Venice had officially renamed it St. Mark’s Square centuries before, soon after it settled its military colonists in the town in the early thirteenth century.
The Plateia was the buzzing nerve center of Candia, and as Capsali entered the square, he saw the municipal and business centers of the city, including the main marketplace, currency exchange, merchants’ loggia, and the Latin church of Saint Mark. As he entered the open square, Capsali must have inescapably drawn in the scents of food sellers’ stalls and the acrid tang from smiths’ workshops. Merchants loudly hawked all sorts of wares, from bread to horseshoes, from their rented benches. He might have heard the sudden hushed attention to public announcements made by the public crier in the central arcade, or lobium. At one time or another, he surely saw a criminal doing time in the berlina, the pillory set up in the square.2 Though the duke was not sitting in judgment at that moment, since indeed he had been visiting with Capsali, the Plateia was even the spot where the ducal court heard its cases “in the open air” of the square.3 The Plateia was a theater of life in Candia.
To the horror of religious leaders like Capsali, even Candiote Jews loved to watch the spectacle of the market and court proceedings—especially on Saturday mornings, when they should have been at Sabbath prayers.4 Though Capsali’s personal visit to the duke, the highest colonial official and governor of the island, was certainly not typical, for at least three centuries before Capsali’s time, every Candiote Jew spent time in the Plateia, probably followed by a walk back to the Jewish Quarter. Such was Capsali’s plan on that day.
Map 2. Venetian Candia c. 1350–1450.
The Candia in which Elia Capsali lived thrived as a cosmopolitan colonial capital. During his lifetime, the city’s cultural life bustled even more than it had a century earlier. Byzantine refugees fleeing Constantinople in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of 1453 created a hub for literature, art, and classical philosophy in this Veneto-Greek milieu.5 Nevertheless, even in the darker century after the Black Death, Candia served as a key node for travel, trade, and settlement, and had done so since surprisingly soon after Venice settled its first military colonists on the island in 1211. In fact, during the century or so after the Black Death, Crete hit her stride as a trade hub. With the Genoese controlling the hub city of Famagusta (on Cyprus) from 1374 to 1464, Candia became the key stopover point on the Venice-Levantine commercial route.6 The first half of the fifteenth century witnessed the peak in Candia’s role as a major emporium.7 It was not simply that Candia was a hub for trade in other places’ goods; the city and its hinterland produced highly desired items for export, including wine, cheese, wool, and tanned hides, among other lucrative merchandise.8
However bustling, Candia was nevertheless a small city, comprising 192 acres—only three-tenths of a square mile.9 Today, a stroll from the Venetian piazza (now popularly known as Lion’s Square), up the old main street known then as the Ruga Maistra (or Magistra), and right up to the harbor—a journey through the entire length of the walled city south to north—takes little more than five minutes. At least in the late sixteenth century, it was densely populated, with a 1583 census estimating the population inside the walls (not including the borgo) at 15,976. Only a relatively small percentage of these residents—fewer than a thousand people—belonged to Venice’s noble class. Most of the city’s inhabitants—over 80 percent—were middle-class Greeks, non-noble Italians, and Armenians. The city’s suburb, the borgo, housed more of this community, especially Greeks but also Venetian elites who preferred some distance from the center of power and others who were priced out of central city living.10 Jews made up another small but substantial population within the city’s walls: about 950 souls, according to that census.11 To be sure, we must add to this mix those who were not counted: people such as slaves and temporary visitors, including merchants and pilgrims.12 Nevertheless, Candia remained a small town, physically and demographically. In comparison, even during the plague-ridden centuries after 1348, Venice managed to rebuild its population to above 100,000 souls; a census from 1500 puts the number at about 120,000.13
Unfortunately, no similar contemporary demographic assessment has survived for the century following the Black Death. Sally McKee has estimated Candia’s demographics according to status and profession. She argues that “feudatories,” the Venetian elites given land directly from the state, “and their families very likely never reached, much less surpassed, the figure of two thousand individuals” in the late Middle Ages. She also suggests that the “Candiote working population” (capaciously understood) hovered between at least five and eight thousand people.14
Yet any overarching total remains highly speculative. This fact—and a suspicion of numbers proposed by contemporary visitors—has led scholars to debate Candia’s Jewish population numbers in the late Middle Ages.15 But the census data for the late sixteenth century seem to me quite consistent with the earlier period. Counting the Jews mentioned in court documents, notarial records, and Hebrew sources from 1350 to 1454 suggests a similar population of at least 1,000 Jewish souls in the city—and probably more—in this century.16
These thousand or so Jews took part in the vibrant commercial life of the city, producing goods and offering services for Candia, for export, and for the internal Jewish community as well.17 Some Cretan Jews busily made their livings in professions habitually associated with medieval Jews—moneylenders, merchants, and physicians. They were also notaries, religious scribes, and teachers, positions of high social standing.18 Often these individuals involved themselves in more than one of these arenas, such as those who were both physicians and creditors. Despite the ubiquity of these high-status, “white-collar” jobs in the sources, many members—perhaps a majority—of the Jewish community in Candia worked in manual labor. Jewish laborers and skilled craftsmen hired themselves out and maintained their own workshops; these include tailors, artisans (faber), goldsmiths (aurifex), cobblers (cerdo), tanners, cork makers, butchers, healers, and dyers (tintor). Kosher food manufacture, including the production of kosher wine, dairy products, and meat, as well as overseeing their production for religious purposes, also employed a number of residents. Some Jews were domestic servants (famulus/famula), most likely serving in Jewish households.19 Undoubtedly many unskilled laborers also existed among the community.
Though men predominantly filled these professional roles, Jewish women certainly also contributed to their own and their families’ economic coffers across the spectrum: as creditors and merchants, health practitioners, domestics, and textile workers, actively and publicly taking part in the life of the city, as they also filled the at-home roles more commonly prescribed to them: wives and mothers.20
The Development of Candia’s Kehillah
As he left the Plateia on that Friday afternoon in 1546, perhaps Elia Capsali glanced up at the clock on the bell tower to check how long he had before Sabbath began.21 Though the clock was relatively new, the square—its organization and central role in the life of the city—remained much as Elia’s ancestors saw it during more than three centuries that the Capsalis, once Byzantine Jews, had lived under Venetian rule. As a man keenly attentive to his family’s and community’s history—Capsali considered himself a historian and keeper of the community’s memory—it could not have been lost on him that his situation was exceptional for a Jew of his time: his access to the halls of Venetian power, freedom in this colonial society, and, indeed, the place of the community he led.22 In his book on Ottoman history, he himself would write of the trauma of other Jews that he had personally witnessed when some of Iberia’s expelled Jews—poor, ragged, and hopeless—washed up on Crete’s shores after the traumatic expulsion of 1492.23
In contrast to the insecurity of contemporary Sephardim, his community was confidently situated to help these homeless
