Abstract

The essay investigates the relations between the history of the tyranny of the Duke of Athens in Florence in 1342/1343 reflected in his documentary tradition, deposited without interruption in Florentine archival funds until its first historiographical and editorial exhumation. The documentary rediscovery of the fourteenth-century seigniory took place precisely in the three-year of the historical birth of the Kingdom of Italy, around 1860, and in a context of archival science in full renewal. The conjunction of the identity of places and names thus conditioned the historical image of the dialectic between seigniorial and purely communal regimes associated with the lordship of Gualtieri di Brienne. In this brief documentary research an attempt is made to reconstruct the long-term historical significance of that regime through the events of its archival tradition