City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (37 page)

In this system, cases could be dismissed, mitigating circumstances allowed or judgements overturned on the vote of the relevant appeal body. In March 1415 a fine imposed on Mordechai Delemedego, ‘Jew of Negroponte’, is reversed – ‘the syndics do not have the right to act against the Jews’. The same year a similar fine imposed by the syndics on Matteo of Naplion, at Negroponte, for renting the Republic’s property whilst an officer of the state is annulled; ‘It has been proved that Matteo had resigned his post when he undertook these transactions’ ‘A judgement against Pantaleone Barbo – banned from public life for ten years – is reconsidered as ‘too severe for a man who has committed his life to the service of the Signoria, with exemplary loyalty’; Giacomo Apanomeriti, a Cretan, fined or alternatively sentenced to two years for raping a woman and refusing to marry her, is given a chance of reprieve. ‘The judges of appeal had examined this case: given the youth and poverty of the boy, he is released from all penalties if he marries the girl straight away.’

With its mixed populations of Catholics, Jews and Orthodox Christians, the Republic was concerned above all to keep a social balance. The Stato da Mar was essentially a secular state. It had no programme for the conversion of peoples, no remit to spread the Catholic faith – beyond the occasional leverage of papal support for particular advantage. Its opposition to the Orthodox
Church on Crete was a fear of pan-Greek, nationalist opposition, rather than religious zealotry; elsewhere it could afford to be lenient. On docile Corfu, Venice decreed that the Greeks should have ‘liberty to preach and teach the holy word, provided only that they say nothing about the Republic or against the Latin religion’. It was equally alarmed by outbursts of undue fervour from the Catholic monastic orders who trailed in the wake of its conquests, and sometimes appalled. ‘The night watch have had to arrest four [Franciscans],’ it was reported from Candia in August 1420. ‘These men, holding a cross, processed completely naked, followed by a great crowd of people. Such acts are disagreeable.’ The Franciscans threatened a delicate cultural and religious balance. Any kind of civil unrest was to be feared. Two years later the doge wrote directly to the administration of Crete about

the sometimes scandalous reports on the behaviour of certain clerics of the Latin Church; this behaviour is all the more dangerous on Crete; one has just learned, in particular, that certain priests preach … to the detriment of the Signoria; the scandal has rebounded on the Venetians of the isle; the authorities will take immediate and rigorous measures against these priests, so that peace and tranquillity are restored on Crete.

Deep down Venice wished to keep the balance between its subjects: peace and tranquillity, honour and profit – the ideals went hand in hand.

But if the Republic could afford to be lenient in social matters, as far as security and civil peace allowed, economic pressure was felt everywhere. The colonies were zones of fiscal exploitation, taxed thoroughly and continuously, with the heaviest weight falling on the Jewish population. In matters of money the oppressive presence of the Dominante was inescapable. The central administration was endlessly concerned with collecting taxes. It had little concern as to how they were raised at the local level and there was almost no local say in how the proceeds were spent. The state managed its money like good merchants, accruing as much as possible, spending as little as necessary. Resource extraction was a central preoccupation.

From the Stato da Mar, Venice sought food, manpower and raw materials – sailors from the Dalmatian coast, Cretan wheat and hard cheese (a staple of the sailor’s diet), wine, wax, wood and honey. For the hungry urban population of the lagoon, these resources were vital. Crete was a critical support during the Chioggia war. Everything was funnelled directly back to the lagoon under strict conditions – even inter-colonial trade came via the mother city – and goods could only be transported in Venetian ships. Cargoes were scrupulously examined and heavy fines apportioned; each landfall at the customs house earned a small ingredient of state tax. The key products – salt and wheat – were commodity-traded at fixed prices, whose tariffs formed a subsidiary grievance of Cretan landowners, aware of greater gains to be made on an open market. The state registers minuted the operation of this oppressive system. The Dominante stipulated where, when, what and at what price goods could be transported across the Aegean and the Adriatic. It insisted on the use of its weights and measures and forced its currency on subject peoples. The ducat became as potent a symbol of Venetian power as the armed galley.

