Abstract
Although the shipwrecked crew of the Querina, now ungovernable, have put their fate at stake democratically, the fact remains that the eleven survivors are all noblemen. The political game here confronts what we might call, with Thomas Piketty, an ideology of inequality. Taking the question of ideology seriously once again means taking stock, over the long term, of the creativity shown by different human societies, not only to justify social inequalities ideologically, but also to structure them institutionally. It is from this perspective that we propose to reconsider the historiographical scope of Georges Duby's book Les Trois Ordres ou l'Imaginaire du féodalisme (1978), on the assumption that what is at stake here is not so much the imaginary as ideology, and that the narrative experiment Duby is attempting " is more perilous than any other, since it consists in entering the trap in order to dismantle its mechanisms ", as Pierre Bonnassie rightly noted. It also raises the question of testimony and what the historian can expect from it. This theoretical discussion on the methodological expectations of the trifunctionality survey raises anew the question of the proliferation of political experiences in medieval Italy, between imperialism and contractuality.
