Erasmo Castellani Foreigners in : common features and particularities of Dalmatians,

Germans, and Lucchesi in Pre-modern Venice. Some historiographical

issues.

Leaving behind the crowded streets surrounding St. Mark’s square towards

Castello, one of the six districts in which Venice is divided, one can find calle degli Albanesi, rio, calle and salizada dei Greci, fondamenta dei Furlani.

Proceeding, there are Calle Schiavona, Calle Schiavoncina, fondamenta San

Giorgio degli Schiavoni and Corte Schiavona. The waterfront which goes from the Dogal Palace almost up to the Arsenal is called Riva degli Schiavoni. These names are traces of the importance of the eastern Adriatic coast and its people for the history of Venice: they are there to testify to former settlements of communities of the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, in particular Dalmatian people, which have been a major component in the life of the Most Serene

Republic.

Perhaps geographically less visibly spread, but certainly no less important, was the presence of German immigrants, whose signs are still tangible today on a couple of bas reliefs in the parish of Saint Samuel, where was located the fraternity of the German shoemakers, and in the massive building right at the feet of , the Fontego dei Tedeschi, just recently transformed in a luxurious—and controversial—shopping mall.

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All over Venice there are traces of the presence of “national” communities which inhabited particular sections of the city: calli, fondamente, corti are named after the people from Florence, Bergamo, Lucca, Spain, Lombardy,

Morea, who migrated and settled in Venice from the middle ages onward. Since most of the times these national groups excelled in a particular activity, their presence defines as well a geographical division of labor in Venice: Dalmatians established themselves near the Arsenal, the heart of the seafaring activities of the Republic, and in the area where traders unload their cargo , because they had a primary role in , sailing and trading activities; The

Germans, the largest foreign community of merchants, were right next to the

Venetian market center par excellence, Rialto; the Lucchesi settled as close as possible to the German headquarter in the neighborhood where other textile industries were already in place, since they manufactured and traded silk.

The importance of foreign communities and labor-specific immigration is well known and studied as a common phenomenon in early modern and medieval

Europe, as a necessary element for the survival of cities, whose mortality rates usually exceeded the birth rate.1 Foreigners and immigration in pre-modern

Venice specifically, has been extensively studied with different goals and methodological takes. These works focus mostly on the economic and social dimension of immigration, whether on a micro or a macroscopic level (e.g. the

1 S. Caciovicchi (ed.), Le Migrazioni in Europa, in which several Italian cities are juxtaposed to French and Mediterranean centers in order to define communal pattern of migration in Medieval and Early Modern time; E. Schubert, “L’Etranger dans l’Allemagne Médiévale et Moderne,” in L’Etranger au Moyen Age, pp. 191-215.

2 study of one nation or a specific artisanal activity on the one hand, or to the function of trading networks and the relationship between “citizen” and

“foreigner” on the other),2 or deal with the political administration of fluxes of immigration in different moments of the most serene Republic.3 Yet, in the light of these studies, general patterns of immigration show their limits and inaccuracies, and a too simplistic way to read the phenomenon.

Here I will try to analyze the historiography of three of the most prominent and well-studied foreign communities in Venice, highlighting potential and limits of both sources and methodological approaches of these works. I have decided to focus mostly on European bibliography mainly for two reasons. First, these communities have been an object of interest predominantly for European scholars. Secondly, American historiography considers by and large the different nations settled in the Venetian republic with little attention to their specificities, being more prone to identify paradigms of immigration and foreignness rather than peculiarities of each group. Here I will consider the works on the Dalmatian, the German, and the Tuscan nazione of the Lucchesi to exemplify the interpretative obstacles encountered—and sometimes generated—by the scholars. Rather than simply summarizing the features of

2 G. Fedalto, “Le Minoranze Straniere a Venezia tra Politica e Legislazione,” in Venezia Centro di Mediazione, vol.1; A. Bellavitis, Identité, Mariage, Mobilité Sociale: Citoyennes et Citoyens à Venise au XVI. Siècle. : 2001. 3 A. Zannini, Venezia Città Aperta; for an overview of the historiographical approaches to immigration in premodern Europe—in particular regarding German and Italian cities, G. Rossetti (ed.), Dentro la Città, pp. XXI-XXVI. In general, German historiography tends to focus on the legal consideration of foreignness, while Italian (but also Spanish and French) historians are more interested in socio-economic studies of the subject.

