"There are chosen for judges of their country, as I have said, Castellans--writers who serve as secretaries (_cancellieri_); and 'Captains to look after the robbers,' who all set rapaciously to rob these poor people, taking what little any of them may have hidden from the Cavaliers under pretext of disobedience, in which the peasant abounds, by reason of his desperation, so that he is in every way wretched. The Castellans cannot by law judge the value of more than two sequins, although by some regulation they are allowed authority to the sum of two hundred _perperi_, about fourteen sequins; and because they have eight per cent. for the charges they make, all causes amount to two hundred _perperi_, however small it may be, in order to get their sixteen of charges, with thousand other inventions of extortion to eat up the substance of the poor. The Captains, whose name indicates their functions, have their use from robberies, and always find means to draw their advantage from the same, plundering the good and releasing the guilty, to the universal ruin.... The men chosen for the galleys are in continual terror of going, and those who have the means, with whatever difficulty, from some vineyard, or land, or animals, throw all away unhesitatingly for a trifling price to pay for their dispensation, which costs fifteen or twenty sequins--expense which they cannot support. The poorest, hopeless of their release, fly to the mountains, and thence, reassured by the Cavaliers, return to their villages, so much the more enslaved as they are fearful of justice, and by their example make the other villagers more obedient, attributing to the Cavaliers the power of saving them from the galleys.... To which, add the extortions to which they are subjected by a thousand accidental circumstances, execution of civil debts, visits of rectors and other officers, to whom they are obliged to give sustenance at miserable prices.... So that the peasantry, oppressed in this manner, and harassed in so many ways, annoyed by the reasonings of the Papists, and made enemies of the Venetian name, ... are so reduced by the influences I have enumerated, that I believe I can say with truth that, with the exception of the privileged classes, they desire a change of government, and though they know they cannot fall into other hands than those of the Turks, yet, believing they cannot make worse their condition, incline even to their tyrannical rule."