Further south, the barren islands of the Cyclades, offered to Venetian privateers after 1204, had become an increasing problem. The Republic had repeated difficulties with their overlords, by turns treacherous, tyrannical, even mad. Turkish, Genoese and Catalan pirates also plundered the islands, abducted their populations and rendered the sea lanes unsafe. As early as 1326, a chronicler wrote that ‘the Turks specially infest these islands … and if help is not forthcoming they will be lost’. The Florentine priest Buondelmonti spent four years in the Aegean in the early 1400s and travelled ‘in fear and great anxiety’. He found the islands wretched beyond belief. Naxos and Siphnos lacked any sizeable male population; Seriphos, he declared, offered ‘nothing but calamity’, where the people ‘lived like brutes’. On Ios the whole population retreated into the castle each night for fear of raiders. The people of Tinos tried to abandon their island altogether. The Aegean looked to the Republic for protection, ‘seeing that no lordship under heaven is so just and good as that of Venice’. The Republic started to reabsorb these islands, but as ever its approach was fiercely pragmatic.
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The empire that Venice acquired in this second wave of colonial expansion was held together by muscular sea power. To its triangle of priceless keystones – Modon–Coron, Crete and Negroponte – was now added Corfu. But beyond, the Stato da Mar was a shifting, supple matrix of interchanging locations, flexible as a steel net. The Venetians lived permanently with impermanence and many of their possessions came and went, like the moods of the sea. At one time or another they occupied a hundred sites in continental Greece; most of the Aegean islands passed through their hands. Some slipped from their grasp only to be regathered. Others were quite ephemeral. They held the rock of Monemvasia, shaped like a miniature Gibraltar, on and off for over a century and they were in and out of Athens. They had a foothold there in the 1390s, when they watched Spanish adventurers stripping the silver plates from the Parthenon doors, then ruled it themselves for six years. Fifty years later they were offered it again, but by then it was too late.
Nowhere exemplified reversals of colonial fortune as sharply as Tana, on the northern shores of the Black Sea. After Venice was ousted by the Mongols in 1348, a merchant settlement was restored in 1350 and maintained for half a century. But Tana was so far away that news was slow to reach the centre. The galley fleets made their annual visit then vanished again over the sea’s rim. Silence gripped the outpost for long months. When Andrea Giustinian was sent to Tana in 1396, he was staggered to discover nothing there – no people, no standing buildings – just the charred remains of habitations and the eerie crying of birds over the River Don. The whole settlement had gone down in fire and blood before an assault by Tamburlaine, the Mongol warlord, the previous year. In 1397 Giustinian appealed to the local Tatar lords for permission to build a new, fortified settlement. Venice simply started again. Tana was that important.
But in the centre of the eastern Mediterranean, Venice ran an imperial system of incomparable efficiency. Throughout the region, wherever the flag of St Mark was flown, the propaganda symbols of Venetian power – economic, military and cultural – were visible: in the image of the lion, carved into harbour walls and above the dark gateways of forts and blockhouses, growling at would-be enemies, offering peace to friends; in the bright roundels of its gold ducats, on which the doge kneels before the saint himself, whose purity and credibility undermined all its rivals; in the regular sweep of its war fleets and the spectacle of its merchant convoys; in the sight of its black-clad merchants pricing commodities in the Venetian dialect; in its ceremonies and the celebration of feast days; in its imperial architecture. The Venetians were omnipresent.
