convinced by the visible show of force. The Croats saw what was coming and tried to buy him off. Orseolo was not to be turned, though his task was made harder by the coastal terrain. The pirates’ stronghold was well protected, hidden up the marshy delta of the Narenta River and beyond the reach of any strike force. It was shielded by the three barrier islands of Lesina, Curzola and Lagosta, whose rocky fortresses presented a tough obstacle.
The Narenta River and its barrier islands
Relying on local intelligence, the Venetians ambushed a shipload of Narentine nobles returning from trade on the Italian shore and used them to force submission from the Croats at the mouth of the delta. They swore to forgo the annual tribute and harassment of the Republic’s ships. Only the offshore islands held out. The Venetians isolated them one by one and dropped anchor in their harbours. Curzola was stormed. Lagosta, ‘by whose violence the Venetians who sailed through the seas were very often robbed of their goods and sent naked away’, offered more stubborn resistance. The inhabitants believed their rocky citadel to be impregnable. The Venetians unleashed a furious assault on it from below; when that failed, a detachment made their way up by a steep path behind the citadel and captured the towers that contained the fort’s water supply. The defence collapsed. The people were led away in chains and their pirates’ nest demolished.
With this force de frappe , Orseolo put down a clear marker of Venetian intentions, and in case any of the subject cities had forgotten their recent vows, he retraced his footsteps, calling at their startled ports in a repeat show of strength, parading hostages and captured banners. ‘Thence, passing again by the aforesaid town, making his way back to Venice, he at length returned with great triumph.’ Henceforward, the doge and his successors awarded themselves a new honorific title – Dux Dalmatiae – lord of Dalmatia.
If there is a single moment that marked the start of the rise to maritime empire it was now, with the doge’s triumphal return to the lagoon. The breaking of the Narentine pirates was an act of great significance. It signalled the start of Venetian dominance of the Adriatic and its maintenance became an axiom for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must be a Venetian sea; nostra chaxa , they would say in dialect, ‘our house’, and its key was the Dalmatian coast. This was never quite straightforward. Over the centuries and almost until its last breath, the Republic would spend enormous resources fending off imperial interlopers, cuffing pirates and quelling troublesome vassals. TheDalmatian cities – particularly Zara – struggled repeatedly to assert their independence but only Ragusa (Dubrovnik) ever managed it. Henceforward there was no rival naval power to match Venice in the heart of the sea. The Adriatic would fall under the political and economic shadow of an increasingly ravenous city, whose population would reach eighty thousand within a century. In time the limestone coast became the granary and vineyard of Venice; Istrian marble would front the Renaissance palaces on the Grand Canal; Dalmatian pine would plank their galleys and its seamen would sail them out of Venetian naval bases on the eastern shore. The crenellated limestone coast came to be seen almost as an extension of the lagoon.
The Bucintoro and the Senza
The Republic, with a Byzantine talent for transforming significant victories into patriotic ceremonies, henceforth performed an annual celebration of Orseolo’s triumph. Every Ascension Day, the people of Venice participated in a ritual voyage to themouth of the lagoon. At the start it was a relatively plain affair. The clergy, dressed in their copes and ceremonial robes, climbed aboard a barge decked with golden cloth and sailed out to the lidi , the long line of sand bars that protects Venice from the Adriatic. They took
Irene Garcia, Lissa Halls Johnson