1 Genoese Military Transport: An Overview

Ever since 1528, when Andrea Doria and Emperor Charles V signed a far-reaching contract (asiento) for the management of 12 galleys for the Spanish crown, Genoese aristocratic families such as the Doria, Centurione, Lomellini, Spinola, and De Mari had played a vital role in shipbuilding, financing and naval supply alongside the recruitment of maritime personnel.¹⁰ Due to its strategic position along the ‘Spanish Road’ to the Low Countries, Genoa served as a centre for military transport, and Genoese shipping merchants, either on their own initiative or as sub-contractors of the larger asientistas de galeras, shipped Spanish soldiers around the region.¹¹ This business widened substantially after 1650 as Spanish military decline opened up new opportunities for Genoese naval transport, a process that further accelerated when the French forced the maritime republic to declare neutrality following their brutal bombardment of the city in May 1684.¹² Consequently, Genoese transporters played a vital role during the first half of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–06) as close to 100,000 Bourbon military personnel from Toulon, Marseille, Naples and other friendly ports either disembarked in Genoese territory or transited through the city to the Duchy of Milan, Sardinia, Sicily, the State of the Presidi, or elsewhere in the Western Mediterranean.¹³

The precise terms of Genoese employment in the Bourbon armed forces remain unclear, however. Staunchly neutral throughout the conflict, the government of Genoa refused to provide galleys to the Franco-Spanish armies. Indeed, to strengthen their non-interventionalist claims, Genoa’s rulers instead offered vital transportation to diplomats, grandees, and their families under neutral banner including, among many, the wife of the Duke of Savoy, Anne Marie d’Orléans; the Spanish Viceroy to Sicily, Felipe Antonio Spinola, 4th Marquis of Los Balbases; the English ambassador Henry Newton; and the French commander Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme.¹⁴ Surviving French naval records show that Genoese shipping merchants did not take on seasonal military transport directly from the French state. For example, no Genoese-registered vessels appear among the 31 ships that ferried 8,774 soldiers, 113 officers, and 245 horses from Provence to Alassio from 26 February to 15 March 1703 nor among the dozen ships moored in the port of Genoa that same year awaiting the transportation of over 2,000 French and Piedmontese infantry, although this does not preclude the possibility of Genoese captains working under false identity such as a certain “Captain Calcagno”, who transported 230 soldiers and 30 horses for the French around this time.¹⁵ Rather, contemporary reports suggest that before 1706 the bulk of Genoese skippers involved in the military transport trade took up employment as sub-contractors of the Genoese-Neapolitan asientista de galeras Giovanni Andrea Mariano Doria Del Carretto, Duke of Tursis, whose seven galleys made up the second largest squadron in the Spanish galley fleet.¹⁶ In fact, the Genoese presence in the Duke of Tursis fleet was not lost on France’s enemies. In 1703, the English Admiral Cloudesley Shovell threatened the republic with reprisals because crews of Genoese manned and commanded three of the duke’s galleys.¹⁷ Two years later the British envoy to Savoy, Richard Hill, ordered the HMS Mary Galley and Lyme to attack a 40-gun Genoese ship transporting 500 Italian soldiers from Finale to Barcelona because he could not “bear the sending of forces from the Milanese to Spain”.¹⁸

2 The Allied Convoy System and Transport-for-Hire (1707–12)

Regardless of how they were employed, the combination of relatively short transportation distances, an absence of significant enemy ships in the region, and pre-existing personal and business ties meant that private, short-term transporters in the Western Mediterranean before 1707 worked alone or in small numbers. This regional pattern of naval transport changed dramatically due to the Bourbon defeat at Turin in September 1706 and the subsequent shift of the Mediterranean theatre from Italy to Iberia. Beginning in December 1707 the Allies set up a complex transportation system whereby its wealthy members (the maritime powers of Great Britain and the United Provinces) promised to transport Austrian-Imperial soldiers as well as subsidized Prussian, Palatinate, Hessian and Grison troops to Catalonia, choosing to do so from Genoese Liguria because, as one British official remarked, “the expense of the transport [would] be much less and easier from the coast of Genoa than from any other place whatsoever.”¹⁹ Importantly, due to naval shortages, long travel distances, French privateers, underdeveloped maritime networks, and the sheer complexity of naval combined operations, the British and Dutch shipped these soldiers in highly organized convoys of auxiliary vessels and transports. 49 ships ferried about 7,500 troops from Vado to Barcelona in December 1707 (see below) while the shipment of 2,200 Palatinate and Austrian-Imperial cavalry and 3,600 infantry in July 1708 required 32 British and Dutch men-of-war and between 80 and 90 transports.²⁰ Similar large-scale embarkations from Vado, Savona, and Finale set off in July 1708, November 1708, January 1709, June 1710, May 1711, November 1711, and June-August 1712, taking a total of approximately 40,000 Allied soldiers to Catalonia from 1707 to 1712.²¹

