Venice and the Arctic Ocean
Sebastian Caboto's plan to preserve Venice's global projection, and the present-day geostrategic relevance of the Arctic Ocean.
Original article by Il Foglio
When Venice, now cut off from the new Atlantic routes, sought its last chance to remain a global power in the Northern ice. Sebastian Caboto tried to trick it.
In the autumn of 1522, Girolamo Bucignolo, emissary of Sebastian Caboto, then piloto mayor of Emperor Charles V, i.e. the man who managed Spanish expeditions along the new Atlantic routes (a position of power and great prestige that Amerigo Vespucci had held before him), arrived in Venice in great secrecy.
“I know how to get you out of trouble”, Caboto essentially told the Council of Ten, the highest political authority of the Serenìsima, through his trusted Bucignolo. “Give me your trust and sufficient resources, and I will inaugurate an entirely Venetian Arctic route that will pass through Greenland and lead to China and from there to the Spice Islands”.
One must put oneself in the shoes of the Venetian government of the time to understand how seductive Caboto’s proposal to open a passage through the ice of the Northern seas was. At the beginning of the 16th century, after the years of great discoveries, Venice was a naval power in rapid decline in a world undergoing geopolitical upheaval. In just a few years, first Portugal, then Spain, then France and then England had become the new great naval powers.
Venice, the queen of the seas, naturally wanted to be part of the game. But it was trapped in the Mediterranean and increasingly destined for political irrelevance. After the exploits of Christopher Columbus, and even more so after those of Vasco da Gama, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India (1497), a feeling of bewilderment had spread among the ruling class. “Something, anything, must be done”, insisted the most willing (five centuries before Draghi’s “Do something!”).
In truth, the Venetians had already attempted to do something. In 1504, the Council of Ten proposed to the Mamluk sultan of Cairo, Qansuh al-Ghuri, to open a canal between Port Said and Port Suez to connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The expense would be borne by the Republic. Two fortresses, at the entrance and exit of the canal, would guarantee the sultan control of traffic. In return, the Venetians would have had free access to the Red Sea and thus to the Indian Ocean and the markets of the East. The whole operation was aimed at outsmarting the Portuguese, who by then were masters of a quadrant stretching from Lisbon to the Moluccas. At the last minute, the sultan backed out, pressured by the Portuguese themselves (and the Ottomans, editor’s note).
Now the Spanish were getting involved too. The Council of Ten had just received news that one of Magellan’s five caravels, the Victoria, had succeeded in circumnavigating the globe (now reduced to a wreck, it arrived in Seville in September 1522). It was another blow, and not a small one. Far from decline, there was a risk of collapse.
Sior Bucignolo immediately obtained an audience at the Doge’s Palace.
Sebastian Caboto knew the Northern seas well, having sailed them since he was a boy with his father Giovanni, an illustrious navigator from a Venetian family but long in the service of the English crown and who went down in history for “discovering” the island of Newfoundland while searching for a route to China (1497). In reality, the Beothuk, a seemingly unwelcoming indigenous people, had long lived on that barren, windswept island. Caboto senior barely had time to plant the flags of St Mark and the King of England before making a hasty retreat. However, he was welcomed as a hero on his return to London and pocketed the handsome sum of 10 pounds.
Four years later, Caboto junior, in his early twenties, led an expedition to those icy seas to open up the Northwest Passage that his father had sought in vain. He too failed in his endeavour. But on his way back, he stopped off in Newfoundland, just long enough to capture three natives “dressed in skins, eating raw meat and speaking a language that none of us understood”.
Twenty years had passed, Bucignolo explained, and his paròn (master) was ready to try again, this time in the service of Venice. The idea of an Arctic route to China immediately caught the attention of the government of the Serenìsima.
A century and a half earlier, two Venetian navigators, Nicolò and Antonio Zen, had crossed the North Atlantic after many vicissitudes, following the ancient Viking route to the ice of Greenland, which they called “Engronelant” and had drawn with surprising precision on their navigation chart. So why not take that route again? The Venetians had lost their knowledge of those seas, but Caboto junior had grown up there. He had led several expeditions in those icy seas himself. He had become a great navigator, now at the height of his fame; an intrepid visionary, and what’s more, born in Venice. Was he the man of providence, the prodigal son who would save the Republic?
The Venetian government immediately said it was very interested but obviously wanted to know more. Bucignolo replied that Sebastian would reveal the route and plan only in person, before the Council of Ten. In order not to arouse the suspicion of the Spanish, he wanted to be officially summoned by the Serenìsima on the pretext of having to deal with inheritance issues related to some of his mother’s properties. Of course, Bucignolo pointed out somewhat evasively before returning to Seville, Sebastian could always lead the expedition under the aegis of the Spanish crown, but he was motivated by sincere love for his country (a bluff: Charles V, grappling with the colonisation of his overseas territories, had no interest in opening an Arctic route to China).
