‘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’.

Some of this wealth flowed north into the Syrian cities of Damascus and Beirut. For most of it the destination was Cairo, from where goods were reloaded into flat-bottomed boats and floated down the Nile to Alexandria, the bridgehead with the infidel world. It was here, after the war of Chioggia, that Venice particularly concentrated its commercial efforts and proceeded to crush its rivals, not by warfare, but by patience, commercial acumen and superior organisation. In the century after the peace with Genoa in 1381, the Republic fine-tuned all the unique mechanisms of its mercantile system to dominate oriental trade. What came together was the potent combination of Venice’s unique collective endeavour, maritime evolution and the flowering of commercial and financial techniques.

Trading was hard-wired into the Venetian psyche; its heroes were merchants, the myths that it constructed for itself accentuated these values. Its historians conjured a past trading golden age, when ‘every man in Venice, both rich and poor, bettered his property … The sea was empty of robbers, and the Venetians brought goods to Venice, and merchants of all countries came to Venice and brought there merchandise of all kinds and took it back to their countries.’ Its iconic moments were framed in commercial terms – the same chronicler, Martino da Canal, cast Dandolo’s final rallying speech before the walls of Constantinople in 1204 in words that entwine religion and profits as conjoined values: ‘Be valiant, and with the help of Jesus Christ, my lord St Mark and the prowess of your bodies, you shall tomorrow be in possession of the city, and you shall be rich.’ The natural right to gain was the Venetian foundation myth.

By the Middle Ages, the mercantile republics of Italy had unshackled themselves from any lingering theological stigma attached to trade. Christ, rather than turning the money-changers out of the temple, could now be seen as a trader; piracy not usury was the Venetian idea of commercial sin. Profit was a virtue. ‘The entire people are merchants,’ observed a surprised visitor from feudal, land-holding Florence in 1346. Doges traded, so did artisans, women, servants, priests – anyone with a little cash in hand could loan it on a merchant venture; the oarsmen and sailors who worked the ships carried small quantities of merchandise stashed beneath their benches to hawk in foreign ports. Only colonial officials during their periods of office were excluded. There was no merchant guild in the city – the city was a merchant guild, in which political and economic forces were seamlessly merged. The two thousand Venetian nobles whose senatorial decrees managed the state were its merchant princes. The city expressed a development in human behaviour that struck outsiders forcefully with the shock of modernity and not without alarm. The purity of the place was unmissable, as if it expressed an entirely new phenomenon; ‘It seems as if … human beings have concentrated there all the force of their trading,’ reported Pietro Casola. As the diarist Girolamo Priuli bluntly put it, ‘Money … is the chief component of The Republic.’

Venice was a joint-stock company in which everything was organised for fiscal ends. It legislated unwaveringly for the economic good of its populace, in a system that was continuously adjusted and tweaked. From the start of the fourteenth century it evolved a pattern of overseas trade, communally organised and strictly controlled by the state with the consistent aim of winning economic wars: ‘Nothing is better to increase and enrich the condition of our city than to give all liberty and occasion that commodities of our city be brought here and procured here rather than elsewhere, because this results in advantage both to the state and to private persons.’ It was through the application of sea power that it sought monopoly. A century of nautical revolution – the development of charts and compasses, novel steering systems and ship designs – had opened up new possibilities. From the 1300s ships were able to sail the short choppy seas of the Mediterranean in both summer and winter. A larger merchant galley was evolved, principally a sailing vessel with oars to manoeuvre in and out of ports and in adverse seas, which increased cargo sizes and cut journey times. A galley that could carry 150 tons below deck in the 1290s had enlarged to a carrier of 250 tons by the 1450s. This galea grossa was heavy on manpower. It required a crew typically of over two hundred, including 180 oarsmen who could also fight and twenty specialist crossbowmen as a defence against pirates, but it was comparatively fast, manoeuvrable and ideal for the safe transport of valuable cargoes. Alongside these were the cogs and carracks, high-sided sailing vessels manned by small crews, used mainly for transporting bulk supplies, such as wheat, timber, cotton and salt. It was the sailing ships that provided the staples to keep Venice alive; galleys coined the gold.

