The Fiscal System in the Kingdom of Naples. Tools for comparison with the european reality (13th-18th centuries)

Regarding the kingdom of Naples, the fiscal system was investigated from the Middle Age to the eve of 18th century Neapolitan Revolution. The articulations, due to dynastic alternations, were substituted by the common and identifiable characteristics of the system, with the attempt to make the available data comparable with those of other Italian and European states. This objective required the necessity to first define the state as subject in its physiognomy of tax state. The use of the Schumpeterian paradigm: domain state – tax state resulted useful to this aim. This paradigm was used according to the modalities of historiography regarding the last decades (Petersen, Vann, Kruger, Carsten, Schremmer, Oestereich, Bonney, Ormrod). In this manner the following phases of the period in examination were identified; domain state (XIth -XIVth centuries), birth of the tax state (mid of XV century)), consolidation of tax state (XVIth –XVIIth centuries), tax state crises and anti-tax popular revolt (mid XVIIth century) and fiscal revolution (the end of XVIIIth century). Once the tax state course was defined, it was possible to delineate characteristics and trend of the revenue income, keeping present that the 1647-48 revolt divided the Kingdom’s tax history into two separate periods, since part of the tax income was given to the direct management of its creditors by the state. In an extreme synthesis, we can affirm that the Kingdom presented an income physiognomy almost exclusively based on tax collection; internal to this, a mixed system of direct and indirect taxes was identified through the adoption of a homogeneous interpretative line regarding the nature of the yield sources. In the two centuries preceding the mid 1600’s revolt, the direct tax on the communities hearths had a dominant role and only at the end of the 1500’s duties, tolls and privatives acquired increasing importance; in the following period a substantial equilibrium between direct and indirect taxes was registered, where at one time one prevailed then the other. Also the extraordinary tax required attention, since between the mid 1600’s and mid 1700’s it become a flexibility element of a tax system blocked by the tax revolt through which it is possible to follow, time by time, the attempts made to improve the taxation techniques. The community accounting documents were added to the survey on the state budgets, due to the central position they assumed in the kingdom tax system: the communities, as intermediate bodies, constituted the connection between state and taxpayers and provided the first issue of the budget income, that is the hearth tax. The municipal dimension permitted a verisimilar re-construction of the per-capita tax burden, which was proposed for the first decades of 18th century, placing it in comparison with the average income of the southern peasant family (10-15%). Lastly, I have tried to explain the reasons of the Kingdom tax system physiognomy, where the hearth tax assumes and maintains in time a significant role, recalling the choices of political nature and the characteristics of a strongly conditioning economy.