I
The period between the battle of Lepanto and the middle of the seventeenth century has a certain unity. Barbary pirates did not go away – indeed, they became more piratical, in the sense that the Ottomans allowed them a freer hand, for the Sublime Porte no longer expected to extend its direct authority deep into the western Mediterranean.1 The western Mediterranean was also exposed to vicious raids by Christian corsairs – to the Knights of Malta could now be added the Knights of Santo Stefano, Tuscan pirates and holy warriors whose order was founded in 1562 by the Medici duke of Tuscany. Like the Venetians, they brought some of the Ottoman banners back in victory from Lepanto; they still hang incongruously in their church in Pisa, daily proclaiming the faith of Islam amid the incense of Catholic ritual. It would be otiose to repeat the endless saga of attacks and reprisals as Christian Knights of Malta or Santo Stefano scored points against Barbary corsairs; the most unfortunate victims were always those who were carried away into slavery from the decks of captured merchant ships, or from the shores of Italy, Spain and Africa (the French were relatively immune to Muslim raiders as a result of their ties to the Ottoman court). Galleys out of Sicily continued to patrol the seas in the hope of defending the Spanish king’s Italian possessions from sea-raiders, but large-scale galley warfare had come to an end, not just because new ship-types were seen as more efficient but because the cost of building and maintaining galleys was prohibitive. Even so, the Ottomans reconstructed their war fleet in the immediate aftermath of Lepanto. There were alarums in the West: it was confidently assumed that the Ottomans would launch a second great assault on a Christian target.
Yet the Sublime Porte had lost its taste for naval warfare, and was content to leave the Spaniards alone, while pursuing its traditional rivalry with the Shi’ite emperors of Persia. This was extremely convenient, since Spanish preoccupations also now turned away from the Mediterranean; Philip II’s great ambition was to defeat the new type of Infidel who was crawling all over northern Europe: the Protestants. Philip was ensnared by wars with Elizabeth of England and his rebellious subjects in the Low Countries. He had seen off not just the Ottomans but the Moriscos, whose lands in Andalucía were depopulated and abandoned.2 In addition, he had received an unexpected prize in the form of Portugal and its overseas empire. Filled with crusading bravado, the youthful King Sebastian of Portugal led his forces to a massive defeat in Morocco in 1578, whereupon he was succeeded by the last member of the house of Aviz, Cardinal Henry, and after he died without an heir in 1580 the Portuguese crown passed to Philip of Spain, who did not actively pursue the old Portuguese dream of taming Morocco.3 The Mediterranean looked quite small within the massive conglomeration of lands Philip ruled in the Old World and the New. An Italian political theorist, Giovanni Botero, published a work onReason of State in 1589 that was to prove especially popular in Spain. He argued that dispersed states are inherently weak, but that the Spaniards had managed to overcome this through the flexible use of their fleet. Within the Spanish Empire, ‘no state is so distant that it cannot be aided by naval forces’, making it possible for Catalan, Basque and Portuguese sailors to join together Iberia, King Philip’s Italian states and even the Low Countries in a single unit: ‘the empire, which might otherwise appear scattered and unwieldy, must be accounted united and compact with its naval forces in the hands of such men’.4
The calming of the Mediterranean resulted from the tacit settlement between the Ottomans and the Spaniards. But crossing the sea became all the more dangerous once Spanish patrols limited themselves to protecting the coastal waters of southern Italy, Sicily and Spain. Jewish and Muslim merchants regularly saw their goods seized by Christian pirates. The dangers were increased as newly disruptive seamen took to the waters of the Mediterranean. As the Atlantic economy began to develop a new vigour, Dutch, German and English seamen made their way deep into the Mediterranean, whether for trade or piracy; once north European merchants appropriated a large share of the traffic in grain and spices within the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic, the relationship between the two great seas, developing gradually since before 1300, became much more intense. More will be said shortly about these visitors; yet there were also interlopers from within the Mediterranean who posed a severe threat to the navigation of the traditionally dominant powers. The Uskoks of Senj operated from a base tucked away among the islets and inlets of northern Dalmatia, behind the islands of Cres, Krk and Rab. What is now seen as a coastline of great beauty inspired fear in the late sixteenth century. This was a borderland between the Ottoman territories in the Balkan interior and the Habsburg domains in what are now Slovenia and northern Croatia, not to mention the Venetian possessions along the Adriatic coast. In such a setting it was possible for wilful, independently minded bandits and corsairs to flourish, especially if they presented themselves as standard-bearers of the Christian crusade against the Turks, working for the good of Christendom and Habsburg Austria.5
