HISTORY OF VENICE (800 - 900 A.D.)
(Doge Pietro Candiano I killed in battle with Dalmatian pirates in 887 A.D.)

(Napisao: gosp. Marko Marelić -  S. Francisco - USA)
--> Marko Marelić osobna stranica

With peace restored to the lagoon, Doge Agnello was free to turn his attention to a new problem which was every bit as challenging as that which he had just surmounted. The islands of Rialto, flat, muddy and often waterlogged, were neither large enough nor firm enough to accommodate the new influx of settlers. If they were to be made into a capital worthy of the growing Republic, they would have to be strengthened, drained and enlarged - wherever primitive methods of land reclamation made that possible. They also had to be protected from the sea, against which the outer line of lidi provided a not always effective barrier. To undertake these tasks the Doge appointed a commission of three men. Nicolo Ardisonio was to fortify the lidi, buttressing them artificially where necessary; Lorenzo Alimpato was entrusted with the digging of canals, the shoring up of islands and the preparation of building sites; and the buildings themselves were made the responsibility of Agnello's close kinsman, Pietro Tradonico.

These buildings were still for the most part modest, two-story structures, lightly constructed to minimize subsidence and usually thatched with straw. Already, like Venetian houses today, they tended to have two front doors, one giving out on the land - probably with a little patch of garden for vegetables - and the other opening directly on to the water. Wood was still the most popular building material; it was light, easy to transport, abundant - thanks to the pine forests around the lagoon - and cheap. Bricks, so characteristic of later Venetian architecture, were still almost unknown; the mud of the lagoon was too soft and thin. For the more important buildings where wood seemed insufficiently durable or impressive, there remained only one answer - stone, and in particular the hard, white stones of the Istrian peninsula.

But stone presented its own problems, notably that of weight. The only means of establishing a firm enough foundation for it was to drive thousands of wooden piles into the ooze, so close that they touched one another and their sawed-off tops made a virtually unified solid surface. It was a long and laborious process, but it worked; and many houses in Venice today still stand on piles sunk almost 1,000 years ago, and the technique was to be continued well into the twentieth century. In the ninth century, however, it was still in its infancy. There were few stone buildings except for the churches - and the great palace that Agnello began for himself and his successors near the old church of St. Theodore.

Of this first Doge's Palace nothing now remains. Though it occupied the same site as the present one, its appearance must have been very different; heavily battlemented with corner towers and drawbridges, it was more a fortress than anything else - and no wonder, in view of the Republic's recent history. Architecturally it cannot have compared with the splendid edifice that was simultaneously rising just behind it to the east. This was the church and convent of S. Zaccaria, designed to receive the mortal remains of the father of John the Baptist, recently presented to Venice in a gesture of friendship and goodwill by the Byzantine Emperor, Leo V the Armenian. Leo may well have gone even further and paid for the whole building himself; he certainly sent architects and craftsmen from Constantinople. Alas, their work too has disappeared. S. Zaccaria, like most of the older churches of Venice, has been rebuilt and restored so often as to be unrecognizable for what it was originally. But its importance in the early history of the Republic was considerable.

This initial period of carefully planned construction laid down the lines on which the new capital was to develop and gave it the basic shape it still preserves. Inevitably, however, the Doge had other more immediate problems to contend with - for the gravest of which he was himself responsible. Though by far the most enlightened ruler that Venice had yet produced, he too fell into the temptation of trying to make his office hereditary; and since his elder son Giustiniano was away in Constantinople he raised the younger son, Giovanni, to share the dogeship with him. Giustiniano returned in anger and demanded that his brother be deposed - a step which drove Giovanni into a fury and shortly afterwards into exile. But these family quarrels, undignified as they were, never seriously threatened the security of the state. The building work went on uninterrupted; and Agnello Participazio can be considered, more than anyone else, the first architect of modern Venice. It was only sad for him that he did not live to witness what was perhaps the most important single event in the spiritual life of the Republic - that which did more than any other event to strengthen its ecclesiastical independence and to focus its national pride and which, incidentally, gave the city its most glorious and enduring monument. One day - so the story goes - when St. Mark was traveling from Aquileia to Rome, his ship chanced to put in at the islands of Rialto. There an angel appeared to him and blessed him with the words "Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus. Hic requiescat corpus tuum.". ("Peace be unto you, Mark, my evangelist. On this spot shall your body rest.") The historical evidence for this story is, to say the least, uncertain; the prophecy - since St. Mark later became the Bishop of Alexandria and remained there until he died - would have seemed improbable; but the legend certainly came in very handy when, in 828 or thereabouts, two Venetian merchants returned from Egypt with a corpse which they claimed to be that of the Evangelist, stolen from his Alexandrian tomb. As might be expected, the details of this enterprise vary from one account to the next; the consensus seems, however, to be that the Christian guardians of the shrine, concerned for the future of their church under Saracen rule, were somehow persuaded - or bribed - to cooperate. The shroud was slit up the back, the body removed, and the remains of St. Claudian, which lay conveniently nearby, substituted for it. It was then put into a large basket and carried down to the harbor where a Venetian ship was waiting.

