The day, for most people, was subdivided into times for prayer: matins at midnight, lauds three hours later, prime at daybreak, terce at midmorning, sext at noon, none at midafternoon, vespers at sunset, and, at bedtime, compline. In the Age of Faith, science consisted largely but not entirely of spurious pursuits such as alchemy—the effort to transmute so-called base metals into gold—and astrology, which went hand in hand with astronomy.
People depended on wind, water, and animals for power. In Western Europe, coal had yet to be exploited as an energy source; paper money and the printing press also lay two hundred years in the future. The most advanced technology consisted of ships—considered a marvel of transport, though very dangerous.
Throughout Europe, travel was exceedingly slow and hazardous. Crossing the English Channel was a dreaded undertaking; those who completed the ordeal would claim that the effort had impaired their health. Over land, people moved no faster than a horse could take them; the average land journey covered eight to ten miles a day, or under special circumstances, for brief durations, fifteen to twenty miles. Superstition led those who undertook such journeys to seek shelter at nightfall in primitive inns, infested with vermin, where two or three sojourners shared a single bed. It took five harrowing weeks to ride by cart from Paris to Venice.
But in Venice, conditions were very different. Tiny in size, yet global in outlook, Venice was entering the Late Middle Ages, a period of economic expansion, cultural achievement, and the lowering of barriers to commercial activity. Travel was not the exception, it was the norm. Everyone in Venice, it seemed, was a traveler and a merchant, or aspired to be. Across Europe, political power, formerly scattered among disorganized and crumbling empires reaching back to Roman times, had coalesced in well-armed and well-organized city-states, such as Venice. The growth in commerce among European city-states contributed to rapid advances in art, technology, exploration, and finance. The compass and clock, windmill and watermill—all vital to the smooth functioning of European economies—came into being, and great universities that survive to this day were being founded. As a result of all these advances, Venice—indeed, all of Europe as we know it—began to emerge.
VENICE—SEDUCTIVE, Byzantine, and water-bound—was among the most important centers of commerce and culture in thirteenth-century Europe, a flourishing city-state that lived by trade. Her economy thrived thanks to her aggressive navy, which vigorously defended the city from repeated onslaughts by rapacious Genoese rivals and Arab marauders. Unlike other medieval cities, Venice had no walls or gates. They were not necessary. The lagoon and swamps protected Venice from invaders by land or by sea.
As the gateway to the riches of the East, Venice gave rise to a sophisticated merchant aristocracy, including the Polo family, known for frequent journeys to the East, especially Constantinople, in search of jewels, silks, and spices. Venice was highly structured, fiercely independent and commercial, and based on a unique combination of feudal obligation and global outlook.
Because Venice was compact, hemmed in by the lagoon and by its enemies, the sense of common cause among its inhabitants was strong. “By virtually confining the Venetians to so restricted a space,” says the historian John Julius Norwich, “it had created in them a unique spirit of cohesion and cooperation…not only at times of national crisis but also, and still more impressively, in the day-to-day handling of their affairs. Among Venice’s rich merchant aristocracy everyone knew everyone else, and close acquaintance led to mutual trust of a kind that in other cities seldom extended far outside the family circle.”
As a result, Venetians developed a reputation for efficient and thorough business administration—the most advanced in Europe. “A trading venture,” Norwich says, “even one that involved immense initial outlay, several years’ duration, and considerable risk, could be arranged on the Rialto in a matter of hours. It might take the form of a simple partnership between two merchants, or that of a large corporation of the kind needed to finance a full-sized fleet or trans-Asiatic caravan.” Either way, Norwich concludes, “it would be founded on trust, and it would be inviolable.”
JUST ABOUT EVERYONE in Venice engaged in commerce. Widows invested in merchant activity, and any young man without means could describe himself as a “merchant” simply by launching himself in business. Although the risks were great, riches beyond imagining lured the adventurous, the willing, and the foolish. Fortunes were made and lost overnight, and Venetian family fortunes were built on the success of a single trade expedition to Constantinople.
