City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  Both sides were able to put out substantial fleets at great cost. None equalled the ostentatious but futile Genoese display of 1295, when they despatched 165 galleys and thirty-five thousand men. It would be three hundred years before the Mediterranean would see such a show of maritime force again, but the Venetians evaded it and the armada was forced to slink home. In 1298, when the two finally met off the island of Curzola in the Adriatic, 170 galleys were involved. It was the largest maritime battle the republics ever fought. This time the Genoese won a startling victory: only twelve of Venice’s ninety-five galleys survived; five thousand prisoners were captured. Andrea Dandolo, the Venetian admiral, shamed beyond indignity at the prospect of being led through Genoa in fetters, beat his brains out against the gunwales of a Genoese ship. Yet it was a hollow victory too. So many Genoese died at Curzola that when the victorious admiral, Lamba Doria, stepped ashore at Genoa, he was met by silence – no rejoicing crowds, no church bells. The people just mourned their dead. And it would be Venice that gained the posthumous glory. Among those Venetian prisoners unloaded at Genoa was a wealthy merchant who had got up a galley at his own expense. The Venetians mockingly called him Il Milione – the teller of a million tales. Ensconced in some comfort as a rich man, he struck up friendship with another prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances. As Il Milione started to talk, Rustichello spotted a business opportunity. He took up his pen and began writing. Marco Polo had time to talk himself back down the Mongol highway all the way to China. The gold, the spices, the silk and the customs of the furthest Orient, as well as the tall stories, were transmitted to a fascinated European audience.

  One year after Curzola both sides were led sullenly back to the negotiating table. The Peace of Milan in 1299 solved nothing. Its terms left the matter of the Black Sea unresolved. The search for food and raw materials from its shores, the access to the trade routes of central Asia, intensified the unofficial war. The Venetians worked hard to build their position; the Genoese to shoulder them out. Through diplomacy and patience, Venice slowly gained footholds. On the Crimean peninsula the two republics confronted each other across a distance of forty miles; the Venetians at Soldaia, the Genoese at the much more powerful commercial hub at Caffa. It was an unequal contest. The Genoese had absolute control of Caffa; it was a well-fortified city whose magnificent harbour, according to the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta, contained ‘about two hundred vessels in it, both ships of war and trading vessels, small and large, for it is one of the world’s most celebrated ports’. The Genoese worked to smother the Venetian upstart at Soldaia. In 1326 Soldaia was sacked by local Tatar lords beyond Mongol control and abandoned. On the southern shores, the republics competed more directly at Trebizond – the roadhead of the second path to the Orient, via the land route to Tabriz and the Persian Gulf. Here, as at Acre, they occupied adjacent barricaded colonies by permission of the Greek emperor of the tiny kingdom and could stoke up a healthy hatred.

  Venice worked to ratchet up the pressure on the northern shore. In 1332 its ambassador, Nicolo Giustinian, journeyed across the winter steppes to the Mongol court at Saray to request an audience with the khan of the Golden Horde. Approaches to the Mongol overlords were occasions of trepidation: Venetian state registers reported ruefully on the lack of volunteers. The khan was a Muslim – ‘the exalted Sultan Muhammad Uzbeg Khan’, Ibn Battuta titled him,

  exceedingly powerful, great in dignity, lofty in station, victor over the enemies of God … his territories are vast and his cities great … [he holds audience] in a pavilion, magnificently decorated, called the Golden Pavilion … constructed of wooden rods covered with plaques of gold, and in the centre of it is a wooden couch covered with plaques of silver gilt, its legs being pure silver and their bases encrusted with precious stones. The sultan sits on this throne.

  Bowing low before the khan, Giustinian presented his suit. He had come to beg the khan to allow the establishment of a trading colony and to grant commercial privileges at the settlement of Tana on the Sea of Azov – the small, shallow offshoot in the north-west corner of the Black Sea, shaped like its miniature replica.

