Renaissance Studies Vol. 16 No.

Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice

LINDA GUZZETTI

I. INTRODUCTION
In the exchange of gifts taking place at the time of marriage, the most sig-
nificant in late medieval Italy – as generally in Mediterranean Europe – was
the dowry, which was given by the bride, or her family, to the bridegroom.
Its aim was dual: during the marriage it had to defray the expenses of the
household (‘sustinere onera matrimonii’). To that end it was in possession of
the husband, even though the wife did not lose her rights to it. During
marriage the wife had a nuda proprietas (mere ownership) on her dowry, i.e.
a right of property without usufruct, so that she could neither alienate nor
pledge the goods comprising her dowry.1
Upon the termination of the marriage, if the husband had predeceased his
wife, the husband’s heirs were obliged to restore the dowry to the widow.
Thus the dowry had also the second function of preventing widows from
falling into poverty.2 If the wife had predeceased her husband and the couple
had children, the dowry passed to the surviving children, the wife’s heirs. In
this way the goods comprising a dowry moved from one family to another
through women – a disturbing factor in the strongly patrilinear society of late
medieval Italy. At the same time, this suggests that the reintroduction of the
dowry in southern Europe in the twelfth century had weakened, but not
completely destroyed the bilateral inheritance system.3
The existence of the dowry reminds us that not all wealth was in the
A three-month grant from the Förderprogramm Frauenforschung of the Berlin Senate made it possible to
collect the records from the notarial registers into a database. I wish to thank this institution for its support. I
am also grateful to all who helped me by discussing the issue and improving and translating the manuscript:
Marina Borowski, Renzo Derosas, Dieter Girgensohn, Luca Guzzetti, Ricky Kurz, Reinhold C. Mueller, Steve
Stapp, and many others. In the last phase of the preparation of the paper I received support and valuable
comments from Julius Kirshner, from the editor of Renaissance Studies, and from an anonymous referee of this
journal.
1
On property of the dowry, see Francesco Ercole, ‘L’istituto dotale nella pratica e nella legislazione
statutaria dell’Italia superiore’, Rivista italiana per le scienze giuridiche, 45 (1908), 191–302; 46 (1910), 167–257,
particularly 46, 171–6; Manlio Bellomo, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra coniugi. Contributo alla storia della
famiglia medievale (Milano, 1961), particularly ch. III; Bellomo, ‘Die Familie und ihre rechtliche Struktur in den
italienischen Stadtkommunen des Mittelalters (12.–14. Jahrhundert)’, in Alfred Haverkampf (ed.), Haus und
Familie in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt (Köln and Wien, 1984), 122–4.
2
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, widows were considered as a group deserving protection. See André
Rosambert, La veuve en droit canonique jusqu’au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1923); James A. Brundage, ‘Widows as
disadvantaged persons in medieval canon law’, in Louise Mirrer (ed.), Upon my Husband’s Death: Widows in the
Literature and History of Medieval Europe. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), 193–206.
3
Diane Owen Hughes, ‘From brideprice to dowry in Mediterranean Europe’, Journal of Family History, 3
(1978), 262–96; Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘La mère cruelle. Maternité, veuvage et dot dans la Florence des
XIVe–XVe siècles’, Annales ESC, 38/5 (1983), 1097–109, trans. in Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in

© 2002 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 431
hands of men. The question of which portion of the whole wealth belonged
to women, and whether they actually controlled it as widows, remains a
subject of intense debate.4 Did Italian widows in general receive their goods
from the estates of their deceased husbands – as the ius commune5 and the city
statutes required – and how difficult was this procedure? Nino Tamassia and
Manlio Bellomo have argued that widows had little chance to recover their
goods in court. On the other hand, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber notes that
widows in the fourteenth century had the law on their side, even if the resti-
tution of the dowry could be a long and complex procedure.6 While
Klapisch-Zuber’s position is widely accepted, the discussion is still open on
how the law was applied and how difficult the proceedings could be for the
widows; and local differences have yet to be clarified.
The study of the Venetian documentation expands considerably our know-
ledge regarding the dowry, which – at least concerning Italy – has long been
dominated by the Florentine experience.7 The Venetian statutes were explicit
on the property rights of women: ‘if a woman in the power of her husband
[i.e. a married woman] makes any contract with [the goods of] her dowry,

Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL and London, 1985), 117–31; Isabelle Chabot, ‘Lineage strategies and the control
of widows in Renaissance Florence’, in Sandra Cavallo (ed.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Harlow, 1999), 127–44; Julius Kirshner, ‘“Li emergenti bisogni matrimoniali” in Renaissance Florence’, in
‘Visibilità’ delle donne tra Medioevo e età moderna: carte private e pubbliche apparenze, lusso e prescrizioni (Perugia,
1999) (Università degli studi, Facoltà di lettere e filosofia, Studi storico-antropologici 20–1), 63–5, reprinted in
William Connell (ed.), Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 2002), 79–109.
4
Agnes Fine and Angela Groppi, ‘Histoire, femmes et sociétés. Editorial’, CLIO: histoire, femmes et société =
Femmes, dot et patrimoine, 7 (1998), 7–18; Chabot, ‘La loi du lignage. Notes sur le système successoral f lorentin
(XIVe/XVe–XVIIe siècles)’, CLIO: histoire, femmes et société, 7 (1998), 51–72; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘La bourse ou les
boules de saint Nicolas. De quelques représentations des biens féminins en Italie’, CLIO: histoire, femmes et
société, 7 (1998), 73–89; Maristella Botticini, ‘A loveless economy? Intergenerational altruism and the marriage
market in a Tuscan town, 1415–1436’, Journal of Econmonic History, 59 (1999), 104–21.
5
The ius commune was a combination of Roman and canon law, developed and taught at the universities, in
Italy first of all in Bologna. It did not apply everywhere and for all matters, but in most Italian cities it applied
when in customary law a rule failed. The ius commune had an ‘international’ character and was technically more
precise than the statutes and customs (iura propria), to which it tended to become a framework. See Thomas
Kuehn, ‘Law, schools of’, in J. R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York, 1986), 7: 512–17.
6
Giovanni Tamassia, La famiglia italiana nei secoli decimoquinto e decimosesto (Milano, 1910), 203; Bellomo, La
condizione giuridica della donna. Vicende antiche e moderne (Torino, 1970), 44; C. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Le complexe de
Griselda’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, 94 (1982), 7–44, trans. in Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and
Ritual, 213–46; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘La mère cruelle’, 1100.
7
On women in Venice, see Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Patrician women in early Renaissance Venice’, Renaissance
Studies, 21 (1974), 176–203, reprinted in Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Twelve Essays on
Patrician Society (Baltimore, MD and London, 2000), 115–31; Chojnacki, ‘Dowries and kinsmen in early
Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1974–5), 571–600, reprinted in Chojnacki, Women
and Men in Renaissance Venice, 132–52; Chojnacki, ‘Nobility, women and the state: marriage regulations in
Venice, 1420–1535’, in T. Dean and K. Lowe (eds), Marriage in Italy 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998), 128–51,
reprinted in Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 53–75; Chojnacki, ‘Daughters and oligarchs:
gender and the early Renaissance State’, in J. Brown and R. Davis (eds), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy
(London and New York, 1998), 63–86, reprinted in Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 27–52;
Anna Bellavitis, ‘Dot et richesse des femmes au XVI siècle’, CLIO: histoire, femmes et sociétés, 7 (1998), 91–100;
Bellavitis, ‘Patrimoni e matrimoni a Venezia nel Cinquecento’, in Giulia Calvi and I. Chabot (eds), Ricchezze
delle donne. Diritti patrimoniali e poteri familiari in Italia (sec. XIII–XIX) (Torino, 1998), 149–60; Bellavitis I dentité,
marriage, mobilité sociale. Citoyennes et citoyens à venise au xvie siècle (Paris and Rome, 2001).
432 Linda Guzzetti
this is not valid . . . but she may pledge and alienate all [other] goods
belonging to her, also without the permission of her husbands, as she likes’.8
In particular, the records studied here show how local courts dealt with the
rights of widows in a conclusive moment, namely the separation of their
goods from those of the husbands, in which they had been incorporated
during marriage.
The present study analyses two registers of rulings relating to the restitu-
tion of dowries, called in Venice diiudicatus carte, kept by the notary and court
scribe, Marino, and including 1284 documents for the period 1366–91.9
These registers constitute an exceptional and precious source, because they
are the only complete registers of such acts from the fourteenth century to
survive in Venice, although single diiudicatus carte can be found scattered in
the folders of numerous other Venetian notaries. Constituting a series, the
records in these registers make possible a statistical treatment of dowry values.
It is already well known that there were large differences in dowry values,
according to social and legal groupings, and that the average dowry
increased in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but
heretofore detailed studies of dowries values are not numerous.10
At the same time, the limitations of the source must also be kept in mind.
First, the results are not valid for the whole population, since women without
dowries do not appear in these records and women with dowries under
50 ducats are heavily underrepresented.11 A second limitation concerns the
accuracy of the average duration of marriages. This has to be calculated
using the date on which the dowry was conveyed to the husband and the date
when it was restored to the widow, since we know neither the date of the
marriage nor that of the death of the spouse who died first. The results
therefore are necessarily approximate, but none the less useful, for medieval
demography is a field in which continuous series are rare. Third, since
Marino of S. Trovaso was just one of the notaries who drew up diiudicatus
carte, it remains unknown what percentage of marriages ending in the years
1366–91 these records represent. But, as the surviving registers constitute a
random fraction of those drawn up at the time, they can be considered a valid
sample.
All records studied report routine rulings. Here is an example of the usual

8
Roberto Cessi (ed.), Statuti veneziani di Jacopo Tiepolo del 1242 e le loro glosse (Venezia, 1938), 1, 39: ‘si
mulier in potestate viri aliquam cartulam fecerit contra repromissam suam non valeat . . . sed de omnibus
bonis que ipsa possidet etiam sine consensu viri facere possit et securitatem et alienationem sicut sibi
placuerit’. Hereafter, quotes from the first five books of the statutes are from the Cessi edition and quotes from
the sixth book from an early printed edition present in the Berlin state library. For both, the abbreviation ‘Stat.
nov.’ is used.
9
These records – together with several other databases concerning medieval and modern Venetian
history – will soon be on an Internet site of the University of Venice: http://helios.unive.it/~riccdst/
index.html. For the meaning of legal terms used in this paper, see Glossary, 469–73.
10
See note 7.
11
On poor widows in Florence, see: Chabot, ‘Poverty and the widow in late Medieval Florence’, Continuity
and Change, 3 (1988), 291–311.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 433
format: the diiudicatus carta of Gerita, widow of Jacobello, son of the tailor
Zaneto, residing in the parish of S. Maria Mater Domini, was drawn up on
10 July 1374 by the judges of the curia de proprio.12 In the decision it was stated
that Gerita had proved in court the existence and the amount of her dowry
through a securitatis et manifestacionis carta, drawn up by the notary Bartol-
omeo de Alemanis on 17 February 1362 (1363 according to the modern
reckoning). Gerita’s dowry amounted to 40 libre denariorum venecialium
grossorum (400 ducats).13 The court enabled her to take this amount and, in
addition, twelve and a half libre denariorum venecialium ad grossos (4.79 ducats)
for her mourning gown (vestis vidualis) from the estate of her late husband. In
the event that the estate of her husband was insufficient, she was authorized
to take what was lacking to complete her dowry from the estate of her
father-in-law. This property was given to her with all rights, as expressed in
the abbreviated formula habendi, tenendi etc. (‘to have and to hold’).
Although the structure of the rulings is always the same, there are some
variations. First, in about one-fourth of the records, not the widow, but the
legal heirs of a deceased wife applied for the dowry restitution.14 Second, the
existence and amount of the dowry was settled through the oral testimony of
witnesses, if written evidence was lacking.
Marino, the scribe of these records, was active as a private notary from
1335 to 1391 and worked also in the doge’s chancery. He never signed with a
surname, but he added to his first name that of the parishes to which he was
attached: first he was priest (presbyter) in the church of S. Tomà and, later,
parish priest (plebanus) in the church of S. Trovaso.15

12
Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cancelleria inferiore, Notai (=C.I.N.), busta 114, reg. 1, f. 40v. Hereafter, the
dates will be indicated according to the modern reckoning. Except in quotations, personal names are given in
the Italian spelling. All unpublished material is from the state archives of Venice.
13
On Venetian moneys and Venetian notaries, see Glossary.
14
The ‘legal heirs’, who had to apply for the dowry restitution of a predeceased wife, were her heirs
(successores) if she died intestate, but her testamentary executors (commissarii/e) if she made a testament, or the
furnitores of her testament after the death of the executors. Concerning these persons, we find in a gloss: ‘Quod
dictum est de muliere, dicendum est de eius commissario, furnitore vel successore’, Stat. nov., gloss to
‘quoniam multociens’, 48.
15
The numerous testaments Marino drew up are preserved in the section ‘Archivio notarile, testamenti’ of
the Venetian state archives, his other acts in the section C.I.N. in five buste (folders) (111, 112, 113, 114, 115).
The first three folders include single documents on parchment, chronologically ordered, while the last two
folders contain registers on parchment. Both registers examined here are in the busta 114 and are entitled:
Diiudicatum. Marino added on the larger one his signum tabellionis and his signature: ‘Ego Marinus plebanus
sancti Gervasii notarius et aule incliti ducis Veneciarum cancellarius complevi et roboravi.’ The larger one
(1366–91) has 200 pp. (100 folii), the smaller (1374–80) 37 pp. (19 folii). In both registers the folii have a
modern numbering in pencil. In the references to these registers the larger one will be indicated with 1, the
smaller one with 2. The two registers will be examined together because they do not have significant
differences in content and they overlap in time. Not all records are written in the same hand, but different
hands appear in both registers. The two registers differ only in a few points: in the second the date and the
notary of a few pieces of evidence for the entitlement of the heirs of the deceased wives as applicants were
omitted; the formula ‘proprietates casarum et terrarum cooperte et discooperte’ is used only in the second
register.
434 Linda Guzzetti
II. TYPE OF EVIDENCE
As legal basis for the dowry restitution, one or more pieces of evidence were
summarized in each record studied here. When a widow applied, either
written evidence or a witness was sufficient to prove the conveyance and
amount of dowry. When the legal heirs of a deceased wife appeared in court,
they had first to prove their entitlement as applicants through a successionis
carta or a testament. Additionally, they needed the same type of evidence as
the widows. In the whole, 1617 pieces of evidence were summarized in the
1284 diiudicatus carte of Marino’s registers.
Written evidence was overwhelming: in almost 1000 cases widows and legal
heirs of deceased wives proved the existence and amount of dowries through
acknowledgements which were drawn up at the beginning of the marriage,
called securitatis carte and instrumenta dotis.16 As evidence these two types of
instruments were equally valid, although formally different. In the remaining
cases witnesses were brought to court.
In twenty-four cases, testaments of husbands were used as evidence.17 Since
in these cases the widow could receive her dowry as a bequest, one wonders
why she went to court. The records are silent, but, as the testaments of
husbands appear so seldom as evidence, it may be presumed that special
circumstances in their execution made it advisable to have the restitution of
the dowry confirmed in court.
As evidence for the entitlement of the applicants for the dowries of de-
ceased wives, 182 testaments and 60 successionis carta were presented in court,
i.e. three times more testaments than successionis carte. This confirms that in
the Venice of that time it was common to make a testament, except among
the poor, who rarely applied in court for dowry restitution. But, as we will
see, cases in which underage children of an intestate mother were heirs are
not to be found in this source. As a consequence, the number of successiones is
probably underestimated in these records, and the relation between testa-
ments and successionis carte in this source does not correspond exactly to the
relation between testate and intestate deaths.
Only infrequently did another person appear in court on behalf of the
widow or of one of the heirs of the deceased wife. In twenty-five cases procura-
tionis carte were summarized in the diiudicatus carte. Moreover, there were
sixteen cases in which a person was named as a legal representative, but no
evidence of his or her precise qualification was recorded.18 Those sending a
legal representative to the court were almost exclusively persons living
outside Venice, and the legal heirs of deceased wives more often than
16
In order to avoid the possible difficulties for the widow resulting from the absence of written evidence, in
1449 the Greater Council obliged the notaries to give the doge’s chancery a copy of all securitatis carte for the
dowries they drew. Chojnacki, ‘Daughters and oligarchs’, 84.
17
Marriage contracts were never mentioned as evidence, but passages from them were occasionally quoted
in husbands’ testaments.
18
In these last cases it could be only indicated that somebody had a general power of attorney (‘scriptus/a
in curia pro eo/ea’). On the procurationis carte see also the Glossary.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 435
widows. As is to be expected, most procurators were men; even though
women procurators were not numerous, their presence is important because
it shows that in Venice women could take this role in court. The diiudicatus
carta of Franceschina was drawn after ‘Agnes mater sua scripta in curia pro
predicta filia sua comprobavit et iuravit de sua repromissa.’19 Elena, widow of
Giovanni Calergi, was procuratrix for Marchesina, widow of Nicolò Griti.20
Marchesina needed a proxy because she lived in Crete. Besides, Elena had
given Marchesina’s husband the dowry at the time of their wedding, but it is
not clear what relationship existed between the two women.

