INTRODUCTION

We will consider, attend to, and work for the honor and profit of the people of Venice in good faith and without fraud.

—FROM THE DOGE OF VENICE’S OATH OF OFFICE, 1192

In the year 452 the world was ending.

The Roman Empire, which for centuries had dispensed prosperity, power, and security to its citizens, was crumbling. Once, long ago, the roads of the empire had bustled with merchants, soldiers, and citizens making their way across a landscape of peace and plenty. Now those roads were the avenues of invasion for barbarians and conquerors.

At the head of the Adriatic Sea, the lush plains and hills of the Veneto were especially hard hit, for they stood at the crossroads of the eastern and western halves of the broken empire. In the old days of the Pax Romana this area had been one of great beauty and wealth. Patavium (modern Padua) had boasted of its affluent citizens who reaped rich profits from the wool and wine afforded by the verdant countryside. Noble Aquileia, the “eagle city,” was a place of opulence with heavily fortified walls surrounding magnificent forums, palaces, monuments, and harbors. Its markets and homes spilled over with every luxury and delicacy that a vast empire could afford.

But in 452 Attila the Hun came to Aquileia. Abandoned by their empire, the citizens of the great city manned the walls and defied the Asian conqueror and his fearful hordes. The Aquileians were a determined people, and they fought with great courage. Three months later Attila was still frustrated in his ambition, still unable to take the city—and his men were grumbling. One morning, while considering his next move, Attila took a walk around the fortifications and noticed something unusual.

The storks were restless.

Beyond the walls, on the roofs of Aquileia hundreds of white storks had been nesting for months, but this morning there was something different about them. They no longer lounged serenely, looking contemptuously from their perches down onto the Huns. Instead, they were busily picking up their young and flying off toward the horizon. Attila knew an omen when he saw one. At once he ordered his men to storm the walls. The storks proved prescient. Great Aquileia fell that day. The Huns quickly reduced the city to a smoldering, corpse-strewn ruin. Soon they would do the same at Patavium, and Concordia, and Altinum, and every other Roman city in Attila’s path.

The few survivors of this devastation searched for refuge but found none. Where could one flee when even Rome itself was in danger? With no secure retreat on the mainland, ragged bands of refugees made their way to the marshes of the nearby lagoon, a brackish hideaway between the land and the Adriatic Sea. They loaded their families and what possessions they could scrounge onto boats and rowed out to the sandy islands of a new watery world. There they found safety from the barbarians. There, they hoped, they could survive the end of their world.

Although they could never have known it, the desperate men, women, and children in those lonely boats were the founders of one of history’s most remarkable cities. From an archipelago of sand, trees, and marsh they would bring forth the extraordinary beauty that is Venice—a city unlike any other. It did not happen all at once or easily. For centuries the lagoon remained a collection of small island communities. Even after settlements began to cluster around Rialto, Venice was still a place of wood and mud. But that, too, would change. By the thirteenth century Venice was no longer simply a town built on the water, it had become western Europe’s second-largest city with a maritime empire that stretched across the Mediterranean Sea. Venice and wealth would become kindred concepts. And with that wealth the Venetians built a magnificent city—a stunning composition of stone and waves that still evokes wonder today.

Venice and its history have always fascinated people from all walks of life. It is a place of contradictions—a city without land, an empire without borders. Everyone knows what Venice is, but fewer know why it is or how it came to be. It is not simply a work of art, but a birthplace of modern capitalism. The medieval market stalls of Rialto were the nerve center for a complex commercial network that stretched thousands of miles, in which bond markets, liability insurance, and banking (among other things) developed. While the rest of medieval Europe groaned under kings and landed magnates, the Venetians formed a free republic—one that would last for a thousand years.

In the last quarter century there has been a tremendous flowering of historical scholarship on the city of Venice. One can visit the hushed reading rooms of the Archivio di Stato or the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice any time of the year and find dozens of professional scholars from around the world closely studying the manuscripts and documents of past ages. The fruits of all that research have been presented in thousands of journal articles and scholarly monographs. As a result, we now know much more about Venice than we have ever known before. By their nature, however, these studies are technical and difficult to comprehend without extensive background knowledge. And, of course, only a minority are in English.

As a professional historian, I have spent my share of hours in Venice’s archives and libraries and penned my share of scholarly studies. At some point, though, it seems to me that someone must draw from that wealth of scholarship to produce a new history of Venice accessible to anyone with a desire to know about it. That is the purpose of this book.

