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The Enlightened Anthropology of Friendship in Venetian Dalmatia: Primitive Ferocity and

Ritual Fraternity among the Morlacchi

Author(s): Larry Wolff

Reviewed work(s):

Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, Politics of Friendship (Winter,

1998/1999), pp. 157-178

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press . Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

(ASECS) .

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JHE ENLIGHTENED ANTHROPOLOGY OF

FRIENDSHIP

IN VENETIANDALMATIA:

PRIMITIVE

FEROCITY AND RITUAL

FRATERNITY

AMONG THEMORLACCHI

LarryWolff

FRIENDSHIP AND FEROCITY

"It is enough to treat the Morlacchiwith humanity,"wrote the

Paduan philosopheAlbertoFortis, "to obtain from them all possiblecourtesies and

cordiallyto make them friends [farselicordialmenteamici]."This enlightenedpre-

scriptionfor friendshipappearedin Fortis's accountof histravels in Venetian Dalmatia,

Viaggioin Dalmazia,publishedin Venice in 1774. The philosophical centerpiece of

the work was Fortis's anthropological treatmentof "TheCustomsof the Morlacchi,"

and he took for grantedthat the Venetianreadingpublic would alreadyknow the

Morlacchiby reputation"as a raceof ferociousmen, unreasonable,without human-

ity, capableof anymisdeed."'Theywere the pastoralpeople of the inland mountains

of Dalmatia,the most intractablesubjectsof Venice'simperialadministrationacross

the Adriatic, repeatedlycited in official reportsfor their barbarous ferocity.If the

Morlacchi were alreadynotoriousin Venice, Fortis, reevaluatingtheircustoms,made

themfamousthroughoutthe Republicof Letters,as his bookwas promptlytranslated

into German(1776), English(1778), and French(1778);furthermore,

therewere spe-

LARRY WOLFF is Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author

of The Vaticanand Poland in the Age of the Partitions, ChildAbuse in Freud's

Vienna: Postcards from the End of the World, and Inventing Eastern Europe:

The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. His recent re-

search focuses on the idea of childhood in the Enlightenment and on eigh-

teenth-century Venice and the Slavs of Dalmatia.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 32, no. 2 (1998-99) Pp. 157-178.

32 / 2

158

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

STUDIES

cial 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, desig-

nated as "Morlackisch," in his collections of Volkslieder.2This "ferocious" people

thus found important and cordial friends within the European Enlightenment, enjoy-

ing 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 ob-

scurity 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 eigh-

teenth-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 popu-

lation 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 con-

text 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 ap-

pear 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 vio-

lence." 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 so well received and humanely treated, a most ample Apologia, writing

that which I personally have seen of their inclinations and customs."4 In a section on

"Moral and Domestic Virtues of the Morlacchi," he paid tribute to their hospitality,

notably toward himself; then, in a section on "Friendships and Enmities" (Amicizie e

/ Primitive Ferocity and Ritual Fraternity

159

WOLFF

Inimicizie), he explored their customs of friendship, in counterpoint to their bloody

conventions of the vendetta which had frustrated the Venetian administration in its

efforts to impose judicial order. Like Rousseau, in the discourse on inequality of the

1750s, Fortis inverted the value of civilized and primitive societies to discover a no-

bler capacity for friendship beyond the Adriatic. Like Voltaire, in the article on friend-

ship in the Dictionnaire philosophique of the 1760s, Fortis looked to a classical model

of ritually sacred friendship, and found it reflected in the customs of the Morlacchi. In

the 1770s, his Viaggio in Dalmazia represented and recommended to the public of the

Enlightenment an anthropological model of fraternal friendship, founded on ancient

custom and preserved in the mountains of Dalmatia. In the 1780s, Giutiniana Wynne

made Fortis's work into the basis of an anthropological novel, Les Morlaques, in

which primitive solidarities became the basis for an envisioned national fraternity

among the Slavs of Eastern Europe. The bond of friendship among the Morlacchi, as

studied by Fortis in Venetian Dalmatia, was ideologically relevant to issues of impe-

rial loyalty under the Serenissima Repubblica, and proved of further political signifi-

cance for appreciating the sentimental affinities of an imagined national community.

UNCORRUPTED FRIENDSHIP AMONG THE MORLACCHI

"Friendship," wrote Fortis, "so subject to change among us, even

for minimal motives, is most constant [costantissima] among the Morlacchi." He es-

tablished clearly the narrative divide that separated himself the author, together with

his reading public in Venice-"us"-from the objects of anthropological investiga-

tion in Dalmatia. He wrote as a moral critic of friendship in his own society, revealed

as fickle and superficial by comparison with the supremely constant connections that

he observed among the Morlacchi:

They have made of it almost a point of religion, and this sacred bond

is sealed at the foot of the altars. The Slavonic Ritual has a particular

benediction to join solemnly two male friends, or two female friends,

in the presence of the whole people. I found myself present at the

union of two girls, who became Posestre in the church of Perussich.

