Mythic Venice #Dungeon23 #City23 April

This year I’ve been participating in Dungeon 23, which is a daily writing challenge, to get together material for a Venice Gazette here for Ars Magica or Magonomia. The first four entries for April have already been published as part of the March episode because they were to do with carnival masks, so I kept all of that material together.

April 5th, Navigum Isidis.
This mystery cult was imported into Imperial Rome from Egypt. It focuses on Isis and uses a model ship in its rituals, hence the name Ship of Isis. Its sacred days the 5th of March. Some scholars claim that the procession, the Carras Navalus, is the ancestor of carnival. This may or may not be true in real life, but it might work for us in Ars Magica. It’s a cult for seafarers and merchants, which includes most of the ruling class, the Venice.

April 6th, Liston de Maschere.
At the start of carnival, people dress up, mask and promenade in the Campos and Stefano. Later, the Liston, the promenade, moves to St. Mark’s. It was so popular it needed the largest space. On the 26th of December, since Stefano’s Saints Day, men wear a tabarro, a heavy cloak, some women do also. Women usually wear the zendale, which is a black shawl, although some men do also. The tall shoes mentioned in earlier episodes are called chopines, apparently, and the fans mentioned in an earlier episode, where I discussed fans as a replacement for wands, are called ventuoles.

The 7th of March, Fat Thursday.
Fat Thursday is the final day before Lent, feasting, dancing, ball fights and baiting, and from 1548 an acrobat walks from a ship up to the Campanile, then down again, saluting the doge on the way. I haven’t made clear there that they’re walking up a rope from a ship, which is moving with the tide, up to the top of the bell tower.

There are boating contests for both men and women. There are fights on the San Barbara Bridge, and it ends with fireworks. There is art on Italiancarnival.com.

There’s also a mention in my notes of Hunting Thursday, which is apparently a bull sacrifice.

April 8th, Cards.
Bassetta was invented in 1593, it’s a game for 3 to 4 players and a banker, 13 cards per hand, players each show a card, or more, and bet, and then the dealer shows the bottom card and pays out half bets. Then he deals four cards and pays matches, one to one, and then he deals another card and takes the matches for himself. You go until the money or the pack are exhausted. There’s also a reparlay rule for higher odds. The bank has a very severe advantage.

In English it’s called Basset. When it gets to France, only the sons of nobles are legally permitted to be bankers. It’s played mostly by the very wealthy. Its inventor was sent into exile for the destitution it bought on some of the noble families.

The Biribissi is a lottery: There’s a mention of burning lotto balls in Dante’s Inferno.. The public lottery, the Pirie e Botteghe a Rialto, was first held in 1522 and the prize was real estate.

Primiera is a late 15th century game, it’s the ancestor of poker, it has raising, bluffing, and card combinations. The cards in Primiera are as follows, four high card, a seven is equal to 21, a six is
equal to 18, a five is equal to 15, a four is equal to 14, a three is equal to 13, a two is equal to 12, a face card is equal to 10, and an ace is equal to 16.

A chorus is what we would call four of a kind.
A fluxus is what we would call a flush,
A supremus is the seven six and ace of a single suit.
A primiera is one card per suit.
Numbers are two and three of one suit.

April 9th, the first theatre and notes on keysellers.
The first modern theatre in the world is built in Venice in the Magonomia period, it’s called
the Michieli theatre.

There are no tickets, people who want what we would now call a season ticket instead are given a key to a theatre box. If you want using your box you can rent out your key for the night, there’s even a particular peddler that people trust with their keys to hand them out in haggle prices. At some point ambassadors are banned from hiring theatre boxes because these are great places for running agents.

The first opera house was opened in 1637, the Teatro San Casino. “Casino” just means “little house” by the way,

The apparati of the theatre (the sets and props) are side-lines for some famous painters.

