Episode 2 — The Long Arc

Excerpt

The History of Venice spans some two millennia, and in this first episode of the podcast I’ll try to draw some long lines from the very earliest times until the current.

Transcript

The Roman and Byzantine period

The history of Venice started long before the current city of Venice existed, and even before many people had settled in the lagoon.

In the iron-age, the people of the Veneti lived on the mainland. The Veneti were as indigenous as you could be in Europe two-three millennia ago.

The area became part of the Roman Empire with the rest of cis-alpine Gaul, and at the time of Augustus it became the Regio X Venetia ed Histria.

Venice was on the map two thousand years ago.

The Roman region became a Byzantine province, and the empire introduced a Dux — a kind of governor. This Byzantine title is the origin of the Doge of the Venetians, the head of the later Venetian state. The province was a ducatus — a duchy — which in Venetian is dogado.

The Byzantine presence in the north-east of Italy lasted several centuries. It diminished in the 700s under pressure from first Lombard and later Frankish invaders. Many people, who had been part of Byzantine rule, moved into the lagoon areas along the Adriatic coast.

After 751, the lagoon areas were the last territories in north-eastern Italy which remained loyal to Byzantium.

The mainland passed from the Lombards to the Franks, who established a Kingdom of Italy under the Carolingian Empire.

Becoming a state

The Venetians had gradually been acting more independently during the 700s, when they started electing the doge themselves.

This was one of the first steps towards a de-facto independence, but the process was long.

In 809, the Franks attacked the Venetians in the lagoon to complete their conquest of Northern Italy. The Venetians survived — barely. The Doge was forced to move his residence to the area which is now called San Marco.

The peace treaty of 812 between the Carolingian and Byzantine empires established a border, which made the lagoon Byzantine, while the mainland remained Frankish.

Venetian society, now firmly centred around the Rialto islands, remained aligned with Constantinople.

The area where the Doge settled would be the centre of Venetian government for almost a thousand years. The name “San Marco” arrived a bit later.

In 828, two Venetian merchants brought the relics of St Mark from Alexandria to Venice. This was huge. St Mark had been a travelling companion of St Peter, he was the author of one of the four gospels and the founder of the Orthodox Church of Africa. He is therefore sometimes called the Thirteenth Apostle.

Saints of the calibre of the apostles were usually in Constantinople or in Rome. Acquiring such an important protector made Venice something more than just a small community of merchants in the Upper Adriatic

The bond with Constantinople meant that Venice was Eastern Europe, not Western Europe. It would remain such well until into the 1400s. Some things wouldn’t change. For example, the court ceremonial around the doge maintained a Byzantine, eastern appearance until the end of the Republic in 1797.

Building on the eastern connection, Venice slowly became one of the main harbours for the importation of luxury goods from the east to Western Europe.

However, Venice was still a small power in the 800s and 900s. Other peoples along the Adriatic coasts therefore preyed on the Venetian ships travelling back and forth, laden with valuable merchandise.

The Venetian sources call these people pirates, and Venice fought several naval wars with them. Not all these wars were victorious, but overall the Venetians prevailed. At some point, the “Doge of the Venetians” became the “Doge of the Venetians and of the Dalmatians”.

Venice had acquired oversea territories on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, for commercial reasons.

Ascendency

While still formally under Byzantine protection, the Venetians acted ever more independently, fighting their own wars, and making treaties with the powers on the mainland, while at the same also declaring their allegiance to Byzantium whenever requested.

The Byzantine Empire went through a series of crises over the following centuries, which gradually weakened it.

This tilted the power balance in the relationship in favour of the Venetians. They extracted trade privileges in Constantinople, and became still richer.

The city of Venice grew into a real capital, with important monuments and churches. The first Basilica of San Marco was built in the mid-1000s, and both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor paid visits to Venice on those occasions.

Venice didn’t participate much in the first crusades. The crusader armies travelled mostly over land, past Constantinople, but Venice naturally tried to profit from them as much as possible, in fierce competition with Genoa.

Along with the crusades, the relationship with the Byzantine Empire started to sour, and Venice fought a successful war against the empire in the 1120s. The issue was, unsurprisingly, trade privileges in Constantinople.

Later, in the 1170s, Venice negotiated a peace between the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire, with both Pope and Emperor present in Venice, for reconciliation in the Basilica.

Venice had by the late 1100s become an important Mediterranean power, both militarily and economically.

Wealth, power and empire

The Fourth Crusade in 1204 was quite different from the earlier crusades.

Venice participated fully, with an entire navy to ferry the crusaders to the Holy Land. However, rather than going there, they went to Constantinople, which they took after a prolonged siege, and sacked.

For most of the 1200s, Constantinople was under a Latin Empire of the East, which existed for some seventy years. As spoils of the conquest, Venice got control of numerous Greek islands, including Eubea (which they called Negroponte), Crete (which is Candia in Venetian) and Corfu.