Yet the safety of such huge convoys came with steep downsides as Anglo-Dutch warships frequently arrived to the seaside late, under-manned and short of sufficient cargo room for their (also often tardy, miscounted, and ill) human and animal freight, forcing Allied agents to turn to Genoese trading vessels to fill the supply gaps on the fly. Most often, these agents began their frantic searches for transporters at the Loggia della Mercanzia/dei Mercanti (Loggia of Commerce/Merchants), the city’s merchant exchange. To find Genoese vessels in December 1707, John Chetwynd, envoy to the Duke of Savoy in Turin, hired an unnamed merchant conjointly with a naval officer who searched the city for available captains.²² The recruitment of troop transports was done on an ad-hoc basis, fitting the immediate needs of the moment such as when British admiral John Leake, having arrived at Vado with insufficient space to transport Austrian-Imperial cavalry in 1709, sent his attaché, James Croft, to rent as many ships as he could and deliver them to Vado for service to Barcelona.²³ Beyond the exchange, Allied agents further used less formal commercial settings such as banquets and the city’s two theatres, the Teatro Falcone and Teatro Sant’Agostino, to solicit shipping merchants to take up military transport. State-sponsored avvisi from Vienna, for example, report the common sight of German and British officers at performances such as the handful of Austrian-Imperial cavalrymen who watched a performance of La caduta dei decemviri in late 1701; a group of Hessian officers awaiting embarkation to Iberia who took in one of the first performances of Turno Aricino in October 1707; or the British Admiral John Jennings, who visited the city’s opera while preparing to escort 2,444 men and 720 horses from Vado in November 1711.²⁴

Wherever they solicited Genoese captains, Allied diplomats, soldiers and naval officers actively competed with each other for the employment of Genoese shipping merchants, an unfortunate outcome of the broad, coalition warfare of the era. Exactly such a supply shortage plagued the July 1708 convoy mentioned above. Problems began when John Chetwynd and his Genoa-based brother, William, learned that Admiral Leake had failed to bring sufficient ships to transit the 5,800 Italian and German troops assembling at Vado. “The transports I brought with me are of several burthens, which I have computed will be sufficient to carry 1560 horses, more than which I could not procure, unless I had stayed a fortnight longer for the unloading of some merchant ships”, Leake wrote to Chetwynd from Vado in late May.²⁵ Worse still, agents of Albert van der Meer, the Dutch commissaris at Turin, had been renting out Genoese trading vessels all summer in anticipation of shipping his own part of the Palatinate cavalry. Austrian-Imperial diplomats had also been renting vessels in the city for a variety of other military purposes.²⁶ Thus, after Leake had sent his attaché J. Wardlaw to Genoa to recruit captains in early June, he was disappointed to learn that the Genoese at the exchange had “very unkindly refused to let their vessels, though otherwise unemployed” while others “demand double the freight that [had] been usually paid.”²⁷ Unable to find available transports in Genoa, Leake and the Chetwynds had to look further afield, employing merchants from Livorno, loading them up with supplies, and sending them over to Vado, an unexpected delay to the whole operation.²⁸ “We have no news yet of our transports from Livorno or yours from Genoa”, William Chetwynd wrote to his Dutch counterpart Van der Meer in early July, “so I am beginning to worry … but I do not command the winds.”²⁹

