Comparing Communities. Onomastic cultures and elite dynamics in 15th-century Venetian Friuli

Abstract

At the beginning of the 15th century, with the decline of the Patriarchal State, Friuli became part of the Venetian Stado da Terra. However, the 15th century area of Friuli was historiographically marked by certain specific characteristics: an identity of geographical periphery, as a land of passage, and institutional, as a highly feudal and rural area. In this framewor, the former Patriarchan territories would compose a border region that lacked the solid ramification of city powers typical of the Po-Venetian area. Reversing this traditional historiographical approach, the article does not focus on properly ‘feudal’ subjects or on the rural communities of the Friulian area, but on the comparison between two Friulian communitates with an uncertain statute – Cividale and Gemona – with the aim of investigating this border area in a chronological period that is little considered: the fifteenth century. The essay begins with an overview of the 15th-century Friulian context and then focuses attention on specific realities, with a careful comparison of the peculiarities of the different centres, focusing on the relationship between onomastic cultures and local elite dynamics in the two communities. By reconstructing certain onomastic trends within the two communitates, a number of aspects emerge: the plurality and historical depth of the changes and cultural features present in the community spaces of 15th-century Friuli, at the beginning of Venetian rule over the region.