Brokering Empire

Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul

E. Natalie Rothman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801463129
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

In Brokering Empire, E. Natalie Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian-Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant.Rothman argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. Rothman begins her story in Venice's bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state's efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutual transformation. The story ends with Venice's diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. Rothman's new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.

PART I

Mediation

1

Trans-Imperial Subjects as Supplicants and as Brokers

The goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.”

—Michel de Certeau (1988, xiv–xv)

In early August 1573, word reached the Holy Office of a teenage slave named Zorzi who had run away from the house of his patrician master.1 According to the initial deposition, Zorzi, formerly a Muslim, had been baptized and had received communion and other holy sacraments. But now, having gone into hiding in the attic of a house “where several Turks live,” he had allegedly returned to Islam (“tornato a far Turco”) “having shaved his head and dressed as a Turk in order to go secretly to Turkey.” Five days after Zorzi’s escape, his master, Marcantonio Falier, visited Zorzi’s place of hiding.2 He was met by an uncooperative landlord, a Greek commercial broker named Francesco di Demetri Lettino but better known by his nickname, Frangia, and his wife, Giulia. The couple claimed complete ignorance of Zorzi’s whereabouts, but Falier persisted in demanding that his slave be returned. That evening Frangia sent Zorzi to spend the night at a friend’s house nearby, and the following morning Zorzi was unceremoniously returned to his master.3

Despite this “happy ending” from Falier’s point of view, and the apparent restoration of Venetian social order, the Holy Office did not drop the case. Rather, it arrested Frangia and opened a lengthy investigation, in the course of which the inquisitors interrogated not only Zorzi but also Frangia, Giulia, and their eighteen-year old son, as well as neighbors and friends of the family.4 Their depositions reveal the deep tensions between how inquisitors and witnesses drew moral, religious, and social boundaries between Venetians and Turks, Christians and Muslims, masters and slaves, and merchants and brokers. They also underscore the important role of diffuse networks of trans-imperial subjects in defining belonging and foreignness in early modern Venice.

Frangia’s inquisitorial trial is exceptional among the archival traces left by early modern Venetian commercial brokers. The overwhelming majority of documents conserved in the archives of the Venetian brokers’ guild concern legal attempts to regulate the activities of commercial brokers in the market. Indeed, the Venetian state entrusted brokers with the important task of mediating between foreign and local merchants. Venetian law envisioned brokers—ideally, if not in practice—as loyal Venetian citizens, impartial and vigilant agents of the state, who should note down their transactions in a special notebook, collect taxes and duties from foreign merchants, and protect the latter’s interests vis-à-vis less than scrupulous trading partners.

Unlike the archives of the brokers’ guild, examined later in this chapter, the record left by Frangia’s inquisitorial trial underscores the extent to which the marketplace and the home were—and are—intermeshed and the importance of domestic arrangements and personal ties in forging alliances between commercial brokers and their clients. Indeed, these testimonies reveal a complex set of interests, hierarchies of authority, and modes of interaction between locals, localized foreigners (such as Frangia himself), and Ottoman sojourners. Such interactions clearly violated the mythic representation of a perfected Venetian social order premised on Christian morality and civic unity in the face of religious and political Others. Moreover, rather than bringing into contact the supposedly preexisting categories of “Venetian” and “Turk,” Frangia and his household members were active participants in shaping these categories.

The unique position of Frangia and other trans-imperial subjects in the Venetian commercial sphere is well attested in the unfolding testimonies in his trial in summer 1573. The testimonies—including those by Frangia, Giulia, Zorzi, the Ottoman merchants, and their slaves—underscore the embedding of such localized foreigners in extensive social networks in Venice and beyond. As important, they suggest the transgressive nature of the witnesses’ domestic arrangements, at least from the point of view of Frangia’s patrician interrogators.5 Such arrangements belie a simple parsing of their milieu into “Venetians” and “Turks,” and reveal the role of long-settled émigrés, such as Frangia and Giulia, in facilitating a range of interactions across linguistic, religious, and juridical boundaries.

Indeed, key evidence regarding the prevalence of transgressive domestic arrangements was provided by the escaped slave himself. In his testimony, Zorzi claimed that he had planned to go back to the Ottoman Empire in the hope of finding his Christian Bulgarian parents, whom he had not seen since he had been kidnapped as a young boy. He was encouraged to escape from his Venetian master, he said, by several friends in similar circumstances. All of them had purportedly managed to escape Venice on board a ship heading for Izmir just a few days earlier. They were all aided not only by Ottoman merchants and their slaves but also by Frangia’s family.6

From the beginning of the proceedings, then, Zorzi presented himself as reluctant to abide by the rules governing Venetian domestic slavery. Rather than endorse his new identity as a baptized slave, he asserted his wish to return to his ur-identity—not that of an Ottoman Muslim convert but that of a kidnapped Christian boy. To that end, he related how he had recruited an extended network of accomplices, crossing spatial, social, and religious boundaries. His professed desire to reunite with his parents was, moreover, a powerful indictment against his current servile state, challenging the legality of his very enslavement.7 To befriend Frangia’s tenants, the Ottoman merchants, and secure their assistance in his escape, Zorzi implied he was even willing to “reactivate” his Muslim past and resume Muslim bodily practices such as having his head shaved and wearing a white turban.8 It is impossible to determine what exactly transpired between Zorzi and his Ottoman-Turkish hosts in Frangia’s house, but we can assume that Zorzi was convincing enough in invoking his Muslim background for the merchants to collaborate in his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to return to the Ottoman Empire.

