Page 182 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

182 from Italy to the Canary Islands

Lanzarotto Malocello in notarial acts

ut another claim made by Canale astonishes us even more, as he
declares that he found three documents in the notarial records of
Genoa:
st
a) the first, of 1 April 1330, shows Lanzarotto Malocello (with the name
written like this) as a witness.
b) the second is of 22 February 1384.
nd
th
c) in the third, of 18 March 1391, Eliana, daughter of Bartolomeo Fiesco
and wife of the “q. Lanzarotto Marocello” institutes legal proceedings.
The letter “q” in Italian notarial acts is the abbreviation of the Latin
“quondam”, which corresponds to the English “late” used in the vital re-
cords office documents.
This means that Lanzarotto Malocello was definitely alive and residing
in Genoa in April 1330 and that he died before his wife, in at least 1384.
His wife belonged to the important Fiesco, or Fieschi, family.
This shows us, concludes Canale, how Lanzarotto also must have been
very important to have entered such a marriage: and this is a sign that our
hero must have belonged to the famous Malocello, Marocello or Marox-
ello family.
We should not be amazed by the fact that Lanzarotto died before his
wife; remember that in ancient Greece, until the end of the Middle Ages,
marriage (especially between important families) was for business rather
than for love, to the extent that women married at the tender age of four-
teen or fifteen, and their husbands were aged between twenty and thirty
and over thirty. This was precisely because they had to have already had a
long enough career in politics, trade or in the art of war, to provide them
with valid guarantees of financial stability and security. Lanzarotto must
have returned to his birthplace twenty years later, seeing as though he was
a witness in a notarial act in Genoa on 1 April 1330, and it was in that
st
period that he announced his discovery, if we consider that the Canary
Islands were not shown in the famous cartography of Dalorto in 1325,
whereas they are not only shown in the cartography of Dulcert in 1339,
but the island is actually identified as having been discovered by him. If
we consider him to have returned to Genoa in 1330 (in time to act as a wit-
ness in a notarial act), then Lanzarotto would have had a good nine years