Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  Venice may have been ‘the seat of opera’, but in many other respects the city had, by the second half of the eighteenth century, become a provincial backwater compared with the capital cities of the great powers that now controlled the destiny of Europe. And Goldoni was well aware of this. It was time for him to leave what his biographer Timothy Holme characterised as ‘the dainty powdered and prattling world of Venice where corruption and decay were so lovingly disguised with silks and perfumes’. The attention of Voltaire made Goldoni realise that it was possible for him to achieve fame and fortune in the greatest cultural city of them all, namely Paris. In May 1762 the fifty-five-year-old Goldoni and his wife left Venice, taking a leisurely four months to reach their destination. Here, after some initial difficulties, he began to achieve a modicum of success, writing in French, which he spoke fluently, though with a pronounced Italian accent. His work was put on at the Comedie-Francaise, and King Louis XV invited him to Versailles, where he became a royal tutor and was given a state pension. But Goldoni no longer worked so hard, preferring instead to enjoy the delights of Europe’s most sophisticated society. Instead of cups of Venetian coffee driving him on to work night and day, he drank chocolate and played cards, letting it be known that ‘I almost always accept invitations to lunch’. But not to dinner: he still felt the need to write, and started his memoirs. He died in France in 1793, just a few days short of his ninety-sixth birthday.

  Once, the likes of Marco Polo had left Venice to explore the outermost limits of the known world, and beyond, in an attempt to expand the Republic’s trading empire. Now its leading artists were forced to leave the city and seek their fortune elsewhere, in the great capitals of Europe, amongst which Venice no longer numbered. Vivaldi had gone to Vienna, Goldoni and others to Paris; even Goldoni’s great rival, Baretti, eventually left for London, where he became a popular member of Dr Johnson’s circle. Such was the city’s continuing decline.

  * The word ‘baroque’, which especially characterised both the music and the architecture of the period, takes its name from the Portugese word barroco, meaning ‘an irregularly shaped pearl’. In music, it preceded the classical period.

  Part Four

  Dissolution and Fall

  19

  The Last Days

  THE 1699 TREATY of Karlowitz had effectively marked the end of Ottoman territorial ambitions with regard to the heart of eastern Europe, but the elements of the ‘empire’ that Venice regained in the Aegean and the Peloponnese under the terms of the treaty were another matter. In Turkish eyes, such possessions would always represent a threat, though for fifteen years nothing was done about this. However, when the Venetians intercepted a Turkish ship in the Adriatic, the Ottoman Empire used this as a pretext to declare war against Venice in December 1714. This belated attempt to assert Ottoman domination was organised by Grand Vizier Damat Ali, who now effectively wielded the power of Sultan Ahmed III. In 1715, in a well-prepared two-pronged attack, the Turkish fleet sailed south to attack Venetian coastal strongholds in the Aegean, the Peloponnese and other outposts, while an Ottoman army marched south through Thessaly (northern mainland Greece) into the central Peloponnese. The Venetian forces in the region proved unprepared, undermanned, ill-equipped and unwilling to fight. (Bernardo Balbi, the Venetian commander of the Aegean island of Tinos, even went so far as to surrender before the Turkish fleet had arrived; a deed for which he would be lucky not to be sentenced to death on his arrival back in Venice, instead being gaoled for life.)

  During the summer of 1715 the Turkish forces swept all before them, taking all Venetian possessions in the Aegean, overrunning the Peloponnese and even taking Venice’s last remaining outposts in Crete at Souda Bay and Spinalonga. Emboldened by this success, Damat Ali launched Turkish forces north through the Balkans and west towards the Venetian Ionian islands, where Corfu guarded the entrance to the Adriatic. Though the Venetian authorities had initially been slow to act, they now speedily appointed the great German mercenary general Matthias von der Schulenburg as military governor of Corfu, where he immediately set about building up the defences of the island’s formidable fortress. However, when the Ottoman fleet arrived off Corfu on 5 July, ready to disembark a 33,000-strong invasion force, the promised reinforcements had yet to arrive from Venice. Schulenburg decided against trying to defend the island and tactically withdrew to the fortress of Corfu Town, organising the local inhabitants as support for the inadequate Venetian garrison. The island was quickly overrun, apart from the fortress itself. Here the invaders encamped beneath the walls, preparing to wait through the hot months of summer for what promised to be a long, but ultimately successful siege.

