History of Venice

Tag: French Domination

  • Subject city (1800–today)

    Subject city (1800–today)

    Chapter 7 — Subject city

    The war that led to the fall of the Republic of Venice finished, but other wars followed. After the several wars of the French Revolution came the Napoleonic wars.

    All in all, Europe was at war almost continuously for twenty-five years, until 1815.

    The sack of Venice

    Venice was under Austrian rule from 1798 to 1805, when Napoleon returned to Venice — this time as emperor.

    Napoleon annexed Venice to his Kingdom of Italy, and he formally took over the Doge’s Palace as his royal palace. He made wide-ranging changes and reforms in all parts of society, but more than anything, he had wars to fight and wars cost money.

    Venice was still a place full of riches, so Napoleon started extracting as much as he could.

    Despite all the upheavals of ceasing to be a state, there were still many very wealthy families in Venice, including many from the old Venetian aristocracy.

    Napoleon mostly let them be.

    His victims were foremost churches, monasteries and the Venetian schools.

    Of some two hundred churches, Napoleon had about seventy deconsecrated and stripped of everything of value. Many of the church buildings were later demolished, others reverted to secular uses, and some still stand empty and abandoned to this day.

    The vast majority of monasteries were closed, and their buildings, land and properties sold.

    The part of Venetian society which was worst hit by Napoleon’s sackings, were the schools, which is Venice meant charities, guilds and various confraternities. Many of these institutions had accumulated substantial fortunes over the centuries. Napoleon had them all shut down and their wealth confiscated. Of some three hundred such institutions, only a couple were allowed to reform with some of their wealth remaining.

    Paintings, statues, tapestries, furniture were taken to France, or simply sold off to raise money for the wars.

    Austrian takeover

    The wars ended when Napoleon lost at Waterloo in 1815.

    The peace was organised at the Congress of Vienna, where the victorious European powers tried to restore almost everything as it had been before the French Revolution.

    Almost everything.

    The Republic of Venice had always been a thorn in the side of the European monarchies, and the Venetian state was not restored.

    Any immediate hope of returning independent died in 1815.

    Venice was now simply a pawn in the game of the great powers, and what the Venetians wanted was of little importance to them.

    The city and the Venetian mainland territories all went to Austria, which had a strategic interest in getting naval access to the Mediterranean.

    After over a thousand years of independence, Venice was now ruled by one of its old arch enemies. The city was run by foreigners who spoke another language.

    The Austrian-Hungarian Empire organised the Northern Italian territories into a Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, in a personal union with Austria-Hungary, and capital in Milan.

    The Austrian rulers made France return many identifiable works of art, which had been looted during the reign of Napoleon. Most of these objects had belonged to legal entities, which no longer existed, such as the numerous schools, monasteries and churches Napoleon had shut down. Many of these artworks were put in the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts — the Galleria dell’Accademia.

    The Kingdom of Lombardia-Venetia under Austrian rule.
    The Kingdom of Lombardia-Venetia under Austrian rule.

    The shape of the city

    Venice had always been a boating city, where the canals were more important than the alleyways. The canals were there first, and Venetian culture was predominantly a boating culture. The city therefore had rather few bridges.

    The Austrians came from a mostly landlocked empire, and they didn’t have the experience needed to run a place like Venice.

    They were, however, in a position of power, so rather than try to adjust themselves to the city as it was, they set out adapting the city to themselves.

    They filled in canals, sometimes simply to save money on maintenance, and built bridges all over the city. Some thirty to forty canals disappeared over the 1800s, and the number of bridges in the city went from around a hundred, to near four hundred.

    Venice gradually became a pedestrian city during the Austrian period, something it had never been before.

    The process accelerated when the Austrians built a railroad between Milan and Venice, which brought in numerous visitors. To get them from the station towards the Rialto and St Mark areas, many canals were filled in, and buildings demolished to create the Strada Nova — a road only outsiders would ever need.

    The Republic of San Marco

    The years 1848 and 1849 were a period of revolutions and major change, in almost every European nation.

