Venice's Intimate Empire , livre ebook

VENICE’S INTIMATE EMPIRE
FAMILY LIFE AND SCHOLARSHIP IN THE RENAISSANCE MEDITERRANEAN
E RIN M AGLAQUE
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
 
 
 
To my grandparents
 

C ONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1.   Venetian Families 2.   Documenting the Mediterranean World 3.   Gender and Identity between Venice and the Mediterranean 4.   Becoming Istrian 5.   Colonial Governance and Mythology on Skiathos 6.   On the Borders of Italy Conclusion Appendix I Appendix II Notes Bibliography Index
 
I LLUSTRATIONS
1  Map of Bembo and Coppo’s Mediterranean world
2  Bembo family tree
3  Coppo family tree
4  The opening page of Giovanni Bembo’s Latin letter
5  A page of Giovanni Bembo’s sylloge
6  Pietro Coppo’s map of Greece, Crete, and the Aegean Islands
7  Giovanni Bembo’s annotations to his geographical encyclopedia
8  Pietro Coppo’s map of Istria
 
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank the many friends, colleagues, and institutions that made this book possible to write. The initial phase of this project was made possible by the generous funding of the Clarendon Fund. I have since enjoyed three wonderful years as a junior research fellow at Oriel College writing the book. Thank you to Moira Wallace and John Elliott for making that possible, and for welcoming me so warmly to Oriel. I spent a semester at Harvard in 2015, which proved critical for further researching and revising the book manuscript. I owe a great deal to Jim Hankins for his support, and to the Lauro de Bosis Committee for making this possible.
My research in Italy was generously supported by ERASMUS, the Oxford History Faculty, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the Bibliographical Society, the Old Members’ Trust of University College, and the John Fell Fund. At the Cini, many thanks to Massimo Busetto and Lucia Sardo for making my stays on the island so enjoyable and productive. I am also grateful to the archivists and librarians at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, Biblioteca Estense, Biblioteca Marciana, Biblioteca Trivulziana, Houghton Library, and Smith College for their assistance. I am particularly grateful to the archivists at the Archivio di Stato in Trieste, who patiently helped me make sense of crucial documents on microfilm.
Several colleagues read chapters of this book at various stages. I am indebted to Chris Carlsmith, John Elliott, Catherine Holmes, Oren Margolis, Sarah Ross, and Chris Wickham for their comments and advice. Hannah Murphy read, discussed, and cheered me on through multiple revisions of the manuscript—thank you, Hannah! I am especially grateful to Lyndal Roper and the members of the Early Modern Workshop for helping me test new ideas and for reading an early, crucial draft of the introduction to the book. I am also very grateful to John-Paul Ghobrial and Stephen Milner for their continuing support.
I benefited enormously from the supervision of Nicholas Davidson and Catherine Holmes. Nick has been a wonderfully supportive guide to Renaissance Venice. I am so grateful for his encouragement and expertise as I learned to navigate Venetian history and its archives. Catherine has been a wonderful mentor and teacher since I first arrived in Oxford as a master’s student. I am more indebted to her intellectual generosity and patient guidance than I could ever possibly express here.
Karl Appuhn, Alex Bamji, Karen-edis Barzman, Tony Campbell, Georg Christ, Maya Corry, Lia Costiner, Cristina Dondi, Piero Falchetta, Patricia Fortini Brown, Tom Harper, Jim Harris, Holly Hurlburt, Claire Judde de Larivi è re, Mary Laven, Noel Malcolm, Nick Millea, Monique O’Connell, Sandra Toffolo, and Bronwen Wilson offered their advice and support at various stages of this project. Richard Scholar and Ita Mac Carthy are the best research (and spritz!) companions, from San Giorgio to Oxford. Many thanks also to Rachel Gibson, Natalie Lussey, and Renard Gluzman for their friendship and support, in and out of the archives. I have presented aspects of this project to seminar audiences in Oxford, London, Cambridge, and Norwich, and in conference panels at Renaissance Society of America meetings in San Diego, New York, Berlin, and Chicago. I am grateful to those audiences for their questions and critiques, which proved crucial for shaping the book.
Three anonymous readers closely read, critiqued, and made important, incisive suggestions for improving the book manuscript at two critical stages. I am enormously grateful to them for their time and careful consideration of this manuscript. It is a pleasure to thank Reader 1, in particular, who consulted this manuscript twice—it is immeasurably better for her or his interventions and suggestions. Emily Andrew has been a wonderfully supportive editor and has made it all seem easy. Of course, all errors remain my own.
Chapter 5 is a substantially revised version of my article “Humanism and Colonial Governance in the Venetian Aegean: The Case of Giovanni Bembo,” published in the Journal of Early Modern History 19, no. 1 (2015). I gratefully acknowledge Koninklijke Brill NV for granting permission to reproduce this work. The publication of this book has been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.
My family have sustained and encouraged me in countless ways, and in recent years have done so across an ocean. I owe them deeper thanks than it is possible to convey in print. My dad, stepmom, and brother have been a constant source of support. My mom even read the entire book—I am grateful to her for that, and for so much more. My sister has been my wonderful best friend and adventurous travel companion for almost three decades.
I finished this book manuscript a week before I got married to Tom. He has lived alongside this project since its very beginning and has been its most ardent cheerleader and most incisive critic. It simply would not have been pos sible—or nearly as fun—without him. Here’s to many more books together, and long walks discussing them.
This book is dedicated to my grandmother, for teaching me the importance of a well-constructed outline; and to my grandfather, who encouraged me to keep asking questions.
 
