Hands on the Throat of Venice

 

1500–1503

In Venice, the loss of Lepanto was the scandal of the age. The inquiry and trials that followed were marked by unprecedented recriminations. Immense animosity was directed against Antonio Grimani and his clan; the Grimani palace was under siege from the mob; all its goods had to be hurriedly moved to a nearby monastery for safe keeping; a faithful Arab slave was attacked and left for dead in the streets; both the palace and the Grimani shops were daubed with graffiti. In the streets urchins took to shouting rhymes: ‘Antonio Grimani, Ruina da Christiani … traitor to Venice, may you and your sons be eaten by the dogs’. Other members of the family were too frightened to appear before the senate.

It was nearly four months before Grimani could bring himself to come back to Venice. He was peremptorily told that if he sailed into the Basin of St Mark in his general’s galley he would be executed on sight. He returned in a small sailing ship, chained like all disgraced naval commanders, in scenes as dramatic as those that accompanied the failure of Pisani. It was 2 November, the day of the dead.

Unlike Pisani, no sympathetic crowd of well-wishers turned out to watch Grimani struggle down the gangplank after dark. No man had fallen so far or so fast in the public estimation; the common consensus was that the admiral who had appeared to Priuli ‘like the Great Alexander, the famous Hannibal, the illustrious Julius Caesar’ had turned to jelly at the sight of an enemy. It was an example of the mutability of human fortune that one could see ‘this general pass from such fame and fortune to shame, disgrace and infamy … and that everything could change in a flash’. Weighted down with fetters and supported just by his sons he clanked his way to the steps of the doge’s palace. Four servants had to carry him up to the council chamber. Despite the lateness of the hour, two thousand people watched in dead silence as the proclamation was read out committing him to a damp dungeon.

The proceedings that followed were bitter and long drawn out. With rhetorical fury, the prosecution demanded the ultimate penalty for the man who was declared to be ‘the calamity of the nation, rebel of the Republic, enemy of the state, unworthy captain who has lost Lepanto through irresponsibility, a man who is rich and vain’. They contrasted this disgrace with the long and glorious roll call of public offices held by Grimani, now ill from the deprivations of a prison cell, ‘commander of galleys, captain of the Alexandria convoy, proviseur of salt, sage of the Terra Firma, governor of Ravenna, leader of the Ten, lawyer of the Commune, admiral in chief’ and terminated on a drumbeat of doom: ‘On his tomb will be written: here lies he who was executed in St Mark’s Square.’ The charge of wealth introduced a new note into Venetian public life. To be rich had always been a virtue; now it was a moral stain. The piles of gold flaunted on the recruiting benches returned to haunt him. Behind this lay jealousy and factional spite within the heart of the ruling class. There was a determination to eliminate the Grimani clan from commercial competition.

Grimani’s defence was that his orders had not been obeyed; the patroni had not engaged; commanders had held back through cowardice and disobedience. Everyone had their own version. Alvise Marcello, despite his own protestations, certainly bore a part of the blame; Malipiero thought that Grimani’s fault was not cowardice but inexperience: he had failed to organise the fleet properly and he had caused confusion by raising a crucifix instead of the war standard which he was given in St Mark’s – the signal to which captains were accustomed to respond. It was clear that Grimani had not reprimanded the noble commanders for their failures to engage, probably because he had no wish to alienate those on whose support his political future might lie. In the end it was recognised that the blame was collective, not individual. Grimani did not die. He was banished from Venice and forced to pay heavy compensation to the aristocratic families whose members had been killed in battle.

*

The war went on almost as badly as before. New commanders were appointed but the tide of fortune could not be reversed. At Lepanto the Ottomans now had a secure forward base on the edge of the Ionian Sea from which to conduct naval operations. During this tense time, Leonardo da Vinci arrived in the city to offer his services as a military engineer. He came with a head full of extraordinary schemes for the city’s defence – a diving suit of pig’s leather with bamboo pipes for air tubes, sketches for submarines. Whatever conversations took place came to nothing. (Two years later he was drawing up proposals to put to Sultan Bayezit for a single-span bridge across the Golden Horn.)

The senate’s concerns were more immediate. During the early months of 1500 fears grew for the safety of Coron and Modon. In July, a new commander, Girolamo Contarini, fought a repeat of Zonchio in the same waters, with the same mixture of galleys, round ships and merchant vessels. At they swept in to attack, the wind failed; the round ships were unable to engage; four of the great galleys withdrew; two more were taken. Contarini’s vessel, shot to bits and sinking, was forced to withdraw. Again there were recriminations.

