City of Neptune

 

THE VIEW FROM 1500

In 1500, an exact half-millennium after Doge Orseolo embarked on his voyage of conquest, the Venetian artist Jacopo de’ Barbari published an immense and spectacular map, almost three metres long. The angle of vision is giddily tilted to present a bird’s-eye view of Venice impossible to human perspective before the invention of flight. From a thousand feet up, Barbari calmly laid out the city in huge and naturalistic detail. The woodcut panorama was based on careful surveys conducted from the city’s campaniles. It shows everything: the churches, squares and waterways, the doge’s palace, St Mark’s and the Rialto, the customs house and the German fondaco, and the lazy S-shaped meander of the Grand Canal spanned at its centre by the one wooden bridge.

Despite the level of detail, the map is not quite a factual record. De’ Barbari tweaked the perspective to emphasise the marine appearance of the place, so that it looks like an open-mouthed dolphin with its distinctive fish tail at the eastern end. Like the visual propaganda of the city – its buildings and banners, its elaborate rituals, feast days and festivals – the map is a work of profound intention. De’ Barbari’s Venice is a city of ships, a celebration of maritime prosperity. On the auspicious anniversary it trumpets the glorious ascent from muddy swamp to the richest place on earth. The city appears immortal, as if abstracted from the erosions of time. There are almost no people visible, none of the hubbub and jostle of trade. It displays wealth without human effort.

The lagoon itself is tranquil, just lightly stirred by benign winds blown by the breath of cherubs to speed the fleets on their prosperous way. Tubby sailing ships, fat as jugs, ride at anchor on taut hawsers in all states of readiness: some are fully rigged, some are demasted, others are chocked up in dry dock or tilted on their sides; aerodynamic galleys, raked back and low, lie beside them; on the Bucintoro, symbol of the marriage with the sea, the figure of Justice stands, sword in hand, erect in the prow; a merchant ship is being towed up the Grand Canal. Around the ocean-going craft, a host of little vessels skim the woodcut ripples. All the permutations of Venetian rowing styles are on show: a regatta of four-man racing craft; the flat-bottomed lagoon skiffs rowed by two men; gondolas poled by one; small sailing boats like beaked Phoenician traders laden with produce from the vegetable gardens of the lagoon. The mainland has been pushed back, as if irrelevant.

The map is presided over by benign gods. At the top, the tutelary deity of Venice is Mercury, god of trade, proclaiming with a semicircular sweep of his hand the message, ‘I, Mercury, shine down favourably on this above all other places of commerce’; underneath the portentous date: 1500. But it is Neptune who really catches the eye at the centre of the map. The powerful muscled figure rides a scaly and snouted dolphin; from his trident, held aloft to the skies, the message proclaims: ‘I, Neptune, reside here, watching over seas and this port.’ It is a triumphant statement of maritime power. In de’ Barbari’s image the city is at its peak.

City of Neptune

 

The ships so carefully portrayed, whose number the pilgrim Pietro Casola was unable to count, were Venice’s life blood. Everything that the city bought, sold, built, ate or made, came on a ship – the fish and the salt, the marble, the weapons, the oak palings, the looted relics and the old gold; de’ Barbari’s woodblocks and Bellini’s paint; the ore to be forged into anchors and nails, the Istrian stone for the palaces of the Grand Canal, the fruit, the wheat, the meat, the timber for oars and the hemp for rope; visiting merchants, pilgrims, emperors, popes and plagues. No state in the world occupied itself so obsessively with managing the business of the sea. A sizeable proportion of the male population earned their living there; all ranks and classes participated, from the noble shipowners down to the humblest oarsman. When the doge Tommaso Mocenigo gave his deathbed oration in 1423 he counted up the Republic’s maritime resources, albeit with some element of exaggeration: ‘In this city there are three thousand vessels of smaller burden, which carry seventeen thousand seamen; three hundred large ships, carrying eight thousand seamen; five-and-forty galleys constantly in commission for the protection of commerce, which employ eleven thousand seamen, three thousand carpenters, three thousand caulkers.’

