16. A few words about my ghosts.
A reflection for the Day of the Dead.
It hadn’t happened to me in years. Middle of the night and I was neither asleep nor awake. Something was hovering, neither threatening nor reassuring. I could not move, nor will myself awake. I must have made some noise because my wife shook me, resentful for the sudden awakening and with no sympathy in her voice: “It’s all those dead people you are messing around with. This is what happens”.
I do wonder about this exhumation of names. Names that represent once living people who once lived real lives, but now live only in tombstones, documents, and in my head. I do question what business I have to disturb their eternal rest, their terrestrial journey long done, their names and lives slowly expunged from the awareness of successive generations of descendants. They would have remained unknown in their eternal rest if not for my nosing around all those documents trying to reconstruct their lives, a close to futile task that can at best create a plausible facsimile, and at worst a gross misinterpretation of who they were. Every single document is a thread in this family fabric that I try to stitch whole again, and it’s taking a whole lot of disturbing the dead to untangle their threads. And yet I keep looking, spending quality time with some, while others after brusquely waking them, I leave behind once again. I get to decide which of their stories needs telling. I am not sure if it’s those I leave behind who are haunting me in my sleep begging for more time or those I won’t leave alone and who wish to return to their peace.
It should be said, for the benefit of the reader who thinks that this whole reflection is ridiculous, that there are places in the world where the separation between the living and the dead is not absolute; there are places where it’s not considered an impenetrable wall, but rather a veil that sometimes allows prayers to enter from one realm and responses to arrive from the other. To that end, pictures of ancestors on a wall are not just relics but potential portals through which one can converse with those who are gone; but even for those who embrace that notion, signals from four centuries ago can be just static noise.
But some of those signals do come through, and I turn my head sideway like a dog trying to figure out the sound – you now the look – [1] picking up fragments of the story of the Argentina family at the turn of the 17th century. Fragments made up of documents that detail events that took them back and forth between Francavilla and Naples and involve the Mangerio as well as the Argentina family. The souls who will be importuned are Josephi Argentina’s first born, Giovandonato, and his wife Fiorenza Mangerio, the other ones that I need to put back to rest are…so hard to leave behind. They also have stories, and even four centuries later, I can make out their faint signals.
It’s hard to leave behind Giovandonato’s siblings and the documents that offer a peek into their stories; I could justify spending considerable time with any of them. Hard to say goodbye to Roberto, who married his aunt’s sister (Claudia and Livia Tagliavanti, respectively) and both named their son Giulio Cesare: who doesn’t want to know what that was all about, right? Hard to say goodbye to Alfonsina who was a nun[2], somehow got out of it thanks an official dispensation from the Vatican, THE Vatican, to marry a baron from a nearby town; hard to say goodbye to Filippo who was a married lawyer but then became a priest and a theologian of some importance in Naples. Hard to say goodbye to the whole Mangerio family in Naples. There are Portia and Donato Antonio who left their fortunes to Fiorenza, her uncle Scipione who threatened to sue to get some of that back as his own son Pompeo committed himself at his own cost to defend his cousin Fiorenza’s inheritance. The telling of that story is in last month’s essay.
With sadness I release them all back. They need return to the archive for now, probably forever; I should have started this family documents business thirty years ago. Their consolation is that they lasted longer than any of us ever will as the digital traces of our existence will unlikely last centuries and will more probably vanish before we are even dead, just as we are letting vanish the great literary and philosophical works of our past by not remembering them anymore. We are but a couple of generations away from a society that will have released back into their past the words of Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and the whole literary canon that was part of our collective consciousness. But I digress… and be that as it may, the reader curious enough to take a peek at the papers that regard the souls that I am leaving behind, or at least interested enough to read the list and quick descriptions of those documents, she may find at the bottom of the essay a link to documents I refer to in this writing.
