CURTENSE SYSTEM. — This was the medieval economic and administrative system that governed the *curtes*, consisting of a landed estate and the ensemble of buildings and persons bound to it; these rose to the status of juridical entities with peculiar rights. The most numerous of these entities were the royal ones (villa, or private properties) and those belonging to the Church and monasteries.
From the economic standpoint, the *sistema curtense* regulated the position of the various categories of persons dependent on the *corte* (serfs, artisans, etc.), with their respective rights and duties and the specific services they owed to the dominant estate. Under the administrative aspect, the *curtes* enjoyed special treatment and a certain autonomy: they were dependent on a single head, with officials assigned to various offices (keepers of charters, churches, bread, vineyards, etc.), according to the size and importance of the *corte*; this autonomy was further enhanced by peculiar fiscal and even judicial immunities, initially limited to royal *curtes* and later extended, around the mid-9th century, also to ecclesiastical and monastic *curtes*.
As for their origin, today there is a tendency to consider them a derivation of the Roman latifundium system. The diffusion of these institutions spread throughout Latin Europe, as evidenced by the names remaining in many countries of Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, etc., composed with the word “corte” (Cour, Cortes, and in German with the suffixes -hof, -hofen, -huben).