By this time the odor of sanctity that came from the body was becoming so strong that, in the words of one chronicler, "If all the spices in the world had been gathered together in Alexandria, they could not have so perfumed the city." Suspicions were understandably aroused, and local officials arrived to search the ship; but the Venetians had covered their prize with quantities of pork. At the first sight of the pork, the officials, pious Muslims to a man, cried "Kanzir, kanzir!" - (Pig, pig!) - and they fled in horror. The body was then wrapped in canvas and hoisted up to the yard-arm, where it remained until the ship was out of the harbor. Even now the dangers were not over, for the vessel headed straight for some unchartered reef and would have surely wrecked had not St. Mark himself roused the sleeping captain and induced him, just in time, to lower his sail. At last, however, the ship was brought safely to Venice, where its precious cargo was received with appropriate rejoicing.

Now this story - which is admirably depicted, down to the very cries of the customs men, high on the mosaic walls of the present Basilica - is something more than just another of those legends in which early Venetian history is so rich. That a body thought to be that of St. Mark was brought to Venice at this time is generally believed to be an historical fact. And it is equally beyond doubt that Giustiniano Participazio - now sole Doge since the death of his father in 827 - instantly commanded that a special chapel should be built for its reception, in the brolo or garden separating the church of St. Theodore from his own palace. There is a strong possibility, that the whole expedition from Alexandria had been undertaken on the secret orders of the Doge. If the Republic was to command respect in the new Europe that was gradually taking shape around it, it needed some special prestige beyond that which wealth or sea power alone could confer; and in the Middle Ages, when politics and religion were still inextricably intertwined, the presence of an important sacred relic endowed a city with a mystique all its own. The body of St. Zacharias might be better than nothing, but it was not really enough. The body of the Evangelist, on the other hand, would endow Venice with Apostolic patronage and place her on a spiritual level second only to Rome itself, with a claim to ecclesiastical autonomy - further strengthened by the patriarchal status of her bishop - unparalled in Latin Christendom.

Similarly, there was no reason why a spiritual advantage should not be turned to straightforward political ends; and here again the relic arrived at an opportune moment. Barely a year before, in 827, a synod at Mantua, headed by representatives of the Pope and Western Emperor, had proposed the restoration of the old Patriarchate of Aquileia, giving it authority over the see of Grado. Since Aquileia was part of the Western Empire, such a decision might have constituted a serious threat to Venetian independence. Now, with the body of St. Mark slammed, as it were, on to the scales in favor of Grado, the Mantuan decision could be safely ignored. Grado remained the metropolitan see to which the Church of Venice, revived and regenerated in the name of the Evangelist, owed its ecclesiastical allegiance.

It might in these circumstances have been expected that Doge Giustiniano would consign the body to the new cathedral at Olivolo. His decision to preserve it instead in an obvious dependency of his own palace deliberately associated it from the outset with the civil rather that with the religious authorities of the state. From that moment on, old St. Theodore and his dragon were relegated to the top of a column in the Piazzetta and, for all practical purposes, forgotten. St. Mark became the patron saint of Venice. His lion with its wings outstretched, its forepaw proudly indicating the angelic utterance, was to be emblazoned on banners and bastions, on poops and prows, whenever and wherever the Venetian writ was to run. His name above all others was invoked by the faithful at prayer and by soldiers and sailors of the Republic as they went into battle.

