Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

Grave dissensions, however, appeared in the caste of patricians. Gradenigo found himself opposed on the one hand by the Tiepolo faction, on the other by certain families which, although descended from the ancient tribunes of the island, and consequently of most ancient and respected race, were excluded from the Great Council, merely because they had not been represented in it during the last four years. It became necessary, therefore, to modify the law in the following manner:—

It was decreed that all who had sat in the Council themselves, and all who, though they had not had a place there themselves, could prove at least one ancestor a member of the Council since 1172, should be eligible for the Council, by the vote of the Forty. It is a remarkable fact that the word ‘nobles’ is not to be found in any of these decrees; but it was clearly useless to insist upon a mere word when the whole aristocracy, which had proposed and passed the law, was to profit by it. The nobles never lost sight of a possible danger to themselves in the resentment of the people.

Last of all, it was decreed that those who had never themselves sat in the Council, nor had any ancestors who had been members, should be considered as ‘eligible by grace.’ This was done in order to leave a shadow of hope to ambitious men of other classes, an idea that they might some day be admitted as ‘new men’ into an assembly which was shutting its gates for ever. As a matter of fact, in the beginning a limited number of councillors ‘by grace’ were created, and some were chosen for their own personal merits, or to quiet the ambition of certain turbulent citizens. In order to be admitted in this manner, it was necessary in the first place to receive twenty-five votes from the Forty, and the votes of five out of six of the Doge’s counsellors. A few years later, admission was made still more difficult by requiring thirty votes from the Forty, and it is likely that under this law very few ‘new men’ were ever elected. Venice was still far from the days when the first comer would be able to buy a seat in the Great Council at auction, in order that the proceeds might help to pay the interest on the public debt. The exclusion of illegitimate sons, which was already in force, was maintained, and it was further ordained that no one under twenty-five years of age should enter the Council. The latter measure, however, was soon followed by a palliative one. Each year, on the fourth of December, the feast of Saint Barbara, the Doge placed in an urn the names of all young nobles twenty years of age, who at twenty-five would have the right to a place in the Council, and thirty of these were drawn by lot, and received permission to be present at the assemblies of the Council from that day, but without the right of voting; this constituted a sort of novitiate in those duties to which, at the regular established age, the young men would be called. The process of admission was called ‘coming to the Barbarella.’

It appears to me that the last word contains a play on words; for it may mean ‘the little Barbara,’ the saint on whose feast the lots were drawn, or it may mean the down on the chin of a youth of twenty, ‘the little beard,’ for though an improperly formed diminutive, it is quite a possible one in dialect.

As may be imagined, the nobles showed the utmost haste and anxiety to prove their rights before the ‘avogadori,’ or counsel to the commonwealth, whose duty it was to decide upon them. In some cases there was evidence that an ancestor had sat in the Council at the end of the twelfth century, but it might be that there were no documents to prove it, and the most

Galliccioli, i. 331.

extraordinary means were resorted to, to persuade the judges of the truth of the assertion. Some families, in order to prove that they were nobles, which of course was the real object of the inquiry, adduced the fact that they possessed great quantities of arms in their houses. The number of persons who, without the slightest chance of proving their rights, inscribed their names on the books of the avogadori, beginning in 1315, was so great that it was found necessary to impose a fine upon those who had done so without any chance of establishing their claim, and all titles whatsoever were carefully examined before being allowed. It is almost needless to say that the families about whose right there was no doubt possible did their very best to exclude all the rest.

As soon as the first list of members by right, and members who were eligible, was made out, it was decreed that they required to be elected, if they had attained the age of twenty-five years, in order to sit at the Council. It appears that no matter what the precise number of the members under this category might be, a certain number were always elected from among the ‘eligibles,’ a fact which explains the changing number of councillors in each year. There is reason to believe that the assembly had never consisted of more than five hundred members before 1297, but that after the law passed in that year it reached (1340) the number of twelve hundred.

It is clear from all this that the measure known as the Closure of the Great Council did not consist so much in any regular elections yearly as in a close limitation of the class of candidates, and the fact that it was necessary that they should be elected by the Council of Forty; whereas in former times they were elected by the people, represented in their turn by one or two electors in each of the six regions of the city, or else by two electors from the regions on one side of the canal, and two from the regions on the other.

Little attention has been paid to the law of 1298, which at the time appeared to be of secondary importance, but which had close connection with the others that had been framed by the aristocracy. The law of 1298 established that no one should belong to the Forty who had not already sat in the Grand Council, or whose father or grandfather had not sat there. By this law each assembly was strictly dependent on the other, and the right to sit in the one, like the possibility of sitting in the other, became a privilege of noble birth.