The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (5 page)

Little wonder this pandemic would later be christened the Black Death. Cantacuzenus recognised it as the Athenian plague that had been described by Thucydides in 300
BC,
and most medical historians now agree that this medieval outbreak was a virulent and extremely contagious strain of the bubonic plague (so called because it gave rise to buboes or boils). All Cantacuzenus could do was describe its symptoms, and the course it took: ‘some died the same day, a few even within the hour. Those who could
resist for two or three days had a very violent fever’; those who survived ‘were no longer possessed by the same evil, but were safe. The disease did not attack twice in order to kill them.’ Yet despite the emperor’s meticulous attention to detail, no physician could discover a cure: ‘There was no help from anywhere.’ Only now do we know that this pandemic almost certainly arose from a bacillus passed on by the bite of a flea (
Xenopsylla cheopis
) carried by the black rat (
Rattus rattus
). And as the Venetian merchants fled Constantinople in the ensuing panic, their galleys carried with them some of these black rats. On their voyage home during the latter months of 1347 these galleys called at various Venetian trading ports on the way, spreading the plague to Negropont (Euboea), Crete, Corfu and up the Adriatic islands, to Trieste.

The first recorded death from plague in Venice occurred on 25 January 1348. The putrid waterways provided an ideal breeding ground for the black rats, which quickly spread. By the coming of the heat and stink of spring, officially designated barges had begun plying the canals crying out for
‘Corpi morti’
(dead bodies). Corpses were transported to be buried on remote islands of the lagoon. Soon there were so many that they were simply tossed ashore to rot. By the height of summer it has been estimated that there were 600 people dying each day. The streets were littered with suppurating bodies, the canals bobbed with bloated corpses; the stench was almost unendurable. Commercial activity, and even the city’s renowned bureaucracy, had come to a virtual standstill. The prisons were thrown open in an attempt to replace municipal manpower, but as many as could simply fled to the mainland. This belatedly included most of the city’s physicians, who had suffered disproportionate losses whilst vainly attempting to treat the disease.

Within months the disease had swept across the Alps and by the summer of 1348 it had even reached England. An anonymous monk in Austria recorded, ‘And in this year a pestilence struck that was so great and universal that it stretched from sea to sea, causing many cities, towns and other places to become almost totally desolated of human beings.’ At the same time bands of frenzied survivors, maddened with grief and terror, sought out scapegoats. Jews throughout Europe soon became targets, and the Jews of Venice were no exception. They lived on the island of Spinalunga (now known, after its former inhabitants, as Giudecca), which made them easy
targets. When news reached Italy from Switzerland that two Jews had been tortured into confessing that they had poisoned the local wells with a plague powder concocted from ‘Christians’ hearts, spiders, frogs, lizards, human flesh and sacred hosts’, the situation became further inflamed. During the course of 1348 Pope Clement VI was forced to issue two papal bulls instructing the clergy to protect the Jews, and condemning those who blamed the Jews for the Black Death as having been ‘seduced by that liar, the Devil’.

In Venice all citizens lived cheek-by-jowl, its population being the most concentrated and urbanised in Europe. As a result, no class of citizens was to be spared the scourge of this pandemic. By October 1348 as many as fifty noble families had been completely wiped out, their centuries-old names vanishing into history. Such losses were reflected several times over amongst the poor. To make up for this depletion, many exiles were encouraged to return, and even debtors who had fled or been imprisoned were absolved on payment of a token amount of their debt. Formerly Venice had guarded its citizenship with jealous pride; rarely were any other than those born in the city permitted to become Venetians. Yet within nine months of the plague arriving, the government was even advertising for citizens, promising that anyone who settled in Venice within the year would be guaranteed citizenship. A crucial aspect of the Republic’s character was now showing itself – the belief in pragmatism rather than ideals, no matter how long these ideals may have been held.

It is impossible to tell how many died. Most experts concur that the toll across Europe probably amounted to around one-third of the population, with other estimates varying between 20 per cent and 80 per cent mortality. The involvement of Venice and Genoa in the lucrative Black Sea and Levantine trade had made them amongst the richest, and probably the most populous, cities of the Western world – inspiring the contemporary poet Petrarch to refer to them as ‘the twin torches of Europe’. Yet they would pay dreadfully for their involvement with the Orient, suffering much higher mortality rates than other trading cities. According to the historian Christopher Hibbert, writing of Venice, ‘In all there were some seventy-two thousand deaths in a population of about a hundred and sixty thousand.’ Genoa is said to have suffered a 60 per cent loss of population.

