the obnoxious and cowardly Venetian government, being in itself imbecilic and in decline, supported itself in its subjugated territories not so much by the dignity of its own power, or by the sanctity of its laws, but by the perpetual division of the people; and the people so divided became weaker than the government itself, and it was therefore easier to oppress them.
Ugo Foscolo, Stato politico delle Isole Ionie (1817)Footnote 1
Introduction
The above reflections by the Zacynthian poet Ugo Foscolo reveal the deep impression made by class divisions on Ionian society under the flag of St Mark. The class structure of society in the main Heptanese islands of Corfu and Cephalonia has been well studied,Footnote 2 but the scholarship has neglected the study of smaller islands such as Ithaca.Footnote 3 How the patterns of Venetian social structure presented themselves on Ithaca remains an open problem. It has been questioned whether Ithacan society during this period ever developed to the size that allowed it to support class divisions, though such views in the scholarship tend to be presented as impressions on a matter deemed to have only peripheral significance for the histories of the larger islands.Footnote 4 Most general works on the history of the region merely mention that there was just one barony on Ithaca in the Venetian period, that of the Galati, and do not interrogate the matter further.Footnote 5 Despite the presentation of documentary evidence for the ennoblement of the Galati by the major nineteenth-century historians, there is scant elaboration on what this meant for the structure of broader Ithacan society in the same period.Footnote 6 The scholarship either treats Ithaca as an insignificant outlier about which little can be said, or simply describes it by extrapolation from the conditions of the larger islands. This article instead concentrates on Ithaca and documentary evidence for social divisions on the island under the reign of the Neapolitan family Tocco (1357–1479) through to the early Venetian period (1503–ca. 1600). The example of Ithaca furnishes Ionian historiography with fuller evidence for the evolution of island society in various periods. Just as the studies of later Ithacan class structures have proved significant for scholarship of the entire region,Footnote 7 so the case of Ithaca in this earlier period of Latin rule gives an insight into the economic and political forces which conditioned the societies of the region.
Ithaca has commonly formed part of an administrative unit with neighbouring Cephalonia, and often with Zante (Zakynthos) to the south. Through the main shifts of power in the region between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the fate of Ithaca followed that of its two larger neighbours.Footnote 8 A series of frequent transfers of power in the Latin period stabilized around 1357, when Leonardo Tocco, a young Neapolitan noble, took the title of Count Palatine of Cephalonia, Zante and Ithaca, and later of Duke of Leukas.Footnote 9
The task of reconstructing Ithacan society under the Tocco must turn to a small amount of documentary evidence which concerns the grant of noble privileges and landholdings to the family Galati on Ithaca. It is possible to describe these in full detail. The first Tocco ruler of the county, Leonardo I Tocco, granted to Nicolò Palagano and his wife Eudokia (née Galati) certain privileges, likely for service to the comital court.Footnote 10 The Palagani were a family of Apulian descent who were employed as servitors of the Tocco and for this service received feudal landholdings on Zante.Footnote 11 Eudokia is named in the sources as the daughter of a Nicolò Galati,Footnote 12 whose name is perhaps specified because he too was employed at court. Nicolò Palagano and Eudokia Galati had a son, Franculo or Francesco, who was a courtier of Leonardo II on Zante and castellan of the fort of St Stephen.Footnote 13 Zante was governed within the Tocco realm separately from Cephalonia, since in 1399 Leonardo II had been personally granted the island of Zante by his older brother Carlo, who had inherited the realm on the death of their father Leonardo I. Carlo granted the island to his younger brother Leonardo, to return to Carlo's line on Leonardo's death.Footnote 14 In this way, the government of the realm was divided under Carlo, with the previous capital on Cephalonia controlled by Carlo's wife Francesca, Zante by Leonardo, and Lefkada (Santa Maura) by Carlo.Footnote 15 On 1 February 1403, Leonardo II confirmed that Franculo was entitled to the noble privileges that had earlier been granted to his parents Nicolò and Eudokia by his father Leonardo I.Footnote 16 As for the place of Ithaca in the divided realm, we can assume that it was also part of Carlo's grant of Zante to Leonardo II (therefore not administered from closer Cephalonia), since it was Leonardo who in turn granted landholdings and privileges on Ithaca to the Galati.Footnote 17 Kaisar (Caesar) Galatis was ‘enrolled among the nobles of the realm, and freed of all burdens and chores, and granted landholdings [on Ithaca].’Footnote 18 The precise date of Kaisar's receipt of privileges is not identified by historians. Chiotis seems to identify Leonardo II as the grantor, in which case it must have occurred between 1399 and his death between 1416–1421.Footnote 19 Hopf and Miller, however, identify Leonardo III, which would push the receipt of privileges by the Galati on Ithaca to a later date.Footnote 20 Whatever the dating of Kaisar's receipt of the grant, he must have had some family connection with the other Zacynthian Galati in the sources. While we are not in a position to reconstruct the connection between Kaisar and Nicolò, Eudokia, and Franculo, their close relation is made clear by Hopf's indication that the Ithacan Galati later inherited certain privileges which had been granted to the Zacynthian Palagani.Footnote 21
