Venezia e le sue colonie tra differenziazione socio-giuridica e mobilità sociale

Over the five centuries separating the Serrata of the Great Council (1297) from the fall of the Republic (1797), Venice pursued a dual strategy: on one hand, safeguarding the privileges of the ruling patrician families and a narrow elite of citizens; on the other, creating controlled mechanisms of cooptation and social integration that offered limited outlets for social advancement to aspiring groups. This rigid socio-legal differentiation ‒ rooted in the medieval tripartite division of functional orders ‒ was applied within Venetian society in parallel with pathways of social mobility that could serve as a prelude to legal and civic promotion. The framework, which identified the lineage (casata) as the unit of reference for privilege, was perfectly suited to Venetian society understood as the resident population of the lagoon islands. However, it excluded individuals whose lives unfolded beyond the boundaries of the capital, particularly in the overseas colonies of the Stato da Mar. This essay seeks to investigate why the families of Venetian nobles from Crete, who returned to Venice during and after the Cretan War (which began in 1645), were not welcomed by the Venetian patriciate. Instead, they were branded as a «degenerate nation». After a brief overview of the social and legal tools used to assess and verify eligibility for inclusion in the patriciate, the analysis reveals that these families were, in fact, victims of political retribution disguised as social critique - an accusation easily leveled against them due to their troubled history of noble recognition and their failure to comply with the established Venetian rules of cooptation.