The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (13 page)

No sooner were both popes ‘deposed’ than the very next day the Cardinal Bishop of Milan, Petros Philargos, was elected the new pope, taking on the name Alexander V. As his name suggests, he was of Greek origin, having been born seventy years previously at Candia in Crete. According to one source, his family was so poor that as a child he ended up surviving on the streets as a beggar, before being taken in by the Franciscan order, where his exceptional intellectual ability soon became apparent. At the age of eighteen he was sent to study at Padua and Oxford, before being appointed a professor at the University of Paris, then regarded as the intellectual centre of Europe.

Far from ending the schism, the election of Alexander V only made matters worse. As Gregory XII and Benedict XIII both adamantly refused to resign, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church now had three popes. Though Gregory XII still considered himself to be pope, he now found himself to all intents and purposes homeless, forced to accept hospitality as he roamed northern Italy with his ‘court’ of remnant cardinals and family hangers-on. In order to gain access to much-needed funds, he took the drastic step of simply selling off the Papal States to King Ladislas of Naples for a mere 25,000 florins. This act reeks of desperation, to say nothing of illegality, and was in all likelihood arranged by the Bishop of Ragusa and Gregory XII’s nephews. Many were outraged at this disposal of what was after all the papal inheritance, rather than Gregory’s personal possession. On the other hand, it could be argued that Gregory XII (or his ‘intermediaries’) were doing nothing more than making the best of an impossible situation. Ladislas of Naples had already occupied many of the Papal States, and would probably have occupied the rest regardless. However, many were not prepared to see the balance of power in Italy shifted in such a dramatic fashion, and by the end of 1409 Florence and Siena had forced Ladislas to relinquish his gift from Gregory XII.

The reaction of Venice to the deposing of its first pope was naturally unfavourable. Despite Venice’s new position as the major power in northern Italy, supposedly eclipsing the likes of Milan and Florence, its political influence appeared as nothing amidst the expert machinations of the Italian scene. It was an open secret, for example, that Florence had played a major role in engineering the election of Alexander V. Within weeks of his election, a delegation of ambassadors from England, France and Burgundy arrived in Venice with the intention of persuading the authorities to accept the dubious legality of the Council of Pisa and recognise Alexander V as pope. It was evident that Venice was now regarded as a power far beyond mainland Italy, and was in a position to use its new European influence to cement some important alliances. Here was a chance not to be missed: Venice’s pragmatism would now blossom into opportunism.

Many in Venice were coming round to the view that Gregory XII’s behaviour as pope, especially with regard to the papal territories, hardly reflected well on the Republic. Consequently delicate negotiations were
opened with the visiting ambassadors pressing the case for Benedict XIII. However, in August 1409, in the midst of these discussions, the authorities found themselves embarrassed by the arrival of the itinerant Gregory XII at the border of their territory, requesting permission to enter what was undeniably his home city. The authorities faced a choice of either refusing their famous son or offending the visiting European ambassadors. Confronted with this dilemma, they decided to exercise their fledgling diplomatic skills by granting Gregory permission to travel through Venetian territory, while at the same time refusing him permission to cross the lagoon and set foot in the city itself.

Meanwhile the Senate continued to debate, in increasingly heated terms, the question of whether the Republic should recognise Alexander V. Supporters of Gregory XII insisted that Venice should remain loyal to one of its own citizens; their opponents ingeniously argued that this applied equally to Alexander V, whose birth in the Venetian colony of Crete also made him technically a Venetian citizen. After a stormy debate, the senators decided by sixty-nine to forty-eight in favour of recognising Alexander V. This confirmed Venice’s alliance with Florence, as well as causing France, England and Burgundy to remain favourably disposed towards the Republic. After years of being outmanoeuvred during negotiations prior to peace treaties, Venice was at last becoming more adept at mainland politics.