History records no more shameless example of body-snatching; nor any - unless it includes the events associated with the Resurrection - of greater long-term significance. But once the Venetians had the Evangelist safely among them, they adopted him as their own, more whole-heartedly than any other guardian saint in any other city. As their guardian, over the centuries, they were to work him hard and to try him sorely; but as their patron they were never to fail him in their love and veneration. And he, for his part, was to serve them well.

The first church of St. Mark - smaller and less magnificent than that which now stands on the same site but still, by the standards of the day, a building fit for an Evangelist to dwell in - received its formal consecration only four years later in 832. By that time Doge Giustiniano, three years in his grave, had been succeeded by his younger brother. He had always despised Giovanni, and what can be gathered from the scant sources available, he was probably right. Had the new Doge not already reigned briefly at his father's side he would never have been chosen; as it was, his ineffectiveness and general apathy soon became more than his subjects could stand. On June 29, 836, the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, just as he was leaving St. Pietro di Castello after mass, he was seized by some of his own subjects and compelled to abdicate. Then, his head shaved and forcibly ordained, he was sent to end his days in a monastery at Grado.

One of the main reasons for the Venetians' dissatisfaction with Giovanni Participazio had been his ineffectiveness in dealing with a new menace which was now looming every larger on the horizon. For some years already, Adriatic trade had been harassed by Slav pirates, slipping out from their lairs in the hidden creeks and inlets of the Dalmatian coast around the mouths of the Narenta and Cetina rivers and falling upon any well-laden merchantman that caught their fancy. Early successes had caused a rapid growth in their numbers, to the point where Venetian captains were becoming wary of putting to sea and Venetian commerce was being threatened with slow strangulation. Nor was Venice the only sufferer; the Western Empire also was beginning to feel the pinch as sea communications with Ravenna, Padua and the other cities of imperial Italy became progressively harder to keep open.

Firm action against these pirates was thus a matter of high priority for any new ruler; and Pietro Tradonico from Jesolo, now raised from his position on the building commission to be the eleventh Doge of Venice, was not a man to shirk his responsibilities. Within three years of his election he was leading a naval expedition to Dalmatia; and in 849, his hand strengthened by the moderately successful outcome of these operations, he sent an ambassador to the Franks to conclude a treaty with Charlemagne's grandson, the Emperor Lothair. Much of this treaty was a simple configuration of previous agreements, but it is remarkable for two reasons. First, the original manuscript of it still exists - the oldest Venetian diplomatic document to have been preserved. Secondly, it contains an explicit pledge by the Doge to bear responsibility for the defense of the Adriatic against the Slavs or any other enemy, together with implicit acknowledgement by Lothair of his own naval weakness and Venice's consequent right over the central Mediterranean.

About this time, too, another race was giving another Empire still graver concern. In 827 a Byzantine governor of Sicily named Euthymius, in an effort to avoid the consequences of his recent elopement with a local nun, had proclaimed his independence and invited the Aglabi Saracens of North Africa to support him. It was just the opportunity they needed. Landing in strength along the southwest coast they soon got rid of Euthymius, and before their conquest was complete they were already using the island as a springboard from which to attack the Byzantine province of Apulia. There, the Greek garrisons in Bari, Brindisi, and Otrano found themselves as helpless against this new enemy as the Franks had been against the Dalmatians. In the past thirty years the Emperors at Constantinople, reassured by their friendship with Venice and the growing Venetian power at sea, had allowed themselves to neglect their own bases in the Adriatic. Even on the Eastern shores, the once formidable strongholds of Durazzo and Cephalonia were no longer able to launch an offensive on any scale. Thus it was that in 840 or thereabouts - at roughly the same time as the Venetian plenipotentiaries were signing their treaty with Lothair - there arrived at Rialto no less a personage than the Patriarch of Constantinople himself, to confer upon the Doge the title of spatharius and seek his active help against the Saracen peril. Tradonico responded at once. The Saracens, he saw, constituted a far more serious threat in the long term than any number of Slav pirates. It was in the interests of Venice, jut as much as of Constantinople, to prevent them from establishing themselves in the narrow waters. The Venetian navy was quickly made ready, and in early 841 sixty of its largest ships, each carrying 200 men, sailed out of the lagoon to their appointed rendezvous with a Byzantine squadron. The combined fleet then moved on southward, until it came upon the Saracens off the little Calabrian port of Crotone.

