Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe

. The historical literature on state-formation in late medieval and early modern Europe has suggested that a coercive apparatus consisting of courts, prisons, and police emerged in an uncomplicated way from the state’s interest in the repression of violence. Using the cities of Lucca and Marseille as case studies, this article demonstrates that some jurisdictions, during a formative period of state formation, were surprisingly hands-off in their approach to interpersonal violence. In the fourteenth century, both cities do display well-developed infrastructures of coercion. The target of these coercive institutions, however, was indebtedness, not criminal justice. The principal argument of this article, therefore, is that debt recovery was a major engine for the growth of a coercive apparatus in late medieval Mediterranean. The agency lying behind this process was not the unitary agency of thinking, planning, “colonial” state but rather the fragmented agency of myriad private creditors.

the space of a few short years, articles and books in the area of medieval studies containing the word "violence" in their titles increased nine-fold in frequency. Almost without exception, what this literature has queried is the idea that violence was impulsive and mindless. The trend today is to explain violence as political, strategic, and calculating. As one collection has put it, "violence was not an expression of the irrationality and extreme emotions of medieval people but a product of their rationality, a behaviour well understood and strategically deployed." 11 Thomas Bisson, in this vein, describes the violence of castellans like Thomas de Marle as a method of lordship and an order of power. 12 Chris Wickham has shown how violence was a strategy that helped promote certain kinds of legal claims, since an unwillingness to be reasonably violent in twelfth-century Italy hinted that you really weren't confident about your rights. 13 William Ian Miller has suggested that the heroic figures of saga Iceland accepted violence as the price of personal liberty. 14 Robert Bartlett has argued that the otherwise incomprehensible violence practiced by eleventh-century Norman mercenaries in Sicily was a performance finely calculated to spread the rumor of Norman violence and thereby cow their adversaries. 15 The new school of thought has done much to recuperate the period before 1200 as an actual society rather than a Lord of the Flies anarchy. If customary vengeance flourished in the early and high middle ages, that was because it formed part of a legal system. 16 By restoring the logic of violence, moreover, historians have exposed the hidden motives of kings and states. The emerging monopoly on the legitimate exercise of coercive force, in this view, had nothing to do with a sovereign desire for peace. The state was instead born in sin and violence. 17 States repressed everyday violence out of a desire to generate spectacles of power. They sought monopolies of violence in order to deploy violence against their many enemies, both real and imagined. The historians who once By all accounts, it was during the later middle ages, from 1250 to 1500, that the infrastructure of coercive central authority made its appearance. Statutes, customaries, commentaries, images and artifacts: the evidence conspires to suggest that the growing state monopoly on violence and the sovereign domination of the body unfolded in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. Or at any rate, this is what the normative evidence suggests. In recent years, a different picture has emerged from the archival evidence. Everywhere we look in later medieval Europe, from Florence and Valencia to England and the Low Countries, among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, layfolk and clerics, men and women, we find not only practices of vengeance, but persistent expectations or assumptions of the rightness of vengeance. 18 Confronted by vengeance, moreover, sovereigns looked the other way. Combing through the archives of the Parlement of Paris, Claude Gauvard came across letters of pardon and grace issued in their tens of thousands by the late medieval kings of France to men and sometimes women who killed and maimed in hot or cold blood. 19 The foundations of royal majesty, she argued in her magisterial 1991 work, were erected not so much on the spectacle of punishment as on the power to reprieve the penitent from the rigors of local justice.
The time has come to cast off the grip of the colonial narrative and write the history of sovereignty, violence, and coercion in the later middle ages on its own terms.
In this article, I want to show that the repression of everyday violence was not always a major preoccupation of late medieval jurisdictions. The courts of law in the two cities examined here were most certainly developing an apparatus of coercion, including prisons, court stenographers, and dozens of strongmen. In their daily rounds, these men, the crier-sergeants, inflicted countless acts of coercion and humiliation. But their principal target was not private violence. What generated much of their violence was the condition of indebtedness. Whence the major claim of this article: the regulation of debt stimulated the growing apparatus of coercion in later medieval Europe. In Mediterranean Europe, it was far more influential than the repression of interpersonal violence.
