Salt (14 page)

This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

Unlike the Chinese salt monopoly, the Venetian government never owned salt but simply took a profit from regulating its trade. Enriched by its share of sales on high-priced salt, the salt administration could offer loans to finance other trade. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period when Venice was a leading port for grain and spices, between 30 and 50 percent of the tonnage of imports to Venice was in salt. All salt had to go through government agencies. The Camera Salis issued licenses that told merchants not only how much salt they could export but to where and at what price.

The salt administration also maintained Venice’s palatial public buildings and the complex hydraulic system that prevented the metropolis from washing away. The grand and cherished look of Venice, many of its statues and ornaments, were financed by the salt administration.

Venice carefully built its reputation as a reliable supplier, and so contracts with the merchant state were desirable. Venice was able to dictate terms for these contracts. In 1250, when Venice agreed to supply Mantua and Ferrara with salt, the contract stipulated that these cities would not buy salt from anyone else. This became the model for Venetian salt contracts.

As Venice became the salt supplier to more and more countries, it needed more and more salt producers from which to buy it. Merchants financed by the salt administration went farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt from Alexandria, Egypt, to Algeria, to the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, to Sardinia, Ibiza, Crete, and Cyprus. Wherever they went, they tried to dominate the supply, control the saltworks, even acquire it if they could.

Producing salt for the Venetian fleet was hard work—moving mud and rocks, clearing and preparing ponds, building the dikes that separated them, carrying heavy sacks of harvested crystal. Often entire families—husband, wife, and children—labored together. They were paid by the amount of salt they harvested.

Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt. The Venetians then brought in all the salt needed for local consumption, built stores to sell the imported salt, and paid damages to the owners of saltworks. The policy was designed to control prices and at the same time keep the locals happy. But two centuries later, when a salt fleet en route from Alexandria was lost at sea, the farmers of Crete were in a crisis because salt was so scarce on the island that they could no longer make cheese, which is curdled milk drained and preserved in salt.

In 1473, Venice acquired Cervia, forcing the onetime rival to agree to sell to no one but them. An exception was negotiated for Cervia to continue supplying Bologna in the nearby Po Valley. When Venice’s new archrival, Genoa, made the island of Ibiza the largest salt producer in the Mediterranean, the Venetians made Cyprus into the second largest producer. In 1489, Cyprus officially became a Venetian possession.

Aiding its ability to ruthlessly manipulate commerce and control territory, Venice maintained the ships of the merchant fleet as a naval reserve and called them into combat where needed. The Venetian navy patrolled the Adriatic, stopped ships, inspected cargo, and demanded licensing documents to make sure all commercial traffic was conforming with its regulations.

No state had based its economy on salt to the degree Venice had or established as extensive a state salt policy except China. Possibly this was not entirely a coincidence, since Venetian policy was influenced by one of its best-known families, the Polos.

I
N 1260, NICCOLÒ
Polo and his brother Maffeo, both Venice merchants—Venice was by then a city of international merchants—left on a commercial trip to the court of Kublai Khan, a dynamic leader who ruled the Mongols and had just conquered China. They returned in 1269 with letters and messages from Kublai Khan to the pope. The khan asked for more Westerners, intellectuals, and leaders in Christian thought to come to his court and teach them about the West. Two years later the Polo brothers went on a second trip, this time taking with them Niccolòs seventeen-year-old son Marco and two Dominican monks. The Dominicans abandoned the arduous trek, but Marco stayed on with his father and uncle.

If his account is true, no teenager ever went on a better adventure. They traveled the Silk Road across central Asia and the Tarim basin and, four years after leaving Venice, arrived in Shando, or as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it in his famous poem, Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Mongols. The khan, at least by Marco’s account, was not disappointed that the Polo brothers had returned with no greater emissary of Western knowledge than Niccolò’s young son. Marco traveled throughout the vast empire the khan had conquered, learned languages, studied cultures, and reported back to Kublai Khan.

Almost twenty-five years later, in 1295, the Polos returned to a Venice, where few, even in their own household, recognized them. Three years after his return, Marco Polo, like other Venetian merchants, was serving in a naval fleet at war with the Venetian rival, Genoa. He was taken prisoner and supposedly dictated the story of his adventures to a fellow prisoner named Rusticello, a fairly well known author of adventure tales from Pisa.

