Sinews of rule: the politics of officeholding in fifteenth‐century Venetian Crete

Abstract

Crete, a colony of Venice from 1204 to 1669, presented administrative challenges to the Venetian regime, one of the most important being the distribution of offices in the island's government. Venetian patricians, Veneto‐Cretan settlers, and local residents all had a stake in the politics of officeholding, and the Venetian Signoria had to mediate between the interests of officials eager to reap the rewards of office and complaints of the islanders quick to defend local privilege, in order to create a stable colonial administration. To maintain this balance, Venice relied on a flexible system of government which used Cretan embassies to the Senate, state inspectors' investigations and prosecutions for official misconduct, individual petitions for favours, or gratie, and judicial appeals as avenues for necessary change in the island's administration. These complaints and prosecutions, ambassadors' requests, and the Senate's response to them reveal a pattern in the administration of this territory: in most matters, the Venetian administration was responsive to requests from its subjects and displayed a measure of flexibility, balancing its own interests with those expressed by the islanders. The exception to this policy was the eligibility and distribution of offices in the highest levels of the administration on Crete, which the Venetian Signoria kept under its own control despite pressures for greater local involvement from the local population.