The first and last Doge
- Richard Crooks
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
We have arrived in our second Venice. The Venice. Magical Venice. Mercantile Venice. The capital of the Stato da Mar. Capital of the first European colonial power. The blue-print for the British Empire. The Serenissima.
We have driven 1,200 miles from Cirencester. And nearly 1,100 miles from the ‘Venice of the North’ Bruges, coincidentally also a famous centre of lace production.
So much of Missy Bear’s travels in the past few years have been influenced by Venice and its maritime empire, that it is a real treat to have finally arrived by road, and to be able to discover a bit more of its beating heart, or at least what made it tick at the height of its medieval pomp.
After the fall of the western Roman Empire, waves of Germanic tribes had flooded south into the Italian peninsular and pushed the ‘natives’ almost into the sea in this north-western, marshy corner of the Adriatic. It has a shallow lagoon sheltered from the open sea by numerous islands. I guess this made the people face the sea, and grow to love eating fish. They had to build on the muddy, marshy Archipelago, completely cut off from the mainland. And they also had to build boats and ships, and to become the master mariners that they did.
As we sit on our hotel terrace, all manner of floating vessels pass-us by: wafting gondolas; private gleaming, wooden water taxis; bigger, public vaporetti chugging by; barges with derricks transporting building materials to sites; other barges carrying building waste and hotel waste away; boats delivering newspapers and bottled drinks; even yellow DHL boats delivering Amazon packages no-doubt.
Perhaps this also partly explains why everything in Venice is relatively expensive. I remain amazed there are not many boat-on-boat collisions, but all the captains seem to have a sixth sense of how to avoid them.
The waterways are teaming with life: along the sinuous, wide and choppy Grand Canal; and the narrow, sheltered channels cutting between the tall town houses, and old warehouse and churches, perched on their hidden, ancient wooden stilts. The occasional residence leans almost imperceptibly to one side as it continues its glacially-slow sink into the mud. One church tower on Burano challenges the Pisan tower for its jaunty angle.
There are little arched bridges everywhere enabling the pedestrian to hop from one water-bound block to another. When walking around the streets one eventually finds a canal blocking your way with no bridge. Time then to back-track, unless you can find a boat.
Wavelets and wash lap-up at buildings' front steps, and you wonder how many fewer steps are visible above the surface now, than when these old buildings were initially erected. There are larger tectonic effects at play, slowly sinking foundations, as well as changing sea levels that account for the changing relative level of the waters.
I suspect that, incredible though the amount of water traffic is, it is no more than would have passed by hundreds of years ago, albeit by punt or oar, or occasional sail. We know that the Venetian’s were trading all over the Mediterranean Sea (just like their Roman forefathers) quite early on. For example, it is believed that some light-handed republicans stole St Mark’s relics from Alexandria in 828, and brought them back to Venice. Hence the legend of St Mark that became the brand of the republic.
As well as day-to-day routine of life, ships would have arrived carrying tons of imported precious items: foodstuffs, such as wheat from the Black Sea; raw materials for industry. such as wool from Southampton, London or Bruges perhaps?; minerals for glass making, such as cobalt maybe from Syria; sugar, spices, and silks from beyond the Levant; timber from the Balkans, cedars from Lebanon; and Malvasia wine from the Peloponnese. You can find a lot of red Malvasia wines in today's bars.
Merchants from many nationalities would have swarmed around the boats and wharves, buying and selling goods for onward movement to western movement. Goods would have also been loaded onto the ships, including Slavic ‘slaves’ from north-eastern Europe, for sale to the Ottomans.
The Jewish presence would have been important, and the financial bourse key. Indeed, there is still a sizeable Jewish ghetto on the main island, and many Jews go about their business today, conspicuously in traditional dress, and hopefully not too intimidated by the ubiquitous “Free Palestine” graffiti. The type is only outnumbered by “anti-fascist” or more modern “climate justice” daubs.
All this industry brought unimaginable wealth to Venice. Wealth to construct the magnificent public building, palaces, townhouses, and the wooden galleys necessary to make the commerce work. (It took the who Venetian arsenal 13 months to construct all the galleys needed to transport the Franks eastwards on the fourth Crusade.)
