agement of Venetian
policy, home and foreign. The oldest documents in the archives of Venice
belong to the Senate. They are contained among the volumes of Pacts or
treaties, seven in number, without including the volume Albus, which is
devoted to treaties between the Republic and the Eastern Empire, nor the
volume Blancus, which contains the treaties between Venice and the
Emperors of the West. The thirty-three volumes of Commemoriali formed a
sort of commonplace book for the use of statesmen; in them were
registered briefly the most important events and abstracts of principal
documents which passed through the hands of the Government. The
Commemoriali cover the years 1293 to 1797; but after the middle of the
sixteenth century they were neglected, and they are chiefly valuable
down to that date only. After the Patti and Commemoriali we begin the
record of the regular proceedings in the Senate. This series contains
papers relating to home government, foreign policy, the dominions of
Venice on the mainland, in Dalmatia and the Levant, ecclesiastical
matters, relations with Rome, instructions to ambassadors and reports
from governors. So widely spread and so varied were the attributes of
the Senate, that the analysis of a single day's proceedings in that
house would prove most instructive to the student of the Venetian
constitution, and would, in all probability, bring him into contact with
a large number of the leading magistracies of the Republic. The series
of senatorial papers proceeds in almost unbroken completeness from the
year 1293 down to the close of the Republic; and counting files,
registers and rubrics, numbers 1599 volumes. This main series is known
by different names at different periods, and shows signs of that
tendency to subdivision which characterizes all Venetian Government
offices. The volumes which run from the year 1293 to 1440 were known as
Registri misti; those covering from 1491 to 1630, and overlapping the
first Misti, were called Registri secreti. After the year 1630 the
papers of the Senate are divided into those known as Corti, relating to
foreign Powers; and those known as Rettori, relating to the government
of the Venetian dominion.

Besides this great series of Deliberazioni, containing the general
movement of business in the Senate, there is another voluminous series
of documents, equally important, and even more interesting to the
student of general history, the dispatches received from V