Map of 13th-century Venice
I promised that I would write a post on Western Christian gæopolitics in early modernity, from an Orthodox perspective that takes account of world-systems theory. This blog post quickly sprawled out in three different directions, and I soon realised that to retain coherence and not to try the patience of my readers, I had better split it up into three or four separate blog posts. I also decided that given the ecclesiological nature of the discourse, it would be best posted here rather than on Silk and Chai (even though it overlaps strongly with S&C’s wonted subject matter). This, then, is the first part of that series, where I explore the Crusades and the œconomic opportunities and class rifts that they exposed, particularly among the mercantilist northern Italian city-states: particularly Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. The Maronites play a significant rôle here, because they demonstrated, especially to the Venetians, the value of having a local comprador élite class which could serve as agents of extraction for that city-state’s high financial and commercial interests. For a long time, the Western Church did not act on this insight – not, at least, until the financial depression brought about by the bubonic plague and the ecclesial instability brought about by the Western Schism.
To start with: one of the conceits that several of the sui iuris non-Latin rites of the Catholic Church – in particular, the Maronites and the Byzantine Greek Catholics – have about themselves is that they are ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’. This self-descriptor actually conceals more than it illuminates, which is of course precisely the point. If they were Orthodox Christian, they would be in communion with at least several of the established and visible body of Patriarchal Churches (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Moscow, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Tbilisi, Justiniana, Athens, Tiranä, Warsaw and Prague) that is generally recognised by that name. The descriptor of ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’ is meant to conceal as much as possible the actual gæopolitical and œconomic agenda these churches were created to serve, and which they have served throughout their history.
The first attempts at ‘Unia’ were largely political and œconomic instruments of the merchant city-states of Northern Italy as they attempted to break into the mediæval world-system along the Silk Road and the Maritime Route. Subsequent attempts at ‘Unia’ were deployed by the mercantilist powers, and their ultimate aim was to keep the global semi-periphery from escaping the control of the global core. With a few notable exceptions, today they largely continue in that rôle, particularly in gæopolitical flash-points like the Ukraine and Lebanon. Their aim is to constrain the semi-periphery, and prevent any organised alternative to capitalism from forming – particularly in Russia or in China.
It’s first necessary to understand something about Europe’s historical and current place in the world-system. Historically, Europe was a benighted backwater. Most of the world’s trade was happening around and across Asia, over the southern land route and the Indian Ocean maritime route. One broad swathe of trade routes existed between Damascus and Luoyang, and another trade between Zanzibar and Guangzhou. This trade between Byzantium, India, China and later the Arab world created and transferred the majority of the world’s material wealth, and it was carefully and meticulously regulated on both ends. Standing on the sidelines, beyond Byzantium and Damascus, were the doges of the Italian thalassocratic merchant republics and city-states: particularly the ‘big four’ of Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. In general, Venice had been content early to sit back and rake in the secondary benefits of trade with Constantinople, but one major motivating factor of the First Crusade had been the desire of Genoa and Pisa to ‘break into’ the trade network with its terminus in the Eastern Mediterranean. As Janet Abu-Lughod puts it:
Appetites whetted and abilities tested by prior sea battles and seeking to expand their horizon from the western basin of the Mediterranean to the eastern, the Genoese enthusiastically answered the call of the Pope for the first foray of that bloody and eventually unsuccessful venture—the conquest of Palestine… It was thus Genoese and Pisan ships that came to the rescue of the French, Flemish and other European knights who had eagerly answered Pope Urban the Second’s call in 1095 for a ‘reconquest’ of the Holy Land from the Muslims…It would not be entirely accurate to characterise the Crusades between 1100 and 1400 as being a purely predatory enterprise by the volunteer foot soldiers of these merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod makes clear, some Crusaders were authentically and genuinely driven by a pious desire to defend the Christian holy places from Islâmic oppressors. In this, they were motivated by an often stunning degree of idealistic naïveté. However, it is necessary to look at the œconomic motivations of the people who had answered Pope Urban II’s call to Crusade, because many of the high-ranking Crusaders saw it as an opportunity to carve pieces for themselves out of what had once been the Eastern Roman Empire – and certainly the naval city-state powers mentioned above had material stakes in diverting trade towards themselves.
Venice held back until the operation looked as though it might succeed. Not until ‘1099, after the Frank armies had battered their way into Jerusalem, slaughtering every Muslim in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue… did a Venetian fleet of 200 [leave] the Lido port’. It finally arrived in the summer of 1100 just in time to assist in the recapture of Jaffa and other towns. As a reward the Venetians were also allotted one-third of the towns’ land and environs and given special trading concessions in the new Crusader kingdom. Later, Venice received her usual third when the ports of Tyre and Ascalon were taken with her help. Venetians were allowed to form their own quarters and enjoy a position privileged to exploit the commercial opportunities of expanding trade.
This direct entrée to the riches of the East changed the role of the Italian merchant mariner cities from passive to active… The Genoese and to a lesser extent the Venetians had begun the long process of tipping the fulcrum of the world system. By the thirteenth century ‘the centre of gravity [of Europe at least] had definitely moved to the “big four” of northern and central Italy (Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence) whose powerful merchants had a firm grip on the routes towards the fertile and industrious European hinterland and endeavoured to reach far beyond the declining Islamic façade into the depths of Asia and Africa’.
Particularly interesting in the above account is the Venetian and Genoese interest in the coast of Lebanon, and here is where we can begin to see the origins of the Unia – not as a disinterested and pacific desire for Christian unity, but instead as a political stratagem to cultivate and firmly entrench a coterie of native informants and compradors. The Maronites – a religious community tracing its origins to the monastic communities that arose around Saints Mârûn in Syria and ’Ibrâhîm in Lebanon – had firmly and decisively detached themselves for political reasons from Eastern Rome several centuries before. Blessed Theodoret of Kyrrhos notes disapprovingly that the first self-described disciples of Mârûn waged a civil war with other Orthodox Christians over their beloved saint’s body after his repose!
