Renaissance Venice’s Politico-Economic Landscape

Renaissance Venice’s Politico-Economic Landscape

For a maritime empire built on commercial transactions, trade was a principal matter of domestic and foreign security in Renaissance Venice. For this reason, the protection of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic was of primary importance to the Venetian authorities. 

This was one of the reasons why, throughout the sixteenth century, the Venetian Republic concentrated its maritime trade activities on that part of the European continent. Consequently, the shores of Western Europe played second fiddle to the Eastern coast of the Levant.

 By then, while the Portuguese had established a direct maritime route to Asia, transforming, thus, the landscape of Eurasian trade, the English, French, and Ottomans joined in the competition for territorial expansion and, by extension, commercial domination. At the same time, wars of religion for Catholic or Protestant dominance amplified this highly competitive international environment.

While Venice managed to temporarily maintain control, anxiety over the potential risks of losing the title of the commercial broker between the Levant, Asia, and Europe led the Venetian government to proceed to a profound restructuring of two interrelated practices: its foreign policy and, by extension, its economy. The period between the 1470s and the 1570s has been characterized as an ‘iron century’, due to Venice’s overreliance on military action for the defence of her colonies in the Stato da Mar.

The gradual decrease of the Republic’s maritime dominion instigated a more defensive attitude towards its foreign policy, as even coeval observers of Venetian politics remarked.²⁰ This defensive stance resulted in the need for continuous military protection and—more often than not—action, which had political repercussions for the Republic’s diplomatic conduct and public funds, respectively.

Of particular significance were a slew of initiatives to reinforce naval patrols in the Eastern Mediterranean and to refortify the Venetian Levantine possessions, especially after Venice suffered further territorial losses during the third Ottoman-Venetian war (1537–40).

The Venetian strongholds of Corfu, Crete, and Cyprus, in particular, acted as bases for Venetian galleys under the direction of the Capitano Generale da Mar, the commander-in-chief of the Venetian fleet.

Intent on also policing ‘the Gulf ’, as the Adriatic Sea was known amongst the Venetians, Venice performed off-the-cuff controls on foreign armed vessels traversing it. In 1562, for instance, a Venetian commander seized an armed galiot hailing from Ragusa (contemporary Dubrovnik)—a major trading rival of Venice—warning the Ragusan authorities that, if they persisted in their dogged efforts to arm more vessels, he would be forced to obliterate them.

Similarly, during the War of Cyprus, the Venetians arrested the crew of a ship that was carrying weapons sent on behalf of Greek merchants to Coron, which at the time was under Ottoman control. The reason for the arrest was to interrogate the crew and captain about their cargo and mission.

 The Venetians’ policing role in the Adriatic was also accepted by the Ottomans, who saw it as part of the wider web of reciprocal rights and duties that supported the idiosyncratic politicoeconomic relationship between the two empires.

The use of the word ‘politico-economic’ is not fortuitous here, since the Venetians could not see a clear-cut distinction between politics and commerce, as political affairs could affect one’s business and livelihood, and commercial pursuits could have political repercussions and, by extension, diplomatic implications. 

This is one of the reasons why, as will become increasingly apparent throughout this book, the Venetians became crafty adversaries of the Ottomans, aiming to please and placate them by supplying them with intelligence on European affairs and offering them a panoply of lavish gifts, especially during the politically tempestuous sixteenth century.

Ensuring that the Sultan would not impose impeding commercial restrictions on Venice was one of the major politico-economic objectives of the Venetian government. It is for this reason that Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to Venice between 1539 and 1546, grumbled that the Venetians preferred to safeguard their economic interests in the Levant to challenging the Ottomans in that region.

As he graphically reported in a missive to Charles V, ‘of all the world powers, the Venetians feared only Charles and the Turks, respected only Charles, and wished everyone else ill’. Indeed, while the Ottoman Empire posed an unremitting threat to the Venetian state’s Levantine possessions, it was simultaneously one of Venice’s primary trading partners, absorbing large quantities of Venice’s silk and wool, and, by extension, securing the employment of tens of thousands of craftsmen who formed part of the Venetian textile industries, especially in the second half of the sixteenth century. 

This interdependent relationship that Venice had developed with the Ottoman Empire meant that the Venetians were amongst the first to receive news reaching the Mediterranean from the East, to the dismay of the Spanish, who looked at the peculiar relationship between the Venetian and Ottoman empires with a jaundiced eye. 

Passing through the Dominante’s possessions in the Aegean and Ionian seas, which were used ‘as observatories and relays for the transmission of maritime news’, and also via the Venetian strongholds across the Balkans and the Adriatic, information arrived in Venice before it reached other parts of the European continent. 

Consequently, Venice became the central terrain of encounters between foreign emissaries hungry for news. The social and diplomatic whirl that ensued from the frenzy of daily updates reaching the lagoon turned Venice into a boisterous information centre where news became as purchasable a commodity as silk and spices.