Abstract: The book traces the creation of the Lucchese state from classical antiquity to the end of the 15th century. It describes and explains the geographical configuration, institutional organization, and social structures of an Italian city-state that retained its independence in a world of much larger political entities. Medieval Lucca ruled over a relatively large city territory. The book argues that the region over which Lucca aspired to rule corresponded with its ecclesiastical diocese. Precise borders were the product of inter-city warfare; but in early medieval Italy the diocese provided a basic framework in a world of fragmenting authority. The early chapters discuss not only the origins and evolving shape of the city territory, but also the firm control exercised by the city over its territory. Though not unique in this respect, Lucca provides a particularly strong example of the centralization of political and juridical power upon the hegemonic city. Lucca was especially innovative and precocious in the early division of its dominions into compact vicariates. Indeed Florence's restructuring of its own dominions was modelled on lands conquered during the fourteenth century from its western neighbour. The book asks how far Lucca's troubled political history in the fourteenth century subverted the earlier development of administrative institutions. Neither the disasters of the 14th century nor the decades of princely rule at the beginning of the 15th century brought a radical change of direction. The overview of the history of the Lucchese state from classical times provides the necessary background to the book's ultimate objective: the analysis in the final two chapters of the politico-administrative and socio-economic characteristics of the state that emerged from the Florentine wars of the 1430s. The final chapters compare Lucca with the new territorial or regional states of the Renaissance that have figured so largely in the historical literature, and ask whether the defining qualities of a city-state retarded the greater market integration that historians have sometimes attributed to the newer political formations.

Keywords: Lucca, Sei Miglia, vicariates, city-state, Renaissance state, peasants, landholding