The Renaissance in Italy
SUBJECT READER COMPILED BY CATHERINE KOVESI
WEEK 7
The Venetian Republic 7.1_Chambers.1 ‘The Doge’. In Venice: A Documentary History, edited by Chambers, D.W. and B. Pullan, 45-47. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 7.2_Chambers.2 ‘State Security and Arbitrary Power: The Council of Ten’. In In Venice: A Documentary History, edited by Chambers, D.W. and B. Pullan, 54-57. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 7.3_SumptuaryLaws ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Venice, 1360-1512’. In Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith, 378-379. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995. 7.4_Von Harff Harff, Arnold von. ‘Venice, Mistress of the Seas’. In The Portable Renaissance Reader, J.B. Ross and M.M. McLaughlin, 168-174. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. 7.5_Aretino Aretino, Pietro. ‘A House in Venice’. In The Portable Renaissance Reader, J.B. Ross and M.M. McLaughlin, 241-244. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
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7.6_Martin & Romano Martin, J. and D. Romano. ‘Reconsidering Venice’. In Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilisation of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797, edited by John Martin and Dennis Romano, 1-38. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 7.7_Lane Lane, F. ‘The Corruption and Perfection of the Constitution’. In Venice: A Maritime Republic, 251-273. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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D. W. Chambers, The Doge (a) Death and election of a Doge noted by a visiting pilgrim, 1462 From the Latin. Wey ed. Williams 1857, pp. 83-6. On 3 May of that year [1462] the lord Pasquale Malipiero, the very illustrious Doge of Venice, quitted this world,(1) and was laid out in his palace for three days. Then he was taken for burial. At his funeral first arrived all the confraternities, in religious dress with candles and scourges in their hands. Before them crosses and tapers were carried. Then came the parish clergy of Venice, the secular and regular clergy, and lastly the canons of St Mark's with a cross and tapers. Next came two noblemen carrying his arms. Then came his body laid out as follows: on his head he wore his biretta and his face was uncovered; under his head was placed a cushion of cloth of gold. His body was dressed in the golden robe of his office and a cloak. On his feet there were slippers, with golden spurs to one side; on the other side was placed his sword in a gilded scabbard. And with these accoutrements he was buried high up in the wall of the church of the Friars Preachers [Santi Giovanni e Paolo] in Venice. After his death and burial, the Venetians met to elect a new Doge, summoned by the appointed Councillors. Called to the election were all the eminent nobles, who, on oath, were to choose from among the more noble of those lords firm in the Catholic faith. They themselves had to swear, on pain of losing all their worldly goods, to choose the man who was the wisest, the best provided by circumstances, the staunchest in defence of the faith and the most experienced in the affairs of the world, to serve the city and its dominions. Those 100, with some notaries, were confined to a house from which they were not to emerge until they had elected forty of the more noble for this honourable task.(2) Then the forty took Communion so that they might elect him whom they believed would be most firm in upholding the Catholic faith and of the greatest benefit to the city of Venice. And the man acknowledged to have the majority of the votes they accepted as their Doge. They will not, on pain of death, reveal the name of the loser. Then he who has the majority and who is elected to the office of Doge is taken to his house. As he is taken by water, the Venetians come up to him saying, 'All your possessions arc now ours'; and he says, 'I know that well, but I beseech you to accept between you 100 ducats, and that will content you.' And he gives them the money, and scatters coins as he goes, to clear a way home. And, after he has settled his domestic affairs, he is led by the lords of the city to the Ducal Palace. They make 548
him a knight, and then they robe him in the vestments of his office and place a biretta [berriculam] covered in precious stones on his head. And the following Sunday he comes to the church of St Mark, and before him process all the confraternities, one of which puts on a pageant for him. Then come the religious in procession with relics, torches, crosses and canopies. Among them arc many children dressed as angels; they are carried on high floats, and they sing to the Doge while the secular clergy sing Te Deum laudamus, etc. And thus he leaves the church of St Mark with a great procession, and a multitude of the people. Coming to the Ducal Palace, he stands on the threshold, turning to face the people. Then all the lords climb towards him in reverence to pay their respects. Once all this is over he dines in his Palace, where he will remain for the rest of his life. After his election, ambassadors from the various subject provinces attend him bearing gifts, heartily congratulating him on his elevation to such a dignity. The Doge elected that year is Cristofaro Moro, a man strong in his Catholic faith ... 1. The Doge actually died on 5 May 1462. William Wey (c.1407-76), a Fellow of Eton College, was making his second pilgrimage to Jerusalem; he is inaccurate on dates as on many other particulars. 2. Wey telescopes the complicated procedural stages of the election; the ultimate electoral college numbered forty-one [sec below, II.3(c),14(b)]. He seems not to have known that the election took place within the Ducal Palace.
(b) Some restrictive obligations in the promissione of Doge Moro, 1462 From the Latin. Selection from 127 clauses in BL Additional ms. 15816. 12 May 1462. Proemium ... We, therefore, Cristofaro Mauro [Moro], by the Grace of God Doge of Venice etc., promise to you, the whole Venetian people, great and small, and to your heirs ... for the rest of the days during which we shall bear the Dogeship, to govern and uphold the state .... 54 And if we shall suffer any temporary impediment, whether on account of illness or any other cause, whereby we are unable to carry out the government of the Doge of Venice in the Ducal Palace, one of our Councillors, whom the said Councillors have elected by a majority vote, must act on our behalf, until we shall be able to exercise the said government. ... 71 Item, we cannot nor ought we to engage in trade, nor arrange for it to be done by any person in any way, or of any kind, either in or outside Venice, nor must we invest in any partnership; and we shall make our Dogaressa and our sons and neph549
ews, whether or not they are living with us, swear that they will not engage in trade, nor arrange for it to be done by person in any way or of any kind either in or outside Venice, nor invest in any partnership. And similarly our daughters and nieces living with us are held and bound to the observance of all the foregoing. Nor even can we have or keep as associate any notary, page, servant or household retainer who engages in or arranges any commercial business, or who invests anything in a partnership .... 83 Moreover, we are obliged every two months to have the present capitulary and promissio of the Venetians clearly read out to us, in the right order .... 96 Moreover, we cannot nor ought we to go outside the Dogado(1) of Venice, unless by the wish of our Small and Great Councils. Item: we cannot pass through the port of Malamocco or the bishopric of Torcello, unless by the wish of our Small Council or a majority of it. ... 101 We shall also arrange that, within three months of our entry into the Dogeship, we shall have made two capitularies similar to this one, one of which must be kept in the Chancery and the other in the Procuracy of St Mark's, the third one remaining with us. These three capitularies are secured with our lead seal. ... 117 Moreover, we are obliged to have an ermine cape [baverum], which we must wear at least ten times during the year, and more often if we please, and on those days which shall seem, appropriate to us. 118 We are held and obliged under oath, whenever the Great Council is called, to be present and to stay in it, unless some personal impediment prevents us, and the same we arc bound to do whenever the Senate is called. 119 Also, we are held and obliged to give audience with our Councillors at least once a week, and the statutory day for this is Monday. And, if, because of other urgent business, this is not possible, it shall be on the following Tuesday or the next day after that. And this pious and necessary provision must without fail be observed at least once a week. 1. Places in the vicinity of the Lagoon, listed by Sanudo at the end of his description [I.i]
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D. W. Chambers, State Security and Arbitrary Power: The Council of Ten (a) 'A very severe magistracy' Sanudo, De . .. magistratibus urbis: BCV ms. Cicogna 969, ff. 48r-v (Sanudo ed. Fulin 1880, pp. 98-103; Sanudo ed. Arico 1980, pp. 98-100). The Council of Ten is a very severe magistracy of the top nobles [primi] of the city. They are ten patricians who hold office for a year, and the term of office is meant to be completed unless someone else is elected in their place. The election of the ordinary members begins in the first meeting of the [Great] Council in August, and lasts all through September, and at the end of September they take up office. It is done by election of the bench, and four electoral committees. First three, then two, arc elected in August; three and two are elected in September, so that they reach the number of ten. Every month they elect tl1ree Heads from among themselves in the following manner: first, they place in an urn ten ballots, three of which arc gilded, and the first to select one of these can elect himself, or choose whom he pleases. And, if the first to be eligible is not chosen, the second can be chosen, and likewise the third, so that only one of those eligible can become a Head, and the two others must not be among those who are being elected. They arc excluded from being Heads again for one month .... Also, they choose by lot among themselves two Inquisitors¡ that is, the seven remaining in the Council select from five ballots of silver and two of gold, and those who select the gold ones are Inquisitors for that month. Moreover, every four months they ballot among themselves for a Treasurer [cassiere], who has charge of the funds of the Council of Ten and also the armoury of the Great Council. This Council of Ten was first created under Doge Piero Gradenigo in 1310, and now, as always, is in very high repute. They preside over three matters: the Republic, that is [to say] its state of peace; the coinage; and sodomy. However, they also have other powers and hear serious cases, and they impose whatever penalty the Council thinks fit. And those who fall into the hands of the Council of Ten cannot defend themselves with lawyers; when they examine a case they block [access to] the Palace, and there are four persons delegated as a committee, a Ducal Councillor, a Head of the Council of Ten, an Avogador and an Inquisitor (and sometimes they double the size of this committee for important cases) and it is they who act for the defence, if they are so willing; and whatever is decided by the Council of Ten is firm and valid, and cannot be revoked except by the said Council of Ten. Present in the Council are also the most se551
rene Prince, the six [Ducal] Councillors and the Ten of the said Council itself, and the Avogadori also enter, but they cannot cast a vote. This Council imposes banishment and exile upon nobles, and has others burnt or hanged if they deserve it, and has authority to dismiss the Prince, even to do other things to him if he so deserves. Long ago in 1355 a Doge's head was cut off by order of this Council, and in 1457 another was dismissed for being incapable of exercising his duties as Doge.(1) This Council of Ten has even imposed the supreme penalty on great lords who have given cause for it: in 1432 it had Count Carmagnuola, who was our Captain General on the mainland, beheaded. There cannot be more than one member of a family in the said Council, and, so that they do not [try to] avoid election, they get exemption for a year after serving before they can be re-elected. They do not receive any salary; they can be elected whether present in the city or absent; and, if elected to an ambassadorship or any other office, they can refuse without paying a fine. Their Heads sit on a dais [tribzman in the Great Council and Senate, and take their place after the Avogadori when they accompany the Signoria. They enter the Collegio when they wish, and, when they enter, the Head of the Forty, the Savi agli Ordini, the Provveditori sopra I'Armar(2) and the Treasurers leave the Collegio. It is laid down that the Council of Ten meets every Wednesday, so that, meeting so often, there should not be a great terror in the city whenever it is called. And so there is a meeting of the Council of Ten every Wednesday, or at least once a week, and, when the Signoria has given the order for some other Council, and the I-leads of the Ten want their Council to meet, the Signoria is obliged to give way to them. They have two notaries and a captain and two officers or foot soldiers. It is, in conclusion, a very terrifying magistracy, and the Council is highly secret. And often, when they have to debate some arduous matters, the seventeen elect various Zonte of twenty or twenty-five of the top nobles, who arc not incompatible because they arc not related to any member of the said Council of Ten. In these Zonte for the most part Procurators, and others of the top nobles, usually take part. And they have various of these Zonte as occasion demands. 1. Respectively Marino f'alier, who was beheaded on 17 April 1355 for alleged conspiracy against the nobility, and f'ranccsco f'oscari, who was compelled to abdicate on I November 1457 [sec below, II. 14(a) ). 2. Officials in charge of enrolling crews for war galleys (Lane 1934, p. 147).
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(b) Special duties and official secrecy From the oath taken by members of the Council of Ten, in the Council's revised statutes of 1578 (Romanin 1853-61, VI, 523-33). (ii) I am obliged to preserve the confidence which is understood to have been entrusted to me upon each and every matter or question which is read, proposed, considered or discussed in this Council: this is to include letters of every kind, and other writings and reports, whether written or brought before this Council by word of mouth. I am obliged not to disclose the questions themselves, or the names of those who Ipay have spoken for and against them, or the identity of those who have proposed or wished to propose a resolution upon them. I must not reveal a sign or word, by any device, hint or other means, which could be plotted or planned outside the limits of this Council, under pain of immediate dismissal from this or any other office which I may happen to hold, and of exclusion from all the offices, benefits, governorships, councils and secret committees of the state for ten years, this penalty to be imposed on me immediately by the Heads of the said Council. ... (x) If any anonymous note containing information which affects or could affect the general interest of our state should be handed in at the Ducal Palace, in a church or in any other part of the city, the Ducal Councillors arc obliged to have the note read to the Heads of the Council ofTen as soon as they have it in their hands, so that appropriate measures can be taken by the said Council if the matter falls within its competence. I shall not, however, concern myself with any note or information which is lodged with or comes in the house of the state Avogadori [di Comun], which concerns individual persons, and which has not been presented by those who lodged the information in the first place .... (xix) I must take account of the fact that this Council ... besides decreeing the death penalty against those who have betrayed any city or other place in our dominion to any enemy, is, in any case where one of the said cities, fortresses or strong points has been occupied by our enemies (which Heaven forbid), the authority responsible for inquiring into that crime and for prosecuting and punishing the offenders. Once the event has occurred and our government has received news of it, the Heads of the Council are obliged with all dispatch and no delay to institute a special and accurate inquiry and to report to this Council at the earliest moment to render account and execute justice. The penalty for failure [to do so] is 1000 ducats in gold.
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Sumptuary Legislation in Venice, 1360-1512 The Senate Limits the Value of Wedding Gifts, Dresses, Ornaments, and Luxuries Generally, 1360 Because the beginning of all wisdom and the foundation of any government is the fear of God, and because it is well known that in our city more than any other part of the world, there are many vanities and inordinate expenses, especially concerning weddings and other matters concerning wives and ladies, all of which certainly offends God greatly. Moreover, these illicit and depraved expenditures cause our state to be less powerful than it should be, because money which ought to be used in trade and to increase from time to time, now lies useless, because it had been diverted for these vanities and expenses. And in addition, since it has been seen and is seen that God had preserved us from many adversities and difficulties in the past, so we wish to recognize and correct our defects so that we will be preserved and defended by His mercy and piety in the future. Therefore, it is decreed, invoking the love of Christ, from whom comes every perfect gift, that concerning these vanities and expenses it should be provided as follows: no bride may receive, beyond her dowry including a trousseau and other gifts, more than 40 lire di grossi. Any person giving a dowry of 30 lire di grossi and upwards must present himself before the Avvocatori di Comune and swear to observe the law. Any notary drawing up a will must remind the testator that it is illegal to bequeath to his daughters more than the value named. No husband, at the time of marriage or within four years after, may give his wife dresses or jewels exceeding the value of thirty lire di grossi. Costly furs, such as ermine, are to be denied to men under twenty-five years old. The maximum value of a girdle is fixed at twenty-five ducats for a man, twenty ducats for a woman. The clothes and jewels of an unmarried woman must not exceed thirty lire di grossi in value, of a married woman seventy lire di grossi. The Senate Allows Women to Wear Head Coverings Only for Religious Purposes, 1443 Whereas, for some time, an abominable fashion has been introduced among our la dies and other females of every condition, who go about with the head and faces covered, contrary to the ancient and good custom, under which dishonest mode various dishonest acts have been and every day are committed, against the honour of God and of our 554
dominion .... It is decreed that for the future no lady or other woman or girl, of any condition whatsoever, may go abroad with the head and face covered beyond what has been the custom, by land or by water, except those ladies and other good persons who desire to hear mass, and sermons, and divine service, and attend confession. To such it is conceded, when they enter any church for the said reasons, to remain covered as it shall please them. Further, all ladies and other females may be covered to the earliest communions in their parish churches, or in the convent churches near, but only on Sundays and the prescribed festivals, and they may return home covered. The Senate Limits the Size of Banquets in Venice, 1512 Waiters and cooks who serve at any feast are compelled, the waiters under fine of twenty ducats, and the cooks under fine of ten ducats and four months' imprisonment, to come to the office of the Provveditori sopra le Pompe and declare the time and place of any banquet for which they have been engaged, in order that our office may be sent to inspect, and find out if in any respect the law will be violated. And the waiters, under the aforesaid penalty, are under obligation to lead the officers through the halls and smaller rooms, in order that they may perform their duty. And if any person of the house where they happen to be, or any other person, should interfere with our officers, and hinder them from doing their duties, or should molest them in any way by making use of injurious epithets, or throwing bread or oranges at their heads, as certain presumptuous persons have done, or should be guilty of any insolent act, it will be the duty of the waiters to leave the house immediately, and not to wait or be present at the banquet, under the aforesaid penalty. And nevertheless they shall have their salary, as if they had served. From Margaret Newett ed. "The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Historical Essays, eds. T. F. Tout and James Tait (Manchester, at the University Press, 1907), pp. 245-248, at pp.249-250.