The Uskoks became the Robin Hood figures of Croatian folk epics and, though few in number and reliant on small ships, they succeeded in boxing Venice into a corner of the Adriatic. This made them into the heroes of a school of nationalist and then socialist historians in modern Yugoslavia.6But one should not be too romantic about the Uskoks. They had their own patrician leaders, and were not very different from bands of corsairs and robbers along both the Christian and the Muslim shores of the Great Sea. The termuskok means ‘refugee’, and, like the Barbary pirates, they were ethnically diverse, with recruits from the Venetian colonies along the Adriatic, Dubrovnik and Albania, as well as Italian sailors and occasional renegade Muslims. Some had been born as Habsburg, some as Ottoman, and some as Venetian subjects; and their background changed slightly over time, so that in the 1590s a high proportion hailed from the Dalmatian hinterland behind Zadar and Split, an area under intense pressure during the lengthy land conflict between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs.7 The Venetian view was that the Uskoks were ‘former subjects of the Turk, who have fled to Senj, unable to bear the tyrannies of the Turkish ministers’.8 Senj seemed to offer the chance to make good again: men ‘taken from the hoe and the plough, badly dressed and barefoot, have become fat and prosperous in a short time’.9
Senj did not offer a natural harbour. When the strong wind known as the bora blew, ships had to be beached and tied down firmly so that they were not torn away. But the town was well protected by steep mountains and thick forests at its rear.10 At the peak of their influence, between Lepanto and about 1610, the Uskoks were able to set up outposts some way from Senj, as far south as the mouth of the river Neretva, which is no great distance from Dubrovnik.11 They were an incorrigible bunch. If the Austrian authorities were at peace with their enemies, that did not deter them from attacking Venetian or Turkish ships, as opportunity dictated.12 In the 1590s, far from welcoming the Uskoks as Christian refugees from the Ottomans, the Venetians continued to treat them as dangerous criminals, blockading Senj and executing large numbers (though in 1596 the total number of armed men in Senj was only about 1,000, and generally around 600).13 The Venetians would tolerate them only if they agreed to abandon their evil ways and to serve loyally on the galleys of the Most Serene Republic.14
As early as the 1520s, raiders from Senj had begun to threaten Turkish ships in the Adriatic. The Venetians too were easy prey because of their willingness to enter into treaties with the Turks, and because of occasional hostilities between Venice and the Habsburgs in the Slovenian borderlands. In the early days the Uskoks were content to seize cargoes of fish, wine, oil and cheese carried on local boats, but they soon graduated to attacks on large roundships bound for Dubrovnik and Ancona, threatening the line of communication that stretched by land and sea from Tuscany to Constantinople.15 In 1599 the Venetians were so exasperated by the Uskoks that they sent a cargo of poisoned wine into Uskok-infested waters, let it be captured, and hoped to hear that the Uskoks had all died from drinking it. Since they remained full of life, however, the ruse obviously failed. The relationship with Dubrovnik was also fraught. The Ragusans were seen as collaborators with the Turks, and the Ragusan city fathers knew that the Turks would not tolerate collaboration between Dubrovnik and the Uskoks. On one occasion the Ragusans decorated one of the city gates with the heads of executed Uskoks, making a clear point both to the Uskoks and to the Ottomans. The result was predictable: a Ragusan report stated that ‘they regard us as they do the Turks themselves’.16
Still, they were generally more interested in cargoes owned by Jews and Muslims than in those of Christians, and would board ships simply to confiscate ‘infidel’ goods; as a result, Jewish merchants were about seven times more likely to enter an insurance claim than Christian ones. Muslims also fared badly: a captain from Perast, a flourishing port in the Bay of Kotor, reassured his Muslim passengers when his ship was boarded by Uskoks in 1581, saying he would look after them, but he sailed to Senj and feasted with the Uskoks while his passengers were enslaved and taken away.17 Jewish and Muslim merchants trading out of Italy tried various subterfuges. Marking cargoes with a cross was perhaps too obvious; keeping a secret account book along with a falsified one was another trick. Meanwhile, the bishop of Senj was happy to confirm that Christian merchants who collaborated with the Turks, especially in the armaments trade, deserved to be excommunicated – or, reading this differently, no objection could be made if holy warriors from Senj seized their cargo.
