Information and communication in Venice: rethinking early modern politics

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I N F O R M AT I O N A N D C O M M U N I C AT I O N IN VENICE

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Information and Communication in Venice Rethinking Early Modern Politics FILIPPO DE VIVO

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Filippo de Vivo 2007

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vivo, Filippo de. Information and communication in Venice : rethinking early modern politics / Filippo de Vivo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–922706–8 (alk. paper) 1. Communication in politics—Italy—Venice—History. 2. Communication—Political aspects—Italy—Venice—History. 3. Venice (Italy)—Politics and government—1508–1797. I. Title. JA85.2.I8V58 2007 320.945’31014—dc22 2007021411 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–922706–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents

Contents Acknowledgements Note on citations and abbreviations

viii x

Introduction: Wars of Words

1

1. Government 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Eloquence Debating in the councils Comunicazione between councils Secrecy and the myth of Venice

2. Political arena 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

The archive’s preservation, use, and dispersal The politics and economics of leaking: the case of relazioni Diplomacy: between ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial communication Professionals of intelligence

3. City 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

18 19 25 32 40 46 48 57 70 74 86

News on the Rialto Before the coffeehouse Politics’ possible publics The words of women

89 98 106 112

4. Communicative transactions

120

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

The interaction of orality and literacy Necessary encounters: ofﬁcial publication Posted words, political messages: Venice’s pasquinades Reason of state in the barbershop

5. The system challenged: the Interdict of 1606–7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Fighting over communication Enforcing security, representing order The circulation of manuscripts The explosion of communication

121 127 136 142 157 160 170 176 187

Contents 6. Propaganda? Print in context 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

From manuscript to print The scale of the offensive Fabricating consensus, encouraging criticism Beyond intentions

vii 200 203 215 227 238

Epilogue

249

Bibliography Index

259 301

Acknowledgements I would like to thank several institutions for supporting me while working on this book. Trinity College, Cambridge ﬁrst sponsored me to study in France (where this project was conceived), then granted me a graduate studentship, and ﬁnally elected me to a splendid Research Fellowship. The Arts and Humanities Research Board covered the fees of the Ph.D. which was the ﬁrst incarnation of this work. After that the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London, provided the most congenial working environment. The last crucial months of writing were undertaken in Paris, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and I wish to thank the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine for welcoming me there. I have had the good fortune, and the privilege, to beneﬁt from the help of formidable historians, and it is far more than a formality to thank them now. In Paris, Christian Jouhaud was a stimulating ﬁrst teacher and a great source of inspiration. Back in Cambridge Peter Burke supervised my doctoral research with unfailing optimism from the start and always encouraged me to broaden my perspective. It was an honour to work with him. Mario Infelise ﬁrst drew me to Venice, the history of the book, and Paolo Sarpi, and later followed my work with attention and in friendship; I can only hope that he has no regrets. I owe a special debt to Nicholas Davidson, who commented in detail on early drafts of my thesis and other works and (not unimportantly) has been a very supportive referee. I wish to thank Corrado Pin for the generosity with which he shared his unparalleled knowledge of Sarpi’s work with me; and Conor Fahy for all the time he kindly spent in the Rare Books Room of Cambridge University Library teaching me that bibliographic precision can be as enjoyable as it is important. For their encouragement and suggestions, I must also thank my Ph.D. examiners, David Wootton and Carlo Ginzburg. The latter has stimulated my work ever since, combining obscure bibliographical references with thought-provoking ideas. He has been an extraordinary model of intellectual vision, at once rigorous and unconventional. In Cambridge, I was fortunate to beneﬁt from numerous conversations with Melissa Calaresu, Mary Laven, Ulinka Rublack, William St. Clair, and Jonathan Walker. At Birkbeck, my colleagues have created the ideal working environment, offering encouragement and intellectual respect. I would like to single out John Arnold, Barry Coward, Caroline Goodson, John Henderson, Jan Rüger, and Julian Swann for helping at difﬁcult times. In Venice, Federico Barbierato, Giuseppe Del Torre, Piero Lucchi, Vittorio Mandelli, Federica Ruspio, and Alfredo Viggiano gave me invaluable help both in the archive and elsewhere. Other people have provided me with crucial information, and I would like to thank in particular

Acknowledgements

ix

Gian Luigi Betti, Maria Soﬁa Fusaro, Pasquale Guaragnella, Liz Horodowich, Claire Judde de Larivière, Filippo Maria Palladini, Dennis Rhodes, Simone Testa, and Giuseppe Trebbi, and Evelyn Welch. John Arnold, Carlo Ginzburg, and Mary Laven read drafts of the whole manuscript and gave invaluable suggestions. Giancarlo de Vivo, Mario Infelise, Claire Judde de Larivière, Jim Shaw, Jake Soll, and Jon Walker read various sections, offered helpful comments, and corrected many mistakes. Many more remain, of course, and they are entirely my responsibility. I would like to thank the staff of the Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Marciana, and Biblioteca del Museo Correr in Venice; the British Library, the Warburg Library, and the Public Record Ofﬁce, in London; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, in Rome; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the University Library and the Wren Library, in Cambridge. I would also like to thank Christopher Wheeler at Oxford University Press for believing in this book, and Kim Allen and Angela Anstey-Holroyd for improving it in the process. In its various forms, this book has taken many years to conceive and write. My gratefulness now goes to all the numerous friends who have made my research easier and my life more pleasurable than they could possibly have been without them. For their generosity, ideas, hospitality, and ever-smiling support, I thank: Nadja Aksamija, Giulia Albanese, Oded Asherie, Philippe Audegean, Bruno Besana, Déborah Blocker, Niels Buch-Jepsen, Caroline Callard, Nina Cannizzaro, Chiara Cappelletto, Giotto Castelli, Leonardo Chesi, Tony and Una D’Elia, Ila Fazzio, Terri and Enrico Finzi, Daniela Hacke, Ombretta Ingrascì, Cindy Klestinec, Francesca Levorato, Antoine Lilti, Catherine Lister, Marco Margheri, the late Raul Merzario, Peter Meyers, Eric Nelson, Berta PanésGoday, Valentina Pisanty, Carlo Ratti, Marion Ross, Marco Santambrogio, Jason Scott-Warren, Anya Serota, Giovanna Silva, and Mark and Mania Spalding. I do hope that each of them realizes how much they have given me. Ilaria Favretto has been a peerless companion in life, a model in thinking, and a beacon of good humour. My debt to her is enormous. Last but deﬁnitely not least, I should like to thank my marvellous, large, and supportive family for helping me throughout long years of work and for reminding me that there is always a world beyond. My parents both know how much I owe them, and to them this book is dedicated.

Note on citations and abbreviations Unless otherwise stated, more veneto dates have been adapted to the modern style, that is with the year beginning on 1 January rather than 1 March. All translations are my own unless otherwise speciﬁed. In footnotes, printed sources are referred by author and year of publication (anonymous works are referred by short title). For ease of reference, pamphlets concerning the Interdict controversy (all published in 1606–7) are referred by short title and marked with an asterisk. The bibliography at the end of the book gives full references, including the printer’s name for works published before 1800 (when known). In the footnotes and bibliographies, I have used the following abbreviations.

Archives and Libraries ASM AV ASPV ASV AC CCX CL Coll. Cons. iure CX ES GP IS MADM QC RSP Sen. SU ASVat FB NF NV SS BAV Barb. Lat. Urb. Lat.

Archivio di Stato, Modena Cancelleria estense, Ambasciatori Venezia Archivio storico del Patriarcato, Venice Archivio di Stato, Venice Avogaria di Comun Capi del Consiglio di Dieci Compilazione delle leggi Collegio Consultori in iure Consiglio di Dieci Esecutori contro la bestemmia Giudici di Petizion Inquisitori di Stato Miscellanea di atti diversi manoscritti Quarantia criminale Riformatori dello Studio di Padova Senato Sant’Ufﬁzio Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome Fondo Borghese Nunziatura di Francia Nunziatura di Venezia Segreteria di Stato Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome Codice Barberiniano Latino Codice Urbinate Latino

Abbreviations BL Add. Ms. BMV Cod. Ital. Cod. Lat. BNF BNM MCV Ms. Donà NA SP ULC

xi

British Library, London Additional Manuscript Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice Codice Italiano Codice Latino Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venice Manoscritti Donà delle Rose National Archives (Public Record Ofﬁce), London State Papers University Library, Cambridge

Printed Publications DBI CSPVen

Dizionario biograﬁco degli Italiani (Roma: 1960– ) Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, 38 vols., ed. H. R. Brown and A. B. Hinds (London: 1864–1940)

Other Abbreviations b./bb. c./cc. - c.n./cc.nn. f./ff. fasc. Ms./Mss. n. pseud. q. r./rr. sig./sig.s s.v. v./vols.

Busta/Buste Leaf/ves; unnumbered leaf/ves Filza/Filze Fascicolo Manuscript/s Note Pseudonymous Quondam (son of, mostly of patricians) Registro/Registri Signature/signatures Sub voce Volume/volumes

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Introduction Wars of Words After the Venetian Republic’s crushing defeat at the hands of the League of Cambrai in 1509, Niccolò Machiavelli sarcastically observed that in the few cities which the Venetians had regained, they changed their emblems making the lion hold a sword rather than the usual book. ‘From this’, he remarked, ‘it would seem that they have realized at their own expense that books and studies are not sufﬁcient to hold States.’¹ It was a joke, but also a ﬁrm belief, repeated in verse and later reformulated in a famous chapter of the Prince where, reﬂecting on Savonarola’s shortlived rule, Machiavelli wrote despisingly of ‘unarmed prophets’ who based their power on persuading the people without realizing that ‘the people are ﬁckle; it is easy to persuade them about something, but difﬁcult to keep them persuaded.’ As he concluded, ‘when they no longer believe in you, you must be able to force them to believe.’² In this view, force mattered rather than persuasiveness, swords rather than words. Writing in Venice a century after Cambrai and in the wake of a renewed political crisis, the Republic’s legal and theological advisor Paolo Sarpi disagreed. As he put it, in a brief recommending strong government control over press censorship, ‘the substance of books might appear unimportant since it is only words. But from those words come the opinions of the world, giving rise to factions, seditions and ultimately to war. They are words, true enough, but in their train they bring armed hosts.’³ To Sarpi, words and opinions were considerable, even dangerous, elements of political life. In turn, he also thought that writings could help governments win political conﬂicts. During the Interdict crisis, which broke out in 1606–7 between Venice and the papacy over the jurisdictional status of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical properties, he engaged in ‘a kind of war by writing’ (as he later put it), ‘handled on both parts with very much heat, and which served greatly to the confrontation’s resolution.’⁴ In Sarpi’s evocative images, and contrary to Machiavelli, communication was force. ¹ Machiavelli 1964, v. 3: 1202. ² Translation (adapted on the basis of the original) in Machiavelli 1988a: 21. The verses against Venice are in Machiavelli 1965: 324. ³ ‘Sopra l’ofﬁcio dell’inquisizione’ (1613), in Sarpi 1958: 190; the translation is taken from Sarpi 1639: 69. ⁴ Sarpi 1968: 284; the translation is adapted from Sarpi 1626: 194.

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Information and Communication in Venice

That of words engaged in wars—papers ﬁred like bullets, tongues sharp as blades, pens mightier than swords—is one of the most recurrent metaphors in Western culture. Drawn from the classical rhetoric of ancient times, it was common in scholastic treatises and Renaissance academic controversies, and even inspired musical themes.⁵ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it described large conﬂicts from the Reformation to the French wars of religion, the Fronde and the English civil war.⁶ During the Venetian Interdict, and from the opposite side to Sarpi’s, the procurator general of the Jesuits in Rome described armies and pamphlets as two ‘knives’, either of which was to be used in case the other should fail.⁷ There is no doubt that the image pleased authors as well as rhetoricians, who liked to see their own status and their work’s consequence elevated from the realm of letters to that of political action. However, other than accompanying the military and political confrontation, the role which words really played in those encounters is unclear. Surely what mattered were real weapons rather than the wishful thinking of scholars. Did Machiavelli not have a point? This book investigates the reality behind the metaphor, the political uses of verbal communication—oral, manuscript, and printed: from council debates to manuscript reports, pamphlets, rumours, and grafﬁti—in Venice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, roughly the period between Machiavelli’s and Sarpi’s remarks.⁸ Today, in an age of spin-doctoring and media politics, we take it for granted that communication and power mutually inﬂuence each other. What, however, was the use of communication for government in an age when those in power recognized no political role for their ‘ﬁckle’ people? And on the other hand, what access to political information did those excluded from the political process have in an age when government was ruled by arcana imperii, a form of high knowledge which, like others, was forbidden to those below?⁹ Or was politics really extending, as the author of a reason-of-state treatise lamented in 1621, to ‘barbers and the humblest artisans in their workshop’?¹⁰ Ordinary men and women were supposed to suffer the government’s decisions in silence, were denied any institutional political role and, in Venice’s proverbially paciﬁc history, mostly abstained from extra-institutional collective activities like rioting. Is it possible to say that, barred from political action, they participated in political communication? Was communication, in fact, itself a form of political action? And, if so, what impact did that have on the world of formal politics? This book uses the expression ‘political communication’ in a broad sense, as the circulation of information and ideas concerning political institutions and events. As I explain below, it is a use which contemporaries would have recognized. I ⁵ Some examples in Benzoni 1980, Prandi 1989, and Nestola 2001: 282; cf. also de Vivo 2001a. ⁶ Cf. Jouhaud 2006: 732 and Raymond 2003: 53. ⁷ Letter dated 28.10.1606 in Pirri 1959: 253; cf. Prosperi 1994. ⁸ Communication is deﬁned as verbal only; on printed images, cf. now Wilson 2005, a book that otherwise has many parallels with this one. ⁹ Ginzburg 1976. ¹⁰ Zuccolo 1930: 25.

Introduction

3

stress communication as well as the information which was its content, so as to include media as well as messages, the activity as well as the object of exchange, and the people it involved as producers, receivers, or intermediaries. At the heart of my inquiry are the social and political interactions which information exchanges involved and contributed to shaping, as well as the tensions which they caused. This brings me to consider not just patricians engaged in decision making, but also their secretaries and clients, foreign ambassadors and their own agents and, beyond the professionally educated and committed to politics, the vast and varied world of men and women who populated Venice’s streets, from notaries to artisans, from barbers to prostitutes. In turn, drawing on the insights of historians of written and printed culture, I emphasize the importance of the material means of communication, from orality to manuscript to print.¹¹ Finally, I consider the role of the settings in which communication took place, from secretive council halls to taverns and pharmacies around the Rialto, public places of sociability, conviviality, or competition, where conversation and arguments easily moved between private gossip and public affairs. By placing my work deliberately at the intersection between different ﬁelds of historical inquiry—the history of reading and the book, urban history, social and cultural history—I hope to problematize our understanding of early modern politics by enlarging the context in which we situate it and by breaking down the barriers which we use to constrain it. Political history has undergone mixed fortunes in recent decades and political events are no longer, as they used to be, the sole object of mainstream history. However, on the whole, political historians still concentrate on high politics, while ‘history from below’ is the territory of social historians. The revisionist turn which insisted on day-to-day factional intrigues and institutions, accentuated this divide. For its part, cultural history, while successfully reconstructing and deconstructing political representations, has largely failed to engage with political agency. It is time to bridge the gap between these different ﬁelds.¹² When we say (as we always do) ‘Venice moved to the conquest of the mainland’ or ‘The Republic opposed the papacy’, we of course use rhetorical ﬁgures of our own—synecdoches, single words which overshadow large groups and numerous people. Behind the actions described in those statements lay complex processes, which began with the decision-making machinery inside the government, involved outsiders as well as insiders, and led to the never easy effort to implement those decisions in collaboration, or contrast, with wider sections of the population. Each of those actors, at each of those stages, worked through constant communication with the others—from dialogue to confrontation.¹³ Rather than viewing history from the upper windows of government buildings, or else turning ¹¹ McKenzie 1986 and the essays collected in Chartier 1998. ¹² Cf. Grifﬁths, Fox and Hindle 1996, but also the earlier Le Goff 1971. ¹³ I take the idea of ‘dialogue of power’ from Najemy 1991.

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Information and Communication in Venice

the lens to look at history from below, then, this book hopes to show that even the most secretive oligarchs, ensconced in the secrecy of the Ducal Palace’s most restricted councils, were constantly preoccupied by the voices of their subjects in the squares below.

Why Venice As both a city and the capital of a large state, Venice offers a rich terrain for this inquiry. Government was ruled by deliberative councils where large numbers of patricians constantly engaged in debating and decisions were taken on the basis of voting. It was a political system which made eloquence and command of information crucial tools of statecraft—communication as the ‘nerves of government’, in Karl Deutsch’s words.¹⁴ Comunicazione had a technical meaning in Venetian governance, referring to the transfer of information from one governing council to another, a mechanism leading to the constitution of a continuous track of records in the government’s archive. Comunicazioni were highly regulated and often subject to careful censorship, an instrument of power at the inner core of government.¹⁵ In the government’s desires, then, communication was very different from limitless publication—although we shall see that in practice one often led to the other, whether through intentional leaks or accidents. In this connotation, communication implied its opposite, secrecy, a feature for which the Republic was famous. As an exasperated papal nuncio wrote in the 1530s, ‘it is easier to obtain a secret from heaven than from them’.¹⁶ The patricians after all ruled as a caste deﬁned by birth and allowed for no power sharing with others. For the same reason, they accepted no scrutiny from outsiders and tried to preserve all knowledge of politics for themselves. In investigating communication, this book offers an interpretation of information control as a functional element of Venetian governance, a system unique for its large ruling class but also for the strict boundaries which deﬁned it. In practice, secrecy was an obsession rather than a reality—arguably, it was an obsession because it was so difﬁcult to preserve in reality. In spite of its image of most serene concord, a further interest of Venice is that the ruling patriciate was ridden with personal and factional conﬂicts as well as temporary disagreements, making unlawful communication an element of informal and extra-consiliar political activity. Patricians were surrounded by a host of servants and agents, many of them drawn from the second-class elite of the cittadini, allowed by birth to serve in the administration of the state. Venice also hosted a large constituency of people with a professional interest in political information—diplomats and their agents, authors and newswriters, groups living at the margins of early modern politics.¹⁷ These professionals of information spoke of ‘ricevere’ or ¹⁴ Deutsch 1963. ¹⁵ See section 1.3 below. ¹⁶ Preto 1994a: 56; see section 1.4 below. ¹⁷ See section 2.4 below.

Introduction

5

‘dare comunicazione’ whenever exchanging special intelligence outside the formal channels of government communication. In 1539, the government’s desire to stop this unlawful communication led to the creation of the Inquisitors of State, a special magistracy charged with counter-intelligence and the punishment of disclosures, and initially known as Inquisitori sopra li segreti.¹⁸ In the early seventeenth century, at a time of mounting international pressure, the Inquisitors established an increasing number of moles following foreign agents or placed at key locations in the city, an important development signalling the government’s heightening awareness of the importance of information control. In turn, as will be explained in greater detail below, this move makes this book possible, by furnishing much of the evidence on which it is based. Beyond both formal government and the informal political system, political action and knowledge were barred to the third and largest group in which Venice’s population was divided, the popolani (to distinguish them from patrizi and cittadini). To Venice’s rulers, the people were no legitimate constituency—so much so that, in a remarkable semantic shift, Gasparo Contarini described the patrician Great Council as the democratic, popolare, element of Venice’s mixed constitution.¹⁹ Popolani is a vague tag, including both tradesmen and traders, artisans and manual labourers, men and women who differed socially as well as economically. What united them was political exclusion, and Venice differed from other medieval and early modern city states, because it gave no role in government to trade guilds, and instead closely supervised confraternities so as to prevent excessive power building.²⁰ And yet, in practice, means of information and opportunities for political communication abounded. In a densely populated city, and a capital without a court, different social groups had a rich variety of social and business interactions.²¹ One of Europe’s great urban centres, with around 150,000 inhabitants at the end of the sixteenth century, Venice had literacy rates amongst the highest in Italy.²² Like other early modern capitals, it constantly attracted large numbers of migrants and visitors, some of whom stayed only as temporary workers while others remained as stable residents.²³ For them and for many other people in different trades, information was a crucial aspect of daily life, a means of survival, or an instrument of professional success. As both a commercial and a political capital, Venice was at the intersection of vast regional and international information networks, one of the time’s most cosmopolitan metropolises.²⁴ It was at the heart of an extended but tightly knit and urbanized region where more than 20 per cent of the population lived in relatively large cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants, each of them with ¹⁸ Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 122–3. ¹⁹ Contarini 1591: 15. ²⁰ Mackenney 1987. ²¹ Romano 1987 and 1996, Chojnacka 2001, Cowan 1999. ²² Beltrami 1954: 38, and cf. Zannini 1993b. On literacy, cf. the discussion below, section 4.1. ²³ Their numbers are evident in demographic studies showing that deaths consistently outnumbered births, Beltrami 1954: 101–92. Cf. Roche 1987. ²⁴ Cf. Burke 2000.

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Information and Communication in Venice

its own centres and means of information.²⁵ As we shall see, the exchanges were continuous and systematic. Moreover, as Fernand Braudel noted, Venice was conveniently situated midway between East and West, and so was an ideal place for international information exchanges.²⁶ If the government was at the forefront in developing diplomatic and consular representations, merchants and other lowlier professional ﬁgures had their own means of both long-distance and local information. From gossip in squares, to whispered news in the Rialto marketplaces, to disputes in the city’s countless barbershops, the city acted as a vast resonating box, attracting news and multiplying it into a thousand rumours. Distant events rebounded in discussions at all social levels, as I have shown with a case drawn from the time of the French wars of religion.²⁷ Although it never coalesced into large collective actions such as riots, recent historiography has highlighted the pervasive unrest in Venetian society, which expressed itself for example in such collective encounters as the ﬁst-ﬁghts opposing different neighbourhoods and parts of the city.²⁸ This book contributes to that inquiry by emphasizing the political element in the diverse cultures of the city’s population. The period under consideration was marked by two moments of deep crisis. Between 1509 and 1513, the Republic suffered a series of disastrous military defeats which halted a long phase of territorial expansion. That crisis led to important institutional adaptations in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, giving shape to a long-lasting and distinctive constitutional framework.²⁹ Pace Machiavelli, Venice’s recovery was self-consciously intertwined with books, because institutional restructuring coincided with, and inspired, a large political literature celebrating a republican ideal of stability, timelessness, and harmoniously mixed government. It was a ‘myth’, but as Frederic Lane suggested, it ‘contributed to the solidarity of the state’ and ‘strengthened the Republic’.³⁰ This book assesses how that could be so in practice by analysing the ‘myth’ in terms of political communication. The myth was not just a body of Aristotelian-inspired theories; its success rested in its ability to permeate the state through a range of media, from Contarini’s treatises to Sansovino’s popularizations to non-textual communication.³¹ On the other hand, the perspective of communication allows me to offer a novel interpretation of the ‘myth’ by emphasizing the contradictions which its publicity occasioned in a political system otherwise dominated by secrecy. To whom was the message of serenity directed? What was the reception of the myth? Did everyone believe Venice’s fac¸ade of serenity?³² As we shall see, ²⁵ Beltrami 1954: 69–70, and Knapton 1992: 204–8. ²⁶ Sardella 1947, Crouzet Pavan 1994, and Doumerc 1994. ²⁷ Section 4.4. ²⁸ R. C. Davis 1994, cf. the comments in Davidson 1997. ²⁹ Gilbert 1973, Del Torre 1986, and Cozzi’s works cited below, n. 36. ³⁰ Lane 1973: 88–9. On the ‘myth’, both in Venice and abroad, see: Gaeta 1961 and 1981, Gilmore 1973, Bouwsma 1973, Pocock 1975: 272–330, Haitsma Mulier 1980, Benzoni 1991. ³¹ Muir 1981. ³² Cf. de Vivo 2003.

Introduction

7

the myth was far from a unifying set of cultural norms moulding the entire city into a single community.³³ In the early seventeenth century, then, for reasons which will be analysed below, the Republic’s stability was again put to a serious test when Paul V excommunicated the Senate and declared an interdict over divine services in the entire state (Venice had last suffered such a censure precisely during the Cambrai defeat of 1509).³⁴ Unlike the previous time, in 1606 the conﬂict quickly entered the public domain, resulting in a great mass of pamphlets. In early modern Italy, this amounted to an unprecedented moment of both manuscript and printed publications concerning current affairs, and thereby provides us with the opportunity of testing the war of writings metaphor by showing the different weapons with which the ﬁght was conducted—sermons, rituals, and manuscripts as well as pamphlets. Thus, the Interdict controversy will be discussed at the end of the book both as a case study testing the importance of political communication, and as a special moment in which the normal functioning of communication broke down under unprecedented pressure. It was a moment when the government had to ﬁght for things which it normally took for granted, a brief time in which political and religious events turned the people into a public, recognized as such by the conﬂict’s protagonists, patricians, and foreign diplomats. In turn, by focusing on political communication, the Interdict case will help us to see political events and diplomatic negotiations in the light not of high politics alone, but of the greater world with which politics interacted. Beyond the Interdict and the other events discussed in this book, I hope to contribute to the history of Venice’s political system by offering a novel interpretation axed on communication. On the one hand, at the system’s centre, I draw from the analysis of the government’s functioning and distribution of power, as discussed for example by Robert Finlay but neglected in recent years.³⁵ By considering the precise ways in which individual patricians and groups dominated information, I show the ways in which control over information secured inﬂuence and deﬁned power hierarchies. On the other hand, on the level of contacts between centre, subjects, and peripheries, communication was crucial to the administration of both the city and its dominions. In the interpretation of Gaetano Cozzi and others, the state manifested its authority by exerting its control over the domain of the law—most deliberative councils doubling into juridical courts and constantly sending out judges into the provinces.³⁶ Law enforcement, however, itself rested on communication. As shown in Chapter 4, for example, the publication of laws was a carefully regulated communicative act ³³ This assumption provides the basis of Kallendorf 1999 otherwise highly original study of Renaissance readership and reception. ³⁴ See Ch. 5. ³⁵ Finlay 1980; on the constitutional history of Venice, cf. the summaries in Cozzi 1986 and 1992. ³⁶ See esp. Cozzi 1973 and 1982 and the essays in Cozzi, ed. 1981–85.

8

Information and Communication in Venice

which was necessary to the laws’ validity. In fact, as they were meant to reach out to even the humblest subjects, proclamations may have constituted the most important way in which the overwhelming majority of people knew about their government. At the same time, as we shall see, ofﬁcial publication was also a terrain fraught with tensions and difﬁculties. In such ways, communication was not just a means of governance; it was one of the practical limits of the state’s authority, an object of negotiation rather than a top-down imposition.³⁷ As recent historians agree, the Republic of Venice lacked a full monopoly of force and effective authority.³⁸ That it also lacked one over political communication was part of the same problem, both in the day-to-day afﬁrmation of power and at the time of challenges such as the Interdict, when competing authorities like the Roman curia effectively undermined the government’s legitimacy.

Sources and methods This book draws from a wide variety of sources, both manuscript and printed, reﬂecting the plurality of ways in which political information could be communicated in early modern Venice. The printing press has long absorbed the attention of historians of Europe, and is one of the most studied aspects of Venice’s culture and economy. My research too began with print, namely the printed pamphlets published at the time of the Interdict controversy of 1606–7, of which I have assembled a large bibliography nearly doubling the amount of publications we know to nearly 300 separate editions.³⁹ Pamphlets remain an important object of my argument, combining methods drawn from textual analysis, material bibliography, and archival research to study the production, circulation, and impact of printed political literature. My aim is to show how those engaged in the political process envisaged large-scale and deliberate publicity through print as a political act meant to cause further actions—pamphleteering as ‘literature of action’, in Christian Jouhaud’s deﬁnition.⁴⁰ This will bring me to study the meaning of texts as well as the intentions of their authors, something which, as we know thanks to the work of Quentin Skinner, can only be done properly as part of a dialogue, a larger discursive context. Indeed, moments of controversy provide the ideal ground for testing such methods.⁴¹ The point, however, is how to deﬁne that context.⁴² Printed texts cannot satisfactorily be the only object of our inquiry because they interacted with, and were constantly surrounded by, other forms of communication. In this book, only at the end do I turn to pamphlets because I realized while studying the Interdict ³⁷ Raggio 1990. ³⁸ Povolo 1981 and 1997, Grubb 1988, Viggiano 1993, Corazzol 1997. ³⁹ For editorial reasons, this bibliography will be the subject of a separate publication. ⁴⁰ Jouhaud 1985 and 2006, and cf. Marin 1989. ⁴¹ Skinner 1969 and 1976 and cf. Skinner 1972 on a speciﬁc controversy. Tully 1988 described Skinner’s concern with the relations between words and actions with the pen–sword metaphor. ⁴² Cf. Ginzburg 2003.

Introduction

9

that they constituted only a fraction of the ways in which political actors opposed each other. When Sarpi described the Interdict as a ‘war of writings’, he used a deliberately broad term, scritture, which a contemporary bi-lingual dictionary translated as ‘any kind of writing, writ, indenture, evidence, scedule, note, bill or handwriting . . . Records, Evidences, Writings’.⁴³ In particular, a large part of this book is devoted to manuscripts, apt instruments of political communication because they ensured a degree of ﬂexibility and swiftness impossible to printed texts. As Harold Love showed, manuscript was a form of publication involving authors, copyists, and further readers, and I have tried to demonstrate the same for Venice.⁴⁴ But I have also included other means of textual diffusion, from posted proclamations to manuscript newssheets, from ceremonial inscriptions to grafﬁti, as well as instances of reading aloud, a practice which historians of culture know but which they rarely connect with political documents of the kind discussed in this book.⁴⁵ The maximization of written sources requires a concentration of chronological span, and accordingly, most of the archival evidence described in this book comes from the ﬁrst two decades of the seventeenth century.⁴⁶ I have tried to turn this constraint into an opportunity, however, by showing how speciﬁc events were reﬂected, elaborated, and publicized in countless texts and other communication acts.⁴⁷ This perspective does not only allow me to enlarge the corpus of sources. It entails a signiﬁcant novelty in the understanding of those sources. While political historians generally see archival documents as descriptive records, I have studied them as themselves means of communication. They were so in a very speciﬁc sense because records which we tend to think of as secret were in fact the object of deliberate diffusion, occasionally written with an eye to publicity. The study of disclosures—a recurrent phenomenon, as we shall see—is a powerful corrective to the insistence on high politics, because in Venice it shows that the governmental archive was not separated from the rest of society, but rather it was open to contact with a variety of agents, all of them closely integrated in the urban world.⁴⁸ It may be noted that amongst other materials I venture to use some of the most famous sources in Venice’s history (indeed, in the history of early-modern Europe, in the case of the ambassadorial relazioni which made Ranke’s reputation). This is deliberate. They are so well known that we tend to take them for granted, forgetting the extraordinary fact that the copies we consult in various libararies ought not to be there at all.⁴⁹ I hope to have formulated a convincing hypothesis on the nature of this evidence as aimed at persuasion rather than information, moulded ⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸

Florio 1611: s.v. ‘scrittura’. Love 1993, and cf. Woudhuysen 1996; on Italy, Richardson 2000 and 2004a. Chartier 1992 and Coleman 1996; on Italy, Richardson 2004b. A detailed case study from 1591 is also included, section 4.4. Once again, the same can be applied to printed images, cf. Wilson 2005: 133–85. Cf. de Vivo 2002c. ⁴⁹ See section 2.2 below.

10

Information and Communication in Venice

by polemical as well as descriptive aims. This, incidentally, is not about taking a sceptical epistemological approach: it is precisely in order to underline the difference between truth and lie that the study of a document’s manipulation in the political struggle is important. Beyond documents produced by an elite, I have focused on evidence of textual production meant for large circulation in the city—a short lampoon, a posted text, a grafﬁti scribbled on a wall and then retranscribed on paper. Whenever possible, thanks to enquiries held by the Council of Ten and Inquisitors of State (and to a lesser extent, by the Holy Ofﬁce), I have tried to piece together the passages which a text went through in going from one person to another. As will become apparent, those records never allow us to recontruct anything other than a fraction of textual circulation, but even that fraction is often revealing of that circulation’s large extent. This leads me to combine the study of the production of political texts with that of their reception: the uses of communication not only for authors and patrons, but also for the many more who read, discussed, heard about, or repeated texts. If texts were acts of communication meant to prompt precise effects, the effects produced by all communication always escaped the control of those who originate it. In early modern Venice as elsewhere, political statements multiplied and changed innumerable times in the processes of reception and further circulation, and invariably transcended the intentions of the political actors who ﬁrst made those statements. In order to trace the impact and uses of texts, we must turn to a more informal and largely oral sphere of communication. Traces of the latter are elusive by deﬁnition, but they are not insigniﬁcant. At the centre of power, a high degree of record keeping ensures that in Venice we have transcripts of diplomatic audiences (esposizioni) as well as substantial legislation concerning the handling of debates in government councils. In so far as the wider political arena is concerned, more can be found in the manuals of behaviour addressed to patricians and diplomats, as well as in the private libraries of both: letters, leaked documents, diaries, and transcripts of speeches were all elements nourishing communication. Of course, the study of the wider urban sphere of communication is more difﬁcult. In order to reconstruct a sense of the spaces, and contents of that communication, I have relied on a variety of sources. Travellers’ accounts consistently refer to the pervasive public sociability of Venice. In the early seventeenth century, the English traveller Thomas Coryat described meeting locals as well as foreigners at San Marco, at the churches of the Redentore and of the Greek community, in the Ghetto as well as on water, while riding in the English ambassador’s gondola.⁵⁰ In a city which was also a large marketplace, merchants’ letters describe the impact of news on commercial transactions at Rialto, and the diaries of Girolamo Priuli and Marin Sanudo constantly record practices of communication and information in the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries—in turn, as we ⁵⁰ Coryat 1905, v. 1: 329, 367, 369, 374 and 332. Cf. Burke 1987: 15–24.

Introduction

11

shall see, their record keeping was itself a form of political communication.⁵¹ Unfortunately Priuli and Sanudo are unmatched by later diarists, but I have made use of some detailed chronicles which we have in manuscript.⁵² One of the sources I have used most extensively is constituted by the reports of informers posted in and around foreign embassies or charged to follow prominent outsiders. The reports become particularly rich in the early seventeenth century, mostly due to intensifying international pressure and other reasons connected with the narrative of this book and analysed in further chapters.⁵³ The informers’ intention was to target elite intelligence exchanges, but in the process of compiling their records, they revealed much of that elite’s systematic interaction with other people. These records have the advantage of being written by eyewitnesses rather than with hindsight (as travellers’ accounts or chronicles). Furthermore, generally (although not always) their authors had themselves little education or literary aspirations which would hinder the reliability of their reports for historians interested in the reports’ objects. Of course, such sources also involve problems. Like authors, spies too wished to sell their services, and we always risk taking groundless calumnies at face value. A critical eye, however, is necessary for all sources, and I can make at least two points in favour of mine. First, even the most unjust calumny made to spite an enemy or obtain an advantage must be phrased in credible terms, and thus can be used as evidence of the manner in which some contemporaries thought that, for example, conspiratorial talk could be framed.⁵⁴ The speciﬁc accusations informers made may be occasionally unreliable; but they do nevertheless reveal a widespread interest in current affairs and distant news. The mosaic worker who accused a lawyer of extolling Spain and criticizing Venice may well have been lying. But when he said that the matter arose while they were speaking together about ‘the things of the World’ (le cose del Mondo), there is no reason to doubt his words.⁵⁵ Secondly, accusations relating to political rumours are themselves instances of political communication. When Rocco, shoemaker at the sign of the Fortune, reported having heard another shoemaker conspire to help the viceroy of Naples conquer Corfu, he may have made all that up, but he still showed some awareness as to the geography and military balance of the time.⁵⁶ Accusers knew this conundrum well, and most tried to justify having obtained their knowledge as if ⁵¹ Sanudo 1879–1903 and Priuli 1912–41; see below p. 56 on Sanudo. ⁵² I have made large use in particular of the chronicle of Gian Carlo Sivos, a doctor and prominent member of the Scuola Grande della Carità, BMV, Cod. Ital. VII. 1818 (9436) and VII.122 (8863) (respectively on the years 1595–1615 and 1615–21). ⁵³ See section 2.4 below. ⁵⁴ As far as possible, of course, I have tried to ascertain the truth in the accusations I mention by following the authorities’ inquiries and searching for further evidence in records from the following years. Whenever I believe an accusation to be groundless, I say so. ⁵⁵ ASV, IS, b. 1213, ﬁle 31, cc. nn., deposition of Alvise Gaetano, 13.3.1618; see below, p. 92. ⁵⁶ Deposition of 13.3.1606, in ASV, CX, Deliberazioni secrete, f. 28, cc. nn.

12

Information and Communication in Venice

by accident, assuring the authorities that they had no dealings with people who discussed political business. As a spice trader denouncing a pigment seller told the Inquisitors of State, ‘I mind my own business and give no attention to such things in detail’.⁵⁷ However, minding his own business—what the authorities wanted him and his like to do—was the one thing he certainly was not doing.

Politics and communication The study of political information in early modern Italy has expanded remarkably over the last decades, largely building on the basis of the related ﬁeld of the history of the book.⁵⁸ Printed periodicals and the occasionals preceding them have been the object of several studies.⁵⁹ Partly drawing from Italy’s strong palaeographical tradition, but in line with developments elsewhere, historians have also recently drawn attention to manuscript as an important means of information well into the age of the printing press, and particularly to the role of professional newswriters.⁶⁰ Numerous other objects of study can be added to the list, from astrological prognostications and almanacs of large circulation, to more speciﬁc information for smaller elites, from ﬁnancial news to written records regarding the court, postal services, epigraphy, posters, and grafﬁti.⁶¹ Above all, perhaps, historians of Italy have been at the forefront in bridging the gap separating production from consumption, and have thus opened the way towards a serious history of communication, by studying the uses of literacy, the question of readership, and the nature of reading and its impact on popular culture.⁶² Thanks to these studies, we now know much more than we used to about the ways of early modern information. This book wishes to build on these ﬁndings and methods in two ways which invite comparison beyond Venice. First, by concentrating on a single city, I intend to combine those studies’ different objects so as to show that means of communication constantly worked in interaction, either complementing, or conﬂicting with, each other in one ‘information society’.⁶³ What matters is not to evaluate the strength of orality vs. manuscript vs. print, but to see the ways in which each functioned by connecting to the others. As Robert Darnton and Donald McKenzie ⁵⁷ Deposition by Matteo Riva, 6.1.1619, in ASV, IS, b. 522, cc. nn. ⁵⁸ Recent syntheses on early modern Italy include Braida 2000, Nuovo 2003, and Richardson 1999. On the history of the book, cf. Darnton 1983 and Rose 1998. ⁵⁹ Castronovo 1976; cf. Bertone Pannain, Bulgarelli, and Mazzoli 1979. ⁶⁰ Infelise 2002a, Dooley 1999a and 1999b; cf. Petrucci 1982 and Love 1993. ⁶¹ Braida 1989; Barbierato 2002 and 2003; Tucci 1993; Raines 1991; Dooley 2002; Caizzi 1993, Petrucci 1986. ⁶² Ginzburg 1980, Petrucci 1977, Seidel Menchi 1987, Zardin 1992, Cavallo and Chartier 1999; Kallendorf 1999. Cf. Darnton 1991. ⁶³ Robert Darnton has employed the notion of ‘information society’ in his studies of eighteenthcentury France as a way of moving away from the history of the book to the history of communication, see especially Darnton 1993 and 2000; on the interaction of media in a ‘system’, Briggs and Burke 2000.

Introduction

13

showed, the same can be said of other societies.⁶⁴ As I highlight at various points in the following chapters, Venice’s system of political communication shared many features with other urban societies and polities. In turn, by setting Venice in the light of other societies, it is possible to retrieve important aspects of its culture and political system which have otherwise escaped historians—one example being the professionalization of information intermediaries, whose systematic political function has been emphasized in England and France.⁶⁵ The differences are equally important, and they will be highlighted in the course of the analysis, from the absence of a court to the downplaying of political factions and the political exclusion of guilds. But it is above all by offering a novel approach to the interplay between communication and politics at different social and cultural levels that this book hopes to offer matters for comparison. At the heart of my analysis is not just a communicative process of interaction between different media, but the political relevance of that interaction: the extent to which political authorities and their agents manipulated information and shaped communication, and in turn the ways in which information and communication affected the conduct of politics. On this aspect, it seems to me that histories of information have been less satisfactory. Broadly speaking, they have fallen into two very different patterns of interpretation, deriving respectively from the opposed points of view of the authorities and of individuals, and engendering sets of binary oppositions: control and liberation, propaganda and public opinion. On the one hand, the history of information has long been associated with the rise of political freedom. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, liberal historians drew inspiration from David Hume’s dictum that the liberty of the press and that of the people ‘must stand or fall together’.⁶⁶ Closer to us, this view has gained new popularity thanks to the work of Jürgen Habermas who connected the constitution of a ‘public sphere’ of political criticism with the proliferation of the periodical press and of places for discussion such as coffeehouses and salons from the late seventeenth century onwards.⁶⁷ This model has been extremely successful amongst historians of early modern Europe, no doubt because it allows greater speciﬁcity than the more ambiguous notion of public opinion. Most historians have concentrated on discussing Habermas’ chronology or geographical priorities, either predating or moving the emergence of the public sphere.⁶⁸ This book too includes ample evidence showing that sixteenth-century Venice already hosted numerous spaces where public political discussion was possible. If anything, they included a wider cross-section of ⁶⁴ Darnton 2000 and McKenzie 2002. ⁶⁵ Cf. Jardine and Sherman 1994, Jouhaud 2000 and Raymond 2005. ⁶⁶ e.g. Muddiman 1908. ⁶⁷ Habermas 1989 (ﬁrst published 1962, translated into Italian 1971). ⁶⁸ e.g. Van Horn Melton 2001; on Italy, cf. Dooley 2001, Infelise 2002a, and also Civile 2000. A critical survey is Raymond 1999.

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Information and Communication in Venice

society than the polite bourgeoisie on which Habermas concentrated. However, the Venetian case allows us not just to predate or enlarge the ‘public sphere’ model, but also to engage critically with some of its characteristics. The point is to study how those spaces functioned and how they interacted with people’s other social preoccupations, professional and economic activities, and material culture. These aspects are absent from Habermas’ account, based on a famously idealized notion of communication.⁶⁹ A second problem of his model derives from the fact that it describes the public sphere as essentially separate from, and opposed to, the state—a distinction drawn from the sociological opposition of Staat and Gesellschaft. This leads to underestimating the inﬂuence of political institutions and agents over publicly circulating information. As has been noted, it contributes to a teleology of liberalism which often rests on taking at face value partisan descriptions drawn by authors for their own agenda or that of their political masters.⁷⁰ As we shall see, the power games of government authorities and faction leaders manifested themselves also by disseminating and manipulating information in ways which Habermasian historians mistake as evidence of political criticism. The same goes for those instances—and pamphlets constituted one—where educated authors assumed a mask as ‘representatives of the people’.⁷¹ Public opinion is a difﬁcult historical object because it was a powerful political ﬁction. The other approach to the political uses of information privileges the notion of propaganda. Its historiographical origins are equally distinguished and can be traced to Jakob Burckhardt’s idea of the state as ‘a work of art’, capable of coordinating its entire population through the command of all ﬁelds of culture—an account generally referred to princely rule, but one where republican Venice too scored highly: ‘No state has ever exercised a greater moral inﬂuence over its subjects’.⁷² Historians in the twentieth century—understandably preoccupied with hegemony and totalitarianism—have identiﬁed this theme with the rise of early modern states in the age of the baroque, while others, particularly in Italy, have concentrated on the Church.⁷³ Although occasionally raising some doubts as to the term ‘propaganda’, historians return to it time and again as a useful tag for many different media and genres, from historiography to poetry to the visual arts, whenever they detect a communication instrumental to obtaining effects on a generally large public in favour of an institution or a group.⁷⁴ The problem is not whether the term ‘propaganda’ existed. A congregation De propaganda ﬁde was founded in Rome in 1622, but its title referred to ⁶⁹ See below, end of Ch. 3. ⁷⁰ See Roche 1996, Lilti 2005, Ellis 2004. On Habermas’ notion of the public, Chartier 1990: 32–52. ⁷¹ See section 6.3 below. ⁷² Burckhardt 1990: 61. ⁷³ Cf. Villari 1998: x–xi, Meylan 1957 and Rotondò 1991; others have pre-dated the concept, eg. Cammarosano 1994 and Miethke 2002. ⁷⁴ On historiography, cf. Moeglin 1985 and Ianziti 1988. For historians’ reﬂections on the history of propaganda, cf. Elliott 1985, Burke 1992: 1–37, Scribner 1994: xiii–xix, and cf. Ellul 1967.

Introduction

15

propagation rather than persuasion. Above all, its object was religious faith, not political conviction. The Counter-Reformation Church was equipped to resort to public communication in ways which secular rulers could hardly conceive. While seminaries taught priests how to address their ﬂock, the rhetorical prowess of political rulers only had to do with convincing small elites. As some historians have suggested, the Church’s unparallelled strategies of indoctrination for the simplices made it remarkably more ‘modern’ than secular rulers.⁷⁵ It might be said that the very separation between religion and politics is an anachronism, but this does not detract from the secular authorities’ insistence on secrecy. The religious legitimation of rule worked by inspiring awe through mystery, to turn politics, as Ernst Kantorowicz suggested, into a form of mysticism.⁷⁶ The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an increase in the governmental machinery at the service of celebrating the sovereign, especially in France, where rulers were told that they should ‘lead the subjects by their nose’ (as Gabriel Naudé counselled Mazarin).⁷⁷ This picture is more problematic in Italy and does not apply to Venice. In the late sixteenth century, the literature of reason of state continued the medieval tradition of arcana imperii.⁷⁸ True, ‘reputation’ was a central preoccupation for those authors but, as stated in Botero’s founding Della ragion di stato (1589), the best means for upholding it consisted in dissimulating weaknesses rather than celebrating strength.⁷⁹ ‘Secrecy is of great importance to a prince, because it makes him similar to God, so that men, ignorant of his thoughts, are kept in great suspense about his schemes’.⁸⁰ Venetian rulers too opted for censoring rather than diffusing information. By evoking a large machinery and the systematic will to use it, the notion of propaganda presupposes that the authorities were determined to win the opinion of a public and move it to action. But the Republic’s governmental practice—and above all its behaviour during the exceptional moment of the Interdict—was one of hesitation before public communication. Ultimately, patricians regarded their subjects as incapable of opinion, and generally distrusted their possible actions. Subjects were supposed to be silent spectators rather than actors. To sum up, then, on the one hand the public opinion approach leads to downplaying the agency of powerful political actors in an idealized view of communication as invariably liberating, as empowerment from the bottom. On the other hand, the analysis of communication in terms of propaganda exaggerates the extent of top-down impositions. In their different ways, both ⁷⁵ Ginzburg 1972: 650–9, Prosperi 1981: 162, and cf. Prosperi 1996. ⁷⁶ Kantorowicz 1955. ⁷⁷ Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’Etat of 1639, quoted in Jouhaud 2000: 265; cf. Burke 1992. ⁷⁸ The equation of ‘reason of state’ with ‘arcana imperii’ was common place, e.g. Zuccolo 1930: 35. Cf. Stolleis 1980 and Villari 1987. On reason of state, I have relied on Meinecke 1957, De Mattei 1979, Burke 1991, Viroli 1992, and Baldini 1999. ⁷⁹ Botero 1606: 73. ⁸⁰ Botero 1606: 77.

16

Information and Communication in Venice

approaches have a common weakness: they interpret political communication in an ultimately a-political way, as if it were abstracted from the political struggle which subjected all forms of authority to negotiation from all sides. As the government’s continuous and continuously frustrated insistence on secrecy shows, early modern Venice’s means of information were the object of mutual contests by different political actors and escaped the control of any one of them. This book suggests that communication was politics, and not in the vaguely postmodern sense that everything is communication, but in the very real sense that political communication was itself the terrain of both conﬂict and compromise, possibilities and difﬁculties. An inﬂuential critique has denounced the rise of communication theories in the twentieth century as a utopia papering over the underlying political conﬂicts, the social and economic interests bending the means of communication.⁸¹ However, the real utopia consists in the idea that politics can ever be totally and utterly devoid of conﬂict.⁸² In so far as conﬂicts did exist, this book studies how their protagonists confronted each other by using different means of communication. By so doing, they undermined the secrecy which governments would have preferred and thereby, ultimately, they created opportunities for further political conﬂict. On the basis of the Venetian experience at least, this book shows that we should think of early modern political communication not as an opposition between abstract categories (power vs. the public; propaganda vs. public opinion) but as a tense, at times creative, interaction between multiple actors engaged in political conﬂict. It is possible to locate them in three partly overlapping spheres: the government and its representatives; a political arena dominated by individuals and factions, and thick with the professional informers at their service; and ﬁnally the majority of the population, who had no personal connection with the authorities. While it was the government’s business to control information, information was the business of professionals in the political arena; meanwhile, both operated in a context full of people who were supposed to have no interest for politics and yet may have discovered that information was their business too. The next three chapters consider each of those three spheres in turn. In the subsequent three chapters, we shall move on to the interaction between those spheres: from structures to the communicative events which animated those structures both in peace and at times of crisis. As we shall see, messages produced in the governing councils were re-elaborated and appropriated across the city’s social structure, occasionally in direct opposition to the government; proclamations turned into objects of deﬁling, and factional attacks into radically anti-authoritarian texts. The ﬁnal part of the book, chapters ﬁve and six, is ⁸¹ Breton 1992; cf. Sfez 1988. ⁸² Enlightening remarks, on a different social and political context, in Elias 1983: 146–213 and 276–83.

Introduction

17

especially concerned with an event, the Interdict controversy, which is perhaps the most famous in Venice’s early modern history. By analysing it from the point of view of policies and communication, I propose a new interpretation of that event as a moment of massive politicization, when the government had to confront its subjects in ways which it would have thought inconceivable at other times. In turn, to join politics and history in the analysis of that political event will allow us to see that the very notion of high politics was alien to early modern political practice. Political history cannot be studied in separation from the society of which it was part, because high and low, elite and ordinary people, patricians and barbers, constantly interacted to determine the outcome of policies and events. Because I systematically focus on the political uses of words, it might be thought that I exaggerate the extent to which power shaped communication, and that I neglect the importance of other, non-manipulative aspects of human expression. It might be thought, in short, that in spite of my caveats I project back modern preoccupations with propaganda. I do believe that if we look closely enough, we shall ﬁnd motives concerning political and social relations behind many seemingly innocent statements; that we must keep in mind the dynamics of power when analysing communicative acts of all kinds. This is true; but I also hope to show that there is an in-built liberating mechanism in the use of communication by those in power. As the historian of seventeenth-century French literature, Louis Marin, wrote, every narrative contains a trap.⁸³ All attempts to persuade subjects or glorify rulers imply the need to confront outsiders, to respond to challenges, and to submit to risks; words carry the weight of responsibility and the likelihood of consequences. Manipulating information may serve a precise cause, but in so far as it involves public communication it also renounces control over that information. Ultimately, all representations or misrepresentations—and especially those which are most forcefully and pervasively made—create expectations which may one day be turned against those who made them. However minimal, here lies a ﬁssure through which the powerless can empower themselves. ⁸³ Marin 1978.

1 Government Venetian government by council bears no comparison with the representative assemblies of early modern Europe’s larger states. In France, the Parlements were mainly judicial bodies with no sovereignty of their own and the Estates General were rare occasions, never summoned between 1614 and 1789. By ﬁnancing the crown, both the Spanish Cortes and the English Parliament inﬂuenced, but never determined, policy, which strictly speaking remained outside their remit. And although, of course, things changed in England in the mid-seventeenth century, before then Parliament only met temporarily and without regularity.¹ By contrast, Venetian councils were permanent institutions, with members meeting on ﬁxed days every week to engage in a continuous process of deliberation and voting on both home and foreign affairs, considering the minutest aspects of state administration. They are better compared with the urban assemblies of the German imperial area, although the latter only ran small cities and their outlying territories, while Venetian councils ruled over a large empire, stretching from the Po valley to the Eastern Mediterranean.² Council debating—political communication at its highest level—was therefore a prominent feature of Venice’s political life, taking up a remarkable amount of the patricians’ time and energy. By and large this is an untold story, in contrast for example with England, where constitutional historians have studied parliamentary debates in detail. The dearth of sources partly explains this historiographical bias. In Venice, the most ofﬁcial and primary form of political communication was also the most ephemeral. The audiences of foreign ambassadors were faithfully recorded, as well as the replies the latter received from various patricians. However, no record was kept of the speeches or arguments voiced inside deliberative councils. The legislative process was meant to leave no trace other than its eventual outcome, duly recorded by specially appointed secretaries. The rationale of these arrangements was essentially political, to preserve a consistent image of unity in the ruling class. Although, in line with classical republican culture, Venetians described eloquence as a central element of civil life, they were equally preoccupied that it might turn into a cause of disorder. If communication was power, it was also a dangerous sort of power. Debating was to be locked behind closed doors and disagreements hidden inside the government. The people outside were to learn about the government’s ¹ Cf. Myers 1975; on England, cf. Hirst 1986: 36. ² Friedrichs 1995: 43–60 and 2000: 11–24.

Government

19

decisions as the uncontroversial outcome of the patriciate’s unanimous will. What made Venice exceptional in the eyes of early modern observers, to whom discussion was synonymous with disorder, was not that it was a Republic ruled by council; Venice’s most extraordinary feat was the fact that it was a peaceful Republic, stable in spite of the fact that it was ruled by council. Venetians were proud of their serenity, a trait which they made into their state’s deﬁning feature, Serenissima. As Marin Sanudo proclaimed in the 1490s, this feat had echoes of the miraculous: ‘this holy Republic governs itself with such order that it is astonishing; it has no popular uprising or discord amongst the nobles, but all are unanimous in making it greater, so that . . . it will last forever.’³ Unanimity, ‘the convergence of a multitude of wants and aspirations into a single will’, was a central value in the ruling class’s culture and a pillar of the latter’s celebration of Venice.⁴ Foreign observers agreed when they extolled a constitution allowing Venice to be ruled (as they said) by reason rather than passion, laws rather than men. This chapter suggests that stability largely depended on the government’s management of communication. On the one hand, debating and information transfer in council debates were regulated through principles of rhetorical restraint as well as controlled procedural mechanisms known as comunicazione. Their aim was to prevent disagremeent from degenerating into open confrontation. On the other hand, Venice’s government was extremely proud of its ability to retrieve information from the most distant parts of the world, thanks to an impressive network of outposts and ambassadors. As an Ottoman minister told the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople in 1533, ‘you know that which the ﬁsh do at the bottom of the sea’. It was an ability, however, which had to be guarded jealously, and the Republic was equally renowned for its secretiveness. In fact, the minister’s compliment hid the complaint that the bailo only gave him that news ‘which in any case cannot be of damage to [Venice]’.⁵ As we shall see, secrecy was essential to the Republic’s constitution and image.

1 . 1 E LO QU E N C E When Sarpi said that books ‘in their train bring armed hosts’, he applied to writings a shared assumption about speaking at its politically most inﬂuential level, the conduct of deliberation inside Venice’s governing councils. More than a century earlier, the humanist Filippo Morandi similarly wrote that patrician eloquence dictated deliberations and therefore ‘arouse[d] the very armies and camps.’⁶ Celebrative treatises echoed this point, often boasting that a phrase ³ Sanudo 1980: 39. ⁴ King 1986: 92. ⁵ Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 58: 304–5. ⁶ King 1986: 48 and 406–7; Sarpi’s quotation above, p. 1. On rhetoric in Venetian governance, see Del Negro 1977 and 1984: 424–30; Doglio 1983; King 1986: 37–49; Cox 2003; and cf. Folena 1977.

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spoken by a Venetian patrician was a mighty weapon.⁷ These were classical commonplaces drawn from a long tradition of rhetorical treatises, but in Venice they also referred to the real effects of council oratory. Throughout Renaissance Europe, speaking well was a sign of distinction, the subject of lengthy sections in manuals on the good behaviour of the elites, from Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) to Della Casa’s Galateo (1558), as well as numerous rhetorical treatises.⁸ In Venice too, eloquence was coupled with status. In 1603 the French ambassador remarked of a patrician that he was ‘one of the most splendid lords and of the best conversation of Venice’.⁹ However, there was more to it. For Venetian patricians eloquence was part of political life, not just politeness, and success depended on the ability to speak well and convincingly. The patricians’ most important public activities were essentially rhetorical, whether they debated in the Senate, represented the Republic as ambassadors, or acted as lawyers and prosecutors in the city’s various courts (especially as Venice’s legal system privileged oral argument over written legislation).¹⁰ Thus, it is not surprising that patricians’ recommendations to their juniors insisted on acquiring a proper training in rhetoric, as in a set of instructions to a nephew written in the 1570s by Agostino Valier, himself a senator who taught at the public school of Rialto before beginning a remarkable ecclesiastical career.¹¹ Other works on patrician education concurred.¹² Sixteenth-century Venice had an abundance of means to satisfy the demand for rhetorical training. We know little of the earliest tuition which some patricians received at home until a certain age, but can guess that formal rhetoric was important. In the early sixteenth century, the Trevisan family built a miniature model of the Senate’s speaker’s stand for their son to practise at home in front of his friends.¹³ Outside the privacy of home, groups of children were taught grammar and rhetoric for a fee in several private schools of humanities, often housed in parish churches.¹⁴ Public schools, ﬁrst experimented in the ﬁfteenth century and boosted from the mid-sixteenth century, also devoted great importance to rhetoric. At the School of San Marco, founded in 1443, young ⁷ Collurafﬁ 1623: 15–16. ⁸ Cf. Burke 1993: 96–102; on the reception of Castiglione in Venice, cf. Burke 1995: 40–4, 48–52. ⁹ Canaye 1636, v. 2: 10. ¹⁰ On patrician lawyers, cf. Trebbi 1996: 491–508, and see [Sansovino] 1554: 14 (a list of famous patrician lawyers), and Memmo 1563: 157 (on legal work as training for senatorial duties). ¹¹ Valier 1803: 45–8; cf. Cozzi 1963: 40–51. ¹² Sansovino 1566: 9–10v, Manuzio 1584: 35–44, Meduna 1588: 23, Olcinio 1610: sig. a3, Collurafﬁ 1623: ch. 3. ¹³ [Sansovino] 1554: 15v. The richest patricians educated their children at home, cf. [Freschot] 1709: 260, and Burke 1994: 86–8. Collurafﬁ was a tutor in patrician households, see DBI, s.v. ¹⁴ Cf. Nardi 1971: 77–9 (on Stefano Plazon from Asola), P. Grendler 1989: 337n. (on Lodovico Carbone, author of several rhetorical treatises), and Micanzio 1974: 1276 (on the parish school attended by Sarpi as well as noble children in the 1560s).