Yet in May 1410 the situation was once again thrown into confusion when Alexander V died, whilst on a visit to Cardinal Cossa in Bologna. Despite widespread suspicion that Cossa had poisoned Alexander, the Council of Pisa quickly elected him the new pope and he took on the title of John XXIII. Many felt that he alone had sufficient expertise to resolve the papal situation, though there was no denying that the new pope was an unscrupulous character. John XXIII had been born forty years previously in Naples of impoverished nobility, but as a young man he had remedied the family’s impecuniousness by making a fortune as a pirate, preying on merchant shipping in the Mediterranean. Consequently he had taken a degree in law at Bologna, and then used his fortune to buy himself increasingly powerful posts within the Church. In 1403 he had succeeded in getting himself appointed as cardinal and papal legate of Bologna, whose citizens he proceeded to tyrannise in unrestrained fashion. According to the
contemporary chronicler Theodoric of Niem, ‘an eyewitness to many of these events’, Cardinal Cossa’s spiritual qualities were ‘zero, or minus zero’. He immediately proceeded to recoup from the citizens of Bologna the large fortune that he had spent rising up the Church hierarchy. His position as the pope’s representative also gave him free reign to debauch ‘hundreds of wives, widows and maidens, as well as a vast number of nuns’. Extraordinarily, despite being a cardinal, he had not in fact been ordained, though this oversight was remedied on 24 May 1410, a week after he was elected pope.

In an attempt to resolve the ongoing anomalous papal situation the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund persuaded John XXIII to call the Council of Constance in 1414. All three popes were expected to attend, but to the surprise of John when he arrived in Constance he was imprisoned and charged with heresy, poisoning Alexander V and no fewer than seventy further misdemeanours. As the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon put it, when it came to John XXIII’s trial, ‘The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.’ Left with little alternative, John promised to resign, on condition that his two fellow popes followed suit. Gregory XII, now in his ninetieth year, was persuaded to abdicate in July 1415. Benedict XIII proved less malleable, so the Emperor Sigismund ordered him to be deposed. Consequently the Great Schism was finally healed with the election of Martin V as the sole pope in 1417.

To appease the dignity of Venice, which did not take kindly to the demotion of its first pope, the Council of Constance decreed that the former Gregory XII should be made senior cardinal bishop in the Church, ranking second only to the new pope himself. He then retired to Recanati near the coast some 150 miles south of Venice, where he died in October 1417, declaring, ‘I have not understood the world, and the world has not understood me.’

Such an aggrieved sense of isolation might well have been felt by the Republic itself when it came to its complex and dangerous relations with the other powers of Italy over the next few years. After King Ladislas of Naples had claimed the throne of Hungary, along with its Balkan possession Dalmatia, he had eventually found himself with no money to maintain
the large army that was necessary for him to fulfil his ambitions in Italy. In 1409 he made a drastic move to remedy this situation, offering to sell the whole of Dalmatia back to Venice. Though still very much beginners in the field of political negotiation, the Venetians were masters of financial negotiation, and managed to secure Dalmatia for the bargain price of just 100,000 florins. Unfortunately, five years later Ladislas died and the Emperor Sigismund inherited the throne of Hungary. He then abrogated the treaty signed by Ladislas and claimed back Dalmatia. When the Venetians refused to recognise this claim, the Emperor Sigismund began orchestrating a political and military campaign against Venice. Covert moves were made to induce the citizens of Padua and Verona to rebel against their new Venetian overlords, and when these failed Sigismund assembled an army of 20,000 men under the flamboyant young Florentine
condottiere
known as Pippo Spano, who was already gaining a reputation as a dashing military genius. In an attempt to avoid a disastrous war it could ill afford, Venice sent a delegation including its most accomplished ambassador, Tommaso Moceingo, to negotiate with Sigismund. Mocenigo stressed that Hungary had virtually no naval power, and would thus be unable to control the pirates who infested the Adriatic islands and preyed upon shipping. Sigismund was well aware that most of this shipping consisted of Venetian merchant ships, a source of great wealth and power to the Republic, and refused to withdraw his claims. Even when Mocenigo made it clear that Venice was willing to concede Hungarian sovereignty over Dalmatia, as long as Venice was permitted to pay a handsome sum to rent the territory as a vassal state, Sigismund still refused. He had dreams of making Hungary a Mediterranean power, which meant that he needed access to the sea; at the same time he knew that he would have to destroy Venice if he was to achieve such an ambition. Mocenigo and his delegation were dismissed, and Sigismund ordered Pippo Spano to prepare to march on Venice. As a counter-measure the Republic quickly began conscripting an army from its Italian territories on the western mainland, such as the formerly independent city states of Verona and Padua. This army was then placed under the command of the brothers Carlo and Pandolfo Malatesta, experienced
condottieri
from Rimini.