3 these three different groups, I will try to highlight the elements which can constitute a common ground for immigration (at least in pre modern Venice), as much as those which make problematic a general understanding of this phenomenon. This aspect is, I believe, crucial not only to understand the different dynamics of their settlement, but it also forces us to unpack and re- conceptualize the dimensions of “foreigner” and “nation” in pre-modern time.

Prior to any enquiry on immigration—in Venice, as anywhere else—should be an understanding of who were the immigrants and their relationship with the city they were settling in. Being a city whose growth and development in the

Middle Ages was strictly connected with trade and thus the presence of merchants from a variety of places, this question has been widely studied, sometimes comparing its dynamics with those of Genoa, which shared with

Venice a common trading vocation and the republican government, but differed significantly in its administration. Roberto Sabatino Lopez and Benjamin Z.

Kedar describe the generosity with which “Genoa bestowed citizenship on all comers,” as opposed to Venice, which was far more cautious in conceding such privilege.4 Such statements may be understood as general political trajectories, but the surviving archival documentation shows that these narratives are at times exaggerated, if not completely fabricated to support mythical or anti- mythical narratives of these cities.5 Reinhold Mueller describes profusely how

4 B. Z. Kedar, Merchant in Crisis, p. 8. 5 G. Casarino, “Rappresaglie o Privilegi?,” in G. Petti Balbi (ed), Comunità Forestiere e “nationes,” pp.321-324. Here there is the example of a Lucchese living in Genoa from 17 years who, in 1404 finally received a “temporary citizenship” for 10 years.

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Venetians and the Venetian Republic dealt from time to time with immigrants, forensicus, updating—sometimes dramatically changing—the legal requirements for conceding different degrees of citizenship, according to a combination of ecological, economic, demographic, and political factors.6 The different trajectories which emerged from the studies of the three nations mentioned above clearly show how these factors intertwined and determined fortunes and misfortunes of their presence in Venice.

Perhaps the most relevant—if not the only—trait shared by these three groups is something that we could call “professional geographical determinism:” the

Lucchesi manufactured, spin and trade silk, the Germans—with regional specificities—imported to Venice metals, furs and leather, and established themselves in the lagoon as bakers, shoemakers and, later, as printers, while the Dalmatians excelled in seafaring and shipbuilding activities. If that may certainly explain that their professional specialization fulfilled Venetian deficiencies in said professional sectors, and that most of the immigrants who came to Venice worked in the respective regional area of expertise, it is however insufficient to describe and explain immigration and immigrational flows to

Venice. For instance, it only offers hints for interpreting why the Venetian

Republic decided to rely on foreign groups for certain professions; moreover, it leaves in the shade all the other unskilled individuals who migrated to Venice along with their fellow specialized countrymen, attracted by professional

6 R. Mueller, Immigrazione e Cittadinanza, pp. `17-31.

5 opportunities, who constituted, in Gigi Corazzol’s provocative words,

Microsocietà incapsulate (encapsulated micro-societies).7 Did they stay at the margin of their own original group or were they assimilated in the local social fabric, giving up their original territorial identity?

Also women are almost completely silent in the sources and, consequently, in the studies. An interesting perspective on the subject is given by Patrick Gilli, who introduces his work on the Italian city-states of the with a consideration over the meaning of étranger. He makes the distinction between the binary categories citizen/non-citizen and indigenous/stranger. Stanger, in fact, was not only someone born in a different place, but also all those categories who were excluded from the enjoyment of—most—legal rights: children, poor people and, indeed, women.8 Thus, women appear in the sources most commonly used by historians of foreign communities in Venice, but they appear to be mute because, to a certain extent, they are also foreign to the narratives expressed by the communities and their documentations: women are mentioned countless times in the wills of foreigners living in Venice, but their social world remains largely impenetrable; in the fraternities’ member lists, the female components are only recorded with their names and the name of their men (father or husband), but only seldom with their profession. A few more information emerged from extended painstaking researches on Dalmatian women: they were almost entirely domestic servants in patricians’ mansions,

7 G. Corazzol, Livelli Stipulati a Venezia, p. 16. 8 P. Gilli, “Comment Cesser d’Être Étranger,” in L’Etranger au Moyen Age, pp. 59-61.

