Erasmo Castellani Paolo Sarpi, the Absolutist State and the Territoriality of the Adriatic Sea The years between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first few decades of the seventeenth constituted a period of general reconfiguration throughout the Mediterranean. The hegemonic position held by Venice from centuries on the Adriatic Sea, or “the Venetian Gulf”, as it was called, started to be disputed persistently by other powers. The Dominio da mar, the Venetian territories in the Mediterranean – and Venice itself – were not living their best times: Venice was still recovering from the terrible wounds inflicted by the Ottoman Empire in the 1570s, and trying to solve the tragic loss of Cyprus, extremely significant for the Republic not only in terms of resources and men, but also for its political value and reputation. The Turks, who had represented the main threat for the Venetian maritime territories from the end of the fourteenth century, were worn-out too by the intense and truculent decade, and after 1573 (the so-called war of Cyprus), did not engage in seafaring wars with Venice until 1645 with the Cretean wars. The Uskok corsairs, who enjoyed the support of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, officially to fight the Turks, tormented Venice and its territories on the Dalmatian coast between the 1580s and 1610s, raiding villages, cargos and, in general, making the Adriatic routes less and less secure. The Uskoks, as the Barbary corsairs, represented not only a harmful presence on the sea, but also an economic and political threat for Venice: corsairs activities in fact offered to the Venetian subjects on the 1 Dalmatian coast opportunities to engage in small commercial enterprises without being submitted to the Serenissima’s regulations. As a consequence, these Venetian subjects were able to take advantage of the situation in order to gain leverage in the negotiations for their privileges with the Venice. As Braudel reminds us, there is a “positive correlation between piracy and the economic health…they rise and fall together” (Braudel II, 887); and sure it was, not necessarily for Venice, who was reconfiguring its trading economy on a more regional level, but surely for other merchant cities in the Adriatic Sea, in particular Ancona and Ragusa (Dubrovnik), whose trading was flourishing with great advantage of the Pope. The Jews played a significant role in this economic growth. In fact, after they were expelled from Spain, they settled in different places, creating vast and strong networks that increased the trading in the Mediterranean. Both Ancona and Ragusa attracted several Ponentine Jews, and towards the end of the XVI century, they were already well-established and their business was flourishing (Arbel, 2013). In this troublesome context, the reins of the Serenissima were in the hands of the “giovani”, the youngsters, a section of the patriciate more open to the protestant countries (England and the Netherlands in particular, but also sympathizers of the Huguenots in France too, to the point that they considered seriously to welcome the Reformation in Venice too), and less keen to find agreements with the Papacy and with the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria; the Venetian interdict of 1606-1607 and later the War of Gradisca are probably the most sounding episodes that testify this political trend. The Doge Leonardo 2 Donà was one of the most prominent – and radical – members of the Giovani party. After just two days from his election, and less than a month before the Pope lifted the interdict against Venice, he appointed state theologian a monk of the Servite order, Paolo Sarpi. As such Sarpi elaborated several consulti, writings in which he offered theologico-juridical expert advices to the patricians of Venice, whose political knowledge was often acquired through practice rather than studied on a theoretical level. On February 11, 1612, the Senate assigned to Sarpi the duty to write a consulto on a particular inlet close to Ferrara called Sacca di Goro. This inlet, closed to the Venetian southern border in a territory under papal jurisdiction, represented a very delicate issue: building there a commercial port would have offered to the merchants trading with the Papacy an easy access to the fluvial routes, up till Milan through the Po River, and therefore threating the Venetian markets. The official appointment specified that “a detailed writing on the subject with our reasons [was necessary] to be used when needed, as it happened on the writings regarding Ceneda, which satisfied [the Senate] very much and brought great benefit to the public good” (Sarpi/Pin, 2001). In order to do that, the Senate authorized Sarpi the access to all the official documents, including those classified, relating not only the inlet, but also, and here I am just translating Sarpi, “several other