Back
to Homepage Annuario 2002
p. 177
Publishing the Morosini Codex
John R. Melville-Jones,
University of Western
Australia
About
ten years ago, when studying the surviving accounts of the occupation of
Thessaloniki by the Venetians in 1423-30, the events which led up to this
occupation and the final capture of the city by the forces of Murad II, I
became aware of the existence of a major documentary source for the history of
Europe and the Mediterranean which had received less attention than it
deserved. It was written between about 1400 and 1434 by a Venetian, Antonio
Morosini.
The document is not unknown to scholarship. Some selections
from it were published a little over a century ago[1], and
it is often referred to in scholarly literature, but the greater part remains
in manuscript form. It has provided material for specific research projects,
particularly among Italian scholars, but no attempt has been made until now to
publish the whole of it. This is not surprising, because the surviving text,
even though it is incomplete[2],
contains more than half a million words. It is the largest surviving example of
Venetian autograph writing in the vernacular of its time[3].
Its author was a member of one of the greatest noble families
of Venice, from which three doges, Domenico Morosini, Marino Morosini and
Michele Morosini had already come, the last named being his uncle. The family
also in later years provided the city with a fourth doge, Francesco Morosini
(1688-1694), who was nicknamed ‘the Peloponnesian’ for his anti-Turkish
campaign in the Morea. Many of its
other members were highly successful in public affairs, and some of them
also contributed to scholarship and literature.
But although his family was so well known, Antonio Morosini
himself was not prominent in the life of his time. He seems to have played no
part in the public administration of Venice. He is not known to have held any
public office, although he was elected to the Maggior Consiglio of Venice, like
other young men of his class. This election took place on December 4th, 1388,
the feast of St Barbara, and the fact that it took place on that particular day
gives us a clue to his date of birth. The normal age for entry to the Great
Council for those whose birth entitled them to do so was twenty-five, but under
the system known as the grazia della
Barbarella , thirty young men who had attained the age of twenty years were
chosen by lot each year on St Barbara’s day to become members. If Morosini
p. 178
was one of these Barbarelli, it may be calculated that he
was born during the five years before December 4th 1368.
Little more than this is known of him. He made a will (see
note 3) at an early age in 1377, following his father’s death, and updated it
in 1384. If he made a later will, which is likely, seeing that he lived for
about another half-century, its present whereabouts are unknown. The existing
will gives us some information about his property and his relatives. Almost
everything else about him is left to our imagination, since there is only a
very small number of references to himself or his actions which may be found in
the Codex which bears his name, and they give us a minimum of personal
information. The fact that over a period of more than thirty years he created
an extremely lengthy account of the major events of Venetian, European and
Mediterranean history of his time suggests that he may have had a reclusive
personality, or was prevented by some physical informity from undertaking other
pursuits, but this is no more than a guess.
What Morosini left to us consists of 561 sheets of paper of
approximately A4 size, bearing writing in a 15th century hand (probably, as has
been said, his own) on both sides. It has been held by the Austrian
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, since 1801[4]. A
manuscript copy made at the end of the 19th century also exists, which is held
by the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice[5]. The
Venice copy, made in 1887-8 by Giuseppe Gallovich, an archivist at the Archivio
di Stato of Venice and checked by the Director of the Archivio, Bartomeo
Cecchetti, is for the most part a very accurate transcription, although it
introduces some capital letters and punctuation which are not to be found in
the original. It is not entirely free from errors, but they are of a minor
nature, and when one considers the amount of work which was involved in
producing this transcription in a relatively short time, one can feel nothing
but admiration and gratitude for the work done by Gallovich and Cecchetti.
Publication of the manuscript with an English translation by
a small team of scholars began five years ago. Two volumes have been produced
to date, and a further four are planned. There are two reasons for publishing
it in parts over a period of years, rather than waiting until the whole of it
has been transcribed and translated, and publishing it in two or three volumes
(a multi-volume publication is almost inevitable, given the bulk of the work).
The first is that by drawing attention to the project as early as possible, it
will be possible to arouse interest in it among other scholars. The second is
that publication of a document of this kind is to some extent a learning
process. By publishing a little at a time, we will be able to improve our work
and test our decisions earlier than
would otherwise be possible.