Hostilities of one form or another would continue for some years, with
Spano and the Malatesta brothers campaigning sporadically over Venice’s mainland territory to the north and west of the lagoon. At one point, Pippo Spano launched a characteristically daring raid on the Lido, near the fort of San Nicolò, but his limited force was quickly beaten back. Later Pandolfo Malatesta sailed inland up the mouth of the River Livenza, some twenty miles west of Venice, with a fleet of three galleys and seventy lesser craft to inflict a surprise defeat on Spano. But in truth, as the historian Horatio F. Brown put it, this had become ‘the contest of the dog and the shark’. Neither side could win. Spano realised that he would never be able to take Venice itself, thus giving Sigismund access to the sea, while Venice realised that it could not hope to retain control over wide stretches of the Lombardy plain.

Yet still the war dragged on. Soon it was costing Venice a ruinous 50,000 ducats a month to keep its army in the field, and in 1413 Tommaso Mocenigo managed to negotiate a five-year truce. However, no sooner had this expired than once again Sigismund invaded the Venetian mainland territory from the north; but this time he proved to have overplayed his hand, and Venice prevailed to such an extent that by 1420 the Republic held the vital trade routes across the Alps to the north, and Dalmatia was once again fully under its control.

The risks and draining effort involved in landward expansion should by this stage have been evident to the Venetian authorities. Despite this, the Republic’s politics now became increasingly polarised between the ‘Party of the Sea’ and the ‘Party of the Land’. The latter favoured looking west, to the mainland, seeking to extend Venice’s role in Italian politics by making an alliance with Florence, the cultural hub of Italy, where the Renaissance was by now beginning to flourish. This policy was favoured by an unlikely alliance of the few Venetian humanists, who sought to introduce Renaissance art and thought to Venice, and those who covertly sought to reinstate Venice as the major power in northern Italy. The ‘Party of the Sea’, on the other hand, sought to consolidate Venice’s empire to the east, where its network of trading colonies throughout the eastern Mediterranean was responsible for the lucrative trade that brought the city so much of its wealth. This empire would not simply continue of its own accord, for it was now coming under increasing threat from the expanding Ottoman
Empire, which besides its seemingly unstoppable land advance through the Balkan, Anatolian and Greek territories of the Byzantine Empire was also beginning to clash at sea with the Venetian navy.

By 1423 the former negotiator Tommaso Mocenigo was doge, a position he had occupied for almost ten years. He was deeply in favour of the ‘Party of the Sea’, and had used his considerable influence to ensure that their policy prevailed. But by now he was eighty years old, and it was evident to all that he was dying. Summoning to his bedside the Signoria, his six-man committee of senior advisers, Mocenigo delivered a stark warning:

Be sure to take great care in the choice of my successor, for he will have in his power the ability to do Venice much good or much evil. I know that many wish to select Messer Francesco Foscari, not fully realising what an arrogant windbag he is – an impetuous rabble-rouser, no less.

If he becomes doge we will be continually at war and our citizens will be ruined. He who now has a fortune of 10,000 ducats will have it reduced to 1,000; he who owns two houses will lose them both. You will all lose your gold and silver, your honour and your respect. Though at present masters of your fate, you will be reduced to slaves, condemned to follow the decisions of foreign mercenary generals and their soldiers.

Tommaso Mocenigo died on 4 April 1423, the date on which, according to the historian W.R. Thayer, ‘Medieval Venice is commonly said to have passed away.’ Despite his warnings, in less than a fortnight Francesco Foscari had been elected to succeed him. However, to the surprise of many, one of his first actions was to accept the request from the Greek city of Salonica for Venetian protection against the Turks. This was the second city of the Byzantine Empire, and in accepting its defence it appeared that Foscari was making an unmistakable statement of intent to the Turks. Venice would not tolerate the defeat of the Byzantine Empire. Yet many now accepted the inevitability of this defeat, and Foscari was in fact manoeuvering in the hope of obtaining a favourable peace treaty from the
Ottoman sultan, thus allowing Venice’s eastern-Mediterranean trade to continue unmolested. And having made his tactical move in the east, Foscari now devoted his attention all but exclusively to the west, fulfilling Mocenigo’s worst fears by declaring war on Milan in 1426. As Frederic Lane succinctly put it: ‘Within a few years Venice was sending a bigger navy up the Po River … than to the Aegean Sea, and Salonica was lost.’