Age, Marriage, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa. (Reviews).

David Rheubottom. Age, Marriage, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiii + 220 pp. $70. ISBN: 0-19-823412-0.

Middle Tennessee State University 

This book is many things. It examines how elite family alliance and allegiance intersected with politics in late medieval Ragusa -- a miniature Venice on the edge of the Balkans. It also analyzes the historiography of the medieval Mediterranean marriage pattern as well as the historiography of the meaning of household in the medieval Mediterranean, comparing Ragusa with Florence and Venice. It expounds the methodology of historical anthropology that is ethnography over time. Lastly, it presents a tightly knit study solidly based on good archival sources, using clear quantitative techniques. Not only is this a model for what a historical monograph should be, it is a pleasure to read -- informative, focused, and conclusive. While Ragusan elite families may have on the surface appeared as a closed world -- to be considered patrician one had to have two patrician parents, which led to a high level of endogamy, for instance -- use of kinship ties as tools for marital and political strategy rarely occurred. Moreove r, competition for offices was fierce, with the offices themselves held more for honor than for bureaucratic purpose. This competition likewise indicates that this elite was less closed than would have been thought. This study then makes a wonderful companion to the studies on elite marriage in Florence by Anthony Molho and the studies on patrician political behavior by Donald Queller and Thomas Madden.

Years before this book was published, David Rheubottom studied fifteenth-century dowry records in Ragusa and found something interesting. Elite men there postponed their marriages to younger women even later than other elite men in the Mediterranean. Why did they do this and what effect did this have on household and on politics? Would this have resulted in a domination of Ragusan office holding and politics by a dominant fraction of a closed elite? This book is a result of these questions.

Rheubottom describes Ragusan merchant society at the end of the Middle Ages well. Because it possessed a good geographical location -- between the Balkans and Europe -- Ragusa profited handsomely from and contributed significantly to trade. Spices, salt, dyes and dying, shipbuilding and especially the movement of silver from the Balkans elsewhere dominated this trade. Some families became tremendously wealthy, and they began to dominate politics, so much so that in 1332 they closed off competition for offices to only themselves. Ragusa, like many Mediterranean communities, had many short-term offices and considerable competition for them. For instance, two-thirds of all governmental business involved elections and electioneering for offices.

He also describes the family, the casata, well. The exact definition of family has occasioned considerable historical interest amongst medievalists, especially in trying to determine whether it meant lineage. From his Ragusan evidence, Rheubottom concludes decisively that it was not; the term family as understood in the medieval Mediterranean is more akin to the anthropologist's concept of a kindred (basically a short term lineage extending back only a few generations and extending outward only a few degrees). Casate were not corporate. Few families married upwards out of their level in the elite, so elite wealth was not redistributed in Ragusan society.

For women, youth, as Molho found from his Florentine studies, was crucial to honorable marriage. Ragusa's closed system of marriage and politics exaggerated this as the pool of suitable elite men was smaller than in other Mediterranean communities. To attract them, women married young; so sisters married before brothers, and younger sisters had larger dowries than older ones. Families then concentrated more on marrying off their daughters than their sons. All this led to considerable age skewing in Ragusan society: paternal kin were older than maternal kin and there was a political gerontology.

Over time Ragusan elite culture grew in size, which increased competition for office holding. While Rheubottom is able to determine both a hierarchy of offices held and a elite core within the patrician class, this core was not firmly set and there was considerable movement in and out of it amongst the elite. He does note an interesting point for these offices. Their importance seems not so much what holding them can do for the family but what possessing them did for the status of the holder -- and what the status of the holder did for the prestige of the office.

In this study Rheubottom combines the insights of anthropology and demography with the methods of history, which provides a necessary corrective to anthropology alone, which tends to minimize change over time. Years ago Annalistes called this total history; and it is good to see anthropologists now making forays into history rather than seeing just historians making forays into anthropology. This book is old-fashioned Annales-style history. And that is a good thing to see again.