The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04

by Unknown

But for the present, at any rate, the tide of devastation was turned, and few events more powerfully impressed the imagination of that new and blended world which was now standing at the threshold of the dying empire than this retreat of Attila, the dreaded king of kings, before the unarmed successor of St. Peter.

Attila was already predisposed to moderation by the counsels of his ministers. The awe of Rome was upon him and upon them, and he was forced incessantly to ponder the question, "What if I conquer like Alaric, to die like him?" Upon these doubts and ponderings of his supervened the stately presence of Leo, a man of holy life, firm will, dauntless courage—that, be sure, Attila perceived in the first moments of their interview—and, besides this, holding an office honored and venerated through all the civilized world. The barbarian yielded to his spell as he had yielded to that of Lupus of Troyes, and, according to a tradition, which, it must be admitted, is not very well authenticated, he jocularly excused his unaccustomed gentleness by saying that "he knew how to conquer men, but the lion and the wolf (Leo and Lupus) had learned how to conquer him."

The tradition which asserts that the republic of Venice and its neighbor cities in the lagoons were peopled by fugitives from the Hunnish invasion of 452, is so constant and in itself so probable that we seem bound to accept it as substantially true, though contemporary or nearly contemporary evidence to the fact is utterly wanting.

The thought of "the glorious city in the sea" so dazzles our imaginations when we turn our thoughts toward Venice that we must take a little pains to free ourselves from the spell and reproduce the aspect of the desolate islands and far-stretching wastes of sand and sea to which the fear of Attila drove the delicately nurtured Roman provincials for a habitation.

If we examine on the map the well-known and deep recess of the Adriatic Sea, we shall at once be struck by one marked difference between its eastern and its northern shores. For three hundred miles down the Dalmatian coast not one large river, scarcely a considerable stream, descends from the too closely towering Dinaric mountains to the sea. If we turn now to the northwestern angle which formed the shore of the Roman province of Venetia, we find the coast line broken by at least seven streams, two of which are great rivers.

These seven streams, whose mouths are crowded into less than eighty miles of coast, drain an area which, reckoning from Monte Viso to the Terglon Alps—the source of the Ysonzo—must be four hundred and fifty miles in length, and may average two hundred miles in breadth, and this area is bordered on one side by the highest mountains in Europe, snow-covered, glacier-strewn, wrinkled and twisted into a thousand valleys and narrow defiles, each of which sends down its river or its rivulet to swell the great outpour.

For our present purpose, and as a worker out of Venetian history, Po, notwithstanding the far greater volume of his waters, is of less importance than the six other small streams which bear him company. He, carrying down the fine alluvial soil of Lombardy, goes on lazily adding, foot by foot, to the depth of his delta, and mile by mile to its extent. They, swiftly hurrying over their shorter course from mountain to sea, scatter indeed many fragments, detached from their native rocks, over the first meadows which they meet with in the plain, but carry some also far out to sea, and then, behind the bulwark which they thus have made, deposit the finer alluvial particles with which they, too, are laden. Thus we get the two characteristic features of the ever-changing coast line, the Lido and the Laguna. The Lido, founded upon the masses of rock, is a long, thin slip of the terra firma, which form a sort of advance guard of the land.

The Laguna, occupying the interval between the Lido and the true shore, is a wide expanse of waters, generally very few feet in depth, with a bottom of fine sand, and with a few channels of deeper water, the representatives of the forming rivers winding intricately among them. In such a configuration of land and water the state of the tide makes a striking difference in the scene. And unlike the rest of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic does possess a tide, small, it is true, in comparison with the great tides of ocean—for the whole difference between high and low water at the flood is not more than six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand.

Here, between sea and land, upon this detritus of the rivers, settled the detritus of humanity. The Gothic and the Lombard invasions contributed probably their share of fugitives, but fear of the Hunnish world-waster—whose very name, according to some, was derived from one of the mighty rivers of Russia—was the great "degrading" influence that carried down the fragments of Roman civilization and strewed them over the desolate lagoons. The inhabitants of Aquileia, or at least the feeble remnants that escaped the sword of Attila, took refuge at Grado. Concordia migrated to Caprularia (now Caorle). The inhabitants of Altinum, abandoning their ruined villas, founded their new habitations upon seven islands at the mouth of the Piave, which, according to tradition, they named from the seven gates of their old city—Torcellus, Maiurbius, Boreana, Ammiana, Constantiacum, and Anianum. The representatives of some of these names, Torcello, Mazzorbo, Burano, are familiar sounds to the Venetian at the present day.

From Padua came the largest stream of emigrants. They left the tomb of their mythical ancestor, Antenor, and built their humble dwellings upon the islands of the rivers Altus and Methamaucus, better known to us as Rialto and Malamocco. This Paduan settlement was one day to be known to the world by the name of Venice. But let us not suppose that the future "Queen of the Adriatic" sprang into existence at a single bound like Constantinople or Alexandria. For two hundred and fifty years, that is to say for eight generations, the refugees on the islands of the Adriatic prolonged an obscure and squalid existence—fishing, salt manufacturing, damming out the waves with wattled vine-branches, driving piles into the sand-banks, and thus gradually extending the area of their villages. Still these were but fishing villages, loosely confederated together, loosely governed, poor and insignificant, so that the anonymous geographer of Ravenna, writing in the seventh century, can only say of them, "In the country of Venetia there are some few islands which are inhabited by men." This seems to have been their condition, though perhaps gradually growing in commercial importance, until at the beginning of the eighth century the concentration of political authority in the hands of the first doge, and the recognition of the Rialto cluster of islands as the capital of the confederacy, started the republic on a career of success and victory, in which for seven centuries she met no lasting check.