The Venetian Empire Read online

  Night and day the ships go by. Sometimes a great freighter passes, hugely out of proportion, its riggings, aerials and radar-scanners gliding away queerly through roofs and chimney-pots towards the docks. Sometimes a cruise ship prances in. Ever and again there come and go the indomitable vaporetti, the water-buses of Venice, deep in the water with new arrivals from the railway station and the car parks, and sometimes the yellow-funnelled Chioggia steamer hoots, shudders a little, backs away from her moorings and sets off into the lagoon. The gondolas, if it is the tourist season (for gondolas nowadays tend to be hibernatory craft) progress languidly here and there, a flutter of ribbons from gondoliers’ straw hats, a trailing of honeymoon fingers over gunwales. Portentous official launches hasten from office to conference. Speedboats of the rich speed away to the Lido or Harry’s Bar. A grey customs launch detaches itself with a bellow from its berth beyond San Giorgio and ominously roars off in pursuit of contraband (or possibly lunch).

  It is a restless scene. The ships are never satisfied, the tourists mill and churn. The water itself has no surf or breakers, but often seems to be chopped, in a peculiarly Venetian way, into a million little particles of light-reflecting vapour, rather like ice-fragments, giving the surface of the lagoon a dancing, prismatic quality. The Piazzetta is never static, never silent, and never empty of life: it has been in this condition, night and day, since the early Middle Ages, and every now and then it has been the setting of one of those spectacular displays of pageantry and purpose which have always been essential to the style of Venice.

  Captains-General of the Sea, for example, have set off with their squadrons for distant campaigns. Enormous regattas have celebrated holy days or victories. Visiting potentates or holy men have been welcomed. In 1374 Henry III of France sailed in on a ship rowed by 400 Slavs, with an escort of fourteen galleys, a raft upon which glass-blowers created fanciful objects from a furnace shaped like a marine monster, an armada of fantastically decorated floats circling all around, and a welcoming arch designed by Palladio and decorated jointly by Tintoretto and Veronese. In 1961 Queen Elizabeth II of England arrived in her royal yacht, while from the gun-turret of her escorting destroyer a solitary Scottish piper, kilts swirling in the breeze, head held high like cock-o’-the-walk, played a proud if inaudible Highland melody. I myself have seen a dead Pope come in, golden-masked and gilt-coffined on the poop of a ceremonial barge, to a heavy swish of oars and the rhythmic beat of a galley-master’s drum.

  On 8 November 1202, ‘in the octave of the Feast of St Remigius’, one such spectacle, never to be forgotten by the Venetians, began the transformation of their city-state into a maritime empire: for on that fine day of a St Martin’s summer the octogenarian and purblind Enrico Dandolo, forty-first Doge of Venice, boarded his red-painted galley in the Basin, beneath a canopy of vermilion silk, to trumpet calls, priestly chanting and the cheers of a mighty fleet lying all around, and set in motion the events of the Fourth Crusade – which were presently to make him and all his seventy-nine successors, at least in name, Lords of a Quarter and a Half-Quarter of the Roman Empire.

  Venice had been in existence for some five hundred years already. Born out of the fall of Rome, when her first rickety townships were built within the fastness of the lagoon, she had become a client of the Byzantine Empire, which had its headquarters in Constantinople, alias Byzantium, now Istanbul, and was the eastern successor to Rome’s glories. Through the first centuries of their history, while much of western Europe endured the Dark Ages of barbaric regression, the Venetians had organized their affairs within the fold of Byzantine power. Sometimes they availed themselves of Byzantine protection, sometimes they acted as mercenaries for Byzantium, and so loyal had they been to the suzerainty that one of the more fulsome of the emperors had called Venice ‘Byzantium’s favourite daughter’.

  In 1202, accordingly, this was in many respects a Byzantine city, though of a very particular kind. The impact it had upon strangers was much the same then as now: the marvellous spectacle of a city built upon mudbanks, its walls rising directly out of the lagoon, was perhaps even more astonishing in those days, when laborious journeys over the wild Alps, or perilous voyages through the Mediterranean, deposited the stranger at last upon this marvellous strand. The earliest townscape picture we have of Venice, a fourteenth-century miniature in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, seems to have been painted in a kind of daze: fantastically coloured domes and turrets crown the scene, suave white swans float around, and a sightseer in the Piazzetta is looking up at the lion on its column in just that attitude of disjointed bemusement in which, any summer day, you may see amateur cameramen aiming themselves at the animal now.

