Download PDF | Grabiela Rojas Molina - Decoding Debate in the Venetian Senate_ Short Stories of Crisis and Response on Albania 1392-1402-Brill Academic Pub (2022)
266 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book began as a doctoral dissertation at Central European University. I started my research caught up in a refugee crisis, continued it as my university was being expelled from its home by Hungary’s authoritarian regime, and finished it amidst a global pandemic. During all of this, cEU and its Medieval Studies Department offered me the unabating support that allowed me to bring this project to completion.
I also owe my gratitude to Monique O’Connell and Andrea Nanetti, who so graciously answered my questions and offered their views and insight. Their suggestions were inspiring and illuminating. I am in debt to Julia Benavent, who offered me a wonderful working space at the University of Valencia, and shared with me her expertise in Italian literary and manuscript culture. I would also like to express my gratitude to Johann Petitjean and Nada Zecevi¢é for reading my work and pointing out the ways by which I could make my case stronger. Any errors or inconsistencies are my own.
The motivation to undertake a project that was, at times, as nerve-racking as it was intellectually rewarding came from my family: my parents, my sisters, and my US family. Most importantly, I owe everything that is good in this book to my loving husband John. With his acute intelligence and impeccable logic, he believed in my project even when I did not, and thus convinced me that there was definitely something ‘there’. Plus, I will be the first to acknowledge that this study would be much more enjoyable if I had listened to him and squeezed in more than just one joke.
Introduction
This is my husband's favourite joke:!
Q: Why did the Jew go from Minsk to Pinsk? A: Because it’s the same, but different.
Beginning this project, I understood that I would be facing thousands of records that seemed pretty squarely ‘the same’. Yet several years of research proved that the Yiddish fellow of the joke and I faced different realities. I found myself answering a question which few in academia had asked: how does one perceive subtext within documents produced by the Venetian Senate? For centuries, scholars consulting these documents assumed that, given their repetitive terminology, monotonous syntax and similar page layout, entries in those Senate books worked towards an identical function. This, I realised, is not the case. The recorded entries in my study, which cover a decade of Venetian Senate proceedings, turned out to be a treasure trove of short, clear-cut narratives produced from collective resolution, yet codified via refined and systematic know-how. My study thus evolved into an exploration of the guidelines used by scribes to encode discussions by the ‘Council of pregadi’— the Invited Ones—, as they were known at the time.* During the years covered in this book, the Council saw its power grow in tandem with the city’s evolution. By pointing out the reasons why and how certain issues pertaining to Albanian territories?
stood out in the pregadi’s meetings, I was able to highlight the ways in which ‘everything else’ the pregadi discussed could be categorised in terms of importance. Ultimately, seemingly minor questions—Why were entries formulated in certain specific ways? Whose concerns and priorities were encoded in the records?—led to the realisation that each of those questions was dependent on the other. Consequently, my investigation would look into the texts as much as it peered into the agency behind them.
The Senate was Venice's chief deliberative assembly and the centre of politics.+ Consisting originally of sixty annually elected members, it was enlarged after 1324 through the inclusion of the Council of Forty (a Supreme Court). Later, in 1363 twenty pregadi de Zonta were temporarily added to the Council.® By the late fourteenth century, the Council sat approximately 120 full members. Every important official, ambassador and high naval commander had the right to sit in on Council meetings: ‘everybody who was anybody politically had a place in the Senate’.® These ex-officio members, however, did not have the right to vote. Due to its relatively small membership,’ the Council met regularly to discuss and, deo gratias, attend to incoming needs from their evergrowing mercantile domain.
