A dowry was a woman’s property, sometimes seen as her share of her father’s estate, but more often as a bequest in lieu of it. Roman law prescribed that all children, female as well as male, share their father’s inheritance, but prevailing legal opinion held that dowries justified the exclusion of daughters from inheritance.268 Even as it was legally hers, the dowry was not a woman’s to do with exactly as she pleased, and certainly not during the marriage. Shortly after marriage, the dowry was transferred directly from her father (or brothers) to her husband, who was required to acknowledge it in a notarized act that protected her right to recover it if he predeceased her. Dowries supported the marital household and sometimes provided husbands with investment capital. For those like Goro Dati, who did not have great family wealth, dowries were crucial to business activities. When, in 1393, he married his second wife Isabetta, whose deceased parents both came from modest families of the popolo, her cousins promised a substantial dowry of 900 florins, and, “apart from the dowry,” Dati noted in his diary, the income from a farm in the contado. He also received his wife’s trousseau, which the cousins valued at 100 florins, presumably as the final portion of the dowry, but which he thought was overestimated by 30 florins. The cash portion of 800 florins was duly paid within days of the marriage, and Dati then “invested it in the shop of Buonaccorso Berardi and his partners.” Husbands were expected to declare the receipt of dowries, insure them, and pay the tax on the notarized documents. But Dati failed to declare Isabetta’s dowry until nine years later, apparently out of pique against his wife’s cousins for over-valuing the trousseau and thus not delivering the promised amount. But he knew he had to do so sooner or later in order to protect his wife’s rights: “Yet I must do so, and if by God’s will something were to happen before I do, I want her to be assured as can be of having her dowry, just as though it had been declared and insured. For the fault is not hers.” Dati may also have been worried about Isabetta’s health in her ninth (and last) pregnancy, and thus about the fate of the dowry if she died in childbirth. According to Florentine law, if a wife predeceased her husband, her children from this husband (but not those from previous marriages) inherited the dowry. If there were no children from this last marriage, the entire dowry went to the husband. As it happened, Dati finally declared the dowry and paid the tax just six days before Isabetta died, no doubt to ensure his and his children’s right to inherit the dowry. Of the eight children (five sons and three daughters) he had with Isabetta, only one, a son, survived into adulthood, and he presumably inherited his mother’s dowry. But until then it remained in Dati’s hands.
The next year, as Dati was putting together capital for a new business venture, he listed his available resources and added: “The rest I expect to obtain if I marry again this year, when I hope to find a woman with a dowry as large as God may be pleased to grant me. If I do not marry, I will find the money some other way.” He quickly found a new wife and the needed funds: in May 1403 he married a twenty-one-year-old widow, Ginevra Brancacci, and in July received from her kinsman Felice a dowry consisting of 700 florins (671 in cash with a trousseau worth 29 florins) and a farm at Campi in the contado. This time he declared and insured the dowry without delay. The marriage lasted seventeen years until Ginevra died in 1420. Dati then married Caterina Guicciardini, whose kinsmen provided a dowry of 615 florins.269 Curiously, as each successive marriage took Dati to a socially more prestigious parentado, the dowries became smaller, a sign perhaps that he was marrying into households that, despite their lineages’ notable names, were in some financial difficulty and had to settle for marriage alliances with a man they considered not their social equal.
