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In 16th century the Republic of Venice created an efficient diplomatic network that was active in the most important courts of Europe. Starting from 1560 the Serenissima maintained a resident ambassador at the Savoy court, as it was considered of great political importance. In their relations, all Venetian diplomats underlined the progressive consolidation of the ducal power and tried to explain the causes of this process. The essay focuses on the thoughts of the Venetian ambassadors on the Savoy sovereignty in the period 1560-1613, when the Duchy was ruled by Emmanuel Philibert and Charles Emmanuel I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In agreement with the last will of Doge Francesco Erizzo († 1646), his heart was buried in San Marco, the political and religious center of the Serenissima, next to the high altar and thus ad sanctos to the relics of Venice's patron saint. This unprecedented privilege not only disrupted the city's restrictive policies concerning public monuments, but her republican ideals in general. Due to the significance of the heart in Christian eschatological thinking and corporal state doctrines his burial elevated Erizzo to the status of an absolute ruler threatening the Republic's sacred constitution. In Venice, however, individual and public interests were closely intertwined. This study therefore analyzes the heart burial in the context of Erizzo's self-fashioning, Venetian state ideology, devotional practices and collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation has three interlinked goals. The first is to resolve a concrete and long-standing problem that has challenged epigraphists and art historians. It involves establishing a plausible date for a five-line proverbial inscription carved in Old Venetian on the Treasury wall of San Marco in Venice. The inscription, often read and sometimes misread, has a lengthy critical history given its sensitive location in the great ceremonial passageway between St Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace, the nerve centres of Venetian religious and political power. It is also the focal point of an intriguing sculptural ensemble whose problematic dating is also at stake in the investigation. The critical disarray over the chronology of our public text is such that it has been assigned to various points between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. I attempt to clarify this chronological issue with detailed evidence drawn, in particular, from palaeography and linguistics. The second aim is to demonstrate, via a specific case study, the descriptive and predictive value of vernacular epigraphic philology as a critical tool in historical research when its interdisciplinary resources are systematically and conjointly exploited. The third objective is to provide an epigraphic contextualization for the enquiry. In this background survey I review the current state of play in Italian and Venetian medieval inscription studies, highlighting the discipline’s recent advances but also its reluctance to draw on the type of diachronic and comparative analysis of script and language exemplified in our case study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early sixteenth century, the Republic of Venice began to admit the first of a succession of patrician historiographers into the heavily restricted inner sanctum of its state records, the secret chancery, in order to inform their accounts of the city's recent affairs. Whilst this development has often been considered from the perspective of Venetian politics and self-image, the experiences of the historians within a constantly evolving collection of state records also provide us with an invaluable case study into the nascent practice of archival scholarship at a time before its emergence as a fundamental aspect of the historian's craft. The following study will consider the administrative and scholarly developments which took place within the archive of the Venetian secret chancery across the turn of the seventeenth century - a period in which the location, staffing and accessibility of the chancery archive underwent its most substantial reform - in order to demonstrate how the discovery and use of historical information in contemporary Venice was heavily influenced by the practical and ever changing circumstances of the archive as a site for the preservation, indexing and retrieval of government records. As we come to better appreciate the role of the archive in shaping our conception of the past today, we must also consider the ways in which the works of early modern historians were equally facilitated and restricted by the physical surroundings of the record collections with which they were confronted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the rise and fall of the Venetian Empire in maritime power and international trade. Topics discussed include the significance of mercantilism in the economic development of Venice, Italy, the history of Venice's dominance in maritime trading, and its trading commodities. Also discussed are history of Venice's republic, and the growth of foreign traders.