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Amanda G. Madden, "Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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- [00:03]
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- [01:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Amanda Madden about her book titled Civil Vendetta, Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Examining a very still well known practice. Right. When we think about early modern sort of 16th century Italy, vendetta I think is the word that often comes, but probably not in a super historically accurate way. Right. There's lots of drama and bloodshed and all sorts of things attached to it and that might actually make us think that this is so sort of over the top now that it cannot possibly have been true. Now I think the real history is way more interesting because there is a thing called vendetta and there is some drama attached to it, but it's neither exactly what we expect from sort of B list TV dramas now, nor is it like, oh, actually the real story is really boring. It's nuanced and intricate to learn the actual history, which is what this book helps us do. So, Amanda, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
- [02:49]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Thanks so much for having me, Miranda. And thank you for that really lovely introduction to the book. I'm really excited to talk to you today. So I'm Amanda Madden, Assistant professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and affiliate faculty at the Roy Rosenweig center for History and New Media. My areas of specialization include the social history of early modern Italy with an emphasis on crime, violence, and the state. My other hat is as a digital historian with a specialization in spatial history. And I have several collaborative digital projects that I'm also working on that I may get a chance to talk about during the course of this interview, particularly as one is related Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy is related to this book. It's funny, whenever I'm asked why did you decide to write this book? I didn't originally set out to write this book at all. My initial plan was to turn my research on vendetta violence into a digital history project, specifically a GIS mapping project. At the time, I was learning gis, working on a digital humanities focused postdoc and applying almost exclusively to digital humanities positions. So that's where my intellectual energy was going to But a number of friends and colleagues who were familiar with the sources I was working with kept pushing back. They felt the material was simply too rich to not to tell as a sustained narrative. And a book, of course, allows me to do things a digital project alone can't. They also reminded me that writing a monograph didn't mean abandoning digital methods or questions. Then the pandemic happened. So during the spring of 2020, in the middle of lockdown, I finally sat down and started writing in earnest. And as I wrot and as I continue to apply digital history methods to the research, I realized that vendetta violence couldn't be captured from a single angle. It needed to be examined as law, politics, social practice, gendered behavior, and lived experience. So you know the picture behind the drama that you're referring to when you think of vendetta violence. And that's when the project really became Civil Blood, a book that brings together digital methods and close Archival work to tell a much more complex story about violence, power and state formation in early modern Italy.
- [05:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is why I love starting out interviews with the like. Why did you write this? Because the editor is always like, well, I started here, but then, right. And so having that kind of backstory, I think is always a really interesting way to start and often gives us kind of a number of things to then build on in the rest of our conversation. So we've clearly got already a number of things to discuss. But I think the first one that we want to do is making sure we really understand what it is when we say vendetta in the 16th century. Because we have all sorts of ideas sort of floating around. But to do it kind of properly, to get into these sources and this history, how can we define and conceptualize the concept of vendetta?
- [05:46]
Dr. Amanda Madden
So one of the most striking parts of writing this book was realizing how clearly 16th century observers recognized a vendetta when they encountered it, and how little I really understood what that specifically meant. But I chose to take them at their word, as I was, you know, reading some of these accounts. And when I examined their accounts and commentary closely, a vendetta emerged, not as spontaneously as spontaneous, dramatic and violence like I was expecting, but really as a strategic and highly ritualized practice that drew heavily on the language informs a civic ritual and civic politics. It really struck me when I encountered a description of vendetta, as in Italian, the phrase or a civil cause or matter. And that really sort of changed my perception of vendetta in civil blood. So I examined vendetta at several levels as a systemic feature of early modern political life and as well as a lived practice. And vendetta was something performed, ritualized and understood within a shared civic framework. I do think, however, that one can say vendetta has several distinct features. It was one expression, though not the only means. By no means the only expression of an inimical relationship between groups. So there's some enmity inherent in the vendetta. Vendettas were also inherently public. Without an audience, I discovered a vendetta simply would not be a vendetta. I found that it was most often practiced by well connected political elites and pursued with clear political aims, Particularly the reassertion of traditional rights and privileges, including that of justice. Crucially, vendetta was not a single act of violence, nor merely a one time act of retaliation. It was really a complex system with moving parts unfolding over time and across spaces. To give an example of how a single