by commerce. In the original island territory of Venice there
could be no such thing as landed property. The agricultural
plebeian of old Rome and the feudal noble of contemporary
Europe were both of them at Venice impossible characters. The
Venetian nobility is an example of a nobility which gradually
arose out of the mass of the people as certain families step by
step drew all political power into their own hands. The plebs
did not gather round the patres, neither were they conquered by
the patres; the patres were developed by natural selection
out of the plebs, or, more strictly, out of the ancient populus.
The commune of Venice, the ancient style of the commonwealth,
changed into the seigniory of Venice. Political power
was gradually confined to those whose forefathers had held
political power. This was what the later nobility of Rome
was always striving at, and what they did to a great extent
practically establish. But, as the exclusive privileges of the
nobility were never recognized by any legal or formal act, men
like Gaius Marius would ever and anon thrust themselves in.
The privileges which the Venetian nobility took to themselves
were established by acts which, if not legal, were at least formal.
The Roman nobility, resting wholly on sufferance, was overthrown
by the ambition of one of its own members. The Venetian
nobility, resting also in its beginnings on sufferance, but on
sufferance which silently obtained the force of law, lasted as long
as Venice remained a separate state.
The hereditary oligarchy of Venice was established by a series of changes which took place between the years 1297 and 1319. All of them together really go to make up the “Shutting of the Great Council,” a name which is formally given to the act of the first of those years. In 1172 the Great Council began as an elective body; it gradually ousted the popular assembly from all practical power. It was, as might be looked for, commonly filled by members of distinguished families, descendants of ancient magistrates, who were already beginning to be looked on as noble. The series of revolutions already spoken of first made descent from former councillors a necessary qualification for election to the council; then election was abolished, and the council consisted of all descendants of its existing members who had reached the age of twenty-five. Thus the optimates of Venice did what the optimates of Rome strove to do: they established a nobility whose one qualification was descent from those who had held office in past times. This is what the nobility of office, if left unchecked, naturally grows into. But the particular Way in which oligarchy was finally established at Venice had some singular results. Some of the great families which were already looked on as noble were not represented in the council at the time of the shutting; of others some branches were represented and others not. These families and branches of families, however noble they might be in descent, were thus shut out from all the political privileges of nobility. When one branch of a family was admitted and one shut out we have an The Roman Curiae and the Great Council of Venice. analogy to the patrician and plebeian Claudii, though the distinction had come about in quite another way. And in the Great Council itself we have the lively image of the aristocratic popular assembly of Rome, the assembly of the populus, that of the curiae, where every man of patrician birth had his place. The two institutions are the same, only the way in which they came about is exactly opposite. The assembly of curiae at Rome, originally the democratic assembly of the original people, first grew into an aristocratic assembly, and then died out altogether as a new Roman people, with its own assembly, grew up by its side. It was a primitive institution which gradually changed its character by force of circumstances. It died out, supplanted by other and newer powers, when it became altogether unsuited to the times. The Great Council of Venice was anything but a primitive institution; it was the artificial institution of a late age, which grew at the expense of earlier institutions, of the prince on the one side and of the people on the other. But the two different roads led to the same result. The Great Council of Venice, the curiae of Rome, were each of them the assembly of a privileged class, an assembly in which every member of that class had a right to a place, an assembly which might be called popular as far as the privileged class was concerned, though rigidly oligarchic as regarded the excluded classes. But, close as the likeness is, it is merely a superficial likeness, because it is the result of opposite causes working in opposite directions. It is like two men who are both for a moment in the same place, though their faces are turned in opposite ways. If the later nobilitas of Rome had established an assembly in which every one who had the jus imaginum had a vote and none other, that would have been a real parallel to the shutting of the Venetian Great Council; for it would have come about through the working of causes which are essentially the same.
The nobility which was thus formed at Venice is the very model of a civic nobility, a nobility which is also an aristocracy. In a monarchy, despotic or constitutional, there cannot in strictness be an aristocracy, because the whole political power cannot be vested in the noble class. But in the Venetian commonwealth the nobilityThe nobility of Venice and aristocracy. was a real aristocracy. All political power was vested in the noble class; the prince sank to a magistrate, keeping only some of the outward forms of sovereignty; the mass of the people were shut out altogether. And, if no government on earth ever fully carried out the literal meaning of aristocracy as the rule of the best, these civic nobilities come nearer to it than any other form of government. They do really seem to engender a kind of hereditary capacity in their members. Less favourable than either monarchy or democracy to the growth of occasional great men, they are more favourable than either to the constant supply of a succession of able men, qualified to carry on the work of government. Their weak point lies in their necessary conservatism; they cannot advance and adapt themselves to changed circumstances, as either monarchy or democracy can. When, therefore, their goodness is gone, their corruption becomes Worse than the corruption of either of the other forms of government.
All this is signally shown in the history both of Venice and of other aristocratic cities. But we are concerned with them now only as instances of one form of nobility. The civic aristocracies did not all arise in the same way. Venice is the best type of one way in which they rose; but it is by no means the only way. In not a few of theCivic aristocracies. Italian cities nobility had an origin and ran a course quite unlike the origin and the course which were its lot at Venice. The nobles of many cities were simply the nobles of the surrounding country changed, sometimes greatly against their will, into citizens. Such a nobility differed far more widely from either the Roman or the Venetian patriciate than they differed from one another. It wanted the element of legality, or at least of formality, which distinguished both these bodies. The privileges of the Roman patriciate, whatever we may call them, were not usurpations, and, if we call the privileges of the Venetian nobility usurpations, they were stealthy and peaceful usurpations, founded on something other than mere violence. But in many Italian cities the position of the nobles, if it did not begin in violence, was maintained by violence, and was often overthrown by violence. They remained, in short, as unruly and isolated within the walls of the cities as they had ever been without. A nobility of this kind often gave way to a democracy which either proved as turbulent as itself, or else grew into an oligarchy ruling under democratic forms. Thus at Florence the old nobles became the opposite to a privileged class. The process which at Rome gradually gave the plebeian a political advantage over the patrician was carried at Florence to a far greater length at a single blow. The whole noble order was disfranchised; to be noble was equivalent to being shut out from public office. But something like a new nobility presently grew up among the commons themselves; there were popolani grossi at Florence just as there were noble plebeians at Rome. Only the Roman commons, great and small, never shut out the patricians from office; they were satisfied to share office with them. In short, the shutting out of the old nobility was, if not the formation of a new nobility, at least the formation of a
