Encoding Administration in the Stato da Mar: A Digital Scholarly Edition of Michele Steno’s 1408 Ducal Commission

The Republic of Venice governed its overseas dominions through a complex administrative system that relied upon a network of magistracies to ensure oversight and accountability. Among these, the Sindici inquisitori were responsible for investigating the conduct of local officials and supervising fiscal and administrative practices across the Stato da Mar. This study presents a digital scholarly edition of the ducal commission issued in April 1408 in the name of Doge Michele Steno, appointing Andrea Barbaro, Jacopo Michiel, Giovanni Emo, and Luca Tron as Sindici charged with inspecting Venetian officials in Crete, Corfu, Negroponte, and the Morea. The text survives in two manuscript witnesses, preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. The edition is encoded in TEI-XML and provides a semi-diplomatic transcription enriched with scholarly annotation and a critical apparatus recording significant textual variation between the witnesses. By combining historical and philological analysis with structured digital encoding, the project demonstrates how Venetian administrative manuscripts can be modelled as machine-readable scholarly resources.