Venice’s fortunes, like those of the Zen family, have been inextricably linked to the Islamic world at least since the eighth century, when her merchants began trading with Alexandria. In this long-running tale of interdependence, the Adriatic city was a gateway to the Middle East, giving Muslims a taste of Europeans as businessmen rather than Crusaders.
The Venetian Republic was “an entrepôt for the importation into Europe of profitable luxury goods such as carpets and textiles, and opened a European door to the Islamic cultures that created those goods,” writes Walter Denny, an art professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, in the catalogue for “Venice and the Islamic World.” This landmark exhibition of art, ceramics, metalwork and fabrics ran at the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Venice’s own Palazzo Ducale last year.
Inside the Muslim cities of Alexandria, Constantinople (later renamed Istanbul), Damascus, Acre, Aleppo, Trebizond and Tabriz, the Republic created mini-Venices, commercial enclaves overseen by a bailo, or consul, complete with churches, priests, merchants, doctors, barbers, bakers, cooks, tailors, apothecaries and silversmiths.
“Abroad, Venetian diplomats and merchants traveled throughout the Islamic world, from the Nile Delta to Syria to Constantinople to Azerbaijan,” notes Denny, “and their relazioni or reports to the Venetian authorities still serve as important documentation of Islamic politics, history, economics and art.”
Without Muslim trade, Venice would simply not have existed. Instead of the powerful maritime republic, “La Serenissima,” that dominated Mediterranean commerce from the 12th to the 16th century, the lagoon settlement would likely have remained a fishing village.
But of course, there was trade—arguably the greatest the world had known. Silk, spices, carpets, ceramics, pearls, crystal ewers and precious metals arrived in Venice from the East, while salt, wood, linen, wool, velvet, Baltic amber, Italian coral, fine cloth and slaves went to Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and Persia.
“Who could count the many shops so well furnished that they also seem warehouses,” marveled the Milanese priest Pietro Casola on a 1494 visit to Venice’s Rialto, “with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every color and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of aromatics, spices and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax!” (Presumably, the priest was happy to locate wax suitable for votive candles.) It was a somewhat one-sided business, since trade with Venice was a relatively minor aspect of the Mamluk and Ottoman economies. Nonetheless, the Republic was important enough to be the only Christian city to appear on Ibn Khaldun’s 14th-century world map. Yet for Venice, on the other hand, Muslim trade represented fully half the Republic’s revenues.
Christian pilgrims flocked to the city from across Europe to sign on for package tours to the Holy Land. These visitors were so critical to Venice’s economy that they were invited into the Palazzo Ducale to be individually embraced by the doge himself, and sailings were sometimes delayed on purpose to force the faithful to linger longer, and spend more money, before departing for Jaffa. On separate galleys, Venetian merchants collected Muslim pilgrims in Tunis, Djerba and Alexandria and brought them to the Levant en route to Makkah.
Numerous Arab words were absorbed into Italian, including trade terms such as doana (customs) and tariffa (duty) and the names of luxury goods such as sofa, divan and damasco. A gold ducat was a zecchino, taken from the Arabic word sikka, or mint.
As the chief European center for publishing, Venice also printed many Arabic texts in Latin and Italian translation, including the Canon, the standard medical reference book by Persian physician Ibn Sina (called Avicenna in the West), and commentaries on Aristotle by 12th-century Córdoban philosopher Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroës). Even the first printed text of the Qur’an was published in Venice in 1537–1538 by enterprising local booksellers aiming to crack Arabic-speaking markets. Riddled with errors, the edition proved a dismal failure, but it did inspire translation into Italian in 1547, according to Stefano Carboni, the curator for the Met exhibition.
“From the last years of the 15th century onward, Venetian publishers printed Muslim treatises on medicine, philosophy, astronomy and mathematics,” explains Giandomenico Romanelli, the director of the city’s Correr Museum, an extensive repository of art, ceramics, maps and manuscripts. Elaborately tooled leather bookbindings made in Venice were modeled after those of Istanbul, Tabriz and elsewhere in the Muslim world, he notes. In publishing, trade, diplomatic relations and pilgrimages, “Venice was the hinge between East and West,” says Romanelli.
