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Venice - History

Early Venice

Venice's history as an autonomous state began some time during the early Middle Ages, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and continued in all its originality for more than 1,100 years until the Napoleonic era.

Attila and his brother succeeded their uncle as leaders of the Huns in 434, with Attila in the junior role until his brother's death (perhaps at Attila's hand) 12 years later. The Hun kingdom was centred in modern-day Hungary. Attila embarked immediately upon a series of wars extending Hun rule from the Rhine across the north of the Black Sea as far as the Caspian Sea. From that base he soon began a long series of sabre-rattling negotiations with the capitals of the Roman Empire at Constantinople in the East and Ravenna in the West.

Finally, Attila forged an alliance with the Franks and Vandals and in Spring 451 unleashed his long-threatened attack into the heart of Western Europe. After pillaging a broad swath of cities in his path, he was near obtaining the surrender of Orleans when the combined Roman and Visigoth armies arrived and forced Attila's retreat to the northeast.

Near Troy's the opposing forces joined battle at Chalons in one of the decisive battles of European history. Though the margin of victory was slim, the Western army prevailed, precipitating Attila's withdrawal back across the Rhine and avoiding a decisive shift in the course of political and economic development in Western Europe.

Venice lay at first on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, acting as a trading and shipping centre on the lagoons and rivers up to the plain of Padua, and as a centre of distribution for goods from the East. According to Venetian historical traditions, Venice was independent of Byzantium from the first, and the first doge or duke; Paoluccio Anafesto (or more commonly, Paulicius) was elected in 697. Roberto Cessi's rather more critical assessment identifies this figure with Paul, exarches of Ravenna.

Pope Gregory II opposed the extension to Italy of the edict of the iconoclast emperor Leo III "the Isaurian" by ordering the destruction of the holy images in 727. The armies of Byzantine Italy proclaimed their own dukes; in Venice this may have been Orso, third in the traditional list of doges. The crisis was successfully overcome, however, and when the Lombard king Liutprand conquered Ravenna in 740, the exarch took refuge on the lagoon, from where he reconquered his capital with the help of the venetici.

At a time when Byzantine rule in Italy was we could make out, was troubled, the doge's seat was transferred from Cittanova to Malamocco. The inhabitants of Venetia, landowners, merchants, seamen and farmers continued their lives uninterrupted by the difficult circumstances of the time.

In 805 Doge Oberlerio degli Antinori--fearing a coup such as the one he had himself engineered against his predecessor--rashly committed Venice to the sovereignty of Charlemagne's Frankish empire (by then grandiloquently called the Holy Roman Empire). Charlemagne was seeking to consolidate his power in Northern Italy by nibbling away at areas that were--like Venice--historically subject to the sovereignty of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Roman Empire then centred at Constantinople [present-day Istanbul]. In 809, his political position having become even more tenuous, the Doge invited Charlemagne's son Pepin, whom Pope Hadrian had crowned as King of Italy, to send an armed force up the Adriatic coast from Ravenna to occupy Venice and its lagoon. Shunting aside the hapless Doge, the people of the lagoon forgot all political differences and immediately formed a common defence under the leadership of Agnello Participazio (whose family in later generations assumed the surname Badoer). At the southern end of the Venetian lagoon, Chioggia and Palestrina fell quickly to Pepin's advance in the Spring of 810, together with Grado and perhaps Jesolo at the lagoon's Northern end. Then, however, Pepin was stymied by Venice's watery defences. The Venetians removed all buoys and channel markers, making the shallow lagoon a dangerous maze of shoals and currents, impenetrable to Pepin's naval forces. The channel between Palestrina and the heavily-settled barrier island of Malamocco became an impassable obstacle and the islands of Rivo Alto were even further removed from danger.

Greater than the military victory itself was the campaign's importance in forging among the lagoon dwellers a sense of unity, of community, that persisted for the next 1,000 years. The siege can be viewed as the event that defined Venice.

