Storia di Venezia - Rivista II, 2004 Firenze University Press DIREZIONE Federico Barbierato Giuseppe Del Torre (Coordinatore) Michele Gottardi (Direttore responsabile) Dorit Raines Walter Panciera Anastasia Stouraiti Alfredo Viggiano Andrea Zannini SEGRETERIA DI REDAZIONE Chiara Vazzoler [email protected] A questo indirizzo va inviata la corrispondenza Cura dei testi e impaginazione di Valentina Rachiele, Fabiola Sartori e Federico Barbierato ISSN 1724-7446 (online) ISSN 1825-5132 (print) © Firenze University Press Università degli Studi di Firenze Firenze University Press Borgo Albizi, 28, 50122 Firenze, Italy http://epress.unifi.it/ Printed in Italy ANDREA MOZZATO, Problems and possibilities of constructing a re- p. 1 search database. The venetian case ISABELLA CECCHINI, Il cantiere di Palazzo Ducale dopo l’incendio del p. 39 1574 SERGIO LAVARDA, “Per causa del Palio”. Note su di una sedizione nel- p. 61 la Terraferma veneta del Seicento FEDERICO BARBIERATO, “… con soggiongergli che avesse prudenzia”. p. 79 Brevi note sui retroscena di un processo veneziano del 1739 RECENSIONI E SCHEDE p. 91 MATERIALI E DOCUMENTI ALESSIO SOPRACASA, Sui falsi del monastero veneziano dei Ss. Ilario e p. 127 Benedetto (secc. IX-XIV) DANIELE SANTARELLI, Le vicende di Paolo IV e dei Carafa osservate p. 147 attraverso le lettere degli ambasciatori veneziani a Roma. Annotazioni preliminari ALESSIA GIACHERY, Catalogo delle mariegole conservate presso la bi- p. 161 blioteca del Museo Correr risalenti ai secoli XIV-XV Storia di Venezia – Rivista, II, 2004, 1-38, ISSN 1724-7446 ©2004 Firenze University Press Problems and possibilities of constructing a research database. The venetian case* Andrea Mozzato This paper has three aims: to present the database Rulers of Venice 1332 – 1524; to discuss its creation; and to highlight the possibilities it offers for re- search in the history of Venice. At the moment, the database contains about 60,000 thousand records, each of which represents a single election. There were about 600 different offices, councils, and regimens that constitute the Ve- netian state, and more than 9,000 nobles were elected to these positions. This early version of the database now contains the first nine registers of the Segre- tario alle Voci, including elections to the offices in the Great Council and in the Senate.1 The first part of this article analyzes the type of sources used to con- struct the database, the type of data included in these sources, and the solu- tions we adopted to organize the data within the database. The second part of the article offers some examples of how the database can be used for historical research and some general statistical analysis of the database’s content.2 * This article is an extended version of the paper given at the Annual Meeting of the "Renais- sance Sociaty of America", New York, 1-3 April 2004 and will be printed in the next edition of the ACLS History E-Book Project (HEB) as part of the introduction of the database project "Rul- ers of Venice" published by the Renaissance Society of America. Translation: Monique O'Con- nell. The author would like to thank Benjamin G. Kohl, Monique O'Connell, Claudia Salmini, Reinhold C. Mueller and Michela Dal Borgo. 1 ARCHIVIO DI STATO DI VENEZIA, Segretario alle Voci, Universi, regg. 1-9 (from here forward SV). 2 The database remains an ongoing project, and there are many other sources yet to be included. Thus, the results given here are provisional, and I have for the most part drawn my examples from the period 1438-1458. For example, for the fifteenth century, the database does not yet include elections to the Council of Ten and Senate. (ed. F. Zago, Consiglio dei Dieci, Deliberazioni Miste, reg. I-V (1310-1363), 3 voll., Venice, Comitato per la Pubblicazione delle Fonti Relative alla Storia di Venezia, 1962-1993; or eds. R. Cessi. - M. Brunetti, Le deliberazioni del Consiglio dei Rogati (Senato), serie Mixtorum, 2 Vol., Libri XV-XVI, Venice, Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, Monumenti Storici, Nuove serie, vol. 16, 1962). Andrea Mozzato I. From the Register’s Pages to Electronic Files A) The fields of the database The registers were originally created by a notary of the ducal chancellery called, from the sixteenth century onwards, the “Segretario alle voci”, or the Secretary of the Voices. The first nine registers of this series, called misti or universi, cover a long period from 1340 to 1524 and consist of about 800 pages, front and back.3 The individual elections, which correspond in large part to the individual records in the database4 were called voces because the name of the candidate was proclaimed aloud (stridate) in the principal councils – the Great Council, for the most part, and the Senate