Erasmo Castellani 1 Early Modern Venice and the Stato
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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 Erasmo Castellani 2 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. Erasmo Castellani 3 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 Erasmo Castellani 4 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. Erasmo Castellani 5 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 Erasmo Castellani 6 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.