The precise nature of the Galatis fief in Ithaca may only be ascertained by an interpretation of the original documents presented by the nineteenth-century historians Mustoxidi, Hopf and Chiotis. Following the destruction of the Zante archive in 1953, these survive only in their secondary citations. Absent the discovery of other copies, certain general characteristics might be implied by the comparative evidence of other Tocco grants in the region. The Tocco established vertical social relations, enforced by obligations of service given for various privileges, the most significant being grants of interests in property. Footnote 22 Several fiefs were granted for military service or loyalty,Footnote 23 with ‘the most privileged servitors’ most often being other Tocco kinsmen or their relatives from southern Italy.Footnote 24 Other high roles in the Tocco power structure were occupied by Italian nobles, with Greeks and others (such as Albanians and Serbs) filling the lower strata.Footnote 25 Where precisely the Galati fitted into the Tocco power structure is indicated by certain features of their receipt of privileges. The marriage between the Apulian noble Nicolò Pelegano and Eudokia Galati makes it possible that the Galati were also Catholic and of southern Italian origin (though intermarriage cannot be ruled out). If the Galati were indeed Italian, this would in turn indicate that they occupied a higher rather than lower position in the Tocco hierarchy. That is certainly indicated by the significant position of castellan held by Franculo at the main castle at Zante, seat of the local unit.Footnote 26 This would not be surprising, since the receipt of a fief in Ithaca would have been a significant privilege in terms of its prestige. Miller has described the unique place of Ithaca in the imagination of Greece's Latin rulers, even reflecting on the county palatine as ‘the picturesque realm of many a mediaeval Odysseus’.Footnote 27 Despite its small size, the island was an attractive prize for its Latin conquerors who associated it with its Homeric heritage and fancied themselves heroic kings.Footnote 28 For a Tocco ruler to grant land in the kingdom of Odysseus, the recipient, here the Galati, must surely have won favour at court.
What the grant of land on Ithaca by the Tocco to the Galati tells us about the island's society depends on the extent of infeudation over the island. We are again confronted by the paucity of specific evidence for Ithaca. The holdings of the Galati are described invariably by historians as a ‘barony’,Footnote 29 but nowhere is the term given legal precision. The precise nature of these ‘baronial’ landholdings is not supplied by the nineteenth-century historians who record scant detail from the lost original documents of the Latin period. Chiotis, who lists the Galatis estate as the only barony on Ithaca, omits the size of its taxable agricultural product as he does for the Cephalonian and Zacynthian baronies.Footnote 30 The term ‘barony’ used here to describe the Galatis landholdings might be the application ex post facto of Venetian administrative language, where the term appears as early as the first decade of Venetian rule (1500–1510) to describe certain estates in Cephalonia.Footnote 31 Zapanti has shown that the label ‘barony’ is selectively attached by Venetian administrators to those estates which already existed on Cephalonia at the time of its capture from the Ottomans (1500), some having been granted by the Tocco. Footnote 32 Such a definition would clearly encompass the landholdings of the Galati on Ithaca, but here it is necessary to be cautious with respect to the language in the sources. Jacoby has shown that in some instances where feudal language was employed — and even if by contemporary administrators, rather than by later historians — the substance of a non-feudal relation could prevail over the label, with the mere ‘imposition of feudal terminology … constitut[ing] a legal fiction’.Footnote 33 Absent the existence of more particular evidence about the so-called ‘barony’ of the Galati and the extent of infeudation on Ithaca, it is impossible to know to what extent Ithacan society was conditioned by feudal relations. The apparent settlement of three distinct villages on the island in the fifteenth century might indeed indicate the presence of other smaller landowners.Footnote 34 While it might well be surprising if the Tocco had granted the entire island to the Galati, consideration of slightly later evidence from the start of the Venetian period indeed opens up this possibility, as will be shown.
