Appendix D — Venetian society

The Republic of Venice was a class society, with an economy based on international trade and manufacturing.

Classes

The main classes were nobles, citizens, commoners and foreigners.

The classes were foremost legal, but they also had social and economic aspects.

Which class a person belonged to, was primarily decided by their birth, but other factors also mattered. An illegitimate child didn’t necessarily get the status of the father, and the social standing of the mother also mattered, as did what they did for a living.

What possibilities a person had to earn a living, depended entirely on which class they belonged to.

Class society was second nature for Benedetti and his contemporaries. They knew no other system, and probably considered the differences between people as natural and god-given.

The Nobility

It was the prerogative of the nobility to participate in the running of the state, as all noblemen, aged twenty-five or more, were members of the Greater Council of the Republic of Venice.

The Republic of Venice was, to a large extent, synonymous with the Venetian nobility. They were the state, and the state were them.

The Venetian nobility was highly regulated.

To be recognised as a noble, the father had to be noble, and legally married to the mother, who had to be of ‘decent’ birth, which normally meant noble or citizen.

The birth of a boy to a noble family was registered in the Golden book, kept in the chancellory Doge’s Palace.

Not all nobles were necessarily wealthy. There were even destitute nobles, who, however, didn’t lose their status — and their right to participate in government — because of that.

Besides the clearly political positions in the republic, there were many other jobs which had to be performed by a nobleman, in administration, in the tribunals, overseeing taxes and duties, and much more.

The Superintendants and Over-superintendants of Health were noblemen.

Whenever Benedetti refers to somebody as Lord, Sir, Excellency or as ‘magistrate’, those men were noble.

Citizens

The status of citizen was hereditary, following the father, just like for the nobility.

Most citizens were merchants and shopkeepers, or they engaged in the liberal arts.

Many roles within the state institutions were reserved to citizens, and in some cases, to a subgroup called the original citizens.

To be an original citizen, the requirement was to be a legitimate child of an original citizen, and a mother of decent birth, and likewise for the grandparents. If any of the men of the three generations had engaged in ‘mechanical arts’ (the opposite of the liberal arts), original citizenship was forfeited.

The reason for these restrictive rules was, that the original citizens could occupy numerous influential positions in the state apparatus. The secretaries of all major state institutions were original citizens, and so were the lawyers and notaries.

The original citizens were therefore central for the functioning of the republic, and the group was as regulated as the nobility. The birth of an original citizen boy was registered in the Silver book.

Benedetti was, since he was a notary, an original citizen.

Likewise, all those, who he refers to as ‘ministers’, were original citizens employed by the state institutions to assist the noble ‘magistrates’.

When he mentions the ‘mace-bearers of the Health authority’, they were original citizens too. Anybody, who somehow exercised a bit of state power, no matter how minute, had to be an original citizen.

Commoners

The rest of the legal residents of Venice were generally commoners. They included most craftsmen, who worked with their hands (the mechanical arts), and all manual labourers, of which there were many.

Commoners could potentially be quite wealthy, say an artisan with a large workshop, but no matter their wealth, they were and remained commoners.

They did have some rights, such as access to courts and tribunals, and they could be members of guilds and confraternities, which were important civil institutions in the Venetian republic.

When Benedetti wrote about rowers, porters and such people, they were necessarily commoners. So were the pizzigamorti, if they weren’t foreigners, and the whores sent to the Lazzaretto to work.

Foreigners

Foreigners in Venice were abundant, but they had very few rights, and they could be summarily banished.

Some were travelling sellers of goods from their home towns, who came and went, others moved around selling their services. Some foreigners lived in Venice for very long periods.

There were some procedures for becoming citizens or commoners, but the rules were generally restrictive.

The Grisons, who Benedetti mentions, were obviously foreigners, and so were the pizzigamorti imported from the mainland, even if they came from the Venetian dominions on the mainland.

A trading and manufacturing nation

The territory of the original Venetian state was all lagoon, with very little farmland. It was not, therefore, possible to have an economy based on agriculture, like in most other parts of Europe.

Venice consequently developed an economy based on long-distance trade, between the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe. Even though this trade diminished after the journeys of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, it was still a large part of the Venetian economy in the later 1500s.

Concurrent with the trade, Venice also developed a manufacturing sector, primarily fabrics and textiles of all sorts, glass, and later pharmaceuticals, printing and all sorts of luxury goods and services.

At the time of Benedetti, most of the nobility had ceased engaging directly in trade, but they continued to function as financiers, bankers, owners of the ships, and such.

Most of the international trade and manufacturing were in the hands of citizens, like Benedetti himself.

They, in turn, employed most of the lower classes, as Benedetti notes in his description. As trade stopped and shops were shuttered, two-thirds of the common people were left without an income.

It is not a coincidence that Benedetti finished his account by noting how shops reopened and trade returned, and expressed the hope that the money lost would soon be recovered.