Writing the history of Venice is a proud, ancient tradition in itself, yet one that has often involved taking a certain license with the facts. The Biblioteca Marciana holds hundreds of centuries-old manuscripts, containing in their yellowed parchment pages a wealth of histories of Venice written in Latin or the Venetian dialect. These are, for the most part, a fascinating hodgepodge of local legend, cherished traditions, and pure fabrication. Occasionally there were attempts at real accuracy, such as Doge Andrea Dandolo’s fourteenth-century Chronica, based on solid archival documentation and a sincere desire to tell a true tale. But the vast storehouse of Venice’s state archives was not available to just anyone. Indeed, the archives were open to virtually no one. That changed after 1797 when the Republic of Venice fell and its archives were packed away into the Frari monastery, where they still remain today. Modern history writing can perhaps be traced to Pierre Darù’s multivolume Histoire de la République de Venise, published in 1819. Drawing extensively from Venetian archival documents, Darù, who had been one of Napoleon’s assistants, painted a generally unflattering picture of the Republic of Venice. Venetian scholars quickly fired back with their own larger, more comprehensive, and better reasoned histories based on careful studies in the archives and manuscript collections. The greatest of these was Samuele Romanin’s Storia documentata di Venezia, published between 1853 and 1861. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this work, which ran to ten volumes and for the first time brought together an extensive historical narrative with edited archival documents to support it. Romanin’s book was the basis for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of shorter histories written in English, French, and German for popular audiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Since 1900, though, comprehensive histories of Venice based on independent research have been relatively rare. Among the best are Heinrich Kretschmayr’s Geschichte von Venedig (1905–34), Roberto Cessi’s Storia della Repubblica di Venezia (1944–46), and Frederic C. Lane’s Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973). None of them, however, are what one might call an easy read. For that, the twentieth century served up a cornucopia of histories of Venice written by a variety of popular authors, including Gore Vidal, Jan Morris, Peter Ackroyd, and John Julius Norwich. Yet professional historians have been slow to take up the challenge of producing a new comprehensive history of Venice based on the best available research. Elizabeth Horodowich’s A Brief History of Venice (2009) makes a good start. This present book, however, aims to tell the story of Venice more completely with an emphasis on the people and events that shaped its unique history. It is impossible to talk about Venice without speaking of the artistic and cultural treasures that it produced—and those are certainly here. But it is the overriding aim of this book to set Venice within its own times, to follow its people, both common and noble, and to examine the challenges that they faced. The artists and musicians are here—but so, too, are the doges, the sailors, the priests, and the prostitutes.

The people of Venice have always been among the most fascinating in the world. During more than two decades of research, I have had the privilege of reading thousands of their personal documents from the Middle Ages and forming close friendships with Venetians of our own time. I have learned over those years that Venetians are not a people who can be boiled down to a myth or a trope, as some histories and guidebooks have unfortunately done. This is particularly true when we look to the medieval and Renaissance history of Venice. Venetians from that millennium are often branded disdainfully with the mark of Shylock, Shakespeare’s Venetian moneylender who insists upon his “pound of flesh.” Perhaps, as the great historian of Venice, Donald E. Queller, once remarked, it is simply that intellectuals and academics are uncomfortable around businessmen. The Venetians, who were businessmen through and through, often appear in modern histories as the equivalent of snake-oil salesmen: crafty, conniving, greedy, and on the make. I respectfully disagree with that assessment. Norwich, for example, goes too far when he writes, “There spoke the authentic voice of Venice. The state might come first, but enlightened self-interest was never far behind.” Similarly, Donald M. Nicol was wrong, I believe, when he summed up the Venetian character saying, “They were Venetians first, and Christians afterwards.” Over the decades I have held in my hands too many medieval Venetian parchments containing wills, reports, and writs of charitable donations to believe that so diverse a people can be dismissed with such stereotypes. Capitalism and idealism are not incompatible concepts. Like all peoples, the Venetians were a complex tapestry of good and wicked, selfless and selfish, honorable and shameful. They cannot be pressed between the leaves of a stale morality tale.

It is my hope, then, that this book will open a door for its reader to a clear and fascinating history of the city and republic of Venice. Of course, no single volume could ever encompass so vast a subject. But the high and low points are all here, as well as the battles, triumphs, tears, and tragedies along the way. It is a remarkable tale, and one that deserves to be told.

Fifteen centuries ago the families who loaded their simple boats and fled the Huns were escaping one world and building a bridge to another. While Europe was becoming a feudal battleground, Venice established a republic of free citizens. That republic would survive across the centuries, just long enough to inspire new generations who likewise sought to escape a crumbling world. They included the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. John Adams, for example, carefully researched the history of Venice, setting some of it down in his work A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787). But by then time was running out for aged Venice. Although the world’s newest republic sought formal relations with the world’s oldest, the histories of America and Venice would overlap for only two decades before the latter was no more.

And yet, before the storks again took wing, the achievements of the city on the water were carefully passed on to a new age.