The Venetian Empire Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE VENETIAN EMPIRE

  Anglo-Welsh by birth, Welsh by loyalty, Jan Morris divides her time between her library-house in North Wales, her dacha in the Black Mountains of South Wales and travel abroad. She is an Honorary D. Litt. of the universities of Wales and Glamorgan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary FRIBA. She was made a CBE in the 1999 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

  Jan Morris’s other books include studies of Venice, Oxford and Spain; Last Letters from Hav, a novel about an imaginary European city, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985; and Fifty Years of Europe: An Album, a highly personal evocation of contemporary Europe. She has also written half a dozen works about the British Empire; a capricious biography of Admiral Lord Fisher, RN, Fisher’s Face, six volumes of travel essays and two autobiographical volumes. She has also edited The Oxford Book of Oxford and the travel writings of Virginia Woolf. Her two most recent books, which are both available in Penguin, are Wales and Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest.

  Jan Morris

  The

  Venetian Empire

  A Sea Voyage

  Penguin Books

  For Suki Provstgård Morys

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published in an illustrated edition by Rainbird 1980

  Published in Penguin Books 1990

  16

  Copyright © Jan Morris, 1980

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-193802-8

  Contents

  Introduction

  Pre-Imperial

  O City, City!

  Aegeanics

  The Great Island

  The Bitter-Sweet Island

  Shores of Greece

  Ionian White and Gold

  Adriatica

  Post-Imperial

  Gazetteer

  Chronology

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  For six centuries the Republic of Venice, set resplendently in its lagoon at the head of the Adriatic Sea, was an imperial power. Like many another medieval city-state, it extended its authority gradually over the countryside round about, and at the height of its success ruled much of north Italy, as far south as Ancona, inland almost to Milan. But in a more properly imperial kind, it acquired too over the years a dominion overseas, a colonial empire in the classic sense – Stato da Mar in the Venetian vernacular – and it is this romantic entity, scattered through the world’s loveliest seas, that is the subject of my book. It is a traveller’s book, geographically arranged, but space and time are jumbled in it, and I have wandered at will from the landscapes and sensations of our own day into events, suggestions and substances of the past.

  I call the Venetian Empire an entity, but it often feels more like an abstraction. The Venetians were never without overseas possessions, from the time my story starts at the end of the twelfth century until the fall of the Venetian Republic at the end of the eighteenth century. Rome apart, theirs was the first and the longest-lived of the European overseas empires. Their imperialism, though, was piecemeal and opportunist. They had first become rich by collecting the products of the east, shipping them home to Venice, and dispatching them through Europe: their empire was contrived to protect and develop this activity, and was accordingly pragmatic to a fault. It adapted all too easily to circumstance. The Venetians were exporting no ideology to the world. They were not hoping to found lesser states in their own image. They had no missionary zeal. They were not great builders, like the Romans. They were not fanatics, like the Spaniards.

  They were above all money-people – every Venetian, wrote Pope Pius II in the fifteenth century, was a slave to ‘the sordid occupations of trade’. If their overseas adventures gave them a sense of patriotic fulfilment too, that is because during their years of national virility the Venetians were intensely proud of their republic and its institutions, and carried their loyalty into everything they did. Pride and profit were inextricably mingled. As the oarsmen of a Venetian galley said, when they found themselves trapped in the Golden Horn during the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453, ‘where our wares are, there is our house… We have decided to die upon this galley, which is our home’ – and seizing their swords, they prepared to repel boarders beneath the banner of St Mark, the patron and protector of all things Venetian.

  It was an empire of coasts and islands, distributed along the republic’s trading routes to the orient. Its entire population was probably never more than 400,000, but it extended in scattered bits and pieces from the Adriatic in the west to Cyprus in the east, and northward far into the Aegean. It was never, so to speak, definitive. It had no moment of completion. It was changing all the time, and its possessions varied enormously in style, size and longevity.

  Some were mere isolated fortresses on an alien shore. Some were great centres of transhipment or naval power, where the merchant galleys could find food, water and repairs, and the warships could base their patrols. Some were settlement colonies: Venetian families settled permanently in Crete and Corfu, for instance, and others held Aegean islands as feudal estates. In some places Venice stayed so long that her presence seemed almost geological: in others, hardly had her soldiers stormed the walls than the flag came down again and the galleys vanished into the sea, their punitive duties done. A place like Koroni, in Greece, was Venetian during three separate periods of its history, in the intervals being ruled variously by French knights, Greek emperors and Turkish sultans: and to add to the complexity of it all, so many of the Venetian possessions have changed their names, at one time or another, that I have felt obliged to include a gazetteer at the back of the book, to explain where is where.

