An Attila unto the State of Venice

On April 25, 1797, Francesco Donà and Lunardo Giustinian arrived in Graz (modern Austria), two exhausted diplomats representing an equally weary and addled state.  They came to see the Emperor Napoleon, Consul of the French Republic, and to beg him for mercy and for restraint.  Donà and Giustinian spoke for arguably the only state in the world that actually remembered other consuls of a previous epoch, those appointed by the emperors in Constantinople and Ravenna.  Donà and Giustinian came from Venetian Republic, La Serenissima.

In the early days of consuls and western emperors, Venice as we know it didn't exist, either culturally or politically or even geographically.  The islands which we today recognize for their palazzos and church towers and throngs of sunburnt tourists are the product of landfill and dredging and tens of thousands of wooden posts thrust into the lagoon bottom which hold up Venice and which now are slowly sinking back into the sands that support them. Before the Venice was Venice, the Rialto (the central area of the city) and the Lidi (the barrier islands that hem in the lagoon from the Adriatic) and Murano and Burano and all the others were sandbars in a swamp overshadowed by the real cities on the mainland.  Cities like Aquilea and Padua and Treviso, with roman roads and amphitheaters and, critically, with patriarchs or bishops. The islands were at first a refuge, a safe haven that would remain so for 1300 years. According to tradition, Venice was founded on March 25, 421, 11 years after Alaric sacked Rome and exactly 1378 years and one month before Donà and Giustinian sat gobsmacked before a new Emperor of the West.  As the Gothic armies and then Attila the Hun marched from the east across northern Italy in the fifth century, they sacked the important places, Aquilea and Padua and the rest, but they ignored the lagoon.  Particularly in the face of the Huns, many townspeople on the mainland faced a choice between braving the war at home or scratching a living from the Venetian lagoon.  If any one man was responsible for turning Venice from a derelict marsh into a real medieval population center, it was Attila the Hun, both in historical fact and in the Venetian popular imagination thereafter.

We'll speed through most of Venetian history. After Junstinian's Gothic Wars of the 6th century brought northern Italy to heel under the Exarchate of Ravenna, Venice came once again under the nominal protection of the Roman state.  The city was nearly taken by Pepin in the early 9th century, but in the end he lacked the necessary resources to cross the water of the lagoon.  It was threatened again by Stephen of Hungary and others, but Venice was never captured.  Trusting the strength of natural defences, the city ignored the Italian mainland for many centuries and focused east where Venetian merchants held special rights in many ports of the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt (even after the Arab conquest) and where Venice itself held many colonies directly.  It grew into a wealthy diplomatic and economic power-broker that played host to emperors and popes and crusading armies.  But as commercial fortunes waned with the rise of the Ottomans and, critically, the Portuguese discovery of sea routes to Asia, Venice began to lose both its colonies in the East and its Byzantine-influenced culture and became, for the first time, Italian.  After amassing a sizable mainland empire largely in the Po valley of northern Italy, Venice entered a period of stasis and military decline which was in full swing by the 18th century.  Venetian merchants were not insignificant but were largely out-competed by Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch and Englishmen on the world stage.  Rather than the pivotal commercial link between East and West that it had once been, Venice was just another regional state in another corner of Europe, powerful enough to continue on but thoroughly at the whims of the world's Great Powers.

And then suddenly, all the Great Powers were at war, and the careful diplomatic balancing act that had safeguarded Venice crumbled.  The republic stayed officially neutral for most of the war, fearing both the French and the Austrians.  But when Venice failed to halt a Habsburg army from crossing south through its territory, Napoleon saw his chance to dominate northern Italy.  He would have his wish.  Just four days after his fateful meeting in Graz with the Venetian emissaries, the Venetian Senate met to conduct formal business of no special kind, and when that was concluded it adjourned as normal.  It never met again.  And then the Great Council, another vital organ of Venetian governance, met on May 12 to dissolve the Republic itself as crowds outside roared and chanted Viva San Marco! in protest.  Most delegates -- if they showed up at all -- slipped out of their robes, out a side door, and finally out of the city entirely as soon as the meeting adjourned.  The last Doge, Ludovico Manin, simply returned to his apartments, where he removed his ducal corno hat and allegedly handed it to his valet with the words Tolè, questa no la dopero più (Take it, I won't be needing it again).

So what did Napoleon say to Francesco Donà and Lunardo Giustinian that convinced the Republic to dissolve itself and end its thousand-year political history just four days later, without even a French assault on the city?  Most of his recorded tirade that evening revolved around detailed foreign policy of the previous year and the alleged mistreatments of French prisoners in Venice, which we won't go into here.  But Napoleon also saw the Republic itself as an affront to his revolutionary principles; it was, after all, a strict oligarchy just as ideologically opposed to mass democracy as were the conservative monarchies of its day.  And on this point Napoleon was clear: even just for its anti-Republicanism and its patrician councils that decided matters of state without the people, Venice had to go.  "I will have no more Inquisition, no more Senate."  And then finally, in his heavily Corsican-accented Italian, he uttered the words that would once and for all seal the fate of Venice, unmake the city just as it had been formed.

Io sarò un Attila per lo Stato veneto.  I shall be an Attila unto the State of Venice.

Source: John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice, 2003.