The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (3 page)

Faced with the prospect of disgrace and capture by the Genoese, the humiliated Dandolo took his fate into his own hands. It is said that he gave orders that he be lashed to his flagship’s mast, and then proceeded to smash his head against it until his skull split open. However, his defeat had not been quite as devastating as he perhaps imagined. Dandolo’s fleet had managed to inflict sufficient damage on the galleys under Doria’s command that the Genoese admiral decided not to risk consolidating his victory by sailing to attack Venice itself.

Amongst the Venetians taken prisoner was Marco Polo. Since returning to Venice he had continued to trade, and had done so with such success that he soon had sufficient funds to sponsor the building and equipping of a galley, which he himself captained in the campaign. Along with his thousands of fellow captives, Marco Polo was now transported back to Genoa in triumph aboard the captured galleys. Within a month of the battle he found himself confined inside the grim Palazzo di San Giorgio; adding insult to injury, this prison had been constructed out of stones taken more than thirty years previously from the sacked Venetian embassy in Constantinople. Polo and his fellow Venetians now faced the prospect of being confined for many years.

In the manner of the period, the prisoners were allowed to range freely within the castle, and ‘nobles’ such as commander Marco Polo were permitted large cells that could be decorated with furniture – carpets, bed, hangings and so forth – sent from home. Although many of the poorer ordinary sailors were all but starving, the ‘nobles’ were permitted to purchase extra rations to ensure their survival. As the months passed, Marco Polo reverted to character, keeping his fellow prisoners entertained with the fabulous tales of his travels through the East. Word of the exploits of
‘Il Milione’
began to spread through Genoa and, according to Ramusio, ‘he was visited by the most noble gentlemen of the city, who bestowed upon him presents to alleviate his confinement’.

Polo now attracted the attention of another prisoner, who had already been in San Giorgio for fourteen years by the time of Polo’s arrival. This was the writer known as Rustichello of Pisa, who had in his day been
something of a storyteller himself, having penned numerous tales of courtly love and knightly valour, specialising in Arthurian romances. These latter had earned him such renown that he had been invited by the future King Edward I of England to join his court and entertain him during his crusade to the Holy Land some twenty-five years earlier. There is some speculation that Rustichello may even have met, or at least heard of, Polo during this period, which coincided with the Polos’ outward journey through Palestine. At any rate, Polo and Rustichello were to make an ideal partnership: the compulsive storyteller and the writer of legendary tales would combine to produce what would become one of the best-known works in Europe. This might not have been a great work of literature, but its content more than made up for its lack of style. Here was the first description of an exotic civilisation whose existence had lain all but unknown on the other side of the world. We were not alone in the universe: here was another world. Little wonder that an early title given to Polo’s work was simply
Il Mondo
.

It is no exaggeration to say that in many ways Polo had visited the future. While for the most part Europe languished in medieval stasis, China had seen the invention of gunpowder, paper money, printing, and the burning of coal as a fuel. According to some sources, Polo brought to Venice in his remaining luggage examples of another Chinese invention, namely ground lenses, which he is said to have used as a form of spectacles to boost his failing eyesight in old age. These could have been used to make a microscope or a telescope, but no mention is made of this, and it would be another 300 years before these instruments were ‘invented’ in Europe. And beside these innovations China could also boast such futuristic wonders as Kinsai, the ‘City of Heaven’, which in Polo’s description sounds almost like a utopian vision of Venice. What he saw was:

the finest and most splendid city in all the world, filled with wide and spacious waterways. On one side of the city is a lake of crystal clear fresh water. Its shores are thirty miles long and are filled with stately palaces and mansions of such splendour that it is impossible to imagine anything more beautiful. These are the abodes of nobles and magnates. At the same time there are also cathedrals and monasteries. The surface of the lake is covered with all manner of barges
filled with pleasure-seekers. Once they have finished their work the people of this city like nothing better than to spend their time enjoying themselves with their womenfolk or with hired women.

