The nature of the ‘family’ and the relationships of members of a family have been much re-considered by social historians of Europe, more particularly with Britain and France than Italy. The concern in Italy has been more with family–clan and family–household inter-connections, than with affective relationships within the closer family. The composition of the household, whether it is a multi-generational group with unrelated servants and apprentices or a nuclear family of two parents and young children, affects the relationships and affections of key family members. So a discussion of household and family structure precedes a consideration of marital and parental relations.
The supposition for western Europe is that historically from the middle ages to the present various forms of composite or extended family and multi-generation households gave way to a norm of a family and household structure with two parents and their children (until those grow up and leave home in early adulthood). Increasingly, social historians detect greater variations and complexities in the composition of family–household structures, past and present, and in the meaning of ‘family’.1 Several relevant issues have already been raised, as in dealing with population figures, with rural tenancies or with the employment of servants, many of whom lived within a household or ‘family’, and some of whom might be illegitimate children with an ambiguous status.
A large family or household might be seen as a sign of prestige and object of pride. The humanist architect L. B. Alberti (who incidentally never married), wrote a Dialogue on the Family, in which one speaker defined the family as ‘children, wife, other relatives, retainers, and servants’, and another commented: ‘we pay salaries over the years to various strangers and feed and clothe servants, not because we wish only to take advantage of their services, but because we want to have more people in our house’.2
This is an optimistic approach to a large establishment. The intrusion of servants, apprentices and other outsiders within the household has recognised negative aspects. A well-run, and lucky, household might have loyalty from its servants. But many owners were fearful of servants, worried by the possibility of thefts and about immoral behaviour between servants, and between servants and younger family members or the master. Servant problems could seriously disturb marital and child–parent relationships. Alternatively servants and apprentices might fear the discipline, wrath and violence of master and mistress, which could even lead to murders, as Venetian prosecution records show.3
Modern research has undermined past simplistic views that the Mediterranean world had a typical family–household model with multiple generations (sons not necessarily relocating on marriage), and with women marrying young (under 20). This family characterisation has been undermined, with commentators stressing complex diversities up and down Italy, and within narrower areas between urban and rural, and/or economic groups.4 In rural regions of central and northern Italy the configurations of households became more complex from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, while the female age of marriage rose. Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria maintained the late marriage profile, and had multi-generational families. Other parts of the north-central regions, such as Umbria and the Marches, also had multiple households of a horizontal configuration, where married brothers lived in the same house or housing group with their offspring.
The south tended to see more families splitting into nuclear families in separate residences; but women were still marrying young in the eighteenth century. A delay in the age of marriage occurred in Puglia through the seventeenth to eighteenth century, but women were still marrying in their late teens. For the rural south G. Delille (1985) argues for a division between monocultural plain areas with large estates, where women married younger, and more mountainous areas of mixed-crop farming and smallholdings which encouraged later marrying. Some communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might have women marrying on average aged a mere 15.2 years, others at 26.4. In Venice by the eighteenth century, marriage for both women and men was delayed into the twenties, with many postponing to nearly thirty. In northern urban areas, and in Sardinia, late-marrying couples tended to move into their own residences, not staying with parents or siblings.
Before marriage many children and youths went to live outside the parental home, as farm-hands, servants or court attendants. Marzio Barbagli argues that in northern urban areas in the sixteenth century a third or even half the males, and a third of the females spent some years serving others; from the seventeenth century such male service declined considerably, leaving domestic service to women. In northern rural areas in the sixteenth century about 20 per cent males and 10 per cent females did a period of service, and this persisted in the following two centuries. In the Pisa contado, 30–40 per cent households included a farm-hand, with males aged ten to twenty. In the eighteenth century some started such work before their teens and served about eight years, and came from families headed by widowed or abandoned women. In southern Italy, however, few youngsters went into service with other families, in rural or urban areas.5
All kinds of peculiarities and interesting variations existed. This might be illustrated by consideration of two different areas, at the beginning and end of our period. The Florentine Catasto of 1427, the register of wealth of households/hearths as the basis for taxation, has provided the fullest information on households, families and resources for any area.6 The bare statistics that the Tuscan population of 264,210 persons was divided into 59,770 households indicate that the average household size was 4.42 persons. This might suggest the prevalence of the conjugal family, but in fact a considerable number of small household units of one or two persons existed (especially in the towns), and a significant number of very large households. Nearly 44 per cent of the hearths contained fewer than four people; and 10.8 per cent of the population lived in substantial households of eleven to twenty-five persons. The large households could be those of the urban wealthy, with numerous servants and ready to house affines and cognate relatives in one substantial palazzo; but there were also large households of share-croppers under the mezzadria system; poor rural families not owning the land maintained multiple family households, and sons did not move out to another home on marriage. Multiple households could house the rich, and the poor.7 Multiple households containing parent(s) with children and their spouses numbered 8104 households (13.4 per cent of all designated households), while multiple households with married brothers together (called a frérèche) were 3147 (5.24 per cent). In contrast 3980 ‘households’ were of solitary women (6.66 per cent), and 3804 (6.36 per cent) were made up of widows with children.
Florentine law dictated that inheritance of the patrimony went to sons, and females did not share in the patrimony; a wife was brought into the husband’s family, but it was rare for any of her relatives to be added to the multiple family structure. If widowed she might go back to her father or brothers. A son might bring his bride into his father’s household to create a patrilineal multiple family, but a daughter would rarely bring her husband into such a structure.
The largest household found in the 1427 catasto record was the frérèche of Lorenzo di Iacopo, living in suburban Florence. It had forty-seven members from four generations, centred on Lorenzo and three brothers. There were ten conjugal families, eighteen unmarried children or nephews and eight grandchildren or grandnephews. Unfortunately there is no evidence about the physical living arrangements for this group.
The second instructive example selected comes from eighteenth-century southern Italy, where W. A. Douglass has studied the joint-family in Agnone and some neighbouring localities in Molise.8 Agnone was the largest town in Molise in the seventeenth century, and remained an important regional centre for some time. In the eighteenth century two-thirds of the inhabitants were involved in agriculture, whether as labourers and share-croppers on property of local landlords (generally absentee), or having their own small plots of land. The town of Agnone (with 861 households in 1753) was 850 metres above sea level, on a border level between arable and pastoral agriculture, as was the dependent village of Pietrabbondante (133 households). Lower areas farmed wheat, grapes and olives; upper land meant pasturage. Douglass argues that the ideal household formation was the joint-family where sons married and stayed with father, though demographic realities made this hard to achieve on a full scale. A static figure in 1753 gives 63.2 per cent as nuclear, and only 10.5 per cent of households in Agnone as joint, but a long-term study of families in one major parish suggests more families aspired to this latter configuration, only to be impeded by marital plans and untimely deaths. The first married sons remained with their fathers, but later sons might leave a crowded household on marriage and start new households. There were few frérèche households in Agnone or dependent villages. The death of the father led married brothers to split up. Unlike the earlier Tuscan scene, this Molise region shows few solitary households, female or male (about 2.5 per cent of households).
