City of Fortune

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City of Fortune Page 28

by Crowley, Roger


  In the endless embassies to the potentates of the Levant the Republic deployed the consummate diplomatic skills that it had learned from the Byzantines and that would serve it well in all its long, entangled dealings with the Muslim world. They set aside bribery funds for the sultan and wooed him with sumptuous gifts and impressive shows of gravitas. No single image captures the exotic ritual of these diplomatic exchanges as vividly as the painting of the reception of the Venetian ambassadors at Damascus in 1508. The consul, wearing a red toga expressing the full majesty of the Most Serene Republic, presents his papers to the Mamluk governor, seated on a low dais, before a vast assemblage of Muslim dignitaries in conical red turbans and gowns of multicoloured silk. The setting, with its mosques, hyperreal sky and vivid trees, its attendant black servants and animals – monkeys, camels and deer – catches the note of rapt fascination the East held for Venice. This was a world of vivid sense impressions: the taste of a banana (‘so exquisite it’s impossible to describe’); the appearance of a giraffe, the beauty of Mamluk gardens. When the consul in question, Pietro Zen, was later caught in collusion with the Persians, an even more magnificent delegation was despatched to the sultan in Cairo.

  The account reads like an extract from the Arabian Nights. The Venetians arrived with an entourage of eight trumpeters, dressed in scarlet, who proceeded to announce the ambassador’s presence with a magnificent fanfare, but their show of splendour was clearly dwarfed by the audience in the sultan’s palace.

  We climbed the stairs and went into a room of the greatest magnificence – far more beautiful than the audience chamber of our Illustrious Signoria of Venice. The floor was covered with a mosaic of porphyry, serpentine, marble and other valuable stones, and this mosaic itself was covered by a carpet. The dais and the panelling were carved and gilded; the window grilles were bronze rather than iron. The sultan was in this room seated by a small garden planted with orange trees.

  However, the new ambassador, Domenico Trevisan, obtained Zen’s release with an impressive array of gifts, carefully chosen for the Mamluk taste: fifty brilliantly coloured robes in silk, satin and cloth of gold, seventy-five sable pelts, four hundred ermine pelts, fifty cheeses ‘each one weighing eighty pounds’.

  If the gifts were magnificent the underlying diplomatic principles were patience and unbending firmness: insist on the strict upholding of agreements; never give up on a claim, no matter how small; never leave an imprisoned subject unreleased; distance oneself from the wrongdoings of other nations – the piratical Catalans, the aggressive Genoese, the crusading Knights of St John; impose strict discipline on one’s own subjects. Merchants were absolutely forbidden to buy in Egypt anywhere but Alexandria, to buy on credit, to enter into trading partnerships with Muslims. Any Venetian who cut and ran with an unpaid debt risked the safety and reputation of the whole trading community. Unlike the individualistic Genoese, the Venetian traders, all drawn from the same tight-knit squares and parishes, had a strong sense of group solidarity. They paid into a common insurance fund, the cottimo, by which the costs of extortion by Mamluk officials or fiscal penalties imposed on the colony as a whole were shared between its members. ‘Like pigs’, as the Florentine preacher had unflatteringly put it, they gathered together. Under the circumstances it was a virtue.

  The running of the Levant trade was exhausting and risky – merchants faced ruin on an autocratic whim of the sultans. It required continuous oversight, endless senatorial debate, and it drove men to the edge. It was frequently discouraging, always unstable. When Pietro Diedo was sent on an embassy in 1489 his report was doleful in the extreme. The merchants ‘meet with so many obstacles that they are pitiful to behold … I maintain that in this country … there is a greater abundance of pretence than of good results … Unless they find a remedy for the errors and extortions made in Alexandria, this country should be abandoned.’ Diedo, like many of his countrymen, never came back. He died in Cairo.

  But the diplomacy worked. Self-discipline, straight dealing and an appeal to reason over armed force won the grudging respect of the Cairo court – and a sideways glance from much of Christendom, as the Mamluks’ friends. Decade by decade through the fifteenth century they inched ahead of their rivals. The regularity of their galley lines made the wheels of commerce turn. The muda’s arrival at Alexandria was as welcome to the Egyptians as was its return to the Germans. By 1417 Venice was the foremost trading nation in the eastern Mediterranean; by the end of the century they had crushed the competition. In 1487 there were only three fondaci left in Alexandria, the two Venetian and one Genoese; the other nations had withdrawn from the game. Venice beat Genoa, not so much at Chioggia, but in the long-drawn-out, unspectacular trade wars of the Levant. And the profits were huge: up to eighty per cent on cotton, sixty per cent on spices, when sold on to foreign merchants on the Rialto.