The recent exhibition was designed to illustrate Venice’s status as a “privileged partner”of the Islamic world, says Carboni, who was himself born near the Rialto and has devoted the past two decades to studying the artistic exchanges between Venice and the East.“Venice is usually associated with Byzantium, not the Islamic world,” he explains. “But I wanted to surprise the public with the breadth of artistic, cultural, mercantile and diplomatic connections.”
Carboni is quick to point out that the key to the pragmatic Venetians’ trading success was that they never regarded themselves as superior. “Muslims were understood simply as figures in the wider world with whom it was necessary to do business,” he says. “Also, the Venetians were far more tolerant from the religious point of view than the rest of Europe.”
For centuries, the Christian Republic carried on a diplomatic high-wire act, balancing competing allegiances to Muslim rulers and the Catholic Church, essentially doing whatever was necessary to keep commerce as free and unhindered as possible. Even during the Crusades, the Venetians continued trading with Islamic partners. The Fourth Crusade, in fact, famously turned into an opportunity for Venice to attack the Byzantine empire, not Muslims. After the sack of Christian Constantinople in 1204, Venetians brought back incalculable treasures, including the four bronze horses now in the basilica museum. (The ones on the roof are copies.) From time to time, the Vatican placed restrictions on trade with Muslims. But the Venetians, eager to assert their independence from papal authority, circumvented the bans by trading surreptitiously through Cyprus and Crete.
The Mamluks, who ruled a vast stretch of territory from Egypt to Syria from 1250 till 1517, relied on the Venetian navy to protect their coasts, according to Deborah Howard. Although diplomatic relations were generally warm, the sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri personally placed chains on vice-consul Pietro Zen in 1511 and imprisoned him in Cairo for holding secret talks with Shah Ismael, the first Safavid ruler of Persia. The Venetians were seeking a Persian alliance to contain the expanding Ottoman empire, which did indeed end Mamluk power six years later, in 1517.
Carboni acknowledges that Venetians had a “love-hate relationship” with the Ottomans, who, unlike the land-locked Mamluks, nurtured aspirations to usurp Venetian control of the eastern Mediterranean. Despite several bitterly fought conflicts—notably over Corfu in 1537, Cyprus in 1571, Candia (Crete) from 1646 till 1669 and Morea between 1684 and 1716)—overall there were many more years of peaceful trading than war, he says, and it was Napoleon, not the Ottomans, who finally conquered Venice in 1797.
Like the ambitious French emperor, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453, had a hunger for world recognition. “He wanted to be acknowledged by the European powers as the equal of emperors and kings,” says Carboni. To spread his fame, Mehmet requested that the Venetian government send an artist to immortalize him in portraits and a sculptor to forge medallions with his image.
The Venetians thought it would be in their interest to please the conqueror of Constantinople, so they selected Gentile Bellini, the most prominent painter of the time, and sent him off in 1479. In the nearly two years he resided at the Ottoman court, Bellini painted numerous portraits that ultimately left their marks on local artists and miniaturist painters in Istanbul and as far away as Isfahan and Tabriz.
Mehmet’s publicity campaign succeeded beyond his dreams. The Bellini portraits have spawned so many copies on everything from book covers and posters to banknotes, stamps and comic books that, according to the Turkish Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk, “any educated Turk must have seen them hundreds, even thousands, of times.” They embody the iconic image of an Ottoman sultan “the way Che Guevara’s portrait incarnates that of a revolutionary,”
Pamuk observes in the French magazine Connaissance des Arts. After Mehmet’s death, his son and successor, Bayezid II, who warred with the Venetians over their southern Greek territory of Morea, sold Bellini’s portraits in the Istanbul bazaar to help finance the construction of a mosque complex.
When it came to Muslim artists and craftsmen settling in Venice, however, the locals wanted to limit the competition; they allowed in very few artisans. Instead, the city imported impressive quantities of luxury goods made overseas, including Mamluk and Persian carpets, Syrian and Egyptian glass, Iznik porcelain and incised metal bowls and ewers from Syria.
