- 1 This statement is part of the Verseichniss Der anderweitigen Türken und türkischen Unterthanen, (...)
1In 1767, Emir Ismael was questioned about his professional activities in Vienna. Born in 1742 in the Anatolian city of Konya, he worked for his father and his uncle in a family company based in Istanbul. From 1766, he imported textile raw materials into the Habsburg lands and exported manufactured goods from the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands to Istanbul. Emir enumerated the stations of his trade in Ancona and Venice before arriving in Trieste, where he was quarantined at the Lazzaretto San Carlo until he received the health certificate that he had to present to the Habsburg administration’s agent to establish the regularity of his situation. We learn from the statement he provided when being questioned that his quarantine in Trieste was far from being an endless and painful sojourn. Indeed, at the Lazzaretto San Carlo, he met and became friends with other merchants, and also began considering new business opportunities. These included the offer by Panajot Castro for him to become an agent of the company that Castro had established with Ottoman merchants from Smyrna (Izmir) and Saloniki. In exchange, Emir would be granted space in a warehouse rented by one of Castro’s partners in Vienna, as well as receiving a salary to supplement the income that he and his family received from his trading activities.1
2Emir’s statement was only one element in a large survey on Ottoman activity in Vienna that the administration of Maria Theresa (ruling from 1740 to 1780) conducted in 1767. Among other things, this survey attached crucial importance to the Ottomans having carried out their quarantine in one of the maritime or continental lazarets bordering the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (Do Paço 2015, 75-83; Do Paço 2021). These lazarets were a key element in international circulations of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, scholars and any travellers coming or returning from the Ottoman lands. But while the endemic nature of the plague in the Ottoman territories was certainly regarded as a risk, there were two other factors that Christian-ruled states had to deal with: firstly, the fact that, despite the risks, they needed to maintain circulations with the Ottoman world, which represented both an economic opportunity for their subjects and a source of tax income for the states themselves, and, secondly, the fact that eighteenth-century administrations were not physically able to control individuals’ mobility, despite the regulations they introduced and the knowledge and information they regularly acquired. As places where people were identified and controlled, lazarets produced a wealth of economic, political and sanitary information for local and central administrations. However, they were also micropoleis, or places of negotiation, where everything possible was done to maintain a certain social life and, above all, to ensure the continuity of trade (Alfani and Murphy 2017; Bulmus 2005; Calafat 2015; Chase Levenson 2020; Foucault 1977, 197; Varlik 2015).
3The history of circulations often insists on the fluidity of the movement of individuals, goods and ideas, so much so that immobility, conversely, is seen as enunciating or being symptomatic of a decline. This is particularly true for the history of eighteenth-century Europe, which was strongly influenced by, and has at times been reduced to, a history of the Republic of Letters, its networks and smooth commercial exchanges (Edelstein and Edmonson 2019; Fumaroli 2015; Goodman 1996). But while circulations are certainly a matter of space and flow, they are also a matter of tempo. And it was the lazarets that defined the scales, actors and tempo in a sequence of circulation in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean world, which was particularly marked by episodes of violent plagues. Between 1720 and 1722, for example, poor management of the quarantining of goods in the port of Marseille led to the city’s inhabitants having to go into strict quarantine. As a result, Marseille lost half of its population within those two years, and nearly 1% of its population every day between mid-July and mid-August 1720. However, far from calling into question the free movement of people and goods, or promoting early de-globalisation, the city of Marseille, the States of Provence and the Bourbon monarchy instead implemented a policy of seeking to control these circulations in order to guarantee and promote them (Takeda 2011; Hildesheimer 1980 and 1985).
- 2 Archivio di Stato di Trieste (AST), Cesarea Regia Intendenza Commerciale (Int. Com.), 373-381; AS (...)
4In the same year that the Marseille epidemic broke out, Trieste celebrated the opening of its first lazaret, the Lazzaretto San Carlo. The attractiveness of the free port that had been established by Charles VI in Trieste in 1719 later prompted the local authorities to build a second lazaret in 1769, the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa, and then, in 1804, to establish a health authority in the port of Muggia, which had recently been annexed by the Habsburgs (Finzi, Panariti and Panjek 2003; Do Paço 2018). The archives of the Trieste lazarets comprise two collections, corresponding to the administrative hierarchy of the Habsburg Empire. Within the Archivio di Stato di Trieste, these collections depend on the archives of the Intendenza Commerciale, which governed the free port and supervised the municipality’s activities from 1724 to 1774. These collections were later taken over by the Cesareo regio Governo per il Litorale di Trieste, whose establishment in 1774 showed the Emperor gaining a stronger hold on the institutions of Trieste. These collections essentially document the permanent transformation of the regulations and infrastructures of the Lazzaretto San Carlo and the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa. In Vienna, the archives of the Hofkammer – the administration in charge of the estate of the Habsburg family and that had authority over the Intendenza Commerciale and then the Governo in Trieste – detail the construction of knowledge specific to the Mediterranean. From Trieste, the Hofkammer looked towards the Danube, the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean and pragmatically oversaw the commercial facilities in Trieste.2
5The article is organized as follows. First, it examines how the lazarets of Trieste were part of a system for circulating information and knowledge that connected the lazarets of the Mediterranean with those of the Danube river valley. Second, it explores the system that the Habsburg administration developed to regulate circulations from the Adriatic to Central Europe. It particularly focuses on an exceptional polycentric system established in Trieste and composed of three lazarets simultaneously operating on several scales: the Adriatic, the port, the lazaret, the different facilities that composed the lazaret, and the passengers. Eventually, while the lazarets marked a pause in a circulation of trans-imperial flows, this article demonstrates that they were also a space for exchange and circulation that allowed the passengers to maintain a certain social life.
