"Honor, bonum et magnum averum". The medieval mobility in a lawsuit of the twelfth century

The short, medium and long-range mobility is a characteristic feature of the Middle Ages. The examination of the evidence of the witnesses of a lawsuit for hereditary possession, instituted in the second half of the twelfth century in the Lombard context, offers an interesting and unpublished cross-section on a personal and territorially circumscribed story and on the dynamism of men and women to move for the most disparate causes from one place to another. In particular, the events, recorded inside an aristocratic family of “milites”, point out the family ties, the dynamics for the control of power, the intrigues of all kinds to get the paternal heritage and the consequent patrilineage development, the relationships with the ecclesiastical and civil institutions, the constant trips on foot, on horseback or through waterway both locally and regionally than international, to arrive to the big centres of the Communes of northern Italy, to the heart of Christianity, in Rome, and to the capital of the Eastern empire, in Constantinople.