act of Violence opens onto a much larger story in the book. In the late spring of 1547 in Modena. This is one of the examples I talk about in the book. A young nobleman named Annabella Bellincini was attacked and killed on the Feast of the Ascension by three young men from the Fontana family, apparently over a public insult. The killing happened and fueled full view of witnesses, and the response was immediate, both from the government and from the Bellincini family. But it wasn't the response we might expect. Right. We tend to assume that a murder automatically leads to arrest, trial and punishment. And that's a very modern conception of justice. In the early modern world, that wasn't always a priority after a murder had happened. And in cases of vendetta violence, the central concern was often stopping the violence from escalating. In this instance, the Duke of Government, after this murder focused less on capturing the perpetrators. Everyone knew who was responsible. Again, Vendetta's republic, and more on preventing retaliation by pushing both sides towards a truce, even if it was a temporary truce. So you see here that the real priority was restoring social equilibrium. So what was interesting about this is right after this happened, Annabelle's father, Giovanni Battista Bellincini, who happened to be a prominent figure in local government, who was already entangled in several violent feuds. This is not his first vendetta by any stretch of the imagination. He flat out refused to sign a peace agreement agreement, even after Duke Ercole came to him personally and tried to force him to do so. Instead, he openly vowed revenge. And that revenge came just a few months later, when Annabella's uncle assassinated Giovanni Bautista Cadebo while he was attending mass at church. Now, Cadebo was the brother in law of one of Annabella's killers, but he was also a member of the Ducal Council of Justice and someone who could influence the pardon process and could pardon Annabella's killers. So that tells us this wasn't just random violence. It was targeted, calculated, and in many ways deeply political. And in between. There were two months between these murders. Annabella's murder took place in May and Giovanna Batista Cadebo's took place in August. Both families rewrote their wills, which tells us that they're anticipating further retaliation and and were protecting themselves against legal consequences of breaking truces or peace agreements, because these could bring heavy fines if they broke a truce, they could be fined more heavily than if they just, you know, committed, you know, one act of violence, or they could even risk the confiscation of their property. So Even though these families knew that vendetta was premeditated and risky, there was really no clear will to stop it, or even, you know, like. And so these vendettas became. Were part of ongoing cycles and became kind of endless in many ways. They could stretch on for decades. There were in several cases I encountered vendettas which lasted for 100 years, which is stunning to think about. The really interesting part of this scenario, however, is that the heads of these rival families, neighbors in Modena, continue to govern together. So they sat side by side in the halls of government, ruling on things like bread prices as if nothing had happened. There's no suggestion in the records of the council conservators that vendetta ever impacted. That their ongoing vendetta has ever impacted governance. So that tension between public cooperation on one hand and violence on the other reveals vendetta not as chaos, which is kind of how I think we think of it, but is a systemic, highly racialized and strategic form of political behavior, and one that, as I argue, allowed elites to keep justice in their own hands.
- [11:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, this is really interesting to understand, kind of theoretically, but also with the example as you've laid out there, that really kind of makes it real. But before we go further into some of these intertwinings of justice and elite power and kind of who gets to make these decisions about crime and punishment, why are we focusing on Modena? Why is that our plate examination?
- [12:06]
Dr. Amanda Madden
That's a really excellent question. The choice in Modena was accidental. In retrospect, it turned out to be an ideal case study. But that was not, again, how I kind of set out. Like, I'm going to study Modena for my research. The book actually began as a very micro historical project. So I was actually looking for something else entirely when I came across a remarkably rich source, which was the diary of a 16th century aristocratic nun, Sister Lucia Piopi, whose convent in Modena actually figures her prominently in chapter five of the book. I still remember this moment vividly. I was translating a passage in her diary when I came to a description of a small box painted with flowers and tied with a string that exploded when the recipient opened it. And I remember thinking, as I'm translating this, this can't possibly be right. Like, my Italian must be absolutely awful or have deteriorated in the last, like, 15 minutes. I even asked several native speakers of Italian to double check my translation, but it was right. Sister Lucia was describing bladder bombs. Specifically, she was describing the events of June 9, 1562, when Lafranco Fontana had couriers deliver letter bombs to members of the Bellincini in seven different locations across Italy at the same hour, specifically lunch, and on the same day. And the logistics of this are as astounding as they are horrifying. And Sister Lucia, in her account, explicitly leaked it to a vendetta. Made it even more extraordinary was what followed her in her diary. That account was immediately followed by a dramatic verse dialog written in Tirza Rima, which is modeled on Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno and was set on the banks of the River Stick. It's a really interesting poem. The recently murdered victims in this poem discuss her deaths and then calmly plot the continuation of the vendetta. It was astonishing on a number of levels. And it really raised an obvious question for