The shoemaker, who died in 1190, left two living brothers. He bequeathed the belongings to his partner [FRAGMENT KSI¡¯KI]

The authors of “Experience Love in the Middle Ages” describe how Roman and barbaric rites came together under the influence of Christianity, creating new concepts, customs, laws and practices. Traces of many of them can be found in the present day. Could the future wife be simply kidnapped? When did monogamy become the norm? Could the woman have asked for a divorce? What was the wedding ceremony like and was the wedding night romantic? The Gies track the development of marriage and the family from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. Below we present a fragment of the book “Experience love in the Middle Ages” translated by Grzegorz Siwek.

Frances Gies, Joseph Gies, “Experience Love in the Middle Ages, translated by Grzegorz Siwek – excerpt from the book

The Genoese families had commercial, social, political, and military dimensions, and grew as needed, using the services of fewer or more clients and poor relatives. When in 1188 a thousand men from Genoa made their signatures to keep peace with the rival city of Pisa, a third of their names and surnames were grouped in ancestral-neighborhood groups, and after the male heads of the great families, not their relatives were included in this list, but customers. Private wars shook the city from time to time from its very beginnings, and also from the beginning great families operated there; as early as the 10th century, two of Genoa’s founding fathers, Obertus Vicecomes (Visconti) and Obertus de Maneciano, argued with each other. Two hundred years later, their descendants, the offspring of their relatives, and allied families continued to fight each other in the streets and besieged one another’s homes. The head of the Camilla family, begging the Pope for permission to build his own church, assured that his family members would prefer not to risk a trip to the nearby Basilica of Santa Maria delle Vigneii.

Arranging marriages served political, military and commercial purposes. Marriage contracts were rarely concluded by hostile families, they almost always had in mind a covenant with potential allies. The concluded alliance was most often renewed from time to time for commercial and military purposes; sometimes it lasted for generations or even centuries. As elsewhere, dowries and dowry formed the material basis of a marriage, and as in many other regions, the size of the contributions made by the bride and groom’s families changed markedly in the 12th century. In Genoa, the bride of a patrician family was initially doubly gifted, receiving an antifactum in money or valuables, and a third – the right to use one third of her husband’s entire property.

In 1143 the tercia was abolished and the antifactum was reduced to half the dowry or one hundred Genoese lira (pound silver equivalent), the more modest of these options. So also there, the wedding was more profitable for the family of the groom, who often married while still a teenager, under the supervision of his father or older relative. Full rights were obtained only after the age of twenty-five. The young man made his first voyages with his father, uncles or older brothers. The attempts by the city board to give young people more powers in concluding property contracts and to hold them personally responsible for the crimes committed were overturned by local nobles; Patrician Genoa remained a society dominated by family fathers.

The family life of representatives of other important Genoese social groups – artisans, shopkeepers, small merchants, laborers – differed significantly from that of aristocrats. There were no families among craftsmen, and the phenomenon of branched families, so important in the circles of the powerful, was unnoticeable. For a shoemaker, cooper, or fishmonger, the family consisted of a wife and children huddled together under one roof. The wife was a business partner, a collaborator; the children also helped with the work or were sent as journeymen to a representative of the same or a different guild. In a larger family, an adult son stayed at home to run a stall or workshop when his parents reached the age when they could no longer deal with it, or the son-in-law took over this role.

Yet the craftsman belonged to a larger community composed not only of his household. This larger group was made up not of his relatives but of his colleagues. The church functioned in a similar way, which was to lead to salvation and provide other benefits, as in the case of the aristocracy, it was a parish community that had no family ties with it. The preserved wills clearly show with whom and with what the sense of loyalty and solidarity shared a sense of loyalty and solidarity.

A shoemaker, who died in 1190, left two living brothers, yet he bequeathed the house and most of his possessions to an accomplice in the interest and appointed the parish church to take over this inheritance upon the death of his immediate heir – “something an aristocrat would never do,” she wrote Diane Hughes, who established that in the wills of Genoese craftsmen, in the absence of a direct heir, 14 percent of the property was transferred to unrelated persons. The kind of contracts concluded by aristocrats with relatives in old age were made by representatives of the trade and their widows with co-workers or neighbors: it consisted in the lifetime handing over of the house and movables in exchange for a bed and a place at the table and stove. Again, 23 percent of the surviving wills of artisans made the main heirs of the wife, sometimes even in the presence of children – “members [genueńskiej] the aristocracy to be rewarded in such a way [żon] it didn’t even come to mind.

