Mythic Venice January

This week an experiment I’ve been participating in #Dungeon23, or the #City23 variant, which is a challenge where people write a dungeon room (or in the city variant a chunk of a city) each day, at about a paragraph length for the entire of 2023. For the dungeon 23 people each month is a level in the dungeon, eventually creating 12 levels. #City23 is a little more nebulous. Some of the people who’ve been following #City23, through my tweets or insta posts, have asked that it be made accessible on the Arts Magica Forum and in the blog so, as an experiment, I’m going to read the first month’s worth of entries into this podcast episode. Feedback on this format is particularly welcome. If this seems valuable I’ll do it for every month for the rest of 2023. If you don’t want me doing it you’d .better tell me.

January 1: What we already know – faerie foundations

Mythic Venice is founded on a faerie forest. The wooden piles that hold up the artificial islands were sacred to a Diana cult. Even the first patron saint of Venice, the virgin of the grapevine, is faerie aligned. In 1004 this allows the strongest faerie in Europe to move his court to Venice, as per the blog entry about the Rotting Princess.

This faerie, The Master of Games, claims to have once been the Founder Tytalus. In the beginning people thought he was harvesting the emotional energy of the city to craft a body for one of the creatures of Deep Arcadia. This may even have been true, there is a glass statue of a dogaressa hidden somewhere. The thing is he’s changed a lot of unnecessary stuff. The new theory is that since faeries reflect human stories, he wants us to tell better ones. He’s basically starting the Renaissance early. If humans are more interesting they create more interesting Fae creating is a virtuous circle.

This means that anachronisms are found in Mythic Venice. Gondolas for example.

January 2: What we already know – The city of women

The mystical version of Venice is called “Serenissima”.

Cosmetics and domestic alchemy have been tied together since ancient times. The perfumes etc. of the Venetians are meant to have quasi-mystical results. Women trade alchemical recipes as a sign of favour. In the real world Elizabeth the First and Catherine de Medici did this. Catherine was the granddaughter of a famous alchemist, Caterina Sforza.

Women dye their hair with family recipes and this has strange effects. The oddest is that during the siege of Padua, when the ancestors of the Venetians were fending off the Huns, they replaced the cables in their siege engines with ropes made of human hair. This gives us magical strings for pocket crossbows. Women hunt with standard crossbows in real life. They take grebe heads as trophies. Their crossbows use clay pellets. Left over from that battle: Attila’s sword is in the church of Saint Michele. Also his throne is on Torcello, although that’s not in my notes.

Some Venetian women wear a cornu, which is a sort of horned hairstyle that we will tie to the Goddess Diana.

January 3: What we already know – gardens

All wealthy people had gardens and used them for luxuries like flowers, not practical food items. Many great festivals were in the public gardens – well, their afterparties were. Picnics were apparently a big deal. It extraordinary that gardens are so popular when space is at such a premium. There’s no space to bury people, for example, and yet they conspicuously waste space on greenery. This is for spell components obviously. These are used in bocchero (which are scented clay balls), cosmetics, home remedies, food, confections, decorating, and religious observances. Houses of the rich are three sides of a square, with a garden in the middle. The roof (or altane) is used by women as their space. It may have plant containers. In Venetian houses servants live on the lowest floors, master bedrooms are on the upper floors. The altane is also used to bleach linen in the sun and perform weaving magic

January 4: what we already know – St Mark

The Venetians steal the relics of Saint Mark from Egypt by smuggling them past customs inspectors under a load of pig carcasses. His relics are kept in a purpose-built chapel in the Piazza San Marco. The Doge specifically does not give his relics to the Church: they belong to the Doge. The Basilica of Saint Mark is legally the doge’s personal chapel. The church in Venice has little land or money and so they can’t fight this. There’s also the fact that Venice is theoretically a duchy of the Roman Empire in the East and could go Orthodox without very much bother. Saint Mark’s lion is the symbol of Venice. The statue of it in the Piazza is an Egyptian statue that’s been repurposed. His saints day, April the 25th, is the Bocolla, a sort of national courtship day. This is apparently coincidence but it still prevents the Dominion from increasing on that day: too many hopes, rosebuds, and broken hearts

January 5: what we already know – festivals

Previous podcast episodes have discussed:
* the Festa Del Marie which is the marriage of mannequins
* the Boccola which is the rosebud/lovers festival
* the Marriage to the Sea, which to summarize some new information was oddly commanded by Pope Alexander III in 1177. This adds to our evidence that Alexander III was a weird weird sort of dude.

