Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

THE CARMINE

XV
VENICE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

As an epoch, if not precisely as a period of a hundred years, the fourteenth century in Venetian history closes with the war of Chioggia, as it began also before the year 1300 with the Closure of the Great Council. For the final defeat and ruin of the Genoese, Venice made the supreme heroic effort necessary to establish her greatness; thenceforth none questioned it, and with the attainment of her highest national aim ended the noblest page in her history.

The Venetians of the first period were at once brave and prudent; they were at times needlessly harsh in judging those whom they believed dangerous to the Republic, but they were sincere, and they found means to make other nations respect their country as they respected it and loved it themselves.

After Chioggia, Venice was both feared and admired, but it is not possible to feel much sympathy with her sumptuous social life, nor with a government that seems to have been for ever preoccupied with its search for secret enemies; nor, indeed, with its too docile working people, or its soldiers who so willingly obeyed the commands of the foreign condottieri under whom they were too often led to battle.

We look on her history and judge her by imaginary standards, which were never hers. We feel that at the end of the fourteenth century she entered upon a mistaken course in which she obstinately persevered to the end; we are sure that she should have been above any mere petty jealousy of her neighbours, and that she should have used all her strength in defence of her maritime trade and her colonies; we would have had her abide by the old law of 1274, which forbade a Venetian to own estates on the mainland of Italy; we consider that she was blinded to her true interests by all sorts of intrigues, and that she neglected her trade in order to put herself on the same war-footing as her adversaries, though she had not their natural aptitude for warfare; that she drained her treasury to pay grasping condottieri, and spent on futile campaigns the resources which had hitherto fed her commerce. All this we are to some extent justified in concluding, and upon those points we judge her, as we should strongly object to being judged.

Nevertheless, all this is but the criticism of speculative moralists and philosophers, a class of well-meaning persons whose influence in the world has never been large. Unhappily for philosophy and morality, they are but too easily answered by the sledge-hammer argument of success. In plain fact, Venice survived, and grew great, and was a power during four hundred years after she adopted her ultimate formula of existence, and in the end she died, not by the hand of the enemies at home or abroad whom she had successfully baffled for centuries, but of sheer old age and marasmal decline after a life of eleven hundred years, during which she was never at any time subject to a foreign power, or a foreign prince, was never once occupied by a foreign army—and was never bankrupt! Unfortunately for sentiment, no European nation, not ancient Rome herself, can point to such a past, and the suggestion that Venice might have done much better by acting much more sentimentally is utterly futile. It is a good deal as if, when the ‘oldest inhabitant’ of a village has just died after utterly beating all other records of longevity, some well-meaning old woman should say: ‘Ah, but he would have lived much longer if he had taken my advice.’

It is useless, I think, to inquire whether the complicated machinery of Venetian government would have worked with the same results, if any part of it had been altogether removed. No one of the many parts had been made arbitrarily, still less had any then been called into existence to afford lucrative posts for favourites, as has happened hundreds of times in the existence of other nations. The machinery had grown constantly, as more and more was required of it, but it had never stopped, nor had it ever been taken to pieces for repairs, like the British Constitution, for instance. It was a government of suspicion and precaution, which took it for granted that every man, from the Doge down, would do his worst, and provided against the worst that any man could do. This is true; but has any government ever thriven which reckoned on man’s virtues? The plain reason why all the many artificial communities founded by good men, from Buddha to Fourrier, or even Thomas Hughes, have been failures is that they have all reckoned on good motives in men, rather than on bad ones. Venice systematically expected the worst, and when she was disappointed it was to her own advantage. Christianity begins by telling us with energetic emphasis that we are all miserable sinners, and threatens us with torments which, if they could be brought before our eyes, would turn the hair of young men grey. Venice followed very much the same principle. Venice had the Pozzi; Christianity has Hell.

As for the manner in which Venice conducted her wars, by the aid of condottieri of reputation, she only followed the example of most of her neighbours. The practice had many advantages, one of which undoubtedly was that the prince, or the republic, was not bound to support an idle, restless, and ambitious general and his force of trained soldiers in times of peace. The professional fighter was sent for when needed, as one sends for the doctor. He made his bargain, beat the enemy if he could, was paid for the work, and went his way with his army in search of occupation elsewhere.