Page 188 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

188 from Italy to the Canary Islands

na, once wife of Mr. Lanzarotto Malocello; she, appearing before me
with her husband, undertakes voluntarily to ask, request, demand, recover
everything and anything that the aforementioned Pietro Malocello must
have and receive or can and may receive either as income payment or
instalment payments from any person... paid in full, and this with docu-
ments and writings and the signature of witnesses, and provide receipts
for the payments received, without exceeding her limits or the limits of
the receipts, she is hereby empowered to conclude needed and opportune
debt settlement agreements. The same shall be true for all disputes she has
or may have with any person as above, promoting actions to defend her
opinion before any magistrate both ecclesiastical and civil and to bring
and handle lawsuits which she must pursue to the end and cannot truncate,
soften or revoke for any reason, occasion or with.... (?). Made in Genoa, in
the New Town Hall in front of the usual court bench of the aforementioned
honourable judge in the year of our Lord 1391, on the thirteenth indiction,
th
according to Genoese custom, on 18 March... (?) appearing before me
Melchiorre Pinetto, Cristoforo di Revellino and Giovanni da Vernazza, no-
taries of the town of Genoa, before summoned witnesses”.

2) In 1908, forty-eight years after Canale’s work, another local scholar
(Nicola Russo) wrote in Savona the aforementioned Sulle origini e la
costituzione della “Potestatia Varaginis Cellarum et Arbisolae” [On
the origins and founding of the “Potestatia Varaginis Cellarum et Arbi-
solae”] in which he devotes as many as sixty pages to the Malocellos
(from p. 80 to p. 140), reporting a great number of notarial and ep-
igraphic documents.
Yet, incredibly, he devotes only a half of page 81 to Lanzarotto Malo-
cello, just to say that the French historiography of the time mistakenly
identified him as a French traveller of Italian origin (?) by the name of
Lancelot de Moisey, and that he lived between 1200 and 1300, ending up
by saying that he was a native of Varazze.
Strange as it may seem, not even Russo (usually so well documented)
devoted space or indicated documents on his behalf.

3) Four years after the aforementioned work, I Grandi Navigatori Liguri
[The Great Ligurian Navigators] was published, an interesting and ex-
haustive work by Amedeo Pescio, published by Edizioni Ugo Nalato,
Rome 1912.