Giovanni's valetudinarian body

Giovanni Dario between his friends, the Bellini brothers.

Gentile Bellini, Procession at San Marco, 1496.

Every week the New York Times interviews a famous person and asks which three people would be the best dinner guests. I would need several dinners, but for one I would choose Giovanni Dario, Cyriaco of Ancona, and Cardinal Bessarion. We know that Dario and Cyriaco were acquainted, and I can demonstrate the likelihood that Bessarion knew both of them. It is possibly not correct to chose only men for guests, but I would prefer an all- women's dinner another time with Cleofe, Paola, and Battista Malatesta. I have written about Cyriaco and Bessarion in recent months, but it has been a long time since Giovanni Dario was a guest here.

He came to mind because a recent publication by Nicky Tsougarakis in Dumbarton Oaks Papers of 14th-century Cretan notarial documents includes a number from 1356-57 with a Giovanni Dario as witness. This is surely my man's great-grandfather: we know he was a notary, as was my Giovanni – or Zuam or Zuan or Zan (I have all three names in a letter to him from the Signoria).

Dario was born about 1414 in Crete, a citizen of the stato da mar. He was at least the fourth generation of his family to be trained and certified as a notary, following his great-grandfather Giovanni (who also owned sheep) and his grandfather and father (both named Marco). Marco Dario fils was also a gold-worker and jeweller, protomaestro of the goldworker’s guild, a procurator of the cathedral of St. Titus, and a merchant who combined business with travels as an emissary for the duca of Crete. I am quite sure, without evidence, that Marco Dario had something to do with Commander Giovanni Delfino's acquisition of the most beautiful small antiquity in existence, that Cyriaco wrote about in 1445. Cyriaco had visited the Dario property at Pediada in Crete, possibly arranging for a shipment of cheese or wine, while looking for antiquities.

Giovanni joined his father in business and political ventures to Constantinople, Venice, Rhodes, and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean, apparently picking up useful bits of Arabic and Turkish to add to his Venetian and Italian. He was licensed as a notary in 1450, which certified him as doctissimus in litteris grecis et latinis, which means that he was compentent to write legal documents in both languages. That same year he interpreted for Nicolò da Canale, Venetian ambassador first to the court of Constantine XI in Constantinople, then to the court of Murad IV, and finally to the court of Thomas Palaiologos in the Peloponnesos, and may have translated the final agreements from Greek into Latin for Venetian records. Tradition puts him in the camp of Mehmed II as an observe during the 1453 siege of Constantinople, but documents put him in Sitia in eastern Crete.

Like his father, Dario combined government responsibilities with his own business as a merchant. His knowledge of Greek and Latin extended to the classical forms, and he found his friendships among humanists—writers and artists. One of them was the humanist and hunter of antiquities, Cyriaco of Ancona. Both of them them were engaged in the same kind of work, some of it diplomatic, some of it brokering objets des fines arts between Italy, Crete, Egypt, and Constantinople: both were men of great good humor and good conversation, Cyriaco hyperactive and ebullient, Dario quiet and inclined to sit.

By 1465 Giovanni was employed in the cancelleria in Venice which involved him in most aspects of the Venetian government, especially diplomacy within Italy. He received regular raises of salary, and promotions in titles and responsibilities, but it was was clearly the exhausting Venetian-Ottoman war (from July 1463 to January 1478/79 ) that demonstrated his unique value to the Signoria: he was sent at least four times to Constantinople with various patrician ambassadors to negotiate peace, on one trip negotiating with Mehmed's emissary on Mount Athos.  It was to his great advantage that he could speak Turkish. He went at least twice to Egypt to protest abuses against Venetian merchants in Damascus and Cairo. He continued his own business—just before he left on the second Egyptian voyage, he and his brother contracted with a Paduan goldworker to buy metal and worked silver in Cairo, and exchange a silver cup for a pearl, and then he arranged in Alexandria to export wheat, always needed in Crete.

In Venice, he lived near S. Apostoli (just off the Rialto bridge) with a woman to whom he was devoted, though all we can be sure of is her name, Chiara. Their child Marieta was born, probably, in 1473. The household included his sister Salamona's sons—Francesco, Giovanni, and Andrea Pantaleo (who eventually took Dario for their last name), whom he expected to regard Chiara as if she were their mother.