The work has in the past been known as the Morosini
Chronicle, but for the purpose of this publication it has been given the title
of the Morosini Codex[6]. This
title makes it possible to distinguish between the two different elements which
make up the text.
p. 179
The first part[7],
a little over one-sixth of what survives, consists of a chronicle of Venetian
history of a conventional kind. To a great extent it repeats material which
survives in other Venetian chronicles, most notably those written by or
attributed to Nicolò Trevisan, Rafaino or Rafaelo Caresini, Martino da
Canale, ‘Enrico Dandolo’ and Lorenzo de Monacis. It becomes more detailed when
it describes the events of the end of the fourteenth century, which occurred
during Morosini’s early manhood. Because most of it is derived from other
earlier Venetian chronicles, it is of less importance to historians than what
follows, although students of these chronicles will find it valuable to have a
printed version of it, and like all Morosini’s work it provides a fertile field
of study for students of the Venetian dialect of the fifteenth century. This
part ends shortly before the end of the second volume of the present
publication.
The remainder of the Codex, dealing with events from the end
of the period of office of Antonio Venier to November 1433[8], is
of a different character. It contains a diary of noteworthy events which
occurred in Venice or in the neighbourhood, or were reported in Venice from as
far away as England, Constantinople or the Levant. As a member of the Consiglio
Grande, Morosini was well placed to acquire information, and he reported it
faithfully. His information was based on official documents, on private
communications from abroad received in Venice (which he sometimes quotes in
full) and on the numerous rumours which abounded in the city.
The text presents us with an enormous amount of material:
wars and battles, debates of the Venetian Cabinet and Council, embassies and
expeditions, trade relations, earthquakes and epidemics, processions and
religious festivals, state visits and reports from external sources on events
in Europe, Africa and Asia. It is particularly rich in information about events
in the Greek world, since a constant stream of messages flowed to Venice from
the Venetian establishments in Greece and the Aegean, brought by individual
merchants or by the convoys of armed galleys which sailed each year to the
Black Sea and Syria carrying precious cargoes.
The period during which Morosini wrote was a particularly
important one in the history of Venice. It was at this time that an aggressive
expansion into the mainland, the terra
ferma, was continued, and in its latter period, during the reign of one of
Venice’s best known Doges, Francesco Foscari, a similarly expansionist policy
was also pursued in the eastern Mediterranean, not always successfully. Major
events were taking place in the history of England and France, and the
Byzantine Empire was in the process of collapsing. All these events are
mirrored in the Diary.
The information which Morosini presents can often be found in
other sources, official and private, or is confirmed by them. But the Codex
often gives us information which is not found elsewhere. Morosini does not
merely repeat the information which is available in official Venetian documents.
He records minor happenings of which no records would otherwise survive,
reports rumours which, even if they were later proved to be wrong, will
p. 180
have for a while have had as
much force as the truth, and in the case of major events often preserves the
text of private letters which never found their way into the state archives, or
if they did, were later lost or detroyed.
As stated above, only a small part of this unique document
has appeared in print. In 1898-1902 two French scholars, G. Lefèvre-Pontalis
and L. Dorez, printed extracts from the Diary
in a work entitled Chronique d’ Antonio
Morosini. Extraits relatifs à l’histoire de France. Their selection
was confined to material of interest to French readers, particularly those
passages which reported the exploits of Joan of Arc. The proportion of the text
which was published in this way was a about fifteen per cent. A few short
extracts were included by N. Jorga in his work Notes et extraits pour servir à l’histoire des croisades au XVe
siècle (Paris 1899-1902), and the work has occasionally been cited
by other scholars. But for its full value to be realised, complete publication
is essential.
How should such a text be presented to modern readers? In the
first place, it is necessary to consider the differing interests of those who
will wish to study it. Some will view it primarily as a source of historical
information, and for them a translation will often be enough. But others will
need to study the text in the original language. This is where the difficulty
lies, because there are many ways in which it may be presented, and no single
way will satisfy all requirements. There is a spectrum of possibilities,
ranging from photographic reproduction of the original to the printing of a
completely modernised version.
Photographic reproduction is excluded for reasons of cost. In
addition, there would be hardly anything to be gained by publishing photographs
of the manuscript. There is occasionally room for doubt over the transcription
of a word, but the number of occasions on which a photographic reproduction
would be useful is very small indeed[9]. As
in most other cases, therefore, the right answer is to publish a transcription;
but once this has been said, what kind of transcription is appropriate in this
case?
