CHAPTER 10
In October 1372, in the city of Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus, the king of Jerusalem gave a banquet. Of course, no king had actually ruled in Jerusalem for almost two centuries and this particular king, Peter II, was no exception. But as the newly crowned monarch of Cyprus, the sixteen-year-old ruler was entitled to the crown of Jerusalem and he certainly had no reason not to take it. The celebratory banquet, though, did not go at all well. Even as the lavishly dressed attendees took their places in the sumptuous banqueting hall, a palpable tension filled the air. Earlier in the day the young king had made a public procession through the streets of Famagusta to celebrate his new crown. As the crowds pressed in, a group of Venetian residents rushed in to take the right rein of the monarch’s horse—a position of honor normally reserved for princes or prelates. Seeing this, the Genoese, who also had a large community in the city, rushed forward as well, grabbing the left rein and loudly insisting that it was they who deserved the right. Shouts and insults flew as each side tugged and pushed the other, with the terrified horse and the bewildered teenager caught in the scuffle. Finally, King Peter’s uncle, the prince of Antioch (another city long ago lost to Christendom), pressed into the fray with some of his men and forced the Venetians and the Genoese to return to their places among the crowd. He then took up the horse’s rein and himself led the king to his palace.
At the evening banquet the Venetians and the Genoese were seated at tables far across the room from each other, and at first, all went well. Guests offered many speeches and toasts to the health of the new king. Indeed, there were so many toasts with so much Cypriot wine (known for its potency) that what little restraint remained among the angry Italians after the morning’s fracas quickly evaporated. Shouts and insults between the Venetians and the Genoese began again, followed by threats, shoves, and finally outright fighting. The Genoese had come prepared. From their cloaks they produced daggers and even a few swords. The Venetians had not arrived without a few hidden weapons of their own, but they had much the worst of the fight. Enraged at the disturbance, the king called for the palace guards, who rushed in noisily, sized up the situation, and attacked the Genoese. Some of the Genoese were killed in the banquet hall; guards carried others to nearby balconies and threw them down to the street, five stories below. When news of the brawl spread beyond the palace, the people of Famagusta, also blaming the Genoese, stormed their quarter and burned their warehouses. By morning, the smoke of the bloody conflict still hung heavy in the air.
Hostility between the Venetians and the Genoese was intense, so intense that they could scarcely be put together in the same room, let alone the same city, without violence. It was a contempt bred of familiarity. Venetians and Genoese understood each other perfectly. Both sought fortunes in the East and found the other forever in the way. They were enough alike to grasp each other’s stratagems and different enough to despise them. Many on both sides welcomed open conflict. War, it seemed, was the natural state of affairs between Venice and Genoa. What no Venetian imagined, though, was that the next war, waged within only a few years of the knife fight in Famagusta, would threaten the survival of Venice itself.
Its seeds were sown not just in the banquet brawl, but in the overall political morass of the East. Although the once-great Byzantine Empire was but the faintest shadow of its former glory, the Venetians and the Genoese continued to jockey for position in Constantinople and its access to the ports of the Black Sea, still a source of goods from eastern and central Asia. The big news in the eastern Mediterranean was the dramatic expansion of the Ottoman Turks, a Muslim power that had settled in Anatolia more than two centuries earlier. Nicaea (modern Iznik) in northwest Asia Minor, not far from the capital, fell to their armies in 1331 and nearby Nicomedia did the same in 1337. The work of the Crusades finally undone, most of Asia Minor quickly came under Turkish rule. Only the waters of the Aegean and the straits of the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and Bosporus (and the Christian fleets that sailed them) kept the Turks from crossing into Europe itself.
As surprising as it may seem, it was the Byzantine Greeks themselves who ferried the Turks across those waters. In 1351 another in a long line of civil wars between those contending for the ruined throne of Constantinople raged across the shrinking Byzantine Empire. Fearful that he would lose his crown, Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus enlisted the powerful Turks to fight on his side. He rowed an army of ten thousand Turks across the straits and stationed them near Gallipoli, where they quickly put an end to the civil war. Although the strategem saved Cantacuzenus’s power, the empire—and indeed all of Europe—was imperiled. The Ottoman forces soon began raiding the fields of Thrace while the emperor tried to bribe them into returning home to the Asian side of the waters. Then, in 1354, an earthquake brought down the fortifications of the city of Gallipoli and the Turks quickly captured and fortified it for themselves. The gateway to Europe was thus opened.
A growing and very reasonable fear of the Turks gripped Europeans in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Under the sultans, the Turks expanded their power at an alarming rate, making no secret of their desire to conquer the Western infidels. For nearly eight centuries, the Christian world had been shrinking, the victim of the extraordinary power of the medieval Muslim states. The Crusades, which had been launched to restore the Holy Land to Christian control, were retooled in the fourteenth century to defend Europe itself from Turkish invasion. The danger was grave indeed.
Pope Innocent VI (1352–62) called for new Crusades to push back the Turkish advance, and no state responded with greater enthusiasm than Venice. Although Emperor John V Palaeologus, who took the throne in Constantinople in 1354, promised to become Catholic himself and reunify the Catholic and Orthodox churches in return for crusader help, he could offer nothing in terms of military support. Byzantium relied completely on Genoa for its naval defense—and the Genoese liked it that way. Indeed, when Byzantines had tried to build their own navy, the Genoese living in Galata (a suburb of Constantinople) burned it in the harbor.