As case studies, I shall use the cities of Lucca and Marseille in the fourteenth century. 20 These were mid-sized cities with populations hovering around 20,000 to 25,000 before the Black Death. The former was a center of banking and silk production; the latter a port town. Both cities cast a political and economic shadow over a sizable territory with relatively well-defined boundaries, although neither enjoyed the political autonomy of Florence or the German imperial cities. Marseille, in the fourteenth century, was a stable possession of the distant and declining Angevin crown of Naples. 21 Lucca's history in the fourteenth century was more turbulent; after the death of the Castruccio Castracani in 1328 the city became a political football kicked around between Pisa, Florence, and other foreign powers until the return of some degree of autonomy in 1369. 22 Both cities followed Roman-canon law. Both cities, moreover, followed a nearly identical set of unwritten customary procedures that had grown up inside the trellis provided by Roman-canon procedural law. The late medieval archives of both cities, finally, have preserved an appallingly rich body of sources: thousands of registers, often hundreds of pages in length. These offer genuinely fine-grained perspectives on the practice of justice in the fourteenth century. They allow us to reconstruct patterns that are less visible in the equally voluminous but rather coarse-grained documentation extant from the great kingdoms of northern Europe.
The argument proceeds in two phases. The first, centered on penal justice, explores the widespread practice of contumacy: the custom of responding to a criminal summons with flight. Contumacy matters for a very simple reason: where there is no body to put on trial and punish, the court cannot mount a spectacle of violence. Although the proportion of contumacious individuals in fourteenth-century Mediterranean Europe varied from region to region, the custom itself was ubiquitous. If the accused has fled, the only possible sentence, apart from the automatic banishment, was a very large fine, soon transformed into a lingering debt. In a curious way, courts did not respond to violence with counter-violence. They responded to violence with debt.
Everywhere, historians of late medieval justice have noticed that the debt to society was paid in the currency of coin more often than the currency of pain.
Everywhere, the phrases used to describe the practice of fines invoke images of failure, greed, inefficiency, or expedience. These invocations reveal a reflexive adherence to the idea that the state, if it is to be a state, must inflict violence on the body. But the idea that a monetary fine represents a failure of justice is gross anachronism. It arises from a misunderstanding of the coercive possibilities of indebtedness. The condition of being in debt allowed for coercion in multiple dimensions, ranging from neighborly gossip to imprisonment for debt. In the second section of this article, I shall pay special attention to one of the least explored elements of debt recovery, namely, the practice of seizing or distraining goods for the repayment of debt. I call this "predation," from the Latin word used by the Lucchese courts, namely, preda, which means booty or plunder or prey. In a spectacle every bit as scripted as the more familiar spectacles of pain and humiliation, the crier-sergeants charged with debt recovery would invade homes, seize their prey (prede), and cart them off. The prey consisted of clothing, fabrics, finewares, tools, barrels, comestibles: practically everything that could move. Though words varied from one jurisdiction to the next, the custom of predation was universal in later medieval European jurisdictions. 23 Predation was a state-sponsored spectacle of violence. More accurately, predation was a service, bureaucratically bound up, packaged, and sold to creditors in exchange for a small fee consisting of a percentage of the debt. Charles Tilly has invited us to think about the state as a protection racket. 24 I propose an equally ironic image: the state as a collection agency. The creditors who purchased this service included ordinary people, women and men, Christians and Jews, along with great property lords and professional moneylenders. Some creditors in all probability were in debt to others, since the late medieval culture of debt should be seen as a complex web of relations rather than a system of classes. Some debts originated as loans and deposits; others sprang from sale credits, unpaid rents and legacies, and a host of other obligations. The scale of the practice, in the cities I have studied, was startling. Predation exceeded, by distance, other vectors of court-sponsored violence. Spectacles of predation outstripped penal spectacles of pain and humiliation by several orders of magnitude.
So yes, things that look like states were hastening to develop a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence in the later middle ages, using debt recovery as the symbolic field for the creation of sovereignty. Perhaps hyper-statist assumptions are correct after all. Yet the appearance of intention and design always dissolves when the analysis is carried out at a higher resolution. 25 Where debt recovery is concerned, here is the key: it was the interests of creditors, not states, that drove the process. Private debt recovery was primarily responsible for building the prisons, police forces, and other features of the apparatus of coercion in late medieval Mediterranean Europe. Sovereignty simply came along for the ride. Here, the putative state interest in acquiring a monopoly on coercion dissolves into untold thousands of acts of petty interest. In exploring the fragmentation of agency that characterizes this situation, we can appreciate first-hand the perils of applying colonial narratives to late medieval contexts.

