narrator clinches the tale with the surprising revelation that the ensign’s wife
narrated “all these events” (“tutto questo successo narro la Moglie dell’Alfieri”)
( 389 ). We are thus reminded of the crucial point and problem: there once
was in Cyprus an ensign.
It makes sense that an Italian writer from a country on the front lines of
the Mediterranean might exhibit a certain nonchalance about the presence
of a Moor in Venice, given what we know about the interconnectedness of
Mediterranean exchange, to which Venice was pivotal. By the mid-sixteenth
century, when Cinthio was writing, Italy was renowned as a place where
“Jews, Turks, Greeks, Moors, and other easterly merchants” were engaging in
“traffic” of Eastern goods with Western peers, Venice, in particular, providing
a “common and generall market to the whole world.”^9 “Inhabited by people
of sundry nations, and traffiqued to by marchants from out all partes of the
world,” Venice was a place where “a man may heare all languages, and see all
diuersitie of garments.”^10 In addition, the Venetian land army was notable for
being “served of strangers”—some “noblemen”—“both for general, or cap-
tains, for all other men of war.”^11 In fact, if William Thomas’s History of Italy
( 1549 ) is any indication, in the mid-sixteenth century Venice was particularly
accommodating to “strangers.” According to that text, “one principal cause
that draweth so many strangers thither” is that “all men, specially strangers”
have “much liberty there”: “He that dwelleth in Venice may reckon himself
exempt from subjection. For no man there marketh another’s doings, or that
meddleth with another man’s living” ( 83 ). Even “if thou be a Jew, a Turk,”—
or we might add, a Moor—“or believest in the devil (so thou spread not thine
opinions abroad),” Thomas’s Historyasserts, “thou art free from all control-
ment” in what seems therefore a sort of don’t ask/don’t tell society ( 83 ). Fur-
ther, according to a early sixteenth-century Italian account translated by
Lewes Lewkenor as The Commonwealth and Government of Venice( 1599 ),
though “mercenarie men” were not given claims to citizenship, certain noble
or deserving “forrain men and strangers” were, with some even serving in the
“great councell (upon whose authority the whole power of [the Venetian]
commonwealth, as also the dignitie of the senat [sic] and of all the magistrates
dependeth).”^12 This is certainly not the only reputation Venice held during
the sixteenth century, and I will return shortly to others. But from a Mediter-
ranean perspective, the idea that a Moor once lived in Venice was not as much
a cultural curiosity as it was a fact of life. To be a “stranger” there was not per-
force to be estranged, to be a “Barbarian,” not perforce to be “barbarian.”
If we also consider England’s representation of Moors and the dramatic
158 chapter seven