Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  To make matters worse, Venetian trade through Smyrna remained at a low ebb, which meant that back in Venice his posting was regarded as of little importance, a fact that was reflected in his meagre salary. Normally a noble appointee would have been able to supplement his income with the aid of his family wealth; Lupazzoli, on the other hand, found that he was barely able to provide for his vast family, to which had now been added numerous grandchildren, a succession of dependent former in-laws and the like. As for keeping up the appearances required of his office, this was becoming all but insupportable – at least in the material sense. However, where maintaining dignity was concerned, he would not be outdone: his dealings with the French consul, who still insisted upon claiming diplomatic seniority, became increasingly acrimonious.

  In 1671 Lupazzoli’s third wife Anna died, having added four more children to his progeny. Within a year he had married his pregnant fourth wife, a servant from Chios called Maria. After giving birth to a second child, she too died, in 1674. Undaunted, the ‘lone wolf’ now married his fifth wife, a local woman from Smyrna who provided him with four children. The last of these was a daughter born in 1682, by which time her father had reached the venerable age of ninety-five.

  A year later the Ottoman Empire once more declared war on Venice, along with its allies in the Holy League, and once again Lupazzoli was reduced to the status of mere agent, though by now trade between Smyrna and Venice had dwindled to the point where there were only a couple of Venetian traders left. This state of affairs was quickly resolved when he was banished from the city as an enemy subject. After the Peace of Karlowitz was finally signed in 1699, the doughty 112-year-old Lupazzoli returned to take up his official post as consul, and once more he was forced to endure the seniority of the French consul, who had remained in place throughout the war. (Louis XIV had maintained his duplicitous policy of covertly offering sympathy to his European neighbours whilst maintaining peace with the Ottomans.) Although Lupazzoli gamely kept up appearances, while seemingly remaining as fit and healthy as ever, it had now been seventeen years since his fifth wife had produced a child, and two years later his age finally began to catch up with him. The following year, in 1702, he eventually died at the age of 115.

  Despite their differences, the French consul had evidently been intrigued by the exceptional qualities of his former adversary, for he now commissioned the writing of a biography of Lupazzoli. This task was given to Lupazzoli’s son Bartolomeo, who had followed his father’s original calling and become a priest. The French consul was eager to discover any features that might have contributed to Lupazzoli’s amazing longevity and his equally amazing sexual potency. Father Bartolomeo duly followed his brief, and revealed that his father’s secret appeared to lie in his abstemious behaviour (in all but one department): ‘His diet consisted of fruit, bread, and water, supplemented by an occasional bowl of soup or a few slices of unseasoned roast meat.’ To replenish his thirst in this hot clime, he seems to have drunk only water: ‘He had never touched wine, brandy, coffee, or sherbert, nor milk since he was weaned. He did not take snuff or tobacco.’ Such was the regimen that was evidently responsible for his longevity, his five marriages and his twenty-four children. However, in the words of the Oxford historian Sonia P. Anderson, ‘Nor was this the end of the tale. Father Bartolomeo had to report that besides his legitimate offspring, the “lone wolf” of Smyrna was responsible for 105 bastards.’

  * All this is by no means as far-fetched as it may sound, and was certainly in the air at the time. This was the motive that had driven no less a figure than Machiavelli to compose his ruthless political instruction-manual The Prince, which had first been published in 1532 and was now established as one of the most widely read works in Italy.

  * Strictly speaking, during this period the sultan did not formally marry the concubines of the harem who produced his children; however, the hierarchy of the harem was such that the favoured women who produced male heirs were, to all intents and purposes, regarded as wives, with the Bash Kadin being the senior and most influential wife. The only woman senior to her was the Valide Sultan, literally ‘Mother of the Sultan’.

  † Such seemingly vicious slaughter was not quite as wanton as might at first appear. In preceding generations it had often been the practice for an ascending sultan’s brothers and half-brothers to be slain, in order to preempt any attempted coup. Later, such male heirs would be confined to the ‘Golden Cage’ in the harem, where they would take no part in politics and have no occupation other than to entertain the concubines and young boys with whom they shared their quarters. Eventually the one chosen to become sultan would be released, while his brothers and half-brothers would be strangled in the traditional manner with a silken cord. Such captivity, and its ever-attendant insecurity, would result m several cases of mental instability amongst ascending sultans.

  * Despite her death, Safiye’s legacy would live on. All subsequent sultans of the Ottoman Empire would be direct descendants of this remarkable Venetian woman.

  * Chief judge of sharia law, appointed by the sultan.

  * Sultan Ibrahim I’s feelings for his harem, with whom he was in the habit of spending his days frolicking in a marble pool on a terrace overlooking the Golden Horn, were particularly volatile. According to contemporary sources, when he suspected that one of the members of his harem had been unfaithful to him, he ordered all 280 of them to be tied up in sacks weighted with stones and thrown into the Bosphorus.