The effects of these central controls were keenly felt. The economic development of the shores of Greece was stifled, industry stunted (with the exception of Cretan shipbuilding), the opportunity for the growth of a local entrepreneurial class severely curtailed. Instead, Venice concentrated on the agricultural exploitation of its key domains. The terrain was unpromising: large areas of the Stato da Mar were mountainous, barren, short of water and hit by desiccating winds, but in the fertile valleys of Crete, Corfu and Negroponte, the Venetian administrations worked assiduously on irrigation and conservation of fertility. The Lasithi plateau, abandoned by edict under the revolts of the previous century, was brought back into cultivation. When Francesco Basilicata visited in 1630 it was described as ‘a very beautiful, flat area and an almost miraculous work of nature’.

The agricultural development of the Stato da Mar was always hampered by a shortage of manpower. People vanished from the
fields. Plague and famine and the generally high mortality in the harsh landscapes took a heavy toll; the downtrodden peasantry sought continuously to evade oppressive Venetian control; slaves escaped; pirates snatched whole populations – the continuous draining away of human resources was a running complaint. In 1348, the Signoria could lament that ‘the pitiful epidemic which has just ravaged Crete and the resulting high number of deaths require steps taken to repopulate. In particular it is necessary to give confidence to fleeing debtors so that they return to work their land. The landlords lack men.’ By the late fourteenth century slaves from the Black Sea were being imported to work the land in a plantation-style system. For the indigenous Greek peasantry life had always been hard; under its colonial overseers it became no easier. Venetian rule paid scant attention to its rural workforce; they were a resource, like wood or iron, used without curiosity. When later, more compassionate observers visited Crete they were startled by what they saw. Four hundred years of Venetian rule produced few gains for its subjects: ‘the deprivation of the Cretan people defies credibility,’ wrote a seventeenth-century observer. ‘There must be few in the world who live in such miserable conditions.’ What Venice offered back was just some measure of security against pirate raids.

Colonial administration was a work of continuous oversight, microcosmically managed from the distant lagoon. The exhaustive detail of the state registers bears witness to the attention that Venice paid to the Stato da Mar. The millions of entries set out its preoccupations and obsessions. Here are precise instructions for galley fleets – when they can sail, how long they can land for, what they can sell – price incentives for shipping Cretan wheat, permits to trade, taxes for repairing city walls, accounts of corruption and street brawls, Turkish pirates and shipwrecks. Losses are lamented and blame apportioned. There are the persistent and endless demands for restitution. No detail seems too small for the telescopic vision of the state, recorded by inky clerks toiling in the windowless bowels of the doge’s palace: a murder is documented
in Constantinople; a Genoese privateer noted in the Cyclades; a hundred crossbowmen are ordered to Crete; 4,700 sacks of ship’s biscuit must be prepared for the galleys; the chancellor of Negroponte has too much work; a courageous galley commander loses an arm in battle; the widow of the duke of Crete has purloined two gold cups and a carpet belonging to the state.

Proficium et honorem
– profit and honour – are the two persistent accusatives that echo through the record of this colossal and exhaustive enterprise. If profit was the ultimate driver, the Republic gloried in the naming of its colonies and counted them proudly like gold ducats in a merchant’s chest. It bestowed on them swelling titles that emphasised their structural importance – ‘the Right Hand of our city’, ‘the Eyes of the Republic’ – as if they were organic parts of the Venetian body. To its inhabitants Venice was less a few finite miles of cramped lagoon than a vast space, vividly imagined, extending ‘wherever water runs’, as if from the campanile of St Mark, distance were foreshortened and Corfu, Coron, Crete, Negroponte, the Ionian Isles and the Cyclades were plainly visible, like diamonds on a silk sea. Damage to the Stato da Mar was felt like a wound; losses like an amputation.