Bayezit then proceeded in person with his army to the walls of Modon. He brought with him a large number of cannon, and the standards of the vessels captured from Contarini to demoralise the defence. From the town, the rector despatched short, desperate messages describing their plight: the whole countryside beyond the walls covered with a sea of tents … unceasing bombardment day and night … a third of the population dead or wounded … everyone else expecting to lose their lives … the gunpowder almost gone. Off shore, the patroni of the merchant galleys, daunted by the Ottoman fleet, again refused to fight. Only one captain, Zuam Malipiero, offered to take four galleys and run the blockade and ‘lay down his life for his country’. Such moments of exemplary bravery met their response. ‘At once, the galley crews cried out that they would volunteer to die with him, that they would man the galleys. The others,’ Priuli recorded bitterly, but from a safe distance, ‘lacking spirit and courage remained in the fleet.’ Malipiero’s galleys heroically pierced the Ottoman blockade and made it into the small encircling harbour of Modon. The exhausted defenders, overjoyed at the prospect of relief, abandoned their posts and started to run for the ships. The result was catastrophic.

On 29 August, at the twentieth hour, the news reached Venice as news always did: a light frigate cutting up fast on the wind to the Basin of St Mark. It was the day of the decapitation of St John, an ill-omened anniversary in the Christian calendar. When the loss of Modon was reported to the Council of Ten in their gilded chamber, the august dignitaries who commanded the Most Serene Republic of Venice burst into tears. Even more than Negroponte, Modon mattered. Its significance was both emotional and commercial. It was not just the six thousand prisoners taken, the loss of 150 cannon and the twelve galleys. Modon was part of the original imperial heritage of the Fourth Crusade; it counted as one of the richest treasures of the Stato da Mar. ‘It was’, said Priuli, ‘as if they had seen the whole ability of shipping to sail taken away, because the city of Modon was the staging post and maritime turntable for all ships on every voyage.’ When the sultan turned up at the walls of Coron twenty miles away, the case was judged hopeless; the town surrendered without a fight. The Eyes of the Republic had been extinguished. To Priuli the merchant it was a moment of prescient doom: ‘If the Venetians can’t make their voyages, their means of living will be gradually taken away, and in a short time they will wither away to nothing.’

On the eve of this gloomy news, the Republic had elected yet another captain-general of the sea. There were no volunteers for the post; all those proposed excused themselves on grounds of age, ill health and so on, so low had fallen the standing of the post, so great was the fear of the Turkish fleet. Eventually they found Benedetto Pesaro, known colloquially as Pesaro of London, who willingly accepted. Pesaro was an experienced commander, stern, resolute, impervious to the politics of the noble class and completely ruthless. At the age of seventy he still apparently kept mistresses. ‘Totally reprehensible in such an old man,’ yelped Priuli. Pesaro was, in effect, a throwback to the rougher age of Pisani and Zeno – a seaman’s seaman, able to command respect and love from his crews, and fear from his captains. In the light of previous failings he was given the widest power to ‘kill and execute anyone guilty of disobedience, be they provveditori, captains or galley commanders … without seeking permission from Venice’. Such phrases had become stock; they were no longer believed, but Pesaro did just that. Like Pisani, the old libertine understood the mentality of the working seamen: he improved their morale enormously by giving them leave to plunder, whilst helping himself as well. He was effective. He rampaged round the coasts of Greece destroying Ottoman shipbuilding efforts, restoring some Ionian islands to Venetian control, preventing the enemy from further consolidating their naval position. He acted without fear or favour. When two noble subordinates, one of whom was a relative of the doge, surrendered their fortresses without a fight he simply killed them. When he captured the Turkish pirate Erichi he roasted him alive. He preserved the integrity of the Adriatic and maintained control over the Ionian Sea so effectively that by the end of 1500 the great galleys were resuming their voyages to Alexandria and Beirut. Ultimately, however, he was unable to reverse the tide of conquest.

In 1503 Venice accepted the inevitable and signed a humiliating peace with Bayezit that confirmed everything he had won. Soon the Venetians would dip their flags to passing Ottoman ships in implicit recognition of a vassal status they were too proud publicly to acknowledge. From now on co-operation with their powerful Muslim neighbour would become an axiom of Venetian foreign policy and the city would turn its attention increasingly to building a land empire.

