Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe [1 ed.] 1032017457, 9781032017457

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PRO REFRIGERIO ANIMAE: DEATH AND MEMORY IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE FOURTEENTH–NINETEENTH CENTURIES Edited by Angela Jianu and Gheorghe Lazăr

Pro Refrigerio Animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe

The historiography of death, memory, and testamentary practices is already abundant in Western Europe and a fairly large number of extra-European regions. For East-Central Europe there are many short studies in various regional languages, mainly on anthropological/ethnographic aspects of the funeral rituals. This is an edited collection of studies by international scholars on the interlocking themes of attitudes and discourses on death, commemorative practices, and inheritance/testamentary strategies in the Balkans and EastCentral Europe. These and other related themes are addressed comparatively and cover areas including Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and areas of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from the perspective of imperial – Ottoman and Habsburg – legacies. Pro Refrigerio Animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe contributes to this subject by: linking anthropological/religious/cultural approaches to death to the legal/economic aspects of inheritance/commemoration; adding a still absent East-Central European and Habsburg, Balkan, and Ottoman dimension to the study of death, memorialization, and testaments; and presenting an abundant primary and secondary material in English translation and thus placing research on death and testaments by EastCentral and Greek scholars within the international scholarly circuit. Angela Jianu studied English and classics at the University of Bucharest in Romania and obtained a PhD in history from the University of York (UK) in 2004. She currently works as an independent historian, copy editor, and translator. Her publications include: “Women, Fashion and Europeanisation in the Romanian Principalities,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans, eds. Amila Buturovi
 and Irvin C. Schick (2007) (trans. into Turkish as Osmanlı D
neminde Balkan Kadinlari, 2009); Earthly Delights – Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900, eds. Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu (Brill, Leiden, 2018). Gheorghe Laz
r is a senior research fellow at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History (Bucharest, Romania), co-editor (with Violeta Barbu) and

coordinator of the collection of medieval documents Documenta Romaniae Historica B. Wallachia, published by the Romanian Academy (10 volumes, 1998–2016). He obtained a PhD in history at Laval-Québec University in 2005. His doctoral dissertation was published in 2006 as: Naissance et ascension d’une catégorie sociale: Les marchands en Valachie (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Romanian Academy Award 2008). His published works include edited documents of social, economic, and family history: Mrturie pentru posteritate: Testamentul negustorului Ioan Blu din Craiova (2010); Documente privitoare la negustorii din ara Româneasc, vol. 1 (1656–1688), vol. 2 (1689–1714) (2013, 2014); Testamente de negustori i meteugari din ara Româneasc(secolele XVII-XIX), 2021.

Pro Refrigerio Animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe Fourteenth–Nineteenth Centuries Edited by Angela Jianu and Gheorghe Laz
r

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Angela Jianu and Gheorghe Lazr; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Angela Jianu and Gheorghe Lazr to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Jianu, Angela, editor. | Lazr, Gheorghe, editor. Title: Pro refrigerio animae : death and memory in East-Central Europe 14th-19th centuries / edited by Angela Jianu and Gheorghe Lazr. Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022061643 (print) | LCCN 2022061644 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032017457 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032017464 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003179801 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Death--Europe, Eastern. | Death--Europe, Central. | Funeral rites and ceremonies--Europe, Eastern--History. | Funeral rites and ceremonies--Europe, Central--History. | Collective memory-Europe, Eastern. | Collective memory--Europe, Central. Classification: LCC GT3242 .P76 2023 (print) | LCC GT3242 (ebook) | DDC 393.09437--dc23/eng/20230320 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061643 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061644 ISBN: 978-1-032-01745-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01746-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17980-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

viii 1

PART 1

Death and Funerary Practices 1 Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia: Cultural Responses, Before and After (1463–1878)

13

15

A M ILA BUTURO V I  

2 The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia (Seventeenth–Early Nineteenth Centuries): Between Liturgical Norm and Social Practice

32

PETR O NEL ZA H A R I U C

3 “The Last Passage”: Commemorative Discourse and Practices in the Testaments of Merchants (Wallachia, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries)

52

GHEO R GHE LA Z R

PART 2

Testaments, Property, and Family 4 From Fear of Death to the Salvation of the Soul and Eternal Life: Reasons for Composing Last Wills in the East Adriatic (Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries) ZO R A N LA DI 

69

71

vi Contents

5 Demise Far from Home: Testaments of Ragusans Who Died in Bulgarian Lands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

97

PENKA DA NO V A A N D E L E N A K O S T O V A

6 “For a Christian Ending to Our Life”: Church Endowments, Commemoration, and Tomb Purchases in Albania and the West Balkans (Thirteenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

114

KO NS TA NT I N O S G I A K O U M I S

7 Families without Children: Testamentary Norms and Practices among Moldavian Boyars (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

143

ELENA BED R E A G A N D M I H A I M Î R Z A

8 Strategies of Succession in the Testaments of the Cantacuzino Family (Wallachia, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

167

M A R IA NA L A Z R

9 Between Material and Spiritual Memoria: Last Wills and Testaments in Late Medieval Transylvania (Fifteenth–Mid-Sixteenth Centuries)

186

M Á R IA LUP E S C U M A K Ó

PART 3

Funerary Art, Monuments, and Memorialization

227

10 Dead but Not Departed: The Consolation of the Dangerous Gaze – Funerary Portraits in Early Modern Poland and Roman Egypt

229

JEA NNIE ŁAB N O

11 Portraying the Dead in Early Modern Hungarian and Polish Funerary Traditions

248

A LEKS A ND R A K O U T N Y - J O N E S

12 “The Death of the Righteous”: Agency, Memory, Self-Representation, and Identity in Transylvanian Medieval Altarpieces M A R IA CR C I U N

266

Contents

13 Moldavian Eighteenth-Century Diptychs: Prosopographic Sources for Social History

vii

291

M IHA I-BO GDAN A T A N A S I U

14 Princely Necropoles of Moldavia (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)

306

M A R IA M A GDA L E N A S Z É K E L Y

15 Lost Monuments: The “Death” of Family Necropoles in Medieval Moldavia

317

TEFA N S . GO R O V E I

Appendix Index

333 339

Contributors

Mihai-Bogdan Atanasiu has a PhD in history from the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University (Iai, Romania, 2012) and is a research fellow in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at the same university. His publications include: Patrimoniu i practic succesoral în familia cronicarului Ion Neculce (Patrimonial and testamentary practices in the family of chronicler Ion Neculce), in Cultura juridic, stat i relaii internaionale în epoca modern: Omagiu Profesorului Corneliu-Gabriel Bdru, eds. Marius Balan and Gabriel Leanca (Iai, 2016), 17–43; Testamentele familiei Hudici din secolul al XVIII-lea (The testaments of the Hudici family, eighteenthcentury), Studii i materiale de istorie medie XXXII (2014): 317–336; Testamente de monahi putneni din secolul al XVIII-lea (Testaments of monks at Putna Monastery), Analele Putnei VI/1 (2010): 175–200. Elena Bedreag has a PhD in history from the “Alexandru I. Cuza” University in Iai (Romania) (2013). She has been a member of staff of the “N. Iorga” Institute of History since 2013. Her publications include: “Alianele i solidaritile boierilor Rusete ti în ara Româneasc,” Studii i materiale de istorie medie XXXV (2017): 255–282; “The Dynamic of Family Structures in Seventeenth-Century Moldavia: Adoption and Godparenthood,” The History of the Family 19/2 (2014); “Succesiunea testamentar între voina individual i cea a neamului în Moldova secolului al XVII-lea,” Analele tiinifice ale Universitii “Al. I. Cuza” din Iai (new series)-History, LIX (2013): 165–179. Amila Buturovi is a professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests span the intersections of religion and culture, especially in the context of Islamic societies. Her latest book, Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam since c.1500 (Routledge, 2016) addresses the spaces and culture of death in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Maria Cr
ciun is a professor in the Department of Medieval, Early Modern, and Art History (Faculty of History and Philosophy, “Babe -Bolyai”

Contributors

ix

University, Cluj, Romania). Her recent publications include: “The Polyptych of Dobârca and the Issue of the Text Retable in Early Modern Transylvania,” Brukenthal Acta Musei XIII/2 (2018); “‘Ora pro nobis sancta Dei genitrix’: Prayers and Gestures in Late Medieval Transylvania,” in Ritual, Images and Daily Life: The Medieval Perspective, Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna/Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012); “Apud Ecclesia: Church Burial and the Development of Funerary Rooms in Moldavia,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Penka Danova graduated from the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology (Italian Studies) of the “St. Kliment Ohridski” University in Sofia. She is currently an associate professor at the Institute for Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy. Her publications, some of which contain translations and commentaries of Italian sources on the Bulgarian lands and the Balkans, include Bulgaria and the Bulgarians in the 14th–16th Century: Italian Geographical Writings (in Bulgarian) (Sofia, 2010); A. Nikolov et al., Dubrovnik Documents about the History of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians (13th–15th c.), vols. I–II (Sofia, 2017–2018); “The Will of the Venetian Diplomat Marino Cavalli (1500–1573),” Historical Future XXII/ 1–2 (2018): 118–135 (in Bulgarian). Konstantinos Giakoumis is an associate professor of World Civilizations and Art History at University College “LOGOS,” Tirana. He is a PhD holder from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Studies at the University of Birmingham. His publications include: The Codex of the Diocese of Dryinoupolis (1760–1858) (University College “Logos” Press, 2020) and “Monastic Financial Management in the Provinces of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (1867–1873): The Case of the Metropolis of Dryinoupolis and Gjirokastra,” in Monastic Economy Across Time: Wealth Management, Patterns, and Trends, eds. Roumen Avramov et al. (Sofia: Centre for Advanced Study, 2021). tefan S. Gorovei is a professor at the “Alexandru I. Cuza” University in Iai and a member of the International Academy for Genealogy. His research interests are in the areas of: Romanian medieval and early modern history, ecclesiastical history, genealogy, and urban history, among others. His many publications include: Princeps omni laude maior: O istorie a lui tefan cel Mare, with Maria Magdalena Székely (2005); Moviletii: Istorie i spiritualitate româneasc, with M.M. Székely, 2 vols. (2006); Maria Asanina Paleologhina: O prines bizantin pe tronul Moldovei, with M.M. Székely (2006); tefan cel Mare i Sfânt: Atlet al credinei cretine, co-edited with M.M. Székely (2004); “Un ctitor uitat la Putna i asocierea la atributele puterii suverane,” Studii i materiale de istorie medie XXI (2003): 257–270. He is a contributor to several funded research projects, among which: ara Moldovei între Commonwealth-ul

x Contributors bizantin i Respublica Christiana: Metafore, simboluri i concepii ale puterii în secolele XIV–XV: Un studiu al imaginarului politic (project leader: Prof. Alexandru-Florin Platon, Department of History, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, 2006). Elena Kostova is an associate professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Science, Institute for Historical Studies. She graduated from the Faculty of History of the University of Sofia (1999) and obtained a PhD in History at the same university (2006). Her publications include Medieval Melnik from the End of the Twelfth to the End of the Fourteenth Century: The Historical Vicissitudes of a Small Balkan Town, Sofia 2013 [This volume won two international awards: the Gipson’s best dissertation competition (2011) and the John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize (2014)]; A. Nikolov et al., Dubrovnik Documents about the History of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians (13th–15th c.), vols. I–II. Sofia 2017–2018; Bulgaria, Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and the Balkans: Political, Economic and Diplomatic Relations (end-12th Elena Kostova is an associate professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Science, Institute for Historical Studies. She graduated from the Faculty of History of the University of Sofia (1999) and obtained a PhD in History at the same university (2006). Her publications include Medieval Melnik from the End of the Twelfth to the End of the Fourteenth Century: The Historical Vicissitudes of a Small Balkan Town, Sofia 2013 [This volume won two international awards: the Gipson’s best dissertation competition (2011) and the John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize (2014)]; A. Nikolov et al., Dubrovnik Documents about the History of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians (13th–15th c.), vols. I–II. Sofia 2017–2018; Bulgaria, Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and the Balkans: Political, Economic and Diplomatic Relations (end-12th Aleksandra Koutny-Jones is an art historian specializing in early modern Central Europe. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge where she was awarded the Zdanowich Price for Polish Studies. Her first book, Visual Cultures of Death in Central Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015), explored the emergence of a cultural preoccupation with a so-called culture of death in Poland-Lithuania from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. She has also published on themes relating to artistic transmission within Europe, dealing especially with macabre art, orientalising portraiture, and the impact of the printed image. Dr Koutny-Jones is a tutor in the History of Art at ICE, University of Cambridge. Jeannie Łabno is an art historian whose research interests include: the reception of Classical and Renaissance art and culture; the culture of memory; artistic networks and collaborative practices; gendered patterns of patronage. Her publications include: Commemorating the Polish Renaissance Child: Funeral Monuments and their European Context (Ashgate Publishing, 2011). As an editor, she published East Meets West

Contributors

xi

at the Crossroads of Early Modern Europe (special issue) Ikonoteka 22 (2010), co-edited with Grazyna Jurkowlaniec (University of Warsaw). Zoran Ladiis a senior research fellow at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Zagreb). He specializes in medieval and early modern Croatian and European history. Currently, he is an associate researcher on the project Medieval Istria: The Region of Unity and Contrast (from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century) (principal investigator: Ivan Jurkovi
). His publications include: “Oporuke stanovnika župe Drvenik iz 16. Stolje
a,” in Viniš arski zbornik, ed. Ivan Pažanin (Viniš
a, 2008) and Last Will: Passport to Heaven: Urban last wills from late medieval Dalmatia with special attention to the legacies pro remedio animae and ad pias causas (Zagreb, 2012). He is a contributor to the volume Towns and Cities of the Croatian Middle Ages: Image of the town in the narrative sources - reality and/or fiction?, edited by Irena Benyovsky Latin and Zrinka Pes orda Vardi (Zagreb, 2017). Gheorghe Laz
r is a senior research fellow at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History (Bucharest, Romania), co-editor (with Violeta Barbu) and coordinator of the collection of medieval documents Documenta Romaniae Historica B. Wallachia, published by the Romanian Academy (10 volumes, 1998–2016). He obtained a PhD in history at Laval-Québec University in 2005. His doctoral dissertation was published in 2006 as: Naissance et ascension d’une catégorie sociale: Les marchands en Valachie (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Romanian Academy Award 2008). His published works include edited documents of social, economic, and family history: Mrturie pentru posteritate: Testamentul negustorului Ioan Blu din Craiova (2010); Documente privitoare la negustorii din ara Româneasc, vol. 1 (1656–1688), vol. 2 (1689–1714) (2013, 2014). Mariana Laz
r has a PhD in history from the Romanian Academy (2006) and is a researcher at the Cotroceni National Museum (Bucharest). Her research addresses the economic and social history of the Romanian Old Regime (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries), with a focus on monastic communities, religious mentalities and practices, the genealogies of elite families in Wallachia (ara Româneasc) – the Cantacuzino family in particular – the history of the book, etc. Her publications include: “Spre folosul sfintei case”: Constituirea i evoluia domeniului mnstirii Cotroceni (secolele XVII–XIX) (Brila, 2012; awarded the “Mihail Koglniceanu” prize of the Romanian Academy in 2014); Sub semnul vulturului bicefal: Cantacuzinii veacului al XVII-lea (Bucharest, 2016), and many studies in historical journals. Mária Lupescu Makó obtained a PhD in history in 2008 with a thesis entitled: Societate nobiliari culturmaterialîn Transilvania medieval: Testamente nobiliare din Transilvania pân la 1540. She is currently a senior lecturer at the “Babe -Bolyai” University (Cluj, Romania). Her

xii Contributors publications include: “Item lego …: Gifts for the Soul in Late Medieval Transylvania,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 7 (2001); “Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval Sighioara (Segesvár, Schässburg),” Caiete de antropologie istoric III/1–2 (5–6) (2004); “‘Donum pro salute animae’ – un alt tip de oblaie?,” Studia Universitatis “Babe-Bolyai”– Historia, 51/2 (2006); “Spoken and Written Words in Testaments: Orality and Literacy in Last Wills of Medieval Transylvanian Burghers,” in Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy II, eds. Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska (Turnhout: repols, 2014); “Pro memoria perpetua: Az emlékezés stratégiái a kés középkori Erdélyben,” in: Emlékezet és felejtés: Interdiszciplináris párbeszéd 5, ed. Károly Veress (Kolozsvár, Egyetemi Mhely, 2017). Mihai Mîrza is a member of the board of directors of the Romanian National Archives (the Iai county subsidiary) and associate lecturer in the history department of the “Alexandru I. Cuza” University (Iai). He obtained a PhD in history from the same department in 2011. His publications include: “Înclcri ale dreptului de ctitorie: Procesele dezînchinrii Mnstirii Precista Mare din Roman (secolele XVIII–XIX),” Anuarul Institutului de Istorie A.D. Xenopol, Iai, LII (2015): 101–153; “Daniile lui Mihai Racovi vod la mnstirea Sf. Ecaterina de la Muntele Sinai (studiu i documente),” in Rela iile românilor cu Muntele Athos i cu alte Locuri Sfinte (secolele XIV-XX), ed. Petronel Zahariuc (Editura Universitii “Alexandru I. Cuza” Iai, 2017), 341–384. Maria Magdalena Székely is a professor in the History Department of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University (Iai. Romania). Her many published works include: Sfetnicii lui Petru Rare: Studiu prosopografic (2002); Princeps omni laude maior: O istorie a lui tefan cel Mare (2005) (coauthored with tefan S. Gorovei); Maria Asanina Paleologhina: O prines bizantinpe tronul Moldovei (2006) (co-authored with tefan S. Gorovei); Grdina rozelor: Femei din Moldova, ara Româneasci Transilvania (sec. XVII-XIX) (2015) (co-authored with Violeta Barbu, Kinga S. Tüd s, and Angela Jianu). She is a contributor to Earthly Delights – Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900, eds. Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu (Brill Leiden, 2018). Petronel Zahariuc has a PhD in history (2002) from the “Alexandru I. Cuza” University in Iai (Romania) where he is currently the dean of the History Department. As a senior researcher at the “A.D. Xenopol” History Institute in Iai, he is the coordinator of the editorial team for the collection of medieval sources Documenta Romaniae Historica, series A, Moldavia. His main research interests are in the areas of medieval and early Romanian history, the history of the Romanian Orthodox Church, social history, and Slavonic palaeography, among others. His publications include: ara Moldovei în vremea lui Gheorghe tefan (1653–1658) (Iai, 2003); De la

Contributors xiii Iai la Muntele Athos: Studii i documente de istorie a Bisericii (Iai, 2008). His edited collective volumes include: Contribuii privitoare la istoria relaiilor dintre rile române i Bisericile Rsritene în secolele XIV-XIX (Iai, 2009). He edited several collections of Romanian documents from the archives of Mount Athos monasteries, among which: Documente româneti din arhiva mnstirii Simonopetra de la Muntele Athos (Iai, 2016).

Introduction Angela Jianu

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, Let’s choose executors and talk of wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 3, scene 2

On a balmy night at a bistro terrace in Bucharest’s old quarter in October 2018, three historians met and discussed possible themes for a collaborative project involving international scholars working on Balkan and East-Central European history/ies. The inter-related topics of death, inheritance, and memory were ultimately dictated by the nature, availability, and amount of the archival and written sources, as well as by the specialisms of would-be participants: testaments and last wills. Little did we know then that in a few months’ time, we and the entire humanity were going to be engulfed by the Covid-19 pandemic and that intimations of mortality and death would be literally around us during the planning and writing of this volume. While the global situation caused delays in the workflow, it also provided a – sadly, appropriate – backdrop for our reflections on mortality and memory.

Death And Funerary Practices Amila Buturovi
 draws on poetry, folklore, and anthropological studies rather than on testaments, and opens the volume with a detailed cultural survey of ways of dying in Ottoman Bosnia (1463–1878), a multi-cultural, multi-confessional entity comprising Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and Sephardic Jews. While sharing one common belief in a single, omnipotent God who held the key to salvation or damnation, these discrete faiths coexisting closely in the communities created a spiritual and cultural environment where boundaries were often blurred and funeral rites and practices sometimes merged. DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-1

2 Angela Jianu Buturovi
shows that the Qur’an is highly economical with details about death and what happens after it, leaving the elaboration of funerary ritual to the Prophetic hadith, the sunna, and the medieval scholars. Bosnian Islamic approaches to dying emphasized the preservation of health via a fusion of herbal treatments, alchemy, and a close connectedness to the environment and the seasonal cycle. Such approaches, originating in Islam spread across Europe in the medieval period, thus placing Bosnian medical knowledge in a much broader context. More importantly, Buturovi
 shows that such knowledge, including the treatment of the dying and the dead, spread across religious boundaries in Bosnia itself, where communities were happy to share it across religious divides and where often individuals of different faiths were buried alongside each other in the same cemetery. In his chapter on Moldavian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Moldavian funeral practices, Petronel Zahariuc offers a multi-layered overview of burial and commemorative rites and, while reiterating some of the findings on testamentary practices outlined in other chapters in the volume, he adds new elements.1 These include: 1. a linguistic analysis of the Greek and Slavic vocabulary used in Romanian funerary rites, highlighting the region’s mix of Byzantine and Slavic traditions; 2. a colourful description of the material culture of burials, including artefacts, textiles, and food. The presentation and disposal of the dead body was important, and wealthy members of the elites spared no expense in purchasing expensive items for the coffin, the burial service, and the alimentary gifts. ‘Eating with the dead’ has a long tradition in world history and has assumed various forms. In European history, it was practised both in the pre-Christian and in post-Conversion eras and included: food offerings to the dead, graveside cooking and food-sharing, funeral banquets, and alimentary offerings to the poor.2 Interestingly, one may note the erection in early Christian times of special edifices called cellae memoriae in former Roman provinces such as Frankia and Allemania: these were places where mourners could share a meal after the funeral, thus connecting explicitly food and memory.3 Zahariuc shows that, while testators’ concerns for the salvation of their souls and for leaving a good memory remains a constant in the period, the items left in their bequests shifted in time as did their requests for commemoration. Gheorghe Lazr uses his sample of circa one hundred Wallachian merchants’4 testaments from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the first three decades of the nineteenth (1831) to analyze their attitude to imminent death and their funeral plans. While merchants shared with other social and professional groups the same anxieties over mortality and Christian concern for salvation, they brought an additional element into play: a business-like approach to their post-mortem fate which makes their lists of requests for commemorations appear like “accounts of goods sold, revenue, and debts.” Lazr’s key case study in the 1831 testament of Ioan Blufrom Oltenia (in southern Wallachia), in which the prosperous merchant makes comprehensive lists of requests, from his choice of burial clothes to the drilling of holes in the

Introduction

3

coffin to accelerate decomposition and the number of churches that were to ring bells. This might be a unique expression of a unique mindset, but it offers a picture of the funeral “kit” available to testators.

Testaments, Property, and Family Across medieval and early modern Europe, men and women who considered making a will were cautioned against focusing on their material possessions and advised to concentrate on their spiritual “capital” instead, especially if they were on their deathbed. In practice, however, concern for salvation and transfer of property went hand in hand and the culture of gifting, donations, almsgiving, and pious bequests continued apace despite moral and religious injunctions.5 Concern for the post-mortem fate of the soul, a legacy from late Roman, Byzantine, and post-Byzantine times, was paramount in all the regions and cultures considered in this volume. The so-called ‘part for the soul’ (Gk. psychikón), addressed in this volume by Elena Bedreag and Mihai Mîrza, Konstantinos Giakoumis, Gheorghe Lazr, and Petronel Zahariuc, was first articulated by Basil of Caesarea and subsequent Greek Fathers and provided a juridical rationale for pious bequests and donations geared towards a comprehensive “mechanics of salvation.”6 As many of our contributors show in the present volume, spiritual and economic concerns were not seen as incompatible and this nexus joined transfer of property, caritative acts, and commemorative practices within one single legal framework, which endured for centuries.7 It is worth noting that most of the regions covered in this volume from the medieval to the early modern periods were inhabited by traditional, conservative societies, in which, arguably, elites and stakeholders had no interest in shaking up systems and regimes. Charitable donations to poorer members of communities and the refurbishment of churches were meant simply to ensure the salvation of one’s soul (perhaps coupled with the assuagement of guilt or with genuine generosity) and as a guarantee of remembrance rather than channelled towards projects of social improvement or as challenged to old-regime structures. In his comprehensive analysis of last wills in the East Adriatic region from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century Zoran Ladi
 who, unlike some contributors to this volume, benefits from well-preserved archival material, focuses on the reasons why Croatians of all classes and, increasingly, of both genders, decided to write up their wills. Arguably, the “democratization” of will writing, as he terms it, came earlier in this region compared, for instance, to the Romanian Lands or other regions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. This may have been due to the presence of professional notaries public, graduates of Italian universities, and to the impact of an Italianate administrative culture. Large areas of the East Adriatic, including the Dalmatian metropolis of Zadar and major ports, were controlled under a contractual basis by Venice in the period considered here.8

4 Angela Jianu In terms of gender, Ladi
shows that women were as likely as men ready to undertake long and often hazardous pilgrimages to holy places and to take the precaution of having their last wills recorded and ready. Ladi
also addresses the last wills of soldiers and their families in the fifteenth century, as Ottoman forces pushed their way into Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire was perceived as a growing threat to Western Europe as a whole. Penka Danova and Elena Kostova draw on testaments to analyse the situation of Ragusan nationals, largely merchants, who died away from home, in Bulgaria, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The authors also discuss the Bulgarian and Ottoman charters regulating trade between Ragusa/Dubrovnik and Ottoman-controlled areas and analyse the administrative processes involved in returning the property of the deceased Ragusans. These are important sources for the study of trade in EastCentral Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the medieval period. Ragusan wills and testaments, written in Latin, Italian, and Slavic, add a human dimension to the topic of trade and reveal, for example, the testators’ concern for the welfare of parents and wives in the event of their death, as well as principles of a professional deontology that placed an emphasis on honouring trade relations and contracts. The concept of donations pro maltolecto (vars. maletollettum, maltolettum, referring to ill-gotten gains) embodies this ethic and reflects the uneasy, ambiguous relations between individuals and their worldly possessions in the medieval period, an unease that other contributors mention in the present volume. Konstantinos Giakoumis explores the link between the spiritual and the pragmatic in his chapter on church endowments and tomb purchases in Albania and the West Balkans from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Churches and monastic communities in the Balkans leased accommodation in cells for the elderly in their last stages of life and burial space for those who could purchase them. In doing so, they provided a muchneeded practical and financial service to their communities and parishioners before modern banking and credit facilities were introduced in the region. The system ensured that donors had their end-of-life needs met, their postmortem commemorative service “pre-booked,” while religious establishments generated revenue for repairs and maintenance of their property or for charitable activities. Recent studies have started intriguing explorations of the economic roles of monastic establishments in the regions covered in the present volume, and these insights are worth pursuing in future research.9 The, sometimes uneasy, balance between the spiritual and the material roles of ecclesiastical establishments is addressed by Giakoumis’s chapter in the present volume as well as in Mária Lupescu-Makó’s chapter. In their study of testamentary practices among childless families of the Moldavian elites from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, Elena Bedreag and Mihai Mîrza show that, even when couples had no direct heirs or a family line became extinct, blood ties remained important for the conservation of the patrimony, for the salvation of the soul, and the perpetuation of

Introduction

5

memory. Adoption was one strategy used by couples without issue to keep the wealth in the family, while the endowment of religious establishments in return for commemorative rites was regarded as a sub-category of “adoption”: such sites were sometimes referred to as “immortal sons.” As Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen have shown, legal adoption and other “strategies of altering heirship” were used in various parts of late medieval and early modern Europe by testators who had no direct heirs or who wished to exclude would-be heirs whose behaviour or failure to offer end-of-life care were considered unacceptable.10 Mariana Lazr offers a case study of the testamentary strategies used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by one high-ranking Wallachian family, the Cantacuzinos (descendants of the Byzantine Kantakouzenoi), who rose to the highest political positions in their adoptive land. While ostensibly Lazr’s analysis focuses on the transmission of property, it also sheds light on the precarious status of Wallachian ruling princes, caught between the interests of local boyar factions, the political pressure of the suzerain Ottoman Porte, and the claims of the Habsburg Empire for influence in the region. It is a dramatic family saga packed with acts of loyalty and betrayal, cohesion and rebellion, depositions of princes, and Ottomansponsored executions. Despite the hopes of the dynasty’s founding couple, Constantin and Elina Cantacuzino, the lands and properties were ultimately fragmented. The Romanian juridical system did not include the right of primogeniture, resulting in the dispersion of family estates among descendants, including daughters, even when they had been dowered. Norms and practices did not always overlap and, in the case of a large dynasty such as the Cantacuzinos, this was a predictable outcome.11 Mária Lupescu-Makó uses mainly testaments of members of the Transylvanian nobility from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but also attempts comparisons with the last wills of burghers and clergy.12 In a social and confessional context that differed from Eastern Orthodox Moldavia and Wallachia, for example, the author focuses on the growing competition for burial spaces between parish churches and the mendicant orders in Transylvania, an aspect also addressed by Maria Crciun in this volume. Lupescu-Makó provides evidence for the same trend of families choosing sites of burial other than their family foundations that Maria Magdalena Székely addresses in her chapter on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Moldavia. Patterns are hard to discern and the choice of the burial site and the endowment that went with it could be motivated by very different individual reasons: perhaps because kin was already buried there, members of the family were members of the orders, or because, highly self-consciously, some donors wanted to be buried next to a “famous” tomb on site and thus establish their place among the elites (as the case of János Kenderesi in 1521 shows). Lupescu-Makó’s documents show that, like in most areas covered in the present volume, beyond the anxiety around death and possibly a troubled afterlife, testators appear to have been more concerned with more mundane

6 Angela Jianu matters: the display of status, wealth, and lineage; the fear of oblivion and a wish to maintain a post-mortem “presence” in the community, including through donations of material items that ensured a measure of “physical” survival in this world.

Funerary Art, Monuments, and Memorialization The last section in this volume explores the funerary semiotics of graves, funerary accessories, and artwork. As argued, for example, by Erika Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann, the early modern period across Europe was not the first to deploy political savvy and expertise in the use of mediality. The use of the media and multimedia was not the invention of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but represented an older trend, albeit with different techniques as carriers of individual and collective memory.13 Nor was the use of such strategies confined to Western Europe. Some of the studies in the present volume show that early modern East-Central Europe was not lagging far behind: the choice of burial site and funeral dress, the often lavish funeral processions, the chapels, burial aisles, and funerary monuments, the display of donated personal and family possessions, were all conspicuous ways for political leaders, the elites, and, increasingly, those from humbler backgrounds, of embedding themselves in the memory of their nation or communities. The performative, mnemonic nature of graves, funeral monuments, and mortuary art is the emphasis of the present volume’s last section. Jeannie Łabno’s chapter argues that the Polish coffin portrait, which flourished in the Polish-Lithuanian Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is unique in Europe and is only comparable to the funerary portraiture of Roman Egypt. She looks at its inception in the sixteenth century, explores the causes for its dissemination, and charts its later developments. Intriguingly, during the eighteenth century, Polish coffin portraits underwent a change in the representation of human expression: from the former funereal solemnity, they evolved into court portraits in which the protagonists were smiling. This corroborates the contemporaneous “smile revolution” in French art, discussed by Colin Jones.14 Łabno also suggests influences and continuities from ancient Greek panel painting to Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits, and onwards to early Christian icon painting and ultimately to early modern Polish coffin portraiture and WestEuroperan panel painting. Aleksandra Koutny-Jones offers a comparison of Hungarian and Polish funerary portraiture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Despite the threat of Ottoman military invasion and conquest in Europe at the time, there was also fascination among Europeans with exotic “Eastern” styles in dress, textile furnishings, and accessories, an ambiguity noted by Koutny-Jones. She indicates the channels of Ottoman aesthetic influence and describes some of the accessories used in funeral portraits in both Poland and Hungary. Beyond the Ottoman influence, coffin portraits of the deceased, often depicted with

Introduction

7

open eyes and looking at the viewer, were meant to ensure the “presence” of the dead at their own funeral and, subsequently, their post-mortem “survival” and enduring presence in this world. After the funeral, both coffin and catafalque portraits were placed on permanent display in churches and other venues and became visual galleries commemorating dynastic or family status and wealth. Koutny-Jones shows that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, commissions of funeral portraits as status symbols and mnemonic devices spread from royalty and top elites down to wealthy burghers, interestingly, largely from Protestant and Eastern Orthodox rather than Catholic circles. Maria Crciun focuses on the interrelations between agency, memory, self-representation, and identity expressed in the pictorial programs of altarpieces devised by commissioners from the nobility, wealthy burghers, middling classes, and clergymen in late medieval Transylvania. She uses the distinction between agency and patronage to differentiate between the mnemonic techniques, and the spiritual and social aspirations of the individuals and groups who form her sample. Their choices in terms of burial site, location of personal insignia, and the aesthetics of the artwork they commissioned or supervised enable the author to offer a nuanced picture of Transylvanian society from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Thus, for example, she shows that interment in churches was reserved for the higher-status groups, with the poor being generally buried in cemeteries, which was only to be expected. There were differences, too, in the “allocation” of commemorative spaces in the church: parish priests, some of whom came from the nobility, often chose the chancel to display their coats of arms or initials, leaving the nave to the laity. In terms of endowments of ecclesiastical establishments, the Transylvanian nobility tended to donate to mendicant establishments, with a preference for the Franciscan order, while burghers preferred to endow parish churches. Despite the royal privileges granted to ecclesiastical institutions in the Crown Lands, parish priests too often aspired to become “patrons” of the arts, especially in 1500 with an increase of priests educated in Vienna, Cracow, Bologna, and Padua and displays of family or class allegiances, and the choice of pictorial programs by the clergy. Crciun also shows that just like diptychs in Eastern Orthodox churches, as discussed by Mihai-Bogdan Atanasiu in his chapter in the present volume, inscriptions, donor portraits, and church paraphernalia are now important sources helping modern historians in the identification of medieval and late medieval individuals and families. Mihai-Bogdan Atanasiu combines linguistic analysis with an art historical approach to show how diptychs and triptychs (called pomelnice in Romanian) were used in Moldavian churches and monasteries from at least the sixteenth century onwards. These were lists of names of living and dead founders and their families to be read out in church during liturgical services of commemoration. Written on paper or painted/chiselled on wood, they were a form of

8 Angela Jianu materialization of memory and served as intercessory tools for securing the remembrance of founders and donors. Atanasiu provides a useful linguistic guide to the Romanian, Slavic, Greek, and Latin lexicon associated with commemorative rites that may prove useful to those puzzled by the alternative meanings of the terms and by the multiplicity of languages in the postByzantine world. He also shows how, nowadays, the surviving diptychs have evolved into indispensable sources for the study of genealogies, family and church history. Having one’s name erased from a diptych was the Eastern Orthodox equivalent of damnatio memoriae. Maria Magdalena Székely looks at the burial sites of ruling princes of Moldavia (Ro. Moldova) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and charts the “dynastic thinking”15 behind the choice of burial location and funerary visuals. Her comments on the impossibility of finding out why members of a royal or noble family chose not to be buried in their traditional family foundations match the conclusions of Joel Rosenthal for the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English nobility.16 Székely looks at the painting and funerary artefacts of the princely necropoles and adds to the growing number of studies that have recently come to recognize the originality of funerary art and church architecture in the Romanian Lands.17 With its close links to Hungary, Poland, and Transylvania, Moldavia achieved a fusion of aesthetic influences that were then grafted onto a post-Byzantine cultural ethos in what Nicolae Iorga memorably called “Byzance après Byzance.”18 Under the reign of tefan cel Mare (“the Great”; r. 1557–1504), which is the focus of the chapter, Moldavia experienced a “golden age” in church art and architecture. The prince and his second wife, the Byzantine princess Maria Asanina Palaiologina (d. 19 December 1477), became patrons of the arts and encouraged a flourishing network of workshops that produced lavish embroideries for secular and ecclesiastical use.19 Székely also argues, adding to Jeannie Łabno’s discussion of Polish funerary portraits in this volume, that Moldavian ecclesiastical establishments, too, had their own versions of likenesses of the high-born dead, either as painted portraits or on tomb embroidered covers. In the closing chapter, tefan Gorovei reminds us that, like the humans they commemorate, funerary monuments and graves have their own lives, deaths, and timelines and go through cycles of memory and forgetting, just like the communities that built them. It has been estimated that social memory declines over a relatively short time span, varying between one hundred and two hundred years.20 Gravestones, funeral chambers, and monuments, in their – apparently enduring – materiality, were in all periods in history meant to stand as bulwarks against the physical disappearance of the individuals who made them, the frailty of memories, and the ensuing, multi-layered processes of oblivion threatening to engulf departed individuals, families, and communities. The passage of time, the inclemency of climate, and man-made destruction often played havoc with hopes for eternal rest and remembrance. Gorovei focuses on the last factor in the decay and disappearance of many

Introduction

9

family burial sites in Moldavia’s churches from their foundation in the early modern period to the present day. Moreover, as a long-term champion of these monuments, he takes a polemical stance against the inadequacy of past and present state-sponsored programs of conservation.

Conclusions As Michael J. Boyd and Anastasia Dakouri-Hild have suggested in their study of funerary practices in the Aegean, “[f]unerary place is not the outcome of behaviour frozen in time, the mere fossil of construction activity and the deposition of bodies, but is inherently mutable and performative: “place” was continuously reworked, revamped, rebuilt, remembered, or turned to ruins, obliterated, abandoned, forgotten, and rediscovered.”21 The key notions here are “performance” and “theatricality,” and many chapters in the present volume offer evidence of the high drama of death and funerals, as well as of the dynamics of long-term commemoration in liturgies, of the evolving trends in endowments, and of the rise and decline of princely necropoles and other burial sites in areas of Eastern and Central Europe. We, the editors of this volume, and our contributors have sailed in uncharted seas, across social, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries that were often volatile and found that firm comparisons and conclusions are difficult to offer at this stage in research. We hope the journey will continue. Note: All chapters submitted in Romanian (except the chapters by Maria Crciun and Mária Lupescu-Makó) were translated into English by Angela Jianu and revised with the authors. The other chapters, submitted in English, were revised jointly by the editors and the contributors. We wish to thank all our contributors for the patience with which they treated our requests and for their hard work over the last two years.

Notes 1 For an additional edited volume of Moldavian testaments not cited in the present volume, see Liviu Papuc and Olga Iordache, Urmasilor mei … Testamente, 4 vols. (Iai: Tipo Moldova, 2011–2016). The volumes include testaments from 1841 to 1870. 2 For a comprehensive analysis of the funerary uses of food, see Christina Lee, Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007); On the role of food in burial and bereavement outside Europe, see Candi K. Cann (ed.), Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky, 2018, pbk. ed. 2019). 3 Lee, Feasting the Dead, 93. 4 For two important studies on the networks of Balkan merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see: Evguenia Davidova (ed.), Balkan Transitions to Modernity and Nation-States: Through the Eyes of Three Generations of Merchants (1780s–1890s) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013); and eadem, Wealth in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans: A Socio-Economic History (London/New York: I.B.Tauris, 2016). Davidova calls Ottoman, Balkan, and East-European merchants “social

10

5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15 16 17

Angela Jianu actors with the ability to navigate multiple social, political, and economic systems” (Balkan Transition, 198). In addition, they were cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, and highly mobile, with trade networks extending across the Ottoman Balkans and often into Western Europe. One could argue that from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, this group made perhaps the most significant contribution to modernizing trends in East-Central Europe, including in terms of economic growth and patterns of consumption. Davidova, Balkan Transitions, 199. Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen (eds.), Planning for Death: Wills and DeathRelated Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200–1600 (Leiden: Brill. 2018), 8 (including references). Vasileios Marinis, Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium: The Fate of the Soul in Theology, Liturgy, and Art (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87. Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle (eds.), A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 284. Oliver Jens Schmitt, “Reassessing the Venetian Presence in the Late Medieval Eastern Adriatic,” in Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic Spheres of Maritime Power and Influence, c. 700–1453, ed. Magdalena Skoblar (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 351–364. See, for example, Monastic Economy Across Time: Wealth Management, Patterns, and Trends, eds. Roumen Avramov, Aleksandar Foti
, Elias Kolovos, and Phokion P. Kotzageorgis (Sofia: Centre for Advanced Study, 2021), 156. Many contributions to this well-researched volume highlight the role of religious establishments in promoting early variants of a market economy. Korpiola and Lahtinen, Planning for Death, 1–2. For further details on the strategies employed by Wallachian elites to ensure the preservation of estates and lineages, see the groundbreaking studies of Violeta Barbu, collected in the volume De bono coniugali: O istorie a familiei din
ara Româneascîn secolul al XVII-lea (Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 2003). For a recent chapter in English, with three Wallachian case studies, see AndreeaRoxana Iancu, “Defining the Patrimony: Name, Lineage and Inheritance Practices (Wallachia at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century),” in Wealth in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans, ed. Davidova, 50–68. Edited collections of Transylvanian testaments not cited elsewhere in this volume include: Erdélyi nemesek és f emberek végrendeletei 1661–1723 (Marosvásárhely: Csíkszereda, Mentor Kiadó; Pro Print Könyvkiadó, 2011); Kora újkori marosvásárhelyi végrendeletek 1586–1689 (Marosvásárhely: Mentor Kiadó, 2014); Erdélyi nemesek és f emberek végrendeletei 1600–1660 (Marosvásárhely: Mentor Kiadó, 2008); Erdélyi nemesek és f emberek végrendeletei (Marosvásárhely: Mentor Kiadó, 2006), all edited by Kinga S. Tüd s. Erika Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann, “Introduction,” in Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, eds. Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (eds.) (Leiden: Brill, 2018, open access), 10. Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Korpiola and Lahtinen, Planning for Death, 4. Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972; republished by Routledge, 2021), 96–7. See, for example, several contributions in Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages, Series: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, eds. Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan, vol. 65 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

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18 Necula[Nicolae] Iorga, Byzance après Byzance: Continuation de “L’Histoire de la vie byzantine” (Bucharest, Edition de l’Institut des études byzantines, 1935). There are several later editions of this study. 19 Alice Isabella Sullivan, “Byzantine Artistic Traditions in Moldavian Church Embroideries,” Cahiers balkaniques 48 (2021): 126–27. URL: http://journals. openedition.org/ceb/18529; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ceb.18529 20 Henige (1974); Vansina (1985), cited by Richard Bradley, “The Translation of Time,” in Archaeologies of Memory, eds. Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock (Malden, MA/Oxford (UK): Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 221. 21 Michael J. Boyd and Anastasia Dakouri-Hild (eds.), Staging Death: Funerary Performance, Architecture and Landscape in the Aegean (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 2.9

Part 1

Death and Funerary Practices

1

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia Cultural Responses, Before and After (1463–1878) Amila Buturovi
 Every person has a star. When the person dies, so does the star. When you look up at the night sky, don’t point your finger at any stars. You may unknowingly point at your own, and the star will take that as a signal to fall and die, in which case you will die too. (Bosnian folklore)

For a relatively small country, the landscape of death in Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth Bosnia) is expansive and layered; figuratively speaking, it is bigger than its borders. Throughout the countryside and urban areas, cemeteries exhibit distinct physical layouts, architectural forms, religious symbolism, and linguistic markers. Of course, it is not just its material evidence that testifies so richly and vividly to the mortality of Bosnia’s inhabitants. Death and dying are pervasive subjects in literature and arts, religious tenets, customs, and politics. Bosnian feelings and attitudes towards mortality, death, and the afterlife have evolved through various cultural lenses, often building on previous generations’ views through continuity and, at times, discontinuity. In relating these different forms of expression, we get a more rounded picture of the dilemmas, anxieties, emotions, and customs surrounding death. After all, death is both individual and universal. It is also imminent and intimate while being distant, unknown, and transcendent. The title of this study uses the adverbs “before” and “after” in two senses of the words. The first one evokes the acceptance of death and efforts to deter or delay it through health, healing, and various apotropaic practices. Caring for the living, young and elderly, and the dead are signs of communal involvement in individual life, and they are interrelated in terms of medical anthropology, ritual theory, and holistic and integrative medicine. The latter usage sheds light on continuity and discontinuity in Bosnia’s historical praxis surrounding death. This chapter thus addresses two intertwined aspects of death culture: one that tries to ward off death and the other that comes to terms with it and even embraces it. While focusing on cultural expressions that seek salvation from and salvation after death, primarily in the Ottoman context, the present study recognizes a considerable connection DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-3

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between what happened before and after this long historical period that lasted, officially speaking, between 1463 and 1878. As a religiously plural environment that comprised of Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and Sephardic Jews, many local beliefs and practices were designed and shared through a socially familiar pool of knowledge and reworked through specific eschatological symbols and material culture.1 The rise of secularism and the national awakenings of the late nineteenth century profoundly affected the beliefs and practices of death by both secularizing them and making them more politically, even ideologically framed. Still, many premodern narratives, myths, and commemorative representations have endured to date, testifying to the resilience of shared cultural imagination in providing a buffer zone against mortality and forgetting. The reason lies partly in the fact that religious institutions have to date been the main agents in handling death-related rituals, even in the communist period between 1945 and 1991. Furthermore, cultural reality usually constructs new pasts by casting inherited practices in new contexts, allowing them to mutate and persevere. Many local scholars point to the persistence of rituals and beliefs surrounding death that predate the Ottoman Islamic norms and old Slavic customs, locating them in the ancient Illyrian customary repertoire.2 The past is thus preserved even when it mutates into different presents.

