In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon’s rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown’s attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages.

在过去的二十年中，人类学家、档案学家和历史学家越来越关注将档案作为研究对象本身的研究。为此，学者们主要研究了近代早期档案的出现和转变，主要关注政治和外交保存处。他们倾向于忽视金融档案，这是不幸的，因为与司法档案一起，它们可能是前现代世界最大的文献库，并且是那些首先面临管理大量文件的问题的文献库。这篇文章讨论了中世纪后期西西里王国金融档案馆的形成和发展，认为这个档案馆在 15 世纪早期演变成一个收藏档案馆，当它不仅保存中央财政管理部门制作的记录和账目时，还保存了一些地方官员和裁判官的记录和账目。我认为，这种档案转向源于这样一个事实，即阿拉贡王室的统治者不断需要增加收入来资助官僚机构和战争以及行使赞助，因此需要有组织的、掌握在他们手中并受他们控制的财务信息。在简要讨论了 13 世纪金融档案的出现之后，这篇文章追溯了皇室试图创建一个稳定的存储库来存储财务记录和账户的尝试以及它为防止文件分散和分散而进行的持续努力。最后，它考察了阿拉贡国王阿方索五世 (1416–58) 称为宽宏大量的成功策略，追求组织财务文件，并将财务管理部门产生的记录和账目集中到一个稳定的建筑物中。这篇文章特别关注保存记录的物质方面，例如，建筑物的修复、箱子的建造和安全锁的准备，这些都是中世纪后期出现的金融文件收集档案的组成部分。