There is an annual athletic festival (shooting, wrestling, boxing etc) on the beach. Jews are buried on the beaches [that’s an aside but it may prove use for later]. The annual athletic festival was training in archery and street fighting and revived after a lapse. It was originally started by a Teodora Selvo, the Rotting Princess. it causes factional rivalries between the eastern and western sides of the city. The two sides of the Castellani and Nicolotti. The Church of San Trovaso is their neutral territory for meetings.

Executions are always carried out between two pillars at the south end of the Piazza. This is to spite the architect that put them up. He was offered any reasonable fee, and he asked to put a gambling tent, the first gambling in Venice apparently, between them. The doge responded by hanging rotten corpses above his gambling den

January 6: what we already know – the Fragilii

A trade school is called a fragilia, which has something to do with the whip. The dogaressa is the particular patroness of tradespeople. Early trades include: clockmakers; silversmiths; ivory carvers; makers of dowry chests (which are called aricelle); blacksmiths; fishers; saddlers; carriers by water; shepherds; butchers; masons; carpenters; cabinet makers; shoemakers; furriers; mazeri (silk merchants). After the conquest of Constantinople the fine arts kick off historically speaking. It’s briefly debated if they should rule from Constantinople but the Doge decides not to.

In 1220 the dogaressa is Princess Costanza the first princess since Teodora Selvo. She’s the daughter of Tancred of Sicily. Her husband is Pietro Ziani. The Ziani fortune was founded on an ancestor finding a golden statue of a cow in a ruined Temple of Juno. The private contract they have with the state was designed to favour the civic treasury but fortunately for them “as rich as a Ziani” is an aphorism, so they don’t care.

There’s a note on the side of this entry saying “Time to cheat. I’ve had some good ideas so I’m going to get them down but keep to daily writing and posting.”

January 7: what we already know – geography

The islands have been extended artificially so maps of the coast are weirdly smooth. The largest island is divided into six administrative regions called sestieri. There are three on either side of the Grand Canal. In Ars Magica (1220) there is a single bridge over the canal called The Bridge by the Mint. By the time of Magonomia it’s been rebuilt in stone and is called the Rialto.

The districts are:
Castello which is the one around the Arsenale. It’s the seat of the Bishop of Olivio and this merges with the Patriarchate of Grado in the 15th Century to become the Patriarchate of Venice. This is based in the Basilica that the Doge owns.
Cannaregio is where people land when they’re coming from the mainland. It contains the Jewish ghetto, which we’ll come back to in another episode.
San Marco is the ceremonial centre of Venice.
and then across the canal are
Saint Polo which is where the city markets are. it’s the smallest but most densely populated of this sesitieri.
Dorsoduro has the highest land in Venice and includes (administratively) the island of Guidecca which isn’t, in some senses, part of Venice legally.
San Croce. My notes indicate that in the 13th century this belongs to a Hungarian nobleman. I need to check that one.

January 8: things we already know – the other Islands

The Venetian Lagoon is cut off from the sea by barrier islands. The two largest are the Lido and Palestrina. The towns of Malamocco and Palestrina are the largest on those two islands. Malamocco was probably the old capital, at least it was nearby. There is an island called Choggia which is far to the south. It’s the customs house for Venetian trade.

Murano is the third island. It’s really seven tied together by bridges. In 1291 all the glass makers are forced to move there. This makes an odd group of rich guys who make mirrors for a living. San Erasmo is mostly farmland and is governed from Murano.

The square, graveyard island is from the 19th century which is a pity. There was an earlier one, but that went missing. When an island goes missing I think it may be Shrouded Glen. The locals think it’s caused by flooding. The northern parts of the lagoon are less busy and are a good spot for chapter houses.

Torcello was the centre of the area before it fell into decay and was superseded by Venice. It’s a cathedral for the infernal. Howell says the angels look infernal or weird and I want to bring in the Walter De La Mare All Hallows idea here All Hallows is a short story where Satan is rebuilding a decrepit cathedral.

Burano is an island where lace is produced. The lace-making skills are based on the net-making skills of the fisher people. The design was first seen in a fragment of red coral. It’s a centre for weaver magic

January 9: The Infernal island of Torcello

Hell runs Torcello. It pays the Magister Ludi souls as rent. There are rules and there are agreements about what demons are allowed to do. Masks help them get away with more than they’re allowed to do.

Hell’s Ambassador to Venice is Dona Soranza Quirini. She was the daughter of a doge, imprisoned by her father because her husband had rebelled against the state. She escaped her convent with the aid of Hell and now she’s their grateful, loyal representative.

I need to write up a basic local demon.

People don’t know what the Magister Ludi is doing with the souls. These are deliberately not souls hell hates losing. They’re let out of Limbo (presumably) as his bondspeople. I need to write that up as a character design kit.