  It was a city of about 80,000 people, one of the biggest in Europe, and it was organized by parishes, each with its own strong character, its own social hierarchy, so that there was no rich quarter of town, and no poor. It was mostly built of wood, but its functional shape had already been evolved – that sensible, machine-like pattern which modern town-planners so admire. The waters all around it meant that it need not be circumvallated, but a wall protected the city on its seaward side, and the principal buildings were mostly defensive in style. This gave it a very jagged look: for besides the big pot-bellied chimney-pots which crowned every house, there were embattlements everywhere, and in particular a twin-pronged kind of merlonation, slightly oriental of cast, which seemed to run along the tops of everything, and pungently accentuated the exotic nature of the place.

  In 1202 much of it was new. The first stone bridges had quite lately been built, the Piazza had been paved within living memory, the columns had not long been standing on the Piazzetta. The city plan, though, was immemorial, and was based then as now upon the Grand Canal, which bisected the city and was its principal thoroughfare. It ran in a big reversed S from one side of Venice to the other, and acted as a feeder highway for every part of the city: from it traffic fanned out through all the parishes by barge and boat on a myriad lesser canals, by horseback or porters’ shoulders through a labyrinth of alleys.

  The commercial centre of Venice was Rialto, halfway along the Grand Canal, where the single bridge that crossed the waterway provided an obvious fulcrum. Here the bankers had their stalls, the merchants their offices, the slavers their auction-yards, and here the barges from the mainland were moored in their hundreds for the transhipment of cargoes from ocean-going ships. The port of Venice was nearly everywhere, for if the Basin was the ceremonial harbour of the city, docks and wharves were scattered all over it, and deep-sea vessels found their way far into its urban heart. Most of the Grand Canal palaces, being the homes of successful merchants, had their own small docks in front, where cargoes were unloaded directly into their ground-floor warehouses, and there were shipyards up side canals, and chandlers in market squares, and ships’ masts protruding among bell-towers, so that almost every part of the city had a dockside vigour and vivacity.

  The centre of military power was in the east of the city: since 1104 Venice had possessed, in her famous Arsenal, the greatest of all shipyards, and probably the chief industrial undertaking in Europe. When Dante, descending into his Inferno, wanted images to express the awful turmoil and congestion of purgatory, he drew upon his memories of the Arsenal, for hardly less than the wonders of Venetian architecture and display, the shipyard captured the imagination of everyone: every old map, print and drawing shows it – fairly hazily as a rule, for security was tight, and draughtsmen with easels were hardly encouraged, I imagine, at its heavily battlemented gates.

  Political power, though, was concentrated upon the Piazza San Marco, and this was still unmistakably an expatriated Byzantine forum. It was much its present shape and size, paved in herringbone brick, and the sides of the square were already arcaded; but scattered over it were the booths of trade guilds collecting dues, shipmasters recruiting crews and passengers, tourist entrepreneurs selling souvenirs, while at the entrance to the Merceria, the chief shopping street, there was a clump of elde
r trees to which citizens’ horses were habitually tied. The buildings around the Piazza were a mélange of shops, offices and travellers’ hospices, and the whole was dominated by the great red-brick tower of the Campanile at the corner, which was more or less flat-topped then, and served the simultaneous functions of a beacon-tower, a tocsin and a church belfry.

  Around the corner, in the still unpaved Piazzetta, was the palace of the Doges. This was nothing very grand. It was rather like the palace of an Arab sheikh or African king, a jumble of buildings around a yard, some private, some public, with fortified towers forming part of the defences along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Its southern outlook, over the Basin, was magnificent even then; its eastward prospect, over the often muddy Piazzetta, gave the Doge a view of the public bakeries across the way, and the jumble of money-changers’ stalls that clustered around the base of the Campanile.

