Erasmo Castellani 1
Early Modern Venice and the Stato da Mar: Sovereignty Over the Adriatic
(1575-1620)
In the fall of 1604 the Venetian governor of Cattaro—today’s Montenegrin
Kotor—started a tug-of-war with Turkish officers of the nearby Castelnuovo
(Herceg-Novi), a city under Ottoman control. The people of Castenuovo were building four small galliots, allegedly to protect the surrounding coast from
Uskok raids. Even though the Uskoks (irregular soldiers from Serbia and
Croatia) posed a growing threat to Castelnuovo and much of the southern
Dalmatian coast, the Venetian governor feared that these galliots endangered the seafaring activities of his subjects.
The largely local dispute quickly assumed an international facet, one that threatened Venetian power on the Adriatic. Shortly after the news of the event reached the Dominante, as Venice was called, the Senate sent the Capitano in
Golfo (the Admiral in charge of the Adriatic fleet) to begin negotiating the destruction of the galliots, and instructed the Bailo—the Venetian ambassador in Istanbul—to pressure the Sultan to order the burning of these ships. The
Venetian admiral, negotiating with the chiefs of Castelnuovo and the Pashas of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, emissaries of the Sultans, asserted that “the sea rightfully belongs to Venice, and every year the Republic dispatches an admiral with a fleet of heavily armed galleys to punish the usurpers of said right, especially the Uskoks. Hence the [Turkish] galliots must be immediately
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removed from Venetian waters.”1 The Pashas, without openly rejecting the
Venetian order, answered that they would immediately destroy their ships, but only after the Venetians had cleared the Uskoks from the sea.
Several months later, despite many petitions from the Southern Dalmatian subjects of the Republic to Venice, and a number of military and diplomatic expedition commanded by the Venetian Senate, the situation had not changed at all: the Uskoks kept raiding villages and seizing cargos, Venetian, Turkish, and Ragusan alike, and Castelnuovo’s galliots still patrolled the coasts and bootlegged salt from Puglia.2 The independent city of Ragusa – today’s
Dubrovnik – wrote to the Archduke of Austria to call his Uskok subjects to order, but to no avail. One Uskok chieftain, who was in fact negotiating the ransom to leave the villages of Ragusa, ridiculed its leaders, affirming that the
Uskoks recognized no authority other than themselves.
These events highlight some the most salient challenges that Venice faced to its claims of sovereignty over the Adriatic between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Significantly, these challenges coincided with a period in Venetian history in which its ruling group was committed to ensuring that the city continued to exercise control over this sea – a policy motivated in part also by the Venetian elite’s opposition to both the papacy and the Habsburgs.
1 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Senato, Dispacci di rettori & altri, Dalmazia e Albania (filze), v. 4 (1605-6): 02/12/1605 more veneto. 2 ASV, Collegio, Relazioni di ambasciatori, rettori ed altre cariche, v. 65. Report of Camillo Michiel, p. 7v.
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The “Adriatic question” that Venice faced at the turn of the seventeenth century offers an opportunity to approach the history of the modern state formation from a novel perspective. As I will demonstrate, by the sixteenth century the Venetian elites had come to conceive of the Adriatic as a legally unified “territory” under Venetian sovereignty. Within this framework I address three questions in particular. I turn first to ideas about sovereignty that circulated among the ruling elite of Venice; then to Venetian practices aimed at preserving their dominion over the Mediterranean in the face of challenges posed by the Uskoks and other powers; and, finally to the ways that Venetian subjects, especially those in Dalmatia, responded.
The Evolving Notion of Sovereignty among the Venetian Elite
As a major center of trade and publishing, Venetian humanists read the political theory of their contemporaries from throughout Europe. In the late sixteenth century they were particularly interested in Bodin; by the early seventeenth some Venetians were even beginning to pay attention to Hobbes.
The key figure in the reception and reworking of French and English ideas about sovereignty was Paolo Sarpi, the celebrated theologian and jurisconsult of the Venetian state. Sarpi, as I have already shown in a conference paper, was capable of reinterpreting and adjusting the new ideas of sovereignty that were developing in France and England, and molding them according to
Venice’s own specific traditions, needs, and goals - above all their attempt “to
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territorialize the sea.”3 Sarpi was a key figure for the politics of Venice in this period. He maintained an extended correspondence with several Italian,
French, and English thinkers such as Jaques Gillot, Francis Bacon, and
Thomas Hobbes, sharing their thoughts with his fellow members of the Ridotto
Morosini, an important salon in Venice in this era. Through his correspondence, Sarpi played a major role in diffusing many of the new political ideas among the Venetian patriciate, and even translated some controversial works into Italian.4 More often, however, Sarpi “translated” and developed these new ideas in his consulti (theologico-juridical (“white papers”).