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Arnold Von Harff, Venice: Mistress of the Seas (1497) Item at Venice I was taken to the German house, which is called in the Lombard speech Fondigo Tudisco, into the counting house of Anthony Paffendorp, who now lives in Cologne behind St. Mary’s. He obtained for me an honourable reception there and showed me much friendship and conducted me everywhere to see the city. Item to describe first this trading house. As I stayed there for some time I was able to see daily much traffic in spices, silks, and other merchandise packed and dispatched to all the trading towns, since each merchant has his own counting house there-from Cologne, Strassburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Lubeck, and other German cities of the Empire. The merchants told me that the counting houses paid daily to the lords of Venice a hundred ducats free money, in addition to which all merchandise was bought there and dearly paid for. Item from this German house one goes over a long wooden bridge on the right hand. Then one reaches a small square called the Rialto. Here the merchants assemble daily about nine or ten o'clock for their business, so that each one can be found without delay. Item this square is built round about and is about as large as [that at] Duren. Close by the square sit the money-changers who have charge of the merchants' cash, which they keep with the money-changers so that they may have less money to handle. When a merchant buys from another he refers him to the bankers, so that little money passes between the merchants. Item leading from the Rialto are long streets where the merchants have their shops, such as goldsmiths and jewellers selling pearls and precious stones. Item one street contains tailors, cobblers, rope-sellers, linen and cloth dealers, and others, trading there without number. Item .above the shops is a place like a monastery dormitory, so that each merchant in Venice has his own store full of merchandise, spices, rare cloths, silk draperies, and many other goods, so that it can be said that the wealth of Venice lies in this square. Item from here we went, to the chief church of St. Mark through many narrow streets, in some of which were apothecaries, in some bookbinders, in others all kinds of merchants driving a thriving trade. Item St. Mark's is a very beautiful but low church, above which are many round vaults covered with lead. Item this church, below and above and on both sides, is covered with marble stones, and in addition above and on both sides it is covered with gold. Item as one enters the church from the square there is, on the left hand, an altar enclosed with a railing against a pillar, upon which stands
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a wooden crucifix which was struck by a disappointed gambler and which has performed many miracles ‌ Item close by St. Mark's Church, southwards, stands the Doge's Palace, which is very fine and is daily being made more beautiful by the Doge Augustin Barbarigo, who is now having the palace covered with marble and gilt. He was also building a whole marble staircase with beautiful carving, which at this time was not half complete, the half having cost ten thousand ducats. Item as one first enters the palace, stand two four-cornered marble columns carved with flowers, on the left close by that St. an Mark's iron bar Church. can be These laid on two them, columns, are called so placed the Doge's Gallows. If he does evil, he is forthwith hanged between the two columns, and I was told as a truth that within a hundred years one person has been hanged there. Item as one first enters on the right hand one climbs a staircase to a round hall in which justice is administered. Also in this hall hangs an innumerable collection of arms of pilgrims who have been to the Holy Land. Item from this hall one ascends by a stone staircase to a very large hall which is the council chamber of the lords of Venice. In this council are seven hundred persons who are nobles called gentlemen, and I counted them at one time in this hall. Item in . this council chamber there is, finely pictured, the story of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, which I have already related. In this council chamber there are pictures also of all who have been doges of Venice. Item I asked a gentleman and told him that it seemed to me that there were a great number of councillors. on the day when I counted them. He answered and said that if there were as many councillors as the land and people [could send] there would be seven thousand in the council. But the seven hundred who went daily to council were gentlemen-that is, nobles, all fine men, handsomely dressed in long gowns to the feet, the heads all shaved and on the head a small bonnet; all usually wear grey beards. They wear generally girdles round the gown. The sleeves of this gown are narrow at the hand, but' behind they hang down about an ell wide, like a sack, just as we make clothes for jesters in our country. The gentlemen have to wear these cloaks and to go about like this. Item Venice is a very beautiful city with many inhabitants. It lies in the middle of the salt sea, without walls, and with many tidal canals flowing from the sea, so that in almost every street or house there is water flowing behind or in front, so that it is necessary to have little boats, called barks, in order to go from one house, from one street, or from one church to another, and I was told as a fact that the barks at Venice number more than fifty thousand. Item in this city or lordship they elect from the seven hundred gentlemen twelve chief lords, and from the twelve they choose a doge who has in the council only two votes. He must live in the palace and cannot leave the city or the palace without the 557
permission of the eleven lords. Item this doge with the government has very many towns, countries, and kingdoms under him, since their dominion extends as far as Milan and to Jaffa, a port of the Holy Land, which I reckon is more than five hundred German miles, to name also many beautiful towns in Lombardy, Padua, Vicentia, Verona, Brescia, Tervicium [Treviso], Ravenna, Mestre, 'with other countless towns and castles. Item they have also fine towns in Poyen [Apulia] in Calabria. Also many towns in Wendish lands. Item many towns in Slavonia. Item many towns and castles in Albania. Item many towns and castles in Greece. Item innumerable islands on which are beautiful towns and castles. Item the kingdom of Candia. Item the kingdom of Cyprus, with many other remarkable towns in Turkish lands. Item also many towns and castles in the kingdom of Dalmatia. All which they govern with wisdom, sending every year new governors to these towns, castles, islands, and countries from among the gentlemen of Venice. Item the doge at this time was Doge Augustin Barbarigo, an old man of more than seventy years. I saw him going in state to St. Mark's Church in this manner. Item first they carried before him eight golden banners, of which four were white and four brown. Item then came a picture which was borne on a golden standard. Item next was carried a golden chair with a cushion which was made of golden stuff. Item next they carried his hat with which he is made a doge, which is valued at a hundred thousand ducats. Item then came the doge, most gorgeously dressed. He had a long grey beard and had on his head a curious silk hat shaped like a horn behind, reaching upwards for a span’s length, as he is pictured here. This hat must be worn by every doge. Item before the doge was carried also a white lighted candle in a silver candlestick. Item there preceded him also fourteen minstrels, eight with silver bassoons, from which hung golden cloths with the arms of St. Mark, and six pipers with trumpets, also with rich hangings. Item behind the doge was carried a sword with a golden sheath. Item there followed him the eleven chief lords with the other gentlemen richly attired, fine stately persons. Item on Ascension Day the doge celebrates a festival each year before the haven on the high sea. He then throws a golden finger ring into the wild sea, as a sign that he takes the sea to wife, as one who intends to be ford over the whole sea. Item the ship in which he celebrates is a small stately galley, very splendidly fitted out. In front of this ship is a gilt maiden: in one hand she holds a naked sword and in the other golden scales, a sign that as the virgin is still a maid, so the government is still virgin and was never taken by force. The sword in the right hand signifies that she will do justice: for the same reason the maiden holds the scales in the left hand. Item this lordship of Venice has inside the city a great house of weapons called the arsenal, which is about as big as Duren. I was taken in with the help of two gentlemen 558
and by means of certain presents. 'Item nrst at the entrance, travelling with the sun, we ascended some stairs to a great hall thirty feet wide and quite a hundred long which is full of arms hanging on both sides in three rows, one above the other, very orderly disposed, with everything that belongs to a soldier, such as a coat-of-mail, a sword, a dagger, a spear, a helmet, and a shield. In addition, as part of the arrangement of this hall, there are stored there more than three or four thousand swords, daggers, and innumerable numbers of long pikes, with many more accoutrements for war, and above in the roof are cross-bows hanging side by side, touching each other, six rows deep. Item we were taken higher, up still another staircase, to a fine hall which was also arranged like the first and was no smaller. Item from these halls we went out and came to a large high building which has thirty arches under one roof, each arched space being one hundred and fifty paces long and ten broad, beneath which they build the great ships. Also close by stands another building with arches, in which they also build ships. Between the two runs deep water, and when the ships are ready they are rolled on round wooden wheels into the water. Item we went further into another building in which were very fine cannon, namely five main pieces of copper. They measured by one of my feet twenty-four feet long, and each cannon had three pieces which could be screwed into each other. As we were about to look into one of them, out crept a boy with a vegetable basket, who had hidden himself in it. I was told that each piece had cost seven thousand ducats and that each piece discharges a stone of a thousand pounds. Item cloe by in two rows were more than four hundred copper half-slings, which had just been mounted on two strong wheels. Item close by were also many carthouns, slings, half-slings, and chamber-guns, which are all used on the ships. Item close by were also three copper motrars. Item I was told as a fact by a gentleman who had made an inventory that there were thirty-eight main pieces, one hundred and sixty large copper slings, forty-four copper carthouns, and more than five hundred half copper slings. Further that in every town under their dominion was more artillery than we saw there, since in his opinion Venice did not need so much, as she had only to arm the ships. And I can say in truth that having seen many armaments in such towns as Brescia, Verona, Padua, Treviso, Mestre, Vienna, Madon, Corfu, Roumania, Candia, Cyprus, and in many other towns, I had not seen even a part ... Item at Venice I new Venetian ducats had called to change all my de zecca, since money for the money in Greece, Turkey and in heathen lands is differently coined from Christian money. Item since it was in my mind to travel in the lands of unbelievers I had to see that my money was not stolen or taken, which often happened to me. I was taken therefore with the help of¡ the German merchants to a gentleman of Venice who traded in all countries overseas, who gave bills of exchange in the cities of Alexandria, Damietta, Damascus, Beiruth, Antioch, Constantinople, and other towns, so that I could supply my needs, for which ¡ the other merchants of the counting house of An559
thony Paffendorp of Cologne were my sureties, that they would make good what I spent in other countries. Item when I came to a heathen town and presented these bills to the person to whom they were made out, although I could not speak with him, I nodded my head at him and kissed my finger in order to show my respect, and gave him the bills. Whereupon he would stare at me and disappear into the back of his house, returning at once and paying me my money, indicating with his finger that I should write down how much I had received. I was told this by the gentleman in Venice, and in truth they keep to it although they are heathens. From Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, Knight ‌ 1496-1499, trans. Malcolm Letts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1946).
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Pietro Arentino, A House In Venice (1537) TO DOMENICO BOLANI It would appear to me, honored gentleman, a sin of ingratitude, if I did not pay in praises the debt I owe to the divinity of the place in which your. house is situated, where I dwell with all the pleasure that there is in life, for its site is the most ¡proper, being neither too high up nor too low down. I ani as timorous about entering upon its merits as one is about speaking of those of the emperor. Certainly he who built it picked out the best spot on the Grand Canal. And since it is the patriarch of streams and Venice the popess of cities, I can say with truth that I enjoy the finest street and the pleasantest view in the world. I never go to the window that I do¡ not see a thousand' persons and as many gondolas at the hour of market. The piazze to my right are the Beccarie and the Pescaria [meat and fish markets]; as well as the Campo del Mancino, the Ponte and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; and where these meet there is the Rialto, crowded with men of business. Here, we have the grapes in barges, the game and pheasants in shops, the vegetables on the pavement. Nor do I long for meadow streams, when at dawn I wonder at the waters covered with every kind of thing in its season. It is good sport to watch those who bring in the great stores of fruit and vegetables passing them out to those who carry them to their appointed places! All is bustle, except the spectacle of the twenty or twenty-five sailboats, filled with melons, which, huddled together, make, as it were, an island in the middle of the multitude; but then comes the business of counting, sniffing, and weighing them, to judge their perfection. Of the beautiful housewives, shining in silk and superbly resplendent in gold and jewels, not to appear to be indulging in an anticlimax, I refrain from speaking. But of one thing I shall speak, and that is of how I nearly cracked my jaws with laughter when the cries, hoots, and uproar from the boats were drowned in that of grooms at seeing a bark-load of Germans, who had just come out of the tavern, capsized in the cold waters of the canal, a sight that the famous Giulio Camillo and I saw one day. He, by the way used to take delight in remarking to me that the entrance to my house from the landside, being a dark one and with a beastly stair, was like the terrible name I had acquired by revealing the truth. And then he would find in my pure, plain, and natural friendship the same tranquil contentment that was felt on reaching the portico and coming out on the balconies above. Â
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But that nothing might be lacking to my visual delights, behold, on one side, I have the oranges that the gild the base of the Palazzo dei Camerlinghi, and, on the other side, the rio and the Ponte di San Giovan Cristostomo. Nor does the winter sun ever rise without entering my bed, my study, my kitchen, my other apartments, and my drawing room. But what I prize most is the nobility of my neighbours. I have opposite me the eloquent, magnificent, and honoured Maffia Lioni, whose supreme virtues have taught learning, science, and good manners to the sublime intellect of Girolamo, Piero, and Luigi, his wonderful sons. I have also his Serene Highness, my sacramental and loving godfather, and his son. I have the magnanimous Francesco Moccinico, who provides a constant and splendid board for cavaliers and gentlemen. At the corner I see the good Messer Giambattista Spinelli, under whose paternal roof dwell my friends, the Cavorlini (may God pardon fortune for the wrong done them by fate). Nor do I regard as the least of my good fortune the fact that I have the dear Signora Iacopa, to whom I am so used, for a neighbour. In short, if I could feed the touch and the other senses as I feed the sight, this house which I am praising would with all be to me a paradise; for I content my vision the amusement which the objects it loves can give. Nor am I at all put out by the great foreign masters of the earth who frequently enter my door, nor by the respect which elevates me to the skies, nor by the coming and going of the bucentaur, nor by the regattas and the feast days, which give the Canal a continuously triumphal appearance, all of which the view from my windows commands. And what of the lights, which at night are like twinkling stars, on the boats that bring us the necessities for our luncheons and our dinners? What of the music which by night ravishes my ears? It would be easier to express the profound judgment which you show in letters and in public office than to make an end of enumerating all the delights my eyes enjoy. And so, if there is any breath of genius in my written chatterings, it comes from the favour you have done me - not the air, not the shade, not the violets and the greenery, but the airy happiness I take in this mansion of yours, in which God grant I may spend, in health and vigour, the remainder of those years which a good man ought to the live. From The Works of Arentino, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Convici, Friede Inc., 1933).
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SECTION 6
John Martin and Dennis Romano, Reconsidering Vencie Venice was not only one of the greatest cities of medieval and early modern Europe, it was also one of Europe's most enduring republics, an expansive empire and, from the fifteenth century on, an imposing regional state. At the height of its power in the sixteenth century, the city of Venice counted nearly 170,000 souls, with a population of more than two million in its subject territories. Its republican constitution, which took shape in the late thirteenth century, when the formidable Edward I was the king of England and the pope was Boniface VIII, stood for five hundred years, until its fall to Napoleon on 12 May 1797. Its empire reached from the Alps, through the cities, towns, and villages of northeastern Italy, across the Adriatic to Istria, Dalmatia, Corfu, Crete, and Cyprus. A maritime power, Venice served as an entrepĂ´t for trade between Europe and the Middle East, and as early as the thirteenth century its merchants (possibly including Marco Polo) traveled as far as India and China. Crucially, the wealth derived at first from trade and then from industry (primarily textiles) helped Venice remain independent from foreign control down to the end of the eighteenth century. Medieval and early modern Venice was also one of the great cultural capitals of Europe. It was home to scores of artists, musicians, and writers of international stature. Indeed, it is difficult to think of Venice without also thinking of Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Palladio, Veronica Franco, Giovanni Gabrieli, Paolo Sarpi, Carlo Goldoni, Antonio Vivaldi, and Giambattista Tiepolo, to name only some of Venice's major creative figures. Nearby Padua, which had been under Venetian control since 1405, was the site of one of the most influential universities of the Renaissance, and from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century Venice was one of the leading centers of printing in the world. That the city of Venice was itself, as a man-made island, an ecological improbability - a frail construction in the center of a coastal enclave protected from the sea by a string of thin barrier islands (the lidi) - has had the inevitable result of making Venice one of the most fascinating and thus one of the most intensively studied societies in history.1 Not surprisingly, scholars have traveled to Venice for the most varied reasons. Some have sought in the shimmering mosaics of its churches echoes of the city's Byzantine past and especially of the role Venice played as the link between Europe and Asia. Others have pored over fading account books and maritime contracts and explored the canteens of its decaying Arsenal, the state shipyard, in search of the origins of modern 563
capitalism. Still others have conjured up - in Titian's sumptuous Venuses, in the autobiographical writings of Giacomo Casanova, and in the drawing rooms of eighteenthcentury palaces - an erotic past seemingly alien to the modern spirit. But Venetian history and civilization are inevitably far greater than any one narrative can encompass. There are simply too many Venices, too many unknown dimensions. Just when one believes one is beginning to follow the storyline, Venice transmogrifies and, both in spite of and because of the richness of its archives and artistic treasures, is again a mystery, an enigma, an indecipherable maze of interweaving stories, false and true. Nonetheless, Venice does offer a central story, one that acts as a constant in the ever-changing complexity of its history. It is the story of Venetian stability. Other states, whether in Italy or north of the Alps, were subject to frequent change in the nature of their rule. Venice's longevity as a republic made it an exception. Indeed, this aspect of Venetian exceptionalism, combined with ¡ many other of its remarkable elements, came together in the writings of humanists and other panegyrists to develop what would come to be known as the "myth" of Venice. The myth, which first emerged as a coherent and influential representation of the city in the late Middle Ages, portrays Venice as an ideal republic, a strong maritime empire, and an independent state in which the Venetian nobles were devoted to the ideals of civic humanism and the commercial virtues of sobriety, hard work, and selfsacrifice. Venice, that is, appeared to be a city like no other. Moreover, whereas other towns were torn by internal discord, Venice, as Petrarch observed as early as the fourteenth century, was stable, ruled by wise laws. It was a new Sparta. It was the Serenissima, the most serene republic.2 Yet Venice has not always been represented in a positive light. Alongside the view that Venice was an open, just, tolerant, and benevolent republic, a countermyth portrayed Venice as a repressive state, harshly governed by a decadent and secretive oligarchy. According to this antimyth, which first took shape as Venice began to expand its power over the terraferma, or the mainland towns and villages, of northeastern Italy in the early fifteenth century, a small circle of aristocrats not only controlled the levers of political power in Venice itself but also sought to place the rest of Italy under its dominion.3 "One sees here a universal hatred against them," Machiavelli wrote of the Venetians in a dispatch to the Florentine government in 1503, alluding to what he and many of his contemporaries saw as a Venetian campaign to place all of Italy under its rule.4 By the early seventeenth century, as Richard Mackenney's contribution to this volume makes clear, the antimyth had struck a different key. Venice was represented not as hungry for domination but rather as an oppressive and secretive tyranny. It was, however, in the eighteenth century that the countermyth assumed a coherent form. For by then Enlightenment republicanism had made the Venetian Republic, with its fran564
chise restricted to a well-defined nobility of birth (at that time limited to approximately 2 percent of the city's population), seem an anachronism in an age of more democratic aspirations. Several critics, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spent the year 1743-44 as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, found the Venetian government secretive and repressive. In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau characterized the Republic as a "simulacrum" of the real thing and went so far as to condemn the Council ofTen as "a tribunal of blood." In his Confessions (1770) Rousseau underscored the decadence of Venetian society, which he famously connected to the "defects in that Republic's highly vaunted constitution." He did, however, admire Venetian music, not only the exquisite performances of its operas and conservatories but also the popular songs sung in the city's taverns and in its streets.5 These two powerful representations-one a myth that idealizes Venice, the other an antimyth that vilifies it-have played a decisive role in shaping the way scholars approach Venice, its history, and its civilization. As Claudio Povolo's essay in this volume shows, the first major modern history of the Republic, Pierre Antoine Noel Dam's Histoire de la Republique de Venise, published in eight volumes (1815-19), portrays Venice as decadent, oligarchic, and incapable of reform. Given his loyalty to Napoleon, whom he served both during and after the Italian campaign, Daru's harsh historical treatment of Venice can be read in part as a partisan attack on a political system he himself had helped to destroy. Nonetheless, in the early nineteenth century, despite occasional protestations from Venetian scholars who maintained (correctly) that his documentary evidence was largely unreliable, Daru's interpretation of the Republic was widely shared, as such literary works as Lord Byron's Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1823) and James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo: A Venetian Story (1834) illustrate.6 Indeed, in a recent book Povolo has even made the tantalizing suggestion that the masterpiece of modern Italian literature, Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, published in three volumes in 1825-27, which portrays the repressive rule of aristocrats over their peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy, was based on the record of a trial from the earlyseventeenth-century Veneto.7 And the countermyth exercised a considerable hold over John Ruskin. As well, whose Stones of Venice (1851-53), while celebrating the creativity and individualism of the medieval craftsman, deplored the decline in artistic talent and vitality in the period beginning with the Renaissance, when, in Ruskin’s view, medieval libraries were suffocated by an increasingly repressive state.8 It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, with the publication of Samuele Romanin's Storia documentata di Venezia, that modern historians effectively resurrected the positive myth of the Republic."9 Romanin's work owed its documentary rigor largely to the example of Leopold von Ranke, who not only mined the Venetian archives for his studies of early modern European politics but himself contributed three 565
well-researched essays to Venetian history.10 But Romanin's project was also shaped by the climate of the time, which encouraged scholars to view the Venetian Republic in the context of Italian unity.11 Indeed, much of the scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on constitutional and legal developments as historians sought to uncover the medieval roots of the modern nation-state. Thus, like historians of England and France who looked back to the early development of monarchic power and parliamentary rule, historians of Venice sought to reconstruct the city's constitutional development as the Byzantine protectorate with its quasi-monarchic doge slowly evolved into a republican commune with a ducal head of state. For many of these historians, moreover, the Venetian polity reached a state of constitutional perfection around 1310, in the wake of the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy, with the creation of the Council of Ten, a golden age that not coincidentally corresponded with the period of Venetian commercial greatness.12 Many of these same historians considered the later centuries, when Venice, like the other Italian medieval city-states, fell under foreign domination, less worthy of consideration, especially as these were the years when Italy failed to make a smooth transition to nationhood.13 Indeed, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century the Venetian myth would continue to find its proponents both among scholars who turned to the Republic as a model for their own times and among those who saw in the secretiveness and the repressiveness of the Venetian state an example of a political system to be avoided. Both the myth and the antimyth, that is, have enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife in which scholars have, whether consciously or unconsciously, molded their interpretations of Venetian history in order to further their own political or cultural agendas. Remarkably, this interpretive dialectic between myth and countermyth continued to define Venetian studies in the first three decades after the Second World War. In the scholarship of that generation it is possible to distinguish hvo relatively clearly delineated interpretations of Venetian history. Some historians tended to celebrate Venice's significance as a model republic. In Italy the most significant contribution to this perspective was Gaetano Cozzi's Il doge Niccolo Cotarini (1958), which analyzed an entire generation of Venetian nobles who, begin ning at the end of the sixteenth century, emerged both as reformers of the Venetian constitution, seeking to limit the power of the Council of Ten, and as articulate critics of the papacy's efforts in the early seventeenth century to curtail Venice's independence.14 Indeed, for Cozzi - as for several scholars - the Interdict Controversy of 1606-7 became the emblematic struggle that defined the Venetian Republic as tolerant and open, free from the tyranny of the Counter Reformation Church, animated by an aristocracy steeped in the values of civic humanism and evangelism, and committed to commerce and an irenic diplomacy.