  The Venetians, nevertheless, did try to make a unity of this ungraspable congeries. Despite appearances, theirs was a severely centralist empire. Everything looked towards Venice, to the Signory at the summit, just as the merchant convoys which were the imperial raison d’être were all sailing to and from one grand destination, Venice herself. When the empire was at its most dynamic it was very tightly run. All colonial trade with Venice had to be carried in Venetian ships. All surplus colonial produce had to go to Venice. All Adriatic trade was channelled through the lagoon. Officials sent from Venice governed all the chief colonies, under various titles – governor, rector, bailie, prefect, lieutenant – and the defence of the realm was always in the hands of Venetian noblemen.

  Lower in the hierarchy the indigenes were usually allowed some share in government, but the last word came always from Venice, and there was no devolution of real power to the coloni
es, and no colonial representation at the imperial capital. There is no pretending that it was a very enlightened empire. No improving instinct guided the Venetians, such as tempered the pugnacity of the British empire-builders later, and their standards of government varied from the impersonally efficient to the incorrigibly corrupt. ‘If you want the Dalmatians to be loyal,’ the theologian Paolo Sarpi advised the Signory in 1615, ‘keep them ignorant and hungry… As for your Greek subjects, wine and bastinados should be their share.’ In many of their possessions they were intensely disliked. Orthodox Greeks, after a few generations of Venetian Catholic rule, frequently welcomed the arrival of the Muslim Turks – who, if they had unappealing weaknesses for mass slaughter, arson and disembowelment, at least did not despise their subjects as bumpkin schismatics.

  In other places, though, it is fair to say, the authority of Venice was sentimentally beloved. Great trust was placed in the distant Signory itself, as against its officials on the spot, and sometimes indeed the subject peoples were more resolute in its defence than the Venetians themselves, when Turks or Genoese, pirates or hostile feudalists disembarked impertinently on its foreshores.

  More than most empires, the Venetian was single-minded in its function. It did not in itself make Venice rich – keeping the colonies probably cost more than the revenues they supplied. Strategically, as the centuries passed, it became more of a burden than an asset. It did, it is true, provide jobs and chances for members of the ruling nobility, but it was an empire of small places, and it attracted no mass migration from the mother city.

  No, this was specifically a mercantile empire. Beneath the guns of its scattered strongpoints the merchantmen could sail with confidence on their enterprises: and in an age when seamen preferred to spend their nights ashore, the existence of so many Venetian havens meant that a voyage from the lagoon to the east was in effect a series of stages from one Venetian port to the next: Venice – Poreč – Split – Durrës – Corfu – Methoni – Kithira – Crete – Cyprus – Beirut. In the fifteenth century, say, a Venetian ship need put in at no foreign harbour all the way from its owner’s quay to the warehouses of the Levant.

  Many enemies beset those routes, but one in particular loomed over Venetian prospects almost from the start. The Ottoman Turks first burst into history, from their Anatolian homeland, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Four centuries later they had taken Constantinople, were masters of the Arab world, and had advanced into Europe as far as Vienna. The truest thread of Venetian imperial history is the republic’s long defensive action, lasting on and off for three hundred years, against the power of this colossus. Venice was the most exposed and vulnerable of the European Powers in the long contest between Islam and Christianity, and for most of her imperial history she was intermittently at war with the Turks: even before her own expansion had reached its limits, the Signory was losing its first possessions to the Porte.

  But at the same time Venice depended upon the Muslim trade. Her relationship with Islam was always ambiguous. Though she took part in more than one Crusade, she hung on to her trading stations in Syria and Egypt: even while she fought the Turks, she maintained her commercial contacts within their territories, and at the height of the antagonism indeed allowed Turkish merchants to establish their own business centre on the Grand Canal in Venice. However appallingly the Turks used her, she was generally swift to appease them. While she represented herself to the west as the lonely champion of Christendom, to Islam she liked to appear as a sort of neutral service industry: when in 1464 some Muslim passengers were seized from a Venetian ship by the militantly Christian Knights of St John, at Rhodes, within a week a Venetian fleet arrived off the island, an ultimatum was delivered, the Knights were overawed, and the infidels were delivered safely to Alexandria with fulsome hopes, we may assume, of continuing future favours.

  The Venetian Empire was a parasite upon the body of Islam, but as the centuries passed this became an increasingly uncomfortable status. If the Venetians needed Islam, Islam did not greatly need Venice, and in four fierce wars and innumerable skirmishes the Turks gradually whittled away the republic’s eastern possessions. One by one the colonies fell, until at the moment of Venice’s own extinction as a state, in 1797, she had nothing much left but the Ionian Islands, off the coast of Greece, and a few footholds on the eastern shore of the Adriatic – properties useless to her anyway by then, except as reminders of the glorious past.

