The history of Venice

Venice, almost uniquely among the great Italian cities, is not a creation of the Roman Empire. The marshlands at the northern point of the Adriatic were a wet and useless wasteland as far as the Emperors were concerned. Though the legions did occupy the region inhabited by the Veneti tribe, they skirted round the soggy lagoon with its inhospitable mosquito-infested islands and marched on down the Dalmatian coast.

A refugee crisis

It was the fall of Rome that brought Venice into being. From the 4th century ad, waves of invaders came from the northern side of the Alps and crashed through the Brenner Pass. Huns, Germanic Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Lombards: one after the other they overwhelmed the rural population and spread down the Italian peninsula. The invasion created a huge refugee crisis within the Empire. Many countryfolk flooded into the cities, but in the Venetian region some fled away from centres such as Padua and Aquilea to the unpopulated islands of the Venetian lagoon. The island we now know as the Rialto, the largest in the archipelago, was cut off from the mainland by three miles of clear water at high tide. The water was too shallow and treacherous for a ship-borne assault; the invading hordes usually went for easier targets. By the time the flood of intruders had receded, some of the refugees had found ways to make a home – and a living – in the brackish wetlands of the lagoon.

The beginnings of a settlement

It was a strange kind of existence, or so it seemed to Cassiodorus, secretary to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, who passed that way in around 535 ad. ‘The houses are like seabirds’ nests’, he wrote. ‘Where first you saw land, you soon see islands, more numerous than the Cyclades. The reflections of their scattered houses stretch far on the flat sea. Nature provides a place that the care of man enriches. With slender branches tied in bundles, they consolidate the land and have no fear of facing the sea waves with such delicate defences. All their exertion is in the saltworks; in place of the plough and the scythe they rake the salt … They tie their boats to the walls of their houses, like domestic animals.’

Cassiodorus’ description touches on all the things that would preoccupy Venice for the next thousand years and make it rich. There is the endless fight against the sea; the clever commercial exploitation of its unique topographical circumstances; and the masterful use of ships and boats.

In the 7th century ad, the people of the scattered islands were settled enough to begin to organise themselves politically. In the same century, large buildings appeared. A cathedral was consecrated on the island of Torcello in 639; the name of its bishop is inscribed on the oldest known document of Venetian history. In 697, the Venetians elected a leader – dux in classical Latin, doge in the dialect of the Italian northeast. By the middle of the next century, Venice was sufficiently coherent as an entity – and perfectly sited geographically – to strike trade agreements with the Frankish Empire to the north, and with the Byzantine Empire across the sea to the east.