The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Page 55
Meanwhile, the English had no compunction about attacking Venetian ships, especially if they were trading with Spain, which supplied the wool they needed for their looms. In October 1589 an English captain fell out with a Venetian captain in the harbour of Corfu; the Italian challenged the Englishman to a duel, and called him an insolent dog. When the Venetian ship slipped out of port the English captain impudently gave chase. After a brief exchange of gunfire the Italian decided he had had enough and abandoned ship, but even then the English captain pursued his longboat part of the way back into Corfu harbour. These pirates respected no one. In 1591 English pirates who had been made welcome in the port of Algiers plundered a Ragusan ship in the channel between the Balearic islands and Barcelona as it was sailing west from Livorno. The North African rulers were often content to let the pirates use their ports so long as they shared their booty with the rulers of Barbary. Crews might be half-Muslim, half-English.31 One English exile, John Ward, brought 300 men under his command; in 1607 he terrified the captain of a Venetian spice galleon into surrender, and sold its cargo in Tunis for 70,000 crowns, only to follow this with the seizure of goods worth 400,000 crowns.32 Irate at the treatment Protestants received when they fell into the hands of the Inquisition, English pirates also defiled Catholic churches on islands held by Venice.33
The pirates owed much of their success to new technology. They brought with them into the Mediterranean high-sided sailing ships that the Italians called bertoni. They looked fairly similar to the galleons that were coming into fashion in the Spanish and Venetian navies, but they possessed a deep, strong keel and functioned well with three square-rigged sails. They were not especially large and they carried crews of around sixty, with one cannon for about every three men. When their rivals within the Mediterranean managed to capture these ships, they made every use of them; they even purchased them from English and Dutch captains. Yet Venice was strangely conservative. Lateen-rigged galleys had defended the city’s trade and empire for many centuries, and attempts to convince the Venetian government that the new type of ship was vital to the defence of the republic fell on deaf ears. The Venetian elite could not understand why what had worked in the thirteenth century would not work in the seventeenth. Bertoni became a common sight in Venice only in the early seventeenth century, when the republic begged England and Holland to support its struggle against the Austrian Habsburgs. By 1619 the Venetian navy possessed fifty bertoni alongside fifty galleys. Yet even when Venetian captains sailed bertoni, they seemed unable to challenge the superior skill of northern seamen. In 1603 the Santa Maria della Grazia, a Venetian bertone, was heading for Alexandria when it was captured off Crete – Venetian territory. Then, once released, it was seized at night-time while sailing up the Adriatic, and deprived of its guns. The Italians were no longer near-invincible at sea.
Northerners also attacked northerners; the relationship between the English and the Dutch oscillated violently in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 1603 Thomas Sherley, in command of a motley crew of English, Italian and Greek sailors, attacked two Dutch ships carrying Aegean grain from the Cyclades to Genoa. Sherley was content to pose as the agent of the Medici duke of Tuscany, and as a sort of crusader against the Turks, though quite how an attack on the Dutch fitted into this is a mystery. Sherley had to write to the duke to explain himself, because he had clearly over-reached himself. The Medici were happy to buy English bertoni and to employ English sailors. The duke even obtained his gunpowder from England. He wondered whether it might be a good idea to lure John Ward into his service, since he seemed such an effective corsair. The duke of Savoy, whose territory extended down to Nice, was happy to make his flag and his port at Villefranche available to all sorts of dubious sailors.34 As Alberto Tenenti pointed out, ‘in the Mediterranean at the end of the sixteenth century, a real change was taking place, psychological as well as naval and commercial’: the spirit of the crusade had been replaced by a cynicism which was occasionally masked by the language of holy war, but among the pirates that was belied by their willing cooperation with Turks and Moors.35 The clearest indication of this was provided by the Knights of Santo Stefano: by the seventeenth century they were freebooters able to benefit from the handsome concessions made to them by the Medici dukes of Tuscany.
The northerners found that the tough shipboard life of the seventeenth century – fetid water, biscuits full of weevils, tough discipline – was alleviated a little when sailing in Mediterranean waters. John Baltharpe was an English sailor who recounted in doggerel his voyage around the Mediterranean in 1670. Putting in at Messina, ‘a market was on board each day’ and he could buy
Silk-stockings, Carpets, Brande-wine,
Silk Neckcloaths, also very fine:
Cabidges, Carrets, Turnips, Nuts,
The last a man may eat from Sluts:
Lemmons, Orenges, and good Figs,
Seracusa Wine also, and Eggs.
