The Morosini Codex, I: To the Death of Andrea Dandolo (1354). (Reviews).

Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John R. Melville-Jones, and Andrea Rizzi, eds. Antonio Morosini, The Morosini Codex, I: To the Death of Andrea Dandolo (1354).

Eds. and Trans. Michele Pietro Ghezzo, John R. Melville-Jones, and Andrea Rizzi. (Archivio del Litorale Adriarico III.) Padua: Unipress, 1999. xxi + 151 pp. Lire 40,000. ISBN: 88-8098-043-2.

Benjamin Arbel, Cyprus, the Franks, and Venice, Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries. (Variorum Collected Studies.) Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. xii + 332 pp. $105.95. ISBN: 0-86078-824-75.

Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xiii + 273 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-8122-3562-2.

Diverse yet somewhat interrelated, these three publications illustrate the lively enterprise and productivity characterizing Venetian studies these days.

The first is as much a promise as an achievement. We badly need the histories by Venice's earliest chroniclers in new critical editions combined with convenient modern translations. The Morosini Codex initiates one such individual project.

Born about 1365 into a distinguished ducal family, Antonio Morosini enjoyed no discernible public career of his own. Little about his life is known, and what survives of him is his Cronicha, composed in Venetian dialect. (Because of its diverse character and interpolated Latin texts, the editors have chosen the general title of Codex for the work.) Its autograph manuscript is preserved in two bound volumes in Vienna's Imperial Library. Intended to cover the entire history of Venice into the author's own time, the manuscript now lacks its first fifty pages, covering events into the 1190s. Its increasingly detailed account runs to about 1414, after which it was subjected to government scrutiny and some censorship. Morosini continued to add to it thereafter, if more sporadically. In surviving form it extends to 1433, but how much more there might have been is not certain.

For material before his own day Morosini's treatment is quite sketchy, often with vast gaps. He draws heavily on the works of predecessors (Nicolb Trevisan, Martino da Canale, Andrea Dandolo) and contemporaries (Lorenzo de' Monacis). He sometimes misunderstands events or chronology. Thus (4-5), he transfers to Doge Vitale Michiel I (d. 1102) the unhappy death of his descendant, Doge Vitale Michiel II(1172), whose own career he otherwise ignores. His treatment of the Fourth Crusade is quite muddled: he has the Venetians and the Crusaders go off to fight infidels in the Holy Land between their setting up of Alexios IV in Constantinople in 1203 and the capture of the city in 1204 (8-9); he also has Doge Dandolo go back to Venice after that victory (12-13) and then return to Constantinople (14-15).

More confident and detailed as he works his way further into the fourteenth century, Morosini delights in battles and political maneuvering. Chatty in tone, he even ventures some opinions: as in his reflection that the Venetians would be better off to leave the Dalmatian coast to the Hungarians (114-115); or in his chiding of his own countrymen for their arrogance in battle in 1354 (138-139).

All of which is, of course, mere prologue. The real meat of Morosini's chronicle lies in the portion still to come. But the project's blueprint is well established, with sensible policies for textual transcription and orthography and for general layout explained here. The English translation, on facing pages, earnestly captures both the flavor and the meaning of the Venetian original, with helpful explanatory footnotes added. Since Morosini's work has never before been published in full, the completion of this project will at last make available to scholars and general readers alike a valuable and neglected source for late-medieval and early Renaissance Venice.

Different in make-up, our other two books are complementary treatments of Venice's experience with its two largest island colonies, Cyprus and Crete. For the past three decades the Israeli scholar Benjamin Arbel has pioneered in the study of Venice's rule of Cyprus, which lasted from 1489 to 1571. His steady flow of publications has revealed the rich resources and insights to be found in that previously neglected sphere of research. Given his large output of essays and articles, the fourteen studies contained here (nine in English; four in French; one in Italian) constitute only a gleaning of Arbel's work. Nevertheless, this anthology transcends the scattershot character of so many Variorum collections. The author's own choice of selections creates a well-rounded entity; whose interconnections he notes in a careful Introduction.

Many of the studies are quite specialized: on slavery or on the Jews in Venetian Cyprus; on the loyalties of the Cypriote population; on the lasting contributions of the Genoese to the island's character and culture; on the effects of blights and famines. At least one essay, by contrast, is a piece with wide scope: a masterful sketch of how Cyprus fitted into its Levantine world on so many counts and levels.

Understandably, there are recurrent themes. Two are demographic: comparing the process of colonizing by noble families and settlements by people from other territories; and the situation of Greek "nobles" in the Venetian system. Another is the interplay of the Corner family interests with state interests -- reflecting on the famous "myth" of Venetian patricians' primary loyalty to the state, even as those family interests generated the anomaly of Venice as a "royal republic" through the Corner connection to the Lusignan throne. The importance of towns in the colony's economic and social life is also dealt with.

