Excerpt
The origins of Venice go back to Roman times, long before there was a Venetian state, and a city called Venice.
Links
- Early Venice
- Invasions of Italy in Late Antiquity
- The Birthday of Venice
- Why did Venice become a republic?
Transcript
Venice was on the map two thousand years ago.
When Augustus reformed the administration of the empire, he organised the Italian peninsula into a number of regions. One of these was the Regio X Venetia ed Histria, covering the land around the upper Adriatic.
The name Venetia was derived from the people who lived there, the veneti.
The lagoon areas were far more extensive back then, than they are now. They started around Aquileia in the north, and extended south to around Ravenna, for more than two hundred kilometres. In comparison, the current Venetian lagoon is about fifty kilometres long.
Very few people lived in the lagoons, however.
The mainland was safe and fertile, with good roads and rivers, so that was where most people lived. The veneti, and Roman soldiers from the armies of Augustus, lived on the mainland, where they were mostly farmers and landowners.
The few people living in the lagoons were mostly fishermen, farmers on the scarce larger islands, and, most importantly, salt extractors. Salt was an important commodity in Antiquity — one of the few available methods of conserving food — and the shallow waters of the lagoons were perfect for salt pads.
Another use of the lagoon was for villas — summer houses — for the wealthy landowners from the mainland.
Collapse of the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire split in two in the early 300s.
The Easters Roman Empire — often called the Byzantine Empire, with its capital in Constantinople on the Bosphorus — would last for another thousand years.
The Western Roman Empire fell apart within the following two centuries.
The Italian peninsula suffered a series of invasions, which all arrived from the north-east, through the lands of the Veneti.
In the early 400s, the Visigoths invaded twice. They sacked Rome in 410.
Attila the Hun invaded Italy in 452. They devastated Aquileia, the main Roman city in the land of the Veneti.
Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed in 472. Odoacer, a general of Germanic troops serving the empire, became the new ruler of Italy, but didn’t claim the title of emperor. He sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople, accepted a Byzantine title, and therefore formal submission to the Byzantine Empire.
The city of Ravenna, some hundred kilometres south of future Venice and similarly placed in a lagoon, had been the capital of the last Roman emperors, and it became the capital of the realm of Odoacer.
Odoacer, however, didn’t behave as a subservient vassal to the Roman Empire and started encroaching on Byzantine territories in the Balkans.
Constantinople consequently dispatched Theodoric, ruler of the equally troublesome Ostrogoths, from the Balkans to Italy to displace Odoacer. Theodoric did as he was asked, but rather than handing his conquest over to Byzantium, he too established a de facto Independent kingdom of his own.
The Empire, however, wouldn’t relinquish their claim to Italy — the cradle of the Empire.
This led to renewed wars in the 540s under emperor Justinian, now between Byzantium and the Ostrogoths. These wars lasted two decades, and were fought all over Italy.
An epidemic of bubonic plague — often called the Justinian Plague — hit Europe at the same time.
Italy was not in a good place after the Gothic wars.
Byzantine Venetia
Constantinople reclaimed large parts of the Italian peninsula for the Empire, including the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, parts of the south, the areas around Naples, Rome and Ravenna, and the ancient region of Venetia et Histria.
The rest of the peninsula remained under Ostrogoth rule.
Byzantium established their local capital in Ravenna, which became the seat of a vice-emperor for Italy, called the Exarch.
The Exarchate was subdivided into a number of administrative units, each led by a Dux — which simply means a leader or a commander. Such a unit was a Ducatus.
The Byzantine title of Dux is the origin of the English word Duke, and of the Venetian Doge.
The Venetian mainland was the Ducatus Venetiae — the Duchy of Venetia — with the Dux residing in Opitergium, modern day Oderzo, on the mainland some forty kilometres north of Venice.
The Dux had both civilian and military authority.
He had to ensure that basic infrastructure, such as roads, irrigation, markets, granaries and water supply, were all functional, that the countryside was kept safe, so the farmers could work, and the landowners get richer, and, of course, defence against the marauding Lombards.