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noblemen and cittadini trained to become chancery servants and were taught ‘grammaticam, rethoricam et alias scientias’. From 1460 the school hosted a special chair in rhetoric. When in 1551 the government began funding public schools in each sestiere, it insisted on classical as well as modern orators being part of the curriculum.¹⁵ At the schools, pupils were asked to make declamations, and in the 1520s Sanudo described classes of patrician teenagers engaged in making orations and counter-orations.¹⁶ Copies of the young patricians’ exercises still survive.¹⁷ Ultimately, it may have been because of Venice’s ample provision that the University of Padua focused little on rhetoric.¹⁸ Venice’s vibrant publishing industry was quick to translate the attention for rhetoric into a vast printed literature, celebrated eloquence as a mark of freedom and promised to guide readers through its mysteries.¹⁹ Many treatises speciﬁcally addressed young patricians, pledging to train them for the Republic’s councils and particularly for the Senate. To this end, they abridged, paraphrased, digested, and deﬁned centuries of rhetorical culture into pocket books.²⁰ Such was the appropriately titled Del parlar senatorio, written before 1588 by Cornelio Frangipane, a Friulan jurist frequently employed on ofﬁcial business, reproduced scribally ﬁrst and then published posthumously in 1619. The editor, Girolamo Canini, was a professional author who also possibly worked as a private tutor in patrician households.²¹ It is a true handbook, ‘for the beneﬁt of the most generous patrician youth, born to govern’, divided into sections and subsections, and followed by a large table summarizing the training, skills, and tropes required for addressing the Senate on various subject matters, each with its favoured ﬁgures of speech and common arguments.²² Actual orations were published alongside rhetorical treatises, in ﬂorilegia, commented editions or collections ‘where one can learn all precepts useful and necessary for any good orator, especially those [speaking] in the Palace, following the use of modern times’.²³ The most famous of the poligraﬁ (writers who also worked as editors, translators, and publishers), Francesco Sansovino, was especially active in that ﬁeld and in 1543 planned to publish a collection of rhetorical works in twenty-three volumes. Having begun his career as a lawyer pleading in civil courts, Sansovino embodied the close connection between the ¹⁵ On the school of San Marco, cf. Segarizzi 1915–16: 640–5, 650–2 and Nardi 1971: 3–43. On sestiere schools, see P. Grendler 1989: 61–70, and on education in general, Ross 1976 and Benzoni 1996: 805–15. ¹⁶ Quoted in Nardi 1971: 76–8, 82n., 93; later evidence in [Sansovino] 1554: 12v. ¹⁷ e.g. BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1200 (8821), cc. 1–9. ¹⁸ P. Grendler 2002: 23, 225, 232–4. ¹⁹ Particularly powerful vindications of rhetoric can be found in: Antonio Brucioli’s preface in Cicero 1542: 4, Manuzio 1584: 35, Canini 1619: 37, Collurafﬁ 1623: 20–1. ²⁰ Cf. Plazon 1526 (and undated abridgment), Sansovino 1546 (republished in 1569 and 1575), Denores 1574, Frangipane 1619, Simoneschi 1667. ²¹ Frangipane 1619, followed by the editor’s annotations, Canini 1619. On Frangipane—not to be confused with his similarly named nephew (cf. p. 54 below)—see Antonini 1881–82; on Canini, DBI, s.v. ²² Frangipane 1619: sig. *2 and Canini 1619: 4–7. ²³ Mascher 1560.

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printing press and Venice’s requirements for eloquence.²⁴ In special cases, some of the speeches actually delivered in councils—known as renghe— were also published, especially when they played a celebratory function, as was the case of panegyrics addressed to newly elected doges by representatives of subject towns. When delivered on similar ceremonial occasions, the speeches of some patricians were also published, although this was less common.²⁵ Perhaps the culmination of this production came in 1672 with a collection of phrases attributed to past patricians, arranged by subject matter and nature (facetious, prudent, wise, eloquent, etc.), and published with an index for easier consultation.²⁶ As is to be expected of works addressed to a republican audience, in spite of the inroads of generations of humanists inﬂuenced by Quintilian, most treatises priviledged a Ciceronian notion of rhetoric as a practical instrument of political life.²⁷ For the same reason, they favoured experience over formal learning. As Ermolao Barbaro put it in 1489 praising the eloquence of Bernardo Giustiniani, ‘I have learned more from him in the Senate than from six hundred volumes of rhetoricians in the schools.’ A sophisticated humanist himself, Barbaro’s criticism may have been directed at a particular school rather than all schools, but his words were bound to sound convincing to his pragmatically-minded contemporaries.²⁸ Most treatises insisted that it was only by paying attention to the practice of eloquence that patricians could learn its secrets, whether in person or indirectly, by reading transcripts of speeches by past senators.²⁹ Common wisdom dictated that noble practitioners were better than salaried teachers or their theory books. Here, however, lay a problem. Young noblemen were unlikely to enter the councils where most debating took place (the Senate in particular, as we shall see), and it was forbidden to disclose speeches made in those councils. The authorities welcomed the publication of celebratory texts, but forbade even the recording of speeches relating to government business. While Sansovino praised above all deliberative rhetoric, the majority of the orations he published were epideictic.³⁰ And yet Sansovino’s collections show that the practice of publicizing speeches did exist, presumably deriving from their authors’ desire to advertise their rhetorical prowess and powerful connections. In 1542 Cornelio Frangipane recorded in his diary transcribing a congratulatory speech he had delivered in the Collegio because many patricians wanted to see it. Within three days, he boasted, ²⁴ Sansovino 1543: 453; cf. Sansovino 1561, 1562, 1569, and Bonora 1994: 49–50. On the poligraﬁ see di Filippo Bareggi 1988, and Richardson 1994. ²⁵ Sansovino 1562 was a collection of such orations, republished at least four times by 1584. During the Interdict, ambassadorial addresses were printed in great number, see below, p. 230. ²⁶ Fiorelli 1672. ²⁷ For example, Frangipane 1619 dealt with the deliberative genre only; cf. Cox 2003. ²⁸ Quoted in King 1986: 39; cf. Cox 2003. ²⁹ Canini 1619: 37–8; Frangipane 1619: 11, 16, cf. [Sansovino] 1554: 15–16. Memmo 1545, and Valier 1803: 48 also recommended the reading of histories. ³⁰ Folena 1957; cf. Vickers 1994: 84–5.

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the copies multiplied to ‘ﬁll Venice’.³¹ As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, personal motives combined with economic reasons to originate a substantial circulation of reserved political manuscripts, and the same applied to transcripts of orations which had once been part of the decision-making process.³² Thus, the individual patricians’ learning needs won over their collective desire to preserve a fac¸ade of unity. The pragmatic understanding of rhetoric had an impact on style. All treatises in the sixteenth century insisted on plain and unadorned rhetoric, reviving the classical distinction between Atticist and Asianist rhetoric inherited from the Greeks through Cicero. In the 1570s Agostino Valier explicitly referred to this debate when he described senatorial rhetoric and compared Venetian with Atticist style as ‘very brief, simple, and alien from ostentation’.³³ Frangipane warned against employing overly ‘adorned speaking’ (parlare ornato), and maintained that brevity and moderation were, more than stylistic features, moral qualities revealing honesty.³⁴ Collurafﬁ stressed that eloquence must be distinguished from loquacity, which he described as licentious and hurtful.³⁵ Practising patricians voiced the same principles. For example Leonardo Donà, an ambassador and future doge, wrote that ‘both in the Great Council and the Senate, one should speak with charity and truth, not with beauty of words, which are useless’.³⁶ Such positions were part of a debate extending well beyond Venice and having to do not just with intellectual trends but with political preoccupations concerning the implications of rhetoric and debating in the collective exercise of power. As Marc Fumaroli has shown, the French Parlements revived the classical dislike for the Asianist style in the sixteenth century.³⁷ Likewise, in Venice patricians knew by experience that rhetoric was an instrument of both collaboration and division, common good and private interest. As the jurist Giuseppe Matteacci put it, eloquence was a double-edged sword, ‘when well used, it can bring about the greatest goods, ruling the masses, clarifying what is obscure, defending justice and honesty; but, when badly used, it becomes an instrument of serious crimes, sowing the spirit of discord amongst the people, oppressing the good, and exhalting what is false under an appearance of truth.’³⁸ The republican attitude to rhetoric is essentially ambivalent, exalting freedom of speech as a condition of civil life, but also fearing the orators’ manipulation of their fellow citizens. As Frangipane put it, a senator deceiving other senators ³¹ Antonini 1881–2, v. 8: 50. ³² See below, sections 2.1 and 2.2. Fiorelli 1672: sig. A4a claimed to draw his anthology both from printed histories and word of mouth. ³³ Valier 1803: 46. Valier’s earlier Senator Venetus also warned against the Asianist style, ibid.: 46–7n. ³⁴ Frangipane 1619: 17, 18–19. ³⁵ Collurafﬁ 1623: 23. He maintained that Plato’s Republic banished loquacity rather than eloquence. ³⁶ Quoted in Brunetti 1933: 135. ³⁷ Fumaroli 1980: 427–75; cf. also Sozzini 1981. ³⁸ Matteacci 1613: 67 and cf. 87.

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really deceived himself.³⁹ Thus, the emphasis on simplicity—very often taken at face value by later historians—stems less from the patricians’ style than from their collective ideology.⁴⁰ Thus, a common line of political attack consisted in describing someone as making excessive use of rhetoric, a criticism raised in the early seventeenth century against ﬁgures as diverse as Leonardo Donà and Renier Zen.⁴¹ At the time of the Interdict, observers thought the loquella of the doge to be the force inciting resistance to the pope, and in perfect republican fashion critics attacked him as a new Pericles enslaving free people through rhetoric.⁴² In 1609, the papal nuncio naturally connected eloquence with leadership when criticizing the group of those ‘who dominate and have [good] tongue’.⁴³ When treatises advised patricians to address the Senate as if they were speaking spontaneously, without preparation—‘hiding as much as they can their technique and preparation, and in fact showing their speech to be without previous consideration and without apparel’—they were not just applying the ideal of sprezzatura to rhetoric. They were making a political point: speakers must above all steer clear of the accusation of studiously applying themselves to cultivating charisma through force of speech.⁴⁴ So far as the sources allow us to determine, the point was taken to heart by patricians, many of whom began their speeches by apologizing about their decision to speak.⁴⁵ Language itself was supposed to reﬂect the plainness and therefore honesty of Venetians. Written sources are notoriously misleading concerning spoken language, and we have contradictory references to the language ordinarily used in council halls. The results of debates, laws, and decrees were recorded ﬁrst in Latin and, roughly from the later fourteenth century, in Italian; most transcripts of speeches I have found are in Italian; legal courts used Venetian, and Marin Sanudo’s diaries (at length referring to council debates) are a mixture.⁴⁶ Whatever the actual nature of the language used in Venetian councils, all treatises agreed in extolling it as particularly ‘pure’: a sort of a ‘beautiful and purged language’, ‘common and popular, neither affected Tuscan nor ancient Venetian’, as Frangipane put it; almost ‘a new kind of language’, ‘Venetum dicendi genus’, Valier wrote.⁴⁷ Perhaps, these phrases referred to the ‘language question’, which ³⁹ Frangipane 1619: 18–19. ⁴⁰ Cf. Baschet 1870: 376–7. ⁴¹ Cf. the nuncio’s opinions in Zanelli 1930: 4 and Cozzi 1958: 237. ⁴² Dispatch of the ambassador of Mantua dated 20.5.1606, in Putelli 1911, v. 22: 55, and anonymous ms. speech in MCV, Ms. Donà 486, fasc. 16, cc. nn. ⁴³ Quoted in Savio 1936–42, v. 10: 59. ⁴⁴ Memmo 1545: 26r –v and cf. Manuzio 1584: 41. On the inﬂuence of Castiglione’s sprezzatura in speaking, cf. Burke 1993: 98–102. ⁴⁵ e.g. Sanudo 1879–1903 v. 24: 327–8. ⁴⁶ Cf. A. L. Lepschy 1993 (on Sanudo) and Vianello 1957 (on legal courts). Both Besta 1899: 220 and Maranini 1931: 235 quote the scathing remarks about senators only understanding dialect from Amelot 1676, preface. ⁴⁷ Frangipane 1619: 17; Valier 1803: 46, 47n. The same point was later made in Olmo 1628: 20, and in Accademico Imperfetto 1674: 75. There is no mention of a speciﬁcally Venetian position in Vitale 1984—as is known, the Venetian Pietro Bembo favoured literary Tuscan.

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in the sixteenth century put Tuscan literary traditionalists in opposition to pragmatic innovators. But, beyond their connection with a speciﬁc geographical origin, they embodied an idealized notion of political language as based on clarity and conducive to honesty.

1 . 2 D E B AT I N G I N T H E C O U N C I L S The ambivalence concerning eloquence has a parallel in the attitude towards debating in councils. In all communities, speech is at once a means of cohesion and an instrument of disagreement, but in Venice the danger was greater, because debating threatened unity at the very heart of the state. The conservative oligarchy’s natural uneasiness about this can be seen clearly in Gasparo Contarini’s image of a dissonant voice raised above the others as a metaphor of discord destroying Venice’s mixed constitution.⁴⁸ Venetian patricians tried to restrain council debating not only through rhetorical recommendations, but also by means of strict legal prescriptions developed over the centuries to regulate the conduct of governing assemblies. This was especially true of the two largest assemblies, the Great Council and the Senate.

The banishment of discussion from voting: the Great Council Debating was not just regulated but kept to a minimum when it touched on voting, the main activity of the Great Council which gathered the entire body of adult male patricians, about 2,000 men in the late sixteenth century, of whom around 70 per cent regularly assembled in Sanudo’s time and between 53 and 67 per cent a century and a half later.⁴⁹ The Great Council assembled ordinarily every Sunday to discuss constitutional matters—over which it retained the ultimate say, in the form of a right to veto laws passed by other councils—and above all to elect the host of smaller councils temporarily charged with the running of both judiciary business (such as the Quarantie courts), and government (the Senate, the Council of Ten, the Signoria). In the Great Council, speeches were delivered only on very special occasions, and the law avoided discussion as much as possible. This may have been the result of a trend. In the early sixteenth century a relatively minor politician, Marin Sanudo, claimed to have been a frequent speaker in the Great Council, while by 1677 as inﬂuential a politician as Battista Nani said that he had never addressed ⁴⁸ Contarini 1591: 51; conversely, panegyrics commonly referred to musical harmony, Doglio 1983: 168. ⁴⁹ A minimum of 600 attendants was required; cf. J.C. Davis 1962: 137, Finlay 1980: 174, and Hunecke 1997: 417. On Great Council admission requirements and prerogatives, Maranini 1931: 41–6 and 78–102.

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a speech to that assembly.⁵⁰ Procedural regulations conﬁned communication to a minimum: no discussion preceded the elections, and patricians were required to cast their ballot in the urns without speaking, ‘con grandissimo silentio’, as some contemporaries remarked with respect.⁵¹ Gasparo Contarini contrasted the silence of voting in the Venetian Senate with the Roman practice of speaking one’s vote.⁵² The emphasis on silence was such that the round wax ballots were substituted with cloth ones in both the Senate and the Great Council, because cloth would make no sound when thrown into one of the three boxes.⁵³ By preserving secrecy, silence ensured independence of choice. The Censori magistrates, created in 1517, invigilated over sessions and on the whole secured orderly procedures.⁵⁴ All sorts of unlawful electoral deals took place informally outside the Great Council and those patricians selling their vote even had a name (‘Sguizari’, like the Swiss mercenaries).⁵⁵ Inside the Council, however, the secrecy of ballots was on the whole preserved, making it almost impossible to know the candidate for whom any patrician voted. Secrecy ultimately protected everyone’s freedom. Whatever their actual implementation, these procedural arrangements reveal an important mentality, at once moral and political. For the overwhelming majority of patricians, voting was the only form in which they exercised their sovereign power, and secrecy was supposed to ensure that they could do so free from outside pressures. In turn, given the equality of status of all patricians, these rules attempted to make it possible to elect on the basis of individual merits alone. Thus the constitution sought to eliminate individual passions from the pursuit of the common good, and this at the very moment of choosing the Republic’s rulers—as a sonnet in the 1599 English translation of Contarini’s De magistratibus put it, where all corrupt means to aspire are curbed, And Ofﬁcers for virtues worth elected.⁵⁶

If, as Gasparo Contarini said, Venice saw the rule of laws not of men, then reason rather than speech was to rule government.⁵⁷ The Repulic was quick to capitalize on this arrangement, turning the Great Council into a visible symbol of good government and harmony. Important ⁵⁰ Nani quoted in Del Negro 1984: 427; Sanudo in Finlay 1980: 251–80. ⁵¹ Maranini 1931: 122; a description in Sanudo 1980: 146–52; the quotation from Priuli 1912–41, v. 1: 332. ⁵² Contarini 1591: 57. ⁵³ Voters put a hand in each box to hide where they let the ballot fall, Maranini 1931: 116 and 255. ⁵⁴ The Censori were ﬁrst created in 1517, to aid the Avogaria di Comun, see Tiepolo 1994: 921–3. ⁵⁵ Megna 1997: 175. For episodes of squabbling in the Great Council, see Queller 1986: 92 and 240–5, but cf. Finlay 1980: 197, 220. ⁵⁶ Quoted in Lane 1973: 258. ⁵⁷ Contarini 1591: 10–11; see also Sanudo 1980 quoted above, p. 19.

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foreign visitors were invited to attend the voting operations, as if the latter were a ceremonial moment designed to impress as much as a working part of the constitutional machinery. In fact if Venice was a ‘theatre state’, as has been suggested, then the constitutional assemblies at its heart provided one of its rituals’ most important stages.⁵⁸ A poem composed in the ﬁfteenth century spoke of the Great Council as a ‘spectacle of majesty’, where solemnity equated with tranquillity and the absence of altercation—in a word, silence allowing reason to triumph.⁵⁹ Reporting to his king at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Spanish ambassador was very impressed at the ‘admirable order’ with which 1,500 patricians all dressed in their black robes voted without a word.⁶⁰ The same point was amply publicized in countless engravings and travel accounts. This message was also elaborated into a constituent part of republican theories in Venice and elsewhere. Historians have emphasized the importance of Venetian electoral procedures in European political thought, a model of ‘mechanized virtue’ (as John Pocock put it), enabling the common good to triumph by constitutional mechanisms rather than individual effort.⁶¹ In principle, however, machines require no speech, and it seems fair to say that the Venetian regulation of debating played an equally central role in the history of political ideas. Thus James Harrington, who visited Venice in the early 1630s, described with admiration the silence in which elections took place. As the protagonist of Oceana remarked, Venice ‘is of all others the most quiet, so the most equal commonwealth’, ‘ow[ing] a great if not the greatest part of her steadiness unto the same principle; the Great Council . . . never speaking a word. Nor shall any commonwealth where the people in their political capacity is talkative ever see half the days of one of these . . . being carried away by vainglorious men.’ To Harrington, Venice was a model because it managed to silence disagreement in a way which the English Commonwealth failed to do.⁶² A century later, Rousseau too, otherwise a critic of Venice, may have appreciated the voting procedures which he observed while living there. In the Social Contract he certainly afﬁrmed that communication between voters ought to be avoided in order for the general will to triumph over factions.⁶³ Some modern constitutions (including Italy’s) are similarly concerned with the effects of rhetoric on freedom of choice, ordering that campaigning must stop some time before elections begin. ⁵⁸ Casini 1996: 294 and Fortini Brown 1988: 51. Testimonies in: Sanudo 1980: 62 and 147 (1490s); Schickhardt 2002: 209 (1599–1600); Coryat 1905, v. 1: 419; Somerset 1993: 250 (1610–11); Amelot 1676: sig. ev (1660s). On Venice as a theatre state, Muir 1989: 31. ⁵⁹ Francesco Arrigoni’s Poema de omni Venetorum excellentia, in Queller 1986: 338n. ⁶⁰ Italian translation of the report by Francisco de Vera (1603), in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1589 (7975), cc. nn. ⁶¹ See Pocock 1975: 284–5; cf. Haitsma Mulier 1980, Bouwsma 1973, Wootton 1994. ⁶² Harrington 1992: 114, 149–50; cf. Scott 1996: 105–10. ⁶³ Rousseau amply referred to Venice (for once, in a positive light) when speaking ‘Of elections’; Rousseau 1997: 126. However, he of course recommended adequate information prior to voting, ibid.: 60.

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The regulation of debates: the Senate Venice was not just a republic; it was a conservative oligarchy. Even more than a republican concern with the free exercise of reason in decision making, the restraint of debating stemmed from the fear that arguments could unsettle the order of government. This is evident in the norms regulating debates in the Senate, the assembly where speech making was a daily activity, and hence the principal arena of rhetorical prowess—not for nothing many treatises deﬁned deliberative rhetoric as ‘genere senatorio’.⁶⁴ The executive body of the Republic—as Sanudo deﬁned it in 1493, ‘the council which governs the state’—the Senate also was its central deliberative assembly, normally meeting two or three times a week to discuss and vote on the most important policies concerning both home and foreign affairs.⁶⁵ The assembly gathered between 180 and 280 patricians (many of them not senators in their own right, but holders of ofﬁces which gave access to debating). They were divided into different groups by complex rules aiming to bring order to the process of deliberation: some both proposed and voted policies; others could either vote or propose; and others still only attended the proceedings.⁶⁶ Senators were Venice’s most prominent and experienced politicians, ‘everybody who was anybody politically’ as Frederic Lane summed up.⁶⁷ Unlike the members of most other councils, they could be conﬁrmed year after year, in order to allow a degree of continuity. Their participation in the discussion of governmental business was taken to be a guarantee of success, because (as the nuncio’s secretary complained in 1646) it was inevitable that 200 men thought better than one.⁶⁸ As Giovanni Botero wrote, the advantages which the Republic derived from Senate debates were two-sided: on one hand, in ensuring the quality of the decisions; on the other in offering an arena for the elaboration and containment of disagreement. The contrast with royal councils, divided by personal enmities, could not be greater.⁶⁹ Thus, freedom of speech was supposed to be the rule in the Senate. Marin Sanudo for example stressed that ‘every senator has the liberty of speaking his opinion in the speaker’s stand, be it against the doge’.⁷⁰ Even critics who tended on the whole to stress the authoritarian aspects of Venice’s constitution, conceded that senators spoke freely.⁷¹ Strict laws were passed to ensure that speakers were respected, because, as a law of 1507 recited, ‘nothing is more convenient to a well instituted Republic . . . than ⁶⁴ Frangipane 1619: 1, and cf. also Sansovino 1546: 40v. ⁶⁵ Sanudo 1980: 100. On the Senate’s powers, see Maranini 1931: 192–225; Besta 1899: ch. 3; Cracco 1997. ⁶⁶ Maranini 1931: 151–62 and Besta 1899: 108–10. Attendance depended on the subject of discussion. ⁶⁷ Lane 1973: 254. ⁶⁸ Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 212; cf. also Olcinio 1610: sig. a3. ⁶⁹ Botero 1605: 95. ⁷⁰ Sanudo 1980: 102. Sanudo at one point supported a proposal for making compulsory Senate discussion of all decisions involving expenditures, Cozzi 1968: 107. ⁷¹ e.g. Thesoro politico 1593: 70v and Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 212 (1646).

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that those who are in charge of its government may deliberate with a peaceful mind, free from all external passions, in order to ﬁnd that which is conducive to the Republic’s safety, honour, and need.’⁷² To this effect, speakers were reserved a special position in the Senate’s hall, a bench close to the doge known as arengo or renga.⁷³ Some speakers’ ability naturally commanded respect—as Marin Sanudo boasted, no one dared spitting while he spoke,⁷⁴—but everyone was protected by law. A number of superior magistrates (the Heads of the Ten, the Avogadori, and the Censori) punished anyone interrupting the speaker with words or in other manners, including murmurs (from 1509) and the motion of hands or feet (from 1604).⁷⁵ A sign that these laws were not always respected, the Council of Ten repeatedly passed new and graver ones, in 1549 threatening transgressors with temporary exclusion from the Senate, in 1659 raising the punishment to exile, and in 1697 equating the crime to lèse-majesté.⁷⁶ For greater effectiveness, all these laws were also inserted in a capitolare to be read in the Senate twice every year.⁷⁷ In fact, however, freedom of speech was limited in a number of ways. First, senators were not allowed to speak about matters concerning their own or their families’ private interest. The famous ﬁfteenth-century law excluding patricians with relatives in the Church (known as papalisti) from governmental debates of matters concerning Rome, responded to a general principle.⁷⁸ Thus, in 1613 one of the period’s leading politicians was made to leave the renga after he had begun speaking, because it was realized that he was going to touch upon his nephews’ interest.⁷⁹ Secondly, insults were naturally forbidden, whether directed to colleagues, or even more (in an adjustment typical of the sixteenthcentury oligarchic involution) to the doge, the Signoria, or to the ‘dignity of the Senate’.⁸⁰ If insults bring dishonour and disagreement to any community, in the halls of government they strengthened dangerous divisions and posed a threat to collective honour. Hence, laws, rhetorical treatises, and individuals all agreed that senatorial debates required ‘modesty’.⁸¹ ⁷² Law of 20.11.1507, in ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 551. ⁷³ Montar in renga was synonymous to delivering a speech, and renga indicated both the speech and its transcript; cf. Maranini 1931: 232. By extension, the term was used for the orator himself, e.g. Del Negro 1984: 430n. ⁷⁴ Quoted in Besta 1899: 228. ⁷⁵ Parti of the Ten dated 5.11.1509 28.6.1604, in ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 557 and c. 668. ⁷⁶ Parti of the Ten, dated 10.10.1549 (ibid., c. 614), 1.4.1659 (ibid., c. 714), and 10.1.1697 (in Besta 1899: 225). ⁷⁷ e.g. ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 620 (9.12.1548). ⁷⁸ Maranini 1931: 240–1 and Del Torre 1998, and cf. Queller 1986: 184. ⁷⁹ Parte dated 12.10.1613, in ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 676 (cf. ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 30, cc. nn., 27.6.1612), referring to Girolamo Giustinian, 11 times savio del collegio in 12 years (see below section 1.3), who represented Venice at the 1618 peace talks with the Habsburgs together with future doge Nicolò Contarini (Cozzi 1958: 168–9). ⁸⁰ ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 549, and IS, b. 924, cc. nn., dated 15.12.1599. ⁸¹ Parte of the Ten, dated 31.3.1659, in ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 712. Sanudo frequently described his own speeches as spoken with ‘gran modestia’, e.g. Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 3: 619.

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In practice, many preserved transcripts of senatorial speeches mix a high style full of rhetorical ﬁgures and classical citations, with remarks meant to cause laughter. When countering a colleague’s argument about the danger of a particular proposal, a patrician and future doge remarked ironically that ‘he did not know of a place where there existed no danger, apart from paradise, and that was where those who wanted to avoid all dangers should go.’⁸² Thus, just as attitude to rhetoric was ambivalent, so practice in the delivery of speeches was a mixture of spontaneity and restraint. Perhaps this was typical of a class born to rule but also destined to fear its own excesses. Finally, and most importantly, not all propositions were open for discussion, and speakers were forbidden from addressing issues extra materiam.⁸³ This meant that, before every meeting of the Senate, the debate’s range was limited by the Collegio, a smaller council charged with setting the agenda. The importance of this norm cannot be exaggerated, and I shall return to it in the next section.⁸⁴ The Collegio determined the object of debates, which it then dominated thanks to detailed norms regulating the speakers’ precedence. In Sanudo’s words, senators acceeded the speaker’s bench ‘gradatim’, not so much ‘by step’ as ‘by precedence’, according to their rank (‘gradus’).⁸⁵ First, the Collegio made a proposal and its members, known as savi, spoke in its favour in order of seniority. Then it was the turn of savi speaking against the proposal, also in order of seniority. Only afterwards did the other senators have the right to speak. The savi had the right to respond to any criticism, and no vote was to be taken before the savi were satisﬁed that they had sufﬁcently spoken. Thus, the savi, who as we shall see included Venice’s most powerful men, controlled the conduct of communication in the Senate. The following example, taken from rare records of an actual debate, shows the intended effects of the procedural hierarchy. In November 1610, senators were called to decide whether to move the quarantine of ﬂeets from Venice to Spalato. First the savi who put forward the proposal spoke in its favour. Then Nicolò Donà, the brother of the doge, though no savio himself, spoke against it. The reply came from Ottaviano Bon, one of the proposing savi, but Donà again objected to the reply. At this point, seeing that such an inﬂuential opposition had to be countered appropriately, Antonio Priuli (he too a savio, a Procurator of St Mark as well as a future doge), spoke conclusively in favour of the proposal, which passed. No room was made in the debate for the younger savi agli ordini, in spite of the fact that they were supposed to be in charge of maritime matters.⁸⁶ ⁸² Antonio Priuli replying to Nicolò Donà, BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.2507 (12186), c. 35v, see below, n. 86. ⁸³ Parti of the Ten, dated 20.11.1507, in ASV, CL, b. 348, c. 549; also, a law of 1659, quoted in Besta 1899: 225. ⁸⁴ On procedures in the Senate, see Maranini 1931: 226–47, and Besta 1899: 210–14. ⁸⁵ Sanudo 1980: 101–2. The treatises mentioned in the previous section conﬁrm this procedure, e.g. Frangipane 1619: 8; Canini 1619: 3. ⁸⁶ Information reconstructed on the basis of the 1609 anonymous diary of Tommaso Contarini, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.2507 (12186), cc. 34v –35v (the author’s identity can be established

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In other words, as is often the case, who spoke mattered more than what they said—what is elsewhere an unspoken social assumption, was in the Senate a legally binding procedure. The spatial disposition of debating in both the Great Council and the Senate reinforced this sense of hierarchy, as special places were assigned to certain categories to mirror their authority—as Richard Sennett reminded us, in considering civic interaction it is wrong to separate the ideal of speech from its physicality.⁸⁷ There was no ﬁxed seating for the majority of patricians, because they were nominally equal. However, a number of important ofﬁcers (including Council of Ten and Collegio members) sat in a higher position.⁸⁸ This arrangement symbolized the greater authority of some who, unlike the others, did not have to move to the renga in order to address their peers. Such arrangements tended to limit the freedom of the majority of senators. Thus in 1715 the Council of Ten repealed a law it had passed in 1604 forcing senators to move to the renga even when they wished to make short ‘suggerimenti’ (which until then they could make from their seats); the Ten admitted that this law discouraged senators from speaking.⁸⁹ Time combined with space to favour the inner core’s inﬂuence. Anyone who has glanced at the paperwork produced during Senate meetings may reasonably wonder at the amount of business on a senator’s agenda. The Senate’s gatherings could last a very long time, although the audience seemed to have the custom of interrupting the speaker with loud noises whenever a speech became too long,.⁹⁰ As Sanudo wrote in 1493, ‘most of the times, when the matter is important for the state, senators remain [in the Senate] almost all night long, because many wish to speak, so that candles are lit, and only the most elderly are excused and go home’.⁹¹ When kept waiting for a reply in 1495, the French ambassador lamented that conducting negotiations with the Republic was always a lengthy affair, because, he said, ‘so many old men cannot ﬁnd an agreement in little time’.⁹² As in modern parliamentary ﬁlibustering, debating procedures gave savi the power to obstruct the discussion of certain business by proposing a large number of affairs for deliberation, or by speaking at great length so as to steal time from possible opponents. Girolamo Priuli once confessed himself ‘dazed at the quantity of matters’ in a long session of ﬁve hours.⁹³ through a personal reference c. 34v). Nicolò Donà, brother of Leonardo, was considered an expert in maritime matters (see DBI, s.v.). The parte was passed on 7.12.1609, with a majority of 129 out of 158, see ASV, Sen., Mar, r. 69, cc. 24–5. ⁸⁷ Sennett 1994: cf. 65–6. ⁸⁸ Sanudo 1980: 147–8. Cf. Besta 1899: 198–203, Maranini 1931: 231, 235, and Cozzi 1986: 106. ⁸⁹ Parti of the Ten dated 28.6.1604 and 7.6.1715, in ASV, CL, b. 348, cc. 668 and 734. ⁹⁰ Maranini 1931: 249–50. There was no time limit to Senate gatherings; the Great Council adjourned at sunset. ⁹¹ Sanudo 1980: 102. ⁹² Commynes 1901–3, v. 2: 217. ⁹³ Quoted in Besta 1899: 210n., cf. 223.

32

Information and Communication in Venice

Given these arrangements, it was almost impossible to voice discord or inform a substantial alternative to the proposed line in the Senate or, to an even lesser extent, in the Great Council. Opposition could only take shape in a negative, and silent way, with the ‘muted’ act of voting against.⁹⁴ Thus, the constitution enabled speakers from the inner core of the Collegio to turn the regulations protecting freedom of speech right against the freedom of their lesser colleagues.

1 . 3 COMUNICAZIONE B E T W E E N C O U N C I L S Beyond the fact that decisions were taken in deliberative councils, a further way in which communication mattered in Venice’s political structure had to do with the number of such councils and other ofﬁces. A certain amount of information continually ﬂowed between them. Speciﬁc government bodies collected speciﬁc kinds of information, in response to which others elaborated policy proposals, which they would in turn bring to others for voting. As a general rule, all large assemblies included smaller bodies which processed data to make proposals for discussion. The Great Council had the Signoria, which put forward laws for approval, and the Senate, which selected some of the candidates for elections. As we have seen, the Senate had the Collegio; and the Collegio, the Consulta, while the Council of Ten had its Heads (as did the Forty). The communication between constitutional bodies was a speciﬁc aspect of government business which contemporaries described with the name comunicazione. In general, the term indicated the disclosure of knowledge to people who were not initially supposed to receive it and who were henceforward supposed to preserve secrecy.⁹⁵ More speciﬁcally, it indicated the transfer of data from the Ten to the Collegio and then, if need be, to the Senate. As a result, a continuous and independent series of Comunicate ﬁles was constituted running from 1582 to 1796. That this series is in the Collegio’s archive is a sign of the latter’s key role in screening and redistributing information (something previously unnoticed, because the series was erroneously attributed to the Senate).⁹⁶ The control over information and proposal making was not just necessary for the management of business in large assemblies. It also gave smaller councils—dominated as we shall see by a core of powerful patricians—the power to curb the potential for disruption in larger ones. Thus, the notion of communication provides a valid criteria for reassessing Venice’s constitutional structure. This ⁹⁴ Cf. Finlay 1980: 63, 67–8. ⁹⁵ By extension, it also included the lawful revelation of information to outsiders, see below, p. 180. ⁹⁶ ASV, Collegio, Communicate, attributed to the Senate for example in the English CSPVen and in Baschet 1870: 367–9; cf. Tiepolo 1994: 891.

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is traditionally visualized as a pyramid, with sovereignty residing at the bottom, in the Great Council which elected the members of the other councils, most executive magistracies, and, notably, the doge.⁹⁷ When we move from nominal authority to control over comunicazione, however, the pyramid must be turned on its head. The ﬂow of information proceeded from the Ten to the Collegio to the other councils, diminishing as it trickled down from the smaller to the larger ones, and rarely ever reaching the Great Council (at least lawfully, since much information circulated against the government’s prescriptions, as the next chapter will show). Similarly, access to debating gave patricians more power than the prerogatives to which their ofﬁce entitled them. The example of the doge is revealing. Contemporaries and historians alike have found it hard to pinpoint the extent of his power.⁹⁸ The nominal head of the state but severely conﬁned in his every movement and choice, the doge derived an undeniable inﬂuence over policy making from his unique right to make proposals and deliver speeches in all assemblies and to do so with all the trappings of authority. As a contemporary remarked, the doge’s power could be great, should he have been ‘bel parlatore’.⁹⁹ Freedom of speech, which was in theory the prerogative of all patricians, was on the whole reserved to the smaller assemblies, where few or no rules regulated debates. In turn, the smallest of all assemblies, the Collegio and the Ten, were called to control debating in the larger ones—it was the Ten which formulated most of the procedural laws analysed in this and the previous section.¹⁰⁰

Retrieving and guarding information: Council of Ten and Inquisitors of State While debate was primarily a feature of the Senate, the retrieval of sensitive political information was the prerogative of the Council of Ten. Originally established in the aftermath of Baiamonte Tiepolo’s famous conspiracy of 1310, the Ten was the organ in charge of the state’s security. As Gaetano Cozzi showed, the Ten’s power was an inextricable mixture of judicial and political prerogatives developed over the course of centuries, occasionally in competition with the Senate (for example in difﬁcult international circumstances, as during the war on Cyprus in the 1570s, when the Ten went as far as conducting a separate foreign policy). ¹⁰¹ Crucially, much of the Ten’s power derived from their control over the Republic’s information machinery both in Venice and on the mainland: ⁹⁷ Cf. Maranini 1931: table pp. nn.; Lane 1973: 96 and 429; and Finlay 1980: 39. ⁹⁸ Brunetti 1917; Maranini 1927: 172–206 and 1931: 273–96; and Finlay 1980: 109–24. ⁹⁹ Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 213. ¹⁰⁰ I found only one law restricting Collegio debates, passed by Ten on 28.12.1498; ASV, CL, b. 137, c. 375. ¹⁰¹ Cozzi 1973, 1981, 1982, and 1989. The Ten’s sphere of action included both home and foreign politics, as reﬂected in the multiple divisions of their records; cf. Cozzi 1992: 175–82.

34

Information and Communication in Venice

from the appointment of external legal counsellors, to the control of legitimate claims to patricians’ status (alongside the Avogaria), to the supervision of the archive.¹⁰² The Ten also conducted special trials with a specially inquisitive and secretive legal procedure (rito), and from 1624 prosecuted all crimes involving other patricians and their private lives. As a result, there was little they could not ﬁnd out.¹⁰³ In 1539, at a charged political time when some patricians tried to enhance the government’s oligarchic nature, the Ten created a special tribunal of Inquisitors of State, They were chosen from amongst the Ten and are best understood as one of their branches.¹⁰⁴ The term ‘inquisitors’ refers to a medieval judicial tradition shared by both Church and state including the authority to start investigations ex ofﬁcio, to investigate and then try the accused secretly, making guilt easier to prove and evidence less open to discussion. The parallel with the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, founded only three years later, is striking.¹⁰⁵ In Venice, the Inquisitors’ remit was spelled out by their initial title as ‘inquisitors on the disclosers of secrets’ or simply, ‘inquisitors on secrets’. As we shall see in the next chapter, by extension, they came to supervise any instance of political communication outside government, which by deﬁnition raised suspicions as a potential threat of conspiracy. Thus, while the activities of the Ten and the Inquisitors took place under the strictest cover of secrecy, nothing could in principle be kept secret to them. The Ten, defenders of the oligarchy’s collective security, became the guardians of the inner core’s power over the rest of the patriciate. This led to occasional clashes with other assemblies, as in 1582, when the Great Council abolished some of the Ten’s power (indirectly, by refusing to elect a ‘zonta’ of 35 additional members who added power to the already powerful Ten). After that correzione (as the reform was called), conservative oligarchs such as the patriach of Aquileia Francesco Barbaro lamented the passing of an age in which the most important affairs—and notably the negotiations with the Holy See—were ‘buried in the profound secret of the Council of Ten’ rather than discussed in the Senate.¹⁰⁶ Yet even after 1582, the Great Council left it to the Ten to oversee those subjects considered ‘secretissimo’ before deciding whether to bring them to the Senate for deliberation.¹⁰⁷ Similarly, by the early seventeenth century, the Inquisitors too ¹⁰² On the archive, see below, section 2.1. ¹⁰³ The Ten were in charge of crimes of sodomy, Davidson 1994. ¹⁰⁴ On the Inquisitors of State, see Preto 1994a: 55–74, and cf. the wording of the founding decrees in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 122–3. On the attempted oligarchic coup of 1539, see Ventura 1976: xlix–li. ¹⁰⁵ In addition other inquisitori were charged with overseeing disputed jurisdictional areas, or with investigating allegations of corruption amongst ofﬁcials both in Venice and on the Mainland—but none had the same strength as the Inquisitors of State. ¹⁰⁶ Trebbi 1984: 343n. Sarpi unmasked Barbaro’s position as an attempt to maintain supremacy thanks to the Republic’s refusal to take public position, Sarpi 1985: 219–20 ¹⁰⁷ Cf. Stella 1958a and Lowry 1971.

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extended their functions from prosecution to politics. For example, they began issuing ofﬁcial commissions in their own name, something which would have been unthinkable earlier.¹⁰⁸ Finally, these two bodies’ control over information extended to the collection of secret denunciations and, as shall be seen in the next chapter, to the supervision of an expanding system of intelligence and counter-intelligence.¹⁰⁹ The Senate, the Ten, and the Inquisitors were all in direct and continuous correspondence with government representatives outside Venice (whether ambassadors abroad or governors of subject territories), but they received different information. Each representative wrote not one, but three series of dispatches: one to the Senate (known as ‘lettere pubbliche’); and the others to the smaller bodies.¹¹⁰ It is difﬁcult to distinguish clearly between the subjects of the Ten’s and Inquisitors’ correspondences, but they clearly differed from that of the Senate. As I have found no explicit legislation, the following are not absolute rules.¹¹¹ The Inquisitors dealt with matters concerning disclosures, while the Ten worked on the prevention of conspiracies and on ‘delicate’ political affairs, such as those involving important foreign ﬁgures (for example requests of favours, which it was thought appropriate not to reveal to the Senate). The Inquisitors passed some of their letters to the Heads of the Ten, who then took on themselves the related affair (or vice versa). For example, when in late 1607 the ambassador in France wrote to the Inquisitors of State with intelligence concerning an alleged conspiracy against Venice, the Inquisitors passed his letter to the Heads, who then replied to the ambassador. Yet the ambassador kept writing to the Inquisitors. (And the entire set of information was only communicated to the Collegio months later.)¹¹² At times ambassadors were themselves unsure about the body to which they should write, and left it to one or the other to decide.¹¹³ Thus, between them, the Ten and the Inquisitors gathered a vast body of information which it was then their duty to guard and their right to keep for themselves—they had no need to pass information onto the Senate unless they needed the latter’s agreement for further action. When they did pass some ¹⁰⁸ See for example the commission to Roberto Lio for his mission to the Duke of Mantua, dated 18.7.1621, in ASV, IS, b. 157, cc. nn. ¹⁰⁹ ASV, CCX, Raccordi e denunzie (starting in 1603); cf. Preto 2003. On intelligence, see below, section 2.4. ¹¹⁰ On dispatches to the Senate (formally addressed to the Doge), see the introduction to Morozzo della Rocca 1959 and Carbone 1974. The other dispatches are kept in the Ten’s and Inquisitors’s fondi (CCX, Dispacci, and IS). ¹¹¹ Having consulted in detail all the dispatches to the Ten and the Inquisitors of State in the early seventeenth century, I found no obvious rule. The problem is further complicated by the fact that many of the dispatches addressed to one body are now kept in the ﬁles of the other. ¹¹² ASV, IS, b. 436, cc. nn.; Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 3; CX, Parti segrete, r. 15, and f. 29. ¹¹³ e.g., dispatch of the ambassador in Spain to the State Inquisitors, in ASV, IS, b. 483, cc. nn. (16.11.1610).

36

Information and Communication in Venice

information, they were likely to censor it (something which it is possible to discover today by juxtaposing the Council of Ten’s records with the censored documents passed to Collegio and Senate, each preserved in a different archive). Sometimes, this was a means of covering the source of intelligence, as it may have been when, in 1618, a Venetian commander wrote to the Ten about his informants in the enemy camp at Gradisca. The Ten had the dispatch especially copied for communication to the Senate, but all the informants’ names were substituted by dissembling deﬁnitions: thus Baron Wallenstein became ‘an important ﬁgure, of the greatest inﬂuence with Ferdinand’, and the commoner Nadal Obizzi, ‘sogetto conﬁdente’.¹¹⁴ At other times the Ten made no communication at all, because they feared the Senate’s propensity to leaks. Such is the case of a piece of conﬁdential information the Ten received from the ambassador in Savoy just before the declaration of war against the Habsburgs in 1615, which they decided to hide from the Senate given ‘the damage which publication would cause’.¹¹⁵ This phrase points to the difference between comunicazione, controlled and only meant for a limited public, and pubblicazione, potentially boundless and likely to escape the control of the government bodies originating it. It is clear that, so long as the choice was open, the Venetian government was always in favour of the former over the latter. As we shall see, in 1606–7 the government similarly tried to maintain the controversy with the pope within the limited boundaries of comunicazione, and was only forced to defend itself publicly because the interdict’s promulgation brought the confrontation into the public domain. Selective comunicazione could be put to political use as a means of internal propaganda, not just in order to minimize contentious matters but also to pressurize the Senate in particular ways by disclosing shocking pieces of information. For example, at a time of renewed constitutional crisis in 1628, when a majority in the Senate headed by Renier Zen was trying to curb the Ten’s prerogatives, the latter communicated to the Senate various anonymous letters as evidence of impending riots and sedition in mainland cities and in Venice. Interestingly, this time the Ten did not let the Collegio decide whether or not to communicate the matter to the Senate, but ordered to do so at once. As a result of this ‘strategy of tension’, even Nicolò Contarini—who initially sided with Zen—spoke in favour of the Ten. As a contemporary commentator reported, he ‘exaggerated the Republic’s difﬁculties, so that the Great Council stopped in its excessive reforming attempt of the Ten’.¹¹⁶ Thus, Venice’s wars of words started inside the government itself. ¹¹⁴ The original dispatch dated 29.1.1618 is in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 32, cc. nn.; the censored comunicazione (dated 1.2.1618), in ASV, Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 8, cc. 288–91. On the word conﬁdente, cf. below, p. 74. ¹¹⁵ Dispatch to the ambassador in Savoy, dated 20.7.1615, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, r. 15, c. 172. ¹¹⁶ Cozzi 1958: 276; cf. Cozzi 1992: 180–1.

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Managing information: the Collegio Whenever the Ten or the Inquisitors of State wished to pass information to the Senate, they had to do so through the Collegio, leaving it to decide whether or not to pass the information, and when to do so (only occasionally did they request the Collegio not to inform the Senate). Collegio members screened all the information which eventually reached the Senate; they read and summarized the Senate’s correspondence, and also drafted the replies which senators were then asked to approve.¹¹⁷ They could stop all information originally meant for the Senate, or even reverse the order of communication, passing information ﬁrst sent to the Senate to the Ten or to the Inquisitors instead. For example, a dispatch addressed by an ambassador to the Senate relating to his counter-intelligence in Spain, although opened by the Collegio, is in the Inquisitors’ ﬁle with a note scribbled by a secretary of the Collegio explaining that ‘this letter was read only in the Collegio and by its order handed over to the Inquisitors of State, to whose authority it properly belongs’.¹¹⁸ Thus, the Collegio was the central mechanism in the transmission of information inside the political system. It included the Signoria (the doge and his six counsellors, all elected by the Great Council), and a Consulta of 16 savi (‘wise men’, senators elected by the Senate), who divided into subgroups (known as mani) to oversee all sorts of affairs which the Collegio then brought to the Senate for approval.¹¹⁹ They made it possible for the Senate to process business which would otherwise have been unmanageable, and unsurprisingly, the Collegio was a busy council, the sole one in Venice to meet daily (apart from Mondays).¹²⁰ The Collegio was also the body in charge of dealing with foreign diplomats as well as representatives from the subject territories, and it collected precise records of all their audiences.¹²¹ It was to the Collegio that governmental envoys reported after their return and ambassadors delivered their famous relazioni, and the copies are still preserved in the Collegio’s archive.¹²² Thus, we can consider the Collegio as the Republic’s mouthpiece, ‘the only prince that foreign representatives encounter’, as a nuncio’s secretary wrote in 1646.¹²³ It was the most important ¹¹⁷ All letters to the Senate were available to be read in full whenever it was felt necessary (thus in 1610 Alvise Venier enjoined his colleagues to read a recent dispatch from France before taking a decision on the Collegio’s proposal, BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1908 (9045), cc. 124v-140, c. 126v). ¹¹⁸ Dispatch dated 6.6.1611, in ASV, IS, b. 483, cc. nn. The Inquisitors reprimanded the ambassador for writing to the Senate concerning intelligence (see Priuli’s reply of 28.8.1611, ibid.). ¹¹⁹ Besta 1899: 177–94, Maranini 1931: 325–44, and Cozzi 1986: 109–10. ¹²⁰ Cf. the description in Sanudo 1980: 96. ¹²¹ ASV, Coll., Esposizioni, divided in Roma (for audiences of the nuncio or otherwise relating to Rome) and Principi (for all other ambassadors). ¹²² ASV, Coll., Relazioni; only few bear the manuscript annotation ‘recitata al Senato’. Relazioni’s mistaken attributions to the Senate date back to the classic editions Albéri 1839–63 and Barozzi and Berchet 1856–78. More on relazioni in section 2.2 below. ¹²³ Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 213.

38

Information and Communication in Venice

element in ofﬁcial communication and, as is to be expected in a government preoccupied with communication, strict rules regulated audiences. While kings elsewhere stated their mind in personal audiences, the patriciate had to express its collective will with one voice. In particular, no one could interrupt the doge, but the latter was not allowed to improvise beyond the most general terms; instead he would assure foreign ambassadors that the Collegio would prepare a reply.¹²⁴ Just as orderly silence was meant to impress foreigners watching the Great Council, so the Collegio was designed as Venice’s apotheosis, further reinforced by the allegorical paintings on its walls, representing prudence and harmony. Foreign diplomats were advised to behave there ‘as if they were in the presence of a great king’.¹²⁵ After the ambassadors’ audiences the Collegio reported to the Senate, which voted on the appropriate responses. Ambassadors therefore described the former as the antechamber to the latter (which it physically was, being the room next to the Senate, opening onto it through a door), or, more imaginatively, as ‘the stomach of the Republic, where all things are ﬁrst digested’.¹²⁶ Nominally, the Collegio had little authority of its own. By law, it could take no decision involving expenditures of more than 25 ducats.¹²⁷ However, it derived unparallelled indirect power from the constitutional mechanism determining that the Senate could vote no proposition which had not previously been discussed in the Collegio.¹²⁸ This mechanism was crucial in avoiding conﬂict, as contentious issues would normally be resolved into agreed compromises before reaching a large constituency. Once more, regulated communication was essential to the balance of the constitution. As Contarini afﬁrmed, the Collegio’s function was to moderate the potential for discord in the Senate: if all the senators could make their proposals, he argued, there would be ‘always the greatest troubles’ (grandissimi rumori).¹²⁹ In 1578, when a jurisdictional encroachment regarding a prelate’s prosecution was about to lead to open confrontation with Rome, the patricians who favoured the Holy See, and who dominated the Collegio, managed to prevent the formation of an antipapal consensus by framing the proposal in such terms that the Senate could only agree. The parallels with the 1606 Interdict are many, and it is likely that, had the Collegio been similarly compact then, things would have turned out differently. In 1578 communication remained in the smaller councils, whereas in 1606 the Interdict’s proclamation swept away its normal mechanisms and made the Senate’s intervention necessary. In 1578 Leonardo Donà—later the Interdict’s doge—realized this when he warned the nuncio that ‘by the love of God, one ought to beware of [excommunication and interdict], because the effects would be such that those who cause them would have reason to regret them’.¹³⁰ ¹²⁴ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁷ ¹²⁸ ¹²⁹

Besta 1899: 190 (law of 1577) and Queller 1977: 70–1 (law of 1485); cf. Mallett 1994. Thesoro politico 1593: 310. ¹²⁶ Wotton 1907, v. 1: 53; cf. Amelot 1676: 7. Parte of the Great Council dated 25.10.1441, in ASV, CL, b. 137, c. 143. Parte dated 8.11.1431, in ASV, CL, b. 137, c. 165; cf. Maranini 1931: 348–9. Contarini 1591: 53. ¹³⁰ The quotations in Stella 1964: 27 and 25.

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The Collegio’s control over communication minimized the Senate’s freedom to formulate an autonomous line, because it presented the latter with an already agreed policy, or with at most two contrasting proposals (and even then, as seen above, the savi dominated discussion).¹³¹ In a speech probably delivered in 1610, senator Alvise Venier complained that it was hard to speak out against the proposal of the savi, who secured their victories by formulating proposals very late. In this way senators had no information about the matters at hand and no time to formulate alternative policies. Consequently, Venier invoked a law allowing senators to be informed well in advance of the proposals to be made.¹³² There is no evidence that his request was granted. In turn, this explains why it is relatively rare to ﬁnd a proposal sent to the Senate and rejected, unless the Collegio was itself divided. As the nuncio was told by his secretary in 1646, favour in the Collegio brought command of the Senate, because the former passed the latter’s proposals ﬁve times out of six.¹³³ As a result of the Collegio’s power, the most ambitious politicians consistently sought election to the ofﬁce of savio. This is revealed by studying the identity of those elected savi di consiglio (or savi grandi), the most prestigious and powerful of the Consulta’s three subgroups, dressed in different robes and, unlike the others, carrying the right to propose motions to the Senate concerning all sorts of affairs.¹³⁴ A statistical analysis of those elected to this position over a chronological sample of 13 years (1606–18) shows that the ofﬁce was monopolized by a very small group of patricians.¹³⁵ Over this period, 213 different elections were made, divided amongst a group of 62 patricians.¹³⁶ In theory, then, everyone had the chance of being elected three or four times; but in practice Table 1.1 shows Table 1.1. Elections to the post of savio di consiglio, 1606–1618. Number of times elected

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Total

Number of patricians elected

21

16

4

4

3

2

4

1

2

4

1

62

Total

21

32

12

16

15

12

28

8

18

40

11

213

Subtotals (times/patricians)

65/41

79/12

69/7

213/62

¹³¹ See above, pp. 30–1. ¹³² Draft speech in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1908 (9045), c. 124v, see above n. 117. ¹³³ Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 212. ¹³⁴ Cf. the descriptions in Sanudo 1980: 93 and Vecellio 1598: 80. ¹³⁵ I wish to thank Dott. Vittorio Mandelli for generously providing me with this list, which he has reconstructed from the records of elections in ASV, Segretario alle voci, Senato, rr. 1–5 and from the consegi in MCV. I began with the ﬁrst election of 1606, and ended with the last of 1618. For a similar statistical attempt on both Collegio, Signoria, and Council of Ten, see P. Grendler 1990. ¹³⁶ Elections were held four times a year, for three savi everytime. They were to serve for six months, thus coinciding with three colleagues for the ﬁrst half of their term, and three different ones for the second half. Savi often changed mid-term, which explains the high number of elections.

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that seven patricians were elected between nine and eleven times each, while the majority were elected less than three times. This meant that a restricted group of politicians was in the almost permanent position of proposing their will to the Senate.¹³⁷ Venetian patricians were aware that, if they wished to see their ideas approved (or at least discussed) in the Senate, it was vital to be a member of the Collegio.¹³⁸ For this reason, because one could not be elected to the same position twice in a row, patricians were prepared to downgrade to the inferior charge of savi di terraferma.¹³⁹ Thus the Collegio was the means of the inner core’s domination over the rest of the political community. Political communication, which was nominally the prerogative of all patricians, really was restricted to a small group amongst them. 1.4 SECRECY AND THE MYTH OF VENICE In the late summer of 1607, the Council of Ten caught wind of a testament in which a recently deceased nobleman stipulated that his daughter would forfeit her inheritance unless she married a patrician ‘di casa nuova’. The distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ lineages (admitted into the patriciate respectively, before and after the formal closing of 1297), had been in use for centuries. But what was common in informal language was unacceptable to the government. The Ten were appalled and condemned these words as not only ‘unwise’ but also ‘seditious’. They ordered a secretary to fetch the testament from the notary and erase those words ‘as if they had never been written’, because ‘this unheard-of distinction cannot be tolerated, and must be forever cancelled from everyone’s mind’. Their intransigence went even further, and they recommended that no copy of their own decision be seen outside their council.¹⁴⁰ This is a striking measure, a government body seizing a private document to manipulate the will of a deceased man and then wishing to leave no trace of the words it condemned even in its own records. On the one hand, it shows the power of the authorities. On the other, however, it reveals the central problem at the heart of the ruling class as well as the ultimate purpose of communication control. Because of their number—with some 2,000 men all competing for promotion and inﬂuence—the patriciate was naturally divided in all sorts of ways ¹³⁷ The savio elected eleven times was Girolamo Giustinian (see above, n. 79); those elected ten times: Nicolò Donà, Andrea Morosini, Agostino Nani, Antonio Priuli (three of them procurators, and two future doges). ¹³⁸ The saviato (Consiglio and Terraferma, but not Ordini) also gave the right to join the Senate for a year after the elapsing of the ofﬁce; see Sanudo 1980: 93–4. ¹³⁹ During the Interdict, similar actions raised several eyebrows, cf. a dispatch by the ambassador of Savoy in de Magistris 1906: 284; cf. also the Mantuan ambassador in Putelli 1911, 22: 77. On ofﬁceholders’ periods of ineligibility, cf. P. Grendler 1990: 46. ¹⁴⁰ Parte of 20.9.1607, in ASV, CX, Deliberazioni segrete Roma, r. 4, cc. 65r –v.

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around lineages, personal sympathies, wealth and economic interests, patronage and kin ties, as well as ideological tendencies. The fact that the ideal was not consistent with reality explains why the control of language was attempted with such desperate force. More generally, hiding divisions was the ultimate purpose of the secretiveness for which the Venetian government was so renowned. Foreign diplomats remarked time and again about this. In the 1490s Philippe de Commynes wrote that ‘no other people in the world are as suspicious and keep their councils so secret’.¹⁴¹ Thirty years later, an exasperated papal nuncio commented that it was ‘easier to obtain a secret from heaven than from them’.¹⁴² In practice, however, as the next chapter shows in greater detail, a large governing class made disclosures an everyday fact, and this was why, ultimately, such governnment magistrates as the Inquisitors of State constantly guarded the preservation of secrecy.¹⁴³ The point of the government’s insistence on secrecy was not just functional but also symbolic: to maintain a degree of conﬁdentiality over sensitive business, but also to project an image of harmony over a reality of disagreement. This allowed the remarkable achievement that a government unique for its large power sharing and complex deliberative process was renowned above all for its secrecy and harmony. Most historians have dismissed examples of governmental secrecy, particularly the Council of Ten’s special rito, as signs of Venice’s oligarchic decline.¹⁴⁴ But secrecy was in fact inherent in Venice’s republican ideology. The manipulation of communication helped secure harmony in the ruling councils. More importantly, it made disagreement unspeakable, in the hope of cancelling it from ofﬁcial and private language and so of erasing it from people’s mind—as if it had never existed. Accordingly, many, even amongst those who championed broad power sharing inside the patriciate, praised the arrangements limiting debating and information sharing. Marin Sanudo, who consistently spoke for patrician equality and freedom of speech inside the councils, nonetheless also repeatedly exalted secrecy in his description of the constitution. In particular, when it came to hiding the ﬂaws of the highest authorities, he too favoured hiding information from as large an assembly as the Great Council. Otherwise, he wrote in 1501, ‘everybody would be made aware of the entire affair, including those involved in material crafts, to the shame of the State.’¹⁴⁵ To him, secrecy was a matter of collective honour. Similarly, during the 1582 correzione which diminished the Council of Ten’s prerogatives, even those in favour of reform favoured secrecy. No less than ¹⁴¹ Commynes 1901–3, v. 2:225. ¹⁴² Quoted above, p. 4, and cf. Preto 1994a: 55–74. ¹⁴³ See above, p. 34. ¹⁴⁴ See the works quoted above, n. 101; an assessment of the rito’s working in practice in Povolo 1997. ¹⁴⁵ Quoted in Cozzi 1992: 112, and cf. Sanudo 1980: 99, 101, 145. On Sanudo’s political opinions see Cozzi 1968 and Finlay 1980: 251–80.

