Family Solidarity in Exile and in Law: Alberti Lawsuits of the Early Quattrocento

Abstract

This paper is about law in early quattrocento, specifically about lawsuits involving exiles. Exile was result of political or economic misfortune, but it was also a family tragedy. Fathers, sons, and brothers were forced to leave communities of their birth and citizenship; property was confiscated and sold, women and children left to carry on in greatly reduced circumstances and facing an uncertain future from a harsh and hostile present. The cases I will be discussing raise in interesting ways some valuable perspectives on families acting under du ress. The legal maneuvers of Alberti in exile and their treatment by jurists reveal something of conception and dynamic of meaning of family only a few decades prior to Florence's first catasto of 1427. These cases cannot give insight into demographic and residential dimensions of domestic life, which are well known for Florence thanks to pioneering work of David Herlihy, culminating in Les Toscans et leurs familles, coauthored with Christiane Klapisch-Zuber.1 However, there are certainly other dimensions to family. Herlihy himself, at end of his career, went on to investigate family a moral unit and a moral universe: a unit in sense that it is sharply differ entiated from larger associations of kin and community, and a universe in sense that human relations within it are very different from human relations out side its limits.2 Herlihy situated in Florence?and notably in texts of that bastard sired in exile Leon Battista Alberti?a new and wide division between household and based on the apprehension of external society as hostile and demanding.3 Government intrusion and a cash economy posed such poten tial external threats. Kin were forced to rely on each other more so than before for help and comfort. Exile would seem above all to be an extended moment of testing bonds of family solidarity in opposition to forces loose in wider society.4 It can bring into view what strengths there were to material and