Chapter Eleven

THE ALLOTMENTS
OF THE GODS

SMALL-ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

The “South Seas”—Hawaii and Easter Island—the Aleutians—the Maldives—Malta—Minoan Crete—Venice

“Why in God’s name would they [Aleutian Islanders] want to come out here, unless they were nuts?” Red shook his head, and answered his own question. “Guess they’re just nuts. . . . ”

—T. BANKII,Birthplace of the Winds

All of us, without exception, live on islands. But some of these islands on our planet are so much larger than others that we have decided to let them belong to a class of their own and have called them “continents.”

—Van Loon’s Geography

The Tangle of Isles: Polynesian Navigation

We are used to small islands that are rich. By some measurements, Iceland has the richest population of any country in the world. Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are homes to some of the world’s most dynamic economies. Other small islands seem to be magnets for the wealth of the jet set and the tax-shy. Inan era like ours, with huge volumes of seaborne trade, islands can cash in as staging posts and entrepOts—knots in the net of commerce.

It is easy to mistake these exceptional current privileges for the normal state of affairs, or to be seduced by the traditional romantic image of islands, especially in the tropics, as patches of paradise—traps of abundance, inviting Edens.¹For most of history, small islands have been condemned to poverty and insecurity. Limited surface area means restricted local food production.

Isolation threatens supply from outside. Yet the sea also provides an avenue of attack, and the inhabitants of islands are condemned to vigilance and costly countermeasures. Their homes tend to be—as the great historian Fernand Braudel said of most of the islands of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century—“hungry worlds” or “prisons of a precarious life.”²

Even today, many small islands are among the poorest places in the world, if they are remote or out of the way of trade or tourism or the tax-avoidance industry. Others need subsidies from mainland economies, or special tax rights, or free-port status, or gambling dens to keep them going. Yet some conspicuous exceptions show that when islands break out of poverty they can be very rich indeed; and when they protect themselves from invasion they can nurse distinctive civilizations. This happens usually, but not exclusively, by way of trade. Difficulties and opportunities, delicately balanced, constitute a challenge to which some small-island peoples have been able to respond with impressive results. Islands off the coast of East Africa have profited at various periods, for instance, by mediating trade across the Indian Ocean. Medieval Kilwa and nineteenth-century Zanzibar had cultures compounded of richly mixed influences from Africa, Arabia, and India. You can still sense this when you look into what survives of the ruined dome of Kilwa’s ancient mosque, lined with blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. The Comoros have a luckless reputation today—a client of power politics, a victim of volatility in the vanilla market—but under the Shirazi sultans of the early-modern period they had the lively cosmopolitan culture of an emporium with exports of its own: rice, ambergris, spices, slaves. Some isles of Southeast Asia benefited in what we think of as medieval times from their unique conditions for producing rare spices. In the sixteenth century, Ternate and Tidore were the prizes over which Spanish and Portuguese cosmographers wrestled mentally, trying to adjust the meridian of demarcation between their allotted zones of navigation to trap the world’s nutmeg and mace on their side of the line.³

The sea can shape island civilizations either by confining them or by linking-them to other lands. Either way, proximity to the sea is such a powerful feature of any environment which includes it that it dwarfs all other features. Whatever the nature of the soil or temperature, the relief or biota, if the sea is at hand it has a shaping force. Nearness to the shore molds one’s outlook and affects the way one thinks. The sea is awesome because it is intractable, untrappable;it changes everything it touches without being easily changed in turn. It makes coral of bones and pearls of eyes. It reshapes shorelines, erodes coasts, gulps swards and cities, hews continents. At us land creatures it flings weather systems which, after all our millennia of civilization, expose the continuing feebleness of our power over the environment. The sea has no appointed limits, except in the pious cravings of the prayerful. It is a part of chaos that survived creation. It makes us feel small.

“Smallness” is a relative concept, and the reader will want to know, I expect,-how small a “small-island civilization” has to be to qualify for this category; what matters, however, is not so much the size, arbitrarily defined, as the relationship to the sea. If the nature of the civilization depends on its insularity, the island, for present purposes, is small. If the hinterland is so big that the coasts are left as places marginal to the civilization as a whole, then the island is not, for present purposes, small; but the critical mass involved in this sort of computation will vary from place to place according to circumstances.

A small island can become a nursery of civilization in two ways: by enrichment through trade, and by self-reliance through isolation. By “small-island civilizations” in this context I therefore mean those shaped by the sea in either of these ways. If their inner resources have been decisive without isolation, I assign islands to other categories. In practice, many get disqualified by size. They may be so long in one dimension that they include climatic zones which extend around the world: in consequence, the sea is unlikely to be a uniquely decisive part of their environment. They may be so big that they generate civilizationbuilding resources and initiatives from within themselves, without being cut off from outside influences; or they may house more than one civilization.

Like all decisions about classification, many in this context are made on the basis of small and inconclusive discrepancies. Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English—though not, I think, other peoples of the island—have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.⁴The conviction that their island “arose from the azure main” and is like a gem “set in the silver sea” resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the “English eccentric”—which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as “a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad.”⁵Their relationship with the rest of the European Union is defined by opt-outs. While reveling in affected isolation, the English are also fond of a countervailing myth of themselves as a nation of mariners, for whom the sea is “England’s way to win wealth,” and for whomtrade routes are the veins of life.⁶Most of this is sham. England’s maritime vocation is not particularly that of an “island race”: it is shared by other peoples of Western Europe’s Atlantic shore (see pages 305 – 22 , 390 – 401 ). Ironically, exceptionalism is typical of the same part of the world: every claim to be exceptional disproves itself.

No scientific law, no sociological model can predict when or exactly where the sea will turn a small island into a civilization; many small islands are untouched by such effects. It seems odd—yet some island peoples have never developed any maritime culture; and sometimes, if they have it, they abandon it. The peoples of Tasmania forgot the technology that took them to their island and even stopped eating fish.⁷The Canary Islanders before the European discovery—people living, in many cases, within sight of other islands—are said by all their early reporters, without exception, to have been ignorant of the art of navigation.⁸The latter case seems particularly baffling, as some of the Canaries are small islands, with limited local resources, compared with Tasmania. This sort of self-imposed isolation tends to lead to a form of cultural impoverishment, without the refreshment of initiative that contact with others can stimulate. Although the Canary Islanders had some selectively impressive skills—in mummifying their dead, for instance, and building drystone walls—they were easily dismissed as savages by would-be slavers and conquistadores; the Tasmanians were so innocent of even rudimentary artifice that they were depicted as simian by the first artists to notice them,⁹and were hunted as subhuman by early white colonists.

The home of another extraordinary experiment in isolation, the island of Hirta, beyond the Outer Hebrides, can boast that rare thing, an environment which has driven off civilizing projects. As it rises from the ocean it looks unconquerably craggy: a little more than fifteen hundred acres and nearly fourteen hundred feet high. For eight months of the year, deafening storms surround it. The crofters and cragsmen who lived there for most of its recorded history were cut off for years at a time. At the end of the seventeenth century, in a period of exceptional prosperity, there was only one vessel on the island. The Hanoverian “spy” Rachel Erskine, known as “Lady Grange,” was kept isolated there by Jacobite kinsmen from 1734 to 1742 ; a few years before her visit, the island was scythed by smallpox, like any “primitive,” unimmunized native population in the “age of European expansion.”