Death in Theory and Method For a steady interaction to take place, there ought to be a common framework. In the case of Bosnia’s religiously plural environment, such a framework is cast as a common monotheistic premise of an omnipotent God who, as a supreme deity, fashioned the world and all its living beings according to His design. Created and thus perishable, the world and its beings are all subject to a cycle of life and death that God oversees with reason and justice. No life or death goes unnoticed. God determines the length and vicissitudes of individual life and summons the dead to His supreme realm of spiritual eternity while leaving the body first to decay and then be resurrected so the believing soul can enjoy post-mortem eternity or be damned if it was wicked. Of course, in Bosnia today, much like elsewhere, various opinions circulate regarding the idea of life after death, yet most respond to and/or reconfigure this monotheistic premise of eternal bliss or damnation. Such long-standing perspectives present in all three monotheistic teachings have over many centuries been coupled with the legacy of close social contact, pre-monotheistic beliefs, secularism, and communism, leaving the region without a stable view as to what to expect in death or from the dead. While theological tenets, not only among the monotheistic religious traditions but within their internal denominations, dictate the subplots of this basic cosmological narrative of God as the creator of life and death, cultural markers enable its application and manifestations in ritual life and corresponding beliefs and practices surrounding mortality and post-mortality

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 17 alike. This dialogue between text and context is enacted in all aspects of ritual life. In Bosnia, the historical intermixing within its enduring but small geography has led to many porous lines of demarcation in ritual practices. Confessional affiliations kept firmly in place some beliefs and lent others to hybrid forms. The Slovenian historian and ethnologist Emilian Lilek (d. 1940), who investigated folk customs in Bosnia and Herzegovina shortly after the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian rule in 1878, noted that the beliefs and practices related to healing and death were commonly shared among the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of Bosnia. While citing a local proverb, “There are as many customs as there are villages” (Koliko sela, toliko adeta), Lilek concludes his study with the following: “Because the people here are divided into three religions, I have presented the customs according to each one. That way I can demonstrate to what extent each of the three had preserved their pagan customs in its praxis, and to what extent each religion has in turn mutually appropriated these old customs.”3 Although problematized by cultural historians and scholars of religion, the common term in anthropological and popular vocabulary for religious phenomena that seem to establish out-of-ordinary exchange with systems outside of itself is syncretism. Readily found within localized forms of religious expression, syncretism points to social intimacy and porous boundaries with deep historical and cultural roots. However, despite acknowledging the pervasiveness of such phenomena, many religious scholars caution about the discursive charge of the term. Neither noticed nor used by its practitioners, the term syncretism is difficult to deploy descriptively, to acknowledge religious mingling and exchange, because it had entered original use prescriptively to flag non-normative religious developments as a deviation from the assumed authenticity and integrity of pure Christianity.4 Another common scholarly way of differentiating the multiple realities of religions is their bifurcation into “great tradition” and “little traditions.” This typology, introduced by Robert Redfield to distinguish between the continuing components of religion and its adaptations at local levels,5 assumes essential stability and purity of a religious core and its imperviousness to historical and cultural mediations. Like syncretism, it puts to doubt the continuous and multiple processes of interpretation and mediation that allow religions to breathe in different times and acclimatize to many places. Such interpretations are inevitable, and scholars of religion grapple with acknowledging non-institutional as much as institutional agents of interpretation. Nobody owns a deity, but every believer owns the invocation of their deity. Because the methods of religious solidification and transformation can be traced in exegesis as well as in ritual, scholars of religion are careful to avoid normative categories of classification so as to come to terms with the multiple voices in each religion. While focusing primarily on Islamic funerary customs in Bosnia, this chapter acknowledges that hybridity is integral to the Bosnian Islamic understanding of death and post-mortem life and refrains from using either the

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terms “syncretism” and “little tradition,” both of which imply a degree of inauthenticity. When it comes to saving life and defying death, attitudes in Bosnia are commonly drawn from all available pools of cultural reference, including the dominant theological teachings.6 There is an internal logic to this process of interpretation and ritual enactment of religious norms that aligns text and context and does not shy away from cumulative knowledge to better face the challenges of life and death. Bosnian Muslims’ understanding of post-mortem time draws on Qur’anic eschatology according to which God, who causes both life and death (Q 23:80) so that every living soul shall taste death (Q 29:57), will grant continuity where biological life irrevocably ends. While careful and meticulous in its depiction of Resurrection and its effects, the Qur’an discloses very little regarding the condition of death before Resurrection. There never is escape – where there is life, there is death. God determines the time and place for it as per His reminder that “wherever you are, death will find you out” (Q 4:78). From the divine perspective, death is neither random nor precipitous. Nor is it pleasant. When it occurs, God instructs us, the soul will be extracted through the throat and be carried away by the attending angels (Q 56:83–85). What unfolds in death is not much addressed, resulting in prolific and voluminous efforts by the Prophet and his followers to elucidate the Scripture’s silence. It is the medieval religious scholars who infused this motif of the extraction of the soul with ethical norms, interpreting it as agonizing for the sinners and smooth for the virtuous souls to slip out gently. Paradise will welcome such souls upon their separation from the body (Q 16:32). Until the Day of Reckoning, when the soul is to be reunited with the body for the purposes of resurrection and judgment (Q 6:36), the body remains entombed (Q 80:21). Grave, then, is the necessary method of disposing of the body. How and when the body is laid, however, and what funerary order and specific rituals are to be used, is not scripturally clarified. Over the centuries, and with the help of the Prophetic Hadith where death and burial are categorized under the “funerary compendium” (kit b al-jan ’iz), Islamic scholars elaborated the ritual action and experiential reality for post-burial events, amending the textual gaps and choreographing a post-mortem itinerary for the soul and its abandoned body until their salvific reunion.7 For Islamic theologians, whose main goal was to elucidate the nature of God, it was important to detail His behaviour towards the dead as an affirmation of His consistency and justice, even when God Himself left things unsaid.8 For legal scholars, on the other hand, it was the proper social behaviour towards the dead, including funerary rituals, which required explication and specification. Finally, the Muslim eschatological imagination reflects the collective hope of what is to come. If the Qur’an leaves us with prescriptive silence and ritual ambiguity, the Prophetic sunna lays out the basic rules of conduct as do, in the course of history, various theological and legal injunctions peppered by cultural and environmental conditions of

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 19 Muslims around the world, including Ottoman Bosnia where healing and dying became dialectically related.

Health and Death in Ottoman Bosnia Bosnian contributions to the rich and diverse Islamic eschatology span many genres of writing, customary beliefs, and practices. The topics of illness, dying, bereavement, and afterlife are cast and recast in all aspects of material and immaterial culture. As many local and foreign ethnologists observe, there is an intimate connection with the natural world and its resources, and an alignment with seasonal cycles is extensively present in the management of health and death. In health, the consumption of local plants and herbs (e.g., honey, chamomile, garlic, stinging nettle, wild leek, mushrooms, tree bark), the association of wellbeing and wellness with specific times of the year (before or after St George’s Day; before or after the lunar eclipse or full moon; the harvest season; the pilgrimage season); healing visitations to sacred grounds (shrines; mountain gorges; caves; rocks; creeks); therapeutic alchemy (strava/ lead pouring; harnessing metals and stones; pulping bones and rock; hydromancy) all reveal an eclecticism that derives from shared cumulative knowledge but also resonates, albeit in a simplified fashion, with premodern medical theories of health as established through the balance of the body’s internal elements with environmental elements.9 In death, their figural representation in funerary architecture ascertains their association and continuity within the new environment in which the body li(v)es. This understanding of the connections between health, death, and environment is not unique to Bosnia. In the general Greco-Islamic system that dominated premodern medical theories in the Islamic world and Europe and that was disseminated through the region in the Ottoman period, the body is made up of four elements (earth, air, water, fire) which possess different temperaments (cold, hot, wet, dry). Health is a state in which there is a balance in the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile), while disease marks an imbalance of humours that may be caused by external factors such as injury, an incorrect diet, environmental factors, and/or internal factors like improper digestion.10 For health to be sustained, the body must be encouraged to maintain its power of self-preservation through environmental regulations and be open to medical intervention under the right conditions. The trajectory of engagement involved mainstream medical knowledge, healing customs, herbalism, environmental provisions (position of stars, climate, seasons), and occult practices which relied on hidden meanings in the sacred texts and natural world that were believed to have a healing potential. Health thus relied as much on preventive medicine as it did on curative actions.11 While in Bosnian customary practices these sophisticated theories and associations were absent, there was a general predisposition to find ways of deterring illness and death in cures that connect different forces of nature. Lilek mentions the reverence for the four elements (air, fire, water, earth)

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among all Bosnians, as well as for animals and supernatural beings, all of which feature prominently in healing customs and funerary rites.12 In numerous ethnographic works and compendiums of healing, most potions, recipes, ointments, and advice cross the lines of group identification and open the entire cultural space to uninterrupted exchange of ideas and practices. As early as the sixteenth century, we encounter references to mutual openness to health management and improvement and protection against ill energies. We are, for example, told that people wore double amulets against fatal illnesses or tragic deaths, solicited help from connoisseurs outside of their immediate surroundings, and generally trusted the reputation of practitioners who were skilful in directing the world of spirit and nature into the physical world for individual and collective healing.13 Such attitudes brought together the population of Bosnia across the religious divide through specialized knowledge, authority, insights, and experience. As traced through oral and written sources, artefacts, music, and extant healing repertoire, Bosnians nurtured shared ethics and commitment to health in a belief that health could be influenced and manipulated, for better or for worse, not only by religious or medical authorities but by local healers as well. The dead were also involved – their sighting, their touch, and their conjuring could have both healing and harming properties, so knowing how to engage them was collectively sanctioned.14 In matters of health, shared beliefs about the empowerment of the dead stood above religious divisions. No wonder, then, that death culture at large reveals inclusive elements. Preparations for death that incorporate caring for the dying relative at home, ritual visits to bid goodbye, and refraining from ill-talk in front of or about the person on the deathbed are ritually present among all Bosnians.15 In one shared practice, the dead, while lying at home before the burial, are not to be in contact with any domestic animals, especially black cats, for fear of vampirization. They are to be kept apart, and all reflective surfaces are to be covered so that the soul may not look at itself when leaving the body. Localized practices generally do not only conform to mainstream religious prescriptions but also add diversity. Lilek mentions that Orthodox women in southeast Herzegovina, like Muslim women across the region, do not attend funerals, whereas elsewhere in Bosnia, they do. In some parts of Bosnia, the Orthodox population does not use coffins, but, like their Muslim neighbours, they lay the wrapped corpse directly into the soil. Most religious communities pay equal attention to carefully timed practices of mourning and remembrance, especially after seven and forty days and one year after the death. Forty days in particular appear to be a common interval for the necessary commemoration because it bears a special meaning for the departed soul.

Bosnian Muslims and Death An eighteenth-century Ottoman Bosnian Sufi author, Abdulvehab Ilhami (d. 1801), remembered for his courage in standing for justice and for his

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 21 devotion and piety, left us a poem in which he melancholically describes his own dying and death: In the moments of my death, remind me to say the shahada16 lest I am hurried out of this world faithless. Close my eyes so that I scare off nobody. Let the imam tie my feet, so they do not move. Let my body not smell much. Let my friends not be overcome. May this be done smoothly so that the mourners do not get bored of my burial. If I was bad, do not condemn me. If I did wrong, do not scorn me. If I was good, God knows it. If I was bad, He knows that too. Immediately ask for forgiveness. Say prayers as you can. Forgive my faults. I have already forgiven you all. Don’t be petty. Do not abandon Muhammad’s community. Azra’il has arrived, brothers. Shed tears out of fear of God. Quit chatting about this world now. Open Abdulvehhab’s lips with a toothpick so that he may be able say, “There is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet.” Say a prayer, oh believers, from the verses about God’s mercy. My soul is going through duress. Say something pleasing for it. The Almighty is causing pain in my head. I will not shed a tear for this world, nor will I hang on to its goals. I have already passed through the gates of transition (barzakh). Until this moment, I had fights with my grave. Now, let me love it …17 Rare in that it imagines the duress of departure from this world and reflective of the last emotional moments of separation from life, the poem also does cultural historians of Ottoman Bosnia a favour for describing in rich detail the ritual moments and customary etiquette at the deathbed of those who bid goodbye to the dying and the dead. The rituals described are Islamically grounded, with a Qur’anic framework providing the teachings about here and the hereafter, life and death, as well as their cosmological location and separation, while the ritual enactment of those teachings draws on the Prophetic sunna to lay out the actions and purpose for each of the steps associated with funerary rites. The main value of this short passage is that it removes otherness from the description and the experience of dying and offers us a poignant glimpse into the anxiety of dying as much as into the ritual of death. As death closes in on them, the dying persons ought to utter the shahada as a way of ensuring a righteous itinerary for the soul after the body is laid in the grave.18 Dying as a Muslim guarantees resurrecting as one, so repeating that “God is one and that Muhammad is God’s Prophet” as life is about to end is mandatory for all those who face death. Death happens when God’s angel, Azra’il, publicly invisible and inaudible, sounds the trumpet and announces to the dying one that the moment has arrived. In the Qur’anic cosmology, the dying cross an invisible barrier, the barzakh, that separates the two worlds, the world of the living and that of the dead, changing their state of being irrevocably. The barzakh is a fixed, non-porous divide akin to a strip of land separating sweet and salt waters and preventing them from

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mingling (Q 55:19–20). Because the barzakh is uncrossable until the dead return for the Last Judgement, the body ought to remain entombed (Q 80:21), which means that interment is the required method of disposing of the body. For the departure to be dignified, the body ought to remain calm. Its involuntary contractions and pain are prevented by securing the limbs and the mouth so the corpse does not injure itself. The poet here calls on his caregivers to close his eyes, again as per a Prophetic injunction, and the imam to tie his feet. The caregivers and visitors should recite Y
-Sn (Q36) for the dying or, as the poet says, the verses that express God’s grace. Very early on, the poet evokes forgiveness as a key step in the death rite of passage: I forgive you, so please forgive me in turn. While forgiving and seeking forgiveness is Qur’anically stipulated as a lifelong practice (after all, God only forgives those who provide it and seek it), forgiveness in the process of dying is ritualized as the first step on the way to a joyful Hereafter. Forgiveness for the dead in the Hadith is said to be pleaded at the gravesite because the questioning begins promptly upon the burial. However, Bosnian Muslims pay great emphasis on making sure that the person dies only after being forgiven and after their offer of forgiveness is accepted by those whom they may have wronged. In the late nineteenth century, an Austro-Hungarian teacher in Bosnia, Antun Hangi, recorded in detail the customs of Bosnian Muslims, paying considerable attention to death culture. He noticed the intricate rituals around the dying person that begin with the shahada, which is said by the dying person and all those who surround him or her at that moment. Without distressing the departing spirit, which longs to reunite with the body, Hangi continues, and without excessive weeping that may appear as a challenge to the Lord who has summoned the person at his/her destined hour, the visitors themselves begin forgiving bad deeds, as revealed in the deathbed confession, if the dying person has committed any. “Halali mi” [Forgive me] is pleaded by the dying person if s/he can still speak. “Halal ti bilo. Halali i ti meni” [I forgive you. You forgive me too] answer the visitors, one after another, as they bid farewell.19 A popular saying, “Umrijet u al halalit ti neu” [I shall die but shall not forgive you], is a proverbial curse, notorious for its potential consequences of a lifelong rejection from the company of believers. A recurring motif in popular songs and stories, dying without being pardoned leads even to a rejection by the grave itself because the soul is doomed in its ill-fated body: They took her to the forest The forest rejected her They took her to the water The water refused her They took her to sis-in-law And the second she forgave The soul could fly away.20

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 23 When a person dies, the body is ritually washed. The Prophet encouraged that “the honest ones should wash the dead” and stated that the one washing the corpse (ghusl) and preparing it for the burial regains his/her utmost purity. Similarly, the persons carrying the corpse to the grave ought to perform ablution. Bosnian Muslims follow Hanafi legal teachings and practices that slightly deviate from other legal schools. For example, specific to the Hanafis is the prohibition against the husband washing his wife’s body unless there is no female present to do the ritual. In contrast, the wife can wash her husband’s body. A Muslim can wash the corpse of a nonMuslim, which in Bosnia was especially relevant for first-generation converts to Islam. In all cases, the caregiver and/or the person performing the ritual washing of the corpse should take a bath after performing the act so that the body emits no odour, especially after a long illness, and proceeds to the grave ritually cleansed. Lilek notes that, like Muslims, Christians who live in close vicinity to Muslims tend to do a similar ritual wash, although not always with the same attention or order. Catholics, he says, wash the body with cold water and then throw away the soap and the comb. Catholics elsewhere wash only the limbs. In central Bosnia, including Sarajevo, some Orthodox communities mix water with wine and rinse the still-warm corpse with it. In their case, the comb and soap are buried, so nobody can ever find them or handle them for fear of bad luck.21 The burial procession begins with a prayer. Muslim women do not attend the burial since the tradition demands that there be no weeping at the grave lest one provokes the anger of the interrogating angels. Women therefore perform funerary prayers at home. In Bosnia they hold a ritual known as tevhid/tawhid, which is likely to have been introduced by Sufi caregivers: the women form circles and read selected passages from the Qur’an under the guidance of a professional female scholar, bula. Meanwhile, three rows of praying men accompany the bier as that will ensure the gift of Paradise, and behind them follows the funerary procession. The bier is carried on men’s shoulders, the pace should be neither too fast nor too slow and must be dignified and muted. Those who see a procession go by must stand up and wait until the bier is either put down or out of sight, even if the deceased is not a Muslim. Upon the placing of the bier, the basmala is uttered, followed by takbirs (proclamations that God is great), and finally a supplication prayer to ask for forgiveness on behalf of “those who are living and those who are dead, those who are present and those who are absent, our young and our old, male and female.”22 A funerary prayer should be said at the grave after the completion of the burial, commonly the opening chapter of the Qur’an, the Fatiha, as that was also the Prophet’s preferred choice of recitation. A prayer is also said to relieve the dead of the “punishment in the grave” and grant them a smooth passage to Paradise. As per the Prophet’s commands, graves need to be slightly raised and used for only one body, but if necessary, two or three bodies can be placed together in one and the same grave, as was done for the Uhud martyrs.23 In

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Bosnia, funerary evidence shows that one person occupies one grave, with one notable exception to this rule, in the village of adovina, where two brothers, Hasan and Ahmet, are buried together or their burial place is marked by the same grave (Figure 1.2). As Leor Halevi explains in detail,24 very early on in Islamic religious history, a subgenre of literature arose regarding the so-called punishment the grave, which elaborated on the Qur’anic message that the soul remains in some form of connection with the body after the interment, and that some form of punishment is meted out to wrongdoers before the Day of Judgment (Q 6:93; 32:21; 52:47). The anxiety over disembodied pain sustained while awaiting the final judgment resulted in the formulation, as early as the eighth century, of ritual and theological aids to ensure favourable conditions in the grave and avoid damnation. In later literature, we see a dramatic rendering of these events as two monstrous angels, Munkar and Nakir, appear to the dead and question them about their faith and loyalty to the Prophet and his message; in another, stemming from the Prophetic Hadith, the angel called Ruman is first to reach the corpse, asking it, in a less terrifying fashion than Munkar and Nakir, to record the good and bad deeds.25 The Hanafi jurists followed their founding father Abu Hanifa’s words that “the questioning in the grave shortly upon death by Munkar and Nakir is a fact. The rejoining of the spirit [r ] with the body [jasad] of the servant is a fact. The tightening of the grave and the punishment in it affecting all unbelievers and some sinful believers is a fact.”26 They stipulated that it is incumbent on the living to exercise special care while attending to the dead as they are to be carried into the grave. In Bosnia, these injunctions are rendered and applied by religious scholars in both strict and flexible ways, growing out of the normative principles in combination with the existing beliefs about death and the dead, which suggests transcultural paradigms. Many traditional Muslim songs in Bosnia mention Munkar and Nakir, as do stories around gravesites that speak about the voices of agony, especially among younger folk, during the interrogation. These poems and stories tend to be didactic in tone, urging young people to live a life of virtue. In one such poem mentioned by Hangi, a wealthy young woman on her deathbed is advised by her grieving father to speak of her virtues the moment when she is visited by Munkar and Nakir so as to charm them into forgiving her for her idle ways. She does that, but the two angels are not fooled – they counterargue with a series of accusations about how in her life she was careless, wanton, and tightfisted with the poor despite her wealth. In another observation, Hangi notes that some imams in Bosnia, after the burial is over and everyone disperses, remain at the gravesite to help the dead with the interrogation by shouting the answers about faith and belonging.27 This is also noted as a common practice by Karl Steiner, who remarks that one of the imam’s duties in Bosnia was to prepare the corpse to meet the angels after the burial is complete.28 This is an enduring practice.

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 25 Bosnia’s other religious communities do not share this notion of interrogation in the grave, although related narratives do exist. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Franciscan monk and ethnologist Ivan Zovko recorded a local Catholic belief that an angel enters the grave shortly after the burial and examines the dead person’s character. If the dead had been a good person living a life of virtue, the angel appears joyfully for three successive nights to shine bright rays of sun on the corpse. On the other hand, if the person had lived a life filled with malice and immorality, the angel appears morose and, cloaking himself in black, augments the darkness of the tomb three nights in a row. But the angel performs another important eschatological task: he collects slivers of the corpse’s flesh on each of the three nights, from the head, torso, and legs, that are then used to reassemble the person into the premortem condition on Judgment Day.29 In both cases, Muslim and Catholic, the necessity to retain the integrity of the deceased person requires the coherence of the body and soul, which the interment puts to risk. The ontological hiatus which occurs during the entombment, when the soul is disembodied and the flesh disintegrates, is bridged by the emphasis on ritual connections and activities that protect the person from doom and oblivion.

Gravestones and Commemorative Culture The deathscape of Bosnia provides visual and physical evidence of social intimacy between the living and the dead. These connections endure not only with the familial and communal dead but also with the ancestors at large. The spatial arrangement of the dead is intense and layered, just as Bosnia’s historical reality is. The continuity is both simultaneous, in the sense that the cemeteries are evident throughout the space, and it is historical, in the sense that the cemeteries contain graves that date to different epochs. Many cemeteries lie within settlements in an organic and integrated way, and many of them are religiously mixed or positioned side by side. For Muslims in particular, the cemeteries are part of everyday life as a social and not only ritual space. Steiner notes, with some amazement, the extent to which the Muslims of Bosnia feel comfortable around their dead: they congregate, socialize, laugh, and chat while sitting among or leaning against the gravestones. He observes nothing sorrowful in their demeanour: everyone seems relaxed and engaged, enjoying the shades of lilacs and acacia trees that sway over the graves.30 While this attitude may not be reflected everywhere, a tight relationship with the dead is. For centuries, there was no taboo in burying the dead in the same burial field or close to each other. While nowadays this practice is largely absent, especially in the aftermath of the 1992–1995 war that brought about aggressive policies of mutual exclusion, most city cemeteries juxtapose sections for different groups and modes of burial, secular, and religious. In fact, it is clear from both death- and health-related rituals, beliefs, and anxieties

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that the dead are never just dead, remote, and forgotten. On the contrary, they seem to be given agency to act in their death and affect the wellbeing of individuals and communities in multiple ways. In some ways, they are more alive in death than they were in life. Maintaining their personhood, no matter how much altered, as well as their subjectivity, reactivates and secures their engagement with the living across generations and social divisions. The gravestones represent contact zones of different commemorative and historical encounters, leaving an impact of emotive materiality and affective presence on life in Bosnia. This is especially obvious now, in the aftermath of the 1992–1995 war, where the annual commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide involves a peace march to the gravesites in Potoari and the burial for the remains of victims who are painstakingly identified and repatriated each year. Here, an intimate burial of loved ones and the public commemoration of genocide go hand in hand. In general, Bosnian rituals of remembering the dead are closely connected with the culture of health and wellbeing, superstitions, and beliefs, hopes and anxieties. Evoking the dead and including them in the pursuit of health combines handling the corpse, visitations to the graves, and speaking to the dead by conjuring up their presence and influence. In fact, the funerary practices in Bosnia, followed by commemorative rituals that are held according to discrete sacred calendars, emphasize that the dead are kept close to the living and their relationship continues to evolve. In a similar vein, a shared environmental and ritual tradition of disposing of the body through burial, most commonly in a single-person grave, and of marking the graves in a way that promotes their visibility regenerates those links over time and enables rituals to be enacted and grounded in the local setting. While the orientation of graves may be at odds in that the Muslim headstones are commonly positioned to enable the dead to face the direction of Mecca and Eastern Orthodox to face Jerusalem, there is no predictable differentiating pattern in the sacred topography of either type of graveyard. The visual characteristic of Muslim and Christian graves in early Ottoman Bosnia reveals minor typological differences, especially when considering all aspects of this funerary culture – location, type of burial, general masonry, environment, iconographic and textual clues. In maintaining important commonalities that allowed the overall transition to be multilayered and inclusive, it is not unusual to find many early Muslim tombstones in close vicinity to the medieval burial sites where they visually belong to the same frame of reference. The issue of continuity is thus as much spatial as it is cultural. Bosnian medieval burial practices involve large monoliths known as ste
aks (standing stones), which are scattered across the countryside and mountains and appear in neighbouring Montenegro, Serbia, and Croatia along Bosnian borders. The ste
aks can be solitary but are also found in both small and large clusters. Colossal in size, they are often mute and plain, containing no inscription or imagery. Of some 60,000 ste
aks that are numbered in the

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 27 region, only a fraction, some 10,000 of them, hold iconographic content. Of these, only several hundred are inscribed with epitaphs.31 After some speculations regarding the origins of the ste
ak, the general conclusion is that all Christian denominations within the region – Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, schismatic Bogomilism, and the local Bosnian Church – used the ste
ak as their way of marking the dead’s resting places. With the advent of Ottoman Islam, however, Islamic funerary forms were introduced. They were initially erected close to the ste
ak cemeteries but also emerged closer to settlements and in mosque courtyards. They often adopted the existing aesthetics. While the upright slabs characteristic of the Ottoman style were a novelty, the slab’s size was often disproportionate, and its iconography was directly or with modifications imported from the ste
ak. That also means that many early Ottoman Islamic gravestones in Bosnia bear no epitaphic reference, making it difficult to reconstruct social history as per funerary inscriptions. To the extent that we may establish it with consistent precision,32 the Ottoman prototype consists of two upright stelae, one of which is the headstone and the other the footstone. In the case of deceased males, the headstone is capped with a turban that reflects his social status or profession. Stones for females have no turbans and are only rounded, flat, or an inverted V shape The headstones face Mecca and contain an inscription that follows a common formulaic order: an evocation of God, usually drawn from one of the 99 of His Beautiful names; the mention of the deceased through language that expresses hope for their forgiveness and mercy (e.g., maghfûr, marhûm); the name and the basic or most relevant biographical detail; a request to say a prayer for their soul, specifically the opening sura of the Qur’an, al-Fatiha; and the year of death Of course, variations exist in terms of detail, epitaphic style, or language (Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, or Bosnian in Arabic alphabet), and throughout Bosnia such variations point to local influences and permutations that highlight the fact that the imported prototype was subject to growth as a cultural text in multiple ways. The historical timeline is also of relevance: while in urban centres and especially among the affluent families one encounters an early adoption of the Ottoman norms, the countryside reveals a slow and diverse adaptation thereof, so much so that until the eighteenth century, it is often hard to establish a clear “Islamic” signification of a gravestone.33 Ottoman mainly in architectural shape, these gravestones do not undergo a quick epigraphic change to reflect the new eschatological attitude. Instead, we continue to witness connections with funerary sensibilities of non-Muslim neighbours, so much so that it is often hard to differentiate among the gravestones despite confessional differences In the early modern period, those differences were made sharper with the advent of nationalism which tied religion to ethnicity and nation and ascertained that the identity of the dead is as clearly demarcated as the identity of the living. As a result, the graveyards were forcefully separated whenever possible by erecting fences or ploughing roads to keep them apart.

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The connections with the dead continue in oral tradition and ritual practices. In death, there is the ability to heal, see the truth, and understand a broader picture outside one’s singular circumstances. The dead can be conjured and their displacement from the challenges of everyday life, coupled with their new insights in the invisible powers, can be harnessed through rituals and occult engagements. Oftentimes, when such graves are associated with martyrdom (šehitski nišan) or sainthood (svetci and evlije), they are revered as focal points of ritual and symbolic action.34 Some are shared, as is the case of the tombstone of the fallen female martyr in Ostružnica near Fojnica, rabbi Moshe Danon’s shrine in Mostar, or Sheikh Gaibija’s shrine in Gradiška. There, the dead exercise theurgic powers of healing and assist the living in achieving well-being and sustenance. In so doing, the dead keep an important social presence and engage communities and groups across time and cultural divides.

Conclusion In its longue durée history, Bosnia’s religious plurality has nurtured undeniable social intimacy reflected in the way the dead are placed and integrated into everyday life. From forms of cultural anxiety that keep the dead apart as the dangerous other who can mess up our lives if we do not handle them properly,

Figure 1.1 Orthodox cemetery in the village of Žunovi containing a medieval ste
ak and an old Muslim slab among the Orthodox Christian graves. Source: Amila Buturovi.

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 29 as illustrated in a rich repertoire of funerary practices, occult and superstitious beliefs across Bosnia and Herzegovina, attitudes to the dead evolved to forms of cultural affinity. These continuously keep the highway of ritual, spiritual, artistic, and social communication with the dead open and running: more often than not, the living treats the dead not as objects of memory but as subjects that have their agency, their voice, and power to participate, and even

Figure 1.2 Solitary Ottoman Muslim grave, fifteenth c., Sokolac. Source: Amila Buturovi.

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influence, everyday life. This influence is not to be confused with the so-called “prospective memory”35 whereby the living arrange copious last wills to manage their assets and direct post-mortem affairs. Rather, the authority of the dead is repeatedly swayed through narratives, folklore, religious evocations, traditional healing and occult practices, so much so that the dead are often more alive in death than they were in life. They enhance our sense of boundaries, of what is possible and expected, and of who we ought to be or must not be. References to the dead in common lore are rarely if ever, referred to by the labels of modern national identities. Rather, they are children, mothers, heroes, villains, wives, neighbours. They form a part of collective wisdom that can be accessed through detailed ritual practices and evocations. Through it, interpersonal and neighbourly connections are kept alive regardless of political upheavals and shifts, and regardless of their displacement from the community of the living (Figs.1.1 and 1.2).

Notes 1 Amila Buturovi, Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones, and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 2  iro Truhelka, “Lijeništvo po narodnoj predaji bosanskoj i po jednom starom rukopisu,” Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja Bosne i Hercegovine 2 (1889): 95–127 (hereafter GZM); Muhamed Hadžijahi, “Sinkretistiki elementi u islamu u Bosni i Hercegovini,” POF 28–29 (2017): 301–29. 3 Emilian Lilek, “Vjerske starine iz Bosne i Hercegovine,” GZM 6 (1894) 142. 4 Ronald A. Lukens-Bull, “Between Text and Practice: Anthropological Considerations in the Study of Islam,” Marburg Journal of Religion 4/2 (December 1999): 1–21. Ulrich Berner, “The Notion of Syncretism in Historical and/or Empirical Research,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 27/3 (2001): 499–509. 5 Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 6 One of the earliest treatises that concerns funerary culture is Mustafa b. Muhammad al-Aqhis
r, Ris lat al-dh kir fziy rat ahl al-maq bir. MS. 154. Bratislava: The University Library of Bratislava. 29b–41b. 7 Leor Halevi offers a thorough analysis of the early forms of these rituals and teachings in Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 8 Jane Smith and Yvonne Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30. 9 Karl Steiner, “Bosanska narodna medicina,” GZM (1903): 563–70. 10 Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Joseph Ziegler, “Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, eds. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2001). 11 Fazlur Rahman, Health and Medicine in Islamic Tradition (New York: ABC International Group, 1989); Miriam Shefer-Mossenshon, Ottoman Medicine (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 12 Lilek, “Vjerske starine,” 141–43. 13 Mehmed Handži, “Jedan prilog povijesti prvih dana širenja islama u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Narodna Uzdanica 6 (1938): 29–45. 14 Steiner, “Bosanska narodna medicina,” 569.

Death and Dying in Ottoman Bosnia 31 15 Aiša Softi, Obe
ani as (Sarajevo: Zemaljski muzej, 2016), 10–15. 16 The shahada is the first pillar of faith, expressed as personal piety on a daily basis but also ritualistically on specific occasions, including the moment of death. It reads, la-ilaha- illa-llah, Muhammadu-rasulu-llah: there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet. 17 Kasim Dobraa, “Tuhfetul-musallin ve zubdetul-haši’in od Abdul-Vehaba Žepevije Ilhamije,” Anali GHB 2–3 (1974): 65. Translation from Ottoman Turkish mine. 18 The next paragraph is a rendering from three authoritative sources of Hadith, Ibn Majah’s Sunan (book 6), Abu Dawud’s Sunan (book 20), and Bukhari’s Sahih (book 23). 19 Antun Hangi, Život i obiaji muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo: Naklada Daniela Kajona, 1906), 288–89. 20 Lilek, “Vjerske starine,” 160. 21 Ibid., 168–170. 22 Abu Dawud, Sunan, 20:3195. 23 Bukhari, Sa, 23:370, 371. The battle of Uhud was fought between the Muslims and the Meccan enemy in 3AH/625CE. Incurring a great loss of life, the Muslim army was defeated. 24 Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 215–18. 25 Jane Smith and Yvonne Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, 42–3. 26 Abu Hanifa, Al-fiqh al-akbar, in I. Ninowy (trans.), online http://fahadmahdi.webs. com/Other%20Books/Fiqh%20e%20Akbar%20By%20Abu%20Hanifa.pdf, 17. 27 Hangi, Život i obiaji, 322. 28 Steiner, “Bosanska narodna medicina,” 569. 29 Ivan Zovko, “Dvije narodne praznovjerice: o uskrsnuu tijela,” GZM 3 (1891), 215. 30 Steiner, “Bosanska narodna medicina,” 576. 31 Marion Wenzel, Ukrasni motivi na ste
cima (Sarajevo: n.p., 1965). 32 Edhem Eldem and NicolasVatin, L’épitaphe ottomane musulmane, XVIe–XXe siècles (Paris: Peeters, 2007). 33 Buturovi, Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory, Chapter 3. 34 Alija Bejti, “Jedno vi enje sarajevskih evlija i njihovih grobova kao kultnih mjesta,” POF 31 (1981):111–30. 35 Jan Assman, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 46.

2

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia (Seventeenth–Early Nineteenth Centuries) Between Liturgical Norm and Social Practice* Petronel Zahariuc (In honour of Professor Ion H. Ciubotaru)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Moldavia the cult of the dead (including the interment, the funerary feast, the commemorative rites, the gifts made at the burial, etc.) was important both in terms of church ritual and in terms of social practice. Documents that have survived (testaments, lists of expenses, probate inventories, etc.) make it possible to reconstruct the ceremonial of interment in the Eastern Orthodox rite and the commemorative services performed during the first three or seven years after death. The study of these religious and social practices may contribute to the understanding of spirituality among the Romanians of the early modern age, of the interworkings in the social fabric, as well as of the links between status and wealth. It is important to note that most surviving testaments from the period considered here are those of the social, political, church, and urban elites rather than those of poorer urbanites, traders, or peasants. As one of the major events in the life cycle of individuals, the family, and the community, the ritual of death was, and still is to some extent, a public performance showcasing the social standing of the individual and his or her family. The thought of death and the preparations for the “ultimate journey” and the “most terrifying rite of initiation, death,”1 is a constant in human life and intensifies as age and physical decline prompt people to think of their demise and of writing up a testament (Ro. diata). This is how Gheorghe Cog
lniceanu in his testament from the early nineteenth century describes his state of mind at the time: “being of an age when one must recognize that the end is not far, having lived for over fifty years and seeing the frailty of my body, yet being still in possession of my faculties and sound of mind, I have deemed, enlightened by God, that it is time to write my testament.”2 This

* Research for this study was supported by a grant from the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0263, within PNCDI III.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-4

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia 3

33

testament was conceived in the “first person” and written by the testator himself, which was increasingly common starting with the mid-eighteenth century as the Romanian lands negotiated their way into modernity.4 However, the majority of testaments compiled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the result of interactions between the men and women preparing for the “great passage” and a professional writer, recruited among literate family members, the clerks of the princely chancellery, or among priests.5 Here is a fragment from the testament of Catrina Ruset, written by the high cupbearer (Ro. mare paharnic) Miron Vârnav: “as I reckoned that every Christian, old or young, is duty bound to consider death, for this reason and contemplating the end, hurrying near like the sickle towards the wheat, and first of all as justice and good faith require, I demand forgiveness from everyone …”6 A fragment from the testament of Metropolitan Misail, written by the scholar Axinte Uricarul, reads as follows: “We have pondered earnestly upon the hour of our death, as is every man’s duty, for no worldly greatness exists that is not cut short by death, for life is like the flower that dies and the shadow that passes …”7 Beyond the literary flourishes, all these writers used a format that was specific to this type of document and was transmitted from one generation to the next. The style was formalized in the early eighteenth century by the Wallachian Metropolitan Anthimos of Ivíria (Ro. Antim Ivireanul) in his Capetele de porunc
c
tre preoi (Instructions to all priests and clerics).8 We do not have data on the circulation of this template for testaments, but the fact that these documents used the same formulae shows that Metropolitan Anthimos was inspired by religious and social realities common to both Romanian provinces, Wallachia (Ro.  ara Româneasc
, Muntenia) and Moldavia (Moldova). All testaments include clauses for burial and commemoration rites: Christians used to reserve a portion of their bequests as the so-called “part of the soul” (Ro. partea sufletului; Gr. psychikón).9 Such clauses included provisions for the movable or immovable assets reserved by individuals for their interment and commemoration liturgies, the names of relatives or ecclesiastical establishments (monasteries) left as executors, as well as the spiritual penalties these incurred if they failed to carry out the testators’ instructions. The “part for the soul” had three main components: an ecclesiastical one, a juridical one, and a social one. They are well documented in studies by historians of the Romanian Orthodox Church, ethnologists, and historians of society and the family in the Romanian lands of the medieval and early modern periods. Over the last three decades,10 historians and scholars in other disciplines have come to recognize the importance of testaments as the main source for the study of the “part for the soul,” chiefly under the impact of the French school of social history.11 Whereas in 1994, Andrei Pippidi noted the difficulty for Romanian historians of conducting serial, quantitative research on attitudes to death in the manner of Michel Vovelle because of the gaps in sources,12 the increase in the availability and publication of primary documents has since become a game changer in research.

