Venice: Pure City

had always to be paid for his services, for example, with salt or with a coin. The transaction had to be seen to be fair on both sides. Magic could be used for political purposes. There were many cases when the devil was summoned to reveal the names of those who would be successful in the election to the great council. Gamblers used spells and symbols. It was a culture, also, in which love potions flourished. One such potion was sage mingled with menstrual blood; when it was mixed with the food and drink of a male, he became irresistibly attracted to the woman who had dispensed it to him. Where people are packed so closely together, the passions may run high.

More than any other place in Italy, Venice was a harbour for ghosts. There are few other Italian cities where ghost stories are part of cultural tradition. Yet by the eighteenth century the city had become the setting for wraiths and phantoms, continued in a book such as Alberto Toso Fei’s Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories published in 2004. In a real sense Venice was haunted by its past. It wanted to keep hold of its past. What better way to express it than to see ghosts in the corners? It was said that, on the vigil of All Souls, the dead left their resting places on the cemetery island of S. Michele and crossed the lagoon into the city. Each spirit visitant then returned to his or her home, and sat invisible by the kitchen fire. How did you see a ghost? Only those whose baptismal rites had been interrupted, or improperly conducted, possessed that ability. The lure of money, to the Venetians, was also to be found in the spirit world. The most frequent type of ghost was one who had concealed its treasure before death.

Some of the grander houses were reputed to be haunted. Certain passages of water were avoided. There are stories of shrieking skulls, of statues coming alive, of strange creatures of the deep. The Venetians have always loved the bizarre and the fantastic. Living on water opens the mind to the supernatural and to unconscious association. From this watery and uterine landscape, strange shapes will emerge representing the dreams or nightmares of humankind. Hence in Venice the intense fear of magic.

X The Shadows of History

32 Decline and Fall?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the city was no longer building enough ships; its share of the import trade from the Near East was shrinking; the merchants of Holland and England exploited the recently discovered Cape route to trade with the Indies; the German market collapsed, in part as a result of the Thirty Years War. There were only three Venetian merchants in Constantinople. The depredations of sea pirates meant, also, that the mercantile routes were under constant threat.

The Venetian government, in the face of economic competition from other European states, decided that its pre-eminent duty was to maintain standards of production; costs, therefore, remained high. In the face of challenge and competition the city reverted to its innate traditionalism. It retained all the institutional rigour of its existing guilds; the work practices of the manufacturers were unchanged. Laws were passed that gave priority to Venetian shipping in Venetian ports; goods destined for Venice could only be carried in Venetian-owned ships. Its conservatism and its new protectionism meant that it could not effectively confront the quickly changing mercantile world of the 1630s and 1640s. Cheaper manufactures undercut the Venetian markets in such areas as dyeing and printing. Venice retained its hold in the trade of luxury goods; in all other items, it fell behind. The annals are dominated by the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of a once great economic and imperial power.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century Venice was placed under solemn interdict by the pope, thus effectively being excommunicated. The interdict failed of its effect, largely as a result of the indifference of the Venetian people to papal disapproval. When a member of the government told a prominent ecclesiastic that no papal bull was to be opened or read in the territories of the republic he replied, “I shall proceed as the Holy Spirit inspires me.” The Venetian official told him that “the Holy Spirit has already inspired the council of ten to hang all disobedient subjects.” When a priest conformed to the papal edict and closed down his church, a gallows was erected outside the porch on the following morning. “These leaders of your senate,” one pope had told a Venetian ambassador fifty years before, “are tough fellows and need a lot of cooking.” The successful rebuff to the pope materially hindered papal ambitions in the rest of Italy, but the threat of excommunication added to the impression that the independence of the city could never be taken for granted.

The sense of threat was given dramatic expression in the discovery of, and almost hysterical reaction to, what became known as “the Spanish plot.” It is said that in 1618 a mercenary from Normandy approached the Spanish government, and its representatives in Italy, with a plan to destroy the city of the lagoon. On a certain day his agents would set fire to the Arsenal, the Mint and the ducal palace; at the same time all of the Venetian nobles would be massacred, and the Spanish fleet would take charge of all the passages into the city. Venice would fall to Spain. Such was the plan. According to report, it was enthusiastically received by the Spanish ambassador in Venice, the marquis of Bedmar, and by the French authorities. The duke of Osuna, the Spanish viceroy of Naples, was deeply complicit.

Yet, as so often happened in Venice, the conspirators were betrayed by secret informants. The scheme was revealed to the council of ten, who took prompt measures on 17 May 1618. By chance it happened to be the day when a new doge was to be elected. So the city was filled with travellers and interested observers.

On the morning of 18 May the people of Venice woke to find the bodies of two men suspended from a gibbet between the two columns of the piazzetta. The celebrations for the election of the new doge took place, over the next three days, with the bodies of the condemned in full view. Nothing was said about them by the authorities. It became known that they were Frenchmen. Some of the inns, populated by Frenchmen, suddenly found that they had vacant rooms. It was said that five hundred other conspirators had been drowned on that night in the canals. Bedmar was forced to flee. The French ambassador, also under suspicion, took the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to Loreto.

The silence of the authorities might be construed as embarrassment. It seems very likely that there was no real conspiracy at all, and that the council of ten acted in panic on the basis of false information. Their reaction suggests, however, that the leaders of the city considered Venice to be in imminent danger of destruction.

In historical literature “the Spanish plot” has taken its place with the “gunpowder plot” and the “massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s” as an emblematic event. It was, according to Sir Henry Wotton, “the foulest and fearfullest thing that hath come to light since the foundation of the city.” There were various explanations and interpretations of the conspiracy, none of them entirely convincing. It has, for example, been claimed that the Venetian authorities were in league with Osuna, to bring Naples under Venetian domination, but on fear of discovery of the plot they had covered up the evidence by killing all of Osuna’s emissaries in the city. There may have been a conspiracy, and a conspiracy within a conspiracy, with all the machinations of a convoluted plot utterly suited to a suspicious and theatrical city. It became the subject of plays, and pamphlets, of the most melodramatic nature. It inspired Otway’s greatest play, Venice Preserv’d. Venice has always been preserved. It always will be. One Venetian proverb, sempre crolla ma non cade, tells the story. It is always collapsing but it never falls down.

There was a further and major blow to civic harmony twelve years later; in the course of the great plague of 1630 almost fifty thousand residents of the city died. The government undertook a major effort in health care and sanitation; at all costs, at a time of weakness, civic panic or disorder had to be avoided. Yet the population dipped to 102,000, and never properly recovered in the following centuries. This was not necessarily a matter of lasting regret to the authorities. There was of course a fall in tax revenues, but the relative depopulation meant that there were more jobs available for those who remained and that wages increased exponentially. Incomes rose, and prices fell. At times of emergency, too, the city could prove its self-sufficiency.

How in any case can we speak of failure and decline in the context of a city that still survives intact? By the end of the seventeenth century Venice had a working polity. The English ambassador had in 1612 described the