Malta was not the only location in the central Mediterranean that experienced an economic boom in the sixteenth century. This was the age when ‘free ports’ came into existence on either side of Italy. Two types of free port developed: ports where people of all religions and origins were made welcome, and protected from the interference of the Inquisition; and ports that were free in the modern sense, places where taxes were reduced or abolished in order to encourage trade. A good example of the former is the western Adriatic port of Ancona, within the Papal States.23 Despite concentrating on trans-Adriatic exchanges, notably with Dubrovnik, Ancona managed to maintain a limited trans-Mediterranean trade during the later Middle Ages, jealously observed by the monopolistic Venetians but protected by Ancona’s papal overlords. Around 1500 two or three ships were sent each year to the Levant, bringing back raw silk and cotton as well as spices, which were then distributed outwards both from Ancona and Dubrovnik. Among the goods sent from Ancona to the East were soap, oil and wine, but cloths sent overland from Florence and Siena were also loaded, as well as a famous by-product of the cloth business, Fabriano paper, made from rag according to techniques the Italians had learned from the East – evidence for the way the technology of western Europe supplanted that of the East by 1500.24 By that date the Florentines were concentrating their eastbound cloth traffic through Ancona; this consisted not simply of silks and velvets produced in Florence, but of goods acquired from right across western Europe: linen arrived from Rheims, whence it was carried along rivers and roads to Lyons, now a flourishing business centre linking northern and southern Europe. The aim was to supply the rich markets of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire. From the 1520s the Florentines were able to meet their Balkan clients closer to home, as Turkish, Ragusan, Greek and Jewish merchants congregated in Ancona, which rapidly developed into a free port for all nations and religions. The Jewish merchants consisted of two groups: the Ponentini, Sephardim of the western Mediterranean largely descended from Marrano converts (and in some cases still notionally Catholic, under the ambiguous label ‘Portuguese’); and the Levantini, Sephardim who had settled in the Ottoman Empire and traded out of Constantinople, Salonika and Smyrna. One group had acculturated more to western styles of living, the other to Turkish manners.
From the Balkans, hides arrived in great quantities; and, as Ancona grew and flourished, the city had to turn beyond the Italian Marches for supplies of grain, which the Ragusans willingly provided from their sources of supply in Sicily, southern Italy, the Aegean and Albania (a source of millet).25 Grain supplies came under increasing pressure in the late sixteenth century: land was being given over to vines and olives, in reaction to local population decline in Italy and Iberia, but the inevitable result was that estates produced grain for local consumption only, and lost interest in supplying the international market. This posed a problem for those city communities that could survive only by importing surplus food from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The problem formed part of a wider series of difficulties that was changing the character not just of trade across the Great Sea, but of the cultivation of the lands close to its shores.26 When Florentine cloth supplies dwindled in the late sixteenth century, following political strife in central Italy, Ancona reached further afield and imported woollen cloth from as far away as London, which it then passed on to Dubrovnik, Herceg Novi and Kotor, for distribution within the Balkans.27 The rise of Ancona was not, then, simply a phenomenon of a small corner of Italy. A whole network of Anconitan ‘connectivities’ came into being; it was densest in the Adriatic but extended far beyond. Ancona was a ‘true frontier’ between Islam and Christendom, where merchants from many nations met face to face.28
Ancona’s business partner Dubrovnik reached the high point of its fortunes precisely during this period of bitter tension between the Ottomans and the Spaniards, for its Senate steered with agility between the opposing navies. Tribute continued to flow to the Sublime Porte, and yet Ragusan ships were content to join the Spanish Armada in its disastrous attempt to invade England in 1588; the ‘Tobermory wreck’ found in Scotland is thought to have been a ship of Dubrovnik.29 It was an extraordinary achievement that a republic whose territory consisted mainly of a compact walled town was able to maintain a fleet of 180 ships as early as 1530. Its total capacity by the 1580s has been estimated at 40,000 tons.30 Dubrovnik drew full benefit from being both a Catholic city and an Ottoman vassal. But it also began to open its doors to non-Christian merchants. The city fathers had at first wanted to ban Jewish settlement, as the number of Jews in the city increased following expulsion from Spain and southern Italy either side of 1500. Then, by 1532, they began to see the Jewish merchants as a vital link on the route to Ancona, where Jewish settlement had been strongly encouraged. Now the city fathers lowered customs duties for Jewish merchants, in the hope of stimulating business. Among the influx of Sephardic settlers were a number of physicians. A small ghetto was established in 1546, but the area in which it was placed was not unpleasant or remote, like the ghetto of Venice: it lay close to the Sponza Palace, which was the customs house, just off the Stradun or Placa, the attractive main street of Dubrovnik. Although a massive earthquake in 1667 led to the reconstruction of much of this area, the ghetto can still be identified, with its ancient synagogue.31
Dubrovnik became a cosmopolitan city. This was a period of cultural efflorescence, in which the study of Latin texts was matched by the growth of literature in Croatian – the dramatist Marin Držić was influenced by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, and has attracted much attention, not just from nationalist Croatians but from Titoist Yugoslavs who saw in him a harbinger of socialism. Meanwhile, the Franciscans and Dominicans accumulated sizeable libraries, which still survive; and artistic styles, rather dependent on those of the Italian Marches and Venice, are further testimony to the profound influence of Italian culture alongside Croatian.32 Italian, indeed, continued to be the language of government. The port cities of the Adriatic (including Venice) were places where the cultures of East and West created a kaleidoscopic mix.
