Chestnuts in Charters
This chapter responds to a point which Chris Wickham raised in his recent review of my book on Dark Age Liguria: did chestnut cultivation show any economic specialization in this region in the early medieval period? Chestnuts figured a great deal in that book, which drew briefly on the surviving charter documentation for the region. In this chapter a more detailed analysis of charters from the tenth and eleventh centuries develops an answer to the question of specialized production with a comparative study in which the Genoese evidence is set alongside similar charter evidence from Milan and its region, where chestnuts were also cultivated for food. The Genoa–Milan comparison puts into practice Wickham’s advocacy of comparative method at the micro as well as at the macro scale, for regions where comparison has not historically been the norm. The comparison suggests that chestnuts were more important to the Genoese than the Milanese economy, in part for local climatic reasons but also, perhaps, because of fundamental political and social differences between these two cities. It will be shown that some charters show that the production of chestnuts was to some degree specialized, how it was specialized and what the consequences of that specialization were for each economic system.