Venice (52 page)

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the city was no longer building enough ships; its share of the import trade from the Near East was shrinking; the merchants of Holland and England exploited the recently discovered Cape route to trade with the Indies; the German market collapsed, in part as a result of the Thirty Years War. There were only three Venetian merchants in Constantinople. The depredations of sea pirates meant, also, that the mercantile routes were under constant threat.

The Venetian government, in the face of economic competition from other European states, decided that its pre-eminent duty was to maintain standards of production; costs, therefore, remained high. In the face of challenge and competition the city reverted to its innate traditionalism. It retained all the institutional rigour of its existing guilds; the work practices of the manufacturers were unchanged. Laws were passed that gave priority to Venetian shipping in Venetian ports; goods destined for Venice could only be carried in Venetian-owned ships. Its conservatism and its new protectionism meant that it could not effectively confront the quickly changing mercantile world of the 1630s and 1640s. Cheaper manufactures undercut the Venetian markets in such areas as dyeing and printing. Venice retained its hold in the trade of luxury goods; in all other items, it fell behind. The annals are dominated by the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of a once great economic and imperial power.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century Venice was placed under solemn interdict by the pope, thus effectively being excommunicated. The interdict failed of its effect, largely as a result of the indifference of the Venetian people to papal disapproval. When a member of the government told a prominent ecclesiastic that no papal bull was to be opened or read in the territories of the republic he replied, “I shall proceed as the Holy Spirit inspires me.” The Venetian
official told him that “the Holy Spirit has already inspired the council of ten to hang all disobedient subjects.” When a priest conformed to the papal edict and closed down his church, a gallows was erected outside the porch on the following morning. “These leaders of your senate,” one pope had told a Venetian ambassador fifty years before, “are tough fellows and need a lot of cooking.” The successful rebuff to the pope materially hindered papal ambitions in the rest of Italy, but the threat of excommunication added to the impression that the independence of the city could never be taken for granted.

The sense of threat was given dramatic expression in the discovery of, and almost hysterical reaction to, what became known as “the Spanish plot.” It is said that in 1618 a mercenary from Normandy approached the Spanish government, and its representatives in Italy, with a plan to destroy the city of the lagoon. On a certain day his agents would set fire to the Arsenal, the Mint and the ducal palace; at the same time all of the Venetian nobles would be massacred, and the Spanish fleet would take charge of all the passages into the city. Venice would fall to Spain. Such was the plan. According to report, it was enthusiastically received by the Spanish ambassador in Venice, the marquis of Bedmar, and by the French authorities. The duke of Osuna, the Spanish viceroy of Naples, was deeply complicit.

Yet, as so often happened in Venice, the conspirators were betrayed by secret informants. The scheme was revealed to the council of ten, who took prompt measures on 17 May 1618. By chance it happened to be the day when a new doge was to be elected. So the city was filled with travellers and interested observers.

On the morning of 18 May the people of Venice woke to find the bodies of two men suspended from a gibbet between the two columns of the piazzetta. The celebrations for the election of the new doge took place, over the next three days, with the bodies of the condemned in full view. Nothing was said about them by the authorities. It became known that they were Frenchmen. Some of the inns, populated by Frenchmen, suddenly found that they had vacant rooms. It was said that five hundred other conspirators had been drowned on that night in the canals. Bedmar was forced to flee. The French ambassador, also under suspicion, took the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to Loreto.

The silence of the authorities might be construed as embarrassment. It seems very likely that there was no real conspiracy at all, and that the
council of ten acted in panic on the basis of false information. Their reaction suggests, however, that the leaders of the city considered Venice to be in imminent danger of destruction.

In historical literature “the Spanish plot” has taken its place with the “gunpowder plot” and the “massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s” as an emblematic event. It was, according to Sir Henry Wotton, “the foulest and fearfullest thing that hath come to light since the foundation of the city.” There were various explanations and interpretations of the conspiracy, none of them entirely convincing. It has, for example, been claimed that the Venetian authorities were in league with Osuna, to bring Naples under Venetian domination, but on fear of discovery of the plot they had covered up the evidence by killing all of Osuna’s emissaries in the city. There may have been a conspiracy, and a conspiracy within a conspiracy, with all the machinations of a convoluted plot utterly suited to a suspicious and theatrical city. It became the subject of plays, and pamphlets, of the most melodramatic nature. It inspired Otway’s greatest play,
Venice Preserv’d
. Venice has always been preserved. It always will be. One Venetian proverb,
sempre crolla ma non cade
, tells the story. It is always collapsing but it never falls down.

There was a further and major blow to civic harmony twelve years later; in the course of the great plague of 1630 almost fifty thousand residents of the city died. The government undertook a major effort in health care and sanitation; at all costs, at a time of weakness, civic panic or disorder had to be avoided. Yet the population dipped to 102,000, and never properly recovered in the following centuries. This was not necessarily a matter of lasting regret to the authorities. There was of course a fall in tax revenues, but the relative depopulation meant that there were more jobs available for those who remained and that wages increased exponentially. Incomes rose, and prices fell. At times of emergency, too, the city could prove its self-sufficiency.