  At this stage the war took an unexpected turn. The Turkish advances in the Balkans had prompted the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, ruler of Austria, to form an alliance with Venice. In August, news reached the Turks besieging Corfu that the Imperial Army, under its commander Prince Eugene of Savoy, had won an overwhelming victory at the Battle of Peterwardein (modern Petrovaradin, on the Danube fifty miles north-west of Belgrade). The Turkish commander at Corfu now realised there was no time for an extensive siege. If the fortress was not taken quickly, he was liable to be attacked from the rear, or simply cut off. In the early hours of 18 August, under cover of darkness, the Ottoman forces launched a surprise all-out attack on the fortress.

  Woken by the screeches of the charging Turks, Schulenburg rushed to take charge of the defences, which were soon being defended by the entire population – including bearded orthodox priests, women in peasant dress and even children. The Greeks and Venetians were soon driven back from the outer defences, but managed to hold out behind the solid high walls of the inner bastion, despite heavy artillery fire. After six hours of fighting Schulenburg decided to take the initiative. At the head of 800 chosen men, he slipped out of a small side-gate in the walls and quickly outflanked the Turkish line, before launching a surprise attack from the rear. In the ensuing confusion the Turks fled in disarray, abandoning their guns as they tried to get back to their own lines. More than 2,000 of them were cut down by Schulenburg and his men.

  Later that day the Turkish commander withdrew his lines in order to recoup his forces in preparation for a further more powerful assault that would overrun the walls. But that night a violent storm broke, with high winds and torrential rain. The tents of the Turkish camp were blown away in the wind, the trenches filled with water and the encampment was reduced to a quagmire. Meanwhile the offshore Ottoman fleet was blown from its moorings, and in the resulting chaos ships rammed into each other, splitting their hulls and sinking.

  Next morning, when the winds abated, the defenders in the fortress spied sails making their way up the channel between Corfu and the mainland. This was the allied Hapsburg fleet sailing to the relief of the beleaguered fortress. When Schulenburg sent out a patrol to reconnoitre outside the walls, they found the shattered army camp deserted. The Turks had fled, leaving the remnants of their tents, their artillery, provisions and equipment, and even a number of wounded. They soon learned that the Turkish besiegers had been picked up by the few remaining ships of the Ottoman fleet, which had set sail for the open sea on a stiff easterly breeze with a flotilla of allied ships in pursuit. In all, the Turks had lost 15,000 men in the course of the seven-week siege. Never again would Turkish warships venture into the Adriatic.

  When the victorious Schulenburg finally made it back to Venice, the grateful Great Council presented him a bejewelled ceremonial sword and a pension of 5,000 ducats for life. So touched was Schulenburg that in 1718, at the age of fifty-seven, he took up residence in the Palazzo Loredan on the Grand Canal, living out his retirement in Venice. Here he proved himself to be an art collector of considerable taste, assembling a fine collection that included works by Raphael and Giorgione. At the same time he also supported a number of contemporary artists, as well as enjoying a reputation as a convivial host.

  After Corfu, the tide of the war turned against the Turks. With
Venetian confidence restored, the Republic assembled twenty-seven ships off the Ionian islands and sailed for the Dardanelles with Admiral Ludovico Flangini in command. On 12 June 1717 Flangini encountered a Turkish fleet of forty-two ships near Mount Athos in northern Greece. Fighting continued for four days and nights, with the fleets manoeuvring for advantage under the clear moonlight. On 16 June, Flangini was shot by a Turkish archer, but insisted upon being carried up to the poop deck of his ship, from where he was able to witness, in his dying moments, the victory of the Venetian fleet.

