’A man of particular ability’: A Jewish-Genoese military contractor in the fiscal-military system

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in feeding and arming European armies from 1500 to 1800. Yet they have ignored the problems these merchants faced when they cast outside national borders to urban centres far from the battlefield, a multi-national mobilisation of resources known as the ‘fiscal-military system’. This article uses a case-study of one Jewish merchant, Jacob Levi, from the port of Genoa to explore the essential brokerage role of ethnic-religious minorities in the early modern fiscal-military system. With knowhow built through his private businesses as well as a network of his co-religious, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as Levi’s records show, other war matériel accompanied grain, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that Levi transited through the port in these years.

On 29 May 1705, the Genoese prayed for a Jew to save them from annihilation. The threat had arrived four days earlier when a French convoy of four Men-of-War, three merchant ships, seven barques, and twenty tartanes (small ships) appeared outside the Mediterranean port carrying all manner of war matériel for the French army in Lombardy − 10,630 cannon balls, 3528 bombs, 24 cannon wheels, 482 bandoliers, 116 barrels and 114 bales of musket shot, 340 bales of cartridge paper, 7 barrels of nails, 4 barrels of flints, 8600 rock hammers, 400 pick axes, 158 bales of hatchets and spades, 23,980 pickaxe handles, 1800 pairs of shoes, 313 bales of woollen goods, and 18,346 baskets of wheat.¹ Such a fleet, while large, was not unusual; since the mid-sixteenth century, the ostensibly-neutral maritime republic had served as a critical military logistics centre, and for the last four years it had played a ‘an essential role’ role in supplying the French army in northern Italy fighting the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Indeed, the ongoing struggle over the Spanish throne between Louis XIV’s France and his opponents from the Grand Alliance of Great Britain, the United Provinces, Austria, and Savoy arguably could be called Europe’s first great resource war as these two Europe-spanning coalitions supplied armies from Iberia to Bavaria and everywhere in between.²

But even by Genoese standards, six ships in the convoy – the L’Angelo Gabrielle, S. Andrea, Il Fortunato Rinaldo, and three smaller vessels – carried an especially volatile cargo: 3933 barrels of gunpowder, far more than the port could manage.³ What ‘massacre would happen to this poor city…if there would be a lightning bolt, which so often rumble the air, or…a discharged match or another mishap of fire’, feared an anonymous Genoese writer on 29 May.⁴ Genoa’s rulers had in fact foreseen a disaster brewing for weeks as dozens of ships flooded the port with powder. On May 14, the Sargent General of the Genoese Minor Consiglio (Smaller Council) ordered ‘the Jew Jacob Levi’ to hire forty mules and ‘other carts and wagons and animals’ to haul away 500 barrels of gunpowder idling in port ‘in any way and speed without permitting any excuse or pretext neither for time, feast day, nor money to the muleteers’ doing so ‘before anything else…because such ammunition coming frequently’ threatened ‘some great disorder’.⁵ Now, with thousands more barrels arriving, both the Genoese and French turned to Levi, one of a few dozen Jews in the port, to remove them. ‘The entire city remains frightened…to find four thousand barrels of French powder in our port at the whims of a Jew, who, many other times, has unloaded [gunpowder] from Sestri [Ponente] to Sant’ Andrea’, the above-mentioned anonymous writer fretted. ‘Good God it makes one’s hair curl out of panicked fear that by this Jew…[Genoa] runs the risk of total extermination’.⁶

****

The story of how Jacob Levi – a Jewish merchant living in a Christian, self-governing neutral urban republic – found himself as the lynchpin of a Mediterranean-wide military logistics network supplying Europe’s largest army fighting Europe’s greatest war of the early eighteenth century adds to our understanding of the role of religious minorities in the business of war during the early modern period. Scholars have devoted great attention to how European rulers from 1500–1800 fed, clothed, armed, healed, transported, and paid their armies as military logistics transitioned from the baggage trains of sutlers and camp followers in the sixteenth century into the more methodical systems two centuries later of military magazines and convoys re-supplied by private companies using standardised contracts.⁷ In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role played in these logistical networks by ethnic-religious minorities, Jews most of all. Spread over vast familial and co-religious networks, Jewish merchants provided belligerent states fast and efficient means to tap into commercial markets and the credit necessary to facilitate the flow of goods to the battlefield.⁸ Examples abound of Jewish merchants taking part in the business of war, none more important than the vital supply of cereals (wheat, rye, barley, oats and maize). During the Nine Years’ War, the Jewish merchants Moses Machado and Jacob Pereira of The Hague monopolised the provisioning of Dutch troops as well as those of their British and German allies.⁹ A decade later, the wealthy Jew Solomon de Medina kept fed many of the same armies, a job for which he was notably knighted.¹⁰ And over the eighteenth century, Jewish families such as the Bonfil, Grego, Luzzato, and Treves supplied foreign troops with grain in the Veneto.¹¹

But as the French convoy sailing into the neutral port of Genoa full of grain, gunpowder, and other war goods destined for Spanish-Habsburg Milan in May 1705 suggests, Jewish merchants dealing in the business of military supply had to navigate complex, overlapping, and often contentious political economies. States had to cast outside their borders to clusters of financiers and merchants in urban centres far from the battlefield to bring resources to bear in the multilateral, globe-spanning wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cities like Amsterdam, Hamburg, Regensburg, Geneva, Gdańsk, London, and (of course) Genoa facilitated transfers of war resources across a dense, interdependent network of sovereign states, semi-sovereigns, and non-state entrepreneurs, what Peter H. Wilson and Marianne B. Klerk have called Europe’s ‘fiscal-military system’.¹² Yet without proper management, such continent-wide supply chains constrained market forces and prevented the smooth flow of goods. Guns and grain could fall afoul of labyrinthian tariff regimes, languishing in the warehouses of neutral freeports for months. And wagons loaded with war supplies could dig their wheels into muddy mountain roads if neighbouring neutrals failed to maintain these arteries. The job of keeping the European fiscal-military system humming along fell then to men like Jacob Levi, intermediaries who possessed the ‘specific expertise needed to organise and effect the mobilisation and transfer of human and material resources needed for war-making’.¹³

As we shall see, Levi possessed intimate knowledge of Genoa’s cryptic tariff regime and linked himself through bonds of kinship and faith into a wider network of Jewish financiers and victuallers. With such knowhow and connections, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy, moving tens of thousands of baskets, bushels, and bales through the port from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as the convoy coming into Genoa that May shows, other war matériel frequently accompanied them, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that transited through the port in these years.¹⁴ While seemingly a simple observation, the military necessity of convoying matériel over land and sea shaped the market for these goods in the early modern period. Rather than spread risk, convoys concentrated it.¹⁵ Exploding powder and burning debris could set fire to boats full of wheat as they arrived in port. Mules hauling oats and muskets could eat the former along the way. And grain could rot in silos waiting as wagons, hired to move it, hauled canons to the front instead. Rather than an age of ‘great specialists’, sundry skills were necessary, and Jacob Levi possessed them, building his reputation for moving one resource before transferring those skills to other economic sectors (Table 1).¹⁶

Table 1.

