City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  The map is presided over by benign gods. At the top, the tutelary deity of Venice is Mercury, god of trade, proclaiming with a semicircular sweep of his hand the message, ‘I, Mercury, shine down favourably on this above all other places of commerce’; underneath the portentous date: 1500. But it is Neptune who really catches the eye at the centre of the map. The powerful muscled figure rides a scaly and snouted dolphin; from his trident, held aloft to the skies, the message proclaims: ‘I, Neptune, reside here, watching over seas and this port.’ It is a triumphant statement of maritime power. In de’ Barbari’s image the city is at its peak.

  City of Neptune

  The ships so carefully portrayed, whose number the pilgrim Pietro Casola was unable to count, were Venice’s life blood. Everything that the city bought, sold, built, ate or made, came on a ship – the fish and the salt, the marble, the weapons, the oak palings, the looted relics and the old gold; de’ Barbari’s woodblocks and Bellini’s paint; the ore to be forged into anchors and nails, the Istrian stone for the palaces of the Grand Canal, the fruit, the wheat, the meat, the timber for oars and the hemp for rope; visiting merchants, pilgrims, emperors, popes and plagues. No state in the world occupied itself so obsessively with managing the business of the sea. A sizeable proportion of the male population earned their living there; all ranks and classes participated, from the noble shipowners down to the humblest oarsman. When the doge Tommaso Mocenigo gave his deathbed oration in 1423 he counted up the Republic’s maritime resources, albeit with some element of exaggeration: ‘In this city there are three thousand vessels of smaller burden, which carry seventeen thousand seamen; three hundred large ships, carrying eight thousand seamen; five-and-forty galleys constantly in commission for the protection of commerce, which employ eleven thousand seamen, three thousand carpenters, three thousand caulkers.’

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  In de’ Barbari’s map the single most prominent structure is the immense walled enclosure of the state arsenal at the tail of the dolphin. It had grown in size continuously over three hundred years with the maritime requirements of the Republic. By 1500 the sixty-acre site, enclosed by blind fifty-foot-high brick walls topped with battlements, comprised the largest industrial complex in the world. It was capable of building, arming, provisioning and launching eighty galleys at a speed and a level of consistency unmatched by any rival. The ‘Forge of War’ manufactured all the maritime apparatus of the Venetian state. It provided dry and wet docks, hangars for building and storing galleys, carpenters’ workshops, rope and sail factories, forges, gunpowder mills, lumber yards, and storehouses for every component of the process and the associated equipment.

  The arsenal

  By continuous refinement the Venetians had evolved something as close to assembly-line production as was possible given the organisational resources of a medieval state. The key concepts were specialism and quality control. Skill separation was critical, from the woodmen growing and selecting trees in distant forests, through the master shipwrights, sawyers, carpenters, caulkers, smiths, rope weavers and sail makers down to the general labourers who carried and fetched. Each team’s work was the subject of rigorous inspection. Venice knew well that the sea was an unforgiving judge, gnawing iron, rotting cables, testing seams, shredding sailcloth and rigging. Strict regulations were in place governing the quality of materials. The bobbin of each hemp spinner was marked so that the work could be individually identified; every rope that emerged from the ropewalk was tagged with a coloured label, indicating the use to which it could reliably be put. The care with which the Signoria oversaw each stage of production was a reflection of its understanding of the marine life. A ship, its crew and thousands of ducats of valuable merchandise could founder on shoddy work. For all the mythological rhetoric, Venice rested on profoundly material facts. It was a republic of wood, iron, rope, sails, rudders and oars. ‘The manufacture of cordage’, it was declared, ‘is the security of our galleys and ships and similarly of our sailors and capital.’ The state made unconditional demands; its caulkers should be accountable for split seams, its carpenters for snapped masts. Poor work was punishable with dismissal.