Whether the Greek admiral fled at the first engagement - as the Venetians were later indignantly to swear - or whether the fault lay elsewhere, will never be known; but the Christian defeat was total. The pride of the Venetian navy went to the bottom; the land force which had disembarked near Taranto was wiped out. The Saracen fleet then advanced unhindered up the Adriatic, sacking Ancona and reaching the very edge of the lagoon before the shoals and currents swirling around the delta of Po forced it to turn back.

Once again Venice had been saved by her geography; but this time she had no cause to congratulate herself on her good fortune. The sea that she had claimed as her preserve and that the two great Empires of Europe had recognized as such only a year before, had been openly demonstrated to be nothing of the kind. The very next year was to see the Saracens pressing yet further up the coast, the Venetians powerless as ever to check them. Meanwhile the Narenta pirates, seeing that they had less to fear than they had imagined, grew bolder and still more predatory. It was to be many decades before these twin scourges were finally eliminated and the Adriatic approaches made safe again for Venetian and imperial shipping.

After so complete a debacle, it was inevitable that Venice's relations with Byzantium should have suffered a sharp deterioration. The old links were still there, but they were becoming more tenuous all the time. With the Empire of the West, on the other hand, once the principle of independence - both political and ecclesiastical - had been properly established, friendship continued to blossom. In 856 Lothair's son and successor, the young Emperor Lewis II, went so far as to pay a state visit to Venice with his Empress. They were met and entertained by the Doge and his son Giovanni - whom it is hardly necessary to add, he had associated with himself on the ducal throne - at Brondolo, a little south of Chioggia; thence they were taken with much pomp to Rialto, where they remained for three days, in the course of which the Emperor stood as godfather to Giovanni's little daughter.

On the domestic front too, Doge Pietro had his problems. It was now nearly half a century since the Venetian capital had been established on the islands of Rialto. After all that had gone before, it was hardly likely that their comparative freedom from factional strife - one of the principal reasons for their selection - should last forever. Despite her Adriatic enemies, Venice was now the leading emporium- and clearing-house in the Christian Mediterranean. Trade was expanding in all directions; the advantage went to the first to seize it; and in the prevailing atmosphere of commercial ruthlessness and cut-throat competition, new jealousies and resentments were bound to arise. Many of the recent settlers had brought their old animosities with them. For most of his 28 year reign - the longest of any Doge to date - Pietro Tradonico kept the peace with remarkable success. It was only after the death of Giovanni - one of the few associate Doges to justify an institution that was nearly always disastrous - that he found he could no longer hold the balance between the factions. Perhaps he resorted to repressive measures which his subjects found intolerable, perhaps he showed too much favor towards one group and thereby antagonized another; whatever the reason, a conspiracy took shape, and on September 13, 864 the conspirators struck. It was on the eve of the Exaltation of the Cross, a day on which by tradition the Doge attended a mass at St. Zaccaria; and as the old man - with well over fifty years of service to the state behind him, he cannot have been far short of eighty - was leaving the church after vespers, he was sprung upon by an armed band and left for dead in the square. The ensuing struggle between his attendants and the attackers soon led to a riot; the nuns of the convent attached to the church did not at first dare to come out to rescue the body. Not until after nightfall could it be brought to safety and given a decent burial.

Meanwhile the servants of the murdered Doge - probably a bodyguard of Croatian slaves - had hurried back to the palace and barricaded themselves in. There, while the street fighting raged throughout the city, they kept up their resistance for several days until they heard that five of the leading conspirators had met their deaths at the hands of the mob. Only then did peace return sufficiently for a certain Orso, a nobleman whose principal qualification was that he had had no part in the plot, to be elected to the supreme power.