If this were not bad enough, Venice would be stricken by lesser outbreaks of the plague at least once a decade throughout the last half of the fourteenth century. Despite this, the city’s trade quickly revived in the wake of the Black Death. The main engine behind this revival was the Arsenale, the city’s ship-building centre. This formidable enterprise had been founded as early as 1104 by the city authorities, its name deriving from the Arabic
dar sina’a
, meaning ‘place of construction’, strongly suggesting that, like several European innovations of the medieval period (such as negative numbers and double-entry bookkeeping), this was based on an Arab original. The Arsenale was soon producing galleys of the highest standard, which were leased to private merchants for commercial enterprises. It also began producing armed galleys for the city’s defensive fleet and to protect the bullion convoys to the eastern Mediterranean. The industry and efficiency of the Arsenale would soon become legendary. Here, for the first time, assembly-line production was introduced (nearly 600 years before Henry Ford adopted this method for his car-building plants). Once the bare hull was complete, it would be launched, then towed up a canal overlooked by a wall. As the ship passed along the canal, through windows in the wall would be passed in succession equipment, sails, armaments and dry-goods supplies (culminating in barrels of hard tack), until the ship emerged at the other end of the canal, entering the lagoon fully constructed, rigged and stored-up, ready for manning by a crew of sailors and oarsmen. Utilising sail-power, and disciplined rowers at close quarters, meant that these galleys were highly manoeuvrable (prior to the sixteenth century Venetian galley-oars were powered by highly motivated, well-fed young Venetians). Besides rapid production, this assembly-line manufacture would also enable standardised ships’ parts to be transported to Venetian depots throughout the Mediterranean, available for immediate replacement of faulty or damaged equipment as soon as a ship put into port.

This massive state-run enterprise also enabled the introduction of necessary modifications across the fleet, such as powerful rudders, streamlined hulls and compasses to assist in the reading of charts. Soon merchant ships – formerly cumbersome vessels powered by sail alone – had evolved into massive galleys, capable of transporting 150 tons of cargo. These were powered by 200 oarsmen, so that they could keep up with the naval galleys
that protected them against pirates on the increasingly large convoys to the Levant. These would soon be leaving Venice at the rate of one every two months and consisted of as many as 200 ships. At its height, the Venetian fleet would have 36,000 sailors manning 3,300 ships.

The
Arsenalotti
, as the workers became known, would over the coming centuries hone their assembly-line production to a fine art. When the young Henry III of France visited Venice in 1574, he was shown the
Arsenalotti
laying down the keel of a galley, and was then taken for a meal. When he had finished his dinner, he marvelled to see that an entire galley had been assembled, rigged out and armed in just two hours. Conditions in the Arsenale were more like those in a factory of the Industrial Revolution than a craftsman’s workshop of the medieval era. During the early years of the fourteenth century the Arsenale was visited by Dante Alighieri, who was so struck by what he saw that he incorporated it into a scene in his
Inferno:

As in the Arsenale at Venice

They boil in winter bubbling pitch …

One man hammers at the prow, another at the stern,

This one shaves oars, that one rigging twists,

Still others make the mainsail and the mizzen …

Fire … thick boiling pitch with great bubbles black as ink,

Rising and bursting in a seething tide …

Working in the heat of the forges, and assembling the galleys beneath the burning sun, proved thirsty work for the industrious
Arsenalotti
, and a free wine fountain was provided for them to slake their thirst. At the height of the Arsenale’s productivity this fountain accounted for more than 13,000 gallons of wine in a year, with individual workers consuming as much as a gallon a day. Even though the wine would certainly have been watered down, this nonetheless marked a prodigious consumption. The
Arsenalotti
were a proud breed, who were recruited exclusively from the three neighbouring parishes of the Castello district. They regarded themselves as superior to other workers of the city, and certain privileged employment was restricted to their number. Only
Arsenalotti
were permitted to form the
bodyguard of the doge, or make up the force of rowers required for the doge’s barge, the large golden ceremonial
Bucintoro
(from
bucio in oro
, or ‘barque in gold’). Likewise, only
Arsenalotti
were considered sufficiently skilled and trusted to be employed in the city’s Mint, or to be retained by the corps of city fire-fighters.

