A common trope when discussing Mediterranean historiography is the divide in the literature between ‘battlefield’ and the ‘bazaar’, to borrow the colourful labels coined by Eric Dursteler.Footnote 1 The ‘battlefield’ perspective emphasises a dynamic of division in a sea split along religious lines. The ‘bazaar’ perspective, meanwhile, highlights the many examples of encounter, connection and entanglement that existed across such lines, exposing putative boundaries to have been of little importance in practice but merely the era’s ‘rhetoric’.Footnote 2 Daniel Hershenzon offers a similar characterisation of the field: ‘scholars often write the history of the early modern Mediterranean as either a story of religious enmity or a tale of canny merchants or thriving markets’.Footnote 3
By and large, however, it is probably more accurate to say that the contention has existed not between specialists but between historians and a certain strain of public and political discourse. The success enjoyed by the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis in certain policy-making circles and public debates in the early decades of the century spurred many Mediterranean historians to highlight the prevalence of connection and coexistence in the early modern Mediterranean, pushing back against the idea that Christianity and Islam represent monolithic civilisational blocs destined to clash in both past and present.Footnote 4 An interesting corollary of this emphasis, as noted by Francesca Trivellato, is that Edward Said’s Orientalism has likewise fallen out of favour among Mediterraneanists, since this not only posits the existence of East and West as stable categories but effectively denies meaningful dialogue between them.Footnote 5 Some scholars have recently gone even further in this vein and condemned a second-order ‘battlefield’ approach (which they christen ‘neo-Eurocentrism’), in which the decision to adopt these two civilisational blocs as the units of comparative analysis fatally compromises the scholarly endeavour a priori.Footnote 6 The scholarly consensus is therefore currently weighted somewhat towards the ‘bazaar’ pole, even if this position has recently been challenged by Anastasia Stouraiti, who argues that the importance of imperial ideology and war in the Mediterranean has been consequently obscured.Footnote 7
In this article, my intention is simply to complicate an idea implicit in these common characterisations of the field: the notion that commercial activity represents the highest form of connectivity, one that necessarily stands in opposition to ideological divisions. The bazaar, the canny merchants, the thriving markets: these, it is implied, are the antithesis of religious and political boundaries. An association between trade and connectivity is intuitive, of course. Trading, by its very nature, is an activity which connects people from different locations. Mediterranean commerce, moreover, often piggybacked on the entanglements – familial, religious, political – of ‘trans-imperial subjects’ and helped to create such subjects in turn by encouraging travel, migration and boundary crossing, and by exposing whole societies to foreign cultural influences.Footnote 8 Beyond historiographical surveys, much of the literature contrasts the ‘rhetoric’ of the era with the ‘pragmatism’ that prevailed on the ground, with trade being the archetypal example of pragmatism in action.Footnote 9 Trade is thus presented as immune to ideology, indeed, as the inherently anti-ideological activity.
Here I address two questions: is it possible that cross-cultural commerce contributed, albeit perhaps ironically and inadvertently, to the propagation of ideological divides? And secondly, is it possible to offer a more coherent account of entanglement and ideological division? Commercial interactions have generally been excluded from recent efforts by historians to trace the concrete channels by which ‘connectedness’ on the ground led to information flows and shaped wider perceptions and discourses.Footnote 10 To use E. Natalie Rothman’s words, commerce has rarely been analysed as part of ‘a systematic account of how “diversity” and “connectivity” as a flow of social practices and the categories for speaking about them have been articulated through specific institutions and genres’.Footnote 11 Despite the great success of Francesca Trivellato’s The Familiarity of Strangers, arguing, amongst other things, that the experience of living and trading in the cosmopolitan freeport of Livorno actually led to more clearly defined cultural boundaries, one of the central research agendas she advances – to connect ‘nuts and bolts of cross-cultural trade and the flourishing [or not] of mutual cultural understanding’ – remains very much incomplete.Footnote 12
The analysis presented here focuses on trade between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in the early-seventeenth century, during the longest period of peace between the two polities and when cross-cultural trade was thriving like never before. It reconstructs how one boundary-drawing ‘commercial’ category that was clearly ideologically charged – the so-called ‘avania’ – was articulated through interactions between various Venetian subjects and institutions. The central source base will be the dispatches of the Venetian bailo in Constantinople (pl. baili), the chief Venetian representative at the Porte. These are then connected with other sources, including documents produced by Ottoman institutions.
This word ‘avania’ paints a profoundly negative image of commercial interaction under an Ottoman aegis and both assumes and reinforces implicit cultural boundaries. A precise meaning, as will be shown, is impossible to establish, but modern dictionaries define the avania as an act of financial extortion carried out by Ottoman officials: ‘an extortionate exaction or tax levied by the Turks’ in the Oxford English Dictionary or a ‘heavy imposition that the Turks levied on the Christians in the Orient’ in Treccani, the leading Italian encyclopaedia.Footnote 13 Both of these definitions suggest that the avania was a recognisable Ottoman institutional practice, possibly an officially sanctioned one. Yet this label is not part of a shared vocabulary but rather a European rationalisation or framing of events, for Ottoman sources never use it nor a single consistent alternative, even when translating European texts that contain the term.Footnote 14 Despite the fact that the institutional blueprint for European trade in the Ottoman empire was provided by the Italian city-states, neither the avania discourse nor the circumstances giving rise to so-called avanias have ever been examined in a Venetian context. Investigating the ‘avania’ allows us to grasp simultaneously both the deep extent of entanglement and the potential limits of its wider impact. Furthermore, while the chronic use of the term demonstrates the longevity of certain types of religious and ‘civilisational’ prejudice in a fashion one might label Orientalist, the distinctiveness of Venetian usage attests to the importance of local conditions in shaping such discourses.