The merchant galley. Its central hold was adapted to form a dormitory on pilgrim voyages to the Holy Land

 

The merchant galleys, built in the arsenal, were property of the state, chartered out by auction each year to bidders. The aim was to manage entrepreneurial activity for the good of both people and state and prevent internecine competition of the sort that wrecked Genoa. Every detail of this system was strictly controlled. The patrono (organiser) of the winning syndicate had to be one of the two thousand nobles whose families were enrolled in the Golden Book, the register of the Venetian aristocracy, but the sailing captain was a paid employee of the state, responsible for the ship’s safe return. Crew sizes and rates of pay, weapons to be carried, freight rates to be paid, goods to be transported, ports of call to be visited, sailing times, destinations and stopover periods were all stipulated. Maritime legislation was heavy and precise, as were the penalties for abuse. The galleys travelled set routes, like a timetabled service, the details of which, set down in the early 1300s, were to last for two hundred years. At the end of the fourteenth century there were four: those to Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople and the Black Sea, and the long-range Atlantic haul, an arduous five-month round trip to London and Bruges. A century later this had expanded to seven, visiting all the major ports of the Mediterranean. After 1418 Venice also cornered the pilgrim market. Two galleys a year would depart for Jaffa carrying profitable shiploads of pious tourists to wonder at the sights of the Holy Land. In the fifteenth century Venetian galleys quartered the seas with high-value goods while cogs carried the bulk merchandise.

Venice’s genius was to grasp the laws of supply and demand, based on centuries of mercantile activity, and to obey them with unmatched efficiency. The secret lay in regularity. Venetian merchants lived with an acute sense of time. The clocks in St Mark’s Square and in the Rialto fixed the pattern of the working day. On a larger scale the annual pattern of voyaging was dictated by seasonal rhythms far beyond the confines of Europe. The metronomic cycle of monsoon winds over the Indian subcontinent set in motion a series of interconnecting trading cycles, like the meshing cogs in an enormous mechanism, which moved goods and gold all the way from China to the North Sea. Borne west on the autumn winds in the wake of the monsoon (the Arabic mawsim, a season), ships from India departed for the Arabian peninsula in September, carrying spices and the goods of the Orient. These would be trans-shipped to reach Alexandria and the marts of Syria in October. The Venetians’ merchant convoys would depart for Alexandria in late August or early September, within a time slot rigorously dictated by the senate, reaching their destination a month later to coincide with the arrival of these goods. Beirut was set to the same rhythm. The duration of the stays was firmly fixed – Beirut usually twenty-eight days, Alexandria twenty – and enforced with severity. Return was set for mid-December, variable within a month for the hazards of winter navigation. With the snow on the mountains the great galleys would haul themselves back into Venice to mesh with another set of trading rhythms. German merchants, furred and booted, would jingle their way across the Brenner Pass from Ulm and Nuremberg with pack animals for the winter fair. The departure and arrival of the long-distance Flanders galleys would also be synchronised to interlock with this exchange and with the sturgeon season and the silk caravans at Tana.

What Venice had understood was the need for predictable delivery, so that foreign merchants drawn there could be confident that there would be desirable merchandise, worth the long haul over the Brenner Pass in the grip of winter. Venice made itself the destination of choice, profiting individually by the trades and as a state from the element of tax it extracted from the movement of all goods in and out. ‘Our galleys must not lose time’ was the axiom.

