The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (9 page)

For years now there had been little to celebrate in Venice and, despite the somewhat premature nature of this news, the city launched into three days of enthusiastic celebration, with jousting, displays of horsemanship and mock-battles staged in the Piazza San Marco before the doge on his throne, with Petrarch sitting at his right hand.

The sixty-year-old Petrarch was a guest in the city, having fled there two years earlier to escape from an outbreak of plague in nearby Padua. He had arrived with his extensive library, in the form of bales of manuscripts strapped to the backs of a lengthy string of packhorses. The city was honoured to receive such a celebrated guest, and Petrarch was offered the free use of the Ca’ Molina delle due Torri (Palazzo of the Two Towers) overlooking the
main harbour, in return for which he promised that on his death he would donate to the city his library, which is known to have contained some 200 codices of priceless manuscripts and books that he had collected during the long years of his travels through Europe.
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His fervent wish was that his collection should form the core of a great library used by visiting scholars, in conscious echo of the ancient Library of Alexandria, which had been used by the likes of Euclid, Archimedes and Plutarch.

Petrarch enjoyed the company of many friends in high places in Venice, most notably Benintendi dei Ravignani, the Grand Chancellor of the city,
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‘who would arrive on his gondola at dusk, after his fatiguing day’s work, and we would relax together in scholarly conversation as we were rowed across the night-bound lagoon’. We know from Petrarch’s many letters to his friends elsewhere that he admired Venice for its just government and its citizens’ sense of adventure; he is also known to have enjoyed its ‘foaming wine’ and to have passed many happy hours gazing down at the busy port below his window, where:

even amidst the gloom of winter and the violent springtime storms the water was crammed with ships, one turning its prow to the east, the other to the west; some carrying off our wine to foam in British cups, our fruits to flatter the palates of the Scythians … others to the Aegean and the Achaian isles, some to Syria, others to Armenia, some to the Arabs, others to the Persians, carrying oil and linen and saffron, and bringing back all their many wonderful goods.

Yet the Florentine-born poet’s relationship with the city remained essentially ambivalent. He admired Venice for being ‘strong in power, and even stronger in virtue’, but paradoxically found its ‘foul language and excessive
licence’ offensive. Similarly he admired its cosmopolitanism, but was repelled by ‘encountering in the alleyways filthy slaves with Scythian features’. Likewise it seems that the ‘father of humanism’, for all his great learning, was not fully appreciated by the more advanced local intellectuals, who tended to favour scientific knowledge over humanist studies. And apart from these, most of the local thinkers clung to the rigid medieval authority of Aristotle, which Petrarch’s humanism sought to overcome. When sometime during 1367 he heard that behind his back ‘four friends … had called him ignorant and illiterate’ because he did not read Aristotle, he decided this was the last straw and determined to leave Venice. The following year he crossed to the mainland, taking his library with him, regardless of his promise, and settled once more in the territory of Padua, whose ruler Francesco da Carrara was no friend of Venice. Deep in the countryside by the village of Arquà,
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on a hillside above the distant Venice lagoon, he built himself a house beside a vineyard and an olive grove and here he lived out his last years. He died peacefully whilst reading in his library on the warm summer night of 19 July 1374, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.

Petrarch’s will made no mention of his precious library, or of his promise to Venice. As a result, the manuscripts and books were sold off piecemeal, and can now be found scattered in collections ranging from the Bodleian Library in Oxford to the Vatican Library in Rome, as well as in London, Paris and even Venice. Indeed, it appears that when Petrarch departed in high dudgeon from Venice he may even have left a part of his library behind in the Ca’ Molina. These manuscripts would become, in the words of the modern Italian scholar Manlio Stocchi, the ‘subject of an uncertain and veiled tradition … halfway between history and legend’. In 1635, the antiquary Giacomo Tomasim discovered a long-forgotten cache of Petrarch’s manuscripts hidden away, in a small dark room behind the four horses of San Marco, above the great entrance doorway. According to the nineteenth-century historians Charles and Mart Elton, ‘Some had crumbled into powder, and others had been glued into shapeless masses by the damp. The survivors were placed in the Libraria [
sic
] Vecchia.’ Many historians
now dispute that these were left behind by Petrarch, claiming that the abandoned ‘survivors’ in fact came from Petrarch’s dispersed collection. Either way, neither Petrarch nor Venice fared well from this ‘veiled tradition’ of broken promises, ingratitude and neglect.

