The merchant galley. Its central hold was adapted to form a dormitory on pilgrim voyages to the Holy Land
The merchant galleys, built in the arsenal, were property of the state, chartered out by auction each year to bidders. The aim was to manage entrepreneurial activity for the good of both people and state and prevent internecine competition of the sort that wrecked Genoa. Every detail of this system was strictly controlled. The patrono (organiser) of the winning syndicate had to be one of the two thousand nobles whose families were enrolled in the Golden Book, the register of the Venetian aristocracy, but the sailing captain was a paid employee of the state, responsible for the ship’s safe return. Crew sizes and rates of pay, weapons to be carried, freight rates to be paid, goods to be transported, ports of call to be visited, sailing times, destinations and stopover periods were all stipulated. Maritime legislation was heavy and precise, as were the penalties for abuse. The galleys travelled set routes, like a timetabled service, the details of which, set down in the early 1300s, were to last for two hundred years. At the end of the fourteenth century there were four: those to Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople and the Black Sea, and the long-range Atlantic haul, an arduous five-month round trip to London and Bruges. A century later this had expanded to seven, visiting all the major ports of the Mediterranean. After 1418 Venice also cornered the pilgrim market. Two galleys a year would depart for Jaffa carrying profitable shiploads of pious tourists to wonder at the sights of the Holy Land. In the fifteenth century Venetian galleys quartered the seas with high-value goods while cogs carried the bulk merchandise.
Venice’s genius was to grasp the laws of supply and demand, based on centuries of mercantile activity, and to obey them with unmatched efficiency. The secret lay in regularity. Venetian merchants lived with an acute sense of time. The clocks in St Mark’s Square and in the Rialto fixed the pattern of the working day. On a larger scale the annual pattern of voyaging was dictated by seasonal rhythms far beyond the confines of Europe. The metronomic cycle of monsoon winds over the Indian subcontinent set in motion a series of interconnecting trading cycles, like the meshing cogs in an enormous mechanism, which moved goods and gold all the way from China to the North Sea. Borne west on the autumn winds in the wake of the monsoon (the Arabic mawsim, a season), ships from India departed for the Arabian peninsula in September, carrying spices and the goods of the Orient. These would be trans-shipped to reach Alexandria and the marts of Syria in October. The Venetians’ merchant convoys would depart for Alexandria in late August or early September, within a time slot rigorously dictated by the senate, reaching their destination a month later to coincide with the arrival of these goods. Beirut was set to the same rhythm. The duration of the stays was firmly fixed – Beirut usually twenty-eight days, Alexandria twenty – and enforced with severity. Return was set for mid-December, variable within a month for the hazards of winter navigation. With the snow on the mountains the great galleys would haul themselves back into Venice to mesh with another set of trading rhythms. German merchants, furred and booted, would jingle their way across the Brenner Pass from Ulm and Nuremberg with pack animals for the winter fair. The departure and arrival of the long-distance Flanders galleys would also be synchronised to interlock with this exchange and with the sturgeon season and the silk caravans at Tana.
What Venice had understood was the need for predictable delivery, so that foreign merchants drawn there could be confident that there would be desirable merchandise, worth the long haul over the Brenner Pass in the grip of winter. Venice made itself the destination of choice, profiting individually by the trades and as a state from the element of tax it extracted from the movement of all goods in and out. ‘Our galleys must not lose time’ was the axiom.
It was never a perfect system. There could be delays in the arsenal fitting out the vessels for departure, contrary winds, menacing pirates and political turmoil in any of the countries to which the galleys went to trade. The round trips had a reasonable predictability: three months to Beirut, five to Bruges. In exceptional circumstances, however, the time lags were immense. The shortest round trip on the Tana route was 131 days, the longest 284; in 1429 the Flanders galleys sailing on 8 March overwintered and did not tip the lagoon again until 25 February the following year. In cases of late return, the goods were almost always sequestered, so that when merchants arrived at Venice for the regular trade fairs they could be certain of a healthy stock of merchandise to buy. Customer satisfaction was the key.