*

On 9 May 1500, as on every Ascension Day for the past five hundred years, the Senza took place in Venice, the elaborate ceremony that expressed the city’s sense of mystical union with the sea. As usual, the doge, decked out in his regalia, set sail in the golden barge and tossed a gold ring into the depths to proclaim the marriage. The same year de’ Barbari was running off images of the triumphant maritime city on Venetian presses. These were fine allegories but on the turning of the sixteenth century the reality was different. The sea was no longer quiet and the marriage was tempestuous. The truth had been neatly summed up in Constantinople some time earlier. When a Venetian ambassador presented himself at Bayezit’s court to broker a peace deal he was told that there was no point in being there. ‘Up till now you have married the sea,’ the vizier roundly remarked. ‘From now on it’s our turn; we’ve got more sea than you.’

The treaty marked a major shift in naval power. Henceforward no Christian power could compete with the Ottomans single-handed. They had taken just fifty years to neutralise the most experienced naval force in the Mediterranean and to turn around centuries of Christian dominance in its eastern half. Yet during this time they had established no real superiority in nautical matters, had fought few sea battles and conclusively won none. However, both Mehmet and Bayezit had grasped an essential principle of warfare in the closed sea: there was no need for dominion over the waves; it was the land that counted. By working in conjunction with a powerful army and using the fleet for amphibious operations, they had swept up the strategic bases on which galleys, with their need for frequent harbour stops, depended. Now they were established on the edge of the Adriatic, well poised to strike further west and to threaten Venice’s other great islands. For fifty years Venice had warned and implored the pope, the other Italian city states, the king of France, anyone who would listen, of the dangers of this possibility: ‘When the sultan has occupied the coast of Albania, which God forbid, nothing else remains but for him to cross over into Italy, whenever he wishes, for the destruction of Christendom.’ Bayezit added to all the sultan’s usual titles a new one: ‘Lord of all the sea kingdoms, both of the Romans, and Asia Minor and the Aegean’. Henceforward European merchant ships could hardly sail the eastern seas without permission. Only a few large islands – Corfu, Crete, Cyprus and Rhodes – were left in Christian hands.

*

The image of the fireball at Zonchio remained seared into the Venetian imagination, crystallised in a brilliant woodcut of the battle just as the flames started to take hold. It was the moment when Venetian naval self-confidence fell guttering to the deck. The Venetians had been overawed by the explosive effects of gunpowder and the apparent strength of their opponent, then betrayed by hairline cracks in their own command structure. In the end it was not so much a question of numbers as a failure of will, a refusal to die for causes. The galley captain Domenico Malipiero was unsparing in his analysis: ‘If we had had a larger fleet, there would have been greater confusion. Everything arose from a lack of love for Christianity and our country, a lack of courage, a lack of discipline, a lack of pride.’ ‘This Turkish engagement’, wrote Priuli, summing up in the summer of 1501, ‘meant everything; it was not a matter of losing a city or a fort, but of something much more serious’ – he meant the Stato da Mar itself, and the wealth that flowed through its channels.

There was another wider legacy of Zonchio. The spectacular destruction of the colossal sailing ships served to discourage both sides from further experiment in this direction. Henceforward battles in the Mediterranean would follow established practice; ever larger fleets of oared galleys would hurtle towards each other, firing their lightweight guns as they closed, then attempt to down each other in hand-to-hand combat. Beyond the gates of Gibraltar, it would be first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, the English and the Dutch whose wind-powered galleons, packed with heavy cannon, would construct world empires unimaginable in the landlocked sea.

The first inkling of this came hard on the heels of Zonchio. Priuli had been wrong about names, right about the deeds: not Columbus but Vasco da Gama returned from India in September 1499, having rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The Republic despatched an ambassador to the court of Lisbon to investigate; it was not until July 1501 that his report came in. The reality of it fell on the lagoon like a thunderclap. Terrible foreboding gripped the city. For the Venetians, who lived with a particularly intense awareness of physical geography, the implications were obvious. Priuli poured his gloomiest predictions into his diary. It was a marvel, incredible, the most momentous news of the time:

Cutting out hundreds of small middlemen, snubbing the avaricious, unstable Mamluks, buying in bulk, shipping direct: to Venetian merchants such advantages were self-evident.

