Venice — Background and Themes

e did not achieve her object; but Venice was weakened by the blow, and misfortune after misfortune fell upon her. The passage round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered; which took commercial trade with the East out of her hands, and left her no longer the mart of Europe. Then came the great battles with the Turk, in which both blood and money of Venice flowed in vain. Europe was either powerless or too indifferent to help. Gradually the strength of Venice was broken. She declined and sank. Still, the rigidity and the power of endurance of the Venetian constitution were marvellous. She kept a semblance of life long after the heart had ceased to beat. The constitution of the State was the most elaborate imaginable, and not easily brought to nothing. Nevertheless, although there were occasional flashes of the old brilliancy of Venice, her day was over. The last of her Doges yielded the State to Napoleon without a blow. Laying the ducal biretta on the table, he called to his servants, "Take it away: I shall not use it more."

When the first refugees came from the mainland and started life on the islands of the Archipelago, the mud-banks of Torcello and Rivoalto, they little thought that they were founding a city which was to be the admiration of the whole world, that her navy would ride supreme in all known waters, that Venice was to be the pride of the Adriatic. When those early people, the Veneti, from whom the Venetians take their name, drove in their first stakes and built their wattled walls, they could not have foretold that this was to be the greatest of mediæval republics, the centre of the commerce of Europe. Nature helped Venice handsomely. Had the channels been deeper, men-of-war might have entered and conquered the city. Had the waves been stronger, the airy structure that we know as Venice would have been supplanted by the ordinary commercial seaport. Had there been no tide, for sanitary reasons the city would have been uninhabitable. Had the tide risen any higher than it rose, there would have been no water entrances to the palaces, the by-canals would have been filled up, and the character of the place spoiled.

One's imagination is inclined to run riot in Venice. One gilds, and romances, and fills the city with pomp and pageantry, ornamenting the canals with State barges, the piazza with noble men and fair women, and the Ducal Palace with illustrious Doges. But far more interesting is it to see Venice as she really is, in her own simple strength. Think of the more rugged Venice, that city built by strong and patient men against such terrible odds, and in so wild and solitary a spot. In order to gain some idea of Venice as she was in those early days, it is well to go out in a gondola at low tide, when the canal is a plain of seaweed. As your gondola makes its way down a narrow channel, you have some conception of the difficulties with which the founders of Venice had to contend. To the narrow strips of land, long ridges guarding the lagoon from the sea, ill sheltered from the waves, the few hundred stragglers came. Their capital, Padua, had been destroyed by the northern hordes, and they took shelter in the islands of the lagoon. So desolate and wind-swept were these islands that one can scarcely imagine men disputing possession of them with the flocks of sea-birds. They were impelled by no whim, however: they were exiles driven by necessity. Here they looked for a temporary home, lived much as the sea-birds lived, and were quite fearless. The soil, composed chiefly of dust, ashes, and bitumen, with here and there a layer of salt, was rich and fertile. This was in the fifth century of our era, of which period there are but few Venetian records.