Several of these consulti concerned the Adriatic and the Uskok pirates. But it was primarily in his Dominio del mar Adriatico (On the Dominion of the Adriatic
Sea) of 1612 that Sarpi laid out the justification for Venetian dominion over the
Adriatic as both a natural and a historically-defined territory.
This work has already been analyzed as either a work concerning the politics of Venice, or, more recently, as a piece of legal literature. Here I would like to stress that, especially in light of other official writings and the private correspondence of Sarpi, the Dominion of the Adriatic Sea also strategically
3 Erasmo Castellani, “Paolo Sarpi, the Absolutist State and the Territoriality of the Adriatic Sea” (Presentation, Sixteenth Century Society Conference. New Orleans, Louisiana. 16th October 2014). 4 Sarpi in his correspondence mentions, among others, Jaques-Auguste de Thou’s Historiae sui Temporis (1604-8)—which he wanted to translate in Italian,—Pierre Pithou’s Libertés de l’Église Gallicane (1609), Francis Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum (1609), Pierre Du Molin’s Anti-Coton (1610), Edmund Richer’s Libellus de Ecclesiastica et Politica Potestate (1611) and other works by John Barclay, Jacques Leschassier, Guilliaume Ribier, and Isaac Casaubon. He also translated two short treatises on excommunication attributed to Jean Gerson. See Paolo Sarpi (ed. Boris Ulianich), Lettere ai Gallicani. Weisbaden, 1961; F. L. Polidori, F. Perfetti (ed.), Lettere di Fra Paolo Sarpi. Florence, 1863.
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develops a discourse around sovereignty, very much in conversation, both in terms of subjects and language, with more global concerns. With his Dominion of the Adriatic Sea, Sarpi appears to be participating in a European dispute, that is, the heated debate of the seventeenth century on the “free” versus the
“closed” sea. This debate became particularly relevant beginning in the mid sixteenth century, when the Netherlands, England, and France started challenging the Iberian monopoly over the oceanic routes. Both the supporters of mare liberum (Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, and Hugo Grotius), and those who proclaimed that the sea could be “occupied” (John Selden, Serafim
Freitas, Pietro Battista Borghi, and Giulio Pace), developed general theories of maritime law—even though they were politically motivated to support their respective countries—grounded in varying interpretations of natural law and law of nations.
Sarpi’s work preceded the writings that supported the mare clausum
(Freitas was the first one to reject Grotius’s Free Sea in 1625), and although, in many respects, his language anticipated the debate that would ensure, it also differed from the others methodologically, linguistically, and substantially. In fact, Sarpi avoided as much as possible a purely philosophical and juridical discourse. Rather, by limiting his work to a specific geographical area—the
Adriatic Sea—he developed an approach that could be called “scientific.” In other words, discovering and observing historical facts allowed Sarpi to develop hypothetical models by which he could reinterpret human events. Moreover, unlike all the other treatises on the Sea, which were written in Latin, the
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Dominion of the Adriatic Sea was the only text composed in Italian. Sarpi was able to articulate originally, in his own language, the most recent intellectual debates, and attune them to the Venetian environment. By doing so he arguably informed, directly or indirectly, the “free” vs “closed sea” debate. To be quite specific, Sarpi developed a road map for the Venetian government to reshape the Republic as a territorial, centralizing state, whose dominions extended across land and water alike.
In this sense, such intellectual discourse informed the centralizing politics which emerged in Venice at the turn of the seventeenth century. These politics were echoed in the Republic’s administration of its territories, a policy that it carried out primarily through legal institutions. Like many other states at this time, Venice was what historians have come to call a “jurisdictional state.”5 This was even truer for the Serenissima, since it relied on a pragmatic, mercantile legal system, somehow closer to the Common Law of England— which was based upon societal customs and enforced by the judgments and decrees of the courts—than it was to the continental Roman Civil Law—in which the body of rules was based on written codes. The administration of the subject cities of the Republic, however, followed different trajectories: Venetian law, local statutes, customs, and civil law were organized hierarchically, according to the different conditions under which each city fell under Venetian rule.
5 Luca Mannori, Bernardo Sordi, eds. Storia del Diritto Amministrativo. Bari: 2001.
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The Practice of Sovereignty
Venetian claims to sovereignty over the Adriatic were severely tested by piracy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The key players here were the Uskok pirates from Senj, on the northern coast of today’s Croatia.
Besides threatening the Venetian ships, the Uskoks—with the informal support of the Austrian Habsburg—endangered Venice’s very authority over the sea.
Moreover, both the Papacy and the Ottomans, who shared an interest in freely crossing the Adriatic Sea—and therefore avoiding the taxation and the limitations imposed by Venice—argued that Venice’s inability to keep the waters safe from the pirates, automatically negated any of the Republic’s pretensions over the sea.