me. Why was vendetta, violence, being discussed in this way, appearing so centrally in a nun's diary? That would be the exact place I would not expect to find a lengthy discussion of vendetta, violence. I'm actually working on an article on that diary now because it's such a rich and understudied source. But from there, I thought, well, I have to follow this trail in the archives. Like, I have to figure out what's happening here. And what I found in Modena were unusually detailed firsthand accounts of vendetta among the city's leading families, along with commentary on how vendetta was understood, justified, and criticized, even by observers. And that allowed me to start kind of reconstructing vendetta not just as violence, but as a broader system, including things we don't usually associate with vendetta, like property transactions. Like I found property transactions invoking vendetta by these families, inheritance that talked about their inheritance strategies and even conflicts over the governance of women's religious institutions, which framed it within the context of vendetta. Of course, this is such a rich story that at first I worry that Modena might be an exceptional case. And I really did want to write a book that had wider implications for understanding vendetta in the 16th century. But, you know, as I started to work in archives in Bologna, Venice, Verona and Vicenza and engaged with excellent recent scholarship, it did become clear that this wasn't that unusual. Even though some of these sources were striking, vendetta among ruling elites and other places does actually follow strikingly similar patterns. I think I probably could have written this book about Vicenza or Reggio Emilia or Verona or, you know, or even Bologna or Venice. Mona just really offers an especially clear window, because of the sources, onto a much broader phenomenon and after spending the past few years encountering it again and again in the archives, I'm actually beginning to think I might have to write a follow up book to this one.
- [15:59]
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- [16:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is very helpful to understand your sort of case selection there. And I appreciate the kind of behind the scenes of the extent to which you did or didn't mean to in the first place. Right. I think again, so often our research processes, we don't have everything all worked out as soon as we start a project. We're often guided by these sorts of sources and questions of like, what if I've chosen a case that doesn't apply to anything else? So get a sense of kind of what your case selection is and sort of how it fits into the wider picture. We do need to know then a little bit more about Modena at this point. So you've given us some specific examples, but like, bigger picture, what is the city like at this point? How do we see sort of civic politics and vendetta intertwined in more than just sort of the case of one particular family or issue?
- [17:17]
Dr. Amanda Madden
That's a really excellent question. Moda is frustratingly understudied and it was particularly frustrating as I was writing this because in some ways I felt like I was just, you know, like really struggling to just understand context. But I also think that's part of what makes it so revealing. So to give kind of a brief overview. At the start of the 16th century, Modena was part of the composite state of Ferrara, which was ruled by the Este family. Although the Este also held the title of Dukes of Modena as well as Duxa Ferrara. Modena was technically, they held it as fief of the Holy Roman Empire. So it was kind of a confusing political configuration. The estate in general were largely focused on Ferrara, right? Because you think of Ferrara, you know, the beautiful castle and you know, the art and, you know, the center of culture. They really weren't interested in Modena and they paid relatively little attention to Modena itself, even though it was, you know, by, by contemporary standards, it was a large enough city. Like it was an urban center, a center of trade and so on and so forth. So it was by no stretch of the imagination some backwater. But the, you know, the essay were kind of indifferent to it. Day to day governance was really left to appointed governors because they just weren't interested that interested. And crucially for the larger picture, the local elites who feature so prominently in the book. This picture started to change a little bit with the Italian wars, especially after the papal takeover of Modena in 1511. Julius II, when he came through, conquered Modena and the papacy ruled Modena until 1527 or so. Interestingly, the position of papal governor was held for a time by Francesco Guiaciardini, who had some really entertaining things to say about working with Modena's elites. That was not particularly flattering. When the Este regained the city in 1527, which they did, they started paying a little bit closer attention to it. But by then, you know, political equilibrium had long been established and in a sense the habit were it was almost too far gone to change. Monet's elites were used to running local affairs in their own way and deeply resented interference in what they saw as their purview. The resistance to kind of estate interference took many forms, but long standing rivalries and vendettas among these families really did begin to erupt more openly in the 16th century. At one point I actually sat down and mapped the electoral rules in Moniz town council and what emerged was striking. At any given moment in the 16th century, at least half of the councilors were locked in some form of entity or vendetta with one another. And this wasn't a brief thing, it wasn't a phase. It was remarkably stable across the 16th century. One might think the whole thing would therefore descend to chaos and nothing would get done and no governance would take place. But because vendetta was kind of contained by design, it seems to have paradoxically upheld stability. So vendetta was clearly shaping local governance, but not in the ways we might expect. Rather than breaking the system, vendetta's actually became kind of a testing ground, a laboratory for