  The winter spice fleets returning from the Levant, whose imminent arrival would be heralded by fast cutters, would be seen first from lookouts on the campanile of St Mark and welcomed home by the thunderous peal of church bells. The arrivals of the various mude – cotton cogs from Beirut, merchant galleys from Languedoc, Bruges, Alexandria or the Black Sea – slotted between the round of religious processions, feast days and historical remembrances, were great events in the cycle of the year. The Alexandria muda, putting in some time between 15 December and 15 February, sparked off an intense period of commercial activity. Swarms of small boats put out to welcome the galleys home; everything had to be landed at the maritime customs house – the dogana da mar – on the point jutting out into the Basin of St Mark. The word dogana (divan) was an exotic Arabic import like the goods it contained. No bales could be landed until they had paid the import tax (between three and five per cent) and been stamped with its seal – though abuses were numerous.

  The maritime customs house

  Throughout all the centuries of port life, the Basin of St Mark was a chaotic, colourful theatre of maritime activity. The Venetians treated it as an industrial machine, outsiders were just amazed. The landscape of spars and masts, rigging and oars, barrels and bales dumped on quaysides, the hubbub of ships and merchandise, was celebrated in the great panoramas of Venetian painting, from fifteenth-century woodcuts jammed with detail to the bright seascapes of Canaletto in the eighteenth. Venice was a world of ships. The literal-minded Canon Casola tried to count them, starting with gondolas, but gave up, having already excluded from his count ‘the galleys and navi for navigating long distances because they are numberless … There is no city equal to Venice as regards the number of ships and the grandeur of the port.’

  Once taxed and cleared through customs, goods were loaded onto lighters, ferried up the Grand Canal and landed at the Rialto or unloaded into barred ground-floor warehouses, via the water gates of the palaces of the merchant princes. It was the Rialto, situated at the mid-point of the wide S-bend of the Grand Canal, that comprised the centre of the whole commercial system. Its wooden bridge was the only crossing point in the fifteenth century. Here was Venice’s second customs house – the dogana da terra – where all the goods floated down the rivers of Italy or packhorsed across the Alpine passes arrived by barge. This meeting point became the axis and turntable of world trade. It was, as the diarist Marino Sanudo put it, ‘the richest place on earth’.

  The abundance dazzled and confounded. It seemed as if everything that the world might contain was unloaded here, bought and sold, or repackaged and re-embarked for sale somewhere else. The Rialto, like a distorted reflection of Aleppo, Damascus or medieval Baghdad, was the souk of the world. There were quays for unloading bulk items: oil, coal, wine, iron; warehouses for flour and timber; bales and barrels and sacks that seemed to contain everything – carpets, silk, ginger, frankincense, furs, fruit, cotton, pepper, glass, fish, flowers – and all the human activity that animated the quarter; the water jammed with lighters and gondolas, the quays thronged by boatmen, merchants, spice garblers (examiners), porters, customs officials, for
eign merchants, thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and pilgrims; on the quaysides a casual spectacle of chaotic unloading, shouting, hefting and petty theft.

  This was the bazaar of Europe and the historic location of Venice’s founding myth. It was held that Venice was established here on Friday 25 March 421, at noon precisely, by the site of the Church of San Giacomo di Rialto, the merchants’ church, said to have been built the same year. An inscription on its walls sternly enjoined probity and fair dealing: ‘Around this temple let the merchant’s law be just, his weights true and his promises faithful.’ The square beside the church was the centre of international commerce, ‘where all the business of the city – or rather, of the world – was transacted’. Here the proclamations of the state were read out and the bankers, seated at long tables, entered deposits and payments in their ledgers, and transferred by bills of exchange considerable sums from one client to another without the least movement of actual cash; here the public debt was quoted and the daily price of spices compiled, set forth in lists and distributed to the many merchants – both resident and foreign. Unlike the bawl of the retail markets, everything was conducted demurely in a low voice, as befitted the honour of Venice: ‘no voice, no noise … no discussion … no insults … no disputes’. In the loggia opposite, they had a painted map of the world, as if to confirm that all its trade might be imagined here and a clock that ‘shows all the moments of time to all the different nations of the world who assemble with their goods in the famous piazza of Rialto’. The Rialto was the centre of international trade: to be banned from it was to be excluded from commercial life.

  The Rialto to the left of its wooden bridge. The German fondaco is the named building on the right.

