The Documents of Angelo de Cartura and Donato Fontanella: Venetian Notaries in Fourteenth-Century Crete

Dumbarton Oaks
edited by Alan M. Stahl
ISBN: 0884022714
price: $35.00   paperback

This volume contains the text of two notarial protocols in the Notai di Candia series of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia. Both are of Latin notaries active in the town of Candia, modern Herakleion, in the Venetian colony of Crete in the early fourteenth century.
While most of the documents recorded by Cartura are private contracts, a few are public records or of general historical interest. Four documents concern the efforts of Guido de Canale, the Venetian duke of Crete, and his council to assure their jurisdiction over a church in the burg (suburban area) of Candia, claimed by the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, Leonardus. An undercurrent of Greek opposition to Venetian rule is reflected by several contracts that make special provisions for sheep and a mill should Greek rebels threaten parts of the hinterland. In one document, the body of Venetian soldiers ("universitas militum") designates an agent to borrow more than 1,275 hyperpera from whatever source he can find, to meet debts such as the salary sought by the physician Bonus, a Jew. One Venetian resident of Candia contracts to garrison and defend the village of another in exchange for a share of its revenues. Other documents record payments to sailors on a Venetian ship armed against Byzantium.
The largest group of private documents in the protocol (111) are colleganza contracts, a Venetian version of the commenda contract typical of medieval Italian trade.
The next greatest number of documents (99) concerns the sale of slaves. Most of these concern Greeks, newly enslaved in Asia Minor, sold there by Turks to merchants from Crete, and resold in Candia.
Though the two protocols published here are fragmentary in terms of their survival and selective in the aspects of life that they record, they are both valuable sources for understanding the lives of Venetian, Greek, and Jewish men and women in fourteenth-century Crete.
Texts in Latin with English Preface and extensive indices.