Piazza San Marco in Venice, with the lion, symbol of St. Mark above the stairwell
Earlier this summer, I noted that my wife and I had visited Venice, Italy, as the result of an invitation in late May at IUAV, the Architectural University of Venice. I was asked to speak at a conference on how climate change is changing cities and affecting city planning.
Because Venice is unique in so many ways, it excited my intellectual curiosity. I pulled together four substantial books from the Chicago Public Library, and I eventually completed reading all of them, though not before we flew to Europe. Stealing time night after night, I indulged my habit—I am an unabashed history buff—until I got the job done. I learned one thing about the history of Venice: There are many ways to write the extensive history of even this one small place. The three books I chose on the history of Venice could not have been more different. One other book I will discuss separately because it involves very recent history, dealing not with Venice’s imperial glory but with its current struggle to defend itself against the rising sea.
I started with Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire, the work of Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University who lives in Evanston, just north of Chicago. I have met and known him for many years, though mostly I have simply shared banquet tables with him at Chicago literary events, and on one occasion presented him with the Society of Midland Authors award for biography—for a book about James Madison. If the combination of Madison and Venice gives you any idea of this man’s intellectual range, you are only beginning to understand his achievements, which are staggering. They include the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for Lincoln at Gettysburg. Those banquet conversations were perennial reminders of his erudition. He has also written on the subject of church and state, and on the current state of the Roman Catholic Church.
Wills takes the reader on an impressive journey through the history of art in Venice, explaining in remarkable detail the ways in which it reflected the imperial logic of the Venetian experiment. We learn, for starters, that medieval Venetians saw nothing untoward about its merchants slipping into Alexandria in the eighth century, stealing the remains of St. Mark, who was martyred there by a mob in the first century, securing them beneath a load of pork that Muslim inspectors would not touch, and spiriting them back to Venice so that they could fulfill a possibly apocryphal angelic prophecy to the apostle that, “Here you shall find rest.” If God didn’t see fit to end Mark’s life in a city that did not yet exist in his time, the Venetians would see to it themselves, and thereafter use Mark as their shield and symbol—in the form of a lion, an image that most likely never occurred to Mark himself in his entire life.
But imperial ventures must be justified in the public realm, and Venice spared little expense in creating its own mythology, including an improbably precise date in the fifth century when the city was officially born (at a time when Italians of the area were building in the lagoon mostly to protect themselves from marauding Lombards on the mainland). Like most ultimately powerful national enterprises, including our own in the U.S., Venice started small and humble but grew steadily and aggressively and needed a solidly aspirational manifesto to motivate its citizens and intimidate its enemies. Divine sponsorship by St. Mark combined with ruthless mercenary skills to produce a Venice that dominated the seas. But manifestos need all manner of effective communication to maintain their appeal, and artists in service to the state, says Wills, provided that backbone to an unabashedly imperialistic city-state. And empires, Wills reminds us in his closing chapter, are inherently predatory.
One of the most appealing aspects of Wills’s book is the liberal use of plates and drawings, combined with his explications of their significance and meaning, to convey the nature and value of all this art, and the important fact that one should not overlook a single detail in mining these works for their nuances and symbolism.
Wills does not spend much time telling us just how predatory such a venture can become because his primary mission is to explore the use of art in service to such a venture, one that distinguished itself repeatedly from the power of the Pope and felt free to defy him. It takes the story-telling prowess of English historian Roger Crowley to pursue such details. In City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, Crowley, a scholar of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, explores precisely that question—how this small city-state built on wooden pilings into a lagoon at the north end of the Adriatic Sea was able to dominate the Mediterranean for centuries until its power was eclipsed by more westerly nation-states building empires in the New World and the Pacific. This is a nation that ruthlessly suppressed rebellions in maritime colonies like Crete and Cyprus. It is also a state that led Crusaders in 1204 to invade and plunder Constantinople in repeated defiance of Pope Innocent III, who had threatened wholesale excommunication if the Venetians launched an attack on another Christian nation—which they did. They solved all problems of Crusaders’ potential fear of excommunication by simply refusing to share the news of the Pope’s communication on this point. This extraordinary achievement against an internally rotting Byzantine Empire not only did terminal damage that set the stage for the eventual Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, about which there are several worthwhile books (including one by Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople: 1453), but freed Venice to acquire and exploit its maritime colonial holdings in the first place. But, like every other imperial system, this too was destined to collapse due to its own weight and that of unforeseen historical forces. By 1798, Venice was an empty shell of its former republican self and fell easily to Napoleon Bonaparte. From that point forward, including its incorporation into modern Italy under Garibaldi in the 1860s, Venice primarily became the artistic playground of European writers, poets, and painters who found its charms timeless and its environment inspiring.
The culture that now makes Venice a world heritage site is the focus of Joanne M. Ferraro, a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of Venice: A History of the Floating City. Considerably more academic in tone than the other two, her book explores the social and material life of Venetians from the Middle Ages into the post-Renaissance period. Like Wills, she is less focused on the military and political evolution of Venice as a state than on the soul of its people, which she dissects with analyses of everything from cooking utensils to clothing to the ways in which imported spices altered cuisine and the exposure to ship-borne rats ravaged the city with bubonic and other plagues on a periodic basis. It is a very scholarly work, but for those willing to bear with the writing, a nice balance in some ways to the work of Wills and Crowley, who are definitely more engaging as writers.
As I said at the outset, there is no one way to write the history of a city with such a compelling story. The rise of Venice occurred in a power vacuum, in an age when competing powers were few and when its people had a unique ability to advance the cause of commerce in the midst of a continent dominated by feudalism. In hindsight, the days of such an empire were clearly numbered; between the rise of the Ottomans to the east, and the discoveries of new lands to the west, Venice became an anachronism by the 16th century. Nonetheless, Venice took another century or two to realize that its decline had become irreversible. It has been the fate of every great power in world history to look over its shoulder to see who’s gaining on them.
Jim Schwab