The topics discussed in each of the Council’s meetings are preserved in volumes of the Senate’s Deliberazioni, held in the state archive of Venice. However, these are the edited versions of meetings that occurred behind closed doors and to which there are no other witnesses. The ‘debate’ of the title, and generally of this study, is figurative speech. Thousands of pages reproducing discussions and their respective voting tallies have survived, but even assuming that they preserve (more or less) accurately the order in which interventions were delivered more than half a millennium ago, details uncaptured by the written word are lost. The intentions undercuting a literal statement, those knowing smiles exchanged at common references, oblique attempts to disrupt political legitimacy—these are now metaphorical dust. However, those thousands of pages are still the product of debate and discussion, and in that sense, part of the pregadi’s political role.
Traditionally, the Deliberazioni have been used fragmentarily to study discrete areas or topics and tell stories about those individual subjects. Those ‘conventional’ stories include the logistics and profit or loss of Venice’s merchant galleys, atypical situations merchants faced in kingdoms abroad, encounters with pirates, conflicts and requests arriving from cities in Italy; in short, they may relate to any territory, big or small, in contact with or subjugated to Venice at one point or another. Although important in their own right, such episodes are secondary to a more intriguing story, one long untold: how do we unravel the secretive, edited records of Venice’s most important political entity?
Each entry within the Deliberazioni tells a story relating to the Council's assessment of its own activities. However, it falls to future research to fully expose what lies buried within the Senate books. As a starting point, I concentrated on one specific aspect of this Council self-assessment, namely, how to identify and decode those issues which made the strongest impact on the pregadi, that is to say, those developments the pregadi perceived might pose an existential threat to the republic or bring about transformative advantage.
An untrained reader could not guess, solely by looking at the factual data within certain entries, that the Deliberazioni ranked the importance of unfolding contemporary events. Yet such a reading is possible if one regards each individual entry as an embodiment of scribal intent—a ‘linguistic act’. At first, this suggestion may alienate historians, given the associations of that expression with a particular theoretical stance within the field of political philosophy. Interdisciplinarity, though commended, comes with drawbacks. In this book, it may result in a reader’s disappointment should they expect to find a new history of Albania or of the evolution of news management in Venice's state apparatus. However, I offer that the examination of methodological precepts is (or should be) a fundamental step in historical research. It would be inadequate to produce an epistemological reckoning of the texts within the Deliberazioni without a demonstration of how such ‘borrowed methodology’ works in practice.
Placing scribal intent at the core of the analysis is a new proposition within Venetian studies. For that reason, presenting the grounds which make this reading possible must precede the ‘stories’ about the pregadi’s assessment of Albania. I hope the reader will find the wait worthwhile. Approaching entries in this manner increases our understanding of the Deliberazioni as an historical source, opens new avenues for how they should be read (thus bringing them back to life), and facilitates conclusions which have been elusive in previous scholarship on late fourteenth century Albania.
Despite its unconventional approach, this book is a history, in several senses. It is the story of Venice’s involvement in Albania from 1392 until 1402 from the pregadi's point of view, and it delineates their strategies and motivations for communicating with Albanian lords and representatives. It is a portrait of the pregadi’s broader world and their political manoeuvrings, of the manner and mechanisms by which their goals were accomplished and how their priorities fluctuated—from the pregadi’s readiness to respond up to their limit of resources and qualified personnel to their occasional idle silence watching situations unfold. It is also an historical illustration of how modern readers can bring the Council's secretive records to light, and how contemporaneous eyes related to these texts and echoed high points of the pregadi’s discussions outside the ducal palace.
As a whole, the Deliberazioni are a collection of tales of international crises and intrigue. This book concentrates on three entry types which codified the most important matters of state. Scholars of news and intelligence studies may offer the opinion that precisely because game-changing ambassadorial proposals or events abroad put the republic in danger, these entries are inherently more important than the rest. While this may be true for pragmatic considerations of decision-making, the fact is that those entries were codified through the same systematic means as all the other entries. Additionally, other kinds of entries may signify equally fundamental changes for Venice, albeit outside the realm of international politics. The first step in understanding these texts is grasping the scribes’ serpentine system of encoding the pregadi’s discussions.