In Livorno, Baltharpe was delighted to find excellent fish, ‘which ’mongst Italians is a good dish’, while at ‘Cales’, or Cagliari, ‘nothing was scant’. Even at Alicante, where meat was scarce and ‘instead of English Cheese, and Butter, A little Oyl we get, God wot, far worser’, there was the consolation of plenty of red wine – ‘this blood of Bulls … ’Tis sweet, Delicious, very tempting, The Bottle is not long a emptying’.36 Looking into the future, the efforts of Lord Nelson around 1800 to keep his men supplied with Sicilian lemons – 30,000 gallons a year, made available to the entire British Navy – ensured that his crews in the Mediterranean and beyond did not suffer from scurvy.37
The interest of northerners in the Mediterranean was accentuated by the rising standard of living in the sixteenth century, and, even though this stalled in the seventeenth century, the northerners became a permanent presence after Lepanto. Their identity varied: the Hanseatic Germans were pioneers (arriving when Mediterranean harvests failed in 1587), but did not maintain a strong presence, while the ‘Flemish’ increasingly consisted of mainly Protestant Dutch from the rebellious northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, rather than the Catholics of Flanders proper.38 The rise of the Dutch navies began with the emergence of Antwerp as the hub of the Portuguese spice trade with the East, but Dutch prosperity was based on profits from expanding trade and piracy in the Mediterranean just as much as it was based on the proceeds of its Atlantic and Indian Ocean traffic.39 When the United Provinces established their de facto independence from Spain, business shifted increasingly to the shipyards of Holland. Within the Mediterranean there was some cooperation, at first, with the French merchants who were beginning to make headway in North Africa, and occasionally allowed Dutch ships to fly the French flag (guaranteeing their safety in Ottoman waters).40 The phrase ‘flag of convenience’ is especially apt: captains switched back and forth, to gain whatever protection a particular nation could claim from the rulers of the Mediterranean shores and islands.
III
Among all those that sailed this sea, the ‘Portuguese nation’, mostly Marranos, attracted special curiosity. The Portuguese Inquisition had (by royal command) held back from persecuting the New Christians in the years after the suppression of Judaism in Portugal (1497); but it turned against them in 1547, with the result that many started to move to more welcoming lands. The indistinct status of the Ponentine Jews was exploited by rulers such as the dukes of Tuscany, ever happy to offer their patronage to any merchants who might help them maximize their income. In extending their favours to the ‘Portuguese’, the dukes did not intend to emancipate all the Jews of their dominions; indeed, they enclosed the Jews of Florence within a ghetto in 1570.41 Gradually, though, they began to see the advantages of creating an open port in which not just Marranos of doubtful religious allegiance but Levantine Jews, Muslims and northern Europeans could take advantage of rights of settlement and special tax provisions. Duke Cosimo I, who died in 1574, transformed Livorno from a sleepy fishing village into one of the great centres of Medite
rranean trade. Towards the end of his life, the harbour was greatly improved, and a canal was dug that linked the town to the river Arno, facilitating the transfer of goods to and from Pisa and Florence; under his successor Francesco I, Livorno was surrounded with its impressive pentagonal set of walls. Within this area a rectangular Roman-style street plan was laid out, in accord with the best principles of Renaissance town-planning.42 Gradually the population grew: in 1601 there were nearly 5,000 inhabitants, including 762 soldiers, 114 Jews and 76 young prostitutes, the last group a sad reminder of the sexual services in demand in every Mediterranean port. After this, as the port infrastructure developed, the city boomed.43
The right of aliens to live in Livorno was confirmed by a series of privileges, the Livornine, which determined the relationship between the Medicean government and its non-Catholic subjects for over two centuries. In the most famous of these privileges, of 1593, the duke extended a welcome to ‘merchants of all nations, Levantine and Ponentine, Spanish and Portuguese, Greeks, Germans and Italians, Jews, Turks and Moors, Armenians, Persians and others’.44 It is noticeable how low down the list were the Italians, in an Italian city. It is also significant that the document repeated again and again the welcome to the Marranos: as Ponentines, as Iberian merchants, as Jews. Ponentine merchants needed to declare themselves as Jews, despite their mask of Christianity, thereby ensuring exemption from interference by the Inquisition – which meant that they had to keep switching their identity, especially if they traded intensively with Spain and Portugal, but they were adept at doing this.45 Few restrictions were placed on their economic activities; uniquely in Italy, they were permitted to acquire landed property. Although they generally lived close to the synagogue, which, by the eighteenth century, was a grand and opulent building, there was no official Jewish quarter. There was also a church for Armenian merchants from the eastern Mediterranean. Three mosques existed within the bagno, the quarters reserved for galley slaves, though free Muslim merchants certainly came to Livorno in growing numbers; permission was granted for the creation of a Muslim cemetery.46
