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“Millain The Great”

Population and the Urban Fabric

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Spanish Milan
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Abstract

Located in the heart of the Po Valley, the city of Milan was the center of one of the most prosperous European regions. Fertile land, advanced agricultural techniques, abundance of natural resources, and a strategic position as a bridge between Italy and northern Europe made Lombardy a highly praised region throughout the continent. Writing on the State of Milan in 1595, Giovanni Botero wondered, “Is there a Duchy more abundant in victuals, grain, rice, livestock, cheeses, wines, and flax, more replete with artificers and traffic, more densely populated, or more conveniently located?“1 The English traveler William Thomas, visiting Lombardy in 1549, wrote that “such another piece of ground for beautiful cities and towns, for goodly rivers, fields, and pastures, and for plenty of flesh, fowl, fresh-water fish, grain, wine, and fruits is not to be found again in all our familiar regions.“2 In 1611, another Englishman, Thomas Coryate, admired the countryside around Milan from the top of the city’s cathedral:

The territory of Lombardy, which I contemplated round about from this tower, was so pleasant an object to mine eyes, being replenished with such unspeakable variety of all things, both for profite and pleasure, that it seemeth to me to be the very Elysian fields, so much decantated and celebrated by the verses of Poets, or the Tempe or Paradise of the world. For it is the fairest plaine, extended about some two hundred miles in length that ever I saw, or ever shall if I should travel over the whole habitable world: insomuch that I said to my selfe that this country was fitter to be an habitation for the immortall Gods then for mortall men.3

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Notes

  1. cited in Domenico Sella, Crisis and Continuity. The Economy of Spanish Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1.

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  22. For 1587, see Relazione di Bonifazio Antelmi in Eugenio Alberi (ed.), Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato (Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 1858), series II, vol. 5, 363.

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  23. This number seems to be confirmed by the data of the Status Animarum (Stefano D’Amico, Le contrade e la città. Sistema produttivo e spazio urbano a Milano fra Cinque e Seicento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994), 40).

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  24. For the eighteenth century, see Mocarelli, Costruire la città, 31, note 2. Beloch’s record showing 8,127 houses in 1626 looks completely unreliable as there was no substantial demographic growth between 1587 and 1626. See J. K. Beloch, Storia della popolazione italiana (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1994), 515.

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  27. Despite the fact that it was probably the worst epidemic in the city’s history, the plague of 1524–25 has not been adequately studied yet. For some information, see Samuel K. Cohn Jr. and Guido Alfani, “Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2007), 177–205.

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  28. Giovanni Marco Burigozzo, “Cronaca di Milano,” Archivio Storico Italiano 1 (1842), 447

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  30. Gasparo Bugati, Historia universale (Venezia: Gabriel Giolito di Ferrari, 1571), 771

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  31. Alfonso Corradi, Annali delle epidemie occorse in Italia dale prime memorie fino al 1850 compilati con varie note e dichiarazioni (Bologna: Forni, 1972, I edition 1865–1892), I, 393.

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  32. Cited in Giorgio Cosmacini, La Ca’ Granda dei Milanesi. Storia dell’ospedale maggiore (Bari-Roma: Laterza, 2002), 63.

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  33. Beatrice Besta, “La popolazione di Milano nel periodo della dominazione spagnola,” in Atti del congresso per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione, Rome, 1931 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1933), I, 593–610; Domenico Sella, “Premesse demografiche ai censimenti austriaci,” in SdM, XII, 459–78. Beloch used a multiplier of seven people per hearth, definitely too elevated considering that in 1576 the average household in Milan counted 4.5 people (D’Amico, Le contrade e la città, 58).

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  34. Giuseppe Alleati, La popolazione di Pavia durante il dominio spagnolo (Milano: Giuffrè, 1957), 13–14.

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  35. In 1540 the birthrate was 44 per 1,000 in a small town like Monza and 68 per 1,000 in the countryside (Carlo Maria Cipolla, “Per la storia della popolazione lombarda nel secolo XVI,” in Studi in onore di Gino Luzzato (Milano, Giuffrè, 1950), II, 144–55).

