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The Enlightened Anthropology of Friendship in Venetian Dalmatia: Primitive Ferocity and Ritual Fraternity Among the Morlacchi

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.1999.0008

1086-315X

Larry Wolff,

Central European national history

The Enlightened Anthropology of Friendship in Venetian Dalmatia: Primitive Ferocity and Ritual Fraternity among the Morlacchi Larry Wolff* (bio) Friendship and Ferocity “It is enough to treat the Morlacchi with humanity,” wrote the Paduan philosophe Alberto Fortis, “to obtain from them all possible courtesies and cordially to make them friends [farseli cordialmente amici].” This enlightened prescription for friendship appeared in Fortis’s account of his travels in Venetian Dalmatia, Viaggio in Dalmazia, published in Venice in 1774. The philosophical centerpiece of the work was Fortis’s anthropological treatment of “The Customs of the Morlacchi,” and he took for granted that the Venetian reading public would already know the Morlacchi by reputation “as a race of ferocious men, unreasonable, without humanity, capable of any misdeed.” 1 They were the pastoral people of the inland mountains of Dalmatia, the most intractable subjects of Venice’s imperial administration across the Adriatic, repeatedly cited in official reports for their barbarous ferocity. If the Morlacchi were already notorious in Venice, Fortis, reevaluating their customs, made them famous throughout the Republic of Letters, as his book was promptly translated into German (1776), English (1778), and French (1778); furthermore, there were special [End Page 157] separate translations of “The Customs of the Morlacchi,” as “Die Sitten der Morlacken” (1775) and “Les moeurs et usages des Morlaques” (1778). Interest in the Morlacchi was sufficiently sensational in the 1770s for Goethe to translate poetry “Aus dem Morlackischen,” and for Herder to include translated specimens, designated as “Morlackisch,” in his collections of Volkslieder. 2 This “ferocious” people thus found important and cordial friends within the European Enlightenment, enjoying the celebrity of a constructed identity, which was then so thoroughly effaced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Morlacchi have passed into complete obscurity and oblivion, indeed, anthropological extinction. When Fortis offered a formula for making friends of the Morlacchi, he testified from his personal experience as a traveler in Dalmatia, but also addressed the most problematic issue of Venetian administration in the province. With the eighteenth-century inland extension of Venetian Dalmatia, at the expense of Ottoman Bosnia, by the treaties of Carlowitz in 1699 and Passarowitz in 1718, the increased subject population of Morlacchi presented serious problems of provincial order to the Provveditori Generali, the Venetian governors of Dalmatia. Zorzi Grimani, who served as Provveditore Generale in the 1730s, compared the more easily administered population of the coastal cities, which had long been subject to Venice, to the more recently subjected Morlacco, represented in a character portrait: “He is by nature ferocious, but not indomitable. He is accustomed to being treated without excess. Too much gentleness makes him impertinent, and extraordinary rigor renders him fierce and harsh.” Thus the question of how to “treat” the Morlacchi was already a matter of official concern and even debate, decades before Fortis philosophically recommended that they be treated with humanity. In 1747, Marco Foscarini addressed the Maggior Consiglio in Venice about administrative abuses and popular discontent in Dalmatia, especially about the case of the “unhappy Morlacco,” and insisted that “the manner of Venetian government has usually been to enamor peoples.” Pietro Michiel, Provveditore Generale in the 1760s, considering “the true character of the Morlacco,” declared that “although he appears to be without discipline, he is not incapable of receiving it.” 3 This official controversy over administrative alternatives—gentleness versus rigor, enamoring love versus inculcated discipline—formed the discursive context for Fortis’s philosophical prescription to treat the Morlacchi with humanity in order to make them friends. He argued anthropologically for the plausibility of this approach by insisting that the same primitive customs that made the Morlacchi appear ferocious also made them especially susceptible to friendship. “The inhabitants of the littoral cities of Dalmatia,” wrote Fortis, “recount a great number of the cruel deeds of these peoples, who by their avidity to steal have been often led to the most atrocious excesses of murder, arson, and violence.” The unprecedented adventure of his own voyage was that he left the coastal towns to explore the inland mountains of Dalmatia, to befriend the Morlacchi and to redress their reputation. “I believe that I owe to the nation,” he declared, “by whom I have been...