52 alfredo viggiano
initial and elementary duty of controlling the law that had been entrusted
to these magistrates, many other responsibilities would subsequently be
added over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Sanudo recounts the procedures, already quite formalized, for their
interventions. The college of the three avogadori could intromettere
[introduce an appeal] into the government council which seemed most
suitable to the typology of the case: the Quarantia civile or the Quarantia
criminale—courts of justice composed of 40 nobles each, destined during
the course of the 15th century to become state’s highest courts of appeal;
the Senate or Consiglio de’ Pregadi—the principal Venetian legislative
organ at the center of the production of norms regarding foreign and
domestic policy, civil, and military; the Minor Consiglio—a restricted and
elite body represented by the doge’s councilors, six nobles nominated by
the Senate; or the Maggior Consiglio—composed, instead, of all the nobles
who had reached their majority. To introduce the discussion of a contro-
versial case in one or the other of these sites of power did not constitute
an indifferent or merely technical choice. The choice of whether to debate
among an elite group of wise fathers of the patria or, rather, in a plenary
assembly of all the components of the ruling class a case of the corrup-
tion of a magistrate or the presumed arbitrariness of a rector’s verdict, to
intervene in the proceedings of the attribution of an ecclesiastical ben-
efice, or in the criteria of admission to the nobility, to judge as formally or
substantially unconstitutional a decree of the Serenissima Signoria, or of
any other sovereign institution: this was already in and of itself a political
decision. It meant opting for publicity and civic debate in the decision-
making process instead of secrecy; preferring the vertical communication
of political “news” among the roughly 2500 members of the patriciate to
the arcana imperii, the application of a sort of “reason of state” deposited
in a restricted nucleus of oracles of the law.
The history of these magistrates might be used as a reasonable measure
of changes in the constitution and within the patrician class, and it was
precisely in the 15th century that the role of this magistracy took center
stage in the political and constitutional history of Venice. The demographic
growth of the patriciate and the new demands of government for the stato
da terra and da mar would hand the Avogaria new responsibilities and
jurisdiction with respect to those it had originally held.9 Decrees of the
9 Regarding the repression of crime within the city and the typologies of crimes, see
Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).