Recipients

The preceding chapters have analysed the forces that affected the varying trajectories of military expenditure. We must now turn to another important problem: identifying the economic actors who beneted from these payments. The importance of participating privately in military systems and in assuring the functioning of an army is widely acknowledged (Parrott 2012). Therefore, in addition to the components of the system elucidated heretofore, the role played by the beneciaries of military expenditure should be considered one of the most important elements comprising the Venetian military structure. Starting with the expenditure that remained within individual local communities’ economic circuits (as identied in Chapter 5), records show that various gures, including oarsmen, sappers and militiamen, received a payment for their service. Usually, they were members of the ‘lower-middle class’ (inasmuch as such a class existed or can be distinguished), and with the exception of militia ofcers, they did not belong to families sitting on the high council of the community. This reected the fact that remuneration for these services lagged behind the demands they placed on those involved, and did not account for the likelihood of injury or death on the battleeld (Pezzolo 1981, 427; 1990, 169). The same assumption can be made with respect to other occasional labourers, e.g. saltpetre cart drivers, saltpetre storehouse repairmen and troop luggage transporters. These were all paid services, but they were not highly paid or of signicant economic relevance in a wider sense. Thus, they were the preserve of minor gures, recruited according to their availability or specialisation. Military-related work could constitute a major opportunity for such labourers: the most fortunate beneciaries included construction workers employed for building houses and warehouses for the saltpetre industry, and gunsmiths located in rural population centres who periodically repaired harquebuses, pikes and muskets for militiamen. The extremely high frequency, for example, of references to Schio gunsmith Antonio Guarnier in the archives of Magrè and Schio is a clear indication of how important military commissions could be for this part of the labour market. The fact that the commissions were limited to repairs and did not extend to purchased weapons means that the province-wide contract

offered by the Corpo Territoriale of Vicenza to a city gunsmith during this period was binding for communities and penalised small local artisans and merchants. In the province of Brescia, the proximity of weapons production centres meant that there were a limited number of such facilities but when the communities needed to repair a weapon, they brought it directly to the producer. When in September 1584 the community of Maderno needed to readjust harquebuses, they were sent to Brescia. In September 1611, Maderno’s weapons were sent to Salò to be cleaned, but for more complex works some years later, Salo’s ‘master of ries’ invited the men of Maderno to bring their weapons to Gardone, in the Trompia Valley1. These were relatively minor expenses, but we have already seen that the communities – as well as the Corpi Territoriali and the state – made some payments that were substantial. Large contracts were obviously an enticing prospect for investors who had the money and the inuence to win them. A prime example was troop lodgement: in the seventeenth century, especially in areas heavily involved in the transit or quartering of troops, communities often used specic buildings for lodging soldiers. This practice aimed to reduce the burden on peasants by utilising public structures, but at periods of intense military commitment, communities were forced to lease private houses and stables. Lease contracts were issued to peasants who had enough property to be able to put some at the disposal of the community. Many rural families earned important sums from such contracts, which was not a peculiarity of the Republic of Venice, given the presence of proto-barracks in the Spanish Lombardy (Buono 2009), in the Marquisate of Finale Ligure (Calcagno 2011), for example, or in the Kingdom of Sicily (Favarò 2010).