Letters, Couriers and Information in the Venetian Republic

In the Venetian Republic, letters linked the lagoon capital with ambassadors, magistrates, merchants and communities on the mainland and overseas. The Terraferma meant Venice’s mainland domains; the Stato da Mar meant its overseas possessions. Couriers, ships, diplomatic households and private commercial connections carried messages among them.

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Messages across land and sea

Venetian officials sent instructions to representatives in the Terraferma and Stato da Mar, while ambassadors abroad reported on negotiations and political conditions. For correspondence with Constantinople, sea and land routes worked together: from the fourteenth century, one copy could travel aboard a Venetian ship while another went overland through the Balkans with a courier. By the sixteenth century, postal boats carried official mail between Venice and Corfu, stopping at ports along the Istrian, Dalmatian and Albanian coasts to collect and deliver government letters.

Merchants used letters to manage cargoes, debts, prices and agents. Ships could carry private correspondence with commercial goods, and merchants’ networks sometimes moved mail faster than official dispatch routes. In May 1624, the Senate told its ambassador in The Hague that his letters arrived a week later than private mail and often appeared opened; it instructed him to send future correspondence under merchants’ names. The government thus used a commercial route when its diplomatic channel failed to deliver news promptly.

Reports and the work of government

Ambassadors sent reports about courts, negotiations, military developments and local conditions. In the early seventeenth century, Christofforo Suriano wrote weekly from the Dutch Republic to Venice. At home, councils and secretaries read incoming papers, compared reports, issued replies and retained letters with other state records. Correspondence required clerks and systems for receiving, sorting and filing as well as the courier who carried the packet.

Reports also moved through ambassadors’ households and personal contacts. A dispatch could be copied or summarized before it reached the Senate, while private letters supplied additional accounts. On returning to Venice, an ambassador could present a relazione, a formal report on the court where he had served, to the Senate.

Delayed and captured dispatches

In November 1623, a courier carrying mail from Bassano toward Trento was attacked at the bridge of Cismon del Grappa, within Venetian territory. Letters were scattered. The papal nuncio in Flanders received several dispatches belonging to Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini and a private letter from the secretary Agostino Dolce to Alvise Vallaresso. Dolce’s letter discussed the delay in approving a monument to the recently deceased friar Paolo Sarpi. The nuncio shared its contents with the Spanish ambassador in Brussels, turning private correspondence into diplomatic information.

In August 1624, Dutch soldiers crossed into the Spanish Netherlands and seized a courier between Namur and Brussels. The Prince of Orange passed the Venetian originals and copies of Spanish correspondence from the bag to Contarini. Contarini discussed the Spanish letters with the English ambassador Dudley Carleton, using them to publicize alleged Spanish plans.

Seals, ciphers and risk

Seals could reveal whether a packet had been opened, but they could not stop an armed seizure. Later in 1624, Vallaresso’s baggage, left with merchants at Basel during his return journey, was seized at Ensisheim in Alsace, now France, then part of Habsburg territory. His cipher book, which contained the key needed to read encoded letters, fell into hostile hands. Venice’s Council of Ten ordered a replacement cipher for its ambassadors. Protecting correspondence therefore involved both how a message was encoded and the routes and containers through which it travelled.