There is a small infernal regio on the Piazza between the two pillars because of the gambling and executions which, in this project were mentioned a week ago but you heard a couple of minutes ago. There’s got to be something about demons working with molten glass. The infernalists probably have a compagnia, a club for young noblemen. They need a uniform. I don’t know whether that should be crimson or black, both of which are pretty common colours in Venice but they need law

January 10: Compagnia

Staley says there were 40 compagnia but they may not have been simultaneous. The obvious one is the Compagnia de la Calza. This group arranged public spectacles for the Doge and Dogaressa. Calza are tights: they wear them. They’re run by a prior who has a costume made of cloth of gold. Its other offices are two councillors, a treasurer, a chaplain, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a poet, an analyst and a notary. I’m doing this in such detail because a covenant could pretend to be a compagnia.

Each club has different stripes on its tights. They wear tight silk doublets. They have a badge for their club, slashed sleeves with puffy white shirt cloth coming through (that’s linen). They wear short cloaks (which is cloth of gold or damask and fur lined). They have a small hat with a heron’s feather and a jewel. They wear red, pointed shoes, a leather belt and pouches (which they call scarelle). Women were also members but they didn’t wear tights. Instead they had the word Calza printed in gold thread on a visible petticoat. They wore gold hairnets.

The compagnia ra the Caccio Del Tori which were public games on Maundy Thursday, the first Monday in September, Santa Marta’s Day, and the first Monday in October. They ran them at the Lido and The Piazza

January 11: The Bucintoro / The Bucentaurus / The Bucentaur

This is the state barge of the Doge. It’s used in the annual Marriage to the Sea. The earliest reference to it is in 1252. There were a series of them – at least four. The name bucintoro means “lagoon ship of gold” however medieval Latin people mis-etymologized it as” bucentaurus”. Supposedly there’s a man with the head of a bull on the prow as a figurehead. This is untrue: there are plenty of paintings of this ship, so we can be certain of that. I’m happy, however, to take an aquatic minotaur variant and use it in Mythic Venice.

I’m going to have the second-last bucintoro as the one being used, so that the player characters can be involved in the creation of the last version. It has two decks, 42 oars with four rowers per oar, and 40 sailors in addition to the rowers. There are removable canopies and a throne for the Doge at the back. The deck has sufficient seating for 80 passengers. It’s decorated with sculptures of lions and the figurehead, which is of Justice although we would probably swap in a Minotaur because it is cool. The final bucintoro has sirens and hydras instead. We must also assume there are musicians and catering.

Eventually I need to get a deck plan of this done because it’s too good as a setting for story events. Oil paintings exist for reference also there is a group trying to recreate the ship.

January 12 – Water

This is where I start going through Peter Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City to remove useful ideas.

“When you look down upon the water Venice seems to have no foundation except Reflections. Only reflections are visible. Venice and Venice’s image are inseparable. In truth there are two cities which exist only in the act of being seen.”

I’d like to suggest that Reflections are ways into regio levels in Serenissima.

There is a season called the Acqua Alta – the flooding season – which can be used for the Cyclical Magic Virtue.

Water is collected from the roofs in campos into cistern wells. These use a sand filtration system. These areas used to be graveyards (gross and creepy). Anyway there are also two big public cisterns at the Ducal Palace and water carriers (who are women) roam the city from there.

Water works as a centre of public life and gossip. The wells are considered holy, particularly the carved wellheads that protect them. After floods cisterns may be contaminated with salt water and boats are dispatched to the Bottenigo and Brenta Rivers for supplies. If these are blocked, adventurers are needed. Floods are caused by demons and they are held at bay by prayer. In Venice floods come up from below. Water rises through the cobblestones. Canals turn green in warning of coming floods.

Glass is metaphoric water

January 13: The Bella Figura (the honour culture)

Venice is an honour culture, but your honour is based on how you appear to the public. This is the Bella Figura. Ackroyd notes that Venetian houses are decorated only on the canal side, and people entertained in public because they don’t want other people seeing the inside of their homes. You can be rich by being publicly profligate and miserly at home. You can be an upstanding citizen by maintaining public forms while being absolutely depraved at home. Gossip is currency in honour cultures.

I need to recheck “Why honor matters” by Tamler Sommers. The Ars Magica Reputation rules need additions for gossip attacks. In Magonomia there’s already a social combat rule system, but it needs examples. Ackroyd later mentions Istrian limestone being used as a marble replacement, as a sort of metaphor for how a veneer or façade suffices.

One commentator in Ackroyd says Venetians are easy to con because they are trained to not look past the superficial layer. It’s rude to look and it puts everyone else’s illusion in danger. A person pointing out the artifice is saying everyone should step down a social level. Even wealthy people don’t do this because their money lets them buy props to cut a finer figure.