II
Four incidents from Lucca. The year is 1335. 26 1. Cyia, the wife of a certain Stefanello, struck another woman in the head with a small dagger, drawing blood. The court issued a summons, but "she did not come, but instead was contumacious" (non venit sed potius contumas existit). The court banished her and assessed a fine of £10.
2. Fiore, the wife of Giacomo, struck another woman on the nose, drawing blood. The court issued her a summons as well, but she too was contumacious (non venit sed pottius contumas existit). She was banished and fined £5. An additional note records that in 1338, she made peace with her enemy, a record of which was notarized. She was allowed to pay 10s., a tenth of the original sum. Late medieval and early modern legal and social historians have repeatedly noted the existence of contumacy in towns and cities throughout Europe. 27 Some have been tempted to use the contumacy rate as a proxy for a more general failure to police. 28 "Medieval states were notoriously inefficient, and judicial and police institutions of only limited efficacy," remarks one set of authors. 29 Another historian, commenting on the high levels of violence in early modern Europe, notes the lack of centralized police agencies and an "inadequate range of local police operatives." 30  The four cases offered above, mere summaries, are too insubstantial to provide answers. Happily, the original proceedings of many criminal inquests do survive in the voluminous Lucchese criminal archive, in the form of registers or day-books that meticulously recorded the stages of each trial. From these registers, we can establish a set of customs that operated within the interstices of the procedural law, and get a better sense of the activity of the crier-sergeants.
All inquests began with a denunciation made either by the victim, an interested party, a local official, or personnel of the court itself. The denunciation was immediately followed by a summons (citatio), a procedure whereby crier-sergeants went to the houses or neighborhoods of the accused and called them to court. It is important to note this sequence: summonses were necessary because the men and women accused of crimes of violence were almost never incarcerated in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.
Did the accused respond obediently to the summons? Consider, by way of example, a typical case, this one initiated on 3 January 1334. 31 Ten men from the countryside around Lucca were accused of committing egregious acts of violence and theft. Witnesses were named and a single crier-sergeant was sent to issue the first of the summons required by procedural law. The crier-sergeant returned and reported that he had personally sought out each of the accused, in their homes, and to each he had delivered a summons, ordering him to appear at court the next day. The men, who paid no attention whatsoever, were found in contumacy, and a marginal note records that they were all banished on 22 January and sentenced to decapitation and to restitution of the stolen goods.
The sequence of events outlined here is characteristic of almost every case of murder, grievous injury, professional theft, and banditry in a sampling of registers drawn from the Lucchese criminal archive from the 1330s. But let me draw attention to an especially noteworthy feature of this record: there is no ambiguity about the fact that the crier-sergeant stood face to face with each of the ten men while issuing a summons. It was not his job to make an arrest. It is possible, of course, that the crier-sergeant was lying to the notary when he claimed that he spoke personally to each of the men. But there was, in fact, little temptation to lie, since procedural law did not demand a face-toface encounter with the accused. Summonses could be issue to the family of the accused; in cases where the accused was not a resident of Lucca or its district, a public crier The scale of banishment means that the court itself did not often make pre-trial arrests. This does not mean, however, that the court did not have a system of pre-trial detention. The reason is that the accused occasionally chose to obey the summonses to appear in court. Consider a register of the criminal court from 1339-1340, which is especially well preserved and meticulous in its construction. 36 This register recorded 74 inquests in five months. In a number of cases, especially those involving violence, the accused consisted of both individuals and groups. In 33 inquests, including all of the homicides and other grave injuries as well as one case of arson and another of blasphemy, the accused individuals or parties were contumacious and received an automatic sentence of banishment. In two inquests involving groups of men, the results were mixed; some came, some did not. If we leave aside the two mixed cases, the rate of initial contumacy was 33 in 72 (46 percent). In the remaining thirty-nine inquests, the accused showed up voluntarily at court in response to the summons. In fourteen cases, the accused (individuals or groups) were incarcerated while awaiting trial. In fifteen cases, the accused relied on oathswearers (fideiussores) to provide bail. 37 In six cases involving fairly minor offenses, the accused were released, and in the remaining four the results were mixed. were then clapped in jail. Three of the six, including the rapist, were found guilty, but the fines they were given were relatively small. Although we can't know for sure, the sequence of events suggests that the contumacious individuals were not only negotiating with the victim or his or her family; they were also negotiating informally with the personnel of the court.
