Download PDF | Elena Bellomo - The Templar Order in North-west Italy, (1142-c.1330) (The Medieval Mediterranean) (2008).
479 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have given me support and advice in the course of preparing this book for publication and it is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge their help. I owe the most to Giorgio Picasso, my supervisor in the doctorate of which this publication is the result.
I would also like to thank all the other scholars from the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan who were on the doctorate scientific committee, and the members of the examining committee, Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, Hubert Houben and Giovanna Petti Balbi. I also had the occasion to broaden and extend the scope of this work thanks to the research conducted in my post-doctoral studies at the Universita di Padova, and for this I must thank Antonio Rigon, my supervisor at that time.
My greatest debt and deepest gratitude are also owed to Valeria Polonio, who has been a continuous source of precious suggestions and diligently followed my work.
I have also benefited greatly from numerous correspondence, conversations and encouragements from a number of scholars. Steven Epstein kindly examined the results of my research in Liguria. Essential information for my work were provided by Giuliana Albini, Annalisa Albuzzi, Gabriele Archetti, Barbara Bombi, Jochen Burgtorf, Maria Teresa Brolis, Marisa Camoriano, Elisabetta Canobbio, Renzo Caravita, Giovanni Coccoluto, Primo Giovanni Embriaco, Elisabetta Filippini, Luca Fois, Simona Gavinelli, Maria Laura Mazzetti, Luca Patria, Romeo Pavoni, Antonio Placanica, Anna Riva, Mariaclara Rossi, Aldo Settia, Ivo Musajo Somma, Fabrizio Spegis, Miriam Tessera, Xenio Toscani and Giulietta Voltolina.
Giuseppe Ligato pointed out useful references on several occasions. Marco Meschini kindly drew the map of the Templar houses in North-west Italy. I would like to express my gratitude to Damien Carraz, Simonetta Cerrini, Cristina Dondi, Alan Forey, Zsolt Hunyadi, and Anthony Luttrell for their invaluable advice. Samantha Kelly and Helen Nicholson also made useful suggestions about the translation of this work into English.
Barbara Frale, Elisabetta Girardi, Cristian Guzzo, Lorenzo Tacchella and Francesco ‘Tommasi provided me with advance information on their work that was being published. Paola Guglielmotti kindly gave me useful hints and ideas in the analysis of some documents.
The research on which this book is based was carried out in several archives and libraries. I am greatly indebted to the following institutions for providing me photographic prints and for granting me the permission to publish unedited sources: the Archivi di Stato in Bergamo, Brescia, Genoa, Milan, Modena, Parma, Pavia, Piacenza and Turin, the Archivio Storico della Diocesi di Ivrea, the Archivio Vescovile in Pavia, the Archivio del Capitolo cattedrale in Piacenza, the Archivio Storico del Comune in Moncalieri, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, the Biblioteca Regia in Turin, the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi in Florence, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, and the Biblioteche ‘Angelo Mai’, Queriniana, Marciana and Vaticana.
I am most grateful to the staff of these libraries and archives and, in particular, I would like to thank all at the Sala di Consultazione of the Universita Cattolica in Milan. Finally, Robert Elliot, Johanna Wagner Rossi, Marcella Mulder, Alexia Grosjean and Julian Deahl have also been enormously helpful in translating and editing this work.
Family and best friends often come last in acknowledgements but this does not mean that they matter the least. Cristina encouraged me constantly with her friendship and enthusiasm. An especial debt of gratitude needs to be expressed to Andrea for the patient and affectionate way he has followed my work. My family also supported me over these years of long and often difficult research. ‘To my Mother in particular I offer my heartfelt gratitude for her encouragement and assistance.
INTRODUCTION
“Gli studi sugli ordini militari durante il basso medioevo hanno continuato ad essere largamente trascurati in Italia (...). Per il Tempio, a parte 1 recenti lavori di Tommasi, c’é poco di valore scientifico, anche se esiste una letteratura di carattere esoterico o scandalistico.”! ‘This was how Anthony Luttrell described the state of research into Military Orders in Italy in 1987.
He later added that “the templansti are apt to turn local traditions into facts, to misinterpret toponyms such as “Tempio’ and ‘Magione’, and mistakenly to attribute Templar origins to Hospitaller houses”.?
Despite a certain revival of interest in the subject and a number of important research projects,’ the presence of Military Orders in Italy is still a marginal area of investigation in the field of mediaeval studies. People dealing with this topic still find themselves faced with a very uneven bibliography, which includes recent, reliable works in line with current historical research methods, plausible but very dated studies, and contributions made by amateurs with lots of enthusiasm but not the slightest trace of scientific rigour.
And this is without considering the publications of a more or less marked masonic or esoteric nature which have nothing whatsoever to do with the academic discipline of history. The lack of accurate synthesis studies is the necessary consequence of this state of local historiography.* ‘There are, in fact, no general treatises on the ‘Templar presence in North-west Italy, apart from a few general accounts on Piedmont, which are, though, often superficial and not very reliable.’