The rivalry between Venice and Genoa in the fourteenth century, therefore, played out against the backdrop of Byzantine decline and Turkish ascendancy. The Venetians naturally favored international crusading efforts, since they promised to remove the Turkish threat and disrupted Genoa’s power in the Aegean and the Bosporus. For precisely those reasons, the Genoese looked on Crusades with suspicion. Emperor John V at first clung to the Genoese for aid, even giving them the island of Chios in payment for their services to the empire. The Venetians, for their part, offered to cancel the Byzantine government’s enormous debt—a debt that included the pawning of the imperial crown jewels—if the emperor would cede to Venice the island of Tenedos (modern Bozcaada) as a base for a Crusade against the Turks. A small, triangular island of no more than fifteen square miles, Tenedos was chiefly remembered as the spot where the ancient Greeks had hidden after placing the great wooden horse before the gates of Troy. Although it had little instrinsic value, the island’s strategic location could significantly reinforce Venice’s access to Constantinople and the Black Sea, since it commands the Dardanelles, the southern straits by which vessels must enter the Sea of Marmara and pass north to the capital. The Genoese naturally opposed the trade and so, unwilling to upset his defenders, the emperor rejected the Venetian offer.
Venice continued to contribute men and vessels to the Crusades and other operations against the Turks throughout the 1360s, but with only marginal successes. The Ottoman foothold in Europe was not an easy thing to reverse. Although a Crusade led by Count Amadeo of Savoy managed to recapture Gallipoli, Turkish forces had by then conquered all of Thrace, west of Constantinople. In 1369 the Turks seized Adrianople (modern Edirne) in the heart of Thrace and transformed it into a new western capital for the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople now lay completely surrounded—a bit of Byzantine flotsam in the vast sea of the Turkish empire. Serbian and Bulgarian leaders, who had for centuries threatened the Byzantines, were forced to become vassals of Sultan Murad I (1362–89). Even Emperor John V, the successor of the Roman Caesars, paid tribute and did homage to the Ottoman sultan.
Desperate for Western aid against the Turks, John V personally traveled to Rome. There he proclaimed himself a Catholic in return for the promise of even more and greater Crusades. On his return journey he stopped in Venice, an extraordinary visit for a number of reasons. The large and wealthy city of the lagoon remained proud of its heritage as a city of refugees who had fled the chaos of the West to maintain their allegiance to the emperor in Constantinople. Now, for the first time in its history, the emperor of Byzantium had come to Venice. But the glory of the Roman Empire had faded irretrievably in the past nine centuries, making for an awkward encounter. John did not find the Venetians particularly obedient, nor did the Venetians find the pauper emperor much to their liking. For one thing, John continued to owe Venetian bankers and the Venetian state a great deal of money. Since the loan contracts were severely overdue, and since John rejected every proposal for settling his accounts, the Venetians at last detained him as an insolvent debtor. While legally sound, the house arrest of the Byzantine emperor proved just as unpopular among Venetians as it was among Europeans and Byzantines. Seeking a way out, the Venetian government offered John their best deal yet. In return for the much-desired little island of Tenedos, the Venetians would cancel all the empire’s outstanding debts, return the Byzantine crown jewels, and even provide John with a princely sum on which to travel. They would also, of course, let him leave. After some delay, John finally accepted the proposal. However, when it came time to pay up, John’s son Andronicus refused to hand over Tenedos. Instead, John’s other son, Manuel, raised the money himself to pay off the Venetians and thereby free his father. Despite the Venetian government’s desire to get its hands on Tenedos, it had little choice but to obey the rule of law. When, in 1371, the emperor’s debts were paid in full, he was promptly released.
But the matter of Tenedos persisted. After his return home, John V found himself not only short of funds but forced to defend himself against another coup, this one led by his son Andronicus. After suppressing the rebellion, John could not bring himself to execute his son or even to blind him—the usual punishments for failed coups. Instead, he split the difference, partially blinding and imprisoning him in the hope that this would end the matter. A few years later, in 1376, Venetian ambassadors in Constantinople finally persuaded the troubled emperor to sell Tenedos to Venice for thirty thousand ducats and the return of the crown jewels. Word was sent to the people of the island that Venice was to be their new protector, although their churches would remain under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, and the Venetian lion and Byzantine eagle would fly side by side on every wall and tower. The Genoese, who were unaccustomed to having emperors disobey their orders, moved quickly to depose John. A large band of armed Genoese broke into the imperial prison and released Andronicus, bringing him back to Galata, where he found the representatives of Sultan Murad waiting to help him in his bid for the throne. With Genoese and Turkish troops, Andronicus broke through a city gate, seized power, and threw his father and younger brother, Manuel, into the same dark prison he himself had only just escaped. When it came time to parcel out rewards, Andronicus IV (1376–79) handed Gallipoli back to the Turks, and Tenedos, which the Venetians had just purchased, to the Genoese.