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Leonardo Donà, a prominent leader of the reform movement, lamented that open talk of dissensions damaged the Republic’s policies and reputation.¹⁴⁶ Thus he favoured both power-sharing amongst government councils and secrecy outside the government. The Ten were initially stripped of control over the secret chancery, but eventually regained it; and the power of the Inquisitors of State was not questioned.¹⁴⁷ In fact, the real winner in 1582 was neither the Senate nor the Great Council, but the Collegio. While the Ten were compelled to communicate more matters to the Collegio, the latter retained the right to keep those matters to itself, without informing the Senate—a move which was at the origin of the archival series of comunicate discussed above.¹⁴⁸ Constitutional laws and literature alike conﬁrm that, far from being opposed, secrecy and republican liberty converged in the patricians’ minds. A law conﬁrming the power of the Inquisitors of State barely a year after the 1582 correzione, afﬁrmed that ‘buon governo’ required ‘secretezza’.¹⁴⁹ The same language recurred in Gasparo Contarini’ De Magistratibus, a pillar of Venice’s self-perceived republican myth written in the 1520s. There, knowledge is at once a sign of status, a mark of ofﬁce, and an instrument of authority.¹⁵⁰ The treatise ends with a revealing variation on the classical metaphor of the body politic, describing the body’s direction as stemming not from head or heart (as was customary), but from the eyes. In the same manner as the human body only sees through the eyes, so in the Republic, only patricians can see the affairs pertaining to government. Not for nothing are they called the ‘eyes of the city’.¹⁵¹ Venetian lawmakers thought that the skill which gave power was sight, because it was through knowledge that opinions were formed and decisions taken. But they also knew that knowledge must be restricted. Mixing an egalitarian notion of the patriciate with support for an oligarchical distribution of power within it, Contarini stressed that knowledge of secrets pertained to the Council of Ten.¹⁵² It was on this basis that other patricians applied the metaphor of the eyes not to the entire patriciate but to the Council of Ten alone.¹⁵³ Nearly a century later, writing in a different literary genre and for a different audience, Traiano Boccalini ﬁrmly placed secrecy at the heart of the myth of Venice. His Ragguagli include a dispute in Parnassus over the reasons for Venice’s ¹⁴⁶ See his letters in Brunetti 1933: esp. 133–7. ¹⁴⁷ Trebbi 1980: 117; see also below, section 2.1. ¹⁴⁸ Cf. Besta 1899: 210–11. Differing accounts of this reform’s signiﬁcance in Cozzi 1958: 2–51, Stella 1958a, and Lowry 1971. On the comunicate, see above, p. 32. ¹⁴⁹ Law of 19.4.1583, in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 130. ¹⁵⁰ For example, he associated knowledge with honour when discussing the condition of the cittadini, excluded from ofﬁce but admitted to all the records of the Republic, Contarini 1591: 102–3. ¹⁵¹ Contarini 1591: 106. On variations of the body politic metaphor, see Le Goff 1990, Najemy 1995, and Sperling 1999a. ¹⁵² Contarini 1591: 60. On Contarini’s preference for oligarchical authority, see Gleason 1988. ¹⁵³ For example in a famous speech of 1677 by Battista Nani, cf. Cozzi 1995a: 11.

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greatness, presided over by no less than Lady Venetian Liberty herself. The various opinions recapitulated the myth’s various elements as formulated ever since Contarini: constitutional stability; excellence of the city’s site; prudence of the ruling class; harmony between nobility and ordinary citizens; fairness of justice. Yet none of these explanations satisﬁed Lady Liberty, until a ﬁctional Ermolao Barbaro—a famous Venetian statesman and diplomat as well as a humanist—pointed to secrecy. This at last was the correct answer, she said, because secrecy was vital to good government.¹⁵⁴ Secrecy was tantamount to serenity. The greatest secret of all did not concern the subject matter of council debates, but the fact that there were debates at all. In this way, the government maintained unanimity, if not in the eyes of the wider patrician assemblies, at least of the people outside and of foreign observers. The law prohibited mention of any conﬂict inside the ruling councils, to divulge what was under discussion or that anything was discussed. Since 1556, for example, papalisti, who left whenever ecclesiastical affairs were discussed, had to swear not to reveal that they had left at all.¹⁵⁵ This prohibition was strengthened at particularly charged times, such as during the Interdict, when it was extended to all those excluded from deliberations for whatever reason, and also forbade other patricians relating that any governmental council had taken any special such precaution.¹⁵⁶ When outside, even the physical behaviour of insiders was supposed to include no sign that there had been a contrast inside: ‘everyone should come out of the Senate happy as if nothing was with them’.¹⁵⁷ At times of particular tension, the public was supposed to ignore even the fact that an assembly met at all. For example during Cambrai, the Senate suspended the ringing of bells summoning senators to the gatherings, lest people grow too anxious at the continuous meetings.¹⁵⁸ In a way, secrecy compensated for the lack of divine right legitimacy. Where decisions are taken through compromise, they must be made to seem principled and unanimous, the result of consensus rather than confrontation. The secretive rituals surrounding the scrutinio ducale, the election of the doge, together with its complicated mechanisms, were meant to shroud the actual politicking leading to the election and thus to turn a contested choice into a representative authority.¹⁵⁹ The same applied (and still applies) to Europe’s only theocracy at the precise moment when it brieﬂy becomes elective during the conclave. In Venice, secrecy was instrumental in projecting as well as maintaining unanimity, an element of the myth as well as a tool maintaining the reality underpinning that myth. The control ¹⁵⁴ Boccalini 1910–48, v. 1: 31; cf. also ibid.: 78–81. ¹⁵⁵ Parte of the Ten dated 28.12.1556, in ASV, CL, b. 14, c. 266; Besta 1899: 107 wrongly dates this law at 1605. ¹⁵⁶ Parte of the CX of 28.11.1605, in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 138. ¹⁵⁷ Quoted in Maranini 1931: 248. A similar preoccupation in Philip II’s Spanish monarchy, Parker 1998: 33. ¹⁵⁸ Besta 1899: 198n. ¹⁵⁹ On the ducal election, see Maranini 1927: 184–92 and 1931: 290–1, and Lane 1973: 111.

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of communication allowed a public image of unity to triumph over the sphere of private interests and disagreements. The contrast with Genoa is striking, a republic so dominated by kingroups and factions that private interest dominated all public discourse.¹⁶⁰ There were divisions in Venice too, of course, and we shall see in the next chapter that their leaks continually frustrated the government’s secrecy. However on the whole, factions found it impossible to voice their disagreements with sufﬁcient strength to break the apparent harmony of the system. The control over communication fortiﬁed the power of the patriciate over the state. The law not only regulated political communication inside the government, but absolutely prohibited it outside. Government was based on the systematic exclusion of all non-patricians, with the exception of a carefully restricted group of cittadini admitted to public employment as secretaries or clerks, an elite order within Venice’s second order.¹⁶¹ Outside this group, no discussion of politics was to be allowed. Unlike the imperial cities with which some of Venice’s constitutional mechanisms can be compared, Venice made no political room for guilds and their representatives. Scuole grandi and piccole, confraternities and guilds, all performed valued services for the state, from charity to the provision of manpower for the ﬂeet or for civic occasions. But they were denied any possibility of meddling with the administration of either city or state. Special laws barred patricians from joining scuole —so as to prevent any mutual inﬂuence—but all secular and religious lay associations were subject to the control of the authorities, and particularly of the Council of Ten.¹⁶² In Venice’s vast celebrative literature, outsiders could read a celebration of their own exclusion as the key to the Republic’s stability, at once a vindication of the aristocracy’s elitism and the sign of its success. The most important authors in that tradition all afﬁrmed that Venice prospered by preventing the populace from laying claim to power, unlike ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence.¹⁶³ The same point was repeated in countless lesser known works. One of them, a Comparison of Republics Ancient and Modern (1627), praised the absence of popular participation as a mark of Venice’s superiority: ‘As heaven is without matter or objects which can oppose resistance, so this republic is without people, and nothing can unsettle its conduct.’¹⁶⁴ The simile made Venice part of the cosmos, superior to earthly affairs, incorruptible, and never-ending. To uphold this idea, it was crucial to prevent outsiders not just from seizing power, but even from laying their eyes on the human beings who happened to hold it. In our society, we consider political secrecy as an aberration. Elsewhere, however, it plays a more complex role. For example, on the basis of her investigation of ¹⁶⁰ Cf. Grendi 1987 and 1993, Burke 1997: 111–23. ¹⁶¹ See below, pp. 50–1. ¹⁶² Pullan 1971: 44. For the background, see ibid.: Part One, and Mackenney 1987: 1–28. ¹⁶³ Contarini 1591: 14, Giannotti 1850: 29–31, Paruta 1852, v. 1: 397, and v. 2: 103, Memmo 1563: 92, 98–106, 121. ¹⁶⁴ Caimo 1627: 186.

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the secret Poro communities of sub-Saharian Africa, the anthropologist Beryl Bellman showed that secrecy can work as social cement.¹⁶⁵ The same could be said of Venice, where secrecy provided group cohesiveness. This is not to say that the manipulation and subtraction of information were commendable. They were meant to disinherit most patricians of their birthright in favour of an inner core and in turn to foster oligarchic rule upon a whole population. What cemented some people’s relations, also built walls which other people could not penetrate. However, rather than engaging in a moral critique of secrecy, the point is to show the ways in which it played an essentially functional role in government and, if anything, the ways in which it occasionally became dysfunctional. Thus, for example, by stubbornly adhering to a policy of censorship, the Republic found it hard to formulate any positive public statement in the face of increasingly aggressive challenges during the crisis of 1606–7. More generally, secrecy was always bound to run into major difﬁculties, which was why it was sought with such desperate force. The government’s attempt to obliterate all signs of internal dissension reveals an impossible, almost utopian desire: as if silencing disagreements were the same as engendering unity, as if politics could be turned into an ideal world away from earthly divisions. But ultimately, politics cannot be depoliticized. As the next chapter shows, banned by the constitution, conﬂict was bound to surface in other ways. ¹⁶⁵ Bellman 1984.

2 Political arena In the previous chapter we have seen that secrecy was an overriding principle of Venetian governance. Here we shall see that it may well have been so because, in practice, it was so hard to maintain. The control over political communication could hardly be complete in a ruling class where information was at the disposal of hundreds of patricians, each one surrounded by an often large household, as well as non-patrician servants, clients, and friends. As one patrician put it, secrecy was structurally unrealistic in Venice: ‘the form of our government does not allow for this to be done in secret’.¹ In the early sixteenth century, both Priuli and Sanudo admitted that the secrets of the Senate were well known in Rome.² Breaches of secrecy were a normal feature of the system. Traiano Boccalini’s literary celebration of secrecy should be taken with a pinch of salt, given that he was thought by some to have been active himself as an informer in the same years as he wrote his Ragguagli.³ If secrecy was part of the myth of Venice, by the early seventeenth century it began to be seen as precisely that: a delusion of the past, as a Spanish ambassador put it (and he must have known, since he was regularly updated about the Senate’s secrets.)⁴ Information circulated beyond the institutional boundaries of government into a large and loosely deﬁned political arena of informal interaction between insiders and outsiders. The former included members of the most powerful councils as well as their friends, canvassing support for a particular policy or election. Insiders also included patricians temporarily excluded from councils, who tried to regain power by seizing and manipulating information to which they had no right. Alongside patricians was a host of outsiders, a composite group defying deﬁnitions and straddling social boundaries. They included the illegitimate offspring of patricians, noble or rich foreigners, well-connected men of letters and ecclesiastics, as well as shadier and socially humbler ﬁgures, professionals of information whom, for lack of a better word, we describe as spies, but whose role was more ubiquitous than this word suggests. They may be compared with today’s ‘chattering classes’. Their common traits consisted not in wealth or status, but ¹ Piero Gritti, referring to the bribing of foreign ministers (1620), in Firpo 1975–96, v. 9: 544. ² Quoted in Besta 1899: 106; cf. Del Torre 1998. ³ Cf. Cozzi 1956a, corrected in Luigi Firpo’s entry in DBI, s.v.; on writers as professional informers, see below, p. 79. ⁴ De Vera 1620: 67; on De Vera’s intelligence activities in Venice, cf. Preto 1994a: 123–8.

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in education and connections, the ability to access, elaborate, and redistribute, reserved information. To the patricians amongst them, politics was a privilege of birth, but to all it was an over-riding, professional or quasi-professional, concern, crucial to fortifying social status or ensuring livelihood. Arguably, all early modern political systems included a political arena alongside government, and thus entailed a contradiction between the principle of exclusion and the practice of inclusion. Insiders could not do without the services of outsiders such as secretaries, scholars, or servants. In Venice, the political arena was particularly important. First, this had to do with both the size of the ruling class and its deﬁnition along kin ties. The latter furthered social exclusion but undermined the distinction between public and private. For example, as Stanely Chojnacki has shown, patrician women were excluded by gender from the exercise of government but played a crucial role in providing their male relatives with horizontal bonds to other lineages in the same class.⁵ These bonds cut across the patriciate. Political divisions were certainly less prominent in Venice than in early modern Italy’s other republics, and faction is not a word that is frequently used in analysing the Serenissima’s politics. However, this may well be a consequence of the systematic elision of traces of discord from the records. Although we should not think of close ideological units, let alone of organized parties, there is no doubt that in Venice too personal ambitions interacted with kin ties, personal preferences, and business relations, the amici e parenti who, as Sarpi recognized, divided Venice like the consorterie did other Italian cities.⁶ Secondly, regulated debates could not realistically provide the sole avenue of political discussion. Barred from voicing excessive opposition inside governing councils, patricians handled their disagreements outside them. In Venice politicking enjoyed specially dedicated, extra-constitutional spaces, where council members discussed business, arranged alliances, and planned strategy. This was the world of broglio and ridotti, the former a square just outside the Ducal Palace’s main gates where patricians met daily before or after council sessions, the latter private occasions for more or less select socialization. The broglio hosted, and gave its name to electioneering and canvassing, a crucial moment of the patricians’ political activities. It was regulated by special rules of politeness, the ‘civill and courteous gestures’ which impressed an English traveller in the 1600s.⁷ As one spelled out, the point was to cultivate one’s network, not just to ‘spend the morning there speaking to two others only’.⁸ Ridotto, the Venetian equivalent ⁵ Chojnacki 2000a; more on this below, section 3.4; and cf. Mackenney 1998. ⁶ Pin 1975: 266. The contrasting accounts of political divisions in Venice are Cozzi 1958 (for the ideological opposition of groups), Lowry 1971, and Finlay 1980 (for shifting, mainly interest-driven, alliances). Cf. on Genoa above, Ch. 1, n. 160. ⁷ Coryat 1905, v. 1: 399, and cf. the suggestions for behaviour in Manuzio 1584: 46, and Accademico Imperfetto 1674: 51–7. On the broglio, see Queller 1986: 57–75 and 95–101 (with full references to previous bibliography), Everett and Queller 1993, and Queller and Swietek 1977. ⁸ Accademico Imperfetto 1674: 57.

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of the French salon, was a loose term indicating both an exclusive social occasion and the room hosting it inside private households.⁹ Occasionally they acted as informal foci of competition with formal government. In the 1570s and 1580s, for example, the ridotto in the Morosini palace at San Luca helped in constituting the movement against the Council of Ten which led to the correzione of 1582. Martin Lowry convincingly disputed the interpretation which, beginning with Ranke, insisted on the ridotto’s role in cementing a culturally and politically cohesive opposition.¹⁰ By placing the ridotto in the political arena, however, we can understand its importance in providing an avenue for informal political communication for different viewpoints. Whatever their potential for political association, broglio and ridotti were inescapable elements of political success. A 1623 treatise on patrician education reminded its readers that neglecting the broglio ‘would give the impression of disregarding public affairs’.¹¹ However informally deﬁned, broglio and ridotti were institutions of Venice’s political system, enabling patricians to interact more freely than in the controlled framework of governing councils, and as such they helped to resolve disputes and preserve that system.¹² But, as this chapter shows, they also posed a threat to the system, because they were open to a number of outsiders, commoners as well as foreigners, such as ambassadors and authors. In the Venetian Republic, the political arena was particularly porous and prone to disclosures. Unlike monarchical capitals, Venice had no court. A court would separate the business of insiders from the participation of outsiders, or at least establish degrees of exclusion. A court would have made it possible to contain political communication in well-deﬁned spaces. There, secrets whispered by courtiers may well have echoed powerfully through grand halls, but they would have done so far from undesired ears.¹³ By contrast, in Venice information revealed just outside the Ducal Palace quickly travelled around the entire city.

2 . 1 T H E A RC H I V E ’ S P R E S E RVAT I O N , U S E , A N D D I S PE R S A L The inquiry into the breaches of political secrecy must begin where political secrets were kept. This takes us back to the Ducal Palace, which did not just host governmental activity, but also the archive holding the latter’s records. From ⁹ The contemporary English translation was appropriately inclusive: ‘a home or retiring place. Also a gaming house, an ordinary or tabling house or other place where good company doeth meete. Also a company, a crue assembly of good fellowes met together’, Florio 1611: s.v.; cf. Boerio 1829: s.v. ¹⁰ Lowry 1971, and cf. Trebbi 1993: 77–96. ¹¹ Collurafﬁ 1623: 201; the same point was made in Manuzio 1584: 49. ¹² Cf. the discussion of a passage from Priuli’s diary in Chambers and Pullan 1992: 77. ¹³ Cf. Ago 1997 and the essays in Signorotto and Visceglia 2002.

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1402, it was known as the Cancelleria secreta, or, quite simply, the Secreta.¹⁴ It was an institution of great importance in the minds of patricians. The Council of Ten described it in mid-ﬁfteenth century as the ‘heart’ of the state (cor status nostri), and in the 1620s a legal counsellor called it a ‘treasure’, to be guarded with the utmost attention.¹⁵ Ofﬁcial laws and printed treatises (including a pioneering De Archiviis, published in 1632) equally described the proper preservation of archives as an element of good government.¹⁶ Venetians pioneered the collection and systematic storing of information, created a ducal chancery as early as the thirteenth century and soon set it apart from the repository of private, notarial records (known as Cancelleria inferiore). The Secreta came under the control of the Ten in the ﬁfteenth century, thereby making the guardian of current political secrets also the guardian of the secrecy of past records. Venetian patricians were required to deposit all their ofﬁcial papers in the state archive before and more systematically than the ministers of monarchies, a sign of the impersonal nature of Venetian governance. Finally, in 1601 the Secreta acquired added importance in the collective image of the ruling class, when its supervisors doubled as ofﬁcial historians, pioneering the use of governmental records in the writing of history.¹⁷ The constitution of the Secreta reveals the government’s desire both to preserve and to use information. However, in spite of all precautions, it was a less secure treasure, and open to more uses, than the government wished. Secrecy failed at the very centre of the political system.

The permeability of the archive Repeated measures show the government’s anxiety over the preservation of the Secreta’s order, especially following the bureaucratic growth of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. As the mass of documentary material grew, correctly storing it became increasingly difﬁcult. In 1518 the Council of Ten was concerned about the number of papers that had gone missing during the wars of the previous years.¹⁸ In 1604 a secretary was put in charge of reordering the ﬁles, for a yearly salary of 40 ducats.¹⁹ In December 1612, weeks after the prosecution of very serious disclosures, the Collegio promised a generous reward to two clerks who could bring order to a large quantity of unﬁled letters from representatives abroad, which were believed to amount to 75 years worth of documents.²⁰ In ¹⁴ Most of the historiography concerning the constitution of the Secreta dates from the ninteenth century: cf. Baschet 1857 and 1870, Cecchetti 1865 and 1873, R. Brown 1865 and H. Brown 1907; more recently, Trebbi 1980 (summarised in Pozza 1995 and 1997). ¹⁵ Trebbi 1980: 115; Micanzio 1974: 1375. ¹⁶ Cecchetti 1865: 21 and Bonifacio 1632. ¹⁷ Benzoni 1982: xxxiii, cf. Zorzi 1987: 96–7. ¹⁸ Parte dated 30.6.1518, in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 120. ¹⁹ ASV, CCX, Notatorio, r. 33, c. 24 (the secretary was Valerio Antelmi). ²⁰ Parte dated 17.12.1612, with attached list of the ‘calendars in progress of the letters sent to ambassadors in foreign courts’, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 30, cc. nn. For the prosecutions

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the following years the ordering attempts increased to engage a growing number of specially appointed secretaries.²¹ As the newly elected Secreta supervisor reported in 1601, the trouble was that the archive’s disorder facilitated the dispersal of documents.²² Thirty years later, another report complained that the lack or rules (poca regola) in the ﬁles’ maintenance enabled thieves to steal without difﬁculty, to the extent that some of the documents ended up in the most unthinkable places—including the shops of food-sellers, where they were presumably used for wrapping.²³ In the same years, the antiquarian Fortunato Olmo, charged with ordering the archive of the Procurators of St. Mark, marvelled at ﬁnding some of the most interesting documents in the ‘rubbish’.²⁴ That similar complaints occurred elsewhere in Italy, is a sign of the difﬁculties of storage in a society whose graphic obsession led to the amassing of huge quantities of paper.²⁵ It also shows the looseness of the boundaries distinguishing precious from non-precious documents. To prevent dispersal, rigid rules regulated the Secreta’s accessibility. At ﬁrst it was restricted only to senators, then only to those amongst senators with a certiﬁable reason for consultation. Copying was subject to strict scrutiny.²⁶ Only the Inquisitors of State had unrestricted access to all archives.²⁷ However, the frequent repetition of these prohibitions indicates that they were often breached. In 1605 the Ten lamented that some patricians took originals out of the Secreta, ‘and those things which they take out never get back there’.²⁸ In 1619, again, they tried to prevent the ‘scandal and danger’ originating from the fact that ‘many dare enter the secret chancery, even those who are not senators, and some who are in fact subjects and foreigners’.²⁹ In parallel, as part of the bureaucratization resulting from ﬁfteenth-century territorial enlargement, the Republic devised a complicated examination process for the selection and advancement of the chancery personnel. In 1478 the Council of Ten restricted its posts to cittadini, a group that was itself, at the time, undergoing a process of deﬁnition and separation from the rest of Venetian society. The qualiﬁcations for eligibility to public employment were made stricter over the course of the sixteenth century, thereby creating an elite group of families within the citizen order.³⁰ Within that elite, in turn, those working in the Secreta were at the top. In 1589, they were recognized as the apex of the civil service’s hierarchy, of November 1612, see below, pp. 73–4. In the same years, the archive of the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia was in a similar mess, cf. Derosas 1981: 512–13, 515–16. ²¹ See for example the parte of 19.4.1617, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, r. 16, c. 96v. ²² Report by Andrea Morosini, in Baschet 1870: 170–3. Morosini was elected on 17.9.1601, the ﬁrst ofﬁcial historian to be given supervision of the Secreta; see Zorzi 1987: 96, 105. ²³ Report dated 1632, in Cecchetti 1865: 21. ²⁴ Pozza 1995: 364; further evidence in Cecchetti 1873: 37–44. ²⁵ Cecchini 1976. ²⁶ Baschet 1870: 181–2; Cecchetti 1865: 25–6. ASV, IS, b. 924, cc. nn., contains a list of the senators who accessed the Secreta in the years 1698–99 with the items they consulted. ²⁷ Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 133 and 142–4. ²⁸ Cornet 1873, v. 5: 124–6n. ²⁹ Zannini 1993a: 126. ³⁰ Grubb 2000.

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as the Ten’s secretary Antonio Milledonne proudly boasted. In 1633, then, the government explicitly privileged the recruitment of sons of past employees. Thus, having closed on themselves as a caste, patricians also helped their civil servants distinguish themselves from the rest of the populace in the attempt to limit access to governmental business as much as possible.³¹ In a system of quickly rotating ofﬁces, secretaries had a particularly important position, with even greater access to information than the patricians themselves. Although exalted in numerous treatises, ‘like the angels closest to God’, as faithful guardians of the government’s secrets, they could prove major sources of disclosures.³² In 1564 Sansovino built on a hallowed tradition in saying ‘secretaries derive their name from secrecy’, but a counter-image also existed on the basis of which a century later a literary-minded anonymous denunciation punned that segretari really ought to have been called palesari from the word for ‘disclosing’.³³ Like the Spain of Philip II and Antonio Peres, Venice too had its spectacular cases of secretaries defecting and selling their masters’ secrets, for example in 1542, when two secretaries of the Ten were hanged for selling information concerning the peace negotiations with the Turks.³⁴ Partly, disclosures were inescapable in a large bureaucracy of 80–100 permanent secretaries; in 1633 the Ten tried to reduce the number of employees.³⁵ Secretaries were the natural object of bribes by all those who wanted information, some of it necessary to the simple running of politics, such as records of elections.³⁶ Lower down in the government’s employment scale, both the guards of the Cinque savi alla mercanzia and the doorkeepers of the Collegio sold reserved information; as early as 1583, the Esecutori alla bestemmia took the keys of their archive away from their guards.³⁷ In parallel with other branches of the executive, the management of the archives was often in the hands of people ready to supplement their income by conniving with outsiders in exchange for information.³⁸ Not for nothing was it ancient custom to choose illiterate men as custodians of the Secreta, lest they copied and sold secret documents (the same measure was also recommended to ambassadors for their own archives). However, neglect for this rule ran so high that it was the subject of jokes—one contemporary ³¹ Trebbi 1980 and 1986a, Neff 1986, and Zannini 1993a. On the parallelism of patrician and cittadino processes of social closure, cf. Chojnacki 1994, 2000b, and Grubb 2000. ³² Sansovino 1564: 1; Contarini equally emphasized the secretaries’ honour (above p. 42). Cf. Nigro 1998. ³³ Sansovino 1564: 1v; the 1672 denunciation is quoted in Barbierato 2003: 723. ³⁴ Preto 1994a: 75–6 ³⁵ Baschet 1870: 184–6. By the late sixteenth century the various employees of the chancery amounted to 80–100 secretaries, although of course fewer were charged with the secreta, Trebbi 1980: 82–3; for 1631 Zannini has a total number of 88, 26 of whom had access to the secret records, Zannini 1993a: 131. ³⁶ Raines 1991 and p. 57 below. ³⁷ Molà 2000: 293 and Derosas 1981: 511, 517–24. On the lower ofﬁces in the government’s bureaucracy, see Zannini 1993a: 183–246 and 1996: 449–55. ³⁸ Cf. Derosas 1981, Povolo 1981, Shaw 2004.

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joke went: A custodian caught in the archive scribbling on a piece of paper was challenged ‘So you can write!’, replied ‘No, Your Excellency, I am drawing’.³⁹ Government personnel constituted only one link in a longer chain of people involved in managing reserved documents. At its simplest, the physical transfer of documents by means of couriers endangered secrecy, as Fernand Braudel ﬁrst showed.⁴⁰ The Venetian government knew the importance of keeping foreign couriers under control and often obtained through them information about competitors.⁴¹ Couriers were after all by deﬁnition people who lived between different states, foreigners in the country they served (as a Venetian governor complained).⁴² The postal service necessarily entailed a risk of dispersal. In Venice, the government pioneered the professionalization of postal services and, unlike other governments, tended to make use of the same Compagnia dei corrieri that also served private customers.⁴³ Couriers incurred accidents and ambushes. In 1635 the Compagnia petitioned the government for greater protection, and throughout this period the cases of robbed postal parcels are innumerable.⁴⁴ The robbing of Zorzi Telco, postiglione charged with carrying German letters across the northern territories of the Republic in 1612, is similar to a hundred more. Two men assaulted him in a small village, tied him with a rope, and then opened his parcel, from which they read ‘at leisure’ before leaving him there.⁴⁵ In some cases, ambushes may have been organized by the intelligence services, as the Spanish ambassador, marquis of Bedmar, was reported fearing in 1612.⁴⁶ The use of couriers meant relying on the services of outsiders supposedly barred from political information for the transportation of that information. In 1607 Fausto Verdelli, a man who as we shall see had a lot of experience in the ways and hazards of intelligence, sent a Venetian governor a letter on the safe manner of capturing a Spanish fortress. For us, the most interesting aspect of Verdelli’s message lies in the medium rather than the content. The servant he sent carried a generic letter di complimento, but also, unknowingly, a secret message sewed in his coat by Verdelli. The governor got hold of the message while the servant was asleep, and hid his reply in the same manner.⁴⁷ This example shows ³⁹ Baschet 1870: 176 and Cavalli 1935: 80 on ambassadors. ⁴⁰ Braudel 1949: 310, and cf. Delumeau 1957–59: 37–79. ⁴¹ e.g. in Sardella 1947: 15. ⁴² Quoted in De Zanche 2000: 33. ⁴³ Pozza 1998, Caizzi 1993: 211–62. ⁴⁴ Caizzi 1993: 31–2. Many such cases were reported in this period’s weekly newsletters, e.g. ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 3, c. 47v (10.3.1607, courier from Milan); ASV, IS, b. 704, fasc. 3, cc. nn. (1.8.1615, Spanish courier at the border between France and Genoa); ibid. (30.12.1617, courier from Milan); BAV, Urb. Lat. 1086, c. 401 (13.10.1618, courier from Milan). ⁴⁵ Dispatch dated 12.12.1612, in ASV, Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 5, c. 408. ⁴⁶ Report dated 17.11.1612, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 3. A few years later the Duke of Savoy was suspected to have organized the robbing in Antibes of the courier from Spain, avviso dated 24.7.1615, in ASV, IS, b. 704, fasc. 3, cc. nn. The Spanish ambassador to Venice in 1607–18 was Alonso de la Cueva, marquis Bedmar from 1614. He recurs frequently in the following pages, always under the latter title; cf. Magdaleno 1976: 157. ⁴⁷ Letter by Marco Bragadin, Provveditore in Terraferma, dated 28.2.1607, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 29, cc. nn.

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one way in which ordinary people became tangled in the net of the political elite’s exchanges. At other times, however, they no doubt skilfully exploited the material frailty of the system which they were meant to serve. The author of a 1585 encyclopaedia of professions emphasized that couriers ‘are not without fault either’: he described one who, on discovering an important seal amongst the letters in his bag, opened the letter only then to pretend that he had been robbed on the way.⁴⁸ So many were these cases, that in the seventeenth century they gave origin to both political pamphlets pretending to disclose secret documents, and to literary works predating the genre of the epistolary novel, such as Ferrante Pallavicino’s appropriately titled Corriero svaligiato (1641).

The private use of public documents Before becoming the object of historians’ inquiry, archives were tools of government, consulted for the everyday conduct of political affairs. Use, however, was bound to involve dispersal. Time and again, for example, the controversies of the early seventeenth century forced the government to open the Secreta to outside advisors in search of supporting evidence of the Republic’s claims over the Adriatic, the patriarchy of Aquileia, as well as the Interdict.⁴⁹ Not for nothing, in this period, did the Collegio pass special measures for the archive’s ordering, because, as the Secreta’s supervisor pointed out, ordering the ﬁles was particularly important ‘especially now given the affairs which we are dealing with’.⁵⁰ The government also then institutionalized the occasional recruiting of legal consultori. They were given special access to the Secreta, a fact extolled as extremely useful by Paolo Sarpi, legal and theological consultore between 1606 and 1623.⁵¹ And yet, his own eminent example shows that, however beneﬁcial, their work undermined the archive’s secrecy. Sarpi had unqualiﬁed access to the Secreta, which he knew so well that his biographer Fulgenzio Micanzio wrote that his mind resembled it.⁵² Many historians have taken this as a sign of his complete identiﬁcation with the state.⁵³ However, Sarpi used the sources he found not only to write on behalf of the Republic, but also for his personal use, to ground his own works, such as the History of the Council of Trent.⁵⁴ He also took many volumes of documents to his convent cell (after his death, they had to be brought back to the Secreta), ⁴⁸ Garzoni 1996: 724–5. Note that couriers often supplemented their income with smuggling, Caizzi 1993: 48. ⁴⁹ Cf. de Vivo 2003. ⁵⁰ Morosini’s report dated 19.4.1617, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 32, cc. nn., on the basis of which the Ten allocated special funds for the archive’s ordering, ASV, CX, Parti segrete, r. 16, cc. 96v and 126v. ⁵¹ e.g. in Pin 1975: 254; cf. Barzazi 1986. ⁵² Micanzio 1974: 1375. ⁵³ e.g. Frajese 1994: 16–17. ⁵⁴ Several of Sarpi’s ﬁles (now in the ASV Cons. in iure series) are full of historical notes drawn from the records of the Secreta, which may contribute to clarifying the controversial problem of

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and he may have shared the knowledge he acquired with friends—as Micanzio commented, conversing with Sarpi was like reading the archive’s documents.⁵⁵ No doubt Sarpi thought he was advancing the Republic’s good, but many in the patriciate disagreed—really, he was furthering his own and his friends’ view of that good. In the same years, another consultore, Claudio Cornelio Frangipane (1553–1643), was repeatedly condemned for subtracting secret material from the Secreta. Eventually, he handed over a long list of ofﬁcial records which he claimed not to have ‘stolen’, but ‘taken out by public order’. Still, he transcribed many in his personal zibaldone diary-cum-common-place-book, thus showing how easy it was to move from the lawful use of secret information to its illicit appropriation.⁵⁶ The new limitations on access to the Secreta issued in 1611, should not only be seen as an attack on Sarpi, but also as part of the government’s broader realization that archival use must be reconciled with the preservation of secrecy (as the nuncio, no friend of Sarpi’s, stressed at the time).⁵⁷ These cases show that from use came familiarity and from that, ultimately, appropriation. Even more than their civil servants, patricians felt they had a right to keep those documents which they constantly used but which properly belonged to the Secreta. The same records which the government regarded as ofﬁcial, many patricians tended to see as belonging to themselves. In this sense, control over information was part of a larger tension between competing deﬁnitions of political institutions, part of a larger confusion between private and public which was true of other late medieval and early modern states, but was greater in a republic such as Venice, where one social group identiﬁed with the state.⁵⁸ While (as we have seen) the government laid claim to such private documents as testaments, patricians were in turn prepared to seize the ofﬁcial documents they accessed while on public duty. The papers taken by ambassadors on their travels provide an apt illustration. Before their departure, ambassadors were allowed into the Secreta, where they read their predecessors’ dispatches and other relevant records. They could also Sarpi’s sources in writing the history of the Council of Trent, cf. Vivanti 1974: lxxii–lxxxvii, and Asor Rosa 1993: 848–51. ⁵⁵ Micanzio 1974: 1375. In 1623, the secretary making an inventory of the documents in Sarpi’s cell found many which were unrelated to his charge, see Pin 1978: 316. In turn, Sarpi’s ofﬁcial and supposedly secret writings circulated in Venice and beyond, cf. Pin 2001: 123–55. Copies of Sarpi’s letters also had a vast circulation, extending to Europe’s ‘republic of letters’, cf. Ulianich 1961, Del Corno 1964, and Miller 2000: 87 and 169n. ⁵⁶ Frangipane’s supplica of 1628 addressed to the Ten, in MCV, Ms. Cicogna, 2505/IV, cc. nn. The list includes several feudal privileges, original papal bulls, political treatises, and extracts from histories of Venice (including some which ‘are not communicated either than with the Council of Ten’s consent’). Frangipane’s two volume ms. Zibaldone in BMV, Cod. Lat. XIII.73–4 (3918–3919). Cf. DBI, s.v. ⁵⁷ Parti of 14.10.1611, in ASV, Sen., Terra, r. 81, c. 130v, and 30.1.1612, in Cecchetti 1865: 17–18; nuncio’s dispatch dated 22.10.1611, in Savio 1936–42, v. 10: 43 n. Cf. Frajese 1994: 185–7. ⁵⁸ Cf. Romano 1996 and Chittolini 1996.

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make copies to take on their mission, occasionally bound in small manuscript volumes.⁵⁹ Such copies were put to numerous uses, as well as abuses. In 1605, for example, the recently appointed ambassador to France asked for a number of useful transcripts from the Secreta, including several dispatches and a report composed by previous ambassadors. Meanwhile, he also asked his immediate predecessor, Angelo Badoer, still serving in France, to leave him the documents he had himself taken from Venice. Badoer’s reply pointed to the dangers involved in copying documents. He wrote to the Inquisitors that he had no such documents, which he preferred to learn by heart, ‘because it is very dangerous to bring them around the world in such a way that they are handed from one to the other’. Badoer’s own example, however, conﬁrmed that ofﬁcial documents often remained in the ambassadors’ households; his father, he told the Inquisitors, had entire ‘bagfuls of letters and writings which he left in [our home] for the instruction of his children’. Badoer handed his father’s papers to the Ten, ‘regardless [as he revealingly added] of what others did’.⁶⁰ Time and again, the government tried to halt this practice, beginning in 1401 when ambassadors were ordered to deposit their papers within ﬁfteen days of their return ‘that they not come into the hands of others’.⁶¹ In the sixteenth century the effort became more widespread, and turned to past as well as present records. In 1558 the Ten asked all living former ambassadors to swear that they had presented their entire archives, and in 1596 called upon their heirs to hand over all ‘public documents’ preserved in their homes. A register was to be kept with the names of all the families who complied, followed by a list of the ‘ofﬁcial documents’ they presented.⁶² The government also repeatedly prohibited ambassadors to refer to their public missions in their private letters.⁶³ The frequency with which the prohibitions repeated themselves suggests that they were hardly effective. Breaches included law-abiding patricians such as Leonardo Donà, who as ambassador in Rome frequently discussed both home and foreign politics in letters to his brother.⁶⁴ Other ambassadors in Rome and Paris entertained long correspondences with Sarpi and his successors and, when occasionally intercepted by foreign agents, these letters caused serious embarassment in Venice.⁶⁵ ⁵⁹ Cf. secretary Andrea Suriano’s ‘Extract of various documents from the Secreta’, transcribed on behalf of the ambassador in Constantinople and bound in two quires, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 29, cc. nn. (30.4.1608). ⁶⁰ De Vivo 2001a: 191–4. Angelo’s father Alberto had been one of Venice’s most important patricians and ambassadors, see P. Grendler 1990: 76. On Angelo’s later vicissitudes, see below: p. 104. ⁶¹ Aspetti e momenti: 22; the same order was reissued in 1518, Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 119–20. ⁶² Ibid. 127–8, 134–6. ⁶³ Laws of 1437 (in Queller 1977: 40), 1464 (Queller 1966: 44–7, Aspetti e momenti: 24), and 1510 (ASV, CL, b. 14, c. 108). ⁶⁴ Brunetti 1933. ⁶⁵ Cf. Sarpi 1892 and Secchi 1969; in 1622–24 the ambassador in England regularly corresponded with Fulgenzio Micanzio, Dal Pino 1957–58: 148.

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The confusion between private and public documents makes it crucial for historians to integrate the state’s archive with collections of manuscripts formerly belonging to patrician families.⁶⁶ Perhaps the single most widely used source for the history of Renaissance Venice, Marin Sanudo’s diaries, are a monument to that confusion. They included not only his personal views, but also, on almost every page, accurate transcripts of secret information, from Senate debates to ambassadors’ dispatches. Furthermore, Sanudo collected more than 6,000 ﬁles, setting alongside private and ofﬁcial documents, Lutheran texts, poems, and pasquinades.⁶⁷ Sanudo claimed to have collected information thanks to his patrician status and as an old man listed all the times he sat in council—eight in the Collegio, ﬁve in the Senate. There, he boasted, ‘I have seen and heard the truth not just about this city, but about the whole world’.⁶⁸ For much of his life, however, Sanudo was out of ofﬁce.⁶⁹ His means of collecting information included accessing the archive possibly by cultivating its keepers, asking relatives who were in ofﬁce, or drawing information by frequenting ‘the piazze’.⁷⁰ Often, he admitted relying on copies which others had previously made of a secret document, and when once absent from Venice for a long period, he perused the diary kept by another patrician, a friend of his father.⁷¹ Clearly, collecting supposedly secret information was a habit Sanudo shared with others, a social practice rather than an individual obsession. All patricians had good reason to imitate Sanudo’s collecting, although on a less systematic scale. One may quote the example of transcripts of speeches made in the governing councils, the renghe. As we have seen, it was forbidden to record those speeches, but many circulated in manuscript form, and countless copies are preserved in the libraries put together by patrician families, bundled together according to subject matter, author, or without any apparent criteria, given out in writing by the speaker, or transcribed on the basis of hearing.⁷² Active politicians collected them as a record of their activities and families as a monument to their collective public role, and they also had a pedagogic function in training young patricians. Presumably, when inserting senators’ speeches in their histories, ofﬁcial historians used precisely these documents (although some may have invented ⁶⁶ Cf. Aspetti e momenti: 92–4, and now Raines 2006b. Nineteenth-century archivists created the series Archivi propri degli ambasciatori by putting together papers once in patrician families’ private archives. ⁶⁷ On Sanudo’s diaries, see Cozzi 1968, Gaeta 1980: 81–5, and Chambers 1998. A description of Sanudo’s library in Berchet 1902: 55 ff. Cozzi 1968: 104 compares some originals with Sanudo’s transcripts and ﬁnds the latter reliable. ⁶⁸ Berchet 1902: 96. ⁶⁹ Finlay 1980: 251–80. ⁷⁰ Gaeta 1980: 85. ⁷¹ Sambin 1944–45, and cf. Chambers 1998: 11–13. ⁷² A list is in Baschet 1870: 374–5; and cf. early seventeenth-century bound miscellanies in ASV, MADM, b. 3, cc. nn. (arranged by subject, the Uskoks) and BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1235 (7459) (by author, Tommaso Contarini). Many renghe in MCV, Mss. Donà 39, 210, 216, 228, transcribed and put together by Nicolò Donà, brother of doge Leonardo. As I will show below (pp. 58–9), the Donà collection also contained other illicitly transcribed documents. Parliamentary speeches similarly circulated in England, Love 1993: 9–22.

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speeches in humanist fashion, such as Pietro Bembo, who proudly afﬁrmed that his history reported ﬁner speeches than those actually delivered in the Senate.)⁷³ Like renghe, other reserved documents circulated because they were useful. In the process of voting or canvassing, patricians required wide-ranging knowledge, from lists of magistracies to summaries of the electoral procedures and records of past candidatures and appointments. Government secretaries collected such information and reproduced it in pocket format for commercial circulation amongst the political elite.⁷⁴ Secret information enjoyed a kind of select publication by means of manuscript which, as the next section shows, was typical of the political arena. The government’s attempt to ban it was bound to run into difﬁculties because it clashed with the patricians’ exercise of their political activity outside the governing halls—something which no patrician could afford to renounce.

2.2 THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF LEAKING: T H E C A S E O F RELAZIONI We can gain greater understanding of the mechanisms in the diffusion of supposedly reserved information by considering a staggering case of the systematic circulation of secret documents. Amongst the best known sources in European history, the relazioni of Venetian ambassadors have had almost iconic status ever since Leopold von Ranke used them to ground his ‘historiographical revolution’.⁷⁵ They are the end-of-mission reports which ambassadors and other government representatives presented both orally and in writing from (probably) 1268. The point of relazioni, as all ambassadors boasted, was to bring useful knowledge of the world to the government. Crucially, then, that knowledge had to be locked away from the eyes of outsiders, not least because relazioni often supplied sensitive information concerning allies or enemies. Therefore, in 1425 the Council of Ten instituted a special section in the Secreta for the reports’ preservation.⁷⁶ Despite such precautions, however, relazioni circulated in Venice and elsewhere to such an extent that those held today in Venice’s state archive are a small fraction of the existing copies. On visiting the university library at Oxford following an ⁷³ On the practice of inserting speeches in ofﬁcial histories, see Cozzi 1963, Gaeta 1980, and Finlay 1999. ⁷⁴ Raines 1991 stressed the role of the ballotini and of professional writers located near the Ducal Palace’s main gate; also Netto 1995. On patrician archives, see Raines 1996 and 1998. ⁷⁵ Relazione deﬁnes any sort of report. This section deals above all with those written by ambassadors, but all government representatives also composed relazioni. The bibliography on relazioni is vast, but cf. Andreas 1943, Benzoni 1990, Contini 2001, Del Negro 1984, Queller 1972 and 1973, Ventura 1976 and 1981. ⁷⁶ The extant series runs over 88 miscellaneous volumes, from the 1520s to the 1790s. Ventura 1976: xi–xii and Aspetti e momenti: 21, 23. In 1524 the obligation to present reports was extended to all government representatives, ibid.: 84.

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audience with the king in 1616, the representative in England was astonished to ﬁnd there ‘a large volume in manuscript’ containing fourteen relazioni by Venetian ambassadors.⁷⁷ Similar cases abound.⁷⁸ Ranke himself ﬁrst perused a large collection which he found in the Royal Library in Berlin and then went on to build a rich collection himself.⁷⁹ Nonetheless, neither he nor the historians following in his steps have engaged with the mechanisms of and reasons for relazioni circulation. What mattered to Ranke was that secrecy allowed Venetian ambassadors to be objective. In his and successive interpretations, relazioni are ‘the classical expression of diplomatic activity’ and the Venetian ambassador, the Republic’s faceless representative.⁸⁰ What is missing in these interpretations is the uses to which ambassadors and others put relazioni. As acts of communication, relazioni began inside the government. However, for ambassadors trying to gain personal prestige or assert a factional line, it was important to reach peers in the wider political arena through leaking. Others, patricians and non-patricians alike, then turned relazioni into objects of further exchange, whether for partisan, economic, or professional reasons. It was a form of scribal publication which was common well into the age of the printing press, and this is why we have to speak of both the politics and the economics of leaking.⁸¹

The publication of relazioni To understand how relazioni circulated we must turn from the modern editions to the palaeographic analysis of manuscripts carrying material traces of circulation. They show that all modes of manuscript publication identiﬁed by Harold Love in seventeenth-century London—authorial, entrepreneurial, and personal reproduction—already applied to sixteenth-century Venice.⁸² The large collection owned by the Donà family, for example, is mostly constituted by separates: independently tied documents, written by different people and at some later point bound together in aggregations according to subject matter.⁸³ This is in contrast with most of the volumes in foreign ⁷⁷ Dispatch dated 26.8.1616, in ASV, IS, b. 442, cc. nn., cf. CSPVen, v. 14: 285. ⁷⁸ Cf. R. Brown 1865: 111–15, Benzoni 1999: 143 (referring to 1722), Aspetti e momenti: 92 (1789). ⁷⁹ Tucci 1990, Muir 1983. Tucci does not attempt to trace the document market much before Ranke’s time, but Foscarini 1752: 461 already mentioned the relazioni’s ‘inﬁnite number of copies’. Arnaldo Segarizzi began collecting a list of extant copies, which is now held in the Biblioteca Querini Stampalia of Venice, cf. Tiepolo 1994: 890n. ⁸⁰ Morandi 1935: liii. ⁸¹ Love 1993 and Woudhuysen 1996, and on Italy, Richardson 2000 and 2004a. ⁸² I draw from the terminology used in Love 1993: 9–22 and 46–83. ⁸³ The following information is drawn from seven miscellanies: MCV, Mss. Donà 41 (miscellaneous), 47 (reports from France), 51 and 52 (from Switzerland), 146 (Constantinople), 216 (Rome), 219 (various Italian states). Patrician libraries generally contained relazioni, cf. Raines 1996.

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libraries which, like the one found by the Venetian agent in Oxford, generally (although not always) consisted of continuous compilations by one hand only. The difference indicates a different kind of composition and circulation. The Venetian separate was closer to the time of the relazione’s ﬁrst delivery, and perhaps originated from the author himself or his associates. The other was made later for a collector, in Venice or elsewhere, and generally by a paid copyist (although some collectors would transcribe compilations for their own use). The quality of the handwriting is also important. A good hand indicates a professional scrivener—either a commercial entrepreneur or a secretary—while rougher writing is generally that of the relazione’s owner, a case of ‘user publication’. One mode does not exclude the other. For example, Leonardo Donà owned a copy of Piero Duodo’s 1592 relazione about Poland written in elegant italic; but attached to that, we also ﬁnd a short summary of the report in Donà’s own writing, dating from the day Duodo delivered his report in the Senate. Donà clearly took notes of the report, then acquired (or was given) a copy.⁸⁴ The frequent presence of marginal annotations in Donà’s hand or his brother’s is further evidence of the combination of different uses. The nature of relazioni helps to explain the modes of their publication. The ﬁrst, and in theory the only mode of a relazione’s publication, was its oral delivery before the Senate or the Collegio. In either case, the ambassador was then under the obligation of depositing a written copy of his report in the archive. The Council of Ten worried that ambassadors could either ‘show’ or ‘even give out copies’ of their reports, and for that reason set increasingly strict time limits for presentation.⁸⁵ Those who listened to delivery were of course prohibited from divulging what they heard. But we know from Sanudo and the Donà brothers that it was possible at least to take mental notes which they then transcribed in their diaries—often no more than two-line summaries.⁸⁶ Frequently, Sanudo added that he would later ﬁll in the gap on a speciﬁc relazione, a promise which he did not always maintain. This suggests that he expected to obtain further information concerning that relazione. This brings us to a second mode of relazioni publication, the circulation of short summaries prepared either by members of the audience or by the ambassadors themselves (perhaps on the basis of notes made for delivery).⁸⁷ Examples abound in Sanudo’s ⁸⁴ MCV, Ms. Donà 41, c. 168; Duodo’s relazione is cc. 168–81. A similar case is in Ms. Donà 146, cc. nn. ⁸⁵ Parte dated 27.1.1558 in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 127–8. Laws were passed on the subject again in 1596 (ibid.: 134), 1620 (ASV, CL, b. 14, c. 597), and 1634 (ibid., c. 709). ⁸⁶ e.g. Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 35: 226 summarized Antonio Surian’s 1523 report from England in a few lines. An incomplete list of relazioni summarized or transcribed by Sanudo is in Baschet 1870: 340; cf. Also Antonibon 1939. ⁸⁷ e.g. Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 28: 15, referring to Sebastiano Giustiniani’s 1519 report about England; a summary, once in a private patrician library and now in BMV, in Firpo 1975–96, v. 8: 167–89.

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diaries, even when he was not in the Senate, which indicates that he was working on the basis of documents received from others. Comparing the summary written by an ambassador and the version transcribed by Sanudo shows that they enjoyed different channels of distribution.⁸⁸ A third mode of publication consisted in the circulation of a complete relazione, either the same as the one which was deposited in the Secreta or different versions. Whatever its ﬁrst source, once a relazione was available, only some paper and a few writing tools were necessary for circulating it further. The ﬂexibility of the manuscript medium made for continuous variations. In 1532, for example, Sanudo transcribed a very long relazione in full by the ambassador returning from the imperial court. His text largely coincided with one held in a private Florentine library, but while Sanudo’s version is heavily inﬂuenced by Venetian, the Florentine text is in polished Tuscan. Sanudo’s also contains more detailed factual information.⁸⁹ This indicates a multiplication of uses as well as users. What was important information in Venice at the time of delivery, later became an object of literary interest in Florence. Finally, user-reproduction interacted with the work of professional scribes working either as private secretaries or public scriveners or both, a thriving industry offering its services to a diverse clientele.⁹⁰ For example, the Inquisitors of State received a report about Cesare Prata, ‘who used to work as scrittore’ and in 1613 was denounced for ‘making a profession of ambassadorial relazioni’.⁹¹ Other cases show that the boundaries between commercial information and intelligence were not clear-cut. In the same period Giovan Francesco both worked as a public scrivener and supplemented his income by copying and selling relazioni. He brieﬂy turned to the sole service of the Duke of Urbino’s agent, but when the arrest of a spy made things too dangerous, he set up again a public stall (un boteghino di scrittore) in the parish of San Moisé, where most scriveners dwelled.⁹² Relazioni nourished a veritable market. While serving as ambassador in Rome, Leonardo Donà compiled a long two-page double-columned list of ‘relazioni which can be bought in Rome’.⁹³ Evidence of price is scant, although it would be very interesting to trace variations over time. In 1609 the duke of Mantua’s representative in Venice wrote to his master offering to buy the recent relazione from England for ten ducats, a high price but certainly one ⁸⁸ e.g., compare Sanudo’s summary (sumario) of a 1527 relazione on the Habsburg court of Vienna (Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 44: 383–4), with the ofﬁcial version, published in Firpo 1975–96, v. 9: 165–8. ⁸⁹ 1532 report by Nicolò Tiepolo, ambassador to Charles V, the full text (from Florence, Codici Capponi) is published in Firpo 1975–96, v. 9: 173–284; Sanudo’s version in Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 56: 320–56. ⁹⁰ More on scrittori below, pp. 123–5. ⁹¹ Report dated 26.2.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ⁹² Report dated 14.3.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 5, cc. nn. On San Moisé, see below, p. 81. ⁹³ Undated list, including six relazioni about France, ﬁve about Rome, ﬁve about the Empire, and eight about Constantinople; MCV, Ms. Donà 216, cc. 259–60v.

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that his master could afford.⁹⁴ In 1692, the agent of the Duke of Modena in Venice offered to broker the large sale of an entire collection, including ancient chronicles, political treatises, as well as relazioni, for a hundred ducats.⁹⁵ Possibly, political currency drove price, recent texts costing more than older ones. Of course, this was an elite market, but it was a market nonetheless, accommodating a larger public than Sanudo’s retrieval of copies through acquaintances did at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Moreover, the step to print was short. In the decades between 1589 and 1618, several printed collections appeared, most (but not all) outside the Venetian state or under the cover of false imprints, and without the names of the relazioni’s authors. They were appropriately titled ‘Tesori Politici’, containing ‘relazioni, instructions, treatises and speeches of various ambassadors, apt to the perfect knowledge and intelligence of the states, interests and dependencies of the world’s greatest princes’.⁹⁶ Such and later collections, generally in small formats so as to ensure greater diffusion, consistently boasted their authenticity—for example, ‘on the basis of an Italian Manuscript which had never seen the light before’.⁹⁷ Some relazioni also appeared shortly after being delivered.⁹⁸ And such was the demand for relazioni that forgeries appeared too.⁹⁹ The movement between manuscript and print went both ways. For example, the Donà collection, as we have already seen, included several reports about France transcribed from the Thesori.¹⁰⁰ Finally, many published historical works summarized or excerpted entire passages of relazioni, which became veritable classics by the eighteenth century, regarded as ‘one of the most solid foundations of historians’, as the erudite historian and future doge Marco Foscarini put it.¹⁰¹ As already implied by a nineteenth-century expert of Venice’s archives such as Rawdon Brown, Ranke walked in well-trodden steps.¹⁰² To speak of publication in general must not make us forget that we are talking of people, each with their different motivation for seeking, disclosing, or mediating the circulation of, relazioni. Some were minor nobles, real or self-styled. Cavalier Giulio Cesare Muzio repeatedly sold relazioni which he drew ⁹⁴ Baschet 1870: 353n. Further evidence in Baschet 1862: 51. On the information market in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, see Seidler 1996 and Signorotto and Visceglia 2002. ⁹⁵ Infelise 2002a: 62. ⁹⁶ Tesoro politico (1589). A bibliography of Tesori politici is in Bozza 1949: 68–71; cf. J. Balsamo 1995, Baldini 2000, and Testa 2001 and 2002. ⁹⁷ Recueil de diverses relations (1681); another collection is Lettere memorabili (Naples, 1693–7). ⁹⁸ The originals of the relazioni in [Sagredo] 1670 and Zane 1672 dated respectively from 1665 and 1659. ⁹⁹ A fake relazione was printed in French in 1663 under the name of Angelo Correr, cf. Antonibon 1939: 104 (and cf. 123). A relazione presented under the name of Tommaso Contarini, who died while serving in Rome and thus never presented his report, was a pastiche of earlier reports containing several factual mistakes; cf. Antonibon 1939: 123. ¹⁰⁰ MCV, Ms. Donà 47, cc. 128–206. ¹⁰¹ Foscarini 1752: 460; cf. Testa 2002: 684; Morel-Fatio 1913: 152; and Andretta 2000: 83–4. ¹⁰² R. Brown 1865: 116–17; cf. Burke 1990 and Grafton 1997.

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from his high-placed connections.¹⁰³ Secretaries and servants of patricians also acted as moles. A copy of ambassador Girolamo Lando’s report on England bears the signature of Lando’s maestro di camera, who obviously prepared the copy (with or without his master’s approval).¹⁰⁴ Francesco Paisio, who had served as a secretary for the patriarch as well as for the governor of the fortress at Palma, was accused of having ‘disseminated many relazioni of ambassadors from England, France, Spain and elsewhere, descriptions of the Arsenal, expenditures and income of the Republic and every business of land and sea, including [a description of] all the fortresses of this state, indicating the number of soldiers on land and sea.’¹⁰⁵ Even more than supply, it was demand that drove this market. The Inquisitors’ informers tell us above all about ambassadors—the people they were interested in. The Spanish ambassador, for example, was reported to be on the look out for any relazione; most of all, he desired those concerning Spain and in 1612 was prepared to pay dear (una buona mano di cechini) for the most recent one.¹⁰⁶ But beyond ambassadors, relazioni appealed to many other people. Like renghe, relazioni had a recognized educational value inside the ruling class.¹⁰⁷ Outside, they were known as repositories of information and political maxims. As Gabriel Naudé’s celebrated bibliography of political texts shows, Venetian relazioni were an irrenounceable item in the personal libraries of the politically informed throughout Europe, collectors, antiquarians, and travellers.¹⁰⁸ People whose birth excluded them from direct involvement in Venetian politics, but who constructed their status over the intelligence which they offered to their more powerful contemporaries, all sought relazioni. One example was Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli, not a patrician like Sanudo, but the owner of a comparably large manuscript and printed library including both relazioni and other ofﬁcial documents which ought to have been locked in the Secreta. At his death in 1601, the Ten seized fourteen boxes of manuscripts for inspection and eventually conﬁscated two thick ﬁles of documents dated from 1380 to 1594. They contain none of Pinelli’s relazioni, perhaps because the Ten realized that such texts circulated anyway as, indeed, they continued to do.¹⁰⁹ ¹⁰³ Granzino’s deposition dated 1.11.1612, is in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 3, cc. nn. See also his report dated 7.6.1612, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 1, cc. nn. ¹⁰⁴ Relatione del viaggio di Girolamo Lando in Inghilterra, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.984 (7510), cc. 48–93. ¹⁰⁵ Letter by Granzino dated 24.5.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 609, fasc. 7, cc. nn. Further information about Paisio is in the reports dated 2.1, 4.1, 24.5, 20.6.1618, ibid. ¹⁰⁶ Granzino’s reports dated 7.10.1612 (ASV, IS, b. 607 fasc. 1, cc. nn.); cf. also ibid., b. 609, fasc. 1, cc. nn., the reports dated 17 and 29.3.1614, referring to the relazione by the governor of Bergamo, which Bedmar passed to the Spanish governor of Milan (delivered on 17.12.1613, now in Tagliaferri 1973–79, v. 12: 323–30); cf. similar cases in Baschet 1870: 348–50. ¹⁰⁷ Cf. Discorso a Monsignor d’Elci: 216 and Accademico Imperfetto 1674: 74. ¹⁰⁸ Naudé 1961: 84–5. ¹⁰⁹ Tiepolo 1994: 914; on the further dispersal of Pinelli’s library, see M. Grendler 1981 and Hobson 1971; Rivolta 1933: 60, 74, 75 lists some of Pinelli’s relazioni, now in the Ambrosiana library.

