It is said that Venice was the first true European colonial empire. It has also been said that Venice gave Britain the blueprint for its own future empire - both were small maritime powers that gained global reach. Do we see any other similarities in how Venice and the early British endeavours were organised?
Let’s start at the end. Two main factors led to the waning of the famous Venetian Republic: i) a prolonged war with the Ottomans, which we touched on in a previous blog; and ii) a diversion of trade due to the enterprise and courage of the early Portuguese navigators:
- The 1503 peace treaty with the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit confirmed all Venetian territorial losses in the previous battles with the Turks. Venice had become a vassal state and now dipped its flags when passing Ottoman ships as a sign of subservience.
- But more importantly Vasco da Gama had returned from India in 1499 after sailing to find the source of the spice trade. The Portuguese then captured Malacca and it could now ship spices in bulk in its huge galleons, so avoiding the Middle Eastern spice road that was controlled and heavily taxed by the Ottomans and the Egyptian Mamluks. These Galleons would make the old trade routes through Venice (via Alexandria and the Levant) redundant. German merchants could now relocate from Venice to Lisbon and pay much less for their purchases.
It was not the Turks who had their hands on the throat of Venice, but the Portuguese.
A Merchant Guild
The Venetian empire started its slow decline by about 1500, which is 100 years before the founding of our (English) East India Company. We must remember that the British Empire was not originally a national public enterprise, but one established at their own risk by private companies with private finance.
Venetian and English merchants would have been trading for many years before 1500. Alix and I live in Cirencester, a town in the Cotswolds built on the wealth from the wool trade. The large size of the local church towers is testament to that. The wool of the Cotswold Lion sheep was highly prized across Europe and the Middle East. Cotswold wool merchants sold their fleeces to the Venetian merchants who were based in Southampton and London.
Maybe those commercial interchanges gave the entrepreneurial English merchants a taste of what greater prizes lay well beyond our shores to the east?
In many respects the Venetian Republic was set up, not as a nation, but as a private commercial company, where all Venetians were shareholders in some way. “Our agenda in the maritime parts”, the Venetian senate declared in 1441, “considers our state and the conservation of our city and commerce.” Roger Crowley (author of ‘City of Fortune – How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire) notes that these words sounded like a corporation setting out its strategic plan. [Alix: but did they have a mission statement?]
Venice had no Merchant Guild, because the whole city was a merchant guild. The republic had no real land holdings and no feudal income. In contrast, their later arch-enemy, the Ottomans, relied upon autocracy, taxed land-holdings and continued expansionism to keep afloat. Venice’s existence was purely down to the profits arising from maritime trade with the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea.
Unlike the Genoese - their main maritime rivals - who acted as individuals, the Venetians traded like a commune. They even had a communal insurance pot that they all paid into in case one of them got cheated by the Mamluks for example. Ships were owned by the commune and leased by auction before the next sailing season. The captains, though, were salaried employees of the commune; this was to help ensure that the commune’s ships got back in one piece! It’s like Budget leasing you a car, but providing their own driver at their own expense to stop you pranging it.
With its mixed populations of Catholics, Jews and Orthodox Christians, the Republic was concerned above all to keep a social balance. The ‘Stato da Mar’ was essentially a secular state. It had no programme for the conversion of peoples it controlled, and no remit to spread the Latin faith. However, there was a sense of racial purity, including how a Venetian should look. At Modon (now Methoni), for example, the Venetians were forbidden to grow beards and to remain clean-shaven, to distinguish them from the hirsute Greeks!
Most importantly, the Venetians never lashed out at their trading partners. Where the Genoese sent armed galleys, “Venice sent diplomats. Again, and again and again.”
Ultimately, Venice needed a long necklace of ports between it and the Black Sea, the Levant and Egypt. These included major islands such as Crete, which became a full-blown colony. The ports would be needed to re-water, make repairs and to share intelligence on trade and the location of hostile ships and pirates. Like the British Empire, it relied on naval power to keep all these disparate ports stitched together.
It is to some of these strategic ancient ports – such as Modon (now Methoni) and Coron (now Koroni) - that Missy Bear will soon be sailing soon. And this is why this blog subject is interesting to us.