Douglass looks to joint-family, multiple households governed by economic poverty in the central and northern Italy as a possible point of comparison, and finds interesting differences. In the north share-cropping arguably encouraged the continuation of joint-families, because the landlord saw greater efficiency in keeping a labour force together within the tenant family. If the active household became too limited the share-cropping agreement might not be renewed. But this factor hardly operated in the Agnone area which only had share-cropping on a limited scale. Here we have poor labourer families in largish joint-family households; Pescopennataro – situated at 1190 metres and reliant almost entirely on animal husbandry – had even more joint-family households. In this area, unlike in Emilia or rural Tuscany under the mezzadria systems, there was no tendency to stabilise the workforce by delaying marriage or encouraging male celibacy. Nearly all males married, on average aged 25.85 years. Most women also married, and were likely to be forced out of the natal home if they did not. The mean age for first female marriages was 22.88, which might be expected for mountainous areas according to Delille’s verdicts on southern Italy generally. So we have a different version of the multiple household from a poor area, with different family implications.9
The ‘family’ of course extended beyond the household structure systems, even of the most complex kinds. We can usefully distinguish between (a) ‘family’: the nuclear or conjugal group of parents and children whether married or not; (b) ‘lineage’: a kin group of blood relations who recognise their relationship with each, and know it as stemming from a common ancestor; (c) ‘clan’: a kin group where the members have a sense of community and of relationship, but without clear and accurate knowledge of the precise relationship, lost way back in the family tree.10 The extent to which this extension was recognised and played a role in family strategies, economic arrangements and political ploys was again variable. Kinship factors were not only important for patrician and noble families, when much might be at stake financially and politically, but also for some peasant families with smallholdings who used kinship relationships in planning marriages that would help keep properties together.
An ‘ordinary’ household (as opposed to large palaces of the elites), could include persons who were not blood-relatives, marriage partners or servants and apprentices; i.e. friends, business colleagues or apprentices who remained as adults. Examples have been noted in Altopascio. An interesting example that has been clarified is that of the household of the Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino, who did not marry or have his own children. Bronzino had been caringly treated, as it were ‘fathered’, by his own painting master, Jacopo da Pontormo. Bronzino became close friends with Cristofano (Tofano) Allori, a sword-maker, and lived with him and his family; and when Tofano died young in 1541, Bronzino immediately took care of his widow and the young children, including five-year-old Alessandro. Bronzino and the Allori had previously shared expenses, but now Bronzino became the main financial support, paying for the funeral, liquidating old debts and helping provide a dowry for the daughter Alessandra. He also trained Alessandro to become a major painter, to whom he later left his artistic equipment and pictures. For years he essentially paid for the whole family as if his own. In the 1540s Bronzino brought into the Bronzino–Allori household his own mother and a niece, creating an extended family of seven for a while. After marriage, Alessandra and her husband remained close friends and visitors, and helped him look after and feed his old master Pontormo. After Bronzino’s death (1572) Alessandro Allori signified his love for his master and surrogate father by having him commemorated on the Allori family monument. This example not only highlights the complex natures of households and families, but illustrates the place of friendship (coming to the rescue after untimely death) and hospitality, and the ties of artistic relationships.11
Economic factors of various kinds affected the size of households in both countryside and towns, and the work of Douglass and Delille emphasises that the relevant economic forces involved could vary within a short distance. A significant number of people occupied households containing several blood-relatives, but also living-in servants, apprentices and farm-hands. The complex mixture could affect the wealthy, living in large urban palaces or in villas, but also poor farming families. The household composition was likely to affect personal relationships, marital and parental. Parent–child relationships at most levels of society could be influenced by teenagers leaving home to work elsewhere, and – in better-off families – by having babies sent away to wetnurses.
Marriage planning was one of the most crucial decision-making processes for the family, since much could be at stake. Marriage was seldom the decision of the couple alone, and they might be the least of the decision makers. While love and affection, sexual attraction and unwanted pregnancies might play their part, the more hardheaded financial and political considerations of parents, brothers and uncles were far more important. The family had to consider the suitability of the intended bride or groom in terms of social standing, the nature of the family relations who would thus be conjoined, the earning power of the male, the implications for land ownership or tenancy-control and the size and nature of the dowry to be given or received.
The major considerations for marriage hinged on inheritance laws and the dowry systems. The inheritance laws were not uniform throughout Italy, and on the fringes of succession – when direct patrilineal succession could not operate – could be very complex. There was, however, a great stress on the power of the will and that the testator’s wishes should be upheld. Local social conditions and customs would affect the tendencies of will-making. Fundamentally, in non-feudal cases primogeniture did not operate; the patrimony was divided between the surviving sons, but not daughters. The principle of male partible inheritance not only affected upper ranks with significant property to pass on, but could affect peasants with tenancies. In the southern feudal areas if a nobleman died intestate then all feudal property went to the eldest son, but the non-feudal possessions were divisible between all sons and those daughters without dowries.12 The essential protection for daughters was a dowry, whose value had to be guaranteed by her husband’s family and was to be available to restore to her if widowed; it did not become part of the husband’s patrimony. Under the social pressures of will-making the testator sought a balance where possible between preserving intact a family patrimony, and providing something for all offspring, male and female.
These conditions had considerable implications. To preserve basic family resources and the patrimony younger sons might be encouraged to delay marriage or not marry at all, and remain within the multiple household. Various ploys had to be used to prevent excessive subdivision of landholdings, whether noble or peasant. In the region of Biella in the north the remedy by the eighteenth century was for all sons to inherit the holdings jointly. On the other hand daughters would be encouraged to move out of the parental home, with a dowry for marriage or a convent. But the expense of dowries might space the marrying of daughters while resources were accumulated, so leading some to marry late – or not at all if family conditions worsened.
The bridal dowry was of great significance. In the past a married couple had received dowry and gift contributions from both families to resource the new family, often in near equal amounts. But by the fifteenth century, virtually all the contribution came formally from the bridal dowry and her trousseau. The dowry amount had to reflect her family’s social standing, and her honour. A dowry remained attached to the woman until her death, to act as a resource and protection if she were widowed. A dowry was an indication of respectability, and was deemed a requirement for the honourable poor as much as the patricians. As Christiane Klapisch-Zuber put it, for the pre-tridentine period: ‘From the top of Tuscan society to the bottom, families rushed to the notary to establish a dowry, and a marriage without a dowry seemed more blameworthy than a union unblessed by the Church. The dowry penetrated to the very heart of the social ideology of the time.’13 In the fifteenth century, Florence in particular developed an elaborate dowry fund to enable the upper families notably to plan suitable family strategies, consolidate kinship networks and preserve honour and wealth.14 The fund became an investment institution with wide political implications for the Republic. The problem of the dowry for others in society led philanthropic confraternities to provide dowries for poor virgins so that they could secure husbands, and not be forced into an evil life.