There were counter voices; some pointed out the difficulties of the voyage:

But Priuli was certain: ‘From this news spices of all sorts will decrease enormously in Venice, because the usual buyers, understanding the news, will decline, being reluctant to buy.’ He ended with an apology to future readers for having written at such length. ‘These new facts are of such importance to our city that I have been carried away with anxiety.’

In a visionary flash, Priuli foresaw, and much of Venice with him, the end of a whole system, a paradigm shift: not just Venice, but a whole network of long-distance commerce doomed to decline. All the old trade routes and their burgeoning cities that had flourished since antiquity were suddenly glimpsed as backwaters – Cairo, the Black Sea, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Smyrna, the ports of the Red Sea and the great cities of the Levant, Constantinople itself – all these threatened to be cut out from the cycles of world trade by ocean-going galleons. The Mediterranean would be bypassed; the Adriatic would no longer be the route to anywhere; important outstations such as Cyprus and Crete would sink into decline.

The Portuguese rubbed this in. The king invited Venetian merchants to buy their spices in Lisbon; they would no longer need to treat with the fickle infidel. Some were tempted but the Republic had too much invested in the Levant easily to withdraw; their merchants there would be soft targets for the sultan’s wrath if they bought elsewhere. Nor, from the eastern Mediterranean, was sending their own ships to India readily practical. The whole business model of the Venetian state appeared, at a stroke, obsolete.

The effects were felt almost immediately. In 1502 the Beirut galleys only brought back four bales of pepper; prices in Venice steepled; the Germans reduced their purchases; many decamped to Lisbon. In 1502 the Republic despatched a secret embassy to Cairo to point out the dangers. It was essential to destroy the Portuguese maritime threat now. They offered financial support. They proposed digging a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. But the Mamluk dynasty, hated by its subjects, was also in decline. It proved powerless to see off the intruders. In 1500, the Mamluk chronicler Ibn Iyas recorded an extraordinary event. The balsam gardens outside Cairo, which had existed since remote antiquity, produced an oil with miraculous properties highly prized by the Venetians. Its trade symbolised the centuries-old commercial relationship between Islam and the West. That year the balsam trees withered away and vanished for ever. Seventeen years later the Ottomans strung up the last Mamluk sultan from a Cairo gate.

Tome Pires, a Portuguese adventurer, gleefully spelled out the implications for Venice. In 1511 the Portuguese conquered Malacca on the Malay peninsula, the market for the produce of the Spice Islands. ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca’, he wrote, ‘has his hand on the throat of Venice.’ It would be a slow and uneven pressure, but the Portuguese and their successors would eventually squeeze the life out of the Venetian trade with the Orient. The fears that Priuli expressed would in time prove well-founded; and the Ottomans meanwhile would systematically strip away the Stato da Mar.

The classical allusions of de’ Barbari’s map already contain a backward-looking note; they hint at nostalgia, a remaking of the tough, energetic realities of the Stato da Mar into something ornamental. They perhaps reflected structural changes within Venetian society. The recurrent bouts of plague meant that the city’s population was never self-replenishing; it relied on immigrants, and many of those from mainland Italy came without knowledge of the seafaring life. It was already noticeable during the Chioggia crisis that the volunteer citizens had to be given rowing lessons. In 1201, at the time of the adventure of the Fourth Crusade, the majority of its male population were seafarers; by 1500 they were not. The emotional attachment to the sea, expressed in the Senza, would last until the death of the Republic, but by 1500 Venice was turning increasingly to the land; within four years it would be engaged in a disastrous Italian war that would again bring enemies to the edge of the lagoon. There was a crisis in shipbuilding, a greater emphasis on industry. The patriotic solidarity which had been the hallmark of Venetian destiny had been seen to fray: a sizeable part of the ruling elite had demonstrated that, though still keen to recoup the profits of maritime trade, they were not prepared to fight for the bases and sea lanes on which it depended. Others, who had made fortunes in the rich fifteenth century, stopped sending their sons to sea as apprentice bowmen. Increasingly a wealthy man might look to reinvest in estates on the terra firma, to own a country mansion with escutcheons over the door; these were respectable hallmarks of nobility to which all self-made men might aspire.

It was Priuli again, acute and regretful, who caught this impulse and pinpointed the declining glory it seemed to imply. ‘The Venetians’, he wrote in 1505, ‘are much more inclined to the Terra Firma, which has become more attractive and pleasing, than to the sea, the ancient root cause of all their glory, wealth and honour.’