6 but a handful are also listed as workers in the Arsenal, as rope and sail makers.9 Even in the Lucchese community, women were employed in the production of textiles, and both the Venetian government and the statutes of the scuola protected their employment, limiting slave occupation to menial labor.10 Some particular activities in the production chain were female business only—setting the yarn on the spinning wheels, unraveling silk yard from the cocoons—but the workers in the documents have no names and they are identified only collectively with their profession—respectively maestre and folexellis.11 If possible, we know even less of German women, who are almost completely invisible in the Fontego: they appear only in rare cases as something more than wives, mothers, or daughters of German men. Is it possible to find a few more details on those who run hotels, which was commonly operated by foreign women, especially Dalmatian and German in Venice?12 The only documents which give us more meticulous descriptions on those women are criminal records, in which they are often dealing with allegations of prostitution and black magic. Although they show that a large component of the sex workers in Venice were foreigners, they tell us little of, perhaps the majority of the other women, who were not prosecuted.13

9 L. Čoralić, “Unacceptable Social Behaviour or False Accusations, in S. Miljan & G. Jaritz (Ed.) At the Edge of the Law, pp. 82-97. 10 L. Molà, La Comunità dei Lucchesi a Venezia, p. 172-173. 11 Ibid, pp.190-192. 12 P. Braunstein, Les Allemands a Venise, pp. 388-390. 13 L. Čoralić, “Unacceptable Social Behaviour, cit.; P. Braunstein, Les Allemandes à Venise, pp. 388-390.

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I insist with another question regarding foreignness, considering it a relevant issue even in current debates: how did the local people considered the foreigners living in Venice? A Major Council’s decision in 1327 compares the

German immigrants who were not high-profile merchants or rich professionals, to people of bad reputation, and therefore more prone to be criminals.14 Guido

Ruggiero mentions the institution of a new magistracy in 1319 (Capi di

Sestriere) to patrol the city and prevent crimes and homicides created by the multitude of people who came to live in Venice in particular from Lombardy and Tuscany.15 But was this the way in which all foreigners were perceived in

Venice, throughout the centuries? Stan Chojnacki describes the two-pronged

Venetian policies of the XIV century which aimed on the one hand to attract and welcome foreign workers to Venice, and on the other to control and contain their unruliness.16 Related to this question there is also another major analytical problem. Who were the foreigners? Before it has been mentioned the

“legal” definition of Gilli. Broadly speaking, Giorgio Fedalto speaks of an

“extremely fluid understanding” of the concept of “foreigner, which defines the non-Venetian.”17 In the specific cases, we need to say a few words on the composition of the nations, and if cultural and geographical remoteness from

Venice were directly proportional to their degree of foreignness.

14 State Archives of Venice (ASV), Deliberazioni del Maggior Consiglio, reg. 22, c. 62v. 15 G. Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice, p. 36. 16 S. Chojnacki, “Crime, Punishment, and the Trecento Venetian State,” in L. Martines, Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, pp. 184-222. 17 G. Fedalto, cit., p. 145.

