Abstract
This chapter pieces together the autobiographical fragments and information about the bandits’ networks in order to study, from a prosopographical perspective, problems that have been highlighted in previous chapters. The broad context in which the bandits operated was constituted by the interweaving of kin dynamics and power dynamics, situated between local history and high politics. The role of bandits in local communities can be explained with reference to feuds between kin groups, in the context of competition for power and local resources, and of illegal activity related to circuits of exchange. The confessions made to commissioners recount individual stories that include elements of all these overlapping realities. But there is also another aspect that comes to the fore in some of the depositions, and in the bandits’ behavior. Organization into companies, a high level of mobility, a skilled use of weaponry, and a vast network of supra-local and diversified relationships permitted the bandits to carve out an autonomous space with respect to the cohesive structures of kinship and village.
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Notes
- 1.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1429. The commissioner was supposed to see to it that “the men leave their weapons and return to their farming and their business.”
- 4.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 507.
- 5.
Ibid., filza 508.
- 6.
Ibid., filza 512.
- 7.
For example, in the official letter sent to Pietro Maria de Ferrari on 15 July 1578 in ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1429.
- 8.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224. The kin groups were as follows: Fopiano, Leverone, Consegliero, De Martino, Boitano, Scarlasato, Casazza, Capellino, Barbazelata, Porcella, Garbarino, Pezzolo, Malatesta, Crovo, and Barbero. Five bandits from the Fontanabuona were also included in a general list of fifteen “capital bandits” that was published in Genoa and posted in all of the Levante communities. On the Fontanabuona bandits in the late sixteenth century, see G. Pessagno, I Banditi della Fontanabuona 1578–1581 (Chiavari, 1939).
- 9.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 507.
- 10.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filze 103, 1226.
- 11.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1451, “Crida per conto de banditi” (year 1581).
- 12.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 512.
- 13.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 103. The “enormous impostures and false accusations” were incentivized by the system of rewards. The Genoese dealt with this problem repeatedly in the seventeenth century, but recognized that “no one wants to become their [the bandits’] enemies, or to alienate their relatives or supporters, or be marked as infamous … unless such information is almost violently extracted through the enticement of the reward” (Biblioteca Civica Berio, Genoa, Misc. Gen. B.206.42, Repubblica di Genova. Legge che stabilisce premi contro i banditi, 13 August 1652).
- 14.
This concept is used by R. Boudon to describe the problem of analyzing social change in Effets pervers et ordre social (Paris, 1977).
- 15.
Favorable witnesses were used not so much for their depositions on the facts as to show the support enjoyed by the party in question and to demonstrate the “good reputation” of the accused. On the other side, the number of hostile witnesses and “public rumor” had the juridical value of proofs. For different examples of utilizing criminal records, see the special issue of Quaderni storici 66 (1987) dedicated to Fonti criminali e storia sociale.
- 16.
The commissioners were lodged at Pianezza in the “palace” of Galeazzo Arata. The bandits were interrogated and tortured in the attic of the same “palace.” To assist him in torture procedures and with capital punishments, Pietro Maria de Ferrari employed a Moorish slave named Alí. On the role of the Arata and the significance of these events for the power balance among the valley’s kin groups see the next chapter.
- 17.
See the summary-discussion by L. Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1980,” Past and Present 101 (1983): 22–33.
- 18.
Here I have in mind the observation of Ludwig Wittgenstein on historical explanation as “one way of gathering data” ( Wittgenstein, Note sul ‘Ramo d’oro’ di Frazer, 28).
- 19.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223.
- 20.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 515. An anonymous denunciation outlining what happened on 4 April 1580 accused the podestà of having tolerated the presence of the bandits when he came back to the town at around midnight.
- 21.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 514. A list of bandits from the area between the Val Bisagno and Chiavari, drawn up by the commissioner Ambrosio Lomellino during the same year, included 125 names, a third of which were from the Fontanabuona.
- 22.
In 1584 the Doria “princess” justified her refusal to issue permission to Pietro Maria de Ferrari to pursue bandits in the territory of Torriglia by claiming that “all of the bandits should be pursued, and not only those of one faction” (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224).
- 23.
The interrogation of Arghenta, from which all of the following citations were taken, is in ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224.
