Ricostruire dopo la tempesta. Strategie farfensi di difesa e controllo del territorio nel contesto politico della Sabina e del Reatino (1140-1160 circa)

Around the middle of the twelfth century, a group of written sources document the attempt made by the Benedictine abbey of S. Maria di Farfa to rebuild, reacquire and reclaim the castra of Septem Ianule, Trebula, Offiano, Poggio S. Lorenzo, and Monte Tancia, all located in the Reatino and Sabina areas where the monastery had an extensive network of castles, monasteries, churches, and estates. Produced in Farfa between about 1140 and 1160, these sources can be considered a direct expression of the aspirations and concerns that agitated the abbey in those years, and can therefore provide information useful for reconstructing the political line adopted by the Farfa abbots facing with external pressures and internal turmoil. For this purpose, the aforementioned testimonies, which scholars have up to now studied individually and in a limited way, are reconsidered as a whole and analyzed in relation, on the one hand, to the complex vicissitudes the abbey went through in the immediately preceding twenty years and, on the other, to the wider geopolitical context of central Apennine Italy in the mid-twelfth century, when the eastern territories of Sabina and Reatino became a disputed frontier between the Papacy, the Empire and the Norman kingdom of Sicily.