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576 Daniele Andreozzi

Marseilles. Trieste’s strong relationship with these markets were
guaranteed by contacts, some of which were personal, via the
important trading and financial company Brentano Cimaroli and
Venino, one of whose head offices was in Trieste, and Pasquale Ricci.
Ricci was a Livorno native who had come to the city in 1750-1. One of
the most important members of the Hapsburg bureaucracy resident in
Trieste, he was interested in the most profitable of the city’s business
18
activities, despite the fact that this was theoretically banned .
Cereals were a further strategic product of importance to Trieste’s
trade, including its oceanic trade. Sailing with full cargoes was
fundamentally important to keeping transport costs down and
guaranteeing safety at sea. Costs and profits were calculated
according to the overall make up of loads which frequently travelled
with small quantities of valuable goods such as coins, jewels and
luxury goods in such a way as to conceal these and enable them to be
used as contraband . Cereals from Styria, Carinthia, Hungary and
19
the Banat of Temeswar were thus key to Trieste port’s functioning.
From the mid-1750s onwards, the city’s customary trade was
supplemented by that resulting from new imperial policies . To
20
strengthen the border with the Ottoman Empire, the Viennese court
decided to populate the Banat of Temeswar with colonisers who were
to be entrusted with forming a peasant militia responsible for defence.
It was an area in which the important house of Perlas was influential
with the latter having attempted to use its significant real estate
possessions to launch development projects from the early 18th
century onwards. To fund this militia it was decided to support trade
21
in cereals and other agricultural products through Trieste . In the
second half of the eighteenth century, exploiting the cereal circuits of

18 G. Felloni, Gli investimenti finanziari genovesi in Europa tra il Seicento e la restau-
razione, Giuffre, Milano, 1971. D. Andreozzi, Respectabilité et confiance au travers de la
norme et de la fraude. Le cas de Trieste au XVIII siècle, in Moralites marchandes dans
L’Europe méditerranéenne au XVIII siècle: istitutions, appartenances, pratiques, «Rives
Méditerranéennes», 49 (2014), pp. 81-98.
19 F. Galiani, Dialoghi sul commercio dei grani, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1978.
20 Sat, Intendenza, 357, 20 and 31 March and 19 July 1762.
21 B. Landais, Habsburg state and the local Orthodox elite. The case of the Banat of
Temesvár (1750-1780), in H. Heppner, E. Posh (eds.), Encounters in Europe south east.
The Habsbourg Empire and the Orthodox world in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries,
Verlag, Bochum, 2012, pp. 109-120; H. Petric, The navigation and trade agreement of
1718 and Ottoman Orthodox merchants in Croatia and the military border in C. Ingroo,
N.N. Samardžić, J. Pešaly (eds.), The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718, Purdue University
Press, Indiana, 2011, pp. 179-189 (180-181); W. Klinger, La Guerra di Successione spag-
nola e le origini dell’emporio di Fiume (1701-1719), «Atti, Centro di Ricerche storiche di
Rovigno», XLIV (2014), pp. 63-85.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Dicembre 2018 n.44
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)