← The institution

THE SAFEGUARDS

The safeguards

The institution must also be described in its worst form, because it is against that form that a funder buys a guarantee.

Residence in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was compulsory: a German merchant in Venice was not free to lodge elsewhere. All his transactions passed through Venetian brokers, and officials of the Republic recorded the traffic. At the Fondaco dei Turchi the windows onto the canal were walled up and a single guarded entrance was left, avowedly for the safety of those inside. The doors were closed at night from the outside.

These are the features of an enclosure under compulsion, and they appeared wherever the agreement stopped being reciprocal. Where one side could impose and the other only accept, the house became an instrument of control within a generation. Any modern version that does not answer this in its founding documents will reach the same point, whatever the intentions.

The difference must therefore be structural and not declared. The following seven clauses stand in the statutes and can be amended only with the favourable vote of all the rifāq. Failing unanimity they stand.

One. Admission by application, never by category

Nobody belongs to the house on account of origin, descent, faith or membership of a group. Each applies individually, is admitted by name, and could have been refused: any application may be rejected with reasons given. The clause takes from the house the possibility of becoming the seat assigned to a community, which is how the fondaci ended.

Two. No residence requirement

A rafīq may live in the house or elsewhere. Nothing in being a rafīq decides where a person sleeps. The house is residential, because that is how a craft is transmitted and because common life is what one has come for; the clause does not deny that form, it denies that anyone can be kept there. Whoever chooses to live outside remains a rafīq, with the sole consequence that he takes part in what his presence allows. It is the clause that answers directly the lodging requirement of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and its presence makes it verifiable from outside that the house holds nobody.

Three. An exit that costs only membership

The rafīq withdraws at any time by written notice, without penalty or payment, keeping his own tools and whatever he has accrued. He suffers no consequence beyond ceasing to belong. The point at which arrangements of this kind break, in experience, is the moment when a member wishes to leave and the internal rules have quietly acquired more weight than the right to withdraw: that is why withdrawal is written among the clauses that can be amended only unanimously.

Four. Reciprocity

The association makes its statutes and its rules available, on the same terms, to any community that intends to found a similar house. Reciprocity is the part usually left out when the fondaco is described, and it is the part that did the work: the agreement ran in both directions between the two civilisations, which meant that an abuse met with an answer elsewhere, in a house belonging to the other side. Written into the founding documents, the clause prevents the model from being offered to one community and denied to another.

Five. The buildings are not sold

The buildings are bound to their purpose and are not sold except unanimously. The House does not own the property outright, and the clause takes from any future majority the quickest way of closing the thing down, which is to sell its seat and distribute the proceeds.

Six. Those who support do not govern

To the founders, the funders, the supporters and those who endow named funds no powers of appointment in the bodies, no additional voting rights, no special categories of members and no power to suspend the effect of resolutions are reserved. It is the clause a funder reads first and which, were it missing, would make all the others useless: whoever pays buys one thing only, which is that the house exists and is governed by its members.

Seven. The founders’ lodging, and its limits

The three founders will be reserved a personal, lifelong and non-transferable right of lodging in three apartments on the first floor of the north wing, to be constituted by notarial deed at the same time as the purchase. It stands among the entrenched clauses for the opposite reason to the one that might be suspected: the limits are the part that matters. The right confers no additional vote, is not transferable to heirs, does not extend to other premises or other persons, and no majority can enlarge it any more than it can remove it.

The reason it stands in the statutes deserves to be given in full, because a lifelong right reserved to those who wrote the rules is the first thing an attentive reader looks for. The three founders ask to be able to live in the house for the rest of their lives because it is the place they wanted and where they intend to stay, and because whoever has written a rule should remain where that rule applies: it is a guarantee for those who are subject to it, and not a power over them. The right confers none. Whoever lives there by virtue of it observes the niẓām like every other resident, has one vote if he is a rafīq and none if he is not, and can neither approve nor suspend a resolution of the majlis. Nothing prevents a founder from leaving, like anyone else; the right says only that it cannot be taken from him.

What would count as a verdict·Venice, and the drift