Because the official ambassador to the Sultan had died, exhausted from his many trips between Venice and Constantinople in the last year of the war, Dario was given broad discretion to negotiate, persuade, and cajole the final peace agreement from Mehmed. Mehmed gave him his ^cahd-name on 25 January 1478(9), and presented him with a horse, and three cloth-of-gold robes. Mehmed sent a kyahya, Lüfti Beg, back with Dario to Venice to receive the Signoria's confirmation of the agreement, and the Signoria gave Lüfti Beg cloth-of-gold robes of his own in return. Mehmed asked for artists: when Dario returned to Constantinople in early summer, he took with him Gentile Bellini and a sculptor. 

In Gentile's painting above, Dario is shown as an elderly man. The painting was made two years after he died, in 1494 at the age of 80.  He had been troubled for some years with heart trouble.  In Turkey in 1485 he had pled with the Signoria to allow him to return to Venice:

To stay here in order to spend uselessly seems to me unnecessary; besides my age and the condition of my valetudinarian body require a better place than this. because if I should have another attack, it will take me with no coming back Here there is neither doctor nor medicine, nor any tending, either physical or spiritual, and one who dies here dies like a dog. It makes me extremely afraid when I think of such danger, and so I hope in the clemency of Your Most Illustrious Signoria that it will not want such a faithful servant to perish in this way, entreating from you a particular grace in reward for my fatigue, that you grant me welcome permission to come home, and that you do not leave me here to die unnecessarily – because if I live it might happen that some other time I might be a useful instrument for some need of Your Most Excellent State . . .

The Venetian bailo in Constantinople wrote:

He is much loved by the paşas. Frankly, Most Serene Prince, I will say that it would be a sin to lose this man because of his fine service, because he is profoundly fatigued because of his personal condition, incurably sick, he has spent the winter in Adrianople with the greatest discomforts of living and continual fatigue . . . I respectfully request that Your Most Illustrious Signoria grant that he be permitted to return with me on the galleys.

It was another year before he was permitted to return, but he came back to the lovely little house on the Grand Canal that the Signoria gave him in appreciation for his work.  I have written about its decoration here, and about its inscription (and Cyriaco) here.

Despite his age and ill health -- he wrote three wills between then and his death in 1494 -- Dario made a final trip to Turkey in 1487, to persuade Beyazid that Venice would not join the Knights of St. John at Rhodes for a crusade against the Ottomans. In his last, handwritten, will of 1493, he directed his procuratori to free his slaves -- some of them Turkish -- with ten years of service and provide them with adequate clothing and money for the next stage of their lives.

In one of his wonderful letters he wrote: io che son de natura quieta et de etade ormai inclinata a la quiete—"I am by nature quiet and now at my age inclined to rest." That quietness shows in the mild face that gazes from Gentile Bellini's great Procession in the Piazza San Marco. Towards the lower left, where the white-robed figures break, standing between the Bellini brothers, is an elderly balding man, somewhat overweight, in the red patrician "toga" with old-fashioned sleeves to which he was entitled as a Secretary, and Guardian Grande of the scuola of  S. Giovanni Evangelistra. The Bellini brothers were members, too, and Dario was the one who paid them for their work.

There are two clear reminders of Dario's Turkish experience in Venice today, in addition to his letters and the ^cahd-name with its great gold tugra. One is the small Turkish fountain room he had put in his house at the end of the great L-shaped room of the piano nobile. Marble benches center on a fountain in a small square pool, and windows look out on the garden behind. The second is in that Bellini painting. Dario had taken Bellini to Constantinople to paint for Mehmed. In the painting, Bellini shows Dario carrying a Turkish handkerchief. He never saw the work: it was painted two years after he died, a tribute from a friend.

Much of this blog was taken from this article, published in The Turkish Studies Association Journal.  In it you can read translations of Dario's letters about stratioti, the Kladas affair, and exotic visitors and gifts to the Sultan's court.  Giovanni Dario's web page is here.

The first of the hundred

Doge Leonardo Loredan, Giovanni Bellini, 1501.

National Gallery, London.

When I was a child in West Africa, my parents had a book entitled One Hundred Great Paintings, or The Hundred Greatest Paintings in the World -- it was a title that juxtaposed hundred and great and paintings. This portrait of Leonardo Loredan, Doge between 1501 and 1521, was the first of the hundred. The second was the glorious Titian Bacchus and Ariadne. Mona Lisa was in there, a Sunflowers, The Birth of Venus, The Fighting Temeraire, and a number of ladies wearing very little in the way of clothes. The ladies bemused me, because my parents were extremely intolerant of my coming in the way of noticing anything that might suggest the realities between the chin and the knees, but they apparently allowed to Art what was unacceptable for Life.

