CHAPTER 13
Few things foster unity like a common enemy, which is precisely what Europeans faced in 1453. With the fall of Constantinople and Sultan Mehmed II’s promise that he would extend his conquests into Italy itself, the wars that raged between Western powers began to seem trivial and foolish. The Hundred Years’ War between France and England came to a close that very year. Venice’s long war in Italy, which seemed intractable only a few months earlier, quickly ended as Italian eyes looked fearfully to the Turkish East.
The Treaty of Lodi, signed on April 9, 1454, committed the five great powers of Italy—Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, and the Papal States—to a firm peace in order to prepare for an expected Turkish invasion. The treaty envisioned a balance in Italy, in which the great powers kept their hands to themselves and the smaller states in check. Venice was the largest and most powerful of the five, yet also had the most to lose, for the Venetians ruled not only much of northern Italy but also a maritime empire that lay directly in the path of the sultan.
Amid the lamentations and prophecies of doom that the conquest of Constantinople elicited among Europeans there were also more than a few recriminations. Cruelly, many of those fell upon the people of Venice. Had they sent more ships, more troops, more money, and done all of it more quickly, it was said, Constantinople might have been saved. Of course, those who pointed fingers at Venice, more often than not, had failed to lift those same fingers to aid Byzantium. Only Venice and the papacy had sent military aid to Constantinople, and Venice had sent the lion’s share. Hundreds of Venetians had given their lives to defend the ancient city. It was galling to hear that they had not done enough.
When the looting and carnage in Constantinople ended, Sultan Mehmed II proclaimed the city the new capital of the Ottoman Empire, and he began at once working on its reconstruction. For a thousand years Constantinople had been the head of a great Christian state. For the next nearly five hundred years it would rule the largest Muslim empire in the world. The young and ambitious Mehmed was determined to restore the dilapidated city to its former glory. Calls went out for builders and architects to begin work in the capital. Justinian’s masterpiece and for centuries the heart of Greek Orthodoxy, the church of Hagia Sophia, was promptly converted into a mosque. Most of the remaining churches, however, were allowed to remain Christian. The patriarchate of Constantinople was relocated to the Church of the Holy Apostles, on which Venice’s own church of San Marco had been modeled centuries earlier. The patriarch remained there only a few years before Mehmed ordered the church demolished and his own Fatih Camii (Mosque of the Conqueror) built in its place. In this way, the traditional site of the Byzantine emperors’ tombs would become the final resting place of the city’s conqueror.
For Constantinople to flourish, it needed people. Mehmed ordered the Ottoman government to move there, but he needed to reinvigorate the abandoned markets and fill up the empty streets and neighborhoods. He offered tax incentives to bring Turks to the city, and Greeks as well. Indeed, he extended full amnesty to all Greeks who wished to settle in Constantinople. And settle they did, by the thousands. Within a decade the Greek population of Ottoman Constantinople grew many times greater than it had been before the Turkish conquest. Thus began the long history of the Greek people under Turkish rule. Since the Catholics had been unable to save them from conquest, the Greeks repudiated the Council of Florence and its unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. It soon became commonplace among Greeks to say that the conquest of Constantinople was God’s punishment for their apostasy at Florence.
Yet not all Greeks remained among the Turks. Those with money or influence fled to the West. Indeed, many Greek aristocrats had been shipping their wealth and belongings to Italy for years before the fall of Constantinople. Much of Hagia Sophia’s plate gold had been sent to Venice. Not surprisingly, many Greeks arrived in Venice after 1453, seeking a new home. Unlike the Greeks in Constantinople, those in Venice still upheld the Council of Florence, but they nonetheless petitioned the Senate to allow them to have a regular church for their Greek liturgy. Establishing a new liturgy in Venice was complicated, largely for jurisdictional reasons, yet the senators finally assigned the Greeks the church of San Biagio, near the Arsenale. It saw much use, for the number of Greeks in Venice continued to climb. By 1478 more than four thousand called it home. In 1539 the Greeks were given land in the center of Venice to build a new church, which is today San Giorgio dei Greci. Completed in 1573, it remains the oldest of the churches in Europe built by the Greek diaspora. The Masses celebrated in San Giorgio were sung in Greek, yet remained in communion with Rome. At some point in the late sixteenth century, however, the Greeks returned to the old rites and quietly separated themselves from the papacy. No one noticed. Today San Giorgio dei Greci remains a Greek Orthodox church directly under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople.
