Abstract
When the constitution of the Republic of Genoa was rewritten in 1528, the traditional distinction between nobili and popolari was abolished and the now unified ruling class was organised into 28 groups called alberghi, which were granted equal political representation by an elaborate and bizarre voting mechanism. Using data on the composition of the Genoese nobility in 1528, we simulate the rounds of voting, nominations, and sortition of the electoral protocol to reveal how they determined the allocation of power. Our analysis shows that the constitutional reform could not succeed in bringing concord to the nobility, as the system was heavily biased towards the popolari (later renamed nobili nuovi), who could gain control over all key magistracies. We also show that the use of the alberghi for office allocation made the system less favourable to the nobili nuovi, but only marginally so. These results help explain the persistence of political instability in Genoa after the 1528 reform, and they shed light on the voting system reforms that followed.
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Notes
The reformers’ choice fell to the alberghi who had at least six houses open in Genoa in 1528, with the exception of the archbishop’s albergo, the Cybo, which had fewer than six (Bitossi 2018: 96; Pacini 1990: 350). The number of the Genoese private alberghi peaked at about 100 at the end of the fourteenth century, declining afterwords. Before 1528 there were no mixed aberghi, as each one included either noble or popular families, but not both (Grendi 1975: 245).
A further reason behind the abolition was the conflict that had arisen over the years between the original private aim of the alberghi and their new public function; in particular, the new arrangement was the source of disputes over the administration of inheritances. (Grendi 1975: 269; Savelli 1981: 58.)
Genoa had been ruled by a doge since 1339, but before 1528 the doge had monocratic powers and was elected for life, although few doges held office for that long. The position was reserved to the popular faction.
The book, also known as Liber civilitatis, was renamed Liber nobilitatis after 1580.
The reform has sometimes been misunderstood on this point, as it reads “let all the names and surnames of the noble citizens of the twenty-eight families be placed in an urn or bag.” However, a report on the formation of the Maggior consiglio in 1529 says that “Today the greater council of four-hundred citizens was extracted by lot from twenty-eight bags, in which each family was placed individually”. (Pacini 1990: 305, 394). We believe that the reference to “one bag” is to be interpreted as yet another attempt to suggest that the nobility was undivided.
In the law passed in 1528, 300 patricians were to be chosen at random and the remaining 100 by ballot, and only a quarter of the council was up for renewal each year. However, the law was amended in March 1529, before it was ever applied (members of the first Maggior consiglio were chosen by the twelve reformers). (Pacini 1990: 304, 340; Petracchi 1989: 40, 57).
Three years include six semesters and, therefore, 12 alberghi. Six more were excluded if they had an incumbent governor, leaving 10 out of 28. The actual number could be lower if some governors died while in office.
As with the equal division of offices, the constitutional dictate on the matter does not exactly correspond to practice: Due to great differences in wealth and prestige among the nobles, patronage relationships were common and could lead to a newly admitted noble being a client of a vecchi family. Therefore, some of the newly admitted were only nominally nobili nuovi. For this reason, data on the size of the two factions after 1528 must be interpreted with caution.
If 14 nobles are taken from a bag, the number of new nobles drawn can take values in \(\{0, 1,\dots , 14\}\). Then, over the 23 mixed alberghi, there are \(15^{23}\) possible outcomes to consider.
The elections of the doge and the governors required a relative majority, which is equivalent to a simple majority under our assumptions (i) and (ii).
Molinari (2020) shows that, when sortition is used to form a smaller electoral college, as in the election of the Venetian doge, the probability that a minority will become a majority in the electoral college is close to the minority’s share of the population. This result corresponds to a probabilistic version of proportional representation.
Assumption (ii) above ensures that if a faction had more than two nominees, votes were not squandered by dividing the ballots among them.
As explained in Section 3, each albergo gets between 14 and 15 members in the Maggior consiglio, then 14 is arbitrarily chosen. However, the changes in the estimated probabilities are negligible if we choose 15.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Simple majorities in the Maggior consiglio (Table 4)
Let T denote the population size in the bag and N be the number of nobili nuovi it contains. We denote by H(T, N, d, x) the hypergeometric cumulative distribution function that gives the probability of getting x or less nobili nuovi in d drawings without replacement.
1.1.1 Estimate 1: first row of Table 4
We fix the number of nobles drawn from each of the 5 popular only alberghi to 14 to get 70 sure nobili nuovi in the council.Footnote 13 In List 1, Cybo is also not mixed and, therefore, the number of sure nobili nuovi is raised to 84. The remaining 330 members (316 for List 1) are drawn without replacement from the pool of the mixed alberghi.
