City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  ROGER CROWLEY

  CITY OF FORTUNE

  How Venice Won and Lost

  a Naval Empire

  For Una

  ‘The people of Venice neither have any foothold on the mainland nor can they cultivate the earth. They are compelled to import everything they need by sea. It’s through trade that they have accumulated such great wealth.’

  LAONICUS CHALCONDYLES, fifteenth-century Byzantine historian

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Place Names in this Book

  PROLOGUE: Departure

  PART I Opportunity: Merchant Crusaders

  1 Lords of Dalmatia

  2 T he Blind Doge

  3 T hirty-four Thousand Marks

  4 ‘A Dog Returning to its Vomit’

  5 At the Walls

  6 Four Emperors

  7 ‘The Works of Hell’

  PART II Ascent: Princes of the Sea

  8 A Quarter and Half a Quarter

  9 Demand and Supply

  10 ‘In the Jaws of our Enemies’

  11 The Flag of St Titus

  12 Bridling St Mark

  13 Fight to the Finish

  14 Stato da Mar

  15 ‘Like Water in a Fountain’

  16 City of Neptune

  PART III Eclipse: The Rising Moon

  17 The Glass Ball

  18 The Shield of Christendom

  19 ‘If Negroponte Is Lost’

  20 Pyramid of Fire

  21 Hands on the Throat of Venice

  Epilogue: Return

  Sources and Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  1 The Basin of St Mark

  2 The capture of Constantinople in 1204, by Jacopo Tintoretto

  3 Detail from ‘The Meeting of Etherius and Ursula and the Departure of the Pilgrims’, St. Ursula Cycle, 1498, by Vittore Carpaccio

  4 Detail from ‘The Ambassadors Return to the English Court’, St Ursula Cycle, c.1490–95, by Vittore Carpaccio

  5 La Riva degli Schiavoni, the Senza and the departure of the doge in the Bucintoro, by Leandro Bassano (da Ponte)

  6 Marco Polo setting out from Venice with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan, from a fifteenth-century manuscript.

  7 The gateway of the Arsenal

  8 Carpenters building ships in the Venetian arsenal

  9 Rovigno (Rovinj) on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia

  10 The Venetian fortress of Modon (Methoni), southern Greece

  11 The Venetian harbour fortress at Candia (Heraklion), Crete

  12 The lion of St Mark, Famagusta, Cyprus

  13 The reception of the Venetian ambassador in Damascus, from the School of Gentile Bellini

  14 Woodcut of the battle of Zonchio, 1499

  Illustrations in the plate section are reproduced by kind permission of the following: Roger Crowley (1, 7 and 12), Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library (2), Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library (3), akg-Cameraphoto (4), The Art Archive/Academia BB AA S Fernando Madrid/Collection Dagli Orti (5), IAM/akg/World History (6), The Art Archive/Private Collection/Gianni Dagli Orti (8), Igor Karasi/Shutterstock Images (9), Andreas G. Karelias/Shutterstock Images (10), John Copland/Shutterstock Images (11), akg-Erich Lessing (13), The Trustees of the British Museum (14)

  Maps

  Venice

  Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean 1000–1500

  Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade 1203–1204

  The Venetian Lagoon

  The War of Chioggia June 1378–December 1379

  The Siege of Chioggia December 1379–June 1380

  Place Names in this Book

  I have used a number of place names employed by the Venetians and others during the period covered by this book. This is a list of their modern equivalents:

  Acre Akko (Israel)

  Adrianople E dirne (Turkey)

  Brazza The island of Braç (Croatia)

  Butrinto Butrint (Albania)

  Caffa Feodosiya on the Crimean peninsula (Ukraine)

  Candia Heraklion (Crete). The Venetians also used Candia to refer to the whole island of Crete.

