Download PDF | Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium And Venice A Study In Diplomatic And Cultural Relations, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
480 Pages
PREFACE
Constantinople and Venice, the two richest and most romantic Christian cities in the early Middle Ages, were separated by the many nautical miles of the Aegean and Adriatic seas. To sail from one to the other might take six to eight weeks. Yet they were bound together by long tradition, by mutual needs of defence, by commerce and by culture. Venice was born as a province of the Byzantine or East Roman Empire, linked by the ties of a remote provincial city to its capital in Constantinople, the New Rome. It grew into an ally, came of age as a partner and matured as the owner of extensive colonial possessions within the disintegrating structure of the Byzantine world.
In theory Byzantium and Venice were friends, however distant. Their relationship went back to the fifth century. In practice they were often at variance. They differed in language, in the form of their Christian faith, and above all in politics. Byzantium, the heir to the ancient Roman tradition, never forsook the idea of universal imperium. Venice was less demanding, more subtle and more realistic. Venice was a republic, hedged about by aspiring western kingdoms and empires which were nearer and more threatening than Byzantium. The Venetians lived by the sea and the trade that went by sea. The Byzantines preferred the dry land. They had an imperial navy but no great merchant fleet. Their ruling class regarded trade as rather beneath their dignity. Since Constantinople was the centre of the world, at the point where Europe and Asia meet, they expected the trade of the world to come to them. They never mastered the intricacies of capitalism and a market economy. The Venetians were traders by nature and by necessity. The wealth of Byzantium attracted their merchants like a magnet. The Venetians disapproved of monarchy, though they had an innate love of pomp and ceremony, of ritual and pageantry; and for these accoutrements of their courtly and cultural life they turned to the Queen of Cities, to Constantinople. Venice was like a sunflower, its roots firmly planted in the Latin west, yet constantly bending over to catch the rays of light from the Greek east.
Many books have been written about Byzantium and many about Venice. Many scholars have devoted their researches to one or another aspect or period of the association between the two. So far as I am aware, no one hitherto has tried to set down the whole history of that association during the thousand years from the foundation of the Venetian republic to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. A Greek scholar of the nineteenth century remarked that the Venetians, being in some sense heirs to the Byzantine bureaucracy, had too many officials and, as a consequence, too many archives. The abundant Venetian documents concerning trade and the commercial interest of Venice in Byzantium would fill another book. I have dwelt mainly on the diplomatic and cultural exchanges between Byzantium and Venice; though I have tried to see trade as a vital factor in the love-hate relationship that developed between the two centres of such different cultures. The book might have been entitled Constantinople and Venice. But this would have obscured the fact that Constantinople was the hub of the wheel of a wider world which the Venetians half admired and half despised, and which in the end they sought to appropriate, to exploit it for their own profit and honour.
The Bibliography will indicate to whom I owe acknowledgments. Above all, I am indebted to the original sources, Greek, Latin and other, for the long history of Byzantium and Venice. Among modern historians I would like to express my gratitude especially to the late Freddy Thiriet who died while I was at work on this book; and to Sir Steven Runciman, who gave me the idea and the licence to write it and would have done it so much better.
D.M.N. London, 1987
VENICE: THE BYZANTINE PROVINCE
THE imperial province of Venetia and Istria at the head of the Adriatic Sea was as old as the Roman Empire. It had been the tenth of the eleven regions of Italy marked out by the first emperor Augustus. Encircled by the foothills of the Alps on the north and itself encircling the sea, its southern border in Italy was fixed by the river Po, to the south of which, on the Adriatic shore, lay the imperial naval base of Classis or Ravenna. Its main cities were Padua, Aquileia and between them Opitergium or Oderzo. It was a mainland province whose inhabitants saw no promise in the muddy islands and lagoons on to which they looked. Fish could be caught there and salt could be collected. But no one could have foreseen that the islands would have a greater future than the continent. It was said in later years that the Veneti or Venetici were so called both in Greek and in Latin because they were a praiseworthy people.' It was a scholarly but fanciful etymology. For in truth the original Veneti were neither Greek nor Latin but Illyrian.
By the fourth century ap, when Constantine the Great became the first Christian Emperor of the Romans, the christianisation of Venetia had already been assured by the establishment of a bishopric at Aquileia. The province lay much nearer to Rome than to the new capital of the civilised world set up by Constantine on the site of the ancient Byzantium. But it was still a mainland province of the undivided Roman Empire. It survived as such for only some seventy years after the foundation of Constantinople. In 403 the Goths came down upon it. The Emperor Honorius fled to the fortress of Ravenna. Aquileia was destroyed and the Veneti took refuge in the offshore islands. Their own historians in a later age associated this event with the first beginnings of their city of Venice on the group of islands of the Rivo Alto or Rialto. They dated its origin precisely to 25 March 421, at midday.' They anticipated the truth by some 400 years. The settlement of the Veneti in the islands of the lagoons was not yet permanent. The mainland was still their home. Aquileia was repopulated, only to be destroyed again by the Huns of Attila in 452. The Huns, here as elsewhere, came and went. But the Goths stayed. They had made themselves indispensable and hence immovable as part of the Roman military machine. In 476 their leader Odoacer deposed the last of the line of Roman Emperors in the west and made himself effective ruler of the Gothic Kingdom of Italy. There was now only one Emperor of the Romans and he reigned at Constantinople, the New Rome.