French grain and powder transited through Genoa, 1701–1706.¹⁴⁸

	Wheat (lbs.)	Powder (barrels)
1701	–	3300
1702	10,097,401	–
1703	4,752,851	–
1704	4,247,999	4180
1705	5,444,991	9,632
1706	5,397,889	450
Total	29,941,131	17,562

This article therefore uses a close examination of how one man (Levi) in one city (Genoa) during one war (the War of Spanish Succession) moved two interrelated resources (grain and gunpowder) to expose the challenges state authorities imposed upon the flow of war goods, the degree of specialisation of merchants who operated in this trade, and, most importantly, how ethnic-religious minorities like Jacob Levi proved pivotal in brokering the business of war.

I

Jacob Levi owed his key position during the War of Spanish Succession to the overstretched supply and logistics system of the forces of Louis XIV and those Spanish armies aligned with his grandnephew Philip, Duke of Anjou (the future Philip V), a union contemporaries referred to as Le due corone (the Two Crowns). Despite its vast wealth and strategic interests in northern Italy, Louis’ France was ‘something of a lumbering giant’ logistically and had struggled for decades to supply northern Italy with war matériel.¹⁷ A large, accessible port was thus essential for the French prosecution of the war. Genoa long had served as such a centre; Spanish troops and supplies had flowed through the port as part of the ‘Spanish Road’ to the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt (1567–1648) and Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and the city also serviced the Habsburg’s various Mediterranean possessions (especially Milan and Naples) in subsequent conflicts.¹⁸ It had been the city’s permission to allow Spanish reinforcements to transit its territory during the War of the Reunions (1683–1684) in fact that led to the brutal French bombardment of Genoa in May 1684, and the subsequent French demand that the city remain neutral in future conflicts.¹⁹

Beyond political necessity, the city further remained open in order to attract foreign trade out of which customs duties, anchorage dues, and dozens of other port charges relentlessly fed the Genoese Casa delle compere e dei banchi di San Giorgio (Casa di San Giorgio) – Genoa’s para-governmental public debt consortium and deposit/giro bank. Officials of the Casa di San Giorgio stationed at the city’s gates and piers scanned bills of lading for fraud and weighed hundreds of sacks of goods daily in order to siphon off charges on wine, oil, cured meats, silk, and, most importantly, grain.²⁰ From the port, the Casa’s agents grasped outward for additional fees (pedaggio) at extramural toll stations in the Genovesato, the Republic’s territory; for some sense of scale, a revision of the pedaggio issued in 7 January 1693 listed 218 taxable goods including such military staples as biscuit (twice-baked bread), oil, rope, wine, and, again, grain.²¹

But the tide of French soldiers and war goods washing over Liguria in early 1701 threatened to disrupt commercial revenues flowing through Genoa, especially its freeport or portofranco. Begun in the late 1580s to attract grain to the city, Genoa’s portofranco had evolved by the early eighteenth century into a sprawling 6000 square/meter complex of bonded, duty-free warehouses.²² Yet rather than ‘an island of liberalism as the word free or franco seems to suggest’, the freedom the portofranco lay in the privilege visiting Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and Italian merchants enjoyed in the duty-free zone as they awaited journeys further afield. The Genoese maintained this delicate balance of steep customs fees and duty-free privileges through masses of paperwork, surveillance over tax-exempt goods, and a cadre of handpicked Swiss- and Lombard-born stevedores (the Compagnia dei Caravana).²³ Such tight regulations however could not withstand French diplomatic pressure, backed as it was by threats of a repeat of the 1684 bombardment, and in February 1701 the Genoese conceded to the Bourbon troops customs-free transit of grain along with other goods ‘to serve the army…of His Most Christian Majesty’.²⁴

Thus two parallel customs regimes sprung up overnight, side-by-side: an unregulated, duty-free space in the suburb of Sampierdarena hurrying French war goods to Lombardy and another just east at the portofranco, tightly regulated to protect the anchorage, transboarding, re-export, and storage fees generated for the Casa di San Giorgio. It was a disaster. Goods destined for Lombardy fell off ships in Sampierdarena only to disappear into the portofranco such as the three barrels of wine that went missing out of a cargo of 52 barrels and 22 cases meant for French soldiers in March 1704.²⁵ Warehousing demand in the suburb quickly overshot supply; French contractors had to store grain in the Grimaldi palace only to discover it filled so quickly ‘we will need another palace that is close to the first’.²⁶ Pack animals transiting war goods ripped up Genoese roads.²⁷ And the French envoyè Louciennes endlessly hectored the Genoese to revise their definition of matériel to include items as varied as canvas, sugar, glue, black pitch, arsenic, acid, and dry herb roots, the latter to treat wounded French soldiers at the front.²⁸If such flaunting of Genoese tariffs was routine, others were more exotic.

In May 1702, officials of the Giunta dei Confini (administers of the Genovesato) discovered grain contractors returning empty canvas sacks marked for the army in Lombardy (and, thus, duty-free), filling them with grain from Genoese stores, and sending them back to Lombardy, draining Genoa of revenue and foodstuffs.²⁹ Another plot by these same contractors avoided the tax on milled grain by mixing 10,000 mine of wheat from French silos at Sampierdarena with rye and milling the spare wheat duty-free.³⁰ Worse still, the man responsible for both schemes, Giacomo Molinari, had been handpicked by the Spanish ambassador to supply wine and grain to the army of the Two Crowns in Lombardy. Matters only deteriorated further three months later when Genoese officials arrested a porter, who testified that he had helped unload 40 sacks of grain for Molinari and his accomplice, stored them illegally in a chapel near the French-designated warehouses in Sampierdarena, and planned to sell them on further to avoid all required duties. When French officials learned of the plot, they strenuously denied their participation in the scheme, relinquished the keys to the French-run store, fired Molinari, and looked to hire a new merchant to handle the grain trade.³¹ They found Jacob Levi (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Harbour with several people around a fountain, Ports of Genoa.