For my purposes, the issue of piracy is particularly important because it problematized the Venetian’s novel conceptualization of territory as a political defined and defining space. How should Venice seek to regulate its jurisdiction over pirates, who carried out their unlawful activities over waters scarcely defined in legal terms? How could a given—watery—space, previously conceived as a space of transition, be redefined as a “territory” over which the Venetian state could claim dominion? In what ways were the Venetians able to impose their centralist authority on what had been considered, for centuries, a
“heteronomous” (to use John G. Ruggie’s definition) medieval political
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framework of non-exclusive, overlapping local and regional rights? 6 One way entailed the reconceptualization of the subject populations in these territories.
Dialectical Responses of the Dalmatian subjects
The Venetian subjects of the Adriatic coast are thus the third object of my study. In this sense, complementary to the “foreign politics” of the pirate raids I have described above, I consider this section of my research to engage with Venice’s “domestic politics.” Here my aim is to understand the ways in which the Venetian subjects on the Dalmatian coast, in Braudel’s words “the backyard of Venice,” adjusted to the new language of power, in order to maximize their benefits in this new, centralizing environment.
Petitions (suppliche) will help to shed light on this enquiry. These suppliche were submitted in person to the Doge and his Council, and therefore they show the direct interaction between the subject and the central power.
The relationship between the Prince and his subjects, although asymmetric, is nevertheless a relationship that can exist only if both parts recognize and accept each other, even in a context that witnessed more and more power move towards the center. These petitions, composed in this very moment in which the state was trying to reduce the jurisdictional autonomy of its dominions, enhances my broader project in two ways. First, through the suppliche the
Republic could “take the temperature” of its subjects, and respond with
6 John Gerard Ruggie. “Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, 1 (1993).
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strategic measures according to the most frequent concerns and the regional needs of its population. Second, by appealing to the Doge, the populations implicitly recognized their status as subjects of Venice. It is important to understand that petitions, however, did not exclusively serve the central power’s project. Rather, they were perhaps the most powerful legal weapon available to subjects that allowed them to negotiate with and seek to minimize imperial power. The populations under the rule of Venice, although formally bound to appeal only to their prince, in reality—especially in this particularly spurious border region— also submitted their petitions to foreign powers. In this way, the subjects could evaluate who would offer them the best deal—both for the specific issue expressed in the petition, and in the long run—and thereby gained leverage in their relationships with their recognized ruler. A good example is offered by a report of Francesco Bolizza, a nobleman of Kotor who played a central role in the regional diplomatic relationships between
Venice and the Ottomans in the first decades of the seventeenth century. He reported that in 1631 the peasants of Perast, a small but important Venetian village in the Gulf of Kotor, submitted their petitions to the Pasha of Bosnia who was on an official visit in the area. They appealed to the Ottoman representative, asking him to legalize renting cultivable lands in Turkish territory, as they had already done for quite some time. Bolizza, who had close connections with the community of Perast, despite expressing abashment at their audacity in his report—drafted for Venetian readers—skillfully stressed the fact that this village had serious problems raising crops due to the lack of
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cultivable land. Hence, the suppliche must be conceived of not merely in juridical terms, but also in political ones, as tools for negotiation. 7 A systematic study of the suppliche submitted between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries will play a crucial role not only in understanding which issues, previously submitted to local tribunals, were presented with increasing frequency in Venice, but also in offering glimpses of the political claims made by subjects.
In other words, in this part of my study I want to analyze the dialectical tension between the subject populations and administrations, as it was influenced by both the marauding expeditions of the pirates and the strategies adopted by the central state. My argument is that the Dalmatian subjects were not only victims of the piracy, but they strategically took advantage of it in order to gain leverage in their political negotiations with Venice. Hence, in what appear to be a paradox, they played a significant role in shaping the centralizing politics of
Venice over the Adriatic in a more complex way than in merely contesting them.
Between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries Venetians,
Italians, Ottoman, Ragusean, and Dalmatians, all perceived the Adriatic as a connective space, one that kept the eastern and western shores united. For instance, Evliya Çelebi, the celebrated Ottoman travel diarist, highlights the
7 Cecilia Nubola, and Andreas Wurgler, eds. Suppliche e "gravamina:" Politica, amministrazione, giustizia in Europa (secoli XIV-XVIII). Bologna: 2003.
