The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova by Paul Strathern Read Free Book Online Page A

territory. Gerona, Mantua, Verona and Padua were all bribed to sign up, with Charles IV of Bohemia agreeing to be paid as commander of the league’s forces. According to the Venetian historian Lorenzo de Monacis, writing some sixty years later with access to the relevant documents, all this was accomplished ‘at almost incredible cost’. However, the Venetians underestimated Visconti of Milan, whose even greater financial inducements soon dissolved the league, allowing Charles IV to retire from his command with a further 100,000 ducats in his pocket. Even so, Visconti was not yet ready to take on Venice and despatched a peace mission to the city.
    This mission was led by the forty-nine-year-old poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca (now known as Petrarch), who would later develop a special relationship with Venice. At this time, he was the most celebrated intellectual figure in Italy since Dante. Twenty years previously he had been crowned ‘poet laureate’, complete with laurel wreath, in a ceremony at the Capitol in Rome that had not been performed since ancient classical times. He was an early champion of the new humanism, which sought a rebirth of classical learning, with its emphasis on human enquiry and action, rather than the religious authority and spiritual aspirations of the medieval era, which he referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’. For this reason Petrarch is often regarded as the father of the Renaissance.
    He had a wide circle of humanist friends, which included Guidone da Settimo, the Archbishop of Genoa, as well as the Doge of Venice, thescholarly Andrea Dandolo. * Indeed, as early as 1351 Petrarch had written to the Genoese and to Doge Dandolo suggesting that the Venetians and the Genoese should desist from waging war against one another, join forces and sail to the Canaries, the Orkneys, Thule (in Greenland) and the regions of the extreme north and south. But this remarkably prescient advice had fallen on deaf ears – not until two centuries later would gold be discovered in West Africa and serious exploration would reveal the New World and a passage around Africa. And despite Petrarch’s close friendship with Doge Dandolo, his peace mission to Venice would be met with equally deaf ears. Petrarch blamed himself for what happened, but there is no denying the anger he felt at his rejection:
    When many words had been wasted, I returned as full of sorrow, shame, and terror as I had come full of hope. To open to reason ears that were stopped and hearts that were obstinate was a task beyond my eloquence, as it would have been beyond that of Cicero.
    Yet Venice had good reason to reject Petrarch’s offer from Archbishop Visconti. Despite Genoa’s apparent submission to Milan, it had unexpectedly decided to revive the war of its own accord, carrying the fight right into Venice’s back yard. Early in 1354 Genoese galleys made a lightning strike into the Adriatic, laying waste the Venetian islands of Curzola and Lesina (modern Hvar), before disappearing back into the Mediterranean as swiftly as they had appeared. Venice at once decided to pursue the war with renewed vigour. Over the winter, their depleted fleet had been restored by the production line at the Arsenale, enabling them to mount two separate naval expeditions. The first was a squadron ordered to seal off the mouth of the Adriatic by mounting a constant patrol across the sixty-mile channel between Otranto on the Italian mainland and the island of Corfu, to prevent any repeat of this incident. The second was a fleet of fourteen galleys under the command of Pisani, which were ordered to liaise with nineteen further galleys from Venetian ports along the Dalmatian coastand as far afield as Crete. Pisani was then to hunt down and destroy the Genoese squadron responsible for the attack, as well as any other Genoese shipping it came across on the open sea. Having picked up his reinforcements, Pisani at once set sail for Sardinia, the scene of his former