54 alfredo viggiano
emitted by the Giudici di Petizion. The presidents of that prestigious court
of appeals had established that a member of the same tribunal, Davide
Contarini, could participate in the vote. But this decision, according to
the members of the Avogaria, contradicted the letter of that archaic decree
which ordered that judges or officials belonging to the families of women
involved in cases discussed in the jurisdictional seats to which they had
been nominated could not collaborate in “resolving those disputes.”11
The ever-increasing interventions of the Avogaria in the years 1440–60
represent a true turning point in Venetian political history. The apex of
the constitutional system—the doge, the Provveditori di San Marco, the
ducal councilors, the Savi del Consiglio—thus came to be subjected to a
form of continuous supervision. In 1453, for example, the avogadori were
able to block an order from the Doge to the Giudici di Petizion. The high-
est representative of the republican constitution had tried with that act to
impede the execution of a sentence in the dispute between the brothers
Antonio and Tommaso Malpiero. A chapter of the Promissione, the col-
lection of norms accumulated over time that delineated the rights and
responsibilities of the doge, ordered him to collaborate and favor the exe-
cution of the sentences he was called to countersign, and not to prolong
the course of justice.12
We have mentioned the defense of the law. Leze might at first appear a
term both clear and neutral, but if we stop to consider the ways in which
it was translated, the multiple realities this term might encompass (i.e.,
collections of statutes of the subject cities, customary laws, and a gener-
ally regulative idea of justice, charged with ethical and religious mean-
ings) and the close identification of leze and the defense of legality with
the republican constitution, that first and oversimplified perception is
replaced by the awareness of a far more complex system.
Colleges of jurists from the principal cities of the terraferma; Cretan
nobles’ families detaining seigniorial powers and capabilities of territorial
control (the feudati), and the family clans with seigniorial powers in the
Patria of the Friuli; notaries and syndics of the lesser communities of the
stato da terra and stato da mar; rectors and students of the University of
Padua; the Jewish communities—there was no juridical subject possess-
ing some degree of authority whose complaints for the interruption of a
11 Ibid., reg. 3648 (I), c.63r, 21/III/1432.
12 Ibid., reg. 3650 (I), c.72v, 11.VI.1453.