The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Venice had in fact been from its earliest years part of the Byzantine empire. Constantine had successfully preserved the Roman empire as a vast single political unit in the early fourth century, but thereafter it began to crumble under the weight of barbarian invaders. In the fifth century the western empire finally disintegrated – but parts of Italy and north Africa were reconquered in the sixth century by Justinian. Among the territories newly subject to him was north-eastern Italy, the Veneto, its people loosely controlled by the exarch of Ravenna further south on the Italian coast. In the eighth century, the inhabitants of the growing settlement of Venice acquired their own resident official, who was given the customary name of a local governor: dux. This is how the office of doge, the name given to the chief magistrate of Venice, originated, although contrary to what the Venetians themselves liked to believe, the first doges were not Venetians but Byzantine officials.

  In the ninth century, a time of turmoil in Italy, the Byzantine empire negotiated a semi-independent role for Venice: it remained part of the empire, but paid tribute to the neighbouring Frankish kingdom of Italy in return for a guarantee of its ‘borders’ and freedom to trade. One of the turning points in the city’s history was the seizing of the supposed body of St Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria by Venetian sailors in 828. (They concealed the body in a drum of pork to deter inspection by Muslims.) The first patron saint of the city had been the Byzantine Theodore; now he was discarded in favour of Mark, whom, as we have seen, legend linked to nearby Aquileia.

  It was the freedom to trade that underlay the survival and growing prosperity of the city. Although the Adriatic coast itself can be treacherous, Venice itself was well protected and proved an ideal staging post between the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe. Its merchants could exploit trade routes across the Alps which had been in use for centuries. The special status of Venice within the Byzantine empire was recognized by a treaty of 992 in which Venetian ships were given privileges at Constantinople in return for Venice’s promise that it would remain a loyal servant of the empire. It had few obligations in return, and in any case was much too distant from Constantinople for any effective control to be exercised by an empire which was itself constantly under threat from hostile neighbours closer to home.

  By the time of this agreement the tentacles of Venetian trade stretched through the eastern Mediterranean and even into the Islamic world, which had devoured much of the Byzantine empire in the seventh and eighth centuries. Motifs from Arabic architecture can be found in Venice alongside Greek influences from Byzantium – all woven into styles and themes which were distinctively Venetian. So begins the almost fairy-tale magic of Venetian architecture, the spell enhanced by the contrast of light and shade and glitter of the water. ‘While the burghers and barons of the north were building their dark streets and grisly castles of oak and sandstone,’ wrote John Ruskin in his Stones of Venice (1851–3), ‘the merchants of Venice were covering their palaces with porphyry and gold.’

  The first inhabitants of Venice had shifted the nucleus of their city from island to island as conditions dictated. (The isolated and atmospheric ‘cathedral’ on the island of Torcello, an island from which the Venetians were driven by malaria, remains as a reminder of their changing fortunes.) Eventually a piece of firm land in the central lagoon, well placed on the edge of a deep basin, the Bacino, was selected as a foundation for the first doge’s palace, which in these early, unsettled days was built as a fortress. Behind it was a small church, in effect the doge’s private chapel, which had originally been dedicated to Theodore. It was here that the relics of St Mark were laid to rest in the ninth century; the church was rededicated in his name, and the area became the ceremonial centre of the city. In the eleventh century St Mark’s itself was rebuilt in its present form, in the shape of a Greek Orthodox church – almost certainly modelled on the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, the burial place of Constantine, with its five mosaic-adorned domes. Around it and what had by now become the palace rather than the fortress of the doges, new public areas were set out. As entry to the city was from the Bacino, a proper landing ground with a pavement, the Molo, was built along the seafront. This new space, the Piazzetta, was soon dominated, as it still is, by two huge granite columns from Alexandria, set up there in the twelfth century, on top of which were later placed statues of St Theodore with his crocodile and a winged lion, the emblem of St Mark. The visitor would look down between them to the corner of St Mark’s, where an official entrance through the narthex led into the church.

  The Piazzetta was always a political space. The Grand Council of Venice would meet in the Doge’s Palace and spill out into the open air for less formal discussion; foreign dignataries would be greeted on the quayside. However, again in the twelfth century, another great open space was being laid out to the west of St Mark’s. Impediments such as the chapel of San Gemignano and an orchard belonging to a nunnery were cleared away – though the chapel was rebuilt further to the west after the pope protested at its wanton destruction – and a rectangle some two hundred metres long was marked out. This was to become the Piazza San Marco – St Mark’s Square.

  A direct source of inspiration for this new feature may have been the courtyards of the mosques of the Islamic world; certainly that of Damascus was well known to Venetian traders and very similar in size to St Mark’s. Another may have been the imperial forums of Constantinople, twelve of which still stood in the twelfth century. The Venetian traders knew Constantinople well – as we have seen, they had their own resident community there – and from the tenth century it was the custom for the doges’ sons to be educated in the imperial capital. A hinge between Piazza and Piazzetta was formed by the Campanile, the famous bell tower, originally set up in the ninth century, and visible far out to sea. The bells would ring daily to mark the start and end of the craftsmen’s day and the offices of the church, as well as less regularly to summon the nobles to vote in council and to announce public executions.