I spent a great deal of time with these paintings, and particularly with the first two. The Titian was incomprehensible -- up in the bush in West Africa, there was no place to look for Titian or mythology -- but it was intoxicating, which seems the way to respond.  I spent most of my great-paintings time with Doge Loredan. I didn't know what I was looking at, beyond the fact of a rather tense man in interesting clothes, painted in beautiful colors, but it gave me joy. 

So I was inordinately pleased, fifty years later, to come on his signature in a Venetian protocollo belonging to Jacobo Grasolario probating the will of Zorzi Cernovich.  This is a will written like a love-letter, and it has a fascinating story to it. Most wills did not require a dogal signature, but Cernovich had been the ruler of Montenegro, he died outside Venice, and had created an international incident with the French. Grasolario had to have the will translated from the Slavic Cernovich had written into Italian. 

A protocollo is the permanent, legal, record of a notary, licensed by the Venetian government. This one belonged to a Jacobo Grasolario who handled the wills of my beloved Giovanni Dario. The signature says, "We, Leonardo Loredan, by the grace of God, Duke of Venice, etc, undersigned, his own hand," and it looks to me like the signature of a tense person.

There are a few other scattered Loredan signatures in the Grasolario protocollo, and what is striking about them is that by 1518 or so you can watch the writing deteriorate.  The last signature is nearly illegible and droops far down at the right.  He died less than a week later.



Thanks to Bonnie Blackburn for helping me read the signature.

Determining the Dividing Line: 1480 & 1482

 

Aerial view of the (modern) Venetian Argolid.

Once the peace settlement for the Venetian-Ottoman war had been put in writing, it had to be worked out on the ground -- literally. The 14th provision of the settlement provided for lands taken by the Venetians to be returned to the Ottomans, and the 15th provided for lands taken by the Ottomans to be returned to the Venetians.  This meant that, in many cases, both sides had to determine what actually belonged to whom.  There were two main issues for the Argolid.

1. The Ottomans held Argos: Argos had not actually been taken in the war, but before the formal declaration of war, so it was not covered by the 15th provision. 

2. The Ottomans held the entire Argolid peninsula as the result of the surrender of Demetrios Palaiologos in 1460.  It had been agreed in correspondence between the Doge, Giovanni Mocenigo, and Mehmed, that the boundaries were to be those boundaries.  However, Demetrios had appropriated the territory in about 1449 (#3 here) despite the treaty made by his uncle Theodoros in 1394 which assigned this territory to Venice, and the matter had been in negotiation when the Morea disintegrated.

A third issue was that the sançak-bey of the Morea, Suleiman, had arbitrarily set Nauplion's boundary at the stream of Profitias Elias, on the road to Tiryns, and Nauplion was strangled for land for its food.  The governor, Bartolomeo Minio, had had two tense and unsatisfactory encounters with Suleiman on this matter.  Whatever the attitude of the sançak-bey, Minio's letters show that he was tense, legalistic, and hostile.

The official boundary commission arrived in Nauplion on 12 August, 1480. The Venetian representative was Giovanni Dario, and the Ottoman was Sinan Bey, protogero of Greece, the official over the sançak-beys of Greece. Minio was less than a week out of sickbed after nearly dying from an attack of malaria.  He was not ready for all this, but he found a house for Dario and another for Sinan -- "the best that I could manage, considering the condition of the place" -- making him a gift of 30-40 ducats "so that Your Lordship's affairs will prosper."

Sinan sent for the sançak-bey, and the cadis of Karitena and Kalavrita.  When the Turks arrived, Sinan, Minio, Dario, and their staffs met them at Argos where they were joined by the cadi.  They seated themselves in the sançak-bey's pavilion -- a great tent -- and went over the main issues to be settled, the castles of Kiveri (actually, Myloi), Kastri (Hermione), and Thermissi and the salt pans. 

Minio immediately said he had documents demonstrating Venetian ownership.  The Turks said they had documents demonstrating Turkish ownership: these territories were listed in Mehmed's cadaster of 1460 and had already been assigned.  

They spent two days arguing this.  The Venetians produced witnesses, beginning with the Greek bishop (possibly Demetrios Pigasi), and then the oldest citizens.  All the witnesses testified for the Venetian position, and the testimonies were written down in Greek and Turkish and compared for accuracy.  The Turks agreed with them and said that Mehmed made the final decision.

Then there was the boundary between the actual cities of Argos and Nauplion.  Minio said he had documents and witnesses: more important was the fact that Nauplion territory had 20,000 people and Argos fewer than 200 households (or about 800 people).  Nauplion needed a fair share of land.  This was fine with the Turks, but they wanted to leave the Albanians out of the population numbers, since they were foreigners. (This would have reduced the Nauplion population by at least 4000 people and possibly several thousand more.) There was an impasse.  Finally, they decided to ride the boundaries while the oldest citizens from both sides pointed out where the line had traditionally been.

