Chiavenna, 1695: the soldier buried where animals were buried, and exhumed on the commissioner's orders

On the same page there is a man who fell into the water at Casaccia, a woman who died in childbirth after three days of pain, two constables stabbed to death. Then a line from 1695 that at first looks like an ordinary burial, and instead tells of a small war between two authorities, fought over the body of a man whose name we do not even know.

A soldier dies in Chiavenna. The archpriest has him buried in the place where animals were buried, because, the register says, he had no «signs of the Roman religion». At that point the commissioner steps in, the magistrate the Three Leagues of the Grisons sent to govern Chiavenna: the body is dug up, carried across the border and buried with honour in Castasegna, the first village of Bregaglia.

For anyone who grew up in Bregaglia, as I did, the road between Chiavenna and Castasegna is familiar. In 1695 it was much more than a few kilometres: it was the line between two worlds.

A note on method: I transcribe the entry from the published source, not from the original register, which I have not consulted. I distinguish between what the document says, what can be inferred from the historical context and what remains a hypothesis. The historical information comes mainly from the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, linked in the text.

The source

The entry is published in:

Giacomo Maurizio, Le matricole parrocchiali della Bregaglia, offprint from Clavenna. Bollettino di studi storici valchiavennaschi, VII (1968), Edizioni del Centro di studi storici valchiavennaschi.

Maurizio lists, village by village, the pastors who kept the Bregaglia registers and a selection of extracts from the death records. The 1695 entry appears in one of these lists. That a Reformed register in Bregaglia should record something that happened in Chiavenna is not odd: the soldier was finally buried in Castasegna, and the pastor had every reason to explain where this body had come from and why it had been exhumed.

I have used the same source for other cases: the stillborn child buried on the orders of the Criminal Magistrate in Bondo in 1805, the woman who went missing from Promontogno in 1736 and the death of Ursa in Roticcio in 1679.

The entry

Here is the text as it appears in the published source, followed by my translation:

«9-5-1695 per ordine del signor Arciprete di Chiavenna fu sepolto in Predegiana in Chiavenna, luogo dove si sepelliscono animali, un soldato che non aveva alcuni segni della religione romana; ma per ordine dell'Ill.mo Signor Commissario Giulio Capol di Flims fu fatto dissotterrare e portare a Castasegna, dove fu honoramente sepolto nel cimitero.»

«9 May 1695: on the orders of the archpriest of Chiavenna, a soldier who had no signs of the Roman religion was buried in Predegiana in Chiavenna, a place where animals are buried; but on the orders of the Most Illustrious Commissioner Giulio Capol of Flims he was dug up and taken to Castasegna, where he was buried with honour in the cemetery.»

A single sentence, built in two stages separated by that «but». It is worth taking apart.

The final words are not a matter of style. The writer deliberately sets the animals' ground beside the cemetery, the soldier without signs beside the honourable burial. It is a register, but it takes a position.

One last caveat concerns the date. In the 17th century the Reformed communities of the Grisons still largely used the Julian calendar, while Catholic territories followed the Gregorian one, ten days ahead. We cannot be sure which calendar the pastor used, so «9 May» should be read with that margin.

The context: a political border that was also a religious one

Chiavenna, a subject land of the Three Leagues

In 1695 Chiavenna was not free. From 1512 to 1797, explains the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, the County of Chiavenna was subject to the Three Leagues, the old state of the Grisons. The Leagues sent a commissioner for a two-year term to govern and judge; Piuro had a podestà.

Bregaglia, by contrast, was a full member of the Leagues. And from the mid-16th century it was Reformed: Vicosoprano, Soglio, Stampa and Bondo converted in the early 1550s, and Castasegna in 1555.

The Valtellina massacre and 1639

To understand the 1695 line we have to go back seventy-five years. Between 19 and 23 July 1620, in Valtellina, a conspiracy led by Giacomo Robustelli ended in the killing of about six hundred Protestants, men, women and children. Italian historiography long called it the Sacro Macello, the «Holy Butchery», a name that, as the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland notes, historians used until the late 20th century and that is now being replaced by more neutral terms. According to the same source, Protestantism south of the Alps was practically wiped out. Chiavenna, the entry on the town specifies, took no part in the massacre.

Twenty years of war followed, with Spain, France, Venice and Austria fighting over the passes between Milan and the Tyrol. In 1639 the Grisons recovered Valtellina and Chiavenna, but, as the entry on the Counter-Reformation sums up, they had to accept a ban on Reformed worship there. The Treaty of Milan allowed only the Catholic religion and barred foreign Protestants from settling permanently, a ban that was later not always enforced. Only in 1762 did a secret agreement with Austria once again tolerate the presence of Reformed residents.

The result was a curious situation: the rulers of the territory were largely Reformed, the subjects compulsorily Catholic. The commissioner governed Chiavenna, but religion was the archpriest's business.

«No signs of the Roman religion»

The whole story hangs on this phrase. And, read by an investigator, it is also the weakest.

The register does not say the soldier was a Protestant. It says he had no signs of the Catholic faith. We do not know which signs people looked for: devotional objects such as a rosary or a medal, or something else, such as the absence of the last rites before death. The second reading would better explain why the archpriest was the one to decide. Either way, the conclusion «he is not one of us» was drawn from an absence.

