Titles and Roles
The terminology surrounding roles on board a ship is vexed because these terms were not used consistently by contemporaries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the word ‘captain’ and its cognates in other European languages were reserved for the commander of a military vessel, while a man in charge of a merchant vessel was known as a shipmaster. Over the course of the century, however, the commanders of large merchant vessels slowly became known as ‘captains’ in French and Dutch contexts. In Italy, the two words
capitano and
padrone roughly reflect this military and commercial division. In Venice, a captain was always a military commander, while
padron was used for a man who was both the owner and master of the ship. In Genoa,
padrone technically referred to the owner of vessel. In practice, the terms were used less precisely, and it’s clear in both contexts that
padrone could refer to the master
or owner of the ship or someone who was both. More details on these divisions can be found in the table of roles compiled by the ERC project,
Sailing into Modernity.
1 ‘Sailing into Modernity: Table of Roles’, <https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/maritime/resources/sailingintomodernity/roles> [1 February 2024].In seventeenth-century Tuscany, as far as can be gleaned from the sources, the term capitano was used for military commanders, including the commanders of corsairing vessels. It was also clearly used for the commander of large commercial vessels. Padroni often owned a share of the vessel, as many of the sources make clear, but it is impossible to be sure that this was always the case. For both capitano and padrone, therefore, I have used ‘shipmaster’ or ‘master’ if the man was commanding a commercial vessel, only using ‘captain’ when the man was clearly in charge of a military or corsairing vessel.