They began across the bay from Nauplion, at the White Tower by the shore and "the river which is ours," went up to Kefalari, then started east across the plain. No problems were found and, coincidentally, Nauplion fiefholders in the area had made more gifts to Sinan and the sançak-bey.  As they went along, a secretary for each side noted descriptions, wells, trees, points of significance, drawing out a map. Once they encountered an Albanian settlement which had been paying taxes to both the Ottomans and the Venetians, in the hope of being left alone.  

A problem came up when they got to the monastery of Osios Theodosios (Minio called it San Theodosio).  

Osios Theodosios at the end of the road, quite isolated even now. 
Google maps (click to enlarge). 

Osios Theodosios was in Ottoman territory, but Minio argued for it to be given to Nauplion, as the Greeks thought it was a miraculous shrine. (They still do, and I have a bottle of holy water from the well on my iconostasis.)

Another problem came up when they got to the end of the bay of Drepanon, and the mountain pass giving access to the narrow coastal road to the plain of Candia.

Google's version of the enclosed bay of Drepanon (center)
and the triangular plain of Candia (right). (Click to enlarge.)

Nauplion's stratioti had been given the land at Candia to support themselves, and pasture their horses.  Further, this land gave access to Kastri and Thermissi. The Turks produced two witnesses "of the vilest sort" who testified that, on the contrary, this land had always been despotate territory.  Minio said he had documentary proof of possession.  The Venetians asked for their own witnesses to be heard on this matter.  Then Sinan said he had no authority to hear witnesses, and that this territory had not been mentioned in his commission. It may or may not be relevant that there were no fiefs in this area whose fief-holders could make gifts.

It was August.  It was hot. Minio was still weak, and Dario had chest pains.  We don't know how Sinan and Suleiman felt, but at this point they had spent 10 days on horseback and matters were not going well at all.  There was a great crowd of concerned citizens, potential witnesses, and the curious, trooping along with the dignitaries and their staffs.  No one seems to have noticed that the beach at Drepanon was lovely and that they could all do with a swim.  Instead they broke up and went home.  Dario, however, went back to Argos with the Turks.

Dario spoke Turkish, liked Turks, and he and Sinan were well-acquainted.  The next morning Dario sent Minio a note to say Sinan had agreed to Osios Theodosios, and to leaving a route to Thermissi.  Candia was still at issue.  Minio called in the citizens and showed them the proposal.  It was generally agreed to accept Sinan's proposal, but keep Candia open for discussion, and they offered a few modifications of the dividing line.  Minio sent a messenger to Dario.

Dario sent back the messenger with a note suggesting that representatives from both sides go look at the two sets of proposed boundaries one more time.  So six men from Nauplion met six men from Suleiman and they went out to look again.  They came back and reported that they all agreed with the Nauplion lines. Sinan said Nauplion could have Candia until further notice. 

It should be noted that these discussions had been primarily between the two governors involved, Suleiman and Minio, with Sinan and Dario mediating. So Dario acquired, without Minio, everything that Minio wanted.  The agreement had to be submitted for Mehmed's approval.  Mehmed sent a letter saying that, although Kiveri, Thermissi, and Kastri had been given as timars to his people, he was returning them to Nauplion for the sake of peace. 

Mehmed died three days later and it all had to be done again.  People from Beyazid's new sançak-bey met with Minio's people and went over the lines in April 1482, very quickly.  April in the Argolid is a delight -- yellow flags grow in the coastal streams, the fields are full of poppies, the nights are cool. There was a period of delay while various timar-holders argued against the former lines, and once again Minio started bringing out witnesses and documents,  but they were confirmed without too much difficulty.  Again, the agreement had to be submitted to Beyazid, and again, approval was given.

Both times, the details of the boundaries and the agreements were written down by the Turkish scribe and Minio's secretary, and two copies made in Greek which were compared for accuracy.  The documents for Constantinople were signed by the Venetian side, and the documents for Venice signed by the Turkish side.

Somewhere in Venetian archives is the boundary commission's map of the Argolid boundaries.  I have examined every unidentified map in the Archivio di Stato, trying to find it.  There are more archives, more papers to be discovered.

Read about the boundary commissions in more detail here.  

Minio's letters reporting the boundary commissions can be found here, particularly in letters 5, 21, 22, 74, 77.