    In early 1848, there were two dominant factions in Venice. One, mostly consisting of descendants of the old nobility and the wealthiest citizens, wanted to use the upheavals to extract concessions from the Austrians, in terms of a constitution and more self-rule. The other faction wanted the Austrians gone and the creation of an independent democratic republic. The dream of independence wasn’t dead yet.

    The second faction was initially victorious. They forced the Austrians to leave without a fight, and declared an independent democratic Republic of San Marco. The president was Daniele Manin, who had the same surname as the last Doge of Venice, even though they were not related.

    The Austrians, however, quickly got their act together. They regrouped their troops at Trieste, and they were already on the offensive in the spring of 1848.

    The leadership of the Republic of San Marco hadn’t prioritised the military organisation, and they weren’t ready. Many of the mainland cities — the subject cities of the Republic of Venice — didn’t really trust the Venetians, and several opted for annexation to Piedmont as the best alternative to Austrian rule.

    Throughout the summer of 1848, the Austrians reconquered most of the mainland.

    The Republic of San Marco also sought help from Piedmont, and even decided that annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont was acceptable, but the king didn’t send much help. The interests of Sardinia-Piedmont were more in Lombardy than in the Veneto.

    The Venetian republicans defended the city and the lagoon — the ancient dogado — but overwhelming Austrian force and the spread of cholera in the city forced them to surrender.

    A famous poem, written at the time, goes:

    Il morbo infuria
    Il pan ci manca
    Sul ponte sventola
    Bandiera bianca!

    which in my quick translation is:

    Disease all around
    We’re out of bread
    On the bridge it flies
    The white banner!

    The bridge mentioned is the railroad bridge the Austrians had built shortly before. At the middle of the bridge it crosses a small island, where two cannons stand, pointing towards the mainland. That is a little known monument to the defenders of Venice of 1849.

    In Italy, the movements in Milan and Venice — together with a war between the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont and Austria — was, in hindsight, called the First War of Independence.

    If the Austrian iron hand over Venice had worn a velvet glove before 1848, that glove came off after 1849. The period following the rebellion were not happy years in Venice.

    The opposition to the Austrians — mostly in exile in Turin and Paris after 1849 — gave up on Venetian independence and put their hopes in Italian unification under the leadership of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

    Becoming Italian

    The Second War of Independence in 1859–60 led to a united Italy under Sardinia-Piedmont — soon after renamed the Kingdom of Italy — but without Venice.

    The Austrian ruled Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was broken up. Lombardy became a part of the Kingdom of Italy, while Venice remained under the Austrians.

    Venice and the mainland only became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. The Kingdom of Italy joined a war between Prussia and Austria, managed to lose every battle, but Prussia won, and Italy got Venice.

    Austria had wanted Venice for the Arsenale and the navy traditions. The Austrian navy in the Adriatic was created based on the Venetian navy. All the Austrian navy officers were educated in Venice, and large parts of the crews of the navy ships came from Venice and old Venetian dominions in the Adriatic.

    Ironically, the last battle of a “Venetian” navy — sailing under the Austrian flag at the Battle of Lissa in 1866 — was against Italy.

    Modernisation

    The Venetian economy had languished under Austrian rule, and especially after 1849.

    Under Italian rule, there were several attempts at modernisation.

    An aqueduct brought fresh water from the Dolomites to Venice for the first time ever, which was an enormous improvement over the ancient rain water cisterns which can still be seen all over the city.

    The first motorised public transport is from the same time. They’re called vaporetti — which means little steamships — because that was what they were in the beginning.

    Several industrial projects started in Venice proper. The building of an industrial grain mill on the Giudecca island is now a hotel, while the metalworks behind the Frari church are all gone, leaving just a few place names behind.

    The first Biennale, in 1895, was another — more successful — attempt at putting Venice back on the map.

    The city of Venice hadn’t really grown since the late 1500s, but around the turn of the 1900s, several lagoon areas near the city were reclaimed. The quarter of Sant’Elena to the east, and a large area at San Gerolamo in the north-west, were added to the city.

    Many of the abandoned gardens of ancient palaces and suppressed monasteries were built up, with modern housing, educational institutions and whatnot.

