January 1, 2019 | Lena Kornprobst | HI Research Blog |
It is not true what their brother Piero is saying. They, Antonio and Simone, are not obliged to support him in his financial hardships caused by the high rents due for a tax farm, which he purchased by action alone and was thus the only person responsible for. Contrary to Piero’s claims, his brothers deny the existence of a fraterna, that is, of the institution of shared ownership, but also of shared liability based on family ties. Moreover, they reject his calls for brotherly support, considering him to have behaved in a foul way (in the brothers’ recorded testimony they say: “considerando essere lui de degno cathiuo gouerno”.1 Note how the scribe at first wrote the exact opposite, “degno”, but then corrected it to “cattivo”). This dispute between the brothers Antonio, Simone and Piero de Augubio took place in the Dalmatian town of Split in the year 1494. The civil lawsuit litigated in the presence of the Venetian governor, or comes, the highest legal and political authority in town, was recorded in great detail and is kept today in the Croatian State Archive of Zadar. Thanks to this it is now, more than 500 years later, possible to reconstruct such a conflict between three brothers, their opinions of and relations to one another, and thus their daily life on a micro level.
Before delving deeper into the case of our three brothers on the micro level, however, it is first necessary to take a look at late medieval Split on a macro level. Split is situated on the Dalmatian coast, relatively far to the South of today’s Croatia. It was ruled by the Venetians (again) from 1420 and up until 1797, the downfall of the Most Serene Republic. For 377 years, Split thus continuously belonged to the Venetian Stato da Mar, the republic’s overseas possessions, stretching from Istria, Dalmatia and Albania over Corfu and the Peloponnese to Crete and Cyprus, if, however, to a constantly changing extent, losing and (re-)gaining (mostly losing, though) towns, islands and strips of land.2 Split had approximately 5000 inhabitants, for whom the late 15th century was a difficult time due to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. In 1463 the Ottomans conquered the kingdom of Bosnia, causing thousands of people to flee, and in the following Ottoman-Venetian War that lasted until 1479, the Ottomans advanced and reached the immediate hinterlands of the Dalmatian towns. Moreover, another war was waged between 1499 and 1503 and the outbreak of the plague in 1525 caused the death of approximately two thirds of Split’s population. Split was thus in a fragile position between coast and hinterland and was dependent on imports, although contacts with the hinterland and trade with Ottoman territories always persisted, if under difficult circumstances. The situation of Split around 1500 can thus be described as a state of isolation and constant siege. Alongside the Ottoman pressure, the life of the inhabitants of Split was shaped by the Venetian rule and administration. The above mentioned governor was a Venetian patrician, who represented Venetian rule and exercised the highest authority, and who was in position for a two-year term of office. As a Venetian, thus an outsider, and through the short term of office, the governor should remain separated from the society in order to exercise an impartial and just rule. This was, however, not always the case, as various governors maintained personal and economic ties to the local population.3
How do we know so much about both the theory and the practice of Venetian rule in Dalmatia? We do so thanks to the rich archival material preserved both in the State Archive of Venice and, just as the case of the Augubio brothers, in the Croatian State Archive of Zadar. In the latter, apart from decisions and correspondences of the comites, we also find numerous civil and criminal lawsuits as well as notarial acts, such as contracts of purchase or lease, marriage and dowry contracts, testaments and inventories, or procuratorial acts. These sources allow us to study the daily life of the inhabitants of towns like Split on a micro level as they record precisely who did what with whom when and how. Hence we can reconstruct the personal networks of individuals and see who that person married, who he traded with, whose land he rented, who he appointed as a procurator, who he sued and who helped or opposed him in a trial. Combining this reconstruction of personal networks with the study of communities, which were based on various categories such as shared legal status, kinship, origin, neighbourhood, profession or political interests, seems promising: By asking which communities an individual belonged to and how these various belongings might have influenced his interactions with other people, who themselves belonged to the same or different communities, we can better understand the factors that influenced the daily life of people as well as the possibilities and limits of their interactions. How, for example, did patricians and non-patricians, that is, people belonging to the legally defined community of nobiles on the one hand, and cives on the other, interact? Do we see patterns of solidarity or opposition based on these legal communities, was it possible for a civis to marry a noble woman or to participate in commercial ventures operated by noblemen, were these categories invoked during conflicts and trials? When and how did it thus matter to be a patrician or non-patrician?
By studying the connection between individual networks and communities, several topics can be addressed that help us better understand daily life in late medieval Split: In the field of economy, we can ask which role belonging to a specific community played in trade or transaction of land and real estate. Did, for example, common origins facilitate commercial relations? In the political sphere, certain families might have been more closely involved in the Venetian administration than other, maybe even having personal or commercial ties to the Venetian comes. We have already mentioned the question in how far patricians and non-patricians interacted with one another, which leads to the interesting point of the actual importance of the noble status in the social practice of daily life. Demographic developments such as the visibility of refugees or migration to Italy are also interesting to study. When looking at lawsuits and thus at concrete conflicts, we can ask how personal networks were mobilized and if shared belongings to communities led to solidarity. Finally, lawsuits also enable us to study the actual working of the Venetian institutions, the judicial system as well as the role of the local statutes in conflicts.
Let us take these questions and the focus on networks and communities back to our case of the three quarrelling brothers Antonio, Simone and Piero de Augubio. The sentence seems not to have been preserved, but the extant records of Piero’s accusation and his brothers’ accounts contain interesting information. First, we learn something about the relations within the Augubio family, especially since this brotherly dispute continued, also in different constellations, in other lawsuits. This shows that one must not consider the community of the late medieval family to have been always fixed, stable and solidary. Furthermore, the case shows how a fraterna could work and that family ties could be used in such economic activities as a tax farm. The case also shows, however, that a fraterna could be dissolved and that this dissolution did not always happen unanimously or unequivocally. Here it is interesting to ask whether the Augubio-fraterna actually existed and was used at some point and how it is possible that one brother could claim its existence while the other two denied it. Furthermore, we can compare this with other fraternae and ask whether similar contradictions and conflicts existed in other families. Since the Augubio brothers were cives, the case shows that non-patricians were allowed to and could have the economic capacity to purchase the tax farm for the revenues of the island Šolta, which belonged to Split’s jurisdiction. The Augubio-family’s economic capacities are all the more interesting, since their father was an immigrant from Gubbio in Italy – hence the name – and managed to become one of the wealthiest inhabitants of Split, while, however, he and his sons did not enter the ranks of the patricians. Wealth was thus not only concentrated in the hands of the nobility. Regarding the working of the institutions and the legal practice, we learn that such a case could be heard by the Venetian governor and thus by the highest authority in place. In addition, Piero hired an attorney originating from Ferrara, which shows that Italian lawyers were present in Dalmatia and could work for cives.
Such a case can thus be a starting point to investigate, together with other lawsuits and notarial acts, the individual networks of the members of a family such as the Augubio and, crucially, to ask, which communities they belonged to apart from their quarrelling family and how this dispute influenced their networks and belongings to other communities. By starting with individual members of one family, we can thus study the working and the importance of communities and networks and hence a crucial aspect of the daily life in late medieval Split.
