We demonstrate that the late-medieval public did not purchase single life annuities for children and argue this points to contemporaries having preferences other than for maximizing profits. Our data give ages at purchase of annuitants as well as the pairings of investors in joint and survivor annuities and thus they allow us to link life-cycle events and family relationships to participation in financial markets. We analyse late-medieval investment behaviour using a new dataset of hundreds of life annuities. Precious little is known about the precise connections between the life cycle and family on the one hand and investments in financial instruments on the other, though. Recent literature has suggested how late-medieval families may have used financial markets to navigate the life cycle. As has been proved for other European cities from the same period, Dalmatian wills also show the influence of this process of “democratization” on the development of so-called “social Christianity.” Generally, it may be stated that the analysis of urban last wills of Dalmatian testators points to great similarities in the social, economic, and religious development of late medieval Dalmatian cities in comparison to the cities in other European (particularly Mediterranean) regions. Thus, all members of urban communities were given an opportunity to compose their wills. Changes in religiosity may be clearly followed through such research into last wills, which precisely in the Late Middle Ages are submitted to a process of “democratization”. These changes in some aspects of religious practice were related mainly to changes within the church (primarily the appearance of the mendicant orders) and urban society (economic development and population increase in the cities). As in other parts of the Mediterranean, and to a certain extent also in continental Europe, the process of change in the expression and sensibility of religiosity started in the second half of the thirteenth century. The analysis of Dalmatian urban last wills from the Late Middle Ages shows great similarity to the results previously reached by European scholars dealing with this subject in other regions.

Life expectancy in middle ages