III. THE RESTITUTION OF THE DOWRY AND OF THE NON-DOTAL GOODS

First we need to clarify if, and the manner in which, dowries were restored to
the widows or to the legal heirs of deceased wives at the end of marriage.21
There were marriages in which no dowry was conveyed to the husband.
Obviously we have no notarial acts recording this phenomenon; none the
less, references in testaments and court documents prove its existence, but
they are not systematic enough to estimate the frequency of non-dowry
marriages.
When the husband died before the wife and provided for the restitution of
her dowry in his testament – either as a bequest or included in the residuum
of his estate – the widow needed no court judgment to obtain possession of
the dowry. In other words, testamentary restitution made restitution in court
unnecessary.22 If the husband made no testament, or did not provide for the
restitution of the dowry in his testament, the widow had no recourse but
to seek redress in court and the diiudicatus carte show only this kind of
restitution. The widows who received the dowries through the courts did not
differ socially from those who received them through the last wills of their
husbands. The only difference was whether or not the husband had ordered
the return of the dowry in his testament.
When the wife died before her husband, one of the duties of her executors
or heirs was to claim the restitution of the dowry. If she provided in her
testament for allocating her husband the whole dowry or part of it, he did not
need to go to court to obtain his part of the dowry.23
There were marriages at the conclusion of which the dowry was not
returned. This could result from different causes: for instance that the
husband was too poor, or that he had disappeared. Moreover, many dowries
were likely to be too small to justify the trouble of seeking restitution in court.
19
Franceschina lived in Mestre and was widow of Franceschino de Candido (reg. 1, f. 47r, 22.08.1375);
‘Agnes, her mother, her daughter’s proxy in court, proved and attested by oath her dowry.’
20
Reg. 1, f. 57r, 07.07.1378.
21
See the schema in the Appendix, p. 469.
22
None the less, a few widows presented the testaments of their late husbands as evidence for the
restitution of their dowry in court, as we will see further.
23
Stat. nov. 4:9; ‘si uxor reliquit dimissoriam viro in pecunie quantitate, volumus quod de tanta quantitate,
quanta fuit dimissoria, non fiat iudicatum, sed tantum de residuo, et dimissoria remaneat ipso iure apud
virum’. Among the applicants there were only a few husbands, as we will see further.
436 Linda Guzzetti
This becomes evident comparing the dowry values Dennis Romano has
calculated from the acknowledgements, made by the husbands at the
beginning of marriage, with those found in Marino’s records at the end of
the marriage.24 Romano relates that the average dowry of the commoner
brides for the period 1309–1419 was 74 ducats, the mean being 50. As will be
shown further, in Marino’s records the average dowry is 136 ducats in the
artisan milieu and 176 for all commoner brides. The data Romano presents
differ from those taken from Marino’s registers for several reasons, first of all
because the periods are coincident only in part. But the difference is so
consistent that we must assume that small dowries were not claimed in court,
even if they had been acknowledged by the husbands. These dowries were
either not returned or restitution was made out of court. The comparison
with Romano’s study confirms that Marino’s records are not representative
for the poorest part of the population.
Besides the dowry, some women had non-dotal goods (extradotalia). Accord-
ing to the legal doctrine, there were two kinds of non-dotal goods: goods
which belonged to the wife but which the husband had at his disposal during
marriage, and goods which belonged to the wife and which she had at her
disposal, even if they were included in the estate of the husband during
marriage.25 Also the Venetian chancellor Iacobo Bertaldo pointed out this
issue in his Splendor venetorum civitatis consuetudinum, written in the first half
of the fourteenth century.26 Only non-dotal goods of the first kind could be
claimed from the estate of the husband in the same proceedings that related
to the dowry. The widow had instead to claim separately in court her non-
dotal goods which were kept in the estate of the husband, but which she could
have also claimed any time during marriage.27 The possibility of applying for
non-dotal goods in the same way which the customary law permitted for the
dowry represented an advantage for the widows and the heirs of deceased
wives. They could make use of a simplified procedure: for instance, the
24
Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani: the Social Foundations of Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore,
MD, 1987), 34–6. On the notarial authentication of the conveying of the dowry to the husband at the time of
the wedding in Tuscany, see Kirshner, ‘Maritus lucretur dotem uxoris sue premortue in late medieval
Florence’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Reditsgeschichte, 108 (1991), Kanonische Abteilung, 77, 111–55;
Samuel Kline Cohn, ‘Marriage in the mountains: the Florentine territorial state, 1348–1500’, in T. Dean and
K. Lowe (eds), Marriage in Italy 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998), 174–96.
25
On non-dotal goods, see Ercole, 46, 203–11, 249–51; Kirshner, ‘Materials for a gilded cage: non-dotal
assets in fourteenth and fifteenth century Florence, 1300–1500’, in D. Kertzer and R. Saller (eds), The Family in
Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT, 1991), 184–207. Venetian testaments show that some wives
themselves administered their non-dotal goods.
26
Iacobus Bertaldus, Splendor venetorum civitatis consuetudinum, ed. Franciscus Schupfer (Bologna, 1895;
reprinted Torino, 1962), 36–7.
27
These non-dotal goods had to be secured separately, i.e. neither through the carta securitatis repromisse nor
through the carta augmenti dotis. Also in the glosses to the statutes, the distinction between the two types of
non-dotal goods was drawn, Stat. nov. 1:20, gloss to ‘quoniam multociens’, 51–2. For the property that could be
claimed together with the dowry, it was stated: ‘id est dimissoriis ei dimissis et aliis bonis, que ab intestato
perveniunt ad mulieres et ea habuerunt in sua potestate ipsarum viri, et donis factis in usu veteri, que debent
inseri et poni in huiusmodi breviario insimul cum suis repromissis, et exigi de bonis viri, sicut repromisse’
(Stat. nov. 1:31, gloss to ‘bonis’).
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 437
testimony of only one person – instead of the usual two – was considered
sufficient proof.
In the diiudicatus carte of the notary Marino there are sixty-three cases in
which the restitution also concerned non-dotal goods. These had been given
to the wife from a third party during marriage and had been kept in the
estate of the husband. The carte augmenti dotis were presented as evidence in
only nine of these sixty-three cases. In the other fifty-four cases the property
rights of the wife to the goods given her after marrying were proved through
the testament of the person who had bequeathed them to her, or through a
witness or a declaration of the husband. For instance, the priest and notary
Domenico Peressemollo bore witness on 3 June 1379, in the curia proprii, that
beside the dowry the deceased Marino Tondena, from the parish of S. Pietro
in Castello, had received from his wife Lucia 10 ducats she had as a bequest.
On the basis of this testimony the court gave Lucia both the dowry and the
bequest.28 Such cases confirm that in the court practice of the second half of
the fourteenth century, some non-dotal goods were returned to the widow
through the same procedure as the dowry, but, obviously, they do not show
anything about goods that were returned to the widows through other
procedures.
Testaments prove that, beside the dowry, some women had a corredum. In
the thirteenth century, when this word was used in the Venetian statutes and
in their glosses, the corredum (or arcella) of the bride included only clothes
and objects. As Chojnacki has recently shown, by the end of the fourteenth
century, the word corredum had come to mean goods – cash and precious
objects for the accoutrement of the bride – which did not belong to the
dowry, but which were given to the husband without the legal restrictions of
the dowry and under conditions which were established in the marriage
agreements.29 The diiudicatus carte bear no evidence on this issue.

IV. THE PROCEDURES OF RESTITUTION

The court which adjudicated the dowries studied here was in most cases the
curia proprii (or de proprio), but other courts could be also concerned with
the matter. For instance, the iudices procuratorum when the Procurators of
S. Marco were applicants, or the iudices forinsecorum when a spouse was not
Venetian.30
28
Reg. 1, f. 57v.
29
Chojnacki, ‘From trousseau to groomgift in late Medieval Venice’, in Ellen E. Kittell and Thomas F.
Madden (eds), Medieval and Renaissance Venice (Urbana, 1999), 141–65, particularly 148–54, reprinted in
Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 76–94. On instances of corredum in this new meaning in the
late fourteenth century, see Linda Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse. Die soziale und wirtschaftliche Situation
von Frauen im Spiegel spätmittelalterlicher Testamente (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1998) (Ergebnisse der
Frauenforschung 50), 110, 149.
30
At the beginning of the first register, the names of the judges were repeated in each decision; thereafter
in the first register and always in the second, those of the curia proprii were just denominated iudices
suprascripti. When the composition of this court changed, the sentence ‘Tempore domini nostri [name of the
438 Linda Guzzetti
Application was the necessary condition for restitution in court.31 Before
the document called diiudicatus carta could be drawn up, the widow had to
prove the existence and the amount of her dowry, which in the court lan-
guage was called ‘vadiam comprobandi repromisse sue dare’. On the basis of
the widow’s declaration, the court settled a carta (or breviarium) vadimonii
which she corroborated with her oath.32 The oldest registers of the carte
vadimonii, drawn by the iudices proprii and kept in the Venetian state archives
are those of 1429.33
The carte vadimonii comprised a precise description both of the goods
forming the dowries and of the ways they had been conveyed to the
husbands. For instance, to prove the conveyance of her dowry, Margarita,
widow of Victor de Magistris, presented to the curia proprii on 19 June 1461
two documents (cedule) her husband had drawn up. In one the husband
acknowledged that the dowry had been paid in eleven instalments between
1452 and 1460 to the total amount of £24.13.4 grossorum. The other listed the
objects contained in her dowry, together with their value.34 In the diiudicatus
carte, such information was summarized or omitted, mostly with a reference
to the vadimonii carte.
The next step after the carta vadimonii was the diiudicatus carta. The diiudi-
catus carta mentioned the sum the widow or the legal heirs of a deceased wife
demanded from the estate of the husband.35 This sum was established after
the widow had asserted under oath that the dowry and the wedding presents –
if any were mentioned in the carta vadimonii – were kept in the estate of her
husband. In addition, she had to declare the value of her personal items and
clothes included in the dowry.36 Then, the widow had either to swear to have
received no property and no presents from her husband during marriage or
to attest with her oath which property or presents of his she had in her
doge] incliti ducis Veneciarum et dominorum [names of the judges] iudicum’, was interpolated between two
decisions.
31
On the mechanism of dowry restitution in court, the contributions of the legal historian Enrico Besta are
still valuable. Besta, ‘Il diritto e le leggi civili di Venezia fino al dogato di Enrico Dandolo’, Ateneo Veneto, 20/2
(1897), 290–320; 22/1 (1899), 145–84, 302–31; 22/2 (1899), 61–93, 202–48, particularly 22/2 (1899), 310–13;
Besta, ‘Gli statuti civili di Venezia anteriori al 1244. Prefazione’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, n.s., 1 (1901), 40–2. See
also Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote: Venezia, 1360–1530’, in S. Seidel Menchi, A. Jacobson Schutte, and
T. Kuehn (eds), Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo e età moderna (Bologna, 1999), 461–92, especially
466–7, trans. as ‘Getting back the dowry’, in A. Jacobson Schutte, T. Kuehn, and S. Seidel Menchi (eds), Time,
Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kickville, 2001), 77–96; reprinted with small changes in
Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 95–111.
32
Judges had to sign all breviaria (written records) when they entered them in the trial minutes, with the
exception of those confirming the dowry: ‘de breviariis mulierum vadiam comprobandi de sua repromissa et
ceteris bonis suis, nihil dicimus quod examinatores in eis subscribant quia non est necesse quod subscribant’
(Stat. nov. 1:24, 31). This divergent provision was changed in the course of the fourteenth century (Stat. nov.
6:7), so that at the time when Marino drew up the records studied here the judges had to write down and sign
these breviaria also.
33
Giudici del Proprio, vadimoni; the first busta (register 1–7) spans the period 1429–1476.
34
Giudici del Proprio, vadimoni, reg. 4, f. 36r–v.
35
The legal heirs of deceased wives had to perform the same oaths as widows. To make the following
explication of the procedure easier to read, ‘legal heirs of the deceased wives’ will not be repeated every time.
36
Stat. nov. 1:54, 55. In the registers of the notary Marino no marriage presents are mentioned.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 439
37
possession. In this second case, she could generally keep what she had, but
its value was to be subtracted from the dowry. However, if the heirs of the
husband claimed any specific property of his that the widow had in her
possession, she would receive the corresponding amount in cash. Further-
more, the widow had to be repaid from the estate of the deceased husband
for what she had spent for her own and her family’s expenses and for rent
after the death or during any previous absence of the husband. Also, any
money and property the wife had lent to the husband had to be returned to
the widow.
By the restitution of dowries out of court, the widow received her property
directly from the legal heirs of her husband. A gloss to the statutes explained
this possibility as follows: ‘after the death of the husband the woman did no
vadimonium because the heirs of the deceased husband satisfied his wife for
her dowry’.38 Bertaldo stated that dowry was seldom returned out of court39
and in the older legal scholarly literature, the thesis was that dowry was
usually returned in court. However, since fourteenth-century testaments have
been analysed, it has become evident that testamentary restitution must
have been very common.40 In the sample I studied, about 80 per cent of the
husbands who made a testament provided for the return of the dowries to
their widows. None the less, as it is unknown what percentage of married
men made a testament, it is not possible to establish how often dowries were
restored out of court 41 Dealing with this issue in twelfth-thirteenth century
Genoa, Steven Epstein emphasizes that dowries were in most cases restored
to the widow through the husband’s will.42