The investigator's lesson. Absence of evidence is not evidence of the opposite. A soldier might carry no religious objects for a thousand reasons: he had lost them, someone had taken them, or he simply did not carry them although he was Catholic. In 1695 that absence decided where a body would end up. Today the same mistake, inferring an identity from what is not found, is one of the most common in checks of every kind.

For people at the time the question was not trivial. Burial in consecrated ground was reserved for those regarded as members of the Church. Depending on time and place, heretics, the excommunicated, suicides and sometimes unbaptised children were excluded. I touched on this in a very different context in the article on deviant burials and vampires: where and how someone was buried said whom the community recognised as one of its own.

Where was Predegiana?

The register places it «in Chiavenna». I have not been able to identify it with certainty. The name recalls the Pratogiano, the large open area of Chiavenna, but that is only a resemblance: without a document to confirm it, it remains a hypothesis to check with someone who knows the town's historical place names.

Who was the soldier?

The register does not say, and honesty requires stopping here. We can, however, list the hypotheses compatible with the context, without choosing one.

In those years Europe was in the middle of the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), and mercenary service was widespread in the Three Leagues. Chiavenna lay on one of the great transit routes between Lombardy and the Alpine passes.

The cause of death is not given either. The register mentions no violence, no illness, no accident. We can only say that the death occurred in subject territory and that the body was buried quickly, before the commissioner intervened.

Commissioner Giulio Capol of Flims

The Capol were a noble family from Flims, in the Surselva, that gave the Three Leagues many magistrates. The family genealogy lists several commissioners of Chiavenna between the 16th and 18th centuries. It also includes a Julius (Giulio) von Capol, born in 1645 and died in 1731, who was Landrichter of the Grey League in 1684.

It is possible that he was the commissioner of 1695, but I have not found a source that confirms it. The lists of the commissioners of Chiavenna kept in the Grisons archives would make it possible to check.

Why did he intervene? Here too the register is silent. There are several possible explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive:

• jurisdiction: the commissioner was the County's judge, and the handling of an unknown man's body could fall within his remit;
• honour: a soldier treated like an animal could be an affront to the Leagues or to whoever had recruited him;
• confession: in the 17th century the Capol family had both Reformed and Catholic branches, and we do not know Giulio's faith.

What we can observe is the solution he chose. The commissioner did not impose a Protestant burial in Chiavenna, which would have breached the Treaty of Milan. He had the body taken to Castasegna, just across the border, in the first Reformed community. He respected the rules of the subject territory and at the same time reversed the archpriest's decision. It was the move of a skilful administrator rather than a partisan.

Two authorities, one body

Read this way, the 1695 line shows a problem familiar to anyone who investigates: who has jurisdiction?

Neither authority, at least judging from the register, seems to have asked the question that would come first today: who was this man?

And today?

In Switzerland today, an unidentified body is not a matter for a priest or for a private investigator. Article 253 of the Swiss Criminal Procedure Code provides that, if the identity of the deceased is unknown or there are signs of an unnatural death, the public prosecutor orders an examination by a specialist physician to establish the cause of death or identify the person. The body is released for burial only once the identity is established and no evidence of an offence emerges.

Where offences are concerned, the police and the prosecution service have jurisdiction, not an investigator. My work begins elsewhere: in archival research, genealogy and the reconstruction of historical facts like this one. It is the same method I use to verify the authenticity of documents and that I describe on the services page.

Myths and facts

How the case could be taken further

If I were to reopen this case, I would start with these sources:

1. The original register from which Maurizio took the extract, to check the transcription and read any marginal notes.
2. The church archives of Chiavenna, which might hold a trace of the first burial or of the archpriest's position.
3. The State Archives of the Grisons in Chur, for the lists of commissioners and any records of the Chiavenna commissariat from 1695.
4. The Bregaglia historical archive, for the Castasegna documents.
5. The Capol family papers, if they survive, to find out who the commissioner was and whether he left any record of the affair.

It is slow work, made of palaeographic reading and cross-checking. But that is how one line becomes a verified story.

What we can say, and what we cannot

We can say that in 1695 a soldier who died in Chiavenna was buried on the archpriest's orders in a place for animals, that the stated reason was the absence of signs of the Catholic faith, and that the commissioner Giulio Capol had him exhumed and buried with honour in Castasegna.

We cannot say who the soldier was, what he died of, what his faith was, exactly where Predegiana lay or why the commissioner intervened. To date, no documents have been found that would answer these questions.

In brief

Nothing remains of that man's name. What remains is a sentence written by a pastor who, for once, wanted it known not only where he had been buried, but also where he should never have been.

Main sources: G. Maurizio, Le matricole parrocchiali della Bregaglia*, offprint from* Clavenna. Bollettino di studi storici valchiavennaschi*, VII (1968); Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, entries «Chiavenna», «Sacro Macello» and «Controriforma»; Swiss National Museum, «The Reformation in Val Bregaglia» (2026); Capol family genealogy; Swiss Criminal Procedure Code, Art. 253.*