*

In de’ Barbari’s map the single most prominent structure is the immense walled enclosure of the state arsenal at the tail of the dolphin. It had grown in size continuously over three hundred years with the maritime requirements of the Republic. By 1500 the sixty-acre site, enclosed by blind fifty-foot-high brick walls topped with battlements, comprised the largest industrial complex in the world. It was capable of building, arming, provisioning and launching eighty galleys at a speed and a level of consistency unmatched by any rival. The ‘Forge of War’ manufactured all the maritime apparatus of the Venetian state. It provided dry and wet docks, hangars for building and storing galleys, carpenters’ workshops, rope and sail factories, forges, gunpowder mills, lumber yards, and storehouses for every component of the process and the associated equipment.

The arsenal

 

By continuous refinement the Venetians had evolved something as close to assembly-line production as was possible given the organisational resources of a medieval state. The key concepts were specialism and quality control. Skill separation was critical, from the woodmen growing and selecting trees in distant forests, through the master shipwrights, sawyers, carpenters, caulkers, smiths, rope weavers and sail makers down to the general labourers who carried and fetched. Each team’s work was the subject of rigorous inspection. Venice knew well that the sea was an unforgiving judge, gnawing iron, rotting cables, testing seams, shredding sailcloth and rigging. Strict regulations were in place governing the quality of materials. The bobbin of each hemp spinner was marked so that the work could be individually identified; every rope that emerged from the ropewalk was tagged with a coloured label, indicating the use to which it could reliably be put. The care with which the Signoria oversaw each stage of production was a reflection of its understanding of the marine life. A ship, its crew and thousands of ducats of valuable merchandise could founder on shoddy work. For all the mythological rhetoric, Venice rested on profoundly material facts. It was a republic of wood, iron, rope, sails, rudders and oars. ‘The manufacture of cordage’, it was declared, ‘is the security of our galleys and ships and similarly of our sailors and capital.’ The state made unconditional demands; its caulkers should be accountable for split seams, its carpenters for snapped masts. Poor work was punishable with dismissal.

The arsenal was physically and psychologically central to Venice. Everyone was reminded of ‘the House of Work’ on a daily basis by the ringing of the marangona, the carpenter’s bell, from the campanile in St Mark’s Square to set the start and end of the working day. Its workers, the arsenalotti, were aristocrats among working men. They enjoyed special privileges and a direct relationship with the centres of power. They were supervised by a team of elected nobility and had the right to carry each new doge around the piazza on their shoulders; they had their own place in state processions; when the admiral of the arsenal died, his body was borne into St Mark’s by the chief foremen and twice raised in the air, once to betoken his acceptance of his responsibilities and again his fulfilling of them. The master shipwrights, whose skills and secret knowledge were often handed down through the generations, were jealously guarded possessions of the Venetian state.

The arsenal lent to the city an image of steely resolve and martial fury. The blank battlements that shut out the world were patrolled at night by watchmen who called to each other every hour; over its intimidating gateway the lion of St Mark never had an open book proclaiming peace. It was firmly closed: the arsenal lion was ready for war. The industry of the place amazed visitors. When Pietro Casola came in 1494 he saw in the munitions store ‘covered and uncovered cuirasses, swords, crossbows, large and small arrows, headpieces, arquebuses, and other artillery’; in each of the large sheds used for galley storage there were twenty compartments, holding

And he saw the Tana, the rope-making factory, a narrow hall a thousand feet long, ‘so long that I could hardly see from one end to the other’.

The arsenal worked on a just-in-time basis; it dry-stored all the components of galley construction in kit form for rapid assembly in times of war. Orderly arrangement was critical. To despatch a fleet of war galleys at short notice, the arsenal might be holding five thousand rowing benches and footbraces, five thousand oars, three hundred sails, a hundred masts and rudders, rigging, pitch, anchors, weapons, gunpowder and everything else required for quick deployment. The Spanish traveller Pero Tafur saw the fitting-out of a squadron of galleys in double-quick time during the summer of 1436: one by one hulls were launched into the basin where teams of carpenters fitted the rudders and masts. Tafur then watched as each galley passed down an assembly line channel:

Round ships and galleys in the Basin of St Mark

 

The arsenal produced not only ships of war but also the state-owned merchant galleys that formed the regular muda runs. For Venice, shipping was binary, a deeply understood set of alternatives. There were oared galleys and sailing ships; war galleys and great galleys; private vessels and state-owned ones; armed and disarmed vessels – not so much an opposition between fighting and merchant vessels, because merchant galleys could be used in war, and all ships carried a certain quantity of weapons – more an understanding as to whether a vessel was to sail out with a full complement of men, heavy armour, arquebuses and trained crossbowmen, or not. The state attended closely to their management. A maritime code was first introduced in 1255 and continuously refined. There were laws about loading, crew sizes, the quantity of arms to be carried, the duties and responsibilities of captains and other sea-going officials, taxes to be paid and the managing of disputes.

