City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (54 page)

The treaty marked a major shift in naval power. Henceforward no Christian power could compete with the Ottomans single-handed. They had taken just fifty years to neutralise the most experienced naval force in the Mediterranean and to turn around centuries of Christian dominance in its eastern half. Yet during this time they had established no real superiority in nautical matters, had fought few sea battles and conclusively won none. However, both Mehmet and Bayezit had grasped an essential principle of warfare in the closed sea: there was no need for dominion over the waves; it was the land that counted. By working in conjunction with a powerful army and using the fleet for amphibious operations, they had swept up the strategic bases on which galleys, with their need for frequent harbour stops, depended. Now they were established on the edge of the Adriatic, well poised to strike further west and to threaten Venice’s other great islands. For fifty years Venice had warned and implored the pope, the
other Italian city states, the king of France, anyone who would listen, of the dangers of this possibility: ‘When the sultan has occupied the coast of Albania, which God forbid, nothing else remains but for him to cross over into Italy, whenever he wishes, for the destruction of Christendom.’ Bayezit added to all the sultan’s usual titles a new one: ‘Lord of all the sea kingdoms, both of the Romans, and Asia Minor and the Aegean’. Henceforward European merchant ships could hardly sail the eastern seas without permission. Only a few large islands – Corfu, Crete, Cyprus and Rhodes – were left in Christian hands.

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The image of the fireball at Zonchio remained seared into the Venetian imagination, crystallised in a brilliant woodcut of the battle just as the flames started to take hold. It was the moment when Venetian naval self-confidence fell guttering to the deck. The Venetians had been overawed by the explosive effects of gunpowder and the apparent strength of their opponent, then betrayed by hairline cracks in their own command structure. In the end it was not so much a question of numbers as a failure of will, a refusal to die for causes. The galley captain Domenico Malipiero was unsparing in his analysis: ‘If we had had a larger fleet, there would have been greater confusion. Everything arose from a lack of love for Christianity and our country, a lack of courage, a lack of discipline, a lack of pride.’ ‘This Turkish engagement’, wrote Priuli, summing up in the summer of 1501, ‘meant everything; it was not a matter of losing a city or a fort, but of something much more serious’ – he meant the Stato da Mar itself, and the wealth that flowed through its channels.

There was another wider legacy of Zonchio. The spectacular destruction of the colossal sailing ships served to discourage both sides from further experiment in this direction. Henceforward battles in the Mediterranean would follow established practice; ever larger fleets of oared galleys would hurtle towards each other, firing their lightweight guns as they closed, then attempt to down each other in hand-to-hand combat. Beyond the gates of
Gibraltar, it would be first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, the English and the Dutch whose wind-powered galleons, packed with heavy cannon, would construct world empires unimaginable in the landlocked sea.

The first inkling of this came hard on the heels of Zonchio. Priuli had been wrong about names, right about the deeds: not Columbus but Vasco da Gama returned from India in September 1499, having rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The Republic despatched an ambassador to the court of Lisbon to investigate; it was not until July 1501 that his report came in. The reality of it fell on the lagoon like a thunderclap. Terrible foreboding gripped the city. For the Venetians, who lived with a particularly intense awareness of physical geography, the implications were obvious. Priuli poured his gloomiest predictions into his diary. It was a marvel, incredible, the most momentous news of the time:

… which will take a greater intelligence than mine to comprehend. At the receipt of this news, the whole city … was dumbfounded and the wisest thought it was the worst news ever heard. They understood that Venice had ascended to such fame and wealth only through trading by sea, by means of which a large quantity of spices were brought in, which foreigners came from everywhere to buy. From their presence and the trade [Venice] acquired great benefits. Now from this new route the spices of India will be transported to Lisbon, where Hungarians, Germans, the Flemish and the French will look to buy, being able to get them at a better price. Because the spices that come to Venice pass through Syria and the sultan’s lands, paying exorbitant taxes at every stage of the way, when they get to Venice the prices have increased so much that something originally worth a ducat costs a ducat seventy or even two. From these obstacles, via the sea route, it will come about that Portugal can give much lower prices.

