Excerpt
Venice became a more important state in the 1000s and 1100s, and started to build not only their trading empire, but also more equal relations to the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope in Rome.
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Building on trade
The Venetian elite were predominantly merchants, so securing international trading relations became a central function of the Venetian state.
The conquest of Dalmatia was fragile, and the Venetians fought many wars to ensure their control of the main harbours. There were several rebellions in Dalmatian cities, where the locals clearly didn’t approve of their new Venetian overlords.
However, Venice needed those cities and harbours.
Medieval ships weren’t huge, and more commercial cargo meant less space in the hold for provisions. Venice therefore needed safe harbours along the Adriatic for their ships to resupply, and to seek shelter in bad conditions.
They also needed to ensure that those harbours didn’t revert to being nests of pirates, as they had been in the past.
While it wasn’t easy — nor without setbacks — Venice more or less kept the Dalmatian coast under its control.
In 1082, the Byzantine emperor formally recognised the coast of Dalmatia as Venetian sphere of influence, and gave the doge the official title of Duke of Dalmatia.
In the 1100s, the situation had partly changed, and some cities in the upper Adriatic actively sought Venetian stewardship. Venice had become the safer bet in an uncertain world, and a bringer of wealth through their ever wider trade networks.
Closer to home, the Venetians went to war with the Duchy of Padua over the management of the shared river.
Byzantium and the Normans
Further down the Adriatic, in Southern Italy, the Normans had replaced the Saracens as the shared nuisance of both Venice and Constantinople.
The Normans had taken Apulia —- the heel of the Italian boot — and thus became a threat to Byzantine territories in Greece and Albania, and to Venetian trade in and out of the Adriatic Sea.
The relationship between Constantinople and Venice at this time looked more like an alliance of near peers, than between an empire and a marginal province.
A weakened Byzantine Empire needed the Venetian navy in the Adriatic and around Southern Italy. Constantinople still had interests and claims there, but they were under increasing pressure and the empire had fewer resources to defend them.
Venice, on the other side, needed the Byzantine Empire because that was where they did the most of their trade — the trade which was the basis for the power, wealth and status that Venice was building up.
Mutual interests — as much as shared history and culture — had Constantinople and Venice fighting shared enemies.
It was, however, a declining Byzantium and a Venice on the ascendancy.
The Crusades
The first crusade in 1099 had two purposes. One was to take back the Holy Land and Jerusalem from the Caliphate. The other was to give the Byzantine Empire a helping hand against the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor.
The mostly German and French crusader armies marched to Constantinople over land, and then across Anatolia to the Levant. The Venetians therefore didn’t have much of a role, and didn’t participate in any significant way.
The crusade was a spectacular success on the first account — on taking back the Holy Land. A series of Latin crusader kingdoms soon dominated much of the Levant, from Antioch to Jerusalem.
In terms of helping Byzantium against the Turks, the crusade was a failure, to say the least. If anything, it soured the relationship between the Byzantines and the crusaders, and, as crusaders travelled back to Western Europe, also with the western powers.
For the Venetians and their trade, the upheaval of the power balance in the Levant caused plenty of problems.
Many important harbours in the Levant were now under Latin rulers. The Venetians had frequented these harbours for centuries, and they had developed long-term relationships with the former rulers. Now they had to start all over.
Furthermore, the new Latin rulers in the crusader kingdoms had more cultural affinity with some of the main competitors of Venice, such as Genoa and Catalonia. These quickly moved in to get a larger slice of the trade.
As the antagonism between the crusader states and the Byzantine Empire grew, Venice also got caught up in that conflict.
Nevertheless, Venice tried to navigate these turbulent waters, and with some success. In 1104, Venetian troops participated in the conquest of Acre, which became the main harbour of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1110, Venice got part of the city, which they managed to keep into the 1180s.
Institutional reforms
The Venetian state wasn’t planned, neither was Venetian statehood. It just kind of happened.
Consequently, the early Venetian state was rather rudimentary. It was mostly the Doge and a few officials appointed to handle basic, practical tasks. The popular assembly — the Concio — only met whenever it was needed.
The main problem was that too much power was given to the Doge, who was chosen for life.
In 1032, after the violent deposition of yet another doge, the election of the new doge got some strings attached. He could no longer appoint a co-ruler, and thereby influence the succession. There would be no more dynasties competing for the position of doge.
The new doge also had to accept two councillors, who would partake in the decision process. These councillors were elected annually by the Concio.
This was a significant change. It introduced checks on the power of the doge, who now had to confer and agree with the two councillors before taking any major decisions.
The Concio, which until then had only met whenever there was an occasion, now had to meet annually to choose two new councillors for the doge. The hitherto rather informal assembly became an institution with regular meetings and procedures.
These changes moved the Venetian state away from being that almost elective monarchy, which it had been from the earliest times.
A proper capital
Venice was, by the early 1100s, an important European state.
It had also become one of the wealthiest cities in Europe — but it didn’t look like it yet.