The Venetian period
Tocco rule came to an end in 1479 with the Ottoman assault on the island.Footnote 35 Later, in 1500, the Venetians captured the island and formalized their sovereignty in 1503.Footnote 36 How Ithacan society looked in the late fifteenth century, just a few decades before the Venetians took control, requires us to look forward to the early Venetian records. On 18 March 1504 the Venetian Senate decreed a tax incentive to promote the repopulation of Ithaca, which they described as ‘uninhabited’ but with the capacity to be ‘fertile and productive’.Footnote 37 Those subjects who took up the offer to settle on Ithaca would receive land for cultivation together with an exemption from all taxation for five years, whereafter they would be obliged to pay the same taxes as paid in Cephalonia. The scheme to build a new agricultural economy integrated into the empire's trade networks was successful, though administrators were soon urged to restrain the development of a monoculture devoted to currant production. By 1548, the authorities would report that the island was inhabited by sixty families (a figure open to dispute) between three sub-regions,Footnote 38 identified as the capital Vatì and the two northern villages Anoì and Stravonichio (later Exoì).Footnote 39 Yet despite the Senate's description of the island as ‘uninhabited’ in 1504, it has been doubted that the island was totally deserted and suggested that the Senate's choice of word was ‘an overstatement’.Footnote 40 The Senate's description probably responds to the likely fact that there was a sharp decline in the Ithacan population in the few decades preceding 1504, but not a total depopulation.Footnote 41 The reasons for the decline are often attributed to pirate activity, together with the threat of Ottoman activity in the region which led to the short-lived Ottoman seizure of the island in 1479–1500.Footnote 42
Still, it must only have been a small number of people who did survive through the late fifteenth-century decline if the Venetians were inclined to promote the island's official resettlement. However, the first group of settlers following the Ottoman assault on the island did not in fact come under the official Venetian scheme for repopulation. Four months earlier than the March 1504 decree, the Proveditor of Cephalonia Nicolò Marcelo observed the arrival of unauthorized settlers:
Come è venuti alcuni subditi di la Signoria nostra, et senza alcuna licentia è intrati in l'isola del Thiacin over Val di Compare … E lì hanno discargato 15 over 20 paia di buoi e semenato, dicendo ditto loco aspetarli per esser stà suo patrimonio. Et perchè esso proveditor non voria el Signor turco di ziò mormorasse, licet ditta insula fusse dil signor Lunardo e di quella juridition, et però li fece intender che advertiscano ai fati loro e non dagi causa di inconvenienti…
[Some subjects of our realm [i.e. Venice] came, and without any authority entered the island of Ithaca or Val di Compare … And there they unloaded 15 or 20 pairs of oxen, and grain, claiming that the place [Ithaca] had been awaiting them, since it belonged to them as their property. And since the Proveditor did not wish that the Turkish Lord complain about this, he accepted that the aforementioned island did belong to Lord Lunardo and was under his jurisdiction, but had them understand that they should look after their own affairs and not cause any inconvenience…] Footnote 43
Marcelo's record makes clear that the resettlement of the island began independently of the Senate's decree. Who these pioneering Venetian subjects were is not stated, but their claim that Ithaca belonged to them means they must have had some connection with the island before they decided to return in late 1503. Michalopoulos had interpreted the passage as referring to the arrival of a ‘caravan of Venetians’ who were ‘new settlers’ rather than returnees.Footnote 44 Zapanti rejects this reading, rightly stressing that the ‘alcuni subditi di la Signoria nostra’ refers merely to subjects of the Republic, not necessarily to settlers from Venice itself.Footnote 45 Zapanti suggests instead they were the Galati, the noble family from the regime of the Tocco.Footnote 46 Though Zapanti does not give her reasons, there is justification for seeing the Galati in Marcelo's record. The record makes clear that the claim made by the group was tolerated by the authorities, since the Proveditor merely warns them not to cause trouble with the Ottomans who were still present in the region despite the island being handed to the Venetians. The fact that the authorities tolerated the group's claim by respecting their right to be there suggests that they must have recognized some truth in the assertion that the island belonged to them (or, very much less plausibly, that to resist them was undesirable or impractical).Footnote 47 This narrows the possibilities. The text clearly indicates that the settlers had some antecedent relation to the island, since they claim to be exercising their right to return to property they assert as their own. From what is known about Ithaca in the preceding century, only the Galati are known to have had an estate on the island. Moreover, the reference to ‘Lunardo’ in Marcelo's