Introduction
Some of us might not like our siblings, but this is ridiculous:
“Your excellences must know that my ill-born brother, whose name will shortly be revealed to you…is a traitor to our motherland; he reveals the most important secrets of the negotiations of our councils to Zuane Pecchi, who lives in Calle Sporca, in the neighborhood of San Luca…and then Pecchi reveals them to his compatriot; who is the servant of the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador…”
This was not a secret denunciation to a block captain in a 20th century dictatorship, but one written in Renaissance Venice, to the Heads of the Council of Ten, the masters of Venetian counterintelligence. (It was probably deposited in a special box reserved for such denunciations, like the one above.) And when you realize that the Republic of Venice’s foreign intelligence and cryptographic services were no less developed than its internal secret police, it becomes clear that, as my guest Ioanna Iordanou writes, Venice had created “one of the world’s centrally organized state intelligence services.” This was literally centuries before anyone else did so.
And this is more than just the history of Renaissance espionage or the spycraft of Venetian intelligence. It’s about the history of institutions, organizations, and corporations. For it shows how “organizational entities and managerial practices existed long before contemporary terminology was coined to describe them.”
About the Guest
Ioanna Iordanou is Reader in Human Resource Management at Oxford Brookes Business School. An organizational and business historian, her research spans coaching (with a particular focus on ethics and development) as well as the emergence of early modern organizations and managerial practices. She has consulted coaching associations and accreditation bodies, contributed to the intelligence and espionage galleries at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and her research has appeared in the Guinness World Records. She is the author of Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance.
Discuss
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