    Fascism

    The Great War didn’t do much to Venice.

    However, in its wake, the liberal democracy of the Kingdom of Italy gave way to fascism, and the modernisation of Venice went into overdrive.

    The railroad bridge was flanked by a car bridge, and an entire Venetian neighbourhood was razed to the ground to create the modern marvel which is the Piazzale Roma — cars, buses, giant parking houses and everything which is alien to Venice. The neighbourhood church is now a warehouse for the public transport company.

    Motorboats replaced the traditional rowed boats, but the city canals were too narrow and winding for fast modern traffic. More ancient houses were demolished to create new, straighter, wider, faster canals. The results of these “improvements” should be evident to anybody who has visited the city.

    What happened to the people who once lived there? Fascism doesn’t appreciate dissent, so if people didn’t shut up and obey, the regime had some very nice thugs to teach them to shut up and obey.

    Most of these people ended up in modern housing on the mainland, whether they wanted to or not.

    If industrialisation hadn’t worked in Venice — for the obvious reasons of transport costs — it would have to work on the mainland. The harbour of Venice had to follow.

    Consequently, in the 1920s, plans were drawn up to create several large industrial areas on the edge of the lagoon, with a huge modern harbour. This is what today is known as Marghera.

    Along with these extensions of Venice, as an economic entity, onto the mainland, half a dozen small municipalities in the lagoon, and another half a dozen on the mainland were adjoined to the municipality of Venice. The municipality, which in the 1800s had been just the city of Venice, now covered half the lagoon and extended over ten kilometres into the mainland, including the new industrial expansion zones.

    Work started on these projects in the 1930s, but the second world war stalled much of it, and the full effect of the changes would only become evident after the war.

    The rise of the mainland

    Like with the first world war, the second didn’t change much in Venice.

    Afterwards, Italy became a republic — the monarchy was too tainted by fascism to survive — and it became a part of the West.

    Italy was one of the founding members of the European Coal and Steel Union, and later of the European Economic Community, the forerunners of the European Union of today.

    Marshall aid and European economic integration made the industrial projects on the mainland interesting again. Venice once more had an advantageous geographical position, but now the infrastructure would be on the mainland.

    The first parts of the industrial area of Marghera started working in the 1950s, and in the 1960s, the mainland harbour was connected to the Adriatic by a deep artificial canal which cut across the Venetian lagoon.

    This canal, made for short term economic gain without any proper understanding of the hydrology of the lagoon, is the main cause of the many floodings Venice has suffered since.

    The current airport opened in 1961.

    The Dream of Suburbia

    A large industrial area with a major harbour needed plenty of workers.

    Many of them came from Venice.

    As the autarchy of fascism and the deprivations of the war were replaced by economic growth and a hope for a better future, the dream for many young men and women became one of Suburbia.

    For a young man, it was to get a good paying, stable job, so he could get a mortgage, buy a house, marry and start a family. If there was room in the budget for a small car, so much the better. And, of course, an annual family holiday somewhere.

    This dream of stability and relative affluence wasn’t just Venetian. It was common in much of Western Europe.

    For Venetian young men, that dream often started with a job in industry in Marghera, and in the 1950s and -60s, most of a generation moved to the mainland where housing was more affordable and more modern, where you could have a car and send your kids to play football.

    The Venetian children of the 1960s and -70s largely grew up on the mainland, in Marghera, Mestre and surroundings. Unable to imagine a life without a car, Venice offered them few attractions, beyond a night out occasionally, or a photo opportunity at their wedding.

    “Venice is beautiful, but I couldn’t live there,” became the common refrain.

    The grandparents and great-grandparents of this generation were still in Venice, in their old homes. As they got older, moved to retirement homes, or died, their flats passed on to their descendants, who often lived on the mainland, whose car-centred lifestyle was no longer compatible with Venice, who didn’t want to live in Venice.

    “Venice is beautiful, but I couldn’t live there.”

    As working-class people in much of Western Europe became homeowners, car owners, holidaymakers, mass tourism became a thing.