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But it was American scholars who developed the theme of Renaissance republicanism most fully. In its most exaggerated form this historiography sought in the Renaissance republics of Venice and Florence the origins of an unbroken and transatlantic republican tradition, a tradition reborn in new lands through the transmission of a few central concepts and texts. While the fundamental work in this historiography was Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, which focused on Florentine developments, Venetian historians were quick to follow suit, with Baron himself leading the way with his studies of Venetian humanist traditions.15 In the United States the theme of Renaissance republicanism was most fully adopted by Frederic C. Lane and William Bouwsma, both of whom served as president of the American Historical Association. In his 1965 presidential address Lane, the founder of Venetian studies in the United States, placed Venice within the tradition of Western republicanism. Lane's specialties were economic and maritime history, but he did not hesitate to put Venice to ideological use. In the address he praised late medieval Venetian capitalism as a precondition for Renaissance republicanism - "the most distinctive and significant aspect of ... the Italian city-states" - and offered in the guise of history what was in fact a latetwentieth-century version of the myth of Venice: The Venetian Republic gained a high reputation for the success with which it solved many problems in state building that were to confront European governments during the next few centuries, namely, upholding public law over private privilege and vengeance, curbing the Church's political influence, and inventing mercantilist measures to increase wealth. Byzantine traditions and the relative weakness of professional organizations at Venice made it easier to establish there a coordination of social life under the sovereignty of the Republic.16 Three years later, in his Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty', Bouwsma argued that Paolo Sarpi and others in Venice revived the Florentine humanist discourse of republican liberty during Venice's struggle with the papacy in the Interdict Crisis. As the heroic wording of its title suggests, this book was a further elaboration of Cozzi's study.17 As a corollary to their civic humanist emphasis, American scholars, 'With very few exceptions, have been concerned, at least until recently, with the capital city only, viewing the Renaissance from a decidedly urban perspective. Other scholars, by contrast, have stressed the Venice of the antimyth. From their perspective, the central problem was not Venice's role as an Exemplary Republic but rather its decadence. To Fernand Braudel - Venice stood at the center of his celebrated study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II - Venetian economic history was largely the story of the Republic's inability to adjust to the shifting economic structures of the long sixteenth century.18 Intellectual historians have also stressed Venice's decadence, especially in the eighteenth century, when En567
lightenment ideas, though known in the Veneta, had little impact on the way the Venetian aristocracy shaped either its political or its economic policies.19 But the anti myth has found its most articulate expression in political history. The two most influential works on the Venetian state have been Marino Berengo's La societia veneta alla fine del Settecento (1956) and Angelo Ventura's Nobilita e popolo nella societa veneta del ‘400 e ‘500 (1964) both of which explored especially the relationship between the capital city (the dominante) and its mainland territories (the dominio). Berengo viewed the decadence of the Venetian state as a consequence of the aristocracy's inability to share power and its abuse of jus tice, its twisting the courts to serve its own interests. Ventura concentrated on the dominante's exploitation of the dominio, especially its highhanded techniques, which undercut the autonomy and authority of local notables. For him the Venetian territorial state was feudal, backward, and an inevitable target of Napoleon.20 To oversimplify, one might say that alongside the rather triumphalist history of the Venetian Republic celebrated primarily by American scholars, Italian scholars in the postwar period have looked harder at the reali ties of Venice as a regional state, stressing the degree to which its political and legal institutions varied from city to city and place to place. But what is the status of the myth and the antimyth today, especially among scholars who were born after 1945, many of whom are represented in this volume? In a provocative and important essay published in 1986 James S. Grubb maintained that there were reasons to believe that the myth of Venice, while it would never be discarded entirely, had lost its power for this "younger" generation, for whom, in Grubb's words, "neither myth nor antimyth seems compelling." And Grubb's explanation, at least with respect to the evident decline of the positive, celebratory myth of the Venetian Republic, is largely one of generational experience. "As memory of Nazism, Fascism, and the Cold War fades in a generation of historians born since 1945," Grubb observed, "the urgency for a model of a free society's resistance to tyranny has been blunted.�21 In another lucid survey of Venetian historiography Nicholas S. Davidson has made much the same point. The immediate postwar generation, preoccupied with the problem of building strong democratic states in the wake of fascism' and war, Davidson argues, naturally turned to Venice as a model republic. But the intellectual outlook of the more recent generation of Vene tian scholars has been shaped by an entirely different set of experiences, above all by upheavals in the social and political structures of the Western democracies in the late 1960s. As Grubb trenchantly writes, "The logical implications of an exemplary Venetian Republic, with blue-blood paternalism on the one hand and happily powerless masses on the other, are dubious lessons for our own dayespecially if we take seriously Ventura's demonstration of the patriciate's systematic abuses of justice, tax evasion, fiscal corruption, abuse of office, and in general thorough exploitation of class privilege at the expense of underlings."22 568
Although it is certainly true that the celebratory myth of Venice has witnessed an eclipse in the historical writing of the most recent generation of Venetianists, it is by no means clear that Venetian studies have escaped entirely the interpretative framework of these competing representations of Venetian society. For whereas the preceding generation found Venice a model of an ordered, well-regulated society, the more recent scholarship on Venice, as Davidson eloquently argues, has tended to highlight fissures, tensions, contradictions, and elements of disorder in Venice. What we see in recent Venetian historiography," he observes, "is a shift in interest from order to disorder, from orthodoxy to dissent, from the center of power to the broader social context.�23 Thus, in the current scholarship Venice is no longer represented as the Exemplary Republic. On the contrary, much recent scholarship has highlighted Venetian domination of the terraferma and, in particular, the institutional and legal framework within which Venice ruled its subject territories. Perhaps the most significant work in this respect has been Claudio Povolo's L’intrigo dell'onore: Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento, though the field has been crowded with both Italian and non-Italian scholars.24 But the shift in emphasis has also been true of studies of the dominante, with recent scholarship underscoring social and cultural tensions.25 However, this generation has been interested not only in tensions, approaching Venetian history in the spirit of what Paul Ricoeur calls "a hermeneutics of suspicion," but also in inclusion. Thus there is a profusion of new works on women,Jews, workers, vagabonds, and other long-neglected groups.26 Indeed, because it was so profoundly multicultural and diverse, Venice seems especially suited to current sensitivities and concerns., though precisely which version of the myth lives on is less evident. Perhaps it is the myth of Venice as a multicultural metropolis - with its diverse ethnic subcultures of Greeks, Germans, Jews, Turks, and Armenians living in relative harmony - that resonates most strongly with the concerns of scholars today. But even if in certain respects the dialectic between myth and antimyth perdures, Grubb was likely right that the power and appeal of the myth have been attenuated. This is largely the result of a number of studies that began in the late 1950s and continued into the seventies and even eighties, in which for the first time-the myth itself became the object of interest, an interest that continues to animate current scholarship. Indeed, beginning with Gina Fasoli's and Franco Gaeta's seminal articles on this subject in 1958 and 1961, finding support in art historical studies such as Staale SindingLarsen's Christ in the Council Hall (1974), and continuing to Grubb's essay itself, myriad scholars have helped to make clear that, although it should not be viewed as a representation of Venetian realities, the myth of Venice has nonetheless played an important role in shaping Venetian society, politics, and culture.27 They have, in short, not only specified the fundamental attributes of the myth but also shown how the myth served particular functions and interests. In Fasoli's view, the central elements of the 569
myth were the beauty of the city, the stability of its government, the greatness of its empire, the piety of its citizens, and, finally, its liberta, its exceptional ability to preserve its independence from foreign power. On the most basic level, the work of Fasoli, Gaeta, and others has made it possible to analyze the myth itself as a kind of constitutive discourse. This discourse functioned not only within Venetian society itself, where it served to legitimate the power of certain ruling groups and to provide people with a means of making sense of their social order, but also abroad, where - in late fifteenthcentury Florence, in seventeenth-century England and Holland, and in eighteenthcentury America - Venice became a model for republicans, a central element in what William Bouwsma has called "the political education of Europe."28 The identification of the power of the myth as a discourse also. had a tremendously important effect on the study of Venetian art and music, whose portrayal of the city's history, legends, and, yes, myth could now be fruitfully analyzed. From the mosaics and the music of San Marco to the rich and variegated cultural life of the city's churches, monasteries, guilds, and confraternities, art, music, literature, and theater have come to be seen as vehicles that celebrated and reproduced Venetian culture.29 But the analysis of the myth as discourse also has significant implications for our approach to Venetian history. It suggests that scholars do not have to analyze the history of Venice from within the framework of Venice either as Exemplary Republic or as Repressive State. In short, we are no longer obligated to rehash old battles. This does not mean that our studies of Venice will be more objective than those of an earlier generation, but it has led to a set of decidedly new questions and, more significantly, to a new set of assumptions or a new paradigm in Venetian studies. In the history of Venetian politics it is now possible to view the legal and governing institutions not merely as the expression of classical models but as rooted in the complex social and economic structures of the city and its territories. In social and economic history it is now possible to discover beneath the images and representations of Venetian constitutional stability and social harmony an almost incessant fluidity of status groups and tradesmen. Finally, in cultural history this shift in perspective has made culture itself an integral part of history, facilitating the tying of such fields as intellectual history, art history, music history, and even the study of ritual more closely than ever to the concerns of political and social historians. The study of Italian political history has been shaped by a tendency, evident at least since Machiavelli, to classify states as either republics or principalities. "All the states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either republics or principalities,� Machiavelli wrote in the first sentence of the first chapter of The Prince, a distinction he reinforced by devoting this famous book to a discussion of principalities 570
(seignorial regimes or monarchies) and his longer, less well known but nonetheless influential Discourses to an analysis of republics.30 To a large degree this dichotomy has also shaped the traditional understanding of Venetian political history. As the preceding discussion of the myth of Venice makes clear, the republican history of Venice is well known. But if there is general agreement that the city of Venice should be characterized as a re public, there is no consensus about how to characterize Venice's rule over both the terraferma and the stato da mar (its far-flung dependencies and colonies in the eastern Mediterranean). For the Venetian government acted not as a re public but rather as a kind of collective prince over its diverse subject territories, whether the smaller cities and towns of the terraferma, the powerful feudal families, whose power the Venetian government contained but was never able to break, or the various merchant colonies of its maritime empire. From the vantage point of traditional scholarship Venice was somehow both a republic and a principality. Accordingly, one earlytwentieth-century scholar described the Venetian political system as a diarchy; others have thought of it as a kind of federation.31 Yet while both these terms help conceptualize the apparent contradictions in the Venetian polity, neither succeeds in elucidating how the Venetian state worked in practice. Recent work on Venice, however, has moved away from these rather ab stract formulations and concentrated on the distribution of power. Thus scholars, formerly intent on explicating the constitutional and institutional history of the Republic, have grown increasingly conscious of numerous subtle shifts in the distribution of power among the Venetian elite, alert to fissures within the nobility, and suspicious of the motives of various patrician groups. For example, in their contributions to this volume Gerhard Rosch and Stanley Chojnacki make clear that the development of both the patriciate and the governing institutions of the state was an ongoing process. In a similar fashion, Debra Pincus enriches our understanding of the doge's role in the late medieval period. Using art-in this case ducal tomb monuments of the fourteenth century - she demonstrates, among other things, that there was no constitutional fixity with regard to the doge, that ducal power was renegotiated during each ducal reign and that as the doge's legal power was circumscribed his sacred and ritual power increased. And Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan suggests here, as she does in her magisterial study "Sopra le acque salse": Espaces, pouvoir et societte a Venise, a dynamic interaction between the physical environment and human action in the development of the Venetian state. In her view, it was the need, evident from the later fifteenth century on, to contain the now menacing waters of the lagoon that promoted new bureaucracies and new powers of the state.32 Although they differ in emphasis and in focus, these studies resonate with the later work of Cozzi and others whose analyses of Venetian political magistracies, especially those devoted to law, have demonstrated how certain in stitutions, most notably the Council of Ten, became ascendant in the sixteenth century in the wake of the 571
,war against the League of Cambrai.33 Several other scholars, among them the German historians Volker Hunecke and Oliver Thomas Domzalski, as well as the Italian scholars Piero Del Negro and Giovanni Scarabello, have highlighted comparable shifts in the institutional and political histories of Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.34 Just as scholars have tended to move away from an over-idealized image of the Venetian Republic and learned to examine its history with closer attention to actual institutional, legal, and fiscal practices, historians have also developed a far more nuanced view of the Venetian state. As noted above, the works of Angelo Ventura and Marino Berengo served a generation ago to place the study of Venetian rule of the terraferma on a par with the analysis of the political history of the city. But it is doubtful that anyone could have predicted the enormous energy that would be devoted to this theme over the next thirty years-down to the present. In these analyses the study of institutions has remained central. Scholars have explored the role of the patrician administrators (rettori, podesta, capitani) that the Venetian government dispatched to the terraferma to protect its interests. In general the Venetians found it advantageous to undercut the authority of the local oligarchies while granting a certain formal recognition to the continuation of their institutions, legal and legislative. The process required a complicated balancing act. The Venetians, whose own outlook had been shaped largely by life in a commercial, cosmopolitan city, confronted a political mosaic on the terraferma of petty tyrants, local grandees, feudal lords, patrician elites, and peasant communes.35 In addition to these secular powers, moreover, historians have also explored, though inadequately, the role of Venetian ecclesiastical administrators in the countryside, for virtually all of the bishops and most of the abbots of the greater houses were themselves members of important Venetian families, and they too exercised considerable authority in the Venetian state.36 But it has become clear that a purely institutional approach does not cut deeply enough. Scholars have now begun to emphasize the importance of understanding the social, economic, and cultural matrices in which these institutions operated; they have been particularly successful in illuminating the development of agriculture and protoindustrialization on the terraferma, the interpenetration of city and countryside in such phenomena as villegiatura and the image of the peasant in Venetian literature.37 Much more attention is now given to the study of social practices and to microhistorical analyses. Not surprisingly, the picture that is emerging neither celebrates the expansion of Venetian power onto the terraferma nor condemns it as a simple act of repression of peripheral territories by a centralizing power. On the contrary, scholars now approach the Venetian state as a complex mosaic of diverse political structures. In such cities as Brescia and Vicenza local oligarchies still dung to pov,rer, though their spheres of influence were often restricted by their Vene572
tian lords. And in the countryside peasants often con tinued to enjoy a measure of freedom in their communal institutions. Indeed, recent scholarship has made dear that Ventura's celebrated thesis emphasizing the aristocratization of the landed elites and the erosion of traditional communal freedoms, while of enormous heuristic value, undoubtedly exaggerated the degree to "which these traditional institutions and freedoms atrophied from the sixteenth century on. But Venetian administrators not only found it necessary to mediate between diverse councils and legal institutions in both the subject cities and the countryside; they also confronted the entrenched landed interests of great feudal families such as the Savorgnan in the Friuli. Accordingly, the early modern Venetian state can now be seen as a regional state, a phrase used by the eminent Italian political historian Giorgio Chittolini to describe the Italian political systems of this period not in terms of the traditional Machiavellian or classical vocabulary but rather in relation to their fundamental realities, namely, a significant concern for the security of their borders, an acceptance of the coexistence of multiple, even contradictory forms of political organization; a new appreciation of the perdurance and functionality of apparently irrational social practices such as feuds or clientalism; and, at least from the perspective of Enlightenment theories of the state, a complex blurring of the boundaries between public and private forms of power.38 Among Italian scholars, the more recent works of Cozzi and Povolo have been especially valuable in explicating the interplay of the varied institutions of the Venetian state as a mosaic of varied forms of political domination and subjugation.39 Within American scholarship the work of Edward Muir has been especially compelling. In the essay he offers here Muir invites a dialogue with Italian scholarship by attempting to decipher the role republican ideology and republican practices played in binding together the Venetian regional state. As he does in his book Mad Blood Stirring, Muir presents a dizzyingly complex picture of Venetian and terraferma political culture in which currents of medieval republicanism (the ben comune), classically inspired Renaissance republicanism, and feudal and courtly traditions competed and intertwined all the way from the halls of the ducal palace in Venice to the rural communes of the Friuli. The connection Muir makes between these two traditions of scholarship, largely because of the degree to which it is based on the careful analysis of particular practices and discourses in well-defined contexts, opens an especially promising avenue for further research into Venetian political history, What Muir and the other scholars who have begun work on these and related political themes have made clear is the need to go beyond purely legal and institutional perspectives. Future considerations of the development of the Venetian government will have to take into account the interaction of many factors, including the control of resources and the environment, bureaucratic infighting, patterns of feuding, patron-client 573
relations, and evolving social and cultural practices. Even more urgent is the need to integrate or at least confront the American historiographical concern ¡with republicanism and the Italian concern with the development of the regional state. While Muir's essay represents a promising beginning and there is already much work-for example, on the consequences of terraferma expansion for the distribution of power within the Venetian bureaucracy, which illustrates the impact of expansion on republi can practice-scholars - working in each tradition need to ask how their work might shed light on the concerns of scholars working in the other tradition. To give but 011e example, historians might explore the ways in which ducal imagery was reshaped by the acquisition of the mainland territory and what consequences, if any, this had for the distribution of power bet\veen the doge and the councils of government. Such a dialogue might also help scholars rethink the periodization of the republican traditions and of the regional state, both of which suffer in the existing literature either from a lack of diachronic refinement or from lingering dependence on a narrative of rise and decline. Indeed, the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon in 1797, when the Great Council voted itself out of existence, was a determining moment in the creation of that narrative - what we might call the organic model of Venetian history - for now Venice, like ancient Rome, could be understood to have had a rise to grandeur, a golden or imperial age, and a slow but inevitable decline, and the city could serve as another proof of the theory that the polity is analogous to the human body. Venice's organic history was most easily read through its imperial and economic fortunes. The fate of empire, from the first tentative efforts to control the northern Adriatic in the ninth and tenth centuries to the final attempts to resist the advance of the Turks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with the story of Venice's rise to riches, including the dramatic turning point with the news in 1499 of a Portuguese fleet's arrival in India, seemed to confirm this theory and allowed historians to make sense of Venice's past. Other aspects of the Venetian experience, including society and art, were reinterpreted to accord with this model as well. Emblematic of efforts to trace a congruence between the cultural, political, and economic fortunes of the city and its underlying social structures is Pompeo Molmenti's monumental Storia di Venezia nella vita pritata, first published in 1880 and now in its seventh edition, whose three chronologically arranged volumes bear the subtitles, La Grandezza, Lo Splendore, and II Decadimento. The power of the model is such that it has continued to shape scholar ship do,"'¡n to the late twentieth century, as a rapid survey of titles in the field makes clear.40 A model of the rise, splendor, and decline of Venetian civilization is no longer tenable. This is not to say that time and its charting did not play a central role in Venetian history. But Venetian notions of historical time were to some degree the product, as Pa574
