Nicolò set about rearranging, editing and weaving the content of what remained of the five surviving letters into a unified narrative, padding generously and adding new information along the way. He then drew a map of the region where the travels took place, based “on an old and rotten chart we still had in our house,” but no doubt consulting other cartographic sources available to him. “I think it’s come out rather well,” he noted, pleased with himself. “It will certainly enlighten interested readers who might otherwise have trouble understanding the narrative.” To be sure, the Zen map had its share of incongruities. But Nicolò had reason to be satisfied: by contemporary standards it appeared to be a great step forward in the geographical knowledge of the North Atlantic.
RAMUSIO’S MUCH-ANTICIPATED second volume of the Navigationi et viaggi was mostly devoted to Asia. It was built around Marco Polo’s travels but it included more recent reports on Persia, Tartary, Russia and the Black Sea by Venetian ambassadors. Scandinavia was also part of the volume because it was considered an extension of the Asian continent. Thus Nicolò’s labor of love seemed a perfect fit: after all, Frislanda, Estlanda, Islanda, Engroneland and Estotiland2 were seen as an extension of the Scandinavian world. Ramusio, who knew Nicolò well through their work in the Senate, was familiar with the voyages of the Zen brothers. Although there is no evidence that he ever planned to include them in the second volume of his collection, I imagine he was certainly open to the idea and discussed the matter with his closest friends and advisors.3
However, the publication of that second volume was plagued by delays. Ramusio, who did not want to keep his readers waiting, decided to go ahead with the third volume, on the New World, which included firsthand accounts of Columbus’s voyages and narratives by Peter Martyr, Oviedo de Guzmán, Hernán Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Coronado, Giovanni da Verrazano and Jacques Cartier. Volume three came out successfully in 1556.
One possible cause for the long delay in the publication of the second volume—but this is mere conjecture on my part—were the secret negotiations Ramusio was carrying forward at the time. In the early 1550s, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Navigationi et viaggi, the Republic contacted Sebastian Cabot and discreetly put forward the idea that he lead a Venetian exploratory mission to find a northwest passage to Cathay under the Arctic Pole. Sebastian, a Venetian citizen then living in England, was the obvious candidate for the job. Son of John Cabot, who had reached North America in 1497, he was a great navigator and explorer in his own right. Initial talks with the Venetian ambassador in London were encouraging and the parties decided they should be continued in Venice. Ramusio was entrusted with this delicate dossier, possibly on account of his geographical knowledge. The immediate task was to find a pretext to bring Sebastian to Venice without raising suspicions in London. It was decided that the Seigneury would summon him to settle certain matters related to family properties.
In any discussion about the search for a northwest passage, Ramusio and indeed Sebastian himself are bound to have brought up the voyage of the Zen brothers. And it is unlikely Ramusio would have agreed to make the Zen narrative and the map public while the Republic was secretly trying to set up a mission to that region. By 1556, however, talks with Sebastian had broken down, possibly because the English ambassador in Venice, having been informed of the talks by his spies at the Doge’s Palace, had managed to scuttle them. It does not appear Sebastian came to Venice. Instead, he turned his attention to the Arctic Sea north of Russia and helped to organize several unsuccessful expeditions to find a northeast passage to China.
As it turned out, the fruitless talks with Sebastian were to be Venice’s last, half-hearted attempt to play a role in the Age of Discovery.
THE FOLLOWING summer, Ramusio retreated to the peace and quiet of his villa near Padua to finish editing the intractable second volume. But he developed a case of petechia and purplish spots soon appeared all over his body. He weakened very quickly—he may have contracted typhoid fever as well—and on July 10 he died, leaving the work unfinished.
Tommaso Giunti, the printer, was devastated by the death of his close friend and associate. He assured his readers that the ill-starred second volume would be available by the end of the year, but on November 4, 1557, a devastating fire broke out among the presses and the print shop was reduced to a pile of ashes. Giunti was inconsolable. “The loss has been very substantial,” he lamented. “Several of the texts which Ramusio had prepared and were ready to go to press went up in flames together with a number of maps.”