You must be polite. Although there are social classes the patricians demand personal frugality (which they call mediocrity) in their number. It’s not like the British class system. It’s not like the American system of pretending everyone’s equal, but letting everyone work out who’s in charge using expensive status symbols. Masters must not be insolent to their servants. Masters must not strike their servants. There is freedom of belief by the Magonomia period, of a sort. You can’t speak against Venice, or its structure of government, but other than that you are free to be (for example) a Muslim, even during Wars with the Turks.

January 14: The City of Exiles

The Jewish Ghetto will need its own entry.

Venice welcomes immigrants from everywhere. They are used as cheap labour for industry and by the end of the Magonomia reign, Venice is the most densely populated city in Italy. Immigrants tend to live in streets by community and to be packed in. Sometimes ethnic groups dominate Industries. Marriage into mainstream society is common.

German merchants must live in a complex called the Fondaco Dei Tedeschi at the Rialto. It has two dining halls and 80 rooms. It may be a model for covenants.

The Flemish settled during Elizabeth’s reign.

The Greeks have their own quarter which enlarges after The Fourth Crusade.

The Armenians have a district and they have a school based at the monastery of San Lazzaro.

Albanians have a district.

Turkish merchants live at the Fondaco dei Turchi. It has an Arabic school.

Venice prides itself on being a refuge. Dispossessed nobles love to come to Venice. Religious outliers come to Venice (for example Anabaptists). Venice is theoretically Catholic but it resists Rome in ways which will follow in other episodes.

Ackroyd mentions there are about 6 000 beggars in Venice I’m not sure why I’ve recorded that separately on this page.

Interestingly Venice has socialized medicine in the 16th century possibly before.

January 15: The Ghetto

Jews were not allowed to live in Venice (the island) or work there. Note that Guidecca is outside this boundary. Early on it’s called Spinalunga). Their graveyard is at the Lido.

They forbidden all professions except medicine and all trades except money lending. Again enforcement outside of Venice’s main island is quite loose. The first ghetto opens on the 29th of March 1516 and it’s in the foundry area around Cannaregio. Two adjoining neighbourhoods are soon added. As precursors the Germans and Turks were similarly forced to live in gated communities. Venice also has other national quarters in colonies.

The Jews were forced to live on a single island with a wall and drawbridge. They were allowed out at dawn and locked down at sundown. All windows in the ghetto faced inwards. Guards and two patrolling boats (that worked for the city) were paid for by the Jews through a tax.

The area is quite poor and very overcrowded. Buildings reach eight stories in places. Jewish leaders run the place. It has non-Jewish inhabitants. It’s renowned for gambling dens (but then again so is most of Venice). It also has a Jewish carnival on Purim.

It’s a centre for rabbinical studies and Jewish publishing. Christians go there as tourists, particularly for the Purim plays, but also to attend synagogues. The state tried to ban this, but the reaction was so severe that they reversed the policy.

Basically the ghetto is a valuable internal colony. Jews in danger in other kingdoms send their capital to relatives in Venice. Ackroyd states there were no pogroms I believe he’s wrong: Staley states that the people tried to have one. The doge sent the military to protect the ghetto. Jews or not mobs of poor people aren’t allowed to steal stuff from rich people in Venice.

Ackroyd does have a paragraph about cultural similarities between Jews and Venetians, but it seems like he’s gilding the lily quite a bit. He mentions superstitions about statues coming to life on page 60 and I’m not sure why that note is on this page.

January 16: The Signoria (The State)

Venice loves a bureaucracy. They have a census. They develop some of the statistical sciences to a degree not seen elsewhere, which means they may have faeries based on mathematics. They have a huge bureaucracy for pageants, particularly popular processions.

It is illegal to speak ill of Venice. Locals who do it are sent to prison. Immigrants are deported and assassins are possible, indeed we have documentary records of payments being made to assassins to silence people who’ve criticized Venice. Social rituals govern the city and its office bearers. They give spaces meaning.

This deep story may be the mechanism building the Glass Dogaressa, which is rumored to be an avatar of a being from Deep Arcadia. Is she Justice? Liberty? Venus No she’s not. I shouldn’t do these sorts of things. I’ll get back to her on the 18th. All art is for presentation. Rhetoric is prized. Some of the most skilled diplomats in Europe come from Venice. Ambassadors are not just random nobles or royal favourites, the way they are in Elizabeth’s Court.

