History of Venice

Tag: Plague

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    The Pope demanded that Venice handed the two over to the church tribunals, and that they rescinded the laws limiting the donation of property to the church.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

  • Changing geography (1400–1600)

    Changing geography (1400–1600)

    Chapter 5 — Changing geography

    The 1400s and 1500s were centuries of enormous change for Venice, and for the rest of the world. The changing geography moved Venice from a central position in European trade to the margins.

    The shape of the state

    The territory of the Venetian state was originally just the Byzantine Venetia Marittima, later generally referred to as the Dogado ­— the Duchy. This was an area of about 130 by 15 kilometres of mostly lagoon, from Grado in the north to Cavarzere in the south.

    The Dogado from Grado to Cavarzere was always the heartland of the Republic of Venice.

    Dalmatia, and later many Greek islands and cities, became overseas colonial dominions. They were usually referred to as the “Sea Dominion” — Dominio di Mar — or the “Sea State” — Stato di Mar.

    From a Venetian perspective, its main purpose was to protect and facilitate the commercial interests of the Venetian merchants, who were generally based in the Dogado.

    The mainland

    The mainland was — as it had been since the times of the Lombards — another country.

    In reality, the mainland was several other counties. There was a Duchy of Padua, a Duchy of Verona, and the Patriarchy of Aquileia which was closely aligned with the Austrian Habsburgs. A bit further away were the Duchy of Milan, the Duchy of Florence, and the Papal State.

    Venice regularly fought small wars with these neighbours, mostly over issues related to control of the rivers or trade in the upper Adriatic.

    When, in the mid-1300s, Venice temporarily gained control over Mestre and Treviso (two nearby cities on the mainland), they were the first mainland possessions ever for the Republic.

    Venice played along in a game of ever-changing alliances between all the small states on the mainland, but the main concern quickly became the influence, that the Duchy of Milan could exert on the direct neighbours of Venice.

    Besides not wanting to have as powerful a state as Milan bordering directly on the lagoon, there was also the ever urgent question of food security. Venice, with its population of over one hundred thousand, relied heavily on the mainland for food supplies.

    That was not a tenable position in the long term.

    When the Duke of Milan died in 1402, Padua seized the opportunity to grab Verona, which had fallen under Milan. The heir of Milan asked the Venetians for help, in return for a handful of cities on the mainland.

    Venice went to war against Padua, which they conquered in 1405.

    The last members of the ducal dynasty of Padua ended up imprisoned in Venice. After some discussion, it was decided to kill them. They were unceremoniously strangled in their prison cells.

    The Stato di Terra

    Venice now held a good part of the immediate hinterland, which became the third and final part of the Venetian state. The Dominio di Terra (the land dominion) or the Stato di Terra (the land state) complemented the Sea Dominion.

    Padua, Verona and others became “subject cities” and Venice la dominante — the dominant one.

    The power games in the valley of the Po River were now between the Republic of Venice, the d’Este dynasty from Ferrara, south of the Po, the Duchy of Milan, and the Patriarchy of Aquileia.

    Soon, a war with Austria and Hungary over Friuli to the north brought Aquileia and Friuli under Venetian control.

    Finally, further wars with the Duchy of Milan during the 1420s and 1430s earned Venice the Lombard cities of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema.

    By the mid-1400s, Venice had become an important player on the mainland, and there were no foreign powers bordering directly on the dogado any more.

    The Stato di Terra by the mid-1400s, extending well into Lombardy.
    The Stato di Terra by the mid-1400s, extending well into Lombardy.

    Constantinople and the Ottoman Turks

    If matters turned out fairly well on the mainland side, they became more challenging on the side of the Stato di Mar.

    The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453.

    The last Roman emperor had travelled around Western Europe in the preceding years, to get help in the form of a new crusade in defence of Christendom — but to little avail.

    The bailo — the Venetian ambassador to the Byzantine court — and many Venetians in the city fought and died on the Theodosian walls of Constantinople, along with the emperor himself.

    In 1461, the Empire of Trabzon — the last remnant of ancient Byzantium — fell too.

    After more than two millennia, there was no Roman Empire any more. If there ever was a “Fall of Rome”, this was it.