34

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The “part for the soul” was allocated by testators to correspond to the costs of the burial and post-mortem rites as they had been established in the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church.13 In addition, there were specific guidelines for both Romanian provinces and for various areas within them. In practice, an individual’s last will as expressed in that “precautionary document the testament”14 was respected by heirs: if heirs carried out their duties in terms of the “part for the soul,” there were no further litigations over the movable and immovable assets that had been transferred to them in the succession. Even when there was no testament and relatives were fighting in court over the distribution of the inheritance, the boyar judges ruled that the sides had to agree to pay the late testator’s debts first and deduct the expenses for burial and commemoration from the inherited assets.15 When there was a testament and relatives took heirs to court, they challenged the authenticity of the document rather than neglect in carrying out the duties required for the “part for the soul.”16 As mentioned before, there has been much progress in the study of Romanian testaments17, and yet we still do not have published collections of medieval and early modern testaments.18 Recently, another type of sources for death studies has attracted historians’ attention: lists of expenses for burial and commemoration,19 a category of documents previously described as “unusual” in a study about the burial customs and rites in the Romanian Middle Ages.20 The first and only document of this type we have identified so far is a testament with an annex of funds left for carrying out the testator’s last will. Sometime before 30 September 1612, the nun Agripina (Gripina), “in her last words” (Ro. cu limb
de moarte), left a vineyard at Cotnari to her nephews, Gligorie and Sora, asking them to “take care of the funeral feast and her burial and, by testament, every year to give half of the wine from the vineyard to the church at Arhangheli in Suceava, and a horse, every year, to Sveta Gora, in Dionisée [Dionysiou] at Sveta Gora [Mount Athos].”21 One year after the testator’s death, the nephew Gligorie wrote up a “Register of all expenses after Agripina’s death” (Sl. Catastih kto celtoval coli umerti Agrïpina), in which he noted the amount of wine sold for the funeral feast (Ro. comând) and for commemoration liturgies (Ro. pomeniri) at twenty and forty days, half a year and one year after death, as well as for the purchase of a horse for the Monastery of the Dormition in Suceava,22 and of another horse for the Dionysiou Monastery on Mount Athos, alongside ten thaler in cash.23 The term diat
(testament) is of Greek origin and appeared in Romanian documents in the early seventeenth century.24 In the earlier Slavo-Romanian documents there was no specific term for the document expressing a person’s last will; words such as “writ” (scrisoare) and “composition” (întocmire), or the expression “with my last words” (las cu limb
de moarte) were used instead. In the later Romanian documents all these words and phrases often appear together, for example in the aforementioned document of 30 September 1612: “left in her last words to her nephews […] and, by

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia 25

35

testament, every year.” From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the term of Latin origin “testament” appeared in documents, but rarely.26 This is because the term was initially used to refer to writs whereby ruling princes granted tax exemptions to ecclesiastical institutions or certain social groups. Sometimes both terms, “diat
” and “testament,” are used in the same document.27 The testament (diata) often listed the range of actions required for the interment (followed by a funeral feast) and for the commemoration of the testator. All these actions came under the umbrella term a griji and its derivates (griji, grijire, grijanie), literally meaning “to take care of.” The funeral took place three days after death, and “commemorative rites were due at the following intervals: the third day (  , usually corresponding to the day of the funeral28), the ninth day (    ), and the fortieth day (       ), six weeks) after death. Further services were to be conducted at six, nine, and twelve (one year) after death, followed by annual commemorations up to seven years after death [ … ] In some areas (especially in Moldavia) it is also customary to have commemorations at twenty or twenty-one days (three weeks) after death.”29 The evidence from ethnographic research and old documents shows that the commemoration after three days was separate from the burial ceremony as such: on this day, the family of the deceased organized a new funeral feast and took the memorial dish, kollyva (Ro. coliv
) to church to be blessed and distributed to the congregation.30 These intervals are documented for the first time in Moldavia in the donation deed (Ro. carte de danie) issued by Prince  tefan cel Mare for the Zographou Monastery on Mount Athos on 10 March 1466. The prince requested for his post-mortem commemoration liturgies on the third, ninth, twentieth, and fortieth day after death, as well as at half a year and one year.31 The document issued by  tefan cel Mare was endorsed by the most important rulers of Moldavia in the sixteenth century (Bogdan al III-lea,  tef
ni
, Petru Rare, Alexandru L
puneanul, Petru  chiopul, and Ieremia Movil
), who all requested commemorations at the same intervals.32 Very few testaments mention these intervals specifically; usually the testator expresses his or her request for commemoration in general terms such as “let them commend my memory as is the Christian custom,” (Ro. s
m
 grijeasc
dup
obiceiul cretinesc)33 or as demanded by “Christian laws” (Ro. legea cretineasc
)34. They knew that these intervals, being now well established, were familiar to their executors, who were going to carry out the requests according to the law (Ro. pravil
).35 From the fewer documents that mention the intervals I have selected two, which also have lists of expenses to be allocated to the services. For example, the testament of the monk Veniamin Nastas
, dated 10 May 1767, includes the following: “150 lei to pay for my burial; 10 lei for the commemoration of the third day; 10 lei for the commemoration of the ninth day; 20 lei for the commemoration at twenty days; 50 lei for the commemoration at forty days; 50 lei for the commemoration after half a year; 100 lei for the commemoration after

36

Petronel Zahariuc

one year.”36 Here is an excerpt from the testament of postelnic (court superintendent) Gheorghe Cog
lniceanu, dated 22 September 1811: “1,500 lei for the interment; 600 lei for four commemorations: at three days, nine days, twenty days, and forty days; 400 lei for two commemorations: at six months and one year; 400 lei for a further two commemorations: at three years and at disinterment.”37 The sums allocated for burial and postmortem commemorations were directly related to the social status of the deceased: they ranged from a few dozen lei or the price obtained from the sale of one or two cattle or a vineyard up to several thousand or even several tens of thousands lei, at times when the currency was devalued and purchasing power declined.38 For example, the monk Teofan Buc
wrote that, as he found towards the end of his life that “nothing had come easily to me for my soul,” he gave an acre of a vineyard “made with his own hands in the forest” to the Bishopric of Roman39; the chronicler Ion Neculce left 116 lei for his inhumation (old Ro. astrucare), as well as some chattels and an amount of wax40; Metropolitan Gheorghe (the IVth) left all his money, 300 lei, to cover the “expenses of death,” commemorations and post-mortem prayers41; Ecaterina Cantacuzino gifted her son, the aa (chief of city guard) Ioan Cantacuzino, with a village in Cotnari county, in exchange for which he was going to pay for “fifty commemorative prayers” for her soul42; the high chancellor (Ro. marele logof
t) Vasile Ceaurul, “in the hour of his death, provided for his commemoration and decided with his last words” to leave 1,000 lei to his wife, Maria, to “commemorate him”43; the same sum was left by vorniceasa (wife of a vornic, court chamberlain) Catrina Ruset to her mother for burial, commemorations, and almsgiving44; the high cupbearer Vasile Carp left 5,000 lei for commemorations and alms45; the ruling prince Scarlat vod
Callimach spent 6,387 lei for the burial of his daughter, Ruxandra46; the high chamberlain Dracachi Ruset left 25,000 lei for his interment and commemoration services up to forty days47 and 80,000 lei for subsequent liturgies until the disinterment of his remains seven years later and for three years after that.48 Alongside commemoration days, most testaments also mention varying numbers of s
rindare (sg. s
rindar; from the neo-Hellenic      = a group of forty) or s
r
custe, meaning “the mention of the name of the deceased at forty consecutive liturgies, especially during the first forty days after death.”49 By testament, depending on economic power and social standing, an individual established the sums of money to be paid by the surviving spouse or a relative for s
rindare at the church where the deceased was to be buried, at churches and monasteries that he or she had founded, at other ecclesiastical establishments in the region or in the country, at the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem, at monasteries on Mount Athos, or other Holy Places. S
rindare for immigrants were to be said in churches of their native countries. The number and locations of these readings of names varied: poorer families often could only afford one,50 while the wealthy, for example the high chamberlain Ion Pr
jescul,51 the high chamberlain

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia 52

37

Iordache Ruset, or Ilinca Paladi, the wife of a chancellor of the court,53 could afford to pay for forty to one hundred such readings. For example, the medelnicer (a court official who served at the prince’s table) Andreia Ianovici requested one s
rindar to be read at the church in the village Cristeti (Suceava county),54 whereas B
laa, the wife of medelnicer Iorga, wished her name to be heard at the Church of the Ascension at Neam Monastery, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and in twentyfour monasteries and sketes (small communities of hermits or semi-hermits) on Mount Athos.55 The high chancellor Iordache Cantacuzino left a large sum of money to pay for commemorations at the Monastery of St. Sava near Jerusalem, at the Athonite Monastery of St. Gregorios, as well as at monasteries and churches in Moldavia, including churches he had founded on three of his estates in Iai and Hârl
u counties.56 The treasurer Statie, nostalgic for his native region south of the Danube, “instructed” his wife, Cristina, to donate for his soul “one hundred lei to ten monasteries on the Holy Mountain [ … ] and thirty lei to the monastery of Stemna in Rumeli.”57 Testators who still had a few steps left before the “last gate” used their last will to try and secure help for the remainder of their life and support in the event of illness. If “on the threshold to death,” they tried to reward those who had supported them and considered other provisions for the “rest of the soul.” Such provisions included: a fair distribution of portions among heirs so as to avoid contestations in court; the repayment of debts – which tended to be significant among Moldavian boyars58 – so that the prayers of priests should not conflict with the maledictions of creditors, servants, and peasants59; the emancipation of dependent peasants (Ro. vecini) on their estates60 and of some Roma slaves61; the choice of a burial site and instructions for details of the funerary rites; the allocation of gifts and alms for tenants, the poor, orphans, and hospitals; allocations for the building of churches, fountains, bridges, etc. Some testaments were written well ahead of the date of death – sometimes during an illness that the individual survived – and were replaced and updated. For example, Zamfira, from Iai, initially left her wealth by testament (1763) to her great-grandson, Gheorghe Fr
ti
. However, as he did not seem willing to support her “in the frailty of old age,” the following year she wrote up another testament in favour of Apostol, to whom she left her house. In exchange for his bequest, he was to “look after her, provide food and help as long as she lived, and after her death to oversee the due Christian rites of commemoration and s
rindare, for she took him on as a soul child to inherit all she had after her death.”62 Some testators tore up their testaments, often at confession on their deathbed for the same reason: their executors failed to carry out their duties even before the donor died. One such example was that of Ania Bal, whose last will was made orally, “through confession” to the hieromonk Andrei, the ecclesiarch of the Metropolitan church in Iai. The high cleric noted the testatrix’s direct admonition to her appointed executor: “and you pledged, cup bearer

38

Petronel Zahariuc

Gavrili, to look after me in my illness and provide for my needs, but you never kept your promises; therefore hand over the deeds I gave you for the estate to my nephew Ion, for I gifted the land to him as one who looked after me in my need and illness.”63 Another example is the priest Savin, who donated a vineyard to his cousin, Pavel, who was supposed to work on it and return part of its revenue to the priest for his funeral expenses. However, Pavel failed to carry out the task and the priest concluded bitterly that his cousin had “squandered the money for his funeral feast.” Subsequently, the priest gave the vineyard to one of his nephews, the priest Toader, to pay for “commemorations of his soul.”64 There were cases of heirs writing up fake testaments at times when the testator was unable to do so because of illness. For example, Safta, the daughter of the stolnic (high steward) Preda Palade, had a testament written for her by her cousin, Br
escul, “while she was ill and without her consent,” whereby she allegedly “left herself” and all her wealth at the goodwill of the high chamberlain Iordache Cantacuzino after her recovery. Safta destroyed the testament and wrote a new one, whereby several villages in Cern
ui county were passed on to her relatives, the high-ranking boyars Sandul Sturza and Toader Palade, who were to “care for her and look after her needs” as long as she lived and, after her death, to “commemorate her in the Christian way, and according to her rank as a boyars’ daughter, and pay for six readings of her name [s
rindare] in church.”65 A similar story involved Bejan Hudici, a court official, who wrote a testament in favour of a son from his first marriage, Antiohie, leaving him the greatest part of his inheritance. Out of his portion, Antiohie was to give Paraschiva, Bejan’s second wife, the following: “four bulls, two cows, and twenty beehives, to pay for his commemorations.” There must have been vivid debates in the family around the writing of this testament, as it was witnessed and signed by no fewer than four of Moldavia’s top hierarchs: Metropolitan Ghedeon, Sava, the bishop of Roman, Calistru, bishop of R
d
ui, and Iorest, bishop of Hui.66 However, three years later Bejan Hudici became seriously ill and accepted his wife’s suggestion of changing the testamentary clauses in her favour, for which she was under obligation to “commemorate him after death.” Once he recovered, the boyar wrote that, during his illness, he had “lost his mind and common sense,” being “more dead than alive,” and had been lured by “female wiles” into changing his testament. However, “coming back to his senses and his first judgment,” he saw his “wretched error” and changed his testament back in favour of his son, Antiohie.67 Yet, despite such incidents, all the requests expressed in testaments, whether of a spiritual or material nature, were observed and carried out by heirs. This is supported by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, there were no resounding court trials for the non-compliance of the executors, which would have left documentary evidence behind, as well as by the lists of expenses for burial and post-mortem expenses. The earliest list of expenses, as commented above, dates back to 1612–1613. I have not found a similar

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia

39

one for the seventeenth century. But in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, their number increased. Some have been published, and others are yet to find their way into print, but they are all evidence of the patterns of memorialization as Romanian society advanced towards modernity. The lists of expenses68 complement the data from testaments69 and complete the picture of the Orthodox ceremonial of interment and of postmortem commemorations that have resulted so far from other historical sources (chronicles70 and historical works,71 narratives by foreign travelers72) as well as from ethnographic surveys and ethnological research.73 In the first half of the seventeenth century Moldavia’s Catholic population, who “buried their dead according to the rites of the [Catholic] Church,” nevertheless “in some must be following the Wallachians, because they use the selfsame ceremonials for burial and funerary feasts.” (Catholici prerumque Ecclesiae ritu sepeliunt mortuos solum in quisdam Valachos sequuntur, nimirum quod exequias et mensas eodem prorsus modo intruant).74 The contents of testaments compiled by Catholics were also similar to those of Eastern Orthodox testators. Here is, for example, an excerpt from the testament of Ana Lapas: “This, my testament, is an attestation that I, Ana Lapas, being afflicted by a grave illness and fearing that in my great weakness, I will pay the duty of every mortal human, from what is mine, I have made portions and divided them as follows: two large vineyards at Copou to be sold for the memory of our souls, mine and that of my spouse, and for the burial, and a carpet to be given to the church and the money from our household to be given for the interment and for a further commemoration of our souls.75 Likewise, Catrina Dediuleasa donated to the priest Iosif Zingali from Faraoani “for the liturgies one vineyard and thirty-five vineyards,” for him to officiate the liturgies and pay some of her debts.76 In preparation for the burial, both the individuals readying themselves for the “last journey” and their heirs and executors made sure that everything was ready, both in terms of material and spiritual requirements. At this – still exploratory – stage in research, I have looked selectively at some aspects of the burial rites and at some of the items used as presented in documents. Some elements of the ritual stand out: testators prioritized the coffin and its lining (with a shroud made of silk, a small cushion with cotton filling, red Damascus silk or red cloth and pins for attaching the fabric inside and outside the coffin); the clothes of the deceased; the material used as a cover for the bier (silk fabric with embroidered gold thread flowers; red sandaliu [Tk. sandal = brocade or silk and cotton fabric]; white and red bogasiu [Tk. boasi = cotton]; satin [Tk. atlas] and yellow pins for attaching the fabric); kerchiefs for covering the bier, the candle-holders, torches, and the cross carried ahead of the coffin; the fee for the prayers read by priests inside the house of the deceased; large amounts of white and yellow wax for the candles; incense and myrrh; decorations for the candle-holders (colored paper) and torches (Ro. flori lipc
neti, i.e., imported from Leipzig); the pay

40

Petronel Zahariuc

for the burial to be made to bishops, hegoumenoi (Gk. superiors of monastery), archimandrites, priests, hieromonks, deacons, and church singers; the cost of the tomb; money for the grave-diggers and pallbearers; money for the canvas used to lower the coffin into the grave; live poultry for the funerary feast, offered as food gifts by the graveside; money for bell ringing and prayers; large amounts of bread to distribute to the poor (600, 1,000, 2,000 loaves and more); alms for the poor and schoolchildren, distributed as the coffin was carried out of the house, and along the road the church; money for the lanterns of the guilds and for the elder of the undertakers’ guild. The documents considered here do not include significant data on the use of “wailing women” (Ro. bocitoare), who were present at most funerals. In his eighteenth-century history of Moldavia, the prince and scholar Dimitrie Cantemir wrote that “only wealthier women hired wailers, who knew many chants that expressed the gloom and vanity of life.”77 Only in one testament in my sample, the testator, AndreiaIanovici requested: “upon my death, do not grieve for me with fiddlers and wailing women,”78 which suggests that such practices were frequent.79 Fiddlers, too, are not often mentioned in testaments or in lists of burial expenses. Only for the burial of the Princess Ruxandra Callimachi, in 1813, documents mention payment for “German musicians.”80 The interment ritual included the obligatory memorial dish called kollyva (Ro. coliva), made of sweetened boiled wheat decorated with sweets, which is well documented in the sources. Other items included a “tree” and a “table of alms,”81 which accompanied the funeral procession from the house of the deceased to the graveside. These were laden with foodstuffs: bread rolls of various sizes, sacramental bread (Gk. prosphoron; Ro. prescura), sultanas, strings of figs, lemons, oranges, adorned with silver or gold glitter and tinsel,82 as well as an assortment of sweets and sweetmeats (Ro. cofeturi, zaharicale), etc. All these items were purchased at shops in the capital city, Iai, or in the other important towns, and were handed over to the colivar and some women to hang on the tree or place on the “table of alms.” There are lists of expenses for foodstuffs used at the funeral feast (Ro. comând) as well as at commemoration feasts at one, three, and seven years after death, which included: wheat and corn flour (in the eighteenth century), rice, cornmeal, peas, cabbage, onions, beans (in the eighteenth century), fish (sturgeon, catfish, carp, cod roe, sometimes caviar), and, very rarely, octopus, poultry (chicken, goose, turkey), lamb and beef,83 very rarely pork,84 honey, chickpeas, saffron, oil, butter, lemons and lemon juice, salt, mushrooms, sugar, as well as drinks: wine (in some cases, in large amounts), sometimes beer, and less often horilc
(var. holerc
, a strong beverage made of distilled fruit) and raki (plum brandy) (in the eighteenth century). The foodstuffs listed here confirm in part the mid-seventeenthcentury observations of the visiting Catholic monk Niccolò Barsi on the funerary feast: “At this feast they only eat fish and say that they do so to mortify their bodies and show that they grieve for the dead, yet they drink

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41

wine and beer.” The greatest expenses were incurred on the feast at forty days after death, also called panagia or the “raising of the panagia,” the day when, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, “the soul was finally “detached” from the worldly realm and integrated into the great family of mythical ancestors and arch-ancestors.”86 Alongside the traditional “alms feast” (Ro. mas
de poman
),87 the family of the deceased also offered gifts: pots, trays, cutlery, clothes for the poor and schoolchildren, kerchiefs, shirts, hand towels (Ro. mâneterguri), napkins and bath towels, etc. The more expensive furs and clothes were gifted to relatives and ordinary clothing to poorer kin or families of impoverished boyars. Catrina Ruset, the wife of a court chamberlain, decided that “my garments, all of them, must be given to daughters of impoverished boyars,”88 and the high treasurer Iordache Balcommanded his sons “to sell [his better clothes], and with the money to purchase ordinary clothes and give them to the poor, to as many as they could.”89 As the funeral cortège proceeded to the church and after the funeral, the heirs sent alms (food and money) to prison inmates, to disabled people (Ro. calici), to the poorer children at the school of Socola Monastery (established in the nineteenth century), and sent gifts to priests, monks, impoverished widows of boyars, and hermits. For example, the parents of Vasile, a court official who died in September 1743 in Istanbul, sent moderate amounts of money to two unnamed hermits at Hl
peti i Ceahl
u as well as to two well-known hermits, Agathon, who lived in a forest near the town Botoani, and Sila, the hermit of Putna Monastery.90 The data mentioned so far were collected from several testaments and lists of expenses. The next section is based on a single case study: the list of expenses for “interment and liturgies” for the late Ion Bal, dated 10 March 1779.91 Ion Bal, whose place in the genealogy of the Balboyar family has not been determined,92 died in the spring of 1778, after an illness. According to the list, 100 lei had been spent on his treatment. The funeral expenses included: the cost of liturgies (“for 27 gospel readings and 6 psalms”); one large candle for the candlestick, incense, myrrh, the painting of the crucifix (or the shroud); the cost of the burial clothes (a pair of mestii [Tk. mest = leather bootees]), three lengths of lining [Tk. astar], cotton for covering the body); the funerary staff and the “gear of the deceased” 93; (one okka [approx 1.288 liters] wax for “the making of the staff and cross”; one Hungarian golden ducat [the equivalent of 4 lei and 78 bani] for the crucifix he was buried with; the coffin (with a rug, yellow pins, and iron nails) and the bier; various fabrics and napkins for draping the coffin, biers, candlesticks, and funeral banners, etc. (two sashes and eight silk kerchiefs, red and white sandal, golden thread, cloth and atlaz [satin]); the cost of hiring the tent that sheltered the coffin; the cost of the grave (including 200 bricks and ropes for lowering the coffin); a red powder for coloring the kollyva; the foodstuffs for the “table of alms” (including the nine bread rolls placed on the”small bier”94) and for the “tree of alms” (twelve lemons at six bani each,

42

Petronel Zahariuc

glitter, coffee, white paper, figs, two okka of red sultanas, three okka of sugar, two okka of sweets, pretzels, crispbread); candles and torches (thirtyseven okka for the torches, costing seventy-five lei); the cost of bell-ringing at ten churches, one leu for each church; the fee of the ecclesiastical staff (the metropolitan and two bishops), of the archdeacon, the first and second singers, the pay of four priests from the metropolitan church, the archdeacon, and four hegoumenoi; kerchiefs for the metropolitan and the confessor; money, food (olives and cod roe), and beverages (Ro. horilc
) for the builder, joiner, pallbearers and their elder, as well as for the women who picked the wheat for the kollyva; money for the priests who officiated the mass for the dead (Ro. prohod); a large sum of money (fifty lei and forty bani) and 500 loaves of bread for the crowd (twelve lei and sixty bani; at the rate of 133 bani per leu, one loaf cost a little above three bani; the loaves were brought on a cart); twelve lei for the twelve torches carried by the guilds of the city of Iai. Aside from expenses not mentioned in the list, a total of 371 lei and eighty-seven bani were spent on the funeral of Ion Bal. The list of expenses also mentions the sums spent for commemoration liturgies three, nine, forty days, and one year after death (the half-year service is not listed). The main items purchased by the family included: an “alms tree” and “alms feast.” Apart from the aforementioned foodstuffs, additional ingredients were purchased and other expenditures occurred: dough for the bread to be given as alms, honey for the kollyva, apples and oranges; several okka of wax candles and torches; money for the bishops, deacons, and singers; money for priests and the poor; two hundred loaves of bread were given to the crowds and ten okka of wine were sent to the city’s prison at the one-year commemoration. In total, with the funeral expenses, the Balfamily paid 986 lei and thirty-six para. In addition, the high logothete Lupu Bal, the head of the family, was allocated 150 lei for “readings of the dead man’s name” in church (s
rindare) and seventy lei to repay the debts of his late relative. One generation later, in 1833, at the funeral of the court superintendent (Ro. postelnic) Ioan Vârnav in the cemetery of the St. Nicholas Church at Pop
ui (Botoani county), the list of expenses totalled 8,409 lei and offers additional data on the composition of a funeral cortège and on items used as signs of mourning: four boyars accompanied the bier, which was carried by four house servants; black fabric was draped around the candles carried by the boyars; black ribbons were used to attach the kerchiefs (Tk. çevre) to the metropolitan’s staff and candle.95 There was a novel element, not mentioned in other documents of this type: a payment of “two golden coins [sixty-eight lei] to the administrator Ionic
for his eulogy, the encomion [neo-Hellenic enkómion), at the graveside.”96 Eulogies for deceased in church are mentioned by Dimitrie Cantemir for the burial ceremonies of the Moldavian princes,97 but such “orations” have not been preserved. The earliest available sources for such “orations for burial and commemoration” [Ro. cuvânt
ri de înmormântare i de pomenire] date from the second half of the eighteenth century and the custom continued in the nineteenth century.98

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia

43

Alongside the list of burial expenses for Ioan Vârnav, lists of commemorative services at three, nine, twenty, forty days, half a year99 and one year100 after death have also been preserved. The first four lists include impressive numbers of attending priests and deacons (over one hundred) and a large number of bread loaves (over 2,000) distributed to the crowds. The last two lists show that the commemorations took place by the graveside and the feasts were held at the late Vârnav’s manor in the village Tudora (Botoani county) and at NeamMonastery. The attendance of large numbers of priests at the funerals of notables was a constant of social life in the Romanian lands. In his travel narrative from the mid-sixteenth century, the archdeacon Paul of Aleppo noted that in Moldavia the funeral of a wealthy member of the elites could be attended by all the priests in the city of Iai.101 The custom endured into the early nineteenth century, for example, Ilinca Paladi requested her burial to be officiated by seven archbishops (Moldavia’s four archbishops and three bishops of eparchies in the Ottoman Empire who resided in Iai), seven deacons, fifteen archimandrites, 150 priests, and two church singers.102 Returning now to the lists of expenses, they included data on the obligation of heirs to oversee the construction of tombstones,103 of one or several drinking fountains,104 by the side of a road and with good quality water, or of a bridge over a river on the testator’s estate or even in the city of Iai (for example, in the case of Gheorghe Cog
lniceanu). When the testator was very wealthy, he or she requested the building of a church,105 of a skete, of a monastery106 or part of a monastery’s buildings (the surrounding walls, cells, etc.), or of hospitals: for example, one testator asked for a hospital to be built for the “fathers [of the monastery at Mogoeti, in Dorohoi county] who might fall ill, but also for strangers,” an establishment that should have a doctor and a dispensary (Ro. spierie).107 Other testamentary requests included the maintenance of schools for peasants on family estates (for example Dumbr
veni and Pacani, villages owned by the Balfamily).108 After the one-year commemoration, commemorative rites were performed yearly, as well as on the days of the dead in the Church calendar, up to the ceremony of disinterment, which took place three or seven years after death. Disinterment of the remains after three years is well documented in testaments and lists of expenses,109 although the liturgics of the Eastern Orthodox Church does not mention this interval. In the mid-seventeenth century, the aforementioned archdeacon Paul of Aleppo recorded that Patriarch Makarios of Antioch officiated a liturgy in the cemetery of St. Sava Monastery in Iai, upon the request of a man who had told him: “My father, before he died, requested with his last words: “three years after my death, open my grave and take care to have a court dignitary present, and if a metropolitan is available, have him read over me the prayer for the absolution of my sins’ [Ro. molitva de dezlegare].” After the liturgy, the family organized a memorial feast in the refectory: “a large table was laid with many sorts of foodstuffs, followed by kollyva and wine, and large

44

Petronel Zahariuc

candles were given to all present.” “After the feast, the son of the deceased gave alms to all those present because this is the custom in the land of Moldavia and ara Româneasc
[Wallachia].”110 The Eastern Orthodox liturgics mentions and comments on disinterment after seven years,111 but this interval is more rarely mentioned in the sources used here; I found examples only for the early nineteenth century.112 Disinterment of the remains was also accompanied by a memorial service, followed by a feast and almsgiving for family and for the poor who attended. For example, around the year 1800, the Ruset family arranged for the disinterment of the remains of the court chamberlain Neculai Ruset and his sister, Ecaterina,113 both buried in the cemetery of the Dancu Monastery. They spent 1,820 lei, which they distributed to the metropolitan and his aides, to the hegoumenos and monks of the monastery, also giving candles, alms, kollyva, bread, and money to the poor.114 The present study offers preliminary findings on the rites of burial and post-mortem commemorations that draw on Moldavian testaments and lists of expenses from the early seventeenth century to the third decade of the nineteenth century. Across several generations there are no observable shifts in the patterns of funeral and commemorative rites, apart from some details due to economic and cultural changes in Moldavia. Notable changes are visible in the diversification of sites chosen by testators as recipients of their bequests made in the hope of gaining redemption of their souls and obtaining divine forgiveness. The Church remained the main recipient, but, starting from the mid-eighteenth century, the list of recipients grows and includes the Hospital of the St. Spiridon Monastery in Iai,115 as well as other hospitals and schools, and even planned “homes for children” (orphanages)116 in Moldavia’s capital city and towns.

Notes 1 Mircea Eliade, Arta de a muri: Antologie. 2nd, enlarged edition, eds. Magda Ursache and Petru Ursache (Editura Eikon: Cluj-Napoca, 2006), 119. 2 Arhivele Naionale Iai (hereafter: ANI), Mitropolia Moldovei, CLII/35 (copy, confirmed by the Divan of Moldova on 22 September 1811); Gh. Ghib
nescu, Surete i izvoade (Documente Kog
lniceneti între 1528–1828), vol. XXV (Iai: Institutul de Arte Grafice 1932), 124–29, no. CXVII. 3 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Tratat despre moarte, trans. Ilie Gyurcsik and Margareta Gyurcsik (Timioara: Editura Amarcord, 2000), 25–8. (First published as La Mort [Paris: Flammarion, 1966]). 4 Ioan Tanoviceanu, “Viaa i diiata marelui logof
t Ioan Bogdan,” Noua revist
 român
I/3 (1990):130-34 (16 July 1762); Constantin Bobulescu, Banul T
nas
 Gosan (Bucharest, 1928), 59–64 (6 April 1828). 5 On 27 March 1715, the priest Grigorie from M
rgineni wrote: “I have written this testament under the instructions of Lady Ania Aslan” (Biblioteca Academiei Române [hereafter BAR], Documente istorice, CXVI/5). 6 Toma G. Bulat, Documentele m
n
stirii V
ratec (1497–1836) (Chiin
u, 1939), no. LXVIII (14 April 1788).

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia

45

7 ANI, M
n
stirea Neam, LXXXVII/21 (16 April 1707); Dionisie Uditeanu, Misail mitropolitul Moldovei i Sucevei, ed. Mircea Motrici (Suceava: Editura Muatinii, 2007), 121–24 (text), 101-107 (analysis); Catalogul documentelor româneti din Direcia Arhivelor Centrale (hereafter CDM), V, Bucharest, eds. Veronica Vasilescu and Doina Duca-Tinculescu (Bucharest, 1974), 167–68, no. 644. 8 Antim Ivireanul, Opere, ed. Gabriel  trempel (Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1972), 390–93; Nicolae Iorga, “O formul
de testament,” in C
ri i scriitori români din veacurile XVII–XIX (Bucharest, 1906), 18–20; Violeta Barbu, “‘Sic moriemur’”: Moartea i construcia identit
ii individuale în interiorul familiei,” in eadem, De bono coniugali: O istorie a familiei din ara Româneasc
în secolul al XVII-lea (Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 2003), 147–50. 9 Artur Gorovei, Partea sufletului: Un vechi obicei juridic al poporului român (F
lticeni, 1925), 17 pp.; Emanoil Em. S
voiu, Contribuiuni la studiul succesiunii testamentare în vechiul drept românesc (Craiova: Editura Ramuri, 1942), 76–80; idem, Partea sufletului în istoria dreptului 
rii Româneti (Craiova: Editura Sitech, 2010), 67 pp. 10 Violeta Barbu, “Câteva diate munteneti din a doua jum
tate a secolului al XVII-lea,” Revista de istorie social
I (1996): 495–506; Maria Magdalena Székely, “Testamentele: O abordare preliminar
,” Revista de istorie social
 II–III (1997–1998): 25–9; Barbu, “‘Sic moriemur,’” in eadem, De bono coniugali, 134–66, 201–207; Mariana Laz
r, “‘Gândul mieu c
tr
motenitorii miei cei alei’: Diata Ilinc
i Cantacuzino-Racovi
,” in Miscellanea historica et archaeologica in honorem Professoris Ionel Cândea, eds.Valeriu Sârbu and Cristian Luca, (Br
ila: Editura Istros, 2009) 477–97; Constana Vintil
-Ghiulescu, “‘Spre b
trânee m-am povârnit’: Diata marelui ban al 
rii Româneti, Grigore Greceanu (1748),” Studii si materiale de istorie medie XXX (2012): 149–68; Mariana Laz
r and Gheorghe Laz
r, “‘Pentru sufletul meu i pentru clironomii mei am orânduit’: Diata marelui logof
t al Moldovei Iordache Cantacuzino,” in Aut viam inveniam aut faciam: In honorem tefan Andreescu, eds. Ovidiu Cristea, Petronel Zahariuc, and Gheorghe Laz
r (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” 2012), 255–88; Elena Bedreag, “ ‘La vrerea mea s
-i dau au ba dintr-ale mele lucruri’: Diata marelui vornic Iordache Ruset,” in Mihai Dim. Sturdza la 80 de ani: Omagiu, eds. Mircea Ciubotaru and Lucian-Valeriu Lefter (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2014), 571–86; Dan Dumitru Iacob, “Testamentul vornicului Gheorghe Beldiman din 25 mai 1790,” in Retrospecii medievale: In honorem Professoris Emeriti Ioan Caprou, eds. Victor Spinei, Laureniu R
dvan, and Arcadie M. Bodale (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2014), 291–330; Mária Lupescu Makó, “Zis i scris: Oralitate i scriere în testamente,” in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie “G. Bariiu.” Series Historica”, supliment 1, 2015 (Literacy Experiences concerning Medieval and Early Modern Transylvania, eds. Susana Andea and Adinel Ciprian Dinc
), 13–31. 11 Philippe Ariès, Omul în faa morii, I–II, trans. Andrei Niculescu (Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 1996) (first published as L’homme devant la mort [Paris: Seuil, 1977]); Robert Favre, La mort au siècle des Lumières (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1978) (new online edition, 8 September 2020); Michel Vovelle, Mourir autrefois: Attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, online edition, 2014); idem, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978). See also the special issue of Caiete de antropologie istoric
III/1–2 (5–6) (2004): Oamenii i moartea în societatea româneasc
. 12 Andrei Pippidi, “Vision de la mort et de lau-delà dans les anciennes sources roumaines,” Revue roumaine dhistoire 1–2 (1994): 91.

46

Petronel Zahariuc

13 Ene Branite, Liturgica special
pentru Facult
ile de Teologie, 5th edition (Bucharest: Editura Basilica, 2008), 383–407. 14 Vovelle, Piété baroque, 57. 15 ANI, M
n
stirea Brazi, XXX/4 (28 February 1703); CDM, V, 50, no. 197. 16 Biblioteca Naional
Bucureti (hereafter BNB), Documente, L/27 (1708–1709; court decision of Prince Mihai Racovi
, in the case of Ursu Bulai vs Ion Purece postelnic, in which the former contested the testament of his sister, Maria, written in favor of the latter, who was her stepson). 17 Gheorghe Laz
r, “Studiu introductiv,” in idem, M
rturie pentru posteritate: Testamentul negustorului Ioan B
lu
 din Craiova (Br
ila: Editura Istros, 2010), 9–62. 18 Older collections of testaments include: L.T. Boga, Documente basarabene, III. Testamente i danii (1672–1858) (Chiin
u, 1929), 94 pp. (50 testaments from the collections of the State Archives in Chiin
u); Nicolae Iorga, Anciens documents de droit roumain, II (Paris-Bucarest, 1931), 304–14. 19 Lucian-Valeriu Lefter, “Osp
ul funerar în Moldova: M
rturii istorice i etnologice,” Anuarul Muzeului etnografic al Moldovei X (2010): 475–500; idem, “Izvoade funerare, I, II,” Anuarul Muzeului etnografic al Moldovei IV (2004): 307–322’; V (2005): 307–34; Gheorghe Laz
r, “Cheltuielile de înmormântare a unei jupânese de alt
dat
: Cazul Mariei Greceanu,” in Mihai Dim. Sturdza la 80 de ani: Omagiu, 777–97; idem, “Despre averea unui slujitor domnesc: Cazul c
pitanului Anton Arapul,” in Retrospecii medievale: In honorem Professoris emeriti Ioan Caprou, 351-72. 20 Ion Chi ter, “Credinele i riturile de înmormântare în Evul Mediu românesc,” Anuarul Arhivei de Folclor XV–XVII (1994–1996): 279–80 (“an unusual document”: a list of funeral expenses for his late wife, Maria, excerpts; the entire document is in Iulian Marinescu, “Documente relative la Ioan Neculce,” Buletinul Comisiei Istorice a României IV (1925): 72–5, no. 33). 21 ANI, Spiridonie, II/92 (Romanian-language original); Documente privind istoria României, XVII/3 (hereafter DIR) (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 1954), 101-102, no. 165 (text reproduced after the original). 22 We do not know the reason why Gligorie and Sora replaced the Monastery of the Archangels in Suceava, their aunt’s choice, with the monastery at Icani, dedicated to the dormition of the Virgin Mary. Nicolae Stoicescu, Repertoriul bibliografic al localit
ilor i monumentelor medievale din Moldova (Bucharest, 1974), 797-98, 800. 23 ANI, Spiridonie, II/91 bis (document in Slavic, unpublished, undated; Gligorie’s name can be seen on the seal used to authenticate the document). 24 I. Minea and L.T. Boga, “Cum se moteneau moiile în ara Româneasc
pân
 la sfâritul secolului al XVI-lea? Contribuii la istoria vechiului drept din ara Româneasc
,” Cercet
ri istorice VIII–IX/3 (1932–1933): 237. 25 ANI, Spiridonie, II/9; DIR, XVII/3, pp. 101–102, no. 165. 26 BAR, Documente istorice, MCCLV/20 (29 January 1679; “therefore, I made this testament and this writ,” Statie former treasurer). 27 CDM, V, no. 1229 (7 June 1714). 28 “The remembrance service for the dead is performed upon demand from private individuals, on the third, ninth, and fortieth day after the demise, and at three, six, or nine months after the demise.” Vasile Mitrofanovici, Teodor Tarnavschi, and Nectarie Nicolae Cotlarciuc, Liturgica Bisericii Ortodoxe: Cursuri universitare (Cern
ui, 1929), 904. 29 Branite, Liturgica special
, 402 and note 100. See also Ioan Mircea, “Cultul morilor în Biserica Ortodox
 dup
 Sfânta Scriptur
 i Sfânta Tradiie,” Ortodoxia XXXVII/ 2 (1985): 465–95; Eugen Dr
goi, Înmormântarea i pomenirile pentru mori, 6th edition (Galai: Editura Partener, 2014), 47 pp.

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47

30 “Three days after the funeral, the kollyva is brought to church, and on the 9th, 21st and 40th days, there is a feast with kollyva and colaci [ring-shaped wheat breads], called panakhida. Alexandru Lambrior, Studii de lingvistic
 i folcloristic
, ed. Ion Nu
(Iai: Editura Junimea, 1976), 190. “The custom is for seven feasts. The first, named “de 
rân
” or “al 
rânei” [litt. “of the dust”] takes place immediately after interment. The second takes place “on the third day” and aims to placate the soul of the departed, said to be lingering in the house and to be able to “see and hear” everything.” Ion H. Ciubotaru, “Folclorul obiceiurilor familiale din Moldova (Marea Trecere),” Caietele Arhivei de Folclor VII (1986): XLV. For a documentary illustration, see Ion Neculce’s list of funeral expenses for his wife, dated 20 January 1738, in Marinescu, Documente relative la Ioan Neculce, 73. 31 Branite, Liturgica special
, 402, note 100. 32 Petre  . N
sturel, Le Mont Athos et les roumains: Recherches sur leurs relations du milieu du XIVe siécle à 1654, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 227, Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium (Rome, 1986), 194–95. 33 BAR, Documente istorice, CLXXXVIII/260 (6 August 1701). 34 Ibid., CXXI/28 (15 July 1796). 35 Iulian Marinescu, “Copii de documente din diferite arhive (1557–1863),” Buletinul Comisiei Istorice a României VIII (1929): 88–97, no. 15 (27 February 1767), the testament of Vasile Ruset hetman). See also Ion H. Ciubotaru, Marea trecere: Repere etnologice în ceremonialul funebru din Moldova (Bucharest: Editura “Grai i Suflet. Cultura Naional
”, 1999), 162–79. 36 Uricariul, XVII, ed. Theodor Codrescu, (Iai, 1891), 56–7. 37 ANI, Mitropolia Moldovei, CLII/35; Gh. Ghib
nescu, Surete i izvoade, XXV, 126, no. CXVII. 38 For the Romanian currency leu (pl. lei) and the variations of its exchange rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Gh. Zane, Economia de schimb în Principatele Române, ed. Gheorghe Luac (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2010), 121-26. 39 BAR, Documente istorice, LXIII/1 (20 December 1720). 40 BAR, CXX/137 (25 February 1745); Marinescu, Documente relative la Ioan Neculce, 81–2, no. 36. 41 Mihai Cost
chescu, “Documente: Lucruri din Moldova,” Ioan Neculce 3 (1923): 113–114 (18 December 1729). 42 ANI, Spiridonie, I/87 (1760). 43 Idem, Ms. 628 (Condica Asachi I), fols. 297v–298r; CDM, IV, eds. Mihai Regleanu et al. (Bucharest, 1970), 86, no. 299 (abstract). 44 Bulat, Documentele m
n
stirii V
ratec, 152, no. LXVIII (14 April 1788). 45 Uricariul, XIX, ed. Theodor Codrescu (Iai, 1891), 39–40 (6 December1792). 46 N. Iorga, Documente privitoare la familia Callimachi, II (Bucharest, 1903), 142 (the year was 1813). 47 BAR, Documente istorice, DCCCXLV/263 (1 January 1837; original document, bearing the signature of vornic Dracachi Ruset). The chamberlain Dracachi Ruset (Baston) died on 15 September 1841 and was buried at Dancu Monastery in Iai. Radu Rosetti, Familia Rosetti, I: Coborâtorii moldoveni ai lui Lascaris Rousaitos (Bucharest: Monitorul Oficial i Imprimeriile Statului, 1938), 152–54. 48 Ibid., DCCCXLV/264 (June 1835; original document, signed by Dracachi Ruset. 49 Branite, in Liturgia special
, 405-406, considers the term s
r
cust
to be of Greek origin, “from        μ  = the fortieth day.” However, it is widely accepted today that it comes from the Slavic word soroc = forty. Ofelia V
duva, Magia darului (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedic
, 1997), 179. The word s
r
cust
 was less often used in Moldavia, where the term s
rindar was

48

50

51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Petronel Zahariuc preferred. For a rare use of s
r
cust
, see the testament of Simion Gheuca, a court official, dated 6 July 1635; ANI, Documente, CLXXIX/9; Documenta Romaniae Historica, XXIII, eds. Leon  imanschi and Nistor Ciocan (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 1996), 194–95, no. 159. On 5 December 1629, Ana Ciuroaia gifted a plot of land to priest Ionacu from Bârg
oani “for the soul of her daughter, Costanda, who died without the last rites, to have a s
rindar and parastas for the good of her soul.” Uricariul, XXV, ed. Theodor Codrescu (Iai, 1895), 132. CDM, Supliment I, eds. Maria Soveja et al. (Bucharest, 1975), 249–50, no. 766. BAR, Documente istorice, CCXXIV (November 1720); Bedreag, “Diata marelui vornic Iordache Ruset,” 582. Gh. Ghib
nescu, “Testamentul vornicului Constantin Paladi i al soiei sale, Ilinca Costachi,” Arhiva XXVI/9–10 (1915): 252 (“one hundred s
rindare to be said in one hundtred churches, 40 should be here in the city of Iai, and 60 should be given to poorer sketes and churches”). BAR, Documente istorice, CXII/70 b (an abstract, incorrectly dated to “5 March 1699,” and entered under the name of “Dumitraco Cuza (?),” was published by N. Iorga in Studii i documente cu privire la istoria românilor, XI (Bucharest, 1906), 93. Arhiva m
n
stirii Xiropotam, Muntele Athos, nr. 491; Documente româneti din arhiva m
n
stirii Xiropotam de la Muntele Athos, I, eds. Florin Marinescu, Ioan Caprou, and Petronel Zahariuc (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza,” 2005), 233, no. 491 (2 December 1794). Mariana Laz
r and Gheorghe Laz
r, “Diata marelui logof
t al Moldovei Iordache Cantacuzino,” 271 (3 July 1819). BAR, Documente istorice, MCCLV/20 (29 January 1679). I. Caprou, O istorie a Moldovei prin relaiile de credit pân
la mijlocul secolului al XVIII-lea (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza,” 1989), 142–45. On 6 August 1701,  tefana, the wife of the court steward Zaharia, requested that her young relative Cârstian “pays all her debts, and gives the due money to the servants, so that we are not to be damned to endless labor .” BAR, Documente istorice, CLXXXVIII/260. Ibid., DCXCVI19 (15 March 1744). Bobulescu, Banul T
nas
Gosan, 61–2. BAR, Documente istorice, CXLIV/136 (23 March 1764). On adoptions and the concept of “soul child,” see the chapter by Elena Bedreag and Mihai Mîrza in the present volume. (Editors’ note). Ibid., CCCVIII/21 (5 December 1735). Ibid., XLV/86 (10 February 1691). A. Vitencu, “Documente,” Ioan Neculce 4 (1924): 205–206, no. CXXXV (5 June 1740). ANI, M
n
stirea Doljeti, XIV/1 (15 January 1715). Ibid., XIV/2 (25 February 1717). Iacov Antonovici, Documente bârl
dene, IV (Bârlad, 1924), 170 (circa 1740: a list of funeral expenses for the high-ranking boyar Toader Sturza); BAR, Documente istorice, LXXXVI/79 (30 November 1740, funeral expenses of court official Vasile, who died at Bogdan-Serai in Istanbul); ibid., CXX/137 (“a register of what I owe, in the year 7253 , February 25, for the funerary feast, prayers, and s
rindari,” signed by Ion Neculce, former high vornic (chamberlain); Iulian Marinescu, Documente relative la Ioan Neculce, 81–2; BAR, Documente istorice, MDXLIV/8 (8 June 1747, a register of the remainder of the assets of the late priest  tefan from Odobeti and of the expenses for his disinterment; ibid., LXXXVI/137 (7 April 1759, a register of expenses for the

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia

69

70 71

72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82

83

49

interment of treasurer Dumitraco Palade); ibid., DCXLIVI/12 (2 October 1772); N. Iorga, Documente privitoare la familia Callimachi, II, 140–41 (burial expenses for Ruxandra Callimachi); Gh. Ghib
nescu, Surete i izvoade, X (Documente cu privire la familia Râcanu) (Iai: Tipografia Dacia, 1915), 299–305, nos. CL, CLI (circa 1831). BAR, Documente istorice, CXII/70 b (6 July 1673, the testament of court official AndreiaIanovici); ibid., CLXXXVIII/260 (6 August 1701: the testament of  tefanei, wife of court official Zaharia); Uricariul, XVII, 56–7 (10 May 1767, the testament of monkVeniamin, son of Constantin N
stas
); T.T. Burada, “Documente,” Ioan Neculce 4 (1924): 127–28, no. XXIII (25 August 1773, the testament of Lupaco Covrig, elder of the undertakers’ guild); Uricariul, XI, ed. Theodor Codrescu, 322–36 (15 May 1805 and 21 March 1809, the testament of high treasurer Iordache Bal); ibid., 337–60 (30 January 1822 and 5 June 1822, the testament of court chancellor Constantin Bal); Ghib
nescu, Testamentul vornicului Constantin Paladi i al soiei sale, Ilinca Costachi, 251–53. Cristina Dobre-Bogdan, “Moartea i lumea veche româneasc
(în textele cronicarilor moldoveni i munteni),” in “Imago mortis” în cultura român
veche (secolele XVII–XIX) (Bucharest: Editura Universit
ii din Bucureti, 2002), 120–82. Dimitrie Cantemir, Descrierea Moldovei, trans. from the Latin by Gh. Guu (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1973), 241–244, 331–334; Anton-Maria del Chiaro Fiorentino, Revoluiile Valahiei, trans. 1929 by S. Cris-Cristian (Iai: Editura Tehnopress), 2005, 58–62. C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, VI, eds. M.M. Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru and Mustafa Ali Mehmet (Bucharest: Editura  tiinific
i Enciclopedic
, 1976), 70–2: the mid-seventeenth-century journey of Paul de Alep (Paul of Aleppo), section “Înmormântarea în Moldova.” Ion H. Ciubotaru, Obiceiurile funebre din Moldova în context naional (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza,” 2014), 762 pp. Marco Bandini, Codex. Vizitarea general
a tuturor Bisericilor catolice de rit roman din provincia Moldova 1646–1648, bilingual edition, ed. Traian Diaconescu (Iai: Editura Presa Bun
, 2006), 414–15. See also Ion H. Ciubotaru, Catolicii din Moldova: Universul culturii populare, II (Obiceiurile familiale i calendaristice) (Iai: Editura Presa Bun
, 2002) 141–207. Documenta Catholicorum Moldaviae, A. Documente româneti, I. Fondul Episcopiei Romano-Catolice Iai, I (1627–1750), eds. Silviu V
caru and Anton Despinescu (Iai: Editura Presa Bun
, 2002), 103-104, no. 49 (8 April 1718). BAR, Documente istorice, CXXXV/156 (5 August 1744). Cantemir, Descrierea, 331. BAR, Documente istorice, CXII/70 b; Chi ter, “Credinele i riturile de înmormântare,” 270 (after Iorga, Studii i documente, XI, 93). Vezi Teodor T. Burada, Datinile poporului român la înmormânt
ri (Iai: 1882), 71–157; Ciubotaru, “Folclorul obiceiurilor familiale din Moldova,” LV–CXI. Iorga, Documente privitoare la familia Callimachi, II, 140. S.Fl. Marian, Înmormântarea la români: Studiu etnografic (Bucharest, 1892), 161–88; Ciubotaru, Obiceiurile funebre din Moldova, 207-214; Ion Ghinoiu, Lumea de aici, lumea de dincolo: Ipostazele româneti ale nemuririi (Bucharest: Editura Fundaiei Culturale Române, 1999), 251–53. According to Bishop Iacov Antonovici, glitter “was used to paint the figs, lemons, and oranges, that were then pinned into S-shaped or 8-shaped bread rolls, called capete by folk in Moldavia and still made for funerals today.” Antonovici, Documente bârl
dene, IV, 170–71. As an example, for the commemorative services for postelnic (court superintendent) Gheorghe Canan
u a great number of cattle were slaughtered: “an ox,

50

84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97

Petronel Zahariuc 6 sheep for the firtst commemoration; 4 sheep, at 15 days; 6 sheep, at 20 days; 1 cow, 6 sheep, at 40 days; 1 cow, 3 sheep, at half a year; 1 cow, 6 sheep, at one year; 1 cow, 2 sheep, at 2 years.” N. Iorga, Studii i documente cu privire la istoria românilor, XXI (Bucharest: Editura Ministerului de Instrucie, 1911), 130. De La Croix, secretary at the French embassy in Constantinople, noted in 1676 that the funeral feast after the burial of a Romanian ruling prince “closed with the distribution or roast meat to the poor, especially beef; there was a slaughter of over fifty cattle for the event.” C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, VII, eds. Maria Holban, M.M. Alexandrescu Dersca-Bulgaru, and Paul Cernovodeanu (Bucharest: Editura  tiinific
i Enciclopedic
, 1980), 266–67; Paul Simionescu and Paul Cernovodeanu, “Pagini de etnografie româneasc
în opera memorialistic
a unor c
l
tori str
ini (secolele XVII-XVIII),” Revista de etnografie i folclor XVII/5 (1972): 380. I only saw pork mentioned in one list of expenses for the commemoration feast of six months after the death of M
riua Holban. Ghib
nescu, Surete i izvoade, X, 304; circa 1830). C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, V, eds. Maria Holban, M.M. Alexandrescu Dersca-Bulgaru, and Paul Cernovodeanu (Bucharest: Editura  tiinific
i Enciclopedic
, 1973), 77. Ion H. Ciubotaru, “Aspecte ale ceremonialului funerar din Moldova,” Anuarul de folclor V–VII (1984–1986): 260–64; see also idem, Folclorul obiceiurilor familiale din Moldova, LI-LIV. For a more recent outline of the funerary feast see Violeta Barbu, “The ‘Emperor’s Pantry’: Food, Fasting and Feasting in Wallachia (17th–18th Centuries),” in Earthly Delights: Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, eds. Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu (Leiden: Brill, 2018), esp. 230-31. Ofelia V
duva, Pai spre sacru: Din etnologia alimentaiei româneti (Bucharest: Editura Etnologic
, 2011), 182–86. Bulat, Documentele m
n
stirii V
ratec,154. Uricariul, XI, 334 (15 May 1805). BAR, Documente istorice, LXXXVI/79. ANI, Documente, MXLII/1. The document was mentioned by  tefan Lemny in Sensibilitate i istorie în secolul XVIII românesc (Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 1990), 128. “Tabelul genealogic al familiei Bal,” in Familiile boiereti din Moldova i ara Româneasc
: Enciclopedie istoric
, genealogic
i biografic
, I, ed. Mihai Dim. Sturdza, (Bucharest: Editura Simetria, 2004), 252–55. Ciubotaru, Obiceiurile funebre din Moldova,174-176, 181–82. Ibid., 212–214. Black kerchiefs worn for grieving were also noted by the Swedish officer E.H. Schneider von Weismantel in a diary of his journey to Moldavia in 1710–1714. C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, VIII, eds. Maria Holban, M M. Alexandrescu Dersca-Bulgaru, and Paul Cernovodeanu (Bucharest: Editura  tiinific
i Enciclopedic
, 1983), 363. Anton Maria del Chiaro Fiorentino noted that the family of the deceased “dyed their old clothes black.” (Revoluiile Valahiei, 60). BAR, Documente istorice, CM/214 (27 April 1833; the coffin of court superintendent Ioan Vârnav was lowered into the grave of his father, the ban (governor) Constantin Vârnav, whose remains were collected in a bag and left in the grave. Alms were distributed among members of the boyar class and clergy, all named and presumably belonging to the inner circle of the deceased. Ibid., CM/216/ Cantemir, Descrierea, 241.