The Council of Ten asked its ambassador to Spain, Girolamo Contarini, a refined diplomat of great culture, to sound out Caboto’s real intentions and, above all, to assess his character. For he was, yes, a great navigator, but he was also said to be a man consumed by ambition, often opaque, still grappling with serious “daddy issues” despite his success. In short, he was a complicated character to deal with (and remains a controversial figure to this day).
Contarini summoned Sebastian to his home on Christmas Eve. The two talked late into the night. The ambassador remained unconvinced. The plan, as far as he could understand it, was vague and unclear. Caboto junior seemed to him to be a madman who rambled on “about spices, gold and other things”. And when Contarini insisted on more details, Sebastian immediately refused: the details would only be revealed to the Council of Ten. This irritated the ambassador, who dismissed his guest and wrote in his report that, having “dabbled a little in geography” during his career, he did not see how the expedition was feasible.
Not to mention the costs and logistics. If the ships were built in the Arsenale, they would then have to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to reach the North Atlantic, and the King of Spain and the King of Portugal would not stand idly by. Of course, the fleet could be built and armed outside the Mediterranean, perhaps in some port on the Red Sea, but the whole enterprise risked being held to ransom by the Sultan. And where would they have found enough timber in those areas? How did Caboto plan to sail safely to the Atlantic, given that the Indian Ocean coast was dotted with Portuguese fortresses? At other times, a fleet could have been built in the Baltic Sea, wrote the ambassador, and this would have avoided many problems.
But by now Germany was a loyal ally of Emperor Charles V, so this option was also out of the question. Sebastian, irritated in turn by Contarini’s objections, told him in a final tone before leaving that he had already received an offer from England, a country he loved, where the Caboto family was held in high esteem.
Charles V had blocked everything, but if an opportunity to work with the English ever arose again, he would not refuse it. And Venice would be cut off from the great routes forever.
“I shrugged my shoulders”, Contarini wrote to his family. “But although it seemed impossible to me, I did not want to dissuade him from going to Venice.”
The matter dragged on for several months. There were prevarications, delays and postponements. It was clear to Contarini that Sebastian was negotiating on several fronts. But then he reappeared and asked for a new letter of summons (the first had expired), which was immediately sent to him. He said he was preparing to ask the emperor for permission to leave. Everything now seemed ready for the trip to Venice. “He assures me that he is thinking of nothing else,” wrote Contarini caustically, who, it must be said, had smelled a rat from the very beginning.
Sebastian, in fact, did not ask Charles V for permission. After leading the Republic by the nose, the piloto mayor returned to the ranks and shortly thereafter set sail again on the Emperor’s orders to discover if there was a faster route to the spice islands than the one inaugurated by Magellan. But the expedition was a fiasco (shipwrecks, mutinies), so much so that Caboto’s star began to fade in Spain.
Sebastian’s betrayal was a severe blow to the Serenìsima. At that point, the game seemed definitively lost to the new Atlantic naval powers. The decline had been so rapid! In those very years, among other things, the lagoon was beginning to silt up due to sandy debris carried by rivers from the mainland. Venice was in danger of finding itself stranded in a foul-smelling swamp. Not a pleasant prospect for an ancient maritime republic (only the diversion of the rivers in the second half of the 16th century saved the lagoon).
Paradoxically, the political decline of the Serenissima coincided with a golden age in the arts. Venice was the European capital of culture. Titian and Tintoreto were painting their masterpieces. The book industry was booming. Palladio and Sansovino were redesigning the city in the spirit of an exuberant renovatio urbis. In short, it was no longer a naval power but a power of the arts, culture and good living.
Except that the charm of the Arctic still lingered in the corridors of the Doge’s Palace. And when Sebastian Caboto unexpectedly came forward with a new proposal, this time a north-easterly route to China via the icy seas between Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, Venice, incredibly, fell for it again.
Sebastian’s idea was crazy, but fascinating. Even though the old navigator was now in his seventies. After serving Spain for almost three decades, he took advantage of a short leave granted to him by Charles V to move to his beloved England, where he became grand pilot at the court of King Edward VI - the same position he had held in Seville but with greater autonomy and the possibility of organising maritime ventures with private consortia.
In 1551, a group of investors created the Merchant Adventurer’s Company for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown. In 1553, Sebastian took over the leadership and immediately began planning a daring expedition along the icy Siberian coast.
While working for his English investors on a venture sponsored by the Crown, Sebastian, true to his old habits, opened new negotiations with the Venetian Republic, proposing the same project.
This time, he secretly approached the Venetian ambassador in London, Giacomo Soranzo. As he had done thirty years earlier, he asked to be summoned to Venice, again using the usual excuse of the alleged real estate inheritance.
