Excerpt
The 1400s and 1500s were centuries of enormous change for Venice, and for the rest of the world. The changing geography moved Venice from a central position in European trade to the margins.
Transcript
The shape of the state
The territory of the Venetian state was originally just the Byzantine Venetia Marittima, later generally referred to as the Dogado — the Duchy. This was an area of about 130 by 15 kilometres of mostly lagoon, from Grado in the north to Cavarzere in the south.
The Dogado from Grado to Cavarzere was always the heartland of the Republic of Venice.
Dalmatia, and later many Greek islands and cities, became overseas colonial dominions. They were usually referred to as the “Sea Dominion” — Dominio di Mar — or the “Sea State” — Stato di Mar.
From a Venetian perspective, its main purpose was to protect and facilitate the commercial interests of the Venetian merchants, who were generally based in the Dogado.
The mainland
The mainland was — as it had been since the times of the Lombards — another country.
Actually, the mainland was several other counties. There was a Duchy of Padua, a Duchy of Verona, and the Patriarchy of Aquileia which was closely aligned with the Austrian Habsburgs. A bit further away were the Duchy of Milan, the Duchy of Florence, and the Papal State.
Venice regularly fought small wars with these neighbours, mostly over issues related to control of the rivers or trade in the upper Adriatic.
When, in the mid-1300s, Venice temporarily gained control over Mestre and Treviso (two nearby cities on the mainland), they were the first mainland possessions ever for the Republic.
Venice played along in a game of ever-changing alliances between all the small states on the mainland, but the main concern quickly became the influence, that the Duchy of Milan could exert on the direct neighbours of Venice.
Besides not wanting to have as powerful a state as Milan bordering directly on the lagoon, there was also the ever urgent question of food security. Venice, with its population of over one hundred thousand, relied heavily on the mainland for food supplies.
That was not a tenable position in the long term.
When the Duke of Milan died in 1402, Padua seized the opportunity to grab Verona, which had fallen under Milan. The heir of Milan asked the Venetians for help, in return for a handful of cities on the mainland.
Venice went to war against Padua, which they conquered in 1405.
The last members of the ducal dynasty of Padua ended up imprisoned in Venice. After some discussion, it was decided to kill them. They were unceremoniously strangled in their prison cells.
Stato di Terra
Venice now held a good part of the immediate hinterland, which became the third and final part of the Venetian state. The Dominio di Terra (the land dominion) or the Stato di Terra (the land state) complemented the Sea Dominion.
Padua, Verona and others became “subject cities” and Venice la dominante — the dominant one.
The power games in the valley of the Po River were now between the Republic of Venice, the d’Este dynasty from Ferrara, south of the Po, the Duchy of Milan, and the Patriarchy of Aquileia.
Soon, a war with Austria and Hungary over Friuli to the north brought Aquileia and Friuli under Venetian control.
Finally, further wars with the Duchy of Milan during the 1420s and 1430s earned Venice the Lombard cities of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema.
By the mid-1400s, Venice had become an important player on the mainland, and there were no foreign powers bordering directly on the dogado any more.
Constantinople and the Ottoman Turks
If matters turned out fairly well on the mainland side, they became more challenging on the side of the Stato di Mar.
The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453.
The last Roman emperor had travelled around Western Europe in the preceding years, to get help in the form of a new crusade in defence of Christendom — but to little avail.
The bailo — the Venetian ambassador to the Byzantine court — and many Venetians in the city fought and died on the Theodosian walls of Constantinople, along with the emperor himself.
In 1461, the Empire of Trabzon — the last remnant of ancient Byzantium — fell too.
After more than two millennia, there was no Roman Empire any more. If there ever was a “Fall of Rome”, this was it.
Even if the Venetian relationship to Byzantium was often difficult and ambiguous, Byzantium had always been a known, Christian entity in a Levant.
After the fall of Constantinople, the Levant was almost entirely Muslim, and ever more inclined towards seeing westerners as enemies.
