religious life 381
diocese of Castello. This territorial configuration of the Venetian patri-
archate would remain substantially unchanged during the following
centuries.3
The church that giustiniani and his successors would lead and reform
had a political, social, and cultural physiognomy all its own. indeed, a
multitude of factors rendered the patriarchal curia’s operations both con-
stant and politically influential: Venice’s importance on the international
scene, the presence in the city of non-Catholic communities, significant
immigration, the close links between the patriarchs and the governing
class, the exceptional juridical and humanistic culture of the heads of the
Venetian Church, and, not least, the more or less ongoing tension between
the Serenissima and the papacy, which led to a reluctance on the part of
the ruling class to appeal to Rome in matters spiritual.
The role of patriarch, as that of bishop before it, was filled almost exclu-
sively by members of the Venetian nobility, which the pope generally
chose from a list proposed by the Venetian senate, though at times the
patriarch was directly nominated by the Republic and only confirmed by
Rome, and at others simply imposed by the Roman pontiff. Most of the
candidates were ecclesiastics, especially since the few laymen proposed
had to be consecrated in Rome following their nomination. Before assum-
ing their post, these men had frequently undertaken political and diplo-
matic service for the Republic.
With its choice of patriarch, the Serenissima marked out its political
coordinates in relation to the Apostolic see: it could even express the ide-
alized aspiration of a reunified Venetian Church under its own auspices by
choosing as patriarch the primicerio, head of the ducal church.4 Though a
member and an expression of the Venetian nobility, the patriarch was not,
however, subordinate to it. The ruling class, for its part, maintained an
instinctive mistrust for the head of the Venetian Church and to all nobles
who chose to dedicate themselves to an ecclesiastical career, suspected
of serving the papacy to the detriment of the Republic’s interests.5 such a
dynamic materialized even when the primicerio himself was head of the
3 Bruno Bertoli, “introduzione,” in Bertoli, ed., La Chiesa di Venezia nel Seicento (Venice,
1992), pp. 5–16.
4 gaetano Cozzi, “Note su giovanni Tiepolo, primicerio di san Marco e Patriarca di
Venezia: l’unità ideale della chiesa veneta,” in Bruno Bertoli, ed., Chiesa Società e Stato a
Venezia (Venice, 1994), pp. 121–50.
5 giuseppe Del Torre, “ ‘Dalli preti è nata la servitù di questa repubblica.’ ecclesiastici e
segreti di stato nella Venezia del Quattrocento,” in stefano gasparri, giovanni levi, and Pie-
randrea Moro, eds., Venezia. Itinerari per la storia della città (Bologna, 1997), pp. 131–58.