My research project in Tübingen – ‘Migration, Mobility and Documentary Culture in Italy between the Eighth and Tenth Centuries’ – aimed at uncovering the changes provoked in legal and documentary cultures by small-scale movements of people across the boundaries between areas of different legal and documentary practice, focusing on Italy in the late Lombard and Carolingian periods. My research involved the examination of particular documentary witnesses to the migration or mobility of people in their archival context, investigating how far documents relating to those who move into one region from another differ from others in the same archive.  I looked again at the best (though still not comprehensively) studied such group of migrants: the so-called ‘Transpadani’ identified in the documents relating to northern immigrants into Tuscany in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.  I also examined a group who are just as interesting in their effects on effects on documentary culture in Lombard and Carolingian Italy, but have never been studied systematically: those who professed Roman law or used Roman legal procedures.  My preliminary findings suggest that these movements indicate the high degree of legal pluralism in Carolingian Italy, which requires us to re-think the way that political boundaries themselves were conceived of and operated in the peninsula’s fluid and creative legal environment.

You can find more information about Marios Costambeys here.