record, who must be Leonardo III Tocco, recalls that the Galati are first connected with the island by a grant of noble privileges under the Tocco. If we are to work with the documentary record from the preceding decades, the Galati are the only candidate, save for the Tocco themselves (an impossibility, since their return to Italy is documented).Footnote 48 The Galati would thus appear to have abandoned the island some time before they returned in late 1503 after the island had been secured by Venice. This would comfortably align with patterns of movement observed in Cephalonia, where noble landowning families like the Ariani and the da Bressa fled immediately after the Ottoman assault, only to return to manage their estates once the island had been secured by the Venetians.Footnote 49
If the Galati are seen to underlie Marcelo's record, then once they returned in late 1503 it is clear that they received special treatment. Marcelo makes clear his acceptance of their asserted right — ‘licet’ — despite their unlicenced initiative to settle on the island. To return to an issue discussed earlier, it even appears that the right asserted was over the whole island — ‘dicendo ditto loco aspetarli per esser stà suo patrimonio’ — which would indicate that the Tocco had granted the island in toto. Since Marcelo affirms their right of settlement, the proprietary claim must have been recognized to a certain extent, but with any total claim over the island being necessarily eroded by the state's grant of property in early 1504 to new settlers. The Galati, however, appear to have been authorized to settle the island independently of the official resettlement.
Even allowing for the possibility that the Galati cannot be implied into Marcelo's record, it is still possible to conclude from other evidence that their status obtained independently of the official incentives which applied to the rest of the new population of settlers. Whereas the Senate's tax incentive would expire after five years, the Galati remained exempt from taxation, perhaps throughout Venetian rule. A document of 1558 records the following comment by the Proveditor of Cephalonia Zuane Dolfin:
la famiglia Galati al tempo del signor Lunardo De Tochis erano tornati, et trattati per persone civili et non erano sottoposti a niuna gravezza.
[during the reign of the lord Leonardo Tocco the family Galati returned, and were treated as civili and were not subjected to any burdens.]Footnote 50
Whether that status was a full or partial exemption (that is, a general untaxed status or merely a list of specific exemptions) would again depend on a proper reading of the full text of the documents, the existence of which is uncertain and remains to be discovered by archival research. Whatever its precise form, the exemption from taxation must have been extensive. The note by Dolfin, that the Galati ‘non erano sottoposti a niuna gravezza’ (‘were not subjected to any burdens’) clearly begs us to view the status of the Galati as being totally unburdened, but it is not clear that this means they were entitled to use for their own benefit the tax collected from their estates like other baronial families.Footnote 51 If the family's privileges were confirmed by no less than twenty successors of Dolfin, as Hopf says, then the status of the Galati was maintained long into the Venetian period.Footnote 52 That is supported by another document relevant to determining the status of the Galati under the Venetians is located centuries later in the papers found by British colonial police on the pre-revolutionary figure Nikolaos Galatis when he was arrested in Corfu in 1816.Footnote 53 In the list of his papers is the following description of a document (which was probably not confiscated, since it does not appear to have been archived): ‘Un privileggio che esenta i Galati da ogni travaglio ottenuto dai Veneziani’ (‘A privilege obtained from the Venetians which exempted the Galati from every obligation’).Footnote 54 The striking feature is the parallel between ‘niuna gravezza’ in the 1558 document above and ‘ogni travaglio’ in this later certificate. The emphatic epithets in this documentary evidence (‘not subject to any obligation’ and ‘exempted … from every obligation’) make it clear that the Galati were — at least to a large extent — free from the burden of taxation imposed on their fellow Ithacans, though more evidence is required to know to the precise nature of their landholdings and the attendant privileges. Here it is possible to perceive a marked distinction between the Galati and the ‘new’ Ithacans who settled after 1504. An ancient claim to rights under the Tocco was the basis on which the Galati were later able to reassert their presence on the island in 1503, with the acquiescence of the Venetian state. Their status was renewed under the Venetians, and as we have seen, maintained to some extent through three centuries of Venetian rule. On the other hand, the growing settlement of the new Ithacans conditioned new structures which responded to the economic objects of the Venetian decree, to increase agricultural production.Footnote 55 Thus the new Ithacan society can only be understood through the relations of production imposed by the new economy.
