religious life 403
political experience who placed this experience at the service of Rome. To
a Republic that gave its best men to the Church, the Church responded
by making them saints and respected cardinals and selecting from within
the Venetian ruling class a veritable genealogy of popes (five Venetians
ascended to the throne of st Peter between the 15th and 18th centuries).52
- Venice against Rome: 1509 and 1606
The public face of religion in the Venetian Republic, however, also bears
a different interpretation from that proposed in the preceding paragraphs.
This alternative view rests above all, though not exclusively, on two impor-
tant dates in the city’s history: 1509 and 1606. in the relationship between
Venice and Rome there were other analogous moments to those in 1509
and 1606, but in these two years the antagonism between the city of the
doges and the city of the popes manifested itself more clearly as a conflict
of religious, not political, nature and as a structural, rather than a contin-
gent, one. The Republic rose up against Rome inasmuch as it was “another
Rome”: it claimed, that is, an innate charisma conferred upon it from on
high, and it generally opposed the papacy in the name of a higher author-
ity, that of Christ and the gospels. The events of 1509 and 1606 showed
Venice to be the only italian state capable of confronting the popes in the
name of Christian values.
in 1509 a league of powers which included the principal european states
(france, spain, and the empire) inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the
Venetians which has gone down in history as the rout (rotta) of Agnadello
(14 May). The definitive collapse of their state, which the Venetians had
believed imminent, was avoided, but the terraferma state was taken apart
and repartitioned, at least for a few years, among the victors, while Vene-
tian expansion in the italian peninsula was stopped forever. The plan to
expand the state of st Mark over much of italy—there are good reasons
to believe such a plan was conceived and initiated—thus suddenly came
to an end. The ruling class never forgot the lesson of 1509.53
52 gregory Xii (1406–15), eugenius iV (1431–47), Paul ii (1464–71), Alexander Viii (1689–
91), Clement Xiii (1758–69).
53 in the synthetic works of Venetian history, 1509 does not generally represent a date
which marks an era. i believe the importance of this collective trauma has been under-
estimated. A reading of Marin sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, ed. Rinaldo fulin et al.,
58 vols (Venice, 1879–1903), vol. 8, cols. 247–332, esp. cols. 279, 300, 301, restores the sense
of catastrophe that pervaded the city and its subject territories. All of Venetian histori-
ography tends to make light of the trauma of 1509, even federico seneca’s quite specific
work, Venezia e papa Giulio II (Padua, 1962). for the conviction of many italian political