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  36. See also Vittorio Beonio Brocchieri, “Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo” Famiglie e mestieri nel Ducato di Milano in età spagnola (Milano: Unicopli, 2000), 43.

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  37. On the Status Animarum, see Le fonti della demografia storica in Italia (Rome: CISP, 1972), vol. I, in particular the essays by Athos Bellettini, “Gli ‘Status Animarum’: caratteristiche e problemi di utilizzazione nelle ricerche di demografia storica,” 3–42; Carlo Corsini, “Gli ‘status animarum,’ fonte per le ricerche di demografia storica,” 85–126; Elena Fasano Guarini, “Gli stati d’anime milanesi al tempo di Carlo e Federico Borromeo,” 127–54; and Eugenio Sonnino, “Le registrazioni di stato a Roma tra il 1550 e il 1650: gli stati delle anime e le ‘Listae’ di stati delle anime,” 171–200. See also Gauro Coppola and Casimira Grandi (eds.), La ‘conta delle anime.’ Popolazione e registri parrocchiali: questioni di metodo ed esperienze (Bologna: II Mulino, 1989).

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  38. For the reconstruction of the population based on the Status Animarum, see D’Amico, Le contrade e la città, 48–60. The total figures provided by the ecclesiastical censuses have been rounded up by 10 percent as they did not include the clergy, hospital and shelter inmates, the castle garrison, and the numerous vagrants with no stable residence. As for the size of these groups, secular and regular clergy represented around 7 percent of the population of Bologna, Florence, and Pavia in this period. Athos Bellettini, La popolazione di Bologna dal secolo XV all’unificazione (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961), 56

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  39. Carlo Maria Cipolla, Contro un nemico invisibile. Epidemie e strutture sanitarie nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 56; Aleati, La popolazione di Pavia, 15. The estimate of 14,000, including clergy and hospital inmates, provided by Morigia was probably not far from the truth, considering that in 1587 the Milanese hospital system was taking care of 3,803 people (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Ms. 1426). In the castle the Spanish garrison numbered 1,400 soldiers in 1576 (ACAM (Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile, Milan), Sezione X, S.Fedele, XLVII, 11).

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  40. The number of vagrants in the city is more difficult to ascertain and could vary widely: in 1651 the Magistrato Ordinario estimated the presence of 8,000 local and foreign beggars (Giovanni Liva, “Il controllo e la repressione degli ‘oziosi e vagabondi’: la legislazione in età spagnola,” in Danilo Zardin (ed.), La città e i poveri. Milano e le terre lombarde dal Rinascimento all’età spagnola (Milan: Jaca Book, 1995), 324). We also have to consider a margin of error in the parish censuses, as the priests were not always accurate in reporting every single household in their circumscriptions.

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  41. One of the censuses, reporting 129,220 people, has been studied in Caterina Santoro, “Chiesa, luoghi pii e popolazione a Milano sulla fine del ‘500,” in Studi in onore di Carlo Castiglione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1957), 781–7. The other, which counts 134,723 people, is contained in an historical description of the city (BAM, Ms. A 202 suss).

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  42. Giovanni Liva, “Il controllo e la repressione degli ‘oziosi e vagabondi’: la legislazione in età spagnola,” in Danilo Zardin (ed.), La città e i poveri. Milano e le terre lombarde dal Rinascimento all’età spagnola (Milan: Jaca Book, 1995), 308.

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  43. See D’Amico, Le contrade e la città, 51. Bologna, between 1587 and 1595, lost 18 percent of its population; in 1591, in Arezzo, mortality almost quadrupled (Bellettini, La popolazione di Bologna, 39–40; and Lorenzo Del Panta, Le epidemie nella storia demografica italiana (secoli XIV–XIX), (Torino: UTET, 1986), 148–9).

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  44. For the effccts of the famine on the countryside of the State of Milan, see Domenico Sella, “Coping with Famine: The Changing Demography of an Italian Village in the 1590s,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 185–97.

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  45. Cited in Massimo Livi Bacci, La société italienne devant les crises de mortalité (Firenze: Dipartimento di Statistica, 1978), 43.

