The bloody barbarian invasions of the 5th and 6th
centuries AD obliged people of the Roman Veneto towns
and along the Adriatic to flee to the marshy islands of
the Venetian lagoon.
In the 6th century, the islands began to form a loose
federation, with each community electing representatives
to a central authority, although its leaders were under
the sway of Byzantine rulers in Ravenna. Byzantium’s
hold over Italy weakened in the early 8th century and in
AD 726 the people of Venice elected their first doge
(duke), whose successors would lead the city for more
than 1000 years.
By the late 11th century, Venice was a Mediterranean
merchant power, prospering from the chaos caused by the
First Crusade in 1095. At the beginning of the 13th
century, under Doge Enrico Dandolo, Venice led the
Fourth Crusade on a devastating detour to
Constantinople. Venice not only kept most of the
treasures plundered from that great metropolis, it also
retained most of the territories won during the crusade,
consolidating its maritime might in the Eastern
Mediterranean. In 1271, the young Venetian merchant
Marco Polo set out with his father and uncle on an
overland trip to China, returning by sea more than 20
years later. Their adventure was symbolic of the
enterprising spirit of Venice.
During much of the 13th and 14th centuries the Venetians
struggled with Genoa for supremacy at sea, a tussle that
culminated in Genoa’s defeat in 1380 during an epic
siege at Chioggia. The Venetians then turned their
attentions to the mainland, absorbing most of the Veneto
and portions of what are now Lombardy and
Emilia-Romagna.
Worse still in the long term, the discovery of the
Americas in 1492 and the rounding of Africa’s Cape of
Good Hope in 1498 by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama
opened up new trade routes that would eventually
supplant the Mediterranean and allow European importers
to avoid Venetian taxes and duties.
Even so, Venice long remained a formidable power. The
dogi, the Signoria (a council of 10 high ministers that
effectively constituted the executive arm of government)
and, later, the much feared judicial Consiglio dei Dieci
(Council of Ten) ruled with an iron fist. They headed a
complex system of councils and government committees, of
which the Maggior Consiglio (Great Council) was the
equivalent of parliament. The doge, an elected leader,
was the head of state and generally the most powerful
individual in government, but a complex set of checks
and balances limited his power and ensured that Venice
was ruled by a tightknit oligarchy. A decree in 1297
virtually closed off membership of the Maggior Consiglio
to all but the most established patriarchal families. In
all, Venetian government was among the most stable and,
in a narrow sense, democratic in Italy and, for that
matter, most of Europe.
For security reasons, Venetians were encouraged to spy
on each other wherever the Venetian Republic had an
interest. Acts considered detrimental to the state were
punished swiftly. Trials were rarely public but
executions commonly so – the classic location was
between the columns bearing the statues of the Lion of
St Mark and St Theodore on Piazzetta San Marco. On
occasion, though, a body would just turn up on the
street as a potent example to other potentially wayward
citizens.
Venice was remarkably cosmopolitan, its commerce
attracting people of all nationalities, from Parisians
to Persians. And although Venice limited the activities
of its Jewish community, which it concentrated in what
was one of Europe’s earliest ghettos, it did nothing to
stifle Judaism. Similarly, the Armenians were permitted
religious freedom for centuries and were given
protection during the infamous Inquisition. That Muslim
Turkish traders were granted use of a fondaco (major
commercial building) in Venice was little short of
astounding.
1797 the Maggior Consiglio meekly opened the city’s gates to Napoleon, who
in turn handed Venice over to the Austrians. The
movement for Italian unification spread quickly through
the Veneto and, after several rebellions, Venice was
united with the nascent Kingdom of Italy in 1866. The
city was bombed during WWI but suffered only minor
damage during WWII, when most attacks were aimed at the
neighbouring industrial zones of Mestre and Porto
Marghera.
The city’s prestige as a tourist destination grew during
the 19th century as it was surpassed as a trade port by
Trieste. Today, Venice’s modest permanent population (a
third of what it was in the 1950s) is swollen by up to
20 million visitors each year, two-thirds of them
day-trippers.
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