The scribal conventions responsible for the recording of the Deliberazioni have the potential to reveal those high points, since the pregadi’s debate was embedded in the Council’s record-keeping practices. The Albanian territories of Durrés, Lezhé, Shkodra, and Drisht (which I will refer to as Albania, for brevity’) are the testing ground for this approach. These Albanian lands were among the larger sphere of Venetian influence and power.? Depending on circumstances, those Albanian territories might offer short-term naval assistance or advantages in procuring food and other goods, yet they might also confront Venice with political and military hurdles demanding immediate attention. Either way, from time to time Albania might unexpectedly take centre stage of the state’s agenda, even if such urgency lasted but a day.
Venice and Albania shared histories dating back to the high Middle Ages, but only after the spring of 1392 did strategic decisions resulting from changes in international politics signify the beginning of Venice’s unreserved disposition to control Albania more directly. From then on, a constant Ottoman presence was the background against which the silhouette of these Albanian cities was drawn. Ten years later, in the summer of 1402, the army of Bayezid I—the feared Ottoman Sultan—was crushed by the Mongol conqueror Timur Bey and this threw Bayezid’s empire into utter disarray. A few weeks after this news reached Venice, Gian Galeazzo Visconti died, and thus his imperialistic ambition ceased to be a threat to the free communes of northern Italy. Those turns of events brought unexpected twists to continuing concerns in Venetian politics. The book ends with these two episodes, as contemporaries perceived them as turning points in Venice's history.
The book is divided into several chapters: Chapter 1 describes the methodology and theoretical approach fundamental to ‘decode’ Senate records. Chapter 2 describes a number of cultural ‘languages’ inhabited by the pregadi and which prevailed in the broader experiences of patrician politics and society (including the Council), and Chapter 3 provides a general context on the Venetian administration of overseas territories, the configuration of Albanian cities, and the main parties involved. Chapters four and five examine the structure of entries used to codify distinct sets of critical incoming news and outgoing responses and instructions. These, I hope, will illuminate ways of reading which go beyond the seemingly formulaic codes of expression of recorded entries.
This book uncovers the pivot points in the political debate of the pregadi, whose world revolved around contact with many far-reaching regions. Salient moments of such discussions of state matters surfaced in texts outside the ducal palace, too. Antonio Morosini, a contemporary and keen witness of the events covered in the study, echoed some of the Council’s discussions and penned them as entries in his diary. There he stood, out of the way of the pregadi, but close enough to offer a quasi-outsider’s perspective of the relevance and consequence of certain events. His judgment of what was worth recording bears relevance for the understanding of attention or neglect that accompanied decisive Council pronouncements. For that reason, this book incorporates his view of the decade under analysis in an epilogue. By developing a methodology of analysis that also accounts for an entry’s importance in relation to Morosini’s role as curator, I hope to offer a wider view of the pages from the Council’s discussions.
Using state documents as records of Senate debate, or to it put another way, interpreting the impulse behind their creation, helps to elucidate the conveyance of meaning in political texts and to build a bridge between research areas traditionally kept apart: the history of the stato da mar, Venice's social and cultural history, record-keeping practices in state organs, and theories of intellectual history and political thought. This research is also an attempt to empathise with all those buried under masks of anonymity and state devotion. Looking back, patricians are often overshadowed by their posts and the offices to which they belonged, if not their family lineage and class. But the pregadi were not lifeless mannequins; they were figures of flesh and blood with particular takes on Venice’s priorities and their own limited share in the state’s voice.
