A History of ‘integration’ in Angevin Naples

Abstract

In every epoch cities have been the landing-place for immigrants. The medieval cities were also places in which have been verified numerous and variegated migratory movements that involved all classes: from economic and political elites to more humble components of social stratification. That which is presented in these pages is certainly an exemplary event, symptomatic of a general picture, all things considered, that is contradictory, giving on the one hand evidence of the persistence of phenomena such as the practice of the commerce of slaves, and on the other hand the social ransoming of an “Ethiopian” slave, by means of its inclusion in the ganglia of the Angevin kingdom and the awarding of high profile bureaucratic offices. In the urban framework of Naples in the first half of the Fourteenth century a human story is unraveled that the tangle of literary and documentary sources with architectural persistencies has made possible to reconstruct.