Abstract:

Petar aka Perencan, son of the late Azon de Lemicetis from Padua, was active as a notary in Zadar during the second half of the 14th century. So far, he has not been in the focus of specific research and his biography consisted of only a few pieces of data. These basic facts were based on Perencan’s preserved corpus related to his activity as a public (1365 – 1392), curial (1366 and 1367), and chapter notary (1380 – 1392), as well as the end of his communal service in the period between 1374 and 1376, under unclarified circumstances. Based on unpublished archival sources preserved at the State Archive in Zadar, the author has discovered various data to be added to Perencan’s biography, namely concerning the end of his service (which has been corrected), some previously unknown documents that have now been included in his notarial corpus, the service of the vice-count’s vicar on the island of Cres, and the procurators of the Cress communities, as well as his cooperation with other notaries, his ownership of a property, his legal status as a habitator – defined by means of analogy to the recorded statuses of his colleagues – his various addresses, his son Azon, and the time of his death. For some of these data, it is difficult to say something in great detail, especially concerning the nature of Perencan’s ownership over houses at four different addresses where he used to live, or the circumstances that brought him to occupy the post of the vicecount’s vicar on the island of Cres. The reason for the scarcity of data, as well as the fact that they are occasionally unrelated to the context of political, legal, social, or economic historical reality, must be sought in the fact that a relatively small amount of notary registers and other types of administrative documents has been preserved when compared to the number of notaries active during the almost thirty years of Perencan’s activity.

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