236 paola sacchi and pier paolo viazzo
neat between north-western and eastern countries, Mediterranean Europe remained
a largely uncharted land: Hajnal (1965: 103) could only guess that significant depar-
tures from the north-western European pattern of late and restricted marriage “may
probably be found not only as one proceeds eastward but on the southern edge of
Europe as well.” His surmise was confirmed by a spate of demographic studies of
localities scattered all over south-western Europe which revealed that in the seven-
teenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marriage ages for women had ranged
between 18 and 20, whereas men had tended to get married in their middle-to-late
twenties. In the same years, other researchers exploring the archives of villages in Italy
and southern France discovered for the early modern age high proportions of what
Laslett had classified as “complex” households: either “extended family households”
where a conjugal pair co-resided with one or more relatives other than their offspring,
or “multiple family households,” that comprised all forms of domestic groups which
included two or more conjugal pairs.
Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber’s painstaking analysis of the Tuscan cadaster (catasto)
of 1427, which listed all the members of the 60 000 households under the authority
of the Commune of Florence along with a detailed inventory of their wealth, showed
that nearly 40% of all Tuscan households could be classified as either extended or
multiple, and that in the countryside the proportion of complex households
approached the level of 45% (1978: 482–486). No less significantly, women were very
young when they married, hardly any woman remained permanently celibate, and
especially in towns the age gap between spouses was considerable: on average women
took husbands who were 7–12 years their senior.
These figures raised a crucial problem of interpretation, namely whether the catasto
simply recorded the local variant of a medieval pattern common to the whole of
Europe or was rather evidence of a distinctive pattern of long standing. The residen-
tial arrangements of fifteenth-century Tuscany were clearly a far cry from those pre-
vailing in north-western Europe at a later date, but quite consistent with the outcome
of research on Italian and southern French village populations in the early modern
period. Moreover, marriage ages were close to the ones found later in other parts of
southern Europe. The question was whether the people of Tuscany and their families
were to be seen as medieval or rather as Mediterranean. Smith (1981) emphasized
that his own work on Poll Tax returns from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
strongly suggested that in medieval England households had already been small and
structurally simple, and marriage age for both women and men already late: the con-
trast between northern and southern European patterns was therefore visible well
before the onset of the modern age. This suggested that the structural complexity of
fifteenth-century Tuscan households and the early marriage of women, far from being
representative of a medieval stage in the evolution of the European family, were
functionally interconnected aspects of a very old and distinctive pattern which had
basically persisted in southern Europe up to the nineteenth century. The dominance
and persistence of this pattern had probably been favored by economic factors, which
encouraged both marriage and the formation of large households, but there were
reasons to believe that it was also rooted in cultural traits specific to the Mediterranean
area such as the insistence on the virginity of brides at marriage and more generally
the heavy emphasis placed on family honor—a feature which anthropologists deemed
to have distinguished Mediterranean societies from an early date. Indeed, the