It would be possible, within the limitations of the
typographic process, to offer a printed version which reproduces the original
document with its conventions of writing and spelling as exactly as possible, a
‘diplomatic’ version. This would preserve the exact spelling of the original,
its use or avoidance of capital letters, apostrophes and accents, the
separation or joining of words, contractions and abbreviations and marks over
or below letters. It would, in effect, be something which is close to a
photographic reproduction, but easier to read. This style of presentation might
be appropriate to some kinds of document, but there is little to be gained and
much to be lost by following it in this case. A fully ‘diplomatic’ version
would be more difficult for most modern scholars to read than one which
expanded abbreviations and made some other adjustments, and when the text
consists for the most part of simple narrative, there will hardly ever be any
possibility of argument about the correct expansion of contractions and
abbreviations.
At the other end of the spectrum, it would be possible to
produce a modernised version of the text in which the current standard form of
words are used, mistakes are corrected (for instance, Morosi’s text often contains
what seem to be confusions between
p. 181
el
and al, and di, de and da); and
perhaps fifteenth century Venetian forms of words might be with the standard
Italian ones, to make what in Italian might be called a trascrizione, a version in more or less standard Italian of an
archaic or dialect original.
This would make the text as easy as possible for an Italian
reader, or a non-Italian with a knowledge of contemporary standard Italian, to
follow, but it would, unless the editor stepped over the border between
transcription and translation, create many problems. For example, when Morosini
writes ertona or sem culo for Southampton or St Cyrillus, what should the editor do,
if a direct transcription is not to be printed? It should also be noted that
the Morosini Codex is not only a source of historical information. It is the
largest surviving document written in the fifteenth century in Venetian. It has
no equal as a record of the development of the language at this stage, when it
was beginning to be used instead of Latin for the production of written
documents. For these reasons, it would be wrong to present it in a completely
modernised version. Much of the flavour of the original would be lost if this
were done. Something between these two extremes was therefore required.
As a first principle, and my fellow editors and I decided
that the text would be published exactly as written, in the sense that every
letter, whether written or implied by a mark of contraction or abbreviation,
would be reproduced. This was for the most part a straightforward matter,
except for four letters, which may be represented in print as i, (with or without a short slanting
straight or curved stroke like an acute accent above it) j (with a dot above it) y
and J. The first of these is easy to
understand. During the fourteenth century it is not uncommon in mediaeval
manuscripts to find that the letter i,
which in earlier times was a simple undotted stroke, is distinguished by having
a slanting mark placed above it. This was because at that time the letters i (undotted), m, n, u and v could easily be confused. They all consisted essentially of one,
two or three thick vertical strokes, the last three of them with two or three
fine lines joining them at top or bottom. A sign that showed that an i was an i, and not one of the other letters, was a considerable aid in
reading; consider, for example, how easily nimium
can be distinguished from minimum in
this way. The slanting stroke which began to be used then has survived into
modern times as a dot above the letter, although like many other survivals from
the past it is of little practical use nowadays.
A longer form of this letter, with a curved tail hanging
below the line, and usually with a dot or a slanting stroke over it, is
sometimes found in Morosini’s manuscript, both as a letter and as a numeral,
usually at the end of a word or a series of digits. It signifies the end of a
group (we may compare the use of the two different forms of the letter sigma in Greek). This again is a common
feature of manuscripts of the period. In modern texts it is often rendered as a
j, and in the first drafts of the
publication of the Morosini Codex it was printed in this way. Later, however,
the decision was taken to replace it by an i,
for the letter and the numeral.
The same decision was taken in relation to the third of these
letter forms, which resembles a y.
Like the ‘j, it is usually found at
the end of a word, and a sloping or curved line is placed above it. In modern
texts it is often printed as a y. Our
decision was in the end to print this also as an i. Again, the only significance of this letter form seems to be
that it was conventionally used to end a word. It has no phonetic or linguistic
significance.
The origin of this form of the letter may be that it
represented a double i, written as ij. But it is only occasionally possible
to render it in this way. It is appropriate to print such words as capetany, navily, privilegy, as capetanii, navilii and privilegii.