Venice soon made peace with the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople — because money matters — but they almost as soon also ended up at war with the Turks, and lost a handful of their possessions in the Levant.
That would be the first of many wars between Venice and the Ottomans.
Trade on the Levant became more difficult, but the Muslim and Turkish rulers weren’t the only reason.
The world map before the “discoveries”
The journeys of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the 1490s, changed the world, and for Venice, for the worse.
To understand the reason, we need to take a step back to see how the world was seen — from a Venetian and Western European perspective — before the journeys.
Everything around the Mediterranean was well-known, and also around the Black Sea and the Baltic in the north.
The Europeans knew Northern Africa, and indirectly Eastern Africa down to Madagascar.
They also knew about Tartaria (the Mongol lands east of the Black Sea), China, Persia, India and Arabia, even if few westerners went there.
Notably absent from this map were the Americas, the western and southern parts of Africa, and everything around the Pacific.
On this map, Western Europe was a dead end. Western Europe led nowhere. It was at the end of the world.
The land was generally fertile, so Europe could maintain a sizeable population. Forests and metal deposits meant they could build stuff.
Based on these natural resources, Western Europe developed a wealthy elite which wanted to enjoy life.
The Romans knew about silk from China, fur from Eurasia, spices and gemstones from India, and ivory and tropical hardwood from Africa, and so did the later Europeans, but where could they get these goods?
The almost global trade of the times of the Romans, never ceased. Among others, Byzantium kept it going.
From the Baltics, goods travelled south past Kyiv to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Silk from China and cotton from Central Asia travelled across the Caspian Sea, up the Volga river, down the Don river to the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Goods from India went through the Persian Gulf, up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to the coast of Syria, around ancient Antioch.
From Eastern Africa and Madagascar, merchants travelled north to the Red Sea towards the Eastern Mediterranean.
From Central Africa, goods followed the Nile to Alexandria.
In the west, the Western Mediterranean was open and exposed, but the Adriatic Sea was a perfect route to the Eastern Mediterranean.
All these trade routes were like spikes in a great wheel of global trade, whose axis was in the Eastern Mediterranean, between Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria.
Venice, with safe harbours in the shallow lagoons, with good rivers going far inland, at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea, sat in an enviable geographic position to connect Western Europe with the trade routes of the rest of the known world.
This role as a bridge between west and east was the basis of the wealth and power of Venice, and, as we have seen many times already, the Venetians were willing to do almost anything to protect this position.
The effect of the “discoveries”
The discoveries of the route south of Africa to Madagascar, Eastern Africa, Arabia and India, and of the routes across the Atlantic to the Americas, made the nations of Western Europe do a 180 degrees turn.
They had always been forced to look towards the Eastern Mediterranean for luxury goods, with Venice as an envied middleman. Now, they turned their backs to the Mediterranean and looked across the Atlantic.
The focus of Western European trade shifted from the Levant to the Atlantic.
Western Europe, which on the old map was a peripheral dead end, was now at the very centre of world trade.
For Venice, the new Atlantic focus was detrimental.
From being an essential link in European trade, it became a peripheral nation, placed on an unimportant branch of a Mediterranean which led nowhere any more.
Furthermore, due to geography, Venice couldn’t take part in the new Atlantic game.
The Adriatic Sea went in the wrong direction, and the Venetians now had to navigate the more difficult Western Mediterranean, and then pass the Strait of Gibraltar, which was controlled by a competitor.
Manufacturing
Now, changes of such a magnitude don’t happen overnight.
The initial exploratory journeys to the Americas took decades, and the full effect of the changes only set in much later in the 1500s.
The impact on the spice trade was felt sooner. The Venetians noticed changes in trade patterns already in the early 1500s, when Lisbon seized the position as the main spice market in Europe, displacing the Rialto market.
Venice sent spies to Lisbon to figure out what had happened, but they could do little to intervene in trade on the Atlantic.