figuring out how the law actually worked in practice. They exposed the limits of ducal authority and the extent to which the duke could enforce his sovereignty. And they also exposed where he still needed the cooperation of the local elites to govern effectively, which was in most cases. Some of these conflicts did kind of echo older Guelph Ghibelline alignments with pro ducal and pro imperial factions, although the boundaries were not really that clear. What contemporaries did Consistently emphasize, however, was that much of this violence was political and it was about local autonomy, especially the desire of the elites to keep control over justice in their own hands. There was one moment in my research that really crystallizes for me. One of my richest sources is the chronicler Tommaso Lanceloti, who wrote a 12 volume history of Modena covering the first half of the 16th century. And Lanceloti also belonged to the same elite world and was often a firsthand witness to these events, served on the town's council, was interrelated to some of the protagonists, and at one point he describes Ludovico Bellincini, the head of the Bellincini family, and discusses his repeated refusals to sign a peace agreement after a son had committed a really public assassination against a member of a rival faction, who also happened to be someone that he had been serving on the town council with that quarter. So the Duke's response to this is really interesting. Rather than imprisoning Ludovico for not signing the peace agreement, the Duke essentially said to Ludovico, at least according to Lanceloti, quote, I've let you have your way in many things. Please just let me have my way this time with the implication, just sign the peace agreement, we can move on. Like, let's just get past this moment. What makes this moment so revealing is that it coincided with Ludovico's Bellincini's work on reforming the Monese statutes for the Duke. And Lentili presents it as kind of a devil's bargain. The Ducal administration depended on these men to govern and carry out reform. And in return, it seems to have been willing to tolerate, you know, a certain degree of elite violence and pushback.
- [22:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to think about, the kind of official stuff on paper versus the what's actually happening in the room of like, dude, can you just come on, let's work together here.
- [23:05]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Right, exactly, yeah.
- [23:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is, you know, the sorts of things we'd love seeing in these sorts of sources, and that you can kind of bring it to life for us then. And also really makes very clear the point that the same people doing the vendetta violence are the same people in those rooms of power.
- [23:20]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Right.
- [23:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Like, that's not an accident, is it?
- [23:23]
Dr. Amanda Madden
No, not at all. And the families most engaged in vendetta violence were also the families at the heart of Modena's governance. And this was a coincidence, and I don't think it was either. Neither was it really unique to Modena, because you do see this in other places like Vicenza or Verona, politics and governance in Italy was deeply fraught, especially when it came to relationships between political centers and their peripheries. We often talk about the Italian states during this period as being composite states, which means they're kind of puzzle pieces put together, not necessarily in ways that may fit many states. Venice is a really good example, Left significant authority in the hands of the local elites, you know, after incorporation or conquest. But these arrangements were always kind of fragile, and they were pushed to the breaking point during the Italian wars and their aftermath. I think this instability due to the Italian wars and political shifts does help explain the surge in vendetta violence among the civic elites partially in the 16th century. So on the one hand, you have centralizing governments who are operating themselves in a new geopolitical context. They're trying to consolidate power by drawing justice and coercion, centralizing institutions. But you also have local elites who have long governed their communities, were fairly legally sophisticated. After all, they were the ones responsible for upholding law at the local level, and they had been promised a degree of autonomy, but they were never really fully part of the state. So when ruling powers like the Assaya began intervening more aggressively in local affairs, those tensions really came to. To the forefront. And these very elites that the USA relied on to govern were now being asked to surrender meaningful authority, which they were not really willing to do in most cases. And vendetta became one of their ways of navigating that shift. And so what you have is emerging as a kind of shadow system of politics and justice and response, one that challenges state authority and also kind of appeals to it, exploits its structures even as it undermines them. That paradox is really embodied by figures like Ludovico Bellincini, you know, who, you know, on the one hand, is refusing to, you know, refusing to, like, do what the duke wants him to, but is also reforming the ducal law at the duke's request. And he served on ducal councils. You know, he kept serving on the ducal councils even after his, you know, repeated sort of, like, confrontations with the duke and broke the very laws he was kind of charged with upholding. And there's this great quote about the Bellincini that really kind of underscores this. The Bellincini, by one chronicler, were described as bellicose men or warlike men who are also jurists. And I think that really kind of encapsulates what's going on here of families who are legally savvy jurists, who are highly educated but are also happen to be, be prone to like, vendetta, violence for, for very good reasons.
- [26:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those examples there share a number of things. In terms of elites, they also all sound like men. Is this always just a male thing?