The Cult of the Dead in Moldavia

51

98 Cuvânt
ri de înmormântare i pomenire (din veacul al XVI-lea pân
la 1850), ed. N. Iorga (V
lenii de Munte, 1909), 21–138. 99 BAR, Documente istorice, CM/215, 229; CM/265; CM/266; CM/267; CM/220. 100 Ibid., CMI/55 (5 May 1834). 101 C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, VI, 71. 102 Ghib
nescu, Testamentul vornicului Constantin Paladi i al soiei sale, Ilinca Costachi, 251. 103 BAR, Documente istorice, CLXXXVIII/260 (6 August 1701). 104 Burada, Datinile poporului român la înmormânt
ri, 51. 105 BAR, Documente istorice, DCXX/117 (testament of Constantin Fetil
, dated 11 January 1776). 106 ANI, Documente, CDLX/64 (2 March 1774; in their testament,  tefan Capa and his wife, Maria, request the foundation of the monastery at Broteni, Suceava county). 107 N. Iorga, “Testamentul unui c
lug
r de la începutul veacului al XIX-lea,” Studii i documente cu privire la istoria românilor, XXII (Bucharest: Editura Ministerului de Instrucie Public
, 1913), 222. 108 Uricariul, XI, 325, 327. 109 BAR, Documente istorice, CXII/70 b (6 July 1673); Archives of Protaton, Mount Athos, no. 236 (24 July 1786; Ρμ   Α . Α   Π, ed. Florin Marinescu [Athens, 2001], 295, no. 383); Documente româneti din arhiva m
n
stirii Xiropotam de la Muntele Athos, I (2 December 1794); BAR, Documente istorice, CXXI/28 (15 July 1796); ANI, Mitropolia Moldovei, CLII/35 (1811); Mariana Laz
r and Gheorghe Laz
r, “Diata marelui logof
t al Moldovei Iordache Cantacuzino,” 271 (July 1819). 110 C
l
tori str
ini despre 
rile Române, VI, 70–71. 111 Branite, Liturgica special
, 406-407. 112 Uricariul, XI, 345 (30 January 1822); Bulat, Documentele m
n
stirii V
ratec, 188 (10 April 1827); Iorga, “Testamentul unui c
lug
r,” 222. 113 For the Ruset family, see Rosetti, Familia Rosetti, I, 102–103). 114 BAR, Documente istorice, DCCCXLV/53 (circa 1800). 115 From its foundation, the hospital of the St. Spiridon Monastery was considered “the best and most useful” recipient for their donations, both for the “remembrance of their souls” and towards “the support of the holy church and the expenses at the hospital for the care of the poor of the burg of Iai.” (ANI, Spiridonie, X/9; 15 February 1760). 116 Uricariul, XI, 50 (30 January 1822; the high-ranking boyar Constantin Bal requested the following: “should there be one day any prospect in the city of Iai for the building of an orfanotrofion,” his sons should donate 1,000 lei per year to this establishment, referred to under its Greek-derived name.

3

“The Last Passage” Commemorative Discourse and Practices in the Testaments of Merchants (Wallachia, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries)* Gheorghe Laz
r

Nearly half a century ago, the pioneering studies of Michel Vovelle and Pierre Chaunu1 marked the moment when the study of testaments became an important research area in Western historiography. Testaments were recognized as required sources for the understanding of human societies from the Middle Ages to at least the early modern age, and especially for the understanding of Western “attitudes toward death,” to use the title of a seminal work by Philippe Ariès.2 Romanian historiography was slow to catch up during the communist regime (1945–1990), when Marxist ideological constraints marginalized the use of such sources. The few references to such documents were largely theoretical and limited to their juridical implications. This changed significantly after 1990 as Romanian researchers’ new interest in the detailed study of last wills and testaments resulted in a substantial number of studies that look at these sources from multiple perspectives.3 Having looked at family relations and their impact on the economic practices of merchants in Wallachia (Ro. ara Româneasc
) in an earlier study,4 in the present chapter I am exploring the discourse and imagery in testaments of merchants that reflect their religious behaviour and their attitudes to death. In particular, I have tried to identify those elements of the testamentary discourse that shed light on themes such as, for example: an awareness of the fragility of earthly life; requests for forgiveness, both human and divine; the planning of the funeral and choice of place of interment; clauses pertaining to postmortem commemorative rites; with the required intervals and the sums of money to be allocated to each. Predictably – and it is something that the literature on the topic has long recognized – Wallachian merchants did not differ from their peers elsewhere in their wish to use testaments to express their attachment to Christian values, their angst in the face of the last journey and fear of Divine Judgment. Some testators also touched – sometimes discreetly –

*This research was supported by a grant from the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0263, within PNCDI III.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-5

The “Last Passage”

53

upon their hope of leaving behind a good reputation, often linked to a respectable socioeconomic status. The present analysis is based on data from a documentary corpus of around one hundred such archival sources, covering the period from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the first three decades of the nineteenth (1831).

“For Every Man’s Life Must Reckon with Death, It Is Well Known” Unsurprisingly, as anticipated from the study of testaments belonging to other social groups in Wallachia, merchants, too, included a discourse on the meaning of death in the preamble to their wills. Their reflections were focused largely on themes such as the fragility and transitoriness of earthly life, the possibility of a serene acceptance of the inevitability of death as a defining and unavoidable feature of the human condition.5 These documents were formulaic and stereotypical, with stylistically more elaborate variations depending on the period. What they illustrate, alongside the universal attachment of the testators to the teachings of the Christian Church, is, on a more mundane level, the popularity of the format recommended for these documents by the Metropolitan Antim Ivireanul (Anthimos of Ivíria) in his work Capete de porunc
 la toat
 ceata bisericeasc
 (Instructions to all priests and clerics) (1714).6 None of the 9 testaments available for the period 1670–1714 follows the format prescribed by the high church hierarchy, but after 1714 most testaments allow ample space to the preamble – an indirect proof of the popularity and authority of the metropolitan’s norms. The only testaments that do not include a preamble with the testators’ reflections on death are those of individuals surprised by a “hasty” or accidental death.7 Beyond what was often emphatic rhetoric, testamentary preambles drew on a discourse on death with shared recognizable themes and features across Europe,8 including Wallachia.9 Here are a few examples gleaned from Wallachian testaments: a

b

c

Human life is transient and ephemeral (“for man’s life is like grass, his days like the flowers of the field” (a reference to 1 Peter 1:24) – Mihai draper, 20 December 171410; “for every man’s life must reckon with death, it is well known” – Dimitrie haberdasher, 22 January180411); The salvific nature of alms and pious bequests (“for all good deeds done and alms given, no matter to whom, are useful for the soul and save a man from the depths of hell” – Zmaranda hagica, 16 March 1817)12; It is the duty of all good Christians to set their house and wealth in order so that the great passage does not find them unprepared (“every Christian must always be prepared for that journey and put his worldly goods in order in a thrifty manner” – Arghira D
rasca, 1 March 1811).13

54

Gheorghe Laz
r

This oratorical repertoire often included references to biblical figures such as the Evangelists John14 and Mark,15 the Apostle Paul, and the Prophet David.16 The wealth of religious references might suggest that the testators wished to present themselves as true upholders of the faith.17 However, it is difficult to apportion the contributions of those involved in the compilation of the testaments and one can presume that professionals had their role. Many testators were not literate enough to be able to give their testaments the final polish, a fact that was often spelled out in the documents themselves.18 Another key section in the format of testaments of the merchant class in Wallachia included the theme of reconciliation with Divinity and with one’s peers: this, too, was in accordance with Metropolitan Antim’s prescriptions.19 Testators expressed their hope that, for any sins that they may have committed in life, “as a man is bound to do in this world,” they will have God’s forgiveness, as well as that of their peers, who, in turn, were offered forgiveness. This is what, to cite just one example, Mihai, a cloth dealer, wrote in his testament dated 1714: “Now, therefore, I pray God to have mercy on all our erring Christian brethren and may He also have mercy on my soul, sinner that I am. I also beg my kin and all my Christian brethren to forgive me, as I forgive them.”20 Unfortunately, the sparse and formulaic style of testamentary preambles – across all social groups – do not allow a deeper insight into the emotions underpinning the death rhetoric, into the testators’ feelings when facing the “great passage,” into their eschatological vision, as it were. As more testaments will be published and analyzed in light of the growing homiletic literature of the eighteenth century, historians will be in a better position to analyze the mental and emotional attitudes of individuals facing their own demise.21

The Spectacle of Death The hope of obtaining divine forgiveness at the Last Judgment was intertwined with a more mundane aim of striving to build and perpetuate an image of respectability and leave an honourable memory. Some merchant testators left precise instructions for the rites to be performed at the pogrebanie (from Sl. pogrebanije = burial).22 The quantitative analysis of testaments revealed that, although such testamentary requests became more frequent from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, they never appeared in more than 25–30 per cent of the sample of documents considered here. The earliest document in the sample to include such a request is the testament of the aforementioned Mihai, a draper by trade (1714), who asked for the considerable sum of 180 thaler to be spent on his funeral. He also requested that, for this money, he expected a lavish ceremony and liturgical service (Ro. s
m
grijeasc
frumos), so that his last moments on earth should leave a good memory for his kin and peers.23 Significant sums of burial money, often accompanied by specific requests for a ceremony that should be “fine,

The “Last Passage”

55

as befits my status” (Ro. frumoas
, cum mi se cade), are also listed in the testaments of the merchants Constantin, son of Maxim (150 thaler) (6 February 1735),24 Chirica (100 thaler) (6 October 1735),25 Petre (10 thaler and some immovable assets for one commemorative service) (15 July 1748),26 to mention only the more suggestive ones. Such pecuniary details were a clearly observable trend in the period considered and, beyond the testators’ wish to display their success and prosperity, they also imply a belief that a generous bequest might “buy” a ticket to divine forgiveness.27 This was a belief that endured, as suggested by the joint testament of June 1831 of the merchant Dimitrie Gheorghiu and his wife Elena, who left the highest sum of money known so far in the available documents for burial services. Having no direct descendants to inherit their wealth “in accordance with the laws of nature and the custom of the land,” the couple found an alternative way of disposing of it after sixteen years of marriage, during which, the document states, they lived “in love and within the honourable bonds befitting the union of man and wife.” Their assets were divided between close kin and specific religious establishments and 1000 thaler were allocated for the burial ceremony.28 In the Romanian lands, as elsewhere in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, death had become a “public affair, one that produced images and appearances crafted according to public taste.”29 Accordingly, some of the testators wanted their burial service to be led by a high-ranking church hierarch. The funeral involved priests, family members, people close to the deceased, as well as many strangers keen to attend such “spectacles,” which ended with the offer of food gifts, a widespread funerary custom.30 This multilayered pageantry was expected to enhance the image of the deceased as a good Christian while also celebrating the social standing and prestige earned in his or her earthly life. The earliest testament in the sample to include such a clause was that of Ilinca, the wife of the draper Mihai (1714). She entrusted her surviving former husband to make sure that her funeral would be led by the country’s highest-ranking prelate, the metropolitan: “ask his holiness the metropolitan to be kind and trouble himself to be there at the burial.” In addition, she left 15 thaler for a commemoration service.31 This type of request became ever more present in merchants’ testaments throughout the period and up to the late eighteenth century. In their testaments, Petre, a merchant born in Bulgaria (15 July 1748),32 and Pan
 (25 March 1785)33 both requested that their burial should be a “beauteous ceremony, as befits someone of my stature, and led by a bishop.” This “theatricalization” of death was still very much present in testaments compiled in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, which shows that, even as modernity dawned, individuals were still preoccupied with the post-mortem fate of their bodies and souls and made arrangements accordingly. Examples include Zamfira (wife of the tailor Manea),34 Neaga (wife of the late Ignat),35 Marica (wife of Bogdan, the hat-maker and dealer),36 and the grocer woman Cristina.37 All four ladies requested on their deathbeds that the

56

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r

funeral ceremony be led by no fewer than three archpriests,38 a detail which sets them apart from the rest of the sample. The only exception is the testament of Arghira D
rasca: she was content with just the presence of the land’s metropolitan at her funeral.39 However, there are many testaments that do not include requests for the burial, while others offer sketchy data on the basis of which it is difficult to recreate the ceremonial sequence of the funerals of merchants and other groups in Wallachia. We do have, nevertheless, one archival source that has exceptional value for death studies: the testament of the merchant Ioan B
lu
 from Craiova (the premier city of Oltenia, in southern Wallachia). Compiled in several stages and completed in 1831, after much reflection and with the authoritative endorsement of Bishop Neophytos of Râmnic (Ro. Neofit al Râmnicului),40 the testament is a document written in “loving detail”41 by a man who wished to be in control of every detail of his demise and funeral. First, a striking feature in the text is the testator’s concern for the presentation of his body, exposed to the more or less benevolent gaze (and judgment) of those attending the funeral. This concern illustrates not only a successful merchant’s wish to display his socioeconomic status, but also reflects a certain refinement in taste. For example, for his “final passage” (Ro. petrecerea cea de pe urm
), B
lu
 wanted to be buried in new, highquality, clothes, rather than in old, already-worn garments, which appears to have been the custom at funerals.42 He had a down-to-earth, pragmatic approach to “things” and their uses, but also one that was not devoid of a sense of humour. He asked, for example, that the fur cap (Tk. ba lık; Ro. i lic), normally used as headgear among the upper and middling classes, be replaced with the modern fez, explaining that in the other world he would have “no use” for the tall fur hat, an accessory with a powerful status and socioeconomic connotations at the time.43 Equally valuable – and unique in the period’s testaments – are the testator’s instructions regarding the coffin in which his body was to be laid and buried. This is closely related to one of the fundamental themes of Christian doctrine: divine creation and the return of the body to “dust.” The testator wanted his coffin to be made of perishable material, and, to accelerate the process of decomposition, he suggested the drilling of holes into the top of the coffin (clause no. 4).44 The merchant was also very punctilious in his recommendations for the set-up of his funeral procession. He allocated a sum of 1 500 thaler for the event and insisted on the presence of top-ranking clerics, as befitted the prestige and prosperity he achieved in his lifetime: the bishop of Râmnic, the parish priests active in the town of Craiova, and all other clerics and monks who might have resided in the town at that time. For their trouble, all were to be rewarded with a basma (kerchief) worth two thaler and a half each – and carefully wrapped in paper – as well as one thaler on top. The highest fee – 500 thaler – was reserved for the services of the highest-ranking hierarch. Ioan B
lu
“directed” his funeral procession like a consummate master of ceremonies, with due attention to the pomp and circumstance of the event.

The “Last Passage”

57

The route of the cortege was to take the coffin from his home to his chosen burial site, the Church of “Madona Dudu” in Craiova. The coffin was to be carried by eight “beloved brethren,” picked from his close friends and business associates. Contrary to tradition, which required that the coffin be left open during the funeral, B
lu
wanted his to be kept closed and covered with a “taclit (Tk. taklit = a small rug) made in Leipzig and costing up to ten dodekária.” He was concerned about the possible “nuisance” his decomposing body might be to those attending the event.45 Despite such graphic details, the solemnity of the moment had to remain safe and the testator wished that, throughout the procession, his coffin be accompanied by “wax lanterns” (Ro. f
clii d
 cear
),46 to be carried solely by the officiating priests.47 The entire burial ceremony was to be conducted as a celebration of the defunct man’s status in life: his “passing” was to be announced publicly by the tolling of all church bells in the “polity” of Craiova and beyond, in neighbouring counties, as well as in the country’s capital, Bucharest. Sums of money were earmarked carefully for each stage in this complex operation.

The Anxiety around the Body Some testaments of merchants included clauses specifying the sites where their bodies should be interred is another indicator of religious attitudes among this socio-professional class in the period considered here. However, such requests were only included in 20 per cent of the testaments included in the sample, which suggests that, compared to Western Europe,48 preferences for specific burial sites were not prevalent.49 Nevertheless, some merchants’ testaments indicate that they requested burial on the sites of religious establishments.50 It is difficult to establish whether this was done to comply with the testators’ wish or because those establishments granted such privileges as a reward for pious bequests. Further research over longer timespans and across other social groups might shed more light on this in the future. Returning to merchants’ testaments, however, the majority of those who addressed this issue requested that their bodies be laid to rest in churches or monasteries, although, in line with Byzantine tradition, such privilege was reserved to ktetors (founders) or ecclesiastical members of those establishments.51 Those who wanted to enjoy this privilege52 were known to have been founders of churches and monastic establishments and to have made endowments to secure post-mortem care for their bodies and souls – and there is no reason why merchants should have been an exception. Quite often, testaments mentioned simply the name of the site where the bodies were to be interred. For a significant number of merchants, however, the choice was dictated by the fact that family members – spouses, children, parents – were already buried at the site and therefore this would be a first step towards an easier reunion in the afterlife.53 An example is that of Matei, a tailor by trade, ailing and without close family, who expressed his wish to be buried “on the porch” of Stelea Church in Bucharest, where his first wife

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and some of the children they had had together were already resting. To secure this privilege, Matei endowed the church with his entire wealth, comprising two shops next to the Monastery of St. George (the New) in Bucharest.54 The church was the burial site of choice for another merchant and money-lender, Nica Papa, who wanted to lie by the side of his mother: he left 500 thaler and a silver icon light, along with the candleholder he had donated previously.55 In 1790, a nun named Anastasia requested a burial at Creulescu Church, where she had taken the solemn vows and where her former husband, Manole, a grocer, was already buried.56 Two decades later, Mistress (Ro. jupâneasa) Marica, the former wife of Bogdan, a hat-maker, made a bequest of 400 thaler to the Church of the Old St. George in Bucharest, because she wished to be buried there next to “my late husband and my son, Ionic
, and other kin.”57 Family solidarity was also the basis for testamentary requests by other merchants, to cite only a few: Constantin wanted to rest at Colea Monastery, next to his father58; Negoi
 Fusea at the Church of St. Vineri in Târgovite, where his parents and some of his siblings rested;59 Iane, who had migrated from a region south of the Danube and had settled in Wallachia, chose his burial place at the princely foundation at Râmnicu S
rat, where one of his brothers was buried.60 The prestige enjoyed by some religious establishments also had a part to play in the testators’ choice. The merchant Ianache, for example, wanted his body to be laid to rest in the burial aisle inside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Bucharest, although we know from his testament that both his wife and his brother were buried in other Wallachian towns: Câmpulung i Câmpina.61 Merchant Chiri
from Târgovite paid even greater attention to detail: he picked his site of choice, the Metropolitan Cathedral in Târgovite, but also asked specifically to be buried “on the church porch.”62 Mihai, a draper, wanted his remains to rest “inside, to the right” of the Monastery of the New St. George in Bucharest. This was the highly prestigious foundation of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu (r.1688–1714) and Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem (1669–1707), and one of the draper’s business associates, the merchant Apostol Lazaru, had contributed financially to the construction.63 The Colea Monastery in Bucharest, a foundation of the dignitary and army commander (Ro. mare sp
tar) Mihail Cantacuzino, included on its premises a hospital for the underprivileged. It was the burial site chosen by the merchant Lacar Dimitriu, originally from Târnovo (in today’s Bulgaria),64 as well as by Ilinca, former wife of the draper Mihai, who in addition asked for a “stone to be placed on the tomb in her memory.”65 This request appeared in other testaments and is undoubtedly an indicator of a concern for memorialization, but also a form of post-mortem “publicity exercise.” Thus, Adriana, the wife of the late merchant Constantin, requested that her remains be interred on the site of the skete (Gk.   , Ro. schit; a small monastic establishment dependent on a larger monastery) at Boldeti, with a “carved stone” on top.66

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59

Other religious establishments chosen by Wallachian merchants as their final resting places include the Monasteries Cernica,67 Arhimandritului,68 V
leni,69 as well as the Churches Enii,70 St. Ilie,71 and St. Nicolae in elari,72 all in the capital city Bucharest. There was only one case of a merchant – Petre, who had migrated from the south of the Danube – choosing for burial the church nearest to his place of residence, and, one may presume, of his commercial activities. His decision may have been due to the fact that his economic assets were probably modest judging from the relatively small donation of 10 thaler for just one commemorative service.73 In his testament dated December 1823, the merchant Cernea Popovici requested that his remains be buried either inside the church he had built on his estate at Zmârdioasa – “should I meet my end here on the estate” – or at the Monastery of St. Pantelimon if he died while away on business in Bucharest.74 On the topic of a choice of burial location, too, the testament of merchant Ioan B
lu
 again proves the best source, as he appears to have been someone who left no detail unplanned. He not only mentioned the name of the burial site – the Church of “Madona Dudu” in Craiova – but also the precise place in the church for interment: “by the holy altar to the north.”75 Being buried next to the altar makes a lot of sense: this was the sacred hub of the church, where the sacrament of Eucharist was received,76 so it was the best location where the testator could “remain present in the collective memory.”77 The choice of church was not random either: the merchant believed that the privilege he was seeking was justified by his status as trustee (Ro. epitrop) of the establishment, one who made significant endowments for its maintenance. In addition, there was his kinship to one of the church’s founders, the merchant Hagi Gheorghe Ioan, as well as, last but not least, the prestige of the religious establishment. This hope of perpetuating his name in posterity led B
lu
to ask that, over the tomb – which had to be around 180 centimeters deep (Ro. “adânc
d
trei coi”) – be “placed [ … ] a stone slab, and order it to be inscribed [ … ] so that I shall be remembered as time goes by.”78 A few testaments expressed concern for the post-mortem fate of the body: a small number of testators asked for their remains to be exhumed three years after death. This is a practice that the Eastern Church has been tolerating up to the present day and is to be explained through people’s fear of eternal damnation, a state that would have denied the dead any hope of absolution at the Last Judgment. The earliest testament in the sample to include such a request is that of the aforementioned draper Mihai (1714). He expressed his wish that his remains be disinterred after three years during a ceremony conducted by a patriarch.79 Hagi Constantin Malache (1770)80 and Zamfira, the wife of Manea, a tailor (1803),81 both wanted, after the lapse of the three years, to have a “disinterment and commemoration.” The former earmarked the precise sum of 250 thaler to be given as alms on that occasion. Ioan B
lu
’s testament is again on hand with the most interesting and unique details: it is the only documented case of a request for a two-tiered

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r

burial, a practice that Philippe Ariès has described solely for the illustrious dead.82 The testator asked his executors and the Bishop of Râmnic that his remains be disinterred “after four and up to five years after my inhumation.” The bones and the stone slab were to be moved to the site of the church in the P
tru Boji neighborhood in Craiova, where his parents, two former wives, and one of his sisters were buried. Haunted by the idea of original sin, the testator did not exclude the possibility that, upon exhumation, his body might be found in a state showing that he had not been granted “remission […] for his many sins.” Should this be the case, the merchant added, his remains were to be re-interred in the same place, with the greatest possible number of clerics saying the “prayers in accordance with canon and as demanded by our holy church of the East.” However, if our “father the bishop” approved, his bones could still be transferred to the P
tru Boji church, wrapped in a simple piece of cloth and to the accompaniment of the prayers required by the canons. In the hope that after all these ceremonials, his mortal remains could find “remission,” B
lu
demanded another exhumation after another threeyear period. For all these “disinterments” and canonical “checks” on his soul, he left 1500 thaler to reward for their trouble the hierarch and all “blessed priests and deacons” officiating the ceremony, as well as for 12 commemoration services and almsgiving to “impoverished houses.”83

“For the Solace of my Soul”: Post-Mortem Commemorations In the aforementioned study, Philippe Ariès observed that the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in Western Europe was one when “death was an occasion for having more liturgies,”84 a reflection of the collective belief in the medieval and early modern periods that the fate of the soul after death could be influenced not only by the dead person’s behaviour and faith in life but also by periodic prayers and intercessions by others after death. While there was a time lag between Western and Eastern Europe, this is an observation that can apply to the Romanian lands in general, and in particular to the Wallachian merchant class. A serial analysis of the sample of testaments used in this study has revealed that an overwhelming number of Wallachian merchants in the period considered here held strong beliefs on the need and efficacy of intercessional religious services both at the moment of death and in its aftermath.85 There were few Wallachian testaments that did not include a request for such post-mortem intercession.86 Most included specific clauses for the timeline of these “detailed liturgies,”87 (3, 5, and 7 years after death), as well as the precise sums of money to be allocated for these commemorative rites, which sometimes exceeded the bequests left to kin and other close inheritors. Without a doubt, as the analysis of the documents suggests, there was a correlation between the testators’ wealth and the sums in the bequests. These illustrated a wish to display one’s prosperity, but coupled with the hope that the commemorative ceremonial was also a means to ensure a posthumous

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61

image of a person preeminently guided by Christian values. In his aforementioned testament of 1714 the draper Mihai left 150 thaler for commemoration liturgies on the prescribed 3rd, 9th, 20th and 40th day after death.89 An equal sum was earmarked for commemoration rites at six months, one year, and two years after death. In the third year, he wanted his remains to be disinterred and a liturgy led by a patriarch, “if one was to be found, otherwise by the country’s metropolitan,” leaving a further 150 thaler, one third of which was to be offered to the hierarch. The testator obviously planned for the long term: he allocated 250 thaler for 25 prayers (Ro. s
rindare) to be said in the Churches of St. Gheorghe, one at Argeand one at Sârbeni, which he had supported financially in his life. In addition, 60 thaler were left to “our holy father chir Antim, metropolitan of Wallachia,”90 also for commemorative prayers. Chiric
, another member of the merchant class, also left a bequest for forty prayers to be said in no less than twenty religious establishments, most of them located in Bucharest and Târgovite. Half of these prayers for his soul were to be said in the Church of St. Dumitru in Târgovite, which also received a “lot with a stone cellar” as a donation on top of the money. In exchange, the testator requested that his name, those of his parents and kin be remembered in perpetuity (Ro. “s
s
pomeneasc
neamul mieu  i al p
rinilor miei”).91 The same mix of ostentatious display and actuarial precision was a characteristic of testamentary lists of ritual timelines and sums of money, which looked very much like business account books. Examples include the testaments of Ilinca, wife of the late draper Mihai (1725),92 Constantin from Bucharest, (1735),93 Hagi Constantin Malache (1770),94 R
ducanu (1800),95 and Dan bra oveanul (1800; from Braov, in Transylvania)96: their lists of requests for commemorations are like accounts of goods sold, revenue, and debts. Here, again, the aforementioned testament (1831) of Ioan B
lu
 from Craiova is the one that offers the richest details and evidence that the passage of time did not diminish beliefs in the intercessional power of post-mortem prayers. The merchant wanted commemoration ceremonies for the “solace of my soul” to be held by the local metropolitan or another high-rank cleric “over three years, as is customary in the church.” For this purpose, he left a sum of 1500 thaler, to be topped with a further 1200 thaler for prayers to be said for his soul for three years. The latter sum was to be distributed for the benefit of churches in the regional capital, Craiova, as well as in areas of Oltenia’s five counties. In fact, the number of requested liturgical commemorations was far greater, if we factor in the services entrusted to his heirs.97 The examples selected for this discussion might leave the reader with an incomplete, or even distorted, picture. The selection might leave the impression that most individuals from this socioprofessional group could afford such “extravagances.” The reality was much more nuanced, and there are examples from the opposite pole, of merchants who found themselves in dire circumstances at the end of their lives. For example, as he was facing

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r

death, merchant Lamba grecul (the Greek) entrusted Nichifor, the hegoumenos of the monastery at Râmnicu S
rat, not only with the post-mortem care for his soul but also with the management of his modest wealth. Although the testator expressed his hope that the cleric might be able to recoup his costs from investments of the merchant’s remaindered estate, this was a remote possibility, given the long list of his outstanding debts.98 Hagi Constantin Ioan stood out as an example of entrepreneurial success in Oltenia in the second half of the eighteenth century. He was also one of the founders of the Church of “Madona Dudu” in Craiova. Yet, even he found it difficult at the end of his life to leave a large sum of money for his commemoration rites. In his testament, he blames the hardships caused by “expenses at the holy church and two widowed daughters, burdened with large households, under-age infants, and marriageable daughters.” Consequently, he could only make bequests for two post-mortem prayers for his soul, one of which was to be shared between the Churches of Saints Gheorghe and Ioan.99 Equally modest numbers of prayers were requested in their testaments by Maria, the wife of publican Gheorghe, and Ancua, the wife of Pan
, a trader. The former requested only three prayers, to be paid for by the surviving husband from the sale of an ermine-trimmed coat.100 Ancua listed five such prayer services, of which two were to be said at the church at Valea Negovanilor, where she wished to be buried.101

Conclusions Summing up, the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchants’ testaments in Wallachia (today southern Romania) offers us insights into the ways in which views of their mortality and demise shaped the everyday lives and work of this socio-professional group. Concern over what happens to the body and the soul after death was, of course, shared across classes, as illustrated by testaments from other social groups. What perhaps distinguishes merchants’ testaments is the methodical, business-like way in which many of them made lists of commemorative liturgies, prayers, and valuations of bequests. Romanian society at the time was traditional and imbued with Christian values, and it is not surprising that the Church was the main beneficiary of testamentary donations. As Jacques Le Goff observed, medieval and early modern man everywhere had an “obsession de la rédemption,”102 and the Church was quick to take advantage of the resources spent by many to gain a “good” death and a good memory. Bequests of property such as money, garments, and landed estate, were sometimes left by merchants to help the impoverished or to support building projects, but such donations were fairly rare in the period considered here and belong to later, pre-modern attitudes. Further research on testaments should address these distinctions and establish whether and when a shift in testamentary practices and patterns occurred.

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Notes 1 Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Plon 1973); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 16e, 17e, 18e siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978). 2 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Barnes&Noble, 2000), transl. Helen Weaver from the French original, L’homme devant la mort (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). 3 Given the constraints of space, I shall be citing only a selection of recent contributions to death studies in Romanian historiography, most of which include good bibliographies: Toader Nicoar
, “Istoricul i moartea: Un itinerar,” Caiete de antropologie istoric
III/1–2 (5–6) (2004): 20–3 (and the other studies in this issue); Mihaela Grancea (ed.), Reprezent
ri ale morii în Transilvania secolelor XVI–XX (Cluj-Napoca: Casa C
rii de tiin
, 2005); Mihaela Grancea and Ana Dumitran (eds.), Discursuri despre moarte în Transilvania secolelor XVI–XX (Cluj-Napoca: Casa C
rii de tiin
, 2006); Mària Lupescu Makó, “‘Pro memoria perpetua’: Strategii de comemorare în Transilvania la finele Evului Mediu,” in Istoria  i scrisul istoric azi: Opiuni metodologice, Paradigme. Agend
, eds. Susana Andea et al. (Cluj-Napoca: Editura coala Ardelean
, 2020), 105–20; Gheorghe Laz
r, “Social Life and Family Relations in the Testaments of Wallachian Merchants (18th c.– early 19th c.),” Etudes balkaniques (Sofia) LVII/1 (2021): 140–68. 4 Laz
r, “Social Life.” 5 Violeta Barbu, De bono coniugali: O istorie a familiei din ara Româneasc
în secolul al XVII-lea (Bucharest: Meridiane, 2003), 148–49. 6 Ibid.; Andreea Iancu, “Se préparer à la mort: Le devoir de chaque chrétien. Le testament entre la rémission des péchés et la succession,” New Europe College. Yearbook 2003–2004, 165–66. 7 One example of someone ‘surprised’ by death was the merchant Cârstea  opa, who did not have enough time to authenticate his testament, written on 1 December 1732. The act looks more like a hastily written list of his most valuable possessions. Laz
r, “Despre afacerile i familia unui negustor braovean în  ara Româneasc
,” Acta Terrae Fogarasiensis IX (2020): 97–108. For similar situations, see the testaments of Bratu, a cloth dealer who fell ill with the plague (1 September 1719; Arhivele Naionale Istorice Centrale, Bucharest [hereafter ANIC], Mitrop.  . Rom., LVIII/31), the merchant Radu (13 March 1785; Biblioteca Academiei Române [hereafter BAR], Documente istorice, CDXV/92), Alexie and his wife, Mua (15 December 1792; ANIC, Ms. 146, fol. 78r); Catrina, wife of Petre, dealer in fine fabrics (BAR, Ms. Rom. 611, fol. 215r; 6 March 1801). 8 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, I, 95–6. 9 Barbu, De bono coniugali, 148–149. 10 Laz
r, “Testamente de negustori din  ara Româneasc
(secolele XVII–XVIII)”, Revista de Istorie Social
VIII–IX (2003–2004): 421-24. 11 BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 42r–44r. 12 ANIC, M-rea Cernica, XIV/23. ‘Hagi’ (Ro. masc.) and ‘hagica’ (Ro. fem.), from Tk. hacı are terms used for those who had been on pilgrimage to the Holy Places and two their spouses. 13 ANIC, Achiziii Noi, MMCMXC/10. 14 Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 421. 15 George Potra, Documente privitoare la istoria ora ului Bucure ti, 1594–1821 (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 1961), 340-44. 16 BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 80v–85r (Cristina, a grocer [female], 9 November 1804). 17 This has also been noted in Venetian testaments. See Claire Judde de la Larivière, “Procédures, enjeux et fonctions du testament à Venise aux confins du

64

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

Gheorghe Laz
r Moyen Âge et des Temps modernes: Le cas du patriciat marchand,” Le Moyen Âge CVIII/3–4 (2002): 531. On this, see also Iancu, “Se préparer à la mort,” 164–65. Barbu, De bono coniugali, 149. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 421. Barbu, De bono coniugali, 139–44; tefan Lemny, Sensibilitate  i istorie în secolul XVIII românesc, 2nd ed. (Iai: Polirom, 2017), 153–67. In contrast to the findings of Philippe Ariès (The Hour of Our Death I, 178–79), the sample of merchants’ testaments analyzed here shows that it was rare for the testators to ask for commemorative liturgies to start immediately after death. One exception is Hagi Constantin Malache, who asked for a sum of 100 thaler to be distributed upon his “soul’s exit” and the same sum to be offered at the burial ceremony. Laz
r, Catastife de negustori din ara Româneasc
 (secolele XVIII–XIX) (Iai: Editura Universit
ii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2016), 55. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 422. Potra, Documente Bucure ti 1594–1821, 340–44. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 427–29. ANIC, Mitrop.  . Rom., CCCLXXXII.20. On this topic, see Jean-Claude Larchet, La vie après la mort selon la tradition orthodoxe (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2001). ANIC, Documente Munteneti, CLXXV/10. The same sum was left in the testament of the merchant tefu from Bucharest on 19 January 1831 (BAR, Ms. Rom. 650, fols. 41v–43r). Barbu, De bono coniugali, 165. Constana Ghiulescu, “Preoi i enoriai: Exemplul 
rii Româneti în secolul al XVIII-lea,” Revista Istoric
, s.n. (new series), XIII/1–2 (2002): 129. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 422. ANIC, Mitrop.  . Rom., CCCLXXXII/20. BAR, Documente istorice, MXL/7 L. BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 14r–16r. BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 39r–41r. BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 190r–191r. BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 80v–85r. Moreover, all these ladies requested the presence of an archpriest at all the commemorative services to be performed in the three years after their demise. ANIC, Achiziii Noi, MMCMXC/10. Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate: Testamentul negustorului Ioan B
lu
 din Craiova (Br
ila: Editura Istros, 2010). Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, I, 135; see also I, 166–67. See, for example, a note in the probate records of Pan
, a town hall clerk and son of the merchant Pan
Pepano, which shows that he was buried in already worn clothes. Laz
r, “Documente privitoare la negustorii Pepano i ctitoria lor de la Codreni ‘pe Mostite’”(I), Studii  i materiale de istorie medie XVIII (2000): 152–58. For the importance of dress and fashion as indicators of social prestige and honor in merchant circles, see a longer discussion in Laz
r, Les marchands en Valachie, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2006), 283-88; see also Constana Vintil
-Ghiulescu, Patim
 i desf
tare: Despre lucrurile m
runte ale vieii cotidiene în societatea româneasc
. 1750–1860 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2015); for Western Europe, see Daniel Roche, La culture des apparences: Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1989); for the Ottoman Empire and South-Eastern Europe, see Suraiya Faroqhi, A Cultural History of the Ottomans: The Imperial Elite and its Artefacts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016);

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44 45

46

47

48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

65

Constana Vintil
-Ghiulescu (ed.), Women, Consumption, and the Circulation of Ideas in South-Eastern Europe, 17th–19th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2017). On the practice of drilling holes in the coffin, see Johann Jakob Ehrler in his study Banatul de la origini pân
acum (Das Banat vom Ursprung bis Jetso, 1774), ed. Costin Fenean (Timioara: Editura de Vest, 1982), cited in Lemny, Sensibilitate, 148. Dodekária was Turkish coinage worth 12 Romanian lei prior to 1800. Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate, 71. Similar details are to be found in the testament of the boyar Sandu Buc
nescu, for which see Ion Ionacu, “Acte i însemn
ri relative la boierul muntean Sandu Buc
nescu († 1760),” Arhivele Olteniei XIII/ 71–73 (1934): 433. For other examples of funerary processions, see Lemny, Sensibilitate, 149–50. Only one other testament mentions the use of wax lanterns, that of Chiri
, a merchant from the town of Târgovite, written in 1735. He requested that such candles be used in all commemoration services up to one year after his demise. Moreover, he specified punctiliously the amount of wax to be used, as well as the number of food parcels with cold polenta and cheese to be distributed among those present. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 427–29. Ioan B
lu
, however, also recommended that candles should not be used in church during liturgy, fearing that there might be accidents among the crowd. But, to compensate for this ‘break’ with custom, he asked for one lantern to be given alongside the “distribution of clothes [ … ] to impoverished families” after the funeral. Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate, 70–1. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death I, 109–114; Vovelle, Piété baroque, 100–107. Barbu, De bono coniugali, 149. On this see Laz
r, Les marchands en Valachie, 330–34. Gheorghe Cron, “Dreptul de ctitorie în  ara Româneasc
 i Moldova: Constituirea i natura juridic
a fundaiilor din Evul Mediu,” Studii  i materiale de istorie medie, IV (1960): 77–116. For Western Europe, see Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, I, 45–51; Françoise Bayard, Le monde des financiers au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion,1988), 436–37. Barbu, De bono coniugali, 150, 159. This choice reflected another facet of family solidarity based on the Christian belief that the entire family would be reunited after death. See, for example, Paul H. Stahl, “L’Autre monde: Les signes de reconnaissance,” Buletinul Bibliotecii Române (Freiburg) XIV (1983): 7–106; Idem, “Le départ des morts: Quelques exemples roumains et balkaniques,” Études rurales 105–106 (1988): 215–41. For similar beliefs in Western Europe, see: Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’audelà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–vers 1480) (Ecole française de Rome: Editions Albin Michel, 1980): 147–49; Michelle Fournié, Le Ciel, peut-il attendre? La culte du Purgatoire dans la Midi de la France (1320 environ-1520 environ) (Paris: Le Cerf: 1997); Gaël Rideau, De la religion de tous à la religion de chacun: Croire et pratiquer à Orleans au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). ANIC, M-rea Radu Vod
, XXIII/4. Lidia Cotovanu and Gheorghe Laz
r, “Un marchand banquier au service de Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688–1714): L’Épirote Nica Papa saraf,” Thesavrismata 46 (2016): 31–68. BAR, Documente istorice, DXCIV/117. BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 190r–191r. Potra, Documente Bucure ti 1594–1821, 340–44. Laz
r, “Un negustor târgovitean i destinul familiei sale (secolul al XVIII-lea – începutul secolului al XIX-lea),” Revista Istoric
, s.n. (new series) XXII/5–6 (2011): 520.