From Venice, carpets were sold throughout Europe. Cardinal Wolsey, first minister to the English King Henry VIII, was “a pathological carpet collector,” who pressured diplomats to give him dozens as gifts, says Denny. Venetians bought raw silk from the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Persia, manufactured elegant velvet caftans with Ottoman-style floral designs and sold them in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Muslim world. To combat the Venetian monopoly on luxury textiles, the 16th-century Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha promoted new techniques to produce silk brocades and velvets that are “among the supreme artistic achievements of Ottoman art,” according to Denny.
Ultimately, the development of the pedal-powered loom and spinning wheel in Europe led to the export of so much cheap cloth that it constituted what one economist called an early example of product dumping in Islamic markets. In the 15th century, Cairo historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi exhorted Muslims to abandon low-quality European fabrics and wear local clothing instead.
A similar give-and-take process occurred in glass production. Recognizing that the glassmakers of Syria and Egypt had no serious rivals in Europe, the Venetians began importing raw glass, as well as broken glass (cullet) and plant soda ash from the Levant around the 13th century to copy Muslim designs at home. So successful was the transfer that certain enameled and gilt beakers, decorated with camels and desert plants and once believed to have originated in Syria, turned out to be Venetian-made. By the middle of the 15th century, Venetian glassmakers had perfected a technique to produce cristallo glass, a clear, colorless creation, free of defects, that successfully imitated expensive rock crystal. Ottoman artisans soon adapted the technique in the manufacture of Iznik porcelain. Thus a process that had begun with Venetians borrowing styles and materials from Islamic craftsmen came full circle with Ottoman ceramists building on Venetian expertise.
As cargoes of carpets, glass, silks and porcelains filled the harbor, it was obvious how Venetian fortunes and spirits faced East. The sheer energy of the commerce driving the city was a spectacle and entertainment to behold. The scale of trade was staggering; the sight of countless ships coming and going was breathtaking. From his quayside house overlooking the Riva degli Schiavoni, the 14th-century poet Petrarch, on a three-month visit from Florence, marveled at ships the size of “floating mountains,” the square-rigged, round-hulled cogs that boasted five decks and a hold. Four centuries later, the 18th-century painter Canaletto found the harbor just as vibrant, filling his canvasses with dozens of ships at anchor and a forest of masts.
Overseas, trading posts known as fondacos (funduqs, khans or wakalas in Arabic) served as home bases for Venetian merchants. First mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BC, these caravanserais eventually stretched from Spain to China and are illustrated in the Maqamat, a 13th-century compendium of travelers’ tales by Muhammad Ali al-Hariri. Constructed around a large square courtyard with a well, the two-or three-story structure had colonnaded arcades with storage rooms for goods and stables for pack animals on the ground floor and rooms for travelers on the upper levels. Typically, the fondaco’s single great gate was locked at night, both to protect merchants from robbery and to keep close watch on them. Although most of the fondacos decayed or were destroyed long ago, Acre’s Khan al-Ifrani, with its huge Gothic arches, is one that still exists; it has been converted into private residences.
Over the centuries, Venetian enclaves expanded around the fondacos. In Constantinople, where the Venetian quarter was located near the spice market, the residents built three churches over the course of 400 years from the 11th to the 15th century. The former house of the bailo is now—still— the Istanbul residence of the Italian consul-general. In Trebizond on the Black Sea, the Venetians built a church, houses, warehouses, quay and loggia.
Despite treaties intended to protect them, the Venetians were occasionally held prisoner in their fondacos, and one 17th-century bailo was hanged in Istanbul. Instead of retaliating with sanctions, the Venetians continued business as usual. “The boundlessly cynical Venetians never let morality, religion or ideology get in the way of making money,” Romanelli dryly observes.
In contrast to the extensive Venetian settlements in cities of the Muslim world, there were no permanent Muslim embassies in Venice. Ambassadors generally came for brief annual stays ranging from several days to a few weeks, according to Maria Pia Pedani, a specialist on Ottoman history at the University of Venice. When Mamluk envoy Taghribidi arrived from Cairo with his retinue of 20 attendants for an unusual 10-month round of treaty negotiations in 1506 and 1507, he caused a sensation as he was escorted around the city by pages and macebearers. Taghribidi and other Muslim diplomats were housed on the Venetian island of Giudecca so they could be controlled and watched, says Pedani.
