Venice is said to have been founded in AD 421 by refugees from the mainland fleeing Vandal invaders; in the following century they were joined by others escaping the Lombards. They settled on the islets, mudflats and sandbanks of the lagoon, initially at Torcello and at Malamocco on the Lido, but in the early ninth century they established their capital on the safer central islands of the Rialto. Bleak and inhospitable though the lagoon must have seemed, it provided a secure sanctuary. The problem was less how to defend than how to inhabit what was largely a swamp. For centuries the inhabitants drained and dredged, diverting silt-carrying rivers from the lagoon and converting sandbanks into islands which they could build upon. The construction of a building required long wooden stakes driven into the mud covered first by clay and then by wood planking upon which a brick wall base was laid – all below the high water mark; upon these foundations the building was then completed in brick, often with stone too and sometimes with marble as well.8
In its early years Venice was governed from the exarchate of Ravenna, and its ‘dux’ (later doge) was a vassal duke of the Byzantine Empire. Later it became autonomous, but the link between Venice and Constantinople remained strong until the thirteenth century. For an empire with little commercial nous, the trade and shipping of the islanders made Venice a very useful ally; the lagoon also benefited from Byzantium’s cultural influence and from trading links with different parts of the empire. Another boon was Charlemagne’s decision, after two failed assaults on the Lido, to let Venice remain tied to the Byzantines, thereby excluding it from his kingdom of Italy and from the Holy Roman Empire. This spared the city’s inhabitants from having to choose between Guelphs and Ghibellines and, though they gave money to the Lombard League, from fighting in Italy’s interminable medieval wars. Venice had plenty of enemies in the Adriatic – Arabs, Slavs, Normans and later Turks – but its only lasting Italian foe was Genoa, and the wars between them were a result of commercial rivalry in the Levant.
Until the early fifteenth century Venice turned its back on the peninsula and concentrated initially on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Needing Istria for its stone and Dalmatia for its timber, it gained control of their coasts and, around the turn of the millennium, its doge proclaimed himself Dux Dalmatiae et Chroatiae, a title with implications that the kings of Hungary resented. In the twelfth century the Venetian fleet enabled the city to have a strong trading presence in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, but it was not until the next century that circumstances allowed it the opportunity to acquire an empire at the expense of Byzantium. Providing the knights of the Fourth Crusade with ships in 1202, Enrico Dandolo – an old, blind and ferocious doge – persuaded the crusaders (who had planned to invade Muslim Egypt) to attack and loot the Christian town of Zara and thence to capture and plunder Constantinople, the greatest city of Christendom, overthrowing the emperor in the process and transforming his empire of the east from a Greek entity into a Latin one. Although the Greeks were back in control half a century later, Byzantium was by then irretrievably weakened and in no shape to defend itself against the advance of the Ottoman Turks.
After the Crusade and the pillaging of Byzantium, Venice ceased to be simply a maritime republic with trading posts scattered across the eastern Mediterranean. It became a colonial power that acquired, together with many smaller places, Crete in the thirteenth century, Corfu and parts of the Morea in the fourteenth, Cyprus and Salonika in the fifteenth, and Cephalonia in 1500. The island of Crete was divided into six districts named after the six sestieri of Venice: San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, San Polo and Santa Croce. Yet the empire remained essentially mercantile, one of the colonies’ main purposes being to provide friendly harbours all the way home from the Black Sea. Its total population of some 400,000 people (including Venice itself) meant that it could never have been a true colonizing enterprise. The empire was less a place of settlement and plantation than a world of ships and quays, wharves and warehouses, populated mainly by shipwrights, sailors, fishermen, merchants, dockers, consuls and customs officers.
