City of Fortune

by Crowley, Roger

  *

  From the start the Venetians were different. The first, rather idyllic snapshot we have of them, from the Byzantine legate Cassiodorus in 523, suggests a unique way of life, independent and democratic:

  You possess many vessels … [and] … you live like seabirds, with your homes dispersed … across the surface of the water. The solidity of the earth on which they rest is secured only by osier and wattle; yet you do not hesitate to oppose so frail a bulwark to the wildness of the sea. Your people have one great wealth – the fish which suffices for them all. Among you there is no difference between rich and poor; your food is the same, your houses are alike. Envy, which rules the rest of the world, is unknown to you. All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity, and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt.

  The Venetians were already carriers and suppliers of other men’s needs. Theirs was a city grown hydroponically, conjured out of marsh, existing perilously on oak palings sunk in mud. It was fragile to the sea’s whim, impermanent. Beyond the mullet and eels of the lagoon, and its saltpans, it produced nothing – no wheat, no timber, little meat. It was terribly vulnerable to famine; its sole skills were navigation and the carrying of goods. The quality of its ships was critical.

  Before Venice became the wonder of the world, it was a curiosity; its social structure enigmatic and its strategies distrusted. Without land there could be no feudal system, no clear division between knight and serf. Without agriculture, money was its barter. Their nobles would be merchant princes who could command a fleet and calculate profit to the nearest grosso. The difficulties of life bound all its people together in an act of patriotic solidarity that required self-discipline and a measure of equality – like the crew of a ship all subject to the perils of the deep.

  Geographical position, livelihood, political institutions and religious affiliations marked Venice out. It lived between two worlds: the land and the sea, the east and the west, yet belonging to neither. It grew up a subject of the Greek-speaking emperors in Constantinople and drew its art, its ceremonial and its trade from the Byzantine world. Yet the Venetians were also Latin Catholics, nominal subjects to the pope, Byzantium’s anti-Christ. Between such opposing forces they struggled to maintain a particular freedom. The Venetians repeatedly defied the pope, who responded by excommunicating the whole city. They resisted tyrannous solutions to government and constructed for themselves a republic, led by a doge, whom they shackled with so many restraints that he could receive no gift from foreigners more substantial than a pot of herbs. They were intolerant of over-ambitious nobles and defeated admirals, whom they exiled or executed, and devised a voting system to check corruption as labyrinthine as the shifting channels of their lagoon.

  The tenor of their relations with the wider world was set early. The city wished to trade wherever profit was to be made without favour or fear. This was their rationale and their creed and they pleaded it as a special case. It earned them widespread distrust. ‘They said many things to excuse themselves … which I do not recollect,’ spat a fourteenth-century churchman after watching the Republic wriggle free of yet another treaty (though he could undoubtedly remember the details painfully well), ‘excepting that they are a quintessence and will belong neither to the Church nor to the emperor, nor to the sea nor to the land.’ They were in trouble with both Byzantine emperors and popes as early as the ninth century for selling war materials to Muslim Egypt, and whilst purportedly complying with a trade ban with Islam around 828, they managed to spirit away the body of St Mark from Alexandria under the noses of Muslim customs officials, hidden in a barrel of pork. Their standard let-out was commercial necessity: ‘because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade’. Alone in all the world, Venice was organised for economic ends.

  By the tenth century they were selling oriental goods of extraordinary rarity at the important fairs at Pavia on the River Po: Russian ermine, purple cloth from Syria, silk from Constantinople. One monkish chronicler had seen the emperor Charlemagne looking drab beside his retinue in oriental cloth bought there from Venetian merchants. (Particularly singled out for clerical tut-tutting was a multicoloured fabric interwoven with the figures of birds – evidently an item of outrageous foreign luxury.) To the Muslims they traded back timber and slaves, literally Slavs until that people became Christians. Venice was by now well placed at the head of the Adriatic to become the pivot of trade, and on the round turning of the millennium, Ascension Day in the year 1000, Doge Pietro Orseolo II, a man who ‘excelled almost all the ancient doges in knowledge of mankind’, set sail on an expedition that would launch the Republic’s ascent to wealth, power and maritime glory.