    Even if the Venetian relationship to Byzantium was often difficult and ambiguous, Byzantium had always been a known, Christian entity in a Levant.

    After the fall of Constantinople, the Levant was almost entirely Muslim, and ever more inclined towards seeing westerners as enemies.

    Venice soon made peace with the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople — because money matters — but they almost as soon also ended up at war with the Turks, and lost a handful of their possessions in the Levant.

    That would be the first of many wars between Venice and the Ottomans.

    Trade on the Levant became more difficult, but the Muslim and Turkish rulers weren’t the only reason.

    The world map before the “discoveries”

    The journeys of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the 1490s, changed the world, and for Venice, for the worse.

    To understand the reason, we need to take a step back to see how the world was seen — from a Venetian and Western European perspective — before the journeys.

    Everything around the Mediterranean was well-known, and also around the Black Sea and the Baltic in the north.

    The Europeans knew Northern Africa, and indirectly Eastern Africa down to Madagascar.

    They also knew about Tartaria (the Mongol lands east of the Black Sea), China, Persia, India and Arabia, even if few westerners went there.

    Notably absent from this map were the Americas, the western and southern parts of Africa, and everything around the Pacific.

    On this map, Western Europe was a dead end. Western Europe led nowhere. It was at the end of the world.

    The land was generally fertile, so Europe could maintain a sizeable population. Forests and metal deposits meant they could build stuff.

    Based on these natural resources, Western Europe developed a wealthy elite which wanted to enjoy life.

    The Romans knew about silk from China, fur from Eurasia, spices and gemstones from India, and ivory and tropical hardwood from Africa, and so did the later Europeans, but where could they get these goods?

    The almost global trade of the times of the Romans, never ceased. Among others, Byzantium kept it going.

    From the Baltics, goods travelled south past Kyiv to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    Silk from China and cotton from Central Asia travelled across the Caspian Sea, up the Volga river, down the Don river to the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    Goods from India went through the Persian Gulf, up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to the coast of Syria, around ancient Antioch.

    From Eastern Africa and Madagascar, merchants travelled north to the Red Sea towards the Eastern Mediterranean.

    From Central Africa, goods followed the Nile to Alexandria.

    In the west, the Western Mediterranean was open and exposed, but the Adriatic Sea was a perfect route to the Eastern Mediterranean.

    All these trade routes were like spikes in a great wheel of global trade, whose axis was in the Eastern Mediterranean, between Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria.

    Venice, with safe harbours in the shallow lagoons, with good rivers going far inland, at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea, sat in an enviable geographic position to connect Western Europe with the trade routes of the rest of the known world.

    This role as a bridge between west and east was the basis of the wealth and power of Venice, and, as we have seen many times already, the Venetians were willing to do almost anything to protect this position.

    The effect of the “discoveries”

    The discoveries of the route south of Africa to Madagascar, Eastern Africa, Arabia and India, and of the routes across the Atlantic to the Americas, made the nations of Western Europe do a 180 degrees turn.

    They had always been forced to look towards the Eastern Mediterranean for luxury goods, with Venice as an envied middleman. Now, they turned their backs to the Mediterranean and looked across the Atlantic.

    The focus of Western European trade shifted from the Levant to the Atlantic.

    Western Europe, which on the old map was a peripheral dead end, was now at the very centre of world trade.

    For Venice, the new Atlantic focus was detrimental.

    From being an essential link in European trade, it became a peripheral nation, placed on an unimportant branch of a Mediterranean which led nowhere any more.

    Furthermore, due to geography, Venice couldn’t take part in the new Atlantic game.

    The Adriatic Sea went in the wrong direction, and the Venetians now had to navigate the more difficult Western Mediterranean, and then pass the Strait of Gibraltar, which was controlled by a competitor.

    Manufacturing

    Now, changes of such a magnitude don’t happen overnight.

    The initial exploratory journeys to the Americas took decades, and the full effect of the changes only set in much later in the 1500s.

    The impact on the spice trade was felt sooner. The Venetians noticed changes in trade patterns already in the early 1500s, when Lisbon seized the position as the main spice market in Europe, displacing the Rialto market.

