Inquisitori di Stato

Venice’s repeated survival against conspiracy sat at the heart of its state mythos. In 1310, the Venetian senate thwarted a conspiracy led by Venetian patrician Baiamonte Tiepolo to overthrow the Doge. Commemorated by a pillar of infamy, the plot prompted the establishment of a Council of Ten to act as the guarantors of state security.

By the mid-sixteenth century Venice was an imperial power that sought to control the flow of information in the eastern Mediterranean. This meant everything from guarding trade secrets against northern rivals, to knowing when and where to head off Ottoman naval forces. In 1539, three State Inquisitors were constituted from the Council of Ten. They formed a special tribunal with a tight mandate to counter breaches in state secrecy. The inquisitors consisted of three men selected by annual election; two came from the Council of Ten, and one from the Doge’s six counsellors. Together with a support staff drawn from the Venetian cittadini class, they formed one of the earliest centralized state intelligence services.

The 1582-1584 correzione of the Council of Ten marked a turning point as the Great Council (Maggior Consiglio) sought to reclaim authority from the autocratic Council of Ten. Over the following decades, the inquisitors grew their own mandate from protecting state secrecy to investigating and prosecuting crimes. Offenses included everything from counterfeiting, to forbidden publications and indecency. Particularly egregious offenders (such as traitors) might be found hanging between the columns in St. Mark’s square, or simply drowned under cover of night. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inquisitors loomed large in Venetian society.

Discovering and purging spies required spies of one’s own. The inquisitors maintained a corps of paid informers in Venice and abroad, as mediated by Venetian diplomats or a police chief (the captain of the Council of Ten’s guard). By the first decades of the seventeenth century the inquisitors even kept spies within the households of Venice’s diplomatic community or tasked them with tailing subjects-of-interest. Foreigners and nobility alike reported feeling uneasy, suspecting that their movements and conversations could be observed and reported.

Despite their reputation as a secretive and even tyrannical tribunal, the inquisitors generally followed procedure with the same punctiliousness as other Venetian governing bodies. They opened cases, called witnesses, took depositions, gathered evidence, and rendered sentences. The foundational document for the inquisitors was the case file, or processo. However, intelligence-gathering is often pre-emptive, which meant that not every lead led to a case, and not every case was pursued. Miscellaneous material might include:

• Denunciations: Letterboxes for the collection of denunciations (known as bocche dei leoni) could be found throughout Venice. Sometimes denunciations were also delivered to the houses of current or past inquisitors.
• Intercepts and Contraband: Intercepted correspondence or seized publications were important sources of intelligence for the inquisitors. These included many maps and avvisi (handwritten newsletters).
• Correspondence: In addition to their correspondence with informants, the inquisitors maintained their own channels of (frequently, ciphered) correspondence with Venice’s many rectors and diplomats.

The inquisitors and the Council of Ten remained deeply intertwined. Their shared archive, known as the Venetian Secret Chancellery, or the Secreta, reflected this. While requiring high-level security clearance (to borrow a modern term) the chancellery was still very much a working archive. By the seventeenth century secretaries introduced a system of rubrics and annotations to track documents. We see from these how case files were routinely aggregated, disaggregated, borrowed, and lost.

Today, the surviving contents of the Secreta cabinets can be found at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, located in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, colloquially known as the Frari church. Documents related to the inquisitors constitute their own eponymous collection, or fondo. The guide to the Inquisitori di Stato inventory fills three books of the 1888 manuscript catalog completed by archivist Giuseppe Giomo. A card catalog (schedario) and guide to letters to and from informants (confidenti) further cross-reference the material by name, location, and subject material.

Nonetheless, the Inquisitori di Stato collection bears little resemblance to the original archive. The current organization disaggregated whatever remained of the original case files into a more traditional nineteenth-century archival organization: namely, type of document, recipient (in the case of correspondence), and location of interest. The collection is therefore best navigated in close consultation with the secreta registers of the Council of Ten.

Scholars have long known about the reorganizations and repatriations of Venetian collections following the fall of the Venetian Republic. Yet secretaries also purged documents throughout the life of the secret chancellery. Reasons included poor condition, poor organization, or irrelevance. With the creation of the archive at the Frari, books were removed to the Marciana library. Many more documents that likely originated in the chancellery can be found in the Miscellanea collection, or even the library of the Museo Correr.