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  46. According to contemporary chroniclers, during the plague of 1656 in Naples, more than 60,000 people left the city (Claudia Petraccone, Napoli dal ‘500 all’800. Problemi di storia demografica e sociale (Napoli: Guida, 1974), 42).

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  47. Francesco Novati, “Milano prima e dopo la peste del 1630 secondo nuove testimonianze,” ASL 38 (1912), 328.

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  48. For 1688, Ferrario reports a total of 125,829 people including the clergy (Giuseppe Ferrario, Statistica medico-economica di Milano dal secolo XV fino ai nostrigiorni (Milano: Bernardoni, 1840–50), II, 374–8). For 1715, we have a census, limited to the parishes within the city walls, that reports a population of 111,155. If we add the population of the parishes of the Corpi Santi, which in 1610 hosted around 8,500 people, the secular clergy and the monks and the nuns hosted in the city’s 92 monasteries, and the population of the hospitals, we reach a total between 130,000 and 135,000 (BAM, Ms, H114 suss).

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  50. for Lyon and Madrid, see Olivier Zeller, Les recensements Lyonnais de 1597 et 1636. Démographie historique etgéographie sociale (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983), 148.

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  52. In Venice in the sixteenth century, more than 40 percent of popular dwellings were composed of two-three rooms (Isabella Palumbo Fossati, “L’interno della casa dell’artigiano e dell’artista nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” Studi Veneziani 8 (1984), 120).

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  53. A typical case of such a dwelling in Milan is the house of the infamous barber Giacomo Mora, executed as plague-spreader in 1630: Mora had at his disposal a workshop, a room above it, and a cellar (Giuseppe Farinelli and Ermanno Paccagnini, Processo agli untori. Milano 1630: cronaca e atti giudiziari (Milano: Garzanti, 1988), 207).

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  73. The concentration of single trades in specific streets seems to date back to the late middle ages or the beginning of the early modern period. It definitely occurred after the plague of 1348 that revolutionized the structure of inedieval cities putting an end to a great freedom of choice in the location of professional settlements (Antonio Ivan Pini, “La ripartizione degli artigiani a Bologna nel 1294: un esempio di demografia sociale,” in Artigiani e salariati, Il mondo del lavoro nell’Italia dei secoli XII–XV (Pistoia: Centro Italiano di Studi di Storia e Arte, 1984)).

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  74. In the sixteenth century the process of concentration of certain trades was already common in many urban contexts. For the case of Florence, see Pietro Battara, “Botteghe e pigioni nella Firenze del ‘500,” Archivio Storico Italiano 116 (1958), 11–13.

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  76. In Milan the concentration of some trades in specific areas, and in some cases, parishes, was already clear in the middle of the fifteenth century (Maria Paola Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti. Organizzazione del lavoro e conflitti sociali nella Milano sforzesca (1450–1476) (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1996), 10–11).

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  80. The concentration in the city center of the most specialized and less common crafts and a widespread presence in the urban fabric of the more numerous and socially useful professions (bakers, tailors, shoemaker, notary) seems to be the norm in preindustrial cities. For the cases of Bologna and Lyon, see Fabio Giusberti, “Le botteghe in una città pre-industriale. Un paesaggio regolato,” in Mercati e consumi: organizzazione e qualificazione del commercio in Italia dal XII al XX secolo (Bologna, 1984); Zeller, Les recensements Lyonnais, 185. However also the more common activities tend to gather in the center: if we find at least a shoemaker in every parish, in 1610 there was a unique settlement in St. Raffaele, just north of the Duomo, with 79 shoemakers, shoe-workers, and shoe-repairers (ACAM, Duplicati e Status Animarum, 64).

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  88. Also in Paris, at the end of the sixteenth century the noble hotels tended to be located in the peripheral areas (Robert Descimon, “Paris on the Eve of Saint Bartholomew: Taxation, Privilege and Social Geography,” in Philip Benedict (ed.), Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 93.

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  90. The concentration of poor households in the alleys seems to have characterized many preindustrial cities (Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society. A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 121

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© 2012 Stefano D’Amico

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D’Amico, S. (2012). “Millain The Great”. In: Spanish Milan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309372_2

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