For most Venetians, losing Tenedos to the Genoese was simply unacceptable. Combined with their base at Galata, it would give the Genoese the power to harass or even halt altogether Venetian commercial traffic to Constantinople and the Black Sea. The small Greek population of Tenedos found Genoese rule equally unacceptable. They were proudly loyal to John V, refusing to have anything to do with the rebel Andronicus. When the Genoese arrived to claim their prize, the Byzantine governor of Tenedos refused to surrender and beat off a Genoese attempt to take it by force. Shortly thereafter the Venetians arrived to a grand welcome with joyous songs and a parade of crosses. This the Genoese could not allow. They commanded their Byzantine emperor Andronicus to seize Venetian citizens and goods in Constantinople and even to arrest the Venetian baillie (an official who oversaw the Venetian community in Constantinople) and his councillors. The senators in Venice responded by sending additional war galleys, led by Carlo Zeno, to reinforce Tenedos and raid Byzantine properties near the capital. Finally, in November 1377, a combined fleet of Genoese and Byzantine forces attacked Tenedos. After a difficult and deadly engagement, Zeno and his men repulsed the assault, forcing the invaders to withdraw. Venetian and Genoese blood had been spilled in battle. The time for diplomacy between the powers had again come to an end. Back in Venice, the Great Council declared war on Genoa.
The War of Chioggia, as it came to be known, was the fourth, largest, and last of the wars between Venice and Genoa. Before it was over, the battle would spill across the Mediterranean and even into the Venetian lagoon itself. It is perhaps not surprising that a struggle of such magnitude would give rise to larger-than-life heroes who led it. The first was Carlo Zeno himself. As with all national heroes, Zeno’s early life is wrapped in tall tales, some of which may be true. His father, Pietro, had been killed in 1343 during Venice’s Crusade against the Turks at Smyrna. His family later marked him for a career in the Church, so he was sent first to the papal court in Avignon and then to the University of Padua for his studies. The bookish life, however, did not appeal to Zeno. Then, as now, there were plenty of taverns and diversions near the university, and Zeno made frequent use of all of them. Impoverished by gambling losses, he sold his books and joined a mercenary army—a promising, if often brief, career in late medieval Italy. Five years later he returned to Venice and, with no job prospects, again took up a clerical position, this time in a church in Patras, a thriving Greek port city in the northern Peloponnese with a large Venetian population. But church life still did not suit Zeno, so, despite his religious office, he organized and led several attacks against Turks in the region. Later, after challenging a knight to a duel, Zeno was dismissed from the church. He married and relocated to Constantinople, where he conducted business for several years. It is not clear what role he played in the Venetian purchase of Tenedos, but there is no doubt that he was on the island when the Genoese came to claim it.
More traditional than Zeno, but no less accomplished, was Vettor Pisani, a well-seasoned naval commander. Charismatic, sometimes rash, but with a down-to-earth demeanor unlike that of many of his fellow patricians, Pisani had a strong following among the common Venetian people. He had distinguished himself at the Battle of Porto Longo in 1355, during the last war with the Genoese, where he had served under his uncle, Nicolò Pisani, who died in the defeat for Venice. When the War of Chioggia began, Zeno was ordered to Negroponte, to look after Venetian interests in the East, while Vettor Pisani received the banner of St. Mark from the hands of the doge, who named him Captain of the Sea, the highest military office in Venice.
The Venetians hoped to overwhelm the Genoese with an offensive surge. Pisani was sent with a squadron of galleys to enter western waters near Genoa and attack at will. Zeno, who commanded a similarly well-armed naval force, received a more flexible mandate. He was to prey on Genoese shipping and interests in the East wherever he found them vulnerable, while still maintaining watch over Venetian vessels and colonies there. Both Venice and Genoa scrambled for allies in the war. Not surprisingly, they both found willing support among their enemy’s closest neighbors, who naturally hoped to use the war to thwart the local powerhouse. The Genoese allied with the king of Hungary, who controlled Dalmatia and hoped to extend his power into the Adriatic. The Carrara family, who still ruled nearby Padua, joined the Genoese in an attempt to eject Venice from the mainland entirely. On the other side of Italy, Venice allied with Bernabò Visconti, the ruler of Milan, who was eager to reexert control over Genoa.
In April 1378 Vettor Pisani’s fleet sailed out of the Adriatic, rounded the peninsula, and in May engaged a Genoese squadron not far from the Tiber River, capturing or destroying at least half of it. Along with some booty, he also took aboard a number of Genoese nobles, who were transported back to Venice to be held in comfortable confinement for the duration of the war. Pisani then sailed to the Aegean, where he added more galleys to his fleet before returning to the Adriatic, Venice’s own sea. He put into port at Pola (modern Pula) and sent a message to the Senate requesting permission to return home for refitting and supply. But the Senate denied his request, insisting that he remain at Pola, where his fleet could better protect the spring convoys making their way through the Adriatic. This put Pisani in a difficult, although not unmanageable, position. At the time there was no reason to expect trouble so deep in Venetian territory. Early in the summer of 1379, though, a sizable Genoese fleet of more than twenty galleys appeared off Pola. Although Pisani opposed a direct engagement with them, his fellow officers insisted that anything less would be cowardice. Bowing to their opinion despite his reservations, Pisani led the attack, which managed to isolate the Genoese commander’s vessel and kill him. Relief swept through the Venetian ranks; it seemed they had won the day. However, just then six additional Genoese galleys rowed out from behind a hill and moved swiftly to ram the Venetian vessels. Caught by surprise, the Venetian fleet fell into disarray and was soon forced to surrender. Hundreds were killed or taken prisoner, but Pisani’s vessel and a few others managed to escape. They sailed into Venice with the frightening news that the Genoese had gained control of the upper Adriatic.
