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POLITICAL SCIENCE,

the lot and the ballot, show the jealousy which the mem-
bers of the council entertained toward one another, t>po
daily toward the relatives of the deceased do-e ; but such
complicated votes were not confined to the Venetian re-
public.*

The doge's power was limited by the grand council, by
his own special council, by the quarantia, afterwards by
the power of the ten, and by special laws. Although chief
magistrate, he could do very little on his own authority, I le
could not leave the republic without pcrmisHun obtained
from the two councils. He could appoint no relative of his
own to a civil or ecclesiastical office. He cmdrl marry no
foreign woman, lest the state might be brought inln unpleas-
ant foreign relations. He could give audience nl<*ne to nu
foreign ambassador, nor receive an ambasssy from fordgn
parts.f His executive power was rather a semblance than a
reality within the limits of his official duties ; fnr lie was
surrounded by so many councils created by the aristocracy,
that little means of doing good or evil to the state were left
to him.

2. The great council, especially after it became a close
^               corporation, was the controlling hmiy in the

The grand councU.         x                                           /*           *                                          *

state, as representing first the community, then
the wealth over against the people, then the upper arislnrrucy
over against the new wealth. We have already spoken of
the sources from which the aristocracy was derived, They
were-—to enumerate them more accurately-the families made
rich in early times by navigation and commerce ; the patrician
families or town gentry who fled to Venice as a refuse in
early times; the new-comers afterward, like the more than
fifty magnates from the territory of Aquilcia, and the nineteen

* The account given by Dandolo differs from this in sonic partial-
•s-he ***» nothmg of gilded and plated balls, for instance-but i»

the same.

of A* Dandolo, a law is mentumtl in
in7              authonty to receive ^assadors, P*««I under
o Zeno, XIL, 372.                                            ' r