Let’s think about forms of government. Like many writers, I’m paying some attention to the governments in my worldbuilding. But I’m doing so as a writer shaped by growing up in a republic. I’m doing so as a reader who believes that Tolkien and many writers before and after him have a tendency to romanticize absolutist or authoritarian forms of government.

I once read the letter where Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So I decided to build some critiques of monarchs and emperors into my story. I decided to build some critiques of oligarchs into my trilogy, but I’m a supporter of communal capitalism, as I understand it. So how to proceed in writing about government was tricky.

Add to the brew that I want to lean into realism, and you encounter specific historical realities. Yes, the peasants revolted fairly frequently in many autocratic societies, and they usually lost, with an aftermath of getting slaughtered in large numbers. Yes, some historians have argued that large organized civilizations always have oligarchies, either lurking in the background and exerting great influence or preening in the foreground and possessing direct control.

Enter the Most Serene Republic of Venice as my current research obsession. Even setting aside some of Venice’s early history, you see a type of republic that lasted for a thousand years, right through the entire Middle Ages. More restrictive in many ways regarding office-holding and voter participation than even the early United States of America, the Venetian republic had a ruling class that resulted from the fusion of aristocratic families with commerce and trading. Hundreds of families worked together to set up a system that preserved hereditary privilege and limited the access of most people to high office. But they also developed a fairly intricate system designed to routinize power-sharing and to prevent any one ruler from achieving absolute power.

I’m reading through a number of good histories, trying to understand how the Venetians managed to hold this intricate construct together for so long. Frederic C. Lane’s Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973), M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale’s The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400 to 1617 (1984), Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (2011), and Thomas F. Madden’s Venice: A New History (2012) are fascinating books. The stories about the doges and the Great Council are entertaining and illuminating.

Make sure, however, that you notice the Council of Ten. You might overlook them because they wanted you to. Imagine ten elected spymasters running gigantic networks of agents who act ruthlessly against any threats to the Republic.

Note: I lack a good personal photo to illustrate this column. The Lion of St. Mark war flag or a shot of the Doge’s palace would be great, but alas, I haven’t visited Venice. Instead, I used a photo of water, which is appropriate in its own way.