Page 119 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

A Dynasty of Mayors and a Member of Parliament

them are seizures, and stands out for the high value of the seized assets.
The case is important for understanding the land market among farmers in
the Karst in the middle of the eighteenth century (Panjek 2023), but here
we are only interested in Ivan as a figure and as a mayor from the Černe
family.
At the beginning of the 1750s, the mayor Ivan Černe was at first glance
active on the local credit market in accordance with the pattern of some
other mayors appearing in the documentation on real estate transactions,
as he had about 360 Venetian liras in claims against his fellow villager Ivan
Petelin. But Ivan Černe not only lent, but borrowed, too. In fact, he was
implicated in several credit and debt affairs, which took place more or less
in parallel in the years 1752–1757, six of which left a written trace in the
manorial administration records.¹ To give an immediate impression, at the
end of these transactions Ivan Černe lost a total of landed assets worth al-
most 2,700 Venetian lire or 600 guilders of Carniola. For a feeling on these
values, atthattime a nice Karst farmhouse, althoughnotanew one, was
worth around 300 lira, and a good dowry of a Karst peasant bride amount-
ed to around 500 lira, while at 500 guilders the dowry of a noblewoman in
Carniola was quite decent.
In February 1752, the manorial court ruled in favour of Urša, daughter
of the late Andrej Stankič, married to Jurij Miller, and awarded her her fa-
ther’s property in the village of Vrhovlje near Tomaj, ‘which until then was
held by Ivan Černe, the mayor of Tomaj.’ The mayor had appropriated the
holding, from which he had to be dismissed by a court order, on the one
hand testifying to his social power, and on the other hand indicating that
his reputation was crumbling. By January 1753 Ivan Černe was no longer
mayor and it is possible that the loss of the important role triggered the
avalanche of legal proceedings that suddenly fell on him. In fact, from this
point, the timeline of events works as if his creditors were waiting for the
moment when he would no longer be in office (or else we believe in coin-
cidences). Perhaps the Stankič farm affair contributed to the fact that he
was not confirmed for a new term in office, but it certainly indicated to
his other creditors that it was possible to win a lawsuit against the mayor
(later former mayor) in the court.
In 1753, following the order of the manorial court, two ‘pieces of arable
land’ measuring 0.4 ha, with 164 vines ‘with their trees’ and two plum

¹ All the following information about Ivan Černe’s credit and asset issues is based on docu-
ments in ast, atta, 195.1.2, 6, 7, 11, 12 and 13.

117