V. THE DURATION OF DOWRY RESTITUTION

It is difficult to ascertain how long widowed women had to wait before they
could take actual possession of their dowries. Contemporaries must have felt
the importance of the matter, since in the sixth book of the city statutes –
published in 1346 – it was stated solemnly that the doge himself was

37
The court had to evaluate any property of the husband that was kept by the widow. The valuation was
usually done in the court room. But when ‘erunt multe et graves ad portandum vel indecentes ad videndum’
(‘when the objects were numerous and heavy to carry or indecent to see’), the judges had to go outside the
court to estimate the property (Stat. nov., gloss to ‘quoniam multociens’, 49).
38
Stat. nov. 1:55, gloss 299 to ‘per quam’: ‘Ecce mortuo marito, mulier non fecit vadimonium, pro eo quod
heredes mariti defuncti satis fecerunt uxori eius de dote.’ On the meaning of vadimonii carta, see Glossary.
39
Bertaldus, Splendor, 35; ‘dicta solucio valet fieri, et solet, de voluntate aliquando viri, si supervixit, vel, si
mortuus fuerit, de voluntate eius commissarii vel eius heredum, sine vadia vel iuramento aliquo et sine strepitu
iudicii, quod vero fit raro’.
40
Ercole, ‘L’istituto dotale’, 46, 223; Giorgio Zordan, ‘I vari aspetti della comunione familiare di beni nella
Venezia dei secoli XI–XII’, Studi veneziani, 8 (1966), 135. Also, among the members of the eastern
Mediterranean minority in Venice, most dowries were returned out of court; see Brunhilde Imhaus, Le
minoranze orientali a Venezia 1300–1510 (Roma, 1997), 201.
41
Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse, 154–5. See also http://vill.unive.it, Guzzetti, Tables to Venezianische
Vermächtnisse, Table 125.
42
Steven Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa 1150–1250 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 103–117.
440 Linda Guzzetti
responsible for ensuring a timely restitution of dowries.43 By restitution in
court, the whole interval between the death of the husband and the com-
plete payment of the dowry to the widow can be divided in three stages: the
time between the husband’s death and the application for dowry restitution
in court; the duration of the restitution procedure; and the time between
the verdict ordering the restitution and the actual and complete payment.
Venetian law provided that widows had one year to apply for the restitution
of their dowries, while the legal heirs of deceased wives had thirty years.44
After initiating the procedure that would lead to the carta vadimonii, the
widow – or the legal heirs of the deceased wife – had eight days to prove their
right to the dowry through written documentation or witnesses.45 As seen
above, after drawing up the vadimonii carta the widow had to take an oath
attesting which property she had given to the husband and which she had
received from him. This oath could be performed any time during the
following thirty years. After swearing the oath, the widow had eight days time
to present in court the goods in her possession belonging to the estate of her
husband. If she did not do so before the expiration of this term, she had to
repeat the oath. Finally, the diiudicatus carta was drawn up, but even then the
payment could be postponed. The testamentary executors or the heirs of the
husband could be unwilling, or unable, to restore the dowry at once.46 Or
they could question the declaration of the widow about what she had already
received from the estate of the deceased. A delay could be also be caused by
the procedures of another court, that of the iudices examinatores, which had to
adjudicate on all transactions involving real estate.47
When a diiudicatus carta was drawn up a second time, the new version
(refectio) often shows that the payment settled in the first version was not
complete. Termolla, widow of Marco Contarini called Raffo, with a large
dowry of £182.14 grossorum, expected the restitution of £108.14 grossorum
through a verdict of 21 January 1377. As her diiudicatus carta was drawn up
again on 3 January 1379, she still had £68.14 grossorum to receive, as well as
the customary sum of £12.10 ad grossos for her vestis vidualis.48
43
Stat. nov. 6:16; ‘de cetero dominus dux teneatur ad executionem ducere . . . bona ipsius viri possint et
debeant intromitti et accipi per dominum ducem’.
44
The statute concerning dowry restitution did not indicate the period in which the legal heirs of
predeceased wives must restore the dowry (Stat. nov. 1:54). The subject was dealt with in a gloss to this statute
(gloss 287 to ‘poterit dare’): ‘Quid, si mulier moritur ante maritum, infra quod tempus commissarii vel eius
heredes tenebuntur dare vadiam? Dicas quod infra XXX annos.’ The same was reported in the gloss to
‘quoniam multociens’, 47.
45
Stat. nov. 1:54; Bertaldus, Splendor, 36–7.
46
Widows or the heirs of deceased wives could be obliged to sue husbands, or their heirs, to force them to
restore dowries. Legally, it was required that husbands secured dowries through their whole estates, but, if they
guaranteed them through specific items of property, it was easier for the widows to have them quickly restored;
see Kirshner, ‘Encumbering private claims to public debt in Renaissance Florence’, in Vito Piergiovanni (ed.),
The Growth of the Bank as Institution and the Development of Money-business Law (Berlin, 1993), 40.
47
The statutes obliged the iudices proprii to accept both the decisions of the iudices examinatores concerning
the real estate which was given to the widows and those of their predecessors, without having to consider them
again ‘ad evitandas dilationes pariter et expensas’ (‘to avoid both delays and costs’) (Stat. nov. 3:41, 54).
48
Reg. 2, f. 9v; reg. 2, f. 14v.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 441
During the restitution procedure the financial situation of many widows
must have been difficult. Once they had the diiudicatus carte they could not
live on the estates of their husbands, although they could stay in their houses
until the complete repayment of the dowries. After the payment was com-
pleted, they had two months time to leave the house of their husbands. The
same provisions applied when the widow received the dowry out of court.49
Only the widows who formally swore in front of the bishop not to remarry
(votum solempne viduitatis) could live in the house of their deceased husbands,
but not on their estates. They were entitled to receive a living from the
husbands’ estates if they cared for the common children, but only until the
youngest came of age.50 However, husbands could provide in testament that
their future widows receive better conditions than those required by law, and
many did.

VI. THE RETURNED AMOUNT

At the end of each diiudicatus carta, the amount which had to be taken from
the estate of the husband was established. This was expressed through the
formula ‘debet tollere de bonis omnibus et habere mobilibus et immo-
bilibus, presentibus et futuris viri sui defuncti’ (or ‘de bonis . . . viri sue
commisse’ if the wife had died). In only 530 cases (41.3 per cent of the
sample) were the widows or the legal heirs of the deceased wives able to
receive from the estate of the husbands an amount equal to the dowry. In all
other cases they received a lower sum, on average four-fifths of the original
amount of the dowry.51
It is not possible to ascertain the reason for the only partial restitution in
each record, but the most common was likely to have been that the wife had
already received some property from the estate of the husband. As seen
above, the statutes provided that widows or the legal heirs of deceased wives
had to show to the iudices proprii what they had received from the estate of the
husbands, to assess the value of this property and subtract it from the dowry.
49
Stat. nov. 1:60. ‘Cum secundum consuetudinem approbatam mulier annum et diem post decessum viri
de bonis mariti vivere possit, ut inde questio non oriatur, determinantes dicimus quod, quandocumque infra
annum et diem mulier fecerit iudicatum de sua repromissa, ab inde in antea non debeat vivere de bonis viri,
tamen remaneat in domo quousque solutionem plenariam receperit de sua dote. Verum si soluta fuerit de sue
repromissa sine iudicatum infra annum et diem, similiter ab inde non vivat de bonis, salvo eo quod mulier
habere et gaudere debeat omnia, que sibi relicta fuerint a viro suo.’ In the sixth book (Stat. nov. 6:17), it was
specified that the widow had to leave the house of the deceased husband two months after the dowry’s
complete restitution: ‘quod uxor defuncti exeat de domo presentata sibi dote et dimissoria infra duos menses,
et ad hoc per iudices compleatur’. This new provision was already presented in a note to the statute 1:60
(‘verum si soluta fuerit’). Bellomo notes that the situation of widows was easier in other Italian towns, where
they could live on the estates of their husbands until the repayment of the dowry was completed: Bellomo,
Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali, 219.
50
Stat. nov. 4:33.
51
The amount of the dowry is almost always given in these records. Only in a few diiudicatus carte of the
second register was the amount of the dowry omitted with reference to the vadimonii carta (‘sicut in vadimonii
carta amplius continetur’). When the due amount exactly corresponded to the dowry, the formula ‘ratione
dicte sue repromisse’ was used; when it was lower, ‘ratione residui dicte sue repromisse’. Occasionally, by
restitution of non-dotal goods together with the dowry, an amount higher than the dowry was returned.
442 Linda Guzzetti
But in the diiudicatus carte this point was not supported by quotations or
references to notary or court records, as was usual for any other step of the
procedure. None the less, other court proceedings from the fourteenth
century – as well as the vadimonii carte from the fifteenth century – prove that
the iudices proprii kept account of the property bestowed by the husband on
the wife during marriage, as the following instance shows. Since the notary
had made a mistake in the diiudicatus carta of Franceschina Morosini in
giving the amount of her dowry, she had the act drawn up again.52 In the
record of the second trial it was specified that Franceschina was entitled to
receive not her complete dowry, but 171 ducats less, because ‘for these [i.e.
the 171 ducats] she had received objects and movable goods which had been
estimated by the iudices proprii, as it appears in the statement of the esti-
mation (scriptura extimationis) by the same judges, and as domina Francischina
herself recognises’. Therefore the iudices proprii had estimated the value of
the property she had already received from her husband and registered it, as
the expression scriptura extimationis demonstrates.
There were other possible reasons for the partial restitution of the dowry.
A second was that the dowry had not been completely paid to the husband.
Generally, the diiudicatus carte do not allow us to recognize in which form
and at what time the husband had taken actual possession of the dowry. In
most cases, the formulas say only that the husband had entirely received the
dowry (‘fuit contentus se habuisse et recepisse ab ea’).53 However, witnesses’
testimonies by dowry restitution and testaments prove that not all dowries
had been paid completely to the husband, as in the following case. The two
witnesses Filippa, wife of Micolo a Gabato, and Maria, widow of Antonio de
Rigi, declared in court that Marina, wife of Lazaro Donato, had told them,
just before dying, that she had given her husband only £7 grossorum, even
though she had received from him a securitatis carta for £16 grossorum.54 The
court ruled to give to the heirs of Marina the amount that, according to the
witnesses, the husband had really received.
A further reason for the partial restitution concerns some of the cases in
which the heirs of the wives applied for the dowry. When they applied
separately, each one was entitled to a fraction of the dowry, for instance a
third or a quarter, then only this part was subtracted from the husband’s
estate; we cannot know whether and when the rest was returned. The dowry
was restored only in part also when the wife bequeathed a fraction of the
dowry to the husband. As we have seen, he was permitted to keep this
bequest directly and the other heirs or executors received a consequently
52
Avogaria de Comun, busta 3645, raspe 5, f. 29r–v, 10.11.1400: ‘pro quibus habuit res et bona mobilia
extimata per iudices proprii pro ut apparet per scripturam extimationis ipsorum iudicum et eciam sic ipsa
domina Francischina fatetur se habuisse’. The error of the notary was that he wrote 71 ducats instead of 171.
53
‘He was satisfied he had had and received from her.’
54
Reg. 1, f. 99v, 09.11.1390; ‘quod ipsa Marina existens infirma ex qua infirmitate decessit dixit
suprascriptis testibus quod ipsa nolebat quod dictus Lazarus quondam vir suus gravaretur ultra quantitatem
librarum septem grossorum pro repromissa sua cum ipse plus non habuerit ab ea pro repromissa licet ipsa
Marina habuerit cartam dotis ab eo de libris sexdecim’.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 443
reduced amount. In this fourth case, passages of the wives’ testaments were
usually quoted in the diiudicatus carte as entitlements for the husbands.
Generous gestures by dowry restitution of husbands to their future widows
were not unusual. Paolo Zacaria, for instance, bestowed through his testa-
ment of 28 August 1381 upon his wife Lucia her dowry, which amounted to
£2000 ad grossos, inclusive of the 50 ducats that she had still to pay to him plus
the jewels and clothes she used.55 Such generosity could be due to affection
and love as well as to the husband’s concern for his own soul.56 Moreover, the
husband could be thankful to the wife for having had her dowry at his dis-
posal during marriage. If he had been successful in business, his thankfulness
could also be expressed in money, usually through a bequest to the widow.
Other husbands will have already set down in their marriage contracts that
they would return to the widows higher amounts than they had received, and
the judges recognized such agreements. For instance, in witnessing the dowry
of Tomasia, widow of Bono de Mediolano, Crestina, an unrelated women,
declared that the husband had received from her only £4 grossorum in clothes
and other objects, but he had promised to acknowledge £4.10 to her. Tomasia
received this last amount thanks to the testimony of Crestina, even if no
securitatis carta on the £4.10 was presented in court.57
The background of these acknowledgements in which husbands declared
higher sums than actually received, consisted of the traditional presents from
the bridegroom to the bride. Such presents, called antefactum, donatio propter
nuptias, morgencap, were secondary in Venetian custom and had more import-
ance where the inf luence of the Lombard law on the customary law had been
strong, as for instance in Genoa.58 The presents were not deducted from the
dowry by restitution and the widow received both. Generosity to the
widows – by the judges as well as by the husbands – was also a result of the
traditional attitude according to which widows as such were a needy group
(pauperes).59 This attitude found expression in the statutes where, in con-
nection with the restitution of the dowry, it was provided that ‘with which
ones [the dowries] we must deal favourably’.60
According to custom and the law, widows – not the heirs of the deceased
wives – were entitled to receive a ‘mourning gown’ (vestis vidualis) from the
estates of the deceased husbands. The additional payment was settled in the
statutes at 10 per cent of the dowry, if this did not exceed £125 ad grossos; for
dowries over this amount the vestis vidualis was always £12.10 ad grossos. This
55
This bequest was confirmed in the sentence which converted the husband’s noticia testamentaria – i.e.
draft – into a legally valid testament (Giudici del Procurator, sentenze a legge, reg. 2bis, f. 2v, 10.10.1381).
56
Probably the widows were more inclined to care for the soul of the deceased husbands –praying and
ordering masses – if they had been well treated in their testaments.
57
Reg. 1, f. 73v, 12.12.1382; ‘recepit ab ea pro eius repromissa in rebus extimatis libras 4 grossorum et
promisit sibi facere cartam de libris 4 cum dimidia grossorum’.
58
Epstein, Wills and Wealth, 104. In many Italian cities both the presents of the bridegroom to the bride and
the bequests of the husband to his future widow were limited; Bellomo, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra
coniugi, ch. 1; Bellomo, Profili della famiglia italiana nell’età dei Comuni (Catania, 1966), 135–45.
59
See note 2
60
Stat. nov. 1:61: ‘quibus [dotibus] debemus favorabilius confavere’.
444 Linda Guzzetti
provision was never revised after the promulgation of the statutes.61 The
registers of Marino show that in the second half of the fourteenth century
almost all widows received twelve and half libre ad grossos. Only 81 received
a lower amount for the vestis vidualis, having a dowry of less than £125 ad
grossos.