- 24.
Brawls and violence were quite regular occurrences during religious festivals, dances, and tavern banquets. Such fights were unexceptional, not the result of anomie, and were almost always tolerated by local authorities. Custom and the general excited state of the participants secured for them a kind of impunity. Judges tried to prevent more serious disorders by prohibiting the carrying of weapons—which in everyday life were tolerated or even authorized for personal defense, and not only for socially privileged groups—on feast days. But this effort ran up against such things as the customary practice of accompanying the canopy or the statue of the saint in processions with arquebus salvos. Still, toward the end of the sixteenth century, prohibitions were increasingly frequent and rigorous, and were extended to dances, games, ambulatory wine sellers, and musette (musicians). The proclamations issued by the Republic were perfectly harmonious with the prescriptions of the diocesan synod of 1588 which, in a chapter entitled “On the reverence to be exercised in churches and sacred places” that referred generally to the bull of Pius V, prohibited “in particular dances and taverns that are closer than thirty paces (of five palms each) to a church” (ASG, Archivio Segreto-Propositionum, busta 1027). The main target of the proclamations were taverns, the center points of sociability and of many local and supra-local economic exchanges. The official role assumed by religious values tied the “public good” to the “preservation of houses and families,” as can be seen in the proclamation issued by the captain of Chiavari in 1579, in which the prohibition against swearing and frequenting taverns features alongside those against playing dice, keeping arquebuses at home, “carrying standards,” and “interacting with bandits” (ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 513).
- 25.
In the first half of the seventeenth century there were twenty tavern-keepers from the Fontanabuona who paid the galley tax, but the number of those who occasionally ran their businesses without licenses, such as during the summer or in their own houses, rose to at least forty. Between 1595 and 1630 there were about twenty tavern-keepers from the valley, including three women, who were involved in criminal cases in Rapallo. The lists of the tavern-keepers who paid the galley tax are in ASCR, Criminalium, filza 35.
- 26.
Beyond the members of the company, Arghenta named about twenty inhabitants of the valley, both men and women.
- 27.
I have not been able to reconstruct with greater precision the ties of Arghenta with her kin group of origin, but it is clear that the feud between the Leverone and the Fopiano and the conflict between the two companies led by these kin groups (in early March 1579 they engaged in a night battle near the village of Castello—see ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 513) forced the woman to choose sides. Arghenta must have had difficult relations with the relatives of her husband: three first cousins of Nicolino “enjoyed” his property after he and his father Lorenzo were banned (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1226).
- 28.
The nobles Della Torre from Calvari, a village on the border between the captainate of Chiavari and the podesteria of Rapallo, carried out formal and informal political and judicial functions in the Lavagna Valley and in the chapels of Soglio, Canevale , and Coreglia. But among their “clients” were also the Consegliero and other kin groups from the Fontanabuona. As it will be recalled, Ottaviano had been one of the captains during the civil war. In summer 1578 he and Pasquale Casazza, Carlo Fopiano, Galeazzo Arata and Simone Queirolo had held talks with the commissioner about the conditions necessary to bring peace to the valley. They obtained a “pardon and absolution” for all inhabitants of the Fontanabuona parishes who had “interacted and done business with the bandits” or who had taken part in the “skirmishes.” In part, the agreement was reached in order to avoid “creating an infinite number of bandits.” The official Rapallo residence of Pietro Maria de Ferrari was the house of messire Antonio della Torre (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224).
- 29.
G. Duby , “Dans la France du Nord-Ouest au XIIe siècle: les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique,” Annales ESC 19 (1964): 835–46 (Italian trans. in id., Terra e nobiltà nel medio evo [Turin, 1971], 135–48). Younger sons, gathered together in “companies,” were key element of feudal aggressiveness; see also N. Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 50 (1971) (Italian trans. in id., Le culture del popolo [Turin, 1980], 130–74).
- 30.
There was a customary practice of planting foliage in front of the door of adolescent girls’ houses (or a smelly bush if the girl’s morality was questionable). In the Fontanabuona, the entire group of neighbors participated in this ritual. In one case, at Lorsica, they planted a tree “whose nickname was the Baciatroia [kiss the whore]” in front of the house of a young widow (ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 32).
- 31.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 1.
