the anthropology of venice 491
customs alien to the Venetians.10 everywhere in italy dialects divided
people by locality and by class, but in friuli linguistic diversity was pro-
nounced. There were a few german- and seventy-three Slovene-speaking
villages, which constituted a significant linguistic minority. even within
the majority friulan population there were distinctive linguistic strata.
The mass of uneducated peasants and artisans spoke only friulan, which
was indecipherable to outsiders and did not give its native speakers easy
access to italian. Some better-educated peasants, such as the now-famous
heretic miller Menocchio, knew Veneto, which allowed them to read ital-
ian books.11 only a tiny group of the highly educated knew Tuscan and/
or latin. in his 1484 translation into the vernacular of the Constitutions of
the Patria of Friuli, the humanist pietro capretto analyzed the linguistic
problem of the appropriate vernacular for friuli. he wanted to choose a
language that would be accessible to most of the people who might need
to consult the constitutions. he rejected both Tuscan, because “it is too
obscure to the friulan people,” and friulan, because “not everyone speaks
it in friuli and because it is hard to write and understand, read, and pro-
nounce, especially by those who do not know the friulan vocabulary and
accent.”12 Thus, unlike the cosmopolitan Venetians, whose language had
become the lingua franca of merchants across the Mediterranean, the iso-
lated friulans could not even communicate effectively with one another.
At la Motta di livenza, the first friulan town the Sanudo party vis-
ited, Marin described the small castle and 50 cottages around it. outside
the walls there were 31 villages under la Motta’s jurisdiction—16 under
the laws of Treviso, 15 under those of friuli. here is one of the first clues
to the complexities of the political anthropology of friuli. The itinerant
auditori nuovi, who were politicians untrained in law, faced a mission
fraught with contradictions. Venice itself employed what the late gaetano
cozzi called “oracular law,” which paid little attention either to statute
or precedent and was highly subject to political calculations and graft.13
10 Muir, Mad Blood Stirring, p. 16; edward Muir, “la patria del friuli e della repubblica
di Venezia,” in caroline callard, elisabeth crouzet-pavan, and Alain Tallon, eds., Usage de
l’histoire et pratiques politiques en Italie, du Moyen Age aux temps modernes: autour de la
notion de réemploi (paris, forthcoming).
11 carlo ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller,
trans. John and Anne c. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980).
12 Costituzioni della Patria del Friuli nel volgarizzamento di Pietro Capretto del 1484 e
nell’edizione latina del 1565, ed. Anna gobessi and ermanno orlando, intro. study giorgio
Zordan (rome, 1998), pp. 103–04.
13 gaetano cozzi, Repubblica di Venezia e stati italiani: Politica e giustizia dal secolo XVI
al secolo XVIII (Turin, 1982), pp. 217–318.