April 10th, My shopping list
Master Alexis’s book.
Monsters and statistics.
Generic human NPCs
Covenant creation guide
Maps of significant places
Deck plans for the Bucintoro and for a generic gondola.
Deck plans for a generic galley, great galley, and a round ship..
Generic palazzo and nunnery plans,
Generic pharmacy floorplan
Stats for the mask characters: all lists of their advantages and virtues
The Pantamerone monsters I’ve been putting off for years
Consider some production details

April 11th. Master Alexious of Piedmont’s Book of Secrets, Volume 1.
It has the following spells which I am going to try and map across to Ars Magica and Magonomia.
Curing lunacy caused by double headed passion worms.
Cure for the falling sickness (which is epilepsy)
Oil of brimstone
To draw out the poison of wounds made by envenomed blades.
To draw out animal venom.
To draw out arrowheads and iron.
A perfect remedy for blows of sword or staff or stone
A water to heal all manner of wounds that every man should always have in his house
To make red oil of St John’s Wort
To cure withered limbs
Remedies for malaria, pleurisy, rabies and scrofula.
Plague cures and protective charms,
Scented waters, oils and powders, soaps, perfumes, pomanders, jams, sugared fruit, sugared place settings.
Waters that make the face look 25 or 15.
Face treatments, depilatory creams, hair and beard colours, dyes, paints, inks, silverpoints.
Powder to erase letters or mistakes
Recipes to make quicksilver, cinnabar aqua fortis and to make metals.
How to gild iron with water, foil and quicksilver.
How to gild silver
How to counterfeit a diamond with a white sapphire
How to fuse rubies or emeralds into larger rubies or emeralds
How to gild copper

April 12 The Second Book.
Spells to:
make cosmetics
make oil of vitriol
colour stone or metal gold
make iron or steel soft
harden iron or steel
make a glue that holds like a nail
cause marvellous dreams
have a good memory
make no dog bark at you
have steel cut iron like lead
make bones soft
make invisible ink triggered by water
make invisible ink triggered by fire,
make wild beasts not hurt you
be safe from serpents
see wild beasts in a dream
make an apple or ball that provokes sleep
dye copper into gold
make oil of brimstone
make sal ammoniac
dye iron gold
dye iron silver
erase letters from parchment,
make dry vinegar
cure sickness, sea sickness, deafness
create magical fish bait
remedy scorpion stings
make magical bait for fowls
cure salamander bites
cure snake bite
cure rabies
cure venomous stings
drive venomous beasts from your house
defend against poison, eaten or drunk
not be stung by scorpions
not be stung by wasps or bees
cure one who has eaten toadstools
grant safety from all sorcery and enchantment
grant safety against all lightning and tempest
grind gold and silver
imprint metals
make metals seem like silver
make a light in the night (to attract fish)
make a stone which creates flame when it is wetted with spit
make oil of laudanum,
make leather look like gold or silver
help one who cannot sleep
detect arsenic
restore letters, and equine medicine.
to brew an emetic for poison

April 13, The third and fourth books of Master Alexis of Piedmont
Cures for epilepsy, tinnitus, toothache, quinsy, throat puss, pleurisy, stomach pain, dropsy, colic, flux, and thrush
An inducer of birth
An easer of birth pain
Cures for incontinence of the bladder, swollen testicles, gravel (bladder stones), psoriasis
To staunch blood
To create opiates
To soften or harden iron
To soften or harden crystals
A solder for metals
To cast horn in a mould
To cast amber in a mould
How to capture salamanders
How to make gold using salamanders
How to make petroleum using walnuts
How to solidify mercury with aqua lunaris

Book four is all very similar with a couple of standouts like “a plaster to cure a rupture of the skull.”

April 14, Private lives in Renaissance Venice by Patricia Fortini-Brown – Knighthood

There are two orders of knighthood in Venice. The knights of St. Marco, who are virtually all foreigners, are honoured by the state and have no role in government. The knights of the
Stola d’Oro, are named after the gold sash they wear. The role is granted by the Senate to
Venetian men who have served in foreign courts and been knighted. They have no inherent power in government, but to be an ambassador you need to have political power and connections.

April 15, Pulling down palaces
The Querini Palace was pulled down after the Tiepolo-Querini plots failed. The state pulled down to thirds of the Querini Palace, because it was owned in common by three brothers, only two of whom were plotters. They bought the remaining third from the innocent brother, then designated the surviving structure as the city’s slaughterhouse. After the Tiepolo doge tried to seize the state with a popular uprising, the state pulled down his palace and made its footprint into a public park. There’s a pillar explaining the sentence,.

