[713-900 A.D.]
Therefore between the two extreme dates quoted by the chroniclers there is a difference of sixteen years, sufficient time to afford material for criticism. But the different points were defended and contested without result. Muratiri Leo defended the date of 697, which is the date given by Dandolo and his followers; Romanin oscillated between the two dates; Filiasi and Balbo were inclined to the medium course and put the election of Paoluccio in the year 706 or 707. But as neither the one nor the other adduces more authentic proofs in support of the closer date, we will remain firm in preferring that of 713, which is according to the most eminent author on Venetian matters. We are the more led to this preference by the cause to which the chroniclers generally attribute the foundation of Venetian dukedom. For if it is true that the imminence of the Lombards led the inhabitants of the islands to institute a supreme magistrate, it could not have referred to the time preceding Liutprand in which the Lombards, either through flaccidness of purpose or through internal disputes, were incapable of thinking of new conquests or exercising fears or apprehensions among their neighbours. The chronicler Giovanni says nothing of the attributes of the new magistrate, and his silence on such an important subject is the more deplorable, as in the computations made by posterior chroniclers on the ducal authority we find names used of matters more contemporaneous to them than to the time of which they speak.
Andrea Dandolo,[g] the most authentic among them, describes in the following words the attributes of the first Venetian dukes: “They had,” says the doge chronicler, “the power and right to convoke the general meeting for public affairs, to appoint tribunes and judges to administer all matters private, lay, and ecclesiastical, save the mere spiritual; they had power in everything befitting the title of duke; and by their orders there the councils of the clergy took place and the election to the prelature was made by the clergy and the people, the election and the investiture being from their hands, as they had the power of appointment.” It is very doubtful whether the ducal attributes were originally so defined in detail. Anyhow, from the appearance of a military magistrate with the title of master of the militia alongside of the first duke, it can be inferred that the jurisdiction of the duke was limited to civil affairs. For the chronicler Giovanni,[h] in speaking of Paoluccio Anafesto, says that he judged his own with temperate justice. And here the verb to judge is used in a more definite and proper sense than in that used by the Lombard histories and documents respecting their dukes. It expresses that which is solely civil jurisdiction, whilst the jurisdiction of the Lombard dukes included the military jurisdiction as well as the civil.
We have an important document of the dogedom of Anafesto,[i] which shows how beneficial the institution of the ducal power was to the Venetians. This document is a convention of the doge with Liutprand, by which the Lombard king conceded to the Venetians the trade of the territories of the kingdom proper, and, defining the limits between the two states, it declared to be Venetian the territories between the Piave Major and the Piavicelli on the side of Heraclea. Such, according to the chronicler Giovanni, was the tenor of the treaty of peace concluded between Liutprand and the first doge of Venice. And we have authentic confirmation of its truth in its verification, made by Barbarossa in the year 1177, of that which pertained to the designation of the Venetian confines on the part of Italy.[c]
It was in 809 [or 810], in a war against Pepin, son of Charlemagne, that the Venetians made choice of the Island of the Rialto, near which they assembled their fleet bearing their wealth, and built the city of Venice, the capital of their republic. Twenty years afterward they transported thither from Alexandria the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, their chosen patron. His lion figured in their arms, and his name in their language whenever they would designate with peculiar affection their country or government.
VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY
[900-996 A.D.]
While the Venetians disputed with the Lombards, the Frank and the German emperors, the little land on which stood their houses, they had also to dispute the sea that bathed them, with the Slavonians, who had established themselves for the purpose of piracy on the eastern side of the Adriatic.[b] It was hardly five hundred years since the fugitives from Padua and Aquileia had sought refuge in the lagunes. Content with having found safety there and freedom to enlarge their town and extend their commerce, they had hitherto only made just wars, having only taken to arms to repulse pirates, help oppressed neighbours, or to defend their liberty against Pepin and the Hungarians.
Although many victories had given them a just appreciation of their strength, they had no aggression to reproach themselves with, unless perhaps that against the Saracens, but this war was undertaken at the solicitation of the Italian people, and on the request of the Eastern emperor. Moreover, in generally received ideas of this epoch, the Saracens, in their quality as infidels, were beyond the pale of common rights. The republic had never made incursions on the continent, for it would not be just to lay to its account the short expeditions of the two doges, who had no other object than their own interests.
