Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622.

In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano wrote hundreds of surveillance reports, based on material compiled from a revolving cast of suborned informants. Vano submitted these reports to his nominal employers, the Venetian Inquisitors of State, who were dedicated to protecting state secrets—that is, to counter-intelligence in modern parlance. Vano’s targets were the embassies of powers then hostile to the independent Venetian republic, principally Spain and her Hapsburg allies. In working against these targets, Vano was one of a number of competing suppliers in what we might describe as a deregulated free market of information (indeed, a black market); one whose invisible operation on capitalist principles was unique in the guild economy of early seventeenth-century Venice.

The Inquisitors of State did not directly employ informers (although they could directly reward them); rather, they delegated this task to independent intermediaries like Vano, whose reports are distinctive among those submitted by his contemporaries for their professional focus. They are also crudely melodramatic and obviously mendacious, even if it is virtually impossible to catch Vano outright in any specific lie. Nonetheless, these reports resulted in the arrest, imprisonment and/or execution of several of Vano’s protagonists. But since the Inquisitors’ final statement on the matter was to execute Vano for perjury, his reports clearly present unique interpretive problems.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! is therefore about Vano as a storyteller, but it is also more generally about the role of stories in historical analysis. To do justice to Vano, it was necessary to experiment with several devices that have no direct equivalent in his surveillance reports, but that illuminate them by analogy, such as original illustrations drawn in the style of seventeenth-century woodcuts and a dialogue between myself and two other historians.

The wide angle

Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee, the Inquisitors of State. Vano was one of the first people involved in this process to fashion himself as a professional spy—as Venice’s “General of Spies,” no less. Thus Vano’s career is not only an invitation to rethink historical storytelling, but an invitation to rethink the place of the spy within the genealogy of modernity.

Jacob Burckhardt, in his groundbreaking study The Civilization of the Renaissance, first published in 1860, concentrated on architects, artists and the princely despots who transformed political life by treating the state as if it were also a work of art, which meant that it could be remade and transformed according to its ruler’s wishes. Since Burckhardt wrote his book, modernity has lost much of its shine. The alienated, protean figure of the spy, whose existence is defined by bad faith and duplicity, seems more representative of contemporary disillusionment than Burckhardt’s heroic geniuses do. Baroque cynicism has replaced sunny Renaissance optimism.

The major issue for seventeenth-century Venetians was not how to assert their individuality so much as how to reconcile competing claims on their loyalties. Nonetheless, this problem itself contributed to the “birth of the individual.” People became aware of who they were not only by meditating on their own uniqueness, but by outwardly pretending to be someone they were not. They began to define identity in terms of what separated them from other people. The origins of this way of thinking lie in the careers of men like Vano as well as those of courtiers and Burckhardt’s artists.

Gerolamo Vano was therefore a kind of performance artist; less idealised and more democratic than the traditional modernist hero, he lived in a compromised, complicated world, rather than existing on some higher, Olympian plane of Truth and Beauty. In his mind, as much as in that of the princely despot, the state became a work of art, but his art was ephemeral, improvised, and personal. He left no monuments to his genius except a pile of neglected, handwritten notes, but he explored the relationship between the private and the political in highly original ways. He was not above the moral obligations of mere mortals. Rather, he paid for the choices he made with his life—and those of others.

The major issue for seventeenth-century Venetians was not how to assert their individuality so much as how to reconcile competing claims on their loyalties. Nonetheless, this problem itself contributed to the “birth of the individual.” People became aware of who they were not only by meditating on their own uniqueness, but by outwardly pretending to be someone they were not.