Ioanna Iordanou - Venice’s Secret Service: Organising Intelligence in the Renaissance

Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Cambridge

Author of The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

Each year, more than 1.3 million tourists visit the Doges Palace in Venice, perhaps the greatest surviving masterpiece of Gothic secular architecture. Very few visitors, however, are aware that during the Renaissance the Palace housed, in addition to the Doge and the Council of Ten, what was then the worlds leading intelligence headquarters.

The room of the three State Inquisitors (Inquisitori sopra li segreti), appointed by the Council of Ten from among their number, has on its ceiling a magnificent painting by Domenico Tintoretto of the return of the Prodigal Son. Tintorettos masterpiece (probably the greatest ever produced for the offices of intelligence or security chiefs) epitomized the inquisitors self-image of returning deviant Venetians to the path of civic virtue and respect for official secrecy.

There are still some visible traces in twenty-first-century Venice of the culture of clandestine denunciation promoted by the Council of Ten and the State Inquisitors. Among the most striking are the lions-mouth (bocca di leone) letterboxes in which citizens were encouraged to post the names of those who subverted the authority of the state. Two survive on the walls of the Doges Palace: one lions mouth for unspecified denunciations and a second (with the head of a bad-tempered bureaucrat instead of a lion) intended specifically for secret denunciations of officials who accepted secret bribes and favours.

The interrogation/torture chamber in the Doges Palace still contains the strappado sometimes used by the Inquisitors on recalcitrant prodigal sons. The victim was hoisted off the ground by his hands, usually tied behind his back, with a rope on a pulley which was then allowed to drop with a jerk, sometimes wrenching joints from sockets.

The greatest innovation in sixteenth-century European intelligence collection was what is now called signals intelligence (SIGINT)a field in which it retained for several centuries a major lead over other continents. As well as having probably Europes best-informed ambassadors and the leading agent network in Constantinople, the Council of Ten also established the first European codebreaking (SIGINT) agency in cramped rooms, ignored by most tourists, on the upper floors of the Doges Palace.

Though few historians have noticed it, beginning in Venice, the Renaissance marked a major turning point in the history of intelligence. For the first time, especially in SIGINT, Europe established a global intelligence lead which went unchallenged until the American Declaration of Independence. Ioanna Iordanous bold and brilliantly researched interpretation of Venices Secret Service during the Renaissance thus has a significance which extends well beyond Venice.

SIGINT, in particular, remains almost a missing dimension in the history of early modern international relations. The path-breaking achievements of the great Venetian codebreaker Giovanni Soro were to be equalled in northern Europe during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In Elizabethan England, Thomas Phelippess success in breaking the ciphers of both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Philip II of Spain, won him warm congratulations and a pension from Elizabeth I. Her intelligence chief, Sir Francis Walsingham, told Phelippes that he would not believe in how good part [the queen] accepteth of your service. Richelieus chief codebreaker, Antoine Rossignol, was so well rewarded that he was able to buy the chateau of Juvisy, where he was paid the extraordinary honour of royal visits by both Louis XIII and Louis XIV.

Ioanna Iordanous remarkable book, Venices Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance, is thus both a major contribution to the history of Venice and an inspiration to similar exciting and demanding research in other parts of early modern Europe.