  Canea Chania or Hania (Crete)

  Cattaro Kotor (Montenegro)

  Cerigo The island of Kythira (Greece)

  Cerigotto The island of Antikythira (Greece)

  Coron Koroni (Greece)

  Curzola The island of Korčula (Croatia)

  Durazzo Durrës (Albania)

  Jaffa Now part of Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv-Yafo (Israel)

  Lagosta The island of Lastovo (Croatia)

  Lajazzo Yumurtalık near Adana (Turkey)

  Lepanto Nafpaktos (Greece)

  Lesina The island of Hvar (Croatia)

  Modon Methoni (Greece)

  Naplion Naflio or Navplion (Greece)

  Narenta River Neretva River (Croatia)

  Negroponte The Venetians used this name for both the whole island of Euboea, off the east coast of Greece, and its main town Halkida (or Chalkis)

  Nicopolis Nikopol (Bulgaria)

  Ossero Osor on the island of Cres (Croatia)

  Parenzo Pore (Croatia)

  Pola Pula (Croatia)

  Porto Longo Harbour on the island of Sapienza (Greece)

  Ragusa Dubrovnik (Croatia)

  Retimo Rethimno (Crete)

  Rovigno Rovinj (Croatia)

  Salonica Thessaloniki (Greece)

  Santa Maura The island of Lefkadtha or Lefkas (Greece)

  Saray The now vanished capital of the Golden Horde, on the river Volga, probably at Selitrennoye near Astrakhan (Russia)

  Scutari Shkodër (Albania)

  Sebenico Šibenik (Croatia)

  Sidon Saïda (Lebanon)

  Smyrna Izmir (Turkey)

  Soldaia Sudak on the Crimean Peninsula (Ukraine)

  Spalato Split (Croatia)

  Tana Azov on the sea of Azov (Ukraine)

  Tenedos The island of Bozcaada at the mouth of the

  Dardanelles (Turkey)

  Trau Trogir (Croatia)

  Trebizond Trabzon (Turkey)

  Tripoli Trablous (Lebanon)

  Tyre Sour (Lebanon)

  Zante The island of Zakynthos (Greece)

  Zara Zadar (Croatia)

  Zonchio Later Navarino, the bay of Pylos (Greece)

  Prologue

  DEPARTURE

  Late in the evening of 9 April 1363, the poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch was writing to a friend. The Venetian Republic had granted the great literary figure of the age an imposing house on the waterfront overlooking the Basin of St Mark, from where he could survey all the rich hubbub of the city’s port. Petrarch was drowsing over his letter when he was jolted rudely awake.

  It was completely dark. The sky was stormy. I was tired … when suddenly the shouting of sailors struck my ears. Remembering the meaning of this from previous occasions, I hurriedly got up and climbed to the top of this house, which surveys the harbour. I looked out. Good God, what a sight! At once touching, marvellous, frightening and exhilarating! Here in the harbour there were some sailing ships which had moored at the marble quayside over the winter, as massive as this great house which the most generous of cities has put at my disposal. Their masts rise as high as its square corner towers. At this very moment, while the stars are muffled by thick cloud, while my walls are shaken by blasts of wind, while the sea roars and bellows horribly, the largest of them casts
off on its voyage …

  If you’d seen this vessel, you would have said it was not a boat but a mountain swimming on the surface of the sea, and so heavily laden with a huge quantity of cargo that the great part of its bulk was hidden beneath the waves. It is setting out for the River Don, for this is as far as our ships can sail on the Black Sea, but many of those on board will disembark and journey on, not stopping until they have crossed the Ganges and the Caucasus to India, then on to farthest China and the eastern Ocean. What is the source of this insatiable thirst for wealth that seizes men’s minds? I confess, I was gripped by compassion for these unfortunate men. I understand now why the poets rightly call the sailor’s life wretched.

