Factions on the Venetian Terraferma During the Early Modern Period*

Not Only Blood: Factions on the Venetian Terraferma during the Early Modern Period*

Andrea Savio

Medieval Vicenza had a small population and its governing noble elites were prone to infighting; for these reasons, it was not one of northern Italy’s major cities. The city sat at the heart of the Veneto region, and as a result it was an appetising target for powerful neighbouring lords and was forced to defend itself repeatedly against attack. This situation continued until 1404 when it became one of the first cities to submit voluntarily to the Most Serene Republic of Venice, becoming known as the primogenito (firstborn).1 In the sixteenth century, Vicenza was described by Leandro Alberti in his Descrittione di tutta Italia, as a city blessed “with a great abundance of wealth” inhabited by “men […] of lively mind, of great courage and most predisposed to the arts, arms and trade”.2 By the mid-1500s, it was home to between 30,000 and 32,000 people, possibly making it larger than Padua.3 Another of the city’s distinguishing traits was its governing noble class, praised by the Marche scholar Giovanbattista Dragonzino da Fano in the 1530s for its “pure lineage” and “ancient and noble Vicentine blood”.4 Vicenza was also one of Italy’s earliest manufacturing towns, with its thriving wool and silk industry. Both sectors drove the city’s international trade, which was mainly with Lyon until 1572. From then until the Thirty Years’ War, its main trading partners were Anvers, the German-speaking canton of Switzerland, and England. Vicenza also boasted a range of international merchant businesses run by the city’s wealthy noble families, many of which employed the renowned architect Andrea Palladio.5

* I would like to thank the University of Padua for granting me the research funds that made the writing of this article possible. Abbreviations used: Archivio di Stato, Venezia = asv. 1 James Grubb, Firstborn of Venice (Baltimore, 1988). 2 Leandro Battista Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia (Venice, 1551), 383. 3 Walter Panciera, ‘Vicenza. L’età moderna (1516–1813)’, in Giuseppe Gullino, ed., Storia di Vi- cenza (Verona, 2014), 137–40. 4 Giovanbattista Dragonzino, Nobiltà di Vicenza (Vicenza, 1525; ristampa anastatica Vicenza, 1981), 23. 5 Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2000); Francesco Maria Vianel- lo, ‘Cloths for Peasants and the Poor: Wool Manufactures in Vicenza Countryside (1570–1700)’,

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Upper Vicenza was home to the Republic of Venice’s largest mining district. The apogee of the local silver mining industry was between the 1480s and 1520s, when the area experienced an influx of Bavarian labourers. After this period, crisis struck local mining and production ground to a halt. Between 1573 and 1575, attempts were made to reopen some of the silver mines in Tretto di Schio, and although the attempts ultimately failed, they were “important for other reasons in that gunpowder was used to mine silver for the first time in mining history”.6 Regarding politics, the Republic of Venice used the local bureaucracy to insinuate itself into the Mainland’s governing classes, a pragmatic move that brought its influence to the suburbs of many cities.7 Venice’s subject cities en- joyed a high degree of autonomy, with contemporary political language rein- forcing this approach; for example, Venice had no objection to the Commune of Vicenza choosing to call itself respublica. Vicenza was also free to award citizenship, use its own units of measure and hold its own festivities.8

in Giovanni Luigi Fontana and Gérard Gayot, eds., Wool: Products and Markets (13th–20th Century) (Padua, 2004), 411–17; Francesco Maria Vianello, ‘Rural Manufactures and Pattern of Economic Specialization: Cases from the Venetian Mainland’, in Paola Lanaro, ed., At the Cen- ter of the Old World. Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and Venetian Mainland (1400–1800) (Toronto, 2006), 347–61; Edoardo Demo, ‘Industry and Production in the Venetian Terraferma (15th-18th Centuries)’, in Eric R. Dursteler, ed., A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797 (Leiden, 2013), 291–318; Edoardo Demo, ‘New Products and Technological Innovation in the Silk Industry of Vicenza in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Karel Davids and Bert De Munck, eds., Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities (Farnham, 2014), 81–93. On Palladio, see Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns, eds., Palladio (London, 2008). 6 Raffaello Vergani, ‘Gli inizi dell’uso della polvere da sparo nell’attività mineraria: il caso veneziano’, Studi veneziani, nuova serie 3 (1979), 104–15; idem, ‘L’argento veneto: mito e realtà nei secoli xv–xvi’, Ricerche Storiche, anno xiv n. 1 (January–April 1984), 143–61. 7 On the Mainland, see Angelo Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del ’400 e ’500 (Bari, 1964); Matteo Melchiorre, Conoscere per governare. Le relazioni dei Sindici inquisitori e il Do- minio veneziano in Terraferma (1543–1626) (Udine, 2013); Michael Knapton, ‘The Terraferma State’, in Eric R. Dursteler, ed., A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797 (Leiden, 2013), 85–124; Michael Knapton, John E. Law, Alison A. Smith, eds., Venice and the Veneto during the Renaissance: the Legacy of Benjamin Kohl (Florence, 2014). 8 James Grubb, ‘Elite Citizens’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered. The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), 339–64. On Republicanism, see Edward Muir, ‘Was There Republicanism in the Renaissance Repub- lics? Venice after Agnadello’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered. The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), 137–267; Filippo De Vivo, ‘Rhetoric and government in sixteenth-century Venice: some paradoxes’,