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556 David Laven

There was one other aspect on which Sismondi focused that reso-
nates with Venetian accounts: the neglect of and contempt for military
careers. Expressing views close to those of his friend Mme de Staël in
Corinne and of Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme, not to mention of
the thousands of Napoleonic officers who engaged in publicly per-
formed contempt for the population of the peninsula , Sismondi
55
pointed to the supposed fact that powerful, rich, noble Italians had no
shame in avowing «hautement leur pusillanimité»: «Ils parlent sans
rougir de la grande peur qu’ils ont eue, ils confessent que leurs
femmes ont plus courage qu’eux [...]» . The problem for Sismondi was
56
that Venice did not fit comfortably into this narrative: it displayed a
marked independence from Rome; it never fell under Spanish hegem-
ony; moreover, it continued in the seventeenth century – not least in
the defence of Candia and in its wars against the Uskoks – to demon-
strate considerable military resolve.
While Sismondi did appreciate Venice’s independence from Rome,
he displayed a more ambivalent attitude to Venetian military power in
the face of the Ottoman threat in the eastern Mediterranean. He rec-
ognised that, through most of the seventeenth century, the Venetians
remained capable of defeating the Turks at sea; and he acknowledged
that when the Venetian army encountered the Ottomans it was capa-
ble of victory, albeit less often and less convincingly. He noted too the
valour the Venetians during the siege of Candia. Nevertheless, in his
treatment of the loss of Crete, Sismondi put greater emphasis on the
devastating effects it had for Venetian power, than on the fact that
Venetians displayed much of their old warrior spirit. Sismondi was
rather less impressed by the brief Venetian reconquest of Morea: his
account was of failure and decline, when he might have stressed that
the Republic, albeit beleaguered and lacking its former economic and
fiscal strength, could still wage effective campaigns. Unfairly, he as-
cribed the credit for the brief re-establishment of Venetian power on
the Greek mainland to a «général suédois» (Otto Wilhelm von Kö-
nigsmarck) rather than to the valiant Venetian, and future doge, Fran-
cesco Morosini . Sismondi was especially critical of the nature of rule
57
of the Stato da Mar, which he presented as exploitative of – and hated
by – the Republic’s Greek subjects:

55 M. Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796-1814. Cultural imperialism in a
European context, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005.
56 J.C.L.S. de Sismondi, Histoire des français cit., vol. xvi, pp. 453-4.
57 Ibidem, p. 283.

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)