Lena Sadovski-Kornprobst

PhD Candidate
University of Vienna, Institute for Eastern European History

“In my dissertation conducted at the Institute for Eastern European History of the University of Vienna, I am studying the Dalmatian town of Split (It. Spalato) under Venetian rule in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. My research centres on the ways the Venetians administrated the town and how the various communities living in Split organized their daily lives under the influence of both the Venetian dominion and the constant Ottoman threat coming from the Balkan hinterland. By consulting various sources from the archives of Zadar, Split, and Venice – especially notarial acts and court proceedings – I thus have studied who lived in Split, which groups and communities existed there, and how they interacted.

When researching the merchant communities and the economic relations Split had within the Adriatic, I realized that a fairly large group of Apulian merchants worked and lived in Split, which was not very surprising for geographic reasons. When looking for background information on the merchants’ Apulian towns of origin, I stumbled upon the book by Prof. Benjamin Scheller from the University of Duisburg-Essen on the New Christians of Trani, and I quickly recognized many of the names of the New Christians families from Scheller’s book in my sources from Split, which made me dig into that topic deeper.

The Apulian New Christians – Cristiani novelli, or neofiti – were descendants of Jews who more or (rather) less willingly had converted to Christianity in the face of growing repressions or imminent expulsion at the end of the thirteenth century. Although they were already born as Christians, the New Christians of Apulia continued to constitute a group distinct from the rest of society for centuries. By the end of the 15^th and the beginning of the 16^th centuries, however, they were increasingly persecuted, and the new Spanish government tried to expel them from Apulia in 1510 and 1514. Many of them thus had to leave their homeland and seek refuge abroad. Some went to Venice or its Greek possessions, others to Ragusa or Ottoman territories, but their presence in Venetian Dalmatia has been ignored so far by historians of both sides of the Adriatic.

The archival source material from Split shows that members of more than twenty New Christian families from Trani, Barletta, and Manfredonia can be found there at the end of the 15^th and the beginning of the 16^th century. Most of them came to Split as traders of grain, but many also settled there permanently. The goal of my research is to examine the ways in which they integrated themselves into the society of Split, to understand how they interacted with the locals, and to investigate the extent to which, and methods by which, they maintained contacts with each other and continued to form a separate community also in Dalmatia. Crucially, I want to determine if and to what extent their religious ambiguity as New Christians or “crypto-Jews” was perceived and addressed by the Spalatin society or the Venetian government. Preliminary results show that in times of conflict, their opponents could use references to their Jewish origins as an argumentative weapon in court.

And upcoming article of mine to be published in the journal Medieval Encounters contains micro-historical case studies of two prominent New Christians who settled in Split. After finishing my PhD thesis in the coming weeks, my post-doctoral project will focus on the migration of Apulian New Christians to Venetian Dalmatia and their integration into the local societies. The goal will be to better understand the social and religious structures of Dalmatia as well as to conceptualize the Adriatic and the wider Mediterranean as a connected space where Christians, Jews, and converts both of Italian and Iberian origin met, interacted, and lived together – both in peace and in conflict.”

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