Metadata: Correspondence of the State Chancelleries
Collection
- Country:
- Italy
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of Milan
- Holding institution (official language):
- Archivio di Stato di Milano
- Postal address:
- via Senato 10, 20121 Milano
- Phone number:
- +39 027742161
- Web address:
- http://www.archiviodistatomilano.beniculturali.it/
- Email:
- as-mi@beniculturali.it
- Reference number:
- Carteggio delle Cancellerie dello Stato. Boxes: 2; 17; 86; 273; 310; 320; 322; 324; 330-331; 333; 335; 340; 354-356; 358; 405; 410
- Title:
- Correspondence of the State Chancelleries
- Title (official language):
- Carteggio delle Cancellerie dello Stato
- Creator/accumulator:
- State Chancellery and the Secret Chancellery of the Spanish and Austrian period
- Date(s):
- 1535-1624
- Date note:
- Jewish-related material dates from 1537-1617
- Language:
- Italian
- Extent:
- 435 boxes
- Physical condition:
- good
- Scope and content:
-
The fonds Correspondence of the State Chancelleries consists of 435 boxes, equal to 62 linear meters of documentation, dating from 1535 to 1624. It comprises correspondence of the governmental chancelleries (Secretariat of State and Secretariat of War) and the chancellery of the Grand Chancellor (or Secret Chancellery) with the central and peripheral authorities of the State, various communities and with single individuals. Beside the correspondence, it includes concessions and privileges, gride and documents relating to the census and the tax system. This fonds contains many documents relating to major issues of Jewish interest, as follows:
1. Conservators of the Jews, i.e. those magistrates who held civil jurisdiction in disputes between Christians and Jews, and had the task of collecting the annual tax due by the Jewish Communities to the Ducal Chamber and generally to check the activity of Jewish moneylending banks. Box 2, file 8, includes documentation of the appointment of Cardinal Marino Caracciolo as a substitute of Countess Bianca Stampa of Lodrone, conservator of the Jews together with Giovanni Angelo Rizzo. The Countess would be reconfirmed in her office by King Charles V, 15 December 1537 (box 17, file 4).
2. Exemptions from the obligation to wear the yellow "beret", introduced by the grida of 2 September 1566. Box 310 contains, for example, the request of Liberale Levi from Mantua to be allowed to wear the black cap in case he had to go to Milan on behalf of the Duke of Mantua. After the expulsion of 1597, numerous requests were made to be allowed to wear the black cap for those Jews who - in order to be able to conclude the procedures left open with their departures - had to go to the capital or more generally travel in the Duchy. In folder 355 these include: 4 September 1600, authorisation to Isaac and Giuseppe Luria of Casale Monferrato; 13 November 1600, authorisation granted to Isaac Soave of Cremona. The same authorisation is granted to Consiglio Carmi (box 358, file 1, 27 April 1601), Simone Sacerdote and his family (box 358, file 1, 29 April 1601), Anselmo Vitale Sacerdote (box 405, file 2, 23 February 1616), Samuele Melli and Angelo Levi of Mantua (box 410, file 1, 4 August 1617).
3. Expulsion of the Jews from the Duchy. Box 324, file 1, includes minutes of the Secret Council that urges cities to take over the debts of the State owed to Jews in order to speed up their expulsion. The definition of the quotas to be attributed to each city caused a long controversy of which one finds traces also in box 330, file 2 (doc. 27 June and 21 July 1595). The conservator of the royal patrimony, Matteo Ferro, also intervened in the quantification of the debt. Ferro argued that since the Jews had no longer paid the annual fee since the expiry of the condotta in 1569, they themselves were debtors of the State and it was therefore necessary to proceed with the recalculation of the amounts (box 331, file 1). At the same time, the Jews of the Duchy tried to avert the expulsion by promising to cancel the Crown's debt in return for an extension of the 12-year condotta, a proposal dismissed by the Secret Council (box 331, file 2). The following documents are also relevant: in box 335, issue 1, minutes of the Secret Council on the lack of funds for the payment of Jewish credits; in box 333, file 3, document relating to the date of expulsion and in box 340, issue 2, the minutes of the Secret Council of 23 June 1597 in which the agents and prosecutors of the Council declare that the expulsion has ended.
