A Price List for Rowers’ Health Expenses in Sixteenth-Century Venice

In March 1595, the Venetian office overseeing the Republic’s galleys rowers sought guidance from the local College of Physicians.

“For order of the most excellent Commander of the Convicts [the rowers were mostly convicts or slaves], may it please Your Excellencies to provide written information for the benefit and welfare of the galley slaves as well as for the benefit of the Serenissima [the govern of Venice], concerning the expenses that it will incur for the aforementioned and other cares. If the aforementioned galley slaves in the army require assistance, for they have wounds and sores in various parts of the body […].”[1]

A Venetian Galley in parade. (Venice, Museo Correr)

This information comes from the archives of the College of Medicine in Venice, which preserved its correspondence with the municipal government. The request responded to two preoccupations: the health of the rowers and the financial burden on the state, responsible for the rowers’ medical care in case of illness or injury. At the end of the sixteenth century, the practice of using galley slaves was relatively recent. The Republic of Venice began to employ convicts and prisoners laying in the humid Venetian prisons as rowers in 1542.[2] The office of Commander of the Convicts was created precisely at this time. Such practice came as a response to two conditions. First, the increasing scarcity of free oarsmen (called “galeotti di libertà”) the word galeotto comes from galley—a type of ship propelled primarily by rowing. Previously, Venetian ships employed mostly free rowers (also called buonavoglia, meaning “goodwill”). Since rowing was a hard and dangerous activity, and working conditions were very poor, progressively less and less men voluntarily accepted such a job. Therefore, tribunals would convict insolvent debtors or others to rowing in the galleys, and sometimes switched a death sentence into a rowing sentence of ten years.[3] Another category of galley slaves were public slaves. These were people enslaved as prisoners of war, populations from coastal areas more easily subject to attacks, or ships’ crews or passengers boarded by corsairs. Thus, one of the solutions to the lack of rowers was slavery.[4]

A page of the correspondence between the College of Physicians and the Commander of the Convicts in 1595.

The second reason for the institution of galley slaves was the necessity to reduce prison overcrowding. Keeping prisoners was costly while having galley slaves killed two birds with one stone, it emptied prisons and provided rowers, at the expenses of poor wretches and to the benefit of the public coffers. However, the Serenissima had to provide for the basic needs of the galley slaves, hence the query to the College of Physicians. The physicians responded cautiously, emphasizing that the vast variety of ailments and rowers made it challenging to provide the information required:

‘‘Your Illustrious Lordship sought our opinion on the specific illnesses described in your mandate, namely the potential expenses involved in wounds and other emerging maladies, as well as other medical procedures concerning the human body. We respond by saying that we cannot provide specific information on what is being sought due to the vast variety of both ailments and individuals. These things vary infinitely, including both medications and their quantities, as it may happen that the same illness in different subjects requires much more varied and extensive treatments. Therefore […] we reasonably request such specific information, which the galley overseer or another authority could obtain, particularly regarding the nature of the illness, the time it has been treated, and the medications used. Keeping detailed records in a book, which, upon arrival in Venice, could be more firmly and reliably assessed by experts from our College. This would allow a more informed and well-founded judgment than what might be inferred from such diverse and uncertain subjects and illnesses.’’[5]

In the medical tradition of the time—the Galenic framework—individuals were considered more in relation to their singularities and specificities rather than in relation to their affinities, as we tend to do today. Illnesses were often not considered specific diseases, acknowledging the variability in individual responses to medical problems. Indeed, even today physicians are not able to explain why one person gets an infectious disease and their siblings do not, or why similar patients with the same disease even if treated similarly progress differently.

After having waited two months, the Commander of the Convicts finally received the desired response. In the meantime, officials of the two offices first tried to clarify their differences through letters, but eventually they had to meet and discuss the request “with words,” in person.

The physicians made a catalogue of possible injuries. Which sounded like this:

“An injury of the head with a bone fracture of a sturdy person with a good complexion it will take no less than 60 and more days to heal with an expense of 7-8- ducats.

An injury up to the bone but without fracture, will take a little more than a month and an expense of 3-4 ducats of medicines.”[6]

The Commander of the Convicts was a branch of the government of Venice, while the College of Physicians was a professional association to which the government delegated decisions regarding public health. Both institutions were primarily made of aristocrats which enjoyed a high social status. Yet, they held different views of human bodies and illness. Eventually, the Medical College complied to the economic needs of the Venetian state. By cataloguing possible injuries and diseases, the physicians created the price list they were asked for. Treating rowers as if they were economic assets instead of humans, lumping their health problems in made-up categories which unlikely and imprecisely represented reality. This was an early instance of the objectification of human bodies for economic reasons. A process that, in this case, physicians tried to resist, but only for a little while. During the early modern period, as this blog shows, such a trend would only intensify. In the nineteenth century, the new medical framework that emerged after the scientific revolution stressed on the mathematization of the body, an approach that brought many advantages but also favored the trend of objectifying bodies.

Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore is a social historian of early modern medicine, pharmacy and science. She received her PhD in History from Yale University in 2021. She is currently working on her book project, The StateDrug. Theriac, Pharmacy, and Medicine in the Global Age.

[1] Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia, Collegio Medico 2329 (9723), 96r.

[2] Mario Nani Mocenigo, Storia della marina veneziana: da Lepanto alla caduta della Repubblica [History of the Venetian navy: from Lepanto to the fall of the Republic] (in Italian) (Rome: Tipo lit. Ministero della Marina, 1935), 42.

[3] Giovanna Fiume, “La schiavitù mediterranea tra medioevo ed età moderna. Una proposta bibliografica,” Estudis. Revista de Historia Moderna 41 (2015): 267–318, 281.

[4] Jacques-Guy Petit, Nicole Castan, Claude Faugeron, Michel Pierre, André Zysberg (eds.), Histoire des galères, bagnes et prisons (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1991); Salvatore Bono, Schiavi musulmani nell’Italia moderna. Galeotti, vu’ cumprà, domestici (Perugia: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1999).

[5] Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia, Collegio Medico 2329 (9723), 96r-96v.

[6] Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia, Collegio Medico 2329 (9723), 97v.