The New Lands Museum | Sala 2 - Le Terre Nuove in Europa - Museo delle Terre Nuove
La nascita di terre Nuove non coinvolse solamente l’Italia ma anche molti paesi d’Europa a partire dall’anno Mille.
museo valdarno, musei arezzo, museo arezzo, musei del valdarno, musei toscani, museo toscana, musei toscana, museo delle terre nuove, museo san giovanni valdarno, san giovanni valdarno, palazzo d'arnolfo, comune di san giovanni valdarno, musei rurali toscani, musei italiani
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Room 2

NEW LANDS IN EUROPE

The emergence of these New Lands was not just a feature of Italy but also of numerous other countries in Europe from the year 1000 onwards.
From French bastides – built basically as military fortifications – to English abbeys, which gathered together religious communities, this room provides an overview of the situation in 11th-century Europe, introducing the developments that would affect Tuscany from the 12th century until the mid-14th century.

Insights


A WIDESPREAD PHENOMENON

The demographic growth that marked the period defined by historiography as the ‘long thirteenth century’ in a large part of Europe, and which began at the end of the previous century and lasted until the beginning of the following century, also offered the opportunity for a change of scale in the planning of new settlements whose capacity for population could grow to a respectable size. This gave rise not only to castles, but also to built-up centres and even to towns. Indeed, the population surplus produced even highly populated settlements in south-western France, Eastern Germany and the Iberian peninsula where their names (Villefranche, Freiburg, Salvatierra, etc.) still bear the memory of the prerogatives, tax immunities and personal freedoms offered to the new inhabitants. These were initiatives taken by sovereigns, powerful local lords, monasteries and knightly orders: Kings of Navarre or Aragon, Counts of Toulouse, Angevins, Cistercians, Templars and Teutonic Knights to name but a few.
The wave of new foundations that had swept through much of Europe did not stop at the Alps. In the Italian peninsula, particularly in the central and northern area, the role of promoting new centres during the thirteenth century was taken on by municipal institutions that had, first and foremost, the evident aim of consolidating the city’s dominion over the countryside. This was, on closer inspection, a significant change in perspective compared to the logic that had overseen the birth and spread of the castles and fortified villages created on the initiative of the seigniory.
Indeed, the action of the city communes was no longer limited to concentrating individuals and families in one place, as the lords did to keep their fideles bound: on the contrary, these initiatives were based on the promise of enfranchisement and liberation from all feudal bonds for those who decided to move to the new centres. This explains the names chosen here too for the new settlements: Castelfranco, Villafranca or Borgo Franco manifested the political project envisaged for those who chose to live within the walls that were being erected. For the city municipalities, the foundation of new settlements was thus a further instrument for the realisation of effective hegemony over entire counties, for the implementation of control over the population but also over centres, markets, productive structures, roads and all other types of resources: in short, dominion over a territory, at least initially, circumscribed by the limits of the city’s jurisdiction over the counties.
Thus, while the great monarchies such as the Iberian, French and English had begun to structure their territories into real kingdoms, in the Italian peninsula, the Comuni went in the same direction, albeit on a relatively smaller scale, embarking on the first, sometimes uncertain and not always evident, steps towards the construction of a city state.
(The text is taken from the museum guide, edited by Claudia Tripodi and Valentina Zucchi, Sagep, 2024)