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At a time when information largely depended on status, owning a relazione was a sign of wisdom and insight which one would boast in public, as some were said to do even in Venice.¹¹⁰ Finally, we should not underestimate the sheer pleasure which less important people derived from reading reports of distant lands. That was no doubt the case of a report of the Ottoman serraglio written by ambassador Ottaviano Bon. Thanks to the sultan’s temporary absence, the author reached as far as the sultan’s private bedchamber. The eye-witness description of the most intimate space of a famously mysterious empire and of a court renowned for its exotic harem must have caused some kind of voyeuristic frisson at once political and sexual. It circulated widely in manuscript before being printed in London in 1650, where it quickly went through three editions.¹¹¹ Working back from texts to people, we can conclude that between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, Venice saw a deﬁnite widening in the educated public interested in political information concerning foreign states. As the next paragraph shows, home affairs could equally become exposed.

The leak of Ottaviano Bon’s relazione (1619) For some people, the exchange of relazioni was an occasion for gaining favour; for others it was a commercial transaction. We shall come back at the end of this chapter to these professionals of information, for whom information was valuable literally as well as metaphorically. For the patrician insiders of Venice’s politics, however, relazioni had a primarily political value; unlike Ranke, the ambassadors who authored relazioni cared for publicity rather than secrecy. Indeed, if Sanudo and others like him obtained the documents they were interested in, it was only because others had an interest in leaking those documents. The circulation of reserved information originates from an act of disclosure whereby an individual unlawfully makes that information available to others—an act which a governing structure strictly regulating access to information made all the more precious. In a political system based on voting, those who, thanks to their position, had access to secret information, turned its unlawful circulation into a weapon of advancement. Then much as now, leaks could gain merit or deﬂect guilt, expose enemies and unite friends; in the last analysis they were meant to exert inﬂuence on government through the wider political arena. As we shall see, at times of political confrontation such as the Interdict, leaking was repeatedly used on all sides.¹¹² The trouble is that it is not easy to spot a leak centuries after it has taken place. How can we establish whether a piece of information circulated lawfully or otherwise, when all we have is the document at the heart of the leak itself? In order to shed ¹¹⁰ Granzino’s report of 14.10.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ¹¹¹ It is still in print as ‘an intimate portrait of life at the Ottoman court’, Bon 1996, 2002; for one reader’s pleasure, cf. Lollino 1854: 9–15. ¹¹² See below, pp. 179–83.

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light on the politics of leaking, I wish to concentrate on one case study about which we do know a good deal because it led to a trial whose records have been preserved. The leak involved another of Ottaviano Bon’s relazioni. As ambassador extraordinary to France, he conducted the negotiations which in 1617 ended a two-year war with the Habsburg Archdukes of Gratz. Because the peace treaty included concessions openly violating the ambassadors’ commission, the Senate impeached Bon and Vincenzo Gussoni, the ordinary ambassador in Paris.¹¹³ On their return, their relazioni naturally acquired special importance as a means to vindicate the ambassador’s conduct in the government’s highest spheres. At the end of February 1618, Gussoni, a younger patrician and in a less prominent position than Bon, presented his relazione. He protested his innocence and blamed Bon for prevaricating his authority in order to constrain them both to accept the peace proposal.¹¹⁴ He described his report as a reply to his critics, and perhaps tried to halt the circulation of allegations in the political arena through a formal communication inside the government (both he and Bon spoke to the Senate rather than the more customary Collegio).¹¹⁵ However, if Gussoni was hoping to put an end to communication, he failed. A few days later, it was Bon’s turn to reply by delivering his own report; when he then circulated it—a year and a half later—he brought the debate back from the government to the political arena.¹¹⁶ Leaking shows that it would be pointless to set clear boundaries inside the political system, because those involved in politics were always active on more than one level. Bon’s relazione effectively accepted Gussoni’s account and proclaimed his full responsibility for the treaty. But in order to justify his seemingly harsh choice, he offered a grave denunciation of the Republic’s policies—and this is why his text’s leak stirred the Collegio’s angry reaction. According to Bon, Venice had been unwise in beginning the war and inefﬁcient in conducting it; above all, the government had misjudged the developments on the European scene (particularly the rapprochement between Marie de Medici’s France and the Habsburgs, effectively isolating Venice). In this situation, insisting on the original negotiation commissions was suicidal and, in fact, Bon deserved praise for realistically solving the difﬁculties on the basis of his wisdom and experience.¹¹⁷ Moving the argument from contingency to principle, Bon insisted that a good ¹¹³ ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni segrete, r. 109, c. 22v (16.9.1617). On the peace of Paris, cf. Cozzi 1958: 165–7, and the editorial notes in Sarpi 1969: 1020–4. ¹¹⁴ Relazione published in Firpo 1975–96, v. 6: 579–94. Gussoni was born in 1588, Bon in 1552, see DBI : s.v. ¹¹⁵ Firpo 1975–96, v.6: 593. ¹¹⁶ Bon’s relazione is published ibid.: 597–645. This is the report that Bon circulated, and we have no means of knowing how far it coincided with the one he delivered in front of the Senate; the version which circulated was probably written in late 1618 or early 1619, after the so-called Spanish conspiracy of May 1618, to which there is a vague reference (p. 632), and before the election of Ferdinand of Habsburg to the Imperial throne, to which there ought to have been one (p. 630). Gussoni presented his report shortly before 24.2.1618, and Bon before 3.3. 1618, cf. BAV, Urb. Lat. 1086, cc. 68, 79. ¹¹⁷ Firpo 1975–96, v. 6: 615–16, 630, 623, 632–3, 638–9, 642–3.

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aim justiﬁed disobedience and that more than law mattered reason of state, ‘according to which all sovereigns nowadays act’ (as a good republican, he claimed that there was no contradiction between reason of state and Cicero’s teaching).¹¹⁸ Bon’s defence ran contrary to the Republic’s ofﬁcial position in ways which epitomize the divergence between the political arena and the government in both principle and media. The government wanted to maintain unity and blame the peace as a diplomat’s mistake, whereas Bon was prepared to raise opposition and defend his conduct as a more sensible strategy than the government’s. The Senate invoked the sanctity of the law, whereas Bon exhalted the preeminence of his own sense of reason of state. Above all, the Republic wanted to silence the matter, whereas Bon wished to publish his defence in order to turn a personal matter into a political cause where he would obtain the support of a group. For that reason, he offered his relazione as a lasting testimony of his ‘conscience and honour’ and called for a special inquiry.¹¹⁹ Then, in 1619, he set out to bypass the government, anonymously leaking his text and arranging its circulation. This, however, was one step too many. Denounced to the Collegio, the leak was investigated by the Inquisitors of State, and Bon eventually came before a Senate-appointed criminal commission.¹²⁰ The government in full prosecuted the return of communication to the political arena—although in the end, there was little it could do about it. Piero Gritti, the man who had been ambassador to Spain at the time of the peace, denounced the report’s disclosure because he felt the report to be offensive against both his own role in the negotiations, and in general against the Republic. Gritti claimed not to know the report’s author, and explained that it had come into his possession through his son, who himself received it from another patrician.¹²¹ The case was referred to the Inquisitors of State, who soon traced the text to Bon. They interrogated several witnesses, ﬁrst some of those whom Gritti mentioned had seen the relazione, then others whom the ﬁrst witnesses mentioned in their turn. Their inquiry, together with the special commission’s later ﬁndings, reveal a large network of people who either read, transcribed, or discussed the relazione. The pattern of this diffusion is represented in Figure 2.1.¹²² However, it is important to stress that we can only guess the full extent of that network, because the Inquisitors did not interrogate ¹¹⁸ Ibid.: 645. ¹¹⁹ Ibid.: 600–1n. Gussoni too called for a public prosecution, ibid.: 579–80. ¹²⁰ After the Inquisitors’ ﬁrst inquiries, the Senate set up a special commission on 30.11.1619; ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni segrete, f. 106, cc. nn. The entire trial’s records are held in ASV, QC, b. 137, fasc. 1, trial numbered 228; unless otherwise speciﬁed, all following records refer to interrogation records in this ﬁle. ¹²¹ Deposition before the Collegio on 14.11.1619 (cc. 17r –v). ¹²² The interrogations were conducted 15–16 November 1619 (cc. 18–23v); more witnesses were interrogated by the specially appointed Senate committee between 5 and 7 March 1620 (cc. 53–61).

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Information and Communication in Venice Ottaviano Bon

Nicolò Contarini Giulio Contarini Zuanne Tiepolo

Filippo Bon

Alessandro Bon

Girolamo Boldù Agostino Bembo Zorzi Corner

Silvestro Morosini

Lorenzo Valier

Silvestro Valier

Andrea Valier

Simone Contarini

Marco Trevisan Marcant. Gritti Girolamo Priuli

Nicolò Barbarigo

Andrea da Leze

Piero Gritti

Agostino Nani Sebastiano Venier

Paolo Sarpi*

Collegio

Domenico Molin

Zorzi Contarini

Inquisitors of State

Alvise Donà

Alvise Biscacciante

Vincenzo Grimani Francesco Pisani

Senate Copy lent

Alvise Mocenigo o Bold: person interrogated

* Sarpi was asked to write a report, Report discussed but we do not have the text of his deposition Copy read

Lunardo Mocenigo Zorzi Contarini

Figure 2.1. Diffusion pattern of Ottaviano Bon’s relazione (October–November 1619)

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all those who came into contact with the report. They were only interested in discovering who had originated the leak; once they established that, they stopped the interrogations. The relazione’s ﬁrst disclosure and manuscript reproduction took place under Bon’s control. A sign of the superposition of family with political ties, Bon ﬁrst gave his report to relatives.¹²³ While a young nephew made copies, Bon’s brother Filippo passed them on to both relatives and acquaintances.¹²⁴ Later, the relazione moved from author- to user-publication, as readers turned into further distributors by actively making copies for themselves, and subsequently lending them to others who would then make their own. In this way textual circulation played a double role, both in passing information and in deﬁning a group, a manuscript community who would also associate with Bon’s political ideas.¹²⁵ It was an extremely unstable community, however, escaping the control of author or users. Thus, Filippo Bon gave Marco Trevisan a copy which Trevisan then passed to Andrea Da Lezze; when Bon asked Lezze to pass it on to Domenico Molin, however, he found that Lezze had already lent it to Zorzi Contarini and could not now have it back. In fact, Lezze said that he thought that Contarini still had it because he ‘had heard so from others who have seen it’. This circulation was both in, and against, Bon’s interest. Lezze said that he felt justiﬁed in showing the relazione, because he was sure that Bon wanted it to circulate, but he also showed it to Sarpi, who in turn then suggested that Gritti denounce Bon.¹²⁶ Finally, in addition to the exchange of written texts was a thick web of oral communication, a third mode of diffusion. Many people who may not have copied or even read the report knew about it and discussed it, in turn originating further diffusion. As one witness said, he asked for a copy ‘out of curiosity, because I heard rumours that this text circulated in the piazze’.¹²⁷ Only once the scandal broke out, was a patrician refused the report; yet so normal was the circulation that he found the refusal offensive.¹²⁸ The diffusion of the report took place as part of social events. As the physician Alvise Biscacciante told the Inquisitors, he mentioned the report at a dinner party he gave, when (presumably after eating) ‘the women began playing and we began reading this text’. Several of his guests, all of them patricians, said that they had already seen the report. As Biscacciante’s case shows, the report’s circulation inevitably involved outsiders too; he had obtained it when on a professional visit to Bon’s household, and ¹²³ Interrogation of 22.11.1619, c. 26v and again 26.2.1620: c. 49r –v. ¹²⁴ Ottaviano Bon’s interrogation of 28.2.1620, c. 52v; Zorzi Corner’s, Silvestro’s, and Lorenzo Valier’s interrogations, 5–7.3.1620: cc. 54–61v. ¹²⁵ They all belonged to papalista families and were likely to be supporters of appeasement with Spain; on manuscript communities, cf. Scott-Warren 2000. ¹²⁶ Andrea Da Lezze’s deposition, 15.11.1619: c. 18. ¹²⁷ Agostino Bembo’s deposition, 5.3.1620: c. 55v. ¹²⁸ Nicolò Contarini (q. Giovan Battista, not the future doge) was upset by Filippo Bon’s refusal to give him a copy, interrogation of 5.3.1620: cc. 54r –v.

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later himself lent it to other patients.¹²⁹ Circulation exposed the fragility of governmental secrets to outsiders’ appropriation; as Lezze told the Inquisitors, Trevisan’s servant brought the report to his home and there clumsily left it lying on a table.¹³⁰ The spatial diffusion of the report is stunning. Filippo Bon approached two patricians in Rialto and another one in San Marco; Andrea da Lezze said he heard about the relazione in the Great Council hall, then seen it while at Rialto; Domenico Molin read it in Lezze’s house, but then also talked about it while conversing in San Marco; Biscacciante read it while on the boat taking him back from Padua, and then made it the object of a dinner conversation at home.¹³¹ Numerous copies circulated from household to household, and from there to both public places and the Ducal Palace—as the Inquisitors charged, ‘publicly in the Great Council, in the piazze, and everywhere’.¹³² Thus, Bon’s relazione aroused discussions and disagreement in the very councils where, according to the constitution, harmony should have reigned supreme. When ﬁrst interrogated and before he realized how much the Inquisitors knew about his leak, Bon blamed the circulation of his relazione on people’s curiosity for that genre: ‘what occurred to me is that which occurs in all cases of relazioni, because they are curious and desired things.’¹³³ It was a lie, but one which, as we have seen, he could reasonably expect his interrogators to believe. Once leaked, his relazione beneﬁted from the same diffusion channels as other relazioni, as shown by material traces on the numerous extant exemplars. Even if it was never printed, Bon’s relazione was apparently very common in the eighteenth century.¹³⁴ Most are in the neat handwriting of copies made for circulation and (possibly) sale. The titles varied.¹³⁵ Rather than as a section in a compilation, it is commonly found as a separate, originally circulating independently, at times with its own apparatus of indexes and summary.¹³⁶ Some carry scathing remarks by readers who thereby professed their disapproval (but still kept the relazione rather than destroying it as ordered by the Senate).¹³⁷ Thanks to the ﬂexibility of manuscript reproduction, all copies contain more or less slight variations, whether mistaken or intentional, both in style and ¹²⁹ Alvise Biscacciante, 16.11.1619: cc. 23r –v; the Inquisitors were incensed that commoners had access to the relazione, c. 26v. ¹³⁰ Andrea Da Lezze’s deposition, 15.11.1619: cc. 18–19. ¹³¹ Cc. 18v –19, 21, 21v, 23r –v. ¹³² The Inquisitors of State to Ottaviano Bon, 22.11.1619, c. 26v. ¹³³ Ottaviano Bon’s interrogation, 22.11.1611: c. 27. ¹³⁴ Foscarini 1752: 463–4. Andrea da Lezze estimated the relazione’ s circulation at 25 copies, 15.11.1619 (c. 19v). I have found seventeenth-century exemplars in: ASV (3 copies), MCV (Mss. Donà, Cicogna, Correr: 4 copies), BMV (Cod. Ital.: 2 copies), BAV (Mss. Barb. Lat.: 2 copies). ¹³⁵ MCV, Ms. Correr 1147, cc. nn. carries the title ‘Manifesto’; MCV, Ms. Cicogna 1124, cc. 83–146v, ‘Giustiﬁcatione’; BMV, Cod. Ital. VI.296 (5846), cc. 133–48: ‘Scrittura [. . .] in scarico’; ibid., cc. 168–204: ‘Scrittura di Escolpatione’; BAV, Barb. Lat. 5308: ‘Scrittura [. . .] per giustiﬁcarsi’. ¹³⁶ e.g. BAV, Barb. Lat. 5196. ¹³⁷ e.g., MCV, Ms. Donà 450, fasc. 15.

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occasionally in contents. For example, a passage attacking another ambassador, Antonio Donà, is not contained in all copies, and notably not in the one which reached Piero Gritti (who was politically close to Donà). Revealingly, when the Inquisitors showed Bon a copy, he admitted that the text was his, but warned that he could not be sure whether it coincided ad verbum (word for word) unless he read it all.¹³⁸ Scribal publication turned Bon’s relazione, essentially, into a polemical pamphlet, a ‘writing published to the world’, as his prosecutors charged him, ‘with a demonstrative and apologetic aim’.¹³⁹ Indeed, the leak served Bon well. With successively close ballots, a divided Senate eventually decided to drop all charges, and soon later elected him podestà of Padua.¹⁴⁰ Bon was unlikely to be interested only in personal advancement, however, which he could have obtained in other ways. The heir of one of Venice’s richest families, in 1619 he also donated large sums to the Giudecca college for poor patricians (newswriters were quick to make the connection with Bon’s trial).¹⁴¹ He was not just settling personal scores with his past; he had a political aim in the present. As he repeatedly afﬁrmed during the trial, his report was really written in the public interest.¹⁴² Bon’s strategy becomes clear if we set his leak in the context of political events in 1619, two years after the embassy’s end. At this time the Senate was called to deliberate on a difﬁcult and rapidly evolving international situation at the beginning of what was going to become the Thirty Years’ War. With the Habsburgs on a renewed aggressive course—Ferdinand, the enemy of 1615–17, had seized the imperial crown, and Olivares was bringing Madrid towards war—the Senate faced difﬁcult questions. Having arduously ﬁnalized an alliance with Savoy, in November senators split on a similar proposal with the United Provinces. Meanwhile, the impeachment of Antonio Donà, formerly ambassador to Savoy and the nephew of the Interdict’s doge, harmed the anti-Habsburg cause.¹⁴³ Inside the Senate, Sarpi’s friend Sebastiano Venier pleaded for that cause.¹⁴⁴ Outside it, Bon, excluded from politics since his return to Venice, used his relazione to rally support for neutralism. As he argued, Venice was marred by ineffective and costly troops, divided generals, and international isolation; he ¹³⁸ Bon’s interrogation, 22.11.1619, c. 25v. In February, he claimed that the text which circulated differed from his version concerning signiﬁcant details of the military confrontation (26.2.1620, c. 48v). ¹³⁹ Bon’s interrogation, 22.11.1619: c. 33v. ¹⁴⁰ Bon was elected podestà on 1 March 1620; on 29 April the Senate voted Bon’s sentence, and after two very close ballots (–61–65–19, and –64–71–11) absolved him (c. 61). ¹⁴¹ The school was to host forty young patricians from poor families, cf. Zenoni 1916 and (on Bon’s role) Cozzi 1995a: 53, 56; avvisi dated 4 and 9.12.1619, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1087, cc. 696 and 704v. ¹⁴² Bon’s interrogation of 22.11.1619, cc. 28, 30v. ¹⁴³ On Venice’s international position in these months, see Cozzi 1992: 103–9. ¹⁴⁴ Nani 1720: 198–201.

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appealed to the patricians’ self-interest by insisting that war depleted the treasury, forcing them to heavy taxation.¹⁴⁵ He also criticized the policy of drawing troops from distant countries—which was precisely the point of the proposed Dutch deal. Finally, he extensively drew on the traditional discourse of Venetian and republican paciﬁcism embodied in the writings of another great ambassador, Paolo Paruta. Bon’s relazione was the political manifesto of an entire group. Bon’s relazione illustrates the confrontation between the patricians’ group interests and those of the government as a representative of all patricians. Read and transcribed in spite of the Senate’s ban, his report’s circulation shows that the government had very limited control over political communication in the political arena. As this was a political conﬂict, others made a point of responding. Against Bon, Sarpi wrote a consulto directed to the government and also composed (in the same months as Bon’s report circulated) a history of the recent war meant to convince patricians to ﬁght on.¹⁴⁶ Sarpi’s text was never published, however, perhaps because the government preferred to keep the controversy as much as possible inside the political arena only. In a pattern which, as we shall see, matched that of the Interdict controversy, individual politicians stood to gain from leaking as a tool of politics, while the government hesitated before public communication. Meanwhile, leaking was meant to rally support inside a well-deﬁned group but it also involved a potential for further publicity amongst outsiders, making the government’s claim of unanimity little more than a mockery.

2 . 3 D I P LO M AC Y: B E T W E E N O F F I C I A L A N D U N O F F I C I A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N The political arena in which patricians operated extended beyond the government to include outsiders whom the government had to bar from sensitive information, but whom it made sense for patricians to associate themselves with. Such is the case of foreign diplomats and other agents. In the sixteenth century, all European states escalated the intensity of diplomacy and created stable representations. A well-established tradition of consul–merchant cooperation put Venice at the forefront of diplomacy’s development.¹⁴⁷ Moreover, the government’s independence, coupled with the city’s position midway between the Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, made Venice the territory for the encounter of emissaries interested in information on behalf of a range of foreign ¹⁴⁵ Firpo 1975–96, v. 6: 642–3. ¹⁴⁶ Sarpi’s consulto is dated 20.11.1619 (after the interrogation of most witnesses, and before the interrogation of Bon), see Sarpi 1969: 1023, 1059–70; on the Trattato, see below, p. 254. ¹⁴⁷ Mattingly 1955; on Venice: Aspetti e momenti, Queller 1967, Ventura 1976: xi–xxii, Zannini 1999.

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powers. Thus, alongside an ofﬁcial system of information there developed an unofﬁcial and largely unlawful one, where information was the trade of competing professionals. Foreign representatives in Venice constituted a large group, including not only ambassadors of crowned sovereigns, but also envoys of minor Mediterranean powers (such as Ragusa), of the major religious orders, as well as representatives of cities in the Venetian dominions (like foreign diplomats, they were known as oratori or nunzi —a reminder that the capital regarded its dependencies largely as foreign). From the early sixteenth century the presence of these ﬁgures in the city became increasingly permanent.¹⁴⁸ As potential actors in information exchanges, we must add to all ofﬁcial representatives their smaller or larger retinues as well as a score of minor ﬁgures who acted as unofﬁcial agents, some of them on secret missions, others with self-appointed charges. In 1606, for example, Fausto Verdelli arrived in Venice on behalf, as he claimed, of the Duke of Lorraine. The Republic refused to recognize him as an ambassador because, as other diplomats remarked, Verdelli was only a ‘private person’. He was, however, received as a personal representative of the Duke’s son, a foreign condottiero in the Republic’s service.¹⁴⁹ The diplomatic world of early modern Europe was less formally sealed from the rest of society than we now perhaps think. As a growing body of treatises on diplomacy all stressed in this period, ambassadors were a vital means of political communication, ‘the organ which communicates distant thoughts and intentions’.¹⁵⁰ Ambassadors were ‘golden channels for public knowledge’, a Venetian ambassador agreed.¹⁵¹ In theory, as we have seen, all diplomatic communication was supposed to take place through formal audiences in the Collegio.¹⁵² One function of this arrangement was to limit all unofﬁcial contact between power’s inner sphere and the outside world. Patricians were forbidden to entertain any contact (however occasional) with foreign diplomats, a prohibition extending from 1542 to all nobles, regardless of whether or not they held governmental ofﬁce.¹⁵³ Forbidden from mingling as they would in other capitals with their social equals, foreign ambassadors to Venice complained about their missions, comparing them to ‘conﬁnements’ where (as England’s Dudley Carleton put it), they were forbidden from exchanging ‘almost a word with any man of merit unless it be with a public minister (whose conversation consists only of compliments) or a straggling traveller’.¹⁵⁴ ¹⁴⁸ Morpurgo 1877, Fasolo 1935, Queller 1977: 66–7 and 84–5, Grubb 1988: 151, Viggiano 1993: 30–1. ¹⁴⁹ ASV, Sen., Terra, r. 76, c. 39v., and dispatches of 15.4 and 6.5.1606, in ASM, AV, b. 84, cc. nn., and in Putelli 1911, v. 22: 552. ¹⁵⁰ De Vera 1649: 22; cf. Bazzoli 2002. ¹⁵¹ Benzoni 1999: 140. ¹⁵² See above, p. 37. ¹⁵³ The punishment for contravention was reinforced in 1612, then again 1659, 1662, 1664, 1717; in 1790 the law was extended to noblewomen. Cf. Molmenti 1919: 25–63, Queller 1966 and 1977, Preto 1994a: 61. ¹⁵⁴ Carleton 1972: 15, and cf. [Freschot] 1709: 334.

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It is likely that such complaints referred to formal occasions, however, because ambassadors had a number of informal ways of communicating and associating with ‘men of merit’ (Carleton himself entertained assiduous contacts with no less than Sarpi).¹⁵⁵ Together, the repetition of prohibitions and the Inquisitors of State’s reports show that foreign diplomats and patricians met recurrently, ‘in private homes, in churches, squares, and street-corners’ (as a law complained in 1480).¹⁵⁶ In practice, it proved impossible to stop informal communication. For example, in 1591—at a particularly charged time to which we shall return—Giulio Michiel reported to the Collegio how it had proved impossible to prevent the Spanish ambassador from sitting in the stall next to him while he was hearing mass in San Giovanni e Paolo. Michiel was sorry but could not have stopped the ambassador on account of ‘good manners’—politeness regulated but also called for such encounters. As Michiel then recounted, the ambassador ‘began talking to me about different subjects, such as civil and criminal justice, and about Spanish procedure in these matters, and about the privileges which Spanish nobles enjoy and the different opinions of Spanish nobles concerning that. And then he asked me, ‘‘What does vostra Signoria think of the Duke of Savoy’s latest move?’’ ’ This is a rare glimpse in the conversation of high ranking politicians, ranging from legal to social questions, and from that to current affairs. Perhaps, the former were mere pretexts for the latter, but they still show these people’s readiness to compare and evaluate distant cultures and societies.¹⁵⁷ Ambassadors—including Venetian ones—knew the importance of cultivating the political elite of the state where they resided. A late seventeenth-century manuscript which was certainly read (and perhaps written) in Venice pointed to sociability as the best way of ‘skilfully and tactfully’ discovering ‘the affairs of the court, the news of the world, and the important business of other princes’. ‘You will succeed easily with generous table and grateful hospitality, by making a habit of welcoming those people who may give you such information; and your ear must be ready to listen as your tongue must be ready to blandish.’ While referring to commendable norms of social conduct (hospitality, generosity), this text clariﬁes the real nature of the transactions by recommending that ambassadors keep their informers’ names secret, ‘because otherwise you will lose their trust and damage your friends’.¹⁵⁸ Both aspects went together in fact, because sociability enabled diplomats to obtain information and to justify the manner in which they did so. As education and social pride united elites across national borders, prominent Venetians and foreign diplomats must have regarded associating with each other as useful, pleasurable, and somehow natural—politics was a birthright ¹⁵⁵ See the letters in Sarpi 1969: 643–719. ¹⁵⁶ Molmenti 1919: 47. ¹⁵⁷ Report dated 9.4.1591, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Principi, f. 7, cc. nn.; more on this exchange below, section 4.4. ¹⁵⁸ Ricordi per li ambasciatori, MCV, Ms. Cicogna 3271/III, cc. nn. A different version of this text, evidence of its manuscript fortune, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VI.187 (6039), cc. 245–64. On this document see Queller 1972, disputed in Ventura 1976: lxx.

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for both, after all. For diplomats, Venetian patricians were precious sources of information, and the latter felt the same about the former. A sixteenth-century text of advice for young patricians, recommended conversation with them as a way of ‘growing skilled in affairs of state’. The author (himself an experienced ambassador) explained: ‘although the law prevents us from visiting the houses of foreigners, it is not forbidden to converse with them every now and then, with discernment, in public’.¹⁵⁹ Discernment is the key word here—although in practice, it was hardly respected. An example concerns the ridotti where ambassadors, foreigners, and patricians socialized while gambling. As we shall see later, playing cards for money was a favourite pastime across different social groups. Moral treatises and legislation both frowned upon it when it involved patricians, because it posed a threat to the wealth of ruling families. From 1539 gambling came under the control of the Esecutori alla bestemmia and, when it also involved foreigners, of the Inquisitors of State.¹⁶⁰ In the 1610s the Inquisitors discovered that one of the Spanish ambassador’s most prominent agents, Antonio Meschita, prepared cards which the nobles used in the Spanish embassy; the ambassador also salaried another man to run the games.¹⁶¹ In 1612 an inmate who had been a servant in the embassy, likened it to a ‘public tavern’, where ‘people play cards and dice, bring women, and eat and drink’.¹⁶² The point was that economic loss also meant political danger, because losing made patricians vulnerable to outside inﬂuences. When the winner was a foreign ambassador, losing threatened not just personal independence, but collective sovereignty. As gambling shows, there were convivial reasons for associating with foreign ambassadors. Other reasons were less innocent. Ambassador Bedmar’s careful evaluation of the conditions of the poorest nobles was a preliminary recognition made to assess opportunities for corruption.¹⁶³ The nuncio was approached by patricians seeking ecclesiastical beneﬁces in Rome; no doubt, he expected a quid pro quo.¹⁶⁴ Anzolo Badoer, who was condemned for his contacts with foreign ambassadors (including the nuncio), was suspected of entertaining similar hopes.¹⁶⁵ Unlike other Italian nobles, Venetian patricians were forbidden from receiving foreign patronage or pensions; yet it is clear that practice was far from principle.¹⁶⁶ Furthermore, as well as personal greed, some contacts reﬂected conscious political strategies by entire groups. In 1612, some patricians with traceable links to prominent pro-Habsburg leaders in the Senate were prosecuted ¹⁵⁹ Suriano 1856: 12–13. ¹⁶⁰ Derosas 1981: 446. ¹⁶¹ Deposition of Francesco Alborante, 6.11.1612, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 11, cc. nn.; cf. also the report dated 14.3.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 5, cc. nn. ¹⁶² Deposition of Francesco Alborante, 4.11.1612, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 11. ¹⁶³ ‘Relatione delle cose di Venetia’ (1618), in BL, Sloane Ms. 1834, cc. 16v –18v. ¹⁶⁴ Dispatch of the nuncio dated 14.7.1607, in ASVat, SS, NV, r. 38, cc. 18v–19. ¹⁶⁵ Cozzi 1958: 124–7, Preto 1994a: 79–82 and Fulin 1868: 1–61. ¹⁶⁶ Lane 1973: 227–8 and Queller 1986: 185–9; for comparison, cf. Spagnoletti 1996: 51–128.

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for frequently attending the Spanish embassy.¹⁶⁷ In the same years, the nuncio frequently referred to the nobles who visited him as sympathetic to the Holy See, and conversely described those who attended the English embassy as being close to Sarpi.¹⁶⁸ In these cases, contacts involved mutual beneﬁts for both ambassadors seeking to obtain information, and for patricians trying to gain inﬂuence for their political line. They did not necessarily lead to treason, however. In fact, most patricians involved in those illicit contacts would see themselves as trying to steer the government’s policies towards what they perceived as their country’s good. However illicit, informal contacts with foreign ambassadors constituted a common aspect of patrician social life as well as one of the ways in which patricians conducted their political activities. Once again, then, those who set down the law in Venice also knew that actual reality escaped the letter of that law, and the political arena occupied the gap in between. Through that gap, information potentially leaked further, as we will now see by turning from the select circles of patricians and ambassadors, to the wider and more varied social world which thrived at their margins.

2 . 4 P RO F E S S I O N A L S O F I N T E L L I G E N C E As well as bonding with patricians, ambassadors also surrounded themselves with a more heterogeneous host of intermediaries, people who were not fully part of formal politics but who networked their way into the secrets of the powerful through favours, personal friendship or money. These often shady characters’ sensational adventures have been made the object of numerous romantic stories, generally under the tag of spies.¹⁶⁹ ‘Spy’ was a derogatory term in the seventeenth century, used to refer to one’s enemy’s informers, whereas one referred to one’s own as conﬁdenti, a term implying a more acceptable human relationship.¹⁷⁰ With its connotations of exceptionality, the word spy imperfectly renders the systematic role of people who shaped their social and professional success around their ability to mediate between those who sought, and those who held, intelligence. The notion of spying also suggests an alien element deviously penetrating into a community. But, however unlawful their activities, information professionals were part of the political system, helping communication between different members of the political arena. Patricians, for example, did not always author their relazioni, some of which were penned by their educated secretaries under their masters’ names (an occurrence which ¹⁶⁷ The condemned patricians included Alvise Battaglia, Domenico Bollani, Alvise Gabriel, Domenico Moro; cf. Preto 1994a: 123–8. ¹⁶⁸ e.g. dispatch dated 14.7.1607, in ASVat, NV, r. 38, c. 22v; the nuncio’s complaints in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 15, c. 214 (11.8.1607), and r. 16, c. 12v (28.3.1608). Cozzi 1958 mentions many instances from the nuncio’s correspondence. ¹⁶⁹ Cf. Infelise 2002b and Preto 1994a: 597–603. ¹⁷⁰ Cf. Preto 1994b.

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should be studied in greater depth).¹⁷¹ As historians of early modern England and France have suggested, this period saw the increasing professionalization of ‘intelligencers’ providing their patrons with foreign news, historical insight, and texts on statecraft or classical scholarship.¹⁷² In Venice they included a wide range of professionals, from servants and secretaries to newswriters and authors, people of different social status who extended political communication beyond the political caste.

A nest of informers Commenting on the arrest of an agent of the Venetian ambassador in Turin in 1591, the Spanish ambassador said that he could not blame his Venetian counterpart there, ‘because these are things which ambassadors habitually make use of.’¹⁷³ Diplomacy and illicit intelligence differed in acceptability and lawfulness, but were mutually necessary activities, and the growth of the former entailed an increase in the latter.¹⁷⁴ This is why the establishment of permanent embassies was initially perceived as creating hostile cells at the heart of a state’s capital—the French Philippe de Commynes recommended that, for every ambassador his king received, he should retaliate by sending back two.¹⁷⁵ As we have seen, Venice tried to limit all contacts between the inner sphere of power and the outside world. For that reason, embassies were located not in the city’s centre, but—surprisingly perhaps to us—conﬁned to the peripheral area of Cannaregio, not far from the Jewish Ghetto, and crucially distant from San Marco’s seat of power.¹⁷⁶ Although impossible to quantify, it is important to stress the pervasiveness of intelligence activities in the city. Thanks to its ties with East and West, Venice was prized by foreign powers as a centre of information. As summed up by Juan Antonio de Vera, who himself served as Spanish ambassador in Venice in the 1630s, ‘sometimes one can learn more about French business in Spain by means of the ambassador based in Venice, or Rome, than by means of the ambassador in Paris’.¹⁷⁷ The government’s attempt to monopolize political communication and control political knowledge was frustrated by the unrelenting spying of Spain, France, and England, as well as the Church and the Turks.¹⁷⁸ Locked between opposite blocks—Bourbons and Habsburgs, Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Turks—Venice became an arena for espionage not wholly unlike central European capitals during the Cold War. ¹⁷¹ e.g. Fassina 1992: 297–313; MCV, Ms. Cicogna 2989, ﬁle 1. ¹⁷² Jardine and Sherman 1994 and cf. Raymond 2005; on France, cf. Viala 1985, Jouhaud 1991, 1995, 2000. ¹⁷³ Report dated 9.4.1591, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Principi, f. 7, cc. nn. ¹⁷⁴ Preto 1998; cf. Bély 1990. ¹⁷⁵ Queller 1977: 53; cf. Gentili 1585: I.xv. ¹⁷⁶ Cf. Coryat 1905, v. 1: 379; on Cannaregio, cf. Braunstein 1998. ¹⁷⁷ De Vera 1649: 306; cf. the essays in Beck, Manoussacas, and Pertusi 1977. ¹⁷⁸ Preto 1994a: 87–146.

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In the course of the sixteenth century, the Republic stepped up its own network of spies abroad. By the early seventeenth century, no doubt preoccupied by mounting pressure in the international arena, the Inquisitors of State also began operating a system of counter-intelligence in Venice itself. Mainly they posted moles in or around foreign embassies, or after key ﬁgures. The Interdict acted as a turning point in heightening the government’s distrust of its neighbours. A few weeks after the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, perhaps in response to Sarpi’s attempted assassination (which some blamed on papal agents), the Inquisitors of State ordered unnamed ‘people’ ‘to observe those who enter and exit the house of the Lord Nuncio, and follow them either by water . . . or land’.¹⁷⁹ As they secured the collaboration of the nuncio’s oarsman and waiter, they knew both about the places the nuncio visited and the people who attended his table. The nuncio himself complained about ‘the exquisite diligence of spies posted around my house’.¹⁸⁰ In the following years, the Ten employed guards to keep foreign diplomats under control, and the Inquisitors secured the cooperation of a man who worked in the Spanish embassy itself, Alessandro Granzino, a conﬁdente to whom we shall return, as he also sold his services to other masters.¹⁸¹ By deﬁnition, secret informers tried to leave as little evidence as possible, and their masters often preferred to omit their names from written records. However, the Inquisitors of State’s records help to sketch an idea of the rich variety of agents passing secrets from the patriciate to foreign ambassadors and vice versa. They can be usefully analysed according to the double criterion of informers’ attitude to the trade and closeness to the insiders of Venice’s power. We can start from those closest to the centre. Some illegitimate children of patricians are known to have sold information to foreigners. Granzino for example reported several visits to the Spanish embassy by one ‘bastardo’ of a senator of the Giustinian family.¹⁸² Others were mainland nobles, who must have often had occasion to reside in Venice.¹⁸³ There, they had frequent contacts with political insiders. Cornelio Frangipane, the Friuli nobleman who authored a rhetorical treatise we have already seen, recommended such contacts, in particular with Venetian patricians. The latter, he said, were ‘civilised and delightful in ¹⁷⁹ Parte dated 5.10.1607, in ASV, CX, Deliberazioni segrete Roma, r. 4, c. 67 (the same day as Sarpi’s attempted murder). The reports are in ASV, IS, bb. 644–50; they begin in 1608 and continue until 1619. It is likely that many of the following ﬁles have gone missing. ¹⁸⁰ Dispatch dated 21.4.1612, in BAV, Barb. Lat. 7628, c. 236v; the nuncio again lamented spie one week later, ibid., c. 251. ¹⁸¹ e.g. ASV, IS, b. 638, cc. nn. (on the representative of the Duke of Urbino); ibid., b. 606, ﬁle 9 (on the Spanish ambassador). On Granzino see DBI, s.v., and Chiarelli 1925, Spini 1949–50, v. 107: 20–9, and Preto 1994a: 124–5. His reports are scattered in ﬁve large ﬁles in ASV, IS, bb. 606–10, covering the period 1612–20 and 1628–33. ¹⁸² Undated report (in a ﬁle mostly from 1620), ASV, IS, b. 610, cc. nn. On the patricians’ illegitimate children, see: Zannini 1993a: 108–18; Megna 1997: 166–7; and Cowan 2003. ¹⁸³ In 1579, for example, eighteen nobles from Vicenza alone resided in Venice, Fasolo 1935: 154.

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conversation’, because ‘they have visited many countries for trade, on embassies and out of the desire to know different peoples and customs.’¹⁸⁴ Social status endowed illegitimate children of patricians and non-Venetian nobles, equally excluded by birth from power, with familiarity with those in government. Rather than working as paid spies, they reinforced that status through their ability to retrieve and mediate reserved information. For example, the Vicenza count Giuseppe Porto and his son Paolo wrote regular letters to French ministers between at least 1606 and 1623.¹⁸⁵ Giuseppe also collaborated with the French ambassador in Venice and occasionally acted as an intermediary for business which the ambassador did not wish to deal with personally. It was him, for example, who delivered the letter concerning Protestant advances in Venice to the Inquisitors of State, probably because the French ambassador did not wish to discuss it formally in the Collegio.¹⁸⁶ The connection established and reinforced family identity. The Portos had longstanding ties with France since at least the time of Luigi Porto (1485–1529), brieﬂy an ofﬁcer in the French army, and one of Giuseppe’s brothers served in France at the time of the Wars of Religion. Giuseppe repeatedly pressed for, and eventually obtained, a pension from the French crown.¹⁸⁷ He seemed to see no clash of allegiances with Venice. As he afﬁrmed, he informed the French ‘in the interest of my prince, whom I hope to see raised above all other princes of the world together with his Majesty’. At the same time, Giuseppe also appreciated the dangers involved in his information activity. He repeatedly asked for reservation and used a cipher.¹⁸⁸ Other people, with greater contacts than family fortunes, turned information into a source of revenue. For them, proﬁt was more important than loyalty. A man we have already encountered, Fausto Verdelli, provides an interesting example. In 1606 he was the agent of minor foreign potentates and brieﬂy provided intelligence to the Venetians.¹⁸⁹ A native of Crema, he later moved to Venice but also switched sides. In October 1613 he was denounced in strong terms for publicly despising the Republic, ‘continually chatting with every kind of people, having a lot to do with the agents of foreign princes, proving always extremely curious, meddling with everyone in a scandalous way’.¹⁹⁰ The guard whom the Inquisitors ordered to follow him discovered that Verdelli was ‘one of those so-called honoured spies’, in the multiple pay of the dukes of Savoy, Parma, and Lorraine, and of course of the Spanish ambassador. He wrote newsletters ¹⁸⁴ Quoted in Antonini 1881–82, v. 9: 53. ¹⁸⁵ The letters are scattered amongst others in miscellaneous papers relating to Italian affairs addressed to the French court, in BNF, Ms. Français 16082–16087. ¹⁸⁶ Document dated 10.9.1609, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 3, cc. nn. ¹⁸⁷ Canaye 1636, v. 3: 41. ¹⁸⁸ Letter dated 6.9.1606, in BNF, Ms. Français 16082, c. 9; also ibid.: c. 14, 15.9.1606. ¹⁸⁹ Preto 1994a: 127, Putelli 1911, v. 22: 552 and passim; cf. also above, p. 52. ¹⁹⁰ Anonymous denunciation dated 10.10.1613 in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn. The secretary of the English ambassador also pointed the Inquisitors to Verdelli, 15.12.1615, ibid.

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to each, as well as to correspondents as far away as Flanders.¹⁹¹ Verdelli’s network was impressive. In his home, he entertained Bedmar’s secretary, the representative of Malta, various patricians, and others who ﬁgured prominently in the Inquisitors’ ﬁles; for a time he ran a whole workshop for the distribution of newsletters.¹⁹² Clearly what aroused the attention, and no doubt the envy, of those who denounced Verdelli was the fact that he thrived without a trade: ‘no one knows what Verdelli does here, and yet he remains here’.¹⁹³ As the Ten’s guard reported, Verdelli used to wear rags and live in rented lodging, ‘but now is dressed in the haughtiest way, and has plenty of money . . . he has no trade or profession whatsoever’.¹⁹⁴ In effect, his profession was information. If some people made intelligence into their sole profession, others coupled it with other trades. Clearly, political informers also included more common ﬁgures than the spy’s popular image would suggest. Many people whose names recur in the Inquisitors of State’s reports, for example, worked in the large world of early modern Venice’s legal professions.¹⁹⁵ They would avail themselves of their profession to gain useful information because, as one boasted to the Inquisitors in 1616, ‘Lawyers have the occasion of hearing many of their clients’ private affairs, and when a gentleman hears something concerning the interest of the state, he must at all costs let your Excellencies know about it.’¹⁹⁶ This lawyer made a point of his patrician loyalty to Venice, but we can only guess what his colleagues did. Before becoming a professional informer, Verdelli brieﬂy worked as a solecitator di Palazzo, a minor lawyer following a client’s legal suit.¹⁹⁷ Others combined the two activities, such as Fabrizio Tessera, who (according to one of the Ten’s guards) ‘deals bravely (alla galiarda) with matters of state . . . under cover of being a Palace solicitor’, or Vincenzo Tucci, whose soliciting provided him with ‘ample contacts with important nobles’.¹⁹⁸ Lawyers did not only inform the Spanish ambassador; in 1617 they served the French one, and, as the next chapter shows, their social networks extended to much of the city.¹⁹⁹ Similarly, physicians were particularly well placed to provide connections and information. According to Granzino, Bedmar employed a Portuguese doctor, who ‘serves in important matters having frequent contacts with various nobles, to whose homes he has ease of access because of his medical profession.’²⁰⁰ As he later added,

¹⁹¹ Undated note attached to report dated 2.6.1614, in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ¹⁹² Deposition of Lodovico Parisan dated 20.12.1615, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 20, cc. nn. ¹⁹³ Anonymous denunciation dated 10.10.1613 in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ¹⁹⁴ Report dated 6.8.1614, ibid. ¹⁹⁵ Cf. Cozzi 1982: 7 and Trebbi 1996. ¹⁹⁶ Deposition of Marco Molin, 17.8.1616, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 26, cc. nn. ¹⁹⁷ Report dated 6.8.1614, in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ¹⁹⁸ Reports dated 19.3.1615, in ASV, IS, b. 609, fasc. 2, cc. nn., and 5.7.1615, ibid., fasc. 3, cc. nn.; on Tucci see also below, p. 92. More lawyers are mentioned in a report dated 30.3.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 5, cc. nn. ¹⁹⁹ Report dated 9.5.1617, in ASV, IS, b. 609, fasc. 6, cc. nn. ²⁰⁰ Report dated 26.2.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 4, cc. nn.

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those patricians may not have wanted to reveal any information, but people like the Portuguese doctor knew how to obtain the information they sought.²⁰¹ According to Granzino, another informer in the Spanish ambassador’s pay was Giovanni Mendoza. ‘He professes to be a learned writer, but is really a spy because with the excuse of his learning he goes to many of the principal houses and then reports all [he sees] to the ambassador’.²⁰² This leads us to the ﬁnal point that many professional informers also doubled as actors in Venice’s thriving publishing industry, authors, but also editors, scholars, and literary hacks. Major writers of baroque literature were also minor ﬁgures of the same period’s politics, a fact which is often overlooked in literary histories. No less than Francisco de Quevedo, for example, was a client of the Spanish viceroy of Naples and in that function also wrote against Venice.²⁰³ We tend to associate these authors with courtly capitals, but they also prospered in republican Venice at least since the fourteenth-century humanists’ cooperation with patricians.²⁰⁴ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous academies provided authors and patricians with avenues for encounters, and other informal channels also existed.²⁰⁵ As sociologists of literature have shown, at a time when writing was no self-sustaining professional activity, most writers drew a living from the patronage of powerful members of the political arena, whom they served as full time secretaries, government clerks, private tutors, or simple collaborators.²⁰⁶ The exchange of information was at the heart of the deal. The authors’ connections allowed them to access reserved information and in turn their education enabled them to elaborate that information for the beneﬁt of their patrons. Both stood to gain from their contacts, whether in material or symbolic terms. Giovan Battista Leoni (1542–1613) is a typical example. He published numerous works of contemporary and historical interest (including a commentary on Guicciardini’s History of Italy in defence of Venice’s dominion of the Adriatic).²⁰⁷ Under a pseudonym, he also published some extremely successful ﬁction.²⁰⁸ During the Interdict, Leoni authored both printed pamphlets and conﬁdential manuscript reports: he published the former anonymously, and offered the latter in person to the government.²⁰⁹ No doubt he expected ²⁰¹ Report dated 12.3.1613, in ASV, IS, b. 607, fasc. 5, cc. nn. Other physicians are mentioned Preto 1994a: 65. ²⁰² Report dated 5.8.1614, in ASV, IS, b. 608, fasc. 3, cc. nn. ²⁰³ Fernandez Guerra 1897. ²⁰⁴ King 1986: ch. 1. ²⁰⁵ Benzoni 1978. ²⁰⁶ This phenomenon has received greater attention in England and France: see above n. 172, but cf. also Dionisotti 1967 and Vivanti. ed. 1981 (especially the essays by Prosperi, Perini, and Barberis). For secretaries doubling as authors of political tracts, see Testa 2005 and Brunelli 2001. ²⁰⁷ Leoni 1583, which became standard reference during the 1610s controversies on the dominion of Adriatic, see Roiter [pseud.?] 1616: 39v –40 and Cirillo Mechele [pseud.?] 1618: sig. A3v. ²⁰⁸ Leoni 1607 (reprinted at least seven times); surprisingly, there is no mention of Leoni in the multi-volume Arnaldi and Pastore-Stocchi 1976–86 or in the DBI. ²⁰⁹ ∗ [Leoni], 1606 Dve discorsi, according to Micanzio, Leoni also collaborated with Sarpi in writing the ﬁrst draft of the latter’s Considerationi, Micanzio 1974: 1334–5. Several unpublished

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some reward, which he duly received when—to the Inquisitor’s anger—he was appointed censor of imported books.²¹⁰ Leoni coupled his literary activity with service for statesmen. In the 1570s he worked as a secretary to Venetian ambassadors—and in this function also authored a relazione. His published letters show that he cultivated, and cherished, a vast network of connections with patricians.²¹¹ Later he supplied newsletters to the Tuscan grand dukes (for which he was brieﬂy arrested in 1600), and in 1606 he acted as the Duke of Urbino’s representative. The two sides of Leoni’s activity supplemented each other. It is likely, for example, that Leoni eased his way into Urbino’s service by publishing a celebratory biography of the duke’s father.²¹² Professional information shaped the social position of authors such as Leoni. For us, this is important because it points to the potential for further diffusion of political communication. Moving easily between the antichambers of the powerful and the workshops of printers, authors multiplied a political leader’s capacity for publicity. As we shall see at the time of the Interdict, authors and publishers relished controversies—to them, paper wars were more than a pleasing metaphor; they were a precious occasion for advancement and proﬁt. Through print, authors made the information which they obtained through their contacts available to a wider public—a public which exceeded the political arena, because it was deﬁned by the ability to afford books rather than by birth or connections.

The newswriting industry When the governor of Bergamo transmitted an intelligence offer from an unnamed Spanish conﬁdente based in Milan in 1618, the Ten warned the governor that he should ensure that the offer involved serious revelations and not ‘public avvisi, which everybody knows’.²¹³ They referred to the weekly or bi-weekly manuscript newssheets distributed by professionals to subscribers for a fee and known as avvisi. Previously little known, this trade has recently been the object of several studies which have corrected the common assumption that periodical information developed late in Italy, a generation after the printed corantos which began to be published in the Netherlands and England in 1618.²¹⁴ texts attributed to Leoni are preserved in: ASV, MADM, b. 74–8, cc. nn. (two writings, both untitled); BMV, Cod. Ital. VII. 1689 (7757) (‘Discorso sopra le Censure fulminate da Paolo V Sommo Ponteﬁce contro la Serenissima Republica di Venetia’). ²¹⁰ ASV, RSP, b. 64, cc. nn. (record 24.4.1608); cf. Spampanato 1924: 347, 353. ²¹¹ Leoni 1592–96. ²¹² Leoni 1605; Leoni took up his post towards the end of the interdict, cf. de Rubertis 1938: 252. Preto 1994a: 64; the 1579 relazione (in Fassina 1992: 297–313) circulated anonymously, although its authorship was known at least to Leonardo Donà (note in his copy, in MCV, Ms. Donà 216, c. 259). ²¹³ Dispatch dated 10.2.1618, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, r. 16, cc. 109v–110. ²¹⁴ The ﬁrst Italian printed periodical is the subject of some debate, cf. Bongi 1869 and Castronovo 1976; on corantos see Dahl 1946 and 1952; on the Gazette de France, Feyel 2000.

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This view was based on the study of printed periodicals alone, whereas we now know that manuscript newssheets already circulated on a regular basis in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Venice’s avvisi provided much of the news which foreign printed periodicals were likely to reproduce. The earliest recorded Dutch coranto in fact began with a piece of news from Venice, and each following issue similarly resembled avvisi in both contents and textual arrangement, with successive paragraphs relating to different cities.²¹⁵ Until the 1660s, Venetian avvisi were the second most important source for the information which was then printed in Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette de France (after Paris and before London, Rome and Vienna).²¹⁶ As shown by Brendan Dooley and Mario Infelise, if Venice did not witness an early revolution in printed news, it is because it had already pioneered one in manuscript.²¹⁷ This is not surprising, given Italy’s large urban and literate population as well as substantial commercial economy. Probably drawing from the medieval merchants’ habit of collecting regular information from their agents, in the second half of the sixteenth century new professional ﬁgures emerged in Venice and Rome, known (respectively) as reportisti or menanti.²¹⁸ They often employed several scribes to make multiple copies of their avvisi which they then sold ‘by the sheet’ to paying customers abroad for an advance fee. Thus, they commercialized the exchange of information to make it a commodity available for a price to all those who could afford it. Not for nothing, in 1568 did the pope describe newswriters as a ‘new guild’.²¹⁹ The timing of their appearance suggests that curiosity caused demand for information. In the same way as the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was to boost the periodical press in Northern Europe in 1618–19, so did the French wars of religion for manuscript periodicals in Italy half a century earlier. Later, avvisi continued to thrive because their format allowed customization: newswriters catered for the different interests and political inclinations of their different subscribers. To procure foreign news, newswriters themselves subscribed to avvisi from which they collated selected items. For home news, newswriters concentrated in the areas where they were most likely to obtain interesting leaks or gossip: in Rome, in the Banchi quarter between the Vatican and popular Piazza Navona; in Venice, in the parish of San Moisé, midway between the main postal ofﬁce and the centre of government at San Marco.²²⁰ The Inquisitors of State’s records conﬁrm that newswriters were often to be seen in the city’s gathering places at Rialto and San Marco. The English ambassador’s secretary thought that there newswriters found much of their information: ‘the avvisi which go to foreign courts are written on the basis of discussions’ ‘at that corner in Rialto where all foreign ²¹⁵ Dahl 1946: 1. ²¹⁶ Haffemayer 1997, referring to the period 1647–63. ²¹⁷ See especially Infelise 2002a; and cf. Delumeau 1957–59: 25–36. ²¹⁸ On medieval mercantile information, see Doumerc 1994, Sardella 1947, Tucci 1993; and cf. Reyerson 1999. ²¹⁹ Infelise 2002a: 10, 42. ²²⁰ Infelise 2002a: 25 ff.

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ambassadors and others meet every morning to discuss the affairs of the world’.²²¹ Avvisi too frequently described their source as oral communication, ‘no end of whispering amongst the curious’, ‘arguments of our curious friends’, ‘rumours in the square’.²²² In Rome, they referred to the ‘news’ (or, alternatively ‘prattle’,) ‘of the Banchi’.²²³ Of course such descriptions cannot all be taken at face value; often they would have been set phrases disguising the real provenance of particular pieces of intelligence which newswriters obtained from unnamed insiders of the political elite. As the next chapter will show, however, the oral circulation of political information in public places was a true part of the city’s life. Avvisi point to the urban pervasiveness of political communication. We can throw some light on the organization of the newswriting business by considering an inquiry conducted in 1616 on the activities of Antonio Meschita, who was, according to the Inquisitors’ records, one of the Spanish ambassador’s most important informers throughout the 1610s. Alberto Lana, a professional scrivener originally from Bologna (although he said that he had lived in Venice for more than 30 years), denounced Meschita to the Inquisitors. He told them that for a few months he had been working every week, from Thursday to Saturday, in the house of Meschita. The latter, together with his associate Francesco Gelmini, composed a newsletter containing information from Constantinople, Paris, Savoy, and England and, as they said ‘all the parts of the world’. They drew their information from letters which they received from abroad, and to that they added a paragraph or more concerning Venice itself. Meschita then gave Lana the text ‘which served as the mother’, and Lana made ten copies out of it; to them, Meschita occasionally added a further paragraph—probably consisting of news which he did not want Lana to know about. Meschita then sent the ten copies to subscribers in the Venetian mainland (Padua and Vicenza), and abroad (including the dominions of the archdukes of Austria, then at war with Venice).²²⁴ Thus, once again, scribal publication combined entrepreneurial organization with authorial intervention to constitute a successful means of information. In terms of the political uses of communication, it is important to stress the close connections between newswriters and the political elites. This is shown by the economics of the newswriting business. According to Lana, Meschita, received up to 30 ducats a year from each of his ten subscribers. From this total revenue we must subtract the costs. Evidence from later in the century suggests that newswriters needed to reinvest about half of their income into the business itself—mainly on subscriptions to other newsletters and on the ²²¹ Report by Tommaso Contarini dated 29.8.1611, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 4, cc. nn. ²²² Avvisi dated 22.3.1606, in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 2, cc. 77r –v, and 24.6.1606, in ASV, IS, b. 704, fasc. 2, cc. nn. ²²³ Infelise 2002a: 31. ²²⁴ Interrogation of Alberto Lana, 18.8.1616, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 26; cf. Infelise 2002a: 51–2.

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scriveners’ salaries.²²⁵ If we apply the same ratio to Meschita’s ﬁgures, his net income would be reduced to 150 ducats, to be shared between him and his associate Gelmini (they would also have to pay Lana, of course, although the latter glossed over that). This was hardly a fortune, considering that in the same period a minor guard of the Council of Ten—perhaps including the moles charged with spying on Meschita himself—earned 60 ducats a year, a ﬁgure likely to increase as a result of supplementary forms of revenues connected to all charges in the state administration.²²⁶ Similarly, the newswriter Ottavio Tedeschi was known to his neighbours for receiving money from abroad; he lodged in a rented room, however, and another neighbour, the woman who was in charge of cleaning the building, knew that Ottavio’s business was less remunerative than he liked to boast. As she recounted, he had debts and ‘had it been only for his newsletters, he would have starved himself, but he worked as a translator from French into Italian, and in that way he earned a lot.’²²⁷ It is likely that Meschita, Tedeschi and most newswriters drew money not just from their customers but from patrons—the former, no doubt, from the Spanish ambassador himself (the Inquisitors discovered that the ambassador paid for the house in which Meschita lived).²²⁸ This is conﬁrmed by the Inquisitors of State’s records, which show that several of the Spanish ambassador’s informers also doubled as avvisi-writers.²²⁹ This is a crucial point. Before the late seventeenthcentury boom of the press, the newswriters’ livelihood depended not on the market, but on high-placed patrons for whom they acted as intermediaries. The relationship was not just economic. Information also ﬂowed from one to the other, because newswriters furnished political insiders with foreign news—ambassadors’ dispatches regularly included avvisi —and in turn the latter were in the best position for giving reserved information to the former.²³⁰ Thus, newswriters must be understood not as instruments of the public sphere, as they occasionally are, but rather as agents of the political arena (which is why they are discussed in this chapter rather than the next).²³¹ Being loyal to political masters rather than public opinion, newswriters consistently slanted the news they reported in their masters’ favour. Meschita’s ties with Spain, for example, affected his newsletters, which always put news in a light that was negative for Venice. As Lana related, ‘when [Meschita] writes ²²⁵ See Infelise 1998 and 2002a: 37–9. ²²⁶ Entry dated 2.6.1606, in ASV, Camerlengo del CX, Notatorio, r. 5, cc. nn.; for more comparisons, see below pp 223, 226. ²²⁷ Interrogations of Domenico Cattani and Polonia Artusi, 24.10.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 609, fasc. 8, cc. nn. ²²⁸ Deposition of Marco Molin, 17.8.1616, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 26, cc. nn. ²²⁹ e.g. report dated 19.4.1611, in ASV, IS, b. 606, fasc. 9, cc. nn. Granzino himself regularly sent avvisi to at least six cardinals in Rome, dispatch dated 17.3.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 471, cc. nn. ²³⁰ In early seventeenth-century Venice, this was true of the nuncio, the representative of the duke of Modena, and the English ambassador. ²³¹ Cf. Dooley 1999a: 27–8 and Ettinghausen 2001.