1 Albania in Focus
Why did I choose Albania to identify and test recording conventions which display state priorities? What space did Albania inhabit in the discussions of Venice's most formidable Council? What priority, weight or effect was Albania given? In the eyes of the pregadi, Albania gained relevance in 1392, due to the continuous Ottoman presence in the region having become more pronounced. Albania became an arena of political hostility short, for the most part, of open warfare, yet its importance did not rise to the level of territories such as Constantinople or Crete. Albania was neither the capital of an empire, nor a strategic holding for Mediterranean trade; its relative unimportance made it an ideal springboard for the central aim of this book. Discussions on Albania allow me to describe consistencies and changes in record-keeping without ‘stealing the show’ by virtue of Albania’s geographical or political status. In this way, I could glean how critical events and embassies became codified in the Deliberazioni, and thus answer several questions: When did developments in Albania gain the import of a crucial state affair for the pregadi? How systematically employed was the wording and structure of entries pointing to such developments? What clues do entries offer about the manner in which information reached the pregadi and was later presented, debated or reacted to? Beyond putting into practice a theoretical methodology, another aim of this study is to show that these are interrelated questions and that there is, in fact, something new to be learned from the dry words of those state documents.
Having Albania as focus offers an added advantage. The decade between 1392 and 1402, after Venice’s war against Genoa but before its expansion into mainland Italy, has been neglected by scholarship. I centre on this period because the events of these years have been overshadowed by the resonance of Genoa’s defeat, and scholars have tended to jump forward to the Renaissance period, when the terraferma was being incorporated into Venice.!° Yet, during this decade, the Council’s attentiveness to Albanian cities swung back and forth, due partly to changes in state priorities. By examining entries about Albania, those changes to the state’s most pressing issues can be brought to the fore more easily.
Although this book does not offer a new history of Albania, the ‘short stories’ disclosing the pregadi’s stance on crucial developments there does add a new layer to scholarship on the region. Previous research on Albania touched upon cardinal aspects of Venetian Albania’s political and historical evolution, but scholars struggled to draw out any insights between these events and the intrinsic nature of the Senate sources they analysed. Selecting Albania as a humble but worthy protagonist of the pregadi’s meetings is an attempt to show that ‘peripheral’ locations can be incorporated into a holistic understanding of Venice’s institutional memory. In the eyes of the pregadi, territories both in Italy and overseas deserved the same space in the books recording Senate meetings.
That is not to say that Albania has been an area of study entirely detached from the rest of Europe, but such relationship has been constrained by historical and regional boundaries." In the initial stages of the field, ethnographic and geographical descriptions became fairly common because Albanian historical study was a field haunted by demons of nineteenth-century nationalism.”
Interest in Albania (and the Balkans in general) rose partly as a consequence of that century’s power politics, once the Ottoman Empire had retreated from the region and the Habsburgs’ Balkan policy aimed to strengthen Austrian presence there. Giuseppe Valentini—an Italian Jesuit priest credited with advancing the field of Albanian studies—spent decades compiling and editing a remarkable amount of documents from the Archivio di Stato in Venice concerning administrative and diplomatic affairs in Albania, but his endeavour was not exempt from nationalistic traces. His Acta Albaniae Veneta has been a gold mine for studies in economic, political and ecclesiastical history, as well as a window into the life and customs of Albanian people and interactions between Venetians and the locals.!3
However, despite stating that he understood the area from Kotor to Durrés as ‘Albania’, in the AAV he included territories contested by Greeks (and which did not reflect local fourteenth-century contexts), thereby incorporating an unfortunate Albanian nationalistic undertone into his enterprise. The question of Albanian ‘ethnicity’ or ‘identity’ continued to arise in both the national and foreign historiographical traditions, and for some time there was a risk that nationalist sentiment would dominate the field of historical research.!* Much of this is now in the past, but the history of the Eastern Adriatic region still struggles to be incorporated into general accounts of medieval Europe. Current efforts by Serbian and Croatian historians, who publish articles and deliver papers in more accessible European languages, are slowly but steadily improving this situation.
Oliver Schmitt attempted to produce an authoritative study of late medieval Albania in his 2001 work Das venezianische Albanien. He analysed the mechanisms by which the Venetians organised the heterogeneous province of Albania Veneta in political, administrative, demographical and economic terms. In doing so, he abridged most of the literature written in Albanian, Serbian and Croatian, making it accessible in a more widely spoken European language. Praiseworthy for its ambition and for bringing attention to this under-served part of Europe, the book needs to be revisited. Schmitt’s lack of knowledge regarding the scribes’ codification protocols for categorising Senate debate led him to unsound conclusions concerning the Senate’s assessment of Albania.
