The Republic of Venice with its Domini de Terraferma and Stato da Mar – its main territories in Italy and overseas by Ariel196 for Wikipedia “Venice” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(11) VENETIAN EMPIRE (697 – 1797)

Technically the Venetian Republic – La Serenissima or the Most Serene Republic of Venice – it was another imperial republic in the style of Rome, indeed with quite the few parallels between them.

Of course, the world had moved on from the days that an Italian city-state could dominate the peninsula and then the Mediterranean (and beyond) in the style of Rome, but Venice took a damn good swing at it, punching remarkably above its weight.

The parallels with Rome extend to a similarly legendary founding – the Republic dated its founding back to 697 AD (hence my starting date for the Venetian Empire), albeit predated by Venice itself reputed to have been settled by refugees from the Huns and Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire seeking the safety of its islands.

The Republic was founded as the Duchy of Venetia within the eastern Roman Empire’s Exarchate of Ravenna – its leader’s title of Doge originating from the Latin for dux (or duke) as an imperial provincial title. It became increasingly independent as the exarchate crumbled, until effectively achieving de facto independence because of an agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the eastern Roman Empire.

Its independence corresponded with its rise as imperial republic in its own right. Venice relied on the tried-and-true methods of a smaller state – particularly city and island states – to punch above its weight, namely naval power fuelled by wealth from maritime trade, as well as cunning and sharp practice in diplomacy. That wealth was also fuelled by its art, craft and manufacture – historian Geoffrey Blainey’s observation that Venice was like the Silicon Valley of its time, in things like glassmaking, has always stuck in my mind.

Indeed, while it resembled Rome’s classical (and imperial) republic, it also followed the classical Greek model of a maritime colonial empire with a focus on its naval power and trade, while in many ways pre-empting the European colonial – and neocolonial – empires of which it was a predecessor.

And like all empires, even maritime or mercantile ones, it was in the business of territorial expansion – “During its history it annexed a large part of north-east Italy, Istria, Dalmatia, the coasts of present-day Montenegro and Albania as well as numerous islands in the Adriatic and eastern Ionian seas. At the height of its expansion, between the 13th and 16th centuries, it also governed the Peloponnese, Crete and Cyprus, most of the Greek islands, as well as several cities and ports in the Mediterranean”.

Of course, its rise as imperial republic caused it to come into conflict with rival Italian city-states, notably Genoa, but also the eastern Roman empire. Venice had a weird love-hate symbiotic-parasitic relationship with the eastern Roman Empire – evolving from an imperial province and vassal in the empire’s reconquest of Italy, to ally and close associate of the empire effectively as its navy and trading house, and ultimately to rival and perfidious adversary in the Fourth Crusade.

In some ways, that symbiosis involved Venice as almost the inversion of Constantinople – the heart of a mercantile empire which waxed and rose, sucking from the blood of the latter as it waned and fell. Although ironically, Venice found its fortune to be little more symbiotic with Constantinople than it would have liked after all – as the rival declining eastern Roman empire was replaced by the new rival rising Ottoman Empire.

Even then, its remarkable to think that Venice as a city-state held its own going toe-to-toe with the Ottoman superpower for four centuries or so of Ottoman-Venetian Wars (that commenced even before the fall of Constantinople), albeit inevitably losing territory to the Ottomans.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire also indirectly prompted one of the primary factors behind the decline (and fall) of the Venetian Republic and the Mediterranean in general – the decline of Mediterranean trade relative to the Atlantic as the latter opened in the European Age of Discovery and conquest of the Americas. Even so, the Venetian Republic endured until 1797 when it finally fell to the French under Napoleon.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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