by Ed West
Captain Casola recalled that “death was chasing us . . . the sea so agitated that every hope of life was abandoned by all . . . During the night such heavy waves struck the ship that they covered . . . the whole galley in general with water . . . the water came from the sky and from the sea; on every side there was water. Every man had ‘Jesus’ and the ‘Miserere’ constantly in his mouth, especially when those great waves washed over the galley with such force, that, for the moment, every man was expected to go to the bottom.”5
Each ship carried a cook and a cat, to eat the rats, and a lodesman or pilot. However, it was not until the great Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century that people had any great idea where they were going and “navigation was almost one of the black arts.”6 Even hugging the coastline was not a guarantee you’d know where you are, and a French ship going to Scotland would not dare go near the English shore, just as an English captain would not risk getting too close to France on the way to Aquitaine.
There were now regular journeys not just across the Channel to Calais, Bruges, or Harfleur but beyond, a thirty-day adventure sailing down the coast of Spain and through the Strait of Gibraltar toward the great Italian powerhouses of Genoa and Venice.
Italy was the first to revive after the collapse of the western Empire and by the tenth century there were merchants at fairs in Pavia on the river Po, selling “Russian ermine, purple cloth from Syria [and] silk from Constantinople.”7 Milan had grown beyond its old walls and already had a hundred towers around this time, its wealth built on its trade network. It also became the chief armorer of Europe, and “its smiths and armorers turned out swords, helmets, and chain mail for the knights of Italy, Provence, Germany, and even more distant lands.”8
Between antiquity and 1200 AD no western city surpassed twenty thousand in population; by 1300 there were nine cities in Italy alone of more than fifty thousand; Paris had meanwhile increased from twenty to two hundred thousand in a century. By the time of the Black Death three Italian municipalities had more than a hundred thousand, among them Genoa, Pisa and, most magnicifent of all, the real-life Braavos.
The destruction caused by the Hun horseman following the fall of Rome had led a group of people to flee to a lagoon in the north-east of Italy to seek shelter. They came to live inside an archipelago of 118 islands protected from the Adriatic by a long sandbar called the Lido, and so hidden from prying eyes. The city of Venice, began as a refuge, grew to become the most important in the world, a great center of banking, trade and empire. But unlike other cities, Venice had no walls or gates, as it had lagoons and swamps to protect it.
Likewise, the Secret City, as Braavos is also called, was founded by slaves following a rebellion in the Jade Sea, the fugitives choosing their new home on the advice of a sage, but mainly beause the location was well hidden. Both cities were founded on a group of islands, and both were famous for their canals and bankers. Both are also sinking, and Braavos has an older section that has already fallen into the sea, the Drowned Town, while Venice is still sinking at a rate of 2mm a year, a result of subsidence and global warming. Both were a sea power, with Braavos led by a sealord and Venice by the Doge (duke). Bravo is Italian for bold, but it also meant hired killer, and Braavos is famously home to the Faceless Men death cult.
The Braavosi were originally a people “who were no people: scores of races, a hundred tongues, and hundreds of gods.”9 Although the different groups had nothing in common but their bondage, they spoke Valyrian as a common language for trade, a lingua franca (the original Mediterrean Lingua Franca was a pidgin spoken in the eastern Mediterrean, but “Frank” in that region applied to any westerner, not specifically just the French, and the language was closest to northern Italian).
Just as Braavosi evolved from High Valyrian, the language of Venice, Vèneto, developed from Latin, although Veneto also borrowed from German, Croatian, and Spanish, ports always being subject to overseas influences. The highly-sexed English romantic poet Lord Byron called it “sweet bastard Latin” during his time there, where he claimed to have enjoyed the company of two hundred women in two hundred nights. Venetians had borrowed the phrase sciao vostro or sciavo, literally “[I am] your slave,” from Croatian, which became the standard Italian ciao. Lagoon, lido, and gondola are also Venetian, the latter becoming gondolier; arsenal, another word, was brought into the European lexicon from Venice but originally comes from the Arabic dar al sina’ah, workshop.*
Later Tuscan began to dominate as the main literary language of Italy, with writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli writing in that dialect, and so becoming today’s standard Italian; despite this some four million still speak the Venetian language.