Upon his arrival, Vettor Pisani was immediately arrested on the charge of poor leadership and abandoning a battle while it still raged. He was quickly tried and found guilty on all counts. The court stripped him of his rank, forbade him to hold public office for five years, and sentenced him to six months in prison.
While Pisani languished in jail, Venice’s enemies continued to press forward. Hungarian forces closed off the rivers and roads to the north, while the Carraras in Padua did the same to the west. With Genoa in control of the Adriatic, the three powers had managed to isolate Venice, cutting it off from access to food and trade. Before long Genoese vessels could be seen sailing just off the Lido and the entrance to the lagoon near the monastery of San Nicolò. The cold fear of conquest, a stranger to the Venetian lagoon for centuries, now gripped the hearts of its citizens. The call went out for mercenaries, who came quickly enough once payments were assured. The land forces on the Lido were commanded by the condottiere Giacomo Cavelli, whose mercenaries had served Venice well in previous wars. An emergency committee of seven officials began sitting round the clock in the Ducal Palace, ready to respond to the expected invasion of the lagoon. When that happened, the bells at San Nicolò were to ring out the alarm, followed by the bells in the great Campanile of San Marco, and finally by all the bells in more than a hundred churches across the city. Each parish was charged with assembling armed men and bringing them to the Piazza San Marco at a moment’s notice.
The attack finally came in August 1379. A combined force of Paduans and Genoese sailed into the lagoon and, after a bloody battle, conquered Chioggia. No foreign power had come this close to Venice since the Magyar invasion in 899. Yet this time the threat was more dangerous. The Magyars, as well as the Carolingians and Huns before them, had brought land forces that captured the periphery of the lagoon, but had no obvious way to advance into its watery core. Now that core was the city of Venice—one of Europe’s largest and wealthiest urban centers. And the attackers were not simply land armies, but included Genoa, a great maritime power. The frightened Venetian government at once called for negotiations, hoping to talk their way out of the noose that was closing around them. The invading allies responded that they would hear no words of peace until they had bridled the proud horses of San Marco.
Things looked dark indeed for Venice. Much of the navy was off with Carlo Zeno, and no one knew where he was or when he might return. In so great an emergency, the government imposed a forced loan on wealthy Venetians to raise funds for mercenaries to man the forts of the lagoon. The resulting property assessment, called the estimo of 1379, is a boon for getting a closer look inside the city at this time, for it reveals the names and parishes of thousands of Venetians as well as estimates of their landed wealth. Those named in the estimo were required to buy government bonds in accordance with their means. Venice was also short on fighting men, so rather than casting lots (as was the common practice) the government conscripted all able-bodied men to defend the city. In the Arsenale, new war galleys bristling with oars were produced in record time, yet the oarsmen and marines that would serve aboard them were in reality shoemakers, cooks, and accountants. These new sailors needed to be trained to fight and to row—and soon.
The government appointed a new Captain of the Sea to replace Pisani, a puffed-up patrician named Taddeo Giustinian. His appointment did not warm the hearts of the popolo, who, as at Porto Longo, were blaming the present disaster on the arrogant nobility. Vettor Pisani was a noble, yet he had a unique rapport with the commoners. In the streets of Venice people grumbled over the shameful way that the government had treated him. The defeat at Pola, they insisted, was not his fault but that of the government leaders. It was they who had refused Pisani’s request to return home for resupply, probably because they were jealous of his successes and eager to see him fail. Many common Venetians resolved only to serve if commanded by Pisani. Unmoved, the new galley commanders set up desks for enlistment on the Molo, but true to the people’s word, only a trickle of men came forward. Meanwhile, several hundred men from Torcello arrived saying that they stood ready to fight under Pisani’s command. When Doge Andrea Contarini (1367–82) informed them that Taddeo Giustinian was now the captain general, they cursed and went home.
As the invaders began to press forward toward the Lido, Doge Contarini finally prevailed upon the Senate to release Vettor Pisani. The senators did so reluctantly, perhaps fearing that the beloved admiral would use his popularity to overthrow the government. But Pisani was no Julius Caesar. He quietly left his cell and went immediately to Mass, where he received Holy Communion. He then appeared before the doge, to whom he promised every loyalty. When he later entered the Piazza San Marco, he was, of course, mobbed by thousands of ecstatic Venetians shouting, “Viva Vettor!” But he sharply corrected them, saying, “That’s enough of that, boys! Say ‘Viva the good Evangelist San Marco!’” A few days later Pisani took his seat at one of the galley registration desks on the Molo. He was surrounded by hundreds of men who pushed and shoved to enlist under his command. At last giving in, the government restored Pisani to his former position as Captain of the Sea.
