Archaeology and Architecture of the Military Orders

New Studies

Mathias Piana, Christer Carlsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472420534
• eBook ISBN: 9781317179856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

As elite communities in medieval societies the Military Orders were driven by the ambition to develop built environments that fulfilled monastic needs as well as military requirements and, in addition, residential and representational purposes. Growing affluence and an international orientation provided a wide range of development potential. That this potential was in fact exploited may be exemplified by the advanced fortifications erected by Templars and Hospitallers in the Levant. Although the history of the Military Orders has been the subject of research for a long time, their material legacy has attracted less attention. In recent years, however, a vast range of topics concerning the Orders' building activities has become the object of investigation, primarily with the help of archaeology. They comprise the choice of sites and building materials, provision and storage of food and water, aspects of the daily life, the design and layout of commanderies, churches and fortifications, their spatial arrangement, and the role these buildings played in their environmental context. This volume contains ten articles discussing the archaeology and architecture of buildings erected by the three major Military Orders in different geographical regions. They cover most countries of Western Europe and include a number of important fortifications in the Levant. These studies break new ground in the investigation of the built fabric of the Military Orders. Written by noted international scholars this publication is an important contribution to modern research on these institutions, which, in their association of monasticism and knighthood, were so typical for the Middle Ages.

PART I
The Hospitaller Order/The Order of Malta

Chapter 1

The Cabrei of the Order of Malta as an Archaeological Source: Some Notes on Piedmont

Elena Bellomo

The study of local documents and antique maps forms a vital part of the background work that precedes any archaeological investigation. With regard to the Order of Malta the cabrei figurati, illustrated inventories of the Order’s properties, are a source of primary importance as they also contain both the plans and the elevations of the buildings in their possession. This paper highlights the significant contribution that these sources can make to archaeological background work and studies in landscape archaeology.

Originally the cabrei consisted of notarial registers which recorded the privileges and rights enjoyed by a landowner and as such they only served a juridical function. However, the detailed descriptions of territorial possessions resulted in these registers playing a notable role in the economic administration of landed property at the end of the seventeenth century. The first cabrei only contained written descriptions of the possessions belonging to noble families and ecclesiastical or lay bodies (cabrei descrittivi). Later they came to include an iconographical part which portrayed the properties through various drawings (cabrei figurati). These registers sometimes embraced a wide range of documents such as lists of rights, inventories of goods, valuations of landed property, maps, locations of borders, and so forth. In the eighteenth century the cabrei became the preferred means to gather and keep all the information that could prove useful when checking landed possessions, making land improvements or developments, settling inheritance issues, and paying taxes.¹

When producing a cabreo figurato land surveyors were entrusted with the delicate task of highlighting the distinctive characters of local topography, measuring and locating the several parcels, borders, streets, waters, and buildings in their descriptions of the landscape. After calculating the size of the property in question and setting the location of lots by using precise points of reference (such as a stream, a street, a row of trees), the land surveyor took note of the portions of cultivated land and the presence of woods or unexploited lots. Any nearby rural buildings would also be depicted, both in plans and elevations. This kind of detail could involve an engineer or an architect.² Land surveyors’ skills in portraying landscapes and buildings gradually improved as the cabrei gained in official value. The earliest drawings of possessions and buildings were often imprecise and very approximate, but techniques became increasingly sophisticated and the outline of the borders and the features of buildings more precise and realistic.