Until the later fourteenth century Venice’s chief enemies were not the Arabs or the Turks but the Genoese, who, after subduing Pisa in 1284, dominated the Tyrrhenian coast and much of the western Mediterranean. Genoa was as great a maritime power as Venice, maintaining trading posts as far away as Syria and the Black Sea. Although the navies of the two republics were well matched, the Genoese unexpectedly lost the most crucial of their battles, at Chioggia in 1380, when their ships besieging Venice were blockaded by a returning Venetian fleet and destroyed. Genoa’s main disadvantage as a state was its chronic factionalism, the most persistent in all Italy: the city suffered fourteen revolutionary outbreaks in the first half of the fourteenth century. Yet political weakness did not prevent the Genoese from becoming the world’s principal bankers in the late sixteenth century, taking over from Lyon and Antwerp as the financial centre of western Europe.
It was the lagoon that saved Venice from the Genoese, as it had protected the city from earlier invaders. In the ninth century Charlemagne’s son Pepin ran aground on the sandbanks and lost his ships, an Arab fleet proved incapable of negotiating the currents, and a Magyar army that was invincible on land launched a disastrous attack in coracles. Innocuous though it may seem to visitors, the lagoon is a labyrinth of currents and shoals, of mudflats and sandbanks, of narrow channels and unexpected shallows, both a haven for its occupants and a hazard for outsiders. One of the smallest islands is called Buel del Lovo (‘wolf-gut’ in Venetian) because its navigable channel is so tortuous.
A trip down the lagoon to the fishing ports of Chioggia and Pellestrina takes you away from the touristic isles of Burano and Torcello and shows you how human settlement has changed over the centuries and in some cases disappeared altogether. The earliest buildings on most of the smaller islands are convents and monasteries, and many ruins remain, much vandalized since the suppression of the religious orders. One island was set aside for plague victims, another for lunatics, a third for quarantine. Many others were appropriated for military purposes, usually by the French and Austrian occupiers of the nineteenth century: then they were used for barracks, hospitals, munitions factories and gunpowder magazines. More recently, some have acquired new roles such as a fish cannery, a university, an archaeological school and a sailing marina.9
The voyage also reminds you how real and important the maritime life still is to the economy and livelihood of the lagoon. Among the lines of fishing vessels, the boats of pilots and coastguards are constantly busy; beyond the island fortresses, oil tankers ply their way to and from the refinery at Porto Marghera (destroying as they do so the delicate ecological balance of the lagoon). Everywhere you notice the maintenance operations, the boatyards and the dry-docks, the incessant dredging, the re-siting and replacing of the bricole and other posts. You become aware of how the lagoon is defended against the Adriatic when you see the great sea-walls of Pellestrina, erected to stop the waves from breaking in, sweeping away the port and swamping the other islands.
Knowledge of the lagoon allied to supreme nautical skills enabled Venice to become a great sea-power. Its galleys, rowed very largely by free men not slaves, were the Mediterranean’s most effective fighting ships until the sixteenth century. By contrast with Genoa, where business was an affair of individuals, the Venetian state directed much of the city’s economic life: it regulated trade, organized convoys for its merchant marine and ran the great shipbuilding yards of the Arsenale, which was the largest factory in the west, capable in a crisis of constructing several galleys a week. The yards’ workforce of about 1,500 men, the arsenalotti, were well rewarded for their skills, each receiving annually, among other benefits, 500 litres of wine. In the early sixteenth century Venice was the richest and most splendid city in Christian Europe, its wealth generated by trade and the production of vast quantities of silk and glass: its largest employer, with a thousand looms, was the silk industry.
