Rom. ii. 90, 341.
According to a statute which regulated the election and the offices of the Great Council in 1172, and which was perhaps instituted in that year, the Council was composed of a variable number of members, originally four hundred and eighty, and never more than five hundred, who were elected every year without any distinction of class from the principal citizens, and undoubtedly, in the great majority, from the aristocracy.
The position it occupied in the Republic has, I think, no example elsewhere. In one shape or another it had always existed, and there was an aristocracy amongst the first fugitives from the mainland; from that time on, the nobles and the people, the tribunes and the artisans, had fought like comrades against the barbarians, as well as against the elements of nature. Like shipwrecked men of one country, speaking one language, they had been as brothers; the noble families had been the chief defenders of the new home, and its earliest law-givers, and they transmitted to their descendants a traditional influence which was rarely misused in earlier times. The people did not hate them, as the populace has always hated the aristocracy in agricultural countries; for agriculture, where the poor work on the estates of the rich, seems to degrade both alike, or at least to brutalise them, whereas men who till their own lands almost always grow in character and independence. In Venice, while the people looked up to the nobles as their intellectual and social betters, they did not cease for a long time to regard them as their allies and helpers.
The nobles, therefore, had taken the lead from the beginning, and they kept it without difficulty and almost without opposition; in politics the people effaced themselves, trusting to the ruling class to maintain the liberties of the maritime state abroad, both in the east and the west, and confident that the commerce and art of Venice would continue to develop under its influence. The nobles were ambitious, it is true, but they had nothing to gain by oppressing the people, for they were themselves the principal creators of the public wealth. They dominated the people,
BOATS OFF THE PUBLIC GARDEN
which is quite another matter; until the fifteenth century they cannot fairly be said to have abused their power, and the privileges they kept for themselves involved the heaviest responsibilities. If they held control of the tribunals, yet were these as ready to try the nobles, and even the Doge himself, as to judge the poorest fishermen of the lagoons; and though the Doge could only be a noble, his head might fall under the axe of the common executioner, the lowest of the
COURT OF APPEALS, GRAND CANAL
low. Unlike the aristocracies of other countries, that of Venice never claimed for itself exemption from justice.