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How to Record a Confl ict? The Communities of the German Part of the Diocese of Trent during the Late Middle Ages by Hannes Obermair “In this central and centralized humanity … we must hear the distant roar of battle”. 1 M. FOUCAULT I. The considerations made in the following deal with a short, but close examination of the research on South Tyrol in the Late Middle Ages, which—after a long period of decreasing interest followed by the great stories of the fi rst part of the twentieth century—has gained new breath from recent investigations conducted as comparisons and seems therefore to have undergone a renaissance. In order to give more detail to the project, the fi rst and more general part is followed by some concrete examples, which in their turn are followed by general conclusions. The refl ections then attempt to reconnect with themes from the social history of the Pre-Modern era, which have experienced notable accelera- tion over the previous years, when one refers to the picture of the often endemic confl icts. Although for a long time separated from Medieval Studies where priority was given to modern and contemporary history, the dimensions of confl ict throughout life in the Late Middle Ages are in fact now demonstrating all their analytical value. It is principally the concept of the “economy of war”, developed by sociologists and social Translation by Joy Avery 1 This is an extract from the famous fi nal sentence by M. FOUCAULT, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York 1991, p. 308. 101 anthropologists2, which can be applied in this context, for example with regard to the history of the European urban centers or the birth of the pre-state or state territorial structures3. However, less attention has been paid to the more rural type of societies until now, for example, the prevalently agricultural economies within a particular context such as the Alpine regions. But even here, the ice is beginning to thaw, and an important historian such as Luigi Lorenzetti has placed the theme of confl ict at the center of his recent investigations on migration from the Italian Alps, not without underlining the particular quality and functionality of the economic and social confl icts associated with such migration4. II. It is useful to start with a general overview, before presenting the geographical area of study. According to a theory, which is relatively diffuse and substantially agreed upon, social practices of the individual agents between the Late Middle Ages and the start of the Modern era were largely conditioned by the social class they belonged to, which in turn contributed towards forming a social identity. In this way, using a class-driven approach—to use the Marxist terminology—inevitably, however, would tend to prevail over the historical perception of a plurality or social multitude made up of individuals, which has always been present. It will therefore be a challenge for historians, at least when their ac- tions are strongly inspired by the canons of social history, to not dilute the associated individualities and mentalities into mere groups. In this sense, the classic studies carried out by Natalie Zemon Davies or Carlo 2 See only R. COLLINS, Confl ict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science, London 1975; J.S. COLEMAN, Foundations of Social Theory, Cambridge MA - London 1990. 3 See M. BARBER, The Two Cities. Medieval Europe, 1050-1320, London - New York 2007, and W. BLOCKMANS - A. HOLENSTEIN - J. MATHIEU (eds), Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300-1900, Farnham - Burlington VT 2009. 4 L. LORENZETTI, Razionalità, cooperazione, confl itti: gli emigranti delle Alpi italiane (1600-1850), in A. ARRU - F. RAMELLA - D.L. CAGLIOTI (eds), Donne e uomini migranti. Storie e geografi e tra breve e lunga distanza, Roma 2009, pp. 181-209. 102 Ginzburg are exemplary. Both of them have tried to connect an empirical impetus aimed at individual lives and Pre-Modern biogra- phies with a more general picture of the historical macroprocess5. Of course, we must not forget the fundamental contributions made by the pioneering Anglo-Saxon school coupled with great names such as Edward P. Thompson or Peter Laslett, who, with their concept of an “economic moral” and with an epistemological perception of “social humanism” deeply changed the historiographic approach towards “the world we have lost”6. This research, characterized by a strongly sociological method, high- lighted the fact that the Pre-Modernist social groups were conditioned by various basic dimensions, made up of different settings: primarily economic, oriented towards the fi eld of production; the reproductive sphere, profoundly connected to the question of gender; and fi nally, the cultural and “ideological” sphere, where these conditions refl ect and self-represent if taken to a level of cultural, literary and iconographic representation. Inserted into