tricia Fortini Brown has emphasized in her recent book Venice and Antiquity of the city's lack of a Roman past.41 Having no direct link to the classical and Christian chronologies that shaped the histories of other places and peoples, Venetians were free to create and shape their own past. As they rewrote their history, especially the story of the city's foundation, they identified particular moments of import: the praedestinatio of Saint Mark, the flight from Attila, the city's foundation on the Feast of the Annunciation, and the move from Malamocco to Rialto. Venetians were no less inventive at the time of the fall of the Republic. Indeed, as Martha Feldman makes clear in her contribution to this volume, one of the great moments in the rewriting of the past (as well as opera) occurred during the summer of 1797, after the Republic fell to Napoleon. In those revolutionary days the Venetians annihilated their own history as they attempted to turn the clock back to 1297 and the days before aristocratic "tyranny" began. In the long run, however, their efforts to define 1797 as a moment of rebirth and renewal collapsed beneath an alternative reading of that year as one of decline and death. Indeed, throughout the centuries, Venetians rewrote their history to tell again who they were. From the perspective of the lived experience of Venetians, that is, the temporal dimension was malleable; and the particular ways in which they described the origins of their city or their republic or their state tell us much about how they saw themselves. In his celebrated history of the Renaissance, first published in 1860, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt paid especial attention to two Italian cities, Venice and Florence. "Among the cities which maintained their independence are t\vo of deep significance for the history of the human race;' Burckhardt wrote, "Florence, the city of incessant movement, which has left us a record of the thoughts and aspirations of each and all who, for three centuries, took part in this movement, and Venice, the city of apparent stagnation and of political secrecy."42 Burckhardt was wise to include the term apparent in this characterization, for recent work on Venice has radically transformed our understanding of the social and economic history of both the city and its subject territories. Indeed, we believe it fruitful to appropriate Burckhardt's phrase "the city of incessant movement," which he used to describe Florence, and apply it to Venice, for Venice, despite its appearance of stability, was a city of constant change in both its internal social arrangements and its relations with the outside world. It has not always been easy to see beyond the facade of stability that has mesmerized observers of Venice from the Renaissance to Burckhardt and beyond. The most familiar representation of Venice, after all, has been that of a society of orders. This model, 'which placed the nobility at the summit of a hierarchy and the popolani at its base, originated with theorists of Venetian republicanism, who set about the task of explaining both the longevity of Venetian political institutions and the relative absence of 575
social conflict in the city and its subject territories. Powerfully influenced by their knowledge of classical models and Roman history, these writers found the explanation for Venetian success in the Aristotelian and Polybian ideals of mixed government. Gasparo Contarini, the best known of these authors, argued in his De magis tratibus et republica Venetorum, for example, that the classical forms of government - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy-were institutionalized in Venice in the doge, the Senate, and the Great Council and that the city's social harmony was the result of a commitment on the part of the nobles to justice and the welfare of the populace.43 One consequence of this theorizing by Contarini and other contributors to the myth of Venice has been the canonization of the vision of Venetian society as consisting of well-defined orders arranged hierarchically. And, indeed it is useful to know that from the time of the Serrata to its fall to Napoleon five hundred years later the ruling class of the city-male nobles and their families generally made up less than 4-5 percent of the population.44 Only adult noble males had the right to sit in the Great Council and to participate in the political life of the Republic. Next in prestige were the cittadini (citizens), a diverse group comprising some 5-8 percent of the population whose privileges granted them entry into the state bureaucracy (to act, for example, as secre taries in the Ducal Chancery) or special commercial privileges as merchants. Many cittadini were among the wealthiest and most influential members of Venetian society.45 Finally, at the base of this "hierarchy" were the artisans, shopkeepers, and workers, who accounted for the remaining 90 percent of the city's inhabitants. However, recent scholarship, much of it found in the essays included here, suggests that the received model of Venetian society as a rigidly hierarchical and tripartite one in which legal definitions of status were central, is collapsing under the weight of several trends-new readings by intellectual historians of the works of such political theorists as Contarini; a growing emphasis by historians of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music on the social and political functions of the arts in Venetian cultural life; and novel approaches by the practitioners of the "new" social history to previously neglected groups in Venetian society, especially women, artisans, and workers. First, scholars are increasingly aware of the degree to which late medieval and early modern writers offered idealized images of Venice. While these representations had important cultural functions, they also often masked social and political realities. In this light, treatises such as Comarini's are now read less as roadmaps to Venetian society and more as artifacts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggles for position, power, and place both within Venice and beyond. On this front Elisabeth Gleason's recent studies of Contarini, including her essay presented in this volume, and Margaret King's survey of humanism in the fifteenth century, in which she argues that the hu-
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manist writers sought to inculcate the value of unanimitas within the patriciate, are exemplary.46 A second, related development has been the introduction into the debate about society and social structure of a whole body of research, most of it carried out by historians of art, music, and literature, on a vast array of evidence from the realm of culture, traditionally defined. Much of this work, such as Peter Humfrey's examination of Soranzo family commissions at San Sebastiano, involves issues of patronage, including the ways elite families in particular used conspicuous acts of patronage and display to assert, establish, or maintain social prominence. But another body of work, represented here in the contributions of Patricia Brown and Martha Feldman, explores ways in which acts of patronage, consumption, and performance were themselves moments of contestation and negotiation over ever-shifting social boundaries. Both the growing skepticism about the reliability of Venetian treatises and a new interest in the political and cultural uses of art for an understanding of Venetian society have been matched by a veritable explosion of work by social historians. One of the most promising lines of inquiry has been prosopographical, and its origins can be traced in large measure to Stanley Chojnacki's article in John Hale's Renaissance Venice, "In Search of the Venetian Patriciate," As Chojnacki noted in that piece, the lively and often contentious debates about the Serrata and its significance were waged largely in ignorance of the players involved; it was, and to some extent remains, unclear exactly who the nobles were at any particular moment in time.47 The identification of large groups of individual actors or at least the construction of collective biographies is now proceeding on many fronts.48 Another broad line of investigation among social historians entails examining practice, especially rites of passage, when critical choices (about marriage partners, sponsors and godparents, executors, etc.) needed to be made. Again Chojnacki's work is illustrative.49 Many of these rites involved an individual's or a kin network's reaching beyond itself to establish links to other individuals, kinship groups, or even institutions. Hence, they allow historians to trace the constant recreation of social structures and attitudes at moments of high-stakes decision making. For example, in their essays included here Gerhard Rosch and Chojnacki demonstrate quite clearly that there was not one moment, the Serrata, when the qualifications for noble status and the qualifiers for that status were definitively established. Rather, during the course of the Republic's history nobility was continuously redefined (although there was a remarkable continuity among most of the constituent families). As Rosch's essay demonstrates, the Serrata should be viewed not as a legislative act but rather as a social and political evolution that began in the 1280s and took decades to accomplish. Reinforcing Rosch's findings, Chojnacki's study makes a convincing case that it is possible to discern a second and a third Serrata.50 But even this third moment 577
of definition, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, should not be considered conclusive, since additional adjustments were made in the seven teenth century, when entry into the nobility was put up for sale, and after the fall of the Republic, when the status of the Venetian nobility was redefined again, this time by the Austrian Habsburgs.51 However, the nobility was not the only group whose status underwent constant redefinition. James Grubb's search for the cittadini suggests a similar lack of definition among that social group, and almost certainly a close study of various professions and a prosopography of guild leaders would yield similar results among the popolo.52 In fact, in recent years many social historians have turned their attention to the experience of the popolo. This constitutes a major shift in historiographical interest, for even a survey as recent as Frederic Lane's Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973) portrayed the working classes as playing almost no role in the story of Venetian development between the tumultuous decade of the 1260s, when the guilds were subordinated to the patriciate under the.jurisdiction of the Giustizieri Vecchi, and the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when manpower shortages in the navy once again brought guildsmen to the fore of the government's interest.53 Moreover, traditionally, when the history of these groups has been given consideration, it has been largely in the context of noble- and cittadino - based charitable efforts and public-assistance programs or at the margins in studies of immigrant, minority, or heretical groups. But this scholarship has undergone significant shifts in the 1980s and 1990s as students of Venice, like their counterparts in other fields, have begun to examine the history of non-elite groups from new angles. In Venetian studies, Carlo Ginzburg's studies of popular beliefs among the peasants of the Friuli played an especially pivotal role. Ginzburg’s preface to his now classic work The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, first published in 1976, raised a number of enticing theoretical issues about the nature of the study of popular culture that have inspired an entire generation of scholars whose work explores groups such as the shipwrights and other workers of the Arsenal, fishermen from the parish of San Niccolo dei Mendicoli, household servants, witches, vagabonds and others long beyond the purview of historians.54 Women too have become the subject of analysis. In addition to the researches of Chojnacki, which are by and large restricted to the lives of patrician women, such scholars as Federica Ambrosini, Monica Chojnacka,Joanne Ferraro, and Linda Guzzetti have begun to pull back the veil on the experience of popolano women as well.55 Consequently, it is no longer possible to imagine the popolani as an unvariegated and inert mass passively dominated by the cittadini and the nobles. On the contrary, the term popolani covered a broad spectrum of individuals, from wealthy artisans and merchants (whose experience often paralleled that of the cittadini) to poor day laborers, washerwomen, and peasants. 578
From the essays included in this volume, questioning old verities and applying new methods, a picture of Venetian society emerges that is infinitely more complex than the one previously presented.56 One of the most striking features of this new vision, as all these new research trends suggest, is the growing recognition on the part of scholars of social status and position as an ongoing process of definition and self- or groupassertion. Clearly, the earlier model of Venetian society as neatly tripartite is eroding. It is now evident that legal status was only one of several factors determining social position in Venice. Many of the essays included here suggest that cultural factors (including lifestyle, cultural patronage, religion, and gender) must be considered along with birth, wealth, and office holding in thinking about how Venetians assessed their own (and others') place in society. The essays by Brown and Grubb both point to fluidity and lack of legal fixity. Brown's essay raises the issue of individual or family self-presentation through domestic space, problematizes the meaning of sumptuary laws, and underscores the importance of style of life in defining status. Grubb finds that at least one group among the cittadini appear to have asserted their status not through regular officeholding in the chancery but rather by their inclusion in chronicle lists of cittadino families. Nothing better illustrates just how complicated our picture of Venetian society has become than Federica Ambrosini's portrayal of a changing social and cultural climate in which women were often able to create and sustain certain options and freedoms despite the enormous restraints they confronted in a patriarchal setting. Economic historians have also fundamentally altered our understanding of late medieval and early modern Venice. If an earlier generation celebrated Venice as an example, if not the example, of an emerging capitalism, more recent studies have moved away from an emphasis on the city itself as a center of trade and commerce to stress instead the variety of economic forms that co existed throughout the Republic as a whole. This tendency was already present in the work of Frederic Lane. While most of his scholarship focused on aspects of maritime trade, capital accumulation, business practices, and banking-all aspects closely connected to the development of commercial capitalism-he was also one of the first to underscore the central role that industry and manufacturing came to play in the Venetian economy in the sixteenth century, as the city's privileged trading position as an entrepot between Europe and the Middle East was threatened in the wake of the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa.57 To be sure, trade remains an important theme, as one might expect, but the history of industry both in the city itself and throughout the mainland has become a major area of investigation. Economic historians no longer emphasize the problem of the origins of capitalism but examine instead the complex ways in which the Venetian economy both shaped and was shaped by social and political realities.
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This has been especially true in three areas. First, like their counterparts in political history, economic historians have substituted an analytical framework of transformation and adjustment for the more traditional narratives of growth and decay.58 Second, and again the parallels to recent trends in political history are striking, they have moved away from an emphasis on the dominante and begun to explore the economy of both the terraferma and the Venetian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean, highlighting the place of both trade and industry in the creation of regional economies. This work has been especially important in the analysis of cottage industry and related problems of proto industrialization in the Venetian hinterland.59 But scholars have also cast new light on the history of agriculture and land management, which are important dimensions in the history of the regional state, though more needs to be done on the interplay of economic and political developments in both the late medieval and early modern periods.60 Finally, economic historians, often in close alliance with social historians, have begun to explicate the history of such aspects of the Venetian economy as the roles of work and wealth in shaping the experience of Venetians rich and poor. These new initiatives have already done much to illuminate the history of labor, of the guilds, and of immigration.61 But they also promise a better sense of the ways in which trade, manufacturing, wealth, and property ownership defined status in both city and countryside as well as methods for understanding the levers that lifted certain families into prominence as others fell from power. Particularly through analyses of familial wealth, economic historians seem poised to fill in many gaps in the new vision of Venetian society as fluid, porous, flexible, and ever-changing. Indeed, one of the most productive areas of recent Venetian scholarship, one that has benefited in significant ways from interdisciplinary perspectives, which draw not only on social and economic history but on institutional and cultural history as well, has been the study of foreign communities in Venice. Indeed, as several generations of economic historians in particular have taught us, Venice, perhaps more than any other city in Western Europe, was a cosmopolitan center where merchants from throughout the European and Mediterranean worlds gathered to exchange goods and to learn news of foreign markets. At the end of the fifteenth century, for example, the French diplomat Philippe de Commynes observed that in Venice "most of the people are foreigners." Not long afterwards, the Venetian patrician and banker Girolamo Priuli made a similar observation about his native city: "With the exception of the patricians and some cittadini, all the rest are foreigners and very few are Venetians.� Two generations later, in 1581, Francesco Sansovino underscored the striking presence of foreigners in the city in his compendious Venetia citta nobilissima et singolare, a kind of guidebook to the monuments and the history of the Republic. "Peoples from the most distant parts of the world gather here," he wrote, "to trade and to conduct business. And though these peoples differ among themselves in appearance, in customs, and in lan580
guages, they all agree in praising such an admirable city."62 These writers exaggerated only a litte. The commercial importance of the city, its wealth, and its reputation for cultural freedom had attracted men and women from all corners of the European and Mediterranean worlds. At various points in its history Venice hosted colonies of Greeks, Germans, and Turks. The Greeks lived in a well-defined community in Castello; the Germans, most of them merchants, resided at Rialto in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; and Turks lived in a somewhat more loosely knit community in the parish of San Giacomo dall'Orio. The Jews, themselves a multi ethnic community of German, Italian, Iberian, and Levantine origins, were confined to the Ghetto from 1516 on.63 There were other neighborhoods in which particular ethnic groups were concentrated. The Slavs and the Annenians, for example, tended to live in the sestiere (district) of Santa Croce, and the Florentines and the Lucchesi both chose to reside in the parishes nearest the Rialto.64 Venice found numerous ways to negotiate its interests with foreigners, including, as Robert Davis shows in his essay here, the freeing and ritual reintegration into society of ransomed slaves. Many wealthy merchants from other lands were granted citizenship; certain trading communities were recognized; persons passing through were accommodated; and at times guilds were open to immigrants. We might imagine Venice, therefore, as a city that not only allowed for a certain degree of social mobility up and down the status hierarchies but also was characterized by remarkable geographical mobility. Indeed, in our view, the central paradox in Venetian history lies in the sharp contrast between the tendency of Venetians both to represent and to think about themselves in terms of fixed categories and the underlying reality of economic, social, and geographic fluidity.65 The relation bet\veen the social and commercial world of Venice, which was constantly in motion, and the representation of Venice as a stable society needs further study and elaboration. Moreover, as Chojnacki's and Ambrosini's essays make clear, much more attention needs to be paid to issues of gender. In some fundamental ways the older vision of Venetian society was inextricably tied to a patriarchal order and male categories of status. When gender is figured into the equation, several questions emerge that are only beginning to be answered. First, did women and girls, both noble and non-noble, have a significantly different understanding of social structure and place than men and boys (as some of Chojnacki's research suggests), and if so, what were its effects?66' Second, can gender questions be located as central to the fluidity of Venetian society? Some of the material presented here indicates that it was persons who did not fit conventional gender and family roles - spinsters, prostitutes, bastards, bachelors - whose status was least defined and who bridged or fell between status groups.67 The role of the religious
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(both women and men, secular and regular) in reinforcing, mediating, or modifying conceptions of social rank also needs to be explored. Finally, much work remains to be done on Venetian social structure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the role nineteenth- and twentieth century historiography has played in shaping our view of Venetian society during the Republic. As Brian Pullan observed in reference to the events of the summer of 1797, within the space of a few weeks everyone became a cittadino - a citizen of a new revolutionary government.68 The long-term significance of that moment of democratization needs to be unpacked, as. does the role that scholars, several of them scions of noble families, have played in shaping our view of Venice's social past. Just as nineteenth-century political agendas shaped the writing of Venice's political history, so struggles for social position framed the vision of Venetian society.m Historians need to consider those agendas in shaping and reshaping the Venetian past. In the realm of Venetian culture no less than in those of political and social history, scholars have begun to push back boundaries and to offer a more inclusive and more dynamic history. No longer content with merely formal questions of style, influence, and composition, they have embraced a broad range of perspectives and adopted a truly interdisciplinary approach. What is more, the study of culture has expanded beyond the fine arts. Inspired in large part by work in social and cultural anthropology, many Venetianists have participated in remapping the boundaries of cultural studies in medieval and early modern Venice, reconsidering in their work topics as diverse as the occult sciences, magic, and sexuality. The result has been a profusion of new studies of Venetian art, architecture, music, and intellectual life, the best of which seek to explore the relation of ideas and art to the context(s) in which works were produced. Several of the contributions in this volume point to this trend. Elisabeth Gleason's reading of Gasparo Contarini's De magistratibus et republica Venetorum shows how the political climate in Venice in the years immediately following the Peace of Bologna in 1530 shaped Contarini's work. Peter Humfrey's study of Veronese's painting for the high altar at the parish church of San Sebastiano demonstrates the value of exploring the religious and familial contexts in which art was embedded. Moreover, in keeping with the interest of many recent studies of Renaissance art, Humfrey places particular emphasis on the dynamics of patronage and raises important questions about the role of noblewomen as patrons.70 Patricia Brown's essay on interior spaces shows how aesthetic objects were charged with social meanings. And Peter Burke's synthetic study of early modern Venice as "a center of communication and information," especially in its attention to the diverse aspects of publishing in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illuminates intellectual 582