Polo describes such ‘hired women in revealing detail:

They are found throughout the city, attired in the highest fashion, smelling of sensual fragrances, waited on by attendants, and living in richly decorated accommodation. These ladies are exquisitely practised and accomplished in the use of endearments and caresses, using words perfectly suited to the occasion and the person who is with them. Those who have enjoyed their company remain utterly beside themselves and so captivated by their delicacy and sweet charms that they can never forget them. As a result, when any foreigner returns home, he boasts that he has been to ‘Kinsai’, in other words to Heaven, and can hardly abide the time before he returns.

Marco Polo, by then in his early twenties, would seem to have experienced these qualities at first hand. He also describes the delights of the table. China not only had its own, entirely original cuisine, but also had foodstuffs such as rice and rice pasta, which were as yet unknown to Europe. In Kinsai:

because the fish in its lakes are so well-fed, they are plump and delicious. When you see all the different varieties of fish on display in the streets, you wonder how on earth they will all be sold. Yet in just a few hours they have all been bought. Because so many of the citizens have grown accustomed to the highest cuisine, they are used to eating both fish and meat at the same meal.

Little wonder that so few believed the tales told by
Il Milione
. Yet surprisingly, Polo’s Kinsai has been identified as modern Hangzhou, and his descriptions would seem to be true, apart from a few minor exaggerations (the lake had a shoreline of ten rather than thirty miles). His account is confirmed by that of the contemporary Persian historian Vassaf, as well
as by the words of a travelling Franciscan friar named Odoric of Pordenone,
*
who passed through Kinsai some forty years later and also claimed that it was ‘the greatest city in all the world, and the most noble’.

There is no denying that Rustichello’s written version of Polo’s travels contains the occasional exaggeration or even plain falsehood. He was, after all, a romance writer by profession, and as such saw no harm in including entire passages lifted verbatim from his own works. For example, Polo’s description of his second meeting with Kublai Khan is recognisable as Rustichello’s earlier written account of the legendary Tristan’s arrival at King Arthur’s court at Camelot. Other reasons for questioning the veracity of Polo’s account include the very obvious things that he missed out, such as tea-drinking, chopsticks, printing and the Great Wall of China.
†
It is possible that Polo did mention these items, and Rustichello simply found them too incredible to include in the finished version. However, despite Rustichello’s ‘assistance’, most of what Polo described was to be confirmed by later writers. Such confirmation would take time – indeed, certain remote parts of south-east Asia and Burma that he passed through would not see a European face for over 600 years (until the Second World War). And as for the wonders that he left out, Polo would have had a ready explanation for these. On his deathbed, in 1324, he would inform his listeners, ‘I did not tell a half of all I saw.’

The presence of Odoric of Pordenone in Kinsai during the early 1300s confirms that the Polos were not the only Venetians venturing beyond the horizon of the known world during this period. Just half a century after the death of Marco Polo, the Zeno brothers, Nicolò and Antonio, members of the distinguished family that produced doges and famous admirals, were reported to have sailed beyond the British Isles and reached an icy land called Engronland. It has been suggested that this was Greenland, but their
description of a monastery heated by boiling water which gushed from the earth makes it sound more like Iceland. The Zeno brothers are then said to have travelled on to a country called Estotiland, where they describe recognisable Native Americans and Inuit with kayaks and igloos, as well as the Norse settlement in Labrador, which only died out at the end of the fourteenth century (all this, well over a century before the arrival of the Genoese-born Columbus).
*

Early in the same century, the Venetian geographer Marino Sanuto (known as ‘the Elder’ to distinguish him from the well-known diarist who lived 200 years later) travelled throughout the Levant and as far north as the Baltic. On his return to Venice he began creating a five-sheet atlas of the known world, incorporating previous maps and his own first-hand experience. This atlas covered territory from Flanders to the Sea of Azov, from Scandinavia to Africa. However, although Sanuto is said to have incorporated information from Marco Polo’s
Travels
, his atlas gives little detail of China or India. In fact, its most impressive cartography is focused upon Palestine and Egypt. Like so many maps, then and now, this had a hidden purpose. Sanuto was advocating a vast crusade that would invade the Nile delta, conquer Egypt and then move on to Palestine. This would be followed by a blockade of trade along the entire swathe of Moslem territory from Syria through North Africa as far as Granada in Spain. The consequent ruin of the Arab world would be followed by the launching in the Persian Gulf of a Christian fleet, which would sail into the Indian Ocean and take over the spice trade. Such world ambition was symptomatic of Venice during the early fourteenth century. If they could but defeat the Genoese, with whom they continued to do battle, the world was theirs.
†

