The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (28 page)

Everywhere around us are the brags of empire – Venice, George Eliot remarked once, was ‘a creature born with an imperial attitude’. The Doge’s Palace is full of them, in huge allegorical studies of Venice Crowned By Fame, Sitting on the World with Lion, Surrounded by Virtues Receiving the Sceptre of Dominion, or in depictions more specific, like vivid reconstructions of the sack of Zadar, or Vettore Pisani taking Kotor in 1378. Outside, just beside the Porta della Carta, are the four little knightly figures, embracing each other in porphyry, which we saw the Venetians loot in Constantinople on page 40. Nearby are the ornamental columns from the same page and all around are the marble slabs like veined silk, the porphyry panels and the miscellaneous pieces of antique carving brought home from the Crusade as ballast.

The Piazza, when we look at it now, is pure empire. The very shape and scale of it bespeaks a consequence grander than any city-state’s: Napoleon’s finest drawing-room in Europe was really a lobby for the eastern Mediterranean. Tremendously out of scale above us stands the Campanile, no longer the one that Dandolo knew, for that fell down in 1902, but still recognizably a beacon tower as well as a belfry, upon whose summit the angel stands sublime beneath his halo, to salute the captains as they pass. On the loggetta at its foot Jupiter, playing the part of Crete, Venus personifying Cyprus, lie in attendance upon a Venice disguised as Justice: nearby are the three bronze flagpoles from which on State occasions flew, according to the current state of empire, the flags of Cyprus, Crete, Euboea or the Peloponnese. The great square all around is as crowded, as variegated, as endlessly entertaining and as wickedly expensive as ever it was in the days of dominion, when it was habitually frequented, we are told, by ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea’.

Presiding over it all, as ever, is the Basilica, no longer the Doge’s private chapel, nor even alas a state church, but still the seat of the Venetian Patriarchate, still the shrine of everything
Venetian, and still an eclectic and magical jumble of many rites, anomalies and nuances of the Christian faith. Its façade seems almost to sag with the weight of the gold ornament, statuary, fragments of ancient art, grace-notes of marble and afterthoughts of architecture added to it since Dandolo’s day, so that its still graceful and airy outline looks as though it is straining to move, but is held down by the sheer weight of its magnificence. The shallow Byzantine domes of the thirteenth century have been covered with more bulbous cupolas now, giving it a much more eastern look, and upon each of these there is a device of golden frivolity, giving the whole a last exuberant touch of sparkle.

Into this inimitable building, over the eight centuries since we began our voyage, the Venetians have packed shiploads of loot. The treasury is a jackdaw’s nest of stolen reliquaries, chalices and sacred ornaments, bones, fingers, hair-locks and blood-phials of countless saints, exquisite altar-pieces from the lost churches of Byzantium, marvellous vestments and episcopal rings from Greece, the Aegean and the further east. The Zen Chapel, once the State entrance to the building, is supposed to be walled with the marble and verd-antique tombstones of Byzantine emperors. The Pala d’Oro, the great gold screen behind the high altar, with its 1,300 pearls, 300 sapphires, 300 emeralds and 15 rubies, is studded with the lovely enamels the Crusaders took from Constantinople, and in its centre the figure of the Emperor John II Comnenus, its original patron, has been metamorphosed into the Doge Ordelafo Falier.

In her own chapel to the north of the high altar is the Nikopoeia, that most holy prize of empire. If she served the Byzantine emperors well and long, she served the Venetian Republic better and longer. The Venetians adopted her, like the Byzantines, as their Madonna of Victory; before her image supplicatory Masses were held at the beginnings of wars, Masses of thanksgiving after victories. She was adorned by the Venetians beyond her original simplicity, and set in a sumptuous frame, but still from its recesses her lustrous eyes looked out, smoky but reassuring, to bless the admirals before they sailed, or congratulate the loyal
condottieri.

In 1979 some of the jewels from the Madonna’s frame were stolen by a pair of young toughs from the mainland, who had
concealed themselves inside the Basilica when it closed for the night, and rushed out with their trophies when the caretaker opened it in the morning, giving him as they passed, like janissaries at Nicosia, a valedictory clout on the head. The jewels were soon recovered, but I happened to be in Venice on the day of the theft, and went along to the Basilica to attend the Mass of repentance and supplication that the Patriarch immediately held. Never was history so poignantly played out. A profound sense of sadness filled the fane, nuns sighed and priests blew their noses heavily, as they mourned the desecration of that particularly cherished piece of stolen property.

