La métallurgie extractive dans la Maremme toscane : des communes à l’État moderne (XIIe-XVIe siècles)

Starting from the end of the 12th century, the various municipalities of the Tuscan cities progressively increased the production of copper by installing the production structures close to the streams, where it is possible to apply hydraulic energy to the metallurgical processes. Near Massa Marittima, there were already some mining and metallurgical activities related to the production of lead, copper and iron, and there were also many furnaces and hydraulic plants. All these metallurgical works were organized by the Artes, which brought together workers specialized in the various fields of artisanal production which took place in urban context. In this city, the customs which governed the work of the miners and the metallurgists were defined by a specific normative corpus – the Ordinamenta super artem fossarum rameriae and argenteriae civitatis Massae – which had been inserted in the statute of the municipality between 1311 and 1325. Then, a new radical transformation took place under the domination of Cosimo Medici (1559), who introduced the “indirect process” in the field of iron metallurgy. During the same period, the manufacture of other metals faced some consistent changes too. In fact, to realize the fusion of the copper-silver mineral, an innovative process based on reverberation furnaces was applied for the first time in Tuscany, and at that time it was already used in Carnia, the region where these metallurgists had been recruited.