But chusy (così) and Venexiany must be printed with only a
single i at the end. In each case, it
seemed best to choose the more appropriate form.
p. 182
Finally, at the beginning of some words a tall letter
appears, sometimes hanging and curving partly below the line, with a top in the
form of a closed or broken loop. It is something between a capital I and J in
old-fashioned longhand writing, and since it appears at the beginning of a word
it is tempting to print it as one of these, particularly when it begins the
kind of word that would be capitalised in English. But it is not intended to be
a capital letter. Morosini regularly uses full majuscules at the beginning of a
paragraph, but rarely elsewhere, and the tall J often appears at the beginning of quite insignificant words, such
as iera ‘was’. It should therefore be
regarded only as a variant form of i,
and rendered in this way in a modern text. It is particularly inappropriate to
represent it by a J or j in a text which is to be placed before
readers whose first language is English, because they will inevitably be
tempted to assign to it the value which it has in their own language, and
mispronounce it.
So much for letter forms. Another point which was considered
was the division between words. Morosini’s manuscript divides or joins them in
a way which appears at first to be haphazard, although it may in some cases
show how groups of words were pronounced. After considering various
possibilities, we came to the conclusion that few linguists and no historians
would benefit materially from a transcription of the text which preserved this
feature of it accurately. In addition, the nature of the writing of the
manuscript is not that of a trained scribe producing an official document, and
it is often difficult to be certain whether letters are intended to be
separated by a space from the letters which follow them. We therefore decided
to divide the words as they would be divided in a modern book, with one major
exception. When some prepositions are followed by the definite article in
modern Italian, they are joined to it, sometimes with doubling of the intial
‘l’, in various combinations (alla,
nello, delle, etc.). In Morosini’s manuscript the preposition and the
article are sometimes written together, but more often separated. In addition,
since the language is Venetian, the consonants are not doubled. We decided to
keep article and preposition separate (writing a la, de le, etc.). This has the advantage of avoiding some
potential confusions (for example, with the noun ala).
The manuscript regularly shows dots between words, and in
many cases also a slanting slash which is clearly intended as some form of
punctuation, approximately equivalent to the comma which is used in modern
printed texts. This punctuation, if that is what it is, was not reproduced
exactly, because we did not feel that it would be helpful to do so. A modern
reader is accustomed to conventions of punctuation which follow or illuminate
the syntax of the sentences. Morosini’s punctuation, if it can be explained in
this way, is of a more ‘elocutionary’ kind. It may perhaps represent the pauses
which occurred during dictation. Our investigations have suggested to us that
it is possible that what we have is a copy (what would nowadays be called a
back-up copy) of the text, rather than the original document, and if that is
so, it may well have been produced by this process.
Like other writers of his time Morosini does not use capital
letters (except at the beginning of a new section). Nor does he use accents or
apostrophes. For a modern edition, there is much to be gained from the
judicious insertion of these. This is not, however, a simple matter. Italian
usage is not fixed. The current trend is to reduce the use of majuscules to the
minimum (for instance, to write i
veneziani). We have decided that since a majority of the readers of this
text are likely to be non-Italians, we would retain the use of the majuscule
for proper nouns, even when they have an adjectival form (writing i Padovani but il campo padovano).
p. 183
Morosini does not use accents or apostrophes. In this
publication they have been inserted in cases where there is no doubt as to
their appropriateness. They have sometimes been omitted when it is impossible
to decide where they should be placed (for example when Morosini writes senderendeva which in modern Italian
would be written as se ne rendevano),
or when he writes non niera, where
the third n might be interpreted as ne, or as a reduplicated n without any linguistic significance,
or chomo io dito, which might
according to modern conventions be rendered as chomo i’ ’o dito, chom’ ’o io
dito or chomo i’ ò dito). Chi and che often seem to be confused, so although in some cases it might
have seemed appropriate to print ch’i,
this has been avoided. An apostrophe has been placed at the end of a word in
some cases where truncation has occurred (for example fe’ in the sense of fexe,
which can thus be distinguished from fè
as a shortened form of fede), but it
has not been used in such expressions as de (as opposed to de’)Veniciani, because
Morosini often omits the article before names.
As in modern Italian, a grave accent is used to distinguish
monosyllables of the same spelling but different meaning (for example, to
distinguish hò or o (‘or’) from hò(‘I have’) and ho’
(‘where’). The third person (singular and plural) of many verbs seems to have
the ending -a, which has been printed
as -à in this text, on the
assumption that these words are parole
tronche, pronounced with a stress on the final syllable, and that the verbs
are in the remote past tense. An alternative possibility might be considered,
that they should be interpreted as being in the present tense (in which case
they would be written without the accent), and that Morosini is using a present
tense with historic meaning, to create an effect of vivid narrative. This is a
standard feature of style in the classical authors, but there is nothing which
would lead us to suppose that it was the practice of any of the writers of
Venetian chronicles to use this construction. In addition, where these words
occur, they are often found in proximity to other verbs which are certainly in
a past tense. These words have therefore been treated as if they are in the
remote past tense, which is the normal practice in other modern printed
publications, even though in everyday speech in Venice and in many other places
it is still common practice to use the ‘historic present’. Some doubtful words
have been left without an accent.