April 16. The fraterna
The basic commercial unit is the fraterna, which is an extended family unit. In Venice, only one or two sons in each generation marry. They live in their casa together with their parents and unmarried siblings. Married siblings may get a floor, the unmarried siblings get a room. Venetian casas are large with a shared central corridor and stairs. There are side rooms that lead into each other. This means that as the family changes, the suites can flex.

It’s a cheaper way of living than living independently, because it allows extended families to share servants into kitchen. There’s not a lot of privacy, however. Despite the lack of space, idealized versions have husbands and wives with separate connected rooms.

April 17, Mannerism, or Maniera
Mannerism is a style of art which became popular in the 1520s, vying with the High Renaissance style and ending around 1590, extinguished by the Baroque style. The term is an 18th century one, so it’s not used in period by characters, but it is useful to us.

Mannerist art doesn’t have the formality in design and perspective of High Renaissance art. The core principle is for the art to appear effortlessly elegant, so artists do odd things to sidestep problems in formal art. Limbs are elongated, they can quill weirdly, heads sometimes seem shrunken from true proportion. Space distorts. Symbols are jumbled together. It looks artificial. It’s not naturalistic, This might be our new Demon type, just humans that are done in this Mannerist style.

Mannerist art is meant to look good, as opposed to being functional or religious, much as it might be one of those two. Mannerist paintings are deliberately tense and unbalanced
compositions with twisted poses and exaggerated facial expressions. They have garish colours
and weird lighting choices.

April 18, Mannerist Gardens
The idea of Mannerist gardens and grottoes is to express the elegance, intellectualism, shock, and style of art in a navigable real world space. Oddly, some look quite like regiones, from an Ars Magica perspective. These gardens are designed for drama, so they are great for scenes and stories. In real life. They often hosted masques.
.
Water flows through the garden in a deliberate, dramatic way, often aided by water pumps. This may motivate automatons like musical instruments. They also sometimes have hidden squirters.

The best modern example is the Sacra Bosco, the Sacred Wood. Rough statues provide shocks in settings reached by paths hidden and revealed by landscaping tricks. The biggest sculpture is Hell’s Mouth, which was used for dining in the masques. Guests could eat while simultaneously being eaten by the Hell’s Mouth. There is an inscription on it which says “Abandon all thought, you who enter here.” and this is probably a deliberate nod to Dante. I have a note here that a giardino segreto might work as a lab.

April 19th, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 
This is a very popular book at the time, complete with illustrations. It’s highly symbolic, and its stories are filled with mannerist imagery. It reminds me a lot of Ars Magica’s “The Travels of Fedoso” in that it’s imprecise, and so can be read as a prophecy, as a life guide, or as entertainment. Similarly, the art is copied into real-world gardens and the processions are copied by the Venetian calza. I may steal some of the images for the final art in this project.

April 20th, Notes from “Sweets” by Tim Richardson.
Just as a note, for a long time I was working on an idea of a civil war in the Grocers’ Guild in London. In the real world, the Grocers split in half during the Magonomia period. The ones who made a great deal of money out of sugar gained their independence through various forms of legal chicanery. Eventually they gained the sponsorship of James I. This is why their symbol is a rhinoceros (which was meant to represent a unicorn) over a shield supported by two unicorns (these being the symbol of Scotland). Anyhow, because we’re using speziale, or pharmacies, so much in this project, I decided to combine the two.

We will get a lot of shapes and materials out of this for the Shape and Material table in Ars Magica.

Unicorns are known to love liquorice. Since Roman times, soldiers were issued liquorice
as a thirst suppressant. It was first planted in England, in York, in the 16th century.

A comfit is a sugar-coated seed or nut used generally to freshen the breath. Drageess, for example, are a comfit. Dragees were invented in France in the 13th century.
A pennet is a tube of sugar, sometimes twisted, and they’re prescribed for colds and consumption. Elizabeth’s brother Edward was prescribed them for his final illness.
A sucket is a candied fruit peel, originally from citrons, certainly later oranges and lemons. Preserves come in two forms, the wet form in the dry form. Wet forms are rather like jam or fruit in syrup, and dry is like old-fashioned quince paste. It can be sliced and rolled. Lozenges, originally, are the diamond shapes cut from the dry forms.

