A New History of the City and Its People
"Elizabeth Horodowich is an associate professor of history at New
Mexico State University. She earned her BA from Oberlin College in Ohio
in 1992 and her Ph.D in European history from the University of Michigan
in 2000. She has published articles in journals such as Past and Present,
Renaissance Studies, and The Sixteenth Century Journal. Her first book,
Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge, 2008)
considers speech acts and foul language in sixteenth-century Venice.
She has received scholarly grants and fellowships from numerous
organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and
Harvard University's Villa I Tatti. Professor Horodowich lived in Venice
for six years and always looks forward to returning to the watery city."
"INTRODUCTION
The first time I went to Venice was in the autumn of 1991 as an
American exchange student from Oberlin College in Ohio. Like other
college students, I had studied Venice and its art and architecture, and
had read about its gondolas, canals, pigeons and museums. I had seen
many images of the city - of the alleys and public squares, the 'Bridge of
Sighs' and the Ducal Palace - and had come prepared (or so I thought)
to see it for myself.
I arrived in the city by train: an approach that does not afford the grand
spectacle offered to visitors who arrive by boat, as most have done
throughout the history of the city, but an approach that is perhaps even
more perplexing. Leaving the station, despite my preparation and book
knowledge of the city's topography, I nevertheless instinctively expected
to smell exhaust and hear the buzz of traffic as in every other major
Italian city. I wearily shook off the lull of the train and prepared to steel
myself against the clamour and confusion of urban life outside the
station. Instead, I stepped out into a quiet world. Not that it was silent,
but something seemed amiss. When things came into focus, I noticed
that between me and a row of buildings, where a street should have
been, there glittered instead a wide green canal lapping at its banks and
a boat or two streaming along it in either direction. The impression of the
scene was powerful. Despite the fact that I had seen similar images in
slides and textbooks and in my mind's eye hundreds of times, somehow
nothing could have prepared me for the first impact it made in real time.
As I stared, I began to understand more profoundly than before that
things here were not put together in any normal way. Though perhaps
not as dramatic as a panorama from a mountaintop or a sweeping vista
down a wide and bustling urban avenue, the effect of this landscape was
entirely disconcerting, no matter how many times I had seen it
reproduced before. I put down my bag for a moment, blinking into the
dazzling glare of light, stone and water, and taking in the seemingly
incomprehensible. This could not be - a city of water and boats instead of
streets and cars - and yet, it was.
My experience was, of course, hardly exceptional. Writers and historians
through the ages have commented on the breathtaking nature of their
arrival in the city of Venice, whether by boat, train, bus or plane, and on
the sense of wonder and confusion generated by this city perched on
water. It is not just the shifting light and colour of the sea that startles;
Venetian architects and builders have seemingly defied the properties of
stone so that the city's palaces and churches, its squares and towers,
appear to float rather than sit on the surface.
Introducing a history of Venice with such a description is not meant to
romanticize it. Like many other cities, Venice is both wonderful and
difficult, delightful and frustrating, accessible and outrageously
expensive. The Venetians are both friendly and (as we shall see,
perhaps justifiably) rude. I describe my sense of confusion associated
with my first moments in Venice because I believe it neatly reflects the
sense of bewilderment that many scholars have experienced in
approaching the city's history. Almost everyone who has poured over its
records and read its texts has come up with more questions, paradoxes,
myths and mysteries than concrete conclusions or exacting, stable
narratives. Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss art historian
and one of the first modern scholars of Italian culture, famously stated
that while Florence was 'the city of incessant movement, which has left
us a record of the thoughts and aspirations of each and all,' Venice, in
contrast, was 'the city of apparent stagnation and of political secrecy
[that] recognized itself from the first as a strange and mysterious
creation.' Not unlike the dazed tourist who looks upon the
incomprehensible, Burckhardt remained bewildered by what he
perceived as the ever-shifting and impenetrable nature of the Venetian
world. Rather than try to unwrap its mysteries, he focused the bulk of his
scholastic energy on Florence and the Italian courtly cities and left
Venice largely untouched.
The sense of bewilderment associated with this floating city has proved
so powerful and pervasive that it has earned itself a title, the 'Myth of
Venice': the term modern scholars have used to refer to Venice's
seemingly unique historical capacity for peace, piety and republicanism.
In brief, Venetians and their rulers appeared to demonstrate a
remarkable degree of political unity and civic stability. To this day people
wonder, why? Some of the questions and paradoxes include, how did
Venice survive as a republican state for nearly a millennium when its
neighbours did not? Why, for this same thousand years, was it never
conquered by an outside power, despite the fact that the city had no
walls, battlements or ramparts? How was it possible that among its
population, 90 per cent of whom were workers and labourers, there
wasn't a single, significant popular revolt? How did its female population,
with no formal political role, also contribute to its civic stability? How
could this city have been both so pious - as the historian Edward Muir
observed there is 'a virgin on every street corner' - while appearing so
clearly stamped with the mark of the Muslim Orient? And was Venetian
peace due to Venetian piety, to a sense of political and social justice that
was equally imparted to all, or was it the result of a system of ruthless
policing that forced its residents into trembling submission? Entire
libraries have tried to answer these questions, and the results are still
debated. Mythically, if not mystically, Venice's historical appearance of
serenity, independence and freedom, as well as its beauty, religiosity
and long-standing republican nature have caused generations of
historians, like the tourist staring for the first time at the Grand Canal, to
wonder, how could this be?
This book by no means aims to answer fully these questions.
Thousands and thousands of pages written by professional historians
have already been dedicated to that task, which naturally begs the
question, why another book on Venice? How can we possibly propose
yet another volume on a city that has already been overly studied and
excessively scrutinized? The answer to this question is twofold.
First, despite the thousands of volumes on Venice, ranging from the
highly focused and specialized historical monograph to the slim
guidebook, there is still no complete history of Venice from the city's
foundation to the present day in a single volume. Yes, there are many
masterful histories of the city in the English language, but none is aimed
at the general reader. Those interested in studying the history of
republican Venice in great depth should read Frederic C. Lane's Venice:
A Maritime Republic or John Julius Norwich's A History of Venice. But
both are demanding in their attention to detail and focus on political,
economic and maritime history. Indeed, most general histories of Venice
tend to be political histories with an occasional nod at art, leaving much
to be said about social and cultural history that this volume, in contrast,
considers more at length.
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan's Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth
organizes the history of Venice thematically and culturally, but extends
her story only through the sixteenth century. Indeed, many general
histories conclude their narratives with Napoleon's arrival in the lagoon in
1797, such as Peter Lauritzen's Venice: A Thousand Years of Culture
and Civilization or Alvise Zorzi's Venice 697-1797: A City, A Republic, An
Empire. Other excellent surveys such as Margaret Plant's Venice, Fragile
City: 1797-1997 cover instead the modern segment of the city's past.
Peter Mentzel's A Traveller's History of Venice offers an excellent
general synopsis of the arc of Venetian history, but again is primarily a
political history written by a historian of the Ottoman world with a
perspective that does not tend to reflect the pressing questions that have
driven more recent generations of Venetian historians. The best general
and brief histories of the city to date are in Italian by Gherardo Ortalli and
Giovanni Scarabello (now in English translation, though not readily
available) and in French by Christian Bec.
My aim has been to provide a general history of Venice from the city's
foundation to the present day and tackle the questions that have puzzled
scholars for decades. While some historians and writers have
deliberately broken with traditional narrative histories and taken a
thematic approach - as in Jan Morris's grand essay, Venice, or Garry
Wills's Venice: Lion City - I have stuck to a traditional, chronological
format. And though I occasionally consider art and architecture, the
history of Venetian art is simply too vast and complex to do justice to it
here. My tale is primarily historical. I've therefore struck a balance
between breadth and depth, between the grand battles and everyday life.
Most importantly, I've tried to make complex historical questions and the
latest research accessible to the non-specialist, partly by using narrative
explanation rather than academic notes. But how can I claim to do so
much in one concise volume, to break new ground where thousands
have gone before? Only by recognizing that you can't have one, singular,
exhaustive, complete or completely objective history of Venice.
So many stories, tales and anecdotes in Venetian history make it more
than apparent that it is often impossible to establish 'the truth'. So much
of Venice's history is shrouded in dubious accounts with a variety of
stories explaining Venetian landmarks and traditions. For example, is the
body of St Mark still preserved under the high altar in the basilica of the
church that bears his name, or was his body destroyed in a fire in 976?
Is the Campo dei Mori - 'the square of the Moors' in a neighbourhood on
the north side of the city - so-named because there was a Moorish
warehouse nearby, because of the Moorish statues placed here in the
walls or because a prominent family that once lived here came from
Greece, then called Morea? Was Marco Polo's famous account entitled Il
Milione to describe the 'millions' of riches he brought back from the
Orient, or for the wearisome 'millions' of lies and exaggerations it
contained? And what is the origin and meaning of the ferro, the eerily
shaped six-pronged prow of the gondola? Is it descended from Roman
galleys, an emblem of the decisive axe of Venetian justice,
representative of the Grand Canal, or of the six sestieri or
neighbourhoods of the city? Any two gondoliers or guidebooks will offer
two different answers to these questions, and there are hundreds of
other, similar questions. In many instances nobody really knows the
answers.
As in many other cities, it is often difficult to appreciate the density of the
past in the physical remains of the city since on any given plot of ground,
buildings have been built, razed, rebuilt, embellished, their decorations
chiselled out and sold, and then restored or re-created and pasted back
in. The city's art and architectural fragments, in many cases, have been
taken from Venice to Paris, Vienna, or Brussels and brought back again,
or have been replaced by replicas or acceptable substitutions. The
function of any given building that we see standing now could easily
have changed many times, from a church to a hospital, factory, mill,
stable, movie theatre, mask shop, or bar today. Because of these
complexities and the essential impossibility of finding 'the truth' in the
past, good historians always recognize that their craft entails
constructing history, as if with clay, rather then trying to reflect history to
modern readers as if with a mirror.
The second reason for another book on Venice is that there still exists
the need for a comprehensive history of Venice with more tourists - for
better or worse - visiting than ever before. On 1 October 2006 the New
York Times reported that from 15-18 million tourists had visited Venice
that year, and the numbers keep on rising. During Carnival week there
can be as many as 150,000 visitors a day. Venice has been used to
tourism since the Middle Ages because it was the great take-off point for
pilgrims and crusaders travelling to the eastern Mediterranean, but such
numbers overwhelm today's population of about 60,000. In their book
Venice, The Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most
Touristed City, Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin understand the
benefits that Venetians glean from such tourism while lamenting the
physical and cultural problems. Tourists, they claim, 'are consuming not
so much Venetian culture, but rather the images of that culture, and
consuming them, for the most part, as quickly as possible.' Statistics
show that most visitors come to Venice for just a day trip. To help the
tourist who wishes to stay longer know more about the history of Venice,
the final section of each of the following chapters describes the locations
around the city and the lagoon where the history in that chapter is made
visible. This allows visitors 'to read' the city's stones in person: stones
and monuments that recount and relay the city's past more directly and
often more poignantly than any written text.
Before delving into the riches of Venice's past, a brief word about the
location and topography of the city. While this isn't a guidebook,
establishing a basic understanding of the city's layout will make it easier
to understand events as they unfold. And of course that layout is
bizarrely based on water. The modern city exists on a series of
interconnected islands in a lagoon in the northern Adriatic. This lagoon is
an unusual and unique natural environment where brackish water is
created by the mixing of fresh water from nearby rivers with the waters of
the Adriatic that enter the lagoon through three principal channels. The
islands that form Venice are protected from the sea by a series of barrier
islands that separate the lagoon from the Adriatic and act as a
breakwater. To the north and south of the centre of Venice the lagoon is
peppered with islands, rocks, mudflats and uninhabited shoals of waving
reeds and grasses. Though the lagoon is vast, much of its waters are
shallow and can only be navigated by shallow craft and by those who
know its sandbars and channels.
Venice may look like one geographic whole - especially from the air - but
the central city is actually composed of about 120 islands, spanned and
connected by more than 430 bridges that cross 170 canals (called rii, or
rio in the singular). In terms of its overall shape, as the Venetian writer
Tiziano Scarpa has pointed out, 'Venezia è un pesce' ('Venice is a fish'),
which it really does resemble from above. Its backbone is the Grand
Canal, which weaves through the city and divides it into two. To date, in
2009, four bridges cross this canal.
Unlike other Italian cities, Venice does not call public squares and
streets piazze and strade. Instead, Venice's open spaces are called
campi, and its narrow and often winding streets are calli. A small alley is
a ramo, and a street that used to be a canal but has since been filled in
is a rio terrà. In Venice the only piazza is that of San Marco, the city's
ceremonial and civic centre. The names of Venetian streets, spaces and
canals - that often refer to the craft, profession or activity that happened
there - are frequently in Venetian dialect. And the final point to note is
that in the twelfth century Venice was divided geographically into six
municipal zones called sestieri: San Marco, Castello, Dorsoduro, San
Polo, Santa Croce and Cannaregio. In each of these districts, houses are
numbered consecutively.
Chapter One considers who the first Venetians were, where they came
from and how they formed an unusually independent political state by the
middle of the ninth century. Chapter Two traces how this city of humble
fishermen and salt traders came to control the economy of the
Mediterranean through conquest and commerce, beginning with the theft
of the body of St Mark in 828 through the thirteenth century. Chapter
Three tackles the same time period, but considers political and social
developments in the city. Chapter Four investigates the spectacular
events of the fourteenth century that made Venice the polity it remained
to the end of the republic. Chapter Five examines Venice during the early
modern period, otherwise known as the Renaissance. In particular, it will
question how and why Venice became a mainland empire and look at
the city's complex and productive relationship with the eastern
Mediterranean in terms of political and cultural diplomacy. Chapter Six
looks at the history of Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and explains how Venetian culture and politics changed as the
city's economic status began to decline. Chapter Seven covers the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Venice was violently thrust into
the modern world with the arrival of Napoleon, followed by the end of the
Venetian republic, the onset of Austrian rule, the unfolding of the
Risorgimento (the founding of the Italian state) and the wars of the
twentieth century.
Underlying all these topics is one persistent question: is Venice
fundamentally similar to or different from other cities? Should it seek to
emulate them and their paths towards modernization, or should it focus
primarily on protecting and shoring up its past? Such questions date far
back into the Middle Ages when Venetians first considered whether to
build a mainland empire. Most medieval cities had a contado or
surrounding territory that buffered them against foreign powers. Venetian
politicians debated whether they too should conquer a territorial empire,
or continue to focus their resources and capital on the sea, the traditional
source of their wealth, defence and success? Later, in the wake of the
Enlightenment, Venetians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
often wondered if they should emulate the liberal political ideas
emanating from Paris or stick with their age-old aristocratic rule. Daniele
Manin, the city's revolutionary leader in 1848, even suggested selling off
some of the city's paintings and other works of art to finance the new,
modern, political configuration of a democratic regime. However, the art
historian John Ruskin, one of the city's most influential visitors and
writers on Venice, famously scorned modernization in Venice, from gas
pipes being laid over bridges to arriving in the city by train. For him, it
was more crucial to preserve the city's unique past than to bring it up to
speed with other cities in the modern age.
Following his ideas, it is interesting to note that the three biggest and
potentially most significant modern architectural projects proposed for
the city in the twentieth century (a centre for students on the Grand
Canal by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953, a new hospital by Le Corbusier in
1964 and a new conference centre by Louis Kahn in 1969) were all
ultimately rejected by the city's politicians and urban planners. Change
and modernization in many ways always ran counter to the survival of
the city; indeed, today we are grateful that the Venetians did not opt to
install a subway (or underground) a project that was discussed at length
in the later twentieth century. Change, however, has been necessary to
the city's survival. Debates about change and modernization in Venice
are ubiquitous in discussions about art and architecture (conservation or
restoration?) and in arguments about how best to protect the lagoon from
flooding (leave it alone or opt for the MOSE project, a series of flood
gates?).
It has always been hard for Venice to find its way between the old and
the new, or between the lagoon and the rest of the world. Is the city a
museum or a modern city? As one writer put it, does it survive or does it
live? These questions and conflicts are embodied in the symbol of the
Lion of St Mark that, in Vittore Carpaccio's painted rendition, has two
paws on land and two on the water. Venice is like other cities, but at the
same time, it is not, because of its curious history and singular position
on water. These tensions characterize all of Venetian history, from its
foundation to the present.
An understanding of the history of Venice has much to offer the modern
reader. If one believes that the past offers insights into the present, the
lessons of Venetian history teach us about cosmopolitan life and
multicultural interaction. Historically, many Venetians lived abroad and
large communities of foreigners lived in Venice. In this way, Venetian
history has much to tell about cultural exchange, immigration, and the
politics involved in sharing a dense, limited, urban space - topics that
constantly confront the contemporary world. Furthermore, we shall see
that the Christian state of Venice managed to maintain a tense but
productive and pragmatic relationship with the Muslim East, perhaps
offering insights into similar relationships in the modern world. Venetian
history also serves to inform us about the relationship between republics
and despotisms, and potentially, how republican politics survive in an
otherwise dictatorial world.
For those who think that we rarely learn from the past, the history of
Venice - like all good history - offers a Copernican understanding of time
and the world. Just as Copernicus suggested that the earth was not at
the centre of the universe, so history destabilizes our sense of ourselves
as unique or important. Where else has a population lived so differently,
travelling by boat not by land, living from the sea instead of farming?
Where else has people's work interacted with water in such a peculiar
way?
And perhaps most pressingly, the recent history of Venice has much to
tell us about the relationship between politics and the natural
environment. Like New York, Calcutta and other coastal cities, Venice is
at the forefront of concerns about climate change. Is it sinking, is the
water of the lagoon rising, and what efforts are being undertaken to
understand and cope with such phenomena? While this is an enormous
topic, Chapter Eight includes discussions about Venetian efforts to cope
with a variety of environmental, political and economic crises that have
challenged the city in recent decades. In this way, we shall see that for
all its uniqueness, modernization has impacted on Venice, as it has on
much of the rest of the world. Venetian creativity and ingenuity in
confronting these challenges will ultimately demonstrate the degree to
which Venice is as unique and mythical as it has always claimed to be."
"1 ROMANS, BARBARIANS AND REFUGEES: 400-812
Walking the streets of Venice today, it is difficult to imagine what the
landscape must have looked like several thousand years ago, or to
envision the slow, painstaking process behind the city's construction and
development. Perhaps the one visible clue giving us an indication of the
challenges involved in building this city is the maintenance that is always
being carried out. We constantly see workers dredging canals to clear
away the build-up of mud and silt. Buildings often have to be restored to
repair the leaning and crumbling produced by shifting foundations and
dank air. In fact it is almost impossible to look around any campo or
down any street in Venice without seeing scaffolding covering the façade
of a building, or a canal being dammed to hold back the water, so that silt
and debris can be cleared away and the foundations repaired. No piece
of the city can be allowed to sit for too long before nature begins to eat
away at the built environment. All this work offers a small window on to
how hard it must have been to come and live on these marshy islands in
the first place. Why did people leave the comforts of the Roman world -
its roads, aqueducts, theatres and baths - to undertake a much more
laborious existence on the barren mudflats of the Venetian lagoon? As
the beloved Venetian poet Diego Valeri put it, when 'our saintly
forefathers [came here] more than a thousand years ago, they must have
had both an enormous supply of stubborn will, as well as a generous
grain of insanity.'
Venice was not founded like other European cities where people came
together at the intersections of trade and commerce, or gathered around
ancient holy sites as they remade them into Christian ones. It did not
grow outward from a market or forum, did not grow inward from
defensive walls and, though Venice eventually emerged as one of the
greatest European commercial capitals, it did not spring up at any
Roman crossroads; it was instead deliberately founded as far away from
them as possible. Its islands possessed no hallowed ground, and the
city's inhabitants would have to invent, and steal, their political and
spiritual legitimacy. Understanding how the first Venetians came to
inhabit the islands of the lagoon, their relationships with Rome and
Byzantium and their relationship to their physical and natural
environment are crucial to grasping the history of the city.
Venice, as we shall see, first formed as a city of immigrants with ties to
both Rome in the West and Constantinople in the East: ties that
influenced the foundation myths of the city and the way that Venetians
saw themselves. However, as these settlers built up their confidence and
wealth by repelling outside invaders and harnessing the lagoon's
resources, the city slowly emerged as a powerful, independent state in
the northern Mediterranean. In turn, Venetians developed a narrative
about their inborn sense of freedom and independence, a narrative that
more than any of their cultural ties to Rome or Byzantium defined their
identity and their understanding of themselves. The events surrounding
the first large-scale migrations to the lagoon, as well as the way that
subsequent generations of Venetians interpreted the foundation of their
city, are defining moments in early Venetian history.
Tracing the origins of Venice's first inhabitants requires delving into a
murky past where myth and history overlap, and it is often impossible to
separate one from the other, not least because there is little
documentary evidence from the Venetian lagoon in late antiquity and the
early Middle Ages. Very little was written down about Venice during the
Roman Empire, and the Roman and Greek historians who did write
about the lagoon, such as Livy and Strabo, only discussed it in passing.
While archaeological studies have added greatly to our understanding of
how populations grew on the lagoon's islands, there are still many
questions about the first residents of these islands whose answers
remain unclear. Who were the first inhabitants of the Venetian lagoon,
where did they come from and why did they leave the mainland in the
first place?"
"The First Venetians
The name of the city, Venezia, derives from the name given to this
Roman region in the northern Adriatic: Venetia. Venetia was the Decima
Regio, or the tenth of eleven regions (not a province, which was a
territory outside Italy that was governed by Rome) established by the
Roman Emperor Augustus. Venetia represented essentially all of north-
eastern Italy, roughly from the Alps to the Po River and from the Adige
River to the Adriatic Sea. According to one sixteenth-century writer,
Francesco Sansovino, Venetia was derived from the Latin phrase veni
etiam meaning 'come back again', or 'return to see this beautiful place'.
Some Venetian historians and chroniclers in the Middle Ages claimed
that the first Venetians came from Gaul, emphasizing ties between
Venice and France. Others argued they came from Troy, suggesting
either that the Trojans found refuge in Venice following the sack of their
city by the Greeks, or that the descendants of the Trojan leader Antenor
founded the city of Padua on the mainland and then later came to the
lagoon. It is also said that Antenor founded the mainland town of
Aquileia, in the same way that Aeneas founded Rome in the wake of the
Trojan War. Yet another story claimed that Antenor found protection in
the lagoon and built a castle on one of the islands, now in the Venetian
neighbourhood known as Castello. Possible Trojan origins were a big
plus since they suggested that Venetians, like Trojans, were subject to
no one and would rather flee their homes than be ruled by outsiders. A
different myth, focusing on Rome rather than Troy, claimed that a group
of three consuls from the Roman city of Padua founded Venice on 25
March 421, the same date that marks the beginning of the first month of
the Roman year and also the feast of the Annunciation to the Virgin.
While these foundation myths proved crucial to the way all future
Venetians imagined and described themselves, we need to look for the
origins of Venice much closer to home, in the lagoon. In all likelihood, the
earliest inhabitants of Venice were not Roman consuls or Trojan
refugees but humble, local fishermen and hunters arriving from nearby
Roman towns on the mainland. While some archaeological evidence
suggests that people have inhabited the islands of the lagoon since
Neolithic times, radio-carbon dating has shown that the islands of San
Francesco del Deserto in the northern lagoon and the area around the
Piazza San Marco, for instance, were first inhabited in the fifth century
and sixth century AD, respectively. On the island of San Francesco,
archaeologists have discovered evidence of a port where Romans
received goods from traders in the Adriatic and then ferried them to
mainland towns a few miles to the west. Some studies have also
suggested that there was a fixed Roman colony on the island of Torcello
(also in the northern lagoon) in the pre-Christian era. These island
populations were by no means large, and it is unlikely that people initially
inhabited the islands regularly or year-round since few people wanted to
live far from the benefits and comforts of Roman civilization.
In the early Roman Empire the islands of the lagoon were thinly
populated by boatmen. They crossed the waters in shallow craft and
returned with their catch to the bustling cities of Aquileia, Altino and
Oderzo on the Roman mainland. While some recent archaeological
theories have argued that this entire region was not lagoon but farmland
irrigated by a network of canals, and that the lagoon formed as a result of
a natural catastrophe at some point in the early Middle Ages, this seems
unlikely. Most historians and archaeologists tend to agree that the lagoon
and its islands existed during the Roman Empire and that they were
sparsely populated by fishermen, duck hunters and the occasional party
of picnickers and weekend revellers. The mythical idea that the first
Venetians moved to an uninhabited place is surely false, though popular
since it affirmed Venetian ideas about their independence and denied
any pretence of rule by foreigners or outsiders. For many centuries,
people came and went among the mudflats and reeds and the obscure,
anonymous islands of the Venetian lagoon quietly remained outside of
history.
All this changed, however, with the arrival of the barbarian tribes. The
period of the barbarian migrations in Europe lasted from approximately
the fourth to the seventh centuries when a series of Eastern, Germanic
and Central Asian tribes - including the Huns, the Visigoths and the
Ostrogoths - moved into the territory of the Roman Empire. The
barbarians are best known for supposedly having contributed to, or even
caused, the fall of the Roman Empire, but here they had another
important effect. Imperial authority was decadent and incapable of
defending its subjects in north-eastern Italy against these invaders.
Fleeing the violence and destruction of these tribes as they moved down
into the Italian peninsula, the populations of Roman cities in the northern
Adriatic took refuge on the islands of the lagoon and became the first
Venetians.
No one knows which barbarian groups caused the greatest waves of
immigration or when settlement in the lagoon became permanent. Some
have argued that people first fled to the Venetian islands in large
numbers when the Visigoths, under Alaric, arrived in the area in the early
fifth century. On their way to attack Rome in 410, the Visigoths first
sacked the wealthy Roman city of Aquileia in the northern Adriatic in 402.
One of the major trading posts between Rome and the East, Aquileia
was the Roman administrative capital of this region and one of the
largest and richest centres of the Roman Empire, with a population as
high as 100,000 at its peak in the second century AD. Its wealth attracted
barbarian tribes seeking profit and plunder, forcing Aquileians to leave
for the safety of the nearby lagoon, about 6 miles (10 km) away. These
barbarian invaders were excellent horsemen but were completely
unfamiliar with seamanship, leaving them unable and unwilling to attack
at sea. When the danger passed, Aquileians returned to the mainland
and resumed their usual way of life.
Alternatively, some believe that the first major migrations occurred
during the Italian campaigns of Attila the Hun who swept into Italy in 452
and sacked the town of Aquileia on the way. It is said that Attila was so
terrifying that he did not speak but barked like a dog and, wherever he
passed, 'the grasses no longer grew'. After Attila passed through north-
eastern Italy, Aquileia never regained its former status as a Roman
imperial city but presumably most locals did return to live there.
Interestingly, one of the remotest islands in the northern lagoon, the
small and mysterious Monte dell'Oro, or 'mountain of gold', is the site of a
legend about Attila. According to tradition the King of the Huns buried his
immense riches on the island and had them guarded by a demon. Even
today, local lore claims that fisherman continue to fear this island
because, at night, you can still see the souls of the Huns guarding their
treasure.
It's very likely that the Venetian lagoon was first colonized with a series
of improvisory and gradual movements back and forth between the
mainland and these nearby islands, when people seeking refuge from
invaders tried living in the less exposed Adriatic. The Visigoths and Huns
were clearly part responsible, but most scholars now think that the first
major migrations to the lagoon happened not in the fifth century but in
the sixth and seventh centuries, as a result of the Lombard invasions.
The Lombards (sometimes called Longobards, meaning 'Longbeards')
were a Germanic tribe from Northern Europe that some historians
believe had agreed to offer their military services to the Byzantine
Empire in the territory of Pannonia (now Hungary) in exchange for land in
Italy. In 568 the Lombards moved south across the Alps to claim this
territory in the valley of the Po River, marking one of the last major
movements in the period of the barbarian migrations. Unlike the
Visigoths or the Huns, the Lombards founded a permanent kingdom in
Italy that lasted until Charlemagne conquered it in 774. The Lombards
gave their name to the modern region of Lombardy in north-western Italy
after they eventually conquered Milan and made Pavia their capital.
A consensus now suggests that when the mainland residents along the
coast of the northern Adriatic realized that these barbarian invaders
intended to stay, they established the first permanent communities in the
lagoon. The locals saw their world die around them as the barbarian
scavengers of the Roman Empire swooped in and conquered their
homes. With the arrival of the Lombards, the inhabitants of many
mainland towns along the northern Adriatic coast moved to a series of
islands in the nearby lagoon in large numbers, bringing as many of their
belongings as they could, including the tools of their trade and their civil
and religious institutions. They carried their relics, sculptures, vestments,
chalices and even funerary inscriptions to the islands, saving them from
otherwise certain destruction. They were no longer temporary guests but
immigrants intending to stay.
Archaeologists have been able to determine with a fair amount of
certainty the exact routes and migration patterns that these refugees
took. On any map of the area at this time, moving from north to south,
you can see how the peoples of Friuli and Aquileia moved to the town of
Grado at the extreme end of the port of Aquileia. Aquileians, with the
residents of Concordia, then moved to Caorle. As the Lombards
threatened Oderzo, further south, its inhabitants moved to Eraclea and
this population expanded outward to the island of Jesolo. Moving closer
to what is today the city of Venice, the inhabitants of Altino (just north of
Venice's modern Marco Polo airport) fled to the island of Torcello just a
few miles to the east. Altino, like Aquileia, had existed at the intersection
of several major Roman roads. When its residents moved to the lagoon,
Torcello became the largest commercial centre of the early island
communities: a source of supplies for Byzantium as well as an outlet for
Byzantine goods in the lagoon. The inhabitants of Treviso and Padua
moved to Malamocco and Chioggia, and the populations of the towns of
Este and Monselice, even further to the south of Padua, fled there as
well.
Although we have no contemporary testimony that describes this
exodus, we can imagine people from the entire arc of this shoreline, from
Grado in the north to Cavarzere and Chioggia in the south, fleeing to the
lagoon after the arrival of the Lombards. The founders of the islands of
Venice were immigrants and refugees, and while they did not travel as
far from home as many refugees do today (on a clear day, you can see
Altino on the mainland from the island of Torcello), they nevertheless left
their native towns under duress, seeking safety and protection in the
coastal marshes. Whereas most people once wanted to live close to the
routes along which Roman trade and culture spread, it became suddenly
necessary to move as far away from these routes as possible since it
was precisely these paths on which the invading barbarians travelled. As
the Lombards completed their conquest of the Adriatic mainland, these
settlements in the lagoon became the last remnants of the Roman
Empire in North Italy. Under King Alboin, the Lombards conquered Friuli
and much of north-eastern Italy including Aquileia, and King Rotari
completed the conquest of the region by eventually taking the cities of
Oderzo and Altino on the mainland near the lagoon by 639.
Amidst the conflicting evidence surrounding the earliest inhabitants of
the lagoon - who these people were, and when and why they left the
mainland - we can draw some conclusions about the symbolic meaning
of these accounts for Venetians in later generations. Many of the city's
foundation myths sought to link Venice's origins directly to Rome to
demonstrate that Venice had mythically inherited the greatness of that
ancient civilization. Roman origins gave Venice a powerful civic
pedigree. The story of later migrations to the lagoon further emphasized
the 'Romanness' of Venice since such narratives claimed that Venice
was born in opposition to the violence of the barbarian tribes that came
to destroy the last vestiges of Roman civilization. Viewed in this way, the
first inhabitants of the lagoon - the first Venetians - were the noble
preservers and transmitters of Roman culture, transporting the physical
scraps of their lives to a barren new world. This description suggests that
in the twilight of the Roman Empire, Venetians represented some of
Rome's last surviving descendants. A thousand years later, historians
living at the height of Venetian cultural and economic supremacy would
argue that the virtuousness of Venetian citizens stemmed in part from
the noble Roman families who immigrated to the lagoon during the
period of the barbarian migrations.
But what was life like on these islands during the period of the first major
settlements? While there are very few records from before the year 1000
there is one famous letter that offers a glimpse of the experiences of the
first Venetians. The Roman official Cassiodorus - a minister to the
barbarian King Theodoric in Ravenna - wrote a letter 'to the tribunes of
the maritime population' of the lagoon (i.e., the local military men who
governed the region) around the year 537-8. The letter ordered
Venetians to help transport supplies of wine and oil from Istria to the
Byzantine capital at Ravenna, and gives a striking account of life in the
lagoon. Cassiodorus described the landscape of the marshes - the
reeds, brackish waters, aquatic birds, currents, flooding, tides and silt -
as well as the fragile houses of these first inhabitants that, he said, were
'like [those of] aquatic birds, now on sea, now on land'. He explained how
these people made their living through hunting, fishing and making salt.
Compared to the hustle and bustle of Roman cities, the lagoon was
nearly deserted and the inhabitants lived in 'permanent, tranquil security'
largely because they were free of the Roman Empire and the Roman
Church. Though the lagoon's inhabitants were for the most part poor,
according to Cassiodorus, 'rich and poor live together in equality. The
same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot
envy each other's hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule
the world.' Freedom, nobility but noble simplicity, according to
Cassiodorus, were the political and social characteristics that defined life
in the early lagoon.
As the historian Frederic Lane has noted, Cassiodorus' letter reads like
the daydreams of a harried bureaucrat staring out his window during an
especially busy day at the office. Surely life among the earliest
inhabitants of the lagoon was neither easy nor peaceful. Even if there
once was some type of primitive egalitarianism among these island
dwellers, this soon came to a close after the Lombard invasions when
various local noble families established themselves in the lagoon and
determined to control the best fishing holes and salt beds. It was not long
before rich local landlords established dependent tenancies. Whatever
the case, Cassiodorus does at least give some idea of how the first
Venetians lived and what their environment looked like. And he helped
fuel the myth that the first inhabitants' virtuosity was steeped in their state
of independence and some form of democracy."
"Political Life Between Byzantines and Franks
What type of political structures defined life in the early lagoon? From its
inception Venice was governed by the political powers in Byzantium, the
Eastern Roman Empire. At the beginning of the fourth century, the
Roman Emperor Constantine founded a separate Roman capital in
Constantinople (now Istanbul). When the Western Roman Empire
collapsed at the end of the fifth century, this eastern half of the empire
survived. While the roots of Byzantine civilization were clearly Roman,
the Byzantine world and especially its church (which became the Eastern
Orthodox church) grew to become quite separate and distinct from Rome
in the West, both politically and culturally, especially after the fall of
Rome. The territory of the Venetian lagoon fell under the jurisdiction of
Byzantine rulers. Since Constantinople is a long way from Venice, the
city was governed by a local administrative functionary of the Eastern
Roman Empire called the Exarch of Ravenna (a type of civil and religious
Byzantine governor who oversaw the empire's lands in Italy). When the
western Roman Empire disintegrated at the end of the fifth century,
Ravenna remained an outpost of Byzantium or the eastern Roman
Empire in Italy. By answering to the Exarch of Ravenna, Venetians were
political dependents of the Byzantine Empire and as such, Venice
maintained economic and cultural ties with Constantinople from early on
in its history. Venice was also controlled in the fifth century by local
governors called maritime tribunes - the same officials to whom
Cassiodorus wrote - who were subject to the Byzantine emperor.
The establishment of the first doges or dukes in the lagoon reinforced
Venice's subordinate political relationship to Byzantium. Not surprisingly
there are competing theories about who was the first doge since records
are fragmentary and confusing. According to one legend, Venetian
dignitaries convened in Eraclea in 697, called by the Patriarch of Grado
to discuss the persistent threat of the Lombards. This assembly decided
to replace the existing system of military tribunes with a single leader or
duke called a dux (in Latin) or doge (in Venetian). Legend claims that the
first doge, Paoluccio Anafesto - the Exarch of Ravenna - was elected in
697 during this assembly, and he was given the title of doge when
Byzantine authorities decided to make the entire Venetian lagoon
subordinate to one military ruler, though he continued receiving orders
from the emperor's local representative in Ravenna. For this reason, the
first doge was merely a representative of Byzantium, making the first
'genuine' Venetian doge Orso Ipato. During the iconoclasm controversy
of the early Middle Ages, the Eastern Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-
41) prohibited the use and cult of sacred images and ordered their
destruction. Rome did not agree, and the Venetians sided with the West.
Again according to lore, the protesting Venetians then armed, revolted
and nominated their own duke or doge - Orso - in 726, making him the
first (or according to the Anafesto tradition, the third) doge who was
elected without Byzantine authority and without outside intervention. The
election of Orso signified the first big step Venetians took away from the
Byzantine sphere of influence.
It was not until the eighth century that Constantinople first accepted a
locally elected doge, and even eighth-century dukes continued to
maintain some political allegiance to the Exarch of Ravenna, much as
before. It is true that the highest Byzantine officials given the task of
governing Venice were distant - they were either in Ravenna or Pola
(now Pula, across the Adriatic in modern Croatia) - but the lagoon was
overseen by a series of military officials who represented the Byzantine
Empire in the lagoon during the period of late antiquity. The first
Venetians might have come from the nearby Roman mainland, but
politically Venice was Byzantine. Until Venice achieved a greater degree
of political independence in the ninth century, many Venetian
administrators were Byzantine appointments that were subject to the
approval of Eastern exarchs, military leaders or emperors. In addition,
the earliest doges were more likely mid-ranking military generals and
mercenaries in the Byzantine chain of command than princes or dukes.
These early political ties to Byzantium had a profound cultural impact on
the rest of Venetian history. Venice's cultural roots were Byzantine more
than Roman. Its streets and urban organization would never reflect
Roman planning so that there never existed in Rome a Roman city
layout with a grid like Ostia's, urban quarters as in Florence,
amphitheatres like those of Verona and Arezzo or baths and aqueducts
like those in Rome. Venetians never fully adopted Roman law, they were
often at odds with the Roman papacy and they were slow to take up the
revival of Roman classicism that interested so much of the rest of Italy
during the Renaissance. While some accounts of Venice's foundation
emphasize its Roman roots and while Venetians at times wanted to
emphasize their Roman pedigree, they also found themselves to be very
different from Rome and often sought to emphasize this difference. This
paradox - of wanting to be Roman while wanting to be distant from Rome
- represented one of the great tensions defining Venetian history
throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
This strong connection to Byzantium meant that Venetians would form
lasting and complex cultural ties with the Eastern Mediterranean.
Venetian architecture, for instance, was first modelled on Eastern rather
than Roman designs. One of the city's most representative buildings, the
church of San Marco, with its brick and rubble walls, low-domed roof and
small windows, is in stark contrast to luminous Western cathedrals that
reach for the sky. Like much Venetian architecture, San Marco's design
is unmistakably derived from eastern models. Venetian trade was also
primarily with the East, Venetian ambassadors spent much of their
careers in Constantinople and Venetian artists were heavily influenced
by the Byzantine tradition of mosaic production while artisans in the East
learnt how to blow glass from their Venetian counterparts.
Following their initial subordination to Byzantine politics, however,
Venetians slowly began to assert their political independence as
Byzantine authority in Italy began to decline after the middle of the eighth
century. The Lombards captured the Byzantine capital of Ravenna and
the exarchate - the lynchpin of Byzantine control in Italy - collapsed in
751, effectively terminating any Byzantine presence in Italy. Without a
mainland base, the Eastern Roman emperor's control over Venice
became remote and with the fall of Ravenna locally elected doges in the
lagoon began to exercise real political power.
The most decisive event solidifying Venetian political independence
however was the Venetian defeat of the Franks in the early ninth century.
The Franks, the ascendant barbarian group in Europe by the eighth
century, succeeded the Lombards in Italy after 750. Towards the end of
the eighth century, Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, entered the
Italian peninsula with the aim of conquering all the Lombard territories
and incorporating them into his kingdom that was by then well
established in Gaul. Charlemagne is perhaps best known for the way in
which he fashioned himself as a new, Western Roman emperor and
forged the largest territorial empire in the West since the fall of Rome in
476. Based on its established eastern-political orientation however,
Venice resisted Roman rule under the Emperor Charlemagne and
remained loyal to its established ties to Constantinople.
Twice in the first decade after he was crowned emperor in Rome in 800,
Charlemagne's armies tried to conquer Venice, and his attacks on the
Lido settlements - the outermost islands separating the lagoon from the
sea - almost succeeded. After defeating the local Lombards,
Charlemagne decided to make himself lord of the lagoon primarily
because it was the last corner of Byzantine territory not yet subject to the
Franks. He proclaimed his son Pepin the King of Italy, and Pepin tried to
conquer Venice in 810. Pepin destroyed Jesolo, Eraclea and Grado and
then prepared a fleet in Ravenna to attack the Lido town of Malamocco.
The battle raged for over six months, and the Frankish fleet eventually
entered the lagoon, but the Venetians thwarted Pepin's attack in part by
removing the shallow water markers along various channels in the
marshes, thereby grounding the Franks' boats and preventing them from
penetrating the lagoon's centre. With their flat-bottomed boats, the
Venetians could practically fly around the Franks and were able to attack
with much greater agility and speed, fighting off the invaders with arrows,
rocks and boiling pitch. The Venetians decimated the Frankish fleet and,
as the story goes, the waters turned red from the slaughter and, the
canal that crossed this part of the lagoon, was named the 'Canal of
Orphans' since the battle left so many Frankish children fatherless. The
Franks eventually agreed to stop the siege of the city when the
Venetians offered Pepin an annual tribute in exchange for their
permanent withdrawal. The Venetians had narrowly escaped being
subjected to a feudal power. Its lands would not be split up into baronial
estates, the inhabitants were not made into serfs and farmers, and the
city continued to rely on the sea for its existence. Through a series of
treaties signed between 812 and 840, both Constantinople in the East
and the Franks in the West slowly recognized greater degrees of
Venetian political independence and the Venetians became conscious of
the nascent power of their state.
The Venetian defeat of the Franks was significant not only because it
earned the Venetians their freedom, but also because it was precisely in
this period that the population of the lagoon moved to the islands that
today comprise the city of Venice. In 742 Venetians had transferred their
political centre from Eraclea (where the first doge was perhaps elected)
in the northern lagoon to Malamocco on the outer islands of the Lido.
Political crises within Byzantium had forced the transfer of the doge's
seat, Malamocco being a good choice because it was even further away
from the mainland and therefore safer from foreign conquest and
invasion by land. However, with the naval threat of Pepin and the Franks,
the principal families of the lagoon were forced to move again, this time
to protect themselves from threats by sea. Once again fearing for their
lives, these families turned inward from Malamocco to inhabit the muddy,
flood-prone islands in the centre of the lagoon that had not previously
been major areas of settlement. These islands formed the archipelago of
the Rialto, the 'rivo alto' or high bank. They were the vestigial bed or
sedimentary banks of the Brenta River that lay a few miles to the west
and offered the most elevated land in the area that was best suited to
habitation. It is these islands that form the dense urban centre of Venice
today.
With this second migration to the islands in the centre of the lagoon
Venetian history truly began, as these refugees in the eighth and ninth
centuries laid the first foundations of the city that exists today. In
addition, this movement from various lagoon communities to the islands
of the Rialto encouraged the growth of a common civic identity. Before
the settlement of the Rialto, the inhabitants of the lagoon maintained a
variety of family and kinship allegiances rooted in the mainland cities
from which they came. When they inhabited the Rialto islands, however,
those from Eraclea, Torcello, Jesolo and Malamocco left the more
peripheral islands in the lagoon, including their animals and fields, and
merged their families with their historic adversaries to try and forge a
single civic entity on what was then a deserted mudflat. While it would
take many years for Venetians to develop a real shared sense of identity
and for Venice to spring to life, once they moved to the Rialto together
these people became perhaps for the first time Venetians with a distinct
sense of shared purpose.
While Venice clearly had both Roman and Byzantine roots, the events
leading to a new degree of Venetian political independence by the ninth
century would also contribute greatly to the myth of Venice and
suggestions that it was free and independent. Commentators like
Cassiodorus believed that Venice had a 'natural' tendency towards
political independence. They argued that the first Venetians prized their
freedom so much that to preserve it they fled their mainland homes for
the islands of the lagoon. This, however is clearly wrong. The first
Venetians did not found a city based solely on the noble virtue of
independence. They fled the mainland in desperation and misfortune as
terrified refugees running from the destruction and chaos resulting from
the arrival of various barbarian tribes and the disintegration of the
Western Roman Empire. They were by no means free but were politically
subject to the Byzantine Empire for several centuries following the first
mass migrations to the lagoon. However, in a rather singular fashion,
Venetians defended themselves against the encroaching Franks about
the same time that they managed to wrest their freedom away from the
Byzantine Empire.
Nestled between Byzantium in the East, which maintained its political
sovereignty over the Adriatic and its coast, and the incontestable
dominion of the Franks on the Italian mainland, Venetians found
themselves strategically located on a string of marshy islands on the
margins of both empires. Their watery location on the borders of these
worlds allowed them slowly to chip away at, and extract their freedom,
from both sets of overlords and eventually collaborate with the Muslim
Orient. Venice would become a great cultural mediator between the
worlds of Christianity and Islam. By the middle of the ninth century,
Venetians had managed to carve out an embryonic but stable form of
political autonomy. Such independence was unique in a world where few
lived outside the dominion of the larger kingdoms and empires that
dominated the Western and Mediterranean worlds. Venice's peculiar
geographic location, as well as the fact that it became a tiny,
independent republic amidst otherwise sprawling empires, were powerful
factors influencing the way in which Venetians understood themselves as
political actors throughout their history. This permitted the developing city
to possess a type of political power and imagination very different from
its mainland counterparts."
"Primitive Life
Most histories of Venice skip rather quickly from the migrations to the
lagoon and the events leading up to Venetian political independence
directly to the high Middle Ages and the explosion of Venetian
commercial success in the Mediterranean. In doing so, these histories
confirm that mythical Venice was born seemingly perfect and fully
formed. As the historian Ennio Concina put it, Venice appeared to
emerge as if it were an 'independent shard of history'. It is important to
emphasize, however, the great degree of struggle that these early
Venetians undertook not only to establish their political independence but
also to simply survive in the hostile environment of the lagoon. This is, in
essence, the same struggle that Venetians are engaged in today as they
try to maintain and protect their palaces and canals against shifting
ground and rising tides. The lagoon did offer its refugees peace, safety
and protection from a variety of invaders, but it was also an extremely
challenging if not repellent environment in which to try to build and
preserve a community. It was desolate and barren: a vast, swampy,
brackish marsh of mud, silt and sand bars inhabited almost exclusively
by birds and mosquitoes.
Venetians laboured painstakingly for centuries to stabilize and conquer
the lagoon's inhospitable bogs and mudflats. They did not reap the
benefits of traditional Roman planning or engineering, or of being able to
build on a pre-existing site. What little land existed above water was
tenuous and fragile. It needed to be drained, filled with mud, raised and
enclosed with dykes, its banks and shorelines built up, in order to
construct stable shelters and buildings that would last. Mud had to be
dredged from channels in order to make them navigable. Wells had to be
built to collect drinkable rainwater. Perhaps the most pressing problem
was that little would initially grow on these islands (contradicting the
theory that this area was irrigated farmland). Though much of the
produce at the Rialto market today comes from the islands of the lagoon
(artichokes and lettuces, for instance, are often labelled as 'St Erasmo'),
these islands originally had no viable farmland to fill to feed their
inhabitants let alone to provide agricultural goods for export or profit.
Early local farming primarily involved simple gardens and small
vineyards, making Venetians almost entirely dependent on long-distance
trade for food supplies. As one Italian proverb put it, however, the
Venetians were a strange people because 'they never planted or
harvested, but always had their silos full'.
Determined settlers, they slowly learned how to carve out a place for
themselves in the economy of the Mediterranean through hunting, fishing
and, in particular, trading in salt. As Cassiodorus' letter explains, the first
Venetians did not farm; 'instead of ploughs and scythes they used rollers
to pack the base of salt pans'. The earliest fishermen quickly realized
that the waters of the lagoon produced a valuable resource in salt,
thanks to the high salinity of the lagoon's shallow waters. Venetians built
dikes to enclose areas of the lagoon, and the dikes contained locks and
moveable doors to allow salt water to enter special bays where it began
to evaporate and transform into a dense, salty liquid. This liquid passed
into other smaller bays where the last of the water was left to evaporate
and the salt concentrated into crystals. These crystals were collected
and deposited on nearby docks or quays to be broken up with mallets
and sent to warehouses to be stored and sold. As the islands of the
lagoon slowly became peopled in the seventh and eighth centuries,
island dwellers increased their salt production since then, as now, salt
was indispensable for flavouring and preserving meat and fish. For the
earliest Venetians, salt provided a formidable natural resource with which
to trade for other goods, including grain, oil and wine, that they could not
supply for themselves. While Venice would eventually become one of the
greatest maritime empires as a result of its trade in luxury goods, such
as silks and exotic spices, it is somewhat ironic that the humble resource
of salt provided Venetians with their first substantial commodity for
exchange. Salt represented the coin of the first Venetians and the
original source of their wealth.