VII. DURATION OF MARRIAGES

The only dates we find in the source studied are those of the dowry acknow-
ledgement and those of the dowry restitution. We find neither the marriage
dates nor the dates of death of the spouses who died first. If we can assume
that marriage celebration was close to the dowry acknowledgement and the
termination of the marriage was close to the dowry restitution, we may
use the dates we know to estimate the average duration of marriages (see
Table 1) and to calculate the increase of the dowry values in the course of
time.

Table 1 Duration of marriages in years

All cases Commoners Nobles

No. of cases % No. of cases % No. of cases %

≤1 year 61 6.19 56 6.84 5 2.99

>1, ≤2 years 49 4.97 41 5.00 8 4.79
>2, ≤5 years 166 16.84 142 17.34 24 14.37
>5, ≤10 years 200 20.28 166 20.27 34 20.36
>10, ≤20 years 248 25.15 213 26.01 35 20.96
>20 years 262 26.57 201 24.54 61 36.53
Total 986 100 819 100 167 100

With regard to the beginning of the marriages, the question is whether

the dowry acknowledgements were drawn up at the time of their celebration.
In the records studied witnesses often said that they had been present at the
time of marriage, when the bridegroom received the dowry from the bride
and acknowledged he was ‘contentus’ with it. In legal language, contentus/a
referred to a full payment, i.e. that there were no claims left. If we can reach
the conclusion that most husbands had acknowledged the dowry at the time
of marriage, the date of the carta securitatis or of the instrumentum dotis would
be close to the date of the marriage.62 To this end, we have to group the
61
Stat. nov. 1:54; ‘per quam [cartulam diiudicatus] accipiet eciam de bonis viri per crosnam et pelliciam
vidualem, quam mulieres ex consuetudine habent, decem pro centenario, facta ratione repromisse a centum
vigintiquinque libris de moneta S. Marci et infra’.
62
To establish the beginning of noble marriages Chojnacki considers the date of the securitatis carta as close
to that of the wedding; see Chojnacki, ‘La formazione della nobiltà dopo la Serrata’, in Lellia Cracco Ruggini
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 445
marriages according to the length of the period between the date of the
dowry acknowledgement and that of the diiudicatus carta. It appears that
marriages lasting up to one year are 6.19 per cent of the total. Particularly in
these, short, marriages it is possible that the securitatis carta was drafted on
the deathbed of the husband or just before. But if we then compare this
percentage with that of the marriages lasting between five and ten years
(20.28 per cent; i.e. on average 4.06% for each year), we notice that the
percentage difference is limited (2.1 per cent). This outcome shows that most
dates of the dowry receipts must have been close to the marriage. Therefore,
for calculations concerning a large number of cases, we can consider both
dates as generally coincident, even if instances of acknowledgements that
were drawn up during marriage, or even shortly before its dissolution, can be
easily found.
Acknowledgements were drawn up in the course of marriage more frequently
for wives with small dowries, who were in a weak position to obtain from their
husbands the declarations they were entitled to. The following instance
shows that pressure could be necessary to compel the husband to have the
acknowledgement drawn up. Benedetta, widow of Nicolò Scortegacan, be-
queathed Martina, wife of Nicheto, – a woman she protected, possibly a
former servant – her bed with a blanket and the best sheets, on condition that
Martina would receive these objects only as a widow. But she could have them
at once if her husband acknowledged her dowry, adding the bequest to the
acknowledgement.63 When a husband acknowledged the dowry well after the
wedding, presumably the notary did not add the date of the marriage, but the
date of the day he drafted the acknowledgement.
Moreover, in Marino’s records there are seven cases in which only one
month or less passed between the date the husband had acknowledged the
dowry and the date the diiudicatus carta was drawn up. No doubt, some men
died shortly after their wedding, but probably other men wanted to settle all
their affairs, including those with their wives, when death was approaching.
A similar situation can be recognized in the following testimony. On 17
October 1386, Bertucio a Ture bore witness that Giovanni Maliperissa had,
about fifteen days before, while he was already aff licted by the illness from
which he would die, asked him to witness the amount of his wife’s dowry.64
Additionally, the determination of the end of marriages is problematic.
First of all, we have to distinguish between the applications through the
(ed.), Storia di Venezia. G. Arnaldi, G. Cracco and A. Tenenti (eds), La formazione dello stato patrizio (Roma,
1997), 3, 641–725; Chojnacki, ‘From trousseau’. But, as he assumes that it was common for widows to ignore
the one-year deadline for the restitution of their dowries, he does not consider the dates of the diiudicatus carte
as marking the termination of marriages and does not calculate the marriage duration. He speaks only of the
‘Intervals between the conveying of the dowry and the vadimonium’ (Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 472).
63
C.I., b. 154, no. 12, notary Bartolomeo Ravacaulo, 26.04.1301.
64
Reg. 1, f. 86v; ‘quod dictus quondam Iohannes Maliperissa olim de confinio S. Samuelis tunc infirmus
modo est circha dies quindecim de qua infirmitate decesit, dictus testis se reperit esse in domo ipsius Iohannis
Maliperissa qui dictus Iohannes dixit ipsi testi ser Bertuci (sic) si esset necesse ego volo quod sitis testis qualiter
recepi ab uxore mea Francisca pro sua repromissa libras octo grossorum’.
446 Linda Guzzetti
widows and those through the legal heirs of deceased wives. As the latter had
a thirty-year period to apply for restitution, their cases cannot be used for the
present purpose. Even when the testament of a deceased wife is quoted in a
diiudicatus carta, it is not possible to know how much time had passed
between her death and the application, but only between her testament
and the application, and in course of the fourteenth century an increasing
number of testaments were drawn up not on the death bed, but while the
person was healthy.65 It is likely that executors took their time – although less
than the maximum thirty years – before they applied for the dowry. Execu-
tors, who were not necessarily the beneficiaries of the estates of the deceased,
but only their temporary administrators, might not have been in a hurry for
the goods to be transferred.
When the husband died first, according to the statutes widows had to
observe a one year deadline for application, as seen above. Moreover, for
many of them it was financially essential to act at once. This suggests that, in
general, the date of the diiudicatus carta must not have been far from the
death of the husband. Therefore, to calculate the duration of marriages, we
will use the date of the diiudicatus carta as marking their end and we will
consider only the cases where widows were applicants.66
The average duration of marriages was almost fourteen years (13.99),
being a little shorter among the commoners, 13.26 years, and much longer
among the nobles, 17.55 years.67 Since the beginnings and the ends of mar-
riages are approximate, the division into groups of five or ten years is more
significant than the average duration. It is notable that, in spite of the high
mortality rate due to the plague epidemics, there was a large number of long
lasting marriages. More than half of the marriages considered here lasted longer
than ten years and more than one quarter longer than twenty.68 Regarding
the duration of marriages, Guido Ruggiero comes to similar conclusions
studying a part of these same records of the notary Marino. He has calculated
an average duration of 13.1 years for the 664 cases he considers – 12.4 years
for the 552 marriages of commoners and 16.8 for the 112 marriages of
nobles.69
The differences in marriage duration between commoners and nobles
65
Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse, 68.
66
The only cases considered are those where dated securitatis carte or instrumenta dotis were presented as
evidence.
67
For noble marriages Chojnacki has calculated that the average interval between the conveying of the
dowry and the beginning of the restitution procedure 23.5 years, on the basis of a sample of 138 carte vadimonii
from the fifteenth century. He considers both the marriages ending with the death of the husband and those
ending with the death of the wife; see Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 472.
68
As the dowry could be acknowledged in the course of the marriage instead of at its beginning, long
lasting marriages may be more numerous than it appears in the calculations. There cannot be marriages much
shorter than they appear to be, since no husband acknowledged the dowry before the wedding and the widow
had only one year to apply for restitution of the dowry.
69
Accoding to Ruggiero’s data, 50 per cent of marriages lasted longer than nine years, 25 per cent longer
than eighteen years and more than 10 per cent longer than twenty-seven years; see G. Ruggiero, The Boundaries
of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), 14, 170 note 8.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 447
are remarkable. About 29 per cent of commoner marriages, but only about
22 per cent of the noble ones, lasted less than five years. For marriages over
twenty year duration it is the other way round: almost 24.5 per cent of com-
moner marriages, but 36 per cent of the noble had that duration. Probably
marriages in the nobility lasted longer than among the commoners because
their better social condition resulted in longer lives. However, the source
used inf luences the outcome. Thanks to their families, the noblewomen had
a stronger position vis-à-vis their husbands, so that they were more likely to
have their dowries acknowledged at the beginning of the marriage. There-
fore, the figures on duration of noble marriages are probably more accurate.
Conversely, in these records commoner marriages may look shorter than
they actually were because of the delays in drawing up dowry acknowledge-
ments.
Klapisch-Zuber has studied the duration of marriages in the Florentine
elite of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As Table 2 shows, these
Florentine marriages lasted longer than those in this Venetian sample, which
was the socially mixed, and also longer than among the Venetian nobles:
46 per cent of the Florentine marriages lasted 20 years or longer, as against
36 per cent of those of Venetian nobles.70

Table 2 Duration of marriages in the Florentine elite

Duration (years) No. of cases %

0–4 14 12.2
5–9 15 13.0
10–14 13 11.3
15–19 20 17.4
20–24 15 13.0
25–29 12 10.5
30–34 10 8.7
35–39 16 13.9
Total 115 100

VIII. DOWRY VALUE

The cash value of the dowry is given in 1259 cases out of 1284 (see Table 3).
In twenty of the twenty-five missing cases the dowries consisted of real
estate.71 Therefore, almost all dowries in Marino’s records were estimate and
the husband did not have to restore what he had received, but only its
equivalent value.72 We find little information about the goods comprising
the dowries; sometimes the general formula appears: ‘in denariis et rebus

70
C. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘La fécondité des Florentines (XIV–XV siècles)’, Annales de démographie historique,
(1988), 41–57, particularly 48. Klapisch-Zuber also considers the marriages that ended with the death of the wife.
71
Real property was mentioned thirty-two times, in twelve of which its monetary value was added.
72
On the dos estimata and inestimata see the Glossary.
448 Linda Guzzetti
estimatis’ (‘in money and estimated objects’). For small amounts this
formula was reduced to ‘in rebus estimatis’, presumably because dowries of
£2–5 grossorum (20–50 ducats) often included only clothes and objects.73
At time of the celebration of the marriages studied here, there was no legal
maximum for dowries. In 1334 an enactment of the Greater Council fixed
the maximum for wedding presents (‘pro donis’) at 20 libre grossorum; the
enactment dealt with clothes and objects (‘in vestibus et aliis quibuscumque
coredis et arnesiis’), but neither with the whole dowry nor with the cash
portion of it. In 1360 the maximum value of dona et correda, was set at 40 libre
grossorum.74 Moreover, the act of 1334 forbade husbands to bequeath their
wives more than £2 grossorum in the form of clothes and jewels, but it speci-
fied that there was no limitation for bequests consisting of other goods –
real estate as well as cash.75 For the fifteenth century, Chojnacki analyses the
provisions on the maximum dowry amounts and shows that the wealthy
nobles disregarded them.76 Little is known about the enforcement of the
fourteenth-century enactment concerning the dona et correda and the data
from the registers of Marino do not add any information on this issue.
Only nine times were imprestita (credits in the city’s public debt) men-
tioned, or money amounts expressed in imprestita. Since government credits
were a form of investment giving a sure revenue, involving little risk and
requiring little management, the imprestita office kept many deposits in
favour of women, either as future dowries for underage girls or as bequests
for married women. This can be observed in both testaments and the records
of the procurators of S. Marco.77 The rare mention of imprestita in the
diiudicatus carte results from two factors. First, the market value of the
imprestita was generally lower than the nominal value. Consequently, to
prevent understating the dowry because of this difference, it was advan-
tageous for the woman to have the amount of the dowry expressed in ducats,
when the husband acknowledged it, even if the dowry had been conveyed to
73
Clothes and objects were seldom itemized or described in the diiudicatus carte, other than in the vadimonii
carte.
74
The law of 9 June 1334 can be found in: Giulio Bistort, Il magistrato alle pompe della repubblica di Venezia.
Studio storico (Venezia, 1912) (Regia Deputazione veneta di Storia Patria. Miscellanea di storia veneta 3:5),
106, 331–2. The law of 21 May 1360 is published in Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia (10 vols,
Venezia 1853–1861; reprinted Venezia 1972–1975), 3, 386.
75
There are no studies on the enforcement of the sections of the sumptuary laws concerning clothes and
objects in fourteenth-century Venice. Newett brief ly remarks that until the second half of the fifteenth century
the enforcement of sumptuary laws was committed to different officials; see Margaret M. Newett, ‘The
sumptuary laws of Venice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in T. F. Tout and J. Tait (eds), Historical
Essays, First Published in 1902 in Commemoration of the Jubilee of the Owens College, Manchester (Manchester, 1907),
245–78, particularly 251. In other Italian cities the bequests of husbands to wives were subject to stricter legal
limitations than in Venice (see note 58).
76
Chojnacki, ‘Marriage legislation and patrician society in fifteenth century Venice’, in Law, Custom and
Social Fabric in Medieval Europe (Kalamazoo, 1990), 163–84, reprinted in Chojnacki, Women and Men in
Renaissance, 76–94; Chojnacki, ‘Daughters and oligarchs’, 63–86.
77
Reinhold C. Mueller, ‘The procurators of San Marco in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: a study
of the office as a financial and trust institution’, Studi veneziani, 13 (1971), 175–84. See also the Internet site of
the University of Venice, Databases on Venetian history, Guzzetti, Tables to Venezianische Vermächtnisse, Tables
55 and 93.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 449
78
him as imprestita. The problem was felt already in the late thirteenth century,
when the Greater Council ruled that, if dowries were restored in imprestita,
their market value – not their face value – had to be taken into account.79
Second, while the percentage of estates invested in imprestita grew dramati-
cally during the war of 1379–1381 against Genoa, the majority of the marriages
studied here were celebrated before that time.80

Table 3 Average amounts of dowries

according to legal groups81

No. of cases Average in

ducats

Nobles 214 714.96

Commoners 1045 175.90
Total 1259 262.32

The average size of all dowries was 262 ducats, but the values are very
irregularly distributed, pointing to the differences among the social groups.
About two-thirds of the values were under the average and only one-third
over it (838 and 421 of 1259 cases, respectively), the median being only 150
ducats. The most frequent value was 100 ducats, with eighty-two occur-
rences.82 There were seven dowries with values of 2000 ducats or more and
eleven with 20 ducats or less. Since the smallest dowry was 12 ducats and the
largest 5700, the range is remarkably wide.
In the sample of 500 testaments of women in the period between 1376 and
1400 I have studied, the amount of the dowry was indicated only thirty-nine

