History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 1 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

While the power and name of the Romans was passing away under the imbecile rule of the Greek emperors, and commerce and navigation shared in the general decay, a new maritime power, the State of Venice, destined to become the greatest of the Italian republics, was imperceptibly increasing in strength and renown. From the time when the inhabitants of that portion of Italy, now known as Venetian Lombardy, were driven by Alaric, the barbarian conqueror, to seek refuge in the small islands of the Adriatic, near the mouth of the Brenta, their progress had been one of almost uninterrupted prosperity. Devoting their attention exclusively to the pursuits of commerce, and avoiding, by every means in their power, interference with the affairs of their neighbours, the Venetians drew towards their infant colony all whose habits and tempers induced them to seek industrial pursuits. Among these, many families of Aquileia, Padua, and other towns, fleeing from the sword of the Huns and similar barbarous tribes, found a safe but obscure refuge. A modern writer[360] has eloquently described Venice as “immoveable on the bosom of the waters from which her palaces emerge, contemplating the tides of continental convulsions and invasions, the rise and fall of empires, and the change of dynasties;” and certainly no description could be more true of the splendour and position of Venice, and of the policy of its rulers, when at the height of its prosperity.

The cause of its prosperity.

A.D. 997.

But many centuries elapsed from the time when the infant colony was planted, before “the water fowl, who had fixed their nests on the bosom of the waves,”[361] obtained a prominent and independent position as a great maritime nation. Although in the early career of the Venetians their independence was more especially due to their determination to attend to their own affairs, and not to trouble themselves with those of their neighbours, at a later period the western[362] and eastern empires, in turn, claimed authority over them, and thus they were invaded and at last conquered by Pepin, father of Charlemagne, though ultimately restored to the Greek empire in the tenth century. The Venetians therefore can hardly be considered as a really independent republic till they had acquired the maritime cities of Dalmatia and Istria, including the people of Ragusa, the posterity of the mariners who, in classical times, owned and manned the fast sailing Liburnians. The population of these coasts still retained the piratical habits of their ancestors; and having in some respects identical interests to defend, were not unwilling to place themselves under the strong government of the Venetians. From that period the Venetians carried on, for between four and five centuries, a most important commercial intercourse with other nations, and exercised, as a trading people, more influence than any other country had done before them. The long duration of this enterprising republic, with its maritime greatness and vast commerce, will, with the story of the sister republics of Genoa and Pisa, form a subject to which we shall frequently have occasion hereafter to refer. It is enough now to remark that these cities, all favourably situated for conducting an extensive maritime commerce, were among the first to revive the genuine spirit of trade in the south of Europe after it had been almost annihilated by the repeated inundations of the barbarians.

Spread of the Scythians, Huns, or Turks, A.D. 997-1028. A.D. 1074-1084.

A.D. 1076-1096.

The Crusades, A.D. 1095-1099.

The nomad Tatar, or so-called Scythian populations, have been already slightly noticed; the rapidity with which they spread their arms over Asia having been a matter of surprise to every historian who has written on the subject. About the time of Mahmud of Ghazna, after having overrun the West of India, an important section of them settled in great force in Asia Minor. Opposed to the Greeks and their religion, they became the most powerful enemies the eastern Roman empire had yet encountered; and their occupation of the Holy Land, with their conquest of Jerusalem, led to conflicts with the Greeks only less terrible than had been the earlier wars between the Saracens and the nations of the West. Their ignorance of navigation alone deferred for a time the fall of the eastern empire, though internally weak and decrepid, chiefly owing to the blow it received during the Crusades, and from which it had never recovered.[363] The first Crusade, made about twenty years after the conquest of Jerusalem, had for its object the recovery of the Holy City from the infidel. To replace the Cross in Palestine, where the Crescent had been impiously raised, was a duty the whole of Christendom considered itself bound to accomplish. But the Christians in their enthusiasm undertook a task as wild as it was disastrous, and one, too, so miserably planned, that three hundred thousand of the first Crusaders lost their lives, either by fatigue and hunger or by disease and the weapons of the Saracens, before they rescued a single city from their grasp.

A.D. 1147.

Siege of Acre, A.D. 1189.