The VINCULUM project researched a key feature of the social fabric of Pre-modern societies of southern Europe and their colonial spaces: entails (morgadios, mayorazgos) and chantries. These institutions, analysed jointly under the term of entailment, developed as a form of maintaining property within specific family formations, by creating a corporate body, administered by the chosen successors, in a horizon of perpetuity. The corporate body, which encompassed the living, the deceased, and the future family members, had enormous power. Anchored in the deep culturally-constructed figure of the founder, it regulated human relations within the family and outside it; it established specific relationships with property and the economy; it negotiated tradition and controlled change. The matrix of entailment organization far surpassed social solutions. It constituted a cultural phenomenon, almost genetic to society.
Building on the Portuguese-Iberian case, the project proposed to study entailment as a diverse but pivotal practice, one embedded in law, aristocratic discourse, and kinship-based organization, and to carry out comprehensive analysis that explores this global nature.
The project’s central hypothesis was that entails were entities endowed with corporate agency, which in turn conditioned individual agency. Such entities were structured around three parameters: kinship, power, and identity. Finally, it was argued that the potential for social organisation of entails could be studied with a focus on the “Atlantic territories” of the Portuguese Empire, especially on the islands of total colonisation (the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and that one might be confronted with the existence of “entailment societies.” The four volumes of historical studies confirmed these hypotheses, explaining how they unfolded historically.
The project’s database, built from an innovative documentary survey – a cartography of the institutions producing documentation – is a core product whose archival structure will allow it to be used for research on multiple themes. Its construction was documented in detail, so as to ensure full transparency regarding the data collected, and the process was described in the “User Manual” and in the “VINCULUM Information System Guide”. Like all the other results of the project, it is available in open access and preserved in a Zenodo community.