And now, a little historical context refresher. Giovandonato and Fiorenza were married in 1597[3]. A year after their wedding Philip III of Habsburg, King of Spain inherited one of the largest empires Europe had ever seen. Besides the Iberian and most of the Italian peninsula, his overseas possessions encompassed much of Southern and Central America, the Low Lands, and the northern end of the Balkans. A lot to manage and during his reign, in 1618, the Thirty-Year War commenced and would deplete much of his treasure just as the ships with the silver from the New World were coming home a little emptier every year. The effect of this on the Kingdom of Naples was that there never was a large Spanish garrison in the bottom half of the Italian peninsula, never far away from Naples, and most people in the kingdom did not feel a direct presence of the Spanish Crown in their everyday lives. The Spanish viceroys entrusted with governing the Kingdom of Naples made use of local barons and rich landowners to run things on their behalf. The result was that though Spanish law was the nominal law of the land, it was difficult for a poor field worker to access it, and he remained dependent on the whims of the landlord on whose land he worked, a relic of the old feudal system that would continue until Napoleon. Wealthy landowners or the remnants of the nobility who still owned lands and towns, had full administrative, economic, and judicial authority over those who lived there. And so it was in Francavilla where the Imperiali family had owned the town since the late 1500s, and whose current ruler was Prince Michele (Michael) Imperiali III.[4] By most accounts, this was a period when the Imperiali ruled Francavilla with full powers, but are remembered as benevolent rulers, doing much to expand the town’s commercial and trading potential, beautifying the castle and the city walls, creating in alliance with religious institutions free schools for children of poor families, and also opening the first hospitals and homes for the sick.
At the turn of the 17th century, the Argentina are in their fifth generation, or about 150 years, in the Terra d’Otranto region of the Kingdom of Naples. Giovambattista Argentina had arrived in the heel of the Italian boot from Naples around the 1450s as a military officer for the Crown of Aragon with some money as he was able to marry a ‘noblewoman’ soon after. Their son Roberto had means enough to buy the family’s first property, for which there is a paper record anyway, near Francavilla in 1480, the year of the siege and capture of Otranto by Ottoman troops. Future generations continued to purchase agriculturally producing land, one of the principal sources of generational wealth accumulation in the region, so that by the time we arrive in the first decade of the 1600s, the family has established itself as one of the leading families in Francavilla, living like nobility, according to historian Pietro Palumbo, and with aspirations to enter its ranks. Following the death of Josephi Argentina the considerable properties are divided amongst his offspring as detailed in two documents from the years of 1602 and 1603.[5] But as established as the status of the Argentina already was among Francavilla’s elite families, Giovandonato’s marriage to Fiorenza Mangerio was one of those unions that help create dynasties. The Mangerio were a wealthy Neapolitan family and among the city’s elite, though not one the capital’s families of ancient nobility according to the almanac of Naples’ noble houses of the time. This is an era during which the professional and landowning classes overtake many of the older noble families of the kingdom in wealth and prestige. The noble families’ members had long lost the ability and interest to work many idle generations earlier, and kept up appearances solely with the sale of their diminishing resources. A turn of events that will be repeated in the 20th century when the world will leave behind established families that did not adapt to changing times. We’ll talk about that when we get there.
An indication of the family’s comfortable status is reflected in the close observation of family records. There are few early deaths recorded in the family tree prepared by Feliciano Argentina, though in this era child death rate was remarkably high by today’s standards, as was the mortality of women during childbirth. This can mean a number of things: There weren’t many child deaths in the family, or the church records did not bother with children due to the high mortality rate, or Feliciano did not record them in his accounting of the family. Regardless, this must be reflected upon: there begins a period in the Argentina family that will continue for a couple of centuries when each marriage produced large families with many children, a statistic that could be used to indicate an elevated quality of life and a family that could provide a level of maternal care that was superior to that of the population average. Another demographic element that indicates better health and protection from the hardships of a life of labor was the longevity of Argentina family members who often died in their seventh decade or later, an outlying statistic for the average life expectancy in the general population before the 20th century. I often remind my wife that Argentinas live a long time, but regrettably we lose our sanity early on. Best wishes.
