As swans glide past a gorgeously stylized Venice, Marco Polo sets out with bis father and uncle/or the court ofKublai Khan. In this time-compressing illustration/rom a 15th Century edition of Polo’s book, the travelers bid farewell to friends on shore fright, center), take boats to their ship (right) and depart under full sail f/oregroundj,
Of all the Venetian merchants of his era, none traveled more widely or with more lasting effect than Marco Polo. His book, Description of the World — based on a 24-year odyssey that began in 1271 and took him through the vast Asian empire of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan—aroused Europe’s greed for the wealth of the East and influenced exploration and trade for centuries.
The book’s impact was due in no small measure to its abundance of detailed commercial information. Although he went to Cathay with his father and uncle on a diplomatic mission for the Pope and then traveled about as the Khan’s own emissary, Marco Polo assessed all he observed with a mercantile eye.
He provided figures on the consumption of pepper in Hangchow (9,589 pounds per day) and on the Yangtze River’s shipping traffic: a staggering 200,000 vessels a year moving upstream, “without counting those that passed down.” In some astonishment he described the paper money issued by the Khan—paper currency was unknown in Europe—with which traders could “buy what they like anywhere in the Empire, while it is also vastly lighter to carry about.”
The book’s range of information was extraordinary. Polo explained the technique of opening the belly of a Chinese musk deer to obtain the precious substance used in perfume. He told how merchants on the road in Tibet warded off wild beasts at night by burning green cane that exploded in the fire, and how they would be offered young women at every stop, because a Tibetan man was not expected to marry a girl till she had had at least 20 lovers. He warned readers in Europe not to be deceived by what were alleged to be dried pygmies from India; he had discovered that “those little men are manufactured” in Sumatra— from monkeys. “They pluck out all the hair except of the beard and breast and then daub them with saffron until they look like men. But it is all a cheat.”
Predictably, ships fascinated him. He warned that some Persian vessels were “very bad and dangerous,” being held together by “a kind of yarn” made from coconut husk fibers. But he described with admiration huge four-masted Chinese ships that required a crew of at least 200 men, carried up to 6,000 baskets of pepper, and had “50 or 60 cabins, wherein the merchants abide at their ease.” It was on just such a ship that in 1295 Marco Polo began his journey back to Europe and his destiny as a best-selling author and the most famous merchant Venice ever produced.
Retreated to Crete when they received news of the capture of the Miami.
Ever resilient, Andrea tried to diversify the use of his small remaining capital. He bought a little gold thread in Constantinople and arranged for it to be shipped to Venice on the Galley of Romania. Andrea also planned to transport skins from central Italy overland to Bruges in return for English cloth. But by winter the overland route had been choked off by German hostility.
The new year, 1433, found him almost impoverished. During the previous fall, news had arrived of Genoese privateers looting the eastern Mediterranean. Andrea had received only two bales of his Syrian cotton; the rest was still sheltering unused in Crete. His English cloth could not reach him through Germany. And the Galley of Romania, carrying his gold thread, had lingered to plunder Genoese ships and was delayed off the Dalmatian coast by snow and by the bitter north wind that had been his father’s ruin more than 15 years before.
There was little he could do about the cotton and the gold thread. Moreover, Dolceto seems to have been playing him false in Acre, and before the end of the year a curt note had appeared in Andrea’s letters to him; “Put your mind on my affairs, I pray you.”
Andrea did not stay idle. He now concentrated on getting his English cloth overland from Flanders past the German embargo. For this dangerous operation he needed a trustworthy German to carry the merchandise under his own name. He chose a certain Lorenz Schrench, whom he described to his agents in Bruges, the Cappello brothers, as ‘‘a fat man of about 40 who has a thick open beard almost black below and tending to blond above.” Schrench signed a statement of indebtedness for the cloth and set off with it on the long journey through the Wiirttemberg forests and up the Rhine toward Venice.
Suddenly, with the new year, the tight knot of Andrea’s concerns magically unraveled. In January his surviving bales of cotton arrived at last— 14 of the 26 loaded in Acre by Dolceto nearly a year before. Cotton was then scarce because of the war in the Mediterranean, and Andrea sold at the peak of the market. A month later his gold thread came home, and in Bruges and London his skins had been sold well by the Cappello brothers. In April of 1433, peace treaties with Milan and Genoa assured the resumption of a normal cotton trade. And finally, in June, the strangely bearded Schrench arrived with his English cloth at a time when it was fetching a fine price.
Andrea made a small fortune, and he was never broke again. After 1435 he increasingly withdrew from the Syrian marketplace and traded in Spanish wool and oil through more reliable agents than Dolceto. And he prospered. By 1439 he had returned to his old and profitable business in English cloth, working with the Cappello brothers, and the same year he married the Cappellos’ sister, Cristina, who brought with her a dowry of 4,000 ducats. The 1440s found him trafficking in cloth, copper, spices, silks and gold with the Galley of Barbary. By this time he had grown independent of his old helpers, the Balbi and Cappello families. He was himself the patron of young men starting their careers on the sea; among his agents he counted Alvise Cadamosto, who was later to explore the
Cape Verde Islands and to nose his ships up the rivers of western Africa.
In 1443 Barbarigo built a little country house at Montebelluna, where the Venetian plain merges gently with the Alps. He began to delegate responsibility for his affairs. And in 1449, at the age of 50, he died, bequeathing a handsome estate of some 15,000 ducats to his widow and two young sons.
