Salt and royal finance in the Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnanimous

Abstract

The military campaigns waged by Alfonso V of Aragon in Italy and the central Mediterranean from 1420 to 1458 strained royal finances and pushed the monarchy toward a relentless exploitation of traditional crown revenues. With the completion of his conquest of the Kingdom of Naples in June 1442 Alfonso acquired a state furnished with an extensive, if by then somewhat decayed, fiscal system. A significant portion of royal revenues derived from sovereign rights that included state monopolies on some critical commodities, of which the salt monopoly was the most lucrative. Shortly after 1442 the new Aragonese administration implemented stringent controls over salt production within the kingdom, linked salt consumption to a new direct tax, and required every household to purchase salt from royal stocks. The present study intends to examine those developments from the perspective of some administrative records from the late 1440s and early 1450s which also raise questions on the effectiveness of the fiscal policies of the Aragonese monarchy in southern Italy. [excerpt]