Crops can hardly grow on Hirta, except in the one small, almost soilless valley,-a cold bosom between hard dugs, or on sharply inclined pastures where the islanders’ precious sheep used to graze. Elsewhere, rain and sleet would wash them away. To keep life going, the traditional inhabitants exchanged annual tribute, in bird oil and feathers, for salt and seed grain with the Hebrideans. They were pictured by their neighbors in terms of romance or repugnance. For a visitor of 1697 , they epitomized noble savagery. “What the condition of peoplein the Golden Age is feign’d by the poets to be, that theirs really is, I mean in innocency and simplicity, purity, mutual love and cordial friendship.”¹⁰Macaulay regarded them as free of “all the flatteries of sense and time.” Henry Brougham, a few years earlier, shared most of Macaulay’s political principles but not his view of the islanders, who, to his mind, lived in “laziness, . . . a beastly degree of filth [and] . . . natural savagery.”¹¹

The archaeological record shows that human life has been interrupted on Hirta by periodic extinctions. The last known occupants, however, enjoyed a strange era of plenty, in what is generally regarded as the late Middle Ages and the early-modern period, because of the abundance of bird life that comes to Hirta to breed—especially puffins, from March to August, and petrels, all year round except in autumn. The cliff faces are solid with them. Islanders would hammer a peg into a rock at the top and let themselves down with a rope, killing as they went and stuffing dead birds into a pouch made from a goose’s stomach—or, if the sea was still, tossing them into their boat at the cliff’s foot. For want of salt, they dried the birds in crude wind tunnels of stone and turf.¹²The visitor of 1697 , who wrote the fullest account of island life while accompanying the laird’s tribute-gatherer on a tour of inspection, reckoned that the population of 180 islanders ate 16,000 eggs a week and 22,600 sea birds a year.¹³Similar levels of consumption were recorded in the early nineteenth century, when “the air is full of feathered animals,” according to an account of 1819 . “The sea is covered with them, the houses are ornamented with them. . . . The town is paved with feathers. . . . The inhabitants look as if they had been tarred and feathered for their hair is full of feathers and their clothes are covered with feathers. . . .

Everything smells of feathers.” Hirta’s reputation on Skye was as the home of “the best fed people in the world. I speak the truth, master.”¹⁴Hirta would be hell to a child of conventional civilization, but it was a paradise for puffin-eaters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when missionaries and bureaucrats wrenched the island towards the civilized world, it became unbearable to its inhabitants: the last survivors migrated to mainland Britain in 1930 . Now it really is only for the birds.

It therefore seems a happy fact that self-isolation is relatively rare, even among islanders: the normal pattern of island life is to look out to sea and cull it for riches. The most determinedly maritime civilization in the world is perhaps found in Polynesia and Melanesia, where civilization was spread, against the wind, by feats of navigation unsurpassed elsewhere for intrepidity and technical expertise, despite limiting materials. This was a genuinely seaborne civilization, based on conquest of—or, at least, compromise with—the part of the biosphere most hostile to man. European discoverers of the South Sea Islands in the eighteenth century did not at first appreciate the scale or nature of this achievement. They cast Polynesians in the role of the noble savage. “Prince” Omai, a restless misfit on his native island, was lionized in England in 1774 – 76 , praised byduchesses for his naturally gracious manners, and painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds to symbolize the equipoise of untutored dignity. He was credited with masterstrokes of natural wisdom, as when, offered snuff at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he was said to have declined with a “No tank you, Sir, my nose be no hungry,” or when he outdid Fanny Burney’s beaux in table manners, which showed, she thought, “how much Nature can do without Art.”¹⁵His fellow “prince,” Lee Boo, from Palau in Micronesia, was even more adept in the assimilation of gentlemanly accomplishments. When he succumbed to smallpox in 1783 , he was buried in the Rotherhithe churchyard under the inscription:

Stop, Reader, stop! Let Nature claim a Tear—
A Prince of Mine, Lee Boo, lies bury’d here.¹⁶

Visitors to the Pacific found a voluptuaries’ garden, painted by William Hodges, who sailed with Captain Cook in 1772 . His image of Tahiti is of a ravishing habitat for the nymphs in the foreground: one invitingly presents a tattooed behind; another swims supine, under a diaphanous film of water. The sexual hospitality of the island tried the discipline of Captain Cook’s men and broke that of Captain Bligh’s. It became an essential ingredient of reports of this sailors’ paradise—an unshamed Eden of sensuous gratification, such as George Hamilton, surgeon of an expedition of 1790 , extolled:

What poetic fiction has painted of Eden, or Arcadia, is here realised, where the earth without tillage produces both food and clothing, the trees loaded with the richest of fruit, the carpet of nature spread with the most odoriferous flowers, and the fair ones ever willing to fill your arms with love.¹⁷

French engravings of Easter Island show the foreigners entertained in elegant-conversation by natives in classical poses, examining documents together and exchanging, where appropriate, amorous glances, under the imperious gaze of the great stone statues. The day before eleven of his men were massacred on Samoa, La Perouse called it “the abode of felicity” of “the happiest people on earth, . . . serene and tranquil in the bosom of repose,” where you could find architecture “as well and indeed better made than any in the environs of Paris.” Even of Easter Island, on which he lavished less enthusiasm, La Perouse considered that it nurtured civilization and actually encouraged some civilized corruptions—manifest in the behavior of native pimps who tried to sell unwilling thirteen-year-old girls to the visitors.¹⁸The South Seas, in short, had just the combination of liberty and license which ennobled savagery in the eyes of the suitably disposed.¹⁹

Yet these romantic and condescending images missed the point. They werebased on evaluations of the material culture of the islanders’ landward life, where almost nothing was made to dwarf man or defy time, where no pottery was used, and where—on most islands—large polities with institutions recognizable to European scrutineers did not exist. The achievements of South Sea Island civilization could only be fully appreciated at sea, where the islanders’ technology and architecture as shipwrights approached practical perfection; where their science as navigators was unsurpassed by any people in the world; and where their ability to record information on reed maps was as good, for its purpose, as any more conventional writing system.

The achievement was not, of course, uniform throughout this vast area. The sailing vocation was felt with great intensity in the central Caroline and Marshall Islands, the Trobriands, Tonga; yet on Anuta seafaring was almost a timid activity, usually limited to the seventy-mile voyage to Tikopia, or occasionally the two-hundred-mile journey to the New Hebrides. Anutans, moreover, were barely competent ship-handlers against the wind, tacking with full sail, then paddling back across the wind.²⁰Still, it is possible to put together a composite picture of the maritime culture of typically committed small-island peoples of the South Seas.

