224 benjamin arbel
Individual Venetian Presence Overseas
For a fuller evaluation of the economic importance of the stato da mar we
must go beyond the public sphere of expenditures and revenues and look,
from a Venetian perspective, at the colonial economy in general. First we
must consider the private benefits that many Venetians derived from the
colonies, a topic that cannot be treated here in great detail. Thousands
of Venetian citizens served in the overseas colonies in official capacities,
including military service, and many of them took advantage of their stay
to round up their revenues.394 Similarly, many Venetians enjoyed nice
revenues from ecclesiastical benefices held by them in the colonies.395
Others, particularly patricians, held estates overseas, were settled there
for several generations, and derived profits from their presence there.396
Taxation of these revenues benefited the Republic as well. Marriage
between Venetian patricians and rich colonial heiresses was a rather
common phenomenon, which often ended up transforming Venetian
families into local barons and feudatories in Crete, Corfu, Cyprus, and the
Aegean.397 Not uncommon was a direct or indirect combination of these
factors: official service, involvement in the colonial economy, holding
Church benefices, marriage alliances with local dignitaries, and so forth.398
394 Praga, History of Dalmatia, p. 172; O’Connell, Men of Empire, pp. 57–74; Mueller,
“Aspects of Venetian Sovereignty,” p. 37; Sander, Urban Elites, pp. 230–32; Benjamin Arbel,
“Operating Trading Networks in Times of War: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian Patrician
between Public Service and Levant Trade,” in Suraiya Faroqhi and Gilles Veinstein, eds.,
Merchants in the Ottoman Empire (Leuven, 2008), pp. 23–33.
395 Arbel, “Colonie d’oltremare,” pp. 974–75; Mueller, “Aspects of Venetian Sovereignty,”
pp. 39–40.
396 In the late 16th century there were around 400 families of patrician settlers in Crete;
Monique O’Connell, “The Venetian Patriciate in the Mediterranean: Legal Identity and
Lineage in Fifteenth Century Venetian Crete,” Renaissance Quarterly 57.2 (2004), 486n72.
See also Frederic C. Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice, 1418–1449 (Baltimore,
1944), pp. 23, 33–34, 36–37, 40; for Cerigo, see Marina Koumanoudi, “Fragments of an
Island Economy: The Venier Kytherean Estate Records (15th C.),” in Maltezou, Tzavara, and
Vlassi, eds., I Greci durante La venetocrazia, pp. 497–514; for Istria, Ivetic, L’Istria moderna,
p. 55; for Negroponte, Reinhold C. Mueller, “Ambienti ecclesiastici e laici attorno alla figura
di Chiara Bugni,” in Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri, La vita e i sermoni di Chiara
Bugni, Clarissa veneziana (Rome, 2011), pp. 72–77.
397 E.g., Lunzi, Della condizione, pp. 426, 467; Bacchion, Il dominio veneto su Corfù,
p. 209; Arbel, “Greek Magnates,” pp. 329, 331–32, 334, 336–37; O’Connell, Men of Empire, pp.
62–69; Jacoby, La féodalité, pp. 264–65, 305.
398 O’Connell, Men of Empire, pp. 62–69; Reinhold C. Mueller, “Pubblico e privato nel
dominio veneziano delle isole greche a metà Quattrocento: il caso dei Giustinian,” in
Chryssa Maltezou and Gherardo Ortalli, eds., Venezia e le Isole Ionie (Venice, 2005), pp.
71–100; Sander, Urban Elites, pp. 229–34.