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No month no day, 1661, Strofades Islands
Issel and Agamennone (1893) report that an earthquake was felt in the Strofades
Islands (south of Zakynthos) in 1661. They claim to have received the infor-
mation from A. Gaeta Foscardi, librarian in Zakynthos. Foscardi, in his turn,
received it from a monk Cirillo, abbot of the monastery in Strofades, who prob-
ably took it from a chronicle then existing in the monastery. This information
could possibly be related to the earthquake that affected Zakynthos.
No month no day, 1661, Kefallinia
Getting to Kefallinia, von Degenfeld (1670
ca
) says: “Last year 1661, one [earth-
quake] has been so violent, that nearly all houses throughout the island collapsed,
even those built of square stones linked together by iron links. The stones were
separated from each other, the iron being without any strength. This earthquake
also split a high and strong rock from top to base” (fol. 34).
The coeval Venetian documents from Kefallinia (ASVe, 1660-1662) do not support
von Degenfeld's statement. In this case he is not an eyewitness, as for the 1662
earthquake in Zakynthos (see Sections 3.2 and 4.4), and he could be simply com-
bining and wrongly dating what he had been told of the damage caused in Kefallinia
by both the 1658 and the 1660 earthquakes.
4.4 12-19 March 1662, Zakynthos (Formerly dated 1664)
The event known to have hit Zakynthos in 1664 is the only one within this time-
window that Barbiani and Barbiani (1864) report on the basis of what they thought
were coeval documents. Both Shebalin et al. (1974) and Papazachos and Papazachou
(1989) indirectly derive their information from the same documents through Barbi-
ani and Barbiani (Fig. 8). Papazachos and Papazachou (1997 and 2003) use both
19th century compilations and recent studies, as shown in Fig. 8.
It is interesting to see how the 1664 came to be accepted as the date (no month,
no day) of this earthquake. What Barbiani and Barbiani (1864) supply is the full text
of two documents transcribed from a register that they say it was then kept at the
archives of the Council of Zakynthos:
a Resolution of the “Council of 150” (local assembly of the citizens of Zakynthos),
dated 24 March 1664;
a Deliberation of the Senate of the Republic of Venice, dated 3 May 1664.
Both documents concern the amount of 1,500
ducati
, the local Council established
to be collected in order to repair the fortress damaged by the past earthquakes. But
they were just the last of a series of documents concerning this earthquake written
in the two years since it had happened, as it will be discussed in the following.
All those who relied on Barbiani and Barbiani (1864) consequently assumed
that the year of these two documents (1664) was the one in which the earthquake
occurred. The correctness of this assumption can now be re-discussed, thanks to the
new evidence emerged from the whole series of documents available at the State
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