With the internal strife resolved, the Venetian people and government worked diligently to ward off the common threat. Nearly forty galleys were produced and stationed at key locations around the lagoon. Every day galleys rowed between Giudecca and the Lido, training the craftsmen and day laborers to propel a war vessel. At last, in December 1379, the Venetians were ready to counterattack the enemy clustered in and around Chioggia. The plan was a variation of the one used against Pepin more than five centuries earlier. The Venetian lagoon appears to be a sea, but in reality it is a shallow pool with an average depth of about three feet. Vessels navigate the lagoon only by following the rivers and channels that lie hidden below the deceptive waves. Although Chioggia is surrounded by water, vessels can reach it only by means of a few waterways. The Venetians planned to cut off those waterways. Venetian war galleys would defend a group of heavy barges and cogs (large sailing vessels) filled with stones, which would be brought to the channels near Chioggia and sunk. Galleys, some carrying the new technology of stone-ball cannons, would then batter Chioggia’s defenses, attempting to take back the island. The operation was launched on December 22, led by the elderly doge and accompanied by Vettor Pisani. It met with great success. Against the odds, the Venetians managed to turn the tables on their enemies. They surrounded Chioggia, although the Genoese on the island remained defiant.
The war had begun at Tenedos and continued in clashes and skirmishes across the Mediterranean, but its most desperate battle was fought at Chioggia. The Genoese worked hard to clear the channels and repel the Venetians, still hoping that their blockade of the lagoon would bring the city to its knees. But the Venetians received a much-needed dose of good news on January 1, 1380, when the long-absent Carlo Zeno sailed into the lagoon with fourteen well-armed and expertly manned galleys. His mission to disrupt Genoese shipping had been an unqualified success. With their forces tied up in the Adriatic, the Genoese had been unable to defend themselves against Zeno’s attacks. His patrols between Genoa and Sicily had netted numerous Genoese vessels and tons of precious cargo. Zeno had then sailed to Tenedos, which he fortified, and then successfully preyed on Genoese shipping in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. At Rhodes he had even captured the Richignona, the largest Genoese cog of its day bearing a cargo valued at half a million ducats. When he put in at Crete, which remained a Venetian colony, Zeno received orders to return to Venice at once. After refitting his ships, he did just that, culminating in his magnificent arrival in the lagoon on January 1.
With Carlo Zeno and Vettor Pisani working together, Venetian spirits soared. Zeno, the old swashbuckling mercenary, was especially useful for dealing with the frequent scuffles between the various Italian and English mercenary companies working for Venice. Indeed, when Genoese supplies in Chioggia were finally depleted, they attempted to bribe Venice’s mercenary leaders to switch sides—something not at all uncommon in those days—but Zeno thwarted the plan. With all options exhausted, in June 1380 the Genoese on Chioggia finally surrendered the island. The worst was over for Venice. Over the next year Venetian fleets kept busy taking back the Adriatic Sea. Vettor Pisani died during those battles, and Carlo Zeno succeeded him as captain general. In 1381 the long and difficult War of Chioggia finally came to a close with the painstakingly negotiated Treaty of Turin. Venice lost little, but neither did she gain. The island of Tenedos—the cause of the war and still a bitter bone of contention between the two powers—went to the treaty’s honest broker, Count Amadeo of Savoy, who, it was hoped, would use it as a base of operations against the Turks.
For Venice, the spoils of the War of Chioggia were measured not in booty, but in survival. Although Venice was the capital of a large and prosperous maritime empire, it had nonetheless come within a hairbeadth of conquest. It survived because the republican government, for all its complexities and inefficiencies, remained rock solid even during enormous adversity. Although they had disagreed with their government in the matter of Vettor Pisani, the Venetian people expressed that disagreement peacefully. Once again, the Venetians’ love for their republic won out over their attraction to any one man. As Pisani himself had said, it was not to him, but to San Marco, the symbol of Venice, that the people owed their allegiance. That belief not only carried them through the war, but ensured that they were poised to capitalize on the peace.
Within a month of signing the Treaty of Turin, the Venetian government awarded thirty commoner families permanent membership in the nobility. In part, this was a recognition of the extraordinary contributions that they had made toward the war effort. However, in so great a struggle as the War of Chioggia, virtually all Venetian citizens had made extraordinary efforts. What set these thirty families apart was their wealth. It cannot be stressed enough that the patrician nobility in Venice was not a static, landed gentry like that in most other places in the world. It was instead a large group of families with a right to serve as representatives of the “people of Venice” in the Great Council and to hold high offices in the government. Because Venice was a capitalist society based on international commerce and entrepreneurialism, it was natural that over time some family fortunes would rise while others would decline. Throughout their long history the Venetians had repeatedly made adjustments to membership in circles of power based on those fluctuations—whether it was the new families of the eleventh century who became the “good men” of the doge’s court or the families that gained admittance to the Great Council during the fourteenth-century Serrata. To make no adjustments would have produced dangerous imbalances whereby old yet financially weak families ruled over new economically powerful ones, a state of affairs no republic could endure. The War of Chioggia, therefore, provided an opportunity for the government to again co-opt those Venetians who were in the best position to help or, if excluded, to harm the Republic of St. Mark.