Much in this city falls more easily into place, once you have travelled the imperial routes. What are those crumbled relief-maps affixed to the façade of Santa Maria Zobenigo, and why are they there? They are the fortresses of Split, Corfu, Iraklion and Zadar and they are there because members of the Barbaro family, patrons of the church, fought actions in all those places. What recumbent hero is this, high on the wall of San Zanipolo, attended by Roman soldiers? It is the fighting Doge Pietro Mocenigo, formerly Captain-General of the Sea, whom we met with his galleys at Cyprus on page 96, and whose epitaph is frank and simple:
From The Booty Of Enemies.
Does the funeral church of San Michele, on the cemetery island, look curiously familiar? It does: it is thought to have been based on Orsini’s masterpiece, the cathedral at Šibenik.

The remains of Morosini the Peloponnesian, brought home from Nauplia, He as you might expect beneath the biggest funeral slab in Venice, in the church of San Stefano, around the corner from the Campo Morosini. The remains of Pisani, victor of Chioggia, and Venier, victor of Lepanto, lie near each other in San Zanipolo, the first beneath a fourteenth-century stone statue, the second beneath a twentieth-century bronze. The remains of Jacopo Pesaro the Bishop-Admiral lie in his own family chapel in the Frari – he did everything in style, and close beside him is the marvellous altarpiece, showing the Pesaro family prostrate before the Virgin and Child, which he himself commissioned from Titian when his fighting days were over. Look hard at the tomb of
Bragadino in the south aisle of San Zanipolo. It is surrounded by symbols of fortitude and virtue, lions winged and wingless, cherubs, coats of arms, and on its bas-relief is portrayed the general’s terrible end, his degradation before Ali Pasha at the gate of Famagusta, his flaying alive beside the cathedral in the city square. In the heart of the composition, though, is a small stone urn: within it there lies, peaceful at last, the hero’s poor scarred skin, brought home from Constantinople at such risk and sacrifice.

The greatest of all the winged lions, the one who must have roared the loudest through the storm at Methoni, stands guard above the gate of the Arsenal, the power-house of the entire imperial undertaking. He is attended by four wingless lions, all trophies of empire. On the far right is the now re-capitated lion which Morosini mentioned in his dispatch from Athens on page 134. On the extreme left is the lion who used to spout water from his mouth on the harbour-front at Piraeus, and who gave his name indeed to the Port of the Lion there: he is inscribed on his flank with a runic inscription, cut it is thought during some Grecian engagement by members of the Varangian Guard who protected the Byzantine emperors so formidably in Chapter Two.

The Arsenal behind them is a shipyard to this day. It has been greatly extended in the centuries since its foundation, but if you stand on the wooden bridge outside its twin protective towers, you may look inside to see exactly the dockyard from which, in the years of empire, the warships of Venice emerged with such phenomenal profusion. They sailed to the open sea beneath your feet, only pausing at the quayside commissariat, we are told, to be provisioned, victualled and armed for all the contingencies of the trade routes. Ships are still prepared for sea in there, and in an iron shed there very likely lies, being touched up for the next civic ceremony, the latest descendant of the Doge’s
bucintoro,
flash and grandiose as ever.

Here is the church of the Greeks, with its precarious leaning tower over the Rio dei Greci, and its attendant Hellenic Institute. It was to this nucleus of Greekness, founded by Cretans and Corfiotes, that the exiled writers, philosophers and theologians came, and it possesses a famous collection of pictures from the Veneto-Cretan school. Around the corner is the Scuola of the
Schiavoni, the charitable guild of the Slavs. They were powerful in Venice, providing many of the workers of the Arsenal besides many sailors, and they commissioned one of their compatriots to decorate the building for them: Carpaccio the Istrian, whose exquisite fantasies of saints, cities, dragons and little dogs make the building one of the loveliest things in Venice.