  Tana and the Sea of Azov – a later print

  Here, where the River Don reaches the sea through a wide marshy delta, the Venetians hoped to regain an effective presence in the Russian and oriental trade. Tana was well situated at the heart of the western Mongol kingdom, ideally placed for journeys north to Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod, the river routes of the Don and the Volga, and at the very head of the great trans-Asian silk route: ‘The road you travel from Tana to Cathay is perfectly safe, whether by day or by night,’ the Florentine merchant Francesco Pegolotti assured the readers of his merchant’s handbook a few years later. The Mongols were not uninterested in trade with the west and the great khan granted the request. In 1333, the year of the monkey, he gave the Venetians a site on marshy ground beside the river with permission to build stone houses, a church, warehouses and a palisade.

  In many respects Tana was better placed than the powerful Genoese centre at Caffa, 250 miles to the west and located on the spur of the Crimean peninsula. Genoa maintained a colony at Tana too but it was subsidiary to its powerful hub, and it certainly had no wish to see Venice develop a foothold. The Venetians also had particular advantages in exploiting this new opportunity. The Sea of Azov was familiar terrain – an estuarine lake with a mean depth of eight metres, whose channels and hidden shoals made navigation difficult; the lagoon-dwelling Venetians with their shallow-draughted galleys managed to nose their way up to Tana with greater ease than the Genoese in their heavier ones. According to the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani, ‘the Genoese could not go to the trading post at Tana in their galleys as they did at Caffa, to where it was more expensive and difficult to get spices and other merchandise overland than to Tana’. From the start, Tana was a thorn in Genoese flesh – an intrusion into their zone of private monopoly. It became a cornerstone of Genoa’s policy to dislodge Venice from the northern shores of the Greater Sea: ‘there shall be no voyages to Tana’ was the mantra of their diplomacy. The Venetian response was equally robust. According to treaty, the Black Sea was common to all and they intended, as the doge roundly declared in 1350, ‘to maintain free access to the sea with utmost zeal and the employment of all their powers’. Out of this collision of interests would come two more bloody wars.

  At Tana a small core of resident Venetian merchants established themselves to manage the hinterland trade across the Russian steppe and the luxury exchanges with the distant East. Marco Polo, from the perspective of his vast, fifteen-year journey to the Pacific, could afford to treat the Black Sea with disdain as being almost on the doorstep of Venice. ‘We have not spoken to you of the Black Sea or the provinces that lie around it, although we ourselves have explored it thoroughly,’ he wrote. ‘It would be tedious to recount what is daily recounted by others. For there are so many others who explore these waters and sail upon them every day – Venetians, Genoese, Pisans – that everybody knows what is to be found there.’ Yet to the resident consul and his merchants it was the outermost rim of the Venetian world. It felt like an exile. Educated Venetians, watching ice freeze up the shallow alluvial sea for another winter, hunkering down in their ermine furs and squinting into the blizzards being swept on the thousand-mile winds, might have longed for the lights of Venice reflected in their domestic canals.

  A note of homesickness, frequent in merchant reports from beyond the Stato da Mar, haunts their letters. It was a three-month round trip for the great merchant fleets from the mother city that set out in spring, touched Tana for a mere few days and vanished again. They left the residents to the vastness of the steppes, watching the nomads moving from horizon to horizon in long processions beyond their settlement, as the merchant Giosafat Barbaro did:

  First, herds of horses by the [hundreds]. After them followed herds of camels and oxen, and after them herds of small beasts, which endured for the space of six days, that as far as we m
ight see with our eyes, the plain every way was full of people and beasts following on their way … and in the evening we were weary of looking.

  Chronic insecurity was the lot of all Venetian trading posts perched on foreign soil. The whims of the local potentates had to be continuously appeased by watchful diplomacy, lavish presents – and whatever physical barricades they were permitted to erect. None was more dependent on goodwill than Tana. Unlike the Genoese settlement at Caffa, which was a fortress ringed by double walls, Venetian Tana had no meaningful defence in the early years beyond a flimsy wooden stockade. It was dependent on the stability of the Golden Horde. The senate viewed Tana as being precariously positioned ‘at the limits of the world and in the jaws of our enemies’. The Venetians walked on eggshells. Cooped up for months close to the detested Genoese, their community was so small that Venice gave unusual permission to grant citizenship to other European merchants. Yet back in Venice, Tana was vividly imagined. It gave its name to the Tana, the rope factory in the state arsenal which used Black Sea hemp in its manufacture. It was Tana too that Petrarch was thinking about as he vicariously shivered from the safety of his writing desk, watching the ships depart for the mouth of the Don and speculating on the fierce commercial energy that impelled the Venetians to such outlandish parts.