The early modern dowry system meant that daughters could be very expensive – and unwanted in some families. It encouraged fathers and brothers to send females into convents, whether they had a vocation or not. For entry into most convents an entrance dowry, and often some continuing contribution to maintenance, were required; but this was considerably less costly than the marriage dowry – possibly a tenth less for the patricians of Venice and Genoa, where marriage dowries were generally the highest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rural families, lacking resources for dowries, might send their daughters into domestic service, through which they could accumulate resources for a later marriage.
The complexities of the dowry system were legion, and the implications were not always detrimental to women. Dowries could be made up of cash, jewellery, land, bonds, furniture or agricultural implements. Some part might be handed over on the signing of the marriage contract, or consummation; some might be allocated but not distributed until the couple set up a new home, or the wife died and the husband or his family claimed the remaining dowry for the children. If land was part of the dowry settlement the implications for the overall property management of both families could be considerable. The husband and his family had to protect the dowry and its value. They may have had the management of the new wife’s dowry assets, but they needed to be able to restore its worth should she be widowed. The husband and his family may have expended considerable sums ‘dressing the bride’ and making gifts, to add to the honour and acceptability of the marriage, at least in Tuscany and Rome.
If a wife perceived that her dowry was being mismanaged and her position endangered, she could in some places and under some conditions resort to law – through her male relatives or a guardian such as the Florentine mundualdus – to protect it or gain control over it.15 Since the dowry was the wife’s and was not in her lifetime absorbed into the husband’s patrimony (though as Gregorio Dati’s diary shows, husbands could use dowries to fund business activities), she could be in a position to reallocate it in her will.
The dowry system made planning who married whom a wide family consideration, and the wishes of the couple concerned could be of minor concern. Negotiations might be conducted through family intermediaries, friendly go-betweens such as the Florentine mezzani or even officially recognised marriage-brokers as in Siena. At the upper levels of society, with considerable political implications in family and clan alliances, political leaders were often actively involved, like the fifteenth-century Lorenzo de’ Medici who had weddings completed in his palace.16 The couple concerned might not know each other or meet before a betrothal (and even that, especially with dynastic princely marriages could be undertaken by proxies at opposite ends of the peninsula). A very short period only might elapse between initial meeting and consummation of the marriage.
The degree of pressure on offspring to marry or not, to go into a convent or agree whom to marry is hard to assess. L. B. Alberti (unmarried), advised the young man to find out the character of his intended bride, and that of her relatives, before agreeing to a match. Florentine records imply considerable discussion of the intended or contemplated partners, and that the views at least of the groom-to-be were ascertained, even if the couple did not converse directly.17 Arcangela Tarabotti in the seventeenth century famously attacked Venetian fathers for forcing daughters into convents, but Venetian patrician mothers often secured their daughters a choice in their fate. The bitter debates at the 1562–3 sessions of the Council of Trent about clandestine marriages suggest that many couples were perceived to be forming unions contrary to parental wishes. While Trent did not insist on parental consent for a marriage to be recognised, some secular governments, such as that of Piedmont-Savoy, did.
Given the cost of dowries, pressures were powerful to arrange marriages within kinship groups to keep the resources close to home. This tendency has been found among feudal families in the Kingdom of Naples such as the Carafa, Caracciolo, Ruffo di Scilla and Tocco, but also among Neapolitan rural families to preserve tenancies. In the north, in mountainous areas around Como, numerous petitions were made for dispensations to marry within normally prohibited degrees of kinship. This reflected a desire to keep property within a kin-focused society – as well as the problem of finding suitable partners within isolated inbred communities.18
Some marriages were triggered by pre-marital sexual relations. The extent of premarital sex and pregnancy is hard to establish, especially as through much of our period there was a battle to establish a common form of marriage, and then to enforce the Tridentine rules on marriage. It is possible in some areas to match marriage and baptismal records, and establish that a certain number of brides were pregnant. This still leaves open the question whether pregnancy had caused a shot-gun wedding that would not otherwise have been likely; or whether an agreed relationship had been established, with or without formal betrothal, and that marriage took place when pregnancy proved the desired fertility of the union; i.e. nobody was seriously embarrassed or shamed, even if the parish priest might be annoyed.
Rape, or an allegation of it, could lead to marriage. Rape of a very young virgin or of a nun was condemned as a very serious offence, but rape of an adult secular woman was treated as an assault, and as an offence against the honour and property of the father or husband as much as against the female victim. The attitude of courts and society tended to be that the couple should marry if both were unmarried, and so rescue her honour (and the family’s). If the rapist was married and his victim not, then he was expected to compensate by paying what would amount to a dowry for her to marry another with some respect, or enter a nunnery. Though seemingly not a good foundation for a satisfactory marriage, for many women it must have been seen as a lesser evil than dishonour. Many rapes were probably resolved within the families without recourse to law. The record of the case initiated by Orazio Gentileschi accusing another painter Agostino Tassi of raping his daughter Artemisia Gentileschi in 1612, does strongly suggest that she was unwillingly deflowered (whatever the counter-charges of her attacker and some of his friends). Once this has happened she allowed further intercourse to take place: ‘What I was doing with [Tassi] I only did so that, as he had dishonoured me, he would marry me. ’ It is when it becomes clear that marriage will not follow willingly, that her father goes to court on her behalf – though by then for punishment not an enforced marriage. Tassi received a sentence of exile, but before he set off he had the sentence cancelled as too harsh, and he was soon running a complex studio again, as we have already noted. Artemisia married another, though this relationship did not last long and she became an independent artist and mother. Her father again worked with Tassi.19
However in some cases ‘rape’ was part of a more complex scenario, as has been revealed by Elizabeth Cohen’s study of some rape cases investigated by the Governor of Rome’s court in the early seventeenth century. Virginity, as she argues it, was a ‘negotiable commodity’. A premature and illicit deflowering could be by choice as well as force. A charge of rape could be used to secure a dowry and marriage; opportunists used the initial sexual episode and the law to secure a desired but ambivalent (about marriage) male, or to persuade the parents of a lover, or her parents, to agree to a marriage. The court transcripts show the females concerned as often remarkably adept at using the court to their advantage.20
The formation of the marriage was thus often a matter of economics, social status and legal strategies that we might find unseemly, and not conducive to a happy and stable marital scene, especially when the household could be large. However we need to look more closely at relations within the family.