The Lombards
Marauding Lombards because if the peoples of Italy had thought for a second that after the wars with the Ostrogoths, they could now live in peace under Byzantine rule, they thought wrong.
In the late 580s, the Lombards invaded Italy, as always from the north-east, through Venetia.
The Lombards — the name derives from longobardo, the long-bearded people — would remain in Italy for two centuries. They left their name in Lombardy.
They quickly took over the remaining Ostrogoth territories, and established a series of loosely connected statelets, usually called duchies.
Throughout the 600s, the Lombards kept pushing at the Byzantine held territories.
Cities and towns in the Duchy of Venetia were taken and sacked on numerous occasions. Padua was sacked in 601, Mantua in 603, Concordia Saggitaria in 615 and Oderzo both in 642 and 667, but it is likely that not all such raids made it into the chronicles.
Migration into the lagoon
A consequence of this constant state of insecurity, was that more and more people migrated from the mainland into the lagoon areas.
We don’t know the details of the movements, but it was a slow process, which took place over several generations. It might have lasted a century or more.
One can imagine that the archaeologically well-documented lagoon villas (summer houses) of the landed elite on the mainland played a role.
When a wealthy household moved to a villa in the lagoon for the summer, with the owners came servants, slaves and a large group of people outside the household which were needed to supply and service it. They then decided to stay the winter because, well, it was safer.
Such a move could easily shift several hundred persons from the mainland into the lagoon, as their presence there shifted from seasonal to permanent.
Repeat this along more than a hundred kilometres of lagoon, with possibly hundreds of villas scattered all over, and at some point a substantial population has moved. Potentially, we’re talking about tens of thousands.
Towns and villages appeared in the lagoon, and some soon became significant.
The city of Eraclea — full name Civitas Nova Heracleiana — was founded around 640 and named after the Roman emperor at the time, Heraclius. It is now on the mainland, north of the current lagoon, but it was on a lagoon island fourteen hundred years ago.
Eraclea became the first centre of the Venetian proto-state.
Other important early settlements in the lagoon were Metamauco — probably modern day Malamocco on the Lido di Venezia — Torcello in the northern lagoon, Rialto and Olivolo in modern-day Venice, and Grado further north.
The Church in the lagoons
The Venetians were subject to the religious jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome, even if they politically belonged to the Byzantine sphere of interest.
The head of the local church was, in the later 500s, the Archbishop of Aquileia. Aquileia is on the mainland, around 100 km north of Venice.
When that city was threatened by the Lombards, the Archbishop fled to Grado, in the nearby lagoon.
Grado was later elevated to a Patriarchate.
The Lombards, however, placed one of their own in the Archbishopric of Aquileia, so there were two Patriarchs. This situation would persist until the 1400s, with the enmity deteriorating into armed conflict at times.
There was one church organisation in the Kingdom of the Lombards, and there was another in the Venetia Maritima.
Venetia Marittima
In 697, the Byzantine Ducatus Venetiae was reorganised to match the realities on the ground. The territory remaining under imperial control was mostly lagoon areas, stretching from Grado in the north, to the estuary of the Po river in the south.
It became known as Venetia Marittima, as it was only the coastal part of the original Venetia.
The Dux was now in Eraclea, as Oderzo had been lost to the Lombards.
This territory, later by the Venetians simply referred to as the Dogado (the duchy), would be the core of the future Venetian state until the end of the republic in 1797.
The year 697 is also the start of the official list of the Doges of Venice, but that doesn’t mean something like the later Republic of Venice existed then, but more about that later.
Lagoon geography
Until now, we’ve only talked about what happened outside Venetia Marittima. It’s time to look inside.
Geographically, we’re talking about a territory of around 130km by 15km, from Grado in the north to Cavarzere (Capo d’arzere or “head of the dykes”) on the River Adige in the south, adjacent to the Po estuary.
The area was almost entirely lagoons and marshes in the early Middle Ages. Today, more than half of it has silted up and become dry land, in particular the central part.