Venetians traded their salt along the rivers of Northern Italy. After they
sacked the nearby rival city of Comacchio on the Adriatic coast, just
south of Chioggia in 886 and again in 932, they obtained access to the
mouth of the Po River and control over the mouths of all the major rivers
leading into the Adriatic from Northern Italy. They began transporting
large amounts of salt up these rivers into the mainland interior in
exchange, at first, for agricultural goods, especially grain. They also soon
discovered that clay from the more solid islands of the lagoon could be
fired into good bricks, and began navigating their rafts upriver to trade
with them as far away as Pavia near Milan. By the ninth century they
were also transporting large quantities of timber, largely from the oak,
ash and beech groves on the plains near Venice, but also larch, pine and
fir from the foothills of the Alps. After mastering this river trade, ensuring
their food supply, and slowly but surely reclaiming the habitable land on
the islands around the Rialto, Venice stood poised to make a grand
entrance into the greater economies of Europe and the Mediterranean.
Exploring Venice today, how can we get a sense of the raw, stark world
of the first inhabitants of the lagoon and their origins? The mainland
towns around the arc of the northern Adriatic - and the civic museums of
Altino, Oderzo and Aquileia in particular - exhibit the humble but stirring
remains of the Romans who lived in this area before migrating to the
lagoon. In addition, the patriarchal basilica of Aquileia boasts the largest
paleo-Christian mosaic floor in all of Europe: a breathtaking reminder of
the Roman world from which the first Venetians came from. Other
remains include archaeological fragments and extant patches of Roman
roads, such as the via Annia and the via Claudia, the formidable
highways that once linked these towns in the Veneto to the larger Roman
world. Patches of these once great arteries are now almost invisible and
lie quietly among the overgrown weeds around these mainland towns.
In the lagoon itself, virtually no architecture from the period of the
earliest inhabitants of Venice survives, largely because the Venetians'
first houses were most likely wooden huts built on stilts to protect them
from the tides and flooding, to wait out a storm, and to temporarily store
supplies. There remains little or no trace of these structures since,
elementary and spontaneous as they were, shifting marshland reclaimed
these first buildings ages ago. The first fishermen to inhabit the lagoon
probably built these shelters as described by Cassiodorus, using
larchwood poles that were sharpened and then forced into the mud to
form walls with a roof of reeds or straw. Fishermen in the lagoon still
build similar structures on piles called cavane to shelter their boats and
nets, and you can occasionally see these huts around the minor islands
of the lagoon. Amidst the buzzing speedboats of weekend visitors,
looming ferries transporting tourists and commuters back and forth
among the islands, and the airplanes that come and go in the
background, these huts offer a quiet reminder of the fragile world of the
first Venetians.
The place that today offers the best image of archaic Venetian life is the
island of Torcello in the northern part of the lagoon. Archaeologists think
that the lagoon basin was colonized to some degree long before the
arrival of refugees fleeing the barbarians. Many Roman objects have
been found on the islands in the northern lagoon, especially on Torcello,
suggesting that there may have been a Roman colony here emanating
from nearby Altino. Torcello preserves a sense of the primitive world of
the early settlers from long ago.
The cathedral of Torcello is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the
lagoon, founded around 638-9 when the Bishop of Altino transferred his
seat here and various families from the mainland followed. In front of the
cathedral today are the remains of the original seventh-century round
baptistery, where the refugee catechumens (those studying to become
Christian) would have been made Christians - perhaps by candlelight, as
was the practice in Ravenna - in this stark world far removed from
civilization. Set into the left-hand wall inside the church is a stone tablet
recording the dedications and consecration of the church in 639. This
inscription, which includes the names of the bishop and the exarch, is
perhaps the oldest authentic document of Venetian history (though some
say this inscription does not refer to this cathedral but to another church
in the mainland town of Cittanova). According to legend a monumental
stone on the island not far from the cathedral was actually once the
throne of Attila the Hun, though it was more likely the seat of one of the
local governors or tribunes. Though fewer than 100 people permanently
live here today (by some accounts, not even 30), at its height in the
twelfth century the island was home to 20,000-30,000 people (a plaque
on the main quay of the island says 50,000). Torcello was abandoned in
the later Middle Ages when silt built up from nearby rivers and created
marshlands that bred mosquitoes and malaria.
According to legend, as the Lombards approached, the residents of
Altino did not know which saint to call on to ward off this impending
danger and, desperately, they decided to hold a public prayer in the
town's central square. Suddenly they saw a flock of birds taking off
nearby carrying in their beaks their newborn chicks. This extraordinary
event was interpreted as a portent and everyone unanimously decided to
follow them. Preceeded by two tribunes, Ario and Aratore, and members
of the clergy, the Altinese followed the birds to Torcello where upon their
arrival, the lord spoke to them from a cloud and told them to erect a
church on that spot. According to one theory the island of Torcello was
named after one of the gates to the city of Altino, Turicellum.
Today Torcello helps us envisage the flight of those first exiled from the
mainland to the lagoon. The immigrants from Altino brought on their
backs the relics of their local saint, St Eliodoro. Near the main altar of the
cathedral of Torcello you can look down through a grate in the floor and
see a sarcophagus decorated with pagan images containing the body of
this saint, brought here in haste and under duress to protect this island.
His image is also found among the apostles in the apse mosaics. The
church is studded with Roman columns and Corinthian capitals, stone
most likely salvaged from the mainland during the Lombard invasions.
Links to Altino and the Roman mainland are visible in numerous
classical inscriptions, especially the Roman funerary monuments in the
Torcello museum, again taken primarily from the area around Altino.
While they could not bring everything, the immigrants dismantled as
much of Altino as they could, stone by stone, including the paving stones
from the Roman roads that ran through the town, moving them to
Torcello to recreate their city in the early seventh century. Looking at all
these remains, we can imagine these immigrants from the mainland
looking around their homes and communities to decide which of their
belongings they could manage to pack up and bring to the lagoon as the
Lombards approached. The great nineteenth-century art historian John
Ruskin aptly described the cathedral of Torcello as being like a ship: a
Noah's arc that saved people from an otherwise certain destruction.
More than in the richness of the Venetian arsenal or the pomp of its
palaces, he argued, merely ascending the crude steps that encircle the
altar of Torcello allows us to experience the original heart of Venice.
Beyond the cathedral and the archaeological remains associated with it,
the surrounding landscape of the island also gives us a sense of the
world inhabited by the first Venetians: an experience that is no longer
possible in the architectural density of today's Venice. Here you can see
the desolate terrain that once confronted these first refugees. Looking
around, there is almost nothing in sight but sea and sky, especially from
the top of the church's bell tower. You can hear little besides the rustling
reeds, lapping waves and the occasional bark of a seagull. Though this
may be picturesque if not blissful to the modern tourist, this landscape
represented the bleak and remote world (compared to the pleasures and
comforts of the Roman Empire) to which the first Venetians came to
remake their lives.
A variety of other small details around the other islands of the lagoon,
and in the city centre, show us the remnants of early lagoon life. The
baptismal font of the church of Santi Maria e Donato on Murano, for
instance, came from the Acilio family in Altino, according to its Latin
inscription. Similarly, settlers transported a series of octagonal Roman
pilasters, originally made in the second century BC, to Murano from the
mainland and applied them to the outside of the church. Various Roman
bricks or artefacts, sometimes called altinelle because they originated in
Altino, can be found randomly around the city: An antique Latin
inscription with several Corinthian columns inserted into the façade of a
building near the Ponte del Paradiso at Santa Maria Formosa, a Roman
tablet from the mainland placed in the base of the campanile of the
church of San Vidal, a set of blind arches with a tooth-patterned border
and a series of winged animals located along the Riva del Carbon near
the Rialto. In addition, the Venice Archaeological Museum houses a
handful of Roman statuettes, each no more than 30 cm (12 inches) tall,
from both the Veneto and the lagoon: a bronze Achilles made near
Oderzo in the first century BC, a Poseidon from the second century BC
discovered near the Lido town of San Pietro in Volta and a Hercules from
the third century BC unearthed near Malamocco. These scraps and
fragments might be small and humble, but remain potent vestiges and
reminders of the Romans who first came to Venice."
"2 VENICE IN THE MIDDLE AGES: LEGITIMACY AND EXPANSION
At the magnificent height of the Roman Empire, the city of Venice was
nothing but a group of barren, grassy islands uninhabited except by
fishermen and hunters. Even at the start of the ninth century, Venice still
only contained groups of families huddled together on a series of muddy
tidal flats: families who prayed for survival against the elements and for
their attackers to pack up and go. By the thirteenth century, however,
Venice had become a world power: the centre of the Mediterranean
economy and the envy of all Europeans who both admired and jealously
eyed the city's wealth and opulence.
Over the course of the Middle Ages, Venetians organized their system
of government from one based on clan loyalties that was subservient to
the Byzantine Empire to a republican state that employed elaborate
government mechanisms to manage its inhabitants and its resources.
How did these remarkable transformations happen? How did Venetians
evolve from a humble community of salt traders and fishermen into a city
of world-class merchants, bankers and statesmen? And how did this
happen when Venice, unlike most other Italian states in the Middle Ages,
did not even have a king or an emperor to make it an equal player on the
field of European politics?"
"Venice and the Mediterranean in the Early Middle Ages
Venice had already achieved a new degree of political independence by
the early ninth century. Byzantine power in Italy had declined and the
Franks had been defeated. After routing Pepin in the lagoon in 810, a
series of treaties between the Franks and the Byzantines in 814 - the
Pax Nicephori (named after the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus) and the
Treaties of Ratisbon and Aquisgrana - stated that the Byzantines would
recognize the Franks as the rulers of the West, but that the Franks in
turn had to renounce their claims over Venice and recognize that it was
subject to Byzantium. These agreements stipulated that Venice was
required to pay a tribute to the Franks in exchange for its independence
from Western rule. For the first time, in the wake of these treaties,
Venetians began to govern themselves like an independent state. As an
island world in the space between two great empires, Venice had quietly
begun to carve out its unique political niche, independent from both.
However, becoming independent was not enough to make these islands
a European power; they needed something to validate their political
importance, and the crucial event that first gave Venetians a European
presence was their theft of the body of St Mark.
At the start of the ninth century Venice was still technically a Byzantine
territory and subject to the patriarchal jurisdiction of Aquileia and Grado,
other Byzantine outposts in the area. While it is impossible to argue that
there was a conscious Venetian desire to assert its power over these
and other cities, some Venetians surely had a sense that they would
need symbols and relics of greater significance than these towns
possessed in order to surpass them in political and religious importance.
In 828, as reported by Venetian chronicles, two men managed to sneak
the relics of St Mark the Evangelist (and the writer of the Gospel of Mark
of the New Testament) out of the eponymous Coptic church in
Alexandria and transport them to Venice. Mark had founded this church
in Alexandria and was martyred in the city in 62/3 AD, and that's where
his remains had lain ever since.
While accounts of this story vary, it seems that two merchants, Bono
from Malamocco and Rustico from Torcello (sometimes called Tribunus
and Rusticus), were either swept into Alexandria by a storm or
deliberately entered despite a ban on trade with the city at the time.
Local caliphs had been destroying Christian churches around Egypt to
use their materials to build a palace in Alexandria, so these Venetian
merchants were in a hurry to seize the relics before they were lost or
destroyed forever. After days of negotiations when the merchants tried to
convince the church's clergymen to hand over the body - both for its
protection and in exchange for potentially great rewards from the doge -
the merchants were permitted to remove the body from its sarcophagus,
most likely replacing it with the body of another saint that was handily
nearby. While they may have obtained tentative permission from the
overseers of the church, they nevertheless had to sneak the body out
from under the eyes of the civic guardians of the city and those who
oversaw trade. Legend claims that they conveyed it safely out of the city
by hiding it under slabs of pork, offensive to both Muslims and Jews, and
sneaking it safely on to a ship. The only problem was a storm on the
return journey near the Calabrian town of Cropani, on the shore of the
instep of the 'boot' of Italy. Apparently the merchants promised to leave
Mark's kneecap in the village in exchange for safe passage from their
city and, as a result Cropani's traders were uniquely exempt from
Venetian taxes during the Middle Ages.
The choice of St Mark was important. According to legend he had once
preached on the shores of the lagoon, when Christ told him in a vision
that he would one day find his final resting place there. Another legend
claims that after ordaining the first patriarch in the town of Aquileia, a
storm forced Mark to take cover in the canals among the islands of
Venice. He got out to pray, perhaps in the exact spot where the Ducal
Palace would eventually exist. An angel appeared to Mark in that
moment and said 'Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus', meaning 'be at rest
here' that could be interpreted to mean both 'do not be afraid of the
storm' and 'this will be your final resting place'. Venetians, naturally,
heard the second interpretation and to this day the motto is visible
everywhere in the city, under the paw of the heraldic winged lion, the
symbol of the evangelist that became the symbol of the city of Venice.
The arrival of the relics of St Mark had the crucial effect of allowing
Venice to usurp the political authority of its nearby rivals, Aquileia and
Grado. With St Mark's body in its princely palace, Venice was now more
powerful than its neighbours.
The merchants delivered St Mark's body to the doge Giustiniano
Partecipazio (r. 827-9), who then lived in the recently erected Ducal
Palace. As scores of historians have pointed out, it is significant that the
merchants gave the body to the doge and not the local patriarch. In most
early medieval cities before the development of stable governing
institutions, the bishop was the centre of most local governments.
Venice, however, as a part of its Byzantine heritage, had an early history
of subordinating the clergy to secular rulers, a trend that would become
very important in its later history. In addition, the patriarch of the area
was resident in Grado at the other end of the lagoon and was technically
not the Bishop of Venice. The local bishop in the lagoon somewhat oddly
resided on the island of Olivolo in the district of Castello, far removed
from the Ducal Palace, all of which meant that Venetians, by the ninth
century, turned to the doge and not an ecclesiastical authority as the
leader of their community. The doge immediately decreed that a church
worthy of the relics should be built. Four years later, Mark's body found a
home in the completed private chapel of the doge that was then named
San Marco. This church was built to honour the arrival of these relics
and, as the doge's chapel, it represented a powerful symbol of the
marginalization of other spiritual authorities in the lagoon.
The theft of St Mark's body also represented a symbolic preview of
Venice's future. As we shall see, Venetians earned much of their wealth
but they also stole quite a bit of it. Mark's body was perhaps the first
great instance of what would become a long tradition of Venetian theft.
With the arrival of St Mark, Venetians switched their allegiance from
their first patron saint, the Greek St Theodore. Theodore was a
Byzantine martyr but, at the time of the arrival of the body of St Mark, no
relics of Theodore's existed in the lagoon. Mark's body therefore
proclaimed a new symbolic independence from Byzantium. Since Mark
was not a Roman saint either, his presence in Venice also asserted a
kind of symbolic independence from, or rivalry with, Rome. Just as the
popes drew their authority from St Peter, now the Venetians could
similarly claim that their authority came from Mark, whose body allowed
them to link their past with the history of early Christianity. Mark's
presence fed Venetian civic imagination and promoted the city, making it
more prominent than its neighbours, both locally and around the
Mediterranean. In one stroke, the theft of Mark's relics gave Venetians
political and spiritual legitimacy.
The story of this robbery is also significant because it illuminates the
expansion of Venetian trade around the Mediterranean in the early
Middle Ages. The residents of Alexandria did not appear surprised to see
Venetian merchants in their midst; if they were able to sneak Mark's body
out of the city, this was in part because people were used to seeing
Venetians in Mediterranean trade centres. By the ninth century and from
900-1100 in particular, Venetians had expanded their trade beyond the
rivers of Northern Italy and turned outward into the Adriatic and the
Mediterranean. Venice had always been Byzantium's main trading base
in the northern Adriatic, but when Byzantine power began to recede,
Venetian merchants began to extend their networks in response. They
increasingly travelled to the East, to Constantinople, Alexandria and
Aleppo to find exotic goods, including silk and spices, that Greek traders
had once brought to them. By the ninth century, in addition to their usual
trade in fish and salt, Venetians began to bring these goods inland to
Northern Italy, especially to Lombard and Frankish courts. One chronicle
indicates that when Charlemagne's forces came to do battle in Friuli, his
courtiers appeared wearing luxurious clothes and precious jewels bought
from Venetian merchants in Pavia. Venetians also began to transport
timber (from groves in Northern Italy, floated down the rivers into the
lagoon) and slaves (primarily from the Balkans) to Muslim Africa.
Not surprisingly the more the Venetians expanded their sphere of
influence, the more resistance they encountered, and the more they
became involved in conflicts and wars. For instance, in 899 yet another
barbarian tribe, the Magyars, invaded and devastated much of north-
eastern Italy and made for Venice, anxious to conquer this city of
growing wealth and prestige. With no experience in naval warfare, the
Magyars were unable to defeat the Venetians on their own watery terrain
and, like Pepin's forces, were forced to withdraw. Nevertheless, the
Magyar came so close that the Venetians promptly tightened their
security within the lagoon. Doge Pietro Tribuno (r. 888-912) ordered the
fortification of the Rialtine islands and the construction of a seaward wall
on all of the islands on the eastern side of the lagoon from the island of
Olivolo in Castello down to what is today the church of Santa Maria del
Giglio. A chain was also attached across the mouth of the Grand Canal,
crossing it near what is today the church of San Gregorio in Dorsoduro,
perhaps in imitation of the chain the Byzantines used to protect the
mouth of the Golden Horn in Constantinople. No traces of the wall and
chain remain today, but they represented a fearful moment in Venetian
history when the city's inhabitants encased themselves in walls like their
mainland counterparts, fearing that the waters of the lagoon might not be
enough to protect them from invaders.
The biggest threats to Venetian survival and expansion, however,
existed not so much in the form of invaders like the Magyars but more
often in the form of commercial rivals in the Adriatic that threatened
Venetian profits from trade. After subduing and subordinating its closest
neighbours, such as Comacchio, the next major step in Venetian
commercial expansion involved eliminating predatory pirates and raiders.
Muslim Saracens had seized parts of Southern Italy in the early ninth
century and threatened Venetian trade in the southern Adriatic, while
Dalmatian pirates in the northern Adriatic raided Venetian ships during
the ninth century. These Dalmatian or Narentine pirates had their base at
the mouth of the Narenta River (now the Neretva River in Croatia); they
infested the Adriatic and threatened mercantile convoys by stealing from
Venetian traders and then retreating into the mouth of the river. On
Ascension Day, 9 May 1000, Doge Pietro II Orseolo (r. 991-1009) sailed
for the Dalmatian coast under a banner of the winged lion of St Mark to
stop these thieves once and for all. His strategy was to blockade the
pirates inside the river by seizing the islands of Curzola and Langosta
(now Korchula and Lastovo) at the mouth of the river, and picking off
their ships one by one when they tried to leave. Orseolo successfully
defeated the pirates, though piracy continued to plague Venice until the
last days of the republic. For the moment, however, the doge and his
forces managed to eliminate one of the great threats to Venetian trade
and, as a result, the city came to dominate the eastern coast of the
Adriatic. This victory in the year 1000 represented the first major wave of
Venetian territorial expansion, and the Venetian Empire was born with its
domination of Dalmatia.
Doge Pietro II Orseolo was not only a great military commander but also
an extremely successful diplomat and negotiator. In the interests of
diplomacy he married his son Giovanni Orseolo to a Byzantine princess
in 1005. She immediately created a stir upon her arrival in the lagoon city
because she didn't eat with her hands; her servants cut up her food into
small pieces which she ate with a tiny, golden fork, perhaps the first fork
used, or at least documented, in the Western world. While forks did not
become an overnight success by any means, they did begin to appear in
Venetian and European wills and household inventories with regularity
by the thirteenth century: a crucial component of western civilization that
perhaps resulted from Venetian diplomacy. During his reign, Orseolo
also released Venice from its annual obligation to pay a tribute of 50
pounds of silver a year to the Holy Roman Empire and additionally
established tribute payments from the people and territories he had
conquered in Dalmatia. The town of Veglia (now Krk), for instance, had
to give Venice 35 marten and fox skins a year, and Pola (now Pula)
2,000 pounds of lamp oil for the lighting of San Marco. Latin and Slavic
locals up and down the coasts of the eastern Adriatic, on the Istrian
peninsula in the north and down the Dalmatian coast in the east, were
forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the doge. The great significance
of these victories, however, was not these tributes but the increased
security they gave Venetian merchants. This safely allowed them to
continue trading with Africa and the eastern Mediterranean without any
interference from pirates. By the year 1000, in large part thanks to Doge
Pietro II Orseolo, Venice had become the master of the northern Adriatic.
It effectively monopolized all trade in this region.
As Venice expanded, its relationship to Byzantium became much more
complicated. Venetian doges, traders and military men had to remember
that technically the territory they conquered in Dalmatia was still part of
the Byzantine Empire. Venetians needed to execute such conquests with
great diplomatic tact. They offered the Byzantines their naval assistance
whenever required, which made Venetian expansion more palatable.
Venetian ships, for instance, helped the Byzantines defend their
territories in Southern Italy when the Saracens attacked them in the tenth
century. The Venetians were rewarded with their first 'Golden Bull' from
the Byzantine Empire in 992, which recognized Venetians as the
preferred traders between Italy and Constantinople. This bull or 'letter of
permission' gave Venetians a more favourable customs tariff than the
one paid by other Mediterranean merchants from Amalfi or Bari. For
many years, the Venetians assisted the Byzantines with their fleet and
the Byzantines subsequently rewarded the Venetians with trading
privileges. While this relationship worked well most of the time, the
Venetians expected Byzantium to pay handsomely for their services, and
the more the Venetians received, the greedier they became. The
Venetians thought they were worth every privilege, but the Byzantines
often found them demanding, arrogant and ungrateful. Consequently
great disagreements often broke out between the two powers that
eventually led to the slaughter of the Fourth Crusade.
A good early example of this symbiotic but tense relationship between
Venice and Byzantium was illustrated when the Normans attacked parts
of the Byzantine Empire in the second half of the eleventh century.
Remember that while the Byzantine Empire maintained its capital in the
eastern Mediterranean in Constantinople, it retained some territories in
Southern Italy through much of the eleventh century. At this time an
upstart family from Northern Europe, the Normans, came to Southern
Italy in 1015 to work as mercenary fighters for the Lombards against the
Byzantines. As they were paid for their services with land, the Normans
slowly built up a large kingdom and eventually conquered Sicily and all of
Southern Italy. They finally ousted the Byzantines from their Italian lands
in 1071 when they conquered Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in the
south. Many thought that the Normans planned to extend their growing
Mediterranean kingdom as far east as Constantinople, which would not
have been that surprising since another branch of this family had
recently conquered England in 1066.
After the Normans had ousted the Byzantines from Southern Italy, they
then crossed the Adriatic and proceeded to attack and besiege the
Byzantine city of Durazzo (now Durres, on the coast of modern Albania)
in 1081 under the leadership of the Norman general Robert Guiscard.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus appealed to the Venetians
for help. Durazzo represented an important strategic location for the
Normans since it was at the beginning of a Roman road that ran through
Greece and the Balkans directly to Constantinople. The capture of
Durazzo would open up a direct route to Constantinople in the East. The
Venetian response to this attack resulted in one of the great naval battles
of Venetian history, and indeed the first Venetian naval battle for which
we have any real description.
Doge Domenico Selvo (r. 1071-84) led this campaign and instructed
Venetian forces to tie their ships together to form a type of floating
harbour at sea that would effectively stop the Normans from leaving port.
On top of this 'harbour' the Venetians constructed wooden towers around
the boats' masts. Using ropes, they then hauled up smaller boats filled
with armed men who, from this raised position, had a strategic
advantage over the Normans. This great floating platform was the first of
what would be many masterpieces of Venetian naval strategy. It allowed
Venetian archers to catapult missiles from the top of the masts to sink
the enemy and repulse Norman attacks. The Venetians hurled both
stones and insults at the Normans; they threw bags of lime into their
eyes and sprayed slippery soap on the Norman decks to upset their
footing. The enemy eventually managed to advance towards
Constantinople over land, but the Venetian naval forces beat them at
Durazzo on the high seas.
Alexius I generously rewarded the Venetians with yet another Golden
Bull in 1082 that greatly expanded the trading privileges the Venetians
had already obtained in 992. This new charter included an exemption
from tolls and tariffs in the Byzantine Empire, giving Venetian merchants
a stunning competitive advantage over merchants from other cities. After
1082 Venetians could enter and leave all Byzantine ports between
Venice and Constantinople without paying any taxes or tariffs. They
could stop and transfer cargo free of charge in ports across the lower
Adriatic and the Mediterranean, in strategic cities including Durazzo,
Corfu, Modon, Coron, Athens and Thebes, and even the imperial capital.
In Constantinople the Venetians gained permission to maintain
commercial docks and warehouses in which Byzantine customs officials
could not interfere. The Venetians still faced fierce competition from
Provençal, Genoese, Pisan, Amalfitani and Pugliese traders in the wider
Mediterranean but, as a result of the 1082 Golden Bull, Venice stood on
the brink of a great commercial revolution. Its merchants and traders had
suddenly gained a spectacular economic advantage."
"The Crusades
While Venetians had often been successful in defending themselves
and their Byzantine overlords against Normans, pirates and Saracens, a
much larger threat was developing in Asia Minor (now Turkey): the Seljuk
Turks. In 1071 Muslim Turks began attacking and colonizing Byzantine
territory in the East, prompting the Byzantines to turn to Western Europe
for help. By 1095 Pope Urban II had called on Europeans to come to the
East's rescue and save the Holy Land, drumming up a fever for
crusading among many European Christians. The Crusades, a period of
European military and political involvement in the eastern Mediterranean,
would last for several hundred years from 1095-1291. While thousands
of crusading knights and their entourages began to make their way
across Europe towards Jerusalem, Venetians found themselves in a
precarious position. On the one hand, they had St Mark behind them and
they too were devout Christians who supported the pope and their fellow
Christians. On the other hand, war and crusading was not good for trade
and Venetians were wary of disrupting their good mercantile
relationships with their Muslim neighbours and markets around the
Mediterranean. They watched their trading rivals of Pisa and Genoa
slowly enrich their coffers - in 1098, for instance, the Pisans conquered
the Byzantine island of Corfu - and the Venetians eventually ended up
using their fleet to prevent their rivals from gaining an upper hand.
Venetian trade clearly benefited from peace and stability in the Byzantine
Empire. It was in Venetian commercial interests to keep their Byzantine
privileges intact. When peace was threatened by advancing Muslim
forces Venice eventually decided to participate in a series of naval
expeditions to the East.
At the very beginning of the crusading period, Venetians were most
concerned with protecting the Byzantine Empire and had no particular
interest in conquering land or gaining territory in Palestine or around the
Holy Land. Active support against the Turks came first from Genoa and
other European forces while the Venetians focused first on preventing
their maritime rivals from gaining a trading advantage. So, in 1099, the
Venetian fleet engaged the Pisans in a battle off the island of Rhodes,
capturing 20 ships and 4,000 prisoners and essentially forcing the Pisans
to promise to stay permanently out of eastern Mediterranean trade. The
Venetians also used the early crusading period to continue the tradition
they had established when they stole St Mark by looting and adding to
their collection of relics and stolen trophies from around the
Mediterranean. For some time Venetians had had their eyes on the relics
of St Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of seamen and merchants (and
the same St Nicholas of Christmas and Santa Claus). They made their
way to the coastal city of Myra in Asia Minor (near the modern Turkish
city of Kas) only to find out that another raiding party from Bari had
already stolen the body in 1100. As smart traders and shrewd inventors
of their own sense of legitimacy, the Venetians responded by insisting
that the seamen from Bari had made a mistake and that the true body of
Nicholas was still there, which they then took. They returned with this
body (though it was most likely someone else's), called it St Nicholas and
lodged it in San Nicolò - the church of the sailors on the Lido - further
empowering themselves with the divine protection of yet another
significant saint. According to guidebooks, the body of St Nicholas of
Myra still lies in the church today. The Venetians demonstrated little
initial interest in fighting the Muslims and their early crusading activities
were dedicated primarily to peripheral forms of profit.
Within the first quarter of the twelfth century, however, Venetians began
to realize the potential commercial gains to be made from engaging
Muslim forces. In 1110 Venetians helped crusaders capture the city of
Sidon (on the coast of modern Lebanon), and King Baldwin of Jerusalem
rewarded them by giving them control over part of the port of Acre and
trading privileges in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1123, after the
Egyptians had attacked the city of Jaffa (an ancient port just south of
modern Tel Aviv), Doge Domenico Michiel (r. 1118-30) led Venetian
forces in the attack on the Egyptian fleet in the Battle of Ascalon (off the
modern coastal city of Ashkelon in Southern Israel). In this spectacular
battle, the Venetians deceived the Egyptian fleet into believing that they
were attacking a small caravan of cargo ships and pilgrims only to
discover, too late, 40 Venetian galleys behind them. With the sea red
with blood for miles around and the nearby beaches strewn with
cadavers, the Venetians temporarily eliminated the presence of Muslim
traders in the eastern Mediterranean. In addition, they captured several
merchant vessels laden with gold, silver and spices. In 1124 they agreed
to help the knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in their siege of the city
of Tyre and were granted one-third of the city after its conquest.
The Venetian forces involved in crusading activities continued to aid
their Byzantine allies as they always had. Defeating Muslims, after all,
worked to fortify and protect the Byzantine Empire. Relations between
Venice and Byzantium nevertheless continued to be volatile during the
crusading period largely because Venetians just could not stop pillaging
as they realized that fortunes could easily be made from theft. Returning
from the Battle of Ascalon in 1124, the fleet of Domenico Michiel stole
the body of St Donatus (still today in the church of his name on Murano)
and repeatedly looted from the Greeks on their way home, sacking many
additional Greek islands, coastal towns and ships. As a result, after
Emperor Alexius I Comnenus died in 1118, his successors attempted to
end Venetian trading privileges. In 1124 the Byzantine Emperor John
Comnenus decided to revoke the favoured status that had been granted
to Venetians in the bull of 1082. This favoured Pisan merchants and
perhaps was aimed at generating increased competition between
Venetians and Pisans, to the benefit of the Byzantines. This prompted
Doge Domenico Michiel to capture even more Byzantine territory in
retaliation, forcing the emperor to renew the Golden Bull. While
Venetians preferred to be at peace with Byzantium to maintain the
stability on which their trading privileges were based, they had no qualms
about attacking the Byzantines when necessary. At one point, as
tensions ran high between the two during the Venetian conquest of
Corfu, Venetian sailors, surely drunk, attacked the dignity of the
Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus by placing a slave, dressed
satirically in imperial robes, on the deck of a captured, imperial galley,
insulting him before the Greek fleet.
The Byzantines needed Venetian allegiance as always to help them
fight the Turks and the Normans, but they did not take Venetian attacks
and insults lightly. In the spring of 1171, when relations with Byzantium
had greatly deteriorated, this same Byzantine Emperor Manuel
Comnenus, in a surprising move, suddenly called for the arrest of all the
Venetians in the Byzantine Empire, seizing their property and holding
about 10,000 Venetians hostage in Constantinople alone. Doge Vitale
Michiel II (r. 1156- 72), who would later become one of the more
infamous doges in Venetian history, rallied Venetian forces for a large
assault on Byzantine coasts and Constantinople, an assault that involved
a massive reorganization of the city of Venice to fund this attack. Vitale
ordered Venice to be arranged into six sestieri, or districts (the same six
Venetian neighbourhoods that exist today), each of which was financially
obliged to support a fleet of 120 ships. Concern for the lives of the
Venetian hostages meant that the fleet could not act too aggressively.
Doge Vitale tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Byzantine officials but
talks failed and, to make matters worse, an epidemic broke out in the
Venetian fleet, killing thousands by the spring of 1172. The doge and his
crew returned to Venice, humiliated.
Venetians at home were infuriated. Doge Vitale's failure left many
Venetians' relatives in danger abroad and threatened the commercial
existence of many clans. Fearing the wrath of many noble families, Vitale
attempted to flee the Ducal Palace, aiming for the safety of the nearby
convent of San Zaccharia. After crossing the Ponte della Paglia (the
bridge from which to view the Bridge of Sighs), he turned left into the
Calle delle Rasse and was stabbed. His murderer was caught and
executed since crimes against patrician politicians were outlawed, no
matter how horrific the doge's failure. And in order to underline the fact
that violence against the political class was not permitted, the
government declared that no stone building could ever be erected on the
site of the murderer's house, located nearby. Builders followed this
decree and erected only small and simple wooden buildings on this site
until the construction of the new annex of the Danieli Hotel in 1948. The
bad relationship between Venice and Byzantium, however, continued to
sour. In an anti-Western riot in Constantinople in 1182, Byzantines once
again seized Venetian property and imprisoned and eventually
massacred many Venetians. These hostilities finally culminated in the
dramatic events of the Fourth Crusade.
If Venetian ascendancy began with river trading in salt and fish, slowly
enlarged into the Mediterranean and was promoted by Byzantine
commercial advantages, the final event that solidified Venetian maritime
supremacy was the Fourth Crusade. While Venetian participation in the
early crusading period was somewhat minor, they finally became more
committed. In 1203-4 as a result of growing tensions with Byzantium, the
Venetians entered the fray of the crusades with full force. This Crusade
began in 1199 when Count Thibald of Champagne decided to try and
retake Jerusalem from Muslim forces. He petitioned the Venetian navy to
transport him and his knights to the Holy Land, and French crusaders
arrived in Venice in the summer of 1202 to negotiate the terms of their
passage. The Venetians agreed to ship 35,000 men to the Holy Land,
with their horses and supplies, for nine months. In exchange they would
receive a fee of 85,000 silver marks and half the loot. The crafty
Venetians then talked them into hiring more ships than they needed,
made all the worse when fewer crusaders than anticipated showed up.
The Venetians - businessmen, well acquainted with failed contracts -
agreed to take the crusaders to the Holy Land anyway in exchange for
additional military assistance in subduing a series of cities that had
recently rebelled against them in the Adriatic. The Dalmatian city of Zara
had resisted Venetian control by placing itself under the protection of the
King of Hungary in 1186. The Venetian fleet and the crusaders left for
the Holy Land in October of 1202, stopping along the way so that the
crusaders could sack and seize Zara, Durazzo and Corfu, thereby
helping Venetians shore up their maritime control of the Adriatic.
Doge Enrico Dandolo (r. 1192-1205), who was over 80 years old at the
time and either nearly or completely blind, accompanied the fleet and
was so impressed with the subjugation of these cities that he craftily
decided to use the crusaders to put the Byzantine Empire in its place for
good. The Venetian fleet took a detour en route to Palestine and then
sailed for Constantinople. Among the crusaders in the Venetian ships
happened to be a man with a claim to the Byzantine throne, Prince
Alexius Angelus. He wanted to capture the Byzantine Empire under his
name, and in retrospect it seems hardly a coincidence that he was on
board. On 26 June 1203 the crusaders arrived in Constantinople and
attempted, essentially as a formality, to convince the Byzantines that
Alexius was the lawful heir to the imperial throne. When this naturally
failed, Enrico Dandolo led a brutal attack on the city.
The Venetians used incredibly creative tactics. Though seemingly
impenetrable walls surrounded the city of Constantinople on its seaward
side, the Venetians sidled their galleys right up against them. As in the
battle of Durazzo against the Normans, they climbed the masts to build
bridges from which to attack the walls. The Venetians managed to
infiltrate and subdue the city and make Alexius the new emperor but he
was slow to compensate the Venetians for their assistance. He was
overthrown and murdered by another Byzantine faction in January 1204
and the next emperor to take his place, Alexius V Ducas, immediately
defended Constantinople against the Venetians. Enrico Dandolo
responded in April 1204 by completely sacking the city. Constantinople
collapsed after four days of violence, murder and plunder, after which
Dandolo announced that the Byzantine Empire had ended. It would
henceforth be renamed the 'Latin Empire', with a Latin emperor to be
chosen by Venetian and French electors. Enrico Dandolo, preferring to
remain the Doge of Venice, declined the possibility of being elected, and
Baldwin of Flanders was made the Latin Emperor of the East in May
1204.
The attack on Constantinople represented one of the most gruesome
slaughters of the Middle Ages. In the history of Europe until the thirteenth
century - a time of barbarian invasions, spiritual hatreds and even regular
violence among European nobles - attacking, pillaging and killing was
much the norm. But even in this culture of regularized violence, the sack
of Constantinople was a shock to those who witnessed and heard about
it. In one of the greatest ironies, mercenary crusaders who had set out to
reclaim Jerusalem as the soldiers of Christ had slaughtered fellow
Christians. Venetians and crusaders nearly emptied the city of all of its
movable goods. They grabbed everything they could take, often
destroying works of art to extract precious metals and gems. They stole
relics, including a (supposed) fragment of the true cross, part of the head
of St John the Baptist, the arm of St George and some of Jesus' blood
which they typically justified as an empowering and honourable type of
theft. As the Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates famously recounted
and exclaimed:
'How shall I begin to tell of the deeds wrought by these nefarious men!
Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden under
foot! Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places!
Then was seen what one shudders to hear, namely, the divine body and
blood of Christ was spilled upon the ground or thrown about. They
snatched the precious reliquaries, thrust into their bosoms the ornaments
which these contained, and used the broken remnants for pans and
drinking cups... Nor can the violation of [Hagia Sophia] be listened to with
equanimity. For the sacred altar, formed of all kinds of precious materials
and admired by the whole world, was broken into bits and distributed
among the soldiers, as was all the other sacred wealth of so great and
infinite splendour.'
The attackers brought horses and mules into the Byzantine church of
Hagia Sophia to carry off their loot and, before leaving, in perhaps the
most famous symbolic incident of the sack of the city, enthroned a whore
in the patriarch's chair and left her dancing and singing obscene songs.
Choniates concluded that 'no one was without a share in the grief. In the
alleys, in the streets, in the temples, [one heard] complaints, weeping,
lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds,
rape, captivity, [and] the separation of those most closely united.' The
crusaders reckoned they had taken loot worth 400,000 silver marks: ten
times the then annual income of the King of France.
The Venetians gained a formidable new degree of power in the
Mediterranean. In the new distribution of political authority in the Latin
Empire, the emperor received one-quarter of the empire and the rest was
equally divided among the Venetians and crusading barons, giving
Venice final sovereignty over nearly half the old Byzantine Empire and
nearly half the city of Constantinople, including its most important
harbours, docks and arsenal. In fact Venetians gained the section of the
city with Hagia Sophia, where Enrico Dandolo was buried in 1205. With
the creation of this Latin Empire, Venice inherited a chain of naval bases
from Constantinople to Venice, essentially the entire coast of Greece
including the many strategically placed islands across the northern
Mediterranean, including Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia. Overnight, the
less than 80,000 inhabitants who lived scattered over a distant
archipelago in the northern Adriatic found themselves in possession of a
massive maritime empire that had once controlled them. The Venetians
now eliminated Pisan and Genoese competition in the eastern
Mediterranean, and Venice was transformed from being one of many
maritime trading cities to a massive imperial power.
To sum up all of these complex events: between 800 and 1300, Venice
went from being a city of fish and salt traders in Northern Italy to being
the capital of a vast Mediterranean empire. In the process of this
transformation, several key themes emerge that define the development
of the city. Firstly, historians by now have long pointed out that Venice
was interested in dominating the sea rather than gaining land or territory.
While this has become somewhat of a commonplace in describing
Venice, repeated more times than we need to hear, it nevertheless
remains a platitude rooted in the truth. Unlike most other cities in Europe,
Venice always negotiated to gain commercial rather than military
advantages: to secure tax-exemption in ports on the richest trade routes
rather than an empire made up of land and territorial possessions.
Though it did gain quite a bit of territory after the sack and conquest of
Constantinople, this territory was primarily in the form of coastal cities
and in these cities, Venetians never built crusader castles of housed
large armies. Secondly, in negotiating for business advantages rather
then political or military advantages, we see how from the beginning,
Venetians were practical businessmen and pragmatic traders, motivated
to turn a profit above any and all other allegiances and motivations. They
were happy to trade with Muslims, or to turn their backs on the Muslims
and fight against them if securing Byzantine privileges so necessitated.
Similarly, while the Venetians were often Byzantine allies, they were
equally as happy to attack them when greater profits could be reaped
from sacking their cities and stealing from them. Lastly, from the history
of Venice in the Middle Ages, we can see that the Venetians were
businessmen, but they were also great thieves, as the wealth and
prestige of their city was derived from profitable trade as well as from
pillage and plunder. The legitimacy of their state was built in part on their
growing economic prestige, as well as on the protection given them by
the relics of their stolen saints and protectors. Unlike for most other
states, the greatness of Venice had little to do with Venetian military
might but resulted instead from Venetian diplomatic skill, shrewd and
exacting mercantile practices, and economic pragmatism."
"Nautical and Commercial Revolution
Despite the fact that many commercial entrepots dotted the map of late
medieval Europe, for good reason Shakespeare did not name his play
The Merchant of Florence or The Merchant of Antwerp. Venice was the
great commercial city of its time. The Venetians' ability to expand into the
Mediterranean, establish a maritime trading empire that included the
capture of Constantinople and bring home the wealth that they did was
largely made possible because they were talented shipbuilders and
sailors. Ships, rather than armies, were the real foundation of Venetian
power. The conquest of Constantinople both encouraged, and was
encouraged by, Venetian maritime trade. But how exactly did Venetians
move about the Mediterranean, navigate its often dangerous seas, and
manage and trade their goods? Where exactly did they trade, and what
did they trade in? How did they maximize their profits, minimize their
losses and finance their commercial ventures?
No one knows exactly when Venetian ships began to voyage east in
great numbers. We know that the Venetians had established trade
agreements with the Byzantine Empire by the mid-ninth century and
were transporting silk from Constantinople to mainland Italy with some
regularity by the tenth century. The galleys making these early voyages
into the Mediterranean were most likely coasting galleys based on
Roman models; they travelled close to the coasts, and only during
daylight and in calm weather. Venetian ships slowly evolved, however, to
include two principle types of craft: round ships for trade and carrying
merchandise, and long ships or galleys for war.
A round ship was shaped like a walnut. It had sails on two masts and
was usually about three times as long as it was wide. The ships were
designed to transport light but bulky cargo, such as cotton and spices.
They tended to weight about 200 tons, but the biggest of these ships, a
roccaforte, weighed about 500 tons. Very few other ships weighed this
much until the nineteenth century and the Mayflower, for instance,
weighed about 180 tons. Galleys, in contrast, were warships designed to
be easily and quickly manoeuvered in battle. They were flat-bottomed
and long, with a length about eight times their width. Rowers propelled
the boats, most of which were biremes, meaning they employed two men
rowing side by side on each bench, each pulling a separate oar.
Venetians eventually added sails to some galleys to increase their speed
on the high seas. In general they carried little cargo and were used to
assist and protect merchant ships. The government forbade Venetians to
sell any ship to foreigners unless they were old or outdated; they did not
want other powers to benefit from their knowledge of shipbuilding.
By the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century, Venetians protected
their trading ships through two principal methods: by travelling in
convoys and by sailing in particular seasons. Convoys typically included
about 15-25 ships with from 10-20 small trading ships, a few large round
ships and a handful of galleys for protection. One such convoy left in the
spring and returned to Venice in the autumn, while another left in August,
spent the winter overseas in the eastern Mediterranean and returned in
the spring. These timed convoys were called the spring and fall muda
and were used primarily to protect expensive and valuable cargo, such
as spices. Less valuable (though not necessarily less profitable) cargoes,
such as oil or cotton, often travelled alone and not necessarily on strictly
prescribed routes. While this system was fairly effective, Venetians never
wielded complete control over the whole of the Mediterranean. They
could never stop their enemies from using the sea or make it completely
safe for Venetian ships at all times, and in some cases sailing in groups
merely provided a concentrated target for attackers. Nevertheless, to
some degree, this system protected Venetian merchants and their
cargoes by keeping ships off the high seas during periods of rough
weather and by finding protection through safety in numbers.
The growth of the Venetian fleet was linked to the construction and
growth of the Venetian arsenal or shipyard. The arsenale - a term of
Arabic origins meaning 'house of industry' - was founded in 1104 in
Castello in the eastern part of the city and was modelled on Byzantine
examples. At first it was built to house arms, naval equipment and
provisions for the navy, the aim being to store weapons, rigging and
supplies in one warehouse. It was also used as a repair yard, but most
new ships continued to be built elsewhere in the city. In the early 1300s,
however, the government quadrupled the size of the arsenal to about 60
acres (with a circumference of about three miles) and began to use this
fortified area as a construction site so that all the state's merchant
galleys could be built within these walls under state supervision. Larger
round ships were still built in private shipyards near the arsenal or on
other islands in the lagoon.
After the enlargement of the arsenal, Venetian shipbuilders built almost
the entire Venetian fleet here, mass-producing ships with a standard
design, as in a modern factory. Labour was highly specialized in order to
promote efficient production and easy repairs. The arsenal was
organized into specialized components - carpentry, tarring, sail
preparation, ropes, oars and the foundry for anchors and cannons - all of
which were connected by canals and docks. Nearby on the quay, grain
warehouses and bakeries prepared and supplied rations for state
voyages. Perhaps most significantly, whereas Roman shipbuilders
tended to build a ship's hull or main body first, Venetian shipbuilders
perfected the technique of constructing the frame or keel first, which
proved to be much faster and ultimately used less wood. The working
conditions nevertheless remained grim: grim enough to prompt Dante to
describe the arsenal as a pit in hell bubbling with black pitch and teeming
with labourers. One of the ways that the state promoted productivity
under such bleak working conditions was by supplying the arsenal
workers with wine. Quite incredibly, wine purchases for the arsenal were
second only to the purchase of timber, and the state spent more than two
per cent of its yearly budget to supply its shipbuilders with drink.
This specialization of labour, including the use of standard and
replaceable parts for all ships, meant that workers could construct a
galley very quickly. In 1570, when the Turks attacked the Venetians on
Cyprus, arsenal workers constructed around 100 galleys in
approximately 60 days. At the height of its capacity in the fifteenth
century, the arsenal employed over 16,000 workers - mostly carpenters -
and the Venetian fleet numbered 3,300 ships: 3,000 for commercial
travel and 300 galleys, almost all of which were constructed by arsenal
workers. Today, while the lagoon quietly laps at its crenellated walls, its
battlements enclose only office spaces and a wing of the Venice
Biennale - the city's international art exhibition - but in the later Middle
Ages the arsenal was a booming, bustling factory. It represented
perhaps the largest and, as some have argued, first truly industrial centre
in the world, employing a level of industrial production that would not be
seen again until the industrial revolution.
When the arsenal was enlarged, a series of advances in navigation also
occurred that, coupled with increased shipbuilding, allowed Venetian
trade to become even more efficient. Venetians first began to use the
nautical compass around 1250 and this, with the development of
portolan navigational charts that plotted directions from one coastal
landmark to another, enabled navigators to travel across the
Mediterranean in the straightest routes possible. Ironically, the only place
where navigation remained difficult was in entering and leaving the port
of Venice itself and crossing the northern Adriatic to the Istrian peninsula.
Especially during winter, Venetian pilots accompanied ships crossing to
Parenzo in Istria and ships entering and leaving Venice to make sure
they did not run aground on sand bars, or on shifting, shallow channels.
With the compass and new maps sailors could begin to cross the sea in
winter since they could now navigate without seeing the sun or stars.
These aids meant that navigators could plot their course through clouds
and fog, and the state could therefore organize two convoys to depart
and arrive within a year so that no convoy was required to winter
overseas. As navigation advanced, so did shipbuilding as Venetians
discovered the efficiency of one-masted cogs over two-masted round
ships. Cogs were similar to round ships in design, but had square sails
on one mast and were easier to manoeuver as a result, especially when
changing directions. By the fourteenth century Venetians also began to
use a fourth type of ship, the galea grossa, or 'great galley', a merchant
galley built to carry high-value cargo. It was like a cross between a large
sailing vessel and a low, fast warship with oars: a ship that had the
solidity of a round ship and the speed of a galley. As trade increased,
great galleys became incredibly useful because they could carry
precious cargo under maximum security since their oarsmen also
functioned as soldiers who fought to protect the goods on board.