During the entire period of banishment, whether it lasted days or years, the banished person was, quite literally, an outlaw. In cases involving homicide, he (very rarely she) could be killed with impunity. Clues suggest that some victims' families took advantage of this precarious legal condition. A register preserved in a series known as "The Court of the Rebels and the Banished" from 1334 lists 615 men euphemistically described as "absent" from the city of Lucca. 43 The point of the register was fiscal: the treasury wanted to know which men were not paying the tax. Some of the absentes may have been debt fugitives or political rebels, but most had fled the city following a serious crime. From time to time a change of circumstances led to a short note entered into spaces left after the names. "He is in Lucca because he paid up." "He is in Lucca and he paid up, with peace." "He is in Lucca and has settled with the father and the brothers." "He settled with the brothers." Underneath a number of names the notary has written: "Dead." This laconic entry is telling us two things. First, men in exile were following the statutory provisions found in Lucca, Marseille, and every other city or commune in southern France and Italy to the effect that killers or assailants must not return home until they can prove that they have established a peace with their victims. We have great drifts of these peace acts from all over late medieval Italy. 44 Second, the family and friends of the victim occasionally got to their adversary before the peace was established.
Although contumacy was the norm, we find the occasional counter-example. On 3 December 1339, two men accused of fighting chose not to be contumacious; they responded voluntarily to the summons and were incarcerated for two days. While in prison, they made peace with each other, and were released on 5 December after paying fines. 45 But cases like this, where the accused party responded to a summons and then made peace, are uncommon. Cases involving incarceration or bail, in fact, rarely led to peacemaking. In some cases from Lucca, the accused responded obediently to the summons because he wished to contest the charges. In other cases, the accused simply admitted the charges and paid the fine without making peace, the norm in Marseille. On 9 December 1339, a man who drew blood during the course of a fight appeared in court in response to a summons. He confessed his guilt and found an oathswearer. On 16 January 1340, he was condemned to a fine of some £28 in Marseille's currency, which he paid.
Although the injury lay within the spectrum of injuries meriting peace, there is no hint of peacemaking.
Why not? The answer is that peacemaking was not a dry and bureaucratic procedure. It was an act of contrition that required the assailant to humiliate himself or herself. In Marseille, extant peace acts reveal men, on their knees in church, begging for peace from their victims or the victims' kinfolk in the front of the entire congregation.
Peace was also potentially shameful for the peace-giver as well, a sign of weakness or lack of manliness. Finally, because peace created a rough equivalency between the two parties, the procedure did not apply to situations where the two parties were of very different social standings. There were, in short, numerous obstacles to peacemaking. The decision to confess to a charge and pay a fine was therefore a decision to abandon the way of peace.
To sum up, the criminal courts of Lucca and Marseille did not see it as their task to regulate violence through counter-violence, coercion, and arrest. Crier-sergeants were involved to some degree in keeping the peace, but the expectation of contumacy means that many criminal inquests, especially in Lucca, unfolded in the absence of the accused.
Tellingly, the more serious the crime, the more likely it was that the accused was absent.
This is not to say that courts weren't interested in regulating violence. But the courts did it indirectly. In both Lucca and Marseille, the criminal justice system put the squeeze on the accused, and coerced them into making peace. The humiliation of the assailant was achieved but far more often through the ritual of peacemaking than through public rites of shaming.

III
To perform the work of violence and publicity that is essential to justice, the judges and notaries of Lucca's law courts drew from a common pool of crier-sergeants.
By statute, fifty were to be elected each year by the General Council. 46  The abstract concept of coercion was manifested in the actions of the criersergeants and their associates, the berroarii. We know they spent a good deal of time facilitating the business of the criminal court, issuing summonses in neighborhoods and villages. Occasionally, they made an arrest and marched the accused off to jail to await trial. Crier-sergeants also delivered public announcements on a daily basis, for this was a world in which important news traveled by word of mouth. But of all the daily tasks they performed, it is debt recovery that stands out. Debt recovery, not a major preoccupation of courts of law in Mediterranean Europe before 1200, emerged in the thirteenth century in tandem with the expansion of commercial and consumer credit. For our purposes here, the crucial feature of the system of debt recovery is that creditors had access to two forms of coercion. First, they could have their debtors incarcerated, a threat serious enough that debtors, like murderers, often took to self-imposed exile in an effort to escape it. 47 Second, they could ask for a predation of the debtors' goods.