  17

  An Intellectual Revolution

  BY THE MID-SEVENTEENTH century the Grand Tour was becoming a required feature to round off the education of wealthy young English gentlemen, as well as aristocratic young noblemen from countries throughout Europe. And Venice, renowned for the beauty of its unique location as much as its relaxed attitude towards gambling and prostitution, soon became a welcome break after the cultural rigours of Florence and the religious requirements of Rome. Meanwhile at the University of Padua, a new liberalism was infiltrating the world of ideas. The calibre of teachers here was continuing to attract intellectually gifted students from all over Europe. As we have seen, at the start of the sixteenth century, Copernicus had travelled here all the way from Poland, and may well have found at Padua the inspiration for his heliocentric universe. A century later, the young Englishman William Harvey would arrive to study medicine under Hieronymus Fabricius, who was renowned throughout Europe for his pioneering work on anatomy, especially with regard to developing our understanding of the foetus.

  Fabricius himself had studied at Padua under the pioneering anatomist Gabriele Fallopius, after whom the Fallopian tube was named. He was also the first to propose the use of condoms – made from pigs’ intestines – to combat the spread of syphilis. And prior to Fallopius the chair of medicine at Padua had been occupied by the great Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, whose work on anatomy released medicine from the stifling ‘authority’ of Galen. Much as Aristotle had been regarded as the last word on everything from biology to philosophy throughout the medieval era, and Ptolemy’s view of the Earth as the centre of the universe had been similarly sacrosanct, Galen’s view of medicine had since classical Roman times been regarded as unquestionable, especially with regard to anatomy, despite the fact that much of his anatomical knowledge had been gained from dissecting the cadavers of dogs, pigs and goats. In the renaissance of the arts and the humanities there had been a rebirth of classical knowledge, which had led to the questioning and casting aside of the old medieval certainties; now, with the emerging scientific renaissance, it was this very classical knowledge, with all its hindering flaws and mistakes, that would be questioned and cast aside.

  Whilst the twenty-three-year-old Harvey was attending anatomy demonstrations by Fabricius he learned that his master had discovered there were valves in the walls of the veins. Fabricius’ ingenious explanation for this was that the valves prevented all the blood in the veins from sinking to the lower half of the body. Harvey became increas
ingly sceptical of this explanation, but could produce no other answer. According to Galen, the blood in the veins was created by the liver. Half of this flowed through the branching system of veins, where it was eventually ‘consumed’ by the body. The other half flowed to the heart, where it passed through the central wall so that in the other half of the heart it could absorb air from the lungs and become arterial blood. From here it travelled through the branching system of arteries, where it too was ‘consumed’ by the body. This lost blood was continuously being replenished by the liver.

  Harvey’s pondering on the purpose of the valves discovered by Fabricius led him to realise that the blood was not ‘consumed’ by the body, but in fact circulated around it. At the ends of the arterial system it passed through minuscule capillaries into the ends of the veins, allowing it to continue to flow towards the heart (and being prevented from flowing away from the heart by the valves that Fabricius had discovered). In fact, the heart acted as a pump, forcing the blood to keep circulating through this system.

  The seeds of this idea were discovered by Harvey in Padua, though it would be more than twenty-five years before he published in London his revolutionary work De motu cordis (Concerning the Motion of the Heart), which is now regarded as the founding work of modern physiology. This subject is concerned with how the body works, rather than what it consists of, which is the main concern of anatomy. Nevertheless, Harvey’s work would not have been possible without the latest discoveries in anatomy. The succession of great medical figures at Padua had not only broken the stranglehold imposed by Galen’s faulty descriptions, but had led to a completely new understanding of how we think about the body.

  Although Fabricius had nothing but praise for his brilliant young English student, it appears that Harvey was not an easy man to get along with. And ideas were not the only thing he would bring back with him from Padua, when he returned to England in 1602. In the Venetian Republic at the turn of the seventeenth century it was the habit of a young man to wear a dagger. This was not only a display of self-protection, but could also be used as a handy weapon when one became involved in any violent dispute, a frequent occurrence amongst the hot-headed young men of the period. Harvey’s contemporary and friend, the biographer John Aubrey, mentions how Harvey retained this Italian custom when he returned to England, claiming that he was ‘very cholerique [that is, quick-tempered] and … would be too apt to draw his dagger upon every slight occasion’. Harvey’s habit would persist into his old age, long after the custom for wearing such weapons had fallen out of fashion in England with the passing of the Elizabethan age. And it appears that this habit gave his presence an unsettling air, owing to ‘his trick of fingering the pommel while he talked’.