The contentedness that flowed out of their eyes, after having sealed

the sacred connection, proved to the bystanders how much delicacy

of sentiment may flourish in souls unformed, or, to put it better, un-

corrupted[non corrotte]by that society which we call civilized [colta].

The male friendsthus solemnlyunited arecalledPobratimi,the women

Posestrime, which is as much as to say half-brothersand half-sisters.5

Fortis was purposefully perverse in praising for "delicacy of sentiment" a people re-

puted, till then, for their murderous ferocity and violent vendettas. His more impor-

tant philosophical intention was to create an inverted anthropological perspective on

"that society which we call civilized," that is, the society of his enlightened readers in

Venice and, in translation, throughout Europe.

Fortis himself was an irreligious enlightened priest, born in Padua

in 1741, within the Venetian republic. He was in Rome in the 1760s, where he pre-

ferred the erudition of geology to theology, and also studied Oriental languages under

32 / 2

160

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

STUDIES

the guidance of Antonio Agostino Georgi. In Venice, in 1768, he collaborated with

Domenico Caminer, and his daughter Elisabetta Caminer, on the enlightened journal

L'Europa letteraria. In 1770, Fortis crossed the Adriatic to study fossils on the island

of Cres, beginning a period of travels in Dalmatia that culminated in the publication

of Viaggio in Dalmazia in 1774. The work was a geological account as well as a

natural history of the province, and, with the partial sponsorship of the Venetian

Senate and the particular patronage of Andrea Memmo, Fortis explored the economic

resources of Dalmatia that might be made useful to Venice.6 Conceived as a scientific

and economic study with ulterior imperial concerns, the book became, owing to its

anthropological aspect in the account of the Morlacchi, a serendipitous international

success with significant philosophical implications. Fortis's scientific interest in fossils

may have helped him to appreciate the ways in which customs preserved the imprint

of ancient and uncorrupted social forms. It was, however, the spirit of philosophical

criticism that led him to doubt the moral superiority of supposedly civilized society,

on the basis of observing in Dalmatia the ritual union of two young girls. At roughly

the same time, Diderot performed a similar exercise in perspective in the Supplement

au Voyage de Bougainville, comparing the sexual customs of Tahiti to those of Eu-

rope, though Diderot had never visited Tahiti.

The most prominent treatment of friendship to come before the

eighteenth-century Venetian public was Carlo Goldoni's comedy II Vero amico (The

True Friend), first performed during the carnival season of 1751. The comedy turned

on the hero's compunctions about being in love with the woman his friend intended to

marry. "I have sworn perfect friendship," Florindo explained; he was obliged to his

friend by "the law of good friendship." Goldoni represented friendship as a solemn

bond sustained by oath and by law, but at the same time the comedy treated with

unmistakable humor the serious scruples of the hero, as he sought to reconcile love

and friendship. "Love on the one hand, friendship on the other," Florindo solilo-

quized, "I would say that the two most beautiful virtues have become for me the two

most cruel torments." Goldoni posed the moral dilemma, permitting the possibility of

ironic inflections, on the way to a comic resolution and happy ending. Florindo, los-

ing the woman he loved, was hailed as "the exemplar of true friendship," and he even

saluted himself for "the most tender, the most constant [costante] friendship."7 In

Germany, in 1747, the young Gotthold Lessing published his first play, the one-act

comedy Damon, oder die wahre Freundschaft, which explored the tensions of the

"true friendship" between Damon and Leander when crossed by romantic rivalry for

the same woman. "Ach, it would be a shame if love should not prove stronger than

friendship," remarked the lady's maid, who later, when friendship proved false, took

some satisfaction in mocking Damon: "Leanderis the most faithful friend in the world.

Ha ha ha ha!"8 Christian Gellert, publishing a model German letter to a friend in

1751, illustrated a more thoroughly earnest perspective on friendship: "Every new

friend is for me a new fortune, for which I thank Heaven. I can offer myself no nobler

pleasure than to gather my friends in my thoughts, and view myself among these

upright men, as if we constituted one single family in the world."9 Lessing, Gellert,

and Goldoni, in their different modes, contributed to a mid-century European consid-

eration of friendship. Goldoni's comedy offered the public of Venice a humorous para-

gon of constancy in civilized Italian friendship, to be supplanted by Fortis's anthro-

pology of supreme constancy between the Morlacchi Pobratimi.

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