  Venice was never primarily an imperial power, and her surpassing interest to historians and travellers of all periods has been only indirectly due to empire. As we make our own journey we must remind ourselves now and then of the great things always happening at the imperial capital far away. The city itself gradually reached the apex of its magnificence as the most luxurious place in Europe – La Serenissima, The Most Serene Republic – and the Venetian constitution was refined into the subtle and watchful oligarchy, under its elected Doges, that was the wonder of the nations. The Venetian bureaucracy was developed into a mighty instrument of power and permanence. For a century a vicious war was waged against the most persistent of Venice’s European rivals, Genoa, culminating in a dramatic final victory actually within sight of the city. The mainland estate, the terrafirma, was created and consolidated, while repeatedly Venice was drawn into the vast dynastic and religious conflicts of the rest of Europe. More than once the republic was formally excommunicated by the Pope for its heretical tendencies. Several times it was decimated by plague. A succession of great artists brought glory to the city: a slow enfeeblement of the national will eventually brought it ignominy.

  For like all states, the Venetian Republic waxed and waned. It reached the apogee of its reputation, perhaps, in the fifteenth century, but its decline was protracted. The stalwart character of the people imperceptibly softened. The integrity of the ruling nobles was corroded by greed and self-indulgence. The rise of superpowers, the Ottoman Empire to the east, the Spanish Empire to the west, put Venice, whose population never exceeded 170,000, out of scale in the world: the more progressive skills of northern mariners, Dutch and Engl∗∗∗ish, outclassed her on her native element, the sea. New political organisms, new ideas and energies left the republic an anachronism among the nations of Europe: until at last in 1797 Napoleon Bonaparte, declaring, ‘I will be an Atilla to the Venetian State’, sent his soldiers into the lagoons and put an end to it all, to the glory of progress and the sorrow of romantics everywhere. Wordsworth spoke for them all, in the heyday of Romanticism, when he wrote his sonnet, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’:

  Once did She hold the gorgeous East in fee:

  And was the safeguard of the west: the worth

  Of Venice did not fall below her birth,

  Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.

  She was a maiden City, bright and free;

  No guile seduced, no force could violate;

  And, when she took unto herself a Mate,

  She must espouse the everlasting Sea.

  And what if she had seen those glories fade,

  Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;

  Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

  When her long life hath reached its final day:

  Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

  Of that which once was great, is passed away.

  All this we should keep at the corner of our mind’s eye, then, as we sail the sunlit seas, clamber the flowered fortress walls, admire the heroes and deplore the villains of the Stato da Mar: and I have included a chronological table too, after the gazetteer, to try and put our voyage into historical perspective. These islands, capes and cities of the sea were distant reflections of a much greater image. It is only proper that we start our journey through them, as we shall end it, in the very eye of the sun, on the brilliant and bustling waterfront before the palace of the Doges.

  Pre-Imperial

  Prospects from the Piazzetta – a very

  particular cit
y – come of age – a pious

  commitment – setting sail

  The most glittering of all the world’s belvederes, the most suggestive of great occasion and lofty circumstance, is surely the Piazzetta di San Marco, the Little Piazza of St Mark, upon the waterfront at Venice. Two marble columns stand in it, one crowned with a peculiar winged lion of St Mark, the city’s patron saint, the other with a figure of St Theodore, his predecessor in that office, in the company of a crocodile: and if you stand between the two of them, where they used to hang malefactors long ago, you may feel yourself almost to be part of Venice, so infectious is the spirit of the place, and so vivid are all its meanings.

  Immediately behind you is stacked the ancient fulcrum of the city: the pinkish mass of the Doge’s Palace, the arcane gilded domes of the Basilica beyond, the towering Campanile with the angel on its summit and the sightseers thronging its belfry, the arcaded elegance of the Piazza San Marco, Napoleon’s ‘finest drawing-room in Europe’, from whose recesses, if the season is right, the wistful strains of competing café orchestras sigh and thump above the murmur of the crowd. To the west, beyond the golden weather-vane of the Customs House (held by a figure of Fortune and supported on its great sphere by two muscular Atlases), the Grand Canal sweeps away between an avenue of palaces towards the Rialto. To the east the Riva degli Schiavoni disappears humped with bridges and lined with hotels past the ferry-boats, the tugs and the cruise-liners at their berths towards the distant green smudge of the Public Gardens.

  Venice

  Immediately in front of you, the ever shining and shifting proscenium of this theatre, lies the Bacino di San Marco, the Basin of St Mark, for a thousand years the grand harbour of Venice. It is dominated from this viewpoint, as by some monumental piece of stage scenery, by the towered island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and it is streaked around the edges with mudbanks when the tide is low, and speckled, as it opens into the wide lagoon, with the hefty wooden tripods that mark the deep-water passages out to sea.