  Immediately next door was the Basilica of St Mark. The Patriarch of Venice, the bishop of the place, had his seat outside the city altogether, in the small town of Grado along the coast, but the true centre of the civic faith was this already remarkable church, in which had been deposited nearly four hundred years before the remains of St Mark himself. The third church on the site, it was officially the Doge’s private chapel – he was its patronus et gubernator, its patron and its governor – but it had long since become a shrine of State and a focus of national emotion. In style it was pure Byzantine, its plan being based upon that of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Its domes were shallow in the Byzantine manner, giving to the brick exterior of the church a severe authority – only a few patches of coloured stone relieved it, and to the right of the main door a single lateen yard-arm protruded from the brickwork in token of some ancient victory at sea.

  The devotions of the Venetians were distinctly eastern in temper: their style of singing was recognizably oriental, their priests wore golden vestments all their own and conducted peculiar offices – for instance, in the service of baptism they laid the child upon the baptistry floor during the singing of the paternoster to symbolize its coming into possession of the church. Over the years, to suit these ritual preferences, they had filled the Basilica with artifacts from the east, mosaics, reliquaries, marble columns, and the great screen called the Pala d’Oro which, beaten into its tremendous form by Byzantine goldsmiths, exquisitely ornamented by Byzantine jewellers, stood refulgently behind the high altar.

  As for the people who thronged this extraordinary city, they were exotic too. For one thing there were always travellers from the east about: Slavs, Greeks, Arabs, Persians, pilgrims of every nation returning from the Holy Land; for another the Venetians themselves, from long association with eastern countries, had acquired something oriental in their temperament. They were more familiar with the east than any other Europeans. They had been trading for generations with the countries of the fertile crescent, with Egypt, and Persia, and Byzantium itself, and so strong was their taste for orientalia that a century before, the Doge Domenico Selvo had ordered every Venetian merchant ship returning from the east to bring back eastern substances and works of art for the embellishment of the city. The two columns of the Piazzetta were oriental booty. The agate-eyed lion of St Mark was a Syrian chimera. The Patriarchal throne was a superannuated Muslim tombstone.

  An eastern love of swank was already apparent in the Venetians, too, a penchant for display and flamboyant dignity, and for showing off in the Piazza – for if ever the Venetians needed a breath of air, if ever there was a rumour to be pursued or a spectacle witnessed, if they felt like a change of scene, or a bite to eat, or something to surprise them, or someone to slander – then as now, to the Piazza San Marco outside the great Basilica they instinctively made their way.

  Imagine them, as we turn the corner by the Campanile, a sumptuous if motley assembly strolling up and down. There are not many women about, for they are hidden away at home as if in purdah, or alternatively busy plying their trade in the city’s many brothels, but the men are colourful enough without them. With hats of ermine or damask and gowns heavy with brocade, with shoes with pointed toes, with multi-coloured tabards, with faces brownish often, or black, or even yellowish, perfumed with precious musk or sweaty from the galleys, talking in the thick Venetian dialect, or in Greek, or Arabic, or Persian – it is a city crowd unlike any other in Europe, looking always to the east, to the chances of Asia and the forms of Byzantium, for its pleasures as for its profits.

  Within the atrium of the Basilica, mostly unnoticed by the tourists who clamorously pass in and out of the building, overshadowed by the clutter ∗∗∗of the souvenir stalls and generally cast in darkness anyway, there is set into the ground a small marble lozenge. It was already there in 1202, and it meant more to the Venetians then.

  It marked the spot where, twenty-five years before, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, ‘Redbeard’, head of the western empire based in Germany, had been reconciled with the Pope Alexander III after a long and tangled squabble that had affected the whole of western Europe. They had settled their differences under the direct auspices of Venice, in circumstances highly gratifying to the Venetians. Prelates and potentates from all over Europe had come to the city for the occasion, accompanied by armies of secretaries, acolytes, bodyguards and advisers, and when the Pope and the emperor met to sign their treaty of accord, it was as though the Piazza San Marco really was, as Venetians have always thought it, the centre of the world.