  The arsenal was physically and psychologically central to Venice. Everyone was reminded of ‘the House of Work’ on a daily basis by the ringing of the marangona, the carpenter’s bell, from the campanile in St Mark’s Square to set the start and end of the working day. Its workers, the arsenalotti, were aristocrats among working men. They enjoyed special privileges and a direct relationship with the centres of power. They were supervised by a team of elected nobility and had the right to carry each new doge around the piazza on their shoulders; they had their own place in state processions; when the admiral of the arsenal died, his body was borne into St Mark’s by the chief foremen and twice raised in the air, once to betoken his acceptance of his responsibilities and again his fulfilling of them. The master shipwrights, whose skills and secret knowledge were often handed down through the generations, were jealously guarded possessions of the Venetian state.

  The arsenal lent to the city an image of steely resolve and martial fury. The blank battlements that shut out the world were patrolled at night by watchmen who called to each other every hour; over its intimidating gateway the lion of St Mark never had an open book proclaiming peace. It was firmly closed: the arsenal lion was ready for war. The industry of the place amazed visitors. When Pietro Casola came in 1494 he saw in the munitions store ‘covered and uncovered cuirasses, swords, crossbows, large and small arrows, headpieces, arquebuses, and other artillery’; in each of the large sheds used for galley storage there were twenty compartments, holding

  … one galley only, but a large one, in each compartment; in one part of the arsenal there was a great crowd of masters and workmen who do nothing but build galleys or other ships of every kind … there are also masters continually occupied in making crossbows, bows and large and small arrows … in one covered place there are twelve masters each one with his workmen and his forge apart; and they labour continually making anchors and every kind of iron-work … then there is a large and spacious room where there are many women who do nothing but make sails … [and] a beautiful contrivance for lifting any large galley or other ship out of the water.

  And he saw the Tana, the rope-making factory, a narrow hall a thousand feet long, ‘so long that I could hardly see from one end to the other’.

  The arsenal worked on a just-in-time basis; it dry-stored all the components of galley construction in kit form for rapid assembly in times of war. Orderly arrangement was critical. To despatch a fleet of war galleys at short notice, the arsenal might be holding five thousand rowing benches and footbraces, five thousand oars, three hundred sails, a hundred masts and rudders, rigging, pitch, anchors, weapons, gunpowder and everything else required for quick deployment. The Spanish traveller Pero Tafur saw the fitting-out of a squadron of galleys in double-quick time during the summer of 1436: one by one hulls were launched into the basin where teams of carpenters fitted the rudders and masts. Tafur then watched as each galley passed down an assembly line channel:

  … on one side are windows opening out of the houses of the arsenal, and the same on the other side, and out came a galley towed by a boat, and from the windows they handed out of them, from one the cordage, from another the bread, from another the arms, and from another the ballistas and mortars, and so from all sides everything which was required, and when the galley had reached the end of the street all the men required were on board, together with the complement of oars, and she was equipped from end to end. In this manner there came out ten galleys, fully armed, between the hours of three and nine.

  Round ships and galleys in the Basin of St Mark

  The arsenal produced not only ships of war but also the state-owned merchant galleys that formed the regular muda runs. For Venice, shipping was binary, a deeply understood set of alternatives. There were oared galleys and sailing ships; war galleys and great galleys; private vessels and state-owned
ones; armed and disarmed vessels – not so much an opposition between fighting and merchant vessels, because merchant galleys could be used in war, and all ships carried a certain quantity of weapons – more an understanding as to whether a vessel was to sail out with a full complement of men, heavy armour, arquebuses and trained crossbowmen, or not. The state attended closely to their management. A maritime code was first introduced in 1255 and continuously refined. There were laws about loading, crew sizes, the quantity of arms to be carried, the duties and responsibilities of captains and other sea-going officials, taxes to be paid and the managing of disputes.