It was never a perfect system. There could be delays in the arsenal fitting out the vessels for departure, contrary winds, menacing pirates and political turmoil in any of the countries to which the galleys went to trade. The round trips had a reasonable predictability: three months to Beirut, five to Bruges. In exceptional circumstances, however, the time lags were immense. The shortest round trip on the Tana route was 131 days, the longest 284; in 1429 the Flanders galleys sailing on 8 March overwintered and did not tip the lagoon again until 25 February the following year. In cases of late return, the goods were almost always sequestered, so that when merchants arrived at Venice for the regular trade fairs they could be certain of a healthy stock of merchandise to buy. Customer satisfaction was the key.

Each route conformed to its own rhythm, and the Venetians conferred on these cyclical convoys the name of muda, a word which conveyed a complex set of meanings. The muda was both the season for buying and exchanging spices, and the merchant convoy that carried them. The various different mude played an emotional part in the annual round of the city’s life. The city stirred into intense activity in the run-up to sailings. The arsenal worked overtime through the hot summer days ready for the Levant sailing; as the departure approached there would be a hubbub along the waterfront. Benches were set up for recruiting crews; merchandise and food, oars and sailing tackle were sorted, parcelled up and ferried out to the galleys anchored off shore. The voyage was blessed in St Mark’s or the seafarers’ church of St Nicholas on the Lido and the ships set sail watched by an intent crowd, for some of whom the enterprise contained their ready wealth. When the German pilgrim Felix Fabri left on a pilgrim galley in 1498 it was ceremonially decked out with banners;

The ritual of departure, the crossing of the threshold of the lagoon to the open sea, were pivotal moments in the communal experience of Venetian people, as well as for outsiders. There was both excitement and apprehension. Wills were written. Some on board would not return.

The merchant galleys regularly carried a handful of young noblemen, recruited as crossbowmen, as apprentices learning the skills of trade and the seafaring life. For many of these ‘nobles of the poop’ this was their first overseas experience. When Andrea Sanudo was preparing for his first voyage to Alexandria in the late fifteenth century, his brother Benedetto gave him copious instructions on how to behave and what to expect and avoid. They ranged widely from behaviour on board ship – treat the captain with reverence, only play backgammon with the chaplain, how to cope with seasickness – to the perils of port life – avoid the prostitutes of Candia: ‘they are infected with the French disease’ – and eating quails in Alexandria.

There was much to learn, both cultural and commercial, about foreign parts. Andrea was advised to shadow the local Venetian agent: ‘Always stay with him, learning to recognise every sort of spice and drug which will be of enormous benefit to you.’ Information was as vital as cash to all merchants voyaging to lands where dealings might be conducted through an interpreter in unfamiliar weights, measures and currencies. Practical handbooks were compiled with trading information on all the concerns of the travelling merchants, and these were widely circulated. Local currency conversions, units of measure, the quality of spices, how to avoid fraud were all covered. One of these, the Zibaldone da Canal, reveals the difficulties of conducting dealings on a foreign shore. In Tunis, it helpfully explains,

Local weights and measures could be equally tough, with the wily Christian merchants of Lesser Armenia setting the ultimate challenge:

An enormous amount of practical information was required: the quantity of fox furs, fish, matting, blocks of wood, lances or walnuts to be loaded in a barrel or bale, the measure for weighing English cloth from Stamford, the Venetian equivalents for olive oil measures in Alexandria or purple dye in Negroponte, the advantages of smuggling gold into Tunis, how to avoid fraud and appraise spices. Frankincense powder might be adulterated with marble dust; nutmegs should be ‘big and firm … you want to pierce the shell with a needle, and if it yields water, it is good; and any other way is not worth anything … The reeds of cassia … should not make a sound when a man shakes them.’ The merchant needed to be quick-witted, armed with a formidable memory (for which commercial courses were available) and an excellent grasp of practical arithmetic as he stepped blinking and groggy down the gangplank at the end of a long sea voyage.

