72 alfredo viggiano
capable of resisting the personal attacks of a nobleman—had come to
Venice to depose in front of the Heads of the Ten. Fearing an inquest,
Pietro Malipiero had then denounced Bonzuanne to the magistracy of the
Signori di Notte: his worker had come to the capital for the purpose of kill-
ing him. The investigation conducted by the “Supreme Tribunal” would
decree the noble’s guilt, first for his act of violence, then for his calumny.
Malipiero had meanwhile fled, however, and would thus be convicted in
contumacy. A similar affair of privation would involve Agostino Donà,
tried during the year 1591.58 He was the illegitimate son of one of the most
prestigious members of the Venetian political class, the Knight of St Mark,
Alvise Donà. Agostino, who resided for extended periods on the agricul-
tural holdings in Piove di Sacco, had offended several public officials who
had been sent by the locality’s podestà to notify him of developments in
some ongoing civil cases. His show of hostility to authorities later mani-
fested itself in even more egregious ways. Crossing the town on horseback,
he had surrounded himself with a sizeable group of men armed with har-
quebuses, used “tyrannical means by demanding to be respected for his
evil deeds,” and had finally blasphemed the name of God. Not only unruly
or violent, Agostino was also a “tyrant” and “blasphemer,” qualities that
emerged in the period’s documentation to label certain components of
terraferma noble houses who committed crimes that jurists placed in the
category of the so-called enormia.59 The exemplarity of punishment, how-
ever, would clash in the above-mentioned case with the prestige of the
accused’s family name, and the vaunted impersonality of the law would
have to come to grips with the true balance of powers. Agostino Donà’s
conviction would be little more than symbolic: two years of relegation to
Zara, in Dalmatia, and a pecuniary reimbursement of the community that
had unwillingly played host to his antics.
Rather than making the patriciate more compact, the inflexible affir-
mation of republican discipline on the part of the Council of Ten widened
the fractures within it. The obligation that all Venetian noblemen observe
norms of conduct provoked an interruption of the forms of political com-
munication within that same sovereign body, the breakdown of elemen-
tary forms of institutional etiquette, of that fictive equality so important
to the Venetian myth. Such were the paradoxical consequences of the
58 ASV, Consiglio dei X, Criminali, reg, 16, c.62r.
59 Mauro Vigato, “La figura del nobile ‘tiranno’ nell’età di Lorenzo Priori,” in Giovanni
Chiodi and Claudio Povolo, eds., L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella Repubblica di
Venezia (secoli XVI–XVIII), vol. 2, Retoriche, stereotipi, prassi (Verona, 2004), pp. 495–526.