The Gothic King Odoacer and his successor Theodoric recognised this fact. Theodoric made his capital at Ravenna and asserted or pretended that he was merely the viceroy of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Emperor at Constantinople. For some years the arrangement worked. Justinian, however, who came to the throne in 527, thought that it had gone on long enough. He was inspired by the vision of a restored and reunited imperium romanum covering the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. It took years of bitter, expensive and destructive war to realise that vision. But in the end, by about 555, North Africa had been won back from the Vandals, part of Spain from the Visigoths and Italy from the Ostrogoths. The Mediterranean was, as Justinian boasted, a Roman lake once again; and at its most northerly point the province of Venetia and Istria and with it Ravenna had reverted to the rule of Rome, or rather of the New Rome from which the liberation of Italy had been directed. Justinian was proud that these furthest outposts of his empire had been recovered and he advertised his pride by enriching the churches of Ravenna, where his mosaic portraits are still to be seen. Other great cities of Italy, such as Milan and Rome itself, had been reduced to ruins in the course of their liberation from the Goths. But Ravenna was built anew as the seat of an imperial governor who was without any pretence the official deputy of the one true Emperor of the Romans.
The Veneti had sometimes supported and sometimes suffered from the war of liberation. They had been overrun by the Goths and then by the Franks who had taken their chance to come over the Alps and occupy much of northern Italy. The coastal cities of Venetia, however, seem to have been Roman again by 539; and they had sent ships to help in the blockade of Ravenna in that year. In 551 they had ferried a stranded army of mercenaries to join forces with the imperial troops at Ravenna.’ By then the inland as well as the maritime province of Venetia had been restored to Roman rule. It was later believed that Justinian’s general Narses, who achieved the final defeat of the Goths, marked the Venetian contribution to his success by building two churches on the islands of Rialto.? Justinian wanted the world to believe that his conquering armies had merely restored the old order of things. The pax romana reigned again. It was as if the barbarians had never been and nothing had changed. The older provinces of Venetia and Istria, together with the neighbouring provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, were simply and quickly reincorporated into the imperial administration with their own governors.° The only innovation, though it is a striking one, was that provincial governors were not now to be appointed by decree of the emperor. They were to be elected from among their inhabitants by the choice of their bishops and leading citizens. The overall government of Italy was committed to a prefect or viceroy of the emperor, the first of whom was Narses, with his capital at Ravenna.‘
The earliest Venetian chroniclers speak highly of the just and pious character of Narses and with admiration of the enormous wealth which he amassed from the spoils of war. It was this, we are told, which excited the envy of the Emperor Justin, who succeeded Justinian in 565, and of his wife Sophia, who taunted Narses with being a eunuch and invited him to wind wool in the women’s quarter of the palace. Narses was relieved of his office and left Ravenna for Naples. If the chroniclers are to be believed, he took his revenge by calling on the Lombards to leave the barren hills and dales of Pannonia and come to take possession of the rich and fruitful land of Italy. He was replaced as prefect at Ravenna by Flavius Longinus.' The vengeance of Narses is probably a myth. But it is a fact that the Lombards, whom he had employed as mercenaries, descended on the north of Italy only three years after the death of Justinian. Later tradition also has it that the new Prefect Longinus visited the city of Venice, which had already sprung up in the lagoons, and negotiated on behalf of his emperor the first treaty between Venice and Byzantium. The Venetians were not asked to take any oath of loyalty to the emperor, only to acknowledge him as their overlord and to express their devotion to his cause. In return they would be assured of security and protection for their merchant ships sailing as far as Antioch and in all parts of the empire.” This is no more than patriotic fiction. The emancipation of Venice from Byzantine control, let alone the foundation of a city of Venice, were still in the distant future in the year 568; and it seems improbable that many Venetian merchants were yet venturing as far afield as Antioch.
Yet it was in that year that the Lombards began their invasion and occupation of Italy, an event that was to cause the final breakdown of the old order so laboriously restored by Justinian. Most of the mainland province of Venetia became a part of Langobardia or Lombardy. Its inhabitants once again took to the offshore islands as refugees. This time their migration was to be permanent. They took with them the name of their province of Venetia and, for a while, retained some footholds on the mainland in Istria on the east and around Padua, Altino and Oderzo in the west. But Aquileia was destroyed yet again in 569 and its people fled to the harbour town of Grado. In the early years of the seventh century the Lombards encroached still further. Padua was taken in 603, Concordia in 615, and their citizens took to the islands of Caorle and Malamocco. Venetia Maritima became a huddle of island refuges. Istria held out against the Lombards but it was cut off and communications by land with other parts of the empire were disrupted. When Oderzo and then Altino fell in 640 almost the last remnants of Roman or Byzantine rule on the mainland were gone. The people of Oderzo fled to Cittanova (Civitas Nova), which later came to be called Heraclea or Heracliana.