- [26:48]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Excellent question. No, actually, and that was one of the more interesting parts of the story is vendetta. You know, while it is very much rooted in male dominated civic, civics institutions also spilled into women's spaces and networks. And that's, you know, I think that it is very evocative that I discover the story in a nun's diary, right, which, you know, a woman who's at the center of these networks, you know, multiple networks, like religious networks, elite networks, and so on and so forth. So I think it's important to note that these, you know, systems, the system of indebted, did not stop at the boundaries of formal politics. Right? It wasn't just men and their institutions, it was also women. So in chapter five, I focus on a woman's convent, the nunnery of San Lorenzo, which is Sister Lucia's convent, which was founded explicitly because of factional tensions and the threats of further violence. The implication is among women, but also among their brothers and fathers and cousins. And that context was actually written directly into the convent's founding charter. The founding charter is really fascinating because the amount of shade that the nuns project towards the other nuns for starting vendettis, as they accused him, accused them of, was really interesting. So, you know, this kind of indicates the nuns themselves were maintaining their family's rivalries. They had a consciousness that they could start their own fights and, you know, keep fights going and so on and so forth. There are a number of letters, you know, and conflicts that come up in the records of the bishop and the convent records, you know, and there was a constant concern that was discussed about, you know, violence might either spill into or out of the convention. Even though I don't really have any, you know, concrete evidence of physical violence, if the women were hitting one another, they weren't talking about it. And I also talk about elsewhere in this book. I, you know, I talk about how women were recognized as keynotes in vendetta networks. So they did play instrumental roles in sustaining, negotiating and transmitting these conflicts to the extent that they were named in a formal peace agreement, so they were legally recognized as being part of these embassies. In later court cases, it was argued that women were not subject to the same enmities that plagued men, was the quote. But those claims were flatly rejected. So I think the legal recognition that Women can be part of vendettos is very important in the story. And I think this is an acknowledgment that vendetta is not just a male phenomenon, but it's also a broader social system that cross institutional and gender boundaries. I think this is actually a promising avenue for further research. And, you know, periodically at conferences, people are like, oh, I heard about the Spindetta and another comment, and I think, oh, well, I'd actually like to write more about this.
- [29:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that is very interesting indeed that this is not just a male thing. I found that very intriguing to read about in the book and see kind of what this spillover looks like. Kind of going back to what you were saying earlier in terms of what's formally the way everything works versus kind of what actually, actually happens. Though I suppose if I had kind of thought a little bit about it more before diving straight into the book, I would have maybe been like, oh, well, I could see how, like, marriage alliances might be a way that women would get involved. Right. So I don't want to kind of ignore that possibility. Is that an element here when we're talking about either ratcheting up or reducing vendetta tensions?
- [30:18]
Dr. Amanda Madden
That's a really excellent question. So one of the more intriguing aspects of the story was, for me was how tightly interwoven the mon elite was, especially through marriage. So they were highly endogamous and extensively intermarried. So when I began mapping family trees, the same pattern kept emerging. Families who were locked in vendetta were often connected by marriage or close kinship, sometimes only 1 or 2 degrees removed. Interestingly, the Bellincini and the Fontana, which is. Was one of the larger vendettas I talk about in the book. Those were the only families who never intermarried with one another, and I'm not clear as to why. So you might have a Fontana that married in the Tassone family, while a Bellincini was also married to a Tsone in the same generation. You know, a member of the Dallforni might be married to a Bellincini, another Tassone. And, you know, while the Tassoni were in vendetta with both. And this, you know, perplexed me a bit because I was wondering, like. Like, how does this work? These are supposed to be close kinship relationships. And it became incredibly complicated. I drew detailed network charts. I'm actually hoping to eventually put these on the website and put it together for the book, because I do think they're interesting and revealing. But I think my ultimate answer was because of the dense web of connections and how closely they were connected, marriage was never really an effective strategy for were reconciling factions or building peace. They were already kind of within close enough degrees of kinship that, you know, like vendetta should not have either would have impacted or not impacted, if that makes sense. And it would not have brought peace to these families. There is one early 16th century case where a marriage was explicitly brokered to heal a feud and then within like two months, the son in law murdered one of his new relatives. So it was not at all successful. But I think my ultimate conclusion was that marital ties, because they were already intermarried, really neither reduced nor intensified violence. It is really striking when you think about how closely they are related, that they could kill one another one day and then sit together in the next, or, you know, maybe go to a feast together, you know, and then just kind of calmly go on like nothing had happened. You know, it really sort of. It really sort of underscored for me how much solidarity as a class is a bigger question in this picture and is a bigger part of the whole story than, you know, rivalries, right? Like in the hierarchy of identity, their identity as a class where was more important than I am an enemy of such and such much. And at several points in the 16th century, the Duchol administration actually tried to use vendetta violence as a justification for reform, particularly of who got elected to the town council or in local political positions. And each time the Modenese elites closed ranks and collectively insisted factional violence was not a problem at all. They had no idea what the Duke was talking about and he was being completely unreasonable and. And they pushed back and reform never happened. And I think that's really revealing of again, the hierarchy of identity in this case. I do think that what deserves more attention when we're talking about vendetta, violence and more research, frankly, is how women's kin networks fit into this picture. Because I did find that mothers and wives families could also become entangled in the datas in important ways. So in one of the assassinations I discussed, you know, the victim was drawn into the consort through marriage to his wife. He wasn't related to the original combatants. And that just shows us how far these networks of, you know, enmity extended beyond the male line. So I think this is definitely something that, you know, I found in the book that I, you know, is an avenue of inquiry that I'd like to see, you know, pursued.