Eraclea is roughly in the middle of the area, and modern Venice in the middle of the lower half.
Lagoons like in Venice are a natural phenomenon. The rivers from the mainland carry sediments, which the prevailing north to south current in this part of the Adriatic pulls out in long lines, creating sandbanks. The word “Lido” originally meant “sandbank”.
The estuaries of the rivers remained open, which allowed the tide in the Adriatic to flow in and out of the lagoons. The lagoons are therefore mostly saltwater, like the sea, but they’re generally shallow and sheltered. As such, they were good harbours for the sailing ships of the time.
The lagoons were full of islands of varying sizes, with natural canals in-between. The current Venetian lagoon, which is around 50km by 10km, has some seventy islands. In the much larger early medieval lagoons, there must have been hundreds.
These islands were where the Roman villas existed, and where the first settlements appeared.
The most successful settlements were generally the ones on larger islands or groups of islands, on or near the rivers flowing through the lagoon from the mainland towards the sea.
The Rialto area was in such a location, as was the nearby Olivolo, and Torcello further north, and Eraclea.
Lagoon economy
What kind of economy can you develop in such a place?
On the mainland, society was agrarian. The wide Po valley is all fertile farmland. The arable land was the main means of production, so those who owned or controlled the farmland became rich, and consequently powerful.
The Venetian elite in the original mainland Ducatus Venetiae were the great landowners, like everywhere else.
In the lagoons, that had to change. An economy and a social system based on land ownership cannot function, where there is very little land to own.
So what could make you rich in the lagoons in the early Middle Ages?
The original resource of the lagoons was salt. Salt was the reason for the earliest settlements in the marshes in Roman times. It was the main food conservant, and one of the first commodities of trade.
Large parts of the lagoons were shallow enough for the easy construction of salt pads for the production of salt on a large scale. Deeds and other medieval documents attest not only to the widespread presence of salt pads in the lagoons, but also to their commercial value.
You cannot live on salt alone. It has to be traded to somebody who needs it. That somebody was primarily the food producers on the mainland, that is, the landowners. Landowners, who at the end of the 600s, to a large extent, were now Lombards.
The only other option, especially for those whose connection to the mainland had been broken by the Lombards taking their estates, was long-distance trade towards the east.
The lagoon communities were still under Byzantine control in the 600s and up to the end of the Exarchate.
Most of the people living in the lagoons, and especially the elite, were there exactly because they relied on Byzantine protection.
The geographic and political position of the lagoons gave the early Venetians a unique opportunity. They could be a commercial bridge between the west, which started on the mainland, and the east, of which they had been a part for generations.
Western Europe was rich. It was rich in fertile land, and hence people. There were ample forests, and metals in the ground. The basics were well covered.
What Western Europe didn’t have, were all those luxury items, which the early Roman elite had enjoyed: silk, cotton, ivory, tropical hardwood, gemstones, spices.
All this, and more, was available in the marketplaces in the east, in Constantinople and in the Levant, and the Venetians in the lagoons had all the possibilities of exploiting this opportunity.
They were themselves a part of the east, and they knew their way around there. The Adriatic Sea provided a fairly safe route to the east, and the lagoons were excellent harbours. Behind the lagoons were navigable rivers, such as the Po, the Adige and the Piave, which could carry the goods further west.
This is why the earliest flourishing settlements were located on the rivers crossing the lagoons. Trade in the lagoons wasn’t internal trade north-south along the lagoons, but external trade east-west across them.
Lagoon politics
Early Venetian society therefore had two major fault lines, which caused lots of internal strife.
One was the split in the elite between those who still owned estates on the mainland, and those who had embraced trade, overseas or up the rivers, as an alternative source of wealth.
The other, partially related, was between factions who wanted the lagoon community to align with the Lombards on the mainland, and those who wanted to remain embedded in the Byzantine realm.
The early doges
The official list of the doges of Venice starts in 697, with the organisation of the Venetia Marittima, but it is unlikely that this coincided with the Venetians electing the doge themselves.