78
For the fifteenth century, Chojnacki notes this same way of protecting dowries; see Chojnacki,
‘Riprendersi la dote’, 482.
79
The decision of the Greater Council of 16 October 1291 is reported in Roberto Cessi (ed.), Deliberazioni
del Maggior Consiglio (3 vols, Bologna, 1931–50) (R. Accademia dei Lincei. Atti delle assemblee costituzionali
italiane dal medioevo al 1831. Ser. 3: Parlamenti e consigli dei maggiori comuni italiani. Sez. 1: Deliberazioni
del Maggior consiglio di Venezia), 3, 307. The decision was also added to the capitulare of the iudices de proprio,
where it appeared under the title ‘Dent (iudices) imprestita pro repromissis pro eo quod valent’, Melchiarre
Roberti (ed.), Magistrature giudiziarie veneziane (vol. 1, Padova, 1906; vols 2–3, Venezia, 1909), 2, 89. This issue
is discussed by Gino Luzzatto, Il debito pubblico della repubblica di Venezia dagli ultimi decenni del XII secolo alla
fine del XV (Milano and Varese 1963), 63. First published: Prestiti della repubblica di Venezia (sec. XIII–XV).
Introduzione storica e documenti a cura di Gino Luzzatto (Padova 1929) (Documenti finanziari della
repubblica di Venezia, 3. serie, vol. 1, parte 1).
80
Mueller, ‘Effetti della guerra di Chioggia (1378–1381) sulla vita economica e sociale di Venezia’, Ateneo
Veneto, n.s. 19 (1981), 27–41.
81
Only the cases where the monetary value of the dowry is known are taken into account. Marriages are
considered noble when at least one spouse – almost always the husband – was noble. The same approach is
used to define the marriages of foreigners and artisans.
82
The second most frequent value was £1000 ad grossos (383.14 ducats), with 78 occurrences; the third most
frequent was 60 ducats with 74 occurrences.
450 Linda Guzzetti
Table 4 Average amounts of dowries according to social groups

No. of cases Average in

ducats

Artisans 297 135.91

Textile 65 171.72
Wood 39 89.19
Glass 24 100.85
Navigation 23 66.57
Food 22 129.64
Leather, shoes 21 122.00
Construction 18 115.83
Metal 18 132.41
Gold 16 131.50
Civil servants, free professions 21 130.02
Foreigners 131 181.01
Venetians who lived abroad 17 193.04

times.83 The average of these cases was 273 ducats, a value close to that of the
diiudicatus carte of the notary Marino. The average for the thirty-one com-
moners among those thirty-nine women was 190 ducats and for the eight
nobles 593 ducats.
At 715 ducats, the average dowry in noble marriages in Marino’s records
was almost four times as high as that in the marriages of commoners. The
women whom we know to have been born in a noble family had slightly
higher average dowries than those we only know to have been wives of
noblemen. Among the noblewomen as well as the wives of noblemen, 1000
libre ad grossos (383.14 ducats) was the most frequent value.84 A dowry of 1000
ducats is to be found in noble marriages in twenty-six of thirty cases and one
above 1000 ducats in twenty-three of twenty-five cases.
Chojnacki, analysing noble marriages from the same registers of the notary
Marino presented here, shows how wide the range of the dowries was.85
Moreover, he revises the dowry values calculated by Donald E. Queller and
Thomas Madden on the basis of thirteen court cases from the period
1370–89. These authors consider 1000 ducats as the standard value at that
time; according to their opinion a lower amount would have damaged the
reputation both of a noble father and of a noble bride.86 In contrast to this,
Chojnacki shows that in the period between 1361 and 1390 low noble dowry
83
See Guzzetti, Tables 67 and 68 (as note 41). Since in testaments the date of marriage celebration was not
indicated, it is not possible to group chronologically the dowries mentioned there.
84
Sixty-eight of the 78 cases of 1000 libre ad grossos dowries concerned noble marriages. This amount was
the most frequent value for all noble marriages studied, but not for those celebrated after 1370.
85
Chojnacki, ‘La formazione’, 3, 641–725. Chojnacki, ‘From trousseau’, 143.
86
Donald E. Queller and Thomas Madden, ‘Father of the bride: fathers, daughters and dowries in late
Medieval and early Renaissance Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 685–711.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 451
values – 385 ducats or less – were as frequent as high values – 1000 ducats or
more.
A profession was indicated in 318 cases, mostly for artisans (see Table 4). In
282 cases it was the profession of the husband of the woman whose dowry
was adjudicated. A woman’s own is mentioned only eight times, that of her
father fifteen times and that of another relative thirteen times. Among the
artisans, marriages were celebrated with a definitely lower dowry than
the average of all commoners, but there were differences according to pro-
fessional group.87
The most numerous group of artisans worked in the textile sector: among
others, ten sartores (male tailors) and three sartoresse (female tailors), eight
samitarii (silk weavers), seven cimatores (trimmers), seven strazaroli (sellers of
second-hand clothes) and seven a stopa (producers/merchants of tow and
oakum). The wives of artisans and women artisans in this sector had an
average dowry above that for all other artisans. This results from the fact that
the poor in the sector, particularly the spinsters, were absent from – or are
not identifiable in – these records. Moreover, disparities were particularly
strong in this group, the smallest dowry being 20 ducats and the largest
1000.88 As might be expected, the wives of sailors and boatmen (navigation)
brought small dowries into marriage.89
Twenty-one non-artisan professions were mentioned: we find ten precones
(town criers), but also some better situated, for instance three husbands
denominated a moneta and therefore either working at the mint or money
changers.
The average dowry of the women for whom, or for whose husbands, a
foreign origin was indicated, was slightly higher than the average of the com-
moners.90 Obviously, foreigners were a very heterogeneous group. On the
one hand, Brunhilde Imhaus shows – on the basis of 197 acknowledgements
of the dowry made by their husbands – that in the fifteenth century the
women from Dalmatia, Albania, Greece and the eastern part of the Mediter-
ranean brought into marriage 100 ducats on average and among them there
were further differences depending on region and profession.91 On the other

87
Philippe Braunstein shows that in the period between 1420 and 1450 a dowry of about 60 ducats was
typical in Cannareggio, an peripheral area of Venice; see Braunstein, ‘Cannareggio, zona di transito?’, in
Donatella Calabi and Paola Lanaro (eds), Città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri, XIV–XVIII secolo (Roma and Bari,
1998) (Biblioteca di cultura moderna 1141), 59.
88
The average dowry values of women artisans and of the wives of artisans in Marino’s records confirm the
disparities within the single trades Romano notes; see Romano, Patricians and Popolani, 35–6.
89
On the basis of the acknowledgements drawn up by the husbands, Stefano Piasentini shows that most
dowries of wives and daughters of sailors amounted to 60–90 ducats; see Piasentini, ‘La setta di Londra: un
ammutinamento di ciurme veneziane del 1396’, Studi storici, 37 (1996), 537.
90
At the beginning of each record, the place of origin was indicated, not for the woman whose dowry was
being adjudicated, but for her husband or father in law. In only a few cases, through quotations of testaments
or witnesses, is it possible to know if the woman or her father were foreigners.
91
Imhaus, Le minoranze orientali, 198.
452 Linda Guzzetti
Table 5 Average amounts of dowry according to type of evidence93

Type of evidence All cases Commoners Nobles

No. of Average in No. of Average in No. of Average in

cases ducats cases ducats cases ducats

Securitatis carta 822 303.86 660 194.31 162 765.17

Instrumentum dotis 159 174.00 157 169.05 2 823.50
Witness 239 176.18 202 124.17 37 517.24
Total 1220 1019 201

hand, some women from foreign merchants’ families were married with large
dowries.92
The dowry level was also related to the type of evidence used. Women pre-
senting a securitatis carta on average had a higher dowry than those who
presented the court an instrumentum dotis and than those who proved their
dowry through witnesses (see Table 5).
This correlation was another consequence of social differences. All women –
except two – who presented an instrumentum dotis were commoners. These
statements were usually drawn up for foreign women or wives of foreign
men; Venetian women could have an instrumentum dotis drawn up when they
married outside Venice. Among the commoners as well as among the nobles,
the average dowry of the women who had to present witnesses for the
restitution of their dowry was about one-third lower than that of the women
who had a securitatis carta. As mentioned above, it was more difficult for
women with small dowries to have their husbands draw up the securitatis carte,
or possibly they were less careful in preserving them.
A gloss to the statutes expressed the following worry: ‘every day we see that
poor women and also their testamentary executors bear false witness, and
they swear the false about the dowry because here the possibility is given of
swearing the falsehoods’.94 These words show a clear mistrust of poor women.
However, the previous figures suggest that most widows, or legal heirs of
deceased wives, did not misuse the possibility of proving their dowry through
witnesses by asking for excessive sums.
The amount of the dowry was seldom given in non-Venetian currencies;
hyperpera were mentioned seven times, f lorins, libre of Bologna and other
92
Luca Molà refers to cases of women from the merchant lucchese families who married Venetian noble men
and had dowries of 2000–4000 ducats in the period between 1370 and 1424. Margherita Paruta, who had a
dowry of only 500 ducats, received from the testament of her husband Marco another 1500 ducats as a bequest.
See Molà, La comunità dei lucchesi a Venezia. Immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo medioevo (Venezia, 1994)
(Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, Memorie, Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 53), 120 note 27,
134.
93
The only cases taken into account are those in which the money value of the dowry is known.
94
Stat. nov., gloss to ‘quoniam multociens’, 52: ‘Item nos videmus cottidie quod misere mulieres et etiam
commissarii earum probant falsa et degerant in dotibus exigendis, quare hic dabitur materia degerandi.’
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 453
95
currencies were each mentioned once or twice. Although many people
living in Venice were of a foreign origin and some Venetians lived in other
towns, generally the notaries expressed the dowry amount in Venetian cur-
rency when the husband acknowledged receipt of it. Only in exceptional
cases do we find hints of currency exchange. Belenzario ‘appotecharius olim
in Bolzano’ put down in writing that £700 had to be returned to his wife
Catarina, as it was stated in the carta del so voto (acknowledgement of her
dowry), ‘calculating the ducat to £4 solidi 12 denarii 6 of the mentioned
currency’.96

IX. ‘DOWRY INFLATION’

‘Dowry inf lation’ was mentioned as early as in Dante’s Paradiso, although in
1320, when the Divina Commedia was completed, the custom of giving high
dowries to daughters was still at its beginning.97 Dante tells us that at the
time of his ancestor Cacciaguerra, who died in 1148 during the second
crusade, fathers did not yet consider the birth of a daughter as a hardship.98
By Dante’s time, on the other hand, the birth of a girl was connected with
the short-term prospect of high costs for the dowry. In reading his verses
today one wonders why Dante considered it a reason for joy that in previous
Table 6 Average value of the dowry according to the marriage year99

Period All cases Commoners Nobles

No. of Ducats No. of Ducats No. of Ducats

cases cases cases

1314–50 171 248.89 125 167.72 100 46 469.46 100

1351–60 160 250.20 130 185.24 110 30 531.69 113
1361–70 305 286.50 259 190.84 114 46 825.12 176
1371–80 274 336.47 236 214.95 128 38 1091.22 232
1381–89 66 261.25 62 138.80 83 4 2159.25 460
Total 976 812 164

95
In Venice the most common hyperpera were those from Byzantium and Ragusa. The f lorins meant here
were the Florentine coins with almost the same value as ducats. On moneys and their rates of exchange, see
Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986), 81, 286–91.
96
Reg. 1, f. 35r, 03.10.1373: ‘£700, contando lo ducato £4 solidi 12 denarii 6 . . . de la sovrascrita moneda’.
The currency meant here was the libra imperialis.
97
On dowry inf lation in Florence, see J. Kirshner and Anthony Molho, ‘The dowry fund and the marriage
market in early Quattrocento Florence’, Journal of Modern History, 50/3 (1978), 403–38; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Le
complexe de Griselda’; A. Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA, 1994), par-
ticularly 157, 310. On dowry inf lation in Ragusa, see Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘Dowry increase and increments in
wealth in Medieval Ragusa’, Journal of Economic History, 41 (1981), 795–811.
98
Divina commedia, Par. XV, 103–6: ‘Non faceva, nascendo, ancor paura/la figlia al padre, ché ‘l tempo e la
dote/non fuggien quinci e quindi la misura.’
99
Only the cases where both the date of the securitatis carta and the amount of the dowry are indicated are
considered.
454 Linda Guzzetti
times women had less property at their disposal. Actually, Dante’s words
expressed only a particular point of view – that of men fearing that they
would be obliged to spend more money for their daughters and sisters
because of the new habit of giving higher dowries and so have less to leave to
their sons, the only ones who would secure the continuity of the family.
Setting the average value for the marriages celebrated in the period
1314–50 as equal to 100, the development of the dowry values for the
marriages celebrated after the middle of the century becomes evident (see
Table 6). The dowries of nobles increased dramatically and the turning point
must be set around 1360. By the seventies, the average dowry of noble
marriages was over 1000 ducats, that is more than the double of the base
figure.100 For commoners the increment was moderate, the average value in
the seventies was about one-third higher than in the period up to 1350. Con-
sidering the consistent inf lation in the second half of the fourteenth century,
the increment in the dowries of the commoners probably just kept pace
with the increase in wages and prices of commodities and meant no real
growth in their value.101 Thus the partial redistribution of wealth between
women and men, which took place in the elite, did not concern the greatest
part of Venetian society, at least not before 1380.
Chojnacki points out the consistent increase in the values of dowries of
noblewomen in the second half of the fourteenth century.102 Comparing the
marriages celebrated between 1331 and 1360 with those celebrated between
1361 and 1390, he also demonstrates that in the second period the difference
between the high and the low dowry values increased. He argues that
Venetian noble fathers – as everywhere in Italy – strove for family advantage
by marrying their daughters to noblemen, particularly to the economically
and socially better off. For this purpose, a high dowry was a requirement and
this set dowry inf lation in motion and kept it going.
I agree with Chojnacki that noble fathers strove for this advantage for
themselves and their kin, even for their sons who would become related to
rich or powerful brothers-in-law even if they themselves were left with a re-
duced estate. But this is not a sufficient explanation of the dowry increase.
Dowry increase was also a ‘self-sustaining’ phenomenon: women of one
generation helped their daughters and other women of the following
generation to improve their economic situation by bestowing large parts of
their own dowries on them. In this way they disadvantaged their sons and
100
In the seventies there were sixteen cases of dowries of 1000 ducats and only four of £1000 ad grossos,
while in the whole period considered £1000 ad grossos is the most frequent value for the nobles. The huge
dowry increase for the noble marriages in the last nine years of Marino’s activity is clearly apparent: there are
only four cases and one of them is a 5700 ducats dowry, the highest value in the database. Also, the decrease
of the dowry values of the commoner marriages celebrated in these last nine years does not mean a reversal of
the trend, being possibly due only to the small number of cases.
101
On contemporary wages and prices, see R. C. Mueller, The Venetian Money Market: Banks, Panics and the
Public Debt, 1200–1500, 2nd vol. of Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD,
1997), 647–64.
102
Chojnacki, ‘La formazione’; Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 455
other male heirs. Chojnacki cites this role of women in dowry increase, but in
his conclusions he shows only the fathers as playing an active role.
The decision of many Venetian women – noble as well as commoner – to
make their daughters and other women the beneficiaries of their dowries was
not obvious. This was not the case in Florence where mothers largely pre-
ferred their sons as beneficiaries. Moreover, the Florentine statutes forbade
mothers to disadvantage their sons in their testaments, and at the intestate
death of mothers admitted daughters as heirs only if there were no sons.103