- 32.
The security guarantee for the Fopiano bandits exiled at Savona was underwritten by Galeazzo Arata (ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1437).
- 33.
In February 1579 the Fopiano company was ambushed on the village square of Castello; ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 513.
- 34.
In 1581 the number of Fontanabuona bandits included in the “classifications,” indicating that their capture or killing would earn a reward or the lifting of one’s own status as a bandit, increased to twenty-four (ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1451, “Crida per conto de banditi che si ammazzeranno l’un l’altro”).
- 35.
“The Corsicans were perhaps worse than the bandits,” wrote Ambrosio Lomellino to the Senate, “because they go freely into any house, stealing property where they find it, and they are all dressed like princes. Just as the kingdom of Naples is almost a colony of the Spanish, so it seems to me that the Fontanabuona is a colony of the Corsicans” (ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 515).
- 36.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223.
- 37.
Ibid. Gio Consegliero indicated that Lorenzo was the head of the bandits. Gio was interrogated in Pianezza, “in the room with the chimney of the house of the noble Galeazzo Arata,” on 2 March. He offered an account of the feud between the De Martino and the Barbazelata that had taken shape two years earlier, when Stefano Barbazelata had shot his arquebus at Raffaele de Martino while the latter attended Mass at the church of San Vincenzo in Favale. In other matters, he confirmed what Marcho Repetto had said in his confession.
- 38.
Lombard muleteers used the road that linked the market of Monleone and the pass of the Scoglina, via Favale. The mills were concentrated in the villages of Castagnelo, Acqua, and Follo.
- 39.
Testimony of Nicolino Canessa, a bandit from the Leverone company (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223).
- 40.
Maurice Aymard raised the issue of a monetary economy of banditry in his discussion at a conference in Venice in 1983; see Bande armate, banditi, banditismo, 505–11.
- 41.
ASG, Archivio Segreto-Secretorum, filza 1557.
- 42.
Testimony of Nicola Cella, capital bandit of the Leverone company (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1226). A portion of the stolen merchandise was sold in Lodi and Pavia, according to the testimony of Cella and of Arghenta Consegliero.
- 43.
In Chap. 2 I drew attention to the onomastic ties between the kin groups of the Fontanabuona and the villages of the Trebbia Valley, and to the constant interactions between kin groups’ various territorial segments. Other examples include the villages of Connio, Prianegra, Foppiano, Donderi, and Barbieri.
- 44.
Bits of evidence regarding these relations between emigrant “kin” can be found in the interrogation records of Stefano Cassina, a bandit from the parish of Dezerega who had joined the Leverone company in 1618 (ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 9; in this connection see my “Parentele, fazioni e banditi,” 270–71). There is some indication of a seasonal or permanent emigration to the Po Valley during the sixteenth century. Marco Epis has indicated to me the presence of co-resident and cohesive emigrant groups from the Fontanabuona and the Trebbia Valley in Lodi during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- 45.
See Sbriccoli, “Brigantaggio e ribellismi nella criminalistica,” 483.
- 46.
See the cases that I reconstructed in Chap. 2. Information on the bandits from the Levante communities and their kin was collected by the commissioners Gio Batta Adorno and Giulio Cesare Lomellino in 1617–20; see ASG, Rota Criminale, filze 1236–37.
- 47.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223, “Inventarium de bonis” dated March 1580. This document was drawn up by the pretore of Rapallo according to the order of the commissioner Gio Batta di Negro. Property in the house of the fugitive Stefano Leverone included “four caratelli and one barrel of wine; a small barrel; a barrel of oil; a funnel; two quarter-barrels; a ladle; a wooden bucket and a copper one; an oil pump and a water pump; a small barrel of oil; a barrel of salted fish; a piece of salted meat; half a mina of flour; a balance with weights; a copper plate; a copper basin; a copper pot and two iron chains; a pan for cooking fish; a pan for cooking chestnuts; a mortar; a wooden table; another table; a table with twenty leftover pieces of bread; four chairs; four stools; three wooden stools; five benches; two chests with cupboards; a camp bed; a big sack; a quilt; a blanket; two arbaxo blankets; two heavy wool coverings; a pair of black trousers; two pairs of blue undergarments, one pair of red, and one pair of yellow; a woven jacket; a woman’s taffeta hat; two women’s collars; two iron boxes; a collar of black leather; a pin; a candelabrum; a mirror; an axe and a hatchet; various bundles of wood; a pitchfork; a dagger; a pike.” Stefano was thirty-two years old.