  Whatever the contemporary inspiration for the ceremonial areas of Venice, the Venetians adopted many of the features of the forums of the ancient world. Venice’s rivals on the mainland, such as Padua and Verona, could boast their descent from Roman cities; Venice could not, but it could create an artificial heritage by constructing a dignified square and embellishing it with imported antiquities. These were not difficult to find, as many of the great classical cities of the east had fallen into ruin as a result of earthquakes, Arab invasions and abandonment. As early as the ninth century ancient columns were being brought back to Venice, and in the eleventh century an order went out to look for marble for the rebuilding of St Mark’s. One fourteenth-century decree ordered a captain to search out medium-sized columns and shafts of any variety of marble so long as these were ‘beautiful’ and could be brought back as ballast without overloading his galley. Of the six hundred marble columns in St Mark’s today, half are from outside Venice and all but fifteen of these from outside Italy. The effect, in the entrance to the west door, of the patterns of so many varied marbles is stunning; as the sun moved across them, enthused John Ruskin in the nineteenth century, it was as if the colours of the artists Rembrandt and Veronese had been united.

  The other centre of medieval Venice was the Rialto, mentioned for the first time as a commercial centre in 1097. As in many other European cities of the time – London, with its distinct City and Westminster areas, is a good example – the ceremonial part of the city was kept well separate from its commercial area, and it was only gradually that the space between them was filled in and built on. The Grand Canal was preserved as the city’s main artery, echoing the rivers that ran through most European cities: the Seine through Paris, the Thames through London. It was, like them, crossed originally by only one bridge, at the Rialto, where the canal bordered the commercial area on its western bank. Lesser canals were the main means of transport in the city and Venice never needed to develop wide streets. Tourists still strugg
le today in their masses along the narrow Merceria, the medieval thoroughfare between St Mark’s and the Rialto which was first paved in 1272.

  Any Christian inhibitions Venetians might have shared with their Byzantine overlords about indulging in trade were soon dissolved. In the twelfth century the standard rate on a loan in Venice was 20 per cent, which was justified as ‘an old Venetian custom’. Even when the church tightened up the laws on usury, the Venetians developed forms of contract which ensured that borrowing money cost the borrower money – and just to make sure that there was no divine disapproval, God himself was accorded the responsibility for the city’s success.

  Since by the Grace of God our city has grown and increased by the labours of merchants creating traffic and profits for us in diverse parts of the world by land and sea and this is our life and that of our sons, because we cannot live otherwise and know how to survive except by trade, therefore we must be vigilant in all our thoughts and endeavours, as our predecessors were, to make provision in every way lest so much wealth and treasure should disappear.

  Thus a fourteenth-century decree from the Senate. However magnificent the ceremonial centres of the city, it was never forgotten that it was the commercial areas at the Rialto, ‘that sacred precinct’ as one document of 1497 put it, which sustained their grandeur. Those who wanted scriptural support for Venice’s success could turn to chapter 28 of the prophet Ezekiel, where God talks of ‘that city standing at the edge of the sea, doing business with the nations in innumerable islands … your frontiers stretched out far to sea, those who built you made you perfect in beauty … Then you were rich and glorious surrounded by the seas.’ The fact that these apparently celebratory words come in the middle of a lamentation on the fall of Tyre, which had indeed been a great trading city like Venice, was no doubt passed over.

  By the twelfth century, then, Venice was a vibrant and expanding city-state, although still technically subordinate to Constantinople. The relationship between the old empire and the increasingly self-confident city was bound to be uneasy, and in the late twelfth century it broke down completely. In 1167 a crushing victory by the emperor Manuel over the Hungarians allowed the Byzantines to expand down to the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. The Venetians, always obsessive about their control of the Adriatic, feared that this imperial advance might threaten their cherished freedom to trade without interference; so they began negotiations with the Hungarians to help them regain their lost territories. Doge Vitale Michiel then made the highly provocative move of placing a ban on trade with Constantinople. From this point things went quickly downhill. In retaliation for the ban, Manuel granted trading concessions to Venice’s great trading rivals, the Italian cities of Pisa and Genoa (It was now that the Genoans were given their own quarter of the imperial capital.) The outraged Venetian community in Constantinople rioted and then refused to pay for the damage. On 12 March 1171 Manuel ordered the arrest of all Venetians in Constantinople and the seizure of all Venetian shipping in the empire. The doge reacted by launching a Venetian fleet to do what damage it could do in the empire, and the cities along the Dalmatian coast were bullied back into Venetian control.

