The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (38 page)

Yet this was not to be. After falling foul of the Ottoman authorities, Zevi was taken to Constantinople to be seen by the sultan. Here, to the horror of his followers, he was persuaded to convert to Islam. Surprisingly this did not lead to the immediate downfall of Sabbateanism, but the movement would never fully recover from this apostasy, and not long afterwards Sabbatai Zevi himself faded into obscurity. He is thought to have died in 1676 in Albania, where he had been exiled by the sultan.

Ironically, although Leon da Modena had died in 1648, the very year in which Zevi had proclaimed himself the Messiah, it was Leon’s theological writings against the Kabbala that would prove a bulwark against Zevi’s influence in Venice. In a situation unique throughout Europe, young Venetian Jews had been permitted to study at the University of Padua, where they were in no way segregated and attended lectures in medicine;
away from the restrictions of the ghetto, many of these students had become ardent devotees of the Kabbala as propagated by Zevi. When Leon da Modena had heard of this, he had been horrified that such clear-thinking young students in the science of medicine had been seduced into what he saw as metaphysical mysticism, and had taken it upon himself to demonstrate to them the error of their ways. Leon’s rebuttal of the Kabbala had been typically sensational – characterising it as fraudulent, and backing his claims with a blend of profound interpretation and inspired intuition (or guesswork). The beliefs of the Kabbala were founded upon the Zohar, a collection of works written in an ‘eccentric style of Aramaic’, and said to date from the same Old Testament era as the Book of Ezra, around the second or third century
BC.
Evidence of the Zohar had first appeared in Europe in Spain during the thirteenth century, when it had been published by the rabbi Moses of Leon. Rushing in where angels feared to tread, Leon da Modena had made so bold as to suggest that the Zohar was really a forgery, which had been assembled by Moses of Leon himself, thus accounting for its faulty Aramaic. This had caused a sensation that had divided the Venetian Jewish community, with some abandoning Kabbalistic practice as a result, whilst others pointed out that Leon had no actual proof to back up his claim, apart from a blend of obscure scholarship and speculation.
*
However, the doubts raised by Leon da Modena were to prove sufficient to combat Sabbatai Zevi’s Messianism, and the influence of Sabbateanism soon faded.

All this indicates a profound difference between the Italian Christian and Jewish intellectual traditions of the period, especially with regard to original thinking and religion.
†
While Christianity adhered to a strict orthodoxy, maintained by the power of the Roman Church and such institutions as the Inquisition, the Jewish community was in an intellectual ferment, producing such figures as Leon da Modena, who would inspire a legacy of Jewish thought.

*
This was in line with other confined areas established for communities of foreigners resident in the city. As early as 1314 German traders had been confined at night to the warehouse-cumresidence of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. And in the 1570s the community of Turkish traders would petition for their own confined residential quarters. As we have seen, such residential restrictions on foreigners had long been accepted as normal practice for the Venetians and the Genoese in Constantinople – both under Byzantine and Ottoman rule. Indeed, such enclosed quarters were accepted as commonplace in trading cities throughout the eastern-Mediterranean region – for both the control and the protection of their foreign inhabitants.

*
In its isolation from its Spanish roots, this language would preserve over the centuries the precise enunciation of its sixteenth-century Spanish elements – so much so that in the first half of the twentieth century Spanish literary scholars took to visiting Ladino communities in Venice and Corfu in order to acquaint themselves with the Spanish that Cervantes would have spoken.

*
Modern scholarship has gone a long way towards confirming Leon’s thesis.

†
Outside Italy, in northern Europe, the Reformation had begun to release thinkers from the strictures of a moribund intellectual orthodoxy, whilst within Italy the power of the Counter-Reformation launched by the Church had only served to put a halt to such speculation.

16

Deepening Decline

D
ESPITE THE LOSS
of Cyprus, and Ottoman control of the eastern Mediterranean coastal cities from Greece to North Africa, Venice still held Crete and remained the leading western European commercial power in the region. From its zenith in around 1500, Venice had settled into a gentle decline throughout the ensuing century, as Spain prospered immensely from its New World trade and Portugal profited from the luxuries transported from the Orient around the Cape of Good Hope. This decline in Venice’s fortunes would accelerate slightly with the coming of the 1700s – though these years remained a period of economic stagnation, rather than actual ruin. Over its long years of prosperity, Venice had built up considerable wealth, and this would not easily be dissipated by its canny businesslike citizens, who not only continued to participate in financing trading ventures ranging from the Americas to the East Indies, but at the same time reaped incomes from their mainland estates.

However, over the earlier years of Venice’s decline a significant social division would gradually open up, leaving the commercial activity of the Republic lacking in that vital spark of enterprise and innovation that had served it so well in the former times of its pre-eminence. By 1610 a noble speaker in the Senate would find himself lamenting to his fellow members that ‘commerce now lacks capital. The nobility takes no more part in trade; all its resources are tied up in funds or in real property, and expended either on house property or on amusements in the city.’ The egalitarian attitude towards making money, which had once so distinguished the Republic, giving it the edge over its rivals, had given way to snobbery: the nobility now considered commerce to be beneath them. This would have a
catastrophic effect on many noble families. Whilst the more-distinguished richer families, with their great estates, investments and incomes from their government positions, would grow richer still, the vast majority of noble families would be gradually taxed into poverty. This would bring about a political struggle that would result in a profound transformation of the Republic’s democratic oligarchy. A majority of the nobles in the Great Council would soon number amongst the impoverished families, giving them considerable power. But the rich and powerful families now engineered a constitutional change by which far more of the effective executive power of government was transferred from the unwieldy Great Council to the more efficient Council of Ten. This certainly improved the effectiveness of the Republic’s government, but it meant that an important check on the ruling power of the Council of Ten had been diminished. It also severely limited the democratic nature of the Republic’s government. This had never been widespread at the best of times, but at least many people had believed that they had a say in power, be it ever so indirect. Such belief now vanished.

