60 alfredo viggiano
opinions are only briefly mentioned; and the precise accounts of the votes
for and against the proposals put forward certify the success of an elegant
institutional minuet. The personalized versions of 15th- and 16th-century
diarists restore to us the fullness and variety of the interest and positions
in play.
Of particular interest is the question of what we might refer to as
“republican patriotism,” and of which we can identify two main trajec-
tories. On the one hand, there developed a model of a “written repub-
licanism,” distinguished by a loyalty to the letter of the constitution of
the padri (fathers).22 Old normative legislation and archaic sentences of
the medieval courts were dusted off and reintegrated into contemporary
political communication in order to justify proposals of law and legitimize
their authors. During the second half of the 15th century, this tendency
to create a coherent primitive republicanism was already evident in the
proclamations that accompanied the publication of laws by the Council of
Ten in matters of decorum and urban security (the regulation of the role
of the Capitano del Consiglio and the police that served him) and electoral
systems (the procedures determined by placing a ballotta for elections
to office so as to avoid fraud). The boni et antiqui mores [the wise and
ancient customs] evoked by such laws worked toward the construction of
the fundamenta status nostri [the foundations of our state]. It was during
the lively debates that occurred within the Council of Ten or the Maggior
Consiglio that the lexicon of a coherent power was forged. In the mid-
15th century, the search for roots of Venice’s origins in the distant past
aimed to legitimize the Venetian political class. Genealogical research and
chronicles recounting family histories, coherent and placid, would accom-
pany the process of mythological construction of the elite as part of an
operation that was consciously executed. The intentional erasure of the
darker pages of this history, the ambiguities that very same tradition had
passed on regarding the “sacred” and uncontaminated origins of the city,
the stories of internal conflict between the 9th and 12th centuries, and in
the very act which baptized the patriciate—the serrata [closing] of the
Maggior Consiglio—would characterize the construction of a collective
identity.
22 John G.A. Pocock’s categories can be usefully transferred onto the terrain of republi-
can history. See his The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law. A study of English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957; Cambridge 2004).