This is a history, not of Venice, but of Venetian maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea. It begins around the year 1000 but cruises quickly through two centuries before exploding into life with a magnificent narrative of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when Venice steered the crusaders to Constantinople and ended up with an empire of their own. It ends with the war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in 1499-1503, when Venice lost its naval edge and reports from Portugal warned the Italians that they were about to lose their trading supremacy as well.
Crowley writes with real vigor about seafaring and war. You will rarely read better narratives of battles, sieges, or campaigns. He is not so great on anything else (money, trade, politics, art), but if you want action, he delivers. I also learned a great deal from this book about the Venetian empire, made up of islands like Crete and Corfu and scattered fortress ports on the mainland. For example, the Venetians ruled Crete with extractive zeal, imposing high taxes and waging near constant war against peasant resistance and banditry; for nearly a century they forbade cultivation of one of the island's most productive farming districts, determined to starve out the armed revolt raging there.
What moved me to write about this book was the horror of it all.
Crowley gives us the accounts of terrified passengers on galleys caught in storms, drenched and tossed around the ship in total darkness and awful fear, knowing they might soon be dead. As bad as storms were, dead summer calms could be even worse, dooming sailors to death by thirst or disease on the broiling sea. Then there were pirates, sometimes freebooters but more often the semi-deniable agents of one or another naval power. As if that wasn't enough, there was also the constant low-level skirmishing between Venetians and their Italian rivals, Pisans and Genoses, which regularly broke out in deadly riots even when the cities were theoretically at peace.
Crowley conveys the grim horror of battles between the crews of galleys, fighting as if on land but with the sea all around, their steel breastplates dooming them to a swift drowning if they fell overboard. Gruesome injuries were common, and something like a crossbow bolt through the cheek was so minor as to be hardly worth mentioning.
It was not just the common sailors who suffered. Captains were expected to fight beside their men and were regularly killed, especially by enemy crossbowmen. If they lost the battle but survived they were sent back to Venice in chains to face trial as suspected enemies of the state, for Venice had no sympathy with losing commanders. Noblemen could also be sent as ambassdors to sultans or khans who might decide to imprison them or even behead them, which seems to have been a widely used diplomatic signal in the Middle East at the time. Or they might be slain in duels of honor with each other.
And this was the life of Venetians. Every years tens of thousands of Venetian men set sail on voyages from which they might very well not return. They might drown, or be slain, or be shipwrecked on some desert shore, or die of the plague in a foreign port where their ship ended up trapped by a quarantine. But they went, every year for nearly a thousand years.
It was mad.
But maybe human life has mostly been like that, a desperate struggle against dangers of a thousand kinds, when death could find you just easily at home as at sea, and all the routes out of dire poverty involved awful risk. And maybe one reason we are so unhappy in our fat, happy age is that we evolved in conditions like those of Venetian sailors and Cretan peasants, and some part of us longs for that kind of life and find our own age too boring to endure.
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