The Private Political Archives of the Venetian Patriciate – Storing, Retrieving and Recordkeeping in the Fifteenth-Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article describes the birth and development of the political archives that Venetian patrician families kept in their private palaces for the use of the Republic's officeholders. It will shed light on the different uses made of public documents as well as on the different approaches to recordkeeping, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. These archives, shared by all family members and transmitted from generation to generation, eventually became extremely voluminous partly because copies from documents in public registries were made and kept, but also because new types of analytical documents based on data extracted from the public record were introduced. Until the eighteenth century, when rational retrieval systems began to be introduced, the documents were kept in ‘buste’ (containers) and extracted as and when needed by the officeholder.

Notes

Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishing, Access and Use,’ 93–108.

On the Venetian chronicle and its political use of data, see Raines, ‘Alle origini dell'archivio politico del patriziato,’ 5–57. Today we can estimate roughly 100–120 chronicles in public and private collections. If we calculate the number of patrician families (casate) at around 140, we may conclude that a great number of the large patrician families possessed a chronicle. On the number of patrician families see Raines, ‘Cooptazione, aggregazione e presenza al Maggior Consiglio,’ 305–354.

Some evidence for the existence of 14^th–15^th century documents in the private archives, apart from the Bollani documents (see below), is in Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venice (hereafter BMC), Cod. Cicogna 3475, a collection of Ducali (ducal instructions) sent to various officeholders.

After long practice, never expressed in any law, the Council of Ten issued in June 1605 a decree which permitted the appointed ambassadors to have copies of various documents from the Secret Chancery. De Vivo, ‘Le armi dell'ambasciatore,’ 192.

In the mid-thirteenth century the parva cancelleria already existed, an archive deprived of any clearly-defined recordkeeping system. Other magistrates kept archives too. The July 15, 1268 decree which established the office of the Great Chancellor, thus officially creating the Chancery, kept only records of the most important state councils as well as diplomatic documents. Pedani Fabris, ‘Veneta auctoritate notarius,’ 96.

On the proliferation of mainland officeholders, Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, 37–43; Del Torre, Venezia e la terraferma, 217–234. On those of the maritime Republic: O'Connell, Men of Empire, 39–56.

In fact, the creation of the Secret Chancery in 1402 coincides with the mainland conquest and the need to keep secret records apart from other sections. Archivio di Stato, Venezia (hereafter ASVe), Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni (Leone), reg. 21, c. 125r, decree from April 23, 1402. On the lack of an effective arrangement and retrieval system for Chancery clerks and the consequent archival disorder in the Chancery offices from the 1570s until the second half of the seventeenth century, Zannini, Burocrazia e burocrati, 126–127. A number of attempts was made by the Republic to reform the Ducal archives: in the 1630s with the division of documents between Corti and Rettori, in order to divide diplomatic material and that coming from Mainland governors; the 1669 De Negri-Nani index of the Secret Chancery; the 1662 enormous work of compilazione leggi (index of laws by argument).

Some evidences of patricians copying directly from State documents: Marino Sanudo in ASVe, Collegio, Notatorio, copy of Sanudo (1291–1442); Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia (hereafter BNM), Cod. Marc. It. VII, 375 (=8954), Marin Sanudo, Fogli volanti in gran parte autogr., cc. 43–58: ‘Note varie da registri dell'archivio di stato, ecc. (autogr.)’; Marco Barbaro in his work Cronaca dei Procuratori di S. Marco in Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Cod. Foscarini CCXI, no. 6175, stated in the preface that he had found it difficult to trace in the Chancery ancient documents regarding the Procurators of St. Mark; Pietro Bembo, as well as Andrea Morosini, upon election to the office of official historiographer were allowed access to all documents produced by the Senate and the Council of Ten. For Bembo see: ASVe, Consiglio dei Dieci, Notatorio, reg. 8, c. 165, ‘Decreto dei Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci col quale è concessa al Bembo la lettura dei documenti ufficiali’, December 18, 1530 (published in Lagomaggiore, ‘L'Istoria Viniziana,’ 335, doc. III); For Morosini, von Reumont, Della diplomazia italiana, 320–322: Morosini's election and 322–325: Morosini's report on the Secret Archives’ situation; Baschet, Les Archives de Venise, 170, citing from ASVe, Council of Ten, decree from April 21, 1600. See also ASVe, Inquisitori di Stato, b. 924: ‘Note on Senators who consulted documents in the Secret Chancery in the month of September 1698,’ quoted in Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishing, Access and Use,’ 107. One may also consider that by the 17^th century the Somaschi Fathers (a charitable religious congregation of priests and brothers, founded in Italy in the 16^th century) took it on itself to educate patricians, providing a political curriculum derived from copies coming either directly from the public archives through patricians, or from the private political archives. Barzazi, Gli affanni dell'erudizione, 85–111.