Every ship had a specified carrying capacity – calculated by mathematical formula in the fifteenth century – and a load line was marked on its side, a forerunner of the Plimsoll line. Before departure, ships were inspected to ensure that they were legally loaded, with a crew adequate to their size and the requisite quantity of weapons. Such regulations could be minutely fine-tuned according to circumstance; when ships were obliged to carry more arms by the law of 1310, they were permitted to load just one inch deeper; from 1291 hats were ordered to replace hoods as protective military headgear; when it became practice on large sailing ships mechanically to compress lightweight bulky loads, such as cotton, with screws or levers, the dangers of damage both to goods and hull became subject to legislation. Maritime law then distinguished between loading by hand and by screw, with the limits on mechanical loading fixed according to the ship’s age.

The business of the sea was managed as consistently as the Stato da Mar itself – by regulation, continuous oversight and recourse to law. These hallmarks of the Venetian system, widely admired by outsiders for its good order and sense of justice, ran through all its maritime arrangements. They replicated in miniature all the characteristic workings of the whole state and were closely attended to by the doge and ducal council. Sets of elected officials monitored, inspected, organised and fined both the state and the private sectors: they inspected crews, checked cargoes and collected custom and freight dues, rated loading capacities and handled legal disputes between shippers, masters and crew.

State-controlled voyages were organised at the highest level by elected officials of the Great Council, the central governing body of Venice. The savii, as they were called, planned the mude for the coming year, based on a continuous stream of intelligence about threats of war, the political stability of destinations, the state of markets and food stocks and the level of piracy. Their remit was wide. They could stipulate fleet sizes, routes, landing stages, durations of stops, freights to be carried and freight rates. Conditions would be most onerous with regard to high-value cargoes – the transportation of cloth, cash, bullion or spices – and the conveying of important state functionaries, ambassadors and foreign dignitaries. No leasing consortium could refuse to load legitimate freight from any merchant. Even after the vessels had been leased, the ships and their crews could be peremptorily requisitioned in the event of war. The state appointed its own official on merchant galleys, the capitano, the nautical and military leader of the fleet, tasked with protecting the Republic’s property and the lives of its citizens. Everyone on board down to the lowliest oarsman was contracted to the venture by sworn oath.

*

The regulation, the safety measures, the quality controls in the materials production in the arsenal, the attempts to legislate against human fallibility, fraud, exploitation and greed were founded on long experience of voyaging. The sea was a taskmaster that could turn profit into plunging loss, safety into extreme danger on a shift of the wind. Nothing made the Venetian system shudder more than dramatic cases of failure. In the spring of 1516, the Magna, an older merchant galley, was being fitted out for the Alexandria run. From March to July it was in the arsenal undergoing an examination of the hull. There was unanimous agreement that the vessel was dangerous; it needed repairs for which the hiring consortium was reluctant to pay, and they were anxious not to miss the spice fairs. The arsenal authorities finally permitted departure, with the empty assurance that it would be repaired further down the Adriatic at Pola. The Magna sailed on past Pola, carrying, amongst other things, a cargo of copper bars that may or may not have overloaded the vessel. It probably had a crew of about two hundred.

On 22 December, 250 miles off Cyprus, the Magna hit a storm and started to ship water. As it thrashed in the rolling sea, the copper bars broke loose and tumbled across the hold; at dawn the following day the vessel broke up into three parts. There was an instant rush for the ship’s boat, which quickly became overloaded. Some managed to scramble aboard, others were forcibly prevented with drawn swords. The late arrivals slipped back into the sea and drowned. There were now eighty-three men crammed onto a raft of death. They contrived a rudder and crude sails from sacks, spars and oars, and tried to sail to Cyprus. For a week they tossed violently day and night on a tempestuous sea ‘with waves as tall as St Mark’s’. They had no food or water. One by one the men started to die of hunger, thirst and cold. They drank their own urine and ate the shirts off their backs; they started to hallucinate: they saw saints carrying bright candles across the sky. Civilisation collapsed. ‘And perhaps’, it was elliptically explained in a letter from Cyprus, ‘some went to alleviate the hunger of others, and they had already resolved to kill the little ship’s clerk, because he was young, fat and juicy, to drink his blood.’ On the eighth day they sighted land but were too weak to choose a safe landing spot. Some drowned in the swell; the rest crawled ashore on their knees. Of the original eighty-three, fifty were still alive. ‘A young Soranzo has survived,’ it was reported, ‘but he is only holding onto life by the skin of his teeth, and the patrono, the noble Vicenzo Magno, but he is very sick and likely to die … certain of the other survivors will present the boat as an offering of the True Cross, and some will go on a barefoot pilgrimage to one place, others to another. All have made various vows.’ The writer of the letter drew sober conclusions:

Despite de’ Barbari’s Neptune, Venetians were always ambivalent about the sea; it was both the cornerstone of their existence and their fate. They believed they owned it all the way to Crete and Constantinople, but it was also dangerous, infinite and unappeased – ‘a zone that it is boundless and horrifying to behold’, wrote Cristoforo da Canal, an experienced captain of the sixteenth century. If the Senza was a claim to possession, its subtext was fear. Storm, shipwreck, piracy and war remained cardinal facts. The galley life was particularly hard and increasingly unwelcome as the centuries went on. The sense of shared purpose had begun to fragment. The status of the galeotti – the oarsmen sitting at the narrow benches in all weathers – declined steadily with a growing specialism of roles on ships and an aggregation of wealth and power among the noble class. They existed on a diet of wine, cheese, coarse bread, ship’s biscuit and vegetable soup. With the nautical revolution, the development of winter sailings worsened their lot – Pisani’s sailors, frostbitten and underfed, died of cold. Wages were pitiful; they were made up by the opportunity to trade on their own initiative on the merchant galleys: each man was permitted to carry on board a sack or chest.

In the war galleys, the captains who commanded respect, such as Vettor Pisani and the maverick Benedetto Pesaro a century later, understood what a man at the oars needed to live. A tolerable diet, protection from the worst of winter sailings and the chance to seize booty would win enduring loyalty from the men of the bench. For commanders who would share their food and the perils of battle they would go through hell. It was the galley crews who hammered on the door of the council chamber to free Pisani and who demanded his coffin; for more standoffish aristocrats they occasionally went on strike. They wanted comradeship, identity and a shared destiny. Their patriotism to St Mark was unbounded; when Venetian sea power faced its ultimate test in 1499 it would not be the men of the bench who failed.

By the late fifteenth century, they formed a veritable underclass; many on the merchant galleys were debt slaves to the captains, though rarely chained, and as the Black Death thinned the Venetian population they were increasingly drawn from the colonies. The Dalmatian coast and the shores of Greece were a crucial resource of raw manpower. The German pilgrim Felix Fabri observed their lot closely on the galleys to the Holy Land in 1494:

The good friar was most vexed by the swearing. Protection from his crew was one of the contractual obligations that the captain of a merchant galley had to his pilgrim passengers.

Insecurity was built into the seafaring life; any encounter with an unrecognised ship might cause alarm. In situations of uncertainty, galleys would enter a foreign port backwards, crossbowmen covering the shore with cranked bows, the oarsmen ready to pull out at a blast of the whistle. With the decline of the Byzantine Empire, piracy, always endemic to the Mediterranean, had a ratcheting effect on the maritime system. After 1300, freebooting Catalans, ousted Genoese factions, Greeks, Sicilians, Angevins – and increasingly Turks from the coasts of Asia Minor – turned the sea into a free-for-all. In 1301, all vessels were ordered to augment their armed defences; in 1310, state galleys had to enrol twenty per cent of their crew as bowmen. The crew were all expected to fight and were issued with weapons; laws required the provision of specified quantities of plate armour. The muda system, where merchant galleys travelled in convoy, was introduced to ensure a level of mutual defence. Their sizeable crews – about two hundred men – were a deterrent to all but a squadron of Genoese war galleys. It was the lone private sailing ship that was more likely to be picked off by pirates lurking in a passing cove. For Venice, piracy was the most detested crime, an affront to business and the rule of law. The Republic preferred its maritime violence organised at state level. The registers minute thousands of instances of robbery or dubious confiscation of cargoes under pretext, followed by demands for restitution from other states held responsible for the actions of its citizens, but at sea it was frequently the survival of the fittest.