Each route conformed to its own rhythm, and the Venetians conferred on these cyclical convoys the name of muda, a word which conveyed a complex set of meanings. The muda was both the season for buying and exchanging spices, and the merchant convoy that carried them. The various different mude played an emotional part in the annual round of the city’s life. The city stirred into intense activity in the run-up to sailings. The arsenal worked overtime through the hot summer days ready for the Levant sailing; as the departure approached there would be a hubbub along the waterfront. Benches were set up for recruiting crews; merchandise and food, oars and sailing tackle were sorted, parcelled up and ferried out to the galleys anchored off shore. The voyage was blessed in St Mark’s or the seafarers’ church of St Nicholas on the Lido and the ships set sail watched by an intent crowd, for some of whom the enterprise contained their ready wealth. When the German pilgrim Felix Fabri left on a pilgrim galley in 1498 it was ceremonially decked out with banners;
… after the galley was dressed they began to get ready to start, because we had a fair wind, which was blowing the banners up high. The crew began with a loud noise to weigh up the anchors and take them on board, to hoist the yard aloft with the mainsail furled upon it, and to hoist up the galley’s boats out of the sea; all of which was done with exceeding hard toil and loud shouts, till at last the galley was loosed from her moorings, the sails spread and filled with wind, and with great rejoicing we sailed away from the land: for the trumpeters blew their trumpets just as though we were about to join battle, the galley-slaves shouted, and all the pilgrims sang together ‘We go in God’s name’ … the ship was driven along so fast by the strength of a fair wind, that within the space of three hours we … had only the sky and the waters before our eyes.
The ritual of departure, the crossing of the threshold of the lagoon to the open sea, were pivotal moments in the communal experience of Venetian people, as well as for outsiders. There was both excitement and apprehension. Wills were written. Some on board would not return.
The merchant galleys regularly carried a handful of young noblemen, recruited as crossbowmen, as apprentices learning the skills of trade and the seafaring life. For many of these ‘nobles of the poop’ this was their first overseas experience. When Andrea Sanudo was preparing for his first voyage to Alexandria in the late fifteenth century, his brother Benedetto gave him copious instructions on how to behave and what to expect and avoid. They ranged widely from behaviour on board ship – treat the captain with reverence, only play backgammon with the chaplain, how to cope with seasickness – to the perils of port life – avoid the prostitutes of Candia: ‘they are infected with the French disease’ – and eating quails in Alexandria.
There was much to learn, both cultural and commercial, about foreign parts. Andrea was advised to shadow the local Venetian agent: ‘Always stay with him, learning to recognise every sort of spice and drug which will be of enormous benefit to you.’ Information was as vital as cash to all merchants voyaging to lands where dealings might be conducted through an interpreter in unfamiliar weights, measures and currencies. Practical handbooks were compiled with trading information on all the concerns of the travelling merchants, and these were widely circulated. Local currency conversions, units of measure, the quality of spices, how to avoid fraud were all covered. One of these, the Zibaldone da Canal, reveals the difficulties of conducting dealings on a foreign shore. In Tunis, it helpfully explains,
… there are many kinds of money. There are two kin
ds of gold coins, the one is called dopla and is worth 5 bezants, and the bezant is worth 10 miaresi, so the dopla is worth 50 miaresi. And the other kind of gold coins is called the masamutina, which is worth half a dopla, and 2 masamutina are worth one dopla, and the masamutina is worth 2½ bezants. Accordingly, the masamutina is worth 25 miaresi.
Local weights and measures could be equally tough, with the wily Christian merchants of Lesser Armenia setting the ultimate challenge:
… wheat and barley is sold by a measure that is called marzapane and by the wish of the Armenians no one can truly tell from one month to another [what this measure might be] because no measure converts with this one, because it increases and decreases at their wish and so the merchants get out of it many times what they give.
