venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 233
main source of Venice’s customs revenues.437 Although not a few colonial
subjects derived great profit from the oil economy, the enlistment of the
Ionian Islands (Corfu in particular) to Venice’s economic needs had seri-
ous repercussions on the island.438
Colonial Shipping and the Limits of Colonial Control
During the second half of the 15th century, Venice confronted a serious
crisis in its shipbuilding industry, mainly resultant from the competition
of the marani, those unarmed lateen-rigged vessels built in Istria and
generally used to transport bulky and heavy materials. These vessels
were highly successful in Adriatic and Mediterranean trade, thanks to
their lower operational costs. Venice tried to prevent this competition
by forbidding in the late 1460s the construction of any ship of 60 tons
or more between Venice and the Quarnaro Gulf, an act that pushed
the colonial shipbuilding industry further south. In the 1480s a new law
allowed building and using such vessels only for Adriatic voyages that
did not touch Venice or Ragusa,439 but this limitation does not seem to
have withstood the development of shipping in the Venetian empire. In
early 16th-century Corfu, for example, vessels weighing more than 30 tons
were built and employed without any apparent limitation regarding their
destinations.440 A similar development, presumably on an even larger
scale, can be observed in 16th-century Crete.441 Recent scholarship has
brought to light the broad dimensions of 18th-century Greek shipping, a
great part of which was operated by Venetian subjects, who even allowed
themselves, whenever it proved to be profitable, to sail under foreign flags.442
437 Ciriacono, Olio ed ebrei, pp. 91–109; Mattozzi, “Olio pugliese e olio ionico,” pp. 147,
149–50, 153–54; Ivetic, L’Istria moderna, p. 101.
438 Mattozzi, “Olio pugliese e olio ionico,” pp. 154–57.
439 Lane, “Venetian Shipping,” pp. 8–9; on the marani, see also Hocquet, Le sel, 2:98–99.
440 Gerassimos D. Pagratis, “Ships and Shipbuilding in Corfu in the First Half of the
Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranea 22 (2011), 237–46.
441 Chryssa A. Maltezou, Η Κρήτη στη διαρκεία της περίοδου της βενετοκρατίας (1211–1669)
(Iraklion, 1990), pp. 65–68; Arbel, “Colonie d’oltremare,” p. 977.
442 Bacchion, Il dominio veneto su Corfù, p. 209; Gerassimos D. Pagratis, “Shipping
Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of the Greek Subjects of Venice,”
Mediterranean Historical Review 25.1 (2010), 67–81; Gerassimos D. Pagratis, “Greek
Commercial Shipping from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century. Literature Review
and Research Perspectives,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 12.2 (2002), 411–33; Molly
Greene, “Trading Identities: The Sixteenth-Century Greek Moment,” in Adnan Husain
and Katherine E. Fleming, eds., A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean,
1200–1700 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 121–48.