Andrea’s children, when they came of age, did not emulate their venturesome father. Instead of trade, they invested in real estate. It was more reliable and not as demanding. Andrea, who wanted to keep all his capital at work in commerce, had only rented the handsome palace on the Grand Canal; after his death his family purchased it. The oldest son, Nicolo, in whose hands the family fortune was concentrated, made only one voyage. His wealth was based in land and in government bonds. He died in 1496, expressing the opinion that commerce was a poor investment.
But the Barbarigos continued to be rich. Nicolo’s sons became holders
The port ofMadon an the Ionian Sea served the republic a/Venice bath militarily and cammercially. As a heavily fortified autpost, it was one af the ‘‘eyes 0/the republic," keeping watch on the movements af pirates (and, later, the TurksJ. As 0 way station along the route to the Levont, it stockpiled spices, raw silk, dyes and wax brought/ram the Eost by privote merchontmen; state-owned merchant galleys then took the goods the rest af the way ta Venice.
Of state office (the oldest was elected a I, ord of the Arsenal in 1512) and preserved their patrimony. And the palace on the Grand Ganal was renowned for its festivities—those apparently frivolous exhibitions of wealth and high spirits that were in fact a subtle and sometimes useful kind of self-publicity.
From the time of Andrea’s father, the unfortunate Nicolo who abandoned a ship of the Galley of Alexandria on the wild Dalmatian coast in 1417, the Barbarigo line had come full circle. Its members were again important servants of the state and campaigners for political prestige. But in this family the commercial vigor and enterprise of an Andrea Barbarigo were never seen again.
Yet the drive, the acumen—even the self-seeking—of men such as Barbarigo bore dazzling fruit. It was through their disseminated wealth that the city of Venice, by the end of the 15th Gentury, was nourished into its exotic maturity.
Now the medieval township of wooden houses scattered among or-
Chards was scarcely a memory. In its place stood a city of dreamlike beauty—a maze of canals overhung by Gothic palaces, marble bridges, and a whole procession of secretive mansions and churches treading on their own reflections in the water. “The Grand Ganal,’’ wrote the French historian Philippe de Gommynes in 1494, “is the most beautiful street in the world,” and the whole city, viewed from the sea, resembled a fantastic theater set rather than a city of living people. As for the Venetians, “it is their constant boast,” wrote a Florentine ambassador in 1463, “that they are the successors of the Romans, and that the sovereignty of the world belongs to them,”
It was in the endurance of their government, of their economy and of their political power that such a boast lay. The Great Gouncil—unique in its time—was the envy of Italy. The Venetian system of justice was the most effective and impartial of its day. And the secrecy with which the state was administered, together with the precedence given to age in the republic’s councils—doges were generally elected to office in their early 70s—increased the impression that the republic’s affairs were run
Flonked by his father and son. o Venefion merchant (foreground, left) entertains visitors ot his mainland estate in this illumination from o 16th Century manuscript. Mony Venefion businessmen invested in such villas in the Itolion countryside, where they hunted, feasted ond hired entertainers for amusement. The numbers in the upper left corner refer to manuscript pages.
With a grave and unfaltering serenity. Chronic patrician dissensions, thr; reluctance of qualified men to accept burdensome state offices (Ifie Great Council was sometimes riven with cries of “Don’t elect me!’’J and the snobberies and petty vanity of some of the aristocracy were a small price to pay for 1,000 years of political stability.
“All the princes of Italy are tyrants,” wrote the patrician Bernardo Bembo, “except for the Doge of Venice.” The Doge was a salaried government official, hedged about with restrictions; he was not even allowed to leave Venice without permission from the Senate, and his power lay less in law than in the prestige he commanded as the symbol of the republic itself.
The city that had now reached its zenith within this proud tradition was a paradox. Rich, hectic, cosmopolitan, it staged a steady round of banquets and public spectacles that were the talk of Europe. Its young aristocrats dressed in outrageous finery, and it basked in the perpetual sunlight of travelers’ eulogies. But, for all its beauty, Venice was ferociously crowded, built on open sewers, plagued by crime, and wracked by winds and rain for much of the year. Most of its patricians lived frugally, and the dress of the middle-aged and elderly was strikingly sober—black gown and black cap. The lives of its women were channeled into predictable paths—they could achieve eminence almost solely as courtesans—and slavery persisted both in households and on the great estates of the empire.
Even the religious life of the citizens was ambiguous. “They wish to appear Christian before the world,” wrote Pope Pius II, “but in reality they never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred.” Yet the pious lay fraternities of Venice, its prelates, its churches and relics—the bodies of more than 50 saints were said to be enshrined in the city—exercised a somber moral counterweight to its proverbial levity.
In most of its faults, perhaps, Venice was typical of the time. But its eminence was all its own. The 15th Century, drawing to a close, found the love of the ancient classical world flowering both in learning and in architecture. But above all it was in painting that the city excelled. The patronage of wealthy patricians, of religious brotherhoods, and of the state itself clothed the walls and ceilings of church and palace with canvases of a prodigious opulence and variety. The radiant, almost sensuous color and light of Venetian painting complemented the weightless fagades of Istrian stone that adorned the republic’s palaces. Already in this century, the restrained yet magically intense works of Giovanni Bellini and the luminous observation of Garpaccio were predictions of glories to come: the aristocracy of Titian and the grandeur of Tintoretto.
Venice, in fact, gave the impression of mounting to greater and greater heights. “Today the Venetians are the most powerful people on both land and sea,” conceded Pius II, “and seem not unfitted for the larger empire to which they aspire.”
Yet by the end of the 15th Gentury such aspirations were doomed, and the whole aspect of the Mediterranean had dramatically changed. For the Turks were spreading westward over the sea.
World History
