The history of taxation appears to have downplayed the importance of the cadastre in the early modern age. On the other hand, taxes on consumption and the transfer of essential goods, such as gabelles and duties on flour, wine, oil, and other items became the primary focus due to the significant increase they brought in terms of State and municipal tax revenue. These taxes did not involve any means of determining wealth or income. (Ardant 1984, Hart 1995, Pezzolo 2003, Carboni 2008), nor did they include mechanisms for ascertaining wealth and income.

Subsequent to the era of medieval land registers, which were prevalent in the Italy of the comuni during the 12^th and 14^th centuries in particular (Grohmann, 1986), the approach to taxation in early modern Europe seems to have shifted towards indirect forms in order to ensure a stable and long-lasting public debt. The rise in military spending for ongoing wars, which led to the concept of the fiscal military State, resulted in a need for greater revenues. States thus began to rely on indirect taxes, which were easily collectable and provided a stable source of revenue, especially when managed through contractors. Additionally, these taxes were less noticeable to taxpayers. It was not until the reforms of the eighteenth century that the use of the cadastre for taxation purposes was revived, using new forms of assessment.

This article aims to revisit the prevailing notion that the cadastral system was overshadowed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and to question its accuracy. This doubt stems from the absence of comprehensive studies on local finance during the 16th-17th centuries. Instead, studies conducted on individual municipal and mostly urban cases were often assumed to represent the tax system as a whole in a given area. Applying an inductive method by generalizing specific results can lead to distorted interpretations. The case in question is the Kingdom of Naples, where extensive government inquiries into local finance were conducted throughout the entire territory. Additionally, budget documents were produced by municipalities at the end of each financial year and are available in serial dating back to the early eighteenth century. In this context, there was also an increase in the number and scope of indirect taxes at both the central and municipal levels (De Rosa 1958). Nevertheless, by studying these sources, it has been possible to challenge the traditional notion and establish the prevalence of taxes on the wealth of individual households (known as the tassa inter cives). These taxes relied on the cadastre as the primary instrument for detecting and assessing wealth (Bulgarelli Lukacs 1993, 2008, 2012, 2012, 2021). Therefore, also for the 16^th - 18^th centuries, the cadastre deserves significant attention from scholars, particularly concerning rural areas. However, there are still relatively few studies able to give an idea of how these census tools were developed and used at the local level. This contribution aims to explore ancient cadastres, focusing especially on direct taxation. Specifically, this paper aims to address Bonney’s call to investigate how wealth was assessed, what the tax base was, and what tax collection mechanisms were used (Bonney 1995, p. 473). This inquiry will be divided into two parts: regulatory context and current practice. The aim is to examine the existing correspondence between these two aspects and to adopt a comparative approach. The study will compare the cadastral mechanisms in use before and after the reforms implemented by Charles of Bourbon, King of Naples and later of Spain, highlighting the original reasons behind this initiative.

The starting point for understanding the field of taxation and the census is the regulatory framework that governed it, an essential source for navigating in this area of study. Capitularies, pragmatica laws, and instructions issued by the sovereign and government bodies from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century reaffirmed the importance of the cadastre in the tax system of the Kingdom of Naples. This was based on appraisal or cadastre, also known as aes et libram, and was highly regarded by the government, which considered it a legitimate and fundamental component of the tax system. As a result, it served as a constant point of reference between the tax authorities and the universitates (Bulgarelli Lukacs 1993, 113-116). According to historical studies, the long-standing cadastral tradition dates back to the pragmatica law of Ferdinand I of Aragon, the 1467 De appretio seu bonorum aestimatione, considered a crucial starting point for the cadastral system in the Kingdom of Naples (Giustiniani 1803, III). Undoubtedly, the edict was a significant turning point in the history of taxation, bringing certainty and regularity to the tax levy through a decisive and irreversible reform (Del Treppo 1986, pp. 111 et seq.). This reform, like other innovations of the time, was grafted onto past traditions through reference to the Angevin capitularies and statutes of the previous century, displaying substantial consistency in its regulatory provisions. Similarly to the capitularies and statutes of the previous century, the reform regulated cadastral practice in only broad terms. Although it firmly called on municipalities to adopt the cadastre, the indications it provided were general, serving merely to lay down principles.