4. The series also contains extensive documentation on the various Communities of the Duchy and in particular on that of Alessandria and on the Sacerdote family (boxes 86, 273, 320, 322, 335, 354, 356, 358).
- Archival history:
-
The fonds is the result of the merger of the state chancellery papers existing at the time of the Spanish-Austrian domination:
1. the Governor's secretariat, itself divided into Secretariat of State and Secretariat of War. This Chancellery processed the Governor's acts (as a direct representative of the sovereign), in the areas of regulatory, control and coordination of the Lombard magistrates, appointments of the members of the city and provincial organs and notification to the public of the sovereign’s will, through dispatches and gride.
2. the Grand Chancellor’s chancellery, known as the Secret Chancellery. This Chancellery acted as a filter between the duke’s will and the central and peripheral administrations of the Sforza domain (Leverotti 1997). It had many tasks: diplomatic relations, relations between central authorities and local courts, issues relating to the granting of ecclesiastical benefits, supervision of criminal cases, as well as the drafting of safe conducts, letters of grace and special exemptions. Control over all the ducal earnings and expenditures was ultimately up to the secret chancellery. To these were added documents from the plenipotentiary minister's chancellery and, to a lesser extent, material from the archives of the other chancelleries created as a result of the Theresian and Josephine reforms, namely: the Government Registry and the State Chancellery.
The merger of the documents probably took place at the San Fedele Government Archive, under the direction of Luca Peroni. After 1818, in fact, the archives of the Visconti-Sforza and Spanish-Austrian ducal period were merged and the documentation ordered chronologically in order to select, extract and order the documents by subject, according to the system known as "Peronian". From this activity of fusion of fonds of different origins derives the vast archival complex of the AS MI called Government Acts.
Under the direction of Luigi Osio (1851-1871) the bulk of the documentation underwent a new reorganisation, forming a partition of the so-called Historical-Diplomatic Section commissioned by Osio himself. The fond was named "Diplomatic correspondence of the various governments in the State of Milan after that of our dukes", or "Post-1535 diplomatic correspondence" and also included "documentation following to the duchy, until 1815: archives of the Vice-presidency Melzi, of the Italian Republic, of the Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Italy and of the Bellegarde Imperial Commission "(GG II 931). Subsequently, under the direction of Cesare Cantù (1873-1895), the chronological endpoints of the documents were brought back to the end of the duchy (1796) and, with the new name of "Carteggio generale" or "Diplomatic documents", formed a single series with the Visconti-Sforza correspondence. This situation remained unchanged until the early years of the management of Luigi Fumi (1908-1920), when the correspondence of the chancelleries, united with the Visconti-Sforza letters, constituted the fond "Diplomatic documents of the lords of Milan, of the Visconti, of the captains and defenders of the Ambrosian Republic, of the Sforza, of the foreign sovereigns who succeeded them in the government of Lombardy”.
The archives that were removed from the fonds in the following period were used to reconstitute the so-called National Archives (that is, the complex of fonds of the Napoleonic period); the acts of the Bellegarde Commission were in turn attached to the Government Presidency of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom.
With Giovanni Vittani (1920-1938) the correspondence of the state chancelleries was arranged in a logical and chronological way and was followed by the registers (see the record of the archival complex Registers of the state chancelleries and of different courts, asmi1060).
Finally, in the guide to the fonds held in the Italian state archives of 1944, the correspondence (more precisely called Carteggi) is one of the two sections - with the registers - of the documentary complex Secretariat of the State of Milan (1536-1796). In the description of the material, which at that time consisted of 517 envelopes from the years 1536-1796, with the exception of the last seven containing documents from the Austrian period, it is pointed out that: "most of the correspondence and acts that originally formed this series were distributed in the various entries of the Peronian system: those that remain are acts of various kinds: reports of ambassadors and commissioners in the various cities of the duchy and minutes of replies to them, minutes of decrees, petitions of parties, drafts of chancellery, arranged chronologically under the item Diplomatic documents "(State Archives 1944, p. 151 ff., in particular pp. 152-153).
Documents are only preserved only up to the years 1623/1624, after the fonds suffered significant damage during bombardments in August 1943.
See also http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/archivi/complessi-archivistici/MIBA002451/
- Access points: locations:
- Alessandria
- Milan
- Yerusha Network member:
- Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center - Milan
- Author of the description:
- Rori Mancino; Centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea; 2018