Complicating matters further, the Chetwynds, van der Meer, and other Allied agents had to compete for the same Genoese ships with their Bourbon opponents, Bourbon-aligned asientistas, the Genoese state and, of course, private commercial firms. Despite the collapse of the Bourbon position in Italy, agents working directly for the French crown continued to hire Genoese merchant skippers to move troops alongside war supplies such as guns, gunpowder, and food for the Duke of Tursis. Most famously, in March 1710, Tursis, the Duke of Uceda (Juan Francisco Pacheco y Téllez-Girón), and the Marques de Lacoli (leader of the pro-Bourbon Sards) hired a number of unnamed Genoese ships to assist in a covert invasion of the Allied-controlled island of Sardinia, a scheme made all the worse because a significant portion of the soldiers were in fact Corsican, Swiss and German soldiers only just demobilized from the Genoese army.³⁰ And while the invasion ended in disaster, the duke and his men returning to Genoa infirmed and distraught, the British pressed the Genoese to arrest the injured asientista and prevent him from hiring transporters in their city.³¹ “This government has pretensions to Her Majesties’ Favour as well as by the assistance we have given to the German Troops towards their embarkation on board the fleet and the readiness with which we complied with whatever was desired by the Commanders thereof”, the Genoese secretary of state replied angrily, reminding the Allies of the vital role his city played in military transportation and adding how, although the duke was their “fellow citizen”, “you know very well that he and his family have for so long a time been in the service of another Prince and that his employment has nothing to do with their being inhabitants of this city.”³²

Indeed, the sheer quantity of Genoese ships transporting soldiers for the various combatants around the Riviera di Ponente in these years threatened to breach the city’s neutrality and bring its merchants into open war with each other. In 1708, for example, four papal galleys accompanying Genoese transports from Avignon to support the papal campaign against Joseph I narrowly averted firing on two English men-of-war escorting a further four rented Genoese ships with 1,000 recruits for Barcelona only “because of the tranquillity (of the sea)” prevented them from catching up to their quarry.³³ An even more precarious moment occurred the following year when the Allies failed to find Genoese transports for Barcelona and nearly declared war on the republic. The conflict arose in spring 1709 when the Genoese government, fearing famine, hired the bulk of their trading vessels and sent them to Greece and the Levant in order to secure vital grain supplies. This order had serious consequences for Allied military transportation. First, it drained the pool of available shipping merchants who worked routes to Iberia and other places needed for Allied military supply and transport. As shown in detail in the records of the Magistrato dei Conservatori del Mare, the Genoese office governing the registration and administration of its merchant fleet, 66 per cent of all Genoese state-funded trading vessels (navi di guerra) travelled to Greece in 1709, a dramatic increase compared to the previous year (see Table 13.1).

Second, the importation of vital foodstuffs to the city opened up opportunities for French intermediaries to smuggle grain, much of it on Genoese ships, to feed famine-ravaged Marseille and other places in Provence.³⁴ “The French did begin to buy up corn at this place and I find that they let none slip, a ship being no sooner come into port, [then] they have her loading secured”, William Chetwynd observed, the diplomat offering up a variety of schemes to stop the smuggling from a blockade to withholding passports to Genoese ships in the Aegean to capital punishment for smugglers to even suggesting that the British employ an improvised fleet of Genoese felucca to attack other Genoese ships.³⁵ “When the Genoese see this … they will be cautious how they proceed afterwards”, Chetwynd wrote to his superiors in November 1709, adding in a later letter that he had approached “some particular people here” about “their arming out upon their own account a good vessel or two to intercept the convoys as they go out … provided I can procure them an authority from the admiralty to arm under English colours.”³⁶ While Chetwynd never provided the identity of these “particular people”, the very proposition that some Genoese would, for a price, take up arms against their countrymen in illicit French employ speaks to just how integrated the neutral city’s merchant shippers were into the war effort. Regardless of such schemes, French suppliers continued to “dispatch barks away every day” escorted by the Duke of Tursis’ galleys so that Chetwynd, exhausted, in December first implied that “force must be employed, not arguments” against the Genoese, only to abandon such strategies a few days later out of economic pragmatism: “if the war lasts, we shall be obliged to employ these people upon other occasions such as embarkations.”³⁷

Although little came of Chetwynd’s complaints in the end, the circumstances of the whole episode are worth reflection. A British agent had threatened war when he had been unable to employ Genoese merchants to ship out German-speaking troops to Spain because the neutral republic’s government had already employed these captains to bring grain to the city, some of whom then had taken up smuggling for the French supported by a Genoese asientista. The inherent complexity of the military transport-for-hire market made Allied agents at times try to avoid foreign hired help altogether and move troops on state-owned vessels. William Chetwynd, for instance, noted in October 1708 how British men-of-war would “save the Queen the expense of hiring transports”, even suggesting that a regiment of Grison foot soldiers bound for Barcelona later that year could serve makeshift marines providing “good service for the defence of her Majesties Ships.”³⁸ “My former orders from Lord Sunderland in relation to sending away recruits for Spain were to put them aboard the men-of-war at least so many as they will carry to save the expense of transports as to avoid the danger of falling into the enemies hands”, John Chetwynd wrote Captain Byng later the following spring in preparation for the next round of troop transport, a proposal Byng sharply rejected because it would “be a prejudice to the service to take any recruits or small parcels of corn into the men-of-war.”³⁹