Back to the beginning
We came across the Venetians in last season's blog, 'The Norman Conquest'. We noted their very strong links to the Byzantine Empire and how, when Robert Guiscard, sailed across the Adriatic - to march on Constantinople in his Greek campaign - he suffered naval losses to the Venetian fleet loyal to the Greeks. There would be other naval battles with the Venetians that Robert would win. But he eventually succumbed to typhoid and died in 1085, it is thought, on Cephalonia?
So it may seem ironic that Venice’s big breakthrough came with the rather shameful Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. The March Pact set down rules for the division of booty; the Venetians would get three quarters of the proceeds of the Byzantine Empire, until their debt of 150,000 marks was paid off by the Frankish knights. Thereafter the spoils would be divided equally. The new Emperor would be chosen by a committee of six Venetians and six Franks. Critically for the merchant Venetians, the chosen emperor would bar trade with anyone at war with Venice. This allowed Venice to exclude its maritime competitors - the Pisans and the Genoese.
The Venetians were granted all of western Greece, Corfu and the Ionian islands, bases and islands in the Aegean, control of the sea lane to Constantinople, and three eighths of Constantinople, including its docks and arsenal. The merchants had been trading in the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years and they knew exactly what they wanted. While the feudal Frankish lords gained petty fiefdoms on the poor soil of continental Greece, Crowley notes that “the Venetians demanded ports, trading stations and naval bases with strategic control of seaways. Wealth lay not in exploiting an impoverished Greek peasantry, but in the control of sea lanes along which the merchandise of the east could be channelled into the warehouses of the Grand Canal.”
Modon and Coron - the two strategic ports on the south-west tip of the Peloponnese – became the eyes of the Republic, ever watchful of pirates, but particularly of their perennial enemy, the Genoese.
At the end of the 13th century, the crusading knights were eventually squeezed out of the Holy Land by the Melmuk Egyptians when Acre fell (1291). The Melmuks forbade trade with infidels. Prior to this, the great Mongol Genghis Khan had been securing the overland Silk Road, and so the Venetian trade route simply moved northwards from the Persian Gulf and Levant to the Black Sea.
Topically perhaps, the ports of Caffa (Crimea) and Tana (Sea of Azov) were active centres of slave trading, largely controlled by the Genoese. The Mongols raided the interior for slaves to sell; “Russians, Mingrelians, Caucasians, Circassians, Bulgarians, Armenians and diverse other people of the Christian world”. The qualities of the ethnic groups were carefully distinguished. Tartars were highly valued because they were loyal. In general, the slaves were young teenage boys in their teens, with the girls a little older. Some were shipped to Venice as domestic and sexual servants, others to Crete in conditions of plantation slavery. Sometimes they were sold illicitly (i.e., expressly forbidden by the pope) as military slaves to the Mamluk Islamic armies. Sometimes whole shipments of slaves would be placed in the holds in a manner similar to that of the later Atlantic slave trade. (In 1347-8 the Black Death spread from Tartars in Caffa via Constantinople to Venice. Two-thirds of the population of Venice died!)
The pesky Genoese then established a base at Galata (across the Golden Horn from Constantinople) and continued to weaken the city. They even became allies of the Orhan, the Ottoman Sultan, son of Osman! As the rump states collapsed, the Ottoman Turks advanced. Ever to spot a quick profit, the Genoese ferried an Ottoman army across the Dardanelles into Europe at a charge of a ducat a head. Once established in Gallipoli (north of the Dardanelles), the Turks became impossible to dislodge and were in Europe for good.
Venice continued to war with their biggest nemesis, the Genoese. One famous reverse occurred in 1354 at the sea battle at Porto Longo on the island of Sapienza, near Modon. The Genoese, led by Doria, beat the Venetians, led by Pisani, with the loss of all its galleys and 6,000 men! These ongoing Christian wars frustrated the pope, who was mindful of the growing Ottoman threat. A pope would never again be able to organise a Christian coalition against the Turks. We know how that ended, in our earlier Season 2 blog about the Ottomans.
Despite all these setbacks, and the growing chaos in the seas - including Catalan pirates from Aragon - the Venetian Republic proved its resilience and its ability to rebound. Between 1380 and 1420 Venice doubled its land holdings and its population. These new acquisitions were piecemeal. As Crowley relates, “Ambassadors were despatched to guarantee the safety of a Greek port or a Dalmatian Island; an absentee landlord could be tempted to sell up for ready cash; a couple of armed galleys might persuade an embattled Catalan adventurer it was time to go home…” At one time or another the Venetians occupied a hundred sites in continental Greece with most of the Aegean islands passing through their hands. They held the Peloponnesian rock of Monemvasia (a mini-Rock of Gibraltar, where Missy Bear will anchor this spring) on and off for over a century.