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Philippe Braunstein in his extensive studies on the German community in

Venice comes to a conclusion so broad and inclusive to be almost analytically unuseful: not only foreigner is, but also German is qui reputatur esse. It is an individual dimension, related to status, wealth, inclusion in or exclusion from networks, and membership to the national fraternity. The Germans allowed to the board of the Fontego are those “coming from a creatively recomposed

Germany, mythical rather than historical, which encompassed not only the subjects of the Habsburg Empire, but also those who participated to that linguistic and cultural community spread between Bruges and Cracow.”18

Language, however, is a problematic criterion for defining foreigners, or members of a given nation: the Lucchesi for instance, spoke a dialect which differed from Venetian as much as those spoken in Vicenza or Treviso, cities subject of the Most Serene Republic. Even among the Germans, language was not an exclusive category: up till the XV century people from Friuli and Trent, for instance, were included in the German nation, despite the fact that only a minority of them spoke German or a German dialect.19 Most importantly, as

Eric Dursteler argued, considering language as identity matrix is a product of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ nationalisms, while “the linguistic environment [of premodern Mediterranean, especially] created a situation in which multilingualism was both the norm and essential to communication.”20

18 P. Braunstein, “Appunti per la Storia di una Minoranza,” pp. 515-516. 19 P. Braunstein, Les Allemands a Venise, pp. 11-14. 20 E. Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues: Multilingualism and Multicultural Communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean” in Past and Present, 217, p. 52.

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It is often difficult to single out the origin of the Germans who lived in Venice, because in most cases they are generically identified as Alemanno or Todesco, and only seldom their names are associated with their native towns. Yet, since every city was specialized in the trade of specific goods, it is possible to deduct the origins of many merchants according to the business they run: for instance, merchants who imported gold and silver in the beginning of the fourteenth century most likely came from Regensburg, while traders of iron came from Wien, Laybach (today Ljubljana), and Carinthia.21

The Dalmatian case is probably even more fractured and complicated. The natione Dalmata included Venetian subjects coming from the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The dedication of their scuola—national fraternity—to Saint

George and Saint Tryphon in 1541 is telling of the migrational fluxes to Venice.

While Saint George was—and still is—a popular devotional figure in the

Eastern European world, from to Russia, Saint Tryphon is the patron saint of Kotor (on today’s Montenegro’ coast), but his cult beyond the gulf of

Kotor was almost nonexistent.22 This testify the primary role played by the people of Kotor for the foundation of the scuola. At the same time, the gradual disappearance of Saint Tryphon’s name as an identifier of the Dalmatian fraternity only forty years later, shows the declining influence of Kotor within

21 Ibid, pp. 201-203, 209-218. 22 Čoralić, “Kotorski Iseljenici I Hrvatska Bratovština Sv. Jurja I Tripuna U Mlecima (Xv-Xviii. St.)” in Croatica Christiana Periodica, Vol.32 No.61 (2008) pp. 23 T. Vallery, A. Sigovini, “Le Bocche Di Cattaro e la Scuola Dalmata di Venezia. I legami fra la Città di San Marco e di Bocchesi,” in Numero Unico della Scuola Dalmata dei SS. Giorgio e Trifone, no.56 (2009/1) pp. 9- 10.

10 the Schiavoni in Venice. Lovorka Čoralić (whose works I will describe later) in the decades spent digging in the Venetian archival sources, has found evidences that a large component of the Dalmatians who settled in Venice from the XV to the XVIII centuries, were people coming from Zara—Zadar—(14%) and Bocche di Cattaro—the Bay of Kotor—16%).23 She has been able to come to this conclusion by going beyond the “usual” sources, crossing the analysis of the lists of the fraternity and the wills of their members with criminal records, petitions, cadasters and, most importantly, administrative and juridical records from several archives in , , and Montenegro. Otherwise, in most cases it would be very difficult to determine the origin of an immigrant from the

Eastern coasts of the Adriatic: sometimes their names are associated with the city of origin, some other times with the region, but for the large part they are just identified with a generic Dalmatian or schiavo/schiavone, connotation that is often lost in the offspring of the Dalmatians who settled in Venice.

I did not find studies on the language of the Dalmatians in Venice. Dursteler says that in “Sixteenth-century Venetian reports on we can find that

‘all the citizens speak lingua franca’, and that ‘every young man ordinarily knows the , which they call Franco.’”24 It is worth noticing, however, that archival sources somehow problematize such contemporary statements. In fact, the Venetian representative in Kotor was frequently

23 Čoralić, U Gradu Svetoga Marka: Povijest Hrvatske Zajednice U Mlecima. Zagreb (2001) p. 446. 24 Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues,” cit., p. 69.