*

For all Venetians – novices or old hands – the final destinations, be they Beirut or Tana, Alexandria or Bruges, were territories which they did not control. They traded on the erratic sufferance of foreign powers. Xenophobia, extortion, cheating, political upheavals and commercial rivalry made the merchant’s life terribly insecure – even within the Christian lands. A colony could be sacked in London, as it was in the fifteenth century, but nowhere were the merchant venturers so exhaustingly tested as within the Muslim Levant. Dealings across the frontiers of faith were tensioned by mutual suspicion and the long back story of the crusades. Alexandria, which must have looked so fair to Andrea Sanudo on first sight when spied from out at sea, was a decaying place. ‘Every day one house falls upon another, and the grand walls enclose miserable ruins,’ wrote Felix Fabri in 1498. The cause of much of the devastation was the Christian sack of 1365 – an expedition which Venice had strenuously opposed, but for which it had been apportioned blame by the Mamluk sultan in Cairo. The process of exchange was edgy, fraught with suspicion on both sides, but neither could live without it. On the shores of the Levant in the Middle Ages Venice developed the first efficient operation of a world trade.

European merchants in Alexandria, Aleppo, Damascus or Beirut lived a barricaded life. Apart from their consul and a small group of long-term residents, they were generally forbidden to dwell outside their fondaco – a large enclosed complex of residential buildings provided for their security. Each nation had its own fondaco which contained sleeping quarters, warehousing, kitchens, bakery, a bath house, a chapel – and frequently quite extensive gardens, where exotic animals might roam. The Aragonese in Alexandria kept ostriches and a chained leopard in theirs in the 1480s. The sultan in Cairo provided these fondaci as a service for foreign traders. He wanted to keep his valuable customers safe from the potential hostility of the population, but he also wanted to control them. The key to the outer door was in the care of a Muslim keeper; overnight and during Friday prayers they were locked in from the outside. Within they could live the semblance of an embassy life; wine would be drunk (sometimes in the surreptitious company of visiting Muslims) and worse. When Fabri visited the Venetian fondaco, he was surprised to meet a large pig snuffling in the courtyard, which the Venetians kept out of contempt, but for which they paid the Sultan a handsome sum, ‘otherwise the Saracens would not have allowed it to live and even worse, would have destroyed the house on account of the pig’. Provocations existed on both sides.

From the fondaco, the merchants went forth into the streets of Alexandria in the care of an interpreter to buy and sell. The negotiations were always tough, the abuses numerous. They started and ended with the welcome and farewell of the customs officials who were adept at random deductions, double taxation or confiscation. Scarlet cloth and Cretan cheeses were eyed particularly keenly. The process of spice dealing was fraught. Ascertaining the quality could be tricky, according to a merchant, as the Venetians bought in bulk often ‘without sorting and without picking over … as they come from India, nor do they let us see beforehand what we are going to buy’. Both sides needed the deal but it was a game of brinkmanship. Knowing the fixed period of the muda – and senatorial decrees were peremptory in the matter – Egyptian merchants might wait until the last day to set the price, leaving no time to haggle, or the far worse prospect of returning empty-handed. The transaction could go down to the wire. Fabri watched the final trans-shipment of a spice deal. The giant sacks, five foot wide and fifteen foot long, lay on the quayside, watched by a jostling and intent crowd. The spices had been inspected, weighed and cleared from customs. The galleys were anchored off shore. The sailors rowed across in long boats to load up. At the last moment there was a sudden intervention:

On the other side, the Venetians were flinty opponents, well versed in the psychology of the deal. When Fabri and his fellow pilgrims tried to negotiate passage back to Venice with a sick boy, they found the sea captains ‘harsher and more unreasonable in the price they asked than Saracens or Arabs, for some demanded from every pilgrim fifty ducats, and when we stuck at paying this, another proud captain said that he would not accept less than a hundred a man’. The boy died in port. The merchant class could be crafty and devious, expert at smuggling gems and gold from the probing officials, capable of embezzlement, tax evasion and flight from a sealed bargain unless severely constrained by punitive Venetian law.