The Venetian economy didn’t collapse, despite the blow from the Atlantic trade, but it changed dramatically.
Some trade in the Levant remained, and other goods, like silk, were now produced in Europe rather than being imported from far away.
Venetian artisans and craftsmen had developed skills which remained unmatched elsewhere. Venetian glass and textiles, for example, were still among the best, and would be for a long time to come.
It helped, that the Venetians were always attentive to technological developments. The first ever patent law was issued in Venice in 1474, giving inventors of new things legal protection for ten years.
New technologies, such as printing with movable types, were imported and developed further. A mercantile approach, a more lenient censorship, and a certain disregard for what the Pope might think, created a flourishing printing industry. Venice became the printing house of Europe, and made good money from it.
For example, Venetian printers created the very first Quran, printed with movable types, in the 1530s. It was made for export to Muslim nations in the Levant. However, the Islamic world wouldn’t accept printed versions of the Quran, and worse still, there were errors in the text, so when the books arrived in Constantinople, they were all burnt. One single copy survived, in the library of a monastery in Venice, where it remains to this day.
League of Cambrai
When Venice acquired the dominions on the mainland, it was opposed by various smaller states in northern Italy.
By the early 1500s, this had changed.
Both France and Spain made a claim to the Kingdom of Naples. They fought a war over it, which Spain won, and southern Italy would remain Spanish for another two centuries.
France also made a claim to the Duchy of Milan, which they took over. This left Venice with a land border on territory under the French king.
Austria had always had interests in Northern Italy, especially in Friuli, which Venice had taken. Then the crowns of Spain and Austria united, and the Habsburgs ruled over the first empire where the sun never set.
The ancient Kingdom of Italy, from the times of Charlemagne, was one of the two legs of the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans had always had a claim on all of Northern Italy.
The Italian peninsula had become a battleground for all the major European powers of the time, and they all eyed the Venetian territories in particular, and Venetian wealth in general, with much interest.
In 1509, all these powers, and also the Pope and Hungary for good measure, made a secret alliance against Venice, in the French city of Cambrai. The express purpose of the League of Cambrai was to divide all the continental Venetian territories between them.
Only the Turks didn’t attack Venice.
The Venetian situation against the League of Cambrai was difficult, and when they lost the first major battle, it became desperate. City after city on the mainland surrendered to either the French, the Germans or the Pope. Soon the enemies were almost at the edge of the lagoon.
The reconquest of Padua a month later gave Venice hope, but the major game changer wasn’t arms, but diplomacy.
Venice, as a nation of merchants, knew how to negotiate in difficult situations, and the Venetian diplomacy was probably what the allied powers feared the most.
They weren’t wrong in that fear. Venetian negotiators managed to detach the Pope from the League, and Spain followed. The Hungarians were bought off.
The war of everybody against Venice broke down into a war of everybody against everybody, in ever-changing alliances, where Venice at various times found itself allied with several of the original members of the League of Cambrai.
When peace was made in 1517, Venice was mostly unscathed. If anything, its prestige and status had increased.
Plague
The Black Plague, which had arrived in the mid-1300s, came back in recurring waves well into the 1400s.
Every wave killed thousands, rich and poor alike. It certainly didn’t help that the plague arrived with the very same ships, which made Venice rich, so trade suffered too. Besides all the human suffering, the damage to the economy was enormous.
After yet another wave of the plague in 1423, the Venetian senate decided to isolate all those afflicted by the plague on an island in the lagoon. This island became the first Lazzaretto.
Removing and isolating the sick helped somewhat in limiting the spread of the disease, and the Venetians learned a bit more about how the contagion moved. In particular, they realised that just isolating the sick wasn’t sufficient because people could be contagious before they got visibly sick. They had observed the incubation period of the infection.
In 1468, they therefore created a quarantine station on another island, not for the sick but for those who had been in contact with the sick, and for the goods from the ships where plague had been observed.