San Giorgio is not the only legacy of the Greek diaspora in Venice. Cardinal Bessarion, who had been the Greek Orthodox metropolitan (archbishop) of Nicaea and took part in the Council of Florence, felt a close bond with Venice. In his will he left to the people of Venice his massive collection of Greek manuscripts salvaged from Constantinople, which included works by authors such as Plato, Ptolemy, and Apuleius. These precious volumes became the foundation of a new Venetian state library, the Biblioteca Marciana. Housed in the Procuratie Nuove, just across the Piazzetta from San Marco, the Marciana remains one of the most important libraries in the world. Amid the throngs of pigeons, tour groups, and coffee shops, one can still today spy the odd scholar making his or her way quietly into the unassuming doors, behind which are preserved the treasures of the ages.
The peace that Venice concluded with Sultan Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople was extremely fragile. No one doubted that the Ottomans meant to press westward, which would naturally put them at odds with Venice’s colonies in Greece and the Aegean Sea. Europe’s kings and princes regularly paid lip service to the pressing need for Christians to stop warring against one another and unite against the common foe. Their words were sincere, but they were only words. And words would not stop the juggernaut of the Ottoman Empire.
In August 1458 the famous humanist, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, was elected pope, taking the name Pius II (1458–64). Few popes since Innocent III felt as strongly about their obligation to bring peace to Christendom in order to turn back the Muslim peril. For Pius II, the conquest of Constantinople ended nothing. Europeans, he believed, must cease their petty wars and join together in a mighty Crusade that would restore Byzantium to Christianity and force the Turks completely off the continent. One of Pius’s first actions was to call a congress of Europe’s leaders to meet at Mantua in June 1459. Yet, although he received many attractive letters borne by well-dressed messengers and filled with fine words, it was clear that Mantua would not be the show of solidarity for which Pius had hoped. The opening of the congress was delayed for months, and still only a handful of delegates attended. Undaunted, Pius proclaimed a new Crusade. It was a medieval gesture in an early modern world. Some, like the French, were still upset with the pope for unrelated decisions, and therefore refused to join any Crusade. Others, like the Germans, promised mighty armies, yet never delivered a single soldier. Still others accused Pius of cynically beating the drum of holy war so as to avoid calls for reform in the Church.
Venice showed no such misgivings. As Europe’s most frequent crusading state, the republic stood ready to take up the cross of Christ and make war against the enemies of Christendom. However, it would not do so alone. The Venetian delegates at Mantua made a point of reminding the attendees that only Venice had sent aid to Constantinople. It would no longer be pulled into wars with the Turks in which many Europeans enrolled, but for which only the Venetians showed up. If clear evidence emerged that the Crusade of Pius II would become a reality, Venice would be among its strongest supporters. Otherwise, the Venetian delegates preferred not to discuss the matter.
Venice’s response to Pius’s plea was not unexpected. Indeed, the pope had long ago developed a rather strong opinion about Venetians that was destined to echo through the centuries, even to our own time. Pius wrote in his Commentaries:
Venetians never think of God. And, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy. To a Venetian, that is just which is good for the state; that is pious which increases the empire.
That this could be said about a people who routinely fought difficult and expensive wars against Muslims demonstrates the expectations that Europeans had for the city of the lagoon. In 1460 Venice still commanded a fleet and an empire of extraordinary size. The wealth of Venice was beyond great. It was legendary. Its fleets had no equal in the Mediterranean. Therefore, in the courts of France, England, Germany, and even Italy, the Turkish peril was increasingly seen as a Venetian matter. Indeed, in states like Milan and Florence, people actually hoped for Turkish advances that might draw back the Venetian power that extended across northern Italy.
None of this, however, brought Pius II any closer to his Crusade. The embittered and elderly pope decided to shame Europe’s leaders into joining by announcing his own intention to take the crusader’s cross and promising to personally lead the expedition. The armies and fleets of Christendom, he said, were to meet him at Ancona in 1464. From there they would launch the Crusade. Promises from states such as Burgundy flowed in, although it was clear that many princes were cautiously eyeing their rivals rather than preparing for departure. In Venice, though, the pope’s example filled the people with hope and a firm resolve. Cristoforo Moro (1462–71), a former crusader himself, was elected doge and the Great Council voted almost unanimously to launch a Crusade fleet with Moro at the helm. In preparation for the war, the Senate made an alliance with Hungary and informed the Ottomans that their fragile peace was now at an end.