The emotional content of family life and affections, especially for France and England, has been hotly debated. This can be connected with another debate on the extent of misogynist attitudes (and whether they grew or decreased over the period), which might have affected husbands’ and fathers’ attitudes to wives and daughters. New work on Italy further undermines old allegations of affectionless childhoods and marriages before the eighteenth century.21 It is dangerous to assume a marriage to be loveless because arranged by others, with partners much different in age; or that the high mortality of infants froze emotions concerning children. The existence of multiple households, and/or households with resident servants and apprentices in buildings which might not allow much privacy, could have impeded the development of close relationships. The age difference may be more significant again in modern terms than it was in the past; though it was good copy for sixteenth-century plays, where old husbands are ridiculed while their young wives enjoy youthful lovers, as in Giovanni Maria Cecchi’s The Horned Owl (L’Assiuolo, 1549), or Girolamo Bargagli’s The Female Pilgrim (La Pellegrina, c. 1564–8).22 The age gap probably encouraged a patriarchal mentality; but this need not necessarily have frozen out affection.
Much of the public literature of the period suggests a misogynist attitude that would have fostered a domineering patriarchal attitude within the family. A prevalent male attitude throughout our period towards women was that women were weaker physically and mentally, that they were vulnerable and in need of male protection – whether paternalistic protection against marauding males, or protection against their own weak and inferior natures. Women were also seen as dangerous to men, because of their supposed sexual insatiability once their sexual instincts were aroused (so beware in particular the young widow), or because they could wield magical powers over men (or other women), particularly through using their menstrual blood. Such attitudes are found in literary dialogues or sermons, or in trial records investigating women charged with superstitious and witchcraft practices. It is difficult to know how far the extreme views were shared by most males, or were even the ‘real’ views of the writing persona. There is currently some debate as to whether the misogynist attitudes towards women worsened through the period, and their social roles became more circumscribed – particularly as a result of the Counter-Reformation, whose reformers might stress the role of women as wives and mothers, or as enclosed nuns. However recently historians have highlighted males who wrote to defend and praise women, and women who counter-attacked in literary polemics and in playing an active role in society and cultural activity. On either side much was part of an exaggerated literary battle of the sexes.23
For male misogynist writing one can cite from Niccolò Machiavelli, diplomat, political theorist, historian and leading literary figure. Hanna Pitkin, has particularly stressed Machiavelli’s concentration on the masculine world of politics, and how a feminine presence can be threatening to men of virtù. ‘Women have caused much destruction, have done great harm to those who govern cities, and have occasioned many divisions in them.’ (Discourses, Bk 3, ch. 26: ‘How women (femine) can be the cause of the ruin of the state’.) He is seen as despising and fearing women and the effeminate (with effeminato as a major abusive epithet). Characters in his plays argue that ‘all women lack brains, and are timorous’(Mandragola, Act 3); though once angered women are full of deceit and cruelty, pride and anger so unable to pardon, as he argues in Clizia. Relationships between the sexes involve battle and struggle, with men having to show mastery, to conquer, to make sure they take women, and are not taken by them. In his short story, Belfagor, a devil is released from hell to marry; he possesses a number of women, falls in love with a beautiful one, and makes the mistake of being besotted by her; in return she becomes arrogant and begins to lord it over him. His servants prefer to return to hell ‘to live in fire rather than stay in the world under her rule’ and he finally escapes ‘to return to hell rather than again with such great annoyance, anxiety and danger put his neck under the marriage yoke’.24
Less well-known is the late fifteenth century Neapolitan short-story writer, Masuccio Salernitano (alias Tommaso Guardati), whose collection of stories, Il Novellino, attacked lusty women, along with immoral clerics and misers. Women belonged to a putrid, coarse and most imperfect sex, full of every kind of lasciviousness. The theme of part three of his collection is of insatiable female desire, such that for example a widow who seduces her son is called a most luxurious pig, an inhuman and most rapacious wild beast. Rarely do Masuccio’s women receive favourable treatment and comment from him, and they are constantly treated as inferior to men. Women, in his eyes, exist to be admired: ‘they universally hold that their whole reputation, honour and glory consists in nothing else, unless to be loved, gazed upon, and exalted for their beauty, and they would sooner be seen as beautiful and vicious, than be reputed very virtuous and ugly’. If not granted easy admiration they will use their wiles and skills to win it, and satisfy their lusts. One critic of Masuccio argues that this deep misogyny is heartfelt, and not just the product of literary conventions (unlike some of his anti-clericalism).25
The inferiority of women was based on legal codes and attitudes. They were not equal before the law. They could not act as a litigant in their own right, needing father, brother or guardian to pursue their causes. The extent to which they could fully inherit, control and dispose of property was variable between states and cities, and much debated by lawyers.26 Domenico Bruni da Pistoia, one of the male defenders of women, argued (in his Difese delle donne, 1559) that until the legal discriminations against women were removed there would be no serious change in misogynist attitudes, such as those just quoted. Men treated women as inconsistent, licentious, vindictive, treacherous, mentally imperfect and so on, because their legal and economic restrictions rendered women weak; they could not hold public office, not judge or pass sentences, not accuse in a criminal trial, not make wills on their own, not adopt children, not provide collateral. If it was better recognised that women could be the equal of men economically – as when working as farmers, gardeners or tailors – then respect might grow towards women in each rank of society, and laws eventually be changed.27
None of the above was conducive to happy family life, breeding distrust and maltreatment – if and when it was believed. However there were counter attitudes. In the fifteenth century and beyond companionate marriage was advocated, as by the Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro, celebrating (1415) the marriage of a Florentine friend, Lorenzo de’ Medici (brother of the famous Cosimo), to Ginevra Cavalcanti:
What greater pleasure, than to decide together all things, even while spared concerns of the household? Than to have a modest wife, a companion in good days and bad, a spouse and a friend? To whom you can confide your most private thoughts regarding your affairs? Whose sweetness and company soothe all your cares and woes? Whom you love so much that you think that a part of your own life depends on her well-being?28
Rudolf Bell (1999) has shown that printing generated a considerable literature as guidance for middling classes not just the elite, giving advice on family life and strategies, lively and mutually enjoyable sexual relations to produce healthy children, on household management and ensuring family harmony. While most emphasised a subservience of children to parents, wives to husbands, they did encourage mutual consideration, care and affection. Sermons spread such messages to the illiterate.