Because of the magnitude of the sums involved and the uses to which they were put, husbands and their heirs, chiefly their sons, did all they could to avoid losing the dowry when the husband died. Struggles over dowries sometimes resulted in serious strains and conflicts between widows and their marital families. When a husband predeceased his wife, the dowry had to be returned to her unless she agreed to a different arrangement. It was here that the dilemmas imposed on women by the dotal system became particularly acute.270 A widow could either remain in her husband’s household and live with her children, in which case the dowry, although legally hers, would not be extracted from the husband’s estate and paid back to her; or she could move out and remarry (sometimes under pressure from her natal family), taking the dowry with her but leaving her children behind because they belonged to their father’s lineage. Husbands offered financial incentives in their wills to persuade wives not to leave. An example, from the mid-fourteenth century, is the testament of Fetto Ubertini, who bequeathed to his wife Pia, in addition to her dowry, the sum of 125 florins and an income “sufficient to maintain herself and a servant” on the condition that she “remain a widow and live with our children,” adding that “if she withdraws her dowry, then I cancel the bequest of 125 florins, nor shall she receive living expenses..., but only if she leaves her dowry in my estate, and remains a widow, or becomes a tertiary [in one of the mendicant orders].”31 For widows still young enough to bear children, the pressure to remarry could be considerable, partly from assumptions about the moral and social dangers that sexually awakened young widows allegedly represented, and partly because their natal families were reluctant to lose the social capital of another parentado, another marriage alliance with the advantages deriving from the reciprocal obligations assumed by in-laws. By remaining with her children in her husband’s household, a widow was less valuable to her natal family. But in order to reclaim the dowry and leave her husband’s household, she had to accept separation from her children. Young widows were thus caught between the interests of their natal and marital families, between the incompatible desires to remarry and to be with their own children. Some Florentine men lamented their mothers’ decision to remarry and remembered it as abandonment. Even when a mother’s remarriage did not prevent continued contact with her children, it had damaging financial consequences for them, especially if, as often happened, assets had to be liquidated in order to restore to their mother the dowry that made her second marriage possible. Giovanni Morelli’s mother, Telda Quaratesi, was among the Florentine women trapped in this dilemma. She was only twenty-four when her husband died in 1374, and she was quickly remarried to Simone Spini, “because she was very young,” as Giovanni wrote. Giovanni and his siblings were brought up by their maternal grandparents, Matteo and Filippa Quaratesi, a relatively unusual arrangement made necessary by the deaths of Giovanni’s father and all his paternal uncles in the plague of 1363, which left no close relatives in the Morelli patriline to assume care of them. Giovanni refers to his maternal grandfather as “our second father” and says that Matteo and Filippa “loved” him and his brother and sisters “like their own children.” In these circumstances he probably had regular contact with his mother as a young boy, but he nonetheless experienced his mother’s remarriage as betrayal and abandonment: “shortly after [our father’s death] we lost our mother, who remarried.” The bitter lament of having been “abandoned by his cruel mother” is twice linked in Morelli’s recollections to the financial losses he suffered when their father’s estate
31
Brucker, Society, p. 50.
Was entrusted to guardians who in a short time diminished its value by 25 percent because of a variety of expenses, among them “our mother’s dowry.”271
Florentine inheritance law devoted considerable attention to the substantial sums of money and property that women took from their natal lineages, both dowries and non-dotal assets, and which they sometimes took with them again into a second marriage. All the parties involved (women, their children, husbands, and natal families) had an interest in controlling and ultimately possessing these assets. Out of deeply ingrained imperatives, Florentine men preserved and augmented property and assets within their lineages, ensuring that as much as possible came in and as little as possible went out. Limiting the inheritance rights of daughters through dowries was one way of preventing a lineage’s patrimony from being dispersed, if, as was likely, daughters, become mothers, bequeathed their worldly goods to their children. But dowries themselves now represented in many cases significant portions of the paternal patrimony, which helps to explain the increasing pressure on young widows from their fathers and natal families to remarry, establish another parentado, and not let this considerable wealth slide into the hands of the daughters’ marital kin. All Florentine families pursued the same combination of contradictory desires, pressuring their widowed daughters-in-law to leave their dowries in their husbands’ (and children’s) estates and encouraging their widowed daughters to reclaim their dowries and contract new marriages. This complicated an already contentious and frequently litigious inheritance system.
