As Europe entered the year 1600, the expansion of global naval commerce had precipitated the shifting of economic power from the Mediterranean and overland Asiatic trade routes to the Atlantic shipping lanes. The Republic of Venice, which had evolved from a Byzantine outpost to dominate Mediterranean trade since the First Crusade, saw its predominant position circumvented by the rise of Portuguese, Dutch and English sea trade into India and Asia and the growth of colonialism in the Americas. Venice would gamely cling to independence for two more centuries, turning increasingly toward the Italian mainland to try to boost declining revenues that reduced its military might and political clout. But while the Venetian Republic ceased to exist when Napoleon’s 1797 conquest of the city finally ended twelve centuries of self-rule, its legacy as the prototype for modern democratic governance lives on to this day.
Legend pegs the founding of Venice on March 25, 421 CE, and the city was originally under the authority of the Exarch of Ravenna before becoming a Byzantine province in the 8th century. As Venice’s influence as Europe’s preeminent market city grew over the next four centuries, it gradually earned greater independence from Constantinople in late 9th century before taking over large sections of the Byzantine capital in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade in 1204.[1] As they consolidated their new colonial interests in Crete, Cyprus and other formerly Byzantine lands, the Venetians also reformed their government to provide for greater popular control. The governmental structures of the Venetians for the last 500 years of the republic’s existence would look fairly familiar to citizens in a modern democracy.
The Venetian Republic provided one of the earliest examples of the separation of church and state by a modern government. As French ambassador Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaie observed in the 1677 English translation of his Histoire du Gouvernement de Venise:
The Ecclesiasticks as well of the Nobles as Populace, are excluded from all Office, and uncapable of being of any publick Council, though the Bishop and Curats of that City were admitted into the Councils before the Reformation 1298. But this Regulation shuts the door upon all Enterprizes from the Court of Rome in temporal matters.[2]
The clergy, the Venetians recognized, “have relation to another government, viz. the Pontificall.”[3] By preventing the clergy — and excluding, as Amelot de La Houssaie later notes, even those with filial or fraternal ties to Catholic cardinals — from holding office, post-Byzantine Venice was taking conscious steps to prevent future outside influence in the affairs of government. While still spiritually linked with Catholicism, the Venetians did not allow themselves to become subservient to Rome. In their political separation from the clergy, Venice successfully managed to mitigate the influence of the church in political affairs.
The Venetian system of government was designed to separate legislative and executive powers, which were assigned not to one person but to separate committees. The Doge (“duke” in the Venetian dialect), the elected leader of the Republic, was in reality “a shadow of a King… [which] has more of the Name than Authority.”[4] Accountable to other sectors of the government structure, the Venetian system provided checks and balances that “cut off all wayes he might possibly take to make himself absolute.”[5] The real power in the Venetian government resided not in the Doge’s grasp but in the Grand Council and the Senate and the various subcommittees embodied within both larger groups.
This division of legislative powers provided the ability for both the nobility and the common public to have a voice in the operation of the Venetian government. The Grand Council, a weekly meeting attended by more than 2000 members of the Venetian nobility, was granted the “Authority to make Laws, or abolish them, to elect Magistrates, and other inferior Councils.”[6] The Senate, composed of 120 representatives of the general populace, was charged with the other legislative operations of government: signing treaties and declaring war, controlling the operations of the military, levying taxes and tariffs, and assigning the value to the currency. Other councils and authorities were in place, much like the standing committees in modern legislatures, and the executive functions of the government were divided amongst them to further delegate and disperse the power inherent in the management of the state.
Unlike other feudal systems, where titular claims were more often than not a lifetime stake, membership in the Grand Council and Senate was reelected annually, inuring the representatives “to Moderation by the continual vicissitude of Obedience and Command. For,” as Amelot de La Houssaie noted, “if they grow proud and insolent in annual employments, what would they do were they to enjoy them for life?”[7] Because of the system’s structure, with term lengths and balances in place, no person or class could seize absolute power.