Trade routes changed and evolved over the course of the Middle Ages
but, for the most part, there existed two principle lines of Venetian trade
that crossed the Mediterranean. One left Venice and sailed down to
Modon or Coron and turned around the Peloponnesus to Negroponte
and eventually up to Constantinople. The other main trade route also
travelled south to Modon or Coron but then turned south to stop at
Candia on Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus, and eventually headed for ports in
the Near East, such as Acre or Jaffa. Ships leaving Constantinople often
followed the same route home, but ships leaving Acre or Jaffa often
travelled further south to Alexandria and along the African coast before
heading north for home. Venetian navigation formed a kind of triangle
around the Mediterranean bordered by Byzantium in the north, Levantine
ports in the east and Africa in the south.
Other routes emerged over time. After concluding a treaty with the
Persian emperor in 1319, Venetian ships began to sail to Trebizond on
the southern coast of the Black Sea as well as to Tana (now Azov) on
the north coast at the mouth of the Don River. This arena of maritime
trade as we shall see would become the source of much tension and a
series of wars between Venice and its rival, Genoa. The Venetians also
developed the Barbary route through the western Mediterranean along
the coast of North Africa to Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, etc., out of the
straits of Gibraltar and up the coast of Spain to trade in Bruges and
London. The route began around 1300 and became more popular by the
fifteenth century. For much of the Middle Ages there was a covered
archway at the foot of the Rialto Bridge where merchants met to consider
these routes and plan their voyages using a world map painted on the
wall.
It took about a month to sail from Venice to Crete through most of the
Middle Ages, about eight weeks to Constantinople and three months to
Tana or Trebizond, though these times lessened as ships improved in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Trade in the opposite direction
and cargo returning to Venice from the Mediterranean unloaded at the
Rialto. The Rialto, of course, was the commercial and mercantile heart of
the city where barges from the mainland met incoming cargo from the
sea. Ships carrying as much as 200 tons of cargo could come up the
Grand Canal to unload, and the Rialto was a wooden drawbridge that
allowed ships to pass under it for much of the Middle Ages. Unloaded
cargo then followed a series of overland European trade routes, up rivers
or over the Alps, through passages in Friuli towards Vienna and Cracow
or through the Brenner and Septimer passes towards Augsburg,
Nuremberg and Ulm.
Venetians traded in a great variety of goods in different parts of the
Mediterranean, but the bulk of their trade in the Middle Ages - and the
greatest source of their profits - was in pepper, cinnamon, cloves,
nutmeg and ginger, with spices being in high demand in Northern
Europe. Even better, they were easily transported being light and not
taking up too much space. They were incredibly valuable and relatively
cheap to move. Furthermore, they did not spoil easily so merchants
could keep them in warehouses or transport them over long distances
without any risk of their rotting. They were the perfect cargo on which the
Venetians could build a profitable empire. Though some of the spices
came by overland routes from India, most of them were transported by
ship into the Red Sea, to Jiddah, the port of Mecca on the Arabian
peninsula, and then by camel to Damascus and Mediterranean ports
including Acre and Jaffa. Alternatively, spices came via Egypt through
the Red Sea port of Quseir and on to Alexandria. Pepper and ginger
were the most in demand and the most profitable, and Venetians
imported thousands of tons a year. By the middle of the fifteenth century
Venetians were apparently importing as much as 5,000 tons of spices
annually, and half of this was in pepper and ginger. The volume of
Venetian merchandise grew to approximate 10-12,000 tons in the
fifteenth century. While these figures may not appear so great in terms of
weight, we must keep in mind that the spices sold for a high price. One
chronicler claimed that by the beginning of the fifteenth century the value
of the cargo of an entire convoy in any given direction was about
250,000 gold ducats and could even be double that depending on the
cargo: a massive figure in the medieval economy when a salary of 15 or
20 ducats was enough for one family to live on rather well for a year.
It is nearly impossible to overemphasize the role of spices in the history
of Venice. Indeed, when we think about the city in a tangible and
physical way - the construction of its streets, waterways, homes and
churches, the commissioning of its art and architecture, and even the
sewing of the clothes worn by Venetian men and women - much of this
material culture was fundamentally built up stone by stone or stitch by
stitch from the income derived from spices. This is so much the case that
when we walk in the city and gaze upon Venice's medieval palaces and
churches today, we can imagine each stone slab, brick and marble arch
as purchased with the profits turned from cloves of ginger or pepper.
Spices were the 'black gold' of the Middle Ages.
Other goods were also in demand and proved profitable for Venetian
traders. A dazzling array of merchandise, including dyes, silks, carpets,
gems, incense and cotton, was transported in both directions during the
Middle Ages. Many of these luxury goods commanded extremely high
prices, allowing merchants to double their capital investment. In
Trebizond and Tana, for instance, Venetians found Eastern products,
such as spices, silk and, more importantly, hemp for rope making in the
shipbuilding industry, that were popular in Western markets. In addition,
they traded in the Black Sea for slaves. Technically there was
ecclesiastic legislation against enslaving Christians, but both Venetian
and Genoese merchants regularly turned a blind eye to such regulations
and carried nominally Christian slaves - primarily Russians and Tartars -
from the Black Sea to Muslim ports in the greater Mediterranean.
According to one calculation, in the middle of the fifteenth century Italian
traders brought over 2,000 slaves a year to Egypt to work as concubines,
household servants or to be transported elsewhere, for instance to sugar
plantations in Cyprus or Crete. (According to many accounts, the
Venetian word for slave, schiavon, gave Italy the informal greeting ciào,
from (s)cia(v)o, which loosely means 'at your disposition' and derives
from 'I am your slave'.) Arab traders brought these goods by ship or
overland caravan to the edge of the Christian world. Venetians met them
there to exchange their cargo for European wares, usually metals, such
as gold, silver, copper, tin, lead and mercury, and also woollens, furs,
hats, amber and coral.
Venetians made their profits in three ways. They sold products, such as
glass, salt and soap. They managed to create monopoly markets where
suppliers were either forced or strongly encouraged to sell their products
only in the city of Venice, thereby placing Venice in control of both the
supply and demand of products, such as salt and grain. And, for the
most part, they had the monopoly as middlemen between Europe and
the East. In the Adriatic Sea in particular they had a monopoly on all
exchanges and, by the eleventh century, trade between any two cities in
the Adriatic was permitted only in Venetian ships. Foreign merchants and
their ships did operate in the Adriatic, but Venetian patrols were powerful
enough to force all merchants to unload their Adriatic cargo only in
Venice. A Florentine ship, therefore, could not take cloth to Zara to do an
exchange for spices; all exchanges had to take place in Venice where
Venetians would be the middlemen and profit from the taxes on the
buying and selling of all goods. To enforce their privileged position, strict
Venetian maritime laws stated that merchandise coming to Venice either
had to come on Venetian ships or on ships from the country where the
wares originated. By the thirteenth century inspection points around the
lagoon allowed officials to check ships and monitor that their cargoes
were legitimate and covered by permits. Foreign merchants in Venice
were prohibited from trading with each other in the city. Germans, for
instance, could not trade directly with the Milanese, and Germans could
only sell German goods in the city, not wares transported from France or
England.
European states distant from the East or with little or no coastline often
had little choice but to trade in Venice, and many luxury goods from the
East could only be found in Venetian warehouses. Venice represented
the most central point of trade and exchange in Europe in the Middle
Ages because it existed at the crossroads of two great trading arteries:
the sea route into the eastern Mediterranean and land routes over the
Alps into Northern Europe. Playing all this to their greatest advantage,
Venetians oversaw and policed every sale that took place in their city
and ruthlessly made a profit from each one. The position of middleman
was incredibly profitable in the Middle Ages. According to the figures
made public by Doge Tomasso Mocenigo in 1423, an annual investment
of ten million ducats in the spice trade yielded a profit of four million
ducats. Spices earned Venetians the highest net profit among all their
tradable goods. While the city itself produced very little, it profited from
the riches, exchanges, needs and desires of others.
The Venetian trading economy, not surprisingly, was highly regulatory.
As both a cause and result of the fact that trade enriched both individual
merchants and the state, trade was organized and closely overseen by
the state. The state built and owned the arsenal where it manufactured
and maintained its fleet, and much civic regulation oversaw even the
tiniest details of Venetian shipbuilding, including ships' rigging, ships'
dimensions and the arms they carried. In addition, the republic of Venice
precisely defined many aspects of Venetian commercial life. By the
fourteenth century, the state regularly provided armed escorts for its
convoys to the East and also began to build state-owned galleys that it
auctioned and chartered to the highest bidders. The winning bidders
agreed to operate these ships for one voyage in a convoy on a specific
trade route under conditions designated by the state, including the length
of the voyage, its exact itinerary and ports of call, and the exact fees to
be paid by each travelling merchant. The winners of the auctions would
hire a crew and organize the cargo, and the state would furnish each
galley with enough rations for the journey. Convoys sailed under an
admiral appointed by the doge, and ships leaving port had to post a bond
that they would adhere strictly to the established itinerary and would not
attack other friendly people.
Such state-organized convoys formed only part of the total fleet of ships
trading out of Venice, and many merchants voyaged alone and unarmed
throughout the Middle Ages. Typically, galley captains hired crews in the
portico under the waterfront façade of the Ducal Palace or recruited them
from various parishes around the city. Recalling many Hollywood images
of Roman slaves rowing ships around the Mediterranean, it is often
surprising to learn that the galley oarsmen were not slaves but free men,
and the job of rowing on a galley in Venice during the Middle Ages was
considered both honourable and profitable. There were usually more
than enough applicants from the native population to fill Venetian
convoys until the mid-sixteenth century. Especially with the advent of the
great galleys used for commercial cargo, men were encouraged to sign
up since they were allowed to trade individually and carry their own
weapons. This meant that individual sailors could bring their own wares
to trade and sell, duty-free, on state-owned galleys and would help
defend their ships if attacked. Even such small-scale, individual trade
could prove incredibly profitable. One pilgrim recounted that when a
merchant galley arrived in Alexandria, local traders swarmed aboard to
trade with the crew even before the ship's official cargo was unloaded. A
saying existed in the Middle Ages that every Venetian sailor was worth
four of his adversaries since he would fight so hard to protect his
personal cargo and profit. By the thirteenth century, Venetian trade was
tightly organized and controlled by the state, and by the fourteenth
century great galleys manned by individual traders appeared invincible
across the Mediterranean.
Venetian merchants originally tended to sail personally with their own
goods and capital to trade in foreign lands, but a great variety of trading
and investment patterns emerged over the course of the Middle Ages.
Families, for instance, began to band together through marriage to form
corporations in which one partner resided in Venice while the other lived
and worked in foreign ports. Family partnerships then allowed other
travelling merchants to invest either funding or goods to be traded in their
vessels, so that a ship travelling to the East in the high Middle Ages
might have 12 merchants aboard who represented the investments of
more than 100 other people. The capital of both state-owned and private
ships tended to be divided into 24 basic shares, each of which could then
be further subdivided when necessary.
Travelling merchants originally obtained the funding for their voyages to
pay for the ship and its services through loans, but by the twelfth century
they tended to use a variety of different forms of financing. With an
agreement called a commenda, a silent partner put up two-thirds of the
voyage's capital and the active partner accompanied the goods abroad
and oversaw transactions in foreign ports. The active partner put up the
remaining third of the investment, and the partners would divide the
profits accordingly at the end of the journey. Perhaps the most common
form of financing was the colleganza. Under this arrangement, rather
than promise a fixed percentage of returns on investments, the
merchants who travelled to and from foreign ports promised to pay
investors three-fourths of the overall profit from the voyage. In this way
travelling merchants did not have to invest any funds initially but obtained
them from their business partners. A trader could voyage to and from
foreign ports and make a profit without putting up any of his own money,
as investors contributed capital and the merchant contributed the labour.
The colleganza was an especially dynamic form of business
arrangement because it enriched Venetians across the social spectrum.
You did not have to be rich to enter into a colleganza; if you were
talented and had a mind for business, you could do well by investing
even small amounts of goods or capital. Other commercial arrangements
included the joint venture, where investors pooled funds and paid in
advance to make a large purchase from abroad, say wine or grain, and
shared the profits when they returned. Some traded using commission
agents who received a percentage of the value of the merchandise that
they handled for investors, and earned a fee based on the volume of
goods exchanged whether they ended up being profitable or not. Lastly,
bills of exchange allowed merchants resident in Venice to send or
receive funds from abroad and quickly receive the profits from a sale
without having to wait for the bullion to travel, riskily, across the
Mediterranean.
Furthermore, the development of marine insurance eventually allowed
investors to pay a premium in exchange for compensation for the loss
due to shipwrecks or piracy, and Venetian knowledge about the practice
of insurance became commonplace and widespread. In one colourful
example, in 1587 the hospice of the Convertite - a convent on the island
of the Giudecca - told the Savi della Mercanzia (an administrative
organization that oversaw trade) that it would pray for the successful
voyage of Venetian ships in exchange for eight per cent of the insured
capital: a proposal that was rejected for being 'too speculative'.
Innovative and forward-looking, Venetian banking techniques were
another crucial factor supporting Venetian commercial life. Venetian
bankers during much of the Middle Ages did not make loans so much as
make payments on behalf of different clients. It was inconvenient and
dangerous to carry coins so, instead, merchants used credit to pay for
purchases with other merchants, orally instructing a Venetian banker to
transfer money to the account of the person being paid. Such banks
were established in the twelfth century as banche del giro or 'turning'
banks because their main function was to 'rotate' or turn credit from one
account to another. Four or five of these bankers typically sat under the
portico of the church of San Giacomo or in the square at the Rialto.
Money passed safely and easily between merchants, who often moved
enormous sums of capital without the exchange of a single coin.
Venice was also at the centre of the cash economy. Enrico Dandolo
minted the first Venetian coin, the silver penny or grosso, upon receiving
payment in silver from the crusaders after the Fourth Crusade. In 1284
Venetians also began to mint the gold ducat, later known as the
zecchino, that had same weight and economic importance as the
Florentine florin. The ducat essentially became the medieval equivalent
of the dollar or the euro. Because of its stable weight in gold, the ducat
was considered one of the most stable currencies in the Mediterranean
and around the world for hundreds of years, and was used until the fall of
the republic. The bankers with their account books and money-changers
with their ducats also sat at their desks at the base of the Rialto.
It is worth noting that in feudal states across the rest of medieval
Europe, it was common for elite or noble families to hold land and
wealth. In Venice, in contrast, where landholding was not so valued (at
least, not yet), all ranks of Venetian society took party in the expanding
wealth of the city. A large part of the population of the city, both nobles
and commoners alike, whether they worked for the arsenal, participated
in colleganze or had family businesses in Venice and abroad, had a
direct stake in the fortunes of the city and made money if Venice was
successful. This widespread Venetian participation in trade and
commerce is unique and fascinating in two principle ways. First, one of
the hallmarks of Venetian life, and perhaps one of the reasons Venice
saw remarkably less civic violence than many other cities, was that there
was a greater distribution of wealth between nobles and non-nobles than
in other states. The latter could make a good profit unlike their
counterparts through the rest of Europe. Second, it was extremely
unusual in the European Middle Ages for nobles to participate in
commerce. In most of the medieval world, wealth was associated with
landholding and rents. In fact ancient Roman law specifically prohibited
nobles from participating in any type of commercial activity. This legacy
of Roman law is made clear in a telling story related by the historian
Robert Lopez. In 829 the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus saw a large
commercial ship moving into the harbour of Constantinople. He inquired
who owned this impressive ship, and when he discovered that it
belonged to his wife, the empress, he was furious and ordered the ship
and all its merchandise to be burned, exclaiming that 'God made me an
emperor, and now, you, woman, want to make me a sea-captain!'
According to Theophilus' Roman mentality, nobles made money by
taxing plebian merchants, not by becoming merchants themselves.
Venetians, however, clearly did not follow these rules.
European feudalism began with the Franks who rewarded their fighters
with land in exchange for military service. When the Venetians defeated
Frankish forces in 810 they took a significant step away from this
traditional European social hierarchy based on the clergy, knights and
workers. They declared themselves separate and distinct from the
Romans and Byzantines since all Venice's social classes publicly
engaged in, and profited from, the proceeds of maritime trade. Venetians
purposefully created the conditions for good business. They established
systems and institutions to support merchants and bankers separated by
long distances or by different kinship orientations. A clear social
hierarchy still existed in Venice, but it was much less rigid than in other
European states. Doges, patricians and even Venetian bishops
participated in commercial life, though perhaps not while in office.
Given the volume of international trade, many foreigners lived in Venice.
In order to compete with other trading cities in Italy, Venice tried to attract
foreign merchants by providing attractive lodgings and warehouse
facilities in the city. Many warehouses sprung up around the city during
the Middle Ages for different national groups; Venetians built the
Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the 'German warehouse') in 1228, right by the
Rialto Bridge (the Fondaco is now the city's central post office). Here, as
in warehouses for other foreign communities, Northern Europeans could
sell their goods in Venice and take home products from around the
Mediterranean and the Far East. Similarly, many Venetians lived abroad,
in various settlements around the Mediterranean; in the twelfth century
and especially after the conquest of Constantinople, swarms of Venetian
merchants moved about the Mediterranean, staying often several
months or years in the Levant, selling their goods and buying new
merchandise.
This Venetian presence around the Mediterranean raises a curious
question. Historians typically argue that Venice was unique and different
from other medieval nations in that it was not a feudal power. As we
have seen, Venetians were not interested in gaining land or conquering
vast swathes of territory but in gaining ports and trading privileges.
Nevertheless, during the Crusades when Venetians were given one-third
of every town they helped capture, and especially after the conquest of
Constantinople in 1204, Venice became an empire as it gained foreign
territories that fell under Venetian control. Why is it, then, that we do not
tend to consider Venice a traditional colonial power, even in the middle of
the thirteenth century at the height of the Venetian Colonial Empire?
Venice did indeed enjoy a network of trading posts around the
Mediterranean that have long been called 'colonies', with seaports at the
likes of Acre and Tana. Maintaining not only harbours but warehouses
around the Mediterranean made trade much more profitable because if
traders tried to unload an entire shipload of imported goods at once, this
tended to depress local prices. Stockpiling goods and maintaining
storerooms and agents in foreign ports all-year round allowed Venetian
merchants to wait and sell their goods when prices were highest. But
because Venice had a relatively small population (approximately 50,000
in the thirteenth century), it never wanted to obtain or oversee and
govern massive landholdings. It did not have the capacity to do so. The
Venetians may have reigned on the high seas, but they were not
prepared to oversee the rough and mountainous terrain of inland
Greece, for example. That's why the Venetian Empire was never colonial
in the traditional sense; it did not seek to exploit local resources or
labour. What interested the Venetians were ports and trade centres. This
is not to say that Venetian populations living abroad were small. The
Venetian colony in Constantinople, for instance, was so big that at times
it rivalled the population of Venice in the thirteenth century. Venetian
senators even had a formal debate in the wake of the conquest of
Constantinople in 1204, to decide whether to shift the seat of Venetian
government from Venice to Constantinople. Doge Pietro Ziani (r. 1205-
29) apparently had his proposal defeated by only one vote.
The only places where Venetians tended to govern local populations in
a more traditional colonial fashion - recreating their own native
administrative and political structures away from home, developing a
colonial aristocracy and exploiting local resources and labour - was on
the island of Crete and, to a lesser degree, Cyprus. Venetians obtained
Crete after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 and continued to hold it
for more than four centuries. Like other territories it gained around the
Mediterranean, Crete gave Venetians control over eastern
Mediterranean trade routes. However, Crete was different from other
colonial possessions because it was wealthy in timber and agriculture,
especially grain, oil and wine. Venetians therefore sought to exploit its
local resources. In doing so, they often found themselves in conflict with
the local ancient feudal organization, controlled by wealthy landowners
and peasants, which resisted Venetian rule, demanding a heavier ruling
hand than most other outposts around the Mediterranean. Eventually
Venetian Crete became a replica of Venice with its own Senate and
Great Council. Otherwise, Venetian colonial occupation around the
Mediterranean did not involve extensive landed territories, but more often
only the key points on the tips of land masses: points like Durazzo,
Modon, Coron and Negroponte, where colonies ranged from fortified
military outposts to portions of coastal cities where Venetians governed
the native populations of those towns. In addition, there were several
examples of individual Venetian families who went to various Greek
islands where they established themselves as colonial overlords,
especially in the Aegean Sea. They did so by offering themselves as
protectors against the Genoese and the Turks, which often delighted the
locals. In this way a type of small, secondary colonial system arose
during the crusading era when Venetian nobles declared themselves the
feudal lords of various Greek islands.
During the period of Venetian expansion, a particular Venetian ritual
developed that symbolized and captured the spirit of the age: the
Venetian 'marriage to the sea', or the Sensa. This ritual began after Doge
Pietro Orseolo first defeated the Dalmatian pirates in the year 1000.
Venetians recalled his victories every Ascension Day when the Bishop of
Venice and the doge blessed the sea in remembrance. This ritual
blessing was elaborated when, as the story goes, on 25 February 1341 a
Venetian fisherman was awakened by St Mark. He asked the fisherman
to ferry him to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore where they were
joined by St George. They then went to the Lido where they were joined
by St Nicholas. Though a ship full of devils was sweeping a huge storm
towards Venice, these three saints held it back and saved Venice from
certain destruction. Mark then gave the fisherman a ring and told him to
present it to the doge. With this ring, the Sensa eventually evolved to
include the ritual marriage of the doge to the sea. Venetians rowed their
doge out to the mouth of the Adriatic on the Bucintoro, the ceremonial
galley of the doge, followed by a procession of vessels. There the doge
dropped his ring into the water, declaring, 'We espouse thee, O sea, as a
sign of true and perpetual dominion.' As a husband traditionally
dominated his wife, so the doge made the sea his subject: a relationship
that would define the city for hundreds of years to come.
If any architectural features in Venice symbolize this period of financial
and maritime expansion, they are the two columns in the Piazza San
Marco. Despite his tumultuous reign, Doge Vitale Michiel II left this
incredibly important material legacy to his city: he brought these columns
to the Piazza San Marco where they still stand today, topped with
statues of St Mark and St Theodore. Vitale supposedly brought three
classical columns back to Venice amidst much other loot from
Constantinople, and perhaps used the heavy columns to ballast his ships
on the way home. It is said that one column fell into the water as it was
being unloaded, and was lost forever to the bottom of the lagoon where it
may still lie today. As thanks for having donated these columns to the
city, the republic permitted Vitale to add the honorific 'dalle Colonne',
meaning 'of the Columns' to his last name and hand this title down
through his family. An engineer from Lombardy, Nicolò Barattieri (who
also designed the first pontoon Rialto bridge in 1178 and raised the
campanile in San Marco in 1180), finally managed to raise the columns
in place in 1172 using a system of ropes. Apparently his reward was the
exclusive right to gamble between the two columns, but he was
discouraged from doing so since public executions also took place on
this spot. As the Venetian writer and bookseller Franco Filippi has
astutely pointed out, for a city without walls or specifically delineated
points of entry, these two columns neatly symbolize the perennially open
door of the city, or the entrance to the city without doors."
"3 LIFE AND POLITICS IN THE MEDIEVAL CITY
While the Venetian fleet, its sailors and merchants were building a
maritime empire across the Mediterranean, the city of Venice was
growing and changing. As the city and its commercial life developed, so
did its government. During the course of the Middle Ages, Venetians
expanded the offices and functions of their state to respond to the
growing needs of their citizens and to further insure civic peace and
stability. One of the most significant political changes that occurred in
medieval Venice was the refinement of the office of the doge, who was
elected with increasing scrutiny and was subject to increasing checks on
his powers. Meanwhile, numerous other civic and religious organizations
blossomed in the city, and complex networks of social and spiritual
groups established a place in everyday Venetian life. How did Venetians
govern their city? What did the city and its streets look like, and how did
people experience daily life in the world of medieval Venice?"
"The Evolution of Venetian Political Life
As we have seen, the Doge or Duke of Venice was originally a
Byzantine military figure who, over the course of late antiquity, began to
gain more power and independence from Byzantium. The Venetian
government in the early Middle Ages was technically a democracy since
the doge was elected, and two tribunes oversaw his work to make sure
that he did not abuse his powers. In addition, Venetians maintained a
governing body called the arengo, a general assembly where people
voted primarily on matters of state security. However, between the ninth
and eleventh centuries the tribunes' powers became curtailed, arenghi
were called less frequently and were increasingly dominated by several
powerful families, and the doge became more like a prince. As a result,
this period saw a succession of dynastic doges. Following the election of
Doge Angelo Partecipazio (r. 811-27), the doge to whom the body of St
Mark was given, the Partecipazio and two other families supplied Venice
with 17 doges over the next 200 years. The Candiano family produced
four doges and famously dominated this office in an almost hereditary
fashion for much of the tenth century, and the Orseolo family had three
doges in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Venetians, however, became
uncomfortable with the idea of rulers or their families having close to
unlimited powers and inheriting this office like a king. When the last of
the Candiano doges, Pietro Candiano IV (r. 959-76), tried to introduce
feudal reforms into the lagoon, including using state armies to protect his
own personal landholdings on the mainland, a riot erupted and a fire
broke out in the Ducal Palace, forcing Pietro to flee. Angry crowds killed
him and his infant son and dismembered both their bodies. After Otto
Orseolo (r. 1008-26) was sent into exile as a result of overreaching his
powers (by appointing his brothers, for instance, to become the Patriach
of Grado and the Bishop of Torcello), another member of the Orseolo
family, Domenico, engineered a coup to take over the government in his
name, which he did for about 24 hours in 1031. In the wake of these
ambitions, Venetians became much more wary of dynastically-oriented
doges and began to impose more limitations on their power.
In the eleventh century Venetians slowly curtailed the doges' powers
with advisory councils, and the office of doge was transformed from
being like that of a king to more of a symbol of the state and its authority.
After Domenico Orseolo was overthrown in 1032, Venetians began to
elect two individuals - one from either side of the Grand Canal - to serve
as the doge's personal advisors. In addition they decided that the doges
could no longer nominate their successors, as had become the norm.
During the course of the eleventh century and into the twelfth, the doge
found himself increasingly surrounded by groups of nobles who oversaw
his work. While the Michiel family had dominated Venetian politics for
most of the twelfth century after the reign of Doge Vitale Michiel II
(whose failed mission in Byzantium resulted in his brutal murder outside
the Ducal Palace in 1171), Venetians increased the number of the doge's
inner council from two to six advisors (one from each sestiere or
Venetian neighbourhood) to increase surveillance of his activities.
Thereafter the doge and his main advisors formed a type of central
cabinet called the Signoria, and Venetians began to embrace the idea
that the doge should always act in accordance with his advisors. After
1172 a further reform stated that future doges would be named by
nominating committees, giving a committee the power to nominate a
doge who, it was believed, would respect his advisors.
At the end of the twelfth century, Venetians further curtailed the power of
doges by instituting the Promesso Ducale or the 'Ducal Promise'. As we
shall see, one of the hallmarks of Venetian politics was promoting the
symbol of the unity of the state above any other single individual or
family. Venetians were determined to stop family rivalries, and their state
survived for so long in large part because they were successful in doing
so. The Promesso Ducale restrained any sense of family gain or glory
that might result from becoming a doge. Each new doge was required to
swear a set of oaths or promissioni limiting his actions and, every time a
doge died, a committee added new details to the oath before the next
doge took office. The doge's heirs were even forced to compensate the
state if the doge abused his powers or wrongly benefitted in any way.
The first doge to take these oaths was Enrico Dandolo in 1192. He
promised to follow the laws of the state, not accept gifts or favours, not to
have personal correspondence with the pope or other European rulers
and to follow the directives of his advisors. The length of the promissione
grew remarkably over the years: that of Doge Mariano Grimani, elected
in 1595, ran to 108 pages and that of Lodovico Manin, the last doge,
elected in 1789, was 301 pages. New limits on the doge's powers
continued to be instituted until the last days of the republic in the
eighteenth century.
Furthermore, in 1268, election procedures began to state that an
elaborate system of votes and lotteries would be put in place to elect the
doge. This incredibly complicated process required that, From the Great
Council, there was chosen by lot 30 (out of anywhere from 1,000 to
2,000 members, depending on the year and size of the population); the
30 were reduced by lot to 9; the 9 named 40; the 40 were reduced by lot
to 12; the 12 named 25; the 25 were reduced by lot to 9; the 9 named 45;
the 45 were reduced by lot to 11; the 11 named 41; the 41 nominated the
doge, for approval by the Assembly.
Lots were drawn in the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace
when nobles filed past urns and drew copper ballot balls out of them; if
they randomly chose a gilded or golden ball, they were allowed to remain
in the chamber and participate in the nomination of the doge. Voting, by
contrast, took place when ballot boys walked around the chamber and
patricians dropped soft fabric balls into the bag for the person for whom
they were voting. The balls were used to prevent others from hearing for
whom you had voted. Though seemingly arcane, this lottery, nomination
and voting procedure effectively prevented the rigging of elections. In all
these ways, most dramatically in 1172 when nominating committees first
began to choose the doge, doges lost their regal attributes and went
from being monarchs to republican magistrates.
When we look carefully at the evolution of the office of doge over the
centuries and all that being a doge required - especially in the evolution
of the promissione - it appears surprising that anyone ever wanted to be
doge at all. According to the writer Alvise Zorzi these many restrictions
even meant that the doge could not receive any official state visitors
without his advisors being present and he could not have any private
audiences, he could not display his own coat of arms in public, he and
his family could not give or receive gifts, he could not let anyone kiss his
hand or kneel before him, he could not leave the palace at all except for
official functions so that he could not go to the theatre, cafes or even into
the streets, and that he could not have a holiday without state
permission, and then only on medical grounds. Furthermore, the
expenses of the office traditionally far exceeded the salary since doges
paid hefty taxes. They also paid for civic festivities, their magnificent
wardrobe and various expensive gifts to the church of San Marco and
the city while, at the same time, they were forbidden from engaging in
any commercial activities while in office. Many families surely cringed at
the idea that one of their men might become doge, and it is a great
testament to the honour and glory attached to this office that it was
regularly filled, despite these enormous disadvantages.
In addition to all the ways that the powers of the doge were curtailed in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, shifts also occurred in other
important offices in the state. After the shock of the murder of Vitale
Michiel, the arengo lost its powers to elect the doge and its authority was
handed over to a new council called the Maggior Consiglio, or the 'Great
Council', consisting of about 500 men. It included every Venetian
patrician over the age of 25 and by the sixteenth century it had over
2,000 members. The arengo retained only the powers to acclaim a
nominated doge and to approve the making of war or peace. Venetians
also gave more power to another, more exclusive magistracy called the
Pregadi, or the Senate, a group charged with receiving ambassadors
and overseeing diplomacy and foreign policy especially when crucial to
commercial life, such as drawing up trade contracts, gaining better tariff
rates and introducing strategies aimed at defeating commercial
competitors. All these changes swept through the Venetian state in the
last quarter of the twelfth century and established how the state would
function for hundreds of years to come.
Historians sometimes refer to a Venetian constitution, which is
somewhat misleading since Venetians did not produce any one single
document that codified its central body of laws. But the reason why
historians use this term is because Venetians, like the British, generated
a constitutional structure found in many different documents and
sources, including the Promissione Ducale, civic statutes and various
ancient customs. Historians have traditionally described the structure of
the Venetian state as like a pyramid with the arengo - the general or
popular assembly - at the base. While this popular assembly never
ceased to exist, by the thirteenth century its powers were given to the
next level up on the pyramid, the Great Council. This was the most
central legislative organ and its primary purpose was to generate and
approve laws. Since this council was rather large, ranging from 500 to
over 2,000 men, more intense deliberation and debate occurred at the
next level up, in the Forty or Quarantia (an appeals court at the apex of
the state's judicial system, which also oversaw financial legislation), and
in the Senate which oversaw international, military and economic
matters. The Forty elected three heads or capi, who attended the
meetings of the doge and his six advisors, and it was this group of ten
men, the Signoria, that constituted the top of the pyramid and the most
powerful executive council in the republic of Venice. The Signoria's
responsibilities included tackling various state crises, naming the
commanders of galleys and fleets and handing out justice at the highest
level. At the very top of the political pyramid was the doge though, as we
have seen, his position became increasingly symbolic.
The workings of the Venetian government were obviously much more
complicated than this pyramid suggests. As the city and its overseas
possessions and fortunes grew, so did various magistracies overseeing
virtually every aspect of civic and commercial life. The Senate and the
Great Council elected over 200 magistrates to oversee business, trade,
crime, tax collection, customs duties, the food supply, price controls and
flood control. City planning was particularly important in this city on
water, and the state was quick to assert its authority over how the city
grew and was organized. The doge and his magistrates took many
initiatives to assure that the channels and canals remained clear and
navigable. During the course of the thirteenth century, the government
formed a magistracy to oversee the channels and a board to oversee
communal property and issue building permits, and eventually formed
the Esecutori alle Acque, or Water Commissioners, who, with other
groups, oversaw flood control and the health of the lagoon. Eventually
there were councils overseeing remarkably specific problems such as the
organization and behaviour of nuns, corrupt voting practices, the salaries
and behaviour of gondoliers, the eradication of blasphemy on the streets
and the way people dressed in public, so that scores of administrative
groups oversaw practically every aspect of daily life. In addition, each of
the 70 or so city parishes had a chief, the Capo di Contrada, who
oversaw tax collection, loans and naval service. The capi also doubled
as neighbourhood policemen until the Signori di Notte, or Lords of the
Nightwatch, became the civic police force in 1274.
At perhaps the very bottom of this administrative pile was an elaborate
web of civil and criminal Venetian courts whose complex jurisdictions
again covered even the most miniscule aspects of Venetian life,
including who was and was not allowed to beg on certain bridges, the
number of trees that could be felled in a certain area on the mainland
and by what percentage retail fishmongers could price their fish above
wholesale sellers. Well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
offices and magistracies proliferated to meet the growing civic needs for
organization, administration and justice. The Venetian government and
its bureaucracy expanded well into the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries so that the state and its functionaries became like an octopus
with infinite arms that extended into every aspect of daily life.
In general, however, while changes in state organization occurred from
time to time, the way that the doge was elected, and how he operated in
tandem with the Senate, the Great Council and a variety of smaller
magistracies remained essentially unchanged until the arrival of
Napoleon and the fall of the republic in 1797. In essence, during the
course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Venice became a commune
or a community with shared leadership that asserted its rule over the
lagoon at large (the earliest Venetian document that mentions Venice as
a commune dates from 1144).
It is important to note that from 1000-1250, political developments in
Venice were much the same as they were in other parts of Northern Italy.
Across the northern Italian plains, as citizens of various towns wrestled
control away from the pope and the emperor, they too formed communes
and placed political control in the hands of oligarchies of local nobles.
The political scene in Venice differed, however, after 1250 when more
and more communes fell victim to factionalism and family violence. On
the mainland communes tended to collapse and become dukedoms or
hereditary despotisms in cities where one powerful family was able to
dominate its neighbours. Historians of Venice have long been fascinated
by the fact that this never happened here. Though similar attempts were
made, Venetians managed to generate and maintain a sense of loyalty
to the commune as a whole and not become divided by family rivalries
within the ruling class. The Venetian constitution was by no means
perfect, but historians agree that it generally provided better government
than elsewhere. The government, most unusually, tended to enjoy
popular support among its inhabitants; the state rarely needed to
maintain troops in the city, and the under-classes never attempted to
overthrow the nobles."
"People and Groups
As the state and its economy grew, so did its social life. People formed a
great variety of social groups based on spiritual devotion, ethnic
identities and different professions. These groups had an impact on both
the physical development of Venice and its political life.
Different types of work and labour fundamentally influenced where
people lived and the types of social organizations to which they
belonged. Different parts of the city, which often meant separate,
individual islands, were designated for different types of manufacture and
work, often for safety reasons or to facilitate transport. Shipbuilding
became concentrated in the eastern part of the city around the arsenal,
the government transferred all glass-making activities (window panes
and eyeglass lenses were manufactured as early as the twelfth century)
to the island of Murano in 1292 to prevent fires spreading and destroying
the city while the tannery was established on the island of the Giudecca
to protect the city's water supply. Also, businessmen, traders, and
wholesale and retail merchants of both food and more durable goods like
spices set up their tables around the base of the Rialto bridge and the
Grand Canal. In the Middle Ages people tended to live relatively close to
where they worked, so that neighbourhoods of people who worked in
similar crafts formed around their workshops and businesses.
Shipbuilders tended to live near the arsenal and glassworkers on
Murano. Different types of labour helped mould neighbourhood
communities all over the city.
The street names told people then (and us, because the names haven't
changed) where you could find different professions. Calle del Forno
indicates the street of a baker (there are 31 such streets in the city),
Calle del Magazen was a street of shops (and there are 16 such streets
in Venice), Calle del Malvasia had a wine merchant and Calle dei
Saoneri was a street of soap makers. There are many craft names on
the streets near San Marco: Calle dei Fuseri was a street of metal
workers; Calle dei Fabbri of blacksmiths; Calle del Fiubera of buckle
makers; the Frezzaria of arrow makers; Calle dei Botteri of coopers; and
delle Rasse of the woolworkers who made gondola cabins. The streets
and alleys around the Rialto identify the many different crafts and
businesses that once existed (and, in many cases, continue to exist)
there: the Riva de L'Ogio was the dock where oil for cooking and lighting
was unloaded; the Sotoportego del Banco Giro was where the bankers
worked; the Campo de le Becarie indicated butchers; the Naranzeria was
the site of the orange market and warehouse; the Ruga degli Orefici was
the street of the goldsmiths; the Erberia was where Venetians sold
wholesale fruit and vegetables; and the Campo della Pescaria was the
fish market. Unlike in any other city, the names of the streets, alleys and
squares in Venice are written directly on the walls of buildings. These
white signs, first painted in the early nineteenth century, are called
nizioleti/ninzioleti, or 'little sheets' in Venetian dialect. Each one contains
a story or a fragment of history, and reading them is one of the best ways
of looking back into the complex social fabric of the Middle Ages in
Venice.
Beside the names of the crafts and merchants, you can also see how
the nizioleti record the presence of communities of foreigners in the
lagoon. Good examples include Calle dei Albanesi, dei Armeni, dei
Greci, dei Tedeschi and dei Turchi. If different professions were one of
the organizing forces behind the different neighbourhoods and social
groups in the city, so was nationality and ethnicity. As we have seen,
Venice became the mercantile and trade centre of Europe in the Middle
Ages and large communities of foreigners came to live here just as
Venetian traders made their homes around the Mediterranean.
Venetians welcomed foreign merchants and traders, and often extended
housing to communities of foreigners trading in the city. While the
Romans coined the term hospes for 'guests' - a term that has the same
roots as the word hostis, meaning 'hostility' - the Venetians adopted the
slightly friendlier term forestier to mean all those who were not Venetian,
probably originating in the idea of da fuori, meaning 'from outside'.
Consequently foreigners from around Europe and the Mediterranean
tended to live in concentrated communities in Venice, forming another
significant part of social life in the lagoon. The government authorized
foreigners to live in specific areas, allowing the state to monitor, to some
degree, their commercial activities and keep track of the number of
residents and their movements with the hope of reducing any possible
tensions. The government allowed foreign communities to maintain their
traditional cultural and religious practices but, by encouraging them to
live in certain segregated areas, hoped to prevent them from mingling
much with the native population. The Germans (i.e., all German-
speaking people) were the largest foreign community and included
Poles, Hungarians, Austrians and the Swiss. Greeks, Turks, Slavs and
Egyptians also formed large communities in the medieval and early
modern city. The Armenians were recorded in Venice as early as the
second half of the twelfth century and maintained a hospice and a church
close to San Marco. To this day a great variety of Venetian surnames,
including Schiavon, Tokazian, Turco, Del Turco, Turchetto, Moro and
Moretto indicate the historic presence of these foreign communities. The
Greek and Armenian churches are still active today.
Throughout the Middle Ages, workers formed guilds in order to protect
their economic interests in the competitive world of the market. Guilds
were rather like modern labour unions, consisting of groups of craftsmen
or labourers who drafted the rules governing their trade. The guilds
regulated who was permitted to enter certain types of work and at what
age, what training was required and how much money they could make
depending on their age, experience and superiority. Perhaps most
importantly guilds determined the prices for the goods they sold. They
also tried to eliminate unfair competition, bad or inferior workmanship
and excessive hours of work. In doing so they maintained standards and
benefitted both individual workers and consumers.
Historians of Venice have long noted that guilds or arte were less
powerful and significant here than in other mainland cities like Florence,
and that guilds in the early Middle Ages, for instance, did not always
represent the most significant professions in the city. This was in part
because the central government of Venice was so well organized and its
powers so well articulated that the state tended to oversee commercial
life more than in other cities. In addition, to have both guilds and the
state overseeing business life would have meant too much regulation. In
1173, for instance, Doge Sebastiano Ziani (r. 1172-78) created the
magistracy of the Giustizia Vecchia: these three government officials
regulated various aspects of the market in Venice, including the guilds
themselves, as well as trades that did not form guilds. The Giustizia
oversaw weights and measures, price controls and numerous other
aspects of Venetian commercial life, and was the chief public institution
overseeing the market until the fall of the republic. Quite simply, many
crafts did not need a guild.
In addition, and perhaps most importantly, medieval people tended to
form guilds to protect primarily manufacturers and labourers. However,
the Venetian economy was based on commerce more than manufacture,
and merchants in foreign trade - the mainstay of the Venetian economy -
did not have guilds. Nevertheless, Venetians did form guilds in many
industries, especially during the course of the thirteenth century when
many groups found it necessary and useful to form organizations to
protect their financial interests. The earliest groups to form guilds in the
Middle Ages were tailors, jacket makers, goldsmiths, jewellers,
physicians and surgeons. Various types of workers in the shipbuilding
industries also formed guilds at this time, including the rope makers, oar
makers, carpenters and caulkers. Fishmongers, oil vendors, sand
suppliers (sand being used in well and water filtration) and various parts
of the cloth and silk industries, to name a few, also formed guilds around
1250. By the middle of the thirteenth century, there were at least 100
guilds. This may sound like a lot but most guilds had less than 250
members.
Venetians also organized themselves into religious groups and formed
societies, or brotherhoods, to provide aid and assistance to the needy.
These groups were called confraternities or scuole (schools). Scuole
were associations of laymen with communal and charitable goals that
they tried to achieve through devotional practices, communal worship
and philanthropy. If guilds were like labour unions, confraternities and
scuole were like charities. It was common for groups of workers or guilds
to form scuole to assist workers and their families in times of need. Their
members included the rich and poor, all of who paid annual dues used to
help those in need. Members met weekly to pray, sing hymns and hear a
sermon. They also often participated in public, ritual festivals. These
organizations had spiritual goals, but they were not religious
organizations per se: priests could not belong, and these organizations
were places where lay people who did not become priests or monks
could express their spirituality.
These fellowships each had a base in the city and a particular place of
worship. The shoemakers' guilds, for instance, formed the Scuola dei
Calegheri, or Shoemakers' Confraternity, in Campo San Tomà. Over the
doorway of the house there is a relief of the Virgin protecting the
members of the guild. Another relief here shows St Mark healing the
shoemaker Aniano (connecting the cobblers to the city's saint), and
around the lintel of the doorway are images of shoes. The largest and
wealthiest of the scuole were the six scuole grandi, or 'big'
confraternities, so-called because they admitted up to 600 members and
often built extravagant houses for their members, such as the Scuola di
San Giovanni Evangelista, founded in 1261 as a brotherhood of
flagellants who physically beat themselves in imitation of Christ's
suffering. Smaller scuole often maintained single chapels and altars in
churches. The church of San Giacomo at the Rialto, for instance, has ten
altars that were built by various scuole including the grain-winnowers'
guild, the cheese-vendors' guild and the goldsmiths' guild. Scuole, in
fact, became highly differentiated even within single professions. For
example, though they were all carpenters, different scuole were created
for the builders of houses, furniture and frames. Among the goldsmiths
different scuole existed for those who spun gold and those who made
gold leaf. Different national or ethnic groups, such as the Greek
community, also began their own brotherhoods. The scuole would
become particularly important in Venice - and particularly interesting to
modern tourists - since these organizations commissioned so much of
the city's art. Confraternity members used their pooled funds to purchase
paintings from the leading artists of the day to decorate their chapels and
altars, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Scuola
Grande di San Rocco founded at the end of the fifteenth century to assist
the Venetians in times of plague, has more than 60 paintings by
Tintoretto, one of the city's most important Renaissance painters. By
1200 there were at least 14 of these organizations in Venice; 200 were
active by 1500 and hundreds still existed at the fall of the republic in
1797. Scuole were communities that integrated and embodied Venetian
social, religious and civic life.
Many other groups and communities formed, and as we will see later in
the cases of Jews and prostitutes, were forced to live together in
designated parts of the city during the Middle Ages. This leaves us with
one final group that played a prominent role in the early development of
the city: the religious orders. Episcopal and parish churches were the
first sites around which religious communities developed in the lagoon
and, by the ninth and tenth centuries, monastic communities had also
sprouted up. Monasticism, or the following of a set of rules governing
community and spiritual life, first became popular in Europe in late
antiquity, especially following the monastic rule developed by St Benedict
in the sixth century. The Benedictines began to have a presence in
Venice as early as the ninth century, followed by other orders such as
the Clunaics and Cistercians. These early monasteries were virtually
autonomous communities that often owned and oversaw their own fields,
orchards, saltpans and water supplies. Indeed, the goal of early monastic
communities was to be in this world but not of it, and to aid the
surrounding community not by participating in it but by praying for it. By
the mid-fifteenth century there existed some 50 monastic communities in
the lagoon, representing more than 21 different orders of men and
women, and new orders continued to arrive and grow throughout the
history of the republic.
The most important of these groups were the mendicants who arrived in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Whereas Benedictines led a quiet
life of prayer and contemplation inside their monasteries, the
mendicants, by contrast, emphasized poverty above all other values. In
addition, their practices differed from the Benedictines since they
preached in public and took their spiritual message out into the world
instead of meditating and praying in cells by themselves. Historians have
long argued that the development of the mendicants or friars - the
Franciscans and the Dominicans - was the most powerful and important
spiritual event of the Middle Ages. As European economies grew and
prospered after the year 1000 - and Venice is a great example of this -
the mendicants and their emphasis on poverty and charity offered a
sense of spiritual relief to offset the Christian guilt associated with
making money. The Franciscans (the followers of St Francis) settled in
the city around 1227 and completed their magnificent church of the Frari
in the western part of Venice around 1338. The Dominicans arrived
around 1234 and finally finished and consecrated their church of San
Giovanni e Paolo on the opposite side of town around 1430. If you visit
almost any large Italian town that has its roots in the Middle Ages, it will
almost always have two churches dating from the thirteenth century, built
by the Dominicans and the Franciscans. In Florence there is Santa Maria
Novella and Santa Croce. In Venice, if you climb any bell tower that
offers a view over the city's roofs, the Franciscan and Dominican
churches of the Frari and San Giovanni e Paolo immediately stick out
being among the largest buildings: a testament to the prestige and power
they wielded in the medieval city. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Frari
was home to more than 1500 mendicants. Doges were buried in both
churches. As historians have long pointed out, such social groups -
religious communities, confraternities and workers - were so important in
the medieval and early modern worlds since neighbourhood and
community were among the most powerful forces giving individuals a
sense of identity."
"Political status
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Venice had clearly become a
bustling city and a powerful political and economic player in the world of
the Christian Middle Ages. What marked out Venice as a truly legitimate
political power, however, was the fact that it held a crucial summit in
1176 between the two greatest powers, Pope Alexander III (r. 1159-81)
and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1155-90).
Frederick was one of the most powerful men of the European Middle
Ages. A German king who was crowned emperor by the pope, he spent
much of his life and career on military campaigns in Northern Italy, often
in Tuscany and Lombardy near Milan where he attempted to conquer
these territories and make them part of his empire. Various cities in
Lombardy eventually banded together to resist his campaigns and
formed the Lombard League in 1167. The pope supported this league
since he did not like the German emperor interfering in Italian affairs.
Frederick's campaigns eventually brought him into direct conflict with
Pope Alexander III. Frederick went so far as to support an anti-pope,
Calixtus III, to pressure Alexander III to give in to his (Frederick's)
expanding power. Frederick's forces, however, suffered a tremendous
defeat at the hands of the Lombard League at the Battle of Legnano in
1176, which finally broke Frederick's hold over Lombardy. Pope
Alexander III was nevertheless afraid of being captured by German
knights and, as a result, decided to flee to Venice for protection. Both the
Venetians and the Lombard League forced Frederick to make a formal
peace with the pope (though some accounts say that Frederick came
willingly): the peace was arranged in Venice and overseen by Doge
Sebastiano Ziani (r. 1172-78). On Ascension Day in 1177, Frederick
came to Venice and kissed the foot of the pope in the church of San
Marco, thereby reconciling their differences. Grateful for Venetian
assistance, the pope gave the Venetians a series of gifts including,
among other things, a gold ring. According to some, it was with this ring
(and not the symbolic ring that St Mark gave the fisherman) that
Venetian doges symbolically married the sea on each subsequent
festival of the Sensa.