Those of Altino settled on the island of Torcello.' Yet Venetia in its new form remained a province of the Byzantine Empire. It was governed by a magister militum or military official answerable to the Prefect of Ravenna who, for the time being, upheld what was left of Roman authority in this far-flung outpost. Those who had no option but to live under the Lombards felt left out. In 590-1 some of the bishops wrote to the Emperor Maurice to express their feelings. ‘Although for our sins,’ they said, ‘we are at present subjected beneath a grievous foreign yoke, yet we have not forgotten your pious government under which we formerly lived in peace and to which, with the help of God, we wish wholeheartedly to return.”
There was little that the emperors in Constantinople could do to save the situation in Italy. The heirs of Justinian were not his equals and they faced the impossible task of paying the cost of his visionary enterprise from a treasury that he had emptied. At the same time they had to contend with enemies and invaders nearer home, with the Persians in the east and with the new flood of barbarians from across the Danube frontier, the Avars and the Slavs. The Emperor Maurice came to the throne in 582 after a victorious campaign against the Persians, which he pursued for another nine years. Maurice was a soldier and he took a soldier’s view of what could be done to save the western provinces. They must be placed under martial law. Carthage in North Africa and Ravenna in North Italy were now to be governed by imperial deputies of a new kind with the title of Exarchs. The old distinction between the civil and the military administration was abolished. The Exarchs of Ravenna, whose authority extended to the province of Venetia and its islanders, combined the functions of a general with those of a magistrate. The civilians under his command must be conscripted to defend their own patch without expecting the imperial army to come to their rescue. The officer in charge of the Venetians held the military rank of magister militum and he seems at first to have been based on the island of Torcello, which early established itself as the market and commercial centre of the island settlements. After 640 the seat of the military government was moved to Cittanova, of which there is now no trace. It was a sensible move since the city had been founded by the people of Oderzo, which had formerly been the administrative centre of Venetia and the residence of adux.'
It was left to another soldier-emperor in Byzantium to complete the work that Maurice had begun on the eastern frontier. Heraclius, son of the Exarch of North Africa, achieved more than any Roman Emperor before him by driving off the Persians from Constantinople in 626 and then utterly destroying their army at Nineveh in the heart of their own territory. The Persian Empire, the ancient rival and only equal of the Roman Empire, was ruined. Jerusalem was recovered. The True Cross was taken in triumph to Constantinople. It seemed as if the balance of power between east and west had been decisively tipped. Like Justinian, Heraclius now felt free to turn his mind to other areas of his empire. But whereas Justinian had found freedom only by patching up a treaty with the Persian king, Heraclius had laid the Persians low for ever. The mood of confidence and euphoria which his great victory induced was soon to be shattered; and perhaps Heraclius is to be blamed for not having foreseen that the defeat of the Persians left the way open for the Arabs. But for a moment before his death in 641 it was possible for him to see his empire as a whole stretching from Italy to the Euphrates.”
As the son of a former Exarch of Carthage, Heraclius understood the significance of these military enclaves in the west. He appointed as his Exarch in Ravenna an officer called Isaac who had served under him on the eastern frontier. It was probably Isaac who kept the emperor aware of the new developments in the province of Venetia and of the necessity of maintaining a strong naval establishment in the islands at the head of the Adriatic as an alternative base for the imperial fleet at Ravenna.? An inscription in the church now called Santa Maria Assunta at Torcello provides the earliest contemporary evidence for the continuing concern of Byzantium for Venice in the seventh century. It records that, in the twenty-ninth year of the reign of Heraclius (639), this church of St Mary the Mother of God was founded on the order of the Exarch Isaac as a memorial of his own achievements and those of his army. The building was completed by the local magister militum Maurice, then resident governor of the province of Venetia, and consecrated by its bishop Maurus. The governor Maurice was buried in the church. This precious lump of stone gives the lie to the tale later told that Venice had achieved political autonomy by the seventh century. The link with Byzantium and with the old Roman order of the world was still strong. In 639 the Provincia Venetiarum was still Byzantine territory governed by a master of soldiers answerable to the Exarch of Ravenna. It was a province made up of islands, of which, at that time, Torcello was evidently the most prosperous; though its governor was soon to make his permanent residence at Cittanova or Heraclea.'
The dedication of the cathedral at Torcello to ‘the Mother of God’, the Theotokos, demonstrates the religious Orthodoxy of the Christians of Venetia. The Council of Ephesos in 431 had confounded the heretics by declaring that Mary was the Mother of God and not simply the Mother of Christ. The definition had been accepted by the church universal, in west and east. In the seventh century the refugees in the Venetian islands may have built their houses of perishable mud and wattle; but they built their churches of stone and brick. The church provided the essential element of stability and continuity in their shattered lives. The leadership of the church, however, was not so easily resolved in the unsettled circumstances. When the Lombards had attacked Aquileia in $69, its bishop Paulinus had taken the relics and treasures of his church to Grado, among them the body of the martyr Hermagoras. When the coast was clear he went back to Aquileia. Ten years later, in 579, a new cathedral was built at Grado. By the eleventh century the Venetians claimed that the Emperor Heraclius had presented its bishop with the throne of St Mark, which had been brought from Alexandria to Constantinople by St Helena, the mother of Constantine. No such throne now exists. The so-called Sedia di San Marco, now in the Treasury of St Mark’s, has no connexion with Heraclius or with the Evangelist and is more likely to have been a reliquary than a chair, unless its incumbent was a dwarf.?