From the 16th Century, Venice is nominally neutral in all external affairs. Her ambassadors, however, are ruthless intriguers for the good of Venice, which is their moral cynosure. At the end of their terms ambassadors write detailed reports to the senate about every possibly-interesting feature of the state they are sent . These are called relazioni and if they go missing that’s an adventure hook. The nominal neutrality may tie into the loss to the League of Cambrai.

There’s a note here telling me to check for a period text called “A survey of the signor of Venice” by James Howell in 1561.

January 17: The Council of Ten and prisons

The Council of Ten started as a conspiracy, but became a government body. It meets daily and it’s served by a network of spies and assassins. Some of these are the Signori de Notte, the Lords of the Night. Members wore black mantles. They examined the accused in the dark. They meet above a prison and torture chamber. They are called the Small Council or Black Inquisitors. There are lion-mouthed sculptures around the city in which people may post anonymous attacks. No cross-examination of witnesses or defendants, or discovery process exist.

The most notorious prison in Venice is under the Doge’s Palace. Individual cells have names. The worst of these are the Wells, which flood occasionally. The stories about the prisons are exaggerated to a tremendous degree. I will mention particularly the artist Piranesi whose carceral etchings are entirely unreal, except perhaps in a regio. There’s a separate force called the shirri who kidnap criminals and take them to jail. There is about one policeman for every 250 inhabitants in Venice. By way of comparison in the current U.S it’s one policeman for 418 inhabitants. The oath of the Council of Ten is to “Swear, forswear and reveal not the secret.”

The city archives are maintained by a man who cannot read or write. The Doge must not visit the city archives unless accompanied. Where they are is none of your business.

There is a special inn called the Golden Ship which is for sharing rumours and intelligence. Venice is a centre for rumours, particularly merchant news.

Almanacs and fly sheets exist. The first newspaper in the world is created in Venice in the 17th century.

The Council of 10 have a code breaker as a secretary.

January 18th: Spies and informants

They are everywhere. If you are a Venetian overseas it is your patriotic duty to be a spy. People in Venice expect spies. Every foreign household has at least one. If you do not have one it means people don’t know that you are dangerous and interesting. You should have an adventure to get one.

Gondoliers and sex workers are notorious as spies. I will come back to this in the gondolas section. They are notorious spies except in matters of amour. If a gondolier mentions that a lady has been with a gentleman in his gondola, the other gondoliers will seize him and drown him as a matter of honour.

Even cardinals and bishops have a civic duty to act as spies in the private councils of the Vatican. The Vatican knows this. Merchants perform espionage as a matter of course. They are great story instigators: “I learned X, if we do Y, then Z.”

The patron saint of spies is Joshua. His feast day is the 1st of September. He was one of the 12 agents Moses and the land of Caanan. Venice has counter agents and also freelance information brokers. Foreign ambassadors get in on this too, apparently. Meetings at the theatre (or opera after the game period) are the stereotypical things – so much that there’s some sort of ban on foreigners renting theater boxes, to make it more challenging.

Accusations could be posted in the mouths of lion statues. Informers were paid if their accusations proved true. Accusers were never identified to their victims but denuncia had to be signed and there had to be two attestations of the informer’s good character on the denunciation. Certain lion mouths are for specific infractions.

January 19th: The Queen of Glass

When I started this I decided I wouldn’t do a twist ending, because it’s an RPG supplement not a fiction piece, but apparently I can’t help myself. On the first day I mentioned the plan to make a body for a creature from Deep Arcadia, and then I said “No! No! Look at my other hand!”

So no secrets…my idea and there will be other options for other campaigns…is that the Queen in Glass is Eve’s youngest daughter Naamara, which you’ll see I constantly mispronounce, or Norea in Greek, is an embodiment of wisdom that was tainted by the fall of humanity. She is sometimes called the Lesser Lilith. Noah wouldn’t let her on the Ark so she set it on fire a couple of times and then was saved by an Angel (or some sort of emanation from God).

She comes from before the Realms divided not just before Faerie and Magic fission, but from before the Divine and the infernal were distinct. She’s seen God, been a demon, embodies human wisdom, and is one of the deep Arcadian Powers.

Why the Master of Games want her is unclear. Maybe he wants to fuse things back together. Maybe he wants to create another realm. Maybe he wants to seriously muck around with how the Realms work.

For those confused, because they can’t remember this from Bible school, this is Scythian Gnosticism. It was an early heresy which, among other things, said that Jesus wasn’t actually fully human. Also in Sethian Gnosticism the snake’s a good guy: he gets us out of the dead end in which God has placed us

January 20th: Trade convoys

Venice’s first Monopoly was in salt. All Adriatic colonial salt is sold from Venice to ensure a monopoly on prices. There are seven annual trading expeditions. The city owns galleys and rents them out. In addition there are thousands of ships in private trade. These expeditions start in 1315 and end in 1533, so PCs could start or restore the idea.