Further proposals for the use of state transports met with similar refusals, and as a consequence, the Chetwynds and other Allied agents hired a number of Genoese captains on short-term contracts. While to date I have been unable to discover one of these arrangements (such is the difficulty of examining what was admittedly a transitory, often one-time business), diplomatic correspondences reveal a good deal about their contents. We know, for instance, that transport-for-hire contracts specified the price of each soldier per-head; that they detailed how captains were to be compensated either through cash, bills of exchange, or other credit devices; and that they included routes and delivery times of troops, a necessity given that captains almost always returned from Catalonia with commercial freight. We know furthermore that this entire process became substantially more complicated when shipping cavalry. Horses required not only fodder, but purpose-built stables to hold them. A British government report made in 1707–08 calculated that, including food (oats, hay, biscuit, wine, pork, rice, beans, oil, and cheese) and stables, shipping a unit of 100 cavalrymen from Genoa to Barcelona would cost 19 Genoese lire per man, but 165 lire per horse.⁴⁰ Moreover, building stables took time and energy, making the precise timing of convoys even more difficult while the extra time it took to load thousands of horses aboard could prove deadly to the animals, 42 dying in one ship in August 1712 as it lay off Vado.⁴¹ Faced with such stark propositions, John Chetwynd suggested in January 1708 that the British should simply hire Genoese cavalry transports on a permanent footing because he was unsure if he could “find vessels enough in these seas for the transport of all the horse at one time”, going on to explain that “making use of the same transports” would “save the expense of the stables.”⁴² Chetwynd’s advice was ignored, however, and for the remainder of the conflict the Allies only occasionally recruited cavalry transports, drawing on state-owned vessels out of British-controlled Port Mahon in 1711 and 1712 to move the bulk of their horses, an inefficient and costly policy.⁴³

Whether transiting people or animals, transport contracts contained specific dates for the duration of service in order to prevent “the masters of the transports cheating both the Queen and soldiers.”⁴⁴ “What is proper to be done about punishing the Masters of Transports for breach of Contract by not being ready to sail on the 12^th inst. as stipulated?” John Chetwynd asked a certain Captain Butler when Genoese transports hired to transport a regiment of Grisons arrived past their November 1708 start date.⁴⁵ Anglo-Dutch contractors moreover had to be careful not to hire too many ships at Genoa nor contract transports too early in a campaign. “The admiral promised to let me have the convoy which I wait for with great impatience, having found the necessary transports for their embarkation, for which we must pay so much a day should not the Men-of-War arrive before the 17th of this month”, William Chetwynd worried in May 1709 in preparation for sending 2,278 Austrian-Imperial and Italian troops, adding three weeks later how, in the absence of a British convoy, his situation had turned even worse. “The transports I have hired are so much a day till [the convoy] arrives”, Chetwynd grumbled, “this does not a little vex me thou there is no avoiding it being obliged to fix a time if we will take up transports.”⁴⁶ Furthermore, it is clear that these agreements circulated around the broader information economy of Genoa, and deliberately contained falsehoods meant to hamper enemy intelligence. When Tursis, Uceda and Lacoli hired numerous Genoese barks for their failed Sardinian revolt in 1710, for example, the contracts (according to William Chetwynd who read them personally) specified that the ships were not to pass near Naples, Sicily or Sardinia, a ruse meant to “blind the designs they are doubtless on against the latter place [e.g., Sardinia].”⁴⁷ Finally, it is important to note that troop transportation did not necessarily imply employment as all the war’s belligerents at times forced Genoese shipping merchants to transport soldiers against their will. In March 1710, for instance, the Bourbon authorities in Sicily coerced two Genoese and two Venetian ships bound for the Levant to transport 600 soldiers, provisions and artillery to Porto Longone instead.⁴⁸

