The subventio generalis (or "general aid"), also known as collecta, was a direct tax in the medieval Kingdom of Sicily.
The subventio generalis had its origins in the obligation of the holders of fiefs in the Kingdom of Sicily to provide military service to the monarchs. [1] [2] They were required to serve in the royal army without compensation for maximum 90 days for each 20 ounces of their annual income. [1] They could get rid of this irksome duty, if they pay a special fee, known as adohamentum or adoha. [3] Most barons and counts preferred to pay the fee which thus developed into a tax already under the Norman kings of Sicily. [3] The landowners collected the fee from their tenants, thus in practice the peasants were to pay the adoha. [3] Those who lived in the royal demesne—all burghers and the majority of the peasantry—were subjected to levies in money or in kind, known as collecta. [1] The monarchs could in theory freely demand such levies, only their fear of riots limited their greed. [1]
The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who was also king of Sicily, summoned the host in each year after 1231. [3] This practice enabled him to annually collect the adoha, transforming it into a regular tax. [3] The adoha and the collecta were not differentiated from 1238 and they were united three years later. [3]
Charles I, commonly called Charles of Anjou or Charles d'Anjou, was a member of the royal Capetian dynasty and the founder of the second House of Anjou. He was Count of Provence (1246–1285) and Forcalquier in the Holy Roman Empire, Count of Anjou and Maine (1246–1285) in France; he was also King of Sicily (1266–1285) and Prince of Achaea (1278–1285). In 1272, he was proclaimed King of Albania, and in 1277 he purchased a claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Charles II, also known as Charles the Lame, was King of Naples, Count of Provence and Forcalquier (1285–1309), Prince of Achaea (1285–1289), and Count of Anjou and Maine (1285–1290); he also styled himself King of Albania and claimed the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1285. He was the son of Charles I of Anjou—one of the most powerful European monarchs in the second half of the 13th century—and Beatrice of Provence. His father granted Charles the Principality of Salerno in the Kingdom of Sicily in 1272 and made him regent in Provence and Forcalquier in 1279.
The Kingdom of Naples, also known as the Kingdom of Sicily, was a state that ruled the part of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States between 1282 and 1816. It was established by the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), when the island of Sicily revolted and was conquered by the Crown of Aragon, becoming a separate kingdom also called the Kingdom of Sicily. This left the Neapolitan mainland under the possession of Charles of Anjou. Later, two competing lines of the Angevin family competed for the Kingdom of Naples in the late 14th century, which resulted in the death of Joanna I by Charles III of Naples. Charles' daughter Joanna II adopted King Alfonso V of Aragon as heir, who would then unite Naples into his Aragonese dominions in 1442.
The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised the English monarch. Great councils were first called Parliaments during the reign of Henry III. By this time, the king required Parliament's consent to levy taxation.
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The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in Sicily and the south of the Italian Peninsula plus, for a time, in Northern Africa from its founding by Roger II of Sicily in 1130 until 1816. It was a successor state of the County of Sicily, which had been founded in 1071 during the Norman conquest of the southern peninsula. The island was divided into three regions: Val di Mazara, Val Demone and Val di Noto.
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The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a kingdom in Southern Italy from 1816 to 1861 under the control of a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons. The kingdom was the largest sovereign state by population and size in Italy before Italian unification, comprising Sicily and most of the area of today's Mezzogiorno in covering all of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States.
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