- [34:21]
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- [34:48]
Dr. Amanda Madden
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Dr. Amanda Madden
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Dr. Amanda Madden
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- [35:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that would definitely be interesting to get more exploration on. But of course we can figure out quite a lot from mapping out these different pieces as you've done. And one thing that you mentioned earlier that I think now we have enough understanding of sort of the networks of vendetta to kind of go back to is this idea that at the same time we're also seeing reform and working more towards a kind of rule of law system. Again, that's not a coincidence, right? That these things are happening at the same time.
- [36:19]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, you know, vendettas didn't fracture, right. They kind of produced a, you know, a solidarity and they did actually help drive reform rather than hinder it. And I think that was a really interesting part of the picture for me. You know, as we might imagine, it was. It was actually hard for rulers like the Este to ignore completely their local elites murdering one another in public ways. Like they couldn't just ig the situation, especially since, you know, vendettas were often in public streets, on holidays, civic holidays, they were certainly accused of tolerating that violence, but they still had to kind of address it in some way. So as the 16th century progressed, controlling violence in general across the Italian peninsula, especially violence that threatened public order, became increasingly urgent. I think, for most Italian polities, you know, both practically. Practically and symbolically, you know, vendettas could really expose the weaknesses in the legal systems, you know, court procedures, you know, the. The fragile arrangements between central authorities and local elites, you know, and as a result, this did, you know, drive efforts to concentrate power within composite states. You know, that state centralization that we often think of as being characteristic of the 16th century, you know, was in part, I argue, in response to some of these conflicts. You know, the Bellincini Fontana vendetta in Mona provides a really concrete example. After a series of highly visible assassinations, several which have involved firearms, which is kind of an innovative new thing, the ducal government became increasingly concerned not with just with punishing individuals, which is, you know, again, this punishment's a weird thing to talk about in the system. But, you know, they did become concerned with regulating access to weapons. That became a. As central concern to the Ducal administration. You know, at first, firearms circulated with relatively loose oversight. Particularly, you know, nobles had a certain, you know, privileges to carry weapons. But, you know, once guns became central tools of vendetta violence, that really did change. And you start to see proclamations and, you know, changes and emendations to the laws. And the dukes did start to tighten weapons licensing, you know, limiting more practically who could legally carry arms, and started to treat unauthorized possession as a more serious offense than they had previously. But these reforms didn't emerge in a vacuum. Right? I mean, they emerged in response to these very concrete conflicts that were taking place, and they were shaped in part by vendetta violence. So I think that a good way to look at it is vendetta's function as a stress test for the state. You know, they did force rulers to confront the limits of their authority and, you know, in many ways, to rethink how violence can be managed, regulated, and ultimately brought under control, particularly as they were practiced by the same people that they were, you know, relying upon to, you know, rule, you know, part of their territories.
- [39:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this kind of back and forth, I think, is really interesting, especially as you said, because it's the same people. So are there any other ways that we want to talk about the legal reforms influencing vendettas and vendettas influencing legal reforms, especially as we kind of go across the 16th century.
