La Serenissima was entirely dependent on trade -- not only for her prosperity, but survival itself. Comprised of a collection of small islands (notoriously vulnerable to tides and earthquakes), she could no longer grow her own food, much less the timber for the ships that weighed anchor throughout the Mediterranean, Levant, Black Sea, and occasionally the Atlantic. (The "John Cabot" who crashed Canada's party in 1497 in the name of England was in fact "Giovanni Cavuto," a citizen of Venice.)
But Venice's Middle Eastern trading post, Acre, had disappeared when that Crusader-held city fell back into Muslim hands. She was by now paying the price for the greed and ruthlessness of her for-profit (cough!) "Crusade" (cough!) a century before: She was on the outs with the Byzantine Emperor, and many of her principal Constantinople residents languished in prison. Again.
Closer to home, her on-again-off-again war with hated rival-city Genoa had resumed, and, for the moment, Genoa was in the lead. And territorial squabbling over the city of Ferrara had brought down the wrath of Pope Clement V. The latter, in addition to spiritual penalties such as forbidding baptisms, weddings, and funerals, also included an injunction to the rest of Christian Europe against trading with Venice.
One might expect that in times when a storm appears on the horizon, people would put aside their differences and face the common dangers united. After all, the Venetians had certainly been more than capable of this before (and would be again). In this case, however, one would be very wrong.
The fight with the Pope, for instance, had been the most avoidable part. The "old guard" nobles of Venice favoured conciliation, while the nouveau riche patricians tended to be war hawks. Debate had been fierce, and had even spilled into street-bloodletting. But, in the end, the hawks had carried the day...with disastrous results.
Now, Venice's political system was All About checks and balances. Relatively early-on, she had rejected the notion of hereditary monarchy. At the top of her social and political order was a Doge -- a title that means "Duke." In reality, the office was rather analogous to that of the U.S. President, except that it was for life (or retirement) and its powers decreased, rather than increased, over the centuries. Once, "election" had nominally been a matter of popular accord; in later centuries its Rube Goldberg complexity made the U.S. horse-race of debates, primaries, and the Electoral College look straightforward by comparison.
In the late 13th and early 14th century, however, this office's authority was still very real. The current Doge, Pietro Gradinego, being from the newer clans, had been the loudest of the war hawks. And, in the threadbare tradition of arrivistes everywhere, his other (ahem!) "gift" to Venetian history was the consolidation of his class's gains by shutting out everyone below them on the social ladder. Thus, only members of certain families were henceforth allowed to serve in what functioned as Venice's legislature, the Maggiore Consiglio. Already tending to oligarchy, its exclusivity was given the force of law in 1299.
Despite suppression by the police, the unrest, demonstrations, and public blood-letting continued. As Doge Gradinego's popularity plummeted, his arrogance increased. The "old guard" (which included the Querini and Tiepolo families) plotted government overthrow. For reasons unknown to history, they chose the dodgy, if dashing, Bajamonte Tiepolo as their leader.
As revolts go, this one was more than the usual let-down. Tiepolo, for one, had absolutely no desire to roll back the oligarchy: As far as can be determined, he planned to set himself and his allies up as the rulers of Venice, sweeping away centuries of constitutional safeguards.
But one of their co-conspirators lost the nerve (or stomach--it doesn't matter which) for the enterprise and had already informed on them. A wild summer storm prevented one of their three contingents from linking up with the rest. Another contingent ran into an ambush, and those who escaped had their attempts to regroup frustrated by the painters' guild (whose loyalties were certainly to the Republic, if not its Doge). More ignominiously, Bajamonte Tiepolo paused his assault at an unlucky spot by the house of a old woman who attempted to kill him by dropping a stone out her window. She killed his standard-bearer instead, but the confusion (plus the raging storm) took what wind remained out of Tiepolo's sails.
Surprisingly, the Bajamonte Tiepolo party (standard-bearer excepted) came out relatively unscathed, but only because they had the great, good sense to retreat to a section of the city more hospitable to their cause. He was sentenced to four years' exile and his house pulled down, along with that of his Querini co-conspirators*.
