1434 (9 page)

Venice prided herself on wealth but also on a republican government enshrined in a written constitution replete with complex checks and balances. Although the doge was head of state, he was constrained by various committees and councils. When Genoa was defeated in 1380, the Italian city-states of Verona, Vicenza, and Mantua willingly accepted the Pax Venetica. Their governing bodies were added to the Great Council. By 1418, Venice had outmaneuvered the Holy Roman Emperor and expanded her territories southward. Representatives of Istria, Friuli, and Dalmatia further swelled the Great Council. Gentile da Fabriano, Antonio Veneziano, and Jacobeló del Fiore were retained by the procurators of Saint Mark to adorn the walls of the Great Council Chamber with paintings of the glorious history of the Serenissima. Roberti carved his wonderful marble capitals, which adorn the façade. In 1419, Pisanello's frescoes were unveiled.

The Doges' Palace was designed for different functions. At the front, overlooking the lagoon, is the Great Council Chamber. At the far end, next to Saint Mark's, the doge's quarters are linked to the legislative areas by golden staircases. At the heart of the Doges' Palace is the map room—the biggest in his quarters.

The map room might well be described as the heart of the Venetian Empire. Here the doge would receive visiting heads of state, including Chinese delegations. The two long walls of the room are covered with eleven painted maps of the world. Facing the visitor is a map of the Venetian Empire in the eastern Mediterranean showing the route to China and the East. To the left is the Venetian Empire in the western Mediterranean. Neither of these maps shows latitude or longitude. They cover the same area as maps on the opposite wall showing the rest of the world. The Venetian Empire is thus shown far larger than it was.

The opposite wall is divided by the door into the Sala del Filosofi. To the left of the door is a map of central Asia from Crete to Tibet—the former trading empire of Byzantium. To the right is a map of the world from Arabia across the Pacific to California. India and the Indies, China, Japan, the Pacific, and North America from Alaska to California are depicted with general accuracy. Other maps show the Northeast Passage from the Faeroes to the rivers of Siberia; North and South America; the Red Sea and Arabia; the Atlantic coast of North America to 55° N, and central Asia. The whole world is there save for southern Australia.

Of greatest interest is the world map showing the Pacific and North America. There are two roundels on this map: one describes the part that Marco Polo played in gathering the information; the other recounts the role played by Niccolò da Conti. These are the world maps that Dom Pedro was given during his state visit to Venice between the fifth and twenty-second of April 1428. A host of Venetian records describes that visit:
Les Chronique Venetienne: The Diaries of Antonio Morosone from 1416
–
1433; the manuscript Zorsi delfine.
An extensive bibliography exists in F. M. Rogers's marvelous book
The Travels of the Infante, Dom Pedro of Portugal
.

There are no material differences among the various accounts, which Professor Rogers summarizes: “In March of 1428, Mario Dandolo, the Venetian Ambassador to the King of Hungary, reported that the Infante Don Pedro had left for Venice. The Doge (Francesco Foscari) and the Council decided to receive the Portuguese prince and his companions in regal fashion as their guests and at their expense…. the Doge received Dom Pedro on board the
Bucintoro
(royal barge).”

Of the gifts bestowed upon Dom Pedro during his visit to Venice, Professor Rogers cites several accounts,
¹⁷
the first by the celebrated historian Antonio Galvão:

Further corroboration is provided by Professor Rogers: “In early 1502 in Lisbon the famous German printer Valentin Fernandes published a beautiful volume of the Indies of the East [China]…. He included Portuguese translations of the Indies based on information gathered in Florence from Nicolo da Conti and delegates to the Council [presided over by Eugenius IV] and included in Book IV of his treatise
De Variaetate Fortunae
.” Later Professor Rogers writes:

Professor Rogers also summarized Marco Polo's and da Conti's contributions to world maps:

It seems to me beyond argument that the world map on display today in the Doges' Palace is, as the Venetians claim, based on information that reached Venice from Marco Polo and Niccolò da Conti and that this was the same world map taken to Portugal by Dom Pedro in 1428. Consequently, both the Venetians and the Portuguese knew the contours of the whole world before the Portuguese voyages of exploration even started. We know that da Conti was in Calicut the same time as Zheng He's fleets, for he describes the junks and his description tallies with those of Ma Huan, Zheng He's historian, who was in Calicut in 1419.
¹⁸

A sketch of Mongol faces by the Veronese artist Pisanello, 1430s.

