ISLES pub

Oral communication at a multidisciplinary workshop on Islands and Islanders in the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Island worlds in the longue durée. Originally given in Greek at the University of Crete, December 2014. Translated and revised in Athens, 2022 The Cyclades of the people, the land and the sea. A dialogue with historical sources I have reached the point that calls for overall rethinking. When I think of my research, I tend to fantasize that I am midway, as there are so many aspects that remain still unexplored. If this was a realistic assumption, at the end of seventy years of intensive work I would have obtained some extremely interesting results, given that the latter course would have been informed by a background totally lacking at the beginning of my doctoral studies back in 1979. Apart from the fact that I was a novice researcher, the study of the subject was still in an embryonic stage. There had not yet appeared extensive investigations about the Aegean islands in the early modern period. The earliest dissertation available –that of Spyros Asdrachas on Patmos (1972)- had not been published, while Ben Slot’s Archipelagus Turbatus (1982) had not come out yet; and despite the pioneering but dated studies of Pericles Zerlendis and William Miller or the documents published and commented upon by legal historians, the internal history of the Aegean island societies in the long seventeenth century (1566-1718) remained largely untouched. Since then, however, a lot of steps have been taken in the right direction and the present multidisciplinary and diachronic workshop even if it is still only exploratory and unformed may well serve as a forerunner of setting fresh questions, finding new synergies, and developing the inception of original models that will be dealt with in the next thirty-five years. Back to the original narrative, it is more or less known to students of the Cycladic societies that my searches involved a detailed examination of the island of Naxos in the early modern period on the basis of about three thousand notarial acts. By comparison with other contemporary quests, my effort was supported by a large quantity of documentation and it did not take me long to form the specific design of reconstructing the world of Naxos as far as this was possible, although at the time I was not aware that what I aspired to do was ‘total history’. A point that highlights the state of things in those far-off days is that my choice of Naxos and notarial documents had been quite accidental. I had just completed my MA in the English late medieval peasantry at the Medieval History Department of the University of Birmingham. I wished to start a Ph.D in agrarian history at the same University but with a slight variant; that is, I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to transfer what I had gained during my postgraduate studies to some unspecified Greek material of date as close to the Middle Ages as possible. I sought the advice of Spyros Asdrachas, the par excellence specialist in Greek agrarian studies, and he suggested the case of Naxos. However, he did not have a clear idea about the number of dispersed sources, and his personal interest lay in a late eighteenth-century tax register of viticulture (Η μάνα των αμπελιών / The register of vineyards). Not what I was looking for, but it nevertheless prompted me to try to collect sources that would give me information about the salient features of that island’s economy and society. At the time, those sources were relatively unknown and often inaccessible, but I have given elsewhere a brief survey of the rather unfortunate fate of most Greek archival material until the latter part of the 20th century. There it is shown that the situation of the sources concerning Naxos (which were dispersed in various collections in Athens, Naxos, and Rome), was far from exceptional. Most of the documents were unpublished and very haphazardly catalogued, and the case was far from exceptional. This largely explains why locating and collecting the largest possible corpus of acts was such a gradual process requiring an inordinate amount of time and effort. While the evidence was neither continuous nor evenly balanced, it was fairly representative of most economic and social strata of the island’s society. Once the initial difficulties were over, I spent a number of years studying the sources and trying to find meaningful ways to organize the flood of information and the many similarities and variances contained in it; problems and ambivalences had to be pointed out, and tentative interpretations to be put forward. Apart from the opus magnum of my doctoral thesis, the result was a number of papers, several of which are primarily about the value of notarial acts and the amazing wealth of information that they generate; also about various aspects of the economic and social history of the societies that produced them. Needless to stress that at the same time I am fully aware of the limitations of this single type of evidence, some of which may be clarified by other types of sources, such as taxation registers, Ottoman state documents, or the rich archives of maritime and trading Italian towns; these last were in frequent contact with the islands and the documentation has to a large extent survived. As my research progressed, one could say that I did not follow any specific model. Not that there was not any theory behind my work –how would that be possible- but at this point, I am bound to acknowledge that my sense of history is rooted in the extremely fertile soil of the Medieval section of the School of History, from which (and my supervisor R.H. Hilton) I did not want to part from. The soil was undoubtedly extremely fertile, but at the same time none of my Birmingham colleagues had anything to do with south-eastern Europe or with notarial sources, something that undoubtedly presented some difficulties but at the same time gave me the incentive to devise my own path and the freedom to follow it. I started from the economic and social history I had