Already in 1050, the reconstruction of the Basilica of St Mark started, of a much larger and more monumental church. In 1053, Pope Leo IX visited Venice to venerate St Mark.
Somehow, during the building of the new basilica, the Venetians managed to lose track of their greatest treasure, the bones of St Mark. They were miraculously relocated in 1094 for the inauguration of the basilica.
What an incredible coincidence!
Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire came to Venice for the celebrations, and old treaties on mutual trade were reconfirmed.
As discussed in the previous episode, the relics of St Mark were important to Venice for much more than simple reasons of religion. The presence of the bones of the thirteenth apostle and author of one of the gospels, conferred a status on Venice, beyond what economic weight and military might could achieve alone.
Venice needed shipyards for its navy, and had until the early 1100s relied on private shipyards to build what was needed. That proved insufficient, though.
The state navy docks — the Arsenale — were established in 1104. They would become a fixture of life in the city, and arsenalotti — workers from the Arsenale — later served as guard of honour and bodyguards for the doge and other state officials. The Arsenale is still there today, nine centuries later, now used by the Italian navy.
Later, in the mid-1100s, the process of embellishment of the entire area of St Mark’s accelerated.
Most of what is now the Piazza San Marco, belonged to the nuns of the nearby monastery of San Zaccaria. A canal — the Rio Batario — crossed the area, roughly in the middle of the current square. Beyond the canal, the nuns had an orchard with fruit trees — a brolo in Venetian.
In the 1150s, the campanile — the bell tower — was built. It would get an important role in the daily life in Venice. The bells would regulate the working hours in the navy docks, the opening and closing hours of shops, the work of prostitutes and a special bell would summon the aristocracy to the palace when needed. It is, even today, affectionately called el paròn — the master who controlled time and labour.
Sometimes around 1170, the nuns of San Zaccaria donated parts of their orchard to the state.
The canal was filled in — the first known example of the removal of a city canal — and the square almost doubled in size. The square wasn’t paved then — that wouldn’t happen for another century.
The Doge’s Palace was enlarged and the two columns on the waterfront raised, with the symbols of the two patron saints of the city and the state: St Mark and St Theodore.
The first Rialto Bridge — a wooden drawbridge crossing the Grand Canal at the narrowest point — was also from this period.
This monumentalization of the area of St Mark was the Venetian state dressing up, to make its looks match its increased wealth, power and international status.
A great capital of a great nation is more than just buildings and structures. It is also great events and ceremonial.
One such event was born in 1162.
The invasion of the Lombards, centuries earlier, had caused the patriarch of Aquileia to flee into the lagoon at Grado, within the dogado. The Lombards chose their own patriarch, and thus there were two competing patriarchs, with about twenty kilometres between them.
The head of the Catholic Church in the dogado was the Patriarch of Grado, while the Patriarchy of Aquileia developed into a semi-autonomous small state.
The two never recognised each other, and in 1162 the Patriarch of Aquileia personally led his troops in an attack on the Patriarch of Grado in the lagoon. No turning the other cheek here, thank you very much.
Venice intervened on behalf of their patriarch, and soundly defeated the Aquileian forces, and captured the patriarch himself.
He was taken to Venice, paraded through the city, and had to pay for his freedom with a promise of a tribute of a bull and twelve pigs, each year henceforth, for the carnival.
This tribute was paid each year until the end of the Republic in 1797, and the commoners of Venice feasted on the slaughtered animals during the carnival. Nobody’s going to say no to a party and free food, so this tradition soon became very popular.
Peacemaker
The new splendour of the palace, the church and the square all served Venice well, shortly after, in 1177.
From the times of Charlemagne, most of Northern Italy had formed a Kingdom of Italy, which in the 1100s was formally part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Many of the cities had, however, developed into semi-autonomous city states, of which Milan in Lombardy was the most important.
When in the early 1160s, emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to encroach on this de facto self-rule, the cities formed first the Lega Veronese, later extended into the Lega Lombarda, to fight for their autonomy.
The Lega was not an independence movement — most cities were fine with being part of the empire, which had its advantages — but they wanted to handle local matters themselves.
The Pope sided with the Lega, so this fight too became a part of the almost perpetual struggles between the Pope and the emperor.
During the conflict, the Pope excommunicated the emperor, who in return appointed an anti-pope. Both sides tried to strike at the legitimacy of the other.
The Lega won a decisive battle against an imperial army led by Barbarossa himself, at Pontida in 1176, and Barbarossa sued for terms afterwards.
The details of those terms were negotiated in Venice in 1177.
The Pope arrived in Venice in March that year, on war galleys from the navy of the Kingdom of Sicily. Barbarossa remained in Chioggia at the southern end of the lagoon, until an agreement had been reached.
In July, Barbarossa arrived at San Nicolò on the Lido, and was accompanied to St Mark’s by the doge and the patriarch on a richly decorated Venetian war galley.
The Pope and the emperor met in the Basilica of St Mark, where the final reconciliation took place.