The bond between husband and wife among artisans was different from that between aristocratic married couples. The craftsman’s wife worked in the same or different profession as her husband, and they both made equal or similar material contributions to the marriage in the form of dowry and antifactum. The average value of the artisanal antefacta (fourteen lire – pounds of silver) was 70 percent of the typical dowry amount (twenty lire). More than 70 percent of the antefact was at least half the value of the dowry. In the marriages of aristocrats, the figure was only 44 percent. In other words, the Genoese artisans resisted the customary law restricting the husband’s contribution to the marriage. In the aristocracy, the size of a daughter’s dowry was a measure of status, which, in turn, did not care too much for the working-class newlyweds, who used all resources to provide the marriages of their offspring with material living conditions.

Both of these social strata also differed in terms of childcare. Mothers from craft families nurtured the babies themselves; aristocrats handed them over to their nurses or hired a mother to their home. Many of the wealthy women of Genoa remembered the care of their children and their children, making appropriate entries for these women in their wills. The Piast dynasty undoubtedly strengthened the ties between children of craftsmen and their mothers, but a few years later the same children were thrown out of the family nest, often condemning them to the harsh fate of their journeymen. Later, the son of a craft family gradually became independent, got married and started his own family. A craftsman’s daughter often had to wait for the death of her parent in order to buy a dowry that would allow her to leave the family home. After her marriage, she probably had relatively greater freedom in marriage than the aristocrat’s wife – thanks to her dowry, working together with her husband, and sometimes also thanks to being the daughter of a guild master, who accepted the proposal of an ambitious journeyman.

Widowhood also looked somewhat different in the two Genoese classes. The working widows, as a rule, were seriously concerned with remarrying, and they often achieved their goal if they were young enough, either by taking their children to their new home with them, or by bringing a new husband to their own house. Not infrequently, a widow married a craftsman in the profession of her late husband (and herself), and sometimes even with a journeyman seeking some social promotion. By contrast, the typical aristocratic widow rarely remarried because, when she did, she had to hand over the children to guardians appointed by the new husband’s lineage. In turn, widowhood afforded a wealthy wife and mother a greater degree of freedom than she had before. Most of these women had formal contracts that guaranteed them control of their homes and other properties.

Early 13th century documents mention Driu Stregghiaporco, who invested over a thousand silver lira in overseas ventures in Spain, Africa and the East; Giardinia Boleto spent 615 lira on similar investments in foreign countries, and Mavilia Lecavella sold wine to the King of France, trading land and commercial properties, investing 325 lira in four trade deals in Africa and the East, and trained children to take over from their deceased father. The wives of aristocrats rarely appear in Genoese mercantile records, while aristocratic widows are abundant in these documents. A logical conclusion can be drawn from this that the wives were more familiar with their husbands’ professional affairs than the files themselves would suggest.

For the orphaned children of people from the commune, the death of the father was a shock related to the stepfather’s move to the house or the struggle of the family, without a manager, to survive in extremely modest conditions. In the case of the children of aristocrats, the tragedy of losing a parent was somewhat mitigated by the possibility of continuing to live at home, surrounded by uncles, aunts and other relatives.

Thus, two distinct family forms developed in Genoa in the 12th century as a city of commerce. The aristocratic pattern can probably be considered a big-city version of how powerful families lived in other places, cultivating history and warlike traditions, which, however, in many details was modified by specific material and social conditions; but basically, the changes were one-way – towards a professional occupation of trade. As we will see shortly, the patterns of family life of Genoese artisans bring to mind associations with the popular model of the peasant family – with the life of a conjugal family under one roof, the work of husband and wife, and closer relationships with neighbors and associates than with other relatives.

Frances Gies, Joseph Gies, ‘Experience Love in the Middle Ages’ mat. ferry. Wydawnictwo Znak