Although Venice was a sea power, it was also the driving force behind the birth of banking, and almost all of Europe’s bankers came from northern Italy, despite the Church’s restrictions on lending with interest. Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato, went by the motto written on his ledger, “In the name of God and of profit.”10 Genoese banker Antonio Pesagno had brokered loans to Edward II, around twenty-five thousand pounds a year, while his son borrowed from the Florentines, much to their regret.
The Republic of Venice developed the most advanced banking system in the world; in 1156 it raised a public loan, the first since antiquity, and also passed the first banking laws in Europe, so that “sophisticated sea-loan and sea-exchange contracts spelled out obligations between ship-owners and merchants, and even offered insurance—mandatory in Venice beginning in 1253.”11 Contracts were called commenda or collegantia and Venetians could be assured that it was worth the paper it was written on. Venice’s first merchant bank dates to 1157, the industry partly developed by Jewish moneylenders who had fled Spain and offered credit and insurance services. They couldn’t buy property in Christian cities and so bought a bench, or banco, at the piazza.
Venice was uniquely blessed in having what sociologists now call high social capital, levels of trust and social solidarity conducive to lending and joint ventures. On Venice’s main island, across its Grand Canal, lies the Rialto Bridge where trading ventures were agreed upon by merchants, and investments raised, often in a very short space of time.
The goods on display at the Rialto were enough to astonish any visitor. There was English Cotswold wool and Russian fur being sold to Egypt, Syrian cotton to Germany, Chinese silk to Florence, sugar and Indian pepper going to England, tin, paper, fried fish, copper from Slovakia, “minerals, salt, wax, drugs, camphor, gum Arabic, myrrh, sandalwood, cinnamon, nutmeg, grapes, figs, pomegranates, fabrics (especially silk), hides, weapons, ivory, wool, ostrich and parrot feathers, pearls, iron, copper, gold dust, gold bars, silver bars, and Asian slaves,” all passing through a trade route that linked the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, east and west.12 However, their subsequent wealth and reputation for greed naturally made them enemies. Pope Pius II said Venetians were hardly better than fish, while to Syrian Arabs “Venetians” and “bastards” sounded convenientally identical.
In atmosphere it would not have been unlike Braavos, Venice being a city with “decaying palazzos, busy markets, lively brothels and wine-soaked taverns” while “the streets thronged with high-born ladies in strange headdresses, merchants hurrying to make their next deal, servants scurrying on errands in the fish and fruit markets and traders crying out their wares.”13
The city was “opaque, secretive, and rife with transgressions and superstitions. Even those who had lived their entire lives in Venice became disorientated as they wandered down blind alleys that turned without warning from familiar to sinister. The whispers of conspiracy and the laughter of intimacy echoed through narrow passageways from invisible sources; behind dim windows, candles and torches flickered discreetly.”14 The evening mist would emerge from the canals and the city’s seedy side would come to life, as prostitutes walked the Castello while plots were hatched inside its grand houses.
Braavos has no slavery and will not deal in slaves. This was not
true of Venice, or its marine rival Genoa, which had more unfree men than any other city in Europe. Human cattle in Venice were sold young—boys in their teens, girls a bit older. Most slaves who turned up in Venice were shipped to the city as domestic servants where they could expect to be sexually abused as a matter of course. Others were sent to Crete to work on plantations, an even worse fate. Tartar slaves, horsemen from central Asia, were especially expensive, a third more than others, since it was believed that no Tartar ever betrayed a master—and the Tartars would not sell their own kind nor did they take kindly to those who did.
Some Christians were illegally sold to the Mamluk slave armies in Egypt, and Spanish traveller Pero Tafur recalled: “The seller makes the slaves strip to the skin, males as well as females, and they put on them a cloak of felt, and the price is named. Afterwards they throw off their coverings, and make them walk up and down to show whether they have any bodily defect . . . If a slave dies of the pestilence within sixty days, he will return the price paid.”15 However, in 1381 slavery was abolished in Venice altogether.