Venetian merchants had developed all sorts of strategies for dealing with the vagaries of their livelihood, global trade. In the absence of standard exchange rates, the many types of coins in use created a nightmare of conversion. The Byzantine Empire had its bezants, Arabic lands their drachmas, Florence its florins. Venice, relying on the ratio of gold to silver in a given coin to determine its true value, tried to accommodate them all. Merchants such as the Polos sought to circumvent the vexed system of coins, with its inevitable confusion and debasement, by trading in gems such as rubies and sapphires and in pearls.
To meet these sophisticated and exotic financial needs, Venice developed the most advanced banking system in Western Europe. Banks of deposit on the Continent originated there. In 1156, the Republic of Venice became the first state since antiquity to raise a public loan. It also passed the first banking laws in Europe to regulate the nascent banking industry. As a result of these innovations, Venice offered the most advanced business practices in Europe.
Venice adapted Roman contracts to the needs of merchants trading with the East. Sophisticated sea-loan and sea-exchange contracts spelled out obligations between shipowners and merchants, and even offered insurance—mandatory in Venice beginning in 1253. The most widespread type of agreement among merchants was the commenda, or, in Venetian dialect, the collegantia, a contract based on ancient models. Loosely translated, the term meant “business venture,” and it reflected prevailing customs of the trade rather than a set of consistent legal principles. Although these twelfth-and thirteenth-century contracts seem antiquated, they are startlingly modern in their calls for precise accounting. Contracts like these reflected and sustained a rudimentary form of capitalism long before the concept came into existence.
For Venetians, the world was startlingly modern in another way: it was “flat,” that is to say, globally connected across boundaries and borders, both natural and artificial. They saw the world as a network of endlessly changing trade routes and opportunities extending over land and sea. By ship or caravan, Venetian merchants traveled to the four corners of the world in search of valuable spices, gems, and fabrics. Through their enterprise, minerals, salt, wax, drugs, camphor, gum arabic, myrrh, sandalwood, cinnamon, nutmeg, grapes, figs, pomegranates, fabrics (especially silk), hides, weapons, ivory, wool, ostrich and parrot feathers, pearls, iron, copper, gold dust, gold bars, silver bars, and Asian slaves all poured into Venice via complex trade routes from Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Even more exotic items flowed into the city aboard foreign galleys. Huge marble columns, pedestals, panels, and blocks piled up on the docks, having been taken from some ruined temple or civic edifice in Constantinople, or another Greek or Egyptian city. These remnants of antiquity, the very headstones of dead or moribund civilizations, would wind up in an obscure corner of the Piazza San Marco, or on the façade of some ostentatious palazzo inhabited by a duke or a wealthy merchant of Venice.
The variety of goods moved Shakespeare to observe, through the character Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, that “the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations.” Venetian trade was synonymous with globalization—another embryonic concept of the era. To extend their reach, Venetians formed partnerships with distant governments and merchants that cut across racial and religious divisions. Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks, and eventually the Mongols became trading partners with Venice even when they seemed to be political enemies.
The Polos were not the first merchants to travel from Venice to Asia, but thanks to Marco Polo’s exploits, they became the most celebrated.
WHEREVER VENETIANS WENT, they announced themselves with their distinctive accent and dialect, veneto. This tongue, like other Romance languages, was based on Latin, and it incorporated vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation from other languages—some German and Spanish (in the form of the Castilian s, pronounced “th”), and some Croatian. There was even a little French thrown into the mix. There are lots of x’s and z’s in veneto, but almost no l’s. Lord Byron, who claimed to have enjoyed two hundred women in Venice in as many consecutive evenings, called veneto a “sweet bastard Latin.” To further complicate matters, veneto had numerous variants. The Polos of Venice would have strained to understand the dialect spoken elsewhere in the area by the inhabitants of Padua, Treviso, or Verona.
