Becoming Istrian

This chapter examines Pietro Coppo’s new life in Isola, Istria, where he married a local noble woman, Colotta, had five sons, amassed property, and crafted a successful career on the Istrian municipal council. It follows the Coppo family through the rich notarial records of municipal Istria, showing how successful Coppo and Colotta were in establishing their political and economic fortunes in the town. The chapter examines the ‘portability’ of imperial sovereignty between Venice and its colonies, tracing the way in which imperial power is translated between metropolitan and colonial contexts; and shows how this was refracted through gendered family relationships.

Gender and Identity between Venice and the Mediterranean

This chapter focuses on Cyurω‎, Giovanni Bembo’s Corfiote wife. It traces her experiences and encounters, in Venice and in the Mediterranean world. Cyurω‎’s social and cultural identities and sources of belonging were constantly in flux, as she moved between Venice and the Mediterranean, encountered Venetian aristocrats and Greek scholars and subjects, was subject and ruler. Tracing these changing ways of belonging shows that categories of identity could be wafer-thin, permeating the boundaries between governor and governed, between wife and servant, between exalted mother of aristocratic children and scorned outsider who threatened the integrity of the nobility.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the two families at the heart of the book, the Bembo and Coppo. It positions them within the social world of the Venetian patriciate and its intellectual culture. It suggests that these families experienced unusual possibilities of social mobility, which would condition their later experiences both as scholars and as imperial governors. Finally, the Introduction sets out the three primary themes of the book: humanism, empire, and family, and sketches the historiographical coordinates of each; and the limitations of studying these in isolation.

Conclusion

The Conclusion explores some of the implications of the book, arguing in particular for a wider definition of humanistic writing; and for further study of ‘secondary’ humanism in Italy, and its relationship to political culture. It also argues that we need to know much more about the histories of women and families in the Mediterranean. In the final section, the Conclusion suggests that the desires and fears of these families were often irreconcilable with the social and political institutions of their imperial metropole. In a discussion of fantasy in this final section, I consider the wider implications of this intimate, subjective approach for the main political narrative which has structured Venetian historiography: the myth of Venice.

Documenting the Mediterranean World

Through family networks and scholarly ones, Bembo and Coppo first experienced the material evidence of antiquity in the Mediterranean empire: from the ruins of Crete, to the Roman inscriptions of the Adriatic world, we will trace how their scholarship gained its particular Mediterranean inflections during this time. This chapter argues that Bembo and Coppo were particularly closely tied into humanist ways of understanding the Mediterranean past. This method of scholarship - of recording inscriptions and mapping ruins - would become important during their later political lives in the maritime empire, as they described and mapped their own experiences in the Mediterranean setting of empire.

Venetian Families

This chapter begins in the natal family households of Bembo and Coppo. We consider their relationships to their fathers, uncles, cousins, and mothers, as well as the wider social distinctions between patrician social status in Venice. Through the eyes of Bembo and Coppo, the chapter examines their educational progression, from learning Latin in the household, to the lecture hall, to the printing houses of Venice. The emotional dimensions of humanist education have not been well understood. At the heart of this chapter is a consideration of the bonds of family: the family these men were born into, and the families they made for themselves amongst their classmates and teachers.

On the Borders of Italy

Chapter 6, we turn to examine Coppo’s Del Sito de Listria, his regional description of his adopted homeland. In this text, we can see the relationship between Coppo’s experience of family and political life in Isola, and his humanist scholarship. His geographical writing and homemade woodcut maps began to reflect his new perspective onto the empire from his study in Isola. Through classical literature, contemporary humanist writing, and most importantly, through his own witnessing of Istrian Roman material culture, Coppo wove an alternative history for Istria than that imposed by the Venetian empire.

Colonial Governance and Mythology on Skiathos

Chapter 5 studies a number of interrelated texts produced or read by Bembo while he was governor of the islands of Skiathos and Skopelos in the northern Aegean, suggesting that his humanist education had important consequences for how he perceived his governance there. It explores the sexual scandal which rocked his brief tenure as governor, and argues that problems surrounding sexuality, ethnicity, and reproduction were crucial concerns on the edges of the Venetian empire. It suggests that we look critically at the ways in which family matters - those concerning marriage, childbirth, and the raising of children - rippled outwards to influence governance and imperial political culture.