Out of Italy

Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise

Fernand Braudel, Siân Reynolds

• Publisher: Europa Compass
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781609455354
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia italiana

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650. In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history. Viewing the Italy?the many Italies?of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the acclaimed French historian, Fernand Braudel, achieves here. He brings to life the two extraordinary centuries that span the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque and analyzes the complex interaction between art, science, politics, and commerce during Italy's extraordinary cultural flowering.

A SERIES OF OVERALL PERSPECTIVES

Contrary to assumptions sometimes made in the social sciences, there is no such thing as a straightforward synchronic cross section, springing unproblematically into view the moment one’s argument requires it. A single snapshot, outside time, without a degree of chronological depth, would be lacking in life and therefore in usefulness. If I present a series of perspectives, as I intend to, from about 1450, 1500, 1550, 1600, and 1650, it is not with the idea that on each occasion I shall be able to give a precise picture of the “situation” immediately discernible at these precise dates. Rather it is to assume a convenient set of vantage points from which to look both forward and backward, according to the disposition of time, the landscapes, and the realities before our eyes.

How can one gauge or comprehend life in progress without enlisting the passage of time as an accomplice?

WHAT THE WORLD LOOKED LIKE
TO AN ITALIAN IN 1450

To take 1450 as our starting point is of course to make an approximate choice. For greater precision (though it would in fact be misleading) one might have taken the fall of Constantinople (May 29, 1453) or the Peace of Lodi (April 9, 1454) which saw the opening of a long period of peace in Italy—a restless and suspicious peace perhaps, but peace all the same, which would last broadly until the French invasion of September 1494. Lodi set the seal on a balance of power in Italy of which the European balance of power would afterwards be but a reflection and extension.

I need hardly say that the “Italian” of my title is also a convenient fiction for the purposes of exposition, and indeed an anachronism. Fifteenth-century Italians did indeed feel different from other peoples in Christendom, but they were divided among a series of tiny states, little Italies, lively, jealous, and sometimes violent units, not unlike the nation-states of Europe in the recent past, whose “greatness” lay only in the eyes of shortsighted beholders. For the divisions of Italy, in that age at once so far from the present and so near to it, offer an image of the recent history through which we Europeans have all lived and indeed continue to live. So to say “Italy” or “an Italian” is to use a misleading singular. An obvious remark, but one so easily overlooked that it has to be made at least once.

The Subjugation of Three Civilizations

In about 1450, the world influenced by the teachings, the various economies, and the intellect of Italy covered Europe in the wide sense, plus the Mediterranean—although in the non-Christian countries it was usually confined to coastal strips with no access to the hinterland. But the entire sea, that is its waters and surface area, depended in some degree on the narrow Italian peninsula, which cut it in two the better to control it, as if geography had sympathetically connived with Italy’s predominance.

The whole can be seen as an immense echo chamber, a zone of diaspora and influence, spatial evidence of domination (or perhaps we should call it “imbalance”), of a very special kind—and all this had been achieved well before 1450, in the course of a long history of effort, renewed endeavor, patience, and strategic victories. A few words must be said on this score, otherwise the “present”—1450—cannot be explained. How did Italy, or rather a handful of Italian cities, a few men in all, succeed one day in acquiring and holding on to a position of domination vis-à-vis Byzantium, Islam, and western Europe? The last had been a slow developer, but the first two had long been worlds of splendor and superiority. Only an exceptional breakthrough could have overcome them. We need not linger over the details of these struggles, whose outcome long remained in the balance. We shall approach them only at the point where success seemed to be within grasp.

Byzantium: A Civilization Worn Threadbare

The decisive blow against Byzantium was struck in 1204, with the diversion of the Fourth Crusade, during that “orgy of capitalism,”14 which led to the fall of Constantinople, and was even more pronounced after its fall. Until 1261, the great city was the capital of a Latin empire. The reconquest of the “citadel” by the Palaeologi of Nicaea in 1261 did little to alter Byzantium’s fate: its decline was slow until 1453, since it remained both on the route to the wealth of Asia, and on that taken by goods exchanged for this wealth. So its prosperity endured. But that prosperity had in reality been appropriated by Italian merchants, mostly Venetian and Genoese, for their own advantage. In 1348, the Genoese customs post at Pera collected revenue to the tune of 200,000 gold solidi while the imperial customs of Constantinople received a mere 30,000!15