After the year 1000 Venice became a great Mediterranean naval power, and her role as intermediary between East and West was strengthened. With the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 she became the dominant power in the Levant. The Republican system of government developed in the city-state led it as well to supremacy in the Italian peninsula.

The Ottoman Turks first appeared in history in 1227 as a group of several thousand persons fleeing from Central Asia before the advance of Mongol invaders. Just 226 years later an Ottoman army--90,000 warriors--stood at the gates of Constantinople, capital of Byzantium, the successor to the legendary Roman Empire. The transformation of the Ottoman Turks from a refugee horde to a mighty military force was a testament to the remarkable leadership of the Ottomans in that period and to their highly effective governance structure. For decades the advance of Ottoman strength and the enlargement of its territory had seemed inexorable to the Byzantines and to other interested observers such as the Venetians. In 1438 John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine emperor, with a huge entourage had made a personal visit to Venice and elsewhere in Italy in a desperate effort to assemble allies against the Ottomans. Much was said and little was achieved.

In fact, the Venetians had succeeded better than most western powers at establishing and maintaining - subject to intermittent interruptions - important trading relationships with the Ottomans as Ottoman power and territory grew. Nonetheless, in early 1453 as the Ottoman siege on Constantinople tightened, only the Venetians attempted to provide any substantial military assistance to the Byzantines. For Europe as a whole, the great unanswered question was: how far west would the Ottoman expansion ultimately reach? By 1529 the Ottoman army was at the gates of Vienna, the geographic centre of Europe. That unsuccessful siege was repeated in 1681, provoking at last a unified response from the major powers of Western Europe. The Ottoman advance into Europe had been stemmed.

The lesson of Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 is the supremacy of technology and economics in the shaping of great historical trends. The 500-year territorial expansion of Venice had been founded in technology: In the period around the year 1000 Venice had developed a technically advanced war galley and within the next century had begun to put in place its Arsenal -- a huge and efficient shipyard for the rapid and efficient mass production of her war ships. Economically, the trading and natural resource opportunities of the newly-discovered continents dwarfed the financial rewards that Venice so effectively exploited in its trade with the Far East and around the Eastern Mediterranean. Scholars have debated the degree to which Venice's Asian trade was adversely affected in an absolute sense by Columbus' discovery, but there can be no doubt that in a relative sense Venice would soon be outstripped by the giant economic powers who were building their strength on the riches of the New World.

Beginning shortly after 1500, the Republic of Venice began taking a series of decisions so wrong-headed that she provoked a military alliance against her by virtually every major power of Southern Europe -- an improbable consensus among rulers who seldom agreed on anything. In fact, Cardinal della Rovere, now Pope Julius II, swiftly and effectively forged an alliance among all of Venice's neighbours, offering them an opportunity to avenge their grievances of the past and carve up all of Venice's territory among themselves. The bargain was sealed in a December 1508 convocation at Cambrai in southern France; by the following spring Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States, Hungary, Savoy, Mantua and Ferrara had all agreed to send their armies into the field against the mercenary forces of Venice in a devise campaign .

If Europe in the second half of the 1700s was a stage for great theatre, the tired old Republic of Venice was only sitting in the wings, waiting patiently for her cue to enter onstage and expire.

Her economy undermined, her military strength dwarfed by the emergence of the great warring nation-states of Europe, Venice adopted a foreign policy based on having no policy at all: Venice was determined to be a neutral at all costs, to give no offence to anyone whatsoever. As Napoleon Bonaparte moved into the military leadership of France, however, Venice learned that offence can be taken even when none is given.

In early 1796 French forces under the 26-year old Bonaparte slashed into Lombardy. By mid-May the Austrians had been pushed from Milan; their last stronghold on the Italian peninsula, at Mantua, was to fall soon thereafter. Napoleon used the occasion to begin questioning Venice's neutrality, citing the passage of Austrian forces through Venetian territory. In the following year French forces occupied Bergamo, Brescia and Verona and then pushed northward through the Brenner Pass into Austria. Clashes between the French and the local populations inevitably followed--each provoking still more aggressive French demands and more effusive Venetian apologies.

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