Mocenigo Family

▪ Venetian patrician family

 one of the most renowned patrician families of the Venetian Republic, to which it supplied military leaders, scholars, churchmen, diplomats, and statesmen, including seven doges.

      Tommaso Mocenigo (1343–1423) commanded a crusading fleet that sacked Nicopolis (now Nikopol, Bulg.) in 1396. Elected doge in 1414, he extended Venetian dominion over the Trentino, Friuli, and Dalmatia. Yet his statesmanship was essentially pacific, and he is best remembered for a deathbed address in which he described with many details the flourishing commercial state of Venice and admonished against military adventures. Tommaso's nephew Pietro (1406–76) was one of the greatest Venetian admirals. Reorganizing the Venetian fleet after the defeat of Negroponte (1470) at the hands of the Turks, he conducted successful reprisals, taking Smyrna in 1472 and raising the Turkish siege of Scutari (now Shkodër, Alb.). He was elected doge in 1474; a new Venetian coin struck during his reign was given the family name. His brother Giovanni (1408–85) became doge in 1478 and succeeded in concluding peace with the Ottoman Empire; in the War of Ferrara he acquired Rovigo and Polesine for Venice.

      The next outstanding Mocenigo was Giovanni's grandson Andrea (1473–1542), who added literary lustre to the family name with a verse history of the Turkish war of 1500 and a prose history of that of the League of Cambrai. His nephew Alvise I (1507–77) was doge from 1570; his reign was dominated by a new war with the Turks in which Nicosia and Famagusta were lost but in which the great naval victory of Lepanto was won. The family suffered a political eclipse for the next 125 years, until a great-grandnephew of Alvise I became doge as Alvise II from 1700 to 1709, followed a few years later by Alvise III Sebastiano, doge from 1723 to 1732. A distant cousin, Alvise IV (1701–78), was doge from 1763 to 1778 and sought to reverse the declining fortunes of the republic by an enlightened commercial policy and a series of measures in restraint of clerical wealth and privilege that provoked a conflict with Pope Clement XIII.

      The Palazzo Mocenigo survives on the Grand Canal in Venice.

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