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“Latinity” of the Dalmatian people calling “Franks” the inhabitants of Split.8
The people of the Dalmatian coast dated their ties with “the west” back to the age of the Roman Empire, claiming that their neo-Latin idiom was not adopted under the Venetian rule, but rather was a legacy of the Roman times, and survived even under the Byzantine domination, despite Greek’s status as the language of the Empire. Moreover, the Dalmatians followed the Church of
Rome, with the exception of some rural and mountainous areas bordering
Albania and Montenegro, where they practiced Servian, akin to Greek
Orthodoxy. Finally, the social organization of the Dalmatians was predominantly city-based, while the neighboring peoples on the mountainous hinterland were largely pastoral nomadic societies. The dividing geographical feature between the “Latin” coasts and the Slavic Balkans were instead the adjoining mountains. The imperial framework makes this division apparent:
Slavonic populations were under Ottoman and Habsburg rules, while the majority of the Dalmatians were under Venetian rule. The two worlds were often in conflict and their inhabitants referred to each other in derogatory terms; it is not incidental that the Uskoks, originally Serbian and Croatian populations moved by the Habsburgs to protect the borders of the Austrian
Empire from Turkish invasions, gradually shifted to the coast, where they could raid “Latin” and Ottoman people, reducing violent interactions with fellow
Slavs. In this borderland there were, however, interesting interstices in which
8 Cemal Kafadar, “Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia. An Ottoman Gentleman’s Encounter with the Arts of the Franks,” in Alina Payne, ed., Dalmatia and the Mediterranean Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence. Leiden: 2014.
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exchanges between and across the groups were as frequent as clashes. That is to say that the Dalmatian subjects strategically defined their identities with fluidity, for their own benefit. The rhetorical and formulaic language of their petitions, in which, for instance, the people from Kotor proudly claimed their
“Venetianness,” must therefore be read together with their actual behavior, which included, for example, bootlegging salt from the territories of the Papacy, in joint ventures with Ottoman and Papal subjects. The inhabitants of Kotor did not completely hide their illegal enterprises: they used them to bargain with
Venice political and economic privileges. They showed Venice that if the
Dominante (the metropolitan center) was not able to satisfy the requests of its subjects, they would obtain what they wanted anyway, and by doing so, they would undermined the sovereignty of the Republic on the sea. Shifting identities and fluid loyalties were not a peculiarity of the Dalmatian subjects of
Venice, but characterized the multicultural, transnational and interconnected
Mediterranean of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Noel Malcom in his recent work Agents of Empire describes similar strategies employed by the members of two Albanian families who established themselves within the
Mediterranean and beyond.9 The overall success of these Albanian and
Dalmatian politics, which I would call “amoral,” shed light on the ways in which these imperial subjects dealt with the conflictual diversity of their
9 Noel Malcom, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits & Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean. Oxford: 2015.
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territory, navigating between different ethnic and religious components without following exclusive unidirectional dynamics.
Consequently, my work aims to interpret these power dynamics between subjects and Venice to problematize both the concepts of subjecthood and colonial empire. Analyzing the Venetian Stato da Mar and its politics in the ways in which they were conceived and “practiced” at the turn of the seventeenth century, will highlight how terms such as “colony” and “empire” should be taken with a grain of salt as far as the Venetian State—and, more generally, the Mediterranean powers—are concerned. The study of the subjects and their relationship with the Venetian institutions and politics will be crucial for this aspect of the project. Investigating the ways in which these subjects recognized and described themselves, and how they identified Venice, the
Dominante, will help to better understand the dialectical interactions between the ruler and ruled, the center and the periphery of the Republic. This approach by no means aims to exclude the Serenissima from a more global conversation of empires. On the contrary, it offers an opportunity to reconsider the genealogy of the colonial system. The importance of such an addition is both methodological and substantial. Empire, colony, state are all concepts whose definition has been (and still is) constantly contested. This is not to say that there are not predominant understandings of these notions, but rather that they are deceitfully imposed by univocal narratives.10 Studying the early
10 Quentin Skinner. “A Genealogy of the State,” Proceedings of the British Academy (2009).
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modern Venetian state on its own terms and analyzing the ways in which actors in the Mediterranean articulated their interactions with the Dominante, will help avoid, at least partially, ideological views that either support or undermine, but are nonetheless produced by, the dominant understandings of empires and subjecthood. In other words, this study of the Venetian empire does not aim at creating a new paradigm of early modern empires, but rather it questions the existing ones (especially those ideologically charged with presentist concerns).
The research seeks to enrich the current literature on Venetian and
Mediterranean historiography, which for several decades has been heavily influenced by the French Annales School, and therefore has placed great emphasis on the economic and mercantile nature of the Republic.11 Even in more comprehensive accounts of the maritime state, the juridico-political aspects have received only limited attention.12 The only work that gives great attention to the legal and institutional framework of the Stato da Mar is part of a general history of the Venetian state, and it has been left almost unchallenged.13
Another limit of the historiography of the Adriatic—and the
Mediterranean, more generally—is that few works approach it as a whole,
11 Freddy Thiriet. La Romanie Vénitienne au Moyen Age; le Développement et l'Exploitation du Domaine Colonial Vénitien, XIIe-XVe Siècles. Paris: 1959. 12 Fernand Braudel. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: 1972-1973; Frederic Lane. Venice, a Maritime Republic. Baltimore and London: 1973. 13 Gaetano Cozzi, and Michael Knapton. La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna: Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica. 2 vols. Turin: 1986–1992.