However, on foreign soil it was usually an unequal contest. Despite trading agreements, the sultans might insist on arbitrarily fixing the prices. In 1419 a pepper price of 150–160 dinars a unit was imposed in Alexandria, against the market rate of one hundred. Sometimes Cairo would enforce purchase – or sale of the goods the merchants had brought with them. In Syria the Venetians often fared worse. Landing at Beirut, they travelled to Damascus to buy. On return they might be attacked or the camel and donkey drivers might steal part of their loads. Under the strain of theft, abuse and rapacious extortion patience frequently gave way. In 1407 all the Europeans in Damascus were imprisoned after a brawl; in 1410 they were bastinadoed. The Venetian consul travelled repeatedly to Damascus to plead release of a Venetian subject or to request fulfilment of agreed trading terms. He might be met with understanding – or insouciance. When a consul threatened the withdrawal of all Venetian merchants from Alexandria, the sultan responded that ‘as to the power of you Venetians, and after that of the rest of Christendom, I hold … it not so high as a pair of old shoes’. There was an element of bluff within this – the Mamluks needed the influx of European gold – but the abuses continued. Sometimes the consul himself was beaten and imprisoned.

Driven to distraction, some of the trading nations retaliated. The Genoese raided the coast of Syria; in 1426 a Catalan squadron attacked Alexandria. The Venetians kept their distance from armed aggression but paid the price by association. In 1434 they were all expelled from Syria and Egypt at a loss of a massive 235,000 ducats. Their strategy was patience and endless diplomacy. When their merchants were imprisoned they despatched their long-suffering consul to Cairo; when goods were purloined they made a claim; when the spices began to be unacceptably cut with rubbish they used sieves; when the tension became unbearable they prepared to evacuate the whole community. For short periods they suspended the galley service altogether. They faced down the avaricious Sultan Baybars in a long and intense arm-wrestle during the 1430s when he imposed a blanket price-fixing monopoly on the export of all spices, and they broke his attempt to impose his own gold currency on the deals: the purity and reliability of the ducat outgunned its rivals. Underneath was a calculation – that the unpopular Mamluk rulers needed the lucrative inflow of taxed gold to prop up their rule just as much as Venice needed the trade. And they never lashed out. When the Genoese sent armed galleys, Venice sent diplomats – again and again and again.

In the endless embassies to the potentates of the Levant the Republic deployed the consummate diplomatic skills that it had learned from the Byzantines and that would serve it well in all its long, entangled dealings with the Muslim world. They set aside bribery funds for the sultan and wooed him with sumptuous gifts and impressive shows of gravitas. No single image captures the exotic ritual of these diplomatic exchanges as vividly as the painting of the reception of the Venetian ambassadors at Damascus in 1508. The consul, wearing a red toga expressing the full majesty of the Most Serene Republic, presents his papers to the Mamluk governor, seated on a low dais, before a vast assemblage of Muslim dignitaries in conical red turbans and gowns of multicoloured silk. The setting, with its mosques, hyperreal sky and vivid trees, its attendant black servants and animals – monkeys, camels and deer – catches the note of rapt fascination the East held for Venice. This was a world of vivid sense impressions: the taste of a banana (‘so exquisite it’s impossible to describe’); the appearance of a giraffe, the beauty of Mamluk gardens. When the consul in question, Pietro Zen, was later caught in collusion with the Persians, an even more magnificent delegation was despatched to the sultan in Cairo.

The account reads like an extract from the Arabian Nights. The Venetians arrived with an entourage of eight trumpeters, dressed in scarlet, who proceeded to announce the ambassador’s presence with a magnificent fanfare, but their show of splendour was clearly dwarfed by the audience in the sultan’s palace.

However, the new ambassador, Domenico Trevisan, obtained Zen’s release with an impressive array of gifts, carefully chosen for the Mamluk taste: fifty brilliantly coloured robes in silk, satin and cloth of gold, seventy-five sable pelts, four hundred ermine pelts, fifty cheeses ‘each one weighing eighty pounds’.