Florentine statutory law regulated inheritance in cases of intestacy, the absence of a valid will. Testamentary succession, on the other hand, was governed by a combination of custom, Roman law, and opinions of jurists in disputed cases. Florentine men generally left the bulk of their patrimonies in equal shares to all living and future sons, to grandsons if sons had died, or, if they had neither, to brothers, nephews, or other male agnates. In addition to giving dowries to daughters, and providing for the restitution of their own wives’ dowries, they typically bequeathed income from, or use of, designated properties to wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and other female relatives, and made any number of special bequests to relatives, male and female, as well as charitable bequests to confraternities, hospitals, and the poor. No laws limited or prescribed the bequests and legacies of testamentary succession, except for the generally accepted stipulation of Roman law that fathers could not irrationally disinherit children or refuse to dower daughters.272 No laws prevented women from being named as heirs, even as it was customary in Florence to limit a daughter’s share of the inheritance to the dowry if there were male heirs; where there were none, daughters could and often did inherit.
Communal legislative intervention was thus largely limited to cases in which there was no will, or the will was invalidated, and especially to the controversial area of women’s inheritance rights in cases of intestacy. While most upper-class men wrote wills, it was much more common for women to die intestate. Most of this legislation limited women’s rights to inherit from their own children, fathers, brothers, and mothers, or even to control their dowries. But it seems unlikely that such laws would have been needed unless it was perceived that too much property was passing into the hands of women amid confusion and disputes surrounding their rights to inherit and dispose of their dowries. As early as 1295 a law prohibited women from inheriting in intestate succession from their children (or grandchildren) if the deceased son or daughter had a living son, grandson, great-grandson, father, brother, sister, nephew (a brother’s son), or cousin (the son of an uncle on his or her father’s side). At most, in these circumstances women had a right to an allowance for living costs. Even in the absence of any of this long list of relations, a woman could inherit only one-fourth of her child’s estate, and even then with a 500-lire limit (then about 250 florins) on real estate. This law was included in the 1325 redaction of communal statutes, where it is linked to a series of other restrictions on women’s inheritance rights.273 By this time women were barred from inheriting in intestate succession from a brother if he was survived by a son or daughter (or their children) or by another brother. In this case, a woman had the right, if and when she became a widow, to reside in her brother’s house. Women and all others born “in the female line” (i. e., their daughters’ and sisters’ children, male or female) likewise could not inherit from their intestate fathers, grandfathers, or great-grandfathers if the deceased had a living son, grandson, or great-grandson, brother, nephew, or other descendant in the male line; they did, on the other hand, have a right to be dowered from such estates and to receive living expenses until they married. If a woman had no brothers, but only uncles or cousins, the law gave her the right of use (usufructus), but not inheritance, of her father’s property, unless she had already been given a dowry. If she was widowed, she had the right to return to her father’s home, or, if no male descendants remained, she again gained the use of the estate. To all of this, which was more or less standard practice among elite families, the law added that a woman could inherit from her own intestate mother only if the mother had no living sons. Since most women’s estates consisted above all of their dowries, the law in essence prevented daughters (unless they had no brothers) from inheriting the dowries of their own mothers, thus channeling the assets that women brought to their marriages from their natal families into the hands of their sons and their husbands’ patrilines.274 With regard to her dowry, the statutes prescribed that when a woman died without children, the husband inherited the entire dowry; even if she left a will, her husband got one-third of her non-dotal goods.275
The limitations spelled out in 1325 were made even more restrictive in subsequent statutory redactions, especially that of 1415, in which the list of relations by whom a woman could be excluded from the paternal inheritance was expanded to include her deceased father’s father and grandfather. Women’s exclusion from their mothers’ inheritance by their own brothers and brothers’ children was extended to inheritance from their maternal grandmothers as well. If a woman had living sons (or grandsons from these sons), her maternal granddaughter was excluded by these uncles and cousins. Other changes in 1415 eliminated “usufruct” and replaced it with subsidies for living costs from the paternal estate both before marriage and in widowhood, and declared that no woman could dispose of her dowry, even in her will, in any way that damaged the rights of her husband, her sons, or their descendants.276 Such at least were the intentions of Florentine legislators. Much less evident is the extent to which Florentines, both women and men, actually observed these laws. The very fact of intensifying restrictions suggests that, whatever the rules may have been (and it is worth emphasizing again that they applied largely to intestate succession), a good deal of property was being inherited and bequeathed by women, to the chagrin of many men.
World History
