City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (39 page)

… there are many kinds of money. There are two kinds of gold coins, the one is called
dopla
and is worth 5
bezants
, and the
bezant
is worth 10
miaresi
, so the
dopla
is worth 50
miaresi
. And the other kind of gold coins is called the
masamutina
, which is worth half a
dopla
, and 2
masamutina
are worth one
dopla
, and the
masamutina
is worth 2½
bezants
. Accordingly, the
masamutina
is worth 25
miaresi
.

Local weights and measures could be equally tough, with the wily Christian merchants of Lesser Armenia setting the ultimate challenge:

… wheat and barley is sold by a measure that is called
marzapane
and by the wish of the Armenians no one can truly tell from one month to another [what this measure might be] because no measure converts with this one, because it increases and decreases at their wish and so the merchants get out of it many times what they give.

An enormous amount of practical information was required: the quantity of fox furs, fish, matting, blocks of wood, lances or walnuts to be loaded in a barrel or bale, the measure for weighing English cloth from Stamford, the Venetian equivalents for olive oil measures in Alexandria or purple dye in Negroponte, the advantages of smuggling gold into Tunis, how to avoid fraud and appraise spices. Frankincense powder might be adulterated with marble dust; nutmegs should be ‘big and firm … you want to pierce the shell with a needle, and if it yields water, it is good; and any other way is not worth anything … The reeds of cassia … should not make a sound when a man shakes them.’ The merchant needed to be quick-witted, armed with a formidable memory (for which commercial courses were available) and an excellent grasp of practical arithmetic as he stepped blinking and groggy down the gangplank at the end of a long sea voyage.

*

For all Venetians – novices or old hands – the final destinations, be they Beirut or Tana, Alexandria or Bruges, were territories which they did not control. They traded on the erratic sufferance of foreign powers. Xenophobia, extortion, cheating, political upheavals and commercial rivalry made the merchant’s life terribly insecure – even within the Christian lands. A colony could be sacked in London, as it was in the fifteenth century, but nowhere were the merchant venturers so exhaustingly tested as within the Muslim Levant. Dealings across the frontiers of faith were tensioned by mutual suspicion and the long back story of the crusades. Alexandria, which must have looked so fair to Andrea Sanudo on first sight when spied from out at sea, was a decaying place. ‘Every day one house falls upon another, and the grand walls enclose miserable ruins,’ wrote Felix Fabri in 1498. The cause of much of the devastation was the Christian sack of 1365 – an expedition
which Venice had strenuously opposed, but for which it had been apportioned blame by the Mamluk sultan in Cairo. The process of exchange was edgy, fraught with suspicion on both sides, but neither could live without it. On the shores of the Levant in the Middle Ages Venice developed the first efficient operation of a world trade.

European merchants in Alexandria, Aleppo, Damascus or Beirut lived a barricaded life. Apart from their consul and a small group of long-term residents, they were generally forbidden to dwell outside their
fondaco
– a large enclosed complex of residential buildings provided for their security. Each nation had its own
fondaco
which contained sleeping quarters, warehousing, kitchens, bakery, a bath house, a chapel – and frequently quite extensive gardens, where exotic animals might roam. The Aragonese in Alexandria kept ostriches and a chained leopard in theirs in the 1480s. The sultan in Cairo provided these
fondaci
as a service for foreign traders. He wanted to keep his valuable customers safe from the potential hostility of the population, but he also wanted to control them. The key to the outer door was in the care of a Muslim keeper; overnight and during Friday prayers they were locked in from the outside. Within they could live the semblance of an embassy life; wine would be drunk (sometimes in the surreptitious company of visiting Muslims) and worse. When Fabri visited the Venetian
fondaco
, he was surprised to meet a large pig snuffling in the courtyard, which the Venetians kept out of contempt, but for which they paid the Sultan a handsome sum, ‘otherwise the Saracens would not have allowed it to live and even worse, would have destroyed the house on account of the pig’. Provocations existed on both sides.