II
These developments confirmed a broad trend in the political and economic life of Venice, visible since the mid-fifteenth century: withdrawal from the great Levant trade, and the integration of the city into the life of northern Italy. Quite apart from the consequences of piracy, the Venetians had to cope with the effect of the new route to the East opened up by the Portuguese in 1497. A strong Venetian presence remained in Constantinople, where twelve merchant houses had established themselves by 1560, even though numbers had shrunk significantly since the heyday of medieval trade.18 Besides the patricians who had traditionally dominated Venice’s Levant trade, other businessmen were active, notably the Jews who had settled in Venice in the sixteenth century. They were a mixed community. There were German and Italian Jews who concentrated on pawnbroking, under licence from the city government, and who were required to live in the ‘new foundry’, or Ghetto Nuovo, tucked away in the north of the city. Next door to them, there were communities that were more involved in Mediterranean commerce, notably the overland trade through the Balkans towards Salonika and Constantinople – the Sephardim, divided (as at Ancona) between the ‘Levantines’ from the Ottoman Empire and the ‘Ponentines’, or westerners, mainly Portuguese Marranos, who had often spent much of their lives, at least outwardly, as Christians. The Ponentines faced the threat of investigation by the Venetian Inquisition, but on balance the need Venice felt for its Levant traders outweighed any scruples about imposing Christian orthodoxy.19 The pragmatism of the Venetians was also visible in the willingness of the government to sanction the erection of a Greek Orthodox church, San Giorgio dei Greci, for all the other Greek churches in Italy up to this point were Uniate, that is, they recognized papal authority.20
‘The decline of Venice’ is too easily identified simply with the decline of Venetian sea power.21 In fact, Venice proved remarkably adaptable in the sixteenth century. This was a period of economic expansion in continental western Europe, and the Venetians claimed their share of the proceeds. Old industries, such as glass-making, expanded, and production of woollen cloth inflated massively. In 1516 the city was producing fewer than 2,000 cloths per annum, but in 1565 Venice was producing over ten times that amount.22 The city benefited from a decline in the production of similar cloths in Florence, and from the regular supply of Spanish raw wool. This placed greater emphasis on its trade routes to the west, with stocks arriving by land across Lombardy as well as by sea, though there was still every need to keep the city supplied with grain, oil and wine from its possessions in the Ionian isles and Crete. The loss of Cyprus contracted the range of Venetian sailings, but renewed peace with the Ottomans ensured that, for the moment, Crete was still safely under Venetian rule – the principal threat there was not from the Turks but from its restive native population.