11 assisted by the voivode—administrator of rural and mountainous villages—who translated for him the petitions presented by the peasants surrounding the walls of Kotor, who only spoke a Slavic language called in the sources Serviano, a language that was hardly understandable even from the inhabitants of the city of Kotor.25 Yet, there is no evidence of Dalmatians who settled in Venice, who needed assistance to understand or translate from the Venetian vernacular, something that was not uncommon among the German traders.

Thus, we can see commonalities and differences of the immigrational patterns of Germans and Dalmatians. The communities of both nations—together with the Lucchesi, as we will see with their activities in the silk industry—largely settled in Venice to run businesses in which they excelled; in other words, their immigration was, at least in the beginning, labor-specific, and filled the

“occupational gaps” of the Venetian society, to the point that often the profession defined their national belonging, following dynamics which were quite common in premodern European societies. On the other hand though,

Germans and Dalmatians differed in their relationship with the Venetian vernacular: for the latter group, understanding the local idiom appears to be shared among all who settled in Venice, while for the German traders (or

25 ASV, Collegio, Relazioni dei rettori, ambasciatori ed altre cariche. b. 65. These people from the surroundings of Kotor were not sporadic presences in Venice: see infra, footnote 38.

12 shoemakers, bakers, and—to a lesser extent—printers), multilingualism was not a precondition for immigration.26

Changing scale of enquiry thus problematizes significantly the systemic analysis of immigration in Venice. It is worth mentioning here at least two other questions which exemplify this: why did a national group settle in Venice in a particular period, and under which conditions? And which were the processes of assimilation of these foreign communities into the Venetian social fabric—if that ever happened? Once again, the followed patterns differ significantly. Luca Molà in his work on the Lucchesi describes different migrational and assimilative patterns in the XIV even within that community.

Even though there are several evidences of the presence of Tuscan traders in the Lagoon at least from the XIII century, the oldest document which mentions a settlement of Lucchesi regards some fugitivi (bankrupt merchants) who came to Venice in 1307.27 Seven years later, several important Guelph families fled from Lucca after a Ghibelline coup. The government of Genoa, Bologna and

Venice—and to a lesser extent Florence—competed with each other to welcome these families, as they represented the excellence in the silk industry. At least

60 Lucchesi settled in the Most Serene Republic and started the production

26 Unlike the Germans, who in several occasions are mentioned in the official documents helped by translators, I have not encountered—nor had others who have studied the Schiavoni in Venice—evidences of Dalmatians who could not communicate in Italian-Venetian language. 27 L. Molà, cit., p. 24. Molà explains that the word Fugitivi with which the Venetian Great Council called the Lucchesi has long been misinterpreted as “political refugees,” its meaning in today’s Italian language. This interpretation was also reinforced by the tumultuous political situation in Lucca, at that time profoundly shaken by the clash between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Yet in the administrative Venetian language of that time, fugitivo means “bankrupt.”

13 and commerce of luxury silk textiles, a commercial sector which was little developed in Venice at that time. The next hundred years, several Lucchesi received the Venetian citizenship, second in numbers only to the Florentines.28

There were however different degree of citizenship, which defined domestic and international commercial rights and limitation, taxation, as much as political privileges. The Venetian government expanded and restricted such privileges according to the political and ecologic events which affected the XIV and XV century.29 Without going into details, here, it is important to point out that the example of the Lucchesi shows best that immigration in Venice was a phenomenon subjected to a multitude of variables whose combination is often incidental, and whose causal interpretations are not necessarily compelling.