To get a simple majority for the nobili nuovi, strictly more than \(200-70=130\) (or \(200-84=116\)) of its members must be drawn from the mixed alberghi. Therefore, the probability of the nobili nuovi having a simple majority in the great council can be computed as \(1-H(T,N,316,116)\) for List 1 and \(1-H(T,N,330,130)\) for List 2 and 3, where the values for T and N are given in the following table.
Mixed alberghi pooled | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
List 1 | List 2 | List 3 | |||
Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total |
N | T | N | T | N | T |
663 | 1615 | 558 | 1264 | 909 | 1752 |
1.1.2 Estimate 2: second row of Table 4
In our second estimate, we take into account the asymmetries of the mixed alberghi, by assuming that for the 23 non-popular alberghi sortition is made from only two very asymmetric bags, which are formed by pooling together the alberghi according to their size. To keep things simple, Cybo is now included in the group of small alberghi and we deal with the odd number of alberghi by splitting the 12th smaller albergo between the two bags. The composition of the bags is described below. Notice that the new nobles are distributed between the non-popular alberghi quite evenly. The nobili vecchi, instead, are concentrated on the larger alberghi.
Non-popular alberghi pooled in two groups based on size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bag | List 1 | List 2 | List 3 | |||
Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total | |
N | T | N | T | N | T | |
Small | 363 | 618 | 264 | 445 | 446 | 684 |
Large | 350 | 1047 | 294 | 819 | 463 | 1068 |
As before, we assume that each popular only albergo gets 14 members. Half of the remaining 330 are drawn from each bag. The number of nuovi drawn from each group is a hypergeometric random variable and drawings from each urn are independent. We use these two facts to numerically evaluate the cumulative distribution function of the sum of nobili nuovi drawn from the two groups, and from this we compute the probability that the nuovi drawn from the mixed alberghi are more than 130.
1.1.3 Estimate 3: third row of Table 4
To assess the role of the alberghi, immagine to draw all the 400 members of the Maggior consiglio from the pool of all the nobles, without distinction of alberghi. In this case the composition of the bag is as follows.
Unicum ordo | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
List 1 | List 2 | List 3 | |||
Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total | Nuovi | Total |
N | T | N | T | N | T |
1080 | 2032 | 811 | 1517 | 1294 | 2137 |
A simple majority is gained by getting strictly more than 200 members in the council. Therefore, the probability of the nobili nuovi having a simple majority can be computed as \(1-H(T,N,400,200).\)
1.2 Qualified majorities in the Maggior consiglio (Table 5)
To estimate the new nobles’ probability of, respectively, reaching a qualified majority and being irrelevant, we use the same assumptions of Estimate 1, i.e. we consider the sure result of the non-mixed alberghi and pool all other nobles together. A qualified majority in the great council is reached with at least 267 members. Since the new nobles have 70 sure members (84 if we use List 1), a qualified majority is obtained if they get at least \(267-70=197\) members in \(400-70=330\) drawings (for List 1 the numbers are \(267-84=183\) out of \(400-84=316\) drawings). This probability can be computed as \(1-H(T, N, 330, 197)\) or, for List 1, as \(1-H(T, N, 316, 183).\)
By a similar reasoning we obtain the probability that the new nobles are irrelevant, that is they have less than 133 votes in the council. This can be computed as the probability that the new nobles drawn from the pool of the mixed alberghi is less than \(133-70=63\) out of 330 draws, that is H(T, N, 330, 63). For List 1 irrelevance comes with less than \(133-84=49\) draws out of 316, and therefore the probability is H(T, N, 316, 49).
1.3 Composition of the colleges (Table 6)
To give a conservative estimate of the advantage held by the nobili nuovi, we (i) rule out the possibility that the nobili vecchi fail to elect their own governors when in control of the great council, that is we assume that they always have enough candidates, and (ii) use the lower bound for the probability p that the nobili nuovi have a simple majority in the great council (Estimate 1 in Table 4).
Let \(q^G(4i)\), where \(i \in \{0,1,2\},\) be the probability that there are 4i members for the nuovi in the Collegio dei Governatori. Because each great council elects four governors and the compositions of successive councils are independent experiments, the number of governors of the new faction divided by four has a binomial distribution with parameters 2 and p. Therefore,
A similar argument can be made for the elected Governatori and Procuratori combined. For \(i \in \{0,1,2,3,4\},\) the probability \(q^{GP}(4i)\) that there are 4i members for the nuovi among the elected GP is
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Molinari, M.C. Much ado about nothing: voting in sixteenth-century Republic of Genoa. Const Polit Econ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09414-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09414-z