All this reflected the opening of trade routes between Livorno and Islamic lands: ships were arriving from Alexandria in the years around 1590, but the real success story was the opening of routes to North Africa between 1573 and 1593, a period during which Braudel and Romano identified forty-four voyages to Livorno from a great swathe of territory between Larache in Morocco and Tunisia. These contacts could not have been effected without investment by the Sephardic merchants, or without cooperation between the rulers of Barbary and the Medici; the Dutch also became involved in this traffic, providing insurance and additional shipping capacity. The routes were vital for the provisioning of Tuscany, which drew wheat from North Africa, as well as wax, leather, wool and sugar.47 Other basic products such as tin, pine-nuts, tunny and anchovies were brought from Spain and Portugal, often on ships originating in the ports of southern France. Something, however, had changed in the geography of Spanish trade. Barcelona had few contacts with Livorno, and Valencia had only a modest role, but Alicante, which had an excellent port and which gave access by good-quality roads to the produce of the Spanish hinterland, was the favoured port within Mediterranean Spain. Alicante itself produced little apart from soap, made with local olive oil, and wine; ‘it retained into modern times something of the air of a colonial factory, of the kind which might have been found in the somnolent hinterlands of Asia or Africa’.48 Along the route between Alicante and Livorno (and a rival one between Alicante and Genoa), the Ragusans were the dominant intermediaries, carrying cochineal and kermes, the red dyes made from tiny insects, rice, silk, honey, sugar and, above all, wool, and Jewish merchants played a major role in this commerce, even though it was forbidden for them to practise their religion within the Spanish kingdoms.49
Livorno also established relations with places beyond the Straits of Gibraltar – with Cádiz, which was emerging as a major Spanish trading centre in the Atlantic, with Lisbon and with the North Sea lands. The Dutch were attracted there like bees to a flower. Although the Livornine did not specifically encourage Protestant settlement in Livorno, Dutch merchants found they could live there in peace with a certain amount of discretion. Livorno was the hub of the Dutch network within the Mediterranean as well as the target for many Dutch ships arriving from Atlantic waters. Despite the intensification of trade with North Africa, and despite occasional good harvests, Tuscany remained hungry for Baltic grain. Its quality was often prized above that of the Mediterranean, and at the same time – even allowing for transport costs – it was usually cheaper. As has been seen, this reflects the retreat of cultivation around the shores of the Mediterranean in this period. The Italians developed a taste for northern rye: in 1620, around one in five of the Dutch ships that brought grain to Livorno carried a cargo solely of rye. The Medici dukes negotiated favourable prices in Holland so that their subjects could afford sufficient food; and when grain was plentiful in the Mediterranean it was always possible to substitute smoked and dried herrings, pilchards and cod, even caviar.50 The Dutch merchants who brought this grain did not simply carry goods to and from northern Europe. They intruded themselves into the carrying trade within the Mediterranean, willingly finding space in their holds for south Italian grain and salt, which they ferried to northern Italy. If there was a famine in northern Europe, as in 1630, Dutch captains were willing to pick up provisions for Livorno in the Aegean, defying Ottoman orders that anyone found exporting grain illegally was to be tied to a stake and allowed to die by starvation. When supplies of grain within the Mediterranean were adequate, they shopped around, picking up wool and salt in Alicante, wine and dried fruits in the Ionian isles, silk in the Aegean, and so on, and they sought to develop their relations with the great centres of trade in the Levant – Aleppo had emerged as the main emporium in Syria, and there was a Dutch consul there who also looked after trade in Palestine and Cyprus. Since Aleppo lies inland ships would dock at Alexandretta, and goods would then have to be carried overland; they included such exotic products as indigo and rhubarb, which was prized for its medical properties.51
