venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 219
Expenditures
The salaries of the colonial civil administrators were generally financed by
the resources of the colonies themselves. Likewise, public works, upkeep
of ports, roads, water supply systems, salt pans, quarantine installations,
and so forth were normally covered by local revenues. On exceptional
occasions, however, big civic projects required subsidies from Venice.
Thus, the colonization of Istria by the so-called Morlachs, a project that
was carried out between the late 16th century and the 1670s, involved
massive expenditures. According to Egidio Ivetic, the cost of this long-
term project during the last six decades of its implementation may have
reached 240,000–300,000 ducats,361 a sum that could hardly be totally
covered from the local resources.
Not surprisingly, military expenditures required, more often than not,
heavy subventions from Venice. The available data on sums that are said
to have been spent on the army in the “Levant” (not including war peri-
ods) range between 35,000 ducats in 1641, an exceptionally low sum, con-
stituting merely 1.3 per cent of the total expenses, to 426,307 ducats in
1575, which then constituted 21.4 per cent of the total expenses of the
state budget. The expenses on the military fleet (excluding the arsenal)
ranged between 230,000 ducats in 1579 (12.3 per cent) and 557,434 in 1679
(20.6 per cent).362 Somewhat paradoxically, the contraction of the over-
seas empire did not result in a radical reduction of military expenses. Dur-
ing the 18th century, military expenditures that aimed at defending the
overseas territories, including the navy, the arsenal (where warships were
constructed and maintained), and the units stationed overseas fluctuated
between two-thirds and three-quarters of the entire military budget in the
bilanci of 1679, 1710, and 1714 and were still higher by about 200,000 ducats
than those spent on the mainland territories in 1789–90.363
In wartime the costs were, of course, much higher, necessitating emer-
gency measures such as forced loans and additional taxation. During the
War of Cyprus and Venice’s involvement in the Holy League (1570–71),
the Republic had to bear annual expenses amounting to 3.5 million
ducats, a sum that exceeded by 30 per cent Venice’s annual revenues.364
361 Egidio Ivetic, Oltremare. L’Istria nell’ultimo dominio veneto (Venice, 2000), pp. 48–50.
362 Pezzolo, “Stato, guerra e finanza,” p. 95.
363 Del Negro, “La politica militare,” p. 114.
364 John R. Hale, “La guerra e la pace,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 6 (1994): Dal Rinascimento
al Barocco, eds. Gaetano Cozzi and Paolo Prodi, p. 245.