Mobilità e pratiche di negoziazione dei mercanti ebrei nei circuiti fieristici dello Stato della Chiesa. Il caso di Rieti (sec. XVII–XVIII)

Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, as authority over Jewish mobility became centralized in the Holy Office, temporary permits to attend fairs in the Papal States turned into political tools for selectively regulating access to space. This paper analyzes the case of Rieti and its annual fairs as negotiated political spaces, where Jewish merchants, through documentary practices and relational strategies, secured margins of presence in an urban context from which they were formally excluded. Petitions submitted to the Holy Office reveal a systematic use of regulations to suspend the obligation to reside in the ghetto. In this light, mercantile mobility appears not merely as a tolerated exception, but as the outcome of a structured interaction between legal norms, economic interests, and negotiation skills, exposing the ambiguities of papal control and the potential for bottom-up influence on the concrete configuration of local political space.