X. THE WOMEN WHOSE DOWRIES WERE ADJUDICATED

In each of these records the woman whose dowry was being adjudicated
played the principal role: all family relationships revolved around her and in
144 cases it was explicitly said that she herself had given the dowry to her
husband. When written records on the existence and the amount of the
dowry were lacking and the testimony of witnesses was presented in court, a
formula – used in only 173 cases – gave the name of the person who had
conveyed the dowry to the bridegroom at the time of the wedding; in 144
cases, the notary mentioned the bride as that person (see Table 7).104 This
formula emphasizes that the dowry belonged to the bride, but it conceals
the fact that many related and unrelated persons contributed to the
settlement of the dowry, as the testaments of the time show.105
Through the analysis of their denominations, we can state that the widows
who applied for their dowries belonged to different social and legal groups,
Table 7 Persons who conveyed the dowry to the
bridegroom

No. of cases %

Bride 144 83.2

Bride’s father 20 11.6
Bride’s mother 4 2.3
Other persons 5 2.9
Total 173 100

103
Stat. f lor. 1415, 2:129; ‘et nulla mulier in dote, vel de dote vel de eius parte . . . possit condere ultimam
voluntatem, nec aliquid etiam inter vivos quoquomodo disponere de dicta dote, vel eius parte in praeiudicium
viri, vel filiorum, seu aliorum discendentium ex eis’. Under the expression praeiudicium filiorum daughters too
were understood, when there were no sons. In the other case, filii was interpreted as ‘sons’, not as ‘children’,
Chabot, ‘La loi du lignage’, particularly 57. Regarding the preference of sons in the last wills of Florentine
mothers, see Chabot, ‘Risorse e diritti patrimoniali’, in A. Groppi (ed.), Lavoro delle donne (Roma and Bari,
1996), 47–70, particularly 68–9.
104
The formula reported always the point of view of the bridegroom: ‘tempore eorum desponsationis
ipse . . . recepit ab ea pro dote et nomine dotis’ (‘at the time of their wedding he received from her as a dowry’).
The husband being always the grammatical subject (‘ipse recepit’), the person who gave him the dowry was
mentioned in an object complement, for instance ‘ab ea’, for the bride.
105
Queller and Madden, ‘Father of the bride’, 46, 686–688.
456 Linda Guzzetti
not merely to the elite, but not to the very poor. None the less, it is not always
possible to establish it for each case. Whereas surnames of noble and
commoners can usually be distinguished, commoners are difficult to group;
among them, only foreigners and artisans are easily identified. Moreover, in
most cases, the woman whose dowry was adjudicated was referred to by her
first name and the qualification uxor (wife) or relicta (widow), followed by the
first name and often the surname or profession of the husband, so that we can
establish to which social or legal group he belonged, but not his spouse. When
passages from testaments or witness depositions were quoted in the carte
diiudicatus, we usually find more information, such as the name of the kin of
the woman whose dowry was adjudicated, the profession of her father – in
rare cases her own profession – and her or her father’s place of origin.106
Two hundred and seventeen husbands had noble surnames, an indication
that they were probably noble.107 For the majority of the wives of noblemen, it
is not possible to determine if they were also born to members of the nobility
because the name of their kin is missing, only for fifty-eight of them can we
be certain that they were noble (see Table 8). On the other hand, we learn
that the husbands of fifty-five out of these fifty-eight noble women were
noble; for the remaining three it was indicated that they were cives.108

Table 8 Noble marriages

Total Other partner Other partner No information

also noble commoner on partner

Noble husbands 217 55 8 154

Noble wives 58 55 3 –

Concerning marital status, we find in the source studied that almost 78 per
cent of the marriages ended with the death of the husband and about 22 per
cent with that of the wife (see Table 9).109
Undoubtedly, these figures show that mortality was higher among the

106
Through the way they were named, we are better informed on professions and places of origin of the
women who appeared in court as applicants for deceased wives or as witnesses than we are for the women
whose dowries were adjudicated. Some of the applicants and witnesses were identified by their first names and
surnames and not as somebody’s wife or widow.
107
A noble surname indicates a high probability – but not a certain conclusion – that the kin was noble,
while the adjective nobilis added to the name does allow certainty. The women whose dowries were adjudicated
were seldom called nobiles; more often their fathers and husbands were. Regarding the use and meaning of the
adjective nobilis and of other titles at the end of the fourteenth century, see Chojnacki, ‘La formazione’, 3,
680–2.
108
My sample of noble marriages is larger than that used by Chojnacki in his article ‘La formazione della
nobiltà dopo la Serrata’, because I consider both dowry registers of Marino. On endogamy in the Venetian
nobility in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, see Chojnacki, ‘Marriage legislation’.
109
Marital status is indicated in the table as it is in the records: ‘wife’ means that the woman died married,
i.e. she predeceased the husband; ‘widow’ means that the husband predeceased her.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 457
Table 9 Marital condition of the woman at
the termination of marriage

No. of cases %

Widows 998 77.72

Wives 285 22.2
Unknown 1 0.08
Total 1284 100

husbands than among the wives.110 The average age of spouses at time of
first marriage in fourteenth-century Venice is unknown, but it is known that
brides were usually younger than bridegrooms. Also the causes of death
according to sex are unknown, but probably the plague was as common
among women as among men. We may suppose that wives usually lived
longer than their husbands because they were younger. None the less, the
mortality of husbands from this source is so high that it deserves closer inves-
tigation.
Underage children applied for the dowries of their mothers – through
their fathers or other guardians – in only 21 cases.111 At the death of a woman
who had underage children and whose husband still lived, the children
remained under the guardianship of their father. One expects that the father
would have applied for the dowry of his predeceased wife on behalf of the
children, but this was only rarely the case. Whereas the ius commune provided
that the husband had the use of the dowry of his wife when the couple had
underage children, the Venetian statutes did not deal with this issue.112 Since
Venetian widowers with underage children did not usually apply for resti-
tution of the dowry, it must be assumed that either the children received it
directly from their fathers when they came of age, or that they applied
themselves at that time.113 Presumably, some of the cases in which the wife
died first and intestate do not appear in the registers of the diiudicatus carte
and, therefore, there were probably more marriages ending with the death of
the wife than this source shows.

XI. OTHER PERSONS MENTIONED IN THE RECORDS: APPLICANTS,

WITNESSES, AND GUARANTORS OF THE DOWRIES
In addition to the women whose dowries were adjudicated, applicants,
110
However, Klapisch-Zuber has found that slightly more than the half of the marriages in the Florentine
elite terminated with the death of the wife (60 out of 115). This usually happened before the wife had reached
the end of her fertility – about forty-five years of age; see Klapisch-Zuber, ‘La fécondité des Florentines’.
111
As entitlement, the applicants presented carte tutorie only twice, in the other cases it was stated that they
were filii or filie familie.
112
Ercole, ‘L’istituto dotale’, 46, 215.
113
In the case of testate death of the wife, other testamentary executors than the guardians of underage
children could apply for the dowry.
458 Linda Guzzetti
Table 10 Applicants

No. of cases %

Women 254 49.03

Men 232 44.79
Procurators of S. Marco 32 6.18
Total 518 100

Relationship
Mothers 69 13.32
Daughters 67 12.93
Sons 50 9.65
Sisters 46 8.88
Brothers 39 7.53
Fathers 38 7.34
Unrelated men 35 6.76
Unrelated women 34 6.56
Procurators of S. Marco 32 6.17
Husbands 32 6.17
Nieces, granddaughters 13 2.51
Aunts 8 1.54
Nephews, grandsons 7 1.35
Sons-in-law 7 1.35
Brothers-in-law 5 0.97
Other in-laws 5 0.97
Fathers-in-law 3 0.58
Uncles 3 0.58
Cummatres 3 0.58
Patres spirituales 2 0.39
Mothers-in-law 2 0.39
Grandmothers 1 0.19
Other kin 15 2.9
Unknown 2 0.39
Total 518 100

witnesses, and guarantors of the dowries are also mentioned in these

records (see Tables 10–13).
The first word in all the records studied here is diiudicatus. The next words
allow the division of the records in two groups: either the name of the widow
follows – because she applied for restitution after the death of her husband –
or the name or names of the legal heirs of a deceased wife are indicated.114
The widows as applicants are to be found 970 times, the legal heirs 314. The
total number of legal heirs making application is 518, an average of 1.65 for
each application.
Among the applicants there are more women than men, without consider-

114
Other applicants than the widows had to prove their entitlement: ‘Verumtamen commissarius ostendet
testamentum mulieris; furnitor autem testamentum et furnitionem; successor autem probabit successionem
per duos testes ad minus, quod ipse solus est magis propinquus talis mulieris quam alius qui vivat.’ Stat. nov.,
gloss to ‘quoniam multociens’, 48.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 459
Table 11 Applicants of noblewomen and of wives of
noblemen

Relationship No. of %
cases

Procurators of S. Marco 18 11.92

Daughters 17 11.26
Brothers 16 10.6
Sons 15 9.93
Sisters 13 8.61
Husbands 13 8.61
Unrelated women 9 5.96
Unrelated men 9 5.96
Mothers 7 4.64
Fathers 5 3.31
Nieces, granddaughters 4 2.65
Brothers-in-law 3 1.99
Sons-in-laws 3 1.99
Sisters-in-law 2 1.32
Aunts 2 1.32
Grandsons 2 1.32
Other kin 8 5.3
Other kin of the husband 5 3.31
Total 151 100

ing the Procurators of S. Marco.115 Mothers are the most numerous group of
applicants, slightly ahead of daughters. In third and fourth places there were
sons and sisters, followed by the male members of the kin of the deceased
wives, i.e. their brothers and fathers.
The preference for women was often the consequence of a decision of the
woman whose dowry was adjudicated, expressed in her testament. Otherwise,
following the provisions for the legal succession – i.e. by intestate death –
men would be more numerous than women, because daughters and sons
were equally heirs, but fathers were the preferred heirs of women who died
without children, while mothers could be heirs without testament only when
there were no other relatives.116 Actually, all mothers (except one) who ap-
plied for the dowry of their daughters were testamentary executors.
In Venice, all children had the same rights to the estate of a mother who
died intestate, and children were also the most frequent universal heirs of
mothers who made a testament.117 Although children were frequent appli-
cants for the dowries of their deceased mothers, only a few among them were
underage, as seen above. Among the applicants there were many unrelated
115
The procurators of S. Marco appeared in court either as commissarii or as furnitores of the testaments of
deceased wives.
116
Stat. nov. 6:54.
117
Stat. nov. 4:27: ‘quod tam masculis quam feminis, virginibus, maritatis et viduis omnium mobilium et
immobilium equalis successio deferatur’.
460 Linda Guzzetti
women and men, because a high percentage of the testamentary executors
were unrelated people.
Moreover, the category of applicant for the dowry of a deceased wife de-
pended on social group (see Table 11). For deceased noblewomen and wives
of noblemen, mothers were much less frequent as applicants than for all
women. The Procurators of S. Marco were the most common applicants for
this group. Daughters, brothers, and sons were slightly less frequent than the
Procurators, ahead of sisters and husbands. The percentages of unrelated
people were only slightly lower than in the whole sample.
Chojnacki, studying noble marriages over a partially later period, uses a
sample of only 34 cases for this issue. He finds that 38 per cent of the appli-
cants were brothers of the deceased wives, followed by sons with 32 per cent,
while mothers were only 3 per cent. In his sample neither unrelated persons
nor the Procurators of S. Marco appear.118
If we consider again all cases, we notice that only twenty-nine applications
(2 per cent) were made in the name of widows by their legal heirs after the
death of both marriage partners. The rarity of these cases proves that, as a
general rule, a woman applied for the restitution of her dowry as soon as she
became a widow. In a sample of 454 noble widows, on the other hand,
Chojnacki found a somewhat larger number of such cases, namely seventy-
two, or 16 per cent of his sample.119 He ascribes these cases to the continued
presence of the widows in the houses of their deceased husbands. The
discrepancy between Chojnacki’s data and those studied here derives at least
in part from differences in the social composition of the samples. Obviously,
staying on in the houses of deceased husbands was more common amongst
widows of noblemen, who were likely to own their houses, than amongst the
majority of non-nobles who lived in rented f lats. None the less, Chojnacki’s
argument that many widows lived in the houses of their deceased husbands as
long as they found it convenient and applied for the dowry only later is not
convincing. The fact that heirs of the widows applied for dowry restitution
after the deaths of both spouses does not necessarily imply that all those
widows had remained for years in the houses of their deceased husbands.
They might well have died shortly after their husbands, they might have
stayed with their natal families (or, indeed, they might have remarried), they
might have lived off income from assets they possessed beyond the not-yet-
restored dowry, or they might have had to borrow money for their living.120
118
Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 477.
119
Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 468–73. Chojnacki’s sample is taken from different registers of the
iudices proprii of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the larger of the two studied here.
120
Catarina, born in the noble Marino family, who made her testament in 1323, had still to receive legacies
from the estates of both her predeceased husbands. She wrote that ‘quando extracta et recepta fuerint mea
dimissoria de domo Mauroceno’ and ‘quando extracta et recepta fuerint mea dimissoria de domo Paradiso’ –
when her legacies from the house Morosini and from the house Paradiso would be taken and received, they
should be used to pay the debts she owed to her brother. Her dimissoria could comprise both the dowry and
bequests from the husbands. The fact that they had not been promptly paid may explain her debts to her
brother. Archivo notarile, Testamenti, busta 54, notary Nicolò of S. Agostino, prot., no. 129, 05.02.1323.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 461
As we have seen, Venetian law obliged women to apply for dowry restitu-
tion at the very beginning of their widowhood and set precise conditions for
widows willing to live on the estates or in the houses of their deceased
husbands. It is difficult to state how strictly these regulations were applied,
since we would have to know, not only when widows applied for the dowry
restitution, but also when their husbands had died. This is never stated in the
diiudicatus carte, but, dealing with the carte vadimonii, Chojnacki writes that:
‘Vadimomium filings frequently failed to meet the statutory deadline of a
year and a day after the husband’s death; in those cases, the women or their
heirs made use of a loophole in the statutes extending the deadline to the full
thirty years for those “ignorant of the law”.’121 He also presents the instance of
the procurator of a widow who swore in court that she had not known about
the obligation of applying for restitution within the first year after the death
of her husband, which released her from the one year statutory deadline. But
it seems to me that Chojnacki makes the situation of widows appear easier
than it was when he generalizes from such instances. In the attempt to
strengthen his argument that widows could decide themselves when to apply
for their dowries, Chojnacki creates confusion on two different issues. First,
he writes: ‘Most widows remained in their marital residence for many years,
claiming their dowry only decades after its conveyance to their husbands.’122
Since the original payment took place at the time of marriage, it is probable
that these women spent ‘many years’ in the houses of their husbands as wives,
not as widows. Second, he considers the dowry restitution to the widows and
that to the legal heirs of deceased wives as being subject to the same
regulation. But he does not mention any statute in support of his affirmation
that the legal heirs of a deceased wife had one year to apply after her death.123
Actually, the legal heirs had no need for the loophole of the ‘ignorance
of the law’, having thirty years to apply. Chojnacki’s conf lation of the case of
widows with that of the legal heirs of deceased wives and his unclear
treatment of the marital status of the women staying in the houses of their
husbands aim to bolster the dubious theory that widows could get ‘the best of
both situations’, living in the houses and on the estates of their deceased
husbands as long as they liked, and separating their dotal goods from their
husbands’ estates, when they found it convenient.
When the wife died first, the husband could keep – without restitution
procedure – the part of her dotal goods she had bequeathed to him, but not
what he had to administrate as testamentary executor.124 For this latter part of
his wife’s estate, he had to apply, even if it was already included in his estate.
121
Chojnacki, ‘Getting back the dowry’, in Time, Space and Women’s Lives, 83–4; in Women and Men in
Renaissance Venice, 100–1. See note 31.
122
Chojnacki, ‘Getting back the dowry’. In the version published in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice,
this statement has been changed slightly to: ‘staying in their marital residence and delaying claiming their
dowries for years or even decades’, dropping ‘after its conveyance to their husbands’.
123
Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 467. See note 44. The statutes of other Italian towns did not allow the
widow to apply for the dowry before one year had passed since the husband’s death.
124
Stat. nov. 4:9. See note 23.
462 Linda Guzzetti
However, husbands usually did not apply at all, rather they let the other
executors go to court. In the records of the notary Marino, only thirty-two
husbands – about 11 per cent of the 285 who lived longer than their wives –
applied for the restitution of a dowry they were already in possession of. In
their restitution requests there are unexpected expressions: the dowry had to
be taken ‘de bonis omnibus viri dicte sue commisse’ (‘from the estate of the
husband of the woman whose testament he executed’), but the ‘vir dicte sue
commisse’ was the applicant; hence, he should take a certain amount from his
estate to give it to himself. Obviously, all thirty-two husbands who applied for
restitution were executors (they could not be heirs by intestate death), eleven
as sole executors and twenty-one together with other persons. Eight husbands
apparently applied because they needed entitlements to get the dowries of their
deceased wives out of the estates of their fathers in which they were kept.125
In the sample of 500 testaments of women from the last quarter of the
fourteenth century I have studied, 68 per cent of the married women chose
their husbands as executors, alone or together with others.126 Therefore, the
husbands who applied in court for restitution of the dowry were a small per-
centage of those who participated in the execution of their wives’ testaments.
Chojnacki notes too that only a small number of husbands applied for their
wives’ dowries and that usually the other executors did this. He asserts that
one reason for the low number of husbands as applicants was that many
widows did not have their dowries restored during their lifetimes. When their
executors applied for restitution, obviously the predeceased husbands could
not be among them.127 This explanation can apply in single cases, but the
main reason was that husbands were allowed to keep the bequests from their
wives without going to court.
In 251 records out of 1284 – almost 20 per cent – the dowry was settled
with recourse to witnesses; in all other cases, written evidence was presented
in court. In order to prove the existence and amount of a dowry, the statutes
and their glosses specified that the testimony of one person – instead of the
usual two – was sufficient and that women were permitted to be witnesses.128
The difference between the Venetian and the Florentine statutes was notable
in this regard. The latter prohibited women from appearing in court and
even from entering the court buildings. When judges must absolutely hear
them as defendants or witnesses, this had to happen outside court.129
The majority of the witnesses were not related people (see Table 12); some
125
See, for instance, the application of Zanino Taiapetra for the dowry of his deceased wife Catarina, which
was kept in the estate of his father Marino (reg. 1, f. 99r, 12.09.1390).
126
Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse, 147.
127
Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 477–8.
128
Stat. nov., gloss to ‘quoniam multociens’, 48: ‘nec refert quod illi testes sint masculi vel femine’; idem 51:
‘per unum vel plures testes cuiuscumque sexus’; idem 52: ‘quia in dotis et donacionibus propter nuptias datur
ista prerogativa mulieri, ut possit probare etiam per pedissequam liberam’. The issue dealt with in this gloss –
that both men and women could be witnesses – was confirmed about a century later in the sixth book of the
statutes (Stat. nov. 6:7).
129
Romolo Caggese (ed.), Statuti della repubblica fiorentina, II: Statuto del Podestà 1325 (Firenze, 1921), ch. 71.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 463
Table 12 Witnesses

