Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic

Political Conflict and Social Contestation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Venice

Maartje van Gelder, Claire Judde de Larivière

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic explores the different aspects of political actions and experiences in late medieval and early modern Venice.

The book challenges the idea that the city of Venice knew no political conflict and social contestation during the medieval and early modern periods. By examining popular politics in Venice as a range of acts of contestation and of constructive popular political participation, it contributes to the broader debate about premodern politics. The volume begins in the late fourteenth century, when the demographical and social changes resulting from the Black Death facilitated popular challenges to the ruling class's power, and finishes in the late eighteenth century, when the French invasion brought an end to the Venetian Republic. It innovates Venetian studies by considering how ordinary Venetians were involved in politics, and how popular politics and contestation manifested themselves in this densely populated and diverse city. Together the chapters propose a more nuanced notion of political interactions and highlight the role that ordinary people played in shaping the city's political configuration, as well as how the authorities monitored and punished contestation.

Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic combines recent historiographical approaches to classic themes from political, social, economic, and religious Venetian history with contributions on gender, migration, and urban space. The volume will be essential reading for students of Venetian history, medieval and early modern Italy and Europe, political and social history.

1

Popular protest and alternative visions of the Venetian polity, c.1260 to 1423

Dennis Romano

Shortly after 1230, the western façade of the church of San Marco was adorned with five doorways. The most elaborate of these, the portale maggiore, was decorated with three elaborately carved arches, the third of which extoled on the intrados various trades or crafts by depicting masters and their assistants hard at work (see Figure 1.1). Completed sometime between 1235 and 1250, the sculptures celebrated in a prominent location the crafts as essential components of Venetian society.¹

Figure 1.1 Detail of one of the carved arches of the Basilica’s portale maggiore (thirteenth century), showing blacksmiths at work. Below, we see fishermen, who were never organized in a guild.

Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

For a time in the mid-thirteenth century some entertained the possibility of a greater role for artisan guilds in politics as well, but that vision of a guild-based polity was quashed in a series of laws passed in the 1260s and by the eventual triumph during the Serrata or closing of the Great Council of a regime based on kinship and the accompanying emergence of a hereditarily defined noble ruling class.

This essay explores the records of the Council of Ten to document popular dissatisfaction with and resistance to that regime between 1310 and 1423.² The Council of Ten, which despite its name was composed of 17 members—the doge and his six councillors who sat ex officio and the ten elected members—comprised the most powerful and feared body in the Venetian republican regime. Founded in the wake of the 1310 Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy in which a group of disgruntled nobles tried to seize control of the city from a rival group led by Doge Pietro Gradenigo, the Ten’s jurisdiction came over time to include supervision of state security and the prosecution of sodomy and counterfeiting. The Ten were charged with protecting the three cornerstones of the Venetian regime: the government, the currency, and the fruitful reproduction of families.³

The Ten’s records indicate that many non-noble Venetians, including some of the lowliest men and women, as well as established guild masters and scuola (confraternity) officers, used a variety of strategies, means, and tactics to express their discontent or protest their lack of power, and in two instances to offer an alternative vision of the polity as well. Such conclusions would be unsurprising for other medieval Italian cities, where evidence of popular unrest, including most especially the Florentine Ciompi Revolt of 1378, is well-documented.⁴ Yet Venetian historiography has consistently downplayed both discontent with the regime and popular engagement with politics, as evidenced by Giorgio Cracco’s characterization of the popolo as a “corpo morto,” and Alberto Tenenti’s even more damning condemnation of them as “hardly more than a spineless multitude.”⁵

Silence in the archives?

Historians’ dismissal of Venetian popular politics can be attributed at least in part to a concerted effort by the regime and its allies to present an image of the city as almost preternaturally tranquil. Such expressions of this view as Petrarch’s description of Venice as “solidly built on marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civil concord” are well known, but they could also find their way into mundane legislation as when in 1321 the Council of Ten wrote to the Count of Gorizia, whose wife wished to attend the parish-based festival of the Marie (Marys), that there was no need for him to bring armed escorts since the city was so “quiet” that both residents and foreigners could go about unarmed.⁶

Another tactic the Venetian elites employed was to suppress evidence of disaffection. This is particularly apparent in the records of the Ten, which are notoriously elliptical, and especially so in cases involving verbal outbursts. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they did not record in the registers of their deliberations the words that they viewed as threatening, but simply characterized them, for example as “unseemly” or “shameful,” and noted who or what they believed to have been damaged by them.⁷

Understanding why the records are so laconic is more difficult. Perhaps the Ten did not record the words that had been spoken since they had heard them described during their investigations. However, two cases examined by the Ten suggest another possibility. In 1365 shortly before his death, serious accusations were leveled against Doge Lorenzo Celsi. Celsi may well have aspired to power in the manner of his predecessor Marino Falier, who was beheaded by the Ten in 1355 for trying to subvert the regime. Be that as it may, on 30 July 1365, the Ten determined that all the testimony and papers regarding the investigation into Celsi should be destroyed and that “no mention [of it] should be made at any time for the good of our state because there is no need.”⁸ The second case occurred in October 1402 when two letters described as “against the honor and order of our dominion” were discovered: one had been placed in the spot where the doge sat in the Great Council Hall; the other in the office of the Signori di Notte (the Lords of the Night), one of Venice’s police forces. The Ten voted to deal with the matter as follows: the letter that had been placed at the doge’s seat had already been burned; the other letter was to be kept “closed and marked with a seal” until it could be determined if anything more should be done.⁹ These decisions suggest that the Council of Ten understood that words carried an awesome power. Consequently, to repeat them or even to record them was to perpetuate their influence—it was better to destroy them or at the very least to keep them tightly guarded.¹⁰

