The Venetian constitution is one of the strangest documents in political history, partly because it is not a single document. It is the accumulated case-law of seven hundred years of councils legislating about councils, of corrections of corrections, of provisions added in response to specific scandals and never removed. By the year 1500 it had become, in the words of the seventeenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin, "the most artful political mechanism that the wit of man has yet contrived". By the year 1797, when it was abolished, it was also the oldest continuously operating government in Europe by a margin of three hundred years.
The Serrata of 1297
The crucial event in the formation of the mature Venetian constitution was the so-called Serrata del Maggior Consiglio, the "closure" of the Great Council, in 1297. Before 1297 the Maggior Consiglio — the chief legislative body of the republic — was a small assembly of some four hundred and fifty male citizens drawn from a wider pool by annual election. After 1297 it was a larger and self-perpetuating body of about a thousand, restricted to the male descendants of families that had held seats in the Maggior Consiglio in the previous four years. The effect was to convert Venice from a partly democratic to a fully hereditary republic. After 1297 you were either born into the political class — into the families later inscribed in the Libro d'Oro, the "Golden Book" of Venetian patrician houses — or you were not.
This decision was deeply controversial. There were riots. A conspiracy by the dissenting non-noble Tiepolo and Querini families in 1310, intended to overthrow the new aristocratic constitution, was suppressed at the eleventh hour. The Council of Ten — the permanent committee of state security that would become the most powerful single organ of the republic — was created in response to that conspiracy, originally as a temporary body for one year, but extended again and again until in 1335 it became permanent. The Tiepolo conspiracy is also the reason the doge's residence still carries, on its eastern facade, an unusual gap between two columns of red marble where, by tradition, the proclamations of death sentences were posted.
The doge, and how he was elected
Inside this closed aristocratic system, the doge himself remained an elected officer. But the procedure by which he was elected became progressively more elaborate, designed precisely to prevent any single noble family from capturing the office. By the time the procedure was finalised in 1268, the election worked as follows. The Maggior Consiglio, on the day after the previous doge's death, drew thirty members by lot. These thirty drew nine by lot. The nine elected forty by majority vote. The forty drew twelve by lot. The twelve elected twenty-five. The twenty-five drew nine by lot. The nine elected forty-five. The forty-five drew eleven by lot. The eleven elected forty-one. The forty-one then elected the doge by twenty-five votes from forty-one, after each candidate had been heard by the entire body of forty-one in person.
The procedure took several days. The point of the cascading lots and ballots was to make family politicking effectively impossible: any noble house attempting to control the outcome would have to predict, simultaneously, the results of five separate lotteries and four separate ballots. The procedure was abused only once, in 1457, when a powerful family did manage to coordinate enough of the steps to install one of its members, Pasquale Malipiero — but Malipiero was a perfectly competent doge and the matter was let pass. For the remaining three hundred and forty years of the republic, the procedure produced doges who were, on the whole, capable, experienced, and emphatically not the founders of dynasties. Of the one hundred and twenty doges elected between 697 and 1797, three reigned for more than twenty years, twenty-two reigned for less than a year, the average tenure was eight years and four months, and not one of them succeeded in installing a son in the office.
"The election of the doge of Venice is to a republic what the parable of the talents is to the Gospel: a procedure so contrary to ordinary human nature that one can only conclude it must have been designed by an intelligence superior to it." — Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576
The promissione ducale
The doge, once elected, was required to swear, before taking office, an oath called the promissione ducale — the "ducal promise" — which functioned as a kind of personal constitution binding him alone. Each new doge swore a new promissione, drafted by a commission of five inquisitors who reviewed the previous doge's reign and added any new restrictions that recent events seemed to recommend. By the sixteenth century the promissione had become a document of more than two hundred and fifty separate clauses, prohibiting the doge from receiving gifts above a defined value, from corresponding with foreign powers without supervision, from leaving the Ducal Palace except on specified ceremonial occasions, from appointing his own kin to office, from holding private audiences with ambassadors, from speaking in council on matters in which his own family was involved, and so on, at length. The result was that the doge, while formally the head of state, was procedurally constrained to a degree no other European head of state was constrained.
The other councils
Around the doge sat a network of overlapping councils. The Maggior Consiglio — the closed aristocratic legislature of approximately a thousand members — was the formal sovereign body. Below it sat the Senate, a smaller body of about two hundred elected by the Maggior, which handled foreign affairs, commercial regulation, and tax. Below that sat the Consiglio dei Pregadi, the executive committee. Above it all, in a sense, sat the Council of Ten — established in 1310, made permanent in 1335 — which exercised summary jurisdiction over treason, political subversion and matters of state security, with the authority to act by night, in camera, and without appeal. The Ten in turn delegated routine surveillance to the three State Inquisitors, the famous Tre Inquisitori di Stato, who from 1539 onwards ran what was, by modern standards, a small but effective political police.
What the system was for
It is easy, from a modern democratic perspective, to dismiss the Venetian constitution as an oligarchy. It was an oligarchy. The political class never exceeded about two and a half percent of the adult male population. Membership was hereditary. The cittadini (commoners with some legal privileges) had no formal political voice; the popolani (ordinary tradesmen and labourers) had none at all. But the system also did something that no other early modern European state managed: it produced, year after year, a working government that did not collapse into civil war, dynastic succession crises, religious civil conflict, or royal absolutism, and that did so for half a millennium. The English, French, Spanish, Austrian and Dutch states all had episodes — sometimes long episodes — of civil war or revolution in this period. Florence's republican constitution collapsed under the Medici. The Holy Roman Empire's electoral monarchy produced the Thirty Years' War. Venice produced none of these. It was the only large European state that, between 1300 and 1797, never had a successful coup, never had a civil war, and never had a revolution. Whatever one thinks of the oligarchy that ruled it, that is a non-trivial achievement.
The next two centuries of Venetian history are the long peak of the republic, financed by a Stato da Mar at full extent, defended by a fleet of more than a hundred war-galleys, and administered from an Arsenal that was itself one of the wonders of the medieval world. We turn to that next.
End of Chapter V