Italian women, especially in northern cities, were not always seen as restricted in behaviour or demeanour. Foreign visitors admired (or hypocritically disdained) the extravagance, flamboyance and freedom of upper-crust women as well as courtesans. The Welshman William Thomas in his 1549 History of Italy noted that ‘in good ernest, the gentlewomen generally for gorgeous attire, apparel, and jewels exceed, I think, all other women of our known world. I mean as well the courtesans as the married women... specially where churchmen do reign’. While for Venice he noted the number of beautiful courtesans for the many men who did not marry, in Genoa – a city which could teach Ovid the arts of love – wives were very open:
‘Truly the Genoese themselves deserve that their wives should be praised, because I saw in no place where women have so much liberty. For it is lawful there openly to talk of love with what wife soever she be...’ The Genoese defend the liberty of talk and action of wives, ‘thinking that their wives through this liberty of open speech are rid of the rage that maketh other women to travail so much in secret’. So ‘the supreme court of love is nowhere to be sought out of Genoa’.29
In contrast, the early modern period perpetuated the attitude that female adultery was an offence to the honour of the husband, and others in the family; and that it might be punished by death of the woman and her lover. Masuccio Salernitano stressed this in his short stories. This attitude and the legal system evolved out of Roman law in the lex Julia, and medieval adaptations in communal law, with glosses on the Roman law. There was some debate whether – for such a reprisal killing to be justified and exonerated – the offenders had to be caught in the act, and in the house of the offended husband; whether evidence of kissing was enough to indicate adultery; whether the male lover had to be warned beforehand. It was not only argued that an offended husband could be excused for killing his adulterous wife, but also argued in Naples that a husband had a duty to kill or punish her, and would be seen as a ‘pander’ (pro lenone) if he spared her. A compliant husband would be socially disdained, alleged Antonius Matthaeus (though himself disparaging such an attitude in 1644). The Milanese argued that resorting to law over an adulterous wife – as opposed to taking the law into one’s own hands – was mistaken, since it added to the shame and the publicity. Suspicion of adultery was enough to mitigate punishment for murder. In sixteenth-century Milan, Togninus Garmendus warned Menghinus Dentonus not to have dealings with his wife; Menghinus insulted Togninus in the street, called him a billy-goat, for which he was killed. The murderer was merely sentenced to three years in the galleys, because this was a homicide for the sake of honour. Apparently many Milanese senators deemed this sentence too harsh a punishment after such provocation.30
The marital relationship was often very unequal, with the wife encouraged to be subservient, if adoring, but many husband–wife relations in the upper orders of society produced considerable consultation about family and business matters. When husbands were away on business, political-diplomatic careers or on military service wives were as likely to be left with some control as another male relative or paid manager. And when political exile was involved in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wives appear as the stalwart family organisers and co-ordinators as with the Strozzi in Florence or the Baglioni in Perugia.31 Widows could and did take over affairs on the death of husbands. In the case of the Caracciolo di Brienza clan a succession of young widows from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century beneficially used their extensive dowries and organisational skills to foster the clan’s interests, preserve patrimonies and re-establish their sons, nephews and nieces. They usually earned male gratitude for their efforts.32
The assumption that the family in the period was patriarchal and that all key decisions were made by the father/husband when present, and that wives and mothers had limited say, needs qualification. Stanley Chojnacki’s studies of the Venetian patriciate up to the early sixteenth century show how and when females could make a major impact on family affairs, especially for their daughters.33 The age at which patrician daughters were betrothed and married rose generally through the fifteenth century, from child bridehood at 12–13 years to more mature adolescence of 15–16, or later. This may be attributed to the growing influence of the mothers, who also were more inclined to allow daughters to choose freely between marriage and the convent (and more occasionally continuing spinsterhood). A patrician female’s only claim on the patrimony was her dowry. But in Venice this tended to be substantial, and she was freer than her husband to distribute in her will to the wider lineage or clan relations, and to remember her female relatives more. Women could thus (and in other ways) accumulate their own non-dowry property, and use this with some freedom. As the patrician dowries increased in relative value, so did the economic use of it by the women, who could happily get involved in capital investment, lending and business enterprise – usually in connection with their kinsmen. Ingoldise Morosini even entered as a partner in a soap-manufacturing business in 1420. In the political arena female relatives were involved surprisingly frequently in sponsoring the young patrician men in the Balla d’Oro process whereby they were judged eligible as patricians to enter the Grand Council, and so the political offices that stemmed from this. While the male’s testament is usually seen as manipulative over wives and daughters, Venetian women could use their wills to influence the behaviour of their male kin, or offer greater freedom to daughters. Maria Bembo, married to Girolamo Zane, in her will of 1479 so disposed that her three daughters would have financial resources to choose between marriage, the convent or life-long spinsterhood whether living with their brothers or separately. Studies of wills of women in places like Florence, Genoa or Tivoli, also show them – for the beginning of our period – in control of much money and property, and as shrewd business women.34
With children, all those who married expected and wanted to have male issue to perpetuate the family, and would struggle to that end – and manuals advised how to conceive a male. The surviving eldest male was likely to be the child to receive most attention and physical care. As already indicated girls might be deemed a financial liability. That there was some ‘family planning’ should probably be accepted, through (in ascending order of importance or efficacy) contraception, sexual practices, abandonment of babies and timing of marriage in the first place. Condoms were available in a primitive form from the sixteenth century; but they were probably reserved for protection from infection from syphilis. While John Riddle (1994) argues that the classical and medieval knowledge of partly efficacious herbal contraceptive and abortifacient concoctions had declined by the late Renaissance (as tested by surviving manuscripts and printed books), it is difficult to believe that such knowledge did not persist among both midwives and cunning women. Techniques of coitus interruptus and anal intercourse were used to some extent to limit conceptions, judging by church and court condemnations. Infanticide, especially of female babies, was part of family control, explaining notable differences in sex ratios revealed by the Tuscan catasto records of the 1420s. The spacing between children was undoubtedly affected by whether babies were breast-fed by the mother, or given to wetnurses. Upper-rank women who more regularly used wetnurses became pregnant again more quickly. Breast-feeding in itself may delay conception; and parents were advised to avoid sexual intercourse as long as a baby was being breast-fed, in case the milk was contaminated or weakened by intercourse. The merits and demerits of employing wetnurses, and their selection and treatment, were seriously debated.35
The abandonment of babies rose through the period and reached a horrendous peak in the nineteenth century. The apparent increase of abandonment from the later fifteenth century can be explained partly, as Richard Trexler (1973) in particular has argued, through a reduction under religious and civic pressure in infanticide of unwanted babies; by a rise in population, followed by war and dearth crises of the early sixteenth century; and by the greater provision of foundling hospitals and other institutions, especially following the model of the Innocents’ hospital (designed by Brunelleschi), which finally opened in Florence in 1445. An airy and healthy hospital designed to save and bring up abandoned babies (esposti) safely, it was soon swamped by excessive numbers. This was to be a pattern; the more facilities there were to rescue abandoned babies, the more were abandoned. The death rate was high, given normal childhood ailments and the lack of hygiene, exacerbated if the babies stayed in a hospital facility, the weaknesses of babies brought in from a distance, then often sent back out to country wetnurses and the lack of care and fraudulent intent of some wetnursing families. By the late eighteenth century, exposure of babies virtually amounted to a death sentence.36
While many of the abandoned babies were bastards, many others were clearly not. Through the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries poor Italian families abandoned their later babies and children when they felt they could not cope economically – as a temporary or permanent measure. Clearly some of the abandoned children had been wanted and loved, but parents could not cope and thought institutions would help. Some left notes, talismans and tokens to help later identification, expressing an intention to reclaim the child if family conditions improved; some families did make such attempts to bring back their offspring, and some found them alive. Many of course made no such attempt, and their initial expression of intention may have been merely to calm their conscience. Whatever the intentions, by the end of our period child exposure was an effective if callous family limitation practice. It is difficult to know how aware parents were of the likely death rate for abandoned children.