There are a number of problems with Rusticello. He may have taken great liberties to improve on the story. Whole passages appear to have been borrowed from his previous books, which were imaginary romantic adventures. For example, the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai Khan bears a disturbing resemblance to the account of Tristan’s arrival in Camelot in Rusticello’s book on King Arthur.

From its initial publication in 1300, the Venetians were suspicious. Some questioned if Marco Polo had ever gone to China at all. Why did he write nothing of the Great Wall, about the drinking of tea, about princesses with bound feet? It seemed odd to the few knowledgeable Venetians, and it has seemed suspicious to subsequent scholars that Marco Polo completely missed the fact that China had printing presses in an age when this pivotal invention had not yet been seen in Europe. This omission seemed even more glaring to Venetians 150 years later, once Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe, and Venice became a leading printing center.

His book was full of unheard-of details and was missing many of the facts known to other merchants. But later travelers to China were able to verify some of the curious details of Marco Polo’s book. And he had been away somewhere for twenty-five years. Polo’s account sparked an interest in Chinese trade among many Europeans, including Christopher Columbus, and remained the basis of the Western concept of China until the ninteenth century. His legend has grown.

It is widely accepted that he introduced Italians to pasta. It is true that China at the time, and still today, abounded in fresh and dried, flat and stuffed pastas. But Marco Polo’s book says almost nothing about pasta other than the fact, which he found very curious, that it was sometimes made from a flour ground from the fruit of a tree.
Maccheroni,
one of the oldest Italian words for pasta, appears to be from Neopolitan dialect and was used before Marco Polo’s return. The word is mentioned in a book from Genoa dated 1279. Most Sicilians are certain that the first pasta came from their island, introduced by the Muslim conquerors in the ninth century. The hard durum wheat or semolina used to make pasta was grown by the ancient Greeks, who may have made some pasta dishes, and the Romans ate something similar to lasagna. The word
lasagna
may come from the ancient Greek
lagana
, meaning “ribbon,” or from the ancient Greek word
lasanon
, which probably would not make the dish Greek since the word means “chamber pot.” The Romans, according to this theory, started using lasanon—presumably not the same ones but perhaps a similarly shaped vessel—as a pot for baking a noodle dish.

Marco Polo never mentioned that the Chinese printed paper money, but it is more significant that he did describe how in Kain-du salt cakes made with images of the khan stamped on them were used for money. Among the unexpected details in Polo’s book are many on salt and the Chinese salt administration. Polo described travelers journeying for days to get to hills where the salt was so pure it could simply be chipped away. He wrote of the revenue earned by the emperor from the brine springs in the province of Karazan, how salt was made in Changli to the profit of both the private and public sector, how Koigan-zu made salt and the emperor derived revenues from it. Marco Polo seldom mentioned salt without pointing out the state revenues derived by the emperor.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and may have been genuinely interested in salt and the way it was administered. He also may have decided that, since his readership would be Venice merchants, this would be a subject of great interest to them. But it also could be that whether he had gone to China or not, one of his motivations for writing the book was to encourage the Venetian government to extend its salt administration, especially in possessions around the Mediterranean.

The extent of Marco Polo’s influence is difficult to measure, but it is clear that Venice, like the khan, did extend its salt administration and derive great wealth and power from it.

CHAPTER SIX

Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between

W
HAT WAS IT
about this not especially salty stretch of the Adriatic that made Venetians get into the salt trade, along with the merchants of Cervia, the monks at Comacchio, and the archbishop of Ravenna? It was not so much the sea in their faces as the river at their backs. The Po starts in the Italian Alps and flows straight across the peninsula, spreading into a marshy estuary from Ravenna to Venice. The valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula, so strikingly different that its uniqueness becomes apparent after a moment’s glance at a map of Italy. With the Alps to the north and the sylvan mountains of Tuscany to the south, one thick ribbon of rich, rolling green pastures stretches coast to coast along the Po. A haven for agriculture, this has always been the most affluent area in Italy, and today, known as Emilia-Romagna, it still is.

The Romans built a road, the Via Emilia—today it is the eight-lane A-1 superhighway—connecting what became the centers of culture and commerce from Piacenza to Parma to Reggio to Modena to Bologna and on to the Adriatic coast. The agricultural wealth of this region depended on both a port for its goods and a source of salt for its agriculture. By competing for this business, two fiercely commercial competitors at opposite ends of the Po, Genoa on the Mediterranean and Venice on the Adriatic, became two of the greatest ports of the Middle Ages.