These territories became the Dominio di Mar — the Sea Dominion or the Sea State, which were governed as colonial possessions.

Venice was now one of the dominant forces in the Mediterranean, and no longer subservient to anybody. It was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in Europe.

Genoa and Venice had been fighting over trading rights and privileges in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, and in the late 1300s this conflict came to a head.

The Genovese entered the Adriatic, and took the city of Chioggia at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon. The Venetians found themselves with their back against a wall, fighting for their very survival. Naval battles took place inside the lagoon, within a short distance of the Doge’s Palace.

Venice survived this fight too, but it was close.

While Venice had established control over the Adriatic Sea, it had no such control over the mainland, which is far closer. The now very populous city of Venice also needed stable food supplies, which the lagoon alone couldn’t satisfy. The control of Dalmatia helped somewhat, but the city still depended on food supplies from the mainland.

In the 1300s the mainland closest to Venice was divided between several city states — the Duchy of Padua, the Duchy of Verona and the Patriarchy of Aquileia — while both Milan and the Habsburgs in Austria played a part in the internal struggles between these small states.

Changing geography

In the early 1400s, Venice was in a position to make a move. Within a few decades, they conquered the entire hinterland, extending into Lombardy with the cities of Bergamo and Brescia.

These new possessions became the Dominio di Terra — the Mainland Dominion or the Mainland State.

For the next many centuries, the Venetian state would have these three parts: the Dogado (the Duchy) which was the ancient lagoon part of the state; the Stato di Mar overseas dominion; and the Stato di Terra on the mainland.

Statues and paintings of the winged lion of St Mark are often depicted with the forelegs on land and the hind legs in water. The lion represents the Dogado physically dominating the sea and land states. It is an allegory of the Venetian state.

In the East, the Ottoman Turks defeated the Byzantine Empire in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople.

The loss of Constantinople cut western merchants off from the Black Sea, and the Ottoman Empire conquered the rest of the Levant. Venetian — and western European trade in general — suffered.

Luxury goods such as silk, cotton, spices, gemstones, tropical hardwood, sugar, coffee and much more, had for centuries come to Western Europe from the east, and Venice had been in the front exploiting this trade.

The reduced access to the ancient trade routes led western Europeans to search for alternate routes to the goods they well knew were behind the Turks.

The failed attempts are all forgotten, but we remember the successful ones. The journeys of Vasco da Gama and of Christopher Columbus changed the world, and indeed shaped the world we now live in.

Geography — at least as seen from a European perspective — changed dramatically.

Western Europe was the main beneficiary of the changes, and within a short time, there was a Portuguese Empire, a Spanish Empire, a French Empire, a Dutch Empire and an English Empire, none of which had been there before.

With the new trade routes in the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea lost importance. Venice, which had always been in a favourable geographical position, now sat in the entirely wrong place on the new map.

The Venetians did what they could to adapt, but they couldn’t participate or interfere with trade in the Atlantic.

The territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant put pressure on the Venetian possessions there. Over a period of 250 years, the two fought at least eight major wars, some lasting decades.

Sometimes the Ottomans prevailed, sometimes the Venetians, but all in all, Venice lost more than it won. Over the 1500s and 1600s, the Ottoman Empire slowly pushed Venice back from much of the Sea Dominion.

Venice held on to the island of Corfu. The island occupies an important position at the entry into the Adriatic Sea, which never fell under Ottoman control.

The decline in trade in the Levant was a slow process, and not evident for a long time.

If long-distance trade through Venice declined, manufacturing and other productive activities developed and prospered.

The Republic of Venice had a relatively relaxed censorship regime, and in particular, weren’t too bothered by the index of forbidden books issued by the Catholic Church. This led to a booming printing industry, and made Venice a centre of publishing in Europe.

Likewise, glasswares, textiles, medicine, furniture and many other industries continued to flourish.

The Venetian elite, which had always been mercantile, slowly changed into landed gentry. The combined effect of the conquest of the mainland and the decline in overseas trade led many wealthy families to establish great estates on the mainland.

While Venetian architecture had been Byzantine or Arab inspired in the 1200s, 1300s and 1400s, from the 1500s onwards architecture in Venice is western.

Venice, following the money, was becoming more and more western. Traditions often die hard, and much state ceremonial retained eastern Byzantine traits until the end of the republic, but the economic focus changed.

The Grand Tour was an educational journey many young men of wealthy northern European families took, often lasting years. Italy was central to such journeys, and Venice with the university of Padua was an obligatory stop.

The university of Padua is one of the oldest in Europe, and it was a renowned place of study of jurisprudence and medicine.

The Grand Tour helped spread Venetian art and produce all over Western Europe. Venice became a centre for theatre and comedy, and Venetian painters, sculptors and other artists enjoyed widespread success and fame. Names like Titian, Tintoretto, Carriera and Vivaldi are still household names.

Decline and fall

Venice fought its last war with the Ottoman Turks in 1718.