Was the story of the Zen voyages among those destroyed by the fire? In the light of the controversy that has surrounded the Zen map for so long, the question takes on more than a mere bibliographical interest. It would have been useful to know whether Ramusio, a very diligent and widely respected editor, had actually gone through the material himself and put his stamp of approval on it before dying. In the absence of any evidence one can only guess what his opinion might have been.
As a rule, Ramusio preferred to publish eyewitness accounts drawn from original manuscripts. Admittedly, Nicolò had used fragments of five badly damaged letters and a chart to stitch together a narrative. That alone would probably not have disqualified the story: Ramusio readily acknowledged that many manuscripts came to him “damaged and filled with mistakes,” and this did not prevent him from publishing them, usually after very intense editing sessions. “I hesitate a long time before publishing the documents I receive,” he explained, “because I cannot swear on the quality of the material. But after hesitating, I usually let myself be swayed by my desire to leave for future generations information that might turn out to be useful to them.”
Still, my feeling is that Ramusio had decided to leave the Zen story out of the second volume. Not so much because he didn’t find it convincing—his editorial policy, we have just seen, was “when in doubt, print”—but because it was a heavily edited text prepared by someone other than himself. By his own admission, Ramusio was a hands-on editor, a perfectionist who worked on his texts obsessively during his “many sleepless nights.” He would have resisted the inclusion in his series of a story “packaged” by another editor—even an eminent Venetian like Nicolò.
The truth is that by the early summer of 1557, only days before Ramusio’s death and weeks before the fire at the Giunti press, Nicolò was already making plans to publish the story elsewhere. Who did he call on? Marcolini, of course, who immediately petitioned the Council of Ten for permission to print. The Riformatori dello Studio di Padova—the commission in charge of overseeing printing rights—sent the manuscript to two of their habitual readers: Nicolò Robusto Cipriota, a Carmelitan monk, and Alfonso de Ulloa, a freelance translator of Spanish texts. Both readers thought the book was “worthy to be printed as there is nothing against religion, good morals or the State.”4
Marcolini must have been thrilled by this unexpected turn of events. I checked his list for 1558 and it was rather dull: a life of the doges, a new edition of Nicolò Zen’s book on the origins of Venice and a couple of classics—Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Cicero’s Epistles. The Zen voyages were just what he needed to jazz things up a little. He went straight to work and by the end of the year produced what turned out to be one of the season’s hits. The book was printed in an elegant italic type; it had a clean layout and lovely decorative motifs. Marcolini was an experienced copywriter and he assured his readers they would discover “wondrous things about wars and cultures, about the way people live and the clothes they wear, about landscapes and animals and many varieties of fish under the Arctic Pole, where the cold is very great and there is much ice and snow.”5
* * *
1 In the fifteenth century the Venetian Republic expanded its mainland possessions to gain hegemony over the vast and fertile plains of the Po Valley. Pope Julius II felt the papal territories, which bordered in the north with the Republic, were increasingly under threat. In 1509 he formed an alliance with France and S
pain, two powerful states which had developed ambitions of their own in northern Italy. The ostensible purpose of the League of Cambrai—after the name of the town where the alliance was signed—was to fight the growing menace of the Ottoman Empire. But the immediate objective was to curb Venetian expansion in northern Italy. The mercenary army in Venice’s pay was no match for the league and was crushed at the battle of Agnadello. The Venetian strongholds on the mainland collapsed one after the other. In a matter of weeks, the Republic lost all the territory it had gained in a century of expansion. Many saw the humiliating defeat at Agnadello as God’s punishment for the hubris that had infected the Republic, not to mention the loose morals that had made the city a symbol of greed and depravity. Andrea Gritti, a fiery and courageous young patrician, led the struggle for Venice’s redemption. He recaptured Padua and other cities on the mainland. Meanwhile, the League of Cambrai broke apart as the pope and the king of Spain turned against France, their erstwhile ally. Venice seized the moment, siding with the young French king, Francis I. In 1515, the French won a decisive battle at Marignano with the help of the Venetians. As a result, France consolidated its presence in Piedmont while Venice regained most of the provinces lost after Agnadello. The Republic had learned its lesson, though, and it gave up its aggressive expansionism, opting instead for a prudent policy of neutrality.