Of course, new arrivals into any elite group are often looked down upon, and the Venetians were no exception. Old families (many of whom had been new families only a few centuries earlier) referred to themselves as the longhi. These included stalwarts such as the Dandolos, Michiels, Zianis, Mastropieros, Morosinis, and Gradenigos. Researching and producing genealogies became popular in fifteenth-century Venice as noble families sought to link their distant ancestors with the first tribunes or other early settlers in the lagoon. In the sixteenth century Marco Barbaro produced his massive compendium of Venetian family genealogies, which laid out the real and sometimes imagined histories of Venice’s noble clans. Although the longhi did have impressive pedigrees, much of the early history that they now claimed was simply wishful thinking. The newer patrician families were known as the curti. It is sometimes said that relations between the longhi and the curti were poor, but there is little evidence of it; in fact, the two groups frequently intermarried and voted for each other in state elections. While the longhi may have enjoyed a certain prestige, it was often mitigated by their relative poverty and increasing dependence on government stipends to make ends meet. Given the natural rise and decline of family businesses based on commerce rather than agricultural estates, it is not surprising that the curti grew in power during the next few centuries—indeed, virtually all the subsequent doges were members of the curti.
The War of Chioggia badly bruised Venice’s economy, but did not undermine its fundamental soundness. Disruptions in trade coupled with punishing forced-loan levies on the citizens had taken their toll. Yet Venice’s rulers were businessmen. They understood finance and worked hard to pay off debts and restore government bonds as a safe investment. Genoa did not fare as well. Torn by civil wars and factional violence, the city passed from one ruler to the next. Genoese merchants also began to spend more of their time in the western Mediterranean, searching for profitable markets there. It was not an unreasonable decision. The Turkish advance into the Balkans continued apace throughout the late fourteenth century. The Ottoman Empire was becoming the superpower of its age, and the sultan could raise large and well-trained armies of foot soldiers and cavalry. He also had the Janissaries, an elite unit made up completely of slaves taken from their Christian parents during infancy and raised in military barracks to be warriors par excellence. Europe had no comparable military force. Even the Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396—perhaps the largest Crusade yet launched—was utterly destroyed by Ottoman forces. It seemed nothing could stand in the way of the Turks.
The Venetians did not even try. They were sailors and their field of battle was the sea. Fortunately for them, the Ottoman Turks had little interest in naval matters, leaving control of the Aegean largely to Venice. Venetian patrols continued to make their way through the Adriatic and Greek islands, and Venetians still held colonial bases at Negroponte, Crete, Modon, and (most recently) Corfu. Indeed, the relentless advance of the Ottoman Empire actually opened up opportunities for Venice, as various Greek or French lords decided that it was better to sell their Balkan port cities rather than lose them to the Turks. In this way Venice greatly expanded its overseas colonies, acquiring Durazzo, Scutari, Lepanto, Patras, Argos, Nauplia, and even Athens as well as several additional Greek islands. Provided that the sultan’s rights were respected and sufficient payments made, the Venetians were allowed to keep all their new acquisitions.
Venice moved quickly to gather up these crumbling fragments of the Byzantine Empire, in part to keep them away from Genoa but also as insurance against the day when the ancient empire would be no more. By 1400 the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1391–1425) ruled little more than Constantinople, and even that was besieged by the armies of Sultan Bayezid I (1389–1402). Desperate for aid, Manuel left the capital on a two-year fund-raising tour of Europe. The Renaissance in the West had created a strong appetite for Greek and Roman antiquity, so there was a good deal of interest in the emperor and his colorful entourage. Everywhere he went, Manuel was received with unbounded enthusiasm. Crowds poured out to cheer the brave, yet humble, emperor who had become a symbol of defiance against the Turks. After touring Italy, Manuel arrived in Paris, where King Charles IV lavishly entertained him. The following year he was the guest of King Henry IV in England, where he was similarly celebrated. Manuel’s trip had a powerful impact on European fashions and Western perspectives of the East. But the large sums of money and vast armies that his hosts promised never did materialize.
With little help against an implacable foe, it seemed that the last chapter of the long history of the Byzantine Empire had at last been written. But remarkably Constantinople was saved by powerful forces that it neither controlled nor truly understood. A Turkish/Mongol leader named Timur (or, as he became known in Europe, Tamerlane) led a huge Mongol army into Anatolia and demanded the immediate surrender of all Turkish lands there. Sultan Bayezid abandoned his siege of Constantinople and amassed his forces near Ankara to fend off the eastern invasion. What followed was one of the largest engagements of the Middle Ages. Timur and his Mongol armies not only crushed the Ottoman forces but captured Bayezid as well. According to some reports, Timur kept the sultan on display, chained in a cage like an animal. The loss of the sultan and much of the army led to a mad scramble for power in Turkish lands, which eventually resulted in a brutal civil war between Bayezid’s three sons. Ottoman power, which had caused all of Europe to tremble, suddenly evaporated. Timur swept through Asia Minor and then, as quickly as he came, returned to the East, where he later died. The ruins of the Ottoman Empire lay strewn everywhere. Anatolia was awash in petty emirs and Ottoman princelings competing for the throne. In Thrace, Bayezid’s oldest son, Suleiman, managed to gain some measure of control in Adrianople, but he was weakened by the continued civil war. Fearing a new Crusade from the West to save Constantinople, in 1403 Suleiman returned a number of lost territories to the Byzantine Empire, including Thracian ports, the Peloponnese, various Aegean islands, and even the city of Thessalonica. He furthermore abolished the annual tribute and the vassalage of the emperor. It was an amazing reversal.