The acute accent has been used as it used by most writers of
contemporary Italian. In particular, it has been used to indicate the third
person of some verbs in the ‘remote past’ tense (andé, poté, dé), the reflexive form sí (sé
in modern Italian) and né (‘neither’).
These notes have been compiled because after seeking guidance
from other publications we reached the conclusion that there was no completely
fixed and universal convention which could be applied to the publication of
documents of this kind. It is even possible to find inconsistencies within modern
publications. Each editor of a mediaeval text will have to make some
adjustments, and no fixed set of rules will cover every kind of language and
every kind of document.
For this material, permission is granted
for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and
personal use.
Whether you intend to utilize it in
scientific purposes, indicate the source: either this web address or the Annuario.
Istituto Romeno di cultura e ricerca umanistica 4 (2002), edited by ªerban
Marin, Rudolf Dinu and Ion Bulei, Venice, 2002
No permission is granted for commercial
use.
© ªerban Marin, August 2002, Bucharest,
Romania
Back to
Homepage Annuario 2002
[1]
G. Lefèvre-Pontalis and L.
Dorez, Chronique d’Antonio Morosini. Extraits relatifs à l’histoire de
France, Vols 1-4, Paris, 1899-1902. This consists of three volumes of
extracts with French translations, making up about 15% of the total text, and a
fourth volume which ontains information about the manuscript together with
essays on various subjects related to it and to its author.
[2]
The first forty-eight folios are missing. The last page of the second volume in
which the manuscript is now bound ends in the middle of an incomplete sentence
(see note 5 below for evidence that in fact it continued for many more pages).
It is impossible to guess how much of the latter part of the text has been
lost, since we do not know when the author died or became unable to continue
his work; we can only say that we have a maximum of 92% of what he wrote, and probably
rather less.
[3] The statement on page 520B of the
manuscript, ‘e io Ant° Mor° ò
vezudo e scrivo de mia man cusì sia la veritade’, does not prove
this, since it might have been repeated by a copyist. But Morosini’s will
(Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Sezione Notarile, notario Giacomo Ghezzo busta
562), which includes the statement that it was ‘fato e scrito de mia man propria’‚ appears to be written in the
same hand.
[4]
Ms. bound in two volumes, cat. 6586 and 6587. Its whereabouts between 1434 and
1756 are unknown. In the latter year it was given to the noted Venetian man of
letters and diplomat Marco Foscarini (who later served as Doge in 1762-3) by
another man of letters, Annibale degli Abati of Pesaro. The binding is
certainly subsequent to Foscarini’s receipt of the manuscript, since an
introduction, probably composed and written by him, is included in the first
volume.
[5]
Ms. It. VII. 2048 and 2049.
[6]
Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John R. Melville-Jones and Andrea Rizzi, The Morosini Codex, Volume I: to
the Death of Andrea Dandolo, Padua, Unipress, 1999; Vol II: Marino Falier to Antonio Venier, 2000.
[7]
In the opinion of Lefèvre-Pontalis
and Dorez, folio 157A represents
the point at which the ‘Chronicle’ became a diary. We feel that the ‘diary’
begins rather earlier, because even as early as the closing stage of the rule
of Antonio Venier, there is some material which may be original, and certainly
does not appear in any earlier or contemporary chronicles.
[8]
A single floating folio (which ends in the middle of a sentence and is
therefore not the last one), which has been incorrectly inserted into the wrong
place in an earlier location in the second volume of the bound manuscript,
refers to events of April 1434, and provides evidence that more than one folio
has been lost from the end of the text.
[9]
A photographic reproduction of the whole manuscript would be of limited value
because the writing is remarkably consistent throughout, given that its
production may have extended over two or three decades. Unlike many scribes of
the time, the writer formed the letters u
and v in a manner which makes it easy
to distinguish them. This consistency makes the task of transcription
relatively simple. There are variations in the forms of some of the other letters
that he uses. The last stroke of n
and m is sometimes short, and
sometimes has a pendent tail. The letter s
is sometimes small and rounded, sometimes tall. The letter i has four forms, which are
discussed in the text above.