Izvorni znanstveni članak
Regarding the process of Democratization in Writing of Late Medieval Private Legal Documents in the East Adriatic Communes
Zoran Ladić
orcid.org/0000-0003-1006-2021
; Odsjek za povijesne znanosti ZPDZ HAZU, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
In the first part of the article the author examines factors which influenced the significant increase in number of private documents written by notaries from the second half of the thirteenth until the end of the fifteenth century in all communal centres on the East Adriatic coast – from Poreč to Kotor. In contrast to the period from the ninth to the beginning of the thirteenth century, when private documents were recorded exclusively for individuals belonging to the elite layers of East Adriatic urban societies, the period of the last decades of the High Middle Ages and the entire period of the Late Middle Ages was characterized by continuous growth in the number of private documents for both male and female, poor and rich, citizens and inhabitants, domicile population and foreigners. Starting from the end of the thirteenth century, the practice of recording private documents spread even to the rural areas belonging to the Adriatic communes and from decade to decade more and more villagers (villici, villani) traveled from their villages in districts to cities in order to record certain private document. Inspired by the research done on Italian city of Siena by Samuel K. Cohn, the author accepts the term “process of democratization” as the most appropriate in defining that historical process which enables the analysis of various topics related to social, economic, religious and other aspects of daily life in communal – rural and urban – societies on the East Adriatic coast. The author concludes that the “process of democratization” in recording private documents was the consequence of two main factors: the significant growth in number of Italian notaries (from the fourteenth century onwards, Croatian notaries also studied in Bologna or Padua) employed by communal and urban civil authorities, as well as codification of statute laws which started from the second half of the thirteenth century. Statute laws were particularly important since they contained different paragraphs related to various fields of private law that obliged all adult individuals regardless of their social status and gender to possess written confirmation of their important dealings, such were, for instance, various business contracts. One of the consequences of the “process of democratization” was the fact that in the fourteenth and especially in the fifteenth century there was almost no adult men or women who did not compose some document, at least their last wills in forms of testaments or breviaries (breviarium) and inventories of goods in one of many notary offices situated all over cities. Therefore, the period of anonymous masses or individuals with no name became past. It may be concluded that the “process of democratization” in writing of private documents in notary offices widely opened the door for the research of many specific scholarly fields related to the period from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century.
Ključne riječi
the Late Middle Ages; democratization; East Adriatic urban societies; notariate; city statutes
Hrčak ID:
136433
URI
Datum izdavanja:
29.12.2014.
Posjeta: 1.897 *