In early days all important matters in Venice were decided by a General Assembly of the people; but as the population grew, this unwieldy body was replaced by a ‘Grand Council’ of leading citizens. In the early fourteenth century another and still more important change was made, for the ranks of the Grand Council were closed, and only members of those families who had been in the habit of attending its meetings were allowed to do so in future. Thus a privileged aristocracy was created, and the majority of Venetians excluded from any share in their government; but because this government aimed not at the advantage of any particular family but of the whole state, people forgave its despotic character. Even the famous Council of Ten that, like the Court of Star Chamber under the Tudors, had power to seize and examine citizens secretly, in the interests of the state, was admired by the Venetians over whom it exerted its sway, because of its reputation for even-handed justice, that drew no distinctions between the son of a Doge, a merchant, or a beggar. ‘The Venetian Republic’, says a modern writer on mediaeval times, ‘was the one stable element in all North Italy,’ and this condition of political calm was the wonder and admiration of contemporaries. Sometimes to-day it seems difficult to admire mediaeval Venice because of her selfishness and frank commercialism. She had no sense of patriotism either towards Italy or Christendom; witness the Fourth Crusade,[43] where nothing but her insistent desire to protect her trading position in the East had influenced her diplomacy. This accusation of selfishness is true; but we must remember that the word ‘patriotism’ has a much wider scope in modern times than was possible to the limited outlook of the Middle Ages. Venice might be unmoved by the words ‘Italy’ or ‘Christendom’, but the whole of her life and ideals was centred in the word ‘Venice’. Her sailors and merchants, who laid the foundations of her greatness, were no hired mercenaries, but citizens willing to lay down their lives for the Republic who was their mother and their queen. Thus narrowing the term ‘patriotism’, we see that of all the Italian Powers Venice alone understood what the word meant, in that her sons and daughters were willing to sacrifice as a matter of course not merely life but family ambitions, class, and even individuality to the interests of their state. The ambitions of Venice were bound up with the shipping and commerce that had gained for her the carrying-trade of the world. To take, for example, the wool manufacture, of such vital interest to English and Flemings, we find that at one time this depended largely on Venetian merchants, who would carry sugar and spices to England from the East, replace their cargo with wool, unload this in its turn in the harbours of Flanders, and then laden with bales of manufactured cloth return to dispose of them in Italian markets.