- [39:46]
Dr. Amanda Madden
I think that's an excellent question. So, you know, there's alongside some of the more visible reforms like weapons regulation, it was a slow and steady accumulation of legal changes from response to Vienna. It's kind of like, you know, the silt building up at the, you know, at the mouth of the beach or whatever. It was just kind of a slow and steady accumulation of these reforms. Something would happen, and law would be passed, and then the elites would find a kind of way to subvert it. And it was just a slow, gradual process of almost like a stone gathering moss. Yeah. And so in many ways, I think the vendetta must have felt like. I can't extrapolate how the, you know, how the rulers felt about it, but I often think it must have felt like a moving target for the ducal administration. You really do. See, as soon as a new proclamation was issued or a law was revised, elite families, again, these are highly legally trained, in many cases, not only helped author the laws, but helped uphold them, would find ways around it. One of the interesting examples that I often think about, that I didn't get to talk about as much in the book as I would have liked, was in the 1560s, the Duval government issued a prohibition on dowries and bride gifts. And this is a little unusual, actually, a little unusual in the Italian context. And officials realized that families involved in vendetta were deliberately channeling large portions of their patrimony to daughters under the guise of bride gifts because women's property was not subject to the same rules on confiscation that men's property was. So, and this was technically illegal and, you know, subverted a number of Italian inheritance norms, but it served a very practical purpose. You know, property transferred this way was harder for the state to confiscate. You know, if violence escalated, it was clear the family's plan for violence, violence to escalate. So families were using these marriage and dowry laws strategically to protect assets they feared may be seized as punishment for vendetta violence. But this also had, like, a secondary intended or unintended, you know, consequence, and that it helps start revising inheritance norms and practices. You know, property transferred this way was harder for the state to confiscate. But, you know, as these and these often kind of rolled over into civil conflicts where, you know, the property would be the property, like the ducal camera would try to go up to property, and there'd be a lawsuit subsequently, and some families would sue the others and so on and so forth. It really did start to help refine the inheritance system, which is really interesting. So, you know, the state was really struggling to control this, but, you know, it was really kind of refining, you know, refining, like, where the boundaries of law were and, you know, how families were going to practice inheritance. You know, and as I was, again, I wish there had been more space in the book because I was. As I was writing this, I did, you know, look at dowries from these families that were unusual. But, you know, fully tracing the complex web of property transfers, you know, looking at the inheritance, the civil suits that came after, and, you know, all of these legal fictions tied to vendetta would literally have been a book of its own. So there was so much material there. But, you know, I do think these cases show how vendetta was wasn't just about violence. It reshaped law, property and family strategy in lasting ways that did impact, you know, the formation of the state.
- [43:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely interesting to understand kind of how the different things play off of each other. And I can imagine, as you said, it would be sort of frustrating for the people in charge to, like, no, no, wait, wait. We thought we closed that loophole.
- [43:32]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Ah, right. And.
- [43:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But also, like, it makes it clear that there was an impact, right? If. If these laws didn't mean anything, then families wouldn't change their behavior and response. So in some ways, like, I mean, it was probably hard for them to take it as a compliment, but looking at it from, you know, centuries later, we can see that, you know, even if they didn't think immediately something was happening. As you said, the moss was growing, right. The river was silting up, up. So what other sort of aspects do we see this having an impact? I mean, you mentioned kind of strategies around inheritance. You talk in the book about wills. Do we want to discuss that aspect of vendettas and how they get tweaked there?
- [44:11]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Yeah, yeah. Finding vendettas and wills again was another unexpected archival find because I did not expect these families to be explicitly mentioning their conflicts and their wills. But as it turns out, you know, they do appear explicitly in wills and codicils. And, you know, these families were openly acknowledging in their wills and codicils that they were involved in vendetta and that confiscation, not just fines, did pose a serious threat to their patrimony. So they would author these clauses saying in the event of enmity or, you know, an heir rupturing a peace agreement, you know, the property should go to X, Y and Z. And this is Unusual. These inheritance. While these kinds of inheritance clauses, you know, kind of like substituting errors was not unusual, they were unusual enough in this context that once the Ducal administration got wind of it, they immediately started to try passing laws to prevent this. Because they, they actually said in the laws, we know these families are using these codicils and the wills and these clauses to keep committing further homicides. And we need to stop this, practice this, you know. But they were taking deliberate steps to protect their family property. And you do start to see increasingly elaborate clauses that disinherit errors. You know, if they're accused of m. And your vendetta. And you know, given that vendetta is often involved entire lineages up to the fourth degree, these provisions could become extraordinarily complex. Again, you know, some of these inheritance cases were wrapped up in the courts for like, like decades, if not a hundred years. One of the examples I do discuss in the book is, which I think is a good example, is that of Alexandra Fontana. Her father was accused of a vendetta related murder and of breaking a peace agreement. And her mother and her father altered their wills to channel property to her to prevent confiscation of their property. And when the Ducal administration attempted to enforce the financial penalties for her father's violation of the peace, it triggered a legal battle that stretched on for decades. And I think this, you know, legal battles like this in this process did help clarify inheritance storms in this case.