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unifying space, in favor of specific regional studies.14 Peregrine Horden and
Nicholas Purcell have pointed out the problematic issue of scales, distinguishing between histories in the Mediterranean and histories of the
Mediterranean and the difficulties in reconcile these two perspectives.15
Moreover, only recently historians of the eastern coast, especially those from
Albania and ex-Yugoslavian countries, have begun collaborating with their
Western peers. Yet, despite several international conferences that have drawn together scholars from both Italy and the western Balkans, a significant segment of the Croatian historiography is still imbued with nationalistic values that limits a wider understanding of the intertwined relationship of Dalmatians and Venetians.16 In the past two decades, however, a few scholars have devoted particular attention to the Adriatic, but in many cases they have still limited their investigation to economic and cultural exchanges between the Dalmatian coast and Venice.17 More recently, leading scholars have turned their attention to the Venetian administration of power over its territories on the Sea, but they have done so either by imposing colonial models of rule onto the Venetian state or emphasizing the common traits with other colonial powers, rather than highlighting the specificities of the Adriatic world, or paying greater attention to
14 Alina Payne, ed. Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archeology and the Poetics of Influence. Leiden: 2014. 15 Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: 2000. 16 Lovorka Čoralić. ‘Croatian Migrations in the Italian Coastal Area in the Late Middle Ages and at the Beginning of the Early Modern Age’ in Études Balkaniques, 46 (2010). 17 Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, Mohamed-Salah Omri, eds. Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel's Maritime Legacy. London and New York: 2010; Sandro Franchini, Gherardo Ortalli, and Gennaro Toscano, eds. Venise et la Méditerranée: Actes du colloque tenu les 30 et 31 octobre 2008. Venice: 2011.
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the political strategies of the patriciate of Venice. These scholars underestimate what I consider crucial to understanding the Venetian Republic’s power dynamic: the dialectical role of the subjects in the process of articulating sovereignty.18 These subjects, both Venetians and Turks, are, on the other hand, the main characters in the works of other historians who have investigated their agency in the “liquid landscapes” of the Dalmatian territories, where the Ottoman and the Venetian worlds intersect.19 Yet, in their works, the political institutions and the legal practices simply constitute a framework that the subjects were able to bend in their favor, but their dialectical agency in production of the imperial politics is excluded from their analysis.20 My work, though engaging with the literature of the Venetian Empire, aims to put the
Adriatic in a broader conversation. I have hinted before at the impact of the
Protestant countries for the reconfiguration of the politics of Venice. Hence, one of the goals of my research is to highlight this seemingly paradoxical “return to the sea” as a result of north-western European influences, as it emerges from the connections between Venice and other European states, France and
England in particular.21 In particular, I want to demonstrate the part played by
18 Monique O’Connell. Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State. Baltimore: 2009. 19 Eric Dursteler. Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, 2011. 20 Eric Dursteler. “Speaking in Tongues: Language and Communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Past & Present No. 217 (2012/1); Natalie Rothman. Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Ithaca: 2012. 21 Filippo De Vivo. Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics Oxford and New York: 2007; Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660. London and New York: 2008; Jaska Kainulainen. Paolo Sarpi: A Servant of God and State. Leiden: 2014.
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Venice in the “laboratory” of the modern state, not only in the ways it articulated a discourse of sovereignty—both in theory and in practice— specifically for the Adriatic Sea, but also how it became a model to reckon for other colonial enterprises in their earlier stages. In this regard, the correspondence between Sarpi and Sir William Cavendish via his secretary
Thomas Hobbes and the influence it had on the young William Petty could be enlightening. This juxtaposition between Venice and its European neighbors highlights the juridico-political similarities between the Adriatic experience and the mercantile empires.22
Preliminary table of contents:
Ch. 1 Introduction
Ch. 2 Territorializing the Sea: The Evolving Notion of Sovereignty in the
Venetian Elite
Ch. 3 Piracy, Policies and Politics: The Practices of Sovereignty
Ch. 4 Negotiating the Empire: Dialectical Responses of the Dalmatian subjects
Ch. 5 Conclusion
22 John Gerard Ruggie. “Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, 1 (1993); Philip Stern. The Company State. Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India. New York: 2011.Lauren Benton, and Richard Ross, eds. Legal Pluralism and Empires. New York: 2013.
