IMC 2018: Sessions
Session 707: Accounting and Bookkeeping in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Comparative Approach - Catalonia, Sardinia, and Sicily
Tuesday 3 July 2018, 14.15-15.45
| Sponsor: | Irish Research Council Project 'Empire or Composite State?: Aragonese Rule over the Mediterranean in Later Middle Ages' (ID: GOIPD/2016/488) |
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| Organiser: | Alessandro Silvestri, School of Histories & Humanities, Trinity College Dublin |
| Moderator/Chair: | Flocel Sabaté Curull, Departament d'Història, Universitat de Lleida |
| Paper 707-a | The 'House of the Racional': A Repository for the Political Memory of Late Medieval Catalonia (Language: English) Index terms: Administration, Archives and Sources, Economics - Urban, Politics and Diplomacy |
| Paper 707-b | Accumulating Information and Examining the Accounts in the Kingdom of Sardinia during the Late Middle Ages (Language: English) Index terms: Administration, Archives and Sources, Economics - General, Politics and Diplomacy |
| Paper 707-c | Too Much to Account For: Recording, Budgeting, and Auditing in the 15th-Century Kingdom of Sicily (Language: English) Index terms: Administration, Archives and Sources, Economics - General, Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Abstract | Historians have for a long time acknowledged the importance of finances for late-medieval governments. Nonetheless, they have generally neglected the practical tools through which rulers collected and managed an impressive amount of financial information. By focussing on a multi-regional polity such as the Crown of Aragon, this session aims give a new emphasis on those matters, and to explore comparatively the strategies adopted in different areas of the Aragonese dominion. Paper -a examines how the financial officer of Catalonia known as racional became, in the late medieval period, not just the 'Auditor General' of finances, but the keeper of the political memory of the state. Through demonstrating the importance of archives, Paper -b looks at the accounting system developed by the 14th-century Aragonese authorities for controlling financial memory of Sardinia. Paper -c focuses on the bookkeeping system established in 15th-century Sicily in order to organise and use an unprecedented amount of financial records. |