    Tourism offered a market for all those homes in Venice whose owners didn’t want to live there. The flats of their grandparents and great-grandparents often became tourist accommodation.

    A large part of the housing in Venice — owned by Venetians who don’t live in Venice, never have, never will and who don’t want to live in Venice — is now unavailable for those who would like to live there, whether Venetian by birth or not.

    A dying city

    In the census from the 1950s, the city of Venice had around 175,000 inhabitants.

    Today, it has just over 48,000.

    That is a population decline of over seventy percent in seventy years.

    Seventy percent in seventy years.

    The population of Venice has not been so low for over a thousand years. Not even the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages reduced the population to what it is now.

    Venice is — demographically — a dying city.

    Every year, there are fewer people living here.

    Economically, the city is doing fine, or better than fine. Every year sees visitor numbers rise, and lots of money is made.

    However, money made by whom?

    Mostly by people who don’t live in Venice, and very often, people who don’t want to live in Venice.

    Venice is today a cash cow to be milked, but those who benefit, only care about the money, and not about the city. To continue the metaphor, everybody wants part of the milk of the cow, but nobody wants to take it to the vet, or even just feed it.

    The direction in which the marketplace is taking Venice, is a slow death.

    The failure of politics

    Why don’t the politicians do something about it?

    They’re elected to represent the people, right?

    The relevant question here is: which people?

    The enlarged Municipality of Venice has over 250,000 inhabitants, but less than 50,000 live in Venice. There are some 25-30,000 people living in other communities around the lagoon, such as the Lido, Murano, Burano, Sant’Erasmo, etc.

    This means some 175,000 inhabitants live on the mainland.

    So, in local elections, for each vote in Venice, there are at least three votes on the mainland.

    The ancient city of Venice is pedestrian, with many bridges, and public transport and most logistics on water, with the added costs which follows.

    The cities on the mainland are modern Italian cities, mostly built after the second world war. Asphalted roads full of cars, high-rise office buildings, declining high streets, shopping malls in the periphery where you can only go by car.

    They’re physically separated by the lagoon, and they’re very different places with very different needs.

    Consequently, they vote very differently.

    For many years, the residents of the city of Venice have tended to vote leftish, while the people on the mainland lean more to the right.

    The current electoral system gives a guaranteed fifty-five percent majority in the city council for the party which wins the direct election of the mayor, so the city council has a right-wing majority.

    Furthermore, the right-wing parties are dominated by people from the mainland, so in the city executive — the giunta — of sixteen full-time politicians, fifteen are from the mainland. Only one member of the giunta actually lives in Venice.

    The bottom line is, that the residents of Venice — understood as the ancient city in the lagoon, not the entire municipality — have practically no political representation.

    With the voices of the people who actually live in the city mostly excluded, local politics is predominantly about what matters to the majority on the mainland, many of whom own flats in Venice they rent to tourists.

    The view of Venice as a means to easy profit is therefore dominant, also within the local administration.

    Venice, which historically dominated its periphery on the mainland, is now itself the periphery of the dominant mainland.

    Venice — la dominante — is now a subject city of the mainland, which it once dominated.

    Tourism

    In this rather long discussion about the fundamental causes of the woes of Venice, tourism hasn’t played a large part.

    That is because tourism is not the cause of the problems of Venice.

    Tourism is a symptom.

    The overwhelming number of tourists in Venice is a result of an economic monoculture, which again is a consequence of how the governance of the municipality is structured.

    Catch-22

    Venice of today is trapped in an abusive relationship with the outside forces which control the city now, and there is no obvious way out.

    The residents of Venice cannot elect another local administration because they’re too few.

    They cannot leave the Municipality of Venice — this has been tried several times — because it requires the consent of the entire municipality, but the mainland consistently votes against a split of the municipality. Again, the residents of the city are too few.

    A reversal of the demographic decline requires policies favouring more affordable housing. That won’t happen because that would require flats to be moved from tourist rentals to residential rentals, but that is less profitable for the owners of the flats.

    Without more affordable house, even more people will leave the city.

    There’s no way out, but if Venice stays on the current trajectory, it will die.