- [46:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting. I don't think that was something certainly I wasn't expecting to read about in a book about vendetta. Like how did that change will?
- [46:38]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Right.
- [46:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But clearly it does have these broader impacts. So once we start to realize these kind of links between vendetta and reform, that may not have been as apparent. How does this change our understanding of sort of Italian politics more broadly in this century and maybe even beyond.
- [46:59]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Thanks for asking that question. So traditionally, I think vendetta and violence more broadly has been framed as something fundamentally opposed to. To politics and state formation. Right. You have the classic models like Weber's, the state is defined by monopoly over legitimate violence. Or Elias, who casts vendetta as antithetical to the so called civilizing process and really focused on the shift from vendetta to dueling. I think of this book and in my broader work in general, I do argue that violence isn't necessarily opposed to state formation. Difficult is that that, you know, paradoxical as that may be, you know, like any form of conflict, vendetta really could actually clarify and reframe key political questions, questions like who had the right to carry weapons, you know, like, what laws were, you know, were worthy of being upheld, you know, exactly how should we regulate violence? You know, where are the boundaries of jurisdictions? You know, And I think. I think it's useful to think of vendettas at the end of the day and enmities that sustain them as relationships. Right? They're deeply structured relationships. They help solidify identities among this class. They help define institutions, help sort of really clarify political processes, however counterintuitive that may kind of seem. In that sense, violence could be productive as a state, as well as kind of know, fundamentally a part or an end piece of the state, as paradoxical as that is, you know, and right now, I've been doing a lot of work in the Venetian archives this past year, and I'm finding a wide range of cases of enmity and mortal hatred, actually, that are continuing well into the 6th 17th century. So this did not go away. Like, the end of, you know, 1600 is not the end of the story. And it really is making me realize that this story probably does not end with civil blood. I may need to, I don't know, write a second, more geographically expansive book that talks about vendettas, how they endured into the end of the 17th century. But that's a preliminary thought as I'm kind of combing through these materials in the Venetian archives.
- [49:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
A hint of a sequel. I like it. Okay, that's exciting. Anything else you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview on Once?
- [49:28]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Yeah. So I did spend the fall of 2024 here in Venice, and some of 25 and Christmas in Venice, actually this past year working in the archives of the Council of ten, and I've been focusing on criminal deliberations and proclamations. This material is actually part of a different project, which is mapping violence in early modern Italy. But it's also the foundation for my next book, which I've just barely begun, which is examining gender violence in space and the courts of the Venetian Republic. What I'm finding so far in the material I've been working with is it's pushing me towards rethinking questions of agency in the criminal courts. Who could act, who was constrained, how gender roles were enforced, negotiated, subverted. I'm finding some really interesting material on how women acted in relation to gender norms and the criminal courts. It's also raised new questions for me about the boundary between the public and the private, particularly as I'm finding a lot of, again, cases involving nuns. Somehow I can't get away from archival materials involving nuns who are subverting expectations. And I'm seeing this taking place in legal settings where those distinctions are constantly being tested, because this is the court, the Council of ten, and the courts they supervise. So alongside working on this next book, I'm also working on this project, Mapping Violence, which is a digital humanities project and that actually should be going live at the end of the spring. And the goal of this project is, from talking to other researchers and comparing notes and comparing data and so on and so forth, I really do think, like violence and the early modern period deserves a very collaborative and comparative framework. And so the goal of this project is to bring together data from different regions, cities. And so you could just kind of compare across space and time what violence look like and identify larger patterns in early modern violence. Particularly because a lot of the data sets that we've been working from just. Just because prior to, I guess, the Internet age and laptops, we just didn't have as much computing power. So some of the data sets from the 1990s, for example, are very small. It's a good time to kind of revisit with digital tools what we can do and how we can examine violence on a larger scale. Thinking in terms of larger data sets, I've really having uncovered a lot of really fun material and. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been just a blast to work through. And finally, right now, I'm finishing my syllabi for next semester, so I'm teaching my first undergraduate course focused entirely on the history of video games, which I'm really excited about because I've taught video games before, but not to this extent. I've never taught an entire course on video games. So I'm pretty excited. And yeah, it's a busy, though, very exciting moment for me.
- [52:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, plenty going on. So while you are off working on all of those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Civil Vendetta, Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Amanda, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [52:59]
Dr. Amanda Madden
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. This has been truly. Sam.