In other newly captured Venetian territories, feudal structures often survived for some time into Venetian rule on account of the continuity of the old law among the old landowners and the state's recognition of their proprietary claims.Footnote 56 In Cephalonia, several old feudal estates of some size survived past 1504.Footnote 57 In Ithaca the only comparable estate was that of the Galati, the size of which is unknown, as we have seen. Clearly much of the island had come into the hands of the state which then sought to grant parcels for cultivation. The 1504 decree declares that land granted by the state to recipients under the scheme would have the right to pass it on to their heirs.Footnote 58 That the land was also alienable is evinced by a contract for sale from 1565.Footnote 59 Thus Ithaca was largely divided up into small parcels and granted to settlers who became taxable landowners with rights of alienation, rather than tenants for a term paying a ground rent to the state.Footnote 60 This mirrors at least some of the many grants made to new smaller landowners after 1500 in Cephalonia. Footnote 61 The land-grant scheme for the resettlement of Ithaca succeeded such that it was reported to the Senate in 1563 that the island was ‘very well inhabited’.Footnote 62 The island's population rose steadily, from 1500 in 1590 to 4500 in 1655 (though caution with individual statistics is needed).Footnote 63 In the first years after 1504 this must have corresponded to dozens, and later hundreds,Footnote 64 of small landowners, most of whom held their land direct from the state, having received parcels of land for cultivation, and were thus not tenants of a vassal (the Galati). If the Galati were the only (or at least the largest) pre-Venetian landowners on the island, then, whatever the size of their former estates, the land available to them on this very small island must have been reduced by the grant of many more pockets of land to new settlers after 1504. Such a distribution of land is indeed indicated by the Prossalendi will of 1585, which describes the disposition of several parcels of land on Ithaca by a Corfiot settler.Footnote 65 The testator describes many parcels of land, which suggests their small individual size, a fact that is confirmed by references to their small productive output.Footnote 66 Interestingly, the will lists an Apostolos Galatis, though as witness not landowner.Footnote 67 A later instrument of 1636 mentions a deceased Linardos Galatis as the landowner of certain plots held by tenants who appear to have received them in Linardos’ will — these were perhaps inherited fragments of the original Galatis estate.Footnote 68 The image thus depicted by the evidence for sixteenth-century Ithaca is of an island divided into small agricultural parcels held directly by individual landowners, with some amount of leasing to other farmers.Footnote 69
Informal and formal class structures in Venetian Ithaca
As we have seen, the structure of the new Ithacan society must have been more horizontal than in the larger islands where the widespread subinfeudation of estates vertically divided society. The archival evidence for sixteenth-century Ithaca thus presents few indicators of class distinctions. Even when confronted with a man recorded at Anogi in 1565 with the honorific title μισέρ, Zapanti considers it likelier he was a visitor from Cephalonia and not a local, given the smaller island was ‘a society of farmers among which a miser would not have been able to be distinguished’.Footnote 70 The term miser denoted a landowner who did not cultivate his own plots, instead commonly leasing it to others for production.Footnote 71 Yet the increasing appearance of such honorifics in later records of the seventeenth century shows that while Ithacan society was at first incapable of the development of such distinctions, they must have emerged with time.Footnote 72 Indeed already in the 1585 Prossalendi will the testator lists land owned by him which he rents to others who cultivate it for him (as I shall discuss below).Footnote 73 The general character of the early post-resettlement society is nevertheless not marked by clear social stratification. The only exception is the Galati, whose legal status on the island, as we have seen, obtained independently of the rest of the population. Hopf records in his research journal that the Galati ‘had the sole right to use the title “illustrissimo”’, contrasting this privilege to the rest of Ithacan society ‘where no catalogue of nobility existed’.Footnote 74