Maybe it is because the Venetians became so wealthy, that they remained fiercely independent. Like the Genoese or the Nicoise, for example, Venice remained an independent republic. Until Napolean conquered the peninsular that is.
And who was in charge of all this 'global' commercial empire. The Doge, or Duke! He of the impressive waterfront palace, next to St Mark’s square. He can be thought of as the republic's CEO, although a lot of his roles were ceremonial. He oversaw a council of ten, that dealt with law making and justice and trade laws etc. The role of Doge remained non-hereditary.
I like to think that Donald Trump’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a clever word play. And we know that the Doges were 'deal-makers'. They made deals with the crusaders, for example, that ended up with the sack of Constantinople. The Venetian curators seem quite unashamedly proud about episode of history!? And, when the Pope (Papal States) were trying to gain control over Venice, the Doge had no qualms in making a deal with the first Bourbon French King, Henry IV, to avert that risk.
German merchants from the Holy Roman Empire visiting Venice even referred to Doge as new Roman Emperor, as they were so impressed with the city and its maritime empire and wealth. This was despite the Roman Empire in the east still being in existence, albeit shrinking rapidly, until it’s fall in to the Ottomans in 1453.
All this pretention to being the heirs to Rome was backed up by vast propaganda of-course. If you get the chance to visit the Doge’s palace, you will be surrounded by massive and magnificent paintings, often by Tintoretto, glorifying Venice in heroic, Greco-Roman god-like terms. Other paintings confirm the power of the ‘Stato da Mar’ and its dominion of Republic over precious overseas possessions, such as Crete and Cyprus, the birthplace of the beautiful Venus. All this ary was to impress visiotrs, but also self-confirming.
Francesco Morosini is glorified in art. He was ‘Capitano da Mar’, and led the Venetian forces to victory in crucial battles against the Ottomans, so expanding the Republic's dominion in the Peloponnese against the Ottomans.
These gains were short-lived.
But, as I wrote in my Missy Bear blogs from Season 2, “it was not the Ottomans (Turks) who had their hands on the throat of Venice, but the Portuguese. Vasco da Gama had returned from India in 1499 after finding sailing to find the source of the spice trade. The Portuguese then captured Malacca, and it could now ship spices in bulk in its huge galleons, so avoiding the Middle Eastern spice road, that was controlled and heavily taxed by the Ottomans and Egyptian Mamluks. These Galleons would make the old trade routes through Venice (via Alexandria and the Levant) redundant. German merchants could now relocate from Venice to Lisbon and pay much less for their purchases.”
But then Napoleon delivered the coup d’etat. He conquered Venice and took its remaining colonial possessions, including the Ionian islands. The Doge, Ludovico Manin, and his Council could have made a deal with Napolean: Napolean wanted Venice to become a democracy. It had been originally, I think, but gradually became and oligarchy under the control of important families. But the Doge decided to abdicate. He was to be the last one, and so ended a 1,000-year existence of one of the most famous republics and empires. I found the painting showing the Doge leaving the palace for the last time quite moving.
To add insult to injury, Napolean selected some of the city’s finest works of art to decorate the Louvre. The painter Veronese's canvas depicting "Jove descending from the skies" was among them. The one you see on the ceiling of one of the many magnificent rooms of the Doge’s palace is a replica from the 19th century. I'm continually surprised at how much art work, pinched from churches in Italy by Napoleonic troops, still resides in various French museums.
And now Venice is part of Italy. And Italy is part of the European Union. And although Venetians still make glass (on Murano Island) and lace (on impossibly pretty Buran Island), I suspect the vast source of its wealth is now based on tourism.
As a post-script, when Venice was still under the post-Napoleonic, Austro-Hungarian empire, the railways were spreading their tentacles. A “ferrovia” line was built across the lagoon to connect to the main island. A church was demolished to make way for the station, which was built in 1860. The existing terminus building was designed in the 1930s and 40s in the ‘Rationalist’ style, and is the only modern building fronting the Grand Canal. I can see it clearly from our hotel bedroom windows.
And that is the same Rationlist architectural style used by Mussolini’s architects to design and build Lakki, on Leros. I love a good historical connection! We are gradually making our way to that far-way island. We travel south next, along the Adriatic coast to Rimimi, and then to the ferry terminal at Ancona for the ferry to Igoumenitsa, Greece.
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