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about Venice, he always detracts and speaks ill’; for example, ‘he goes to the piazza, and when he sees that companies of soldiers are being sent to the ﬁeld, he takes some notes, and then writes, ‘‘Five hundred Albanian soldiers have been embarked, incapable of ﬁghting, but very capable of looting’’.’²³² Then as today, the boundary between news and spin was easily blurred by the partisan professionals of news. In turn, this means that prominent political patrons relied on newswriters not only to obtain, but also to disseminate information. The Venetian ambassador in Rome in the 1580s, reported that a conventicula of newswriters met in the household of the French Ligueur cardinal de Sens to ‘invent and fabricate newssheets every time couriers arrive to Rome, according to that which they ﬁnd expedient to make [people] believe.’²³³ When the viceroy of Naples wrote a letter to the pope regarding a controversy with Venice in 1617, Sarpi noted that ‘at the same time as he sent it to His Holiness, he sent copies to his correspondents in Rome, who published it and put it into the hands of all newswriters, for distribution not only in that city but everywhere.’²³⁴ Sarpi commented that the outcome of Osuna’s dissemination was that ‘idle and partisan people turned the letter into a matter of discussions’.²³⁵ Although newswriters worked for the political arena, their news eventually reverberated outside that arena—the popes lamented that newswriters made secrets of state known in Rome’s humblest quarters.²³⁶ Perhaps for this reason, the authorities soon tried to prohibit avvisi. In 1571 the Council of Ten ordered severe punishments ‘let no one dare to write news of any kind, be it those which are discussed in the piazze’.²³⁷ But complete prohibition was unrealistic. As Pope Gregory XIII had lamented in 1572 ‘old vices keep returning in spite of severe punishments’.²³⁸ Afterall, newswriting was necessary to the authorities themselves as well as to the elites forming them. At the same time as condemning the production and distribution of avvisi in their own countries, statesmen made use of those coming from abroad—including the Venetian ambassadors who summarized newssheets in their dispatches, thus feeding back to the government itself.²³⁹ In Venice the failure of prohibition made the government move from an initial stance of absolute repression to one of discerning censorship and manipulation—but we shall come back to this later, when discussing the Interdict controversy, because it was one of the consequences of that political crisis. In this chapter we have moved from the secret archive at the heart of the state to the professional diffusion of documents which ought to have been locked there; from the patricians’ leaking of information for their factional aims, to the ²³² Interrogation of Alberto Lana, 18.8.1616, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 26, cc. nn. ²³³ Seneca 1959: 190. ²³⁴ Sarpi 1965: 203. ²³⁵ Ibid.: 204. ²³⁶ Infelise 2002a: 154. ²³⁷ Text in Romanin 1857–61, v. 6: 129–30 and 132. ²³⁸ Bellettini 2000: 69. ²³⁹ Evidence from 1620 shows that the government added copies of avvisi to its dispatches to ambassadors abroad; record dated 16.3.1620, in ASV, IS, b. 522, cc. nn.

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professional outsiders’ skill in obtaining and commercially redistributing that information. The material traces left by those exchanges—Bon’s leak, relazioni, avvisi, spies’ reports—enable us to trace the extent of the political arena, a sphere of politics which included both insiders and outsiders, patricians and ambassadors as well as humbler professionals, people for whom securing and redistributing information was a business or an essential aspect of their profession. Their activities regularly frustrated the government’s attempted control over information. Of course, this does not mean that we are dealing here with a free and independent public, because all those in the political arena had a closer relation to power than the overwhelming majority of their contemporaries. The success of information professionals was determined not by the ability to judge power from the outside, but by the knowledge of someone inside who would provide them with information, a world of patron–client relations rather than service to the public. Furthermore, those professionals sold their information back to other insiders, once they manipulated it to suit their interests or those of their masters. Even so, however, the operations of these privileged groups—whether driven by personal or factional interest, social ambition, or economic greed—opened ﬁssures into governmental secrecy through which others could gain a view of political affairs. It is to that wider world that we now turn.

3 City The members of the political arena constituted a political, if not a social, elite, deﬁned by connections, education, and specialization, if not necessarily by status. Those social exceptions, however, never operated in a social vacuum. They often met in public or semi-public spaces, where little shielded their words from the ears of ordinary bystanders, a church, the shops around Rialto or, as I will show below, a pharmacy near the Arsenal in the peripheral sestiere of Castello. Similarly, Bon’s relazione was discussed ‘in piazza’ as well as patrician houses. Those involved in the government—and even more their servants, clerks, lawyers—all participated in a host of social interactions in a city that was overwhelmingly populated by people with no direct tie to the world of power. No less than Antonio Meschita, whom we have seen in action as one of the Spanish ambassador’s most important informers, made business, quarrelled over letters of exchange, and acted as a witness in partners’ deals, moving in and out of widely different social spheres.¹ This chapter moves to the city’s wider world of mostly oral communication to assess the impact of political information on the life and minds of ordinary Venetians and, in turn, to explore the role which the greater population played in the circulation of information. The sources have already been discussed in the introduction together with their special difﬁculties.² Here an additional warning should be made. ‘Ordinary people’ is a tag hiding a wide variety of different individuals, divided by wealth and education, social status and profession, geographical origin or neighbourhood of residence. As Natalie Zemon Davis insisted long ago, it is crucial to deﬁne speciﬁc milieus rather than generically refer to ‘the people’.³ As far as possible, I try to avoid simpliﬁcations by picking out the faces in the crowd, emphasizing rather than obliterating the differences between the people mentioned in the sources. Furthermore, the people discussed in this chapter shared two features which in turn clearly set them apart from the political arena described before. First, all the different people we shall see engaging in political communication—apothecaries, notaries, merchants, barbers, weavers, scriveners, mercers, as ¹ Transactions recorded in 1602 and 1611, in ASV, Notarile Atti, Luca e Giulio Gabrieli, b. 6549, cc. 244v –245r , and b. 6556, cc. 61v –62v ; cf. also Spini 1949–50, v. 108: 165. I am grateful to Dr Federica Ruspio for pointing me to this evidence. ² See above, pp. 11–12. ³ N.Z. Davis 1975: 192–3.

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well as their apprentices—worked for their living in ways that were not directly related to the business of politics or of information (although, as we shall see, many were interested in political information for reasons related to their own trade). I do not stress this distinction in the attempt to divide Venetian society into classes—this book’s intention is to trace communication between different social groups as well as amongst peers. However, it is crucial to distinguish the professionals of the political arena from those who may occasionally have been their social equals but always lacked their connections. The point is to identify those at the shorter end of disadvantageous power relations; in other words, to distinguish the barber from the spy who kept him under control. The danger of ignoring the difference between the political arena and the wider population consists in mistaking as historical testimonies of ‘public opinion’ the claims of a minority to control, and speak on behalf of, the entire population. It was a mistake which no contemporary would have made. The second feature shared by those discussed in this chapter, was that they were not meant to have any interest in politics. Politics was the preserve of patricians to the exclusion of all those outside that caste. This was true in a deeper sense than the institutional barring of guilds from the conduct of government.⁴ Apart from the cittadini in public employment, non-patricians were neither allowed to be political actors nor recognized as a legitimate political public. It was as if commoners were foreigners—and it was a commonplace that in Venice ‘most of the people are foreigners’.⁵ The historical justiﬁcation of this idea, widely accepted in Venice’s classical literature, was that only patricians descended from those who built the city, while the commoners’ ancestors moved there later in order to proﬁt from its wealth. For that reason, therefore, only the former and not the latter had an interest in state matters. This ﬁction drew not just on historical certitudes; it resulted from an entrenched sociological bias at the heart of patrician mentality assigning precise functions to social groups. While patricians were in charge of public affairs, non-patricians could only concentrate on private activities. As Contarini put it, commoners were good at making proﬁt not politics, which was the preserve of people who often ruined their fortunes out of public-mindedness.⁶ In earlier generations the distinction was likely to have been one of commerce vs. mechanic arts. But in the course of the sixteenth century, as patricians increasingly turned to landed property and aristocratic trappings, they developed a new ideology where proﬁt and politics could not go together (of course, they were prepared to make exceptions for themselves, but not for those whom they ruled). Even more so, lower down the social scale, all people could desire was the ⁴ See above, p. 44. ⁵ Commynes 1901–3, v. 2: 213; cf. Giannotti 1850: 28–35, and the patrician Girolamo Priuli in 1509, quoted in Cozzi 1986: 148. ⁶ Contarini 1591: 14.

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satisfaction of their basic needs. As a governor of Candia put it in 1619, the populace was ‘all stomach and no head’; all they wanted was ‘to be fed’, ‘they have no ears to listen to arguments or explanations, but always cry out ‘‘bread wine and oil’’.’⁷ The legitimation of oligarchy passed through a particular notion of ‘aristocracy’ where merit coincided with aptitude to politics and the latter presupposed independence from private needs. The patricians saw themselves as exercising their birthright for the good of the entire population. Largely, for one thing, they did cater for all those in need through an attentive social policy of charity and food-provisions, one of the two pillars of Venice’s remarkable stability.⁸ But the majority were not to be asked whether they thought their good well-served by the minority. The other pillar was the systematic exclusion of all non-patricians from the realm of politics. In practice, however, the distinction between private and public concerns, economy and politics, patricians and traders, was always going to raise a problem in a city that prided itself on commercial success, bringing together diverse people interested in exchanging news as well as goods. The symbol of that world was Rialto, causing travellers to marvel at ‘that famous concourse and meeting of so many distinct and sundry nations. . . . There you may see many Polonians, Slavonians, Persians, Grecians, Turks, Jewes, Christians of all the famousest regions of Christendome, and each nation distinguished from another by their proper and peculiar habits.’⁹ Venice itself was celebrated as ‘the magnet of travellers’ or ‘the theatre of the world’.¹⁰ Yet, behind such civic pride was a subtle anxiety. It can be seen, precisely, in Francesco Sansovino’s description of Rialto of 1581. Although he boasted that Rialto was ‘famous as one of the ﬁrst piazze of the Universe’, he was keen to describe patricians and foreign merchants as gathering at opposite ends of the square, and stressed that patricians gathered there ‘for no reason other than to strengthen their mutual knowledge by conversing with each other, in order to preserve unity and concord’.¹¹ When set in the conﬂictual political arena described in the last chapter, Sansovino’s insistence reveals that, while commercial afﬂuence was a matter for celebration, the communication which was inextricably tied with commerce was a cause of fear. In reality, Sansovino’s peaceful framework, with insiders united in harmony and physically separate from outsiders, had to do with the ideal rather than the reality. As in social transactions, in the political system distinctions become more important when contamination is more probable.¹² ⁷ 1619 report by Donato Morosini, quoted in Benzoni 1984: 68; similar examples in Benzoni 1978: 36–7. The English ambassador in Venice similarly described ‘the plebeyity, whose supreme object is bread’, Wotton 1907, v. 2: 139. ⁸ Pullan 1971. ⁹ Coryat 1905, v. 1: 318. ¹⁰ Zuniga 1694 and cf. Wilson 2005. ¹¹ Sansovino 1663: 363 (when referred to Rialto, the term piazza probably meant ‘commercial entrepôt’); cf. also the description of noble gatherings at San Marco, ibid.: 451. ¹² Cf. Douglas 1966.

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3 . 1 N EW S O N T H E R I A LTO The political communication described in the last two chapters centred formally in the Ducal Palace and the broglio, and informally in private and restricted spaces such as patrician homes or foreign embassies. Venice, however, was of course larger than that. As the government’s informers discovered, the professionals of the political arena regularly frequented urban spaces of public gatherings. For months in 1614, for example, the Inquisitors’ moles spied Antonio Meschita going daily not just (as one would expect) to the broglio, but also to Rialto, and visiting various shops on the way. The following report was rather typical of Meschita’s days: In the morning, he came late to San Marco, because he ﬁrst went to the Spanish ambassador’s house. He then went to the Court [of the Ducal Palace], where he spent a good deal of time talking to the Florentine representative and with Verdelli. He then left and went to Rialto on his own, and there he remained in the Calle della Sicurtà, talking to the newswriters there. . . . And when he left, he went to the stall of Signor Francesco Zordan, the notary, and there wrote a letter; and then he left, and went to San Cassian, to a barbershop where he spent a good deal of time; and then he left to go home.¹³

True, Meschita may simply have been busy with his errands—one day the guards certainly saw him buy some groceries (far spese) at the meat market at Rialto.¹⁴ However, as the Inquisitors knew, the regularity of his visits showed that Meschita was interested not just in the goods he could buy at the city’s markets, but in the services which the latter performed as centres of information. In the Calle della Sicurtà, for example, Meschita would ﬁnd the stalls of insurance brokers as well as, no doubt, precious news on maritime commerce and naval operations. The movements of the political arena’s professionals help us draw a map of the places where one would go when seeking for information in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Venice.

Information in the marketplace The large market at the city’s commercial centre thrived not just with goods but with news of all kinds, a world epitomized by The Merchant of Venice’s famous question, ‘What news on the Rialto?’ Shakespeare’s contemporaries would know that phrase to be commonplace, and their answer would include political information. In 1611, the English ambassador’s secretary advised the Inquisitors of State to put ‘a trusted person’ on permanence ‘at that corner in Rialto’ where, ‘as is known,’ ‘all the ambassadors of foreign princes ¹³ Report dated 4.11.1614, in ASV, IS, b. 606, fasc. 10, cc. nn. ¹⁴ Report dated 22.11.1614, ibid.

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meet every morning with other people to discuss the affairs of the world and the interests of princes’.¹⁵ A few years later a Polish Jew had less connected conversations in mind when he similarly advised that the best way of gaining information from the town of Triest was to send someone dressed in rags to beg in the main market square and taverns ‘in order to ﬁnd out about those people’s thoughts, because in such places they speak freely of the affairs of their government.’¹⁶ At Rialto, many people required information for their own private or professional reasons. In the same way as patricians were supposed to know the ways of the broglio, so merchants and humbler traders were supposed to know the news of Rialto. In the mid-ﬁfteenth century, Benedetto Cotrugli instructed fellow merchants about the importance of receiving prompt information, both local and from abroad: ‘make sure that you ﬁnd out about everyone’s affairs and their plans, and to have news from everywhere, or you will be harmed.’¹⁷ While in the Middle East on trade, the merchants Andrea Barbarigo in the 1440s and Andrea Berengo in the 1550s, practised what Cotrugli preached, constantly asking by letter for news from Venice. It is likely that while Barbarigo had relatives in the Ducal Palace, Berengo (a citizen, although he boasted patrician origins) proﬁted more from the glove-maker’s shop he owned at Rialto in obtaining news.¹⁸ Pierre Sardella showed in a pioneering study nearly sixty years ago, that in Venice news meant proﬁt or loss. Shipwrecks, epidemics, or harvest yelds affected the price of commodities such as spices or cereal and in Rialto’s sophisticated market, they informed speculation in primary material, public debt investment, insurance premiums, and foreign currencies.¹⁹ The same has been shown for other commercial communities.²⁰ Writing at a time when economic historians disregarded political history, Sardella concentrated on the economic aspects of information. But traders at Rialto would ﬁnd it hard to distinguish between commerce and politics, because they knew that, from however far, policies and events affected their lives and business. To them, the patricians’ separation between private and public affairs was likely to make no sense. Furthermore, the circulation between private and political channels of information was great. When, famously, news of the Portuguese new spice route around Africa reached Venice in 1501, it did so ﬁrst through the government’s diplomatic network because the ambassador in Spain sent home a letter he had ¹⁵ Deposition of 29.8.1611, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 4, cc. nn., quoted above, pp. 81–2. On Rialto cf. Cessi and Annibale 1934: 231–3 and 258–62. ¹⁶ Deposition of Giacob Levi, enclosed in dispatch dated 14.1.1617, in ASV, Coll., Lettere segrete, f. 48, cc. nn. ¹⁷ Cotrugli 1990: 164 (written in 1458, ﬁrst published in 1573). ¹⁸ Lane 1944: 120–1, and Tucci 1957; there is sadly no mention of information in Tucci 1973. ¹⁹ Sardella 1947: 19–43, and cf. the observations in Braudel 1981: 410–12 and Doumerc 1994. ²⁰ Cf. the Genoese merchants’ attention for information ranging from foreign fashions to wars, Doria 1986.

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received from his agent in Lisbon. Only later did the news spread to provoke panic amongst the merchants at Rialto.²¹ In this case, communication worked in full circle. The Rialto merchants prompted the government to send an expedition to Lisbon to ﬁnd out about the actual extent of the trade. In turn, if merchants were interested in governmentsupplied news, they also had their own means of supplying information to the government or powerful members of the political arena, either thanks to agents located in distant places (in the case of important traders), or as grass-roots informers (in the case of humbler tradesmen). A century later, Girolamo Corner, an important patrician who served as a general on the western frontier, was regularly updated by one Antonio Dal Bello, a Venetian subject who had an iron monger’s shop in Milan.²² Sarpi also knew merchants and relied on some of them to obtain the news which he then channelled in his letters.²³ In other cases, however, one imagines less collaboration than rivalry in obtaining news, with the government interested in censoring news so as to avoid shocks to the market, and individual traders competing to secure the earliest reports. As the English ambassador realized in 1608, the same news could be received in very different ways at Rialto depending on whether one had a mainly commercial or political bias: ‘this piazza is full of noise touching the arrival of the Indian ﬂeet in Spain, the merchants glad, the politiques troubled therewith’.²⁴ Once at Rialto, news provoked further communication. Girolamo Priuli’s early sixteenth-century diary, for example, reported how the news of the Portuguese direct spice route to the East occasioned disbelief, then disagreement, and eventually despair. It seemed incredible . . . and the talks varied about the actual amount, some said more, others less, . . . and this was bad news for Venetian merchants . . . and so for this news they made the greatest celebrations in Lisbon and throughout Spain, and by contrast in Venice there was the greatest melancholy and distress. . . . And the price of all spices and other goods fell in Venice, putting the merchants in a bad state and in great doubt.²⁵

Only a few years later, in 1509 the Venetian army’s defeats and the enemy’s advances—closer events, and more immediately affecting a greater number of people—made for anxious rumours and contradictory reports. Then, while the ofﬁcial channels broke down, refugees, travellers, and fugitives became the carriers of news. In Venice, one could hear the enemy’s artillery pound Padua, while ﬁshermen returning with the night’s catch reported what they saw from the lagoon, bringing ‘panic and disturbance to the whole city’, and likewise ‘peasants coming from the area of Padua continually arrived to Venice [as refugees] and related the actions of the enemy, although they also lied a lot and spoke without substance.’²⁶ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁵

Sanudo 1879–1903, v. 4: 87 (26.6.1501). Dispatch dated 1.8.1616, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 31, cc. nn. De Vivo 2005. ²⁴ Letter dated 21.11.1608, in Wotton 1907, v. 1: 439–40. Priuli 1912–41, v. 2: 305–6. ²⁶ Ibid.: v. 4: 334–5.

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A century later, we have no diaries like Priuli’s or Sanudo’s, but we can use the Inquisitors’ reports and other sources to trace the impact and habits of public communication. The Inquisitors’ guards constantly reported on members of the political arena joining groups of people gathering in conversation at San Marco and Rialto, discussing the latest newssheet or the capture of a merchantship.²⁷ They described those groups as bozzoli, a word also meaning the silkworm’s cocoon and the urn used for casting votes in the Republic’s councils—perhaps a half-ironic reference to the political self-importance which people boasted in bozzoli, although ‘cocoon’ also aptly describes a small group of people gathering in a circle to shelter their conversation, as much as possible, from surrounding noises (and we probably ought to imagine public space in early modern Venice as extremely noisy). John Florio’s contemporary translation contains an indication of size: ‘a knot or crue of men or good fellowes, so that it be not under foure and exceede not the number of sixe’.²⁸ Two early seventeenth-century English visitors similarly saw people ‘meet[ing] together in great troupes’ in San Marco at particular ‘walking times’, ‘every where in clumps and clusters’.²⁹ The word also applied to groups gathering in conversation elsewhere, including the Ghetto, where a Jew lamented that, following a trial in the 1630s, ‘they hold me for excommunicated, so that I cannot attend any bozzolo, nor converse’.³⁰ The Inquisitors’ reports also show how information fuelled gregarious or confrontational discussion in bozzoli. In the course of an investigation on the professional informer Vincenzo Tucci in 1617, the Inquisitors of State interrogated the mosaic craftsman Alvise Gaetano, then working at the basilica of San Marco. He reported about the various bozzoli which gathered in the square, ‘where—as he said—one has often the occasion of chatting with friends’. Although, as Gaetano hastened to add, he had no prattica of those who spoke ill of his fatherland, he heard others insult the Republic, ‘laughing of all its actions, making fun of everything, saying that [the Venetians] are good-for-nothings’.³¹ For this reason, two lawyers once had a ﬁght; one sided for Spain, the other was known as ‘half French’ (mezzo gallo).³² Here we have rich evidence of factionalism well outside the political elites, a combination of personal sympathies, social loyalties, and professional rivalries. ²⁷ e.g. reports about Meschita dated 15 and 19.11.1614, in ASV, IS, b. 606, fasc. 10, cc. nn.; report on Verdelli dated 29.8.1614, ibid., b. 608, fasc. 4, cc. nn.; report about Cerutti dated 4.12.1611, ibid., fasc. 10, cc. nn. ²⁸ Florio 1611: s.v. Use of the term is amply documented for the late seventeenth century, cf. Infelise 2002a: 148. A nineteenth-century dictionary of Venetian dialect translated bozzolo as a circle of people talking together, Boerio 1829: s.v. ²⁹ Coryat 1905, v. 1: 318, and William Bedell in Shuckburgh 1902: 236–7. ³⁰ Cozzi 1995a: 43. ³¹ Deposition of Alvise Gaetano, 3.5.1617, ASV, IS, b. 1213, ﬁle 31, cc. nn. Niccoli 1991 describes sixteenth-century mosaic craftsmen at San Marco engaging in heterodox religious discussions. ³² Deposition of Alvise Gaetano, 3.5.1617, ASV, IS, b. 1213, ﬁle 31, cc. nn.

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At a time of tension with Spain, it is no wonder that the Inquisitors’ reports contain denunciations of Spanish sympathizers. But even when exaggerated or outright false, those denunciations point to actual practices. In June 1618, for example, an anonymous denunciation accused Gasparo Casati, a merchant in the campo of Rialto Novo nicknamed il Spagnolo, of having violently argued with people who defended Venice’s foreign policy. The person making the denunciation concluded that Casati must have been involved in the aborted conspiracy which had been discovered a few weeks earlier.³³ But another witness, a notary in the brokers’ ofﬁce near Casati’s shop, pointed out that, although Casati’s talked in Spain’s favour, he was no ‘rebel’. It was normal for ‘a young and light-spirited man, [to] follow the facts of war as young people do’; Casati was a ‘chatterer who blabbers a lot’. The rest of the notary’s deposition points to the pervasiveness of factionalism in Venice’s streets. He explained that it was normal to hear discussions concerning foreign politics, but one should beware of jumping to conclusions: ‘when people debate things, one has one opinion, and the other another one, some speak in a way, and others in another; and from their words, people jump to conclusions, and say ‘‘he’s on that side, and he’s on that other side’’.’³⁴ The exchange of political information in bozzoli was also a form of entertainment, more so than we can imagine today, when information reaches us mostly in privatized contexts and media. The scrivener Ottavio Carnevale for example convinced the Inquisitors that he was no spy by pointing out that he only had a leisurely interest for general ‘things of the world’, which he liked to discuss while walking near the canal at the Misericordia with a compatriot before going home for supper: ‘every now and then we meet up and walk at length along the fondamente, as we in fact did last night, and so we speak about what crosses our mind concerning the things of the world’.³⁵ Two years later a priest wishing to appease the Inquisitors’ suspicions told them that he had no other pratica than the usual ‘evening conversation in the piazze’ with other priests.³⁶ Not unlike in the squares of Morocco’s Fez or Brazil’s Olinda today, early seventeenth-century descriptions of San Marco show people fascinated by the street actors, charlatans, and mountebanks, and others busy talking with each other, engrossed in their discussions.³⁷ Political communication interacted tightly with those urban forms of entertainment. In 1618 an exchange broker (sensale di cambi) recounted a discussion ‘about the affairs of the world’ which he had had around four years earlier; the ﬁrst thing he remembered was that it took place in a campo during ³³ Anonymous denunciation dated 26.6.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 522, cc. nn. ³⁴ Interrogation of Giacomo Beni, 5.7.1618, ibid.; the Inquisitors of State dropped the case. ³⁵ Interrogation of Ottavio Carnevale, 30.12.1617, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 42, cc. nn.; cf. Infelise 2002a: 29. ³⁶ Interrogation of Francesco Fabri, 27.8.1619, in ASV, IS, b. 1053, ﬁle ‘Padre Francesco Fabri da Pesaro’, cc. nn. ³⁷ Cf. the engraving in Franco 1609.

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a bullﬁght.³⁸ As we shall see when discussing a late-sixteenth century text, the coincidence of politics and entertainment also affected the contents of political communication.³⁹

Information centres Bozzoli gathered in public because Venice offered little enclosed and sheltered space for sociability other than the shade of a porch or the occasional gaps in the close sequence of houses bordering onto its narrow streets. In the city, commercial transactions too unfolded in semi-public conditions, at the entrances to shops and professionals’ studios which were too small for many people to enter. Some business ventures, larger shops and warehouses, offered more welcoming spaces to people who not only wished to conduct business but who also gathered there to discuss news of all kinds. In such places members of the political elite met with traders and tradesmen, and private enterprises turned into places for the discussion of public issues. It would be difﬁcult to establish precise social or cultural distinctions between these establishments, but clearly they did differ. Some addressed themselves to reﬁned clienteles, to whom they offered not just welcoming spaces for sociability, but also protection from the inconveniences of the public street, and from its socially demeaning characters. Others were open to a wider range of people. Printers’ workshops and bookshops—cramming educated editors and correctors alongside humble workers—recur in the Inquisitors’ reports as well as references to authors, many of whom were themselves members of the political arena. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, for example, some of Sarpi’s friends were known to gather in the bookshop of Roberto Meietti, the most productive publisher of Venetian pamphlets during the Interdict. One implied that it was a matter of course that he could be found there.⁴⁰ The Spanish ambassador was also reported as frequenting bookshops in the same years.⁴¹ On reaching Venice, the philosopher Giordano Bruno and the poet Giovan Battista Marino both tried to make useful contacts in Giovanni Battista Ciotti’s bookshop in the 1590s. A discussion there they hoped, would result in a ﬁrst launch into Venetian society which they would later crown with an invitation to a patrician household or an academy.⁴² In turn, there is no doubt that Ciotti himself, an enterprising businessman, hoped to proﬁt from such occasions to build the reputation of a well-connected intellectual entrepreneur.⁴³ Bookshops welcomed ³⁸ Interrogation of Zuanne Castelli, 16.3.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, ﬁle 31, cc. nn. ³⁹ See below, pp. 152, 155. ⁴⁰ Deposition of Giovanni Marsilio, 5.7.1607, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 29, cc. nn.; Sarpi 1931, v. 2: 46, 58, and cf. Masetti Zannini 1970: 185–6. On Meietti, see below, pp. 220–1. ⁴¹ Interrogation of Zuanne Castelli, 16.3.1618, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 31, cc. nn. ⁴² Spampanato 1933: 61, 69–73, 128–31; Infelise 1997; Nuovo 2003: 262. ⁴³ On Ciotti’s career, DBI, s.v., L. Balsamo 1991, and Rhodes 1991.

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not just customers but also people who were interested in conversation more than in book-buying. As Goethe’s father found in Padua in the 1730s, people ‘visited bookshops more in order to study and browse books, than to buy them . . . to the point that when I went there, I saw nothing but reading and talking.’⁴⁴ On the whole, however, attracting people to one’s bookshop was an effective boost to sales, as Aldo Manuzio discovered nearly two and a half centuries earlier. By boastfully describing the gatherings in his shop as a scholars’ academy, he hoped that cultural recognition would turn into publicity for the further sales of his classics.⁴⁵ Unlike public gatherings, the conversation hosted in enclosed spaces was described as ridotti in the records of both the Holy Ofﬁce, which feared that shops sheltered religious discussions, and the Inquisitors of State, who were more concerned with political issues. As we have already seen, this word applied to polite gatherings in noble homes; but clearly it also had a more socially inclusive sense, which a law of 1606 equated to ‘taverns’.⁴⁶ In the 1590s, for example, Paolo Sarpi paid frequent visits not just to the noble Ridotto Morosini, but also to Alvise Secchini’s mercers’ shop at the Golden Ship in the Mercerie. As Sarpi’s biographer recounted encomiastically, in that shop ‘a group of virtuous and honest gentlemen gathered together to recount the news . . . as well as many foreign merchants who travelled throughout Europe, the East and West Indies . . . to hear those who had been there give faithful reports about the places, the people, their customs and religions’.⁴⁷ Twenty years later, Giovanni Marsilio, one of the Interdict’s most proliﬁc authors, stated that he was ‘used to’ frequenting that shop, implying that gathering there for conversation was a social habit which had little to do with the shop’s primary function.⁴⁸ Similarly, Bartolomeo Bontempelli’s shop at the Chalice—not far from the Golden Ship—also hosted discussions (ragionamenti) including the nuncio’s and the Spanish ambassador’s employees, as well as numerous patricians and various clergy.⁴⁹ It would be wrong to assign exclusive political or religious leanings to such gatherings—as the witness quoted above put it, one should not ‘jump to conclusions’. The nuncio, for example, denounced the Golden Ship as the nest of a heretical conventicola.⁵⁰ He may well have been right, of course. But the doge refused the accusation and stated that the shop’s customers discussed current ⁴⁴ Nuovo 2003: 260–1. ⁴⁵ Lowry 1979: 193–9. ⁴⁶ ASV, CX, Parti comuni, r. 55, cc. 181v –182; the term also had a speciﬁc usage indicating gambling dens, see Derosas 1981. ⁴⁷ Micanzio 1974: 1306–7; most later works refer to this passage, but more references can be found in Sarpi’s letters, e.g. Sarpi 1931, v. 1: 5. ⁴⁸ Deposition of Giovanni Marsilio, 5.7.1607, in ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 29, cc. nn. ⁴⁹ The earliest report on this shop is dated 9.1.1609, in ASV, IS, b. 644, cc. nn., but several more can be found ibid. b. 606, fasc. 7 (and reports 21.5–5.6.1612), and in b. 1213, fasc. 20 (20.12.1615). ⁵⁰ Audience of 11.8.1607, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 15, cc. 214v–215. In his dispatches, the nuncio lamented at length the gatherings in that shop, e.g. dispatch dated 21.7.1607, in ASV at, SS, NV, r. 38, c. 37v, and Savio 1936–42, v. 10: 30 and 36. Witness quoted above, p. 93.

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affairs only; more signiﬁcantly, he indicated that such discussions were a common form of sociability: ‘when people meet in one shop or another or other places, they do so for their own entertainment and to speak about the things of the world, and not to speak about religion’.⁵¹ Crucially, the presence of Sarpi’s associates did not prevent others of the opposite political allegiance from visiting the Golden Ship, including many informers in the Spanish ambassador’s pay.⁵² Bontempelli’s shop also hosted many in the Spanish and papal retinues, even though he was a strong supporter of Venice’s anti-papal stance during the Interdict (and pledged money for a war against Rome).⁵³ Bontempelli and Secchini were rich men. The former had interests ranging from commerce to mining and at his death was worth more than 100,000 ducats; the latter we know through a portrait by Palma il Giovane, showing him surrounded by a collection of classical statues. It is likely that in their cases, high-ﬂying connections were both expressions of political culture that also helped business. Other less afﬂuent establishments were speciﬁcally devoted to the entertainment of a large range of people. Accommodation and nourishment of locals and visitors was an important aspect of the urban economy, which in 1624 was said to employ a quarter of household heads in widely different activities, from tavern-keeper to cook, cellar-keeper and handiman (canever and sfadigante).⁵⁴ Establishments varied substantially, from the more distinguished osterie (the best were located in the area between San Marco and Rialto), to smaller and cheaper locande, albergarie, and semi-public fondaci. In principle only three taverns were allowed to accommodate foreigners, but in practice the prohibition was not enforced and, especially in the poorer ones, the opportunity for social transactions was very good. Easily identiﬁable by their signs, these places would be the ﬁrst point of call for all the many strangers who arrived in Venice. Gathering people of different origins and confessions, recent arrivals as well as local go-betweens, they turned into natural places for the exchange of information. As an oste offering his services to the Council of Ten proudly said, ‘as a tavern-keeper I have the true way of hearing, dealing, and reporting . . . because every quality of people come to my place, and I can make them familiarize with me’.⁵⁵ The structures for the accommodation of foreigners came under the control not just of the authorities charged with the city’s commercial economy, such as the Giustizia Nuova, but also of magistrates such as the Esecutori alla bestemmia (from 1583), to whom landlords had to register all passing visitors.⁵⁶ Clearly, these places raised moral as well as political concerns. ⁵¹ 25.8.1607, ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 15, c. 222v. ⁵² Reports dated 27.1.1611 in ASV, IS, b. 606, fasc. 9, cc. nn., and 27.11.1614, ibid., b. 606, fasc. 10, cc. nn., and 7.8 and 3.9.1612 in ASV, IS, b. 201, c. 98 and 108v . ⁵³ Mackenney 1987: 110–11 and DBI, s.v. ⁵⁴ Beltrami 1954: 208–9. On taverns, cf. Costantini 1996 and Ortalli 1993; for comparisons, cf. Brennan 1988, and Kümin and Tlusty 2002. ⁵⁵ ASV, CX, Parti segrete, f. 31, cc. nn. (4.5.1616). ⁵⁶ Derosas 1981: 446.

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have read or otherwise become exposed to pamphlets? As we shall see, in order to answer these questions it is crucial to consider the interaction between print and other communication acts to which, effectively, the pamphlets were meant to respond. The notion of propaganda would result in ignoring the ways in which pamphlets were received, their message appropriated in often unexpected ways. It is then perhaps best to describe pamphlets by going back to the warlike metaphor used by contemporaries, a metaphor which reminds us of the varieties of tactics, weapons, and terrains involved. As in early-modern armies, there were fewer conscripts than mercenaries, and regular troops were surrounded by a large array of auxiliaries, looting parties, and independent companies. To an extent, each fought its own war, with unforeseeable consequences.

6 . 1 F RO M M A N U S C R I P T TO P R I N T Amongst the supposedly secret documents, written for private purposes but disclosed for public effects at the beginning of the controversy, there circulated some which were written primarily for public polemical purposes. Contemporary reports referred to a great number of texts in both verse and prose. We have already seen some of these, but most have probably been lost.¹⁴ In the same days as the government published the Protesto, the English ambassador sent ‘an Epigrame or Pasquinata’ in Venetian dialect (the text is not preserved). A week later, he again reported that ‘the Poets have plentifully rayned showers of theire witt uppon the season’, and then again at the end of the month wrote that ‘new discourses . . . doe dayly appeare’.¹⁵ Most witnesses agreed in describing those texts as ‘Pasquinate’, a supposedly popular genre which they dismissed as ‘not worth reading’.¹⁶ Such scorn is disingenuous, however, as the same witnesses also copied and collected pasquinades which, as we know, constituted a polemical feature of the political arena. Extant collections conﬁrm elite usage.¹⁷ Most of these texts were the products of professionals, people who, unlike the government, had an interest in publicizing information on the Interdict. Those who knew that world, realized that the recourse to the pen was inevitable as soon as the troubles started. As the ambassador of Mantua put it, in what amounts to a good commentary on this book, ‘in a city it is very difﬁcult to stop people ¹⁴ See above, section 5.3. ¹⁵ Dispatches of 12, 19 and 26.5.1606, in NA, SP 99/3, cc. 76v, 80, 86; also letter of 3.5.1606, in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 26. ¹⁶ Dispatch of 20.5.1606, Canaye 1636, v. 3: 43; also an anonymous letter in the English ambassador’s papers, dated 5.5.1606, NA, SP 99/3, c. 68; dispatch of the representative of Mantua of 6.5.1606, in Putelli 1911, v. 22: 32n; and avviso of 27.5.1606, BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 278v. ¹⁷ For example, doge Leonardo Donà and his brother Nicolò owned a two-volume miscellany of around ﬁfty manuscript texts, some of which are inscribed by other patricians, MCV, Ms. Donà 486 and 487. On Pasquinades see section, 4.3 above

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from speaking and writing’.¹⁸ As we shall see, the ties of professionals with the publishing industry, made the step to print extremely easy. While manuscripts continued to play an important role, during the summer they were increasingly overshadowed by printed pamphlets. This section analyses the manner in which print became the terrain of the Interdict conﬂict.

The earliest printed pamphlets In spite of the government’s claimed monopoly over political communication, the ﬁrst pamphlet appeared on the same day as the Protesto. It was an edition of two short works by the ﬁfteenth-century French conciliarist Jean Gerson, setting strict boundaries on the pope’s power to excommunicate and arguing that there was no obligation to observe a censure proclaimed outside those boundaries. An anonymous letter, ﬁctitiously dated from Paris but in fact written in Venice by Sarpi, served as preface. It ingenuously made no mention of the interdict and instead proclaimed astonishment at the news—surely false—that the pope had excommunicated Venice on Christmas day (a reference to Paul V’s ﬁrst briefs).¹⁹ In terms of communication, it is important that Sarpi’s motivation and intention in publishing the Interdict’s ﬁrst pamphlet lay within the sphere of the political arena rather than the wider public. Sarpi probably arranged for his publication with the informal backing of some patricians, who encouraged him (as his biographer later recounted) ‘with their authority’.²⁰ What is more, his pamphlet was aimed at convincing other patricians. First designed to be published in Latin rather than Italian, unlike later pamphlets it dealt with excommunication (which struck the Senate alone) rather than interdict (which struck the entire state).²¹ Known as doctor christianissimus, Gerson provided a safe authority to draw moderate elements within the patriciate towards appealing to the council, a solution supported by Sarpi’s patrician friends, and concerning which Sarpi had already mentioned Gerson in a brief addressed to the Collegio.²² Gerson had also been chancellor of the University of Paris and one of the founding fathers of French Gallicanism, an association which suited anti-Spanish patricians at a time when they were working towards an alliance with France.²³ Finally Gerson wrote at a time of strife and conveyed an important message to Venice’s nobility: as there was no reason to fear unjust censures, the ¹⁸ Audience of 30.6.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, c. 139v. As early as the end of April, Cardinal Borghese foresaw that the Venetians would recur to printed pamphlets, de Magistris 1906: 36. ¹⁹ ∗ Gerson, Trattato e ressolutione: 171–84. ²⁰ Micanzio 1974: 1334–5. ²¹ It has never been noticed that the Italian version of the preface is an abbreviated rendering of the Latin one, which probably appeared earlier, cf. ∗ Gerson, De Excommunicatione, sigg. A2r –v. ²² Consulto ‘Intorno all’appellazione o altro da farsi’, written in late April, in Sarpi 2001: 374–5. ²³ On the search for legal precedents connecting Venice with France, among other states, see de Vivo 2002b: 155–6.

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danger was disunity more than excommunication.²⁴ Sarpi’s pamphlet tried to rally patricians around the doge rather than their subjects around Venice—far from being the natural expression of Venice’s republicanism, pamphlets began in the factional competition which the republican principles condemned. As with other printed controversies at the time, the rationale of the Interdict pamphlets rested in the converging interests of professionals of the pen, political patrons, and publishing entrepreneurs.²⁵ The anonymous Reply of a Doctor of Theology to a Letter by a Clergyman Friend appeared two weeks after Sarpi’s pamphlet. It expounded the Republic’s legal challenge to the Interdict for the beneﬁt of the clergy. Thus, even though it originated inside the patriciate, printed publication soon escaped it.²⁶ The author, Giovanni Marsilio, was the typical intelligencer connected to the political arena. An apostate Jesuit from Naples, he had recently arrived in Venice as a private tutor, was to author four more pamphlets, and spent the following years unsuccessfully seeking governmentsponsored positions, working as an informer for the English ambassador, and penning encomiastic prose for the doge and his family.²⁷ The last pamphlet published before the government clamped down on printing was, like Gerson’s, a translation of an earlier work with a polemical sting which clearly referred to current affairs.²⁸ St Bernard’s De consideratione was ﬁrst written in 1150 to remind pope Eugenius III of the pre-eminence of his spiritual duties over his temporal powers and to warn him against the corruption of the Roman court. Whoever made the choice, it was a cleverly chosen publication, likely to push a wedge between different factions in Rome at a time when the papal court was reportedly divided.²⁹ In fact, as some in Venice no doubt knew, St Bernard’s letter had divided the Congregation of the Index only a few years earlier, when the strictest cardinals (including some active during the Interdict, such as Colonna and Bernieri) inserted it in the Index of 1593—an Index which was later repealed.³⁰ The relations between those pamphlets and the Venetian government are, at best, shady. Sarpi’s and Marsilio’s were anonymous publications which carried no licence and presented themselves as if they had been written outside Venice (a trick which did fool some readers).³¹ St Bernard’s De consideratione was the only pamphlet to advertise the name of the printer, but the latter’s licence referred to ²⁴ ∗ Gerson, Trattato e ressolutione: 179. ²⁵ Cf. Jouhaud 1997. ²⁶ ∗ [Marsilio], Risposta. ²⁷ Information drawn from a letter by cardinal Caetani of 28.6.1606, in ASVat, FB, III.131.c, c. 101v, and from ∗ [Possevino], Risposta di Teodoro Eugenio: 6 and Benzoni 1970: 83, cf. Marsilio 1609. ²⁸ ∗ St Bernard, Trattato. ²⁹ Putelli 1911, v. 22: 44. ³⁰ St Bernard’s text was published in Rome in 1594 by G. Facciotto, the same printer who published many Interdict pamphlets; De Bujanda et al. 1994: 319 and 422, and cf. Frajese 1986. ³¹ Camillo Abioso’s letters from Ravenna described Gerson’s pamphlet as ‘published in Paris’, 6 and 13.6.1606, in ASV, IS, b. 542, cc. nn. Also, dispatch dated 14.6.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Milano, f. 30, c. 71v.

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a deal secured earlier.³² The anti-Venetian ambassador of Savoy said that Sarpi’s Gerson was authorized by ‘these Lords’ (questi Signori); but he probably extended to the entire government that which had been the will of only a few patricians.³³ No doubt, some in the government, perhaps the doge himself, welcomed the move to print and assured the pamphlets’ authors that the censoring authorities would turn a blind eye to their publication. But the pamphlets had limited circulation and were sold under the counter; as the representative of Modena recounted, he had found it hard to buy them because booksellers were afraid of censorship.³⁴ While there is no evidence that the authorities encouraged pamphlet publication at this stage, we know that many in the government resented those pamphlets which were published.³⁵ At the end of May some authors close to the political elite (Sarpi himself, senator Antonio Querini, as well as the professional intelligencer Giovan Battista Leoni) did approach the Collegio with texts for publication; but they were all turned down and the Collegio refused to present their texts to the Senate—probably because it sensed that they would ﬁnd no support there.³⁶ Instead the government turned to suppressing the diffusion of those pamphlets which had already been published, prohibiting the sale of Marsilio’s Risposta, preventing the others’ reprint, and possibly withdrawing copies from circulation.³⁷ Venetian patricians did not only disagree on the political line to take vis-à-vis the Interdict, but also on the degree of publicity to give to that line. In doubt, the government limited itself to the minimum, conﬁning all discussion of the controversy to politics’ traditional framework. Querini’s text was refused publication and instead sent in manuscript form to ambassadors abroad.³⁸ Initially, the government devoted itself with great energy to censorship rather than publishing, a negative rather than positive use of the press. It prevented the publication of unfavourable books, induced publishers to censor famous theological texts (such as Francisco Suarez’ De Censuris), and intervened directly with authors to alter their texts. In fact the ﬁrst—and indeed one of the very few—recorded evidence of a government payment for publication-related costs during the Interdict does not concern the publication, but the expurgation of a book, a receipt of money paid to a printer for inserting a cancel suppressing the section on ecclesiastical immunity from a work on Scholastics.³⁹ ³² Camerini 1962–63, v. 2: 487–521. ³³ Dispatch of 6.5.1606, in de Magistris 1906: 53. ³⁴ Letter dated 6.5.1606, in ASM, AV, b. 84, cc. nn.; cf. Cozzi 1959: 92. ³⁵ The anonymous author of a Collegio diary for example mentioned the pamphlets reproachingly, ASV, Cons. iure, f. 537, c. 19v (undated entry); cf. also below, p. 210. ³⁶ Undated entry (between 22.5 and 14.6.1606), in ASV, Cons. iure, f. 537, cc. 36v –38. No pamphlets are mentioned at this stage in the chronological diary of the Collegio in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Principi, f. 16, cc. nn. ³⁷ Dispatches of 2 and 3.6.1606, in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 65, 68; cf. Cozzi 1959: 95. ³⁸ Dispatch of 14.6.1606, in ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 67. ³⁹ This was the case of Alessandro Pesante’s Commentaria brevia on Aquinas, see de Vivo 2002b: 272–3.

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The Roman response Like the Venetian government, the pope also hesitated before using the printing press. He was said to have commissioned a text for publication, but then ruled it out.⁴⁰ Perhaps Paul V believed that the Republic would give in to his threats; or (just like Venice) he feared the consequences of enlarging the controversy. A report by the Tuscan ambassador points to the latter. According to him, some cardinals opposed printing because it would ‘cast doubts on what was certain and clear’; others because it would ‘open the opportunity for those who wished to write against’ Rome; others still warned that pamphlets would attract offensive replies, harming not just the Holy See but the pope himself and his family.⁴¹ Clearly, publicly engaging in a polemic was an embarrassing act for all authorities, and, as we have already seen, the pope chose to address the clergy rather than the entirety of the faithful.⁴² The publication of pamphlets in Venice, however, changed this attitude and attracted furious public responses in Rome. In June, the Inquisition issued the ﬁrst of several prohibitions against the Republic’s texts, lumping together the ofﬁcial Protesto, the false letter Alle comunità e sudditi, and other unnamed texts, both printed and manuscript.⁴³ More condemnations were to follow soon.⁴⁴ The unconventional intervention of the Congregation of the Inquisition (rather than the Index), shows the Holy See’s desire to issue a strong message against Venice—it was the last time the Inquisition was to prohibit books autonomously.⁴⁵ Like the Monitorio, the Inquisition’s prohibitions were meant to reach a large public, ofﬁcially proclaimed in the papal states, reported in newssheets, and then printed in thousands of copies of various formats to be disseminated elsewhere.⁴⁶ In Brescia, the governors’ guards pasted exemplars on the walls ‘in many public places’.⁴⁷ Paradoxically, the condemnation of printed publication helped the controversy to escape the political arena. The Venetian pamphlets also moved the pope’s defenders to publish responses, including some of the same prelates who also sat on the inquisitorial board prohibiting the Venetian works. No less than three cardinals took up the pen ⁴⁰ News reported in the Roman avviso of 24.5.1606, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 276. Some Roman authors also allegedly restrained themselves from publishing, such as Paolo Comitoli, who kept his text in manuscript for ﬁve consecutive months, ∗ Comitoli, Trattato: sig. +2r. ⁴¹ Dispatch dated 26.5.1606, in De Rubertis 1933: 95–6n. ⁴² See above, p. 164. ⁴³ Prohibition dated 27.6.1606, not included in later collections of decrees (Librorvm Post Indicem Clementis VIII prohibitorum Decreta Omnia of 1624 and Index Librorvm Prohibitorvm Alexandri VII of 1664), cf. Reusch 1883–85, v. 2: 321. ⁴⁴ On 20.9 and 30.10.1606, cf. Index Librorvm Prohibitorvm Alexandri VII : 299–300. ⁴⁵ Infelise 1999: 41. ⁴⁶ Evidence of immediate distribution to nuncios and inquisitors in Tedeschi 1991: 306, and de Magistris 1906: 144n. Condemnations were also reprinted outside Rome (e.g. in Milan, dispatch dated 30.8.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Milano, f. 30, c. 127), and were advertised in newssheets (e.g. avviso of 20.9.1606 in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 2, c. 250). ⁴⁷ Dispatch of 11.10.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn.

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in the summer, two of them, Baronio and Bellarmino, renowned theologians.⁴⁸ Their pamphlets trumpeted the authority from which they emanated, boasting the titles and coat-of-arms of their authors on the title-page, and afﬁrming at once the Holy See’s superior scholarly prestige and absolute power over spiritual and temporal matters. On the basis of this double authority they declared Venetians to be not just disobedient, but also heretics. A trained inquisitor, Bellarmino concentrated on showing the inﬂuence of a whole catalogue of condemned heretics on the Venetians: the editor of Gerson resembled Luther and Calvin; the author of the Risposta, Marsilio of Padua, the Hussites, and the English heretics who wished to subject the Church to temporal rulers; like the Waldensians, the Venetians wished to overturn the social order.⁴⁹ The cardinals’ pamphlets also shrewdly attempted to rally opposition inside the Venetian ruling class. Thus, Bellarmino pointed out that Marsilio’s Risposta exalted the power of the doge in Venice, undermining the liberty of other patricians. Above the doge was the Great Council, Bellarmino afﬁrmed, perhaps hoping to give some comfort to the internal opposition to Donà (which he knew to exist but also to be weak). Not for nothing did he remind his readers of the ominous pride of another doge, Marin Faliero, whom the patricians executed in order to save the state.⁵⁰ With the same aim in mind, Baronio confessed himself amazed that the Protesto was published ‘in the name of all Senators’ whereas (as he claimed with some substance) everyone knew that the Senate was divided.⁵¹ It is signiﬁcant that Baronio also called on the patricians to return to their piety in the name of prudence and old age, against a breed of young politicians leading Venice to damnation—no doubt an oblique attack on the group commonly described as the Giovani faction, who led the Interdict offensive.⁵² While targeting the elite, these pamphlets also evaded its conﬁnes, enjoying numerous editions in Italian and Latin, distributed by the highest Roman authorities and published in small format close to the Venetian borders for maximum circulation.⁵³ With the pamphlet war as with most wars, both parties accused each other of starting the hostilities. The question of precedence interests us too—not, of course, for the moral weight it carries, but because it shows the difﬁculties connected with publishing polemical texts, the constraints which publicity imposed on the agents of publication.⁵⁴ Sufﬁce to say that Sarpi’s edition of ⁴⁸ We know that all these pamphlets were published between July and August because they were announced in the manuscript newsletters (see above, p. 185): ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a dve libretti, avviso of 19.7, in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 2, c. 199v; ∗ Baronio, Parænesis, 29.7, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 388; ∗ Colonna, Sententia, 19.8, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 424v. A fourth cardinal, Bonifacio Gaetani, joined the ﬁght later. ⁴⁹ ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a dve libretti: 64–6, 31–5, 53, 19. ⁵² Ibid.: 44–6. ⁵⁰ Ibid.: 45–6. ⁵¹ ∗ Baronio, Parænesis: 4. ⁵³ All three pamphlets were republished in Cremona in octavo. Borghese sent Baronio’s Parænesis to all nuncios on 5.8.1606, see dispatch in de Magistris 1906: 156n. ⁵⁴ The details of the beginning of the printed publication of pamphlets are in de Vivo 2006: 264–70.

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Gerson was the ﬁrst pamphlet, although he then (almost) always denied it in public as well as secret writings, pointing the ﬁnger instead at a short broadsheet published in Milan.⁵⁵ Sarpi’s deﬂection of responsibility for the pamphlet with which he began the controversy—his ﬁrst published writing—is an interesting sign of the pamphlets’ uneasy status. Sarpi published Gerson in spite of the government majority which opposed publishing and with only the unofﬁcial backing of some patricians. To acknowledge his pamphlet would have meant sanctioning the political arena which the government wished to silence. Finally, Sarpi’s description of Venice’s pamphlets as legitimate defence shows that blaming the enemy’s responsibility for the polemic became a polemical weapon in itself.⁵⁶

The government enters the battleﬁeld The Roman pamphlets raised the stakes of the confrontation. As long as the attack was carried in manuscript, the Venetian government could pretend to ignore it. At the beginning of June, for example, the Collegio ordered a pasquinade found by the governors of Padua to be burnt without even showing it to the Senate.⁵⁷ Once the Inquisition resorted to public condemnations and cardinals published pamphlets in thousands of copies, however, it became impossible to stop their circulation. Furthermore, in parallel with the Roman offensive, dissenting voices mounted within the Republic itself during the summer, including amongst mercenary troops who openly refused to serve against the pope.⁵⁸ It was at this point and on the background of a dramatically deteriorating international situation—as the king of Spain pledged his military backing to the pope and Genoese bankers offered him a substantial loan—that the government changed tack to approve the publication of pamphlets. To appreciate the reasons for printed publication we must move back brieﬂy to political communication of the most reserved kind, an internal debate which divided the governing councils between July and August 1606. A shift in Senate majorities can be recorded at this time. In June, as we have seen, the government refused to publish Antonio Querini’s text; in mid-July, asked whether they wished to have it sent to all mainland governors, the senators again overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.⁵⁹ Only three weeks later, however, this position was again ⁵⁵ Sarpi 1968: 284–5, referring to ∗ Instruttioni; the only exception is discussed below, p. 232. ⁵⁶ The line blaming ∗ Instruttioni as beginning the controversy was developed later, e.g. parte dated 21.11.1606, in ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 179, and audience of 24.11.1606 Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 14, c. 113. The same point was made in ∗ Marsilio, Seconda parte: 7 (published after November 1606), but not in his earlier ∗ Marsilio, Difesa; ∗ Sarpi, Apologia: 49, published in September, only mentioned the Instruttioni in passing. ⁵⁷ Dispatch of 2.6.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Padova, f. 3, cc. nn. ⁵⁸ Dispatch dated 8.8.1606, in ASV, Coll., Lettere comuni, f. 111, cc. nn. Querini later complained about the wavering loyalty of other mercenaries, de Magistris 1941: 268–9 and 282–3. ⁵⁹ Parte dated 15.7.1606, ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 84v, with only 12 votes in favour and 119 against.

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overturned, and on 4 August the Senate allowed the printing of Querini’s and other pamphlets with a similarly large majority.⁶⁰ A sign of the tensions which it aroused, the shift to printed publication took time and, no doubt, a lot of arguing. The opposite positions are interesting to us, in so far as they show contrasting views not just about print and its possible political uses, but also more generally about the legitimate sphere of politics, with some arguing in favour, and others against, a direct engagement with the public. The Inquisition’s condemnations lent strength to internal criticism. It was one thing to defend Venice’s sovereignty, another to be likened to heretics. At the end of June, one of the Senate’s secretaries, Alvise Cherini, was arrested for voicing such concerns. He especially criticized Marsilio’s Reply, presumably a safer target than Sarpi.⁶¹ That a secretary felt he could publicly criticize the pamphlets proves that they were the expression of only one patrician group rather than the government. In turn, his arrest provoked a split inside the Ten and, publicized by newswriters, probably caused concern in the political arena.⁶² In the following weeks the opposition to publicity mounted. The most scathing were, of course, those papalisti patricians who favoured cooperation with the Holy See, such as the patriarch of Aquileia.⁶³ But their reasons went beyond attachment to Rome, as Anzolo Badoer, a leader of those in favour of reconciliation, explained in a speech to the Senate.⁶⁴ He did not just oppose the doge’s line, but generally objected to the controversy’s public dimension. As he stated, the problem was not Venice’s ‘justice’, but the fact that it had been ‘dealt with in too many writings, bold and unworthy of the religious purity which always accompanied our rule’, ‘mockeries which one hears and sees printed and sold’. Badoer went on to warn his colleagues against fostering public discussion of religious issues, as not just a Christian’s sin, but a statesman’s mistake, because it would lead to rebellion.⁶⁵ Thus, political considerations combined with spiritual preoccupations in separating medium and message; Badoer’s call for a halt to public communication was even more forceful than his bid for a change in policy. What was really dangerous for him was to allow the people into the political struggle. Beyond the patriciate, other members of the political elite had professional motives for resenting the publicity engendered by printed publication, notably the diplomats involved in the negotiations. In the same days as the Senate ⁶⁰ Parte dated 4.8.1606, ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, cc. 101v –102, with 112 votes in favour, 3 against and 17 non sinceri. ⁶¹ ASV, Cons. iure, f. 537, c. 47v. Cherini (d. 1653), owned a large library, and at one point sought a high-ﬂying ecclesiastical post, cf. Cicogna 1824–53, v. 1: 163, and v. 4: 599, 631. ⁶² Parte dated 26.6.1606, in ASV, CX, Parti criminali, f. 35, cc. nn.; avviso dated 1.7.1606, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 337. ⁶³ Trebbi 1986b: 238–40. ⁶⁴ Badoer’s speech is undated but was ﬁrst quoted on 30 June in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 103. In mid-June the ambassadors of England and Savoy described Badoer as one of the leaders of the opposition to Donà (NA, SP 99/3, c. 109 and de Magistris 1906: 104). ⁶⁵ De Magistris 1941: 328, 343.

