Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/y6zolb8pwm
A Branch of the Aristocratic Family Kosača of Hum in Venice: Tracing Testamentary Documents (the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Lovorka Čoralić
orcid.org/0000-0002-9333-7221
; Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In the fifteenth century, the Kosača family ruled over the territory of Hum (Herzegovina) and belonged to the most powerful aristocratic families of the Kingdom of Bosnia. By the fall of Herzegovina under Ottoman rule in 1482, a branch of the family emigrated to Venice. They retained their social importance there and participated in Venetian political, social and military life. The article is based on the hitherto very little (only partially) used historical sources from the State Archive in Venice, the archival series of testaments recorded by notaries public (Notarile testamenti), referring to the members of the family settled in Venice. In the introductory part of the article are given general data on the trans-Adriatic migrations from Bosnia and Hum to Venice during the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, and then all testaments are analysed in chronological order, particularly the first eight ones which directly and with utmost certainty refers to the Venetian branch of the Kosače, while the last three cases are testaments of persons having as their family names Kosača, but their relationship with the Kosača family cannot be ascertained according to existing knowledge. The analysis of the testaments uncovers that the family was extremely respected within Venetian society, that its members were connected to leading Venetian (and other Italian) noble families by kinship, that they had substantial property, and that they certainly belonged to the elite part of Croatian trans-Adriatic emigrant community.
Keywords
the Kosače; Hum; Herzegovina; Venice; the Republic of Venice; Early Modern Age; testaments
Hrčak ID:
195442
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2017.
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