The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage

F
or
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 colonies, 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.