Pius II was delighted when he heard that Venice had joined the Crusade. He sent a consecrated sword to Doge Moro in gratitude, and the two old men exchanged letters in which they looked forward to a brighter future for the beleaguered West. As with many of his writings from his days before becoming pope, Pius came to believe that he had been wrong about the Venetians and their attitude toward the faith. While Venice prepared for war, the pope traveled to the rendezvous point. However, his health was failing and by the time he reached Ancona in July 1464 he was bedridden, beset equally by disease and heartbreak. From his room in the bishop’s palace he watched the wide harbor below, prepared to accommodate a mighty armada but occupied by only two papal galleys. Aside from a few mercenary bands, the town was completely untroubled by military camps. The pan-European Crusade that would break the back of Ottoman power and save Christendom had proved a fantasy, nurtured by noble lies and flourishing only in the dashed hopes of a broken old man.
And then, on August 12, the alarm went up in the city of Ancona and shouts of joy could be heard in the halls of the palace. A Venetian fleet of more than twenty major vessels led by Doge Cristoforo Moro sailed proudly into the harbor, ready to crusade. Like the pope, the Venetians were stunned to discover that they were the only ones to keep their promise to the Vicar of Christ. Moro asked to see Pius, but was told that he was too sick with fever to receive anyone. Two days later, the pope died. His cherished dream, which had been merely humored in the courts of Europe, died with him. No Crusade would challenge the plans of Mehmed the Conqueror.
Once again the Venetians had responded to the call to defend Europe, and once again they found themselves alone in taking it seriously. The pitiful situation at Ancona was precisely what the Venetians had sought to avoid—a declaration of war against the Turks to join a Crusade that did not, in reality, exist. But they were now at war, and the people of Venice were determined to win it. The fleets were dispatched to Venice’s colonies with orders to push back the Turkish advance. In truth, they could only nudge it here and there while defending Venetian holdings. Occasionally things went well for Venice, as when they were able to extend their control of the Morea (Peloponnese). But such victories were usually rewarded back home by anti-Venetian alliances among Italian powers, which sought to carve up Venetian mainland territories while the republic was preoccupied with the Turks. During the first six years of the war, Venice poured lives and wealth into the struggle with little reward and less gratitude. Pope Paul II (1464–71) offered indulgences to those who would assist Venice in its holy war, yet no one gave it a moment’s thought.
Despite their great efforts, the Venetians managed to hold their own against the Ottomans only because the sultan was distracted by other wars against Christian powers in the Balkans. After conquering Bosnia and executing its last king, Mehmed then crushed the last of the Albanian resistance and soon brought that territory, too, into the growing Ottoman Empire. By 1470 he was already planning his next move westward. Mehmed was a man who thought big. He had every intention of capturing Italy, which would open the way for the complete conquest of western Europe. He ordered the creation of a mighty fleet built along Western models with the aim of becoming the first Muslim power to command the Aegean Sea—and that meant removing Venice. Along with a large army and powerful cannons the Turkish fleet descended on the island of Negroponte, a prosperous Venetian colony since 1390. Mehmed II personally commanded the Ottoman forces as they battered the walls and chased away Venetian attempts to relieve the capital city, Chalkis. On July 12, 1470, the city fell. No one was spared. Men, women, and children were sold into slavery or killed in the most brutal fashion. According to later accounts, the Venetian governor of Negroponte, Paolo Erizzo, begged not to be beheaded. His wish was granted; he was instead cut in half at the waist.
The loss of Negroponte fired the Venetians to redouble their efforts against the Turks. At considerable expense the Arsenale was expanded to produce more war vessels more quickly. The war with the Turks had become stratospherically expensive. The Venetians were spending more than a million gold ducats per year on the effort, requiring the sale of additional war bonds and the levying of more taxes. It is a testament to the strength of the Venetian economy that it withstood the strain year after year. But without help, the Venetians could not continue indefinitely. They were unable to stop the Turkish conquests on land, which now stretched all the way to Friuli. At one point Venetians who crammed onto the top of the Campanile of San Marco could see the smoke of Turkish conquests in the distance. Even on the sea, the Venetians struggled to hold their own, enjoying only occasional help from the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes, Naples, and the papacy.
