Using dogesr to work with Venetian doges family types

Introduction

For the longest part of its existence, Venetian noble families used tactical marriage (Telek 2017) to improve the lot of their case or dynasties. Since access to nobility was closed by the beginning of the XIV century, and then enlarged little by little, there was a kind of stratification in the nobility, and marrying older families was a way of improving the political, commercial and social prospects for your own family.

Using data from dogesr (Merelo-Guervós 2022), we will, in this vignette, see to what extent that happened and how different types of families married with each other.

Set up

We load the datasets needed; doges describes doges and their marriages, families includes data for every noble family.

devtools::load_all(".")
#> ℹ Loading dogesr
data("doges")
data("families")

This will import the data from the dogesr package into the data.doges data frame, and family data in the family.types list. Let’s merge them into a single data frame. The table of all family names and their corresponding family type is shown below.`

marriages.types <- 
  data.frame( doge.family = data.doges$Family.doge,
              dogaressa.family = data.doges$Family.dogaressa,
              fam.type.doge = unname( unlist ( family.types[ data.doges$Family.doge ] )),
              fam.type.dogaressa = unname( unlist ( family.types[ data.doges$Family.dogaressa ] ))
)
knitr::kable(marriages.types)

Let’s create an adjacency matrix for this

marriages.just.types <- marriages.types
marriages.just.types$doge.family <- NULL
marriages.just.types$dogaressa.family <- NULL
marriages.just.types$fam.type.doge <- paste0(marriages.just.types$fam.type.doge,"♂")
marriages.just.types$fam.type.dogaressa <- paste0(marriages.just.types$fam.type.dogaressa,"♀")
levs <- c(unique(unlist(marriages.just.types$fam.type.doge, use.names = FALSE)),unique(unlist(marriages.just.types$fam.type.dogaressa, use.names = FALSE)))
types.adjacency <- table(lapply(marriages.just.types, factor, levs))
types.adjacency <- types.adjacency[,-c(1:9)]
types.adjacency <- types.adjacency[-c(10:18),]
knitr::kable(types.adjacency)

The heaviest link seem to be between the evangeliche and apostoliche cases, although “Not available” is the heaviest column for doges, who either did not marry or married some non-patrician family; this happened most frequently in the pre-Serrata (Puga and Trefler 2014) times.

Let’s look at this in a Sankey diagram

library(tidyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'tidyr'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:testthat':
#> 
#>     matches
#> The following object is masked from 'package:igraph':
#> 
#>     crossing
library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:testthat':
#> 
#>     matches
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:igraph':
#> 
#>     as_data_frame, groups, union
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
library(tibble)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'tibble'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:igraph':
#> 
#>     as_data_frame
links <- types.adjacency  %>% as.data.frame() 
nodes <- data.frame(
  name=c(as.character(links$fam.type.doge), as.character(links$fam.type.dogaressa)) %>% 
    unique()
  )
links$IDsource <- match(links$fam.type.doge, nodes$name)-1 
links$IDtarget <- match(links$fam.type.dogaressa, nodes$name)-1

library(networkD3)
links <- links[ links$Freq > 0,]
sankeyNetwork(Links = links, Nodes = nodes,
                     Source = "IDsource", Target = "IDtarget",
                     Value = "Freq", NodeID = "name", 
                     sinksRight=FALSE)

The “NA” category of families seems to dominate the female part of the diagram, corresponding to dogaresse. The fact that their family name is not available is due either to non-married doges or dogaresse not in patrician families, something that was allowed until the so-called “second serrata” that made marriage between nobles and citizens practically impossible (Chojnacki 2000). This was common at the beginning of the Republic, which is why estinte and apostoliche families seem to have that as a preference. It’s common, however, throughout.

We are mostly interested, however, in the social links formed by different types of noble families, so we will simply eliminate those rows and columns to have a clearer picture.

types.adjacency <- types.adjacency[-1,-1]
links2 <- types.adjacency  %>% as.data.frame() 
nodes2 <- data.frame(
  name=c(as.character(links2$fam.type.doge), as.character(links2$fam.type.dogaressa)) %>% 
    unique()
  )
links2$IDsource <- match(links2$fam.type.doge, nodes2$name)-1 
links2$IDtarget <- match(links2$fam.type.dogaressa, nodes2$name)-1
links2 <- links2[ links2$Freq > 0,]
sankeyNetwork(Links = links2, Nodes = nodes2,
                     Source = "IDsource", Target = "IDtarget",
                     Value = "Freq", NodeID = "name")

What we see here is the popularity of apostoliche dogaresse, and of ducali doges. But also how common marrying up was. Apostolochie families couldn’t marry up, since they were in the first post-Serrata batch, so they married with other similar families as well as evangeliche. These, despite being only four families, were quite popular in terms of providing wives for other doges.

Ducali families, being newer to the noble families pool, married preferably up: apostoliche, vecchie and evangeliche, as well as their own class. Only a relative minority married other nuove families. Nuove families, however, did not manage to marry into any apostoliche family; while the few nuovissime and soldo (paid positions) also married up, to apostoliche and ducali families, respectively.

Conclusions

In (Merelo-Guervós 2022) we hinted at the possibility that marrying in Venetian nobles families was done tactically, so that the commercial and political prospects of both families were enhanced. What we examine in this report is how intermarriage among the different types of families work, and found that, in general, family classes tended to marry older families, thus improving their position in the social network and/or solidifying it by making links to families with higher social capital.