* In its isolation from its Spanish roots, this language would preserve over the centuries the precise enunciation of its sixteenth-century Spanish elements – so much so that in the first half of the twentieth century Spanish literary scholars took to visiting Ladino communities in Venice and Corfu in order to acquaint themselves with the Spanish that Cervantes would have spoken.
* Modern scholarship has gone a long way towards confirming Leon’s thesis.
† Outside Italy, in northern Europe, the Reformation had begun to release thinkers from the strictures of a moribund intellectual orthodoxy, whilst within Italy the power of the Counter-Reformation launched by the Church had only served to put a halt to such speculation.
16
Deepening Decline
DESPITE THE LOSS of Cyprus, and Ottoman control of the eastern Mediterranean coastal cities from Greece to North Africa, Venice still held Crete and remained the leading western European commercial power in the region. From its zenith in around 1500, Venice had settled into a gentle decline throughout the ensuing century, as Spain prospered immensely from its New World trade and Portugal profited from the luxuries transported from the Orient around the Cape of Good Hope. This decline in Venice’s fortunes would accelerate slightly with the coming of the 1700s – though these years remained a period of economic stagnation, rather than actual ruin. Over its long years of prosperity, Venice had built up considerable wealth, and this would not easily be dissipated by its canny businesslike citizens, who not only continued to participate in financing trading ventures ranging from the Americas to the East Indies, but at the same time reaped incomes from their mainland estates.
However, over the earlier years of Venice’s decline a significant social division would gradually open up, leaving the commercial activity of the Republic lacking in that vital spark of enterprise and innovation that had served it so well in the former times of its pre-eminence. By 1610 a noble speaker in the Senate would find himself lamenting to his fellow members that ‘commerce now lacks capital. The nobility takes no more part in trade; all its resources are tied up in funds or in real property, and expended either on house property or on amusements in the city.’ The egalitarian attitude towards making money, which had once so distinguished the Republic, giving it the edge over its rivals, had given way to snobbery: the nobility now considered commerce to be beneath them. This would have a catastrophic effect on many noble families. Whilst the more-distinguished richer families, with their great estates, investments and incomes from their government positions, would grow richer still, the vast majority of noble families would be gradually taxed into poverty. This would bring about a political struggle that would result in a profound transformation of the Republic’s democratic oligarchy. A majority of the nobles in the Great Council would soon number amongst the impoverished families, giving them considerable power. But the rich and powerful families now engineered a constitutional change by which far more of the effective executive power of government was transferred from the unwieldy Great Council to the more efficient Council of Ten. This certainly improved the effectiveness of the Republic’s government, but it meant that an important check on the ruling power of the Council of Ten had been diminished. It also severely limited the democratic nature of the Republic’s government. This had never been widespread at the best of times, but at least many people had believed that they had a say in power, be it ever so indirect. Such belief now vanished.
What had taken place in the oligarchy of noble families also had its effect amongst the population at large. While many prospered, many more were reduced to penury, a distressing tendency that had its effects in all manner of different fields – from tourism to emigration, from civic pride to personal honesty. Court reports and contemporary accounts indicate that gambling, petty thievery, prostitution and even murder all increased. Ignorant tourists became fair game; and knives, formerly worn almost as symbolic ornament, were more readily used for muggings and were drawn to settle disputes. But for draconian measures introduced by the Council of Ten, the city’s reputation as a place of cultured pleasure and leisurely decadence might well have suffered, damaging the tourist trade, which now provided an important source of income to all levels of society.
Despite such strictures, Venice’s decline should be regarded as relative in the overall scheme of things. While other European powers – from England and Holland to Spain and Portugal, along with France and Austria – continued to rise, Venice remained static.