St Mark was locally believed to have been the apostle of the northern Adriatic district and the founder of the church at Aquileia. Aquileia therefore claimed the status of an apostolic foundation and a patriarchate older even than the apostolic church of St Mark at Alexandria. Fiction was piled upon fiction to support this claim. St Hermagoras (probably Hermogenes), whose relics were removed to Grado in the first exile, was said to have been a disciple of St Mark, along with St Fortunatus, of whom there were three versions and three sets of relics. The story that Heraclius gave the Evangelist’s throne to Grado was no doubt meant to suggest that the Patriarch of Grado had his support. Rivalry between the ancient See of Aquileia and the upstart See of Grado had by then along history. The Church of Aquileia stubbornly opposed the doctrinal decisions made at the Fifth Oecumenical Council at Constantinople in 553» decisions which the Church of Rome had supported. Pope Gregory the Great denounced its clergy as deviationists. The Bishops of Aquileia, once the sad victims of Lombard oppression, then turned to the Lombards for sympathy and protection. !
This schism between the ‘Lombard’ bishops of Aquileia and the ‘Roman’ bishops of Grado, though doctrinal in origin, had political consequences of long duration. It was a reflexion of the territorial schism between the Venetian mainland and the islands, a political division that persisted long after the doctrinal quarrel had been resolved at a synod at Pavia in 695. Two bishops presided over Christians of two divergent political interests, one nominally at Aquileia, the other at Grado, and each claiming the title of Patriarch. The Exarch of Ravenna had to keep the peace, through his deputy and governor in Heraclea. No help or support came from Constantinople after the death of Heraclius in 641. The Arab invasion of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire began in the 630s, and within twenty years Syria, Palestine and Egypt were lost to the Christian world. They were the empire’s richest provinces, in foodstocks, raw materials and manpower, as well as being the seats of three of the five recognised spiritual leaders of the Christian Church, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Arab conquests, compounded by the infiltration and settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans and Greece, inaugurated the dark age of Byzantium. In the west Ravenna held out against the Lombards and under its protection the islands in the lagoons of Venice continued to pay at least a nominal allegiance to the Emperor of the Romans. But before long the Arabs from North Africa were to begin their damaging raids first on Sicily and then on the coasts of southern Italy.
In 660 the Emperor Constans II, grandson of Heraclius, profited from a lull in the Arab onslaughts to visit his western provinces, beginning with Greece. From there he took a large army over to Italy. It was the first time for many years that an emperor had visited Italy. Having seen Naples and Rome, where he was graciously received by the pope, Constans settled in Sicily. The Greek chroniclers allege that his intention was to move the capital of his empire to Syracuse, as though he had despaired of Byzantium. The western chroniclers relate that his purpose was to drive the Lombards out of Italy. Both accounts are probably distorted. Constans had other and personal reasons for leaving Constantinople. His visit to Italy is, however, evidence of the fact that he still saw the empire of east and west as one; and he certainly made a tentative effort to make war on the Lombards from Taranto. He may well have meant to use Syracuse as an operational base from which to attack the Lombards in Italy and resist the Arabs from North Africa. His true intentions will remain obscure. For in 668 a conspiracy contrived his murder. The rebels proclaimed an Armenian, Mezezios, as emperor. It was the Exarch of Ravenna, loyal to the house of Heraclius, who came to put down the rebellion and execute the leading conspirators. '
In the course of the seventh century the refugee communities on the Venetian islands developed into permanent settlements, whose leading families began to evolve their own political and administrative institutions. The life of the church was perpetuated through the succession of its bishops. Civic life went on through the appointment of tribunes, originally military officers subordinate to the magister militum. The tribunes had put down local roots as a landowning aristocracy before the migration from the mainland; and later Venetian chroniclers hailed them as the pioneers of the independence of the citizens. In theory they were no more than district officials subject to the Byzantine administration at Ravenna and so in the end to Constantinople, though in fact they exercised a large measure of political authority in their locale. John the Deacon, writing in the early 11th century, reports a momentous event in the constitutional history of Venice which he dates to the time of the Emperor Anastasios II (713-15) and of Liudprand, King of the Lombards (712-39). This was the appointment of the first dux or Doge of Venice. ‘All the Venetians’, he writes, ‘together with the patriarch and the bishops in common council, determined that henceforth it would be more dignified to live under duces than under tribunes; and after much deliberation they nominated the illustrious Paulicius and set him up as dux at Heraclea.’ Paulicius then negotiated a treaty with the Lombard king Liudprand which gave Venice independence and immunity from further attack. !