  The notorious exception to Venice’s reputation as a haven of liberal behaviour and ideas occurred around the same time as Harvey’s years at Padua, and concerned the case of Giordano Bruno, who arrived at Padua believing that at least in the Republic of Venice it would be safe to express his new scientific ideas. Bruno had been born just outside Naples in 1548, and at the age of seventeen entered a Dominican monastery to study for the priesthood. However, his intellectual curiosity soon led him to read subjects far beyond orthodox theology, such as astronomy, alchemy and humanism, in all of which he developed original ideas of his own. In astronomy, Bruno came to the conclusion that the sun was the centre of our planetary system, and that the universe was infinite, with each star being a sun at the centre of its own planetary system. (Copernicus had published his heliocentric theory in 1543, but this remained unknown to Bruno, whose speculative ideas regarding the universe went far beyond those of his predecessor.) In contrast to such far-sighted scientific ideas, Bruno also delved into the distinctly unscientific realms of hermetic secrets and the mysticism attached to alchemy. Meanwhile in the course of his study of humanism he read Erasmus, whose ideas led him to adopt the Arian heresy, which declared that Christ had been human and not divine. Bruno was a bold and outspoken character and made no secret of his ideas. Consequently in 1576 he found himself facing a charge of heresy. This was a very serious matter: if found guilty, he could well have been burned at the stake. Bruno acted swiftly: casting off his robes and donning secular clothes, he fled Naples and made his way north in this disguise, eluding those despatched by the clerical court to apprehend him. Even so, his trial went ahead and he was excommunicated in absentia. Afterwards, a dossier concerning Bruno and his activities was forwarded to the Roman Inquisition.

  Not surprisingly, Bruno ended up in Venice, from where he travelled to Padua, in the hope of finding a teaching post. Here he was persuaded by some fellow Dominicans that his chances of employment would be considerably enhanced if he once more donned Dominican robes, but despite this he was unable to obtain an appointment, and for the next seven years he wandered Europe, publishing his ideas and entering into debates with theologians and leading thinkers in such intellectual centres as Geneva, Lyons and Paris.

  In 1583 he arrived in England, where he would remain for two years. At one stage he took up residence at Oxford. Here his arrogant and sarcastic manner of debate, to say nothing of his heretical blend of scientific, humanistic and hermetic ideas, made him few friends. Indeed, a twenty-two-year-old don named George Abbot (who would later rise to become Archbishop of Canterbury) ridiculed him for holding ‘the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still, whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still’.

  Further travels followed, and there is a suspicion that at some stage he may have supplemented his meagre income by acting as a spy, passing on rather more mundane ideas than those expressed in his frequent and varied works, which ranged over a variety of exotic and novel topics, including one on a new memory system that he had invented. 1591 found him attempting to sell his works at the Frankfurt Book Fair.* Here he was befriended by a Venetian nobleman named Zuan Mocenigo, of the distinguished family who had for centuries been providing the city with admirals, diplomats and doges. Mocenigo was deeply interested in Bruno’s new system for improving the memory, and invited him to come and stay at his palazzo in Venice so that he could personally tutor him in how to use this system. By now Bruno was forty-three years old: he was beginning to tire of his continual travelling and longed to return to his native Italy. Surely his troubles with the Church would have been forgotten? Anyway, he would be quite safe in Venice. Furthermore, he had heard that the chair in mathematics had fallen vacant at Padua. Bruno prevaricated over Mocenigo’s offer, indicating that he would travel first to Padua, where he arrived in the late summer of 1591. He foresaw himself using Padua as a base where he would be free to propagate his theories and at the same time deliver lectures incorporating his constant flow of original ideas, attracting students and acolytes from all over Europe. However, it soon became clear to Bruno that he was not going to be offered a post at Padua, so he travelled on to Venice to take up Mocenigo’s offer. Mocenigo immediately put him up at the family palazzo, one of the finest in Venice, the Ca’ Grande on the Grand Canal. The intellectuals of Venice were delighted to discover that this major European thinker had come to live in their midst, and they flocked to the Ca’ Grande to discover his latest ideas.

  Over the years these had developed, but they remained as original and controversial as ever. As indeed they remain to this day. In the scientific sphere he adopted a strictly materialistic approach: he now proposed that everything in the world was made up of tiny indestructible atoms, of different shapes and sizes to account for the variety of material objects. Yet at the same time he persisted in his utterly contradictory magical-mystical ideas. It is difficult to see how Bruno could possibly have believed genuinely in both of these world-views at the same time. Here was a man who seemed to stand with one foot firmly planted in the medieval world of the past (and remnant hermetic ideas from even earlier), while the other stood firmly in the Renaissance world and the enlightened scientific future
that it seemed to be heralding. Bruno was well aware of this glaring contradiction, yet he maintained that in some inexplicable way his occult beliefs and his genuine science had a ‘point of union’. Perhaps the best illustration of this – even if it is in no way a convincing explanation – is to be found in his ideas about the solar system. Bruno was convinced that the Earth and the planets revolved around the sun, yet at the same time he also believed that the solar system was a mystical-magical symbol of the cosmos.