A note found in a 15th-century Hebrew prayer book by Paolo Galli reveals a previously unknown earthquake in Italys Marche area, providing important insights into the countrys seismic history and drawing parallels to a similar event in 1799. Credit: SciTechDaily.comThe opportunity finding of a note in a 15th-century Hebrew prayerbook fills an essential space in the historic Italian earthquake record, offering a brief look of a formerly unknown earthquake impacting the Marche area in the central Apennines.Paolo Galli, who found the note in the Apostolic Vatican Library while looking for synchronous accounts of another historic Italian earthquake, composes in Seismological Research Letters that the note “not just helps us partly fill a gap in the seismic history of Italy but also triggers us to assess how we still do not understand about seismogenesis even in times covered by written sources.” The Importance of Historical Sources in Earthquake Research” The wealth of historical sources in Italy is unquestionably one of the wealthiest, but it is equally subject to gaps both in regards to time and in locations,” said Galli. “Unlike the Kingdom of Naples, for instance, the production of documents associated to earthquakes has definitely been poorer in the Papal States, of which the Marche Region belonged in the 15th century.” The note found by Galli was composed on the leaf of the prayer book, which was copied in the Marche town of Camerino and completed in September-October 1446. The eight lines of the note describe an earthquake around Camerino that tore down homes, the governors courtyard, and ruined cities and villages “that have become a mound of stone.” Detail of folium 1 recto of manuscript Ross.499 in the Vatican library, reporting the news of the earthquake that struck Camerino and its neighboring settlements in 1446 (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, readily available at https://www.vaticanlibrary.va). Credit: Digital Collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica VaticanaMen and females “come here in Camerino worn white pale dresses with their mules and horses and donkeys packed with bread and food and wine, in order to hold the hand of the poor,” the note relates, while specifying that the earthquakes in the location continued from March to September.The note is the only evidence of a harmful earthquake in the Marche area from the 15th century. Galli stated a 1446 petition requesting funds to restore city walls and a castle in Petrino, a settlement 20 kilometers far from Camerino, may be the only other possible composed sign of a harmful earthquake in the region.A Rare Glimpse into the 15th Century Seismic ActivityThere are just 450 recorded earthquake website observations from Italy for the 15th century, and about half of those observations come from a crucial historic earthquake series in 1456 in the south-central Apennines. Galli had actually been looking through the librarys manuscripts from the Middle Ages to discover more details about this sequence when he came across the prayerbook.” The earthquake of 1456, or rather, the earthquakes of 1456, represent the most catastrophic seismic series that occurred in the late Middle Ages in central-southern Italy,” he described. “Despite the abundance of historic sources, especially a specific treatise on the earthquake composed by the popular humanist Giannozzo Manetti, we still do not have certainties about the various epicentral areas and, therefore, the specifications of private mainshocks– magnitude and center– and their seismic sources.” The damage described in the prayer book note recommends that Camerino might have experienced intense shaking, determining about an 8 on the Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg intensity scale, Galli said. This level indicates severe damage and partial collapse to half of the towns structures, together with the fall of columns, monuments, and walls.Galli suggested the Camerino earthquake might have been a “twin” to a 1799 series in the region, where a magnitude 6.2 earthquake triggered similar intense shaking.” Of course, this is only a hypothesis, but by comparing the epicentral area and the level of damage in Camerino and its environments, it is possible that the results explained in our manuscript explain, albeit briefly, something similar to the event of 1799,” Galli kept in mind.” In particular, the manuscript mentions that lots of settlements around Camerino were decreased to stacks of stones, suggesting that the epicentral location was potentially the like in 1799,” he included. “Similarly, the lack of info in the far field recommends that the earthquake was likely triggered by a shallow-depth fault, as most likely happened in 1799.” Reference: “All the People of Israel Are Friends: An Unknown Mid‐Fifteenth Century Earthquake in the Marche Region (Central Italian Apennines) Recorded in a Coeval Hebrew Manuscript” by Paolo Galli, 1 November 2023, Seismological Research Letters.DOI: 10.1785/ 0220230209.
A note found in a 15th-century Hebrew prayer book by Paolo Galli exposes a formerly unknown earthquake in Italys Marche area, using vital insights into the nations seismic history and drawing parallels to a similar event in 1799. The 8 lines of the note describe an earthquake around Camerino that knocked down homes, the governors courtyard, and destroyed towns and cities “that have ended up being a mound of stone.” The earthquake of 1456, or rather, the earthquakes of 1456, represent the most devastating seismic series that occurred in the late Middle Ages in central-southern Italy,” he discussed.