The story reads well, but it is half fiction. Paulicius, or Paul, was not a Venetian. He was a Byzantine official with the title of dux who was Exarch of Ravenna in the time of Liudprand. With the help of the magister militum Marcellus he marked out the boundaries of what remained of Venetian territory on the mainland. His demarcation was later accepted by Liudprand’s successor Aistulf.? The myth that Paulicius was the first native Doge of Venice dies hard. In the days of Anastasios II, however, Venetia was still a Byzantine province. How long this could be so remained to be seen. There were those among the Venetians who welcomed the arrangement and saw in their connexion with the Exarchate their own salvation from the Lombards. There were others who resented it and looked to the day when they would cease to be provincials dependent on a distant empire which seemed in any case to be in poor shape. Matters were brought to a head in the second decade of the eighth century.
In 726 the Byzantine Emperor Leo III declared himself to be an iconoclast. Four years later he proclaimed his beliefs to be official. A decree went out from Byzantium that the creation and veneration of religious images was forbidden and that all existing icons must be destroyed. In Constantinople and the eastern provinces the decree could be enforced by the emperor’s agents and there were many who supported and obeyed it. In the west, however, and especially in Italy, there was more shock than sympathy and the decree proved to be unenforceable. The pope protested; the towns of Italy rallied round him, for it was rumoured that the emperor had ordered his arrest and murder if he refused to obey the law. A mood of rebellion against Byzantium spread in Italy, encouraged by the Lombards. Paulicius, the Exarch of Ravenna, was assassinated in 727. The Venetians joined in the revolt. Their soldiers, locally recruited, turned against their magister militum. The tribunes and the clergy chose as their own leader Orso or Ursus, a native of Heraclea, who adopted the title of dux. The revolt was promptly and savagely suppressed. But the Emperor Leo tactfully conceded a measure of local autonomy to what he described as ‘the province of Venetia conserved by God’. He recognised Orso as the first native governor or dux of Venice and granted him the Byzantine title of bypatos or consul. This was a first step towards the emancipation of Venice from the Exarchate of Ravenna, although magistri militum continued to be appointed alternately with the local duces for a few more years. No concession was made, however, with respect to the obedience of the province to Byzantine authority.’
The Lombard net meanwhile closed tighter. In 732 the Exarch of Ravenna was temporarily driven out by Lombard pressure. The Venetians loyally gave him asylum in their islands and provided ships to recover his city.? But in 751 the Exarchate was finally overrun and engulfed in the Kingdom of Lombardy. The province of Venice stood alone under the management of its own dux. The days of the magistri militum were over. It was perhaps inevitable that these events should provoke a struggle for power among the leading families in the islands. In 742 the people of Malamocco had rebelled against the administration in Heraclea and elected as their own dux a son of Orso called Teodato (Deusdedit). Local loyalties fuelled the fires of conflict among the islanders. Some were for and some were against maintaining their link with the Byzantine Empire, but the conflict among them was as much a matter of rivalry between families and between island communities. Certainly the enmity of Malamocco for Heraclea was brought about by family jealousies.’ There was jealousy also in the church. In 774-5 a new bishopric was created at Olivolo (Castello) on the Rialto group of islands. It was set up by and under the protection of the dux of Malamocco. Its cathedral was dedicated to St Peter. The fact that its first bishop, Christopher, bore a Greek name suggests a Byzantine influence in its creation, though it cannot be proved. What is more provable by events is the jealousy which this upstart bishopric aroused in the older diocese of Grado. The struggle for power between Malamocco and Grado was long and bitter. But it was essentially a local feud, a storm in a teacup, engendered and prolonged by ecclesiastical rivalry and domestic intrigue among the contending families and their islands. The larger world beyond the islands was not affected or concerned, except when the rival parties sought to enlist the support of the Lombards, the Franks, or the Byzantines.‘
Yet the Venetians retained a powerful sense of loyalty to Byzantium in the second half of the eighth century. It was especially strong during the regime of the Doge Maurizio Galbaio and his son and grandson. The Galbaii were one of the old romanised families of Heraclea, who claimed descent from the Emperor Galba. Maurizio was honoured with the Byzantine titles of bypatos and stratelates, the Greek equivalent of the Latin magister militum; and he was pleased to style himself consul and imperial dux of the province of Venetiae. He also co-opted his son Giovanni as his colleague in authority, a practice which he learnt from the emperors in Constantinople who ensured the succession for their own families by crowning their eldest sons. No doubt the Doge Maurizio had authority from Byzantium to imitate this example, which was followed again when Giovanni co-opted his own son, Maurizio II, as Doge. The office of dux had never been hereditary in the Byzantine administration. There were many who hoped that it would not become so in Venice. !