We can better understand how this exchange between Allied agents and Genoese skippers might have worked in practice by looking closely at two remarkable documents. The first is a report issued by the British government concerning Mediterranean military contractors near the war’s end. Following the crushing Tory parliamentary victory in the 1710 general election, the new government aimed to shine a light on the malfeasance of the previous Whig government by appointing three commissioners on 24 October 1711 – Sir Henry Belasyse (1648–1717), Edward Stawell (1685–1755), and Andrew Archer (1659–1741) – to “enquire into the number and quality of Her Majesty’s forces in Spain & Portugal and to examine the accounts relating to the said Forces and of the Garrisons of Gibraltar and Port Mahon.”⁴⁹ The report was pure partisan politics, with the commissioners discovering all manner of financial improprieties. German troops in the pay of Savoy had disappeared following their payment. Exchange rates paid by the British government had vastly undervalued government-issued bills of exchange. Undertakers for the fortifications of Port Mahon had failed to properly make lime, ditches, doors, windows, and casements. And doctors at Gibraltar had received sub-standard medical supplies. Yet in spite of its manifest biases, the commission offers an excellent depiction of a war effort sustained by contractors (and, for that matter, sub-contractors). Even the commissioners themselves relied on local intermediaries; the trio deposed Majorcan hospital workers through hired translators and asked brokers in Genoa for staple commodity prices to determine if their government had been overcharged.

Among those investigated were the Chetwynd brothers, John in Turin and William in Genoa, who the commissioners ordered to produce all “original contracts & vouchers” in order to determine “whether the stores, mules, oxen, carriages, corn etc. [had] been actually provided pursuant the contracts and at the prices usually allowed in that country in the summer season.” The resultant report tells us a number of things about the inner workings of the brothers’ military transport-for-hire operations at Genoa. For one, it makes clear that the Chetwynds relied on an intermediary, Joseph Boüer, “a person whom Mr. Chetwynd [had] employed” who charged “4 percent for his commission, upon almost all the expenses for these several imbarkations, except for the provisions put on board the ships.” Boüer was a well-known Allied contractor. A merchant, Huguenot, and former British consul at Nice, Boüer had been employed by William Chetwynd for victualling and hiring Allied troop transports to Spain back in 1707 including the procurement of “transports with what corn and provisions [we] shall want.”⁵⁰ Despite nearly a half-decade of work for the Allies, the picture the commissioners painted of Boüer in 1711 was unflattering. Belasyse, Stawell, and Archer deposed anyone they could find in an effort to demonstrate the former consul’s supposed incompetence. “The bread was not worth eating being black & rotten … the beef was very bad … the wine was part good and part bad mixed … the rice was tolerably good” noted a certain Robert Sanders, a sailor on a recently arrived British transport supplied by Boüer. Finding a number of stables that had been purpose-built onboard ships from previous embarkations, the commissioners hired local carpenters to assess their quality, determining Boüer had overcharged the British government as “they might be very well bought for 12 lyres per stable whereas he charges 24 lyres each.” Yet reading between the lines, the commission suggests how Genoese captains fit military transport-for-hire into their general business networks. In writing up their partisan screed against Boüer, the commissioners noted that, while before 1709 transporters had to provide food and supplies for the troops aboard on their own accounts, now Boüer put these costs onto Chetwynd’s account and “charged the Queen with 726 livres for barrells and other necessaries, for which there is no receipt” and further raised the price per man for freighting them from 18 to 19 livres per man. Most importantly, the commissioners noted how Boüer had finagled into the terms of his contract the right to transport 250 mine of corn in addition to “as much other merchandise as Mr. Boüer should put on board and the shipps could carry gratis” demonstrating clearly just how Genoese captains could merge military transport into their normal business networks.

3 The Convoy of December 1707: A Case Study

Unfortunately, the commissioners interviewed none of the captains Chetwynd and Boüer hired, so we cannot know what “other merchandise”, gratis or otherwise, these ships carried. To get some sense of how military transport fit into existing business networks, we have to turn instead to our second text of note: one of the few surviving embarkation rolls of an Allied convoy from Vado to Barcelona in late 1707. Patterned on a troop muster and replicated in its original form in Tables 13.2 and 13.3, two copies of this three-page document survive owing to the complex political economy of the Grand Alliance whereby British and Dutch officials back in London/Amsterdam, in order to prevent cost overruns for the Austrian-Imperial and German subsidized troops they shipped to Catalonia, required either John or William Chetwynd (or one of their subordinates) to account for each person (soldier, officer, dependent) in each convoy as they left the care of Austrian-Imperial paymasters and stepped aboard ship into the pay of the British and Dutch.⁵¹ As such, the embarkation roll provides not so much an accurate picture of all the transporters Allied agents hired at Genoa, but those who actually departed on time from Vado. In fact, the flotilla left behind at least two ships of a certain captain Bollino and Levanto, who the Austrian-Imperial ambassador Carlo Bartolomeo Molinari had contracted to ferry French prisoners to Spain only for six of the captured men to overpower Bollino, hijack his vessel, set ashore in Monaco and force the two ships to miss the convoy entirely, leaving Molinari with the bill for services not rendered.⁵² Nor does the record include cavalry transports because, as John Chetwynd noted, “there are no vessells to be had here, or at Leghorn fit for our service”, meaning these troops had to be sent at a later date.⁵³

