The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (47 page)

Venice still retained an empire, but this was now reduced to a size that had not been seen since the early fourteenth century. On the other hand, this was the final delineation of Venetian overseas territory: an empire that would remain intact through the ensuing eighty years. Venice may have been reduced to a minor power on the international scene, but its skilful diplomacy would prevent it from becoming dragged into the struggles between the major European powers throughout much of the rest of the century. Indeed, during its long, gradual decline Venice would achieve a stability that had often eluded the city during the days of its greatness. Such stability ensured that it now earned much of its living from tourism rather than as a leading commercial power. Trade continued as before, but elsewhere the commercial powerhouses of Europe were empire-building on a global scale and embarking upon an era of industrial revolution that would far outstrip the technological marvels of the Arsenale, which had once been one of the wonders of the Western world.

The beauty of the canals and the palazzi, the abundance of courtesans and prostitutes, the opera and so many fine works of art, as well as the joys of gambling, were now the main attractions of the city. Carnival, with its fancy-dress balls and public revelry conducted behind the anonymity of masks permitting all manner of blatant promiscuity, proved such an attraction that it was extended from the weeks between Christmas and Lent to a period of five whole months. Rich tourists on the Grand Tour were able to take full advantage of the much-vaunted liberty of Venice, even if they had to be protected from the avarice and thievery of its citizens by an increasingly repressive Council of Ten. Spies were everywhere, reporting on everything from the latest gossip of the Rialto and the rumours in the coffee houses to the tittle-tattle of the gambling rooms. Yet tourists knew they were perfectly safe so long as they did not step out of line. Indeed, many found excitement in the ‘bit of intrigue, even of danger’ lurking in ‘the curious and murky quarters’ that lay behind the historic attractions of the city.

However, when the controversial French political writer Montesquieu
visited Venice in 1728, he could not resist the temptation to make a study of the city’s constitution and political life. According to a contemporary commentator, ‘he wrote much and inquired more’. When informed that his activities had come to the attention of the Council of Ten, who had ordered his arrest, he immediately attempted to flee the city on a boat for the mainland. Yet as he did so, ‘he saw several gondolas approaching, and row round his veffel: terror feized him, and in his panic he collected all his papers which contained his Observations on Venice, and cast them into the sea.’ Later Montesquieu learned that he had been the victim of a practical joke. Even so, such an anecdote is illustrative of the pervasive fear inspired by the Council of Ten’s spies.

The coffee houses that had sprung up in Venice to purvey this exotic Levantine beverage amidst informal social circumstances had, from the outset, proved popular with locals and visitors alike. The Venetians first encountered coffee in Constantinople, where it had arrived in the late sixteenth century; by 1638 it was being commercially imported into the Republic, and soon after this the first
caffè
opened. In the words of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica
, in contrast to the tavern, the coffee house provided ‘a much-needed focus for the social activities of the sober’. So popular did these prove that a century or so later the city had nearly 200 coffee houses, with no fewer than thirty-five of them located in the arcades of the Piazza San Marco. The most famous of these, the Caffe Florian, had opened in 1720; it would later be described by an English visitor as consisting ‘of some half dozen very small rooms, almost to be called cells’. Similar ‘cells’ were to be found in all public establishments in Venice, a development imposed by the Council of Ten to prevent populous gatherings that might give rise to political discussion, though from the outset coffee houses became favoured as places for gathering news (political or otherwise), with copies of the
Gazzetta
and similar early newspapers being sold over the counter. The professions, artists and other like-minded groups each tended to favour chosen coffee houses for their own particular purposes; thus Casanova is known to have favoured the Caffe Florian because it was the first establishment to permit the entry of women.