    Venice sent spies to Lisbon to figure out what had happened, but they could do little to intervene in trade on the Atlantic.

    The Venetian economy didn’t collapse, despite the blow from the Atlantic trade, but it changed dramatically.

    Some trade in the Levant remained, and other goods, like silk, were now produced in Europe rather than being imported from far away.

    Venetian artisans and craftsmen had developed skills which remained unmatched elsewhere. Venetian glass and textiles, for example, were still among the best, and would be for a long time to come.

    It helped, that the Venetians were always attentive to technological developments. The first ever patent law was issued in Venice in 1474, giving inventors of new things legal protection for ten years.

    New technologies, such as printing with movable types, were imported and developed further. A mercantile approach, a more lenient censorship, and a certain disregard for what the Pope might think, created a flourishing printing industry. Venice became the printing house of Europe, and made good money from it.

    For example, Venetian printers created the very first Quran, printed with movable types, in the 1530s. It was made for export to Muslim nations in the Levant. However, the Islamic world wouldn’t accept printed versions of the Quran, and worse still, there were errors in the text, so when the books arrived in Constantinople, they were all burnt. One single copy survived, in the library of a monastery in Venice, where it remains to this day.

    The League of Cambrai

    When Venice acquired the dominions on the mainland, it was opposed by various smaller states in northern Italy.

    By the early 1500s, this had changed.

    Both France and Spain made a claim to the Kingdom of Naples. They fought a war over it, which Spain won, and southern Italy would remain Spanish for another two centuries.

    France also made a claim to the Duchy of Milan, which they took over. This left Venice with a land border on territory under the French king.

    Austria had always had interests in Northern Italy, especially in Friuli, which Venice had taken. Then the crowns of Spain and Austria united, and the Habsburgs ruled over the first empire where the sun never set.

    The ancient Kingdom of Italy, from the times of Charlemagne, was one of the two legs of the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans had always had a claim on all of Northern Italy.

    The Italian peninsula had become a battleground for all the major European powers of the time, and they all eyed the Venetian territories in particular, and Venetian wealth in general, with much interest.

    In 1509, all these powers, and also the Pope and Hungary for good measure, made a secret alliance against Venice, in the French city of Cambrai. The express purpose of the League of Cambrai was to divide all the continental Venetian territories between them.

    Only the Turks didn’t attack Venice.

    The Venetian situation against the League of Cambrai was difficult, and when they lost the first major battle, it became desperate. City after city on the mainland surrendered to either the French, the Germans or the Pope. Soon the enemies were almost at the edge of the lagoon.

    The reconquest of Padua a month later gave Venice hope, but the major game changer wasn’t arms, but diplomacy.

    Venice, as a nation of merchants, knew how to negotiate in difficult situations, and the Venetian diplomacy was probably what the allied powers feared the most.

    They weren’t wrong in that fear. Venetian negotiators managed to detach the Pope from the League, and Spain followed. The Hungarians were bought off.

    The war of everybody against Venice broke down into a war of everybody against everybody, in ever-changing alliances, where Venice at various times found itself allied with several of the original members of the League of Cambrai.

    When peace was made in 1517, Venice was mostly unscathed. If anything, its prestige and status had increased.

    Plague again

    The Black Plague, which had arrived in the mid-1300s, came back in recurring waves well into the 1400s.

    Every wave killed thousands, rich and poor alike. It certainly didn’t help that the plague arrived with the very same ships, which made Venice rich, so trade suffered too. Besides all the human suffering, the damage to the economy was enormous.

    After yet another wave of the plague in 1423, the Venetian senate decided to isolate all those afflicted by the plague on an island in the lagoon. This island became the first Lazzaretto.

    Removing and isolating the sick helped somewhat in limiting the spread of the disease, and the Venetians learned a bit more about how the contagion moved. In particular, they realised that just isolating the sick wasn’t sufficient because people could be contagious before they got visibly sick. They had observed the incubation period of the infection.

    In 1468, they therefore created a quarantine station on another island, not for the sick but for those who had been in contact with the sick, and for the goods from the ships where plague had been observed.