Some distinctive words in Marco Polo’s world have leapt from veneto to English. Venetians of Polo’s day bade one another ciao—or, to be more precise, sciavo or sciao vostro—which means, literally, “I am your slave.” (The word came into the Venetian language from Croatian.) Gondola is another Venetian word, although it is not clear when the long, elegant, black vessel itself came into use. It is likely that in Marco Polo’s day, a wide variety of small craft, including sailboats, rowboats, and galleys, jostled one another in the city’s winding canals.
And arsenal, or a place where weapons are manufactured and stored, entered the Venetian language by way of the Arabic term dar al sina’ah, meaning “workshop.” When Europeans of Marco Polo’s era employed this word, they meant the Arsenal in Venice, renowned as a center of shipbuilding. Here shipwrights operated an early assembly line devoted to turning out galleys at a furious rate from standardized, prefabricated components such as keels and masts. A Spanish visitor named Pero Tafur described the precisely choreographed activity devoted to launching the galleys: “Out came a galley towed by a boat, and from the windows they came out to 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 that 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.”
Tafur counted the launching of ten “fully-armed” galleys within a six-hour span: one new warship every thirty-six minutes. No wonder that the speed with which the Arsenal of Venice could turn a bare keel into a fully rigged craft was admired throughout Europe. And commanders could have their galleys in any color they wanted—as long as it was black.
VENICE’S SUCCESS DERIVED, in part, from its single-minded sense of civic and spiritual destiny. Venetian mythology was potent and telling. Marco’s namesake, Saint Mark, was the city’s patron saint. In 828, a group of Venetian merchants conspired to snatch Mark’s body from its resting place in Alexandria and deliver it in triumph to the doge of Venice.
To justify their deed, the merchants devised a theory that they were preserving the body from the evil designs of Muslims, and they concocted a beguiling but apocryphal story that Mark, while sailing the waters of the Adriatic, encountered a storm that blew his craft into the lagoon on which Venice would later rise, and the boat remained overnight at just the spot on which the Doge’s Palace would be built. To top off the story, an angel supposedly appeared to Mark in a dream, uttering the comforting words “Be at rest here.” Over time, those words came to mean both that Mark would be safe from the storm in the lagoon and that he belonged—where else?—in Venice. The transfer of Mark’s body to Venice became perhaps the most prominent theft of a relic in all Christian history.
Mark’s body remained in Venice up to Marco Polo’s day and beyond, sheltered in the private chapel of the doge. The doge’s residence was the only building in Venice known as a palace; every other dwelling, no matter how large or prominently situated, even those along the Grand Canal, was known as a casa—that is, a home—usually abbreviated as “Ca’.” Thus, the Polos’ home was known as the Ca’ Polo, and is to this day.
Venice was an oligarchy ruled by 150 families comprising the city’s merchant aristocracy. Less than 1 percent of the population controlled the destiny of the other 99 percent. Occasionally, a family managed to break into this tightly knit fraternity to become new aristocrats, but the practice was ended in 1297. The Council of Venice did permit the city’s middle class to form guilds to further commerce. These associations and schools trained workers and craftsmen and helped the poor, and even paid for hospitals. It is possible that the Polos belonged to one or more guilds to further their commercial interests. They were recognized as prosperous merchants, but not civic leaders. It seems unlikely they would have been remembered at all, were it not for Marco Polo’s fantastic exploits and his zeal for self-promotion.
DOGE IS A Venetian word, as well as a Venetian concept. It comes from the Latin dux, or leader. The first doges were military commanders appointed by the Byzantine emperor. Once Venice started to emerge from obscurity, the city needed its own leader, and the concept of the doge became localized and self-perpetuating.
The secular doge retained a close connection with the imported saint, and was required to defend the holy relic in his charge. In exchange, Saint Mark was believed to offer Venice his blessing and protection. The peculiar nature of the agreement ensured that Venice would retain a Western, and Christian, ethos rather than align with Eastern sects, whose saints yielded to Mark in the Venetian pantheon. Henceforth, Saint Mark and the doge shared control of Venetian destiny.
