ABSTRACT
As an open, mercantile city and an emporium of the Mediterranean where trade f lourished, Messina was a difficult place to control and discipline between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 Wealth circulated and the main beneficiaries were those nobles (nobiles) and citizens (cives) who, after the struggles of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, came together to manage public affairs and had largely convergent economic aims.2 This resulted in a form of social osmosis between the nobiles and the most important cives families. The urban nobility was not, however, a closed oligarchy that precluded any possibility of upward social mobility. Its ranks grew by admitting ‘bourgeois’ citizens who were co-opted into the nobility by various means, including marriage, wealth, careers in the highest public offices and the exercise of the profession of medicine.3 In addition, the economic expansion of the sixteenth century, the growth in silk production and widespread commercial prosperity had ironed out differences within the elite and favoured a commonality of interests.4 Therefore, the wealthiest sections of the bourgeoisie participated fully in the city’s public life — although the far more numerous members of the lower tiers of the same order remained excluded.5