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r

60 ANIC, M-rea Rm. S
rat, II/125. 61 Potra, Documente privitoare la istoria ora ului Bucure ti (1634–1800) (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 1982), 157–58. 62 The testator also expressed his wish that his remains be “checked” by an archpriest three years after his demise, after which a gravestone was to be placed on the tomb and a “handsome [ … ] silver” icon light be commissioned. Both the stone and the light were to be inscribed with his name. Laz
r, Testamente negustore ti, 427–29. 63 Nicolae Stoicescu, Repertoriul bibliografic al monumentelor feudale din Bucure ti (Bucharest, 1961), 421–24. In exchange for this privilege, the draper donated 100 thaler to the establishment, on top of 20 thaler as payment to the priests for two commemorative services. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 422. 64 BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 97v–98v. 65 Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 425. 66 Ibid., 432. 67 For example, Cristina, the grocer woman (BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 80v–85r), Safta, wife of Gheorghe bra oveanul (BAR, Ms. Rom. 4027, fol. 3r–v), and Radu Ghinea, the  alvar-maker (ANIC, Achiziii Noi, XLI/5). 68 For example, Vasile bra oveanul (BAR, Ms. Rom. 3934, fols. 166v–167v). 69 For example, Stana, the wife of Statie cupe(merchant). Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 430–31. 70 For example, Arghira D
rasca (ANIC, Achiziii Noi, MMCMXC/10). 71 Pan
cupe(BAR, Documente istorice, MXL/7 L). 72 Dumitru, haberdasher (BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 42r–44r). 73 ANIC, Mitrop. T. Rom., CCCLXXXII/20. For similar patterns in Venice, see Judde de Larivière, “Procédures, enjeux et fonctions du testament,” 532. 74 Laz
r “Un testament et un récit de vie: Le cas du marchand Cernea Popovici,” Etudes balkaniques XLIX/3–4 (2013): 129–54. 75 For this praxis in Western Europe, see Ariès, The Hour of Our Death I, 109–14. 76 Ibid. 77 Judde de Larivière, “Procédures, enjeux et fonctions du testament,” 532. 78 Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate, 69–70. 79 Idem, Testamente de negustori, 422. 80 Idem, Catastife de negustori, 55; idem, “De Râmnic à Venise et au Saint Sépulcre: Le registre de frais et de revenus du marchand Constantin Malache (XVIIIe siècle)”, in Venezia e l’Europe Orientale tra il tardo Medioevo e l’Età moderna, eds. Grigore Arbore Popescu and Cristian Luca (Antiga Edizioni: 2017), 219–36. 81 BAR, Ms. Rom. 612, fols. 14r–16r. 82 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, II, 381–85. 83 Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate, 76–8. 84 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, I, 173. See also Vovelle, Piété baroque, 189–93. 85 In Romanian documents this provision for the post-mortem welfare of the soul is known as the ‘part for the soul’ (Gk. psychikón) and represents the part of the bequest left by the testator for commemoration services. On the part for the soul, see Artur Gorovei, Partea sufletului: Un vechi obicei al poporului roman (F
lticeni, 1925). 86 For example, Cârstea, a tailor, also called neamul (the German), did not include any provision for commemoration rites in his testament, possibly because by the time he had it written he had already taken vows as a monk. (ANIC, Mitrop.  . Rom., LXXVII/17). 87 Vovelle, Piété baroque, 114. On commemorative services see also Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, “‘D’abord il dit et ordonna …’: Testaments et société en Lyonnais et Forez à la fin du Moyen Âge” (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2007), 109–12.

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88 Judde de Larivière, “Procédures, enjeux et fonctions du testament,” 533–34. 89 For the Christian symbolism of these ritual periods, see Dagron Gilbert, “3e, 9e et 40e jours dans la tradition byzantine: Temps chrétien et anthropologie,” in Le temps chrétien de la fin de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge, IIIe–XIIIe siècles. Actes du colloque international du C.N.R.S., Paris, 9–12 mars 1981, ed. Jean-Marie Leroux (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984), 419–30. 90 Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 422. 91 Ibid., 427–29. 92 Ibid., 425–26. 93 Potra, Documente Bucure ti, 1594–1821, 340–44. 94 Laz
r, Catastife de negustori, 55. 95 BAR, Ms. Rom. 611, fols. 80v–181r. 96 BAR, Ms. Rom. 611, fols. 191r–193r. 97 Laz
r, M
rturie pentru posteritate, 75–6. 98 ANIC, M-rea Râmnicu S
rat, II/96 (1 March 1712). 99 ANIC, Biserica Madona Dudu, II/4. The merchant Gheorghe sârbul (the Serb), from the market town Gherghia, found himself in a similarly difficult financial situation (“having suffered many upsets in my life and awaiting terrible death”) caused largely by the many conflicts with his second wife. Laz
r, Testamente de negustori, 433–35. 100 BAR, Ms. Rom. 4027, fol. 14r–v. 101 BAR, Documente istorice, MXL/7 G. 102 Jacques Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964), 240.

Part 2

Testaments, Property, and Family

4

From Fear of Death to the Salvation of the Soul and Eternal Life Reasons for Composing Last Wills in the East Adriatic (Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries) Zoran Ladi


Gender and Class: Communal Statutory Laws and the Democratization of Will Writing East Adriatic communes in the high and late medieval period consisted of urban and rural areas (Lat. sg. civitas and districtus). They belonged to the group of European urban-rural societies in which the recording of last wills became routine for individuals from all classes starting from the midthirteenth century. In contrast to the data available in the few extant last wills from the early medieval period, drawn up exclusively by testators from the communal elites, the period starting in the middle of the thirteenth century is characterized by a process of democratization in testamentary practices in terms of social status and gender. From that period onwards East Adriatic wills were composed for testators from all strata of communal societies – patricians (nobiles cives, nobiles domine), citizens (cives, occasionally in presentiarum cives), inhabitants without citizenship (habitatores, occasionally ad presens/nunc habitatores), foreigners (forenses, aduene), and peasants from the villages in communal districts (villici, villani).1 The habit of recording last wills for testators from all communal classes was, to a great degree, the consequence of the establishment of the institution of the communal public notary in all East Adriatic communes, which spread sometime in the mid-thirteenth century. Another important factor that influenced the democratization of will writing and the increase in the volume of recorded last wills in Dalmatian communes was the appearance of written communal statutory laws regulating all legal aspects related to communal everyday life. The statutory laws of the communes on the East Adriatic coast appeared as the consequence of the foundation of the first law universities on the nearby Apennine peninsula where Roman law and canon law were taught. In that respect, for the region examined in this chapter, the most important was the University of Bologna where the study of Roman law and canon law was already obligatory for all students as well as for future notaries by the DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-7

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twelfth century.2 The Statute Law of Bologna had a significant influence on the legal content of East Adriatic statutory laws already from the first half of the thirteenth century and especially during the fourteenth century when almost all East Adriatic communes received their own statute laws based on Roman and traditional law.3 A great number of statutory decrees in East Adriatic communes covered the various personal and juridical aspects to be considered when drawing up a testament: e.g., the testator’s age, physical, mental and intellectual capacities, social position, profession, the presence of witnesses and a communal official as examinator, the choice of the recipients of legacies, the distribution of immovables and movables for pious causes, the choices of universal heirs (heredes universales), trustees or executors of wills, and so on. Moreover, because of the complex nature of last wills as documents that straddled the private and public arenas, in some East Adriatic statutory laws, the legal guidelines related to last wills were included in separate books called Libri testamentorum.4 In some cases, last wills were important in promoting peace or, in contrast, causing legal and even physical conflicts between persons or groups of persons or between members of testators’ families or even their heirs. Therefore, last wills became highly important legal private documents. Due to the continual and significant growth in the numbers of last wills registered in the examined period, starting from the beginning of the fourteenth century many notaries public recorded their clients’ last wills in separate notarial registers called libri testamentorum or libri inventariorum bonorum. *** Before examining the reasons for composing last wills, two main legal regulations prohibiting or allowing the writing up of wills should be mentioned: the legally mature age and the spiritual/mental health or sanity of testators. According to the statutory decrees of East Adriatic communes, an individual had no legal right to record his/her testament if mentally ill. For instance, in the statutory law of the commune of Rab the most important precondition for having a will registered was legally mature age (aetas legitima/aetas perfecta).5 Equally important were the testator’s mental health as well as his/her intellectual and rational capability (sanus/sana mente, sensu et intellectu). The mentally ill (the so-called mentecapti) were not allowed to compose their last wills. If mentally ill persons, usually under the pressure of various interested parties (members of the nuclear or extended family, acquaintances, business partners, even notaries, priests, and so on), composed their wills, the notaries were obliged to cancel these in accordance with the decrees of the East Adriatic statute laws. For example, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Statute Law of Zadar included a clause whereby mentally ill persons were prohibited from writing up their last wills, adding codicils, or having other types of private legal documents drawn up.6 As testified by the Statute Law of Pore
in Istria, East Adriatic statute laws also

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contained provisions for the institution of guardian or mentor of underage or mentally ill individuals.7 There is an illustrative example from the fifteenthcentury Šibenik on the nomination of legal representatives of underage children and mentecapti. On 9 September 1448, Šibenik’s notary Ante (Anthon) Campolongo recorded one notarial document related to a receipt for the payment of debts (quietatio). One of the key individuals mentioned in that document was the learned Dalmatian humanist egregius atrium doctor dominus Ambrosius Michitich, ciuis Sibenici tanquam curator et gubernator ser Pauli Loiiarich siue Marinich mentecapti de Sibenico.8 According to the content of that notarial document, in order to avoid possible fraud and misunderstandings caused by the mental illness of one of the parties involved, Ambrose Mi
etiwas chosen as the guardian (called gubernator and curator) of that individual.9 With the title egregius artium doctor,10 Mi
eti was appointed guardian of the mentally ill Paul Lojari Marini, a patrician from Šibenik.11 According to statutory laws, drunk persons were also not allowed to compose their wills, at least not while inebriated.12 Occasionally, even testators described as senectute grauatus/grauata were legally represented by mentors because some were not considered rationally capable of fully understanding the legal force of a last will in the distribution of their bona stabilia et mobilia. Therefore, when they had their wills drawn up, they were counselled by communal officials or members of the clergy, usually their confessors.

Fear of (Sudden) Death and Hope for the Salvation of the Soul: The Main Reasons for Composing Last Wills in the East Adriatic Communes Until recently medieval last wills written by East Adriatic testators were dismissed by many Croatian medievalists as useful sources for social history. However, in the last few decades, medievalists have re-evaluated last wills and testaments as valuable sources in the examination of almost all aspects of daily life either in urban or rural societies. One of the topics that have received relatively little attention from Croatian medievalists was the problem of testators’ attitudes towards death in the Middle Ages. In that respect, East Adriatic wills provide us with valuable data, particularly regarding testators’ fear of death in general and from sudden death in particular, as well as their concern for the salvation of their souls.13 Last wills from the East Adriatic communes considered here point to the fear of sudden death and concern for the salvation of the soul in eternity as the most important reasons influencing the testators’ decision to record their wills. In similar ways to other European regions, such anxieties were usually expressed with the formula nihil est certius morte et nihil incertius hora mortis (nothing is more certain than death and nothing more uncertain than the

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hour of death) or some similar formulation.14 Thus, researchers of medieval wills have argued that fear of sudden death became one of the central motifs of high and late medieval Christian piety as expressed in wills but also in other, particularly narrative, sources. Moreover, that fear as well as the longing for the salvation of the soul influenced the emergence of new theological ideas as well as new movements in lay piety such as the ars bene moriendi, vita evangelica et apostolica, and imitatio Christi. These pious topoi were particularly popular among East Adriatic testators and were discussed in detail in the works written by the well-known Dalmatian humanist writer from Split, Mark Maruli.15 Fear of (sudden) death was diversely expressed in East Adriatic last wills and depended on the testators’ individual circumstances. Fear of death from sickness, old age, departure to war or joining the crusades, epidemics and other medical reasons, long and hazardous international and regional land and sea voyages, and many other such reasons were mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of wills. The salvation of the soul and the achievement of eternal life in Heaven were as important as fear from sudden death as reasons for writing up a will. This required the sacrament of last confession and the sacrament of the Eucharist (sancta communio), some of the central concerns of Western Christianity in that period, especially in relation to the soul’s transition to Heaven.16 In addition, each testator had his or her own strategy for pious bequests to be made to secure the salvation of their souls. Decree 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required ailing individuals on their deathbed to first seek advice from the curator animae, i.e., the parish priest or confessor: only after spiritual health had been restored could the application of bodily medicine be of benefit to them.17 Having submitted themselves to the cura animarum through the last confession and the Eucharist,18 the testators were fully prepared for leaving this material world and for the final journey of their souls to Purgatory.19 The stay of the soul in Purgatory was usually temporary and was limited to the period needed for sinners to cleanse themselves of any sins that may have committed. Rarely, the direct passage of the soul to Heaven was also possible, depending on individuals’ personal faith, virtues (virtutes), frailties (fragilitates), or sins (peccata).20 However, this was the privilege of only the chosen few living in accordance with the Christian principles of imitatio Christi or vita evangelica et apostolica. In contrast to such saintly figures, most believers relied on a strategy of distribution of pious legacies as one of the main tools for achieving eternal life in Heaven.

Other Reasons for Composing Last Wills The writing of last wills in East Adriatic communes was to a great degree dictated by the aforementioned theological and religious prescriptions imposed by Church councils, influenced by theologians, by the papal curia, as well as by the communal ecclesiastical hierarchy and pious laical organizations and individuals (bishops, chapter, orders, pious laical confraternities,

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patricians). Obviously, one of the main concerns of contemporary theology as well as of laical piety was for the believers’ afterlife and the salvation of their souls and in that respect the last will as a personal, individual document played an important role. Each last will arose from the testator’s free will in the choice of recipients of bequests. The recording of a will was the final expression of a testator’s piety, of his/her thoughtful, and strategical, distribution of donations, regardless of their material value, among those recipients which he/she considered as most beneficial for the eternal salvation of his/her soul. An important impetus to testators’ attitudes towards death and salvation drew on pious contributions from both laypeople and the mendicant orders. The most important outcome of these forms of piety was the development of the so-called social and civic Christianity.21 In the last wills from the examined period social and civic Christian values were expressed in many ways, for example in solidarity and mercy towards persons on the margins of society, in increasing numbers of bequests left for the construction of hospitals and leper houses and for the establishment of urban and rural confraternities, or in clauses providing for the liberation of serfs (servi, famuli, ancillae). Such trends in testamentary distribution ad pias causas were the result of new testamentary strategies derived from the religious values of misericordia and caritas. The, sometimes elaborate, strategies of pious bequests were in the first place aimed at the salvation of the testators’ souls. There was growing interest in the celebration of masses pro anima testatoris or for the testators’ predecessors. Testamentary clauses included requests for such services to be performed by the greatest number possible of urban clergy (parish priests, confessors, canons, bishops, friars) in the presence of members of the testators’ families, their friends or professional partners, and even unknown persons such as members of confraternities and the poor (pauperes Christi, pauperes leprosi). Such pious bequests made pro remedio animae were not limited to the East Adriatic region but were part of general European testamentary practices in the period considered here. A personal, individual document such as a last will was an appropriate medium for the contemplation of anxieties around death, and especially for addressing the fear of sudden death. As such, in the high and late medieval periods, testamenta became probably the most important private and legal documents drawn up and registered by individuals during their lifetime. Old and young, female and male, healthy and sick, patricians and peasants, artisans, merchants, monks and friars, adventurers, pilgrims, crusaders, and commanders of the Istrian and Dalmatian galleys during the war against the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, all of them composed their last wills in the first place because they feared dying intestate. They hoped that their distribution of bequests for pious purposes (ad pias causas) would secure the salvation of their souls. Last wills had another, equally important, function: the distribution of all movable and immovable assets among the testators’ heirs. Yet, this worldlier role was consequent on and secondary to the higher religious rationale of post-mortem salvation.

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The Health Condition of Testators According to data from the available last wills and testaments recorded by Istrian and Dalmatian notaries from the mid-thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century, the largest number of testators cited illness as the main reason for composing their last wills. East Adriatic communal notaries public used different phrases and formulae to describe or define the poor physical condition of testators. During the earlier period, spanning from the second half of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fourteenth century, notaries most often used simple expressions such as infirmus corpore/infirma corpore,22 or corpore languens.23 In the period from the fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century there was a wider lexical range for the physical condition of testators, including infirmitate corporis pergrauatus/pergrauata or corpore grauatus/grauata, aliqualiter grauatus infirmitate,24 corpore aliqualiter languens, etc.25 However, even towards the end of the Middle Ages the physical state of testators was frequently described briefly due to the weak diagnostic capabilities of communal physicians (medici, physici) and lacking data on specific conditions. Thus, as in other contemporary East Adriatic communes, notaries in Trogir used various short and simple formulas when defining the health conditions of testators: e.g., infirmus/infirma corpore or corpore languens. For instance, in his will from the eighth decade of the fourteenth century, Marin, a citizen of Trogir composed his will infirmus corpore.26 In his will from the same period, Dragoga Škarpelini de burgo Tragurii was described as corpore languens at the moment of recording of his will.27 Similar wording was used in last wills and testaments from Dubrovnik. Thus, in her last will from the beginning of the fourteenth century, a certain Vrania, filia Slaui de Luca, was simply described as being infirma corpore.28 Another of Dubrovnik’s female patrician testators, Perua, filia domini Mathey de Binçolla, dictated her last will sana mente, licet debilis corpore.29 In comparison to the notaries from the thirteenth century, some notaries in the fourteenth century became more specific when recording the physical status of testators. This was particularly visible in the wills of testators belonging to the higher communal social strata (i.e., patricians). Thus, in the will of the Trogir patrician Stana, wife of Donat de Saladinis, composed in the second half of the fourteenth century, Stana’s illness and, to some extent, her mental and emotional condition were defined in the following words: infirmitate nimia pergrauata et doloribus plurimis diuersimodo oppressa, video ego Stana uxor condam Donati Salladini, quod tempus appropinquat in quo mortis debitum solvere me oportet.30 There were other contextual data from which testators’ illnesses could be inferred. For example, a number of East Adriatic testators were so seriously ill at the moment of dictating their wills that communal notaries were forced to visit them in their homes in order to record their wills. In such cases, a testator’s serious illness was most often described in the following words: Actum […] in domo habitationis […] testatoris/testatricis. For

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example, Stoja, a citizen of Trogir, was sana mente, sensu et intellectu licet corpore languens during the recording of her will in her home.31 The will of dona Vrsia, vxor relicta Mathei de Adignano (i.e., Vodnjan in Istria), was recorded by Pore
’s notary Anthony de Teodoris in domo testatricis in Pore
. The physical condition of Ursula was described in slightly more details: sedens prope ignem […] senectute grauata,32 (“sitting near the fireplace […] being of old age”). Starting from the second half of the fourteenth century, owing to processes of democratization in the writing of private legal documents and in the registration of last wills, the practice spread across all sections of the population of East Adriatic communal districts. Therefore, we also find data regarding the testators’ physical condition in documents called breviarium testamenti registered for peasants who had settled in the villages situated in the rural parts of East Adriatic communes. Legally, according to the communal statutory laws, those documents functioned as last wills. They were recorded by parish priests or chaplains – most often the only literate persons in these villages – in the presence of two or more witnesses (male and/or female). According to the statutory decrees, the priest (parochianus ville) and witnesses were obliged to present that document to the communal notary within a period of fifteen to thirty days. In the notarial office, they had to take an oath by putting their right hand on the Bible in front of the notary and an examinator representing the communal authorities to the effect that the document was recorded according to the testator’s last wishes. A copy of the breviarium testamenti was kept in the chancellery of the communal procurator. As testified in many documents, the breviarium testamenti was usually written at a time when testators were already seriously ill and unable to go in person to the notarial chancellery in the city. Breviaria testamenti as private legal documents appeared later in rural communes compared to the urban areas of the communes. On the East Adriatic coast, the habit of recording breviaria testamenti started spreading among the peasantry from the second half of the fourteenth century onwards. As already mentioned, since the breviarium testamenti was legally and in its content almost identical to the last will (testamentum) of testators from the urban areas of communes, it contains data concerning the health of peasant testators as well. Each breviarium contained three important dates: the date when it was dictated in the testator’s cottage, the date of the testator’s death as testified by witnesses, and the date of registration of the document in the notarial office in the city.33 Thus, a certain Peter Stipani from Prljina Vas, a village in the district of Zadar, dictated his breviarium testamenti on 28 November 1382 and died the next day.34 The will was registered by Zadar’s notary Peter de Sarcana on December 13 of the same year.35 Towards the end of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century, East Adriatic last wills became more specific in listing the reasons for recording a testament. For example, in 1452 a peasant, Vuchus Spagouich de villa Grebza districtus Sibenici, composed his breuiarium testamenti.36 The priest who

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recorded his will added these comments: die sabbati quarto martii instantis hora quarta noctis iacens in domo sue habitationis sanus mente et intellectu corpore tamen maxime grauatus.37 In 1452 in his office in Šibenik, the notary Karotus Vitale transcribed the breviarium testamenti of a certain Radoslauus Paro, husband of Vlatka, from the village of Siro
e in Šibenik district. Radoslav’s wife Vlatka testified in front of the notary that her husband dictated his will on March 4, 1452. Furthermore, according to her testimony, Radoslav died on 5 March 1452, which shows clearly that he dictated his will while being seriously ill and lying on his deathbed (iacens in lecto).38 Another public notary in Šibenik, Anthony Campolongo, recorded the breviarium testamenti of Matthew, son of Stephen Grškovi, from the village of Konjevrate in the Šibenik communal district on 23 November 1479. In accordance with the statutory clause requesting that the breviarium testamenti should be presented to the office of public notary no later than fifteen days after the death of the testator, the next day Matthew’s wife Cvita and his son Matthew presented that document to the office of notary Anthony Campolongo. They explained that Matthew non potuit venire Sibenicum prope eius inconualescentia (he could not come to Šibenik because of his poor health).39 As shown above, the poor health or terminal illness of the testators came second after the dominant reasons for writing up a will in the East Adriatic region, i.e., fear of sudden death and care for the salvation of the soul. This statement is corroborated by quantitative data. For instance, in Zadar in the period from 1285 to 1340 more than 95 per cent of wills were composed for terminally ill testators; in the period from 1341 to 1404 the number of seriously ill testators composing their wills dropped to 80 per cent. Similar trends may be observed in all other East Adriatic communes considered in this chapter. This short examination of poor health as the main reason for writing a last will in the late medieval East Adriatic urban and rural areas points to the fact that serious illness sounded the alarm for individuals to draw up their last wills. Old Age Mainly because of the poor medical knowledge of contemporary physicians (called medici, phisici, chirurgici), educated at the universities in Padua, Bologna, and Salerno and hired by East Adriatic communal authorities, because of poor eating habits, inadequate standards of hygiene in urban settlements, and ongoing wars between Christian and Ottoman military forces in the hinterland of Dalmatia and in the communal districts, life expectancy in the middle and late medieval period was low. To a certain degree, lack of progress in medicine in that period was caused by some of the church decrees, such as the aforementioned decision of the Fourth Lateran council held in 1215, which stated that “Physicians of the body called to the bedside of the sick shall before all advise them to call for the physician of souls, so that, spiritual health being restored, bodily health will follow.”40

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Yet, old age continued to be recorded by notaries as the main reason for drawing up a will.41 This was in most cases recorded by notaries with simple formulas such as sanus mente, sensu et intellectu, licet senio pergravata42 or ili sanus corpore, mente, sensu et intellectu, licet in senio constitutus.43 In 1452 the notary of Šibenik, Karotus Vitale, registered the will of the distinguished local patrician Martin, son of quondam Mirse. According to his will, Martin was corpore sanus sentiens se decrepite esse etatis.44 A few years later, in 1458, the same notary recorded the will of another Šibenik patrician, domina Vlada, uxor quondam ser Laurentii Lignicich.45 Honesta domina Vlada, described as sana mente, sensu, intellectu et corpore, dictated her last will prope decrepitum eius etatem.46 Since she was not able to leave her home (her family palace in the city) the will was dictated to the notary in domo habitationis infrascripte testatricis.47 In these cases the main reason for composing the will was old age, as the testators were deemed to be otherwise physically and mentally healthy (sanus/sana corpore) and therefore there was no impediment to the writing of their wills. Yet, old age alone presented testators with other issues and anxieties besides fear of sudden death and the choice of strategies for the salvation of the soul via pious bequests. In some cases, the old age of the testators was accompanied by unexplained physical conditions that were serious enough to cause concern. Thus, a citizen of Rab, Anthoniza, daughter of quondam Laurencii barberii de Arba, dictated her will in the office of Rab’s notary Thomas de Stanciis, being deemed sana mente et intellectu licet senectute et corporali impressa infirmitate.48 In 1463 Toma de Stanciis registererd a similar will for Francis (Franjo), son of Mladen, magister brauarius (master shepherd) and citizen of Rab. At the time of the registration of his will Frances was sana mente et intellectu licet corpore senectute grauatus.49 Peter (Petrus) de Zaro, one of the most distinguished and influential patricians in Rab during the late medieval period, dictated his will starting from 1456 (altogether, he recorded six wills and two codicils) to his friend, Rab’s notary public and canon Toma de Stanciis, in domo habitationis testatoris.50 In common with other testators, the reason for registering Peter’s will was theologically endorsed with the formula cum nil certius morte et incertius hora mortis (for nothing is more certain than death and less certain than the hour of death). However, an additional reason was his old age, as shown in the introductory paragraph of his will, according to which Peter was sanus mente, corpore et intellectu sed senectute oppressus.51 In the later versions of his will, Peter explained his reason for recording his will in these words: sanus quidem mente et intellectu licet senectute et corporali infirmitate aliqualiter grauatus.52 Pilgrimages The East Adriatic communes played a significant role in the growing trend for medieval pilgrimaging. As hubs of West- and Central European land and naval routes towards pilgrim shrines in the Apennine peninsula, the Middle

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East, Egypt, and the Black Sea region, they were ideally positioned for this geostrategic role.53 The ports, islands, communes, and cities ranging from Pore
 in Istria to Dubrovnik and Kotor in Southern Dalmatia played important roles as maritime staging posts on the main pilgrim naval routes leading from Venice to the Holy Land. They were equally important due to their role as main ports for Central European pilgrims travelling from Poland, Hungary, and other neighbouring regions to the saintly shrines on the western coast of the Adriatic Sea and to pilgrim centres in the Terra sancta (Palestine), the Byzantine Empire, or Egypt. The popularity of pilgrimages to the Holy Land was also reflected in the flourishing of the literary genre of pilgrim diaries and travelogues written by hundreds of West European pilgrims starting from as early as the fourth century. Since the East Adriatic coast was one of the main staging posts on the naval route54 to the Terra sancta, many writers had a chance to visit these locations and present their opinions on various aspects of life in the East Adriatic communes and urban settlements. Consequently, the late medieval narratives are also extremely important sources for the examination of medieval Croatian pilgrimages. One example is the pilgrim diary written in 1482 by the Franciscan palmarius (pilgrim) Paul Walter Guglingen. He mentioned in his travelogue that during his trip to Jerusalem he was for some time accompanied by a married couple (iugales) from Croatia. Unfortunately, Guglingen writes, somewhere between Ramala and Jerusalem, the husband died and was immediately buried in a Muslim graveyard in the desert.55 As testified in numerous studies on medieval Croatian pilgrimages, pilgrimaging from the East Adriatic communes to various Christian pilgrim shrines became a routine event, particularly from the second half of the thirteenth century. The fact that pilgrimages were often accompanied by risks and danger was an additional impetus for testators to have their wills written up and registered. There were numerous testators in Pore
, Rab, Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, Dubrovnik, and other communes citing pilgrimage as the reason for composing their wills. As with other reasons, the roots for composing a last will in the days prior to the date of departure on a pilgrimage lay in the fear of sudden death without confession and communion and without a prior strategical distribution of legacies ad pias causas and pro remedio animae. Therefore, all types of international, regional, and even local, group or individual religious mobility appeared as logical reasons for having a will. Given that in the period considered here pilgrimages reached a peak of popularity among the denizens of East Adriatic communes, the numerous peregrinationes maiores (international pilgrimages) and peregrinationes minores (regional and local pilgrimages) of individuals and groups were frequently cited in wills.56 For the purposes of this study, I would like to present only a few out of hundreds of cases of wills registered by testators from the East Adriatic coastal region before departing on pilgrimage to various saintly shrines. The earliest known will citing pilgrimage as the reason for composing a will is

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recorded for Zadar’s patrician Thomas (Thomasius) de Penaço in 1291.57 Thomas clearly expressed the reason for having his will written with the words intendens ire ultra mare, which refers to pilgrimage to the Holy Land.58 The earliest known will registered for a woman citing pilgrimage as the reason is that of Mary (Maria), a patrician from Zadar and wife of the late John (Iohannes), who composed her will in(ten)dens uisitare limina beatorum apostolorum Petri, Pauli et Iacobi de Galicia, i.e., her personal pilgrimage to Rome and Santiago de Compostela (the so-called peregrinationes maiores).59 Four years later, in 1295, another patrician from Zadar, Vid, son of rne de Galellis, recorded his will per Dei gratiam conpos mentis et corporis, intendens domino Iesu Christo concedente me cum tribus galeis Venetis ad longinquas partes transferre.60 The reason why Gregory (Gregorius), a sailor (marinarius) from Zadar, dictated his will in 1375 was as follows: affectantis Sanctum Sepulcrum Ierosolymis visitare.61 In his last will from 1383 an Italian newcomer to Zadar, Nicholas de Feltre, habitator Iadre, cited as his main reason: ad terram sanctam sepulcrum domini uisitaturus opporteat proficisci, dubitans hora mortis ne ea preuentur abintestato decedat.62 Thomas de Cancarella, a priest from Rab, composed his will in 1452 after deciding to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem ad sanctum sepulcrum Domini on a Venetian galley.63 In his will he underlined his fear of death at sea caused by the uncertainty and the potential hazards of sea travel (storms, pirates, Ottoman navies) in the Eastern Mediterranean (timens naufragia que inde euenter possent).64 The aforementioned notary public from Šibenik, Karotus Vitale, composed the will of a certain Catherine (Catharina), wife of the late Boži Biseri de villa Iuiierfgrad districtus Sibenici. Being sana corpore, Catherine decided to compose her will in 1452 for two main reasons: uisitare limina ecclesiarum sanctorum Petri et Pauli que sunt in ciuitate Romana timensque uarios casus et pericula quam sibi in tali peregrinatione occurrere, i.e., because she was going on a pilgrimage to Rome and was, like many other testators, afraid of the risks of sea travel.65 It is obvious from the aforementioned examples of last wills which were at the end of the Middle Ages pilgrimaging became a widespread trend among members of all East Adriatic communal social groups. At the same time, there was a narrowing gender gap, with an increasing number of women drawing up last wills. The number of female testators composing their wills prior to departure on pilgrimage equalled that of male testators: in some cases (Šibenik and Rab) women pilgrims even surpassed in number their male contemporaries. Starting from the second half of the thirteenth century, some testators went on pilgrimage to other, newly established but immediately popular, saintly shrines. New shrines on the Apennine peninsula were dedicated to the cults of mendicant saints, for example in Assisi for St. Francis and in Padua for St. Anthony, or the Marian shrines in Loreto or Recanati. Thus, Lucy (Lucia), a citizen of Šibenik and wife of the late Gojslav Naderiza de Sibenico, dictated her will in 1454 sana corpore intendens proficisci Assisium

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(being in good health and intending to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Francis in Assisi).66 It is worth mentioning that the earliest known pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Francis was mentioned in the last will of Zadar’s patrician Dominica de Mauro, registered in 1292. Still, as in many other East Adriatic wills, that hazardous pilgrimage was performed not by ill testator herself but by some other, younger and healthier, person. Dominica left a significant sum of money to the person willing to go on pilgrimage for the salvation of her soul ad sanctam Mariam de Angelis in Assisi.67 Pilgrimages to Assisi from East Adriatic communes reached their medieval peak between 1450 and 1500; eleven pilgrims visited St. Francis’s shrine from the commune of Rab alone. An important economic and financial impetus to medieval pilgrimages in general was given by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300 when he proclaimed the first jubilee in Rome, marked by pilgrimages ad limina apostolorum Petri et Pauli. All pilgrims visiting Rome in that year (and during the following jubilees) received the absolution of all their sins. Later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the papal curia gave the same privileges to various other international, regional, and local pilgrim centres. Among the most popular pilgrim sites were the shrines devoted to the Virgin Mary, to mendicant saints, or communal shrines to patron saints. Thus, as testified in last wills, during the jubilee of 1350 at least thirty-three pilgrims from Dubrovnik visited Rome on either personal or group pilgrimages to receive the pardono grande. During the jubilee of 1450 Peter dictus Siliza, an inhabitant of the commune of Rab, composed his will sano corpore in order to go on pilgrimage (Romam visitatum limina apostolorum Petri et Pauli).68 In the same year, prior to pilgrimages to Rome, the pilgrims writing up their wills included Margarita, daughter of the late Nicholas,69 domina Maria, wife of the Rab patrician ser Peter de Zaro,70 Boža, daughter of the late Bilša and resident (habitatrix) of Rab.71 In the period between 1467 and 1487 nineteen testators from Pore
pilgrimaged to Rome, making that site the most popular late medieval pilgrim centre as a result of Ottoman pressure on routes to the Holy Land and other Eastern Mediterranean regions. After the reaffirmation of the role of the Virgin Mary in late scholasticism, Marian pilgrim shrines appeared all over Europe. Yet, the most popular were biblical places in the Holy Land followed by those in the Apennine peninsula, Loreto and Recanati. Pilgrimaging to Marian shrines was relatively often the reason for the writing up of wills. For example, in his last will dated 1451, Gregory Skal
i de villa Dasline in the district of Šibenik composed his breviarium testamenti stressing his wish to pilgrimage to Loreto ad ecclesiam gloriose matris virgine Marie corpore sanus.72 The case of Gregory (Gregorius) again confirms the growing social and gender democratization in the writing and recording of last wills. Moreover, this and other aforementioned cases show that increasing numbers of testators from lower social strata became financially capable of undertaking pilgrimages to distant shrines.73 Pilgrimages to regional and particularly

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international shrines were always expensive but in the late medieval period they became affordable to pilgrims from all social strata of East Adriatic communes.74 Recanati was an equally important international Marian pilgrim shrine. As early as the fourteenth century, eleven testators in Zadar cited pilgrimage ad sanctam Mariam de Rachanato as their main reason for writing up a will. In his will from 1477 a certain Andrew, preco communis Arbe (Rab’s communal envoy) also visited Recanati.75 Prior to that, in 1454 the notary public from Šibenik, Karotus Vitale, registered the will of Simon Brajkovi, puer legitime etatis, mentioning as the reason intendens traiicere ad sanctam Mariam de Rechanato.76 Interestingly, last wills from Dubrovnik composed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cited many pilgrim destinations, with the notable exception of Recanati.77 One of the most popular sites of medieval pilgrimage was Porciuncula in Assisi. A certain Catherine, uxor Bogdani Tichich from Šibenik, was one of those who made the pilgrimage to Assisi. According to data added later to her last will, she died during the journey (defuncta est in peregrinatione quam fecerat ad Asisium).78 Even before her departure on pilgrimage Catherine was corpore languens, which probably indicates that she wanted to be buried in Assisi in the church graveyard where her favourite saint was buried.79 Yet, when she passed away she was buried in ciuitate sancti Seuerini, having composed her final breviarium testamenti there. Her travelling companions from Šibenik brought that will back to Šibenik and the breviarium testamenti was opened in the presence of the notary Karotus Vitale in 1455.80 Joining the Army and Departure to War Joining the army or departure to war as foot soldiers, navy soldiers, galley pilots, and sailors, or as medics, surgeons, and commanders of communal galleys under Venetian military leadership appeared as reasons for composing wills early on in the fifteenth century in the East Adriatic. Naturally, the testators mentioning these two reasons for recording of their wills were exclusively men. In that period the papal curia started to propagate the idea of organizing crusades contra infideles Turchos.81 That reason was particularly popular among East Adriatic testators, in the first place among Dalmatians, who had experienced the first raids of the Ottoman akıncı (light cavalry corps) in the hinterland of the Dalmatian communes of Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, and Split. Such incursions continued during the entire fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Dalmatian last wills joining the army and departure to war appeared more frequently in wills starting from the midfifteenth century. The earliest such examples may be found in the wills of testators from Rab and Šibenik, the communes that suffered particularly badly de manibus impiorum. During the earliest Ottoman military raids, akıncı units abruptly attacked villages in communal districts, killing or enslaving peasant families – men, women, and children. The Ottomans also committed arson and robberies in villages, causing total devastation in

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district territories that were vital for the survival of the urban areas of the Dalmatian communes. The first Ottoman attack in the district of Šibenik happened in 1432, long before the fall of the Bosnian Kingdom in 1463.82 In the middle and in the second half of the fifteenth century the central Venetian government organized several land and naval attacks against the Ottoman armies in Greece, Albania, and Dalmatia. Numerous young Dalmatian soldiers and patricians participated in these campaigns as commanders of the communal galleys, soldiers or oarsmen, as documented in the last wills of the denizens of the commune of Šibenik. For example, in his last will registered by the notary Karotus Vitale in June of 1464 the patrician Simon Taveli was mentioned as the commander of Šibenik’s communal galley.83 Under his command the galley joined Venetian naval forces during the crusade against the Ottoman army, which at that moment was besieging two important Venetian fortresses in Greece: Modon and Coron. Simon’s will was opened in August 1465 after his death during that expedition (in ei expeditione fecerit obiisse).84 According to the codicil (codicillum) added to the will of another Šibenik patrician, Thomas (Thomasius) Tomaševi, he perished during the battle for Crete contra perfidos et crudelissimos Turcos as a commander of Šibenik’s galley.85 His last will was composed in Šibenik in March 1464 and registered prior to his departure for the aforementioned military campaign. In the will, Thomas was described as spectabilis miles dominus Thomasius Thomasseuich, nobilis Sibenici, patronus siue armator gallee de proximo armate Sibenici.86 John (Iohannes) de Larta, the commander of the Venetian mercenary guard in the fortress above Šibenik’s eastern port (comestabilis ad portam terre firme Sibenici), composed his will in March of 1452 before joining the Venetian army in the war against the Ottomans.87 In contrast to many other soldiers who never returned from the battlefield, John, probably because he was a professional and skilled soldier and mercenary, returned from the war in early 1453. According to data from his codicil recorded on March 30, 1453, because of his bravery in that war he was promoted as caporalis, i.e., commander in the military unit of ser Marci de Rasolis.88 The data in his codicil show that John was not even wounded on the battlefield and returned unharmed (reuersus in militia per gratiam Iesu Christi sanus corpore).89 The crews of Dalmatian galleys included feldshers (field surgeons) with titles such as magister barberius or barbitonsor. One of them was mentioned as Iohannes Boljiševide Sibenico, magister barbitonsor in galea Sibenici.90 He was listed as a crew member of Šibenik’s galley in the port of Corfu in 1449. Interestingly, he was also mentioned in the last wills of a few soldiers from Šibenik as the recipient of their monetary bequests. He must be the same individual as ser Iacobus Domancusouich de Sibenico, magister barberius in dicta galea, listed as a crew member of that galley in the same year.91 Joining the army and departure to war were occasionally mentioned as reasons for the drawing up of wills by testators from the commune of Rab. Rab was an island commune and the Ottomans never directly threatened

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Dalmatian islands and therefore the population of the district of Rab must have felt safe in that respect. However, at the time many Croats from the hinterland of Dalmatia had migrated from their old settlements to Dalmatian communes on the East Adriatic coast, to some of the communes on the islands (e.g., Rab), and even to Istria.92 Some of the denizens of the commune of Rab left wills where they cited joining the army or departure to war as their main motivation. For example, in April 1463 Radoslav, famulus magistri cerdonis93 Petri Clum, a Croatian newcomer to the city of Rab, composed his last will desponens se ire contra Turchos et infidelles pro fide Christiana et pro salutis anime sue.94 Around the same time, a certain George (Georgius), filius Vlatchi Belotich de Scrixa (today Karlobag near Senj on the Croatian littoral) composed his last will using exactly the same formula.95 There are several extant last wills recorded by the notaries public of Rab and Šibenik for young Croatian immigrants to the island of Rab and the commune of Šibenik during the second half of the fifteenth century. These young men, expelled from their homelands and forced to abandon their enslaved families, wives, and children, probably still believed in the ultimate victory of Christian forces over the Ottomans and hoped to return to their fortresses, castles, villages, or regions. However, much of this idealism came from constant propaganda in favour of the crusades encouraged by the members of the Holy League and the papacy. Quite surprisingly, even some wills of female testators cited emotional responses to the circumstances of war. For example, Draga, the widow of Marin Košifrom the village of Grebac in the district of Šibenik, used her last will, registered in September 1485, to express her maternal love for her son, Simon, and worry over his uncertain future: Simon cum multis […] esse abductum a Turchis in captiuitatem et de eius morte uel vita nihil certi […].96 Thus, Draga was even not certain whether her son was alive or dead, or taken into slavery. As reflected in her will, Draga belonged to the poorest strata of communal peasantry and she certainly could not buy Simon out of Ottoman bondage. She was not even able to leave bequests for members of the clergy or ecclesiastical institutions to pray for Simon’s release or, in case he was dead, for the remission of his sins. Thus, while patricians and noblemen from communal society were occasionally bought out of Ottoman bondage, young boys and girls from the peasantry were taken into slavery without any possibility of release. It is therefore understandable why many young people from the districts of coastal Dalmatian communes escaped to more secure regions such as Istria or to insular communes such as Rab, Bra
, and Hvar. Medical Reasons and Plague Epidemics It is interesting to note that towards the end of the Middle Ages testators started recording their wills for medical reasons. The emergence of that reason for writing up wills was in the first place the consequence of the growth of medicine as a science in the late Middle Ages.97 Medical reasons

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became more frequently cited in last wills because of the increasing popularity of learned medical professionals, Italians or Croats in origin, with university degrees such as medicus, phisicus, or chirurgicus. In East Adriatic communes medical professionals were often employed and well paid by communal administrations. Communal authorities usually provided them and members of their nuclear families with comfortable housing within the city walls. The annual salary of Šibenik’s medicus phisicus in the fifteenth century was the significant sum of ducatos ducentum et domum, and that of medicus cerurgicus ducatos centum et domum.98 Besides these two universityeducated physicians, there were one chirurgicus (surgeon) and one aromatarius (herbalist) providing medical care for Venetian soldiers in the city.99 Finally, as mentioned above, one chirurgicus and barberius were obligatory members of Venetian and Dalmatian communal galley crews. All communes on the East Adriatic coast employed at least two, and sometimes even more than ten, health professionals. Their number grew particularly after the first plague epidemic that raged in Istrian and Dalmatian communes in 1348. The plague contagions were linked to various regional rhythms of economic or war activities and weather conditions and occurred repeatedly either in consecutive years or a few times in a decade. In contrast to the Black Death, plague epidemics in the fifteenth century were not limited exclusively to the urban areas of communes. Last wills rarely cited medical reasons as the rationale of testators, except for periods when the plague peaked in communities. One example is the will of domina Rita, written in Zadar in 1392. Rita, the wife of the Croatian nobleman Ratko Martinuševi of the Karinjani kindred, explained that the reason for composing her will was that she was sana mente, sensu et intellectu, licet infirmitate corporea pergrauata, and therefore decided to travel ad partes externas in search for a cure.100 Rita’s will also mentions the possible hazards along the way. In her will recorded in 1394 domina Fantina, daughter of the late ser Lombardini de Saladinis and wife of the Zadar patrician Blase de Soppe, explains the reasons for drawing up a will in these terms: nunc pregnans, timens casus inopinos qui in multibus pregnantibus mulieres solent occurrere, referring to the high risks of complications during the pregnancy.101 The plague (pestis, pestilentia, tempus pestiferis) and other, unspecified, epidemics hit East Adriatic communes particularly hard during the late medieval period. The first late medieval plague epidemic, which spread all over Europe and struck East Adriatic communes in January 1348, was the reason why in December 1348 Dubrovnik’s communal authorities ordered local notaries public to register last wills in separate books (Libri testamentorum) due to the high mortality rate.102 After the Black Death, the plague and other epidemics periodically reached the commune of Zadar. During the second half of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth plague contagions were mentioned in many last wills in Zadar. The earliest of these was that of the patrician testator Nicholas de Gallelis, comitis insule Pagi, from 1361, in which the notary recorded explicitly:

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manifeste concipiens quod morbis pestiferis maxime tunc uigentibus. Epidemics of plague in Zadar are known from 1362 and 1382. The wills also point to epidemics in 1391 and 1392. In some of them, the notary specifically identified the plague as the cause for the recording of wills.104 According to Željko Cvetni, the plague appeared in the commune of Zadar at least twelve times in the period between 1418 and 1500.105 Intriguingly, all the wills mentioning the plague were composed for members of the patrician elites in Zadar, both male and female. The plague as the reason for drawing up a will is documented for other East Adriatic communes as well. The only exception is the case of the Istrian commune of Pore
where, in the sample of wills from the second half of the fifteenth century, the plague was mentioned only once. In November 1477, the notary public of Pore
 recorded the will of patrician ser Vid de Paulo sedens ad balchionem sue domus diuino iuditio sanus quidem mente et intellectu gratiam Ihesu Christi because Vid was peste grauatus.106 In contrast to Pore
, in other communes, such as Zadar, followed by Šibenik and Rab, in the fifteenth-century plague contagions as the reason for the recording the wills are frequently mentioned. Data from wills as well as narrative and diplomatic sources have helped establish the frequency of epidemics with greater accuracy: the number of plague outbreaks in Šibenik during the fifteenth century was above twenty.107 For the present study, I have selected only a few cases. Relatively vivid description of the fear from plague is presented in the breviarium testamenti of Stana, olim vxoris Iohannis de Sibenico, recorded in November of 1451 when this epidemic raged in the commune of Šibenik. As recorder in one document Stana was expelled from Šibenik already in May 1451 because she pestilentiata erat and therefore expulsa fuit a ciuitate Sibenici.108 The notary Karotus Vitale wrote in her breviary: “obiisse (i.e., Stana) extra Sibenici ex peste et condidisse oretenus testamentum suum in presentia presbiteri Michaelis Ratmilich de Sibenico sui patris penitentie, postquam ipsam Rusam cum tota eius familia de mandato ipsius magnifici domini comitis ob timore contagionis dicte pestis subito expulsam fuisse de ciuitate Sibenici et foris stetisse usque hos dies.”109 In January 1457 the will of the patrician nobilis domina Cotta, daughter of Thomas (Thomasius) Tomaševi, was registered in Šibenik. At the time when the will was drawn up, ota was a young girl, yet of legally adult age (puella legitime etatis).110 She was also described as sana mente, intellectu et corpore, but at the same time she was obviously afraid of dying suddenly as Šibenik was continually afflicted by the plague from the winter of 1456 onwards.111 Like many other testators from the elites of communal society, ota decided to compose her will and then leave Šibenik for her residence on one of the district islands. ota explained her departure in her will in the following terms: propter timorem pestis quas nunc uiget in ciuitate Sibenici exituta est a dicta ciuitate et itura ad insulas pro conseruanda sua incolumitate.112 In February 1457 John Tobolovi, a patrician from Šibenik, composed his will. He, too, was said to be sanus mente, intellectu et corpore,

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but he was also worried about the possibility of dying from the plague (pestilentiam esse mortis euentus).113 Thus, the same emotion – fear of sudden death – prompted him to compose his will. ota and John both survived that plague and soon after, according to data from ota’s inventory of goods, they married.114 Usually, the data regarding the plague in wills are recorded in simple words. Thus, villicus (peasant) Thomas Duplovi de Daslina in the district of Šibenik composed his breviarium testamenti in 1464 prope pestem.115 The reason for composing a breviarium testamenti for another peasant, Ostoja Radoj
ide villa Perchouo, in January 1457 was that he pestilentiatus erat.116 In September 1466 the Šibenik notary Melchior Sabin recorded the codicil of the patrician Catharine, daughter of ser John Tobolovimentioning as the reason for the registration of her will: pestifero morbo infecta.117 In December of the same year the same notary transcribed from Croatian into Latin the breviarium testamenti of Radoslav Guzolifrom the village of Dazline who, at the moment of dictating his will, was pestifero morbo infectus.118 There are numerous wills recorded for testators in Rab in the second half of the fifteenth century mentioning the plague epidemic as their main reason for writing a will. Most plague outbreaks in the East Adriatic communes were not confined to a single commune but spread across the entire region of Istria and Dalmatia. For example, there is documentary evidence that the plague epidemic affecting Šibenik in 1449 was also recorded in Rab. The aforementioned major epidemic of 1456–1457 raged in the entire region of Dalmatia. The last will of George, son of the late Duimus, registered in 1456, was composed propter pestilentiam.119 In January 1457 the master tanner Anthony Judei (de Zudio) recorded his will being sana mente, corpore infirmus peste infectus.120 In November 1457 nobilis domina Arbi Soura Damoris, wife of the late Nicholas de Dominis, mentioned that her will was written tempore pestiferis.121 Rab’s patrician Marin de Poruga recorded his will in December 1460 tempore pestiferis.122 Petar from Bergamo, a well-known magister tagliapiera (master stonecutter), recorded his will in July 1465 because of fear of the plague (pericula mortis).123 In September 1496, during the plague epidemic in the commune of Rab, honestisima iuvenis nobillisque domina Cipriana, filia quondam ser Christofori de Cernotis oppressa epidemiali febre, a young patrician girl infected with the plague, composed her last will.124 Her will as well as the wills of other Rab testators recorded in 1496 give details of the terrible plague epidemic that struck the commune of Rab in that year. Cipriana was, as shown in the comment added later on the margin of her will, one of the victims of that plague.125 The wills examined in this chapter show that plague epidemics were often as the main incentive for individuals to draw up a last will in late medieval Istria and Dalmatia.