Just as Zorzi’s testimony pokes holes in patrician representations of a perfected Venetian social and religious order, other witnesses similarly undermine notions of a stable domestic order. Throughout the trial, Frangia sought to present himself as the master of an orderly household and to assert his authority over his wife, children, and tenants. But two revelations seriously compromised his claims to authority: that the keys to his house were actually kept by his Ottoman tenants and that as a broker-landlord he was utterly dependent on the translation skills of his tenants’ slaves because he himself did not speak a word of Turkish.9 Not only did these slaves possess vital communicative skills, but their friendship with a diverse group of young slaves, servants, and apprentices across the city gave them broad social access, belying their presumed isolation. Furthermore, these slaves apparently exerted enough authority to conduct Zorzi’s ceremonial head shaving. This act transgressed not only religious but social hierarchies. It mirrored and reversed Zorzi’s baptism by his patrician master only eighteen months earlier, an important ritual enactment of ownership and supposed spiritual transformation.10

Thus, to act as a broker, Frangia depended on a much larger network of intermediaries. The testimonies of his wife, his son, and his neighbor reveal the extent of this network. The position of Frangia’s wife, Giulia, emerges as particularly ambiguous in that she only partially adhered to the religious and moral boundaries sanctioned by Venetian officialdom. Supposedly subordinate to her husband’s commands, she deftly negotiated with Zorzi’s master and knowingly lied to him about his slave’s whereabouts. More broadly, she was in daily contact with her Ottoman tenants about eating arrangements and may have tacitly collaborated with them not only in Zorzi’s case but in hiding other runaway slaves in her house as well.11

The inquisitorial record further allows us to explore some Venetian officials’ implicit concerns regarding brokers’ persons and profession. From the start, Frangia’s dual social position as both a Venetian civil servant and an ethnic Greek could raise suspicion of political as well as religious subversion.12 As if his Greekness were not enough, Frangia rented rooms to Muslim Ottoman merchants in clear violation of laws that forbade anyone, save for licensed hoteliers, to lodge foreigners. Brokers were specifically warned against doing so in an effort to monitor foreigners’ presence in the city and to secure revenue from the tax collected through licensed hoteliers. This was a repeated point of contention because brokers were ideally placed to offer newly arrived foreign merchants lodgings and other services.13 Brokers, in turn, frequently claimed ignorance of the law and insisted that they were in fact doing merchants a favor by welcoming them into their homes.

The ban on brokers’ lodging of foreign clients was increasingly linked to religious concerns and to restrictions on Muslim Ottoman merchants’ freedom of residence to curb ”scandals” occasioned by the cohabitation of Christians and Muslims (see chap. 6). Indeed, beyond an obvious concern over Zorzi’s planned escape and ostensible apostasy, inquisitors questioned the moral well-being of Frangia’s family itself and located it precisely in the crossing of social and spatial boundaries. During the interrogations, inquisitors repeatedly asked Frangia, Giulia, and their son about the nature of their interactions with their Ottoman Muslim tenants. Inquisitors wanted to know who cooked the tenants’ food, what kind of food it was (in particular, whether tenants ate meat on Friday, a clear sign of religious transgression), and whether the family and the tenants had ever eaten together. Giulia was particularly careful in her replies, assuring her interrogators that no contact through food (let alone through the sociability presupposed and reenforced by commensality) had taken place between her family and her tenants. Concern over food restrictions and their transgression typified attempts by the Holy Office to expose and uproot heresy, and Giulia was clearly conscious of the link between the violation of Catholic food restrictions and ostensible heresy.14 Her detailed answer about what her tenant had given her to cook for dinner on Friday evening when Zorzi was discovered in the attic suggests she was well aware of what her interrogators were after: “He eats meat every day, and we don’t eat meat, neither on Wednesday nor on Friday for any reason, and it is true that he gave one of my little girls, who is four years old, a pumpkin roll, and I told her not to eat anything with grease or meat, so the cat ate it in the pantry.”15 Giulia thus emphasized that she deemed the food that her tenant had given her little daughter worthy only of the cat and in the pantry, out of sight. On the other hand, the fact that her tenant offered food to the girl at all may well suggest that affective ties between the tenants and property-owners in this case went beyond polite greeting on the staircase.

As this case suggests, brokers operated at the interface between the state and trans-imperial subjects, between the mercantile and artisanal sectors of Venetian society, between government institutions and the market, and between rich and poor (see also the frontispiece). They were of key importance to the very constitution of these categories, their boundaries, and their possible mediation. Moreover, against patrician understandings o...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Usage, Names, and Dates
• Introduction
• PART I Mediation
• PART II Conversion
• PART III Translation
• PART IV Articulation
• Afterword
• Appendixes
• Bibliography