  Flangini was succeeded by Andrea Pisani, who the following month linked up with the papal and Portugese fleets. On 19 July this allied fleet encountered a Turkish fleet of fifty ships off Cape Matapan, south-west of the Peloponnese. The ensuing hard-fought battle was indecisive, but the Turkish fleet eventually withdrew after losing fourteen ships, while the allies lost but three. By now the Ottoman forces were being forced into retreat by Prince Eugene in the Balkans, as well as by the resurgent Venetians and their allies in Greek waters. The Venetians were poised to take back the Peloponnese; but before they could act, news came through that the Turks had agreed a peace with the Austrians. The Venetians were furious at being thwarted.

  The actual peace negotiations were held in May 1718 at Passarowitz (modern Pozarevac, thirty miles south-east of Belgrade), and the Venetian delegation arrived in no mood for compromise, determined to reclaim all the territories of the empire they had lost in the early stages of the war. The head of the Venetian delegation was the sixty-four-year-old Carlo Ruzzini, a man of wide diplomatic experience, who had represented the Republic at the negotiations nineteen years previously, which had resulted in the Peace of Karlowitz. However, Ruzzini was quickly made to realise that Venetian wishes now counted for little on the international scene, even though the Republic had played such a leading role in the fight against the Turks. The Austrians had their own agenda: they wished for a speedy conclusion to the negotiations so that they would be free to pursue their own military objectives in Europe. For six long hours Ruzzini argued the Venetian case: the restoration of the Peloponnese, the return of Tinos and Aegean ports, as well as the re-establishment of the strategic Cretan outposts at Souda Bay and Spinalonga. But no one was listening. When the treaty was signed, Venice was lucky to be given Cythera (the southernmost of the Ionian islands), some strategic ports along the eastern Adriatic coast and a number of fortresses to defend the Dalmatian hinterland. Ruzzini returned to Venice humiliated, though he was not blamed for this loss of face. Instead, he was rewarded with the appointment of ambassador to the Ottoman court, and during his last years he would be appointed doge, before his death at the age of seventy-eight in 1735.

  Venice still retained an empire, but this was now reduced to a size that had not been seen since the early fourteenth century. On the other hand, this was the final delineation of Venetian overseas territory: an empire that would remain intact through the ensuing eighty years. Venice may have been reduced to a minor power on the international scene, but its skilful diplomacy would prevent it from becoming dragged into the struggles between the major European powers throughout much of the rest of the century. Indeed, during its long, gradual decline Venice would achieve a stability that had often eluded the city during the days of its greatness. Such stability ensured that it now earned much of its living from tourism rather than as a leading commercial power. Trade continued as before, but elsewhere the commercial powerhouses of Europe were empire-building on a global scale and embarking upon an era of industrial revolution that would far outstrip the technological marvels of the Arsenale, which had once been one of the wonders of the Western world.

  The beauty of the canals and the palazzi, the abundance of courtesans and prostitutes, the opera and so many fine works of art, as well as the joys of gambling, were now the main attractions of the city. Carnival, with its fancy-dress balls and public revelry conducted behind the anonymity of masks permitting all manner of blatant promiscuity, proved such an attraction that it was extended from the weeks between Christmas and Lent to a period of five whole months. Rich tourists on the Grand Tour were able to take full advantage of the much-vaunted liberty of Venice, even if they had to be protected from the avarice and thievery of its citizens by an increasingly repressive Council of Ten. Spies were everywhere, reporting on everything from the latest gossip of the Rialto and the rumours in the coffee houses to the tittle-tattle of the gambling rooms. Yet tourists knew they were perfectly safe so long as they did not step out of line. Indeed, many found excitement in the ‘bit of intrigue, even of danger’ lurking in ‘the curious and murky quarters’ that lay behind the historic attractions of the city.

