Curtensian System

CURTENSIAN SYSTEM. - This is the medieval economic and administrative system that governed the curtes, which consisted of a territorial estate and the whole body of buildings and persons attached to it; they rose to the status of legal entities with peculiar rights. The most numerous of these entities were the royal ones (villae, or private properties) and the ecclesiastical and monastic ones.

As regards the economic side, the curtense system regulated the position of the individual categories of dependents of the court (coloni, craftsmen, etc.), with their own rights and duties and the specific services they owed to the dominant estate. From the administrative point of view, the courts enjoyed special treatment and a certain autonomy: they depended on a single head, with officials assigned to various offices (custodes chartarum, ecclesiae, panis, vinearum...), according to the size and importance of the courts; an autonomy increased by peculiar fiscal and even judicial immunities, at first limited to the royal courts, then extended, toward the middle of the 9th century, also to the ecclesiastical and monastic courts.

As for their origin, the tendency today is to consider them a derivative of the regime of the Roman latifundia. The diffusion of these institutions embraces the whole of Latin Europe, as is attested by the names that survive in many localities of Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, etc., compounded with the word "corte"... (Cour, Cortes, and, in German, with the suffixes -hof, -hofen, -huben).

Alberto Ghinato