If the gifts were magnificent the underlying diplomatic principles were patience and unbending firmness: insist on the strict upholding of agreements; never give up on a claim, no matter how small; never leave an imprisoned subject unreleased; distance oneself from the wrongdoings of other nations – the piratical Catalans, the aggressive Genoese, the crusading Knights of St John; impose strict discipline on one’s own subjects. Merchants were absolutely forbidden to buy in Egypt anywhere but Alexandria, to buy on credit, to enter into trading partnerships with Muslims. Any Venetian who cut and ran with an unpaid debt risked the safety and reputation of the whole trading community. Unlike the individualistic Genoese, the Venetian traders, all drawn from the same tight-knit squares and parishes, had a strong sense of group solidarity. They paid into a common insurance fund, the cottimo, by which the costs of extortion by Mamluk officials or fiscal penalties imposed on the colony as a whole were shared between its members. ‘Like pigs’, as the Florentine preacher had unflatteringly put it, they gathered together. Under the circumstances it was a virtue.

The running of the Levant trade was exhausting and risky – merchants faced ruin on an autocratic whim of the sultans. It required continuous oversight, endless senatorial debate, and it drove men to the edge. It was frequently discouraging, always unstable. When Pietro Diedo was sent on an embassy in 1489 his report was doleful in the extreme. The merchants ‘meet with so many obstacles that they are pitiful to behold … I maintain that in this country … there is a greater abundance of pretence than of good results … Unless they find a remedy for the errors and extortions made in Alexandria, this country should be abandoned.’ Diedo, like many of his countrymen, never came back. He died in Cairo.

But the diplomacy worked. Self-discipline, straight dealing and an appeal to reason over armed force won the grudging respect of the Cairo court – and a sideways glance from much of Christendom, as the Mamluks’ friends. Decade by decade through the fifteenth century they inched ahead of their rivals. The regularity of their galley lines made the wheels of commerce turn. The muda’s arrival at Alexandria was as welcome to the Egyptians as was its return to the Germans. By 1417 Venice was the foremost trading nation in the eastern Mediterranean; by the end of the century they had crushed the competition. In 1487 there were only three fondaci left in Alexandria, the two Venetian and one Genoese; the other nations had withdrawn from the game. Venice beat Genoa, not so much at Chioggia, but in the long-drawn-out, unspectacular trade wars of the Levant. And the profits were huge: up to eighty per cent on cotton, sixty per cent on spices, when sold on to foreign merchants on the Rialto.

The winter spice fleets returning from the Levant, whose imminent arrival would be heralded by fast cutters, would be seen first from lookouts on the campanile of St Mark and welcomed home by the thunderous peal of church bells. The arrivals of the various mude – cotton cogs from Beirut, merchant galleys from Languedoc, Bruges, Alexandria or the Black Sea – slotted between the round of religious processions, feast days and historical remembrances, were great events in the cycle of the year. The Alexandria muda, putting in some time between 15 December and 15 February, sparked off an intense period of commercial activity. Swarms of small boats put out to welcome the galleys home; everything had to be landed at the maritime customs house – the dogana da mar – on the point jutting out into the Basin of St Mark. The word dogana (divan) was an exotic Arabic import like the goods it contained. No bales could be landed until they had paid the import tax (between three and five per cent) and been stamped with its seal – though abuses were numerous.

The maritime customs house

 

Throughout all the centuries of port life, the Basin of St Mark was a chaotic, colourful theatre of maritime activity. The Venetians treated it as an industrial machine, outsiders were just amazed. The landscape of spars and masts, rigging and oars, barrels and bales dumped on quaysides, the hubbub of ships and merchandise, was celebrated in the great panoramas of Venetian painting, from fifteenth-century woodcuts jammed with detail to the bright seascapes of Canaletto in the eighteenth. Venice was a world of ships. The literal-minded Canon Casola tried to count them, starting with gondolas, but gave up, having already excluded from his count ‘the galleys and navi for navigating long distances because they are numberless … There is no city equal to Venice as regards the number of ships and the grandeur of the port.’