F IGURE 1.   Map of Bembo and Coppo’s Mediterranean world.
Cartography by Michael Bechthold.
 
F IGURE 2.   Bembo family tree.
 
F IGURE 3.   Coppo family tree.
 
Introduction
Two Families
In Venice in 1536, Giovanni Bembo’s world was turned upside down: because of “cruel fate and disordered nature,” his dearest wife, Cyur ω , and sweetest fifteen-year-old daughter, Angela, were dead within the space of a month. Bembo poured his grief onto the page in a long and complex Latin letter ( figure 4 ). 1 Part self-consolation, part autobiography, the letter opens with a desperate cry: “Oh, what sorrow! My Cyur ω died on the thirtieth of October in the tenth hour of the night. She was seventeen and I was twenty-four when we were united on Corfu.” 2 The Venetian Bembo had spent time on the island of Corfu as a young man, and Cyur ω , a Greek-speaking, Greek Orthodox Corfiote woman, had been his domestic servant. Evidently, for Bembo, there was no autobiographical time before Cyur ω . He begins the letter with her death, before vaulting backward in time to the moment they met on the island. Bembo then narrates chronologically the events of his own life, from his adventures with Cyur ω in the Mediterranean as a young man, to his studies of inscriptions and ruins in Spain and North Africa, to the highlight of his career as governor of two islands in the Aegean. The mood of the letter turns darker as he recounts the frustration of political offices in Venice, his political downfall on Skiathos in 1526, the deaths of his wife and daughter, and finally his deep mourning. Cyur ω ’s death is the beginning and the end of Bembo’s complicated letter, with memories of their life together punctuating its narrative.
F IGURE 4.   The opening page of Giovanni Bembo’s Latin letter. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek M ü nchen, Clm 10801, fol. 101r.
In his letter, Bembo writes reflexively on the problem of transformation: what had he been, what had he become, who would he now be without Cyur ω ? His friendships with his patrician peers, now crumbled as his career lay in tatters; his family, now fractured, as he lay the blame for Cyur ω ’s death at the feet of everyone surrounding him. Cyur ω ’s death was caused by an accumulation of anxieties, Bembo wrote: their daughters wanted to marry, but Bembo and Cyur ω could not afford the dowries set by Venetian law; to compound matters, those youthful suitors were useless, lazy, entitled, and inarticulate. Their son, Modestino, who was once so promising a scholar, “now hates books so much that he seems to be afraid to open them, nor does he study any other virtuous things.” 3 These anxieties about her children’s futures burdened Cyur ω . Bembo used the evocative “macerabat” (wore down) to describe how these anxieties ate away at her, to describe her mind wasting away from distress. Importantly, this reflexive writing was inextricable from his wife’s own transformation: from a domestic servant to the wife of a patrician governor, from a lively companion on his Mediterranean journeys to a woman deeply anxious, even ill, from her concerns about her own children. In this autobiographical moment, the troubling trajectories of his intimate relationships and his political career were laid bare.
Several years later, in 1550, the Venetian Pietro Coppo sat with his notary in his study in the seaside town of Isola. He was eighty years old and had determined that while still of sound mind and body, he should make his final testament. 4 On the Istrian peninsula, jutting out into the Adriatic Sea, Isola did not seem far from Venice, and yet Coppo had not lived in his native city for more th