(Anthony van Zijlvelt, after Johannes Lingelbach, Amsterdam, Late 17th Century)

II

Little is known of Levi before his employment by the French in 1702. While records of Jews in Genoa date back to the sixth-century CE, the community grew precipitously after 1654 when the Protettori di San Giorgio revised the statutes of Genoa’s portofranco to permit ‘any and all persons of any nation, state, rank, or condition’ to come to the city ‘to do business in [financial] exchanges, merchandise, and supplies’, admitting ‘Jews and infidels…under the rules and forms commanded by the Most Serene College’.³² This was followed four years later with a charter that proposed a ghetto near the freeport as well as regulated Jewish freedom of trade, personal safety, employment of Christian servants, and the wearing of a badge.³³ Over the next half-century, Jews from Livorno, Venice, Portugal, Holland, Nice, Mantua, and the Maghreb moved to the port.³⁴ A survey of the community conducted by the Magistrato della Consegna to examine the feasibility of a new ghetto made in October/November 1707 registered 76 Jews in the city in 27 households.³⁵ Well-connected into the broader Mediterranean and Atlantic diaspora, Genoese Jews quickly entered into the victualling business.³⁶ In 1660, the firm of Abram Vaez-Mordocai Elaich was outbid in an effort to secure the tax farm on the oil gabelle in the Republic, while seven years later a Jewish merchant named David Valensin succeeded in acquiring the licence to deal in spirits (acquavitae).³⁷

It would be this same licence that first connected Levi to Genoa. On 12 March 1696, Levi, together with Josef ‘Aziel Sacerdote, bid on the spirits licence (along with that for coffee) for 23,500 pieces-of-eight per-year for a decade.³⁸ The contract tells us much about Levi’s position in the city. First, Levi and Sacerdote overpaid for it, exceeding the previous annual price of 16,000 pieces-of-eight. Rather than a swindle, however, the overcharge monetised a clause in the contract that exempted them from wearing the identifying badge as well as granting the same privilege to their immediate network including Josef’s sons, Marco and Bonaiuto, and three of Levi’s deputies – Mosè Camaiòre, Salvatore Elarac, and David Leyat. Such a privilege speaks moreover to Levi’s position in the Jewish community. As one of the massari, a watchman charged with managing commercial and personal contacts between Jews and Christians, Levi sought freedom of movement for himself and his network.³⁹ Second, the contract notes that Levi had been living in the city ‘for a long time…for the moving of salt from Monferrato’, while other documents note Levi and Sacerdote originated from the French fort of Casale-Monferrato.⁴⁰ Levi was ‘as good a servant as there are among the French’, touted the envoyè Louciennes to the French Secretary of State, Michel Chamillard, in 1705. ‘[Levi] served well in the time of the late M. de Crenan [Pierre II de Perrien de Bueil-Courcillon, governor of Casale c. 1687], who was very happy with him, and since that time, he never ceased to use his purse and his person in all the [army’s] passages’, Louciennes added, cooing how, without Levi, the French would have had to employ a permanent treasurer in Genoa.⁴¹ The timing of this contract then was in no way coincidental; the French had ceded Casale-Monferrato the previous year to the Duke of Savoy, who had promptly expelled its French-aligned Jews, Levi most likely among them.⁴² Finally, the inclusion of Josef ‘Aziel Sacerdote is telling. Levi’s nephew Salomone – who the aforementioned 1707 survey noted ‘dealt with the affairs of the Most Christian King’ – married a daughter of Finale Sacerdote, and the couple shared with Levi a top-floor flat on Vico da S. Giorgio near the Old Mole and portofranco warehouses.⁴³ Levi’s relations with the Sacerdoti further brought him into direct contact with the network of Jewish financiers funding the French war effort. Together with the Castelli firm of Milan, the Sacerdoti served as intermediaries for the French financier Jean-Henri Huguetan, remitting funds and supplying grain for Bourbon troops stationed in Italy before 1706 and, after the collapse of the French position on the peninsula that year, for Provence, the Dauphiné, and Lyon.⁴⁴

Equipped with intimate knowledge of the Genoese customs system through his work as the city’s wine and spirits supplier and linked through family and community bonds to the French military apparatus in northern Italy, Levi found himself in spring 1702 well-positioned to take over the French grain trade. Along with fellow wine merchant, Giacomo Ottaviano Rossi, Levi agreed with the French envoyè Louciennes in March 1702 to transport French grain through Genoese territory on the express terms that all shipments would be toll-free. Immediately, Levi and Rossi regretted their new position. In a meeting with the former doge Francesco Maria Imperiali-Lercari, the two contractors learned to their surprise that although their contract with Louciennes ‘clearly disobliged them from paying any tolls’, they in fact would be charged at the outpost of Gavi for every bushel of grain to help repair the heavily damaged road up the Bocchetta Pass.⁴⁵ ‘This is not an issue with making profit, as with the collection of gabelles, but with required money to maintain the road’, the Genoese insisted, a position they defended further by noting how French contractors had paid this toll when moving supplies up the pass during the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659).⁴⁶ The two contractors could not ‘demand something that has never been practiced on other occasions for similar toll exemptions granted for the ships of the Lord Emperor, King of Spain, Duke of Savoy and others’, added Marc’Antonio Moschino, the minister charged with the Gavi toll.⁴⁷

Whatever Levi’s initial hesitation, he threw himself into reforming the traffic of French grain to Lombardy. In May 1702, Levi supervised the opening of a second supply route through Rossiglione to Ovada, paying the salaries of the Genoese commissioners charged with managing the road and receiving reimbursement from the French later for the many local fees and tolls he paid.⁴⁸ When this route proved insufficient, he shifted much of the transit back to the Genoese-controlled Bocchetta Pass. By early 1704, Levi managed a complex chain of customs checks for the flow of French grain through the republic and its territory. Levi’s essential role as intermediary began the moment French grain landed at Sampierdarena as officers of the Casa di San Giorgio checked each load against the ship’s bill of lading held by Levi to confirm that ‘all the bills of lading of goods that came from France were recognised and signed by the Lord Ambassador [Louciennes]’.⁴⁹ All grain would then be poured into new sacks of 100 mine each made from canvas Levi purchased (on deposit) from the portofranco, counted by weight on state-run scales ‘in order to eliminate any suspicion of fraud’, and put into silos Levi ran in Sampierdarena for which he and the Commisario of Sampierdarena each held keys. ⁵⁰ ‘In this way, all the goods are unloaded, placed there, and closed up with both keys, one of them retained by the Commissioner [of Sampierdarena] and the other consigned to whomever takes care of these goods’ a March 1705 report on the warehouses noted.⁵¹ As a further form of precaution, the Protettori di San Giorgio sealed each sack ‘above the ligature of the load…so that the bales cannot be opened…without spoiling the seal’ and stamped the seal itself with ‘an impression different from others that are practiced in the port of S. Lazaro’ [e.g. the city of Genoa itself].⁵² From the shore, Levi (or his deputy) transited the grain first through a weigh station and customs check at Pietralavezzara before moving onto the Genoese border at Novi where another official of the Casa di San Giorgio would weigh and count the grain a final time, releasing it out of Genoese territory to waiting wagons (also contracted by Levi) for Alessandria and then Casale, releasing them only upon word that Levi/his deputy had paid all the customs officials in Sampierdarena and the Bocchetta Pass as well as local tolls for repairing the pass’s increasingly run-down road.⁵³

