History of Venice

Tag: Statehood

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    The Pope demanded that Venice handed the two over to the church tribunals, and that they rescinded the laws limiting the donation of property to the church.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

  • Becoming a state (750–1000)

    Becoming a state (750–1000)

    Venice appeared as a kind of, but not quite, sovereign polity in the late 700s and 800s. Venetian society, no longer governed by Constantinople, nor really independent, had to survive between the two super-powers of their time, Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire.

    The Venetians on their own

    When the Lombards conquered Ravenna in 751, they put an end to the Exarchy and to a direct Byzantine presence in north-eastern Italy.

    The Venetians in the lagoons were now almost on their own. Constantinople was far away, and communication was slow. They would have to take care of their affairs themselves.

    The constraints of life in the lagoons forced the Venetians to seek wealth in trade. The only local produce of importance was salt, which still had to be sold to somebody.

    The lagoons were formally still a part of the Byzantine Empire, so trade towards the east didn’t meet major political or economic barriers.

    The main problem for the Venetians was piracy. Some of the other peoples living down the Adriatic Sea preyed on the rich Venetian ships sailing up and down the coast.

    On the mainland side, the Lombards controlled all the territory north, west and south. The mainland was, to all extents and purposes, another country, with all the problems that created for commerce and interaction in general. To be able to trade safely up the rivers on the mainland, the Venetians needed formal agreements.

    In other words, treaties.

    The internal political rift, about which of the two relationships was more important, persisted.

    The extent of the dogado — approx. 130km by 15km.
    The extent of the dogado — approx. 130km by 15km.

    Venetian politics

    It was established that the Venetian elite now chose their Dux (or doge) themselves, but also that the newly elected doge soon after went to Constantinople to swear allegiance to the emperor. He would then return to the dogado (the duchy), invested with imperial authority and courtly titles.

    The communities of the dogado were still Byzantines.

    The election of the doge happened in an informal popular assembly called the concio or the arringo.

    In such an assembly of the ‘people’, who are the people?

    The answer to that question is not always as simple as it seems. For example, in most westerns societies, until fairly recently, women weren’t ‘people’ in the political sense.

    Among the Venetians, where long-distance trade had become the main source of wealth, power was concentrated in a group of wealthy merchants. Most of these resided on the islands in the wider area around the Rialto markets, which was already then the economic centre.

    The election of the doge was by acclamation, so there would have been a good deal of wrangling going on, before a consensus was reached. In effect, it was a kind of power-sharing system between the dominant dynasties and factions.

    The powers of the doges

    The chosen doges had all the powers of the Byzantine Dux. That meant both military and civilian authority.

    However, the Dux under the Exarchs had a superior, so they could be removed. There was some kind of check on the way they exercised power.

    Once the Exarchy was gone, and the Venetians chose their own leader, that was no longer the case.

    The doges wielded almost absolute power, they were chosen for life, and there was no procedure for removing them. They were practically elected kings.

    Competition for the election was fierce, and some dynasties developed, who between them completely dominated the first centuries of the Venetian state.

    Of the first twenty-five locally chosen doges, six were from the Partecipazio clan, five were from the Candiano dynasty, and another three were Orseolo.

    Over almost three centuries, more than half the doges, ruling half the period, came from just those three families.

    That’s a quite amazing concentration of power, but none of these dynasties managed to hold on to it.

    Not for lack of trying, through.

    The problem of succession

    It soon became common for a newly chosen doge to appoint a son co-ruler. The intent was usually to make the position of doge hereditary — establishing a monarchy. When the father died, the son would already be in a position of authority.

    There are several examples of a son following his father as doge in this period, but none of the dynasties managed to hold on to power for long.

    Without any formal constitutional order, such power grabs almost inevitably led to physical violence and people killing each other.

    Of the same twenty-five early doges, about half were either killed, forcibly deposed, or went into monasteries to avoid getting killed or blinded.

    In Constantinople, when an emperor was deposed, rather than killing him outright, it became common procedure to blind him and send him to a monastery. This was also the fate of several deposed Doges of the Venetians. The Venetians were culturally Byzantines, also in their treatment of deposed rulers.

    If the way the early Venetian state functioned seems awfully disorganized, it is because it was.

    Venetian statehood wasn’t planned. There was no declaration of independence, there was no constitution beyond tradition, and there was no consensus within the elite on how the state should work, or even what its purpose was.

    The Franks in Italy

    The Frankish empire expanded into northern Italy in the early years of Charlemagne’s reign. In 774, he defeated the last king of the Lombards, and claimed the title for himself.