What had taken place in the oligarchy of noble families also had its effect amongst the population at large. While many prospered, many more were reduced to penury, a distressing tendency that had its effects in all manner of different fields – from tourism to emigration, from civic pride to personal honesty. Court reports and contemporary accounts indicate that gambling, petty thievery, prostitution and even murder all increased. Ignorant tourists became fair game; and knives, formerly worn almost as symbolic ornament, were more readily used for muggings and were drawn to settle disputes. But for draconian measures introduced by the Council of Ten, the city’s reputation as a place of cultured pleasure and leisurely decadence might well have suffered, damaging the tourist trade, which now provided an important source of income to all levels of society.

Despite such strictures, Venice’s decline should be regarded as relative in the overall scheme of things. While other European powers – from England and Holland to Spain and Portugal, along with France and Austria – continued to rise, Venice remained static.

A feel for Venice during this period can be gleaned from the regular despatches of Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador during the first
two decades of the 1600s. This was the man who famously wrote: ‘An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ And where better to acquire this skill than amongst the intrigues of Venetian society. According to his biographer, Logan Pearsall Smith, paraphrasing Wotton’s somewhat verbose despatches:

Venice, with its hundreds of churches, monasteries, and gardens, with its ten thousand gondolas, and with the great concourse in its
piazze
and streets, of men from all nations of Europe and the East, was regarded as the home of pomp and pleasure, and the most admired city of the world … In spite of the decline of Venetian power, the wealth and display of the noble families had gone on increasing; great palaces had been recently built, or were in the process of erection, and the ceremonies of the Church and State, the processions and pageants, which dazzled contemporary visitors, and still shine for us in the productions of Venetian art, had grown in magnificence and pomp.

He continues with a most telling image: ‘Venice now lies like a sea-shell on the shores of the Adriatic, deserted by the organism that once inhabited it.’

Even though it was now a political backwater, Venice could not escape the growing power struggle that was building up in Europe with the emergence of Protestantism in the German and Czech lands, a development that was on the point of plunging the entire continent into violent conflict. To complicate matters further, Italy too was the scene of growing tension between two major external European powers. Spain, which now held Naples and Milan, confronted Austria, which stood poised north of the Alps, already held northern Dalmatia and was opposed to the powerful Pope Paul V. It became increasingly clear that whoever gained control over independent Venice would hold the balance of power over the entire Italian peninsula.

The tension reached boiling point in 1618, when Venice was gripped with hysteria over the so-called ‘Spanish Plot’. The Republic had recently despatched a mercenary army to drive inland the Uskoks, the people of
the northern-Dalmatian coastal region, who (with the encouragement of their Austrian masters) had begun preying on Venetian shipping. When this victorious army had returned to Venice, the unemployed mercenaries – the so-called
bravi
– had taken to roaming the streets brawling, drinking and whoring. To this volatile mix had been added a large number of naval mercenaries who had recently taken part in a victorious seaborne campaign to drive from the Adriatic a fleet despatched by the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish viceroy of Naples.

The Duke of Osuna, seemingly furious that his plans to take Venice had been thwarted, then decided to hatch a bold and highly original plan to accomplish his aim. In the spring of 1618 he sent a coded despatch to the Spanish ambassador in Venice, the aristocratic Marquis of Bedmar, who was already regarded by the authorities with some suspicion. In the words of John Julius Norwich, the marquis’s embassy was ‘the busiest centre of intrigue in the whole of Venice, its basements, anterooms and corridors teeming with sinister slouch-hatted figures whispering together in groups while they awaited audiences with the ambassador’.

The Duke of Osuna’s despatch instructed the Marquis of Bedmar secretly to hire all the
bravi
and unemployed naval mercenaries roaming the streets of the city and employ them in a plan to storm and seize the Doge’s Palace, thus instituting a
coup d’état
. This would be supported by a force of several hundred fully trained Spanish soldiers, who would be infiltrated into the city in disguise. The likelihood of such a plan remaining secret, let alone coming together in any coordinated fashion, was remote from the start. Yet ironically its failure came about through religious differences, which were all but irrelevant to the issue at hand. A Protestant French mercenary officer by the name of Balthasar Juven, who decided that he had no wish to see the power of Catholic Spain increase, betrayed the Spanish Plot to the Council of Ten. To overcome the plot, the Council of Ten knew that it had to act at once. Two
bravi
were immediately seized and hanged, their bodies left dangling by a single leg on gallows erected between the two columns of the Molo, the traditional public humiliation for traitors, a practice that had in fact fallen into abeyance over recent years. As intended, this spectacle created a sensation: the city was gripped with hysteria and the rumours had soon reached every district. Word spread
amongst the
bravi
that their secret plot had been betrayed; they were quickly rounded up, incarcerated and put to torture. Out of their confused and conflicting confessions the truth in all its haphazard ineptitude was soon revealed. The ringleaders, along with around 300
bravi
, were executed – though no action could be taken against the Marquis of Bedmar, owing to his diplomatic status and aristocratic rank (which included a number of powerful family connections in Italy that Venice could ill afford to antagonise). However, the publicising of the plot proved a propaganda coup, embarrassment enough for the Duke of Osuna, and the whole affair was condemned by Sir Henry Wotton in the strongest possible terms as ‘the foulest and fearfullest thing that hath come to light since the foundation of the city’.