family and society 327
the family’s patrimony. With the law of 1644, the limit for the dowries of
the “nobiles nostri” reached the sum of 20,000 ducats, with no reference
to other social classes.19 However, the limits imposed by law were rarely
respected by the richest patricians and by those members of the bourgeoi-
sie who aspired to forge alliances with the governing class.
the main preoccupation of the sumptuary laws was to limit the squan-
dering of wealth on the part of the governing class, and it is significant
that, between the 15th and the 17th centuries, a transition took place from
an open definition subdivided according to social classes to a restrictive
definition that included only patricians in the law, as if the dowries of
bourgeois women who married noblemen were completely unregulated.
in fact, before the 17th-century annexations, the only way to forge alli-
ances in the governing class was to give a daughter in marriage to a mem-
ber of the patriciate. a case in point is the merchant Giacomo Ragazzoni,
whose nine daughters married patrician men at the end of the 16th cen-
tury, with dowries amounting in total to 130,000 ducats, not to mention,
at the beginning of the 17th century, the marriage between Francesco Gri-
mani and anna maria Bergonzi, daughter of a silk merchant, with a dowry
of 50,000 ducats, or the marriage between Girolamo corner and caterina
tilmans, the daughter of a dutch merchant, with a dowry of 44,000
ducats.20 marital alliances proved to be particularly useful in the rare
cases in which access to the patriciate was open, and many of the families
that were able to purchase the title between 1645 and 1718 were already
related by marriage with patrician families. For example, when the Zon
family asked for and obtained admission into the Maggior Consiglio in
1651, they provided a list of 16 marriages contracted with patrician families
between the 14th and the 16th centuries. even for the period following the
annexations, newly annexed families brought significant sums of money
to ancient families in the form of dowries. this was only one of many
expense categories that newly annexed people faced, beginning with the
disbursement of 100,000 ducats that allowed access to the coveted title of
patrician. in many cases, the accumulation of expenditures was fatal to
the budget of these new families.21
19 chojnacki, Women and Men; Bellavitis, Identité.
20 lucio Pezzolo, “Sistema di valori e attività economica a Venezia, 1530–1630,” in Simo-
netta cavaciocchi, ed., L’impresa. Industria commercio banca, secc. XIII–XVIII (Florence,
1991), pp. 981–88; Hunecke, Il patriziato; maartje Van Gelder, Trading Places. The Nether-
landish Merchants in Early Modern Venice (leiden/Boston, 2009).
21 dorit Raines, “la dogaressa erudita. loredana marcello mocenigo tra sapere e
potere,” in letizia arcangeli and Susanna Peyronel, eds., Donne di potere nel Rinascimento