118 michael knapton
largely manoeuvred by influential minority groups, amid keen rivalry.62
Especially in the 17th century, a clear further expression of local elites’
power lay in many of their members’ inclination to pay taxes late and
only in part, to behave similarly in settling up after holding public posts
involving money-handling, and in their collective promptness in deviat-
ing public funds destined to social needs, e.g., in borrowing from civic
pawn-banks to cover Venetian tax demands on their cities. The general
importance of preeminence in provincial civic bodies as material support
to local elites—in licit and illicit sources of income, in protection against
heavier tax rates and de facto tolerance for under- or non-payment of
tax—became abundantly clear after 1797, when heavy direct tax imposed
by new governments was a major cause of the rapid patrimonial collapse
of many aristocratic families, though this was also due to other factors,
including their weakened inner cohesion. However, mainland nobles in
general survived these decades of change much better than Venetian
patricians.
Differences in a city’s size and distance from Venice roughly corre-
sponded at least partly to differences in the wealth and solidity of local
elites, both in dealings with Venetian authority and in relating to other
components of local society. Amidst often fanciful reconstruction of gene-
alogies, and despite prejudice and polemics by established noble families
against parvenus, there was slow but cumulatively significant long-term
turnover among the families constituting some council elites, seemingly
more evident in cities nearer Venice, like Padua, or in smaller places
like Feltre, with newer families more desirous of this recognition in the
17th century than the 18th.63 Such issues are immensely complex, how-
ever: the failure of reform of the Brescia city council in 1644 was clearly
no boost to the prestige of the Venetian city governors of the time, favor-
able to change. But during the 16th century, the numbers of both council
members and families involved had increased substantially—though at
that time a good many powerful Brescian noble families took little or no
part in council life and the office-holding connected with it.64
62 Michael Knapton, “Cenni sulle strutture fiscali nel Bresciano nella prima metà del
Settecento,” in Maurizio Pegrari, ed., La società bresciana e l’opera di Giacomo Ceruti (Bres-
cia, 1988), pp. 53–104; Paolo Ulvioni, “La nobiltà padovana nel Sei-Settecento,” Rivista Stor-
ica Italiana 104 (1992), 796–840.
63 Ulvioni, “La nobiltà padovana”; Gigi Corazzol, Cineografo di banditi su sfondo di
monti. Feltre 1634–1642 (Milan, 1997).
64 Joanne Ferraro, “Oligarchs, Protesters and the Republic of Venice: The ‘Revolution of
the Discontents’ in Brescia, 1644–1645,” Journal of Modern History 60/4 (1988), 627–53.