Molà’s work, heavily based on archival records, contextualizes numerous individual cases of Lucchesi who came to Venice (particularly in the XIV century). What emerges from his enquiry is that the agency of the actors, whether Lucchesi or Venetian, is often defined and limited to a response to larger issues. For instance, the largesse with which the Venetian government bestowed citizenship on the Lucchesi (and many other foreign group) after the

1348 plague was just a reaction to the halving of its population. The choice made by the Lucchesi merchants to settle in Venice rather than to better established silk markets such as Genoa and Bologna was in certain occasions a deliberate choice of a Tuscan family to opt for a place in which competition

28 Ibid., pp. 37-38. 29 Ibid., pp. 45-48.

14 was limited—therefore having the potential opportunity to hold a monopoly on the Venetian silk industry—, while in others it was because there was no room for them and their activities. The most telling example is probably the institution of the Scuola del Volto Santo, a devotional, yet nationally clearly defined fraternity in 1359. Venice had previously forbade and opposed to the creation of national congregations, fearing organized political forces external to its government.30 However, this time Lucca reached its goal because they submitted the request through the monastery of the Servi di Maria, a monastic mendicant order founded in Florence and established in Venice since the second half of XIII century, whose monastery catalyzed the Tuscan newcomers.

Moreover, this time the deal was sealed because both the monastery and the

Venetian government had received the previous year significant economic support from one Lucchese merchant, Paolo Paruta, who could thus exercise leverage on both institutions.31

One last remark about the Lucchesi regards the relationship between assimilation and the state of foreignness. From the 1430s, the importance of the Tuscan community declined, once again for a combination of economic

(more competitive markets elsewhere and saturated domestic market in

Venice), demographic (progressive increase of the Venetian population), and cultural reasons (detachment of the Venetian patriciate from the essercizi vili—

30 After all, in 1310 Bajamonte Tiepolo, unhappy with the policies of the Doge, leaning towards a more aristocratic direction, conspired against him and—badly—led a coup with other fellow rebellious noblemen who thought it was not possible to contrast the leading faction within the Senate. 31 Ibid., pp. 88-91.

15 read: trade and manufacture—as the ruling class slowly abandoned the commercial vocation of its beginnings), as much as legal and political factors

(the expansion of the Venetian Republic over the Italian hinterland and the subsequent different fluxes of immigration from the newly conquered territories; consequently, more restrictive regulation to gain citizenship).32

Hence, the flow from Lucca rarefied, and with this the cohesiveness of their community.33 What appears in Molà’s interpretation of these dynamics is somehow in contrast with the definition of foreigner developed for the

Germans.34 Even though he recognizes the heterogeneity of the Lucchese community in Venice, in which every individual had his own story, unity and self-consciousness were possible because there was the continuous arrival of new members from Tuscany, almost exclusively exercising professions related to the silk industry. Once the migratory flux decreased, the identifying

“national” traits gradually blended with the local ones. On the one hand, this reading is consistent with the Braunstein’s observation, which determines that one is foreigner because this person is perceived as “other” by the local community and its institutions for his different language, manners, and habits.

On the other, however, one could keep his national identity alive only if the connection with his motherland is uninterrupted. In other words, being a foreigner is thus a communal condition and not an individual one.35 It is not

32 S. Chojnacki, “Social Identity in Renaissance Venice,” in Renaissance Studies, pp. 342-347. 33L. Molà, cit., pp. 268-70. 34 Supra, p. 9. 35 L. Molà, cit., p. 138.

16 the place to investigate on the social dynamics which may have taken place for the two scholars, nor we will discuss the different perspectives adopted to consider the subject of “foreignness” (how a foreigner is seen, in Braunstein’s case, how a foreigner considers himself in Molà’s work). But we should add to the conversation the Dalmatian community.

