Coffee is rather superior this week. I’m in Venice, so between the winter sun glinting on the canals and the excellent quality of the coffee, every morning is a treat.
I’m here to talk about Late Antiquity to a group of keen young minds, which is always a joy, and so is being in Venice. This is my third visit and two things stand out to me every time I come back: it always makes me joyful, and it feels much more familiar than somewhere I have only been three times.
The canals mean that Venice is a functionally pedestrian city. Apart from boat rides between islands, there is no traffic and the only way to get around is on foot. Walking always lets my brain absorb things more slowly - sounds and smells and the change of the shadows through the day, so that is probably one of the reasons why.
Another is the instant recognisability of the place. Wherever you go in Venice, it is hard not to know you’re in Venice and I’ve often found myself thinking that, if the 13th-14th-century merchant traveller Marco Polo could be dropped back in his home city today, it wouldn’t take him more than a moment to recognise where he was. There are not many living cities you can say that about after 700 years!
One of the things I’ve had most fun finding out about on this visit is the secret life of early modern Venice, in the most literal sense. This was a state obsessed with secrets: their power and their danger. All states need to be wary of threats from within, and one of the reasons hereditary or semi-hereditary structures develop is to help to limit the potential pool of challengers for power.
Venice certainly had a hereditary elite, but not a single ruling family, and in a city state, rather than a larger empire or nation, the system of elected Doges and powerful councils meant that a much higher proportion of the population was eligible to compete for civic authority than they were in, say, the Roman Empire (in either its ancient or medieval/Byzantine phases).
One response to this was to put up boxes, all around the city. Here is a rare example that still has its carved front intact:
The inscription reads, ‘Secret denunciations against anyone who conceals favours and services or colludes to hide the true revenue from them’ (in which ‘them’ is the officials of the city).
Citizens were encouraged to post information anonymously, from rumours of palace conspiracies to accusations of corruption by city officials. This was potentially explosive material, so it is no surprise that accessing it was closely regulated. An example in the Doge’s Palace still preserves the two locked doors needed to open one of thee post boxes, requiring two key holders to be present to get in.
Two things struck me as I looked at these boxes and began recognising the telltale, slightly upturned shape of them from other parts of the city, where the grinning face and letters have usually been carved away, leaving something that looks weirdly like the front of a mid-century drawer front set into a wall.
The first thing I thought was that this system must have depended on reasonably high levels of literacy in the city. The boxes were not just placed in or near the centre of government. They were widely dispersed.
Graffiti in the prison, which is located next to the Doge’s Palace, right over the famous Bridge of Sighs, bears out this picture of a significantly literate society. Among the marks made by poor souls stuck in Venice’s scientifically crafted version of Hell are notes from a wide range of people, all the way down to one Livio, a self-described ‘poor rag man’, kept in a dark cell and desperate to see sunlight.
Now, you may have noticed, I’m using a lot of hedging words about levels of literacy: reasonably high levels, significantly literate…
There is no way to be absolute about this, but it is probably fair to say that most societies with some form of literacy were more literate than the stereotypes about them. It is, for example, not true that, in most places in the Middle Ages, nobody could read or write except members of the church.
From casual notes on wood from the archaeological site of Novgorod to research into reading and writing in sub-Saharan Africa from antiquity onwards, to research into different kinds of literacy (functional, situational, partial…), it looks more and more as if evidence for literacy is often there to find if we start by assuming it’s there, and has often not been found because people assumed it was not.
Nevertheless, there are differences, or at least, it feels as if there are, without being able to cough up any figures. I’m not sure that, in either the South India or the East Mediterranean of the mid-first millennium, which I spend so much time studying, the social equivalent of a ‘poor rag man’ would have been able to write, or be able to write much more than his name if he could.
I am not sure that either of these regions in the mid first millennium CE would have developed a post-box Stasi system. There were other reasons for that, such as political structures and scale of society, but I felt as I looked at those Bocche di Leone that I was seeing a glimpse of a society that used literacy differently to the ones I study.
The other thing I’ve found myself thinking about is the cost-benefit of government accountability. Those little drawer fronts make one aspect of it especially visible, a vertical quid pro quo. The people of Venice were asked to spy on their neighbours, their family and mostly, I presume, their social superiors, since conspiracies are mostly the hobby of the rich and powerful and most citizens in any society are neither rich nor powerful.
In return, though, they could post other things, too: notes about blocked drains, complaints that the market manager was taking bribes. In a city built on a swamp, it may be that getting the population to monitor things like water management also just made good sense. Official corruption, though? That sounds like a trade, of the sort that all societies are built on. The chance for people lower down the social hierarchy to have their grievances heard and answered (or at least answered enough, enough of the time to look like accountability) was the price people higher up in the social hierarchy paid for sleeping a little easier in their beds.
These things build up expectations of accountability. It isn’t just the government’s job to punish corruption or mend pavements. It becomes a job that they are actually expected to do. And there are things that people can withhold if they don’t (in this case, gossip about their neighbours).
These trades also build up feelings of solidarity and community: people feel that their government does things for them and so they are invested in its survival. The community works better as a whole (fewer bloody palace coups and mucky market drains) than it might without those bonds. People up and down the social hierarchy can identify with that hierarchy as something they participate in.
Although I said I don’t think the Roman Empire of the mid-first millennium would have had a post-box system like the Venetians, ironically, people in East Asia thought that they did. In the writings about the far distant empire of Fu-Lin, as the T’ang Empire called the Byzantine Empire, official scribes wrote that:
There are twelve honourable ministers who conjointly regulate government matters. They ordinarily let a man take a bag and follow the king's carriage. When the people have a complaint they throw a written statement into the bag. When the king comes back to the palace he decides between right and wrong. Their kings are not permanent rulers, but they select men of merit. If an extraordinary calamity visits the country, or if wind and rain come at the wrong time, he is deposed and another man is put in his stead. (Chiu-t’ang-shu ch. 198 7-10, trans. F. Hirth)
For these writers, what happened in the far-off, semi-mythical empire of the west was often a way to talk, in subtle ways, about their own society. They knew bits and pieces about the Roman Empire, but could also use it to talk about ideas of good government. The Roman Empire could be seen as a mirror of good practice, but also comment on bad and the fun part is that it is hard to tell which, and that may have been the point.
The Romans, they say, did not keep the same emperor, but swapped them the moment something went wrong. Sometimes Roman history certainly does read that way… But then, so does East Asian history. Were T’ang scribes reflecting on their own challenges or perhaps wishing, at some other time, that they could more easily be rid of a particular incumbent?
Any Roman citizen had the theoretical right to bring a petition before the emperor. (Though, the state didn’t make it nearly as easy as a bag and a parade!) Was this a complaint about the T’ang emperor at the time being too inaccessible?
It is always hard to say because the way that imperial histories were written in China means we don’t know precisely when a specific point was recorded or who wrote it.
As I looked at the post boxes in Venice, though, I couldn’t help wondering…
The Roman/Byzantine Empire, like the Tang Empire and the Venetians, all knew that stable societies need systems, however they work, to make all layers of society feel that they are part of the system. And as various countries I care about deeply all go to the ballot boxes this year, how many people around the world feel that enough is being done, enough of the time, to fix their problems?