The People They Married

Two thousand two hundred indexed records for this surname survive in the Croatian church books. Strip out the men who carried the name and what is left is a list of the families who let them in: seventy-one distinct in-law surnames, from a Venetian patrician house to a Carnian weaving family to the descendants of refugee raiders.

Grouped by where those names come from, the pattern is not subtle. The family married the whole of Istria.

The Venetian and Istrian Romance names

The largest group, and the least surprising: Bergamo, Malusà, Moscarda, Padovan, Belloni, Faravallo, Martechini, Frezza, Perusino, Beluzzi. These are the names of the coastal and small-town Romance-speaking Istria the family lived in — the world of the parish register itself, kept in Latin and Italian by priests who wrote de Franceschis for a man everyone called Zuane.

Two of them are not village names at all. A Pietro De Franceschi married an Anna Bembo — the surname of a Venetian patrician house that gave the Republic a doge's chancery, a cardinal, and the type Aldus Manutius cut for him. A Bortolo De Franceschi married a Zanetta Gravisi, the marquesses of Pietrapelosa, one of the oldest titled families in Istria. Neither marriage proves anything about status — patrician surnames spread far beyond patrician households — but they are worth knowing about, and they sit oddly beside modesti possidenti.

The Slavic names

Schifich, Skoko, Vojnić, Michelcich, Mihecich, Bellinich, Buich, Kalanj, Ivancić, Marinovich, Zvitanovich. Twenty-one surnames in -ić, written the Austrian way with -ich, or Slavic outright. In the Ližnjan records especially, the Defranceschi marry Skifich and Skoko and Vojnić generation after generation.

This matters for the identity argument that has been fought over these villages for a century. A family with an Italian patronymic, in a parish whose registers are kept in Latin and Italian, marrying Croatian families for two hundred years, is not a puzzle. It is what Istria was. Acta Croatica records today's Defranceschi of the Pazin area as Croats, rarely Italians — and the marriage record is why.

The Carnian names — and this is the finding

Cleva, Corva, Crosilla, Carlutto, Dorliguzzo, Stefanutti, Clagnan. Friulian and Carnian surnames, in Istrian parish registers, marrying into this family.

Two of them are not merely Friulian in shape. Corva and Crosilla are named in the scholarship on the Canale di Gorto emigration as families of Ovaro's own commune — Giovanni Corva of Muina held tenants at Agrons; the Micoli Crosilla Toscano were the leading house of Mione itself, the family who built the casa delle cento finestre and who ran a cloth shop at Pinguente trading from Montona to Rozzo.

In 1882 a Jacobina Defranceschi, born 1804, was buried as the wife of a Joan-Baptae Crosilla. Somewhere between the 1679 list that puts a De Franceschi of Mione on the road into the County of Pazin, and a Defranceschi woman dying as a Crosilla wife in the 1880s, the two Carnian families were still finding each other in Istria two hundred years after they left the same valley. That is not proof of descent. It is a very loud coincidence.

Read it left to right and the politics change under the same families. Domenica Filipich marries a Francesco De Franceschi in 1776, under Maria Theresa, in a county the Habsburgs had held for four hundred years. Elisabetta Dalino marries in 1793, with Venice four years from extinction. Natalia Ivancić marries in 1806, when the Habsburgs had just lost the province to Napoleon; by 1809 these parishes were in the Illyrian Provinces and the priest's register was, briefly, a French administrative document.

Then the sky closed. Tambora erupted in April 1815, and 1816 became the year without a summer — cold, sunless, endlessly wet across Europe, followed by the harvest failure of 1817 and the last great famine the continent has had. Grain convoys were attacked; hundreds of thousands were left destitute. The Fasana records show a De Franceschi child in 1816 and another in 1819. Whatever else those families were doing, they were doing it hungry.

Maria Michelcich appears against a Carlo De Franceschi in an 1812 record, alongside a Giuseppe da Gologorizza — Joseph of Gologorica, which is how a village clerk writes a man who is known by where he is from. Carlo the historian was three years old that year, in that village, with a father called Giuseppe.

By 1845 a Victorius Defranceschi is marrying Maria-Francisca Ottochian. Ottochian means of Otočac — and Otočac is one of the three surnames historians trace to the Uskoks resettled inland near Učka after Venice forced them out of Senj in 1617. Two hundred and twenty-eight years after the expulsion, a descendant of the raiders marries into a family of weavers' descendants. Senj and Gologorica, the two halves of this archive that never shared a ruler, meet in one parish register.

And in 1879, a Defranceschi marries an Emerico Cosulich — the Lussino family who built one of the great Adriatic shipping houses out of a small island. The century that began with a hungry village ends with the family attached, however distantly, to the steamships that carried the next generation to New York, Sydney and Cape Town.

Every account of Carlo gives the same half-sentence: born at Moncalvo di Pisino on 16 October 1809, to Giuseppe De Franceschi and Lambertina Peschle of Volosca. Then she disappears from the story, as the mothers do.

She does not disappear from the registers. Peschle is not an Istrian name — it is German, and it belongs to Fiume, the Habsburg free port an hour up the coast from Volosca. Two hundred and twenty Peschle records survive in the Croatian church books, and they resolve into a family:

A Mathias Peschle born in 1756, married to a Justina Jacich — a German surname and a Croatian one, in the same marriage, in the 1780s. Their son Alexander, born 1803, married a Franca Descovich. A second Alexander, born 1797, married an Anna Promagnoli, and their children were baptised at Fiume: Pasqualina, Ercolano, Paschalis Maria in April 1832 — and Carmina, born 1832, buried 6 June 1833.

Volosca, where Lambertina came from, sat on the boundary: Habsburg territory, Italian-speaking on the shore, Croatian in the hills behind, looking across the bay at a Hungarian free port full of German clerks and Italian merchants. A Peschle daughter marrying an inland Istrian landowner named De Franceschi is a small piece of exactly that world.

And then the name comes back. Among the burials at Poreč is a Lamberta Defranceschi, born July 1866, died July 1867, daughter of Caroli. Carlo named a daughter after his mother. The child lived twelve months. Two years later, in 1868, his last child was born at Poreč and lived to be eighty-five: Camillo, who would write the history of the county his grandmother married into.

There is one more, and it is the saddest line in the whole dataset. The Poreč and Rovinj registers give Carlo four children who did not survive: Julius, born 1853, died February 1854 at Rovinj. Aurelia Augusta, born 1867, died July 1867. Lamberta, 1866–1867. Virginia, born 1858, died 20 August 1876 at eighteen. The man who spent his life arguing about the future of a province buried at least four of his children while he did it.