- 48.
I use this expression in a slightly different sense than did Franklin Mendels, who first proposed the concept and tied it to the phase that preceded industrialization (F. Mendels , “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 [1972]: 241–61). The debate and empirical checks that followed were focused above all on the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
- 49.
Archivio Storico del Comune di Genova, Magistrato della Seta-Pratiche diverse, filza 600. Young people worked as apprentices both in Genoa and in the valley, as one can see from acordacio famuli contracts drawn up by local notaries.
- 50.
See G. Sivori, “Il tramonto dell’industria serica genovese,” Rivista Storica Italiana 84, 4 (1972): 893–944.
- 51.
G. Ghiara, “Filatoio e filatori a Genova tra XV e XVIII secolo,” Quaderni storici 52 (1983): 135–65. The cases before the Silk Magistracy have been studied by C. Buffoni, “Il problema del controllo del lavoro nell’industria della seta a Genova tra 1500 e 1600,” (MA thesis, University of Genoa, 1973–74).
- 52.
C. Poni , “Misura contro misura: come il filo di seta divenne sottile e rotondo,” Quaderni storici 47 (1981): 385–419.
- 53.
See “Maestri e garzoni nella società genovese tra XV e XVI secolo,” in Quaderni, Centro di studi sulla storia della tecnica del CNR, vols. I-IV (Genoa, 1979–82); G. Casarino, “Note sul mondo artigiano genovese tra i secoli XV e XVI,” in La storia dei Genovesi, vol. 6 (Genoa, 1987), 253–79.
- 54.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1445.
- 55.
Ghiara, “Filatoio e filatori,” 145–46.
- 56.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1224.
- 57.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 508.
- 58.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223. The interrogations of the De Martino were held in Pianezza, in the house of Galeazzo Arata, in February-March 1580. The four De Martino were close kin, Bernardo and Martino being brothers.
- 59.
“Since he was a bandit,” declared Battolino’s father, “I am the one who had the documents notarized by Gio Batta Arata.”
- 60.
Precisely in order to smooth over these differences Bartolomeo and Chiechino Crovo had gone to Genoa in 1578 to visit Stefano de Martino. But in 1580 the De Martino and the Crovo “held each other to be capital enemies and they are held as such in the Fontanabuona and everyone who knows them considers them in this way” (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223).
- 61.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1434.
- 62.
ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223 and ibid., Senato-Litterarum, filza 515.
- 63.
In the Mediterranean world the case of nineteenth-century Greece offers a good example of the intimate ties between bandits and kin groups; see T. Gallant, “Greek Bandits: Lone Wolves or a Family Affair?” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1 (1988) and J.S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause. Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece 1821–1912 (Oxford, 1988).
- 64.
ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 9.
- 65.
In 1621 the bandits were staying in the rectory of the church (ASCR, Criminalium, filza 19). For a comparable episode from 1608, see ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 1.
- 66.
In 1649 Michele, Bernardo, and Ambrosio de Martino had just returned to Lorsica from Genoa, where they had been working as velvet weavers and silk dyers, when they were accused of “having traded a lot of silk and other things with the bandits” (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1116).
- 67.
In 1669 the commissioner-general Ambrogio di Negro would publish a proclamation that prohibited the wearing of “large hats that one could pull down to cover one’s face” (ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1256). I have reconstructed the behaviors and attitudes of bandits on the basis of the criminal documentation; the following examples are taken from ASG, Rota Criminale, filza 1223–24, 1226.
- 68.
In May 1598 the captain of Chiavari wrote that “the time will soon come when it will be more difficult to capture them, because the chestnuts are starting to produce leaves, and they will soon be able to find things to eat in the countryside.” The leafy woods offered a safe refuge for the bandits for many months during the year (ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 571).
- 69.