From the
fondaco
, the merchants went forth into the streets of Alexandria in the care of an interpreter to buy and sell. The negotiations were always tough, the abuses numerous. They started and ended with the welcome and farewell of the customs officials who were adept at random deductions, double taxation or confiscation. Scarlet cloth and Cretan cheeses were eyed particularly
keenly. The process of spice dealing was fraught. Ascertaining the quality could be tricky, according to a merchant, as the Venetians bought in bulk often ‘without sorting and without picking over … as they come from India, nor do they let us see beforehand what we are going to buy’. Both sides needed the deal but it was a game of brinkmanship. Knowing the fixed period of the
muda
– and senatorial decrees were peremptory in the matter – Egyptian merchants might wait until the last day to set the price, leaving no time to haggle, or the far worse prospect of returning empty-handed. The transaction could go down to the wire. Fabri watched the final trans-shipment of a spice deal. The giant sacks, five foot wide and fifteen foot long, lay on the quayside, watched by a jostling and intent crowd. The spices had been inspected, weighed and cleared from customs. The galleys were anchored off shore. The sailors rowed across in long boats to load up. At the last moment there was a sudden intervention:

And though all the sacks had just been filled and weighed at the
fondaco
in the presence of the Saracen officers, and examined at the gates, yet even now when they were just about to be taken on board, the whole contents were spilled out upon the ground so that they might see what was being taken away. And round about this place was a great press, and many came scurrying thither, for [when] the sacks … are emptied there comes hastening a crowd of poor folk, women and boys, Arabs and Africans, and whatever they can grab they steal, and they search in the sand for ginger and cloves, cinnamon and nutmegs.

On the other side, the Venetians were flinty opponents, well versed in the psychology of the deal. When Fabri and his fellow pilgrims tried to negotiate passage back to Venice with a sick boy, they found the sea captains ‘harsher and more unreasonable in the price they asked than Saracens or Arabs, for some demanded from every pilgrim fifty ducats, and when we stuck at paying this, another proud captain said that he would not accept less than a hundred a man’. The boy died in port. The merchant class could be crafty and devious, expert at smuggling gems and gold from the probing officials, capable of embezzlement, tax evasion and
flight from a sealed bargain unless severely constrained by punitive Venetian law.

However, on foreign soil it was usually an unequal contest. Despite trading agreements, the sultans might insist on arbitrarily fixing the prices. In 1419 a pepper price of 150–160 dinars a unit was imposed in Alexandria, against the market rate of one hundred. Sometimes Cairo would enforce purchase – or sale of the goods the merchants had brought with them. In Syria the Venetians often fared worse. Landing at Beirut, they travelled to Damascus to buy. On return they might be attacked or the camel and donkey drivers might steal part of their loads. Under the strain of theft, abuse and rapacious extortion patience frequently gave way. In 1407 all the Europeans in Damascus were imprisoned after a brawl; in 1410 they were bastinadoed. The Venetian consul travelled repeatedly to Damascus to plead release of a Venetian subject or to request fulfilment of agreed trading terms. He might be met with understanding – or insouciance. When a consul threatened the withdrawal of all Venetian merchants from Alexandria, the sultan responded that ‘as to the power of you Venetians, and after that of the rest of Christendom, I hold … it not so high as a pair of old shoes’. There was an element of bluff within this – the Mamluks needed the influx of European gold – but the abuses continued. Sometimes the consul himself was beaten and imprisoned.

Driven to distraction, some of the trading nations retaliated. The Genoese raided the coast of Syria; in 1426 a Catalan squadron attacked Alexandria. The Venetians kept their distance from armed aggression but paid the price by association. In 1434 they were all expelled from Syria and Egypt at a loss of a massive 235,000 ducats. Their strategy was patience and endless diplomacy. When their merchants were imprisoned they despatched their long-suffering consul to Cairo; when goods were purloined they made a claim; when the spices began to be unacceptably cut with rubbish they used sieves; when the tension became unbearable they prepared to evacuate the whole community. For short
periods they suspended the galley service altogether. They faced down the avaricious Sultan Baybars in a long and intense arm-wrestle during the 1430s when he imposed a blanket price-fixing monopoly on the export of all spices, and they broke his attempt to impose his own gold currency on the deals: the purity and reliability of the ducat outgunned its rivals. Underneath was a calculation – that the unpopular Mamluk rulers needed the lucrative inflow of taxed gold to prop up their rule just as much as Venice needed the trade. And they never lashed out. When the Genoese sent armed galleys, Venice sent diplomats – again and again and again.