How in any case can we speak of failure and decline in the context of a city that still survives intact? By the end of the seventeenth century Venice had a working polity. The English ambassador had in 1612 described the senators as “growne fractious, vindictive, loose, and unthriftie”; yet they had held together. In fact Venice experienced a commercial resurgence by the end of the century. Trade with Germany and the Turks of Constantinople enjoyed a revival. The
revenues from taxes on shipping increased by some 70 per cent in the last three decades of the seventeenth century. The standard of living in the city had not fallen at all. It may have been no longer an international market, but it became a vital regional port serving the territories of the Po valley. A great scheme of public works was instituted to increase the traffic along the Adige river. New roads were built along the skirts of the lagoon. Projects were formed for legal, educational and technological reform. The functions of the city had changed. It had adapted and survived. It became in every sense a local, rather than a western, power.

By the eighteenth century, at the very latest, the city lost any illusion about its status as an imperial force. It held only Dalmatia, and some of the Ionian islands. But this was not necessarily a matter for regret. It was said of England in the twentieth century that it had lost an empire and had not yet found a new role. This was not the case with Venice. The city acted as the entrepôt for goods destined for western Europe in general and for the North Sea shores in particular. Thirty English, and fifteen Dutch, merchantmen visited the port each year. Trade in the latter half of the eighteenth century was in no way inferior to that of the fifteenth century. Canals were being deepened to accommodate the larger sailing vessels, and new canals were being dug on the mainland to divert the waters of the rivers threatening the levels of the lagoon. In regional matters Venice adopted a stance of studied neutrality, having realised that wars and rumours of wars were not good for business on the Italian mainland. The city, perhaps unwisely in the light of subsequent developments, became accustomed to peace. Yet its removal from battle also helped its reputation as a wise arbiter and a standard of good governance. The constitution was in no way adapted or amended.

In the eighteenth century Venice, as we have already observed, set itself the task of becoming the city of art and the city of pleasure. It redefined itself as the most seductive haven for foreign visitors. The public buildings were renovated, and the churches were restored. New theatres, and new hospitals, were erected. This was the age of Canaletto, whose views of the city have created a perfect myth of graceful urbanism. But this was also the century of Giambattista Tiepolo, born in 1696 and dead by 1770. He inherited all the liveliness and energy of his Venetian forebears, and thus is an apt token of the
fact that the spirit and greatness of the city did not die. They revived, and flourished, under new circumstances. The first half of the eighteenth century, too, witnessed the music of Vivaldi. Is there not something more glorious about making music than making war? This was not a dying city. It was a city more vibrant than ever before.

That happy state would not last for ever. Quick bright things often end in confusion. By the end of the eighteenth century Venice had lost its freedom. It did not lose its fabric, or its inheritance, but it lost its status as a republic. Twenty years before the catastrophe, there was already nervous fever in the air. When Carlo Contarini addressed the great council in 1779, he declared that “all is in confusion, in disorder. Our commerce is languishing; bankruptcies continually prove it. Food is extraordinarily dear. That which sufficed to maintain our families and left a margin to help the State, is now insufficient to keep us alive.” In the following year the doge, Paolo Renier, conveyed approximately the same sentiment, “We have no forces,” he told the great council, “neither on land nor on sea; we have no alliances. We live by luck, by accident, and solely dependent upon the conception of Venetian prudence which others entertain about us.” In 1784 the patrician, Andrea Tron, completed the litany of complaint. “The old enduring maxims and laws that created and could still create a great state have been forgotten …” The trade of Venice was now confined to “comforts, excessive luxuries, vain shows, alleged amusements and vices.”

The three men were in their different ways intuiting what could otherwise not have been foreseen. Who could have predicted the rise of the Napoleonic Empire in Europe and the submission of Venice to one man’s will? Yet of course it is not the consequence of one man. In
War and Peace
Tolstoy enquired, in relation to the phenomenon of Napoleon, “Why do wars or revolutions happen? We do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other men form themselves into a certain combination in which all take part; and we say that this is the nature of men, that this is a law.”

The “fall” of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or a triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced. That is the flaw in all moralistic interpretations of historical events. We must discount the possibility of ever discerning a purpose in human affairs, except that of
blind instinct reaching its fulfilment, and we must admit that any ultimate purpose will be for ever beyond our understanding. Why did Venice “fall”? We may return to
War and Peace
to understand that an answer is not possible. “Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?”

The end came quickly. Ludovico Manin was elected the doge of Venice in 1789; it was by far the most expensive election in Venetian history, costing half as much again as the previous ducal election of 1779. The cost was hardly worth it. Manin, the 120th doge continuing an unbroken line of rulers since AD 697, was the last doge in Venetian history. Eight years after his accession the city of patrician government was shaken and destroyed by the conqueror still riding on the back of popular revolution. Bonaparte, twenty-six years old, was annoyed by Venice. He was annoyed that some of its mainland territories had become the centre of French émigré activity, and that the Venetian authorities had allowed the Austrian enemy to pass through its territories. When he arrived in the Po region he sent his agents into the city with the message of “liberation.” The forces of Napoleon were not to be considered as blood-thirsty plebeian revolutionaries, but as a dedicated army ready to remove the injustice and ineptitude of an antique and discredited regime. There were indeed some Venetians who would have welcomed him.