A Brief History of Venice, Part One
Part Two will probably be concealed as part of a series on the Crusades.
A few weeks ago I asked whether the agricultural nature of the medieval economy meant that you couldn’t have any cities whose economies were founded on trade instead of agriculture! I intended for my readers to answer, immediately and confidently, no, you absolutely can, because they already know that Venice and Genoa existed. But then I realized that I’m not sure all my readers do know that Venice and Genoa existed, because I am kind of xkcd.geologists about this. I therefore thought that the easiest way to explain how a trade-based medieval economy can exist was demonstrate that a trade-based medieval economy existed, and tell the early history of the Republic of Venice, first and greatest of the maritime republics of Italy.
We start the way all stories of the European middle ages start, with the Fall of Rome. The Fall of Rome was more of a process than an event - a period of about 200 years during which Rome went from the ruler of all Europe to a paper empire desperately trying to defend its own capital.1 Every story of medieval European countries ultimately begins in that sweltering mess of warlords, tribal chieftains, mass migrations and military chaos, an age in which most of the population of eastern and central Europe flooded west to escape the wrath of Attila, King of Kings, Khan of Khans, the Scourge of God, lord of the Great Steppe2. Every people’s people’s own struggle to survive merely one more step in a chain of migrations that would rewrite the map of Europe.
In all this bloodshed and confusion, a few refugees from the ruins of the Roman city of Aquileia decided the best option was to put water between them and the invaders. Attila might raze the plain and cross the mountains, but steppe nomads are bad with boats3 and horses are enthusiastic about neither swimming nor mosquitoes. These refugees fled to a collection of constantly-shifting marshy malarial islands with no land worth farming - lands that had previously been uninhabited because nobody was crazy enough to live - and founded a handful of tiny dirt-poor self-governing fishing villages.
Eight hundred years later they were the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, a center of trade and one of the richest cities in the world. From this Venice would rise further, becoming a major center of art and architecture, rulers of an overseas empire, the inventors of the moving assembly line and the longest-lasting republic in the history of humanity.
What happened?
First, luck. While the rest of Europe4 was being crisscrossed with war, bloodshed and plague, nobody cared about Venice enough to invade it5 while they got their feet under them. This let the Venetians consider their advantages, which were significant:
- Venice was on islands off the coast, so they were impregnable to land attack.6
- The constantly-shifting marshflats off the Venetian coast were impossible to memorize for anyone who hadn’t spent his entire life there, meaning that any vessel approaching Venice needed a Venetian pilot. This made them highly resistant to sea attack.7
- Venetians all picked up constant experience with the waters of the Mediterranean due to being fisherman instead of farmers, making them excellent sailors.
- The Venetian islands produced salt8, a useful export commodity in an age without any better preservatives.9
Selling salt to the Empire would start the Venetians on their path to prosperity. There’s only so much salt anyone wants to eat; past that, you want to trade your surplus - in the Venetians’ case, trade it for food. With Rome falling and the mercantile economy of the Mediterranean falling undone there were all sorts of trade opportunities going spare, and the Venetians were eager to take advantage of them.
This was helped by the fact that the Roman Empire protected them. It had fallen in the west but it continued in the East, and the Emperor in Constantinople,1011 was in an ideal position to provide the Venetians with enough protection that nobody would mess with them without being able to actually govern them. They could import food from Imperial holdings (or anyone’s holdings, honestly) in the Adriatic without being subjected to any extra Foreigner Taxes, since they were nominally an imperial subject, without having to contribute much to imperial income, because the empire was too busy to actually rule them.
They spent this time building up their economy. There were all sorts of juicy opportunities to ship goods from point A to point B that nobody was taking advantage of because of the apocalypse, and the Venetians did their best to pick up the slack. Their combination of a tough defensive position, Byzantine protection and de facto autonomy let them trade with everyone without fear of conquest, dealing with half-Romanized Germans and Byzantine Greeks and Muslim Arabs alike, forging new trade routes and selling anything anyone wanted to buy to whoever wanted it. When the Pope angrily condemned their double-dealing, usury and greed, they listened to the Patriarch of Constantinople; when the Patriarch did the same they appealed to the Pope. The Venetians would be excommunicated multiple times for selling military supplies to both sides during the Crusades, which they defended by saying it was the only way for them to earn their bread; they’d also end up as very successful middlemen in the slave trade. Christianity has always had an uneasy relationship with slavery and the Pope had managed to ban enslaving Christians, so the Venetians picked up pagan slaves to sell to the Muslim powers for their plantations and ghulam12 armies13.
The Venetians also became a republic. Byzantine power in the Adriatic rose and fell over time, and when they were in trouble and the Empire couldn’t help them out the Venetians elected their own duke.14 The first Doges of Venice were elected by the leading families, but they quickly lost their monopoly over the nomination, replaced by increasingly more complex processes in which the people, nobles and established interests all had considerable sway. Innumerable councils and bureaucratic institutions were established to balance the doge’s power, limiting his ability to act as a monarch, for the Venetians were eager to topple any doge who tried to threaten their republican stability.15
The Venetians were a minor power in the ninth century, but they were a power. At that point the Byzantines were hardly holding on to any fragments of Italy and the Venetians had more and more to operate on their own, starting by defeating Charlemagne in a campaign against both French troops outside and a pro-French faction within. Both were defeated (the external enemies through swamp diseases and Venice being an island, and the internal enemies through an angry mob chasing the pro-French doge into exile16 and Venice could go back to getting rich in peace, in spite of increasing competition from other Italian cities that were trying about the same strategy and (as the world economy recovered) having almost as much success.