Last season’s blog included one on the Crown of Aragon. There I included a map showing that the Aragonese mercenaries had gained control of the Duchy of Athens – their easternmost possession - in the late 14th century. Interestingly, the Venetians controlled the port of Athens in the 1390s, and watched on whilst Catalan adventurers stripped the silver plates from the Parthenon doors. Where is that silver now? It's another ‘whataboutery’ fact for your next after dinner debate about Lord Elgin.
[As an aside but not a total tangent, I hadn’t realised until now that the bronze sculpture of the four horses – pinched by the Venetians from Constantinople in 1204 and put at the façade of St Mark’s Basilica – had in turn been pilfered by Napoléon in 1797 and sent to Paris. They were returned to Venice in 1815 on behalf of the allied forces by the British Captain Dumaresq, who had fought with Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. They never did make it back to Istanbul though. But I guess Erdogan doesn’t really have a valid historical claim to them?]
As we know, Mehmet II eventually took Constantinople, and his successors banged on the gates of Vienna. The Ottomans pushed into the Peloponnese, the last stronghold of the fractured Byzantium. By 1460, the Venetian only held onto a few strategic ports and harbours, including Modon, Coron and the island of Negroponte (now known as Euboea). And these would later be lost.
The Ottomans won the Battle of Zonchio (1499), which was the first real naval battle using caravels (sailing ships of a Portuguese design) and cannon. Poor leadership and internecine jealousies by the Venetians played a part in their loss. They later lost Lepanto (in the Gulf of Corinth). Venice and its meagre holdings in the north Ionian and the Adriatic became a thin red line between the Turks and Latin Christianity. The Pope, Milan, Genoa and Naples would only look on.
Modon (won in the Fourth Crusade) was now lost in 1500, following some Venetian naval cowardice and confusion. Coron immediately surrendered without a fight. The 1503 peace with Sultan Bayezit confirmed all Venetian territorial losses. As we said, Venice would now dip its flags to Ottoman ships as a vassal state, and Lisbon would become the new axial point for the spice trade. The decline had started, although the Venetian presence would continue in the Adriatic and Ionian for years to come.
So what?
What similarities then did you see between Venice and early British empire? And how much did the English merchants learn from this early colonial merchant guild?
Controversially I would argue that the Venetians and East India Company were mostly about creating and protecting trade routes. I acknowledge that India would perhaps become our Crete, but generally the ‘colonies’ were simply quarters or ghettos, often fortified, where merchants could do their business in relative safety.
My reading has also highlighted that the Venetian commune was fantastically well-organised and hard-working. The doge was more of the CEO of a large company. Visitors were amazed at the city’s industry and wealth. The republic’s finances and assets were tightly managed, with money made to work and a good appetite for risk and return. And I guess you could say that about the East India Company, and later of the post-industrial British Empire; we were generally good financiers and administrators. We were also very good sailors. We spent a lot of effort on diplomacy or ‘soft power’.
I must say that if you have an empire, you can overreach. And the first thing you must expect is that someone will want to take bits from you. You must spend a huge amount of time and money just to stay still. The other obvious point is that war is ridiculously expensive and tiring. In the same way that the Genoese and Ottoman wars stretched the Venetians to an existential breaking point, fighting two world wars to help European allies finally finished off the British Empire, if not the Commonwealth.
The possibly surprising thing is how reluctant the various 'Christian' republics, kingdoms and duchies etc., became to act together against a common Muslim enemy. The truth is that if you do trade with your 'enemy', its definitely financially better to avoid war. [Note how Angela Merkel and Imran Khan have dealt with Putin over gas and wheat.] Even though the Christian Venetians were 'with' the pope and against the Turks and Mameluks, the pope watched while the Venetians traded in the Levant and Egypt and the only thing he managed to ban (for the most part) was the trade in Christian slaves and in products that could be used in war such as iron and timber.
Anyway, enough geopolitik! All the crew on Missy Bear can look out for now are ghostly images of La Serenissima: a carved lion, probably winged, above a gate lintel for example. We’ll spot them and post photographs.
I bet you can’t wait 😊
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