Marieta Dario

Carpaccio, Unknown Woman

Marieta was the only child of one of the most interesting men ever known in Venice. At the age of 26, on 6 February 1499, she made a testament, "

considering that nothing is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the hour of death, not wanting to die without a testament so that my affairs are left disordered, sound of mind, intellect and body, but close to childbirth  . .

She lived six more years, dying in 1505 from an unrecorded cause.   She was born in about 1473 to the woman Giovanni Dario called "mia Chiara," in their house at S. Apostoli near the Rialto bridge.  In 1478 and 1484-85, Dario had won Venice such concessions from two Ottoman sultans that the city presented him with Ca' Dario, which he so charmingly restored, and 1000 ducats for Marieta's dowry. He was Cretan, and perhaps Chiara was, too, though he was a Venetian citizen, and Marieta was born out of wedlock, but for a few years he was the most valuable person Venice had.

 "to Chiara, mother of my daughter Marieta":
from Giovanni Dario's will of 1 October 1493, made just before he died.

She was married, in 1493, to the boy next door -- Vicenzo Barbaro, the son of Giacomo Barbaro and Nicolosa Bochole.  He may not have been a boy at all: his parents were married in 1448, so he may have been considerably older than she.  All that is known of him is that a particularly violent outburst of temper got him excluded from the Great Council -- all patrician males over the age of 20 were members -- for ten years.  That, and the fact that he is almost unmentioned in her will -- she identifies herself as his wife, but her children are left in the care of her mother Chiara, and Ca' Dario is left to her son at the age of 25 -- and any other that might be born -- with Chiara to be in charge. (Her daughter could inherit at 20.)

Dario loved Chiara dearly, that comes through in his various testaments. He had adopted his sister's sons and brought them to Venice from Crete to share his business ventures: in his testaments he asked that they regard Chiara as their mother.  Only one of them, Francesco Pantaleone, was alive when he made his will, and Dario left Ca' Dario jointly to him and Marieta . When Marieta made her testament she left Francesco half of something, probably the house, but it is not perfectly clear what.  What is is clear that Marieta controlled several pieces of real estate, including an estate near Padua, and had a variety of investments. Dario had given her 1000 ducats at marriage, in addition to the 1000 from Venice, so she had considerable financial autonomy.

When she made her 1499 testament, Marieta had one son, Gasparo, born about 1496.  Giacomo was born about 1501 and Giovanni probably 1502-3, unless he was the child with which she was pregnant when she wrote the testament.  So much personal material involves the words "about," "may," "probably".

Marieta was buried, at her request, in her father's tomb at Sta. Maria della Grazie, on a small island near S. Giorgio Maggiore. Much later, the church was used as an Austrian ammunition depot: the ammunition exploded in 1849, destroying the church and all its tombs.

What happened to Ca' Dario after Marieta died is vague, but she had specified that it be rented out.  The next we know of it, Ca' Dario was used as a residence for the orators -- ambassadors -- of Signor Turco at least three different times starting in 1514.  The office of the governor of one of the state banks was responsible for preparing the house for visitors, and for their expenses.  When a Turkish ambassador arrived, his ship was met at Lido by sixteen patricians dressed in scarlet who escorted him to Ca' Dario.  The ambassadors must have been delighted with the Turkish fountain room Dario had installed.  In 1515, the ambassador was provided 6 ducats a day for expenses, but by 1517 that was reduced to 5 -- rank ingratitude when that year the ambassador had brought with him the head of a commander from Bulgaria where the Turks had won an important battle.

In 1522, when Gasparo was of age, he and his brothers made claim for possession of Ca' Dario and this was granted. The document survives, with the signature of Doge Antonio Grimani. After that, information on Ca' Dario disappears until the early 1800s.

The notary's draft of Marieta's testament (click to enlarge).

My thanks to Emanuela Brusegan Flavel of Venice who transcribed Marieta's testament for me.

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/08/most-beautiful-red-parrot.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/09/genio-vrbis-johannes-darivs.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/09/interlaced-circles.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/03/valor-of-our-stratioti.html

Nauplion's Wooden Houses

Nauplion Houses.
Detail from Camoccio map, 1571.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Canon Casola and Felix Fabri described Modon:

CC: I did not see either houses or palaces worthy of description; for its size it has many houses, and they are close together. . . . The majority of their houses, whether they are large or small--at least from the middle upwards--are built of timbers.   

FF: If I had waited even the sixth of a hour, the whole house would have been in flames, and consequently the adjoining houses: for this house was of wood, and very old, of the dryest kind of timbers and with party walls to similar houses in a congested narrow street.