Once taxed and cleared through customs, goods were loaded onto lighters, ferried up the Grand Canal and landed at the Rialto or unloaded into barred ground-floor warehouses, via the water gates of the palaces of the merchant princes. It was the Rialto, situated at the mid-point of the wide S-bend of the Grand Canal, that comprised the centre of the whole commercial system. Its wooden bridge was the only crossing point in the fifteenth century. Here was Venice’s second customs house – the dogana da terra – where all the goods floated down the rivers of Italy or packhorsed across the Alpine passes arrived by barge. This meeting point became the axis and turntable of world trade. It was, as the diarist Marino Sanudo put it, ‘the richest place on earth’.

The abundance dazzled and confounded. It seemed as if everything that the world might contain was unloaded here, bought and sold, or repackaged and re-embarked for sale somewhere else. The Rialto, like a distorted reflection of Aleppo, Damascus or medieval Baghdad, was the souk of the world. There were quays for unloading bulk items: oil, coal, wine, iron; warehouses for flour and timber; bales and barrels and sacks that seemed to contain everything – carpets, silk, ginger, frankincense, furs, fruit, cotton, pepper, glass, fish, flowers – and all the human activity that animated the quarter; the water jammed with lighters and gondolas, the quays thronged by boatmen, merchants, spice garblers (examiners), porters, customs officials, foreign merchants, thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and pilgrims; on the quaysides a casual spectacle of chaotic unloading, shouting, hefting and petty theft.

This was the bazaar of Europe and the historic location of Venice’s founding myth. It was held that Venice was established here on Friday 25 March 421, at noon precisely, by the site of the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto, the merchants’ church, said to have been built the same year. An inscription on its walls sternly enjoined probity and fair dealing: ‘Around this temple let the merchant’s law be just, his weights true and his promises faithful.’ The square beside the church was the centre of international commerce, ‘where all the business of the city – or rather, of the world – was transacted’. Here the proclamations of the state were read out and the bankers, seated at long tables, entered deposits and payments in their ledgers, and transferred by bills of exchange considerable sums from one client to another without the least movement of actual cash; here the public debt was quoted and the daily price of spices compiled, set forth in lists and distributed to the many merchants – both resident and foreign. Unlike the bawl of the retail markets, everything was conducted demurely in a low voice, as befitted the honour of Venice: ‘no voice, no noise … no discussion … no insults … no disputes’. In the loggia opposite, they had a painted map of the world, as if to confirm that all its trade might be imagined here and a clock that ‘shows all the moments of time to all the different nations of the world who assemble with their goods in the famous piazza of Rialto’. The Rialto was the centre of international trade: to be banned from it was to be excluded from commercial life.

The Rialto to the left of its wooden bridge. The German fondaco is the named building on the right.

 

From this epicentre radiated all the trades, activities and exchanges that made Venice the mart of the world. On the Rialto Bridge were displayed news of muda sailings and the announcement of galley auctions, which were conducted by an auctioneer standing on a bench and timed by the burning of a candle. Across the canal the Republic lodged its German merchants in their own fondaco, and managed them almost as carefully as they themselves were by the Mamluks; around lay the streets of specialist activities – marine insurance, goldsmithing, jewellery. It was the sheer exuberance of physical stuff, the evidence of plenty that overwhelmed visitors such as the pilgrim Pietro Casola. He found the area around the Rialto Bridge ‘inestimable … It seems as if all the world flocks there.’ Casola tried to see it all, rushing from site to site, stunned by the quantities, the colours, the size, the variety, and recording his impressions in dizzying and ever expanding superlatives:

The sensuous exuberance of the Rialto hit outsiders like a physical shock.

