no feudal system, no clear division between knight and serf. Without agriculture, money was its barter. Their nobles would be merchant princes who could command a fleet and calculate profit to the nearest grosso . The difficulties of life bound all its people together in an act of patriotic solidarity that required self-discipline and a measure of equality – like the crew of a ship all subject to the perils of the deep.
Geographical position, livelihood, political institutions and religious affiliations marked Venice out. It lived between two worlds: the land and the sea, the east and the west, yet belonging to neither. It grew up a subject of the Greek-speaking emperors in Constantinople and drew its art, its ceremonial and its trade from the Byzantine world. Yet the Venetians were also Latin Catholics, nominal subjects to the pope, Byzantium’s anti-Christ. Betweensuch opposing forces they struggled to maintain a particular freedom. The Venetians repeatedly defied the pope, who responded by excommunicating the whole city. They resisted tyrannous solutions to government and constructed for themselves a republic, led by a doge, whom they shackled with so many restraints that he could receive no gift from foreigners more substantial than a pot of herbs. They were intolerant of over-ambitious nobles and defeated admirals, whom they exiled or executed, and devised a voting system to check corruption as labyrinthine as the shifting channels of their lagoon.
The tenor of their relations with the wider world was set early. The city wished to trade wherever profit was to be made without favour or fear. This was their rationale and their creed and they pleaded it as a special case. It earned them widespread distrust. ‘They said many things to excuse themselves … which I do not recollect,’ spat a fourteenth-century churchman after watching the Republic wriggle free of yet another treaty (though he could undoubtedly remember the details painfully well), ‘excepting that they are a quintessence and will belong neither to the Church nor to the emperor, nor to the sea nor to the land.’ They were in trouble with both Byzantine emperors and popes as early as the ninth century for selling war materials to Muslim Egypt, and whilst purportedly complying with a trade ban with Islam around 828, they managed to spirit away the body of St Mark from Alexandria under the noses of Muslim customs officials, hidden in a barrel of pork. Their standard let-out was commercial necessity: ‘because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade’. Alone in all the world, Venice was organised for economic ends.
By the tenth century they were selling oriental goods of extraordinary rarity at the important fairs at Pavia on the River Po: Russian ermine, purple cloth from Syria, silk from Constantinople. One monkish chronicler had seen the emperor Charlemagne looking drab beside his retinue in oriental cloth bought there from Venetian merchants. (Particularly singled out for clericaltut-tutting was a multicoloured fabric interwoven with the figures of birds – evidently an item of outrageous foreign luxury.) To the Muslims they traded back timber and slaves, literally Slavs until that people became Christians. Venice was by now well placed at the head of the Adriatic to become the pivot of trade, and on the round turning of the millennium, Ascension Day in the year 1000, Doge Pietro Orseolo II, a man who ‘excelled almost all the ancient doges in knowledge of mankind’, set sail on an expedition that would launch the Republic’s ascent to wealth, power and maritime glory.
On the threshold of the new era the city stood finely poised between danger and opportunity. Venice was not yet the compact mirage of dazzling stone that it would later become, though its population was already substantial. No splendid palazzi flanked the great S-bend of the Grand Canal. The city of wonder, flamboyance and sin, of carnival masks and public
Geographical position, livelihood, political institutions and religious affiliations marked Venice out. It lived between two worlds: the land and the sea, the east and the west, yet belonging to neither. It grew up a subject of the Greek-speaking emperors in Constantinople and drew its art, its ceremonial and its trade from the Byzantine world. Yet the Venetians were also Latin Catholics, nominal subjects to the pope, Byzantium’s anti-Christ. Betweensuch opposing forces they struggled to maintain a particular freedom. The Venetians repeatedly defied the pope, who responded by excommunicating the whole city. They resisted tyrannous solutions to government and constructed for themselves a republic, led by a doge, whom they shackled with so many restraints that he could receive no gift from foreigners more substantial than a pot of herbs. They were intolerant of over-ambitious nobles and defeated admirals, whom they exiled or executed, and devised a voting system to check corruption as labyrinthine as the shifting channels of their lagoon.
The tenor of their relations with the wider world was set early. The city wished to trade wherever profit was to be made without favour or fear. This was their rationale and their creed and they pleaded it as a special case. It earned them widespread distrust. ‘They said many things to excuse themselves … which I do not recollect,’ spat a fourteenth-century churchman after watching the Republic wriggle free of yet another treaty (though he could undoubtedly remember the details painfully well), ‘excepting that they are a quintessence and will belong neither to the Church nor to the emperor, nor to the sea nor to the land.’ They were in trouble with both Byzantine emperors and popes as early as the ninth century for selling war materials to Muslim Egypt, and whilst purportedly complying with a trade ban with Islam around 828, they managed to spirit away the body of St Mark from Alexandria under the noses of Muslim customs officials, hidden in a barrel of pork. Their standard let-out was commercial necessity: ‘because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade’. Alone in all the world, Venice was organised for economic ends.
By the tenth century they were selling oriental goods of extraordinary rarity at the important fairs at Pavia on the River Po: Russian ermine, purple cloth from Syria, silk from Constantinople. One monkish chronicler had seen the emperor Charlemagne looking drab beside his retinue in oriental cloth bought there from Venetian merchants. (Particularly singled out for clericaltut-tutting was a multicoloured fabric interwoven with the figures of birds – evidently an item of outrageous foreign luxury.) To the Muslims they traded back timber and slaves, literally Slavs until that people became Christians. Venice was by now well placed at the head of the Adriatic to become the pivot of trade, and on the round turning of the millennium, Ascension Day in the year 1000, Doge Pietro Orseolo II, a man who ‘excelled almost all the ancient doges in knowledge of mankind’, set sail on an expedition that would launch the Republic’s ascent to wealth, power and maritime glory.
On the threshold of the new era the city stood finely poised between danger and opportunity. Venice was not yet the compact mirage of dazzling stone that it would later become, though its population was already substantial. No splendid palazzi flanked the great S-bend of the Grand Canal. The city of wonder, flamboyance and sin, of carnival masks and public
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