The city exported itself across the sea. Candia was styled alias civitas Venetiarum apud Levantem, ‘another city of the Venetians in the Levant’ – a second Venice – and it replicated its buildings and its emblems of power. There was the Piazza San Marco, faced by the Church of St Mark, a clock tower flying the saint’s flag, which like the bells of the campanile in Venice signalled the start and end of the working day, and the ducal palace and the loggia for conducting business and the buying and selling of goods. Two columns stood beside the palace for the execution of criminals, echoing those on the Venetian waterfront, reminding citizens and subjects alike that the writ of exemplary Venetian justice ran in the world. Here the Venetian state was reproduced in miniature: the chamber for weighing wholesale commodities using Venetian weights and measures, the offices dealing with criminal and commercial law, the antechambers and sub-departments of the Cretan administration, similar to those of the doge’s palace. Through half-closed eyes a travelling merchant could believe himself transported to some reflection of Venice, remade in the brilliant air of the Levant, like an image by Carpaccio repainting Venice on the shores of Egypt, or an English church in the Raj. Outsiders remarked on this trick of the light. ‘If a man be in any territory of theirs,’ wrote the Spanish traveller Tafur, ‘although at the ends of the earth, it seems as if he were in Venice itself.’ When he stopped at Curzola, on the Dalmatian coast, he found that even the local inhabitants had fallen under the Venetian sway: ‘The men dress in public like the Venetians and almost all of them know the Italian language.’ Constantinople, Beirut, Acre, Tyre and Negroponte all had a church of St Mark at one time or another.
Imperial monuments: the clock tower at Retimo
Such features made the travelling merchant or the colonial administrator feel that he occupied his own world; they fended off homesickness and projected Venetian power to their subjects, be they speakers of Greek, Albanian or Serbo-Croat. This was reinforced by the ritual elements of Venetian ceremonial. The formally orchestrated ceremonies so carefully detailed in fifteenth-century paintings were exported to the colonies. The arrival of a new duke of Crete, stepping from his galley to an announcement of trumpets under a red silk umbrella, met at the sea gate by his predecessor and walked in solemn procession up the main street to the cathedral and the anointment with holy water and incense – these were highly scripted demonstrations of Venetian glory. The stately processions, the banners of St Mark and the patron saints, the oaths of loyalty, submission and service to the Republic by subject peoples, the singing of the Lauds service in praise of the duke on the great feast days of the Christian year – these rituals fused secular and religious power in displays of splendour and awe. The pilgrim Canon Pietro Casola witnessed such ceremonial at a handover of the Cretan administration in 1494, which was ‘so magnificent that I seemed to be in Venice on a great festival’.
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Colonial administration was organised in hierarchical tiers with regulated salary structures, privileges, obligations – and a litany of carefully differentiated titles. At its crest – the most powerful post in the system – was the duke of Crete; matching him for salary (a thousand ducats a year), to reflect the strategic importance of the place, was the bailo of Constantinople. Corfu and Negroponte were also governed by a bailo, Modon and Coron by two castellani, Argos and Naplion by a podesta. The islands of Tinos and Mykonos and the other towns of Crete were overseen by rectors; settlements on foreign soil – Tana or Salonica – were the province of consuls. These nabobs of the imperial system were elected, involuntarily, from the nobility of Venice, mandated to their posts and punished for refusal to serve. Beneath these titled people there fell away descending ranks of state servants: counsellors and treasurers, admirals of the colonial arsenals, notaries, scribes and judges, all of them sworn to act for the honour and profit of Venice, each of them apportioned certain rights, responsibilities and restrictions.
For all the pomp and gravitas invested in these state officers their freedom of manoeuvre was carefully circumscribed. Everyone felt the gravitational pull of Venice; even a consul in Tana three months’ sailing time away was subject to weighty regulation. The Republic was a centrist empire; everything was ruled, dictated, regulated from the lagoon and precisioned in an endless stream of edicts. An expec
tation of patriotism was hard-wired into the Venetian psyche; all its colonists came from the same few square miles of the lagoon; all were expected to act with unflinching patriotism for the Signoria. The Republic was obsessed with the racial purity of its citizens. Fear of going native, particularly after the Cretan revolt of 1363, haunted their edicts. Citizenship was rarely granted to foreigners and the frontiers of race were strictly patrolled. Intermarriage and defection to the Greek Orthodox Church were heavily frowned upon, and in the case of Crete actively penalised. High-ranking colonial officials were rotated on a two-year cycle to limit their potential for local contamination, and the centre worked hard to maintain cultural distinctions. At Modon, the Venetians were forbidden to grow beards; their citizens were to remain clean-shaven, distinguishable from the hirsute Greeks.