Questions of battlefield and bazaar, contention and connection, rhetoric and pragmatism, have particular relevance in the context of Venetian historiography. Here, the bazaar perspective enters into phase with one of the many myths veiling the Republic: the idea is that the citizens of the Serenissima were ultimately too shrewd to let their true interests be obscured by cultural and religious antagonism. In this telling, particularly associated with the work of Frederic Lane, the Venetians were ‘Venetians first, and Christians second’ while the city’s commercial calling took precedence over any other consideration as far as relations with the Ottoman Empire were concerned.Footnote 15 In part, this reading also echoes certain strains of contemporary anti-Venetian propaganda, which claimed that Venice preferred to cleave to the Ottoman Empire instead of demonstrating proper Christian solidarity.Footnote 16 This vision of the Serenissima is in many ways amenable to contemporary values that were until recently hegemonic, since the Venetian experience can be made to prefigure a world in which the pursuit of collective economic improvement should be preferred over projects of national or religious aggrandisement and assertion. But, as Anastasia Stouraiti has argued, commerce cannot always be equated with peaceful exchange and cooperation, and not only because trade and violence have often gone hand in hand.Footnote 17
‘Avanias, every waking hour’
The departure point for this investigation is a comment made by the Venetian patrician Ottaviano Bon in a dispatch to the Venetian doge and Senate in 1604. Bon had recently taken up the position of Venetian bailo in Constantinople, the chief Venetian representative in the Ottoman empire, fulfilling the functions of both an ambassador and chief consul. After describing a series of presents he had given to important Ottoman officials and expressing his confidence that they would look kindly on the Republic’s interests, Bon summed up how he felt his appointment was going:
Certainly I ought to tell your lordships [the doge and members of the Senate] for [your] consolation, that the bailate these days is a garden, in which the roses and flowers are the public affairs, and the thorns and twigs are the affairs of private subjects for the occasion of their ships, and the contracts they make, and the avanias that are brought against them, with which I must trouble myself every waking hour. But God be praised that, in the final analysis, everything is going well.Footnote 18
The use of the feminine (le quali) in the original Italian tells us that it was these avanias in particular that were filling Bon’s waking hours. It is partly for this reason that we will concentrate on the period covered by Bon’s bailate (1604–9) and his two immediate predecessors, Agostino Nani (1600–3) and Francesco Contarini (1602–5), together covering a period from 1600 to 1609.Footnote 19 Yet such periodisation also allows us to address effectively the links between commerce, connectivity and ideology. The first decade of the seventeenth century represents a point at which entanglement between the two polities, their subjects and their merchants was particularly marked. The period after the end of the War of Cyprus in 1573 represented an Indian summer for Venetian trade with the Ottoman empire. Venetian subjects operating in the Levant certainly faced substantial headwinds: Uskok pirates and English privateers, increased competition from European rivals, and a struggling shipbuilding sector, to name just a few.Footnote 20 Still, if Venetian trade was no longer flourishing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it retained some vigour, and Venetian subjects could be found all over the eastern Mediterranean.Footnote 21 At the same time, there were also more Ottoman subjects operating commercially in Venice than ever before.Footnote 22 The years 1573–1645 represent the longest period of continuous peace between the Serenissima and the Porte in which diplomatic relations were warm and generally constructive. Yet if Bon’s dispatch is to be believed, avanias too were nevertheless an all too regular feature of Venetian trade in the Ottoman empire at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The question of whether his dispatch is to be believed is a matter of some doubt, however. As we will see, this is, firstly, because the few scholars who have studied the avanias have suggested that it is a term that can hardly be taken at face value and, secondly, because there has been significant historiographical debate over the reliability of the bailo as a privileged observer of Ottoman politics and society, albeit focused not on the dispatches but the much better known relazioni.
Let us begin with the problem of the word ‘avania’. Early, classic literature on the European Levant trade took a much greater interest in the avanias than was subsequently the case.Footnote 23 For these authors, avanias were large and arbitrary demands for money by Ottoman officials, which, though illegal, could not be resisted. Paul Masson actually opens his history by talking about the avanias, claiming that, alongside the ‘ravages of corsairs’, they constituted the greatest threat to French trade in the period 1610–61.Footnote 24 In the more recent literature on eastern Mediterranean trade, avanias have fallen somewhat out of view (the word, if encountered, is glossed in footnotes in a variety of different and sometimes inaccurate ways).Footnote 25 Nevertheless, the established view was challenged in the early 2000s by Merlijn Olnon and Maurits van den Boogert, both of whom were working primarily with Dutch and English sources from the later seventeenth century. The two case studies examined by Olnon suggest that payments referred to as ‘avanias’ were more like a settlement fee or fine during a dispute in which the Europeans themselves were at least partly culpable or had themselves contravened stipulations in the ahidnames (the unilateral grants that regulated the presence of specially protected non-Muslims in the Ottoman empire, known as ‘capitulations’ in European languages).Footnote 26 The decision to frame these disputes as unavoidable impositions, Olnon suggests, was made in order to reduce the impression of culpability when communicating with home authorities. It may also be that the threat of the avania was a useful fiction for members of the European nations when looking to defray expenses collectively, including ordinary expenses such as the gifts made to Ottoman officials.Footnote 27 Maurits van den Boogert’s work, meanwhile, has shown not only that the conventional definition of the term is misleading but that ‘avania’ had a much wider semantic footprint than just ‘official demand for money’. Sometimes ‘avania’ was used to label an informal settlement that European traders had reached pre-emptively with local actors to avoid trouble later on, or to stop a case going to trial, or even simply when facing a decision they felt was unfair.Footnote 28 What is more, neither Olnon nor Van den Boogert finds the word or any variant or direct equivalent used in corresponding Ottoman documentation. On at least one occasion when the word had to be translated into Ottoman, it was rendered by the phrase diye iftira, meaning ‘slanderously suggested’, rather than through a single equivalent term.Footnote 29 We are therefore dealing with a concept which was highly partisan, had a broad range of meanings, was used extensively in the context of European trade in the Ottoman empire, and endured over a surprisingly long period of time.
The fact that the word ‘avania’ has received no serious attention in an Italian context is strange, given the historic role of the Italian city-states in eastern Mediterranean trade. The first known recorded use of the term occurs in a Genoese document of 1381, while the next occurs in a Venetian–Mamluk commercial treaty of 1415.Footnote 30 Like many of the terms of trade that Italian merchants adopted from languages of the eastern Mediterranean, it is difficult to say much about when and how the transfer took place, but the appearance of the word in Genoese and Venetian sources at a similar time but in quite different geographical and political contexts suggests that the word was already well established by the time of these first Italian attestations.Footnote 31 In 1978, the orientalist Alessio Bombaci concluded that the origin was probably the Arabic ‘awān, which can probably be ascribed the meaning ‘tort’, becoming ‘avān in Ottoman, though the evidence is far from conclusive.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, despite almost certainly being a borrowing from Arabic, perhaps via the mediation of a Turkic language, ‘avania’ was not part of a shared trading vocabulary.
The Venetian bailo: an unreliable narrator?