Another popular gathering place of the period was the gambling establishment, which for similar political reasons was at this time frequently
located in a small house, or
casino
in Venetian. As we have seen from the lives of figures such as Leon da Modena, gambling had for centuries been an obsession with citizens of the Republic: dealing with the risks involved in maritime commercial ventures, when one was liable to lose everything in case of shipwreck, meant that gambling was in their blood. Well understanding this predisposition, the authorities had originally banned all public gambling, though they were well aware that this activity continued in private houses, as well as in nefarious semi-private games organised in various dens. (The inveterate gambler and mathematician Cardano describes in his autobiography an incident in such a house. Whilst in the process of losing all his money, Cardano noticed that his opponent had marked the cards. Whereupon he leapt up, slashed his opponent across the face with his dagger and grabbed the money. Outwitting his host’s spear-wielding servants, he fled into the night-shrouded maze of streets, eventually falling into a canal …)
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The advent of public gambling in Venice is largely due to the architect Nicolò Barattieri, who as early as 1181 was responsible for building the first bridge across the Grand Canal, a pontoon construction that was to be the forerunner of the present Rialto Bridge. Barattieri was a man of great ingenuity, combined with a very Venetian eye to the main chance, and some years later offered to solve a problem that had for some time been bothering the doge and the Signoria. Almost a hundred years previously two large columns had been shipped in from Constantinople as spoils of war. (Originally there were three columns, but one of them fell into the sea as it was being unloaded.) The two granite columns proved so heavy and unwieldy that no one could work out how to haul them upright, and for almost a century they simply lay abandoned on the quayside of the Molo. It was now that Barattieri offered his services, assuring the doge that he had devised a scheme that could raise the pillars upright. This involved a sailor’s technique known as ‘watering the rope’. Barattieri ordered a heavy pivot of stone to be placed against the foot of the pillar, then he attached the head of the column by means of a hemp rope to a strong
upright post. Next the hemp rope was doused with water, causing its diameter to expand and its length to decrease, thus raising the head of the column a few inches from the ground so that a wedge could be placed beneath it. This was repeated with increasingly short lengths of rope until gradually, to the delight of the increasing crowds of onlookers, the column was raised.

Barattieri had asked for no payment, but instead requested that if he succeeded he should be allowed to set up a public gaming table between the two pillars. This proved a huge success, earning him a large income. However, this spot between the two pillars soon came to be regarded as a place of ill fortune by more than just unlucky gamblers, when it was chosen as the site for public hangings.
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In the ensuing centuries gambling fever swept Venice, affecting all classes. Nobles set up gambling tables in their palazzi, as did the courtesans in their salons, while street corners hosted vicious games for more modest stakes. Regular edicts issued by the authorities banned gambling in taverns, courtyards, barber shops, on gondolas and even on canal bridges (favoured on account of the good vantage point they gave to lookouts). Such vain attempts to stamp out gambling only served to indicate the widespread nature of the contagion. Even the courtyards and corridors of the Doge’s Palace were not immune, and there large bets would be placed on the results of elections to public office, up to and including that of doge.

In the sixteenth century the authorities had given in to the inevitable, issuing licences for
ridotti
or
casini
, usually small, well-decorated sets of rooms with gaming tables, often including a side-chamber – known as a ‘room of sighs’ – where unlucky gamblers could retire to rue their losses. Not content with gathering revenue from the licensing of
ridotti
, in 1638 the authorities opened their own state-sponsored Ridotto, which is generally recognised as the first full-scale casino in Europe, on which all later versions would be modelled. Such was the popularity of the Ridotto that
other lesser casinos soon followed. An English visitor would remark of these establishments, ‘The crowd is so great that very often one can hardly pass from one Room to another, nevertheless the silence here observ’d is much greater than that in Churches.’

The Ridotto itself remained the most prestigious of all the gambling establishments, occupying an entire wing of the Palazzo San Moisé,
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just a hundred yards west of the Piazza San Marco. This four-storey building had a grand, long entrance hall the size of a ballroom, which became a popular meeting place. Further inside there were dining rooms, with the different gaming rooms located upstairs. Theoretically, as a public institution of the Republic, the Ridotto was open to all; but the high stakes required at the tables and a rigid dress code ensured that it was frequented mainly by nobles and the like. Entry was granted only to those in formal dress, with men expected to wear black three-cornered hats and women fashionable full-length gowns. Gamblers had to wear white masks, with some women wearing smaller black masks, adding a distinct frisson to card games such as basetta, which involved high winnings and high losses, and the poker-like faro, whose participants came to the tables to
puntare
(bet), and were thus the original ‘punters’. The clientele of the Ridotto consisted of a heady mix of nobles – old and young, rich or in ‘reduced circumstances’, sometimes accompanied by their fashionably dressed wives – as well as raffish professional sharks, courtesans and young English bucks.