The lack of directives contained in De appretio is to some extent offset by the jurisprudence of the Naples courts (the Camera della Sommaria, the Sacro Regio Consiglio, the Consiglio del Collaterale) called to deliberate on the matter. Legal scholarship too provided commentary on the legislation of the time. Authors such as Pietro di Monforte, known as Piccolo (1572), Pietro Paolo Parisio (1590), Scipione Rovito (1600), Pietro Follerio (1590), Gio. Paolo Montanaro (1590), and later Lorenzo Cervellino (1686) in particular, became points of reference.

The normative context alone cannot satisfy the historian’s questions. The recognition that autonomy had fiscal implications within the administrative and social particularism of the ancien régime highlights the need to examine the local context. To meet this necessity, investigations must focus on the territorial level, starting from the regulatory framework. However, the method adopted does not involve exploring the cadastral documents of a single locality, rather it is necessary to examine all the available sources in order to observe how the cadastral survey process was implemented and managed in local autonomous practice.

This study is based on multiple primary and secondary documentary sources, most of which are conserved in the Archivio di Stato di Napoli. These collections include the Camera della Sommaria: Catasti Antichi, Catasti Onciari, Notamentorum, Mandatorum Curiae, Attuari Diversi, and the Conti delle Università. Additionally, some sources were obtained from provincial and municipal archives, such as the Archivio Municipale di Tagliacozzo. Printed texts relating to the collection of laws and decrees of the Kingdom of Naples from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, works on the subject of the cadastre, or the administration of the municipalities, as well as legal repertoires, are housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli and the Biblioteca napoletana di Storia Patria.

The Kingdom of Naples, covering 79,477 sq. km, was the largest State in the Italian peninsula and was comparable in size to other European States. It was also densely inhabited: between 1550 and 1750 its population fluctuated between 2.9 and 3.9 million, reaching between 36 and 49 inhabitants per sq. km, making it one of the highest in Europe, second only to the central-northern area of the peninsula (Malanima 2002). The economy was substantially rural, and incomes were low; there was no urban network, and the towns showed a marked polycentrism across the territory: infrastructures were lacking, relationships with the foreign market were marked by substantial dependence on foreign merchant demand and forces, while currency was scarce and often of poor quality. Government policy was restrictive and hindered the free movement of products, taxing their movement and sale both at the State borders both within them and inside the capital itself. Taxation policy in the Kingdom of Naples had to deal with all this if was to be implemented in real life.

In long-term cadastral history, two periods can be distinguished regarding administrative planning and government initiatives.

The first period, spanning from the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century saw the creation of the cadastre largely entrusted to municipal initiatives, which were guided by local customs and disciplined by regulatory provisions such as royal edicts, as well as government resolutions that occasionally intervened in individual cases.

The second period between the 1740s and Italian unification saw direct government involvement in creating land registers to equip communities with a standardized approach to drafting. Two significant initiatives were undertaken during this time:

The first aimed to tax individuals, the heads of the family, based on their overall ability to pay, whereas the second focused on taxing land through a land tax that highlighted the characteristics of individual assets, such as the owner, property type, place denomination, extension, and net taxable income. Although these two typologies differed in their characteristics and fiscal objectives, neither used geometric lots, a practice that would only become widespread in the South after Unification. Nonetheless, the last-mentioned cadastral system included cartography (De Lorenzo 2003 and 2006). Scholars have mainly focused on these later initiatives due to the potential offered by their allegedly standardized quantitative data, which can be used in various fields of investigation, including agricultural landscapes, cultural assets, the anthropization of the territory, socio-economic analysis, and topography, etc. Only these types of cadastral records, especially with the digitization of data in GIS environments, make it possible to connect the data and the reconstruction of larger territorial frameworks beyond the boundaries of individual localities. The cadastres from the early period are mostly registered within these boundaries, due to the limited number - only a few dozen units - that have survived to this day in the entire southern region.

