Lesson 5: The Costs of Venice's Beauty

Venice's beauty is unmistakeable. The white stone sidewalks, the sweeping arches. The mosaics. The age, the grace, the sheer heart-stopping beauty.

But just as we scratch today's billionaires and discover underpaid laborers backing up their fortunes, if you scratch the surface of Renaissance Venice's beautiful buildings and start to follow the trail.... where did all that money come from, anyway?

Slavery, mostly. The spoils of war, in other cases. Here are some interesting but terrible ways that people used each other in Renaissance Venice: 

Aretino: One of the first writers to have most of his profits taken by his publishers! We all know how hard we work to write. Imagine doing all that and expecting money from it and not getting it (Aretino decided to find alternative forms of income by means of blackmail).

Murano glass: The famed glassworkers of Murano are craftspeople who have passed the traditions down their family lines for centuries, and apprenticeships typically started very young... but for hundreds of years they could not leave the island of Murano. Once you knew the secrets so jealously guarded for profit, it was considered sheer betrayal to leave. Betrayal so serious that the penalty was death!

Slave Ships: The battle of Lepanto in 1571 was the last great battle to involve triremes and other rowed battleships. Venice had partnered up with Spain and Rome to take on the Ottomans, and they won... but who do you think rowed all those ships? Many of those rowers were drowned, chained to their oars, if they were unlucky enough to be enslaved by a losing ship (unless, like my hero Massimo, you magically get transported through time -- that's a good way to avoid sudden death in a ship battle!).

Sugar: The Venetians captured the island of Cyprus and were so brutal as overlords that for a full century they didn't let locals have their own food gardens, so they'd have to rely on their overlords for food, and therefore be obliged to work the sugar fields. As the only people in Europe to have a ready supply of sugar for several generations, the Venetians turned enormous profit... turning white sugar into all that  beautiful white marble architecture we now can see in this city.


Thank you for reading along today. There's so much more I'd have loved to touch on -- Venice's beginning as a few swampy islands, more on the book industry, the wonderful orphanages of Venice, more on the beauty of the courtesans and how they achieved that beauty (oh -- an answer to one of the last quiz questions: their favorite hair color was a reddish blonde, and they achieved it by wearing broad-brimmed hats to protect their complexions while their hair poked through a hole in the top. They added lemon juice and put their hair through the hat and sunned themselves to bleach it to that color), the Inquisition, the banking, the food, carpets, links to the Silk Road... just so much to enjoy.

Zara, I've never seen anything about poison darts and Venetians! Where did you hear that?

Christa





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