A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter fifteen
A problem of evidenceTackling the questions that are at the core of any comparative study of the family, for
both history and anthropology, such as weighing commonalities against divergences or
evaluating long-term continuities and discontinuities, has proved singularly difficult
for the Mediterranean area. This has partly to do with the availability and characteris-
tics of documentary sources. Family history has relied decisively on the minute quanti-
tative analysis of parish registers and even more of local listings of inhabitants. One
crucial reason why family history and its sister discipline, historical demography, have
been heavily focused on Europe between the mid-sixteenth and the nineteenth century
is the wealth of such sources, especially plentiful in the Catholic countries as a conse-
quence of directives set forth by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Students of the
family on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean are at a serious disad-
vantage, as there are no archives that come close to what is available in most parts of
Europe. To be sure, since the Ottomans were eager to rapidly estimate the amount of
material and human resources in newly-conquered lands, cadastral surveys based on
the household as a statistical unit were carried out in Anatolia, Syria and Egypt already
in the sixteenth century, and in some Balkan regions as early as the fourteenth century,
but there are large gaps over the centuries and information is scanty for small towns,
villages and tribal areas. Comprehensive census counts using the individual as the basic
statistical unit were not conducted by the central Ottoman government until the end
of the nineteenth century. As to the medieval period, the dearth of sources is predictably
severe for both shores, even if some extraordinary documents (such as the 1427
Florentine catasto) do exist; and the more we move back in time the less our chances
of coming across comparable sources, one outstanding exception being some census
returns from Ptolemaic, and especially Roman, Egypt. As a consequence, those histo-
rians of the ancient Mediterranean who have tried to study marriage patterns, household
structures and family relations from a quantitative perspective have mostly been forced
to rely on the evidence of inscriptions.
Family and Household
Paola SaccHi and Pier Paolo Viazzo