Age, Marriage, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa (review)

Age, Marriage, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa. By David Rheubottom (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000) 220 pp. $70.00

Ragusa (Dubrovnik) merits attention as a major competitor with Genoa, Venice, and France in the fifteenth-century spice trade, despite its much smaller population (approximately 5,000 in the town itself and 40,000 including its surrounding territories). But Rheubottom's goal is not to integrate a relatively neglected city into the historiography of medieval and Renaissance Europe, although his study does so by showing persuasively how Ragusa fit within the culture and traditions of Mediterranean Europe (given its age at first marriage for women, seventeen years, and for men, thirty-three years).

Rheubottom's goal is to examine the relationship between kinship, marriage, and political change. Ragusa was an ideal case study because of its rich archival sources and relatively small size, which enabled a study of Ragusa's elite over a fifty-year period, from 1440 to 1490, thus avoiding the limitations of the "ethnographic present."

For historians, Rheubottom's book is useful primarily for its careful analysis of kinship structures and their relationship to politics. The fundamental social unit in fifteenth-century Ragusa, like the Italian city-states, was the casata. An entire generation of historians, themselves inspired by the work of anthropologists, has been describing the casata in Italy (especially Florence) as a patrilineal lineage. Rheubottom provides convincing evidence that the casata (in Italy as well as in Ragusa) were not lineages at all, but merely a collection of agnates. In order to qualify as a lineage, a social unit typically had to have the following characteristics: a common ancestor of origin; a corporate organization, functioning as a single legal entity; and, from the perspective of outsiders, all of its members at an equal standing, allowing any one of them to represent the lineage of public functions. In these terms, Ragusan and Italian casate fail to qualify as lineages. Genealogical memory was short, going back at its farthest only four generations in Florence. In Ragusa, parents borrowed names as much from material as from paternal relatives, rather than exclusively from a distant paternal ancestor. Nor did the casate act as corporate entities: Property was not held by the casata as a whole, or by shares according to each member's genealogical position, but by individuals; contracts and pacts signed by certain members of a casata were binding only for the signatories, not for the casata; and casata size and political domination had no clear association. Instead of classic lineage systems, such as those in much of Africa, kinship in Ragusa, and therefore the Mediterranean, was much more loosely based, a collection of agnatic kin who formed ad hoc contractual relations with one another for commercial enterprises, supported by an "ideology" of common loyalty and affection (77).

Less interesting is Rheubottom's analysis of office holding in Ragusa, because he spends much of his time refining and debunking Weber's analysis of modern bureaucracy.¹ Historians are already familiar with Rheubottom's critique, since he borrows from historians (especially Stone) to highlight the importance of studying office holders and their careers rather than the offices themselves.² Some readers may be put off by the dense prose and specialized terminology. It would be unfortunate if readers tired before reaching the book's conclusion, in which the author highlights the importance of collaboration between anthropology and history. His dynamic study of generational cohorts shows how one form of kinship (agnatic relations) influenced political careers over time while another form of kinship (the casata) did not provide the same opportunities for political advancement. Rheubottom thereby provides a richly detailed example of historical processes that move beyond the ethnographic present.