and cultural trends over the long term. In particular, Burke underscores the polyglot and culturally varied production of books in the city and challenges overly simple notions of cultural decline as a salient characteristic of seventeenth-century Venice. One of the most important results of work like Burke's has been an uncoupling of cultural studies from narratives of rise and decline and their replacement by a vision of Venetian cultural life from the thirteenth century through the eighteenth as particularly rich and dynamic. Understanding the sources of that creativity and dynamism remains a central concern of Venetian scholars, as does the effort to identify what was essentially "Venetian" about them. Most scholars agree that .one of the primary sources of Venetian cultural dynamism was the large number and ,wide-ranging character of patrons, both institutional and individual, who commissioned works of art, employed musicians, subscribed to opera and theater seasons, and provided support for poets and other intellectuals.71 Given its vast resources and the number of magistracies and courts that it comprised, the state was almost certainly the leading patron in terms of the number of commissions it undertook and in the dominant cultural narrative it created. The everyday business of running the state, as well as extraordinary moments of celebration and crisis, provided numerous opportunities for the government - through individual doges, the procurators of San Marco, and councils and magistracies - to employ artists, architects, and musicians. What is more, the works they produced, especially the mosaics and decorations of the basilica of San Marco and the architecture and paintings of the ducal palace, became touchstones and reference points for everyone, from patricians trying to embellish their private palaces, to swole (confraternities) attempting to outdo their competitors, to heretics seeking confirmation of their prophetic visions.72 Yet what distinguished Venice from many of the smaller princely cities of Italy (and even from its republican counterparts, such as Florence and Genoa) was the vast number of alternatives to state-sponsored patronage. Thanks to the pioneering work of Brian Pullan the scuole grandi, the five largest and most prestigious confraternities in the city, are the best known of these patrons.73 These institutions were controlled in large part by cittadino administrators who not only competed with one another in the construction and decoration of magnificent meeting halls-competition that led to condemnation by men such as Alessandro Caravia in the mid-sixteenth century-but used these orga nizations and the patronage opportunities they afforded to assert their prominence alongside that of the patricians.74 As Patricia Brown has shown, the scuole especially favored narrative painting cycles that had their counterpart (and prototype) in works in the ducal palace.75 But the scuole grandi were only one of many kinds of religious institutions that served as sources of artistic patronage. In addition, the city was home to numerous 583
monasteries, convents, and hospitals, as well as approximately seventy parish churches. Furthermore, there were scores, if not hundreds, of scuole piccole, smaller confraternities that served the religious and social needs of neighborhoods., occupational groups, and ethnic minorities and were important patrons in their own right, commissioning everything from meeting halls to altarpieces and banners.76 Guilds, as Peter Humfrey and Richard Mackenney have shown, provided yet another form of corporate patronage, as did the even more modest traghetti, or unions of ferryboat operators.77 The thick web of religious, charitable, and occupational institutions that were part of the Venetian social order provided an essential foundation for the cultivation of the arts. Complicating the picture even further are the large number of wealthy families who defied the much-vaunted republican ethos of mediocritas and commissioned works of art, architecture, music, and literature to glorify them selves. Every century is filled with examples of patrons, both patrician and nonpatrician-Marino Comarini and Giovanni Dario in the fifteenth century, Zorzi Corner in the sixteenth, the Pesaro in the seventeenth, and the Labia in the eighteenth century-who used domestic architecture in particular to assert their individual and familial status. Indeed, Francis Haskell has suggested, one reason for Venice's continuing cultural dynamism was that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries families, especially newly rich families, took the lead in commissions as state patronage declined.78 If the rich variety of patrons accounts in part for the dynamism of Venetian cultural production throughout the centuries, it does not explain the particular Venetian qualities of the art and music of the Republic. Here too, older, more formal definitions of venzianita, such as Giorgio Vasari's well-worn contrast between Florentine disegno and Venetian colore, are giving way to a more complex understanding of the ideological meanings and uses of Venetian culture. No longer are the arts reduced to epiphenomena. On the contrary, the work of historians of art and music has made clear that the.arts played a constitutive role in the shaping and preservation of Venetian identity, especially its identity as a republic. As Ellen Rosand has observed, "The achievements of artists, musicians, poets, and printers not only contributed to the evolving myth of Venice, they gave it shape, made it legible.79 The visual arts and in particular the complex of buildings around piazza San Marco have long been recognized by scholars as vehicles by which the Venetian Republic authenticated its past, inculcated republican values, and created allu sions to Rome, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.80 Even Canaletto's panoramic city views, which scholars for a long time considered little more than "post card" souvenirs of the grand tour, are now understood as purveyors of the myth of Venice as the Exemplary Republic.81 But this celebration was no less apparent in music, as recent studies of madrigal, opera, and the choral groups of the ospedali grandi, whose highly-skilled female musicians 584
Rousseau greatly ad mired, have shown.82 These studies indicate a concern not only with context but also with how the myth of Venice was represented and functioned in Venetian culture. But the study of Venetian culture is no longer linked only to the study of the fine arts, nor does it take as its goal the deciphering of a single message in that culture. Many Venetianists have redrawn the boundaries of cultural studies in Venice by incorporating the insights of social and cultural anthropology. In this context, the breakthrough book was Edward Muir's Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981). In this work several long-debated issues in Venetian history, from the myth of Venice and the function of Venetian parishes to the nature of Venetian republicanism, were cast in a new light. Rather than conceiving of republicanism, for example, as exclusively a matter of either political institutions or intellectual history, Muir made a convincing case that it was necessary to explore the ways in which the Venetian government both expressed and reinforced its power through legends, ceremonies, and rituals. Moreover, in Muir's analysis neither the myth of Venice nor the legends and rituals that gave it expression were mere instrumenta regni. As Muir wrote, "The myth's function, then, if it can ever be reduced to anything so simple, is not just to reinforce status discriminations, such as keeping the lower classes in their place, nor is it just to maintain group loyalties; its function is to make a 'meta-social commentary' on the whole matter of organizing people around certain institutions."83 Muir's argument, by demonstrating that facile distinctions between myth and reality were ultimately unproductive, went a long way in recasting Venetian historiography and also opened the door for those wishing to explore alternative commentaries on the myth. These new approaches include Robert Davis's analysis of popular violence in the late Renaissance city, Guido Ruggiero's explorations of witchcraft, magic, and illicit sexuality, and Manfredo Tafiui's decoding through architectural programs of fractures within the ruling elite itself.84 The most recent development, then, here best represented by Martha Feldman's essay on opera at the time of the fall of the Republic, is that scholars can now approach symbolic and signifying systems as themselves constituent forms of social and political action. Here, opera, a genre that was perfected in Venice, becomes not only a vehicle through which Venetians imagined their society but also an instrument through which revolutionary and Jacobin Venetians attempted to reshape the Venetian imagination by redefining time and space. Thus, the dynamism of Venetian culture was the result of two interconnected phenomena: on the one hand, artists, writers, and musicians benefited from a multiplicity of patrons, both institutional and individual, who wished to memorialize and honor themselves; on the other, these artists were able to join in a common and especially rich dialogue about the significance of Venice itself. They created works of art that appro585
priated, elaborated, modified, and challenged the mythic meaning of the city. As they did in the councils of the government, so also through their art and music Venetians debated what it meant to be Venetian and to live in a republic. In spite of all this, many issues remain unexplored. Scholars have only begun to appreciate the complexities of Venetian popular culture and its relation to the culture of the elites. At times, as in many of the city's festivals and religious events, these cultural spheres appear to have overlapped and to have been mutually influential. At other times, however, fissures opened up. Issues of resistance and opposition among both patricians in council and the lower classes in the streets and workshops and peasants in the fields need further examination as well.85 Tafuri's emphasis on contestation, which he saw made manifest in differing architectural styles, needs to be taken up by scholars interested in other arts as well. Indeed, formal studies may take on new life if they are pursued along these lines. Closely related to these concerns is the issue of the reception of the messages posed by art, music, and ritual. Given the paucity of sources containing observers' reactions to works of art and other events, scholars will need to find new ways to recover how people thought about what they saw and heard. In the visual arts, for example, further investigation of the marketplace's role in the production of works of both high art and everyday objects, as well as the ways in which those objects were recycled across generations and for different uses, may reveal changes in what it meant to be Venetian.86' Music, dance, and costume, in which imitation, repetition, and borrowing can sometimes be detected, should also provide particularly rich fields for such approaches. Contemporary scholarship has largely abandoned the paradigms that for so long shaped the understanding of the Venetian past. Today Venice does not appear, as it did to the panegyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as uniformly triumphant, just, and free; nor does it appear as it did to its critics, especially those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as secretive, repressive, even ossified. As the myth and antimyth have themselves become objects of analysis, scholars in a variety of disciplines have found new ways to integrate the cultural history of the Republic-from its representations in art and in humanist literature, for example, to the rituals that shaped the lives of Venetians themselves-into the larger social and cultural history of the Serenissima. But recent work has also modified this larger history in important ways. Notions of rise and decline have yielded to a more variegated set of narratives in which scholars examine the subtle ways Venice adjusted, often quite dynamically, to the larger transformations around it. Thus, while great events-from the Serrata, to the battle of Agnadello, to the fall remain useful starting points for reflections on the history of Venice, each period is now read less as a prologue to the next and more as an integral part of the par586
ticular economic, political, and cultural contexts of the time. This scholarship, in short, has done away with a unilinear reading of Venice's past, a reading that was perhaps too uncritically linked to a traditional narrative of Western development. Thus, in this sense too we note a significant break from earlier assumptions that structured the study of Venetian history and civilization. Notes 1. Several recent surveys offer comprehensive overviews of Venetian history and culture: Cirolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, eds., Storia della cultura veneta, 6 vols. (Vicenza, 197686); the new Storia di Venezia: Daile origini a/la caduta ddla Se n:nissima,12 vols. (Rome, 199298); and the books dedicated to Venice in the Storia d'Italia series under the general direction of Giuseppe Galasso and published by UTET: Giorgio Cracco, Un "altro mondo": Venezia nel medioevo dal secolo XI al secolo XIV (Turin, 1986); Gaetano Cozzi and Michael Knapton, La Repubblica di Venezia nell'eta moderna: Dalla guerra di Chioggia al 1517 (Turin, 1986); Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello, La Rupubblica di Venezia nell'eta modenur: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica (Turin, 1992). For a recent guide to Venetian historiography, see Giorgio Zordan, Repertorio di storiografid 11eneziana: Testi e studi Padua, 1998). 2. The literature on the myth of Venice is extensive;James S. Grubb, "When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography," Journal of Modern History 58 ( 1986): 43-94, remains the best introduction, though for an important perspective that stresses the intrinsic and dynamic role of the myth in the making of Venetian history and politics, see Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venise triomphante: us horizons d'un mythe (Paris, 1999). 3. Nicolai Rubinstein, "Italian Reactions to Terraferma Expansion in the Fifteenth Century;' in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London, 1973), 197-217. 4. Machiavelli, Legazioni e commissarie, ed. Sergio Bertelli, 3 vols. (Milan, 1964), 2:676. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London, 1968), 167, 170; idem, The Confessions, trans.]. M. Cohen (London, 1953), 294-95, 377 (quotation). 6. On the representation ofV enice in early nineteenth-century literature, see John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford, 1995), 88-92. 7. Claudio Povolo, n romanziere e l'archivista: Da IHI processo Veneziano del '600 all'anonimo manoscritto dei Promessi Sposi (Venice, 1993). 8. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (London, 1851-53). 9. Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, 10 vols. (Venice, 1853-61). 10. Ranke's three essays are Uber die Verschwonmggegen Venedig im Jahre 1618 (Berlin, 1831); ''Die Venezianer in Morea: 1685-1715," Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift 2 (1835): 405-502; and "Venedig im sechzehnten Jahrhundert und im Anfang des siebzehnten," in Ranke, Zur venezianischen Geschichte:, vol. 42 of Summtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1878), 1133. On Ranke's contribution to Venetian historiography, see Ranke, Venezia net Cinqiwcento con un saggio introduttivo di Ugo Tucci, trans. Ingeborg Zapperi Walter (Rome, 1974), 1-69; Edward Muir, ed., The Leopold von Ranke Manuscript Collection of Syracuse University: The Complete Catalogue (Syracuse, 1983); and Gino Benzoni, "Ranke's Favorite Source: The Venetian Relazioni: Impressions with Allusions to Later Historiography," in Leopold tion Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, 1990), 45-57. 11. See Gino Benzoni, “La storiografia” in Arnaldi and Stocchi, Storia della cultura Veneta, 6:597-623, esp. 6o5-9.
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12. See, e.g., Giuseppe Maranini's La costituzione di Venezia, 2 vols. (Venice, 192731); and Enrico Besta, Il senato veneziano (origine, costituzione, attribuzioni e riti), in Miscellanea di storia veneta, 2dser., 5 (1899): I-29o. 13. At the same time, a major effort was made to publish the capitularies and earliest deliberations of government bodies. See, e.g., Roberto Cessi, ed., Deliberazioni del Maggior Consiglio di Venezia, 3 vols. (Bologna, 931-5o). 14. Gaetano Cozzi, Il doge Niccolò Contarini: Ricerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice, 1958), now reprinted in Cozzi, Venezia barroca: Conflitti di uomini e idee nella crisi del Seicento veneziano (Venice, 1995), 1-246. 15. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Huhtanish and Republican Lilberty in can Age of Classicisti and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955); idem, Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento: Studies in Criticisin and Chronology (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 16. Frederic C. Lane, "At the Roots of Republicanism," Allierican Historical Review 7 (1966): 403-30, quotations on 404 and 409. 17. William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Rgformation (Berkeley, 1968). (Bouwsma served as president of the American Historical Association in 1978.) See also Giovanni Silvano, La “Republica de' Viniziani”: Ricerche sul repubblicanesimo veneziano in età moderna (Florèncê, I993). 18, Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1972-73); originally published as La Méditcrranée et le monde 1ucditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, 2ded. (Paris, 1966). 19. Georges Georgelin, Venise au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1978); Franco Venturi, Venezia nel secondo Settecento (Turin, 1980); and Piero Del Negro, ed., Giannaria Ortes: Un filosofo' veneziano del Settecento (Florence, 1993). 20. Marino Berengo, La società veneta alla fine del Settecento: Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1956); Angelo Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del '4oa e 5oo, 2d ed. (Milan, 1993). 21. Grubb, "When Myths Lose Power, 86, 60. 22. Ibid., 60. For an excellent overview of the shifting perspectives on Venetian history, see Nicholas S. Davidson, “In Dialogue with the Past": Venetian Research from the 1960s to the 1990s," Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies Is (1997): 13-24. 23. Davidson, "In Dialogue with the Past," 22. 24. Claudio Povolo, L'intrigo dell'onore; Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica di Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona, 1997), For a survey ofother recent studies ofthe relationship of Venice and the terraferma, see Michael Knapton, “Nobiltà e popolo' e un trentennio di storiografia veneta' Nuova Rivista Storica 82 (1998): I67-92. 25. See Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980); and John Martin, Venice's Hidden Enemies; Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley, 1993). 26. Several examples of these works are given in inn. 54 and 55 below. For Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion, see esp. his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on interpretation, trans. Denise Savage (New Haven, 1970), 32-36. 27. Gina Fasoli, “Nascità di un mito,” in Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe, 2. vols. (Florence, 1958), 1:445-79; Franco Gaeta, “Alcune considerazioni sul mito di Venezia,” Bibliothèque d’Hiinanise et Renaissance 23 (1961): 58-73; Staale SindingLarsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography of the Venetian Republic, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia, 5 (Rome, 1974); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981).
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28. William Bouwsma, “Venice and the Political Education of Europe,” in Hale, Renaissance Venice, 445-66. See also Felix Gilbert, "The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought," in History: Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 179-214; Eco O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen, The Netherlands, 198o); James Harrington, The Cahillionwealth of Oceana and a Systein of Politics (1656), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992); Piero Del Negro, Il tito americano nelli Venezia del '700 (Padua, 1986); and, for a fascinating effort at a grand narrative of republican theory from the Renaissance through the French and American Revolutions, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tiadition (Princeton, 1975). 29. See Ellen Rosand, “Music and the Myth of Venice." Renaissance Quarterly 3o (1977): 51137; and David Rosand, “Venetia Figurata: The Iconography of a Myth," in Interpretazioni veneziane: Suidi di storia dell'arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand (Venice, 1984), 177-96. 30. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, 1961); idem, The Discourses, ed. and trans. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth, 1970). On the relation between these two works, along with an important critique of the Crick edition of The Discourses, see Gilbert, History, 91176, 31. Francesco Ercole, “Comuni e signori nel Veneto (Scaligeri, Caminesi, Carraresi)” Nuovo Archivio Veneto 9 (19Io): 255-337, reprinted in idem, Dal comune al principato: Saggi sulla storia del diritto pubblico del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1929). 32. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, "Sopra le dcque salse": Espaces, pouvoir, et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols. (Rome, 1992). 33. See Felix Gilbert, "Venice in the Crisis of the League of Cambrai, in Hale, Renaissance Venice, 274-92; and Gaetano Cozzi, "Authority and the Law in Renaissance Venice," ibid., 293-345. 34. Volker Hunecke, Der venezianische Adel an Ende der Republik, 1646–1797: Deinographie, Familie, Haushalt (Tübingen, 1995); Oliver Thomas Domzalski, Politische Karrieren und Machtverteilung im venezianischen Adel, 1646–1797 (Sigmaringen, 1996); Piero Del Negro, “La distribuzione del potere all'interno del patriziato veneziano del Settecento, in I ceti dirigenti in Italia in ctà moderna e conteporanea, ed. Amelio Tagliaferri (Udine, 1984); Giovanni Scarabello, “Una casata di governanti del '7oo riformatore veneziano” in I Querini Stampalia, ed. Giorgio Busatto and Madile Gambino (Venice, 1987). 35. Joanne M. Ferraro, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (Cambridge, 1993); James S. Grubb, Firstborn of Venice: Vicenza in the Early Renaissance State (Baltimore, 1988); Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Fictions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1993); Giorgio Cracco and Michael Knapton, eds., Dentro lo “Stado italiano”: Venezia e la terriferina fia Quattro e Seicento (Trent, 1984); Giuseppe del Torre, Venezia e la terriferina dopo la guerra di Canbrai; Fiscalità e anninistrazione (1515-153o) (Milan, 1986). 36. On ecclesiastical institutions and the Venetian terraferma, see Giuseppe Trebbi, Francesco Barbaro; Patrizio veneto e Patriarca d'Aquileia (Udine, 1984); and Giorgio Chittolini, “Stati regionali e istituzioni ecclesiastiche nell'Italia centrosettentrionale del Quattrocento” in the Einaudi, Storia d'Italia: Annali, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, vol. 9, ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (Turin, 1986), 14793. 37. See, e.g, the studies by Salvatore Ciriacomo, including “Venise et ses villes: Structuration et déstructuration d'un marché régional XVIe-XVIIIe siècle," Revue Historique 276 (1986): 287307, and “Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods: The De-Industrialization of the Republic of Venice from the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century” in The Rise and Decline of Urban 589
Industries in Italy and the Lott Countries (Late Middle Ages-Early Modern Times), ed. Herman Van der Wee (Leuven, 1988). For images of peasants in literature, see Giorgio Padoan, "Angelo Beolco, detto il Ruzante," in Arnaldi and Stocchi, Storia della cultura veneta, 3, pt. 3: 343-75. See also James S. Ackerman, “The Geopolitics of Venetan Architecture in the Time of Titian," in Titian; His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), 41-71, in which Ackerman uses the term Venetan to mean "of Veneto' (including Venice)" (41). 38. Giorgio Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado; Secoli XIV e XV (Turin, 1979); idem, Città, comunità e feudi negli stati dell'Italia centrosettentrionale: Secoli XIV-XVI (Milan, 1996). For a useful introduction to the recent scholarship on the State in late medieval and early modern Italy, see Julius Kirshner, ed., The Origins of the State in Italy (Chicago, I995). 39. See Gaetano Cozzi, ed., Stato, società e giustizia nella Repubblica veneta (sec. XVXVIII, vol. 1 (Rome, 198o); idem, Repubblica di Venezia e stati italiani: Politica e giustizia del secolo XVI al secolo XVIII (Turin, 1982); and Povolo, L'intrigo dell'onore. 4o. Pompeo Molmenti, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata: Dalle origini alla caduta della Repubblica, 3 vols., 7th ed. (1927-29: reprint, Trieste, 1973). On the continuing influence of the organic model, see, e.g., James C. Davis, The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class (Baltimore, 1962); Richard Tilden Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580-1618 (Berkeley, 1967), originally published as Venezia ci corsari, 1580-1615 (Bari, 1961); and Terisio Pignatti, The Golden Age of Venetian Painting (Los Angeles, 1979). 41. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven, 1996). 42. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), 1:82. 43. Elizabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Confarini: Venice, Rolle, and ReforIII (Berkeley, 1993); Silvano, La “Republica de' Viniziani,” 117. 44. For the population figures, see Daniele Beltrami, Storia della popolazione di Venezia dalla fine del secolo XVI alla caduta della Repubblica (Padua, 1954), 72. 45. Ibid. 46. In addition to Gleason's Gasparo Contarini, see her "Reading between the Lines of Gasparo Contarini's Treatise on the Venetian State." Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 15 (1988): 3-25; see also Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanisim in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986). 47. Stanley Chojnacki, "In Search of the Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century," in Hale, Renaissance Venice, 47-90. 48. Hunecke, Der venezianische Adel aul Ende der Republik, Alexander Francis Cowan, The Urban Patriciate; Libeck and Venice, 1580-17aa (Cologne, 1986). 49. See, e.g., Chojnacki's study of registration for the Balla d'Oro, a male patrician rite of adulthood, “Political Adulthood in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 791-810. See also Victor Crescenzi, “Esse de maiori consilio”: Legittiimità civile elegittinazione politica nella Repubblica di Venezia (secc. XIII-XVII) (Rome, 1996). 50. Stanley Chojnacki, “Social Identity in Renaissance Venice: The Second Serrata.” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 34E-58, as well as his contribution to this volume: “Identity and Ideology in Renaissance Venice: The Third Serrati.” 51. For the sale of titles of nobility, see Davis, Decline of the Venetian Nobility; for the Habsburg period, Paul Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-49 (Cambridge, 1979), I8-19, 32-33, 45.