By that
time Venice had already acquired its reputation as a state offering its citizens political stability and personal freedom. It never experienced a successful revolt or conspiracy, although in the fourteenth century there had been one failed plot and one insane attempt by a doge to set up a monarchy. The Venetian political system was convoluted but, as Italians from the mainland admitted, it functioned. Power was diffused, its concentration prevented by councils and committees and electoral procedures so obscure and complicated that it is hard to see how they were dreamed up. The head of state was an elected leader, the doge, the most fettered ruler in Italy. Beneath him and his six councillors (the minor consiglio) were the body of ministers (the collegio), which formed the executive, and the largely autonomous, often maligned Council of Ten (consiglio dei dieci), responsible for the security of the state. A senate of some 200 mainly old men provided the legislature and below that was the Great Council (the maggior consiglio), which effectively contained the ruling class, consisting eventually of more than 2,000 patricians. Often criticized as a narrow oligarchy that closed its membership in 1297, the Great Council did in fact continue to admit newcomers, though fewer than before. It was in any case the largest elective body in Italy, and its meetings required the construction of the vast Sala in the Doge’s Palace decorated with the largest oil painting in the world – Tintoretto’s version of paradise – and a host of lesser works depicting the acmatic moments of Venetian glory.
The factionalism of medieval Italy had forced communes to appoint a podestà, a nobleman from outside, to act as an impartial administrator. Yet as the historian Mario Ascheri has pointed out, Venice did not need a podestà because centuries earlier it had created a tradition for its head of state that guaranteed impartiality.10 The doges lived grandly, housed in splendour in the palace that people often choose as their favourite building in the world. Yet most of them were figureheads who could do little without the consent of their councillors and their law-officers. Moreover, the post required numerous sacrifices: its holders could not trade or accept gifts or own property outside the republic; nor could they abdicate or leave Venice if they wanted to; they were not even allowed to talk to foreign ambassadors on their own. As for their relations, Venice was so unlike the rest of Italy that a doge’s son, far from being able to succeed his father, was not allowed to vote or hold office – or even marry a foreigner without the permission of the Great Council.
The doges were nearly always old men – when he started the job in 1521 Antonio Grimani was eighty-seven – elected for life in the most labyrinthine of processes. The youngest member of the Great Council would go out into the Piazza San Marco and choose the first lad he saw as a ballot boy. The boy would then pick thirty names of the council from an urn, a number which would be reduced by lot to nine members who now went into conclave to vote for forty, again reduced by lot, this time to twelve, who had to choose twenty-five, brought back down by lot to nine, who each had seven votes to choose forty-five, who were then reduced to the eleven who finally chose the forty-five who elected the doge.11 Even at the end of all this, matters might not be straightforward. The election of Marino, the second Grimani doge, required seventy-one ballots.
Venice possessed the most harmonious society in Italy. Outsiders noticed that its citizens were more united than in other places and that they shared a community spirit, a belief in the common good, that was absent in Florence or Genoa. There was little violence or street-fighting, which would have been difficult in any case because of the canals. Venice had class but not class conflict. Aristocrats did not parade about with armed retinues, and fishermen and arsenalotti did not riot in the streets. Men of the middle classes did not agitate strenuously to become part of the ruling oligarchy: they made their fortunes and spent much of them on the buildings of their confraternities, the magnificent scuole which they adorned with cycles of paintings by such artists as Carpaccio, Tintoretto and the elder Tiepolo. In Venice political discontent was defused by the opportunities of sea trade in which all classes participated. At home the patrician and the gondolier lived in very different conditions but they were judged by the same system: there were no legal privileges for nobles. Civil and criminal jurisdiction were regarded as on the whole fair, and women came to enjoy legal rights rarely found elsewhere: husbands were prevented from being in the same room when their wives were making their wills.12 As for the foreign propaganda about dungeons groaning with political prisoners, this was a libel. Despite Bonaparte’s taunts about tyranny, his occupying army was unable to find a single political prisoner in the whole of the republic.
Patricians liked to think that, of Venice’s twenty-four founding families, half of them were descended from early Christians and could thus call themselves ‘apostolic’.13 Yet, pretentious though they may have been about their status, they seldom behaved like patricians in the rest of Europe. Since they did not own country estates before their city acquired a mainland, they did not have a tradition of living in castles or hunting in forests. Nor did they despise trade or administration: they happily accepted their roles as shippers, merchants and councillors. Portraits in other states show nobles wearing bright and sometimes garish costumes, but in Venice patricians wore plain black robes except when they held office. Ostentation was largely confined to the façades of their palazzi, whether on the Grand Canal or in humbler districts where many of them lived; sumptuary laws limited the amount of silk, brocade or tapestries they could use for interior decoration.