The first two on the list — Paoluccio Anafesto (697–717) and Marcello Tegalliano (717–726) — are generally considered to be either mythical or appointed by the Exarch of Ravenna. Very little is known about them, except that they appear on some of the earliest lists of doges from the Middle Ages.
The first doge to be elected by the Venetians, rather than being appointed by the Byzantine Exarch, is Orso (726–737).
The reason for this change was iconoclasm.
Iconoclasm — literally the destruction of the icons — was a religious movement in the Byzantine Empire. One side saw the icons — religious images — as a gateway to the divine, while the other side perceived the icons as idolatry, which is forbidden in the Bible.
Iconoclasm played a huge role in religious, political and cultural life in Constantinople for a couple of centuries.
In 726, emperor Leo III sent orders to Italy that all icons were to be destroyed. The Pope refused, and protests and riots happened in several places. The Exarch in Ravenna was killed that year in an uprising.
Dux Orso
In Eraclea, such unrest led to the election of the local magnate Orso as Dux, without the consent of Constantinople.
We don’t know how the election happened. It could have been an armed power-grab, it could be the result of some riot, or he could have been chosen somehow by an assembly of the wealthiest citizens.
Whichever way it happened, Venetia Marittima now had a local ruler which was not an expression of Byzantine dominance.
Sometimes later, a new Exarch arrived in Ravenna to restore order.
The Lombards, however, saw an opportunity and attacked Ravenna, at some point in the mid-730s. They took the city and sacked it.
The Exarch had to run for his life, and he ran to Eraclea, in the Venetia Marittima. Orso raised a navy, and sailed with Exarch back to Ravenna, which they retook.
This event tells us that Byzantium had de facto recognised the authority of Orso to rule Venetia Marittima, even if he was not a Byzantine appointee. In fact, he received the Byzantine court title of Hypatos as a sign of recognition.
It also tells us, that the elite in Venetia Marittima did not seek independence from Constantinople.
The elite in Eraclea was predominantly pro-Byzantium, while the people of the nearby coastal harbour city Equilium (modern day Jesolo) favoured alignment with the Lombards on the mainland. Equilium was an important centre for trade, and the merchants of the city needed a good relationship with the Lombards on the mainland to sell their wares up the rivers.
In 737, this difference flared up and led to an armed conflict, in which Orso was killed.
Masters of the Militia
That Venetia Marittima was not independent was soon evident.
The Exarch in Ravenna did not allow the election or appointment of a new Dux.
Instead, he appointed a lower ranking, exclusively military, official with the title of magister militum — a master of the militia in a loose translation. The position was for one year only.
This was clearly an attempt at re-affirming imperial control over the territory and over the appointments.
The first two appointments, for 738 and 739, were of military commanders not from the lagoon areas.
For the year 740, Ravenna appointed a local. The son of Orso, Teodato, became the third magister militum of Venetia Marittima.
During the next two terms, the conflict between Eraclea and Equilium flared up again, and in particular under the fifth magister militum in 742.
Riots led to the removal of the magister militum, who was blinded and tonsured, just as was customary in Constantinople when an emperor was deposed.
The leader of this uprising was no other than Teodato, son of Dux Orso.
He was elected Dux, not in Eraclea which was pro-Byzantium, nor in Equilium, but in Metamauco — probably current Malamocco on the Lido di Venezia. This was another coastal trading city, whose merchants were as filo-Lombard as those of Equilium.
Nevertheless, Byzantium accepted his election as Dux, and bestowed the title of Hypatos on him, like his father.
For much of the reign of Teodato, which lasted until 755, he balanced on a knife’s edge between being subservient to the Byzantines, while co-existing with the Lombards on the mainland, trying to keep the internal tensions in Venetian society under control.
When in 751 the Lombards conquered Ravenna again, and killed the last Exarch, the Venetians did not come to the aid of the Byzantines.
This was the end of the Exarchate of Ravenna, and of a direct Byzantine presence in northern Italy.
Venetia Marittima was still culturally Byzantine, but they were now more on their own.
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