Edition of 61 copies
6.5” x 8 ¾” x 1” closed; 13” x 8 ¾” open
2021
Intricate 400-year-old model boats were used to teach naval technology in their time. University of Bologna students in the 1600s learned practical and tactical knowledge for future careers from these and other teaching collections. One boat with oars, striped sails, and flags with distinctive red and gold crosses stands out. Is it a throwback from Roman or medieval times? What was its purpose?
This is a model galley of the Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen, founded by the Medici family in 1561. They created this order to attract potential alliances, especially with the Vatican, mainly in hopes of protecting and advancing Tuscany’s import-export aspirations. Italian duchies, maritime republics and the papacy were forever at war and changing sides. Christian and Muslim corsairs attacked boats, and all powers around the Mediterranean basin, European, Ottoman and North African rulers alike, enslaved, ransomed and sold captives, and sought to monopolize trade items, such as alum, an all-important ingredient to fix the dyes of textiles.
Enslaved people of many religions, mostly captured in raids, actuated the naval technology, together with forced laborers, and paid rowers called buonevoglie. They were chained to benches, five to seven on each oar. Paid rowers left the oars for the artillery in skirmishes. Hundreds rowed each galley owned by countries and merchants on three continents. As Florence lacked a port, the Medici tried and failed to attract immigrants to Pisa, which had silted over. Then they tried to populate Livorno, a mosquito-laden, desolate place. But overtures to Jews and other religious refugees failed again. This tactic had already been attempted by the Vatican in Ancona. Venice had a privileged trading spot with Turkey and Asia in the Adriatic. Both the papacy and the Medici wanted to disrupt that.
Upping the incentive, the Medici declared Livorno a free port and welcomed religious and political refugees to set up business, practice religion and wear what they liked, not required items, such as yellow, pointed hats and badges for Jews, or red badges for Muslims. Some were offered Tuscan citizenship. The most coveted refugees were capable and well-connected merchants, such as Jews and Marranos (Crypto-Jews or Neo-Christians) from Spain and Portugal, with ties to Turkey and the Levant. Non-Tuscan criminals were also solicited.
Around the Mediterranean many enslaved oarsmen slept on boats in ports. In Livorno a purpose-built prison housed these captives of various religions and origins: Il Bagno de’ Schiavi. Bagno means “bath” in Italian, but the term likely arose from Banyol, a Turkish royal prison. Cervantes was in the Spanish navy when he was captured from a ship. His family could not pay the ransom, having previously paid a high price for his brother years before, so the author spent five years imprisoned in North Africa, despite several escape attempts.
Having prisoners on all sides, on boats and in prisons, spurred diplomacy to improve conditions for the enslaved, including spaces to practice their religions. Livorno had many temples of worship for its diverse population, but the Bagno prison itself had four mosques and a Christian chapel. Lining the outside walls of the prison, and dockside, were businesses run by the enslaved, who sometimes passed down possessions in wills, enslaved others and contributed earnings to a fund for the disabled and for funerals. Laws existed also to protect religious and civil rights of refugees, but the Inquisition hounded the Marranos and other religious converts. The healthiest captives rowed nine months a year. The horror of the galleys lives on in a common Italian word for prison: galera.
The Four Moors statue by Pietro Tacca (1626) in Livorno represents this Mediterranean brand of naval power and commerce fueled through enslaved people from different continents. A statue of Ferdinand I stands above Tacca’s four realistic bronze portraits (created with sittings and body casts of local models) chained beneath him. Iconography of rulers with bound captives underfoot has existed for at least 4,000 years. Echoing the 1,000-year-old Arab tradition of monumental sugar sculptures commissioned by rulers, Medici family weddings and feasts featured edible symbols of power: sugar galleys, family crests, and even a sugar replica of The Four Moors in 1667 to celebrate Leopoldo de’ Medici being named cardinal by Pope Clement IX.
Ferdinand I imported sugar to Livorno from Brazil, so the sugar galleys at the wedding of Maria de’ Medici in 1600 also embody the network of global agriculture, trade and shipping. Earlier, the Medici imported sugar from Madeira, until deforestation to process it caused the sugar boom to combust. Later, they imported Caribbean sugar through France, and exported the sugar substitute manna and silk from Southern Italy. Mediterranean trade flourished even when governments fought or severed diplomacy. Only pandemics closed ports and devastated trading economies, such as the bubonic plague outbreak in the vital port of Marseille in 1720. We know about trade in Livorno through sanitation records, quarantine failures and fines.
Captured goods and people were sent back to Livorno for resale by international merchants in the Magreb. The Ottoman alum trade was upended when a rich supply was found near Rome, claimed by the Vatican. The Medici first gained the right to sell it, until Agostino Chigi won the contract and became the richest private citizen in Italy.
The Bagno prison of Livorno, which detained so many men, women and children, Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and Jews, was bombed in WWII. But The Four Moors statue remains, testament to oppression and religious tolerance in a polyglot port, built and managed with the labor and political negotiating of enslaved people. Tiny benches and oars of the model galley in Bologna’s Palazzo Poggi require imagination to summon the rowers nations and merchants hoped would propel them to success. But the Medici fleet dwindled, and some Knights of Saint Stephen avoided duty, including Ferdinando Cospi, to whom the model ship belonged. Scholars’ research in Livorno archives and beyond ensures that some enslaved individuals who rowed these ships, ran the Bagno shops, posed for sculptors and authored diplomatic statements have names and histories still today.
The Medici joined the fray late in the game. Material culture, trade and hegemony in the Mediterranean basin were on display 500 years before the model ship was built: 11th c North African ceramic basins were set into church facades in Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna, a cheap way to add color and light to buildings, proud local proof of global trade in luxury items and a nod to Christian crusades and thinly veiled raids blurring lines between pilgrimage and pillage.
Text and watercolors by the artist of Livorno’s Bagno prison plan from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, a model ship from the Palazzo Poggi Museum in Bologna and an Egyptian ceramic basin from the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa rendered through sublimation on recycled sails. Flotation devices sewn inside by the artist.
Angelonium 