The State Archives of Venice (ASV) is the necessary destination for anyone wishing to conduct original research into the history of Venice’s largest and longest-held territorial possession, the island of Crete (Thiriet 1959; Maltezou 1991:17-47; Gasparis 1997; Greene 2000; McKee 2000). Housed within the ASV are the documentary remains of the Cretan chancery, transferred there at the conclusion in 1669 of the long war between Venice and the Ottomans for possession of the island. An incomparably rich fund of documents pertaining to Crete and the Aegean Islands, the archival remains of the Cretan chancery stand apart from the other sections of the ASV and are thus more accessible and comprehensible than are the vastly larger and encompassing archives of the Venetian bureaucracy (Gerland 1899).
After the Venetian government had the Cretan chancery transferred to Venice in 1670, the documents were incorporated into the State Archives (Tiepolo 1973). The contents of the Cretan chancery were then divided into two principal parts. One part consists of the governmental, fiscal, and judicial records, now known collectively as the Archive of the Duke of Candia (ADC). Although the ADC is large, a general rule of thumb to follow is that the later the date, the more material has survived. The thirteenth century, then, is least well represented by the documents and the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries offer abundant sources for study. The incompleteness of the records, however, may not be the result solely of neglect. In those first centuries of Venice’s occupation, record-keeping practices evolved in Crete at the same time that they were evolving in Venice. For instance, oblique and
Random references in court records reveal that the one register of the deliberations of the three advisory councils of Candia, which begins in 1344 and ends in 1363, may have been the only register to have existed.
The other category of documents pertaining to Venetian Crete are the notarial records, which were separated from the ADC and incorporated into the Notarial Archives of the ASV in a section called the Notai di Candia (NDC). The NDC, with its nearly three hundred separate files listed in the ASV’s indices alphabetically according to the names of the notaries, constitutes the largest portion of the surviving Cretan sources. It would be hard to overestimate the value of these records, especially since they have seldom received a systematic treatment. They contain a wealth of information pertaining to the economic and social life of the colony and its inhabitants, not least of which are the Jews of Crete, whose presence and activities in Candia are evident in them (Starr 1942).
Here, too, some cautions about the archive’s integrity are worth mentioning. In comparison with the notarial registers of all notaries who worked in the colony from 1211 to 1669, the NDC is incomplete to a degree that calls for their careful study and well delimited generalizations. First, since only the registers of notaries who worked inside the city walls of Candia have survived, the scholar must bear in mind that there were notaries who lived and worked in the city’s suburbs and the surrounding villages. Therefore, although villagers from the district of Candia often had cause to come to a notary in the city, most of the names in the protocols are those of residents of the city and its suburbs. Moreover, although the colony had notaries who drew up their documents in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, only those notaries who drafted their instruments in Latin have protocols that have survived. Finally, when analysing the notarial registers, it is important to bear in mind the probable proportion of the original chancery that the surviving notarial registers represents. The notarial protocols from approximately half the notaries active in Candia from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries still exist. This does not mean that half the Cretan chancery can be found in the ASV. For each notary with an entire or fragmentary protocol that has survived there must have been several other protocols belonging to that same notary that did not. Thus, scholars working with notarial sources need to bear in mind that only an estimated quarter to a third of the original chancery now rests in the ASV.
The ADC and the NDC will provide much work for decades to come, but both are finite in comparison to the overarching structure of the ASV. At some point, scholars will find it necessary to turn elsewhere for further traces of the colony’s history and other overseas ventures undertaken by Venice and Venetians. New material will have to be sought in the ASV itself. Those pursuits are initially most likely to involve searching for Venetian and Greek Cretan families who immigrated to the metropolis over the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. A limited sampling of various series in the ASV reveals that Venetian Cretan colonists are relatively easy to identify in a wide range of sources, from the deliberations of Venice's governing bodies to private family archives. As one example, the Procurators of San Marco series contain the estate papers of many Venetian patricians who lived in Crete.
World History
