Naslov
Dying in Late Medieval Dalmatia: Considerations from the Other Side

Autori
Popić, Tomislav

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Preparing for Death in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Mjesto i datum
Helsinki, Finska, 14.03.2013. - 15.03.2013

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Pozvano predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
late middle ages, Eastern Adriatic, court records, bequest litigations

Sažetak
Thanks to the large number of extant wills and other sources, especially from the fourteenth century onwards, the Croatian historiography has been paying a lot of attention to questions of preparation for death in the Middle Ages. The ending result of such extant sources and historiographical interest is a very well researched problem of preparing for death in medieval Dalmatian cities. Preparations of medieval people for the passage to the new world have been considered from many different aspects: from the question of drafting last wills, questions of testamentary bequests and property inheritance, all the way to the religious ideas and spiritual preparations for death. This article would attempt to go a little further, taking as a starting point a fact that regardless of the sometimes very thorough preparations for death, often not everything took place according to the deceased’s expectations. On one hand this statement refers to the fact that not all testamentary bequests were actually executed in real life, and on the other to the fact that some people tried to conceal the existence of last wills due to different personal reasons. The main research question therefore is: where and in what situations can we find departure from usual practice when it comes to paying testamentary bequests, and how were individuals trying to obtain some or all of the assets of the deceased. The main sources for providing answers to this question will be court records, specifically in this article the records of the civil court of Zadar, one of the largest Dalmatian cities. These court records originate from the second half of the fourteenth century, and represent the largest body of court records of any Dalmatian city before fifteenth century. Although only fragments of original corpus of Zadar’s court records survive, it is still a representative sample for research of many different problems. Among other things, these court records reveal a large number of disputes emerging as a result of disobeying or disregarding certain aspects of testator's last will, and a smaller number of cases showing that individuals sometimes tried to conceal the actual existence of last wills. The first group consists of disputes about settlement of testamentary bequests. On the basis of extant court records it appears there was a lot of such disputes. Precise quantitative indicators are not possible because court records do not survive in their entirety. Looking only to the 1393, where all of the sentences except for the second half of December survive, 24 per cent of them refer to disputes over testamentary bequests. All social groups appear in these cases as plaintiffs, and equally men and women. It is interesting that in almost 40 per cent of these cases city's ecclesiastical institutions appear as plaintiffs. The second group consists of records about individuals trying to exploit civil court’s jurisdiction to assign property in the course of intestate inheritance proceedings, in order to get hold of the deceased’s estate. Individuals were sometimes obviously trying to exploit weaknesses of the system checking if the deceased compiled a valid last will or not. There were different situations where it was difficult to verify whether a person composed his last will or not. Some of the last wills were not composed in Zadar, but in other Dalmatian cities, some of them were composed in Venice and other Italian cities, some of them were composed years and years before testator’s death, and some of them were not composed in written at all, but verbally proclaimed in front of witnesses. Some people were trying to abuse such situations to get hold of the deceased’s estate by statutory inheritance order, although a valid last will actually existed.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Povijest

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