On 27 February, 1511, in what is now the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of the largest and most violent revolts of Renaissance Italy occurred during the Carnival celebrations of Fat Thursday.
Long remembered as Cruel Fat Thursday (Crudêl joibe grasse in Fruilian, or Crudel zobia grassa in Italian), the Carnival transformed from an annual ritual of joyful mockery and symbolic reversals to one of unprecedented vendetta violence of warring elite factions that ignited a popular and peasant insurrection.This is a research group building a simulation of the events of that Cruel Fat Thursday to study present social behaviours in Friuli Venezia Giulia using agent-based modelling.
Prototype
A historically informed simulation of early 16th century Friulian elite families will be produced to study causal events and behavioural patterns. A modified version of the medieval dynastic simulator game Crusader Kings II will serve as the tool to recreate and analyse the social networks of 1511. The rationale for initially focusing the simulation on the Savorgnan and Della Torre aristocratic social networks is twofold: research on these families constitute our richest historical data source, and Carnival as a ritual is traditionally understood as a temporary inversion of elite order.
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