Cutting out hundreds of small middlemen, snubbing the avaricious, unstable Mamluks, buying in bulk, shipping direct: to Venetian merchants such advantages were self-evident.

There were counter voices; some pointed out the difficulties of the voyage:

… the king of Portugal could not continue to use the new route to Calicut, since of the thirteen caravels which he had despatched only six had returned safely; that the losses outweighed the advantages; that few sailors would be prepared to risk their lives on such a long and dangerous voyage.

But Priuli was certain: ‘From this news spices of all sorts will decrease enormously in Venice, because the usual buyers, understanding the news, will decline, being reluctant to buy.’ He ended with an apology to future readers for having written at such length. ‘These new facts are of such importance to our city that I have been carried away with anxiety.’

In a visionary flash, Priuli foresaw, and much of Venice with him, the end of a whole system, a paradigm shift: not just Venice, but a whole network of long-distance commerce doomed to decline. All the old trade routes and their burgeoning cities that had flourished since antiquity were suddenly glimpsed as backwaters – Cairo, the Black Sea, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Smyrna, the ports of the Red Sea and the great cities of the Levant, Constantinople itself – all these threatened to be cut out from the cycles of world trade by ocean-going galleons. The Mediterranean would be bypassed; the Adriatic would no longer be the route to anywhere; important outstations such as Cyprus and Crete would sink into decline.

The Portuguese rubbed this in. The king invited Venetian merchants to buy their spices in Lisbon; they would no longer need to treat with the fickle infidel. Some were tempted but the Republic had too much invested in the Levant easily to withdraw; their merchants there would be soft targets for the sultan’s wrath if they bought elsewhere. Nor, from the eastern Mediterranean, was sending their own ships to India readily practical. The whole business model of the Venetian state appeared, at a stroke, obsolete.

The effects were felt almost immediately. In 1502 the Beirut galleys only brought back four bales of pepper; prices in Venice steepled; the Germans reduced their purchases; many decamped
to Lisbon. In 1502 the Republic despatched a secret embassy to Cairo to point out the dangers. It was essential to destroy the Portuguese maritime threat now. They offered financial support. They proposed digging a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. But the Mamluk dynasty, hated by its subjects, was also in decline. It proved powerless to see off the intruders. In 1500, the Mamluk chronicler Ibn Iyas recorded an extraordinary event. The balsam gardens outside Cairo, which had existed since remote antiquity, produced an oil with miraculous properties highly prized by the Venetians. Its trade symbolised the centuries-old commercial relationship between Islam and the West. That year the balsam trees withered away and vanished for ever. Seventeen years later the Ottomans strung up the last Mamluk sultan from a Cairo gate.

Tome Pires, a Portuguese adventurer, gleefully spelled out the implications for Venice. In 1511 the Portuguese conquered Malacca on the Malay peninsula, the market for the produce of the Spice Islands. ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca’, he wrote, ‘has his hand on the throat of Venice.’ It would be a slow and uneven pressure, but the Portuguese and their successors would eventually squeeze the life out of the Venetian trade with the Orient. The fears that Priuli expressed would in time prove well-founded; and the Ottomans meanwhile would systematically strip away the Stato da Mar.