  Petrarch the landlubber was awed by the outsized ambition of this enterprise; the humanist poet was disturbed by the fierce materialism that propelled it. For the Venetians themselves such departures were the stuff of daily life. In a city where every man could row, the experience of embarkation – the drift from land to sea – was almost as unconscious as crossing the threshold of your house: a ferry across the Grand Canal, a gondola to Murano or Torcello, a night’s crabbing in the eerie reaches of the lagoon, the heady departure of an armed war fleet to the blare of trumpets, the seasonal sailings of the great merchant galleys on the regular run to Alexandria or Beirut – these were deep, cyclical experiences of a whole people. Embarkation was a central metaphor of the city’s life, endlessly repeated in art. In St Mark’s, a mosaic boat departs with swelling sails to carry the saint’s body to Venice; Carpaccio’s St Ursula treads a realistic gangplank into a rowing boat while the high-sided merchant ships wait off shore; Canaletto catches Venice setting sail in holiday mood.

  Leave-taking was accompanied by elaborate rituals. All seafarers would commit their souls to the Virgin and St Mark. St Nicholas was also a firm favourite and stops would be made at his church on the Lido for a last prayer. Significant enterprises would be prefaced by services, and ships were routinely blessed. Crowds gathered on the waterfront, then the ropes were cast off. For Felix Fabri, a pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land in the fifteenth century, it happened ‘just before dinner time; all the pilgrims aboard, and the wind fair, the three sails were spread to the sound of trumpets and horns and we sailed out to the open sea’. Once through the barrier of the sheltering sand bars of the lagoon islands, the lidi, ships passed into the open sea and another world.

  Departure. Risk. Profit. Glory. These were the compass points of Venetian life. Voyaging was a repeated experience. For nearly a thousand years they knew no other. The sea was at once their protection, their opportunity and their fate; secure in their shallow lagoon with its deceptive channels and treacherous mud flats that no invader could penetrate, shielded if not insulated from the surge of the Adriatic, they wrapped the sea around them like a cloak. They changed its gender from the masculine, mare, to the feminine mar in the Venetian dialect and every year on Ascension Day they married it. This was an act of appropriation – the bride and all her dowry became property of the husband – but it was also one of propitiation. The sea was danger and uncertainty. It could and did smash ships, hasten enemies and periodically threaten to overwhelm the defences of their low-lying city. The voyage could be terminated by an arrow shot or a rising sea or disease; death came in a shroud weighted with stones and dropped into the lower depths. The maritime relationship would be long, intense and ambivalent; not until the fifteenth century did the Venetians seriously question whether the marriage should be with land rather than water and during this time they moved up the gradient from eel trappers, saltpanners and bargemen on the slow inland rivers of north Italy, to merchant princes and coiners of gold. The sea brought the fragile city, existing like a mirage on its tenuous oak pilings, riches beyond measure and a maritime empire as splendid as any. In the process Venice shaped the world.

  This book is the story of the rise of that empire, the Stato da Mar they called it in dialect, and the commercial wealth it created. The crusades provided the Republic with its chance to ascend the world stage. The Venetians took the opportunity with both hands and profited hugely. Over five hundred years they became masters of the eastern Mediterranean and nicknamed their city La Dominante; when the sea turned against them, they mounted an exhaustive rearguard action and fought to the last breath. The empire that they constructed was already well advanced by the time Petrarch looked from his window. It was a curious, cobbled-together affair, a collection of islands, ports and strategic bastions, designed solely to harbour its ships and channel goods back to the mother city. Its construction was a story of courage and duplicity, luck, persistence, opportunism and periodic catastrophe.

  Above all it is a saga about trade. Alone in all the world, Venice was organised to buy and sell. The Venetians were merchants to their fingertips; they calculated risk, return and profit with scientific precision. The red-and-gold lion banner of St Mark fluttered from mastheads like a corporate logo. Trade was their creation myth and their justification, for which they were frequently reviled by more terrestrial neighbours. There exists no more explicit description of the city’s raison d’être and its anxieties than the appeal it made to the pope in 1343 for permission to trade with the Muslim world:

  Since by the Grace of God our city has grown and increased by the labours of merchants creating traffic and profits for us in diverse parts of the world by land and sea and this is our life and that of our sons, because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade, therefore we must be vigilant in all our thoughts and endeavours, as our predecessors were, to make provision in every way lest so much wealth and treasure should disappear.

