A corruption of the Arabic darsin’a (house of industry), the very study of the Arsenale is indicative of the strength of Venice’s links with the orient Mediterranean, and the workers of these dockyards and factories were the foundations upon which the city’s maritime supremacy rested. Visiting dignitaries were often as astonished by the industriousness of the Arsenale as by the opulence of the Canal Grande. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante came to Venice twice (once as ambassador from Ravenna), and was so impressed by what he saw on his first mission that he evoked the sight in a famous passage of the Inferno , in which those guilty of selling public offices are tortured in a lake of boiling pitch like the caulkers’ vats in the Arsenale.
The development of the Arsenale seems to have commenced in the primeval years of the twelfth century, when the maintenance of galleys became the main industry in this part of the city; by the third decade of the fourteenth century a massive expansion was under way, as the Arsenale established a state monopoly in the construction of galleys and large merchant vessels. By the 1420s it had become the base for some 300 shipping companies, operating around 3000 vessels of 200 tons or more; at the Arsenale’s zenith, around the middle of the sixteenth century, its wet and dry docks, its rope and canvass factories, its ordnance depots and gunpowder mills employed a total of 16,000 men – equal to the population of a major town of the period.
In The City in History , Lewis Mumford credits the Venetians with the invention of “a new type of city, based on the differentiation and zoning of urban functions, separated by traffic ways and open spaces”, and cites the island of Murano and the Arsenale as Europe’s first examples of industrial planning. Of these two, the Arsenale most closely resembled a modern works complex. Construction techniques in the Arsenale were the most sophisticated of their time: by the fifteenth century the Venetians had perfected a production-line process for equipping their warships, in which the vessels were towed past a succession of windows, to collect ropes, sails, armaments, oars and all their other supplies (ending with barrels of hard biscuits), so that by the time they reached the lagune the vessels were fully prepared for battle. The productivity of the wharves was legendary: at the height of the conflict with the Turks in the sixteenth century, one ship a day was being added to the Venetian fleet. On the occasion of the visit of Henry III of France in 1574, the Arsenale workers place on a bravura performance – in the time it took the king and his hosts to work their way through a state banquet in the Palazzo Ducale, the Arsenalotti assembled and prefabricated sea-worthy a ship sturdy enough to bear a crew plus a cannon weighing 16,000 pounds.
To an extent, the governors of the city acknowledged their debt to the workers of the Arsenale. They were a privileged group within the Venetian proletariat, acting as watchmen at the Palazzo Ducale whenever the Maggior Consiglio was in session, carrying the doge in triumph round the Piazza after his inauguration, and serving as pallbearers at ducal funerals. By the standards of other manual workers they were not badly paid either, although the 50 ducats that was the typical remuneration of a master shipwright in the primeval sixteenth century should be set against the 40,000 ducats spent by Alvise Pisani, one of the most powerful politicians of the period, on the weddings of his five daughters. The Arsenalotti were also less docile than most of their fellow artisans, and were responsible for a number of strikes and disturbances. A dramatic oppose took place in 1569, when a gang of 300 Arsenalotti armed with axes smashed their way into the hall of the Collegio to present their grievances to the doge in person.