Cleansing the waters of pirates was the duty of both war fleets and merchant galleys. The contests were bloody and punishments exemplary. Captured pirates would be chopped up on their own decks or hanged from their masts, their ships burned. Retribution was particularly ferocious against Christian subjects of the Stato da Mar, but the fate of a detested Turkish pirate in 1501 probably made even the tough-minded Venetians pause. The captain-general of the sea, Benedetto Pesaro, wrote to explain his fate.

By way of further explanation, Pesaro went on to recount that Erichi’s ghastly end was revenge exacted for similar inflicted on a Venetian nobleman.

For dashing Venetian galley commanders pirate hunting could almost be a sport. In February 1519 Zuan Antonio Taiapiera wrote to his brother about his recent exploits:

As a more permanent memorial than the rotting head, Taiapiera asked his brother particularly to ‘have a banner made for me with fields of yellow and blue, separated by a third dotted with turbans, and make it big, and send it at the first opportunity to Corfu, so that I will have it for the first of May for the parade’. He was certainly going to advertise this success.

*

Travelling by ship was everyday life for many Venetians, too familiar to be described in detail. It was outsiders who provided the most vivid accounts of the Venetian experience of seafaring life towards the end of the Middle Ages, particularly landlubber pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, such as the German monk Felix Fabri and the Florentine Pietro Casola. Fabri, insatiably curious, made the voyage twice and recorded all the alarms and mood swings of the voyage.

Venice ran regular sailings to the Holy Land in adapted merchant galleys, which, keen to preserve its good name and aware of the unscrupulous instincts of noble captains, it regulated with care. It provided a kind of package service with food provided and transport between Jaffa and Jerusalem included. It was backed up by legal contract. All the same, the each-way voyage of five to six weeks was a form of purgatory – and at times a glimpse of hell. The pilgrims were housed in a long unlighted hold beneath the main deck where each slept in a space eighteen inches wide, with the stench of the bilges below and smoke seeping through the deck from the kitchen above. Nights below deck were foetid and foul, ‘right evil and smouldering hot and stinking’ one English pilgrim called the experience, what with the cries and groans of fellow passengers, the unfamiliar motion of the rolling ship, the smell of vomit and urine from upturned chamber pots, arguments, fights, bedbugs and fleas.

Storms, when they came, were abrupt and shattering. In June 1494, Casola’s galley off the coast of Dalmatia was hit by a rising sea and driven seventy miles west to the tip of Italy. Down in their pitch-black hold, the pilgrims were hurled from side to side in the dark; they could feel the ship ‘twisted by the fury of the sea’, creaking and groaning ‘as if she would break up’. Water was forced through the hatches, soaking the wretched travellers. The screaming was terrible: ‘as if all the souls tormented in hell were down there’. ‘Death was chasing us,’ Casola recalled of such an occasion:

The galeotti, drenched to the skin, begged to be allowed below. Those left on deck to steady the ship were exposed to mountainous waves; it took three helmsmen wading in water on the poop deck to manage the rudder.

At times Fabri, keen to witness everything that life had to offer, could experience an almost aesthetic delight in watching a violent sea. ‘Waves of sea water are more vehement, more noisy, and more wonderful than those of other water. I have had great pleasure in sitting or standing on the upper deck during a storm and watching the marvellous succession of gusts of wind and the frightful rush of the waters.’ At night, though, it was a different story. A gale struck Fabri’s galley just north of Corfu.

They hit the ship with a noise ‘as though millstones were being flung against her … so fierce a wind kept tossing the galley up and down, rolling it from side to side and shaking it about, that no man could lie in his berth, much less sit, and least of all stand’. The pilgrim deck was a shambles.

*

In the dark, objects swinging from the bulkheads came crashing through the air; water poured through the hatches, ‘so that there was nothing in the whole ship which was not wet; our beds and all our things were sopping, our bread and biscuits all spoiled by sea water’. It was the creaking of the timbers that petrified most of all. ‘Nothing ever frightened me in storms so much as the loud groans of the ship, which are so intense that one thinks that the ship must be broken somewhere.’ It was now that the arsenal’s quality controls were put to their supreme test.