The position of bailo stood near the summit of the Venetian cursus honorum and was always filled by a patrician of long diplomatic experience.Footnote 33 As well as representing the interests of the Venetian state to the Porte, the bailo also represented the interests of private Venetian subjects in the Empire. His court held jurisdiction over disputes between Venetian subjects and had the power to notarise contracts and other legal documents.Footnote 34 He could appoint and dismiss consuls in other ports, with whom he remained in regular contact. His dispatches (dispacci) – regular and official communications with the government at home – thus include news not only from the capital itself but from wherever Venetians were active within the Ottoman empire and the region at large. These messages, which were usually encrypted, were addressed to the doge, by whom they were to be opened under the supervision of a senior official (savio). The doge would decide whether to keep the information to himself or to forward the dispatch to the Council of Ten or to the Senate.Footnote 35 In practice, most dispatches in our period took the latter course. The Senate, in turn, responded with comments and instructions, which are filed under Senato, Deliberazioni, Constantinopoli. These are sometimes indexed by theme, with some indices including the heading ‘Avanias, travails and disorders’ (Avanias, travagli, e disordini).Footnote 36
The richness of the material produced by the bailo’s office is undeniable, though the bailo’s reliability as an observer of Ottoman society has been the subject of considerable debate. This debate has so far not centred on the dispatches, however, but rather on the relazioni, the oral reports which each bailo was required to make to the Senate at the end of his term of service. These were formal occasions, and secretaries and ghostwriters would often help a bailo prepare his account. Technically state secrets, these were eagerly awaited by the wider public, among whom they circulated illegally in print and manuscript form, often becoming garbled as a result.Footnote 37 Once considered a historical source par excellence (by Leopold von Ranke, among others), their usefulness was later cast into doubt.Footnote 38 It was argued, first of all, that the bailo was not experienced or well positioned enough to be an authoritative witness. It is certainly true that the baili had less direct experience of the Ottoman empire than most of the Venetian merchants and, unlike some of these latter figures, they almost never spoke any Turkish.Footnote 39 They would occupy their post for only around three years before returning to Venice or taking up service elsewhere. Second of all, it was claimed that the relazioni were too Venetian-centric in outlook to act as anything other than a mirror to Venetian concerns and preoccupations. More recently, some scholars have mounted a ‘functional defence’ of the relazioni and argued that many of the bailo’s observations have been borne out by sources produced by Ottoman subjects.Footnote 40 While we might certainly ask the same sort of questions of the dispatches, it is important to note that this is a different source type. The relazioni are often relatively short summaries made for a wide audience and focusing on political events in the empire, whereas the dispatches are regular accounts of the bailo’s activities and the news he collected, usually sent back every couple of weeks.
For our purposes here, it is also worth asking how commercially aware the baili may have been. By the early seventeenth century, the long tradition of direct patrician involvement in eastern Mediterranean commerce was almost extinguished, albeit not entirely eliminated (indeed, we will encounter a patrician trader in events described below).Footnote 41 Some patricians still operated as sedentary merchants from Venice or invested in trade indirectly, but the traditional mercantile apprenticeship on the ground in the eastern Mediterranean was no longer a reality.Footnote 42 It was much more likely that a patrician – certainly one who aspired to become bailo – should have had a humanist rather than a mercantile education, though the two paths were admittedly not mutually exclusive. All three of the baili examined here were known to differing extents for literary accomplishments, though Ottaviano Bon had also undergone a period of mercantile training at the insistence of his father before escaping to the University of Padua.Footnote 43 The baili may thus have had some residual sense of the practicalities of eastern Mediterranean trade, though this would not have been as extensive as in previous generations, when it might have been gleaned from their own direct experiences or those of close relatives.
The case of Ca’fer Pasha and Zuanne da Malvasia
Despite the fact that Ottaviano Bon claimed to be dealing with avanias every waking hour, surprisingly few incidents are explicitly labelled as such in the dispatches. Across a ten-year period, there are just six episodes in which the term ‘avania’ or its variant ‘avanist’ (avano) was used to describe a specific event: four incidents in the roughly two-and-a-half-year period covered by Nani’s dispatches and two in the almost-five-year period covered by those of Bon. (The term does not appear at all in Contarini’s dispatches.) On one occasion, an avania is mentioned in passing, suggesting that not all events that counted as avanias in Venetian eyes may have been labelled as such.Footnote 44 Nevertheless, this is a significantly smaller harvest than might be expected on the basis of Bon’s remarks. The most complex of these events took place on the island of Cyprus in 1604–5 during the bailate of Ottaviano Bon himself. This deserves unpacking in full in order to bring out the complexity of both the meaning of the term and the entanglements it was deliberately employed to conceal.
On 31 May 1605, Bon told the Senate that he had sent Marcantonio Bonrisi, the Venetian chief dragoman (i.e. diplomatic and linguistic interpreter), to see Ca’fer Pasha, the beylerbeyi (chief military-administrative official) of Cyprus, on account of money ‘he got from the agents of one gentleman of ours by means of an avania raised against them’ (per mezo di una avania levatali).Footnote 45 The sum was one thousand five hundred ‘ori’ (either Venetian ducats or Ottoman golden sultani whose value was pegged to the Venetian ducat at this time).Footnote 46 The Venetian gentleman in question was one Rugier Ruzini, a patrician. The dispatch reported that Ruzini’s agents in Cyprus ‘had been found with a Turkish woman’ and that the mufti of the island had wanted to ‘condemn them to the fire’. It is implied that Ca’fer Pasha used or even engineered this situation to extort the money from the agents.
When confronted by the dragoman Bonrisi, however, Ca’fer was reportedly surprised and claimed that, rather than condemning the Venetians, he had intervened with the mufti to save them from reprisals. He did not deny that he received property from the agents but claimed that this was not a cash payment but a gift in the form of clothing in order to thank him for his service, for which he ‘ought to be lauded rather than made the subject of an accusation’. Since gifts were an important part of both diplomacy and social relations in the Ottoman empire, some recognition of this kind could plausibly have been expected in the circumstances.Footnote 47 Bonrisi (still according to the bailo’s account) replied that the business ‘was of another nature’. He then partially excused Bon, saying he had been ‘obliged to proceed according to the commandments of Your Serenity [the doge], albeit with displeasure’. Then he ended the meeting with a threat, telling Ca’fer that he ‘should think on this further, since, as far as making himself whole is concerned, Signor Ruzini knew of the credits of his lordship [Ca’fer] in the hands of Niccolò Lombardo’. Bonrisi then left Ca’fer ‘resentful and troubled by this business’.
The rationale behind Borisi’s words is made clear by a glance at the career of Ca’fer Pasha. As an important official, Ca’fer was already known to the Venetians. His name appears in two relazioni of the previous decades, one of which described him as a ‘wise man, and friend of Christians’ and the other – that of Agostino Nani –as a ‘Calabrian, well disposed towards the Republic’.Footnote 48 As this remark suggests, Ca’fer was originally from Calabria (he was probably captured by Muslim corsairs in his youth), and he was able to speak ‘Frankish’ (i.e. Italian). Ca’fer’s life, too, then, bore the clear imprint of Mediterranean entanglement. We also know that Ca’fer was a big exporter of cotton from Cyprus to Venice, a sector in which Venetian merchants were still very active.Footnote 49 Consular records at the end of the sixteenth century show about twenty Venetian merchants operating in Cyprus, including some patricians, exchanging fine Venetian finished cloths for raw cotton.Footnote 50 As beylerbeyi of the island, Ca’fer would have been well-placed to obtain cotton and to participate in this commerce.Footnote 51 Even though he was thus competing with Venetian merchants in one sense, he seems to have regarded cooperation with the Venetians as a sound business strategy. In fact, the bailo Francesco Contarini even remarked that Ca’fer’s ‘governance of the island [is] very pleasing to our merchants on account of his good qualities’.Footnote 52 Bonrisi’s apology reflects the fact that the Venetians hoped, if possible, to avoid damaging this useful relationship. The threat reflects the fact that the Venetian authorities held some financial leverage over Ca’fer thanks to his business interests in Venice itself.
