by Alizah Holstein
When a statement was issued last November stipulating that a new U.S. government department known by the acronym DOGE was to be formed, the medievalist in me snapped to attention. To me, “doge” was a word with distinctly medieval meaning. But hardly anywhere was this meaning being explored in the context of DOGE.
For anyone who has been living in a glacial crevasse for the past few months, DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. Two phenomena are purported to have inspired the DOGE acronym. One: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. And two: the “doge” internet meme featuring photos of a Japanese Shiba Inu overwritten with pidgin English text that played on a misspelling of the word “dog.” Both were much beloved by Elon Musk, who has to all appearances been heading DOGE.
But there’s a third association worth exploring as we consider the implications of this (unofficial) government department. Stated simply, a doge was the chief magistrate of medieval Italian maritime republics. Venice had doges for over a thousand years, from 700 until 1797 when the Napoleonic Wars brought the republic to its end. Genoa, for a shorter time, had them as well, and Pisa, too, counts a single doge in its historical register. What in Italian is doge in Venetian is doxe, and both derive from dux, the Latin word for leader and a cognate of duke.
The possible association of DOGE with a medieval magistrate has not been widely explored, but I do think it matters. Why? Because medievalism feels peculiarly salient right now in culture and politics alike. Last month at London Fashion Week, models strutted in chain mail and armor, while one carried a decorative sword.[1] Castlecore, which offers “a nostalgic ideal of luxury and wealth,” is trending on social, and romantasy sells.[2] Medievalism has never been very far from the American imagination, but in this moment it feels top of mind.
And it’s not all clothing and recreational reads. Saint Thomas Aquinas has not been this popular in the English-speaking world in a long while.[3] And in the more than two decades since the September 11 attacks, the medieval notion of crusading has made a comeback to conceptualize what is depicted by some, especially on the right, as a permanent civilizational struggle against Islam. The political currency of the crusades, among some audiences at least, has soared. We have cabinet members and elected officials who speak of crusades as positive, even noble, endeavors, and who employ crusading symbols both personally and politically. And so, given the rise over decades in the rhetorical prevalence of crusading and our current openness to things medieval, might the DOGE of the modern-day U.S. government have any connection with the doge of medieval Venice?
I see two possibilities, the first of which is an oligarchic model of government. Beginning in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth, historians idealized the Venetian republic as the embodiment of Aristotle’s ideal of mixed government because it balanced monarchy (as represented by the doge) with aristocracy (the Senate) and a sprinkling of democracy (the essentially powerless popular assembly).[4] In Venice these historians saw a republic that was spared the fractiousness of Florence, Siena, and the other Italian city states, a republic that appeared so peacefully administered that the city earned the moniker “la Serenissima” (the peaceful). More recent research has shown that this was a highly orchestrated conceit. Venice was a republic, yes. But it was an oligarchic republic in which the oligarchy was itself ruled by handful of families. Over time as that system coalesced, the doge became the symbolic figurehead. As the U.S. wrestles with the possibility of an oligarchy on our own shores, one might wonder whether the Venetian model—a republic in appearance, an oligarchy in practice, and festooned with a symbolic monarchical figurehead—is a model some find worthy of emulation.
To explore the second possibility, let us turn to an unconventional source of historical knowledge: a video game. Civilization V is a “turn-based strategy game, where each player represents the leader of a certain nation or ethnic group (“civilization”) and must guide its growth over the course of thousands of years.”[5] One of the civilizations offered by Civilization V’s expansion pack, Brave New World, is Venice. And the leader of Venice that you can play is Doge Enrico Dandolo. Is it serendipity that Elon Musk is a self-described avid player of Civilization V?[6] Perhaps. But as the Shiba Inu might have put it, “much interesting.”
At the time of the Fourth Crusade, which was proclaimed in 1198 but took a few years to get off the ground, Enrico Dandolo was already around ninety years old and was partially blind. In the previous decade during which he was doge, he had reformed the Venetian currency by adding, among others, a new coin called the grosso, which was to become the standard coin of Mediterranean commerce. When the knights of the Fourth Crusade found themselves without the cash to pay for their transit to the Holy Land, Dandolo took the cross, built ships, and promised Venice’s financial and military backing for the endeavor. As the need grew, Dandolo conceded to accept plunder instead of cash. This led to the attacks, in which Dandolo himself fought, on Zadar, a formerly Venetian city on the Dalmatian coast, and in 1204, of the capital city of Byzantium, Constantinople, where Dandolo died in combat. Both cities had been Christian. In sum, Enrico Dandolo was deeply ensconced in an ideology of civilizational conflict, but either because of shrewdness or desperation, he was willing to use the force he commanded to attack and plunder those who had long been considered allies in the name of financial and political gain.
To return for a moment to etymology, two words in modern Italian derive from the Latin dux: doge, and its sibling term, duce. In 1925, Mussolini appropriated the then-antiquated duce for his title il Duce because he thought it reflected on him a kind of long-lost ancient Roman valor. By the time of his assassination in 1945, duce was so closely associated with the fascist leader that it has been all but replaced in contemporary Italian by the English loanword “leader” [pronounced LEE-dare]). We don’t know for sure if DOGE is tipping its hat to the kind of closed aristocratic rule combined with civilizational confrontation that medieval Venice and Enrico Dandolo once exemplified. Nor do we know whether or not the acronym shall one day be struck from the lexicon.
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[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/london-fashion-week-armor-chestplate-trend
[2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/romantasy-books-maas-medieval-romance-taylor-swift.html
[3] https://www.ncregister.com/cna/thomist-trend-leading-dominican-theologian-sees-a-rise-in-interest-in-aquinas-among-young-catholics
[4] David Abulafia, ed. Italy in the Central Middle Ages 1000-1300 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004), 4-5.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_V
[6] https://venturebeat.com/games/spacex-tesla-founder-elon-musk-loves-kerbal-space-program-mass-effect-and-civilization/
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