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Research materials and archives
My research is heavily grounded in archival sources. The Archivio di Stato of Venice—a collection whose sources for the early modern period are second only to that of the Vatican Archives—plays a central role in my work. Since I have worked extensively in these archives, I have already mastered both the politico-juridical organization of the Serenissima—a complex ensemble of more than fifty councils, tribunals, boards, and assemblies whose jurisdictions were not strictly defined—and their respective archival holdings and their countless sub-series. In my research, I will investigate the sources of the Senato in particular. These documents contain, among many other things, all the reports and the correspondence of the Venetian officers who served in the maritime possessions of Venice and of the admirals who commanded the fleets of the
Republic, along with the instructions the Venetian government gave to the officers serving in Dalmatia and in the Adriatic Sea.23 These sources make it possible to determine which problems were most common in those years, and the measures taken to deal with them. I will pay close attention to the relationship between the Venetian representatives and the central government, in order to understand how the centralist strands of the Giovani’s politics were articulated in their policies: for example, how they reduced the broad powers
23 ASV, Senato, secreta, Deliberazioni, rr. 82-114; Senato, Dispacci di rettori & altri, Dalmazia e Albania (filze), vv. 1bis-14.
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often given earlier to the representatives of the Republic on the Adriatic possessions. These sources are extremely rich, since the Venetian governors of
Dalmatia regularly sent weekly or bi-weekly reports to Venice and most of them describe in detail even minor local skirmishes. Their role needs to be taken in account while reading their reports. In fact, the rettori or governors, although they were Venetian patricians, were not simply Venetian representatives in the subject cities. Rather, by taking oath on the local statutes, they were also assuming the role of Venetian representatives of the cities to Venice. Again, the question of space and (maritime) territory appears to be crucial to understand that the Dalmatian possession were not considered, legally and politically, as colonies, but as part of the Venetian territory, as much as the other cities in the mainland which surrounds Venice, the so called Terraferma. For this “in- between identity” it is worth investigating the administration of the rettori in this period in which the Republic, enforcing centralist politics, overrode the authority previously granted to the Venetian governors. Were they active agents of this political change or did they simply readjust their role according to the directions they received from Venice? How did the Dominante redirect its subjects to submit their petitions to the admirals or directly to Venice, and how did the governors react to the erosion of their jurisdiction? Why, and in which cases did the Dalmatian subjects continue to appeal to the rettori? The sources of the Senato will shed some light on these questions.
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Another series that I will explore in depth is that of the Collegio, which includes the suppliche (petitions) submitted to Venice from all its territories.24 I have already worked at length with these documents in the past, and I am aware of the necessary painstaking work to identify those coming from a regional area of interest, since they are ordered chronologically, not geographically. For example, in the Risposte di Fuori (the petitions which were redirected by the Collegio to magistracies located outside the city of Venice) every folder includes some 250-300 petitions coming from all Venetian territories, and, since the origin of the supplica is not always indicated, it must often must be inferred from other details. Every file collects the petitions submitted in a period of six months or one year. The textual analysis of the petition must proceed along two different vectors. On the one hand, I will focus my attention on the subject matter of the suppliche, trying to find clues to answer the questions mentioned in the previous paragraph about the ways in which the centralist efforts redirected the appeals of the Dalmatians. This inquiry, however, will bear more fruits once I will have explored the Dalmatian archives: there I will have the opportunity to explore the local dynamics between subjects, city councils, and Venetian governors, offering me the context in which the petitions submitted to the Venetian Collegio were drafted.
Thus the analysis of the petitions will occupy the last (and most extended) part of my research. On the other hand I will explore the emergence of an
24 ASV, Collegio, Notatorio, rr. 65-70; Collegio, Relazioni Ambasciatori Rettori ed Altre Cariche, vv. 64-65; Collegio, Risposte di dentro, vv. 6-21; ASV, Collegio, Risposte di fuori, vv. 311-380.
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increasingly formulaic structure of petitions. The creation of a template hints at one of the key features of the modern state: the formalization and establishment of a bureaucratic machine. It also suggests, however, a shared understanding of the subjects of the necessary language to communicate, successfully, with the center of power. Hence I will pay careful attention as well to the ways in which the petitioners formally defined both themselves and
Venice.
For the purpose of my project, I will concentrate my attention to those coming from three cities: Zara (Zadar, Croatia), Cattaro (Kotor, Montenegro), and Corcira (Corfu, Greece). I have chosen these cities and their archives, for several substantial, logistical, and methodological reasons. First, all these cities were strategically important for the Serenissima: Zadar was headquarters of the
Provveditore Generale in Dalmazia ed Albania, the most important Venetian officer on the Dalmatian coast, with political, juridical, and military authority.
Kotor, which was the southernmost Venetian stronghold in Dalmatia, surrounded by Turkish territories, was at its peak at the turn of the seventeenth century. Given its geographic position, on the borders of the empire after the loss of Albania in 1571, Kotor and its peasant communities enjoyed several privileges: Venice thought that it was better to keep the local population firmly on its side—a population described by several governors as savages and belligerent, but also excellent soldiers and loyal in nature.