The night before starting work, the canoe-builder would lodge his ax in the sacred enclosure with ritual chants, and make a feast of fatted pig, dedicated to the gods. He rose before dawn the next day to cut and assemble the wood, watching all the time for omens. For a long-range voyage, he would build an outrigger or double hull, rigged with claw-shaped sails which kept the mast and rigging light. The vessel would be steered by a paddle at the stern, or a “dagger board” plunged into the sea near the bow to turn into the wind, or at the stern to swing downwind. A crew of six sufficed: two steersmen, a sailman, a bailer, a spare hand so that rests could be taken, and—most important of all—a navigator, whose years of training enabled him to find his way, without instruments or a fixed star, in the vastness of the Pacific.²¹

Historians formerly refused to believe that the ancient Polynesians and Melanesians could have crossed thousands of miles of open sea except by “ drifting” haphazardly. But their culture of adventure is recorded, for instance, in epics about heroic voyages, and demonstrated by the cannibal feast in honor of a Tongan navigator’s homecoming from Fiji, witnessed by an English mariner in 1810 . They also practiced sea exile, like the Vikings, and, according to their own legends, made long sea-pilgrimages to attend distant rites. The Tahitian navigator Tupaia, whom Captain Cook admired, knew of islands in almost all the major archipelagoes of the ocean.

The most heroic tale is perhaps that of Hui-te-Rangiroa, whose journey from Raratonga, probably in the mid-eighth century, took him through bare white rocks that towered above monstrous seas to a place of uninterrupted ice. Some myths ascribe the discovery of New Zealand to the godlike Maui, whobaited the giant stingray with his own blood; but a less shadowy figure is the indisputably human Kupe, who claimed to be guided from Raratonga, perhaps in the mid-tenth century, by a vision of the supreme God, Io. Perhaps, however, he followed the migration of the long-tailed cuckoo or, as one version of the legend maintains, chased squid who had stolen his bait. His sailing directions were: “Let the course be to the right hand of the setting sun, moon or Venus in the month of February.”²²For food they took dried fruit and fish, coconuts, and a cooked paste made of breadfruit, kumara (the sweet potato of the Maori of New Zealand), and other vegetable matter, though stowage was limited and long hunger must have been endured. Water—not much of it—could be carried in gourds, the hollows of bamboo, or seaweed skins.

Means almost unimaginable to today’s technology-aided sailors kept vessels on course. Polynesian navigators literally felt their way. “Stop staring at the sail and steer by the feel of the wind on your cheeks,” was a traditional navigator’s advice, recorded in the 1970 s. Some navigators used to lie down on the outrigger to “feel” the swell at night. According to an eighteenth-century European observer, “The most sensitive balance was a man’s testicles.” Pilots could correct for a few degrees’ variation in the wind by checking against the long-range swells, generated by the trade winds, and mapped on reed maps, some of which survive from the Marshall Islands. Although currents cannot be felt, navigators built up prodigious knowledge of them: Caroline Islanders interviewed in modern times knew the currents over an area nearly two thousand miles broad.

Above all, they judged their latitude by the sun and monitored their exact course by the stars. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Caroline Island navigators learned their bearings from sixteen groups of guiding stars, whose movements were remembered by means of rhythmic chants: a surviving example likens navigation to “breadfruit-picking,” star by star. They could associate stars with particular destinations accurately enough, according to a Spanish visitor of 1774 , to find the harbor of their choice at night, where they cast their rough anchors of stone or coral.²³

Surviving Isolation: Hawaii and Easter Island

The most intrepid sailors presumably got farthest, and that may explain why—judged by the standards conventionally applied to civilization—some of the most impressive societies founded by Polynesians took shape at the extremities of their navigations: in New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, and Easter Island. The last-named pair constitute an extraordinary anomaly in the history of civilization: they break the rule that isolation breeds stagnation. If history always happened according to the predictions we make by ordinary inferences—letalone in reliance on theoretical models, which are usually useless—all the extremities of the Polynesian world would have ended up like the Chatham Islands. Five hundred miles east of New Zealand’s South Island, this tiny archipelago was as far as migrants could go in that direction. The southerly latitude, cold climate, and limited hinterland made it unpropitious for agriculture; but it was full of eel-rich lakes, rimmed with tidal pools where mollusks bred, and surrounded by abundant fisheries. The people left there submitted to nature; they remained few in number; they lived by gathering shellfish from pools or by inshore fishing with the simplest technology; they clubbed their prey to death. They had, as far as we know, no contact with the rest of the world until, in 1835 , in a horrible simulacrum of European imperialism, musket-armed Maori invaders killed most of them and enslaved the rest.²⁴

The early colonists of Hawaii and Easter Island might also have been arrested by isolation. Their islands were so far from the rest of the original Polynesian world that, like the Maori, they lost touch with it and developed peculiar cultures which resist classification. They were isolated not only by the vast distances which separate them from everywhere else, but also by sailing conditions which made them inaccessible, in normal conditions, under sail. The Pacific has the most regular wind system in the world, and these islands were so far from its tracks that European navigators had traveled to and fro across it for centuries before stumbling on them—certainly, at least, before recording them.²⁵The routes by which they were colonized by the first Polynesian settlers are still unknown (though dates towards the middle of the first millennium A.D. for Hawaii and before 800 A.D. for Easter Island are suggested by archaeological evidence).²⁶The isolation of Easter Island—the presumable fact that no visitors came there for centuries at a stretch—is reflected in the cult of migrating birds. A divine bird-man is a common subject for the makers of petroglyphs; the annual arrival of crowds of sooty tern, squawking deafeningly, was traditionally greeted with relaxed taboos, egg-stealing competitions, and rites of fire and sacrifice.²⁷

Isolation tends to induce cultural impoverishment; without exchange and fresh stimulus, technologies get abandoned or forgotten. Hawaii, however, had the most extensive and intensively farmed field systems in the Polynesian world, able to sustain a population reckoned at two hundred thousand. And Easter Island, as every schoolboy knows, had its “mysterious” civilization, which has called to scholars and scoundrels in almost equal measure: the former are drawn by curiosity, the latter by sensationalism. The civilization of Easter Island has been traced to origins in places as remote and ridiculous as Peru and outer space; yet its Polynesian background is beyond reasonable doubt. Nothing in the island’s culture is incompatible with beginnings in the Polynesian heartlands except the cultivation of the sweet potato, but the chronology of this plant is problematic and unresolved. It seems likely that the civilization which builtthe monuments and, perhaps, devised the writing system of Easter Island never had it.