As noted, in 1419, Pisanello (1395–1455) had painted murals in the Doges' Palace. Pisanello came from Verona, which by then had joined the Pax Venetica—her grandees were elected to the Great Council of Venice. In about 1436 Pisanello painted another fresco in the church of Saint Anastasia at Verona entitled
Saint George and the Princess of Trebizond
. In the left-hand section is a group of horsemen. Seated on a
richly caparisoned horse is a Mongol general with facial features, clothes, and hat very similar to the carvings of Zhu Di's generals that line the road that leads to Zheng He's tomb north of Beijing. The Mongol dignitary wears rich silk clothes. Pisanello's sketches of the hard, powerful Mongol face can be seen separately in the Louvre in Paris. The sketch and painting are so vivid that its seems to me inescapable that Pisanello painted what he saw in the late 1430s—a Mongolian general in Venice or Verona, a captain or admiral of one of the Chinese junks.
¹⁹
(See note 20 for Pisanello's other sketches of Chinese visitors to Venice in the 1430s). In my view Pisanello's sketches depict
the Chinese Admiral and his senior Mandarin advisor in their formal dress when they met the Doge. As captain of HMS
Rorqual
I would wear my ceremonial sword when calling on local dignitaries at the start of an official visit. The Chinese admiral would have carried his ceremonial bow.

The Chinese junks berthed at the Riva degli Schiavoni, or Quay of Slaves, would have created little fuss—Chinese and Arab ships were there as a matter of course. The ambassador and the captains would have presented their credentials to the doge in his palace a few hundred yards away, together with the
Shoushi
astronomical calendar giving details of the Xuan De emperor's conception and birth. Ceremonial gifts of silk and blue-and-white imperial porcelain would have followed, and finally maps of the voyage from China. The barbarians would now be able to return tribute.

Fresh meat, fruit, fish, vegetables, and water would be embarked, paid for partly in Venetian ducats (which the Chinese would have acquired in Cairo) and partly in rice. Zheng He's fleets would have disposed of the poor concubines and slaves who had not died in transit or been given away at a previous port, dispatching them to the slave market or shipping them on to Florence.

A date would have been set for a regulation to fix the price for the sale of the ceramics that crammed the holds. Tampions would have been placed on the guns; then the sailors could begin their shore leave. We can imagine Chinese sailors preparing to go ashore in a manner very similar to that of my fellow sailors fifty years ago when the HMS
Diamond
berthed opposite the Riva degli Schiavoni: we trimmed our beards, cut our long hair, gave ourselves a good wash. For the Chinese, perhaps first a swim in the Lido before donning their best clothes, having a drink, and collecting presents to give out to the girls. In 1434 these were likely to have been children's toys or miniature carts, junks or whirligigs, or perhaps one of the pocket encyclopedias such as the
Nung Shu
, showing how to design farm machinery.

Once ashore, the Chinese sailors could have been excused if they thought they were back in Quanzhou—their Mongolian counterparts
were everywhere. Venice was the gateway to Tuscany and the funnel through which slaves reached Europe. Lazari writes: “Many of the slave girls described in the
Registro degli Schiavi,
mostly in their teens were sold in a state of pregnancy and later used as nurses…. In this way a large influx of Asiatic blood penetrated into the Tuscan population.”

