Because of the complexities of civil law, as well as the monopoly that certain royal scribes held over this branch of the law, the 1782 Ordinance explicitly excluded deputy scribes from participating in civil litigation and notarial transactions.
(69.) According to the Rector of the Real Colegio de Escribanos, the deputy scribes often performed fee-based notarial transactions, lucrative judicial behavior that was contrary to royal legislation and the 1782 enabling ordinance that limited their responsibilities to criminal jurisdiction.
The substantial number of Greeks seemingly acting in their own right in notarial transactions suggests that either non-free Greeks were allowed greater legal freedom than their status would imply, or that there were in fact more free Greeks than has been previously assumed.
Typically an interest-free loan was signaled in the notarial transactions as that sum lent to a person "causa amoris."(51) The sums of these loans amounted to no more than thirteen perperi, which we have seen could represent a servant's yearly salary.(52) The one example of a larger sum lent is the recording of a loan of 100 perperi made by Helena, widow of the Greek feudatory Iohannes Sachlichi, to two Latin men from the eastern end of the island.(53) Typically, family members were the recipients of interest-free loans in several of the transactions.(54) More interesting are the examples of servants and dependents, the humblest of free persons on the island, lending money to others.
The name of one woman particularly catches the eye in the first sixty-six folios of a notarial register, and her case will serve to show the degree of involvement in the wine trade open to a Greek woman.(72) Call, the widow of Andrea Agapito, appears in fifty-four notarial transactions between 9 October 1345 and 29 August 1347, a period of nearly two years.
