La competizione tra grandi possessores longobardi e il regno : le leggi di Liutprando e il patrimonio delle donne nel secolo VIII

At the beginning of VIIIth century, Liutprand, king of Lombard Italy, started to enact new laws, mainly about patrimonial rights of women. First of all, he decided that daughters might inherit from their fathers as their brothers did. It was only the first step of a rather peculiar strategy in order to avoid an excessive storage of assets in the hands of “possessores”. His purpose was to oblige these men to divide in many parts theirs assets at each generation to prevent possible hazardous ascents to the heights of royal power. But the “possessores” reacted against this royal strategy in two different ways: on one side, they began to found feminine monasteries, collecting in their first dotation all the quotes of daughters’ inheritance. On the other side, they began to give to their wives very big amount of their own assets in the form of “morgengabe” in order to create a sort of patrimonial stock out of the harsh inheritance laws. Thus it was that, in the following years, Liutprand enacted a series of new laws, first to limit the amount of “morgengabe”, and than of the “meta”, to one third of the total assets of husband. The paper frames this new interpretation about the politics of Liutprand reconstructing these moves and countermoves, analyzing the laws and proposing feedbacks through the evidences of the coeval charters of Lucca and of the South of Italy.