The major family controls over the size of a family were from controlling the age of marriage, and who married. By and large the later the marriage the fewer children for the child-bearing mother; with breast-feeding or wetnursing having some effect on the periodicity of pregnancy through the childbearing years. It is not clear that there is much change in the mother’s mortality rate through our period. The other family planning factor could be a conscious decision-making that only certain males would marry with a view to establishing new generations. Certain patrician clans, for example in Venice and Milan, deliberately limited inheriting heirs to preserve the patrimony intact. Unmarried younger sons were maintained as part of extended households (along with spinster daughters), or established in bachelor households.
These ‘bachelors’ might of course have courtesans, mistresses or non-noble wives, provided their offspring had no claim on the main family estate. Patricians might select their concubines from the city, or from their country estates – as with Maddalena di Moscaglia or Lucia Coradina, revealed in Avogaria di Comun records. Some ended marrying their concubines, and getting formal recognition of their offspring by this vetting committee.37
From the late seventeenth century the Milan patricate managed to control and limit their families; child mortality decreased (especially for the later children), but fertility of the mothers was reduced (no longer producing ten or more live or dead children as in the early seventeenth century) and there was more control over who did or did not marry.38
Parent–child relationships in the early years are hard to fathom. The high mortality rate for most families until the end of our period may have, as often argued, discouraged a heavy investment of emotion in babies. But arguments for lack of concern based on the cryptic and unemotional entries in chronicles, family journals or surviving letters may be misleading, while effusive emotions are certainly found in Florentine writings, from Boccaccio and Petrarch among others.39 Births were celebrated with ceremonial trays and cups and a party spirit. When we do find some outpouring of joy about a birth, and deep grief about a child’s death – as in the case of Giovanni Morelli in early fifteenth-century Florence – it is difficult to know whether his emotion is unusual, or just his willingness to record it. Giovanni Morelli’s Ricordi expressed his joy over the conception, quickening and birth of his healthy firstborn Alberto; then ten years later the deep shock at the painful and tragic death of that son, which clearly affected his emotions ever after. But Giovanni recognised that his own father (Pagolo) had had a grim childhood: banished to a country nurse until ten or twelve, beaten by successive schoolmasters on his return to the city, and suffering from resentful older brothers out to deprive him of a share in the estate. The revered Pagolo’s own early death had clearly adversely affected Giovanni; and his mother had deserted him to marry again. Giovanni wanted Alberto to have the happy and secure childhood he had not had; and wanted to ensure mothers who outlived early dying fathers should not similarly desert and deprive them of care. And he agonised that he had not made Alberto happier, and paid more attention to him.40
When Valerio the eight-year-old son of the Venetian patrician and military leader Jacopo Antonio Marcello died in 1461, the father went into deep shock. His grief generated a collection of consolatory humanist writings for him (notably by the humanist-architect Francesco Filelfo and Isotta Nogarola of Verona, the leading female humanist), which he collected and preserved. It is clear that father and son for the last few years were devoted to each other, the intelligent and precocious son adoring to hear of his father’s military exploits.
He grew in years with such force of love towards me, his father, that this was the infant’s most amazing quality.... If ever I was agitated with anxiety or perturbation... he acted as if he thought of nothing other than me... [Later, on hearing of his father’s and Venice’s military successes] he wanted to know by what art, by what genius those ships had been dragged from hill to hill, across dangerous chasms and paths, and lowered into the Lago di Garda.... I could forsee that he would accumulate in himself by his acute mind the virtue of my ancestors, so that our whole posterity would be enriched by the glory of deeds well done.
The consoling literature, though drawing on classical formulae, suggests that Jacopo Marcello was not alone in this deep affection and grief. Filelfo had similarly lost an eight-year-old son. ‘A companion stricken with the same disease, it should be recognized that I myself must be consoled as much as I console you. For what counsel can he give who cannot advise himself?’41
The increase in the age before marriage suggests a teenage and adolescent period before full adulthood in marriage. For many it was a period of service in another family, whether court or large household, or apprenticeship in small artisan workshop. For a few there would be schooling (often with harsh discipline), based in the family household for boys, but in a convent for many girls. Some males had an adolescent period of licence and liberty, semi-licit or illicit: the world of homosexuality before most settled into respectable heterosexual family life (as in Florence and Venice), gang rapes of prostitutes or virgins, charivari (festivals where social roles were inverted and authorities mocked), of rough sports (the palio, jousts, the battle of the stones in Perugia until the sixteenth century, the battle of the fists (pugni) in Venice). There were youth confraternities, especially in Florence and Genoa, designed to be more moral and respectable, and sometimes to absorb energies in musical and theatrical activities, though likewise part of male-bonding operations.42
Insights into childhood, family relations and the concept of service come from Annibal Guasco’s published instructions to his daughter Lavinia, originally written when he (then in Pavia) sent her off (aged nine) to the Turin court to be one of the ‘women’ serving the Infanta Caterina, marrying the Duke of Savoy. Lavinia (born 1574), in an introductory letter to the printed edition in 1586, apologizes for the delay in securing its publication, requested by her father! The eighty-page discourse is long-winded, at times pompous, but shows affection and concern for Lavinia, and for the great step she is taking in going to court at this tender age. With God’s help, with her strong beliefs, and with this parental guide written with love ever to hand, worth more than any jewel, to rule her life she will survive and prosper. Lavinia has clearly been well educated already in the liberal arts, with her father very proud of his role in fostering this, and Christian doctrine. She is musically accomplished, especially in the viola da gamba (to accompany her singing) and clavichord, which should serve her well at court. The father’s instructions emphasise the virtues of honour, chastity and reverence for parents and offer advice on how to treat her patroness/employer, other court girls and ladies, and her own servants, to avoid or cope with the envy prevalent at court. She should read Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Della Casa’s Galateo, as guides to courtly behaviour, and adapt to Spanish courtly customs (which he clearly admires), learning Castilian Spanish in order to converse with the right courtiers. Here is parental affection for a daughter, an intense education, but a short childhood, and much early career planning (presumably with a view to a court marriage, though this is not specifically stated). He had a concern for Honour that would have echoed by many concerned fathers of daughters:
I understand honour to be chastity. If chastity is respected then a woman however poor or ugly may become rich and handsome (formosa); and if without chastity, the rich and beautiful woman is reputed a liar and deformed. Chastity is worn like a garment which, if stained has that stain for evermore, because it cannot be washed or hidden from a good eye; and, worse, the stain remains even when this garment of chastity is ripped up and burned – for not only in life, but even after death, the woman remains stained by dishonour.43
It is dangerous to assume from certain types of records that fathers had limited concerns for their daughters, especially after marriage when they were usually transferred to another household. As Renata Ago warned, we should not deduce from the absence of females in some family genealogies, or from some family record books, that fathers or brothers were remote from the females. Genealogies were not ‘innocent’ or necessarily designed to be a full record, but to serve as reminders for certain inheritance strategies. In seventeenth century Rome, Orazio Spada’s domestic memorials may become silent about his daughters on marrying, but surviving correspondence reveals regular affectionate concern with their daily lives, whether married or in nunneries.44
Older children could become ‘unwanted’ when one parent died and the other remarried, as Giovanni Morelli lamented. Some households absorbed, with whatever tensions, step-children; and suddenly large households emerged with widow and widower entering second marriages with a number of children each, and producing more. But especially when sizable dowries and inheritances were involved some children were rejected. A youngish widow might have to abandon her children in the care of her late husband’s family; but take on step-children of her new husband. There was considerable room for emotions of abandonment, rejection, the ‘cruel’ mother and step-mother.