A few weeks later, we learn a little more about the case in another dispatch. One of the agents, Zuanne de Zorzi da Malvasia, had arrived in Constantinople: ‘he from whom Ca’fer Pasha raised one thousand five hundred ducats with an avania’ (quello al quale Giaffer Bassà con una avania levò li ori mille cinquecento).Footnote 53 Bon arranged a meeting between Zuanne and Ca’fer in order to try to mediate between them, to no avail. ‘The truth,’ added Bon, ‘as demonstrated by the writings that the said Zuanne showed, is that he paid out one thousand five hundred ducats to save himself.’ Since this documentation was witnessed only by Christians, the bailo claimed it ‘would have no force’ in Ottoman law. Bon thus recommended that Zuanne and Ruzini reimburse themselves for the said sum in Venice, where he knew that Ca’fer had some assets – the goods held on Ca’fer’s behalf by Niccolò Lombardo. Bon informed the doge and Senate that Zuanne would arrive in Venice along with his documents. He only hoped that Ca’fer would not subsequently decide to ‘doubly reimburse himself’ by seizing cargo belonging to the pair in the Ottoman empire, ‘being old, avaricious, and for money above every other thing’ (quite a contrast, we might note, with ‘wise man and friend of Christians’).
Already, a few aspects of this narrative appear questionable. The idea that the mufti of Cyprus might ‘condemn’ Zuanne is, at best, a synthetic and technically inaccurate description, since the mufti’s role was to issue fetvas (non-binding legal opinions) to aid the kadi (judge) rather than to issue judgments per se.Footnote 54 More intriguing still, the dispatches claim that the mufti condemned the agents to be burned alive. Yet it seems unlikely that the mufti would have mandated such a punishment, even had he been part of a deliberate attempt to frame an innocent man. The crime of which Zuanne was accused would fall under the heading of zina, that is, illicit sexual intercourse. Islamic law (şeriat) prescribes flogging or stoning as a punishment for zina, but not burning alive.Footnote 55 Burning as a form of punishment would, at any rate, run counter to a hadith which declares that burning is a punishment reserved for Allah, not to be used by human beings.Footnote 56 Ottoman imperial law (kanunnames), meanwhile, mandated much lighter, discretionary punishments for zina, usually a fine, in part justified by the very high standards of proof demanded for zina in the şeriat, and evidence for capital punishment being handed down for zina is almost non-existent.Footnote 57 It is possible that Zuanne’s status as müste’min (protected non-Muslim) could have changed something here, but it would nevertheless have been a very unconventional punishment.Footnote 58
In order to obtain further details, we must turn to a different archival repository, Bailo a Costantinopoli. Here we find an affidavit (fede) made before the Venetian consul and copied into the bailo’s court protocol on 15 June 1605 (the original was dated 22 November 1604).Footnote 59 Witnessed by ‘Cristofo Pollo, Gerolimo Danielle and Bernadin de Andrea’, it states that ‘for thirteen or fourteen years, Zuanne da Malvasia visited the house of his aunt (ameda) and that he was taken from that house by Ca’fer Pasha’. Then, in the space of two hours, to liberate himself’ he paid a sum totalling one thousand five hundred ducats to Ca’fer and his associates. This is, presumably, the unspecified document witnessed by Christians mentioned by Bon in the dispatches. However, we also find another, more startling document entered into the protocol a few weeks later on 2 July 1605 that cannot have been among the ‘writings’ mentioned by the bailo in the dispatch, since it includes non-Christian witnesses. It is a Venetian translation of a hüccet – a written attestation made before a kadi.Footnote 60 The document also mentions the subaşı of the fortress, namely the official responsible for policing.Footnote 61 The hüccet provides several intriguing details we do not learn about elsewhere. First, we learn that Zuanne had a Turkish moniker. He is introduced as ‘Zuanne, son of Zorzi, with the surname reis aghi [sic], Venetian subject’. (Reis aghi is probably a rendering of reis ağa, meaning ‘shipmaster’.) The document then begins with Zuanne’s testimony, which reveals that Zuanne’s paternal uncle was also a Muslim Ottoman subject:
Mustafa Casal is my uncle, inhabitant of the [Nicosia] district of Tripoli in the said fortress. For many years, I have habitually gone and carried out business in his house, without anybody witnessing any damage or betrayal on my part. Nonetheless, the lord Ca’fer Pasha imprisoned me, saying, ‘you go to the house of the aforesaid Mustafa,’ and he got the condemnation, and still now the aforementioned subaşı does not cease to harass me (darmi molestia et travaglio).
The hüccet then changes perspective and describes a process of legal investigation:
The said Zuanne has requested that information should be obtained regarding his actions and behaviour from the said Mustafa and others living in the said district […] Christoro son of Poli, Didi son of Dari, Giorghi son of Christoforo, Pietro Rafepoli and Restepoli and others say: we, resident here for a long time, have never seen any lamentable conduct (tristitia) from the aforementioned Zuanne, nor have we ever heard of any betrayal, and we hold him to be a good and faithful man. What is more, the aforementioned Mustafa Casal has confessed, saying that the said Zuanne is my nephew and the son of my brother, and used to faithfully come to my house, nor have I ever seen or discovered any betrayal or any lamentable conduct.
Finally, the document records a process whereby Zuanne submitted a legal proposition, which was rejected. Nevertheless, it is ordered that the harassment of Zuanne should cease:
Zuanne has also presented in this regard a noble statement of faith (nobile fedeltà) […] which says that it stands to right that a Christian of the country should sometimes go to the house of a Turk to conduct business. The reply says that nothing [of the kind] stands, and yet, in virtue of the noble statement of faith, the present document is stipulated to the effect that no one should harass Zuanne on this account, and that this present document is given to him so that if he needs, he may make use of it.
The document is signed by six witnesses with Muslim names, including one man listed as a Janissary.