For Venice all the news was good. The demise of the Ottoman Empire in the east mirrored a similar decline of Genoa in the west. Beset by internal strife, Genoa gave itself (for a time) over to the kings of France, who would govern it until 1409. This did not eliminate the danger for Venice, for there were always companies of Genoese freebooters patrolling eastern waters seeking their own profit. But Genoa no longer controlled its own foreign policy, so the possibility of another full-scale war was greatly diminished. Nevertheless, Venetian foreign policy remained complex as kingdoms and empires continued to shift dramatically in the fifteenth century. As a result, the governmental body charged with overseeing foreign affairs, the Senate, came to dominate the Venetian government. The Great Council remained the repository of all political authority in Venice, yet the need for rapid decisions based on an extensive network of diplomats meant that in practice the Senate began to play the largest role in steering the ship of state. It was the Senate that swiftly deflected the attempts of Francesco Carrara, ruler of Padua, to cut off land trade routes between Venice and Germany. When diplomacy failed, the Senate allied with Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan, in a war to eliminate the troublesome Carraras once and for all. By the time that war ended, Venice had managed to restore complete control over Treviso. A few years later, after Visconti’s death, Venice further expanded its mainland holdings to include Padua, Vicenza, and Verona. In 1400 the Venetian Senate even began dividing its registers of deliberations between terra and mar, land and sea. The Venetians were acquiring a mainland empire to rival their maritime one.
Across the waves, Venetian trade stretched to the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, energizing the economy at home. Indeed, by 1410 Venice had rebounded from the War of Chioggia so strongly that the Dalmatian port cities asked to be returned to Venetian rule, finding it preferable to being fought over by the thrones of Hungary and Naples. The galleys and merchant vessels of Venice sailed out of the Adriatic and across the waves in search of profit—and they found a great deal of it. Spices were the most famous cargo, because they were rare, expensive, and much desired in western Europe. But there were a great many more. The rapid depopulation of Europe due to plague had produced a severe labor shortage within a well-established and still vibrant economy. The cost of labor (and thereby the individual incomes of most Europeans) rose, which in turn provided an economic incentive for producing labor-saving devices. The Venetians themselves had begun using some new ship designs such as cogs, which had single masts and could be managed with smaller crews. There was, of course, no way to skimp on military manpower on state galleys, but since all the Mediterranean powers were equally harmed by the plague, this only meant that fewer vessels took part in naval engagements. The great battle off Pola in 1379 consisted of scarcely forty vessels. Compare that with pre-plague fleets, like that of the Fourth Crusade, which numbered well over three hundred major vessels. Venetian galleys in the fifteenth century continued to escort merchant convoys through the waters of the Adriatic and Aegean. Goods unloaded in Venice were then sold to merchants who bore them northward, across the Alps. Along the way, the state taxed every transaction and the Venetian economy flourished.
Safe trade routes overland had traditionally not been a concern of Venetians, who very deliberately focused their attention on the lagoon and the sea. Since northern Italy was fragmented into competing communes and petty regional powers, there was little fear that all routes could ever be closed. But by the late fourteenth century the rise of the signori had produced powerful and expansionistic states in Italy that could conceivably cut off Venice’s access to the trade routes, produce, and raw materials of the mainland. Indeed, that had been the goal of Genoa and Padua during the War of Chioggia. The Venetian government responded by first neutralizing the threat posed by the Carrara family, and then establishing colonial rule over lands stretching from the lagoon all the way to Lake Garda, near Verona. Once Venice was established as a mainland power, however, it was difficult for its people not to be drawn further into Italy’s politics and wars. Although the cities that Venice acquired were largely left to govern themselves, they nonetheless required Venetian officials, which provided lucrative jobs for nobles needing work. In short, a careful expansion of Venice’s empire onto the terra firma seemed not only prudent but natural.
And there was no shortage of opportunity to do so. In 1418 the king of Hungary allied with the patriarch of Aquileia, who ruled Friuli, to the north of Venice. Their aim was to launch strategic assaults on Venetian strongholds to deprive Venice of both Istria and Dalmatia. The plan was beset, however, by delays and obstacles, so it never fully materialized. The Venetians nonetheless responded by attacking and defeating the patriarch’s forces, which received no support from Hungary because of renewed Turkish threats on its borders. In 1420 the capital city of Udine fell and the patriarch was forced to cede all of Friuli to Venice. The mainland holdings of the Republic of St. Mark instantly doubled.