  • Decline and fall (1600–1800)

    Decline and fall (1600–1800)

    Chapter 6 — Decline and fall

    The 1600s and 1700s were a period of slow decline for Venice, until the Republic of Venice fell to Napoleon in 1797.

    The War of letters

    The conflicts between Venice on the one side, and the major European powers and the Pope on the other, never ceased.

    In the first years of the 1600s, Venice made various laws limiting the passage of property to ecclesiastical organisations, whose wealth had reached troubling levels. Then, in 1605, two high prelates were arrested and tried, sentenced and imprisoned for rape and murder.

    The Pope demanded that Venice handed the two over to the church tribunals, and that they rescinded the laws limiting the donation of property to the church.

    Venice said no to both claims.

    The Pope consequently excommunicated the entire Venetian nobility, and tried to organise a kind of crusade of other Catholic nations against Venice.

    Paolo Sarpi, a highly respected theologian who had authored the Venetian missives to the Pope, got a personal excommunication, and later the Catholic Church sent a group of hoodlums to Venice to assassinate him. Sarpi only just survived the vicious attack.

    This Pope definitely didn’t turn the other cheek.

    The whole affair lasted several years, and was finally resolved by Venice handing over the two criminals, and the Pope lifting the excommunication. Venice didn’t change its laws.

    Fear and anxiety in Venice

    By the early 1600s, Venice was in a rather precarious position, geographically.

    The Habsburgs of Austria governed land to the east, north and west of Venice, parts of the Dalmatian coast, Austria itself and Milan, respectively.

    The Habsburgs were also on the Spanish throne, and Spain controlled the Kingdom of Naples.

    Who ruled southern Italy was important for Venice because they shared a border. Venetian possessions on the eastern Adriatic coastline, and the island of Corfu, were just across from Southern Italy, where the Adriatic is the narrowest.

    Venice was almost surrounded by the combined territories of Spain and Austria.

    The ancient problem of piracy reared its head again with the Uscoc population on the Croatian coast, which was formally under Austria. This led to the War of Gradisca against Austria from 1615 to 1617, and the War of Valtellina from 1620 to 1626.

    During the first conflict, the Spanish ambassador in Venice ran a spy network, which apparently included several members of the Venetian aristocracy.

    Given the nature of the Republic of Venice, where all adult noblemen participated in the meetings of the Greater Council, any secret meeting between a Venetian nobleman and foreign diplomats was automatically suspect.

    The atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion led to several trials for treason against members of the nobility. The most conspicuous case was against Antonio Foscarini. He was sentenced to death, strangled in his cell, and the body hung by the feet from a gallows between the two columns in St Mark’s square. It was later revealed that he was innocent, so his accusers were executed too.

    Corner and Zen

    Venice was an aristocratic republic without a formal constitution. There were laws, traditions and customs, but nothing was set in stone. Everything was in principle negotiable.

    Since at least the 1100s, the doges had been required to swear a formal written oath, known as the promissione ducale — the promise of the doge. This was the main means of curbing the power of the doges, but that too was soon revealed to be negotiable.

    When doge Francesco Contarini died in 1625, the normal procedure was followed for the creation of a new doge. This was an elaborate process, which led to the selection of an electoral college of forty-one nobles, who would choose the next doge.

    Here the process stalled, as none of the two primary candidates could get the needed twenty-five votes.

    After some time, the college elected a third candidate, Giovanni Corner.

    He was the head of one of the most ancient — and wealthiest — Venetian noble families. Furthermore, he had several adult sons in active politics, and another in the church. One of his sons was in the electoral college, which wasn’t exactly proper, and another two were in the Pregadi — the Venetian senate.

    The promissione stipulated that close relatives of the doge couldn’t hold high political offices or positions in the church. The sons of the doge would have to step down, and not occupy any elected positions for the rest of their father’s life.

    Giovanni Corner immediately asked the Signoria — the closest the Republic of Venice had to an executive — that they grant a dispensation, so his sons could finish their terms in office. The Signoria conceded.

    Six months later, when the senate was up for its annual renewal, he asked that they could stand for election again, which was also granted.