From William of Tyre’s Histoire de Outremer
But what was originally, and might have remained, an intriguing footnote in Byzantine religious history, gained an interesting œconomic and political significance during the Crusades. Although their motives for separating themselves from the Byzantine Orthodox Christians around them had more to do with the politics of holy places than with any sort of doctrinal difference, doctrinal differences between the Maronites and the Orthodox nevertheless accumulated. Despite the warnings of several of their leading churchmen against it, by the 1100s – according to contemporary sources William of Tyre and Jacques de Vitry – the Maronite community had embraced the early-mediæval hæresy of monothelitism: probably on account of the military aid they had received from the al-Jarâjima cavalry from the Taurus mountains who inclined to that belief. Still, when the Frankish, Flemish and Italian Crusaders arrived – exhausted and low on supplies – on the Lebanese coast, they were surprised to discover that they were welcomed warmly by the local urban élites who belonged to this sect. The local Maronite leaders fed the Crusaders, resupplied them, furnished them with guides and interpreters, and even sent a supporting unit of archers with them.
The Maronite Patriarch made the first gesture of unity with Rome in 1182, when he sent a missive to the Pope recognising his supremacy over the Church, recognising the entire body of Roman Catholic doctrine, and establishing formal communion. It appears from the record that the impetus for this first instance of Uniatism – again, undertaken for political reasons with the Maronites being opposed to both Constantinople and the Arab Caliphate – came largely if not entirely from the Maronites themselves. Even so, the political and financial potentials of such alliances were not lost on the Italian doges who observed them. They had seen the value in keeping handy a clique of allied locals, particularly ones in a position of relative military and œconomic dominance.
From the perspective of Venice in particular, indirect imperialism became of great strategic importance over the coming centuries. The Fourth Crusade in particular highlighted both the œconomic benefits of dominating important trade hubs like Constantinople, and the political limits of direct conquest and expansion. Venice was not really concerned with exercising direct political authority, so much as controlling points of distribution of trade goods into Europe. Again, from Abu-Lughod, concerning the Fourth Crusade:
Between July 1203 and April 1204 the ‘Latins’ who had set out to fight the infidels instead besieged their fellow Christians and, when the city was finally entered, set it on fire, plundered its riches, and then piously celebrated Palm Sunday and Easter Day ‘with hearts full of joy for the benefits our Lord and Saviour had bestowed on them’.
The Count of Flanders and Hainaut, Baldwin IX, still in his twenties, was elected Emperor of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, his coronation taking place a few weeks later in the great Church of Saint Sophia. The Venetians wanted no high office, they wanted only to expand their merchant empire. They ‘appropriated the best part of the imperial territory’, claiming three-eighths of the city and empire, including all of Crete, from which Venice would direct her spice trade into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries… This, when added to her continuing Egyptian connexion, made Venice the dominant force controlling European access to the spices and silks of Asia.
The siege of Constantinople, 1203
Abu-Lughod then goes on to point out that in the wake of this conquest of Constantinople, Venice entered into a period of marked expansion. Its culture flourished. Private business flourished. Its political system became more efficient. Industrial, naval and transport technologies not so much progressed as leaped explosively forward. Even though Venice was jealous of this new prosperity and wanted to prevent Genoa in particular from benefitting, the other three of the big four Italian mercantile city-states also found themselves on this upward trajectory.
However, with very few exceptions, despite their interest in trade with the Orthodox world (and beyond), and despite the growing body of knowledge that the Crusaders were bringing back from their Muslim contacts in the Levant, the Italian city-states did not pursue a religious-ideological attempt at unifying West and East for the next couple of centuries. This was because such attempts at bringing about political unity between the two halves of Christendom were, from the Italian mercantile perspective, not œconomically necessary. They were doing remarkably well at diversifying, intensifying and expanding their trade networks, and using their presence in various ports around the Eastern Mediterranean to extract wealth and resources, without such a strategy.
A number of events changed that calculus, however. The first and most important of these was the Black Death. The Black Death reached Venice and Genoa through their trade networks, having been imported from Caffa, which had been besieged by Mongols who were carrying the plague. These outbreaks of bubonic plague were utterly disastrous for the merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod notes:
The results were catastrophic.Genoa suffered a similar fate. By 1350 her population was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1341 and never did recover fully.
Something like three-fifths of the inhabitants of Venice died within the next 18 months … Three plague-ridden centuries followed 1348 … In 1500 the population [of Venice] was about the same size as it had been two hundred years earlier.
The Black Death hits Venice
Venice and Genoa both went through a ‘Great Depression’ that lasted until the late 1300s. Abu-Lughod tells us that this had an indelible impact on the political culture of the city-states of northern Italy; power became further concentrated among a handful of family patrimonies across all of the Big Four and their mercantile-republican systems became more openly oligarchic in substance if not in structure. In addition, the ‘bandwidth’ of each city-state’s trade network narrowed. Volume of trade decreased, but not as precipitously as the diversity and interconnexion of the trade networks.
The decrease in population across the entire Mediterranean basin meant that the Big Four were increasingly dependent for logistical purposes on local mercantile compradors who served Venetian or Genoese interests from within their native ports. Though it’s unlikely that these big mercantile empires thought of employing a union between the Western and Eastern churches as a stratagem for easier control of local comprador élites, this consideration did sweeten the deal for them when the proposal was made. This, however, will be covered in a subsequent blog post.
Continued in Part 2 and Part 3.
Fascinating. It deserves to be more widely read,
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