  What drove them on were the possible returns, the ‘insatiable thirst for wealth’ that baffled the scholarly Petrarch so much. At Tana they acquired both the portable, lightweight, high-value luxury items of the furthest Orient and the bulk commodities and foodstuffs of the steppe hinterland: precious stones and silk from China and the Caspian Sea; furs and skins, sweet-smelling beeswax and honey from the glades of Russian forests; wood, salt and grain and dried or salted fish in infinite varieties from the Sea of Azov. In return they shipped back the manufactured goods of a developing industrial Europe: worked woollen cloth from Italy, France and Bruges; German weapons and iron utensils; Baltic amber and wine. On the opposite shore at Trebizond they accessed raw materials – copper and alum, as well as pearls from the Red Sea, ginger, pepper and cinnamon from the Indies. In all these transactions the trade imbalance was huge – Asia had more to sell than the infant industrial base of medieval Europe could offer in return. It had to be paid for with bars of ninety-eight per cent pure silver; large reserves of European bullion drained away into the heartlands of Asia.

  There was one other highly profitable item in which the Venetian merchants came to deal, although its business was always outstripped by the Genoese. Both Caffa and Tana were active centres of slave trading. The Mongols raided the interior for ‘Russians, Mingrelians, Caucasians, Circassians, Bulgarians, Armenians and divers other people of the Christian world’. The qualities of the ethnic groups were carefully distinguished – different peoples had different merits. If a Tatar was sold (expressly forbidden by the Mongols and the source of repeated trouble) ‘the price is a third more, since it may be taken as certain that no Tatar ever betrayed a master’; Marco Polo brought back a Tatar slave from his travels. Generally slaves were sold young – boys in their teens (to get the most work out of them), the girls a little older. Some were shipped to Venice as domestic and sexual servants, others to Crete in conditions of plantation slavery, where village names such as Sklaverohori and Roussohoria still record the legacy and origin of this commerce. Or they were sold on in an illicit trade, expressly forbidden by the pope, as military slaves to the Mamluk Islamic armies of Egypt. Candia, on Crete, formed one hub of this secret business, where the final destinations of the ‘merchandise’ were usually suppressed. Most of these Black Sea slaves were nominally Christian.

  Pero Tafur recorded the practice at the slave markets in the fifteenth century:

  The selling takes place as follows. The seller makes the slaves strip to the skin, males as well as females, and they put on them a cloak of felt, and the price is named. Afterwards they throw off their coverings, and make them walk up and down to show whether they have any bodily defect. The seller has to oblige himself, that if a slave dies of the pestilence within sixty days, he will return the price paid.

  Sometimes parents came selling their own children, a practice which affronted Tafur, though it did not prevent him acquiring ‘two female slaves and a male, whom I still have in Cordoba with their children’. Though slaves usually only made up a small portion of a Black Sea cargo, there were cases when whole shipments of human merchandise would be entrusted to the holds in a manner similar to that of the later Atlantic slave trade.

  To the Republic, Tana mattered hugely. ‘From Tana and the Greater Sea,’ a Venetian source wrote, ‘our merchants have gained the greatest value and profit because they were the source of all kinds of goods.’ For a time merchants there could monopolise almost the entire China trade. The Tana convoys were intricately interlocked with the rhythm of the returning galleys from London and Flanders four thousand miles away, so that they could carry Baltic amber and Flemish cloth to the Black Sea and return with rare oriental goods for Venice’s winter fairs. Exotic produce from the Orient added weight to Venice’s reputation as the market of the world, the one place where you might find anything. For at least a hundred years foreign merchants – particularly Germans – had been coming to Venice in large numbers, bringing metals – silver, copper – and worked cloth to buy these oriental goods.