2 In earlier centuries, spelling was nonstandardized, and sources offer several variants for the place-names in the Zen story. To avoid confusion, I have selected one spelling for each to use throughout this book, except when quoting directly from a text or map: Frislanda, Engroneland, Islanda, Estotiland, and Drogio.
3 In the early 1550s these would have been his publisher, Tommaso Giunti, and his closest friend, the humanist Girolamo Fracastoro, who first brought the Zen voyages to his attention.
4 A reader’s job was not without peril in those days. Three years later Cipriota was forbidden to preach because he had approved the publication of I Dialoghi Segreti, a book by Pompeo della Barba di Pescia that was later deemed irreverent, confiscated and burned. A far more tragic destiny awaited Ulloa, a Spaniard who had come to Venice as a young man in 1547 and had found employment as secretary to the Spanish ambassador, Don Juan Hurtado de Mendoza. The embassy became a hotbed of intrigue and propaganda. Mendoza was recalled to Madrid and the new ambassador, Don Francisco de Vargas, got rid of Ulloa, who found employment as a Spanish translator with Giolito, a well-known Venetian publisher. To complement his income, Ulloa took on a part-time job as a reader for the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova. The job would cost him his life. In 1568 the Council of Ten ordered his arrest because five years earlier he had approved for publication a book in Hebrew that the Inquisition later decided should not have been published. The accusation was couched in very nebulous terms and appears to have been a mere pretext (by the late 1560s the government had become more intolerant and repressive in the face of new international tensions, especially between Venice and Spain). The hapless Ulloa was sentenced to death. He managed to smuggle out of prison a letter to King Philip II in which he pleaded his innocence and begged him to intercede on his behalf. The letter did not reach Philip in time: Ulloa died of fevers in his prison cell.
5 The volume actually contained two narratives. The first one described the embassy of Caterino Zeno to the court of Uzun Hasan, king of Persia, in the 1470s (On the Commentaries to the Journey in Persia of M. Caterino Zeno and the Wars Undertaken in the Persian Empire from the Time of Uzun Hasan). This book, too, was dedicated to Daniele Barbaro, who had been Venetian ambassador to England before becoming the patriarch of Aquilea, and was among the most informed Venetians about the history and geography of the North Sea.
CHAPTER TWO
Messer Nicolò
After the war against the Genoese that so engaged our elders, Messer Nicolò, a man of noble spirit, developed a great desire to see the world & travel & learn the customs and languages of men, so that he might better serve his fatherland if the occasion should arise, as well as earn much honor & fame. And so, having built and equipped a ship with his own riches, which were very considerable, he left our seas and after passing the Strait of Gibraltar sailed for several days in the Ocean to see England & Flanders.
—Nicolò the Younger, Dello scoprimento
ON A LATE SPRING MORNING at high tide, a well-stocked Venetian round-bodied ship sailed out of St. Mark’s Basin, past the Lido and into the green-grey Adriatic Sea. On the poop deck the captain and owner, Messer Nicolò, charted a southern course on his way to the Sea of Flanders as the gulls soared and swooped over the receding lagoon.
The opening scene of this Venetian saga comes readily to mind. But what sort of a man was Messer Nicolò that he should be setting out on such a hazardous journey instead of retiring to enjoy his family and his wealth after four long years of war against the Genoese (1378–81)? Nicolò the Younger does not tell us much at all about his forefather beyond the fact that his riches “were very considerable” and that he wished “to see the world [and] earn much honor and fame.”