In 1608 Duke Ferdinand permitted the ‘Flemish-German nation’ to build a Catholic chapel dedicated to the Madonna containing a vault in which Flemish and Dutch merchants could be buried. Inevitably, many Protestants preferred to be buried outside Catholic precincts; they were allowed to use private gardens. On the other hand, some prominent members of the ‘nation’ were devout Catholics, like Bernard van den Broecke, who was treasurer of the chapel of the Madonna, and who ran his business from a large house on the principal street, the Via Ferdinanda. His house contained ten bedrooms and a reception room adorned with a dozen paintings, a parrot in a cage, a backgammon table and fine furniture; in the garden there was a fountain and a spacious orangery. From Livorno, van den Broecke operated a whole network of business, encompassing the court of the duke of Tuscany, Naples, Sicily and Venice, as well, of course, as northern Europe. In 1624, he even laid plans for the creation of a trade route bringing cod directly from Newfoundland to Naples, but was frustrated by English interference – his cod was confiscated because the English king was once again at war with Spain, which ruled Naples. Even so, the English and the Dutch (including van den Broecke) occasionally cooperated in trade with Spain, using the Tuscan banner as a flag of convenience. Van den Broecke had no qualms about becoming involved in the slave trade within the Mediterranean, though here his aim was to extort ransom money from the families of well-connected captives. He ensured that slaves in his household were well cared for, so they could be returned in top condition; they must have ‘enough to live on and to be clothed without being spoilt’.52 Van den Broecke’s business house flourished until the 1630s, when political difficulties with Spain, competition from the English and epidemics made life increasingly difficult. But the city maintained its primacy in Mediterranean trade, especially because the Sephardic Jews continued to use it as their link to other focal points
of Sephardic settlement: Aleppo, Salonika and, increasingly, Smyrna.
IV
The great success of Livorno was not exceptional. The Genoese also attempted to create their own free port in the seventeenth century, beginning in 1590 with foodstuffs, and extending tariff exemptions to all goods in 1609. This was a different type of free port from Livorno: in Genoa, the emphasis was on free passage of merchandise, whereas in Livorno the emphasis lay on attracting merchants who would be free from restrictions on the right to reside and conduct business. The character of the city and its business had changed enormously since Genoa had competed with Pisa, Venice and Barcelona for mastery over the Mediterranean. The shift from active interest in trade to the provision of finance to the Spanish court had effects throughout Genoese society, even though those who serviced the Spanish royal debt were members of the elite families. By the 1560s they had lost interest in shipowning.53 Genoese ships became a minority among those arriving in the port of Genoa: from 1596 onwards, more than 70 per cent of the ships passing through it were foreign. Predictably, the Ragusans were very active, but so were Hanseatic vessels from Germany and the Low Countries, with the Dutch assuming an ever more important role in the seventeenth century.54 In the late sixteenth century, Genoese merchants often bought shares in Ragusan ships, but this only underlines the great change that had taken place: the idea that a small Adriatic republic could outclass ‘la Superba’, the proud Genoese republic, would have been laughed to scorn two centuries earlier.
The Genoese saw themselves as allies of the Spanish Crown; the king of Spain would rather have seen them as his subjects, but insistence on this point only weakened Genoese affection for the Spanish alliance. Just to show where Genoa fitted into their scheme of things, in 1606 and 1611 the Spaniards ensured that their tributaries the Knights of Malta were given precedence in battle orders over the Genoese, which Genoa rightly understood to mean that Spain saw it as its dependency. Disputes over this issue sometimes reached the point where Genoese and Maltese galleys, arrayed for battle, threatened to turn their guns on each other, and Spanish admirals had to force them to back down. But Spanish finances depended heavily on the Genoese, whose galleys carried bullion from Spain to Genoa – nearly 70,000,000 pieces of eight in the period 1600 to 1640. The principle underlying Genoese loans to the Spanish Crown was that advances would be repaid from the income in silver and gold arriving from the New World.55 Other galleys were dedicated to the lucrative trade in raw silk from Messina; silk had become one the foundations of Genoa’s revived prosperity a century earlier, and it symbolized the intense but troubled relationship with Spain, since it came from Sicily, a Spanish possession, along with Sicilian grain, at the same time as being heavily taxed by a Spanish government anxious to squeeze every penny from the merchants.56