Legal Sources from the Venetian East^*

The Venetian administration in its eastern colonies has endowed historians with an extensive and varied supply of documentary evidence produced by busy and precise functionaries. Among these, certain kinds of documents have attracted more attention than others, and perhaps none more than the famous embellished reports given in Venice by patricians retiring from their colonial postings (the relazioni). While many series of the more popular sources have made their way into published edi|tions, the records of the colonial administrations themselves and of the local political organs have largely remained unpublished. In reflection perhaps of the predominantly social interests of the historiography, the legal sources have generally been somewhat neglected. By consequence, the literature has become complacent with rather vague conceptions of the complex legal and political structures which maintained Venice’s power over its distant colonies. The promotion of legal evidence would do much to improve the situation. This review considers a new edition of a compilation of laws from Venetian Corfu. As the first publication of local laws from the Venetian East (the Levante), it promises to be of great interest to the historiography of the region and to colonial legal history generally.

The competence of local lawmaking in the Venetian colonial polities (reggimenti) was not monopolised by a single organ. Laws were made not only by the councils (consigli) comprised of the local citizens (cittadini), but also through decrees of the Venetian officials, both those posted to one jurisdiction (e.g. bailo di Corfù or provveditor di Zante) and those supervising whole regions (e.g. provveditori generali in Dalmazia e Albania or da Mar).¹ By the 18th century, successive administrations of what had become the three main colonies in the East (the tre isole di Levante: Corfu, Cephalonia and Zante) had inherited large bodies of local laws made by the various competent bodies. These were compiled by colonial officials into series of edited copies (copiarii) which relieved the administrators of the need to consult the dispersed original acts. Some forensic research at Venice and Corfu has sought to trace the compilations of laws which had once formed the basis of the archive of the provveditori generali da Mar based at Corfu.² A collection of decrees and local regulations had been commissioned by the provveditor general Francesco Grimani in 1760 to ease the work of his successors by providing them with an alphabetically ordered repository of legal authorities. While the fate of this Compilazione delle Legge per il Levante remains unclear,³ collections of smaller scope have survived. The laws of Cephalonia (Ordini di Cefalonia) survive in two manuscripts of 1786 held at the State Archives at Athens and others at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) and the Biblioteca Marciana.⁴ Those of Zante must be reconstructed from citations of the libri degli ordini in the major 19th-century literature, and from the copies held at the ASV, as the local archive was destroyed in 1953.⁵ Among the equivalent collections from Corfu is a compilation of acts of the local council, the Statuti del Consiglio della città di Corfù, which has now been published in a new edited volume by Nikos E.Karapidakis.⁶

The present series of laws from Corfu was compiled by at least two hands, the first being the cancellier Stelio Calogerà around 1715–1717, whose collection was later extended to 1797 by at least one unnamed hand whom Karapidakis dates to the years after the fall of Venice (28–29). The 322 |entries mostly span the 17th and 18th centuries, with four dating to the 16th and just two to the 15th. With the exception of formulaic legalisms and decisions of high Venetian magistrates like the avogadori de comùn (or advocatores communis, e.g. 336–337) which appear in Latin, the entries are in the Venetian dialect and their construction exhibits the general characteristics of Venetian legal style.

A catalogue of entries (587–605) allows comparison of the matters to which the orders, decrees, and regulations are addressed. The presentation of the entire series of legislation here reveals certain trends in Venetian administrative practice as they manifest in the colonial apparatus. An imperial concern over the management of local power is represented by increasing regulation of the institutions through which the local elites participated in government. Among these were the council (consiglio) and the smaller conclave. The legislation shows a trend towards the codification of these bodies’ procedures and powers, which represents a Venetian hold on local power. The dissatisfaction of the Venetian administrators with the execution of local elections for the council and various offices was perhaps the most common cause of regulatory intervention, such as in a prohibition of the abuse of influence in electoral politics (63, cf. 82–83, 107–109). Another, and related, mechanism of control was the institution of the fabled register of noble births (libro d’oro) following the model of the class system of Venice proper (61–62). Other regulations concern the election of offices from the members of the council (giudici, sindici, censori, etc.: 102–104, cf. 484–491), who comprise an arm of the colonial apparatus filled by local elites (which remains to be seriously studied for any of the Ionian islands). Further insight into the function of the local organs is given by examples of regulations made by the council itself (e.g. 376–381) and by the conclave (e.g. 503–512).

Following the transcribed documents, the second significant part of this volume is a glossary of technical terms relevant to the legal and political structures of the Corfiote administration. Since these reflect a common Venetian political vocabulary, the glossary is not merely an aid of relevance to the Corfiote Ordini here, but useful for sources from throughout the empire.

The collection of laws from Corfu in this volume represents just one local example of a more widely adopted practice of collation and ordering that characterised Venetian administration with increasing intensity throughout the 17th and into the 18th century. The project of assembling an exhaustive compilation of laws not only from Venice proper but of the many colonial reggimenti was begun in 1662 by the ambitious Marino Angeli. The project was never completed, but the dispatches of relevant material sent from all corners of the empire remain in a large fond at the ASV organised after Angeli’s schema.⁷ This practice may be seen as part of the trend towards the modernisation and systematisation of Venetian lawmaking, though it would never take the form of the kind of systemic codification of the early 19th century. The publication of the present volume, while necessarily representing the more confined scope of one jurisdiction and its local organs, now makes accessible evidence for the transmission of this trend in lawmaking to the administration of the eastern colonies. A study of the substance of the acts contained here will allow insight into the evolving structures of colonial rule, while close consideration of their subjection to a process of collection and ordering will itself make clearer the precise function of lawmaking among the technologies of colonial government.