Think of the trade routes as two distinct rings: an eastern ring and a western ring. In the eastern ring the things that go out are cloth, silver, timber, and weapons. The things that come in are spices, incense, perfume, silk, and cotton. In the western ring the things that go out are spices, cotton, and finished cloths. The things that come in are wool, Flemish cloth, and African gold. Silver comes by land: it trickles down from Germany through the Alps.

The muda or trading expeditions are as follows

Flanders which includes England, France and Aragon.
Barbary which is North Africa, Grenada and Aragon.
Trafego which is Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut and Modone.
Syria: Cyprus, Beirut and Laiazzo (for cotton mostly).
Egypt: which is Dalmatia, Modone, The Peloponnese, Crete, Cypress, Beirut, Tyre, Acre, Diametta, Alexandria (which is twice a year).
Romania: this splits off the Egyptian one at Modone and it goes to Athens, Calcis, Thessalonica, Abydos and Constantinople and after 1318 they added Tana and Trebizond.

January 21 is a reminder to myself to create a shape and material table for Venice, with things thrown into it and where they come from. The carpets from Alexandria and caviar from Caffa and so on. That’s not complete so I’ll just move on.

Venice has an annual luxury fair for 15 days each year, which attracts a heap of tourists. The finest goldsmiths in Europe are in Venice. New luxuries are vital to the national economy so technical advances occur. The Rialto needs an episode. So does the Merceria. The commercial zone is just one of hundreds of zones by trade. Every industry seems to have a physically-mappable spot. They have approved streets, approved quarters, and you can just make them up. You want some soap, go to the Street of the Soap Makers. Want a clock? Go to the Campo with the Clockmakers. Weird new trades emerge and these take over chunks of older areas. For example, net making arises from fishermen and lace arises from net-making. Factory line production of a sort happens in ship building glass making and in textiles

January 22: Markets

The Rialto is the Central Market of Venice. It continually gets bigger, in part by clearing property and in part by repurposing residential buildings at its fringes. Canals next to it have improved. Its streets are widened. The centre is a small church called San Giacomo Del Rialto and more valuable goods are sold closer to the centre. Sex workers, taverns and rag men are at the edge the Merceria and runs off the Rialto towards the Piazza where the bankers do business. Streets and the Rialto are named by craft. The names change when the crafts move about. I need to look at the slave trade and how the PCs break it up.

Art is a trade commodity. It’s easier in the sense that you can get the best pigments in the world here and you can learn powdered-gold painting techniques which aren’t found anywhere else. Well not these set of techniques. A lot is made of stock figures and sizes and a lot of art is exported there are art dealers by the 15th century

23rd of January: Collectors

Venetians, if rich, collect things as a form of display and conspicuous consumption. Initially they just grab interesting stuff. Collectors later specialize. This means treasures that PCs find are more valuable if they have the social contacts to know who collects the thing they’ve found. There’s money to be made in brokers and forgers. Magicians seeking a thing to enchant, like an antique ring, may need to source it from a collector by trade or theft.

After people die their collections are often sold and broken up. This means suddenly there’s a flood of [cool thing X] and this may cause a fashion. Collectors are rivals in honour cultures. You have to stick up for yourself. If some other person is causing you to lose face, even if it’s in the tiny circle of people who collect antique brass plates, you have to stickup for yourself. In Ars Magica collections can be a source of study XP. Collections aren’t necessarily static. They can be, but they can also be an investment or a source of gifts, kind of like fountain pen collectors. I’ve really got into fountain pens recently, part of the reason I’m doing this is an excuse to try out different inks and pens. They presumably have swap meets the same way pen dealers do. There are auctions there are trade shows. I think I should do the PG Woodhouse story with Bertie Wooster and the cow creamer and the trade for Anatole the peerless chef but in Venice

January 24: Nunneries

The number of dogaressas who retire to particular places can be treated as part of the Diana cult thing. Nuns were, in some contexts, freeish. They had servants, entertainers. wore what they liked , ignored dietary rules, some had lovers. The men in charge tried to tamp this all down, sometimes, but the hierarchy of the Church is weak in Venice and the abbesses are rich and very well connected.

San Zaccharia needs investigation and floor plans because too many dogaressas retire there. I need to get some general rules together here. In 1581 there are two and a half thousand nuns in Venice out of roughly 50 000 women. Over fifty percent of Patrician women become nuns. Ackroyd suggests this is because of dowry inflation. Abbesses in Venetian nunneries are unusual in that they are elected by the “mothers of advice”, a sort of ruling council. Someone tried to shut down San Zachariah in 1514 and the nuns stoned them from the walls. Papal dispensation gives nuns holidays. Ackroyd also notes fist fights and a knife duel. Some nuns dressed as men during Carnival so they they could attend.

