The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova

THE

VENETIANS

A New History: From Marco Polo to Cassanova

PAUL STRATHERN

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

To Oona

Contents

List of Illustrations

Maps

Prologue

Part One: Expansion

Part Two: The Imperial Age

Part Three: The Long Decline

Part Four: Dissolution and Fall

Image Gallery

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

List of Illustrations

Prologue

I
N THE WORDS
of the renowned historian John Julius Norwich, ‘One of the most intractable problems with which the historian of Venice has to contend is that which stems from the instinctive horror, amounting at times to a phobia, shown by the Republic to the faintest suggestion of the cult of personality.’ Indeed, he goes on to say, ‘it is hard to find much human interest in the decrees and deliberations of the faceless Council of Ten’. My intention is not to write another history of Venice, but to show that – despite pursuing this policy – the city not only produced, and attracted to its shores, a succession of outstanding characters, but also that these characters (ranging from Marco Polo to Casanova) often embodied the spirit of Venice, which in its turn frequently took on a distinctly individual character of its own. They will be described against the background of events that over the centuries forged and finally destroyed the most powerful of all Mediterranean cities. Venice came to see itself as
La Serenissima
(‘the Most Serene Republic’), yet here its self-identification was as faulty as its attempt to suppress all individuality. Far from being so tranquil and clearly aloof from everyday concerns, its behaviour could be dark and obfuscating, proud and avaricious, efficient or incompetent, devious, vengeful, glorious even, and certainly, towards the end, eaten away by a self-destructive paranoia so embodied by that very Council of Ten, the committee of public safety, spies and secret police.

The Venetians, like the British, were a seagoing island race, who laid claim to an extensive empire out of all proportion to the size of their homeland, whose influence at times extended to the reaches of the known globe. Yet like America, Venice’s empire was more concerned with trade
domination than with actual territorial possession. And, like both empires, it was not afraid of isolationism: of turning its back on the large land mass that began just across the water, or of ignoring the larger continental worlds beyond – in the form of Europe, America and Asia.

Venice was ruled over by a doge, an elected position held for life, whose holder initially held great power, which was gradually diminished over the centuries until he became little more than a figurehead, his sovereignty similar to that of the British monarch today. Although nominally a democratic republic, Venice was in reality an oligarchy ruled by an extensive class of wealthy ‘noble’ families. Only members of these families could sit on the parliamentary-style Great Council and vote, a jealously guarded right handed down from generation to generation, and they alone could be elected to senior administrative positions, such as membership of the many interlocking councils that ensured the checks and balances of ordered daily governance, or become members of the supreme Council of Ten, or become doge.