The Omiš Line

They are cittadini originari — the hereditary civil class of the Republic, below the patriciate and above everyone else, from which the permanent chancery was staffed. In the middle of the fifteenth century Marco Antonio de Franceschi is secretary of the ducal chancery and a member of the consiglio nobile. The family is allowed Venetian and foreign titles, the county among them. Inferred — from the nobiliary literature, not from a document read here.

Niccolò acts for Guillaume Grimoard — the future Urban V — in the negotiations between Louis I of Anjou and the Republic. By a charter given at Buda on 8 March 1359 Louis receives him into the hereditary Hungarian-Croatian nobility with arms, for estates around Zadar. Every Zadar and Omiš descent in this archive traces to him. The family no longer holds the charter; the claim rests on the nobiliary literature and on the family's own 1838 submission.

In the second half of the sixteenth century Francesco de Franceschi (1520–1598) is sent from Venice to Omiš as a member of the town senate, and is named in the parish books. From that point the family runs in two places at once — Zadar and Omiš — and the literature is explicit that the two nurtured their ties for centuries. The foundation plaque of 1584 on his house at Omiš is the oldest object in this archive.

Toma de Franceschi is admitted to the Zadar city council by hereditary right and sworn in 1714, appointed public notary in 1722, and works forty years — running his office in «Illyrian», that is Croatian, as well as in Italian. His son Ivan Krševan follows him into the same office. In 1838 the family submits its documentation and genealogy to the Austrian commission on nobility and is entered in Heyer von Rosenfeld's register of the Dalmatian nobility, printed at Nuremberg in 1873.

Giovanni — «Zuane» — de Franceschi (1673–1741) leads local volunteers from Poljica by way of Vrulja to the siege of Imotski in 1717; after three days two hundred German and two hundred Swiss mercenaries with cannon and as many horse from Sinj join them. Imotski and Vrgorac are taken, and the border between Dalmatia and Bosnia is fixed where it still runs. The Republic pays him in the estates of Arslan-beg Čaušević — land, houses, a mill and a tower on the Vrljika, at the place called Perinuša. Andrija Kačić Miošić put the campaign into verse. In the church at Poljica, before the altar, there is an old family tomb with the arms carved on it.

Giovanni de Franceschi (Omiš 1810 – Zadar 1862) — professor, historian, essayist, travel writer, editor of the monthly «La Dalmazia» at Zadar; bishop's chancellor, honorary canon of the Split diocese, and a schoolmaster. He is remembered for the poem Dalmatinska vila of 1844, and in his own paper he argued for an enlightened cosmopolitanism. He is the point at which this family stops being soldiers and becomes writers.

The nobiliary de is stripped from the Omiš–Imotski family by decree of the Napoleonic administration. That is why the descendants of a count are called plainly Franceschi today, at Split and at Imotski, and why the surname distribution in modern Croatia looks nothing like the eighteenth-century record. Not drift, and not a clerk: law.

Almost everything above is the family's account of itself, corroborated by the Croatian nobiliary literature. The two hard things this archive has found on its own are the foundation plaque of 18 June 1584 and — new in September 2026 — D. Nicolò Defranceschi holding a state vineyard at Vrisovec in the «Gazzetta di Zara» of 4 August 1840, which is set out below. The obvious next test is the Zadar notarial fond: Toma worked in it for forty years, and it will either carry this family or it will not.

An avviso of the Imperial-Royal Pretura d'Almissa — the magistracy of Omiš — dated 6 July 1840 and signed Gio: Maria Ipsich, Pretore, announcing the sale of state property by public auction in the Pretura's office on 16, 17 and 18 September 1840 at ten in the morning. Four lots, all vineyard or arable, all at a place called Strane in Vrisovec, and each listed with the tenant who held it. The second lot: «Un terreno vignato, chiamato Strane in Vrisovec, dell'estesa di vreteni 2 circa, tenuto a colonia al quarto da D. Nicolò Defranceschi. La voce fiscale è di fi. 8 k. 20.» — a vineyard called Strane at Vrisovec, of about two *vreteni*, held in colonia at the quarter by D. Nicolò Defranceschi. Fiscal value 8 florins 20 kreuzer.

The colonato, the Dalmatian sharecropping tenure: the *colono* works the land and renders a share of the crop, here a quarter, to the owner. So Nicolò Defranceschi was not the owner — he was the working tenant of a state-owned vineyard, and the state was selling it out from under him. His neighbours in the same list are the heirs of Matteo Benković, Gian Francesco Pavišić and a Radmillović, and none of them carries an honorific. Only Defranceschi is given a «D.» — Don, or Dominus — which in a Dalmatian public notice marks a priest or a gentleman among peasants.

Almissa is Omiš. This page has the Dalmatian family at Omiš from Francesco the Venetian's foundation plaque of 1584, and follows it to Imotski and Perinuša after 1717 — but almost everything it holds for the nineteenth century comes from a family tree rather than a document. Here is a Defranceschi at Omiš in 1840, named, with a plot of land, a tenure, a valuation and a date, in the official gazette of the province. He is the first of them this archive has found in print rather than in a pedigree.

This issue also carries Buccari — but in a wholly unconnected notice, from the magistrate of «la libera città marittima e commerciale e distretto porto franco di Buccari», dated 7 February 1840, at the instance of one Maria Carina. The two words are pages apart and have nothing to do with each other. Which means the search that produced «nine issues on Defranceschi and Buccari» was matching the two words anywhere in the same issue, not together — and a gazette prints notices from every district in the province. The Bakar lead is therefore much weaker than it looked, and the other eight issues should be read expecting coincidence rather than a household.

A double-barrelled house name in Zadar means a marriage, not a merger: a Franceschi daughter or son married into the Grisogono, and the palace carried both names afterwards. The Grisogono are one of the oldest patrician families of the city — Heyer von Rosenfeld starts their genealogy at a Grisogono de Grisogoni in 1290. This archive does not know which Franceschi. It knows that in Zadar the name was attached to two buildings on the main street, and that is more than it knew this morning.

Antoljak's footnote 155 reads: «O toj porodici v. članak Famiglia Franceschi, Il Rammentatore zaratino, Lunario per l'anno 1859, Zara, 30.» — On this family see the article «Famiglia Franceschi», in the Zadar almanac for the year 1859, p. 30. An article devoted to the Franceschi family of Zadar, printed in 1859, in a serial this project has never touched. It is one page. It is the single most findable unread thing this archive now knows about, and it sits in the Znanstvena knjižnica Zadar or the Državni arhiv u Zadru.

Footnote 156 sends you to Giuseppe Sabalich, «Guida archeologica di Zara», at pages 375–377, 470–471 and 497–498 — the archaeological guide's own account of those buildings. Sabalich is on the Internet Archive. Footnote 157 is Heyer von Rosenfeld's «Wappenbuch des Königreichs Dalmatien», Nürnberg 1873, which is the same armorial that admitted this family's Zadar branch to the Dalmatian nobility.