Tradition, unsupported by any firm historical evidence, maintains that this new Doge was of the family of Participazio. Three of his four predecessors had borne this name, and the fourth Pietro Tradonico, had been closely related by marriage. If, therefore, tradition is to be trusted, it must be seen that the new election was indicating a further drift towards the hereditary principle. But Orso, whether a Participazio or not, showed no disposition to allow the old order of things to continue. Immediately on his accession he launched a radical program of reform; and his first target was his own authority.

From the beginnings of her independence, Venice had been theoretically a democracy. Not only was the dogeship itself an electoral office, but the Doge was attended by two tribunes whose explicit purpose was to prevent him from abusing it. Furthermore, there had always been provision for what was known as the arengo, when all the citizens met in the general assembly to vote on major decisions affecting the security of the state. But democracies are unstable institutions; they need constant maintenance if they are to work. In Venice, over the years, the tribunes had declined in importance, the arenghi were never called, and public affairs had become the preserve of whatever little clique chanced to surround the Doge of the day. Orso now instituted a system of elected giudici, or judges - high state officials, part ministers, part magistrates, who formed the nucleus from which the future ducal curia was to grow and provided an effective check on the arbitrary misuse of the supreme power. Meanwhile changes in the structure of local government brought the outlying islands into closer dependence on the central administration.

Having reorganized the governmental machine, Orso next turned his attention to Church affairs. Here, by contrast, he adopted a policy of decentralization. Several of the old bishoprics in and around the lagoon had ceased to exist, or had returned to the cities from which they had been driven by the barbarian invasions. There remained only Grado, Altino and Olivolo, to which the new diocese of Equilo had recently been added, with the result that many outlying areas were falling increasingly under the influence of the Patriarch of Aquileia or other equally undesirable ecclesiastics in the territory of the Western Empire. To counteract this tendency Caorle, Malamocco, Cittanova - the old Heraclea - and Torcello, which up to now served only as the occasional seat of the Bishop of Altino, were all given sees of their own. Neither the new bishops nor the old were in any way subordinated to the civil power of the Republic; but their very independence increased their loyalty. Within a few years nearly all the newly appointed bishops supported the Doge in one of his periodic disputes with the Patriarch of Grado, and three times in a single year they refused summons from the Pope himself to attend a synod in Rome to settle the matter.

Another dispute, with the Patriarch of Aquileia this time, was even more satisfactorily handled. This rascally primate seems somehow to have acquired temporal control over a large part of the duchy of Friuli - from which, probably as a result of anger over the new bishoprics, he was conducting his own armed campaign against Venetian merchants. Orso's answer was an economic blockade. The mouths of all rivers passing through Aquileian territory were closed and all exports to and from the city were banned. The Patriarch was brought to his knees; and it is worth noting that in the ensuing treaty, while Orso was prepared to accept that the Venetian merchants trading with Aquileia should continue to pay reasonable duties on their goods, he cheerfully stipulated that his own personal trading representatives in the area should be exempt from all taxation. There spoke the authentic voice of Venice. The state might come first, but enlightened self-interest was never very far behind.

Orso's constitutional reforms, far-reaching as they were, did not extend to the problem of nepotism. Like most of his predecessors he had associated his son with him during his lifetime and on his death in 881 this son Giovanni assumed the throne in smooth and undisputed succession. But Giovanni was himself no longer young and his health was uncertain. After a few years' ineffectual struggle he had to admit himself unequal to his office. His subjects agreed. Constitutionally, yet at the same time showing more determination to be heard than at any previous time in Venetian history, they demanded not his abdication - for they seem to have been genuinely fond of him - but the enthronement at his side of the 45 year old Pietro Candiano.

Alas, only five months later on September 18, 887, Pietro Candiano was killed while leading an expedition against the Dalmatian pirates, the first Doge to die in battle for the Republic. Reluctantly, old Giovanni took up the reins again until a successor could be found. And this time the people's choice fell on Pietro Tribuno, great-nephew of that ill-fated Doge Tradonico whose murder had caused such havoc in the city a quarter of a century before.

