I think that focusing on French jingoism alone is futile. Yanks had better view the whole of Europe as the contemporary equivalent of the Byzantine empire of yore; likewise, the US is the modern avatar of the Venetian city-state.... In that perspective, the current tide of events can be viewed as merely a dull rehash of the epic relations between Byzantium and Venice in the early XIIIth century. Just read the following book and you'll have a clue to what awaits us in the coming months/years:
Byzantium and Venice
A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations
By Donald M. Nicol, Professor Emeritus in the University of London (Cambridge University Press 1988)
CONTENTS
Preface
List of abbreviations
Maps of the Byzantine and Venetian worlds
1 Venice: the Byzantine province
2 Venice: the Byzantine protectorate
3 Venice: the ally of Byzantium
4 Venice: the partner of Byzantium
5 Byzantium, Venice and the First Crusade
6 The parting of the ways
7 The calm before the storm
8 The Fourth Crusade
9 Venice in Byzantium: the Empire of Romania
10 Venice: champion of a lost cause
11 Byzantium, Venice and the Angevin threat
12 Byzantium, Venice and Genoa
13 Conflicting interests and competing claims
14 Byzantium, Venice and the Turks
15 Byzantium: the victim of commercial rivalry
16 The profit and honour of Venice
17 Jewels for an island
18 Byzantium in thrall to the Turks and in debt to Venice
19 Byzantine optimism and Venetian vacillation
20 Byzantium the suppliant of Venice
21 The worst news for all of Christendom: Venice and the fall of Constantinople
22 Legacies and debts
Byzantine Emperors
Doges of Venice
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Constantinople and Venice, the two richest and most romantic Christian cities in the early Middle Ages, were separated by 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.
[...]
D.M.M.
London, 1987
____________________ |