The earliest European accounts of Hawaii were full of praise for the native farmers. Expeditions from the 1770 s to the 1790 s recorded fields outlined with irrigation ditches and stone walls, “made with a neatness approaching to elegance,” planted with taro, breadfruit, sweet potato, sugar cane, and coconut, and laid out in a pattern calculated to impress readers at home as civilized; the roads “would have done credit to any European engineer.”²⁸An engraving made on the basis of reports from Vancouver’s expedition early in the 1790 s shows a field system of a regularity that arouses one’s suspicions: was it contrived to present a picture attuned to a European ideal? Yet the same array of farmers’ geometry is visible today, under the surface of fields tilled no longer, in the noon sunlight on the slopes of Hualalai and the Kohala Mountains, on the Big Island of Hawaii.²⁹Only in Hawaii, moreover, among Polynesian settlements, was fish-farming fully developed. Into the grid of fields and pools other civilized constructions were slotted. Massive platforms of stone supported temples of exact symmetry, and the wall-building techniques were adaptable to the demands of fortifications two or three times the height of a man.³⁰Early European visitors could recognize not only institutions of statehood but also a pan-island empire in the making—a process completed in 1795 , when the first emperor, Kamehameha, defeated the last of his enemies. The Hawaiians had no writing but preserved in memory an enormous literary corpus and practical encyclopedia.

In such an isolated position, relative to the rest of the world, so conspicuously civilized a setting for life could only be constructed by exploiting an environment of great diversity. Hawaii has been called a “museum of evolution.” The archipelago is full of microclimates and unique species, distributed among coasts and swamps once teeming with bird life, highlands and forests which produced materials for thatch and rope.³¹To the first colonists, who presumably came from the low and limited Marquesas Islands, Hawaii spread its sharp relief invitingly, in an array of colors from the thick, wet green of the forests to the redrimmed volcanoes and the clouds and snows of the white peaks.³²It seems obvious why Hawaii was able to overcome isolation: it was thanks to the generosity of nature.

Easter Island, on the other hand, is a delightfully defiant example of how civilization can happen in isolation, without much help from the environment. It covers only sixty-four square miles. Apart from Pitcairn Island, fourteen hundred miles away, which has been uninhabited for most of history, no land is less than twenty-three hundred miles away. The island’s relief is modest, rising to a little over sixteen hundred feet but without deep valleys to create niches of rich soil. Rain is abundant for most of the year, but the porous earth dissipates it, and the wind sucks moisture from the ground. The only edible vegetation known to have preceded the first settlers was a tiny palm-nut yielded by the trees whichonce covered most of the surface. There are no helpful reefs and few useful tide pools: most fish have to be caught well out to sea.

The civilization fed from this unpromising spot was not as odd or as accomplished as the mystery-mongers claim. But, like the dog that walks on hind legs, it must be commended for an effort which transcended the limits of the rationally possible. The writing system—known as rongorongo —was the most surprising aspect of the culture. Written language has no precedent or parallel elsewhere in the Pacific Island world. The mystery is genuine, because none of the few surviving inscriptions has ever been deciphered. Its very singularity suggests that it was a local invention; its disappearance from common knowledge hints that it was an instrument of an elite which did not last. An alternative explanation is possible. As no texts came to light until the nineteenth century, and early inquiries among missionaries and ethnographers elicited no one who was willing or able to read them, the suspicion that they were postcontact artifacts became widely shared among scholars. They supposed that the relics were concocted by native imitators and resisters of European ways after the power of letters was revealed in a treaty-signing ceremony with Spanish imperial representatives in 1770 . Although this theory has attracted a great deal of scholarly investment, I find it utterly incredible; the Spanish officers who signed the treaty referred to “native characters” already in use; some of those which appear as signatures on the treaty are identical with or very similar to specimens in tablets known since the nineteenth century.³³By comparison with the strangeness of the rongorongo tablets, most aspects of the material culture were commonplace. The inhabitants lived in mounds or barrows of thatch but lined pits with stone and built permanent stone structures—“edifices” is too strong a word—to gather rainwater and guard plants from the wind.³⁴For community rituals and feasts, they built stone platforms for wooden houses in the shape of upturned canoes—or were they meant to represent the vulvae, which were a favorite subject with makers of petroglyphs?³⁵—equipping some of them with stone pillars. By the standards of other Polynesian islands and of New Zealand, these structures were simple, and impoverished by the limited materials available. When it comes to shrine-building, however, the Easter Islanders were in a class apart.

The renowned statues they grouped on stone platforms are not radically different from the carved monoliths erected by other Polynesian peoples, though they tend to be bigger and more numerous and the best of them excel all others in the sculptors’ freedom and assurance. On an island too small to support a large population, the erection of large numbers of monumental sculptures had to be a true community effort. The pillars, which weighed between thirty and forty tons, were shaped, carved, and polished at the quarry Rano Raraku, round the crater rim of an extinct volcano. A sort of keel along the back was left smooth, which made it easier to drag them along, over wooden skids or rollers,and perhaps on sleds. Large posts set to take the ropes are still visible. The largest surviving statue, it has been reckoned, would have taken thirty men one year to quarry and carve. Ninety men, working for two months, would have been needed to move it to its site, nearly four miles from the quarry. There, the same number would have taken three months to erect it on its stone-faced podium. A statue of average size could have been transported in a week by a party of seventy men, but the delicacy of the operation of raising it in place would still have demanded twenty to thirty days. These were costly operations, but, given sufficient time, could have been undertaken by a single extended family—if their purpose was to honor an ancestor—or about four hundred people joining forces to provide the labor and logistical support.³⁶

An earth ramp was built, adjoining the platform, with a retaining wall of trees and brush, and a pit alongside, into which the statue had to be tipped—balanced over the edge of the incline and carefully guided by ropes to topple upright into the pit. The biggest such platform, now washed away by a tidal wave, was about 150 feet long and had a ramp more than five hundred feet long attached. It supported fifteen statues.³⁷At the podium, most statues were decorated with red “top-knots”—elaborate stone headgear from another quarry, probably intended to represent the red turbans worn by islanders of high status.³⁸White-coral eyes would be added, conjuring the statues into a semblance of life, enduing them with an organ of power. As time went on, the statues got bigger—a clear case of competitive inflation, driving upwards the cost of display. Then the system which produced them collapsed, suddenly, while production was at its height. Six hundred statues survive in place and—as if to deepen the mystery—another 150 are abandoned, unfinished, in the quarry area. The sites were already neglected and abandoned by the time the first European observers arrived, and if the platforms had ever been the scenes of ritual activity, none was observed or recorded.

The proud monoliths, left to collapse in indignity and lie in neglect, and the undecipherable inscriptions, howling inarticulately from the faces of the tablets, seem to be relics of an age that had already departed when the first European intruders arrived. Literacy and ideology are the victims of almost every dark age. How Easter Island’s dark age started is beyond reconstruction. In view of the remoteness of the place, invasion is unlikely to have been the cause. The delicate ecological balance and the limited food resources make natural disaster, famine, and social revolution seem likely sources of explanation, in any combination. At some time in the past, the island had an elite of stargazers who enjoyed privileged banquets of porpoise and dolphin.³⁹The rongorongo texts, if genuinely ancient, demanded one kind of professional expertise, the stone-carving another. Evidence of the organization of labor on a grand scale by competing groups hints at a kind of purposefulness induced by sacred compulsion. It istempting to imagine an act of collective revulsion from the ideology that stared from the statues’ eyes. As the forests were felled, the bird life depleted, the soil eroded by farming and the wind, the ambitions that erected the statues must have become harder to pay for. The period of monumental effort probably lasted something like eight hundred years. What is surprising is not that the elite who masterminded it should have perished and that the social structures which sustained it should have collapsed, but that they should have kept going, against the odds, for so long.

