For decades, social anthropologists have examined local political conflicts, both in European and more especially in non-European contexts, on a micro-analytical scale in terms of ‘factions’. A faction is defined as a non-corporate political group which gathers friends and supporters around an important person, a leader, and enters into conflict with other similar groups in order to control resources and power. More recently, modern historians too have rediscovered the importance of factionalism in the study of political conflict, as part of a general review of the objectives and methods of a political history which favours centrifugal forces, tenacious particularisms and pervasive personal and informal ties, as opposed to the formal use of the modern state paradigm.

Indeed, it can be said that the ‘revision’ of the traditional concept of the modern state, and the reconsideration of the role of factions, lie at the core of all the basic features unifying the contemporary historiographical debate in Europe; these latter are not seen as archaic forms of socio-political organization, but as political configurations that emerge from the mesh of horizontal and vertical relations, patronage systems and family ties.

The study of factions has recently become an important key to understanding the operation of local power in the early modern age (in feudal contexts, communities and cities and, more generally, in the conflictual relationship between centre and periphery), and has at the same time been used as an interpretative grid for the study of courts.