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de scolca were absorbed by the maiore de villa, whose expertise was restricted
to a single village.
1.5 Freedmen and servi
The highest stratum of freedmen consisted of the lieros de cavallu, who were
wealthy enough and capable of maintaining and arming horses for military
service. These milites or equites played a role that was certainly important to
the quarrelsome giudicati of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries.
However, their social profile remains vague until the beginning of the four-
teenth century, when certain Pisan registers show them oscillating along the
subtle border between the status of freedmen and tributary men (homines
tributari) of Donoratico and the Pisan commune.15 Distinguishing them above
all from the mass of vassals was their exemption from tributes, since they were
expected to give the dominus only a fixed and monetary donamentum. The
term donamentum is nevertheless marked by semantic ambiguity, as it refers
to a gift or gesture by a freedman, but at the same time evokes the act of giving
or subjecting oneself to the command of a lord.
The rural population was composed of a nearly indecipherable variety of
social conditions between liberty and servitude. The status of servi, who were
bound to the domus with which they were affiliated for four days per week
and subject to the quasi-despotic power of the donnos, was particularly harsh.
Marc Bloch has rightfully called them quasi-serfs, even though they were not
properly serfs.16 The servi could own property and press charges against their
own lord, if he left them the means and time to do so. They could also join in
marriage (domino consentiente), but they were denied the right to have a fam-
ily, since their progeny would belong to their master or masters, if these dif-
fered for the husband and wife. In the latter case, their offspring were divided
between their respective masters: half to each if there were two masters (one
per parent), a quarter to each if there were four (two per parent), and so forth.17
In theory, there was no limit to the division of a servu’s work hours, except
for the decreasing productivity of a body-machine that lost time and energy by
moving from one domus to another. On the contrary, it was precisely the break-
down in the quotas of the property of the servi that made their exploitation
more difficult and less cost-effective, thus undermining the economy of the
domus from within. The servi did have the potential to ransom themselves with
15 Francesco Artizzu, “Rendite pisane nel giudicato di Cagliari nella seconda metà del secolo
XIII,” Archivio Storico Sardo 25 (1957).
16 Marc Bloch, La servitù nella società medievale (Florence, 1975), pp. 429, 534.
17 Ortu, Villaggio e poteri signorili, pp. 15–27.