The conditions under which they served were closely defined. Governors were strictly instructed, under the terms of their commission, on the number of administrators in their retinue, the number of servants and horses that they must maintain for their prestige and use (the state was particular about the horses, neither fewer nor more), their pecuniary allowances and the limitations of their power. They were forbidden to engage in any commercial activity, or to take with them any relatives, and were bound by stern oaths. The Republic was wary of individual aggrandisement – an aversion to personal ambition was deeply ingrained in this most impersonal of states – and intolerant of corruption. Giovanni Bon, sent to Candia to manage its finances in 1396, not only swore the usual oath to act for the honour of Venice, he was bound to rent out the goods of the state at the highest price, to account in minute detail to the duke and his counsellors on an annual basis on everything that he dealt with and noticed during the previous year, to accept no services or gifts; both he and his employees were forbidden all commercial transactions or to offer any banquets to anyone, be they Greek or Latin, either in Candia or within a radius of three Venetian miles.
In a system where the doge himself was expressly barred from accepting gifts of any value from a foreign agency, such injunctions were standard. Its principles were continuous oversight and collective responsibility. No officer was to act alone. It required three keys, each held by a different treasurer, to open the Candia counting house. The duke of Crete required the written agreement of three counsellors to ratify a decision. Everything was built on documentary evidence. The secretarial corps toiling in the bowels of the doge’s palace, recording and despatching senatorial decrees to the Stato da Mar, was replicated at the local level. Every Venetian colony had its own notaries, scribes and document store. All decisions, transactions, commercial agreements, wills, decrees and judgements were set down in literally millions of entries, like an infinite merchant’s ledger, which formed the historic memory of the state. Everyone was accountable. Everything was written down. By the time of the death of the Venetian state, its archives ran to forty-five miles of shelving.
The records bear witness to the exhaustive central management of the imperial system – an endless struggle against corruption, nepotism, bribery and occasional acts of state treason. ‘The honour of the Commune demands that all its rectors be excellent’ was its mantra. The frequency with which commissions were accompanied by the injunction not to engage in trade suggests that breaches were many and various – and pursued with dogged persistence. Colonial officials at all levels had plentiful opportunity to feel the severe, impartial scrutiny of Venetian audit. Justice was patient, implacable and inexorable. No one was free from investigation. It fell on a duke with the same impersonal force as on a blacksmith. Its methods were exhaustive. At regular intervals, the syndics or provveditori – state inquisitors – made inspections. The sight of these black-robed functionaries stepping down the gangplank at Negroponte or Candia to ask questions and run the rule over the ledgers might strike anxiety in the most puffed-up colonial dignitary. Their powers were almost limitless. In the remit of May 1369 the provveditori are reminded that as well as auditing lower-level officials
A provveditore: auditor of the Stato da Mar
… their mission in the Levant has an equal bearing on the misdeeds of the governors themselves which might damage the state’s interests; the governors cannot refuse to respond about misdeeds with which they are charged, under any pretext, even if invoking the terms of their commissions. The provveditori are authorised to turn up wherever they think useful; their freedom of movement is limitless. Nevertheless [a typical Venetian caveat] they must endeavour to limit their travel costs. If an official happens to have committed an act of such seriousness that the provveditori suspect that he will not agree to go willingly to Venice to meet the charge, it will be necessary, after discussions with the local governor, to seize the guilty official and forcibly send him.
Accounts would be scrutinised, complaints heard, correspondence confiscated and dissected. The provveditori had a year on return to present their findings, to call further witnesses and impeach the guilty. And in a further dizzying level of audit, the inquisitors themselves, despatched usually in groups of three, were forbidden to trade, receive presents, even to lodge separately. The Stato da Mar ran on suspicion.