    Then, in 1485, a permanent magistracy for public health was established. It would run the lazzaretti, and an intelligence gathering network across the Mediterranean, so they could intercept any contagion before it arrived in the city itself.

    These measures combined succeeded in keeping the plague away from the city.

    While the plague arrived in Venice on several occasions in the 1400s, in the 1500s it only happened once.

    In 1575, the plague spread in the city. It hadn’t arrived by sea, as in the past. The lazzaretti were efficient and had stopped that. It had arrived with travellers from the mainland.

    The result was devastating. About a third of the population of the city perished in just two years.

    Famagusta and Lepanto

    The relationship between Venice and the Ottoman Empire vacillated between reluctant coexistence because of trade and open warfare for territorial control. They needed each other, and they were fierce competitors, at the same time.

    The island of Cyprus had become Venetian in the late 1400s through the marriage of a young Venetian noblewoman to the king of Cyprus. He died shortly after, and so did their young son, leaving the 16-year-old Catarina Corner as ruling queen of the kingdom. Venice quickly moved in to take control over the island.

    Almost a century later, in 1570, the Turks invaded the island under the pretext that piracy was rampant in the area, and that the Venetians were complicit in it. The invasion led to a prolonged siege of the fortress of Famagusta.

    A Holy League consisting of Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, the Papal State and the Spanish Empire mobilised a navy to confront the Turks.

    Before they could do anything, the Venetian defenders of Famagusta had surrendered. Despite have received a promise of free passage, they were slaughtered. Marco Antonio Bragadin, the Venetian commander, was flayed alive in front of his officers.

    In early October the following year, the navies of the Ottoman Empire and of the Holy League clashed in a momentous battle at Lepanto in Western Greece. The result was a decisive victory for the league, and much of the Ottoman navy was destroyed or captured.

    Once the threat to Southern Italy was averted, all the others sailed back home, and Venice was left to negotiate a peace treaty alone.

    Despite the defeat at Lepanto, the Turks had still taken Cyprus, so the Republic of Venice came out of the war with a net loss of territory and prestige.

    No place for a republic in Europe

    The predominant form of government in Catholic Europe was monarchy — hereditary power within a single dynasty — sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

    Ever since Charlemagne went to the Pope to be crowned Emperor, the Church had had a say in who was and who wasn’t a legitimate ruler.

    This is the “King by the grace of God” — the divine rights of kings.

    The Catholic Church and the Pope had an interest in such a system because it gave the Church leverage over the succession of secular rulers. They could dispense and remove legitimacy as they pleased.

    The emperors, kings, dukes and princes had an interest in it because it turned any opposition to their rule into a rebellion against the divine order, against God himself. It gave them a degree of legitimacy which it was difficult for others to dispute.

    After the protestant reformations, the Catholic Church doubled down on much of its dogma at the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, where the preference for divinely sanctioned monarchy was reiterated.

    How did the Venetian system of an aristocratic republic — where the sovereign was a social class rather than a dynasty — fit into this world view?

    The short answer is that it didn’t.

    Furthermore, the Venetian Republic never sought the backing of the Catholic Church for their claim to legitimacy.

    Many Venetian aristocratic families claimed a lineage going back to ancient Roman senatorial families. They were, in their own view, direct descendants of Ancient Rome

    They perceived their state as the continuation of a Byzantine ducatus, which was itself a continuation of a Roman region from the time of Augustus, a region which had existed before there were any Popes.

    From the Venetian point of view, the Republic of Venice was the oldest nation in Europe, and even older than the Church itself. The Republic of Venice was therefore inherently legitimate, and didn’t have to ask anybody for confirmation.

    This is one of the main reasons for the repeated conflicts between the Republic of Venice and the Pope. Having a shared border with the Papal State — with inevitable conflicts over border areas, cities and trading rights — certainly didn’t help either.

    The immense wealth of the Venetians — despite the limited territorial extent of the state — led to much envy.

    These latent tensions were behind the League of Cambrai and how the allies abandoned Venice after the wars with the Turks in Cyprus and at Lepanto.

    The other European powers didn’t approve of Venice.