While the use of that honorific itself not being indicative of a particular legal status, the Proveditor Dolfin's instrument of 1558 declares the Galati are to be treated as ‘civili’.Footnote 75 This is significant in how it appears identify the legal status of the Galati. To appreciate this, we must compare Ithaca to the larger islands. In Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante, the administration came to divide society into politically distinct classes by the end of the sixteenth century: the citizens who constituted the political community (cittadini) were distinguished from the masses (popolari).Footnote 76 While the cittadini encompassed large landowners, some of whom who had fiefs from earlier Latin rule, the law recognized them only as a class of political enfranchisees, and not as a class of feudatories per se.Footnote 77 The growth of the towns allowed for the emergence of an upper stratum of the masses known as the civili, a bourgeois class who had made their wealth in the towns as professionals, with some having become significant landowners in the countryside without being resident there.Footnote 78 A constraint on their social mobility was enforced by the tightening of eligibility for the councils toward the end of the seventeenth century, which eventually resulted in antagonism between the enfranchised nobles and the politically sidelined bourgeoisie.Footnote 79 The civili were in some instances afforded certain privileges as a ‘seconda classe di cittadini’, but they were most often left to knock at the door of the council, where introductions of new members declined steadily over time.Footnote 80
Since we are confronted with the absence of such economic conditions on Ithaca — particularly, the absence (owing to its small size) of a marked distinction between town and country— the recognition of the Galati as ‘civili’ is extraordinary. There is no record of acute class tensions in sixteenth-century Ithacan society, though some parallels will be outlined below. By the end of the century, the island would still have been populated by numerous small landowners, whose economic development was bounded by the obvious natural limits of a small, mountainous island. A report to the Senate of 1545 shows that Ithaca paid into state coffers just 26 ducats in tax on wheat production, while Cephalonia paid 677.Footnote 81 Even in the early seventeenth century Ithaca could produce only one tenth of the currants of Zante, and an even smaller fraction of the output of Cephalonia.Footnote 82 The limit on production reflected in these numbers would also have imposed a limit on the development of the economic disparities from which emerged the distinct classes on the larger islands, but we shall see below some evidence for the emergence of social tensions in Ithaca.
Onto this limited agricultural economy the state imposed a limited and direct administration. An equivalent of the council in which sat the enfranchised cittadini on Cephalonia (the Consiglio della Communità) was absent from smaller Ithaca, which fell under the Cephalonian jurisdiction and was administered by a small local apparatus.Footnote 83 There being no Ithacan council, it was not possible for Ithacans to be enfranchised and thus ennobled.Footnote 84 It is all the more exceptional, therefore, that while the Ithacan Galati could not have been nobles, more precisely cittadini, owing to their isolation from the politcal community of Cephalonia, the Proveditor still privileged their status in declaring that they be ‘treated as civili’.Footnote 85 Indeed Hopf makes this point when he identifies the Proveditor's recognition of the Galati as being unique on an island where no catalogue of nobles existed.Footnote 86 Yet the political isolation of Galati in the new regime may be shown by their never having been appointed to the early local administrative positions established by the Venetians.Footnote 87 Zaridi sees in the new political apparatus an opportunity for the emergence of a new stratum of elites.Footnote 88 After the death of the life-appointee Costa Pugliese who had administered the island until 1563, the Cephalonian council elected appointees to the post on a yearly basis.Footnote 89 These delegates so conflicted with the Ithacans that they petitioned the Senate in 1583 to transfer power to the local population.Footnote 90 While not formalized as a legal class as such, the Ithacan functionaries who took the administrative posts shared with the formal nobles of Cephalonia at least the essence of the Venetian civic ‘nobility’, being the privilege of political participation.Footnote 91 While the Galati continued to hold certain privileges under the Venetians, their absence from the new administrative apparatus demonstrates the formal distinction between the feudatory heritage of the old aristocracy and the new ‘nobility’, being a political class of enfranchised citizens. In this way the new political structure formalized the redistribution of economic power effected by the advent of Venetian rule. Since the political structure of the Ithacan community was limited to a small apparatus under Cephalonian supervision, it did not allow for the formalization of a class of nobles as on the larger islands.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the evidence suggests inequalities had begun to develop. The petition made by the Ithacans to the Venetian Senate in 1583, complaining about their Cephalonian administrators, may be read as the symptom of new social tensions which arose from the new agricultural trade economy.Footnote 92 While the background of the Ithacan petition is not clear, it is possible that social tensions had arisen in a similar manner to the larger islands. In Cephalonia and Zante frequent petitions were sent to the Senate after the imposition of Venetian tariffs to restrain the currant trade with English merchants.Footnote 93 The trade had created such dependency on the part of the Zacynthians — and in the Senate's eyes, provoked such hubris — that they sent their own representative to London to negotiate a solution in 1587.Footnote 94 Likewise in Ithaca, the Venetian incentive to cultivation appears to have got somewhat out of control. The fervent local preference for the lucrative currant over grain gave rise to several official complaints. In 1596, the Ithacans were said not to be observing the prohibition on planting vines.Footnote 95 An apparent escalation in the problem caused a complaint about the islanders’ obstinate behaviour in 1611, following an attempt to have the Ithacans rip up their vines.Footnote 96 Another complaint from 1628 states that the deficit in grain was so great that the 1723 inhabitants would survive for just one month if they had to rely on local supplies.Footnote 97