An unexpected windfall came in 1475 when the famous condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni died. For more than forty years, Colleoni had served Venice in her Italian wars, although, like all condottieri, he also served other powers. In his will, Colleoni left to the Venetian people 216,000 ducats and lands valued at more than half a million ducats to support the Crusade against the Turks. In return, Colleoni asked that a statue of himself be erected in the Piazza outside the church of San Marco. The Great Council was glad to have the money, but unable fully to grant Colleoni’s last wish. Venice was a republic, not a dictatorship of the sort that littered Italy. No man, not even the doge, could have a statue of himself set up in the Piazza of the people. And so the Venetians did the next best thing. Recognizing Colleoni’s reverence for the patron saint of Venice, they commissioned the great artist Andrea del Verrocchio to produce a life-size equestrian statue of Colleoni, which was then set atop a monumental pedestal and placed in the open plaza outside the Scuola Grande di San Marco (today Venice’s hospital). The council’s decision is often described in guidebooks and histories as a typically tricky Venetian deal, whereby the clever merchants outwitted the wealthy Colleoni. It was nothing of the sort. The placement of Colleoni’s statue was not a requirement of his will, but simply a request. Placing it outside the Scuola Grande di San Marco not only associated the statue with the saint, but also put it directly adjacent to the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the resting place of doges and heroes. Today the magnificent statue still surveys the busy campo with a quiet dignity it would have lost altogether among the pigeons and postcards of the Piazza San Marco.
Even with Colleoni’s windfall, the Senate finally concluded that Venice could no longer sustain the war with the Turks. As early as 1475 it had begun negotiations with Mehmed, but these did not bear fruit until 1478. Eager to press on to more permanent gains, the sultan signed a treaty of truce with Venice in January 1479. He was in a position to dictate the terms. Venice was forced to accept the loss of Negroponte, Lemnos, and most of the former Venetian territories on the Greek mainland. Albania, which had previously been bequeathed to the people of Venice, was completely given over to the Turks, except for the city of Durazzo. Despite these losses, the remainder of Venice’s territories remained intact, including the Cyclades and, most important of all, Crete. Venetian merchants were permitted to return to Constantinople and to have their own podestà, provided they paid an annual tribute of ten thousand ducats to the sultan.
By 1480 Venice was exhausted and wounded by her long war with the Turks. The enemy stood flush with victory. No sooner had Mehmed made peace with Venice than he launched a major assault against the Knights Hospitaller on their island fortress at Rhodes. The Knights were the last of the old crusading military orders still active in the eastern Mediterranean. More than 150 vessels and fifty thousand Ottoman troops descended on Rhodes, besieging fewer than four thousand Knights. The brutal siege stretched on throughout the summer of 1480, but ended when the Knights courageously beat back a general assault, forcing the Turkish forces to retreat in disarray. The upset marked a rare victory against the Ottoman Empire, and was much celebrated in Europe. Mehmed apparently hoped to eliminate certain Christian powers in the eastern Mediterranean—namely, Venice and the Hospitallers—before advancing westward into Europe. He failed in that, but succeeded in exhausting both powers sufficiently that they were no longer an immediate problem. The sultan ordered the forces that had assaulted Rhodes to sail westward.
In 1453 Mehmed had promised to conquer the old Rome on the banks of the Tiber just as he had conquered the new Rome on the shores of the Bosporus. His subsequent conquests in the Balkans and Dalmatia laid the foundation for his invasion of Italy. On July 28, 1480, the invasion began. More than 120 Turkish vessels landed near the Italian city of Otranto, the easternmost city in Italy, just across the Adriatic from Turkish-controlled Albania. In a matter of days the Turks had captured the strategic port and visited a brutality on its citizens extreme even for them. Eyewitnesses described the elderly rounded up and beheaded and the children shackled and sold as slaves. The nobles of the city were decapitated and their heads placed on lances. The Turks stripped the churches bare and turned them into stables. Bishop Stefano Pendinelli and all of the city’s clergy were bound together and executed. The monasteries were ransacked, the nuns were raped on the church altars, and the precious relics of the saints were cast to the dogs. The passion and deaths of the “eight hundred martyrs” of Otranto would not be forgotten and, indeed, are still celebrated there today.
No one doubted that Otranto was to be the beachhead for the Turkish conquest of Italy, just as Gallipoli had once served for their invasion of Greece. Pope Sixtus IV sent news of the calamity to the kings and princes of Europe, calling on them to come to Italy to repel the invasion. Yet no one, least of all the pope himself, believed that such a call would be answered. In Rome the papal curia joined thousands of foreign diplomats hastily packing their bags to flee north. Although many of the Italian powers proclaimed a coalition to expel the Turks, nothing tangible came of it. Italy, including Rome itself, lay almost completely defenseless.