In the endless embassies to the potentates of the Levant the Republic deployed the consummate diplomatic skills that it had learned from the Byzantines and that would serve it well in all its long, entangled dealings with the Muslim world. They set aside bribery funds for the sultan and wooed him with sumptuous gifts and impressive shows of gravitas. No single image captures the exotic ritual of these diplomatic exchanges as vividly as the painting of the reception of the Venetian ambassadors at Damascus in 1508. The consul, wearing a red toga expressing the full majesty of the Most Serene Republic, presents his papers to the Mamluk governor, seated on a low dais, before a vast assemblage of Muslim dignitaries in conical red turbans and gowns of multicoloured silk. The setting, with its mosques, hyperreal sky and vivid trees, its attendant black servants and animals – monkeys, camels and deer – catches the note of rapt fascination the East held for Venice. This was a world of vivid sense impressions: the taste of a banana (‘so exquisite it’s impossible to describe’); the appearance of a giraffe, the beauty of Mamluk gardens. When the consul in question, Pietro Zen, was later caught in collusion with the Persians, an even more magnificent delegation was despatched to the sultan in Cairo.

The account reads like an extract from the
Arabian Nights
. The Venetians arrived with an entourage of eight trumpeters, dressed in scarlet, who proceeded to announce the ambassador’s presence
with a magnificent fanfare, but their show of splendour was clearly dwarfed by the audience in the sultan’s palace.

We climbed the stairs and went into a room of the greatest magnificence – far more beautiful than the audience chamber of our Illustrious Signoria of Venice. The floor was covered with a mosaic of porphyry, serpentine, marble and other valuable stones, and this mosaic itself was covered by a carpet. The dais and the panelling were carved and gilded; the window grilles were bronze rather than iron. The sultan was in this room seated by a small garden planted with orange trees.

However, the new ambassador, Domenico Trevisan, obtained Zen’s release with an impressive array of gifts, carefully chosen for the Mamluk taste: fifty brilliantly coloured robes in silk, satin and cloth of gold, seventy-five sable pelts, four hundred ermine pelts, fifty cheeses ‘each one weighing eighty pounds’.

If the gifts were magnificent the underlying diplomatic principles were patience and unbending firmness: insist on the strict upholding of agreements; never give up on a claim, no matter how small; never leave an imprisoned subject unreleased; distance oneself from the wrongdoings of other nations – the piratical Catalans, the aggressive Genoese, the crusading Knights of St John; impose strict discipline on one’s own subjects. Merchants were absolutely forbidden to buy in Egypt anywhere but Alexandria, to buy on credit, to enter into trading partnerships with Muslims. Any Venetian who cut and ran with an unpaid debt risked the safety and reputation of the whole trading community. Unlike the individualistic Genoese, the Venetian traders, all drawn from the same tight-knit squares and parishes, had a strong sense of group solidarity. They paid into a common insurance fund, the
cottimo
, by which the costs of extortion by Mamluk officials or fiscal penalties imposed on the colony as a whole were shared between its members. ‘Like pigs’, as the Florentine preacher had unflatteringly put it, they gathered together. Under the circumstances it was a virtue.

The running of the Levant trade was exhausting and risky – merchants faced ruin on an autocratic whim of the sultans. It
required continuous oversight, endless senatorial debate, and it drove men to the edge. It was frequently discouraging, always unstable. When Pietro Diedo was sent on an embassy in 1489 his report was doleful in the extreme. The merchants ‘meet with so many obstacles that they are pitiful to behold … I maintain that in this country … there is a greater abundance of pretence than of good results … Unless they find a remedy for the errors and extortions made in Alexandria, this country should be abandoned.’ Diedo, like many of his countrymen, never came back. He died in Cairo.