  However, when the controversial French political writer Montesquieu visited Venice in 1728, he could not resist the temptation to make a study of the city’s constitution and political life. According to a contemporary commentator, ‘he wrote much and inquired more’. When informed that his activities had come to the attention of the Council of Ten, who had ordered his arrest, he immediately attempted to flee the city on a boat for the mainland. Yet as he did so, ‘he saw several gondolas approaching, and row round his veffel: terror feized him, and in his panic he collected all his papers which contained his Observations on Venice, and cast them into the sea.’ Later Montesquieu learned that he had been the victim of a practical joke. Even so, such an anecdote is illustrative of the pervasive fear inspired by the Council of Ten’s spies.

  The coffee houses that had sprung up in Venice to purvey this exotic Levantine beverage amidst informal social circumstances had, from the outset, proved popular with locals and visitors alike. The Venetians first encountered coffee in Constantinople, where it had arrived in the late sixteenth century; by 1638 it was being commercially imported into the Republic, and soon after this the first caffè opened. In the words of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, in contrast to the tavern, the coffee house provided ‘a much-needed focus for the social activities of the sober’. So popular did these prove that a century or so later the city had nearly 200 coffee houses, with no fewer than thirty-five of them located in the arcades of the Piazza San Marco. The most famous of these, the Caffe Florian, had opened in 1720; it would later be described by an English visitor as consisting ‘of some half dozen very small rooms, almost to be called cells’. Similar ‘cells’ were to be found in all public establishments in Venice, a development imposed by the Council of Ten to prevent populous gatherings that might give rise to political discussion, though from the outset coffee houses became favoured as places for gathering news (political or otherwise), with copies of the Gazzetta and similar early newspapers being sold over the counter. The professions, artists and other like-minded groups each tended to favour chosen coffee houses for their own particular purposes; thus Casanova is known to have favoured the Caffe Florian because it was the first establishment to permit the entry of women.

  Another popular gathering place of the period was the gambling establishment, which for similar political reasons was at this time frequently located in a small house, or casino in Venetian. As we have seen from the lives of figures such as Leon da Modena, gambling had for centuries been an obsession with citizens of the Republic: dealing with the risks involved in maritime commercial ventures, when one was liable to lose everything in case of shipwreck, meant that gambling was in their blood. Well understanding this predisposition, the authorities had originally banned all public gambling, though they were well aware that this activity continued in private houses, as well as in nefarious semi-private games organised in various dens. (The inveterate gambler and mathematician Cardano describes in his autobiography an incident in such a house. Whilst in the process of losing all his money, Cardano noticed that his opponent had marked the cards. Whereupon he leapt up, slashed his opponent across the face with his dagger and grabbed the money. Outwitting his host’s spear-wielding servants, he fled into the night-shrouded maze of streets, eventually falling into a canal …)*

  T
he advent of public gambling in Venice is largely due to the architect Nicolò Barattieri, who as early as 1181 was responsible for building the first bridge across the Grand Canal, a pontoon construction that was to be the forerunner of the present Rialto Bridge. Barattieri was a man of great ingenuity, combined with a very Venetian eye to the main chance, and some years later offered to solve a problem that had for some time been bothering the doge and the Signoria. Almost a hundred years previously two large columns had been shipped in from Constantinople as spoils of war. (Originally there were three columns, but one of them fell into the sea as it was being unloaded.) The two granite columns proved so heavy and unwieldy that no one could work out how to haul them upright, and for almost a century they simply lay abandoned on the quayside of the Molo. It was now that Barattieri offered his services, assuring the doge that he had devised a scheme that could raise the pillars upright. This involved a sailor’s technique known as ‘watering the rope’. Barattieri ordered a heavy pivot of stone to be placed against the foot of the pillar, then he attached the head of the column by means of a hemp rope to a strong upright post. Next the hemp rope was doused with water, causing its diameter to expand and its length to decrease, thus raising the head of the column a few inches from the ground so that a wedge could be placed beneath it. This was repeated with increasingly short lengths of rope until gradually, to the delight of the increasing crowds of onlookers, the column was raised.