536 claudio povolo
forcefully in their dominions.51 criminal jurisdiction, as we have seen, was
substantially modified, and in civil justice the magistracies of the ruling
city became more attractive. tensions with the subject cities and their
ruling classes became inevitable and also led to showdowns, as in the case
of the interdict.52 Most importantly, in the terraferma the Venetian legal
system interfered with that of the subject cities by adding laws and espe-
cially legal precedents that undermined the ius commune and customs.
the terraferma legal system both expressed and upheld the class-based
society centered on honor and privilege. thus, as that legal system weak-
ened, the time-honored patronage and friendship relationships centered
on local nobilities and their powerful lineages weakened as well. at the
same time, Venetian patricians stepped in with their political privileges
to extended their own influence by strengthening patronage relationships
with the other social classes of the terraferma. during the 17th century,
every settlement of any size had privileged relationships with protectors,
influential Venetian patricians, who primarily served as mediators with
the Venetian magistracies. in this way, through patronage relationships,
the importance of the piccola patria [small homeland] paradoxically was
to grow in an ideological sense, although with different political relation-
ships than those which had characterized the early phase of the creation
of the Venetian territorial state.
in the republic of Venice, the legal and political transformations begun
in the final decades of the 16th century were thus destined, in the cen-
turies to come, to influence the very structure of the republican state in
unprecedented ways.
A Scene from the 18th CenturyA Restless Youth
the village of Paluzza in carnia (northern friuli), 9 september 1775. on
this day in september, community leaders met to address a delicate
issue that could no longer be put off. they needed to deal with Pietro
englaro, a village youth who had long shown a marked impatience with
51 Michael Knapton, “tra dominante e dominio (1517–1630),” in gaetano cozzi, Michael
Knapton, and giovanni scarabello, La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna, vol. 1: Dal
1517 alla fine della Repubblica (turin, 1992), pp. 429–65.
52 gaetano cozzi, “Venezia nello scenario europeo (1517–1699),” in cozzi, Knapton, and
scarabello, eds., vol. 1: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica, p. 183.