56 alfredo viggiano
a crypto-oligarchy. This was constituted by the Procurators of St Mark, the
Council of Ten and its Zonta, and the Savi del Consiglio.13 It was among
this restricted group of individuals, often rotated from one of these organ-
isms to another, that choices were made on the strategies to adopt in for-
eign and domestic policy, the instruments suitable for maintaining public
order and administering justice, and fiscal policy and tax collection.
Domenico Morosini, a protagonist in Venetian political life in the 1480s
and 1490s, pointed to the fracture that had been created within the gov-
erning class in his pamphlet entitled De bene instituta re publica. The clas-
sic interpretation of this process provided by Gaetano Cozzi demonstrates
not only how those magistracies in charge of political legitimization, like
the Avogaria, lost power and authority but how other prestigious bodies
that played a fundamental role in the construction of the 15th-century
state and in the expansion of the terraferma and the Dominio da mar
would also see their prerogatives come under increasing scrutiny.14 The
Senate, as one member of that important council would write in 1526,
was convoked “in order to bore the senators with the reading of letters
of no value.” In 1529, another senator quipped that “when the bell of the
Pregadi rings, the Council should come together to make important deci-
sions instead of doing nothing, such as happens at present.”15 The accusa-
tions we have just read are likely excessive and ought be read more as a
symptom of the growing unease in a part of the patriciate vented through
the bitter tones of criticism, rather than as an objective description of the
spleen-like components of an institution on the brink of obsolescence. In
those same years, Donato Giannotti, a Florentine partisan of republican
government in exile in Venice, would write in his dialogue entitled Delle
Repubblica de’ Viniziani that “in this council all the important questions
of the Republic are dealt with: the decision to go to war, peace treaties,
13 On the increase of the Council of Ten’s responsibilities following the territorial
expansion of republican power, see Michael Knapton, “Il Consiglio dei X nel governo della
Terraferma: un’ipotesi interpretativa per il secondo Quattrocento,” in Amelio Tagliaferri,
ed., Atti del Convegno Venezia e la Terraferma attraverso le relazioni dei Rettori (Milan,
1981), pp. 235–60.
14 Gaetano Cozzi, “Domenico Morosini e il De bene instituta re publica,” Studi
veneziani 12 (1970), 436–38.
15 Gaetano Cozzi, “Venezia dal Rinascimento all’età barocca,” in Gino Benzoni and
Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Storia di Venezia. Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima,
14 vols (Rome, 1992–2002), vol. 6 (1994): Dal Rinascimento al Barocco, ed. Gino Benzoni
and Gaetano Cozzi, p. 14.