When Jacopo Bellini fled Florence in the summer of 1423 to avoid retribution over his fight with Bernardo (see Jacopo Bellini: Fight or Flight), he didn’t just catch a boat out of town. He signed on as a hired seaman in Florence’s brand-new merchant galley system, and he stayed in it, or somewhere close to it, for well over a year.
Florence had no natural port. In 1421 it paid Genoa 100,000 florins for Livorno and Porto Pisano and started building a fleet of state galleys. The historian Michael Mallett compiled a table of every Florentine galley voyage of the fifteenth century, and it lists exactly one sailing for the eastern Mediterranean in the summer of 1423: two great galleys that left for Alexandria on July 26. That was a few weeks after the fight and well before Bernardo’s father went to court. They are the best candidates, though no surviving crew list puts Jacopo aboard. The only other voyages that year and the next went west: a trial run to Aigues-Mortes in southern France, and a galley to Catalonia that didn’t sail until April 1424, ten months after Jacopo left.
Which Galley Did Jacopo Bellini Take?
Jacopo fled Florence in June 1423 and was already at sea by September 2. In the ten months after the fight, Florence’s state galleys made three voyages, and only one of them left in that window.
Click any port for a note.
The dated record
- Jacopo's fight with Bernardo in Gentile da Fabriano's courtyard. He flees Florence soon after.
- Two great galleys sail for Alexandria.
- Bernardo's father brings charges. Jacopo is already at sea.
- The Alexandria galleys come home. Jacopo isn't with them.
- The Aigues-Mortes trial galley returns.
- The long galley sails for Catalonia.
- His father makes his will in Venice. Jacopo is probably still working on a merchant galley.
- The Catalonia galley returns.
- A few days after his merchant ship docks, Jacopo is arrested and taken to Le Stinche.
The Alexandria galleys came home on November 28. Jacopo wasn’t on them. In April 1424, when his father made his will in Venice, Jacopo was apparently still working on a merchant galley somewhere. When he finally returned in October, it was on a merchant ship, in a month when no Florentine state galley reached port. I guess that he left his first ship at the far end and stayed in the eastern Mediterranean, picking up work on whatever was sailing, until he was ready to go home. We don’t know where he spent those months.
In 1422, a year before Jacopo, the Florentine ambassador Felice Brancacci sailed to Egypt and kept a diary. His galley stopped at nine ports on the way to Alexandria, from Piombino and Messina to Candia and Rhodes. It was a long galley, built for speed rather than cargo, but the crew was Florentine, and the route was the one Jacopo’s ship probably took.
There’s nothing romantic in Brancacci’s diary. The galley stopped for water. It needed more oars and couldn’t find any. Repairs dragged on, the sailors were worn out, and officials had to be kept happy. When the wind changed, so did the plans. At Rhodes, Catalan and Genoese ships were already in trouble, and in Alexandria Brancacci’s problems turned political.
A Venetian galley in Konrad Grünenberg’s account of his journey to Jerusalem, 1480s. Although painted about sixty years after Jacopo’s voyage, it shows the crowded arrangement of sails, oars, crew, and deck space on a late-fifteenth-century Mediterranean galley.
The best eyewitness to life on board is a German friar, Felix Fabri, who sailed to the Holy Land on a Venetian pilgrim galley in 1483. That was sixty years after Jacopo, but Fabri says Venetian galleys were “as like one to another as swallows’ nests,” and the basic routine didn’t change much. The crew lived on the open deck, “each man upon his own bench, and there they sleep, eat, and work.” Chests of merchandise filled the space between the benches, and the officers ran up and down on top of them “when the oars are being worked.” Next to the kitchen was a pen where “sheep, goats, calves, oxen, cows, and pigs stand all together.” Below deck was the bilge well, which gave off “a most loathsome smell... a worse smell than that from any closet of human ordure.” Someone had to pump it every day, and nonstop in rough weather.
Forget the Hollywood galley, with rows of men rowing from dawn to dusk while someone beats a drum. A great galley traveled under sail. The crew rowed only to get in and out of port, or in an emergency, when the wind died near a harbor or a rocky coast made it dangerous to wait. Some commanders left two-thirds of the oars at home so they wouldn’t get broken. The ship still carried a big crew, because the same men handled the sails, loaded and unloaded the cargo, raised the anchors, stood watch and, when necessary, fought. A merchant galley had to be ready for pirates and for whoever happened to be at war that season.
Fifteenth-century portolan chart of the Mediterranean. For sailors like those aboard Florence’s new merchant galleys, the sea was understood as a network of ports, coastlines, and sailing directions.
The crew also did a little business on the side. Under Venetian rules, every sailor, bowman and oarsman could bring along a few goods of his own to sell, and at each port the men went ashore and set up a small market. Fabri called the rowers slaves, but slaves wouldn’t have been allowed off the ship to sell things.
Did Jacopo what he saw on his travels? Nobody knows. I doubt he sat serenely with a sketchbook while everyone else worked. He was trying to earn money and stay out of Florence, and as a hired hand his time wasn’t his own.
Going to sea was dangerous, and not everyone from a painter’s world came back. In 1459 the purser of a Florentine galley returning from England noted that a trumpeter on board, the brother-in-law of the painter Benozzo Gozzoli, had died on the voyage.
Jacopo survived. In October 1424 he took a merchant ship back to Florence, apparently not knowing he had been convicted while away. Within days he was arrested (see Jacopo Bellini: Fight or Flight).
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Michael E. Mallett, The Florentine Galleys in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1967). The book that makes this post possible. Appendix A, on page 153 for these years, is Mallett’s table of Florentine galley voyages, including the two great galleys that left for Alexandria on July 26, 1423. Look at page 93, note 6, for Benozzo Gozzoli’s unlucky brother-in-law.
Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, Florence’s Embassy to the Sultan of Egypt: An English Translation of Felice Brancacci’s Diary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Chapter 3 is Brancacci’s day-by-day account of the voyage east. Missing oars, exhausted sailors, and difficult officials, all written down by a man who clearly wished he were home.
Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins Press, 1934). Chapter 1, “The Galleys,” is everything you ever wanted to know about how a merchant galley worked: sails versus oars, crew organization, the crew’s private trading, and why you can forget the drum.
Felix Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri, translated by Aubrey Stewart (Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1892). Volume I, pages 126 to 131. A German friar on a Venetian pilgrim galley in 1483, sparing you nothing, the bilge included. Lane reprints the passage, if you’d rather not hunt down the original.
Daniel Wallace Maze, Young Bellini (Yale University Press, 2021). For Jacopo’s hiring as a seaman, the likely eastern destination, the April 1424 evidence that he was still at sea, and his return on a merchant ship.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS is my developing treatment for a television drama about the Bellini family, their workshop, and the world of Renaissance Venice.