Because Venice had just recently negotiated a peace with Mehmed II, it was widely believed in Europe that a secret condition of that peace was Venetian support for the invasion of Italy. After all, Venice had no love for the rulers of Naples. This was compounded by the fact that the Venetians were unwilling to commit to, or even speak of, fighting the Turks after their conquest of Otranto. For the people of Venice, this criticism was infuriating. After more than fifteen years of holding off the Turks, they were now held culpable for the Turkish attack on a dozing Europe. The capture of Otranto mortified the Venetians as much as any other Christians, but they insisted that they would not again be drawn into a war with the Turks without allies. It was all well and good for the French and the English to beat their breasts over the Turkish invasion; they were, at least for the moment, out of the sultan’s reach. Venice was not.
Fortunately for western Europeans, they never had to fight that war against the Conqueror. On May 3, 1481, in circumstances that still remain suspicious, the forty-nine-year-old Mehmed II died. The church bells of Venice rang out in celebration, joined by cannon fire and shouts of adulation from revelers dancing around bonfires. Similar festivities erupted across Europe as the news quickly spread. A succession struggle between Mehmed’s sons diverted Ottoman attention away from the sultan’s grand project, leaving the Turkish garrison at Otranto bereft of support. When the forces of Naples arrived there, the garrison quickly surrendered and returned to Albania. As quickly as it had appeared, the danger to Italy and western Europe had been averted. With a handful of promises from Europe’s leaders to fight the Turks, Pope Sixtus insisted that they seize the moment and permanently safeguard Italy by launching a Crusade to take back the Balkans. “This is the time of deliverance,” he wrote, “of glory, of victory, such as we shall never be able to regain if it is neglected now.” But the evaporation of the immediate threat likewise dissolved what little determination the European powers had mustered to fight the Turks. There would be no grand Crusade. Many were the Venetians who now congratulated themselves on not joining Europe’s latest flight of imagination.
The new Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II (1481–1512), was too busy fighting his brother and rival, Cem, to bother about European conquests. When Cem eventually came under the custody of Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), Bayezid abandoned the idea of an Italian campaign altogether. Likewise, the sultan eased relations with Venice, reducing tariffs on Venetian goods and even canceling its annual tribute.
Despite a century of challenges, by 1490 Venice had actually reached the pinnacle of its power. The tiny archipelago of islands had truly become a far-flung empire. Even the recent losses to the Turks had been more than made up for by the acquisition of Cyprus, through the Venetian noblewoman Caterina Corner, the former queen of the island. The Venetian Senate oversaw colonial governments in the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, and central Italy. It maintained an expert diplomatic corps that was active in every court in Europe. Business in Venice remained brisk, and the wealth that poured into the city was substantial. Much of that wealth was paid to architects, stonemasons, and artists who built magnificent family palazzi towering along the broad avenue of the Grand Canal and almost every other canal and waterway in the city. Venetian pious donations transformed modest wooden churches and monasteries into stone and marble showplaces jammed with every form of religious art and filled with the chant and incense of a devout people. The stunning Venice of the Renaissance that still draws millions of visitors every year was built with the wealth accumulated in this vibrant period.
And yet, Venice itself remained a creature of the Middle Ages. Born in the ruins of the Roman Empire, it had grown and thrived in a medieval world—a world that was depicted in contemporary maps as centered on Jerusalem, with Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East clustered around it. That world was now passing away. If a Venetian was asked to name the greatest threat to the republic in 1490, he would likely have pointed to the awesome might of the Turks. Yet the Turks, too, were children of the Middle Ages. The seeds of Venice’s later decline lay not in any one people or one man, but rather in the coming of a new age—an age that neither the Venetians nor the Ottomans would ever successfully navigate. In France, England, and Spain monarchies were stitching together powerful kingdoms out of formerly recalcitrant fiefs. The result was the rise of powerful states with resources that dwarfed those of Italian cities—in time, even those of Venice itself.
And the world itself was growing. For decades the Portuguese, under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, had been exploring the western coast of Africa. These voyages were a direct response to the rise of Muslim power in the East. In the first place, Henry sought the kingdom of Prester John, the fabled Christian emperor who Europeans hoped would one day save them from the Islamic threat. In the second place, his voyages sought to bypass the Muslim monopoly on Far Eastern goods, which made their way westward by caravan and were sold at premium prices in the markets of Constantinople, Syria, and Alexandria. The Portuguese hoped to cut out the middleman by establishing direct access to the Indies, where luxury goods like cinnamon from Ceylon, nutmeg from the Moluccas, and pepper from Malabar were available in abundance. No Venetian shed a tear to learn that Africa seemed to stretch endlessly southward, foiling every Portuguese attempt to find its end. But in 1488 the inevitable happened. Bartolomeo Dias returned to Lisbon with news that he had discovered the Cape of Good Hope. Africa could indeed be circumnavigated.
