City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire Read Free Page A

spectacle lay centuries ahead. Instead low wooden houses, wharves and warehouses fronted the water. Venice comprised less a unity than a succession of separate islets with patches of undrained marsh and open spaces among the parish settlements, where people grew vegetables, kept pigs and cows and tended vines. The Church of St Mark, a plain predecessor of the extraordinary basilica, had recently been badly burned and patched up after political turmoil that left a doge dead in its porch; the square in front of it was beaten earth, divided by a canal and partially given over to orchard. Sea-going vessels that had sailed to Syria and Egypt crowded the commercial heart of the city, the Rivo Alto – the Rialto. Everywhere masts and spars protruded above the buildings.
    It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice’s growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favourable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he despatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinopleand the Barbary coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton and glass – luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city’s home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was a risky no-man’s-land, patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draughted Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait.
    Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns further up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.
    Orseolo’s departure was marked by one of those prescient ceremonies that became a defining marker of Venetian history. A large crowd assembled for a ritual mass at the Church of St Peter of Castello, near the site of the present arsenal. The bishop presented the doge with a triumphal banner, which perhaps depicted for the first time St Mark’s lion, gold and rampant on a red background, crowned and winged, with the open gospel between his paws declaring peace but ready for war. The doge and his force then stepped aboard, and with the west wind billowing in their sails, surged out of the lagoon into the boisterousAdriatic. Stopping only to receive further blessing from the bishop of Grado they set sail for the peninsula of Istria on the eastern tip of the Adriatic.
    Orseolo’s campaign could almost serve as the template for subsequent Venetian policy: a mixture of shrewd diplomacy and the precise application of force. As the fleet worked its way down the small coastal cities – from Parenzo to Pola, Ossero to Zara – the citizens and bishops came out to demonstrate their loyalty to the doge and to bless him with their relics. Those who wavered, weighing Venice against the counter threat of the Slavs, were more readily