The Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524

Index of Essays

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This collection of essays serves as both introduction to and a series of examples of the dynamic power of this databse as a tool for the study and interpretation of Venetian history.

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INTRODUCTION

by Benjamin G. Kohl

The first version of our database presents materials concerning elections and office holding in Venice from the three major councils that enjoyed the right to elect members of the Venetian patriciate to office: the Maggior Consiglio (Great Council), the Consiglio dei Rogati (Senate), and the Consiglio dei Dieci (Council of Ten), although the vast majority of ordinary officials were, in fact, elected in the Maggior Consiglio.

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ESSAY 1

Problems and Possibilities of Constructing a Research Database: The Venetian Case, by Andrea Mozzato

This paper has several aims: to present the database Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524, to discuss its creation, and to highlight the possibilities it offers for research in the history of Venice. Currently, the database contains more than sixty thousand records, each representing a single election.

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ESSAY 2

Venetian Elections and Their Registration: The Historical and Archival Context of the Office of the Segretario alle Voci, by Claudia Salmini, translated by Benjamin G. Kohl

The image of the Segretario alle Voci is still an obscure one in the panorama of studies on Renaissance Venice. This paper is intended to illustrate the first results of an ongoing project by giving some account of the historical and archival context of the sources used both here in Rulers of Venice (1332-1524) and in an older project, the Patriziato Veneziano or SAV (1524-1601), undertaken many years ago. Both projects rely on documentation produced by the office of the Segretario alle Voci, and thus the history and development of this office is closely linked to the form and organization of the source material.

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ESSAY 3

Class History: Officials of the Venetian State, 1380-1420, by Monique O'Connell

Prosopography, the study of a class or group of people through collective biography, has its roots in genealogy, something that flowered in the Middle Ages and persists to the modern era. [1] In his 1971 article on the method and practice of prosopography, Lawrence Stone drew a distinction between those who used collective biographies to answer larger historical questions and antiquarians, those who simply collected biographical information for its own sake.

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ESSAY 4

The Indispensable Doge of Trecento Venice: The Career of Marco Corner, by Benjamin G. Kohl

One of the commonplaces of Venetian historiography has been how little can be known about the careers and policies of many of the doges of medieval and early modern Venice. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Marino Sanudo attempted to rectify this gap by compiling from chronicles and official documents his famous Vite dei Dogi, the fullest edition of which is available in Muratori's Rerum italicarum scriptores, from the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

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