encountered in my M.A. studies. This put an emphasis on agrarian history with a Marxist predilection of the British type, which was never dogmatic or implacable. Apart from that, I let my sources guide me, and as I proceeded, many of my first inquiries had to be readjusted. My preconceived aim had been to look for a stratified agrarian society and the inevitable conflict between landowners and landholders. Indeed, I found all that, but at every turn I encountered institutions about which or their meaning and function I knew nothing. The first of them was customary law. It was a subject that at the time had been studied exhaustively neither in the foreign bibliography nor in the Greek one and which was to become the central axis of my interpretations. By contrast, custom has been studied quite extensively by the French. See for example, Poisson’s many studies, e.g. Études notariales 1999; also the essays in the conference proceedings Problèmes et méthodes d’analyse historique de l’activité notariale (xve – xix e siècles), Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991. For the Greek bibliography, see Land and Marriage, Chapter 4, which however needs to be updated. In my sources, we find it as το συνήθειο του τόπου (local custom) and various synonyms. It is anything but unchangeable, even though this is how it has always and globally been presented. The second institution was dowry. It involved marriage payments and everything associated with them, i.e. family, property and its disposition between the generations, the inheritance rights of women and men along with their natural extension (pensionary rights for those family members that had withdrawn from active life). A complementary issue that forced itself into the analysis was the development of those institutions as a response to changing circumstances. To recapitulate, most of my island publications up to now have focused on these points, which are interlinked with the extremely important issue of land and the people. My concern was on the one hand with the physical features of that land, land use and the ways and implements of land exploitation, and on the other hand with the relations between men and women, which were shaped through land ownership. Lo and behold, here I actually found the landlords and the peasants, here was class antagonism, here were the obligations of the peasants towards the great and small landowners, quite apart and beyond land rent or revenue. Obligations from which the direct cultivators often attempted to get free, most of all when the liabilities constituted remnants of feudal ties. Correspondingly, here were the privileges of the rich and no longer so rich ‘lords’ (archontes), with their Venetian names and the advantaged status of their estates. As luck would have it in the case of Naxos there exist some sporadic narratives testifying that open social conflict, which remained rampant long after the end of the seventeenth century and about which historical debate is still lively. Compare the opposite views of Slot and Kasdagli in Land and Marriage, chapter VII. Interesting facets of Naxian historiographical development can be found in the e-magazine Ιστορικός Όμιλος Νάξου ΑΡΣόΣ, Φλέα σε μορφή .pdf: http://arsosnaxos.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html Undoubtedly there are some themes that were not touched upon in my Ph.D thesis or the subsequent book. These constitute a discrete field of study, an example being the data concerning material culture, which is encountered in abundance in notarial acts, particularly in marriage contracts. Or geographical mobility, about which (in conjunction with trade) a casual reading of notarial documents will offer little specific information, so that commercial exchanges and corroborating evidence should be sought in conjunction with any other available sources. Mobility was somewhat later the object of Maroula Sinarelli’s research, with which she attempted to highlight networks of exchange. Notwithstanding my attachment to Naxos, very soon my interest turned to other islands as well. The incentive was ‘male dowries’, i.e. marriage payments given to men at marriage by their birth family, identical to the women’s portions. These were the norm in Naxos but unheard of in these terms in the major part of the Greek world, and the phenomenon found its way into the bibliography only late and somehow hesitatingly. For my part I had to ask myself what was the meaning of this: was Naxos a really unique case? Of course not (incidentally I do not give much credit to ‘unique’ phenomena) and this was indicated when I looked at the sparse samples of published dowry contracts from other Cycladic islands. Few as they were, they persuaded me that the same basic model was followed all over the Cyclades and shortly afterward this was emphatically confirmed when hundreds of (unpublished) contacts from Mykonos and Santorini emerged. However, the question remained, albeit in an extended form: were the Cyclades really a unique case on this point? Not quite, but this is not the moment to expand on this problem. On hindsight, I have now to admit that this is as true today as it was eight years ago, although it should be mentioned that a number of relevant discussions have taken place in more recent times. Thus, I am still eager to present a full-fledged description of the Cycladic system, which may lead to more rewarding interpretations. Apart from the endowment of sons, I was impressed by the amazing variety of practices and phenomena from one Cycladic island to the next. Each one presented peculiarities in various aspects of daily life: in the dresses, vocabulary, the names given to different types of land, the clauses of contracts, systems of cultivation, and so on. Having now this new focus, I started re-examining systematically notarial acts from all over the Greek world using the plentiful new editions of registers that have kept appearing. Most of them originate in Crete (under Venetian rule until 1669), Naxos, and the Ionian islands (the latter dating from the 16th to early 19th century). On