venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 127
Venetian perspective, the territories included in it were reachable only by
sea,3 and they were also strongly linked to the routes of Venice’s maritime
trade. But above all, the Republic’s overseas territories must have been
conceived by the early modern Venetians as a different cultural sphere.
In contrast to the terraferma, where all Venetian subjects used dialects
that were relatively not very different from the Venetian ones, where
practically everybody was Roman Catholic, and where Venetian patri-
cians spent a great part of their time in their villas, the overseas territories
presented cultural and physical milieus that were considerably different
from the Venetian one. Such a feeling of estrangement could already be
experienced by Venetians in the Republic’s dominions within the Adri-
atic, once you went some distance from the coast towns of Istria and Dal-
matia into the inner provinces, particularly during the last two centuries
covered by this chapter, following the massive settlement of Morlachs in
these regions.4 The cultural difference between the Italian dominions and
Venice’s Hellenic territories, even those, such as Crete, where Venetian
settlers had lived for several centuries, were of no less significance.
One of the foremost distinctive elements was language. Even in the
Dalmatian towns, which are often depicted in modern historiography as
“Little Italies,” Italian language and culture remained restricted to a minor-
ity of local elites. Most of the inhabitants spoke Croatian and dressed like
Croatians, and many of them did not understand Italian.5 The distinc-
tion between Italians and Oltramarini (based on linguistic differences)
was maintained in Venice as long as the Republic existed.6 The recurrent
need to use the services of interpreters for communication, not only with
neighbors across the border but also with local subjects, a phenomenon
unknown in the terraferma, must have added to a sense of estrangement
among both subjects and governors in the stato da mar.7
3 “Stato di mare chiameremo quello, che confina con le lagune; e per andarvi, senza
toccar altrui, bisogna passar il mare,” Botero, Relatione della Republica venetiana, 10v.
4 Marino Berengo, “Problemi economico-sociali della Dalmazia veneta alla fine del
’700,” Rivista storica italiana 66 (1954), 472–74.
5 Ivan Pederin, “Die venezianische Verwaltung Dalmatiens und ihre Organe (XV. und
XVI. Jahrhundert),” Studi veneziani n.s. 12 (1986), 116, 125; Ivan Pederin, “Die venezianische
Verwaltung. Die Innen-und die Aussenpolitik in Dalmatien (XVI. bis XVIII. Jh.),” Studi
veneziani 15 (1988), 200.
6 Piero Del Negro, “La politica militare di Venezia e lo stato da mar nel Sei-Settecento,”
Studi veneziani 39 (2000), 120; Tea Mayhew, Dalmatia between Ottoman and Venetian Rule.
Contado Di Zara, 1645–1718 (Rome, 2008), p. 47.
7 Anastasia Papadia-Lala, “L’interprete nel mondo greco-veneziano (XIV–XVIII sec.).
Lingua, comunicazione, politica,” in Chryssa Maltezou, Angeliki Tzavara, and Despina