documents concerning the Venetian rule over the Adriatic Sea” (Sarpi/Cozzi, 1969). On April 12 of the same year, Sarpi presented to the Senate the product, which became known as the Dominio del Mare Adriatico. As we have seen, it was a work intended for a limited audience, 3 the ruling class of Venice, and therefore it was conceived and written according to their needs. This work has been analyzed already by some of the most important historians of the Venetian Republic (Cessi, 1953; Cozzi, 1969), and more recently it has been reconsidered in a historical treatise on the law of the Adriatic Sea (Acquaviva/Scovazzi, 2007). While the former have emphasized the political nature of this work, the latter have underlined the juridical value of it. Here I would like to stress that, especially in the light of other official writings and private correspondence of Sarpi, the Dominio del Mare Adriatico strategically develops as well a modern discourse around sovereignty. I will just briefly sketch the structure of this work, and indulge a little more on the strategies that Sarpi adopted to organize a text that could satisfy both the purposes of the Senate and, at the same time, as in the example of his previous consulto on Ceneda, allowed him to elaborate original ideas in the broader – both theoretical and geographical – dialogue around sovereignty. Sarpi organized his work in five parts: in the first one he stressed the fact that the rights of the Republic on the sea were not an acquisition; rather, they were natural and derived from the birth of Venice itself. To make this point, he compared it with Rome and the fact that nobody ever questioned the seven hills to be the Roman natural territory. As a consequence, the Republic’s dominion on the sea was not and could not derive or be revoked either by popes or by emperors. In the following two points he then explained how Venice reaffirmed time and again its rights on the sea, and for which reasons those who argued 4 against it were wrong. The last part – often set aside by those who have studied this work of Sarpi – describes the controversy over the inlet of Goro that, as I have mentioned before, was in fact the starting point for this larger work on the Adriatic’s sovereignty. This last section has been often seen as detached by the rest of the writings even in earlier publications, for it revolved around a particular case, and it was not consistent with the wide-ranging argument of the other sections. Yet, as Cessi and Cozzi have shown, it is on the contrary crucial to understand both the political nature of the work, and the structural strategy adopted by Sarpi to support his theses. Again, the example of Ceneda turns out to be very useful to understand this point. Ceneda was a burgh in the surrounding of Treviso – hence in the territories of the Republic – whose sovereignty was contended between Venice and the local bishop, who claimed it as a feudal possession, and therefore subject to the Pope. In 1611, just one year before writing the Dominio del mare Adriatico, Sarpi presented to the Senate four writings in which he dismissed the pretensions of the Church and reaffirmed the rights of the Serenissima. Although the writing of Ceneda did not explicitly imply a more general analysis of broader territories, as in the Dominio del Mare Adriatico, it appears clear that he started from a defined controversy with the Church to develop a legal and political argument that could have been used as well to impugn similar pretensions in other occasions. In his writings on both the Adriatic Sea and Ceneda, Sarpi avoided to discuss the cases in purely juridical terms for several reasons. One, he was well aware 5 of the muddy waters of the Roman code, and the mastery of the jurisconsults of the Pope. Two, for the fact that Venice’s legal system did not adhere to the Justinian code; therefore, simply relying on its interpretation, implied an abatement of the Venetian legal system. On the contrary, drawing upon the customs allowed Sarpi, on the one hand, to glorify the history of the Republic through selected events; on the other, the customs supported with tangible exemplifications the abstract logical reasoning (Chabod, 1966). Three, because his writings were addressed to the Venetian patriciate, whose appreciation for direct and empirical explanations far exceed its interest in theoretical legal discussions, and whose understanding of Latin was generally quite poor (Povolo, 2006). Four, the Roman code was not the best fit for the needs of a “modern” state or, more precisely, it required inventive interpretations to adapt it to the interactions between sovereign states. Sarpi preferred to rely instead upon history, an inquiry of the past to explain the present times, not limited to an archival research of official documents, but open to chronicles, accounts, and any other source which could have served the purpose.