The setting of the Arsenale at the eastern end of Venice overlooking the lagoon is both formidable and spectacular. Its high pink-brick walls look down over open water and surrounding inland canals, which combine to give it the appearance and defensive strength of a vast moated castle. Its architecture includes ancient and modern in characteristic Venetian fashion: the magnificent landside gateway to the Arsenale was one of the first examples in Venice of Renaissance architecture, whilst two of the nearby stone lions represent spoils of war dating from earlier centuries. One was seized from amongst the sacred sixth-century
BC
ruins on the island of Delos, while the other, captured from Piraeus (the port of Athens) is marked with graffiti of runes carved by eleventh-century Viking mercenaries employed by the Byzantine emperor.

In the aftermath of the plague all Europe suffered from a huge depletion in manpower. Household servants, manual labour in the fields and the cities – all were in short supply. Venice found itself ideally placed to remedy the gap in the market. From as early as the eleventh century the Venetians and the Genoese had shipped slaves from the Black Sea to the markets of the Levant and Egypt, with a number ending up back in Europe. Now they were able to utilise these trading contacts to purchase larger numbers for transport to Europe. Although several papal edicts had been issued against slavery over the centuries, these were ignored during the post-plague years. Venice soon led the lucrative trade in importing Slav, Caucasian, Armenian and Georgian slaves, purchased from Tartar merchants at outposts on the Black Sea, such as Sinope and Trebizond, as well as Nubians purchased from Egyptian caravaners in Alexandria (although these black slaves seldom reached Europe, as they were mostly sold for work in the sugar plantations of Cyprus and Crete). This pitiful trade had originally relied upon a regular supply from Tartar merchants buying up young men and girls sold by their impoverished families in mountain villages of the Caucasus and other remote
eastern regions. Now, such was the demand for slaves in depleted Italy that the young men, women and children on the market often represented the entire able-bodied population of mountain villages, who had simply been rounded up by the Tartars. This trade proved hugely profitable for the Venetian traders, who could realise as much as 1000 per cent on the purchase price of each slave. Whereas the changes to citizenship laws during the plague saw the Republic jettisoning long-held ideals in the name of pragmatism, the opportunistic acceleration of their participation in the slave trade represented a colder element in the Republics character – the willingness to jettison morality for the sake of profit.

In Venice, slaves had originally been sold at what is still known as Riva degli Schiavoni (literally ‘landing stage of the Slavs’, the word ‘slave’ being derived from the Slav name). Once purchased, slaves were deemed to be the property of their owners, and were listed on tax returns as chattels along with domestic animals and furniture. Despite such callous disregard for human dignity, slaves were for the most part treated with a degree of humanity by their Italian masters. Many slaves from Venice were exported to cities such as Florence and Rome, where they entered households and undertook domestic duties like any other servant. As such, they would often dine at the family table and suffered no more or less than the usual affection or maltreatment meted out to the vulnerable country girls who made up the lower retinue of servants. When the banker Cosimo de’ Medici was working in Rome he impregnated his slave girl, whereupon she was sent home to the family mansion to give birth, and her son was treated in much the same way as any other illegitimate offspring of a well-to-do family in Italy; he was educated and then sent to a nearby city to take up a position that had been secured for him in the Church. Such consideration was certainly not the norm, but it was not exceptional. Slaves who had served a family loyally over the years would sometimes be set free in their master’s will, just as Marco Polo had done with the Tartar slave he brought back with him from the East. On the other hand, the Venetian authorities did on occasion purchase slaves to make up numbers in the galleys, though this was only as a last resort. Youths from artisan families traditionally volunteered for a term in the galleys, where (if they were lucky) they could become rich through a share in the spoils of war. The
men who manned the oars were also expected to fight in naval engagements, which made the authorities wary of seconding to the galleys slaves whose patriotism was liable to be suspect.