    Then another of his sons was made cardinal in the Catholic Church, which required the permission of the republic. This too was granted.

    The power and influence of the Corner family was increasing rapidly. The doge wasn’t a powerful figure any more, but his sons, backed by the prestige of their father and the wealth of the family, exploited the situation with impunity.

    Obviously, many others in the nobility resented it.

    The opposition coalesced around the figure of Ranier Zen. He was elected to the Council of Ten in 1627, which was the only body with the authority to stand up to the doge. When he was chosen as one of the three Heads of the Council of Ten, he confronted the doge directly.

    The Corner family managed to depose Zen, who later barely survived an assassination attempt — orchestrated by one of the Corner bothers — by jumping into a canal and escaping in a boat. He was later condemned to exile, but refused to leave the city.

    Venice was as close to a civil war as it had been since the mid-1300s.

    Such an armed conflict was averted by the death of Giovanni Corner in 1629, at the age of 78.

    The complex election process set it, and the next doge came from the faction of Ranier Zen. This restored some balance between the different factions within the aristocracy.

    The conflict consequently fizzled out, but the underlying constitutional problems weren’t resolved.

    War in Mantua and the plague

    Elsewhere in Northern Italy, more conflict was brewing.

    The House of Gonzaga had ruled the Duchy of Mantua since the 1200s, but in 1627 the last duke of that line died.

    Two different branches of the dynasty claimed the ducal throne. One branch was supported by France and Venice, while the other by the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria, the Holy Roman Empire and the Savoys of Piedmont.

    The Gonzaga-Nevers, supported by France and Venice, soon took control of the city of Mantua, and the allies of the other branch invaded the duchy.

    Yet again, all the main European powers were fighting over and on parts of the Italian peninsula.

    The war lasted several years, and it would have disastrous consequences for Venice and the mainland.

    Soldiers from Germany brought the plague with them. Imperial troops defeated Venetian forces at Villabona in 1630, and many of the fleeing Venetian soldiers sought refuge in nearby Verona.

    During the summer of 1630, over half the population of Verona perished.

    Later that year, an ambassador from Mantua arrived in Venice. He, too, was ill.

    The Venetian authorities didn’t consider it proper to quarantine a high-ranking nobleman from a friendly neighbour with common sailors and merchants on the usual Lazzaretto island. They therefore had a special quarantine facility built for him and his entourage on another island.

    One of the workers brought the contagion into the city, where it spread faster than the sick could be rounded up.

    Over forty thousand people died in Venice in the 1630–31 epidemic. That was over a fourth of the population, which still hadn’t recovered from the 1575 outbreak.

    In Mantua, the branch of the Gonzaga dynasty, which Venice had supported, prevailed. Several contenders from the other side died of the plague.

    The epidemic of 1630–31 would be the last major outbreak of the plague in Venice. The preventive measures around the Venetian Lazzaretti became much more stringent, and there would be no further exceptions to the rules.

    The Turks

    The relationships with the Ottoman Empire remained as difficult and ambiguous as ever.

    Whenever Venice had been at war with the major European powers, the Ottoman Empire had either stayed out of the fight, or actually backed Venice with anything but arms.

    Still, Venice and the Ottomans were contenders for the same territories in the Levant.

    They fought a long war over control of Crete, which Venice had held since after the Fourth Crusade in the 1200s. The war lasted almost twenty-five years, from 1645 to 1669. The Turkish siege of the main city of Candia (modern day Heraklion) lasted over twenty years.

    Francesco Morosini, who had surrendered Candia to the Turks after the end of the siege, got some revenge with the War of Morea, which is the Venetian name for the Peloponnese.

    That war lasted over fifteen years, from 1684 to 1699. The Venetian forces, commanded by Morosini, gradually conquered most of the Peloponnese from the Ottomans.

    In 1687, Venetian forces put Athens to siege.

    During this siege, the Turks kept their gunpowder on the Acropolis, inside the ancient Temple of Athena, believing it to be out of range of the Venetian artillery.

    It wasn’t.

    The two-thousand-years old temple was blown to pieces when the Venetian guns scored a direct hit. Archaeologists in Greece are still picking up the pieces of that explosion.