From ship to shore to army camp, Levi relied on his reputation as a merchant of some integrity to make this logistics chain run smoothly. ‘He is a man who is very helpful, expeditious, and who negotiates for us more business in eight days with the Republic than the envoy of the King and the consul of the nation in six months’, praised French commanders in northern Italy in 1706.⁵⁴ A dispute (one of many) between the Genoese government and envoyè Louciennes can help further reveal Levi’s essential role as an intermediary between the two governments. The flair up began in January 1704 when the Genoese Collegi permitted the French to move 100,000 mine of grain from Languedoc through Sampierdarena for the coming campaign season.⁵⁵ Friction soon developed between the two sides over control of the grain warehouses Levi rented out in Sampierdarena, which the Genoese demanded be tightly regulated. Genoese guards were to patrol them and commissioners from the government’s victualling office (Commissario de’ viveri) and the Casa di San Giorgio to hold the keys to the magazines ‘whose door has two locks, one unlike the other, having no other door or window that can be entered’ in order to prevent the tariff-free grain for the French army leaking out to the port ‘to the prejudice of the gabelles’.⁵⁶ ‘If, for example, a boat was able to carry 1000 mine [of grain], and announce only 800 of them’, a Genoese official argued, ‘it would be able to disembark them fraudulently at night, and unload the 200 with public prejudice, and send the other [800] to the warehouse’.⁵⁷ Yet envoyè Louciennes rejected such safeguards, arguing they were ‘unjust’, threatened ‘a new emergency’ for the hungry army, and cost ‘a lot of expense and inconvenience’.⁵⁸ ‘The pretentions of the Casa di San Giorgio wish to treat the Most Christian King worse than any merchant in the precautions taken for the shipment of goods’.⁵⁹ But even more importantly, Louciennes went on, there was no need for strict regulations because he had Jacob Levi. Levi was ‘an honourable man, known by the Camera [of Genoa] for his punctual fulfilment of contracts and rents, and also in his bargains with banks for his business, and that the Casa di San Giorgio itself can attest to this, to him not having been found at fault of fraud’.⁶⁰

As envoyè Louciennes implied, Levi’s reputation made him ideal for moving grain, a commodity ripe for counterfeiting, skimming, and other ill-dealing. But Levi’s standing was not as spotless as Louciennes claimed, and throughout the war the merchant preserved his double-identity as a private dealer in Genoese salt, spirits, and coffee alongside his position as French factor, a confused position that at times clashed. When, for instance, Levi discovered in early 1704 that Ligurian merchants were supplying the French with biscuit, he demanded the Genoese intervene on his behalf ‘out of concern for His Highness, and for the economy, and for the suspicion, that he has when his soldiers eat other bread than that made and distributed by his deputised ministers [e.g Levi]’, eventually getting Genoese officials to ban their own merchants from selling to the French.⁶¹ Levi’s spirit business continued as well; in early 1706 he was arrested in Casale-Monferrato for a £7,000 debt owed merchants there only for envoyè Louciennes to intervene again on Levi’s behalf.⁶² Throughout Levi maintained his independence, his hybrid identity at times working against French interests. A telling incident happened in May 1704 when the Genoese contractor in charge of Bourbon army uniforms, Tommaso Pittaluga, attempted to transit 248 rolls of black damask and calicos from Genoa to Casale-Monferrato tax-free, claiming the cloth as an essential war good. When a customs officer of the Casa di San Giorgio seised the luxury fabrics, objecting quite rightly that they ‘cannot be considered matériel in service of the army’, Pittaluga, the envoyè Louciennes, and other French officials feigned ignorance of the Genoese tax regime. But the Genoese saw through the ruse, city officials shooting back that the schemers expressed a ‘great spirit of dissimulation to continue to blame it on the ignorance of the French officials’ because they had been ‘well informed by the impresario Levi, who, on other occasions, has been suspected of cooperating with such alleged disquiet people’.⁶³ In the end, the disputing parties agreed to put Levi in charge of ensuring the high-quality textiles made it to the front without further incident.

A 20 November 1703 request by the envoyè brings into even sharper focus Levi’s dual position as private merchant and French victualler. In a letter to the Collegi, Louciennes demanded that the Genoese authorities treat Levi and his family with ‘the respect that is suitable’, arguing that the Jew was ‘a man of particular ability’ who ‘handles many [business] affairs and urgent interests in the royal service of His Most Christian Majesty’ having ‘for many years’ provisioned the French ‘not as a paid contractor, but as a factor’ taking on ‘ordinary business, provisions, and similar service of the King’.⁶⁴ In response to Louciennes’ request, the Genoese Collegi replied that while ‘the Serene Lords are inclined justly to the desires of His Lordship…the said Jacob is a contractor of the Camera Eccellentissima and a public merchant’ in addition to ‘managing the contracts and interests on account of His Most Christian Majesty’ and that it would be necessary for him to continue to fall under Genoese law.⁶⁵ Clearly taken aback by the Genoese accusation that he wished Levi to deal ‘outside the jurisdiction of the law’, Louciennes replied that he merely meant to suggest the Genoese treat Levi with ‘the regard suitable to his person’.⁶⁶

As the grain in Levi’s charge changed hands from ship captains to commissioners to muleteers to wagon drivers, problems of course arose. ‘In this port are disembarked many things…coming on board the French ships, that is salted meat, wine, biscuit, beans, grain, clothes, blankets, salted sardines, and other things which are put in the magazine of the Marchese Imperiale’ rather than Levi’s warehouse complained Pietrofrancesco Gaddo, the Commisario of Sampierdarena, a clear violation that made ‘vain all the diligences that have been deliberated up to now’.⁶⁷ But failings and frauds aside, Levi nonetheless helped fed an army of over 35,000 men at the end of a hundreds-mile-long supply chain between the start of his contract in 1702 and the collapse of the French position in Italy in late 1706.⁶⁸ Indeed, Levi became increasingly central to the French war effort. He fed and embarked French prisoners marched down from Piedmont in October 1704 and again in May the following year; carted back up the Bocchetta Pass French canons from Sampierdarena in January 1705; and paid off the creditors of the Spanish ambassador to the republic in October 1705.⁶⁹

Levi’s role as French factotum in itself was unremarkable. Jewish merchants supplied all manner of war goods to the French army during the War of Spanish Succession.⁷⁰ Two brothers from Metz, Joseph and Aaron Bonn, provided tents to a regiment at Toulouse in 1709, and one more pair, Moyse and Abraham Alphen, clothed another regiment in 1712.⁷¹ Still a third duo, Raphael and Moses Sacerdote of Casale, supplied thirty military hospitals for French troops across northern Italy throughout 1705–1706. The two brothers had won the contract from the sons of the prominent Mantuan Jewish contractor Abraham Vitta (Haim) Fano who at that moment also were feeding the French army with grain from Venice and the Levant.⁷² And Jews from Metz supplied 400 horses to the army in Milan, at one point delaying their order until after the sabbath, refusing to work ‘on their holiday, which they would not do for all the gold in the world’.⁷³ But even among his co-religious, Levi stood out. Writing from Genoa to Sir Thomas D’Aeth in a late-1703 report, the English merchant Giles Balle marvelled at Levi’s whole grain operation.⁷⁴ ‘The French have had a commisariy heare about these 12 months who receives greate quantitiye of corne from Langiudoke Provinces (butt none from Barbary), which is putt into magazeans att St. Pier d’Arena halfe a’mile from this city, which comes in for ye army in Lombardy for ye army in Lombardy, which goes sending thither as they have occasions thitherto’ Balle praised, adding how recently the French had ‘received several small vessels laden with powder, bulletts, Bombs, & likewyse four ye army’.⁷⁵ It is to this second, more volatile cargo that we now turn.