Giovandonato and Fiorenza kept themselves busy managing their money and their growing land assets, which frequently involved legal litigation, sometimes against families that had married with Argentinas like the Tagliavanti, as evidenced by legal documents in the archive. A summary of the documentary evidence available for this couple includes a land purchase contract in 1599, when two years after they married and flush with money Giovandonato received in inheritance as well as his wife Fiorenza’s money, the couple purchased more agricultural land outside Francavilla.[6] Giovandonato had inherited properties that belonged to his grandfather Roberto, his uncle Gaspare, and his aunt Laura. They were passed on to his father Josephi, who died in 1594, before the wedding, but Giovandonato would have to wait until 1603 until he and his siblings were finally able to take over their dad’s properties. Two legal documents[7] detail the divvying up of the inheritance from Josephi to his children. In a legal document from 1605, Giovandonato pursued decime[8] owed to him by the Tagliavanti family, the family with the two sisters who married Giovandonato’s uncle and brother. Business is business, and they would see each other in court again in 1622. The year 1611 would turn out to be busy: document 859 of March 5 details the will of Giovan Donato Mangerio, Fiorenza’s brother, making her the sole recipient of a substantial inheritance, and by March 23 Giovandonato had power of attorney for his wife Fiorenza;[9] the complications of that situation were detailed in last month’s essay. The next year, in 1612, Giovandonato argued before the Regia Camera della Summaria[10] that since the family had somehow never paid taxes on a property owned for time immemorial, he shouldn’t either and the property should be included in the tax-free class of Church or noble properties[11]. He won. (Consult your accountant. This is not intended to be legal advice for the reader). Other documents from those years show transactions in which Giovandonato and his brother Filippo purchased olive groves, in addition to other business dealings, including the first record of an Argentina selling a property, as Giovandonato did in 1624.[12]
Besides her brother Donato Antonio’s substantial inheritance, Fiorenza also inherited at least part of her aunt Portia’s wealth, though that money was not without obligations. The Mangerio had been active in fundraising for charitable and religious establishments in Naples, especially the founding of the charity of Pio Monte and its Cappella della Misericordia.[13] In both the inheritances received by Fiorenza there were requirements for payments to be made to institutions in Naples, as was the case for inheritances received by her husband Giovandonato in Francavilla.
To understand the significance of all this money directed towards religious orders it is necessary to observe how Spanish governance of the Kingdom of Naples was an amalgamation of Church and State into a singular cultural entity that made the Spanish style of Catholicism the primary mode of religious and cultural understanding and practice. By inserting itself during religious events like processions for Easter Week or festivities for a city’s patron saint, or support for charities, the state made it clear that it was one with the Church and with society. The Spanish ‘Buongoverno’ used charities and involvement in society to ingratiate itself with the general population and avoid popular revolts that their scant garrison could barely contrain. On the other side, it could not take away too much power from the barons and landlords that served the state’s interests in administering the kingdom. It was a fine balancing act they made work for many decades. But as the Spanish administration integrated itself in society and Church, to speak or act against the state was also an action against Church and society and vice versa. Though Neapolitans resisted the imposition of harsh institutions like the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless the Spanish viceroys realized a partnership with the Church to keep cultural practices consistent, conservative, and non-threatening to either the Church or the state, and both presented themselves as the necessary and sole defenders of society against the declared threatening forces of Islam, Protestantism, and an afterlife in hell. And the Church was a zealous defender of its supremacy over what society should believe: In 1600, three years after Giovandonato and Fiorenza married, former priest Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome after a seven year trial for heresy for his insistence in beliefs that contradicted Church dogma.[14] Especially in Terra d’Otranto, a region that had seen much diversity with Roman Catholic, Byzantine, Jewish, and local cultural traditions living side by side, became more culturally homogenous.