By 1423 Venice’s expansion into Italy had brought its people to a new crossroads. The powerful Visconti family in Milan had rallied under the rule of Filippo Maria after the death of Gian Galeazzo. Milan held Lombardy in its grip and was extending its authority southward. The question for the people of Venice—a question that would have been unimaginable to their ancestors—was what to do about it. There were at this time five major Italian powers: Naples, which ruled southern Italy and Sicily; the papacy, which ruled Rome and central Italy; Florence, which ruled Tuscany; Milan; and Venice. When the Viscontis began their new conquests, Florence reached out to Venice for support. It was an attractive request. Like Venice, Florence was a republic—at least at times. It was also the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. Steeped in the florid literature of civic humanism, Venetian patricians were naturally amenable to Florentine pleas to join a war against the tyranny of the Visconti despots.
But Venetians had never before contemplated a land war of such magnitude. The Viscontis of Milan were not to be trifled with. They currently ruled Genoa, something that made them in every way more dangerous to Venice. Furthermore, a war with Milan—as with all Italian wars in this age—would have to be fought by mercenaries under the command of condottieri, powerful generals who sold their services to the highest bidder. And that would be expensive. In his Lives of the Doges, Marino Sanudo tells us that the eighty-year-old Doge Tommaso Mocenigo (1414–23) spoke out strongly against Venice’s entry into this war. With death approaching, the doge made an impassioned appeal to his countrymen not to mire Venice in campaigns of conquest on the terra firma. He did not call to mind their shared history of isolation from the problems of Italy, nor the dangers of building empires that one cannot sustain. Instead, in good Venetian fashion, he explained precisely why a war against Milan made no business sense. Peace had brought prosperity to the people of Venice. The state debt had been greatly reduced, and each year goods worth more than ten million gold ducats flowed through the ports and markets of the city. As an economic powerhouse, Venice already consumed the fruits of Lombardy, which were traded freely in its markets. Why, the doge asked, would Venetians willingly bring fire and sword to Lombardy and in the process impoverish themselves with military expenditures? He condemned Francesco Foscari, the leading proponent of the war, as a lying scoundrel interested only in expanding his own power, even if it meant the economic ruin of Venice. Venetians had before them a choice: Follow the old ways of honor and profit in the islands, ports, and quarters of the eastern Mediterranean, or turn toward Europe, its states, and its wars.
Weeks later Mocenigo died, and the Venetians elected Francesco Foscari (1423–57) as their new doge.
Foscari began preparing for battle almost immediately. In 1425 the republics of Florence and Venice formally declared war against Filippo Maria Visconti, the lord of Milan, with the stated aim of preserving the freedom of Italy. It is fitting, then, that during the next three decades all of Italy was at some point involved in this war. Venice’s forces struck deep into Lombardy, capturing Brescia in 1426 and acquiring Bergamo by treaty two years later. The twists and turns of this long and complex war need not detain us here; suffice it to say that it was a typically Italian affair, full of treachery, violence, and shifting allegiances. The main actors in the struggle were, of course, the condottieri. These expert mercenary generals commanded enormous wages, which were bid ever higher by the warring states competing for their services. Condottieri were contracted military leaders, working under a condotta, or contract, that bound them to a specific state for a specific period of time and for a specific sum. Although Venice sent officials to accompany its condottieri in the field, their primary purpose was simply to express broad war objectives and to keep watch on their investment. The details of the campaigns, though, were left to the individual condottieri. By their nature, these warlords did not choose sides. While they were under contract to one state, they were obligated to wage war efficiently and effectively for it. When that contract expired, however, the condottiere was a free agent and could just as easily switch sides, waging war against his former employer.
Overall the Venetians found the system to their liking. Indeed, without condottieri and their mercenary armies Venice could not have waged land wars at all. Since successful generals who capture large swaths of territory can often become tyrants, Venetians were also amenable to a system that kept military leaders at arm’s length and allowed them to be easily dismissed. Not everything went smoothly, though. Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola had won Brescia and Bergamo for Venice, but as he advanced toward Milan to press his advantage, he suddenly and unexpectedly halted. No amount of bonuses or promises from the Venetian government could persuade him to take up the offensive again. Agents of the Council of Ten subsequently learned that Carmagnola was secretly negotiating with Filippo Maria Visconti, for whom he had worked earlier. This sort of treachery could not be excused, but punishing a man with a mighty army is not a simple thing. The Ten, nonetheless, devised a plan. The condottiere was invited to Venice in 1432 to discuss strategy. When he arrived, he was welcomed joyously in the Piazza San Marco with high honors and much celebration for his victories. When the party concluded, he was promptly arrested, tried, and beheaded between the two columns on the Molo.
In 1447 Venetian prospects seemed to brighten when Filippo Maria Visconti died without a male heir. The people of Milan overthrew the Visconti family (again) and proclaimed a new republic. Yet even this did not end the war. With help from the new ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, the condottiere Francesco Sforza became Duke of Milan and was able to push hard against Venice’s continued march westward. By 1453 there seemed no way to stop the war and no end to the number of mercenaries willing to fight it.
But then everything changed. Unbelievable news began spreading across Europe, shaking everyone who heard it. The last Christian state in the East had been destroyed by the roaring advance of Islam. The ancient empire that had once seemed eternal, that had civilized western Europe and given birth to Venice itself was no more.
Byzantium had fallen.