By testing a new methodology for reading Senate records, this book will provide complementary stories about Albania. These stories highlight the divisiveness that Albania created among the pregadi but, overall, they show that the area should neither remain separated from broader accounts of Mediterranean politics nor from histories of Venetian society and culture.
2 Sources
The Deliberazioni, the repository of Council resolutions, lie at the centre of this book and are its primary unit of analysis. They contain the Council’s last word on war and peace, military supplies, galley routes, taxes and loans—the most crucial issues of the state. The Deliberazioni comprise two series: the Misti or miscellaneous deliberations, which contain the majority of decisions, and the Secreti or secret deliberations, which record issues deemed sensitive.!®
The documents from the decade covered in this book were not catalogued geographically.” Council records have functioned as basis for a number of published ‘regional’ series pertaining to, for example, the histories of Croatia, England, or France.!® These collections were landmarks of nineteenth-century scholarship, but they should be used carefully. Such collections are misleading in that they present a continuity which did not exist in the actual records of the pregadi’s meetings. This book’s analysis highlights that several weeks may have elapsed between each Council decision on Albania, and that its importance swung back and forth, influenced by the discussions of other, perhaps more pressing crises.
The time frame of 1392 to 1402 for analysing turning points of the Council's attentiveness to Albania is justified by historical developments. By the 1390s, Venice was showing signs of recovery from the dramatic population loss caused by the Black Death and from its costly war against Genoa. Such demographic and financial rebound opened up a prospect of greater Venetian power. This was felt within state organisation: progressively, Venice stopped acting as a commune and began seeing itself as Dominium—or, in vernacular, as the Serenissima Signoria!®—, expanding its direct sphere of influence into the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1402, the Ottomans fell momentarily out of sight. With Venice's power reassured, it embarked on a race to absorb and control cities on the mainland, thus commencing an unprecedented phase of expansion.
The unfolding of international events that justifies the book’s time frame does not run in parallel with changes in the Council's system of record-keeping. My analysis of records for this period begins in media res. Presumably, the system I encountered had been a work in progress since the chancery’s earliest days, in the mid-thirteenth century. On the other hand, after 1402, Venice’s expansion into the mainland was reflected in the exponential increase of secret deliberations. However, any substantial changes in the entries’ structure, formulation or organisation may not have occurred simultaneously to the new set of the signoria’s ambitions. More research is needed to understand the Council’s earliest mechanisms for systematising debate and the evolution of record-keeping after the terraferma expansion.
Both the political debate caused by urgent developments and the scribal system that flagged them may be turned into short stories. All entries are, first and foremost, a source for understanding the world of the men who produced them. By discussing Albania (or any other topic), the pregadi indirectly discussed Venice’s power and its challenges. Secretaries and scribes formed part of this world and were essential to it. However, they remained anonymous, at least in the fourteenth century; whatever political leverage they might have had in Senate politics was not officially sanctioned.
Recently, the ‘archival turn’ brought attention to archives not as passive storage centres for government decisions, but as objects of study in themselves.?° In this way, phases of the archive's reorganisation— producing indexes, adding collections or subdividing existing series—can be seen as historical processes linked inextricably to particular conjunctures of Venetian politics.*! Pertaining directly to collections such as the Senate’s, de Vivo remarked that the state devoted a great deal of energy, time and resources in the long-term preservation of decisions on parchment in wood- and leather-bound registers (instead of paper) to guarantee that previously-approved laws could be retrieved, in this way avoiding inconsistencies in legislation.” But the relationship between Venice's history and the evolution of archival practices, however useful in some respects, is ultimately insufficient to account for the entries’ deeper layers of meaning.
