110 michael knapton
money-raising to pay for war: in vast state sales of common property pre-
viously used by rural communities; in admitting new families—including
many of mainland origin—to the Venetian patriciate in return for dona-
tions of 100,000 ducats each; as well as in other fiscal and financial expe-
dients. Despite such demands, the mainland experienced no significant
form of violent protest during the central decades of the 17th century,
unlike events elsewhere in Italy and Europe, though what this difference
means in terms of political relationships within the state—both then and
later—is not wholly clear: well-gauged calculation by Venetian authority
of what it could ask for, and how to ask? So conciliatory a stance as to not
assert itself? For the first half of the 18th century, furthermore, contingent
necessity connected with mainland defense was much in evidence as a
result of the European wars of succession. Costly mobilization to sup-
port Venice’s neutral stance failed to mask the terraferma’s vulnerability
to attack, especially during the war of the Spanish succession (1701–13),
when the transit and presence of campaigning armies wrought consider-
able material damage in the western and central provinces.
The combination of eastern wars and commitment to mainland defense
made the one hundred years or so after 1645 a sort of belated “iron century”
for Venice. Despite some innovation in government practice in earlier
decades, only between the 1750s and the 1770s did sectors of the Venetian
patriciate have the political energy to contemplate wide-ranging reform of
government, in the mainland and elsewhere, stimulated by knowledge of
similar debate and action in other Italian and European states.
In institutional terms, innovation in mainland government from 1630
onwards largely consisted of empirical development of competence over
the provinces by magistracies in the capital, whose action overlaid and
undermined that of both patrician governors and local terraferma insti-
tutions, though eschewing explicitly declared revision of power-sharing
between Venetian government and its subjects as established at the
moment of annexation. Moreover, the dynamics behind the evolution of
central institutions dealing with the mainland, as well as the balance (or
imbalance) between Venetian authority in the capital and in the provinces,
responded largely to political criteria internal to the patriciate. Tensions
and dynamics within the patriciate over issues of power-sharing, though
already important before 1630, exerted an increasing influence on the
Scarabello, “Il Settecento,” in Cozzi, Knapton, and Scarabello, La Repubblica di Venezia
nell’età moderna, vol. 2: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica (Turin, 1992), pp. 551–681.