100 michael knapton
expanded government activity.28 Cautious indications of some growth
have been given above, especially affecting the areas nearest Venice, but
equally evident, and successful especially for more distant provinces, was
local institutions’ defense of their prerogatives against interference. These
contrasting trends were manifest in the often contradictory handling of
appeal justice, complicated by different policy priorities, rivalry, and ill-
defined or overlapping competence between organs of government. This
margin of uncertainty contributed considerably to the periodic despatch
to Venice of mainland representatives, especially by city councils seek-
ing to defend prerogatives, though central government sought to limit
it. Linked to this was subjects’ development of patronage networks for
lobbying in Venice, often involving patricians who had served in domin-
ion posts.
As already indicated, the more general crisis of the Venetian state
subsequent to Agnadello had a conspicuous terraferma strand: the unex-
pected fragility of control over the mainland, difficulty of reconquest,
and local elites’ dubious loyalty. Venice’s recovery from Agnadello as a
second-rate power in a Habsburg-dominated peninsula gradually brought
closer attention to mainland government in general, which was part of a
slow but progressive shift of the overall political and economic balance
of the whole state towards the mainland—even though it maintained a
high profile in long distance maritime trade until the early 17th century
and a much longer-lasting commitment to a sea empire stretching as far
as the Aegean.29
An absolute priority in mainland government was adapting military
policy to a more secure defensive posture, primarily via progressive
renewal of fortifications from Agnadello down to the building of the for-
tress town of Palmanova on the northeastern frontier, begun in 1593.30
Though permanent armed forces, especially cavalry, had lower priority
than previously, fortifications and their needs entailed higher expenditure
28 Differing emphases in Grubb, Firstborn of Venice, and Viggiano, Governanti e
governati.
29 Though not cited repeatedly, Michael Knapton, “Tra Dominante e dominio (1517–
1630),” in Gaetano Cozzi and Michael Knapton, La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna,
vol. 2: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica (Turin, 1992), pp. 201–549, has been used for much
of this third section.
30 Mallett and Hale, The Military Organization; Luciano Pezzolo, L’oro dello Stato.
Società, finanza e fisco nella Repubblica veneta del secondo ’500 (Treviso, 1990); and Peter
January and Michael Knapton, “The Demands Made on Venetian Terraferma Society for
Defence in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Ateneo Veneto 194 (2007), 25–115.