No one described Nauplion houses, except for Bartolomeo Minio's remark when Giovanni Dario visited: "I paid the expense of a house for him and his household, the best that I could manage, considering the condition of the place."

At the beginning of the century, from 1400-1405, Giovanni Cavaza was castellan at Nauplion,the second-highest position in the administration. A Venetian merchant who was a permanent resident in Nauplion, he had been appointed to the job where we might have expected a castellan to be an official sent out from Venice. The castellan had a budget of about 500 ducats a year. Cavaza was responsible for defense of the city, police functions, security of the castro, operation of the prison, and executions. He made “foreigners” and sailors sleep outside the city at night, regulated curfews, taverns and markets, kept shops and workshops closed on holy days, gave permission to bear arms within the city, supervised guilds, punished illegal dumping of trash, and had laws and announcements proclaimed in the marketplace “in latino et greco.” In addition to the 500 ducats,which paid for staff and expenses, Cavaza collected fees from innkeepers, shopkeepers and prisoners.

Cavaza is mentioned in two brief documents from 1400 in which the Senato Mar made arrangements for repair of the house provided for the castellan. These documents make dire remarks about the “ruritura” of the house and castro, about a man without a place to house “sua familia.” The podestà, Albano Contarini, had written a number of letters about “magna reparatione omnino necessaria,” apparently to small effect until Cavaza delivered a proposal which stimulated a decision. Cavaza had offered to bear half the expense of rebuilding the official residence. Apparently his residence was even more desperately in need of repair than that of the bailo of Negroponte, described in 1403 as:

. . . in the worst condition, because the rain comes through almost the whole roof, and the wood is rotten, and in parts threatens ruin. Similarly, most of the sala magna is badly covered and it pours in, and the wood is rotten, and it is like that in the whole.

The Senato Mar, in a list that slips back and forth between specificity and “other things” itemized wood and nails--in standardized sizes--to be shipped out for repair of the house and the “turrim Sancti Marie.”
      For construction on the tower of S. Maria, larch posts de mesura 12
      Larch planks 40
      Rafters for fitting the house of the said castro 100
      Beams for fitting the house of the said castro 40
      Large nails for constructing a frame for the thatching 200
      Fir posts 10
      Fir beams 50
      Fir planks 300
      Lathes 1050 
      Large nails to repair the roofbeam and for work on other things 200
      Small nails 600
      Slats 200
      #25 nails 2500 
The important thing to note here is that all the items on the list came in standardized sizes.  It is well-known that the arsenal used standardized, interchangeable, parts for building galleys on an assembly line.  It has not, as far as I can tell, been noticed that construction materials for houses were also standardized.

The Senato also provided 200 ducats for administration, another 200 for transporting earth for land-fill, and for manual labor, and gave Cavaza a tax exemption on his half of the imported lumber. Clearly, the castellan’s house, on a standardized plan, was primarily of wood, at least above the ground floor. Cavaza’s thatched roof comes as a surprise, though it is perhaps not so surprising in an economically stressed community without a convenient supply of clay for tiles, fuel for firing, or adequate transport. Still, the image of wooden houses with thatched roofs changes pictorial assumptions of medieval Greece.

[Nauplion construction for the past 400 years -- until cement -- has been mostly half-timber above the ground floor.  But in the 15th-century, Nauplion had no one available who could cut stone, and Minio had to have stone-cutters sent out from Venice when he was working on repairing the walls of Acro-Nauplion and building the walls of the lower city, and he sent soldiers and wagons to Tiryns to collect suitable building stone for the stone-cutters to work on.  The village in the ruins of Tiryns seems to have been abandoned then.]

In the years immediately after this document, massive amounts of wood were shipped to Greece for Venetian concerns. In 1402, a shipment of wood was sent to Corfu to repair the castro. A thousand posts were sent in 1404 for construction at the “Garland” -- the castle -- of Argos. In 1403, the Senato Mar sent wood and nails for the unroofed Arsenal at Negroponte and sent 30 33-foot larch poles, 30 larch posts, 500 planks of larch or fir, 500 palm-sized nails, 500 foot-sized nails, and 6000 #25 nails. With this shipment went wood for the ruined house: 400 fir planks, 100 larch planks, 500 narrow planks, and one barrel of posts. A little later, the regimen of Methoni and Koroni needed to import firewood from Venice, and Nauplion had to import wood to construct a mill.

This is not to suggest that all Venetian houses in the stato mar were generally either wooden or shabby. Canon Casola who found Methoni tawdry apparently saw a few grand houses and non-wood houses there, and he reported that Candia had beautiful houses, beautiful palaces, beautiful gardens.