Four years later the Genoese captain Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus) persuaded the Spanish crown to fund an expedition to bypass Africa by sailing westward to the spice islands. Columbus believed that the world was much smaller than the ancient Greeks had calculated it to be. He concluded that the rich goods of the East were actually just beyond Spain’s western horizon. He was wrong, but for nearly a decade after his discovery of the New World in 1492, there remained uncertainty about just what he had found. And then, in 1499, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon from a voyage around Africa to Calicut (modern Kozhikode) India. He brought with him merchandise worth more than fifty times the cost of his expedition.
The sensational discoveries of the Portuguese and Spanish explorers made for good stories, but they also proved a direct threat to Venice. If Eastern goods could be purchased in India at a fraction of their cost in the markets of Egypt or Constantinople, then Venice’s complex system of trade routes was in danger of becoming obsolete. As with all new ventures, many dismissed the routes to the Indies as impossibly difficult or merely a passing fancy that would not catch on. But the business-savvy leaders of Venice knew better. In 1501 a Venetian envoy to Lisbon wrote to the Senate confirming the Portuguese achievement and noting its extraordinary potential for undercutting Venetian trade. The nobleman Girolamo Priuli, who kept an extensive diary of current events, wrote:
This is more important to the Venetian state than the war with the Turks or any other war that could occur. . . . And if this route continues—and already it appears to me easy to accomplish—the king of Portugal might just as well be called the king of money. . . . The entire city [of Venice] is thunderstruck that in these times such a new route should be discovered, never known or heard of by our ancestors.
Priuli worried that the Portuguese discovery would “rip out the heart of Venice,” depriving it of its commercial income and causing it to expire “like a child deprived of milk and food.”
Not all Venetians shared Priuli’s pessimism. They pointed out that the distances between Portugal and India were vast and would require enormous expenditures to secure for safe trade. The Mamluk sultan in Egypt, after all, would not sit idly by while the Portuguese sidestepped his markets. He would use his powerful navy to attack Portuguese shipping in the Indian Ocean—a body of water so large that little Portugal could never hope to control it. In short, they argued, Portugal had bitten off more than it could chew. Venice’s traditional trade routes were safe.
The pessimists and optimists were looking at different sides of the same problem. For decades the wharves of Lisbon had been stacked high with pepper, sold at four times less than it cost in Venice. But the continued success of Portugal’s routes to India relied on its king, Manuel I (1495–1521), who poured enormous resources into their defense and upkeep. He built artillery-equipped fortresses along thousands of miles of African coast and sent war vessels to patrol the Indian Ocean. Manuel paid for this, not for modern economic reasons, but for very medieval religious ones. He was determined to use the new route to India as a Crusade strategy to break the back of Muslim power in the region and recapture Jerusalem. Although his explorers had dramatically expanded the size of the known world, Manuel still saw the holy city as its very center. When Manuel died in 1521 his successor, John III (1521–57), abandoned the Crusade idea and pulled back royal funding of the Indian routes. As a result, the cost of spices in Portugal soared as Portuguese merchants were forced to absorb more of the costs of maintaining them or the losses of failing to do so. That, in turn, allowed Venetian merchants to reestablish themselves as the reliable venue for quality spices from the Far East. Throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century, the spice trade remained extremely profitable to Venice.
But the pessimists continued to insist that Venice had staked its prosperity on a doomed business model. In an age in which European explorers crisscrossed the globe, Venetians could not expect things to remain the same. The future lay in the Atlantic. The rise of Spain, England, and France had cut Venice out of that ocean, locking it into the medieval Mediterranean world. The pessimists argued that Venice must turn its attention to building a mighty Italian state to offset its future losses on the sea. And many of them did just that. Wealthy Venetians, mimicking the styles and customs of the French, began building rich villas and opulent estates on the terra firma. Many of these still survive, attesting in their majesty to the pinnacle of Venice’s achievement and, paradoxically, also the advent of her decline. For the pessimists were right—at least in the end. Portugal was unable to fully exploit the new routes to India, but the Dutch and English would. By the mid-seventeenth century the wealth of the Far East was pouring into those new markets, leaving Venice to find other ways to generate revenue.
