Despite this possible risk reality, the Mediterranean family in the modern era
was a haven for the elderly, a place of learning and of work for the
youthful, of loyalty to lineage and neighbourhood solidarity.
The family stood within a network of support rather than as an isolated nucleus,
although it is no less true that it suffered through ruptures,
controversy and litigations, as the oft- challenged judicial archives show.
These testify to the constant tension between the group and the individual,
between family logic and personal aspiration, between men and women.
Certainly, during the modern era the family model went through a process of transformation,
evolving from that of the extended family of multiple co-residence
dominated by the strength of the lineage that governs and protects, to that of
the nuclear family, the model we have come to know from the 20th century, basically,
which revolves around the conjugal unit.
This process was closely linked to the growth of the suburban middle class and
the professional class and the influence of the modern State, which diluted
the old ties of lineage inspired in the feudal system.
But the process of change is slow and in the extensive rural areas
the strength of the traditional extended family model remained.
A model to be considered also within the context of the implementation
throughout the whole Western Mediterranean of a system of inheritance based on
primogeniture and exclusion, on the indivisibility of assets,
which occurred in the late middle ages with the recovery of the laws of the
Roman Code of Justinius, although it was mainly the noble and urban classes experiencing
upward mobility that bolstered this system
given its obvious advantages to social status and power.
This meant that among families that had assets to bequeath to their descendants
it became imperative to consolidate these assets to a single person,
with the preference being for primogeniture and masculinity,
so that the heirs would be responsible for maintaining the rest of the family,
those members excluded from the inheritance,
and complex co-residing nuclear families developed, vertical and horizontal.
This model could sustain a considerable number of children in celibacy
who could not marry as they did not have the resources to do so
or had opted for a life devoted to religion.
The patrimonial system and the Tridentine moral system,
which still held the celibate to be of a higher spiritual status than
those joined in matrimony, thus reinforced their position.
So parents, children, siblings, apprentices and servants would co-reside,
all considered to be members of the same kinship network,
all destined to different ends but interdependent,
as described also in classical Mediterranean literature regarding oikos.
An extended and hierarchical family,
while other quite distinct models also existed, the nuclear, perhaps more urbane,
the result of migrations, possibly diminished by poverty, or the widowed,
by the constant presence of death that decimated many households.
Much has been said about this hierarchisation of the modern family,
especially with regard to the place of women,
subordinate to their fathers and later to their husbands,
their state of dependence within what is called the patriarchal family.
In effect, the Western Mediterranean also experienced the consolidation
of this moral, social and political model of the family, and this intimate connection
between male family government and the government of the king
enabled the expansion of this idea.