The Dalmatians, although their presence in Venice can be traced far earlier than the institution of their scuola in 1451, differ substantially from Germans and Lucchesi.36 First, unlike the other two nations, they were (largely, but not exclusively) subjects or former subjects of the Venetian Empire. Consequently, their settlement in Venice was fostered by the Republic in a later period, in a much different socio-political context, and enjoyed far less restrictions than the other foreign communities. Moreover, the composition of their nation was particularly problematic, especially if compared to the other two groups discussed here. In fact, among the Dalmatians or schiavoni, there were not only people coming from the subject cities of the Dalmatian coast, but also Ragusei

(from the semi-independent republic of Ragusa, today Dubrovnik), Ottoman subjects from Bosnia, Croats, and, in rare occasions, Albanians.37 Finally, the

36 On the earlier phases of Dalmatian immigration, see B. Doumerc, “L’immigration Dalmate à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age,” in S. Caciovicchi (ed.), Le Migrazioni in Europa, pp. 325-334. He divided the immigrational fluxes to Venice in four moments: after the plague in 1348, the war of Chioggia in 1381, the territorial expansion of the Venetian Empire in the first quarter of XV century, and the Turkish wars at the turning of the XVI century. 37 In Venice there was also the fraternity of Albanians, and the Mariegola (the “mother-rule” of every scuola) of the Scuola degli Schiavoni explicitly forbade its members to be associated as well with the Albanian Fraternity. The immigrants coming from the Bay of Kotor, also called Venetian Albania never affiliated themselves with the Scuola degli Albanesi. See Mariegola della “Fraternitade ovvero Scuola in Honore de Missier San Zorzi e Missier San Trifon, capitolo XXXIX; L. Nadin, Migrazioni e integrazione, pp. 241-243.

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Dalmatians were for the largest part skilled artisans—caulkers (calafati), carpenters (maestri d’ascia), and oars makers (remeri), blacksmiths (fabri), and sail makers (veleri)—who worked in the Arsenale, or unskilled boatmen

(barcaroli and gondoliers). 38 It is worth to notice that even among the Schiavoni there was regional specialization: for instance, the oars makers were predominately coming from Zeta, a Montenegrin region under Ottoman rule.39

Conversely, among the barcaroli it is possible to recognize a large component made by people coming from Zara (Zadar) and Bocche di Cattaro (the Bay of

Kotor).

Rich, proto-capitalist merchants, however, were very few, and they rarely settled in Venice. Perhaps for this reason, among the Dalmatians is particularly noticeable a quickened process of “venetization,” recognizable from the fact that marriages with non-Dalmatians were quite common, and many first-generation

Dalmatians born in Venice gave up their ethnic and geographic appellation.

This is even more common for the boatmen, who, because of their profession, inhabited neighborhoods other than Castello, in the surroundings of the

Arsenale.40 In fact, in the barcaroli’ wills, heirs are seldom individuals still resident in their hometowns.41 The distance from the heart of the Dalmatian community in Castello, away from a toponymy which constantly reminded them their geographical roots, loosened the connections with the people of the

38 Čoralić, “Hrvati i Mletački Arsenal” in Radovi Zavoda, pp. 169-171. 39 Čoralić, “Compagni E Gastaldi Della Scuola Dei Remèri, in Povijesni prilozi, pp. 162-163. 40 R. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal, pp. 132-145? 41 L. Čoralić, “Hrvatski Barkarioli I Gondolijeri U Mlecima Tijekom Proslosti” in Radovi Zavoda, p. 36.

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Eastern Adriatic coast, and eased the consolidation of new networks with the neighbors, regardless of their heritage.

There are however some historiographical, if not ideological biases on the works regarding the Schiavoni. The Dalmatian community was the only nation in Venice whose scuola was not terminated with the fall of the Republic by

Napoleon’s invasion. Still today, the Scuola degli Schiavoni hosts regular meetings of its members—although there is little, if anything, left of their

Dalmatian roots—and cultivates a lively interest in the history of the

Dalmatians in Venice. Since 1966, first annually, then twice a year, the Numero

Unico della Scuola dei Santi Giorgio e Trifone transcribes documents related to the Scuola, studies the paintings of the seat of the fraternity, and presents some historical works concerning the main events of the fraternity, its building, and some of its illustrious members. Unfortunately, the Numero Unico is not an academic journal, and seldom is the enthusiasm of its essayists consistent with standards of scholarly accuracy. Moreover, focusing on the fraternity and its members, the life of the Dalmatian people outside of the Scuola is only incidental.