Constantinople was to thirteenth-century Italians what Shanghai was to the Europeans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sooner or later, everything fell into eager foreign hands. Genoese merchants settled north of the Black Sea, at Kaffa in the Crimea, in about 1290; much later and this time in league with the Venetians, they reached La Tana, on one of the mouths of the Don estuary, on the Sea of Azov; and at about the same time, Trebizond, on the route to Tabriz and Persia. Venetians and Genoese often came to blows over these distant markets, so much wealth was there at stake. But after 1395 and the devastating advance of Tamerlane, the Black Sea route to Asia lost much of its appeal to long-distance traffic. One of the stages in and reasons for the decline of Byzantium was the shift southward to Syria and Egypt of the major trade routes to Asia, in particular the pepper and spice trades. The Black Sea now had only its own produce to offer: timber, grain, Caucasian slaves, dried fish, and caviar.

But this trade was not inconsiderable—and it was certainly enough to make the Genoese of Kaffa and the Venetians of La Tana hang on to their distant outposts. How determinedly the two republics protected and patrolled these remote colonies! From Venice, the Arsenal sent the posts, scaling irons, nails, arrows, longbows, and crossbows needed to defend Tana,16 for the little town huddled by the marshes was on perpetual alert against constant attacks by the Tartars, a people forever on the move with their herds of horses, sheep, and oxen and their covered and open wagons. The inhabitants of Tana watched the enemy from their ramparts for days on end, fascinated by this tumultuous spectacle of men, women, children, beasts, and wagons on the move. “La sera,” writes one eyewitness, “eravamo stracchi di guardar” (“By nightfall we were exhausted with watching”).17 Historians have marveled, not without reason, at the saga of the building of the fortress of São Jorge da Mina by the Portuguese on the coast of Guinea in 1475. Every stone to be transported to Africa was cut and numbered in Lisbon. But much the same had been accomplished by Venice and its painstaking Arsenal on behalf of La Tana, years before.

After 1395 then, Constantinople was being exploited by foreign merchants, and no longer stood on the busy route to the gorgeous East. Things began to fall apart in Byzantium. The population dwindled, those who remained were poorer, buildings crumbled. And the currency was in a perpetual state of depreciation, as Italian gold coins became more sought after than the hyperperum (despite its name, which originally meant “purer than pure”). What was more, Genoese and Venetians not only coined false money (so-called hyperpera from Pera, Crete, or Negroponte) but appropriated public revenue, and controlled the gold and grain markets. How could the emperor mint sound currency when he had no access to the gold mines of Macedonia? Half-empty streets, and a population “ill-clad, miserable and poor”—such was the impression of a traveler to Constantinople in 1438.18 There was no more trade, no more industry. The acclimatization of the mulberry tree and the silkworm in Italy, and the valuable textile industry that resulted, ended the ancient and profitable lead in silk manufacture on which Byzantium’s fortunes had been founded. The decline of Byzantium could be glimpsed, in early symbolic form perhaps, in the fashions adopted by the still-gilded Byzantine youth, which now, however, wore “headdresses in the Latin style with Persian and Turkish costume.”19

The Byzantine empire, assailed from far and near, withdrew into itself. The basileus scarcely controlled more than the two cities of Constantinople itself, contained by mighty ramparts now too vast for it, and Thessalonika, where no more was now heard of the fabulous St. Dimitri markets held in front of the city’s Golden Gate.20 It was a virtually deserted town when the Venetians annexed it without compunction in 1423 only to lose it seven years later to the Turks. Byzantium by this time consisted only of the capital city, the miraculously still-beating heart of a great body that was now long dead.

That the Italians should not have been more sensitive to this distress, which was to their initial advantage but would also shortly lead to their downfall, is rather curious. But there are plenty of curious things in history. To the merchant, the potential two birds in the bush mattered less than the one in the hand: business, markets, control of key routes—whatever the political and economic disarray of the Black Sea, the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, or the Greek islands. Genoese and Venetians, warring brothers, never found far apart, still controlled the Black Sea and had established themselves in the Aegean: Venice already held Negroponte (the island of Euboea) from which Venetian “settlers” were exporting grain, and Candia; before long, after 1479, she would hold Cyprus as well, partly by agreement with the Genoese businessmen. Genoa possessed the island of Chios, the most remarkable of these western colonies in the Levant.

