1434 Page 9

  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:

  In the year 1428 it is written that Dom Peter [Pedro], the King of Portugal’s eldest son, was a great traveller. He went into England, France, Alamaine, from thence into the Holy Land and to other places; and came home by Italy, taking Rome and Venice in his way; from whence he brought a map of the world which had all the parts of the world and earth described. The streight [sic] of Magellan was called in it the Dragon’s Tail; the Cape of Bona SperanÇa [Good Hope], the forefront of Afrike and so forth of other places; by which map, Dom Henry, the King’s third sonne was much helped and furthered into his discoveries….

  It was told me by Francis de Souza Tavares that in the year 1528 Dom Fernando, the King’s son and heir, did show him a map which was found in the study of the Alcobaza which had been made one hundred and twenty years before [1408] which map did set forth all the navigation of the East Indies with the Cape of Boa Esperanza as our later maps have described it; whereby it appeareth that in ancient times there was as much or more discovered than now there is. (Tratado Dos Diversos e Desayados Caminhos, Lisbon, 1563).

  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:

  In the second part of his lengthy introduction to Marco Polo, Valentin Fernandes makes the following statement pregnant with meaning from several points of view: “Concerning this matter I heard…that the Venetians had hidden the present book for many years in their Treasure House. And at the time that the Infante Don Pedro of glorious memory, your uncle, arrived in Venice [1428]…offered him as a worthy gift the said book about Marco Polo that he might be guided by it since he was desirous of seeing and travelling through the world. They say this book is in the Torre de Tombo.”

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

  With the Cape [Good Hope] rounded, the all-water route to India lay revealed. Valentin Fernandes could think of no greater service to his monarch than the publication in Portuguese translation the three best available descriptions of the world over which King Manuel now assumed dominion. One was that of Marco Polo; another was the description of the Indies (viz China) written by Pogio the Florentine, based on the information supplied to him by the delegates to the Council of Florence and by Nicolo da Conti.”

  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 admira
l 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:

  A traveller arriving in Tuscany at this time might well have been startled by the appearance of the serving-maids and grooms of the Florentine ladies. Mostly small and squat, with yellow skins, black hair, high cheek-bones and dark slanting eyes…they certainly seemed to belong to a different race from the Florentine…and if the traveller had friends in one of the Florentine palazzi and went to call, he found several other exotic figures there too: swarthy or yellow little girls of eleven or twelve…acting as nursemaids or playmates for the little Florentine merchant-princes.

  All these were slaves: most of them Tartars….

  Even a notary’s wife, or a small shopkeeper’s, would have at least one, and it was far from uncommon to find one among the possessions of a priest or nun. And a glimpse of them—perhaps slightly romanticised—even appears in a popular song describing little slaves shaking the carpets out of the windows on the Lungarno:

  “La schiavette amorose Scotendo le robe la mattina Fresche e giorose come fior di spina”*

  [*“The charming little slave-girls—shaking out the clothes in the morning—as fresh and joyful as hawthorn buds.”]21

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

  8

  PAOLO TOSCANELLI ’S FLORENCE

  Arriving 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.