An enormous amount of practical information was required: the quantity of fox furs, fish, matting, blocks of wood, lances or walnuts to be loaded in a barrel or bale, the measure for weighing English cloth from Stamford, the Venetian equivalents for olive oil measures in Alexandria or purple dye in Negroponte, the advantages of smuggling gold into Tunis, how to avoid fraud and appraise spices. Frankincense powder might be adulterated with marble dust; nutmegs should be ‘big and firm … you want to pierce the shell with a needle, and if it yields water, it is good; and any other way is not worth anything … The reeds of cassia … should not make a sound when a man shakes them.’ The merchant needed to be quick-witted, armed with a formidable memory (for which commercial courses were available) and an excellent grasp of practical arithmetic as he stepped blinking and groggy down the gangplank at the end of a long sea voyage.
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For all Venetians – novices or old hands – the final destinations, be they Beirut or Tana, Alexandria or Bruges, were territories which they did not control. They traded on the erratic sufferance of foreign powers. Xenophobia, extortion, cheating, political upheavals and commercial rivalry made the merchant’s life terribly insecure – even within the Christian lands. A colony could be sacked in London, as it was in the fifteenth century, but nowhere were the merchant venturers so exhaustingly tested as within the Muslim Levant. Dealings across the frontiers of faith were tensioned by mutual suspicion and the long back story of the crusades. Alexandria, which must have looked so fair to Andrea Sanudo on first sight when spied from out at sea, was a decaying place. ‘Every day one house falls upon another, and the grand walls enclose miserable ruins,’ wrote Felix Fabri in 1498. The cause of much of the devastation was the Christian sack of 1365 – an expedition which Venice had strenuously opposed, but for which it had been apportioned blame by the Mamluk sultan in Cairo. The process of exchange was edgy, fraught with suspicion on both sides, but neither could live without it. On the shores of the Levant in the Middle Ages Venice developed the first efficient operation of a world trade.
European merchants in Alexandria, Aleppo, Damascus or Beirut lived a barricaded life. Apart from their consul and a small group of long-term residents, they were generally forbidden to dwell outside their fondaco – a large enclosed complex of residential buildings provided for their security. Each nation had its own fondaco which contained sleeping quarters, warehousing, kitchens, bakery, a bath house, a chapel – and frequently quite extensive gardens, where exotic animals might roam. The Aragonese in Alexandria kept ostriches and a chained leopard in theirs in the 1480s. The sultan in Cairo provided these fondaci as a service for foreign traders. He wanted to keep his valuable customers safe from the potential hostility of the population, but he also wanted to control them. The key to the outer door was in the care of a Muslim keeper; overnight and during Friday prayers they were locked in from the outside. Within they could live the semblance of an embassy life; wine would be drunk (sometimes in the surreptitious company of visiting Muslims) and worse. When Fabri visited the Venetian fondaco, he was surprised to meet a large pig snuffling in the courtyard, which the Venetians kept out of contempt, but for which they paid the Sultan a handsome sum, ‘otherwise the Saracens would not have allowed it to live and even worse, would have destroyed the house on account of the pig’. Provocations existed on both sides.