Given the potential threats to Venetian trade posed by the Ottoman Empire and the voyages of discovery in 1500, the Senate turned toward a policy of extending Venetian dominion farther into Italy. Perhaps some senators even envisioned a united Italy under Venetian rule. That desire, whether real or imagined, nevertheless spawned many enemies. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, Italy, which was broken into numerous states and cities, was a ripe target for the unified monarchies of France, Spain, and the German empire. Venice, as the largest single Italian state, stood in their way. Her extraordinary power was also resented by Italian aristocrats, who saw no reason why they should bow to the patricians of Venice. All of this created a complex powder keg of competing interests that could go off at any moment. The job of the Senate and its diplomats was to ensure that it did not—or at least if it did that Venice was not harmed in the explosion.
The senators failed in that, although the damage was not as severe as it might have been. The spark was struck on the northern frontier of the Papal States in Romagna, and in particular the city of Faenza and the coastal towns of Cervia and Rimini. Although theoretically under papal rule, these areas had in practice become independent, thus paving the way for the Venetians to move in. Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who strongly opposed the Venetian incursion, died on August 18, 1503, and Venetian diplomats and operatives in Rome worked hard to ensure the election of a new pope more sympathetic to Venetian interests. They got their wish on November 1, when Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere was elected, taking the name Julius II (1503–13). Della Rovere had long been a supporter of Venice and a foe of Alexander VI (who was a member of the Borgia family). Back in Venice, the senators congratulated themselves that they could now move forward with their acquisition of the Romagna and The Marches without too much trouble.
But Julius II, whom history has dubbed “the warrior pope,” had other ideas. Like all his predecessors during the previous seven centuries, the new pope insisted on the independence of the Papal States, and no amount of Venetian flattery or bribes would budge him from that position. When the Venetian ambassador to Rome suggested that Venice would simply hold and administer the lands in question for the pope, just as Venice had always served the Holy See, Julius retorted, “The Venetians wish to use us as their chaplain, but they shall never do so.” In purely military terms, Venice had the strength to take what she wished. But when a pope is involved, nothing is ever in purely military terms. When Venetian forces began their march south, Julius retaliated by excommunicating Venice and quietly opening talks with Spain, France, and Germany.
None of this escaped Venice’s network of diplomats and spies, which was without question the best in the world. The Senate, however, believed that the divisions between these powers were sufficient to keep the pope’s plan from becoming a reality. And it did its best to widen those divisions whenever possible. When the German (Holy Roman) emperor Maximilian I invaded Italy in 1508, he was just as eager to take Milan and Genoa away from the king of France as he was Verona and Vicenza from the Republic of Venice. In the event, he did neither. With some French help, Venetian mercenary forces were able not only to stop Maximilian, but even to capture imperial territory in Friuli as well as the city of Trieste.
Venice’s impressive victories only inflamed the pope’s rage and worried just about everyone else. Julius II responded by calling a Crusade against the Turks and all enemies of the Church. Whether Venice belonged to the latter group was, for the moment, left to the imagination. At a subsequent meeting in Cambrai, in northern France, Emperor Maximilian I and King Louis XII of France joined numerous other smaller states, including ultimately the papacy itself, to declare a holy league—an association of powers determined to crusade. However, rather than planning how best to defend Europe against Turkish invasion, the League of Cambrai busied itself with the dismemberment of the Venetian empire. Only by destroying the greatest proponent of the Crusades, they asserted (although not in those words), could this new Crusade be successful.
Of course, none of the participants in the league had any intention of disturbing the sultan’s plans, whatever those might be. They cared only for what piece of Venetian territory they could pluck from the carcass of the lion. According to the Treaty of Cambrai, after Venice was defeated Julius II would receive back all of Romagna and Maximilian would reclaim Friuli and Trieste in addition to the rest of the Veneto, including Treviso and Padua. The king of Hungary would take Dalmatia, the Duke of Savoy would have Cyprus, and the king of Spain, who already ruled the southern Italian kingdom of Naples, would take Venetian Apulia. Since France already ruled Milan and Genoa, King Louis would seize all neighboring Venetian territories in Lombardy. The tiny states of Mantua and Ferrara were also allotted a few crumbs. In short, the League of Cambrai meant to turn back the clock on the Venetian empire, returning the republic to its lagoon.
