The political actors and networks of the March of Ancona in the 13th and 14th centuries

Geographic visualisation of communities in the March of Ancona. Presented at the online conference '"Ghibellin fuggiasco". Spazi politici sovralocali e reti di solidarietà nell’Italia di Dante'.

Pierluigi Terenzi (University of Florence)

I use nodegoat to visualise on a map and analyse the political actors and networks of the March of Ancona, a province of the Papal state, between the 1280s and the 1310s.

The visalisation shown above represents communities according to the descriptions provided by two papal documents: on the one hand, a hierarchy of towns (from the ‘maiores’ to the ‘minores’) is visualized using different colours and sizes of the points; on the other, colours are used to distinguish autonomous towns, communities influenced by papal officials and villages controlled by cities. This allowed me to show the existence of two political spaces in the urban March (northern and southern), which is confirmed by the different nature of seigneurial power in the two areas.

The visalisation shown below displays the same for what concerns the capability of political actors to create and/or became part of wider networks, and their transformations over the concerned decades (i.e. the political networks of the March in 1317-1318). The nodegoat points-and-lines approach to visualization offers the chance to combine social network with spatial analysis and to give an incisive representation of a very unstable reality, such as that of Italy in the period concerned. nodegoat allows me to shed light on that complexity, by remarking continuity and change produced by a considerable number of political actors.

Geographic visualisation of networks between communities in the March of Ancona. Presented at the online conference '"Ghibellin fuggiasco". Spazi politici sovralocali e reti di solidarietà nell’Italia di Dante'.