    For the Venetians, it meant that rather than bordering on a regional power on the mainland, they now had an empire there. Furthermore, an empire which soon claimed the entire heritage of the Western Roman Empire in direct competition with Byzantium.

    Charlemagne appointed his second son Pepin King of the Lombards in 781. Pepin embarked on a campaign to subdue as much of the peninsula as possible, in particular the surviving Lombard territories, but also the remainders of the Byzantine presence.

    In the year 800, Charlemagne had the Pope crown him Emperor of the Romans, which wasn’t perceived well in Constantinople. The Byzantines saw themselves as the only “Romans”, and refused to recognise Charlemagne as an equal.

    The Venetians were as always divided into pro-Byzantine and pro-Lombard/Frankish factions. Internal strife between the factions gave Pepin a pretext to try to occupy the lagoons, and he arrived with a navy in 809.

    The Franks quickly occupied the Lidos, where they sacked and burned the Doge’s palace at Metamauco.

    When the Frankish navy entered the lagoon, the Venetians rallied around the Rialto for a last stand. The Franks didn’t know the lagoon well, and had difficulties navigating the narrow, unmarked canals. The Venetians continuously harassed them, using smaller boats and their knowledge of the lagoon.

    The fighting — in an area well within sight of the current Doge’s Palace — was fierce and lasted several months. It was also a very bloody fight, and the lagoon battlefields are still, to this day, called the Canale Orfani — the canal of the orphans.

    The Venetians — figuratively fighting with their back against the wall — were saved by a plague. Some kind of contagious disease spread in the Frankish camp, and they were compelled to lift the siege.

    Pepin died not long after, in 810, likely of the same disease.

    Venetian society survived this attack, but it was close.

    The Doge of the Venetians got a new palace, no longer at Metamauco, but on the Rialto archipelago, where the headquarters during the war had been.

    A peace treaty was negotiated a few years later, in 812. Not by the Venetians, but between the Carolingian Empire on the one side, and the Byzantine Empire on the other. The Venetians weren’t at the table when empires discussed matters of empire. Among other things, the treaty confirmed the previous de facto border between the two empires, with the lagoons as Byzantine territory, and the mainland as Frankish.

    The war with the Franks had several long-lasting effects for the dogado:

    Firstly, any pro-Frankish faction within Venetian society was now dead. Nobody would stand up in the assembly of the wealthy merchants, and argue for closer alignment with the Franks on the mainland. The Venetians would now focus on their Byzantine connections.

    Secondly, the Venetians had won this war, against an imperial foe, with their own forces. Nobody had come to their aid, if not divine intervention through the plague. Despite the devastation of their lands, it was quite a confidence booster.

    Thirdly, with the Doge now settled in the central lagoon, the Rialto area became the undisputed centre of the dogado.

    Finally, the peace treaty between the two empires gave the dogado lasting stability on the border between the mainland and the lagoons. The Venetians could concentrate on their business dealings.

    Saint Mark the Alexandrian

    Not long after the war, in 828, another morale booster lifted the confidence of the Venetians.

    This story is shrouded in myths.

    Two merchants, Bon da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, travelled to Alexandria in Egypt. In the souk of Alexandria, the Venetians bought goods from Egypt, Central Africa and the East African coast. They were well established there, long before the journey of Bon and Rustico.

    The two Venetians got hold of the box with the bones of St Mark.

    Whether they bought the relics from the Alexandrine monks, got them for safekeeping, or simply stole them in the dead of night, is unclear, but they got them.

    The relics of such a saint were worth a fortune, but the two merchants managed to smuggle the treasure through customs by hiding the box in a large chest full of salted pork. The Muslim soldiers, checking the ship before departure, shied away from the chest when they saw the contents.

    When the two merchants arrived in Venice with the relics of such an important saint, they were treated as heroes and got a huge reward.

    St Mark was immediately declared the patron saint of the Venetians, shunting the previous protector St Theodore to a side. A new chapel dedicated to St Mark, grander than the old chapel of St Theodore, was built besides the new palace of the Doge.

    The Procurators of San Marco were initially appointed to oversee the construction of the church, then for its upkeep. This office became one of the very first permanent offices of the nascent Venetian state. Besides the church, they were also charged with the execution of wills, and protecting the property of minors and the mentally infirm. The Procurators, while not politically powerful, ranked just under the Doge, until the end of the Republic.

