In the spring of 1511, Venetian governors stationed in Padua, Split, Hvar, and Udine reported to the Senate on tumults and threats to public order. Their letters provide a revealing vantage point on political culture in Venice’s subject territories at a moment when the Republic was fighting wars on both the Italian mainland and in the Mediterranean. This paper examines how information about political unrest circulated within the empire and how decisions were negotiated across a wide range of actors: from Venetian rectors and civic councils to urban assemblies, elites, and popular groups often excluded from formal channels. By tracing these exchanges, the talk situates Venetian rule between understandings of the state as an empire and as a commonwealth, using a variety of sources to outline a polyphonic conversation in which multiple voices contended to shape outcomes. It asks whether this plurality of participants sustained stability through dialogue or whether it produced the cacophony of crisis.
Monique O’Connell is a Professor of History at Wake Forest University. She holds the James P. Barefield Faculty Fellowship, a position that recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary teaching, scholarship, and student mentorship. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Renaissance Venice and its empire, a topic that has taken her into the details of economic exchange, early print culture, classicizing rhetoric, falsified orations, clerical conspiracies, and the history of botany. She is the author of Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (2016) co-authored with Eric Dursteler, and she is the project editor of rulersofvenice.org. Her current project examines political communication in Venice's mainland and maritime territories during the era of the Italian wars.