III

Much like grain, gunpowder was an essential bulk resource powering the revolution in military logistics, its efficient movement across supply chains and into cannon barrels best epitomised by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s famous maxim ‘il vaut mieux verser moins de sang, dût-on brûler un peu plus de poudre’ (‘better to shed less blood and burn a little more powder’).⁷⁶ Until recently, scholars have paid great attention to how state authorities scoured India, the New World, and Europe for saltpetre (one of gunpowder’s basic components); ground up this resource with sulphur and charcoal (gunpowder’s other elements) at government-run mills; and stored the combustible end product in specially-made, state-controlled facilities.⁷⁷ Studies of gunpowder mills from as far afield as the Fábrica da Pólvora de Barcarena outside Lisbon to the factories of Granada and Pamplona to the Swedish royal mills at Torsebro to mills operated by the British crown at Faversham and Waltham Abbey have tried to highlight how this volatile war good necessitated an ever-larger central state apparatus.⁷⁸ Yet as Levi’s experience will suggest, state authorities often needed to go beyond their territories for the manufacturing and movement of gunpowder by contracting such services with private individuals and firms. Studies of Habsburg Spain, for instance, have shown how private asientistas (contractors) like Miguel Aldecoa (who held powder asientos in 1719 for the Spanish army), Pedro Fermín Goyeneche (gunpowder provisioner for all of Spain in the 1720–1730s), and Juan Gil Meester (an Amsterdam-based powder supplier in the 1770s–1780s) procured much of the monarchy’s powder.⁷⁹

Extraterritorial contractors were especially important for supplying the French army in northern Italy. Due to the aforesaid difficulties of French logistical geography, contractors had to haul powder long distances from mills in northeast France to insufficient collection depots in the Lyonnais/Dauphiné and then the supply entrepôt at Briançon before crossing badly maintained roads over the Alps to the fortress of Pinerolo/Pignerol and down the Po to the French outpost of Casale-Monferrato.⁸⁰ During the Nine Years War (1688–1697), the French transported powder through Genoa and its Ligurian hinterland only sporadically.⁸¹ But the loss of Casale-Monferrato in 1695 and the cession of Pinerolo to Savoy in the Treaty of Turin (1696) meant that when hostilities reignited five years later, suppliers needed to move powder over water through Genoa from Bourbon-aligned ports around the western Mediterranean. Much of these shipments were ad-hoc. In January 1701, for instance, three galleys of the Duke of Tursis (who supplied the Spanish navy seven galleys on contract) escorted several Genoese merchant ships filled with 1500 powder barrels to Finale, an imperial enclave west of Genoa granted to the Spanish in 1619.⁸² Even at this early date, Genoese authorities worried about the dangers of powder ships idling in the port. Tempers flared in May 1701 during celebrations for the Feast of Corpus Domini (Corpus Christi) when Genoese commissioners demanded two French ships filled with powder leave the port immediately out of fears that the city cannons, set to fire blanks to honour the celebration, could ignite the vessels.⁸³ Levi’s takeover of French shipments of gunpowder to Lombardy came about in particular when in October 1703, Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, broke with the Bourbons and switched to the Allied side, depriving the Two Crowns of the all-important Alpine passes.⁸⁴ The Duke’s turn from ally to enemy moreover made his capital, Turin, the new centre of Bourbon energies. French entrepreneurs and transport agents flooded Liguria with gunpowder over the next two years, transferring 300,000 pounds of it from Flanders/Northern France for the planned siege of the Savoyard capital.⁸⁵ Yet this massive feat immediately overmatched the ad-hoc system of the previous two years, and by late winter 1704, 1000 barrels idled dangerously at warehouses and ships at Finale.

It was at this moment that Jacob Levi took charge of the French powder trade. Joining with the French envoyè Louciennes, on 18 February 1704, Jacob suggested to the Genoese Collegi a scheme to unknot the supply chain. ‘Designed by the said Jacob’ and based upon the grain supply trade that ‘had succeeded with ease’ the previous two years (as a report on the project explained), Levi sought to balance the needs of the French ‘so one could somewhat accelerate’ shipments of powder against ‘the agreed-upon safety’ of the port.⁸⁶ By tracing this logistics chain step-by-step (see Figure 2), we can both appreciate how Levi transposed the shipment of gunpowder atop his earlier grain network as well as the numerous issues he faced along the way, problems that led to the events of late May 1705 with which we began this essay.

Figure 2.

Jacob Levi’s Grain/Gunpowder Supply Chain (February 1704).¹⁴⁹

As Levi proposed in February 1704, the first step in bringing powder to Lombardy was to begin over a hundred miles west of Genoa at the Spanish port of Finale and its Genoese-controlled counterpart, Vado, where ships from Toulon and Marseille were to assemble before being sent to Genoa. Restricted to no more than three ships at a time with 100 barrels each, Levi was to strictly managed ‘the course of their departure…to the effect that they would arrive one after the other with little delay’.⁸⁷ Even under ideal weather conditions (never a guarantee with the harsh sirocco winds), Levi would have struggled. Dutch, English, and (after 1703) Savoyard ships constantly preyed on French vessels, filling the Provencal/Ligurian coast with ‘corsair vessels of the principle enemies of the Two Crowns’.⁸⁸ To make matters worse, Savoy’s reversal put the Genoese in the unenviable position of anchoring powder ships from both belligerents simultaneously in the city and its territory as Dutch and English craft frequently used Genoa as a waystation for the Savoyard port of Oneglia.⁸⁹ In fact, at precisely the same time in May 1705 that Levi was struggling to disembark French powder at Genoa, a similar conflagration threatened at Genoese-controlled Vado, where galleys of the Duke of Tursis had trapped a dozen Savoyard and English brigantines loaded with 200 powder barrels for the Duke of Savoy on their way to Oneglia. When the Genoese governor refused to let the ships’ commander, the Marquis de Pallavicini, disembark and transport the powder overland to Piedmont, the trapped mariners revolted and threatened to ignite the powder, exchanging fire with Genoese soldiers sent to quell them.⁹⁰