Giovanni succeeded his father in 787. In the same year the first period of iconoclasm came to an end in Byzantium. A council of bishops held at Nicaea and summoned by the widowed Empress Eirene declared that traditional Orthodox belief in the matter of religious imagery was, after all, correct and that the iconoclasts were in heresy.? The popes and the western part of the church universal had said so all along and were thus pleased that the Byzantine church had seen and admitted the error of its ways. But in the sixty years since Leo had first propounded and enforced the heresy much had happened in the western world. The popes had felt unable to trust or to rely upon emperors who offended not only against the faith but also against the rights of the Roman Church, as Leo had done by detaching some of its provinces. They felt too that no material help against the Lombards was likely to come from emperors in Constantinople who could hardly hold their own eastern frontiers against the Arabs and the Bulgars. The popes therefore turned for comfort and support to the rising power of the Kingdom of the Franks. After the fall of Ravenna in 751 Pope Stephen II had asked the emperor to send an army. No army came. Disillusioned, the pope appealed to Pepin IH, King of the Franks, and crossed the Alps to confer with him. In the spring of 754 he consecrated Pepin and his sons Charles and Carloman and bestowed titles on them. The Byzantine Emperor had failed to act as champion and defender of the papacy against the Lombards. The part would now be played by the Frankish king. A Byzantine embassy that went to the court of Pepin in 756 was informed that all the imperial territory in northern and central Italy, including Ravenna, now belonged to the throne of St Peter. The papal state of Italy had been born. The Donation of Pepin was enshrined in the forged document known as the Donation of Constantine.’
The alliance between the papacy and the Franks challenged the Byzantine claim to the government of northern Italy. The Emperor Constantine V hoped to undermine it by winning the Franks to his side. But the spectacular victories over the Lombards first of Pepin and then of Charlemagne demonstrated that the Franks and not the Byzantines were masters of the situation in that part of the world; and the popes would do no business with Constantine, who was an even more fervent iconoclast than his father Leo. Charlemagne completed the conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774 and went on to conquer Istria in 788. The province of Venetia was all that was left to the Byzantine Empire, and it was a province deeply divided. The arrival on the scene of the Franks aggravated the already existing divisions. Some saw in it the means of their salvation, or at least of the righting of their supposed wrongs and the fulfilment of their ambitions. Others, like the Doge Maurizio and his family, stayed loyal to Constantinople for all that its emperor was a condemned heretic. By the time that iconoclasm was renounced by the Empress Eirene in 787 affairs in northern Italy had acquired a momentum of their own which the Byzantines could no longer check or control. The islands of Venice seemed to be at the mercy of the Franks. Byzantine sovereignty over them had been (tacitly) accepted in the treaty which the pope had made with Pepin in 754. But when Pepin’s son annexed Istria in 788 he intervened directly in Venetian concerns by transferring its bishops to the jurisdiction of the See of Aquileia. Venetian merchants were expelled from the ports of the former Exarchate. When John, the Patriarch of Grado, proclaimed his allegiance to Charlemagne, the Doge Maurizio had him hunted down and murdered as a traitor. The feuds between the ruling families and the islands of Venice were now more than ever fought under the banners of the Frankish and the Byzantine factions.”
On Christmas Day in the year 800 Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of Charles the Great. In the pope’s mind a new empire had been created. The old Empire of the Romans, then presided over by a woman, the Empress Eirene, was now rejuvenated under the aegis of an emperor from the west. This was the culmination of the policy of Pope Leo’s predecessors in fostering their alliance with the Kingdom of the Franks. Whether Charlemagne himself saw eye to eye with the pope in this interpretation of the event is matter for debate. But the Byzantines were shocked and offended. The coronation of a second emperor struck at the very roots of Byzantine political theory. In the world of Charlemagne and Eirene it was axiomatic that the divine order depended on the preservation of a single imperium romanum; and just as there was only one God in heaven so there could be only one emperor on earth. On this point the pope was in agreement. By crowning Charlemagne he had effectively transferred the single sovereign authority in the world from Constantinople back to its origins in the west. The Byzantines were justified in questioning the right or the power of a Bishop of Rome to make or unmake emperors. But the insult to their pride stung them more deeply than the constitutional issue.'
In 802 ambassadors from Charlemagne and the pope went to Constantinople to see if a settlement could be reached. They are said to have been empowered to arrange a marriage between the new western emperor and the Empress Eirene.” It would have been a remarkable union. But Eirene was violently deposed in October of the same year; and her successor Nikephoros elected to bury his head in the sand of the Byzantine imperial myth in the hope that the problem in the west would go away. At the level of political theory and constitutional rights it would have been possible to come to some arrangement with Charlemagne, as was in the end to be proved. But at the level of political power and territorial rights it was a fact that Charlemagne ruled over an acreage of the globe almost as large as if not larger than that of the shrunken Byzantine Empire, while his eastern frontiers encroached upon the western provinces of that empire. This was all too obvious at the head of the Adriatic Sea. The Franks had taken possession of Istria and of northern Dalmatia even before 800. They might at any moment decide to occupy or to propose a protectorate of the islands of Venice. They knew that many of the islanders would have welcomed them, if only to achieve their own selfish purposes.