The classical allusions of de’ Barbari’s map already contain a backward-looking note; they hint at nostalgia, a remaking of the tough, energetic realities of the Stato da Mar into something ornamental. They perhaps reflected structural changes within Venetian society. The recurrent bouts of plague meant that the city’s population was never self-replenishing; it relied on immigrants, and many of those from mainland Italy came without knowledge of the seafaring life. It was already noticeable during the Chioggia crisis that the volunteer citizens had to be given rowing lessons. In 1201, at the time of the adventure of the Fourth Crusade, the majority of its male population were seafarers; by 1500 they were
not. The emotional attachment to the sea, expressed in the Senza, would last until the death of the Republic, but by 1500 Venice was turning increasingly to the land; within four years it would be engaged in a disastrous Italian war that would again bring enemies to the edge of the lagoon. There was a crisis in shipbuilding, a greater emphasis on industry. The patriotic solidarity which had been the hallmark of Venetian destiny had been seen to fray: a sizeable part of the ruling elite had demonstrated that, though still keen to recoup the profits of maritime trade, they were not prepared to fight for the bases and sea lanes on which it depended. Others, who had made fortunes in the rich fifteenth century, stopped sending their sons to sea as apprentice bowmen. Increasingly a wealthy man might look to reinvest in estates on the terra firma, to own a country mansion with escutcheons over the door; these were respectable hallmarks of nobility to which all self-made men might aspire.

It was Priuli again, acute and regretful, who caught this impulse and pinpointed the declining glory it seemed to imply. ‘The Venetians’, he wrote in 1505, ‘are much more inclined to the Terra Firma, which has become more attractive and pleasing, than to the sea, the ancient root cause of all their glory, wealth and honour.’

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‘I do not think there is any city to which Venice, the city founded on the sea, can be compared,’ Pietro Casola had written in 1494. Outsiders attempting to grasp the meaning of the place at the end of the fifteenth century found it impossible to match to their known worlds. Everywhere they were confronted by paradox. Venice was sterile but visibly abundant; running with wealth but short of drinking water; immensely powerful yet physically fragile; free from feudalism but fiercely regulated. Its citizens were sober, unromantic and frequently cynical, yet they had conjured a city of fantasy. Gothic arches, Islamic domes and Byzantine mosaics transported the observer simultaneously to Bruges, Cairo and Constantinople. Venice seemed self-generated. The
only Italian city not in existence in Roman times, its inhabitants had created their own antiquity out of theft and borrowings; they manufactured their foundation myths and stole their saints from the Greek world.

The ducat

It was, in a sense, the first virtual city: an offshore bonded warehouse with no visible means of support – almost shockingly modern. As Priuli had put it, the city rested on an abstract. It was an empire of cash. The ducat, a small golden roundel on which a succession of doges knelt before St Mark, was the dollar of its day. It commanded respect all the way to India, where they interpreted the blurred images as a Hindu god and his consort. The Republic’s fierce concentration on fiscal management was centuries ahead of its time. It was the only state in the world that had government policies solely geared to economic ends. There was no gap between its political and merchant class. It was a Republic run by and for entrepreneurs and it regulated accordingly. The three great centres of power – the doge’s palace, the Rialto and the arsenal, respectively the seats of government, trade and war – were managed by the same ruling group. Venice, before anyone else, understood the essential commercial rules: the principles of supply and demand; the need for consumer choice, a stable currency, on-time delivery, rational laws and taxes; the application of consistent, disciplined and long-term policies. It replaced the chivalrous medieval knight with a new type of hero: the man of business. All these qualities were expressed in the emblem of St Mark. Outsiders had no adequate explanation for the ascent
of Venice. Instead they bought into the myth that the city sold: that this greatness was miraculously pre-ordained. Like any long boom, they thought it would last forever.

It was the maritime adventure that had made all this possible. In the process Venice changed the world. Not alone, but as a prime mover, it was an engine in the growth of global trade. With unmatched efficiency the Republic sharpened the sense of material desire and facilitated the long-range exchange of goods that satisfied it. It was the central cog that meshed two economic systems – Europe and the Orient – shunting goods across hemispheres, facilitating new tastes and notions of choice. Venice was the middleman and interpreter of worlds. ‘I have seen the world in a two-fold mirror,’ wrote Felix Fabri of his voyages. Venice was the first European power to interact seriously and continuously with Islam. It promoted the seepage of oriental tastes, ideas and influences – as well as a certain romantic orientalism – into the European world. Visual ideas, materials, foods, motifs and words passed through its maritime customs post.