I looked for references to Messer Nicolò in the fourteenth-century public record in the State Archives of Venice, at the Frari, and found that he had several namesakes, all more or less distant relatives, all living in Venice at the time. Threading together an outline of his life seemed problematic. How could I be sure I was following the tracks of the right Nicolò Zen? Fortunately, the state clerks of the Republic had to deal with the same confusion of names back in the 1300s. They resolved the problem by adding Nicolò’s colorful patronymic—Draconis, son of Dragon—in all official documents. I began to put together little scraps of information—appointments, sales, deeds, wills, birth and death notices—that referred exclusively to Nicolò Zen, son of Dragon, and the story of his adventurous life gradually took shape.
Messer Nicolò must have been in his mid-fifties when he left for the Sea of Flanders. He had built his fortune trading spices in the Levant and was indeed known in the family as il ricco, “the rich one.” I gained the impression, from the few archival documents available, that he was a man of considerable courage and ingenuity, an expert navigator, a savvy businessman, and a provident husband and father. Commerce in the fourteenth century was not always a peaceful activity; a good Venetian merchant needed to be as much a soldier as a businessman, and Messer Nicolò had his share of rough encounters at sea. Clearly the Republic valued his ability and his experience and turned to him for help in times of both war and peace. Yet I had the feeling he answered the call of duty only if it did not interfere with his own plans and was inclined by temperament to strike out on his own, to bend the rules, to test the patience of the Republic in the pursuit of his goals.
The Zens were among the oldest families in Venice. They settled in the lagoon in early medieval times and played an important role in the affairs of the Republic as it grew and spread its influence in the Adriatic and then in the Mediterranean. Nicolò’s most famous ancestor, Raniero Zen, was a key figure behind the development of Venice’s merchant marine and went on to become one of the great doges of the thirteenth century.
In Messer Nicolò’s time, the family was still among the most powerful in Venice. His father, Pietro Zen, was a charismatic admiral and military commander. He was known as the Dragon because of the fiery beast painted on his shield, which he had wrested from a Genoese captain in hand-to-hand combat. Pietro and his first wife, Agnese Dandolo, had three children: Carlo, Nicolò and Antonio. Agnese died in 1334. The three boys were brought up by Pietro’s second wife, Andreola Contarini. The family lived in the neighborhood of Santi Apostoli, just north of the Rialto, the bustling financial and commercial center.
Pietro the Dragon suffered an awful death. In 1343 he led an allied force of Venetian, Genoese, papal and French ships against the Turks, who had taken Smyrna and were threatening trade in the Aegean Sea. He managed to recapture Smyrna, forcing the Turks to retreat. But they did not go far. When the Christian soldiers gathered outs
ide the city to attend a Mass of thanksgiving, the Turks fell on them and hacked them to pieces. According to one source, Pietro was not killed during Mass but while torching enemy ships in the Bay of Smyrna. Whatever the circumstances, his head was cut off and hoisted on a pike and paraded on the grounds of the massacre.
Pietro’s death threw the family into a period of hardship and penury. Messer Nicolò, still a teenager, probably joined a merchant galley as a trainee—a common first step for a young nobleman destined for a career at sea. Carlo, his restless brother, was granted a canonry in Patras by Pope Clement VI and sent to study theology at the University of Padua. But he was not made for religious studies and spent his time drinking and gambling in the city’s seedier taverns. Antonio, the youngest, was no more than a boy and presumably still living with his stepmother, Andreola.
The 1340s were a bleak decade. The on-again, off-again war with the Genoese crippled trade and seriously hurt the Republic’s finances. But much worse was to come. In 1348 the bubonic plague swept through Europe and in little over a year killed 60,000 Venetians—half the population. An eerie silence fell over the city as boats filled with swollen corpses drifted along the canals. But by the spring of 1350 Venetians and Genoese were already at each other again. This time war broke out over access to the rich markets in the Black Sea. Messer Nicolò, by then in his twenties, distinguished himself in combat and after peace was signed with Genoa, in 1355, he obtained an important military command in Romagna, on the Adriatic coast.
Irresistible North Page 3