*

‘I do not think there is any city to which Venice, the city founded on the sea, can be compared,’ Pietro Casola had written in 1494. Outsiders attempting to grasp the meaning of the place at the end of the fifteenth century found it impossible to match to their known worlds. Everywhere they were confronted by paradox. Venice was sterile but visibly abundant; running with wealth but short of drinking water; immensely powerful yet physically fragile; free from feudalism but fiercely regulated. Its citizens were sober, unromantic and frequently cynical, yet they had conjured a city of fantasy. Gothic arches, Islamic domes and Byzantine mosaics transported the observer simultaneously to Bruges, Cairo and Constantinople. Venice seemed self-generated. The only Italian city not in existence in Roman times, its inhabitants had created their own antiquity out of theft and borrowings; they manufactured their foundation myths and stole their saints from the Greek world.

The ducat

 

It was, in a sense, the first virtual city: an offshore bonded warehouse with no visible means of support – almost shockingly modern. As Priuli had put it, the city rested on an abstract. It was an empire of cash. The ducat, a small golden roundel on which a succession of doges knelt before St Mark, was the dollar of its day. It commanded respect all the way to India, where they interpreted the blurred images as a Hindu god and his consort. The Republic’s fierce concentration on fiscal management was centuries ahead of its time. It was the only state in the world that had government policies solely geared to economic ends. There was no gap between its political and merchant class. It was a Republic run by and for entrepreneurs and it regulated accordingly. The three great centres of power – the doge’s palace, the Rialto and the arsenal, respectively the seats of government, trade and war – were managed by the same ruling group. Venice, before anyone else, understood the essential commercial rules: the principles of supply and demand; the need for consumer choice, a stable currency, on-time delivery, rational laws and taxes; the application of consistent, disciplined and long-term policies. It replaced the chivalrous medieval knight with a new type of hero: the man of business. All these qualities were expressed in the emblem of St Mark. Outsiders had no adequate explanation for the ascent of Venice. Instead they bought into the myth that the city sold: that this greatness was miraculously pre-ordained. Like any long boom, they thought it would last forever.

It was the maritime adventure that had made all this possible. In the process Venice changed the world. Not alone, but as a prime mover, it was an engine in the growth of global trade. With unmatched efficiency the Republic sharpened the sense of material desire and facilitated the long-range exchange of goods that satisfied it. It was the central cog that meshed two economic systems – Europe and the Orient – shunting goods across hemispheres, facilitating new tastes and notions of choice. Venice was the middleman and interpreter of worlds. ‘I have seen the world in a two-fold mirror,’ wrote Felix Fabri of his voyages. Venice was the first European power to interact seriously and continuously with Islam. It promoted the seepage of oriental tastes, ideas and influences – as well as a certain romantic orientalism – into the European world. Visual ideas, materials, foods, motifs and words passed through its maritime customs post.

This exchange had decisive effects. The merchants of the lagoon also hastened the decline of the economic power of the Islamic Middle East and the rise of the West. Over centuries many of the industries that had made the Levant so wealthy – the manufacture of soap, glass, silk and paper, the production of sugar – were either usurped by the Republic or undermined by its transport systems. Venetian merchants moved from buying Syrian glass to importing the key raw material – soda ash from the Syrian desert – until the superior glass of Murano was being reexported to Mamluk palaces. Soap and paper-making followed the same trend. Sugar production moved from Syria to Cyprus, where Venetian entrepreneurs employed more efficient production processes to supply western markets. The merchant galleys allowed energetic European industries harnessing new technologies, such as water power and automatic spinning wheels, to undercut Levantine competitors and nudge them into spiralling decline. Every shipload that sailed east from Venice gradually shifted the balance of power. Payment for oriental goods changed from silver bars to barter – on increasingly favourable terms for the westerners.

The function of the Stato da Mar was as much to funnel this trade across the sea as it was to provide wealth in its own right. It was Europe’s first full-blown colonial adventure. With exceptions – and the Dalmatians were certainly better treated than the Greeks – it was exploitative and indifferent. It provided something of a model to its successors, notably Holland and Britain, as to the ability of small maritime states to gain global reach. It served as a warning too of the vulnerabilities of far-flung possessions linked by sea power. The Venetian business model became suddenly obsolete and its supply lines vulnerable. Ultimately the Stato da Mar was as hard to defend as the American colonies were for Britain. The collapse of ocean-going empires could be as dramatic as their rise: by 1505 Priuli was already sketching an epitaph.