The Stato da Mar was the city’s unique creation. If it drew on Byzantine tax structures, in all other respects its management was the reflection of Venice itself. The empire represented Europe’s first full-blown colonial experiment. Held together by sea power, largely uninterested in the well-being of its subjects, centrifugal in nature and economically exploitative, it foreshadowed what was to come. It probably cost Venice more than was ever directly extracted in taxes, food and wine, but ultimately it was worth it. Beyond the produce and revenue, it provided the stepping stones across the eastern sea, the naval bases to protect its fleets, the stopping places for its galleys, the entrepôts and marts for storing goods, the back stations to retreat to in hard times. And this second wave of imperial expansion allowed Venice to do something else: to dominate, for a time, the trade of the world.

‘Like Water in a Fountain’

1425–1500

A merchant galley bound for Alexandria in the fifteenth century sensed the coast long before it came into view. From far out, the sea was muddied by the outflow of Nile silt; at twenty-five or thirty miles a lookout could sight the crumbling lighthouse – the Pharos – the last surviving wonder of the ancient world, then the granite finger of Pompey’s Pillar spiking the sea’s rim; finally the city itself rose trembling out of the morning haze, glittering with marble, fringed with palm trees, like a vision of the East. Close to the shore, depending on the direction of approach, the vessel might pass a swimming hippopotamus washed out to sea and catch the hot blast of desert wind.

The ship would be quickly spotted. A signal flag on the harbour tower alerted port officials to row out and interrogate the approaching vessel as to its origin, cargo, passengers and crew. On deck they carried a bird cage. Having gathered the necessary information, they would release two carrier pigeons – one to the emir of Alexandria, a second marked with the special insignia of the Mamluk sultan himself, for his personal attention in Cairo 110 miles south. The vessel would then be allowed to proceed into harbour, where its rudder and sails were handed over, its passengers searched ‘to our very shirts’ by probing customs officers hunting for hidden ducats or gems, its merchandise unloaded, rummaged through and stored in bonded warehouses, landing fees and duty paid, and the new arrivals led wandering through the crowded streets to one of the
fondaci
– the secure lodging houses reserved for Christian visitors. Alexandria was the portal to another world.

The Venetians came to this landfall with centuries of experience. They were here, purportedly, in 828 when two enterprising merchants stole the body of St Mark; pilgrims to the city in the Middle Ages were shown the broad street where the saint was stoned and the church on whose site he was martyred and buried. The city and Egypt had an intense hold on the imagination of Venice; their motifs were brilliantly reproduced in the mosaics of St Mark’s – palm trees and camels, deserts and Bedouin tents, Joseph sold into Egypt and the Pharos, reproduced in green and gold, ruby and blue. The city was both spiritually significant – it was here that the Bible was translated into Greek – and, like Constantinople, one of the great hubs of trade. Again and again over the centuries Venetian merchants had steered their ships east from Candia in search of risk and return. The traffic had been subject to frequent interruptions from crusades, papal bans and the shifting of trade routes further east. The relationship with the Fatimid and Mamluk dynasties of Egypt was always fraught, but the potential gains were huge.

By the time Andrea Giustinian stared at the melancholy ruins of Tana on the northern shores of the Black Sea in 1396, that great stream of trade from the furthest Orient was in the process of changing its course. For a hundred years, the Mongol trans-Asian highway and the markets of Persia had diverted the flow of goods north. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol Empire had fragmented; in China it had been replaced by the Ming dynasty which turned its back on the outside world. The spice route reverted to its traditional southern path. Indian dhows trans-shipped their goods at Jeddah on the Arabian shore, from where they were ferried across the Red Sea in small coastal craft, landed on the Sinai peninsula and packed onto camel trains – ‘so many I cannot give an account of them, laden’ according to the Spaniard Pero Tafur, who claimed to have travelled this route, ‘with spices, pearls, precious stones and gold, perfumes and linen and parrots and cats from India’.