The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  5

  Interlopers in the Mediterranean,

  1571–1650

  I

  The period between the battle of Lepanto and the middle of the seventeenth century has a certain unity. Barbary pirates did not go away – indeed, they became more piratical, in the sense that the Ottomans allowed them a freer hand, for the Sublime Porte no longer expected to extend its direct authority deep into the western Mediterranean.1 The western Mediterranean was also exposed to vicious raids by Christian corsairs – to the Knights of Malta could now be added the Knights of Santo Stefano, Tuscan pirates and holy warriors whose order was founded in 1562 by the Medici duke of Tuscany. Like the Venetians, they brought some of the Ottoman banners back in victory from Lepanto; they still hang incongruously in their church in Pisa, daily proclaiming the faith of Islam amid the incense of Catholic ritual. It would be otiose to repeat the endless saga of attacks and reprisals as Christian Knights of Malta or Santo Stefano scored points against Barbary corsairs; the most unfortunate victims were always those who were carried away into slavery from the decks of captured merchant ships, or from the shores of Italy, Spain and Africa (the French were relatively immune to Muslim raiders as a result of their ties to the Ottoman court). Galleys out of Sicily continued to patrol the seas in the hope of defending the Spanish king’s Italian possessions from sea-raiders, but large-scale galley warfare had come to an end, not just because new ship-types were seen as more efficient but because the cost of building and maintaining galleys was prohibitive. Even so, the Ottomans reconstructed their war fleet in the immediate aftermath of Lepanto. There were alarums in the West: it was confidently assumed that the Ottomans would launch a second great assault on a Christian target.

  Yet the Sublime Porte had lost its taste for naval warfare, and was content to leave the Spaniards alone, while pursuing its traditional rivalry with the Shi’ite emperors of Persia. This was extremely convenient, since Spanish preoccupations also now turned away from the Mediterranean; Philip II’s great ambition was to defeat the new type of Infidel who was crawling all over northern Europe: the Protestants. Philip was ensnared by wars with Elizabeth of England and his rebellious subjects in the Low Countries. He had seen off not just the Ottomans but the Moriscos, whose lands in Andalucía were depopulated and abandoned.2 In addition, he had received an unexpected prize in the form of Portugal and its overseas empire. Filled with crusading bravado, the youthful King Sebastian of Portugal led his forces to a massive defeat in Morocco in 1578, whereupon he was succeeded by the last member of the house of Aviz, Cardinal Henry, and after he died without an heir in 1580 the Portuguese crown passed to Philip of Spain, who did not actively pursue the old Portuguese dream of taming Morocco.3 The Mediterranean looked quite small within the massive conglomeration of lands Philip ruled in the Old World and the New. An Italian political theorist, Giovanni Botero, published a work on Reason of State in 1589 that was to prove especially popular in Spain. He argued that dispersed states are inherently weak, but that the Spaniards had managed to overcome this through the flexible use of their fleet. Within the Spanish Empire, ‘no state is so distant that it cannot be aided by naval forces’, making it possible for Catalan, Basque and Portuguese sailors to join together Iberia, King Philip’s Italian states and even the Low Countries in a single unit: ‘the empire, which might otherwise appear scattered and unwieldy, must be accounted united and compact with its naval forces in the hands of such men’.4

  The calming of the Mediterranean resulted from the tacit settlement between the Ottomans and the Spaniards. But crossing the sea became all the more dangerous once Spanish patrols limited themselves to protecting the coastal waters of southern Italy, Sicily and Spain. Jewish and Muslim merchants regularly saw their goods seized by Christian pirates. The dangers were increased as newly disruptive seamen took to the waters of the Mediterranean. As the Atlantic economy began to develop a new vigour, Dutch, German and English seamen made their way deep into the Mediterranean, whether for trade or piracy; once north European merchants appropriated a large share of the traffic in grain and spices within the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic, the relationship between the two great seas, developing gradually since before 1300, became much more intense. More will be said shortly about these visitors; yet there were also interlopers from within the Mediterranean who posed a severe threat to the navigation of the traditionally dominant powers. The Uskoks of Senj operated from a base tucked away among the islets and inlets of northern Dalmatia, behind the islands of Cres, Krk and Rab. What is now seen as a coastline of great beauty inspired fear in the late sixteenth century. This was a borderland between the Ottoman territories in the Balkan interior and the Habsburg domains in what are now Slovenia and northern Croatia, not to mention the Venetian possessions along the Adriatic coast. In such a setting it was possible for wilful, independently minded bandits and corsairs to flourish, especially if they presented themselves as standard-bearers of the Christian crusade against the Turks, working for the good of Christendom and Habsburg Austria.5