as well, so that all the counselors were able to hear the name of the candidate elected to office. After the election, on the basis of the documentation produced by other notaries in the council where the offices were assigned, the secretary recorded all the nobles appointed as officers. He also had to allow for the approval (cedulae) of the Avogadori di Comun, where these officials certified that the election was legitimate.5 At the head of each folio of the registers there appears the title of the office. The appearance of the page varied depending on the amount of information there was to record. If the office in question was a seat on a certain council, such as the Senate or Council of Ten, the name of the plezius, or the man re- sponsible in case of embezzlement or bad behavior of the new officer, almost never appears. On the other hand, for offices and regiments, the plezius’s name is always recorded, with the exception of register seven. The names of the men elected appear in two columns immediately under the title of the office. The secretary recorded in chronological order the names of the elected officers, as- signing a group of pages to each office. After he filled the designated space, for example the pages allotted for the Senate election in the years 1438-1440, he would add further elections to the pages at the end of the register. There would therefore be two separate sections of Senate elections in the register, one pre- 1440 and one post 1440. To indicate he had continued the list in another loca- 3 The expression misti or universi reflects some ambivalence, as in the early modern era two sepa- rated series of registers were created for the election in the Great Council and those in the Sen- ate. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, ed. by F. M. Tiepolo (and others), in Guida generale degli Archi- vi di Stato italiani, 4, Florence, Le Monnier, 1994, pp. 905-906. 4 Special ‘system’ records appear in the database registering blank pages or double ‘pledgers’. 5 On the electoral procedure and on the secretary himself, see Claudia Salmini’s paper at the above-mentioned RSA meeting. 2 Problems and possibilities of constructing a researc database tion, the Secretary would insert a note at the end of the page, such as respice ad cartas or volve. Typically, for each office there is the elected official’s first and last name, his father’s name (sometimes with offices he had held or his honors, e. g. miles or procurator), and more rarely his grandfather’s name, the parish and sometimes the official’s previous office. The name of the pledger, or guar- antor of the office, appears to the right of the information about the official. As we will see further on, depending on the importance of the office there were sometimes multiple pledgers for a single election. Beside the office-holder en- try appears two kinds of marginalia—all additional annotations in the margin of the registers—the first concerning the dating, the second concerning the man appointed and it reveals, as we will see in detail, whether he declined to accept the office, whether he died after the election, or other irregularities in the elec- toral procedure. Each record of the database represents a single voce, or election, with all the associated data. We did not choose in this phase of the work to design a rela- tional database because the results would have been very uncertain, given ir- regularities in the form of the data. Moreover, it is impossible to have an unam- biguous codification of all the men present in the registers, which is the neces- sary condition to have a relational database based on the individual. The prob- lem of homonymy makes the identity of many individual office-holders uncer- tain; for this reason, we preferred to split the data relating to the office-holder and to the office into two series of fields: the original spelling of the words in one series, and normalized or obtained data, for instance the location of the of- fice, in the second.6 All the individuals who appear – both officers and the those standing surety for them, are identifying by the following fields: 1) title (i.e. ser or nobilis vir) 2) name 6 For normalizing the names of individuals I followed the patterns of the tables in S. Chojnacki, La formazione della nobiltà dopo la Serrata in Storia di Venezia, vol. 3, La formazione dello stato patrizio, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997, pp. 641-725. As for the normalization of the office names I used the Italian form of the guides of the Archivio di Stato; for the local place I used the appendix in A. Zannini, L'impiego pubblico, in Storia di Venezia, ed. by A. Tenenti - U. Tucci, vol. 4, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996, pp.