Assuming the powder could arrive at Genoa in an orderly manner, Levi next was to unload these barrels at Sampierdarena, storing them ‘in neither warehouses nor in any dwelling’, but shipping them immediately to the Genoese border.⁹¹ It is worth stopping here to appreciate why gunpowder storage posed so much greater a problem for Levi than the grain discussed above. Gunpowder needed to be stored in magazines fit-for-purpose with thick walls, lead roofs, and grates on doors and windows to prevent damp and safeguard it from lightening, fire, and incendiary sources. French and British authorities, for instance, tolerated no gunpowder factories within several kilometres of domestic dwellings, and powder mills themselves were separate from other parts of industrial production within these factories.⁹² For their part, the Venetians milled and corned their gunpowder on the island of Sant’Angelo delle Polveri (Saint Angelo of the [Gun]powder) and warehoused it in purpose-built, heavily-guarded towers (torresini) on the islets around the lagoon before transferring the volatile resource in covered boats (burchielli coperti) to the Arsenal and onto the galleys.⁹³ The Dogal government built similar facilities in the Terraferma, with eight saltpetre towers in the countryside around Vicenza and a further thirty-two in some state of repair or construction in and around Brescia by the early seventeenth century.⁹⁴ Like the Venetians, the Genoese spread their powder away from populated centres, storing it either along the city’s New Walls (Mura Nuove) or in mills slightly west in the Valle Lagaccio.⁹⁵ Even with such precautions, however, urban industrial disasters occurred.⁹⁶ On 6 March 1711, an explosion of gunpowder ripped through the Porte Nuove (New Gates) of Genoa, levelling nearby houses and killing many when the cannons atop the gate went flying.⁹⁷

To alleviate fears of such industrial accidents, Levi offered a novel solution: rather than wait ashore, French gunpowder would move seamlessly from ships onto waiting mules which would then transport it over the Bocchetta Pass to Novi on the Genoese border. Here again during the final part of the powder’s journey to Lombardy, Levi hired muleteers he had recruited to bring first salt and wine and then (after 1702) grain up the pass. As Levi proposed it, he could hire men who were ‘all subjects of the Republic and therefore would conduct [the powder] with caution to Novi’, recruiting these men specifically from the villages of the Bocchetta Pass in the hopes that ‘each one of these [muleteers], with their animals, should go and sleep at their houses where they will be separate from [the powder] and out of every danger’.⁹⁸ If everything went as planned, Levi’s muleteers would end their dangerous journey at Novi where the powder was to undergo a similar customs check as the grain had before. Levi’s deputies would provide manifests, the powder would be stored outside of the city ‘in some site as remote as possible from this place and from danger’, and wagons would arrive from French-controlled Casale to store the powder for later use.⁹⁹

Looking back, one has to admire the ambition of Levi’s project. Could another Genoese merchant, Jew or gentile, have constructed a similar scheme? Perhaps. But Levi possessed a particular set of skills. Skills he had acquired by marriage ties, local contacts, and personal charisma. Skills made all the better by his unique (albeit fragile) legal position as a non-citizen, foreign-born merchant in an (ostensibly) neutral city. Skills that made him uniquely qualified to haul bulk items for foreign militaries across rough seas, broken roads, and mountain passes.¹⁰⁰

But even he could not manage the sheer magnitude of powder flowing through Liguria that spring and the next. Within a month, Levi’s plan began to unravel. On the evening of 14 March 1704, Levi requested the Collegi permit him to unload a ship with 250 barrels of powder, promising that if he could not get the barrels ‘set off immediately for Lombardy’, the drums would be sent back out to sea.¹⁰¹ ‘Reproaching him forcefully’ and warning Levi of ‘the severity of their resentment’ if he violated their demands, the Collegi relented the next evening on the condition that the ship keep ‘a greater distance from the city as to be able to make every danger more remote’ by withdrawing far out on the Mole Nuovo (New Mole) in the event it needed to anchor for the night.¹⁰² Imagine then the incredulity of the Genoese when they awoke to find Levi’s ship not only anchored inside the port, but offloading its cargo. ‘The mayor of this place…has told me that the ship of the Jew Levi loaded with powder in the port ordered last night by the Sargent General to leave…this morning was anchored not at the point of the New Mole, out of regard to safety in case of the event of a fire on any of the vessels found here, but anchored closer to land than to sea between the New Fortress and San Teodoro’ fumed the secretary of the Collegi that morning.¹⁰³ A seaside squabble then erupted as the Sargent General demanded the ship leave immediately ‘and sail to somewhere or another, off to Finale or another part of the Ponente or else to the Levante’ to which the unnamed captain insisted the rough seas prevented his departure.¹⁰⁴ Only after the Collegi had hauled Levi and Louciennes before them, belaboured the two for ‘non-compliance with the treaty’, complained about ‘the dangers the whole city was being subjected to’, and forced the ships to leave the port, did the whole episode die down.¹⁰⁵ But more disputes plagued Levi in the coming months. In May, Levi fell afoul the Genoese authorities when they again ordered two tartans loaded with 720 barrels of powder to go ‘as far as possible from the body of the city to remove the danger’ and urged ‘the Jew deputised with conducting the powder to disembark it and transport it away as quickly as possible’ on threats of raising his faults with the French court at Versailles.¹⁰⁶ When more powder arrived just four days later, a rightfully apoplectic Giunta de Confini ordered Levi again to remove it with ‘the greatest possible promptness’ not at Sampierdarena, but at nearby San Andrea di Sestri Ponente or else ‘ship them out of this port and keep them out of here or at Vado or elsewhere’.¹⁰⁷

If Levi struggled to transit a few hundred barrels for the 1704 campaign, he must have been even more daunted to learn the following spring of French plans to convoy thousands more into northern Italy. Convoys troubled Levi. They choked up the Sampierdarena beach with men and matériel and strained his muleteers. Yet throughout the winter and spring 1704/5, allied privateers increasingly drove the French to group their war goods in ever bigger convoys direct to Genoa despite Stefano Gentile, the Genoese extraordinary ambassador in Versailles, warning that his republic would ‘not suffer…ships with too much powder’ and demand Levi land them ‘on the beach of Sampierdarena in good order’.¹⁰⁸ And while three French powder ships arrived in December and another with 500 barrels in February, the large convoy of 290 barrels of powder, 680 bombs, and 2250 pickaxes that arrived mid-March foretold a busy summer for Levi.¹⁰⁹ Despite ‘the greater expense of convoys’, ‘the perils that takes hold of them by Flemish and English corsairs and the corallines and feluccas of Oneglia’ meant ‘it is not practical to send by boat the powder a little at a time or to keep them for a bit at Vado as it was designed because of the danger which could befall them of being burned by the enemy’ Louciennes vented to the Collegi.¹¹⁰

