Venice’s Secret Service Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance

Introduction to Venice’s Secret Service Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance

Venice’s Secret Service Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance

On the eve of the fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (1570–3), a man claiming to be a fugitive slave on the run from the Ottomans travelled to Venice to inform the authorities of some alarming news. He had discovered that the Turkish armada was stocking up on munitions and disgorging large warfare reserves in Anamur, a fortress on the southern coast of Turkey. It was feared that these ostensibly military preparations were intended for an attack on Cyprus, a Venetian colony a short sail away on the opposite shore. 

Anxious to make ‘appropriate provisions for the defence of the island’, then one of Venice’s most prized possessions in the Mediterranean, the Council of Ten—the governmental committee responsible for the security of Venice and its sprawling dominion—took the following actions: with great urgency, they posted the informant’s written declaration to the governor of Cyprus, ordering him to verify the written claims by sending out spies to confirm the presence of a military build-up in Anamur. 

They also demanded that the governor report back, in secret, through letters sent by both land and sea.¹ Then, they contacted the Venetian envoy in Constantinople known as the bailo asking him to conduct a parallel secret investigation. In particular, they were keen to know whether the informant could be trusted. 

To ascertain this, they instructed the bailo to identify and interview other slaves in the Ottoman capital. Moreover, the bailo was entrusted with the sensitive detail that the Venetian ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor had also learned, through his own sources, of an imminent Ottoman invasion of Cyprus. As a result of this intricate web of intelligence collection and exchange, the Ten’s worst fears were soon corroborated. 

Shortly after, the bailo sent a letter to the Ten confirming the gruesome news that the Ottomans were, indeed, feverishly preparing to invade Cyprus. Now on a war footing, the Ten contacted their ambassador in Spain, to solicit support from the powerful re catholico, Phillip II. 

This episode is redolent of two significant concepts that are central to Renaissance Venice’s economic, political, and social conduct and to this book: intelligence and organization. In terms of the first concept, it is representative of ways in which sensitive information—primarily of military and political value—was communicated secretly between the Venetian authorities and their formal state representatives stationed overseas. 

But to what extent is this type of ‘sensitive’ information and its clandestine communication indicative of intelligence, its practice and craft, in the Renaissance? This question encapsulates the fundamental issues associated with the study of early modern intelligence, which are, in fact, more complicated than a scholar of modern intelligence might envisage. As will become apparent throughout this book, defining intelligence as a historical phenomenon is problematic. 

Indeed, what exactly constitutes intelligence throughout history? Is it a state affair or a private initiative? A professional service or a civic duty? An act of institutional loyalty or of financial need? In the early modern period, intelligence was a multivalent term, entailing all of the above. For Venetians, the word intelligentia meant ‘communication’ or ‘understanding’ between a minimum of two people, sometimes in secret.

Within the context of state security, it indicated any kind of information of political, economic, social, or even cultural value that was worthy of secrecy, evaluation, and potential covert (at times even overt) action by the government in the name of state security.⁵ In essence, then, there were two aspects to the term ‘intelligence’. 

The first denoted the systematic process of secretly collecting, analysing, and disseminating information. The second related to a ‘ “police and security” dimension’, which could manifest both offensively and defensively.

 These definitions of ‘intelligence’ will be used throughout this book in an effort to explore the meaning and purpose of this word for different actors in that period. But how was such information disseminated to its intended recipients in the early modern era? This leads us to the second central concept of this book, organization. 

As the Anamur episode demonstrates, in early modern Venice, the systematic organization of the collection, communication, and evaluation of sensitive information was administered by the Council of Ten, the governmental committee overseeing the security of the Venetian state. As Venice’s spy chiefs, in an exemplary display of political and organizational maturity, the Council of Ten developed and administered an elaborate system of information flow with and between their informants and other underlings. 

To achieve this, they oversaw and managed a far-flung, yet interconnected network of private informants and public servants whose role was to supply them with vital intelligence for the political and, by extension, economic conduct of the Venetian Republic.⁷ In fact, while in most Italian and European states intelligence operations were organized by powerful individuals in their efforts to secure and consolidate political power and control, the Venetian Council of Ten created and systematized one of the world’s earliest centrally organized state intelligence services. 

This proto-modern organization resembled a public sector body that operated with remarkable corporate-like complexity and maturity, serving prominent intelligence functions such as operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography and steganography, cryptanalysis, and even the development of lethal substances such as poison. To this day, no systematic attempt has been made to analyse the organization of Venice’s secret service. 

Paolo Preto’s work on Venice’s spies and secret agents and Jonathan Walker’s graphic account of one of her most infamous spymasters are amongst the few scholarly outputs on Venice’s intelligence and espionage pursuits. 

Comprising a remarkable abundance of archival evidence and anecdotal nuance, Preto’s work is composed of a systematic list of case studies presented in basic thematic categories. Produced in this format, a thorough analysis and evaluation of Renaissance Venice’s intelligence organization and its role in the Republic’s politics, economy, and society seem to be beyond the scope of Preto’s work.