The only scholar who has put a serious effort trying to investigate the

Dalmatian community of Venice is the Croatian historian Lovorka Čoralić. Her works, heavily based on decades of meticulous archival research, has been extensively published in Croatian language, and only seldom in Italian and

English. Čoralić did a remarkable job in reconstructing different facets of the

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Dalmatian community in Venice, especially for the XV-XVI centuries, where the archival sources are scarce. The fondo notarile of the State Archives of Venice, especially the wills of Dalmatians, provides most of the information which, crossed with other documents coming from the Scuola Dalmata, a few trials and some other material evidences—buildings, streets, gravestones—offers the social life of the Dalmatians in Venice. However, as most of the Croatian historiography, her work is tainted by nationalist ideology: besides repeatedly using expressions like naše obale, “our coasts,” or našega iseljeništva, “our immigrants,” referring to the origin of the Dalmatian people she is studying, more controversially she calls them Croats, regardless of their places of origin being , Zadar, the inland and the piedmont of the Balkans, or the coasts of Montenegro. 42 She explains the use of such an inclusive and controversial term based on two assumptions. First, the Croat kings in the XV century consolidated a unified anti-Ottoman military defense of their territories, by instilling in the Croats as well something we could call today nationalistic values. Second, since the immigrants “were defined by their common territorial origin and recognised and treated as a homogeneous group in their new homelands (based on its unity characterised by the common confessional

42 Čoralić, “Manje Poznati Dalmatinski Zlatari U Mlecima Od Xv. Do Početka Xvii. Stoljeća” in Prilozi povijesti umjetnosti u Dalmaciji, vol.36 no.1 (1998) p.177; Čoralić, Hrvaski I Mletački Arsenal, in “Radovi HAZU Zagreb” no. 39, (1997) p. 171.

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[Roman Christian] belonging and use of the same language), these immigrants will be…called Croats.” 43

What is disputable here is the fact that she decides to use a term, Croats, which, besides being heavily charged ideologically, in the sources is used only to define the subjects of the Kingdom of Croatia. I have not found a single document in which Croat is used otherwise, nor has Čoralić offered any reference which shows the contrary; these immigrants coming from the eastern shore of the Adriatic called themselves and were recognized by their contemporaries as Dalmati, Schiavi, Sclavi, Sciavoni. In addition, sometimes those coming from the Bay of Kotor are mentioned as sudditi dell’Albania

Veneta, and de Bossina and Istrian(us) those coming respectively from Bosnia and the Istrian peninsula, in the same way that Croato/Crovatus is used for those coming from the Croatian Kingdom.

By overviewing these works on the foreign communities in Venice, I have tried to point out strengths and weaknesses of the historiography. The case studies—and only very seldom, the microhistories—of Lucchesi, Germans, and

Dalmatians have shown that general patterns of immigration can only be loosely accepted. At the same time, they have shown how a myriad of variables determined fortunes and misfortunes of each group, the processes of assimilation within the Venetian society and its topography, at times taking

43 Čoralić, “Croatian Migrations in the Italian Coastal Area in the Late Middle Ages and at the Beginning of the Early Modern Age” in Balkan Studies – Etudes Balkaniques, no.10 (2010)) pp. 223-224.

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Most Serene Republic. Causal dynamics, once the scale of inquiry is reduced, appear to be fabricated ex-post, if not arbitrary: Each particular situation constitutes a piece of a puzzle in which the image is printed on top after, and not before all the pieces have been put together. It is however true that the focus on a singular foreign community may limit the capacity of the analysis: there is the risk to reduce the research to insular case studies, whose entanglement with the other foreign communities, and with local population and institutions, is only incidental, or, at best, read only from the perspective of a certain community. The Dalmatian case, as we have seen, is even more problematic, adding to methodological limitation, ideological biases conditioned by present events and narratives, and sometimes even access to the sources itself, as the documents of the scuola are not necessarily fully accessible to every scholar. The study of transnational conditions of foreignness—those who are foreign even to their own nations—is surely an interesting key of analysis, but such an inquiry should not keep out of sight or underestimate the importance of specificities and particular context emerged in the case studies.

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