While the Venetians had celebrated their crushing of the Cretans, the early 1370s saw familiar anxieties return, with another increase in tension between the Republic and Genoa. This would come to a head in Cyprus at the coronation of the fifteen-year-old King Peter II, which took place in October 1372 at Famagusta. Afterwards a grand banquet was held at the royal palace. The festivities were attended by a variety of local nobles, church dignitaries, visiting foreign aristocracy, as well as the resident Venetians and Genoese, who were segregated at separate long tables. After the consumption of much strong local wine, the Venetians and Genoese began boisterously pelting each other with bread. This quickly turned nasty when the Genoese drew back their robes to reveal that they were armed with swords and daggers – an unforgivable breach of etiquette as well as a threatening insult to the king. Amidst widespread outrage a riot ensued, with the Genoese coming under violent attack from both angry Cypriots and Venetians (who appear to have found miraculous access to arms of their own, with no recorded breach of etiquette). A number of Genoese were thrown to their death from the palace balcony, and others were rounded up outside and summarily executed, while a mob began to rampage through the Genoese quarter, setting fire to buildings. Scores of Genoese managed to board two ships in the harbour, eventually making it back to their home city, where their arrival caused a sensation.

The Genoese bided their time, assembling two fleets, which set sail for Cyprus the following summer. The first, consisting of seven galleys, landed raiding parties at several spots along the coast, with armed men conducting a campaign of rape, plunder and hostage-taking. Meanwhile the other fleet of thirty-six ships, carrying some 14,000 men as well as cavalry and artillery, landed at Famagusta. Within days the Genoese had virtual control of most of Cyprus. At a stroke, the balance of power in the Mediterranean had taken a decisive shift. Holding Cyprus meant that the Genoese had command over the lucrative trade routes to the Levant. Such were the
origins of the Fourth Genoese War (also known as the War of Chioggia), by far the most vicious and dangerous conflict to erupt between the two maritime republics. Both sensed that this would be a fight to the death, and reacted accordingly.

Venice appointed to take charge of its fleet two exceptional admirals. The first of these was Carlo Zeno, a brother to Nicolò and Antonio, the explorers who may have sailed to Greenland and America earlier in this period – indeed, according to some sources, Carlo accompanied his brothers on this legendary pioneer voyage. The Zeno family was amongst the more distinguished Venetian nobility, but Carlo was one of ten brothers and was forced by financial circumstances to take up holy orders at an early age. Seldom would a vocation prove more inappropriate. However, all began well enough and the young priest was despatched to France, to serve in the papal court of Clement V at Avignon. The pope eventually rewarded the teenage Venetian with the post of canon of the cathedral of Patras in the distant Greek Peloponnese. This benefice provided him with a sizeable income, and after sixteen months at Avignon Carlo set off back to Italy, where he decided to study law at the University of Padua. Here, despite his priestly vows, he threw himself wholeheartedly into student life, especially the pursuit of women, gambling and revelry – to such an extent that he was eventually forced to sell everything he had, including his books, and enlist as a mercenary to escape his creditors. And it was now that his true character emerged.

Carlo would prove to be an embodiment of that Venetian adventurous-ness so admired by Petrarch. He was a natural soldier, and he spent the next five years honing his military skills, travelling as far afield as France, Germany and England in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV.
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Surprisingly, he then arrived at Patras to take up his post as canon of the cathedral; he was now a battle-hardened warrior of twenty-two. At this time the Ottoman Turks were advancing into the Peloponnese, and once again Zeno took up arms. However, although the Bishop of Patras saw nothing remiss in one of his canons leading a troop of cavalry, he drew the line at undisciplined behaviour. When the hotheaded Carlo
challenged one of his fellow officers to a duel, the archbishop stripped him of both his military rank and his post as canon. Considering himself to be absolved of his priestly vows, Carlo immediately married a local Greek lady, who soon died – whereupon he returned to Venice and married a Venetian lady belonging to the noble Giustinian family. According to his grandson, Japopo Zeno, Bishop of Padua, who wrote his biography drawing on family papers, Carlo now:

made up his mind to adopt the life of a merchant; and leaving Venice with this intention, remained seven years absent, living partly in a castle called Tanai on the banks of the river Tania [at the head of the Sea of Azov], and partly in Constantinople.