Moreover, another reason for the strategic importance of Kotor was that the
Bolizzas, a family from the local nobility, took charge of managing the public
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correspondence between Venice and Istanbul, a task that they carried by relying on Montenegrin—Slavic Ottoman—curriers who mediated between
Venetian officials, Slavic and Dalmatian chieftains, and Ottoman representatives. For my research Kotor thus offers a privileged point of view, since, on the one hand, the administration of Kotor had relatively easier and more direct access to the Venetian authorities, being the communication hub between Venice and the Porte; on the other, the interaction in the area between the subjects of the Republic and the surrounding groups under Ottoman rule was perhaps—or at least it appears to be in the sources—more frequent than in any other Venetian Dalmatian city. Corfu, although located on the Ionian Sea, was on the threshold of the Adriatic, and in fact the Capitano in Golfo had his headquarter in that island. Corfu was also the seat of the highest authority on the sea, the Provveditore Generale da Mar (superintendent in chief of Venice’s maritime affairs).
These three cities also differed among themselves. Both culturally and ethnically they represent the diversity of the Venetian State on the sea, ranging from Dalmatians of Roman ancestors, Slavic and Albanian populations, and
Greeks. Moreover, all three had very different relationships with Venice: Zadar in the past had rebelled against the Venetian government and never really accepted its condition as a subject of the Serenissima, aiming to follow the example of the semi-independent republic of Ragusa. Kotor, on the contrary, had always been described as the most loyal to Venice, to the point that after the end of the Republic in 1797, the city of Perast (which was under the
Erasmo Castellani 23
jurisdiction of Kotor) entered in the Venetian myth as the place in which the last banner of the Republic was hauled down. Finally, Corfu had a very well established identity—even linguistically and religiously different from the rest of the Adriatic—and Venice, on the one hand, recognized it, giving a certain level of autonomy to the indigenous institutions, but, on the other, tried to limit the political influence of the local orthodox clergy as much as possible. To sum up, these different realities offer the possibility of investigating the strategies adopted by the Venetian government to deal with the local issues, as well as the language (or languages) developed by its subjects to interact with the center of power.
There are also logistical issues I have considered for studying in the archives of these cities. I have already visited the state archives in Zadar and the adjoining scientific library, and I have realized that it is particularly useful not only because the archive of the Provveditore Generale in Dalmazia ed
Albania is preserved there, but also because the documents of other Dalmatian cities are stored in its repositories. The records of the city council of Zadar are also well-preserved, and having been a powerful city, and having had a more conflictual relationship with Venice, it will offer a much different perspective on the power dynamics between the Zaratine subjects and Venice. Moreover, its well-established nobility was far less keen then that of Kotor, for example, to join Ottoman subjects in commercial enterprises. Therefore, the analysis of the city records provides the opportunity to also investigate a very different conception of subjecthood. Lastly, in the scientific library, I will have the
Erasmo Castellani 24
opportunity to explore the numerous uncatalogued private miscellanea of early modern papers that lay in its repositories. I have worked in the archives of
Kotor, as well. In my previous visits, I was able to establish networks with local scholars and archivists—such as the director of the archives Snežana Pejović,
Bruno Crevato Selvaggi, councilor of the SDDSP (Dalmatian society of homeland history), Anton Belan, bishop of the cathedral of Kotor and member of the ZICZ (society of the Italians of Montenegro), and Stevo Davidovic, editor of Pastrovski Almanah—vital (especially in this case) to conduct research in institutions hardly explored either by Western European or American scholars.
The material concerning the Venetian epoch there is limited compared to that of the other archives. Yet, in the miscellaneous Acta Notarilia the deeds of the city council are recorded, which can help identify the power dynamics between the local government and the Venetian representative towards the population.
Lastly, the Historical Archives of Corfu are the most important of the northern Greek coast. Of the three archives preserving sources of the Venetian domination, only one—Ενετοκρατία—has received significant attention from
Western scholars.25 Here I will devote my attention in particular to the miscellanea of legal, commercial, political, and notarial papers of the city councils of Corfu, the decisions of the Venetian representatives, and the
25 Γενικα Αρχεια Κερκυρασ - Δημοσια Κεντρικη Ιστορικη Βιβλιοθηκη Κερκυρασ (General Corfu Archives - Central Corfu Historical Public Library): Ενετοκρατία (Venetian Domination: miscellanea of legal, commercial, political, and notarial papers of the city councils of Corfu and decisions of the Venetian representatives); Ενετική Διοίκησις (Venetian Administration: legal papers of the Venetian tribunal); Ειρηνοδικείον (Local Magistrate: legal papers of the community tribunal)
Erasmo Castellani 25
documents of the Venetian tribunal and those of the local tribunal. In Corfu, the peculiar interaction between Venice, the Latin, Roman Catholic community and the strong Greek orthodox one will enrich the picture of the Venetian rule over the Adriatic and the dialectical interplay with its subjects. Furthermore, the Delegations for Venice will be studied in depth. The community of Corfu, more frequently than other Venetian possession, organized public delegations to Venice in order to submit petition and requests. From the records of the city council, in which the petitions were drafted and the members of the delegations were selected, it will be possible to find clues of the power dynamics between different local groups, and how much they were willing to compromise domestic power in order to stake their claims with the Dominante. The picture that will emerge will show a polyphony of strategies and languages of power, which
Venice necessarily took in consideration when centralizing the politics of the
Republic.