Problems mounted for Levi too at the other end of his supply chain. Poor roads and heavy rains slowed the wagons sent from Novi. In October 1704, Levi requested he be permitted to store powder ‘in a safe place…away from [Novi]’, an appeal the Genoese granted because ships ‘laden with powder’ kept causing ‘great disorder’ in the port and ‘great risk and apprehension in the whole city’.¹¹¹ The general condition of French-Genoese relations made Levi’s job no easier. Since January, Dutch and English ships had been using neutral Genoa as a safe port, attacking French ships, and selling them to Genoese as prizes.¹¹² When the French learned of this traffic, they seized a small barque moored at Genoa, claimed the boat was a French ship captured by Savoyard privateers, and put the crew ashore only for the Genoese to send 50 soldiers to take the ship back.¹¹³ Adding heat to the fire, in late April, Louciennes requested Levi assemble étapes (supply depots) down the Riviera Levante east of Genoa for two regiments of Neapolitan troops on their way to Lombardy after Dutch corsairs had forced their transports ashore at La Spezia.¹¹⁴ Nothing went right. When the Genoese rejected Levi’s request to house the men at the lazaretto (quarantine hospital) outside the city, the Neapolitans deserted in droves, and what remained marched the entire circuit of the city-walls looting as they went.¹¹⁵

All these issues collided in May 1705. At the beginning of the month, a convoy of 11 warships escorting a further 40 barques and tartanes arrived with grain, powder, cannons, clothes, and munitions for the army in Lombardy.¹¹⁶ Before Levi could move these supplies off the beach and have his muleteers return, however, the massive convoy with which this essay began – the nearly 4000 barrels of gunpowder and all the rest – arrived. Even without the existing backup from earlier in the month, the convoy utterly swamped Levi, whose appeal to store the powder in Sampierdarena in order ‘to free the port from the danger of boats in this place and to have the barrels ready for loading on their arrival for their conduct’ the Collegi flatly denied.¹¹⁷ Nor could Levi’s muleteers handle such a massive shipment. While no record survives of the men Levi hired, a surviving list from 1713 kept by the muleteers guild (Arte delli Mulatierri) records 552 mules available from Sampierdarena, Novi, and the hamlets of the Bocchetta Pass.¹¹⁸ Assuming Levi could buy all the mules in the Genovasato (which he could not) and have them all haul powder at the same time (which he certainly could not), each mule would have had to carry approximately eight barrels that May!

To make matters worse, the muleteers Levi hired fell under suspicion of skipping checkpoints and skimming powder. When a new captain arrived in Novi in August 1705, he was shocked to find that Levi’s muleteers were moving through the town ‘without wishing to stop the night’ and load the powder into the town’s warehouse. Suspicious, the captain opened some barrels to find ‘a barrel of powder filled instead with sand’ and immediately ordered the muleteers, arrest.¹¹⁹ ‘Jacob Levi, you can do your part to remove every fraud or, better still, send [Republic’s police] to find the muleteer Pitto’, the captain fumed, adding that Levi’s deputies should help them bring the accused into ‘the arms of justice of the Most Serene Republic by arresting the muleteers’.¹²⁰ But Levi fired back, claiming the defective powder came from France itself and proposing that he add an inspector at Sampierdarena to the one already at Novi to prevent any subterfuge.¹²¹

Returning to the growing disaster at Sampierdarena, many observers were alarmed over the backup on the beach. ‘I do not admire [the Genoese] apprehensions, for [the French] not only have magazines heare, and use the Porte with t(he) same fredome as there owne, but sease their shipps without any regard’ observed the English merchant and special envoy to Genoa Mitford Crowe in a 20/31 May 1705 letter.¹²² ‘Genoa is the place d’armes for the Queen’s enemies’, Crowe’s counterpart at Turin, Richard Hill, quipped a few days later, worrying how French and Spanish agents had ‘bought up all the gunpowder which was to be had at Leghorn, and Genoa, not only for their own occasions, but to hinder their neighbours from buying it’.¹²³ Fairly or not, to those outside of Genoa, blame on the supply glut lay squarely on Levi’s shoulders; avvisi (newsletters) as far away as Vienna reported on how the ‘Jewish Commissioner of France’ in Genoa needed to ‘speed up the project of the cannons and war provisions disembarking’.¹²⁴

Yet in the end – although slow, dangerous, and riddled with fraud – Levi succeeded in avoiding a catastrophe, gradually moving the powder off the ships (which remained moored dangerously at the New Mole) as well as a further 1500 barrels between July-September in two smaller convoys out of Toulon.¹²⁵ But even though he managed to avoid disaster, Levi had no illusions. His logistics system, designed for grain, had failed to cope with the rush of gunpowder, and he resolved that autumn to find new solutions. In a 4 August 1705 letter to French Secretary of State Chamillard, Levi proposed to allay both Genoese fears of an industrial disaster and French concerns of fraud by offering to buy up powder and saltpetre in Italy rather than shipping it from France. ‘I could have the most perfect powder made in several factories in this country where we will have to make it at the risk, peril and fortune of Italian entrepreneurs’, Levi wrote, ‘which will spare the King [powder] wagons and prevent the faults which we have noticed in those [barrels] coming from France’.¹²⁶ At first, French officials were supportive of Levi’s plan. Chamilliard ordered Levi to buy up 5000–6000 quintiles of powder and elevated him to the position of Commissaire des guerres at Genoa.¹²⁷ But soon the Secretary of State and other French officials, worrying about the war’s rising costs, demurred.¹²⁸

Frustrated and overstretched financially, Levi finally resolved to rid himself of his gunpowder contract, sending receipts for all outstanding debts owed him on the powder over to French officials in northern Italy, who, after months of cajoling, paid him back.¹²⁹ Doubtlessly, part of their motivation was Levi’s continued victualling of the French army. Gunpowder contract or not, Levi supplied two battalions of French troops in May 1706 and moved over 100,000 mine of grain that year before the catastrophic French defeat at Turin in September halted his shipments leaving thousands of bushels to rot in Levi’s warehouses in Genoa.¹³⁰ Even in defeat, Levi offered his services to the French. He set up etapes for the vanquished army across Genoese territory, supplied them with munitions to fight rearguard actions, and fed the starving French garrison at Finale.¹³¹ Summarising the next year what had been half-a-decade of French grain and gunpowder coursing through the lands of his republic, nearly all directed by Jacob Levi, the Genoese ambassador to Spain (to where the war had shifted) reminded the Bourbons there how his government had permitted ‘disembarkations of every kind of munition, artillery, bombs, balls, and tools, completely free of customs duties’ to such a degree that ‘all the world saw and pondered it’ especially France’s enemies ‘who many times were greatly scandalised’.¹³²

****

Yet even with the French out of northern Italy, the scandals continued, none worse than that which occurred on 13 May 1711. That night the residents of Genoa were horrified to see a ship ablaze in their port. After two weeks of rain, the weather had turned hot, and a fire had started deep in the tight confines of its hull packed with Spanish wool from Cadiz worth around 100,000 silver scudi. But that was not what caused (as an avvisi sensationalized) ‘great evil in the city, especially in the quarters closest to the Port’.¹³³ Rather, it was the 50 barrels of gunpowder, which had been sitting aboard the ship waiting for the rain to let up, that concerned the people of Genoa. As they waited and worried, many nervous Genoese must have been growing tired of over a decade living on the edge of a cataclysm.