See a sixteenth-century decree ordering the constitution of two, then three, copies of the Segretario alle Voci registries, with each destined to be conserved in a different place, yet all available for public consultation. The original text is in ASVe, Segretario alle Voci, ‘Universi.’ Serie moderna, reg. 5, c.1, quoted in Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishing, Access and Use,’ 101. Yet, the Council of Ten pointed out in 1639 that many Venetians and foreigners were allowed to consult election registries and even ‘mark on them whatever they pleased.’ ASVe, Compilazione leggi, b. 108, c. 119r, July 15, 1639. The Avogaria di Comun's (State Attorney) offices too, witnessed quite an assault of patricians eager to extract data on births and weddings. The situation was so chaotic that registries were borrowed and sometimes never returned. A 1643 decree put a stop to this abuse. ASVe, Avogaria di Comun, reg. 17, c. 81. Raines, L'invention du mythe aristocratique, 462–463.

Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, 209–210.

Mattozzi, ‘Le cartiere nello Stato veneziano,’ 118–120.

See the borrowing list of registries and documents from the Chancery, drawn up by the Great Chancellor Andrea Franceschi in the first half of the sixteenth century, in Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishing, access and Use,’ 107. See also BNM, Cod. Marc. It. VII, 1118 (=8850), Documenti della cancelleria segreta, copie di documenti ad uso di Marco Contarini amb. Vienna, 1742, sec. XVIII, c. 2: ‘Copia da levarsi nella Cancelleria Segreta, e da restituirsi al ritorno’ (with a clerk certification of the restitution upon returning from the mission); ASVe, Provveditori, Sopraprovviditori e Collegio alle pompe, ‘Inventario di ciò che portavano seco i Rettori ed altri … (1686–1792).’

On these consulting tools and their role in Venetian politics, see Raines, ‘Office Seeking,’ 137–194.

Contrary to the archival concept linking documents' importance and record durability, already expressed in 1291 by the Great Council, which decreed that all important public acts should be written on parchment, the private documents involving nominations (Ducal commissions, Doge's Promissioni), written on parchment up until the eighteenth century, were the expression of an opposite belief, i.e. that: longevity of the material and its prohibitive cost rendered the document a sort of importance. On the 1291 decree, Lanfranchi, ‘Prefazione,’ in Favaro, Cassiere della Bolla ducale, LXXIX.

The Venetian docket appears, it seems, toward the thirteenth century. It was mainly used in the case of testaments or bequests of property to convents. With the growing mass of documents, the Venetian secretaries adopted this useful practice that transformed the document into a quick-reference tool. They inscribed date and content title onto the outer folded part, and gained time by avoiding unfolding the document and reading its contents. For samples of thirteenth-century dockets, see ASVe, Giudici di Petizion, frammenti antichi, b. 1, docket inserted between c. 5 and 6; ASVe, Monastero di San Zaccaria, b. 28, n. 24b.

Although a bag might be used for the family archives, sometimes kept mingled with the political material in the patrician study, see the case of the Pesaro family archives, with a small bag bearing a label sewn on the fabric, noting reference code and the bag's contents: ‘Bag number 37, exchange of properties, receipts for administrative bills for three fields.’ See Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishing, Access and Use,’ 99. Such bags were equally used to transport material during travels.

See a detailed study of the Bollani case in Raines, ‘L'archivio familiare,’ 5–38.

See for example the Manin archives, divided into family papers, now in the Udine State Archives, and political records currently in the ‘Vincenzo Joppi’ Comunal Library; or the division made between the political papers of the Procurator of Saint Mark, Angelo Morosini (1639–1693) (ASVe, Procuratori di Ultra, Commissarie, b. 203, fasc. 1, 1r n.n.: ‘Manuscritti di materie Publiche et altre’), and his other papers (ibid., pacco n. 1: ‘Inventario delle scritture di ragione del q.m N.H. m. Anzolo Moresini Cav.r e Proc.r essistenti in un Casson bislongo, tre Casse, et due Forzieri pntate nell'Off.o Ecc.mo … .’

The Lippomano family archives, at present part of the Querini Stampalia Foundation library in Venice, are a case in point, where private and political material were kept together. See Raines ‘Public or private records? The family archives of the Venetian patriciate in fifteenth-eighteenth centuries,’ forthcoming in Arquivos de família, séculos XIII-XIX: que presente, que futuro?

See for example, the Priuli archives within the Manin collection in the Vincenzo Joppi Comunal Library in Udine (manuscripts nos. 1000–1074).

Foppa, Memorie storiche. Cfr. Zorzi, La Libreria, 334–335, 339, 341, 345, 347, 519, 520–522, 524, 525. Foppa organized the archives of the following families: Bernardo in calle delle Rasse; Capello in San Giovanni Laterano; Foscolo di San Vidal; Michiel di Santi Apostoli; Mocenigo di San Samuele; Venier ai Gesuiti; Astori in Campiello Sansoni; Corner della Ca' Grande di San Maurizio. Presumably also the Contarini ‘de' Scrigni’ di San Trovaso. Schiavon, L'archivio politico.