Our few early legal documents relating to land supplement this economic evidence to help reconstruct the society developing around the growing agricultural economy. The Prossalendi will of 1585 depicts an island broken up into small agricultural parcels, which might suggest a society of peasant landowners.Footnote 98 Evidence from a contract for the sale of land in 1565 describes several landowners with the title κυρ, denoting landowners whose families cultivated their own land.Footnote 99 As we might suspect from the evidence of the growth in agricultural trade, however, this was not the case for everyone. Almost all the properties disposed by the testator of the Prossalendi will are said to be ‘held’ or ‘being cultivated’ by persons other than the owner himself.Footnote 100 Here might be identified the seeds of economic disparity, though not on the scale of other islands. A figure named Nikolaos Mavromatis appears four times in the Prossalendi will, twice as a landowner of neighbouring properties (clearly for the purpose of delineating boundaries), and twice as the holder of plots owned by the testator.Footnote 101 The latter instances represent leaseholds with rent usually paid in kind, under a system known as the πάκτωμα or πάκτωση, here between an apparently larger landowner, the testator Thodoris Prosalentis (Prossalendi), and the apparently smaller landowner Mavromatis.Footnote 102 Such agreements were common throughout the region, where small landowners, with insufficient harvests from their own properties, would rent more land from larger landowners to increase their yield.Footnote 103 Further, the growth of credit in the other islands, which intervened in the currant trade to increase productive capacity, also conditioned the dependence of smaller growers on larger lenders.Footnote 104 The small amount of Ithacan evidence considered here illustrates a complex network of proprietary relations which corresponds to a substantial degree of economic stratification as early as 1585. The smaller landowners remained reliant on larger landowners to earn a sufficient income, and this can only have been intensified by the growing forces of the currant trade. In this way, the submission of tenant to landowner allowed for a new form of real economic exploitation, on the basis of which it is possible to observe the emergence of greater wealth in the following century. The presence of honorifics in records from 1636 indicates that sufficient economic disparities had emerged by then to support the use of social distinctions, notably μισέρ, which represent the gap between a landowning and tenant class.Footnote 105 Such growth in the wealth of the larger landowners was dependent on the doubling of production of the currant which is observed in the same century.Footnote 106 As these new landowners expanded their production and became integrated into the trade economy of the empire, the disparities in wealth on the island must have become more notable. Yet the isolation of the island from its neighbour, which housed the local seat of power, meant that legal class divisions were established only at Cephalonia, where a class of political enfranchisees was integrated into the state apparatus.
The expansion of the currant trade in the southern Ionian led to a political and economic conflict which has been well studied for Zante and Cephalonia. Such events as the Ithacan petition of 1583 probably represent the eruption of similar tensions in a smaller economy in this important time of expansion. The evidence presented here outlines the forces which shaped the new Ithacan society during the first century of Venetian rule as the state sought to create a new economy. A more precise reconstruction remains to be supplied by further evidence of the relations of production on the island. Among the most important open problems to be addressed are the exact extent of the Galatis landholdings and their privileges, and the evolving distribution of land among the new landowners after 1504. Here we have sketched certain possibilities for these two related questions which remain to be confirmed by future archival work. This must take us to the official archives in Venice and Cephalonia, but also to the early sixteenth-century notary records from Ithaca. These will allow us a better understanding of the extent of tension between the old and new regimes on either side of 1504, and the growth of inequalities between Ithacan landowners as participants in an expanding regional and international economy.
Kyriaco Nikias is a doctoral candidate and University Assistant (prae-doc) in the Institute for Roman Law and Ancient Legal History at the University of Vienna.
