1 - Echoes of Empire

Summary

Chapter 1 focuses on the practices and policies of music instituted in the earliest days of Venice’s empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and on the wide-reaching ramifications of music’s use as a technology of political representation on the island of Crete, the largest, longest-held, and most commercially profitable of Venice’s maritime colonies. Records from the first century of Venetian rule in Crete document the use of song as a bureaucratic tool, in which the singing of laudes—a genre with ambivalently political and liturgical usage—legitimized state contracts of taxation, transfer of property, and vassalage. The starting point of this chapter is a document known as the Concessio insulae Cretensis, drawn up by Doge Pietro Ziani in September 1211, one of the earliest records of Venice’s investment in music as an element of statecraft, and the origin of the laudes ritual on the island. This chapter uncovers the enormous and long-lasting importance of the laudes within the Venetian imperial enterprise, arguing that it served as the sounding image of the state’s claim to romanitas on which its legitimacy as an empire depended.