From the fondaco, the merchants went forth into the streets of Alexandria in the care of an interpreter to buy and sell. The negotiations were always tough, the abuses numerous. They started and ended with the welcome and farewell of the customs officials who were adept at random deductions, double taxation or confiscation. Scarlet cloth and Cretan cheeses were eyed particularly keenly. The process of spice dealing was fraught. Ascertaining the quality could be tricky, according to a merchant, as the Venetians bought in bulk often ‘without sorting and without picking over … as they come from India, nor do they let us see beforehand what we are going to buy’. Both sides needed the deal but it was a game of brinkmanship. Knowing the fixed period of the muda – and senatorial decrees were peremptory in the matter – Egyptian merchants might wait until the last day to set the price, leaving no time to haggle, or the far worse prospect of returning empty-handed. The transaction could go down to the wire. Fabri watched the final trans-shipment of a spice deal. The giant sacks, five foot wide and fifteen foot long, lay on the quayside, watched by a jostling and intent crowd. The spices had been inspected, weighed and cleared from customs. The galleys were anchored off shore. The sailors rowed across in long boats to load up. At the last moment there was a sudden intervention:
And though all the sacks had just been filled and weighed at the fondaco in the presence of the Saracen officers, and examined at the gates, yet even now when they were just about to be taken on board, the whole contents were spilled out upon the ground so that they might see what was being taken away. And round about this place was a great press, and many came scurrying thither, for [when] the sacks … are emptied there comes hastening a crowd of poor folk, women and boys, Arabs and Africans, and whatever they can grab they steal, and they search in the sand for ginger and cloves, cinnamon and nutmegs.
On the other side, the Venetians were flinty opponents, well versed in the psychology of the deal. When Fabri and his fellow pilgrims tried to negotiate passage back to Venice with a sick boy, they found the sea captains ‘harsher and more unreasonable in the price they asked than Saracens or Arabs, for some demanded from every pilgrim fifty ducats, and when we stuck at paying this, another proud captain said that he would not accept less than a hundred a man’. The boy died in port. The merchant class could be crafty and devious, expert at smuggling gems and gold from the probing officials, capable of embezzlement, tax evasion and flight from a sealed bargain unless severely constrained by punitive Venetian law.
However, on foreign soil it was usually an unequal contest. Despite trading agreements, the sultans might insist on arbitrarily fixing the prices. In 1419 a pepper price of 150–160 dinars a unit was imposed in Alexandria, against the market rate of one hundred. Sometimes Cairo would enforce purchase – or sale of the goods the merchants had brought with them. In Syria the Venetians often fared worse. Landing at Beirut, they travelled to Damascus to buy. On return they might be attacked or the camel and donkey drivers might steal part of their loads. Under the strain of theft, abuse and rapacious extortion patience frequently gave way. In 1407 all the Europeans in Damascus were imprisoned after a brawl; in 1410 they were bastinadoed. The Venetian consul travelled repeatedly to Damascus to plead release of a Venetian subject or to request fulfilment of agreed trading terms. He might be met with understanding – or insouciance. When a consul threatened the withdrawal of all Venetian merchants from Alexandria, the sultan responded that ‘as to the power of you Venetians, and after that of the rest of Christendom, I hold … it not so high as a pair of old shoes’. There was an element of bluff within this – the Mamluks needed the influx of European gold – but the abuses continued. Sometimes the consul himself was beaten and imprisoned.
Driven to distraction, some of the trading nations retaliated. The Genoese raided the coast of Syria; in 1426 a Catalan squadron attacked Alexandria. The Venetians kep
t their distance from armed aggression but paid the price by association. In 1434 they were all expelled from Syria and Egypt at a loss of a massive 235,000 ducats. Their strategy was patience and endless diplomacy. When their merchants were imprisoned they despatched their long-suffering consul to Cairo; when goods were purloined they made a claim; when the spices began to be unacceptably cut with rubbish they used sieves; when the tension became unbearable they prepared to evacuate the whole community. For short periods they suspended the galley service altogether. They faced down the avaricious Sultan Baybars in a long and intense arm-wrestle during the 1430s when he imposed a blanket price-fixing monopoly on the export of all spices, and they broke his attempt to impose his own gold currency on the deals: the purity and reliability of the ducat outgunned its rivals. Underneath was a calculation – that the unpopular Mamluk rulers needed the lucrative inflow of taxed gold to prop up their rule just as much as Venice needed the trade. And they never lashed out. When the Genoese sent armed galleys, Venice sent diplomats – again and again and again.
City of Fortune Page 27