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discussed publication, the Spanish ambassador tried to encourage opposition against it in the Collegio. He pointed out that while initially the Republic had done well to communicate its reasons through ambassadors, recently ‘things have changed shape, and are now in the nature of a quarrel’ so that, he complained, ‘with all the texts that circulate on this matter, I have become something of a theologian myself’. He enjoined the Republic to work at ending, rather than discussing, the controversy.⁶⁶ Diplomats who opposed Spain shared the Spanish ambassador’s opposition to publicity. For example, the French ambassador thanked the Collegio for a summary of the controversy destined to his king, and praised this sort of communication, as opposed to publishing on a wider scale.⁶⁷ In the same days he also lamented the prospect of a pamphlet war, ‘more dangerous in my view than real war’.⁶⁸ The disapproval of pamphlets voiced by some patricians as well as foreign diplomats differed from the government’s desire for absolute secrecy. The former revealed an elitist understanding of political communication, one which did not oppose circulating reserved information within the political arena—in fact, Badoer did exactly that by disclosing his speech in order to further his political line. Rather, they objected to widening the conﬂict beyond the political elite. The French ambassador’s disdainful comment about ‘barbers and washerwomen’ summed up this view.⁶⁹ Print publication was at once socially vulgar and politically a mistake, subtracting the controversy from the educated professionals to whom it belonged—the only people who, as he thought, could resolve the conﬂict. Outside that sphere, as the ambassador’s words implied, was only subversion, both social and gendered. Against such opinions, opposite ones coalesced in the group of patricians close to Sarpi. From the beginning he recommended defending the Republic with juridical publications (de iure) as well as practical measures (de facto) because, as he afﬁrmed, it was dishonourable to seem to have no positive arguments.⁷⁰ Sarpi’s associate and senator Antonio Querini, held a similar line. In May he unsuccessfully proposed a text for publication and in the version which was read out to the Senate, he included passages explicitly advocating printed publication. Having discussed the political and juridical aspects of the controversy, Querini expressed the wish that others might be allowed to expand on the religious ones. As he explained, support for the pope was not universal amongst Catholic theologians, many of whom would oppose him publicly if only ‘they were allowed to speak and write what they believe’.⁷¹ Although supposed to leave the Collegio ⁶⁶ Audience of 3.8.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, c. 187v. ⁶⁷ Audience of 12.8.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, cc. 195r –v. ⁶⁸ Letter dated 24.7.1606, in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 128. The agent of Modena similarly complained about pamphlets, e.g. dispatches of 19.8 and 2.9.1606, in ASM, AV, b. 84, cc. nn. ⁶⁹ See above, p. 200. ⁷⁰ Consulto written at the end of April in Sarpi 2001: 367. ⁷¹ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 657–8, 712 and 721; cf. Zanato 1980.

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at the end of June—precisely when internal opposition was coalescing around Badoer—Querini managed to be re-elected, although to an inferior position.⁷² And when pamphlet publication was once again on the agenda, he again spoke in its favour.⁷³ Another of Sarpi’s associates, ambassador Piero Priuli, also urged the government in favour of publication from his post in France. In July, he wrote to Venice about a renowned jurist who offered to write a text for publication in defence of Venice; Priuli unhesitatingly threw his weight behind the proposal, adding that he thought the jurist deserved a reward.⁷⁴ In fact, we know from the correspondence of the nuncio in Paris that Priuli contacted authors as early as May, thereby preparing a publication campaign of his own well before he felt that the Senate would accept it.⁷⁵ Faced with political arenas over which they had no authority, barred in some instances from religious services, ambassadors abroad were likely to feel the poverty of the denial strategy more clearly than patricians in Venice.⁷⁶ Deliberate ignorance of the Interdict was a luxury they knew they could not afford. Inside the Republic’s own territories, government representatives reached the same conclusion. As an anonymous letter informed the governors of Padua, many people ridiculed the Republic’s strategy of denial: ‘some say that, if [the Venetians] had such valid reasons, they would no doubt publish them, as Princes have always done.’⁷⁷ Mainland governors were directly exposed to the fragility of the subjects’ allegiance. When reporting rumours and grafﬁti throughout the summer, they implied that many people not only knew about the conﬂict, but voiced their opinions in very damaging ways.⁷⁸ Some advocated a change of line: from the prohibition of all public discussion of the Interdict to a proactive policy of printed publication to guide that discussion. To rally support for this shift, some resorted to their relazioni, important means (as we now know) of raising political attention. At the end of July, for example, the podestà of Verona’s report to the Senate lamented the ‘impression’ and ‘scruples’ caused amongst Venice’s subjects by the Jesuits’ letters. He afﬁrmed that it was possible to exact the clergy to say mass, but difﬁcult to force people to attend it. For this reason, he had tried to ‘play down’ dissent till ‘time and the strength of your Serenity’s most powerful ⁷² Putelli 1911, v. 22: 77. ⁷³ Cornet 1859: 288–94 published this speech but dated it 19 August. On the basis of different evidence I believe it was delivered around 2 August (Querini’s topic was a French proposal which was discussed on that date, cf. ASV, Coll., Esposizioni principi, f. 16, cc. nn.). ⁷⁴ Dispatch dated 18.7.1606, ASV, Sen., Dispacci Francia, f. 35, cc. 190r –v. ⁷⁵ Dispatches dated 30.5, 16.6, and 27.6.1606, in ASVat, SS, NF, v. 50, cc. 112v, 124, 138; on this nuncio, later pope Urban VIII, cf. Blet 1959. ⁷⁶ Dispatches dated 4.7.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Francia, f. 35, cc. 176, and 11.7.1606, in ASVat, SS, NF, v. 50, cc. 140r –v. ⁷⁷ Letter handed over by the episcopal vicar of Padua, and forwarded on 25.7.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Padova, f. 3, cc. nn. ⁷⁸ See above, section 5.4.

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reasons win over the mood of these people, who are either too simple or too clever.’⁷⁹ His words, originating out of the daily experience of government, show none of the conﬁdence with which the constitution excluded ordinary people from political knowledge. Around the same time, other governors similarly expressed the need to go beyond mere denial.⁸⁰ Thus, the extraordinary situation created by the Interdict made those in charge of government realize that they had to engage with the opinions of those they governed. By early August the campaign in favour of publication reaped its fruits—partly itself an unintended consequence of Bellarmino and Baronio’s pamphlets, which reached Venice to many patricians’ ‘offence and alteration’.⁸¹ When the Great Council renewed part of the Senate’s posts in late July, most of those newly elected supported the hard line. As a newswriter commented on the failed re-election of a member of the important papalista Corner family, ‘it is difﬁcult to remember anyone who ever received fewer ballots’.⁸² Then, on 4 August the Collegio put forward a proposal enabling the publication of pamphlets. ‘It is appropriate to allow the publication of those texts which have been written, or should in the future be written, concerning the most just reasons of our Republic in the current matters with the pope, so that the justice of our cause become all the clearer to the world.’ Never before had the government spelled out the necessity of confronting the public so clearly, but the proposal obtained the Senate’s overwhelming support, with only twenty unfavourable votes.⁸³ The outcome was a major change in the government’s strategy. The Senate praised Priuli and encouraged him to commission more pamphlets; it then ordered several texts to be published; and ﬁnally it instructed the consultori who had provided their legal advice in previous months to prepare their texts for publication.⁸⁴ When the Collegio sent out the ﬁrst printed pamphlets, most governors responded enthusiastically.⁸⁵ Enthusiasts, however, were to be tempered. The very decree which ﬁrst approved printed publication also provided for a special system of pre-publication censorship. The existing system, including the Roman-appointed Inquisitor, was ⁷⁹ Relazione delivered on 27.7.1606, in Tagliaferri 1973–79, v. 9: 172–3. ⁸⁰ Cf. Andrea Paruta’s relazione of Bergamo, 4.8.1606, ibid., v. 12: 299–300, and the entry dated 2.8.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Principi, f. 16, cc. nn. ⁸¹ Dispatch dated 5.8.1606, in ASM, AV, b. 84, cc. nn. ⁸² Avviso dated 19.8.1606, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 425. Cf. dispatch of the ambassador of Savoy, 8.8.1606, in de Magistris 1906: 157. ⁸³ ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 101, passed with 112 votes in favour, 3 against and 17 non sinceri. ⁸⁴ Parte of 10.8.1606, in ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 104. Three pamphlets were immediately inspected for publication, cf. the reports written between 14 and 18.8 in ASV, CCX, Notatorio, f. 17, cc. nn. The Senate wrote to governors and representatives to contact the jurists who had already supplied legal briefs on 11.8.1606, ASV, Coll., Lettere segrete, f. 43, cc. nn. ⁸⁵ Dispatches of 12.9.1606, ASV, Sen., Dispacci Vicenza, f. 4, cc. nn.; 13.9.1606, Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn.; 14.9.1606, Dispacci Verona, f. nn. (1606), cc. nn.

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bound to raise problems during the Interdict.⁸⁶ In response, the Senate could allow pamphlets simply to side-step the ecclesiastical screening, subjecting them only to the government-appointed censors. Instead, it specially elected not one but ﬁve theologians to replace the Inquisitor (later increased to seven)—a crucial provision to avoid the accusation of heresy, as the Senate spelt out on 4 August.⁸⁷ This measure also reveals the government’s uneasiness over the subject of print publication. When Alvise Venier, one of Sarpi’s associates, suggested that the Collegio and the Senate take command of the entire censorship process, his proposal was rejected with only seven favourable votes.⁸⁸ Thus, when the English ambassador hailed the new censorship measures as ‘hiding the seeds of a great good’—‘they have now by this decree incorporated the ofﬁce of Inquisition into the state’—he was working under a misconception dictated by his own Anglican enthusiasm for state leadership in church matters.⁸⁹ Whatever Sarpi himself may have desired, the Venetian Republic welcomed no such development. This debate encapsulates the government’s attitude to print. As we have seen, the state valued censorship as much as the Church did. But, contrary to some historians’ assumption of an equal clash between the two, Venice’s government did not feel that it could intervene in that domain freely and on a par with the religious authorities.⁹⁰ Even at a time of open confrontation with Rome, the government was reluctant to part with an ecclesiastical element, and keen to limit its own direct involvement, in the censorship process. Unlike the eighteenthcentury reformers who undermined ecclesiastical censorship in order to gain public support against the Church, the Venetian Republic during the Interdict did not want to open a limitless public debate.⁹¹ The Interdict special censorship arrangements conﬁrm that the government embraced printed publication only as a last resort and was unwilling to become associated directly with the pamphlets. The majority of patricians wanted control, but without responsibility; and even those who were prepared to seek the support of the public balked at the prospect of the free and unfettered communication of politics. Finally, this made for an important difference between the Interdict and other seventeenth-century controversies. While the English and French censorship system broke down in the 1640s, the Roman Inquisitor continued to do his job in Venice, and the government added its own religious controls. For this reason, we would look in vain for the authors’ and publishers’ free recourse to the printing press, which ⁸⁶ On press-censorship, see p. 201 above. As an ofﬁcial publication, the Protesto did not require the inquisitor’s prior approval for printing (above, p. 129). ⁸⁷ ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, c. 101v; note that the proposal envisaged ﬁve theologians, but in the end seven were elected. ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento: 16 made the point that Venice had greater ecclesiastical censorship than Rome. ⁸⁸ The proposal only received 7 favourable votes, ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, c. 102. On Venier, see Cozzi 1958: ad indicem. He also composed a treatise on the Interdict which was never printed, ‘Difesa della Serenissima Signoria di Venetia’, in ASV, MADM, b. 74–8, cc. nn. ⁸⁹ Dispatch of 11.8.1606, in NA, SP 99/3, cc. 157r –v. ⁹⁰ Ulvioni 1975 and P. Grendler 1977. ⁹¹ Cf. Landi 2000.

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is why printed literature never escalated to the same point in 1606–7. That it did escalate substantially, and how much, is the subject of the following section.

6.2 THE SCALE OF THE OFFENSIVE Printed publication led to a dramatic increase in the scale of publicity. Initially, Roman newswriters publicized each of the few pamphlets appearing in print; by the autumn they found it impossible to keep up. As one of them admitted, ‘so many writings have appeared . . . that it is a ﬂood and it is redundant to mention each.’⁹² The Interdict pamphlets amount to a large and very diverse literary production, around 140 different works, varying widely in genre (letters, harangues, dialogues, treatises, and responses), length (from half a quarto sheet to several hundred pages), and language (Italian, Latin, French, English, Dutch). Some were original works, others adjusted older texts to the controversy; some travelled miles to be read as far as London and Cracow, others were written in a dialect which conﬁned them to Venice and its region. This section analyses the production and intended circulation of this corpus on the basis of a bibliography which nearly doubles the total amount of pamphlets identiﬁed in the lists which have been put together ever since the Interdict.⁹³ Table 6.1 summarizes a number of ﬁgures drawn from that bibliography, to do with the pamphlets’ publication (authors, editions, licences), contents (language), and editorial aspect (format and length). Quantitative methods are uneasily applied to literary controversies, and there would be little point in counting arguments or textual recurrences.⁹⁴ However, the pamphlets’ material elements do lend themselves to quantitative analysis and so assist an understanding of both the varied array of those involved in their production and the actual impact which they were intended to have on readers, people (that is) who were exposed to that materiality ﬁrst, and to ideas only secondarily. As William St Clair has recently shown, counting books and editions can illuminate a whole culture.⁹⁵ The pamphlets’ aggregate number is impressive. It is even more so if we take into account the many different editions published of each text—one had as many as fourteen, and the overall average was more than two.⁹⁶ The differences between editions are often minor and escape scholars compiling simple lists of titles. However, by producing different editions, publishers during the Interdict more than doubled the amount of available pamphlets. If we take the average print run for a quarto to be around a thousand copies, and anything between ⁹² Avviso dated 27.10.1606, BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 558. ⁹³ The largest bibliography so far listed 96 works published in 126 editions, Scaduto 1885. My bibliography, which I hope to publish soon, is based on the holdings of BL, BNF, ULC and on a collection of 62 miscellanies containing 374 pamphlets in BMV Rari Veneti 261–322. ⁹⁴ Cf. Denis Richet’s preface to Jouhaud 1985: 13 and Richet 1982. ⁹⁵ St Clair 2004. ⁹⁶ ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a due libretti had fourteen editions, and ∗ Baronio, Parænesis, eleven.

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Table 6.1. Figures concerning Interdict-related pamphlets For Venice

For Rome

Total

69 143 (2.07) 32 (46.3%) 30 (2.3)

73 152 (2.08) 27 (36.9%) 51 (1.4)

142 295 59 81

Licensed works (% total)d Licensed editions (% total)d Anonymous or pseudonymous works (% total)e Anonymous or pseudonymous editions (%total)e Foreign editions (% total)f

26 (37.6%) 44 (30.7%) 34 (49.2%) 66 (46.1%) 46 (32.1%)

66 (90.4%) 137 (90.1%) 10 (13.7%) 20 (13.1%) 35 (23.0%)

92 181 44 86 81

Works in Latin (% total) Editions in Latin (% total) Works in Italian (% total) Editions in Italian (% total)

25 (36.2%) 45 (31.4%) 40 (57.9%) 67 (46.8%)

38 (52.0%) 58 (38.1%) 35 (47.9%) 80 (52.6%)

63 103 75 147

4◦ editions (% total) 8◦ editions and smaller (% total) Total small editions 4◦ Editions up to 1.5 leaves, or 12 pp. (% total) up to 3.5 leaves, or 32 pp. (% total) 8◦ Editions up to 1.5 leaves, or 24 pp. (% total)

91 (63.6%) 52 (36.3%) 84 (58.7%) 30 (20.9%) 30 (20.9%) 24 (16.7%)

108 (71.0%) 44 (28.7%) 31 (20.4%) 11 (7.2%) 9 (5.9%) 11 (7.2%)

199 96 115 41 39 35

Worksa Editionsb (ratio editions/works) Number of works with more than one edition Authorsc (ratio works/authors)

Notes: a. The ﬁgures refer to substantially different texts rather than different editions of the same text with more or less different titles. They include neither large one-sided broadsheets and other ofﬁcial publications (such as the pope’s Monitorio or Venice’s Protesto), nor pamphlets printed after the end of the Interdict. b. The ﬁgures refer to different editions of the works mentioned above (hence, they too exclude ofﬁcial publications). The do not include different states or emissions (cf. Fahy 1988). c. Attributions have been made on the basis of internal evidence, bibliographical and archival material, irrespective of the number of authors indicated by the pamphlets’ title pages. These ﬁgures are prone to change subject to further research. d. The ﬁgures include all works which bear a printing licence on the title page, whether or not I have found a document attesting it in the respective government’s ﬁles. Obviously fake licences are excluded. e. The ﬁgures also include anonymous editions of earlier texts and texts by deceased authors (e.g. Gerson’s pamphlets) f. ‘Foreign’ is taken to mean outside the borders of the Venetian Republic and the State of the Church.

one and two thousand for a smaller octavo, this means a mass of printed texts amounting to perhaps 350 thousand exemplars printed and sold over just eight months.⁹⁷ An avviso of late July, concerning Bellarmino’s ﬁrst pamphlet, indicates the astonishing rate of some pamphlets’ production and diffusion: ‘certainly no work was ever printed which sold more quickly than Cardinal Bellarmino’s small book published on Monday. . . . By Saturday none remained of the thousand which had been printed [in quarto], and now a thousand more will be printed in ⁹⁷ On print runs, cf. P. Grendler 1977: 6–12, Lowry 1991: 173–206, Richardson 1999: 21–4, and Nuovo 2003: 41–3.

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octavo’.⁹⁸ In terms of titles and editions, Rome was slightly ahead. However, it is likely that the two sides roughly equalled each other in actual printing output, because Venice privileged small-format editions with greater print runs—a crucial point to which we shall have to return. The reasons for the differences in the production of the two sides, reside in the ways in which the authorities’ involvement affected the working conditions of those who produced pamphlets: authors and publishers. Rome’s substantial lead in the number of the former does not only indicate greater ideological commitment, but also points to the papacy’s richer patronage system. This made it easier to reward writers, a crucial advantage at a time when patron–client ties were vital to an author’s livelihood.⁹⁹ The Republic had more limited means, and some of the pamphlets’ authors spent the years following the Interdict competing with each other for government sponsorship.¹⁰⁰ Gasparo Lonigo’s pamphlet was praised by Sarpi, but Lonigo had to wait until 1623 to join the Republic’s service.¹⁰¹ There are two striking signs of the authors’ hesitations on Venice’s side: the far greater number of anonymous and pseudonymous works, and the almost complete lack of dedications. Dedications were an author’s principal means of acknowledging patronage, and nearly half of the Roman pamphlets were duly dedicated to powerful ﬁgures, including the pope himself, the cardinal nephew, and the king of Spain.¹⁰² Instead pro-Venetian authors feared the consequences of coming out publicly against Rome. The ambassador in Paris managed to ﬁnd several sympathetic authors willing to write, but for all his promises of reward could not convince any to do so using his name; he conceded that anonymity was a condition for publication.¹⁰³ Clergymen, who were many on both sides, may have feared suspension or demotion; but laymen were no more courageous. The Milanese jurist Menocchio implored the Venetian representative not to publish his brief on the Republic’s behalf, ‘by the love of God . . . because it would ruin me with the World’.¹⁰⁴ Like their Roman counterparts, most Venetian authors were also interested in the possibility of reward. A sign of the political arena’s lead in print publication, reward mostly materialized itself via the channel of patron–client relations with ⁹⁸ Avviso dated 26.7.1606, in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 2, c. 202. Further information on the printruns of Roberto Meietti’s Frankfurt pamphlets—the shipment back to Venice loaded three chariots—in P. Grendler 1978: 107 and Spampanato 1924: 246. ⁹⁹ See above, p. 79. ¹⁰⁰ For example, in 1608 Giovanni Marsilio competed with Ottavio Menini for the chair of rhetoric in the school of St Mark; neither of them obtained it, but as a result, Menini may have offered his recantation to the nuncio; see Cicogna 1824–53, v. 5: 548, and the documents in Savio 1936–42, v. 16: 18–19. Four years later, it was the turn of Girolamo Vendramin to compete with Menini for the same chair; see a supplica by Vendramin dated 25.12.1612, in ASV, RSP, b. 168, cc. nn. ¹⁰¹ See Barzazi 1985: 221–51. ¹⁰² Cf. cardinal Borghese’s letters accepting a dedication published in de Magistris 1941: 96. Venice’s only exceptions were: ∗ Lonigo, Consilivm and ∗ Severino, Sostegno. ¹⁰³ Dispatch dated 29.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Francia, f. 35, c. 359v. ¹⁰⁴ Dispatch dated 16.8.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Milano, f. 30, c. 118v.

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prominent patricians rather than direct government intervention. Amongst the pamphlets’ authors, we ﬁnd several who had thriving ties with that world. Such was the case of Giovan Battista Leoni, who is the likely author of three pseudonymous pamphlets, or Nicolò Crasso, who authored three anonymous poems and, with his name and full titles, a response to Baronio.¹⁰⁵ Crasso was a lawyer and served with government commissioners in the Levant; but he was also a very active author who cultivated his patronage network through encomiastic writings.¹⁰⁶ It is likely that the aim of such ﬁgures consisted in cultural rather than material capital, a reward which would create new opportunities for writing and gaining favour.¹⁰⁷ Others, instead, may have aimed at obtaining speciﬁc favours, like the mainland notable Alessandro Lisca, whose pamphlet conveniently appeared during a thorny inheritance trial in which the government was to help him greatly.¹⁰⁸ The authors’ hesitations to openly take Venice’s side reﬂected the government’s own ambiguous line concerning print publication. This is conﬁrmed by the data on print authorisations. While in Rome nine out of ten pamphlets had a formal licence, on the Venetian side only one in three did. This is a crucial sign of the government’s attitude towards the pamphlets. The ﬁgures hide an even more problematic picture, which arises when we turn from the licences mentioned on title pages to the archival records of the licensing body. Of twenty-four titles which boasted a licence, only eight are actually mentioned there.¹⁰⁹ It is more than likely that, in an early case of what later became known as permesso tacito, the authorities simply closed an eye, perhaps spurred by particular groups of patricians. If this points to a relaxation in the mood (if not in the actual system) of censorship, it also conﬁrms the government’s caution. In the eighteenth century permessi taciti were at least recorded by the censoring body. By contrast the records’ silence during the Interdict shows the government’s unwillingness to take responsibility for pamphlet publication because, as Sarpi later argued, licences made ‘the world hold the books’ contents as ofﬁcial opinions’ of the government granting the licence.¹¹⁰ The government ¹⁰⁵ ∗ Crasso, Antiparænesis; the poems all bore the title ∗ [Crasso], Canzone nelle presenti turbationi di Stato; see also Medin 1904: 541. On Leoni, see above, pp. 79–80; his pamphlets were ∗ [Leoni], Dve discorsi and ∗ [Leoni], Condoglienza. He may also have been the author of ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento; cf. the attributions in MCV, Ms. Donà 486, fasc. 20 and 22. ¹⁰⁶ Crasso also wrote a long commentary on the foundational texts of Venice’s constitution which he dedicated to the powerful Domenico Molin, cf. DBI, s.v. ¹⁰⁷ Cf. Viala 1985: 77. ¹⁰⁸ ∗ [Lisca], Ad illustrissimvm Baronivm, and parti dated 22.11.1606, in ASV, Sen., Terra, r. 76, cc. 163r –v, and 2.5.1607, ibid., r. 77, cc. 53v –54. ¹⁰⁹ ASV, CCX, Notatorio, r. 33 (stopping in February 1607, after which there is a gap in the records), and f. 17 (reaching the end of February 1606). ¹¹⁰ Sarpi 1969: 634; Sarpi returned to this point repeatedly (e.g. consulto dated 17.8.1615, in Sarpi 1958: 215). ‘Permessi taciti’ became very common in the eighteenth century, cf. Infelise 1989: 71–99, but were prohibited until that time, as spelled out in a law of 1566, in H. Brown 1891: 214–15.

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refused to be associated with most pamphlets and wished to distinguish those with which it was ready to identify from the rest. This resulted in important distinctions. In warlike terms, rather than as a united front, we ought to imagine pamphlets as ranged in a series of circles of varying proximity to the centre. Only three pamphlets can be taken to represent the Republic, carrying all the signs of ofﬁcial recognition, including a lion of St Mark and the full text of the Ten’s licence (a measure of their proclaimed authority). As we shall see, the government allocated funds to sponsor their publication both in Venice and elsewhere.¹¹¹ Another group of three pamphlets were written abroad at the bequest of Venetian ambassadors; they carry no licence and there is no evidence that the government distributed them back in Venice.¹¹² A third group, slightly further from the government, includes ﬁve pamphlets which were licensed or rewarded by the government and written by writers with an avowed connection with the Republic, such as Sarpi himself or the theologians employed in the censorship machinery. There is no trace, however, that the government helped publish or distribute any of them.¹¹³ The rest of the pamphlets—ﬁfty-seven titles in total—had no direct traceable link with the Republic. They had no licence, were never mentioned in government records, and mostly carried the name of neither printer nor author. Many of them were not just unsolicited, but unwelcome, including a number of anti-Catholic texts published abroad. The high number of works written and published outside Venice’s territories—several of which were smuggled into Venice—originated mostly from Protestant authors and from the efﬁcient presses on which the latter could rely in some regions of France and Germany, as well as England. That those authors were ﬁghting their own battle rather than Venice’s is clear by their frequent evocation of millenarian arguments, which were bound to be divisive amongst Catholics; even a broad-minded reader such as Pierre de L’Estoile dismissed them as useless for Venice’s case.¹¹⁴ What Protestant authors of different strands welcomed as a happy coincidence of interests, many readers took as embarrassing for Venice—a sign of the printed controversy’s twisted effects.¹¹⁵ ¹¹¹ ∗ Querini, Avviso, ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi, and the collective ∗ Sarpi et al., Trattato; their licences—granted between 21 and 22.8.1606—are all recorded in ASV, CCX, Notatorio, r. 33 cc. 156r –v. Although theoretically required for all texts, the licence rarely appeared in full, cf. P. Grendler 1977: 274. ¹¹² They are all pseudonymous: ∗ [Casaubon], De libertate, ∗ [Leschassier], Consvltatio, and ∗ [Servin], Pro libertate. Leschassier’s pamphlet was also translated and published in Padua (∗ [Leschassier], Consvlta). ¹¹³ They all obtained a licence between early September and late December 1606, duly recorded in ASV, CCX, Notatorio, r. 33 as well as on the title page. ¹¹⁴ L’Estoile 1958–60, v. 2: 222–3 (23.1.1607). An example in ∗ Vignier, De Venetorvm: 5 and 45. ¹¹⁵ The French ambassador described Vignier’s anti-Catholic work as a worse blow to Venice than any anti-Venetian pamphlet, 3.11.1606 in Canaye 1636, v 3: 262–3.

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The role of publishers Clearly, although I have used the tags ‘for Rome’ or ‘for Venice’ for ease of reference, many pamphlets were ‘against’, rather than in favour of, one or the other. This leads us to the next point. While the government only sponsored a few of the pamphlets, their numbers rocketed because they were the products of a group of professionals—printers and publishers even more than authors—who on the whole worked for their own interests.¹¹⁶ In Rome the initiative for publishing rested with a combination of authorial self-promotion and patronage. By contrast in Venice, where the government only commissioned a few texts and authors were reluctant to offer their works, it was publishers who conducted the game. Only eight printers volunteered their names on their pamphlets’ title pages on the Republic’s side (and one is likely to be a pseudonym), most of them based in Venice (ﬁve printers, twenty-ﬁve editions), with few pamphlets published in Padua (two printers, nine editions) and other mainland centres such as Bergamo, Brescia, and Vicenza.¹¹⁷ By contrast, nineteen printers published against Venice. The difference can be explained by the more difﬁcult conditions of production in Venice, where printers rightly feared the consequences of antagonizing the Roman Congregation of the Index (which had the power to prohibit the entirety of a printer’s production, as it did in the case of Venice’s Roberto Meietti).¹¹⁸ Once again, the authorities’ attitudes also played a role. While on the Roman side the ofﬁcial printers were very active (in Rome, Ferrara, Bologna), in Venice the ducal printer only issued two editions of the Protesto. Unlike Rome’s, Venice’s publishers were on the whole minor entrepreneurs. For example, the international Giunti ﬁrm issued three pamphlets in Florence against the Republic but none in Venice against the pope.¹¹⁹ The only publisher of importance on Venice’s side, Giovan Battista Ciotti, issued just one pamphlet.¹²⁰ Roberto Meietti, the publisher who was to involve himself most fully in the controversy, was a minor member of Venice’s guild.¹²¹ He was an enterprising businessman, however. He published in his own name ¹¹⁶ As is known, printers and publishers did not always coincide, but I have found no evidence of that distinction concerning Venetian Interdict pamphlets. For the sake of convenience, the two are taken to coincide. ¹¹⁷ Six pamphlets were published in Bergamo without the name of the printer (probably Comin Ventura, the only printer known in the city at the time), and at least three were said to have been published in Brescia, but I have not found them. One of the editions of ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite, was published in Vicenza. ¹¹⁸ Rotondò 1963: 184; Meietti’s books were publicly burnt in Rome long after the Interdict, ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 16, cc. 64v and 79. ¹¹⁹ ∗ Bertolotti, Filoprotropia, ∗ G.A. Bovio, Lettera, and ∗ [Possevino], Nuova risposta. ¹²⁰ In 1605 Ciotti stood for the election as head of the printers and booksellers’s guild twice (but failed both times); in 1606–7 he was councillor de respeto, see ASV, Arti, b. 163.2, cc. 60, 65, 67v, 68v. ¹²¹ Meietti rarely played any role in the guild (although he was elected councillor in 1607), and contributed relatively little to the guilds’ expenses, see ASV, Arti, b. 163.2, c. 68v.

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and printed for others, had a sustained network abroad, and frequently sent agents to the Frankfurt Fair—he even printed at least one special catalogue for the fair. He was a man ready to take risks and had already attracted the Holy Ofﬁce’s attention in 1588 and 1598.¹²² During the Interdict, Meietti printed thirteen pamphlets under his name in Padua and Venice (three of them in two editions), as well as ten more without typographical marks or under a different imprint.¹²³ What is striking about Meietti’s work is that it included both ofﬁcial works, semi-ofﬁcial ones, pamphlets with no visible link to the government and—printed abroad—radical anti-papal tracts and lampoons. Thus, he overlapped all the groups discussed so far, showing that he acted for personal proﬁt rather than allegiance to the government. Meietti acted on many levels at the same time, in line with the poligraﬁ’s grand tradition but also in the same way as all minor printers did. He printed not only texts authored by others, but also sought and adapted older ones, such as an extract from the Life of St Gertrud faithfully repeating an old edition, which Meietti rendered relevant through typographical alterations, by highlighting certain passages.¹²⁴ The Interdict was likely to constitute a precious occasion for minor but enterprising players in Venice’s competitive publishing industry. As Roger Chartier suggested in relation to early seventeenth-century France, pamphlets were a publisher’s ideal investment at a time of economic slowdown, because they required small funds and secured ready proﬁts.¹²⁵ Printers produced pamphlets quickly and without halting much of the rest of a workshop’s production. A short pamphlet could take as little as one day to produce in a thousand copies, without employing much of the shop’s font (a major issue for small printers). Paper, a printer’s chief cost, was little, while sales were driven by political events. If (as we have seen) authors willing to challenge the Interdict were scarce in Venice, there were many publishers who saw the controversy as an unmissable business opportunity. However, publishers had their own aims in the battle, and those were likely to concern proﬁt rather than a particular idea on the issues at stake. As happened consistently throughout Europe, even publishers with strong political or religious afﬁliations were prepared to produce and sell works from both sides. At the height of the Reformation, for example, the same Antwerp printer published both Lutheran and anti-Lutheran propaganda, and smuggled Protestant tracts to England before Henry VIII’s reformation and recusant ones afterwards.¹²⁶ In Venice too, the same publishers who printed anti-papal pamphlets during the Interdict also published perfectly orthodox works at other times. Comin Ventura, ¹²² Meietti 1602 and Serrai 1993: 33–4. Cf. also Rhodes 1960, 1971, and Grendler 1978: 106. ¹²³ Rhodes 1960 attributed six anonymous pamphlets to Meietti. Four more, published under the ﬁctitious imprint ‘Nicolò Padovano’, can also be attributed to him: ∗ Crancius, Sententia; Fedeli, Anatomia; ∗ [Leschassier], Consvlta; ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite. ¹²⁴ e.g. ∗ Landsberger, Mirabile rivelatione. ¹²⁵ Chartier 1982. ¹²⁶ Waterschoot 2001: 237–8.

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the (anonymous) publisher of the Bergamo pamphlets, also published the Index expurgandorum; Giovanni Battista Ciotti, who signed one of the pamphlets and may have had a hand in publishing others, published orthodox works of Scholastics and closely collaborated with the proliﬁc Jesuit Antonio Possevino (himself the author of several anti-Venetian pamphlets during the Interdict).¹²⁷ Indeed, after the Interdict, the Inquisition had to relax the prohibition of Meietti’s works, in order to allow the circulation of those which it welcomed.¹²⁸ Above all, the publishers’ aim was to sell their books, whatever the contents. A case in point is the anonymous anti-Venetian Letter of the Republic of Genoa to the Republic of Venice, which some attributed to Possevino. It ﬁrst reached Venice in manuscript and was later printed there together with the response, a publication which favoured the Republic and may have been inspired by some of its powerful partisans. But the Letter was also published in Venice on its own, without the response, probably because it was in high demand.¹²⁹ As this case shows, the publishers’ strategy was to respond to market demand and, if anything, to encourage further demand by stimulating curiosity amongst readers. Curiosity is a characteristic of the mind which, as we shall see, Sarpi and other supporters of the Republic exploited in their political and religious controversy. However, as far as the businessmen of Venice’s publishing industry were concerned, curiosity constituted a primarily commercial, rather than intellectual, mechanism. That these two aspects coalesced at the time of the Interdict was the ultimate reason for Venice’s success.

Pamphlets for distribution, pamphlets for sale Printing did not just multiply polemical texts; it augmented the controversy’s impact by radically increasing the accessibility of those texts. On the one hand, this had to do with price, as a Roman newswriter offering various texts to a Venetian patrician recognized. ‘Manuscript writings are more expensive than printed ones, and buying them all will require a large purse’, he wrote; but once a work was in print, prices decreased as production costs were cut: ‘because in this case one buys the work rather than the writing.’¹³⁰ On the other hand, manuscripts were not necessarily expensive in themselves. Unlike print, manuscript requires no initial investment, and given the time, copying for oneself was the cheapest form of textual circulation. Accordingly, as we have seen, manuscript played a crucial role in Venice’s political communication. However, print drastically altered the conditions in which texts could be purchased. Manuscript reproduction presupposed a personal contact of some kind with the ¹²⁷ L. Balsamo 1991. ¹²⁸ Documents in Rotondò 1963: 184 and Betti 2002: 179. ¹²⁹ ∗ Dve lettere and ∗ Vna lettera. ¹³⁰ Avviso by Orazio Pelizza, 12.8.1606, in ASV, IS, b. 1213, fasc. 2, cc. nn.

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owner of another copy; by contrast, printed publication made texts available to outsiders with money but no contacts. And the money they needed was very little. The pamphlets’ price was determined by a variety of factors, a combination of governmental involvement, costs of production, and extent of demand. Initially, pamphlets were very expensive. According to a newswriter, the ﬁrst edition of Bellarmino’s pamphlet sold at as much as one scudo, a very large sum and one sufﬁcient to buy 23 pounds of beef in Rome in 1606.¹³¹ At the beginning of the controversy, high demand drove prices up, a remarkable sign of the interest raised by the Interdict, and one which it would be interesting to compare to the as yet largely unknown dynamics of the early modern publishing market.¹³² For the same reason, however, prices decreased in the course of the controversy, as swift replies outdated each other while publishers seized the opportunity to increase supply. Unsurprisingly, the Roman newswriter who recorded the high price of Bellarmino’s pamphlet added that a new edition appeared in a cheaper format. Similar evidence can be found in Venice’s territories. At the beginning of September the booksellers of Verona sold out their ﬁfteen copies of Sarpi’s Considerationi in spite of the very expensive price of four lire (80 soldi). As the governors said, this was a ‘truly excessive price’, twice as much as an unskilled labourer earned in a day and 50 per cent more than his master did.¹³³ In a sellers’ market, it was normal for publishers to have the upper hand, and in this case Meietti wanted 68 soldi for every copy, a price which he justiﬁed by saying that the works were belli e curiosi: both beautifully produced and highly interesting.¹³⁴ But if at the beginning Meietti knew that he could exploit the market’s ‘curiosity’, in the following weeks the prices went down. By the end of the month, the governor of Brescia reported that Sarpi’s Apologia sold at 40 soldi. ¹³⁵ This was still a high price, but other factors were at play to determine further adjustments. First, the government was ready to bypass commercial channels in order to distribute those pamphlets which it ofﬁcially supported (the ﬁrst group, as described above). In September, the Collegio sent ﬁfty copies each of the collective Trattato dell’interdetto, Querini’s Avviso, and Sarpi’s Considerationi, to every mainland governors for distribution to local notables and clergy.¹³⁶ The governors of Brescia demanded more copies to distribute to their cities’ ‘gentilhuomini’, while those of Verona went as far as asking for 500 copies of ¹³¹ Avviso dated 26.7.1606, in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 2, c. 202; on the price of beef see Delumeau 1957–59: 656–58 and 702. ¹³² Cf. Lowry 1991: 188 and Nuovo 2003. ¹³³ In 1606–10 a master-builder earned on average a little more than 60 soldi a day, and an unskilled worker in the same trade, a little less than 40; Pullan 1964: 173–4; for comparisons, see Rapp 1974: 130–3 and R. C. Davis 1991: 59. ¹³⁴ Dispatch dated 3.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Verona, f. nn. (1606), cc. nn.; on producers-retailers relations, cf. Nuovo 2003: 118–19. ¹³⁵ Dispatch dated 23.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn. ¹³⁶ Dispatches dated 11.9.1606, in ASV, Coll., Lettere segrete, f. 43, cc. nn., and 23.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn.

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Sarpi’s pamphlets for free distribution amongst the local clergy.¹³⁷ In such cases, publishers could afford to keep prices high because they envisaged selling to the government rather than marketing their books. From the public’s point of view—or at least from the point of view of the speciﬁc audiences targeted by the government—prices were ultimately irrelevant so long as the government arranged for distribution. It is likely that the government also tried to subsidize publishers in order to contain prices. At the beginning of September, the Collegio ordered the printers of Sarpi’s pamphlets to ‘send out a good number at a price which we will ask them to limit, so that all those who wish to buy them can have them easily with reasonable expenditure’.¹³⁸ For this reason, the following day the Senate authorized the Collegio to spend as much as 500 ducats ‘for things relating to printing and writing’, an unspeciﬁed aim likely to refer to subsidies for printers.¹³⁹ On the same day, the Collegio also acted to invite competition in order to reduce prices, instructing local governors to contact printers who would locally re-issue the pamphlets ‘without mistakes and in correct form’.¹⁴⁰ To defend himself from competition, Meietti advertised copyrights (privilegi) on three of the pamphlets he published.¹⁴¹ It is possible that he obtained such copyrights in exchange for lowering his prices (if he really did obtain them, since there is no record in the archive).¹⁴² Naturally, however, governmental subsidies and distribution only concerned the few pamphlets with which the government was ready to be associated. All the others were to be subjected to the laws of demand and supply. After a ﬁrst phase in which publishers were likely to proﬁt from high prices, then, they had an interest in lowering prices to boost sales. For this reason, they may have pursued a double production: expensive governmental pamphlets and cheap unofﬁcial ones. Publishers knew that to achieve the latter, they had to cutdown on paper, their primary cost, and so reduce the size of pamphlets.¹⁴³ The outcome can be seen by turning to the data on format and size in Table 6.1. 84 editions in favour of Venice (58%) were small, and 54 of them—more than a third of the total number, and including none of the government’s pamphlets—were shorter than one and a half leaf, about the same size as ¹³⁷ Dispatches dated 23.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn., and 3.9.1606, in Dispacci Verona, f. nn. (1606), cc. nn. ¹³⁸ Dispatch dated 5.9.1606, ASV, Coll., Lettere comuni, f. 112, cc. nn., referring to ∗ Sarpi, Considerazioni and ∗ Sarpi et al., Trattato ¹³⁹ Parte dated 6.9.1606, ASV, Sen., Terra, r. 76, c. 102v. ¹⁴⁰ Dispatch dated 5.9.1606, in ASV, Coll., Lettere comuni, f. 112, cc. nn. Instances of governors’ attempts to have local editions published in dispatches of 9.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Vicenza, f. 4, cc. nn., and 23.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 5, cc. nn. ¹⁴¹ ∗ Sarpi, Apologia, ∗ Marsilio, Difesa, ∗ Lonigo, Consilivm. ¹⁴² The governors of Vicenza believed a deal involving a privilege to be both possible and useful; dispatch dated 3.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Verona, f. nn. (1606), cc. nn. ¹⁴³ The impact of paper on the overall costs of printers in the hand-press period is estimated at around 70 per cent in Gaskell 1972: 177, and Martin and Febvre 1984: 114.

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the broadsides sold by charlatans around the city’s squares. They were cheap to produce and easy to distribute, ideal for publishers who had to take costs seriously. In contrast, in Rome printers were likely to work for rich patrons whose funds enabled a great proportion of large editions, which small publishers could not afford. Thus, the dynamics of pamphlet production had a crucial effect in widening the impact of political communication. By transforming an economic constraint—the limitation of funds—into a business challenge—the containment of costs—Venice’s publishers seized an extraordinary opportunity for proﬁt and in the process hugely increased the pamphlets’ accessibility. The two mechanisms of pamphlet circulation—distribution and sale—reveal the different publics targeted by the different agents in the controversy: the government and the publishers. The government focused on the ruling classes and the clergy, the same groups to which the Senate had already addressed, respectively, the letter to local assemblies and the Protesto. These groups’ consensus was crucial to the Republic’s deﬁance. The mainland local assemblies, in particular, had the power to pass or stop extraordinary contributions in case of war. Furthermore, beyond elected assemblies, Venice’s patrician government showed its broad sense of informal elite status by asking governors to distribute pamphlets also to ‘those other gentlemen whom you think more appropriate’.¹⁴⁴ The clergy included a wider social variety. In early September, for example, complaining about the high price of pamphlets, the governors of Vicenza requested 1,000 copies for free distribution amongst the ‘monasteries and other clergy . . . many of whom are poor and may easily decide not to spend that money.’¹⁴⁵ In the government’s mind, the clergy were to act as intermediaries in further publicizing the pamphlets’ message. In September, for example, the Senate instructed all governors to ensure that preachers inspired their sermons by reading the government’s pamphlets and it enclosed copies for that purpose.¹⁴⁶ This points to a systematic planning of oral publication, ultimately aiming at the widest possible public but only through the controlled intermediary of a smaller group’s guidance. While the government had speciﬁc groups in mind, it is likely that publishers aimed at a wider, and less easily controllable, public. The extent of that public can be guessed by considering six bound miscellanies held in the Biblioteca Marciana which contain contemporary indications of the price of ﬁfty-ﬁve pamphlets. The average price of the thirty-seven pamphlets for Venice was 10.7 soldi, that of the eighteen others nearly 20.¹⁴⁷ We should adjust these prices upward, because the miscellanies may have been assembled after the controversy, once demand decreased. Still, by doubling the average Venetian price at 20 soldi, we ¹⁴⁴ Dispatch dated 11.9.1606, in ASV, Coll., Lettere segrete, f. 43, cc. nn. ¹⁴⁵ Dispatch dated 3.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Verona, f. nn. (1606), cc. nn. ¹⁴⁶ Dispatch dated 9.9.1606, in ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 15, cc. 126v –127. ¹⁴⁷ The prices are scribbled at the back of the miscellaneous volumes BMV Rari Veneti 261–4 and 266–7.

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obtain a ﬁgure which is comparable to the ﬁve sous which Pierre de L’Estoile considered appropriate for the Interdict pamphlets in Paris (he bought about ﬁfty, and on average spent that amount).¹⁴⁸ That ﬁgure was half an unskilled builder’s daily wage and one-third that of his master. It was a considerable, but not an impossible price, which probably excluded salaried workers, but made pamphlets accessible to shop-owners and artisans. On the whole, then, the pamphlets were likely to reach a far greater group than that envisaged by the government. Most importantly, averages hide a striking qualiﬁcation concerning the smallest, and cheapest, pamphlets. L’Estoile thought the price of the shortest pamphlets too insigniﬁcant to mention. But the Marciana miscellanies show that none of the seventeen smaller quartos (no more than 3.5 leaves) cost more than 6 soldi. Of these, the smallest pamphlets, ten quartos and octavos of up to one-and-a-half leaves, only cost 2 soldi, the same ﬁgure which the miller Menocchio spent some years earlier in Venice for his Fioretto della Bibbia.¹⁴⁹ Even if we again double the ﬁgure to 4 soldi, we would still have a very affordable price, a tenth of an unskilled labourer’s daily wage, not very different from the relative cost of books today (and certainly smaller than the cost of this one)—it was the same relative price which political pamphlets cost their readers in England in the same years.¹⁵⁰ In the 1600s, it was a sum which in Venice’s market could buy half a pound of beef, one fresh eel, or a melon.¹⁵¹ In contrast, none of the Roman pamphlets listed in the miscellanies cost so little. A ﬁnal important point must be mentioned, which conﬁrms the Venetian pamphlets’ greater opening to a wider public. There were considerably more pamphlets in Latin on the pope’s side than on Venice’s. Reliance on Latin may also have revealed the pope’s supporters’ preference for the ecumenical language of the Church—the language of the liturgy, a point of great importance to the Counter Reformation—as well as the authors’ boast of greater scholarly authority.¹⁵² What made sense for authors, however, was unsatisfactory for readers. Italian assured pamphlets a larger readership amongst the laity and the lower secular clergy. In effect, the number of editions show that Italian titles were more likely to be sold both in Rome and in Venice. It was not for nothing that the Roman authors with the greatest experience of proselytizing also wrote ¹⁴⁸ L’ Estoile 1958–60, v. 2 : 230 (6.3.1607); cf. ibid., 203, 214, 222, 228, 230, 243. ¹⁴⁹ Ginzburg 1980: 30. ¹⁵⁰ Raymond 2003: 82–3. The popular ‘twopenny’ and ‘threehalfpenny’ books cost about 1/6 of a building craftsman’s daily wage; Watt 1991: 261–3. ¹⁵¹ The beef and eel prices refer to 1608 (from ASV, Rason Vecchie 222, kindly supplied by Dr James Shaw) and the melon, to 1618 (from the account books of Andrea Chiocco, a physician in Verona who also happened to be a frequent reader of pamphlets during the Interdict, Fahy 1993: 92–7). ¹⁵² On Latin and the Church, cf. Fragnito 1997 and Waquet 1998: 56–100. De Dominis, bishop of Spalato and one of the Republic’s supporters, was strongly in favour of vernacular liturgy, Malcolm 1984: 23.

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in Italian and wished that the Latin pamphlets be translated so as to reap ‘the greatest fruit’.¹⁵³ Obviously, then, Venetian publishers designed many pamphlets to target a large market, minimizing size and costs, commissioning short texts written in easily accessible language, matching format and price to contents (and vice versa). Thus, on an occasion such as the Interdict, economic opportunity interacted with political contingency to make controversial polemical pamphlets as cheap as the cheapest popular literature.¹⁵⁴ The evidence presented in this section suggests the astonishing fact that, at least during the Interdict, controversial political and religious pamphlets, condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities as heretical, were as easily available as the cheapest devotional literature perhaps as cheap as the one-sheet broadsides sold by charlatans. We still ignore the effects pamphlets had on readers, but we do now know that they had a great many readers indeed.

6 . 3 FA B R I C AT I N G C O N S E N S U S , E N C O U R AG I N G CRITICISM If there is no doubt that pamphlets proﬁted publishers, what did they do for the protagonists of the political struggle? Pamphlets were described as weapons in a war, but is it possible to speak of a strategy, intentional and systematic? This section assesses the extent to which pamphlets were designed to play a role in the conﬂict, not so much by looking at the ideas each expressed, but by analysing their interaction with the larger public which (as the evidence just seen shows) they so clearly targeted.¹⁵⁵ In this way, the Interdict controversy can now at last help us answer the question of the political use of communication with which we began. Different modes of communication performed different functions at different stages. When the government responded to the interdict with ofﬁcial publications, it envisaged the latter’s performative effects, undoing the interdict and afﬁrming the Republic’s authority. The publicity of the pope’s counter-offensive fulﬁlled an equally clear role, namely to ensure that information circulated in order to make the interdict binding. This combined with the information exchange of a host of professionals and observers, who had their own interests in the controversy. To understand the function of printed publications we have ¹⁵³ Bellarmino and Possevino, both Jesuits with deep awareness of proselitizing’s difﬁculties, wrote in Italian, and the Jesuit Lorenzo Terzi wished Baronios’ pamphlet translated so as to reap ‘grandissimo frutto’; letter of 12.8.1606 in Pirri 1959: 280. ¹⁵⁴ Unlike much popular literature, pamphlets had no illustrations (apart from simple marks on the title page), a substantial item of the printers’ cost. ¹⁵⁵ Intellectual analyses of the pamphlets can be found in: Cozzi 1959: 99–108; Bouwsma 1968: 417–82; Gaeta 1984: 465–78; Prosperi 1994; Oakley 1996; Lavenia 2004: 366–70.

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to remember that it was the resulting combination of newssheets, sermons, and informal discussions, and not pamphlets, that made the controversy public in the ﬁrst place. The government consented to pamphlet publication in order to counter the legitimation crisis which ensued. Through the pamphlets, it hoped to respond to the explosion of information, to inﬂuence what it could not stop, and raise its voice over the system of communication in a way which the ofﬁcial publications had clearly failed to do. Whatever Machiavelli’s scepticism about the usefulness of books to ‘hold states’, it was better to ﬁght a ‘war of pamphlets’—ultimately subject to censorship and manipulation—than to allow a ‘war of words’ from raging without control. In the government’s intentions, the pamphlets were to be a medium which would overwhelm all others. This strategy had to do with the very nature of print. First, the press surpassed all other forms of political communication in quantity. Pamphlets enabled Venice’s supporters to out-produce the manuscripts inﬁltrating the Republic. For example, a pamphlet contained one of those letters together with a reply: a refutation which was meant to circulate in a thousand more exemplars than the original which prompted it.¹⁵⁶ The same could be said of Marsilio’s Reply, published in four editions, and of the response to the anti-Venetian manuscript Letter of the Republic of Genoa, which underwent two very cheap editions.¹⁵⁷ Publicity became a trap for Rome, as the example of Baronio’s violent speech to Paul V strikingly demonstrates. First pronounced in the consistory which inaugurated the interdict, it circulated in manuscript like other such speeches (known as vota), and soon underwent many editions to become one of the controversy’s most popular pamphlets. They were not printed in Rome, however, but in Venice and other countries against Rome, as evidence of excessive and ineffectual animosity.¹⁵⁸ The English ambassador himself suggested that the Republic should have Baronio’s text printed, because ‘anyway, it isn’t dangerous’.¹⁵⁹ The very act of polemical publication was in many ways a victory for Venice, because the public increase in polemic was bound to show the interdict’s ineffectiveness. The Roman pamphlets afﬁrmed the Church’s authority, but the Venetian responses showed that authority to be disputed—which is why many observers commented that the cardinals’ pamphlets obtained the opposite effect of their authors’ wishes.¹⁶⁰ ¹⁵⁶ ∗ Capello, Lettera. ¹⁵⁷ ∗ Dve lettere. ¹⁵⁸ I have found more than ten editions of this text in various languages and with different titles (e.g. in ∗ [Guidoni et al.], Ad Paulum V ; ∗ Marsilio, Dvo vota; ∗ Risposta di Maestro Pasqvino; ∗ [Tilenus], Christianorvm; ∗ Vignier, De Venetorvm), accompanied by replies. ¹⁵⁹ Audience of 28.8.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, c. 223v. ¹⁶⁰ Dispatch of ambassador of Savoy dated 8.8.1606, referring to Baronio’s Paraenesis, in de Magistris 1906: 156–7. Other diplomats agreed, e.g. the agent of the Duke of Mantua (dispatches of 5 and 18.8.1606, in Putelli 1911, v. 22: 207), and the French ambassador (dispatches dated 5 and 11.8.1606, in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 157 and 161).

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The representation of loyalty Print caused a qualitative as well as quantitative shift in the government’s public stance. Initially, during the strategy of denial, its arguments were mostly negative, consisting either in shows of force or legal quibbles meant to shelter those who were already willing to conform. Unlike ofﬁcial publications which imposed obedience by law, the pamphlets tried to win consensus by convincing readers—they moved from the interdict’s legal invalidity to its injustice.¹⁶¹ The government’s ofﬁcial pamphlets also all ampliﬁed the Senate’s original argument about the beneﬁcial nature of Venice’s supervision over the clergy. Finally, against sweeping accusations of heresy, pro-Venetian pamphlets vindicated the Republic’s piety, historical role as a bulwark of Christianity, and long track of obedience to the Holy See.¹⁶² Thus, they left legal precedents to celebrate the Republic on the basis of its historical legacy. The force of conviction, however, could never be enough. Polemical pamphlets are a strange kind of genre. Even more than other texts, they are meant to prompt reactions; but as partisan statements made in polarized contexts, they are on the whole unlikely to convince unsympathetic readers. Perhaps aware of this, many pamphlets during the Interdict—and notably those closest to the government—opted for a different line: to proclaim, rather than seek, their readers’ consensus and that of all people beyond them. As Sarpi’s disciple boasted, there was no need to persuade readers, because ‘the People are already persuaded . . . and have no doubts or worries’.¹⁶³ To say that readers needed no persuading was no admission of redundancy on the part of the pamphlets’ authors. On the contrary, it gave them a speciﬁc role to play alongside the government’s other forms of communication. As we have seen, the Protesto afﬁrmed the consensus of clergy and subjects, ‘nay of the entire world’.¹⁶⁴ In diplomatic communication, the government made the same point. When he last saw the nuncio on the eve of the interdict, the doge told him that ‘in this city and in all the others in our state, as in all the territories, towns and villages, everyone, of every status condition and sex, feels the same as we do.’¹⁶⁵ The problem with those boasts of unity was that the government had no means of proving them. In a secret brief, for example, Sarpi argued that it would have been useful to convene popular representative assemblies on the lines of the French States General; however, he recognized that Venice’s constitution contemplated no such institution.¹⁶⁶ In spite of Gasparo Contarini’s classic deﬁnition, the ¹⁶¹ For examples of this argument, see the texts quoted in Bouwsma 1968: 426–7. ¹⁶² e.g. ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi, in Sarpi 1969: 153, ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite: 5. ¹⁶³ ∗ Micanzio, Conﬁrmatione: 449. ¹⁶⁴ Cornet 1859: 72. ¹⁶⁵ Audience of 4.5.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, c. 46. The doge made a very similar point to the Jesuits, cf. Pirri 1959: 108. ¹⁶⁶ ‘Che cosa importi l’aggravatoria’, in Sarpi 2001: 475–6.

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Great Council was far from representing anyone other than the patriciate.¹⁶⁷ In their thousands, the pamphlets offered a ﬁctional equivalent of those assemblies, a literary compensation for a political deﬁciency. For example, the many orations presented to the doge on his election by representatives of mainland communities appeared in print at the height of the Interdict, occasionally in several editions—a move from governmental to public communication.¹⁶⁸ By praising the government, and proclaiming the enthusiastic support of each of their communities, printed orations were meant to represent the entire state, united in agreement with the capital. The fact that none mentioned the interdict did not mean that the interdict was absent from their preoccupations; it was a statement on the interdict itself, a sign of disregard in line with the government’s message. On a ﬁctional level, the use of pseudonyms played the same function. Carefully chosen pseudonyms were more than covers for their authors; they turned into symbols of the consensus of entire social categories, a strategy practised in other controversies in the same period.¹⁶⁹ A Polish student in Padua and a German one in Rome, a Parisian doctor and a Roman theologian, a Venetian hermit and an Albanian philosopher, a baker from Bologna and a ﬁsherman from Burano—a colourful array of personae simulated socially widespread support.¹⁷⁰ Like Venice’s colourful but orderly ducal processions, pseudonymous pamphlets celebrated the civic unity of different parts of the social body. At the precise moment when the interdict excluded Venetians from the community of the Church, pamphlets wished to create a sense of community. Indeed, it is not impossible to compare the printed pamphlets’ strategy to that of the press studied by Benedict Anderson as creating feelings of national identity by imagining a large overarching community.¹⁷¹ But what kind of community did the pamphlets imagine? It is interesting that none of them resorted to a commonplace of other controversies at the time, the personiﬁcation of the entire people supporting from below the reasons of the sovereign. Unlike the numerous ‘Soldat françois’, ‘Bon Gaulois’, and ‘Jacques Bonhomme’ supporting the French monarchy against Spain at exactly this time, there were few characters in Venice who could really symbolize the entirety of the Republic’s diverse populations.¹⁷² Likewise, the readership described in the ofﬁcial pamphlets was carefully selected so as to distinguish ¹⁶⁷ Contarini 1591: 15, see above, p. 5. ¹⁶⁸ Del Bene 1606: A4. Del Bene also wrote a pamphlet, which Sarpi recommended for publication, see Sarpi 2001: 497–505. Another oration insisted on the doge’s piety and orthodoxy, dalla Porta 1606: A3–A4. I have found twenty orations (three of them edited at least twice, and one three times), mostly printed by Rampazetto and Meietti. ¹⁶⁹ Cf. Sawyer 1990: 87, and Raymond 2003: 41. ¹⁷⁰ ∗ [Leoni?], Condoglienza; ∗ [Leoni], Avvertimento; [Leschassier], Consvlta; ∗ Lettera di Eulogio romano; ∗ Palmerio, Lettera; ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite; ∗ Litera cuiusdam pistoris; Copia d’vna lettera scritta da Pifanio di Pizzoni, in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 406–7. ¹⁷¹ Anderson 1991. ¹⁷² Sawyer 1990: 88–90, Mathorez 1913, Bitton and Mortensen 1994.