The overriding theme for Arbel, however, is his career-long struggle with the "black legend" of Cyprus's Venetian era, the long-assumed stereotype of that period as one of crude exploitation, stagnation, and decay. Thus, as the final study here, he has chosen a 1998 article in which he traces the origins and flourishings of la legende noire de la Domination venitienne a Chypre, demonstrating its insubstantiality in the process.

Though lacking any continuous pagination, the volume does end with some updating Addenda and Corrigenda, plus a general index, which help to tie the collection together. We may yet hope that Arbel will draw together the fruits of his labors into a comprehensive history of Venetian Cyprus. Until then, this volume is the next best thing.

While the Arbel volume addresses the Venetian island colony of Cyprus in multi-faceted diversity, Sally MeKee's book is more sharply focused, even if they each deal with some parallel demographic and institutional issues. The newest star of Venetian studies on the American academic scene, McKee has already made a massive contribution to the field in her recent three-volume publication of Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 1312-1420 (Dumbarton Oaks, 1998). That gold-mine of information on the study of Cretan society and life provides a launching pad for her own new work, while its Preface proves to be, in some ways, a tiny preliminary sketch for this next undertaking.

In narrow terms, her goal here is to understand how concepts of "Latin" and "Greek" identity were shaped and manipulated during the first two centuries of Venice's remarkably long and durable regime on Crete. Her first chapter describes the establishment and institutions of Venetian rule, stressing the importance of the Latin feudatories on whom the home government -- constantly involved even from afar -- depended for controlling and defending the island. Taking the capital city of Candia as a case-study, the second chapter analyzes both the elites and commoners of the island's social groups. Above all, it traces ways in which Greek elements managed to bridge official gaps and blur recognized boundaries between Latin rulers and Greek subjects, especially as Greek notables acquired significant status within or beyond the ranks of the feudatories from which they were supposedly barred. In her next chapter, McKee traces the overlapping "markers" of ethnic identity recognized by the Venetian regime: differences o f religion, and of language, supplemented by factors of lineage and gender. She demonstrates how, as assimilation of various kinds took place, Greek Cretans penetrated the ruling and feudal elites not only on the island but by emigrating to Venice itself. On that count, she furthers the suggestions of other recent scholars that it was efforts to purge the Venetian nobility of intruders of "impure" Cretan blood that prompted the final phases of the Serrata, or restricting of the nobility as a ruling class, in the early fifteenth century.

McKee's fourth chapter is a considerable expansion of an earlier published study on the so-called Revolt of St. Tito, which, in 1363-68, challenged Venetian rule and attempted to create an independent Crete. The revolt's striking feature is the fact that many elements of the Latin feudatories -- themselves somewhat assimilated by intermarriage and acculturation into their Greek context -- joined forces with Greek elements to carry out this eventually abortive revolt, which "sought to redefine the people of this colony as neither Greek nor Latin but as Cretan" (166). This episode laid bare the complex issues of identity for the Latins. But it reveals for McKee the significant realities of a "middle" colonial elite, more "Latin" than their officially Greek subjects, but less "Latin" or "Venetian" than their superiors back "home" in Venice; that "middle" elite was further subdivided by "old" and "new" factions. McKee's final chapter presents conclusions and broad observations.

The above summary does scant justice to a study dense with interesting details and provocative suggestions. One, in passing, is the observation that their Cretan experience prepared Venetians for the subsequent rule of their Terraferma. McKee is writing not just as a specialized Venetianist, however, but with a constant awareness of comparativist possibilities. She regularly sets the Venetian regime of Crete against the only directly contemporaneous parallel, of the English in Ireland, and also more broadly against subsequent European colonial practices around the globe.

Her larger theme, however, is the one announced in her subtitle: the concept of "homogeneous" ethnicity as a "myth" to be challenged. This is something of a straw man. For all the literature and anecdotes she cites, few people would deny that ethnic identities are shifting and elusive matters (as she so voluminously demonstrates). She begins and ends her book uneasily, by telling of some Cretan Greek colleagues who suggested that Americans may have "identity crises" but they did not, implying that she was making "something more complicated than it is," "driven by the scholarly fashions of the day" (2-3). That Latins and Greeks on Crete had interpenetrated each other's culture and society in many ways has long been understood by scholars she cites, especially by Greek ones (such as Nikolaos Panagiotaris and Chryssa Maltezou), but McKee proposes that political manipulation of subject identities, as it shifted from religious grounds to "ethnic" ones, is only one step from using racial bases. That our time has se en such "toxic" examples of ethnic-identity manipulation in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda is not to be denied, but drawing explicit connections is perhaps more sermonizing than her book requires.

Strained ramifications aside, however, this is still a book of considerable substance, one that will not only affect all discussion of Venetian Crete hereafter but will also be stimulating reading for more than just Venetianists.