Venice Invests Doge With Power

The nearest model for their adoption or imitation was the Lombard type of government almost under their very eyes.

Continuing How Medieval Venice Was Governed,
our selection from History of the Venetian Republic by William C. Hazlitt published in 1860. The selection is presented in three easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in How Medieval Venice Was Governed.

Time: 697
Place: Venice

This measure simply indicates the character of the opinions which were received at the time in Europe, as well as the strong consciousness on the part of the patriarch, and those who acted with him, of the expediency of throwing the voice and countenance of the Church into the scale alike against the tribunitial oligarchy and against local jealousies and prejudices. There was perhaps in this case the additional inducement that the proposal to invest the doge with supreme power and jurisdiction over the Church, as well as over the state, might seem to involve an indirect surrender, either now or hereafter, on the part of the Holy See of some of its power, as a high-priest or grand pontiff, who was also a secular prince, might prove less pliant than an ordinary liegeman of the Church. But the men of 697 acted, as we must allow, sagaciously enough, when they presented their young country to the consideration of the papacy as possessing a party of order, into which the Church entered, and from which it now stood conspicuously and courageously out to take this very momentous initiative.

The creation of an ecclesiastical system had been one of the foremost aims of the first founders, who discerned in the transplantation of the churches of the terra firma, and their familiar pastors to the islands the most persuasive reconcilement of the fugitives to a hard and precarious lot; and after all the intervening years it was the elders of the Church who once more stepped forward and delivered their views on the best plan for healing discord, and making life in the lagoons tolerable for all. They sought some system of rule, after trying several, which would enable them to live in peace at home, and to gain strength to protect themselves from enemies. They would have been the most far-seeing of human beings if they had formed a suspicion of what kind of superstructure they were laying on the foundation. The nearest model for their adoption or imitation was the Lombard type of government almost under their very eyes; and so far as the difference of local postulates suffered, it was that to which they had recourse, when they vested in their new chieftain undivided jurisdiction, but primarily military attributes and a title then recognized as having, above all, a military significance.

On the receipt of the desired reply, the patriarch lost no time in calling on the national assembly to follow up their late vote to its legitimate consequences; and the choice of the people fell on Pauluccio Anafesto, a native of Heraclia, whose name occurs here for the first time, but who may be supposed to have had some prominent share in promoting the late revolution. Anafesto was conducted to a chair which had been prepared for him in his parish church, and solemnly invested by the metropolitan with the insignia of authority, one of which is said to have been an ivory scepter — a symbol and a material borrowed from the Romans. It is not an unusual misconception that this organic change in the government involved the simultaneous extinction of the tribunitial office and title. But the truth is that the tribunes continued to exercise municipal and subordinate functions many generations after the revolution of 697; each island of importance, such as Malamocco and Equilo, had its own tribune, while of the smaller islands several contributed to form a tribunate or governorship; and office, though neither strictly nor properly hereditary, still preserved its tendency to perpetuate itself in a limited number of families. It is only subsequently to the twelfth century that less is heard of the tribunes; and the progress of administrative reform led to the gradual disappearance of this old feudal element in the constitution.

In the time of Anafesto, the larger islands of the dogado formed the seats of powerful factions; the disproportion in point of influence between the Crown and the tribune of Malamocco or the tribune of Equilo was but slightly marked; and the abolition of that magistracy was a much more sweeping measure than the first makers of a doge would have dared to propose.

The military complexion of the ducal authority was not confined to the personal character of the supreme officer of state, for under him, not as a novel element in the constitution, but as one which preexisted side by side with the tribunitial system, served a master of the soldiers, whom there is a fairly solid ground for regarding as second to the doge or duke in precedence, and above the civil tribunes of the respective townships.

To find in so small and imperfectly developed a state the two leading functionaries or ingredients deriving their appellations from a command and control over the rude feudal militia, might alone warrant the conclusion that the most essential requirement of Venice, even when it had so far modified the form of administration, was felt to be the possession, under responsible direction, of a means of securing internal order and withstanding external aggression, if it were not the case that from the Gothic era onward we hear of scholæ militiæ cum patronis, manifestly the schools of instruction for the body over which the magister militum presided. These seminaries existed in the days of the exarch Narses, generations before a doge was given to Venice. Yet, through all the time which has now elapsed since the first erection of a separate political jurisdiction, not only the Church, on which such stress was at the very outset laid, but a civil government, and regulations for trade and shipping, must have been active forces, always tending to grow in strength and coherence.

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