Imprisonment for debt was widely practiced in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe. 48 Important new work has shown the prevalence of the practice in later medieval Europe. 49 In Marseille, fragments of evidence hint at the scale of incarceration for debt. Here, four agricultural workers have their employer imprisoned for nonpayment of wages. 50 There, a Jew is imprisoned, perhaps for reasons arising from his wife's illicit sale of items left in pawn. 51 In 1325, a citizen of the lower city and his family shift their residence a few blocks away to the Praepositura, an entirely different legal jurisdiction, so as to avoid imprisonment for debt, although the court, unimpressed by this legal nicety, arrested him anyway. 52 Merchants, fearing the flight of their erstwhile business partners, have them imprisoned: in 1341, a wine-seller had one of her clients imprisoned for a debt of £7, 12s, and 2d. 53 In 1354, the sub-vicar, an official who was, in effect, the head of Marseille's police force, was himself arrested and imprisoned for a large debt of some £42 owed to a draper. 54 In 1335, a man, indebted to numerous creditors, was thrown in jail; his own wife then sued him, successfully, for the return of her dowry. 55 We also have records showing that people stood surety for friends, husbands, or clients who had been imprisoned by their creditors. 56 The richer Lucchese records provide a better sense of the practice. Between The debts recorded in the fiscal account generated by Giacomo's legacy were a varied lot, expressed in florins, Lucchese pounds, and, in some cases, grain or oil: the latter, presumably, were unpaid rents in kind. Some eighty-two are legible and can be readily translated into Lucchese shillings at the going rate. 59 The average debt was 764 shillings, i.e. £38 4s. or just over 11 florins, although the median was far lower, 435 ½ shillings. The smallest debt, one and one-half bushels (staria) of wheat, was worth just under a pound; the highest, one of several that skew the mean, was a merchant's debt of £273 12s. 6d. for a shipment of muslin.
The drainage basin for the currents of debt that flowed into the Lucchese courts extended well beyond the walls of the city. On 25 February, to take an example, the court authorized a crier-sergeant to arrest the entire population of Loppeglia, a village located in the hills to the north of Lucca, for a collective debt of £22 17s. In the event, the crier, who was working alone that day, took only two representatives of the village back to jail.
Although debtors' residences were not often given, probably a third of the incarcerated debtors were from Lucca itself.
The arrest itself cost money. 60 In Marseille, a fragment of evidence hints at the fees involved. In 1357, as noted earlier, four workers had their employer Fulco Clement imprisoned for non-payment of wages. One of the men should have been paid 4 albos for two days of labor, and a woman should have earned 2 albos over the same period. An albus was a coin roughly equivalent to a shilling. They subsequently sued him to recover the debt, and the resulting record includes a list of court costs which they wished to charge to Fulco. Included was this notation: "For having Fulco Clement detained, 3 albos, and 1 [album] for the jailer." 61 The initial cost of incarceration, in other words, was equivalent to two days labor for a man and four days for a woman. The incarcerated had to pay for their upkeep, and the revenues from the jail itself were not inconsiderable. In Lucca, the records of revenue kept by the treasury in 1337 recorded that the farm for prison receipts was sold for £80 11s. 2d. per month, 62  Two other things must be borne in mind. First, the crier-sergeants of Lucca, at least in the first half of the fourteenth century, typically did not arrest individuals accused of crime; instead, the accused usually reported voluntarily to jail. In Lucca, as a result, the spectacle of arrest was a spectacle associated only with debtors. Second, criminal trials in both cities were typically processed within a few days, ensuring that individuals accused of crime spent less time in prison than did debtors. Though the prisons themselves were multi-purpose, they were used more commonly for debtors.

IV
Coercion for debt did not end with incarceration, for creditors had another option: the predation of goods. Predation operated on the principle that material goods constituted a store of value readily liquidated through the process of public auctioning.
