The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice 1400-1617

"This book isn’t focusing on the maritime empire, which is normally viewed as the more interesting, typical and important component of the Venetian empire. The authors are very consciously focusing on the land-based wing of the empire, the Terrafirma. This is very important because Venice could not have built up the Terrafirma state without being expert, efficient and well-organized as a land-based empire, doing the things mega states at the time did, that is mastering the financial sinews of power to flex military muscle to conquer and defend a territorial state. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book corrects a tendency for historians to focus on the maritime wing of the empire: the galley, the East, gold and pepper. In reality, it goes without saying that the two wings must go hand in hand. It’s great to control the salt trade, and the salt pans. It’s very much a sea-based resource, although technically the salt pan itself is on land. But who uses the salt? Well, the farmers need salt for cattle breeding. You also need it to cure meat and to eat and so on. It’s very much a resource required on land. Therefore, the two things go hand in hand and Mallett and Hale remind us of the importance of the land base. Venice was not what we want it to be: the exception, the extraordinary, the almost mythical, oriental, fairy tale entity in the sea. It’s just a state acting as early modern states did, doing the stuff early modern states have to do—bloody, boring, financial, military things. It really depends which part you’re looking at. Normally the process is marked by a pragmatic use of opportunity. In Friuli at the beginning of the 15th century, there was a civil war. Venice got involved informally at first, with a little bit of money, of support, leaning on one side. Then more muscle comes into play, with Venetian troops eventually becoming active. But it starts off as a relatively low-intensity conflict, taking sides in an internal affair. In other places, it’s different. In Padua, Venice perceives the ruling family as becoming too powerful. They are allied with Genoa, Venice’s archenemy and there was a more robust approach right from the beginning (although, even there, Venice first supported the family). If you take a step back to the beginning of the 14th century and the relationship with Ferrara, that worked well for a long time, with hegemonic, indirect control of the salt trade and other elements of trade. Then they’re challenged a bit, and it becomes more and more difficult to uphold that regime. An opportunity arises during a disputed succession. So they intervene again, on the side of one of the pretenders. The Venetian approach in Dalmatia is different. In the 14th century, they’re rebuffed and cannot really sustain an aggressive military approach. Before that, they did sometimes attack, as they did the so-called Narentinian pirates, who arguably were not pirates, just competitors. As an imperial power, one way to deal with competitors is to call them pirates. People who are outside of everything can be dealt with quite aggressively. So I would say it’s pragmatic. Often the initiative for expansion did not come from Venice, but from the subordinate—a city or territory that wanted protection. It was either the Ottoman emperor or Venice and so that particular territory or city approached Venice. ‘Could you please accept us into your commonwealth/empire? Could you be our overlord?’ The Venetians sometimes said that, no, they couldn’t. It was too expensive, too complicated, too provocative. When you look at the fine print, even when they accept a role as protector or overlord, they often make sure that they are not offending the former or alternative overlords. So they’d say, ‘We are overlords but of course, we accept you, the Ottoman Empire, as our overlord, at least for this particular place we are getting involved with.’ There’s a great deal of ambiguity. They might imply to Ottoman interlocutors that ‘we accept you as an overlord, we are part of the Ottoman Empire.’ Of course they cannot say that publicly, because the Pope would probably have a problem with it. They are very flexible in their approach. They use ambiguity and multiple meanings and they get away with it."