A feel for Venice during this period can be gleaned from the regular despatches of Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador during the first two decades of the 1600s. This was the man who famously wrote: ‘An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ And where better to acquire this skill than amongst the intrigues of Venetian society. According to his biographer, Logan Pearsall Smith, paraphrasing Wotton’s somewhat verbose despatches:
Venice, with its hundreds of churches, monasteries, and gardens, with its ten thousand gondolas, and with the great concourse in its piazze and streets, of men from all nations of Europe and the East, was regarded as the home of pomp and pleasure, and the most admired city of the world … In spite of the decline of Venetian power, the wealth and display of the noble families had gone on increasing; great palaces had been recently built, or were in the process of erection, and the ceremonies of the Church and State, the processions and pageants, which dazzled contemporary visitors, and still shine for us in the productions of Venetian art, had grown in magnificence and pomp.
He continues with a most telling image: ‘Venice now lies like a sea-shell on the shores of the Adriatic, deserted by the organism that once inhabited it.’
Even though it was now a political backwater, Venice could not escape the growing power struggle that was building up in Europe with the emergence of Protestantism in the German and Czech lands, a development that was on the point of plunging the entire continent into violent conflict. To complicate matters further, Italy too was the scene of growing tension between two major external European powers. Spain, which now held Naples and Milan, confronted Austria, which stood poised north of the Alps, already held northern Dalmatia and was opposed to the powerful Pope Paul V. It became increasingly clear that whoever gained control over independent Venice would hold the balance of power over the entire Italian peninsula.
The tension reached boiling point in 1618, when Venice was gripped with hysteria over the so-called ‘Spanish Plot’. The Republic had recently despatched a mercenary army to drive inland the Uskoks, the people of the northern-Dalmatian coastal region, who (with the encouragement of their Austrian masters) had begun preying on Venetian shipping. When this victorious army had returned to Venice, the unemployed mercenaries – the so-called bravi – had taken to roaming the streets brawling, drinking and whoring. To this volatile mix had been added a large number of naval mercenaries who had recently taken part in a victorious seaborne campaign to drive from the Adriatic a fleet despatched by the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish viceroy of Naples.
The Duke of Osuna, seemingly furious that his plans to take Venice had been thwarted, then decided to hatch a bold and highly original plan to accomplish his aim. In the spring of 1618 he sent a coded despatch to the Spanish ambassador in Venice, the aristocratic Marquis of Bedmar, who was already regarded by the authorities with some suspicion. In the words of John Julius Norwich, the marquis’s embassy was ‘the busiest centre of intrigue in the whole of Venice, its basements, anterooms and corridors teeming with sinister slouch-hatted figures whispering together in groups while they awaited audiences with the ambassador’.
The Duke of Osuna’s despatch instructed the Marquis of Bedmar secretly to hire all the bravi and unemployed naval mercenaries roaming the streets of the city and employ them in a plan to storm and seize the Doge’s Palace, thus instituting a coup d’état. This would be supported by a force of several hundred fully trained Spanish soldiers, who would be infiltrated into
the city in disguise. The likelihood of such a plan remaining secret, let alone coming together in any coordinated fashion, was remote from the start. Yet ironically its failure came about through religious differences, which were all but irrelevant to the issue at hand. A Protestant French mercenary officer by the name of Balthasar Juven, who decided that he had no wish to see the power of Catholic Spain increase, betrayed the Spanish Plot to the Council of Ten. To overcome the plot, the Council of Ten knew that it had to act at once. Two bravi were immediately seized and hanged, their bodies left dangling by a single leg on gallows erected between the two columns of the Molo, the traditional public humiliation for traitors, a practice that had in fact fallen into abeyance over recent years. As intended, this spectacle created a sensation: the city was gripped with hysteria and the rumours had soon reached every district. Word spread amongst the bravi that their secret plot had been betrayed; they were quickly rounded up, incarcerated and put to torture. Out of their confused and conflicting confessions the truth in all its haphazard ineptitude was soon revealed. The ringleaders, along with around 300 bravi, were executed – though no action could be taken against the Marquis of Bedmar, owing to his diplomatic status and aristocratic rank (which included a number of powerful family connections in Italy that Venice could ill afford to antagonise). However, the publicising of the plot proved a propaganda coup, embarrassment enough for the Duke of Osuna, and the whole affair was condemned by Sir Henry Wotton in the strongest possible terms as ‘the foulest and fearfullest thing that hath come to light since the foundation of the city’.