 Walker’s study provides a creative account of one of Venice’s most infamous spymasters, Gerolamo Vano. In a spirited narrative that earned the book the characterization of ‘the first true work of “punk history”’, the author takes the reader on an enthralling journey through Venice’s alleyways and circuitous calli, relating Vano’s garish feats and peccadilloes. 

Yet, while the book uncovers the surreptitious underworld of espionage in seventeenth-century Venice, larger questions pertaining to the role that systematized intelligence played in the city’s internal and external security remain unasked. 

In short, while impressive in archival detail and narrative richness, both these works expose specific intelligence operations and secret agents but fall short of a broader analysis of Venice’s intelligence organization and its wider impact on the Venetian state’s internal and external security. 

As a result, Renaissance Venice’s secret service still lingers in the shadows of historiography. This is not accidental, considering that, according to conventional wisdom, systematized intelligence and espionage are ‘modern’ phenomena that span largely from the eve of the Great War to the present.

This does not mean that historians have not made worthwhile endeavours to explore the largely uncharted territory of the early modern era.

 Indeed, some significant scholarly effort has been expended on the diplomatic and, by extension, the intelligence operations of early modern states like England (and later Britain), France, the Dutch Republic, the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, Portugal, Spain, and several prominent Italian states, even though some of these works are premised on the regurgitation of old myths rather than the reality behind them. 

Nevertheless, limited effort has been invested in expounding how systematized intelligence influenced an early modern state’s security and, by extension, political decision-making, economic vigour, and even social conduct. This is astonishing, as, contrary to the methodological impediments to the access of contemporary sources, archival records of the early modern period can yield a wealth of evidence about ‘the dark underbelly’ of early modern politics. 

Aiming to rectify this issue, this book attempts three feats. Firstly, challenging the widely accepted view that systematized intelligence and state-organized security are characteristic of the modern state, developed to serve military-political purposes, the book argues that organized intelligence already existed in the early modern era, and, in the case of a commercial power like Venice, it also undergirded economic-commercial interests. 

Undeniably, early modern intelligence was not as technologically astute as in the twentieth century. Through a systematic analysis of the function and instrumentality of Renaissance Venice’s intelligence pursuits, however, the book reveals the indisputable impact of centrally organized intelligence on an early modern state’s political, economic, and social security and prosperity.

For this reason, Venice’s Secret Service moves beyond simplistic narrative accounts of secret agents and operations, casting the focus, not on the revelatory value of clandestine communication and missions but on the social processes that generated them. In consequence, Venice’s central intelligence apparatus is explored and analysed as an organization, rather than as the capricious intelligence enterprise of a group of state dignitaries. Secondly, the book postulates the core claim that Renaissance Venice was one of the earliest early modern states to have created a centrally organized state intelligence organization. 

This comprised specialist expertise on a single site—the imposing Doge’s Palace overlooking the Venetian lagoon—and under the direction of specific governmental committees, primarily the Council of Ten, who oversaw and administered interwoven ways of working within and beyond the palace’s walls. 

Just like the Venetian diplomatic corpus, Venice’s intelligence organization was a ‘branch of the civil service’, a distinct annex of a broad and structured bureaucratic apparatus that formed part of a rather inglorious area of government within the panorama of international diplomacy.

To examine how this organization was structured, the book describes and analyses the various departments that comprised it, as well as the composite system of managerial delegation that was developed to manage its far-reaching grip across Europe, the Near East, and even Northern Africa.

 Particular emphasis is placed on the two distinct types of workforce engaged by this organization: the formally appointed diplomats and state servants and the casually and—more often than not—selfappointed recruits. Thirdly, the book explores the development of systematic intelligence not only through a political lens but also through a socio-economic one. 

Most intelligence studies to date are conducted with an overwhelming emphasis on military, political, and diplomatic history and international relations. Venice’s Secret Service particularly focuses on the Venetian Republic’s commercial and business acumen and explores the hypothesis that this was one of the main drivers behind its systematic organization of diplomacy, bureaucracy, and, ultimately, intelligence. 

For this purpose, the book not only reveals and analyses Venice’s clandestine missions to protect cities of prime economic significance against the predatory proclivities of enemies (especially the Ottomans), but showcases several instances of Venetian merchants stationed in or traversing the Mediterranean who undergirded Venice’s intelligence operations in order to protect the Republic’s and, by extension, their own economic interests. 

For, as Hans Kissling aptly noted, ‘in the eyes of the mercantile state, it was obvious that Venetian subjects felt the need to serve it at all times, especially while abroad’. Moreover, the book shows how the Council of Ten commodified intelligence and state security operations. It did so by incentivizing ordinary Venetians, who were categorically excluded from political participation, to partake in politicized acts of state surveillance and espionage as a symbol of dutiful contribution to the Venetian society. 

Through this lens, early modern intelligence emerges as both a rigid top-down and a variable bottom-up practice. The book’s ultimate purpose is to examine the time-specific meaning and functions of intelligence in a society and for a state that are decisively different from those in which modern intelligence operates. 

For this reason, intelligence is examined as a flexible activity made up of a conglomeration of social processes that determined what was shared with whom, who was excluded, and how the secret communication of knowledge was controlled and regulated. 