Venice had the least feudal of aristocracies: no baronial courts or feudal contracts, no private armies, no pompous coats of arms and no primogeniture. The patricians did not even have titles, although in the nineteenth century the Austrian rulers invited them to become counts; their only official distinction was the initials NH and ND (Nobil Homo and Nobile Donna) after their names. Renowned for its tradition of public service and conscientious paternalism, the patriciate identified itself with the state to an extent not easy to find among the baronage of European monarchies. It saw itself not as a collection of individuals but as a body administering a state that actively discouraged individualism; indeed, Venetian history reveals a shorter list of charismatic figures than anywhere else except perhaps Siena. In their lifetimes doges were seldom painted in heroic manner, and their deaths went uncommemorated by the state: the great tombs in Santi Giovanni e Paolo had to be erected at the expense of their families. The cult of the individual was so weak in Venice that before 1866, when the city was joined to Italy, it contained only one statue in a public place – and then only because its erection was the condition of a legacy from a wealthy condottiere, Bartolemeo Colleoni.§
Venice was celebrated for religious and racial tolerance, though its citizens were not of course devoid of religious fervour: they stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria and the relics of other saints as well; they were serious about the cause of church reform; and they reacted to plagues by building the great churches of the Salute and the Redentore. They even had the unusual habit of canonizing Old Testament figures by naming such churches as San Giobbe (Job) and San Moisè (Moses) in their honour. Yet, as James Morris has observed, there is ‘no sense of priestly power’ in Venice.14 Religion was important, but its position was subordinate to the state: the doges, not the bishops, were its protectors. The people, as they put it themselves, were Venetians first and Christians afterwards, an attitude that naturally provoked the anger of various popes, who periodically placed the city under an interdict. Yet the Venetians were rarely cowed by such actions and in 1606 they simply ignored an excommunication of their senate and an interdict imposed upon their state because the republic had decided that no property could be given to the clergy and no churches or monasteries could be founded without its consent. They had also had the temerity to arrest two priests and charge them with common crimes without handing them over to an ecclesiastical court. Upon receiving the interdict, Venice ordered its priests to carry on their work as normal, which they did, thereby forcing the Borg
hese pope, Paul V, to back down and lift the ban. The pontiff was not greatly consoled by his opponents’ concession over the clerical miscreants, who were handed over to the French ambassador.
People of different faiths were permitted to celebrate their religion in Venice, and Protestantism too was regarded for a while with sympathy; a considerable number of patricians were potential converts in the sixteenth century. For a few years the republic managed to resist papal demands to set up a local inquisition but in 1547 it acquiesced. As inquisitions go, the Venetian version was relatively relaxed, partly because the state insisted that the inquisitors should include one of its own nobles. When Paolo Veronese completed his enormous picture of The Last Supper, the Inquisition summoned him to explain how he could have depicted so sacred an event in such a gaudy and materialistic manner: the diners, clad in velvet, silk and ermine, are feasting in an ambience of table cloths, marble floors and Corinthian pillars; decanters, jugs and wineskins testify that a lot of drinking is going on – as does the presence of two drunk German halberdiers – and the pagan, hedonistic note is reinforced by the presence of dogs, a cat, a jester with a parrot, and women leaning out of a nearby house to enjoy the spectacle. Tolerant though they were prepared to be, the inquisitors were unimpressed by Veronese’s claim that painters could take the same liberties as poets and madmen and they ordered him to make alterations. In the event the artist made no changes at all except to change the title by inscribing on two pilasters a line from St Luke’s Gospel: ‘And Levi made him [Jesus] a great feast in his own house’ – the event that provoked the Pharisees to admonish Jesus for eating and drinking with publicans and sinners. Veronese’s Renaissance diners do not look very like publicans but they look even less like disciples.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 13