  • Wealth, power and empire (1200–1400)

    Wealth, power and empire (1200–1400)

    Conquest, empire, naval battles, conspiracies, insurrections. The 1200s and 1300s were interesting times for Venice, which was now richer and more powerful than ever.

    Too successful?

    Venice had been extremely successful, and at the start of the 1200s, it was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, and an important regional power.

    In particular, Venice had succeeded in dominating trade, both within the Byzantine Empire and with the west, to such an extent that it had caused setbacks in Constantinople.

    Venice was born as a Byzantine duchy — which is why Venice had a doge — but during the 1100s Venice had gone to war against Byzantium twice, in defence of its trade.

    The relationship was changing.

    The Fourth Crusade

    In 1201, a delegation of French knights arrived in Venice. They needed a fleet to carry a large crusader army to the Holy Land, which had returned under the control of Muslims.

    This was to be the Fourth Crusade.

    After some wrangling, a deal was struck and a price agreed. Venice was to build a navy of three hundred and fifty ships, to be equipped, manned and ready the next year.

    The Venetians built a ship a day for a year. It is quite a testament to the technological and organisational skills of the Venetians.

    The crusaders arrived during the next spring, and set up camp on the Lido, awaiting departure. There was a problem, though.

    They were too few.

    A crusade was also an act of penitence, and each crusader had to pay for his own journey. Being too few, they couldn’t foot the bill for the fleet which had been agreed the previous year.

    The doge, Enrico Dandolo, eighty years old and blind, was also very shrewd. Another agreement was made, that the crusaders had to solve some problems for the Venetians along the way, to pay their debts.

    In particular, the city of Zara in Dalmatia had rebelled yet again, so when the fleet with the crusaders lifted anchors, their first destination was Dalmatia.

    Ironically, the first thing the fourth crusade did, was to take and subdue a Christian city.

    When the Pope heard, he excommunicated the entire crusade — a detail the commanders didn’t tell the rank and file, though.

    A change of plans

    Further along the journey, during a stopover in a harbour for provisioning, the leaders of the crusade — which included the blind octogenarian doge of Venice — were contacted by Alexios Angelos, the son of the deposed Byzantine emperor Isaac II.

    He promised them money and soldiers for the continuation of the crusade, if they made a detour to Constantinople to return his father to the imperial throne.

    Most of the crusaders took the offer, and the fleet changed course towards the Bosphorus, where they arrived in the summer of 1203.

    After a month of fighting, where the crusaders made some gains, the emperor fled the city, and the blinded Isaac II was restored to power.

    This was the stated goal of the crusaders, but they were cheated of their reward.

    They demanded that Alexios Angelos be made co-emperor, so he could keep his promises. This happened on August 1st.

    Alexios (now Alexios IV Angelos) had difficulty gathering the money he had promised the crusaders, and took to destroying icons and religious items to extract the gold.

    He succeeded in satisfying nobody.

    The crusaders grew more and more impatient, and the citizens of Constantinople restive, as religious objects were desecrated to reward people they saw as barbarians.

    Isaac II died in January 1204, and in February, the leader of the anti-crusader faction in Constantinople overthrew Alexios IV and became Alexios V.

    The Sack of Constantinople

    When Alexios V refused to honour the promises Alexios IV had made, the crusaders renewed their siege of the city.

    Constantinople was heavily fortified, but on April 12th, the crusaders managed to breach the sea walls, and then opens passages in the triple land walls.

    The crusaders sacked Constantinople for three days, stealing and destroying immense treasures.

    Constantinople had been the Roman capital for nine centuries, and it contained unimaginable wealth, much of which was now lost or scattered.

    The porphyry statues of the Tetrarchs, mounted on a corner between the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica of St Mark in Venice, were part of the loot of 1204.

    Likewise, the four gilded horses adorning the façade of the Basilica, came from the hippodrome — the chariot racing grounds in Constantinople, just under the Imperial Palace.

    The treasury of the Basilica of St Mark contains numerous Byzantine objects looted in Constantinople in 1204.

    Dividing an empire

    The crusaders had already made an agreement on the division of the spoils. Venice got three eights, or a bit more than a third of the entire Eastern Roman Empire.