The Crusades made Venice. The First Crusade had been an astonishing experiment, one of these rare events that starts as a small, sensible project by intelligent men and then gets wildly out of control.17 While the First Crusade deserves a dedicated post of its own, its chief impact for the Venetians was how different the map was after the smoke had cleared. When the conflict that had lead to the First Crusade had begun, the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean was split between two powers, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate. By the end of the First Crusade, the Principality of Cilicia, Principality of Antioch, County of Tripoli and Kingdom of Jerusalem all clung to the coastline of the Levant18, all of them19 alone in a hostile world, eager for Catholic immigrants and dependent on supplies and reinforcements that would need to be delivered by sea. The maritime republics of Italy20 made their fortunes shipping crusaders, pilgrims and military supplies one way and spices, relics and silks the other, and the greatest of them was Venice. Quarters for each of the republics’ settlements were swiftly established in the Crusader ports, which they all immediately fortified against each other as they feuded over control of Mediterranean trade.
In the wake of the crusades Venice built one more thing which would symbolize the city to the world. The Venetian Arsenal was founded in 1104, five years after the First Crusade ended, to build ships for both war and trade; expanded over time. By the fourteenth century it would be one of the wonders of the world. The Venetians developed the moving assembly line five hundred years before Henry Ford21, and at its peak the Arsenal employed a tenth of the city’s population and could build a new warship in a single day. Arsenal experts developed advanced military technology; the first recorded use of planting guns on carriages instead of just hauling them to the battlefield is by a Venetian general. This mass production would prove one of the keys to the city’s success. When the Fourth Crusade came and the armies of the Crusaders needed to buy a fleet, fast, on credit, they went to the Venetians for help...
... But though that great tale is the story of the true birth of the Venetian Empire, it is, alas, a story for another time.
The normal end date for the “Fall of Rome” is 476, when Odoacer deposed the last Emperor in Rome and sent his regalia east to the Emperor in Constantinople, but the fall of Rome in the West is more of a process, lasting from 378 to 480, after which the West had no Emperor, merely a dozen different kings. The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire would keep going for about another millennium, though.
Keeps coming up, doesn’t it?
Across Europe, the Roman Emperor in the East was making the same calculation and giving his city the greatest land-walls history had ever seen and also kind of mediocre seawalls.
Particularly Italy, which was in a hole. I think I’ll cover this when I do my History of Byzantium post series.
Until 810, which I will get to!
With medieval technology. The Austrians managed to take it in 1848, but they augmented their overwhelming numbers with long-range artillery and aerial bombs.*
I owe you all a post on the sea attack that came closest to succeeding anyway, the War of Chioggia.
They went for the very old-fashioned kind of desalinization plant, where you flood a low-lying island at high tide, wait for low tide let the sewater dry and pick up the remaining salt as a valuable trade good.
Salt is important. The late Tang dynasty couldn’t really collect agricultural taxes, so it just held direct control of salt mines and sold off the gains to pay its armies.
Currently known as Istanbul, originally the Greek city of Byzantium. When Constantine the Great moved the imperial capital there he renamed the city New Rome, but everyone just called it ‘Constantine’s city’ - ‘Constantinopolis’ or, in English, ‘Constantinople.’
They would be reduced to approximately the territory of modern Turkey+Greece after the Arab conquests in the 630s and 640s.
Why do people keep trying military slavery? It never, ever works.
This is why our word for slave comes from Slav, they being the only pagans around.
Duke, Dux, doux, duxe, doge, all the same word. The word just picks up different connotations depending on the culture around it.
Our records of this period are pretty bad - this is one of the many reasons it’s referred to as the Dark Ages - but I strongly suspect there were a lot of other cities that didn’t end up competent and lucky and attached to Republican institutions, and that in those cities one family took power and became hereditary lords of the land, as we know happened in a number of Greek city-states in a much earlier period.
He attempted to return later and his successor as doge defeated him in battle, killed him, stuck his head on a pole and hauled it back home as a trophy.
This is one of my weirdest takes, but I like the frame on it that it was conceived as the Papal intervention in the Seljuk War of World Domination and then events occurred and didn’t stop occurring.
There was also the County of Edessa just off the coast, though it didn’t last that long.
This is less true, but still partly true, of the state of Cilicia. Cilicia was founded by Armenian refugees worried about all being killed by the Turks, rather than by Crusaders, though it tended to work with both Crusaders and Byzantines against the Turks for all the usual enemy-of-my-enemy reasons.
The standard list of maritime republics is Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi (in rough order of importance), plus ambiguous, marginal or short-lived members Ancona, Gaeta, Noli and Ragusa.
They didn’t have electric power, so they used the sea-current instead.