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52. For the popolo, see Ugo Tucci, “Carriere popolane e dinastie di mestiere a Venezia” in Gerarchie economiche e gerarchie sociali: Secoli XII-XVIII (Florence, 199o), 817-51. 53. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritinie Republic (Baltimore, 1973). 54. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Woritis: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). For workers in the Arsenal, see Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers arid Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore, 1991); for fishermen, Roberto Zago, I Nicosotti: Storia di una comunità di pescatori a Venezia nell'età moderna (Padua, 1982); for servants, Dennis Romano, Housecrafi and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-16ao (Baltimore, 1996); for witches, Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650 (Oxford, 1989); and for vagabonds, Francesca Meneghetti Casarin, I vagabondi, la società e lo stato nella Repubblica veneta alla fine del '700 (Rome, 1984). 55. For studies on women, see Federica Ambrosini, “Da mia manu propria': Donna, scrittura è prassi testamentaria nella Venezia del Cinquecento” in Non uno itinere: Studi storici offerti dagli allievi a Federico Seteca (Venice, 1993), 33-54; Monica Chojnacka, “Women, Charity, and Community in Early Modern Venice: The Casa delle Zitelle” Renaissance Quarterly 5 (1998): 68-9 I; Stanley Chojnacki, “Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (I975): 571ópo; idem, “Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice.” Studiers in the Renaissance 2 I (1974): 176-203; Joanne Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 492-512; Linda Guzzetti, “Separations and Separated Couples in Fourteenth-Century Venice," in Maitiage in Italy, 1300-1650, ed. Trevor Dean and K.J. P. Lowe (Cambridge, 1998), 249-74; and idem, “Le donne a Venezia nel XIV secolo: Uno studio sulla loro presenza nella società e nella famiglia” Studi Veneziani, n.s., 35 (1998): 15-88. 56. For another recent collection of essays that point in these new directions, see Ellen F. Kittell and Thomas Madden, eds., Medieval and Renaissance Venice (Urbana, 1999). 57. See the following works by Lane: Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1936); Andrea Barbarigo: Merchant of Venice (Baltimore, 1944); Venice and History: The Collected Papers of Frederic C. Line (Baltimore, 1966); Studies in Venetian Social and Economic History (London, 1987); and, with Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medietal and Renaissance Venice, vol. I, Coins and Moneys of Account (Baltimore, 1985) (see also vol. 2, The Venetian Money Market; Banks, Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200-15oo Baltimore, 1997), by Reinhold C. Mueller). For an overview of Lane's contributions, see Hermann Kellenbenz, "Frederic C. Lane," journal of European Ecotionic History 17 (1988): 59-84. 58. See Brian Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1968); Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline; and James C. Davis, A Venetian Family and Its Fortune, 1500-19ao: The Doni and the Conservation of Their Wealth (Philadelphia, 1975). 59. Còn Venetian trading communities abroad, see esp. Benjamin Arbei, Tỉading Nations: Jerus and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (New York, 1995), as well as David Jacoby's important articles, many of which appear in his Recherches stir la Mediterranée orientale du XIIe au XVIe siècle. Peuples, sociétés, économics (London, 1979). On problems of industry the literature is enormous, but see esp. Salvatore Ciriacono, “Venise et la Vénétie dans la transition vers l'industrialisation: A propos des théories de Franklin Mendels” in Etudes en neinoire de Franklin Mendels, ed. René Leboutte (Geneva, I99ó), 291-318. 60. On agriculture and land management, see Gigi Corazzol, Fitti e livelli agrano: Un aspetto del credito rurale nel Veneto del '5oo (Milan, 1979); Salvatore Ciriacono, Acque e agricoltura, Venezia, l'Olanda e la bonifica europea in età moderna (Milan, 1994); and, more generally, Giuseppe Gullino, “Venezia e le campagne” in Storia di Venezia, 8:651-7o2. On the relation of the 591
Venetian economy to the development of the state, see the discussion of war and finance by Michael Knapton in Cozzi and Knapton, La Repubblica di Venezia nell'età moderna; Dalla guerra de Chioggia al 1517, 275-345; and Jean Claude Hocquet, “The Middle Ages, Developments and Continuities: City State and Market Economy," in The Origins of the Modern State in Europe; Economic Systems and State Finance, ed. Richard Bonney (Oxford, 1995), 81-1oo. 61. Luca Molà, La comunità dei Licchesi a Venezia: Immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo inedioevo (Venice, 1994); Richard Mackenney, Tradesien and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c. 1650 (Totowa, N.J., 1987); Francesca Trivellato,*Salaires et justice dans les corporations vénitiennes au 17e siècle: Le cas des manufactures de verre."Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 54 (1999): 245–73. 62. Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Joseph Calmette, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965– 81), 3:1 14; Girolamo Priuli, I diari di Girolano Priuli AA. 1499-152, ed. Roberto Cessi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 24, pt. 3, tome 4 (Bologna, 1938), I o I; Francesco Sansovino, Venefia città nobilissima et singolare, con aggiunta da Giustiniano Martinioni, 2 vols. (1663; reprint, Venice, 1968), 1:4. 63. The literature on the Jews in Venice is immense. For an orientation, see Cecil Roth, The History of the Jett's in Venice (Philadelphia, 1930); and David Malkiel, A Separate Republic: The Mechanics and Dynamics of Jewish Self-Government (Jerusalem, 1991). On the Turks, see Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Tirchi (Venice, 1975); on the Germans, Henry Simonsfeld, Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venedig und die deutsch-venetianischen Handelsbezichungen, 2 vols. (1887; reprint, Stuttgart, 1987). 64. Two recent works on immigrants are Molà, La comunità dei Lucchesi a Venezia, and Brunehilde Imhaus, Le minoranze orientalia Venezia, 1300-1500 (Rome, 1997). 65. In an interesting parallel, Angelo Ventura has noted a tendency of the Venetian government to mask innovation in the guise of tradition (see "Scrittori politici e scritture di governo” in Arnaldi and Stocchi, Storia della cultura veneta, 3, pt. 3: 546-48). 66. Stanley Chojnacki, "The Power of Love: Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice, in Women and Potter in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, Ga., 1988), 126-48; idem, “The Most Serious Duty: Motherhood, Gender, and Patrician Culture in Renaissance Venice," in Refiguring Wohen: Perspectives on Cender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, 1991), 133-54. 67. Stanley Chojnacki, "Subaltern Patriarchs: Patrician Bachelors in Renaissance Venice” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 73-90. 68. Brian Pullan, comment on session "Society: Inclusions and Exclusions' at the conference “Venice Reconsidered" Syracuse, N.Y., 20 September 1997, 69. Fora general introduction, see Benzoni, “La storiografia” esp. 597-612. 70. Among the studies dealing with female patronage, see Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice; Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans (New Haven, 1986), esp. ch. 2; and Douglas Lewis, “Patterns of Preference: Patronage of Sixteenth-Century Architects by the Venetian Patriciate," in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, 198I), 354-80. 71. See esp. H. G. Koenigsberger, "Republics and Courts in Italian and European Culture." Past and Present, no. 83 (1979): 32-56. See also Michel Hochmann, Peintres et cornhanditaires à Venise (1540-1628) (Rome, 1992). 72. For references to the ducal palace in domestic architecture, see Richard J. Goy, The House of Gold: Building a Palace in Medieval Venice (Cambridge, 1992), 164-67; to San Marco in the scuole, Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters, The Art of Renaissance Venice; Architecture, Sculpfire,
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and Painting, 1460-590, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1990), 106-8; and to heretics and the mosaics of San Marco, Martin, Venice's Hidden Enemies, I98-20I. 73. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of it Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). In 1552 the number of scuole grandi grew to six when the confraternity of San Teodoro was raised to that dignity. 74. Patricia Fortini Brown, "Honor and Necessity: The Dynamics of Patronage in the Confraternities of Renaissance Venice” Studi Veneziani, n.s., 14 (1987): 179-212. 75. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, 1988). 76. Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1993), 110-21. 77. Peter Humfrey and Richard Mackenney, “The Venetian Trade Guilds as Patrons of Art in the Renaissance,” Burlington Magazine 128 (1986): 317-30; for fraghetti, see Romano, Housecraft and Statecrifi, 169. 78. Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New York, 1963), 247–67. 79, Ellen Rosand, comment on session “Politics and Culture in the Late Republic' at the conference “Venice Reconsidered, Syracuse, N.Y., 21 September 1997. 80. For the use of paintings to authenticate the past, see Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 7986; for the employment of sculpture to inculcate republicati values, see Edward Muir, "Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice," Aimerican Historical Revier84 (1979), esp. 34-35; for architectural allusions to Rome, Constantinople, and Jerusalem in piazza San Marco, see Juergen Schulz, “La piazza medievale di San Marco” Annali di Architettura 4-5 (1992-93): 134-56; Debra Pincus, “Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as a Double Heritage in Venetian Cultural Politics,” Artibus et Historiae 26 (1992): 1 o 1-14; and Lionello Puppi, “Venezia come Gerusalemme nella cultura figurativa del Rinascimento,” in La città italiana del Rinascimentofia utopia e realtà, ed. August Buck and Bodo Guthmiller (Venice, 1984), 117-36. 81. Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 1996), ch. 3, esp. 76-8o. 82, Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, 1995); Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice; The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991); Jane L. Baldauf Berdes, Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855 (Oxford, I993). 83. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, quotation on 56. 84. Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Popular Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York, 1994); Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993); Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (Turin, 1985). 85. See Linda L. Carroll, “Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice." Sixteenth Century journal 16 (1985): 487-so2. 86. Two studies that suggest these possibilities are Patricia Allerston, “Wedding Finery in Sixteenth-Century Venice, in Dean and Lowe, Marriage in Italy, 25-40; and Dennis Romano, “Aspects of Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 712-33.
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SECTION 7
Lane, The Corruption and Perfection of the Constitution During the centuries in which the Venetians had imposed restrictions on their doge so as to make him merely a magistrate of the Commune, they had given concrete form to an ideal of political liberty. That ideal had blossomed during the Later Middle Ages in other Italian city-states also. Distrust of personal power was institutionalized by short terms of office, by limitations on reelection, and by delegating powers and responsibilities not to individuals but to committees. In the sixteenth century the conflicts with powerful monarchies called for an efficiency in armament, diplomacy, and finance which was difficult to reconcile with these institutions and the ideal they embodied. Nearly everywhere the republican principles, derived from the communes and extolled by civic humanists, were abandoned, if not completely in theory, at least in practice. Venice alone survived with independence while perpetuating republican institutions. No sixteenth-century government was efficient by standards applied to modern states, nor did it possess comparable powers to collect taxes and enforce regulations, but those most nearly successful were, except for Venice, monarchies. Observers of that century found it amazing that Venice could hold up its¡ head among the great powers while still a republic. Thanks to her navy and diplomatic juggling, she even preserved much of her empire. Venice aroused admiration then as now for many political and administrative achievements. Her populace was relatively well-fed and creative. It enjoyed domestic peace, many municipal services (such as the ministrations of a Board of Health), and a system of justice which had a high reputation of impartiality to all classes. Venice was renowned also for skillful diplomacy and a navy which, though no longer supreme, was at least still a force to be reckoned with, backed by an Arsenal which was the largest industrial establishment of the age. In the eyes of many Venetian nobles, however, none of these was Venice's finest achievement. The most precious was the vitality of their republican constitution. Not being written out in any one document, the constitution consisted of a style and tradition of political behavior based on custom as much as on particular laws. It included the checks on irresponsible personal power, developed in the age of the Communes, and also the aristocratic principle that power belonged by right to the well-born. Top leadership depended on the admiration and confidence of others in the governing group, not on catering to the greed or ambitions of those below. Considered subversive 594
was any seeking of power either through popularity among the non-noble populace or by serving the selfish interests of the more needy, least educated, and least wellinformed members of the nobility. Republicanism required virtue, as Montesquieu said later when summarizing in a word the needed spirit; in the sixteenth century, some observers explained Venice's success by praising the Venetian nobles' devotion to duty and to public welfare. Like the modern democratic ideal, the Venetian republican ideal called for more virtue than is to be found in examining the realities of practical politics, that is, day-byday pursuit and use of public office. At the very time that Venice's political system was being idealized, it also seemed to many Venetian nobles to be showing disquieting signs of corruption. Many distinctive Venetian practices, such as the secrecy of the ballot, for which Venice was in that age distinctive, were perfected as measures against corruption. The contrasts between unrealized but not abandoned ideals on the one hand and attention to personal and group interests on the other hand made Venetian politics quite modern in spirit although quaint in details. GALLERY 7.1
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Noble Gentlemen, Sovereign and Equal All the changes, whether for efficiency or for combating corruption, were within the aristocratic framework established early in the fourteenth century and reaffirmed after the crisis in the War of Choggia. The doge was called “The Prince� (Il Principe), but he could do nothing without one of his councils. The nobles eligible to these councils came from families which formed six to seven percent of the city's population. Their sovereign power, long established in fact, received full symbolic expression when the General Assembly was abolished and, in 1423, the Great Council declared that its own decrees, even if they changed the basic law, were valid without the ceremonial of popular approval. The words "and it please you" were omitted from the presentation before the people of each new doge chosen by the committee of forty-one nobles. The changing spirit of the republic was reflected in its name. In 1462, the doge's oath was altered to remove all references to a "Commune of the Venetians." The government was commonly referred to by the adjective proudly associated with it, La Serenissima. While parading their sovereignty more confidently, the nobility became more exclusive. There were no new admissions like those of 1381. A proposal made in 1403 to admit to the Great Council a new family of native-born, middleclass Venetians whenever one of the old families died out, was killed by the Ducal Council. Nobles of the cities which became subject to Venice, such as Verona, were not given any part in the Venetian government; they were restricted to subordinate roles in their own cities. Very rarely, by a special personal privilege, one of them was made a member of the Great Council of Venice, but he was not accepted by the Venetians as one of themselves to be trusted with high office. Although nobility itself was hereditary, there were no hereditary differences in rank within the Venetian nobility. Real differences in wealth were of course both obvious and painful. They were paraded in the jewels and luxurious costumes of the women and of young men who organized social clubs called compagnie delle calze because each distinguished itself by the fancy many-colored hose and tights which the young men wore. Extravagant displays of wealth increased in spite of being forbidden by sumptuary legislation. At home, both men and women wore highly varied costumes, and the women added to their finery when they went out. But mature nobles went about in plain black robes or togas, except that magistrates were required to wear the red, purple, or violet robes of their office. Thus their clothes symbolized the fact that all nobles had equal rights except when raised up temporarily by the offices they held. Legally all nobles were eligible for all offices unless disqualified by an office they were already holding, by a crime, or by failure to pay taxes or other debts to the government.