  From this epicentre radiated all the trades, activities and exchanges that made Venice the mart of the world. On the Rialto Bridge were displayed news of muda sailings and the announcement of galley auctions, which were conducted by an auctioneer standing on a bench and timed by the burning of a candle. Across the canal the Republic lodged its German merchants in their own fondaco, and managed them almost as carefully as they themselves were by the Mamluks; around lay the streets of specialist activities – marine insurance, goldsmithing, jewellery. It was the sheer exuberance of physical stuff, the evidence of plenty that overwhelmed visitors such as the pilgrim Pietro Casola. He found the area around the Rialto Bridge ‘inestimable … It seems as if all the world flocks there.’ Casola tried to see it all, rushing from site to site, stunned by the quantities, the colours, the size, the variety, and recording his impressions in dizzying and ever expanding superlatives:

  … what is sold elsewhere by the pound and the ounce is sold there by the canthari and sacks of a moggio each … so many cloths of every make – tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax! These things stupefy the beholder, and cannot be fully described to those who have not seen them.

  The sensuous exuberance of the Rialto hit outsiders like a physical shock.

  From here Venice controlled an axis of exchange that ran from the Rhine valley to the Levant and influenced trade from Sweden to China, funnelling goods across the world system: Indian pepper to England and Flanders, Cotswold wool and Russian furs to the Mamluks of Cairo; Syrian cotton to the burghers of Germany; Chinese silk to the mistresses of Medici bankers, Cyprus sugar for their food; Murano glass for the mosque lamps of Aleppo; Slovakian copper; paper, tin and dried fish. In Venice there was a trade for everything, even ground-up mummies from the Valley of the Kings, sold as medicinal cures. Everything spun off the turntable of the Rialto and was despatched again by the muda to another port or across the lagoon, up the rivers and roads of central Europe. And on every import and export the Republic levied its share of tax. ‘Here wealth flows like water in a fountain,’ wrote Casola. All it actually lacked was passable drinking water. ‘Although the people are placed in the water up to the mouth they often suffer from thirst.’

  In the 1360s Petrarch had marvelled at the ability of the Venetians to exchange goods across the vast expanses of the world. ‘Our wines sparkle in the cups of the Britons,’ he wrote, ‘our honey is carried to delight the taste of the Russians. And hard though it is to believe, the timber from our forests is carried to the Egyptians and Greeks. From here, oil, linen and saffron reach Syria, Armenia, Arabia and Persia in our ships, and in return various goods come back.’ The great man had grasped the genius of Venetian trade, even if he was poetically hazy about the details. (The honey was coming from Russia.) A century later, this process had reached its fruition. Its merchants were everywhere – buying, selling, bargaining, negotiating, avid for profit, single-minded and ruthless, exploiting whatever opportunities existed for coining gold. They had even cornered the market in holy relics. The theft of bones – dubious yellowing skulls, hands, whole corpses or dissected pieces (forearms, feet, fingers, locks of hair) – along with material objects attached to the life of Christ added respect to the city and enhanced its potential for the lucrative tourist pilgrim trade. St Mark in 828 was followed by a long list of looted body parts, many of which were acquired during the Fourth Crusade, and which made Venice a stopover of particular attraction for the pious. (So plentiful was this collection of human fragments that the Venetians became hazy about what they had: the head of St George was retrieved from a cupboard in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore by the American scholar Kenneth Setton in 1971.)

  The Ca’ d’Oro

  The visual city had become a place of wonder. To float down the Grand Canal past the great palazzos of the merchant princes, such as the Ca’ d’Oro shimmering in the sun with its covering of gold leaf, was to be exposed to an astonishing drama of activity, colour and light. ‘I saw four-hundred-ton vessels pass close by the houses that border a canal which I hold to be the most beautiful street,’ wrote the Frenchman Philippe de Commynes. To attend mass in St Mark’s or witness one of the great ceremonial rituals that punctuated the Venetian year – the Senza or the inauguration of a doge, the appointment of a captain-general of the sea, the blaring of trumpets, the waving of red-and-gold banners, the parading of prisoners and captured war trophies; to witness the guilds, clergy and all the appointed bodies of the Venetian Republic in solemn procession around St Mark’s Square – such theatrical displays seemed like the manifestations of a state that was uniquely blessed. ‘I have never seen a city so triumphant,’ declared Commynes. It all rested on money.

  *

  Nothing would have confirmed Petrarch’s view of Venetians’ material obsessions so much as the journey of Giosafat Barbaro, a merchant and diplomat who set out from Tana with 120 labourers to search a Scythian burial mound on the steppes for treasure. In 1447 he travelled by sledge up the frozen rivers, but ‘found the ground so hard we were constrained to forgo our enterprise’. Returning the following year, the workmen dug a deep cutting into the artificial hill. They were disappointed to find only a great depth of millet husks, carp scales and some fragmentary artefacts: ‘beads as big as oranges made of brick and covered with glass … and half of a handle of a little ewer of silver with an adder’s head on top’. They were again defeated by the weather. Barbaro’s men had dug into a rubbish tip. They had missed by a few hundred yards the burial chamber of a Scythian princess, adorned with enough jewellery to ignite all their wildest Venetian dreams of oriental gold. It was not discovered until 1988.

  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.

 

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