Crossing Cultural Boundaries in Merchants’ Wills from 14th-Century Cyprus

Abstract

The Western merchants operating in Famagusta, Cyprus—including Geno­ese, Venetians, Catalans, Pisans, Provençals, other nationalities, and Cypriot merchants based in this port city—drew up wills with Genoese and Vene­tian notaries, a number of which are extant. These wills impart information on the bequests these merchants made to family members and friends as well as to institutions, particularly churches, monasteries, and mendicant orders. Furthermore, they record the credits and debts of these merchants to various parties, decree the manumission of slaves owned by the merchants—some of whom also received bequests—and on occasion list material objects such as clothing, silverware, or sums of currency in their possession. We can glean from these types of information that merchants had commercial and personal relations with members of nationalities or Christian denominations different to their own, had slaves of various ethnic backgrounds, and had in their pos­session currencies other than that of the Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus, as well as objects originating from elsewhere. These are phenomena that testify to their geographical mobility and their willingness to cross physical, financial, as well as cultural boundaries. On occasion, they even bequeathed sums of money to individuals and churches of non-Latin rites. In this paper, I intend to examine and assess the importance and utility of such wills, explaining that through their contents one can discover how, why and the extent to which merchants crossed national, ethnic and religious boundaries in both their commercial and their personal dealings. In addition, the limitations of the information such wills offer and the reasons why these limitations exist will also be discussed.