Homeland of Poisons
The Venetian Secret Service and Assassination
From the Renaissance into the seventeenth century, nowhere was more identified with the foul act of poisoning than the boot. In 1614, the theologian Thomas Adams had observed “that there are sinnes adherent to Nations, proper, peculiar, genuine, as their flesh cleaveth to their bones . . . If we should gather Sinnes to their particular Centers, we would appoynt . . . Poysoning to Italie.”
The Italian facility with such underhanded methods went back, so it was said, to the courts of the early Emperors. Following the example set by her predecessor, the empress Livia, Agrippina the Younger (Caligula’s sister) relied on Locusta to supply the toxin that killed her husband Claudius. It was Locusta, too, who concocted the poison, possibly prussic acid or a cyanide, that would be served by Nero to Claudius’s son Brittanicus. All good, clean family fun.
More recently, the Borgias had kept up Italy’s fine reputation by poisoning anyone who stood in their way, even if most of the horror stories should be considered apocryphal. In an age when to boil eggs for too long a time was believed to render them toxic, it was all too easy to gossip that so-and-so had been poisoned by some murderous Borgia psycho when the poor fellow had actually contracted a bad case of salmonella from selfsame eggs. Diarrhea, fever, abdominal cramps, and vomiting followed by the infection fatally entering the blood stream: These symptoms could sound very much like the result of deliberate poisoning.
But it was the Republic of Venice, specifically, that was most notorious as the patria dei veleni (homeland of poisons).
The Worms of Caffa
In the archives of the Council of Ten—the centuries-old “Secret Service” charged with ensuring the Republic’s security and conducting counter-intelligence operations—there are records of at least 34 government-sponsored assassination attempts involving poison between 1400 and 1755. Since the oath of the Council was jura, perjura, secretum prodere noli (swear, foreswear, and reveal not the secret), and many of its tantalizingly blank minutes noting that an important discussion had taken place are marked, non scribatur (not to be written), no doubt there were many more that never officially happened.
But in the detailed ones that remain, the Council scrupulously maintained a log of victims and who voted for and against termination, while a clerk’s neatly written “factum” in the margin indicated successful completion. There was even a contractor scheme in which poisoners bid against each other for the next job. In 1513, for instance, John of Rogabo prepared a list of available poisons and a tariff of fees to remove objectionable people. The most expensive were the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor; kings cost less; and the amounts declined as one descended to mere princes. The Ottoman sultan had a special mark-up for travel expenses.
As it turned out, John of Rogabo was hired but few of his poison experiments worked out and he was let go. John’s lack of success highlights how difficult it was to execute a good poisoning. For one thing, it was difficult to acquire the ingredients. One powerful toxin, “venerum lupimum,” required “the powdered leaves of aconitum lupinum, toxus fructa, powdered glass, caustic lime, sulphide of arsenic, and bitter almonds.” Another needed “hemlock juice, bruised datura, stramonium, belladonna, and opium.”
Ironically, one of the hardest places to acquire the necessaries was in Venice itself, where after a Tatar slave girl poisoned her master with arsenic in 1410, the stuff, as well as something called “worms of Caffa,” opium, cantharides, and napellum were strictly regulated and sold only in two pharmacies, both watched carefully.
The people who had the best connections were Jews, who served as agents and intermediaries between Christian Venice and her Muslim rival, the Ottoman Empire. While consigned to the Ghetto in Venice, Jewish merchants, doctors, and (al)chemists were in high demand in both Europe and Constantinople. Through their international kinship networks they had access to the Silk Road and the exotic substances from the east that best-in-class poisonmaking required.
They had also the “Secret Knowledge” of how the ingredients worked together, but the Council employed (Christian) professors of chemistry or botany to compound them. Their efforts were not always crowned with success, possibly because they were trained in making medicines and antidotes, not toxins.
In 1574, for example, Mustafa dai Cordoani, a legate of Grand Vizier Sokullu Mehmet Pasha, visited Venice to request the release of Ottoman prisoners. It was an unusually contentious time between the two powers and the Council believed that was just a cover story for him to make contact with conspirators within the city. Melchiorre Guilandino, a professor of botany, was hired to produce a poison, but even when Mustafa drank it twice it failed to exert much effect. Guilandino was replaced by a physician named Comasco to make a fresh batch, but that too failed.