What can we establish with certainty at this point? It seems beyond reasonable doubt that Zuanne was imprisoned on a charge of improper relations with a Muslim woman and that Ca’fer Pasha was somehow involved in that imprisonment. The hüccet tells us that Zuanne later had some success in defending himself before the local courts: the matter went before the kadi, and Zuanne seemingly requested a fetva (which would have taken the form of a reply to a legal proposition). Though the mufti did not support Zuanne’s proposition, he nevertheless received a favourable judgment from the kadi, at least as far as the subaşı was concerned. However, the hüccet’s narrative, which focuses not on Ca’fer but on the harassment the subaşı was ‘still now’ carrying out, suggests that Ca’fer had already released Zuanne well before he went to the kadi court, and this is confirmed by the fact that the hüccet was created ‘around 8 December 1604’ according to its dragoman translator, whereas the affidavit witnessed by the Christians which mentions Zuanne ‘paying out’ to Ca’fer is dated 22 November. Since Zuanne thus went to the kadi court subsequent to his release, and since it was Zuanne himself who sought a fetva, the chronology does not support Ca’fer’s contention that his involvement in the case consisted in an intervention after a hostile declaration by the mufti. One thousand five hundred ducats would, in any case, have been a very large sum for a private subject to hand over as an honorific, notwithstanding Ca’fer’s high position. To give some context, the smallest Venetian ships plying the Levant routes were insured for between one thousand and two thousand ducats in this period.Footnote 62 Losing this capital was thus the equivalent of losing a small ship. It is thus difficult to escape the conclusion that the payment was indeed directly connected to Zuanne’s release. Finally, the hüccet reveals, as the dispatches certainly do not, that Zuanne is a prime example of an ‘entangled’ historical actor. Here was a Christian Venetian subject with a Muslim aunt and uncle who went to their house regularly to conduct business. This family arrangement must have been a fairly common set-up in early seventeenth-century Cyprus, which had been a Venetian colony less than forty years previously. Given this, the accusation does begin to look somewhat disingenuous and opportunistic.
What is interesting for us here is the way that Venetian-produced documents respond to this issue. They do not highlight the material injustice of the case – the exploitation of an aspect of daily life which was de facto accepted by everyone – but rather invoke religious difference and animosity. In fact, they are at pains to conceal the material injustice that actually lies at the heart of the matter. We do not learn about Zuanne’s Muslim relatives at all in the dispatches, even though this important fact might have helped to establish his innocence. We only learn that Zuanne was visiting the house of his aunt in the affidavit signed by the Christians, and this document does not explicitly state that his aunt was a Muslim. It is only in the hüccet that we learn that Zuanne’s paternal uncle was also a Muslim, and this document is equally absent from the dispatches.
The bailo emphasises the structural disadvantages suffered by Venetians to justify his proposed course of action, closing down any possibility of redress through Ottoman legal channels with reference to the greater weight given to Muslim witnesses over Christian ones.Footnote 63 Other roads to redress were nevertheless open to the Venetians, at least in theory. Documents generated by the seventeenth-century Ottoman state explicitly recognise expropriations by governors, including those levied through false accusations, as pertaining to a recognised crime genus: zulüm (oppression/mistreatment).Footnote 64 One possible course for redress was to petition for an imperial order (hüküm), a solution which the baili regularly made successful use of in the early-seventeenth century.Footnote 65 Venetian baili also engaged in so-called ‘fetva diplomacy’ in this period, seeking legal opinions from the şeyhülislam (the so-called ‘grand mufti’), which might further their interests.Footnote 66 For whatever reason, these solutions were not contemplated in this case, perhaps because Cafer’s particularly influential position towards the top of the administrative hierarchy rendered them impractical. Bon instead moved straight to a different solution – reprisals – justifying this with reference to the systematic disadvantages under which Christians ostensibly operated in the Empire.
Despite his own various omissions and obfuscations, further documentation reveals that it was not the bailo who was chiefly responsible for the framing of this episode, nor was he the first to label it an avania. That responsibility lay instead with Rugier Ruzini, who, it turns out, had not petitioned the bailo for help in the first instance but had gone directly to the Venetian Senate. When we examine the Senate’s deliberations, we find his original petition, dated 15 December 1604, more than five months before the dispatch relating Bon’s first visit to Ca’fer Pasha.Footnote 67 This petition was then sent to the bailo with instructions to deal with the matter prior to Zuanne’s arrival (the five-month wait may have been due to Ca’fer Pasha’s absence from the capital). It was thus Ruzini, the petitioner, who shaped the framework through which events were presented, which he did in suitably emotive language. The petition relates how Zuanne and his brother-in-law, Nico, had gone to Cyprus to trade for cotton with capital belonging to the trading house of Ruzini and Zuanne’s ‘poor and aged father’, Zorzi. There, Ca’fer Pasha with ‘unjust avanias’ (delle vanie malagiuste) had orchestrated a situation where ‘Zuanne and Nico were at the house of one of his [Ca’fer’s] Turks to dine together’. Ca’fer then raised against ‘the imprudent youths […] the avania that they had intercourse (commercio) with Turkish women, entirely contrary to the truth’, ordering that Zuanne and Nico be ‘burned alive’. This punishment is described in vivid detail. The two agents were surrounded by Ca’fer’s ‘henchmen’ (satelliti), stripped and led before a ‘great fire’ where they asked for the grace that they ‘might confess their sins to Our Lord’. It was then hinted by some of the henchmen that Ca’fer would spare their lives in return for a fee. In order to ‘save themselves from such a cruel and atrocious death, finding themselves before the aforesaid dangers, or martyrdoms’, the two agreed.
Rather than the bailo informing the Senate about what had happened, it had been the Senate that informed the bailo. The bailo’s response and the language it used were conditioned by this original missive, not the other way around. This is an important reminder of something that is often forgotten in discussions about the mediation of knowledge about the ‘East’ to the ‘West’. Though historians are inclined – and, indeed, sometimes obliged – to study unidirectional flows through the ‘official’ chains of transmission, beginning with Ottoman interlocutors before moving through the dragomans and the diplomats, information was perfectly capable of arriving in European capitals without such mediation.Footnote 68 Indeed, in this case, this outside information already constrained the terms of the official record. The word ‘avania’ is hard at work in this original petition, being invoked not once but twice at different points in the narrative: the bailo had merely adopted the terminology presented to him. The dispatches are not one-way traffic: they are a dialogue.
Now we know why Bon could not reveal that Zuanne had habitually visited his uncle’s house for thirteen or fourteen years: it was supposedly only through ‘avanias’ of Ca’fer that Zuanne had ended up having dinner with an unspecified ‘Turk’. Only imprudent youth combined with the wiles of the Turkish pasha, it is implied, could have possibly brought such a situation about. Even if had he been inclined to do so, Bon could not reveal the truth without compromising Ruzini’s case. The threat of being burned alive was almost certainly an invention intended to underline the framing of events as extortion, but the Senate had been led to believe that Ca’fer had, quite literally, held the agents’ feet to the fire. Indeed, we might note the extent to which religious language permeates the whole account. The young agents ask for leave to confess; their imminent death is described as a ‘martyrdom’; and this framing is underscored by the fact that the (probably invented) punishment is burning at the stake. (The narrative in many ways resembles the Orthodox Christian ‘neo-martyrologies’ which, according to Tijana Krstić, enjoyed particular success in western Europe in the era of confessionalisation.)Footnote 69
It thus becomes clear that the use of the term ‘avania’ was chosen deliberately by a petitioner in order to delegitimise better the behaviour of the accused party – Ca’fer – and to capture the attention of the home authorities. Its invocation was also a way of glossing over important but inconvenient details in the account, as part of a broader effort to draw a religious dividing line between the Venetians and Ottoman subjects, apparently an important consideration not only for the success of the petition but in its own right. Finally, and most significantly, the word appeared first not in communication with other merchants, or even with the bailo, but in a petition to the Senate – those who knew least about the actual situation on the ground. (Indeed, the fact that the content of this petition was accepted without question actually suggests a surprising level of ignorance about the realities of Venetian trade.)