This was a huge win for Venetian diplomacy,
First war with Byzantium
The relationship with Constantinople grew more complicated throughout the 1100s.
Venice had for generations had special trading privileges in the Byzantine Empire, which, however, usually had to be confirmed by each new emperor.
Alexios Komnenos issued an edict in 1082 giving the Venetians freedom from all taxes and tariffs, and access throughout the empire. These extended privileges were a reward for the help the Venetians had given the emperor fighting the Normans in Southern Italy.
The Venetians used the trading agreements so efficiently, that they soon completely dominated trade in Constantinople, often to the detriment of indigenous Byzantine merchants, who couldn’t compete with the Venetians’ tariff-free trade.
A sizeable Venetian population lived permanently in the imperial capital, and their wealth, the subsequent political influence — and supposedly also their arrogance — led to tension with the people of Constantinople, and at times to open conflict.
When Alexios died in 1118, his son, John (the second) Komnenos, became emperor.
The Venetians promptly sent an emissary to Constantinople to request a renewal of the edict of 1082, but John refused.
In response, Venice equipped a navy, commanded by doge Vitale Michiel, which attacked Corfu unsuccessfully, and then raided the sea around Greece for several years.
The Byzantines proved unable to stop the Venetians, and in 1126 John confirmed the privileges again, this time, however, with the addition that the Venetians in Constantinople had to behave better.
For the first time ever, Venice had extracted privileges from Constantinople by use of force. The power balance between the two was not as clear-cut any more.
Failed war with Byzantium
Manuel Komnenos inherited this uneasy co-existence when he became emperor after his father in 1146.
During the war of the Lega Lombarda, Manuel tried to win favour with other Italian nations, to have future allies against the Normans in Southern Italy.
To gain their favour, he conceded trading privileges in the empire to Pisa and Genoa.
Venice saw these concessions as an affront to their privileges, and complained.
Manuel Komnenos responded by trying to stir up trouble for Venice in Dalmatia, which, however, a Venetian navy suppressed.
At the start of 1171, the tension seemed to have subsided somewhat.
However, a fire in the Genovese quarter in Constantinople was blamed on the Venetian residents, and Manuel used it as a pretext to order the arrest of all Venetians in the empire, and the confiscation of their property.
When the news arrived in Venice, the Venetians were furious.
During the summer, Venice built a navy of a hundred and twenty ships, which commanded by doge Vitale Michiel II set out for Constantinople in the autumn.
When the navy arrived close to Athens, the Byzantine governor there offered peace negotiations. The talks dragged out, and the Venetian navy had to winter near a Greek island.
The crowded and unsanitary conditions in the navy’s winter quarters caused an epidemic, and in early spring the fleet had to return to Venice, having achieved nothing.
This debacle led to widespread dissent in Venice, and doge Vitale Michel II was murdered. He was the last doge to die as a result of a conspiracy.
The political upheaval led to more institutional reforms.
For the creation of a new doge, a Great Council of several hundred members was chosen, shunting the older popular assembly of the Concio to the side.
While the Concio had maintained the appearance that the election of the doge was by popular acclamation, with the explicit consent of the ruled, now the elite usurped that power. Only the upper class would now have any say in the creation of doges.
Venice had become a more aristocratic republic.
Massacre of the Latins
Relations to Constantinople didn’t recover while Manuel Komnenos lived.
The Venetian position in Constantinople deteriorated, and the influence of merchants from Pisa and Genoa grew.
Manuel died in 1180, but his son Alexios II was a young child. A regency of his mother and an older cousin of Alexios, who was supposedly the lover of the dowager empress, took control of Constantinople.
The regency emptied the imperial treasury, trying to curry favour with the important groups in Constantinople. The main beneficiaries were the great land-owners, mostly Byzantine, and the wealthy merchants, which were predominantly from Pisa and Genoa, even if were still many Venetians in Constantinople.
The regency government was weak and unstable, and wars, conspiracies and suppression abounded.
In 1182, a cousin of Manuel, Andronikos Komnenos, took control of the city. At his arrival, the celebrations quickly deteriorated into a pogrom against all Latins, who were rounded up and killed.
The rage was such, that the Papal delegate to Constantinople was decapitated, and his severed head dragged around through the streets.
There were an estimated sixty thousand Latins in Constantinople, mostly from Genoa, Pisa and Venice. Those, who weren’t killed or managed to flee the city in time, were sold into slavery to the Seljuk Turks.
Andronikos was deposed in 1185, and a new imperial dynasty took over.
Trade resumed because money matters, and the new rulers in Constantinople granted the Venetian renewed trading privileges in 1198, but the already strained relationship between east and west never recovered.
The Fourth Crusade
In 1202, a large Venetian fleet of over three hundred ships set out from Venice. Aboard were some fifteen hundred mostly French knights, about five thousand horses and almost thirty thousand soldiers. Their destination was the Holy Land, but they never got there.
What they did do, shook the world. Neither the Byzantine Empire nor Venice would ever be the same again.
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