Abstract
This impressive volume contains 25 chapters covering both the history and historiography of Venice from the fifteenth century until the extinction of the Venetian Republic by Napoleon in 1797. Its editor, E. R. Dursteler, intended it to be more than just another history of Venice, and to provide a single-volume survey that is informed by the most current scholarship and will provide a point of entry to the subject for students, non-Venetianists, and anyone else interested in the city (p. 21). The papers, written by well-established scholars, cover a range of topics including the environment, political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature and music, organized thematically.
The whole volume is worth reading. However, the papers which the readers of the International Journal of Maritime History will find of direct interest are those that discuss Venice and its surroundings by E. Crouzaet-Pavan (pp. 25–46), Venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period by B. Arbel (pp. 125–253), the Venetian economy by L. Pezzolo (pp. 255–289), D. Howard’s chapter on Architectural Fabric (and especially pp. 743–747) that is directly connected to Pavan’s chapter, and M. F. Rosenthal’s chapter on clothing, fashion, dress and costume in Venice (especially pp. 901–11). That said, it could well be argued that maritime matters have not been given the attention they merit, considering the fact that Venice was a maritime civilization whose raison d’être was the sea and the maritime commerce, even after the massive expansion into the hinterland in the fifteenth century and the creation of the Stato da Terra. No maritime matters are discussed, or are mentioned only in passing, in chapters dealing, for instance, with gender (pp. 353–377): how extensive was the interest, direct or indirect, of women in international trade? Women had made modest investments in trade as early as the thirteenth century, and this reviewer would have wanted to see more attention paid to their involvement in later centuries. Similarly, the chapter on education (pp. 675–699) ignores the question of education for trade and, later, also for shipbuilding and navigation skills. Undoubtedly, a chapter dedicated to Venice’s naval and mercantile power, the industry (the arsenal), the professionals, the economy, manpower and social issues involved, would also have been appreciated.
It should be noted that fresh studies of several aspects of Venice’s maritime history, utilizing new approaches and methodologies, have been published from early 2000s, by myself included. These studies analyse maritime factors that influenced the creation and expansion of the Venetian Stato da Mar and its role in the defence of Venice’s mercantile and political interests; the meaning of control of the sea lanes and the difficulties Venice surmounted to accomplish such control; in shipbuilding technology and the science involved, as well as other aspects of Venice’s policy in the Mediterranean. Surprisingly, this material, some of it published in this journal, has been ignored by some of the scholars published in the current volume. As a result, the bibliographies some of the chapters offer is less than fully up to date. For instance, Benjamin Arbels utilizes outdated and inaccurate information from the 1970s on Venice’s maritime empire and Mediterranean policy in the period before 1500. Thus, he recycles the views and conclusions expressed in his paper ‘Colonie d’oltremare’, published in 1996 (see ‘Colonie d’Oltremare’ [Overseas Colonies], in A. Tenenti and U. Tucci (eds), Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, vol. V: Il Rinascimento. Società ed economia (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996), pp. 947–985). Yet as my own research has shown Venice’s expansion in the Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean Seas from the 1380s was merely a reaction to the Genoese threat. It was Venice’s annexation of Thessaloniki in 1423 that caused the war with the Ottoman empire, not any prior process of territorial expansion. Until the fifteenth century, Venice tried as far as possible to annex territories that would cause conflicts with the Ottomans. The Ottomans, under whose control Thessaloniki was between 1387–1407, considered its annexation by Venice a declaration of war (see my paper in R. Cancilla: Mediterraneo in Armi (secc. XV–XVIII), 4 (2007)).
Reviewing the evolution of the Venetians’ territorial expansion in the Mediterranean on the morrow of the fourth Crusade (1204), Pezzolo, using unreliable information, points to a linear process of the formation of the Venetian maritime Empire that contradicts the information yielded by the archival documents. By so doing he also misses, as an economist, the difficulties Venice had to surmount to achieve its goals. It was Thomas Madden who convincingly argued in 2003 in his opus on Enrico Dandolo, that the Venetian doge could not commit Venice to overseas territorial acquisitions through the partition agreement of the former Byzantine Empire he made with the Crusader leaders at the eve of the conquest of Constantinopolis in 1204 without the approval of the Great Council (Maggior Consilio). In 2007, Guillaume Saint-Guillain pointed out, after analysing various Venetian chronicles from the thirteenth century in combination with prosopographical study, that the waves of conquests of the Aegean islands were neither contemporaneous with nor directly connected to each other to and thus could not have been an attempt to materialize the partition agreement in 1204, which essentially was a paper exercise, as I argued in a paper published in this journal in 2014. Furthermore, Pezzolo mistakably concludes (p. 259) that the Genoese defeat at Chioggia in 1380 led to the shift of their interests from the eastern Mediterranean. As a matter of fact, without ecological intervention the Genoese might have deepened their penetration into the Lagoon, after having burnt Chioggia. It should be stressed that until the 1430s the Genoese were the main rival and maritime threat to the Venetians in the Eastern Mediterranean, despite the continuous internal upheavals against the Genoese Doge that eventually lead to Genoa’s subordination from the 1390s to outside forces, first to France and then to Milan. However, the weaknesses in Arbel and Pezzolo’s chapters relate primarily to the period prior to 1500: their coverage of matters from the sixteenth century onwards, which is the principal specialism of both authors, is far more convincing.
Another point that should be noted is that, in parallel with the publication of this volume, another collection of papers, titled Venice and the Mediterranean, was issued in 2013 in the framework of Studi Veneziani LXVII. Several articles from this publication, most of which can be accessed through the authors’ academia.edu pages, serve to update and complete the information yielded by the current volume. Among these are my own piece on Venice’s fights to control maritime commerce and sea lanes in the Eastern Mediterranean, at the heart of which was the Island of Tenedos in the NE Aegean, and crucial to the success of which was deft diplomacy; the paper also discusses the geopolitical situation of and relationships with the byzantine empire and the Ottomans. E. C. Burke’s paper on ‘Immigration and Identity in Early Modern Venice’, reference to which would have strengthened B. Ravid’s chapter on Venice and its minorities (pp. 449–486); and finally and T. Veneri on ‘“Theatrum Venetae negotiationis per Mediterraneum” mise en cadre del viaggio (1524–1598)’ as well as his another paper, published elsewhere, on Les lieux du compilateur : les Navigationi et viaggi de G.B. Ramusio (1550–1559) that would close a gap and add to M. L. King’s chapter on The Venetian Intellectual world (pp. 571–614). Nevertheless, the latter was one of the best and most stimulating chapters in a volume that, overall, I very much enjoyed reading.