The land surveyors’ task was not merely descriptive since a crucial part of their duty was also to connect this detailed representation of the landscape to the most significant juridical and administrative information, such as the rights enjoyed by the owner in the area (usum aquae, lignaticum, rents, and so forth), the kind of contracts stipulated with tenants, and their obligations. Thus the cabrei served as private land registers as well as administrative and juridical registers, inventories of rights and of economic information, which could also be visualised in drawings.³

The importance and official nature of these registers is confirmed by the fact that they could only be compiled with the explicit authorisation of the owner of the property, and that a notary was often in charge of overseeing the process. Moreover, the legal and official value of the evidence collected in the cabrei could also be formally emphasised in a ‘public social rite’ of setting the borders performed by the land surveyor in the presence of a notary, the representatives of local communities, tenants, local landowners, neighbours, and witnesses.⁴ Upon completion, the cabreo was among the most important documents preserved in the archive of the institution or family who had commissioned it.⁵

The increasing precision, wide range of information collected, and reliability of contents make the cabrei a true mine of information for several kinds of historical investigations. Recent monographs, miscellaneous books, scientific articles, and exhibitions have focused on these primary sources emphasising their significance in several branches of history.⁶ However, their potential use as background sources for archaeological excavations and for landscape archaeological studies is still to be explored.

The importance of careful scrutiny of the cabrei figurati as a preparatory stage in archaeological investigations is particularly apparent with regard to the Order of Malta. The recent revival of interest in the Military Orders in Italy has also involved the cabrei of this Order. The illustrated nature of some of these inventories has also attracted the attention of scholars working on art, architecture, and landscape history.⁷ Cabrei describing the properties and settlements of the Order of Malta can be found in many governmental archives all over Italy where they were collected after the suppression of the local Hospitaller commanderies in the Napoleonic period. The transfer of the documents concerning the Order to public archives was marked by significant losses but numerous cabrei reached their final place of conservation and many of them are in good condition.⁸

From the seventeenth century onwards the Statutes of the Order of Malta included a procedure to oversee the administration of commanderies by periodical visits of provincial officers. Moreover, in the previous century the Statutes had also established that brethren of the Order could obtain higher dignities and concessions only when they could document the improvements made in their houses. Officers in charge of inspecting these improvements had to publicly swear that the documents recording the administration of the commandery had been written according to the rules set in that specific region. These documents were named either papyros terrae, or recognoscentias, and even cabrevationes seu apeamentos (that is, cabrei). The Statutes of the Order prescribed that the cabrei had to be updated and rewritten every twenty-five years.⁹ Later on it also became a requirement that an authentic copy of the cabrei was sent to the priory archive or the provincial chapter.¹⁰

Unfortunately, in the Tongue of Italy this system often failed to work. Visits intended to check improvements in local commanderies did not take place, and the older cabrei were not copied and updated.¹¹ Therefore, severe punishment was imposed on officers who did not comply with these procedures while proctors and commanders were also provided with forms and examples to follow in recording the results of the visits and writing the cabrei. However, transgressions still commonly occurred, not least because writing or updating a cabreo was a very expensive undertaking.¹² In Piedmont the tax collection from the possessions of the Order of Malta, enforced in 1783 by Vittorio Amedeo III di Savoia, was the catalyst in the production of a new and precise valuation of the Order’s patrimony to be compared with the one made by the Regio Fisco and this led to the writing of a new series of cabrei.¹³

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the arrival of the French army in Piedmont, part of the archive of the Hospitaller priory of Lombardy (a province which approximately included Piedmont, Liguria, part of Lombardy)¹⁴ was confiscated and sent to France to the Bureau general de finances, while some of the remaining archival material was sent abroad by the Order and some of it hidden in a private house. These events led to a partial loss of documents, including the cabrei. After the French period, the surviving documentary material and other records were kept in the Archivio di Corte (1836) and in the Regie Finanze (1839), and were eventually moved to the Sezioni Riunite in the Archivio di Stato di Torino in 1925.¹⁵ Here the cabrei of the Order of Malta are the most extensive and homogeneous series of land registers relevant to seventeenth and eighteenth century Piedmont. Due to the considerable size of the Order’s land-holdings and its presence both in the countr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: History and Archaeology
• PART I: THE HOSPITALLER ORDER/ THE ORDER OF MALTA
• PART II: THE TEMPLAR ORDER
• PART III: THE TEUTONIC ORDER
• Index