A Glimpse into the Seismicity of the Ionian Islands Between 1658 and 1664 - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 65

at length by the Provveditore Generale , who decides instead to maintain a sort of a
grinning silence on the sequence of earthquakes and their effects. He simply reports
with a short, annoyed sentence the 12-13 March shock (ASVe, 1662b) in the very
last paragraph of a ten-page dispatch (a particularly long one). He avoids mentioning
earthquakes in the next five dispatches and then leave Zakynthos towards Kefallinia.
The coeval documents do not mention effects in Kefallinia (ASVe, 1661-1665) nor
in Kerkyra (ASVe, 1662-1665).
The Republic of Venice had serious financial problems due to the long-lasting
war operations in Crete. This is one of the reasons for the lack of funds to repair the
fortress and the public buildings damaged in Zakynthos by the September 1661 and
March 1662 earthquakes, as it emerges from the following documents (Table 4).
In the 10 October 1663 dispatch, the Provveditore in Zakynthos Erizzo (ASVe,
1663b) describes the miserable conditions of the public buildings and makes clear
that the sum of 260 ducati is not even enough to start the needed repairs. In the
meanwhile, on 18 September 1663, a Deliberation of the Senate (ASVe, 1663a) was
pushing the Provveditore of Zakynthos to take care of the restoration of the “public
storehouses, where the munitions and other war devices are collected” and let the
Senate know about the expenses. The Fortress also has to be restored, using the sum
already assigned. The Deliberation ends with the suggestion that the inhabitants of
Zakynthos contribute in such effort, so to lessen the financial charge for the Republic
of Venice. The 1663 Deliberation makes due reference to the 23 November 1661
one (ASVe, 1661d), also mentioned by the Provveditore Generale Mocenigo in a
February 1662 dispatch (ASVe, 1662a).
It is only from the 3 April 1664 dispatch by the same Erizzo (ASVe, 1664b)
that we learn the local Council has decreed to collect the sum of 1,500 ducati to
be devoted to the restoration of the fortress (ASVe, 1664a). The latter is the same
document reported by Barbiani and Barbiani (1864), who did not notice that it was
dated 24 March according to the Old Style calendar (3 April in New Style). With
a new Deliberation, on 3 May 1664 (ASVe, 1664c) the Senate approves the tax
levied by the Council of Zakynthos. But the efforts of the inhabitants were not
sufficient, and the fortress of Zakynthos remained unrepaired (ASVe, 1664d, e):
on 16 August (ASVe, 1664f) the recently appointed Provveditore Piero Barbarigo
reports that, notwithstanding the Senate approval, the High Advocate had declared
not valid the tax established by the Council of Zakynthos. As a consequence, the
funds could not be used to repair the fortress and the works had to be stopped
once more.
5 Conclusion
Originated by the retrieval of a hitherto unknown source on earthquakes in the Ionian
Islands (Degenfeld, 1670 ca ), this paper shows that the study of a time-window of
the seismicity of an area may result in a more balanced interpretation of the available
data, if compared with the narrow, and sometimes diverting, perspective offered