In this case, it almost worked. Ca’fer’s goods were indeed seized on the orders of the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia (Board of Trade in Venice), but, some months later, the Senate was forced to relent when Ca’fer was promoted to the position of Kapudan Pasha (High Admiral). Since Ca’fer was now in a position to do serious damage to Venetian interests, the Senate adopted a more politique stance, sending Ca’fer a letter of congratulation and releasing his goods.Footnote 70 The bailo was instructed to try to recoup Ruzini’s capital at a more propitious, as yet unspecified, moment.
What in this episode is ‘rhetoric’ and what is ‘pragmatism’? Despite a fairly muscular initial response, the Senate was certainly not about to risk Venice’s entire eastern Mediterranean trade for the sake of one thousand five hundred ducats once Ca’fer became Kapudan Pasha. The ‘battlefield’ stance thus arguably foundered on the shoals of political reality. But how far can such a conclusion take us? What the case of Zuanne and Ca’fer demonstrates instead is the unproductive and rather misleading nature of the rhetoric/pragmatism framework. The discourse of the avania, like the discourse of mercantile ‘friendship’, is an example of rhetorical pragmatism. Both discourses might be invoked instrumentally to advance a certain end. One can appreciate the logic of Eric Dursteler’s position when he contrasts the ‘rhetoric’ of division with the reality of contact – in our case, real entanglement was concealed behind a fake story of religious enmity – but the fact that such a tall tale was deemed plausible also tells us something about the extent of such entanglement and its cultural reach. While it is true that Ruzini’s version of events reflected the world as the Senate wished it to be rather than the world as it was, Ruzini nevertheless expected his tale to be believed. It was, moreover, designed to have a real-world effect, and it would have achieved it had circumstances not intervened. The case of Zuanne and Ca’fer thus at once reveals both the depth of Mediterranean entanglement and its limits.
The Senate’s role in creating avanias
Other instances in the dispatches corroborate the idea that it was the opinions of the Senate, or the relationship of the bailo to the Senate, which were crucial factors behind the decision to adopt an avania framing. In September 1601, Agostino Nani reported that he had promulgated a recent law passed by the Senate that forbade Venetians from entering into ‘companies or any other kind of mercantile participation with Turks and Jews’ and announced his intention, as per the Senate’s instructions, to pursue transgressors energetically.Footnote 71 (The existence of this law should, in and of itself, temper over-enthusiastic pronouncements about the meaning of Venetian commercial ‘pragmatism’). Before long, Nani was approached by a number of substantial merchants who requested, in accordance with this law, that ‘Turks and Jews’ should be expressly forbidden from loading cargoes under the name of Christian merchants, which they had been doing ‘in order to better insure themselves against the depredations of [Christian] corsairs’. The practice of name lending was common in seventeenth-century Mediterranean trade. Merchants sought security in a disordered sea in which no one state could offer effective protection against maritime violence.Footnote 72 Nor should we be surprised that Jewish merchants sought this protection, as they were also regularly targeted by Christian corsairs.Footnote 73 Nani, however, in support of the new legislation, pointed out that the practice of name lending presented ‘great danger to the merchandise of those same Christians with extreme travail, as well as to the expense of the seamen and officers of the vessel’. Moreover, ‘it opened up to the Turks an easier way to invent avanias’ (si apre à Turchi più facil modo di inventare avanie). He pointed out that such an avania was in progress at that very moment: an Ottoman sipahi (cavalryman) was demanding reimbursement of his cargo from the scrivano (official record keeper) of the ship Martinella, asserting that it had been loaded under the name of a Christian and thus should not have been detained at Palermo.
We would not have learned about this avania had Nani not wished to provide an example to the Senate of the wisdom of its approach. The Sipahi’s demand was, apparently, not a serious enough matter to be included in the dispatches on its own merits. Rather, its inclusion, and its labelling as an avania, is connected to the sycophantic desire to praise the Senate’s new legislation and highlight the present ‘disorder’ with reference to current events. It may be that Nani was indeed visited by ‘substantial merchants’ hoping that the Senate would outlaw the practice of name lending. However, we should not discount the idea that this too was an embellishment designed to highlight cohesion within the Venetian community and a certain unanimity of outlook that did not, in fact, exist. It is, after all, difficult to see a clear interest for the merchants here, since they profited from name lending to “Turks” and “Jews”, and might disavow responsibility if things did go wrong for the name borrowers. Similar motivation may lie behind one of Ottaviano Bon’s dispatches, although the connection is admittedly less evident in this case. In 1604, Bon reported how he had ‘introduced to the Pasha those merchants of the nation against whom are made many avanias by Jews (à chi da Hebrei vengono fatte molte avanie) by making themselves debtors of the Sultan in order not to pay’.Footnote 74 These cross-cultural relationships were clearly of concern for the Senate, as shown by the fact that they legislated against selling to Jews on credit a few years later. (As the above examples suggest, Venetian documentation occasionally uses ‘avania’ not only in relation to ‘Turks’ but also in relation to Jews. This is somewhat surprising since, as far as we know, this was not the case in later English and Dutch usage. It is possible that an initial religious articulation of the term later gave way to an ethnic one.)
At other times, it is clear that the avania was mentioned with the senatorial reader in mind, even if the Senate did not prompt the choice directly. One example is an episode which occurred during the bailate of Agostino Nani in November 1601.Footnote 75 The Venetian chief dragoman, Marcantonio Borisi, had been dragged before the kadi of Constantinople by the customs officials, who ‘raised against him as avania that he had blasphemed their religion’ (levandole per avania che havesse biastemato loro lege).Footnote 76 The customs officials had apparently found over 200 witnesses to testify to this fact.Footnote 77 Borisi was saved from the ‘barbarous justice’ of the Ottomans by the intervention of the bailo, who remarked that the arrest had only occurred because of the current upheaval in the Ottoman government. The accusation was probably false: we cannot be sure, of course, but it is difficult to believe that Venice’s most experienced and trusted cultural and linguistic mediator would have publicly blasphemed before 200 witnesses. That is not to say the Venetians were just innocent victims, however. The customs officials instead seem to have reacted out of frustration after previous Venetian infractions had gone unpunished. Borisi’s visit to the docks had been prompted by the need to free the ship Moresina, which had not been granted permission to leave the port.Footnote 78 The ship’s scrivano had made a ‘bad impression’ because he had previously not recorded all of the ship’s merchandise in his book. Borisi threatened to report the customs officials to the Pasha, a fact that understandably enraged the customs officials, who, after all, had only been carrying out their duties. As Suraiya Faroqhi finds in her study of the Ottoman ecnebi defterleri (registers of matters pertaining to foreigners), the relatively good relationship between the highest-ranking Venetian and Ottoman officials was not always mirrored in the attitudes of lower-ranking officials, who might resent the relatively privileged position of a traditional enemy and the impunity they often enjoyed.Footnote 79
The salient point here is that Nani decides to deploy the word ‘avania’ (along with ‘barbarous justice’) when finding himself in a position of some embarrassment. He needs to explain exactly why the Serenissima’s chief dragoman ended up in such a humiliating position – hence his care to connect events to temporary upheavals in the Ottoman government. Such an event might have reflected badly on Nani’s own ability to cultivate relationships at the highest levels and safeguard the honour and dignity of the Republic, a concern which was, in an early modern context, just as important as any concrete losses or gains he accrued through his mediation. Nani falls back on cultural stereotypes as a way of justifying what should not have happened. The framing is connected not so much with the circumstances themselves, but with the fact that the senators might have been displeased.