But freak storms and feisty old ladies aside, the Venetian government had been lucky...and they knew it. The next (and heavily secured) session of the Maggior Consiglio addressed the not-new problem of efficiently responding to sudden crises. The issue was made more poignant by the fact that the Consiglio's exclusivity--which would only increase over the years, as the sons of noble fathers born to "commoner" mothers would be barred--set off a scramble to prove eligibility...and thus swelled its ranks.
Their solution was to streamline the handling of time-sensitive business (such as rooting out conspirators) by appointing the tribunal known as the Council of Ten. (A misnomer, by the bye: The Doge plus six more elected officials brought the effective head-count up to seventeen.) True to the Venetian phobia of autocracy, checks and balances were baked in from the get-go: Terms were limited. Multiple members of the same family could not sit on the Council at the same time. To prevent a single person from wielding too much power, it had three "captains," rather than one, and their terms were fixed at a single month. Additionally, "captains" could not go out in public where they could be bribed or listen to accusations that were not vetted by the entire Council. And as the ultimate safeguard, the lifespan of the Council was set at two months.
As my Gentle Reader will doubtlessly be unsurprised to learn, that last fail-safe didn't quite work out as planned. A clause allowing for two-month extensions to its mandate was invoked again...and again...and again...and the fiction of "extension" recurred for another two dozen years until the Council's permanency was made law in 1334. Its term expired only with the Republic itself in 1797.
Do the math: An "emergency" two-month response to a specific crisis lasted very nearly half a millennium. During those five centuries, the Ten took on increasing power as, among other things, Venice's spy agency, secret police, Dept. of Defence, and diplomatic corps. Also unsurprisingly, its secrecy and utter non-accountability earned it a sinister reputation, within Venice and western Europe at large.
In fairness, the Ten's efficiency to a large degree justified their extraordinary powers. Checks and balances were kept, and even increased. Alas, these became increasingly meaningless. Two and a half centuries after permanently legalising the Council, even the Maggiore Consiglio was scarcely capable of exempting review of its own laws by the Council...and little else. As La Serenissima glided into the dolce far niente era roughly (and ignominiously) ended by Napoleon, the Ten's corruption was merely one tumour in the larger cancer eating the Republic.
Yet as much as historians so often succumb to an over-dramatic tendency to hang their story around those at the very apex of society, in this case I consider that dangerous. History is not biography, unless it's in a very collective sense. And that's what makes the events of seven hundred years ago and (for me, anyway) a continent away such a very modern tale.
- Increasing concentration of power in hands that already hold much of it
- Politicians willing to divide--even at the risk of being conquered
- Those at the top of the social pecking order arrogantly treating the state as their private property...including as a weapon in their own feuds
- Those nearer the bottom of the pecking order not uniting (and raising Hades) to stop their government from becoming a country club
- Elective wars (including a for-profit one that destablised an entire region)
- Government using a temporary crisis (self-inflicted or not) to justify a permanent power-grab
Technology, true, is occasionally a bona-fide game-changer (although, it turns out, this happens less frequently than you'd think...and certainly doesn't live up to predictions). But the human condition has been fairly immutable over the centuries. Our biggest mistake in the West has been to think of our hothouse as the world and then freak out when an outside stone smashes a window. And our second-biggest mistake is to deny that the stone bears our fingerprints (e.g. al-Quaeda, Daesh, the Taliban).
Ignorance of 13th/14th century Venetian history is perfectly understandable (unless, of course, you're a nerd that way). But ignorance of recent history is inexcusable. Most especially when we allow our soi-dissant "leaders" to let past missteps point the way further down the wrong path.
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* A somewhat ridiculous coda occurred when the Querini house was found to be co-owned by three brothers, one of which had had absolutely nothing to do with his guilty siblings. Because destroying only two-thirds of the house proved problematic, the Venetian government sensibly (and fairly) bought out his share and then razed the structure. History can be goofy like that.
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Bibliography:
- Norwich, John Julius, A History of Venice, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989
- Biography.com: http://www.biography.com/people/john-cabot-9234057#north-american-voyages
- Digplanet: http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/Council_of_Ten
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Gradenigo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ten
