SANUTO
(Sanudo), MARINO, the elder, of Torcello (c. 1260-1338), Venetian statesman,
geographer, &c. He is best known
for his life-long attempts to revive the
crusading spirit and movement; with this object he wrote his great work,
the Secreta (or Liber Secretorum) Fidelium Crucis, otherwise
called Historia Hierosolymitana, Liber de expeditione Terrae Sanctae,
and Opus Terrae Sanctae, the last being perhaps the proper title
of the whole treatise as completed in three parts or “books.” This work
has much to say of trade and trade-routes as well as of political and other
history; and through its accompanying maps and plans it occupies an important
place in the development of cartography. It was begun in March 1306, and
finished (in its earliest form) in January spots, when it was offered to
Pope Clement V. as a manual for true Crusaders who desired the reconquest
of the Holy Land. To this original Liber Secretorum Sanuto added
largely; two other “books” were composed between December 1312 and September
1321, when the entire work was presented by the author to Pope John XXII.,
together with a map of the world, a map of Palestine, a chart of the Mediterranean,
Black Sea and west European coasts, and plans of Jerusalem, Antioch and
Acre. A copy was also offered to the king of France, to whom Sanuto desired
to commit the military and political leadership of the new crusade. Marino
himself tells us that he had spent the best part of his life in Romania,
the lands of the Eastern empire; of the Morea he had especially intimate
knowledge; he had also visited Cyprus, Rhodes, parts of the Syrian, Cilician
and Egyptian coasts, France, Flanders and north Germany, both west and
east of Denmark. He had been in Acre, Alexandria, Constantinople, Avignon,
Bruges and Sluys, as well as (apparently) in Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar,
Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald and Stettin. Among his friends and correspondents
were Guglielmo Bernardi de Furvo, a Venetian nobleman who had travelled
extensively in Moslem and Mongol lands (to Tabriz, Bagdad, Damascus and
Cairo), Bishop Jerome of Kaffa, in the Crimea,, who in 1312 had been sent
to reinforce the Catholic mission in China, and perhaps Peter, the English-born
bishop of Sevastopolis or Sukhurn Kalé in western Caucasia, who
makes an appeal for aid to the prelates of England in 1330. Marino Sanuto’s
ancestor, Marco, had founded the greatness of his family after the Fourth
Crusade as duke of the Archipelago and conqueror of Naxos, Paros, &c.
(from 1207); and his descendant wrote with a personal interest in the question
of crushing Moslem power in the Levant.
The crusading plans of the Secreta are
double: first, Egypt and the Moslem world on the side towards Europe (Syria,
Asia Minor, the Barbary States, Granada, &c.) are to be ruined by the
absolute stoppage of all Christian trade with the same. By such an interdict
Sanuto hopes that Egypt, dependent on its European and other imports of
metals, provisions, weapons, timber, pitch and slaves, would be fatally
weakened, and the way thus prepared for the second part of the campaign
– the armed attack of the crusading fleet and army on the Nile delta. With
the aid of the Mongol Tatars of Asia, natural allies of western Christendom,
and of the Nubian Christians, the conquest of the Delta and of all Egypt
was to be followed by that of Palestine, invaded and held from Egypt, Sanuto
deprecates any other route for the crusade, and unfolds his plan of campaign,
his bases of supply, his sources for the supply of good seamen, with great
detail. Not only Mediterranean seaports, but the lakes of North Italy and
central Europe, and the Hanseatic ports, are enumerated as nurseries of
crusading mariners and marine skill. Finally, after the conquest of Egypt,
Marino designs the establishment of a Christian fleet in the Indian Ocean
to dominate and subjugate its coasts and islands. He also gives a sketch
of the trade-routes crossing Persia and Egypt, as well as of the course
of Indian trade from Coromandel and Gujarat to Ormuz and the Persian Gulf,
and to Aden and the Nile. The
maps and plans which illustrate the Secreta are probably (in
the main, at least) the work of the great portolano-draughtsman Pietro
Vesconte: practically the whole of this map-work corresponds with what
Vesconte has left under his own name; much of it is indistinguishable.
Among the plans that of Acre is of peculiar interest, being the most complete
representation known of the great crusading fortress on the eve of its
destruction, with, the quarters of all its contingents of defenders (Templars,
&c.) indicated. The chart of the Mediterranean and Euxine and of the
Atlantic coasts of Europe is composed of five map-sheets, which together
form a good example of the earliest scientific design or portolano;
in the world-map a portolano of the Mediterranean world is combined
with work of pre-portolan type in remoter regions. Here the shore-lines
of the countries well known to Italian mariners, from Flanders to Azov,
are well laid down; the Caspian and the north German and Scandinavian coasts
appear with an evident,
though far slighter, relation to practical
knowledge; and some idea is shown of the great continental rivers of the
north, such as the Don, Volga, Vistula, Oxus and Syr Daria. Africa, away
from the Mediterranean, is conventional, with its south-east projected,
after the manner of Idrisi, so as to face Indian Asia, and with a western
Nile traversing the continent to the Atlantic. Chinese and Indian Asia
show little trace of the new knowledge which had been imparted by
European pioneers from the Polos' time, and which appears so strikingly
in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. Sanuto’s Palestine map is remarkable
for its space-defining network of lines, which roughly answer to a kind
of scheme of latitude and longitude, though properly speaking they are
not scientific at all. Of the Secreta, twenty-three MSS. exist,
of which the chief are: (1) Florence, Riccardian Library, No. 237, 162
fols. (Secreta and Letters), with maps and plans on fols.
141, v.-144, r.; (2) London, British Museum, Addt. MSS., 27,376, 178 fols.
with maps, &c. on fols. 180, v.-190, r.; (3) Paris, National
Library, MSS. Lat. 4939, with maps, &c. on fols. 9, r.-11, r. 27, 98-99.
All these are of the 14th century. The Secreta has only once been
printed entire, by Bongars, in Gesta Dei per Francos, vol. ii. pp.
1-288 (Hanover, 1611).
See also Friedrich Kunstmann, “Studien über Marino Sanudo den älteren, mit einem Anhange seiner ungedruckten Briefe” in Abhandlungen der historisch. Classe der Königl. Bayerisch. Akedemie der Wissenschaften, vol. vii. pp. 695-819 (Munich, 1855); Foscarini, Letteratura Veneziana; Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. v.; Postansque, De Marino Santo (Montpellier, 1856); C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 309-319, 391-392, 520-521,
S49 555. (C. R. B.)
Eleventh edition