In contrast, the conceptual framework to examine this book’s sources is rather a methodological proposal. This is the first scholarly attempt to produce a systematic study of the Deliberazioni. Given their vast quantity, presenting an inclusive account of all individual entries has, unfortunately yet understandably, not been a matter that scholarship has pursued. Why would one examine the formulation of an entry about a change in legislation pertaining to freight charges when one is studying religious institutions or Venice's rivalry with Milan? There are sound methodological and epistemological reasons why scholars work only on the basis of entries which can be grouped thematically, but these same reasons have inadvertently obscured the grouping mechanisms devised by scribal practices. As it will become apparent in the next chapter, the methodology is supplemented by theoretical considerations of scribal intent. This is an attempt to rethink and redefine the textual production emanating from Venice's state organs. Consequently, individual entries are neither data puzzled together in empiricist fashion nor the means towards an historical narrative. Instead, they are the direct objects of analysis. Entries are discrete units of meaning mirroring the Senate’s executive attributions. This book argues that such reading does not negate other conceptual framings. On the contrary, it adds a new dimension to the politics of an elite body of power made up by specific individuals.
This study’s sources enable a conceptual approach which departs from historiographical narratives favouring coherence and unanimity. Interpretative traditions of the language of politics used in Venice during the late Middle Ages are still pervaded by what modern scholars call the ‘myth of Venice’? The myth is rooted in Venice’s political stability and has shaped the stories that Venetians told about themselves. Contrarily, the pregadi’s debate involves change, disagreement and conflicting opinion, but it was long disassociated, purposefully, from Venice's official life. For centuries, the myth succeeded enormously in maintaining a stereotypical depiction whereby the pregadi’s judgment emanated from a unified body. The loss of clarity produced by Venice’s myth compromised the understanding of Senate proceedings by imposing its idiosyncratic view on Venice's political system and the political texts emanating from it. Therefore, it would be a disservice to the Deliberazioni to contextualise their language or intention within the language used to describe the greatness, beauty, stability and liberty that the myth conjures. The conventions to record the Council deliberations were by no means an unsophisticated aspect of official politics, but a language which needs to be understood on its own terms.
3 Note on Names, Transcriptions and Dates
I render proper names in their Italian spelling as standardised in the online database Rulers of Venice.2+ For toponyms, I use the current English form even in cases where historical names are familiar to the Anglophone audience (for example, I use Nikopol instead of Nicopolis and Heraklion instead of Candia). The title of Venetian provincial administrators varied depending on the location they ruled over. I use the same term (governor) to refer to Venice’s chief official regardless of location. The names of other offices are translated according to the closest English term which describes the activity the post implied. In consequence, I use ‘governor’ to refer to both the baiulus of Durrés and the comes et capitaneus of Shkodra, but I use ‘consul’ for the baiulus of Cyprus.
I capitalise offices held by members of the Consiglio dei pregadi in order to distinguish them from posts elsewhere which share the same name. Therefore, a Councillor refers to a member of the Council in Venice, while a councillor could have his post in Negroponte or Coron. The title of the Captain of the Gulf is capitalised so as to distinguish him from captains of merchant galleys.
I will refer to the Deliberazioni which appear in the AAv with both their numeration within it and their page number in the archival series. For all other entries, the reference corresponds to the archival series.
All transcriptions from the Deliberazioni are my own. In some cases, my reading differs from the text presented by Valentini in the aav. I do not signal those differences. The transcriptions were made to comply with historical (rather than philological) conventions. Although I do not preserve the capitalisation or punctuation from the original documents, the text of the deliberations is not fully modernised. I do not correct apparent mistakes or standardise spelling. In this way, I try to offer, even if in limited form, some semblance of their linguistic richness.
Unless stated otherwise, all translations of the Council deliberations are mine. I use John Melville-Jones’ translation of Morosini’s Diary. The Venetian calendar year began in March. All dates are adapted to modern usage.
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