We witness this same tendency several times in Nani’s dispatches. In the same year, a reis (shipmaster) who was also a janissary had some cargo robbed by Christian corsairs at İskenderun (Alexandretta).Footnote 80 This reis-janissary appeared in the Imperial Divan, claiming that the bailo owed him compensation.Footnote 81 His justification, according to the bailo, was the fact that the Venetian vice consul in Alexandretta had offered him ‘assurance’ (assicurazione) ‘that [the corsairs] were not vessels of malicious intent’ for which reason he had chosen not to leave the port and had suffered the consequences.Footnote 82 Here we see how ‘avania’ did not mean just ‘false accusation’ but could be any false pretext behind a demand. The reis had, however, presented some ‘documents’ (once again unspecified), perhaps hinting at something more than mere verbal assurance. The dragoman Borisi had already ‘demonstrated himself equal to his avania and shown that your serenity [the doge] was not liable for anything’ (il quale mostrava restar capace dell’avvania di costui), but the bailo was worried that the affair might be decided against the Venetians all the same. The business was complicated by the fact that the French ambassador had been placed in a similar position and wanted to make his case before the kadı‘askers (the two most senior judges in the empire).Footnote 83 Nani felt this imprudent, stating that his preference was always for bringing all matters directly to the Grand Vizier or one of his deputies.
An ‘assurance’ given by the vice consul did not, of course, constitute grounds for compensation. In any case, the Venetians would have considered this a private arrangement, and the capitulations/ahidnames decreed that the bailo was not liable for the debts of private subjects.Footnote 84 Nevertheless, it seems significant that Nani deliberately invokes the word ‘avania’ when, notwithstanding the apparent soundness of the case, he also hints that things might not end up going the Venetians’ way. By framing the demand as a serious yet all-too-routine example of Turkish perfidy, Nani pre-emptively defended his own conduct in circumstances he had already perceived to be potentially dangerous. This reading is confirmed by what Nani reports next. Although the words of the ‘Pasha’ (probably the Grand Vizier) had so far been encouraging on this matter, Nani stated that he could not trust them, ‘since he willingly lends an ear to avanias, thanks to his voraciousness and his greedy desire to turn them to some profit’ (dando egli volentieri orecchie alle avvanie per le sue ingordigie et avidità di cavarne utile). As with Zuanne and Ca’fer, we are probably dealing with a much more complicated situation than the dispatch acknowledges, with the presentation of ‘documents’, the unexplained involvement of the French ambassador and, potentially, that of the kadı‘askers. Nani assures the Senate that Venetian conduct has been above board and things are under control, but nevertheless feels the need to manage expectations. The avania, along with the Grand Vizier’s tendency to listen to them, delegitimises the claim without having to go into detail. It also simultaneously distances Nani and the Venetians from the eventual outcome.
Nani’s uses a variant form, ‘avanist’, in another situation where a sub-optimal result seems likely. In the year 1600, an attack on a karamusal (an Ottoman merchant vessel) in the waters near Zante demanded the bailo’s attention. Witnesses appeared in the Imperial Divan claiming that the attackers had been Venetians, notwithstanding the state of friendship between the Republic and the Porte.Footnote 85 Nani immediately sent Bonrisi to the Grand Vizier to complain of the ‘credence given to these avanists’ (avani). Since at this point Nani had no idea whether the accusations were true or not, the use of the term either reflects how Nani directed the dragoman to frame the accusations with the Grand Vizier or was simply a reflexive delegitimation of a hostile accusation. At a meeting with the Grand Vizier the next day – a meeting which Nani initially strove to avoid – the bailo opened by expressing regret that the Pasha ‘should have placed good friendship in doubt by listening to avanists’ (dolendosi che col prestar fede ad Avani si mettesse in dubio la buona amicitia) and ‘expanded upon these themes in order to undermine the credibility of those who are going round saying that the Venetians have become Englishmen’ (a reference to the notorious activities of English privateers in the Mediterranean).Footnote 86 He pointed out the fact that the attack had reportedly occurred at Brazzo di Maina, a coastal fortress in the Morea, and had been attested before the kadi of Modon and Coron, ‘where they are all thieves and the relatives of corsairs’. The Pasha seemed to be mollified, at least for the present. In the dispatch, however, the bailo struck a pessimistic note, ‘since one cannot rightly rebut the deposition of witnesses, which has great force in their law’. The word ‘avania’/‘avanist’ – invoked twice here – seems to be inversely correlated with the bailo’s expectation of resisting the demand.
The most revealing moment of this episode occurred some while later. As discussions and meetings with the Grand Vizier and interested parties continued over the following months, Nani had occasion to confront one ‘avanist’ directly.Footnote 87 A group of interested parties had gone to see the vizier to present their case once again. The vizier sent them away, telling them to await further news, but in order to give them ‘at least some satisfaction in soliciting him’ he directed them towards the Venetian dragomans, and ‘presently [they] came to molest me [the bailo]’. Nani welcomed them all with the ‘normal respect’ until it came to a reis (shipmaster) who had ‘from the beginning come often to molest me and petition me’. ‘Carried away by emotion’, recounts Nani, the reis let slip that neither the Grand Vizier nor the Janissary Aga nor the Kapudan Pasha any longer showed him favour and that his only remaining protector was God. Completely unmoved, Nani asked him what he imagined would happen when further news of the shipwreck came, for ‘I am awaiting nothing other than to pursue you and castigate you by means of justice’. At this point, the narrative unusually jumps to direct speech for a moment: ‘Why! He replied to me. I replied because he was an avanist, who introduced false sophistry (un avano che introduceva cose falsophome) … and he departed from me without reply, more terrified and confused than ever.’