How much of the peace story is true? Not a lot. The pope supposedly
came to Venice in disguise, and spent many nights hiding and sleeping
in the doorways of various churches, including perhaps the church of
Sant'Aponal, or the doorway of San Salvador or Santa Maria della Carità:
all these churches claim this honour. A pilgrim apparently recognized him
(by some accounts after six months in the city!) and alerted the doge to
the pope's presence, and then accompanied the pope to the Ducal
Palace. On the floor of the basilica of San Marco, a small lozenge-
shaped stone in the atrium marks the spot where the emperor
supposedly embraced the pope. We now know that much of this is
fiction.
There were probably no episodes of disguise and recognition, and no
ring. But as with much of Venetian history, the truth did not matter nearly
as much as the symbolic meaning derived from whatever was
exchanged between the emperor and the pope. Just as Mark legitimized
the city, so did the fact that the pope fled here and that the doge was
chosen to reconcile the pope and the emperor in Venice. The role of
arbiter between the dominant forces of church and state in the Middle
Ages gave Venice yet another degree of power and respectability, one
that reinforced and heightened its simultaneously developing
commercial, maritime and spiritual prestige."
"Topography and Civic Space: Visualizing the Middle Ages
When we walk around Venice today, the historic centre of the city may
at first appear incredibly well preserved, and in many ways it is. In truth,
though, very little material or architectural remains still exist from Venice
in the Middle Ages when Venice was at the height of its powers. If it were
possible to visit Venice at this time, we would actually recognize very
little. So what did the city look like, and how did it become a city? Few
buildings survive from before the middle of the eleventh century. It took
hundreds of years for Venice to begin to assume any aspects of a real
city and, in order to understand this process, we need to return to the
ninth and tenth centuries.
When the Venetians defeated the Franks and took their first steps
towards political and economic independence, the city was not much
more than a series of swampy islands and mudflats. Though the city now
appears contiguous with integrated streets, at the start of the ninth
century it rather resembled a series of lily-pads in a pond: separate,
disconnected and entirely uninhabitable. Making Venice into a city, and
eventually into a city that reflected the splendour of the capital of a
Mediterranean empire, involved generations and generations of
painstaking land reclamation.
The earliest structures in the lagoon were made of wood with thatched
roofs since wood was plentiful, easy to transport into the lagoon and did
not weigh heavily on its muddy foundations. The construction of anything
more permanent eventually meant draining the land. First, Venetians
would sink walls of wood or stone around the area where they wanted to
build, usually a proposed plot for a building or a street. They would make
these walls watertight and then pump out any water inside this enclosure
and vertically sink in tightly packed groups of wood pilings, typically of
varying lengths so that they would penetrate different levels of soil and
create as much stability as possible. After filling in the rest of the area
with dirt, debris and gravel, they would place planks and beams
horizontally over the top to create a base platform, and then finally cover
this raft of wood with slabs of stone, typically the hard, white stone that
Venetians obtained from the peninsula of Istria. The wooden pilings
beneath the water level would eventually petrify, making the area solid
and safe for sustaining more lasting, permanent and heavy structures on
top. It's thought that beneath the basilica of the church of Santa Maria
della Salute, builders sunk more than 100,000 trees or pilings - literally
an entire forest - to support this massive structure.
The investment of time and money in drainage paid off. The Venetians
did an extraordinary job and many of today's buildings still stand on piles
driven into the ground over 1,000 years ago. Through such land
reclamation, slowly but surely, parts of the city began to spring up in solid
form, usually as local families and religious orders built near one another.
During the course of the Middle Ages the Franciscans worked on
drainage projects in the area around San Tomà near their church of the
Frari, and the ancient Badoer family drained land in that same area for
their households and businesses. The Benedictines first reclaimed large
tracts of land in part of the city that is now Dorsoduro, starting in the
middle of the ninth century. Churches were often the first significant
structures to appear on an island or stable tract of land, and houses and
other buildings tended to appear around them. In this way, from 1000-
1100, historians estimate that Venetians built approximately 50 churches
on the islands of the lagoon.
Today, as we look at the campo or square around any Venetian church
we can try to visualize how parts of the city came into being and
functioned. With the construction of parish churches, bell towers chimed
the hours of the day, calling people to work, to church or to arms in times
of danger. A central square was established in front of each church: on
one side of it a wharf or dock and boatyards, and on the other side
workshops and a market. In times of war, the government set up public
targets for archery practice in these squares and trained men to use
crossbows.
Each island church had its own saint, identity and festivals. Gradually
houses appeared, as did gardens, plots of vegetables and vineyards.
The leading families who had endowed the local church had palaces,
surrounded closely by the houses of workers and labourers clustered
close together. Animals ran freely around the islands, including cows and
especially pigs that thrived on the garbage people flung out their
windows. Some believe the Venetians built mills powered by the ebb and
flow of the tides. In areas of the islands that were left undeveloped, there
would be mudflats and water creeping in at high tide, with pools where
the inhabitants could fish. Though Venetians were not great horsemen,
they nevertheless kept horses in the city right up to the nineteenth
century, so stables also existed on various islands around the city.
Medieval Venice differed most fundamentally from the modern city since
there were fewer walkways, almost no real streets and many more
canals. Streets were a precious expense but waterways were free. In
most parts of the city streets were not much more than trampled muddy
lanes but, by the eleventh century, some streets emerged between
clusters of houses and buildings, and documents from that time already
refer to them by the Venetian names of calle (street) and fondamenta
(quay).
Just as the earliest structures built in the lagoon were made of wood, the
primitive bridges that first connected these islands were also made of
wood before stone bridges were built. Indeed, the first form of the Rialto
Bridge consisted of boats lashed together. Fires were common and, with
so much construction in wood, they occasionally destroyed entire
quarters of the city. In an attempt at prevention, officials ordered all
residents to extinguish fires and candles after the terza ora della notte, or
three hours after sunset. For this reason Venice, in the Middle Ages, was
unimaginably dark after nightfall and it was incredibly easy to fall into the
water while walking or to be attacked by thieves. After a catastrophic
flood and fire in 1106, however - a fire that became so large that
chroniclers reported flames leaping across the Grand Canal - Venetians
began to use more stone and brick for construction. In addition, in 1128
Doge Domenico Michiel (r. 1118-30, the commander of the fleet at the
Battle of Ascalon) decreed that every night small lamps would be lit at
shrines, gondola stops and intersections around the city at state
expense. In order to shore up public safety, especially against night-time
crime, Venice was the first European city to provide public street lighting.
It is important to note that despite increased building in stone during the
course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Venetian expansion was
largely based on one primary natural resource, wood. Besides water,
wood - oak, beech, fir, larch and elm - was the main resource fuelling the
city's growth and was increasingly in demand as the city grew, becoming
a pressing problem in the city's environmental politics. The Venetians
stripped bare the great forests in Istria near the sea and dramatically
felled trees in Northern Italy to build their ships and houses, sink the
foundations for their buildings and construct bridges to link the islands
together. They tied felled trunks together in large rafts and floated them
along the coast or down river from the foothills of the Alps into the
lagoon's workshops and boat yards (hence the name for the Zattere, the
long quay that faces the island of the Giudecca, where rafts loaded with
wood first docked when they arrived from the mainland by river or canal).
Some historians think that much of the Mediterranean basin, as far as
Northern Africa and the Middle East, had become deforested by as early
as the tenth century as a result of Venetian civic and commercial
expansion. The supply of timber would always be an issue for the
survival of the Venetian state and, by the fifteenth century, Venetians
would have to confront the results of dramatic deforestation in the form of
increased silting. Rivers that ran through deforested areas carried and
deposited more silt in the lagoon that threatened the navigation of
canals. This eventually forced the state to design environmental policies
to try and conserve forests and protect their waterways.
The foundations of the ceremonial heart of the city hinge around the first
church of San Marco, which was begun in the 830s. About the same time
there was some kind of fortress for the doge in the area where the Ducal
Palace is now, which is where the government of the lagoon was also
sited. In fact, the name of this area of Venice, Castello, probably derives
from a fortified castle erected in this area in the ninth or tenth centuries.
We have only vague descriptions of the originals of these buildings, but
they were most likely to include the first buildings in stone or brick. In the
precarious times of the early Middle Ages, the Ducal Palace was most
likely heavily fortified with battlements and towers, and may even have
had a drawbridge. Right through much of the twelfth century, the piazza
was still enclosed by the sea wall built at the end of the ninth century by
Pietro Tribuno to protect the city from invaders. (According to John Julius
Norwich, a few crumbling remains of the wall still survived in 1982 at the
southern end of the Rio dell'Arsenale, but I have never been able to find
them.) What is now the piazzetta (where the two columns stand today)
formed a small harbour and bathing area, where water lapped the base
of the bell tower and church. Much of the area that is now the piazza
was, in the ninth and tenth centuries, grass and trees, and the orchard of
the monastery of San Zaccaria.
By 1150 the bell tower in San Marco was lit at night to act as a beacon
for ships and its bells, like other bell towers around the city, rang out the
time. The marangona, the biggest bell, called labourers to work while
other bells announced the meeting of the Senate or the Great Council
and the bell called the trottiera rang to encourage patricians to rush or
'trot' their horses to the Ducal Palace. The smallest bell, the renghiera,
announced the timing of executions. Many big ships moored themselves
right up against the piazza and, well into the fourteenth century some of
the largest shipyards existed right next to the Ducal Palace in what are
now the public gardens.
There were also two churches that no longer exist today in the piazza.
On the western side of the piazza was the church of San Geminiano,
probably first built in the ninth century but destroyed on Napoleon's
arrival. Its existence is still indicated by a plaque in the ground. There
also would have been the little ninth-century church of San Teodoro - the
patron saint of the city before the arrival of Mark - perhaps to the left of
where the basilica of San Marco stands today. The piazza was often
filled with the booths of craftsmen and officials who granted business
permits or collected shipping fees. Looking out over the water, the
dogana or promontory that sits at the mouth of the Grand Canal just
across from the piazza was the site of a crenellated tower. The view
around the Piazza San Marco during the early Middle Ages would have
looked completely different from how it looks today.
By the twelfth century some aspects of the modern Piazza San Marco
came into being. Most significantly, Doge Sebastiano Ziani (r. 1172-78) -
the same doge who brokered the peace between the pope and the
emperor, and also the first doge to be elected through the republic's new
nominating procedure - supported public works programmes to enlarge
the Piazza San Marco. Ziani had the old sea wall destroyed, had
orchards in the area cut down and the entire area of the piazza paved for
the first time. He also filled in a major canal, the Rio Batario, that once
bisected the central part of the piazza just west of the Ducal Palace (you
can still see signs of this canal by the bay, just under the sailing club as
you head from the piazza to the public gardens). Some say this
rearrangement was specifically so that the meeting of the pope and the
emperor could take place, but it seems hard to imagine such big projects
taking place at relatively short notice. Ziani was one of the wealthiest
men in the history of Venice, and most likely he thought big and ordered
this grand remodelling as a sign of growing pride and confidence in his
blossoming city.
Though Ziani changed some aspects of the piazza, what we see today
came into being primarily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So
where can we still see medieval Venice in a city where remnants from
the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries have long been erased? One of
the few spaces that lets us experience the Venice of the Middle Ages is
the courtyard where one of the more famous figures from Venetian
history lived, Marco Polo. Polo's story is neatly woven into the grand
events of the history of Venice. While the Venetians captured
Constantinople in 1204, they lost it again in 1261 when the returning
Byzantine Emperor Michael Paleologus retook the city. The Venetian
fleet was away from Constantinople at the time and the best it could do
was rescue Venetians from the city and take them to the Greek town of
Negroponte. This was a tragic loss for Venice; it was impossible for the
Venetians and the Latin West to retake the city and the Eastern empire
and, in addition, it was no surprise that the new emperor found the
Venetians untrustworthy and allowed a large number of Genoese to
trade in Constantinople with the privileged trade status that the
Venetians had always enjoyed. The emperor did allow the Venetians
back into the city in 1268, but the Venetian dominance of trade around
the Bosphorus was broken. The Genoese, as we will see in the following
chapter, would become Venice's next greatest threat and challenge.
Ironically the loss of Constantinople may have prompted the journeys of
the Polo family, since the loss of Constantinople possibly encouraged
Venetians like them to look for other routes to get spices.
In 1261 - the same year that the Venetians were ousted from
Constantinople - two merchant brothers, Nicolò and Matteo Polo, set out
to explore the lands beyond the Crimea to see what commercial
possibilities existed beyond Constantinople where they were based.
They travelled north into Russia to the town of Sarai but, according to
some, did not attempt to return Constantinople since they had heard of
the expulsion of the Venetians. Instead, they travelled south to reach the
wealthy city of Tabriz in Persia, but the roads were blocked as a result of
local warfare among Mongol Khans. After about three years in the
central Asian city of Bokhara, they went east with a caravan into China,
over 3,000 miles to the Mongol capital of Peking and the court of the
Great Kublai Khan. The Great Khan told the Polo brothers to ask the
pope to send missionaries so that he could learn about Christianity. The
brothers made it home overland through Persia to the Mediterranean
port at Lajazzo (now Ayas on the southern coast of Turkey). They set out
for China again in 1271 with two missionaries and Nicolò's son Marco,
who was then 21. The missionaries turned back, but Marco made it to
China to work in the service of the Mongol court where, for more than 20
years, he experienced a refined civilization that was quite different from
that of the West.
According to legend, when Marco Polo returned home in 1295, no one
in his household or neighbourhood recognized him or believed his stories
until he slit open his pockets and pulled out handfuls of jewels and
precious stones. While many were transfixed by Polo's stories, others,
especially seasoned travellers (as Venetians often were), tired quickly of
his tales. When Marco eventually wrote a book about his journeys, those
who did not believe his wild stories supposedly called it 'Marco's Millions'
in reference to his reliance on numerical superlatives when talking about
his travels. Marco wrote his book in prison after he had been captured by
the Genoese in 1298. He recounted his travels to a fellow prisoner,
Rustichello of Pisa, who wrote them down and produced an almost
instantaneous bestseller. Polo eventually returned to Venice where he
died in 1324, allegedly claiming on his deathbed 'I did not write half of
what I saw'. He was buried in the church of San Lorenzo, but his
sarcophagus went mysteriously missing when the church was
remodelled in 1592 and has never been found. The Polo family's travels
are legendary for many reasons: they were most likely the first Latin
Westerners to cross the Great Wall of China, and Marco's account is
among the first in-depth, anthropological and ethnological studies of the
Far East from a Western perspective. While some think that Marco Polo
first brought pasta from China to Italy and introduced Italians to their
national dish, this is unlikely, since forms of pasta were probably first
used by Etruscans, Romans or Greeks. Some scholars think that pasta
actually came via the Arabs who invaded Sicily in the early Middle Ages.
The Polo family probably lived somewhere near the modern Malibran
Theatre, in one of the two courtyards nearby named Corte del Million.
These courtyards today are both picturesque and dingy. Off the beaten
path, they can be dark and gloomy on cloudy days and their façades
reveal both delicate medieval architecture as well as some decrepit and
depressing modern exterior plumbing. Modern windows, for instance, cut
abruptly into fragile medieval arches. Nevertheless, there is something
refreshing about the way that the past and the present co-exist in this
square since, unlike in other parts of the city, restoration here has not
been overdone. The remains of these houses give us a real feel for the
Venice of the thirteenth century with their gothic windows, wooden roofs
and various spoglia or architectural fragments, such as Byzantine
arches, pilasters and paterae, fixed into the façades. In a quiet moment,
when the last Venetian talking into his or her cell phone disappears
under the archway and you are left alone in the square, you can almost
hear the clatter of Marco Polo counting out his emeralds, rubies,
sapphires, turquoise, opals and diamonds on his kitchen table.
If not through the street names alluding to the medieval activities or in
the quiet courtyard surrounding what was (most likely) Marco Polo's
house, perhaps the only other site that part survives from the Venetian
Middle Ages - from the age of the crusades and of Mediterranean trade
and conquest - is the façade of the basilica of San Marco. Today, with
thousands of visitors waiting in line to cram into the church, it is not at all
easy to imagine that this was a building of its time. But with a little
imagination and by focusing on some of its details, we can get a sense of
how this building embodied and symbolized Venetian majesty and
cunning at the height of the city's power.
There is much debate about what the first church on this site looked like.
Some say the first church consecrated in 832 was built to imitate the
destroyed church in Alexandria from where the body of St Mark was
stolen; others say its Greek cross plan derived from the great churches
of Constantinople, including Justinian's sixth-century church of the Holy
Apostles. A fire destroyed this first church in 976 and various doges
restored and rebuilt it over the next century, so that the underlying
structure of the church consecrated in 1094 is, for the most part, the one
that exists today. While the basic structure dates from the late eleventh
century, the history of San Marco and the material remains that adorn it
span the ages. Its decoration has been altered greatly over time and any
number of guidebooks can point out the most significant features. Here,
instead of repeating that I'll focus on the evolution and metamorphosis of
the church during the high Middle Ages, especially after the Fourth
Crusade. By focusing on the specific details that were added to the
church in this period we get a sense of how Venetians became the
imperial overlords of the Mediterranean and shamelessly displayed their
power to the public.
The nineteenth-century art historian John Ruskin described the church
of San Marco as 'a treasure heap', a telling phrase since it does not have
an elegant spire that reaches effortlessly towards the heavens (like
Chartres cathedral) or a simple, meditative space in which people
commune directly with God and the universe (like the Pazzi Chapel built
in Renaissance Florence). As Ruskin noted, it is essentially a pile of
plunder, thieved from various sites around the Mediterranean, beginning
with the body of the saint himself. (St Mark's relics could easily have
been destroyed in the fire of 976 but, according to various legends, were
lost and miraculously found several times over the ages and allegedly
found again in 1811 when they was placed permanently under the high
altar, but even this story is suspect.) Before the time of the Fourth
Crusade, the simple brick façade most likely already had some
decorative elements. Mosaic decoration had begun as early as the
eleventh century, and much of the church's decorative, geometric
pavement was already in place. During the Fourth Crusade many of the
church's great treasures first arrived and were literally stuck on, or in, the
church as symbols of Venetian wealth and imperial domination. Rarely
did a ship return from the eastern Mediterranean without a stolen
column, capital or relief to fix on the basilica.
Most notably, the exterior on the ground floor or lower register of the
basilica, especially in and around the portals or arches of the church, is
covered with marble slabs and columns. These were added after the
1204 conquest of Constantinople when ships laden with precious eastern
marbles, columns, capitals and reliefs arrived back from their voyages of
conquest and crusade. These effects - Egyptian porphyry, Greek marble,
Persian onyx and Syrian reliefs - are far from uniform, and their mix-and-
match style clearly shows that they were stolen from around the
Mediterranean and inserted here as decorative symbols of Venetian
domination. On the right side of the cathedral, in the south-west corner,
stands the Pietra del Bando, or 'announcement stone', a stump of
porphyry column stolen from Acre and used for centuries to announce
publicly the decrees of the Venetian government. Next to this red
column, in front of the southern façade, stand two white pillars adorned
with Syrian carvings from the fifth and sixth centuries. They were long
thought to have been taken from Acre as well but are now believed to
have been taken from Constantinople. Most famously, the four bronze
horses that sit above the central doorway of the church also came from
Constantinople. They might have once adorned the arch of Trajan in
Rome, but were definitely displayed at the Hippodrome of
Constantinople. In 1204 Doge Enrico Dandolo shipped them to Venice
as part of the plunder from Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.
According to some stories, in order to bring them aboard the Venetians
had to remove their heads and then make collars to hide the incisions.
They were installed in 1254, and have now been replaced by replicas to
protect the originals that are in the museum inside the basilica.
On the ground floor of the basilica to the far right, in the south-west
corner close to the Ducal Palace, are the porphyry statues of the
Tetrarchs, also stolen during the Fourth Crusade. The Tetrarchs were the
four rulers charged with governing the Roman Empire during the reign of
the Emperor Diocletian. While we do not know the precise origins of
these statues, the missing foot of the figure on the far right was
discovered in an excavation in Istanbul, suggesting once again they were
stolen in the crusading era. Though small, humble and hidden around
the side of the church, these statutes of the tetrarchs huddled together
neatly display the visual process of generating the city's political
legitimacy. Through the tetrarchs and other plunder pasted in and around
the façade of San Marco, we see how Venetians savily used stolen
property to generate political meaning. The tetrarchs are almost an
afterthought in the corner, as if the Venetians simply pasted them in for a
quick and easy fit. In fact much of the plunder from around the
Mediterranean is displayed around Venice in precisely this way - a relief
from Egypt is tacked up above a doorway here, a column plastered
hastily into a façade there. What was most important to the Venetians
was not the antiquity of their plunder but the political message. By
unashamedly flouting such items in public in the very ceremonial heart of
the city, Venetians clearly displayed to the world that they were the
unrivalled masters of the Mediterranean.
There is plenty more plunder inside the church, and the altars and
chapels shimmer with stolen artefacts, gems and stones. Tombs are
studded with Byzantine fragments, and columns and capitals from
around the Mediterranean are fixed all over the basilica. While
guidebooks discuss the interior at length, one particular chapel highlights
the nature of Venetian imperialism. On the eastern altar of the left
transept of the church quietly sits the icon of the Madonna Nicopeia,
shipped back from Constantinople by Enrico Dandolo after the Fourth
Crusade. Called the 'bringer of victory', Byzantine emperors carried this
icon at the head of their armies as they led their troops into battle since
the start of the twelfth century. The theft and placement of this military
icon in the church of the doge of Venice sent a clear political message
about who was now in charge in the Mediterranean.
In and around the basilica of San Marzo Venetians brazenly asserted for
all to see that they were equally or more powerful than the great ancient
and modern empires, especially the Byzantines. Their treasures now
decorated Venetian buildings. As official state representatives read the
newly promulgated laws on top of a column stolen from Acre, in front of
and surrounded by marbles thieved from around the Mediterranean, no
one missed the message that the Venetians were now the masters of
this world. No one questioned their power and authority; no one, that is,
except the Genoese."
"4 CRISIS AND CONSOLIDATION: VENICE IN THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY
The historian Barbara Tuchman once described Europe at the end of
the Middle Ages as undergoing what she called 'the calamitous
fourteenth century'. With war, spiritual unrest and disease this was
indeed a bleak period in the history of the West. But it was not all bad
news for Venice. On the one hand, as a result of advances in
shipbuilding, seafaring, maritime conquest and economic expansion, the
years from 1300-48 were among the most prosperous in Venetian
history. Many historians believe that Venice was then at its most
expansive and powerful. But on the other hand Venice certainly did
experience its own version of Tuchman's calamitous fourteenth century,
in part as a result of the plague, violence and political turmoil at home,
but also as a result of a series of incredibly expensive and destructive
wars with its maritime rival, Genoa. Venice also experienced a series of
social and political transformations that made it a very different state in
1400 than it was in 1300. For this reason, this period merits special
treatment. What events in the fourteenth century both threatened and
stabilized the fortunes of the republic? Venice's wars with Genoa
combined with threats at home had powerful and lasting effects on the
city's social structure and political system, which came to be defined by a
clear and more rigid sense of hierarchy by 1400. By the end of the
fourteenth century, Venetians had developed very different ideas about
the relationship between its social classes, as well as about the powers
that the doge and its state possessed."
"Venice and Genoa, 1257-99
As we have seen, Venice entered the crusades not out of religious zeal
but to seize its fair share of plunder from the Middle East and to try and
block its rivals from doing the same. By the middle of the thirteenth
century, especially after the conquest of Constantinople, Venetian
success in the crusading period had led to intense rivalry with several
other maritime cities including Pisa, Amalfi and especially Genoa. The
first war between Venice and Genoa erupted in 1257, but exactly who
were the Genoese?
If Venice was the maritime outlet for north-eastern Italy, Genoa was its
north-western counterpart, located in the northern Mediterranean on the
western side of the Italian peninsula. While Venice was historically free
and independent, Genoa was subject to the Holy Roman emperor
though local families did wield considerable authority by occupying the
office of consul, a high-ranking political position. And, as in Venice,
shipbuilding, seafaring and trade were prominent in the city's culture and
economy. Genoa also developed a formidable navy (indeed, the city
would be the birthplace of Christopher Columbus) while its merchant and
trading families possessed substantial political power. In addition, the
Genoese founded trading colonies in the Middle East, the Aegean, North
Africa and Sicily, and similarly made fortunes in the Near East. By the
middle of the thirteenth century, the Genoese were nearly as well rooted
in Near Eastern cities, such as Acre and Tyre, as the Venetians. Though
Genoa never had more than half the population of Venice, it too strove to
control trade in its own geographic region of Liguria, aiming to create a
trade monopoly in the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Rhone River down
through Tuscany.
The rivalry between Venice and Genoa was initially overshadowed when
traders from Pisa threatened both Venice and Genoa, but Pisan power in
the Eastern Mediterranean declined after 1250. As both the Venetians
and the Genoese became increasingly aggressive commercial
competitors, their interests began to clash in their struggle for the
domination of various overseas markets, in particular those in
Constantinople and Acre. Growing antagonism and war ensued; wars
that on and off would last for more than a century.
With tensions between the two powers already running high, the spark
that ignited the First Genoese War was the murder of a Genoese citizen
by a Venetian in Acre. In response, the Genoese attacked the Venetian
quarter of the city, causing the various factions in Acre to take sides with
one group or the other. These attacks and tensions forced the then doge,
Renier Zeno (r. 1253-68), to send a number of extra war galleys to
provide protection for a trading fleet in 1257. The commander of the
Venetian fleet and future doge Lorenzo Tiepolo broke through the
Genoese chain blocking the harbour, burned a group of Genoese ships
and eventually expelled the entire Genoese colony from Acre. The
Genoese returned to try and retake the city in 1258 but, with
reinforcements from Crete, Venice and the population of Acre (including
locals who had come to hate the Genoese), the Venetians ultimately
captured half the Genoese galleys. Their fleet defeated, and with over
1700 men dead or taken prisoner by the Venetians, many taken in
chains back to Venice to be used as bargaining chips in peace
negotiations, the Genoese fled to nearby Tyre. This victory fuelled the
story that the Venetians uprooted and carried home the columns from
the great tower in Acre and set them up on the south side of the church
of San Marco, though recent research suggests these columns really
came from Constantinople.
After this, the Venetians and the Genoese continued to spar with one
another around the Mediterranean for many years - a period that is
called The First Genoese War - until 1270. During this time various
battles produced victories for both sides, with the Venetians generally
getting the better of it. While they focused on keeping their trades routes
safe and protecting their convoys in the face of Genoese aggression, the
Genoese strategy was to try and lure Venetian galleys away from these
convoys so that Venetian merchant vessels, undefended, could easily be
raided. In this way the Genoese plundered Venetian ships and colonies,
and the Venetians suffered financially from the cost of providing its
merchant fleet with added protection. The Venetians tended to beat the
Genoese when the fleets met on the high seas, as in the battle of
Settepozzi in 1263, near what is now the island of Spetses off the
eastern coast of the Peloponnese. But the Genoese were capable of
outwitting and evading the Venetians, and tended to gain an advantage
when they were able to raid Venetian convoys. Neither side, however,
gained any decisive advantage over the Mediterranean Sea from such
tactics, and the war came to a conclusion only because Louis IX, the
King of France, threatened to confiscate Genoese properties in France if
they did not make peace with the Venetians. Louis wanted to go on a
crusade to Egypt and needed peace between the two warring factions to
do so, producing in 1270 a temporary halt to the fighting.
This tentative peace was disrupted when Mamluk soldiers from Egypt
retook various territories that had been conquered by the crusaders,
namely Tyre, Tripoli and Acre. The fall of Acre to Muslim forces in 1291
meant that trading rights in the Black Sea became more valuable than
ever before, and they were increasingly contested. Venetians and
Genoese urgently tried to force each other out of this area to ensure their
own exclusive access to spices, silk and slaves. In 1294 the Genoese
caught the Venetian convoy making for Armenia off the coast of Lajazzo
and spectacularly captured almost all the goods it carried, and possibly
also Marco Polo. In doing so, the Genoese initiated their second war with
Venice (1294-99). Emboldened by their success, the Genoese began to
attack their Venetian rivals more than during the first war, most famously
when the Genoese commander Lampa Doria forced a confrontation in
1298 off the island of Curzola (now Korcula in Croatia). This battle was
the largest ever fought between Venice and Genoa, involving about 90
Venetian and 80 Genoese vessels. The Genoese were victorious, killing
9,000 and taking up to 5,000 Venetians prisoners, including the Venetian
admiral Andrea Dandolo who was so disgraced by this loss that he
committed suicide by beating his head against the hull of the ship that
was taking him to prison.
Both sides were so depleted and exhausted that their respective
commercial enterprises suffered heavily because they'd invested so
many resources in the war. The Genoese had won a series of dazzling
victories, reducing the Venetian mercantile fleet to an all-time low in the
Mediterranean, but the Venetians were quick to recover. The two sides
brokered a peace in 1299, but the outcome of the rivalry between Venice
and Genoa was far from decided. Fifty years of calm followed the end of
The Second Genoese War, but not because there was peace. Both sides
were distracted, and in the case of Venice that meant political threats,
social upheaval and the plague."
"Threats, Conspiracy and Republican Resolve
While the Venetians battled the Genoese on the high seas, a
revolutionary political transformation was occurring back in Venice. In
both Venice and elsewhere in Italy, two main questions confronted most
states: how to prevent factionalism and the fighting between families
from disrupting civic peace, and how did one become, and what was, a
noble? Many cities did not manage to stop factionalism, and their
governments were taken over by a single family that became dukedoms,
as in Milan [Sforza], Ferrara [Este] and Mantua [Gonzaga]. Other cities
developed complex mechanisms to avoid this, such as the regular
rotation of public offices in Florence to prevent any one family from
wielding power for too long and creating jealousy and rivalries. All cities
also faced the question of what it meant to be noble. Was nobility
inherited exclusively through the family, or could you become noble
through marriage or economic advancement? The question of who was a
noble - which was important since it conferred political rights and power -
was particularly pressing as more people came to live in Italian cities
from the countryside. These two issues - family violence and nobility -
defined politics for hundreds of years in medieval and early modern Italy.
In Venice these concerns manifest themselves for several reasons at
the end of the thirteenth century in the Great Council. This large body of
magistrates elected other magistrates in the city and settled various
political questions. It consisted of about 500 men before 1300. Problems
began to arise, however, because the means of selecting its members
was fundamentally unclear. Traditionally, most members had held a
government office and were then, as a result, chosen by a nominating
committee to be on the Great Council. Most were nobles but some were
not, and tensions formed around the question of who had a right to be on
this council. For instance, were immigrants to the city or wealthy families
who had only recently obtained their fortunes allowed to join? With
Venice having so much of a presence in Dalmatia and the East, would
foreigners who married into Venetian families, or their children, be
eligible? If so, would there still be room for traditional Venetian families?
Would old Venetian families lose their political clout if newcomers
eclipsed them? Venetians were forced to confront the question of how to
select the members of the Great Council and, in doing so, had to face
the same questions that other Italian cities did: who is noble, and how to
prevent families from arguing about it since this could easily escalate into
violence. Venetians needed to find a permanent solution that would
prevent undesirable families from entering the council while not
excluding old Venetian families.
Different ideas and different solutions for fixing this problem percolated
towards the end of the thirteenth century, but in 1298 Doge Pietro
Gradenigo (r. 1289-1311) finally passed the definitive rule that would
answer this question once and for all. Gradenigo's reform stated that
anyone who had been a member of the Great Council at any time during
the last four years would be a member thereafter, as would his
descendants. In addition, new members might be proposed, but only by
the doge and his council and these families then had to be approved in
the Council of Forty. With this ruling Gradenigo protected the political
status of old families and also ennobled several common and foreign
families by making them members of the Great Council, admitting them
to the Venetian political order. After 1323 these reforms were finalized
and membership in the Great Council effectively became fixed and
hereditary. After this only these designated families were considered
noble, and only these families could be elected to other offices in the
state. These events became known as the closure or serrata of the Great
Council.
In effect, Gradenigo closed the political class. He clearly drew the line
between nobles (members of the Great Council) and non-nobles for the
rest of the republic, though some new and foreign families did become
nobles from 1298-1797. Some families were admitted to the noble class
as a reward for their sacrifices during the War of Chioggia in 1382.
Furthermore, when the government needed money it occasionally
allowed new families to buy their way into the noble class for a tidy sum,
as it would do in the eighteenth century. In general, however, after the
closure of the Great Council it was no longer possible to become a
noble; the title came only by inheritance. Venetians had answered the
pressing social and political questions of the later Middle Ages in one fell
swoop: nobility was hereditary, and if these nobles felt secure that their
political power was stable, permanent and unthreatened this would
prevent factionalism and family violence since no one family could oust
another from its political position. For this reason the government of
Venice is often oddly referred to as an 'aristocratic republic', a term that
one might easily question. Venice's unique and singular political order
from 1298-1797 stipulated that political decisions were made through
voting and that magistrates had to be nominated and voted into their
offices, but only nobles could vote or become officials.
One of the results of this reform was that the Great Council doubled in
size, to well over 200 families and 1,000 men whose names were
recorded in an official register called the Libro d'Oro. That's why this
reform is also referred to as the enlargement of the Great Council.
Though the city was now governed by a closed, hereditary class of
nobles, this group of men was relatively large compared to the governing
classes in other cities, perhaps generating less resentment from
commoners because it was, in fact, so big. In addition, because of its
size, it was more difficult for factional tensions to form among a group of
so many people with diverse concerns. This political arrangement was
strikingly different from the 'feudal pyramid' that existed in much of the
rest of Europe. Whereas in England or France there were barons,
counts, viscounts, marquises and any additional number of feudal titles
in the pyramid of medieval nobility and authority, in Venice there were no
distinctions in rank among nobles. All were technically equal. With this
enlargement, the authority of the Great Council grew and its powers
came to outweigh those of the ancient arengo, or General Assembly.
This was significant because it meant that after the enlargement of the
Great Council, the selection of doges was removed from the hands of the
general populace and given to the nominating committees of patricians
While the closing of the Great Council clearly defined who had political
representation and who did not, there existed one other significant social
group that, though it could not vote, still played an important role in
Venetian politics and culture: the citizen class or the cittadini. Cittadini
existed one rung below the patricians, and one above the popolani or
labourers, and formed and distinguished itself for the first time during the
fourteenth century. The cittadini subdivided into the cittadini originari
(native Venetians), cittadini de intus (immigrants who had lived in the city
for ten years and were thus allowed trading rights in the city) and cittadini
de extra (who obtained full citizenship rights, enabling them to trade as
other native Venetians on the international market after 25 years). While
cittadini could not vote and did not rank as high as patricians, their class
was still extremely exclusive. Its members formed about five to eight per
cent of the population of the city. Membership came either by birth or by
application with proof that the applicant and his father and grandfather
had not earned their livings though manual labour. The cittadini were
small business owners - innkeepers, publishers, artisans and often
merchants like their noble counterparts - and a large subset of this class,
primarily the cittadini originari, also worked in the Venetian civil service
as the secretaries, lawyers and notaries who staffed the bureaucracy of
the Venetian state. Cittadini formed a large portion of Venetian
confraternities and were the ruling group in the scuole grandi or the
largest confraternity in the city. They were also highly influential patrons
of the arts since rich cittadini commissioned art and architecture to
increase their cultural capital.
From 1298-1323 when these social shifts were occurring, a series of
calamitous events shocked the lagoon and contributed to fundamental
social and political change in the city. Between 1309 and 1313 Pope
Clement V placed an interdict on Venice and excommunicated the city
for failing to come into line with his demands that Venetians withdraw
from the mainland city of Ferrara. Ferrara had long been economically
dependent on Venice, and during a dispute about political succession in
the city the Venetians occupied it until a member of the local Este family
effectively ceded Ferrara to Venice. The pope, however, had
longstanding claims to rule Ferrara and his interdict freed European
Christians from their treaties and oaths to Venice so that Venetian goods
could be plundered with no legal or spiritual punishments. The many
enemies of Venice immediately took advantage of the War of Ferrara to
seize Venetian merchandise. However, an additional crusade launched
against Venice by the pope and his allies resulted in the loss of Ferrara.
The Venetians eventually managed to force the pope to lift his interdict
by threatening to cut a canal above Ferrara that would link the Po and
Adige Rivers and ruin the economy of Ferrara by cutting it off from trade.
Nevertheless, Venice had to pay a large indemnity to Pope Clement V -
100,000 ducats, or one-tenth of the public debt - and the loss of money,
goods and men made this war one of the worst in the city's history. The
Genoese Wars and the War of Ferrara clearly demonstrated that while
Venice had become a world power, Venetians were not invincible.
Not surprisingly, between the closure of the Great Council and the
devastating War of Ferrara, many Venetians thought the government
was on the wrong track. After the Great Council had been enlarged,
many old, aristocratic families continued to worry that the government of
Venice was being overrun with undignified 'upstarts'. Not everyone
approved of Doge Gradenigo's reforms. In addition, many of these same
families argued that Ferrara should have been abandoned rather than
pursued, disputing Gradenigo's opinion that it was crucial to control this
mainland city. Indeed, Gradenigo was unpopular, if not one of the most
hated doges of all time. Many oppositional families rallied around the
patrician Tiepolo family. They had clamoured for the election of Giacomo
Tiepolo - a decorated admiral whose father and grandfather had both
been doges - when Pietro Gradenigo was elected in 1289. Giacomo's
son Bajamonte and his fatherin-law Marco Querini now began to hatch a
plot to overthrow the doge.
The Querinis and the Tiepolos were old Venetian families who resented
the fact that Gradenigo's reforms were diluting their families' political
power. They therefore had the support of similar longstanding patrician
lines, as well as the support of many non-nobles who long ago had
wanted Giacomo Tiepolo as doge rather than Pietro Gradenigo. The
rebels prepared their plan of attack, fixing the date for 15 June 1310. The
Querini and Tiepolo families each planned to lead their allies along two
different routes - the long alleyways of the Merceria and Calle dei Fabbri
- to meet up in the Piazza San Marco. Badoero Badoer, the leader of
another old Venetian family, and his forces would approach the piazza
by water. The three would attack from all sides but the doge had been
warned of the plot days earlier by an informer named Marco Donato and
was prepared for the attack.
When the rebel families and their forces arrived in the piazza, the doge's
forces (backed by workers from the arsenal) immediately overwhelmed
them while a storm and rough seas prevented Badoer from landing. The
leading members of the Querini family were killed and their allies
defeated. In one of the more famous anecdotes in the history of the city,
the Tiepolo forces were also defeated as they approached the piazza in
the calle known as the Merceria. Under the now-famous Sottoportego del
Cappello, a woman named Giustina Rossi dropped either a flowerpot or
a piece of mortar on to the crowd below. Though the object missed
Bajamonte, it immediately killed his standard-bearer and the Tiepolo flag
fell into the mud. Confused, and surely unable to see in the narrow and
crowded street, the rebels turned and fled back across the Rialto to the
neighbourhood of the Tiepolo palace near San Stin on the other side of
the city. When the dust settled, Badoer was executed and Bajamonte
went into exile across the Adriatic in Dalmatia. The palaces of the
Querini and Tiepolo families were demolished. Rewards, by contrast,
were handed out to those who had helped defend the doge. Giustina
Rossi, when asked how she would like to be honoured, asked to be
allowed to fly the banner of San Marco from her window on saints' days
and to be promised that her rent would never be raised (her house was
owned by the state), a promise that was kept for 150 years, and perhaps
longer. The informer Marco Donato was admitted to the Venetian
patrician class and became a member of the Great Council, and his
abbreviated Venetian name, Donà, came to mark a particularly illustrious
Venetian noble clan. History has read Bajamonte Tiepolo on the one
hand as the hero of the people and a champion of democracy during the
rule of a tyrannical doge. On the other hand, historians have also
depicted him as a disgruntled noble who only sought to do what princes
up and down the Italian peninsula were doing at the time: namely,
establish himself as the despotic and singular ruler of Venice.
Regardless interpretation, however, the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy laid
bare the fact that while Venetians had already taken great strides
towards eliminating factionalism and violence among families by
enlarging the Great Council, additional measures to prevent the growth
of factionalism and individual ambition were still necessary.
Developing a better way to monitor potential cases of treason, rebellion
and violence against the state happened somewhat by chance. When
Bajamonte Tiepolo and his followers were exiled, the Venetian state
created a council to keep track of his activities abroad. Exile was a
common form of punishment in Europe in the later Middle Ages, and it
was also common for those in exile to plot their return to their native
cities, either by waiting for an overthrow of the government or by secretly
plotting a revolution from afar, sometimes over many years. In order to
prevent the Tiepolo faction from attempting something like this, the
Venetian government created a special council of ten men for a period of
several months, called the Dieci, or the 'Council of Ten', to keep track of
these hostile families in exile. This council proved to be so useful and
effective that in 1334 the republic voted to make it permanent.
At first the Council of Ten focused primarily on checking that exiled
families were serving their sentences as ordered. It tracked the exiles if
and when they moved, lessened their penalties if they behaved well and
ordered them to be executed if they did not. Many of the exiled
conspirators left Dalmatia soon after they were exiled there and began to
plot their return from nearby Padua. In order to combat this threat, the
Council of Ten hired a network of spies, informers and assassins. After
the immediate danger of the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy had passed, the
Ten continued to oversee urgent and secret matters that affected the
security of the state.
Venetians remained shocked for decades by the Querini-Tiepolo
conspiracy since it was both unexpected and could easily have
succeeded. They had to make sure it could not happen again. The
Council of Ten was particularly well designed to combat secret plots
since its small membership meant it could make quick decisions and
keep them secret, unlike the larger bodies of the Senate and the Great
Council. The Council of Ten was like a medieval version of the American
FBI or British Secret Service and began to check possible plans for
armed uprisings or threats. The Ten even made it its business to know if,
and when, families solicited votes from one another in the Great Council
to avoid factionalism. In order to keep this council itself free from
factionalism, its members were elected for just one year, could not come
from the same family and were not immediately eligible for re-election. In
addition they took all their decisions with the doge and his six councillors.
The Council of Ten quickly became the most feared tribunal in the city
and merely catching a glimpse of one of its members surely sent a chill
down Venetian spines.
The Council of Ten came to occupy a specific place in the workings of
the Venetian government. It had absolute powers to do what it wished
and when it wished, but these powers only applied to cases of treason or
threats to the state. Even though it operated within the law, descriptions
of its practices have long been exaggerated and romanticized. For
instance the Council of Ten accepted secret and anonymous
denunciations in boxes shaped like lions' mouths all over the city. The
Ten were famous for torturing those named in these denunciations to
extract information. They did not hesitate to extinguish a potential threat,
sometimes by poisoning or drowning, and supposedly executed criminals
who threatened the state in a tiny, dark alley called the Calle della Morte,
or the 'Street of Death', not far from San Marco. The reality was that
while it did accept anonymous denunciations, it scrutinized them
carefully before acting. It had extraordinary powers and was much more
severe and extreme in its operations than any other judicial authority in
the city and, as we will see, its powers grew so much over the course of
the republic that many questioned whether it had gone too far. By the
nineteenth century, looking back, the Council of Ten had become a
fundamental part of decadent descriptions of Venice as dark and
despotic. Nevertheless, dank prisons and torture were common across
Europe in the Middle Ages, and the practices of the Ten were most likely
extreme only in that it seemed to have been particularly effective at doing
its job.
The council certainly helped prevent the second and probably final
attempt by one man - doge Marino Falier (r. 1354-55) - to take over the
government of Venice. Falier had served the republic of Venice as a
distinguished military commander, diplomat and, ironically, had several
times been a member of the Council of Ten. There are several stories
behind Falier's attempt at a coup d'etat; according to one, a young
Venetian noble fell in love with Falier's young and beautiful wife (who
would have been about 45 to Falier's 70), and when love notes and
drawings were discovered in the Ducal Palace, Falier supposedly
became so enraged that he irrationally began to formulate a way to make
himself the despotic ruler of Venice to weaken the power of other
patricians. According to another more likely story, Falier became aware
of the growing popular resentment against nobles at this time and hoped
to use it in his favour to become the ruler of Venice, as in nearly every
other Italian city republican states gave way to despots in the fourteenth
century. The story claims that the noble paymaster of the navy, Giovanni
Dandolo, hit a galley officer, Bertuccio Isarello, when Isarello refused to
follow some of Dandolo's orders. Isarello quickly formed a gang on the
waterfront that stood in wait to strike back at Dandolo. Dandolo
complained to Doge Falier who publicly chastened Isarello, but then later
that evening secretly recalled Isarello and invited him and other middle
class men to join a plot to oust the ruling nobles of Venice and put Falier
in charge of the city. They did not plan their attack very carefully however
and the Council of Ten soon discovered the plot.
Falier was dramatically and publicly beheaded on the stairway in the
courtyard of the Ducal Palace, where he had not long before sworn his
allegiance to the laws of the city. As Frederick Lane describes, when his
head had been cut off the chief of the Council of Ten held up the bloody
sword and announced to the crowd, 'Note well, justice has been done to
the traitor.' His main co-conspirators were hanged from the upper story of
the Ducal Palace with bits stuffed in their mouths to prevent them from
crying out to the crowd below. In the following days, as the Council of
Ten found more traitors, they hanged them along the loggia of the palace
until there were 11 dangling bodies, sending a powerful message to the
inhabitants of the city. The unity of the state came before individual
honour and ambition."
"The Myth of Venice in the Middle Ages
When we look back at Venetian history so far, it is remarkable that
through the fourteenth century - indeed, up until the fall of the republic in
1797 - the city of Venice did not experience any significant revolts or
civic unrest. A handful of doges attempted to enact some aspects of
sovereign rule, the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy aimed to oust Doge
Gradenigo and Falier tried to take over the government in his own name.
However, not only did none of these attempts succeed, but none of them
appealed to the broad base of society and all were quickly suppressed.
This noteworthy degree of peace in Venice is additionally surprising
when we consider that in the fourteenth century revolts and rebellions
were commonplace in Europe, especially revolts of the disenfranchised
lower classes against nobles, kings and those who had political
representation. These uprisings included peasants' revolts in Flanders in
the 1320s, the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the Ciompi revolt in Florence
in 1378 and the English peasants' revolt under Wat Tyler in 1381.
Historians have long marvelled at, and wondered about, the comparable
degree of civic peace in Venetian history. But how can we explain the
Venetians' successes in keeping political ferment and popular revolt at
bay in a world where insurrection was the norm? How did large
concentrations of manual labourers, such as arsenal workers and
fishermen, live and work in the city without ever threatening or
challenging the patrician class?
One of the main arguments has been that commoners must have been
relatively content and felt included in the political culture even if they had
no official political voice. If they had not been, they would have played a
much greater role in the few plots against the governing class. The
scuole, or confraternities certainly gave everyday Venetians a sense of
political importance and civic participation even if they could not vote in
the Great Council. The middle and lower classes, historians argue, used
these organizations to assert their prerogatives and develop a sense of
political community. Furthermore, the state awarded many such
organizations specific privileges that may well have offered the common
people a sense of political prestige. The confraternity of shoemakers, for
instance, had the honour of giving the doge's wife a pair of shoes every
year on the festival of the Sensa. Similarly, arsenal workers rowed the
doge out to sea on the day of the Sensa, carried the doge around the
Piazza San Marco immediately after his coronation and carried his
casket to be buried. Through such ritualistic relationships with different
groups of workers, the republic made them feel important and they felt
less inclined to revolt. And while the serrata, or closure, of the Great
Council and its connected reforms in the first quarter of the fourteenth
century excluded most commoners, it did also ennoble some of them,
which was the unusual in European politics at this time.
Some argue that the reason why Venice enjoyed such remarkable civic
stability had more to do with the city's economic practices and class
structure. In most of medieval Europe, class structure was both rigid and
extremely unbalanced, with a relatively small number of highly visible,
wealthy, landowning nobles in charge of huge numbers of
disenfranchised commoners who did not own land. You were either one
or the other, and there was no way across the divide, and that generated
plenty of friction and violence against the ruling class. In Venice, by
contrast, there existed a large middle class of merchants and traders.
And though they were not nobles they often became even wealthier than
the nobles through trade. In addition, most nobles made their profits from
Mediterranean trade, so the two classes shared the same business
practices and economic interests.
