UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY USML 50 One of the most important developments in European history took place in communication. A transition is clearly visible from illiterate societies to societies in which most members are active users of the written word. This complex process, which started in Antiquity, and is still not complete, gained momentum during the Middle Ages. This series is intended to provide a forum for publications on the history of non-verbal, oral CCOUNTS AND and written communication in the Middle Ages. Interest in the subject is now A widespread within the worldwide community of medieval studies; and ever more A scholars are becoming convinced of the potential of studying the tensions between CCOUNTS CCOUNTABILITY IN IN A oral and literate modes of thought. L ATE EDIEVAL UROPE A L M E Accounts and Accountability TE Records, Procedures, and Socio-Political Impact M in Late Medieval Europe A Records, Procedures, and Socio-Political Impact ND EDIEV Accounts and Accountability in Late Medieval Europe traces the momentous A transformation of institutions and administration under the impact of accounting records and procedures, c. 1250–1500. The volume’s focus on the materiality and CCOUNT organising logic of a range of accounts is complemented by close attention to the A socio-political contexts in which they functioned and the agency of central and local L officials. E The volume is divided into three parts: the role of financial accountability in the UROPE political designs of late medieval states, the uses of accounts auditing and information A management as tools for governance, and their impact on the everyday life of local BILITY communities. Covering both the centre and the periphery of medieval Europe, from England and the Papal curia to Savoy and Transylvania, the case studies evince the difficult passage from the early experiments with financial accounts towards an accountability of office. This title will be available in Open Access from: https://www.brepolsonline.net/series/usml-eb Cover image: ISBN 978-2-503-58853-7 Account (computus) of the revenues of justice, Savoy, 1394–1396. Edited by Chambéry, Archives départementales de la Savoie, SA 1444, membrane 1 (detail). Ionuț Epurescu-Pascovici Reproduced by kind permission of the Département de la Savoie. 9 782503 588537 ACCOUNTS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY 50 UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY General Editor Marco Mostert (Universiteit Utrecht) Editorial Board Gerd Althoff (Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster) Michael Clanchy (University of London) Erik Kwakkel (Universiteit Leiden) Mayke de Jong (Universiteit Utrecht) Rosamond McKitterick (University of Cambridge) Arpád Orbán (Universiteit Utrecht) Francesco Stella (Università degli Studi di Siena) Richard H. Rouse (UCLA) ACCOUNTS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE: RECORDS, PROCEDURES, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL IMPACT Edited by Ionuþ Epurescu-Pascovici H F British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library © 2020 – Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium This is an open access publication made available under a CC BY-NC- ND 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission of the publisher, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. D/2020/0095/192 ISBN 978-2-503-58853-7 e-ISBN 978-2-503-58854-4 DOI: 10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.119569 ISSN 2034-9416 e-ISSN 2294-8317 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii From the Auditing of Accounts to Institutional Accountability in Late Medieval Europe IONUÞ EPURESCU-PASCOVICI 1 Part One: Financial Accountability and Late Medieval Politics The English Exchequer, the King, and the Counties from Reform to Civil War, 1258-1264 RICHARD CASSIDY 23 Military Recruitment and Funding in Savoy: Piedmont and Chablais, Late-Thirteenth to Mid-Fourteenth Century ROBERTO BIOLZI 47 Accountability in Building Projects in Piedmont under Philip of Savoy-Achaea: Administrative Experimentation and Political Consolidation VITTORIA BUFANIO 73 Part Two: The Tools of Governance: Auditing, Information Management, and Budgeting Auditing of Accounts as an Instrument of Royal Power in Catalonia (1318-1419) ESTHER TELLO HERNÁNDEZ 93 vi Table of Contents From Auditing to Budgeting in Late Medieval Sicily: Institutions, Administrators, and Information Management ALESSANDRO SILVESTRI 115 From Administrative Control to Fighting Corruption? The Procedural Steps of Accounts Auditing in the Papal State (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Century) ARMAND JAMME 145 A Codicological Approach to the Auditing Process: The Duke of Burgundy’s Household Accounts during the Swiss Campaign (1476) EKATERINA NOSOVA 165 The Rolls, the Prince, and their Depositories: The Archiving of Late Medieval Financial Accounts Reconsidered (Savoy, Mid-Fourteenth to Mid-Fifteenth Century) GUIDO CASTELNUOVO 183 Part Three: Financial Accounts and Local Communities Local Communities and Fiscal Reform in Late Medieval Savoy: Lords, Peasants, and Subsidies NICOLAS CARRIER 205 A Century of Insults, Adultery, and Fight: Justice and its Administration in the Accounting Records of the Castellany of Pont-de-Vaux (Savoyard Bresse, 1274-1375) AUDE WIRTH-JAILLARD 229 From Chirograph to Roll: The Records of Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Moneylending DEAN A. IRWIN 251 Churchwardens and their Accounts in Transylvania, Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries: A Preliminary Assessment ADINEL C. DINCÃ 273 List of Contributors 305 Acknowledgements his volume stems from a conference organised in November 2018 at the University of Bucharest in the frame of the European Research Council project CASTELLANY ACCOUNTS, “Record-keeping, fiscal reform, and Tthe rise of institutional accountability in late-medieval Savoy: A source-ori- ented approach”. Both the conference and the volume have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Hori- zon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 638436). I am indebted to my colleagues in the project CASTELLANY ACCOUNTS, Aude Wirth-Jaillard and Roberto Biolzi, for their assistance in organising the confer- ence, and to John Sabapathy and Alessandro Silvestri for their useful sugges- tions. Ionuþ Epurescu-Pascovici (Research Institute of the University of Bucharest) From the Auditing of Accounts to Institutional Accountability in Late Medieval Europe* IONUÞ EPURESCU-PASCOVICI ecause the history highlighted in this volume still reverberates today, six or seven centuries later, to reflect on the institutional and fiscal innova- tions of the later Middle Ages one might start from late modern ordi- Bnary language. An idiomatic feature of the contemporary world’s lingua franca – (American) English – is to describe the apportioning of responsibility and blame, from politics to the judiciary, as ‘bringing to account’, ‘holding account- able’, or more generally ‘demanding accountability’. So widespread is this vernacular that one rarely reflects on the fact that its original meaning was linked to financial records and numeracy, except for the occasional care to distinguish between ‘accountability’ in the broader sense and ‘accountancy’ in the narrow sense of financial numeracy. That counting should have become the * The research leading to the results published here has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 638436). ...................................................................................................................................... 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. 1-19. DOI <10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.120735> 2 IONUÞ EPURESCU-PASCOVICI preferred metaphor for political and judicial responsibility is explained by the social history driving the semantic shift. Beyond the crucial but recent part played by financial capitalism, this history goes back to the twelfth century and the political and institutional reforms that entailed a use of accounts unprece- dented since the Roman Empire. These twelfth-century beginnings were marked by considerable ambivalence between financial accountancy, the ac- countability of officials and administrators, and a more traditional sense of social and moral responsibility – an ambivalence reflected in the different uses of the very term computus, ‘account’ (from Latin computare: to ‘reckon’, ‘count’, or ‘calculate’). It might denote both the financial record itself as well as the act of taking responsibility for one’s conduct in office and the process whereby this was achieved, i.e. some form of auditing – hence the phrase ‘veni- re ad computum’ (‘to come to account’).1 Computus was used together or inter- changeably with ratio,2 translatable as the ‘reason’ or ‘rationale’ for one’s deeds; in the late Middle Ages ratio appears in the title of the private registers and account books of (generally) bourgeois and literate professionals, the libri rationis or livres de raison. This points to the complex dynamic of