Nobili scaduti? The Return of Cretan Patricians to Venice in the Seventeenth Century

In 1211 some of patrician branches left for Crete. Nani, Muazzo, Venier, Canal, Falier, Foscolo, Sagredo and others have left for political and economic reasons to colonize an island and administrate their commercial affairs. These families have always been careful to register (even not regularly) their heirs as legitimate born to patrician parents in order to maintain their right to be a member of the Great Council. After the cession to the island to the Ottoman empire in 1669, the chronicles report of around a hundred patricians reintegrated in the Great Council. Although in need of new blood, the Venice-based patricians disliked the old newcomers and called them “nobili scaduti”. The article assesses the number and identity of these nobles and their reintegration process. Sometimes it is interesting to look not only at the chronological ongoing development of a phenomenon but to observe it from the other side of the pipeline - when it exhausts itself and reaches its natural term. The article then, in a second moment, tackles the question of why one sort of colonialism (of branches who played both on the Venetian and Cretan theaters) was accepted in seventeenth-century Venice and another sort (those who went – or were sent - to colonize Crete) was not.