Venice, Italy

Background and Structure

The foundation of Venice is disputed, but most accounts look to refugees from other cities during post-Roman Germanic invasions settling the islands of what was to become the Venetian lagoon. The traditional date given for the founding of the city Republic is AD 697, but more significant for the city was when the ducal seat of the Byzantine governor and the seat of the bishop moved to what is now the site of Venice in the early ninth century AD, locating on the rivoalto, literally high land, that became the Rialto in the city. The city's rise to power came through the twelfth century and was cemented by the crucial role of its fleet in supporting the fourth crusade in 1204; in return, it demanded that the crusaders sack Constantinople, enabling Venice to capitalize on the power vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean left by the seriously weakened Byzantine empire.

Through the next two centuries, Venice built an empire that extended through and beyond the Adriatic, the Dalmatian coast, the Ionian islands, through to Crete and Cyprus. In the late thirteenth century, Venice could claim to be the wealthiest city in Europe, credited with a fleet of 3,300 ships. Venice was one of the first preeminent world cities organizing, enabling, and profiting from an economy linking Occident and Orient. As such, it offers an example of both Pirenne's argument that cities play a key role in the emergence of nonfeu-dal forms through trading links and Braudel's analysis of their place in the emergence of a world economy.

From the later sixteenth century, this empire came under pressure from the Ottoman empire, rival cities and realms in Italy, and French interests. Cyprus was lost in the later sixteenth century, and Venetian power and wealth declined through the eighteenth century while the Austrian Hapsburg empire expanded. By the end of the eighteenth century, its merchant fleet had declined to a tenth of its peak size; it possessed less than a dozen warships in 1796. The following year, it fell to Napoleon and in the ensuing peace treaty lost its independence and became an Austrian dominion. [Page 952]The Republic (often referred to as La Serenissima, from the Venetian title of Most Serene Republic) operated a unique system of urban governance— often romanticized as showing a spirit of urban democracy. The head of state was the doge, who was an aristocrat elected by the great council, which included most aristocratic families. The doge ruled in conjunction with subgroups of the council that formed the signoria and a senate of 60 members of the great council, along with the Council of Ten, which formed the main governing group, and the Council of Three, which was responsible for security.

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