    The acquisition of the relics of St Mark was a major scoop. It is difficult to overstate its importance. It was much, much more than just a religious matter.

    St Mark was a somebody in the world of saints. He had travelled with St Peter to Rome. St Peter later sent him to Africa to found a Christian church there, the African Orthodox Church, of which he became the first patriarch. Due to this role, he is sometimes referred to as the thirteenth apostle. He is also traditionally considered the author of the Gospel of Mark.

    The relics of such important religious figures were generally kept in major religious or political centres. The relics of many of the apostles were collected in various churches in Constantinople, and, of course, the important saints Peter and Paul were buried in Rome.

    Hosting the relics of the founder of a major church, the author of one of the gospels, and a long-time companion of St Peter himself, lifted the dogado to a new level of importance.

    Besides the religious and political aspects, there’s also the economic.

    Travel was dangerous in the Middle Ages, and people generally only went travelling for either war, trade or for the salvation of their soul. Medieval tourism was therefore mostly religious, and important sanctuaries had a steady flow of pilgrims — and of the pilgrims’ money.

    Relics were big business.

    The city of Venice

    Before the early 800s, there wasn’t any Venice yet. There were, at most, some scattered settlements in the area.

    The entire area, where Venice now is, was an archipelago of marsh islands, divided in two by the winding Meduacus — one of the main rivers traversing the lagoon.

    In the earliest times, there were several settlements in the area, especially around the Rialto, on the Olivolo island, around two twin islands in Castello, whose exact location has been lost, and in Dorsoduro.

    The Rialto marketplace was the defining feature of the area. There was a marketplace at Rialto even in Roman times, before the migrations into the lagoons. That bit of marsh had always been an important crossroads.

    The name Rialto was used for both the Rialto marketplaces, as it is today, and for the entire archipelago, where the city of Venice is today.

    Rialto comes from the Latin rivus altus, which can mean two things. Either it means a deep canal, referring to the Grand Canal, where ships of all sizes could moor safely.

    Alternatively, it means a high brink. In that case, it indicates that these marsh islands were higher, and therefore drier, which would make them a good place for people to meet and barter their goods and produce, no matter the level of the tide.

    If the marketplace was always there, the Church arrived in 774 when the Olivolo island became an episcopal see. The Olivolo island is located in at the easternmost part of modern Venice, and is usually called San Pietro today, after the church of the bishop and later patriarch.

    The elevation of the Olivolo to a bishopric is a testimony to the economic importance of the central lagoon, and a sign that there was a sizeable population.

    With the presence of a bishop, the wider Rialto area became a religious centre, too.

    After the war with the Franks, in 811, the doge of the Venetians moved to Rialto, to the area which is today called St Mark’s. There, a new palace was built, surrounded by earth mounds, palisades, and a moat. Nearby, a chapel for St Theodore — the first patron saint of the Venetians — was erected.

    Finally, the relics of St Mark arrived, to be placed, not with the Bishop of Olivolo, but near the residence of the Doge. St Mark became the new patron saint of the Venetians, and a new, larger, church was erected besides the chapel of St Theodore.

    This made the wider Rialto area a combined economic, religious and political centre, and from the mid-800s it was the undisputed centre of the dogado. It was where the major decisions were taken, and where most major events took place.

    As Venice grew into a real city, it needed infrastructure and maintenance. Another of the very early offices of the nascent Venetian state were the Provveditori di Comun — literally, the Superintendents of the Commons. The commons were all the spaces and facilities in the city which nobody owned, but everybody used, such as streets, bridges, public wells, and quay-sides.

    In ancient sources, Venice is hardly ever referred to by that name. During the Middle Ages it was most often just Rialto, and later also la dominante (meaning the dominant one) or simply la città (the city).

    The terminology was, in short, that the people were the Venetians, their state was the Dogado (the Duchy of the Venetians), and the city was Rialto or the city.

    The importance of trade

    The arrival of St Mark in Venice was a side effect of what was by necessity the main vocation of the Venetians: trade by sea and river.

    The peace treaty of 812 confined the Venetians to the lagoons between Grado in the north and the estuary of the River Po in the south. There were few other options for accumulating wealth than trade.

    Fortunately, that same treaty also gave the Venetians a long period of peace on the mainland side, allowing them to develop that trade over the next few centuries.

    Venetian ships headed down the Adriatic Sea, and ventured as far as the Levant, Constantinople and around the Black Sea.

    The Eastern Mediterranean was a major trade hub in the medieval world.