No. of cases %

Women 126 45.32

Men 152 54.68
Total 278 100

Relationship
Unrelated men 130 46.76
Unrelated women 109 39.21
Other in-laws 13 4.67
Brothers-in-law 7 2.52
Kin 6 2.16
Husbands 3 1.08
Mothers-in-law 3 1.08
Fathers-in-law 2 0.72
Sons 1 0.36
Unknown 4 1.44
Total 278 100

were in-laws of the woman whose dowry was adjudicated. Unrelated people were
probably considered more appropriate because less personal interest was
presumed. On the other hand, the kin and the children of the woman whose
dowry was adjudicated were very seldom witnesses, since they were the most
frequent beneficiaries. Husbands almost never appeared in court as wit-
nesses, but in twenty-four cases their last wills were presented as evidence.
Two hundred and seventy-eight witnesses are mentioned in the 251 cases –
on average 1.11 witness per case; therefore, the judges mostly listened to only
one person. Forty-five per cent of them were women. In the glosses to the
Venetian statutes it was clarified that, in general, the evidence of women
alone could not be the basis of the determination of a court, but had to be
fortified by at least one male witness.130 However, women could be witnesses
without men in dowry proceedings, in proceedings for legacies, and by
attesting a testament when a dying person had communicated his or her will
only orally without having time to call for a notary. The diiudicatus carte of
Marino show that, in the fourteenth century, courts followed this provision:
for the restitution of dowries, female witnesses were about as frequent and
received as much consideration as male witnesses.
Although female witnesses in Venice have not yet been studied, instances
of their presence in court can be found both in civil and in penal trials. For
instance, the records of the iudices examinatorum reveal 137 witnesses (31
130
Stat. nov. 1:24, gloss 148 to ‘idonei’, 59: ‘prohibetur enim mulieres in causis nisi ad minus sit cum eis
unius hominis testimonium, qui earum corroberet testimonium. Possunt autem plures femine vel una
testificare in breviariis, que firmantur in testamentum; item in breviariis dimissionarum; item in breviariis
repromisse, quod vocatur vadimonium.’ On the witnesses of women attesting oral last wills to convert them
into valid testaments, see Stat. nov. 4:1, gloss 3 to ‘si autem per breviarium’.
464 Linda Guzzetti
Table 13 Guarantors of dowries

No. of cases %

Husband’s fathers 115 63.19

Husband’s mothers 20 10.99
Husband’s brothers 20 10.99
Unrelated people 15 8.24
Other husband’s relatives 11 6.04
Husband’s sisters 1 0.55
Total 182 100

women and 106 men) for the period 1383–4 and 119 (10 women and 109
men) for the period 1402–3.131 In twenty-one judicial cases before the podestà
of Torcello, an island in the lagoon, there appeared six women and sixty-four
men. Four women bore witness in a case in which no men testified; the other
two women witnessed in another case together with two men.132
For most dowries the diiudicatus carte did not mention any guarantors.
These are to be found in only 182 records (14 per cent), and they mostly
concern noble marriages and large dowries (see Table 13). In these cases it
was stated that, if the estate of the husband was not sufficient for return of
the dowry, the missing amount had to be taken from the estate of the person
who had received the dowry in his or her care (‘super suis bonis eam
accepit’). This formula can relate to two different circumstances: first,
relatives or friends could have stood as guarantors on behalf of the husband;
second, the dowry could have been kept in the estate of the husband’s father.
Guarantors were mostly men: first of all the husband’s fathers; much less
frequent were the husband’s brothers and the husband’s mothers. These last
are the only numerous group of women guarantors for other women’s dow-
ries.133 The statutes did provide for the cases in which the husbands’ fathers
were guarantors of the dowry, but not for those in which the husbands’ mothers
were, even though the previous figures show that this was not an exceptional
occurrence.134 In this instance, Marino’s registers confirm that notarial acts –
as well as court proceedings – allow us to discern the presence of women in
economic and financial matters even when the laws do not mention it.
131
Giudici dell’Esaminatore, testificazioni, reg. 1, 1: ottobre 1383 – settembre 1384; 3: ottobre 1492 –
ottobre 1403. On the curia examinatorum, see Glossary.
132
Paolo Zolli (ed.), Podestà di Torcello. Domenico Vigliari (1290–91) (Venezia, 1966) (Fonti per la storia di
Venezia. Sez.1,4). This register covers the last years of the thirteenth century and is the oldest preserved dealing
with penal cases before the podestà of Torcello. All cases refer to fights with or without insulting and injuring.
Among the examined persons there were both defendants and witnesses, but no woman was among the
defendants. The six women were witnesses in cases 4 and 21.
133
Regarding the guarantors of the dowry, Chojnacki arrives at similar results using a partially different
sample of noble marriages; see Chojnacki, ‘Riprendersi la dote’, 488.
134
The statutes provided that fathers had to give their sons enough property to be able to return the dowry
of their wives, when they emancipated them after they had themselves received the dowries of their
daughters-in-law, i.e. their sons’ wives. (Stat. nov. 1:58).
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 465
According to custom and the law, fathers and unemancipated sons
(indivisi), as well as brothers – if they had not divided the estate of their
deceased father – were jointly responsible. Such cases are not included in
Table 13, as it is impossible to identify them in Marino’s records.

