venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 181
before Stephen the Small decided to join a monastery himself; and he was
assassinated by an Ottoman agent shortly thereafter.207
In 1768 a new war began between Russia and the Ottoman Empire,
and despite Venice’s neutrality, the Russian presence in the area was con-
ceived by the Republic as an even greater threat than that of the false
tsar. The awakening of a proto-national consciousness among Slavs and
Greeks, encouraged by Orthodox Russia, was not limited to the land ruled
by the Ottomans, and Russian agents were apparently also active in Vene-
tian territories.208 In the following years investigations were carried out
and trials were held in Venetian Albania against local and foreign agents,
who were said to instigate Venetian subjects to emigrate to other coun-
tries or to collaborate with foreign powers. These years were also marked
by strong rivalries among local villages and families who supported either
Venice or the pan-Slavic and pan-Orthodox solidarity.209
The appearance of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean in 1770 had a
dramatic impact on the Orthodox population in the Balkans and the Ionian
Islands. The main arena of the Russian campaign was in the Aegean, but
some Russian warships were also active in the Ionian Sea. As already men-
tioned, Venice declared its neutrality in the Russo-Ottoman war, yet many
of its colonial subjects felt solidarity with their Orthodox brethren in Otto-
man territories, and some of them were ready to be actively involved in
their struggle for liberty. In 1769 Russian agents had already recruited in
Livorno some Slavic deserters from the Venetian Navy.210 The Cephalonian
brothers Spyridon and Ioannis Metaxàs organized a company of about
100 men to assist the Russan army at Patras.211 Such phenomena not only
constituted a defiance of Venetian authority but also risked jeopardizing
Venice’s delicate relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Venice followed
with great preoccupation what Larry Wolff has described, referring to the
Republic’s Slavic subjects, as the latter’s “slippery slope of uncertain iden-
tity and allegiance,”212 a description that can also be attributed, at least
in part, to Venice’s Greek Orthodox subjects in the Ionian Islands. Russia
then nominated Greeks and Albanians as consuls in Corfu, Zante, and
Cephalonia, and Cephalonian merchantmen began flying the Russian flag.
207 Paladini, ‘Un caos che spaventa,’ pp. 183–84.
208 Viggiano, “Venezia e la chiesa greca,” pp. 23–24.
209 Paladini, ‘Un caos che spaventa,’ pp. 183–84.
210 Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs. The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment
(Stanford, 2001), pp. 76–81.
211 Pignatorre, Memorie storiche, 2:185.
212 Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, pp. 11, 81.