And there is a slender hint that Nauplion may have had a few substantial houses. Cavaza had been involved in building on another house: in his will, he makes reference to a house in the burgo, on which “fecerim multas expensas de meis denariis.”   I cannot help but wonder about that tax-free wood supposedly shipped out for the castellan’s official residence, and the idea that he had two houses is provocative. He also held a fief of 200 stremmata, and a few years after he died that fief was the reason for the attempts at murder here.

A house in the burgo, the part of the city outside the defensive walls, is an important piece of information: it has been an article of faith among those writing on Nauplion -- most of whom pick this up from Kevin Andrews who got it from (Pseudo)Dorotheos of Monemvasia -- that there was no construction outside the castro until the landfill projects after 1500. Cavaza’s will provides documentary evidence to supplement the visual evidence to be found in Nauplion that such construction had been taking place at least 200 years before the assumed literary date.  

 * * * * * *

Late addition: I have been thinking about the nails and wondering about their manufacture.  I asked the people at the Guru's den at Anvilfire.  This is their answer

"It depends somewhat on the size and type of nail but a nailmaker working a long (10 hour) day was said to be able to make 1,000 nails in a day. In modern nail making competitions it is not unusual for a smith to make 25 nails in 15 minutes. This adds up to 100 per hour or 1,000 in a 10 hour day.

"Such work was often done by young apprentices, women or slaves. Making your daily quota probably determined whether or not you got fed. The reason I say this is because doing such boring work is is easy to let your mind wander and your production rate to fall. So maybe it was a 12 hour day. . . Quotas may have varied according to type of nail."
 

This material is from my article “The Wooden Towns of the Stato Mar: Medieval Construction in Nauplion,” Studi Veneziani 40 (2000) 169-178.
 

"the valor of our stratioti"

 Sketch of a Turk, Gentile Bellini, 1480.

A couple of years after Minio arranged for pardons for the stratioti who participated in the Kladas affair, Giovanni Dario was in Turkey representing the signoria of Venice at the court of Beyazid II. What happened at that point with the stratioti is best conveyed in Dario's own words:

 * * * * * *

 Yesterday a slave from the Porte arrived here unexpectedly who brought letters from the Most Illustrious Sultan . . . The third letter, which was addressed to me alone, contained complaints by the Ottoman governor of the Morea about the many excesses perpetrated in the Morea by many stratioti and other subjects of Your Excellency, both from Nauplion as well as from your other places in the Morea, and he sent me a good many papers in which are -- all annotated in order -- 56 offenses, including, among others, the insult and rebellion made in the Mani by Kladas and some of the stratioti from Nauplion in time past.

. . . at present there have returned to the territory of Your Excellency some of those banned for the aforementioned excesses -- that was the reason the former governor of the Morea . . . requested and constrained the magnificent messier Bartolomeo Minio . . . that he would pardon them and received them back into favor, because the said governor (who was the more offended and more powerful because of ending the great scandal) had done the same and our administrator was reluctant to consent, and did something that he should not according to our laws . . . This seems an incurable disease and a scandal between us.

* * * * * *

Then two days later Dario had a meeting with the Lords Pasha.  They informed Dario that they knew Venice was not at fault, but the administration of Nauplion and the citizens were sharing the stratioti loot, and had in their houses the robes, the turbans, and swords, and other possessions of the murdered Turks.  In the year since the end of Minio's term, all his restrictions and concern for law and peaceful relations with the Ottomans had been abandoned. The Ottoman governor had been ordered to 'cut to pieces' any Venetian stratioti found in the Morea, and not to accept anyone who was not a merchant or 'original citizen' of the country.  Dario told the Lords Pasha that Venice would have no problem with that. They told him that Piero Busichi was the commander of the thieves, and had become rich from the system.

Piero Busichi was well-known to the Signoria.  Piero was one of four Busichi who had to have special pardons for all their homicides so that they and their troops could be drafted for the Ferrara war.  He first appeared in Venetian records in 1473 when he was hired for 50 ducats a year and a robe worth 100, plus pay for his company of 25 stratioti.  When Ismail Pasha and Minio were trying to settle the Kladas revolt, he acted as go-between.  Then the next year, at the time of the Ferrara draft, he had led a rebellion against Minio for more pay.  He got it.  Five hundred and forty stratioti had enlisted under him for Ferrara and they were so successful that he was given a bonus of 8 ducats for each of them, in addition to the 12 he had already been given.  

As soon as Dario's letter reached Venice orders were given for the arrest of the Venetian governor of Nauplion and a replacement was sent.  Dario wrote again.   

