The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo by Coriolano Cippico (review)

In late July 1470, the city of Venice was consumed by panic, grief, and recriminations as the first reports of the fall of Negroponte trickled into the city. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Aegean island of Negroponte (Euboea) had become Venice's most vital commercial and military possession in the northeastern Mediterranean. After the island fell to an Ottoman siege and assault, Venetians feared that the rest of their maritime empire would begin to fall to the Ottomans as well. The Venetian Senate elected Pietro Mocenigo, an experienced diplomat, politician, and naval commander, as the Captain General of the Sea, sending him and his fleet on a campaign of retribution in the eastern Mediterranean. Coriolano Cippico, a noble from the Dalmatian city of Trogir (Trau), captained one of the galleys in Mocenigo's fleet and was thus a direct observer and participant in the events he later chronicled in his Latin treatise, The Deeds of Commander Mocenigo.

While Cippico had a humanistic education, the work hovers between humanist history and a straightforward chronicle of events. The treatise is organized into three books, each of which narrates a different stage in the naval campaign. The first book begins with the fall of Negroponte and relates the fleet's depredations along the cities and towns of the Anatolian coast. The second book begins with an attack on the Ottoman forces at Gallipoli by a Venetian secret agent and continues on to describe the Venetians' systematic sack and capture of Ottoman coastal towns as well as their alliance with other anti-Ottoman forces in the region, notably the Karamans and Uzun Hasan, sultan of the Aq Qoyunlu emirate. In late 1473, the Venetian fleet's attention was pulled to a growing crisis in Cyprus, and the remainder of book 2 and the beginning of book 3 are dedicated to Mocenigo's efforts to secure the Venetians' hold on the island. The work concludes with the fleet's defense of the Albanian city of Scutari against an Ottoman attack in 1474.

Cippico's text thus delivers what it promises: a short history of the naval campaign captained by Pietro Mocenigo, who was elected doge shortly after the fleet disbanded. As this was only a single expedition in a long history of Veneto-Ottoman commercial and military engagement in the eastern Mediterranean, the reader is often thrust into the thick of the action with very little background. Furthermore, the eventual outcome of events also takes place offstage: Scutari did fall to an Ottoman siege in 1479, while Cyprus was increasingly subject to Venetian influence and became a directly ruled possession of the Republic in 1489. Petkov's careful introduction and notes help provide context and situate events in a broader panorama, doing a great deal to allow nonexperts access to the text.

Two overarching themes run through Cippico's history: the virtues of Commander Pietro Mocenigo and the Venetian fight against the Ottomans. One might assume that Cippico, a subject of Venice's empire, intended to win preferment or advantages for himself by composing a text that praised Venice, but in the introduction, Petkov makes a convincing case that Cippico's intended audience was more local and Dalmatian than imperial and Venetian. Cippico explains practices that would have been familiar to most Venetians, such as the auctioning of booty; he also praises Dalmatian Slavs as much or more than he praises Venetian soldiers or commanders. Cippico's admiration of Mocenigo and his deeds, rather than fitting into the typical praise of Venetian patricians (as seen in the Venetian histories and chronicles that form the backbone of the myth of Venice), seem rather to be part of Cippico's humanist engagement with civic virtue. Mocenigo thus appears as a praiseworthy servant of his civic community, just as a noble of Trogir might be to his own city.

Petkov also argues that while Cippico at times paints the Venetian expedition in religiously...