January 25: Theatres and Theatricality

In Venice, imagine that in your public life, your PC is an improv actor surrounded by a giant LARP with the best sets ever. Everything is built for drama, Fate Aspect style. The Piazza is literally designed as a ceremonial stage. Jewish and Christian priests go to each other’s churches and synagogues to study oratory. Church verandas and outside balconies and gondolas are all designed to be seen. If you break character you are demeaning everyone else and they have to stand up to you. Court testimony isn’t “nothing but the facts”, it is advocates going full drama and witnesses going full scene-chewing. Costumes are deliberately ostentatious. Women will choose up to 18 inches high until the government banned them, particularly for pregnant women. Workers wear role-related uniforms so much that you can tell how you’re expected to treat people by how they dress. The most popular colour is turchino which is sky blue.

Rich people wear black as daily wear. Since black robes were the formal dress of many of the rich, many of the rich look intimidating. Ackroyd says that only the Doge wore gold, but he contradicts himself on the next page. He notes a sudden change in 1529. Before this men have long hair and only wear beards in mourning and after that they have short hair and they wear beards.

Opera is invented in Venice, but after the period. I may need to add it in. People who attend the Opera and the theatre are not silent. They are raucous, Shakespearean-style crowds. Venetians are great at stagecraft some of the big, painterly names you know from the Renaissance had a sideline in painting stage sets.

The idea I was working with on “The discovery of witches”, with people who use special effects rather than actual magic, suits Venice even better than it does London. Scenery pieces are called apparati and this links to the word apparatus but it also links to the word apparition. Gondoliers get into theatres for free. Vendors sell halftime snacks. Ccomedy is popular and tragedy is not. Goldoni who was Venice’s Shakespeare (actually he was more popular and prolific than Shakespeare) wrote city comedies and there is not much violence and there are no monologues

January 26: The slide out of democracy

At the foundation every island had an elected Tribune.

In 697 the first doge was elected by popular acclaim.

By the end of the 12th century the council of aristocrats chooses the doge and presents them to the people for acclimation.

By 1297 men may only sit in the Grand Council if their father or paternal grandfather sat in the council. It is therefore a hereditary aristocracy.

In 1423 Venice stops calling itself a commune and it’s informally a plutocracy. The government is like a complicated clock. The general assembly passes basic laws. The Great Council, which is about 800 paid officers, picks judges, members of smaller councils and they also pick the Doge. The 40 are the immediate councillors of the Doge. The doge is the leader but he is tightly bound by a legal obligation called a promissione, which is a contract. It changes between doges. The promisione is sacred and it’s between the state as represented by the Great Council and the doge. Dogadal promissiones become increasingly onerous. Most doges need permission to travel, read mail, meet foreigners, receive gifts, or discuss policy. No one bows to the doge. His title is Messier Doge and it is no higher. The Doge wields power obliquely through chairing the Ten, the Fortym the Council and through public audiences twice a week. The doge is not in charge except in a ceremonial sense.

Here’s how you get a new doge (brace yourself). The youngest member of the Signoria prays at St Marks and goes outside. There he grabs the first boy he finds. The boy draws nomination slips from an urn at the Ducal Palace. The Great Council elects 30 members. From that 30 they elect nine. That nine then pick 40, each of whom needs at least seven nominations. The 40 is reduced by ballot to 12. The 12 pick 20. The 20 elect 9. The 9 elect 45. The 45 elect 11. The 11 elect 41, and then the 41 elect the Doge. The average doge is aged 72 at the point he gets the job. The point of all of this is to make it very difficult to fix the election for your personal faction.

Social classes: the populari make up about 90 of the population. These are the guild laborers and the sub guild laborers. Six percent of the population are citidanni These are people whose fathers and grandfathers were born in Venice. Four percent of the aristocracy are called the patricians. To be a citizen your father and grandfather can not have been laborers: they have to have been bureaucrats. Patricians are trained in the bow, sword, and lance. They are also trained to be ship captains. There are jousts in the Palazzo from 1242.

January 27: The Islands of Sorrow

Some of the smaller islands are dedicated to civic purposes.

San Servolo is an asylum for men. San Clemente is an asylum for women. suckers and soloists of fever Hospital. Isola della Grazia is a fever hospital. Sacca Sensola is a consumption hospital. Poveglia is a leprosarium.

Constanziaca disappeared during the Ars Magica game period so that could be hidden by Shrouded Glen. It was originally a funeral Island.

