additions to its numbers, and though itself divided into two parties, had on the whole steered the Republic through eleven hundred years of history; secondly, a number of families, mostly of ‘new men,’ though they had sat in the Council four hundred years and more, but who had all been more or less occupied with the legal profession since they had existed; thirdly and lastly, the poor nobles called the ‘Barnabotti,’ from the quarter of San Barnabò, where most of them were lodged at the public expense.
The first category generally held the posts of highest dignity, many of which implied a salary by no means small, but never sufficient to pay for the display which the position required, according to accepted customs. The traditional splendour which the Venetian ambassadors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had inaugurated was dear to the Senate, and had come to be officially required, if not actually prescribed in so many words. These great families had long been accustomed to play the leading parts, and as the business spirit which had made Venice the richest power in Europe died out, their pride was often greater than their sense of responsibility. These and many other causes lowered the standard according to which young Venetians had been brought up during centuries to understand the administration of their country; and the result was that they were not fit to fill the offices to which they were called, and therefore handed over their work to private secretaries, who were generally ambitious and intriguing men. To be a member of the Great Council had now only a social value, like those hereditary coats of arms in which there had once been such deep meaning. Throughout ages the aristocracy of Venice had differed altogether from the nobility of other countries, but as decadence advanced to decay, and decay threatened destruction, the Venetian senator grew more and more like the French marquis of the same period.
In an access of greatness Louis XIV. is reported to have said, ‘L’état c’est moi!’ but the State continued to exist without him. The Venetian nobles might have said with much more truth, and perhaps with more reasonable pride, ‘We nobles are the Republic!’ For when they degenerated into dolls, the Republic soon ceased to exist.
The second category of nobles comprised by far the sanest and most intelligent part of the aristocracy, and it was generally from their ranks that the Quarantie were chosen, as well as the ‘Savi,’ and those magistrates from whom special industry and intelligence were required, or at least hoped.
The Barnabotti had nothing in common with the two other classes, except their vanity of caste, which was so infinitely far removed from pride. As I have said, they owed their name to the parish
Molmenti, Nuovi Studi, 308.
which most of them inhabited. Their nobility was more or less recent and doubtful, and almost all had ruined themselves in trying to rival the richer families. The majority of them had nothing but a small pension, paid them by the government, and barely sufficient to lift them out of actual misery. It was especially for them
Horatio Brown, Venice, 109; Rom. ix. 7.
that the College of Nobles had been founded, in which their sons were educated for nothing, with all the usual imperfections of gratuitous education. Like the ‘New Men’ of the fourteenth century, they felt that an insurmountable barrier separated them from the older and richer classes, and the humiliations to which they were often exposed by the latter kept alive in them the sort of hatred which was felt in other parts of Europe by the agricultural population for the owners of the land. Their poverty and rancorous disposition made them especially the objects of bribery when any party in the Great Council needed the assistance of their votes against another.
The better sort of Venetians were well aware of the evils that were destroying the governing body. In 1774 a member of the Council made a speech on the subject, in which he said that the greatest damage the Republic had suffered had been caused by the action of time; it lay in the already very sensible diminution in the numbers of the Great Council, which was, in fact, the government itself. He pointed out that within one century a large number of patrician families had become