Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501
3,060 words
Following the Greeks’ experiment in democracy, sortition did not play any political role in the western world until the 11th century when a relative power vacuum in Northern Italy led to the emergence of independent city-states in the region.
The political and social conditions in Northern Italy were vastly different from the feudal system in Northern Europe at the time. In Northern Europe, states were ruled by hereditary monarchs to whom the land-owning nobility professed allegiance and from whom they courted favors.
tells the story of a family of Whites trying to cling to their farm in Zimbabwe. The family isn’t racist. They’re anti-racist, claiming (rather credibly) that Robert Mugabe is the real racist. 
Selection by Lot in Florence
The Monte di Pietà, Florence, established in the late 15th century by Franciscan brothers to make small, interest-free loans to give people an alternative to usurious moneylenders.
2,439 words
The other major use of sortition practiced in the Italian city-states was the “scrutiny,” which to a greater or lesser extent governed Florentine political life for 300 years. Similar schemes were practiced in Orvieto, Siena, Pistoia, Perugia, and Lucca. The scrutiny was different than the brevia. Whereas the brevia used sortition to determine the composition of an electoral college, the scrutiny was an inversion of this, using voting first to create a short-list of acceptable candidates and then applying sortition in the final stage to draw at random a candidate from this pre-vetted pool.[1]
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