Before the creation of a temporary funduq for Muslims in the late 16th century, merchants visiting Venice and a handful of artisans stayed at inns near the Rialto. But even when the Fondaco dei Turchi opened in 1621 in the Santa Croce quarter, across the Grand Canal from the Jewish ghetto, it housed fewer than 100 merchants, including Turks, Bosnians, Albanians and Persians. An imposing, three-story building with two tiers of colonnaded arcades surrounding an inner courtyard, the Fondaco dei Turchi had been modeled after Middle Eastern funduqs. Above the ground-floor warehouse were living rooms, a bath and a prayer room. Muslim visitors were free to come and go during the day, but were locked in at night. The former fondaco now houses the city’s natural history museum.
While Venetians respected Turkish merchants, they could not admit that the Ottomans possessed a well-developed culture of their own. “It was only after the Ottomans were defeated at Vienna in 1683 that we could begin to acknowledge that the Turks were not barbarians and had produced literature and art of great finesse and profound reflection,” says Bellingeri. “Once the Ottomans ceased to be a military threat, we could begin seeing them as equals.”
And, occasionally, as objects for ridicule. Carlo Goldoni, the 18th-century Venetian playwright, wrote a number of works poking fun at Turks and Persians—yet mocking Venetians in equal measure. In “The Impresario of Izmir,” an unwitting Turk comes to Venice to organize an opera company and becomes so embroiled in the quarrels of backbiting divas and a nasty castrato that he returns home in frustration without a troupe.
Acquired by the library in 1797 as part of an extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, Arabic and Islamic books, coins and objects donated by Giacomo Nani, Venice’s chief superintendent of naval affairs, the Iskandarnama is a curious East-meets-West cultural grab-bag. It contains not merely the highly embellished exploits of a legendary Muslim version of Alexander the Great, but also an account of the Prophet Muhammad’s journey to heaven, episodes from the Persian Book of Kings, or Shahnama, the signs of the zodiac and the planets as well as conversations between the book’s poet-author Taj al-Din Ibrahim ibn Khidr Ahmadi and a friend.
The costume book, donated to the library by the patrician bibliophile Giralamo Contarini in 1843, could not be more different. Bound in inexpensive cardboard and about the size of a trade paperback, this popular edition was published in Istanbul but features Italian captions, indicating it was published for export. It presents a cross-section of Ottoman society with 62 realistic portraits of individuals characterized by the vividly colored clothes they wear.
The turbaned sultan Bayezid I, “the Thunderbolt,” strikes an unusually meditative pose in a blue robe and sleeveless purple tunic. Regally attired in a dark pink tunic dress with gold belt and brocaded cape, the unnamed wife of a sultan sports red lipstick, painted eyebrows and a crown surmounted by a broad fan. There’s a court page in a long orange caftan and domed hat, a head gardener all in green, a hunter with rifle, horn, axe and plumed hat. On one page, a barefoot Hindu pilgrim with a wispy beard and fringed cape carries a stick to support him on his begging rounds; another illustration shows a sword-bearing soldier with a leopard skin slung around his shoulders and a human head dangling from his belt. In addition to the court treasurer in sober brown caftan and a pair of eunuch harem guards, there’s also a jaunty idyll of three women in a rowboat.
As modest as the Iskandarnama is opulent, the costume book strikes me as yet one more means through which the Venetians were bent on acquiring knowledge, culture and wealth from the Islamic world. Collectors like Contarini and Nani, mapmakers like Ramusio and Membré, explorers and diplomats like Marco Polo and the Zen family, all depended on Muslim trade to make their fortunes. As Zorzi reopens the shutters on one of the world’s most glorious perspectives, with black gondolas bobbing in the silvery water, I wonder how much of this image would have remained a mirage without the matchless Venetian ambition to embrace the risks and possibilities of trading goods and ideas with the strangers of the East.
written by Richard Covington
source : http://saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200802/east.meets.west.in.venice.htm
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