Consequently, the book focuses on the paradoxical nature of secret communication that, on the one hand, erects barriers between those in the know and those in the dark and, on the other, demolishes barriers that would otherwise have to exist if knowledge transfer was not concealed and protected through secrecy. 

From this perspective, secrecy, as the ongoing practice of intentional concealment, is explored as an enabling knowledge-transfer process contingent upon social interactions that formed identities, alliances, and divisions. Stemming from the above, Venice’s Secret Service serves several purposes. Specifically, it is: 

• a book about early modern intelligence: As it will be made clear in the following pages, the early modern period played a decisive role in the evolution of organized intelligence. Lacking the technological advances of the twentieth century, Renaissance Venice was emblematic in the creation of a robust, centrally organized state intelligence apparatus that played a pivotal role in the defence of the Venetian empire.

Official informants and amateur spies were shipped across Europe, Anatolia, and Northern Africa, conducting Venice’s manifold intelligence operations. While revealing a plethora of secrets, their keepers, and their seekers, the book will explore the social and managerial processes that enabled their existence and furnished the foundation for the creation of one of the world’s earliest centrally organized state intelligence services.

• a book about pre-industrial organization and managerial practices: Employing a trans-disciplinary perspective, the book will show that organizational entities and managerial practices existed long before contemporary terminology was coined to describe them. Combining the narrative construction of theoretical concepts from the disciplines of sociology, management, and organization studies with archival records and secondary historical sources, Renaissance Venice’s secret service is analysed as a proto-modern organization with distinct managerial structures that enabled the coordination of uniform patterns of working across long distances.

As will become apparent in the following chapters, the Venetian intelligence organization, made up of geographically dispersed state representatives and state officials, men of the military and the navy, in-house and expatriate white-collar state functionaries, as well as casually salaried spies and informers, all headed by the Council of Ten, was, ultimately, a social structure held together through commonly accepted rules and regulations—the purest form of organization according to Max Weber, the ‘father of organization science’ and one of the foundational thinkers in management studies.

More specifically, the commonly accepted patterns of working within this organization were based on traditional authority—the Council of Ten—and the allocation of human resources through legal-traditional administration—a string of formal decrees that authorized the Ten’s power of command. Consequently, through the lens of early theories of organization and management, Venice’s secret service emerges as a primordial intelligence organization whose governance structure does not diverge greatly from contemporary organizational entities.

• a book about the Venetian empire in the sixteenth century: Much as the focal point of the book is the central organization of Renaissance Venice’s secret service, an endeavour is made to abstain from focusing disproportionately on an inward-looking representation of the Dominante, which has perpetuated the predominant historiographical interpretation of Venice as ‘a great city’, an ‘enduring republic’, ‘an expansive empire’, and ‘an imposing regional state’.

Instead, a systematic attempt is made to redress the balance in Venetian historiography by exploring the Ten’s operations both within the city and, importantly, in the geographically dispersed territories of the Terraferma—Venice’s possessions on the Italian mainland—and the Stato da Mar—the Venetian overseas empire. On the whole, as Venice’s systematized intelligence pursuits crossed borders, traversing the European continent and the Levant and even the shores of Northern Africa, the book will endeavour to present a quasi-global history of Venice’s secret service.

• a book about the Venetian Council of Ten: As we shall see in the following section, the Council of Ten was an authoritative committee responsible for the security of the Venetian state. As one of the most powerful instruments of government in Renaissance Venice, the Ten have been the object of substantial study within the wider context of Venice’s political history.

This book broadens and deepens the historical understanding of the Council of Ten by revealing and analysing their concerted efforts to clay-model and spearhead Venice’s secret service as the Republic’s spy chiefs.

Casting aside normative representations of the Ten as a fear-inducing governmental committee, the book will present a fresh image of them as a group of intelligence leaders deeply wedded to the security of the Venetian state, its subjects, and its secret operatives.

• a book on people’s history: As it will become apparent in the ensuing chapters, Venetian citizens and subjects of all walks of life were invited to contribute to Renaissance Venice’s state security undertakings by participating in risky operations. A variety of incentives were offered for such endeavors, of which monetary sums, the opportunity to reduce political sentences, and income deriving from state services were the most prevalent.

Numerous such instances related in this book demonstrate that, in the early modern era, systematized intelligence was not an outcome of a rigid top-down process of authority and control.

On the contrary, bottom-up contributions of lay individuals are suggestive of intelligence ‘from below’ that is fundamental for our understanding of early modern intelligence. Seen in this way, the study of early modern intelligence is as much a people’s history, as it is a history of elites. On the whole, Venice’s Secret Service investigates and evaluates the function of Venice’s state intelligence apparatus from a political, socio-economic, and organizational perspective.

Accordingly, it is a book of political, economic, and social history as much as it is a book of intelligence and organizational history. Ultimately, the book offers a fresh vista on systematized intelligence in the long Renaissance, adding the concept of ‘organization’ to the study of early modern politics, economy, and society. At the top of this organization sat the Council of Ten and their subsidiary, the Inquisitors of the State.