the terraferma state 95
holders of rural jurisdictions more or less independent of and/or antago-
nistic to urban authority, including lords and feudatories, valley or moun-
tain communities (e.g., the valleys north of Bergamo and Brescia)—all
these more thickly present in mountain areas in general and in Friuli,
where Venice inherited a feudal Parliament; higher-level contado repre-
sentative institutions—corpi territoriali—in explicit competition with
urban authority, which mostly first emerged between the late 15th and
mid-16th century.
Between them, all these local power-holders coped with the great
majority of government, producing norms, dispensing justice, and han-
dling taxation, public finance, and a myriad of other administrative tasks.
The existence of a Venetian higher authority to invoke stimulated them
to seek to alter existing balances of power between them, especially the
extent of cities’ control over their contadi, though Venetian 15th-century
decisions mostly confirmed pre-existing urban jurisdiction, particularly
strong in the Padovano, Vicentino, Veronese, and Bresciano.
By the 15th century, the Venetian patriciate was tightly defined, but
terraferma urban political elites had a looser, more composite collective
identity: prevalently aristocratic, but including newer families; mainly
city-dwelling, primarily land-owning, active in honored military and civil
professions (especially those connected with the law), but with no pre-
clusion of wealth acquired through mercantile or manufacturing activity;
strongly linked to power-holding via civic institutions, which indeed they
dominated and with whose dignity they identified, as symbolized materi-
ally by civic buildings such as those built or revamped by Palladio in 16th-
century Vicenza; also prone to express their family prestige in such forms
as urban palaces, villas and funerary monuments.
Mainland aristocratic elites’ political horizons changed sharply with
passage under Venice. The fairly clean power split between spheres of
Venetian and local government and their exclusion from the Venetian
patriciate—with rare exceptions such as some of the Savorgnan, Friu-
lan feudatories made patricians in 1385 as part of pre-conquest Venetian
diplomacy—downgraded them to a provincial sphere of power-holding.
They had limited opportunities to serve the Republic in a broader dimen-
sion: very occasionally in diplomacy, a few as judges flanking patrician
terraferma governors, some in army service and administration, and little
else; only a few pursued careers serving other rulers. Nonetheless, the
overall tone of their relations with Venice was mostly fairly harmonious,
with a strong element of mutual laissez-faire, especially once past early
15th-century uncertainty over the Venetian regime’s solidity.