politics and constitution 55
time-honored prerogative did not make their way to Venice. On the one
hand, we run into decisions that seem determined by a will to defend the
autonomies and privileges of public bodies and particular institutions. On
the other, numerous other verdicts appear motivated by the intention to
affirm choices of public order in function with the interests of the capital.
Thus, the sentences of the Avogaria mix authority and legality, suspension
of the system of constitutional guarantees/state of exception and the daily
administrative routine, and thus connote the particular flexibility of the
Venetian political system.
This bipolar oscillation between the “mano regia” and an inclination
towards mediation, a trait also evidenced by other contemporary state
realities, led multiple subjects to put forward their disputes and repre-
sent their rights precisely because of the substantial unpredictability of
action on the part of the central power. Reading the interventions of
the avogadori allows us to watch in great detail the law in action, via
the criteria of inclusion and exclusion in the constitutional system for
specific subjects: in a word, the procedures of legitimation. Normative
uncertainty naturally brought about appeals for the recognition of spe-
cific rights, promoting successive adjustments, important hybridizations
between juridical cultures, the formation of compromise, and the search
for equilibrium between the city on the lagoon and local centers. Let us
choose an example from the bountiful extant documentation: in 1492 the
avogadore Pietro Balbi received a complaint put forward by the men of
the rural community of San Felice, in the district of Treviso. A mandate
of the Venetian governor of Treviso—which in their opinion constituted
an infraction of the “customs” they had enjoyed since time immemorial
regarding the pasturing of animals on common lands—ought to have
be considered as violating the law, honesty and equity ( jus, honestas,
et equitatem). It was this tripartite and stereotypical formula that often
accompanied the motivations that the very same avogadori attached to
their decisions from the 14th century on (together with other associated
contra Deum, jus et justitiam or contra Deum, justitiam, et equitatem). Here
we must note the appropriation by legal procurators of local interests of
the lexicon of Venetian authority. Thus we see a fusion of a generic and
universalistic idiom, juridical and abstract, with contingent interests, and
which was equally respected by components of the Venetian councils and
the well-off inhabitants of the countryside of Treviso.
By the last decade of the 15th century and the first of the 16th, many
observers of Venetian politics were already underlining the emergence of