A third possible reason for Venice's lack of civil unrest is rooted in the
Venetian emphasis on civic unity and allegiance to the state rather than
to individuals or families. The fact that there were so many different
offices and councils, and that representation was always for brief periods
of time, having been nominated by lot and election, meant that no one
person or family could develop any type of hereditary power or rule.
Power was distributed broadly and this encouraged patricians to
subordinate their individual interests to the interests of the republic. The
subordination of the individual to the state is evident in many ways,
including street names that infrequently record individual or family
names, and art that did not emphasize individual portraiture to the extent
that it did in courtly cities; when individual doges are represented in
Venetian painting, they are often part of a larger, allegorical scene and
are not the main focus.
Others argue that civic peace in the lagoon city was the result of
effective Venetian justice. Venice maintained a large number of courts to
serve a wide variety of litigation needs ranging from cases of deflowering
a virgin before marriage to merchants overcharging their customers or
customers not paying their bills. Voluminous archival records testify to
the fact that many people from a wide swathe of society - from
commoners of the lowest ranks to the richest patricians - used the
Venetian courts. This argument claims that Venetians felt content with
their lot because they felt that justice protected their interests and
livelihood. Venetian law extended power, respect and protection to the
lower classes and this, in tandem with the constitution and laws of the
state, did much to promote internal harmony. By contrast, a darker
interpretation of Venetian stability suggests that if Venice was so
peaceful, it was not because Venetians felt empowered by their system
of courts and justice, but because they were terrified of the repressive
powers that governed them. According to this argument, the patrician
class clearly wanted to protect the political order that they had
established: the order that represented their political interests. Instilling
fear into the hearts of the city's inhabitants through a series of repressive
forces - namely the Council of Ten and other policing bodies - kept the
inhabitants in line and stifled any possibility of rebellion and revolt.
It must be stressed that Venice was not perfect. Factionalism was
common in the tenth and eleventh centuries in particular, and Venetian
patricians were far from selfless and self-serving, and were by no means
immune to corruption. Many attempted, by manipulation and guile, to
seek prestigious or lucrative offices and to avoid offices that entailed
heavy expenses, such as ambassadorships. When nobles picked lots
some occasionally stuffed balls up the wide sleeves of their gowns so
that when they reached down into the urn this hidden ball would fall into
their hands, and they'd stand a (fractionally) better chance of getting a
place on an important committee. Sometimes patricians moved to
Murano to avoid being present for nominations to offices that they did not
want to hold. Venetians clearly had their rivalries and their political
interests, and quite ironically patricians as individuals were always the
biggest threat to the patrician class as a whole.
In addition, murder, theft, assault and rape were as commonplace in
medieval Venice as elsewhere, and insurrections did happen from time
to time. Seamen were often badly paid, and sailors and galley crews
sometimes demonstrated or rioted in the city, as they did in 1437 when
they looted shops to protest about the government delaying their pay.
Nevertheless, the political interests of individuals and the violent
outbursts of workers only very rarely became serious threats, and crime
and violence never escalated into the more widespread form of class
violence that was then common through much of the rest of Europe.
Venetians simply found more effective means of quelling violent
impulses, and the reasons for this are surely found in a mixture of these
various theories.
We can get a sense of Venice's unique and relatively peaceful political
environment simply by looking at the city's architecture. It is no accident
that in mainland cities rulers lived in castles with walls and ramparts. The
Medici, the fifteenth-century republican rulers of Florence who lived in a
palace on a street in the centre of their city, for instance, had a ground
floor built from large, sturdy stones with small windows to protect those
living inside. Venetian palaces, by contrast, betray little or no fear of
rebellion. Their delicate tracery, abundance of arches and windows, and
relatively open architecture, even on the ground floor, seem confidently
assured that no attacks would occur. Far from the bulky, stone fortresses
that most Europeans used to protect themselves from warring
neighbours or protesting workers, Venetian palaces, such as the Palazzo
Corner Loredan (built in 1362, now the city's Town Hall) and the Ca'
D'Oro (built 1420-34), though imposing and monumental remain light and
airy compared to the impenetrable strongholds of their Italian
neighbours."
"Plague, War and Political Resolution
Fourteenth-century Venice was relatively rich and peaceful, and
remained independent from foreign powers. With a population of about
120,000 in the city and 160,000 around the lagoon in 1300, Venice was
one of the largest European cities in the Middle Ages - when cities of
more than 10- 20,000 were considered large. It was rivalled only by other
Italian cities including Milan, Florence, Naples and Palermo, and abroad
by Paris with a population of about 100,000. Nevertheless, the second
half of the fourteenth century in Venice witnessed a series of highly
destructive events. Venice is built on a seismic zone and, in 1348, the
city experienced an earthquake so powerful that chroniclers claimed it
emptied the Grand Canal and left it dry for more than two weeks. Also,
Venice's thorny relationship with the Genoese remained unresolved in
the middle of the fourteenth century, and as in much of Europe Venice
was hit hard by plague, in 1348.
Though the Venetians and the Genoese were technically in a period of
truce in the 1340s, tensions between the two trading cities ran high as a
result of their continuing trade rivalry in the Black Sea. In 1344 the
Tartars attacked the Genoese trading city of Caffa on the northern rim of
the Black Sea. While the Tartar threat to Western traders was so great
that the Venetians and Genoese temporarily considered an alliance
against them, the Tartars suddenly broke off their siege in 1346 to the
great surprise of both powers. The Tartars were struck by a mysterious
illness and, according to some sources, hurled dead bodies into Caffa to
infect Western forces before withdrawing. As the Venetians and
Genoese picked over what remained of Tartar camps around the
Crimea, they came into contact with the black rats that carried the
disease which had killed the Tartars and which, until then, had been
found in South-east Asia. The Mongols had brought it across Central
Asia to the Tartars and then, to the Europeans. Venetian and Genoese
ships returned from the Crimea to Venice in January 1348, and together
they both shared the horrific fate of introducing the whole of Europe to
the Black Death. It was carried by the fleas that infested the onboard rats
which scuttled among the spices and furs bound for Europe.
By the summer of 1348, historians estimate that 500-600 people a day
died of the plague in Venice. The plague spread in two different ways:
through the lungs in its pneumonic form, transmitted from one person to
another, and by fleas in its bubonic form, which caused the glands to
become black and swollen. In a world unfamiliar with microbes and
bacteria, traditional medicine had little to offer. According to the historian
Horatio Brown, cemeteries overflowed and the dead had to be sent to
new islands in the lagoon, such as San Marco in Boccalama, an island
that no longer exists but which became a mass grave for thousands of
plague victims. The government was forced to assist the collection of the
dead and did so by organizing death boats that passed down the canals
yelling 'corpi morti' ('dead bodies'). By the time the plague finished
sweeping through the city, 55 patrician families had died out and the city
had lost close to half its population. With recurring bouts of the plague,
the city would not return to its pre-plague population of 120,000 for
several hundred years.
Shortly after the arrival of the plague in Venice, the city once again
resumed its battles with Genoa. The Venetians had broken an
agreement they had made with the Genoese to boycott travel to Tana
(now Azov), a trade outpost in the northern reaches of the Black Sea at
the mouth of the Don River. Ignoring their shared defense against the
Khan of the Golden Horde, the local ruler around the Black Sea, the
Genoese began to attack Venetian ships and war between the two broke
out in 1300. In the Third Genoese War, the Venetian fleet faced an
entirely new challenge: conscription. Since the Black Death had
decimated the population of the lagoon, there simply were not enough
men to produce a citizen navy. In addition, one of the primary economic
effects of the plague was that with less labour available, wages went up.
Many Venetians felt that they could make more money by staying and
working instead of serving on a galley, and those who were drafted often
hired others to go in their place. The city was therefore forced to hire
allies from Catalan and Greece, and recruit crews from Dalmatia and
Venice's own Greek colonies, though they were not as well trained or as
disciplined as the Venetian rowers.
As a result, the Venetians did not do that well in the Third Genoese War
(1350-55). Their fleet won some battles against the Genoese, for
example at the Battle of Alghero in 1353, off the coast of Sardinia, but
famously lost others, such as at the Battle of Porto Longo, near Modon,
in 1354. In this devastating battle Genoese galleys managed to slip past
the guarded entrance of the port and attack Venetian vessels that were
tied up and unprepared for battle. The Genoese commander Paganino
Doria successfully captured every last Venetian ship from the Venetian
commander Nicolò Pisani who, with most of his men, was taken prisoner.
The Venetians were spared a punitive peace only because the Visconti
family from Milan had been governing the city of Genoa and, unlike the
Genoese, it wanted to negotiate a serious and lasting peace with Venice.
The Third Genoese War had a powerful impact on social and political
life in the lagoon since it placed many strains on the Venetians, and not
just with conscription. Such strains often dramatically increased tensions
between social classes, and that certainly happened after the Venetians'
devastating defeat at the Battle of Porto Longo. Seamen were discontent
and often proved troublesome. We must remember that it was precisely
at this time in 1355 that Marin Falier attempted to take over the
government by tapping into this discontent, supposedly in the name of
'democracy' and the common people, in defiance of the haughtiness and
self-interest of nobles. Many people expressed anger and hatred for the
incompetent nobles who commanded the fleet, and the state, after this
massive defeat. Such tensions were momentarily quelled as Falier and
his allies were defeated, but they nevertheless demonstrate the ways in
which wars abroad tested the unity of the state and society at home.
Though Venetians had taken many steps to insure the solidity of their
government and prevent factionalism and ensure peace, The Third
Genoese War tried the cohesion of Venetian society and tested its
political institutions.
The entire fourteenth century, so much of it taken up with war with
Genoa, came to a close with a fourth and final war, often called the War
of Chioggia (1378-81). It was caused by tensions between Venice and
Genoa over control of trade in the Black Sea and the island of Tenedos,
a small island in the Aegean - strategically located at the mouth of the
Dardanelles and claimed by both Venice and Genoa.
The Fourth War involved two famous patrician commanders from
Venice: Vettor Pisani who patrolled the Adriatic Sea against the
incursions of the Genoese and attacked them in their own waters on the
west coast of Italy, and Carlo Zeno whose fleet attacked the Genoese,
and their colonies and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean. Pisani at
first won a victory against Genoa off the town of Anzio in 1378, near the
mouth of the Tiber River, but then was soundly defeated in the spring of
1379 when he was lured into an ambush at Pola (now Pula in Croatia)
and, as a result, he was thrown into prison in Venice.
The summer of 1379 was one of the bleakest in the history of Venice as
the city came closer to being taken over than at any other time between
the attacks of the Carolingians in 810 and the arrival of Napoleon in
1797. Pisani's defeat at Pola dangerously gave the Genoese full access
to the northern Adriatic. The enemy fleet received reinforcements and
began to attack Venetian ships within sight of the lagoon. The Genoese
set fire to towns on the island of the Lido, and the Venetians began to
fortify outposts, including the monastery of San Nicolò, near the mouth of
the lagoon. They barricaded the central entrance to the lagoon by
chaining large ships together. As in their historic engagement with Pepin,
they removed all the channel markers in the lagoon so that invaders
could not navigate through it. While they undertook these precautionary
measures, the Genoese took the city of Chioggia on the southern end of
the lagoon in August 1379. That meant the Genoese commanded the
northern Adriatic and one of the mouths of the lagoon, so that by the
middle of August Venice was encircled and blockaded. Though the
Venetians tried to negotiate, the Genoese replied that they wanted only
'to bit and bridle the horses of St Mark'.
The Venetians managed to raise large sums of money by forcing loans
from various families, and used this to finance the war and especially to
man the forts around the lagoon. The state then rallied popular support
by releasing Vettor Pisani from prison. Though he had suffered a huge
defeat at Pola he was nevertheless adored by workers and seamen, and
his release and new command over six galleys dramatically prompted
new conscription. Pisani and his forces began to employ the same
strategy that the Venetians had used against Pepin hundreds of years
earlier: they sank ships weighted with stones in the channels of the
lagoon to separate the Genoese at Chioggia from the rest of their fleet
while the Venetians waited for Carlo Zeno and the rest of the Venetian
fleet to return.
While the Genoese were besieging Venice the city ran dangerously low
on food and supplies, but at the same time the Venetians succeeded in
blockading the Genoese inside the lagoon. Zeno returned to help the
blockade of Chioggia on 1 January 1380; deprived of food and
gunpowder, the Genoese surrendered in June 1380. In the ensuing
peace between the two powers, Venice accepted some harsh conditions:
it gave up the island of Tenedos, the right to trade at Tana for two years
and recognized Genoese sovereignty on Cyprus, among other terms.
Nevertheless, the control of the Adriatic returned to the Venetians so that
the city maintained its monopoly over trade in the Adriatic that was so
essential to its economic survival. For Venice, the War of Chioggia was
both a defeat and a victory. As the Black Sea would become increasingly
less commercially important in the fifteenth century, antagonism between
Venice and Genoa declined and the two powers never fought again.
The War of Chioggia or the Fourth Genoese War represents an
important marker in the history of Venice partly because it was a time of
both profound danger and remarkable patriotism. The city had never
been in greater danger and the Venetians had never come together so
solidly against all odds. Artisans left their workshops to learn naval
maneuvers and patrician women sold their jewels to support the war
effort and help defeat the Genoese in an incredible reversal of fortune. In
addition, like the Third Genoese War, it also had significant political
implications in Venetian political life because the republic dramatically
decided to admit 30 'popular' families to the noble class as a reward for
their war sacrifices and contributions. In September 1381 these new
families were admitted to the Great Council, resulting in a decisive and
fundamental shift in the structure of the Venetian ruling class by giving
power to new families at the expense of the older ones.
Older families, also called the longhi or case vecchie (literally, 'old
houses'), claimed they descended from the tribunes who had governed
the lagoon when it was first inhabited. These 24 families included names
such as Badoer, Contarini, Dandolo, Falier, Gradenigo, Michiel, Morsini,
Querini, Tiepolo and Zen, names that had long held the most important
offices in the republic, being commanders, ambassadors and doges.
After the acceptance of these 30 new families, or curti, no old family
would produce a doge for several hundred years; after 1382 doges
tended to come from these newer families.
By the end of the fourteenth century, all these events and changes that
resulted from wars and political re-arrangements meant that Venetian
society became rigid, fixed and stratified in a fairly permanent way.
Venetian society would never represent the complex and hierarchical
feudal pyramid that defined much of the rest of Europe but, by 1400,
there were now nobles and non-nobles in Venice, and mobility between
the two was essentially impossible. The noble and political class became
impenetrable and, at any given time in the history of the republic, it
represented about four per cent of the city's population. In the fourteenth
century Venetian political and social life became fundamentally fixed until
the arrival of Napoleon.
While there is no one place or site in the city from which to get a sense
of the tumultuous fourteenth century, a handful of small but significant
details around the city mark the curious and crucial events from this
period. For instance, in every mask shop in the city you can find replicas
of the bizarre and macabre masks used by doctors in the plague. They
are clearly discernable with their strange, curved beaks into which
doctors inserted a mixture of herbs thought to protect the air they
breathed. In the Ducal Palace there is an especially sombre reflection on
the deeds of Marino Falier. While Falier's burial was unremarkable, his
plans are powerfully remembered here in the frieze of doges that
encircles the walls of the Hall of the Great Council. Among the faces of
all the other doges of the city, a black curtain hangs where his portrait
should be, on top of which is written, 'This space is reserved for Marino
Falier, beheaded for his crimes.' His family palace, where he lived before
he became doge, is currently a posh hotel overlooking the Campo Santi
Apostoli. Leaving the Piazza San Marco under the clock tower and
entering the Merceria, you can look up to the left and see on the second
floor an unobtrusive and muted plaque noting the spot where Giustina
Rossi momentously dropped her flowerpot on the head of a
conspiratorial standard bearer, thereby preventing the Querini-Tiepolo
revolt from overthrowing the republic.
It is on the other side of town, however, that we can catch a less
touristed but perhaps much more profound glimpse into both the drama
of fourteenth-century Venice as well as into the deeply stratified layers of
history. The families involved in the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy lived on
this side of town, away from the Piazza San Marco; they burned the
wooden drawbridge of the Rialto, destroying it completely in their wake,
to prevent ducal forces from following them back to their neighbourhood
when their insurrection failed. Leaving San Marco behind, crossing the
Rialto Bridge and passing west through the market we soon come to the
placid and now peaceful Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini. Standing
with your back to the bridge that bears the square's name, on the left
there is the thirteenth-century palace of the Zane family, complete (like
the Corte del Million of Marco Polo) with early gothic windows and an
inlaid Byzantine relief of a chain of crosses above them. Straight ahead,
on the opposite side of the square, is the façade of the Palazzo Viaro-
Zane. The gothic second floor of this family palace dates from the
fourteenth century, and the upper floors from later in the fifteenth or
sixteenth centuries judging by their classical Roman arched windows.
Stepping closer and looking carefully at the remains of the relief between
the ground floor and the second floor, in the segment directly over the
front door in the centre of the building, are the markings of what was
once a flying lion that had been placed on this façade. This once
indicated that the state had confiscated the personal goods of the family
because it participated in the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy. The relief was
later chiselled out under Napoleon as an unseemly reminder of the
aristocratic Venetian state that his new and enlightened regime had
come to stamp out.
Gazing upon the shattered remains of this piece of stone with a bit of
imagination, we can construct some of the tumultuous events that
happened in this campo: the rioting crowds and failed and terrified
conspirators beating a hasty retreat to their family homes and locking
their doors behind them: the officers of state following rapidly on their
heels to haul them out of hiding and into exile across the Adriatic in
Dalmatia or to be hanged in the Piazza San Marco: the republican
bureaucrats accompanied by stone masons who systematically marked
various sites around the city with stone reliefs to shame the families who
had dared threaten the unity of the republic: the thousands of passers-by
who, for hundreds of years, would gaze upon such markers with pride or
fear; and the renegade general, Napoleon, who crossed the Alps from
the grey and cold of the North to enlighten the backward peoples of
Southern Europe by imposing his own liberal but megalomaniac and
imperial order.
We can visualize the agents of Napoleon's bureaucracy, one dragging a
wagon behind him and the other carrying a checklist, followed by a
morose and impoverished local stone mason dressed in rags. They
systematically tread the winding streets of the city with the agent in
charge indicating with a pointed finger the markers, plaques, blazons,
shields and sculptures to be removed. The mason then tiredly does their
bidding, chiselling out the plaque and placing the stone carefully in the
cart to be taken to Paris. Napoleon's men sought to erase the signs of a
thousand years of history while simultaneously enriching the general's
coffers with precious art and artefacts. Here, we get ahead of our story,
but still we must note: all this we can make out in this tiny patch of stone
in this otherwise quiet corner of the city."
"5 VENICE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD: 1400-1600
The Renaissance - when Europeans rediscovered the world of classical
antiquity, the cultural remains of ancient Greece and Rome - marks the
Western shift from the Middle Ages to the modern world. Italian
humanists and artists, such as Petrarch and Ghiberti - primarily
Florentines at first - unearthed and studied ancient texts and art that
spawned a host of transformations in Europe, especially in science,
technology and geography.
The defining events of this age were the discovery of the New World,
the invention of the printing press, the Scientific Revolution and the
Protestant Reformation, and they all profoundly affected the city of
Venice. These events were all closely linked to the rediscovery of
classical culture, but their influence and effects also spread far beyond
the elite worlds of art and literature. For these reasons, historians often
use the term 'early modern' to label this period in European history: a
term that denotes this period of sweeping changes as linked but not
limited to the 'Renaissance' or rediscovery of classical culture. While
Venetians became fascinated with ancient Greece and Rome, they did
not embrace classical culture as quickly or in the same manner as the
Florentines or Romans. That is why historians often refer to early modern
rather than Renaissance Venice.
In addition to changes wrought by the Age of Discovery, the advent of
print, the Copernican challenge and Martin Luther's defiance of the pope
in Rome, early modern Venetians also grappled with complex challenges
related to a growing mainland empire and a dramatically altered
relationship with the eastern Mediterranean as the Ottoman Turks
advanced. Women and Jews also came to play more significant cultural
and political roles in the city at this time. So while early modern
Venetians gradually became classicists like their Florentine and Roman
counterparts, becoming fascinated with classical Latin and Greek texts
and Roman architecture, they experienced an additional host of changes
from 1400-1600 that went far beyond the rediscovery of the ancient
world."
"Changes in and Challenges to Venetian Rule
In the fifteenth century Venetians began to conquer and rule subject
cities on the mainland to the west of Venice. For a city that had always
built its fortunes on the sea, this was quite a shift in the state's political
interests. Some historians think that after the Greek reconquest of
Constantinople in 1261, Venetians began to pay more attention to the
nearby mainland, or terraferma. Though Venice had long focused almost
exclusively on the extension, development and protection of its maritime
empire, there were now good reasons for looking towards the land. First,
Venetians wanted to protect their trade routes. They also needed more
secure and local access to food and other supplies, especially raw
materials for developing manufacturing industries, so securing mainland
territory for cultivation, wood, water and other resources was important.
Second, a territorial buffer zone on the mainland would help protect
Venice against military threats by land. And third, Venetian nobles in
search of state incomes quickly came to understand that they could
obtain lucrative and prestigious positions, becoming local governors or
commanders in or near mainland cities as a result of expansion.
The Venetians had conquered Treviso on the mainland as early as
1339, and then in 1403, following a war against the Carrara family in
Padua, the Venetian state acquired political control over the mainland
cities of Vicenza, Feltre, Bassan and Belluno, followed a few years later
by Verona and Padua. By 1420 its territories included Friuli and Udine,
thereby protecting most of Venice's trade routes into the rest of Europe.
Patrician administrators and bureaucrats left the lagoon to oversee the
government, justice and tax collection on the mainland as, slowly, one by
one, town after town in north-east Italy came under Venetian rule. As the
Venetians scored one military victory after another on the mainland,
many Venetians became deeply concerned about the direction the state
was taking. For an economy and a government that had flourished by
looking east towards the sea, did increased involvement in mainland
affairs risk jeopardizing Venetian security and prosperity? Doge
Tommaso Mocenigo (r. 1414-23) argued that maintaining the traditional
Venetian commitment to a maritime empire was the best way to preserve
state stability. War on the mainland was costly and it was better for
Venice to maintain its eastern focus. He warned Venetians as much from
his deathbed. But the headstrong and reckless doge who succeeded
him, Francesco Foscari (r. 1423-62), insisted that Venice did have the
resources to maintain a maritime empire and simultaneously expand its
mainland territories.
After the election of Foscari, the Venetian state pushed its boundaries
even further west and fought a war against Milan that would last 19
years. Despite much public disagreement, Foscari pushed ahead. With
no standing army of its own, the Venetians hired mercenary captains, or
condottieri, to continue their conquests, men who were expert tacticians
and commanders but whose loyalty was often in question. The
commander Carmagnola won Brescia (in 1426) and Bergamo (1427) for
Venice (though he was later beheaded for negotiating with the Milanese),
and armies under the leadership of the mercenaries Gattamelata and
Bartolomeo Colleoni later reinforced these conquests. By the middle of
the fifteenth century, with the Venetian mainland empire at its largest, the
Venetian patrician Bernardo Giustiniani proclaimed the three greatest
powers of the world to be the Holy Roman emperor, the pope and the
doge. However, the price of these wars in Lombardy was exceedingly
high. The Venetians went to incredible expense, and even transported
an entire fleet overland by oxen to fight the Milanese on Lake Garda in
1438. Acquiring and maintaining these mainland territories was so costly
that they bankrupted members of the nobility - including Foscari's own
father-in-law - and the state had to initiate direct taxes on Venetian
subjects for the first time in its history since financing war from the public
debt was no longer sufficient. The Peace of Lodi in 1454 put an end to
these wars for the time being by establishing a boundary between
Venice and Milan along the River Adda in Northern Italy. The Venetians
held their mainland territories, but the cost was extraordinarily high.
Two other events between 1450 and 1500 dramatically challenged
Venice's position in the world, and according to some this meant that
Venice would never again be a world power. First, in 1453, the city of
Constantinople fell to the advancing Ottoman Turks, marking the end of
the Byzantine Roman Empire in the East. The Ottoman Empire formed
around 1300 and slowly extended its rule over the Balkans and Asia
Minor (now Turkey). The collapse of Byzantine Constantinople cemented
the Ottomans as a great imperial power. Though the Venetians had no
political power in Byzantine Constantinople, the city was still the most
crucial hub of Venetian trade in the East. After several months of siege,
Sultan Mehmed II and his troops rushed the gates of Constantinople
and, as the city fell into Turkish hands, Italians and Europeans alike
believed the collapse of the Venetian economy would soon follow. When
Constantinople fell, the Venetians suddenly became everyday traders in
the Mediterranean, no different from anyone else. While the Venetians
established trade agreements with the Ottomans they no longer had a
special or privileged trading status with this powerful empire. The
Ottomans were happy to trade with the Venetians, but only on terms that
benefitted the Ottomans.
After Constantinople, the Turks continued their advance and other
Venetian trade outposts in the Mediterranean fell soon after. In 1470
Mehmed's forces seized the important island of Negroponte (now
Euboea). In the battle for the city of Chalkis on Negroponte, Venetians
and Turks fought street by street and house by house to hold the city. On
the morning of 12 July 1470, the bailo, or Venetian ambassador to the
city, was sawed in half alive and all the remaining Venetians had their
throats cut when the Turks finally won. The Ottomans advanced to
capture the towns of Modon and Coron in 1499 on the southern
Peloponnesus, towns that had been crucial strategic outposts for the
Venetians since 1204. According to chroniclers, the Turks advanced so
far into Venetian territory that when they sacked towns in Friuli, just north
of Venice, Venetians could see the smoke on the mainland from the bell
tower of San Marco. By 1503 the Ottomans had conquered almost the
entire Venetian maritime empire and the Venetians, longing for peace,
surrendered their outposts in Greece and Albania, maintaining their hold
only in Dalmatia, Crete and Cyprus. Venice had arranged a strategic
marriage between Caterina Cornaro - a young Venetian noblewoman -
and King James of Cyprus in 1468 to help secure control of the island.
After the early death of her husband and child just two years after her
marriage, Queen Catherine was forced to hand over Cyprus to the
Venetian state in 1489 and in 1570 the island fell to the Ottomans.
The second crucial event concerned the enormous discoveries being
made in maritime exploration. The Venetians had always been intrepid
explorers and continued this tradition into the fifteenth century. Under the
patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, the Venetian Alvise Ca' da
Mosto (1432-88) was among the first to explore the west coast of Africa
and appears to have been the first European to reach the Cape Verde
islands in 1456, resulting in one of the earliest known descriptions of
Western Africa. In 1497 Henry VII of England authorized the Venetian
John Cabot (or Giovanni Caboto) and his son Sebastian to sail west
across the Atlantic in search of islands. They landed off the coast of
Labrador, which Cabot marked with both English and Venetian flags.
However, Portuguese ships were the first to sail directly from Europe to
India when Vasco de Gama returned to Portugal in the summer of 1499
and announced to the world the opening of a direct sea route to the
spices of India.
When reports of this discovery reached Venice in the following months,
many Venetians were aghast. The Venetian chronicler Girolamo Priuli
reported that such a discovery would allow the Portuguese to obtain
spices, the mainstay of the Venetian economy, at a fraction of the cost
paid by Venetians. Venice, he feared, would be ruined. Shocked and
worried, in 1504 Venetian nobles went so far as to debate a massive
engineering project that would involve cutting the isthmus of Suez to
connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, a forerunner of the Suez
Canal, to allow Venetians to continue to compete in the spice trade, but
the project was soon abandoned because of its complexity and expense.
In the end, Venetian trade with the East would not be seriously damaged
until the Dutch formed the powerful East India Companies that more
effectively excluded Venice from the spice trade in the seventeenth
century. The Venetian economy in the sixteenth century was diversified
and healthy enough to weather the Portuguese discovery. It is
nevertheless interesting to note that when word of the Columbian
discoveries began to spread from Spain in the summer of 1493, no
Venetian ambassador ever considered Columbus' activities worthy of
mention in any their reports. It was the symbolic meaning of the new
Portuguese route to India that grabbed their attention.
Despite these setbacks in the world of Eastern trade - or perhaps
because of them - the Venetians continued to add territories to their
mainland empire. Even at a time when much of the rest of Italy was in
turmoil - the King of France swept into Italy in 1494 and seized vast
Italian lands, at times unopposed - the Venetians occupied Cremona in
1499 and won a series of victories in Friuli in 1508. By this time other
European powers began to question seriously Venetian goals and
motives as Venice appeared poised to extend its sovereignty even
further. Fearful of Venetian ambitions, Pope Julius II (the same pope who
commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel)
organized a defensive league to prevent the Venetians from gaining
further ground. The League of Cambrai - so called because it was
formed in Cambrai, France, in 1509 - included France, the Holy Roman
Empire, Spain and most other Italian states. It aimed to deprive Venice of
its mainland possessions and to stop Venetian imperialist ambitions once
and for all. At the Battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1509, French forces
routed Venetian cavalry in the territory between Milan and Bergamo,
dealing a crushing blow to Venetian forces. In one city after another,
from Brescia to the shores of the lagoon, mainland nobles declared their
allegiance to France and Germany (since local nobles had long resented
the Venetian presence in their cities) and the armies of the League
continued to push their forces up to the lagoon, effectively eliminating the
Venetian presence on the mainland. The humanist and statesman Nicolò
Machiavelli observed this advance from the headquarters of the Holy
Roman emperor in Verona, and he described, in Chapter 12 of The
Prince how, in one day, the Venetians 'lost what it had taken them eight
hundred years' to conquer.
The defeat was crushing but not lasting. By 1516 Venice regained much
of its lost mainland territory up to the Adda River, and continued to hold it
until the arrival of Napoleon in 1797. Nevertheless, this war and the
dramatic defeat of Venetian forces at Agnadello in many ways changed
Venice forever; the symbolic trauma of the loss endured long after these
lands had been regained. For many historians of the Republic of Venice,
Agnadello represents the most significant date in Venetian history since
it marked the beginning of Venetian decline though it is now thought that
the Venetian state and its economy remained vibrant to the end of the
sixteenth century. However, the combined events of the fall of
Constantinople, the Portuguese arrival in Calcutta and Goa, and the
Battle of Agnadello, all signalled a change in Venetian mentality.
Venetian merchants, entrepreneurs and industrialists still made a profit in
the sixteenth century but, after 1509, Venice could no longer claim to be
the greatest European power. This was especially true as Spain and
other countries in Northern Europe began to exploit the emerging
economy of the Atlantic World in ways that the Venetians never would."
"Science, Industry and Entrepreneurialism
While many events implied the potential beginnings of Venetian decline,
they were offset by a number of trends in Venice that promoted a sense
of optimism and vitality in the sixteenth century. Venetian industries and
manufacturing took off as never before and, in addition, the Scientific
Revolution unfolded in Venice in ways no one could have predicted. In
these and other ways, Venice was part of the cultural movement of the
Renaissance, and shared the conscious sensation of being a part of a
new and forward-looking age.
Up until now, Venetians made most of their money as the middlemen
between Europe and the East, transporting spices and luxury goods
back and forth between Venice and the eastern Mediterranean.
However, in the sixteenth century Venetians began to produce and
manufacture more of their own wares. The production of woollen cloth
became common in the city, and the silk industry boomed as Venetian
mills began to spin more and more silk and export finished cloth to
France and the Low Countries. The soap, glass and shipbuilding
industries also thrived in the sixteenth century. The industry that
blossomed most dramatically of all, however, was the printing business.
The technology of moveable type did not originate in Venice but China,
and in Europe it was Johannes Gutenberg who first unveiled the
mechanical printing press in Mainz around 1440. The printing press
changed the world forever. It promoted literacy by making texts cheaper
and more accessible to those outside the nobility; it encouraged new
stirrings of nationalism as people became increasingly aware of the
greater world around them through print; and it changed the way memory
functioned because now people did not need to remember as much
information since it existed on the printed page. The effects of the
printing press - cultural, social, political and economical - were huge, but
what is important here is that Venice became the print capital of the early
modern world.
Paper was cheap and readily available in Venice, and the culture of the
city was relatively liberal and open to new and controversial ideas often
found in books. Venetians had no problem in defying Roman censorship.
The print industry began in 1469 and, by 1500, there were approximately
150 presses in the city. In the sixteenth century Venetian printers
produced some 17,500 editions, nearly half the books printed in Italy
during that time. Scores of print houses popped up around the city and in
particular lined the streets around the Rialto, the area near San
Salvador, and along the streets of the Merceria and the Frezzeria leading
towards San Marco. Printing houses under the names of Giunta, Giolito,
Marcolini, Zanetti and Gardano hung distinctive signs outside their shops
and printed them on the frontispieces of their books, sending the
Venetian imprimatur around the world wherever Venetian books were
bought and sold. The Venetian presses published in every field and for
every audience, producing books on science, music, theatre, religion,
language, politics and spirituality. A great variety of people worked
together in the print houses to produce books, ranging from printers to
editors, humanists, playwrights, poets, linguists, translators and clerics,
creating a great nexus for the exchange of ideas and information. If
fourteenth-century Venetian businessmen made their profits primarily
through commerce and trade with the East, the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries witnessed the growth of this new entrepreneurial arena, the
print house.
The press of one particular Venetian, however, most profoundly affected
the world of books: that of Aldus Manutius. He was first and foremost a
scholar and humanist, being well read in classical Latin and Greek. The
Fall of Constantinople in 1453 drove many Greeks to Europe and Venice
in particular, and by 1500 there was a Greek community of about 5,000
in Venice alone. As the Greek world was crumbling in the East, Manutius
strove to preserve Greek literature by committing its chief masterpieces
to type in his printing house that he opened in 1490. Manutius gathered
Greek scholars and workers around him in his Venice workshop to
collate pages, read drafts and develop models of Greek print to be set
into type. From 1495-98 he issued a five-volume edition of the works of
Aristotle, the first published by the Western press. Through the first
decade of the sixteenth century he went on to publish the works of
Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato and
others, including a host of other texts in Latin. Prior to these Aldine
publications, Greek literature existed haphazardly only in manuscript
volumes in monastic libraries. By the time of his death, only the Greek
works of Aeschylus remained to be printed. Manutius gave Greek
literature and philosophy to the Western world, one of the most
significant Venetian contributions to the West.
In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, the Aldine press
produced for the first time, and popularized, a new and more modern
type of volume, a portable, hand-held book, about 15 × 23 cm (6 × 9
inches) big, that readers could take with them anywhere, rather like a
modern paperback. Manutius was not simply an elitist intellectual, he
was also an entrepreneur who was interested in producing highly
marketable texts. He was the first to use italic print, not for emphasis (as
today) but because the slanting letters meant you could pack in more
words to the page. The small size and reasonable price meant that
anyone from the roaming scholar to the upwardly mobile merchant could
easily load his saddlebag with these portable Greek and Latin classics.
It is interesting to note how Venetians both absorbed, and did not
absorb, the culture of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was largely a
Florentine phenomenon, with humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini and
Coluccio Salutati for instance reading and editing ancient Roman texts
and using them as guides for interpreting the modern world. But Venice
was not interested in the ancient world in the same way. As a curious
example of this so-called 'bibliophobic' tendency, Petrarch promised his
own library of about 200 codices and even more individual titles to the
Venetian republic in 1362 in exchange for housing in the Palazzo Molina
on the Riva degli Schiavoni. As the story goes, Petrarch would keep his
library until his death, but living in Venice he discovered that Venetians
were not that interested in his library and work as a humanist, and so he
moved to Padua. After his death, his library remained neglected for
centuries at the Palazzo Molina, crumbling to powder, petrifying and
decaying into unrecognizable forms. In 1468 the Byzantine humanist
Cardinal Bessarion similarly made a bequest of over 1000 codices,
manuscripts and books to the Venetian state, but it was more than 50
years before the Venetian Senate began to make plans to erect an
official state library to house the collections of (what remained of)
Petrarch and Bessarion.
Based on these stories and other evidence, some have argued that
Renaissance Venice was not a literary city. Venice did not produce
humanists to rival Petrarch or Lorenzo Valla who plumbed the depths of
the classical past and used their knowledge of classical Latin or Roman
history to feed arguments about contemporary politics. Nor did Venice
have equivalents to great Florentine humanists, such as Marsilio Ficino,
and nor could it rival the Florentine Platonic Academy, dedicated to
translating Plato's works into Latin. But why should it? Venetians did not
have a Roman past and were not that interested in rediscovering it. They
were interested in classical texts, but primarily as a means to support
and glorify the Venetian government. Venetian humanists, including
Giovanni Caldiera and Francesco Sansovino, looked to the classical past
but with the almost exclusive purpose of finding evidence that would
support the Venetian ideology of patrician rule, portray the impartial
nature of Venetian justice and help describe the grandeur of their city.
Men with a humanist education did not become lecturers or philosophers
in Venice; they became ambassadors, diplomats and bureaucrats who
staffed the offices of the Venetian state or entrepreneurs (like Manutius)
who sold the printed word and used it simply to make money.
The Scientific Revolution also affected Venice in specific ways. One of
the defining transformations of the early modern period happened when
Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo revolutionized how Europeans
understood their place in the universe. We went from being at the centre
of an orderly, geocentric and finite universe, as described by Aristotle, to
having no clear place in a seemingly endless and changing heliocentric
universe. These ideas did not concur with the teachings of the bible or
the authority of the pope and generated great cultural and spiritual
controversy.
Venice played a role in the Scientific Revolution since Galileo worked as
a mathematics professor at the University of Padua from 1592-1610,
when he also gave private lessons in Venice. Since Padua was then
under Venetian rule, the Venetian authorities oversaw the workings of
the university. Galileo was also a frequent visitor to the Venetian arsenal
where he indulged his fascination in mechanical devices, and it was
during his time in Padua and Venice that he invented the telescope. His
good friend the cleric Paolo Sarpi obtained an audience with the
Venetian Senate for Galileo and, in front of a group of Venetian
patricians, he first demonstrated the use of his telescope on 25 August
1609, according to some accounts on the top of the campanile in the
Piazza San Marco. It was also during his time in the Veneto that he
wrote his famous Starry Messenger announcing his discoveries; the
book that eventually got him into trouble with the Church demonstrated
that the universe was constantly changing, and most likely heliocentric.
Galileo's contribution to the Scientific Revolution is traditionally most
closely associated with Florence since it was there that he was tried, and
it is in the Museum of Science in Florence that Galileo's telescope and
his [middle] finger are preserved. Historians of science have long
speculated that if he had he stayed in Venice his fate would have been
very different. Instead of being forced to recant his ideas and being
placed under house arrest for most of the rest of his life, in Venice, his
theories may have found support, and a cultural and political setting in
which to flourish. With its long tradition of being politically and culturally
separate and distinct from Rome, and its tradition of bucking Roman
authority - especially, as we shall see, with the likes of the writings of his
friend Paolo Sarpi - it is quite possible that the republic might have been
able to protect him.
The Scientific Revolution in Venice was more than just a revolution in
astronomy and physics; it was also a revolution in scientific curiosity.
Medieval, Christian ideas about scientific investigation were somewhat
negative. St Augustine (d. 430) famously considered curiosity a form of
lust and pride since curious people lacked humility. Now curiosity
changed everything. The University of Padua became the centre for
European research on anatomy where Andreas Vesalius, his teachers
and students dissected the human body, demonstrating a new obsession
with understanding how it was put together, and how ancient Greek and
Roman doctors were wrong about its construction. The Venetian Senate
funded annual anatomy demonstrations suggesting that advances in this
branch of science were a point of civic pride that enhanced the city's
stature in the scientific community. In addition, the concept of 'curiosity'
became a positive, not a negative, force in part as a result of the
exposure to so many new and curious things arriving from the New
World. With a new array of specimens of flora and fauna at healers'
fingertips, the world of medicine and healing expanded apace. The
sixteenth-century Venetian marketplace was a true emporium of
'curiosities' from around the world. Venice had numerous pharmacies
that sold a variety of herbs and new medical potions, many of which
hailed from the New World as well as from traditional Eastern trade
routes. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the city had more than 50
apothecaries. The street name calle del spezier still indicates their
presence in the city. In addition charlatans, such as the medical man
Leonardo Fioravanti, hawked their wares around the city, often on
portable stages erected in various public squares including the Piazza
San Marco, trying to make a quick profit by selling their curiosities and
magical healing potions to passers-by. Pharmacists and charlatans alike
marketed a wide variety of pharmaceuticals for the early modern market:
crocodile skins, holy mud, distilled serums and elixirs from exotic plants
and animals, and even Egyptian mummies, widely reputed to cure many
ailments. Both Renaissance humanism and the Scientific Revolution in
Venice encouraged varieties of entrepreneurship and industry. Venetians
were interested in Renaissance literature and scientific discovery
especially where a profit could be turned, true to the longstanding,
pragmatic spirit of the city."
"Social Change in the Early Modern City
The early modern period in European history is marked by what were
shocking and often strident challenges to traditional forms of authority.
Columbus' discoveries challenged the ancients' understanding that there
were only three continents; Copernicus and his followers challenged
everyone's understanding of the structure of the universe; and Martin
Luther - a monk and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg
- challenged the authority of the pope and the power of the Catholic
church. Luther sent a powerful and defiant message to the church in
1517 when he attached his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the
Wittenberg Castle church. These questioned papal authority and many of
the traditional practices of the church - such as the sale of indulgences
(buying people out of purgatory), the veneration of saints, pilgrimages,
the act of confession and the way the popes solicited and spent great
sums of money recklessly - that Luther viewed as corrupt or a corruption
of what the bible intended. Luther essentially argued for a return to what
the bible said, and he wanted to ban a great variety of Christian practices
that he felt had no basis in the book. The Ninety-five Theses were
quickly translated into many languages and printed widely. They called
upon the church to answer to centuries of corruption and abuses,
thereby generating the Protestant Reformation. While the crusading age
had witnessed an unprecedented unification of all Europeans under the
shared umbrella of Christianity, after Luther's challenge Christianity
became permanently fragmented into the camps of Catholic and
Reformed Christians, and would never again have the same shared
meaning that it did for people in the Middle Ages.
Some Venetians, such as the cardinal Gasparo Contarini, were strongly
in favour of trying to reform the traditions and practices of the Catholic
church from within to reconcile Catholics and Protestants and preserve
the unity of the Christian church. But they were unsuccessful and the
differences between Catholics and Protestants hardened and became
permanent with the Council of Trent, a series of meetings of churchmen
from 1545-63 that denied the legitimacy of Luther's arguments. Trent
embodied the ideas of the Counter-Reformation, or the Catholic reaction
to Luther's challenge. The Counter-Reformation reaffirmed the Christian
tradition (the power of the pope and the legitimacy of saints, etc.) while
simultaneously calling for the reform of Christian practices and behaviour
on many different fronts to shore up Catholicism in areas where its
respectability had waned, for example demanding that bishops must live
in their bishoprics and nuns must be kept in convents. Luther's challenge
and the Roman reaction to it had powerful effects on the city of Venice
as they filtered down to the residents of the lagoon.
Most dramatically, in 1542 Pope Paul III revived the workings of the Holy
Office, otherwise known as the Roman Inquisition, which came to Venice
in 1547 and would remain until the arrival of Napoleon. Since Venice was
close to the Alps, Protestant ideas appeared in the lagoon soon after
Luther's challenge and spread quickly, often in and around the print
houses that employed workers from the north and became hotbeds for
discussion and the exchange of ideas. We can easily imagine print
houses hiring German workers to set their type and collate their pages:
workers who casually questioned their Italian colleagues about why they
could not eat meat on Fridays and how the pope had acquired so much
money and power. In the early years inquisitors focused their energies
on cases of heresy, especially Venetians who dappled in Lutheranism
and Anabaptism. As the years passed and heresy ran less rampant, the
Inquisition became more interested in a wider range of heretical
practices that threatened civic piety, such as witchcraft, magic and
superstition. As a mandate from Rome, the Holy Office was
accompanied by the printing of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of
Prohibited Books) in 1543, which forbade the publication and possession
of a list of texts considered heretical, immoral or generally unwholesome
or offensive. They included the writings of Nicolò Machiavelli, Johannes
Kepler and, of course, Martin Luther. Compared to the Spanish
Inquisition introduced by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Venetian Inquisition
was relatively mild. Only a handful of people were put to death over the
several hundred years of the existence of this office, and those who were
punished often received only gentle punishments, for example having to
recite specific prayers a certain number of times a day.
Nevertheless, the arrival of the Counter-Reformation in Venice produced
an atmosphere of fear and it changed the energy and tenor of city life. As
this wave of social and cultural conservatism descended upon the city,
the inhabitants of Venice, its artists, writers, printers, churchmen,
fishmongers and shipbuilders, felt the tightening of the screws. Public
behaviour was more closely scrutinized, blasphemy was harshly
punished and sumptuary laws enforced rules requiring more modest
dress and quieter parties. As the freedom of the press that had
encouraged so many printers and writers to work in the city was
overshadowed by the fear of the Inquisition, books about literature and
science became more scarce. The influential publisher Gabriel Giolito,
for instance, was forced to appear before the Inquisition and several
Venetian texts with anticlerical or ribald passages were added to the
Index of Prohibited Books. In addition, a plague from 1575-76 devastated
the city's population, wiping out nearly one-third of its inhabitants and
bringing much of the city's cultural production to a halt. However, this era
of caution and contraction saw some surprising social turns and
openings.
In the sixteenth century more Jews came to live in Venice. They had
frequented the city with some regularity since the end of the fourteenth
century when, in its state of financial desperation after the War of
Chioggia, the government began to court the services of Jewish
moneylenders as an alternative to Christian usury. The Jews not only
paid taxes but also lent money to the state and the urban poor at a
reasonable rate of return. They were allowed to come and work in the
city by day, and the state increasingly extended their rights to stay in
Venice over the course of the fourteenth century, to the point where they
could remain in the city for up to 15 days. During the war of Cambrai,
Jews offered their financial resources to help defend the city and, in
return, the state allowed them to settle permanently in the lagoon in
1516.
Jews lived in the city under strict rules and regulations. They had to
wear clothing in public that distinguished them as Jews - typically a
circular yellow badge or hat - and were forbidden to own property or to
marry Christians or have sexual relations with them. They were only
allowed to practice certain professions, namely to work as doctors,
money-lenders and vendors of used goods, and were kept physically
separate from Christians on the island of the Ghetto. (The Ghetto was so
called because it had previously been the site of an iron foundry, getar
meaning 'to cast'.) The word 'ghetto', now used to mean any area of
ethnic or racial confinement, represents a unique Venetian linguistic
contribution to the history of violence and persecution in the West. Jews
were required to return to the Ghetto at night where they were enclosed
by a series of doors and drawbridges. Some claim that the windows on
the first floor along the canals were even walled up to prevent nighttime
escapes. Others argue that since the growing number of Jews could not
move to other islands, they were forced to build upwards and construct
buildings much taller than those found elsewhere in the city, often with
their synagogues on top, which are still visible today. The Jewish
population reached its height in 1630 with over 2,400 people living on
this small island, which must have been extremely crowded. They lived
under such cramped conditions until the end of the eighteenth century
when Napoleon's forces threw open the Ghetto gates and allowed the
Jews to live elsewhere in the city.
The early modern period also witnessed the new growing influence of
women as they began to take on different social roles and often became
increasingly empowered. Somewhat ironically, while the two figures that
symbolized the city of Venice were both female - Venus (born from the
sea like Venice) and the Virgin (like Venice, never conquered) - Venetian
women possessed no official political power. Besides the ceremonial role
played by the dogaressa, the wife of the doge, Venetian women could
not vote or participate in political debate. Nevertheless, Venetian women
came into positions of power and influence outside the halls of
government in a variety of ways. The historian Stanley Chojnacki has
demonstrated how Venetian noblewomen wielded a unique amount of
economic power compared to their mainland counterparts. Around the
turn of the fifteenth century, as lucrative state offices became more
coveted, patricians jealously guarded admittance to the Venetian noble
class and required that applicants should have both a father and mother
of noble pedigree. This raised the status of patrician women and
subsequently caused a dramatic rise in the price of their dowries. Since
Venetian women retained their dowries after the death of their husband,
they often used their substantial dowries to make large capital
investments. They also passed them on to their daughters, and they
maintained a fair amount of social leverage over males who regarded
them with increased respect since they had so much money.
It is also now clear that more Venetian women headed their own
households and worked to support themselves, and their families, than
was previously believed. The wills, leases and business proposals in the
Venetian archives show that non-noble women, like their noble
counterparts, were also an independent financial force, with one-third of
all tax declarations in the early modern city being filed by women. They
also had a wide variety of jobs, being landlords, property managers,
writers, bead stringers, seamstresses and writers. The second half of the
sixteenth century saw the publication of Moderata Fonte's The Worth of
Women (1600) and Lucrezia Marinella's colourfully entitled The Nobility
and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600).