this type of superstructure, the dimensions of confl icts and antagonisms take on a topological dimension, they have a physical space and belong to a certain place, but this is true obviously not only for the areas which are the subject of this paper. As far as the so-called “German part” (deutscher Anteil) of the diocese of Trent in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age is concerned, this included an area along the course of the River Adige between Merano, Bolzano, and Salorno, which had only a few side valleys such as the Ulten valley, the lower Sarntal and the Passeier valley, as well as the most southerly stretch of the Isarco valley as far as the gates of Bolzano7. The current pro- 5 See N.Z. DAVIES, The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge MA 1984, and by the same author, Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Cambridge MA 1997; C. GINZBURG, Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, Oakland CA 2012. 6 E.P. THOMPSON, The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth 1975; P. L ASLETT, The World We Have Lost, Further Explored, London 2005. 7 The “German part”—this expression may be attributed to the early Modern period—has been widely studied in monographs, from an ecclesiastic point of view, in the large manual by K. ATZ - A. SCHATZ, Der deutsche Anteil des Bistums Trient, 5 vols, Bozen 1903-1910. See also E. CURZEL, Le pievi trentine. Trasformazioni e continuità nell’organizzazione territoriale della cura d’anime dalle origini al XIII secolo (Centro per le scienze religiose in Trento. Series maior, 5), Bologna 1999, pp. 210-264. 103 vincial capital was even then an important intersection of roads with a fork in the transalpine stretch with reached either the upper Adige valley crossing the Venosta valley and going over the Reschen pass, the Swabian territories, or reached the Renon way or also directly the Isarco valley by means of the “Kuntersweg” which was instituted in the 1300s, crossing the Inntal and Austrian and Bavarian territories via the Brenner pass8. In order to defi ne this micro-region in even more detail, the Überetsch follows the river Adige on the right-hand side from Bolzano upwards towards the small vale of Salorno, where the river is squeezed into a tight stretch, which also represented a language barrier between the territories, which spoke either Romance languages or German from the 1500s onwards. Not to forget Bolzano, either the area of Jenesien with its so-called Tschögglberg or the area of Deutschnofen with its Regglberg, well settled and populated at least from the 1200s on and linked by a dense network of roads between them and in the direction of the central towns, where Bolzano and Merano played an important role, as they also functioned as central market towns for their respective hinterlands, and were thus connected with the larger centers along the edges of the Alps9. To complicate the geopolitical situation described here, all of the area in question belonged ecclesiastically speaking to Trent, while politically, it was an integral part of the dominions of the Tyrolean counts; in fact it was the hinge and determining factor in their politics from the times of Count Meinhard II in the second half of the thirteenth century. With the acquisition of Tyrol by the Habsburgs in 1363, the “German part” of the diocese of Trent became a further bastion of political, military, and economic activity on the part of the Habsburgs towards the lower The region in question in relation to its geographical and political situation, during the interwar period, was also called “Bozner Land”, see R. VON KLEBELSBERG, Das Bozner Land (Alpenlandschaften, 4), Wien - Leipzig 1930. 8 For information on the case of Bolzano, see the refl ections by A. BONOLDI, Dimen- sioni spaziali dell’azione mercantile: alcune rifl essioni sul caso delle fi ere di Bolzano, in M.-C. SCHÖPFER PFAFFEN - F. VANNOTTI (eds), Unternehmen, Handelshäuser und Wirt- schaftsmigration im Alpenraum, Brig 2014, pp. 99-127. 9 A. BONOLDI, La fi era e il dazio: economia e politica commerciale nel Tirolo del secondo Settecento, Trento 1999, pp. 20 ss. 104 Adige valley, towards Trent itself and also towards the more southerly regions of northern Italy. The fortifi cation of the Sigmundskron castle at Bolzano by Duke Sigismund in the last quarter of the 1400s bears architectural witness: the castle is not by chance one of the largest for- tifi ed complexes along the Alps10. Austrian politics in the Late Middle Ages were substantially oriented along an east-west axis, and Tyrol was a decisive anchor in order to connect the Austrian territories in the Swa- bian Vorlande with the lower Austrian hinterland11. In this manner, the area around Bolzano could be described as a balcony overlooking Italy, from whence it was necessary to control the traffi c along the Brenner, but also to gain military access, if and when it became necessary, to the plains of the Po, Veneto and Lombardy.