540 claudio povolo
the council of ten’s investigation ascertained how trento, from the
earliest months of his tenure, had directed his energies toward ending
what he held were widespread abuses and irregularities in most of the
institutions of city government, abuses skillfully perpetuated above all by
the class of local court personnel who acted at the edges of legality. his
invasive actions ignored the deep-rooted social and political equilibria
of the city and were also politically imprudent by avoiding any form of
mediation. in the end, this imprudence impelled the council of ten to
severely restrain his activities.59
the challenging of the podestà of bergamo symbolically represents the
state of the relationship between the ruling city and subject cities in the
final stage of the life of the republic. and it indicates indirectly the com-
plexity of the political and legal relationships/connections as they devel-
oped over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Particularly beginning in the last decades of the 16th century, the Vene-
tian legal system, as we have seen, underwent important transformations.
Legislation—at first mostly criminal and procedural but later also, to a
degree, aimed at regulating administration and civil justice—reshaped
the power relationships between the ruling and subject cities. this phe-
nomenon occurred to one degree or another in almost all the countries of
europe, but in the republic of Venice its particularly distinctive political
and ideological implications set in motion a political drama that would
not end until the fall of the republic.
the imposition of Venetian law on the various parts of its domain was
never explicit and took place, for the most part, within a framework of
formal respect for the ancient institutional systems and without any real
involvement on the part of the subject ruling groups. the political pre-
dominance of the Venetian patriciate and of the republican institutions of
the great ruling city remained an insurmountable barrier to such involve-
ment, despite an intense process of cooptation of wealthy terraferma
families into the Venetian patriciate during the last two decades of the
republic. Venice, the ancient city-state with the face of a republic, none-
theless had to assert its authority, although reluctantly, over a consider-
able part of its dominions, where a myriad of large and small republics
59 claudio Povolo, “il processo a ottavio trento, cartina di tornasole dei conflitti sociali,”
in M. cattini and M. a. romani, eds., Storia economica e sociale di Bergamo. Il tempo della
Serenissima. Settecento, età del cambiamento (bergamo, 2006), pp. 289–90.