Such was the richness of material culture in northern Italy, southern France, Catalonia, and Valencia by the fourteenth century that there was a lot to prey upon. 65 Inventories and other records reveal houses chock full of jewelry, fine metalwares, finely appointed bed sets, and luxurious clothes made of richly dyed silks, woolens, and sendals. These items served simultaneously as prestige goods and as fungibles designed to store surplus wealth in a world without banking. The value of movable assets, in many households, was quite significant, easily approaching the value of houses and lands and rental income.
The extension of consumer credit undoubtedly fueled patterns of consumption in the fourteenth century. Yet that very culture of debt also enhanced the fungibility of household objects. By the fourteenth century, pawnbrokers, auctioneers, resellers, and regratters were becoming increasingly visible on the urban scene.
The process for seizing goods in Mediterranean Europe is already well known, thanks to the existence of readily accessible normative sources as well as copious records of practice. In Lucca (the situation was almost identical in Marseille), the process began when a creditor came to one of the courts to lodge a claim against a debtor. The frequency is astonishing; n 1338, the civil court of the Podestà di Lucca alone processed 750 simple claims (reclama). 66 These were not lawsuits; they were similar to the kinds of cases pursued today in small-claims courts. At this point, strategies diverged according to the nature of the circumstances, the preferences of the creditor, or perhaps even the customs of the court. Following one procedure, creditors asked their debtors to appear in court and respond to the claim. Occasionally they did. In February of 1338, for example, an apothecary named Dino Nuccori was dragged into the court by two brothers who claimed £22 10s. for rent owed on an apothecary's shop. Dino appeared in court, humbly acknowledged the debt, and was ordered to pay up in fifteen days. 67 The absence of any marginal notes suggests that he complied. In other cases, however, debtors contested the claim (and usually lost) or, far more often, simply failed to appear and were declared contumacious. By way of example, in January of 1338, a smith or a horse master (mariscalchus) of Lucca named Cuccharinus, who was very poor, claimed a debt of £8. 68 In August of the previous year, the claim went, he had left a pair of iron sleeves (par manicarum de ferro) with another Lucchese as security for a loan of 40s. His creditor, who bore the colorful sobriquet Freelance (Francalancia), had evidently been unwilling or unable to restore the sleeves. Freelance failed to show up at the hearing the following day and was declared contumacious.
Following a second procedure, which could be used in cases where the flight of the debtor was a serious possibility, creditors brought forward their claims but requested that goods be seized immediately and without warning and placed in the hands of a third party, a neighborhood official known as the consul. If not redeemed within three days, the goods sequestered in this way, called res intesite, were then redefined as prede, held for another three days, and then handed over to the creditor. The margins of these acts of intesimentum often include the characteristic phrase preda levata est ("the prey was then seized") followed by the amount and the day. In theory, any seizures should then have been recorded in the acts of predation, and occasionally they were. 69 However, extensive cross-checking suggests that notaries often did not make the effort.
Regardless of the process, once a claim had been validated and remained unpaid within the time allowed, the creditor could request a license to arrest (licentia capiendi), a license to prey upon the goods of the debtor (licentia predandi), or, in some cases, both.
In the case above, once Freelance was declared contumacious, the judge authorized a seizure of his goods; a small note in the register declared that a preda (not necessarily the iron sleeves) was seized on 1 March 1338. 70 In the 1330s, predation was far more common than incarceration, although records suggest that the trend, later in the century, was toward more incarceration. The process was highly regulated and public. Though procedures varied, the creditor's intention to move against the goods was typically conveyed to the debtor by means of a public proclamation, to the sound of trumpets, delivered by one of the crier-sergeants before the house of the debtor and throughout the neighborhood. If the debtor owned or even rented more than one house or workshop, the proclamation could be repeated before each and every one. 71 In Marseille, seals were placed on doors, warning people not to remove goods without the authorization of the court. Failing any response, the court then proceeded with the seizure of goods by one or more crier-sergeants. In Lucca, the goods were carted off to house of the consul or, sometimes, to the creditor; if the goods were many, porters were hired to help. The crier-sergeant then reported his predation to the notary of the court, who transcribed the list of items seized into his day-book. The debtor was granted a three-day period in which to ransom the goods. If the debtor failed to act, the goods were either auctioned off or simply held indefinitely. In both cities, rules stipulated that the sale had to take place in the accustomed and habitual sites, so as to avoid any appearance of impropriety or price-fixing. Predation, in short, was wholly unnecessary: any debtor had the means to liquidate his or her own goods. Yet the practice of predation was extremely common. In What is more, as noted above, it is very likely that many of the acts of intesimentum resulted in predations that were not consistently recorded in the accounts of predation. It is important to bear in mind that many of these seizures involved residents of Lucca's rural district. Unfortunately, the debtor's domicile is not usually indicated in the notebooks. Where indicated, however, it appears that around two-thirds of the seizures derived from the district. In the 1330s, the city of Lucca had a population of perhaps 20,000, suggesting an absolute minimum of around 600 seizures annually within the city walls. Even allowing for the fact that some of the debtors surely appeared more than once, it is possible that one in ten households in the city suffered an act of predation every year.