    The victors didn’t, however, manage to secure all parts of the empire for themselves.

    Three parts of the Roman Empire survived as rump states, in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, in Nicaea in the north-west of Anatolia, and in Epirus in what is now western Greece and Albania.

    Venice got a third of Constantinople, including the harbour areas, and parts of the coast of the Marmara Sea, which was essential for access to the Black Sea, and several major Greek islands. They later bought more islands from other participants of the crusade.

    Doge Dandolo styled himself “Doge of the Venetians and of the Dalmatians, and ruler of a quarter and a half of the Roman Empire”.

    Enrico Dandolo never came back to Venice. He died in 1205, and was buried in the Hagia Sofia.

    The Sea dominion

    In the decade following the conquest of Constantinople, Venice acquired several major Greek islands.

    Corfu ­— which has a strategic position at the entrance to the Adriatic Sea — was held by Venice in the years 1207–1214, after which they lost it again. It came back to Venice in 1386, and then remained Venetian until 1797.

    The coastal cities of Corone and Methoni, on the southern Peloponnese, became Venetian in 1207.

    Candia — the Venetian name for Crete — came under Venetian control in 1211. The people of Candia clearly didn’t approve, as there were many insurrections and rebellions in the following decades.

    While Negroponte (modern Evia) near Athens, strictly speaking, wasn’t Venetian, the Venetians managed to exert a huge influence over it, until they took it over completely in 1390.

    Together with the territories, which Venice already controlled in the Adriatic Sea, this became the Stato di Mar or the Dominio di Mar.

    Venice had become a small empire, with its own overseas territories.

    Overseas territories, which were perfectly located to support Venetian trade.

    Venice did not, however, have political or administrative structures in the 1200s to manage such distant territories. They were therefore often simply handed over to members of the Venetian elite, who then ran them as semi-autonomous, but Venetian aligned, mini states. Some, like the Duchy of Naxos, lasted for centuries.

    The Stato di Mar as it appeared around 1300.
    The Stato di Mar as it appeared around 1300.

    Trade competitors

    Before the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Byzantine emperors had tried to curb the influence of the Venetian merchants on the economy of the city.

    After the conquest, Venice governed a third of the city, and could do whatever it wanted.

    The main competitors of Venice, in particular Pisa and Genoa, were favoured by the Byzantine rump states of Nicaea, Trabzon and Epirus, but Venetian dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean was as firm as ever.

    Genoa was the most important of the competitors to Venice, and there would be many wars between the two in the 1200s and 1300s. Many of these fights would take place in the Eastern Mediterranean, but they also fought much closer to home, as we shall see later.

    The loss of Constantinople

    Acre in the Kingdom of Jerusalem was the main harbour city of the kingdom, and had both Venetian and Genovese merchants resident. In 1255, the enmity between the two groups flared up, and the Genovese raided the Venetian quarters.

    The ensuing War of Saint Sabas lasted until 1270. The Venetians sent a fleet, which entered Acre, destroyed the Genovese quarters, and expelled the survivors.

    Around Constantinople, the Latin Empire of the East was much weakened, as the Byzantine rump states of Nicaea and Epirus slowly took back territory.

    Genoa approached Michael VIII Palaiologos of Nicaea, and made an alliance for the reconquest of Constantinople. Genoa would help Nicaea take back the city, and in return, they would get all the territories and privileges the Venetians had.

    In 1261, Nicaea retook Constantinople, but before the Genovese arrived to help.

    Trade to and from Constantinople and access to the Black Sea was now in the hands of Genoa, which thereby dealt a major blow to Venice.

    The Venetians weren’t, however, completely expelled from the city. A few years later, as the relationship between the Byzantines and the Genovese soured, new treaties between Constantinople and Venice were negotiated.

    Venice also tried to create a Latin alliance to make a repeat of the Fourth Crusade, but those attempts failed, partly because of an anti-French rebellion in Sicily in 1282 — the Sicilian Vespers.

    The Byzantine Empire had been restored, but much weaker, and just as dependent on western merchants — predominantly Venetian and Genovese — as it had been before the Fourth Crusade.

