76 alfredo viggiano
court and shifted their interests, clientele, and wealth from the ancient
republican capital to the center of Christianity.
In response to the process of growing marginalization in the context of
the Italian and European states, the Republic, beginning in the mid-17th
century, would invent its own peculiar inclination that we might define as
micro-imperialist, first during the war of Candia (1645) and subsequently
in the course of the two campaigns in the Morea (1685–99 and 1714–18).
In the context of Mediterranean tensions and the claim of new territo-
ries to occupy broadcast in this case as well, by a well-oiled propaganda
machine, Venice put forward its candidacy as bastion of anti-Ottoman
resistance, not only though the exercise of military virtues but also thanks
to the protection offered to its “Greek Orthodox” subjects. From this
moment forward, it would be on this complex issue of Venice’s overseas
empire that a part of the republican body would attempt to reconstruct
its image. Diverse and evasive identities thus reappeared within a class
that even by external observers—travelers, ambassadors, polemicists/
journalists, great intellectuals—was now recognized and represented as
“plural” and contradictory.66 The internal demographic crisis—from the
circa 2500 members of the Maggior Consiglio at the outset of the 16th
century to little more than 1000 at the end of the 18th century67—would
make such internal ruptures even more obvious. It was a crisis of sub-
stance as well of image that would strike, by the turn of the 18th century,
perhaps even the most prestigious function of the Republic which Vene-
tian boasted they themselves “invented”: the embassies.68
III. Reforms and Enlightenment: “une question mal posée”?It should be remembered that the two politico-intellectual attitudes I have
emphasized—the intransigence of Sarpi and his supporters and the cri-
tique coming from within the system—reappeared in the second half of
66 David Wotton, “Ulysses Bound? Venice and the Idea of Liberty from Howell to
Hume,” in David Wotton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty and Comercial Society, 1649–1776
(Stanford, 1994), pp. 341–67.
67 Volker Hunecke, Der venezianische Adel am Ende der Republik 1646–1797. Demogra-
phie, Familie, Haushalt (Tübingen, 1995).
68 Donald Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” in John R. Hale,
ed., Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), pp. 174–96; Andrea Zannini, “Economic and Social
Aspects of the Crisis of Venetian Diplomacy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,”
in Daniel Frigo, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplo-
matic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 109–46.