Why Venice

Why Venice? 

In her pioneering book entitled Political Economies of Empire, Maria Fusaro postulated the bold, yet apt proposition that ‘it is time to start considering the Venetian state in its entirety—terra and mar—blending together different historiographical strands and traditions, aiming at a holistic approach to the topic of statecraft and political economy’. 

Fusaro’s call to scholarly arms holds great merit, especially in relation to the study of early modern diplomacy and, by extension, intelligence activities that linked inextricably Venice with early modern Europe, the Near East, and Northern Africa. Such a link was the consequence of the high level of bureaucratization and institutionalization—even in Weberian terms, as we shall see in Chapter 3—that led to the ‘rise of information-fed bureaucracies’ in the early modern era. 

This information-fed bureaucratization of Renaissance Venice spawned both its intelligence organization and the vast paper trail that enabled the conception and materialization of this book. 

Accordingly, the surviving documentation furnishes an abundance of information on the intelligence organization of both the Venetian motherland and its periphery, rendering Venice an appealing case study through which we can explore the Dominante, its dominion, and the former’s diplomatic reach beyond the latter. 

The relationship between Venice and its dominion in the Terraferma and the Stato da Mar was quite diverse, with overarching similarities in the way territories were governed but also important differences. 

Venice was the ruling power, responsible for the defence of its provinces and its subjects. As part of the Venetian defence organization, members of the patriciate were sent to govern territories of both the mainland and overseas Venetian holdings and were expected to cooperate with local elites and institutions in order to fulfil their duties.

In the Ionian Islands, in particular, local elites, whose grasp of the native Greek language provided a considerable advantage, played the role of the intermediary between the motherland and the local populations.

 These elites were, thus, responsible for the overall governance of those territories and they reported to the Senate and to the Heads of the Council of Ten, who, from the 1480s onwards, increasingly assumed a growing influence over the affairs of Venice’s maritime dominion. 

Venice’s mainland and maritime possessions were governed in a rather ‘light touch’ manner, through the appointment of Venetian officials occupying key posts in the Venetian cursus honorum. These included one or two civil governors (called rettori or even podestà); a military governor (called capitano); and, more often than not, one or two treasurers or financial administrators (camerlenghi).

As we shall see in the following pages, Venetian elites overseeing the Republic’s territorial possessions were expected to perform a variety of public services, from administering the recruitment of servicemen to orchestrating daring espionage missions. Tenure was brief, usually two years in duration, a time period that was deemed sufficient to establish one’s authority without being entrenched in local affairs and interests to such a degree that could lead to corruption.

Yet such temporal restrictions could not guarantee the elimination of debauchery, and critics of the system voiced concerns that two years was not an adequate time frame to enable a governor to gain a thorough understanding of local idiosyncrasies and needs.

While local legislation was respected and preserved, in a territorial state like Venice the administration of justice was left to the motherland as ‘the principal expression of the Dominante’s dominion’.

As a result, all judicial appeals of the Stato da Mar were sent to Venice. This imperial-like organization of the colonies, alongside her economic and political rise and fall on the international scene between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, induced Venice to create a vast and robust diplomatic network. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Venice’s diplomatic structures had assumed such gargantuan proportions that historians such as Stefano Andretta referred to an ‘elephantiasis of its diplomatic apparatus’.

This exponential growth in Venice’s diplomatic activities coincided with an era when her foreign policy focused on the ‘outright defence of her domains’. This period culminated in a thunderous confrontation with the Ottomans in 1571 that cost the Venetians the island of Cyprus, a Venetian stronghold of immense economic and geopolitical significance in the Mediterranean, as we saw at the start of this Introduction. 

It was during that period that the Republic’s intelligence pursuits, subtly but steadily undergirding her diplomatic regime, intensified to such a degree that the authorities were willing to risk placing the most unexceptional men in the most exceptional circumstances, in an effort to achieve the defence of the Republic at any cost. 

These unexceptional men were Venice’s amateur spies and informers. According to Tommaso Garzoni’s late sixteenth-century treatise on ‘all professions in the world’, spies in that period were ‘the sort of people that, in secret, follow armies and enter cities, exploring the affairs of enemies, and reporting them back to their own people’.

This definition differs from sociological conceptualizations of a professional service as the outcome of ‘cognitive specialization’, which is premised upon a common educational process, a shared professional identity, and even an emerging professional ethos and philosophy.

In short, contrary to established professions such as those of the chancery secretary or the cryptologist, as we shall see in the following chapters, the métier of the spy had still not transmogrified into a stand-alone valid profession in the early modern era. Consequently, Renaissance Venice deployed spying rather than spies.

It is rather surprising that a territorial state like Venice that braved the creation of a vast and systematic intelligence apparatus did not make provisions for the professional development of specialist spies. 

Epochal political events in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, namely four disastrous Ottoman-Venetian wars between 1463 and 1573, rife with lacerating polemics and the devastating defeat of the Venetians by the League of Cambrai at Agnadello in 1509, led to an aggressive ‘realpolitik policy of neutrality, a balancing act between the French, the Habsburgs, and most importantly, the Ottomans’.

As a result, Venice focused its attentions on the art of defence, in order to preserve its gradually dwindling maritime possessions, resorting to military action only when necessary. For the Venetian outposts in the eastern Mediterranean this entailed maintaining a robust network of fortifications and garrisons to protect them. 

In consequence, Venice’s foreign policy became increasingly concerned with ‘disarming’ her enemies by keeping up appearances, while maintaining secrecy and, eventually, even manipulating information. To maintain this stance of neutrality, sending bona fide spies to foreign territories, especially those of perennial enemies such as the Ottomans, could prove provocative and, ultimately, counterproductive. 

Sending amateur ones, in the hope that they would pass unnoticed, was deemed more prudent. As will become evident in Chapter 5, this is the strategy the Council of Ten employed. Accordingly, Venice’s defensive stance led to an increase in the number of amateur spies, in addition to a proliferation of formal legates and their entourages sent overseas, especially those dispatched to the Ottoman capital. 

Venetian ambassadors and governors were expected to collect and disseminate information as part of their diplomatic repertoire, while the stealthy business of espionage was left to unabashed dilettantes who were willing to risk their life for a moderate compensation. 

Through their espionage activities, these individuals were granted a certain degree of political agency and contributed to an emerging political culture of information-gathering that still lurks in the margins of historical scholarship. Overall, then, Venice furnishes a rich case study for the exploration and analysis of intelligence organization in the long Renaissance. This is due to three reasons. 

Firstly, the vast paper trail stemming from the intense bureaucratization process that the Venetian government underwent in that period has left a surplus of extant documents that include the correspondence between the Ten, the State Inquisitors, and their delegates; registers and notes of secret deliberations and decrees stemming from them; Venetian citizens’ and subjects’ anonymous denunciations; and several other enciphered and deciphered documents pertaining to Venice’s intelligence pursuits—a scholar’s feast, indeed. 

Secondly, Venice’s territorial expansion as a vast maritime empire with diverse geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and even religious traits advanced the need for the systematization of the Dominante’s central intelligence organization. 

And thirdly, Venice’s stance of defence and neutrality, as part of its broader foreign policy, produced a mixture of professional informants and amateur spies whose feats and peccadilloes form part of the wider social interactions between the government and the governed that merit further scholarly exploration and analysis.