Methodology and Sources

Methodology and Sources

 

In terms of chronology, the book deals with the time span between 1500 and 1630, a period when the Council of Ten played a pivotal role in creating and consolidating Venice’s secret service. 

This is the primary reason for the choice of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the book’s main chronological focus. Moreover, this is an era of some momentous events in the history of both Venice and Europe, which coincided with the economic and political rise and fall of the Venetian Republic, in addition to its geographical expansion and contraction. 

The book explores how such events contributed to the Republic’s economic and political security and prosperity, both domestically and internationally. From a more practical perspective, as the principal unit of historical analysis is the Council of Ten, their ‘secret’ deliberations and letters are of primary significance. Dating from 1525, these archival records exist in abundance and offer a wealth of information on Venice’s central intelligence organization. 

It was, therefore, deemed prudent to make use of these sources, some of which remain untapped to this day. By the close of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth, the Ten’s administrative power slowly started to diminish, as the onus for issues of state security gradually fell upon the Senate and the Collegio, and the State Inquisitors took over the role of administering Venice’s intelligence and espionage activities. 

This gradual deterioration of the Ten’s authority coincided with the progressive decline of Venice’s supremacy on the international scene. Consequently, the 1630s were considered an apt end point for the book. A large proportion of the archival material used in this book was produced in the early modern period, especially in the years between 1550 and 1630, with great emphasis put on the last thirty years of the sixteenth century, when the imminent threat of the loss of Cyprus intensified the use of intelligence and espionage. 

The time span between 1550 and 1630, in particular, is a period that the historian William Bouwsma has styled the ‘waning of the Renaissance’. In this book, the word ‘Renaissance’ is deliberately used to combine Chabod’s 1950s model of the ‘Renaissance state’, made up of late medieval and early modern officials and institutions that produced an ‘Italian way’ of ‘modern’ statecraft, with Mattingly’s pioneering, yet outdated representation of Renaissance diplomacy, premised upon the grand narrative of the birth of resident embassies, which were pioneered primarily by Italian city states.

More importantly, Renaissance intelligence organization here is coterminous with the revisionist representation of Renaissance diplomacy, stripped of the classic dichotomy between medieval and early modern, as a flexible, ‘all-consuming’ political activity based on negotiation, information gathering, and representation.

In consequence, systematized intelligence is discussed and examined as an essential component of the broader landscape of early modern diplomacy, as it evolved in the period of the long Renaissance to entail a Europe-wide ‘common language of interaction’ with diverse ‘traditions and styles’. 

It is for this reason that the terms ‘early modern’ and ‘Renaissance’ are used interchangeably in this book. In terms of conceptual framing, this is a book about intelligence organization. More specifically, the book ventures one of the first scholarly attempts to explore a complex proto-modern organization that, as will become more evident in Chapter 3, was premised upon structured managerial practices. 

Accordingly, Venice’s secret service is presented as an exemplar primordial organization in two senses of the word, organization as an entity and organization as a process. The book argues that the phenomenon of organization—perceived here as a network of people sharing interwoven ways of working and common professional values, knowledge, even technology extending beyond the legal boundary of a firm—was conceived and given meaning in the era of the long Renaissance, which hosted the gradual systemization of diplomatic practices that went hand in hand with the development of state bureaucracies. 

This argument contests conventional wisdom that has traditionally presented organization as a natural by-product of the rationality, industrialization, and technological advancements that emanated from the Industrial Revolution.

Based on the quintessential modern corporation as it emerged in the United States, this established view stemmed from a misleading scholarly association of the progressive mechanization of production in the post-industrial era with increased productivity and, by extension, national wealth.

 The normative depiction of organization as the modern corporation inevitably excludes early modern administrative bodies from systematic historical analyses of organizational entities. Early modern organizations such as Venice’s secret service, however, were premised on a form of governance that is not widely dissimilar to contemporary managerial structures. As this book unfolds, it will become apparent that this distortion is not simply due to the lack of industrialization, the primitive form of technology, and the relatively less complex market conditions in which pre-industrial organizations operated, and which, allegedly, make for a rather ‘thin’ conceptual contribution.

Instead, there are other, more practical reasons why both historians and organization studies scholars who engage in historical study overwhelmingly overlook pre-industrial organizations in their scholarship. These reasons are linguistic, methodological, and epistemological in nature.

The main linguistic impediment to the (historical) study of organizational and managerial practices is the necessity to borrow terms from the discipline of organizational analysis that had neither been conceived nor used by actors in the distant past. Such terms are either unknown or irrelevant to historians.

From a methodological perspective, the farther back we go into the past, the more we rely on archival records that, more often than not, are incomplete or partial towards organizational elites rather than other actors.

Consequently, the historian has to rely heavily on reconstruction and what philosophers of history have termed ‘impositionalist’ objection, the distorted sense of structure that the reconstruction and narration of facts imposes.

This leads to the main epistemological hindrance to the historical examination of primordial organizations: an abiding disagreement between historians and social scientists in relation to the value of archival records. 

While, for the historian, archives offer evidence that is regarded as primary data, organization theorists perceive the archive as a repository for ‘anecdote and chronology’ that can only provide ‘background information’ on the history of organizations.

 In other words, according to organizational theorists, archival sources alone cannot make a genuine contribution to our historical understanding of organizations in the early modern era.

 In an effort to rectify these issues, adding to Maria Fusaro’s call for a ‘holistic approach to the topic of statecraft and political economy’ through ‘different historiographical strands and traditions’, this book makes a case for the need to employ a transdisciplinary perspective to historical analysis.

 Adopting this approach, the book combines the narrative construction of established theoretical concepts deriving from the disciplines of sociology, organization studies, and management—such as ‘secrecy’, ‘organizational secrecy’, ‘professionalization’, ‘professional identity’, ‘management’, and ‘accounting’—with the critical examination of an exhaustive body of pertinent archival material and relevant literature. This approach enables a methodological plurality, which allows for more holistic historical explorations and analyses. 

It also provides the groundwork for a conceptual framework which, based on the foundational work of towering figures in the discipline of sociology, such as Max Webber and Georg Simmel, furnishes the book with a solid theoretical underpinning. In consequence, while this is first and foremost a book of historical scholarship, methodologically it strays from welltrodden paths in historiography, in the sense that the study of archival records— some freshly discovered, others freshly interpreted—is complemented by concepts and theories stemming from a constellation of adjacent disciplines.

The aim is to produce new questions that might generate fresh, yet plausible accounts and interpretations of the social processes that brought about intelligence organization and management in the pre-industrial world. 

On the whole, it is hoped that a tried and tested approach of transdisciplinarity, here combining the historian’s narrative construction with the social scientist’s predilection for theoretical constructs, generates both factual richness and methodological rigour, which can alleviate some of the linguistic, methodological, and even epistemological challenges involved in the historical study of pre-industrial organizational entities such as Venice’s secret service. 

As such, this approach purports to enable a balanced and situated analysis of pre-industrial organizational life that moves beyond the conventional, overly empiricist narrative approaches to (business) history, while discarding the overly technicist and abstract discussions of organizational theories that favour methodological rigour at the expense of historical reconstruction. 

Instead, this study will endeavour to retain the epistemological status of historical events by interpreting evidence stemming from the archive through sociological and organizational theories, attempting, thus, to restore the ‘qualities of evidential and interpretative fidelity’ in the historical study of organizations. In this respect, archival records have played the leading role in the book’s narrative construction, supplemented by some simple sociological theorizations.