For a predatory crier-sergeant, a debtor's house offered a range of seizable goods.
The goods seized in the countryside most often took the form of commodities like oil, wine, fava beans, millet, and wheat. Since it would have been expensive and timeconsuming to carry these heavy, low-value goods into the city, crier sergeants almost always left them with the consul of the village, leaving it to them to arrange for shipping the goods to Lucca. Within Lucca itself, it was possible to find houses that had been entirely stripped of seizable assets; these are noted in notebooks entitled "Accounts of Seizures Not Found." Some of these cases surely arose from the absolute poverty of debtors, although it is quite clear that debtors had numerous ways to spirit goods out of their houses in the days leading up to predation.
Not everything was fair game. In both Italy and Spain, according to Gian Maria Varanini and Antoni Furió, municipal statutes often forbade the seizure of tools and animals. 75 In Verona, the list of prohibited items included iron and copper tools, clothing, beds and other furniture, tools, and animals. Crier-sergeants operating within the city of Lucca itself showed a preference for clothing: tunics, surcoats, cloaks, and capes. The notaries often noted down the colors as well as trims used, including vair, muslin, and other fine fabrics. Many of the articles of clothing listed in the Lucchese records were identified as masculine or feminine; this gendering extended to blankets and even mattresses. Crier-sergeants also seized coffers, bolts of fabric, hand-and face-towels, and ironwares. In Marseille, registers of seizures are not as common, and it is less easy to establish the range of items seized. In the extant records, I have come across a silver belt, a crown studded with pearls, a book, two silver goblets, a green cape, a golden pot or vase (potum) decorated with pearls and precious stones, sails, and a bed. There are also foodstuffs, though much fewer than in Lucca.
How shall we approach these lists of objects seized? To begin with, at least where cityfolk are concerned, it is possible to discern a preference for clothing and fine goods over commodities or ironwares. From the evidence of inventories in Marseille, it is clear that every house had a pantry or larder where the household kept food supplies. These were highly fungible items of known value, and thus, in theory, should have been ideal objects of seizure. In addition, the pantry was often located near the door, right off the hallway leading into the house. Thus, food supplies would have been the among the first items to attract attention. Despite this, crier-sergeants usually walked right by the pantry, the kitchen, and the dining hall so as to get into the bedrooms and other rooms. They seem to have preferred goods that carried the identity of the owner, clothing above all.
As Furió has noted, most seizures did not result in auctions. Goods were sometimes ransomed by their owners, and in other cases the creditors simply held on to them as if they were hostages. In Lucca, perhaps one in ten seizures led to an auction.
Where we do find auctions, they were far more likely to involve identity objects: although foodstuffs constituted around two-fifths of all objects listed in the inventories of seizures in Lucca, they were only one-seventh of the goods actually sold at auction.
Creditors showed a marked preference for exposing the more personal objects to the potential humiliation of the auction.
The several dozen records of auctions I have consulted sometimes reveal a gap between the nominal value of the item seized and the amount earned at auction. 76 In one case from Lucca in 1333, a ring was seized for a debt of 56s. and sold at auction for 34s. 77 It is easy to appreciate the difficulty of estimating, on the spot, the value of a ring.
Yet the pattern persists in other records. A lady's tunic and a robe seized for a debt of £8 Given that there were plenty of ways to liquidate one's own goods so as to pay off a debt, we have to assume that debtors deliberately pursued the path that led to predation.