Recent studies by Filippo de Vivo and Claire Judde de Larivière on the early modern period are illuminating in this regard. De Vivo, who has studied political communication during the Interdict Crisis of 1607, argues that secrecy “was an overriding principle of Venetian governance.”¹¹ Secrecy created an aura of unity and serenity and allowed the government to control political debate. This policy had a long history. As early as 1414 the Ten had been worried that its records were not being tightly controlled and commanded that they be maintained “securely [secrete] and not seen except with due order.”¹² For her part, Judde de Larivière examines a protest that occurred on the island of Murano in January 1511 during which the inhabitants threw snowballs at the outgoing podestà. She labels this event a “revolt” but notes that the Venetian government never called this or similar outbursts by that term, preferring such labels as “murmurings” or “cabals.” By naming them in this way, she argues, the government sought to deny their political meaning.¹³

Yet as cryptic as they are, the Ten’s records do offer, when read carefully, significant evidence of popular dissatisfaction with the prevailing economic and political power structures as well as of the methods and means that the popolo used to express their discontent. This is not altogether surprising given the Ten’s mandate to protect state security: they were constantly on the lookout for threats to the status quo.

Threats and conspiracies

Conspiracies to overthrow the regime constituted not only the most serious but also the least common danger. As noted, the Council of Ten was instituted in response to the 1310 Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy, which involved a power struggle within the newly-defined ruling class.¹⁴ The aforementioned Doge Marino Falier’s attempt in 1355 to overthrow the regime included a number of popolano followers, but appears to have been aimed at installing Falier as lord of the city rather than at a redistribution of power to the non-elites.¹⁵ Similarly, threats to the regime by Marino Boccono in the immediate aftermath of the Serrata and by the noble Barozzi family in 1328 seem to have been fueled by power struggles among the elite or by those who thought they ought to have been part of it.¹⁶ In 1412 Francesco Balduin, a member of the elevated class of cittadini or citizens, conspired against the state but was denounced by his godfather Bartolomeo da Anselmo, who was rewarded for his action with admission to the Great Council for himself and his heirs. The Ten executed Balduin.¹⁷

While no evidence has emerged of full-fledged conspiracies against the regime by the popolo, the Council of Ten was very concerned that unauthorized gatherings might spontaneously mutate into riots or revolt. For this reason, in May 1329 it reiterated a law of 1289 which forbade meetings in private homes or elsewhere and extended the penalties to include foreigners. A month earlier they had forbidden anyone from hosting more than four foreigners in his house unless he notified neighborhood officials, the Capi di Sestieri, of his intention to do so.¹⁸ The Ten were especially alert to people congregating at night and during celebrations such as the festival of the Marys, Carnival, and Ascension Day when large groups of inebriated revelers might suddenly turn violent.¹⁹ In 1417, they even considered forbidding the preaching of Lenten sermon cycles at San Marco since they were attracting lots of nobles and “the greatest part of the popolo” (“maxima pars populi”) to the very center of power in the city, thereby posing a “danger to our state.”²⁰

In fact, the popolo did at times resort to collective action as a way of expressing their grievances and pressing their demands. Most often these actions involved men from the same profession. In January 1353, for example, the Ten prosecuted a group of oarsmen who became verbally abusive over the money owed them at the end of a voyage.²¹ In 1355 the Ten investigated men who got into a fight (briga) in Castello during which insults were hurled and a certain Nicolo da Pula (Castro Pole), who may have been a policeman, was assaulted. Usually simple fights were handled by lesser police forces like the Cinque alla Pace, but something about this particular melee led the Ten to handle it themselves and mete out some harsh sentences including long prison terms and blinding. The Ten referred to the perpetrators as “traitors” (pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Popular protest and alternative visions of the Venetian polity, c.1260 to 1423
• 2. Memorializing conspiracy and unrest. Venetian historical writing at the turn of the sixteenth century
• 3. Political participation and ordinary politicization in Renaissance Venice. Was the popolo a political actor?
• 4. Popular heresies and dreams of political transformation in sixteenth-century Venice
• 5. Spaces of unrest? Policing hospitality sites in early modern Venice
• 6. Protest in the Piazza: contested space in early modern Venice
• 7. Female agency, subjectivity, and disorder in early modern Venice
• 8. Tensions and compromises in the republican system of justice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice
• 9. Boatmen, fishermen, and Venetian institutions: from negotiation to confrontation
• 10. Conflicts, social unease, and protests in the world of the Venetian guilds (sixteenth to eighteenth century)
• Afterword
• Index