It is tempting to think as well that Jacob Levi, sitting not far away in his flat on Vico da San Giorgio (and thus well within the blast radius) agonised too, unaware that the barrels had been thankfully taken off the ship before the fire started. He certainly would have known that since the French defeat at Turin in 1706 the flow of grain and powder through the port had not just ceased, but had reversed as suppliers and transporters paid by the Grand Alliance bought up the two vital resources in Lombardy and beyond, dragged it down the Bocchetta Pass, packed it onto ships at Sampierdarena, and sent it off to the war’s new front, Spain. He may as well have empathised with his counterparts who doubtlessly had to hire many of the same wagon drivers, muleteers, and ship captains to move the over 10,000 powder barrels they shipped between 1707 and 1712, all along (like Levi) being chided by Genoese authorities to hurry powder (as one report noted in 1712) ‘out of the Port, so soon as possible, fearing some unhappy accident should happen, having had prodigious Thunder & Lightening’.¹³⁴

Sitting, watching that ship burn, Levi may have fretted as well about his own business ventures. Notarial contracts after 1706 show him dealing in American tobacco through a branch in Nice; stocking Genoa (clandestinely, his contract having expired) with ‘a large quantity of sprits in large drums, barrels and the like’; and insuring ships to Marseille, Algiers, Naples, and Lisbon, although, fortunately for him, not the burning wool ship.¹³⁵ He may also have worried about the course of the war itself as he had followed the war as it went, shifting his interests from Italy to Iberia. His previous work with the French seemed to have spurred this switch from one Bourbon monarch (Louis) to another (Philip); in early 1707 Levi had travelled to Madrid to ask the Marquis de Monteleone to help him settle open accounts with the French.¹³⁶ Yet the move did little for him. In July 1710, Levi co-financed with Salomone Sacerdote a pinco in the name of the Duke of Tursis to transport 600 Bourbon soldiers who had fled to Corsica following a failed attack on nearby Sardinia.¹³⁷ These moves only worsened his relationship with his earlier benefactors. ‘[Levi] often sees the Dukes of Ucceda [the Spanish ambassador in Genoa] and Tursis’, fumed a French official in October 1711, ‘and under the pretext of his permission from the King of Spain to trade with his relatives, he deals with the enemies’.¹³⁸

Watching that ship ablaze, Levi may even have reflected on his legacy. Later that year Levi appointed his nephew Salomone to sell rentes on the Paris Hôtel de ville – long-term annuities Levi had received as compensation for the debts owed him by the French government – to pay back a debt owed another Jewish merchant from Casale, Raffaele Cori Treves, a swap Treves rejected owing to the toxicity of the rentes by the end of the war.¹³⁹ Despite the onerous nature of these assets, however, Levi’s account in Paris remained open for years. A contract from 7 January 1716 states that Levi received as surety and mortgage for expenses incurred on behalf of the King of France 21,200 pounds from Giuseppe Auber, the French Consul in Genoa, as well as a repayment later that August of a further 2216.13.4 pounds, amortised into a 5000-franc rentes in the Hôtel de ville, over which he appointed a representative in Paris of the Verzure firm to try to sell these ‘sclerotic, cumbersome’ annuities with no success.¹⁴⁰ Indeed, Levi’s French investments – back pay for all his hauling, haggling, and headaches on their behalf – remained with him until his death in December 1725. Listed in Levi’s will along with the mirrors, paintings, jewels, linens, clothes, swords, and carpets valued at 9414.8£ that bedecked his twelve-room apartment in Genoa and another one out in Sampierdarena one can find listed his rentes used now, at his last moments, to pay off about a half-dozen creditors, among them Giacomo Ottavio Rossi, the same wine merchant with whom Levi first signed up to move French grain over two decades earlier.¹⁴¹

The course of Jacob Levi’s career – from civilian merchant to Genoese spirit victualler to grain supplier to gunpowder procurer and back again to the former – raises a provocative issue about the impact of military logistics, bulk goods especially, upon the legal status, physical safety, commercial networks, and built environment of merchants like him. Scholars long have dismissed the Genoese for their halting efforts to attract resident aliens and their capital, noting how its rulers never enacted the sorts of privileges, tax exemptions, legal protections, and dispute resolution mechanisms like nearby Marseille, Livorno, and, to a lesser extent, Ancona, Trieste, and Venice.¹⁴² Contemporary observers said as much. ‘This Citie would proove the most famous in all these Seas for Trading, were not the Inhabitants such noted Politicians, and great biters by Exchange, that no strangers can live among them…to their better considerations I referre this point, and publish to the world their owne common Proverbe which admirs hardly any Merchants to live or thrive amongst them, Genoa fatta per noi, their Citie is onely made for themselves’, asserted the English merchant Sir Lewes Roberts in his 1638 Merchants Mappe of Commerce.¹⁴³ Yet as Levi’s crucial role moving grain and gunpowder suggests, the number of Dutch/Flemish, German, English, French, Muslim, and Jewish businessmen need not have reflected their weight in military resource logistics.¹⁴⁴ These men lived doubly-transnational lives as military suppliers to foreigners and as foreigners within their own communities, their pluralistic identities serving them as brokers in sprawling, international markets.

This point is made sharper by the fact that in 1703, 17.4% of all warehouse space in Genoa’s portofranco was rented to resident foreigners, a number that grew to fully 34.2% by 1739 including many Jews as well as Protestant English and French who (a 1746 report noted) ‘formed a small republic well-credited in the portofanco and in some way independent of the Republic’ despite numbering around fifty.¹⁴⁵ In all likelihood, it was this latter community, French Huguenot, who took over the powder transit from Levi after 1706. In October 1707, the English hired a certain Joseph Boüer, the Huguenot former consul at Nice, to procure 130,000 rations of biscuit, 130,000 pints of wine, 25,600 pounds of Genoese lard, 25,600 pounds of cheese, 19,200 pounds of rice and beans, and 6400 pounds of oil for ‘the subsistence of the Troops which must pass from Italy to Spain, being prepared at Genoa’.¹⁴⁶ Part of a community numbering only a few dozen, segregated from the Genoese by his Protestantism, and intertwined to other prominent Huguenot through bonds of faith and family, Boüer was, according to the English envoy Richard Hill, ‘an honest, discreet man’ – a man, so to say, of particular ability.¹⁴⁷

Funding Statement

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper draws on research conducted for the project The European Fiscal-Military System, 1530-1870, which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 787504).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.