    The Venetians took Athens and the Acropolis, but didn’t have the resources to keep them. It was evacuated later, and soon after re-occupied by the Turks.

    The destruction of one of the most important ancient Greek temples had been all for nothing.

    Two large ancient Greek or Roman statues, one of a sitting lion and one lying down, stood in the harbour of Piraeus since antiquity. Francesco Morosini had them taken to Venice, where they’re now guarding the entrance to the Venetian navy docks in the Arsenale.

    There are still visible pockmarks on them, from when the Venetian navy entered the harbour of Athens in 1687, guns blasting. There are also runic inscriptions on the sitting lion, dating back to Byzantine times. That single piece of marble is Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Scandinavian and Venetian, all at the same time.

    On his return to Venice, Morosini was, unsurprisingly, elected doge.

    The last major war with the Ottoman Empire was in 1714–18, when Venice lost most of what had been taken a few decades earlier.

    The only major Greek island to remain under Venetian control was Corfu. Strategically, this was important, as Corfu controls the passage in and out of the Adriatic Sea.

    Money and nobility

    Wars cost money, and decades-long overseas wars cost a lot of money.

    Venice as a society was rich, but Venice as a state wasn’t.

    The main source of income to cover the expenses of the state had always been taxes on trade — import and export duties. The ruling elite thereby unloaded a proportionally larger part of the tax burden on the middle classes.

    This had over the centuries handily covered most ordinary expenses.

    For the extraordinary expenses of wars, especially in those cases where Venice had fought for its very survival, such as the War of Chioggia in the late 1300s and the League of Cambrai in the early 1500s, extraordinary funds were raised by extraordinary means.

    Property taxes and forced loans, which predominantly hit the wealthier parts of society, were ways of raising emergency funds. They hit the ruling elite harder, but they would have lost everything anyway if Venice had lost those wars.

    Such taxes and forced loans in times of war were one of the causes of the rather odd concept of the poor nobility — aristocratic families which were poor, and even destitute. Such families weren’t expelled from the nobility, but were helped economically in various ways by special laws and traditions, and by selling their votes in the Greater Council.

    After the Locking of the Council in 1297, in times of emergencies, the doors of the council could be temporarily unlocked, so wealthy citizen families could pay their way to nobility and political power. As it had happened during the War of Chioggia, the League of Cambrai, so it happened during the War of Candia.

    As trade on the Levant diminished, so did the regular income of the Venetian state. To cover the outgoings, selling entrance into the nobility for cash became more commonplace. Many wealthy citizen families entered the nobility this way during the 1600s and 1700s.

    The price of nobility was substantial. It was in the order of a hundred thousand Venetian ducats paid up front — enough to buy several quite presentable properties on the Grand Canal.

    The patrician class was subdivided by the age of the lineage. There were old families, new families, very new families and finally, families made by money.

    A middling state

    The conquest of the Peloponnese was the last of the Venetian dream of empire. The Venetian overseas dominions were reduced to Corfu and parts of the eastern coast of the Adriatic.

    Venice in the 1700s was a much smaller place, and a much more European place, even if for many travellers from Western Europe it still appeared odd and “eastern”.

    Much of the long-distance trade on the Eastern Mediterranean had disappeared, while regional trade between the nations around the Mediterranean continued. The global trade had moved into the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.

    The mainland territories therefore became more important.

    The wealthy elite, both nobles and citizens, invested their money in agricultural estates on the mainland, rather than in trade.

    Venice, which had never really had a landed gentry — there was almost no land — now had an elite whose main income came from large mainland estates. It is almost the opposite process of what happened everywhere else in Europe.

    The city of Venice had expanded slowly until the late 1500s, but that expansion stopped when all the shallow mudflats around the city had been reclaimed and built up.

    The main architectural trends of the 1600s and the 1700s — Baroque, Rococo and Neo-Classicism — are therefore mostly absent in Venice itself.

    On the mainland, however, these styles abound in the many great villas the new landowners built on their estates. The Venetian countryside is full of villas by Palladio and other renowned architects from the period.