Eventually, the wholesale and extraordinary decline of Byzantium enabled the Turks, who now controlled Asia Minor, to advance through the Dardanelles (1356). Having established themselves at Adrianople, they pressed their advantage across the Balkans, and a century later, in 1453, they took Constantinople. Too many historians have underplayed this event—but it would be the foundation for centuries to come of the great might of the Ottoman empire, as Italy would before long find to her cost. But was there any reason to be apprehensive at the time?

In those days, ships and galleys were valued in terms of the number and quality of the troops they carried (slingers and archers) and the skill of their crews. On May 29, 1416, Piero Loredano and the Venetian fleet had won a crushing victory over the Turkish navy at Gallipoli. It was but a short step from there to underestimating the enemy. True, the conditions of naval warfare were about to change, with artillery being loaded directly on to ships. And Constantinople, a city shaped by the sea, would help the Turks in their pursuit of maritime strength, as Venice was to realize during the first Turkish war (1463–1479), which turned to her disadvantage.

In 1453, however, all that lay in the future. Venice had been kept informed by its “secret services” and knew about Turkish designs on Constantinople ahead of time. As early as February measures had been taken, which were later to be extended, to protect the Byzantine capital, “of which it might be said that it belongs to us,” as one reads in the debates of the Senate.21 Yet, in the event, Venice’s warships and galleys did not venture beyond Modon and Negroponte respectively. The speed of the Turkish victory had rendered any intervention futile. A deal had to be struck. A Venetian “orator,” Bartolomeo Marcello, was sent to Constantinople, where he obtained the release of 117 Venetians, 47 of them patricians, all of them merchants, and some of them compromised in the heroic defense of the city. He also recovered their property, and all for 7,000 ducats.22 So it was perfectly feasible, and certainly worth trying, to coexist with the infidel victor. In any case, how could Venice live without the Turks, without their cheap raw materials and the huge markets they represented? By April 1454, the Signoria was coming to terms with the Sultan. The instructions given to the Venetian ambassador were quite clear: “Et dispositio nostra est habere bonam pacem et amicitiam cum domino Imperatore Turcorum” (“Our intention is to have a good peace and friendship with the lord Emperor of the Turks”).23

Italian Footholds on the Coast of Islam and Ventures Inland

The Crusades had apparently ended with the defeat of the West and thus of Italy. St. Louis was taken prisoner in Egypt in 1245 and died outside Tunis in 1270. Constantinople became a Greek city again in 1261 and, with the fall of Acre, Christendom lost its last significant position on the Asiatic mainland. But the waters of the Mediterranean, especially the eastern reaches, were still held by Christian sailors and traders. And this victory canceled out everything else.

In practice, in economic terms, ancient privileges persisted unaltered, in particular those of Italian shipping and trade. In the late fourteenth century, the Italians still came and went as they pleased in the ports and markets of Syria and Egypt, where the Levant’s outlets to the Mediterranean and western markets were now established: Tripoli in Syria, Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, Alexandria, and later Cairo. Whether along the coast, or in the great caravan rendezvous further inland, Italian and other western merchants, while they might not always get their own way, certainly made their presence felt, buying up the goods of eastern merchants, whose monopoly stopped at, or near, the coast. Thus they obtained drugs, dyestuffs, pepper and spices, cotton thread and fabric, silk, rice, and beans. Since interest and curiosity had very quickly been aroused about the source of the most valuable of these goods—pepper and spices—an expedition was launched by the Vivaldi brothers from Genoa, out beyond Gibraltar and into the Atlantic, but it ended with obscure loss of life and possessions, somewhere on the African coast. Their attempt was made in 1291, the same year as the fall of Acre. Were they searching for the route discovered two hundred years later by Vasco da Gama?

The Italian presence in North Africa followed a similar pattern. All the coastal towns were involved: Tripoli in Barbary, Tunis, Bône, Bougie, Algiers, Oran, and Ceuta. Inland, there were Italian merchants to be found alongside Marseillais and Catal...