It may have been shameful for creditors to insist on repayment, a situation that allowed debtors to game the system. In addition, it is quite likely that seizure cost the debtor less than liquidating the goods himself or herself. 78  where debt is concerned. 79 In some Italian cities, the names of debtors were read out at Sunday mass in the city's cathedral. In Como, the debtor, stripped down to a shirt and bereft of britches, had to stand on a podium before the crowd and expose his rear-end three or four times to the public assembly. In Florence, the portraits of debt fugitives, the pitture infamante, were painted on the sides of houses. 80 When predation came into play, however, the object of humiliation turned from the person of the debtor to the object of seizure, and the humiliation itself became vicarious. The process began with the public announcement of the intention to seize goods, made to the sound of blaring trumpets before the house of the debtor or the felon and in all the public places of the neighborhood. The seizure itself involved sergeants entering a house, rifling through the goods, and taking what they pleased. The goods, like hostages, were carted off through the streets to the houses of creditors or third-party sureties. Some were then exposed on the auction block. In Marseille, the auctioneers were invariably Jewish brokers, which perhaps added to the indignity.
It stands to reason that humiliation was embedded in the process of debt recovery, in much the same way that penal law deliberately exposed the condemned to spectacles of shame and humiliation. 81 This was an age, after all, in which the sources of honor were shifting ever more into the possession and display of material wealth. Archaeologically, we see this in the emergence of a whole new range of buttons, buckles, pins, and other fasteners, including knock-offs of gold and silver fasteners made with tin and pewter. In inventories from the fourteenth century, we find amazing descriptions of things that don't show up so commonly in the archeological record, including finewares, fabrics, and clothes. In a world of artisanal production and familial transmission, a world in which all goods, even clothes, had relatively long life-histories, goods had time to accrue sentimental value and embed themselves in the household as if they were members of the family. The acts of resistance to predation that we sometimes find make the most sense if we understand the following point: the seizure and sale of goods was like the taking of hostages. 82 In his study of the penal system of Old Regime France, Richard Mowery Andrews provides a list of some twenty-five or more punishments that could be applied to the condemned. The Criminal Ordinance of 1670 groups them into three areas: nondefaming, defaming, and afflictive. Nondefaming punishments consisted of alms, warnings, or suspensions from office. Afflictive punishments range from banishment to execution.
Fines are included on the list of defaming punishments, punishments that were designed to "dishonor the guilty person and make him infamous." 83 At first blush this seems very peculiar. Why should fines be dishonoring and infamous? It is only when we understand the humiliation built into the system that the nature of the penalty becomes clear.

V
The regulation of debt was, by a distance, the major preoccupation of courts of law in the two cities studied here. Records from Lucca and Marseille suggest that simple instances of debt recovery were at least three to four times more common than criminal prosecutions. The practice of contumacy, moreover, means that court personnel were little involved in arresting criminals. Crier-sergeants spent considerably more time on debt recovery than on criminal matters-and were well paid for their actions, since they garnered a fixed percentage from every seizure they made. Debt recovery has the appearance of a purely economic concern, and that is how it has been treated in the literature. But to write about debt recovery as an economic matter is just as anachronistic as to speak of contumacy as a sign of impotent justice. The culture of debt was a culture of honor, shame, and humiliation. The considerable investment made in the infrastructure of coercion for debt is a sign that late medieval courts of law, before anything else, were engaged in the regulation of honor. This is also why they meddled in face-to-face honor contests. They did so not because street fights were violent per se, but because they involved honor and standing. With this understanding, we can more easily understand why courts routinely transformed violent offenders into debtors. Indebtedness, in this world, was a vector for shame.
For decades, the history of late medieval justice was driven by the hyper-statist narrative with which I began this paper: private violence gave way to public violence as 38 late medieval states asserted their monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force. But as we have moved more deeply into the records of practice, a different vision has appeared.
Late medieval penal justice could indeed be violent at times. But if Lucca and Marseille are at all representative, the court system of late medieval Mediterranean Europe was not especially violent toward the bodies of the violent. Acting at the behest of creditors, not on behalf of some thinking, planning state, the courts practiced their violence more often on debtors and especially on goods and things. It was in this arena that late medieval states first began to develop, serendipitously, the instruments and apparatus of coercion that Max Weber, a century ago, took to be the signature of a mature state. Only later was the infrastructure of coercion deployed to the ends that Weber, and generations of medieval historians after him, imagined they were designed for.