Unable to compete with the great European powers, Venice accepted that it was now a middling, albeit wealthy, European state. It therefore stayed neutral, and Venice remained outside most of the major European wars of the 1700s.

The Venetian aristocracy, still defined by laws from the Middle Ages, retained their ancient hereditary monopoly on political power, but their number was dwindling.

Theatre, music, and the arts flourished still, and the Venetian carnival, the gambling houses and the famous courtesans attracted wealthy travellers from all over Europe. Venice was still an obligatory part of the Grand Tour.

At the end of the century, the French Revolution naturally sent shivers down the spines of the Venetian aristocracy, but they were determined to remain outside those fights too.

During the wars following the revolution, Napoleon entered northern Italy with an army to contest Austrian control of Lombardy. The fighting spilled into Venetian territory, and Napoleon simply ignored the many Venetian dispatches reiterating their neutrality, as he took control of one fortified city after another.

When Napoleon reached the edges of the Venetian lagoon in 1797 — faced with an ultimatum from Napoleon — the Venetian Republic surrendered.

Venice had lost a war it was never formally a part of.

It would never regain statehood, if not for a short period in 1848–49.

Subject city

Reduced to a pawn in the games of the great European powers, Venice was shuffled back and forth between France and the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

Emperor Napoleon controlled Venice from 1805 until 1815, and he ruthlessly sacked the place to finance his wars. A third of all churches, the majority of all monasteries, and almost all charities and guilds were closed and despoiled of all valuables. Immeasurable Venetian heritage was destroyed and scattered, and much was never recovered.

With the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Venice was given to Austria.

Once an empire, Venice was now a colony, ruled by foreign people who spoke a foreign language.

Europa had been ravaged by twenty-five years of warfare, and much of the continent went through a deep recession. Austria was more interested in extracting resources from Venice than stimulating growth, so Venice became a much poorer place.

The physical shape and structure of the city changed dramatically in the 1800s.

Until the early 1800s, moving around on foot was slow and tedious. There were fewer bridges and more canals than there are now.

Anybody of any importance moved by boat, which was always faster and safer. Venice was a boating city.

The Austrians had little to no boating culture, and they had difficulty governing the place. Rather than adapting their ways of governing, to the city as it existed, they changed the city.

Dozens of canals were filled in, hundreds of bridges constructed, and houses were demolished to widen roads or create entirely new thoroughfares. The process continued after Venice became Italian, and the result is that today visitors to Venice experience a pedestrian city.

The year 1848 was a year of revolution all over Europe, and there were revolutionary movements in Vienna too. The Venetians used the occasion to expel the Austrian garrisons, and declared a republic.

Over a millennium of statehood wasn’t forgotten, but in line with the times, they wanted a more democratic republic than the old aristocratic state.

The Austrians, however, returned. After a devastating bombardment of the city, during which cholera and typhus spread, the Venetians surrendered.

This was the definitive end to the dream of Venetian independence.

Venice became Italian in 1866, after a war which was in principle between Austria and Prussia. It became Italian not by choice, but as spoils of war.

A referendum on the annexation of Venice to the Kingdom of Italy resulted in 99.99% of the votes in favour. It was obviously rigged.

In terms of governance, little changed. Venice was still ruled by outsiders, even if they spoke a more comprehensible language.

One thing that did change, was that the Italian state did more to stimulate economic growth through industrialisation.

Attempts at creating industries in Venice proper failed for the obvious reasons. In the early 1900s, a huge industrial area was created, along with a modern harbour, on the edge of the lagoon on the mainland, in an area called Marghera.

In the same period, many of the smaller municipalities, both in the lagoon and on the adjacent mainland, were joined to the municipality of Venice.

The combined effect of these two processes is at the root of many of the problems of modern Venice.

The post-war decades saw much of the youth of Venice move to the mainland for the jobs, while remaining in the extended Municipality of Venice.

They, and their children, have then inherited the flats in Venice of their parents and grandparents, but they don’t want to live there.

“Venice is beautiful, but I can’t live there,” has become the standard phrase.

There are three voters on the mainland for each voter in Venice. At the same time, a large part of the flats in Venice owned by people on the mainland, who don’t want to live in Venice.

Renting those flats to tourists is more profitable than renting to people who’d want to live in the city, which is largely why we are where we are today.

Venice has become a periphery of the mainland, and as any other resource rich periphery, it is being exploited by the centre, that is, the mainland part of the municipality.

The result is evident.

In the 1950s, Venice had a population of almost 175,000. Today, the resident population of Venice is below 50,000.

The population of Venice hasn’t been that low since the early Middle Ages.

At the same time, it is practically impossible to find an affordable flat to live in.

Tourists are willing to and able to pay a far higher rent than residents will ever be.

Consequently, every year there are about one thousand residents fewer in the city.

The local administration refuses to recognise any problems because the population on the mainland is growing at about the same rate.

Venice today is dying.

Venice is dying, and the local administration does absolutely nothing about it. On the contrary.