Reply to “Comment on ‘The Curious Case of the 1346 Earthquake Recorded Only by Very Young Chroniclers’ by Romano Camassi and Viviana Castelli” by Emanuela Guidoboni, Paolo Gasperini, Gianluca Valensise, and Graziano Ferrari

Abstract

We thank the authors of the comment for an opportunity to explain our reasoning more at length than we thought fitting to do in an article meant for a scientific journal. SRL readers should beware: what follows is historical seismologists’ shop talk with a strong stress on “historical.” First of all, we wish to acknowledge a gross blunder, which we failed to spot in the final proof‐checking of our reference list: the Chronicon Mutinense (Giovanni da Bazzano, 14th century) is written in Latin, not in Italian. We were also wrong in asserting that MS Cl.I.534 does not mention the 1348 Villach earthquake. Earthquakes both in 1346 and in 1348 are mentioned in this MS, which is a sixteenth‐century codex owned by the Ferrara municipal library and likely to be the earliest surviving copy of the Giacomo da Marano (15th century a) chronicle (more on which is included below). The omission of the 1348 earthquake does not occur in MS Cl.I.534, but in a partial edition of the Giacomo da Marano chronicle that was printed in 1929 (Giacomo da Marano, 15th century b) and that is cited as one of the sources of the authoritative study of the 1346 earthquake by Guidoboni and Comastri (2005). We will skip the Guidoboni et al. (2015) paragraph “On the Estimation of Earthquake Location and Magnitude” because it addresses a side issue on which there is no real disagreement between Camassi and Castelli (2013) and Guidoboni et al. (2015). Affirming that “the fluctuations in the magnitude estimates of the 1346 earthquake are largely the result of the intrinsic limitations of the data available for this ancient event and of the methods used for magnitude estimation” (Guidoboni et al. , 2015) is not very different from opining that “the high magnitude value which Boschi et al. (1997) assessed …