Two years later, another opportunity arose when Mustafa visited while a plague ravaged the city. “For the benefit of our state and the whole of Christianity,” the Council ruled he should be liquidated and made to look like a victim of plague. An assassin named Captain Trec did the job a few days later, after which the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople was informed that poor Mustafa had died of illness in the street.
A Higher Form of Killing
The diplomat was directed to inform his hosts that he had heard the sad news from a friend—under no circumstances was the Council’s name to be invoked, or suspected. The Council habitually covered its tracks like this for three reasons.
Morality: The use of poison was considered by theologians and jurists alike as a particularly nefarious form of homicide, more a kind of Murder+ than anything else. This was because poison as a murder weapon had about it a whiff of sulphur; there was something dishonorable and treacherous involved with sneakily administering it to a defenseless victim. Worse, perhaps, in legal textbooks poisoning was associated with the practice of maleficium (the working of evil on someone), under which rubric witchcraft, black magic, and necromancy were contained.
For those who think all this stuff hopelessly alien and outdated, there was a similar kind of debate after the Great War. Many years ago, I read a host of 1920s articles in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institution which were arguing back and forth on the morality of chemical warfare. Some of the military writers thought it uniquely awful and insidious, but others retorted that it was no different from shellfire and bullets—neither of which was a pleasant way to die. In fact, breathing in chlorine gas or being splashed with mustard may have led to temporary incapacity, but losing your legs to a mine was a permanent state of affairs. Which was more humane?
The Council of Ten would have sided with the pro-chemical advocates, poisoning actually being a form of chemical warfare, if you think about it. If poison got the job done rapidly, cleanly, and without hurting others, then surely it could be counted as a higher form of killing than hiring some violent desperado to knife the target in an alley.
Whatever the case, the Council lacked the luxury of being able to debate these interesting philosophical-theological issues. As Cicero had said, “Let the safety of the people be the supreme law,” and that was the principle upon which the Council always acted. As far as they were concerned, they murdered not to serve their own personal interests—in which case, the morality of poison became salient—but for reason of state.
Even so, they were a little queasy about the implications of their actions. Legally, they were in the clear; morally, perhaps not so much. Hence the curious addendum to a motion in 1450 to poison Venice’s archenemy, Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan. The Council insisted that the toxin first be tested on a convicted prisoner, one already condemned to death, to guarantee its efficacy. Sforza, a mercilessly vengeful sort, was the living embodiment of the principle that “if you’re going to take a shot at the king, make sure you kill him.”
Still, as the Council added, the convict “must be presented for selection,” and he must hear his sentence, and not only that, he must “understand what a useful and safeguarding affair the death of Count Francesco would be to our state.” In other words, the prisoner must be quasi-volunteered for human experimentation and he must be aware of his fate, but most important, he would redeem himself as a patriot. He would die for a good reason, making the Council’s Machiavellianism a moral act.
Diplomacy: The second reason for the Council to keep its hands clean was to avoid adverse international fallout. Looking at the names on the Council’s poison list, I can see a few large omissions in choice of targets: There is no king of France or Spain on there, and not even a Pope (despite John of Rogabo’s wishlist).
Instead, the majority are renegades, turncoats, and irritating warlords of one flavor or another. So we have Stefano the Little (despot of Monte Negro), Andrea Bagozzi (an Ottoman spy in Crete), Antonio Gianotti (bandit), a Doctor Fasaneo (renegade), and one Cernovich, a dragoman (diplomatic translator).
Also prominent were high-level artisans or merchants—Venice took industrial espionage very seriously—such as Friulan Piero de Vettor for selling an advanced glazing process and Giovanni Vistosi for moving to Florence and taking with him his knowledge of pearl cultivation. They had betrayed the trust of the people.
Most striking, however, is the presence of the Ottoman sultan (as well as his subordinate governors in south-eastern Europe). There were at least three plans approved to kill sundry sultans, and several more to kill his officials.
A very general principle we can draw from all this is that Christians were exempt from poisoning, unless, like Sforza, they presented a direct threat to the Republic or had acted in an unchristian way.
Yet one could not go around casually clipping Ottoman worthies. They maintained a powerful empire, ruled their side of the Mediterranean, and were the nexus for the east-west trade routes. They had to be dealt with, in other words, very carefully.