Venice was a republic ruled by 150 families, less than 1 percent of the population, and no new clans broke into the aristocracy after 1297; indeed, only twenty-seven families supplied half the members of its 480-man grand council. Their leader, the Doge, “was a mystical figure, rarely glimpsed by the public, who presided over Venice’s longstanding, mystical relationship with the sea, often portrayed as a marriage.”16 The Doge’s state boat, the Bucintoro or Golden Boat, was a luxurious, gilded vessel with two decks and covered with a crimson canopy, rowed by 168 men.
Just as Braavos held an annual Uncloaking festival to celebrate the city’s decision to reveal itself to the world a century after its founders had fled slavery, so in Venice there was the carnival, famously depraved, in which orgies supposedly took place inside the walls of the city’s great houses. Every spring the city also held a ceremony where the Doge tossed a gold ring into the Adriatic to symbolize the city’s “marriage” to the sea, renewing these vows. The Bucintoro sailed past flying the city’s flag, the banner of St Mark, a man at the prow dressed to symbolize justice, holding scales and a sword. As the flagship cruised out into the Adriatic so it was followed by a flotilla of ships, representing the city’s power and accompanied by drums and pipes and cannon. The Archbishop faced the water and mouthed the words: “Grant, O Lord, that for us and all who sail thereon, the sea may be calm and quiet,” at which point the Doge took out a golden ring from his finger and threw it into the sea, announcing “We wed thee, O Sea, in token of our true and perpetual dominion over thee.”17
Likewise, in another free city, Pentos, where “each new year, the prince must deflower two maidens, the maid of the the sea and the maid of the fields. The ancient ritual—perhaps arising from the mysterious origins of pre-Valyrian Pentos—is meant to ensure the continued prosperity of Pentos on land and at sea.”18 However, if things go badly and there is famine or war, the king is sacrificed, which is why it’s not an especially sought-after role.
Venice’s marriage to the sea could be volatile, and few forgot the flooding of January 1106. The sirocco, the notorious wind that comes out of the Sahara and pushes hot air and sand onto southern Europe, had been blowing up, the atmosphere became sultry and there were signs of a coming storm. People noticed moisture on walls, the sea was said to groan, and then the storm broke and rain hammered the lagoon. The Adriatic rose, overwhelming the Lido and swamping the city; an island, the town of Malamocco, was entirely destroyed.
“Wherever water runs” a Venetian can be found selling and buying, so it was boasted, and soon this trade dominance developed into an empire, one the Veneto called the “Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Empire of Romania,” by which they meant they ruled three-eighths of the Roman Empire. And yet this empire was not given to them freely by the many predators found in the sea. The Normans under Robert Guiscard fought them off coast of Albania, and the Venetians responding to their enemy’s courage with primitive torpedoes and ramming logs, sinking and damaging many enemy vessels. Venice soon acquired a series of colonies, including Dubrovnik, which later became the independent Republic of Ragusa. Dubrovnik, a sea-state like Venice, later adopted many innovate ideas during its brief period of independence: it created a health service in 1301, with its first pharmacy opened in 1317 (still operating), and its first public almshouse in 1347; slave trading was abolished in 1417, and an orphanage created in 1438. This remarkable city contributed a huge amount to humanity considering its small size, and added to that proud record in the twenty-first century when it became the location for King’s Landing. (Although some is shot in Malta, and Braavos is actually filmed in Spain, with Yunkai and Pentos shot in Morocco.)19
The growth of a shipping industry led to the invention of insurance as a way of spreading risk; the Thin Man in Braavos, whom Arya is sent to kill by the docks, has a stall selling shipping insurance. Marine shipping contracts were first developed in the fourteenth century in Venice, Genoa, and elsewhere in Italy, although they only really took off in the coffee shops of London in the seventeenth (insurance broker Lloyd’s of London was originally a coffee house, where investors would meet and talk shipping news).