    Tropical hardwoods, ivory and black slaves arrived in Alexandria along the Nile. Spices from Madagascar and timber from Ethiopia arrived there too, by the Red Sea.

    From India, spices and gemstones travelled up the Persian Gulf, the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and then past Palmyra to the coast of Syria.

    The Silk Road from China, which also transported cotton from Central Asia, led to the Caspian Sea. Across there, up the Volga River to Volgograd, down the Don River to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

    From the Baltic area, goods travelled down the Dnieper River, past Kyiv, to the Black Sea.

    The Black Sea, with large populations of non-Christians, was also a source of slaves for the Byzantine, Arab and Western European slave markets. The connection is such that the English word ‘slave’ derives from the word ‘Slav’, through Arab and Byzantine Greek.

    Closer to home, both the Byzantine and the Arab dominions had interesting products of their own. From the Greek lands, the Venetians imported cheeses and wine, and the Dalmatian coast supplied meat, fresh and salted, to the Venetians.

    Therefore, in the harbours of the Eastern Mediterranean and around the Black Sea, the Venetians — and their competitors from Genoa — could buy goods from almost all the known world.

    Being, formally at least, still a part of the Byzantine world, facilitated this trade.

    Several settlements in the lagoons developed into important commercial centres. Naturally, the Rialto, but also Torcello further north, which in the early Middle Ages could compete with Rialto in importance.

    The products, which the Venetians imported or made from imported raw materials, had to be sold somewhere. Much went up the rivers on the mainland, towards the rest of Western Europe.

    The importance of this trade, not just for the Venetians, but also for their trading partners, is evident from some of the agreements made in the 900s.

    The Byzantine emperor issued a Golden Bull in 992, which exempted the Venetian merchants from all customs in Constantinople. Clearly, the empire in the east needed the Venetian trade as much as the Venetians.

    Towards the west, in a treaty from 983, the Holy Roman Empire formally recognized Venice as an independent state, and another treaty from 992 regulated Venetian trade on the mainland.

    Piracy and war in the Adriatic Sea

    The Venetian economy flourished, but even if the Venetians had managed to create long-term working relationships with the two major empires, all was not well.

    The Venetian ships sailing up and down the Adriatic Sea soon became targets of predators.

    The people living around the Naretva river (in modern-day Croatia) caused the Venetians much grief, and the Venetians mounted campaigns against them in 830, 839, 864, 887 and 948.

    In either 932 or 944, pirates — from Trieste or from the Naretva — attacked the bishop’s church on the Olivolo and abducted all the Venetian brides for the weddings of that year. The Venetians set after them and reclaimed the girls and their dowries in a story that would become legendary.

    Likewise, the Saracens, who had conquered parts of Southern Italy, posed a threat to Venetian navigation, and to the Byzantine Empire. The Venetians fought the Saracens — on behalf of Constantinople or on their own account — in 827, 840, and 867.

    The Venetians weren’t always acting in defence. In 932 and in 951, the Venetians attacked Comacchio, another city of merchants in a lagoon south of the Po estuary, and thereby eliminated one of their competitors.

    Finally, in the 990s, Venice took control of the Istrian peninsula and the Dalmatian coast — both in modern Croatia — and the “Doge of the Venetians” became the “Doge of the Venetians and of the Dalmatians.”

    Statehood

    When did the society of the Venetians develop into a Venetian state? What does it even mean to be a state?

    Both are good questions, which naturally implies that they have no simple answers.

    Did the dogado become a state with the election of Dux Orso in 726, against the will of Constantinople? The answer is No because the Byzantines returned and imposed their rulers on the lagoons again.

    Was it a state in 742, when Teodato was elected doge? All later doges were chosen locally, but they kept publicly declaring their allegiance to Constantinople. That doesn’t sound like independence.

    Did they acquire statehood in 809 when they fought off the Franks? Not quite, since the following peace treaty was negotiated between the Carolingian and Byzantine empires, in Aachen, without any participation of the Venetians.

    During the 800s, the Venetians created positions and roles — which we would most likely consider offices or institutions of a state — such as the Procurators of San Marco and the Provveditori di Comun.

    Then, in 841, the Venetians entered into an international treaty, negotiated directly with Holy Roman Emperor Lothar I.

    Modern definitions of sovereignty usually include elements like self-rule with an institutionalized system of government, and the ability to make treaties with other sovereigns.

    The Venetians got there, but slowly, step by step, over more than a century.

    Venetian statehood wasn’t an event. It was a process — a very long process.