In his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, the Roman historian Livy describes the Adriatic littoral of Italy as importuosum, devoid of natural harbours. Anyone who has driven along the coast can confirm his impression: to this day, the landscape of the region is characterized by low, sandy beaches, punctuated by the occasional hilly promontory and man-made harbour. But if our hypothetical traveller reached the central part of the peninsula, where the calf of the Italian boot would be, they would witness a different situation, as the towering mass of Mount Conero replaces the smooth coastline. From the highway, the promontory looks like an extension of the inland hills, continuing for a couple of kilometres before ending abruptly into the sea, where it forms a bay pointing towards the north-east. To the first settlers of this area the natural harbour, able to shield passing ships from the treacherous currents of the Adriatic, must have looked like the ideal place for a city. It is also no surprise that the city they founded was named after the “elbow” of the Adriatic coast created by Mount Conero—“Ankon” for the ancient Greeks, Ancona for us. If the hypothetical driver decided to enter the city, somehow got past the busy traffic still surrounding the port, and after parking wandered around the maze of alleys in the north side of the town, he would eventually run across a small commemorative inscription, placed there by the town council in 1956, which reads:
In front of this palace […] stood the ancient church of Santa Maria di Porta Cipriana, later known as Sant’Anna dei Greci Uniti, which was destroyed during the Second World War.
Turning their head, our traveller would notice the sculpture of a double-headed eagle, what looks to be the statue of a lion, and the corroded remnants of a stone frieze. Scattered around the entrance of what is now a geriatric hospital, those few stones are the only tangible proof that decades ago the building was a Greek church, which in the sixteenth century constituted the centre of a prosperous community of Greek merchants, artisans and sailor who sought their fortunes in the emerging marketplace of Ancona.
This book will look at how and why those Greeks moved from their native lands to Ancona in the early sixteenth century, show the personal connections they forged with each other, how these were maintained and, when the social and religious circumstances radically changed at the end of the century, how they eventually broke down. Their migration to Ancona was only one manifestation of the high degree of human mobility that characterized the Euro-Mediterranean region in the sixteenth century. As late as 1579, when its period of international relevance was already coming to a close, the city was praised for its “great multitude of strangely-clothed Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Moors, Armenians, Hungarians, Poles and Bohemians, and the infinite variety of wonders brought there from overseas”. 1 A brief glance at the documents preserved in the state archive of Ancona will show how all sorts of people reached the city to set up shop, sell their merchandise or use its harbour: ship owners from Ragusa carried Albanian bishops as passengers, while Jewish merchants tried to smuggle cargos of weapons to the Ottoman side by disguising them as soap; Florentine traders executed the last wills of deceased Armenian merchants who owed money to their Turkish partners using Greek and Jewish interpreters; and Flemish financiers offered insurance policies to those Chiot and Tuscan, English or Dutch vessels that dared to cross the sea all the way to Constantinople or Tripoli to sell woollen cloths. 2 These people moved, either in groups or by themselves, and often spent entire years away from home. Their motivations were often linked to commerce but in other cases, military and economic strife had forcefully driven them away from their homes. Whatever reason they had for moving, migrants tended (and still do) to associate according to certain markers of language and religion or, in more recent times, citizenship of a sovereign state. 3 No man is an island, and this was particularly true in the deeply communitarian environment of sixteenth-century Europe. 4
The aim of this book is to offer an analysis of one of these migrant groups, the Greeks. It will consider the multiplicity of factors that contributed to the emergence of migratory waves in the early modern period, and then move on to explore the dynamics of formation, consolidation and dissolution of the migrant communities, and how specific local elements (political, demographic, mercantile) influenced those developments. In order to lay the ground for the following chapters, this introduction will define and introduce some key concepts: the importance of local circumstances; the migrant community as a spontaneous association of individuals beyond its structural manifestations; the migrant as the bearer of a set of identity markers (religious, ethnic, local) that are to at least a certain extent incompatible with those of the majority of the host population, and possibly of the other fellow migrants as well. In short, this introduction will try to answer the following questions: why Ancona? What do we mean when we talk of migrant communities? And what did it mean to be a Greek in Italy in the sixteenth century?
The Case of Ancona: Specificities and Relatability
So far, the study of early modern migrations in urban contexts has focused on major metropolises such as London, Venice or Rome. 5 But despite the undeniable importance of those cities, it needs to be kept in mind that each and every one of them, and other cities of similar size, represents a unique case study, so much so as to be of little or no representative value for the study of the wider phenomenon. Venice in the sixteenth century was the capital of a multi-ethnic maritime empire, and one of the most important nodes of international trade, a huge city inhabited by thousands of Italians, Greeks, Dalmatians, Albanians, Jews coming from the east as well as from the west, Germans, Turks and many more, due to its traditional role as the hinge between Italy, the eastern Mediterranean and central Europe. During the same years, London was emerging as an important financial and commercial marketplace, while also becoming a rallying point of European Protestantism, mostly due to the anti-Spanish policies of its monarchs. 6 Meanwhile, Rome remained the undisputed capital of Catholic Christianity, a huge and chaotic city placed at the centre of a religious bureaucracy that spanned from Belarus to Canada. 7 Trying to assess the true extent of the migratory phenomenon in more ordinary early modern cities through the lenses of these metropolises would be like attempting to understand migrant communities in the towns of the American mid-west, while focusing exclusively on downtown Chicago. These three cities, and others such as Amsterdam or Constantinople, were located at the intersection of huge socio-economic trends, which affected the lives of individuals and the development of their administrative, demographic and political structures in ways that were simply impossible in the vast majority of contemporary urban centres.
The case of Ancona on the other hand offers a more realistic example of how migration and community could have developed in a more ordinary urban settlement. The impact of the historical phenomena that intersected in Ancona during the sixteenth century—things such as the Catholic Reformation, the ebb and flow of Mediterranean commerce, or the slow centralization of the Papal States—was of course significant and visible. But they affected the local society in ways that resembled those of other secondary centres, due to the city’s size, its population and its administrative structures. Unlike places like Venice and Rome, where long-distance mass migration was not only normal but inherent in their role as centres of commerce and religion on a global scale, migration to Ancona was not structural, but only connected to the cycles of commercial revival and decline that characterized its medieval and early modern history. An examination of the processes and patterns of arrival, settlement and integration of the Greeks in Ancona could th...