the present occasion, I refer exclusively to the Cyclades –if nothing else, of the other Aegean islands only Chios and Skyros, have a significant number of early documents. Among the Cycladic islands, Tenos is the only one to display a distinct pattern due to the fact that she had remained under direct Venetian rule throughout the period under examination. There is a great number of marriage contracts in Italian from Tinos and they are currently studied by Anna Athanasoula, a doctoral student at the University of Crete. As already suggested, geographical mobility in the Aegean was great and a notable example outside the Cyclades is the island of Patmos, which was a particularly cosmopolitan place, thanks to the global radiation of St John’s monastery. We often encounter monks from the monastery residing in metochia This was a Byzantine institution and referred to relatively small monastic units, each with their own property and role to play but attached to a more important or richer mother establishment. all over the Aegean, engaging in legal transactions with the view to registering and securing the miscellany of their commercial, religious, political, and other activities. These acts were deposited in their archives, in which a great number of documents have been preserved. Although we do not have samples of this type of documentation from many smaller islands, my hunch is that there existed an amount of notarial activity in all of them. In all probability there were not many instances requiring registration, so the records would be few and probably put down in a haphazard way. In common with what happened everywhere in Greece, the circumstances would not be favourable to preserving and managing archival material but nevertheless, the possibility of the small islands being unaware of what was happening in the wider world is slight. In all truth, however, I cannot explain why such sources do not seem to have survived let’s say from the island of Amorgos, given that the monastery of the Virgin Mary there (Παναγία η Αμοργιανή) was very well-known and is often mentioned in donations or acts of last will and testament. Is it perhaps reasonable to conclude that in smaller or relatively isolated islands the deep necessity of written guarantees which was so common in the major Aegean islands did not leave any traces in the period under examination? At the same time, it is important to stress that there undoubtedly coexisted a thriving oral civilization, and circumstantial evidence corroborates the fact that a large part of agreements was achieved only orally. Some of these issues are discussed in my paper ‘Εγγραμματοσύνη και παιδεία στο Αιγαίο κατά τον ‘σκοτεινό’ 17ο αιώνα από τις μαρτυρίες των νοταριακών εγγράφων: μία πρώτη προσέγγιση», / Literacy and education in the Aegean during the “dark” seventeenth century. A first approach to the evidence of notarial documents’, in Η Ελλάδα των νησιών από τη Φραγκοκρατία ως σήμερα, 2 vols, Athens 2004: II, pp. 535-548. Also, there is no doubt that facets like the islanders’ daily behaviour, the way they raised their children, the music they were listening to, their songs, their faith, their fears and biases hardly ever find their way into notarial documents. The sparse evidence we have about them comes from notices submitted to the notary to be kept for possible future reference. For the rest, the only other sources that give us any illuminating narrative were written by members of the clergy, and in particular the Latins, who were by far the better educated and the relatively more sophisticated locals. This aspect relating to emotions and sentiment I hardly ever touched on over the years. Undoubtedly one can –and ought to- make guesswork based on information whose purpose was primarily of economic significance, because the ways with which a society manages its economic issues is very revealing of its values, no matter how mediated they are when reaching our perception. However, I find it very risky to go uncritically much further down the road on the basis of textual sources that were drawn out to implement quite different targets. Much more so when the people concerned had even in their correspondence neither the need nor the capability to express feelings. The very few extant letters written by early modern islanders are either of a strictly economic character or demonstrate an excessive sentimentality: the latter belong to the mournful or else to the beggar genre and thus have a justifiable element of exaggeration. It would not do to use them for generalizations, although one may consider them part of the ‘national’ feature that we usually call ραγιαδισμός, that is, the contemptible features of a rayah, or somebody who lived in dire circumstances as a Christian subject of the Ottoman Empire. I think that the last paragraphs demonstrated what led me to desire a systematic re-examination of all extant notarial acts, even if this is would be an impossible feat, given that there are thousands of them, most of them still unpublished. This particular quest will have to do with the people’s daily experiences through their own words. My primary aim would be to seek indications about how the islanders of that period viewed themselves as much as ‘the other’; who they considered strangers, and how they treated them? Let us keep in mind that on some islands there existed significant religious minorities –mostly Catholics, but also some Turks, plus colonies of itinerant or settled strangers: traders, pirates, and others. I believe that such an investigation would be enriched if we can distance ourselves from our confined space every now and then, and continue the exchange with people doing different types of research. &&&&&& P.S. 2022. It is disappointing that the praiseworthy intention of the organizers and the enthusiastic response of the participants in that workshop did not have any follow-up. Nevertheless, it is certain that interdisciplinary projects involving different people and new ideas, have much to offer. They give a glimmer of a hopeful future that is so badly missing today. 7