Perhaps most notoriously, Venetian women worked as prostitutes and
courtesans. Venice was famous for prostitution, and chroniclers in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries regularly cite their large numbers in the
city. The chronicler Marin Sanudo put their number at close to 50,000 at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, a clear exaggeration but a sign of
their ubiquitous presence. Venetian law had regulated the work of
prostitutes since 1358 by opening a state-sponsored bordello (as did
many other late medieval European cities) in the Castelletto region near
the Rialto Bridge. Prostitutes frequented a variety of houses, inns and
taverns in this area and, like the Jews, were required to return to their
quarters at night, usually before 10 pm, when the doors were closed.
Prostitutes did not always obey the city's rules and eventually settled in
various areas around the city. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the
degree to which the city viewed Jews and prostitutes alike: their
presence was an unfortunate but necessary evil that the state tolerated
and controlled by confinement on an island. Look for a narrow canal in
the neighbourhood of San Cassiano with the Ponte delle Tette, or 'Bridge
of Breasts' where prostitutes paraded topless both to attract clients and
to discourage Venetian men from the practice of sodomy.
The sixteenth century was the golden age of Venetian courtesans. In
addition to selling sex, they were in high demand and charged high fees
for their spectacular beauty, manners, education, exquisite dress and
ability to sing and play instruments, recite poetry and converse on
philosophy and literature with ease. They entertained their elite clientele,
including the crème of the Venetian aristocracy, in luxurious settings.
One of the most famous courtesans was the poet and humanist Veronica
Franco. Many sixteenth-century writers and tourists came to Venice to
meet these women, and when Henry III, the future king of France, visited
Venice in 1574 he specifically requested a meeting with Veronica Franco
who composed two sonnets for him.
If early modern Venetian women became increasingly visible and
powerful in these ways, more attention was also paid to women and the
vices associated with them as a result of the Counter-Reformation. Along
with the arrival of the Inquisition came a wave of reforms in Venice that
sought to establish ways to assist and protect potentially wayward girls
and women, and to eliminate sexual promiscuity. This resulted in the
dramatic growth of charitable houses for women in the sixteenth century.
Among others, the Convertite ('of the converted', now a women's prison)
was opened in 1530 in an attempt to convert women from prostitution,
the Zitelle opened in 1559 to protect young girls from falling into
prostitution and the Casa del Soccorso (literally, 'House of Rescue')
opened in 1577 to protect adult women and retired prostitutes. On the
one hand these houses were founded to control women, their
movements in the city and their potential to turn to a life of vice but, on
the other hand, they were were also typically staffed and run by women
and, as a result, they were new and uniquely female communities that
supported women and the challenges they faced.
In addition, the early modern period witnessed the dramatic growth of
convents in the lagoon. Nuns came primarily from the Venetian nobility
and like Jews, prostitutes and foreign communities in the city, they were
restricted to enclosed areas, in this case convents. As the price of
dowries rose, patrician families typically could not afford to marry off
more than one of their daughters and the rest were often deposited in
convents. By 1650 there were 33 nunneries in the city and 17 more
around the rest of the lagoon, housing more than 3,000 nuns in all. Like
houses of charity and the asylums, convents offered their inhabitants
both attractive and unattractive living conditions. They were bastions of
prayer and chastity as well as of vice and rebellion; they were places
where women could escape the drudgeries of housework and
domesticity and the dangers of childbirth, but where they were confined
under lock and key, often against their will, for their entire lives. In
practice most nuns managed to maintain a great degree of contact with
the outside world. They often owned their own animals, dressed in
fashionable clothes and maintained their own supplies of wine and fine
food. The richest and rowdiest of Venetian convents, like the convent of
San Zaccaria, held parties and dances, and even put on plays for the
public. The early modern era witnessed the great growth of convents
across the lagoon, presenting the growing number of Venetian nuns with
both a protective female community and a life of enclosure and
imprisonment."
"Venice and the East
Since people first settled on the islands of the lagoon, Venetians
maintained a dynamic relationship with the Byzantine East, and
Byzantine politics and culture defined life in the lagoon from the start. In
the Middle Ages Venice acquired a vast maritime empire that extended
across the Mediterranean, but by the beginning of the sixteenth century it
had lost most of these territories to the Ottoman Turks. By 1500 Crete
and Cyprus were the only places where Venetians maintained
substantial colonies and the Turks, unlike the Byzantines, did not offer
the Venetians any favourable trade status. In the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, Venice's relationship with the eastern Mediterranean became
more complex than ever before. In a period when much of Europe was
focused on the New World and the economy of the Atlantic, Venetians
continued to look to the East. The Venetians may have lost a lot of
territory to the Ottomans, but they continued to benefit from their cultural
and political contacts with them.
Venetian diplomats and merchants maintained a continuous presence in
the main cities of the Islamic East, including Pera, Aleppo, Damascus,
Acre and Alexandria, and there was a bailo or permanent ambassador to
Constantinople. Mamluk and Ottoman officials also frequently visited
Venice on diplomatic missions, bringing gifts to exchange and fostering a
diplomatic relationship between Venice and the East that distinguished
Venice from the rest of Europe. The Venetians even opened the
Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal, a permanent hostel and
warehouse for the Turks, as well as a mosque and hammam or bath for
Turkish envoys in 1621 to provide the Turks with safe lodging and to
facilitate good relations.
Such regular and consistent political contact also meant that the
Venetians had a deep knowledge of the Islamic world. Islamic customs
and culture held less mystery for Venetians than other Europeans, and
this encouraged cultural exchange. In many ways the Venetians' cultural
connection to the East became even more profound in the early modern
world as a great new variety of cultural and material exchanges began to
take place between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps most
famously, in September 1479 the Venetian Senate sent the painter
Gentile Bellini to Constantinople as a kind of cultural ambassador, in
particular because Sultan Mehmed II expressed an interest in Italian art.
Bellini stayed at Mehmed's court for two years and painted a portrait of
the sultan, now in the National Gallery in London. Easterners also
admired Venetian glass and the Ottomans became huge consumers of
Italian luxury textiles and copied Italian patterns and styles. In fact over
50 per cent of the recorded commercial transactions between Venice
and the Islamic world were in textiles, and chroniclers claimed that when
Ottoman envoys and their retinues arrived in Venice, Venetian
merchants displayed their best textiles and, not surprisingly, textile prices
went up at the Rialto during their stay.
Venetians similarly admired Islamic culture and sought out Ottoman
goods. Expensive eastern carpets were in incredibly high demand in
both Venice and Italy during the early modern period, and were a sign of
wealth and prosperity. The Scuola di San Rocco acquired and perhaps
even commissioned carpets from the Eastern Mediterranean to cover the
large tables at which their members held their meetings, and Eastern
carpets are at the centre of many Venetian paintings from this period. In
addition, during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many Venetian
confraternities commissioned painters to decorate their halls with large,
narrative canvases depicting the lives of their patron saints, many of
whom came from the East, so that Islamic figures and architecture
regularly appear in the paintings of Renaissance Venice.
Representations of the Islamic world can also be found Vittore
Carpaccio's paintings - among the finest in Venetian art - in the Scuola di
San Giorgio degli Schiavoni depicting the life of St George.
St George, the patron saint of this confraternity, came from Cappadocia
in Turkey, and in Carpaccio's paintings recounting his life and trials, he
depicts scenes peopled with the turbaned heads of a world far to the
east of Venice. Venetian and Italian industries also produced imitations
of Eastern glass, textiles, ceramics, book bindings and metalwork.
Perhaps most notably Venetian architecture seems to be deeply rooted
in oriental models. Though it remains unclear exactly how such
architectural knowledge and forms were transmitted, the art historian
Deborah Howard has demonstrated how a variety of Venetian
architectural details, including the rooftop terraces and stone screens
that adorn Venetian palaces, echo and emulate Eastern forms and
designs. Venetians were so interested in Islamic culture that the bishop's
throne in the church of San Pietro di Castello has a carved quotation
from the Koran on the seat's back plate.
At the time of the crusades, the Venetians often preferred to fight the
Pisans or the Byzantines rather than the Muslims, and helped to sack
Constantinople rather than the Turkish stronghold in Jerusalem. The
Venetians clearly had a pragmatic, rational relationship with the
Ottomans, with whom they tried to maintain a good economic and
political rapport. Indeed, Venice was perhaps the European city whose
inhabitants best understood and appreciated Islamic culture. As the
nineteenth-century art historian John Ruskin wrote, 'the Venetians
deserve a special note as the only European people who appear to have
sympathized to the full with the great instinct of the Eastern races.'
However, it is important to remember that Venice's relationship with the
East was not always rosy, and the city often found itself in ferocious and
brutal battles with the Turks in order to protect its own economic survival.
After conquering most of what had remained of Venetian territories, the
Turks went on to conquer Syria and Egypt in 1517, Rhodes in 1522 and
Algeria in 1529, at which point the Ottoman Empire encircled much of the
Mediterranean Sea. Many diplomatic and military crises occurred
between Venice and the Ottomans during this period of aggressive
Ottoman expansion. To try and put a stop to the endless march of
Turkish expansion through the Mediterranean, the Venetians joined
forces with the Spanish and other members of a Holy League to prevent
the Ottomans from advancing into Western Europe. In what is often
described as one of the most decisive battles in the history of the West,
the Holy League, half of whose galleys came from Venice, defeated the
Turkish fleet off the coast of Western Greece in the Battle of Lepanto on
7 October 1571. This was one of the first battles where guns and
cannons gave the Christians a decisive advantage, allowing them to
prevent the Ottomans from expanding further to the West. (Some claim
had the West lost, it might now speak Turkish.)
Perhaps the most horrific example of hatred and violence between
Venetian Christians and Ottoman Turks concerns Marcantonio Bragadin.
Bragadin was the local patrician governor on the island of Cyprus, which
the Venetian republic had seized in 1489. Ottomans frequently raided the
island during the period when Venetians ruled it, and Venetian control
collapsed when the Ottomans attacked the island with more than 60,000
troops in 1571. In Famagusta, one of the main towns on the island,
where Bragadin was resident, Venetian defenders were left without a
grain of wheat or a drop of water by the time they finally gave in to the
Turks, in August 1571, after a year's siege. Though a peaceful pact of
surrender had been made, the Turks immediately betrayed it and brutally
massacred Venetian soldiers, ripping their bodies to pieces and feeding
them to famished dogs. Turkish troops mounted the heads of 350 of their
victims in front of the tent of the Turkish general, Lala Mustafa. Bragadin
was singled out for even more spectacular treatment. While accounts
vary, they describe how the Turks cut off his nose and ears and dug out
his eyes, dragged him around the city and then skinned him alive.
According to some reports he did not die until they reached his waist.
They stuffed his skin with straw, tied it to the back of a cow, sent it on a
mock procession through the streets of Famagusta and then tied this
stuffed body to the mast of a ship for all to see as they paraded it around
the Mediterranean. Afterwards, Bragadin's skin was taken back to
Constantinople and offered to Sultan Selim II, though Venetians later
managed to get it back and, according to legend, it is now in an urn in
the church of San Giovanni e Paolo. Today, both a street on the Lido and
a vaporetto bear his name.
Bragadin was not the only one brutally punished by the Turks. The
diplomat Giovanni Soranzo was dragged through the streets of Istanbul
in chains and publicly ridiculed, and his interpreter was murdered in a
moment of political tension between the Venetians and Turks in 1648.
The Turks imprisoned and tortured the ambassador Giovanni Cappello,
who died of starvation in the Castle of Adrianople in 1652. These, and
many other tales of violence and brutality, remind us that the relationship
between Venice and the Ottomans was dicey and characterized by
harmony and hatred during the hundreds of years when these two
powers shared the Mediterranean. As throughout their history, the
Venetians were great pragmatists who focused on filling their coffers
which they did primarily though amicable exchange, though at times they
were forced to defend with the cannon and the sword. Unlike many other
European powers, Venetians were unique since they could comfortably
be both a friend and an enemy at the same time, especially if by
maintaining such a contradictory and complex relationship they still
managed to generate a profit."
"Venice and The Renaissance
Initially, as we have seen, Venetians were not nearly as fascinated by
ancient Greek and Roman art and literature as were their Florentine
counterparts. One of the characteristics of the Renaissance in Venice
was that classicism came to the Venetian lagoon comparatively late.
When the Florentine sculptor Ghiberti first unveiled his classicizing relief
of The Sacrifice of Isaac for the doors of the Florentine baptistery in
1401, or when Brunelleschi first began to employ the techniques of
ancient Roman engineering to construct the dome of the Florentine
cathedral in the 1420s, the work of Venetian artists continued to remain
heavily indebted to medieval and Byzantine artistic traditions,
emphasizing rich surface ornament and gilded mosaics rather than the
classical harmony and proportion of the Roman world. This is not
surprising since Venice had never been a Roman city, had no distinct
Roman history or Roman roots, and typically sought to distinguish itself
culturally and politically from Rome. In the early modern period Venetian
culture was invigorated and enlivened more by its vibrant cultural
exchange with the East than by classical antiquity.
Nevertheless, Venetians did become interested in the art and ideas of
the Renaissance. They began to admire the ancient Romans and
emulate their models of order and proportion in their architecture and
painting. Art historians typically point to the southern gateway of the
arsenal, constructed in 1460 and attributed to the local architect Antonio
Gambello, as the first example of Renaissance architecture in the
lagoon. With its Roman arch, this doorway clearly expresses the
triumphal significance of the Venetian shipyards by using ancient Roman
forms. By the sixteenth century Venetian art and architecture in particular
became even more dominated by classicism with columns, pilasters,
coffered ceilings and Roman arches arranged in the orders and
proportions suggested by classical design. We can see the full-blown
arrival of the classical tradition in Venice perhaps most clearly in the
Piazza San Marco. During the course of the early modern period, the
piazza came to look much the way it does today. The Ducal Palace was
completed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Doge Andrea Gritti (r.
1523-38) enacted numerous architectural and civic reforms to clean up
the city, and make it respectable in the wake of the disaster of Agnadello.
In the early sixteenth century the Piazza San Marco had been cluttered
with money-changing booths, food stalls, hostels and latrines. Gritti hired
the renowned Renaissance architect Jacopo Sansovino to remove the
sordid and dilapidated wooden stalls that had infested the Piazza San
Marco and replace them with new ones to present a more civilized,
classical face to the outside world. In the 1530s Sansovino designed the
Loggetta, the base of the bell tower in San Marco, as well as the nearby
Mint and Marciana Library, all in a classical style. With the work of
Sansovino and other Renaissance architects, Venice as 'a new Rome'
emerged out of the dark years following the League of Cambrai, and
similar civic and architectural reforms continued throughout the sixteenth
century. (Gritti similarly attempted to introduce Roman law to Venice
during his rule.)
The architect Andrea Palladio, arguably the most copied architect in the
history of architecture, also turned the façades of Christian churches
around the city into classical temples, and following the demands
imposed by the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, produced
churches such as San Giorgio Maggiore that represented a 'purified'
Catholicism, 'cleansed' of medieval clutter and superstition. Unlike the
medieval church of San Marco, the pure white walls and exteriors of his
Renaissance churches were 'cleaned up' and devoid of sculptural
ornamentation or decorative elaboration. Giovanni Bellini and Titian in
particular brought a classical, Renaissance style to Venetian painting.
Historians and art historians regularly refer to the period from 1400-1600
as the time when Venice 'turned West'. Venetians built up a mainland
empire and discovered the classical traditions of the Western Roman
world. Venetian elites also increasingly sought to connect their family
lineages to those of ancient Roman families who lived on the mainland
before the conquest of the lagoon, and the terraferma to the west of
Venice saw a veritable building boom as patricians built villas on their
mainland estates in dramatic numbers. This increase in development
resulted in the construction of more than 250 mainland villas by the end
of the sixteenth century. These villas allowed Venetian nobles to display
their fabulous wealth for all to see and embrace classical architecture.
Nevertheless, Venice's 'turn to the West' was never complete or
comprehensive. The city and its artists and artisans always maintained a
particularly Venetian artistic vision, even after the arrival of Renaissance
classicism. While hosts of art historians over the ages have described
the story of Venetian art and the contributions of the city's artists, it is
worth making six points here about the unique nature of Venetian art and
visual culture.
First, Venetian architecture has a long history of imported pastiche or
collage. Buildings and their façades regularly included inserted pieces of
sculpture, tracery, carved window trim and borrowed or stolen elements,
many of which defy classification. This tradition began with the altinelle
first brought to the lagoon from Altino when immigrants fled marauding
barbarians on the mainland. Such fragments are often fixed seemingly
randomly on to buildings with no attempt to integrate them in any
coherent way. These bits and fragments are visible around the city,
around doors and windows or simply plastered into façades. The church
of San Marco is one of the best examples of this tradition. (Sculpture in
Venice was primarily a surface ornament, and there was never any
formative school of Renaissance sculpture in Venice.) This tradition of
what might be called 'stick and go' is significant because it runs contrary
to the classical tradition. If Roman and classical visual culture was
proportional, orderly, graceful and often symmetrical - just think of the
Pantheon - Venetian visual culture was much more idiosyncratic,
irregular and asymmetrical. The Piazza San Marco is not a square but a
trapezoid, bridges often cross canals at sharp angles and architects
often placed palace doors and windows to one side of a façade rather in
the centre.
Second, Venetian painters came to appreciate classicism but they also
consistently emphasized surface patterns as much as modelled forms,
creating the illusion of three dimensions. For example, Venetian painters
were familiar with the mosaics of San Marco and their brilliant optical
effects, and often included such details in their works. Giovanni Bellini,
for instance, incorporated a detailed painted mosaic in his 1505 San
Zaccaria altarpiece, with a strong nod to Byzantine art. The lozenge
pattern on the façade of the Ducal Palace is another good example as it
appears to emulate the surface detail of Eastern and Islamic models.
Third, Venetian paintings often emphasized narratives and the details
that underlay them. The art historian Patricia Brown has shown how
painters, such as Vittore Carpaccio (for example, in The Miracle of the
True Cross series in the Accademia Galleries), recorded the bustling
daily life of the city and delighted in minutiae like Venetian chimneys,
dogs, the presence of Africans and everyday Venetians talking on the
street. While many Italian Renaissance painters in Florence, for instance,
began to produce canvases that emphasized the majesty, emotions and
graceful gestures of a handful of figures in scenes of classical serenity
and simplicity, Venetian painters, in contrast, often employed what
Brown calls an 'eyewitness' style. This packs in as many of the details in
a scene as possible, generating panoramic, busy images, and
emphasizing the cosmopolitan dynamism of the city.
Fourth, Venetian art was significantly employed in the service of political
power, not so much in dynastic portraits of important individuals as in
allegorical depictions used to exalt the Venetian state. For example,
paintings by Palma il Giovane (Allegory of the War of the League of
Cambrai, 1582) and Veronese, many of which are in the Ducal Palace,
depict important events in Venetian history and the foundation myths of
the republic and, in so doing, glorify the mythical republic as a whole and
the citizens who serve the state.
Fifth, compared to its mainland counterparts, Venice is for the most part
far from any greenery. The city is surrounded primarily by brick and stone
and, especially on foggy winter days, the city's walls, air and water form
a decidedly grey world. For this reason it is somewhat surprising that
Venetian painting in the Renaissance emphasized landscape, light and
colour, although this tradition may have been inspired by the very
elements that Venice lacked. In any case, Venetian painters were
landscape painters of pastoral scenes: one of the more prominent strains
in Renaissance painting in the city. And while there is much debate
about this, art historians - beginning with the first art historian, Giorgio
Vasari - have long argued that Venetian painters, such as Giorgione and
Titian, emphasized light and colour where their Florentine counterparts
emphasized design and hard contours.
And sixth, while frescoes were the medium of choice for the star
painters of Florence and Rome, Venetian artists quickly learned that
frescoes soon fell apart in the humid climate of the lagoon. For this
reason, Venetian painters pioneered and established the practice of
painting in oil on canvas.
Considering even this brief synopsis of Venetian art and architecture, it
is easy to see that there are many sites around the city that reveal the
spirit of the age. As with the fourteenth century, though, there exists no
one place that singularly or sufficiently embodies the myriad changes
that took place in early modern Venice. The Ca' D'Oro on the Grand
Canal, built between 1420-34, reveals the complexity of Venetian visual
culture. One of the most ornate and beautiful palaces in Venice, it is at
once asymmetrical, gothic, classical, Islamic (especially in its attention to
surface decoration), substantial and light, with delicate tracery covering
the façade. Later in the sixteenth century, the Rialto Bridge, finally
completed in stone in 1591, and Jacopo Sansovino's classical buildings
around the Piazza San Marco give a sense of the Renaissance tradition
in the city. So does a walk along the islands of the Giudecca and San
Giorgio where a series of classical façades by the Renaissance architect
Palladio neatly stand in a line along the water.
What was once the site of Aldus Manutius' printing house, now a bank,
is marked by a plaque on the northern end of Campo Manin. Some
pharmacies around the city still show the signs of the early modern
medical emporia that they once were: behind the counter and under the
modern cardboard advertisements promoting self-tanning lotions and
body-firming creams often stand the dusty majolica jars that once held
cures for syphilis, gout and the curses of witches. And in the
sottoporteghi or underpasses that lead into the square of the Ghetto, we
can still see the remains of the iron hinges on which the doors once hung
to enclose the Jews: a haunting reminder that the early modern age was
one of both expansive discovery and violent persecution.
Finally, a trip around the mainland of the Veneto reveals the winged lion
of St Mark, often placed on top of a tall column as Venetians
systematically branded the central piazza of each town that came under
Venetian control with this symbol of their dominance. In the countryside
between these towns, Venetians built their majestic but now eerily quiet
and darkened villas. Often closed and frequently gated, their long and
stately driveways lead up to the imposing mansions that once held the
extravagant summer parties of patricians and their guests seeking relief
from the summer heat of the lagoon. In the sixteenth century nobles'
bank accounts still overflowed, allowing them to build these extravagant
villas and throw lavish parties that spilled out on to the surrounding
porches and gardens. Such a world of wealth, security, laughter and
luxury however was slowly slipping away as insidious forces began to
chip away at Venetian fortunes around the turn of the seventeenth
century."
"6 CASANOVA, CARNIVAL AND COFFEE: VENICE IN THE BAROQUE
AGE, 1600-1797
By 1600 the Venetian republic had prospered for almost 800 years, no
small feat in a world where disease, warfare and expanding states like
the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires were a constant threat. The
Venetian economy had survived the Portuguese discovery of the
overseas spice route, and Venetians had rebuilt most of their mainland
empire even after the League of Cambrai beat the Venetians back to the
shores of the lagoon in 1509. In the sixteenth century, in fact, Venetian
fortunes even grew as a result of thriving new industries. Around 1600,
however, things began to change. There was no one decisive event or
single blow but, after 1600, the economic and political centre of Europe
began to shift from the Mediterranean to the North, to England, France
and the Netherlands as the power and momentum of these states grew.
The Venetian economy began to shrink while those states involved in the
dynamic market of the Atlantic grew. In addition, Venetians were very
resistant to new political ideas and political change. For the most part,
they turned their backs on the powerful new ideas emanating from
Enlightenment France, preferring to maintain their age-old government
and modus operandi. In the realm of both economics and politics, Venice
became antiquated and marginalized.
However, despite the fact that Venice slowly began to slip from the
economic and political forefront of Europe, from 1600-1797 the city
became a cultural mecca, the centre of fashionable Europe where
everyone flocked to spend money and enjoy themselves. Venice was a
world of scarlet silk mantles and masks bordered with pearls, powdered
wigs and penciled-on moles, casinos and theatres, and coffee and
conversation, all of which took place under a government of old men that
lay only half awake as it was carried along by the currents of history that
Venetians would soon be powerless to oppose. It is not an accident that
the Venetian who was most representative of this period was not a doge,
a sea captain, nor even a great merchant, but a devious and wily playboy
- Casanova - who spent his days gambling and running from the law. But
why did the Venetian economy decline? How and why were Venetians
resistant to new political ideas? And how did the city remain the cultural
centre of Europe?"
"Economic Downturn
The Venetian economy in the sixteenth century remained relatively
healthy in large part because of its great diversity and complexity.
Portuguese and Habsburg (or Spanish and German) expansion created
some difficulties for Venetian traders but it was not devastatingly
detrimental. The Portuguese had discovered how to go around the Cape
of Good Hope to get spices directly from Calcutta and Goa, but Venetian
spice routes between India and Alexandria continued, partly because this
Mediterranean route was still shorter and safer than the voyage around
Africa. While the Ottomans had taken over most of the trading outposts
once overseen by the Venetians, the Venetians were resilient. Ottoman
Constantinople was still a huge market for Venetian goods, and a large
population of Venetians and Venetian traders remained in
Constantinople to the end of the sixteenth century.
According to some historians, there were more round ships (cargo-
carrying vessels) in Venice in 1560 then there had ever been before, and
the overall tonnage carried by the Venetian fleet may have even reached
its peak around this time. The Venetian population probably also peaked
around 1575 at 180,000, the highest it would be until the 1950s.
Furthermore Venice was still a great emporium and a manufacturing
centre of silk, glass, mirrors and books. Even if international trade slightly
declined in the sixteenth century, markets on the Italian mainland near
the city grew and Venice became the port of its own mainland. At the end
of the sixteenth century the patrician Nicolò Contarini even boasted that
'Venice is perhaps greater than it ever was before'.
Nevertheless, the economy was clearly changing. The loss of Cyprus to
the Turks in 1571 was crushing to the Venetians. The bout of plague that
followed from 1575-77 was also devastating and profoundly disrupted
much of Venetian economic and cultural life. In addition, timber had
slowly become harder to obtain in Venice. It was more abundant in
Northern Europe where ships were consequently cheaper to build and
had better rigging than the Venetian kind, making them faster and able to
carry heavier arms. The cheaper cost of ship construction combined with
a revolution in shipbuilding in Holland meant that while Venice remained
a flourishing port, foreign shipbuilders outpaced the Venetians after
1600. It was no accident that Peter the Great went to Holland to study
shipbuilding in 1697 rather than Venice.
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century also saw a dramatic
rise in piracy, and the Adriatic became more infested with Uskok and
Barbary or African pirates than it had been since the tenth century.
Piracy became so bad that Venetians began to dock their ships in
Albanian ports and take their merchandise overland in caravans to the
Ottoman East in order to bypass the seas altogether. In addition, while
the Venetian and then later Dalmatian, Cretan and Greek oarsmen who
rowed Venetian ships had traditionally been free sailors who were paid a
wage, during the course of the sixteenth century, it became so difficult to
hire them that the Venetian fleet had to rely on forced conscription, on
criminals who were chained to their benches. In fact by 1580 Venice's
fleet of galleys that patrolled the Adriatic was populated almost entirely
by convicts. Also, merchants were increasingly unwilling to incur the
expenses and run the risks of maritime trade. Venetian nobles, once the
main participants in the making of the Venetian commercial empire,
preferred to stay safely ensconced in their mainland villas where they
instead made their money through farming, rents and holding office.
The real demise of the Venetian economy began, however, when
English and Dutch ships began to swarm the Mediterranean in growing
numbers. The English and the Dutch asked the Venetians if they could
dock and ship goods north from the lagoon. The Venetians denied this
request and maintained their age-old requirement that foreigners could
only buy and sell goods through Venetians, thereby destroying the
possibility of potentially reinvigorating their port with new traffic. Not
surprisingly, Northern traders took their business elsewhere and rival
ports, such as Trieste, Ancona and Livorno, got their business. When
these cheaper, faster and more heavily armed Northern ships started
using other ports that the Venetian economic downturn began. In
addition, when the Dutch East India Company formed in 1602 it
effectively cut off the flow of spices to all other traders, including the
Venetians. These two factors resulted in a 40 per cent decline in
Venetian trade around 1600. By the 1630s Mediterranean trade was
almost exclusively in the hands of the English and the Dutch, and
Venetians eventually had to send merchants to London and Amsterdam
when they wanted cinnamon, cloves and pepper. Venetian merchants
and traders suddenly found themselves pushed to the periphery of
Mediterranean and European trade."
"Increasingly Hemmed In by the Papacy, Ottomans and Hapsburgs
Around 1600 events on the Venetian mainland brought the city into
conflict with the papacy. In 1604 the republic announced that no religious
buildings or structures could be built on the mainland without the
permission of the Venetian state. In 1605 the government also forbade
Venetian subjects from donating any land to the church. Both measures
were meant to prevent the growth of Roman power and income on the
Venetian mainland. When government officials arrested two clerics (one
of them, the canon Scipione Saraceno, had smeared the house of a
noblewoman with excrement because she had rejected his sexual
advances) on the mainland in March 1605 and brought them before the
Council of Ten, Pope Paul V (r. 1605-21) objected, arguing that such
arrests violated papal jurisdiction. The church in Venice had long been
subservient to the state: the cathedral of Venice was far removed from
the city centre, St Mark was given to the city's doge and not its bishop,
and Venetians insisted that when the Inquisition came to Venice they be
allowed to maintain three Venetian judges on its court. Paul V decided
that enough was enough and that the Venetians needed to learn who
was boss in the realm of spirituality. He excommunicated the city and its
empire in 1606. This effectively meant that sacraments could no longer
be administered to the inhabitants of Venice and the Veneto, which was
no small punishment for all those deprived of baptism for their children or
last rites for dying family members.
The papal interdict generated heated controversy in Venice since it
demanded that people state where their loyalties lay. The doge at the
time, Leonardo Donà (r. 1606-12), ordered the Venetian clergy to ignore
the interdict and to continue administering the sacraments or face death.
The Jesuits - the order of the church charged with purifying and
empowering Catholicism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation -
refused to comply, and the Senate banished them with several other
orders that would not observe the state's ruling. The Jesuits left the city
in a dramatic procession, wearing crosses as if they were removing
spirituality from the city itself. Crowds of Venetians flanked them on the
streets as they departed, yelling 'go to hell!' in one great chorus. The
Venetians hired the polemical cleric and writer Paolo Sarpi to advise the
government in canon law and defend their position. Sarpi published a
series of pamphlets that attracted worldwide attention, especially from
Protestants, by arguing that the state could indeed forbid people from
donating lands to religious houses since states had a right to organize
their own resources for their own good. The controversy was ultimately
resolved in 1607. While the Venetians kept their property laws on the
mainland they effectively agreed not to enforce them in order to receive
papal absolution. The Venetians emerged from the interdict neither
defeated nor victorious. They had thwarted this challenge from the pope,
though Paolo Sarpi's life was threatened several times by papal plots
and attacks.
Soon after this threat from Rome, Venetians faced additional diplomatic
challenges from other European states. The economic changes facing
the city around 1600 were mainly caused by the size of the states that
surrounded Venice. Venice was simply less able to compete militarily
and economically with states that were becoming so big and so powerful
that they dwarfed the island city. By 1600 not only had the Ottomans
conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean but the Spanish
Hapsburgs had also taken over most of the Italian peninsula. The
Austrian Hapsburgs lay just to the north and were also seeking to
expand their territory. Seventeenth-century Europe is marked by the
growth of large states with their enormous armies and their extravagant
displays of wealth and power. Most early modern people came to live
under the umbrella of one empire or another: the Spanish or Austrian
Hapsburgs, the Ottomans or the Bourbon dynasty in France. This was
the age of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and his elaborate and wealthy court
at Versailles. It became increasingly difficult for Venice to compete in this
international context. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries these massive states crowded around the tiny lagoon city,
directly challenging Venetian independence and its neutrality.
Venetians faced many political, diplomatic and military threats as these
surrounding empires confronted and bullied them. From 1613-17 the
Venetians entered into the War of Gradisca against Uzkok pirates.
Venetians attacked Uzkok ships in the Adriatic after pirates captured the
Venetian captain Cristoforo Venier and flayed him alive. But since the
Uzkoks worked for the Austrian Hapsburgs as defenders of the borders
of their empire, fighting the Uzkoks brought the Venetians into direct
conflict with the Hapsburgs to the north. After several years of fighting,
the Austrians forced the Uzkoks to resettle further into the interior of the
Habsburg Empire, temporarily resolving the conflict between Venice and
the Austrian Hapsburgs.
The Spanish branch of the Hapsburg family, however, represented an
even greater political threat to Venice. The Spanish ruled most of Italy by
1600 and tried to overthrow the Venetian state when the Spanish Viceroy
of Naples, the Duke of Ossuna, sent a fleet to the Adriatic to break
Venetian control of that region. In the War of Ossuna (1617-18).
Venetians used hired help to drive this fleet out, but the Duke of Ossuna
went on to hatch an incredible plot to overthrow the Venetian
government from within. Working through the Spanish ambassador to
Venice, the Marquis of Bedmar, the Spanish mounted a plot to seize the
Ducal Palace and flood the city with Spanish forces. The Council of Ten
discovered these plans and about 300 people were executed for their
involvement. This plot was confused and ill-organized but it had involved
large numbers who were prepared to overthrow the Venetian state.
Then, in 1622, several years after the expulsion of the Marquis of
Bedmar, the prominent nobleman Antonio Forscarini was arrested for
treason. Foscarini came from an old patrician family and had been the
republic's loyal ambassador to England and France. He was tried for
selling state secrets to foreign powers and for spying on behalf of Spain,
and was strangled to death in prison and hung by one leg between the
two columns of San Marco in 1622. However, the Council of Ten later
discovered that Forscarini had been framed and was innocent. His body
was disinterred and he was reburied with state honours, but the incident
painfully revealed both the arrogance of some of the city's most powerful
families who were able to frame him in this way, and the ways in which
larger diplomatic and imperial forces had managed once again to
infiltrate Venetian politics since he had been accused of selling secrets to
the Spanish.
The advances and threats posed by the Ottoman Empire were even
more dramatic than those from Europe. Though the Venetians had
controlled the island of Crete for 450 years, the island fell to Ottoman
forces after the War of Candia. After years of diplomatic tensions, the
Ottomans attacked Crete in 1645 and placed the island under siege by
1648. The siege continued, unbelievably, for almost 22 long years -
arguably the longest siege in history - reducing the island's inhabitants to
skeletons cloaked in rags. The Venetian commander Francesco Morosini
finally capitulated in 1669 but, to this day, the memory of this expensive,
drawn-out and disastrous war lives on. In contemporary dialect to say
'sémo in Candia' or 'séco incandìo' means 'you are as thin as a
Candiote', or someone who has not eaten in years.
The Venetians took their last stand against the Ottomans in the 1680s.
By then Francesco Morosini, the commander at Candia, miraculously led
Venetian forces to make quite a comeback by retaking most of Morea or
the Peloponnese Peninsula of Southern Greece from 1685-88. Then, in
1687, Morosini and his forces stormed Athens. In a moment not unlike
the sack of Constantinople in 1204, a Venetian cannon hit and almost
destroyed the Parthenon and Morosini coordinated the looting of the
temple. He pillaged the sculptures of two lions and brought them back to
Venice as symbols of his victory, sculptures that stand to this day at the
gate of the arsenal. He was made doge in 1688, and the Treaty of
Karlowitz in 1699 temporarily ended fighting between the Venetians and
the Turks. The Morea, however, was eventually lost. Venetian rule in
Greece at this time was incredibly unpopular and the Ottomans regained
this territory once and for all by 1714. The Congress of Passarowitz, a
meeting between the Austrians, Turks and Venetians in 1718, reduced
Venetian territories abroad to virtually nothing but a handful of territories
in Istria, Dalmatia and the Ionian Sea. Venice had permanently lost its
maritime empire. The last significant Venetian admiral, Angelo Emo,
launched several successful military excursions against Barbary pirates
and corsairs from Northern Africa in the second half of the eighteenth
century and he encouraged the arsenal to produce more modern ships of
war but, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were fewer
interested patricians and there was less money for pursuing war with any
seriousness.
One might well wonder, if the economy was suffering and Venetians
were broke, how exactly did they pay for their wars, and especially these
long drawn out and extremely gruelling battles against the Turks in the
second half of the seventeenth century? Venetians obtained money
using perhaps the one trick they had left: they sold titles of nobility to
anyone willing to pay. A total of 67 families were ennobled in 1646 to
support the War of Candia and 47 more in 1685 to support Morosini's
campaigns in Greece. These families each paid 100,000 ducats - a sum
close to 10 million dollars in modern currency - to have their names
added to the Golden Book of Venetian noble families. Additional families
were allowed to become nobles as late as 1770, again as a result of
urgent financial need. Many of these families were not only from outside
Venice and the Veneto but also from outside Italy, and though wealthy
many actually came from humble and lowly origins. The picturesque
Campiello Widmann, for instance, in the northern part of the city, refers
to the Widmann family from North Europe that purchased its Venetian
nobility. Lodovico Manin, the last doge of Venice, also came from a
family in Friuli to the north of Venice that bought its way into the noble
class at this time. Venice's larger role in the Mediterranean was over, but
this last infusion of cash that came from those who wanted to become
Venetian nobles helped finance Morosini's spectacular campaigns.
Thanks to him, for one final moment in their history at the end of the
seventeenth century, the Venetians once again briefly held an empire in
the eastern Mediterranean, permitting a last chance to experience a
glimmer of the city's past greatness."
"The Extravagant Baroque
Even as the city entered an economic downturn and found itself
increasingly squeezed between aggressive and expansionist neighbours,
Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the playground
of Europe and one of the great cultural centres of the world. The
eighteenth century was the era of the Grand Tour when English families
in particular espoused the idea that foreign travel improved a
gentleman's education and imparted political expertise, enabling their
sons to become effective members of ruling class. Men like Edward
Gibbon and Francis Drake toured Italy in their twenties, and visitors from
around Europe flocked to see Venice and enjoy its earthly delights.
Historians typically describe Venice in this period as decadent and
frivolous: a city of gamblers, opera-goers and fan-fluttering ladies who
pursued their various pleasures and frittered away their time and money
while the city and its economy were slowly but surely collapsing. While
the culture of extravagance was also common to many other European
cities, Venice's unique location on water drew extra attention to its
endless parties, lavish entertainment and reckless spending.
Venice also had a lively theatre scene. Its first commercial theatre
opened in 1565 and, by the end of the seventeenth century, there were
close to 20 theatres in the city. The commedia dell'arte was incredibly
popular: a type of theatre based on largely unscripted works that
included pantomime, improvisation and slapstick humour. In the
eighteenth century the plays of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi often
depicted and ridiculed middle-class life in Venice and were wildly
popular. In addition the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the
rise of opera in the city. Opera was originally performed for private
aristocratic audiences but, in 1637, Venice opened the first public opera
house in Europe, the Teatro San Cassiano, and became the centre of
opera in the West after Claudio Monteverdi was appointed choirmaster of
San Marco. The city opened as many as seven opera houses in the
seventeenth century, putting on close to 400 different operas from 1637-
1700. Historians sometimes attribute this development to the fact that the
severe and puritanical Jesuits had been expelled from the city at
precisely this time allowing for a more liberal cultural atmosphere in the
lagoon.
The city's reputation as a centre of opera and baroque music was further
enhanced in the eighteenth century by the Venetian Antonio Vivaldi who
composed 44 popular operas in his lifetime. In May 1792, as the riots
and massacres of the French Revolution took place in Paris and events
in the North unfolded that would have implications far beyond what any
Venetian could imagine, the city opened the Teatro la Fenice, or
'Phoenix' opera house. One of the most sumptuous and fashionable
opera houses in the world even today, it was financed by selling
subscriptions to wealthy patricians who purchased boxes and then
passed them down through their families. Eventually, the opera house
sold all the box to the city, which came to own Teatro la Fenice after the
First World War. But as the Tuilleries were being stormed and the
guillotines crashed, Venetians turned a blind eye, happy to wave their
lace handkerchiefs and gossip behind raised fans while they took in the
works of Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Vivaldi.
Gambling was also an incredibly popular pastime in the city and drew
thousands of foreigners to the lagoon every year. Like opera
performances, gambling houses in the city initially tended to be in private
halls owned by Venetian nobles, and the word casinò (pronounced cah-
zeen-OH) originally meant a small house where Italians met for exclusive
social occasions. These informal pavilions were often set in secluded
gardens that were ideal for gambling. We can still see a surviving
example of such architecture in the Casinò degli Spiriti that juts out into
the lagoon on the remote northern edge of the city. While most popular
casino games were eventually invented in France, Venice officially
opened the first public gambling house in 1638, the Ridotto, to better
control gambling in the city and earn a profit while doing so. The Ridotto
was located near San Moisè, just west of San Marco, and offered
different rooms housing various games as well as food and drink.
Gamblers played biribisso (much like modern roulette), faro (a kind of
bacarrat) and spigolo (an earlier version of poker). Even outside the
Ridotto gambling rooms existed everywhere around the city, in cafés,
theatres and even barber shops. The entire city gambled, and many
Venetians participated in the civic lottery in the eighteenth century,
purchasing tickets at booths all over town. The government eventually
closed the Ridotto in 1774 by order of the Council of Ten who saw it as a
den of vice where impoverished nobles dug themselves deeper into debt,
gambling away whatever crumbs of their patrimony or plots of land in the
countryside they may have had left. Nevertheless, private casinos still
numbered nearly 150 at the fall of the republic, and the remnants of their
existence can still be found around town where the word ridotto appears
in the names of various streets and palaces.
This was also the great age of the café. Perhaps the first documentary
evidence we have of coffee in the West came to Venice in a letter from
the bailo, or ambassador, resident in Constantinople in 1585: a discovery
tied to Venice's long-standing relationship to and fascination with the
East. Giovanni Francesco Morosini reported that 'The Turks, and among
them both humble and important men, are in the almost continuous habit
of sitting and drinking publicly, in shops and on the street, a black liquid,
boiling as hot as you can take it, that is extracted from a seed called
cavée, which they say has the virtue of keeping you awake.' Hot
chocolate had been very popular in the seventeenth century - indeed the
pope claimed to prefer it after he tasted coffee - but coffee soon became
a craze. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Venetians began
importing beans from Egypt for medicinal purposes and, in 1683, the first
coffee house opened under the arcades of the Procuratie Nuove on the
south side of the Piazza San Marco. Archival documents show that
eventually there were over 30 cafés around the piazza alone, and over
206 in the city when the government decided that no more could be
opened in an attempt to reign in the frenzy that had swept the city. Both
Gozzi and Goldoni often mentioned the coffee craze in their plays, and
one of Goldoni's most popular plays was called La Bottega del Caffé, or
'The Coffee House'.
The most famous café was, and still is, Caffé Florian, opened by Florian
Francesconi on 29 December 1720. It was first called Venezia
Trionfante, or 'Venice Triumphant', a somewhat ironic and unlikely name
since at the time Venetians had little to feel triumphant about, having just
lost their Greek empire with the Treaty of Passarowitz. Perhaps for this
reason it was soon re-named after its beloved owner and quickly became
the social centre of the city. Venetians and foreigners flocked to Florian,
especially after the closing of the Ridotto in 1774, to drink their coffee
from fine porcelain cups, show themselves off, gossip, discuss literature
and hear the latest news. From the beginning Florian had an illustrious
clientele of nobles, foreigners, merchants and artists. Frequented by the
likes of Rousseau, Casanova, and the sculptor Canova in the eighteenth
century, in the nineteenth century it attracted the most important
European writers and artists of the day as well as nationalist
revolutionaries and Austrian resistors. Indeed, Florian had played such a
central role in the life of the city and so many events have unfolded both
inside in its rooms and right in front of its windows that if its walls could
speak, they could easily recount the history of the city.
In the eighteenth century, Venetians paid more attention to fashion,
especially foreign fashion, than perhaps ever before, abandoning any
former pretence of restraint in favour of the sensuous and playful designs
from the North. Noblemen traditionally wore black in public as a sign of
their modesty and submission to the Venetian state but, under their plain
togas, they often wore the elaborate styles that hailed from France and
which are now displayed in the museum at the Palazzo Mocenigo near
San Stae. Men wore knee breaches, tight-fitting silk stockings, coats with
tails, shoes with buckles, tunics with lace wrists and tricorn hats in black
felt. Their finery came to rival that of women whose lavish fashions
included bodices supporting, and revealing, ample décolletés, sleeves
that finished in a cascade of lace, elaborate coiffures, gloves and fans.
Wigs for men were also a must, so much so that when the nobleman
Lorenzo Corner died in 1757, newspapers pointed out that he had been
the last patrician to wear his own hair. The irony cannot be lost on us that
while the Venetians followed and consumed French fashion with
enthusiasm and rapt attention, the same cannot be said of their
attentions to French ideas about political life. While their servants ironed
their breeches and fluffed their lace, Venetian nobles disdainfully
brushed off ideas about equality and liberty, even though forces
motivated by these ideas were soon to sweep the entire continent of
Europe and alter life in Venice forever.
Fashionable life at this time also included two new jobs or social
positions, the còdega and the cicisbeo. Despite the fact that Venetians
did their best to prevent night-time violence - in 1732 Venice became the
first European city to provide street lighting - both Venetians and
especially the numerous visitors to the city regularly hired a còdega. This
was a lantern-bearing guide, a bit like a bodyguard, hired to take people
safely from one destination to another through the dark labyrinth of the
dangerous city at night. A cicisbeo was very different, being a gentleman
(though not a lady's husband) who accompanied a noblewoman and was
quite often her lover as well. He gave her his hand in public at balls and
receptions, and attended her from when she awoke until when she
retired. He ordered her meals, sat constantly by her side and even fed
her if she so desired, making the cicisbeo the ultimate accessory in
eighteenth-century fashion.
The most famous figure from the world of fashion and entertainment in
eighteenth-century Venice is Giacomo Casanova (1725-98). Famous for
his life of intrigue, gambling and seduction, he was the son of actors and
an accomplished musician who became popular in the elite circles and
high society of the city. He was suddenly imprisoned at the age of 30 for
no clear reasons: the accusation was simply 'public outrages against
religion'. Some suspect he possessed prohibited books but perhaps the
authorities simply wanted him off the streets. He was taken to the prison
called the piombi, or the 'leads' (so called because its roof was made of
lead plates), above the Ducal Palace. Fifteen months later he made a
daring escape through a hole in his cell and out on to the roof, eventually
descending down though the building. He was mistaken for a civil
servant and left the city by gondola, making his way to Paris, and
eventually became the director of a library in Bohemia. He began writing
his memoirs in the last decade of his life, producing 12 lengthy volumes
that are among the best accounts of European life in the eighteenth
century. His Story of my Life offers an endless stream of wild tales about
courtesans, adultery, Carnival, gambling, balls, complicated plots
involving gallant heroes and despicable villains, and life on the run from
the police. While many European cities at the time maintained a
decadent culture of excess and vice, Casanova's life and memoirs
significantly helped fuel an image of Venice as the most decadent and
lascivious city in Europe in the eighteenth century."
"Festival and Ritual
Like most other medieval cities, Venice had a colourful array of civic
rituals and celebrations. In addition to regular Christian holidays and
saints' days, Venetians also had their own festive calendar rooted in the
history of the city. Historians have long been fascinated by the cultural
and political significance of Venetian festivals, such as the Sensa, the
coronation of the doge and the various rituals surrounding the cult of St
Mark. Venetian rituals served a wide variety of cultural and political
purposes: they celebrated the powers of the doge and the noble class,
reaffirmed the legendary free and independent nature of Venice and tied
the history of Venice to the Christian calendar. They also made the lower
classes feel as if they were politically important. The arsenal workers, for
instance, had significant roles in both the coronation and funeral of the
doge. By including a wide array of people and encouraging the lower
classes to feel politically significant, Venetian rituals may have reinforced
state stability and discouraged popular revolts. Of the many civic rituals
on the Venetian calendar, two in particular stand out in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries as being especially colourful and popular: the
War of the Fists and the Carnival.
Venetians have long had deep feelings of attachment to their
neighbourhoods. Especially in centuries past when only one bridge, the
Rialto, spanned the Grand Canal, it was harder to move around town
and the residents of one neighbourhood did not often visit other areas of
the city. Even today it is common to hear older Venetians comment that
they rarely leave their sestiere or local neighbourhood. Such feelings of
local identity and pride manifested themselves in the Guerre dei Pugni,
or 'War of the Fists': mock battles staged on various bridges without
parapets throughout the city. These battles took place between the
factions of the Castellani or Arsenalotti - mainly arsenal workers from
Castello, San Marco and Dorsoduro - and the Nicolotti or fishermen who
lived on the opposite side of the city in San Polo, Canareggio and Santa
Croce. The goal was for a fighter, or group of fighters, from one faction to
throw their opponents off the bridge, thereby earning honour, glory and
fame. The battles were so popular that at times more than 30,000 people
observed them, including patricians waving their handkerchiefs in the air
in support of their chosen contender. We can still see remnants of this
ritual around the city. The Ponte Guerra near San Marco and the Ponte
dei Pugni just south of Campo Santa Margherita were some of the
bridges on which these battles took place, bridges on the boundaries
between the two factions. The bridges are marked with decorative
'footsteps' in memory of their significance. In addition, the church of San
Trovaso in Dorsoduro is said to have several sets of doors and two
façades because it stood in territory between the two rival factions of the
Nicolotti and Castellani and needed to accommodate both of them,
especially since their rivalry persisted through the nineteenth century.