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it, both morally and socially, from the multitude. The patrician Querini was the clearest in circumscribing his public, by addressing himself ‘to those whom God has charged with the guidance of peoples’, ‘those most knowledgeable and prudent’ distinguished from ‘the simple’.¹⁷³ He also stressed the beneﬁcial nature of Venice’s rule to the propertied classes especially, and particularly to nobles—precisely those categories to whom, as we have seen, the Senate sent his pamphlet.¹⁷⁴ By contrast, Venetian authors accused their adversaries of targeting the ‘simple’ and of inciting ‘commotion, upheaval, sedition and rumour in the people’, ‘the ﬁre of sedition’.¹⁷⁵ If Rome condemned Venice for heresy, Venetian pamphlets accused their Roman counterparts of provoking ‘scandal’.¹⁷⁶ Popular political communication was a line which none of the Republic’s supporters claimed to take. At the same time as they afﬁrmed the public’s agreement, pamphlets also played down the importance of that agreement. Despite their republican rhetoric, Venetian authors never described power as originating in the people, in contrast both with Marsilio of Padua (whom they were accused of following), and with theories which were common in other controversies of this period both in the Netherlands and in France.¹⁷⁷ Venetian authors maintained instead the divine right of rulers, while it was in fact the pope’s supporters who maintained the human origin of secular authority so as to undermine the latter.¹⁷⁸ In terms of political communication, governmental pamphlets suggested that the people had no role other than acclaiming government. As Querini wrote, ‘the laws of the prince have the same force which they would have if all the subjects came together to pass them each with his vote.’¹⁷⁹ The government intended pamphlets to reinforce the traditional framework of politics and thus, arguably, to play a function similar to rituals by celebrating a paternalist vision of society and publicly representing the people in a spectacle of loyalty. Indeed, this effort closely reﬂected ceremonies of the popular acclamation of rulers common in Venice and in smaller communities on the mainland as elsewhere in early modern Europe.¹⁸⁰ By substituting themselves for the public, the pamphlets acted as instruments of symbolic coercion, not empowerment. Ultimately, they attempted to reafﬁrm that which the explosion of political communication denied, the government’s monopoly over politics. ¹⁷³ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 657, 666, 687. ¹⁷⁴ Ibid.: 685, 687. ¹⁷⁵ ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite: 36, ∗ Marsilio, Essame: 32–3; also ∗ Capello, Delle controversie: 21, 148, ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento: 9. ¹⁷⁶ Cf. ∗ Micanzio, Conﬁrmatione: 15, 118, 120, 143, 201, 210, 252, 440, 445. ¹⁷⁷ Cf. van Gelderen 1992 and Sawyer 1990. ¹⁷⁸ e.g. ∗ Querini, Avviso: 667, 676, 687; ∗ Capello, Delle controversie: 34; ∗ Micanzio, Conﬁrmatione: 169; ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite: 35–6. Cf. ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a due libretti: 15. Cf. the discussion in Bouwsma 1968: 431–44. ¹⁷⁹ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 676–7. ¹⁸⁰ Cf. Maranini 1927: 192–4, Muir 1981: 285–6, Ventura 1997: 32–3, and Menniti Ippolito 1986.

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Unmasking the pope’s offensive And yet, the pamphlets were no triumph of an all-powerful propaganda either. As George Orwell showed, the success of propaganda entails the end rather than the control of language: not so much the creation of consensus, but the annihilation of opinion. Similarly the ambition of early modern Leviathans was to prevent all discussion of politics—the sovereign was to rule not through pamphlets but by imposing its voice over all others. As is known, Thomas Hobbes abhorred the proliferation of polemical literature. He objected to arguing against religious sects and ‘fabulous traditions’, and instead concluded that they should be ‘silenced by the Law’.¹⁸¹During the Interdict, the government’s initial strategy of denial through ofﬁcial publication was meant to practise the principles of absolutist communication which Hobbes so clearly expressed. That it failed signals the distance between the ideal and the real world of early modern politics. By resorting to pamphlets, the government conceded that political communication escaped its control. Whatever the authorities’ intended use of pamphlets, pamphlets constituted an exceptional means of publication, very much unlike regularly recurring rituals or ofﬁcial proclamations. Pamphlets may have tried to fabricate agreement, but were bound to stimulate further curiosity and thus to promote, rather than end, communication. As a means of information, pamphlets do not just state opinions; they pose questions and encourage criticism. During the Interdict, some authors consciously exploited that mechanism to pursue a daring strategy, offensive rather than defensive. In this way, the pamphlets as a whole had a double effect. They ﬁctionally covered the reality of disagreement with a semblance of unity, while they also encouraged further political communication in order to turn it against Venice’s adversaries. These two contrasting strategies largely coincided with the aims of the different agents involved in the pamphlets’ publication, the government (which had an interest in unity), and the publishers (who had an interest in furthering curiosity). They embody the tension between political exclusion and inclusion at the heart of the political uses of communication. To understand this strategy, we must bear in mind the chronology of pamphlet publication. Thanks to Sarpi, who anonymously published the ﬁrst pamphlet, Venice led the offensive. As we have seen, he took great care to deny his move, which amounted to a departure from the government’s line on public communication.¹⁸² Sarpi reversed the patricians’ reluctance to confront the public. At the end of his career, he was to vindicate his strategy in a consulto ‘on replying to slanderous writings’, which is his only recorded admission that the paper war started pre-emptively in Venice.¹⁸³ There he argued that whenever ¹⁸¹ Hobbes 1991: 474. ¹⁸² See above, pp. 208–9. ¹⁸³ ‘Del confutar scritture malediche’, in Sarpi 1969: 1170–80; this paragraph is based on de Vivo 2005: 44–8.

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censorship of information was impossible, it was best to respond to slander with a daring policy of publications aimed at exploiting the readers’ curiosity. He explained that mere defences were useless because no government was so perfect that it would escape criticism. Once again, he resorted to the paper war metaphor which he expected his contemporaries to understand. It was a commonplace of military strategies shared by both ‘good commanders’ and ‘good writers’, he stated, that ‘not only in armed battles, but also in literary ones there is no greater misery than to keep solely on the defensive’.¹⁸⁴ The best strategy was to attack the adversary showing his defects to be greater than one’s own, diminishing his reputation in a carefully planned strategy of aggressive publicity, which would blunt the edge of the adversary’s sword (rintuciarli il ﬁlo e levargli la forza).¹⁸⁵ It was the merit of Venice’s ﬁrst pamphlets during the Interdict, Sarpi showed, that they had cornered the pope into defensive replies.¹⁸⁶ True to these principles, Sarpi and others amongst Venice’s defenders focused at length on the adversaries’ faults rather than the Republic’s policies. Thus, they discussed the crimes committed by the two arrested clergymen rather than the extent of secular jurisdiction over the clergy. Even a moderate like Querini tried to elicit shock amongst his readers by dwelling at length on those crimes, including adultery, incest, and murder (the abbot, Querini recounted, killed several people, even resorting to the fabrication of poison); and the other pamphlets—most notably, those originating from non-Catholic authors—were even more explicit.¹⁸⁷ Several pamphlets singled out the Jesuits as a target of shaming allegations, many of them drawn from the printed literature which had circulated in France since the wars of religion.¹⁸⁸ Many concentrated on exposing the Church’s wealth, which Querini denounced as ‘pure luxury’ causing ‘the faithful’s greatest scandal’.¹⁸⁹ He also tried to play the resentment of the poor secular clergy against the richer orders.¹⁹⁰ Sarpi equally charged that the wealth of the Church, originally granted for charitable aims, now only corrupted some in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.¹⁹¹ The point was repeated in one of the cheapest pamphlets, lamenting that the wealth originally bequeathed for the relief of the poor ended up enriching ‘the pomps and luxury of the Court of Rome’.¹⁹² As Sarpi explained, the offensive strategy helped displace the argument from possibly contentious subjects. Criticizing the Church’s enrichment, for example, had the advantage of deﬂecting attention from Venice’s own unequal distribution of land. No pamphlet addressed this subject, a possible source of tension between the patriciate and the mainland landholders because the former amassed huge ¹⁸⁴ Ibid.: 1172–3. ¹⁸⁵ Ibid.: 1174. ¹⁸⁶ Ibid.: 1175–6. ¹⁸⁷ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 702. Similarly, ∗ Palmerio, Lettera: 5. ¹⁸⁸ The most forceful was ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite; cf. also ∗ Z. T. Bovio, Copia d’vna Lettera: 4–5. On the diffusion of the Jesuit anti-myth during the Interdict, see Gui 1989: 67–73 and Frajese 1994: 185–249. ¹⁸⁹ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 673. ¹⁹⁰ Ibid.: 672. ¹⁹¹ ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi: 174–5. ¹⁹² ∗ Palmerio, Lettera: 3.

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properties throughout the sixteenth century, forcing out many of the latter by driving prices up.¹⁹³ While glossing over home facts, pamphlets publicized other, hitherto reserved, information. For example, they publicly recounted the secret negotiations which had been conducted by diplomats on both sides prior to the Interdict, naturally in a light favourable to Venice.¹⁹⁴ They also added more sensitive information. For example, Querini—a senator and therefore acquainted with the Republic’s secret archives—revealed ﬁgures drawn from governmental records concerning the Church’s possessions.¹⁹⁵ Thus, some authors were prepared to undermine the boundaries of political secrecy for polemical purposes. Their revelations reversed the initiative in publication. Whereas at the beginning of the conﬂict the Republic had criticized the pope’s readiness to appeal to the public, it now became the turn of the pope’s supporters to lament that Venetian pamphlets scandalously divulged facts which were better kept secret.¹⁹⁶ The indiscriminate attack on enemy individuals, groups, and institutions was no peculiarity of the Venetian Interdict. Scandalistic revelations were a staple of vicious controversies and, today, of the gossip press. At this particular juncture in Venice, however, criticism of the adversary may have served a liberating function at the same time as it played into the government’s hands. The interdict’s force rested in its capacity to inspire fear by threatening divine punishment, worldly confusion, and otherworldly damnation. As we have seen, this message found a powerful echo in countless means of communication during the controversy, from sermons to manuscript letters, inquisitorial condemnations, and printed broadsheets. The apocalyptic language of many Roman pamphlets built on the same point without mincing its words. As the cardinals warned, struck by the interdict, Venice would be abandoned by its allies, forsaken by other Christians, and eventually, like Babylon, destroyed by the wrath of God, its rulers eaten alive by dogs.¹⁹⁷ Pro-Venetian pamphlets responded to this offensive by comforting readers against fear. In some, the emphasis was on the consolatory mood, for example in the very cheap letter of the hermit Palmerio.¹⁹⁸ Others aimed at undermining the very basis of the Church-inspired fear in a more foundational way. As Sarpi informed the government, ‘not only is unjust excommunication no great punishment, it is no punishment at all’, because the pope had no means of executing it and so his Interdict showed not just his ‘injustice’ but also his ‘impotence’.¹⁹⁹ His pamphlets repeated the same point for a large audience. Since the censure is ‘unjust and null’, ‘there is no reason why it should ¹⁹³ Beltrami 1961, Berengo 1974. ¹⁹⁴ e.g. ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi: 157–61. ¹⁹⁶ For example, ∗ Gaetani, Avvertimenti: 36. ¹⁹⁵ ∗ Querini, Avviso: 671 ¹⁹⁷ ∗ Baronio, Parænesis: 8–11 and 23–4; ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a dve libretti: 56. ¹⁹⁸ ∗ Palmerio, Lettera; cf. also ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi: 215. ¹⁹⁹ ‘Che cosa importi l’aggravatoria della scomunica e censure e che rimedii vi siino da opporre’, in Sarpi 2001: 463 and 470–1.

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be feared in any way, neither in conscience, nor in fact’.²⁰⁰ Several proVenetian pamphlets—including some which were very cheap—insisted on the immateriality of the pope’s threats.²⁰¹ According to Marsilio, the pope could not follow his words with actions, and the interdict itself was ultimately an empty threat: ‘like something written in water or in the air’.²⁰² Another author gave political currency to that idea when he pointed out that, should there have been war, it was likely that the pope’s armies would prove imaginary like his arguments.²⁰³ Only a fool, another pamphlet concluded, would be afraid of the pope.²⁰⁴ Sarpi showed the roots of his position in a reference to past excommunications. When Bellarmino mentioned Boniface VIII’s excommunication of Philip IV of France as an example of the popes’ indirect power over temporal rulers, Sarpi replied that in the end Boniface never managed to have Philip dethroned (quite the opposite, as everyone knew). Thus, the pope had neither direct nor indirect power: he had no power at all.²⁰⁵ Sarpi may well have drawn such ideas from Machiavelli, whose Florentine histories too dwelled on Boniface VIII to show that abuse of excommunication was ineffectual and ultimately counterproductive. ‘If [excommunication] harmed [the pope’s enemies],’ Machiavelli wrote, ‘it harmed the Church even more; for arms which had been used virtuously for the love of the faith, when used for his own ambition against Christians, began not to cut. Thus did too great a desire to vent their appetites cause the pontiffs little by little to disarm themselves.’²⁰⁶ Those words echoed in Venice’s political arena. Paul V’s predecessor, for example, accused some Venetian patricians of ‘thinking that the weapons of priests do not cut’, and at the height of the Interdict other patricians were thought to feel likewise.²⁰⁷ It is not surprising that the politically informed and educated elite read and knew Machiavelli, even though his works were formally prohibited by indexes approved by both the Republic and the Holy See. Patricians collected manuscript commonplaces drawn from his writings, which Venetian publishers printed in abridgements or in full under false titles.²⁰⁸ Shortly after the Interdict, many patricians were denounced to the Inquisition for reading Machiavelli, and the frequency of those and other such cases was such that it may be said that some patricians thought that Machiavelli’s ²⁰⁰ ∗ Sarpi, Considerationi: 214–15; cf. ∗ Gerson, Trattato e resoluzione: 174. ²⁰¹ ∗ Muti, Persuasione, sig. Av; ∗ [Marsilio], Risposta: 14; ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite: 35. ²⁰² ∗ [Marsilio], Risposta: 12; ∗ Gerson, Trattato e ressolutione: 182 made the same point. ²⁰³ ∗ Offman[pseud.?], Avvertimento: 13. ²⁰⁴ ∗ Capello, Delle controversie: 6–7: ‘sarebbe pazzo’. ²⁰⁵ ∗ Bellarmino, Risposta a due libretti: 60. The reply in ∗ Sarpi, Apologia: 62–3, 161; cf. Sarpi 2001: 470–1. ²⁰⁶ I have adapted the translation in Machiavelli 1988b: 36 on the basis of the original. ²⁰⁷ Quoted in Andretta 2000: 27; the phrase is attributed to the Venetians by cardinal Sforza in Giuseppe Malatesta’s Relatione historica in BNM, Ms. 9629, c. 78. ²⁰⁸ Bertelli and Innocenti 1979: xlix –lvi, Quaglio 1969, Richardson 1995, and Procacci 1995; on Machiavelli’s manuscript usage, cf. Scarpa 1984.

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political teachings constituted a form of esoteric knowledge, to be permitted to a restricted elite.²⁰⁹ By contrast during the Interdict, some of the cheapest pamphlets publicized Machiavelli’s dismissal of spiritual censures for the sake of a wide audience. Two, for example, described the pope’s unjust excommunication in exactly the same words, as a wooden knife ‘which does not cut’.²¹⁰ Other texts went so far as to translate Machiavelli’s line into dialect, as did two manuscripts which circulated widely in similar ways to the barbershop’s Paternoster —with subtly different versions copied into a doctor’s diary and collected in miscellanies by other readers (although they seem to have been printed only after the controversy, in Geneva).²¹¹ One of them carried the signature of Pifanio Pizzoni or Pizzocheri (the versions differ), a ﬁctional character supposed to embody Venice’s most popular viewpoint, as suggested by his name (drawn from the vocabulary of Commedia dell’Arte and food), profession (a ﬁsherman), and origin (the peripheral island of Burano). This text ﬁctionally put the Machiavellian realism which ought to have been the preserve of a small elite, in the mouths of the humblest section of Venice’s population. ‘Pifanio’ translated Machiavelli’s ideas into the language shared by poor Venetians, denouncing ‘indulgences and sermons’ as ‘valueless currency’ (monea che no se spende) and warning the pope: ‘people say that you have no knife and if you do, that, it does not cut’ (I dise che no havè cortello, e se l’havè, che’l no tagia).²¹² Pifanio was a ﬁctional character, the embodiment of Venice’s humble people; but the views he expressed were all but humble and, as we shall see in the next section, they were likely to be shared by many of his real contemporaries amongst the city’s lower orders. As this discussion shows, some of the pamphlets’ authors cultivated a radical critique of the very premisses of spiritual authority. This accords with the most recent interpretation of Sarpi as a sceptic who, like the libertines of his time, thought that society could sustain itself without fear of hell.²¹³ Some of that conviction may have played a role in his and other authors’ responses to the Interdict’s threat of eternal damnation. But there is a crucial difference between Venice’s pamphleteers and the libertines, which can only be highlighted by focusing on the extent of political communication. Sceptic libertines fundamentally posed themselves in opposition to the uncultured masses; in their mind, unmasking the imposture of religion was to be reserved for the educated (i.e. the libertines themselves) or the powerful (whom the libertines ²⁰⁹ Savio 1936–42, v. 10: 26–35; other cases are mentioned in P. Grendler 1977: 283–4. ²¹⁰ ∗ Landsberger, Mirabile rivelatione: 8, and ∗ Palmerio, Lettera: 6. ²¹¹ Copia d’vna lettera scritta da Pifanio di Pizzoni and Sermone di Venetia al papa, in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 406–7 and 408–10; cf. the versions of the former in Sivos’ chronicle, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1818 (9436), cc. 101–4v and 118v –120. On the Geneva edition, see Bonnant 1969. ²¹² Copia d’vna lettera scritta da Pifanio di Pizzoni, in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 407. The same point was repeated in a different form in the Sermone di Venetia, ibid.: 408–10. ²¹³ Wootton 1983 and Frajese 1994.

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either served or hoped to serve). Scepticism was an elitist ideology, in contrast with the majority’s obligation to conformity.²¹⁴ By contrast, Sarpi and some other pamphleteers were prepared to turn scepticism into a public message for a wide audience, to unmask the political uses of religion not just in secret writings addressed to the powerful, but in widely published pamphlets as a polemical weapon against the papacy. In the pamphlets’ strategy, engagement with the public was crucial. No mere act of force would sufﬁce to undermine fear of the Interdict. As Sarpi put it in a secret brief for the government, the pope’s power in secular matters rested on an unfounded arcano, a mixture of fear and inscrutable allegations which most people could not understand.²¹⁵ Sarpi’s radical implication was that examination would expose the arcano and dispel fear. He believed that individuals had the right to examine spiritual censures and reject unjust ones.²¹⁶ His and other pamphlets ampliﬁed the same point for a large public; they claimed for the public itself a greater right of judgement than the pope was prepared to allow.²¹⁷ Pamphlets encouraged readers to make themselves judges in the controversy, and their description of their own readership makes clear that they welcomed judgement.²¹⁸ Was not the capability of discriminating a natural feature distinguishing human beings from animals and preventing the former from committing sin, one Venetian author asked? The faithful, he argued, had both a right and a duty to judge the pope’s actions; in fact, because they were closer to the contested events than the pope, they were better judges than he.²¹⁹ The collective Trattato dell’interdetto was most explicit: ‘Christians must show no obedience to the commandment they receive (be that from the pontiff himself,) without ﬁrst examining it and establishing whether it is convenient, legitimate, and obligatory; and he sins, who obeys blindly and without examination.’²²⁰ For all the government’s hesitations, some authors went so far as to invoke the assessment of a limitless ‘public’. As one of them boldly stated, the controversy made the world itself judge.²²¹ Thus, for the sake of state–Church polemics, but with a language preﬁguring the eighteenth-century ‘tribunal of public opinion’, some of Venice’s supporters empowered the public, however ²¹⁴ See Spini 1950, and cf. Berti 1994, and the Gregory et al. 1981. ²¹⁵ ‘Qual sii la potestà data da Cristo nostro Signore alli prelati della Santa Chiesa e che cosa sii la potestà coattiva’ (1608), in Sarpi 2001: 624. Micanzio similarly wrote that religion was used by the clergy as a ‘Medusa’s head’, ‘to scare the fearful’, Micanzio 1974: 1387. ²¹⁶ ‘Sopra la forza e validità della scomunica giusta e ingiusta’, Sarpi 2001: 228. ²¹⁷ e.g. ∗ Tomaselli, Mentite: 35, and ∗ Micanzio, Conﬁrmatione: 384. Cf. Bouwsma 1968: 425–31. ²¹⁸ ∗ Micanzio, Conﬁrmatione: 159 and cf. 228, 392. Cf. ∗ Sarpi, Apologia: 105 and 172–3; ∗ Bernardino da Bergamo, Francesco Foresto, and Ippolito da Brescia, Essendo fatto notorio a noi. ²¹⁹ ∗ Capello, Delle controversie: 15 and cf. 14, 139. ²²⁰ ∗ Sarpi et al., Trattato: 21. Sarpi also referred to the Jesuits’ insistence on ‘blind obedience’, cf. Sarpi 1968: 225 and 291. ²²¹ ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento: 15; cf. also ∗ Sarpi, Apologia: 3.

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ﬁctionally and temporarily, to judge the Church’s highest authority.²²² The pamphlets’ force lay precisely in interacting with the public to foster criticism where there normally ought to have been none. As Sarpi said, they ‘gave matter of discussion to the world, and to each means of forming their own opinion, with diminution of papal authority’. Sarpi had no doubt that this amounted to a strategy, and a very successful one. As he explained, the ‘war of writings’ proved crucial in defeating the pope, ‘because the writings harmed the reputation of the court of Rome more than the papal censures harmed the Republic.’²²³

6 . 4 B EYO N D I N T E N T I O N S So far we have considered the intentions behind printed publication. But what about those who read, or otherwise heard about, pamphlets? Some pamphlets claimed to represent widespread public opinion. However, polemical pamphlets were not the expression of popular culture—as they have occasionally been interpreted by later historians—but the product of professionals and insiders of the political arena, driven by the prospect of proﬁt, exceptional ideological commitment, or partisan loyalty.²²⁴ The question, then, is how pamphlets were received outside that arena, amongst the large variety of people gathering in bozzoli and barbershops. Contemporary observers and modern historians have offered largely contrasting answers, as we have seen. To many of the former, like the French ambassador, pamphlets politicized readers who should have been kept outside the controversy, including ‘barbers and washerwomen’.²²⁵ Modern historians disagree, describing Venice’s stance during the Interdict as the position of an educated minority, bound to be alien to overwhelmingly conservative masses. In this view, the pamphlets could ultimately have no inﬂuence, because—as even Gaetano Cozzi implied—an essentially a-political and ignorant people only cared for traditional religious ceremonies and institutions.²²⁶ For all their differences, both elite contemporary observers and modern historians describe the Interdict as an essentially top-down event—unsurprisingly perhaps, since that is the way in which the educated view most political events. In light of the socially widespread political communication described throughout this book, however, this is an extremely reductive account. During the Interdict ²²² A similar argument concerns the relations between competing French playwrights and their public in this period, cf. Merlin 1994. The pre-history of the notion of ‘public opinion’ has been traced with greater attention in France (cf. Gunn 1995 and Baker 1993) than in Italy; however, for the eighteenth-century, see Tortarolo 1990. ²²³ Sarpi 1968: 294, 285. ²²⁴ For two powerful statements of this interpretation, see Jouhaud 2006 and Scribner 1987. ²²⁵ Canaye 1636, v. 3: 166, cf. above, p. 200. ²²⁶ This is often taken for granted in Cozzi’s and Benzoni’s works, cf. above, p. 202.

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too, all sorts of people beyond both government and the political arena already discussed, lamented, or ridiculed the conﬂict before the pamphlets appeared. There is simply no way of knowing what their opinions were, and it would be a mistake to assume that most were favourable to Rome. The few direct traces of orally expressed opinions we have, show individuals taking positions both for and against both Venice and the pope. It is in the nature of governmental sources to record only those dissenting opinions which raised the authorities’ preoccupations. There is no doubt that dissenting rumours abounded in Venice.²²⁷ But if the Venetian authorities prosecuted ordinary people who spoke against the Republic, Roman ones did prosecute those who sided in Venice’s favour. At the beginning of December, for example, the Milanese courier Giovan Paolo Profondavalle was arrested by the Inquisition in Pavia for ‘speaking in favour of the Venetians during a conversation concerning the present controversies’.²²⁸ The barber of the Venetian cardinal Dolﬁn was investigated in Rome for similar reasons, as were members of the regular orders in Bologna, both male and female.²²⁹ Pro-Venetian opinions of Venetian subjects were only recorded when expressed abroad, under papal rule. For example, in Modena two Venetian ﬁshermen had an argument in a tavern with a priest. When he said that all Venetians were excommunicated, the ﬁshermen took strong issue with him and claimed that they were better Christians than the pope’s subjects.²³⁰ It is far more difﬁcult to ﬁnd direct evidence of pro-Venetian opinions inside the Republic’s territories. For example, we only know that the priest Giacomo Benedetti of Asiago spoke against the pope’s Interdict because this surfaced later as part of a different suit before the Inquisition.²³¹ In 1609 some locals, who tried to have him removed, said that he swore ‘like a Turk’ and read Lutheran books.²³² Amongst other things, witnesses recounted that at the time of the Interdict Benedetti said that ‘he had nothing to do with the bishop or the pope, nor had to obey anybody other than his prince and the Most Serene Republic’.²³³ Apparently, he had claimed to be ‘prepared to quarrel with the pope himself’, and added ‘what bishop? what do I have to do with him? I wish our prince could win’.²³⁴ Benedetti’s enemies accused him of rousing ‘scandal’, but he could hardly have been alone in his opinions. He spoke frequently in other people’s homes, in the sacristy, as well as out in the street and under the town’s porch, and did so with a variety of other people, including a physician, ²²⁷ See section 5.4. ²²⁸ Spampanato 1924: 246–7. ²²⁹ Report of 31.5.1606, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 13, c. 104v (text published in Cappelletti 1873: 75); on Bologna, cf. Betti 2002, 2006. ²³⁰ Cornet 1873, v. 6: 82–3. ²³¹ ASV, QC, b. 127, fasc. 184 ‘Giacomo Benedetti da Asiago per bestemmie’, April 1609. ²³² Deposition of Baldessar Stefani, 16.4.1609, ibid. ²³³ Accusation of Lorenzo dal Sasso, 12.4.1609, ibid. ²³⁴ Depositions of Bartolomeo, rector of San Matteo, 13.4.1609, and of Baldassarre Stefani, 16.4.1609, ibid.

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the mayor (sindaco), the bellman, a lawyer, the miller, and a baker.²³⁵ When the secular magistrates heard about the Inquisition proceedings against Benedetti, they seized the inquiry and had all the sections concerning the Interdict deleted from the witnesses’ depositions. By so doing, they upheld their subjects’ right to support the Republic, but their move contributed to hiding that support from subsequent historians. We only know about Benedetti’s arguments in favour of Venice because we can read through the deletion marks. Given the variety of people’s opinions, pamphlets were bound to prompt a whole gamut of different responses—adhesion, rejection, or indifference—and it would be impossible to reconstruct them all. Those whose education allowed them to leave traces of their thoughts recorded genuinely strong reactions. The patriarch of Aquileia afﬁrmed that one of Rome’s pamphlets ‘moved many people to tears’, while a Roman newswriter wrote that the pope fell ill on reading some of Venice’s.²³⁶ Other reports extended to ordinary people. A merchant from Brescia told the bishop of Cremona (just beyond the border), that in his city the earliest pamphlets nourished heated discussions: the ‘mal affetti pretend they are theologians in favour of the Venetians’, while ‘those who are more knowledgeable laugh about it’. He also recounted that ‘while in a bookseller’s shop, three doctors showed up (as they are used to), and they began discussing and concluded that the Venetians were wrong.’²³⁷ Many agreed that pamphlets ‘give much to talk about’, but it would be hard to pinpoint the opinions voiced in those discussions other than by saying (as an observer did), that there were as many as there were ‘affections’ and ‘passions’.²³⁸ In fact, an anonymous observer writing in Venice with heavy regional inﬂexions afﬁrmed that pamphlets failed to stop the populace from ‘murmuring’.²³⁹ As we have seen, pamphlets are best understood as elements in a dialogue rather than top-down injunctions. Donald McKenzie showed that seventeenthcentury printed texts reﬂected the communicative interchange between orality and literacy that was typical of the culture in which they were produced.²⁴⁰ The same can be said of many Interdict pamphlets. Some were (or pretended to be) transcripts of sermons or harangues; others addressed an audience; many contained easily sung rhymes or traces of spoken dialect. Moreover, some authors drew on elements common in popular oral culture as discussed in connection with the sixteenth-century Paternosters.²⁴¹ Against the pope’s inspired fear, pamphlets responded with ridicule, a desecrating mechanism of debasement through bodily ²³⁵ Deposition of Francesco Benedetti, 14.4.1609, ibid. ²³⁶ Letter dated 18.11.1606, in ASVat, FB, III.131.c.2, c. 63v. Avvisi enclosed in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Chioggia Malamocco Torcello Loreo Murano, f. 1, cc. nn., 6 and 20.9.1606; cf. Porto’s letter of 15.9.1606, in BNF, Ms. Français 16082, c. 14. ²³⁷ Letter dated 8.6.1606, in ASVat, FB, III.131.c, c. 131. ²³⁸ Letter dated 14.9.1606, in ASVat, FB, III.131.c, c. 18, and dispatch dated 21.5.1606, in de Magistris 1906: 71. ²³⁹ Anonymous letter dated 4.10.1606, in ASVat, FB, III.131.c.2, c. 178. ²⁴⁰ McKenzie 2002. ²⁴¹ See section 4.4 above.

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allusions. The pope’s threats made one author speak of stomacoso e ridicolo disprezzo: scorn that made one laugh until one stomach’s hurt.²⁴² Another one described the threats of divine punishments as not just ‘false’ but also ‘ridiculous prophecies’. He also recounted what he described as a common joke about the pope’s authority: Paul V wanted to be like God, but because he had only been elected recently, he was more like the little Jesus in the crib.²⁴³ As in the Paternosters, authors abounded in animal images which were meant to cause laughter by comparing the adversaries with beasts, bestialità.²⁴⁴ The pseudonymous ﬁsherman Pifanio compared the Roman clergy to ‘crabs’.²⁴⁵ As two texts in Venetian dialect put it, the pope had been a fool when he thought that he could seriously frighten people.²⁴⁶ Unmasking the pope’s authority took the form of street ridicule more than learned sceptical philosophy. As with other texts, or perhaps to an even greater extent, when considering pamphlets it is best to speak of the circulation, rather than the trickling down, of ideas. That some authors voiced themes drawn from their readers’ oral culture does not mean that pamphlets faithfully reﬂected popular opinion. It means that authors and readers shared some language as well as images. After all, it is only natural that the former phrased their arguments in ways which the latter would recognize, and possibly sympathize with. In this way, pamphlets reinforced the circulation of ideas, because they drew strength from street language but also widened the potential for communication. Through print, jokes made in a street could reverberate miles away. As far as we know, oral discussions too made a mockery of the pope’s ineffective authority. Giacomo Benedetti, for example, pointed out that ‘he would never get his life back should the prince hang him; but should the pope excommunicate him, he could still be absolved.’²⁴⁷ A priest of Padua made the same point, in a bitter witticism to the governors’ guards who presented themselves at his church to make sure that he said mass. As he reportedly told them, it was ‘better to be excommunicated twelve years than hanged half an hour’.²⁴⁸ An anonymous letter sent to the Venetian governors of Padua at the beginning of the interdict elaborated on the same theme. No one should fear the interdict, the author afﬁrmed, because it was similar to the verola, the bogeyman which ²⁴² ∗ Dve lettere: 6. ²⁴³ ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento: 7, 15. A similar point in the ‘Sermone di Venetia a Papa Paolo V’, in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 408. ²⁴⁵ ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 406–7. ²⁴⁴ ∗ Dve lettere: 6. ²⁴⁶ Copia d’vna lettera scritta da Pifanio di Pizzoni, Gian Carlo Sivos’ chronicle, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1818 (9436), cc. 118v –120, and printed in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 406–7. On this collection, see above, n. 211. ²⁴⁷ Deposition of Giovan Domenico Molini, 24.4.1609, in ASV, QC, b. 127, fasc. 184 ‘Giacomo Benedetti da Asiago per bestemmie’. ²⁴⁸ The anecdote was reported in a French letter amongst the English ambassador’s papers, in NA, SP 99/3, c. 68, and was also known to Pierre de L’Estoile in Paris; cf. L’Estoile 1958–60, v. 3: 488.

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parents evoked to make children shut up; like the verola, the interdict was really an empty ‘mask’, a ﬁction of the imagination. The letter’s author implored the governors to consider his argument ‘even though it may seem ridiculous’.²⁴⁹ In few words, this letter both indicated an effective argument against observance of the interdict and drew from the language of everyday life to summarize the scepticism of those who downplayed the effectiveness of spiritual censures. Some pamphlets commented that such responses, formulated by people across the social spectrum, were the real cause of the interdict’s failure. This was the argument of a short pseudonymous work possibly authored by Giovan Battista Leoni. Excommunication, which used to be a terrorising weapon, is now utterly weakened; and I hear plebeian men who discuss it with substance and in conformity with their intelligence and capacity. . . . Everyone speaks and wants to understand what the authority of the pope really is. And many people understand that they used to live in obedience with their eyes closed, while now they dig up all texts, and reading them thoroughly ﬁnd reasons for doubt and realize their poverty.²⁵⁰

This pamphlet argued that spiritual censures lost their value not just because secular rulers opposed them, but because they became the object of judgement, and ultimately disrespect, by common people who at last ‘opened their eyes’. In this account, political communication was both a result of the Interdict and its undoing. ‘The kittens have opened their eyes’ (i gattesini ha auerto i occhi): other texts repeated the image, including the ﬁctional ﬁsherman’s letter to the pope and a dialect canzon circulating in different versions, perhaps meant to be sung in groups.²⁵¹ Sarpi and his friends employed the same metaphor in private correspondence, but the notion was rooted in more widely spread culture.²⁵² In 1564 Leonardo Fioravanti, a doctor excluded from the circles of his more eminent colleagues, used it to describe the effects of the printing press in bringing medical knowledge to those without classical culture. Thanks to books, he concluded, ‘the kittens have opened their eyes.’²⁵³ Similar phrases occurred in the talk of real medical shops, pharmacies, and barbershops. Only a few years after the Interdict, Costantino Saccardino, a charlatan active in Venice as well as Bologna (where for a while he had a stall next to a pharmacy), was denounced for turning ²⁴⁹ Anonymous letter dated 21.4.1606 in ASV, Senato, Dispacci Padova, f. 3, cc. nn. ²⁵⁰ ∗ Offman [pseud.?], Avvertimento: 14. ‘Smidolare’ may refer to both ‘weakening’ and ‘dismembering’. ²⁵¹ Copia d’vna lettera scritta da Pifanio di Pizzoni; in ∗ Raccolta: 407, and Canzon venetiana, ibid.: 411 (a different version of the latter is published in Medin 1904: 296). The anonymous letter Ai principi d’Italia (above, p. 197) also called for readers to ‘open their eyes’. ²⁵² e.g., Sarpi’s letter to Groslot of 2.9.1608 in Sarpi 1931, v. 1: 31 (and cf. also 254); Sarpi’s Massime, in Sarpi 1996: 718; Micanzio’s letter to William Cavendish of 10.11.1617, in Micanzio 1987: 69. ²⁵³ Fioravanti 1572: 41, cf. Camporesi 1981: 87–8, and Eamon 1994: 168–93.

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the same metaphor into criticism of the authorities while speaking to artisans and butchers. Religion as a whole was an imposture, a means used by rulers for political ends, but now at last, he claimed, the ‘whole dovecote has opened its eyes’.²⁵⁴ It has been argued that people such as Saccardino were inspired by reading the texts of classical sceptics and learned libertines who in those years expressed the same ideas.²⁵⁵ Whether or not that is true, it is likely that they also read pamphlets like those circulating in much greater numbers and at cheaper prices during the Interdict. Above all, in the vibrant world of political communication described so far, it is hard to say whether pamphlets were feeding widespread discussions or, vice versa, they were echoing propositions put forward in those discussions. Contacts and parallels between printed, written, and spoken communication conﬁrm that pamphlets should be understood as neither propaganda nor public opinion, but as elements of an inclusive cultural exchange. Readers appropriated the message of pamphlets which they then propagated in a multiplicity of different forms. But the appropriation did not just go one way, because pamphlets themselves utilized arguments which their authors recognized as common in the culture of their readers. After all, the pamphlets’ strength lay precisely in their ability and willingness to engage with a wide public. Authors and publishers certainly did believe that there was a large public of readers whose curiosity made them sceptical of religious authority. Their gamble was to turn that scepticism against the pope. By doing so, moreover, they showed themselves aware of the unexpected turns of communication. Some pamphlets described the interdict as a prime example of the law of unintended consequences—like the proverbial conti senza l’osto, as a dialect song put it, referring to a popular idiom meaning to calculate one’s bill without asking the tavern-keeper.²⁵⁶ The interdict was meant to inspire fear, but in the end only weakened the pope’s capacity to do so. By the same law of unintended consequences, scepticism could also turn against the Republic. The pamphlets’ authors accused the pope of putting religion at the service of temporal interests, but others used alternative means of communication to turn the accusation against Venice. This can be seen from the reception of religious rituals arranged by the government. An anonymous cartello which was found on the cathedral door in Brescia attacked the services held there as a fraud with ‘no other use than to mislead the poor brigade’.²⁵⁷ Seeing the Corpus Christi procession, the English ambassador reported at great length on what he obviously regarded as idolatrous practices, ‘which go farther than devotion . . . to contain the people still in good order with superstition the foolish band of obedience.’²⁵⁸ Wotton clearly believed himself to be alone in seeing through Catholic deceit. But others had similar thoughts. For a start, ²⁵⁴ Ginzburg and Ferrari 1978 and Ginzburg 1986. ²⁵⁵ Zambelli 1983. ²⁵⁶ Canzon venetiana, in ∗ Raccolta, v. 1: 411–12. ²⁵⁷ Copy enclosed in dispatch dated 26.7.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Brescia, f. 6, cc. nn. On cartelli, see above, pp. 194–7. ²⁵⁸ Dispatch dated 26.5.1606, in Wotton 1907, v. 1: 350.

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followers of the pope agreed with Wotton, for example one Jesuit who dismissed the procession as ‘a miserable spectacle’.²⁵⁹ Most explicit of all were the unfavourable comments made by a Roman newswriter when describing the sumptuous divine services in the Venetian embassy’s chapel. He reported that the host fell from the priest’s hands and commented that such occurrences punished those who turned religious rituals to their secular ends—although interestingly, he made this point through a classical anecdote to avoid discussion of Christianity’s political uses.²⁶⁰ It is likely, however, that the opposed authorities’ heavy use of rituals made many people believe that religion was an imposture, a notion which was gaining ground at the time and which, as has been shown recently, was to become extremely common in Venice across different social classes.²⁶¹ Civic processions counted on representing harmony as if on a stage, away from the audience; but in Venice not unlike in early modern theatres, the audience was a far from disciplined group and continually challenged the actors’ conduct of the play. The Republic’s and the pope’s opposed claims over ritual clashed with ordinary people’s aptitude to make independent use of ritual. For all its insistence on continuous religious services, for example, the government also had to forbid spontaneous processions in Brescia, where children and ﬂagellants marched together chanting litanies centred on the local shrine.²⁶² Such unofﬁcial acts of devotion signalled the population’s piety but also its fear of the interdict.²⁶³ Ultimately, they constituted an embarrassment for both the Republic and the Counter Reformation Church, which condemned all forms of communal devotion outside its control. On a private level too, some people devised means for protecting their beliefs from the authorities’ appropriation of religious services. Orsetta, the female servant who reproached some peasants for going to church in spite of the interdict, provides an interesting example. When one of the peasants retorted that she too had been at the services, she replied that, true, she had gone, but only on the special feast of Corpus Christi, and even then had closed her ears when the eucharist was administered.²⁶⁴ Orsetta’s behaviour—close to the Nicodemitic dissimulation but for once favourable to the Catholic Church—undid the ritual’s intended point and thereby proved the authorities’ powerlessness to mould beliefs by forcing outward conformity.²⁶⁵ Unintended receptions and contradictory appropriations were the norm in Venice’s system of political communication. At a time of crisis, however, the ²⁵⁹ Quoted in Muir 1981: 230. ²⁶⁰ Avviso dated 10.5.1606, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 245. ²⁶¹ Barbierato 2006, an important research which begins where this book stops; cf. Davidson 1992 and Dooley 1999a. ²⁶² Chronicle of G. Bianchi, in Guerrini 1930: 61–2 and Pirri 1959: 224. ²⁶³ Spontaneous processions also took place at other highly charged times, for example following the defeat of Agnadello in 1509, the earthquake of 1511, and the plague of 1576–77; see Dalla Santa 1916–17: 1553 and 1601; Cervelli 1974: 11–15 and 32; and Preto 1984: 76–89. ²⁶⁴ Dispatch dated 27.6.1606, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Padova, f. 3, cc. nn.; on her cf., p. 192. ²⁶⁵ Cf. Ginzburg 1970.

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clash of contrasting messages constituted a serious reason for disorder which the pamphlets ultimately contributed to nourishing rather than halting. It is likely that from the authorities’ point of view in both Venice and Rome, the situation became untenable as rumours escalated into violence. In the early months of 1607, while diplomats were trying to resolve the confrontation inside the Collegio, the tension mounted in the city outside. Members of the Spanish negotiators’ retinue became the object of threats, and the government had to pass special measures for their protection both in Venice and Padua.²⁶⁶ At the beginning of March, a riot broke out in the market area at San Lio when a parish priest and a pinseller spoke against the Republic, the latter apparently inspired by unspeciﬁed pamphlets.²⁶⁷ Meanwhile, various rumours began about a conspiracy to kill the doge, organized by some friars (as some said), or by undeﬁned foreigners (as others did). Whether based on fabrications, whispered revelations, or sincerely felt fears, such rumours revealed a state of anxiety which they in turn contributed to aggravate. As Antonio Querini recounted, they ‘were sufﬁcient to frighten the most intrepid’.²⁶⁸ The government feared that all communication was likely to increase tension, including that which was favourable to Venice. As the physician Gian Carlo Sivos noted, ‘by means of several guards, [the doge] made it known in various places, pharmacies and barbershops, that no one should dare to speak outside their due (straparlare) and insult the Spaniards’.²⁶⁹ Sivos’ detail on the location of the proclamations shows the widespread nature of the public which the government wished to silence. The authorities no doubt feared that violence would not just harm Venice’s enemies, but might also undermine public order. Certainly, several unknown and masked people disrupted the mass in two churches after Christmas.²⁷⁰ We do not know whether they meant to protest about a particular policy connected with the Interdict or whether they were revelling as part of the usual carnival festivities. It is likely that one intention informed the other, and that carnival gave political and religious tension a means of expressing itself outside the control of either the government or the Church. In an extreme response, the Ten prohibited all masks, bull races, and dancing ‘at home or anywhere in the streets’, at ﬁrst only for a few weeks in January, but later for ²⁶⁶ The governor of Padua, for example, prohibited masks because he felt that they may have provided a cover for ﬁghting against the Spaniards, dispatch of 18.1.1607, in ASV, Sen., Dispacci Padova, f. 3, cc. nn. Anti-Spanish violence was also mentioned in Venice in a letter dated 21.2.1607, in Canaye 1636, v. 3: 461. ²⁶⁷ Amongst other things, they reportedly said that it was sinful to attend mass and claimed that all senators were excommunicated, record of 5.3.1607, in ASV, CX, Criminali, f. 36, cc. nn.; cf. (on the priest only) Cornet 1873, v. 6: 110–11. ²⁶⁸ Querini, ‘Historia dell’escomunica’, in de Magistris 1941: 278. Similar rumours appear in a denunciation to the Ten in ASV, CX, Parti comuni, f. 259, cc. nn. (16.2.1607), and in a letter by the English ambassador of 22.9.1606, in Wotton 1907, v. 1: 364. ²⁶⁹ Gian Carlo Sivos’ chronicle, in BMV, Cod. Ital. VII.1818 (9436), c. 111v. ²⁷⁰ San Giovanni e Paolo and Santo Stefano, ASV, CX, Parti comuni, f. 259, cc. nn. (4.1.1607).

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the entire duration of carnival; eventually they allowed private balls—regulated elite occasions rather than public forms of revelry—for only the last three days of the season.²⁷¹ Meanwhile, in Rome too the authorities moved to restraining popular communication; for example, the pope had all street actors expelled on the grounds that ‘these were not times for such things, due to the Venetian troubles and the famine’.²⁷² Thus, it is no surprise that, after a year of confrontation, the conﬂict’s protagonists sought a compromise. French diplomats—who could not afford a division between the two powers Henri IV wished to rely upon in opposing the Habsburgs in Italy—worked especially hard to strike a deal between the pope and the Republic. Just as political communication concerning the Interdict was creating tensions in the public domain, the interest of princes channelled the controversy back into the realm of diplomacy. The controversy’s public dimension made ﬁnding an agreement imperative for the pope too, and in April 1607, Paul V at last lifted the interdict. Perhaps he realized that, as some pamphlets implied, it was better to compromise with an excommunicated government than to see his censure further deﬁed. Certainly, the papacy learnt a lesson, and 1606 was the last time it proclaimed a general interdict on a sovereign state. As the inquisitor of Venice wrote to cardinal Borghese immediately after the conﬂict’s resolution, ‘may I point out in all humility that, whatever happens in dealing any kind of negotiations . . . it is not convenient to publish here any new censure as absolute [as the Interdict], because it would produce contrary effects, due to people’s lack of devotion, the clergy’s unfaithfulness, and the power of rulers.’²⁷³ By most accounts, then, the deal was a victory for Venice, which maintained its property legislation and its right to prosecute ecclesiastics. Although the two imprisoned clergymen were handed over to Rome (indirectly, via the French ambassador, who then relinquished them to the pope), in the following few months the government prosecuted more.²⁷⁴ And yet, in so far as public communication was concerned, the government largely failed to capitalize on its success, perhaps because the ofﬁcial position adhered to throughout the controversy made it difﬁcult to turn a political victory into a narrative one. How could the Republic celebrate the end of a challenge whose very existence the government had never recognized? If peace making required communication, then that communication had to be as contained as possible. Coherently with the only mode of publication the Republic ever ofﬁcially recognized, the government issued an ofﬁcial proclamation, which paralleled the ²⁷¹ Printed proclamation dated 4.1.1607, enclosed in ASV, CX, Parti comuni, f. 259, cc. nn. (30.1 and 16.2.1607). Measures to repress carnival are also mentioned in: avviso dated 5.1.1607, in NA, SP 101/82; dispatch of 9.1.1607, in de Magistris 1906: 284; and in ‘Croniche veneziane dall’origine della città sino al 1616’, BL, Add. Ms. 8581, cc. 226r –v. ²⁷² Avviso of 28.10.1606, in BAV, Urb. Lat. 1074, c. 561v. ²⁷³ Letter dated 29.4.1607, in ASVat, FB III.131.c, c. 304, and cf. Savio 1955: 56–7n. ²⁷⁴ Savio 1955 and Cozzi 1958: 123.

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Protesto in both formality and ambiguity. The text avoided all mention of the interdict and limited itself to proclaiming the doge’s contento—happiness or contentment?—at renewed good relations with the pope. In fact, it did not announce the end of the interdict, but the withdrawal of the Protesto. And like the Protesto, it was addressed to the clergy rather than the laity.²⁷⁵ In blatant contradiction to the reality of the controversy, and going back to the Republic’s initial line, it was as if the rest of the population were alien to the whole matter. As could be expected, Venice’s ambiguities angered the pope, who strongly protested with foreign diplomats.²⁷⁶ Moreover, that which irritated Rome, failed to clarify the situation for countless other people. Venice’s ambiguities made it difﬁcult to impose a clear interpretation of the conﬂict, while professional informers circulated a large number of contrasting manuscript and printed accounts of the ﬁnal agreement.²⁷⁷ The confusion only increased as many of these documents employed the formal language of diplomacy, as if they had been ofﬁcial records. One newswriter went so far as to claim that the Republic had temporarily recognized the interdict in order to receive absolution and make peace easier.²⁷⁸ In just one phrase, he undid the government’s entire position throughout the previous twelve months and claimed victory for the pope. No doubt, the circulation of contrasting written accounts provided substance for further communication. The government prohibited, but could never stop, the former, while it could only have countered the latter with a strong public statement, or with more pamphlets. Instead, as senators and diplomats exchanged their last words before securing the deal, the government turned from publicity back to the secretive realm of diplomacy where, according to many, the confrontation should always have remained. When the Spanish intermediary took leave from the doge, the latter reassured him that Venice wished to be a good Catholic state. ‘True, at times there arise matters of jurisdictional contention [with the pope]’, Don`a added mentioning examples from France, Spain, and Savoy, ‘but this must not move him to exceed in his rigour, and he should deal with sweetness and negotiations, and thereby resolve everything without the danger of stirring the world.’²⁷⁹ In the doge’s mentality, at once pragmatic and elitist, conﬂict was a fact of politics and as such should be kept hidden from the public. When the diplomats who negotiated the ﬁnal agreement left the Ducal Palace, they were escorted not to the grand ‘Scala dei Giganti’ but to a back door—a symbolic move meant to downplay the event, but one which could ²⁷⁵ ∗ Leonardo Donato. Contrasting proposals were debated on 21.4.1607, see ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 16, cc. 28v –29. The Senate sent the proclamations to local governors, and reminded them that all forms of celebration were to be avoided, ibid., c. 29v. ²⁷⁶ Cf. de Vivo 2001b: 208–12. ²⁷⁷ Cf. Sarpi 1968: 423–4. e.g.: ∗ Neufville and Joyeuse, Instanza (both French and Italian, in a small 8◦ ), and ∗ Castro and Cardenas, Instance. ∗ Carrara, Reuer. come Fratello. ²⁷⁸ Avviso of Rome, 14.4.1607, in ASVat, SS, Avvisi, b. 3, c. 63v. ²⁷⁹ Audience of 26.4.1607, in ASV, Coll., Esposizioni Roma, r. 15, c. 118v.

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not unreasonably be exploited by Venice’s opponents as betraying the patricians’ fear at ‘the gathering of great crowds’.²⁸⁰ In similar fashion, in France the king wished to hail the agreement with ﬁreworks and public rejoicing, but in Venice’s territories the Senate prohibited all celebrations, processions, masses, even the ringing of bells.²⁸¹ In contrast to military victories, there would be no ceremony of rejoicing or celebratory publication. It was as if, at last disentangling itself from the controversy, the Republic wished to silence all public communication. ²⁸⁰ Malatesta, Relatione historica, in de Magistris 1941: 294–5. ²⁸¹ The Senate even debated whether it was feasible to have the Te Deum sung in churches on the mainland, ASV, Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, r. 16, c. 30 (21.4.1606); cf. Pin 1992–94: 145. Henri IV’s plans are discussed in the dispatch dated 25.4.1607, in ASV, Senato, Dispacci Francia, f. 37, c. 138.

Epilogue It is possible to build on the resolution of the Interdict conﬂict to reﬂect on the decades that followed. The end of the controversy may come as a disappointment, a return to political secrecy after a bold moment of public communication. Certainly, it has been described in precisely those terms by most historians of seventeenth-century Venice. In most accounts, the Interdict is the turning point of Venetian history, after which political decline began, an interpretation largely repeated in general works.¹ According to Bouwsma, the Interdict was the swansong of the Republic, after which Venice’s republicanism died only to gain new life elsewhere.² Moving from ideal to practical politics, Cozzi and Benzoni thought that the following years saw the fading of the Giovani’s inﬂuence and the rise of a self-interested, uninspiring ruling class dominated by conservatives and clerics, an age of decadence ‘not only economic, but also political, religious and moral’, ‘the world of the baroque’.³ It is unclear how so serious a fall could take place in so short a lapse of years, especially when we consider that the ups and downs typical of elective government continued to maintain patricians close to Sarpi in prominent positions, to the chagrin of the pope’s representatives in Venice.⁴ Although in the 1620s the philopapal Giovanni Corner was an inﬂuential doge, he was succeeded by the staunch anti-Roman Nicolò Contarini, and others of the same political inclination occupied positions of power throughout the 1630s. In spite of repeated attempts, the Jesuits, expelled during the Interdict, were only readmitted in 1657, and then only as a result of Venice’s need for international support during the war of Candia.⁵ Relations with Rome were regulated, as they had been before 1606, by continuous bargaining and compromises—in terms of policies, the Interdict was a temporary parenthesis rather than the climax of a long-term process.⁶ It is when we analyse political communication, however, that we realize just how important the Interdict’s temporary disruption was. One of the weaknesses of the decline interpretations derives from underestimating the radical break ¹ e.g. Lane 1973: 396–405; cf. also the chronology in Crouzet Pavan 2002: xxi. ² Bouwsma 1968. ³ Cozzi 1960 (the quotations from the reprint in Cozzi 1995b: 361); cf. Benzoni 1970 and 1991: 57, and Spini 1950. ⁴ Savio 1955, Seneca 1957; cf. the remarks in Grubb 1986: 58–9. ⁵ Cozzi 1992: 162. ⁶ Cf. Davidson 1997: 18.

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which the pamphlets caused in the Republic’s traditional line. The return to secret negotiations after the Interdict conformed to the government’s preferred policy before it—it was a moment of continuity, not the beginning of decline. More important than the ideals of the Giovani was the long-held aristocratic mentality excluding the majority from the sphere of government. The Senate waited at length before allowing printed publication, desperately attempted an alternative policy, and in the end contained as far as possible the number of texts which could be identiﬁed with the Republic. For a brief and unique time, then, and against strong internal opposition, a majority of senators allowed some of Venice’s supporters to turn to a policy of large-scale publication. But that was never the ofﬁcial line, which remained centred on the denial of the Monitorio and on the containment of the controversy. The government sponsored none of the small and cheap pamphlets, but continued to see the Protesto as its only ofﬁcial statement. It was the policy of third parties—authors and publishers—to produce pamphlets openly addressed to the many, and they were allowed to publish their works for a few months only. When the government at last managed to strike a deal with the papacy, it shifted away from printed publication and restored its control over political communication to the exclusion of outsiders. In the decades after the Interdict, the same effort at control was to manifest itself in other ways, with important consequences. In his classic history of censorship in Venice, Paul Grendler described the Interdict as the culmination of a long process of liberation of book production from inquisitorial encroachments. Cozzi criticized this view, pointing out the involution after the Interdict.⁷ In terms of sheer control—secular or ecclesiastical—in fact, we saw that the Interdict saw an increase rather than a relaxation of censorship, with the appointment of government-elected theologians. Then, in 1607 they forfeited their powers over preventive censorship, while the Inquisitor received his back, showing just how wrong the English ambassador had been when he enthusiastically saluted the Interdict special rules as the ‘the seeds of a great good’.⁸ Meanwhile, as Sarpi lamented, the Congregation of the Index bypassed the state’s police by approaching printers, booksellers, and readers through inquisitors, preachers, and confessors, insisting that books prohibited in Rome were to be avoided whether or not they were prohibited in Venice. As Sarpi complained in 1609, censorship was as strong in Venice as elsewhere in Italy.⁹ The government made it clear that it would defend readers of pro-Venetian pamphlets, but otherwise acquiesced with the Inquisition. In fact, although favouring the publication of works in defence of secular jurisdiction, Sarpi himself thought it inexpedient to object to the Inquisition’s prohibition of, for ⁷ P. Grendler 1977 and Cozzi 1979b. ⁸ See above, p. 214. ⁹ Letter dated 18.8.1609, in Sarpi 1931, v. 2: 46, and his remarks on the inquisitor’s devious means in Sarpi 1969: 593; cf. Ulvioni 1975. The same happened throughout the Venetian territories; e.g. letters to the mainland governors of 9 and 13.6.1607, in ASV, Coll., Lettere segrete, f. 44, cc. nn.

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example, Copernicus’ works ‘since it does not touch on the power of secular governments’.¹⁰ In terms of political publications too, however, negative controls increased more than positive statements. Sarpi’s point was the opposite of greater freedom: in 1615 he recommended that the secular censorship ought to be made more severe so as to prevent the publication of dangerous works.¹¹ This mentality had negative consequences on the public dimension of even potentially favourable political positions. For example, in 1609 James I of England sent all European rulers his Apologia pro iuramento ﬁdelitatis, a book which was meant to establish a common cause against papal encroachments and made explicit reference to the Venetian resistance against the Interdict. The government in Venice failed to build on James I’s proposal. Instead, it accepted the Inquisition’s condemnation and ratiﬁed the book’s prohibition. In the attempt to salvage ofﬁcial diplomatic communication, the Collegio formally thanked the ambassador presenting the book, but the book itself was locked in the Secreta, away from the eyes of politics’ outsiders. Wider political communication concerning the matter was to be prevented.¹² This response represents a shift between secret and public attitudes. Something which could be talked about inside the government’s restricted sphere was to be strictly prohibited outside. It was a position which made it impossible for the Republic to build on the gains of the Interdict. The formal and informal authority of Sarpi and his friends in the patriciate continued after the Interdict. But the level at which Sarpi’s inﬂuence manifested itself also shifted away from the public domain. Thanks to his ofﬁce, he continued to play an important role inside the government, and when he died, his friend and disciple Fulgenzio Micanzio was chosen as his successor. Sarpi’s own ofﬁcial writings were transcribed in large hard-bound volumes for consultation by future counsellors.¹³ Thus, it could be argued that the substance of Sarpi’s legacy was maintained as an ofﬁcial repository of wisdom—but this was to be so only in the secrecy of the archive. At the same time, initial plans for the erection of a public monument in the Servite church were dropped because the government found the issue too divisive and not worthy of an open confrontation with Rome.¹⁴ In effect, the Republic refrained from taking positive public positions on contentious political matters in general. The starkest sign of this change in attitude came some ten years after the Interdict, when Venice found itself again in the middle of a conﬂict which some contemporaries described as a ‘paper war’.¹⁵ ¹⁰ ‘Sopra un decreto della Congregazione in Roma in stampa’ (1616), in Sarpi 1969: 603–4. ¹¹ ‘Del vietare la stampa di libri perniciosi al buon governo’, in Sarpi 1958: 213–20. ¹² Cf. Frajese 1994: 347–59. ¹³ Pin 1986. ¹⁴ Micanzio 1974: 1411–12. ¹⁵ The expression ‘war of papers and legal reasons’ (guerra . . . di carte, ed allegazioni) is taken from Francesco Griselini’s eighteenth-century biography of Sarpi, Griselini 1750 in Sarpi 1763–68, v. 1: 106, but a variation of the metaphor was used at the time, for example by the jurist Claudio Cornelio Frangipane in a brief to the Senate: un’altra guerra, che le fanno i Dottori; brief dated 18.5.1616, in ASV, Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 7, cc. 142r –v.