The welcoming party for the Franks came at last to power in Malamocco in 802. The Doges Giovanni and Maurizio II were sent into exile taking their Bishop of Olivolo with them. The coup had been planned and led by a former tribune, Obelerio, who now installed himself as Doge in Malamocco. He had acted more from personal jealousy than political realism. But the pro-Frankish faction were on his side. In the fashion that seemed to have been set he appointed his brother Beato as his colleague in power. One of their accomplices was the Patriarch of Grado, Fortunatus, who had gone to Charlemagne’s court to seek the restitution of his bishoprics, which had been transferred to Aquileia. He got little comfort from the Franks. In Constantinople, however, the overthrow of the loyalist party by Obelerio was interpreted as rebellion. The rebels may have toyed with the idea of setting up a state independent of Franks and Byzantines alike. They forbade Fortunatus, as the friend of Charlemagne, to return to his church at Grado. But they soon found that they could not go it alone. At Christmas in 805 their leaders, Obelerio and Beato, went to see Charlemagne armed with rich gifts and high hopes. He set the seal of his authority on their usurpation of the province or duchy of Venice. They could hold it as a fief of his empire. In February 806, when he apportioned his empire among his sons, Charlemagne assigned Venetia, Istria and Dalmatia to Pepin, in his capacity as King of Italy.!
What had appeared to be a local rebellion in a distant province had now developed into a much more dangerous threat to Byzantine interests. The Emperor Nikephoros could no longer bury his head in the sand. He sent a fleet up the Adriatic to fly the Byzantine flag and restore order. Its admiral was the patrician Niketas. No imperial navy had been seen in those waters since the fall of Ravenna. The sight made a great impression. There was no resistance. The small Frankish fleet based at Comacchio at the mouth of the Po pretended not to notice; and Niketas anchored his ships in the lagoons of Venice without interference. He was an intelligent man and he had full powers to negotiate a settlement. He wisely decided that it would be better to sanction than to oppose the consequences of the coup d’état. Obelerio was confirmed in office as Doge and honoured with the Byzantine title of spatharios. His brother Beato, however, was taken as a hostage to Constantinople, and with him went the Bishop of Olivolo. The Patriarch of Grado, Fortunatus, was nowhere to be found. He had already fled to his friends the Franks. Venice was thus reconstituted as a province of the Byzantine Empire under its own dux or Doge, whose position was now legally ratified. Niketas completed his business by making a truce with Pepin, King of Italy. It was signed in Ravenna and was to run until August 808. Pepin, whose fief was supposed to include Venice, could not compete with the Byzantine navy. He was ready to sign his part of a mutual agreement. He would see to it that the province was protected from the mainland if the Byzantines would help to protect Istria against raids from the Slavs in the interior. '
The truce ran its course. Obelerio’s brother Beato was allowed to go back to Venice from Constantinople, adorned with the title of hypatos. This was perhaps a mistake. Obelerio was not content to be a lackey of Byzantium. He welcomed Beato back as his colleague and strengthened his position by co-opting a third brother, Valentino, as co-regent. The news was reported to the emperor, and in the autumn of 808 another Byzantine fleet sailed up the Adriatic. It was commanded by Paul, strategos or military governor of the theme of Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. Paul handled matters less tactfully than Niketas. The ducal triumvirate were not pleased to see him and stirred up as much trouble as they could; and he went out of his way to antagonise the Franks. In the spring of 809, having spent the winter in Venice, Paul launched an unprovoked attack on the harbour of Comacchio. He was beaten off after a skirmish with the garrison and forced to make new terms with the Franks before sailing away south to his own headquarters. Pepin was understandably annoyed by this example of Byzantine duplicity. When Paul and his fleet had gone, he answered a call for help from the Doge Obelerio and his colleagues, who saw their power slipping from them. The finer points of the intrigues and rivalries of the islanders in the lagoons were lost on Pepin. He came down with a heavy hand on Venetians of all persuasions. His army attacked them from the mainland, his ships from the sea. Heraclea and other settlements were captured and sacked, and finally Malamocco fell. The fighting went on for six months. It might have gone on longer if the strategos Paul had not reappeared on the scene with his Byzantine fleet. He had come not to rescue the Venetians from the consequences of their own folly but to deter the Franks from plundering the coast of Dalmatia. Pepin withdrew, but not before he had imposed the payment of an annual tribute on the wretched Doges Obelerio and Beato, who were now virtually his prisoners. He died a few months later, in July 810.”
Pepin’s intervention changed the course of history for Venice. The islanders had for the most part sunk their differences in the resistance to his attack; and in the end the victory went to them. But it was not a victory for the old warring factions among them, nor for the Doges who had provoked the attack and the destruction of their earliest settlements. The victims and the refugees collected on the still sparsely populated islands of Rialto; and it was there, when the dust had settled, that they began to rebuild their society and its institutions. The soil of Rialto was fertile; there were settlers enough to cultivate it and to fill its islands; and it already had a spiritual centre for their new hopes and ambitions in the bishopric of Olivolo, with its church of St Peter. The loss of Heraclea and of Malamocco and the discovery of Rialto as the new political and ecclesiastical centre of the Venetian people purged them of their past and inspired them with a fresh sense of unity and independence.