Lynn White quotes Lazari: “Lazari, who has studied most carefully the records of these unfortunates in Venice, assures us that the largest number came from the regions bordering Tibet and China in the north. ‘As they came in their thousands and were rapidly absorbed by the indigenous population, a certain Mongolian strain could not have been rare in Tuscan homes and streets.'”
²⁰

Iris Origo paints a vivid picture of the slaves who reached Florence from Venice:

Now let us follow the rich Chinese ambassador and the poor slave girls across the wooded plains of Tuscany to Florence.

A
rriving in Florence, the Chinese delegations would have seen towering above them the massive dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, a symbol of religious faith and a tribute to Florence's brilliant architects and engineers.

An argumentative, opinionated genius, Filippo Brunelleschi, was the cathedral's architect. To build his creation, he had designed a lift to hoist up the four million bricks the job required. A novel invention, the lift could operate at two speeds, depending on the load, and was capable of reversing direction without stopping the bullocks that supplied its power. Once the bricks arrived at the base of the cupola, giant cranes, another ingenious design, shifted them into place.

The dome was unique, resembling a lemon with the bottom sliced off. Standing a sliced lemon upright, with the severed section as the base, one sees the curve increase as the dome rises. Initially, the cathedral bricks rise vertically, then they curve more and more as the tiers get higher, until, at the top, they are almost horizontal. Without internal supports to secure them, one would have expected the bricks to fall inward. But Brunelleschi solved this problem by deploying complex, three-dimensional mathematics applicable to the volume of inverted cones—an extraordinary solution he reached with the assistance of Paolo Toscanelli.
¹

Brunelleschi designed and organized everything concerned with this
huge structure, at the time the largest in the world after Santa Sofia in Byzantium. He supervised the kilns where the bricks were made; he specified the proportions of lime and sodium bicarbonate for the mortar; he designed new forms for molding the bricks. He even built his own ships—articulated to facilitate sailing along the shallow, twisting Arno loaded with marble from Carrara quarries. He was granted a patent for this invention, accompanied by the right to burn rival boats! For three years, all marble was carried in Signor Brunelleschi's barges. It appeared that Brunelleschi, like Leonardo da Vinci, never went to university yet he became a genius who could turn his hand to anything.

The city that sprawled around the cathedral in the 1430s was one vast building site, a frenzy of civic works.
²
The dome alone created thousands of jobs; bricklayers, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, winchers, plasterers, and tool sharpeners toiled like worker bees. Contractors quarried stone from the surrounding hills, providing marble from Carrara, Siena, Monsummano, and Campiglia. Florence's lead furnaces fired full blast; tile and brick factories in Castinno, Lastra, Campi, and Impruneta worked in shifts at full capacity. Farmers planted new vines, sank new wells, and raised more barns.

Between the acquisition of the port of Pisa in 1406 and that of Livorno in 1421, Florence had enjoyed a continuous economic boom. Merchants made fortunes and patronized a stream of architects, sculptors, painters, and engineers. In this extraordinary era, Florence reached her apogee, “throwing up geniuses with the ease of a juggler.”
³
Or so it seems.

Italy in the fourteenth century was a patchwork of small, independent states of negligible political and military weight. Dialect, money, even weights and measures varied from state to state. Florence itself was a backwater. Yet from 1413 to 1470, Florence produced a series of works so majestic that nearly six centuries later they can still take your breath away. Why did the Renaissance suddenly explode in this small Italian town? What caused Gothic architects, sculptors, and painters to adopt the radical style we call Renaissance? How did such a bounty of genius emerge from obscurity in the space of a few years? Why there? Why then?