This is strong language to describe what would on the surface appear to have been a fairly inept minor plot (even if its intentions were of the most serious nature). Indeed, this conspiracy may not have been quite all that it seemed. Certain mysterious elements were never fully cleared up. According to plans extracted by torture from a few sources, the Duke of Osuna intended to sail his fleet to within sight of the Lido, where he would land a Neapolitan force under his own command. Such a move would have been impossible without the cooperation of the Venetian authorities, and many suspect there was a plot-within-the-plot, to which only a few of the most powerful in the city were privy. According to this version, the Venetians had cooperated with Osuna, who was scheming to rid Naples of Spanish domination and bring the whole of southern Italy into the Venetian sphere of influence. Such a powerful alliance would soon have united the whole of Italy, re-establishing the Italians as a major power in Europe, a dream that had persisted since the glory days of the Roman Empire. A united Italy would thus have been able to resist Spain, France, Austria and the threat of the Ottoman Empire, possibly even laying the foundations for a re-emergence of power not seen since classical times.*
Convincing evidence of such a scheme-within-a-scheme in the so-called ‘Spanish Plot’ is admittedly fragmentary and unreliable. However, one telltale fact remains: in the course of eradicating the plot after its premature discovery, the Venetian authorities went to great lengths to murder anyone Spanish, Neapolitan or Venetian who was known to have had contact with Osuna. As for Osuna himself, he remained silent on the matter – neither denying nor confirming the rumours that quickly passed through the courts of Italy. And besides, from now on he would have more pressing matters to consider. For 1618 saw the outbreak in Europe of the catastrophic Thirty Years War.
What began as a religious conflict within the Holy Roman Empire between Catholics and Protestants would eventually involve the major powers in Europe, such as Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bohemia and Italy itself. Venice naturally sided against Spain, but apart from a couple of defeats whose effects were nullified elsewhere, managed for the most part to remain on the sidelines. Much like England, it was aided in this by astute diplomacy and its fortunate geographical location on the periphery of Europe. The result of the Thirty Years War was the commercial, agricultural and social destruction of large swathes of northern Europe, the bankruptcy of nations and an unprecedented loss of life. Whole regions were reduced to barren overgrown fields infested with carrion and scavengers, entire villages were simply obliterated from the map, and provincial cities reduced to ghost towns. Civil order disappeared, and bands of desperate brigands roamed the countryside.
Europe was left exhausted, and the beneficial advances following upon the Renaissance were halted – though by this stage Renaissance humanist ideas were too firmly entrenched in European civilisation to disappear altogether. (After all, they had played a major role in sparking the Thirty Years War in the first place.) However, the Enlightenment, which might naturally have evolved out of the late Renaissance, was set back by many decades, and in some cases by almost a century.
Following the spread of slaughter and war came pestilence and the bubonic plague. And from this Venice did not escape. In the summer of 1630 the plague swept across Lombardy, spread largely by invading Landsknechte (German mercenaries) besieging Mantua some sixty miles to the west. In July it reached Venice: during the summer heat the fetid canals and putrid detritus were at their worst, which only contributed to the widespread fear of this disease, whose means of contagion remained unknown, but was certainly thought to be spread by malodorous and unhygienic conditions. This was the time when the Venetian ‘plague doctors’ would don their distinctive outfit, which was invented in the previous century but only came into widespread use sometime later. This guise consisted of a cowled wax-covered black robe impregnated with aromatic oils and herbs. Beneath the hooded head their faces were rendered eerily inexpressive by large, round, rimmed glasses (intended to prevent the disease from entering the body through their eyes); the rest of his face was covered by a white mask, from which protruded a grotesque, long beaklike nose whose nostrils were protected by gauze (intended to filter the air). Such sinister figures were able to offer little by way of succour to the afflicted and served mainly to stigmatise the stricken abodes – from palazzi to slum tenements – that they were seen to enter. This outfit distinguished the doctors from other members of the population, enabling them free passage between districts of contagion and those that had remained free of the disease, though needless to say their very appearance was enough to spread terror. During the first months of the 1630 outbreak no fewer than 24,000 are known to have fled the city for the mainland.