The reshaping of Venice (a more suitable expression than ‘decline’) left others freer to intrude themselves into the Levant trade. The withdrawal of Venice was compensated by a revival of commercial activity among the Greeks, who serviced the trade of the Ottoman Empire in the Aegean, and between Asia Minor and Egypt.23 On the other hand, the coming of the English was a by-product of the great rivalry between the king of Spain and the queen of England, between the Catholic monarch and his Protestant opponent. Elizabeth was tempted to make contact with the Sublime Porte, partly for political reasons – seeing in ‘the Turk’ a fellow-opponent of Philip II – but also for commercial motives. In 1578 her minister Walsingham wrote a tract on ‘the trade into Turkey’ in which he opined that the time had come to send an ‘apt man’ secretly to the Ottoman sultan, with letters from Queen Elizabeth. A Turkey Company was founded in 1580, to promote trade with Ottoman lands.24 Yet it also reflected a new aggressiveness among English merchants in markets traditionally dominated by the Italian merchants who had long supplied England with exotic wares. By increasing tariffs on Venetian ships and their goods, the queen made clear her intention of favouring native-born merchants in trade with the Mediterranean, though she did renew her agreements with Venice in 1582, and Venetian galleons were still reaching England until the end of her reign.25 One target of the English was Morocco, where tradesmen of the Barbary Company were making their presence felt even before Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558. Exports included armaments, which English merchants were happy to think might be used against the Spaniards and the Portuguese.26
None of this prevented the English from trying to develop other routes that would bypass the Mediterranean entirely, bringing spices to northern Europe via a north-west or north-east passage, colder but supposedly quicker than the Portuguese route around Africa; as a result the English became involved with the Muscovy trade. Since this failed to produce the spices they sought, they turned back to the Mediterranean, utilizing that combination of piracy and commerce for which the Elizabethan privateers have become so famous; many of those involved in the Turkey Company (soon known as the Levant Company) had also invested in the Muscovy Company.27 The Venetians were in a sombre mood about these developments. As English trading vessels penetrated into Turkish waters, they deprived Venice of the revenue it had traditionally received through forwarding English cloths from Venice into Ottoman territory. An agreement between the English queen and the Ottoman sultan was bad news. Nor did the Venetians approve of Elizabeth’s religious policy; Venice was hardly the most whole-hearted supporter of the papacy, but was still unwilling to send a formal ambassador to England until 1603, the year Elizabeth died.28 And yet there were some developments from which the Serenissima benefited. English ships began to sail as far as Venice itself, with the result that the city was supplied with basic northern products on which its survival increasingly depended, notably grain: the trade in northern grain grew in volume, as grain lands went out of cultivation in the Mediterranean and as shortages were accentuated by a series of famines, which were already beginning to bite as early as 1587. Dried and salted fish from the Atlantic was also a firm favourite – stoccafisso (‘stockfish’) became and remains an essential ingredient in popular Venetian cuisine.
The English and Dutch came to buy as well as to sell.29 Initially, the focus of English attention was not the trade in spices such as pepper and ginger, but products grown on islands that lay under Venetian rule: Zante and Kephalonia, in the Ionian isles. Since the late Middle Ages the English had been obsessed with currants, raisins and sultanas, and competition with the Venetians for access to what the Italians call uva passa, ‘dried grapes’, caused many ugly incidents. English merchants intruded themselves so successfully into the Ionian isles that they were soon carrying off the greater part of its dried fruit. The Venetian government attempted to prevent the islanders from doing business with the foreign merchants, a prohibition about which the inhabitants complained volubly, and which they largely ignored.30
Meanwhile, the English had no compunction about attacking Venetian ships, especially if they were trading with Spain, which supplied the wool they needed for their looms. In October 1589 an English captain fell out with a Venetian captain in the harbour of Corfu; the Italian challenged the Englishman to a duel, and called him an insolent dog. When the Venetian ship slipped out of port the English captain impudently gave chase. After a brief exchange of gunfire the Italian decided he had had enough and abandoned ship, but even then the English captain pursued his longboat part of the way back into Corfu harbour. These pirates respected no one. In 1591 English pirates who had been made welcome in the port of Algiers plundered a Ragusan ship in the channel between the Balearic islands and Barcelona as it was sailing west from Livorno. The North African rulers were often content to let the pirates use their ports so long as they shared their booty with the rulers of Barbary. Crews might be half-Muslim, half-English.31 One English exile, John Ward, brought 300 men under his command; in 1607 he terrified the captain of a Venetian spice galleon into surrender, and sold its cargo in Tunis for 70,000 crowns, only to follow this with the seizure of goods worth 400,000 crowns.32 Irate at the treatment Protestants received when they fell into the hands of the Inquisition, English pirates also defiled Catholic churches on islands held by Venice.33
The pirates owed much of their success to new technology. They brought with them into the Mediterranean high-sided sailing ships that the Italians called bertoni. They looked fairly similar to the galleons that were coming into fashion in the Spanish and Venetian navies, but they possessed a deep, strong keel and functioned well with three square-rigged sails. They were not especially large and they carried crews of around sixty, with one cannon for about every three men. When their rivals within the Mediterranean managed to capture these ships, they made every use of them; they even purchased them from English and Dutch captains. Yet Venice was strangely conservative. Lateen-rigged galleys had defended the city’s trade and empire for many centuries, and attempts to convince the Venetian government that the new type of ship was vital to the defence of the republic fell on deaf ears. The Venetian elite could not understand why what had worked in the thirteenth century would not work in the seventeenth. Bertoni became a common sight in Venice only in the early seventeenth century, when the republic begged England and Holland to support its struggle against the Austrian Habsburgs. By 1619 the Venetian navy possessed fifty bertoni alongside fifty galleys. Yet even when Venetian captains sailed bertoni, they seemed unable to challenge the superior skill of northern seamen. In 1603 the Santa Maria della Grazia, a Venetian bertone, was heading for Alexandria when it was captured off Crete – Venetian territory. Then, once released, it was seized at night-time while sailing up the Adriatic, and deprived of its guns. The Italians were no longer near-invincible at sea.