The other admiral appointed by the Venetians to take charge of their fleet at the start of the War of Chioggia was Vettore Pisani, nephew of the celebrated Nicolò, who during the previous hostilities had led the Venetian fleet to its great victory over the Genoese off the coast of Sardinia, and had later been lucky to escape with his life in the catastrophic defeat by his rival, Paganino Doria, at Porto Lungo.

The young Vettore Pisani is said to have been present at Porto Lungo, and to have escaped with his uncle. Though he was charged with cowardice on his return to Venice, his case was overwhelmingly dismissed. He was a courageous, flamboyant character and became a popular naval captain, commanding the loyalty and admiration of his crews. Such regard was unusual during this period, when nobles were still much despised for their arrogant behaviour. On one occasion Pisani stood up for a galley master wrongly accused of smuggling for his own gain, a serious offence. One of the accusers was the noble Pietro Cornaro, who during the proceedings sarcastically implied that Pisani was lying. Outraged at this affront to his honour, Pisani afterwards went up to Cornaro in the street and demanded to know if he was armed. When Cornaro replied that he was not, Pisani knew that he could not challenge him, so he warned him that next time they encountered each other Cornaro should make sure he was armed. That night Pisani stood waiting for Cornaro to return to his palazzo, so that he could challenge him. But as soon as Cornaro saw Pisani he fled
into a nearby house. For this serious breach of public order Pisani was fined 200 ducats, and was stripped of a public office in Crete to which he had recently been elected. However, such was his popularity that he was quickly elected to another Cretan post, and would become one of the few to serve the Republic with honour and bravery during the Cretan revolt. The choice of Vettore Pisani to lead the Venetian fleet, along with the redoubtable Carlo Zeno, was popular with citizens of all ranks throughout the city.

The official outbreak of the War of Chioggia came in 1378, a good six years after the riot at the coronation of King Peter II in Famagusta. The Venetians held an early advantage thanks to the adventurous escapades of the irresponsible Zeno. In 1376 he had found himself in Constantinople when the Byzantine emperor John V Palaeologus was deposed by his son Andronicus, who imprisoned him and two of his sons in the Tower of Anema, at the same time declaring himself emperor. The former emperor John V had spent some time in Venice (where he had suffered the indignity of being confined in a debtors’ gaol); nevertheless he remained a friend of Venice, while his son – the new emperor Andronicus IV – favoured Genoa. According to the papers consulted by Zeno’s biographer-grandson, which contain Carlo’s not-always-reliable version of events, he now became involved in a spectacular adventure that would change the course of Venetian history no less. Seemingly, John V managed to smuggle a message from his cell in the Tower of Anema to Carlo Zeno, imploring the Venetian to rescue him. Under cover of darkness, Zeno and some companions rowed across the Golden Horn in a small boat, putting ashore beneath the Tower of Anema, where John V let down a rope-ladder from the window of his cell. Zeno climbed up the ladder, but John V refused to escape unless he could take his two sons with him. As there was no room for his sons on the boat, Zeno was eventually forced to leave empty-handed. Making his getaway as best he could, Zeno raised sail and made for the Sea of Marmara. Here he was eventually picked up by a Venetian squadron, which happened to be under the command of his father-in-law, Mario Giustinian. In recompense for Zeno’s brave attempt to rescue him, John V had handed Zeno an imperial decree granting possession of the Aegean island of Tenedos (modern Bozcaada) to the Venetian Republic. This island was of
great strategic importance, guarding the entrance to the Hellespont (Dardanelles). When Giustinian landed and showed the imperial decree to the Byzantine-Greek commander of Tenedos, he immediately handed over the island, making no attempt to defend it.

However, it so happened that the new emperor, Andronicus IV, had just promised Tenedos to the Genoese, and the following year a Genoese-Byzantine fleet arrived off Tenedos to enforce this claim, but was soon repulsed by the resident Venetian forces. Although the Genoese continued to hold Cyprus and command the trade routes to the Levant, Venice now commanded the trade routes running through the Hellespont into the Black Sea and the ports in the Sea of Azov that lay at the western end of the Silk Route from the Orient.