  The Uskoks became the Robin Hood figures of Croatian folk epics and, though few in number and reliant on small ships, they succeeded in boxing Venice into a corner of the Adriatic. This made them into the heroes of a school of nationalist and then socialist historians in modern Yugoslavia.6 But one should not be too romantic about the Uskoks. They had their own patrician leaders, and were not very different from bands of corsairs and robbers along both the Christian and the Muslim shores of the Great Sea. The term uskok means ‘refugee’, and, like the Barbary pirates, they were ethnically diverse, with recruits from the Venetian colonies along the Adriatic, Dubrovnik and Albania, as well as Italian sailors and occasional renegade Muslims. Some had been born as Habsburg, some as Ottoman, and some as Venetian subjects; and their background changed slightly over time, so that in the 1590s a high proportion hailed from the Dalmatian hinterland behind Zadar and Split, an area under intense pressure during the lengthy land conflict between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs.7 The Venetian view was that the Uskoks were ‘former subjects of the Turk, who have fled to Senj, unable to bear the tyrannies of the Turkish ministers’.8 Senj seemed to offer the chance to make good again: men ‘taken from the hoe and the plough, badly dressed and barefoot, have become fat and prosperous in a short time’.9

  Senj did not offer a natural harbour. When the strong wind known as the bora blew, ships had to be beached and tied down firmly so that they were not torn away. But the town was well protected by steep mountains and thick forests at its rear.10 At the peak of their influence, between Lepanto and about 1610, the Uskoks were able to set up outposts some way from Senj, as far south as the mouth of the river Neretva, which is no great distance from Dubrovnik.11 They were an incorrigible bunch. If the Austrian authorities were at peace with their enemies, that did not deter them from attacking Venetian or Turkish ships, as opportunity dictated.12 In the 1590s, far from welcoming the Uskoks as Christian refugees from the Ottomans, the Venetians continued to treat them as dangerous criminals, blockading Senj and executing large numbers (though in 1596 the total number of armed men in Senj was only about 1,000, and generally around 600).13 The Venetians would tolerate them only if they agreed to abandon their evil ways and to serve loyally on the galleys of the Most Serene Republic.14

  As early as the 1520s, raiders from Senj had begun to threaten Turkish ships in the Adriatic. The Venetians too were easy prey because of their willingness to enter into treaties with the Turks, and because of occasional hostilities between Venice and the Habsburgs in the Slovenian borderlands. In the early days the Uskoks were content to seize cargoes of fish, wine, oil and cheese carried on local boats, but they soon graduated to attacks on large roundships bound for Dubrovnik and Ancona, threatening the line of communication that stretched by land and sea from Tuscany to Constantinople.15 In 1599 the Venetians were so exasperated by the Uskoks that they sent a cargo of poisoned wine into Uskok-infested waters, let it be captured, and hoped
to hear that the Uskoks had all died from drinking it. Since they remained full of life, however, the ruse obviously failed. The relationship with Dubrovnik was also fraught. The Ragusans were seen as collaborators with the Turks, and the Ragusan city fathers knew that the Turks would not tolerate collaboration between Dubrovnik and the Uskoks. On one occasion the Ragusans decorated one of the city gates with the heads of executed Uskoks, making a clear point both to the Uskoks and to the Ottomans. The result was predictable: a Ragusan report stated that ‘they regard us as they do the Turks themselves’.16

  Still, they were generally more interested in cargoes owned by Jews and Muslims than in those of Christians, and would board ships simply to confiscate ‘infidel’ goods; as a result, Jewish merchants were about seven times more likely to enter an insurance claim than Christian ones. Muslims also fared badly: a captain from Perast, a flourishing port in the Bay of Kotor, reassured his Muslim passengers when his ship was boarded by Uskoks in 1581, saying he would look after them, but he sailed to Senj and feasted with the Uskoks while his passengers were enslaved and taken away.17 Jewish and Muslim merchants trading out of Italy tried various subterfuges. Marking cargoes with a cross was perhaps too obvious; keeping a secret account book along with a falsified one was another trick. Meanwhile, the bishop of Senj was happy to confirm that Christian merchants who collaborated with the Turks, especially in the armaments trade, deserved to be excommunicated – or, reading this differently, no objection could be made if holy warriors from Senj seized their cargo.

  II

  These developments confirmed a broad trend in the political and economic life of Venice, visible since the mid-fifteenth century: withdrawal from the great Levant trade, and the integration of the city into the life of northern Italy. Quite apart from the consequences of piracy, the Venetians had to cope with the effect of the new route to the East opened up by the Portuguese in 1497. A strong Venetian presence remained in Constantinople, where twelve merchant houses had established themselves by 1560, even though numbers had shrunk significantly since the heyday of medieval trade.18 Besides the patricians who had traditionally dominated Venice’s Levant trade, other businessmen were active, notably the Jews who had settled in Venice in the sixteenth century. They were a mixed community. There were German and Italian Jews who concentrated on pawnbroking, under licence from the city government, and who were required to live in the ‘new foundry’, or Ghetto Nuovo, tucked away in the north of the city. Next door to them, there were communities that were more involved in Mediterranean commerce, notably the overland trade through the Balkans towards Salonika and Constantinople – the Sephardim, divided (as at Ancona) between the ‘Levantines’ from the Ottoman Empire and the ‘Ponentines’, or westerners, mainly Portuguese Marranos, who had often spent much of their lives, at least outwardly, as Christians. The Ponentines faced the threat of investigation by the Venetian Inquisition, but on balance the need Venice felt for its Levant traders outweighed any scruples about imposing Christian orthodoxy.19 The pragmatism of the Venetians was also visible in the willingness of the government to sanction the erection of a Greek Orthodox church, San Giorgio dei Greci, for all the other Greek churches in Italy up to this point were Uniate, that is, they recognized papal authority.20

