A Fiscal-Military State?

In his book on eighteenth-century England, John Brewer has pointed out the emer­gence of a fiscal-military state “whose main features were: high taxes, a growing and well-organized civil administration, a standing army and the determination to act as a major European power.” Brewer’s model, which to some extent echoes Hintze’s, offers a useful checklist of characteristics of the fiscal-military state.^[1656] Was the Venetian republic such a state?

First of all, one has to ask whether Venetian policy, during the great phase of polit­ical and economic expansion from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, was sig­nificantly supported by elements of the preceding model.

At first Venice filled a void caused by the decline of the Byzantine Empire. The lagoon city had grown in the shadow of Byzantium and had managed to acquire elements of control within the Adriatic by replacing imperial power. That allowed

Table 22.1 Budgets of the Republic of Venice, 1343-1679.

Source: Pezzolo 2006c, table 5.

THE VENETIAN

Venice to play an increasingly important role, first in the Adriatic and then in more distant seas, and to fill the role of intermediary in long-distance commerce between East and West.

Prolonged war against Genoa likewise pushed Venice to improve her fiscal and military systems. As far as we know, forced loans and custom duties were the main mechanisms to cope with increased military spending. At the end of the fourteenth century, the government did attempt to impose a form of direct taxation, but it was not intended as a regular tax. Venice's great advantage was in its capacity to trans­form commercial capital quickly into financial resources that in turn allowed it to maintain a powerful fleet. In military terms, Venice could marshal significant naval resources. Its capacity both to mobilize a mighty fleet and to call on the services of skilled sailors was generally recognized, a characteristic that commanded enemies' respect. This naval strength did not depend on a robust, permanent bureaucratic structure, however, since the war fleet was mostly made up of ships temporarily converted from merchant activities (specialization between naval and merchant vessels had not yet emerged definitively).

recruiting system for sailors and oarsmen that involved both the capital and impe­rial dominions. Venice enjoyed comparative advantages that allowed it to achieve a role of crucial importance in the Mediterranean. Starting in the fifteenth century, however, these advantages began to disappear, albeit slowly.

Despite its victories, Venice was unable to take full advantage of its position. From the mid-fifteenth century onward, the Ottoman Empire put new pressure on Venice's overseas territories. To draw out the comparison with England further, one notes that, once rid of the Dutch, the English did not face other rivals that were as dangerous as the Dutch had been, and thus enjoyed enormous opportunities. Venice, by contrast, once it had defeated Genoa, had then to cope with the much more dangerous Ottoman Empire.

The true turning point of Venetian fiscal and military history came between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Republic—strongly committed to empire on both land and sea—undertook major fiscal and military reforms. During the fif­teenth century, a standing army was established with a wartime strength of as many as 20,000 soldiers. A permanent administrative structure was therefore created to deal with regular troop payment, quartering, and mobilization in case of need. In the sixteenth century, moreover, a militia of both peasants (cernide) and citi­zens (bombardieri) was created. Over 20,000 subjects were organized in the new reserve system, armed and (in theory) regularly trained. Likewise, between the fif­teenth and the sixteenth centuries, the navy established an administrative system with jurisdiction over timber resources, artillery, gunpowder, crews, payments, and supplies. A reserve of oarsmen from the mainland was formed. Although not very effective, it provided further manpower for the Venetian military. So we can see that the Republic of Venice was also affected by “a concentration and systemati­zation of strategically important resources and competencies in order to convert them into something which gives muscle to political power.”⁴¹ This process had to be subsidized with ever increasing funds.

Taxation is the field in which one can best both measure the efficiency of civil ad­ministration and gauge the relationship between government and society. We have seen that one of the crucial features of the fiscal-military state is a significant and steady increase in taxation. Let us see what happened in Venice by first considering some figures and then some institutional aspects.

Table 22.1 shows that the Republic's nominal income grew regularly in the course of the early modern period. Between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries, the city-state was transformed into a territorial state, and this dramatic change was mirrored in its revenues, and consequently in its financial needs.

The 1630 plague hit public finance severely, reducing the tax yield and slowing recovery. It is interesting to note that the 1630 crisis hit harder than that associ­ated with the plague of 1576. In the meantime, in fact, economic circumstances had changed for the worse: the resources that had been available to recover after Lepanto were no longer there 50 years later. It is likely that the recovery of revenues to their pre-plague level coincided with the outbreak of the war for Crete. Although there is no data available, it is plausible that the government’s heavy tax burden raised the revenues spent on the navy and troops in Crete. After the war, the rate of growth remained fairly constant, partly because of the dis­placement effect created by taxes that had been imposed in wartime and were subsequently maintained.

What did change significantly were certain features of taxation. The forms of tax­ation multiplied, and—more importantly—became more effective in comparison with the Late Middle Ages. While a Venetian of Marco Polo’s time expected to face the usual excise duties on consumption and a few forced loans (the interest on which was regularly paid), the generation of Vivaldi’s youth was subjected to a much wider array of taxes. Besides new levies on goods and transactions, regular direct taxes and demands on corporate bodies like guilds and other social institutions were taken for granted. Also worth stressing is the growing role of mainland taxpayers, whose share of overall tax revenue had grown in direct relation to the increasing difficulties of the port and market of Venice (with its concomitant drop in indirect taxes). This down­turn was especially evident between the early and mid-seventeenth century.

It must be said that budget figures do not lend themselves to univocal inter­pretation.