For instance, when in 1565 a particularly noisome Turkish privateer was wounded and captured the Council directed the local governor to have the ship’s barber, who’d been treating him, smear a toxic substance on his wound or arrange for him to drink something poisonous to make it look as if he had succumbed to his injuries. The governor was told to make no reference to the Council, to return his written instructions to Venice, and to send his report on the liquidation in his own hand. This particular pirate was of little concern, but there was no point, the Council agreed, in antagonizing Constantinople.
This was because, as the Council well knew, assassinations can make things real complicated, real fast and Ottoman-Venetian relations were a delicate matter even at the best of times. This was illustrated in a case with much more dangerous ramifications.
Shortly after Mustafa dai Cordoani’s unfortunate death of “plague,” an Ottoman representative named Mustafa Celebi arrived in Venice and requested liberation of a Turkish slave named Mamut. The Doge politely said it was out of the question as his crimes were too serious, but offered to release other prisoners as a favor to the great sultan. Secretly, the Council decided that Mamut had to go. But not yet. For the time being, he was useful leverage to extract Venetian slaves from the Ottomans.
Negotiations went on for more than a decade. Complicating matters was that Mamut was a favorite of Sultan Murad III’s mother, Nurbanu, who was thought to be pro-Venetian (she may have had Venetian, Greek and/or Jewish ancestry) and who provided a helpful moderating influence at court. Her death in 1583 brought an end to Mamut’s utility. In summer of 1586, adhering to the order from more than ten years earlier, he was poisoned so as to make his death look as if he had died of “infirmity.” In this instance, it was critical to keep the Council’s involvement firmly out of the story to avoid Ottoman retaliation for his murder.
Reputation: The Council of Ten cultivated a dark reputation for supreme competence and omniscience. No one escaped its sword, it was said (or it liked to say), and to prove it the Council made no secret of its torture chambers, its masked killers, and its immensely long memory (as the late Mamut had discovered). In 1586, for example, the Venetian ambassador to Philip II’s court was directed to find a leaker who had published minutes of Council meetings. Twenty years later, the still-anonymous culprit’s death warrant remained in force and the case continued to be actively investigated.
By staying in the shadows when it came to assassinations, the Council could retain its air of impermeable mystery. People’s imaginations would attribute natural deaths to the Council’s sinister hand, but at the same time they would assume that what were actually botched assassination attempts were everyday occurrences or a bit of bad luck on the part of the victim.
The Council could not be seen to fail because . . . so many poisonings failed. By my count, of the 34 documented cases, 11 failed, in 12 the results are “unknown,” and 11 succeeded. About a third, then, worked, perhaps more if some of the Unknowns turned up trumps. Whatever the rate, the Council of Ten’s reputation as a sleek, slick killing machine—one similar to that, most undeservedly, of the KGB/FSB—would be tarnished if it became known as the body that messed up two-thirds of the time.
A Better Way Forward
Even so, a success rate of 33 percent for poisonings must be counted as quite high; there’s no or little hard evidence available, but my impression is that the Venetians probably were more pro-grade than anyone else.
The irony is that the Council enjoyed far more success by not poisoning people. For the purposes of intelligence-gathering and of advancing national interests, it was much more efficient to rely on less spectacular methods, such as favor-peddling and good old bribery.
Why invite diplomatic blowback, legal problems, economic harassment, and military attacks by knocking off the sultan’s officials when one could simply buy a friendly thumb on the scale or a friendly whisper in the right ear?
In 1477, there had been an attempt to poison the hostile “sanjakbey of Bosnia,” which didn’t come off and led to recriminations, but in 1528 a Venetian representative lavished upon his successor such “gifts” (Ottomans proved highly susceptible to Venetian silks, glassware, and velvet, and ducats, of course) to ensure his benevolence towards the Republic’s neighboring Dalmatian colonies.
As Mr. Putin and his friends may have more recently learned, poisoning one’s enemies may result in instilling fear, but fear is not necessarily successful policy.
Further Reading:
I. Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2019); D. Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015); M. Lubin, “Poisoning as a Means of State Assassination in Early Modern Venice,” in L. Tracy (ed.), Medieval and Early Modern Murder: Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts (Boydell & Brewer, 2018), pp. 227-253; J.C. McWalter, “On Some Historical Poisons,” Pacific Record, 6 (1891), 1 (August 15).
🙂