It was a month to Crete, six weeks to Negroponte, three months to Tana, but anyone could feel the long arm of the Venetian state. At times its reach could be very long indeed. In the spring of 1447, the senate received clandestine word that the duke of Crete himself, Andrea Donato, was consorting treacherously with the Milanese condottiere, Francesco Sforza, and taking bribes. The orders to detain him were brief and ruthless:
To Benedetto da Legge, galley captain, charged with arresting the duke: 1. He will go with all possible speed to Candia – all stops are forbidden. 2. At Candia he will anchor in the bay without landing. He will not allow anyone to disembark or come aboard. 3. He will send a trusted person to Andrea Donato, requesting him to come aboard to confer. 4. The pretext for the conversation will be to get information on the Levant situation, because the captain will pretend that he is going to Turkey to the sultan. 5. When Donato is on board, Benedetto will retain him, affirming that it is essential for him to come to Venice, without giving his reasons. 6. Before leaving Candia he will send the letter with which he is entrusted to the captain and counsellors of Crete. 7. In case Donato refuses to come aboard, or can’t, Captain Legge will send another letter, with which he is furnished, to the captain and counsellors, so that the duke will certainly come. 8. Once Donato is on board, the galley will depart for Venice at once, where … [the captain] will conduct him to the torture chamber. 9. During the whole voyage it is forbidden to speak to the prisoner; in the case that it is essential to put ashore, Donato must not land under any pretext whatsoever.
The accompanying sealed orders to the counsellors read: ‘In the case that Andrea Donato refuses to go on board the galley, the captain and counsellors must use physical force; they will put the duke under arrest and conduct him aboard so that he can be taken to Venice without delay.’ Da Legge made the journey in record time, plucked the duke off the island and hurried him back to Venice for torture. The round trip took a record forty-five days. The message was clear.
The Venetian state waged continuous war against the malfeasance of its officials; the registers ring with thunderous rebukes, inquiries, fines, impeachments and requests to torture. ‘It is forbidden …’ begin numerous entries, and the lists that follow are long and repetitive – to employ family members, sell public property, trade, and so forth. ‘Too many baili, governors and consuls obtain favours, allowances and various exemptions. This is intolerable and these practices are formally forbidden.’ A duke of Crete is arraigned for a grain scam; a chancellor of Modon–Coron is guilty of extortion; an official is fined for failing to take up a post; another is ordered back to account for a missing sum; the castellan of Modon, Francesco da Priuli, is arrested and snatched from his post – the vote to torture him is carried by thirteen to five, with five abstentions. Conversely, loyalty to the Republic was recognised an
d rewarded.
Venice applied its adamantine system to all the other subjects of the Stato da Mar. The governors were enjoined to deliver justice to all – to its Venetian colonists and subjects alike. The local populace, the Jews and other resident foreigners were subject to the same governance. By the standards of the times, the Republic possessed a strong sense of fairness which it wielded with considerable objectivity.
The Venetians were lawyers to their fingertips who operated the system with a fierce logic. In cases of murder there were fine gradations. Homicide was distinguished between simple (manslaughter) and deliberate, and divided into eight sub-categories, from self-defence and accidental, through deliberate, ambush, betrayal and assassination; judges were required to establish the motives as scrupulously as possible. (Actions of the secret state were of course exempt from such strictures: the registers for July 1415 record an offer to assassinate the king of Hungary. The assassin, ‘who wishes to remain anonymous, will also kill Brunezzo della Scala if he is found in the king’s company. The offer is accepted’.) The Republic could and did resort to hideous punishments; they used torture readily to procure the truth – or at least a confession – and they measured their judgements relative to state interests. In January 1368, one Gestus de Boemia was brought before the ducal court at Candia for theft of treasury money. His punishment was intended to be exemplary: amputation of his right hand, public confession of his crime, then hanging outside the treasury which he had raided. The following year, the Cretan Emanuel Theologite also lost a hand and both his eyes for letting a rebel prisoner escape. Toma Bianco had his tongue cut out for uttering insulting remarks against the honour of Venice, followed by imprisonment and perpetual banishment.
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