The importance of this encounter between Franks and Venetians and its consequences were for long remembered in Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, writing in the middle of the tenth century, gives a stirring account of the Venetian resistance to Pepin’s invasion. It derives from Venetian sources. It does not belittle Venetian heroism. But it is naively slanted to show where the loyalties of Venice really lay. When Pepin first tried to cross over from Alviola on the mainland to the island of Malamocco, we are told that the Venetians laid down spars and blocked the crossing. Pepin, baffled by this manoeuvre, said to them: ‘You are beneath my hand and my providence, since you are of my country and my domain.’ The Venetians, however, replied: ‘We want to be servants of the Emperor of the Romans and not of you.”! If they had been unanimous in this opinion things might never have come to the crisis of the year 809-10. Constantine Porphyrogenitus recorded what he was able to discover almost 150 years afterwards. But at the time the crisis of Venice was seen in another light in Constantinople. It was a signal to the Byzantine government that it could no longer postpone the day when it must come to terms with the Frankish Empire in the west. The Venetians were the indirect agents of the first agreement between the Eastern and the Western Emperors.
In 810 the Emperor Nikephoros sent an ambassador to Pepin. He was the spatharios Arsaphios. He reached Italy to find that Pepin had died in July. He went on over the Alps to see Charlemagne at his palace at Aachen, where he was received in October. The terms agreed between Arsaphios and the Western Emperor showed a remarkable appreciation of reality. Far from holding out for his rights as Emperor of the Romans everywhere, Charlemagne promised to relinquish his claim to the Byzantine province of Venetia and to hand it back to the Byzantine Emperor together with the provinces of Istria, Liburnia and the towns on the Dalmatian coast which the Franks had occupied. The quid pro quo was that the Byzantines should recognise his right to the title of emperor. The terms were formally set out in a letter which he gave Arsaphios to take back to Constantinople. He also handed over the Doge Obelerio, whom he had been holding in custody, to be taken to Constantinople to be punished for his treachery ‘by his rightful lord’. In the spring of 811 Arsaphios went back to Venice. With the consent of the people he declared Obelerio and Beato to be deposed from office and solemnly confirmed the election, in the name of his emperor, of a new Doge of Venice. His name was Agnello Partecipazio, and he had been a hero of the resistance to the Franks. The seat of his government and of the new age which now seemed to dawn for Venice was Rialto.’
Arsaphios had done his work well. He sailed back to Constantinople with the disgraced Obelerio as his prisoner. Beato too was banished from Venice and sent to Zara on the Dalmatian coast, though their youngest brother Valentino was allowed to stay since he was thought to be too young to make trouble. The terms of the treaty which Arsaphios took with him had still to be ratified in Constantinople. The clause relating to Charlemagne’s imperial title might well have proved difficult for Nikephoros to accept. But he was killed fighting the Bulgars on his northern frontier in July 811. The new emperor, Michael 1, was more accommodating and also under greater pressure. His secretariate devised a formula which would save face on both sides. In return for handing over Venice and the other territories that Pepin had occupied, Charlemagne was to be recognised as emperor, though not as Emperor of the Romans. His status would be that of an emperor in abstract, holder of a unique and personal distinction graciously conferred upon him by the one true Emperor in Constantinople. As Constantine Porphyrogenitus was to put it in later years: ‘This Charles, the elder, was sole ruler over all the western kingdoms and reigned as an emperor in Great Francia.” That Charlemagne was ready to accept this formula is not too surprising. Unlike the pope who had crowned him, he believed that his title of emperor could only be validated by reference to the source of all imperial power in Constantinople. This much he had achieved.
In ratifying the terms of this first treaty between the Emperor whose power was universal and eternal and an emperor whose status was personal and provisional, the Byzantines seem to have been more anxious about matters of protocol than about the defining of frontiers. Yet agreement was also reached on these more practical considerations. In 812 another embassy from Constantinople went to Aachen. It was led by Michael, Bishop of Philadelphia, accompanied by Arsaphios, now raised to the higher rank of protospatharios, and by one Theognostos. Having hailed Charlemagne in Greek and in Latin as basileus and imperator, the ambassadors got down to business. The question of territorial rights over the Byzantine provinces at the head of the Adriatic was discussed and settled in detail. The settlement was based on that made by the admiral Niketas with King Pepin five years before, but it provided a clearer definition of where the frontiers lay and of how they would affect the passage of travellers and goods and the payment of customs dues. So far as concerned Venice it was agreed that the province should remain under Byzantine jurisdiction, while continuing to pay tribute to the Frankish King of Italy. The text of the treaty was signed by Charlemagne. The second copy was signed in Constantinople by Michael I’s successor, Leo V, and confirmed by Charlemagne’s successor in 814.!
This document, though drawn up between two powers far greater than Venice, secured the new foundations for development which the Venetians had already laid when they abandoned the wreckage of their past and centred their hopes for the future on the islands of Rialto. They were still legally tied to Byzantium and still tributaries of the Franks. But they were not the property of either. The treaty of 812 guaranteed their protection against enemies from the mainland, fixed their boundaries with the Kingdom of Italy, and above all recognised the rights of their merchant ships to sail freely about their business. These benefits had been achieved not through the efforts of the Venetians themselves but through Byzantine diplomacy; and for a while the Venetians were duly grateful. They had gained the liberty to evolve in their own style with the minimum of dependence on either of the great powers that might have hemmed them in. Their submission to Byzantium assured their immunity from harm in Italy. This was in fact the last direct intervention of Byzantium in the affairs of Venice, but it was to have an enduring effect on relations between the ancient empire on the Bosporos and the emerging city-state in the lagoons.
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