Page 19 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Eonomy and Networks of Rural Elite Families in a Manufacturing Area

mographic increase until the mid-sixteenth century, a small decline and
then a certain stability until the end of the seventeenth century (despite
the 1630s plague), and then a relevant increase in the century before the
collapse of the Venetian Republic.
In the Italian area, there is a well-known debate about the demographic
level that a centre should reach in order to be considered a city: on the one
hand, for example, Paolo Malanima (1998, 91–3), recalling De Vries (1984)
and Bairoch et al. (1988), suggests that a city should have at least 5,000
inhabitants, also proposing a differentiation between the urban centres
under and above 10,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, Guido Alfani un-
derlined the inadequacy of such a clear division, given that in the Italian
area there are many relevant centres, often with a little less than 5,000 in-
habitants, that cannot be defined as ‘rural’ tout court (Alfani 2010, 224–55).
Therefore, he proposes to use the limit of 4,000 inhabitants in order to
identify the urban centres. If we use this reference value, Schio can already
be considered a city at the beginning of the sixteenth century, even if, as
we anticipated, from an institutional, political (and, therefore, in a certain
way, economic) point of view it was formally a rural village.
Moving from the architectural and demographic aspects to the insti-
tutional ones, the ‘almost urban’ (Chittolini 1990) character of Schio is
demonstrated also by the presence of councils and officials that trace the
Vicentine ones: the Deputati ad Utilia (a sort of assessor) were present both
in Schio and in Vicenza, with the same name, and while in Vicenza the nar-
rowing of the urban council produced the creation of the Council of 100, in
Schio a similar process led to the creation in 1493 of the Council of 32, grant-
ing a sort of political supremacy to the growing local elites (Ongaro 2011;
Di Tullio and Ongaro 2020).
Finally, the number of notaries who resided and practised in Schio is an-
other clear indicator of the economic dynamism and relevance of the vil-
lage: in 1635, the Podestà Bragadin, for example, wrote that in an attempt
to calculate the number of notaries in the province of Vicenza, it was not
enough to skim the list of the members of the College of Notaries of Vicen-
za, ‘given that in the cities and villages in the countryside there are a high
number of notaries that are not members of the College’ (Istituto di Storia
Economica 1976, 360). Figure 1.3 proposes an estimate of the notaries who
resided in Schio from looking at the archival collections that are preserved
in the State Archives of Vicenza: it is clearly an underestimate, given that
it includes only those resident in Schio, and is based solely on the archival
collections that have been gathered in the State Archives. Therefore, al-

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