You cannot evade empire in the streets and shrines of Venice. There are captured Turkish flags in museums, and great wooden models of colonial fortresses, and imperial pictures everywhere, and scattered across the city, it is said, are the bodies of fifty saints, and segments of many more, most of them brought home as imperial spoils, some snatched in the nick of time from the Turks – like the head of Athanasius the creed-maker, which we last came across at Methoni on page 116, and is now at rest in the imperial city. The best-remembered of the Doges are still those, like Dandolo, Morosini or Venier of Lepanto, who sailed with their fleets on their imperial ventures. The greatest of the Venetian artists were not above portraying imperial events. And we are not in the least surprised to learn that Bajamonte Tiepolo, whose attempted coup d’état in 1310 was thwarted by a stone mortar dropped on his standard-bearer’s head by an old lady in the Merceria – we are not at all surprised to discover that this villain had previously been in trouble among the colonials of Methoni.

The name of the Querini-Stampalia Palace, on the Grand Canal, is a reminder that many aristocratic Venetian families had colonial stakes: the Querinis were feudarchs of Stampalia in the Aegean. The name of the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, now the municipal casino, is a reminder that many a colonial clan made its fortunes in the metropolis – the Calergis were originally Greeks from Crete. The Natural History Museum, between the Rialto bridge and the railway station, was once the Fondaco dei Turchi, the Turkish merchant headquarters established here in 1621, in the lull between the loss of Cyprus and the Ottoman attack on Crete.

Few women figure in the annals of the Venetian empire (or for that matter of Venice itself) but the one tragic heroine of the tale, Caterina Cornaro, is certainly not forgotten in the city. Her last Venetian palace, now the Monte di Pietà, the municipal-pawnshop,
is still called the Palazzo Cornaro della Regina (if only to differentiate it from the fifteen other palaces that perpetuate her family name). A day trip to Asolo, Caterina’s pastoral fief in the hills, is a favourite optional extra of the package tour. Caterina herself is assiduously pointed out by guides in Gentile Bellini’s famous painting, in the Accademia gallery, of a Miracle of the True Cross at the bridge of San Lorenzo: there she kneels, plump, pious and tightly stayed, on the edge of a canal with her row of waiting ladies. Caterina’s reception as Queen of Cyprus is portrayed in bas-relief in the church of San Zanipolo, where the keys of Famagusta are handed over to her on the tomb of her protector Mocenigo. Her corpse has been moved a few hundred yards down the street from the church of the Apostoli to the church of San Salvatore; but there, in her luxuriant funerary chapel, the sacristan still rolls the carpet back with a reverential flourish, to show you where the poor Queen lies, wrapped in her rough habit.

If you can read the imperial text in the substance of Venice, you can read it in the people too. Venice is never more herself than in the high days of the summer season, when the city is jammed to the last attic bedroom with its profitable visitors. This is how it was when
La Dominante
was still dominant. Today’s sightseeing hordes are yesterday’s pilgrims, itinerant traders, sailors, supplicants. The Hotel Danieli, the Pensione Accademia, the Youth Hostel on Giudecca are only successors to the hostelries which, in Enrico Dandolo’s day, occupied the whole southern side of the Piazza. Florian’s and Quadri’s, the cafés whose string orchestras compete so vigorously across the square, stand in the line of the shops which, in 1580, introduced coffee to its first European customers. The Biennale Festival of modern art, the Film Festival on the Lido, are natural descendants of the Great Whitsun trade fair of Venice, where the merchants of east and west met to exchange orders, display samples and indulge in industrial espionage.

There are Jews still in the ghetto of Venice, more prosperous now than they have been for generations, and their synagogues have been handsomely restored. There are still Greeks to worship at their church of San Giorgio. The Armenians, many of whom followed the Venetian flag step by step before the advance of the Turk, have their own island monastery, church and school – the chief Armenian Catholic school in existence, to which students
come from Istanbul, Damascus and Teheran. Above all the Slavs, who did so much of the work of the Venetian Empire, are recognizable everywhere to this day.

In 1797, when the Republic was at its last gasp, a stout message reached the Doge from Dalmatia: ‘Put on your crown,’ it said, ‘and come to Zara!’ Later still it was Slav reinforcements from Dalmatia, sailing into Venice at the last minute, who offered the final chance of resistance to Napoleon: the Doge Ludovico Manin was much too frightened to use them, and indeed was terribly scared by the
feu de joie
which those loyal colonials fired in salute outside his window. By then Venice was half-Slav, and it remains hardly an Italianate city in the popular kind. Those thoughtful blue eyes, those hefty shoulders of bargees and market-men, come from the coasts of Dalmatia, so long the recruiting-grounds of the Republic; and the gondolier himself, the very herald of Venice, often has in his veins the sea-salt blood of Perast or Hvar.