The population of Venice had in fact never fully recovered from the plague of 1575–7, which had carried off Tintoretto and reduced the population by more than a quarter from its zenith of 190,000. By 1630 the population had gradually increased to almost 150,000, but over the ensuing sixteen months of plague it would be reduced by one-third of that number. According to the records, two years after the plague had abated in October 1631 the city population stood at only just over 102,000, reduced to the level it had been at two centuries previously, prior to its rise to imperial greatness.
Relations between Venice and the Ottoman Empire had been healed in the years since the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. One factor contributing to this uneasy alliance was the mutual development between Venice and the Ottoman Empire of their lucrative maritime trade. Venice remained the leading trading partner with the Ottoman Empire, despite increasing inroads into the eastern-Mediterranean market by the French, the Dutch and even the English. However, perhaps the main reason for the improvement in Ottoman–Venetian relations during these years was the unexpected influence of a Venetian woman who became known as Safiye.
Safiye had been born Sofia Baffo in 1550 on the strategic Venetian island of Corfu, where her father, the scion of a respected noble family in Venice, had been appointed governor. During the early 1560s, on a trip home to her family, the ship on which she was travelling had been attacked by Corsair pirates and she had been taken prisoner. Such a prize – a beautiful, educated young European virgin of a noble family – had quickly been sold to the harem of the sultan’s son, Murad, in Constantinople. Here she had given birth to a son in 1566. Eight years later, in 1574, Murad had ascended to
the sultanate as Murad III, with Safiye becoming his first wife and Bash Kadin (Chief Woman of the Harem).* Making use of this powerful position, Safiye had skilfully and stealthily undermined the pervasive influence of Murad III’s mother, Nur Banu, who had effectively run the empire in league with the Grand Vizier. Safiye had then used her dominating influence over Murad to ensure good relations between Venice and Constantinople.When Murad III died in 1595 she had moved swiftly and ruthlessly to protect her power, having eighteen of her husband’s nineteen sons strangled.† This had left the way open for Safiyes own weak-willed son to succeed as Sultan Mehmet III, and she would rule as Valide Sultan, though in this instance her power was more akin to that of regent.
During this period, relations with Venice had continued for the most part to be diplomatically cordial. Yet, in the interests of commerce, Safiye had also maintained relations with Venice’s rivals. She had even written to Queen Elizabeth I of England, who sent her a modern horse-drawn carriage, in which Safiye took to driving about Constantinople to inspect her city. It was during this period that she instigated the construction of the last great classical mosque, the Yeni Cami, which to this day dominates the southern shore of the Golden Horn overlooking Galata Bridge: the full name of this architectural masterpiece is Yeni Valide Cami (New Mosque of the Valide Sultan); likewise the Malika Safiya mosque in Cairo is named after this Venetian matriarch of the Ottoman Empire.
However, over the years Safiye had made several powerful enemies, and in 1602 she herself was strangled in the harem at the behest of a rival faction.* The following year her son Mehmet III died, and Venice now lost its favoured status amongst the Ottoman allies, with relations soon beginning to deteriorate. Although the two nations remained mutually dependent upon their, maritime trade, their ships now intermittently clashed in the shipping lanes, and on occasion both sides resorted to outright piracy. By the early decades of the seventeenth century Venetian trading agents in Constantinople were down to single figures, though admittedly Smyrna had now eclipsed the Ottoman capital as Venice’s main trading port in the north-eastern Mediterranean, and neither of these compared with the likes of Alexandria, Aleppo or Beirut.
Venetians Page 29