  On the threshold of the new era the city stood finely poised between danger and opportunity. Venice was not yet the compact mirage of dazzling stone that it would later become, though its population was already substantial. No splendid palazzi flanked the great S-bend of the Grand Canal. The city of wonder, flamboyance and sin, of carnival masks and public 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, Constantinople and 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 boisterous Adriatic. 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 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. The Dalmatian 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 the mouth 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 a jar of holy water, salt and olive branches out to where the lagoon opens to the sea at the Lido of St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, and waited there, at the meeting of the two waters, for the doge to arrive in the ceremonial galley the Venetians called the Bucintoro, the Golden Boat. Rocking on the waves, the priests proclaimed a short and heartfelt prayer: ‘Grant, O Lord, that the sea is always calm and quiet for us and all who sail on it.’ And then they approached the Bucintoro and sprinkled water over the doge and his followers with the olive branches and poured the remainder into the sea.

  In time the Ascension Day ceremony, the Senza, would become greatly elaborated, but in the early years of the millennium it was a simple act of blessing, a propitiation against storms and pirates, based on seasonal sailing rituals as ancient as Neptune and Poseidon. The miniature voyage enacted the whole meaning of Venice. Within the lagoon lay safety, security and peace; in its treacherous labyrinth of shallow channels all would-be attackers floundered and sank. Beyond lay opportunity but also danger. The lidi were the frontier between two worlds, the known and the unknown, the world that was safe and the one that was dangerous; in their founding myth St Mark was surprised by a squall and only found peace within the lagoon, but the voyage beyond was not optional. For the Venetians the sea was life and death and the Senza acknowledged the pact.

  Venice sheltered by its lidi

  Ascension Day marked the start of the sailing season, when sailors could be hopeful of a calm voyage. Yet the waters of the Adriatic were notoriously fickle at any time of year. They could be smooth as silk, or whipped into choppy fury by the bora, the north wind. The Romans, no great sailors, were frightened of it; the Adriatic nearly drowned Julius Caesar, and the poet Horace thought there was nothing to equal the terror of the waves dashing the cliffs of southern Albania. Oared galleys could be quickly swamped by a mounting sea; sailing ships running before the wind had little room for manoeuvre in the narrow straits. There is no more vivid historical account of the sea’s ferocity than the fate of a Norman fleet crossing to Albania in the early summer of 1081:

  There was a heavy fall of snow and winds blowing furiously from the mountains lashed up the sea. There was a howling noise as the waves built up; oars snapped off as the rowers plunged them into the water, the sails were torn to shreds by the blasts, yard-arms were crushed and fell on the decks; and now ships were being swallowed up, crew and all … some of the ships sank and their crews drowned with them, others were dashed against the headlands and broke up … many corpses were thrown up by the waves.

  The sea was tumultuous, dangerous, pirate-infested. The Venetians fought unceasingly to keep their seaway to the world open.

  Even the lidi were no certain guarantee. Because the Adriatic is a cul-de-sac, it feels the moon’s tug with a special force, and when the phases are right and the sirocco, the wind from Africa, pushes the water up the Venetian Gulf and the opposing bora, hard off the Hungarian steppes, holds it back, the lagoon itself is under threat. In folk memory, the events of late January 1106 emphasised the force of the sea. People remembered that the sirocco had been blowing up from the south with unusual force; the weather became unnervingly sultry, day after day sucking the energy out of men and beasts. There were unmistakable signs of approaching storm. House walls oozed moisture; the sea started to groan and gave off the strange neutral smell of electricity; birds skittered and squawked; eels leaped clear of the water as if trying to flee. When at last the storm broke, shattering thunder shook the houses and torrential rain hammered the lagoon. The sea rose up from its depths, overwhelmed the lidi, poured through t
he openings of the lagoon and swamped the city. It demolished houses, ruined merchandise, destroyed food stocks, drowned animals, strewed the small fields with sterile salt. An entire island, the ancient town of Malamocco, vanished, leaving ghostly foundations visible through the murky water at low tide. Hard on its heels came devastating fires that ripped through the wooden settlements, leaping the Grand Canal, incinerating twenty-four churches and gutting a major part of the city. ‘Venice was rocked to its very core,’ wrote the chronicler Andrea Dandolo. Venice’s hold on the material world was fragile; it lived with impermanence. It was against such forces that people felt their vulnerability and made sacrificial offerings.

  *