“With several sub-departments and a distinct division of work, the Venetian secret service was different to other, more rudimentary espionage networks created by rulers (and their rivals) in other parts of Italy and early modern Europe.”
-Dr Ioanna Iordanou
Giacomo Casanova–as is well known–was fiercely independent, possessing an untempered passion for high adventure, self-promotion, and mischief. As a quick-thinking, silver-tongued, and Janus-faced storyteller, he used his skills to build a wide network of contacts, and this made him especially useful to the Venetian government. Despite his idiosyncratic and self-serving activities, Casanova (and many before him) actually helped contribute to an extensive, highly bureaucratic state machine. This organisation actively conducted a range of covert activities–including espionage and targeted assassinations– and was headed by the Council of Ten, an elite group of Venetian administrators.
In his influential text, The Reason of State (1589), the Italian humanist Giovanni Botero said that secrecy made human beings comparable to God, and in a certain sense the Council of Ten were superhuman. Zeus-like, they silently watched with arched arm over every corner of the Venetian Republic and blasted–by way of their enforcers and secret agents–any perceived threats to its security and prosperity.
Excitingly, the policies and history of this group and its intelligence operations are the focus of Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance (2019), a new monograph by Oxford Brookes University lecturer Dr Ioanna Iordanou. We spoke to Iordanou to learn more.
The Custodian: How did Venice’s centralised intelligence system compare with other contemporary spy networks in Europe?
Dr Ioanna Iordanou: The Venetian centrally organised secret service functioned like an organisation of public administration with managerial structures that determined the working relationships between its members. At the top of the hierarchy sat the Council of Ten (the governmental committee responsible for the security of Venice and its territorial possessions), who, as the political and organisational elites, took all executive decisions and stage-managed the operations that were assigned to those acting at their behest, such as Venetian diplomats and governors, military commanders, secretaries, and lay spies and informants. Deputising and delegating tasks to the relevant subordinate authority, the Ten managed to evaluate information systematically through a process of comparing and contrasting.
With several sub-departments and a distinct division of work, the Venetian secret service was different to other, more rudimentary espionage networks created by rulers (and their rivals) in other parts of Italy and early modern Europe. Indeed, as I detail in Chapter 1 of my book Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance, in most other early modern European states, such as England and France, monarchs and their trusted advisors had created close-nit, rudimentary spy networks whose purpose was to protect the interests of the monarch. Philip II’s Spain was, seemingly, more similar to Venice, in its creation of a centrally organised secret service.
Nevertheless, Philip’s monomaniacal tendency to control single-handedly every minute detail of Spain’s intelligence operations, from the recruitment and reimbursement of spies to the formulation of intelligence strategy, differentiated it from the Venetian intelligence organisation, which was premised upon managerial structures that determined the ways in which people worked and interacted with each other.
C: Did Venetians generally see secrecy as a virtue? How did the popolani usually participate in state espionage operations?
II: Yes. As I claim in Chapter 2 of my book, for the Venetian authorities, secrecy was “one of the most potent virtues”. To be more specific, secrecy, especially official state secrecy, that is, the protection of official state secrets, was sacred in Renaissance Venice. Through a series of formal decrees and regulations, the Venetian authorities sanctioned its significance, threatening with severe penalties anyone who attempted to divulge or leak official state secrets, regardless of their social status. This meant that anyone–from members of the nobility, to civil servants, to lowly boatmen–plotting to leak official state secrets was threatened with severe penalties, from loss of their fortune–and hence, social standing–to death.
In order to protect official state secrets and prevent them from being leaked to foreign rivals, the Venetian authorities invited ordinary Venetians, the popolani, as members of the Venetian laboring classes were called, to gather and divulge any information relating to the security of the Venetian state via written denunciations. This attitude reflected a long-established open-door stance maintained by the Council of Ten, which encouraged Venetian commoners to denounce, in secret, anyone or anything that could pose a potential threat to the stability of the state. More specifically, already from the fourteenth century, Venetians were encouraged to leave anonymous or eponymous denunciations in any public place, including churches, the stairs of state buildings, even the doorsteps of government officials.
As the praxis of the denuncia secreta was rapidly gaining momentum, by the second half of the sixteenth century, the authorities started to install wooden post boxes in prominent locations about the city and its territories in the Veneto, where Venetians could deposit their denunciations. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the plain wooden facades of the boxes were replaced with stone carvings in the shape of masked faces or, more commonly, lions’ mouths, the infamous bocche di leone, which still survive today. In a way, these postboxes were the forerunner par excellence of contemporary surveillance cameras, turning the city and its periphery into an object of continuous observation for the prying and the curious. This was one of the ways in which the popolani were involved in the government’s intelligence missions. The other one, acting as outright spies, I explain in questions 4 and 5 below.