The Venetian Senate’s policy of sowing discord among the greater powers now lay in ruins. Venice was alone, isolated, and the target of one of Europe’s greatest Crusades. As they had done during the War of Chioggia, the people of Venice poured their energy and their wealth into the struggle in a manner scarcely conceivable in that age. An enormous army led by the condottiere Nicolò di Pitigliano and his younger cousin Bartolomeo d’Alviano met an equally enormous French army just east of Milan at Agnadello. It went poorly for the Venetians from the start. Their lines were broken and their mercenary armies scattered. Soon the Italian cities of Venice’s mainland empire began falling like dominoes to the French and the Germans. No amount of bribery or cajoling could persuade the cities to stand firm with Venice, for their leaders believed that the foreigners would prevail and they were tired of Venetian pretensions to being an Italian power in any event. Even a Venetian appeal to Italian nationalism failed to elicit a response. Instead the forces of the league continued to press in. Soon, all that was left to Venice on the mainland were Mestre, Treviso, and Friuli.
The government and people of Venice were astonished at the rapid collapse of their Italian provinces. For some days after receiving the news, the people appeared to be in a stupor of fear and disbelief. The annual Sensa ritual of the marriage to the sea took place on May 17, just two days after news of the defeat at Agnadello arrived. Almost no one showed up—the Piazza San Marco was cavernously empty. No one had the heart to celebrate Venetian greatness after so smashing a defeat. And the threat was by no means over. Although none of the league members could directly threaten Venice’s lagoon, they might be able to blockade it. Quickly, the Venetians began hoarding food, preparing for the worst. The Senate ordered a round-the-clock watch on all entries into the lagoon.
Surprisingly, there were some Venetians who did not believe that the losses on the mainland were necessarily a bad thing. Girolamo Priuli wrote in his diary that there were those who predicted that if the Venetians were ejected from Italy, they would once again “devote themselves to the sea and going on voyages and, besides gaining profits, would become valiant men and experts in the ways of the sea and every other undertaking, and perhaps that would be of more benefit to the Republic of Venice than the income received from the mainland.” Priuli lamented that young Venetian nobles were so enamored of their lavish estates that they no longer ventured to distant lands seeking profit. Something fundamental to the Venetian character was being lost, sinking into a pool of the terra firma problems that the founders of Venice had fled. A maritime empire makes money, but the Italian territories of Venice did not. Indeed, they did little but drain Venetian funds as new fortifications were built and greedy condottieri were paid. Priuli was sympathetic to the argument, as perhaps any Venetian who looked to Venice’s unique history might be. But, in practice, Priuli knew that the Venetians would never accept the humiliation of losing their Italian possessions. At least not without a fight.
Indeed, the Venetians had only begun to fight. A mass levy of men from Venice was raised, and from hundreds of rowed boats across the length of the lagoon the Venetians launched a surprise attack on German-held Padua. They were assisted by additional forces at Mestre and Treviso, led by Andrea Gritti. Their victory at Padua turned the tide of the war. Already revolts in the rural areas were handicapping the League of Cambrai. Common folk in the countryside had discovered that they much preferred Venetian government to the harsh rule of the hated French and Germans. Gritti followed up his victory with a successful advance of mercenary and native troops. As some members of the league realized that the war might not be so easy after all, they began reconsidering their membership. That gave the Venetian diplomats all the traction they needed. Spain switched sides. Julius II himself made a separate peace in return for full control over Romagna and a large pile of money. But the war, nonetheless, continued for five more years. It is a tale of shifting alliances, betrayals, treachery, and mercenary armies marching the breadth of Italy. In 1516, when the War of the League of Cambrai had at last ended, nothing at all had changed. Venice had recovered all her former Italian territories.
If the war did not alter the Venetians’ situation, it did transform their outlook. They had been lucky. The Venetian empire survived, but only through the determination of her citizens and the skill of her diplomats. The struggle made clear to Venice how the sands of European power had shifted beneath her. The new powers—especially Spain, France, and England—were surpassing in wealth and military might anything that Venice could reasonably hope to attain. These were the first truly global powers, with empires that stretched far beyond the old world that Venice knew so well. Venetian foreign policy soon began to reflect those hard truths. Venetians remained proud of their crusading heritage and continued to stand as a bulwark against further Turkish invasion of Europe. Yet as the sixteenth century progressed, that service was increasingly less necessary. As Europe’s great kingdoms grew to unprecedented heights, the Turks and the Venetians were slowly left behind. Still wealthy, Venetians continued to consume French culture with abandon, but they could not challenge French power. And after 1516 they no longer tried.