A small image (“a flyer that is presumably used by the guilty to avoid confessing their crimes”) depicting in ink the cross and the words “heli heli lamas tadabani” (reproducing the cry of Jesus on the cross just before he died—“Elí, Elí lamà sabachthaní?”) is preserved in the Archivio Storico del Comune di Rapallo, attached to the trial records of 1628 against Tomaso Moltedo (ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 23). Tomaso was an extraordinary bandit figure, who had been arrested by the police chief of Rapallo, where he lived with his second wife and a son and worked as a blacksmith. He had been accused of numerous robberies in the shops and the villages near the town, and of the murder of Cattarina Noce, who had been drowned in a barrel of oil. The evidence against him was that “he does not work at his profession” and that despite the fact that he barely had 150 lire worth of property, and did not have a “business, active profession, or work dealings,” he “is involved in wholesale trading and spends a lot of money … gambling and eating with his friends.” During his second day in prison he had his wife bring him “the book that he is used to reading in the evening”—the guard brought it to the captain who identified it as “that work by Ariosto” (Orlando Furioso?), and found between its pages the “flyer” described above. Following interrogation and torture, Tomaso confessed that he had stolen seven otri of oil but defended himself by claiming that he had done so on orders from the Arata of the Fontanabuona. Specifically, he accused Aurelio Arata, son of the notary Gio Batta from Pianezza . He claimed to be a skilled gambler: “I usually play primera, frosada, verdina, three sevens [all card games], and rigorello even though that is a cheese wheel game” (a game involving the rolling of a mold for a round of cheese toward a specific point). He boasted of having worked for and earned the trust of Lady Giovanna Lomellini, a Genoese noblewoman, who had credited him 448 lire for having rebuilt her vegetable patch and the garden of her villa near Rapallo after the nearby creek had overflowed. The trial concluded by condemning Tomaso to be hanged. Aurelio Arata was also questioned but released soon thereafter with a security payment of 1,000 gold scudi.
- 70.
In 1615 a widow from Monti gave to her cousin, who was a bandit, an arquebus with a silver “lock,” so that he could avenge her husband who had been killed in a feud. Benedettina, widow of Pantalino Chichizola, was then accused and tried for having said publicly “that she wanted to dress in red so that she could have her revenge” (ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 6). Evidence of similar interventions in feuds by widows can be found in other trial records. For example, also in 1615, Bernarda Norero, widow of Nicola Canale, accused Gio Carignano before the Rapallo court as follows: “Last night I dreamed that my said husband had come back to life joyously, and then Our Most Holy Lady came too, and told me ‘Bernarda, Gio Carignano is the one who burned your house down and killed your husband’” (ibid.)
- 71.
The concept of “tactical mobility” was used by E.R. Wolf to explain how peasants were recruited into revolutionary movements; see his Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969) (Italian trans. Guerre contadine del XX secolo [Milan, 1971]).
- 72.
For example, in 1608 witnesses against Geronimo Solari, a bandit from the Lavagna Valley who was tied to a company from the Fontanabuona, declared that he “faceva l’arte di Michelasso [was a good-for-nothing] and now runs a tavern and is also a tailor” (ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 3).
- 73.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1527. The bulk of the testimony of Alessandro Arata would be confirmed by another bandit of the Leverone company, Antonio Giudice “the weaver,” in 1581 (ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1457).
- 74.
Some motives of young bandits were probably also to be found in forms of familial and parental organization, matrimonial and inheritance practices, and the management and distribution of kin group resources. These issues could produce “disgust” with one’s father or brothers. It is certain that the behaviors of young people and “sons” were often stigmatized by Genoese authorities: in 1595 the captain of Chiavari negotiated with the older men and fathers of the Fontanabuona to find ways for them to “restrain their sons and grandsons” (ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 563). It would be useful to investigate the role of younger sons, especially in large families. We know for sure that, at least when young men went for long periods as bachelors, waiting for inheritance, and then experiencing an undivided family patrimony, they tended to engage in very risky outside activities, such as smuggling and serving as armed escorts of merchants and muleteers.
- 75.
These bandits were supported by a portion of the townspeople; in fact, they claimed that they had been recruited by Antonio Forno’s numerous enemies in the borgo. Indeed, Antonio had acquired part of the property confiscated from various townspeople by the Adorno faction after the civil war of 1575.
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Raggio, O. (2018). Bandits. In: Feuds and State Formation, 1550–1700. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94643-6_9
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