  All this was self-defeating. Both cities stood to lose heavily from a breakdown in trade, and in the midst of all the tension and turmoil the Venetians sent envoys to Constantinople to negotiate. One of them was a worldly-wise and manipulative diplomat by the name of Enrico Dandolo. He was given no chance to use his skills, for by the time he arrived in Constantinople news had reached Manuel through his agents that the Venetian fleet was decimated by plague and paralysed; there was no need for the emperor to make any concessions. As Dandolo and his fellow envoys waited in the city, their mission in limbo, a strange incident took place. It appears that when Dandolo was out in the city one day he became involved in a fracas and his sight was damaged. (A story was later put about, perhaps by Dandolo himself, that the emperor himself had blinded him.) For the rest of his long life Dandolo was to manipulate his apparent sightlessness to his advantage; but whatever the truth of the episode, there is no doubting his real hatred of the Byzantines, and he harboured it for the rest of his life.

  When Manuel heard that the Venetian fleet had struggled back home, he pursued his advantage with withering scorn.

  Your nation has for a long time behaved with great stupidity. Once you were vagabonds sunk in abject poverty. Then you sidled into the Roman [i.e. Byzantine; the emperors always claimed, with some justification, to be direct successors of the Roman emperors] empire. You have treated it with the utmost disdain and have done your best to deliver it to its worst enemies [the Hungarians] as you yourselves are well aware. Now, legitimately condemned and justly expelled from the empire, you have in your insolence declared war on it – you who were once a people not even worthy to be named, you who owe what prestige you have to the Romans; and for having supposed that you could match their strength you have made yourselves a general laughing stock. For no one, not even the greatest powers on earth, makes war on the Romans with impunity.

  He could not have been more wrong. Dying in 1180, he did not live to see the Venetian revenge; and indeed, at first there seemed no chance that any would be exacted. Manuel’s successors, shrewd and realistic diplomats in the best of Byzantine traditions, realized the importance of getting trading relationships back to normal, and in 1187 a new treaty was negotiated with Venice in which the city’s privileges were restored and the Venetians’ rivals, the merchants of Pisa and Genoa, excluded from imperial trade. Enrico Dandolo, who could be trusted by the Venetians never to betray their interests, travelled back to Constantinople as one of the envoys in the complex and tricky negotiations which any treaty with the Byzantine empire involved. His achievements were well appreciated by his city and in 1192, probably aged well over seventy and with little or no sight left, he was elected doge. Few suspected that the ambition to humiliate Constantinople still consumed the old man.

  This was the age of the crusades. The Second (which dragged on from the 1140s to the 1180s) and Third (1189–92) had ended in failure and in 1201 a new, comparatively young (aged thirty-seven at his accession three years earlier) and untested pope, Innocent III, called a fresh crusade. A band of European noblemen, most of them from France and the Low Countries, gathered under the leadership of one Baldwin of Flanders, and another contingent of barons and supporting troops assembled in southern Italy. The overland route to Jerusalem being considered too hazardous for a large army, the decision was made to invade the Holy Land through Egypt. This meant that a fleet had to be found to convey the crusaders to the Egyptian coast – and here the Venetians found their role. They had well-equipped shipyards and could meet the demand for transport. So Dandolo agreed to provide the ships, but the harsh contract he demanded made no concessions to the ostensibly spiritual motive for the enterprise. Yes, a fleet and a year’s supplies would be provided; but it would cost 85,000 silver marks, payable in any circumstances. The crusaders agreed.

  Then every organizer’s nightmare occurred. The Venetians fulfilled their side of the bargain and the boats were ready by the agreed date of June 1202 – but the crusaders had been hopelessly optimistic and only a third of the hoped-for 33,000 knights turned up to fill the boats. There was no way they could honour the contract, even through raising loans on the Venetian exchange to pay in instalments. From June to November 1202 the knights waited in some embarrassment on the Venetian Lido, until Dandolo, who may well have realized all along that he could manipulate the contract to his own advantage, made a new proposal. Some of the sum could be remitted if the crusaders would stop off on the way to Egypt to recapture the city of Zara, on the Dalmatian coast, which had rebelled against the Venetians and placed itself under the protection of the Hungarians. It was a particularly cynical ploy in that the king of Hungary had been one of the few Christian monarchs to have given support to the crusade. In Rome, Innocent III was now becoming aware that he had entangled himself in political manoeuvres over which he ha
d no control, and he announced in some desperation that he could support the crusade only if no Christians were attacked on the way to the Holy Land. But events overtook him when the Doge, with an instinct for the theatrically effective gesture, took centre stage. He knelt at the high altar of St Mark’s, where a pilgrim’s cross was fixed to his hat, and then, in the Piazza outside, he proclaimed that despite his age and disabilities, he was the only one able to lead the crusade effectively. He would provide fifty galleys of his own, and he called on Venetians to come with him. There was to be, however, no renegotiation of the original contract with the crusaders. The money, whether offered in cash or military service, was still to be paid.