The Wind’s Nest: The Islands of the Aleut

What the Polynesians did in the South Pacific—or something like it—was paralleled in the North Pacific by the Aleut. Their islands have a terrible reputation with navigators, obliged to pick their way among storm-lashed rocks and saw-toothed reefs. The climate is torture to anyone who does not like sleet, cold, fog, and the monstrous anger of the storms known as williwaws, which howl from the mountains and convulse the seas. The range of temperatures is modest, rarely getting above fifty degrees Fahrenheit in summer and normally hovering around twenty degrees in winter. The environment of unstable rocks, active volcanoes, icy mountains, miles of shining, petrified lava, and a dearth of useful soil seems calculated to deter settlement.

Even the islanders had mixed feelings about home: their legends claim that they came originally from a place where there is no winter but were driven out of it by war. Yet the islands have attractions which made them home to a remarkably inventive ancient culture. It survived with little change for thousands of years: in some places, settlement levels extend more than twenty-five feet under the village mounds.

The Aleutians are strung across the Pacific from Siberia to Alaska, roughly along the fifty-second and fifty-third parallels, but compared with the inhospitable mainlands they seem eminently habitable. The Japan current keeps the temperature relatively mild. The countercurrent and the cold drift from the Arctic Ocean make the archipelago a meeting place of fish and of the whales, seals, and sea lions who prey on them: the waters around the Aleutians are rich enough to maintain populous communities of seaborne hunters—probably over twenty thousand strong at the time of their first contact with Russians. Although settled agriculture is impossible, the shores breed edible seaweeds, and the flecks of soil and mounds of guano host berries and herbs. These help balance the diet yielded by the sea, and stock the pharmacopoeia of the Aleuts’ renowned traditional medicine. When Ted Bank arrived to collect plant specimens on Atka, the midmost island, and Umnak, some way farther west, in 1955 ,a village chief and elder were able to show him how to gather and prepare remedies for muscular pain, sores, constipation, internal and external bleeding, stomach pains, sore throats, and shortage of wind.⁴⁰

Their surgery was also famous and evoked admiration from the first Russian students to witness it in the nineteenth century. Aleut surgeons, working with stone knives, bone needles, and thread made from the guts and sinews of fish and sea lions, performed operations deemed hazardous at the time by Western surgeons. They could, for instance, collapse a lung by piercing it with stone needles. They practiced and acquired practical knowledge of anatomy in the same empirical, scientific fashion as traditional European schools—by dismembering the corpses of slaves and battle-dead. They extracted the internal organs of their own dead in preparation for mummification.⁴¹

The Aleutian environment demanded respect: the islanders could survive only by collaborating with it. They could not plant it or reshape it or smother it with cities or make any lasting changes to it. The mummies, however, did represent an attempt both to make something permanent and to arrest a natural process by defying it. They were decently interred in caves or, where these were unavailable, in specially dug pits, sometimes made under dwellings, but were clad and equipped for a continuation of life: with vessels for eating or drinking, tackle for the hunt, and slatted armor and ivory-bladed weapons for war. Corpses of high status were even suspended from hooks against the walls of their burial caves to keep them sitting up in death, and were greased with fat from human innards to give them a lifelike appearance.⁴²

The Russian conquest of the mid-eighteenth century brought all the savagery commonly inflicted by those who consider themselves more civilized than their victims: enslavement, ecological rape, massacres practiced for sport, terror deployed as a method of government. The initial excesses of secular conquerors and private exploiters were moderated by the influence of Russian missionaries and bureaucrats—but nothing could mitigate the effects of new diseases brought by the invaders, to which the natives had no resistance. An epidemic in 1838 – 39 , by official reckoning, wiped out half the population.⁴³The Alaska Purchase in 1867 exposed the archipelago to another wave of casual looting—this time by Americans—and another alien culture, imposed by force. In the twentieth century, the islands became a battleground of rival empires: Russian, Japanese, and American. After a bloody battering in the Second World War, what was left of the traditional island way of life was wrecked by the corrupting effects of Westernization: culture shock, consumerism, and the sexual depredations of GIs, who left their usual debris: venereal disease, neglected bastards, piles of nonbiodegradable trash, people reduced to welfare dependence. Now the traditional ecology has been transformed by a new form of exploitation: ranching hardy sheep introduced late in the nineteenth century by Russians.

Ports of Call: From the Maldives to Malta

The heroic examples of the Pacific Island cultures should not be allowed to go uncelebrated. But they are exceptional cases. What has been achieved in civilizations unlubricated by outside contacts—by islanders whom history left, for most of the time, alone in their seas—is, like the dancing bear, remarkable more for rarity than attainment. More privileged places, unsurprisingly, exceed them. To launch an island civilization, the best place to start is at a nodal point of maritime trade or, at least, a spot that can be converted into an entrepOt by hard work.

A startling example is that of the Maldive Islands: startling, in part, because obscure, and obscure, in part, because the fanatical iconoclasm of the inhabitants has destroyed so many antiquities. Without trade, the islands would not attract a second glance from a historian of civilization. Low, sea-soaked, and cyclone-battered, they steam under the tropical sun: diminutive atolls which poke insecurely above the ocean, as if gasping for survival and expecting to drown. Hundreds of islands, ranging from the southern tip of India to the equator, cover nearly forty thousand square miles—one of the least densely populated nations in the world—but only one is high enough to have salt-free soil. Yet the Maldives are an ideal entrepOt, scattered across one of the world’s oldest maritime trade routes.

Vanished ancient builders known locally as the Redin created temples, whose foundations are still detectable by diggers, and cult statues, which have not survived but are described from folk memory in terms uninfluenced by Buddhism. Inscriptions in an unknown script use symbols curiously reminiscent of Hindu sacred iconography: the conch and sun wheel of Vishnu, the fish of Shiva, the swastika, the double-headed trident of Indra.⁴⁴Marble slabs, carved with reliefs, recall tall temples with large windows and tapering roofs, which perhaps suggest what the earliest buildings looked like.⁴⁵The earliest fragments so far dated are of the mid-sixth century A.D., but it would be surprising if Buddhism had not arrived long before that, borne from India or Sri Lanka on predictable winds. Islam arrived in the twelfth century, but the destruction of the antiquities cannot be supposed to have been begun at once or continued systematically: religious vandalism is by its nature the work of sporadic convulsions of anger and hatred. In the mid-fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, the incomparable traveler, still regarded the Maldives as “one of the wonders of the world.”⁴⁶