  From the fruits of the long boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice was transforming itself. By 1300 all the separate islets had been joined by bridges to form a recognisable city, which was densely inhabited. The streets and squares of beaten earth were progressively paved over; stone was replacing wood for building houses. A cobbled way linked the centres of Venetian power – the Rialto and St Mark’s Square. An increasingly wealthy noble class constructed for themselves astonishing palazzos along the Grand Canal in the Gothic style, tempered with elements of Islamic decoration to which the travelling merchants had been exposed in Alexandria and Beirut. New churches were built and the skyline punctuated with their brick campaniles. In 1325 the state arsenal was enlarged to meet the increased requirements for maritime trade and defence. Fifteen years later work was begun redeveloping the doge’s palace into the masterpiece of Venetian Gothic, a delicate traceried structure of astonishing lightness and beauty that seemed to express the effortless serenity, grace, good judgement and stability of the Venetian state. The facade of the basilica of St Mark was gradually transformed from plain Byzantine brick into a rich fantasy of marble and mosaic, incorporating the plunder of Constantinople and the East, and topped with domes and oriental embellishment that took the viewer halfway to Cairo and Baghdad. Some time around 1260 the horses of the Constantinople hippodrome were winched into place on its loggia as a statement of the city’s new-found self-confidence. Out of maritime trade, Venice was starting to dazzle and bewitch.

  Venetian gothic: the doge’s palace and the waterfront

  Meanwhile in the Black Sea the Venetians at Tana began to steal a march on Genoese Caffa. The state registers bear running testament to the close attention paid to their trading post. After permission for a settlement was granted in 1333, a consul was immediately despatched who ‘is allowed to trade’ – an unusual concession – ‘and must keep in his service a lawyer, four servants and four horses’. In 1340 he was instructed to seek another abode because of the closeness to the Genoese and the frequent fights; ambassadors were sent back to Uzbeg Khan for the purpose. The consul was later barred from trading but his salary rose in recompense. The behaviour of the Venetian merchants was often a cause for concern. In the summer of 1343 it was noted that ‘a lot of merchants are fraudulently avoiding the [tax] imposed by the khan. This is not without risk to the colony. The consul will henceforth insist that all merchants swear that they have actually paid.’ Gifts of carefully stipulated amounts were to be presented to the khan. A later curt directive to the consul states that ‘the Venetians must stop taxing the merchandise of foreign merchants: this could displease the Tatar government and
end up damaging Venetian interests’. The thin margin between tolerance and xenophobia worried the authorities back in the lagoon.

  Despite the careful prescriptions of the Venetian senate the fragile balancing act at Tana collapsed. In 1341 Uzbeg died. His thirty-year reign had been the longest and most stable Mongol administration. Venice was quick to analyse the dangers: ‘The death of Uzbeg exposes the trading post at Tana to difficult days; the consul will choose twelve Venetian merchants to consider the new circumstances and make obeisance to the new [khan].’ This model diplomacy was almost immediately undone – as so often in Venetian trading posts – by the ill-discipline of an individual merchant. It came against the usual brawling rivalry between Venetian and Genoese residents in confined places – men were killed in these contests – which irked the local Tatar governor, unable to tell the two groups of citizens apart. There were other matters too: the tax evasion, the failure to give adequate presents, the accustomed arrogance of the unruly foreigners. Venetian self-confidence was particularly high in September 1343 when armed galleys put in at the mouth of the Don. A personal altercation led to an eruption of violence. An important local Tatar, Haji Omar, apparently struck a Venetian, Andriolo Civrano, in a dispute. Civrano’s response was premeditated: he ambushed Haji Omar at night and killed him along with several members of his family. Aghast, the Venetian community braced itself and tried to return the body and pay blood money. First they called on the Genoese to take a united stance in confronting the crisis. The Genoese did no such thing. They attacked and plundered Tatar property themselves and sailed away, leaving the Venetians to face the consequences. In the ensuing violence, sixty Venetians were killed. The new khan, Zanibeck, descended on Tana and sacked it, destroyed all their goods and took some of the merchants hostage. The survivors fled to Genoese Caffa in their ships where they begged for safe haven. All contact with the Asiatic world was now concentrated on this Genoese fort.