Nevertheless, this flotilla offers a microcosm of the recruitment, contracting, and politics of short-term military transport.⁵⁴ What is immediately obvious is the stark difference between state transports and hired ones. John Chetwynd, who did the accounting, divided the document between state and contracted vessels, with 35 English and two Dutch ships – some men-of-war like the Dutch vessels Wasenaer and Veer, others hastily-refitted frigates (Yarmouth, Norffolke, Winchester, Milford) or hospitals (Jeffreys, Mathews, Smyrna Factor) – carrying 4,634 Palatinate infantry, while twelve contractors carried the 2,927 Austrian and Italian infantry of the regiments of Raventelau and Bomezana, respectively. A close look at these dozen contracted ships suggests their captains had a range of motivations for taking on military transport-for-hire. Seven were Genoese, their ships registered with the Magistracy of the Conservatori del Mare, the office with jurisdiction over maritime issues. These records show that most of the merchant shippers operated as representatives of larger commercial firms and joint partnerships. While Giovanni Antonio Ferro owned the San Antonio di Padova e San Bonaventura outright, the Gallera San Pietro listed one co-owner, the Trionfo di Gloria two, the Santa Chiara four, and the Nostra Signora del Carmine e S. Niccolò ten including relatives of its captain Francesco Decotto in addition to Frà Nicolò Bonaventura Lomellino, a scion of the powerful Lomellini family and ammiraglio of the Knights of Malta.⁵⁵ Investors also came from outside Genoa; just months before transiting the troops, Giovanni Antonio Ferro (San Antonio di Padova e San Bonaventura) had been involved in a series of legal disputes with Tuscan investors adjudicated by the Pisan Magistrato Consolare (Sea Consulate).⁵⁶ Other records furthermore point towards these captains’ broader commercial and social world. Damiano Tixe (Santa Orsola) and Giovanni Battista Calcagno (Santa Maria Maddalena) both hailed from the Ligurian town of Arenzano and had been among a handful of grandees who donated a new roof to the town’s parish church in 1703.⁵⁷ Surviving maritime insurance claims in addition show that the Santa Chiara, Nostra Signora del Carmine, and San Antonio di Padova e San Bonaventura worked the routes to Catalonia earlier in the decade. In fact, just four years before taking employment with the British, Giovanni Antonio Ferro had lost his entire cargo (and thus filed an insurance claim) when two British ships seized the San Antonio di Padova e San Bonaventura enroute from Marseille to Amsterdam (by way of Barcelona) and imprisoned Ferro briefly.⁵⁸ The remaining ships are more difficult to track. I have found no records for captains Grecco (Nostra Signora Rosario) and Bigheri (Grand Madre di Dio), while the two extant copies of the muster roll cannot even agree on the ship Giuseppe Clausel sailed, listing it as either the Barca San Pietro or Il Santo Christo. Among the remaining contractors, the picture is of a motley mix. The Dutch captain Christian Dopf (Ré Giulelmo/Guglielmo) was a privateer based out of Livorno who had seized a French tartan loaded with grain in May 1705 and another French ship later that August with cargo valued at 80,000 reales.⁵⁹ Conversely, Valentino Mingotti (Gli Due Fratelli) worked in the bulk freight business having arrived in Genoa just a few weeks before December 1707 carrying a cargo of high-quality molluscs from Venice, and, upon his return from Spain, leaving for Smirna and coming back in late January with a large cargo of fish.⁶⁰