Northerners also attacked northerners; the relationship between the English and the Dutch oscillated violently in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 1603 Thomas Sherley, in command of a motley crew of English, Italian and Greek sailors, attacked two Dutch ships carrying Aegean grain from the Cyclades to Genoa. Sherley was content to pose as the agent of the Medici duke of Tuscany, and as a sort of crusader against the Turks, though quite how an attack on the Dutch fitted into this is a mystery. Sherley had to write to the duke to explain himself, because he had clearly over-reached himself. The Medici were happy to buy English bertoni and to employ English sailors. The duke even obtained his gunpowder from England. He wondered whether it might be a good idea to lure John Ward into his service, since he seemed such an effective corsair. The duke of Savoy, whose territory extended down to Nice, was happy to make his flag and his port at Villefranche available to all sorts of dubious sailors.34 As Alberto Tenenti pointed out, ‘in the Mediterranean at the end of the sixteenth century, a real change was taking place, psychological as well as naval and commercial’: the spirit of the crusade had been replaced by a cynicism which was occasionally masked by the language of holy war, but among the pirates that was belied by their willing cooperation with Turks and Moors.35 The clearest indication of this was provided by the Knights of Santo Stefano: by the seventeenth century they were freebooters able to benefit from the handsome concessions made to them by the Medici dukes of Tuscany.
The northerners found that the tough shipboard life of the seventeenth century – fetid water, biscuits full of weevils, tough discipline – was alleviated a little when sailing in Mediterranean waters. John Baltharpe was an English sailor who recounted in doggerel his voyage around the Mediterranean in 1670. Putting in at Messina, ‘a market was on board each day’ and he could buy
Silk-stockings, Carpets, Brande-wine,
Silk Neckcloaths, also very fine:
Cabidges, Carrets, Turnips, Nuts,
The last a man may eat from Sluts:
Lemmons, Orenges, and good Figs,
Seracusa Wine also, and Eggs.
In Livorno, Baltharpe was delighted to find excellent fish, ‘which ’mongst Italians is a good dish’, while at ‘Cales’, or Cagliari, ‘nothing was scant’. Even at Alicante, where meat was scarce and ‘instead of English Cheese, and Butter, A little Oyl we get, God wot, far worser’, there was the consolation of plenty of red wine – ‘this blood of Bulls … ’Tis sweet, Delicious, very tempting, The Bottle is not long a emptying’.36 Looking into the future, the efforts of Lord Nelson around 1800 to keep his men supplied with Sicilian lemons – 30,000 gallons a year, made available to the entire British Navy – ensured that his crews in the Mediterranean and beyond did not suffer from scurvy.37
The interest of northerners in the Mediterranean was accentuated by the rising standard of living in the sixteenth century, and, even though this stalled in the seventeenth century, the northerners became a permanent presence after Lepanto. Their identity varied: the Hanseatic Germans were pioneers (arriving when Mediterranean harvests failed in 1587), but did not maintain a strong presence, while the ‘Flemish’ increasingly consisted of mainly Protestant Dutch from the rebellious northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, rather than the Catholics of Flanders proper.38 The rise of the Dutch navies began with the emergence of Antwerp as the hub of the Portuguese spice trade with the East, but Dutch prosperity was based on profits from expanding trade and piracy in the Mediterranean just as much as it was based on the proceeds of its Atlantic and Indian Ocean traffic.39 When the United Provinces established their de facto independence from Spain, business shifted increasingly to the shipyards of Holland. Within the Mediterranean there was some cooperation, at first, with the French merchants who were beginning to make headway in North Africa, and occasionally allowed Dutch ships to fly the French flag (guaranteeing their safety in Ottoman waters).40 The phrase ‘flag of convenience’ is especially apt: captains switched back and forth, to gain whatever protection a particular nation could claim from the rulers of the Mediterranean shores and islands.