Conclusion In the high and late medieval periods, East Adriatic testators mentioned other reasons for writing up their will besides those listed above, for

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example: leaving one’s home in search of job opportunities, ordination into the priesthood, family affairs, and imprisonment. However, the documentary sources citing these reasons do not form a numerically significant sample. As already suggested at the start of this chapter, the key to the democratization of will writing across class and gender boundaries in East Adriatic communities must be sought in the pervasive piety of the high and late medieval periods. Individuals decided to write up a will because they were afraid of dying (suddenly) without the last confession, communion, and without a strategy for testamentary distribution of legacies pro anima and ad pias causas. Such concerns were not simply the outcome of contemporary scholarly theological discussions, but also of an emerging type of Christianity that did not depend solely on official ecclesiastical decisions, papal and councils’ decrees. The impact of lay believers, especially of those who were well educated, led to the foundation of new religious movements in Western Christianity that resulted in the emergence of the so-called social and civic Christianity. This impact was felt not only among lay communities but also in some circles of the Church as an institution. As documented in last wills, a new ethos emerged in late medieval Christianity, one that placed the emphasis on charity and compassion for the marginalized, the poor, the sick, and brothers and sisters from the same confraternities. The care for the salvation of the soul was another, equally important, trend in late medieval Christianity. Yet, changing historical circumstances, dominated by plague epidemics and wars “contra infideles Turchos” as well as by increasing social and individual mobility, the growing popularity of pilgrimages, the increasing influence of medicine in everyday life, added nuances and additional motivation for individuals to write up their last wills and testaments.

Notes 1 The period is particularly important for researchers working with quantitative data in social history, for the wills form “continuous temporal and spatial series” and they have the character of “mass sources.” Gerhard Jaritz, “Osterreichische Burgertestamente als Quelle zur Erforschung stadtischer Lebensformen des Spatmittelalters,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus 8 (1984), 249. See also Urs Martin Zahnd, “Sptmittelalterliche Bürgertestamente als Quellen zu Realienkunde und Sozialgeschichte,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 96/1–2 (1988): 60–1. 2 The foundations of teaching canon law at universities were laid in the middle medieval period with the scholastic legal compendium known as Decretum magistri Gratiani. It was written by Gratian, a twelfth-century professor at the Faculty of Law in Bologna. Gratian’s opus represented the source for the later Corpus iuris canonici, which became the main source for Canon law. During the following centuries canon law was continually supplemented with councils’ decrees (especially of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) and decrees issued by the papal curia (e.g., during the papacy of Gregory IX, Boniface VIII, and Clement VII). See Decretum Gratiani (Kirchenrechtssammlung), Bayerische Staats Bibliothek. Digitale Bibliothek. https://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen. de//decretum-gratiani/online/angebot (accessed 9 March 2020).

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3 See, for instance: Josip Kolanoviand Mate Križman (eds.), Zadarski statut sa svim reformacijama odnosno novim uredbama donesenima do godine 1563 (hereafter: SZ); Ogranak Matice hrvatske u Zadru, Hrvatski državni arhiv (Zadar, 1997); Baltazar Bogiši and Konstantin Josef Jire
ek (eds.), Liber statutorum civitatis Ragusii compositus anno 1272, Monumenta historico-juridica Slavorum meridionalium 9 (Zagreb: JAZU, 1904); Slavo Grubiši(ed.), Knjiga statuta, zakona i reformacija grada Šibenika (hereafter: SŠ) (Šibenik: Muzej grada Šibenika, 1982); Mirko Zja
i (ed.), Statut grada Pore a (Statutum comunis Parentii) iz 1363. godine (hereafter: SP), in Monumenta historico-juridica Slavorum meridionalium, vol. XIII (Zagreb: JAZU, 1979). 4 See, for example, Antun Cvitani(ed.), Statut grada Splita 1312. Godine: Statuta civitatis Spalati. Splitsko srednjovjekovno pravo: Ius Spalatense medii aevi (hereafter: SS), Književni krug, Split 1998, Lib. III, Cap. XVIII–XXXVII, 483–500. All decrees in Book Three of the Statute Law of Split are related to last wills and testators. In response to changes caused by shifting historical circumstances, novels, called reformationes (emendations), were added later. See, for instance: ibid., Reformationes, Cap. XIV, 823 and Cap. CIX, 927. 5 In East Adriatic communes this was between fourteen and sixteen years of age for male and between twelve to fourteen years for female testators. Lujo Margeti and Petar Str
i, Statut rapske komune iz 14. Stolje
a: Statutum communis Arbae (hereafter: RS) (Rab-Rijeka, 2004), 100–1. 6 Statute Law of Zadar, Lib. tertius, Cap. CXV, 356. 7 The same decree contains information concerning the institution of guardian or mentor to underage persons: “quod pupillis, et minoribus quatuordecim annorum masculis et tresdecim annorum femine, si pater ipsorum ab intestato decesserit aut si in testamento non dederit, detur tutor per dominationem Parentii, qui per omnia possit ac si ipsi minores maiores essent.” SP, Lib. II, Cap. LXIX, 100–1. 8 State Archive of Zadar (hereafter: HR-DAZd), Šibenik notarial records (hereafter: ŠB), notary Karotus Vitale (hereafter: KV), kut. 15–16/I, fols. 27–27v. 9 HR-DAZd, KV, kut. 15–16/I, f. 27. In other notary records Ambrose Mi
eti was referred to as “clarissimus legum doctor dominus Ambrosius Michatich examinator comunis.” HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15. Iva, fol. 32v. 10 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, fol. 32v. 11 Being mentecaptus, Paul was assessed by the notary and the communal examinator as mentally and intellectually incapable of participating in the legal process of recording that notarial document. HR-DAZd, ŠB, notary Ante Campolongo (hereafter: AC), kut. 11/IV, vol. 10.IV.a (1448), Quartus instrumentorum, fol. 164. 12 According to the Statute Law of Rab, notaries public were required to take an oath and testify that they would not register notary documents for drunk persons: “item nullum rogitum accipiam ab homine ebrio, si qui non esset perfectae aetatis, quive esset incompos mentis.” Margeti and Str
i, Lib. V, Cap. XVIII, 256. 13 The first study to examine reasons for recording wills in Croatia was Zdenka Janekovi-Römer’s “Na razmeðu ovog i onog svijeta: Prožimanje pojavnog i transcedentnog u dubrova
kim oporukama kasnog srednjeg vijeka,” Otium.  asopis za povijest svakodnevice 2/3–4 (1994): 3–15. The omnipresence of fear from sudden death among all denizens of East Adriatic communes is confirmed and illustrated by the importance of one saint’s cult – St. Christopher. On the role of St. Christopher in late medieval piety see Robert N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995), 183.

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14 For instance, anxiety over (sudden) death in wills recorded by Trogir’s notary Vannes Bernardi from Firmo in Italy, written in the second half of the fourteenth century, was expressed in terms such as: “[…] timens iudicium Dei et periculum mortis nolens intestatus decedere dispositionem omnium bonorum suorum ac rerum in hunc modum facere procurauit.” Marija Karbiand Zoran Ladi, “Oporuke stanovnika grada Trogira u arhivu HAZU,” Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU u Zadru 43, (2001): 161–254. Similar formulae are used in wills recorded by Pore
’s notary Antonius de Teodoris in the second half of the fifteenth century. For example: “Ibique dona Oliua, filia quondam ser Marci Longo, vxor uero ser Petri de Andronicis sedens super lecto diuino iuditio sana quidem mentis et intellectu gratiam Ihesu Christi licet aliqualiter infirmitate grauata timens ne extrema dies et confirmata hora ipsam reperiat intestatam cum nil sit certius morte et nil incertius hora mortis.” Državni arhiv u Pazinu (State Archive of Pazin, (hereafter: HR-DAPa), Istrian notaries (hereafter: IB), notary Anthony de Teodoris (hereafter: AT), sign. HR-DAPa-8, fol. 151r. 15 See, for example: Branimir Glavi
i(ed.), Marko Maruli, Institucija, vols. I–III (Split 1986–1987). The original Latin title of that work, published in Venice in 1506, is De institutione bene vivendi per exempla sanctorum. 16 Brian Patrick McGuire, “Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and Medieval Change,” Viator 20 (1989): 83. 17 See Medieval Sourcebook: Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV 1215. The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, Canon 22, https://sourcebooks. fordham.edu/basis/lateran4.asp, (accesed 11 December 2021). 18 Starting from the mid-thirteenth century, the Eucharist and the last confession were considered as the most important events not only of a good Christian life, but also the main preconditions for the progression of the souls to Heaven. McGuire, “Purgatory,” 83. 19 Today still, medievalists, theologians, and philosophers keep debating the origin of Purgatory. Some argue that the development of the category of purgatorium lasted for many centuries starting from late Antiquity. According to Jacques Le Goff, the notion of Purgatory resulted from intellectual arguments exchanged over a relatively shorter period of half of century, between 1150 and 1200. See Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3–5, 135, 171. 20 Still, we should bear in mind that sin in the Christian sense was the outcome of free will, as defined in the Bible. Essentially, free will was and is a divine right granted to believers, allowing them to choose between two fundamental moral options – sin and virtue. During the period examined here, the notion of free will was central to debate on dominant religious concepts such as the seven deadly sins and the seven works of mercy. As documented in visual and written sources, far from being the preserve of theological and intellectual reflection, the seven virtues and seven sins permeated the lives of all believers from all classes, whether they were aware of it or not. See, for example: Tobias Hoffmann, Freedom without Choice: Medieval Theories of the Essence of Freedom, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 194–216. 21 See Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 16–7. 22 For example, in the will of Master Philip, a scribe (scriptor). Mirko Zja
i, “Spisi zadarskih bilježnika Henrika i Creste Tarallo 1279–1308,” in Spisi zadarskih bilježnika 1 (hereafter ZB 1), Državni arhiv u Zadru, Zadar 1959, doc. 3, p. 45) and in the will of Buna Iadratina, wife of the late Desa and sister of the late deacon Micha (Ibid., doc. 20, p. 57).

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23 For example, in the last will of Zadar’s patrician domina Euphemia, wife of Francis de Çadulinis. Tadija Smi
iklas, Diplomati ki zbornik Kraljevine Hrvatske, Dalmacije i Slavonije. Codex diplomaticus regni Croatiae, Dalmatiae et Slavoniae, vol. 10 (hereafter: CD 10) (Zagreb: JAZU, Zagreb, 1912), doc. 382, pp. 538–46. 24 For instance, in the will of “nobilis vir ser Maurus qm. Andree de Grisogonis de Iadra” from 1376. HR-DAZd, Zadar notarial records (hereafter: ZB), notary Vannes Bernardi de Firmo (hereafter: VBF), b. 1, fasc. 1/2, fols. 31–32. 25 The last will of “ser Iacobus qm. Gregorii de Zadolinis, ciuis Iadre” from 1383. HR DAZd, ZB, notary Iohannes de Casulis (hereafter: IC), b. 1, fasc. 3/1, fols. 12–15. 26 Archive of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (hereafter: HR-AHAZU), Testamenta Traguriensia (hereafter: TT), notary Vannes Dominici de Firmo (hereafter: VDF), fol. 2. 27 HR-AHAZU, TT, VDF, fol. 2. 28 Josip Lu
i, “Spisi dubrova
ke kancelarije: Zapisi notara Tomasina de Savere 1282–1284. Diversa cancellariae I (1282–1284). Testamenta I (1282–1284),” in Monumenta historica Ragusina 2 (Zagreb: JAZU,1984) (henceforth: MR 2), doc. 974, 233–34. 29 State Archive in Dubrovnik (hereafter: HR-DADu), Testamenta notariae (hereafter: TN), vol. 5, fol. 25. 30 Miho Barada, “Trogirski spomenici. Dio I.: Zapisci pisarne opine Trogirske” 1/2 (hereafter: MT 1/2), in Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium (hereafter: MSHSM) 45 (Zagreb: JAZU, 1950), doc. 4, 251. 31 HR-AHAZU, TT, VDF, fol. 7r. 32 Ibid., fol. 161v. 33 These data are of great value for medievalists dealing with historical demography in the late medieval period. 34 HR-DAZd, ZB, PS, b. 1, fasc. 1/6, fols. 182–183. 35 Ibid. 36 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 17v. 37 Ibid. 38 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 14. 39 HR-DAZd, ŠB, AC, kut. 11/III, fasc. 10.VII.b, fols. 30–31. 40 Medieval Sourcebook: Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV 1215. The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, Canon 22, https://sourcebooks. fordham.edu/basis/lateran4.asp, (accesed 11 December 2021). 41 On mortality in the late medieval East Adriatic communes see: Gordan Ravan
i, “Prilog prou
avanju Crne smrti u dalmatinskom gradu (1348. – 1353.) – raspon izvorne grae i stanje istraženosti na primjerima Dubrovnika, Splita i Zadra,” Povijesni prilozi 23/26 (2004): 7–18; Zoran Ladi, “Epidemije kuge i zdravstvena kultura u Šibeniku u kasnom srednjem vijeku,” Povijesni prilozi 40/60 (2021): 39–73. 42 For instance, in the will of “Osre relicte qm. Bogdani Slafcouich de villa Tercici, villane domine Magdalene relicte qm. ser Danielis de Varicassis,” recorded in Zadar in 1387. HR-DAZd, ZB, notary Articutius de Riuignano (hereafter AR), b. 5, fasc. 3, fols. 36–37. 43 For example, in the will dated to 1400 and recorded for Miroje Franolifrom Božava in the district of Zadar. HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fasc. 3, fols. 112–113. 44 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 161v. 45 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15. IV B5, fol. 220v. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut.2/sv.VI, fol. 55. 49 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2/sv.XI, fol. 170.

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50 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2/sv. VIII, fol. 108r. 51 Ibid. An interesting example is the will recorded by Šibenik notary Karotus Vitale for Šibenik’s patrician James Žiljevi, archpriest (“archipresbiter”) of the chapter of Šibenik (“venerabilis dominus archipresbiter et canonicus Sibenicensis”), dated 8 October 1456. HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.Iva, fol. 106a. James’s physical condition was described by the notary as “corpore infirmitate uehementer grauatus.” Ibid. The word “vehementer” in medieval Latin can also refer to an infected person. 52 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. VIII, fol. 108r. 53 For the importance of Zadar as one of the main ports for pilgrims from Central Europe traveling from Zadar on Venetian galleys across the Adriatic Sea on their pilgrimage to Rome during the jubilees see the novel (reformatio) from the Statute Law of Zadar dated July 1448 and entitled De traducendo peregrinos Romam. SZ, Reformationes 134, p. 620. 54 A land route, constructed in the Roman period, that led to the hinterland of Dalmatia and Albania, was also used in the medieval period. The most important staging posts along that route in the medieval period were Senj, Zadar, Šibenik, Split, and Dubrovnik, but the road led further south to Durrës in Albania where it joined with the via Egnatia. 55 “Demum asinavimus per terram planam et campestrem, fertilem, non petrosam versus Iherusalem, et distat a Rama 30 miliaria. Et venimus sero usque ad ascensum montium et ibi stetimus per noctem in campis. Et quidam peregrinus de partibus Slavonie in nocte illa mortuus est presente sua uxore, que multum anxiata est et cum dolore maximo reliquit virum, quem multum amabat, inter gentiles sepelire in campis.” Matthias Sollweck (ed.), Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis itinerarium in terram sanctam et ad sanctam Catharinam (Tübingen 1892), 108–109. 56 The great numbers of Croatian and East Adriatic pilgrims visiting Rome during the first jubilee were noted by Dante Alighieri. In his Divine Comedy, Dante compared the ecstasy of St. Bernard with the religious ecstasy of Croatian pilgrims (Qual é colui che forse di Croazia/Viene a veder la Veronica nostra). Dante, Commedia, Canto XXI, 35. The next jubilee, proclaimed in 1350, seems to have attracted even more pilgrims from Croatia. Finally, during the jubilee of 1400 many Zaratin testators who left on pilgrimage ad limina apostolorum in search of the promised remission of their sins. 57 ZB 1, doc. 32, p. 66. 58 Ibid. Yet, the question remains whether it was peaceful pilgrimage or peregrinatio cruce signati which was then organized by the papacy and some of the Western rulers in order to reclaim Palestine from the Arabs. 59 ZB 1, doc. 33, p. 66. 60 Sero Dokoza, “Inventar fonda don Kuzme Vu
etia u Državnom arhivu u Zadru,” Prilozi povijesti otoka Hvara, vol. XI (2002), 256–60. 61 Arhiv Hrvatske akademije znanosti I umjetnosti (Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (hereafter: HR-AHAZU), Guerrin Ferrante, II.a.43, fol. 10. 62 HR-DAZd, ZB, notary Iohannes de Casulis (hereafter: IC), b. 1, fasc. 3/1, pp. 86–7. 63 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. 6, fols. 55a–56. 64 Ibid. 65 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 20a. 66 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut.16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 61. 67 ZB 1, doc. 36, pp. 69–70. 68 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv.4; fol.1165–1177; god.1450–1453., fol. 1169/3a.

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69 HR-DAZd, RB,TS, kut. 2, sv.4; fol.1165–1177; god.1450–1453., fol. 1173a. 70 Being conscious of possible pericula (dangers) during the journey, Maria bequeathed a sum of money “pro vna missa parua per fratres commemorantes in conuentu sancte Euphemie insule Arbi,” that is for celebrating one mass for the salvation of her soul by Franciscans from the convent of St. Euphemia on island of Rab after her departure on pilgrimage to Rome. HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. 4; fols. 1165–1177; fols. 1176–1176a. 71 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut.2, sv.4; fols.1165–1177; fol. 1176. 72 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 5r. 73 According to data from last wills, pilgrims going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and St. James in Compostela received between ten and sixty ducats depending on the social status of the testators. For pilgrimages to Rome, pilgrims received between three and ten ducats, while those going to pilgrimage sites in Assisi, St. Nicholas in Bari, and other centers in Italy were given between three and eight ducats. An example of bequests made to pilgrims is the will of Šibenik’s patrician egregia et honesta domina Agata uxor ser Nicolai Michoicich. Having made a number of bequests, she left her remaining bona mobilia et immobilia to her husband Nicolai on condition he facilitated the journey of one pilgrim (mittere teneatur unum peregrinum ad visitandum ecclesiam sancti Iacobi de Galicia pro anima ipsius testatricis). Agata and Nicolai were one of the wealthiest married couples in Šibenik at the time and this bequest for a pilgrimage to St. James’s shrine in Compostela was certainly very generous. HR-DAZd, SŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15, fols. 30–30a. 74 Besides the economic growth of East Adriatic communes in the fifteenth century, there is another factor enabling pilgrimaging for persons from the lower social strata: in some cases, two or more testators bequeathed money to one pilgrim who promised under oath to go on pilgrimage for the salvation of the souls of those testators. These so-called ex voto or substantial pilgrimages became a widespread habit in all East Adriatic communes. 75 Zoran Ladi, “O kasnosrednjovjekovnim rapskim hodo
ašima ad sanctos,” in Rapski zbornik, Matica hrvatska, Ogranak u Rabu, eds. Josip Andriand Robert Lon
ari(Rab, 2013), 152–3. 76 HR-DAZd, SŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 56r. 77 Zoran Ladi, “Oporu
ni legati ‘pro anima’ i ‘ad pias causas’ dubrova
kih stanovnika krajem XIII. Stoljea, in 1000 godina dubrova ke (nad)biskupije: Zbornik radova znanstvenog skupa u povodu tisu
u godina uspostave dubrova ke (nad)biskupije / metropolije (998–1998.), ed. Nediljko Ante An
i(Dubrovnik, 2001), 749–50. 78 HR-DAZd, KV, kut. 16/II, fol. 79a. 79 Ibid., fol. 80. 80 Ibid. 81 In that period, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484) was particularly active in organizing the Holy League against the Ottomans. 82 Šibenski list, no. 195, year V, June 6th, 1956, 3. In October 1479 Marica, wife of Dragiša Iadrijevi, who was abductus a Turchos, dictated her breviarium testamenti in the presence of the local parish priest. There were no witnesses because she could not come to the village of Puti
anje ob timorem pestis. HR-DAZd, ŠB, AC, kut. 11/III, vol. 10, VII b, fol. 27. 83 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IV, fol. 222. 84 Ibid. 85 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IV, fols. 263–263a. 86 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IV, fols. 211a–213a. 87 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 15a.

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88 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, f.ol 36. 89 Ibid. 90 HR-DAZd, ŠB, Giovanni Baptista Bonmathei de Verona, kut. 13–14, fasc. 14b, fol. 2. A barberius or barbitonsor combined the roles of barber and assistant surgeon in communes and on ships. 91 Ibid, fol. 71. 92 In the case of Šibenik, the resettlement of the population was organized by the central government in Venice and reached as far as Istria. Expelled by Ottoman troops, some groups of Croats settled on the western coast of the Adriatic, especially in several villages in the region of Molise. 93 Famulus in this period referred to either an apprentice or an experienced hired workman. Cerdo meant artisan. 94 HR-DAZd; RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. XI, fol. 37a. 95 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. XI, fol. 37a. 96 HR-DAZd, ŠB, Antonio de Martinis (hereafter: AM), sign. 20, fasc. B/I. (1), fols. 156–156a. 97 Nevertheless, the total failure of contemporary medicine in containing some contagions, especially the plague, was best expressed in the words recorded by one of Dubrovnik’s notaries in 1348: “Apocrato, Galeno, et Avizena non serviva niente, peró che non vale arte ne scienzia contro lo divino consilio.” Tadija Smi
iklas, Codex diplomaticus regni Croatiae, Dalmatiae et Slavoniae, vol. 11 (Zagreb: JAZU, 1913), 496–7. 98 Josip Barbari Josip Kolanovi (eds.), Povijesni spomenici Šibenika i njegova kotara. Monumenta historiam Sibenici et eius districtus illustrantia, vol. I: Šibenski diplomatarij. Zbornik šibenskih isprava. Diplomatarium Sibenicense (Šibenik 1986), 223. 99 For example, the official medic of the Venetian military unit in Šibenik castle was “ser Matheus Bartolomei, aromatarius de castello Sibenici,” HR-DAZD, ŠB, Ilija Banjvari, kut. 17/II-III, fasc. 13a4, fol. 183. 100 The destination of Rita’s journey was not mentioned in her will. DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, f. 3, ff. 90–90. 101 DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fol. 2, no. 27. 102 Describing life in Dubrovnik during the Black Death in 1348, the chronicler Nicholas de Ragnina wrote the following: “Fu a Ragusa una gran peste. Non fu peste, ma ira di Dio. Morite homeni di conto, fra gentilhomeni et gentildonne et puti, 170, fra povolani de conto 300, povolo menudo n-o 1000.” See Natko (Speratus) Nodilo (ed.), Annales Ragusini anonimi item Nicolai de Ragnina, Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium, Scriptores 1, (Zagreb: JAZU, 1883), 39. 103 HR-DAZd, ZB, PP, b. 1, fasc. 5, fols. 7–8. Other testators from Zadar composing their wills in the same year because of the fear from plague included: Krešo (Cressius) de Zadulinis (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, f. 3, fols. 79–80), Nicholas (Nicholaus) de Matafaris (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fol. 2), Michelina de Zadulinis (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fol. 2), and Gregory (Gregorius) de Zadulinis (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fol. 3, fols. 81–82). In 1392 the plague was mentioned in two other wills, that of Mary de Nassis (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, fol. 2) and Michelina de Matafaris (HR-DAZd, ZB, AR, b. 5, f. 3, fols. 89–90). 104 The usual phrase describing the plague in these wills was that a will was made “considerans tempus modernum pestiferum regnans in ciuitate Iadre.” 105 Željko Cvetni, “Kuga – bolest koja je promijenila svijet (I. dio).” https:// veterina.com.hr/?p=31621 (accessed 13 October 2020). 106 HR-DAPa, IB, AT, fol. 151.

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107 See Zoran Ladi, “Epidemije kuge i zdravstvena kultura u Šibeniku u kasnom srednjem vijeku,” Povijesni prilozi 60, year 40 (2021): 39–75. 108 HR- DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16, sv. II, vol. 15/IVa, fol. 8r. 109 HR- DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16, sv. II, vol. 15/IVa, fol. 7v. 110 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 109r. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 111r. 114 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 203. 115 HR-DAZd, ŠB, KV, kut. 16/II, sv. 15.IVa, fol. 207. 116 Ibid., fol. 109v. 117 HR-DAZd, ŠB, Melchiore Sabino, kut. 19, fol. 12. 118 HR-DAZd, MS, kut. 19, fol. 40a. 119 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. VIII, fol. 100. 120 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. VIII, fol. 117a. 121 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. VIII, fol. 121. 122 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. XI, fol. 152a. 123 HR-DAZd, RB, TS, kut. 2, sv. X, fol. 185. 124 HR-DAZd, RB, notary Georgius Segota, kut. 5, sv. II, 9/II, fols. 15–15v. 125 Ibid.

5

Demise Far from Home Testaments of Ragusans Who Died in Bulgarian Lands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries Penka Danova and Elena Kostova

This chapter focuses on Ragusans who made their wills and passed away in Bulgarian lands in the late Middle Ages. It reviews the conditions for the emergence and development of Ragusan trade recorded in ruler charters stipulating relations between Ragusa1 and Bulgaria, the Ottoman state, and other medieval Balkan states. These initial agreements served as a foothold for the future Ragusan colonies in Bulgarian lands in the fifteenth century. Particular attention will be paid to the content of the wills. They provide abundant information about the economic history of the medieval Balkans, about land trade and communications in the most turbulent period of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan hinterland. Moreover, the wills are also a valuable source of information about the spiritual world of a medieval man, who was concerned about the salvation of his soul, but also about the prosperity and material well-being of his family and associates. The testaments will be discussed clause by clause, with both typical and curious examples, but without any claim to comprehensiveness. Keeping accurate records of the patrimonial assets of Ragusans was also of interest to the authorities of the republic of Ragusa, which is why this chapter also looks at the probate process, as well as the time and the way the last will of a testator travelled from distant lands to their homeland to become an official document of private law. The chapter ends with a table of the deciphered texts available so far and included in the present analysis. Our interest in the wills of Ragusans who lived in Bulgarian lands and left written traces of their last wills and testaments was sparked by our work at the State Archives in Dubrovnik (Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku – DAD) as members of the “Dubrovnik and Bulgaria in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries”2 research team. While researching the Testamenta Notariae3 document series the team discovered and recorded a total of nineteen wills related to the Bulgarian theme, four of which we excluded because they do not fall within the range of interests outlined here.4 In the two volumes of published documents, we included the texts of seven wills designated in the annex by (*).5 To these we added another eight for the period leading up to the end of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-8

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fifteenth century, fully deciphered and accompanied by commentaries for the first time in the present study.6 The wills of Ragusans have rarely been the subject of research by Bulgarian or foreign scholars who made important contributions to Bulgarian historiography.7 The happy exceptions include the publications of Ivan Sakazov (1895–1935), Ioanna Spissarevska (1938–2009), and only a few others.8

Dubrovnik’s Agreements with Its Eastern Neighbours In terms of politics, the Late Middle Ages in Dubrovnik (thirteenth–fifteenth centuries) could be split into two equal periods. The first encompassed the sovereignty of the Republic of Venice (1205–1358). It was characterized by the emergence and establishment of the main governance institutions elaborated according to the Venetian model: the Great Council (Consilium maior), the Minor Council (Consilium minor) and the Senate (also called Consilium rogatorum).9 With the exception of the head of state (comes), who was appointed by Venice, the members of these governance bodies were representatives of the local aristocratic merchant elite concerned with the prosperity of the Dubrovnik commune, as the state was then called. Venetian sovereignty did not hinder the city’s economic development. On the contrary. It was precisely in this period that Ragusa became known internationally by means of its trade with neighbours far and wide, both in the West and in the East, by land and by sea.10 If Ragusa was just one of the ports (along with Zadar, Split and Ulcinj, for example) along the western shore of the Balkan Peninsula controlled by Venice when the first Statutes of the Dubrovnik commune was passed in 1272, in the mid-Fourteenth century the city was already a major trade power in the region. That was why, at the end of the war with the Kingdom of Hungary (1357–1358), Venice tried to retain its power by granting the citizens of Ragusa equal rights and privileges to those of Venetians. With the passing under Hungarian sovereignty in the middle of the Fourteenth century, the city was granted full control of its institutions. Although Ottoman sovereignty is also mentioned after 1458 pursuant to Dubrovnik’s bilateral agreement with the Ottoman Empire, it de facto preserved its political and economic independence until the Napoleonic wars. The end of Venetian power opened doors wide for the trade of the Adriatic commune, which began to call itself the Republic of Ragusa after its emancipation (or the republic of Saint Blaise, after the name of the city’s patron saint). Trade agreements and privileges were an important condition for the economic prosperity of the republic, respectively for the emergence of Ragusan colonies deeper and deeper in the Balkan hinterland. It is well known that bilateral relations between the city on the Adriatic and its Balkan partners have a rich history. At the very end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Dalmatian commune regulated its relations with a large section of the countries in Southeastern Europe.11

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At this early stage of development in the cooperation between individual Balkan states and Ragusa, the matter of Ragusans’ property was reflected in the sources stipulating bilateral contacts. Some of them pertained specifically to the property of Ragusans who died within the boundaries of one or another of the medieval Balkan states. This is confirmed directly by the official royal charters issued to Dubrovnik and its representatives. These charters frequently stipulated the way to proceed with the property of representatives of the Dalmatian city who met their death somewhere in the Balkans. As an example, we shall quote the prostagma12 of the ruler of Epirus, Michael I Komnenos Doukas (1205–1215), issued soon after the capture of Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. The document is dated June 120613 and provides for the sojourn of Ragusans in the state of Epirus. Along with the other clauses, the charter also includes a guarantee that the property of the said merchants who died within the lands ruled by Michael I would be protected. Generally, the charters of Epirus rulers show that the representatives of Ragusa enjoyed the right to express their free will regarding the inheritance of their movable and immovable property that remained free of intercession from the state administration. Ragusa’s contacts with the court of the Bulgarian rulers were established in the 1230s when the city on the Adriatic had already fallen into Venetian hands.14 This happened with the Dubrovnik Charter15 of Ivan II Asen (1218–1241), drawn up in 1230. Several decades later, the agreement between the tsar in Tarnovo, Michael II Asen (1246–1256), and Dubrovnik, issued on 15 June 1253,16 became the source regulating the preservation and relay of the property of foreign merchants who had died in Bulgarian areas. The first stage in this process involved an inventory of the entire movable property of the deceased that was located on the territory of their host country. In the second stage, a letter was drawn up in the birthplace of the deceased, on the basis of which the property was handed over to people sent over to the Bulgarian lands especially for that purpose, without any deductions or losses. In that period Dubrovnik had also already established official contacts with its closest neighbours – the principality of Hum, Bosnia, and Serbia – but the privileges granted by their rulers did not address specifically the issue of the property of Ragusans who might die within the boundaries of their state. These sources established general principles regarding property, such as guarantees for its preservation and inviolability. The fifteenth century saw the beginning of Dubrovnik’s trade and economic partnership with the Ottoman Empire, one that left tangible traces in the lands ruled by the Turkish sultan for over three centuries. The fate of Thessaloniki, the city that was second in economic importance in Byzantium and was taken by the Ottomans in 1430,17 spurred the establishment of official Ottoman contacts with Ragusa. Thus, on 6 December 1430, the Ottoman ruler Murad II (1421–1444; 1446–1451) issued a capitulation granting Ragusans the right to move freely and engage in trade in his territory in return for payment of customs duties.18

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This document does not specifically address the property of Ragusans and contains no clause providing for matters related to the property of persons who died on Ottoman territory. Twelve years later, however, doubtlessly, as a result of practice, this omission was filled in. In February 1442, Sultan Murad II issued a new capitulation in favour of the Dalmatian republic. This document is much more detailed than the previous one and addresses issues related to the movables of Ragusans and the fate of the property of the dead in the realm of Murad II. The text states explicitly that the holding remains untouched, with neither the sultan nor his officials having any rights over it, and that the entire property of the deceased is to be returned to the Dalmatian republic.19 There were other documents aside from ruler charters that addressed issues related to the patrimony of Ragusans who crisscrossed southeastern Europe in the period under consideration here. The movable and immovable property of merchants from the small Dalmatian republic was generated as a result of their vigorous trading activity and of their settlement in colonies of their own in the cities of the Ottoman Empire. The rich contents of Ragusan wills, for example, contain significant information about the character and the fate of their property. The earliest known testaments from the region of Dalmatia date from the tenth and eleventh centuries and belong to members of illustrious families of the urban elites.20 After the thirteenth century the practice of leaving a last will and testament in writing became more popular and this called for the introduction of legal regulation of all activities related to the process of inheritance. Consequently, by the end of the thirteenth century, the Statutes of some Dalmatian cities came to pay special attention to inheritance and the compilation of testaments as an expression of a person’s last will. Thus, norms were regulated and Ragusa was no exception to that practice. The testaments of Ragusans were drawn up in Latin, Italian, or Slavic. All the wills we found were written in Italian, which is typical for the period covered by our research. The penetration and establishment of this language in Ragusan testamentary practice is associated with the two major plague epidemics of 1348 and 1363, as well as with the presence of educated Italians in the Ragusa Chancery, or of locals with high education acquired at the universities on the Apennine Peninsula.21

The Contents of Ragusan Wills: Form, Structure, and Clauses Ragusan wills are similar in form and, although they addressed different individual circumstances, the documents are formulaic and invariably include identical clauses related to the settlement of the inheritance. A testament could have been compiled by either the testators themselves, or by some official representative of the Ragusan authorities – a “notary” for example, or another person well-educated enough to be able to deal with the task (a priest, a scribe, or someone else).

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In terms of structure, the wills consisted of three parts. The first part, regardless of whether the will was compiled in Ragusa or abroad, contained typical formulas such as invoking the name of the Lord (Lat. invocatio) and dating by year, day, month (Lat. datatio). In this section one can also frequently find the names of the witnesses who were present at the compiling of the document. In most cases, the witnesses were adult men of age, residents of the place where the testator was located.22 The second part of the testament contained information about the testator himself – along with the name, the document sometimes also mentioned his profession, position in society, descent, and family status. Particular attention was paid to the testator’s health and the will included an explicit assertion that at the moment of dictation of the last will he was in good health of mind.23 This part of the will was the longest for it contained all the testamentary clauses – first pointing out the donation for Ragusa’s cathedral dedicated to the Dormition of the Holy Virgin24 followed by clauses for the salvation of the soul and for the establishment of the patrimonium. The executors of the wills (epitropi) were cited at the end. Their obligation was to ensure the correct and fair distribution of the donations in accordance with the last will of the testator. Unlike the witnesses, the executors of a will were frequently close relatives of the deceased.

Clauses in Ragusan Wills Donations for the Salvation of the Soul At the drawing up of wills and testaments, a large portion of the donations was made under the so-called pro anima clauses. This type of document was a sort of preparation for the end of one’s time on Earth as passed by the person in question. The will was the last chance for finding peace and being granted forgiveness for sins willingly or unwillingly committed. Hence the pious donations to churches, monasteries, and hospitals, as well as sums left for memorial services, prayers, and pilgrimages aimed precisely to ensure the salvation of the testator’s soul. This type of alms and benefactions constituted a considerable portion of all testaments. These clauses were usually included at the beginning of the document and in most of the wills presented here a lot of attention was given to the details of this act of expression of personal will. 1.1 Donations to churches and monasteries within the city walls rank first among the so-called pro anima clauses. Here again we have sums of money or objects (candles, books, and other items) left to clerics to celebrate memorial services and liturgies in memory of the deceased. The donation was made to either individual clerics (e.g., the chaplain of Sofia, the spiritual father of the testator) or to groups (monks, fraternities of priests).25 The will of the noble ser Sarachino Thomaso

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Penka Danova and Elena Kostova de Bona, of 3 June 1457, includes clauses related to the reading of memorial prayers in all churches within the city walls of Ragusa.26 The text of the document we found on our last visit to the State Archives in Dubrovnik reveals that the testator expressed his preferences and left considerable sums to the benefit of the churches of the orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis where masses for the salvation of his soul were to be read. The wealthy merchant also bequeathed the sum of one hundred perpera that had to be distributed for charitable deeds.27

Such pious donations were also made to churches and monasteries beyond the city walls of Ragusa but within the boundaries of the Republica Ragusina – in Dan
e, Ombla, Breno (Župa dubrova ka), and elsewhere. These are encountered more rarely in the wills. In the name of the salvation of the soul, money was also left to the clergy, not the Ragusan clergy alone, but also to clerics from the lands where the testator sojourned. In quite a few cases, one cleric is donated a certain sum to pray and commemorate the testator or his deceased relatives. The testament of Radoe Giurasseuich, dated 3 October 1486, leaves five perpera to Father  arin, chaplain in Sofia, for memorial services.28 Examples of this nature abound in the sources. 1.2 Most of the Dubrovnik citizens who made their wills in Bulgarian lands in the second half of the fifteenth century were either sick or people who were afraid they were ill with the plague and therefore thought that death was inevitable. It was precisely physical suffering and fear of imminent death that made them show serious concern for the fate of hospitals and infirmaries in their fatherland. It is not by chance that, after Dubrovnik’s cathedral, most donations were made to the Santa Maria church in Dan
e). Therefore, we should add the sums left for health care29 – in the hospitals, infirmaries, and shelters of the Adriatic republic – to the category of donations made for the salvation of the testator’s soul. We find an example of such charity, benefiting the health care office (Sanità) in Ragusa, in the will of Sarachino de Bona, who left the office two perpera. He also donated three perpera each to the hospitals and shelters in Ragusa. Here again we see care for the leprous, to whom he bequeathed ten perpera.30 In 1474 Marino Federico de Gondola explicitly underscored that the sum left in support of the leprous at Santo Lazaro in Plo
e was for the salvation of his soul.31 Milouaz Boxidarouich, who declared in his will of 18 September 1492 that he was of sound body, but died of the plague a little later in Sofia, left ten ducats to the hospitals in Ragusa and Santo Lazaro.32 This was a considerable donation, a sort of tithe the testator imposed on himself considering the sum of one hundred ducats he left to his brother and his wife, providing

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she did not marry again. Such sources allow us to argue that Ragusans took special care to develop and support health care in the republic. 1.3 Sums for pilgrimages to famous locations of Christian veneration were left in five of the wills under review. Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher came first, followed by the capital of Western Christianity, Rome, then Santiago de Compostela, as well as others.33 Although more rarely, wills mention religious centres from the Apennine Peninsula, such as Assisi, and cities along the western Adriatic coast such as Bari and the nearby church dedicated to St. Nicholas, Loreto with the Basilica of the Holy House, or Santa Maria of Recanati.34 These clauses state that the donation is made for the redemption of sins. Sometimes, prayers and memorial services are mentioned. Some sums were intended for unspecified persons who would undertake the journey. In another case, we have an explicit mention of a bequest to the spiritual mentor of the testator.35 Our interest was drawn particularly to the donation for a pilgrimage to St. Petka in Tarnovo. In his will, dated 10 July 1363, Maroe de Sisa explicitly pointed out that the pilgrimage was for the forgiveness of his sins.36 We assume that what is meant in this case is without doubt the Orthodox saint Petka/Paraskevi, not. St. Veneranda, whose name entered Roman Martyrology quite late.37 There were other churches dedicated to Petka/ Venera in the land area of Dubrovnik.38 1.4 One category among the pious donations left for the salvation of the testator’s soul is worth mentioning: the donations pro maltolecto.39 These are sums that served as a sort of redemption for evils voluntarily or involuntarily committed by the testator. Some merchants considered ill-gotten profits a sin, which was why they donated pro maltolecto. These sums were disposed of in two ways. In one case, the testator himself expressed his will as regards the distribution of the money. A case in point is ser Sarachino de Bona, who stated that the sum of 160 perpera per maltolecto be distributed among the needy.40 In the second case, the sums were distributed by the executors. We find such a pro maltolecto in the will of Nicolo Martolo de Latiniza of 2 December 1485.41 The text notes that the executors must dispose of a mite of ten perpera. The opinion that the money willed pro maltolecto was donated mainly to the poor has been voiced in historiography.42 Donations of such nature were also made to the Dubrovnik commune. These sums were not particularly large, but are worth mentioning.43 The Testators’ Property Status and Types of Donated Property Regarding the content of the testaments, it is worth noting yet another important group of features. The sources contain material providing

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interesting information about the social standing of the deceased, their property status, the nature of the transactions, and the partnerships they entered into. The type, character, and quantity of donations made in favour of the testator’s relatives and acquaintances are also among this second main category of features. The sources allow us to track the type and movement of goods in which the Adriatic representatives traded; the ways in which the payment of various debts was settled; the relation of the testator to movable and immovable property; matters related to dowry, and many other aspects of inheritance. 2.1 As a will was the last opportunity to settle family and professional relations, it reflected all monetary matters of the inheritance. The last wills and testaments noted receivables of all kinds – both debts amassed by testators and the sums they had lent and had to be returned, even after their death. Since the assigner strives to clear his own conscience, the settlement of debts is one of the ways to prepare for death according to the norms and canons of the Christian faith. It was precisely matters related to unclarified credit-debt relations that were among the main causes of serious disagreement among Ragusans44 and made them deal very strictly with financial problems. It is evident from the written sources that the movement of monies was frequently recorded in specially drawn-up documents that allowed unresolved financial issues to be dealt with even after the demise of the testator. One example is found in the will of the aforementioned ser Sarachino de Bona, which specifies that he had a special book in which he recorded his receivables and disbursements.45 The testament describes the content of the said document in great detail and notes the testator’s strict dispositions for the sums listed therein – both debts he owed and those he was due. The said documents were intended for the executors alone, which was why they did not have to be presented publicly.46 Information of a similar nature is to be found in the will of Nicolo de Cherach (elsewhere NicolCherachovich).47 He had an obligation amounting to thirtyfive ducats. This outstanding debt was recorded in a note in his own hand attached to a bill left in the keeping of the testator’s spiritual mentor, Father Marino Marini. In case the bill was lost, the sum due was to be used towards dowering three orphan maidens with a view to marriage. A large number of Ragusans left money to orphans. A considerable portion of that was willed to orphan girls who had no dowry, which was an obstacle to marriage. 2.2 Problems related to credit-debt relations are directly linked to another matter: the Ragusans’ commercial companies that operated in Bulgarian lands. The sources also dwell on the subject of redistribution of capital after the demise of a partner in a commercial company. The representatives of the Adriatic republic settled this type of commodity-money

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relations, striving to settle fairly the financial matters between their company members. All monetary relations are discussed in detail in the wills, with executors being frequently involved. The texts on the regulation of financial matters vary to the extreme. The will of Iuancho Dobrassinouich48 notes thirteen loads of merchandise that should arrive in Dubrovnik after his death. Along with that the testator, obviously quite a wealthy merchant, also left a remarkable sum in cash amounting to 15,084 aspri. This money was to be used to buy wax (or some other commodity), which had to be transported to the Adriatic republic. The said property was left entirely in the hands of his brother, Nicola, and one of his partners in trade, Radossauo. According to the will of Iuancho Dobrassinouich, the profit from the sale of the commodities had to be divided between Radossauo and his brother Nicola. The will also mentions another partner, Piraxa de Suancho, who was excluded from the distribution of the monies since he had obviously received his share of the payment earlier. The clauses in the wills settling financial matters between the individual partners are quite interesting, and examples are far from being limited to those mentioned above.49 2.3 Along with the cases listed above, private law acts also feature a wide range of objects left to heirs. These include items of dress,50 cloth,51 household objects,52 books,53 weapons,54 and so on. Information about such objects reflects the daily life of the Adriatic residents who operated across the Balkan Peninsula, and the examples vary extremely.55 The sources also frequently mention various luxury items: silver rings56 and goblets, a silver circlet,57 luxurious fabrics for official or liturgical garments,58 etc. There are also quite a few examples of different kinds of livestock59 left in bequests. The content of the clauses outlining the movables of Ragusans is wide-ranging.60 A small portion of the wills also mention immovable property left to heirs.61 Information about this kind of donations is scant, not allowing any general conclusions about the localization of the property or the property status and social standing of the testator. Heirs and Executors of the Will Our overview of the information on the wills of Ragusans brings up yet another category of issues that derive from the nature of the historical sources under discussion. 3.1 One issue relates to the status of the heirs mentioned in the written documents. Testaments frequently mention the wife or mother of the deceased Ragusan, as well as his brothers or sisters who are to receive

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Penka Danova and Elena Kostova part of the inheritance.62 The testators’ nephews are also listed among close relatives. The testaments also mention a circle of persons who were not family relations but had done business with him. Those were people with whom the testator was in a partnership in compliance with his commercial obligations. There are also quite a few cases when sums of money were left to clerics.