These ancient cadastres deserve our attention because they reveal connections between local cadastral experiences. By examining them, we can move beyond local particularities and identify some interesting aspects, starting with their primary fiscal purpose. It should not be forgotten that taxation was the primary objective of the cadastral instrument during the ancien régime. “The appraisal or cadastre of the Universitas is nothing more than a book in which all the people and goods of particulars are written, and their value and income are appreciated so that according to the more or less that it possesses, so the pro rata contributes to the universal weights”, wrote Leonardo Riccio in 1734, commenting on Lorenzo Cervellino’s text, which appeared in the first edition of 1686. Similarly, Pecori wrote in 1770 that “The cadastre is the act of numbering, estimating and proportionally taxing people and the territory” (Pecori, 1770, vol. I p. 430). However, we are well aware that the southern cadastre, which was originally designed for this function, was more than a mere inventory of real estate for tax purposes. The various types of cadastre in use until the mid-eighteenth century, including the onciario land registry, were survey tools that recorded families, inhabitants and institutions, together with their movable and real estate wealth, work activities, and the animals they owned. The resources of a territory were documented geographically, reflecting their organisation and variety. This wealth of information served to target the individual rather than the res, a fiscal objective that would remain unchanged until the beginning of the 19th century.

The cadastres referred to here are therefore the ancient cadastres and the so-called onciari cadastres, drawn up until the end of the 18th century according to the reform ordered by Carlo di Borbone.

The first and essential normative reference was the pragmatica law De appretio (1467) and continued to be so for about three centuries (Giustiniani, 1803, t. III, tit. XX, pp. 269-70).

The edict affirmed the centrality of the cadastre in the Kingdom’s fiscal system, requiring each community to prepare and update their own cadastral records annually in May, entrusting compilation either to the captain, a representative of the local royal authority, or the municipal officials aided by six citizens, two for each class. The information was obtained through self-reporting by the heads of families and verified by a local deputation, which then calculated and taxed the value of the movable and immovable assets. The assessment was based on the total resources of each household, including the head of the family, the number of working individuals, their occupations, and the assets they owned but also the expenses and passive liabilities borne by them.

The ounce was already present as a measure of taxable value, but further specifications were lacking, such as the parameters for conversion into ounces, or the reference base for evaluating (assets or income?).

In reality, the legislation only sought to regulate the cadastre in a general way, establishing the principles. Although it was compulsory for all the communities in the Kingdom to draft land registers, ample room was left to exercise autonomy, recognizing the value and pre-eminence of local custom over normative sources. In fact, the pragmatica law De appretio, which referred to previous Angevin capitularies, provided no indication of the concrete mechanism to be applied for gathering information and the taxation itself.

To address this gap, from time to time, decrees from the highest government institutions such as the Consiglio Collaterale, the Camera della Sommaria, and the Sacro Regno Consiglio assisted with specific issues raised by individual communities (Bulgarelli Lukacs, 1993, pp. 116-135). Jurisprudence and doctrinal contributions dating mainly from the 14th-16th centuries intervened in remedying the deficiencies of the primary normative source by providing interpretations and comments which, although not always in agreement, always kept it up to date.

The first “Instructions for the creation of the cadastre”, drawn up by the Camera della Sommaria, date from December 1639 ¹ . Probably issued at a time when the viceregal ambition to reorganise the finances of the local communities was clearly expressed, to be carried out by counting again the number of dwellings and compiling land registers throughout the kingdom, these instructions provide a real contribution to understanding the cadastral mechanism.

We should take the opportunity to examine them briefly. References to already defined procedures relating to the start of operations (public calls for self-declarations by the heads of families, the election of six deputies representing the three classes, and two appraisers) are accompanied by innovations including three survey categories who had not previously been subject to tax collection: foreigners holding assets present within municipal boundaries, feudal lords for their allodial assets, and ecclesiastics for assets received as donations rather than through inheritance. Regarding the latter, the instructions also defined the correct relationship between the amount of paternal patrimony and the virile, or dowry, due to those who took religious vows to avoid fictitious transfers as a means of evading taxation.