After the Council of Trent and its focus not only on the Word, but also on deeds as a path to salvation, there was an increase of new religious orders founded with the mission to reach the masses of rural populations in the kingdom, many considered by the Spanish administration and the Church to be as pagan as the indigenous peoples newly met in the Americas. Support for these religious orders became ‘de rigeur’ for the well to do, not unlike belonging to established and visible charities in our own world today. But there was something else, and it brings us back to the conversation about souls: the concern for salvation. A fair number of the documents I have been scanning are contracts for the celebration of masses for family members who had recently died at the time of writing. Some are obligations written in their wills, others are receipts for masses in perpetuity that were paid in advance so that generations of the living would pray for the soul of the deceased to be given a faster track out of purgatory and through St. Peter’s gates. It is here that the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest as the living help keep pressure through masses and prayer for their family member’s advancement to a more desirable real estate in the afterlife, and in return it is expected that when the living need a little help with a situation in their lives, those prayers will be met by the departed with a plead for positive intervention to the higher ups in the eternal world.
Through the centuries there are many in the Argentina family who entered religious orders, willingly or not, as there are records of ancestors who became abbots and priests and nuns, sometimes multiple members of the same brood. Those who entered religious life from noble or rich families, beneficiaries of a decent education, would occupy posts of leadership in those orders, which would include property and land management as the Church was one of the largest landowners in most towns of the kingdom. The Church would gain influence with the ruling families, and those families would have ‘someone on the inside’ with potential influence in the praying business.
And now I need to beg forgiveness to the souls of Giovandonato and Fiorenza for keeping them around a little longer. I fully intended to focus on their stories but got sidetracked as I am wont to do and wish to remain within my self-imposed constraint of 3,000 words per essay. So, they are up next month along the introduction of their son, Pompeo, the first Argentina mayor of Francavilla.
Happy All Souls Day to those who observe.
For all of you archive rats, here is a link to the documents mentioned in this essay: Folder of documents for essay 16.
Please consider using the Substack app to follow these essays. New arrangements with how email is received on Apple accounts may dump these in junk folders.
If you like this sort of thing, please take a look at Jordan’s Substack. He does great dives in old journals and returns with history lessons.
[1] Yes, that’s an M-dash and I love it, I cannot lie. It don’t mean it’s AI. Humans like M-dashes also.
[2] Document 265 is a receipt from the convent for 500 ducats to Giovandonato and Filippo to cover food and lodging expenses of their sister Alfonsina.
[3] Document 968.
[4] A more detailed of the history of the Kingdom and Francavilla at this time can be found in essay #9. Spanish governance of the Kingdom of Naples in the 1500s.
[5] Documents 11 and 10.
[6] Document 1014
[7] Documents 10 and 11
[8] Decime – a tenth of the value of produce harvested by farmers on a leased field was collected by the landowner as part of the lease.
[9] Document 925
[10] Think of it as the IRS with economic policy making powers.
[11] Palumbo, p.196
[12] Document 934
[13] For that occasion, the supporters of the charity commisioned Caravaggio for a painting for which he was paid from their funds.
[14] Look this guy up. His ideas were fascinating for the time he lived in, and a direct threat to Catholic explanations of how the universe works.
Works consulted for this essay:
Argentina, Feliciano. Gli Argentina di Francavilla nella Storia del Salento. Congedo Editore, 1978.
Coco, Primaldo. Francavilla Fontana nella Luce Della Storia. Congedo Editore, 1988.
Croce, Benedetto. The History of the Kingdom of Naples. Translation of Italian 1925 6th edition by Frenaye, Frances, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Dauverde, Celine. Church and State in Spanish Italy: Rituals and Legitimacy in the Kingdom of Naples. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Palumbo, Pietro. Storia di Francavilla Fontana. Reprinted 1974, Arnaldo Forni editore, Editore E. Cressati, 1901.
Parker, Geoffrey. Europe in Crisis: 1598-1648. 1st ed., Cornell University Press, 1979. History of Europe.
Petracca, Luciana. Un borgo nuovo angioino di Terra d’Otranto: Francavilla Fontana (secc. XIV-XV). Congedo Editore. Universita del Salento, Serie Studi Storici.
Safran, Linda. The Medieval Salento. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Visceglia, Maria Antonietta. “L’Azienda Signorile in Terra d’Otranto.” Quaderni Storici, vol. 15, no. 43, 1980, pp. 39–60.