The lack of a solid set of studies in this field is also a direct consequence of the not very encouraging state of the sources. Because of the gradual dispersal of the records, studies into the Temple involve lengthy archival searches that often fail to come up with the hoped-for results. After 1312 the documents from the Templar houses were probably only partially transferred to the archives of the Hospital.
In the inquisitorial administration period, during the trial, some of the Templar settlements were ransacked and destroyed and the stored records probably met the same fate. Moreover, Hospitaller archives have been even further fragmented in modern times, with the oldest documents either being lost or gradually moved to different storage places.®
In the area in question, the only case of mediaeval Templar and Hospitaller records being held in a single archival collection is that of the Commandery of Milan. As for most of the other Hospitaller collections of sources, the material held in the Archivi di Stato is almost exclusively modern.’ Therefore, in order to trace the records of the Templar houses in North-west Italy and other mentions of the Temple, it has been necessary to sift through material containing documents issued both before and shortly after the disappearance of the Order.
The existence of voluminous classified sections of unpublished documents (such as the one in the Biblioteca Civica ‘Angelo Mar in Bergamo) and published collections of documentary sources (such as the ‘Biblioteca della Societa Storica Subalpina’) have speeded up the study of the records and facilitated the identification of passing references to a ‘Templar presence, such as, quite simply, their mentions in lists of adjoming properties. However, given the vast quantity of sources from this period it was thought best to conduct the research along certain clearly defined lines.
Useful pointers in the search for new material have been found in already published mediaeval documents. Mentions of economic relations between the Temple and a number of local institutions have been used to trace records of transactions with the Military Order amongst those institutions’ documents. This was the case in Milan, for example, where the Templars had economic relations with the Humiliati of the Brera house, and a document concerning the Milanese ‘Templar convent is kept along with the Humiliati records.°
Unfortunately, though, these pointers have not always led to finding the corresponding material. Searches of this kind were made in Cremona and Piacenza, based on data found in the inventories of Templar estates drawn up during the trial, but no results were obtained.!°
Indications given by modern or contemporary local scholars have been an important starting point. In some cases it has also been possible to reconstruct the series of events in the gradual dispersal of the Hospitaller records. The study of material accumulated in the archives of noble families that had particular links to the Knights of St. John has resulted in the tracing of some of the Templar documents. A good example of this kind of search is the case of the Order’s house in Brescia, one of the most well-documented in terms of unpublished documentary material.
On going through the nineteenth-century works of some local scholars, it became apparent that one of these, Federico Odorici, had been in possession of deeds regarding the ‘Templar house in the city. A study of Odorici’s documentation led to the discovery of numerous documents on the Templar mansio of Santa Maria. These are now held in the Archivio di Stato in Brescia, sezione Archivio Civico Bresciano, fondo Codice diplomatico bresciano.
Odorici had collected them when building up his collection of Brescia sources, a publication that was to contain the more significant documents from local records, and then left them out. This research into the Templar house of Brescia also led to the discovery of a clear link between the convent, which had long since become a Hospitaller house, and the Averoldis, a local noble lineage, and a search through the family records brought to light a number of documents with references to Santa Maria del Tempio. Finally, a brief acknowledgement in Brescia ecclesiastical records led to the finding of two unpublished wills in which the Temple was mentioned.!
Unfortunately, nothing resulted from the search in the archives of the Piedmontese Ponziglione family. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two members of this family, Amedeo and Luigi, published a number of previously unknown documents on the Temple in the Savoy kingdom. Some of the documents selected or transcribed by the Ponzigliones were subsequently republished, whereas others have never been traced, and finding them could have been useful in dispelling suspicions that they may have been forgeries.
The doubts about their authenticity stem from the fact that Amedeo Ponziglione came into contact with a certain Francesco Giuseppe Meyranesio, now known to have dealt in forgeries.'? In his essay on the Templars Ponziglione states that he obtained two documents from Meyranesio on the Templar house of Mondovi." In his transcription of the first document there are many omissions. An analysis of the text, however, leads one to the conclusion that the charter is a forgery. According to the document in 1178 Guglielmo di Morozzo bequeathed a house and his possessions in Vico ad opus militie temph Domim Nostri Jesu Christi quod est trans mare. The donation was apparently connected to the establishment of a hospital in dicto loco Vico cum jornatis XX terre aratorie in Bredulo prope castrum vetus et X in Caraxonio."*
There are several anomalies in the document: the mention of a son of the donor whose name began with W, whereas none of Guglielmo’s known heirs had a name beginning with this letter, a reference to the donor having property i Caraxono, where, as far as we know, the family had no possessions, a reference to the old castle in Bredulo, a place where there was no such building (only Morozzo had a castle, from which Guglielmo took his cognomen “de veteri castello”) and, above all, the mention of Anselmo Brusaporcello, who had actually died five years before the document was written.!° All of these elements, together with other smaller inaccuracies,'®
lead us to the conclusion that the charter was a Meyranesio forgery. Also, it should be noted that Meyranesio forged several other documents on the subject of Mondovi.'? This should make us even more wary of the second document cited by Ponziglione, yet again obtained from Meyranesio, a deed of 1216 supposedly providing further evidence of the presence of ‘Templars in Mondovi."