One explanation begins with the fact that Nature was very kind to northern Italy. The Alps sweep in a defensive semicircle around her northern frontiers; in spring, their melting snows feed the Po and its tributaries, which meander across the plain of Lombardy to the Adriatic. Rain falls throughout the year; even in high summer the hay fields are lush and green, the sweet corn nine feet high. Three or four crops provide winter fodder for animals. Brilliant sunshine, abundant water, and rich alluvial soil produce crops of every description: walnuts and chestnuts in the mountains; apples, pears, grapes, and peaches in the foothills; on the Riviera, oranges, lemons, and persimmons. From Alexandria to Mantua stretch mile upon golden mile of rice fields. Four thousand square miles of intensively cultivated land in the Po Valley provide plentiful food for everyone.

Italy enjoyed other blessings, as well. Throughout the Middle Ages, life there differed from life in the barbarian north.
⁴
The urban life created by the Romans survived the Ostrogoth and Hun invasions. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italians (unlike the brutish English) were not driven back into forests. Feudalism did not take root (Italy provided few warriors for the Crusades).

Northern Italy had a far more dense population than elsewhere in Europe. Urban wealth and commerce had encouraged an inflow of labor from the countryside, stimulating further economic growth. Old Roman walled cities afforded protection. Cities, rather than states or kings, dominated northern Italy's life. People were born, lived, fought, and died as individuals.

For millennia, Venice had been the hub of European trade, exchanging the riches of the East for raw materials from the north. Venice's wealth spilled over into the Veneto and along the valley of the Po. Genoese, Florentine, and Venetian merchants set up business in Alexandria, Byzantium, and Trebizond. In northern Europe, by contrast, generations struggled to eke out a living in the cold forests and marshes surrounding them. There was little surplus labor for commerce.

Florence, nestled in the lee of the Apennines, enjoys a host of natural advantages. An easy journey from Venice, she is approached through lush, green valleys, their gentle, undulating slopes covered with oaks,
sweet chestnuts, mountain ash, and acacia. Despite calamitous floods, on balance the River Arno has profited the city, providing an abundance of fish while transporting sewage and building materials downstream. Florence has never been much troubled by the water shortages that limited growth in the hill towns. Almost every aspect of the wool trade—separating fleeces, tanning hides, washing, spinning, and fulling—required copious amounts of water.

By the fourteenth century an all-weather road had been built beside the Arno. Traffic from Venice and the Lombard plain converged at Bologna, from which the shortest route to Rome lay across the Apennines. Florence occupied both trade routes—from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean and from Venice to Rome.

Florence's access to Venice enabled her to reap some of the benefits of Venice's trade with the East. It also exposed the city to an influx of Chinese and other Asians, as we can see from period paintings and sculpture. “About this time,” explained art historian Bernard Berenson in
Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting,
“the arts and crafts of the contemporary orient were beginning to invade Italy.”
⁵

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who never left Tuscany, painted
The Martyrdom of the Franciscan Friars
in the church of San Francesco Siena, depicting Chinese merchants with conical hats. Previously, oriental eyes had appeared in faces painted by Giotto and Duccio. As Leonardo Olschki wrote in “Asiatic Exoticism in Italian Art of the Early Renaissance,” “the impression has been given that Tuscany was almost a neighbouring country of the great Mongolian Empire and that Mandarins, Khans and Oriental dignitaries were almost as much at home in Florence and Siena as in Peking, Tabriz and Calicut.”
⁶

There was a very substantial Chinese and Mongolian population in Florence in the decades after 1434, which Olschki describes here:

Florentine families were able to keep Asian slave girls due to the wealth generated by the wool and silk trade. But that trade would never have flourished without the innovations of Italian banking.

Florence produced two bankers of genius: Giovanni de' Medici and Francesco di Marco Datini.
⁸
From 1398 until his death in 1410, Datini devised a range of new financial instruments that revolutionized European banking. Giovanni de' Medici took over where Datini left off,
⁹
leading his family to become the wealthiest in Florence and far and away the most important patrons of Renaissance learning and art. The Medicis funded artists, astronomers, engineers, architects, and cartographers on a grand scale.

