Description
The historical origins of local traditions of self-government can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when institutions, legal and administrative realities comprising areas of self-management of natural resources took shape in the Alpine arc. Isolated and hard-to-reach places, true morphological enclaves, tended in fact to generate administrative and legal enclaves.
The first nuclei around which forms of community management of resources and social life developed were already formed in the early Middle Ages. In the context of the institutional restructuring that affected the Holy Roman Empire at the beginning of the 11th century, the Episcopal Principality of Trento (1027) was established, which administered a territory roughly coinciding with today's Trentino and a large part of Alto Adige.
Situated on the transit route between the Germanic world and the Italian peninsula, for the administration of justice, the collection of taxes and the organisation of assemblies, the Episcopal Principality of Trento relied on an advocatus. As advocates of the bishop-princes of Trent and Brixen, it was the counts of Tyrol who centralised more and more powers on themselves, effectively taking them away from the bishop-princes. Once the dynasty was extinguished, the Tyrolean County came under the control of the Habsburgs: in 1363, through the so-called 'Compattate', Rudolph of Habsburg, formally vassal and defender of the bishop of Trent, accentuated its political and above all military subordination.
In the valleys, meanwhile, customs and unwritten laws found form in codes and charters of rules: subject to the placet of the prince-bishop, these documents testify to ancient forms of self-management of communal property, as in the case of the 'Patti Gebardini' of 1111 from which the Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme originated. The 'usi civici', a form of collective ownership of resources such as timber and pastures, were also widespread in this portion of the Alps, entrenching in the population traditions of community management.
