Venetian Libraries and Foreign Ambassadors in the 1540s Almost a half-century before the two remaining Venetian possessions on the Greek mainland, Nauplion (Nafplio) and Monemvasia, were ceded to the Ottomans in 1540, the presses of the humanist-printer Aldus Manutius had begun to associate Venice with the transmission of Greek literary culture to the republic of letters. Venice was and remained the most important marketplace for Greek manuscripts old and new, with émigré and often penurious Greek scholars struggling to survive as scribes, editors and traffickers of these texts. Although Aldus and his learned community seem not to have had much access to the 752 manuscripts (482 Greek) donated to the Republic by Cardinal Bessarion shortly before his death in 1468, Venice possessed other libraries whose holdings could supply the required material. The manuscript holdings in the libraries of the Dominican convent SS Giovanni e Paolo (Zanipolo), Benedictine San Giorgio Maggiore and the Augustinian Sant’Antonio di Castello grew over the early decades of the sixteenth century. The Dominican general, Gioachino Torriano, for instance, kept at the Zanipolo some 272 Greek and Latin manuscripts and a like number of printed books. In 1523, Cardinal Domenico Grimani left his massive library, built on the foundations of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s, to Sant’Antonio, where provision was made for some 8000 volumes; in Greek, Grimani had increased Pico’s 157 volumes to 392. The degree to which each institution housed what might be thought of as ‘quasi-public’ library remains unclear, and access varied from place to place. Some libraries chained the books, with borrowing permitted only to the exceptional and well-connected few, who, nevertheless, seem to have borrowed on behalf of others. Not unexpectedly, Venetian libraries figured heavily among those in Italy Conrad Gessner inspected in compiling his Bibliotheca universalis (1545), with Bessarion’s library, the Zanipolo and that of the Imperial ambassador, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza named explictly.