Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

The first of these, Orio Mastropiero, the successor of Sebastian Ziano, occupied himself actively in drawing up a criminal code, which should render less arbitrary the sentences of judges who were often incompetent and were always elected provisionally. This code received the name of ‘Promission del Maleficio,’ the ‘promise to, or with regard to, crime,’ and it was frequently improved upon during the years that followed its promulgation. It provided for almost all possible crimes, and established for each one a punishment which seemed just according to the spirit of the times. These penalties in many cases seem barbarous to us, though it was

CAMPO, SANTA TERNITA

not the Venetians who invented strangulation, or the cutting off of the hand, or torture by red-hot iron, or the tearing out of the eyes and the tongue. The tribunals of all nations had long ago adopted these punishments, and it is certain that there was no country where fuller proofs were required than in Venice before any severe penalties could be inflicted on a citizen. One of the chief merits of the Venetian code of that period, as compared with the codes of other countries, is that it points out to the judge the causes of crime, and the small misdeeds which may lead to great ones, as distinguished from those which are not likely to leave any results. Thus, for instance, the smallest act of disrespect to a respectable woman was punished almost as severely as an assault upon her.

Rom. ii. 137.

For a long time the only permanent tribunal in Venice had been the ‘Magistrato del Proprio,’ which dealt with civil questions. The quarrels of the common people were judged by five ‘wise men’—‘savii.’ Orio Mastropiero succeeded in passing a law for the institution of a court to deal with differences arising between Venetians and foreigners, or amongst the latter, and this was named ‘Magistrato del Forestiero,’ the ‘foreigners’ court,’ so to say. In addition to these courts, which were subject to the authority of the Great Council, there were the ‘Avogadori del Comun,’ the municipal advocates, as we should probably say, who had authority in fiscal questions, and the list is complete. The state of Venice was directed and judged by the bodies I have enumerated.

In matters of commerce all Europe recognised the superiority of Venice at that time, and long afterwards. A single illustration of the practical sense of Venetian merchants will suffice: they invented percentage, and the word that expresses it. Before them, the world had always said, ‘so many pence in the pound,’ or ‘four-fifths,’ or ‘seven-eighths.’ The Venetians first conceived the idea, and introduced the practice, of reducing all commercial fractions to the common denominator, one hundred.

Orio Mastropiero further enriched the state with a permanent source of income by giving it a regular monopoly of salt and the salt trade.

Jacopo Tiepolo, elected Doge in 1229, was undoubtedly one of the most enlightened and intellectually well-balanced men of his age, and he seems to have embraced at a glance all those questions which his predecessors had examined one by one, and often only from a single side. He conceived the idea of compiling a complete code which should be a sort of permanent charter for the Republic, and he entrusted the execution of his plan to four ‘learned, noble, and discreet persons,’ for that is all that is to be learned of them, through the note that precedes the original text of their work. That text consisted of five books destined to become famous in the history of European legislation.

This is no place to discuss a legal code, but no one who glances at Tiepolo’s body of laws can fail to be struck by the many provisions it contains for the protection of women and their property. I do not know whether we ought to think that this speaks well or ill for the condition of Venetian ethics at a time when the slave trade was already thriving, and when there were a great number of Eastern female slaves in the capital. On the whole, the laws may have been made with a view to protecting honest matrons from being plundered, directly or indirectly, by their handsome and perfectly unscrupulous rivals, whose influence was already becoming great, and was destined to be portentous.