182 benjamin arbel
There was even an initiative to settle Cephalonians in the new Russian
province of Crimea.213 During the following Russo-Turkish War (1778–92),
the Ionians acted as corsairs, and a Russian general settled in Venetian
Ithaca to direct their operations.214 These were on the one hand manifes-
tations of a nascent national consciousness of Greeks and, on the other,
symptoms of Venice’s limited ability to cope with such developments.
Russian intervention brought to the front ethnic issues, in which poli-
tics and religion were involved in creating a new sense of identity. The
new language of emancipation may have strengthened anti-Venetian feel-
ing among certain colonial elites, such as the restive leaders of certain
clans in Cephalonia, an issue that will be discussed below.
VII. Collective and Individual FidelitiesCommunities and Councils
“Our loyal subject(s)” ( fedele, fedeli nostri) is the term often used in
official Venetian documents when referring to the inhabitants of the
overseas colonies, and the same terms appear in petitions presented by
the colonial subjects themselves.215 Beyond the daily contacts of the latter
with Venice’s magistrates and their agents (judges, tax farmers, soldiers,
heralds, etc.), negotiation between the “loyal subjects” and Venice, which
styled itself “The Dominant” (La Dominante), was conducted in two main
forms—collectively, through the councils or other collective bodies of
the subject territories and their representatives, or individually, through
petitions presented to the Senate (through the Collegio) or the Signory.
The communal councils were essentially urban institutions, although
they generally had pretentions to represent all inhabitants of the territory
for which the town concerned constituted a political and administrative
center. Town councils existed nearly everywhere in the Venetian stato
da mar, and wherever they had not existed on a regular basis before the
Venetian takeover, Venice created them, or allowed them to develop, as
213 Viggiano, “Venezia e le isole del Levante,” pp. 768–69.
214 Miller, “The Ionian Islands,” pp. 236–37.
215 E.g., Elly Yotopoulou-Sisilianou, ed., Πρεσβείες της Βενετοκρατούμενης Κερκύρας (16ος-18ος
Αι.). Πηγή για σχεδίασμα ανασύνθεσης της Εποχής (Athens, 2002), passim. On the concept of
fidelity in the context of Venice’s stato da mar, see Karapidakis, Civis fidelis, pp. 47–82.