On deck the situation was more dire. The mainsail had been ripped to shreds, the yardarm ‘bent like a bow … our mast made many dreadful noises, and the yard likewise; and every joint in the whole galley seemed to be coming to pieces’. Ship management was in a state of pandemonium:

Amid this terror and confusion and the strobic bursts of lightning, a sudden apparition stopped the crew in their tracks. A fixed light – almost certainly a manifestation of St Elmo’s fire – was seen hovering above the prow. ‘Thence it slowly moved throughout the whole length of the galley as far as the stern, where it vanished. This light was a ray of fire about a cubit in width.’ Astonished and awestruck in the middle of the storm, all those on deck ‘left off their working, ceased their noise and shouting, and kneeling down with their hands raised to heaven, cried out in a low voice nothing except “Holy, holy, holy!”’ It was taken as a sign of divine grace. ‘And after this,’ with the storm still raging, ‘the galley slaves returned to their accustomed labours … and worked with joyous shouts.’

Three days after surviving this storm, Fabri’s ship found itself risking another disaster. As night fell off the Dalmatian coast and the wind freshened, the vessel was pitching at ‘the foot of a precipitous mountain … When we were close to the mountain and were trying to turn the galley head to wind, it was struck by the wind and waves so violently that it became unmanageable, and threatened to run its bows ashore on the precipitous rocks.’ There was an instant collapse of discipline; the galeotti ‘began to run hither and thither and prepared to make their escape’; ‘My lords, come on deck; the vessel is a wreck and is sinking,’ was the cry heard down in the hold. Everyone ran to the stern in great disorder; there was a crush on the companion ladders, the ship’s boats had been launched ‘in order that the captain himself with his brother, his brother’s wife and his own followers might be the first to escape’. Fabri had been fed enough tales of maritime disaster to know that the instance of the Magna was not unique: ‘those in the boats would have drawn their swords and daggers and kept others from entering them … [and] cut off with their swords the fingers and hands of men who are hanging to the oar or to the ship’s sides. Howbeit,’ Fabri went on, ‘this time also God saved us; the disorder was quieted, the ship was moored to the rocks, the sails furled, and anchors laid out.’

When a ship was being dragged onto a lee shore, human life hung on the quality of its cables and anchors. Ships carried a large number of anchors which could be tested to the limit. When the galley taking Domenico Trevisan to the Mamluk sultan was off the Peloponnese in 1516, ‘A furious sirocco wind blew up and although the anchors were cast out and we were firmly fixed to the shore by cables – and we increased the number of anchors to eighteen – we were frightened of dragging on our anchors, seeing our cables snapped and our galley hurled on the rocks.’

Ships carried cables of immense length – Casola’s had one that was 525 feet long – but nothing was proof against the vagaries of the sea. The sickening slow-motion doom of the anchors dragging on the sea bed and a looming shore could make even the most hardened seaman quail; the sailors dubbed the heaviest anchor the ‘anchor of hope’: it was the last resort. Fabri watched in dismay their largest anchor failing to catch; with enormous effort it was hauled in and dropped in another spot

Sometimes survival depended literally on a fluke.

Hardly less dreadful were patches of complete calm, when the ship sat motionless for days in the hot sun on a sea so flat ‘that it appeared like a glass of water’. ‘When all the winds are silent and the sea is dumb and calm everywhere,’ thought Fabri,

Sailors who had clean water left could sell it for more than wine, ‘although it was lukewarm, whitish and discoloured’. No galley could travel many days without putting in for water, and these great calms caused great suffering. Fabri had such thirst that he daydreamed longingly of his native Ulm, and ‘I would go up straightway to Blaubeuren and sit down beside the lake which rises out of the depths until I had satisfied my thirst.’

Seasickness, heat, cold, the foul conditions, the poor diet, the lack of sleep, the tumbling motion of the ship, all took their toll. The galley for Fabri became ‘a hospital full of wretched invalids’. Experiences of death were sudden and frequent. Pilgrims, unused to the conditions of nautical life, sickened and died of fevers and dysentery; sailors perished at their benches from the cold or in maritime accidents. Fabri watched one of the noble pilgrims ‘die piteously’.

Shortly after, ‘while the officers of the ship were engaged in managing the sails and tackling the galley, lo! of a sudden a block fell from the masthead which struck and killed our best officer … there was exceeding great lamentation in the galley … nor was there his like on board to take his place’. When they landed, more than once Fabri came across drowned corpses on the beach. Burial rites at sea were according to status. The galeotti were given not even a shroud; after a short prayer, they ‘were thrown overboard naked, for the sea beasts to devour’; whereas when Andrea Cabral, Venetian consul in Alexandria, died on the way home, his body was eviscerated, embalmed and packed in the ballast sand beneath the pilgrim deck, where it became a talisman of bad luck on a frightful run home.