Regarding real estate, different categories were distinguished. For rented houses (homes for personal use were exempt from tax), income was assessed at 10% of the capital value after deducting maintenance costs. For and, on the other hand, assessment was based on income or ownership “according to the usual use of one’s municipality”.

For work activities, such as “industry” or “art”, a specific assessment table was designed. In this table, the various occupations, from medicine apothecary to general labourer, were grouped into three broad categories, which corresponded to different values in ounces. The table was repeatedly referred to by the courts of the Kingdom and reconfirmed by the Giunta (council) of the Allivio delle Università in 1739. It was included, unchanged, in the instructions of the Carolinian cadastre. ²

This normative text from 1639 demonstrates great respect for local customs, allowing the application and reinforcement of municipal particularism. Subsequent instructions between 1710 and the 1730s were written for Camera della Sommaria officials sent from Naples to supervise cadastral operations, providing more specific guidelines on the appraisal of real estate based on income. This method had already been defined before the Caroline reform of the 1740s implemented it. For rented houses and land of any kind, the income was evaluated net of annual expenses and charges, and the result was translated into ounces at a rate of 3 carlini each per annuity. The annuity was valued at 5% of the capital, with the value of the ounce fixed at 6 ducats. Only when assessing the value of animals, was it common practice to consider their capital value, calculated by applying a 10% reduction and converting it into ounces. This was due to the understanding that, unlike real estate, animals were unable to provide a perpetual income due to their nature. ³

Also the calculation of the bonatenenza, a tax, payable by foreigners for goods owned in the community, was adapted to these new methods of evaluation using the data collected from the cadastre. While the 1652 instructions of the Camera della Sommaria on this matter left the choice between capital value and income to the communities, in 1718, in answer to a question from the universitas of Postiglione, only the evaluation of the income was prescribed. ⁴

These procedural methods were faithfully transposed into Charles’ cadastre, but they had already become part of the cadastral practice of places well before its launch, at least in broad terms.

Comparison of these provisions with those of the onciario cadastre allows us to highlight the numerous elements of continuity that survived intact in the Bourbon pragmatica laws, raising doubts about the effective innovative scope of Charles’s initiative (Sofia, 1983, p. 183). There was uninterrupted continuity from the Aragonese edicts to the Carolinian cadastre, and contemporary observers, such as Broggia and Genovesi, had already highlighted the strength of tradition in the typology of Charles’ cadastre (Villani 1952 and 1973, Placanica 1983):

The cadastre ended amidst inconsistencies and conflicts after about 40 years. The stated aims of the cadastre were: 1) to fulfil fiscal requirements; 2) equitable intentions; 3) the recovery of local finance, and 4) to recover information on the demographic and patrimonial consistency of each municipality. However, there was no fiscal advantage for the State since the revenue from the tax (the so called funzioni fiscali) continued to be determined only by the number of hearths and not by the individual’s ability to pay, and still less by the registered real estate wealth, remaining in line with what had been observed so far. As there was no direct relationship between the State and taxpayers and the tax system was divided into two stages of payment - from the taxpayer to the local community, and from the community to the State - the financial consequences of implementing the cadastre would have only been measured internally within local finance. Nevertheless, there were strong interests at this level.

Looking back at the 15th-18th centuries, we can see that the cadastre was a highly valuable tool for municipal tax assessment, remaining in use for a very extended period of time. However, this long-standing use should not be confused with a lack of evolution or change. We should not think that the system continued unchanged until Charles of Bourbon’s reform in 1741. In fact, several progressive refinements were made to the cadastre over time, seemingly as a natural internal development rather than the result of directives from external government institutions. The most significant transformation occurred between the late 1600s and early 1700s, well before the onciario cadastre was adopted. In sum, we can say that the innovations in this period were the adoption of the annuity system, as well as improvements to the data qualification and classification processes through the introduction of categories and classes. There are several documented cases of these innovations throughout southern Italy, spanning from Abruzzo Ultra (L’Aquila) to Calabria Ultra (Catanzaro), and including Terra di Bari (Bari) and Terra di Lavoro (Capua).