When there was a Nicolotti-Castellani marriage, the Castellani family
members could enter through the south door and the Nicolotti by the side
door. The War of the Fists was officially put to an end in 1705 as the
state attempted to replace this violent ritual with more decorous ones
such as a series of regatte or boat races, or the Forze d'Ercole, which
means 'The Strength of Hercules': a competition to build human walls
and pyramids with teams of people showing off their martial and
acrobatic prowess.
The Venetian Carnival barely needs an introduction. Famous around the
world for its masked balls, costume parades, concerts, public
performances and night-time festivities, Carnival has long attracted
foreigners to Venice. Records of Carnival exist as far back as 1094 when
medieval chroniclers began to take note of public celebrations that took
place in the days just before Lent. In 1296 the Senate made Carnival
official by decreeing that the last day before Lent would be a public
holiday. While today Carnival lasts for about ten days - a period notable
not only for people wearing masks and costumes in the streets but for
the fact that every Venetian pasticceria sells delicious Carnival pastries
called fritelle - in the eighteenth century it lasted over six months. The
festivities began on the first Sunday in October, became increasingly
intense after the Epiphany in early January and culminated with the most
brilliant festivities just before Lent. In the main campi of the city, along
the Riva degli Schiavoni, the main quay facing the water by San Marco
and in the piazza performers erected stages and people crowded around
to watch jugglers, acrobats, actors and actresses, dancing animals and a
great variety of other street artists play to the crowds. Venetians even
chased pigs around the Piazza San Marco, captured and decapitated
them, and then threw their ears to the crowd. Bull chases were also set
up around the city. The main courtyard of the German Warehouse was
open for public balls for three days and nights towards the end of the
season. The final week was marked by the 'flight of the dove' when a
courageous acrobat slid across a wire from the top of the bell tower of
San Marco to the Ducal Palace, throwing flowers to the crowd, a ritual
reenacted today with a wooden or plastic bird.
In the eighteenth century as many as 30,000 people came to Venice
every year during the six-month Carnival season. The holiday was
celebrated with particular verve and enthusiasm, and has prompted
historians and anthropologists to question why this holiday was so
popular, and what social and political purposes the ritual may have
served. Carnival had no single meaning, but it was clearly a time when
the world turned upside down: people dressed up in disguise and could
ritually reverse the roles they played in day-to-day life. The rulers
became the ruled, men dressed as women, and participants could
express their social creativity and political critiques with no fear of
repercussion, especially since people wore masks in public. Students
could mock a rebellion when their professors lectured and fishermen
could parody their patrician overlords by dressing in disguise like their
noble rulers. Many nobles in the eighteenth century were particularly
relieved when carnival season arrived since masks could disguise their
poverty. It is said that such festivities promoted social harmony since
they were a kind of social safety valve, a type of ritual inversion of the
normal social hierarchy that allowed people to let off steam. The
enormous number of gaudy mask shops that line the city's streets today
trivialize and commercialize what was once a living and vibrant social
ritual. Carnival offered a type of annual, cyclical commentary on the
established social order and perhaps briefly allowed people to address
their social grievances.
Carnival ended in 1797 with the arrival of Napoleon. French and later
Austrian occupiers viewed its festivities with suspicion: a hunch that was
perhaps correct if the safety valve theory is correct. It was only at the end
of the 1970s that some people and civic associations in the city began to
revive Carnival. Many Venetians say that it experienced a brief period of
local splendour in the early 1980s before it was hijacked by international
tourism once more, and by major international corporations who
subsidized festivities and the concerts of famous performers in exchange
for advertising sites in the city. (Volkswagon, for instance, had often
placed large advertising posters and cars in various public squares
around the city.) Carnival today remains a mixed bag; the city becomes
extremely crowded, especially during its final days, and is often filled with
drunken partiers and tremendous amounts of litter but, if you are lucky,
you can still find local performers - palm readers, puppeteers, magicians
and aspiring actors - performing on small, home-made sets in the quieter
corners of town, offering a small reminder of what Carnival once was."
"The Challenges of Change
Eighteenth-century Venice was an age of extreme wealth and extreme
poverty. When King Gustav III of Sweden visited the city, the Pisani
family put on such a great celebration for him at their villa on the
mainland at Stra that they ruined themselves forever financially. The
Labia family, Spanish aristocrats who bought themselves into the
Venetian nobility in 1646, compensated for their status as new arrivals
with elaborate displays of wealth. According to lore, during a dinner party
held in their palazzo in the eighteenth century, they amused their guests
by casually tossing every one of their heavy gold plates out the window
and into the canal below (though some sources maintain they had cast
nets to catch them). They cried out to their guests and to those who
could hear them on the streets, 'L'abia o non l'abia, saro sempre Labia',
making a play on words to mean 'whether I have [money] or not, I will
always be a Labia'.
While some were able to behave with such reckless abandon, the
eighteenth century saw the formation of a new, impoverished social
group in the city called the barnabotti. These nobles had become so
destitute that they lived on small allowances from the Senate and often in
decrepit housing maintained by the state. Nobles were increasingly
impoverished since commerce had dried up. Even though some local
industries still survived, nobles were forbidden to learn a craft or practice
a trade. Many barnabotti lived in the neighbourhood of San Barnaba,
from where they got their name and where there existed a well-known
local casino where they played, still denoted in the passageway (the
Casìn dei Nobili) through to the campo. There may have still been
patrician families with ten gondolas tied up at their gate and more than
50 servants in their household, but there were also throngs of nobles
with vastly diminished family fortunes, a whole class so financially ruined
that they could no longer even afford the expenses of seeking or holding
office. Barnabotti would rub shoulders with other nobles in the halls of
the Great Council and then return to the shabby rooms of their tiny
apartments. When Casanova went to visit the senator Zaccari Vallaresso
in 1743, instead of finding an apartment suffused in patrician luxury, he
found a room containing four worm-eaten chairs and a battered table.
We can imagine scores of noblewomen in this period draped in jewels
who passed endless, silent hours doing embroidery in the dingy corners
of what had once been majestic palaces.
During this time radical and revolutionary ideas about politics and power
began to filter down from the salons of the North. The Enlightenment was
a political and philosophical movement born in Paris that encouraged
Europeans to challenge traditional ideas about power and authority. The
ideas that thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant developed were
diverse and complex, but these philosophers shared one common
theme: they were revolted by the seemingly limitless political abuses
practiced by the European governing class. Tyrannical kings, who were
often also fanatical Catholics, regularly imprisoned and tortured their
subjects for no clear reason and with no evidence of wrongdoing. English
philosophers, such as like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, argued that
rulers could not be allowed to do as they pleased because the governed
masses had inalienable rights - to life, liberty and property - that needed
to be protected by contracts and constitutions. If governments or rulers
attempted to rule absolutely or arbitrarily, they violated the natural rights
of the individual and thereby forfeited the loyalty of their subjects. The
language of documents like the American Declaration of Independence
and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen reflect these
ideas. Such theories of natural law were used to justify liberal revolutions
in France and America at the end of the eighteenth century. The
Enlightenment encouraged Europeans to use reason to question
traditional forms of authority - the clergy, nobility and royalty - and not to
believe what they were told or to accept history at face value. These
liberal ideas continued to inspire revolutions across Europe through the
nineteenth century.
This vanguard intellectual and political movement in Paris, that
encouraged the protection of the rights of man and the questioning of
those in authority, might have rapidly spread to the rest of Europe and
the Americas, but many Venetians either were not that interested or were
hostile to such ideas. This radical new way of thinking and viewing the
world directly challenged how Venetians had historically structured their
state and their culture. In Venice every man owed his position to what his
father had been before him, and the right to govern was given by God to
nobles and remained theirs because of their patrician bloodlines. When
confronted with revolutionary ideologies from the North, Venetians of all
classes almost categorically rejected any ideas that challenged their
medieval political system. In the eighteenth century most Venetians
appeared to ignore the clashes, quarrels and debates raging among their
European neighbours concerning political rights and representation. Only
a small number of Venetians were interested in the ideas of the
Enlightenment. Freemasons, for instance, were tolerated in the city in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Masonic lodges were male
organizations or clubs that often served as networks for political
discussion and change. They became popular in Enlightenment France,
and two Masonic lodges were founded in Venice, the Union and the True
Light. They welcomed those who wished to discuss ways of infusing the
state with new political life and vigour, and these ideas in fact did
become popular among poor nobles.
Prior to the arrival of Enlightenment ideas, in 1627-28, the reform-
minded patrician Ranieri Zeno had proposed that the government of
Venice be opened to a broader base of people and that the dictatorial
powers of the Council of Ten be curtailed, but the wealthy and
conservative patricians around him were never open to such ideas.
Similarly, in 1780, the senators Giorgio Pisani and Carlo Contarini, both
impoverished nobles, made bold proposals before the Great Council to
reform the government, restore the ancient power of the senate and curb
what had become the inflated powers of several noble families and the
Council of Ten. However, they received no real support and were thrown
into prison. There was one final attempt in 1779-80 on the part of several
patricians to shift the base of state power out of the hands of a few small,
rich families to the advantage of the larger number of poor nobles, but
many opposed ideas about the redistribution of power. Doge Paolo
Renier (r. 1779-89), the second to last doge, called such proposals a
form of agitation for conspiracy. Enlightenment ideas gained some
ground in the lagoon as a fashion, much like the wigs and corsets that
also came from France, but such ideas never took root with any
seriousness and remained more of a curiosity than a real point of
agitation from which to reform Venetian culture and society. No real
steps were taken to change way the state distributed power or the way
the government functioned. Although the doge and the Venetian
government were never as despotic as other eighteenth-century powers,
such as Frederick the Great of Prussia or Catherine the Great in Russia,
some resentment began to fester in the city among poor nobles and
commoners who saw that there was no movement towards a broader
political base. By the mid-eighteenth century especially, it became harder
and harder to ignore ideas about liberalism and democracy, and what
Venetians had once referred to as the great stability of their government
appeared more like political rigidity and inflexibility.
In some ways, the Venetian political system was already dying. While in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were at times around 2500
men in the Venetian Great Council, by 1797 it had fallen to around 1000.
Disease and declining numbers of the patrician class because of the
continued practice of just one marriage per family meant that, by the mid-
eighteenth century, there were seldom more than 600 present to vote in
the Great Council at any one time, and sometimes only half that number.
Among these remaining patrician families, only a handful of the most
powerful and wealthy actually ran the government at this time. The most
prestigious government posts in Venice had become the most expensive
so that, by the eighteenth century, only the wealthiest patricians could
afford to hold high office. According to another count, there were about
450 patrician families in the eighteenth century, half of which were rich or
very rich while the other half were often quite poor or just getting by. To
make matters worse, the nobles were increasingly uninterested in
fulfilling their civic duties. Many preferred to pay a fine for non-
participation rather than undertake their governing responsibilities. In fact
many nobles preferred to wear fashionable Parisian clothing and not
their patrician floor-length robes to better blend in with the crowd. As Jan
Morris has pointed out, the population of the city declined from 170,000
in the sixteenth century to 96,000 in 1797 (although others say the
decline was less dramatic, dropping only to 138,000 or so), though the
Hairdressers' Guild still had 852 members, an indication of where civic
interest really lay.
Historians have long described Venice in this period as a frivolous city
clearly in a period of decline, decay and decadence. It suffered, they say,
from 'a great and incurable disease'. They cite Francesco Guardi's
eighteenth-century paintings that show what it was like to see and be
seen as a public partygoer rather than a senator or commander or the
eighteenth-century Venetian painter Pietro Longhi who depicted
Venetians placidly passing their empty days in luxurious patrician
palaces instead of attending to business. The clouds gathering in the
paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo, forecast the city's doom and
announced the melancholy autumn that lay ahead.
While such claims are a bit melodramatic and clearly benefit from
hindsight, many who lived in Venice at that time also saw the writing on
the wall. Andrea Tron, for instance, a prominent and powerful politician in
the second half of the eighteenth century, noted that trade had collapsed.
Venetians, he claimed, had been,
'supplanted by foreigners who penetrate right into the bowels of our city.
We are despoiled of our substance, and not a shadow of our ancient
merchants is to be found among our citizens or our subjects. Capital is
lacking, not in the nation, but in commerce. It is used to support
effeminacy, excessive extravagance, idle spectacles, pretentious
amusements and vice, instead of supporting and increasing industry,
which is the mother of good morals, virtue, and of essential national
trade.'
In addition, many who visited Venice in the eighteenth century saw the
city as decaying and doomed. Amelot de la Houssaie, the secretary to
the French ambassador, noted the futility of Venetian neutrality and the
way in which its cumbersome government took so long to make
decisions. Other Enlightenment figures, including Voltaire and Cesare
Beccaria, had similar observations. The French philosopher Montesquieu
lamented that Venice had 'no more strength, commerce, riches or law;
only debauchery there has ... liberty.' In 1794 Giambattista Susan, a
priest from Chioggia, prophetically declared himself hopeful for the future
when men 'would be liberated from the repression of sovereigns and
would enjoy liberty and equality' as in France, where land and riches
were shared, unlike Venice, 'where our lords have in income of fifty
thousand ducats and many others have not even a piece of change.' A
sonnet about Venice written in the eighteenth century by Angelo Maria
Labia aptly proclaims:
What luxury in people of all classes
What cradle-like theatres
What symmetry in the Piazza
What regattas ...
What a Canal, what ferries
Oh, God, what women!
And yet, I don't know why, I could cry.
By 1700 Venetians had survived largely by doing the same things they
had always done and by following age-old patterns that had always
served the state well. In terms of changing political ideas and ideologies,
Venetians seemed to encounter nothing outside their city that seemed
worth emulating. They continued to support the rule of a closed caste of
patricians. In addition, much like the Venetian reluctance to get involved
in disputes between the pope and the emperor or to get involved in the
crusading movement in the Middle Ages, Venetian international policy
continued to attempt neutrality. Venice was a small state, and war was
always bad for trade. The republic remained neutral during the Thirty
Years War (1618-48) and managed to avoid the disputes of even close
neighbours in these battles. Similarly, during the War of Spanish
Succession (1701-14), when both the Bourbon and Hapsburg powers
vied for the Spanish throne as the French aimed to unite the kingdoms of
France and Spain under one monarch, war spread around Europe and
involved almost every other European power, extending even into North
America. The Venetians, however, managed to remain neutral once
again, sparing themselves the ravages of war. But while Venice survived
it was not building new ideas or a new political or economic infrastructure
to move the city into the future. Venetians simply continued to do what
they had always done. Such a view of the world was becoming outdated
in the face of the sweeping changes unfolding in the rest of Europe, and
this refusal to engage with the outside world and change would facilitate
the republic's downfall. In an age of dramatic change - of democratic and
industrial revolutions - Venice could no longer survive on the principles of
neutrality and patrician control. All this, however, is not to say that a
traditional political mentality directly caused the collapse of the Venetian
republic. The cause of this can only be attributed to one thing: the
relentless march of the charismatic and ruthless general who came from
the North and swept across Europe, altering the fate of Venice forever.
Various monuments and shards of history around the city indicate the
events and trends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a plaque
outside the church of San Stae decrees the innocence of Antonio
Foscarini; the wedding-cake façade of the seventeenth-century church of
San Moisè exemplifies the dramatic grandeur of the baroque age in
architecture, while the church of the Maddalena just off the Strada Nuova
displays strange Masonic symbols on its eighteenth-century façade. The
grandiose church of the Salute on the spit of Dorsoduro proclaims
Venetians' gratitude for surviving the plague in 1630-31, just as the
'Bridge of Sighs', designed by Antonio Contino at the beginning of the
seventeenth century and perhaps the most visited sight in all of Venice,
supposedly allows you to hear the final gasps of prisoners as they were
either thrown into their dungeons or taken to their deaths.
The monument that best captures the culture of Venice at this time,
however, is the Ca' Rezzonico on the Grand Canal. This museum offers
a reconstruction of life in a noble palazzo in eighteenth-century Venice.
While the furnishings and decorations were brought here from many
homes around the city, after conservationists gathered what was left
after the destruction wrought by the French and Austrians, the composite
effect offers a clear window on to the glittering world of Europe before
the French Revolution. Its ballroom has two elaborate chandeliers, a
trompe-l'oeil ceiling and porphyry statues of Ethiopian warriors with
vitreous eyes. Wandering into the rooms beyond, we see Flemish
tapestries, porcelain tea sets, carved and gilded furniture, wooden desks
inlaid with ivory designs and marble tables. Tiepolo ceilings depict
winged putti ascending into a seemingly infinite blue sky. A yellow
lacquered door, original to the palace, shows a man with an umbrella
riding a camel and a Chinese man sitting cross-legged, smoking an
opium pipe, under palm and bamboo trees, a final testament to Venice's
long-standing fascination with the East. Room after room contains
images of the empty and superficial practices of the elite: pastel portraits
of noblewomen with their bouquets, pale faces, and vague smiles
besides men with powdered wigs; women preparing in their dressing
rooms, or being served hot chocolate in their beds, curled up with their
dogs as their correspondence is read to them. Here are laid bare the airy
fantasies and delicate refinement of the leisured classes, living out what
were to be their last days in their world behind the walls that shielded
them from the increasing desperation of the common people and the
forces of revolution outside. We can almost smell a whiff of tobacco
coming from the study [or that of the unemptied chamber pot in the
bedroom]. Though the house is now silent, we can practically hear the
rustle of damask, the ping of the harpsichord, the clink of glasses as a
servant clears a tray and the lessons of the French teacher. The palace
offers an almost eerie snapshot of a fragile world in the moments before
its collapse, just before its treasures were torn from their owners' hands
and carted off by the forces of war, revolution and occupation that had at
last arrived in the lagoon."
"7 THE LAGOON IN THE MODERN AGE: 1797-1900
For better and for worse, Venetians had managed to keep their city, its
economy and government much the same for a remarkable thousand
years. In the nineteenth century, however, the city was forced through a
series of wrenching changes when it had to confront modernity in all its
forms. In 1797, seemingly overnight, the age-old republic collapsed with
the arrival of Napoleon and the city quickly became a mere cipher of
what it had been before. Venetians first fell under French and then
Austrian rule, suffered a degree of poverty and economic desolation like
never before, attempted a revolution to throw off their Austrian overlords
and eventually joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 all while the Industrial
Revolution was unfolding in the city. How can we - and how did
Venetians - make sense of this dizzying sequence of changes that
happened, especially by Venetian standards, in such a short period of
time?"
"The French Occupations
Approximately one month before the start of the French Revolution in
Paris, Venetians elected what turned out to be their last doge, Lodovico
Manin (r. 1789-97). A native of Friuli, Manin was the first non-Venetian to
hold this office in over 1,100 years. In fact Manin had never held any
state office before but this gave him the advantage of having no real
enemies in government and, in addition, he was spectacularly wealthy,
which greatly appealed to Venetians during this period of economic
difficulties at the end of the eighteenth century. At his coronation
ceremony he threw more than 450,000 worth of lira in coins to the crowd,
most of it from his own personal wealth.
Soon after, Venetians wilfully ignored the warnings of political change
and military aggression that arrived from beyond the Alps, even as
Napoleon and his troops arrived on the Italian peninsula in 1796. The
regions of Piedmont and Lombardy almost immediately surrendered.
Following tradition, Venetians claimed neutrality but several events soon
made Venetian isolation impossible and gave Napoleon an excuse to
move towards the city. On 9 April 1797 French soldiers were killed in an
uprising in the city of Verona on the Venetian mainland, and then on 20
April Captain Laugier of the French ship ironically named the Libérateur
d'Italie was killed when it attempted to enter the lagoon. Napoleon
immediately exploited these events and supposedly exclaimed in his
ancestral Italian that he would become 'an Attila to the Venetian state'.
By 1797 Venetians were not capable of raising or leading an army to
stop Napoleon, and he could no longer be appeased by negotiation. By
29 April French troops landed on the shores of the lagoon and, by 9 May,
Napoleon issued an ultimatum: the republic must surrender to his forces
completely, let his troops occupy the city and dissolve their government
to form a provisional democratic council. On 12 May 1797, to the sound
of French guns on the mainland, Venetian patricians cast balls into
voting urns for the last time and voted to dissolve their age-old
government. Once their votes were cast and the outcome decided,
nobles threw off their traditional robes and fled the halls of state as
quickly as possible, anxious to protect their families, property and
especially their mainland estates. Legend claims that Manin walked
calmly to his private wing of the Ducal Palace, removed his robes and
corno, or ducal hat, with dignity and resolution, and gave them to his
valet saying, 'take this, for I shall not be needing it again'.
Venice had only been seriously threatened with collapse twice before in
its entire history: in 1310 with the Querini-Tiepolo consipiracy and in
1355 by the ambitions of Doge Marin Falier. In both instances, threats to
the Venetian state were quashed in a matter of hours. The events of
1797, however, proved very different. Though boatmen and porters
issued cries of protest calling out 'Viva San Marco' in the streets, on 15
May 1797, for the first time in the history of the city, foreign troops led by
the French general Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers entered the lagoon. While
the figures cited vary, from 3,000 to 5,000 French soldiers boarded 40
longboats supplied by the Venetians and arrived in the city to parade
victoriously in the Piazza San Marco.
French forces soon occupied the lagoon's islands, forts, arsenal and
halls of government, abolishing the hereditary aristocracy of the
Venetians in favour of a new governing municipality composed of 60
members. Though Venetians were appointed to this new government,
none were consulted during its formation and no elections were held.
The new government applied Napoleon's penal and civil code to the city,
the French army garrisoned troops around the lagoon and the city of
Venice was required to pay an indemnity to the French. At this point,
however, Napoleon viewed Venice largely as a bargaining chip for other
European territories that he wanted to get his hands on and, on 17
October 1797, he signed the Treaty of Campoformido giving Venice to
the Austrian Hapsburgs in exchange for the Austrian Netherlands,
freeing him for war against England. (The Museum of Naval History in
Venice holds the silver inkstand that Napoleon used to sign this
document.) The French left Venice in January 1898 and, for eight years,
Venice was relegated to being a relatively inconsequential province of
the Hapsburg Empire until the French later defeated the Austrians at the
Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. On 26 December 1805, the Treaty of
Pressburg once again placed all Venetian territories under Napoleon; the
French returned to the city on 19 January 1806 and Venice became part
of Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy. On 3 February Napoleon's 25-year-old
stepson Eugène de Beauharnais entered the city where he was to
become viceroy and make his home.
After the arrival of the French, Lodovico Manin supposedly never went
near the Piazza San Marco or the Ducal Palace again by day and lived
out the rest of his life shuttered in his palace, the Palazzo Pesaro, on the
Grand Canal, going out only rarely for walks, accompanied only by a
servant, to the more remote parts of the city. According to one story,
during one of these walks on the Fondamente Nuova on the northern
edge of town, an impoverished young patrician girl and her mother
confronted him, protesting about their loss and hitting him with their hats
and coats, shouting every curse known to man as he slowly trailed away.
He died on 24 October 1802 - after leaving a generous 100,000 ducats
to the state to be used for the care of orphans - and is buried in the
church of the Scalzi next to the train station.
Whatever remorse Venetians felt about these dramatic changes in their
city, Napoleon held some appeal and fascination since the French
potentially brought with them the chance to experiment for the first time
with democracy and democratic institutions. Many appeared excited
about the arrival of the revolutionary ideas proclaiming political liberty
and equality. Even before the French had arrived in the Veneto,
mainland aristocrats - long excluded from Venetian political life - had
echoed the slogans of the French Revolution and hung up liberty
banners in their town squares. According to some stories, in the last
days of Carnival in 1797, some barnabotti or impoverished nobles in their
masks and costumes had approached French officials and revealed their
hatred of the republic. They described their political oppression, inability
to maintain their families and longing for the French to come and liberate
them from the tyranny of the Venetian regime. On 4 June 1797 the first
large-scale, public French celebration occurred a few weeks after the
occupation of the city. Many Venetians sang and danced in the Piazza
San Marco, including a number of prominent patrician women
supposedly in scant clothing, where they erected a 'liberty tree' to
embrace the French ideals of liberty and equality. They solemnly burned
a printed copy of the Libro d'Oro, the book that historically recorded the
names of patrician families (someone had thought to hide the original
codices), and scribbled graffiti in praise of Napoleon on the columns in
the Piazzetta. Crowds gathered in the church of San Cipriano on Murano
to dig up the ashes of Doge Pietro Gradenigo, the mind behind the
famous closing of the Great Council in 1297, and dispersed them into the
wind. There were six months between April and October 1797 when
some Venetians, committed to the idea of a new democracy, waited with
baited breath and excitement to see how the ideals of the French
Revolution would play out in the lagoon.
As in France, many changes took place in Venice to generate the new
political order. Nobles gave up their titles and were instead called
citizens. Many buildings and monuments in the city were renamed with
more appropriate revolutionary titles. For instance, Campo San Polo
became Piazza della Rivoluzione and the procuratie or archways around
the Piazza San Marco, became the Gallerie Nazionali, or the Galleria
dell'Uguaglianza ('Galleries of Equality') on the north side and the
Galleria della Libertà ('Galleries of Liberty') on the south side. Caffè
Florian was renamed Caffè della Fratellanza Patriottica or 'Caffe of the
Patriotic Brotherhood', and the Fenice Teatro was modestly renamed the
Teatro Civico. While the emblem of St Mark's lion continued to appear on
civic communications, the traditional text in the book - 'Pax tibi Marce
evangelista meus' - held by the lion's paw, was replaced with the slogan
'Rights and duties of man and citizen', to which a cheeky gondolier
supposedly exclaimed 'At last he's turned the page!'
The Emperor Napoleon eventually came to the city himself on an official
visit in November 1807. He was greeted by a spectacular series of
ceremonies, including the construction of a triumphal arch built across
the mouth of the Grand Canal near the church of Santa Lucia where he
arrived, the illumination of the Rialto and the Piazza San Marco with
thousands of torches, and a lavish series of concerts, balls, banquets
and boat races. For nine days he oversaw various inspections and held
meetings aimed at creating order and efficiency in the city. Napoleon's
favourite local architect, Giannantonio Selva (the designer of the Fenice),
was commissioned to various modernizing projects, some of which were
sorely needed. For example he designed a new civic cemetery on the
island of San Michele so that the dead did not have to be buried in the
city any longer. Napoleon also visited the workers in the arsenal,
emphasizing how important their work was in preparing to give the
English 'the lesson they deserved'. Always sensitive about his humble
Corsican background, he was shown papers in the Marciana library that
suggested his family actually descended from the ancient Roman family
of the Bona Pars, with its long and notable history in Italy before settling
on Corsica. Napoleon was clearly pleased.
However, the negative aspects of the French occupation clearly
outweighed any benefits. Try as Venetians might to accommodate and
impress the emperor, Napoleon was no fan of Venice since he thought
the city embodied the evils of the aristocratic Old Regime. He punished
Venice by making Milan the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, relegating
Venice, once the 'capital' of the Mediterranean, to a regional port.
Venetians were mortified at being subordinate to Milan, a city that for
almost three centuries was only a provincial capital. French conscription
was also devastating and virtually crippled the people of Venice and the
Veneto when many of the region's young men were sent on disastrous
campaigns in Spain and Russia. Furthermore, Napoleon's continental
blockade, intended to isolate and punish England by depriving it of trade
with Europea, devastated the Venetian economy as it deprived the city of
commerce. In addition, in a city where so many had earned their
livelihoods by working for the state government, the dramatic reduction in
public offices under the Napoleonic regime left many Venetians without a
state income, increasing poverty in the middle and upper classes. The
lagoon essentially became the military zone of an occupying power.
Napoleon and his troops demonstrated great contempt for Venice and
sought to point out its failings at every turn, though this was not always
effective. For instance, when the French arrived and flung open the cells
of the state prison - much like with the opening of the Bastille in Paris -
they could merely proclaim that they had found only four people to
liberate from Venetian tyranny, and then they were just petty criminals
and not political prisoners. One of them, in any case, was apparently so
happy to be released from prison after 22 years that he gorged himself
on wine and sweets and died four days later!
Most dreadful, however, was the degree to which the French vandalized
and pillaged the city. Napoleon ordered all the public statues and
sculptures depicting the Lion of St Mark, both in the city and on the
mainland, to be removed since they were symbols of a despotic regime.
They were added to his imperial wealth. He also shipped the four bronze
horses above the doorway of the basilica of San Marco to Paris on 7
December 1797, placing them first before the Palace of the Tuileries and
then on the Arc de Triomphe. He put the lion on top of the column in the
piazzetta on the Place des Invalides. Newspaper cartoons around
Europe depicted the lion of St Mark caught in a net or crushed beneath
the feet of a crowing Gallic cock as Napoleon's troops systematically
pillaged every corner of the city, including the mint, fleet and archives.
They hired women to pick precious stones out of their ancient settings
that they melted down. They took the diamonds from the Treasury of San
Marco to be set in the Empress Josephine's crown. In particular, in the
weeks just before handing Venice over to the Austrians in January 1798,
the French desperately tried to remove anything and everything from the
city that might benefit their Austrian enemies. Before departing the city,
they destroyed the arsenal, bashing to the ground its plaster walls and
marble staircases and, on 9 January 1798, they demolished the
Bucintoro - the doge's ceremonial barge used in his marriage to the sea -
smashing it to smithereens with axes on the island of San Giorgio
Maggiore and setting what was left on fire. In early 1798 the French left
Venice in a state of virtual anarchy and in great economic distress,
consigning the city to the Austrians like a carcass.
They continued their pillage when they returned to the city from 1806-
10. In a perhaps ironic reversal of much of Venetian history, the French
methodically removed every last item of beauty or value from the city,
literally down to the nails on which the city's paintings hung. They
ordered the closure of scores of churches, monasteries, convents and all
the Venetian scuole or confraternities, which Napoleon feared as sites of
political insurrection. He converted these buildings into prisons, hostels
and barracks or demolished them entirely. While figures vary
dramatically, approximately 80-90 churches and around 100 palaces
were razed during the French occupation. They carted off the valuable
furnishings and artworks from both private homes and religious and
charitable institutions to enrich French coffers and museums. Gold,
silver, crosses, candlesticks, goblets and crowns were melted down and
disappeared forever. Marbles, altars, paintings, relics, parquet floors,
mosaics, frescoed ceilings, stuccoed walls, antique reliefs and
inscriptions, furniture, porcelains, textiles, carpets glass, and entire
libraries were dismantled, destroyed or sequestered by the crown.
Through later auctions and resales these objects were eventually
dispersed around the world. For example, some of the doors and ceilings
in the Villa Vizcaya in Miami originally came from various Venetian villas
and palaces.
Paintings probably represented perhaps the greatest of the city's
treasures lost to French greed. Napoleon's agents, especially Peter
Edwards - a scholar, painter, art critic and ex-inspector of public painting
under the old Venetian republic - oversaw the collection and packaging
of works of art to be sold off at auction or transported to Paris or Milan.
Edwards compiled extensive inventories of the works collected. In the
first month he and his assistants catalogued over 12,000 paintings, and
eventually carted off over 25,000. The paintings of Titian, Bellini,
Veronese and Tintoretto among others were systematically removed
from the city. A sizable chunk of these treasures were sent to enrich
Milan, the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy, which needed a gallery -
the Brera - to match its new position. While the French left some
artworks in place and eventually returned some to the lagoon after
Napoleon's demise, the Louvre still proudly displays Paolo Veronese's
Marriage at Cana, stolen from the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore.
According to one estimate, perhaps extreme but nevertheless indicative,
only four per cent of the artworks that existed in the city before 1797 are
still in the city today. When Venetians were asked if the French had
stolen from Venice, the prompt response was 'bona-parte' or 'a good
amount'.
The only physical damage inflicted on the city before the arrival of
Napoleon had been caused by fires. From 1797-1815, however, the city
was virtually destroyed. By 1815, the city was devastated: impoverished,
desolate and empty with blank walls, holes gouged into the sides and
façades of palaces, and vacant rooms throughout the city's buildings that
echoed with the cold emptiness of bare shelves, walls and floors. Within
a generation after the arrival of the French, one-third of Venetian noble
families were extinct and, according to one legend, the remaining
families drew up a pact agreeing that none of their offspring would marry
so that their pedigree would die out and prevent further humiliation. In all
these ways, the city was altered more rapidly and dramatically during the
French domination than at any other point in its history."
"The Austrian Occupations
Venice was handed back and forth several times between the French
and the Austrians from 1797-1814. The first Austrian occupation
occurred after the signing of the Treaty of Campoformido in 1797 when
Napoleon gave the city to the Hapsburgs. The Austrians arrived in the
city on 18 January 1798 under the leadership of the Austrian general
Olviero von Wallis. Everyone gathered in the piazza or along the Grand
Canal, as they had for Napoleon, to witness the arrival of the Austrians,
who were similarly greeted with fireworks, dancing and an array of civic
celebrations. The city's walls were papered with announcements headed
with the symbol of the Hapsburg double-headed eagle. Some Venetians
hoped for better treatment. In particular, nobles who had fled in fear at
the arrival of the 'democratic' French now returned to their palaces in the
city. The head of every family was required to swear an oath of
allegiance to the Austrian emperor before an official notary, and 907
patricians did so in the Hall of the Great Council on 23 January 1798,
putting to rest any ideas about a democratic or popular government. The
Hapsburgs were in the city for eight years before the French retook it in
January 1806. It was not until Napoleon's defeat in Russia and his exile
on the island of Elba that the Austrians occupied the city again when
they really made their mark, fully developing Austrian institutions and
policies here. They arrived in the lagoon for the second time on 19 April
1814 after a winter siege that lasted almost five months, when many
Venetians died of starvation.
In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, The
Congress of Vienna in 1815 and its conservative leadership attempted to
set back the clock and erase European memories of democracy, equality
and revolution. The Congress of Vienna gave Venice and most of
Northern Italy to the Austrian Hapsburgs. In yet another turn of history,
public images of Napoleon were taken down around the city and
Venetians once again swore allegiance to the Austrian Emperor, Francis
II. In yet another dizzying change, Prince Reuss-Plaun, the Austrian
governor of the Venetian territory, entered the city accompanied by
celebrations, on 15 May 1814.
When the Austrians returned to Venice after over a decade of French
rule, they found the city a shadow of its former self. Austrian authorities
counted one-third of the city's inhabitants as impoverished and one-
quarter as making their living from begging. Many were starving and in
rags after the blockade, and many Venetian industries, such as the glass
and textile industries, had virtually ceased to function. According to the
historian Margaret Plant, the period from 1814-18 represented the nadir
of the history of the city. Its population was reduced to around 100,000
as a result of malnutrition, migration to the mainland and a variety of
epidemics including pellagra, a disease caused by vitamin deficiency,
from which many went insane and had to be placed in an asylum on the
island of San Servolo in the lagoon. When the Archduke Ranieri of
Austria was nominated viceroy of the Lombardo-Veneto region in 1818,
he sent a report to the Austrian emperor describing Venice as a city in
ruins, with crumbling palaces and crowds of unemployed workers and
beggars. Grass had invaded the streets and public squares of the city,
and commercial life and civic services had become virtually non-existent.
The Austrians took several steps to try and alleviate matters. The
Austrian navy revived the devastated Venetian arsenal, and Venice
regained some dignity as both Milan and Venice became seats of the
Hapsburg Viceroy. As the city once again became a regional capital, it
regained its position as a centre of administrative offices, courts and the
military. The Austrians built numerous roads to facilitate trade and
connect rural and especially alpine populations to larger cities, and they
made all of Venice, beyond just the island of San Giorgio, a free port in
February 1830. This meant that ships could come and go free of taxes in
an attempt to revive the port of Venice and re-integrate the city into the
European economy.
Nobles permanently lost any vestiges of their antique privileges and
were forced to work like everyone else. While some visitors dramatically
claimed that they had seen ex-nobles working as porters or garbage
men, in reality the vast majority developed professional practices and
became doctors or lawyers. Nuns and monks were allowed to return to
their cloisters, and monasteries and confraternities were allowed to re-
open, all of which naturally generated some sympathy for the Austrians.
As a significant symbolic gesture, in May 1815, as soon as the Austrians
returned to the city, the four bronze horses were returned to sit above the
central doorway of the basilica of San Marco. In 1816 they also brought
back the winged lion to sit once again on top of the column that faces the
bay in the piazzetta. It had been smashed into 84 pieces during its
removal to Paris but was repaired and restored under imperial
patronage. The Austrians experimented with gas lighting around the
Piazza San Marco in 1843 and in the city at large in 1863, and built the
railway bridge from 1841-46 connecting Venice to the mainland. It was
also at the beginning of the second Austrian occupation that the convent
of San Nicolò delle Lattuga and the Scuola of Sant'Antonio (both
adjacent to the church of the Frari) were established as the site of the
State Archives to contain all the documents of the fallen republic. With its
280 rooms, 50 miles (80 km) of shelves and, by some estimates, 700
million documents, the Venetian archive is the third largest in Europe,
after the Vatican and Vienna.
Many aspects of Austrian rule however remained punishing for the
Venetians. Even though the Austrians promoted Venice as a tax-free
port, any positive effects were cancelled out by the fact that the Austrians
continued to favour Trieste in the northern Adriatic as the main port of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, the Austrian penal code was
harsh and did not allow public debate or criticism of the regime or the
right of defense to those accused of crimes. Furthermore, though Italian
troops were not regularly made to fight for the Austrians they were
subject to routine conscription - the most hated legacy of French rule that
persisted under the Austrians - and often eight years of gruelling military
service, frequently in the far away lands of the sprawling Hapsburg
monarchy. Austrian military service involved such savage discipline, low
pay and harsh and unpleasant conditions that many tried to avoid it by
self-mutilation (forced hernias), smashing out their teeth and chopping off
a finger. (The central command of the Austrian military was the Palazzo
Loredan in Campo Santo Stefano. Looking closely at the main doorway
to this palace, you can still see faded German over the entrance of what
is now the Istituto Veneto.) The Austrians also brutally taxed the
Venetians who had no political authority or voice to protest about the way
they were being governed. All orders and decisions came directly from
Vienna; Venice was completely subject to a distant imperial
administration.
The Austrians enforced the support and subordination of the Venetians
in large part through extremely harsh censorship laws. Venetian printers
were ordered to submit all printed material, even single-page
advertisements, to be vetted by the authorities. The Austrian police were
in charge of the newspapers, the possession of foreign papers was
prohibited and incoming vessels were searched for foreign literature as
the Austrians maintained a constant vigilance for anything that might
question their sovereignty. Since travel abroad was also carefully
regulated and discouraged, Venetians had very little contact with liberal
ideas from abroad. Austrian control of religion and public education also
made sure that no one challenged their authority. For all these reasons,
it remains harder to characterize the Austrian than the French occupation
of the city. The Austrians were not not quite as ruthlessly exploitative as
the French, and they tried in some ways to revive the Venetian economy.
Although their rule was marked by relative peace with little political
unrest and even some prosperity, this was still a repressive regime of
policing, censorship and social immobility, as the Austrians treated the
Italians like a subject population. Historians no longer tend to vilify the
Austrians as great oppressors of the Venetians or the Italians, but they
nevertheless recognize the great limitations the Austrians placed on
Venetian growth and national self-realization.
The most lasting legacy of the Austrians, however, might be found in the
city's official cocktail, the spritz or, in Venetian, the spriss. The spritz,
made of white wine, soda water and the likes of Aperol or Campari is the
drink of the city, consumed by Venetians every day. It is said to have
many origins but most stories tie it in one way or another to the Austrian
presence in the city. According to some, the drink originated in Austria
with the Austrian Spritzer, since the Austrians liked to mix white wine and
soda water, which they brought to Venice. Others claim that the drink
originated when the Venetians began to water down the Austrians' wine,
or that the drink was officially created in Padua in the early twentieth
century with the addition of alcohol to this water-and-wine combination.
Though its origins are unclear, it is highly likely that the Austrian
presence in the city played some role in its creation and popularity, which
is no small contribution in the city that consumes thousands, if not more,
a day."
"The Revolution of 1848
The most important and influential ideologies of nineteenth-century
Europe were nationalism and liberalism, proclaiming that people with a
shared history, language, religion and culture should have the power of
political self-determination, and that suffrage should be expanded and
constitutional checks erected to prevent monarchs from abusing their
powers. These ideas motivated political organizations, protests and
revolutions around Europe throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century, primarily in the growing ranks of the middle classes. Such ideas
were first expressed in Italy under Austrian and French rule (while the
Austrians ruled North Italy, the Bourbon family ruled the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies in the south), and in Venice through Attilio and Emilio
Bandiera. These brothers worked for the Imperial Hapsburg Navy but
were interested in the ideas of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini.
They founded a secret society called Esperia in 1841 to support an
uprising against the Austrians and form an Italian state. Esperia,
however, found no real support in the city so the brothers decided to try
to launch an insurrection in the south, in Calabria, instead. They were
captured near Cosenza and shot on 25 July 1844 having failed to launch
their revolution.
The example of the Bandiera brothers illustrates that, as in the Venetian
republic before the arrival of Napoleon, there was no real tradition of
opposition and insurrection in the city, unlike other parts of Italy. With the
Venetians' unique history as an island community, nationalism initially
seems to have had less resonance than for other Italians. The
revolutionary ideas of Italian unity and Italian self-governance were
slower to take root here, and Venetians may have associated the idea of
an Italian state with a domineering government in Milan that would offer
them no real advantages or benefits. Since the Austrians had been
relatively reasonable overlords, the idea of exchanging the rule of Vienna
for that of an Italian dynasty had only limited appeal. Ideas about
nationalism, however, began to change towards the middle of the
nineteenth century. Disastrous harvests occurred in 1845-46, resulting in
high prices, poverty and the increased suffering of the poor, especially in
the countryside. The Austrians did not appear to care and did nothing to
ease unemployment or the tax burden. The middle classes in particular
felt abandoned by the Austrians and started to show signs of hostility. By
1848 national and liberal revolutions swept through almost every country
in Europe, and in Italy revolts broke out around the peninsula and
constitutions were drawn up in Naples, Piedmont, Tuscany and the
Papal States to protect the rights of the local citizens against the abuses
of their foreign overlords.
Venice and Milan initially remained cautious because of the near
presence of the Austrian army but, pulled along by the currents of
revolution, Venetian feelings of nationalism grew though they were still
constrained by the censorship laws and by the ban on reading nationalist
poems, the singing or whistling of patriotic songs and public gatherings.
Nonetheless Venetians began to articulate more fully their intolerance of
Austrian rule through various acts of resistance. They wore patriotic
ribbons, feathers and sashes, and carried patriotic handkerchiefs in the
tricolour of Italy: red, green and white. They turned their hats around as a
symbol of protest. They refused cigars made by the Austrians and
protested against the Austrian tax on tobacco by smoking plaster pipes.
They avoided the Piazza San Marco altogether, a centre of Austrian
social life and military showmanship, and refused to frequent cafés or
celebrate Carnival in the spring of 1848. Some of the most pointed
moments of patriotism and protest occurred in the Fenice Opera House
during the winter of 1847-48. During the fourth act of Verdi's Macbeth
one evening, the words of the chorus at the beginning of Act IV,
'Oppressed land of ours! You cannot have the sweet name of mother
now that you have become a tomb for your sons ... My homeland, oh my
homeland!' produced an outburst of enthusiasm as spectators threw
flowers on stage. After a particularly noisy patriotic demonstration on 6
February 1848 in celebration of the constitution being granted in Naples,
crowds threw red, white and green handkerchiefs on the stage, yelling
wildly when the Neapolitan dancer Cerrito appeared in a red, white and
green dress. Austrian troops ordered the evacuation and closure of the
theatre that night, after which Venetians refused to attend at all in protest
of foreign domination.
The city finally rose up against their Austrian overlords under the
leadership of Daniele Manin in the spring of 1848. Manin was the son of
a converted Jew. His original family name, Medina, was changed to
Manin when the brother of Lodovico Manin, the last doge of the republic,
sponsored his family's conversion. Manin was a lawyer and liberal
political activist who argued that the Venetians had a legal right to self-
governance. He was also outspoken about the need to revitalize the
Venetian economy in the decade before 1848. For instance, he had
petitioned the Austrian government to ask for trade from India to benefit
the port of Venice rather than Trieste. He did not call for full political
independence but he did support 'home rule' under the Austrian Empire
that would give Venetians more political autonomy.
On 30 December 1847 the Dalmatian poet and nationalist Niccolò
Tommaseo gave a lecture at the Istituto Veneto - a forum for intellectual
discussions - denouncing Austrian censorship. A week later Daniele
Manin issued a list of 16 demands for greater rights for all Italians under
Austrian rule. On 18 January 1848 both Tommaseo and Manin were
arrested and imprisoned indefinitely but, on 17 March, word arrived in
Venice that a revolt against the Austrian government had broken out in
Vienna. Venetians demanded the prisoners' release and the Austrian
governor Aloys Palffy acquiesced as crowds carried Manin out on their
shoulders and down the Merceria to his house in San Paternian. Manin
then set up a civic guard of Venetian forces and demanded the complete
expulsion of the Austrians from the territories of the Veneto. On 22
March the deputy commander of the arsenal, Malinovich - unpopular
among Venetians for denying promotions and raises - was murdered by
an angry mob. Manin rushed to the arsenal through the back streets of
the city and while the civic guard held back the Austrians, he managed to
distribute the contents of the city's armories to revolutionary forces.
Manin and the civic guard converged on the Riva - the main quay on the
south of the city - and marched to the Piazza San Marco shouting 'Viva
la Repubblica! Viva San Marco! Viva la Libertà!' They pulled down
Austrian flags and raised the red flags of the former republic. Manin
stood on a table in front of Caffè Florian and dramatically proclaimed a
new provisional government.
The Austrians capitulated and their troops left the lagoon as Austrian
governments in other cities on the mainland, including Milan, also fell to
revolutionary forces. The provisional government immediately began to
reverse the most hated aspects of Austrian rule. They abolished high
taxes, including those on newspapers and the right to fish, they lowered
and fixed the price of bread, established the right to a defense for all
accused of crimes and, as their first important symbolic gesture,
demolished the imperial box at the Fenice. Manin and his supporters
hoped to pick up history where it had left off: where it had been
interrupted 50 years ago by foreign domination.
The Austrians, however, were quick to retaliate. By the middle of June
they had retaken the Venetian mainland. The provisional government
under Manin sent requests for support to Paris. Manin hoped the French
would help, both because of their own revolutionary experiences and
history as a republic, but also because many Venetians felt the French
owed them an immense debt for the shocking damage they had caused
in Venice. In the end only Piedmont, Switzerlandand the United States
recognized the existence of the new republican government, but no aid
or assistance arrived from any of them. Manin and his colleagues went
so far as to draw up a list of 58 paintings, including some by Titian and
Veronese, that could be sacrificed and sold to finance and preserve
Venetian liberty, though they never went through with it. Rich and poor
alike tried to support the revolutionary government but the Venetians
were no match for the Hapsburg army.
The Austrians blockaded and besieged the city, bombarding it with
canons for weeks on end. With revolutions all over Europe petering out,
by the spring of 1849 Venice found itself alone against the Austrian
Empire. Lombardy, Tuscany and Palermo had all been retaken by
Austrian and French forces. Although the Austrian canons pointing at
Venice were not that effective since they were firing from the mainland,
and although the Austrians made a failed attempt at dropping bombs
from air balloons (that often fell on their own forces), the Venetians
quickly began to suffer from food shortages and famine. A chicken cost a
worker's weekly salary and butter was inaccessible even to the rich. The
little remaining flour, beer and wine slowly disappeared, wood for
cooking was nowhere to be found and all the city's osterie and food
markets closed by July. As the bombing continued, blasting holes in the
roofs around the city, gondoliers courageously ferried the wounded to get
medical assistance and to safety around the lagoon.
By mid-summer cholera raged through the city: the factor that decisively
defeated the Venetians. As people fled the quarters of the city where
bombs were landing, overcrowding in Castello and the safer parts of the
city helped spread the disease. By the end of July, nearly 3,000 had died
of cholera, their bodies being piled up in the square in front of the church
of San Pietro in Castello when it was no longer possible to bury them all.