  Every ship had a specified carrying capacity – calculated by mathematical formula in the fifteenth century – and a load line was marked on its side, a forerunner of the Plimsoll line. Before departure, ships were inspected to ensure that they were legally loaded, with a crew adequate to their size and the requisite quantity of weapons. Such regulations could be minutely fine-tuned according to circumstance; when ships were obliged to carry more arms by the law of 1310, they were permitted to load just one inch deeper; from 1291 hats were ordered to replace hoods as protective military headgear; when it became practice on large sailing ships mechanically to compress lightweight bulky loads, such as cotton, with screws or levers, the dangers of damage both to goods and hull became subject to legislation. Maritime law then distinguished between loading by hand and by screw, with the limits on mechanical loading fixed according to the ship’s age.

  The business of the sea was managed as consistently as the Stato da Mar itself – by regulation, continuous oversight and recourse to law. These hallmarks of the Venetian system, widely admired by outsiders for its good order and sense of justice, ran through all its maritime arrangements. They replicated in miniature all the characteristic workings of the whole state and were closely attended to by the doge and ducal council. Sets of elected officials monitored, inspected, organised and fined both the state and the private sectors: they inspected crews, checked cargoes and collected custom and freight dues, rated loading capacities and handled legal disputes between shippers, masters and crew.

  State-controlled voyages were organised at the highest level by elected officials of the Great Council, the central governing body of Venice. The savii, as they were called, planned the mude for the coming year, based on a continuous stream of intelligence about threats of war, the political stability of destinations, the state of markets and food stocks and the level of piracy. Their remit was wide. They could stipulate fleet sizes, routes, landing stages, durations of stops, freights to be carried and freight rates. Conditions would be most onerous with regard to high-value cargoes – the transportation of cloth, cash, bullion or spices – and the conveying of important state functionaries, ambassadors and foreign dignitaries. No leasing consortium could refuse to load legitimate freight from any merchant. Even after the vessels had been leased, the ships and their crews could be peremptorily requisitioned in the event of war. The state appointed its own official on merchant galleys, the capitano, the nautical and military leader of the fleet, tasked with protecting the Republic’s property and the lives of its citizens. Everyone on board down to the lowliest oarsman was contracted to the venture by sworn oath.

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  The regulation, the safety measures, the quality controls in the materials production in the arsenal, the attempts to legislate against human fallibility, fraud, exploitation and greed were founded on long experience of voyaging. The sea was a taskmaster that could turn profit into plunging loss, safety into extreme danger on a shift of the wind. Nothing made the Venetian system shudder more than dramatic cases of failure. In the spring of 1516, the Magna, an older merchant galley, was being fitted out for the Alexandria run. From March to July it was in the arsenal undergoing an examination of the hull. There was unanimous agreement that the vessel was dangerous; it needed repairs for which the hiring consortium was reluctant to pay, and they were anxious not to miss the spice fairs. The arsenal authorities finally permitted departure, with the empty assurance that it would be repaired further down the Adriatic at Pola. The Magna sailed on past Pola, carrying, amongst other things, a cargo of copper bars that may or may not have overloaded the vessel. It probably had a crew of about two hundred.

  On 22 December, 250 miles off Cyprus, the Magna hit a storm and started to ship water. As it thrashed in the rolling sea, the copper bars broke loose and tumbled across the hold; at dawn the following day the vessel broke up into three parts. There was an instant rush for the ship’s boat, which quickly became overloaded. Some managed to scramble aboard, others were forcibly prevented with drawn swords. The late arrivals slipped back into the sea and drowned. There were now eighty-three men crammed onto a raft of death. They contrived a rudder and crude sails from sacks, spars and oars, and tried to sail to Cyprus. For a week they tossed violently day and night on a tempestuous sea ‘with waves as tall as St Mark’s’. They had no food or water. One by one the men started to die of hunger, thirst and cold. They drank their own urine and ate the shirts off their backs; they started to hallucinate: they saw saints carrying bright candles across the sky. Civilisation collapsed. ‘And perhaps’, it was elliptically explained in a letter from Cyprus, ‘some went to alleviate the hunger of others, and they had already resolved to kill the little ship’s clerk, because he was young, fat and juicy, to drink his blood.’ On the eighth day they sighted land but were too weak to choose a safe landing spot. Some drowned in the swell; the rest crawled ashore on their knees. Of the original eighty-three, fifty were still alive. ‘A young Soranzo has survived,’ it was reported, ‘but he is only holding onto life by the skin of his teeth, and the patrono, the noble Vicenzo Magno, but he is very sick and likely to die … certain of the other survivors will present the boat as an offering of the True Cross, and some will go on a barefoot pilgrimage to one place, others to another. All have made various vows.’ The writer of the letter drew sober conclusions:

  … this is a most wretched event. Sea voyages entail too many grave dangers, and it’s all through greed for money. By what passage I shall come home, I can’t tell you. Again this morning I had mass said to the Holy Spirit and Our Lady, because my fear of travelling in old galleys is so great, having seen the wreck of the one bound for Alexandria..

  Despite de’ Barbari’s Neptune, Venetians were always ambivalent about the sea; it was both the cornerstone of their existence and their fate. They believed they owned it all the way to Crete and Constantinople, but it was also dangerous, infinite and unappeased – ‘a zone that it is boundless and horrifying to behold’, wrote Cristoforo da Canal, an experienced captain of the sixteenth century. If the Senza was a claim to possession, its subtext was fear. Storm, shipwreck, piracy and war remained cardinal facts. The galley life was particularly hard and increasingly unwelcome as the centuries went on. The sense of shared purpose had begun to fragment. The status of the galeotti – the oarsmen sitting at the narrow benches in all weathers – declined steadily with a growing specialism of roles on ships and an aggregation of wealth and power among the noble class. They existed on a diet of wine, cheese, coarse bread, ship’s biscuit and vegetable soup. With the nautical revolution, the development of winter sailings worsened their lot – Pisani’s sailors, frostbitten and underfed, died of cold. Wages were pitiful; they were made up by the opportunity to trade on their own initiative on the merchant galleys: each man was permitted to carry on board a sack or chest.

  In the war galleys, the captains who commanded respect, such as Vettor Pisani and the maverick Benedetto Pesaro a century later, understood what a man at the oars needed to live. A tolerable diet, protection from the worst of winter sailings and the chance to seize booty would win enduring loyalty from the men of the bench. For commanders who would share their food and the perils of battle they would go through hell. It was the galley crews who hammered on the door of the council chamber to free Pisani and who demanded his coffin; for more standoffish aristocrats they occasionally went o
n strike. They wanted comradeship, identity and a shared destiny. Their patriotism to St Mark was unbounded; when Venetian sea power faced its ultimate test in 1499 it would not be the men of the bench who failed.

  By the late fifteenth century, they formed a veritable underclass; many on the merchant galleys were debt slaves to the captains, though rarely chained, and as the Black Death thinned the Venetian population they were increasingly drawn from the colonies. The Dalmatian coast and the shores of Greece were a crucial resource of raw manpower. The German pilgrim Felix Fabri observed their lot closely on the galleys to the Holy Land in 1494:

  There are a great many of them, and they are all big men; but their labours are only fit for asses, and they are urged to perform them by shouts, blows and curses. I have never seen beasts of burden so cruelly beaten as they are. They are frequently forced to let their tunics and shirts hang from their girdles, and work with bare backs, arms and shoulders, that they may be reached with whips and scourges. These galley slaves are for the most part the bought slaves of the captain, or else they are men of low station, or prisoners, or men who have run away. Whenever there is any fear of their making their escape, they are secured to their benches by chains. They are so accustomed to their misery that they work feebly and to no purpose unless someone stands over them and curses them. They are fed most wretchedly, and always sleep on the boards of their rowing benches, and both by day and night they are always in the open air ready for work, and when there is a storm they stand in the midst of the waves. When they are not at work they sit and play at cards and dice for gold and silver, with execrable oaths and blasphemies …