Whether Mingotti felt that transporting soldiers differed little from seafood is not clear, but what is obvious is that all these captains took on military transport duty only temporarily and in full expectation of returning from Catalonia or elsewhere with commercial goods. We know Catalonia was to be the convoy’s first (and, as it related to the transporters, only) destination precisely because the ships did not follow that course. Rather, on the insistence of Archduke Charles (the Allied candidate for the Spanish throne), the fleet detoured in an ultimately worthless attempt to drum up support for an anti-Bourbon revolt on Sardinia, thus violating the terms of the transporters’ contracts. “Their contracts being made to go straight for Barcelona … I hope your lordship will be pleased to send the Queen’s orders to authorize my joining with my Dutch friend in the necessary expense for the satisfying of those people”, William Chetwynd wrote Lord Sunderland in March 1708.⁶¹ Evidently, his request was granted, and a number of the captains continued to contribute to the Allied war effort for years to come. After transporting troops to Spain that December, Francesco Decotto (Nostra Signora del Carmine e S. Niccolò) journeyed to Sicily and the Morea repeatedly over the next two years (presumably to buy the aforementioned grain during the famine year of 1709) before heading back to British-controlled Port Mahon in January 1711, a pattern Francesco Maria Rapallo (Santa Chiara) and Damiano Tixe (Santa Orsola) followed as well, returning to Spain in 1710–11 after a year of working the route to Greece.⁶² So, too, did Giovanni Battista Merizano (Trionfo di Gloria) first return to Spain eight months after shipping troops there, then move grain from Greece and Naples after that in 1709 before travelling to London in April 1710, presumably due to connections he made two-and-a-half years earlier.⁶³ Again, the larger aggregate picture of Genoese state-sponsored trade revealed in the records of the Magistrato dei Conservatori del Mare (Table 13.1) points towards the intense integration of Genoese merchant shipping into the Allied war-machine, with 88 per cent of Genoese navi di guerra travelling to Iberia in the first quarter of 1711.

In the end, the degree to which Merizano, Rapallo, Decotto and others considered military transport an essential part of their business is not yet clear. What is obvious, however, is that by 1712 the Chetwynds had built a long list of contacts in Genoa and gained significant knowledge about the transportation of soldiers to Catalonia. Their built-up expertise and networks were laid bare in March 1712 when the British ceased providing funds for the transport of further Austrian-Imperial troops to Spain and forced the Austrians to hire transports on their own. Perplexed at the whole process, the Duke of Uceda (who had defected to the Austrian-Imperial camp two years earlier and now was tasked with fighting a losing effort in Catalonia) sought William Chetwynd’s advice on how to coordinate the embarkation of 6,000 Austrian-Imperial troops from Vado. “[The duke] made to get information both of the persons I employed and myself of the methods taken to subsist the soldiers and made me fancy he may have direction to provide the necessaries in case I refused to take it upon me”, Chetwynd wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, adding how he feared that the duke, “being unacquainted with the usual methods”, lacked the skill needed to synchronize Anglo-Dutch warships, Genoese transports, and German-speaking troops.⁶⁴ Chetwynd was right; the duke botched the whole operation, ordering a dozen smaller ships at Genoa and a pair of navi di guerra to ferry the soldiers, missing his Anglo-Dutch escort multiple times, and nearly sparking a mutiny among the soldiers stranded at Vado, all of which contributed to the deteriorating situation in Catalonia and hastened the end of the war the next year.⁶⁵

Yet even peace – and the inevitable movement around the Mediterranean of soldiers and sailors that followed – offered Genoese captains ample military transport opportunities. On the Allied side, within days of the signing of the Peace of Utrecht (April 1713), William Chetwynd sought to “rent all the ships that he could to be able to send them to Catalonia” to evacuate the remaining German troops, hiring dozens of Genoese ships to ferry over 15,500 soldiers from Spain over the next few months, 11,000 of which landed at Sampierdarena just outside Genoa.⁶⁶ On the Bourbon side in 1713, the victorious Philip V signed an asiento with the Genoese nobleman Stefano de Mari, who would replace the Duke of Tursis after the latter’s fall from favour in 1715 and remain in Spanish service until the 1730s.⁶⁷ Following closely the policies of his soon-to-be-predecessor, in late 1713 de Mari sub-contracted a trio of Genoese captains (Paolo Luigetti, Pietro Maria Boero, and either Niccolò or Giovanni Battista Burlando) to join with French men-of-war out of Toulon and escort Bourbon soldiers from Sicily to Barcelona only for these captains to be delayed at Genoa after their crews, manned by “English and other nations”, deserted “after having received their pay.”⁶⁸ As Genoese ships sailed Bourbon troops out of Sicily (handed over to Victor Amadeus II at the Peace of Utrecht), others sailed Allied ones in. Gian Giacomo Fontana, a Savoyard official, contracted transports at Genoa to ferry the duke, his soldiers and his baggage to his coronation in Palermo in late 1713.⁶⁹ Throughout, Genoese merchant ships moved smaller groups of soldiers on short-term contracts like an unnamed Genoese ship that carried 700 Bourbon soldiers from Alicante to Porto Longone in April 1713, or that which was blown off course while transporting 150 Spanish troops from Sicily on their way to Barcelona in December of that year, or another three Genoese ships hired to ship out an Austrian-Imperial regiment (including 339 women and children) from Milan to Sardinia the following spring.⁷⁰