Pietro Candiano's reign had been brief, bellicose and - at least so far as the Doge himself was concerned - disastrous; The reign of Pietro Tribuno was to be long and for the most part peaceful, with its single emergency ending in Venice's most dazzling military triumph since her victory over Pepin. Tribuno began, auspiciously enough, by renewing the treaty agreements with the Western Empire, first in 888 - the year of his succession, and then again in 891. Since Giovanni Participazio had negotiated a similar renewal with the Emperor Charles the Fat as recently as 883, it may be wondered whether so much diplomatic activity was strictly necessary. But at this crucial stage in her political development Venice was still steering a course of extreme delicacy between the two imperial whirlpools, a course on which she was in constant danger of being sucked into one or the other. It was vital for her to seize every opportunity she could of taking her bearings and adjusting her trim. Seldom, in so doing, did she fail to improve her position. Thus, a few years before, a clause had been written into the agreement by which any murdered of a Doge who sought refuge in the Empire should be fined 100 pounds of gold and banished - a mild enough penalty, one would have thought, under the circumstances. In 888 the terms went considerably further: henceforth any Venetian anywhere in imperial Italy would remain under the jurisdiction of the Doge and subject to the laws of Venice rather than to those of the Empire. This provision was directed not only against criminals - extradition, of a kind, had been allowed for since the days of Lothair. Its principal effect was to guarantee to Venetian merchants in Italy the protection of their own law, and thereby to encourage them to extend their operations further afield.

Thus, with trade expanding, the economy developing steadily, shipbuilding in full swing, a new iron-founding industry growing fast, and the city taking ever more splendid shape as the work of clearance, drainage, reclamation and construction gathered impetus, the last decade of the ninth century proved for the Venetians the happiest and most prosperous of all. Then in 899 came crisis - with the appearance on the horizon of a new enemy. By this time men might have been forgiven for thinking that the age of the barbarians was past; but the Magyars proved them wrong. Emerging, like so many of their predecessors, from the steps of Central Asia, they had crossed the Carpathians for the first time only three years before; their savagery and brutality were still unblunted. Several shocked chroniclers of the time go so far as to describe them as cannibals - which on occasion they may well have been. Already in 898 they had briefly raided the Veneto, but had withdrawn again before much harm had been done. In the following year, however, they returned in strength and, after an initial reverse, overran the whole Lombard plain. Then they turned towards Venice.

One by one the cities around the lagoon fell to the Hungarian horde: Cittanova, Fine and Equilo first, then Altino, and the hinterland north and west to Treviso and Padua. Next, swinging south, the Magyars advanced along the lidi from Chioggia and Pellestrina up towards Malamocco. They reached Albiola without much difficulty, but there - almost exactly where Pepin had come to grief ninety years before - they found Tribuno and his army waiting for them. Coming as they did from the center of the Asiatic land mass, they had no knowledge or understanding of the sea; the portable coracles which they used for crossing rivers were useless against the Venetian ships. Their defeat was quick and complete. Once again the lagoon had saved the city.

But was even the lagoon enough? Pietro Tribuno did not think so. Some future aggressor, more disciplined and experienced in seamanship, might succeed where the Magyars had failed. Once inside the line of the lidi he would find the islands of Rialto still largely unprotected. And so the Doge gave orders fir the building of a bastion from the castle on the eastern side of Olivolo down to what is now the Riva degli Schiavoni and thence all the way along to St. Maria Zobenigo, and for the manufacture of a great iron chain which could be stretched across the Grand Canal from the church of St. Gregorio on Dorsoduro to the opposite bank.

The chronicler John the Deacon, writing about 100 years after the event, sees the construction of this bulwark as marking the moment when the Rialtine settlement first properly became what he calls a civitas. The term is untranslatable, a city; in our sense of the word - although a very small one - had existed there since the days of Doge Agnello and the transfer of the central government. But Pietro Tribuno's wall, and the emergency that brought it into being, gave the citizens a new feeling of cohesion and community that was to have its own importance in the years to come. One can only hope that the few crumbling remnants of it that still survive at the southern end of the Rio dell' Arsenale will continue to be treated by the authorities of today with the respect that is their due.

Excerpted from: "A History of Venice" by John Julius Norwich,
published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982, pg. 26 - 38.

Compiled by: Marko Marelich
Retired Mechanical Engineer
San Francisco, California - USA
September 1st, 2007