    Outside the elite, manufacturing was still the most important part of the economy. Glass, textiles, lace, printing, etc., all remained important.

    For young men from wealthy families in Northern Europe, the “Grand Tour” became an important part of their education. It was usually a journey of several years, taking the young men around to all the most important European cities, and Italian cities were high on the list. Venice, Florence and Rome were almost obligatory stops.

    The Venetian carnival became a major attraction, and so did the Venetian courtesans and gambling establishments.

    Artists like Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera — and many others — sold artworks to these tourists.

    Venetian arts and crafts flourished like never before, and had buyers come from all of Europe.

    Even if Venice was on the decline in the 1700s, it appeared as rich and opulent as ever.

    The end of the Republic of Venice

    The French Revolution put a huge question mark on some of the basic tenets of most European societies, like the divine rights of kings and the legitimacy of aristocratic rule.

    The Republic of Venice was very much aristocratic rule, based on the hereditary rights of the nobility, and the French Revolution therefore resonated with a large part of the Venetian population.

    The revolution didn’t have any immediate effects in Venice, not in 1789 when it started, nor in 1793 when the French king was executed.

    The War of the First Coalition from 1792 to 1797 involved almost every major European monarchy against revolutionary France. Venice remained neutral.

    The war, however, came to Venice anyway.

    In 1796, a 26-year-old field marshal Napoleon led a French army into Northern Italy, where Milan was an Austrian dominion.

    After a battle, the routed Austrian army fled into Venetian territory. Napoleon pursued them.

    Soon his army was under the walls of the Venetian city of Crema, where he demanded they accept a French garrison, as a precaution. This repeated in Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padua and so on.

    The Venetians kept sending dispatches and negotiators to Napoleon, reiterating their neutrality and requesting the French left, but Napoleon didn’t care.

    Within less than a year, Napoleon was in control of the entire Stato di Terra.

    When the Venetians finally realised that Napoleon would never respect their neutrality, they tried to mobilise forces from the Stato di Mar for a last stand in defence of the Dogado. It was too little and too late, and when Napoleon sent an ultimatum, Venice surrendered.

    The Greater Council met, debated and voted to dissolve itself. The doge consequently abdicated.

    Membership of the council was hereditary, so no new legitimate council could be formed. Without the council, no new doge could be elected.

    The Republic of Venice was no more.

    While it is almost impossible to determine when the Republic came into existence as a sovereign entity, we have a date and almost an hour for the end of it: May 12th, 1797.

    The first French domination

    Napoleon promised the common Venetians a more democratic regime, and a Provisional Municipal Government was established quickly after the surrender.

    He didn’t, however, intend to keep that promise.

    Negotiations with the Austrians were already underway. The result was the Treaty of Campo Formio, in which France gained the Austrian Netherlands and Milan, and Austria the naval bases of Venice and Trieste.

    Before Christmas 1797, the workers of the navy docks in the Arsenale were sent home with their pay for the rest of the year. French troops then moved in and destroyed everything. Tools, models and ships were cut to pieces or burnt.

    On January 18th, 1798, Austrian troops entered Venice.

    Losing statehood

    Venice, which had been an independent state for over a thousand years, was now reduced to being a pawn in the game of the great powers.

    Laws, customs and traditions, established over centuries, disappeared overnight. Everything the Venetians had taken for granted, forever, was no longer.

    The privileges of the nobility and the original citizens evaporated. Everybody had to follow the laws of another country, and be subject to rulers who spoke another language.

    Elements of Venetian culture came under attack almost immediately.

    Ancient celebrations and feasts had been a way of maintaining a bond between rulers and the ruled, and in any case, a source of entertainment and free food. Under the Austrians, feasts celebrating the great events of the past — like the conquest of Constantinople — were no longer held.

    The was no Venetian carnival in 1798, or in many of the following years, for that matter. There was no way the newly arrived Austrian rulers would let the Venetians roam around the city at night wearing masks. The carnival was only really resuscitated in the 1970s, in a very different form.

    For most Venetians, rich or poor, noble, citizen or commoner, the future looked bleak.