In between, the passengers saw all the wonders and perils of the deep pass them by. Casola watched a water spout ‘like a great beam’ suck a mass of water out of the sea, and the aftermath of an earthquake in Candia, dashing the ships together in the harbour ‘as if they would all be broken to pieces’, and churning the sea to a strange colour; he passed Santorini, whose bay was thought to be bottomless, where the captain had once witnessed a volcanic explosion and seen a new island ‘black as coal’ rise spontaneously from the depths. Fabri’s ship was all but sucked down by a whirlpool off Corfu, got mistaken for Turkish pirates off the coast of Rhodes and narrowly dodged a Turkish invasion fleet bound for Italy. And in the midst of this, through calm and storm, seasickness and fear of corsairs, there was landfall in the ports of the Stato da Mar, welcome relief from the interminable rocking of the ship, and a promise of food and fresh water.

The pilgrims had full opportunity to glimpse how hard the marine life was. They watched the intense labours of the galeotti, working to the whistle, doing everything at a run and with loud shouts, ‘for they never work without shouting’. Passengers learned to keep out of their way or risk being knocked overboard as the seamen lugged up anchors, lowered and raised sails, scurried up rigging, swayed from the tops, sweated on the oars to manoeuvre the ship against the wind into a secure harbour. They swore ‘Spanish oaths’, terrible enough to shock the pious pilgrims, suffered cold and heat and the endless delays of contrary winds and lived for moments of respite – landfall or a barrel of wine. All seamen were prey to superstition; they disliked holy water from the River Jordan on their ships and stolen holy relics and Egyptian mummies; drowned bodies were an ill omen; corpses in the hold were sure to bring disaster – all misfortunes of a voyage could be attributed to such events. They called on a galaxy of special saints to ease their passage and had their prayers said in Italian rather than Latin. When the winter sea became furious off the coast of Greece, it was the archangel Michael beating his wings; in the rough weather of late November and early December they called on St Barbara and St Cecilia, St Clement and St Katherine and St Andrew; St Nicholas was invoked on 6 December, then the Virgin herself two days later; they were wary of mermaids, whose singing was fatal, though these might possibly be distracted with empty bottles thrown into the sea, with which the mermaids liked to play. And in every port they brought out small quantities of merchandise from chests and sacks to try their luck.

Fabri sat on deck by day and night in good weather and bad, following the intricate life of the ship. He compared it to being in a monastery. In Candia he watched underwater repairs to the rudder:

He had explained to him navigation by portolan maps and observed at close quarters how the pilot read the weather ‘in the colour of the sea, in the flocking together and movement of the dolphins and flying fish, in the smoke of the fire, the smell of bilge water, the glittering of ropes and cables at night, and the flashing of oars as they dip into the sea’. In the dark he frequently escaped the foetid pilgrim dormitory to sit upon the woodwork at the sides of the galley, letting his feet hang down towards the sea, and holding on by the shrouds. If there were the perils of storm and calm, there were also times of exhilaration and beauty when the sea would be like rippled silk, the moon bright on the water, the navigator watching the stars and the compass,

Fabri and Casola were able to make almost the entire voyage to Jaffa by way of Venetian ports. All down the Dalmatian coast, round Coron and Modon, via Crete and Cyprus they put in at harbours where the flag of St Mark fluttered in the salt wind. They witnessed the majestic operation of the Stato da Mar at first hand. They observed the prowling menace of its war fleets, its state ceremonies, colonial dignitaries, banners and trumpet calls. They saw the tangible fruits of the sea stacked high in Venetian warehouses. To outsiders, the city projected in de’ Barbari’s map seemed the pinnacle of prosperity. But this was the last generation of pilgrims to sail so freely. Even as Neptune’s trident was raised triumphantly aloft, the Stato da Mar was simultaneously in hidden decline. For seventy years shadows had been creeping over a sunlit sea. There were social factors at work – the toughness of the maritime life was one – and the Venetian lion now had his paws firmly planted on dry land; the business of the terra firma was starting increasingly to consume the Republic’s resources. But above all it was the inexorable advance of the Ottoman Empire which threatened to dissolve Venice’s marriage with the sea at the moment of its supremacy.