Appendix I: Maps
Erasmo Castellani 26
Map of the Mediterranean showing the Venetian Empire from N. Rothman, Brokering Empires (Cornell, 2012)
Erasmo Castellani 27
Nicolaes Visscher, Tabula Italiae. Sculptum apud Abrahamum Goos (1633)
Erasmo Castellani 28
Nicolas Sanson-Alexis Hubert Jaillot, Le Golfe de Venise avec ses principaux caps (1693)
Erasmo Castellani 29
Henri Abraham Chatelain, Carte de Geographie des Differents Etats de La Republique de Venise (1718)
Erasmo Castellani 30
Appendix II: Research Sources and estimated schedule:
Archivio di Stato di Venezia (State Archives of Venice): Venice, Italy
(Eight months)
Senato (papers produced and received by the Venetian Senate)
- Mar, registri
- Mar, filze
- Dispacci Dei Rettori, Dalmazia ed Albania
- Deliberazioni del Senato, Secreta
Provveditori da Terra E Da Mar, Rubrica Lettere del Provveditore Generale in
Dalmazia e Albania (Letters and reports of the Admiral in chief of the Venetian fleet in Dalmatia and Albania)
Collegio (council formed by the Doge and 22 high-rank patricians. Here are collected the petitions)
- Notatorio
- Relazioni Ambasciatori Rettori ed Altre Cariche
- Risposte di Fuori
- Risposte di Dentro
Consiglio dei Dieci (highest judicial Venetian council)
- Criminali, processi delegati ai rettori
- Criminali, processi delegati a Corfu
- Capi del consiglio dei Dieci, Notatori
- Capi del consiglio dei Dieci, Sentenze dei Rettori
Erasmo Castellani 31
Miscellanea codici, Storia Veneta (it contains the orders and the sentences given by the Admiral in chief of the Venetian fleet)
Državni Arhiv u Zadru (State Archives of Zadar): Zadar, Croatia
(One month)
Mletačka Uprava U Dalmaciji I Istri Do 1797 (miscellaneous of Venetian papers on Dalmatia and Istria):
- Generalni providuri za Dalmaciju i Albaniju
- Dukali i terminacije
- Mletački katastri. Pisma vještaka mjernika
- Sindici avogadori
Općine/Komune (materials of the city council and local tribunals)
- Općina Zadar, Knez Zadra
- Općina Zadar, Kapetan Zadra
- Općina Zadar, Veliki sudbeni dvor
- Općina Zadar, Pomorski sud
Bilježnici Zadra (Notarial papers of the city of Zadar)
Znanstvena knjižnica Zadar (Scientific Library of Zadar): Zadar, Croatia
(One month. The Archives is open five days per week, between 9:30am and
2:30pm, except Wednesday, when it closes at 5:30pm. Therefore, in the same month, I will be able to work in the afternoon in the adjacent Scientific library)
Erasmo Castellani 32
Miscellaneous of Venetian papers; private donations. Both uncatalogued, only on card index.
Istorijski Arhiv Kotor (Historical Archives of Kotor): Kotor, Montenegro
(One month and a half)
Acta Notarilia (extremely rich and dense miscellaneous of legal, commercial, political, and notarial papers of the city councils of Kotor and the surrounding villages under Venetian rule; only partially chronologically organized).
The archives is supposed to be open five days per week between 10:30am and
2:30pm, but the opening time is not always respected.
Γενικα Αρχεια Κερκυρασ - Δημοσια Κεντρικη Ιστορικη Βιβλιοθηκη
Κερκυρασ (General Corfu Archives - Central Corfu Historical Public
Library): Corfu, Greece
(One month and a half)
Ενετοκρατία (Venetian Regime: miscellaneous of legal, commercial, political, and notarial papers of the city councils of Corfu and decisions of the Venetian representatives)
Ενετική Διοίκησις (Venetian Administration: legal papers of the Venetian tribunal)
Ειρηνοδικείον (Local Magistrate: legal papers of the community tribunal)
Erasmo Castellani 33
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