Since the turn of the twenty-first century, it has become commonplace to study early modern Venice through the lens of contemporary ideals of multiculturalism and ‘pacified forms of globalisation’.1 Scholars often describe Venice as a peaceful republic of merchants and a key agent of cross-cultural exchange, but they rarely attempt to integrate this benevolent view with the city’s colonial practices in the Mediterranean and armed conflict with the Ottomans. They invariably agree with Frederic Lane’s view from his classic Venice: A Maritime Republic that the conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 ‘made Venice an imperial power’ but uncritically reiterate his sweeping generalisation that the Venetians were ‘predisposed more toward peace than war’. For Lane, the Republic’s history was supposedly marked by a ‘contrast between Venice of the twelfth and thirteen centuries on the one hand and Venice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the other’.

Chapter 1 treats the War of the Morea as a major media event that sheds new light on the relationship between communication and power in seventeenth-century Venice. Challenging the exceptionalist assumption that secrecy was the guiding principle of official policy, wartime culture reveals an active willingness to deploy publicity to boost government reputation and bolster the Republic’s declining ruling class. In considering different information modalities – oral, manuscript, print, ritual – the chapter approaches news as a form of discourse that integrates facts, emotions, and interpretations. As Walter Benjamin noted, news reporting always comes with explanation, a ‘psychological connection’ that is ‘forced on the reader’. Rather than limit the scope of analysis to the mechanics of communication, the chapter critically examines how war news integrated fact and value to justify military action abroad and encourage popular engagement with empire at home.

Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

Chapter 2 explores the politics of history in wartime Venice, focusing on the processes of documentation and representation that articulated the meaning of war in official and popular accounts. It charts how the two state historiographers, Michele Foscarini and Pietro Garzoni, incorporated the war into the official narrative of the Republic and patrician image-making. It then provides a detailed overview of popular histories, with emphasis on the political and commercial imperatives that determined their publication. Finally, it considers the role of censorship and shows how official historiography became a site of contestation between competing elite groups. The chapter argues that state-sponsored and popular histories compel us to rethink the colonial conditions of the production of Venetian historical sources and the close relationship between historical discourse and overseas empire-building.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

The generative power of war and its centrality to the production of culture lie at the heart of this book. Despite the common perception that these two spheres of human activity are polar opposites, in reality they have always been linked by a shared history. In the opening chapter of his Istoria, Pietro Garzoni cited Lucian of Samosata to argue that ‘war is the mother of histories’. In his celebrated treatise How to Write History, the Roman satirist recalled Heraclitus’s dictum that war ‘is the father of all things’ to mock the proliferation of contemporary war historians and stress the links between warfare and pathological history writing.1 What lies beneath this bellicose conception of historiography is the wider idea that human civilisation is inseparable from war and organised violence. In many ways, the same notion seems to be present in Walter Benjamin’s provocative thesis that ‘there is no document of civilisation that is not a document of barbarism’.

THE KINGDOM OF France was never a coherent territorial entity, what we would call a state, but, rather, a collection of lands, rights, and claims. Additionally, as the word “claims” implies, these were often contested. The ways in which they were advanced, realized, fought over, and lost are related to the nature of French society, however, as are the armies that were a vital element in the monarchy’s development.

Since the collapse of Rome monarchs had been, essentially, the rulers of the rich and powerful who controlled the day to day life of ordinary people. The power of emperors and kings rested on their ability to build up resources, to manipulate the great through patronage, and to overawe or even threaten them with military power. The wealth of the king and his control of government gave him the means to reward. Royal offices were highly prized: to be a count was prestigious and well rewarded, and also enabled its holder to exercise power in his own interests. Kings could give their own land, and sometimes that of the Church, to favoured servants. The king could also, of course, act as a judge in disputes between the great and be the guarantor of the legitimacy of those who held power. This process left powerful lords with virtual autonomy, however, especially in the counties they controlled. Even a monarch as powerful as Charlemagne inveighed angrily against those who misused the royal power to repress lesser men in his Memorandum on Military Matters of 811. These great men drew their wealth from landed estates on which they subjugated the peasantry to the status of serfs, a process very apparent in Carolingian times and even earlier. Kings were expected to lead in war, though a wise ruler would consult so as to ensure that the great men would follow him. Successful war gained loot and gave the king’s aristocratic followers employment for their armed retinues. Monarchy had great patronage, which could be used to manipulate others. Personality mattered a great deal, though, for power was exercised in a relatively small circle of individuals and radiated out from the royal court through the spheres of influence (mouvances) of each.

I OWE THANKS to many people for the help they have given me in preparing this book. The meetings of De Re Militari, the Society for Medieval Military History, have provided enormous stimulus over many years. More particularly, I would like to thank Clifford Rogers and Kelly DeVries, my colleagues on the editorial board of the Journal of Medieval Military History, for their kindness, patience, and great learning. Professors Bernard and David Bachrach have been a rich source of ideas. My colleagues in the History Department of Swansea University, Professor Dan Power and Dr. Simon Johns, have been enormously helpful. I can only admire the scholarly learning of Professor Matthew Strickland, to whose work I owe a very great deal. Dr. Alan V. Murray has been most generous in sharing knowledge and ideas. I owe a great deal to Dominique Barthélemy, whose knowledge of medieval France is remarkable. Federico Canaccini very kindly granted me the benefit of his learning, while Peter Herde made me think again about the Battle of Tagliacozzo.

Much of this book has been written during the extraordinary restrictions imposed by Covid-19. In spite of this, my family, and especially Angela, my wife, have coped with my struggles against these circumstances. Last, but not least, I must thank Anna Henderson of Arc Humanities Press, for all her help and the occasional – albeit tactful – prods, which have kept me going.