With the panorama of life in Altopascio before us, I shall now address the specific problem of the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ and its impact upon the lives of the villagers.

The ‘crisis’ that struck this society was not a general one. There was certainly a severe economic crisis that accelerated the ruin of peasant producers and widened the gap between landlord, tenant, and small producer. This economic crisis provoked correlative changes in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the landlord along with a consolidation of a rural middle class. The economic changes did not, however, give rise to a political crisis either on the estate or in Tuscany as a whole. The peasants and the leaseholders of Altopascio developed techniques of expressing their economic grievances, but these instinctive forms of organization did not create any crisis of ‘society in its relations with the state,’ or any constitutional crisis on the order of the more famous examples of early modern European history. It is true that the worst phase of the crisis in the early decades of the eighteenth century did help to stimulate serious disaffection in Florence with the long rule of Grand Duke Cosimo III. But the political and social changes both within and beyond the village were never of the intellectual force or the quantitative magnitude to challenge the rule of the grand duke in Tuscany.