Paul Strathern - The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova

THE

VENETIANS

A New History: From Marco Polo to Cassanova

PAUL STRATHERN

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

To Oona

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prologue

I N THE WORDS of the renowned historian John Julius Norwich, One of the most intractable problems with which the historian of Venice has to contend is that which stems from the instinctive horror, amounting at times to a phobia, shown by the Republic to the faintest suggestion of the cult of personality. Indeed, he goes on to say, it is hard to find much human interest in the decrees and deliberations of the faceless Council of Ten. My intention is not to write another history of Venice, but to show that despite pursuing this policy the city not only produced, and attracted to its shores, a succession of outstanding characters, but also that these characters (ranging from Marco Polo to Casanova) often embodied the spirit of Venice, which in its turn frequently took on a distinctly individual character of its own. They will be described against the background of events that over the centuries forged and finally destroyed the most powerful of all Mediterranean cities. Venice came to see itself as La Serenissima (the Most Serene Republic), yet here its self-identification was as faulty as its attempt to suppress all individuality. Far from being so tranquil and clearly aloof from everyday concerns, its behaviour could be dark and obfuscating, proud and avaricious, efficient or incompetent, devious, vengeful, glorious even, and certainly, towards the end, eaten away by a self-destructive paranoia so embodied by that very Council of Ten, the committee of public safety, spies and secret police.

The Venetians, like the British, were a seagoing island race, who laid claim to an extensive empire out of all proportion to the size of their homeland, whose influence at times extended to the reaches of the known globe. Yet like America, Venices empire was more concerned with trade domination than with actual territorial possession. And, like both empires, it was not afraid of isolationism: of turning its back on the large land mass that began just across the water, or of ignoring the larger continental worlds beyond in the form of Europe, America and Asia.

Venice was ruled over by a doge, an elected position held for life, whose holder initially held great power, which was gradually diminished over the centuries until he became little more than a figurehead, his sovereignty similar to that of the British monarch today. Although nominally a democratic republic, Venice was in reality an oligarchy ruled by an extensive class of wealthy noble families. Only members of these families could sit on the parliamentary-style Great Council and vote, a jealously guarded right handed down from generation to generation, and they alone could be elected to senior administrative positions, such as membership of the many interlocking councils that ensured the checks and balances of ordered daily governance, or become members of the supreme Council of Ten, or become doge.

We have much to learn from the historical parade of varied characters who so reflected Venices rise and long, long decline. Venice was a city state like no other, in that it was surrounded by no extensive rural hinterland. In consequence, it was forced to rely upon entrepreneurial trade and ingenuity, essentially individual characteristics. This meant that the city developed several of the traits of an industrial revolution some centuries before the actual Industrial Revolution began in eighteenth-century Britain. In the great ship-building yard at the Arsenale, Venice pioneered the manufacturing technology of the assembly line, and its glass-manufacturing factories on the island of Murano saw the beginnings of industrial urbanisation. In order to facilitate their import and export business, the Venetians all but invented banking, established much of the mechanism of overseas trade (bills of lading and so forth) and made financial manipulation an art of their own. At the same time it is hardly by chance that this urban concentration of skills and imaginative thinking not only pioneered printing in Italy, but also nurtured some of the finest artists, musicians and scientists that Europe had seen. Venice nurtured genius and wastrel alike, inspiring tragedy, triumph and all in between, forever reflecting on itself in the mirror of its own enclosed lagoon. Yet this was also the city whose ambitions, as it approached its zenith, drove its citizens to seek out the furthest ends of the Earth.

Part One

Expansion

Il Milione

I N 1295 M ARCO P OLO , accompanied by his father and his uncle, arrived back in Venice having travelled from the Polar Sea to Java, from Zanzibar to Japan. According to the man to whom Polo would one day dictate the story of his travels:

There is no reason to doubt this claim. Marco had left Venice at the age of seventeen, and had been away travelling for twenty-four years. By the time he returned to Venice he was unrecognisable. Just over two centuries later the scholar Giovanni Battista Ramusio, drawing on stories passed down from father to son by Venetian families who were close to the Polos, described their appearance on their return: They looked just like Tartars, and they even spoke with an odd accent, having all but forgotten how to speak in the Venetian tongue. In 1295, the Republic of Venice was more than eight centuries old, and the Council of Ten had over the years imposed very precise sumptuary laws prescribing for its citizens appropriate dress for different classes, commending modest attire, decreeing short hair and prohibiting extravagant or colourful clothes except on special occasions. But Venice was also a busy port, and its citizens would have been accustomed to seeing visitors in rather more exotic attire than their own ranging from mainland farmers in their traditional peasant dress, their dark faces all but obscured beneath wide-brimmed straw hats, to Arab merchants wearing turbans and djellabas; Slavs and Albanians in tribal baggy trousers; and local Jews in their long dark gaberdine cloaks. Even so, the long hair and long beards of the returning Polos, with their weather-beaten skin deeply tanned and wrinkled by long exposure to tropical sun and desert winds, together with their heavy tattered kaftans, which appeared more like carpets than civilised Venetian cloth, must have stood out. Heads would have turned as they walked from the landing stage across the rickety old wooden Rialto Bridge and through the narrow alleyways of the Castello district to the Ca Polo, the family mansion, where no one at the gate even recognised them.

The Polos were a minor family of the ruling patrician class, and their fluctuating commercial fortunes had driven them eventually to undertake the bold and ambitious trading journey into the unknown Orient. (In Venice, unlike the kingdoms and dukedoms of the rest of Europe, upper-class families were deeply involved in trade: this was the ethos of the mercantile republic.) The late thirteenth century marked an age of expanding Venetian enterprise; spurred on by competition with their Genoese rivals, Venetian explorers began searching out new markets by sea as well as by land. The Polo family was the embodiment of this adventurous spirit.