    Locking the council

    The Greater Council, which was established after the crisis of 1172, had taken over the creation of doges and of most other magistrates of the republic. It had, de facto, become the constitutional backbone of the republic — the highest authority of the state.

    The Venetian Republic didn’t have any formal constitution, and the creation of “constitutional bodies” happened as need arose. Venetian statehood wasn’t planned — it just happened — and there was no design, and no real constitution. The Venetian elite simply made up the rules as it went.

    The concentration of power in the Greater Council, and the lack of formal rules, led to a conflict within the Venetian elite about who should be part of the council.

    In practice, two dozen or so of the oldest and riches families in the city had dominated the council for the first century.

    In the 1260s, of 430 members of the Greater Council, over half came from just twenty-seven families. Their names and coat of arms are still visible all over the city. They were, among others, the Contarini, Querini, Dandolo, Morosini, Michiel, Falier, Zorzi, Tiepolo, Gradenigo, Badoer, Zen, Dolfin, and Corner.

    Two loose factions formed within the elite. One side wanted the membership to be more restricted and centred on the most important families, as it had actually developed.

    The other side wanted a more open council, in which able and deserving men, also from less central families, could participate. This was also like the council had developed. Even if the ancient and wealthy families dominated the council, there were many members from minor families.

    Several attempts at codifying the rules of membership of the Greater Council failed.

    In 1286, the Council of Forty suggested letting all descendants of recent members of the Greater Council enter the council automatically. The proposal would have made membership partially hereditary, thus guaranteeing certain families access, but not necessarily excluding others. It proposal didn’t pass.

    Another attempt to regulate the membership of the Greater Council was made in 1296, but that too failed to gather a majority.

    Then, in 1297, the doge suggested that membership should, limited to six months period, be extended to all those who had taken part in the council within the previous four years, to their descendants, and to those who had been eligible, but unable to participate because they’d been away from Venice.

    This limited proposal passed.

    Six months later, the following year, when the first law expired, a proposal to make it permanent passed the council.

    This is usually called the Serrata del Consiglio — the “Locking of the Council”.

    They, figuratively speaking, locked the doors of the Greater Council. No new families would enter, and no old families would leave. The doors were closed, and the discussion over.

    So who won this constitutional battle?

    It is not that clear-cut.

    Membership of the Greater Council became hereditary and limited to a well-defined circle of mostly wealthy families, which sounds like a restriction.

    However, the actual result of the “Locking of the Council” was a substantial widening of membership, up to a point where in the 1500s the council had over two thousand members.

    This reform did make Venice a fully aristocratic republic, where participation in the politics of the state was limited to certain families.

    The families, whose men by right of birth participated in the Greater Council, became the “nobles” or the “aristocracy,” and everybody else were variations of “citizens.”

    The Greater Council became where all major political matters were discussed and deliberated.

    War with the Pope

    The Republic of Venice went to war with the Papal state in 1308, over the possession of a fortress in Ferrara, which controlled an important crossing of the River Po.

    As always in Venetian history, when you scratch a bit at the surface, you find mercantile interests behind their actions.

    The Pope — Clement V, which Dante called “a lawless pastor” — furiously excommunicated Venice and all its citizens, and called for a crusade against the Venetians. The Doge — Pietro Gradenigo — responded, that “small children might be frighted by words, but men shouldn’t even be afraid of the points of swords.”

    Nevertheless, the war didn’t go well for Venice. The Venetian stronghold of Castel Tedaldo in Ferrara had to surrender, and the commander, Marco Querini, fled back to Venice.

    The conflict was eventually resolved by diplomatic means, and by paying a huge bribe to the Pope.

    Money achieved what arms had failed to obtain.

    The ruling elite in Venice — now organized in the Greater Council — was only ever united when there was an external threat to their collective control of the state. The normal state of affairs was one of ruthless in-fighting between factions for positions of power and status.

    This less than honourable outcome — and maybe more than that, the trauma of excommunication — led to a major split in the Venetian elite.

    A group of noblemen — around Baiamonte Tiepolo and Marco Querini — conspired to overthrow the faction of the doge.