6Through the lazaret of Trieste, the Habsburg administration collected commercial and sanitary information and knowledge from the Mediterranean world and beyond. From the perspective of the Hofkammer and the Intendenza Commerciale, the lazarets of Trieste were never seen as isolated. Instead, the Habsburg administration systematically regarded the Lazzaretto San Carlo and the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa as part of a global sanitary system shared between Mediterranean states. Together, these lazarets formed channels for circulating and controlling information across the Western Mediterranean and the Adriatic space and along the Habsburg-Ottoman border.
- 3 AST, c. r. Gov., 128-133.
- 4 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 387, fasc. 37.
- 5 AST. Int. Com., 272-273.
- 6 AST, Int. Com., 272, 106r-139v.
- 7 AST, Int. Com., 380.
- 8 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 782, fasc. 36, report to the Intendenza Commerciale, 30 August 1763. Unless (...)
7The sanitary information collected was circulated through the Habsburg consular network. Under Maria Theresa (1740-1780), for example, the Hofkammer commissioned a series of reports on the lazarets of Venice, the Papal States, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Naples, Tuscany, Genoa, Spain and Poland, while information on the various port partners’ sanitary situation was regularly updated.3 Information also circulated between the Hofkammer and the Intendenza Commerciale.4 In the 1760s, the consular network was organised by the trade councillor Giuseppe Pasquale Ricci and managed from Trieste rather than Vienna. Ricci received reports from the Habsburg consuls in Ragusa, Ancona, Naples, Messina (transiting through Naples), Barletta, Venice, Alexandria, Cattaro (Kotor) and Malta. The Habsburg consuls offered Ricci off-centre glances, which he then synthesised.5 A particularly exhaustive inventory of Neapolitan trade, for example, showed the consul in Naples to be located at the intersection of the trading networks of Genoa, Livorno, Marseille, Venice, Cittavecchia, Rome, Malta and Trieste, and several ports belonging to the Spanish monarchy, such as Barcelona, Cadiz and Valencia, as well as Lisbon, London and Amsterdam, which Ricci did not fail to mention.6 The construction of the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa in Trieste was therefore preceded by a series of surveys conducted or coordinated by Ricci on the lazarets of Marseille and Livorno.7 On 30 August 1763, at the Regent of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany’s recommendation, Maria Theresa even specifically requested “that a lazzaretto sporco [i. e. fully isolated from the city] be established and built on the coast following the example of Livorno”.8
Figure 1. Map of the Trieste network of lazarets
- 9 OeStA, HFK, Litorale, 782, fasc. 36, 20 December 1763. See also ibid., fasc. 36, Eines allerunte (...)
- 10 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 379, fo. 228r-233v.
8The Tuscan free port of Livorno was a major source of information for Trieste since the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had become part of the hereditary lands of the House of Austria in 1737 (Tazzara, Findlen and Soll 2020; Trivellato 2009, 70-101). Ricci himself came from a Livorno merchant family that put its expertise at the service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was also Emperor Francis I from 1745 to 1765, and the husband of Maria Theresa of Austria (Biagi 1986; Andreozzi 2005; Trampus 2008). In 1763, Giovanni Baldasseroni, the cancelliere di Sanità of the Livorno lazaret, moved from the service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo (1765-1792), to that of his brother, Emperor Joseph II (1765/80-1790), and was then commissioned to write a report on the functioning of the Tuscan lazaret.9 Ricci responded to the information he received in this report and the shortcomings identified by presenting a new report, on 1 August 1768, on the advisability of adopting what he called the sistema toscano in Trieste. One of his first remarks was that the people visiting Trieste were socially different from those quarantined in Livorno, where there were many slaves, pilgrims and missionaries, and that Trieste should therefore adapt the facilities to suit its specific clientele in the Ottoman trade.10
- 11 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 787, fasc. 37, n° 41.
- 12 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 787, fasc. 37.
9Within this consular network, two geographical areas – the Western Mediterranean and the Adriatic – had lazarets particularly closely connected to Trieste. Between 1752 and 1804, therefore, the Hofkammer organised a watch from Vienna on the main ports trading with the Ottoman Empire, the Maghreb and the Habsburg monarchy. The Kingdom of Naples attracted special attention, both because of its links with Vienna following the War of Spanish Succession (1700-1714) and because of the roles played by the ports of Messina and Naples in the Trieste trade. Malta and the Spanish ports also attracted attention. And so, too, did Livorno, given the access it provided to trade with the Regency of Tripoli. The watch organised by the Hofkammer extended to all Trieste’s partners. In 1768, for example, the Hofkammer discovered that the arrival in Livorno, from Tripoli, of the French ship La Pollacca Elisabetta had forced the Tuscan health authorities to immediately alert the authorities in Lucca, Nizza (Nice) and Marseille because of suspicious cases being detected onboard. This cordon sanitaire was reinforced by regular flows of information between the ports of the Christian-ruled states and the Ottoman Empire, as evidenced by the actions taken by the Governo from 1776 onwards.11 Similarly, Spanish ports took on a special importance following a trade treaty signed by the Emperor with the Sultan of Morocco in 1783 and that aimed to develop trade between Trieste and Tangiers. In 1804, the Habsburg consul in Alicante informed the Hofkammer of direct contacts that Alicante, Barcelona and Malaga had with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. These contacts represented an additional risk, given that Barcelona and Malaga were regularly visited by ships sailing under the imperial flag. 12
- 13 AST, Int. Com., 272, 1r-2v.
- 14 OeSTA, FHK, Litorale, fasc. 37, 387.
10The reports by the Habsburg consul in Ragusa shaped another informational circuit from Wallachia to Naples and passing through Bosnia and various Adriatic ports such as Ancona, Barletta, Brindisi and Venice. This geography underlined the importance of the activities of the Ottoman merchants, such as Emir Ismael,13 on whom these networks relied. Being shared between the Ottoman, Venetian and Habsburg empires meant the Adriatic Sea constituted a second space for circulating health information directly concerning Trieste. The Hofkammer was consequently particularly interested in the lazarets of Ragusa, Venice and Ancona, although other ports were also seen as worth considering. In Ragusa, a city under Ottoman protection, quarantine had been mandatory since 1377, while an important military complex had been built at the southern entrance to the fortress in 1642. The lazaret thus completed the city’s fortifications. Meanwhile Venice had built a lazaret as early as 1403 in order to isolate people infected by the Black Death. This lazaret later became a transit area for merchants, and the Republic equipped itself with new infrastructures in 1630.14 Ancona, in turn, became even more important for the Habsburg administration when the city of the Papal States, taking advantage of its proximity to the Ottoman Empire, erected a new lazaret between 1733 and 1743. For the Hofkammer, the Ancona lazaret was seen as a competing institution and was therefore observed meticulously. This lazaret was found, for example, to have been used during the Semigallia fair, which was attended by Ottoman and Venetian merchants who then could travel to Trieste.
- 15 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, fasc. 37, 386.
- 16 See Ivetić (2014 and 2019), Andreozzi (2009), Crawshaw (2012), Blažina Tomić and Blažina (2015), (...)
11From 1763 to 1765, the Papal States have facilitated the conditions of quarantine for the Ottoman merchants, which worried the authorities in Trieste until the Intendenza Commerciale decided to reduce the quarantine for ships coming from Turkey. Ancona was also a port where smuggling could be organised through Ferrara.15 In the Eastern Adriatic, meanwhile, cities of the Stato da Màr [Venetian maritime provinces], such as Corfu and Castelnuovo (Herceg Novi), had lazarets. Indeed, the island and the city of Zakynthos had two of them, dedicated to receiving merchants and seasonal workers, respectively. Lastly, Fiume (Rijeka), where a free port was established in 1719 and placed under the authority of Trieste’s Intendenza Commerciale in 1724, built its first lazaret in 1726, initially to relieve the pressure on the Lazzaretto San Carlo.16
12A third geographical entity was responsible for channelling circulations of health information and experts. These circulations developed on the continent rather than along the coastal routes, and specifically at the border of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. This cordon sanitaire was specific to the Habsburg monarchy and accompanied the establishment of a militarised border with the Ottoman Empire. This frontier zone, which was directly administrated by the Hofkriegsrat (the Aulic Council of War) from 1538, was initially intended to protect the patrimonial states of the House of Austria, especially the province (Kreis) of Inner Austria, against Ottoman raids in Western Croatia. It was extended in 1702 along the Sava River to Belgrade, in 1742 along the left bank of the Danube to the Carpathians, and then in 1764 along the Carpathian Arch and the border that Transylvania shared with the beylicates, or principalities, of Moldavia and Wallachia. The crossing points along the Sava, the Danube and the Carpathian valleys were fortified and equipped with lazarets to accommodate merchants coming from the Ottoman Empire. The lazarets in Semlin (Zemun), opposite Belgrade, and the river port of Orșova, which controlled access to the Banat of Temesvár (Timisoara), were the most important lazarets, but smaller ones could be found in cities such as Agram (Zagreb) or Esseg (Osijek) (Pešalj 2019; Fodor and Dávid 2010).
- 17 OeStA, FHK, Kommerz Ungarn, Siebenbürgen und Galizien (KUSG), 1523-1524; Ibid., KS, 397-404; Ibid (...)
- 18 AST, Int. Com, 375, fo. 8r.
- 19 Ibidem, fo. 6r-25v.
13This continental dimension was essential because it allowed the Habsburg monarchy to benefit from a diversity of direct sources of information on economic circulations with the Ottoman Empire and from a diversity of laboratories allowing it to test different ways of regulating these circulations.17 In 1754, for example, when applying for a position as chaplain of the Lazzaretto San Carlo, Pietro De Castro evoked that he had worked for several years in Temesvár, where he had to be replaced “because of the unhealthy air of Hungary” that had affected him adversely.18 Along with Semlin, Temesvár was one of the gateways for the continental route of Ottoman trade to Central Europe. And, like Trieste, the Banat of Temesvár was characterised by major demographic growth driven by a new population, largely from the Ottoman world and partly comprising adherents to Orthodoxy, against whom the Catholic Church considered it had to defend its privileges. After arriving in Trieste, Pietro De Castro was replaced in Temesvár by his cousin, Vincenzo, and thus his family built up expertise in managing a border area between the Danube and the Mediterranean.19
14The career of the hydraulic engineer Maximilien Frémaut (1725-1768), who was in charge of the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa construction site, provides an even more eloquent example for understanding the Habsburgs’ ability to mobilise private scholarly networks in the service of public affairs and relying on both Mediterranean and continental information and knowledge. Frémaut was recruited in the Habsburg Low Countries in 1757 and requested to put his expertise into reclaiming swamp areas for the Banat of Temesvár, which had just experienced considerable flooding as a result of rising waters in the Danube basin. He had acquired a particularly distinguished reputation because of his involvement in developing the port of Ostend and regulating rivers in the Flemish hinterland. After being recommended to the Governor of Temesvár by the Minister Plenipotentiary in charge of the Low Countries, Frémaut seized the opportunity to work on reclaiming the agricultural land in the Banat of Temesvár. Since Frémaut’s agrarian policy was based partly on the specific competences he attributed to the various ethnic groups of migrants presenting themselves in the Banat, he was very familiar with the Orșova lazaret, where the Habsburg administration welcomed candidates for immigration (Nàdasdi 1996, 99-105; Landais 2019).
- 20 OeStA, FHK, Litorale 782, fasc. 36, Resolution über denen allerunterthänigsten Vortrag der gehors (...)
- 21 AST, Int. Com., 376, fo. 76r-77v, 106r-111v, 135r-139r. 151r/v, 177r-179v, 190r-197v, 213r/v, Ibi (...)
15These spaces in the Banat of Temesvár were to be connected from Vienna. The resolution of 15 April 1764 signed by Maria Theresa identified Frémaut as one of the experts, along with Baldasseroni, commissioned to work on constructing the lazaret.20 Whereas Baldasseroni’s role was to lay down the principles, Frémaut was responsible for managing the call for projects, for selecting the best proposal, and for adapting the lazaret and having it built. Frémaut offered the Intendenza Commerciale a panoramic view of all the problems that the construction of the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa might encounter, in addition to the authority he enjoyed as a result of his reputation as a remarkable engineer. As a result, he not only designed the plans and managed the teams, but also assumed political responsibility for coordinating the various public and private actors involved in constructing the lazaret.21 Quite paradoxically, management of the sanitariness of the Habsburg monarchy relied on the increasing circulation of information and expertise. The Lazzaretto San Carlo and Lazzaretto Santa Teresa were, in effect, two inter-connected interfaces that prevented epidemics from spreading, both by generating greater circulation and by facilitating greater control.
- 22 See also MBSM (1771) and IGPLL (1785).
16Commercial circulations in Trieste were handled by a multi-scale and polycentric sanitary system. Lazarets slowed down and decomposed the circulations, aiming to reorganise them by identifying, dividing, classifying and tracking people and goods alike. The panoptic dimension of the lazaret allowed the Habsburg empire to make these circulations comprehensible and governable in accordance with the empire’s own referential framework. The Trieste lazarets responded in a well-coordinated way to varying and complementary needs and to the increased circulations in the Mediterranean. From 1769, the Lazzaretto San Carlo and Lazzaretto Santa Teresa operated simultaneously. The lazaret in Fiume continued to be managed by the Intendenza Commerciale, and then the Governo del Litoral, until 1784, when it was placed directly under the authority of the administration of the Kingdom of Hungary. In 1797, however, following the Treaty of Campo Formio, the Venetian commune of Muggia, south of Trieste, was annexed by the Habsburgs. From then on, the Governor of Trieste administered the Fiume lazaret, where Governor Pompeo Brigido established a new health office in 1804. Muggia served as a marshalling yard for ships, which were directed according to the risk they represented. This polynuclear system, which developed throughout the Mediterranean, and especially in Ancona, Livorno and Marseille, in the second half of the eighteenth century, made it possible to absorb increasingly dense traffic and to set up specific quarantines, depending on vessels’ origins and the risks they represented (Bussolin 1881; Ponte 2006).22
- 23 GRIOSLA (1755), IPPCOAT (1816, 1-6) and Agapito (1824, 72-73, 78, 82).
17This Trieste sanitary polycentricity dealt with risk management by using the patente [Letters patent] system. The General regolamento, ed instruzioni degli officii di Sanità da osservarsi in tutto il Littorale austriaco of 1755 (“the General Regolamento”) identified four different patents. The patente libera was granted to vessels originating from a port in a state where the plague was no longer endemic and where at least forty days had lapsed since the vessels had had any contact with an infected territory. The patente netta was granted to ships originating from a port that had relations with Mediterranean ports where the plague was endemic or where an epidemic had recently broken out. These ships continued to dock at the Lazzaretto San Carlo after 1769. A patente tocca was granted to ships originating from a port in a territory where the plague was endemic and to ships suspected of having cases of contagion onboard. From 1769, these vessels were directed to the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa, which could handle up to sixty such vessels. The patente brutta identified vessels on which proven cases of plague had been declared in the ports of origin or in one of the ports frequented during the previous fourteen days or when cases had appeared during the journey. From 1769, these vessels docked at the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa, and from 1804 at Muggia.23
- 24 AST, c. r. Gov., 130, n° 1367, A.
18In practice, it was also possible to be given a patente bruttissima or patente brutta aggravata, such as the one issued to the checchia San Giorgio sailed by the Ragusan captain Matteo Matković and that had departed from Istanbul and passed through Smyrna. The ship arrived in Trieste on 7 September 1778 with cases of contagion among the passengers. Once again, the Habsburg consular system played an essential role because, as early as 30 July, the Ragusan consul in Istanbul, Giorgio Zurić, had warned the head of the Trieste sanitary administration, Andrea Giuseppe Bonomo, and the Governo del Litorale “that the city of Constantinople and its surroundings were infected by the contagious disease, and every day saw a succession of numerous cases of plague”.24 The San Giorgio had therefore left Smyrna with a patente brutta. Simultaneously, the Habsburg consul Pier Antonio Coletti sent further information from Venice to Trieste, specifying that the affected districts were the “suburbs of Pera, Galata, Terrapia, and Bujukdere”; in other words, the districts of the port of Istanbul and those frequented by the diplomatic corps. He added that the plague had
- 25 AST, c. r. Gov., 130, n° 1367, B.
penetrated also in the Seraglio, where it deprived of life the third figure of the black Eunuch of intimate familiarity of the Sultan. It strikes the Ottoman fleet and other merchant ships, such as a Venetian one called: Madona di Scopò, sailed by the Cap. Giolama, there anchored, and passed to invade the City of Andrinopole, and islands of Tine, and Scio in the Archipelago.25
- 26 OeStA, FHKA, Litorale, 784, fasc. 36, 20 October 1778 and AST, c. r. Gov., 130, n° 1367.
19Upon arrival in Trieste, the captain notified the port of the cases of contagion onboard. The patent then became aggravata or bruttissima. The matter was brought to the attention of Governor Zinzendorf, but owing to its seriousness he decided to send the case to the Hofkammer before ultimately authorising the vessel to dock. In reaching his decision, Zinzendorf had to arbitrate between the health and security of the city and the economic interests of several influential Trieste families who had invested in this important cargo.26
- 27 AST, Int. Com., 374, fo. 23r/v.; GRIOSLA (1755, 13-14 and 19-27).
- 28 GRIOSLA (1755, 41-45).
20The area inside the Trieste lazarets was itself compartmentalised so as to limit contacts between people and goods, and between individuals. This was also the case in the other Mediterranean lazarets, where the areas for quarantining goods were clearly distinct from those for people and animals. The quarantine periods imposed on goods were longer than for people and followed a specific procedure. This was because bales of merchandise were regularly opened and aired, which could constitute a risk for individuals in quarantine, and also required large warehouses. Sometime, bales were stored in the open air, as in the Lazzaretto San Carlo, where the warehouses were regularly full and had no spare capacity indoors until the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa was built.27 In addition, the lazarets included a contagion-free area for the administration, which was headed by a prior.28 The Lazzaretto Santa Teresa had two harbours, as the Trieste historiographer Giuseppe Maria Mainati described in 1818:
Already in 1720 Charles VI had the Lazzaretto of the same name built in Trieste; but since it did not have special and safe facilities for the ships with a patente sporca, and a long quarantine, Maria Theresa ordered a second one, which was completed and opened this year 1769, and was named Lazzaretto S. Teresa (...). The port of this lazaret is beautiful, has an adapted bottom, and is equipped with two mouths: ships subject to default enter and leave through the major one, which is watched by a military guard corps, and is closed by a chain; the secondary mouth only serves the boats and launches carrying the health officers as well as the lazaret authorities. The whole lazaret is very large, there are quarters for people in quarantine and passengers, storerooms for storing goods, squares and dry canopies for hanging out the sails. The house in the centre is dedicated to S. Teresa. All this extensive building is surrounded by a 4-Klafter high wall; and at the front door there is a post of mounted guards. All the subordinate staff, there are four guards, and the necessary porters depend on the administration of the lazaret. A chaplain was employed for the care of the soul and for the celebration of the saintly sacrifices. Antonio Guadagnini, a patrician from Trieste, was the first prior of this lazaret, who then decently held the position of legal, criminal, and prosecutor advisor. The General Regolamento published in 1755 for all health care offices, and lazarets are normally applied to employees and quarantined people. (Mainati 1818, 305-306)
21The quality of the accommodation made it possible to accept the constraints of quarantine and isolation. In 1785, for example, the English prison reformer John Howard appreciated the comfort of the rooms in the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa and their furnishings: “The rooms were eighteen feet and a half by fifteen, had a neat bedstead, chair and table” (Howard 1791, 23). In 1787, the Milanese philosopher Giuseppe Gorani (1793, 150-151) praised the Lazzaretto San Leopoldo in Livorno, observing that “the houses are very well distributed and very comfortable, the architecture is simple, but regular”, and concluding that “everything that has to do with the regime of these establishments, a reasoned product of prudence and humanity combined with the general interest, is made to be admired”. These reflections by Howard and Gorani were aimed above all to support the enlightened despots Joseph II and Pietro Leopoldo through the care they gave to traders.
22The way the lazarets were structured also reflected the legal structures of the Ancien Régime and the fortunes of the quarantined persons. At the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa, the conditions in which people were quarantined differed, but everyone was in the same building. Howard distinguished between the upper-floor dwellings and the common dwellings on the first floor, with the upper dwellings being for the nobility, rich merchants and their families, and ship captains. The diary of Trieste’s governor, Karl von Zinzendorf, mentioned the special care provided to certain merchant families, such as the family of the Armenian merchant George Saraff, with whom he had dealings in the 1770s and 1780s. In Marseille, the social distance between different social groups was greater than between individuals within these groups. Hence, the lazaret could allow social distinctions to be maintained. In 1777, an abbot from Provence, Jean-Pierre Papon, noted, for example, that:
Around this house (of the captain), three enclosures were built: in one, passengers of a distinguished rank were accommodated; in the other, passengers of ordinary class; the third was used to dry the herds of sick people, after they had been soaked in boiling water. (Papon 1787, 714)
23Most travellers reported the existence of individualised accommodation for each household with the aim of preventing contact between different groups of people in quarantine. As the case of Emir Ismael shows, however, social distancing was not a realistic objective. This also applied in 1759, when the Dutch traveller Johannes Wilhelmus Heyman (1758, 408) wrote that, in Livorno, “I got along very well with the other travellers, also in quarantine, and we enjoyed ourselves as much and as well as we could. We visited each other almost every day, so we were very busy all the time”. In Ancona, where the triage of passengers was organised vertically, and where each floor regrouped passengers according to the different vessels patents, communications between individuals appeared relatively simple. Giacomo Casanova related, for instance, how letters were exchanged and how the holes in the floor allowed him to have and maintain a secret affair with a young Greek girl housed on the floor below his. The two of them even worked out an escape plan before Casanova cowardly gave up (Casanova 1999, 144-145).
- 29 GRIOSLA (1755, 75).
- 30 Ibidem.
24In essence, this individualisation was intended to achieve administrative identification and was part of a system allowing the Habsburg administration to track travellers. The General Regolamento of 1755 specified that the director in charge of administrating the lazaret had to maintain two quarantine books (giornali di contumacia), in which he separately identified goods and persons.29 This was a very simplified version of what had been requested back in 1695 in the Instruzzioni e governo del lazzaretto di Messina per la scala franca, namely that five books were to be kept for goods and a sixth for persons. The latter had to state the surname, first name, the patria or place of origin, and the date of entry into quarantine for each person, along with the names of the captains, and the guards assigned to each person in quarantine.30 The 1728 Statuti del Magistrato della Sanità of Palermo give a slightly more precise idea of how captains, sailors and ship passengers were registered by the tax procurator “with the utmost discernment and rigour”. The interrogation had to be conducted in the passenger’s language and then incorporated into the register of acts in the same language. It was then notified to the lazaret’s management, which reported the information in its quarantine journal devoted to individuals (Gervasi 1773, 32). The Trieste Gesundheits-, Polizey-, und Wirtschafts-Ordnung of 1769 referred to the General Regolamento of 1755 for the information to be collected. Article IX in the regulations of 1769 even seemed to mark a relaxation of control:
In the same way, a register must be kept of the passengers, who are quarantined in the lazaret, and of the guards assigned to them. It must contain clearly and in detail their number, surname, first name, status, country, age and religion.31
25Rather than introducing anything new, the Gesundheits-, Polizey-, und Wirtschafts-Ordnung simply validated a practice already in place in the prior’s office and more widely within the Habsburg administration. At the end of the quarantine period, merchants were given a passport, just like Emir Ismael, attesting to their stay at the lazaret and containing the identification criteria imposed by the Habsburg administration (Landais 2019; Do Paço 2015, 88-94). The lazarets of Trieste testified to how the administration of the port and that of the Habsburg empire were keen to establish extremely precise control over individuals. This desire for control obviously made the state vulnerable by exposing it to the risk of epidemics. But it also testified to the administration’s need to adapt to mobilities, the dynamics of which it barely understood, and which in reality imposed themselves on it.
- 32 IGLMSF (1695, 68).
- 33 GRIOSLA (1755, 83-84).
26During the quarantine, the main issue for the lazaret’s prior was to maintain a link between the lazaret and the city, while also safeguarding the health of the urban population and that of the passengers communicating with different social groups in Trieste, announcing and preparing their arrival, or simply doing business. A comparison of the various Mediterranean lazarets sheds light on this social life. The daily life of the lazarets implied a problem of control for the authorities. Mealtimes were particularly important, both for the social life of individuals and for controlling the risks that gatherings could entail. The Instruzzioni e governo del lazzaretto di Messina stated, for example, that during a period of quarantine it was allowed “to run a tavern at the lazaret, where wine and all sorts of edible things are sold, on the sole condition that all operations are treated with such caution, that the quarantine is not disturbed or hindered in any way”.32 The Messina authorities also feared the risk of fire related to the tavern’s activities. This could lead to the lazaret having to be evacuated and to an unexpected end to the quarantine, which would endanger the city. The fire risk was also mentioned in the General Regolamento of 1755.33 Nevertheless, supply management remained central, and the procedure was scrupulously described:
At eleven o’clock in the morning and four o’clock in the afternoon, and at the hours that will be known to be the most convenient, the prior will let the necessary things for the food and sustenance of the people in quarantine pass through the lazarets. The prior, or the guardian, must personally attend this transaction, and monitor and follow the delivery of the parcels through a long wooden basket in which they will be placed. The money will be returned by this same basket after it has been soaked in saltwater or vinegar. None of the persons on duty, nor the guardians will be allowed to eat with the passengers, the guards, or the porter; on this occasion, with the help of the prior or the guardian, entry will be permitted for the captains of the ships that wish to refill water containers without the persons destined for this office being able to communicate with them.34
- 35 OeStA, FHK, Litorale, 784, fasc. 36/1 n° 1431.
- 36 GPWOLPST (1769, 47).
27As in the city, the tavern at the lazaret was intended to organise and monitor the sociability of individuals (Rau and Schwerhof 2004). While all lazarets had a tavern, their functions varied. In 1772, for example, poor management of attendance at the cantina of the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa in Trieste led to the prior’s resignation.35 Lazaret regulations therefore only theoretically prohibited contacts that were not monitored and that may have represented a significant sanitary risk. In practice, the administration of the lazarets had to find a balance between the economic interests at stake, the curiosity of the city’s inhabitants about what the merchants would be offering for sale, and the desire of passengers to establish or re-establish social contacts with their friends and families and to trade or find a job. Maintaining a link between the lazaret and the city implied allowing information, rumours, letters and people to circulate. Letters were one way in which passengers and the urban society could establish and maintain contacts. The four to five weeks of quarantine were also a time when written contacts also had to be managed for long-distance travellers. These correspondences were regulated by letters and bills being disinfected with perfume upon arrival and then rested for a while before being delivered to their addressees. Correspondence announced one’s arrival to family and friends, while also being an opportunity to contact business partners and to use a local gazette to advertise products that would soon be available in the city.36
- 37 GRIOSLA (1755, 63-77).
28The main contacts between quarantined persons and the city were established by guards and officials, even though every effort was made to limit these contacts. The Lazzaretto Santa Teresa regulations, for example, required passengers and people working at the lazaret to follow two separate routes so that they would never have to pass each other. The guards were the first people that passengers met and whom they asked for news about the city they wanted to visit and about the job and stock markets. Guards were also assigned to individuals throughout their quarantine. This physical proximity meant an affinity could develop between the guard and the traveller. Because of this proximity and the possible difference in wealth between some passengers and guards, lazaret regulations placed heavy emphasis on the incorruptibility of the agents employed at the lazaret, with the prior himself being responsible for the people he employed.37 Such proximity could also enable passengers to become quickly aware of the habits of their guards and, in this way, to create a certain freedom for themselves, as Casanova confessed in Ancona: “I begged my guardian to be so kind as not to lock me up as he did every night, and he had no difficulty in satisfying me; on condition, however, that he would keep an eye on me, for if I ventured to jump down [into the first floor courtyard] he would lose his head” (Casanova 1999, 145).
29The prior could also grant certain people the right to enter the lazarets. In 1785, for example, John Howard was received by the prior for a visit, without staying there. Trieste’s regulations also mentioned the possibility for passengers to consult a city doctor of their choice within the lazaret. These visits were at passengers’ own expense and under strict supervision, but could be essential for a merchant. Doctors were not only medical experts, but also influential intermediaries on whom passengers relied for building or developing their local networks and preparing the best conditions for their arrival in the city and their integration into the merchant community.38 Although, of course, not all “curious” people were able to visit the lazaret, they could nevertheless go as far as its doors as if they were at a show. The cultural diversity of the quarantined people and their sometimes high social status meant the lazaret was an eye-catcher. Whereas actors, jugglers and acrobats were prohibited in Trieste because of the risk that they could have been infected and could spread the disease, the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa was transformed in 1783 into a diplomatic scene, with the whole of Europe getting to hear, through the gazettes, of the arrival of a Moroccan ambassador, Mohamed Bin Abdel Malek. The stay of a Muslim ambassador contributed to the lazaret’s prestige and attracted interest among the city’s inhabitants and the gazette writers (Do Paço 2008, 229-261).
30Meetings between passengers and city inhabitants, too, were unavoidable. These were therefore regulated and monitored, with parloirs becoming ingenious places for creating, maintaining and developing social relations. In 1807, the topographer Johann Kollman expressed his enthusiasm for the parloirs at the Lazzaretto Santa Teresa as follows:
In order to allow foreigners and ship captains to do their work even during the quarantine period, special corridors and halls have been designated in the lazaret (...) where they can talk to each other in a separate place and, apart from mutual contact, maintain all civil relations. (Kollman 1807, 30)
31As Kollman saw it, parloirs allowed negotiations to continue despite the health system that quarantined persons were forced to respect. The visiting room could also give the lazaret a labour market function for individual immigrants who were recruited there and could therefore count on protection in the city and on an income at the end of their quarantine. This system was partly inspired by the one set up in Marseille, as Howard reported:
The parloirs are long galleries with seats in them, situated between the gates and separated by wooden balustrades and wire lattice, beyond which there are other balustrades, distant about ten feet, at which the persons in quarantine may see and converse with such friends as may choose to visit them. The wires are intended to prevent anything from being handed to them, or from them. And that nothing may be thrown over, and no escapes be made. (Howard 1791, 4)
32The Neapolitan revolutionary Giuseppe Castaldi noted in Marseille in 1801, when he arrived as a refugee, that “on each side of the gate that projects into the city, there are two corridors, covered with as many similar ones opposite, separated by doors. From there, the inhabitants of the city can communicate with those who are in quarantine without fear of infection” (Castaldi 1811, 4). Papon also observed: “By the side of the great gate, there are two barriers, distant one from the other by two toises, and covered with a roof. It is here that the people of the city come to speak to their relatives and friends, who are in quarantine”. And he added: “This place is open on two sides, so that the porter & his assistant can see what is going on in these conferences” (Papon 1786, 714). Trieste parloirs also inspired the new lazarets of Livorno in 1780. The social importance of the parloirs was such that they remained open even in times of epidemic. With regard to the Tuscan free port, Gorani reported that:
I saw in the third lazaret three Jews arriving from Algiers, where the plague was beginning to manifest itself. They were carefully guarded as were all those deposited in this lazaret, the most rigorous of all. One can communicate with them only through bars placed at a distance far enough so that the air carries away and dissipates the miasmas emanating from their bodies and their clothing. In addition, the guards observe the curious very closely and prevent them from becoming victims of their own imprudence. It is also noteworthy that the inhabitants of Livorno avoid approaching the detainees for fear of being suspected themselves; for the police are so severe on this article that the suspicion of having touched something belonging to the prisoners is enough to be subjected to this detention. (Gorani 1793, 150)
33Gorani thus emphasised an essential element of the social life in the lazarets. For visitors, the fear of police repression was greater than the fear of being exposed to the plague. The tension existing between the agency of the social actors and the health imperatives of the administration was reflected in the management of the parloirs and, more broadly, prevented totalitarian control of the lazarets. In this way, the parloirs illustrated that the principle of good intelligence had to preside over government of the lazarets and also the constant negotiations between the administrative authorities and society.
34While the free port of Odessa imitated Mediterranean facilities, the British lieutenant Adolphus Slade’s feelings about the parloirs were more mixed. He despaired of the superfluous precautions taken by the administration and the poor conditions in which visitors were received:
Every obstacle was also systematically thrown in the way of persons in the city desirous of visiting the detenus: a pass was required in the first place, and then the visitor had to maintain standing in that road exposed to the weather, which was very inclement. He could not approach us nearer than fifteen feet: on either side were iron grattings, through which we looked and shouted at each other. A visit to the lazzaretto was so inconvenient, that we could not but feel exceedingly beholden to any friends who came to see us, feeling it incumbent on us at the same time to beg would not repeat the risk of catching a bad cold by exposing themselves in the wind and snow on our account. (Slade 1840, 314)
35The parloirs invite us to revise the idea of lazarets being totally disconnected from the cities in which they were located. Instead, these spaces can be seen as illustrating the lazaret administration’s concern to make their establishment attractive and to offer opportunities to establish and maintain the bonds that were indispensable for successfully conducting business and integrating newcomers in the city.
36The Trieste lazarets were located at the intersection of three circulation systems and were part of information channels linking them to the Western Mediterranean basin, the Adriatic and the Danube cordon sanitaire. They operated as a multiscalar and polycentric complex that organised, processed and tracked movements of people and goods through a system of identification. While the lazarets together formed an airlock within which an individual’s progress was slow, they were also the framework for a social life that was intended to be as normal as possible, and that was therefore open to the exterior. The history of lazarets allows us to transcend the often-caricatured opposition between health risks and movements of people. Circulations were neither always fluid nor direct. Instead, they proceeded at varying paces and rhythms and, even at their slowest, were never completely motionless. Perceiving a circulatory phenomenon as a question of scale makes it possible to identify flows, the way they were processed and redistributed, and the complex and precise mechanisms by which they were monitored. The history of lazarets cannot, therefore, be limited to the study of a constraining device by which a state developed its bio-power. Instead, lazarets can be seen as observation posts for trans-imperial circulations within the Mediterranean and between the Mediterranean and continental Europe. They were also physical and administrative gateways explaining movements of people and goods, and making these people and goods compatible with the territories to which their circulations led them. Lastly, they were spaces of sociability open to the city where commercial negotiations and the socialisation of individuals played out.
37Is there a contradiction between the lazarets’ roles of control and their roles as facilitators of mobility? Like all European administrations at the time, the Habsburg administration needed merchant circulations to flow. These flows represented important sources of tax revenue, and it was as much for tax collection purpose as for health security that the lazarets were regarded as essential stopovers in trade with the Ottoman Empire. The lazarets of Trieste were essential elements in the city’s status as a free port as they, more than any other institutions, embodied the regional integration intended by the Treaty of Passarowitz on peace and trade that the Habsburg, Ottoman and Venetian empires signed in 1718. To a certain extent, the modernity of their infrastructures and the security they granted to merchants meant that the lazarets did not simply facilitate the mobility of people and goods, but also promoted them through the competition they engaged in the Adriatic and more widely in the Mediterranean. A bolder perspective would also simply be to emphasise that the lazarets bore witness to an attempt by administrations to control territories where mobilities preceded borders and with which empires were obliged to deal, or of which they even tried to take advantage.