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Marriage of nobles with commoners both women and men was not uncommon, and nobility depended on one's father, not one's mother. If the mother was a menial or a prostitute, the child could not be registered in the Book of Gold in which noble parents registered their sons at birth to assure their admission to the Great Council. But there was no difficulty with such registry if the mother was the legitimate daughter of a rich merchant, a master glass blower, or one of the class called "citizens by birth" (cittadini originari). Two of the richest doges, Antonio Grimani and Giovanni Bembo, had mothers who were commoners. It is notable also that the sumptuary legislation made no distinctions between commoners and nobles. Extravagant displays were equally forbidden to both and, in practice, upper-class commoners went about in the same plain black togas worn by ordinary nobles. Thus both dress and marriages softened the line between the nobles and upper-class commoners. The Organs of Government and the Ideal The success of this government by the several thousand nobles, all of equal rights, was attributed partly to Venice's system of interlocking councils. The distribution of power among them entirely ignored the separation to which we are accustomed of legislative, judicial, and executive functions. All three were given in some measure to most every layer of the pyramid of councils depicted in Chapter 8. The Great Council, for example, not only voted on basic changes in the laws, it voted also on the guilt of some accused officials, and conferred offices and granted pardons under stipulated procedures. If any principle other than tradition governed the distribution of power among councils, it was that of mixing appropriately efficiency, deliberation, and broad participation. All nobles except clerics were members of the Great Council by age twenty-five and many became members before twenty-five, so that this body was almost the size that we associate with political conventions. The number of nobles was about 2,500 in 1500. Frequently, over a thousand men attended the Great Council (see Figure 22). Its regular functions were to elect officials and approve the acts of smaller councils (see Figure 40). Since the Great Council was too large for thorough discussion and wise decision about war and peace, armaments and negotiations, laws, loans, and taxes, the deliberative function passed to the Senate. Originally sixty men, nominated and elected by the Great Council, the Senate was enlarged by inclusion in it of the Council of Forty (Quarantia Criminale), which also functioned independently as a court of appeals in criminal cases, and by the addition of sixty more Senators called the zonta. These sixty were nominated by the Senators whose terms were expiring. Practically all important officials were ex-officio members of the Senate during or after their terms of office. Ambassadors and high naval commanders were admitted to the Senate from the time 597
of their election to the end of the year after their return from their assignment. In short, everybody who was anybody politically had a place in the Senate. The number with the right to attend rose to about 300 men, of whom about 230 had a right to vote. They had so many other duties that only 70 were required for a quorum, and the usual number recorded as voting was about 180. Although a Senator's term of office was only one year, many of the same men were elected again and again in a way that fostered continuity and assured that Senatorial decisions were made by well-informed men of long experience. Freedom of debate in the Senate stimulated eloquence. In men raised in awe of Cicero's orations to the Roman Senate, the Venetian Senate aroused admiration both as an example of republicanism and as a guarantee that important questions would be well considered. Every Senator had unlimited right to speak so long as he did not introduce irrelevant matters. Even if he did, it was up to the doge to call him to order, and the doge could not do that effectively unless backed up by his Councillors and the State Attorneys or the Chiefs of the Ten. But there were no filibustering speeches to empty benches, for once a session had begun, only the Senators over seventy could leave without formal permission from the chair. Conversations on the floor were forbidden, but long harangues produced much shufflings and clearing of throats. Sessions frequently went on late as the darkening hall was lighted by candelabras, and were ended only by a motion "to delay," i.e., to continue consideration another day. Although sometimes lengthy, the debates in the Senate were made to focus on welldefined practical issues by rules of procedure and the preparations of steering committees. At first the doge and the six Ducal Councillors acted as the Senate's steering committee. Forming with the three Heads of the Council of Forty the body called the Signoria, they acted as a bench of officers which presided over the Senate, the Great Council, and indeed the whole government. The Signoria had so many functions, however, administrative, judicial, and ceremonial, that about 1400 the Senate created six Savii del Consiglio to prepare its agenda, frame resolutions, defend them, and supervise their execution. They were also called Savii Grandi, which might be translated as "Chief Ministers." For the conduct of the Italian wars, the Savii Grandi were supplemented about 1430 by five Ministers for War and the Mainland (Savii di Terra Ferma). To them were attached an older special committee of five Ministers of the Marine (Savii ai Ordini) concerned with commerce, navy, and overseas colonies. (The "ordini" referred to were the maritime regulations.) These three groups of Savii formed, together with the Signoria, a sort of council of ministers. Meeting all together, they were called the Full College (Pieno Collegio). Frequently present also at this joint meeting of steering committees was one of the three State Attorneys, who had a right to attend any meeting of any council, for an important function of these Attorneys, in theory, 598
was to prevent a council from exceeding its authority. In some cases, they forced the Collegio or Signoria to refer an issue to the Great Council instead of the Senate. An ordinary day's business started with a morning meeting of the Full College, with the doge presiding and the Savii Grandi directing the agenda. This included reading dispatches received, giving audience to foreign envoys and to delegations from subject cities, receiving reports of officials, and deciding what should be placed before an afternoon meeting of the Senate, if a meeting seemed in order. Once the main steps to be taken were clear, the Signoria withdrew, leaving the Savii to work out details of motions, and perhaps counter-motions, to be submitted to the Senate. No proposals which had not been presented first to the Collegio could come before the Senate. Many exofficio members of the Senate, even some without the right to vote, could make motions regarding matters pertaining to their offices, and an individual Senator could initiate a measure, but only after giving the Collegio a chance to accept or revise. In handling crucial issues of foreign policy and of finance, the Signoria could bypass the Senate by taking proposals to the Council of Ten. It did so increasingly in the sixteenth century, when the whirls in the balance of power made speed and secrecy more important, especially at the time of the League of Cambrai. Having proved its efficacy as a special court for the discovery and trial of traitors, as illustrated by the cases of Marino Falier and Carmagnola, the Ten asserted more and more widely its authority to handle emergencies and to defend the constitution. The Ten became the defender of aristocratic or even oligarchic practices against what it considered demagogic subversion. In such matters, the three Chiefs of the Ten took the lead, and their own secretaries kept the records and made up the agenda. The Ten intervened also in a wide variety of municipal problems, even bank failures, in order to maintain law and order. More in dispute was the extent of its authority in finances and in negotiations with foreign powers. At a later date, the Ten came to be thought of as the stronghold of a small oligarchy within the aristocracy, in conflict with the more broadly representative Senate. Conflicts between the Ten and the Senate were rare, however, because both were generally managed by the same men and almost the same steering committee. As already explained, the Ten never acted entirely alone. Regularly it had seventeen voting members, including the doge and his Councillors. It met with one of the State's Attorneys present, who, if he thought the Council was exceeding its authority or disobeying its statutes, could appeal the case to the Great Council. For important decisions an addition (zonta) of fifteen to twenty Senators was called in. When foreign affairs were considered, the Savii Grandi were required to be present. As a result, decisions in the Ten and in the Senate were initiated by the same leadership; there was no conflict between them in that sense. But measures could be taken through the Council of Ten with the 599
kind of speed and secrecy required for changing alliances in the middle of a war. Leaders who felt responsible for acting on issues as they arose could do what they thought necessary, provided they obtained approval in the Ten, even if that required an action generally so unpopular that its approval by the Senate would have been doubtful. For example, in order to make peace with the Turks in 1540, the Ten authorized negotiation of terms which the Senate would not have approved in advance but felt forced to accept. These leaders, who constituted the effective government of the Serenissima Repubblica, consisted at any given moment of the sixteen men holding the positions of doge, Ducal Councillors, Savii Grandi, and Chiefs of the Ten. This was the inner circle. The rest of the Ten, the Savii di Terra Ferma, the three Heads of the Forty, and the three State Attorneys were on the outer edge of the inner circle. Altogether it numbered about forty counting ambassadors and commanders out of the city on important missions. Its members could not be reelected immediately to the same office. Each Ducal Councillor, Savio Grande, or Chief of the Ten was required when his term expired to take a "vacation," usually of a year or two, before again holding that particular office. But the man who had been Ducal Councillor one year could be and often was Savio Grande before the end of the next year and then a member of the Ten, perhaps one of its Chiefs. Their terms were all short, none longer than eighteen months, and were so staggered that some member of the inner circle left it each month only to reenter it immediately a few months later in some other similarly important post. When such moving around occurs in modern Italy's equally frequent changes of cabinet, it is scornfully referred to as "musical chairs." In the Venetian Republic it occasioned no "cabinet crises"; it was planned that way, so as to avoid concentrations of power in single individuals and yet to keep the government in experienced hands. The way the Venetians liked to think their government worked was described about 1520 by Gasparo Contarini, himself an attractive illustration of the kind of careers it fostered. Gasparo was a descendent of the doge who had presided over the victory in the War of Chioggia. This family background and the talents which made him a tactful and eloquent ambassador enabled him to advance rapidly up the Venetian cursus honorum once he was launched on a political career. But he started relatively late. Through his twenties, he devoted himself to a combination of literary and theological studies. He was one of a group of deeply religious nobles uprooted from their studious life at Padua by the defeat of 1509. Like many men of his and Luther's generation, Gasparo questioned how he should live in order to enjoy the blessing of eternal salvation. Two of his closest friends resolved the issue by becoming monks and urged him to do the same. Deciding that salvation depended on God's grace and did not require such a withdrawal from the world, Gasparo turned to an active life in service of his 600
family and his commonwealth. After service, at thirty-six, in a magistracy concerned with surveying and draining some lands reclaimed from the Po, in which he himself made a big investment, he went as envoy to young Emperor Charles V at Worms in 1520 and won the emperor's esteem. On his return, he was taken into the edge of the inner circle of Venice's rulers as a Savio di Terra Ferma. Another embassy being brilliantly successful, to Rome this time, he entered the center of the inner circle and began rotating through the key positions: Savio Grande, Chief of the Ten, and Ducal Councillor. Then the pope stole him, as one old Senator growled disgustedly, depriving Venice of its finest gentleman by making him a cardinal. As a cleric, he was debarred thereafter from ever again holding any office in the Venetian Republic. The pope kept him busy in negotiations which came nearer than any others to giving a peaceful turn to the Reformation. His international reputation as a statesman and churchman won for his view of Venetian government wide acceptance by succeeding generations. Gasparo Contarini's treatise began by considering what form of government was ideal. He had learned from Aristotle and other ancient writers the advantages of a mixed form containing some elements of monarchy, some of government by "the Few," and some of government by "the Many." Believing the Venetian Republic close to perfection, since it had already preserved its freedom longer than any ancient city, even Rome, he described Venice's system of interlocking councils as a harmonious combination of the three forms. For that purpose, the Great Council represented the Many, which he also called the popular element, or the whole body of citizens. He considered citizens only those we call nobles. He felt the need of only a few words to justify the exclusion of the working masses from citizenship, that is, from any share in supreme power, since that was then a universal practice. He used only a few more words to defend the principle, which he felt distinctively Venetian, of basing citizenship (nobility) strictly on ancestry, not wealth. Within the body of citizens thus circumscribed the Senate and the Ten represented, he said, the few who deserved more power because of their abilities, their possessions, and their training, while the doge gave Venice the advantages of a monarchy without its disadvantages. Writing at the time when Venice had impressed contemporaries by surviving the Italian Wars with its mainland domain essentially intact, Contarini presented as an explanation of the greatness of his city this harmonious blending of constitutional forms "by the marvelous virtue and wisdom of our ancestors." Many non-Venetians also, even some Florentines, analyzed the Venetian constitutional structure admiringly. Practical Politics Where all corrupt means to aspire are curbed, And Officers for virtues worth elected. ‌
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Sonnet in Preface to London Edition (1599) of Contarints The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. In an ideal republican government men are chosen for high office because of services to the whole community, as by negotiating a peace or proposing a wise law. Corruption, as Machiavelli stressed in analyzing the way the Medici ruled Florence, put in power men who rendered particular services to the private interests of their supporters, perhaps in connection with taxes, perhaps in the distribution of government jobs. The Venetians were not immune to that kind of corruption; on the contrary, it was constantly present more or less, challenging the virtue demanded by the republican ideal. Analysts of the realities of modern democratic politics emphasize the importance of primaries. Similarly, an examination of the seamier side of Venetian political life must consider in detail not only elections but how men were nominated. Although in theory the job should seek the man and no one could campaign for office, in practice offices were eagerly sought after and by methods which included many appeals to the selfish private interests of voters. To a few of the most important offices, the Senate both nominated and elected by a procedure, called scrutinio, which was relatively simple. Each Senator named the man he preferred, all Senators then voted for or against each name on the list. Ability to vote against a candidate directly, not merely indirectly as we do by voting for someone else, was a feature of all Venetian balloting. The Venetian practice involved the possibility that for every candidate there would be more negative votes than favorable votes. In the scrutinio, after the Senators had all voted on each name, the one with the highest number of favorable votes was declared elected only if he had more votes in his favor than against him. Savii, ambassadors, and many commissioners (provveditori) were chosen in this way, and special provision was made for filling disagreeable posts, such as an expensive embassy foredoomed to failure. Troublesome politicians were likely to be nominated for such posts by their rivals. If they refused, they were not only fined, but lost popularity because of their unwillingness to take responsibility. If they accepted, their opponents had hopes they would fail. At least they would be out of the city for a while, unable to compete in shaping the deliberations of the inner circle. Generally the list of nominees recorded the men who had made the nominations and who were held responsible in case of any defalcation by their nominees. For unpopular posts, however, provision was made for anonymous nominations, so that Senators would not fear to nominate an able but vindictive person. To most offices, election took place in the Great Council which chose among several candidates nominated by a variety of processes. Some were nominated from 602
above, that is, by the Signoria or the Senate. They represented the choices of what Contarini called "the more noble among the citizens," the Few. Others were nominated from below, that is, by committees chosen by lot from the Great Council itself. The use of lot strengthened the role of the Many. It was what Contarini called a "popular" feature (we would say "democratic" in a relative sense) because it assumed that one citizen's opinion was as good as another's. It gave ordinary members of the Great Council a chance to be important. Since it was the core of the "popular" aspect of the Venetian constitution, the selection of nominating committees by lot received much time and attention. The Great Council normally met every Sunday and was all the better attended because each meeting was like the drawings of a lottery from which one might emerge with a rich prize for himself or for a friend. Officers to be chosen had been announced in advance by criers at the Rialto and San Marco or, later, by printed handbills. All afternoon was spent in "balloting" (see Figure 23). The ballots were, as their name implies, small round balls. Most of them were silver, but a certain number were gilded. To determine the membership of nominating committees -there were usually four -all the members of the Great Council rose one by one from the long benches on which they sat and came to the platform at the front of the hall where the doge and his Councillors presided, and where there were urns full of ballots. These urns were of such a height and shape that the member could not tell until after taking a ballot whether he had drawn a gold or silver ball. If he drew a gold ballot, he stayed on the platform to form part of a nominating committee, having shown the ballot to a Ducal Councillor who verified through recognizing a secret mark that it had indeed been drawn from the urn that day and was not a counterfeit brought with him by a noble eager to be on a nominating committee. Every stage of the election procedure at Venice contained similar evidence that cheating was expected unless provision was made to prevent it -a sign of the intensity of competition for honors. Members lucky enough to be on a nominating committee took places on the platform facing the doge, their backs to the assembly so that no signs might be exchanged between them and men anxious to be nominated. Further drawing of lots reduced the number to thirty-six and divided them into the four committees, each of which withdrew immediately to a separate room where it again drew lots to see which member would have the first chance to nominate for the first of the offices to be filled. In most cases the first nomination made was accepted by other members of the committee who wished to have accepted the nominations they would make when their turns came. A member could nominate himself or swap turns with another member. When the four committees reported to the Great Council, its members proceeded at once to vote yes or no on each of the candidates nominated. Sometimes all candidates were voted 603
down. Attendance at the Great Council must have been more attractive because of the ample opportunities (which we lack) for voting explicitly against. In making nominations, there was no restriction on naming members of one's family, but no nominating committee could contain two men with the same family name, and when a nominee was voted on, he and his relatives had to leave the hall. Secret balloting on the names proposed was assured by ballot boxes containing two compartments, a white part for favorable votes and a green part for unfavorable. They were so designed that when the voter put his hand within, no one could see into which compartment he was casting his ballot. Since leaden balls made a noise revealing where they were put, pieces of linen were substituted. Secrecy was the more necessary because there was so much voting against; secrecy made the resentments of those defeated less personal. Any open declaration during the balloting was subject to severe penalties. The nominees had to be voted on the same day they were named, so that there would be no chance to drum up votes over night. In most elections in the Great Council there were in addition to the nominations from below, by its own nominating committees, other nominations from above. Some were made by the Signoria, and the most influential were the nominations made by the Senate through its procedure of scrutinio. For each election of a Ducal Councillor, for example, there were four nominations made by committees of the Great Council chosen by lot and one nomination made by the Senate. The man with the prestige of Senatorial backing almost always won. But not always, sometimes the winner had been reported second or third on the Senate's list. Nominations from above were so likely to win out over those proposed by the Great Council's committees that they had to be limited if the mass of nobles were to feel that their participation was affecting the final results. To give the Great Council's nominees a better chance, the rights of Signoria and Senate to nominate were reduced. In 1500, a reform-minded Ducal Councillor, Antonio Tron, induced his colleagues in the Signoria to renounce their right to make nominations. Previously they had agreed among themselves to take turns in picking nominees. There was much naming of relatives and talk of the sale of nominations. In sponsoring the motion to abolish their own rights to nominate, the Ducal Councillors were relieving themselves of that kind of pressure. Probably their experience had anticipated that of the American president who said hundreds of years later that under the spoils system every appointment he made produced "ten enemies and one ingrate." The same urge to escape solicitation by job seekers moved some Senators to favor limitations on the Senate's nominating power also, but the Senate's procedure of scrutinio recommended itself as the way of selecting the best men for important posts. Even 604
after the Great Council passed a law saying that only its own committees could nominate galley commanders (sopracomiti), the Senate and, in emergencies, the Council of Ten still named commanders for galleys, even if it had to give them a different title (governatori). And in the most important elections, as of a Ducal Councillor or Captain General of the Sea, the Senate’s right to nominate was uncontested and its backing generally assured election. Reducing the number of positions for which the Signoria and Sentate could nominate tended to reverse the trend towards oligarchy. Nomination by the Great Council only would have weakened the leadership of the inner circle if there had been no corruption in the nominating the balloting. But corruptions favouring an oligarchic trend are depicted by several contemporary diarists. One was the merchant-banker, Girolamo Priuli, mentioned above, who repeatedly expressed a businessman’s disdain of “politicians”. He wrote with self-satisfaction that he had held no offices himself because he would not engage in the bowing, scraping, pleading, and bargaining of those who aspired to places in the government. A fuller account of the manoeuvring and manipulation in elections is given by man who took some pact in it, Marino Sanuto. He did not share Priuli’s scorn of politicians nor Priuli’s tendency to attribute any misfortune befalling Venice to the starts or the city’s sins. Sanuto was a hard-headed, highly trained student of politics. Like Gasparo Contarini, he had good family connections, received a humanist education from an early age, and made a name for himself by is studies before holding office. Finding the history written by the humanist Sabellico too sketchy and superficial, Sanuto put together a Life of the Doges, based on his own hunting up of old chronicles, laws, and letters. All his life, Sanuto was a glutton for facts, for detail. He collected a library famous for its maps as well as thousands of books and manuscripts. Day by day Sanuto also kept track of everything going on in Venice. Fires, murderers, lecturers, weddings, concerts, bank failures, cargo lists, and market reports as well as dispatches received, state visits, council meetings, and political scandals – he recorded all these in a diary of fifty-eight large volumes. He began in the expectation that it would serve him as notes for writing a history of his own times. His pride was grievously wounded when, after he had been collecting such notes for some twenty years, the government appointed Pietro Bembo official historian instead, because Bembo commanded a finer Latin style. Sunto was pensioned and told to let Bembo use his notes, that is his diary, and he consented reluctantly. Even while he was personally compiling this equivalent of a diary newspaper for thirty-eight years, Sanuto found the energy for a political career which was quite as significant in its way as Gasparo Cantarini’s. Sanuto began well, as a Lord of the Nightwatch, and moved up to be Savio ai Ordini, a post which Contarini twenty years later 605