The contents of the testaments show that the mothers of the deceased were most frequently the heirs of their sons. In many cases, they are also designated as executors.63 Generally, Ragusans had an exceptional filial love for their parents. Led by Christian values and a sense of moral duty, they took care of their parents even after their own demise. This attitude to the forebears was one of the conditions guaranteeing that the soul would rest in peace. The sources also frequently mention the fathers of the testators, already dead in most of the cases.64 Ragusans held the last will of their late fathers in great respect. A case in point is the testament of Pauao, son of the late Domcho Nixich.65 Here we encounter a case of a sort of will within a will, i.e., the son expresses his own last will as regards the as yet unexecuted testament of his father.66 The circle of direct heirs also includes the wives of the testators, but they are not mentioned in all the wills discussed here. This fact allows us to assume that a considerable portion of the Ragusans who traded in Bulgarian lands were mainly young people who still did not have their own families. The will of Iucho Giurasseuich de Mrauignaz comes in support of this thesis, for it reveals that he left his fiancée a silver circlet.67 As a whole, one can say that through their last wills and testaments married Ragusans managed to take care of the interests and welfare of their wives. The subject of partnership in marriage involves yet another property issue – that of the fate of the dowry received by the husband. The contents of the testaments show that the testator pledged to return what he had received to his wife’s family. In most cases, a certain sum of money was provided to cover the value of the dowry.68 Financial provision for young women with the aim of securing marriage also found a place in the wills. Usually, the nieces or daughters of individuals close to the testator were willed money to be added to their dowry.69 The contents of fifteenth-century documents known to us so far show that only a few testaments mentioned the children of a certain testator. This observation supports the aforementioned thesis that the Dubrovnik traders headed for the Balkans at a younger age. There are also examples where the testators left their children considerable property. In his will ser Marino Federico de Gondola mentioned his son, to whom he bequeathed movable and immovable property. The heir was to receive the legacy in question upon turning twenty. Until then, the property was to be managed by trustees specifically designated in the will.70

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The Legalization of the Wills of Ragusans Who Died in Bulgarian Lands A special Civil Court (Curia consulum causarum civilium) with a one-year tenure was set up in Dubrovnik in 1416. It was authorized to establish the veracity of the wills, the authenticity of the signatures put under them and, implicitly, the validity of the wills.71 Its panel included consuls72 and other justices, all of whom were representatives of the Dubrovnik nobility. The procedure for establishing the authenticity of the will provided that at least two witnesses to the will had to appear before the court. Their total number was not stipulated, which was why the names of more witnesses were entered as a rule. At the court hearing, the will was read out loud, as had been done in older times.73 The final part of the document (Lat. eschatocol) notes that the two witnesses who appeared were questioned both together and one by one. The validation process required that they swear by the Bible that they had been present when the testator made his last will and testament and that he had made it while sane of mind and in possession of his intellectual capacity. It was not mandatory to note the state of the testator’s bodily health. As can be seen from the table of Ragusans who died in Bulgarian lands included at the end, most of them were either ill or had a sense of imminent death from illness.74 Eleven of the wills travelled from Sofia to Dubrovnik, regardless of whether they had been compiled in Sofia, which at that time was the seat of the beylerbeyi (Tk. governor-general) of Rumelia. In most cases, their bearers were the witnesses. The testaments of people whose last will was put on paper in Pirot, Radomir, and Tarnovo also involved Sofia.75 In the second half of the fifteenth century and in the sixteenth, the road from Sofia to Dubrovnik as part of a caravan or embassy was travelled for an average of sixteen to twenty days.76 Comparison of the first two columns of the table (see Annexe 1) shows that the wills transported along this way were legalized within five to six months, sometimes even a year. Whereas the will of Radoe Giurasseuich took only a month and twenty-four days to be proved, the legalization of the will of Iucho Giurasseuich de Mrauignaz took a whole year and two months.77 Moreover, there were other circumstances that slowed down the legalization of a will. In the first place, there was the absence of witnesses. Such was the case of the last will and testament of Stephano Martolo de Latiniza, who died in Skopje. His will, dated 2 December 1485, arrived at the Civil Court in an envelope sealed with the personal seal of the testator. Once it was opened, the document could not be legalized because the witnesses who were entered in it were in Skopje. For a solution to this case, the will was handed to the nobles Francho de Sorgo and Nicolino de Gondola, envoys of the Dubrovnik Republic to the Porte, who, upon their arrival at the city on the Vardar (Skopje), had to question the witnesses to assure themselves of the veracity of the document.78 The witnesses to the will of the wealthy

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merchant Stephano Giurassevich, brother of the earlier deceased Radoe,79 were questioned in a similar way in 1491 in Sofia. At the dawn of the following century, the Civil Court in Dubrovnik freed itself of the mediation of diplomats. In 1500 its officials were sent to Sofia and were authorized to question two of the numerous witnesses entered in the wills, both dated 1499, of the chaplain of Sofia, who had died in Tarnovo (today in Bulgaria), and of a merchant, who had died in Pirot (today in Serbia).80 First, they questioned witnesses to the will of Boxidar Radognich, called Vucheglich. The procedure of questioning and giving evidence under oath was strictly observed, just as it was done in Dubrovnik. To that end, on 10 April 1500 two of the official representatives of the court (officiales) drew up a letter which said that the witnesses, questioned under oath both together and individually, had confirmed that their signatures stood beneath the will and that when it had been compiled Radognich had been with a clear conscience but physically ill. This letter of the officiales gave the court grounds to legalize the merchant’s will on 15 September of that same year. The will of the Sofia chaplain Stephano de Georgio (spelt Giurasseuich in the Latin eschatocol), which the court officials Stephano de Sorgo, Stephano de Palmota, and Stephano Mar. de Gradi authenticated in a letter on 26 June 1500, was treated in the same way. Since the questioning of witnesses also presumed giving evidence under oath, we can assume that in these two cases that happened on the premises of the Sofia covered market which the priests of the Dubrovnik colony used as a chapel and a place to store the church goods.81

Conclusions Most of the wills of Ragusans who died in Bulgarian lands date from the second half of the fifteenth century. Their number increased exponentially in the last decade of the century, a fact in harmony with the establishment and growth of Ragusan colonies in the Balkan peninsula. Most of the testators were merchants, which corresponds to the predominant position of the Adriatic republic among the non-Muslim countries with which the Ottoman Empire traded. The donation clauses in the wills of Ragusans reveal their concern for the salvation of their soul and for the welfare of their heirs and their particularly touching attitude to the mothers. The wills of Ragusans were an important prerequisite for the complete resolution of property-related problems that arose after death. The patrimonium of each Ragusan noble or citizen was of economic interest not only to the family but to the Republic of Saint Blaise too. That was why its governing bodies strived to establish the property status of their subjects, even when they lived and traded far from home. There was a parallel concern for synchronizing Ragusan legislation with the legal norms stemming from commercial and testamentary practices in distant lands. These trends endured and developed over the next 150 years of Dubrovnik-Ottoman economic relations.

1473/10/23 1475/06/22 1482/02/07

1486/03/04

1486/08/21 1486/11/27 1491/06/04 1493/08/16 1493/10/12

1495/08/06

1500/08/08

1500/05/20

1501/06/25

1472/12/24 1474/12/02 1481/08/15*

1485/12/02

1486/03/06* 1486/10/03 1490/09/18 1492/09/18* 1493/07/23

1494/05/07

1499/08/22*

1499/09/15*

1500/08/01

RadognichVucheglich Luchxich

Martolo de Latiniza Nixich Giurasseuich Giurasseuich Boxidarouich Cherachouich/ Cherach Giurasseuich de Mrauignaz De Georgio/ Giurasseuich

Dobrassinouich Gondola Bernardo

Iuan

Boxidar

Stephano

Iucho

Pauao/ Paulus Radoe Stephano Milouaz Nicolo

Nicolo/ Nicola

Maroe/ Marino Sarachino Tho [maso] Iuancho Marino Federico Benedetto

1460/10/01

1363/07/10* 1457/06/03*

De Sisa De Bona

Name

Date of compiling Legalization Family yy/mm/dd date

Soffia

Pirot

Ternova

Sophia

Sophia Sophia Sophia Sophia Sophia

Schopia

Unestablished “In partibus Bulgarie” Soffia Schopia Radomir

Location

Annexe 1: Table of Ragusans Who Died in Bulgarian lands

Sick

Sound

Sick

Sick

Sick Sick Sick Sound Sound

Not specified Sick Sick with plague Sick

Sound Sound

Health

Single

Married

Single

Single

Single Married Single Married Single

Married Married Probably married Single

Married Single

Marital status

Guard

Presbiterus Chaplain of Sofia Merchant

Merchant

Merchant Merchant Merchant Merchant Merchant

Unestablished

Merchant Ser, Merchant Wool artisan

Ser, Merchant Ser, Merchant

Social status

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Notes 1 The name Ragusa for Dubrovnik, found mainly in Latin sources, is widespread in the historical literature. For more about the history of Ragusa in the period discussed here see: Bariša Kreki , Dubrovnik “Raguse” et le Levant au Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1961); idem, Dubrovnik, Italy, and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980); Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London: Seminar Press, 1972). 2 The project was headed by the academician Vassil Gjuzelev, with members Aleksandar Nikolov, Elena Kostova, Penka Danova, and Simeon Hinkovski. For 2016–2017, it was financed by the “Alma Mater” Center for Excellence in the Humanities at Sofia University. 3 This document series at the State Archives in Dubrovnik contains 94 separately bound volumes for the thirteenth–nineteenth century period. Hereinafter it is quoted after the Dubrovniški dokumenti published by us, or by the respective volume number of the series Testamenta. On the volumes covering the Middle Ages, see Daniela Romano, “I mercanti ragusei e le crociate nel tardo medioevo,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 38/2 (2008): 867–83 and the literature cited in notes 3–7. 4 Excluding some testaments (Državni arhiv u Dubrovniku [henceforth DAD], fonds 12, ser. 1, Testamenta notariae 15, fol. 149r; Testamenta 18, fol. 144v; Testamenta 19, fols. 55v, 56r) that do not contain wills of persons who died in Bulgarian lands. Nor shall we discuss the cases of Ragusans who died ab intestat
 (without leaving a will), which has been already done by Ioanna Spissarevska, “                       

  (XV–XVI .),”   
     2 (1973): 85; eadem, “

                   XV ,”         64 (1992): 296. 5 Aleksandar Nikolov et al.,  
 
   
            XIII–XV   I (1230–1403 .) (Sofia, 2017), Doc.  25; Aleksandar Nikolov et al.,  
 
   
            XIII–XV  II (1407–1505 .) (Sofia, 2018), Doc.  51, 93, 98, 105, 110, 111. Hereafter, for brevity the volumes shall be cited as Dubrovniški dokumenti 1 and Dubrovniški dokumenti 2. 6 We wish to acknowledge gratefully the assistance of our colleague Aleksandar Nikolov in the deciphering and translation of the Latin notarization formulas. 7 Konstantin Jire
ek, Die Romanen in den Städten Dalmatiens während des Mittelalters, II Teil (Vienna: C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1902), as well as research by the same author included by Vassil Gjuzelev in Dubrovniški dokumenti 1, 22 and notes 15–17. 8 See Vassil Gjuzelev’s historiographic overviews in Dubrovniški dokumenti 1, 19–26; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 23–32, as well as Zoran Ladi , Last Will: Passport to Heaven. Urban Last Wills from Late Medieval Dalmatia with Special Attention to the Legacies pro remedio animae and ad pias causas (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2012), 23–34. 9 The emergence of the governance bodies is mentioned by all encyclopaedias and general popular works dedicated to the history of Dubrovnik, for example: Robin Harris, Dubrovnik (Saqi Books, 2006), 61 sq. On the judicial institutions see Nella Lonza, “Coram domino comite et suis iudicibus: Penal procedure in Early Fourteenth-Century Dubrovnik,” Criminal Justice History 15 (1994), 1–38. 10 On Ragusa’s early trade relations with the Kingdom of Naples and the West, see Miriana Popovic-Radenkovic, “Le relazioni commerciali fra Dubrovnik (Ragusa) e la Puglia nel periodo angioino” Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 76 (1958), 73–104; Giulia Spallacci, “I rapporti commerciali tra le città

Demise Far from Home 111

11 12

13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

delle due sponde adriatiche nella documentazione di Ancona tra 1345 e 1514” Tesi di dottorato (Università di Bologna, 2017), 74–101; As to the eastern neighbours, see Elena Kostova, “     –      

         !"" . –    !""" ,” 


    
  : C
  
 , 
    
   (Studia balcanica 35), eds. Lora Taseva and Penka Danova (Sofia: Faber, 2021), 25–45. Kostova, “     ,” 25–45. Byzantium was an exception, as relations between the empire and the Dalmatian commune had deeper roots and dated back to earlier times. About the prostagma as a document see: George Ostrogorsky, “     #

  ,”  
 ! 
  , "  ,  
 " #

 , 34 (1968), 253; Valery Stojanow,  
    

 
: $    
   (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na BAN, 1991], 71; Ivan Biliarsky, Word and Power in Mediaeval Bulgaria (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 228. Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi sacret profana 3 (Vindobonae, 1865), 58–9. On this period in the history of the Dalmatian commune and the imposition of Venetian power over the city see: Kreki , Dubrovnik; Idem, Unequal Rivals: Essays on Relations between Dubrovnik and Venice in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries (Zagreb-Dubrovnik: Academia Scientiarum et Artium Croatiae, 2007). Dubrovniški dokumenti 1, 30–1. The volume presents older published versions of the document. Dubrovniški dokumenti 1, 34–43. Earlier publications of the document are presented here. Snezhana Rakova and Elena Kostova, “Venice, Dubrovnik (Ragusa) and the Ottomans (According to two Ottoman Documents from 1430),” Études balkaniques 3 (2019): 485–516. Note 1 provides a review of the sources and literature pertaining to this matter. Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 110-3. The volume presents older publications of the document. Ibid., 178–81. The volume presents older publications of the document. Ladi , Last Will, 34. Diego Dotto,“Scriptae” venezianeggianti a Ragusa nel XIV secolo: Edizione e commento di testi volgari dell’Archivio di Stato di Dubrovnik (Rome: Viella, 2008), 121–3. The names of witnesses, their professions, and signatures were placed at the end of the will. In the fourteenth century upon entry in the registers of Ragusa they were written at the beginning of the copy and its legalized version. The procedure involved the reading of the will in the presence of authorized representatives (officiales), to establish whether it had been compiled according to the rules. See Nikola Vuleti and Diego Dotto, “Il veneziano in Dalmazia e a Dubrovnik (Ragusa) fino al XVIII secolo: Per la storia di uno spazio comunicativo,” in: Lo spazio comunicativo dell’Italia e delle varietà italianel, eds. Thomas Krefeld and Roland Bauer (University of Munich, 2019) < http://www.kit.gwi.uni-muenchen. de/?p=8083&v=72> (accessed 19.04.2021). Ladi , Last Will, 75–7. All realia, personal names, and terms quoted in this text follow their original inscription in the documents. DAD, Testamenta 26, 4r. Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 198–203. Ibid., 198–9. DAD, Testamenta 26, fol. 4r-v.

112

Penka Danova and Elena Kostova

29 On the development of health care in Dubrovnik in the period under review see: Tamara Alebi  and Helena Markovi , “Development of Health Care in Dubrovnik from 14th to 16th Century – Specific Features of Ragusan Medicine,” (sic),Collegium antropologicum 41/4 (2017): 391–8. On quarantine stations in Dubrovnik see: Zdenka Janekovi Römer, “I lazzaretti di Dubrovnik (Ragusa),” in Rotte mediterranee e baluardi della sanità. Venezia e I lazzaretti mediterranei, ed. Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini (Milan: Skira 2004), 246–250; Petar Petrov, “              $ ,” in $    
 : %
      
#.   &
  "", eds. Dzheni Madzharov and Krasimir Stoilov (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo “Sv. Kliment Ohridski”, 2008), 535–41. 30 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 198, 199. 31 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 178r. 32 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 338–41. 33 For more on other religious centers chosen by Ragusans for memorial prayers to be said and services to be celebrated, see: Zdenka Janekovi Römer, “ Na razme%i ovog i onog svijeta: Prožimanje pojavnog i transcendentnog u dubrova
kim oporukama kasnoga srednjeg vijeka,” Otium 2 (1994): 11–12. 34 DAD, Testamenta 25, 131v, Testamenta 26, fol. 167v, Testamenta 28, fol. 172v; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 302–7. 35 DAD, Testamenta 26, fol. 167v. 36 Dubrovniški dokumenti 1, 126. 37 Assumptions have been made regarding the admixture of the cult of St Paraskevi/ Petka with that of St. Veneranda. See Enzo D’Agostino, Da Locri a Gerace: Storia di una diocesi della Calabria bizantina dalle origini al 1480 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004), 51–2. 38 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 72r; Testamenta 27, fol. 61r. 39 Ladi , Last Will, 261; Janekovi Römer, “ Na razme%i ovog i onog svijeta,” 8. 40 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 198–9. 41 DAD, Testamenta 25, fol. 131v. 42 Gordan Ravan
i , “Preparation for a Good Death in the Last Wills of Dubrovnik Citizens from the Late 13th and mid-14th Century and the Influence of the Black Death to the Perception of Afterlife,” Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana 2 (2014): 158–9. 43 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 316–9. 44 Spissarevska, “        ,” 296. 45 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 198–203. 46 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 202. 47 DAD, Testamenta 26, fols. 167v–8v. 48 DAD, Testamenta 26, fol. 72r-v. 49 As an example – and without any claim to comprehensiveness – we shall cite: DAD, Testamenta 26, fols. 167v–168v; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 338–41. 50 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 153r-v. 51 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v. 52 See a prime example of bequests of everyday objects by Ragusans in Bulgarian lands in DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 153r-v; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 304, 354. 53 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v and Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 354. 54 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v. 55 The testament of the chaplain of Sofia, Stephano de Georgio, is a good example of the variety of objects and chattels Ragusans left to their relatives. See: DAD, Testamenta 28, fols. 79v–81v; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 350–9. 56 DAD, Testamenta 26, fols. 167v–8v. 57 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v.

Demise Far from Home 113 58 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v. 59 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 153r–v. See more examples of animals left in wills in: Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 304. 60 Very frequently, the objects donated to heirs had an affixed value, but in different currencies. 61 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 153r–v. 62 DAD, Testamenta 28, fols. 171v–2r. 63 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v. 64 DAD, Testamenta 25, fol. 131v. 65 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 316–7. 66 Pauao was most probably the trustee for the will of his parent and that entitled him to refer to his father’s will in his own testament. 67 DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61r–v. 68 DAD, Testamenta 26, fol. 4v–r. 69 DAD, Testamenta 26, fols. 167v–8v. 70 DAD, Testamenta 21, fol. 153r–v. 71 Branislav Nedjalkovi (ed.), Liber viridis, Series Zbornik za istoriju, jezik i knjiz& evnost srpskog naroda, Trec' e odeljenje, knj. 23 (1984), 116–20. 72 In the administrative practice of the Dubrovnik Republic the word “consul” had various meanings. On some of them, see Kostova, “On the Role of the Dubrovnik (Ragusan) Consulate Operating in ‘Sclauonia, Bosna, Sriemo et Burgaria’ in the 1380s and 1390s,” Bulgarian Historical Review 3–4 (2019): 24–52. Here the term designates members of the Lesser Council included in the court panel. 73 See above, note 21. 74 To these we could add Nicolo Cherach. He drew up his will in Sofia on 23 July 1493, claiming that he was in good health. One of the reasons he had for drawing up his will was that he was in lands ravaged by the pestilence. He returned to Dubrovnik, together with the witnesses to the will, but once there he died of a fever. The case of Milouaz Boxidarouich was similar. See DAD, Testamenta 26, fol. 167v; Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 338–9. 75 On wills drawn up in Pirot and Tarnovo see below. 76 Compare the journey of the Ragusans’ trade caravans, which included Triscano Savregnano (Ivan Duj
ev, “(               XVI .,”       


 #
    
3 [1935]: 240–4) with data for the journeys of Venetian embassies in Stéphane Yérasimos, Les voyageurs occidentaux dans l’Empire Ottoman (XIVe–XVIe siècles) (Ankara: Société turque d’histoire, 1991), 181–2, 334–5. 77 This delay was undoubtedly due to a lengthier process of establishing the patrimonium of the testator, as suggested by a marginal note in the will regarding sums paid by debtors dated 15 June 1495. DAD, Testamenta 27, fol. 61v. 78 DAD, Testamenta 25, fol. 131v. On the mission of these envoys related to the payment of the annual tribute to the Ottoman Porte, see Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 314–5. 79 Spissarevska, “       ,” 84 and note 35. 80 Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 350–1, 360–1. 81 Information on the use of Sofia’s covered market as a chapel comes from the will of the chaplain Stephano de Georgio (Dubrovniški dokumenti 2, 354). The issue of the connections between these authorized court representatives and the Dubrovnik colony in Sofia has already been addressed. Spissarevska, “       ,” 84.

6

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life” Church Endowments, Commemoration, and Tomb Purchases in Albania and the West Balkans (Thirteenth–Nineteenth Centuries) Konstantinos Giakoumis

For a long time, death, inheritance, and memory have only attracted a peripheral interest in Byzantine and post-Byzantine (Ottoman) studies.1 However, in recent times a number of studies have stimulated an interest in Byzantine funerary practices and rituals, touching on subjects such as class, age, and gender perspectives on death, dying, associated rituals, the materiality and spatiality of death, and commemoration.2 Recent scholarly activity has also triggered an interest in the material traces left by similar practices of the post-Byzantine (Ottoman) period.3 Sources on commemoration and death are rich in information on more than death and commemoration practices; hence, they have also been used in research on local historical toponymy and anthroponymy.4 Although this scholarship has considerably extended our knowledge of how, for example, death was viewed and experienced in different Byzantine periods, our understanding is still far from complete for some periods, regions, and social levels, while similar studies for the Ottoman period remain sparse.5 For instance, while the refined analysis of cemetery spaces in the southern parts of Epiros is a remarkable contribution,6 similar synthetic works are missing for, or only partly cover, the northern parts of Epiros and Albania,7 perhaps with the exception of the so-called Koman culture, which was given much emphasis for political reasons, as it provided a material basis for upholding a theory of continuity from the Illyrians to the Albanians.8 Yet, the materials published to date provide a solid basis for comparisons of later Byzantine and post-Byzantine funerary practices (Fig. 6.1). The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I compare known Byzantine mortuary rituals, practices, and material remains with similar late Byzantine and post-Byzantine rituals in Epiros and, mostly in Albania. Consequently, this chapter focuses on church donations, endowments, testaments, and leases DOI: 10.4324/9781003179801-9

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life”

115

Figure 6.1 Michael from Linotopi, The All-Holy Mother of God and Christ, central part of a brevium, early seventeenth century, tempera on wood. Provenance: Monastery of the Annunciation of the All-Holy Theotokos, Vanistër, Dropull, Gjirokastër, South Albania National Historical Museum, Tirana, Albania.

of cells and tombs, as recorded in icon-protheses and parish codices, before analyzing them from a historical-anthropological angle. Samples of this rather under-researched type of archival source from this and other regions of the Ottoman Balkans, dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, have been consulted to understand the complex relations between individuals and their communities, organized around the parish church or the monastery. In the second part of the chapter, utilizing a range of manuscripts from the cities of Elbasan, Berat, and Voskopoja (Gk. Moschopolis) (Albania), I compare findings with similar published sources and I explore the way in which capital accumulation from regular donations on feast days, endowments upon death, credit-lending, cells’ and tombs’ leases, eventually benefited poorer parishioners as well as the well-being of the community, thereby establishing strong ties between the parish church (or monastery) and the local community. As I shall demonstrate, the Church, whether in the guise of a parish church or a monastery, did not only provide a reference centre and a financial hub in a period before the establishment of formal financial institutions such as banks, but it also offered space to individuals for living the last days of their life, burial space for the deceased, and a place in the sacred spatial-temporal space of the holy liturgy and other services by way of commemorating the names of the deceased donors and parishioners.

116

Konstantinos Giakoumis

Funerary Customs and Commemorative Practices […] I, Chr
stos Constantinou, from Gjirokastra, being sick, yet, with the grace of God with healthy and sound mind and all my senses, in fear of the unknown time of my death I decided to record my present testament, which represents my last will, opinion, and decision. And first, I deliver my soul in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God and Savior, supplicating Him with faith and devoutness of soul to forgive my sins in his infinite mercy and place my soul alongside the relics of those dear and beloved to Him, together with the pious Orthodox Christians who pleased Him for centuries. I am then asking forgiveness from all pious Christians; I am also forgiving them all from the bottom of my soul and heart.9 This is the introductory statement of the testament of Chr
stos Constantinou from Gjirokastra (southern Albania), issued in Vienna on 11 July 1778. Like many others,10 he distributed his significant wealth to relatives, churches, and monasteries for commemorative purposes and made donations to charitable organizations of the Habsburg state. Aware of his illness and imminent death, the testator makes decisions that continue centuries-old mortuary and commemorative traditions, documented especially for the late Byzantine period, for example securing commemoration beyond his burial place and financing underprivileged groups such as orphans and poorer, dowry-less girls.11 The supplication of God’s mercy and of his community’s forgiveness are very important elements in the study of death, commemoration, and their social roles in the period under consideration. For the well-off reaching the end of their life, issuing a testament with bequests and donations was one of the most important pre-mortuary customs. The proximity of death and the fear associated with it compelled rich and poor alike to prepare “in fear of the unknown time of […] death,”12 an expression echoing earlier popular beliefs to be found in sources such as the hagiographic novel, the Vita of Saints Barlaam and Joasaph, a tenth-century novel based on earlier Sanskrit texts.13 Through frequent use,14 such statements became standardized.15 Testaments were not the only way in which individuals prepared for death. Preparations also extended to securing a place of interment in religious foundations, giving alms, and donations for the commemoration of life and death. One of the first preoccupations of wealthy individuals willing to display their social status even in death was to secure a place of interment at religious shrines. Although burial in churches had been banned since late Roman times (see Cod. Theod. IX 17.6: “omnia quae supra terram urnis clausa vel sarcofagis corpora detinentur, extra urbem delata ponantur [all bodies kept underground, in urns or sarcophagi, shall be placed outside the city]”),16 with similar prohibitions being repeatedly sanctioned in the course of the Byzantine empire, the practice remained widespread.17 The tone was set by the Byzantine emperors themselves. Their interment from the time of Constantine I (r. 311–317) until

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life” 117 Constantine VIII (r. 1025–1028) took place in the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, while later emperors would take similar care to select their place of burial and even funded monasteries (e.g., the Pantokrator and Lips Monasteries, in Constantinople), where they wished to end of their lives and be buried.18 It is interesting to note that such practices were not confined to the royalty of the Christian Orthodox Byzantine world,19 but were also widespread in other parts of the world. For instance, there were burials in Westminster Abbey, London,20 Irish statutory provisions for burials (Stephens 1845, King George III’s Statutes 11 and 12 for Ireland, p. 879, Act XLVI), and Finnish inchurch Lutheran burials.21 In Trieste, burials, especially of prominent dead individuals, took place in churches or in the small cemeteries outside the churches of S. Nicolò, della Madonna del Mare, di S. Francesco and dei Santi Martiri, until the practice was banned by the orders initially in 1775 and later in 1784 with Joseph II’s reforms and a cemetery was organized for burials.22 There were church burials in non-Christian areas, too (e.g., the tombs of many Ottoman sultans in Istanbul).23 Clearly, “the odo[u]r of decomposing flesh from under-floor church burials greeted church visitors” not only in late eighteenth-century Oulu, in Finland,24 but also in southeastern Europe from Byzantine to late Ottoman times. Their example was followed by prosperous elites in the Byzantine capital and elsewhere.25 During the middle Byzantine period (843–1204 CE), especially following Leo VI’s Novel 53 which gave a choice for people to bury their dead in or outside the city,26 burials inside church narthexes were attested for the Balkans, Georgia (in the Caucasus), Italy, Cappadocia, Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Palestine27; the list is not exhaustive. The practice undoubtedly continued in the late Byzantine and the post-Byzantine periods. Cases from the region under primary consideration here include prominent clergymen, for example, Abbot Meletios of Apollonia (central Albania), buried in the katholikon’s exonarthex in 1350/1 (the term katholikon designates a monastic church).28 Laypersons, too, opted for church burial: one example is the family church of the sevastokrator (senior Byzantine dignitary) Michael Sgouros, dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the village of Brrar, in whose narthex the family members, including Michael himself, were buried in 1200/1.29 The recent discovery of the arcosolium of the ktetors of Philanthrop
non Monastery on the Isle of Ioannina, who were buried next to the northern wall of the katholikon’s narthex in the first half of the sixteenth century, indicates the continuity of the custom. This is corroborated by other examples, such as the tomb of a certain Kontos Karantzas, buried between the end of the fifteen and the beginning of the sixteenth century by the southern wall of the narthex of the katholikon of the Dormition of the Virgin at Zvërnec (southern Albania), a privilege he gained because he was the “noble offspring of a noble family branch,” as the inscription reads.30 There is evidence suggesting that certain places in the narthex were reserved for prominent burials until late in the nineteenth century.31 At the sides of the western entrance to the narthex of the katholikon of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Virgin, called ’Ardenica.’ there are two cenotaphs32 reserved

118

Konstantinos Giakoumis

for the local metropolitans of Berat, as demonstrated by the inscription of the southern one, carved in capital letters and with a blank for the name: “   33       2       Ω  3        

    4      5   (Here is laid the saintly Archbishop of Berat the lord, Lord [blank] from [blank]).” Other places in the narthex, as well as in the church’s court, were reserved for commoners, i.e., individuals of lesser status and wealth, who, however, were by no means less concerned about the choice of securing a burial in a church or outside it. The Orthodox parish Church of St. George in Pest, Hungary,34 as well as the Church of the Life-Giving Spring at Balıklı35 in Istanbul, are some of the best indications of how parish churches with tombs of prominent parishioners in urban settings looked like in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both served as burial sites in the cities of Budapest and Istanbul for elite members of the diaspora from regions covered by this chapter. Two of them were Maria, the wife of Michael Moschas from Voskopoja (d. 27 March 1774) 36 and Ioannis Bici from the region of Ioannina (d. 10 September 1879). Here is an example of the epigrams often inscribed on funerary slabs alongside funerary inscriptions: '() *"+% , π# - .  3  '.

  

 ! "# ["]  2 $% &π# π(//0 0 1 2# /+ π['# ] 4 / π3 42 '" ’4+ ([5%].  5 . -π/+'. 26! (6 () '7π[(]  6 89'"%  (6 :# () 82;'π-

(E() '% J / % (= ) [-" K % μ;μ+

H K 9 (· ["- 8-//( ) 10 4(-π') 12000 (Mr. Argyris Gostou, son of Athanasios, bought a tomb with its pew for 3,000 akçe and be this in memory eternal; he gave 10 kuruh, 12,000 akçe).

7.

11 12 H +  E3 T a9E T )E+' (6 ]# ^(), 2 '9" . π' N μ() M-π; ( H K % 1 /+-#  (6 IE# ()   (/(),  L L b

$μ

13 14 c  ( (6 IE# (), H (= ) [E'@ K % πPQ+-#  . π7' μ() ]# ^(, (= ) μ+7' μ() , '# , H [

, '# ,  "-# , BEE/# , (= ) 15 . \(μ μ() a9E, =

. \(μ H (6 8/2(6 μ() B-- (. d μ"% π$' 4-π' μ'+L 8π. 1 H16/+-#  (6 IE# ()

17  (/() -"-L 2000 >E() C( J / % 4-π'. H  '.% (C( % J'"-(C-μ K % 1 /+-# ,  L . μ$μ (6 μ'# () H18 19

72() 8'N% μ(),  L . μ$μ $% E' V% (6 ]# ^(), =

 L . μ$μ H $% BEE/# +% 15 8-//( )· (= ) e/ (6 L J' - T

20 /+-# , e

(6( H . -π$

. 82 '9" μX . 7/+μ μ(), (= ) 7% X [J

L (H21J/;-A 1 /+-# , (f 8/2N%, (f

22 23 8/2;, (f 4//(% -)EEH ;%, g-L π(6 E3 8π. . -π;

O. X ` μ

π'(  -μ7+, gH -L T 4// % 8/2%, 8μ1 8πNμ  E)μ1

24 μN( μX . -π$

ON, H (= ) π/7( ` 

. -π$

(= ) μX . π' 7J( Nπ(, $μ $% /+-# %. (I, Zonga, daughter of Rizos, dedicate my father’s house to the church of Saint Nicholas, so that it becomes the property of the saint and I also registered my father Rizos, my mother Maria, and in addition Maria, Kostina, Angelina, and my name Zonga and the name of my brother Anastasios to a parrhesia. However, I had received 2,000, i.e., two thousand, akçe. Besides these, we had a debt of 15 kuruh to the church on account of the tomb of my late husband, Stephos, for the tomb of Rizos’s mother and for the tomb of Angelina; and all these were offered by the church free of charge; hence, I am dedicating this house of my own will, so that nobody could bother the church, neither brother nor sister, nor any other relative, as this house were not my dowry, in the fashion [that] my sisters were [also] given [their dowry]; hence, I remain estranged from this house and this house together with its surrounding space is the property of the church).

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life” 121

Buyer and new owner (if different) Previous owner

Place

Price

Reference

10.03.1800

Giannas Tzipe

the church 61 narthex

unknown

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 7v

10.03.1800

Euthymios S
ran


the church 62 narthex

unknown

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 7v

ca. 22.11.1795

Georgios Gokou, son of Michalis

the church 63

narthex, opposite the column

unknown

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 9v

Nastos Rombogiannos

the church 64

narthex

unknown

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 10r

“+ i 5'  -(%  (μπ(E (% _EN'- Y μ$μ K % . '+” (+ Mr. Nastos Rombogiannos bought a tomb in the narthex).

ca. 22.11.1795

22 + i 5' 9'E (% ,  J/+ 9(), _EN'- Y μ$μ K % . '+,  L L `  π( N () μ$μ, =

` 

8 '5 (6

-C/().’ (+ Mr. Georgios Gokou, son of Michalis, bought a tomb in the narthex, in order that it be his tomb forever; and it is [located] opposite the column).

21

13.



12.

11 + 1800 , '# () 10 _EN'-   OCμ (%

+'+ μ$μ K % . '+. (On 10 March 1800 Ethymios S
ran
bought a tomb in the H narthex).

11.

10 H + 1800 , '# () 10 _EN'-   % ^$π μ$μ K % . '+” (On 10 March 1800 Giannas Tzipe bought a tomb in the narthex).

10.

9 “H + 1800 , '# () 3 _EN'- μ$μ K % . '+   ^% a:” (On 3 March 1800 Natzas Zava bought a tomb in the narthex).

Date

Table 6.1 (Continued)

122 Konstantinos Giakoumis

ca. 22.11.1795

Nikolaos Mulla

Adami(s) Gyra, son of Ndona

unknown

25 kuru
 (3,000 akçe)

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 10r

ca. 22.11.1795

Eutyhymios Polemira, son of D
m
trios

Prendo(s)

unknown

25 kuru
 (3,000 akçe)

F. 141, D. 3, fol. 10r

3 “H + i 5'  OCμ (% +μ+'# ()  (/μ# ' _EN'- . μ$μ (6  '7()  L 8-//( ) 25.” (+ Mr. Euthymios Polemira, son of D
m
trios, bought the tomb of Prendo(s) for 25 kuruh).

15.

2 “H + i 5'   N/(% , (6// _EN'- . μ$μ (6 Bμ+  9 C'  L 8-//( ) 25” (+ Mr. Nikolaos Mulla bought the tomb of Adami(s) Gyra, son of Ndona for 25 kuruh).

14.

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life” 123

124

Konstantinos Giakoumis

The intensity of such transactions indicates that by the end of the eighteenth century, the sale of tomb space was commodified, as was the case in other parts of Europe, such as Sweden and Finland.65 Prices per tomb space ranged from 1,800 akçe (doc. no. 8) to 4,000 akçe (Docs. nos. 2 and 3). The cost of the lease was affected by the additional services the buyer was supposed to get (see note 4 above). Yet, it seems plausible that the formulation “L 4-(π') 3000 % 7(% $% ('#%” (3,000 akçe as is the custom in our parish, doc. 1) indicates that the tariff was standardized to avoid bidding that would disadvantage less well-off parishioners. The tariff was set at affordable standards for lower middle-class people. Folio 10r of the ma-nuscript contains a note referring to the silver cover of the halo in the icon of Saint John the Baptist at the Church of Saint Nicholas at Voskopoja: it was made for 50 kuru
, paid for by a certain M
tros Gokou, son of Antonios. The comparison is telling: the donation was sufficient to lease two tomb spaces. For a more accurate sense of the actual costs of funerary spaces, see Table 6.2, which presents comparative data on the rates of tomb leases at various locations against the value of other items.

Table 6.2 Comparative costs of tomb space purchases and other costs over the same time period #

Cost of tomb (1780–1800)

Comparative cost and date

Rate

3,000 akçe (ca. 1780) 3,000 akçe (ca. 1780) 3,000 akçe (ca. 1780)

50 kuru
(= 6,000 akçe) for the silver cover of an icon’s halo (ca. 1795) 66 110,000 akçe for a house sold in Gjirokastra (1778) 67 1114 kuru
and 94 akçe (= 133,774 akçe) for the decoration of the Church of the Almighty in Gjirokastër (1776) 68 1637 kuru
& 73 akçe (= 196,513 akçe) for the decoration of the Church of the Taxiarchs in Gjirokastër (1776) 69 500,000 akçe for the construction of Vithkuq Monastery (1709–1759) 70 6141 kuru
and 15 akçe (= 736,935 akçe) for the reconstruction of the Church of the Almighty in Gjirokastër (1776) 71 7633 kuru
and 42 akçe (= 916,002 akçe) for the reconstruction of the Church of the Taxiarchs in Gjirokastër (1776) 72

50,00%

3,000 akçe (ca. 1780) 3,000 akçe (ca. 1780) 3,000 akçe (ca. 1780) 3,000 akçe (ca. 1780)

2,72% 2.24% 1.53% 0.60% 0.41%

0.33%

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life”

125

At this affordable and, most likely, institutionally fixed tariff, most parishioners could afford to lease funerary space in church or outside in the adjacent graveyard. Although such a space was more often than not meant to be for underground burial, Documents no. 3 and 8 offer a more complicated picture. Had it not been for Document no. 8, which explicitly states that “Nastos Ouianikou […] bought a tomb under the roof of [the adjacent funerary church of] Saint Euthymios,” I would have had no hesitation in attributing the statement “a tomb above the column of the narthex” in Document no. 3 to inadequate use of the Greek language. However, Document no. 8, which clearly mentions the roof as a space for interment leaves little doubt that, albeit rarely, some space by the church’s roof could also be given for burials. I do not know for certain what sort of burials were made next to or under the eaves of a church. I am compelled, however, by the archaeological research of Elizabeth Craig-Atkins, who concluded that eaves-drip burial in medieval England was reserved for unbaptized babies or infants (Craig-Atkins, 2014). It is possible to hypothesize that similar practices could have existed in the Balkans. In supplications “for all our pious and Orthodox brothers and sisters who have gone to their rest before us, and lie asleep here,”73 said in almost all church services, the communion between the living and the deceased is ontological, especially in burial churches. Moreover, contracting burial space in a church or in its graveyard was a source of income for a parish. In 1799, in the end-of-year accounting audits of the metropolitan church of Korçë city, a total revenue of 34,230 akçe was recorded “from tombs, fields, workshops, smallholdings, candles, and other items.”74 This income increased to 37 kuru
 in 1829.75 Tombs were not the only spaces leased by churches or monasteries against donations. We mentioned above the trend set by the Byzantine emperors who founded or renovated monasteries where they intended to retire as monks or nuns, a trend which was also popular among the Byzantine elites. At the end of the fourteenth century, Ioannis primicerius (a top-ranking court official) – to pick just one out of a multitude of such examples – became ktetor of the Pantokrator Monastery on Mount Athos, where he retired, acquiring the monastic name of Ioannikios and to which he left most of his possessions.76 This practice continued throughout the Ottoman period. What is not equally well known is that such practices were not confined to monasteries, but also extended to churches, which often built adjacent cells for the purpose of leasing them for life to elderly people, mostly women, thereby earning an additional income. The preserved archives of the parish churches of Voskopoja provide detailed glimpses into this monastic-like retirement in urban church complexes and into its practical aspects. A document signed by priests and laymen as witnesses, which could be dated to around 1784, specifies practical aspects of this practice for two women. They were presumably elderly: the document

126

Konstantinos Giakoumis

mentions the anticipation of their death and the avoidance of hard-to-access upper-floor cells: 12 H + Z  )' 1 [J

L -D K % . " //# (, (= ) T

"2'(#  L

13 -D H 8π", eμ"% 4 8π(A T  )' 1, L 7:A " T

14

"2'(#  H (= ) . 8π" //# ( L 8π(μ# A $% /+-# %, π/1

L π/+'9-() K % 1 /+-#  C( J / % 4-π'. , #  J / H15 L

16 1 9-() (6 'J(μ7() IE# () +μ+'# (), (= ) μ#  . J'N(, H (= ) 4 8π(A T  )' 1 /)( (= ) T

"2'(#  L 8π(μ# ()

17 H $% /+-# %. 18 H + "$' % K 7')% :: (· //' (%  ;/ :: (· 9'E (%

19 20 21 , +J/

H :: ( H μ+ 9+ :: (

H + +μ;' (% S '5% (6

22 "'E(C- () H :: (  (-

(E :: (

+'() F //;ππ()

:: (.

