From butchers’ shops to dominatus. Upward social mobility and documentary culture of the Porcellaga family of Brescia between the Fourteenth and early Fifteenth centuries

Abstract

In many areas of eastern Lombardy, the 14th century turmoil gave birth in local economy to deep reconversion processes, which subsequently translated into social-ascent opportunities for those economical operators who were able to fully understand the specific conjuncture that had arisen. This essay, following the recent papers conducted about the region of Bergamo, aims to explore the theme from the perspective of the documentary culture of those operators, through the case-study of the private register belonged to de Porzelagis, a family of Brescia later known as Porcellaga. Written in two distinct redactional phases in the last decades of the Fourteenth century, the registro Porcellaga provides us with a diachronic perspective over dynamics which enabled in a short time this foreign group to integrate into civic political life, until the achievement of seigneurial prerogatives, finally formalized by three different investitures. The second aim of this paper is thus specifically to investigate the distinctive features of the lordship exercised by the de Porzelagis family over the rural village of Roncadelle: vertical and horizontal, matrimonial and patron-client relationships – mingled with skillful capability to manage among factions and lucid intuition to adhere to the political proposal put forward by Gian Galeazzo – allowed the establishment of an original seigneurial power. It will in fact be seen that in the lordship of the Porcellaga bottom-up legitimization coexisted with strict territorial control, and the constant loyalty to the different rulers who followed one another (to the detriment of that towards a specific urban faction) did not exclude a meticulous attention to economic and financial direction of estates.