The combination of the doge’s secular power and Mark’s spiritual authority imparted a sense of political destiny to the Republic—a secular destiny, despite everything.
THE DOGE was a mystical figure, rarely glimpsed by the public, who presided over Venice’s longstanding, mystical relationship with the sea, often portrayed as a marriage. Venetians took this concept to such an extreme that every spring, the doge tossed a gold ring into the Adriatic in a ceremony designed to renew the partnership, much as he signed his mutual-protection contract with Mark.
The cult of the doge received affirmation each year on Ascension Day, the most important holiday in the Venetian calendar. The date marked the Venetian occupation of Dalmatia in AD 1000 under the leadership of Doge Pietro Orseolo II. Henceforth, all Venice—doge, citizens, and clergy—would remember the event by blessing the Adriatic Sea. Venetians were addicted to displays of color and spectacle, and none surpassed the rites of Ascension Day.
The ceremony began when officials carrying water, salt, and olive branches—all blessed for the occasion—boarded a convoy of galleys known as a mude. Along the way, the doge, atop an ornate barge, joined them. As they made their way to the Lido, the clergy chanted as a bishop prayed to God “to grant unto us this sea.”
Evolving into a symbolic marriage between the doge and the Adriatic, the Sposalizio del Mare, the ceremony became even more elaborate and revealing of the Venetian psyche. In 1177, Pope Alexander III went so far as to present a ring to the doge, declaring, “Receive this as a pledge of the sovereignty that you and your successors shall have in perpetuity over the sea.” Rising from his throne with a flourish, the doge hurled the consecrated ring into the Adriatic, intoning, “We wed thee, O Sea, in token of the true and perpetual dominion of the Most Serene Venetian Republic.”
After attending Mass, the doge hosted an elaborate banquet for the clergy and dignitaries. The Piazza San Marco became the scene of eight days of nonstop feasting and drinking that culminated in a trade fair famous throughout Europe for offering goods carried to Venice from the ends of the earth. Even the Church entered the festivities, offering indulgences to everyone in attendance.
IN 1268, when Marco was fourteen, the celebration surrounding the installation of the new doge, Lorenzo Tiepolo, outdid even the annual rite of marriage to the sea.
The ceremony began on a gracious note, as the doge formally met with all hi
s political and personal enemies to establish a new tone of goodwill and trust.
With the conclusion of this private ceremony, the captain of the Republic’s fleet led the ships past the Doge’s Palace as he recited prayers for the doge and for Venice, ending with the words “May Saint Mark aid you!” The galleys dispersed through the canals of the city, and waterborne craft of every description from the surrounding islands followed.
Later the spectacle moved to land, where guild members marched through the narrow streets of Venice two by two, resplendent in the costumes representative of their various trades, all of them passing before the new doge and his wife, the dogaressa. There were sailors clad in white accented with red stars; furriers distinguished by their ermine-trimmed capes; textile workers bearing olive branches and wearing olive wreaths; master craftsmen attired in clothing of gold and purple; even quilt makers, their cloaks adorned with fleurs-de-lis, and garlands of beads wrapped around their heads; shoemakers; barbers; glassblowers in scarlet cloaks trimmed with fur—the wealth and finery of Venice on display.
Beneath the celebrations, life in Venice could be cruel. Women, considered second-class citizens, were treated as chattel. Slavery was common, especially the ownership (and abuse) of female slaves by masters, who, married or not, used them for sexual services. Ingrained social customs reinforced the inferior status of women. A popular piece of advice to prospective Venetian husbands about their wives-to-be urged, “The husband should not be guided by the advice of his wife, who has not sound judgment, because she has neither a sound nor a strong constitution, but one poor and weak.”
Yet, in the midst of this gloomy social environment, the Polo home, with its complement of illegitimate children and slaves, was stable and secure, and in a scandalous city, it remained relatively scandal free.
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