III
Among all those that sailed this sea, the ‘Portuguese nation’, mostly Marranos, attracted special curiosity. The Portuguese Inquisition had (by royal command) held back from persecuting the New Christians in the years after the suppression of Judaism in Portugal (1497); but it turned against them in 1547, with the result that many started to move to more welcoming lands. The indistinct status of the Ponentine Jews was exploited by rulers such as the dukes of Tuscany, ever happy to offer their patronage to any merchants who might help them maximize their income. In extending their favours to the ‘Portuguese’, the dukes did not intend to emancipate all the Jews of their dominions; indeed, they enclosed the Jews of Florence within a ghetto in 1570.41 Gradually, though, they began to see the advantages of creating an open port in which not just Marranos of doubtful religious allegiance but Levantine Jews, Muslims and northern Europeans could take advantage of rights of settlement and special tax provisions. Duke Cosimo I, who died in 1574, transformed Livorno from a sleepy fishing village into one of the great centres of Mediterranean trade. Towards the end of his life, the harbour was greatly improved, and a canal was dug that linked the town to the river Arno, facilitating the transfer of goods to and from Pisa and Florence; under his successor Francesco I, Livorno was surrounded with its impressive pentagonal set of walls. Within this area a rectangular Roman-style street plan was laid out, in accord with the best principles of Renaissance town-planning.42Gradually the population grew: in 1601 there were nearly 5,000 inhabitants, including 762 soldiers, 114 Jews and 76 young prostitutes, the last group a sad reminder of the sexual services in demand in every Mediterranean port. After this, as the port infrastructure developed, the city boomed.43
The right of aliens to live in Livorno was confirmed by a series of privileges, the Livornine, which determined the relationship between the Medicean government and its non-Catholic subjects for over two centuries. In the most famous of these privileges, of 1593, the duke extended a welcome to ‘merchants of all nations, Levantine and Ponentine, Spanish and Portuguese, Greeks, Germans and Italians, Jews, Turks and Moors, Armenians, Persians and others’.44 It is noticeable how low down the list were the Italians, in an Italian city. It is also significant that the document repeated again and again the welcome to the Marranos: as Ponentines, as Iberian merchants, as Jews. Ponentine merchants needed to declare themselves as Jews, despite their mask of Christianity, thereby ensuring exemption from interference by the Inquisition – which meant that they had to keep switching their identity, especially if they traded intensively with Spain and Portugal, but they were adept at doing this.45 Few restrictions were placed on their economic activities; uniquely in Italy, they were permitted to acquire landed property. Although they generally lived close to the synagogue, which, by the eighteenth century, was a grand and opulent building, there was no official Jewish quarter. There was also a church for Armenian merchants from the eastern Mediterranean. Three mosques existed within the bagno, the quarters reserved for galley slaves, though free Muslim merchants certainly came to Livorno in growing numbers; permission was granted for the creation of a Muslim cemetery.46
All this reflected the opening of trade routes between Livorno and Islamic lands: ships were arriving from Alexandria in the years around 1590, but the real success story was the opening of routes to North Africa between 1573 and 1593, a period during which Braudel and Romano identified forty-four voyages to Livorno from a great swathe of territory between Larache in Morocco and Tunisia. These contacts could not have been effected without investment by the Sephardic merchants, or without cooperation between the rulers of Barbary and the Medici; the Dutch also became involved in this traffic, providing insurance and additional shipping capacity. The routes were vital for the provisioning of Tuscany, which drew wheat from North Africa, as well as wax, leather, wool and sugar.47 Other basic products such as tin, pine-nuts, tunny and anchovies were brought from Spain and Portugal, often on ships originating in the ports of southern France. Something, however, had changed in the geography of Spanish trade. Barcelona had few contacts with Livorno, and Valencia had only a modest role, but Alicante, which had an excellent port and which gave access by good-quality roads to the produce of the Spanish hinterland, was the favoured port within Mediterranean Spain. Alicante itself produced little apart from soap, made with local olive oil, and wine; ‘it retained into modern times something of the air of a colonial factory, of the kind which might have been found in the somnolent hinterlands of Asia or Africa’.48 Along the route between Alicante and Livorno (and a rival one between Alicante and Genoa), the Ragusans were the dominant intermediaries, carrying cochineal and kermes, the red dyes made from tiny insects, rice, silk, honey, sugar and, above all, wool, and Jewish merchants played a major role in this commerce, even though it was forbidden for them to practise their religion within the Spanish kingdoms.49