For all its immediacy, we should not forget the constructed nature of the account here. Who is this unnamed reis? It is true that Ottoman subjects are often identified by their titles rather than their names in the dispatches, but it is nevertheless a little troubling that we are provided with few concrete details. The episode shows Nani in a very good light and – as far as one can tell – serves no other purpose. These were hardly crucial details that the doge and Senate needed to be kept abreast of. By recounting the pitiful petition of the reis, Nani was able to underscore how his skilful diplomacy and cultivation of key decision-makers had isolated petitioners from their sources of potential support (the Janissary Aga, the Kapudan Pasha). The conversation also demonstrates Nani’s forcefulness in dealing with those who made claims upon the Republic, even when (especially when?) there may have been good grounds for complaint.
Then there is Nani’s very unusual portmanteau adjective falsophome, which appears to be a hapax legomenon coined by Nani himself. Naturally, it is difficult to ascribe this utterance a definite meaning, but given the unusual use of ‘ph’ in the orthography, it should probably be read as a combination of the words falso (false) and sophum (a sophism). The resulting word is a shade tautological, given that a sophism is by nature a false argument. However, the allusion to the word sophistry does highlight an important dimension of the avania in the Venetian context that placed it beyond mere falsity. Though ultimately baseless, an avania bore the outward form of plausibility, just as a sophism deceives and confuses in part because it bears the outward signs of real wisdom. This certainly made the word useful in the circumstances when the baili felt the avania might succeed! More concretely, we might ask how the dragoman Bonrisi was expected to render ‘cose falsophome’ in Turkish for the benefit of the reis – assuming he was in fact present, since he goes completely unmentioned here. Is it possible that this utterance was not intended for the poor, unnamed reis after all, but rather for Nani’s humanist-educated colleagues back in the Venetian Senate?
The immediacy of the exchange with the reis alerts us to another recurrent feature of the avania discourse and gives further clues about the motivations behind its use. Here we must attend to the cultural meaning of the emotions displayed (or, at least, relayed). First of all, avanias and the avanists who raised them were, amongst other things, annoying. The word is frequently linked to the word molestie – harassment – and, as we find in the contemporary index of the Senate’s deliberations, to the word travagli – meaning ‘travails’, ‘hard and tiring work’, or even ‘acute suffering’.Footnote 88 Nani’s ‘outburst’, though in one sense a breach of diplomatic best practice, in fact underlines his ‘normal respect’ when confronted with the tiring and tiresome nature of the work, as well as his skill and success in carrying it out. Orality was leveraged to convey an emotion, but rather than this being for the benefit of the putative interlocutor, here it is for the benefit of the reader.Footnote 89 Bon’s remarks about avanias being ‘twigs and thorns’ consuming his waking hours is another example of the tendency, which appears specifically Venetian, to link the avanias to the idea of endless work.
As should be now clear, Bon was not actually dealing with avanias all day. In fact, he uses the label very sparingly. Rather, we should understand his remark, which, after all, was intended to ‘console’ his colleagues lest they think his work was easy, in relation to patrician discourses about service to the Republic. We might say that the dispatches display exactly the same tendencies that Filippo de Vivo has identified in the relazioni: they ‘praise dedication more than skill’, ‘couch achievement in the Republican language of service’ and stress ‘the particular difficulty of the mission […] carried out’.Footnote 90 In short, we must understand the dispatches, and certainly the Venetian avania, in connection with the so-called myth of Venice – the ideal of the perfect republican polity, served by a disinterested patrician class.Footnote 91 ‘Avania’ bridges such topoi to orientalist and anti-Jewish tropes about religious others, ultimately painting a picture of difficulty and precariousness in the Ottoman empire.
Conclusions
It should be re-emphasised that early modern European Christians were not above justifying their actions through dubious or false pretexts. Indeed, that is part of the logic of dispute and litigation: one side advances its claims under pretexts that the other side maintains are false, unjustified, or irrelevant. The word ‘avania’, however, is only used in relation to the actions of non-Christians. As we have seen, it is often accompanied by negative observations about the low character and greed of Turkish officials. What is more, Muslims and Jews are often portrayed as on the lookout for opportunities to launch avanias and take advantage of Christian merchants. The avania encapsulated this shared understanding in a single word. It had a specific albeit very broad meaning: the false pretexts or legal chicanery that non-Christians used to bring their unjust claims. Yet its power lay in the fact that it concealed more than it revealed, obviating the need to provide concrete details. That extortion occasionally happened seems certain, though it must be said that the number of specific avanias reported is actually very low.
In a very literal sense, commerce did create connections across the Mediterranean that crossed national, religious and cultural boundaries. The avanias recorded in the dispatches of the baili inadvertently attest to a range of commercial relationships existing between Ottoman and Venetian subjects. There was the Christian merchant who had lent his name to an Ottoman sipahi, who was presumably transporting his merchandise on a Christian ship. The bailo suggested that Ruzini might proceed by seizing assets belonging to Ca’fer Pasha in Venice, but this would not have been possible unless Ca’fer himself was a player in Venetian commercial networks. Both Ca’fer and Zuanne, religious adversaries in the sources, had led religiously entangled lives. The fact that prominent Venetian merchants were temporarily unable to recover debts held by Jewish merchants attests to the fact that they had contracted such debts in the first place. Whatever its pretensions, the Venetian Senate would prove unable to prevent ‘mercantile participation’ between actors with different religious identities.
And yet those pretensions did shape our sources to a considerable extent. Actors were aware that invocation of religious boundaries could be a highly efficacious means to obtain institutional support (and not just on the Venetian side: the zina accusations levelled against Zuanne on Cyprus or the blasphemy accusations against Marcantonio Borisi might be considered similarly). The most important dynamic shaping the dispatches, and certainly the accounts of avanias, was the bailo’s relationship with the Senate and his effort to shape his account according to the senators’ expectations, including deeply held notions about religious and cultural difference. We could dismiss this as rhetoric which does nothing but conceal pragmatic reality, and it is certainly important to look beyond official sources to detect the entanglement that was deliberately concealed. Yet that rhetoric too was part of everyday reality and had concrete effects of its own. Prejudice and ideology were no solid barrier to trade, but they impinged on life in the Mediterranean bazaar as much as they did on the battlefield. Liminality could bring many benefits, including commercial ones; it could also bring many problems and difficulties regarding identity and belonging. For both these reasons, cases involving liminal subjects are probably overrepresented in the historical record. The mere fact that trade took place, meanwhile, should not ipso facto undermine the idea that religion remained a powerful historical force that decisively shaped the lives of those living in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean, including and perhaps especially those particularly mobile individuals who were living ‘trans-imperial’ existences.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marissa Smit-Bose and Maria Fusaro for commenting on earlier drafts of this article, the two anonymous peer reviewers for their comments, and Jan Machielsen for his thoughtful remarks. I thank Nick Foster, Avi Rubin and Wael Hallaq for providing valuable expert opinion on a point of Islamic law.
Financial support
This research has been funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU and the University of Padua under the 2023 STARS Grants@Unipd programme (AvCOL - Avania: Commerce, Orientalism, and Law in Early Modern Europe).
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