  ‘The decline of Venice’ is too easily identified simply with the decline of Venetian sea power.21 In fact, Venice proved remarkably adaptable in the sixteenth century. This was a period of economic expansion in continental western Europe, and the Venetians claimed their share of the proceeds. Old industries, such as glass-making, expanded, and production of woollen cloth inflated massively. In 1516 the city was producing fewer than 2,000 cloths per annum, but in 1565 Venice was producing over ten times that amount.22 The city benefited from a decline in the production of similar cloths in Florence, and from the regular supply of Spanish raw wool. This placed greater emphasis on its trade routes to the west, with stocks arriving by land across Lombardy as well as by sea, though there was still every need to keep the city supplied with grain, oil and wine from its possessions in the Ionian isles and Crete. The loss of Cyprus contracted the range of Venetian sailings, but renewed peace with the Ottomans ensured that, for the moment, Crete was still safely under Venetian rule – the principal threat there was not from the Turks but from its restive native population.

  The reshaping of Venice (a more suitable expression than ‘decline’) left others freer to intrude themselves into the Levant trade. The withdrawal of Venice was compensated by a revival of commercial activity among the Greeks, who serviced the trade of the Ottoman Empire in the Aegean, and between Asia Minor and Egypt.23 On the other hand, the coming of the English was a by-product of the great rivalry between the king of Spain and the queen of England, between the Catholic monarch and his Protestant opponent. Elizabeth was tempted to make contact with the Sublime Porte, partly for political reasons – seeing in ‘the Turk’ a fellow-opponent of Philip II – but also for commercial motives. In 1578 her minister Walsingham wrote a tract on ‘the trade into Turkey’ in which he opined that the time had come to send an ‘apt man’ secretly to the Ottoman sultan, with letters from Queen Elizabeth. A Turkey Company was founded in 1580, to promote trade with Ottoman lands.24 Yet it also reflected a new aggressiveness among English merchants in markets traditionally dominated by the Italian merchants who had long supplied England with exotic wares. By increasing tariffs on Venetian ships and their goods, the queen made clear her intention of favouring native-born merchants in trade with the Mediterranean, though she did renew her agreements with Venice in 1582, and Venetian galleons were still reaching England until the end of her reign.25 One target of the English was Morocco, where tradesmen of the Barbary Company were making their presence felt even before Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558. Exports included armaments, which English merchants were happy to think might be used against the Spaniards and the Portuguese.26

  None of this prevented the English from trying to develop other routes that would bypass the Mediterranean entirely, bringing spices to northern Europe via a north-west or north-east passage, colder but supposedly quicker than the Portuguese route around Africa; as a result the English became involved with the Muscovy trade. Since this failed to produce the spices they sought, they turned back to the Mediterranean, utilizing that combination of piracy and commerce for which the Elizabethan privateers have become so famous; many of those involved in the Turkey Company (soon known as the Levant Company) had also invested in the Muscovy Company.27 The Venetians were in a sombre mood about these developments. As English trading vessels penetrated into Turkish waters, they deprived Venice of the revenue it had traditionally received through forwarding English cloths from Venice into Ottoman territory. An agreement between the English queen and the Ottoman sultan was bad news. Nor did the Venetians approve of Elizabeth’s religious policy; Venice was hardly the most whole-hearted supporter of the papacy, but was still unwilling to send a formal ambassador to England until 1603, the year Elizabeth died.28 And yet there were some developments from which the Serenissima benefited. English ships began to sail as far as Venice itself, with the result that the city was supplied with basic northern products on which its survival increasingly depended, notably grain: the trade in northern grain grew in volume, as grain lands went out of cultivation in the Mediterranean and as shortages were accentuated by a series of famines, which were already beginning to bite as early as 1587. Dried and salted fish from the Atlantic was also a firm favourite – stoccafisso (‘stockfish’) became and remains an essential ingredient in popular Venetian cuisine.

  The English and Dutch came to buy as well as to sell.29 Initially, the focus of English attention was not the trade in spices such as pepper and ginger, but products grown on islands that lay under Venetian rule: Zante and Kephalonia, in the Ionian isles. Since the late Middle Ages the English had been obsessed with currants, raisins and sultanas, and competition with the Venetians for access to what the Italians call uva passa, �
�dried grapes’, caused many ugly incidents. English merchants intruded themselves so successfully into the Ionian isles that they were soon carrying off the greater part of its dried fruit. The Venetian government attempted to prevent the islanders from doing business with the foreign merchants, a prohibition about which the inhabitants complained volubly, and which they largely ignored.30