Livorno also established relations with places beyond the Straits of Gibraltar – with Cádiz, which was emerging as a major Spanish trading centre in the Atlantic, with Lisbon and with the North Sea lands. The Dutch were attracted there like bees to a flower. Although the Livornine did not specifically encourage Protestant settlement in Livorno, Dutch merchants found they could live there in peace with a certain amount of discretion. Livorno was the hub of the Dutch network within the Mediterranean as well as the target for many Dutch ships arriving from Atlantic waters. Despite the intensification of trade with North Africa, and despite occasional good harvests, Tuscany remained hungry for Baltic grain. Its quality was often prized above that of the Mediterranean, and at the same time – even allowing for transport costs – it was usually cheaper. As has been seen, this reflects the retreat of cultivation around the shores of the Mediterranean in this period. The Italians developed a taste for northern rye: in 1620, around one in five of the Dutch ships that brought grain to Livorno carried a cargo solely of rye. The Medici dukes negotiated favourable prices in Holland so that their subjects could afford sufficient food; and when grain was plentiful in the Mediterranean it was always possible to substitute smoked and dried herrings, pilchards and cod, even caviar.50 The Dutch merchants who brought this grain did not simply carry goods to and from northern Europe. They intruded themselves into the carrying trade within the Mediterranean, willingly finding space in their holds for south Italian grain and salt, which they ferried to northern Italy. If there was a famine in northern Europe, as in 1630, Dutch captains were willing to pick up provisions for Livorno in the Aegean, defying Ottoman orders that anyone found exporting grain illegally was to be tied to a stake and allowed to die by starvation. When supplies of grain within the Mediterranean were adequate, they shopped around, picking up wool and salt in Alicante, wine and dried fruits in the Ionian isles, silk in the Aegean, and so on, and they sought to develop their relations with the great centres of trade in the Levant – Aleppo had emerged as the main emporium in Syria, and there was a Dutch consul there who also looked after trade in Palestine and Cyprus. Since Aleppo lies inland ships would dock at Alexandretta, and goods would then have to be carried overland; they included such exotic products as indigo and rhubarb, which was prized for its medical properties.51
In 1608 Duke Ferdinand permitted the ‘Flemish-German nation’ to build a Catholic chapel dedicated to the Madonna containing a vault in which Flemish and Dutch merchants could be buried. Inevitably, many Protestants preferred to be buried outside Catholic precincts; they were allowed to use private gardens. On the other hand, some prominent members of the ‘nation’ were devout Catholics, like Bernard van den Broecke, who was treasurer of the chapel of the Madonna, and who ran his business from a large house on the principal street, the Via Ferdinanda. His house contained ten bedrooms and a reception room adorned with a dozen paintings, a parrot in a cage, a backgammon table and fine furniture; in the garden there was a fountain and a spacious orangery. From Livorno, van den Broecke operated a whole network of business, encompassing the court of the duke of Tuscany, Naples, Sicily and Venice, as well, of course, as northern Europe. In 1624, he even laid plans for the creation of a trade route bringing cod directly from Newfoundland to Naples, but was frustrated by English interference – his cod was confiscated because the English king was once again at war with Spain, which ruled Naples. Even so, the English and the Dutch (including van den Broecke) occasionally cooperated in trade with Spain, using the Tuscan banner as a flag of convenience. Van den Broecke had no qualms about becoming involved in the slave trade within the Mediterranean, though here his aim was to extort ransom money from the families of well-connected captives. He ensured that slaves in his household were well cared for, so they could be returned in top condition; they must have ‘enough to live on and to be clothed without being spoilt’.52 Van den Broecke’s business house flourished until the 1630s, when political difficulties with Spain, competition from the English and epidemics made life increasingly difficult. But the city maintained its primacy in Mediterranean trade, especially because the Sephardic Jews continued to use it as their link to other focal points of Sephardic settlement: Aleppo, Salonika and, increasingly, Smyrna.