XII. CONCLUSION
The records studied here show that Venetian widows could expect to have
their dowries restored in court and that wives who predeceased their
husbands could choose the persons who would dispose of their dowries.
Moreover, these records provide additional evidence that Venetian women
in the fourteenth century had property, even if they do not allow us to
establish how large a proportion of the entire wealth was theirs. To be sure,
most goods belonging to women consisted of their dowries, but there were
also non-dotal goods, which appear only partially in these records. Further,
the registers of the notary Marino contribute to our knowledge of marriage
duration and testaments.
With a large sample at our disposal, we can establish that the average value
of the dowries was 262 ducats, but the median value was lower – 150 ducats –
since values below the average were twice as numerous as those above. The
differences between social and legal groups were considerable: the dowries
of the nobles were more than two and half times higher than those for all
women, and the dowries of the women artisans – or wives of artisans – were
half the average. Also, judging by the actual possibility of restoring the dowry
to widows, social differences must have been remarkable. While men with
real property could guarantee their wives’ dowries and generally were able to
return them, poor couples could have consumed the dowry in moments of
economic difficulty. The many wives of artisans who were appointed
universal heirs by their husbands probably did not always find their dowries
in the estates of the deceased.
At any rate, in the fourteenth century the property of widows was legally
protected.135 The declaration that the doge was responsible for prompt
restitution of dowries can be read pessimistically as a hint that usually the
contrary happened, but it can also mean that the property of women was the
object of growing attention and protection. Moreover, these records show
that Venetian women had not only the statutes, but also court procedure on
their side, so that, on this issue, the statutes of the city were applied and
dowries were actually restored in court. Many other widows had no need to
go to court at all, because 80 per cent of married men who made a testament
returned their wives’ dowries as bequests.
It is well known that many married testators bequeathed their wives other
goods besides the dowry; among these were the use of the clothes and jewels
the wives had been given during marriage and the use of rooms in their
135
An indirect proof that widows must generally have been in possession of their dowries is that they had a
larger role than wives in economic activities; see Guzzetti Venezianische Vermächtnisse, 119.
466 Linda Guzzetti
houses. Testamentary bequests made by husbands in favour of their wives
were not deducted from dowries at the time of restitution; this practice,
although apparently incompatible with the separation of goods inherent in
the dotal system, was permitted because these goods were given by the hus-
band to the wife after his death, that is after the end of marriage. Less well
known is that it was also common for husbands to bestow goods on their
wives during their lifetimes; in practice, however, these constituted merely
advance payments, since the statutes provided that their value would be
deducted from the dowry at the time of restitution. Our records show that
the courts applied this requirement, confirming how strictly the separation of
goods in dotal marriages was observed.
From the registers of Marino we can also calculate concrete figures on the
development in the value of dowries over time. In the marriages of com-
moners, the average value of the dowries conveyed to husbands in the 1370s
was one-third higher than of those conveyed in the first half of the century,
while among nobles the increase was much greater. ‘Dowry inf lation’ in
fourteenth century Venice, in other words, was a phenomenon primarily of
the elite, while in the rest of society it might just have kept up with the post-
plague increase in the wage level.
Some data about the duration of marriage can be deduced from these
registers: the average duration was about fourteen years, but more than a
quarter of the studied marriages lasted longer than twenty years. Therefore,
in fourteenth-century Venice, many couples lived together longer than the
average periods heretofore known for marriages in the Middle Ages.136
Restitutions of dowries and testaments show that most husbands pre-
deceased their wives. But the result of the records studied here – that almost
four-fifths of the marriages ended with the death of the husband – cannot be
generalized to the whole population, because it is biased by the absence of
some of the cases in which the wife died intestate with underage children as
heirs. In short, in the population there must have been more marriages
ending with the death of the wife than these records show.
The records of the notary Marino demonstrate again that women made
use of the right the Venetian law gave them to be witnesses in dowry proceed-
ings. This admission of female witnesses denied the principle of the ius
commune and the praxis in many cities, which strongly limited the presence of
women in courts, considering them not suitable as witnesses.137 Women also
appeared as legal representatives of other women in restitution procedures.
Although we find only a few legal representatives and most of them were
men, the presence of some women in this role contradicts the absolute
validity of their exclusion from the role of proxy.
Furthermore, from these records we can deduce what part of the estates
136
Claudia Opitz, ‘Life in the late Middle Ages’, in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (eds), A History of
Women in the West, II: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. C. Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 281.
137
Susanne Degenring, ‘Die Frau die (wider-)spricht: Gelehrte Juristen über Frauen als Zeuginnen’,
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, 116 (1999), Kanonische Abteilung, 85, 203–24.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 467
of the testatrices, on average, constituted the residuum. For this purpose, we
have to compare the values of dowries with the total values of women’s testa-
mentary bequests in the same period. This comparison makes sense even if
the persons are not the same, because the social position of the women who
made a testament – and of those who had their dowry returned in court –
was similar. In the sample of testaments I have studied from the period
1376–1400, the testatrixes made bequests of an average value of 170 ducats,
while the average value of dowries in Marino’s acts was 262 ducats. Generally,
therefore, testatrixes’ bequests totalled some two-thirds of the value of their
dowries, while the remaining one-third – the balance of their dowry – consti-
tuted the residuum. This conclusion is, of course, approximate and, moreover,
it disregards non-dotal goods, but it gives a hint about the average amount
of the residuum, a quantity that cannot be evaluated through the testaments
themselves. This result confirms the impression one gets from reading many
testaments of Venetian women, namely that in numerous cases the residuum
was not the bulk of their estates, but something left after the important
legacies had been discharged.
As testators, Venetian wives could dispose of and transmit their dotal and
non-dotal goods as they wished. Widows went to court and applied, almost
always personally, for their dowries. Women were frequently witnesses and
in some cases legal representatives of other applicants. On these issues the
differences between Venice and Florence are noteworthy, as Isabelle Chabot,
Roberto Greci and others have observed.138 From such differences two re-
lated questions arise: where did the rights and social possibilities of Venetian
women originate? And what explains their enduring operability through the
medieval period without remarkable changes?
Both in Florence and in Venice, the estates of husband and wife were
separate and the dowry changed possessor during marriage. But in Florence,
as in other Italian cities but not in Venice, when the wife predeceased the
husband, the latter had claims on all or part of his wife’s dowry.139 On this
score, Venetian law was much closer to Roman law than that of Florence and
of other Italian communes. In Venice, upon the wife’s death, her legal heirs,
not her husband, applied for restitution, as the statutes required and the
records studied here confirm. Moreover, in Venice, daughters were heirs of
their mothers on an equal basis with sons and independently from their
marital status, whereas Florentine daughters were heirs of their mothers only
in the absence of sons. Venetian daughters also inherited the whole estate
138
The scholarship on medieval Italy has taken account of these differences only in recent years; see
Groppi, ‘Introduzione’, in Lavoro delle donne (Roma and Bari, 1996); Roberto Greci, ‘Donne e corporazioni: la
f luidità di un rapporto’, in Lavoro delle donne, 71–91; Chabot, ‘Risorse e diritti patrimoniali’, 63–4; Chabot and
Giulia Calvi, ‘Introduzione’, in Ricchezze delle donne, 7–18, particularly 14.
139
The entitlement of the husband to the dowry, if the wife predeceased him, could be settled in marriage
agreements (pacta de lucranda donationis et dotis), or it could be provided for in the statutes of the city (lucrum
statutarium dotis); see Ercole, ‘L’istituto dotale’, 46, 194–9; Kirshner, ‘Maritus lucretur dotem’; Kirshner,
‘Materials for a gilded cage’.
468 Linda Guzzetti
when their deceased fathers had no sons, in contrast to Florence where
brothers, rather than daughters, of the predeceased paterfamilias were desig-
nated as preferred heirs.
These differences between Venice on the one hand and Florence and other
Italian cities on the other, have been interpreted as a consequence of Venice’s
special historical path. As the Lagoon area was under Byzantine rule,
Longobard law played no significant role in the development of Venetian
customs, which were deeply rooted in the corpus iuris promulgated in the
sixth century by Justinian.140 None the less, unlike other cities in north and
central Italy, Venetian ius proprium excluded the ius commune as a subsidiary
source of law and a remedy for the deficiencies of customary and statutory
law.141 Concerning the rights of women, Justinian’s corpus iuris was less
restrictive than the ius commune: it admitted sons and daughters equally to the
inheritance of their parents, allowed wives freely to dispose of their dowries
when making their testaments, and gave husbands no automatic claims on
the dowries of their wives. In the high Middle Ages, women in most areas
south of the Alps, owing to the diffusion of the dowry system, suffered an
attenuation of their rights as heirs and as proprietors, but the legal condition
of women in Venice did not deteriorate substantially.142
A second reason for the particular situation of Venice lies in the early
commercial development of the city. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a
time in which finding capital was a major challenge, overseas trade could
expand only if many persons and groups were free to invest their estates, and
numerous widows had been active as investors since the eleventh century.143
Of course, the prerequisite for female investment was that women could
inherit from their parents and obtain control over their dowries after the
deaths of their husbands. Thirdly, up to the fourteenth century, most mer-
chants raised capital and travelled themselves, sometimes remaining abroad
for long periods. They therefore required a business representative at home.
As the procurationis carte show, Venetian men often left their wives as partner
surrogates.144
There are further features of the Venetian society which lent support to the
rights that Justianian’s code had conferred on women. In Venice the state
took control of society earlier than elsewhere in Italy and this resulted in a
relative social peace. This comparatively peaceful situation has been judged
in various ways, as the harmonious convergence of different interests or as
140
Besta, ‘Il diritto e le leggi civili di Venezia’, 2, 290–320; Besta, ‘Gli statuti civili di Venezia anteriori al
1244’, 1, 42, 98.
141
Lamberto Pansolli, La gerarchia delle fonti di diritto nella legislazione medievale veneziana (Milano, 1970)
(Fondazione Guglielmo Castelli, 41). See note 5.
142
Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse, 33–4, 47–8.
143
Raimondo Morozzo della Rocca and Antonino Lombardo (eds), Documenti del commercio veneziano nei
secoli XI–XIII (2 vols, Torino, 1940; reprinted Torino, 1971), 1 (no. 1), 2–3 (no. 3), 39 (no. 37), passim.
144
Documenti del commercio veneziano nei secoli XI–XIII, 236–7 (no. 242), 338–9 (no. 342), 369–70 (no. 376),
passim; Maria Francesca Tiepolo (ed.), Domenico prete di S. Maurizio notaio di Venezia. 1309–1316 (Venezia, 1970)
(Fonti per la storia di Venezia, Archivi notarili 5), 40 (no. 38), 144 (no. 186), 194 (no. 256), 340 (no. 517),
passim.
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 469
145
the dictatorship of the merchants on the other classes. I contend that the
absence of violent upheavals gave women the opportunity to preserve their
rights, so that in the late Middle Ages Venetian women possessed a larger
range of social and personal options compared to their counterparts in
Florence and in other Italian cities.

Berlin

APPENDIX: DOWRY RESTITUTION AT THE END OF MARRIAGE

he bequeaths the restitution

dowry to his wife out of court
with
testament
he does not bequeath restitution
the dowry to his wife in court
The husband dies

without restitution
testament in court

the husband no need for

is heir restitution
with
testament
other heirs and restitution
executors in court
The wife dies
underage children no restitution
as heirs in court
without
testament
other restitution
heirs in court

GLOSSARY
The following definitions of the legal terms used in the text, and the infor-
mation about Venetian notaries and Venetian currency, are intended to aid
145
Giorgio Cracco gives the following interpretation of Venetian social peace: ‘tra il 1275 e il
1300 . . . all’intreccio di lotte tra le classi e gruppi politici [subentra] la dittatura di una classe sola, quella dei
grandi mercanti’, see Cracco, Società e stato nel medioevo veneziano (secoli XII–XIV) (Firenze, 1967) (Civiltà
veneziana. Studi 22), 291. For an opposite, positive judgement, see Frederic Chapin Lane, Venice. A Maritime
Republic (Baltimore, MD, 1973), 109. For a critical appraisal and a bibliography, see Romano, Particians and
Popolani, 7–11, 151–8.
470 Linda Guzzetti
understanding only of the issues dealt with in the main body of the paper.
For the legal terms, the main source consists of the glosses to the Venetian
statutes. The secondary literature on particular issues is quoted either below
or in the footnotes.

Carta augmenti dotis This was an acknowledgement that the value of a dowry
had increased during marriage. According to the statutes (Stat. nov. 1:56), a
dowry increase during marriage could not be acknowledged through a
notarial act, but had to be stated by the court of the iudices examinatores, and
their ruling summarized in the carta augmenti dotis. None the less, in only
nine of the sixty-three cases in which the wife had received an increment to
her dowry during marriage, were carte augmenti dotis presented as evidence.

Carta diiudicatus The diiudicatus carte are the records studied here. Carta
diiudicatus could signify any document summarizing a decision which was
promulgated in the name of the doge and a court (Magistrature giudiziarie
veneziane e i loro capitolari fino al 1300, 1:132, 137). In the context of dowry
restitution, the diiudicatus carte were documents reporting court decisions
allowing widows, or the legal heirs of deceased wives, to receive the dowries
from the estates of their husbands. The diiudicatus carte were issued at the
end of the restitution procedure; they mentioned the sum the widows or
the legal successors of the deceased wives were entitled to and summarized
the legal documents – carte securitatis, instrumenta dotis, carte successionis or
testaments – on which the decisons of the judges were based.

Carta securitatis et manifestacionis repromisse This was the most common

Venetian term for the acknowledgment by the husband of the receipt of the
dowry at the time of marriage. In the records studied, securitatis carte were
presented to court in 830 cases. This figure also includes the abstracts from
the registers of the notaries who originally drew up the securitatis carte.
These were presented in court when widows had lost their own docu-
mentation. Thirty-seven acts, summarized in the records of Marino and
called merely carte, were acknowledgements either of the dowry or of other
goods of the wife kept in the estate of the husband. In the diiudicatus carte,
only the date of the securitatis carte, the name of the notary who drew them
up, and the amount of the dowry were reported.

Carta successionis Documents indicating the entitlement of the legal succes-

sors of an intestate person to receive their portion of inheritance. Carte
successionis were presented in sixty cases, most of them having been drawn
by the curia proprii itself, shortly before the application for the dowry. The
sum of the references to testaments and to successionis carte is slightly lower
than the number of cases where the dowry was returned to the legal heirs of
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 471
deceased wives, because in the second register a few references to the
entitlements of heirs are missing.

Carta vadimonii The terms vadia or vadimonium generally meant the ‘obli-
gation to appear in court at a due time’ or the ‘pledge given for the same
purpose’. In the context of the procedure studied here, carta vadimonii
meant a ‘court decision regarding the restitution of the dowry’ and was an
intermediary step in the restitution procedure. The carta vadimonii included
information about the conveying of the dowry to the husband – for instance
specifying in how many instalments it had been paid and the type of goods
comprising the dowry, or quoting marriage agreements. In the diiudicatus
carte, all this information was at most summarized or completely dropped.
The carte vadimonii did not mention the sum which had to be returned to
the widow or to the legal successors of the deceased wife, because this was
settled only in the last phase of the procedure. Before the drawing up of
the vadimonii carta, it was shown in court – symbolically, through some
gestures – that the marriage had come to an end and that the obligation to
return the dowry existed. See Lujo Margetic, ‘Il diritto’, in Lellia Cracco
Ruggini (ed.), Storia di Venezia, I: Lellia Cracca Ruggini (ed.), Origini. Età
ducale (Roma, 1992), 677–92, particularly 684–6.

Curia de proprio (or proprii) This court was competent in inheritance

litigation and dowry restitution, but also in robbery and manslaughter. See
Magistrature giudiziarie veneziane e i loro capitolari fino al 1300; Giovanni Italo
Cassandro, ‘La curia di petizion’, Archivio Veneto, 5. serie, 19 (1936), 72–144;
20 (1937), 1–201; Dieter Girgensohn, Kirche, Politik und adelige Regierung in
der Republik Venedig zu Beginn des 15. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1996)
(Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts 114), 1, 51–9; Kurt Heller,
Venedig. Recht, Kultur und Leben in der Republik, 697–1797 (Wien, 1999),
353–7.

Curia examinatorum This court was competent in litigation regarding

testaments, transactions of real estate, marital litigation, supervision of the
affairs of persons aged under 18.

Determinatio In eleven cases restitution was ordered with reference to the

determination of another court.

Dos estimata or inestimata When the cash value of the goods comprising a
dowry was indicated in its acknowledgement, the dos (dowry) was called
estimata (valued), otherwise inestimata. In the fourteenth century, almost all
dowries were estimate. However, real property (possessio) was sometimes
given to the husband without an indication of the cash value. At the time of
restitution, it made a difference whether the dowry had been given as
472 Linda Guzzetti
estimata or inestimata. On the basis of the dos estimata, the cash value, not the
actual goods, had to be restored. In contrast, the goods constituting a dos
inestimata, whether buildings or land, clothes or objects, had to be restored
by the husband or his successors in the same condition in which he had
received them.

Furnitores If it was still necessary to administer an estate after the death of

all testamentary executors and of the substitutes provided for in testaments,
the iudices procuratorum had to commit the execution of the testament to the
procurators of S. Marco; this was settled in a furnicionis carta. Seventeen of
these acts are mentioned in the records studied.

Instrumentum dotis This term was used to indicate acknowledgements of

the dowries, which were drawn up according to the ius commune by notaries
imperiali auctoritate; 162 instrumenta dotis were summarized in the diiudicatus
carte studied here. In these cases, not only the date, the name of the notary
who drew it up, and the amount of the dowry, but also the name of the court
(in most cases the curia proprii) and the name of the court scribe who had
authenticated the acknowledgement of the dowry ‘secundum usum patrie
nostre’ (‘according to the custom of our country’) were reported. The
authentication was necessary, because these documents had not been drawn
up according to Venetian law.

Procurationis carta This was a notarial act through which a person ap-
pointed his or her proxy, either for a single occurrence or for any and every
legal matter and transaction. Twenty-five procurationis carte were quoted in
the records studied here.

Refectio This was the remaking of a carte diiudicatus that had already been
drawn up. In six cases, such pieces of evidence were used for new carte
diiudicatus. This happened when the initial act included mistakes either of
form or content.

Repromissa This was a term used in Venice for dowry, alongside the gener-
ally current term dos.

Residuum In a testament, residuum meant the totality of remaining goods

after the bequests were distributed and the debts paid.

Venetian currency The rates of exchange of the other types of Venetian

currency to ducats were: 1 libra grossorum = 10 ducats; 26.1 libre ad grossos = 1
ducat. The rate of exchange of the libra parvorum varied in the course of the
period under examination between 3.17 and 4.6 for one ducat. Each libra
was divided into 20 solidi, each solidus into 12 denarii. For these subdivisions
 Dowries in fourteenth-century Venice 473
the colon is used, for decimals the period. On Venetian currency, see
Frederic Chapin Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in
Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Vol. 1: Coins and Money of Accounts
(Baltimore, MD and London, 1985).

Venetian notaries Notaries active in Venice were mostly authorized by the

doge and were called notarii veneti or veneta auctoritate. Additionally, notar-
ies authorized by the emperor (imperiali auctoritate) or the pope (apostolica
auctoritate) also received permission to exercise their profession in Venice. In
the material examinad here, 171 pieces of evidence – mentioned and sum-
marized in the diiudicatus carte – had been drawn up by notaries imperiali
auctoritate; most of them were instrumenta dotis and some were testaments.
All other pieces of evidence had been drawn up by Venetian notaries, but
this fact was specified only in 437 cases. Some notaries were authorized by
both doge and emperor. In only a few cases was it specified that a notary, for
instance Giorgio de Gibellino, was also authorized through apostolica
auctoritate; this seems to have been simply a further title, since none of the
summarized documents was drawn by force of a papal authorization. See
Attilio Bartoli Langeli, ‘Documentazione e notariato’, in Storia di Venezia,
847–64; Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, ‘Veneta auctoritate notarius’. Storia del
notariato veneziano (1541–1797) (Milano, 1996) (Studi storici sul notariato
italiano 10); Marco Pozza, ‘La cancelleria’, in Storia di Venezia, 365–87.