiments, and unexpected U-turns, to the extent that, two years after the creation of the conservator, the monarch himself asked his second-born John, viceroy of Sicily, to verify “si lo dict offici de conservador es necessari”.25 Viewed from this angle, the problematic administrative rela-tionship between the conservator and the Sicilian magistri rationales appears more as the consequence of a natural process of bureaucratic development rather than as the result of the actual overlap of their activities. On the other hand, as I will discuss below, in a few years both those offices carved out their own specific spheres of intervention, thus becoming fully complementary, with the conservator evolving in all respects into a Sicilian officer to the extent that the office lasted and operated for the next four hundred years, being abolished only in 1819.26
21 On the contaduria, see: M.Á.LADERO QUESADA, La Hacienda real de Castilla en el siglo
XV (La Laguna, 1973).
22 See, e.g. BAVIERA ALBANESE, “L’istituzione”, pp. 3-31, and CORRAO, Governare, pp.
341-380. The latter, however, only focusses on the initial activity of the conservator.
23 On the Sicilian treasury in the fifteenth century, see SILVESTRI, L’amministrazione, pp.
169-300.
24 On Juan Tudela and its proposal for the reformation of Sicilian administration, see P.
CORRAO, “‘De la Vostra Gran Senyoria Humil e Affectuos Servidor’: Corrispondenza di due
CORRAO, “‘De la Vostra Gran Senyoria Humil e Affectuos Servidor’: Corrispondenza di due