  Its gloomy conclusion echoes a manic-depressive streak in the Venetian soul. The city’s prosperity rested on nothing tangible – no land holdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.

  There is a moment when the departing vessels shrink to vanishing point, and the watchers on the quay turn back to normal life. Sailors resume their tasks; stevedores heft bales and roll barrels; gondoliers paddle on; priests hurry to the next service; black-robed senators return to the weighty cares of state; the cutpurse makes off with his takings. And the ships surge out into the Adriatic.

  Petrarch watched until he could see no more. ‘When my eyes could no longer follow the ships through the darkness, I picked up my pen again, shaken and deeply moved.’

  It had been arrival however, rather than departure, which launched the Stato da Mar. A hundred and sixty years earlier, in Lent 1201, six French knights were rowed across the lagoon to Venice. They had come about a crusade.

  PART I

  OPPORTUNITY: MERCHANT CRUSADERS

  1000–1204

  Lords of Dalmatia

  1000–1198

  The Adriatic Sea is the liquid reflection of Italy, a tapering channel some 480 miles long and a hundred wide, pinched tighter at its southern point where it flows into the Ionian past the island of Corfu. At its most northern point, in the enormous curved bay called the Gulf of Venice, the water is a curious blue-green. Here the River Po churns out tons of alluvial material from the distant Alps, which settle to form haunting stretches of lagoon and marsh. So great is the volume of these glacial deposits that the Po Delta is advancing fifteen feet a year and the ancient port of Adria, after which the sea is named, now lies fourteen miles inland.

  Geology has made its two coasts quite distinct. The western, Italian shore is a curved, low-lying beach, which provides poor harbours but ideal landing spots for would-be invaders. Sail due east and your vessel will snub against limestone. The shores of Dalmatia and Albania are a four-hundred-mile stretch as the crow flies, but so deeply crenellated with
sheltering coves, indents, offshore islands, reefs and shoals that they comprise two thousand miles of intricate coast. Here are the sea’s natural anchorages, which may shelter a whole fleet or conceal an ambush. Behind, sometimes stepped back by coastal plain, sometimes hard down on the sea, stand the abrupt white limestone mountains that barricade the sea from the upland Balkans. The Adriatic is the frontier between two worlds.

  For thousands of years – from the early Bronze Age until well after the Portuguese rounded Africa – this fault line was a marine highway linking central Europe with the eastern Mediterranean, and a portal for world trade. Ships passed up and down the sheltering Dalmatian shore with the goods of Arabia, Germany, Italy, the Black Sea, India and the furthest East. Over the centuries they carried Baltic amber to the burial chamber of Tutankhamun; blue faience beads from Mycenae to Stonehenge; Cornish tin to the smelters of the Levant; the spices of Malacca to the courts of France; Cotswold wool to the merchants of Cairo. Timber, slaves, cotton, copper, weapons, seeds, stories, inventions and ideas sailed up and down these coasts. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote a thirteenth-century Arab traveller about the cities of the Rhine, ‘that although this place is in the far west, there are spices there which are to be found only in the Far East – pepper, ginger, cloves, spikenard, costus and galanga, all in enormous quantities.’ They came up the Adriatic. This was the point where hundreds of arterial routes converged. From Britain and the North Sea, down the River Rhine, along beaten tracks through the Teutonic forests, across Alpine passes, mule trains threaded their way to the top of the gulf, where the merchandise of the East also landed. Here goods were transshipped and ports flourished. First Greek Adria, then Roman Aquileia, finally Venice. In the Adriatic site is everything: Adria silted up; Aquileia, on the coastal plain, was flattened by Attila the Hun in 452; Venice prospered in the aftermath because it was unreachable. Its smattering of low-lying muddy islets set in a malarial lagoon was separated from the mainland by a few precious miles of shallow water. This unpromising place would become the entrepôt and interpreter of worlds, the Adriatic its passport.