Original scientific paper

An Analysis of the Genealogy of Buffalis, Based on Historical Evidence

Mladen Andreis

Abstract

Tragurin notary Jerome Buffalis is the author of several works dealing with genealogy and heraldry, one of which also deals with the genealogy of his own family, extant as a manuscript. This work, like his book on Tragurin heraldry, provides a series of genealogical data on noble families from the eleventh century onwards, which, because of the lack of source material, especially for the medieval period, frequently cannot be authenticated. Among these data are also those on the genealogical connection between his direct ancestors with the royal dynasty of the Árpáds, the counts of Bribir of the Šubić kindred, and with the Blessed Augustin Casotti.
The Buffalis kindred got its family name only in the middle of the fifteenth century, and so during the Middle Ages the members of the kindred were noted in documents in the way at that time usual, that is, by filiation. In the previous scholarship regarding the medieval history of Trogir, they are, like most other urban noblemen, mentioned only with their personal names and those of their fathers, that is, without the name of the kindred they belonged to, because the names of these kindreds at that time in most cases had not yet been formed and permanently established. Because of that, the reconstitution of the Buffalis genealogy in this work is made by relying on sequences in which particular members were mentioned, cited, or even directly quoted, in documents with their and their fathers’ names (and sometimes also with their grandfathers’) with the help of a database containing data on all the Tragurin urban noblemen, made by the author of the article.
The reconstitution of the Buffalis kindred genealogy, thus created on the basis of extant evidence – both those sources from the period before the beginning of the fourteenth century, which have been published, and the later ones, which for the most part have not yet been – has shown that numerous data taken from the genealogy created by Jerome Buffalis are mistaken, and that his opus on genealogy and heraldry, which in the nineteenth century served as the principal source for Heyer von Rosenfeld’s monumental book on the heraldry of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, should be used with caution.

Keywords

Jerome Buffalis; Trogir/Traù; urban nobility; genealogy; heraldry; the Middle Ages

Hrčak ID:

10042

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/10042

Publication date:

1.3.2002.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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