alt Hacker NewsWhile I mostly agree...
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
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There's multiple states in Europe that lasted longer (and they are still lasting to this day) than Venice.
We're talking about democratic republics. How does the one map to the other?
>Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
Well at the times of Doges the world hardly revolutionized. Nowadays a person in their 80s has lived through the rise of at least three different medias (radio, TV, internet) and the world has never changed so fast.
That might have as much to do with their insane system for choosing a Doge, which many historians think did a lot to force compromise and reduce corruption.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.