Weak State and Strong Ruling Elite

Political power was the prerogative of the Venetian nobility, which had turned into a closed group between the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. From that point to the end of the republic in 1797, the Venetian patriciate was virtually a caste.

However, shared commercial interests and the ongoing function of trade constituted common ground between the patriciate and the rest of the Venetian population. Therefore, a war whose purpose was to establish or maintain control over a strategic area, or against Genoa, was considered an enterprise involving the whole city. It is very likely that, in wars from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, taxes imposed by the government met with a reasonably positive response among Venetians, who largely agreed with the war's aims, given an expectation of generally enhanced prosperity.

In the fifteenth century, the formation of a territorial state in northeast Italy allowed the Venetian government to increase its tax base considerably. However, this also created new problems from recalcitrant provincial elites, particularly those of wealthy and populous cities like Padua, Vicenza, Verona, and Brescia. These regional annexations involved the mixed use of force and the bestowal of privileges meant to conciliate these new subjects (a common practice in political relations between center and periphery). The Venetian territorial state was thus built upon marked differences among separate categories of taxpayers: Venetians, inhabitants of the subject cities, and peasants. It must, however, be stressed that, as a rule, no one was exempt from taxes. The doge himself was subject to taxation. Nonetheless, the state's fiscal geography was composite, and it is reasonable to assert that the extent of fiscal control exerted by government was directly proportional to the distance from the capital.

It might also be mitigated by the strategic importance accorded to certain territories—for instance, mountain communities near foreign borders. But perhaps the most important feature of Venice's state structure was the sharp separation in political role between Venice and its territories. The provincial elites could not aspire to enter the ruling elite of Venice itself, and could not therefore gain access to important state offices. Whereas in other states the emergence of administrative and military systems brought about significant social and political mobility, in the Venetian state every upward move was blocked by the constitutional structure, which was entirely dominated by the patrician caste of the capital city. This also meant that the Venetian Republic lacked a crucial means for state development—a large bureaucracy—that could not only more effectively enforce the government's will but also, more importantly, attract both provincial elites and emergent social groups.

Institutional representation of the mainland elites was absent from the core of the political system. Fiscal relations were therefore characterized by frequent, tiresome negotiation, as well as ambivalence. No doubt this resulted in high transaction costs, yet it would be wrong simply to infer that the Venetian fiscal system was ineffective. The Venetian patricians left considerable space to local elites in the management,

assessment, and distribution of taxes. Fiscal yields can therefore be regarded as the result of a compromise between the central government and provincial elites. In the Venetian republic, tax revolts occurred very seldom and lasted only a few days. The army was used much more to wage external war than to control or coerce subjects.

The Venetian state of the Late Middle Ages was a lightweight state. Its military and administration were neither large nor effective. Although there was a high incidence of warfare during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it did not significantly intensify Venice's state structure, which maintained the characteristics of a city-state.

Ironically, this small, minimal state nevertheless proved able to mobilize huge resources quickly and to transform them into potent military might, something usually attributed to fiscal-military states. Although nearly constant throughout Venetian history, naval warfare does not seem to have played a crucial role in state development. Those who fought on Venetian galleys were mostly merchants, artisans, and laborers, who returned to ordinary occupations after the campaign. Likewise, many of the ships were quickly returned to their normal commercial usage. Very little remained of navies that had been mobilized. Specialized military administration was rare and subject to a high turnover among the patricians in charge.

Venice's decline began with the emergence of both Ottoman power and strong European competitors. Until Lepanto, however, Venice could still be considered a great naval power. But scant technological innovation in the naval sector and the government's incapacity to improve its military organization soon created a real crisis for the navy. By contrast, the tax system continued to be effective and, along with public debt, provided enormous financial resources (resources that were not fully exploited).

War did, however, drive some developments. The wars against the Ottomans, from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, provided a key argument in favor of further taxation. The Venetian government claimed legitimacy for its taxes on the basis that it fought wars in defense of Christendom against Islam. It was thus able to get money out of its clerical subjects, who, in theory, primarily paid taxes to the Church. Moreover, war mobilized other material and spiritual resources. State iconography stressed Venice's role as the bulwark of Christendom. The long struggle against the Ottomans also involved mainland subjects, who provided considerable support in Venice's war efforts. Nevertheless, the Republic's traditional instrument of war—the navy—remained outside the experience of most Venetian subjects.

The land army, meanwhile, was seen by the state as substantially disconnected from the traditions of the capital. This military hierarchy thus mirrored a crucial weakness of the Venetian state—that is, the profound division between, on one hand, the lagoon city and its patrician government, and on the other, the terrestrial and overseas dominions with their local elites. Venice maintained a peculiar set of characteristics: a city-state, ruled by a sort of caste, which ran a thin, commercial empire with a set of disaggregated social, economic, and ethnic entities that came together to form an extremely composite state.

Over the fifteenth century, Venice began to look at its overseas dominions as a territory to be ruled rather than merely exploited. After the crisis of Cambrai, the attitude of the government changed, choosing a policy of tighter control over the mainland. In the sixteenth century, several central offices were established to manage subject provinces. Along with these institutional elements, however, particular informal and cliental relations emerged that strengthened the link between the capital and its dominions. In the fifteenth century, familial and patron-client connections characterized relations among overseas elites and certain Venetian ruling families.^[1659] It is likely that the establishment of extra-institutional links mitigated tensions between the center and peripheries and, at the same time, allowed the government to play a role in local dynamics. It is no accident that the riots that had characterized the political life of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Crete disappeared later on.^[1660] The same mechanism can be observed on the sixteenth-century Venetian mainland. The increasing presence of Venetian landowners, and the crisis among provincial aristocratic clans, strengthened the role of the capital's institutions. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, within a lively economic and social context, a new principle of power relations between local elites and the Venetian ruling group was established, a principle based on client-patron relations that were, however, strongly tilted toward the lagoon patriciate.^[1661] Thus, the different parts of the Venetian empire were primarily linked via bonds of clientage, which allowed Venice's patricians to maintain sufficient control of the city's dominions but prevented them from building a homogeneous state.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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