 * * * * * *

There was recently brought to the Porte, in a cart, a timariot named Ciri Pasha, robbed and beaten by our stratioti just when he was leaving the Morea, as he said, and 100 ducats taken, and clothes and silk cloth, and other possessions, and the pashas ordered that he should be sent to my house immediately so I might see for myself the valor of our stratioti.   

I responded to those who brought him that I deeply regretted the occurrence, which I did not know about, but I wanted to be informed by them about the persons, so that they could be identified, and would write to Nauplion, and if the malefactors are there, they would settle the accounts and bring them to justice.  They replied that the pasha said that the families of the malefactors were in Nauplion, enjoying his goods and those of others, and also that they aided their husbands to break the law and worse . . .  I, on my part, have written the rettor of Nauplion, and given him information about the names of the malefactors and the stolen items, according to the man who was beaten, and I am informing your Excellency.  

* * * * * *

Dario wrote again, that he had heard from the governor of Nauplion, and from the pashas, that the matter of Piero Busichi had been settled, and that the Ottomans were satisfied with the results. This is all we know about this affair, but occasional Venetian records indicate that the stratioti continued to demonstrate their valor.

Interlaced Circles

I wrote earlier about the inscription on the facade of Ca' Dario.  This entry is about the interlaced circles on the facade, three of them.

This is what four of the top names in Venetian architecture have to say about them:

1. No house front is richer in colored stones, and this has often been pointed out as a consequence of Dario's years in Byzantium.  . . . Rather than Byzantium, it may instead reflect Dario's ego.  If he wanted to make a pretty show, he succeeded.
2. . . . Cima da Conegliano's Healing of Anianus . . . the polychrome marble intarsias on the building are remarkably similar to those on the facade of Palazzo Dario.  Giovanni Dario wanted for his house what he had seen in the work of this impressionable painter; he wanted freedom of invention untrammeled by the rules and limitations of architectural dogma.
3. Little is known of his earlier missions to Cairo . . . but while there he seems to have noticed the "telephone-dial" motif that he chose to adorn his own house.   . . .  The Venetian masons, unfamiliar with the Egyptian precedent, set the marble discs in their interlaced Byzantinizing borders by reference to local cosmatesque mosaic pavements such as that of San Marco.
4. The architect may also have had descriptions of byzantine palaces in mind, . . .

We don't have any documentation for Dario's restoration of the little Gothic house he was given on the Grand Canal, but various things make 1486 look about right.  After he returned from Constantinople in 1485, Dario was treasurer of the scuola of S. Giovanni Evangelista which Pietro Lombardo was redecorating in 1485. During the 80s, Lombardo was also supervising the construction and ornamentation of the Miracoli. 

So it would not have been unlikely for him to have worked with Dario on turning the little Gothic house into a jewel box.  The Lombardo new constructions were highly symmetrical, Venetian Gothic wasn't, and apart from the asymmetry, the slanting slightly-drunk walls show the medieval fashion for building Venetian walls wider at the bottom than at the top.

As you can see, there has been a remarkable amount of extravagant prose expended in an attempt to explain Dario's choice of ornamentation, and especially for the interlaced circles.  They are infinitely pleasing, but they are no more Byzantine than they are late Roman and Venice was always a part of the Byzantine world.  We find these circles all over the place in the 5th and 6th centuries, and they reappeared in the late 12th century as far away as Westminster Abbey 

when the Cosmati set the fashions for church ornamentation a century and a half before that Egyptian "precedent."  S. Marco was nothing if not fashionable, and they ended up all through the rebuilt 13th C church in explorations of the variety of ways of interlacing circles -- on crosses antique even then,

in the treasury,

on carvings over the doors, 

on the floor of the narthex, 

on the floor by the pulpits.  

And on the south side, facing you when you come up from the water.

The Cretan, Giovanni Dario, was in love with Venice and called her quella cità sancta.  Ego? He had pulled Venice out of lethal situations, twice, with the Ottomans, and had several times worked wonders in Cairo.  Venice thanked him with what has become everyone's favorite house in Venice.  It seems silly to go to so much trouble for explanations -- Byzantine (the lack of survivals in Constantinople make this anyone's guess), Cairo?

a painting (a painting done several years after Ca' Dario)?  Dario saw  interlaced circles all over S. Marco and all over most other Italian churches he visited.  He saw them on the Miracoli.  Why would he not have chosen Venetian motifs for this house he dedicated the Spirit of the City?

GENIO. VRBIS. JOHANNES. DARIVS

 

There are more details here.