In addition to art, the family purchased power, assiduously courting the papacy. During the schism that resulted in two competing popes, one in Avignon and the other in Rome, a pirate rejoicing in the name of Baldassare Cossa was elected Pope John XXIII. The Medicis had bought Baldassare his cardinal's hat with a loan of ten thousand ducats. When Baldassari became pope, the Medicis promptly became principal bankers to the papacy. (For a short period the Spinis replaced them, but at the end of 1420, the Spini bank became insolvent and the Medicis acquired their business.)

In 1421, for the statutory two-month period, Giovanni de' Medici occupied the office of
gonfalonieri,
the head of Florence. Within a few years not only did the Medici bank became the most successful commercial enterprise in Italy but the family became the most profitable in the whole of Europe. For the next 150 years, Medici power and money fired the Renaissance.

The Renaissance produced an enormous appetite for talent—engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, and artists whose individual works were so widely acclaimed that others were inspired to follow with confidence. In this, Florence once again had an ideal climate.

While the Medicis and other wealthy patrons provided the funds, substantial projects were overseen by the
operas
,
¹⁰
committees comprising of a cross section of society. Artists, engineers, and bankers sat alongside lawyers, astronomers, and aristocrats, just as they did in the city's governing body, the Signoria. This relaxed communication among different social classes took place in a society that valued diversity. The Medicis counted the pope, the chancellor of Florence (Leonardo Bruni), Toscanelli, Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Nicholas of Cusa among their friends. They ate, drank, and prayed together, frequently meeting every day. They examined almost every aspect of human endeavor with a cold, inquisitive eye. If man could explain the fundamental workings of the heavens, he could expound with equal comfort on sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, music, medicine, civil engineering, and warfare.

A very important tradition, which bound the Florentine hierarchy together, was their private group meal, the
mensa,
held twice a day at the headquarters of the Signoria in the Palazzo Vecchio. As Timothy J. McGee wrote in “Dinner Music for the Florentine Signoria, 1350–1450”:
¹¹
“The Mensa took place in the civic office building now known as the Palazzo Vecchio which has served as the seat of Florentine government since its construction in 1300…. The Signoria was the executive branch of the city government…. Present at the mensa itself were a few senior members of the signoria staff (the famiglia), occasional distinguished visitors and guests of the city….”

The Chinese delegation, with their new ideas, fabulous inventions, and depth of culture, would have made a very forceful impression on Florentine intellectuals meeting for the
mensa,
including Paolo Toscanelli. Florence was the ideal loam for Chinese intellectual seeds.

By pure chance, the Chinese arrived in Florence just as the Medicis returned from exile. In September 1433 the Signoria had exiled Cosimo de' Medici along with most of his family. However, in the elections of September 1434, the conservative faction in the Signoria was routed. The Strozzis, opponents of the Medicis, were exiled or barred from office.

Finance for the winning side had been provided by Cosimo, who had become chief executive of the family bank in 1420. He proved to be a brilliant banker. Profits for the years 1420–1435 totaled 186,382 florins and rose to 290,791 florins between 1435 and 1450. It was a huge sum, more than the income of some European states. Cosimo opened branches in Ancona, Pisa, Genoa, Lyons, Basel, Antwerp, Bruges, and London, becoming the first European international bank. He financed the Council of Florence (1438–1439) and provided the funds to topple the Viscontis in Milan, Florence's old rival.

As Mary Hollingsworth has shown, Cosimo took a dramatic turn after 1434, embarking on an orgy of patronage. He financed exotic palaces and chapels—San Lorenzo, San Marco, and the Medici Palace—fitting them with magnificent libraries. He financed the production of new books, maps, and scientific instruments to fill them. Vespasiano da Bisticci, a leading Florentine bookseller, described Cosimo employing fifty-five scribes to copy two hundred texts—a small undertaking by the standards of Zhu Di's encyclopedia but vast by European standards. (Henry V of England owned twenty books when he died in 1422.)