Italy was not the only place where proto-capitalism was flourishing. Just as Braavos is directly across the sea from Westeros, so over the North Sea from England were the Netherlands and the Hanse towns, the “free imperial cities” as they were called. This loosely confederated group of ports on the German Ocean were all mercantile hubs and exercised a fair amount of freedom, among them Lubeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Visby, and Danzig. Like the Free Cities, the Hanseatics were in forested regions by a shivering sea to the north, the Baltic and North Seas. Likewise, they all spoke related languages that descended from the same tongue, in this case German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish.
Both Free and Free Imperial cities relied on trade more than arms and in Tywin Lannister’s phrase, fought with coins. The Netherlands, in particular, would become the most important center of banking and trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The “Easterlings,” as English people called the Dutch and Flemish at the time, were viewed as being upright but also financially rapacious, a reputation that became only more entrenched as the Netherlands developed modern capitalism. As one author put it: “The functionaries of the Iron Bank of Braavos lack the dash of Venetians; instead they share the austere canniness of the moneymen of the Low Countries.”20
The Secret City is flanked by a gigantic statue, the Titan of Braavos, which is similar to the Collosus of Rhodes, a 100-ft high bronze statue of Helios the sun god which had been built in 304BC and was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Not for long, however, as it had collapsed a century later following an earthquake and been left to rot; eventually it was broken up and sold as scrap to a merchant from Edessa, who needed 900 camels to take it away. Although a great loss, there are similar enormous statues still in existence, such as the Guan Tu in Jingzhou which is 190ft tall and weighing 1,320 tonnes, the warlord primed for battle and carrying a sword.21
After 1200, Venice became involved in the Crusades, although criticized by the papacy for trading with Muslims. The empire was an immense undertaking, as it took twenty-five days sailing from Venice to Crete, the same as Bombay to London in 1900, and it took three months to get to Tata on the Black Sea. Nevertheless, there were regular trips from Venice to Alexandria, Beirut, and Constantinople; the Black Sea Venetian merchant convoys went to Alexandria in late August or early September and reached their destination to coincide with the arrival of goods going the other way. The strict timetable all depended on predictable delivery, without which profits would be hit hard. Many got rich, although for the rowers on board the galleys, life was less rewarding, an exhausting existence with food and water always in short supply.
By the late fourteenth century, Venice was shipping four hundred tons of pepper a year from Egypt and huge volumes of trade from the Levant, and some million
pounds of spices were passing through the city each year. Yet they had acquired an acquisitive rival who sought to counter their trade domination.
Genoa, located on the north-west coast of Italy, was surrounded by trees with which to make ships, but no rich land. It had a sheltered port, and its climate was much more pleasant than the lagoon around Venice, which was prone to malaria. The two rivals were opposites in so many ways; the Venetians, forced by nature to work together to stop the lagoon silting up, created large communal enterprirses, while the Genoese were noted for their individualism. The Genoese were also far more innovative and at the forefront of new technology, including clocks and marine charts.
The two cities were almost continually at war during the late middle ages, and a major conflict erupted in 1294 over competition in the Black Sea, a rich source of grain which could only be accessed via Constantinople. Both cities had colonies in the city and, at some point, the Genoese sailors hurled the Venetian bailo, bailif, out of a window and killed a number of merchants. The Venetians reacted angrily and dispatched a captain, Malabrance “the cruel claw,” to attack Galata, Genoa’s colony opposite the Golden Horn.
In 1295, the Genoese sent 165 galleys and 35,000 men into the Mediterranean to destroy their rivals; but the Venetians changed course and reached home. Finally in 1298, the two fleets met off Curzola in the Adriatic, a battle in which 170 galleys were involved. It was the largest maritime battle the republics fought, and only twelve of ninety-five Venetian galleys returned home. During the course of the combat, Genoese admiral Lamba Doria’s son Ottavio was struck by a Venetian arrow next to his father, but he refused everyone’s pity and said “Throw my son overboard into the deep sea. What better resting place can we give him than this spot.”22 He continued fighting and won.
The Genoese captured eight thousand men, and the Venetian admiral Andrea Dandolo, in disgrace, “lashed himself to his flagship’s mast and beat his head against it until he died of a fractured skull, thus depriving the Genoese of the satisfaction of executing him.”23 Yet so many Genoese died that when Admiral Doria stepped ashore at home there was only silence.