Marriage and Mobility in Venice (late 16th-18th Centuries) – Processetti

The study of migration structures and routes was based on the creation of a database using the Geovistory collaborative platform ((https://www.geovistory.org) developed by the Swiss company Kleiolab. The richness and heterogeneity of the processetti required prior work on structuring and modelling the data, which covered a large amount of essential information: the motivations behind the survey, the typology of journeys, the restitution of durations and temporalities, the definition and aggregation of occupations, the spatial nesting of geographical entities, and the qualification of the forms of relationship between the applicant and his witnesses. This methodological effort - the general scope of which goes beyond the needs of this project - was followed by other stages: transcription of the processetti, semantic annotation, drafting of analysis queries, visualization of the results in the form of tables, graphs and maps. A total of 4,640 processetti were analysed, exhaustively for the years (1592-1604) - which also corresponds to a period of economic prosperity and urban attractiveness - and with shorter cuts and annotation for the beginning of the seventeenth century and the period following the plague of 1630.

Quantitative analysis of the database has produced groundbreaking results on demographic and migratory structures, specifically on the age at which foreigners married (26 on average), the age at which they arrived in Venice (13-14 on average), which corresponds to the period of apprenticeship and domestic employment, and the nature of the relationship with the witnesses. The project has clarified the size of the migratory basin of Venice with a high degree of precision, demonstrating the city's ability to attract people from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, but above all the considerable weight of an immigration that was confined to the political borders of the Republic, without an event such as the plague of 1630 profoundly changing this migratory geography.
The other part of the project, devoted to the procedure for verifying the matrimonial suitability of future spouses, produced significant results on the circulation of administrative practices between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in the Venetian possessions , and threw light on the homogenisation of the procedure throughout Italy during the seventeenth century as a result of instructions from the Congregation of the Holy Office.

Provided that the Geovistory platform is used, the tools are ready to exploit the same type of sources in other major cities with a view to a comparative study of the impact of major epidemics on migratory structures and catchment areas. An ERC project would be the appropriate framework for this change of scale.

This project has given rise to a number of individual papers and publications, which will culminate in two collective books, one on the pre-matrimonial control procedure, the other on migratory spaces and forms of mobility in Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An internal website will be available by the end of 2023, presenting the methodology, the main results and a free search facility.

This historical research programme analyses the interactions between an institution and a practice: on the one hand, marriage, a sacrament of the Church and a crucial step in setting up as a professional, transmitting property and integrating society; on the other, mobility, understood in both spatial and social terms. This programme’s field of study is modern Venice, which was both a very large city of more than 150,000 inhabitants at the end of the 16th century, and a world-city whose mixed population came from around the Mediterranean basin and the Transalpine countries. Venice is therefore an excellent vantage point for studying interconfessional marriages (between Catholics and Orthodox), marriages between foreigners, and marriages between natives and immigrants.
This project relies on a massive volume of documentation: the processetti matrimoniali. These enquiries were made by the Catholic Church to ensure that future spouses were indeed either single or widowed. Initially, these enquiries were carried out for all individuals whose marital status was in doubt, especially non-native Venetians. They were based on witness testimony, and recorded in 340 registries between 1592 and 1807. This serial and diachronic documentation will be used to create a collaborative database developed using a project hosting platform (symoghi.com) with support from the Digital History Unit of LARHRA. The database input will consist of one-third of the processetti collection (120 registries, i.e. around 10,000 enquiries).
This unique documentation will be processed in two ways. Firstly, the processetti will be studied as the central component of a system that the Catholic Church set up in an attempt to reconcile human mobility with the respect of marriage rules. The analysis of this process will be expanded to the Italian peninsula and to the Greek world under Venetian dominion in order to gain a better understanding of the circulation of ecclesiastical norms and practices.
Then, we will regard the processetti as a source of information for grasping marriage as a pivotal moment in a migratory trajectory and an integration process. The processetti lend themselves to both a quantitative and qualitative approach that enables a full range of migratory trajectories to be reconstructed, including for example migrations by women (who leave little trace in the sources typically used for research). Lastly, we will examine how, at the end of a migratory trajectory, marriage could be an instrument for social integration (by looking at the significance of exogamous and interfconfessional marriages) – and for social mobility (paying special attention to the sequence of events surrounding the 1630 plague outbreak, which appears to have opened up matrimonial and economic opportunities). This research programme aims to better understand what inclusion and social mobility mean in an open, cosmopolitan city that is still affected by legal, religious and social barriers.
This project is underpinned by a partnership between LARHRA-University of Lyon 2, the University of Padua, the French Schools of Rome and Athens, and the National University of Athens.