The fate of the widow could be fraught, but there is no easy pattern. The obvious sufferers were the poor old or middle-aged widows, from already disjointed – possibly migrant – families, without economic resources or extended family support, and maybe burdened still with children and other dependants. They might receive some assistance from charitable organisations. In more well-established families (whether from a solid economic point of view, or from the coherence of poorer extended household systems), the widow with or without children might be well-absorbed. For the younger widow remarriage was a complicated problem, since she faced conflicting pressures from relatives who wanted her to marry and those who did not. She probably had more freedom of choice if she had daughters and no sons. Increasingly in Tuscany the Court of Wards (Magistrato dei Puppili ), listened to mothers, awarded them custody of children (though this might debar them from remarrying) or acted when they reported abuse of their children by other relatives.45 It had to be considered what would happen to her existing children, and to dowries, legacies and ‘gifts’ if she remarried. Many wills and conditions of dowry payments sought to control remarriage and the possible alienation of resources from one family to another. There were also social taboos against second marriages, especially if a youngish, experienced woman was seen to be enticing eligible bachelors. Such a remarriage might be punished by charivari extravagances, fines, rides on donkeys backwards, the removal of house-roofs unless compensation was paid to the local community, through Youth Abbey groups (organisations, in Piedmont in particular, that had festivals where normal hierarchies and social relations were temporarily inverted or subverted), religious fraternities and so forth.
The complexity of the situation when a woman faced widowhood – and a number of other aspects of family and gender relationships – can be illustrated from the different experiences of a noble Florentine woman, Maddalena Nerli, as relayed through her journal, and her second husband’s. In 1583 Maddalena aged twenty-one married Francesco Giordano Martelli, and they had a son and two daughters before he died in early 1588. She was denied custody of these children, who remained with the Martelli family, and forced to return to her brother’s house. She then married Cosimo Tornabuoni in November 1589, after one meeting. Cosimo had already lost two wives in childbirth; Maddalena became step-mother to two surviving daughters. Maddalena and Cosimo then had eight children by 1599; Cosimo died in 1605. This time Maddalena was left fully in charge as guardian of the surviving family and the family home. While her husband had had an active political-diplomatic career she had developed considerable expertise in managing his properties and promoting agricultural improvements. She continued this activity as a widow, while she also organised marriage alliances for her daughters and launched the two surviving sons into military and diplomatic careers. By 1625 she was given guardianship of her grandchildren, and briefly in 1638 of three great-grandsons. She worked well with her sons, and with one daughter, Caterina, who had developed psychological problems. Her husband turned to Maddalena for help; to them, their children and grandchildren she was very supportive. But Maddalena had twenty years of bitter conflict with her other two daughters (Cassandra and Virginia) and their husbands, primarily over dowries. The last two years before she died in 1641 seem to have been quiet and peaceful. Maddalena’s story shows distrust and rejection by one husband at death (causing her to sever links with her young children), but the opposite reactions from her second; shows how the widow could be the solid foundation and great organiser of an extended family; and how battles between families over expensive dowries could produce bitter emotions. There was no affection in the first marriage, plenty in the second. Though less well documented other women clearly faced similar mixed reactions, and developed strategies to survive and compete.46
This section has sought to give some flavour of the attitudes and postures within the inner family, with a few individual examples that tend to emphasise personal concern and consideration. They are designed to suggest that family relationships might not have been as formal and economically determined as some past accounts have assumed and implied, and to indicate some new researches and approaches to personal family relationships.
Households and families (especially involving remarriages and step-children), already discussed, could be complex enough. But family relationships extended to wider kinships and clans, and had to accommodate spiritual relationships through god-parents. Various concepts of the clan, kinship or family and of who mattered existed, under different names and legal recognition. In Florence consorteria was often used to indicate the widest linkage of the family, assuming for the most part patrilineal descent; other names used, however, included stirpe, nazione, casa, schiatta, progenia and famiglia. But some contemporaries talked about more than one consorteria within the same house, and some admitted non-lineal relatives or outsiders into the consorteria to be favoured. In Genoa alberghi were similar, though the recognised kin links might be narrower. Here, as in Venice, with legally recognised, closed political systems, it was especially important to be assured of lineal descent in upper-rank families, to determine eligibility for office; though this did not mean that all members of the same Genoese albergo or Venetian casa would cooperate. Outside the specifically political there was undoubtedly an awareness of kin relationships, and a will to record them, as demonstrated by family chronicles, diaries (for example of the fifteenth-century Florentine Gregorio Dati, who paid particular attention to all the god-parents of his twenty-odd children), compilation of genealogies, and so forth.47
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florentine family documents show considerable conscious concern for kin, and what duties were involved. Giovanni Rucellai in his Zibaldone – a family record for the benefit of his heirs – showed the most concern for his relatives, including many entering the relationship through marriages. It was important to know from whom he might thus receive support and favours, and to whom he had a duty and obligation. He was inordinately proud of the extensive consorteria, and of the large households in extensive palazzi on which it was based. He supported the attitude of L. B. Alberti, that when the richer members of the clan, like himself, were approached by kinsmen: ‘Duty requires helping them, not even so much with money, as with sweat and with blood, and by any means one can, even to giving your life for the honour of the house and its members.’48
In a large system numerous tensions appeared over conflicting loyalties, and consorteria could generate both loyalty and tension, as F. W. Kent’s study of 194 households that made up the Florentine consorteria of the Capponi, Ginori and Rucellai in the fifteenth century revealed. Pressures to focus wealth on the narrower family might here be resisted for sake of wider kin. But this may have diminished in later generations of the elites. Matteo Palmieri recognised orders of priority in his Della vita civile (written about 1430): love first went to sons, then ‘grandsons, and anyone else born of our blood; among these I include first of all everybody in the household (casa) and the stocks (le schiatte), lineages (le consorterie), and huge families T H E F A M I L Y A N D H O U S E H O L D (copiose famiglie) which must develop as its numbers overflow’. The wider kin would often be preferentially selected in forming business partnerships, in lending or borrowing money, arranging marriage alliances, in operating political and administrative appointments or in establishing contacts in other cities like Venice and Rome. Large sacrifices might be made in the interest of kinship relationship; Lorenzo de’ Medici (Il Magnifico) asked Giovanni Rucellai to sell him his villa at Poggio a Caiano; Giovanni – loving his property – was upset at the idea, but allowed his son Bernardo to tell Lorenzo (Bernardo’s brother-in-law) that he would agree for ‘we are dealing with inlaws and relations, not with outsiders’.49
Kinship relationships criss-crossed. They might lubricate the wheels of politics and commerce – but create great tensions. Kin had to select those to work with, and those to ignore, reject and distrust. If the love of kin was thwarted, a connection betrayed or ignored, then the feelings were embittered. The counterblast to the anthropological stress on the positive workings of kinship can come from historians showing the breakdown of kinship, and internecine family warfare.