Kyriak
should stay in the cell below and Sophronia should stay [in the cell] above; however, if Kyriak
dies, then Sophronia should come down and the cell above should remain the property of the church. However, they should pay two thousand akçe to the church. One thousand is payable this coming feast of Saint Demetrios [i.e., 26 October]; and the other next year. And if Kyriak
dies and lastly Sophronia [dies, too], they [i.e., the cells] should remain the property of the church. Sot
r
s the priest confirms; Daniel sakellarios confirms; Georgios Michali confirms; Adami Andoni confirms; D
m
trios the priest, son of Georgousios confirms; Kosti Goga confirms; T
rkou Philippou confirms.77 Two years later, both elderly women were still alive, as shown in a document dated 8 November 1786, when they and another pair of elderly women, named Kataphyg
and Magdal
n
, donated 20 kuru
each to the Church of Saint Nicholas.78 This new payment points to the fact that the aforementioned 2,000 akçe in rental fee increased by 20 per cent two years later. Two other documents add to our knowledge of such practices. Their date is hard to determine. However, on account of their proximity to other dates and considered in conjunction with the age of the persons mentioned there, they can be dated to around 1795: 6 H + Z  - 1 T )E+' (6 "'E# ()

# , π'(-$/ k k (6 IE# ()

7  (/() H =

["-  L . //# ( $% , E/+$% 8-//#  K (-

8  L L # -A μ7- 2’ e'()% ^"$% O$%. π7 E'N-  H

[…]

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life”

127

13

H + Z , E/#  (6  V()  +9^+ π'(-;/ k k (6 IE# ()

 (/() (= ) ["- +L ( 7// ( +%  -+;% (6 +N'E+

;

14 8-//; _"-+ π7 E'N-  H    ;-+ μ7- 2’ e'()% ^(+%

)+% [π':/. fol. 7v, 08.11.1786]. Kasian
, [the daughter] of Georgios Sinas came to the church of Saint Nicholas and gave 25 kuruh for Magdal
n
’s cell, so that she stays in for as long as she lives. […] Magdalina, daughter of Giankos Liontzi came to the church of Saint Nicholas and gave 25 kuruh for the cell of Kas
n
, [daughter] of Georgios Sinas, so that she stays in for as long as she lives.79 These documents, although dated imprecisely, significantly enhance our understanding of the lease of cells by parish churches to elderly people. The documents make it clear that the 2,000 akçe the women donated shortly around 1784 and the 20 kuru
they donated in 1786 for the cells were not for lifelong leases of the said church property. First, on account of their vakıf (Tk. for pious foundation) status, it is hard to imagine that churches would evict elderly women from their properties on account of non-payment of rent. Second, a deal appears to have been agreed for the lifelong lease of the cells these elderly women lived in, which is, or shortly after, the year 1795 amounted to 25 kuru
. Third – and perhaps most importantly – the high status of at least one of the tenants and one of the persons sponsoring the lifelong lease of the church’s cells indicates that these tenants were members of the local socioeconomic elites. Kasian
, who in the first of these documents appears to offer 25 kuru
towards the lifelong lease of a cell by a certain Magdal
n
, is twice stated to be the daughter of Georgios Sinas. We know that Georgios Sinas, the father and grandfather of the well-known magnates, merchants, and bankers Simon and Georgios, had two children, a daughter named Maria and a son named Simon.80 The name Kasian
may have been a monastic name given to Maria, but otherwise, we do not know that there was a third daughter named Kasian
. Maria was born before 1753, the year in which Simon was born. Therefore, Kasian
could have been an elder daughter born before Maria or even Maria herself – but with a monastic name. In 1795, when Magdalina paid for Kasian
’s lifelong lease of a cell (perhaps as a favour or to repay a loan), “Kasian
” should have been at least in her fifties. Even without further details on the family descent of Kasian
, which merits some investigation, it seems fairly clear that such cells were reserved for elite members of the local society and staying in one was most likely an indication of status. These documents do not describe an isolated phenomenon. Another manuscript from Voskopoja, also written in Greek and kept at the Central State Archives in Tirana,81 with documents, spanning the period from 1714 to

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Konstantinos Giakoumis

1791, written on paper in a total of 60 folios, offers precious insights. It mostly contains documents related to the administration, functions, and operations of Voskopoja’s guild of tailors from the register’s foundational act dated 10 June 1714 (fol. 1r) to 15 March 1749 (fol. 37v). As of 10 May 1750 (fol. 46r ff.) the manuscript was used to record various (i.e., not confined to the guild of tailors) donations to churches. The last section of the codex contains a few documents of the grocers’ guild up to 7 August 1791, when the last entry on the guild’s new members was recorded (fol. 60r). The manuscript remains largely unknown as it has been published only in excerpts; its full content, however, is now available.82 Two documents from this manuscript’s second part relate to the aforementioned practice of leasing cells. In particular, it is recorded that around 1782, when the Church of Saint Barbara was renovated,83 “nun Kasian
, daughter of Galbatzani, gave 5,300 akçe for her cell,” located in the complex of the church of Saint Barbara (“ 17 + Z  -- 1

18 84 μ(J1 (6 /μπ^

 ["-  L . //# ( +% 4-π' 5300;”). Dating to the last two decades of the eighteenth century, another document specifies that “Maria, daughter of Michalis Gatesia(s) devoted 2,000 akçe for her cell,” again in the same church complex (“ 3 + Z , '#  (6 ,  J/+ 7-  4 85 82 7'"-  L . //# ( +% 4-π' 2000”). Cell or tomb leases within church of monastic enclosures were by no means the only acts of devotion associated with the customs of faithful Christians as they prepared for death. As early as the late Roman times Saint Basil the Great and other Church Fathers conceived, articulated, and elaborated the notion of    (psychikón, the “part for the soul”), calling on Christians to donate a portion of their properties to churches or monasteries, in support of their caritative mission, for the benefit of their souls.86 The afterlife of the soul was thenceforth catered for in liturgical services,87 most notably the Holy Liturgy, in which death, dying, and resurrection are central.88 The tradition of making memorial provisions was documented as early as the eleventh century.89 We have seen above how these commemorative provisions made their way into testaments. One such testamentary clause regarded the so-called trimoiria: when a married man or woman died leaving only one child, the inheritance was divided into three parts, the first of which was inherited by the child, the second by the surviving spouse, and the third was given for alms to the local church.90 Other forms of psychikà were donations in movable property,91 landed assets or immovable property, such as, for example, the house of Kostas Pertza(s)’ wife in Voskopoja, donated to the Church of Saint Barbara.92 As transferred property could then be managed by the beneficiary and hence be leased or even sold, the names of donors were still to be commemorated even after a property was no longer directly managed by the religious institution’s representative. A prothesis from the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in the village of Zervat in Dropull valley, Gjirokastër, in southern Albania, is accompanied by a curse against

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129

whomever forgets this duty: “[…] Father Mr. Ioannis, the first priest, devoted 3.5 ha of land in the [Dropull] valley and wrote his names on the plaque [i.e., the wooden diptychs]. And whoever sells them and does not commemorate [them] may have the curse of the All-Holy [Theotokos] and the excommunication by the prelate; Amen.”93 Other forms of psychikón included various kinds of commemorative registers known as protheses, parrhesiai, brevia, diptychs or triptychs, or catalogues,94 as well as commemoration in special services, such as the forty liturgies conducted before the Easter (sarantaleitourgon; Gk.

      ). Protheses were the registers of names to be recorded either on (diptych or triptych) icons or on the lower part of the niche of the Prothesis, in the altar, where the priest prepares the bread and wine for the Holy Eucharist. This is performed in a part of the service called proskomid or proskomedia by cutting the prosphoron (Orthodox offering of leavened bread stamped with a special seal) in small pieces called   μ   (psychomeridia, literally, “portions of the soul”), each commemorating the name of a living or a dead person. As the term prothesis was adopted as the name for the northern niche of the altar,95 only the names of important donors of the church or the monastery were recorded in it, such as the names of prelates and priest-monks who donated money for the construction of the church, for example at the Sp
laion Monastery in the village Saraqinishtë, in the Lunxhëri region of southern Albania.96 The term brevia denoted protheses written on paper.97 Parrhesiai were lists of names of faithful, living or dead, to be commemorated in several services, written on paper within a space delineated by columns.98 The alternative name of “   π    ” (parrhesia register) appears in a manuscript copied in 1728, which was once kept in the Monastery of the Transfiguration of Christ at Çatishtë, in the Pogon region of southern Albania.99 The participation of the faithful in these customary commemorative tributes was encouraged both by the ecclesiastical authorities and by the local churches or monasteries. In the letter of appointment by the election of Bishop Dositheos of Dryinoupolis and Gjirokastra, Metropolitan Gregorios of Ioannina enjoins the laymen of the diocese to “give […] tributes for the conduct of forty liturgies, parrhesiai, trimoiria and the [other] parts of the soul and anything else that is customary in the place.”100 As far as I know, there are four icon-protheses preserved on the territory of modern Albania, all from the region of Dropull (southern Albania). Three of them are concentrated in the two neighbouring villages of Zervat and Bularat. Their rather uncritical publication by local scholars with more enthusiasm for their village than scientific knowledge and critical acumen101 does not permit safe conclusions. A more serious analysis of one of the artworks and of the paper registers (brevia) from which it was copied enables us to make some plausible assumptions.102 The iconprotheses seem to have been made between the last two decades of the

130

Konstantinos Giakoumis

sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, with entries spanning a period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The first of them appears to be the icon-prothesis of the Church of Saint Athanasios in Zervat (or Bularat)103; the second is another icon-prothesis of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Virgin (or Dryano Monastery),104 also kept in Bularat, while the third belongs to the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Zervat.105 The first, second, and forth protheses carry a scene of the Virgin and Child, as is usual in the iconography of such items.106 The fourth icon-prothesis is from the Monastery of the Annunciation in Vanistër and is now kept at Tirana’s National Historical Museum. The figure of the Virgin is in the iconographic style of Kyriotissa (so named after the Church of Theotokos Kyriotissa in Constantinople (Fig. 9.3) and is painted under three medallions, the lateral two of which depict the Annunciation and the central one Christ Emmanuel. A stylistic analysis of the icon is beyond the scope of this study, but the work can be linked to the painter Michael from Linotopi and it could be dated to the second decade of the seventeenth century (Fig. 6.1). The dated entries of names span the period from 1790 to the early twentieth century. All these icons are triptychs, with a main panel divided in three to five columns. There appear the names of those wishing to be commemorated in the various services of the monastery, recorded in groups. Some of these groups represent prelates, others monastery abbots, abbesses, monastic priests and nuns, as well as lay persons. The most telling category, however, is in the central column of the icon-prothesis of the Dryano Monastery, in which the names of some of the rulers of Muscovy, Moldavia, and Wallachia were recorded as donors.107 The entries were made in 1650 and among them one can recognize well-known names, such as Michael I of Russia (1595–1645), founder of the Romanov dynasty, his father Theodore (Feodor Nikitich Romanov, 1553–1633), and his son Alexei (1629–1676). The donors from Moldavia and Wallachia have been identified and extensively discussed by Lidia Cotovanu.108 The existence of a paper copy of the icon-prothesis109 may indicate that travelling monks would probably carry paper protheses soliciting contributions in return for commemorations of the living and dead on the lists,110 whose names were later to be entered on the icon-prothesis. It should be noted that the use of such paper “diptychs” was quite widespread.111 Incidentally, paper registers of names of living and dead were also called diptychs or diptycharia, which were not actual diptychs, as Chitwood observes,112 but were more like monastic charters. They were given this name, as we can probably conjecture from a manuscript containing records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,113 because they were recorded in oblong registers, which were then folded in the middle. A note on fol. 158r of the manuscript provides some insights on the practice of recording names in this kind of register (diptych):

“For a Christian Ending to Our Life” 131 l  *()/# ()  -G [(% 1781 2 3 H '2(μ . π'. - J( 0 H )μ+μ7" +μ;" M(μ"

4 5 6 E()H'" L μ+μ(C(

1 IE#  H Tμ7', (6 π'(2;() Z/ (6: H 7 *" # () 8'J '7"%. H +   (/() Bπ(-9/+ B-# () … 16 July, year 1781 We write this register of the names of the honorable deceased furriers, so that they get commemorated on the holy [feast] day of the prophet Elijah: Joannikios the prelate [probably the deceased Metropolitan of Berat, cf. Germanos, 1937, 18)] + Nikolaos Athanasiou, son of Apostolis […]114. The aforementioned diptych115 was used until the early twentieth century, thereby providing first-hand testimony of the continuation of such practices. The same manuscript indicates that such donations were not limited to middle-class people or the elites, but were also made by wider sections of the population in the urban quarters of Elbasan: fol. 4r lists the names of faithful from the Castle quarter of the city who registered for commemoration in the Easter service of 4 April 1876 – this time with the sums of money they offered. The faithful were certainly aware that, regardless of the level and number of their donations, or the frequency of their requested commemorations, the time of death remained an unknown. When this time approached, while for monastics preparations for the burial were conducted in the monastery, for the laity the last rites and ceremonial of death started at home.116 If death was near, relatives would invite a priest to give the Holy Communion, if possible, or at least to read a prayer for the delivery of the dying person’s soul.117 While breathing their last or shortly after death, the deceased would be placed in the centre of the house, feet facing east; flowers were placed in the dead person’s hands, and fruit, seeds, and aromatic herbs on the deceased’s bed and pillow; a candle was lit by the head and an icon placed on the chest.118 In older times, in some villages a child appointed by the local teacher would read the Psalter throughout the night.119 The news of the death was spread to the community by the mournful sound of the parish church’s bells, upon which relatives and friends of the deceased would visit the house to honour the dead and offer sympathy to the grieving family.120 And there they would stay all night in vigil to honour the deceased and the family. The actual interment was to take place the following day. The deceased would be placed on a wooden bier either at home or in the church.121 The priest with a retinue of altar boys holding cherubim and cross banners would come to the house of the deceased and, after prayers, they would lead the funerary procession to the local church.122 The endurance in time of these customs is remarkable.123 In the vita of Saint Nikodemus the neomartyr of Berat (late seventeenth century) one reads that “the throng of

132

Konstantinos Giakoumis

Christians present [at his martyrdom] […] took the graceful and martyrish relic and, in hymns and odes, they deposited it in a reliquary in the church of the Mother of God, called Shumbull” (Shumbull was a micro-toponym for the location of the church;).124 The family would lament the dead with cries and ululations, ways of grieving that survived from antiquity and Byzantine times. In some regions, the family appointed professional mourners, “tragic” women endowed with the ability of arousing strong emotions of grief and sadness.125 At the end of the funeral in church the relatives of the dead would give out kollyva (funeral and memorial wheat with seeds and sweeteners) to the entire community honouring the dead on a day they could take off work.126 In earlier times, wrapped in a white sheet, the deceased would be placed directly on the ground and sprinkled with oil and vinegar by the priest. The tomb was erected above a layer of earth covered with a layer of slabs, a practice dating from earlier periods.127 In some places the funeral ended with lunch or supper of greens without meat.128 Family and friends would return to the tomb almost on a daily basis, especially in the summer, to pour water on the grave, light the oil lamp, and offer libations. Formal commemoration services were conducted on the third, ninth, and fortieth day after death and repeated on an annual basis thereafter.129 Kollyva would also be given out on these occasions. Besides commemoration services, the names of the dead would also be read out in a whole range of other services, as detailed above.

Death-Related Capital Formation and Redistribution As I shall demonstrate in the last section of this chapter, capital accumulation resulting from funerary and commemorative customs and practices provided the impetus for an alternative system of redistribution of wealth and capital in times when no banking institutions were available to supply credit. In other words, I shall demonstrate that capital accumulation by parish churches (and monasteries) from the traditions and practices analyzed in the previous section enabled the establishment of pre-modern, local, small-scale, non-bank credit markets operating before banks were established in the Ottoman empire. Credit is an indispensable part of an operational economy. It is an integral part of the creation, sustainability, and success of business, as well as a vital part of household finance. The parish church established a credit market relying on social bonds to manage risk and enforce repayments. As will be shown, this market was not informal, as a web of scribes and witnesses was involved in recording agreements and transactions, as well as monitoring their implementation. In this respect, parish churches and, most likely, monasteries implemented financial operations in which professional guilds engaged in favour of their members.130 From a global perspective, the credit-lending operations of Orthodox parish churches and monasteries in

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133

the Ottoman Empire were similar to those performed by diverse religious institutions in the Christian, for example in the Spanish world131 or at Buddhist establishments in Japan.132 Considering that the topic deserves a more extensive treatment, I will confine myself here to observations on two important manuscripts that cast light on this practice. The first manuscript is from the Cathedral Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God at the Castle of Berat in central Albania.133 This paper manuscript is a register of the properties and financial transactions of the church extending from 1781 to 1847. In its current form, it contains 20 folios with entries on church properties, financial audits run by the church warden’s administration, notes on donations, credit-lending, which interests us here, and details on the ways in which capital was invested. Findings from the study of this codex are corroborated by a similar manuscript from the Church of Saint Prokopios in Tirana.134 A typical document of communal administration of the revenue from donations by private individuals to the church is indicative of these practices.135 On 9 June 1781 the document lists a capital totalling 74,000 akçe from donations, which was then “distributed to the five quarters of the Castle [of Berat in the form of credit] with interest.” The document also records how the collected money was used. For example, the churchwardens later decided to use it “for the renovation of the church of the Metropolis.”136 Insights into how credit-lending transactions were recorded is provided in fol. 9r of the register: “1811 , '# () 1.  2 [J+   '7%

3  j  4-π' $% /+-# %  μX  2('( […] E'N-( ) 200  4 μX

μ(/(E# ” (1 March 1811). Drekas Kajana has 200 kuru
from the funds of the church [repayable] with interest.) The entry was accompanied by a credit-lending document. Getting credit from capital collected by a church was not confined to Berat. Similar documents were included in the register of the Church of Saint Prokopios in Tirana, for example, which shows that capital similarly accrued from donations.137 It is noteworthy that credit-lending and borrowing transactions were not the exclusive preserve of the Orthodox Christian communities and their churches. A document dated 29 June 1803, “copied from the old register to this present one,” shows that the Orthodox Christian community of the metropolitan Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God had borrowed capital not only from the Greek School in Berat, but also from the medrese (Tk. Muslim theological school) in the village of Velabisht, the tekke (dervish monastery) of the Vizier, the King’s Mosque, the Sheh Ali tekke and the tekke at Murad Çelebiasi with the obligation to repay them with an interest rate set separately for each of these institutions.138 It is therefore apparent that similar capital-formation practices with the establishment of credit markets and the trading of capital with interest were also pursued by Muslim and Bektashi religious institutions. It is also clear that the

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Konstantinos Giakoumis

circulation of capital was beyond religious barriers, as long as there were relations of trust. It would appear that such credit-lending transactions were concluded only once the community had decided that capital should not be earmarked for other priorities. One such example of communal administration of church property consists of the community deciding to borrow from the Greek School of Berat 106,700 kuru
for the purpose of supporting the reconstruction of the cathedral (1797–1803). The document recording the loan was apparently deleted upon repayment of the debt.139 This suggests that capital flows and the overall financial administration of the parish church’s common funds were audited on a yearly basis. Wardens were reconfirmed or replaced on the basis of their performance in such matters.140

Conclusions Church endowments, tomb and cell leasing practices, commemoration customs, and the financial transactions these involved helped with the accumulation of much-needed capital in religious establishments. This capital was thereafter invested in line with communal decisions on the financial affairs of the communities concerned. The transactions were meant to supply capital in a period when there were no banks and other credit-lending institutions and the only alternative was to resort to moneylenders. It is therefore fair to claim that death-related rituals and practices and the associated financial transactions were not only aimed at keeping the memory of the deceased alive both corporally and spiritually, but they also “gave life” to the living by way of capital formation and financial administration by parish churches working for the benefit of their congregations. With this in mind, the prayer “for a Christian ending to our life” acquires a very special meaning, linking death and life, the dead and the living. The long-term frame of this chapter (from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century) allows a longitudinal appraisal of continuities and changes in mortuary and commemorative practices. It should be acknowledged, however, that these sources are fragmented and not generous with details, which makes comparison difficult. What seems to be both universal and timeless for all human beings and all societies is the anxiety around imminent death and a desire to secure a place in a parish church or a monastery for the last days of their lives. However, by the end of the Byzantine period, not many individuals appear to have had the financial power to find and endow a monastery for the purpose of retiring there at the end of their lives. At best, members of the local elites would purchase cells within the territories of established monasteries, as is the case of the “Tower of the Albanian” leased between 1421 and 1428 by John Castriota, father of the renowned George Castriota Scanderbeg, which

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returned to the ownership of the monastery upon the death of George Castriota Scanderbeg (1468).141 Moreover, to cope with the fear of death, people of all social backgrounds tried to secure a place of interment in, if they had sufficient means, or outside churches. They also attempted to get a place in the sacred spatial-temporal space of the holy liturgy and other services by way of commemoration. The better-off could afford to commission multiple commemoration services in different places, as well as ensuring that they would be remembered by financing diverse underprivileged groups. continued from middle-Byzantine to late Ottoman times. The major difference between mortuary practices in Byzantium and in the course of the Ottoman Empire, as well as between mortuary practices of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire and similar practices in Europe relates to the role of the Church in executing testaments, while also managing the charity. During the Byzantine empire philanthropy and charity were realms in which the state, the Church and wealthy individuals were simultaneously active.142 In contrast, during the Ottoman period the Orthodox Church and its institutions seem to have acquired a monopoly on the execution and adjudication of testaments, philanthropy and charity; private initiatives to finance such activities were channelled through the Church and its agents. During the Ottoman period, mortuary rites underwent considerable regional variance.143 In the present chapter, I made an attempt to compare Byzantine mortuary rituals, practices, and material remains with similar late-Byzantine and postByzantine rituals in Epiros and mostly in Albania, correlating them with records of church donations, endowments, testaments, leases of cells and tombs, as recorded in icon-protheses and parish codices. Furthermore, archival research data show that capital accumulation from such rituals and practices was used to support the well-being of the parish community and especially its less well-off members. To conclude, I have argued that the Church, at the parish or monastery unit level, not only provided end-of-life space for individuals, but also offered burial space for the deceased, and a place in the sacred spatial-temporal space of the holy liturgy and other services by way of commemorating the names of the deceased donors and parishioners.

Notes 1 Phaidon Koukoules, Β     Β    Π  μ IV (Athens: Institut français d’Athènes, 1951); James Kyriakakis, “Byzantine Burial Customs: Care of the Deceased from Death to the Prothesis,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29/1 (1974): 37–71; Godfrey Goodwin, “Gardens of the Dead in Ottoman Times,” Muqarnas 5 (1988): 61–9; Nicolas Vatin, “Le corps du sultan ottoman,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 113–14 (2006): 213–27; Mehrdad Kia, Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011): 261–74. 2 Dorothy Zani de Ferranti Abrahamse, “Rituals of Death in the Middle Byzantine Period,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 29/2 (1984): 125–34; Jenny

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Albani, “Female Burials of the Late Byzantine Period in Monasteries,” in Women and Byzantine Monasticism: Proceedings of the Athens Symposium, 28–29 March 1988, ed. J. Perreault (Athens: Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens, 1991), 111–17; Alice-Mary Talbot, “Epigrams in Context,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999): 75–90; eadem, “The Death and Commemoration of Byzantine Children,” in Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium, eds. A. Papaconstantinou and A.-M. Talbot (Cambridge: MA: Dumbarton Oaks, 2009), 293–309; Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Sarah Tyler Brooks, Commemoration of the Dead: Late Byzantine Tomb Decoration (Mid-Thirteenth to Mid-Fifteenth Centuries), PhD thesis (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2002); eadem, “Poetry and Female Patronage in Byzantine Tomb Decoration: Two Epigrams by Manuel Philes,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 223–48; eadem, “Women’s Authority in Death: The Patronage of Aristocratic Laywomen in Late Byzantium,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, eds. Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, Michael Grünbart., Galina Fingarova, and Matthew Savage (Vienna – Cologne – Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2011/2012): 317–32; Nicholas Constas, “Death and Dying in Byzantium,” in Byzantine Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity, III, ed. Derek Krueger (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 124–48; Saška Bogevska, “Notes on Female Piety in Hermitages of the Ohrid and Prespa Region: The Case of Mali Grad,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, eds. Theis et al., 355–67. 3 Ivanka Gergova, “mnopoqrstuv ps woxypuzu{y |ry} wo~{u}sp{u€~nuv |yruo

 ‚ƒ„qsruv,”  !"#$ %&'()!&*#+ !,&-.&$)$ 32–3 (2003): 61–78; Magda Parcharidou-Anagnostou, Χ   /Π 0   18  Α1    π Μ 2Κ    (2Ε /   ) (Thessaloniki: Byzantine Research Centre, 2009); eadem, “C(  N%-π'(7- % μ (Nμ 2 '"9 πN +

π' (J; +% 'μ%,” Δ 66100/5 (2013): 34–65. 9: )μ:(/; -+

4 Kostas Spanos, “ … , "'#  (   'NE'2( () 18()  , /7+ " †--/ 9 (π")μ# ", "  (μ" 

"  π"Cμ",” Θ  Ημ 8 (1985): 17–46; idem, “‡  'N-+ +% , (;% ‘E# 

' ’ +% 'N')π% (, 7- () 18()  9): )μ:(/; -+ , /7+ "

(π")μ# " 

"  2 - 9  (μ" +%  ' (J;%  .. +%  '# -%,” Θ  Ημ 11 (1987): 113–32; idem, “   Nμ " 2 '"9 πN

(  -(:# 

+%  ('# () ‡π# '() -+  'N-+ 215 +% , (;% ()  '/μ

  π9)μ

(1613/1614),” Π  35 (1993): 205–16; idem, “   Nμ  "  ' -# " -(  9  ()  (C ˆE (% J# // (% 1811–1881,” in Π    Ημ   Η Λ    Π   1811–1881, (Larisa: Thettalos, 1994), 111–176; idem, “+μ;' (%  '%: …%  ( - 9+% "'+;%% +%  ' -%,” in Η Επ  

Κ    Χ1   Χ  : Ε 2  Α3Επ μ Σ μπ  (Κ   12, 13, 14 Μ 4  1995), ed. V. Nitsiakos (Konitsa: Municipality of Konitsa, 1996: 373–9; idem, “   Nμ "  ' -# " '^;" 

 ^;" (1714–1777) -(  9  8 +% , (;% ˆE (% 72(% "

, 9'",” in Η Λ    Π 2 : Απ  Α     μ5 Σ2μ  : Π   3 Σ   Λ   6 1 Σπ  1 , Λ   8–9 Απ  1995, (Larisa: Omilos Philon tis Thessalikis Historias, 1997): 177–94; idem, “   Nμ "

'"9 -+  ''+-#  9 +% , (;% ‰ % (1774),” in Π     Β3 2 Σ    Αμ 1 7  Σπ  1 . Ι   , Α   , Λ   /  Α 4   Φ01   , 3–4.6.1995 ()π(), ed. Ion V. Kontonatsios (Almyros: Municipality of Almyros, 1997): 227–50; idem, “ 

   -μ(#

+%  π -(π;% "

E9 -(

 - J( 230 +% , (;% ()  '/μ ( 1758,” Θ  Ημ 38 (2000): 273–304; idem, “ 

†--/ (#

   -μ(#

-( '(-(/)μ  N  9  509 (1649–1669),” Θ  Ημ 40 (2001): 293–366; idem, “ 

†--/ (#

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

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  -μ(#



  Nμ " 2 '"9 ()% -+  'N-+ 401 () , E. , 9'() (1520–1540),” Θ  Ημ 43–44 (2003): 97–168. Vasileios Marinis, Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium: The Fate of the Soul in Theology, Liturgy, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 219. Myrto Veikou, Ο 5Θ5  Β   28π  π  7 57  12 Α1  . Μ Τπ  /   Μ  μ  μ9, PhD thesis (University of Athens, 2007), 350–7. For the latter, see Etleva Nallbani, “Urban and Rural Funerary Practices in Early Medieval Illyricum: Some Considerations,” in The Material and the Ideal: Essays in Medieval Art and Archaeology in Honour of Jean-Michel Spieser, eds. Anthony Cutler and Arietta Papaconstantinou (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 47–61. See William Bowden, “Conflicting Ideologies and the Archaeology of Early Medieval Albania,” Archaeologia Medievale XLVI (2019): 41–50. Konstantinos Giakoumis, Ο Ε   Κ1   Δ  6  π7   Α    (1760–1858) (Tirana: University College LOGOS Press. 2020), 183–4. See Gheorghe LazŠr, “Social Life and Family Relations in the Testaments of Wallachian Merchants (18th c.–early 19th c.),” Études Balkaniques LVIII/1 (2021): 140–68. Marinis, Death and the Afterlife, 207–8, 210–12, 215–7. Giakoumis, Ο Ε  , 183. Jean François Boissonade, ΑΝΕΚΔΟΤΑ: Anecdota Graeca e Codicibus Regiis IV (Paris: Excusum in Regio Typographeo, 1832), 34 and 59. See John Philip Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero (eds.), Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), esp. 55, 274, 324, 629. Daniel Georgopoulos, : ; < 0  π     Σπ      Θ7  =π ; Μ  7  >?  (Venice: Francesco Andreola Press, 1833), 197. Sophie Violet Moore, A Relational Approach to Mortuary Practices Within Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (PhD diss. University of Newcastle, 2013), 118–9. Patrick Viscuso, “Death in Late Byzantine Canon Law,” Ostkirchliche Studien 51 (2002): 240–3; Zachary Chitwood, “Dying, Death and Burial in the Christian Orthodox Tradition: Byzantium and the Greek Churches, ca. 1300–1700,” in A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c.1300– 1700, eds. Philip Booth and Elizabeth Tingle (LeidenBoston: Brill, 2020: DOI: 10.1163/9789004443433_009), 205–10. For the Novela, see Spyridon N. Troianos, ΟΝ 5  Λ5 ΣΤ3  Σ/9: Π μ  , Κμ , Απ   Ν 2, Ε  2   Επμ (Athens: Herodotus, 2007), 184–7. Chitwood, “Dying,” 204–10. For the medieval Serbian royalty, see Marko Popovi‹, “The Funerary Church of the Monastery of ŽiŒa: A Contribution to the Study of Medieval Monastic Burial in Byzantium and Serbia,” Starinar 63 (2013): 173–90. Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer (eds.), The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1994). Sanna Lipkin and Titta Kallio-Seppä, “Introduction: Studying Under-Floor Church Burials in Finland: Challenges in Stewarding the Past for the Future,” Historical Archaeology 55 (2021): 1–10. DOI 10.1007/s41636-020-00267-z Olga Katsiardis-Hering1984. Η Ε 2Π   Τ 5 (1751–1830). PhD diss., University of Athens, 173–176 and notes 1–31 on pp. 481–3. For which see Gülru Necipolu, “Dynastic Imprints on the Cityscape: The Collective Message of Imperial Funerary Mosque Complexes in Istanbul,” in

138

24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Konstantinos Giakoumis Cimetières et traditions funéraires dans le monde islamique (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1996), 23–36. Titta Kallio-Seppä and Annemari Tranberg, “The Materiality of Odors: Experiencing Church Burials and the Urban Environment in Early Modern Northern Sweden,” Historical Archaeology 55 (2021) . For comparative purposes, see also Andrew Spicer, “ ‘Defyle not Christ’s kirk with your carrion’: Burial and the development of burial aisles in post-Reformation Scotland, “ in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Meideval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149–69. Cf. John Philip Thomas, Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987); Robert Ousterhout, “Remembering the dead in Byzantine Cappadocia: The Architectural Settings for Commemoration.” In Transactions of the State Hermitage Museum LIII: Architecture of Byzantium and Kievan Rus from the 9th to the 12th centuries, Materials of the International Seminar November 17–21, 2009 (St. Petersburg: The State Hermitage Publishers, 2010), 87–98; Robert Ousterhout, “Byzantine Funerary Architecture of the Twelfth Century,” @&,&A))!& )!A))$,: BA)C  )$#D, *#$ E)!F. #XII ,&!. 19 (2002): 9–17; idem, “Remembering the Dead in Byzantine Cappadocia: The Architectural Settings for Commemoration,” GAHDI)AH#)$,&FJ. $#K #53 (2010): 89–100; Marina Mihaljevi‹, “Üçayak: A forgotten Byzantine church,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107/2 (2014): 725–54. DOI.org/10.1515/bz-2014-0018 Troianos, ΟΝ 5  Λ5 ΣΤ3  Σ/9, 186–7. Spyridon Photeinakis, Η Χ 2  Ε  /   Μ L   9Ν 0 : Ε μ  2Π  5 μΒ  Γ  π 5Π5, PhD diss. (University of Athens, 2012), 69–71. Theofan Popa, Mbishkrime të Kishave në Shqipëri, eds. Nestor Nepravishta and Kostandin Gjakumis (Tirana: Akademia e Shkencave – Instituti i Historisë, 1998), Inscription no. 89, 83–4; fig. 1. Aleksandër Meksi and Damian Komata, “Kisha e Shën Mërisë së Bërrarit,” Iliria 2 (1987): 215–27. Popa, Mbishkrime, Inscription no. 278, 145–6. Spyros Kikis, Η Ι     Χ7 9Μ : Ι    Χ7 9Ζ L M 7 Δ π, (Gjirokastër: Argjiro, 2008), 198. Konstantinos Giakoumis, “Textual Visuality and Visual Textuality in Texts Correlated with Artworks. Nektarios Terpos’ Pistis and Last Judgement Scenes from Myzeqe, Central Albania,” in Texts, Inscriptions, Images: Art Readings. 1/ Old Arts (Sofia: National History Museum, 2017), eds. Emmanuel Moutafov and Jelena Erdeljan, Figs. 3–4, 208. The letters “ ” above the previous word particle “  †.” I. Kaczenyák, Funerary Inscriptions as Tomb Markers in the court of the Serbian Orthodox Church of Saint George (Budapest, 2012). Gk. , π/()/;. See Spyridon Lambros, “ π Cμ:  Ž//;" K # "% , N"   7-A,” Ν5 Ε μ 2μ7 8/4 (1911): 465, Inscription no. 5. Central State Archives, Tirana (Albania) (Hereafter AQSH), F. 141, D. 3 Register of church donations by tailors and grocers in Voskopja. Konstantinos Giakoumis, “The Voskopoja Guild of Tailors’ Credit Lending Operations and Risk Management (1716–27),” Turkish Historical Review 9 (2018): 267. AQSH, F. 141, D. 3, fol. 3r. Register of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Voskopoja.

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40 Loring M. Danforth and Alexander Tsiaras, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 15–23 and 58–69. 41 No previous owner is mentioned in the documents; hence, presumably, the tombs were purchased directly from the church. 42 Although the previous owner of the tomb is explicitly a person and not the church, it seems that the money from the sale was paid to the church and not to the deceased’s descendants. 43 The purchase was accompanied by the registration of a name in a parrhesia. 44 ( "  (. 45 See note 38. 46 This is literally what is recorded in the document; for the possibility of the location of tombs on the roofs of churches, see doc.no. 8 47 See note 40. 48 ATTN text-stter: the author will have to check this at proof-reading stage See note 43. 49 See note 38. 50 These tombs and a debt to the church at the value of 2,000 akçe were repaid by the donation of a house with its courtyard, ownership of which was transferred to the church. 51 See note 38. 52 See note 43. 53 See note 38. 54 See note 43. 55 See note 38. 56 The pew was also purchased with the tomb. 57 The buyer paid 10 kuru
(12,000 akçe, i.e., 120 akçe per kuruh). The difference was most likely a donation. 58 See note 38. 59 Before its destruction by a wildfire in 1916, there used to be a Church of St. Euthymios, as well as a number of cells adjacent to the Church of St. Nicholas. Ahilino Palushi, David Selenicasi: Piktor i “Rilindjes” Pasbizantine në Shqipëri (Tirana: Ombra GVG,2018), 115. 60 See note 38. 61 See note 38. 62 See note 38. 63 See note 38. 64 See note 38. 65 Kallio-Seppä, and Tranberg, “The Materiality of Odors,” 66. 66 AQSH, F. 141, D. 3, fol. 10r. 67 Giakoumis, Ο Ε  , doc. no. 38, 170. 68 Ibid., doc. no. 36, 167–8. 69 Ibid., doc. no. 37, 168–9. 70 Philaretos, Metropolitan of Didymoteichon, “ '=

0   π'J#   -('# %

'0 , (0,” Ε  2Α20 20 (1896–7): 319, note 1. 71 Giakoumis, Ο Ε  , doc. no. 34, 165–6. 72 Ibid., doc. no. 35, 166–7. 73 John Chrysostom, The Divine Liturgy of Our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom (Sydney: St. Andrew’s Orthodox Press, 2005), 35. 74 AQSH, Kodiku i 99-të i Korçës, fol. 25v; cf. Andi Rembeci, Ο Κ1   Μ π7Κ  : N   Ι  2Τμ 7 (17–19Α1  , MA thesis (Ionian University, Corfu, 2009), doc. no. 34, 235. 75 AQSH, Kodiku i 99-të i Korçës, fol. 32r; cf. Rembeci, Ο Κ1  Μ π7, doc. no. 53, 246.

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76 Vassiliki Kravari, Actes du Pantocrator (Archives de l’Athos, No. 17) (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1991), 99. 77 AQSH, F. 141, D. 3, fol. 6v. 78 AQSH, F. 141, D. 3, fol. 7v. 79 AQSH, F. 141, D. 3, fol. 10r; names spelled as per the original. 80 Georgios Laios, Σμ7 Σ  (Athens: Academy of Athens, 1972), 3–4. 81 AQSH, F. 141, D. 2. 82 Giakoumis, “Textual Visuality,” 244–6. For the content of the manuscript, see Konstantinos Giakoumis, “Glimpses from the Activities of Ottoman Guilds: The Register AQSH. F. 141, D. 2 of the Central Archives of the State, Tirana, Albania.” Historiography in Ottoman Europe Working Paper No. 4 (2022). DOI: 10.46586/rub.hoe.209.183 83 AQSH, F. 141, D. 2, fol. 53v. 84 AQSH, F. 141, D.2, fol, 53v. 85 AQSH, F. 141, D. 2, fol. 55r. 86 Chitwood, “Dying,” 201–2. For further details on the ‘part for the soul’ as practiced in the Romanian Lands, see the chapters by Elena Bedreag and Mihai Mîrza and Petronel Zahariuc in the present volume. 87 Marinis, Death and the Afterlife, 85–92. 88 Cf. Paul Jonathan Fedwick, “Death and Dying in Byzantine Liturgical Traditions,” Eastern Churches Review 8 (1976): 157–61; Nicholas Denysenko, “Death and Dying in Orthodox Liturgy,” Religions 8/25 (2017). DOI: 10.3390/ rel8020025 89 Chitwood, “Dying,” 203. 90  ikolaos Spandonis, “ -2+- % $% L ' μ( '#   /+'((μ# %  Nμ()

?π(7-"%,” Ε  2Α20 4 (1882–1883): 172–3. 91 E.g., Dhimitër Beduli, Kodiku i Kishës së Shën Prokopit të Tiranës (1818–1922) (Tirana: Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania, 1997), fol. 6v, 96. 92 AQSH. F. 141, D. 2, fol. 54r. %  +%  ('# () ‡π# '(),” 93 Panagiotis Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- Επ   Ε    Β   1 Σπ  1 5 (1928), Inscription no. 3, 55. 94 Anastasia Tourta, “ ('+E ; '-+' N+  ()μ" ‡EμN" - , (7% +%

†--/(# +%,” in Μ  Γ   (1926–1996): Α/5 7μ  2 (Ioannina: University of Ioannina Press, 2003), 796–7. 95 Ibid., 796; Parcharidou-Anagnostou, Χ   /Π 0 , 59; eadem, “C(

 N%-π'(7- %” 34–5. 96 Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %,” Inscription no. 12, 77. 97 Tourta, “ ('+E ; '-+' N+,” 796 and note 7. 98 Maria-Christina Hadjiioannou, Η Ι  2ΕO5O 7 Ο μ1   Π 2

  Αμ       Τ    : Ο Κ1   Α . 201  Μ 2 Μ  μ /1 7   Σ7 2  ΖL    (Athens: Center for Neohellenic Research / National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2000), 10. 99 Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %,” Inscription no. 3, 68–9. 100 Giakoumis, Ο Ε  , doc. no. 4, 112. 101 Kikis, Η Ι     Χ7 9Μ , 51–4; idem, Kikis, Σ  M. Α   : Ι. Ζ L  Α   . ΙΙ. Δ π  Α   . ΙΙΙ. Μ   Απ Μ 5 Π 5Α20(Gjirokastër: Argjiro, 2012), 133–68. 102 Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %”, 59–60. 103 Cf. Kikis, Σ  M. Α   , 164–8. 104 Georgios Giakoumis, Μ μ Ο 0 O   ΑL  (Athens: Doukas Publ., 1994), fig. 40, p. 32; Kikis, Σ  M. Α   , 133–57. 105 Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %”, 60; Kikis, Σ  M. Α   , 158–64.

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106 Gergova, “mnopoqrstuv”; Parcharidou-Anagnostou, “C(  N%-π'(7- %”. 107 Kikis, Σ  M. Α   , 138 and 157. 108 Lidia Cotovanu, “Le diocèse de Dryinoupolis et ses bienfaiteurs de Valachie et de Moldavie: Solidarités de famille et traits identitaires multiples (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” in ContribuPii privitoare la istoria relaP iilor dintre QRrile Române
i Bisericile RRsRritene în secolele XIV–XIX, ed. Petronel Zahariuc (Iahi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, 2009), 237–311. 109 Cf. Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %,” 59–60. 110 See Marinis, Death and the Afterlife, 93–107. 111 Poulitsas, “ π E'2#



 )μ;- %,” Inscription no. 9, 62–3. 112 Chitwood, “Dying,” 217. 113 AQSH, F. 32, D. 118, fol. 1r. Register (diptych) of the names of deceased persons recording their names for commemoration at the Church of St. Nicholas in the Castle of Elbasan. 114 AQSH, F. 32, D. 118, fol. 158r. 115 AQSH, F. 32, D. 118. 116 Brooks, “Women’s Authority in Death”, 319. 117 Nikolaos Papadopoulos, Η Δ9L  Δ π7Β. Ηπ  (Athens, 1970), 175; Kikis, Η Ι     Χ7 9Μ , 197. 118 Papadopoulos, Η Δ9L  Δ π7, 175; Kikis, 2008, Η Ι      Χ7 9Μ 197; Vasileios Zarbalas, Η Λ    (Α7 Σ   ) (Ι    Λ   /Σ9μμ  ) (Saranda: Elikranon, 2008), 259. 119 Papadopoulos, Η Δ9L  Δ π7, 175. 120 Ibid., 175–6; Zarbalas, Η Λ    , 258, 260. 121 Papadopoulos, Η Δ9L  Δ π7, 176; Zarbalas, Η Λ    , 260. 122 Papadopoulos, Η Δ9L  Δ π7176; Kikis, Η Ι     Χ7 9Μ , 197–8; Zarbalas, Η Λ    , 260. 123 Cf. Moore, A Relational Approach, 112–64. 124 Nikolaos,