Dubrovnik looked both to the sea and to the land. It was a source of skins from the Bosnian interior, importing hides from the nearby town of Trebinje, and further afield from Mostar and Novi Pazar, but the Ragusans also brought hides down from the coast of Bulgaria through the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean and the Ionian Sea.33 The Ragusans were great specialists in the trade in European woollen cloths during the early sixteenth century (including their own, manufactured from Balkan wool), although in the second half of the century they found they had to divert much of their wool trade to overland routes across the Balkans. This was partly the result of competition with the Venetians, who directed their own business away from Dubrovnik and towards their new outpost at Split, of which more shortly. The other difficulty faced by both the Ragusans and the Venetians was the arrival of competitors from the North Sea: the Dutch and the English, of whom more in a moment.34 The flourishing Ragusan colony in London withered in the second half of the sixteenth century as the sea route through the western Mediterranean became increasingly insecure; even their neutral status could not protect the Ragusans against prohibitive charges for maritime insurance.35 And, as will be seen, the piracy of their fellow-Croatians, the Uskoks, based in narrow inlets and islands a little way to the north of Dubrovnik, was a constant irritation.
There was, however, a decline in traffic by sea during the sixteenth century, and land routes acquired greater importance instead.36 Fernand Braudel saw this largely as a late sixteenth-century development, but the trend began rather earlier, as Ancona, Dubrovnik and a few other centres became the interface between the Ottoman world and western Europe, for each side, even in times of conflict, remained hungry for the other’s goods. Braudel insisted that one factor was the mass breeding of mules in Cyprus, Andalusia, Naples and elsewhere; but that might be (to mix metaphors) to put the cart before the horse. Why should mules rather than ships have become the preferred means of transport
? One answer is that the security of the seas had declined to a point where land transport, long regarded as slow and costly, gained a comparative advantage over sea transport. For instance, at the end of the sixteenth century raw silk was sent from Naples to Livorno and then on to Germany and Flanders by land. Dubrovnik became more involved in Balkan business through Bosnia-Hercegovina and less enthusiastic about its long-distance sea trade as far as England, the Black Sea and the Levant.37 Even the emergence of new trading centres on the shores of the Mediterranean was seen by Braudel as evidence for the vitality of land rather than sea routes: the rise of Smyrna, at the start of the seventeenth century, giving access across Anatolia to the riches of Persia; the attempts by Venice to develop its trade through Kotor and then across the ‘black mountain’ of Montenegro. Most remarkable was the proposal of the Marrano Daniel Rodriguez that Split should became Venice’s staple town on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, which led to the rebuilding of this ancient city and the creation by 1600 of a vigorous centre of trade that specialized in eastern products such as silks, carpets and wax.38 The Ottomans complied enthusiastically with such schemes, setting guards along the roads through the Balkans. The Venetian great galleys were now sent on a modest journey one third of the way down the Adriatic to Split, rather than out of the Adriatic towards Alexandria and Southampton; but even the brief voyage they now undertook was liable to interruptions from Croatian pirates.39 This trend towards shorter, more local sea routes had already begun after the Black Death (cases from Spanish waters have been cited already). The eclipse of the long-distance routes was a gradual process; the importance of the Mediterranean Sea as a means of communication was beginning to wane.40
Quite apart from the effects of warfare and piracy, the opening of the Atlantic stimulated into new life the economies of the northern European lands; Baltic rye became the great article of trade in the North. The scourge of inflation in Spain and western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the massive influx of American silver at this period.41 The Fourth Mediterranean was not merely fractured, as a result of the conflict between Habsburgs and Ottomans; it was also marginalized, as a result of the vigorous expansion of the Atlantic economy. Yet the picture was not all bleak. Barcelona, for instance, had not been wiped off the trading map, even though most histories of the city seem to lose interest once its medieval glory days come to an end. Shipbuilding contracts abounded, to meet the needs of the fleets launched against the Turks and the Barbary corsairs. Catalan cloths found a new market in a New World. The trade of Barcelona may well have expanded during the sixteenth century, though it turned more towards the Spanish interior and focused less on the sea, fitting into the general pattern of a shift from sea to land routes. At sea, it was the merchants of Genoa and southern France who increasingly took the lead in trade out of Barcelona, and the Genoese came to dominate the commerce of the western Mediterranean islands, where the Catalans had occupied the first place for three centuries. There were calls for the expulsion of the Genoese from Barcelona in 1591, though hostility to Italian merchants in Spain was nothing new. On the other hand, large numbers of French settlers came to Barcelona, so that, according to one estimate, 10 per cent of the population was of French origin by 1637.42 In southern Italy, the Genoese took charge of long-distance contacts as well as running the finances of Spanish Naples.43 Indeed, Genoa became banker to the Spanish empire, advancing loans on which the Spanish Crown finances heavily depended, against anticipated receipts of American silver.44