said was of great importance as long as Venice’s main concern was seaward. Then it was used to try out young men before they mounted to a more responsible position, such as Savio di Terra Ferma. Sanuto never went to sea, but he was Savio ai Odini several times in his thirties, and worked hard and effectively in mobilising the fleet prior to the battle off Zonchio in 1499. He was given a term as Treasurer at Verona, re-elected Savio ai Ordini in his forties, and nominated a number of times for more important posts, such as State Attorney, once by himself when the luck of the draw gave him a chance and more often by relatives. Once when a close relative drew the golden ball and could have nominated Marino Sanuto but failed to do so, Marino felt wronged. He never quite made it into even the outer edge of the inner circle. He had inherited enough to live on, but not enough to advance his political career with money, as many did. He won his way into the Senate for a few years, and spoke relatively frequently there and in the Great Council. He describes his speeches as eloquent and listened to with such attention that there was "no clearing of throats" ("niun sputava"). But he did not make himself popular with the men running things. When he was nominated to go as inspector (sindico) on a threeyear tour of Venetian colonies, a powerful, well-paying job, he considered that a foul blow by some personal enemy. He wanted to stay in Venice, write his diary, make speeches in the Senate, and compel his fellow nobles to obey the law at home. Sanuto not only lacked the kind of eloquence that benefited Gasparo Contarini and Pietro Bembo, he also lacked political tact. He was a stickler for legality and he spoke his mind regardless, even on some occasions when, as he honestly admitted afterwards in his diary, he was wrong. "My conscience goaded me to speak," he wrote, "for God has given me a good voice, strong memory, and much knowledge from years of studying the records of the government. I felt I would be untrue to myself if I did not voice my opinion of what was under discussion." He resented the successes of richer or more pliable men and wrote bitterly of his failure to become State Attorney or to win a permanent place in the Senate, expressing the wounded vanity of an unsuccessful scholarin-politics who felt that his learning and devotion were unappreciated. Sanuto depicts corrupting pressures concentrating on the Great Council after the nominating powers of the Signoria and Senate were restricted. They were intensified by the fiscal strains of war in 1509-16. On the one hand, high taxes made men more eager for office and for favors from those who held office. On the other hand, all kinds of expedients were used in desperate efforts to raise cash. To men whom it approved and who put down 2,000 ducats, the Council of Ten granted the title and toga of Senator and admission to that body, though without the right to vote. Minor offices were sold. The doge made an eloquent appeal to all officeholders to make large cash loans or gifts, and the amounts they offered as loans or gifts were announced in the Great 606
Council. Nobles began announcing their contributions just before their names were to come up for a vote. On one occasion, Sanuto put up 500 ducats, "found God knows how," in order to win election to the Senate, and he lost some desired offices when rivals put up more than he felt he could. Under these conditions, a law which required electors to take an oath that they had not been solicited was repealed, because nobles taking it were said to be endangering their souls' salvation. Not always were the men offering the largest gifts or loans elected; Sanuto considered some cases when they were rejected dangerous expressions of ingratitude which would make raising money more difficult in any future emergency. But when a clear-cut sale of positions to the highest bidder was proposed, Sanuto made a long speech against it and took warm satisfaction in his contribution to its defeat. As soon as the essentials of the mainland domain were recovered, the bidding in the Great Council was stopped, and new laws were passed against electioneering. New officials, called the Censors, were created especially to stop it. They were immediately effective! But only temporarily, and after four years, the office was abolished. It was recreated, to be sure, in 1524, and the Council of Ten issued new decrees against soliciting votes, but these laws were then so openly violated that they served merely to obfuscate any workable distinction between legitimate and illegitimate electioneering. They forbade any form of political rally, but they did not prevent the buying of votes. Sanuto lamented bitterly in October, 1530: "Votes are being bought for money. Everyone knows it; it is evident that no one can win an office of any importance who does not have a group of impoverished gentlemen to whom he has to give money before he is nominated and after being elected. God help this poor republic lest the proverb be fulfilled: A venal city will quickly perish (urbs venalis cito peritus). Those in power do not occupy themselves with steps against it, and especially not against those who give out the money and win honors in that way. But the poor are pardonable, because poverty cannot do otherwise. May God, who guides all, provide; otherwise I foresee much evil." Among the richest prizes to be won through politics were ecclesiastical benefices. Although no politician could hold office both in the Church and in the Republic, he could add enormously to the prestige and wealth of his family by winning a bishopric for a brother, son, or nephew. The formal appointment was made by the pope, of course, but the Senate imitated contemporary monarchs and insisted on telling popes whom to appoint. If any Venetian accepted a bishopric in Venetian territory contrary to the will of the Senate, it responded by inflicting punishment not only on him but on his family. For men with influence in the Senate, however, an important by-product of a successful embassy or governorship could be the winning of a church living for a relative. There were devices by which such a living, once gained, could be kept in the family. 607
Among the lesser prizes were many positions paying salaries large enough to attract noblemen of moderate means. Minor nobles seeking such posts sought the favor of the powerful who could throw votes their way. This form of corruption as well as more overt bribery increased the concentration of power in a few hands. Wealth cast a dark shadow over the competition for honors within the Venetian nobility. Its corrupting power had no place in Contarini's ideal. On the other hand, public service also counted heavily in the selection of leaders. The impressive wealth of some families and the established reputation for public service of others, while a few enjoyed both, dominated the nominations and elections, even the nominations made by the committees chosen by lot, and nourished the oligarchic trend within the aristocracy. Contrary trends were still strong enough, however, to give some truth to Contarini's picture of the Venetian constitution as a mixture of diverse elements. There were real differences in interests and sentiments between the general body of the nobility assembled in the Great Council and the potential oligarchy of about one hundred men, members of some twenty or thirty families, who held or had held and were likely to hold again offices in the inner circle. Both influenced policy and the style of governing. The Great Council could make its influence felt by votes of no confidence. One way was to reject nominations for the Senate's zonta. An opportunity came each year on the last day of September, when the sixty additional Senators were all voted on at once. Ordinary Senators, like members of the Forty and the Ten, were elected a few at a time from lists of nominees proposed during the summer months by nominating committees. Then, just before the Senatorial terms expired, the outgoing Senators individually made nominations for the following year, these names were combined in a list usually totaling about 120, and the Great Council spent a day voting on that list. There was no obligatory "vacation" for Senators; usually the same men were reelected again and again. But not in years of military defeats! In 1500 and 1509, Priuli and Sanuto considered the results equivalent to the fall of a government. The foremost men of the city who had been the core of the inner circle failed of election because they were held responsible for the recent disasters. Many officers of the fleet were judged guilty of cowardice in the action off Zonchio and their relatives suffered defeat. Men whose relatives had given a good account of themselves in battle were elected in 1500 even if of little experience or personal reputation. Such a revolt in the Great Council could weaken even a united inner circle. Usually the inner circle was not united; it contained strong-minded men of divergent views, rivals sometimes envenomed by personal grudges. Their conflicts were normally argued out and decided in the Senate, but the final arbiter was the Great Council. While Contarini did not begrudge it that role, he feared lest this "popular" element became too strong. There was indeed danger that the Venetian republic would be weakened by ca608
tering to the desire of the general mass of nobles for low taxes and plenty of wellpaying jobs, including many sinecures. There was also danger that members of the inner circle, to which Contarini belonged, would be attentive only to their own interests. Against both dangers worked the faith shared by both Contarini and Sanuto that honor was to be gained by serving the welfare of the whole commonwealth. Administration and the Doges All the successes and failures of Venetian administration depended on the quality of the men chosen by the system of balloting employed in the Senate and Great Council. To their credit must be put the beautifying of the city and the success, in spite of mistakes and controversies, in keeping the lagoon alive and the port open. In many fields of municipal administration, as notably in medical care and the regulations for controlling the outbreak of the plague, the Serenissima was widely looked to as a model. The governors whom Venice sent to administer justice and collect taxes in subject cities also enjoyed a good reputation compared to others of the time, not an excessively high standard. In naval administration they succeeded much better in producing the needed warships than in providing the needed crews, as will be explained in Chapter 25. The diplomatic service of the Serenissima was of especially high quality. Earlier than any other state except Milan, Venice sent to foreign courts resident ambassadors who kept the Senate and Ten extremely well informed. On their return, they made in the Senate reports which analyzed acutely the personalities, resources, and developments of the countries in which the ambassadors had served. Sometimes the reports were too long for one session and had to be continued at the next, yet they were listened to with great attention, for many of the Senators had been ambassadors themselves, or expected to be. Moreover, the returning ambassador, if he came from a major post such as Rome, had probably already served as one of the Savii and would be kept busy the rest of his life in high office if, after hearing his report, the Senators judged him worthy. Administration by boards of elected officials limited Venice's development of bureaucratic structures like those employed by contemporary Renaissance monarchs. Their brief terms of office, rarely as much as four years, prevented noble office holders from acquiring entrenched bureaucratic interests or highly specialized expertise. These qualities affected Venetian government for better or worse only through the officials of lower class, the secretaries, notaries, and accountants. These permanent employees tended to the details of administration, and the chief accountant at the Grain Office or the Arsenal, for example, understood many of its problems better than his noble supervisors. Indeed, some offices for nobles became mere sinecures, providing a salary and requiring little attention, although that was notably not true either of the Grain Office 609
or of the Arsenal where the nobles in charge were often under severe pressure to meet the demands made on them by the governing councils. The upper level of secretarial positions were reserved for the citizens-by-birth (cittadini originarii). Their class became as proud of its status as were the nobles and registered the births of its members in a "Book of Silver" just as the nobles registered theirs in the "Book of Gold." At its head was the Grand Chancellor who took precedence in ceremonial processions over nearly all other office holders, even important nobles. Like the doge and the Procurators of San Marco he held office for life. The whole class of citizens-by-birth could feel that their importance received recognition by the high honors bestowed on their representative, the Grand Chancellor. Secretaries immediately beneath him handled the papers at the meeting of the Ten, the Collegio, and the Senate. These confidential secretaries were occasionally sent on diplomatic missions requiring a combination of skill and low profile. Such delicate posts were never for sale, but lesser positions were sold during the financial crisis in 1510. Current holders were called on to pay eight to ten times their salaries in order to acquire a life-time right to the job and the right to bequeath it to a son or close heir. If the current holder did not buy it, the post was sold to the highest bidder. Such sales were common practice in Europe in that period. They had advantages from two points of view: raising money for the government, and protecting bureaucrats from the spoils system. The purchasers probably felt no shock or much pain in paying a stated price instead of making appreciative gifts to the patrons on whose good will they would otherwise have relied. Although the secretaries and lesser functionaries at Venice provided material for a bureaucracy, they were not under centralized bureaucratic control. They were supervised only by the shifting body of elected nobles. The powers of these nobles were so defined that for each there was some other officer charged with checking against maladministration. The banker-diarist Priuli said nobles were tolerant of each other's failings lest they make enemies who would work against them in the elections, but there is also record of many who tried to move up by demonstrating zeal against wrongdoers. There was little except common repute by which to judge efficiency, however, and the coordination of the activities of the hundreds of nobles moving from one office to another every few years depended primarily on their common spirit. The chief mechanism of routine coordination was supervision by interagency committees on which the inner circle was represented by one or two Savii or a Ducal Councillor. These Savii and Councillors, and the Chiefs of the Ten, were in effect the top administrators, under the doge, but they lacked the clear-cut powers of the chiefs of a bureaucracy. They had no ministries directly under them, just a few secretaries assigned from the ducal chancery. They had no power to remove the governors, naval commanders, or other of610
ficials to whom they transmitted the orders of the Senate. Appeals from their judgments and difference among them were decided by winning a majority in the Senate or the Ten, so that these Councils exercised directly many executive functions. Contarini's claim that the doges gave Venice the advantages of a monarchy without its disadvantages was a bit of nostalgic wishful thinking. Correctly he emphasized that the doge was the unifying center of the administration. But even when supported by his Ducal Council, he lacked the powers to appoint and remove subordinates that would have made him an effective executive. Although they lacked executive powers, the doges could function as political leaders, using not commands but persuasion. Within the Signoria, a doge had preeminence not only formally but for practical reasons. He alone held office for life, while other members of the inner circle were continually changing. A Ducal Councillor served in the Signoria only eight months. The doge stood at the center of the inner circle, presided over the meetings of the top councils, and in all of them could make motions on his own. Almost always the doge was a man who had been Procurator of San Marco, an honor conferred by a direct vote of a majority of the Great Council in lively electoral contests which brought out record-breaking attendance. For example, the number voting in 1510 was 1,671. He thus came to the dogeship backed not only by a majority in the committee of 41 electors who chose him, but also by popularity among the general body of the nobility. For years he had been rotating through the offices of the inner circle. When so many experienced Senators failed of reelection in 1509, Priuli expressed relief that there would be at least one man of experience left at the center of affairs, the doge. (Priuli not only criticized the politicians in power, he criticized throwing them out!) Although the doge did not have personal power anywhere near equal to the honors formally paid him, he was expected to be a real leader. At the beginning of the fifteenth century and occasionally thereafter, that expectation was fulfilled. Certainly Francesco Foscari led in formulating and executing the policy which gained conquests in Lombardy. So long as that policy was successful, he was able to override even such rivals as the naval hero Pietro Loredan, victor over both Turks and Genoese. In doing so, he stirred up hatreds which took revenge when the expansion in Lombardy was checked by Francesco Sforza, when war taxes became a bitter burden, and when he was made vulnerable by the misbehavior of a son. After thirty-four years in office, the proud, imperious Francesco Foscari was deposed in 1457 by vote of the Ducal Councillors and the Ten, led by a Loredan. Most of the next eight doges were in office only a few years. For example, Pietro Mocenigo reigned less than two years, 1474-76, near the end of the Turkish war in which he had been a victorious admiral (see Chapter 25). At the end of the century, the fifteen-year term of Agostino Barbarigo re-echoed faintly that of Foscari. He, too, was 611
an imperious man of executive abilities, at his election the popular leader of a triumphant faction, at his death a discredited member of a demoralized faction. A struggle between the "new" families, to which he belonged, and the "old" families, who had occupied the dogeship before 1382 but not at all since that date, preceded his election. By generous treatment of the rival candidate he did much to heal the bitter feelings then aroused, and he conducted his office with impressive dignity, assisted by a full white beard. He backed the building of the east wing of the Ducal Palace by Antonio Rizzo, a Veronese stonecutter he particularly favored, who responded by placing insignia of Barbarigo's family among the decorations of the Palace. At Barbarigo's death, Rizzo fled to avoid prosecution for profiteering. Agostino Barbarigo was intensely unpopular at his death because of both military defeats and charges that he used his office avariciously. In addition to the Correctors, appointed at each ducal election to revise the oath to be taken by the new doge, Prosecutors were appointed to investigate the dead doge and bring suit against his heirs. They collected thousands of ducats from a son-inlaw who had managed Barbarigo's personal finances. Such Prosecutors were regularly elected thereafter, and the restrictions added to the ducal oath by the Correctors made ducal action more circumspect than ever. Next elected was the suave, smooth-shaven Leonardo Loredan (see Figure 24), popular in 1501 because a French alliance he had favored was proving successful at the moment, and because a member of his family had just died a hero's death in the Turkish war. He was famed for eloquence and good sense, but when the Venetian army was shattered at Agnadello, his popularity dropped. Marino Sanuto describes him as acting half-dead at receipt of the bad news and contrasted his despondent behavior with the way Foscari had rallied men's spirit after a defeat by appearing in the council confidently dressed in his most gorgeous golden robes. Later in 1509, Doge Loredan roused himself on some occasions to exert the leadership expected of him. When a severe measure to force payment of heavy war taxes on real estate was defeated in the Great Council, 700 noes to 650 in favor, Doge Loredan took the rostrum to plead eloquently for the needs of' the emergency and swung the Great Council around so that it passed an amended version, 864 to 494 noes. More influential than any other man in reanimating the fighting spirit of Venetians after Agnadello was Andrea Gritti (see Figure 25 ). He was a grain merchant at Constantinople until well along in his forties when his skill in negotiating with Turks was called on to arrange the last details of the peace treaty of 1503. On his return to Venice, he was accepted at once into the inner circle. As Commissioner with the army he led in the reconquest and defense of Padua. Captured by the French in a later engagement, he turned that to some advantage by winning the confidence of the French king. Besides his native tongue he knew Latin, Greek, French, and Turkish. After the brief 612
dogeship of the octogenarian Antonio Grimani as Loredan's successor, Gritti, then 68, sought the honor in defiance of opponents who held against him his fiery temperament and the entanglements they feared might result from the four illegitimate sons he had sired in Constantinople, one of whom enjoyed high favor at the Turkish court as a merchant supplying its armies. Andrea Gritti was a master of the grand manner and too domineering to be popular, although he sought popularity by selling his wheat at low prices. With absolute monarchy on the rise everywhere in Europe, some Venetians feared he would act the tyrant. The granddaughter he sent home from his inaugural reception because she wore a golden dress in violation of sumptuary laws probably agreed. But Gritti's temperament was no threat to the republic; the shackles on ducal action were too strong, indeed too strong for the public good. Sanuto describes Gritti's impotent anger during the election of Senators at the end of September, 1529, when he was unable to inflict punishment for illegal soliciting of votes even though he himself had witnessed it. Before he died in 1538, he was futilely opposing the actions by which the Serenissima was drifting into war with the Turks. Doges who were effective leaders became increasingly rare. As in many other elective monarchies in which oligarchs chose the monarch, the men chosen were rarely of such a kind as to increase the power and prestige of the office. When they were elected, most of the doges were already at what is now considered an age for retirement. Not infrequently contenders compromised on someone they thought would die soon and give them another chance to get elected themselves. No office in the Venetian political system gave the advantages of a strong executive or invited men to exert political leadership firm enough to check the seepage into the nobility of a tendency toward selfsatisfied self-indulgence. The Consent of the Governed In spite of weaknesses in the Venetian constitution, it provided better government than was generally found elsewhere, and all signs indicate that it enjoyed popular support. There was no need for troops in the city to intimidate the populace; the common people never tried to throw off the rule of the nobles. On special occasions, such as the death of a doge, when it was fell desirable to have extra protection at the Ducal Palace, an honor guard was temporarily recruited from the workers in the Arsenal. Some particular doges became hated, but the system was not attacked. The devices for the restraint of faction woven into the machinery of government were sufficiently successful so that none of the men disappointed in the intense competition for honors tried to overthrow the system, at least none after Marino Falier. The lower classes were never incited to revolt, or given the opportunity to revolt, by vengeful nobles offering to be their leaders. Personal ambitions were blunted and contained within the network of councils and magistracies. 613
The loyalty and obedience which garlanded the Serenissima is to be explained less by the machinery of government than by many of the features of Venetian social structure which have been mentioned in earlier chapters. The vitality of the parish communities, some sixty in number, each containing both rich and poor, palaces and workshops, cut across class lines which, on the other hand, received recognition in the occupational associations, the guilds. Both local and professional groupings gave a sense of belonging which found symbolic expression in a variety of ceremonies and festivals. The most elaborate and impressive festivals were those which the government organized in order to parade its own magnificence. The richness of the doge's robes, the gilded splendor of the huge galley, the bucentoro; in which he went to wed the sea, the glittering elegance of the ambassadors and dignitaries accompanying him on such occasions, and the sumptuous masques staged by the guilds to honor the doge or by the doge to honor visiting potentates were not mere catering to vainglory. They were part of the Serenissima's artistic mastery of government by pageantry. As important as pageantry was food. Her fleets and her regulation of navigation kept Venice's markets relatively well supplied, and even her lower classes relatively well fed. Her acquisitions on the mainland gave added assurance that her graneries would be full. The Grain Office was one branch of administration in which the Venetian system of committees was successful. Venice maintained also the high reputation it had gained in earlier centuries for equitable administration of justice. Nobles and commoners had equal standing in court. Late in the sixteenth century, Bodin, a French champion of monarchy, considered Venice in general an example of aristocracy, yet he said of it, in the words of a contemporary translation: "Yea moreover an iniurie done by a Venetian gentleman unto the least inhabitant of the city is right severely corrected and punished; and so a great sweetnesse and libertie of life is given unto all, which savoureth more of popular libertie than of Aristocraticall government." The rich could of course hire smarter lawyers than the poor could, as in any capitalist society, but to defend prisoners too poor to hire any lawyer one of Venice's corps of licensed lawyers was officially chosen by lot to act for the accused, and in the doge's oath of office he swore to see that equal justice was done to all, great and small. How completely this ideal was lived up to is doubtful, but Venetian courts had that generally high reputation for impartiality which Shakespeare echoed. Equal justice did not imply equality in honors or in economic opportunities and interests. The native-born citizens eligible for posts in the Ducal Chancery and at the head of the Scuole Grandi ranked as a kind of quasi nobility. Below them were the rich members of guilds, such as clothiers or grocers, who had many workmen under them. So many of these shopkeepers were recent immigrants that Philippe de Commy614
nes, the French ambassador who wrote a laudatory analysis of Venetian institutions at the beginning of the sixteenth century, after declaring that "the people" had no part in the government, added: "Most of the people are foreigners." The workmen had their guilds too, even if with restricted functions. Through these many subordinate organizations the Serenissima permitted the common people of various ranks to satisfy on a modest scale their desires for honors and office-holding. Shipwrights at the Arsenal enjoyed one set of privileges, stevedores at the customs house another set; bakers were governed by one set of rules, gondoliers by other rules made by a different magistracy. Each had its own special reasons to be more or less satisfied with the status the government afforded them. This diversity in rights to organize and in job opportunities divided the populace into separate interest groups in a way that impeded any coalescence among them in opposition to the ruling nobility. Government by catering to or threatening the self-interest of separately organized groups within the society would become a form of corruption if not guided by any conception of the general welfare. In practice, the long-lived stability of the Venetian government rested on the attention its rulers gave to both special interests and the general welfare of the beloved city.
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