Indeed, for the rest of the century, Genoese shipping merchants continued to serve a vital role in military transport both voluntarily and involuntarily, taking part in the Spanish expedition to Oran (1732) as well as the Second Morean War (1714–18) and the wars of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20), Polish Succession (1733–35) and Austrian Succession (1740–48).⁷¹ 35 Genoese ships joined a flotilla of 462 vessels carrying over 30,000 men for Philip V’s invasion of Sicily in 1718, while the Spanish hired a number of Genoese trading vessels to assist in the evacuation from Tuscany to Barcelona of the bulk of the Spanish army in 1737.⁷² Remarking on how the Spanish planned to pay these captains in 1737, the British consul in Barcelona William Winder noted the government wished to entangle the Genoese skippers into longer forms of employment by offering them remunerations of “one third in money, or good Bills on Madrid, and, the other two thirds in Cartas de pago [letters of payment] on the Cadastro of the country [the Spanish single tax], which won’t be recoverable for some months”, while his counterpart in Madrid, Benjamin Keene, added a bit more bluntly how the merchants ships would perhaps be “detained in this service [e.g. coerced] … in order to change the garrisons in Africa, and disperse the supernumerary troops in Catalonia” despite their contracts lapsing.⁷³ Again, even the ends of wars brought opportunities for military transportation.

4 Conclusions

Scholars have argued that the 18th century was when the state – either directly through bureaucratic forms or indirectly through state-funded, private military contractors – finally took over military employment, finance, supply and transportation, while a rich body of scholarship over the last two decades has made clear the various ways individual entrepreneurs entangled themselves into the business of war despite swings in state demand. This study shifts our attention away from permanent/semi-permanent contractors towards more temporary forms of war-work exemplified through Genoese military transporters. As consuls Winder and Keene hinted at, military transports-for-hire fell along a continuum between the purely coercive and the purely commercial as captains like Francesco Decotto, Giovanni Battista Merizano, Valentino Mingotti, Paolo Luigetti and others moved soldiers with varying degrees of ease along (and occasional outside of) existing commercial routes. Along the way, these men entangled themselves into a strikingly wide variety of employment relationships: as Genoese subjects feeding their nearly-starved city; as French-employed smugglers working (at least on paper) against the republic’s wishes; as temporary, private employees moving German-speaking troops alongside of and escorted by Dutch and English vessels; and as sub-contractors working at the behest of more permanent Genoese asientisti like the duke of Tursis and the marquis de Mari.

It is an unfortunate fact that short of finding the records of one of these firms, we are left with seeing transporters through the eyes of the states that employed them: through Anglo-Dutch muster rolls, Genoese reimbursement schemes, Austrian-Imperial state-approved avvisi, French navy contracts, British parliamentarian investigations, and other state sources. For this reason, this essay’s findings for now remain more suggestive than definitive. Nevertheless, they open up provocative questions about patterns of socialization and business organization of military enterprise. If, as many have argued, early modern maritime business relied first and foremost on intimate social ties, did military transporters-for-hire build trust and rapport with employers without long-term bonds or were the men Chetwynd hired in 1707 already enmeshed in existing networks yet to be discovered?⁷⁴ If, rather than individuals, Genoa’s captains worked as representatives of established merchant houses and large partnerships, could such diffuse networks anticipate and price-in military transport to their expected profits, and, if so, what can this tell us about the larger history of the relationship between war and pre-modern capitalism?⁷⁵

Whatever the answers to these questions, the labour fluidity of Genoa’s military transporters is an important reminder that when it comes to pre-modern employment, “the notion of occupation was understood differently than it is today, a distinction often lost in long-termism.”⁷⁶ In their military-transport work, Genoese captains defy stable, modern categories like ‘state employee’, ‘privateer’, ‘smuggler’, ‘contractor’, ‘asientista’ or, indeed, ‘military entrepreneur’.⁷⁷