It is unclear why he wanted to betray the King of England, who had welcomed him so warmly. Indeed, it is possible that he had no intention of doing so, but hoped to raise the stakes. In Venice, there were still those who naively believed that he always acted out of love for his country in difficulty. The more cautious suspected that it was just “na roba de schèi” (a matter of money).
Things went wrong from the start. The English ambassador to Venice, the astute Peter Vannes, learned from his spies of the secret contacts between the grand pilot and the Council of Ten, and managed to sabotage the operation before Sebastian could even travel to Venice. Just as well. The expedition, led by Sir Hugh Willoughby, set out in search of a north-eastern passage to China. But two of the three ships were trapped in ice near the Kola Peninsula, between the Barents Sea and the White Sea. Everyone froze to death, including Sir Willoughby. A third ship reached the White Sea but was unable to go any further and had to return to London.
The Serenìsima avoided disaster at Kola but not decline. It is moving to retrace its desperate attempt to escape its fate. Now even old Europe is looking to the Arctic to stay in the game. As we say in Venetian, sperem.
The 21st Century’s Arctic Route: a Civilisational Perspective
by The Third Venetia
Even disregarding climate change, the Arctic Ocean has long been recognised as a key factor in disrupting global geopolitical balances. Therefore, it is not surprising that interest in the Arctic route has been renewed in recent years. Once again, it is history and geography that help us to better understand the situation.
The United States and Greenland: A Troubled History
Since the second half of the 19th century, the United States has viewed Greenland as a strategic asset rather than merely as a potential territory in which to expand into. After purchasing Alaska in 1867, William H. Seward’s administration considered acquiring Greenland and Iceland, but the project never came to fruition.
In the early 20th century, an even more complicated proposal resurfaced in 1910 and was discussed in diplomatic circles, involving an exchange of territories to obtain Greenland, but it was eventually abandoned.
The turning point came during the Cold War when, in 1946, the Truman administration offered Denmark $100 million in gold to purchase the island, but the offer was declined. Over the following years, Washington consolidated its military presence through various agreements, ultimately establishing Thule Air Base (Pituffik) as the cornerstone of its Arctic strategy.
More recently, the issue returned to prominence when Donald Trump relaunched the idea of ‘buying’ Greenland in 2019, a proposal that was rejected by both Copenhagen and the Greenlandic authorities. Against the backdrop of Arctic competition and security in 2026, the issue resurfaced amid political tensions and technical contacts between the US, Denmark, and Greenland. Meanwhile, many Inuit voices in Greenland reiterate that the Arctic land is not a negotiable commodity.
Heartland and Rimland
The concept of the Heartland was developed by Halford John Mackinder in the early 20th century. The idea is that there is a terrestrial ‘pivot’ at the centre of Eurasia - roughly the large inland plain which was historically more difficult to penetrate from the sea - which, if controlled by a land power, can project force towards the peripheries and influence the global balance. In his famous formula, control of Eastern Europe is the gateway to this pivot.
Nicholas J. Spykman developed the concept of Rimland as a critique and integration of this idea. According to Spykman, it is not the inner ‘heart’ that decides, but the coastal and sub-coastal belt surrounding Eurasia (including maritime Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and coastal China). This is because the population, industry, ports and choke points are concentrated here, as is the capacity to combine land and naval power. For Spykman, whoever dominates the Rimland can contain the Heartland and, as a result, influence the entire international system.
The Arctic route therefore offers an alternative to this system, connecting the two extremes of the Rimland without passing through the centre. Consequently, the Arctic route is no longer (or not merely) useful to bypass the Atlantic routes - which are firmly under Western control - but rather to connect the extremities of the Rimland (Western Europe and Japan) without passing through it.
The West is under siege, like the Venetian Republic
Today, the West is experiencing on a macro level what happened to the Venetian Republic on a micro level from the 16th century onwards: it has been cut off from the trade and supply lines on which its economy and security depend.
Pushed back within its European and North American borders, the West now finds itself under siege from various threats, such as the war in Ukraine and mass immigration. Internal divisions between US supremacism, EU managerial globalism, and other Anglosphere countries are a consequence of the polarisation of political conflict.
However, the apparent complexity of the issue can be drastically reduced by changing our perspective. Instead of looking at the Greenland issue through the lens of particular interests (states, lobbies and ideologies), one should adopt a civilisational approach: control of Greenland is crucial for the survival of the West itself.
The means by which such control is maintained will also be crucial to this survival. A military annexation by the United States would mark a final break between the European and American blocs - a rift that the people cannot afford, but the elites can.
Conversely, a joint mission by all NATO member states would be a more internally agreeable scenario, demonstrating that European states are capable of defending themselves and playing an active role in defending the West.
The most tragic scenario would be for Greenland to embrace Chinese influence, which would provide the Eastern Dragon with the means to economically checkmate and subjugate both the United States and the European Union. At that point, the reaction could only be desperate.