From here Venice controlled an axis of exchange that ran from the Rhine valley to the Levant and influenced trade from Sweden to China, funnelling goods across the world system: Indian pepper to England and Flanders, Cotswold wool and Russian furs to the Mamluks of Cairo; Syrian cotton to the burghers of Germany; Chinese silk to the mistresses of Medici bankers, Cyprus sugar for their food; Murano glass for the mosque lamps of Aleppo; Slovakian copper; paper, tin and dried fish. In Venice there was a trade for everything, even ground-up mummies from the Valley of the Kings, sold as medicinal cures. Everything spun off the turntable of the Rialto and was despatched again by the muda to another port or across the lagoon, up the rivers and roads of central Europe. And on every import and export the Republic levied its share of tax. ‘Here wealth flows like water in a fountain,’ wrote Casola. All it actually lacked was passable drinking water. ‘Although the people are placed in the water up to the mouth they often suffer from thirst.’

In the 1360s Petrarch had marvelled at the ability of the Venetians to exchange goods across the vast expanses of the world. ‘Our wines sparkle in the cups of the Britons,’ he wrote, ‘our honey is carried to delight the taste of the Russians. And hard though it is to believe, the timber from our forests is carried to the Egyptians and Greeks. From here, oil, linen and saffron reach Syria, Armenia, Arabia and Persia in our ships, and in return various goods come back.’ The great man had grasped the genius of Venetian trade, even if he was poetically hazy about the details. (The honey was coming from Russia.) A century later, this process had reached its fruition. Its merchants were everywhere – buying, selling, bargaining, negotiating, avid for profit, single-minded and ruthless, exploiting whatever opportunities existed for coining gold. They had even cornered the market in holy relics. The theft of bones – dubious yellowing skulls, hands, whole corpses or dissected pieces (forearms, feet, fingers, locks of hair) – along with material objects attached to the life of Christ added respect to the city and enhanced its potential for the lucrative tourist pilgrim trade. St Mark in 828 was followed by a long list of looted body parts, many of which were acquired during the Fourth Crusade, and which made Venice a stopover of particular attraction for the pious. (So plentiful was this collection of human fragments that the Venetians became hazy about what they had: the head of St George was retrieved from a cupboard in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore by the American scholar Kenneth Setton in 1971.)

The Ca’ d’Oro

 

The visual city had become a place of wonder. To float down the Grand Canal past the great palazzos of the merchant princes, such as the Ca’ d’Oro shimmering in the sun with its covering of gold leaf, was to be exposed to an astonishing drama of activity, colour and light. ‘I saw four-hundred-ton vessels pass close by the houses that border a canal which I hold to be the most beautiful street,’ wrote the Frenchman Philippe de Commynes. To attend mass in St Mark’s or witness one of the great ceremonial rituals that punctuated the Venetian year – the Senza or the inauguration of a doge, the appointment of a captain-general of the sea, the blaring of trumpets, the waving of red-and-gold banners, the parading of prisoners and captured war trophies; to witness the guilds, clergy and all the appointed bodies of the Venetian Republic in solemn procession around St Mark’s Square – such theatrical displays seemed like the manifestations of a state that was uniquely blessed. ‘I have never seen a city so triumphant,’ declared Commynes. It all rested on money.

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Nothing would have confirmed Petrarch’s view of Venetians’ material obsessions so much as the journey of Giosafat Barbaro, a merchant and diplomat who set out from Tana with 120 labourers to search a Scythian burial mound on the steppes for treasure. In 1447 he travelled by sledge up the frozen rivers, but ‘found the ground so hard we were constrained to forgo our enterprise’. Returning the following year, the workmen dug a deep cutting into the artificial hill. They were disappointed to find only a great depth of millet husks, carp scales and some fragmentary artefacts: ‘beads as big as oranges made of brick and covered with glass … and half of a handle of a little ewer of silver with an adder’s head on top’. They were again defeated by the weather. Barbaro’s men had dug into a rubbish tip. They had missed by a few hundred yards the burial chamber of a Scythian princess, adorned with enough jewellery to ignite all their wildest Venetian dreams of oriental gold. It was not discovered until 1988.