Pastilles have gum tracanth in them, and they may be post-period. The idea of that is to keep
the medicine in your mouth longer, trickling down your throat to extend the duration of the effect. Turkish delight was originally a throat medicine, too, although it uses a different mechanism.
The highest quality of fruit paste is called Paste of Genoa, regardless of where it actually
comes from.
Isinglas is sometimes used as a firming agent. That’s airbladder juice from fish.
Fruit leather exists.
What we Australians call hundreds and thousands are called non-parallels and can be used as magic dust.
Blanche powder is granulated, white sugar flavoured with spices to be sprinkled on fruit before eating. You can have blends or singled-out flavours so a diner can pick and mix at the table.
The French word for a box you keep sweets in is a dragieor.
An electuary is a syrup or jelly.
Sherbet is a mixture of sugar and fruit juice and ice.
A cordial is heart medicine in liquid form and it’s fruity.

Spice bread, rolls or cakes spiced as a potion alternative.

Sometimes colour codes flavour, but some people didn’t code by colour. They used pure white because that was seen as a sign of quality in sugar.

I have a note here to check “The names of all kinds of wares” by Thomas Newbury.

It notes that as a quick cheat, you can dip something in egg white and then shake it in sugar
to make coarse but quick comfits.

Marzipan was likely invented around 1150 in northern Italy. A movable edible prop of marchpane is called a subtlety in English, and it’s called an entrement in French and an intermezzo in Italian. They are also known as “warners” in English because they herald the arrival of the next course.

Pastillage is a multiple mix of sugar and gum tracanth.

A subtlety is top level confection work and if you needed one, you might seek out a specialist
to create it for you, rather than depending on your own servant.

April 21, Continued notes from “Sweets”

The first sugar warehouse in Venice was in 966. It imported sugar in conical loaves. Sugar comes in grades. The highest grade is “Egyptian” from Alexandria. It’s refined in Venice, and then often refined at the point of sale, and then sometimes refined again by the user. The first bulk shipment from Venice to England is in 1319 and lands at Southampton. It contains 10,000 pounds of sugar and 1,000 pounds of candy. Their return cargo is wool.

Smaller amounts of sugar are clearly present earlier. It’s clearly known from the 13th century. Candies were preserved fruit, pastes and suckets. They were easy to ship because they’re hydrophilic which makes them antibacterial. The first trace of a Venetian shop specifically for confections is in 1150 and spreads to Sicily in the North Italian cities by 1220.

Confectioners have candied fruit. Hard sweets however are found apothecaries.

Confectionery is seen as an Italian skill. Catherine de Medici brings those skills to France
creating their industry there.

April 22, Manus Christi
Manus Christi is a sweet, believed to be of great medicinal value and it differs slightly between makers. It’s a stick of hard sugar flavoured with violet, cinnamon, rose water and often flaked with gold leaf. It’s taken to maintain health. It’s not an emergency medicine. A variant of it, Manus Christi Parala has crushed pearls in it. Chests of Manus Christi are used as gifts between very rich people.

April 23, Candied fruit flowers and roots.

Candying allows out of season use. Flowers are kept from decay by candying. They retain their scent. Violets and roses seem quite popular. Blue borage, rosemary, dianthus and marigold are also preserved. Candied flowers are considered a Spanish thing in origin so “Spanish” is used as an adjective to mean “containing edible petals”.

Candied roots include ginger, parsley, fennel, elecampane, angelica, eringo and orchid roots (satyricons) are all mentioned. Eringo is sea-holy. There’s an industry in England centred on Colchester, which candies this because it’s valued as an aphrodisiac

Fruits, apples, pears, plums, quinces, damsons, gooseberries, cherries, barberries, oranges and lemons are candied. Dried fruit fills a price point under candied fruit but above honey. By the 16th century the English love to eat raw fruit as a snack in the street and this disgusts some visitors. It’s considered healthy and virtuous not indulgent.

Mint only becomes popular after the 19th century. It’s too difficult to make a strong flavour from its oil with the equipment on hand in period.