Despite Sanuto’s bold plans, intended to thwart the Genoese as well as the Arabs, it was in reality the Genoese who proved more bold. Not only had they inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Venetians at Curzola in 1298, but they had proved to be more courageous in their trade-inspired expeditions and would continue to be so. As early as 1277 the first Genoese trading galleys had arrived in the North Sea off Sluys, the port of Bruges; it would be 1314 before the first Venetian galleys arrived here. And while the Venetians were merely reading about the legendary expedition of St Brendan the Navigator, in 1291 the Genoese brothers Ugolino and Vandino Vivaldi sailed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar west into the open Atlantic in search of a direct sea passage to India. Though nothing was ever heard from them again, there are suggestions that they may have made landfall on the Canary Islands before passing westward, encouraged by two priests on the expedition who had brought with them the work of their fellow Franciscan, Roger Bacon. According to another persistent myth, the Vivaldi brothers are said to have rounded Africa and been taken captive by the mythical Christian king Prester John.

By 1306 the Genoese had certainly reached Poland; and in 1374 the Genoese Luchino Tarigo sailed from the Black Sea up the River Don and transported his ship overland some thirty miles or so to the Volga, whence he sailed down to the Caspian Sea. This was certainly a first for Genoese traders;
*
the intrepid Genoese whom Polo had observed sailing on this sea almost a century previously had not brought their ships overland, but had simply hired local vessels, which then traded under the Genoese flag. Alas, on reaching the Caspian, Tarigo abandoned all pretence of a trading expedition and launched into a campaign of piracy, which
enabled him to seize a fortune from the defenceless shipping on this inland sea.

As with trading, so with the currency of trade: here too the Genoese were ahead of the Venetians. In order to facilitate trade, and marginalise their main trading rivals, the Genoese had realised the advantage of having an identifiable and trustworthy currency of their own. In 1252 they issued a gold coin known as the genoin.
*
It was more than twenty years before the Venetians understood the importance of having a distinctive internationally recognised currency of one’s own, and in 1284 they minted their own golden ducats. These gleaming small coins were produced at the old Zecca (the Mint), and hence became known locally as
zecchini
(the origin of our word ‘sequin’). In the same year, Venice’s other main trading rival of Florence issued its own gold florin. Yet in the commercial world it is often not the pioneers who make the most out of their discoveries and innovations. While the Genoese were more adventurous traders, both the Florentines and the Venetians were superior as bankers. The Florentines had a banking network that stretched over Europe from Geneva to Bruges and as far afield as London. Venice too had a network of banks in Europe reaching as far north as Bruges. The Republic even ran a regular postal service overland between the two cities, a distance of some 700 miles, which was covered by messengers riding post-haste between staging posts to ensure delivery in seven days. Yet where the Florentines had a network of banks in Europe, this was only a part of the Venetian operation, which had established banking agencies around the Levant as well – ensuring them access to the vast market of Asia. And it was this network of small state-backed banks in the eastern Mediterranean, together with the efficient bureaucracy in Venice that administered them, which would eventually enable Venice to outwit its rivals.

Unlike the cities and countries of Europe, island Venice had virtually no home-based industry or production apart from its highly efficient naval yards and its glass-works on the island of Murano. Whereas the banking cities of Florence and Siena flourished in the wool trade, and even Genoa had an
agricultural hinterland with connections to Milan and northern Europe, Venice relied largely upon the import—export business carried by its shipping. And, increasingly, a good part of this business came to be devoted to bullion.