IV
The great success of Livorno was not exceptional. The Genoese also attempted to create their own free port in the seventeenth century, beginning in 1590 with foodstuffs, and extending tariff exemptions to all goods in 1609. This was a different type of free port from Livorno: in Genoa, the emphasis was on free passage of merchandise, whereas in Livorno the emphasis lay on attracting merchants who would be free from restrictions on the right to reside and conduct business. The character of the city and its business had changed enormously since Genoa had competed with Pisa, Venice and Barcelona for mastery over the Mediterranean. The shift from active interest in trade to the provision of finance to the Spanish court had effects throughout Genoese society, even though those who serviced the Spanish royal debt were members of the elite families. By the 1560s they had lost interest in shipowning.53 Genoese ships became a minority among those arriving in the port of Genoa: from 1596 onwards, more than 70 per cent of the ships passing through it were foreign. Predictably, the Ragusans were very active, but so were Hanseatic vessels from Germany and the Low Countries, with the Dutch assuming an ever more important role in the seventeenth century.54 In the late sixteenth century, Genoese merchants often bought shares in Ragusan ships, but this only underlines the great change that had taken place: the idea that a small Adriatic republic could outclass ‘la Superba’, the proud Genoese republic, would have been laughed to scorn two centuries earlier.
The Genoese saw themselves as allies of the Spanish Crown; the king of Spain would rather have seen them as his subjects, but insistence on this point only weakened Genoese affection for the Spanish alliance. Just to show where Genoa fitted into their scheme of things, in 1606 and 1611 the Spaniards ensured that their tributaries the Knights of Malta were given precedence in battle orders over the Genoese, which Genoa rightly understood to mean that Spain saw it as its dependency. Disputes over this issue sometimes reached the point where Genoese and Maltese galleys, arrayed for battle, threatened to turn their guns on each other, and Spanish admirals had to force them to back down. But Spanish finances depended heavily on the Genoese, whose galleys carried bullion from Spain to Genoa – nearly 70,000,000 pieces of eight in the period 1600 to 1640. The principle underlying Genoese loans to the Spanish Crown was that advances would be repaid from the income in silver and gold arriving from the New World.55 Other galleys were dedicated to the lucrative trade in raw silk from Messina; silk had become one the foundations of Genoa’s revived prosperity a century earlier, and it symbolized the intense but troubled relationship with Spain, since it came from Sicily, a Spanish possession, along with Sicilian grain, at the same time as being heavily taxed by a Spanish government anxious to squeeze every penny from the merchants.56
The Genoese shared with the Venetians a nostalgia for past times, for an era in which Genoa had achieved greatness through sending its galleys across the Mediterranean and even into the seas beyond. A Genoese nobleman, Antonio Giulio Brignole Sale, wrote a treatise in 1642 in which he examined the arguments for and against the building of a new galley fleet, which the city fathers hoped would restore Genoese fortunes. He was convinced that the Mediterranean was the ideal theatre of operations, for ‘the provinces are more numerous, and more distinct, where many put in to port, so that everyone can find employment more easily’. By building galleys, it would be possible to renew ‘the ancient Levant routes’, which were the ‘special theatre of the acquisitions and glories of the Genoese’, a point upon which he insisted while admitting that opponents of his scheme argued that the Mediterranean no longer looked the same as it did in medieval days, and building galleys in the medieval fashion would not bring back that lost world.57
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mediterranean suffered from a sort of disorientation. Despite attempts by the Genoese to reconstitute the Levant trade, the Mediterranean lost its primacy in the traffic of western Europe to the Atlantic merchants, for whom the Mediterranean was one, and not necessarily the most interesting or important, of their concerns, which stretched from Holland to Brazil and the East Indies, or from England to Newfoundland and Muscovy.58 The initial promise of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had not been fulfilled.