Cosimo Pantaleoni, European University Institute (Florence, Italy)

Comparative studies of Early Modern piracy in the Atlantic world have stressed the connection between pirate communities and seafarers’ desertions from the imperial navies, a phenomenon comparable to marronage that threatened slave societies in Central and South America. In the Mediterranean sea, pirate actions were mostly associated with privateering, both on the Christian and Muslim side, but petty crime was actually a feature characterizing the Venetian galleys’ crews’ daily life too.

In this talk, I will try to sketch a description of what I call ‘internal piracy’, based on the consultation of Venetian judiciary records by the maritime authorities, to show how much the ships were microcosms reproducing social frontiers at their very core. The monopoly of violence carried out by the Venetian navy was two-fold: public order among the labyrinthine Dalmatian islands, and discipline aboard galleys.