Renaissance Venice’s Intelligence Organization

Abstract This chapter analyses the organizational structure of Renaissance Venice’s intelligence service as it was headed by the Council of Ten and composed of geographically dispersed state representatives and their state officials, military and naval men, in-house and expatriate white-collar state functionaries, and casually salaried spies and informants. The chapter reviews the organizational layout of Venice’s state intelligence apparatus, which included formally appointed diplomats and state officials and a large part of the Venetian state bureaucracy, including the secret chancery. There is a particular focus on correspondence as a vital tool of managing human action and performance at a distance, enabling the administration of large-scale, geographically dispersed organization of work. The chapter also shows how Venice’s intelligence organization was sanctioned through regulations that not only determined uniform professional operations and relationships but, importantly, legitimized the Ten’s power of command as Venice’s spy chiefs.