In the Hotel Daniele on the Riva where the richest families took refuge
during the siege, a group of Venetians finally formed a petition on 3
August 1849 asking Manin to surrender the city. Manin must have known
long before that there was no way he could withstand the Hapsburg
Empire, but he fought tooth and nail until the bitter end until the spread of
cholera finally made Venetian resistance futile. In the depths of their
misery in the first weeks of August, Venetians accidentally discovered a
cache of fine wines and spirits that had been hidden in the palace of the
Austrian governor Palffy - 1,471 bottles of Bordeaux, champagne,
Marsala and more - but this certainly was not enough to save them.
Unable to hold out any longer, on 19 August two gondolas approached
the mainland with white flags and, three days later, the Venetians
surrendered. On 24 August 1849 the Austrian marshal Radetsky
solemnly re-entered the conquered city as Venetians watched sadly and
silently, their thin faces displaying just how much they had suffered from
the long siege. The Austrians expelled all the leading revolutionaries
from the city, including Manin and Tommaseo, but otherwise demanded
no harsh reprisals as Venice fell back under Austrian rule for the third
time. In Campo Mario Marinoni next to the Fenice theatre, there stands a
little-noticed site as a unique memorial to these dramatic years: a
building designed by the engineer Carlo Ruffini in 1869 whose façade is
decorated with the cannon balls, shells and guns used by the Austrians
in the siege of 1849.
Daniele Manin's wife died of cholera the day after the city's surrender.
He went to Paris and supported himself by giving Italian lessons. His son
Giorgio went on to fight in Garibaldi's army, seeing his father's hopes for
national revolution come to life, and living to see Venice join the Kingdom
of Italy in 1866. Lodovico Manin died in Paris in 1857, but Giorgio
returned to live out the rest of his life in his native city. Daniele Manin is
forever honoured by the Venetians, and his tomb is among the lions on
the north side of the basilica of San Marco. His remains were transported
from Paris to Venice by rail, followed by a night-time procession that
conveyed his body through the city along the Grand Canal in a gondola
decorated with bronze statues depicting the state of Italy consoling a
grieving Venice."
"Venice becomes Italian
When the Austrians returned to Venice under the command of
Radetsky, it was no surprise that they carried on as before except they
now maintained a much greater military presence after the events of
1848-9. Their troops appeared everywhere, especially in endless military
exercises held in the Piazza San Marco. They even built the Accademia
Bridge across the Grand Canal in 1854 so that their troops could quickly
rush from one side of the city to the other in an emergency. This was
only the second bridge to be built across the Grand Canal. Their main
artillery garrison was on the island of San Giorgio, where they fired a
canon every day at noon to symbolize the defeat and oppression of the
city. Annulling all the laws of Manin's provisional government, the
Austrians tried to eliminate any remaining signs of resistance and
opposition. They removed all the anti-Austrian graffiti on the walls around
the city, prohibited Venetians from carrying weapons or holding any type
of political meetings and reimposed harsh censorship laws. The
Austrians even confined the privilege of free trade to just one island, San
Giorgio. Over 4,000 Venetians went into exile to resist and avoid
Austrian rule.
Among the first foreigners to come to the city from the outside world and
witness its impoverishment and desolation first-hand were the Ruskins.
John Ruskin was an art historian who drew and catalogued much of the
art and architecture of the city, famously championing the Venetian
gothic style above what he considered to be the barbaric forms of the
Renaissance. He despised, for instance, the work of Palladio and
preferred the buildings on Torcello and other Byzantine architecture
around the city, and published his drawing, findings and opinions in his
famous The Stones of Venice (1851- 3). Ruskin is a central figure in the
history and historiography of Venetian art, but it was interestingly his
wife, Effie, who first noticed and depicted in detail the plight of the
Venetians during the third Austrian occupation. While her husband was
off sketching, she described urban life to her friends and relatives back in
England. She described how she regularly saw impoverished women,
whose sons had been conscripted into the Austrian army, selling lace to
try and earn an income. In November 1849 she noted that,
'many of the Italians here appear to have no homes at all and to be
perfectly happy. At eight o'clock in the evening when we return from
hearing the band we see them all lying packed together at the edge of
the bridges, wrapped in their immense brown cloaks and large hoods as
warm as fires. Then in the morning there are little stands on all parts of
the quay where they can get hot fish, rice soup, hot elder wine, all kinds
of fruit, cigars, and this eating al fresco goes on the whole day ... The
other day an immense fire and a large cauldron was put in the square
where they burned all the paper money issued by the Provisional
Government here while it lasted. I saw the ashes of above 2,000,000
notes.'
Despite the fact that she witnessed such painful events as Venetians
warming themselves by the fire that burned the money from their failed
revolutionary government, both Effie and John Ruskin had mainly
positive things to say about the Austrians, especially since Effie was
excited to be admitted into Austrian social circles in Venice. Other
visitors to the city, however, were more critical of the Austrian
mistreatment of the Venetians. The writer George Sand, for instance,
regularly reported the many things that the Austrians did to make
themselves hated, including urinating on her gondola.
Continued unemployment and the misery of foreign occupation served
to build feelings of nationalism more than ever. While Caffè Florian had
long been and continued to be a nationalist bastion, the Austrians
frequented Caffè Quadri across the piazza, smoking and watching their
military drills. No Venetian ever applauded when the Austrian band
played in the centre of the piazza. The Fenice once again became a
rallying point for nationalists during the occupation, as audiences threw
symbolic red, white and green bouquets on stage. Viva Verdi - standing
for Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia - became the code for defiance against
the occupation and in support of Italian unification. On 22 March 1858 -
the tenth anniversary of Manin's revolution - Venetians acknowledged
the date by dressing in red, white and green, but the Archduke
Maximilian of Austria and his wife had planned a visit on exactly that day
and as they promenaded in the piazza with the Austrian military band,
every Venetian left, and once again the Fenice closed in protest against
Austrian rule.
However, the drive for Italian national unification - the Risorgimento -
was gaining momentum up and down the peninsula. In 1859 the territory
of Piedmont in north-western Italy gained the support of the French and
they went to war with the Austrians. Other news helped maintain morale
in Venice: reports of La spedizione dei mille (Garibaldi's conquest of the
Kingdom of Two Sicilies), the inauguration in Turin on 18 February 1861
of the first national Italian parliament and the proclamation on 17 March
1861 of the Kingdom of Italy. As they saw what was happening, the
Austrians prepared for their departure, once again removing everything
they could possibly take from Venice, just as Napoleon had done many
decades before. On 19 October 1866 Italian troops entered Venice and
shortly after a plebiscite based on universal male suffrage made Venice
part of the Kingdom of Italy. On 7 November 1866 the Italian King Vittorio
Emanuele II entered the city amidst frenzied celebration, and the Fenice
opened once again for a gala evening dedicated to the new sovereign.
By December the Veneto had communal and provincial elections so that,
by January 1867, Venetians could finally begin to work out among
themselves how to fix all the things in their city that had been neglected
and broken by almost 70 years of foreign occupation."
"The Modern Economy
Though Venice's economic development was clearly hampered by the
prolonged Austrian presence in the city, industrialization had
nevertheless been developing in the city through the nineteenth century.
Factories had been opening and industries growing, reflecting the new
industrial age that began to extend right across Europe at this time. To
give just a few examples, in 1848 a tobacco-processing factory opened
in the neighbourhood of Santa Croce that eventually employed
thousands, most of whom were women. A cotton and textile factory
opened in the neighbourhood of Santa Marta in 1882, and a flourmill, the
Mulino Stucky, opened in 1884 and still today offers the best example of
industrial architecture in the lagoon. It sits monumentally on the western
end of the Giudeccca, and though flour production ended in 1954 it has
recently reopened, not surprisingly, as a luxury hotel. The Giudecca
became somewhat like a little Manchester in Venice as this island on the
southern edge of the city became the site of many factories, including a
watch factory, brewery, ice factory and textile factory (belonging to
Mariano Fortuny). By 1850 the city had approximately 50 factories that
employed thousands of Venetians, and by the beginning of the twentieth
century Venice was thoroughly industrialized. In panoramic photographs
of Venice from this time, smokestacks shot up around the city.
Growing public services also fed the Venetian economy, including the
introduction of a gas network for public lighting, an aqueduct for drinking
water and the inauguration of the first vaporetto line in 1881. A French
company won the first concession to build motorized boats to transport
passengers around the lagoon, and the first eight of them came down
the Seine and around the toe of Italy to start the first mechanical
transport service in the city. Before the arrival of vaporetti, large boats
would row passengers from the train station to San Marco, so not
surprisingly the introduction of vaporetto services provoked a wave of
protest among boatmen and gondoliers, especially around the time of the
trial run of the first vaporetto, the Regina Margherita, along the Grand
Canal. Motorized boats had connected the city with Chioggia, Fusina,
San Giuliano and Jesolo since 1872, but they functioned outside the city
and were not seen as a threat. When the regular service began on 15
September 1881 tension in the city grew and, on 31 October, the city's
boatmen began to strike and argue with the police. Resigned to the
vaporetti, however, the gondoliers went back to work within a few days
and the vaporetto found its place in the modern city. In the 1890s there
was further discussion about building a subway - an underground railway
- to connect the centre of the city with the islands of the Giudecca and
the Lido, a discussion that has resurfaced in the twenty-first century as
Venetians have grappled with the best way of moving tourists between
the city and the airport. No serious steps have ever been taken to realize
such a project.
The industry that would transfix and transform Venice forever, however,
was tourism. Tourism had played a role in the local economy for
centuries, with visitors travelling to this mythic city to see its relics and
shrines, to use its port when going on crusade, to revel in the delights of
courtesans, opera, gambling and the Carnival, and to get an education
when taking the Grand Tour. But tourism in the city took two decidedly
different turns in the nineteenth century. First, after the fall of the republic
and the waves of foreign occupation that virtually destroyed the city and
its inhabitants, Venice became the quintessential 'romantic' city. After
nationalism and liberalism, romanticism - the artistic and literary
movement that focused on the sublimity of the emotions as they
extended far beyond the rational mind - was the third main ideology of
the nineteenth century. Rejecting the intellectual focus of the age of
Enlightenment, romantic writers, composers and artists sought out and
embraced the full range of human feelings, especially those of pain and
longing. Romantics were also attracted to the foreign and the unfamiliar,
the macabre and the misunderstood. Venice by the nineteenth century
was all this and more. During the Napoleonic occupation, Venice
became a dead city and a city in ruins. Indeed, the idea that Venice was
disappearing encouraged many visitors to come and see it before it
disappeared (just like today). It was also, of course, an Eastern city, and
a once great place that had fallen into a state of desperation and at
times, despair, a place that encouraged intellectuals to think about the
function of memory. I embodied exoticism, sadness, melancholy,
nostalgia, loss, longing, decay and death. No wonder, then, that Venice
became the centre of artistic pilgrimage in the nineteenth century and a
virtual magnet for European artists and intellectuals who wanted to
embrace it body and soul.
It is impossible to list them all, but Venice attracted the likes of the poets
Lord Byron (who stayed from 1816-19) and Shelley (1818), and the
painter Turner (1818-19, 1829 and 1840). Byron was among the first to
see the city after the departure of the French, and he described meeting
the proud survivors from the Venetian republic. According to Jan Morris,
Byron swam home along the Grand Canal after a long night of revelry
while his servant carried his clothes in a gondola behind him. Other
famous visitors included Corot, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Browning, Dickens,
Henry James, Manet, Whistler, Sargent, Nietzche, Renoir, George Sand,
Walter Sickert and Wagner. The growing numbers of visitors meant that
old patrician palaces were either converted into grand hotels or rented
out. In 1822, for instance, the Palazzo Dandolo on the Riva degli
Schiavoni was refurbished to become what is still today one of the city's
most elegant and luxurious hotels, the Hotel Daniele, where both Sand
and Dickens lodged. Venice was copiously studied, painted and written
about in depth in the nineteenth century, though by this point (apart from
a handful of artists, such as the painters Giuseppe Bernardino Bisson
and Ippolito Caffi) rarely by Italians or Venetians.
The masses followed the artists and intellectuals in the second great
wave of tourism that hit Venice in the second half of the century. After
Italian Unification, almost overnight, mass travel to the city grew
exponentially. While rich tourists had begun to come to Venice in larger
numbers in the 1830s - their gaiety and wealth at odds with the misery of
the Venetians - after 1866 Venice began to attract everyone. In 1867 the
tour agency Thomas Cook began operating its first tours to Venice,
Baedeker's guidebooks helped more people navigate the city and, by
1880, the Lido - previously nothing more than a grassy sandbar with a
Jewish cemetery and a series of deserted fortresses - became a
fashionable European beach. Salt water bathing had become such a
craze in Europe that entrepreneurs established enormous bathing
platforms - huge floating docks where tourists could sun themselves and
swim - around the lagoon, one in particular moored just off the dogana in
front of San Marco. By 1845, in a city with little more than 120,000
residents, around 110,000 tourists were already visiting per year, helping
Venetians begin to find a way out of their economic plight.
Anxious to claim the admiration and fame associated with the different
types of great exhibitions that other cities had begun to enjoy (the Great
Exhibition in London being the best example), Venetians also began to
promote their city as a centre of contemporary art and culture by opening
the Venice Biennale in 1895, an avant-garde contemporary art festival
that is still one of the most prestigious venues for contemporary artists.
The city continued to express its cultural influence at an international
level later in the twentieth century by opening the Venice Film Festival in
1932 and the Theatre Festival in 1934.
Venetians also revived some of their traditional arts and crafts, largely to
profit from the growing number of visitors who wanted a local souvenir.
The city revived its reputation as a centre for glass making and, in 1859,
the Austrian entrepreneur Antonio Salviati established a productive new
glass factory on Murano. In 1871 the countess Andriana Marcello
opened a lace school under the patronage of Queen Margherita of Italy,
reviving this centuries-old tradition on the island of Burano. By 1882 it
had over 300 students who were paid to attend and develop this craft.
Though it closed at the end of the 1960s, you can still visit the school's
museum and watch the lacemakers at work. Furthermore, some of the
earliest photographs of life in the lagoon depict women with trays of
glass beads in their laps, stringing them on to threads with long needles.
These bead-stringers (called impiraresse) and lace-makers were able to
supplement their household incomes without straying far from home or
toiling in a factory. Their products were exported around the globe, and
became a curious component of European colonialism as Venetian
beads became a currency in colonial Africa, used for exchange by the
French in their colonial territories in Senegal. These women, sitting in the
courtyards with their beads and lace soon became another tourist
attraction themselves, as foreigners flocked to see what Venetians did
and how they lived."
"The Nineteenth Century Made Visible
The nineteenth century marks a great turning point in Venetian history.
Whereas the city had long maintained its separation from the rest of
Europe, both in its island location and its traditional form of government,
it had now been wrenched into the modern world and made to function
much like other European cities, sometimes willingly and sometimes
against its will. We can see how and where this happened all over the
city.
French rule dramatically changed the appearance of the Piazza San
Marco. When Napoleon's stepson arrived in the city, he immediately
decided that there was no space near the Piazza grandiose enough to
house him and his retinue. The procuratie - the buildings that lined the
north and south of the piazza - were too humble for a French viceroy
since a royal palace needed the likes of a grand staircase and a ballroom
that these existing buildings did not provide. French planners therefore
knocked down the church of San Geminiano on the western side of the
piazza on 19 May 1807, though patriotic painters such as Canaletto,
Guardi and others often continued to depict the piazza as if the church
was still present to protest against Napoleonic destruction. French
builders knocked it down to make room for the Ala Napoleonica, or
Napoleonic wing, of the piazza, which now stands opposite the basilica
on the far western side of the square. Look up at the upper frieze of this
building and you will see 14 statues of Roman emperors along the attic
storey. A statue of Napoleon was intended to grace the central position
but it was never mounted, so the gap in the centre symbolically marks
the ultimate emptiness and failure of Napoleonic schemes.
In addition, beyond the Piazza San Marco, whenever you find yourself in
a broad street or a wide-open space that is not a campo, or public
square, note that such a space was most likely carved out in the
nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century kings and leaders all over Europe
were concerned, if not obsessed, with making new, open public spaces
out of the dark, irregular and labyrinthine streets left from the Middle
Ages. These open spaces served many functions: they allowed light and
air into cities to improve public health, they offered spaces in which rulers
could show off themselves and their entourages, they permitted new
forms of public transport and they facilitated easier and quicker
movement of troops in urban centres when the use of force was
necessary. The most famous example of such urban renewal happened
in Paris under Baron von Haussmann who opened up wide avenues all
over the city in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Italy new
ideas about urban planning resulted in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan,
and the Corso Vittorio and Corso del Rinascimento in Rome. As Venice
underwent similar changes in urban planning, it became like other
nineteenth-century cities.
At the start of the century, Napoleon's main architect and civic planner,
Giannantonio Selva, organized the clearing of many spaces in the
eastern part of the city, namely the Via Eugenia (now the Via Garibaldi)
and the city's first public park adjacent to it, to the east. Like other city
planners, Selva's intention was to open up a dark, cramped, medieval
section of the city to let in more light, air and traffic. The creation of this
wide, new avenue demanded the demolition of several large churches
and religious complexes and the filling in of canals to make a wide street,
a process that similarly continued around the city into the twentieth
century. One of the churches demolished was San Antonio Abate, the
church that held the tomb of Vettor Pisani, the great hero of the War of
Chioggia in 1380. The monumental arch from the Lando Chapel was
saved and is the only remains of this church. It sits quietly back in the
shade of the gardens, a strange and displaced shard of history. Despite
what were perhaps the good intentions of Napoleonic planners,
Venetians' reactions to these changes were largely negative since, as
Franz Liszt put it when he visited the city, 'to be a Venetian is to prefer
marble to foliage, a palace to a garden'. Later, in 1867, Venetians voted
to open a wide, new artery between the churches of Santi Apostoli and
Santa Fosca - the Strada Nuova - to facilitate movement in the northern
part of the city. They later cleared areas like the Calle Larga XXII Marzo
(to the west of San Marco) and the Merceria Due Aprile (near the eastern
base of the Rialto Bridge), naming these newly opened areas after
important dates in Manin's revolution and again demolishing parts of the
medieval city centre in the process. While many Venetians welcomed
this increased pedestrianization (indeed, many of the modern
sottoporteghi or underpasses around the city were first carved out in the
nineteenth century to improve pedestrian routes), but restoration experts
and urban planners today tend to condemn these avenues because they
are out of scale with, and lacking in sympathy for, the historic nature of
the city's urban layout.
It is important to note that nineteenth-century urban planners
constructed or 'invented' buildings as much as they demolished them.
Invasive and destructive restoration projects were one of the hallmarks of
the nineteenth century. To cite just a few examples, the old Turkish
warehouse - the Fondaco dei Turchi - on the Grand Canal was badly
restored from 1858-69 by planners who hoped to make it look antique or
Turkish while largely ignoring the building's original construction, façade
and appearance (the building was originally a patrician palace and not a
Turkish warehouse). The head of this restoration, Federico Berchet,
placed triangular crenellations inspired by the mosque of Ahmad ibn
Tulun in Cairo on the façade of the restored fondaco, even though such
forms were most likely never on the original building. Similarly, in 1884,
the remains of the Palazzo Querini (where the rebels collected their
weapons before the Querini-Tiepolo conspiracy of 1310) were removed
to create a new pescheria or fish market: a long, metal-roofed, tent-like
structure that was so unpopular that it was soon destroyed to rebuild a
pescheria or fish market in a gothic style that still exists today.
Nineteenth-century architects and urban planners were famous for
attempting to construct buildings in traditional Venetian styles that
appeared authentic or traditional, but as imitations and reconstructions
they were not always entirely successful. Modern experts of restoration
and conservation have long criticized the nineteenth-century penchant
for willfully failing to preserve original structures and appearances.
Throughout the city we can find buildings that were recreated rather than
preserved in the nineteenth century. They are easy to spot (the Palazzo
Franchetti, just to the east of the Accademia Bridge, is a perfect
example) by the way in which their façades handle gothic elements in
ways that appear almost too confident, harmonious, tidy and pristine, just
as overdone plastic surgery produces a face that is wrinkle-free but
pulled too tight. In fact there is something very appealing about the faded
and dilapidated states of many of the city's venerable buildings. When
over-restored they are deprived of their history, as the restorer
Gianfranco Pertot put it, end up looking like a corpse rendered clean and
decent in a funeral parlour.
The nineteenth century was also the great epoch of memorializing the
events of the age in bronze. All around the city bronze plaques and
statues point out the tumultuous events and charismatic leaders of the
nineteenth century. For instance, Campo San Paternian was renamed
Campo Manin, and a bronze statue of Manin made by Luigi Borro in
1875 now stands in the centre of this square, not far from the doorway to
his family home. Just a short walk towards the Accademia Bridge in
Campo Santo Stefano there is the 1882 sculpture of Niccolò Tommaseo
by Francesco Barzaghi. Locals have another name for this statue that
cannot be repeated here, so the curious reader will have to ask a waiter
at one of the several surrounding cafés what it is really called ['Cagalibri',
or 'book-pooper']. At the entrance to the Napoleonic Gardens you will see
an 1885 statue of Garibaldi by Augusto Benevenuto, and another of
Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a united Italy, on the Riva degli
Schiavoni by Ettore Ferrari (1887). In a little noticed but fascinating
corner of the city behind the Piazza San Marco and the Ala Napoleonica,
an array of bronze plaques that plaster the walls, side to side,
commemorates the great Venetian heroes of the nineteenth century,
those who contributed to civic self-realization, the building of national
identity and the Risorgimento or forging of the Italian state.
Indeed, when you note the presence of these statues and plaques in
bronze around the city (sites to which we might normally not pay much
attention or even see in a city so rich in medieval and Renaissance art
and architecture), you get the sense that it was only towards the end of
the nineteenth century that Venetians could finally stop and take a breath
and remember, after all those extraordinary changes that affected the
city. These monuments clearly express the sense of public pride and
patriotism that emerged at this time. Venetians were certainly left
battered by the events of the nineteenth century, but their struggles to
become independent also left them with much to be proud of and hopeful
for, as these bronze memorials communicate.
Though not particularly visually inspiring, of all the monuments and
remains from the nineteenth century around Venice the most important
emblem of this age (and the greatest footprint of the Austrians in the city)
is undoubtedly the railway bridge built to connect the city to the
mainland. The Austrians wanted the bridge to better connect Venice to
the rest of the Hapsburg Empire. As ever, several palaces and churches
had to be destroyed to make space for the new railway station, namely
the church of Santa Lucia, which gave its name to the station. After five
years and the work of a thousand labourers, Venetians and Austrians
completed the bridge that is just over 2 miles (3.2 km) long, cheering the
first trains into the city in January 1846. (The adjacent Ponte della Libertà
for cars and pedestrians was built in 1932.)
As we can imagine, reactions to the bridge both at its opening and over
time were mixed. On the one hand the bridge increased Austrian control
over the city, and it also immediately ruined an entire class of boatmen
who had long earned their living transporting people and goods to and
from the mainland. The decline of the historic role of gondoliers and
ferrymen began with this bridge. There was, on the other hand, much to
be said in its favour. After the revolution of 1848, for instance, when
supplies had run out and Venetian trade in the Adriatic had been
completely stifled, the bridge undoubtedly facilitated the recovery of the
city by enabling food to be brought in quickly, as well as the new tourists
who helped revive and restore the Venetian economy. Ruskin protested
against the bridge by continuing to take a gondola every time he came to
the city, but Wagner was so ecstatic to see Venice for the first time from
the window of a moving train in 1852 that he threw his hat out the
window and into the water in a fit of excitement.
Appreciated or hated, the bridge represents one of the most radical
changes in the entire history of Venice. Though the city's traditional
government had fallen and the city had experienced the brutal disregard
of its own government, culture and economy as a result of foreign
occupation, in some ways these events, though devastating, remain less
significant in the overall history of the city than its permanent connection
to the mainland. Almost overnight, considering the long history of the
lagoon, Venice lost its most fundamental and defining quality as an
island to become, somewhat mundanely and drably, an extension of the
land. Of course Venetians fortunes were always tied to the land in one
way or another: the city's initial rise came from trade up the rivers on the
mainland, and its food and labour supply came in part from the nearby
terraferma. The island and the land had always been economically and
politically intertwined. Spatially and culturally, however, the island had
always been far removed from the rest of the world, even the nearby
mainland. Whereas it traditionally took over four hours to reach the city
by gondola, after 1846 it took only minutes. As we take the train into the
city today and stare out the window on to the vast expanse of the lagoon,
we cannot fail to realize the monumentality of this change. A melding of
brick, stone and mortar was erected across the waters to link the island
to the land, as if attaching it to a leash that reined it in and tethered it to
the rest of the world forever."
"8 VENICE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIFE ON WATER
At 9.53 am on 14 July 1902, the Campanile of San Marco collapsed in a
heap after showing a large crack for several weeks on the north wall.
Though debris came right up to the base of the columns of San Marco,
no one was injured or killed (except for the caretaker's cat) and the
church was spared. Sergei Diaghilev - the creator of the Ballets Russes
and a frequent visitor to Venice - liked to tell of how a Venetian ship
returned to the lagoon the day the bell tower collapsed and how, when its
captain saw that it was no longer there, he went mad. This story is most
likely apocryphal, but both the collapse of the bell tower and the shock it
generated ushered in the twentieth century. The bell tower was rebuilt to
look the same as before but, in retrospect, the collapse represented a
sign of things to come. The twentieth century would present the
inhabitants of the lagoon with a series of problems that were by no
means new but gradually became much more grave: the challenge of
managing an economy, an ecology and an existence in a lagoon where
up to hundreds of thousands of people visit every day and, in addition,
the water is rising.
After the unification of Italy, Venetian history largely came to echo the
history of the rest of the Italian peninsula much more closely. As the city
became woven into Italian politics more broadly, it tended to share more
experiences with the rest of the mainland so that the story of the city to a
large degree becomes less unique. Venetians like their Italian
neighbours on the mainland also struggled through the wars of the
twentieth century, the rise and fall of fascism, the construction of a
democratic regime and the challenges of rebuilding their economy in the
wake of the Second World War. But Venice's history diverged sharply
from the history of other Italian cities because it increasingly had to
confront the health of the lagoon, its rising waters and mass tourism. And
that raises the question, how and why have the waters of the lagoon
risen, threatening life in the city? And what is being done to protect the
way of life of the Venetians who live there today?"
"Venice and the Wars of the Twentieth Century
Before we turn to the lagoon and its ecological management, let us
briefly look at the first half of the twentieth century. Much of the fighting in
the First World War took place very close to the city, in the territories of
the old republic on the mainland to the west and north of Venice, just a
few miles away. Venetian casualties were large as the front between
Austria-Hungary and Italy was for some time along the Piave River to the
north of Venice. The Battle of the Piave in 1918 was the final, decisive
battle on the Italian front. Italian forces were victorious and the Austro-
Hungarian forces had to retreat but only after, as Italians still remark
today, the River Piave ran red with the blood of hundreds of thousands of
the dead and wounded.
In the city itself, after war was declared, the Venetians removed the four
horses of San Marco to an undisclosed location, churches and galleries
were emptied and their paintings taken to the mainland, and scaffolding
and sandbags encased the walls and windows of the Ducal Palace and
San Marco. Statues around the city were also encased in padding, and
Venetians used seaweed from the lagoon to wrap up smaller statues and
to stuff mattresses to protect valuable, fragile objects. All the canals that
led to waters outside the lagoon were blocked, and lights had to be
switched off at night causing many to fall into the canals in the dark.
Shells fell on several churches, most seriously on the church of the
Scalzi near the train station, though bombs launched on San Marco and
the Ducal Palace miraculously did not explode. From 1915-18 the city
suffered 42 air attacks and was hit by over 1,000 bombs while Venetian
gunmen fired back at Austrians planes from the rooftops. The greatest
damage during the First World War, however, occurred when tourism
evaporated. Hotels and theatres closed and, in addition, commerce
came to a halt since mines made it too dangerous to navigate the
Adriatic. Two-thirds of the population left the city. In March 1919, after
the defeat of the Central Powers, Venetians dragged prisoners of the
Austrian fleet into the bay of San Marco to be publicly viewed and
humiliated, an event that must have evoked powerful emotions for
Venetians with the memory of 70 years of Austrian rule still in the minds
of many.
In the 1920s and 1930s fascism took root in the city as it did elsewhere
in Italy. Mussolini offered the hope of revitalization and renewal that
attracted people in the wake of the First World War but, while anti-fascist
groups consolidated in other cities, Venetians seemed much more
compliant and showed less interest in resisting fascism than the
residents of Naples and Florence, for example. Hitler and Mussolini
staged their first historic meeting in Venice in June 1934, greeted and
cheered on by thousands of fascist followers. As the story goes, Hitler
was advised to travel in civilian clothing and he disembarked from his
plane on the Lido in a crumpled suit to be humiliated when he found
Mussolini in his full military regalia. After the Manifesto della Razza or
'Manifesto on Race', the first anti-Semitic legislation published on 4 July
1938, Italians and Venetians began to limit Jewish participation in
commercial and public life, and the deportation of Jews to concentration
camps began in December 1943. Of the more than 2,000 Jews who lived
in the city on the eve of the Second World War, 212 were deported and
most of the rest managed to escape or find refuge in non-Jewish homes.
Of these 212, only 15 eventually returned to Venice, and about 600 Jews
live in the lagoon today.
Once again, after war was declared, San Marco was enclosed in a cage
of wood and sand bags as Venetians transported their artistic treasures
to the mainland while the contents of the state archives were taken to a
castle near Padua. Armando Gavegnin, the most vocal partisan activist
in the city, addressed Venetians from a table top in the Caffè Florian in
the summer of 1943, but that did not stop the Germans who arrived on 8
September. They dealt harshly with any acts of resistance and the Riva
dei Sette Martiri, or 'Quay of Seven Martyrs', the waterfront to the east of
San Marco, is named after seven men who were shot by the Germans in
1944. While the city was not bombed in the Second World War, as both
sides tried to protect the city's artistic treasures, the rest of the Veneto
and the industrial zone of Marghera on the mainland was hit hard by
bombs. Venice suffered dramatically from overcrowding since so many
came to the lagoon for safety, in an almost eerie modern echo of the
founding of the city when the original inhabitants fled here from the
barbarians on the mainland. Food shortages and high prices plagued the
city, and the winter of 1944-5 was one of the coldest in memory. The city
was eventually liberated in 1945."
"Sinking and Rising: Water, Ecology and the Fate of the City
As we have seen, Venice was dramatically and laboriously founded on
water when the first Venetians decided to make their lives on the marshy
mudflats of the lagoon. Venetians have a longstanding and particular
relationship with water, with only about eight per cent of the lagoon's
surface being land. However, the waters that once protected these
refugees and later allowed medieval merchants to make the city among
the richest in the world now threatens the city's wellbeing if not its
existence. From the very beginning, Venetians faced unique challenges
to their survival, and a brief review of how some of these challenges
have been managed will help us understand how Venetians are now
confronting the threats of rising water and possibly a sinking city.
From the start and throughout their history, Venetians found many ways
to adapt to and manage their watery environment to keep it habitable,
safe and profitable. Their existence, in many ways, was a give-and-take
between the forces of water erosion and their ability to build up their
shores.
The lagoon seems to have been formed by a series of rivers as they
came down from the Alps and flowed into the Adriatic: the Adige,
Bacchiglione, Brenta, Sile and Piave all once naturally flowed into the
lagoon. However, over the course of the centuries, from the Middle Ages
and right through the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venetians
diverted the course of these rivers by digging wide canals that forced
them to enter the sea outside the lagoon. The city employed local
workers on the mainland in winter, when tides were lower and labourers
were not needed for farming, to undertake the backbreaking job of
digging these canals. This prevented the lagoon from silting up and
resulted in the creation of the lagoon as it is today: a kind of sea water
lake that is regularly cleansed and kept in motion by rising and falling
Adriatic tides.
These tides once entered the lagoon at nine points or inlets among the
barrier islands between the lagoon and the Adriatic, but in another act of
manipulation the Venetians reduced these inlets to three - the inlets that
still exist today - to better control these currents. In addition, by 1700
Venetians had filled in several of the natural channels on the lagoon floor
so that the tides, when forced through fewer channels, would flow more
quickly and scour them out to keep them cleaner for regular use as
shipping lanes. Later in the eighteenth century, from 1744-82, Venetians
built up the Murazzi, the banks of the Lido, reinforcing the Adriatic side of
the lagoon against storms and flooding by transporting massive Istrian
stones from the opposite coast of the Adriatic and piling them up to build
sea walls on the eastern side of the barrier islands of the lagoon. Such
construction represented a monumental accomplishment when you
consider that the Venetians had no access to cranes or heavy machinery
for transport, and this was one of the last great efforts of the Venetian
republic before it fell. But perhaps the most basic component of Venetian
water management concerned draining the land and sinking supports
into the mud so that inhabitants could build lasting structures on it (see
Chapter 3), a procedure still practiced today almost exactly as it was in
the early Middle Ages.
Venetians have always had to manipulate the balance of water and land
through the use of canals, the Venetians' primary means of transport
through the city. Before the construction of the Ponte degli Scalzi (the
bridge in front of the train station) and Accademia Bridge in the
nineteenth century, only one bridge, the Rialto, crossed the Grand Canal.
So to get from one place to another, and especially between distant
neighbourhoods, you had to travel by boat though a dense network of
canals. City streets were entirely inferior to water travel and, if you need
proof, just look at the main façades of Venetian palaces and their
splendid entrances that face the water and not the street. Street access
to buildings was just a secondary means of entry. In fact part of the
reason why Venetian streets often seem so illogical, which is why so
many tourists get so lost, is precisely because the city's original
inhabitants and planners never meant people to get about much on foot.
The city's canals are laid out in a much more logical fashion. Today the
gondola and the canal-facing façades of Venetian palazzi are the main
remaining evidence that water was originally the primary means of
transport.
Gondolas are one of the most curious legacies of the Venetian republic,
and their eerie black forms still make their way through the canals much
as they did hundreds of years ago, though now they are exclusively for
tourists. There are also far fewer today than there once were. According
to the sixteenth-century Venetian historian Sansovino there were as
many as 10,000 gondolas around 1500 compared with 500 today though
its design has barely changed, if at all.
The Venetian Senate recognized early on that the physical survival of
the city depended on the free movement of the tides through the canals,
and for this reason Venetians created the Magistrato alle Acque in 1501
to oversee all hydraulic matters. The city regularly maintained its network
of canals to meet both the transport and sanitary needs of the city. The
city's' vast network of canals allowed the Adriatic's tides to flow into the
city centre every day and flush out the sewage, and for this reason
magistrates typically rejected most requests to fill in canals. The fall of
the republic in 1797, however, Venetians increasingly began to fill in
canals. The invading French and the Austrians were used to living on the
mainland and wanted more pedestrian routes. Napoleon's architect
Selva, for instance, had numerous canals filled in to create gardens and
thoroughfares, namely the Via Garibaldi where a wide, paved area was
substituted for a large canal.
Canal closures also often occurred because of individual whims and
desires, as a result of landlords, for instance, no longer wanting to be
taxed and pay for dredging the canals outside their houses or because
they wanted them closed since silting made them smell. Under the
period of Austrian rule in particular, so many canals were filled in that
their combined length exceeded that of the Grand Canal; the authorities
eventually decided that it was, in fact, cheaper to close a canal than
maintain it.
From the time of the fall of the republic to the formation of the Italian
government, the roles of land and water travel reversed with more canals
being filled in and the fundamental principles underlying the construction
of Venice being rejected in favour of modernization. Some estimates
claim that close to 50 canals were closed in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, a total of 4 miles (6 km). When foreign powers moved in after
1797, the greatest rupture in the history of Venice also meant that the
Venetians' relationship to their watery environment changed. In the
nineteenth century Venice became more like a pedestrian city in a
manner that would have been once unimaginable.
You can see where these canals once existed where streets are now
called Rio Terà meaning 'canal filled-in'. You can also sometimes spot
the results of filled-in canals because the buildings will have tilted since
the filled-in canals are not as firm as the land that had been laboriously
built up and stabilized. Canal filling continued until the 1950s, but in the
late twentieth century there has been a move to excavate and reopen
some canals since many ecologists and conservationists recognize the
crucial role they play in the functioning of the city and its ecology.
This brief overview illustrates how Venetians have manipulated (and
usually protected) the lagoon to maximize their commercial capabilities,
protect their way of life and benefit from the fact that they live on water.
At times they found themselves in conflict with their watery environment
as they struggled to control it, since land and sea are always in conflict in
the unstable lagoon, though their lives have also been in harmony with
their environment as they adjusted their habits, their ways of building and
their way of doing business in order to survive here. They overcame the
obstacles associated with living on water and turned them to their
advantage.
In the twentieth century, however, dramatic changes began to take
place that permanently altered the city's ecology. Industrialists thought
that greater industrial expansion could take place on land reclaimed from
the marshes around the perimeter of the lagoon which led to the
industrial port and complex of refineries around Mestre and Marghera, on
the mainland to the west of Venice. Much of this development was
overseen and encouraged by one particular person, Count Giuseppe
Volpi, a businessman and financier who wanted to make the Venetian
mainland a massive industrial complex. Volpi had a vision of a city where
the old and the new, the historic and the modern, could come together.
He wanted to pull Venice out of its economic torpor after the First World
War. By 1939 Volpi had overseen 63 factories and plants on the
mainland that employed more than 19,000 people in various chemical,
naval, metal-refining and electrical plants. Marghera was based on the
idea that removing heavy industry to the periphery of the lagoon would
protect the historic centre of Venice from industrial development.
Venetians also realized that they needed to support industries other than
tourism, and thought that this new industrial port would serve this
purpose without threatening either tourism or the city's cultural past,
despite the fact that visually, as most readily admit, Marghera remains an
extraordinary blight on the city and its skyline.
The raison d'être behind such a massive industrial port on the shores of
the Venetian lagoon was questioned, however, after the dramatic flood of
1966 saw the tides rise in the lagoon in an unprecedented way. On 4
November 1966 the city awoke to find itself completely submerged.
There had been a high tide the day before, but nothing unusual, when a
powerful scirocco, a front of warm air coming up from North Africa, swept
in to cause the disaster. At the time when the tide would normally
recede, it continued rising to 6.3 ft (1.94 m) above the average sea level
and stayed that high for 24 hours instead of the usual six hours of high
tide. There was 3.9 ft (1.2 m) of water in the Piazza San Marco as the
waves lapped high up against the sides of the buildings. Boats ripped
away from their moorings and smashed through windows. Anything and
everything turned up in the water, including fruit and vegetables,
drowned dogs and cats, the contents of shops, documents from the
archives and endless garbage. The island of St Erasmo, to the north-
east of the city, disappeared entirely beneath the waves.
Finally, towards 9 pm, the wind died down and the water began to
recede. Venetians came out of their houses with flashlights and candles
to peer and step tentatively back out on the streets. Many recall that it
was a clear night with no moon and you could see all the stars. No one
slept. By morning they saw the full extent of the damage. Debris was
everywhere. Everywhere seawater had risen above the impervious
Istrian marble bases of buildings and seeped into the more porous and
fragile brickwork above it. A massive amount of water managed to climb
up the walls of the city through capillary action, allowing salt to crystallize
in the bricks and eventually make them disintegrate. Electricity and
phone lines were interrupted for a week. Even more dramatically, heating
tanks that had been overwhelmed by the high tide leaked their contents
into the water. The floodwater had become covered with a stinking layer
of surface oil and left a black streak over buildings and streets as it
receeded. The flood represented a dramatic turning point in the history of
the city since it forced Venetians to confront the threats of a changing
natural environment. That day, Venetians and the world started to
wonder if life in the lagoon could continue in the long term.
There was no single cause behind the dramatic flood. There had been
abundant rains combined with an atmospheric depression, strong winds
and the normal tidal pull in the Adriatic. But many argued that the city
had already been sinking as a result of industrial development. From
about 1925, Volpi's industrial complex was permitted to pump
groundwater for industrial use, deflating the water table under the lagoon
and the city. This was finally halted in the 1970s, but the full effect
remains unknown even today. Furthermore, the extra deep dredging of a
shipping canal between Marghera on the mainland and Malamocco on
the Lido - to support mainland industry - altered the city's water table.
Different sources produce different statistics but many suggest that, on
average, the city has sunk by 1.5 inches (4 cm) over the past century.
According to another measurement, the city has sunk by 9 inches (23
cm) since 1897, when measuring devices were first placed near the
church of the Salute at the end of the Grand Canal to keep track of the
'zero' mark or median sea level. Many of the city's public squares,
including the Piazza San Marco, have been raised and repaved
numerous times in an attempt to fight this sinkage.
In addition to the danger of sinking, scientists have been keeping track
of the rising sea level. You can see in museums around the city the
occasional, fascinating paintings and photographs of the lagoon when it
was frozen over. In the rare moments over the centuries when it was so
cold that the canals and lagoon became ice, these images show
Venetians skating, playing winter games and even walking out to Murano
with the peaks of the snowy Alps in the background. According to
legend, Venetians built fires on the ice and roasted oxen in the middle of
the Grand Canal. Of course, the lagoon could easily freeze over again
but, as we are painfully aware, global temperatures are rising. The
effects of global warming mean that surface temperatures around the
world are increasing, melting the world's ice caps and glaciers,
simultaneously affecting sea levels and threatening coastal communities.
Venice is most certainly at risk. When the city was founded, the sea level
was 16 ft (4.8 m) below what it is today. When John and Effie Ruskin
visited the city around 1850, the Piazza San Marco only flooded around
six or seven times a year; towards the end of the twentieth century water
has risen to be knee deep often 100 times a year. At the current rate that
the water is rising, some predict that in 2055 many of the streets and
ground floors in Venetian buildings could be under water on a daily basis
if new measures are not taken to protect the city.
By the 1980s engineers had come up with a possible solution, the
MOSE project (standing for Modulo Sperimentale Elettro Meccanico),
whose name directly recalls Moses, the parter of seas. MOSE is a series
of gates pin-jointed together at their base on the seabed in the inlets
between the lagoon and the Adriatic near Chioggia (18 gates),
Malamocco (19 gates) and the Lido (41 gates). The gates are like giant
teeth that lie flat on the lagoon floor when not in use. When extremely
high tides are predicted, they are inflated with air to rise up and rotate on
their hinges to an angle of forty-five degrees, and emerge out of the
water to create a physical barrier between the lagoon and the sea. The
gates are designed to go up when a tide rises above 3.6 ft (1.1 m) and
protect the lagoon against a tide of up to 6.5 ft (2 m). They will never
protrude more than a few feet above the water, and most of the time are
entirely invisible beneath the surface. The gates also have locks on their
sides to allow boats and fishermen to pass, if necessary, when the gates
are up. The cost? From three to five billion Euros.
From early in its planning phases, from when the prototype for the gates
was launched in 1988 and exhibits were placed in public squares around
the city describing the proposed gates and their function, Venetians and
the world at large have protested angrily and vociferously, arguing that
the gates represent a huge threat to the lagoon. MOSE's critics argued
first and foremost that the gates would present an enormous threat to the
lagoon's ecosystem since when raised they would stop the natural tidal
flux between the lagoon and the sea on which the lagoon's wildlife
depends for its survival. They also say that, based on current and
projected measurements of tides and sea levels, the gates would have to
be raised possibly over 150 times a year, maybe even day after day,
dramatically upsetting the lagoon's equilibrium since pollutants will not be
flushed out and marine life will not receive enough fresh seawater. The
continuous cleansing of the lagoon is crucial since the city, regularly
infused with enormous numbers of tourists, has no system for sewage
collection and treatment. Sewage and contaminants (unbelievably) are
regularly discharged directly into the canals of the city and into the
lagoon, and the curious visitor can witness with this by patiently
observing the pipes near the surface of the canals. If sewage is not
flushed out by the usual tidal flow, the results could be disastrous.
The opponents of MOSE argue that we need to maintain rather than
block the tidal flow, and that Venetians should build up the ground level
of the city instead of blocking the tides. In addition, many argue it simply
will not work. Tides could easily be higher than the gates, which even
their designers admit will function for only a century or so until a better,
more long-term solution is found. And if the rate of the rising sea level is
higher than predicted, the gates could quickly become obsolete. All of
which means that MOSE just buys time, and very expensive time, while
people look for a better, long-term solution. What we should be doing,
the critics argue, is look for that solution now. Many Venetians are also
angry about the vast sum allocated to MOSE when so much is needed
for social services - for day care, parks and schools, restoration and
conservation, and transport and sewage management - to support the
everyday lives of Venetians. Extremists also worry that collapsing gates
could generate a kind of tidal wave if they are let down too quickly, and
that they are therefore at risk from a terrorist plot. Massimo Cacciari, the
philosophy professor turned mayor of the city of Venice from 1993-2000
and in 2005 once proclaimed 'Veneziani, compratevi gli stivaloni', or
'Venetians, buy your tall boots', meaning that he had little faith in the
success of the project.
Those who support MOSE, by contrast argue that Venetians have
manipulated their watery environment from the very beginning by
diverting rivers, digging fishing valleys and shoring up the banks of their
islands to survive in the lagoon, and that there is little that's 'natural'
about the lagoon and its environment. The lagoon is an almost entirely
artificial creation. For decades Venetians have reconstructed salt
marshes around the lagoon and protected them from wave action by
shoring them up with wooden piles or stones, have built breakwaters
around the edge of islands to prevent wave erosion, and have brought
sand to the lagoon's barrier islands to lessen wave damage. Had the
lagoon not been regularly managed by humans, it would have filled in by
now and become dry land, a process that could have happened 500
years ago. MOSE is simply the natural and necessary continuation of
such protective action. The gates, they say, would only need to be raised
about nine or ten times a year for three to five hours a time, and would
not do any permanent damage to the ecology of the lagoon. In addition,
MOSE's supporters point out that it will employ 1,500 people a day. Like
it or not, in any case, work on the gates continues and, given the right
funding, could be operational in 2012.
In addition to the sinking city and rising waters, mass tourism also
threatens the delicate and watery environment of the lagoon. Ever since
the time of the crusades, the city has attracted artists, intellectuals and
tourists, but the degree to which tourism has exploded in the city in the
past several decades is shocking. The statistics speak for themselves.
On 1 February 2009 the BBC estimated that 15 million people visit the
city every year (80 per cent of whom come only for a day trip). Clearly,
tourism is by now the city's main industry, if not its lifeblood, since it
accounts for 70 per cent of the city's economy. So many people arriving
in the fragile city, however, also threatens its survival. On an average
summer day tourists tend to number around 30,000-40,000 and, on
special holidays, there are closer to 50,000-80,000. An influx of more
than 100,000 visitors a day brings the city to a standstill and that easily
happens, for instance, during the last days of Carnival. (An infamous
Pink Floyd concert in July 1989 saw over 200,000 visitors in one day,
and in bars around the city you can occasionally see photographs of the
piles of rubbish that they left behind.) The more people that come, the
more Venice's infrastructure and services are overwhelmed, including
rubbish collection, public transport and toilets. The dramatically
increased levels of human waste and sewage produced by such large
numbers puts incredible pressure on the lagoon, and this will only
worsen if the city does not manage to introduce a more sustainable
sewage system.
The rising tide of tourists is in stark comparison to the declining number
of native Venetians in the city. The population of Venice declined from
around 150,000 (and over 180,000 according to some accounts) in 1950
to near 60,000 today largely because Venetians moved to the mainland
in search of work and more affordable living conditions, and this needs to
be set against the daily arrival of up to 100,000 tourists. Many
businesses and offices in the city closed in the 1990s, including Alitalia
and Assicurazione Generale, a large Italian insurance firm, bringing
Venice to the lowest per capita income in the Veneto. The flight of
younger people from the lagoon has also had the collateral effect of
producing a dramatically aging population in the city with a significant
proportion of the city's inhabitants now being over 65.
As Venetians continue to grapple with their age-old questions of identity
- trying to balance modernization and the drive for economic vitality with
preserving their unique past - the city's future remains uncertain.
Meanwhile, the engineers on the MOSE project continue slowly laying
the doors to the great gates on the floor beneath the lagoon's surface
and Venetians carry on, pushing their way through tour groups to shop at
the Rialto or take their children to school. They run into one another on
the street and stop to drink a spritz and chat, an increasingly rare breed
among the tourists shopping for masks. But if history is any guide, they
do have reason to be hopeful. If their ancestors were able to beat back
the Franks and the Genoese in their own lagoon, to rule the entire
northeastern Mediterranean from Pavia to Constantinople, to survive the
Portuguese discovery of the spice route around Africa, the pillaging of
the French and the assaults and sieges of the Austrians, then surely
there is hope. As the waters rise, and in the face of confident predictions
of the city's certain demise, the world watches with baited breath in the
hope that Venetian's will save the city one again."