ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Surviving the Galleys of Venice: Self-healing, Magic and Spaces of Agency at Sea

• In Event: Bodies in Bondage: Medical Knowledge, Regimes of Health, and Resistance in the Early Modern Mediterranean

English Abstract

Venice’s involvement in the Mediterranean slave trade during the early modern period has often been noted, but rarely examined in detail, especially in comparison with western Mediterranean powers and the Ottoman Empire. While institutional sources allow us to trace the Republic’s growing investment in managing the health of captive and convict rowers in its military fleet, the lived experiences of the galeotti remain far more elusive. How they confronted the challenges of forced labour and navigated their constrained healthscape is much harder to document. Drawing on inquisitorial trials from Venice’s Savi all’Eresia as well as ego-documents from the Tuscan Knights of St Stephen—who accompanied Venice on numerous war campaigns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—this paper seeks to address that gap. By taking the perspective of captives and convicts chained at the oar, it proposes a preliminary framework for reconstructing the forms of agency and healing practices available to them. It highlights a community artificially assembled, for which moments of integration alternated with moments of dissonance. Thus, the paper will examine sociability as well as sexual violence, the gathering of knowledge in the ports of the Venetian stato da mar, but also theft and crime. It will consider opportunities for both spiritual and physical health, and the particular importance of magic in responding to a hostile natural environment and an era of intense warfare. Finally, it will suggest that self-healing offered galeotti a means of reclaiming agency, acquiring new skills, and potentially achieving some social mobility within a highly constrained setting. By contrast, recourse to institutional medical services—provided by barbers and surgeons aboard the galleys—often resulted in a deeper slide into debt and bondage.

Author

• Valentina Pugliano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology