Multiple and Fluid: Religious and Diasporic Belonging in Venice’s Maritime State in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

Abstract:As a result of the Ottoman territorial conquests, the Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a site of an unprecedented influx of immigrants from its colonies in the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. Venice’s own polycentric and plural legal and institutional system provided a backdrop for complex processes of accommodation and contestation of cultural difference. Both state institutions and legal categories struggled to respond to the demands of Venice’s increasingly diverse populations. Immigrants themselves negotiated the legal and social categories of the state, and drew on different conceptions of social membership, in order to formulate their own claims about identity and belonging. This article focuses on two specific social sites where notions of community and belonging were elaborated: the establishment of Venetian civic ritual and the resulting negotiation of local religion in the eastern Adriatic commune of Kotor (Cattaro), and the working of lay religious corporations of foreigners in Venice, which complicated metropolitan and colonial perspectives and created a more reciprocal understanding of the world in which both colonial administration and local populations picked their way between multiple legal, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries. Religious devotion emerges not simply as a reflection of wider social, economic, and cultural changes, but as a dynamic and active agent in their negotiation.