The Maldives are, in these respects, unique within the Indian Ocean, but the Mediterranean has housed many such examples, perhaps because it is a sea remarkably friendly to navigation, with no tides, a mild climate, a surface little disfigured by storms, and a system of winds and currents which links its islands and coasts without forcing ships into long open-sea journeys. As far as is known,the earliest case in the world of a society which built in stone on a massive scale was in the Maltese islands of Gozo and Malta, where at least thirty buildingcomplexes, ranging from the large to the vast, were erected in the fourth and third millennia B.C. Stone is a sign of ambition, because it seems eternal, and of technical prowess, because it is hard to quarry and shape. The Sumerians were building in brick at the time, and the first stone monuments in Egypt are not known to be older. The Maltese buildings are made of neatly dressed limestone. Typically, they have trefoil inner courts surrounded by massive walls, up to twenty-five feet high. In the biggest and finest of them, at Tarxien, a colossal statue was set up as if for worship: a female figure admirably suited to childbirth, with broad hips and bulging stomach. She was attended by “sleeping beauties”—small female models scattered around her. No sculpture of comparable antiquity anywhere competes for scale with this Maltese embodiment of perhaps divine motherhood. Fragments remain of other works of art: what look like carved altars and the remains of decorative reliefs, which show abstract spirals and realistic deer and bulls. Remains of the people who made them lie in communal graves, packed with thousands of the dead.⁴⁷

If one looks at the islands of Malta today—at their poor soils and dry climate—it seems incredible that they could ever have sustained a population big enough, or generated enough surplus energy, to create these monuments. Indeed, it seems that most of the inhabitants’ effort went on these public buildings: very few remains of ordinary dwellings have so far been discovered. However, two early third-millennium houses have come to light in Gozo: suitably dignified “homes for the temple-builders.” They had floors of crushed-limestone plaster over stone packing, brick walls, and pillars which presumably supported the roofs. The floor plan of the larger of them is more than four hundred square feet; the other house is only a small fraction of the size. This raises an important presumption about Malta and an important question about the history of civilization generally. The achievements of the ancient Maltese were produced by a society of inequality, in which some people’s privileges were paid for by others’ work. No known early civilization had enough resources to create great art or monumental spaces without concentrating on particular projects. This meant that elites—to make decisions and accumulate wealth—were an essential part of the processes from which large-scale art projects emerged. It seems that, as time went on, the great buildings of Malta got more complex—their inner sanctuaries more deeply concealed and harder to get at, as if the leaders of society were distancing themselves from their followers.⁴⁸

The environment was probably not quite as sparse in the great days of Tarxienas it is today. The builders had only a few small cisterns for storing water; this would not be a practical strategy now, when rainfall levels are low and unreliable. The present virtually treeless skyline of the islands, where grasses and brushlands are almost the only soil cover, cannot have been typical in thebuilders’ time. It may have been they who denuded the island of trees, for they consumed large amounts of timber for roofing: indeed, at Skorba, in the east of the main island, they used olivewood—which is precious even today. Only extreme profligacy or extreme devotion could explain such a use of sacred trees, which are laborious to cultivate and yield life-giving fruit.

The society that built Tarxien disappeared four thousand years ago—more suddenly and mysteriously than it had arisen. The occupants abandoned the site to “a metre of sterile silt,”⁴⁹into which newcomers, who used metal but built nothing that we know of, flung their rubbish. What became of the Tarxien builders? Were they victims of invasion, or of their own overexploitation of the environment, or of some unrecorded natural disaster, or of some catastrophe as yet unsuspected? Certainly the elite that ruled in hidden chambers lost their power, and the buildings that enclosed them, the way of life that sustained them, vanished with them.

Malta deserves a bigger place in the history of civilization than our historical-tradition gives it. But, like other megalith-strewn islands in the western Mediterranean, it has been relegated to a position of small importance because of the utterness of the extinction of its ancient civilization. Its ruins were reported and engraved in the late eighteenth century,⁵⁰at about the same time as the rediscoveries of the monumental civilizations of the ancient Aztec and Maya⁵¹ and as the great era of excavation at Herculaneum; yet, whereas those other unearthings—rendered impressive respectively by distance and familiarity—gradually transformed the way archaeology represented the world, the ancient Maltese civilization has still not been written into the story. It had no demonstrable influence on anything that succeeded it. It seems to have been a sort of false start. By contrast, the eastern Mediterranean has islands of heroic status where—somewhat shakily—a continuous civilized tradition has been traced, which fed into that of Greece and so into “the West” and the world. The tug of this thread, the lure of “roots,” leads to the Bronze Age Aegean, back through Minoan Crete, to the Cycladic Islands in the third and second millennia B.C., and to the elegant marble harpists of Karos, who do seem to strum in a new and glorious era.

The Wreck of Paradise: Minoan Crete

As small islands go, Crete is quite a big one: thirty-two hundred square miles. But two-thirds of it is covered by uncultivable mountains. Today, it presents one of the rockiest and most barren landscapes in Europe. There was more for farmers in ancient times to work with, before soil was lost to erosion or rainfall to deforestation. But to found a civilization here was never easy. In 1901 , when Arthur Evans, digging for evidence of the origins of writing, uncovered thefabulous palace of Knossos, the splendors of ancient Cretan civilization had been forgotten for more than three thousand years and no one even suspected its existence. Gazing today on what archaeologists have dug up—on the vastness of the palaces, the luster of their ornament, the density of the cities, and, above all, on the wall paintings which display the rich, teeming environment where privileged members of society lived—you could easily be misled into supposing that ancient Crete was a sort of paradise of plenty: gardens of lilies and iris, gladioli and crocuses, fields of grain and vines and pulses, orchards of olives, almonds, and quince, forests of fuel, honey, and venison, all surrounded by seas full of dolphin and octopus, under skies in which partridge and hoopoe flew.

Yet it would be a mistake to judge the wealth of our own world from the prosperous lives shown in advertisements on television; or the diets of the poor from the pictures in rich men’s dining rooms. Similarly, we have to judge the prosperity of ancient Crete not just from the grand art but from the whole of the archaeological record. This shows that the lavish world depicted in the art was not self-supplied from nature’s bounty. It was painfully extracted from a tough environment, harsh soils, and dangerous seas. And it depended on rigorous control of the food supply.

In the spacious palace halls, a few people obviously lived a splendid and easeful life. You can see them in the murals, gossiping, feasting, and at play. At an unplundered site, such as Zakros, you can envy their luxuries: the veined marble chalices and porphyry storage-jars, a box of cosmetic unguent made of schist with an elegant little handle in the shape of a reclining greyhound.⁵²But the palaces did not exist primarily in order to house them. The main function was as places of storage, where food would be concentrated and from which it would be redistributed among the population at large. Commonly, in highly regulated societies, the origins of monumental building are inseparable from the need for storage, just as the origins of writing are linked with the stockpilers’ need for records. What might be called the “granary impulse” is part of the urge to civilize. After the civilization collapsed and the palace of Knossos lay in ruins, people who saw it imagined its galleries and corridors as an enormous maze, built to house a monster who fed on human sacrifices. In reality, it was designed to store great clay jars, taller than a man, some of which are still in place, filled with wine, oil, and grain. Stone chests lined with lead were the strongboxes of a sort of “central bank” for financing state-controlled trade, carried by ships so skillfully piloted that they were said by the Greeks to know their own way through the water. The stores included trade goods awaiting recycling by onward trade or by way of craft workshops: ivory tusks and ostrich eggs nestled in the sediment of Zakros.⁵³All the transactions of storage, distribution, and commerce were recorded in minute detail, on clay tablets, by a specialist bureaucracy.