The suspicion of forgery extends to other references made by Ponziglione, who confirms that he received “much other news about the Templars of Piedmont” from Meyranesio.'® He also refers to another known Meyranesio forgery, the document on the dividing up of marquis Bonifacio del Vasto’s inheritance amongst his children, as authentic.2° According to the forgery this deed, issued in 1142, was transcribed, presumably in the following century, at the request of marquis Enrico di Ponzone, a Templar brother.?!
Two or three Templars bearing this name existed,” but the document is definitely false and one wonders quite simply if Meyranesio had a certain propensity to including ‘Templars in his documents. All in all, therefore, there are good grounds to believe that a number of documents and statements, whilst being accepted in good faith as authentic by Ponziglione, were actually counterfeits.
This is further borne out by the fact that some of them seem to follow a recurrent pattern: the Templars are noted amongst the neighbours of a sold, purchased or exchanged property and a number of Templars appear amongst the witnesses to the deed.?’ The finding of the original documents would have thrown some light on these queries, but unfortunately the records of the Ponziglione family, now held in the Archivio di Stato in Turin, make no mention of the matter.** The existence of houses attested to solely by the Ponzigliones, therefore, is to be considered as dubious.
Another thing to be noted is that documents on the Temple often go missing, perhaps also because of the general aura of mystery that still surrounds the Order. In 1926 Alessandro Colombo studied the deeds concerning the Templar and Hospitaller presence in Milan. Since then two of the documents seen directly by Colombo have disappeared very recently from the Archivio di Stato in Milan, one after being last examined in 1993.”
The almost total dispersal and consequent loss of Templar houses’ archive material has, of course, affected the reconstruction undertaken in this work. There are few surviving documents for this region in comparison with the large number of primary sources available on the Templars in Spain or France.” In even the most well-documented houses of western mediaeval Lombardy there are only about thirty mentions to be found in primary sources and the majority of these are merely generic references to the presence of ‘Templar properties in certain places.
This dearth of information thus prevents an in-depth investigation into a variety of issues such as, for instance, the hierarchical structure, the cure of souls, and the management of property. Even the choice of the geographical area of research was dictated by the need to carry out long archival searches. The region studied corresponds approximately to the current Valle d’Aosta, Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria. It was decided to include the area of Piacenza because of its close links with the Lombard lands and the leading role that the local Templar house had in north-western Italian settlements.’
This geographical area does not coincide with the Order’s entire administrative district, known as Lombardia, which, since the twelfth century at least, covered the whole of northern Italy, mcluding Emilia and Romagna.” Given the impossibility of carrying out archival searches over such a vast area during my doctoral studies, it was decided to concentrate on the western part of the district which, especially in Piedmont, has a large number of published documentary sources. The scope of this study is the period between the first citation of the Temple in the area in 1142 and the last references in the 1330s to houses and property once belonging to the Order.
However, in a number of cases, the need to refer to documents produced long after the dissolution of the Temple, often taken from cabrei of the Knights of St. John from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries,”? has made it necessary to go beyond the date specified in the title.
Going through the documents has made it possible to produce the first census of Templar houses in North-west Italy. Using the records found, the Templar presence was examined first of all at local level, reconstructing the topographical location and the activities of the individual settlements. The results of this initial study form the second part of the book, consisting of outlines of the Templar houses in North-west Italy. The study of the Temple’s role and position in different local con-texts is intended to provide both further knowledge of houses that have already been studied as well as an initial picture of those that have not.
Another aim of the documentary research into the published repertories and local archives was to seek out the information necessary to make a number of general points on the presence of the Order in North-west Italy. These points have been grouped in the initial part of the work.®® With the help of already collected and analysed material it has been possible to trace the Order’s lines of development in the area in question, evaluating not only its relations with the different power groups in the zone but also the way that events in the Latin East influenced the houses in North-west Italy. From this point of view, the work intends to make up for a general shortcoming in the few studies on the Temple in this area which have tended to neglect this poorlydocumented but, nonetheless, existing aspect.
The results of this work, which have brought to light numerous unpublished documents and traced previously unknown houses, cannot, however, be taken as conclusive as far as a census of ‘Templar houses is concerned. It has not actually been possible to go through all the unpublished sources from either before or immediately after the dissolution of the Temple. The finding of new documents on the trial, with their precious inventories of houses and possessions, may also be of significance in tracing other minor Templar settlements (to name but one: the highly important mventory of the Order’s Ligurian possessions, which was taken directly to Avignon by the Inquisitor for the March of Genoa and of which no trace remains).*!
However, it is unlikely that the tracing of new houses and charters will considerably alter the general features of the Templar presence in the area as outlined in this work. ‘Thus, by providing the first picture of the Temple presence at a focal point of the mediaeval Mediterranean, such as North-west Italy, this research hopes to contribute to the knowledge of the Temple and to be a useful aid to students of Military Orders.
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