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In 1615–17, at the same time as a war raged against the Austrian Habsburgs in the Friuli, some twenty pamphlets were published in Italy concerning Venice’s policy, whether in defence or support. They included works by the same authors who had been active against Venice during the Interdict. In particular, some pamphlets mounted a legal challenge to the Republic’s jurisdictional claims over the Adriatic, at just the same time as the Uskock pirates’ and Spanish military pressure combined to expose painfully the weakness of Venice’s actual maritime power.¹⁶ The overall number of pamphlets pales with that of the Interdict, and that in a controversy which lasted twice as long. What is more important, very few of them were published in Venice, and none had the government’s backing. Thus, in the 1610s, the Republic’s position was the reverse of the Interdict. While in 1606 the government eventually allowed a war in writing but abstained from military action, now it entered the military ﬁght but mostly shunned away from the literary battle. The government at last followed Machiavelli’s advice, which we saw at the beginning of the book: wielding the sword rather than the word. As the ambassador and prominent patrician Alvise Contarini was to put it in his relazione to the Senate in 1635, printing historical defences of the Adriatic jurisdiction was counterproductive. Venice was to defend her sea with ships, not books: ‘every occasion of discussing [the dominion of the sea] other than with the sword must be avoided’.¹⁷ And yet the Republic’s retreat into a haughty silence had far-reaching historical consequences to its own detriment. It was not under the walls of Gradisca, or in the victories and defeats on the Adriatic that the outcome of Venice’s reputation was determined, but in the verbal war which accompanied the political and military ﬁghting. This period witnessed the development of a large negative literature, an anti-myth which reversed the image of the perfect Republic in mirror-like fashion.¹⁸ Instead of challenging the offenders, as it had done during the Interdict, the government now preferred to silence the polemic through censorship and secrecy. In this way, the government tried to reassert its dominance against the proliferation of polemical writing, yet also deprived itself of the means of upholding its own image. A case in point is the anti-Venetian pamphlet Squitinio della libertà veneta, published in at least three editions in 1612 and then again in 1619.¹⁹ A stern attack on Venice’s self-proclaimed republican ideals, the Squitinio followed famous theorists like Jean Bodin to challenge the notion that the Republic was a mixed state, but went one step further to argue that Venice’s oligarchy was both overly authoritarian and ineffectual. For all the talk of freedom in the Republic, neither the citizens nor the sovereign were free, especially because Venice was surrounded by stronger neighbours with greater claims to authority (like the Habsburg emperors). The Squitinio was to become the gravest indictment of the Venetian constitution, endlessly quoted by all the authors of the anti-myth ¹⁶ Cf. Battistella 1918, Camera 1937, de Vivo 2003. ¹⁷ Quoted in de Vivo 2003: 176. ¹⁸ Del Negro 1984: 407–24; cf. Zanetto 1991. ¹⁹ Squitinio.

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throughout the century.²⁰ To answer would have meant confronting some of the most contentious points in the structure of Venetian governance, and accordingly the Squitinio received no serious response in Venice.²¹ In contrast with the government’s retreat into silence, the period following the war saw an increase in the ebullience of the political arena. We have already seen an instance of this shift in ambassador Ottaviano Bon’s leak of his relazione in 1619, nourishing discussions and oppositional allegations as part of radical factional confrontations over the conduct of foreign policy.²² The peace negotiations gave reasons for ﬁerce polemics in Venice and elsewhere. Newswriters referred to heated debates, disapproving rumours, and pasquinades ridiculing the Republic’s weakness.²³ Abroad, printed pamphlets described the treaty as a sell-out, a sign of Venice’s decline.²⁴ Even as Bon was writing his relazione, others resorted to the printing press. At the end of 1617 a bookseller was arrested for selling a short history of the wars which had just ended, published against the law under a false name and imprint—not unlike many of the Interdict pamphlets. By no means a pro-Spanish text, the short Guerre d’Italia criticized Venice’s weak conduct of both the military confrontations and the diplomatic negotiations.²⁵ As Sarpi remarked, it related facts which were true but better hidden, combining a generally positive account with a few very damaging details which ought to have been censored.²⁶ The inquiry traced the publication to a printer, Zuanne Alberti, and to a patrician, Alessandro Bondumier, who was likely the source of most of the reserved information contained in the book (including precise movements of troops, ofﬁcers’ letters, and ambassadors’ dispatches).²⁷ The Council of Ten imprisoned and tortured both. The printer was to serve two years in jail. Bondumier was freed, but perhaps only because torture had punished him enough, especially given his weak physical state—he died soon after.²⁸ These are chilling details surrounding the government’s wish to stop all public communication concerning its policies. Rather than publishing its own line, the government busied itself preventing (unsuccessfully) the leaking of information. At ﬁrst, Sarpi himself was asked to ²⁰ e.g. Amelot 1677. ²¹ Cf. Cozzi’s editorial remarks in Sarpi 1969: 614–22. ²² See section 2.2 above. ²³ Avvisi dated 19 and 26.8, 2 and 30.9 and 2.12.1617, in ASV, IS, b. 704, fasc. 4, cc. nn. An anonymous newsletter dated 26.8.1617 containing news of a pasquinade was communicated by the Ten to the Collegio on 31.8.1617, in ASV, Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 8, cc. 180–4. ²⁴ e.g. Castellani 1619. ²⁵ Emigliani 1617: 76–86 and 91 (concerning the negotiations), 28–9, 37–8, 43, 49, and 53–4 (on the war’s conduct). According to Melzi 1848–9, v. 1: 355, it was also published in Latin. ²⁶ ‘Sommario di un libretto intitolato Guerre d’Italia’, in Sarpi 1969: 1056, 1058. ²⁷ Bondumier and the printers Zuanne and Oliviero Alberti were arrested respectively on 23.12.1617 and 22.1.1618, ASV, CX, Parti criminali, b. 44, cc. nn. The inquiry’s records are missing, but the information supplied here may help establish this text’s authorship, a task which has not been attempted until now. ²⁸ Entries 12 and 19.6.1618, ibid., b. 45, cc. nn. Bondumier’s bad physical condition is described ibid., b. 44, entries dated 14.2 and 23.2.1618.

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write a text to append to the publication of the 1617 treaty. It is a striking example of the ambiguities which publishing forced over sensitive information. As Sarpi explained there, ‘my aim has been to say the truth, but avoiding those details which are better covered by silence’. And yet, the government was so concerned about the possible effects of Sarpi’s text that the Senate sent it to ambassadors abroad in manuscript but left it unpublished in Venice.²⁹ In 1618, Sarpi published anonymously and without any publication data, a history of the events up to 1612 which was strongly critical of Venice’s enemies. Although the work successfully underwent several editions, the government never sponsored or licensed its publication, and Sarpi had to give up plans of taking the narrative to the most recent events (and notably to the peace negotiations).³⁰ It is no coincidence that when expressing the most forceful defence of the Venetian dominion over the Adriatic sea, Sarpi put it in the mouth of a lawyer from ﬁve decades previously as a speech given at the time of a past encounter with representatives of the Habsburgs. What Sarpi had to couch in such indirect terms—as an old document supposedly drawn from an archive rather than a current statement, ofﬁcial or otherwise—had a greater success abroad than at home, since extracts of his text were printed in English in the 1650s, obviously after being smuggled out of Venice in manuscript.³¹ In this situation, censorship over public news only augmented widespread curiosity for reserved information, hence the success of the pseudonymous history authored by Bondumier, and the swift circulation of Bon’s relazione. Other elements which we now regard as classic expressions of the anti-myth—from the Spanish ambassador’s report of 1618, to the Opinione falsely attributed to Sarpi—similarly at ﬁrst circulated in manuscript as real or ﬁctional leaks, and were printed only later.³² While the government favoured silence, the political arena thrived with a variety of contrasting allegations; while the government maintained a façade of unanimity, all of these texts pointed to disagreements inside the patriciate. The paradox of the government’s preoccupation with public communication was that the government halted publications directed to the subjects at large but could not prevent the political arena from expressing itself. A history of the anti-myth’s reception in Venice’s wider public still has to be written, but we can guess that people in pharmacies and barbershops could hardly be impressed. If after the Interdict the government was reluctant to express itself publicly concerning current political events, the same went for past ones. In the sixteenth ²⁹ ‘Scrittura per metter in publico la trattazione di pace’ (1617), in Sarpi 1969: 1051. Sarpi’s text was sent to ambassadors abroad and is ﬁled amongst the letters sent by the Ten to ambassadors in France, under the date 26.9.1617, in ASV, CCX, Dispacci ambasciatori e residenti, b. 11, after c. 230. ³⁰ Cozzi 1964: 439–54 and Sarpi 1969: 439–52. ³¹ A translation of Sarpi 1965: 93–107 (from the Supplimento), in Selden 1652: 19–32. ³² On the former see Raulich 1898; on the latter Cozzi 1995b: 363–6, and now Raines 2006a.

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century, ofﬁcial historians had enabled the largely coherent constitution of a corpus of favourable historiography which was one of the pillars of Venice’s cherished image.³³ In the early seventeenth century and for a long time, this was no longer so. The exemplary case of the government’s reluctance to be associated with printed publications was the history of the Interdict controversy itself. As Sarpi saw it, once the publication of polemical pamphlets stopped, history was to play a major role in the confrontation. He began working on one immediately after the controversy drew to a close. As he wrote in 1608, ‘nothing is more necessary than manifesting to the world the truth of the past affair, because our enemies follow their ancestors’ example in fabricating false documents and publishing them whenever they think it useful.’³⁴ Some close to the government held similar beliefs. Notably, the ambassador returning from France, Piero Priuli, commissioned a relatively obscure Frenchman to write a ponderous history of Venice including a substantial last section about the Interdict.³⁵ Dedicated to the king of France it was published in January 1608, and the doge owned a manuscript translation of the Interdict section.³⁶ Sarpi offered to provide the famous French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou with a detailed report on which the latter could base his account.³⁷ In the relazione he delivered on his return from France, Priuli defended the plan before the Senate.³⁸ Resistance to publication made it very difﬁcult to turn the Interdict into a politically useful public memory. Sarpi never sent de Thou his report. This could not have been, as has been argued, because he disapproved of the latter’s rapprochement with the Jesuits since 1610, because a few years later Sarpi still thought of letting de Thou have the report.³⁹ As Sarpi himself explained, cauzione was necessary, because opposition from inside the government itself made publishing difﬁcult, a point to which he was to return again in later years.⁴⁰ When he gave the report to his political ally Agostino Nani to bring to Paris, Sarpi recommended that the report be translated into French and published under a pseudonym and with maximum secrecy.⁴¹ Eventually, Nani abandoned the project, and Sarpi’s history was published only after his death, and ³³ On ofﬁcial historians, see Cozzi 1963, Gaeta 1980, and Benzoni 1982. ³⁴ Letter dated 27.5.1608 in Sarpi 1931, v. 1: 15; and cf. his letters of 2.5 and 6.6.1607 in Sarpi 1961: xxxiv –xxxv, 168. ³⁵ Priuli’s relazione in Barozzi and Berchet 1856–78, series 2, v. 1: 286–7. There is no trace of this commission in Priuli’s dispatches, perhaps because he wanted to present the Senate with a fait accompli. ³⁶ Fougasse 1608; evidence of the doge’s interest in this work is in an extract in MCV, Ms. Donà 453.5. ³⁷ Busnelli 1986: 3–30; and Ulianich 1961: ic–cvii. ³⁸ Priuli’s relazione in Barozzi and Berchet 1856–78, series 2, v. 1: 286. ³⁹ Busnelli 1986: 22–3; Ulianich 1961: civ–cvi. ⁴⁰ Letters to Groslot of 27.5.1608, 3.2 and 27.4.1610, in Sarpi 1931, v. 1: 14, 110 and 120; cf. Sarpi’s opinion in 1621 in Sarpi 1969: 1178. ⁴¹ Letter dated 8.6.1610, in Sarpi 1961: 169.

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outside Venice.⁴² When, Fulgenzio Micanzio, Sarpi’s successor, suggested that Sarpi’s history be published together with the ofﬁcial history written by Andrea Morosini, the government rejected that advice.⁴³ In the end, the relevant passages in Morosini’s work were to constitute the only history of the controversy ever to obtain the government’s licence. This version downplayed the Interdict as a momentary parenthesis in the otherwise good relations between Venice and the papacy, one which was better forgotten than remembered. It also of course criticized the pamphlets’ role in widening the conﬂict’s impact and public. There seems to be a connection between Morosini’s criticism of the pamphlets and his own disregard for reaching a wide readership. Unlike both his predecessors and successors, he wrote his own history in Latin.⁴⁴ When Morosini died, Nicolò Contarini succeeded him as ofﬁcial historian. A strong supporter of opposition to the papacy during the Interdict, he took the narrative back to 1597, perhaps partly because he wished to cover the conﬂict. He never reached it, however, having to interrupt his work at 1604, and in the end he abandoned the prospect of publishing his work. When Contarini’s heirs tried to publish the chapters which he had ﬁnished, the government censors, on the recommendation of two consultori in iure, prohibited publication and instead decreed that the work was to be deposited in the Council of Ten’s secret archive in exchange for a small reward.⁴⁵ The failure to publish Sarpi’s and Contarini’s histories is not just a reﬂection of their group’s decline. Clearly, there was in Venice a more general problem with the communication of recent political events in general. In spite of repeated attempts, no ofﬁcial history was published after Morosini’s until Giovambattista Nani’s of 1662. There, however, the narrative stopped at 1644, on the eve of the long and eventually lost war in Crete, another event which, for good reasons, it would have been difﬁcult to recount.⁴⁶ The paradox was of course that, while the government retreated to its traditional policy of secrecy, the events of 1606–7 could not be forgotten. The Republic’s ofﬁcial position contrasted with the proliferation of political discussion both in the political arena and amongst ordinary people too. In 1622 the governor of Verona wrote a letter to the Inquisitors of State. He recounted being accosted frequently by a local clergyman, who promised to reveal important political secrets (raccordi di stato). The governor refused to pay him any attention. ‘In all his talk, he promises to make reports and revelations about important things, but in the event he slightly changes his words but always recounts the same story, namely that during the Interdict it was he who turned the pope’s soul to the Republic’s favour.’ According to the governor, the clergyman’s revelations proved both groundless and useless. As the governor commented, ‘the only secret I discovered is the confusion in his brain’, such that ⁴² Letter dated 25.9.1612, in Sarpi 1931, v. 1: 243. ⁴³ Cozzi 1958: 226n. ⁴⁴ On Morosini’s history, see Benzoni 1982: xxxv –xxxix and Trebbi 1993. ⁴⁵ Cozzi 1958: 197–227. ⁴⁶ Benzoni 1982: xliii.

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‘in short one can conclude that he is a virtuous lunatic’ (un matto virtuoso).⁴⁷ Some ﬁfteen years after the end of the Interdict, memory of the events was clearly not extinguished but continued to nourish some people’s actions and talk, even though the government refused to listen to opinions which it dismissed as follies. If there was a gap between the authorities and the subjects, it was not necessarily the latter which found themselves closer to the pope, as many historians have imagined. The same conclusion can be drawn from other cases. Only a few years earlier, a patrician was accused of heresy before the Inquisition. Amongst other things, such as refusing to fast on Fridays, he had afﬁrmed that ‘Roman pontiffs are pigherds and goatherds’—an insult which, as we have seen, an anonymous cartello had employed against the Republic’s governor during the Interdict—and that their excommunication ‘is nothing’.⁴⁸ When hearing the case, Agostino Nani, the secular magistrate who oversaw the Inquisition’s work hastened to defend his fellow patrician. There was no heretical intent in his words, he said, but only (again) some confusion in his brain, and he was known to be ‘not completely sane of mind’. Nani was, as it happens, a prominent patrician, ambassador to Rome at the beginning of the Interdict and one of those who had most ﬁercefully opposed appeasement with the pope. Ten years later, however, in order to rescue a peer, he was ready to abandon some of the Interdict’s ideal positions.⁴⁹ Similarly, a friar detained for apostasy was heard saying ‘keep your religion’ (Tioga la tua religione) and adding that, ‘were the pope to excommunicate him a thousand times, [the friar] would not obey him’. In line with the dynamics of communication we have seen throughout this book, the witnesses included some apothecaries and a shoemaker.⁵⁰ But the Republic was no longer willing to exploit the radical criticism of spiritual authorities. More than a decade after the Interdict, in February 1618 and once again at a time of carnival, the Senate received a report from the governors of Capodistria. In the small nearby village of Pinguente, a crowd of revellers had assailed a young deacon, known as il papa. ‘Having eaten and drunk more than is customary, with unashamed dance and clamours’, they had seized him from his house and, ‘making reference to this nickname as ‘‘the Pope’’,’ put him on a mock throne. They then paraded him to the parish church, accompanied by pipes and banging some large keys on a plate, all the time calling him ironicamente ‘Your Beatitude’, ‘Pope’. Finally, they gave the deacon the keys and an iron helmet ‘to signify the kingdom of the world’, put fake donkey’s ears on his head and sat him on a real donkey, bearing large posters inscribed ‘Paolo Quinto’ and ‘This is the pope’s ⁴⁷ Dispatch dated 26.1.1622, in ASV, IS, b. 357, cc. nn. ⁴⁸ Denunciation by Zan Nicolò Piccinin, 8.10.1616, in ASV, SU, b. 71, ‘Cristoforo Canal, per bestemmie’, cc. nn.; cf. above, p. 194. ⁴⁹ Entry dated 13.10.1616, ibid. ⁵⁰ Denunciation by Bartolomeo Frigerio, 3.1.1620, in ASV, SU, b. 75, ‘Fra Gregorio Nicolich’, cc. nn.

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horse’.⁵¹ Thus, in line with the law of unintended consequences which, as we have seen, dominated all forms of public political communication, a popular charivari was couched in the same terms as the Republic’s slogans during the Interdict controversy. Removed from the government’s ofﬁcial history, the memory of the Interdict remained alive in Venice’s unruly communication, an element nourishing discussions and no doubt contributing to widespread criticism of political certainties and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Words, as Sarpi knew, were powerful weapons indeed, but—as he also knew—‘weapons are easily taken up, but laid down only with difﬁculty, and wars begin in one place, but end up elsewhere’.⁵² ⁵¹ File in ASV, Coll., Comunicate del CX, f. 8: 324–27; also, descriptions in the dispatch of 24.2.1618, in Sen., Deliberazioni Roma ordinaria, f. 40, cc. nn.; and in the dispatches of 7 and 21.3.1618, in Sen., Dispacci Provveditori di terra e di mar, f. 340, cc. nn. ⁵² Sarpi 1965: 141.

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Index Abioso, Camillo 205 academies 79, 94, 95, 101 Adriatic, controveries over dominion of 53, 79 251–4 ambassadors, see diplomacy archives, governmental 48–54, 59, 251, 254, 256 establishment of 48–9 disorder of 49 use of, during 1606–7 Interdict 162–3 archives, private 54–7, 58–9 Agostino Valier 20, 23, 24 Alberti, Oliviero, printer 253 Alberti, Zuanne, printer 253 Alessandri, Nicolò, notary and scrivener 124 Amelot de La Houssaie, Abraham-Nicolas 27, 253 Ammirato, Scipione 114 Anderson, Benedict 230 Andrusi, Angela 192 apothecaries 97, 106, 107–8, 109, 257 see also pharmacies apprentices 97, 104, 110, 190 Aquinas, St Thomas 170, 206 Aretino, Pietro 137 Ariosto, Ludovico 137 Arrigoni, Francesco 27 arsenal 103 Artusi, Polonia 83, 116, 125 Asolo 113 Austin, John L. 175 avvisi, see newswriters and newswriting Avogadori di Comun 29, 34, 130 Badoer, Alberto 55 Badoer, Angelo 55, 73, 104, 109, 181, 210, 211, 212 bakers 230, 240 Bakhtin, Mikhail 121 Bandello, Matteo 133 Barbarano, Lepido, apothecary 190 Barbarano, Valerio, apothecary 178 Barbarigo, Andrea 90 Barbaro, Ermolao 22, 43 Barbaro, Francesco, patriarch of Aquileia 34, 179, 210, 240 Barberini, Maffeo, nuncio in France, see Urban VIII

barbers and barbershops 89, 98–106, 126, 143–6, 156, 190, 239, 245 Baronio, Cesare 137, 177, 208, 213, 215, 218, 228, 234 Bartoli, Giovanni, lawyer 125 Bartolo, oarsman 110 Battaglia, Alvise 74 Bedell, William 92 Bedmar, Alonso de la Cueva, Marquis of 52, 62, 73, 77, 78, 83, 94, 103–4, 109, 110, 116, 126, 254 beggars 109, 154 Bellarmino, Roberto 137, 168, 176, 208, 213, 215, 216, 223, 227, 234, 235 Bellman, Beryl 45 Belsamini, Antonio 134 Belsamini, Antonio, (printer) 134 Bembo, Giovanni 180 Bembo, Pietro 24, 57 Benedetti, Francesco, (priest) 240 Benedetti, Giacomo, (priest) 239, 240, 241 Beni, Giacomo, notary 93 Benzoni, Gino 202, 249 Berengo, Andrea 90 Bergamo 80, 150, 220, 222 Bergonzi, Nadalin, (priest) 146 Berlin 58 Bernard, St 205 Bernieri, Girolamo, (cardinal) 205 Biscacciante, Alvise, (physician) 67, 68, 101 blasphemy 136–7, 140, 154, 239 Boccalini, Traiano 42, 46, 142, 154 Bodin, Jean 252 Bodù, Gilberto, (jeweller) 111 Bollani, Domenico 74, 182 Bologna 82, 103, 191, 220, 230, 239, 242 Bon family 69 Bon, Alessandro 67 Bon, Filippo 67, 68 Bon, Ottaviano 30, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 85, 86, 101, 139, 141, 146, 253, 254 Bondumier, Alessandro 253, 254 Bonicelli, Michelangelo, (friar) 190 Boniface VIII, (Pope) 235 Bonifacio, Baldassarre 49 Bontempelli, Bartolomeo, (mercer) 95, 96 shop at the Chalice 95, 96 books of secrets 125, 182

302

Index

booksellers and bookshops 94–5, 97, 223, 240, 253 Boorstin, Daniel 183 Borghese, family 131 Borghese, Scipione, (cardinal) 179, 183, 204, 208, 217, 246 Borsetto, Andrea, (barber) 101 Bortolotto, Piero, (priest) 144, 145, 146, 154 Botero, Giovanni 15, 28, 143, 156, 161 Bouwsma, William J. 201, 249 Bozza, Antonio, (clerk of the Vicenza council) 178 bozzoli 92, 93, 123, 155 Braudel, Fernand 6, 52 Brescia 177, 189, 190, 196, 223 posted texts in 194–5, 207, 243 preaching in 188 printing in 220 processions in 244 reading of pamphlets in, during 1606–7 Interdict 179, 240 Brescia, (prostitute) 192 broglio 47, 48, 89, 90, 123, 139, 140, 200 brokers (senseri) 93, 96, 97, 108–9, 110 of spices 12 Brown, Rawdon 61 Bruno, Giordano 94, 142 Buoni, Tommaso 98 Burano 115, 230, 236 Burckhardt, Jakob 14 Cadena, Valerio, (nurse) 126 Caimo, Pompeo 44 Calbo, Antonio 99, 125 Canal, Cristoforo da 257 Canaye de Fresne, Philippe, (French ambassador) 20, 158, 174, 177, 189, 192, 200, 211, 219, 238, 246 Canini 21, 22 Capella, Claudio 177 Capello, Marcantonio 231, 237 Capodistria 257 Carbone, Lodovico, (teacher) 20 Cardenas, Inigo de, (Spanish ambassador) 211 Carleton, Sir Dudley, (English ambassador) 71, 72, 205 Carnevale, Ottavio, (newswriter and scrivener) 93, 124 Carnevali, Innocenzo, (benedictine friar) 182 carnival 132, 245–6, 257–58 carpenters 126 cartelli, see posted texts Casati, Gasparo, (merchant) 93 Castelli, Zuanne, (exchange broker) 94, 155 Castiglione 20, 24 Castorio, Bernardino, (jesuit) 165

Castro, Francisco de, (Spanish ambassador) 247 Cattani, Domenico, (swordmaker) 83 Cavadenti, Alessandro, (tooth-surgeon) 99, 105, 106, 115 Censori 26, 29 censorship of book imports 80 of comunicazione 33–6, 162–3 of manuscript newsletters 84, 103, 186, 185–7 of news 84, 251–4 of printed books 134, 200–1, 250–1, 256 of printed books, during 1606–7 Interdict 206, 213–15, 218–19 of private communication 40, 44, 164–5, 179, 245 of private letters 179 ofﬁcial publications excluded from 129 permessi taciti 218–19 see also Index of prohibited books, Index, Congregation of Cerutti, Angelo 92, 103, 104 chandlers 106, 112 charlatans 93, 107, 116, 242 Chartier, Roger 221 Cherini, Alvise, (secretary of the Senate) 210 Chiocco, Andrea, (physician of Verona) 226 Chioggia 179, 182 Christian from Lorraine, (pedlar) 111 Church-State relations 38, 157–9 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 22, 23, 65 Cinque savi alla mercanzia 51 Ciotti, Giovan Battista, (publisher and bookseller) 94, 220, 222 Città di Verona a i lettori, La 196–7 cittadini 4, 5, 21, 44, 50, 87, 90 civic ritual 27, 113, 173–6, 231 compared with pamphlets 230–1, 232 see also processions cleaners 83, 116, 178 government clerks 44, 51–2, 57, 106, 182, 196 see also guards coffeehouses 98, 105–6 Coleman, Joyce 123 Collegio 49, 51, 53, 56, 59, 64, 65, 72, 251 control over debates in the Senate 30–2 and comunicazione 33, 35, 36, 37–40 and 1606–7 Interdict 160, 161, 162, 165, 175, 179, 182, 191, 196, 204, 206, 209, 211, 213, 214, 223, 224, 245 diplomatic audiences in 10, 18, 22, 37–8, 71, 77 real winner of 1582 reform 42 Colluraﬁ, Antonino 19, 23, 48

Index Colonna, Ascanio, (cardinal) 205, 208 comandatori, (towncriers) 128–31, 132, 134, 137, 196–7 Comino, Bartolomeo, (secretary of the Inquisitors of State) 101 Comitoli, Paolo 207 commedia dell’arte and street-theatre 152, 155, 236, 246 commoners excluded from government 44, 87–8 factionalism and partisanship amongst 92–3 participation in political communication 89–119 Commynes, Philippe de 31, 41, 75, 87 communication deﬁned 2–3 history of 13–15 sources for the study of 8–12, 18, 24, 82, 85, 92, 112, 118, 152–5, 189, 239 see also debating in councils; laughter and ridicule; legal system as subject of discussion; manuscript circulation; ofﬁcial publication; posted texts; preaching and sermons; processions as subject of discussion; readers and reading; rumours; urban exchange of news; wars as subject of discussion comunicazione 4, 5, 19, 32, 33, 36, 180 during Interdict crisis of 1606–7 36, 38, 161–2, 163 confession 250 conﬁdenti: see professionals of information confraternities 5, 44, 174 conspiracies 33, 34, 35, 141, 173, 245 conspiracy of 1618 93, 97 Constantinople 19, 63, 82 consultori in iure 53–4, 162–3, 180, 213, 256 Contarini, Alvise 252 Contarini, Gasparo 5, 25, 26, 38, 42, 44, 87, 128, 229 Contarini, Nicolò (q. Zan Gabriel) 29, 36, 134, 249, 256 Contarini, Nicolò (q. Giovan Battista) 67 Contarini, Zorzi 67 convents 53, 114, 131, 176–9, 188, 190, 191 Copernicus, Nicolaus 251 Corfu 11 Cornaro (Corner), Caterina 113 Corner family 213 Corner, Giacomo 182 Corner, Giovanni 249 Corner, Girolamo 91 Corner, Zorzi 67 Coryat, Thomas 10, 27, 47, 88, 92, 107, 115 Cotrugli, Benedetto 90, 111

303

Council of Ten 25, 31, 40, 44, 50, 83, 101, 114, 253 and 1606–7 Interdict 161, 162, 165, 182 and censorship 201, 253 and comunicazione 32, 37 and inquiry about 1591 Paternoster circulation 141, 143, 151 and regulation of council debates 29 and retrieval of information 33–7, 80, 96 and secrecy 41–2, 49, 57, 59, 84 reform of (1582) 32, 34, 41–2, 48 reform of (1628) 36 Council of Trent 122 couriers 52–3, 84, 104, 179, 239 courtesans 116, 133, 138 Cozzi, Gaetano 7, 33, 202, 238, 249, 250 Crasso, Nicolò 218 Crema 77, 178 Cremona 150, 191, 195, 240 Croce, Giulio Cesare 117 curiosity 67, 68, 81, 107, 110, 124, 144, 145, 194, 200, 222, 223, 232, 233, 243, 254 Da Lezze, Andrea 67, 68 Dal Bello, Antonio, (ironmonger) 91 Dal Sasso, Lorenzo 239 Daniele from Verona, (oarsman) 110 Darnton, Robert 12, 122, 185 Davis, Natalie Zemon 86, 129 debating in councils eloquence and 19–25 freedom of speech and 28–9 problems with sources 18–9, 22–3, 43–4 rarity of, in the Great Council 25–26 spatial disposition of 31 time constraints over 31 and voting procedures 25–6 see also Senate De Bachi, Vincenzo, (apothecary) 103 De Dominis, Marcantonio 125, 226 De Monti, Gregorio, (secretary of the English embassy) 81, 89 De Vera de la Roca, Juan Antonio, (Spanish ambassador) 46, 75 De Vera y Aragon, Francisco, (Spanish ambassador) 27, 72, 75, 142, 182 Del Bene, Agostino 230 Della Casa, Giovanni 20, 128 Denores, Giason 21 Deutsch, Karl 4 diplomacy Venetian network of 19, 35, 37, 51, 54–5, 57–8, 64, 162, 211–12, 219, 254 foreign ambassadors residing in Venice: 10, 18, 20, 27, 31, 38, 46, 60–2, 70–4,

304

Index

diplomacy (cont.) 75, 89–90, 99, 105, 123–4, 143–4, 173, 177, 203–4 other diplomatic representatives 71, 89, 143–4, 145–6, 230 and sociability 72–4 discussed in newsletters 184 see also relazioni, Collegio, diplomatic audiences in doge, doges 28, 29, 33, 37, 38, 128, 168, 205, 208, 230 eloquence of 24 election of 43 inﬂuence of 33 Dolﬁn family 138 Dolﬁn, Nicolò 133 Donà family 58, 59, 205 Donà, Antonio 69 Donà, Leonardo 38, 42, 55, 80, 255 accused of heresy 161, 188 accused of seeking excessive power 24, 208 and 1606–7 Interdict 157, 161, 171, 180, 181, 205, 206, 229, 247 and civic ritual 173–4 and rhetoric 23, 24 and secrecy 42 and urban exchange of news 95–6 as owner of manuscripts 58–60, 255, 185, 188 ridiculed in posted texts 194 Donà, Nicolò 30, 40, 203 Dooley, Brendan 81 Duodo, Piero 59, 177, 184 Dve lettere vna ... della Republica di Genova alla Repvblica di Venetia 222, 228 England and Venetian foreign policy 251 civil wars in 2, 200, 214 informers working in the service of 75, 205 Parliament in 18 price of cheap literature in 226 printed newsletters in 80–1 professionals of information in 13, 75 epigraphy 131 Esecutori alla bestemmia 51, 73, 96 Fabri, Francesco, chaplain 93 factionalism and partisanship 40 amongst friars 190 outside elites 92–3 popular 110, 117–18, 144 see also patricians, divisions amongst Falier, Francesco 116 Falier, Marino 138, 141, 173 false news 107, 183, 192–3, 204

see also pseudoevents Farge, Arlette 119 Feltre 133, 187 Ferdinand of Habsburg 64, 69 Ferrara 177, 178, 220 Finlay, Robert 7 Fioravanti, Leonardo 98, 101, 107, 242 Fioretto della Bibbia 226 Firpo, Massimo 138 ﬁshermen 91, 121, 141, 230, 236, 239 Florence 44, 60, 116, 137, 158, 220 Florio, John 9, 48, 92 ﬂowersellers 191 Fogel, Michèle 130, 131 Fonte, Moderata 114 forgeries of diplomatic documents 247 of relazioni 61 of senatorial speeches 56–7 Foscarini, Marco 61 Fougasse, Thomas 255 France and Venetian foreign policy 64–5, 204–5, 246, 248 anti-Spanish pamphleteering 1603–6 230 Fronde 2, 200, 214 informers in the service of 77, 78 Parlements 18 parliamentary polemics (1612–15) 230, 231 professionals of information in 13, 75 wars of religion 2, 6, 77, 81, 142, 158, 200, 233 Franco, Nicolò 137 Frangipane, Cornelio 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 76 Frangipane, Claudio Cornelio 54, 251 Frankfurt bookfair 221 Frederick I Barbarossa, (emperor) 173 friars 123, 130, 170, 171, 178, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 239, 245, 257 Frigerio, Bartolomeo, (friar) 257 Fumaroli, Marc 23 Gabriel, Alvise 74 Gaetani, Bonifacio, (cardinal) 208 Gaetano, Alvise, (mosaic craftsman) 11, 92 Galilei, Galileo 175, 191 Gallo, Ettore 190 gambling 73, 95, 102, 104, 115 Garzoni, Gian Giacomo 126 Garzoni, Tommaso 53, 98, 102, 103, 107, 109, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133 Gelmini, Francesco, (scrivener and newswriter) 82, 83 Geneva 167, 236 Genoa 44, 47

Index Gerson, Jean 204, 205, 206, 208, 209 Gertrud, St 221 Gessi, Berlingerio, (papal nuncio in Venice), 24, 54, 73, 74, 76, 95 Giannotti, Donato 44, 87, 153 Ginzburg, Carlo 8, 15, 160, 201 Giolito publishers 201 Giosi, Angelo, pigment seller 110 Giovan Francesco, scrivener 60 Giovani 159, 173, 180, 208, 211–12, 249, 250 Giunti publishing ﬁrm 220 Giustinian, Bernardo see Giustiniani, Bernardo Giustinian, Giovanni 133 Giustinian, Girolamo 29 Giustiniani, Bernardo 22 Gobbo di Rialto 130, 137–41 Goldoni, Carlo 106 government structure, and communication 32–3 see Avogadori di Comun, Censori, censorship, Collegio, comunicazione, Council of Ten, debating in councils, Doge, Esecutori alla Bestemmia, Great Council, Riformatori dello Studio di Padova, Senate Gradisca 36, 252 grafﬁti 140–1, 194–5, 196 Granzino, Alessandro 62, 63, 76, 78, 79, 83, 104 Great Council 5, 33, 34, 36, 37 described as popular element of constitution 5 and comunicazione 32 and 1582 reform 32, 34, 41–2 and 1606–7 Interdict 162, 208, 213, 230 reading in 68, 130 rhetoric in 23, 25 as ritual stage 26–7 and debating 25–7, 31 Greco, Giorgio, (publisher in Vicenza) 200 Gregory XIII, (pope) 84 Grendler, Paul 250 Griselini, Francesco 251 Gritti, Piero 46, 65, 67, 69 Gualdo, Emilio 177 Gualdo, Paolo 121, 177–8 guards 51, 83, 97, 165, 171, 172, 178, 195, 241 guilds 5, 13, 44, 87, 114–15 of printers and booksellers 220–1 Gussoni, Vincenzo 64 Habermas, Jürgen 13, 14, 98, 103, 118, 119 Habsburg archdukes of Austria 36, 64, 82, 252

305

Harrington, James 27 Henri IV, king of France 142, 211, 246, 248 heresy 160, 161, 168, 190, 195, 197 accusations of, against the government 161, 188, 198, 200, 208, 227, 229, in the Venetian Republic 95, 98, 150, 239, 257 and books 122 Hobbes, Thomas 135, 232 Holy Ofﬁce, Congregation of the 10, 34, 95, 98, 112, 122, 161, 168, 198, 207, 209, 210, 221, 222, 239, 251 in Venetian territories 80, 122, 134, 142, 150, 177, 201, 213–14, 235, 239, 246, 250, 257 hospital workers 126 Hume, David 13 illiteracy 51–2, 109, 112, 122, 179 Index of prohibited books 205, 207, 222, 235 Index of prohibited books, Congregation of the 205, 207, 220, 250 Infelise, Mario 81 information, see false news, leaking, leaks, newswriters and newswriting, professionals of information, secrecy Inquisition, see Holy Ofﬁce, Congregation of the Inquisitors of State 5, 10, 12, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 50, 55, 60, 65, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 89, 92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 107, 115, 123, 124, 185, 186, 256 planting of informers, 76 preoccupation with exchange of news in public, 97 problems with sources 11–12, 113 insurance brokers 89, 90 Interdict of 1606–7 24, 38, 40, 53, 102, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 152 and governmental secrecy 43, 76 causes 157–8 nature of 158, 164 interpretations of 159, 238–9, 249 compared with earlier interdicts 158–9, 163–4, 167, 169 initial negotiations 160–3 publication of bull of 163–4 Venice’s ﬁrst response 164–70 legal strategies to counter 169–70, 171 measures for maintaining public order during 170–2, 245–6 role of ritual during 172–6 shift from formal to informal communication 176 rumours during 189–94 posted texts during 194–7

306

Index

Interdict of 1606–7 (cont.) earliest pamphlets 204–9 government’s decision to publish pamphlets 209–15 censorship arrangements during 213–15 role of publishers in 220–2 pamphlets’ production during 215–27 pamphlets’ role during 227–38 responses to, amongst population 96, 98, 126, 189–99, 238–46 conclusion of 246–8 memory of 256–9 see also archives, governmental, censorship, conunicazione, leaking, leaks, manuscript circulation, newswriters and newswriting, ofﬁcial publication, readers and reading, urban exchange of news, women interpreters 110–11 James I, (king of England) 251 Jesuits 2, 126, 141, 162, 165, 170, 175, 176, 177, 185, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195, 212, 229, 233, 249, 255 jewellers 111 Kantorowicz, Ernst 15 L’Estoile, Pierre de 219, 226, 241 Lana, Alberto, (scrivener) 82–3, 84, 123 Lando, Girolamo 62 Lane, Frederic 6, 28 laughter and ridicule in churches 189, 241, 245 in governmental debating 30 in pamphlets 235, 240–1 in public places 98, 155, 241 in the political arena 51–2, 169 see also carnival, parody lawyers 11, 20, 21, 78, 86, 92, 108, 125, 150, 240 leaking, leaks 120, 254 during 1606–7 Interdict 70, 162–3, 179–83, 228 of relazioni 58–70 proneness to 46–70 legal system 20, 130 as subject of discussion 72 Leoni, Giovan Battista 79, 80, 142, 206, 218, 242 Lepschy, Giulio 117 Leti, Gregorio 137 Lippi, Nicolò, priest 188 Lisbon 91 Lisca, Alessandro 218 literacy 5, 81, 121–7, 128

rates of 121 as social transaction 121–5 and access to political information 125–7 Locatelli, Girolamo, (friar) 131 London 58, 63, 81, 98, 103, 106, 125 Longhi, Pietro 98, 141 Lonigo, Gasparo 217 Loredan, Leonardo 138 Lorenzo, (barber) 101 Lorraine, Duke of 71 Love, Harold 9, 58, 123 Lowry, Martin 48 Lucca 108 Lucian of Samosata 150 Machiavelli, Niccolò 1, 2, 6, 156, 201, 228, 252 diffusion of his works in Venice 235–6 magic 125 Malatesta, Giuseppe 180, 181, 235 Malﬁ, Tiberio 102 Malombra, Pietro, (painter) 106 Maltusello, Fabrizio, (priest) 145 Mannucci, Aldo 24 manuscript circulation material analysis of 58–9, 68–9, 147, 151 during 1606–7 Interdict 161, 176–87, 203–4 lending of texts as part of 67–8, 144–6, 147 as a means of publication 58–61, 67–9 see also relazioni, renghe Manuzio, Aldo 95 Manzoni, Alessandro 136 Marin, Louis 17 Marino, Giovan Battista 94 Marsilio, Giovanni 94, 95, 189, 205, 206, 208, 210, 217, 228, 231, 235 Marsilius of Padua 208, 231 Martinengo family 185 Mary I, queen of England 113 Matteacci, Giuseppe 23 Mattei, Orazio, papal nuncio in Venice 161, 163, 173, 229 McKenzie, Donald F. 12, 240 Medici, Giovanni de 116 Medici, Marie de 64 Meietti, Roberto, printer 94, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 230 Memmo, Giovanni Maria 22, 24, 44, 111 menanti, see newswriters and newswriting Mendoza, Giovanni 79 Menini, Ottavio 217 Menocchio, Domenico Scandella, known as 193, 201, 226

Index Menocchio, Giacomo 217 mercers 95–6, 97, 106, 146 merchants 70, 90–3, 108, 110, 111, 125, 146, 240 Meschita, Antonio 73, 82, 83, 86, 89, 92, 99, 103, 116, 123 Micanzio, Fulgenzio 49, 53, 54, 55, 79, 95, 180, 204, 229, 231, 237, 242, 251, 256 Michiel family 146 Michiel, Giulio 72, 142 Milan 178, 207 Milledonne, Antonio 51 millers 193, 201, 226, 240 Minotto, Andrea 109 Molin, Domenico 67, 68, 218 Molin, Francesco 160 Molin, Marco, (lawyer) 78 Molini, Giovan Domenico, (notary) 241 Monte Rotondo, village in Latium 134 Monticolo, Sebastiano 190 Morandi, Filippo 19 Moro, Benetto 182, 183 Moro, Domenico 74 Morosini, Andrea 40, 180, 191, 256 Morosini, Donato 88 Morosini ridotto 48, 95, 142, 143 Moryson, Fynes 107 Muir, Edward 27, 136 Muzio, Giulio Cesare 61 Nani, Agostino 40, 255, 257 Nani, Giovan Battista 25, 256 Naples 137 Naudé, Gabriel 15, 62 Necker, Jacques 135 Netherlands, Revolt of the 231 newswriters and newswriting 80–4, 89, 103, 116, 123–5, 183–7 dependence on patrons 83–4, 184–5 during 1606–7 Interdict 163, 175, 182, 183–7, 192–3, 207, 222, 244 discuss diplomatic negotiations 64, 69, 184, 253 discuss printed texts 185, 216–17, 222 economics of 82–3 see also censorship, of manuscript newsletters Norfolk, Duke of 186 notaries 3, 40, 86, 89, 93, 108, 110, 124, 150 Novati, Francesco 147 nuns 114, 176–7, 191, 239 oarsmen 97, 106, 110 Obizzi, Natale 36 ofﬁcial histories and historians 49, 56, 254–6 ofﬁcial publication 7–8, 127–36, 146

307

procedures 128–31, 135 resistance to 131–6, 194 legal necessity of 134–6, 169–70 use of, in Rome, during 1606–7 Interdict 163–4, 183, 207 use of, in Venice, during 1606–7 Interdict 166–8, 175, 194, 196–7, 227–9, 232, 246–7 mockery of 194–6 Olivares, Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke of 69 Olmo, Fortunato 50 orality, see legal system as subject of discussion, processions as subject of discussion, rumours, urban exchange of news, wars as subject of discussion Orsetta, servant 192, 244 Orwell, George 232 Orzinuovi 137, 190 Osuna, Pedro Giron, viceroy of Naples and duke of 11, 79, 84, 108, 155 Ottoman empire 70 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 102 Oxford 57, 59 Padua 68, 69, 91, 95, 123, 178, 179, 187, 188, 192, 193, 212, 219, 230, 241, 245 bookshops in 95 manuscript newsletters in 82 posted texts in 195, 209 printing in 220, 221 university of 21, 141, 163, 190, 213 Paisio, Francesco 62 Palermo 109, 182 Pallavicino, Ferrante 53 Palmanova 62, 126, 195, 196 pamphlets published during 1606–7 Interdict compared with civic rituals 230–1, 232 criticisms of 210–11 distribution and sale of 219, 222–7 diversity of 215–19 format of 196, 208, 216, 217, 224–7 interaction with other forms of communication 238–46 interpretations of 201–2 language of 204, 208, 215, 216, 226–7 numbers 215–17 originating in political arena 204–5, 217–18 places of publication of 220 polemical strategies of 204–5, 207–8, 227–38 publishers of 220–2, 223–7, 250 see also prices, readers and reading, Adriatic, controversy concerning dominion of

308

Index

papalisti 29, 43, 210 Pariglia, Alessandro, notary 108 Paris 55, 81, 82, 119, 198, 204, 212, 217, 226, 255 Paris, peace of (1617) 64, 253 parody 147–50, 154–5, 194–6 see also carnival; ofﬁcial publication, mockery of Paruta, Andrea 213 Paruta, Paolo 44, 70, 161 Pasinello, Antonio, barber 126 Pasqualigo, Filippo 139, 140 Pasqualigo, Zuanne 171, 192 pasquinades, 56, 137–9, 151–2, 203 see also posted texts patricians; divisions amongst 40–1, 46–8, 69–70, 73–4, 180–1, 208, 209–13, 214, 254, 255–6 education of 20–1, 22, 48, 62, 73 emphasis on unity of 19, 41–4, 181 kin ties 47 old and new houses 40 relations with foreign ambassadors 71–4 Paternoster degli Spagnoli (1591) 146–55, 178, 195, 196, 236 Paul II, pope 114 Paul V, pope 84, 166, 168, 176, 182, 185, 197, 199, 228, 235, 240 and epigraphy 131 reasons for proclaiming an interdict 157 sends briefs to Venice 161–2, 204 proclaims interdict 163–4 attitude of, to printed publication 207 subject of jokes 241 lifts the interdict 246–7 peasants 91, 150, 153, 192, 193, 244 pedlars 111–12, 125, 178 Peres, Antonio 51 perfume makers 116, 126 Pereira, Domenico, barber 143–4, 146 permessi taciti, see censorship Perugia 145 Pesante, Alessandro 206 pharmacies 98–105, 109–10, 177–8, 190, 242, 245 at the Anchor 99 at the Angel 99 at the Golden Head 99 at the Golden Hercules 99, 118 at the Sun 103 105, 112 at the Two Moors 99 in Vicenza 98–9, 109, 190 Philip II, king of Spain 51, 142 Philip III, king of Spain 181–3 Philip III, king of Spain 209 Philip IV, king of France 235

physicians 67, 78–9, 99–101, 107, 125, 155, 198, 226, 239, 245 Piccinin, Zan Nicolò, friar 257 Piero, courier 104 pigment sellers 12 Pimentel de Errera, Juan Alfonso, Viceroy of Naples 182 Pinelli, Giovan Vincenzo 62, 121 Pinguente, village in Istria 257 pinsellers 245 Pisani, Giovan Giacomo 134 Pius V, pope 81 Plazon, Stefano, teacher 20, 21 Plutarch (Mestrius Plutarchus) 102 Pocock, John 27 Poland 59 poligraﬁ 21, 221 political arena 46–85 deﬁned 46–8 meeting places 86 porosity of 70–85 see also broglio, ridotti Porto, Giuseppe 77, 192 Porto, Luigi 77 Porto, Paolo 77 Possevino, Antonio 177, 181, 196, 222, 227 postal system 52–53, 179 see also couriers posted texts 136–41 attribution of 137–9, 195–6 during 1606–7 Interdict 194–7, 209, 243 reception of 140–1 see also Gobbo di Rialto; pasquinades Prata, Cesare, scrivener and informer 60 preaching and sermons 250 during 1606–7 Interdict 1606–7 162, 187–9 organized by Venetian government 188–9, 225 parodied 150 prices of foodstuffs 153, 193, 223, 226 of manuscript newsletters 82–3 of manuscript relazioni 60–1 of printed books 201, 226–7 of printed books, as compared with manuscript 222 of printed pamphlets 222–4, 225–7 priests 93, 104, 105, 133, 144, 145, 188, 189, 192, 193, 239, 241, 244, 245, 256 printed political literature 200–1, 253 collections of documents 61 in praise of Venice 6–7, 44 legal compilations 129 on ambassadors 71

Index

309

on rhetoric in government 21–3 on secretaries 51 see also Machiavelli, diffusion of his works in Venice; pamphlets published during the 1606–7 Interdict; reason of state printers 94, 134, 192, 206, 253 ofﬁcial 129, 220 see also Interdict of 1606–7; pamphlets published during the 1606–7 Interdict prisons 101, 116, 140 Priuli, Antonio 30, 40 Priuli, Girolamo 10, 31, 87, 91, 138, 193 Priuli, Piero 212, 255 processions 128, 243, 244, 248 as subject of discussion 105, 243–6 professionals of information 4, 46, 63, 74–84 in the service of foreign ambassadors 60–1, 75 in the service of Venice 76, 91 see also newswriters; writers Profondavalle, Giovan Paolo, courier 239 Prosperi, Adriano 15 prostitutes 111, 133, 192 pseudoevents 183 pseudonyms 79, 137–8, 169, 181, 217–18, 220, 230–1, 236, 254, 255 Pulci, Luigi 150

reportisti, see newswriters and newswriting rhetoric 20–5 amongst courtesans 115 Richet, Denis 215 ridotti; compared to French salons 47–8 term used to denote gatherings in shops 95 for gambling 73, 115 see also Morosini ridotto Riformatori dello Studio di Padova 134, 201 riots 36, 132, 189, 245 Rocco, shoemaker 11 Rome 14, 102, 108, 164, 165, 167, 184, 185, 223, 230, 239, 246 ancient 26, 44 epigraphy in 131 intelligence in 46, 60 newswriting in 81–2, 84, 184 apothecaries in 109, 115 cartelli and pasquinades in 137–8, 140, 151 printing in 192, 207–8, 218, 220, 225 factions in 205 Rossi, Francesco, pedlar 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27 rumours dismissal of 142–3 see also urban exchange of news

Querini, Antonio 177, 187, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 223, 231, 233, 234, 245 Quevedo, Francisco de 79 Quintilian 22

Saccardino, Costantino 136, 242, 243 saddlers 191 Sagredo, Alvise 107, 117 Sagredo, Giovan Francesco 169 sailors 98, 106, 110, 111, 146 salaries 49, 83, 223, 226 see also prices Salò, Pietro da 137 Sansovino, Francesco 6, 21, 22, 28, 51, 88, 103, 108 Sanudo, Marino 10, 19, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 41, 46, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 92, 132, 137, 138, 140, 193 Sardella, Pierre 90, 107 Sarpi, Paolo 1, 2, 9, 19, 34, 47, 53, 55, 72, 79, 96, 131, 166, 176, 181, 198, 208, 229, 242, 249, 253–4, 258 analyses communication 84, 122–3, 131, 157–8, 198 analyses ofﬁcial publication 135–6 analyses Venetian government and political system 47, 53 and censorship 201, 218, 250–1, 253 and Ottaviano Bon’s relazione 67, 69, 70 and urban exchange of news 91, 94, 95, 125 appointment of, as consultore 163, 180 as author of pamphlets during the 1606–7

Ragusa (Dubrovnik) 71 Rampazetto, Francesco, printer 230 Ranke, Leopold von 9, 48, 57–8, 61, 63 readers and reading 65–9, 235 reader’s response 63, 198, 201, 240, 241 in public 95, 98, 103, 105, 122–3, 124–5, 128–9, 144, 177–8 texts meant for reading in public 122, 151–2 of pamphlets published during 1606–7 Interdict 205, 215, 219, 222, 226, 229–30, 236–7, 238–44 reason of state 15, 64–5, 98, 143, 156, 160–1, 200 relazioni 37, 55, 57–70, 74, 80, 85, 121, 126, 178, 212 forgeries 61 price of 60–1 Renaudot, Théophraste 81 renghe 22, 30, 56–7, 62, 180–1 rented accommodation 78, 83, 102, 114, 116, 191

310

Index

Sarpi, Paolo (cont.) Interdict 169–70, 204–6, 219, 223–224, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237 assesses Interdict pamphlets 1, 9, 159, 217, 232–3, 238 attempted assassination of 76 composes Protesto 166 correspondence of 55, 242 failure to publish his writings 254, 256 falsely attributed Opinione 254 has access to Secreta 53 has ties with English embassy 74 his writings after the Interdict 252–5 inﬂuence after the Interdict 251 opinion of women’s allegiance, during 1606–7 Interdict 191 Savonarola, Girolamo 1 Savoy, Charles Emmanuel, duke of 183 scepticism 159, 236–7, 241, 243 Schiaousal, Pellegrino (priest) 188, 193 Schickhardt, Heinrich 27 schools and schooling 20, 21, 138, 152 Collegio dei nobili at the Giudecca 69 convent schools 115 school of Arabic in Mercerie 111 School of Rialto 20 School of San Marco 20, 21, 217 see also patricians, education of scriveners 108, 123–4 Secchini, Alvise, mercer 95, 96 shop at the Golden Ship 95, 125 secrecy 4, 22, 26, 34–5 and myth of Venice 40–5, 46 difﬁcult to maintain 46–70 see also censorship Secreta: see archives Senate 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 60, 104, 154, 250, 252, 254, 255, 257 and comunicazione 34–40 and Interdict of 1606–7 157, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180, 184, 188, 200, 201, 204, 206, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 224, 225, 229, 231, 248 and prosecution of Ottaviano Bon 64, 65, 68, 69, 70 debating in 28–32, 57, 59, 209–10 propensity to leaks 36, 46, 60, 73–4, 116 Sennett, Richard 31 sensali, senseri, see brokers servants 4, 21, 46, 47, 51, 52, 62, 68, 73, 75, 76, 86, 109, 113, 121, 145, 192, 244 Sguizari 26 Shakespeare, William 89 shoemakers and shoemakers’ shops 11, 97, 106, 112, 190–1, 257

Simone Piemontese, (barber) 190 Simoneschi, Francesco 21 singing and music 115, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 174, 240, 242, 243, 248 Sivos, Gian Carlo 11, 155, 191, 198, 245 Sixtus V, pope 131 Skinner, Quentin 8 soldiers 62, 84, 97, 98, 110, 111, 127, 150, 153, 209 Somerset, Sir Charles, 27, 107 Spain Cortes 18 informers in the service of 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 96, 103–4, 110, 116 Venetian intelligence against 37, 52 Spinelli, Piero, apothecary 97 Squitinio della libertà veneta 252–3 St Clair, William 215 Stefani, Baldassarre, (physician) 239 Stente che fa i contadini, con il Pater nostro 150–1 students 137, 141, 150, 190, 230 Suarez, Francisco 206 Surian, Michele 73 Tacitus, Gaius Cornelius 154 Tassis, Ferdinando 97 taverns and tavernkeepers 90, 95, 96–7, 106, 115, 141, 239, 243 taylors 106 teachers 123 Tedeschi, Ottavio, (newswriter and translator) 83, 116, 125 Telco, Zorzi, courier 52 Terzi, Lorenzo 227 Tesoro politico 28, 61, 200 textile stores 97 Thompson, Edward P. 134 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de 255 Tiepolo, Baiamonte 33 Tomaselli, Fulgenzio 231 Tovaia, Sebastiano, (courier) 178, 179 towncriers, see comandatori travellers to Venice 10, 27, 47, 62, 76, 88, 91, 92, 96–7, 98, 106–7, 110–11, 146 Trevisan family 20 Trevisan, Marco 67 Trexler, Richard 136, 158 Triest 90 Tucci, Vincenzo, (informer) 78, 92 Turco, Bastian, (courier) 179 unmasking of authorities’ motives 154–6, 195–6, 233–4

Index unmasking of spiritual authority 234–8, 240–3, 257 see also scepticism Urban VIII, (pope) 212 urban exchange of news as entertainment 93–4, 95–6 during 1606–7 Interdict 189–94, 239–40 for professional reasons 90 in marketplaces 89–90 indoors 94–106, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 116 outdoors 89–94, 112, 123, 124, 239–40 political and commercial news 90–1 see also barbers and barbershops; pharmacies; readers and reading, in public Uskocks 56, 252 Valerio, apothecary’s apprentice 104 Valier, Agostino 20, 22, 23, 24 Valier, Lorenzo 67 Valier, Piero 130 Valier, Silvestro 67 Vasari, Giorgio 137 Vecellio, Cesare 128 Vendramin, Francesco 143 Vendramin, Girolamo 217 Venice; Arsenal 62, 86, 103, 106, 112, 120, 171 Calle della Sicurtà 89, 108 Campo delle Gatte 103 Campo di Do Pozzi 103, 112 Campo San Bartolomeo 107 Cannaregio 75, 99, 109, 174 Castello 86, 99, 103, 106, 111 church of the Madonna della Fava 146 church of the Redentore 10 church of the Greeks 10 convent of the Frari 99 convent of San Sebastiano 171 Dorsoduro 99 Ducal Palace 47, 48, 68, 89, 90, 107, 113, 116, 120, 123, 139, 196, 247 Fondaco dei Tedeschi 111 Fondaco dei Turchi 111 Ghetto 10, 75, 92 markets 89, 107, 138–9, 245 Mercerie 95, 96, 111, 146 Rialto 3, 6, 10, 68, 81, 86–94, 99, 104, 107, 111, 113, 114, 119, 124, 130, 137, 138, 143, 144, 152 San Bartolomeo 99 San Cassian 89, 99 San Giovanni Bragora 130 San Lio 245

311

San Marco 10, 68, 75, 81, 88, 89, 92, 93, 97, 99, 104, 105, 107, 113, 114, 123, 124, 125, 130, 164, 171, 173, 174 San Maurizio 101 San Moisé 60, 81, 116 San Pantalon 130 San Polo 99 San Trovaso 99 Santa Fosca 99 Santi Apostoli 99, 144 Venier, Alvise 39, 214 Venier, Sebastiano 69 Veniexiana, La 117 Ventura, Comino, printer 200, 220 Veraldo, Donà, courier 179 Verdelli, Fausto, informer 52, 71, 77, 78, 89, 92, 104, 108 Verona 170, 177, 187, 188, 189, 197, 212, 213, 223, 226 posted texts in 178, 196 Inquisition in 142, 256 grafﬁti in 194 printing in 196 Vespa, Francesco, chaplain 146 Vicenza 77, 167, 169, 176, 178, 179, 187, 189, 225 manuscript newsletters in 82 pharmacies in 98, 109, 190–1 posted texts in 140, 197 printing in 200, 220 Vienna 81 Vietri, Fabrizio de Sangro, duke of 182 Villeroy, French secretary of State 162 Wallenstein, Albrecht von 36 war against Austrian Habsburgs (1615–7) 36, 64, 82, 97, 251–4 against League of Cambrai (1509) 1, 6, 7, 43, 91, 150, 193 as subject of discussion 93, 98, 101, 126–7, 142–3, 150–1, 187, 190 of 1510s 49 of Candia 249, 256 of Cyprus 33 risk of, in 1606–7 96, 181–83, 184, 225 Thirty Years War 69, 81 washerwomen 112, 192, 200 weather 189, 193 Wickham, Chris 117 winemerchants 146 women 112–17 as brokers of marriages 115 commoners 114–17

312

Index

women 112–17 (cont.) during 1606–7 Interdict 191–2 may join guilds 114 patrician 113–4 registered as apothecaries 115 teachers 123 see also washerwomen; servants woolmercers 124 Wotton, Sir Henry, English ambassador in Venice 91, 168, 170, 183, 187, 192, 203, 214, 228, 243, 250

writers 21, 79–80, 138 during Interdict 79–80, 95, 205, 217–18 writing in public 83–4, 144–5 writing tools 127, 144 Zen, Renier 24, 36 Zeno (Zen), Elisabetta 114 Zordan, Francesco, notary 89 Zuccolo, Ludovico 2, 98, 143, 156