    Baiamonte Tiepolo — great-grandson of a doge, grandson of a doge, whose father almost became a doge — was extremely ambitious and very wealthy, the scion of a Venetian dynasty.

    Marco Querini — from a family almost as ancient and important — was the commander who had abandoned the Castel Tedaldo in Ferrara during the war with the Pope.

    The Doge was, however, forewarned of the insurrection. As the conspirators approached the Doge’s palace from several directions, they were intercepted.

    The group led by Querini was defeated, and Marco Querini killed in the fight.

    Another group failed for reasons which have become legendary. The armed column proceeded through the alleyways towards the Doge’s Palace, following a standard-bearer, who showed the way.

    As they were about to enter the square, an old woman, from an upstairs window, dropped a stone mortar on the head of the standard-bearer.

    The man fell to the ground in a pool of blood, apparently struck dead from above, and the conspirators fled in disarray.

    Baiamonte Tiepolo hadn’t taken up arms himself, and was allowed to go into exile. The condition was that he didn’t seek refuge with any of the enemies of Venice. After some time, he did so anyway. He never returned to Venice.

    At the Rialto, two ancient arches are embedded in the modern building of the fish market. They were left standing as a monument of shame, when the palace of Marco Querini was demolished as part of the punishment of the conspirators.

    The Council of Ten

    The Greater Council, in an emergency assembly, elected a group of ten members to hunt down and kill the surviving conspirators, wherever they had fled.

    As was by then already an old tradition, such appointments were for short periods. In this case, with such a very specific task, for only two months. The task wasn’t finished after the first term, so it was extended for another two months, and another two, and then annually.

    Continuing in this way, the Council of Ten became a fixture of the Venetian state. The charges were gradually extended, to include any risk or danger to the security of the state, and it became the tribunal, where criminal cases against members of the nobility were heard.

    Every state excludes some people from the decision-making process, and therefore needs a repressive arm to keep dissent down. The Council of Ten became the repressive branch of the Venetian government.

    The Ten Councillors would be the most feared Venetian magistrates until the end of the Republic.

    The Black Plague

    The Black Plague — also called the Bubonic Plague — arrived in Venice at some point in 1347 or 1348.

    The plague originated somewhere in Central Asia, and arrived to the Black Sea through the ancient trade routes along the rivers.

    With the merchant ships prowling the Black Sea — which included Venetian and Genovese ships — it arrived in Constantinople, and from there to Venice and Genoa.

    Within five years, it had spread throughout all of Europe.

    Neither the Venetians nor anybody else, for that matter, had any kind of cure or treatment for the plague. They could do nothing but look on while people died in agony, and fear that they’d be next.

    Other waves of the plague hit Venice in 1361, 1371, 1374 and 1390, and they would continue well into the next century.

    There was an awareness that the plague arrived with the merchant ships, but so did the wealth that had made Venice powerful. As a society, Venice couldn’t — and wouldn’t — stop the ships.

    However, at the end of the 1300s, the population of Venice had halved. The economy was suffering due to a shortage of labour, but attempts at importing skilled labour led nowhere. People were dying all over Europe.

    The problem was becoming existential — a matter of survival, not just of persons, but of the state as such.

    Showdown with Genoa

    One of the many wars between Venice and Genoa almost took Venice off the map for good.

    A fleet from Genoa appeared in the upper Adriatic in 1379, and quickly took Chioggia, which is at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon.

    From there, the Genovese moved north, inside the lagoon, towards Venice. They established a forward base on the island of Poveglia, some ten kilometres south of Venice.

    The two navies fought for much of 1380, inside the lagoon, within sight of Venice itself.

    Venice — fighting for its very survival — threw everything it had into the fight, and in 1381 they dislodged the Genovese from Poveglia. Later that year, they took back Chioggia, and Genoa sued for peace.

    This war, just like the war against the Franks in 809, could have been the end of Venice.

    After this epic struggle, the Venetians started building defences in strategic places in the lagoon.

    The original citizens of Poveglia were never allowed back on the island again. It became a shipyard for the navy, a defensive structure, and, much later, a quarantine station for the plague.