Pirates à la rame. L’économie pénale de la marine vénitienne et les frontières criminelles des galériens

• Department of History

PhD thesis defence by Cosimo Pantaleoni

This dissertation is a history from below of Venetian navy crews at the end of the sixteenth century. Through the criminal trials held in the Cariche da mar Processi (CMP) collection, I look at galleys (military oared vessels) deployed in the Adriatic Sea as a moving social frontier: maritime objects that embodied the social frontier between communal traditions and manufacture capitalism. I insist on the validity of Eric Hobsbawm’s and Marcus Rediker’s thesis on organised thieving as a form of rebellion based on direct redistribution of wealth. Along class boundaries, I detail both the penal strategies of the fleet’s captain-judges, dedicated to an accumulation of capital inserted into a public market of violence, and the daily resistance of frontier workers to debts and chains oppressing them.

What’s the economic effectiveness of military discipline in a frontier environment? What’s the social value of crime in conditions of material poverty? On one hand, the aim is to show that Da Canal’s reform (1545, Venetian ‘vagrancy law’), which had initiated the recruitment of convict rowers on board galleys, was perpetuated in the 1590s by growing judicial autonomy of maritime officers. I argue that such autonomy gave them an unprecedented level of financial arbitrariness, allowing captains to add debts to keep workers onboard, following a double logic of slave and waged labor exploitation. On the other hand, concerning galley workers, especially soldiers and rowers, my aim is to bring together their subsistence strategies, like robbing and smuggling, with actual piracy: after committing crimes to survive, workers escaped and would eventually join the Uskoks, a group of notorious privateers acting under Habsburg banners against the Venetians and against their main commercial partner, the Ottoman Empire. I argue that robbers sentenced to the oar and galley men joining pirates allow to establish a factual connection between the underworld of petty thieves and smugglers with wider phenomenon of banditry and piracy. The adventures of these people, squeezed between the Balkans and Dalmatian islands, speak for a whole early modern frontier world.