The most famous of all the gamblers to be seen at the Ridotto was undoubtedly the Scotsman John Law, who around the start of the eighteenth century gambled with unrivalled sums of money, frequently with spectacular success. Law was that far-from-unique combination of financial genius, con-man and escapee from disaster. The earliest disaster from which he escaped was at the age of twenty-one, when he killed a man in a duel in London and was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn. Spirited out of gaol, he took ship to the Netherlands, an exploit that was aided by Elizabeth Villiers, William III’s mistress (women played a key supporting role in
many of Law’s exploits). From now on, Law would be forced to live off his wits, a circumstance that led to the full psychological development of his three exceptional talents – as a thinker of remarkable penetration and foresight, as a mathematical gambler par excellence and as a similarly skilled womaniser. In this way he visited – and then quickly moved on from – the gaming tables, boudoirs and financial exchanges of Amsterdam, Geneva, Turin and Venice, the last of which he first visited during the final years of the seventeenth century. Here his success at the Ridotto was matched only by his amatory skills, leaving in his wake a procession of broken hearts and outraged husbands. But Law was so much more than a pioneer Casanova. According to his contemporary memoirist, the ‘Scots gentleman W. Gray:

He constantly went to the Rialto [where] he observed the course of exchange all the world over, the manner of discounting bills at the bank, the vast usefulness of paper credit, how gladly people parted with their money for paper, and how the profits accrued to the proprietors from this paper.

Over the coming years Law would acquire an aristocratic English mistress, Lady Catherine Knowles (or Knollys), with whom he would have two children, and he would at same time develop the idea of ‘paper credit’ into the modern concept of an alternative currency for higher denominations, in the form of publicly exchangeable paper money.

With the expertise of a confident man, in 1715 Law finally managed to persuade the roue Regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, to allow him to put his paper-money idea into practice on the vast but stagnant French economy. Philippe had more enjoyable things to do than busy himself with arcane economic matters, and simply handed over to Law the financial affairs of the country, including the French colonies, as well as allowing him to hatch a scheme for the development of French North America (so-called Louisiana, which in fact extended north into the entire Midwest). The Mississippi Scheme, as it came to be known, was created in order to mine the vast quantities of gold widely supposed to lie along the banks of the Mississippi and in the hinterland French territory. The
public was encouraged to invest in this potential goldmine by purchasing a special offer of shares that were released onto the market. At the same time the French economy, which had ground to a halt through a lack of solid currency and massive debts, was revived by the introduction of large quantities of paper money. This was backed by a minimal amount of ‘real’ money, as well as the enormous profits that Law confidently expected would soon be flowing in from the Mississippi Scheme, whose shares quickly shot up in price. In order to facilitate all this financial and economic activity, in 1716 Law was allowed to set up what became the Banque Generale, the first French central bank, with control of the currency. To balance this pyramid of enterprises would require, over the next few years, financial gambling on an extraordinary scale, not seen before or since.
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Expert opinion is still divided as to whether Law was, in the opinion of the great twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter, ‘in the front rank of monetarists of all time’ or simply a superlative con-man whose fraudulent activities led him into waters way beyond his depth. He was certainly ahead of his time, leaving his pioneering scheme exposed to the flaws inherent in paper currency (many of which remain to this day); and all the evidence concurs that he did not set aside any secret personal profit from his scheme. When the Banque Generale eventually collapsed in 1720, bringing down with it the paper money, the Mississippi Scheme and all the rest, many were ruined. On the other hand, the massive debts that had clogged up the French nation’s economy simply vanished in a whirl of worthless paper notes. All the same, Law was lucky to escape with his life, fleeing the country dressed as a woman – though unavoidably he was forced to leave behind his beloved Lady Catherine.