Between Families and Institutions. Zadar’s Notaries as Intermediaries between Church and Society in the mid-Sixteenth Century Adriatic

Abstract

This essay examines the roles of notaries as intermediaries between the ecclesiastical and temporal spheres in Zadar, then the capital of Venice’s Adriatic possessions. My focus is on the economic and social relationships between notaries and urban society during the middle of the century. The essay’s main emphasis is not on the city’s archbishops, exclusively Venetian patricians as they were, but instead on notaries and their ecclesiastical customers. By utilising the rich archival holdings of the Croatian State Archives in Zadar, I investigate the interactions of members of the cathedral chapter and examine their membership status, economic activities, and their formal and informal processes of exchange, as well as various linkages between these functionaries and the city’s inhabitants.