Then, in 1485, a permanent magistracy for public health was established. It would run the lazzaretti, and an intelligence gathering network across the Mediterranean, so they could intercept any contagion before it arrived in the city itself.
These measures combined succeeded in keeping the plague away from the city.
While the plague arrived in Venice on several occasions in the 1400s, in the 1500s it only happened once.
In 1575, the plague spread in the city. It hadn’t arrived by sea, as in the past. The lazzaretti were efficient and had stopped that. It had arrived with travellers from the mainland.
The result was devastating. About a third of the population of the city perished in just two years.
Famagusta and Lepanto
The relationship between Venice and the Ottoman Empire vacillated between reluctant coexistence because of trade and open warfare for territorial control. They needed each other, and they were fierce competitors, at the same time.
The island of Cyprus had become Venetian in the late 1400s through the marriage of a young Venetian noblewoman to the king of Cyprus. He died shortly after, and so did their young son, leaving the 16-year-old Catarina Corner as ruling queen of the kingdom. Venice quickly moved in to take control over the island.
Almost a century later, in 1570, the Turks invaded the island under the pretext that piracy was rampant in the area, and that the Venetians were complicit in it. The invasion led to a prolonged siege of the fortress of Famagusta.
A Holy League consisting of Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, the Papal State and the Spanish Empire mobilised a navy to confront the Turks.
Before they could do anything, the Venetian defenders of Famagusta had surrendered. Despite have received a promise of free passage, they were slaughtered.
In early October the following year, the navies of the Ottoman Empire and of the Holy League clashed in a momentous battle at Lepanto in Western Greece. The result was a decisive victory for the league, and much of the Ottoman navy was destroyed or captured.
Once the threat to Southern Italy was averted, all the others sailed back home, and Venice was left to negotiate a peace treaty alone.
Despite the defeat at Lepanto, the Turks had still taken Cyprus, so the Republic of Venice came out of the war with a net loss of territory and prestige.
No place for a republic in Europe
The predominant form of government in Catholic Europe was monarchy — hereditary power within a single dynasty — sanctioned by the Catholic Church.
Ever since Charlemagne went to the Pope to be crowned Emperor, the Church had had a say in who was and who wasn’t a legitimate ruler.
This is the “King by the grace of God” — the divine rights of kings.
The Catholic Church and the Pope had an interest in such a system because it gave the Church leverage over the succession of secular rulers. They could dispense and remove legitimacy as they pleased.
The emperors, kings, dukes and princes had an interest in it because it turned any opposition to their rule into a rebellion against the divine order, against God himself. It gave them a degree of legitimacy which it was difficult for others to dispute.
After the protestant reformations, the Catholic Church doubled down on much of its dogma at the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, where the preference for divinely sanctioned monarchy was reiterated.
How did the Venetian system of an aristocratic republic — where the sovereign was a social class rather than a dynasty — fit into this world view?
The short answer is that it didn’t.
Furthermore, the Venetian Republic never sought the backing of the Catholic Church for their claim to legitimacy.
Many Venetian aristocratic families claimed a lineage going back to ancient Roman senatorial families. They were, in their own view, direct descendants of Ancient Rome
They perceived their state as the continuation of a Byzantine ducatus, which was itself a continuation of a Roman region from the time of Augustus, a region which had existed before there were any Popes.
From the Venetian point of view, the Republic of Venice was the oldest nation in Europe, and even older than the church itself. The Republic of Venice was therefore inherently legitimate, and didn’t have to ask anybody for confirmation.
This is one of the main reasons for the repeated conflicts between the Republic of Venice and the Pope. Having a shared border with the Papal State — with inevitable conflicts over border areas, cities and trading rights — certainly didn’t help either.
The immense wealth of the Venetians — despite the limited territorial extent of the state — led to much envy.
These latent tensions were behind the League of Cambrai and how the allies abandoned Venice after the wars with the Turks in Cyprus and at Lepanto.
The other European powers didn’t approve of Venice.
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