Outside the palaces, a middle class lived in houses which were like palaces in miniature, with columns, balconies, and upper-story galleries. People wholived here shared some of the luxuries of the palace-dwellers: colorful potters’ art, as thin as porcelain, for instance, and elaborately painted ground-stone baths. On the edges of the system of food distribution were the peasants who kept it supplied. Exhumed remains show that few people lived beyond the age of forty; this was less than the average life expectancy of people a thousand years earlier, long before the civilization had emerged. And most of the population lived near the margin of malnutrition.⁵⁴The environment was capriciously destructive. Long after the civilization disappeared, Greek writers thought of Crete as a land subject to devastating droughts. Meanwhile, on the nearby island of Thera, which was blown apart by a volcanic eruption of disputed date, around the middle of the second millennium B.C., the lavish city of Akrotiri was buried in volcanic ash under layers of bare pumice. Knossos and similar palace complexes around the coast of Crete at Phaistos, Mallia, and Zakros, were all rebuilt once or twice on an increasingly generous scale, after presumed destruction by unknown causes which seem in some cases to have included earthquakes.

Fortifications began to be added to these later palaces. This suggests a new hazard: internal warfare. Knossos’s role as a model for other palaces could have been the result of a political takeover: some of the elite of the south and east of Crete seem to have moved to Knossos at about the time the palaces were rebuilt. By the time of the last destruction of Knossos, generally dated around 1400 B.C., the fate of Crete seems to have become closely entangled with that of the socalled Mycenean civilization of southern Greece. What ecological wastage spared was stunned by earthquakes and struck by war. It is surprising, perhaps, that fragile economies, sustained by bureaucratic redistributive methods, should have managed to go on feeding the cities and supporting the elite culture for so long.

It is often said that Crete was the starting place of the tradition of which modern Western civilization is part—transmitted, via the Myceneans, to classical Greece and thence to us. But a “dark age” without a recognizably related civilization lasted for half a millennium in between. The memory of Mycenae was preserved, in an era without writing, only by bards; and for the Greeks of the classical period, ancient Crete was a thousand-year-old legend—almost as remote to them, in effect, as to us. Late Minoan culture had, it is true, something in particular in common with the makers of the classical world: the people, or at least the elite, spoke a language recognizable as an early form of Greek, but they were also part of a lost world—separated from classical Greece by the three or four centuries that preceded the resumption of literacy. The thread supposed to link us to this past is lost before we get to the labyrinth.

After the Minoan experiment collapsed, Mediterranean islands rarely became the homelands of distinctive civilizations. This is not because islands were incapable of recovering prosperity or attracting cultural influences. Although shipping got progressively bigger, faster, and more efficient,⁵⁵sea lanes never entirelybypassed island stations. Majorca, for instance, was “a land of medieval Wirtschaftswunder. ”⁵⁶Sicily—too big, perhaps, to be considered as a potential small-island civilization—was a vessel into which an extraordinary mixture of cultures was poured by the passage of Greeks and Moors, Normans and Germans, Catalans and Angevins, in the pursuit of empire and trade up and down the Mediterranean. Modern Malta is a unique melange—with its peculiar identity, its intense Catholic faith, its unique Semitic language. It remains true, however, that most new initiatives in civilization-building in the Mediterranean, from the first millennium B.C. onwards, happened on the mainlands. The great offshore exception was Venice.

The Creature of the Lagoon:
Venice as a Small-Island Civilization

“Our ancestors have always striven to provide this city with the most beautiful-temples, private buildings and spacious squares, so that from a wild and uncultivable refuge it has grown, been adorned and constructed, so as to become the most beautiful and illustrious city which at present exists in the world.”⁵⁷The words of the resolution of the Venetian Senate of 1535 still seem entirely justified as one looks around the city today.

Yet it is worth noticing that their pride was not only in present achievement. They were also proud of where their ancestors had started from. In an old English joke, a motorist asks directions from a yokel. “I don’t rightly know the way,” the rustic replies. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Venice—to all appearances—is a place to avoid if you want to start a great civilization. Marshy islands, soaking into the sea, sink under the weight of the fabulous buildings which the sublime overconfidence of past Venetians erected. The wonder of Venice is not just its stupendous beauty, but also its rational impossibility. Now the city is seeping back into the waters. The sea is reclaiming her own creation. Nowhere better than here, you can see what civilization means in practice: a great city summoned by human efforts from a defiant environment.

A pleasure-boat trip away from the Lido, among the clumps of rushes around Torcello and Murano, you can see the inhospitable nature of the environment in its untransformed state: before the buildings, the islands of Venice were just reed banks and salt marshes, like those which still lie, undeveloped, nearby. Early mosaics of the arrival of the relics of the patron saint, St. Mark, show the same unpromising outlines. No means of life are to hand, except the two resources which furnished early Venice with its economy: first fishing, then trade. The great historian Arnold Toynbee is famous for his theory that the origins of civilization are to be found in people’s response to the challenge of theenvironment. Nowhere more than in Venice has such a thorough challenge been met with a more dazzling response.⁵⁸

Venice began late, by the standards of Italian cities, when the Roman empire-in the western Mediterranean was in a state of collapse and mainlanders were forced to flee from invading barbarians. Eventually, Venice became a synonym for magnificence and sophistication and for its aristocracy’s glittering wealth. “Venetian splendor” to Renaissance Europe was like “Persian splendor” in ancient Rome: luxury to disapprove of. A reference to the “Venetian Senate” instantly conveyed an allusion to patrician pride and the supposed impertinence of republican government. In the early days, however, the citizens were praised for their primitive simplicity. “They have abundance only of fish,” wrote a Roman observer in 537 A.D., “rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all, wherefore they cannot envy each other’s hearths and so they are free from the vices that rule the world.” At first, “perched like waterfowl,” they built wooden huts on stilts or gravel patches, fencing them with basketwork to keep out the waves, only gradually piling mud from the lagoon on top of the unstable little islands to provide a platform for more substantial efforts. In a sense, the whole city still rests on stilts: below the limestone foundations, trunks of Istrian pine and oak are driven twenty-five feet into the shifting sands, to find a reasonably solid bed of compressed sand and clay.⁵⁹

Beyond the little republic they formed among themselves, the early Venetians’ wider allegiance was to what was left of the Roman empire. When Rome was conquered by barbarians, Byzantium became the only imperial capital. The earliest buildings which survive in the Venetian archipelago imitate those of Byzantium. In politics and commerce, Venice’s face was turned eastwards, towards and across the sea.

Geographically, however, the city was well placed for some of the natural trade routes across Western Europe: the River Po and the passes across the Alps. As stability returned to the mainland, Venice adopted the role which would mark her history for the best part of a thousand years: that of a clearing house for trade between Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. In consequence, though the city never lost its exotic looks, it became a meeting place of cultural influences from both directions and fused them in a distinctive civilization.