Each island has a bell tower and some sort of square, except the leprosarium and the graveyard

January 28: Venetian Crete

Venetian Crete is designed as a clone of Venice. It has a Duke and they rename the public square as the Palazzo St Marco. Does this create a local Magister Ludi?

They invented plantation slavery. Venetian conquests are sent a governor for civil affairs and a captain for military affairs. Crete’s odd because it’s so far away that the Venetians give land for military service to create a garrison. These lands export all of their surplus to Venice. Other conquests keep their traditions.

In structure Venice reminds me of America in the Pacific. If they can’t get what they want they don’t invade, but every so often the cost and value calculation clicks over, then they do invade. When I say “America in the Pacific” I mean during the Admiral Perry “Let’s invade Japan for Commerce and Trade” era, and the invasion of Hawaii.

Once the Venetians have land they can’t be isolationists anymore, because they need alliances to stabilize their distant territories. Again they can use money (and they do). The next step is mercenaries. A fleet is only sent if trade is threatened and bribery is not enough.

The vassals of Venice call Venice “the illustrious mistress.”

June 29: Foreign enemies

The Genoese traders are rivals. Genoese diplomats and Venetians counter each other. The Siege of Chioggia is significant to Ars Magica players and historical for Magonomia players. There is presumably some sort of magical Divine or infernal counterbalance to the Magister Ludi. There are naval clashes between the two. They are rivals for external adventures. Genoa is called “La Superba” which means “the Proud”.

The Ottoman Empire takes over as the chief rival after 1452, when they take Constantinople. The Venetians try to trade but the Turks want to expand. The other Italians think that the Venetians will eventually win, so they sit out the Turco-Venetian War. Unexpectedly the Venetians lose. In the ensuring piece they lose the Black Sea and the Aegean Islands. The venetians keep Crete and Corfu, but lose some colonies that they’ve had for 250 years.

In 1509 Venice loses all of its Italian holdings in 15 days to the League of Cambrai. the Venetians fight back and by 1517 have pretty much all of that back (well all of the Italian mainland territory). In some cases the Italians preferred the rule of the Venetians to the rule of the French or Germans.

The territories at the start of the Magonomia period are Crete, Corfu, Cyprus, the Po River Valley, Ravenna, and Remini. There is no further expansion: Venetians now try to balance the French, Habsburgs and Turks as the point of their foreign affairs.

In 1527 unpaid mercenary troops sack Rome and the artists flee to Venice. The public areas of Venice are restored on the Roman model. There is much talk of Venice being the “New Rome” as the last free vestige of the Roman Empire. Things get really, really theatrical really fast.

In 1570 the Turks take Cyprus from the Venetians. The West gives no help. In 1571 the Holy League decides that enough is enough and they have the last galley-based naval battle. They defeat the Turks at Lepanto. From here on the Arsenale, which is still building galleys, is building anachronisms. They want to take back Cyprus but the Spanish and the Poope won’t go for it. They keep Crete for another hundred years but don’t get Cyprus back. Ackroyd says that at this point Venice’s Imperial power is replaced by “its power to dazzle” which is a faerie vitality engine in Ars Magica.

January 30: How big is the Venetian Navy?

In 1423 it has 35 galleys, 300 roundships, and 3 000 merchant ships. Venice could maintain 40 000 troops. The fleet above requires 36 000 sailors, which is about 25 percent of Venice’s population. Crews are professional in the Ars Magica period and conscripted in the Magonomia period. The social status of sailors dives by the end of the Elizabethan reign as crews are a form of carceral service. Their diet is deliberately designed to supplement the sanguinary humour. Transmissible illness is a common. Captains are appointed by the Senate from young men of the upper crust. Being a naval commander is necessary to, eventually, gaining other forms of higher office.

The flute is supported by the Arsenal. The Arsenal is eventually 60 Acres of workshops surrounded by walls and towers. It employs somewhere between six and sixteen thousand men. Local people are called Arsenalotti and they are the ceremonial bodyguards of the Doge. The Arsenal is an early assembly line. It is very quick in emergencies. It turns out 30 galleys in 10 days once. It once made a galley in two hours while the visiting king had lunch.

January 31: The army

In the middle of the 16th century the army raised is 20 000, plus militias, and at the end of the century it’s twice that. No Venetian may be a general. No Venetian may command more than 25 men. Covenants need to be careful. Generals are always foreigners so that no faction can take the city by force. Every general needs to pass his orders by two patrician supervisors who are appointed by the Senate. This is not a swift command structure. These people are called conditteri which means “contracted men”. Generous, prompt payment (including palaces and land in the Empire) is the policy. This is to lessen the possibility that the other side could bribe them into changing sides. I need to write basic soldier kit.