The transformations are incorporated in Charles’ cadastre, which took onboard the bottom-up evolution that had developed over the previous decades. It is therefore not surprising that this cadastre appears far from being a novelty in terms of form, as contemporary observers clearly perceived. The hand of the State is not evident in the design of the approved cadastral system, as it was already in force in the provinces of the Kingdom. Furthermore, Tanucci observed insightfully in 1760 that “Amendments and reforms must be made when they are necessary with the least possible change, not only of things, but also of words and names” (Mincuzzi 1969, p. 56).

The real innovative scope of the cadastre can be seen not in its forms, but in its underlying principles. In the first place, the Bourbon State imposed a model that prevented the centrifugal forces of local autonomy from finding possible escape routes that deference to custom, which had been allowed to prevail over written law, had largely permitted over time (Rovito 1981, p. 386, Muto 1988, pp. 317-330). Since the Middle Ages, respect for custom had standardized the jurisprudential practice of the ancien régime to the point of considering the behaviours and methods that had been used over time as binding, resulting in a heterogeneous casuistry of models that remained in force until the eve of the Carolinian cadastre. It is important to emphasize this transition because the recognition or rejection of customary practices is one of the distinctions between old and new in the cadastres of the south.

The onciario cadastre established a principle of uniformity as its foremost objective. In contrast to the autonomous practice of the Aragonese regulatory model, the cadastre of the eighteenth century aimed to standardize surveying, evaluation, and taxation procedures. The single model for all the two thousand universitates was governed by strict rules, unlike in the past, to prevent different interpretations at the local level. The census specified the subjects to be included (natural persons, institutions, and religious bodies), and units of measurement and value, as well providing forms and fiches for each phase of the survey.

Without a doubt, standardizing the procedures allowed the Crown to reduce uncertainty when facing the operating costs of the tax system. It is common knowledge that the higher the level of standardization, the more efficient the State’s fiscal system becomes. Some considered it a necessary step towards creating a modern tax system with centralized and direct tax collection (Johnson, Koyama 2017).

Another aspect to consider is information. The onciario cadastre provided a large amount of information about the territory, including population, agriculture, work activities, wealth, income, the use of capital, and livestock, satisfying a Europewide need stretching from England to France, up to Sweden. For the first time, between the mid-1600s and throughout the following century, this information was combined with the desire to attribute numerical values to descriptions and bring a multiplicity of data back to unique and uniform parameters (Frangsmyr, Heilbron, Rider 1990, Brian 1994). William Petty, along with his successors (Gregory King and Charles Davenant), introduced the quantitative method in the analysis of social phenomena, providing a cognitive basis for the sovereign’s decision-making. Political arithmetic offered new tools for the art of government, the identification, classification, estimation, and taxation of economic reality. This created a pathway of knowledge to build a new policy of territorial control and management. For the first time, the information provided was comparable and above all combinable with other data coming in. In the case of the southern cadastre, the Government had access to an information base that gave an account of the wealth of families in the south.

The path, however, was not so linear. The principle of universality was thwarted after many years of experience, when the Government recognized freedom of choice in the tax system to be adopted and released local finance from the obligation to follows a single tax method. The resistance of local elites to having their wealth surveyed, assessed, and taxed thus prevailed.

Despite obstacles such as local conflicts and autonomous management practices, the cadastre was in place for centuries in the Kingdom of Naples, later known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The reasons behind its long-standing confirmation are discussed in the text. These reasons include the economic framework of the Kingdom, which facilitated the widespread adoption of the cadastre; the desire to create a tax system that was fair and equitable, and which responded to the contemporary precepts of tax legitimacy, and the need to ensure a necessary levy for the Kingdom’s general budget. The first source of revenue was the hearths tax, paid by municipalities based on demographics (number of households), and then internally divided among individual taxpayers based on the cadastre. The continued need for such information explains the cadastre’s longevity throughout the history of the Southern Kingdom, even after the reforms of the Napoleonic era and up to Italian unification.