The laws within the Venetian system further served a populist function in regards to taxation. “In the particular Government of the City,” wrote Venetian clergyman Paulo Sarpi in a posthumously-published treatise, “’tis an excellent Custom to lay the Impositions as well upon the Nobility, as the rest of the Citizens.”[8] In contrast to other contemporary feudal societies elsewhere in Europe, where the nobility was expected to offer military rather than monetary assistance, the Venetian system of impartial and general taxation prevented an armed class of citizens from disrupting the balance within the system. Most feudal contemporaries were destabilized by the pretenses of a singular authoritarian figurehead and a warrior class that often had its own ulterior interests. By putting the financial burden on the entire population the Venetians created a more cohesive and stable society that shared in the fiscal burden of the state without the internal threats posed by militant nobility.
This universal form of taxation allowed for the growth of a large state treasury, prompting the state to develop a thriving military industry — which has become a hallmark of the modern state. The growth of the Arsenal allowed Venice to build a massive naval force. In a single year, 1570, the Arsenal was able to produce “150 light Gallies, 11 great Gallies, 1 Galeon, and 25 great ships.”[9] The republic’s navy had grown to 3000 galleys by the mid-17th century, and the republic also kept an Armory which could provision 1500 men with munitions and was consistently updated with the latest military technology.[10] With a strong navy and a policy of hiring mercenary condottieri to fight land wars, the Venetians ensured that they would have sufficient force to deal with any conflict. Coupled with its strategically defensible location in the Adriatic, Venice used its military might to keep naval shipping lanes open and expand its imperial presence through the eastern Mediterranean.
But while Venice possessed a strong military force, the republic was more inclined to turn to diplomacy than militancy to solve disputes that threatened its security. The 13th century Doge Pietro Ziani, quoted in the Altino Chronicle, set the tone for Venetian diplomatic relations with the dictum, “War we can always have if we want it; peace we should zealously seek, and keep when found.”[11] Rather than engaging in combat with Sultan Muhammad VII of Granada to open the shipping lanes through the Strait of Gibraltar in 1398, for instance, the Venetian government ordained:
that the captain of the said galleys shall, if it should appear to be proper, go with the said galleys to Malaga, and, unless the ruler is absent, he should present to the sultan a selection of the merchandise on the galleys… they should procure a safe conduct from the said Sultan of Granada for the galleys and ships, and the merchandise from our parts for a greater amount of time.[12]
Venice recognized that, for all the military might it possessed, its republic was far more dependent on the retention of commercial supremacy than flexing its muscles in battle; “alwaies with greater regard and reckoning [they] applied their minds to the maintenance of peace than the glorie of warres.”[13] Because of this, diplomacy rather than militancy became the defining trait in the republic’s foreign dealings.
In many ways, the Republic of Venice would lay the foundation for the democracies that have increasingly come to define the modern era. With its separation of church and state, the checks and balances and the division of power within the structure of the government, a system of common taxation, and a strong standing military (retained as a last resort should diplomacy fail), Venetians were governed in a fashion that would not look too unfamiliar to an American citizen in the 21st century.
[1] “Venice”, in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.)
[2] Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaie, The History of the Government of Venice (London: John Starkey, 1677), 18.
[3] James Howell, A Survay of the Signorie of Venice, of Her Admired Policy, and Method of Government (London: Richard Lowndes, 1651), 7.
[4] Sieur de La Haye, The Policy and Government of the Venetians Both in Civil and Military Affairs (London: John Starkey, 1671), 11.
[5] La Haye, 13.
[6] Amelot de La Houssaie, 16.
[7] Amelot de La Houssaie, 31.
[8] Paolo Sarpi, Advice Given to the Republick of Venice How They Ought to Govern Themselves Both at Home and Abroad, To Have Perpetual Dominion, trans. William Aglionby (London: Christopher Nobbes, 1693), 3.
[9] Jean Gailhard, The Present State of the Republick of Venice as to the Government, Laws, Forces, Riches, Manners, Customes, Revenue, and Territory of That Common-Wealth (London: John Starkey, 1669), 61.
[10] Howell, 5-6.
[11] John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 147-148.
[12] Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato misti, reg. 44 (copia), fol. 99r, 15 January 1398, trans. Eleanor A. Congdon, in Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 90.
[13] Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Sir Lewis Lewkenor (London: John Windet, 1599), 15.
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