A clan that illustrates the breakdown of extended family relations and their political repercussions is that of the Baglioni, whose members dominated the affairs of Perugia and surrounding parts of the Papal State in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and which provided some notable military commanders or condottieri. The family is notorious for its murderous infighting, publicised in the nineteenth century by Jacob Burckhardt, but the fertility of the family and the cooperation of some households facilitated leadership of the wider oligarchy.50 The Baglioni were most numerous in terms of households, with twenty-eight registered as separately taxable in 1511, and twenty of them with enough property to qualify for all offices. The nearest rivals were the Armanni della Staffa with twelve separate households and the Montesperelli with ten. Some of these Baglioni taxable-households lived in inter-connecting buildings, or possibly in the same building. But other branches of the clan were remote in lineage, living well away from the main political households, with signs of political or social contact not readily detectable. Great tension, conflict and murder characterised the lives of the dominant households. Braccio Baglioni murdered his cousins when they took over the town of Spello in 1460, and then effectively dominated Perugia. The leading Baglioni cooperated enough to expel the rival Oddi in 1488, but the history of their influence in the city until 1540 (when the Papacy took back full control, and razed Baglioni houses to create a great fortress), is characterised by bloody conflicts between legitimate and bastard offspring of key households.
The most gory family dispute erupted in 1500 at the end of the wedding celebrations for Astorre’s marriage to Lavinia Colonna of the famous Roman clan – the Red Wedding. Poorer or bastard members of the Baglioni (led by Grifonetto and Filippo di Braccio, bastard) turned on the leading clique, killing some of them including Guido and Astorre, whose heart was cut out and symbolically bitten by Filippo. In all about 200 died before Giampaolo regained control and chased out the assassins. Later Giampaolo was to be assaulted or murderously plotted against by at least three different Baglioni challengers.
Leading Baglioni were married to members of the Oddi, Arcipreti, Della Corgna, Armanni, Baldeschi and Ranieri clans; all of whom were to provide key enemies as well as some supporters. It meant that the leading challengers who lost in the 1488– 89 struggle, the Oddi, were never a totally coherent opposition; and an offshoot started to distance itself, and reclassify itself as the Oddi Novelli. Bernardino Ranieri, though married to Drufolina di Braccio Baglioni, backed the main Oddi in a conflict in 1482, but kept out of the way in 1488. He was soon back in the city, and a member of a dominant emergency council, but by 1491 had to flee when his son Costantino led an attack on the city on behalf of the Oddi. His fief at Schifanoia was sacked in revenge. In 1491 Penelope di Guido Baglioni, having remained in the city, deserted her father to join her exiled husband Giulio Cesare Armanni.
That different kinship considerations could divide families is highlighted by the following supposed conversation, reported by a very knowledgeable chronicler, between Girolamo and Agamennone Arcipreti, brothers:
The Arcipreti family was split, though there seem to have been more key players on the Oddi side, or on that of lesser Baglioni against the dominant ones.
Marriage strategies were clearly used in attempts to build alliances and reconcile differences, but with very mixed success, and with some tragedies. Braccio II Baglioni married a Donna Marsilia de Bellis, the wealthiest private landowner in the 1511 tax assessment, which might have been a valuable strategic move. However in 1534 he killed her, and her lover Annibale Baldeschi, following this with a vendetta against the Baldeschi as a whole. This hardly helped his wider campaign to dominate Perugia.
An attempt to consolidate branches of the Baglioni clan was the marriage of Atalanta di Galeotto Baglioni to Grifone di Braccio Baglioni. Unfortunately they produced a jealous or ambitious son who played a murderous part in the 1500 Red Wedding, only to be killed in the revenge assault by Giampaolo, dying in the arms of his mother whom he had chosen to see rather than flee. Atalanta went on to commission from Raphael the famous Entombment for the Baglioni chapel in San Francesco al Prato, Perugia [1507, Galleria Borghese, Rome]. In another marital bid for reconciliation, Atalanta’s sister-in-law (Grifone’s sister) Leandra had married Simone di Guido degli Oddi (d.1496/8), who was officially exiled in 1488. She ended up commissioning for the same church, but for the Oddi chapel (founded by Simone’s sister Maddalena), Raphael’s Coronation of the Virgin [c. 1503, the Vatican]. At least culturally there was some common cause and family co-operation through the females.52
Social historians can establish genealogies, and deduce that ‘family’ relationships were the key to political power, social advancement or business dealing; but detailed study of Perugia indicates that the family factor was only one of many in the battles for power and control. These Perugian details will also serve to illustrate a number of other general points made elsewhere in this book; about the nature of elites, the causes of violence and roles for women in a male-dominated society.
This chapter has aimed to show the wide ramifications of what it meant for an individual to be part of a ‘family’, to indicate some of the values attached to that social concept at the time and to give an idea of how social historians have differently approached the family. Juxtaposed with some broad generalisations, extended examples have been provided to highlight the complexity of the concept of family. The extent to which the inner family was enmeshed in a larger household was affected by economic needs of land-holding or urban businesses. The household might include many non-blood members for economic reasons, and distant blood-relatives through accidents of marriages and deaths. An extended family-household could protect vulnerable individuals. The wider kinship networks might facilitate economic and political advancement, though kinship games could readily get out of control, and obstruct progress, as the lengthy Baglioni example illustrates. Should family solidarity fail, the individual could seek support from guilds, confraternities, neighbourhood groups or un-related members of a social elite in class or order solidarity – though without guarantee that they would be tension free.