Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE CA D’ ORO

V
VENICE AND THE FIRST CRUSADES

It is not my intention to attempt in these pages an unbroken narrative of early Venetian history. Such attempts have been made by men of great and thorough learning, but they have failed in part or altogether because it is quite impossible to trust the only sources of information which have come down to us. These agree, indeed, more or less; that is, they agree just nearly enough to make it sure that something like the event they narrate in such widely different ways actually took place, in some year to be chosen at will from the several dates they give. But that is all, until nearly the end of the Middle Ages.

One thing must not be forgotten: Venice was not the only maritime republic in Italy, even in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were at least three others, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa, which at that time were as prosperous, and seemed likely to be as long-lived, and of which the commerce in the eastern Mediterranean was already much more important than that of Venice. In the end Venice outdid them because she was isolated from Italy; literally ‘isolated,’ since she was built on islands in the sea.

England owes her independence, and the British Empire therefore owes its existence, to twenty-one miles of salt water. A much less formidable water barrier gave Venice a thousand years of self-government. The vast advantage of protection by water was perhaps not evident to the Venetians more than two or three times in their history, any more than the same advantage has been actually felt by Englishmen more than twice or thrice, but those few occasions were most critical; it has been present all the time, and the enemies of Venice, as of England, have always realized with dismay the difficulty of attacking a nation to whose country men cannot walk dry-shod.

The other three great maritime republics did not possess this prime permanent advantage of isolation by water. Amalfi was taken and retaken by land powers; Pisa was ultimately subjugated by the Florentines, the landsmen who lived nearest to her; and Genoa, with a surviving semblance of freedom, became tributary to the House of Savoy in the eighteenth century. Venice alone of the four held her own till the days of Napoleon, protected to some extent, perhaps, by a sort of tacit but general European agreement to consider her a city of pleasure, but also, and always, by that water barrier, which multiplies the strength of a city’s defenders tenfold, and divides to dangerously small fractions the powers of those that assail her.

It may seem fruitless to try to recall in a few words how Pisa and Genoa rose to maritime power; but it is not possible to pass over in silence the period during which Genoa, Venice’s great rival, was growing up on the opposite side of the peninsula, nor the time in which Amalfi and Pisa were becoming powers in the Mediterranean.

Amalfi, most strange to say, though she was the first to disappear, left to the civilised world at large the greatest legacy. To one of her citizens, Flavio Gioia, we owe the mariner’s compass; to her we owe the manuscript of the Pandects of Justinian, by which, as Sismondi justly says, all western Europe came back to the study and practice of Roman law; to Amalfi we owe those laws regulating maritime traffic, which are the foundation of the modern sea-law of civilised nations. And as if this were not enough for her glory, it is to Amalfi that the order of Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem owes its existence, the oldest order of knighthood that still survives, now known as the Sovereign Order of Malta.

At its greatest, the Republic of Amalfi embraced not more than fifteen or sixteen villages besides the little capital itself, scattered along the southern side of the Sorrentine peninsula, some perched on the inaccessible flanks and spurs of a mountain that rises out of the sea to a height of nearly five thousand feet, some built where wild gorges widen at the water’s edge. That breakwaters were built out into the sea before Amalfi and Positano against the terrific south-westerly gales, we partly know and partly guess; that the capital and the dependent villages were strongly fortified may easily be proved. But what is left, though beautiful beyond description, is so little, and that little is so exiguous, that the thoughtful traveller asks with a sort of unbelieving wonder how the Amalfitans can ever have disputed the lordship of the sea with the greatest, and possessed their own rich quarter in every thriving harbour of the East; and how they can have given the maritime world its first rules of the road, or sent out rich and splendid trains of knights to one crusade after another. Yet they did all these things before they sank from power and disappeared and were lost in the turmoil of South Italian history.

Next greater in strength to survive came Pisa, a contrast to Amalfi in almost every condition, and a power which, when at its height, was of more importance in history because history was then less chaotic. Not backed against steep mountains like Amalfi and Genoa, but built in the rich alluvial soil of the delta of the Arno, where the widening stream afforded a safe harbour for ships; not isolated in a natural fortress of rocks, but easy of access by land as well as by sea, and therefore easy to quarrel with and often in danger, Pisa possessed the natural advantages of a modern capital like London or Paris rather than the natural defences of a strong city of the Middle Ages. But the times were not ripe, and Florence was too near, jealous, turbulent, commercial and usurious, a dangerous enemy in war, and a terrible competitor in peace. No country has produced simultaneously so many cities as Italy, any of which might have become the capital of a nation. I can only compare the tremendous vigour of her growth at many points at once to that of a strong oak-tree broken off near the ground by a tornado, and sending up shoots from the stump, so tall, so straight, so vital that each one, if the others were cut away, would grow in a few years to be a tree as tall and robust as the parent. Venice, Palermo, Naples, Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Milan—might not any one of these have grown to be a nation’s capital? And can any other nation of Europe show as much?