III
Those who found a new vocation on the surface of the Mediterranean included the exiled Jews from Spain and Portugal. Two of them achieved international fame, and became directly involved in the sequence of events that culminated in the loss of Cyprus to the Ottomans and the great sea battle of Lepanto. Beatrice Mendes de Luna was born in Portugal around 1510, several years after the mass conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497. Living in Flanders, which shared its ruler, Charles V, with Spain, her family fell under suspicion of heresy, even though several members consorted with the imperial family; the problem in accumulating so much wealth was that it brought false security – whether for holy or unholy reasons wealthy Marranos became easy targets.45 Charles V was convinced that all these dubious converts from Judaism must have something to do with the spread of Protestantism in his German realms. In 1545 Beatrice de Luna and her close relatives precipitately left Flanders for Venice, though there too she fell under suspicion of judaizing, and then found a more secure haven in Ferrara, where the Este princes adopted an easy attitude to the New Christian settlers, who had brought prosperity, medical skills and fine music to their increasingly magnificent city. Beatrice de Luna restored her fortunes and reinvented, or rediscovered, herself as Gracia Nasi, living openly as a Jew, and supporting Marrano refugees from the Inquisition; the first Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible to be printed, the ‘Ladino Bible of Ferrara’, was dedicated to her, and was aimed at both Jewish and Christian readers.46 By 1552 she had once again attracted enough attention from Inquisitors to feel uncomfortable in Italy; she set off in great style for Constantinople, with a retinue of forty horsemen to accompany her across the Balkans. The Ragusan government showed foresight in welcoming her, for once she was in Constantinople her commercial agents in Dubrovnik brought plenty of business to the town.47 The sultan permitted her and her entourage to continue to dress in Venetian style, rather than requiring them to adopt the costume accorded to the Jews. She had not turned her back on the West, however; Doña Gracia maintained an interest in Italy and the Mediterranean, informed by her determination to defend her co-religionists.
How strong this determination was became obvious when the Papal Inquisition descended on Ancona in 1555, searching out heretics among the hundred-odd ‘Portuguese’ who traded through the city and who had been encouraged to settle there in the past. The persecution of the Marranos signalled a newly aggressive policy under Pope Paul IV, who also enclosed the Jews of Rome in a narrow ghetto; he was shocked at the spread of what he saw as unbelief in a trading city that lay under papal jurisdiction. In this spirit, his agents arrested the Portuguese, confiscated their goods (said to be worth 300,000 ducats) and burned twenty-six of them at the stake. Doña Gracia gained access to the sultan’s ear, and in March 1556 Süleyman the Magnificent sent a resounding letter to Pope Paul by way of an emissary of his ally the French king, in which he demanded the release of those Jewish prisoners who were his subjects; the sultan insisted that his treasury had lost 400,000 ducats, but he expressed himself politely enough, describing himself as ‘Great Emperor of all other emperors’, and conceding that the pope was ‘High and Mighty Lord of the Generation of the Messiah Jesus’.48 The pope, in reply, said he was prepared to save the lives and property of Turkish subjects, but the burnings of other New Christians would continue; he argued that his good disposition to unconverted Jews was to be seen in his creation of a ghetto specially for them in Ancona (no irony was intended). As news of this reached Constantinople, the circle of Doña Gracia began to coordinate a boycott of trade with Ancona. A number of Marranos had fled northwards to the port of Pesaro, in the dominions of the duke of Urbino; so, to the intense irritation of the Anconitans, business was diverted away from their own port, which had been so successful over the last half-century, to a previously insignificant rival.49
Pesaro, however, had much inferior harbour facilities, and those Jews in Ancona who were not Marranos were seriously afraid that they would suffer along with their Christian neighbours from a Turkish boycott. Arguments also erupted within the Ottoman Empire, where the Sephardic rabbis refused to be guided by a wealthy, domineering woman who had been brought up as a Portuguese Christian. They did not see her as a new Esther who would protect and save Jewish merchants, despite all her munificence in setting up synagogues and schools across the empire. The boycott fizzled out. Ancona survived. One woman could not strangle Ancona; but the city fathers knew that a Turkish boycott led by the Sephardic merchants
would mean the end of their prosperity. They recognized the great influence that this worldly-wise group exercised, with its ability to cross political, cultural and religious boundaries, despite the risk of becoming trapped in local bouts of persecution. The exiles from Spain and Portugal had moved eastward (and in some cases northward to the Low Countries), but their diaspora took the form not just of new settlements in lands far from Iberia. A whole maritime network came into existence, which at its peak reached as far as Brazil and the West Indies in one direction, and Goa and Calicut in the other.50 They inhabited a larger trading world than their forebears the Genizah merchants five centuries earlier. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain had been a tragedy and disaster for those who experienced it; the next generation turned destruction into regeneration.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 52