April 24th, Lady Confectioners
Confectionery, as a branch of food preparation, is part of the daily domestic alchemy expected of even well-off women. Lady confectioners have some sort of eroticism about them in some places and periods because they smell sweet, and spicy, and exotic. This might be a Fate Aspect. Also, they have sweets of course, which are considered a healthy pleasure.

The 25th, Banquets
Until the 16th century, the final course of an English feast is called a voidee. After that, it changes to a banquet (or a banquette) or sometimes a banker.

Banquet also include wafers and hypocras. Hypocras is spiced wine named after Hippocrates. The dessert course is believed to medically be good for you. The sweet dishes move from being interspersed through the courses to a dessert course in the 17th century.

April 26th, Theology of Sugar
Aquinas ends the debate on if you can eat sugar on fast days and his answer is yes.

Although nutritious, sweets are not eaten with nutrition as an intent. They are eaten to ease digestion and therefore they are medicine and therefore they are exempt from fasts.

Note that this is an easy demonic ploy. You give the conclusion then you undercut the medicinal intent. This encourages gluttony so, thanks Aquinas.

April 27th, Venetian spun sugar

Instead of marchpane, or perhaps in addition to marchpane, the Venetians use spun sugar. Its sugar strands that are made by flicking an implement across a couple of sticks so that you get sugar thread. This is used to make complicated, glassy shapes while cooling. It could possibly be animated by magic.

It can be used to make visually perfect copies of most things. At one banquet, all the items on the table including the tablecloth were made of spun sugar. This was 1,286 items in total. It can be gilded and silvered, so tableware and cutlery are popular choices. There are recipes from 1562 in alchemy manuals.

English people prefer sugar paste instead.

April 28th, Sugar for the apothecary.
Sugar is mildly hot and moist. It comes in a variety of consistencies. It preserves other
medicines. It makes other medicines easy to take. It binds other ingredients together. It aids in
the digestion of medicine. It tunes the strength of other medicines via dilution and the highest
quality of sugar may not be moist. It may be dry.

What I mean by tuning the strength by dilution is this: if you get a potent batch or a weak batch of a herb, you can cut it with more or less sugar so that the potency is correct.

April 29th, London notes
Pepperers are gathered around the Spicery of Westcheap, which is near the docks. I should check the history of the Society of Apothecaries, which was published in 1998 (Penelope Hunting.) By the 14th century, there were about 50 spices regularly traded in London. There were some itinerant traders. By the 14th century, every great town has an apothecary or a spicer. Grocers are people who engage in bulk trades. That’s where their name comes from. It’s German gross, meaning large.

Richardson says that the dispute between the apothecaries and groceries is one part of a 500 year long war that wages across the continent over monopolies on medicine. The apothecaries get their own guilds between 1294 in Freberg in Saxony and 1617 in London. Sometimes this ascendancy is joined to import restrictions on sweets, hence local specialisations and secret recipes.

Eventually in some places, confectioners break off again from the apothecaries.

April 30th, Trade changes in the 15th century.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 blocks Venetian sugar supplies from the east. Some trade continues from Crete and Cyprus. In 1450, the Portuguese start sugar plantations in Madeira and later expand that to the Azores in Brazil. The first Madeira sugar to land in England arrives in Bristol in 1456. The centre of the sugar trade then moves to Amsterdam and then Antwerp. Volumes are very high compared to the Middle Ages, but the Spanish and Portuguese duopoly keeps prices low but stable. Eventually large brokerages in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg and Rouen form. All of this money helps fuel the Dutch-Spanish war, which is covered in the core Magonomia book in some detail.

I’m going to include May 1st with the April material because it’s about confectioners. It’s a Character Aspect for fate, or a design guide
May 1, A note on confectioners skills from the Italian confectioner 1820 translated by Tim Richardson

To make gum paste properly, great care and dexterity, much patience, some knowledge of mythology, of history, and of the arts and modelling and design, are requisite.

That’s the end of the nights from Tim Richardson’s Sweets. Next we will move on to
Venetian legends and ghost stories by Alberto Toso Fei and then go back to the shopping list.
But that will be for the May episode.