“The House of Condulmer,” a new book by Princeton University Library’s Curator of Numismatics Alan Stahl, was published in July 2024 in the Medieval Studies series of the University of Pennsylvania Press. 

According to the University of Pennsylvania Press website, the book, “tells the story of a lower patrician Venetian family in the wake of the Black Death, as they strove for status and wealth over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.” Some of the family’s trials include Jacobello who used his civic participation and donations to achieve noble status for himself and his descendants but impoverished himself and his family in the process; Vielmo, a moneychanger who paraded around in the trappings of wealth, attempting to imitate the appearance of his noble cousins; and Franceschina, who used her power over dowries to get noble husbands for her daughters and stepdaughters.

Stahl began working on “The House of Condulmer” informally in 2001, while he was a visiting professor at Rice University. “I undertook a project called ‘The Nexus of Money and Power in Later Medieval Venice,’” Stahl recalled. “The overall goal was to investigate the degree to which those people and families with the most money were the actual policy makers in what is known as a ‘merchant republic.’"

More than a decade later, and following a Guggenheim fellowship and two Delmas Foundation research grants that took him to the Venetian archives, Stahl realized that through his research he had compiled a detailed account of members of the Condulmer family. 

“The family is first recorded as being among the members of a conspiracy against the Venetian state at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and suffered exile and loss of property,” Stahl said. He added, “The strategies for social and economic advancement used by members of the Condulmer family have parallels in various historical contexts, including those in America today.”

In addition to documenting the family’s trials, Stahl also discovered in PUL’s John Hinsdale Scheide Documents Collection a document of Gabriele Condulmer before he became pope Eugene IV that contained his seal as papal legate to Ancona, a type of seal that was previously unknown and now features in his book.

“The House of Condulmer” is available now.