Venetian art is always unmistakably Venetian. The subjects of portraiture are showily fat. Idealized beauty is typically well layered with flesh. Painting is created by color, not structured by drawing, as if every canvas were a palette. Architecture tends to the exotic and the florid: the onion dome, the pinched cusp over the Gothic architrave, the moldings which drip with ornament. Gothic, which is a way of structuring buildings elsewhere in Europe, is a decorative style in Venice. In Venice and the Venetian dominions, the international style of the High Renaissance fed the quirky genius of Serlio and Palladio. Similarly, Venetian religion has a peculiar history of Catholicism without dogma, orthodoxywithout persecution. Like these other aspects of culture, the food and the language are obvious products of an offshore emporium: close to those of neighbors whose contact and influence are constant, but different because of seaborne influences from farther off, and because of the opportunities to change by incubation on an impregnable island. The oddities of Venice are not monstrous, and it would be silly to exaggerate them; they belong—in the sense of being intelligible—in all the European and Mediterranean contexts which overlap with Venetian history. But everything about Venice arises from her island position. For most of her history, it was the only asset she had.

In the Middle Ages, Venetians’ consciousness of their dependence on maritime trade was ritually evoked in the annual ceremony of marrying the city to the sea, which still takes place every year on the Sunday after Ascension Day. The chief magistrate of the republic, the doge, was borne in procession among the islands to cast a gold ring into the waters, as if appeasing an old pagan seagod. Painted in the eighteenth century by Canaletto or Carlevaris the ceremony appears as a calm assertion of the indestructibility of Venice’s power.⁶⁰In origin, however, it was an anxious act, designed to secure the favor of the vast, restless natural force with which Venice was surrounded, and which always threatened to overwhelm her.

On the whole, Venice’s bargain with the sea worked. The Adriatic bore her trade and swallowed up her enemies—as the Red Sea swallowed Pharaoh, so Venetians liked to think. Venice never fell to seaborne attack. The route between Venice and Alexandria carried the most valuable traffic in medieval Europe: the final stage in the transmission of pepper imports from the Far East. Gradually, Venice became rich enough to assert her independence of Byzantium. In 1204 , she reversed the historic relationship: a crusader army, diverted aboard Venetian ships, captured Byzantium and divided the remains of what was still called the Roman empire among the victors.

Venice became an imperial capital, with colonial territories scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. The spoils of Byzantium decorated the front of the Cathedral of St. Mark and the public spaces of Venice. Unlike Florence or Rome, Venice could not claim to have been founded in ancient times by classical heroes; but the loot she plundered gave her the ornaments of an ancient city. The great bronze horses above the west doors of the cathedral stamp and snort in victory as they once did before Hagia Sophia. Below, a Hercules looted from Constantinople carries off, in his turn, the Erymanthean boar. Outside the treasury doors, Roman emperors, carved in porphyry nearly a thousand years before Venice appropriated them, clasp one another’s shoulders in a gesture of solidarity. Pillars wrought by a Syrian hand fifteen hundred years previously lead into the baptistery.⁶¹

To the wealth from trade in exotic products Venice added the profits of empire,-exploiting territories to produce more of the rare supplies demanded by hercustomers in Western and Northern Europe: sugar, sweet wines, olive oil, and specialist dyes. Rivals opened up new spice routes from the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but growing demand meant Venice’s share of the traffic stayed high. The results, in architecture and art, line the canals and fill the palaces, galleries, and libraries today.

Meanwhile, however, the eastern Mediterranean had grown ever more insecure, because a new naval power had broken into the arena. The Ottoman Turks had arrived on horseback from the steppes of Asia. But when they reached the shores of the Mediterranean they showed, from the late fourteenth century onwards, amazing adaptability in turning to naval power. The Turkish vocation for the sea did not spring suddenly and fully armed into existence. From the early fourteenth century, pirate nests on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean were run by Turkish chieftains, some of whom allegedly had fleets of hundreds of vessels at their command. The greater the extent of coastline conquered by their land forces, as Ottoman imperialism stole west, the greater the opportunities for Turkish-operated corsairs to stay at sea, with access to watering stations and supplies from onshore. Throughout the fourteenth century, however, these were unambitious enterprises, limited to small ships and hit-and-run tactics.

From the 1390 s, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I began to build up a permanent-fleet of his own, but without embracing a radically different strategy from the independent operators who preceded him. Set-piece battles usually occurred, in spite of Turkish intentions, and resulted in Turkish defeats. As late as 1466 , a Venetian merchant in Constantinople claimed that for a successful engagement Turkish ships needed to outnumber Venetians by four or five to one. By that date, however, Ottoman investment in naval strength was probably greater than that of any Christian state. The far-seeing sultans Mehmed I and Bayezid II realized that the momentum of the conquests by land had to be supported—if it was to continue—by power at sea. After the long generations of experiment without success in set-piece battles, Bayezid’s navy humiliated that of Venice in the war of 1499 – 1503 . Never, since Romans reluctantly took to the sea against Carthage, had a naval vocation been so successfully embraced by so unlikely a power. The balance of naval strength between Christendom and Islam, as it had lasted for four hundred years, was reversed, at least in the eastern Mediterranean. In Venice’s home waters, a new era can properly be said to have begun.⁶²

Venice maintained an uneasy relationship with the Turks, which limited interruptions to trade; but the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, from the fifteenth century onwards, turned increasingly to investing in property on the Italian mainland. Venice became a land power, with a land empire. Cities along the Po were emblazoned with the symbol of Venetian power, the Lion of St. Mark.

Even in her greatest days, Venice’s empire was an astonishing exception tothe historic trend. In most of Europe, city-republics—let alone city-empires—were already a thing of the past: most submitted to the rule of monarchs or joined larger states. Venice was an anachronism, which her citizens and subjects paid heavily to defend. Although the rulers of the republic were all merchants—capitalist entrepreneurs, devoted to the accumulation of profit—they kept up, almost for the whole of Venetian history, unrelenting moral pressure on each other to put the interests of the state first. Much of Venetian art is dedicated to this collective ideal and to celebrating the contributions of the various noble families.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the glories of Venetian art and festivals appear undimmed. But the power and wealth of the empire were in relative decline: the economic center of gravity of Europe had shifted, as a result of the creation of Atlantic links and, gradually, of worldwide trade routes. The countries which were best placed to profit from the new opportunities were those with easy access to the Atlantic. Wars against the Turks drained Venetian strength. Commerce was maintained in the eighteenth century only by paying off pirates and appeasing enemies. The land empire remained intact only by the sufferance of its neighbors and subjects. In 1797 , when armies unleashed by the French Revolution conquered the whole of northern Italy, Venice’s independence crumbled at a touch.

The fabric of the city has been preserved ever since because of its uniqueness:it is a haven for romantic travelers and a workshop for art historians. But the bravado of its builders now looks increasingly foolhardy, as, sagging under the weight of its heritage, corroded by a polluted sea, Venice struggles to stay above the waves. The environment against which civilization measures itself takes its long-delayed revenge.