C: Did Venice’s secret service also have a “black ops” division that conducted or arranged assassination?
II: Although I do not use the term “black ops” in the book, indeed, as I relate in detail in Chapter 6 of the book, the Council of Ten, as the spy chiefs of Renaissance Venice, used stealthy assassinations as an extraordinary measure in order to protect state secrecy. The hapless victims of such assassinations were those suspected (but not always proven guilty) of espionage or treason against the Venetian Republic. On such occasions, the Venetian spy chiefs could be ruthless, ordering their immediate assassination with tried and tested methods, such as drowning or strangulation. For instance, after three failed attempts to poison an Ottoman envoy in the 1570s, the Venetians managed to have him assassinated, maintaining that it was the virus (i.e. the devastating plague of the 1570s) that claimed his life.
C: What was the spy recruitment process like? What kind of evaluation process did spies have to undergo in order to get promoted?
II: The first thing I need to clarify here is that, as I explain in Chapter 5 of the book, there was no established profession of a spy in the early modern period. What I mean by this is that, despite the existence of spies for hundreds of years, the métier of the spy did not meet any of the criteria that sociologists and historians have attributed to a profession, which include a sense of commitment, an appeal to expertise, reliance on theoretical knowledge and practical skills, a professional ethic, and a perceived esprit de corps. In short, despite professionalising the art of cryptology, Renaissance Venice failed to establish a profession of espionage based upon “cognitive specialisation”, that is, some kind of formal training which transcended the boundaries of apprenticeship.
Having clarified this, it is now important to explain the nuanced differences between neighbouring terms that might be, wrongly, in my view, used interchangeably. In the early modern period, due to the above-mentioned lack of professionalization, the distinction between a spy—an individual actively recruited, authorised, and instructed to obtain information for intelligence purposes—and an informer (or intelligencer)—someone who voluntarily initiated the information gathering process, aspiring to a reward and, potentially, to a formal appointment by the government—is blurred. Similarly hazy is the term “informant”, which denotes someone who reported to the authorities information they were privy to, primarily out of a sense of duty. Most of the government’s informants were high-profile individuals, such as ambassadors operating in foreign courts.
When it came to the recruitment of spies, however, those who were actively recruited to engage in espionage activities–and please note, espionage had negative connotations in that period, the Venetian authorities opted for amateur dilettantes emanating from the social order of the popolani, who either volunteered their services in exchange for reimbursement or some kind of privilege or favour, or were personally recommended to the Council of Ten. No formal training was offered, and these individuals were usually recruited because they could speak the local language or dialect of the area they were sent to infiltrate. There was no possibility for promotion, since there was no profession of a spy. However, if they carried out their mission successfully, they could get re-deployed. Needless to say that, due to their amateur status, most of these “spies” suffered gruesome deaths in the hands of the enemy.
C: Was it common for fugitives or ex-convicts to be recruited as intelligencers?
II: Very much so, and the Venetian authorities encouraged them to participate in espionage missions by offering them as compensation the revocation of their punishment. The reason why the Council of Ten systematically targeted and recruited fugitives and ex-convicts is simple. These individuals were perceived to have brash and audacious personalities, who would allow them to defy the risk of imminent danger. Moreover, as these individuals usually originated from the lowest echelons of society, they were quite expendable for the authorities, hence why their name or other identifying information was rarely mentioned in relevant documentation. In short, they were the most unexceptional men thrown into the most exceptional circumstances.
C: Did Venice also hire and deploy women agents?
II: Alas, there is very limited evidence of women deployed as secret agents by the Venetian authorities. In his excellent book on the Venetian secret services of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Italian historian Paolo Preto mentions Venetian prostitutes acting as spies but provides no firm evidence for this claim. In my research, which focuses on the sixteenth century, I have only found a couple of examples of well off Venetian women acting as informers to the Venetian authorities in the Ottoman court. There are two reasons for this lacuna.
Firstly, women, especially lower class women, were rarely mentioned in (extant) archival records, primarily because their function and role in sixteenth century societies was not deemed as noteworthy as those of men. Secondly, the only women whose information gathering activities survived in archival records were those of noble descent, especially those who inhabited royal courts. This is why, aside from Nadine Akkerman’s pioneering work on female intelligencers in seventeenth-century Britain, a detailed study on the information-gathering activities of women in early modern Venice is quite impossible, since, in Venice, there was no royal court and, accordingly, noblewomen were confined in the home.
C: Anything you’d like to share about your forthcoming projects?
II: In an ideal world, I would like to conduct research on Renaissance Florence’s espionage networks. Before I embark on such a project, however, I have now turned my attention to issues of organisational secrecy in traditional Venetian industries, such as the Venetian ship-building industry.
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