  The Venetians loved to recall the story of the reconciliation, which had grown ever more satisfying with the years. We hear of the high throne outside the Basilica upon which the millionaire Doge Sebastiano Ziani, attended by the Patriarchs of Venice and Aquilea and flanked by a pair of gigantic Venetian flags, presided over the occasion. We are told that when the Pope mounted his horse after the ceremony, the emperor humbly held his stirrup for him: or alternatively that when, according to a more humiliating protocol, he was obliged to kiss the papal foot, he growled, ‘Not for you but for St Peter,’ to be hissed back at by His Holiness, sotto voce, ‘For me and St Peter.’

  That striking event, to be painted grandiloquently by Venetian painters, described ornately by Venetian chroniclers for generations to come, established Venice as a world power. She held the balances. She had forged her own particular relationships with the two empires, with the Papacy, with Islam. Barbarossa, before he left, recognized her uniqueness with special privileges all over his domains. The Pope blessed her with a whole paraphernalia of holy accoutrements, to accompany the Doge on special occasions ever after – a sword, a stool, a holy candle, an umbrella, a set of silver trumpets and eight richly embroidered flags. Venice was already Venice – ‘subject’, said one German commentator devoutly, having witnessed the Great Reconciliation for himself, ‘only to God’.

  All this only confirmed the Venetians in their native self-esteem. They often saw themselves as true successors to the Romans – the barbarians had never penetrated to these lagoons, and they believed themselves to preserve the Roman virtues unsullied. They liked to trace parallels between their institutions and those of ancient Rome. The noblemen of the Grand Council, in their flowing togas, seemed to them like reincarnations of the grave senators of old. The Doges were like so many Caesars.

  Besides, the particular patronage of the Evangelist St Mark was supposed to have given Venice some divine summons to greatness. Diverse legends assiduously associated St Mark with the lagoon, and the presence of his body in the city was one of the struts of Venetian pride. Everybody knew the famous tale of its acquisition: how the brave Venetian merchants had snatched the holy corpse from the infidels in Alexandria, conveying it to their ship hidden beneath piles of pork to discourage inquisitive Muslim customs men. Everyone knew too that it had been lost in a great fire in the Basilica only eleven years before, but had reappeared miraculously by bursting out of a pillar, when appealed for by the combined prayers of Doge, Patriarch and assembled populace. St Mark’s patronage powerfully re
inforced the city’s sense of separateness. The Venetians did not yet fly his winged lion above their galleys, as they would to the wonder and sometimes the terror of their rivals through so many centuries of maritime history, but already the emblem was the talisman of their state: carved above doorways, inserted into finials, exquisitely delineated in manuscripts and soon to give golden franchise to one of the most commanding of all currencies, the Venetian ducat – the Coin of the Doge.

  The favourite daughter had come of age. Venice was clearly destined to be something special among the nations, and her links with her old Byzantine suzerains had long become anomalous. Commercially she was still largely dependent upon them. The Arabs were masters of the Levant, but much of the trade of the east came through Constantinople, and like other European nations, the Venetians maintained a permanent trading colony there. But the relationship was full of ups and downs, fluctuating from oaths of eternal loyalty to actual declarations of war. Now we hear of a Venetian nobleman marrying, with every manifestation of mutual esteem, the daughter of a Byzantine emperor. Now we see a Negro slave, decked out in crude parody of the imperial regalia, posed on the poop of a Venetian galley and insultingly paraded before the Byzantine fleet. Sometimes the Venetian merchants in Constantinople are honoured guests, prominent at state functions and luxuriously accommodated. Sometimes they are slaughtered. This year the Venetians might have complete freedom to trade anywhere within the imperial dominions. Next year they might find all their ships seized and their properties confiscated.

  What was more, since 1054 Venice and Constantinople had been separated by a theological rift. The Great Schism had irreconcilably divided the Latin Church, based on Rome, from the Greek Orthodox with its headquarters in Constantinople, and Venice had stayed with the Papacy. This had dangerously exacerbated all the other differences, and many grudges were now cherished between the ageing despotism on the one side, the agile and ambitious republic on the other. The Venetians resented the continuing condescension of the Byzantine emperors, who tended to treat the Doges as their feudatories still, airily granting or withdrawing favours. The Byzantines disliked the Venetians for their fierce competitive powers, the hauteur with which they conducted themselves, even in Constantinople, and their notorious willingness, in the age of the Crusades, to do business with infidels.