Sources — The Republic of Venice

General works

Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. London: Allen Lane, 1977–81; one vol. 1982. The narrative history, and still the best way in. Affectionate, sometimes credulous about the legend, and superbly told.
Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. The standard scholarly account, strongest on ships, trade and money. Lane is the historian who took the economy seriously.
Crowley, Roger. City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire. London: Faber, 2011. The Stato da Mar told as narrative, and the best popular treatment of the empire rather than the city.
Madden, Thomas F. Venice: A New History. New York: Viking, 2012. A useful corrective to the decline-and-decadence frame; occasionally over-corrects.
Morris, Jan. Venice. London: Faber, 1960; rev. 1993. Not a history and the best book ever written about the place. Take it with you.
Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. 3 vols. London, 1851–53. Wrong about a great deal and unmatched on the buildings themselves. Read the abridgement unless you have a winter free.

Chapters I–IV

Nicol, Donald M. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. The essential book on the relationship that made Venice, and that Venice destroyed in 1204.
Phillips, Jonathan. The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Queller, Donald E., and Thomas F. Madden. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Argues the diversion was accident rather than Venetian design. Read against Phillips.
Crouzet-Pavan, Élisabeth. Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. On how the city constructed its own image, and the best book on the myth as a myth.
Dorigo, Wladimiro. Venezia origini. 3 vols. Milan: Electa, 1983. In Italian. The archaeology of the lagoon settlement, and the demolition of a good deal of the founding legend.
Demus, Otto. The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Chapters V–VII

Finlay, Robert. Politics in Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980. How the constitution actually operated, as against how it was described.
Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds. Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. The single most useful book on this list for a reader who wants the sources themselves.
Lane, Frederic C. Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934. On the Arsenale, and still unsuperseded.
Mallett, M. E., and J. R. Hale. The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400 to 1617. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Arbel, Benjamin. Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Crete before and after 1669, and the best account of what Venetian and then Ottoman rule actually meant to the governed.
Setton, Kenneth M. Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991.
Crowley, Roger. Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521–1580. London: Faber, 2008. Malta, Cyprus and Lepanto.

Chapters VIII–X

Del Negro, Piero, and Paolo Preto, eds. Storia di Venezia, vol. VIII: L'ultima fase della Serenissima. Rome: Treccani, 1998. In Italian. The standard treatment of the final century.
Plant, Margaret. Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. The two centuries after the republic, which most histories treat as an epilogue and which deserve better.
Pemble, John. Venice Rediscovered. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. On the nineteenth-century invention of Venice as an object of tourism and nostalgia.
Zorzi, Alvise. Venezia scomparsa. Milan: Electa, 1972; rev. 2001. In Italian. What was demolished, filled in and lost — the counter-guidebook.
Davis, Robert C., and Garry R. Marvin. Venice, the Tourist Maze. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. On what mass tourism has done to the city, written before it got worse.
Settis, Salvatore. If Venice Dies. Trans. André Naffis-Sahely. New York: New Vessel Press, 2016. A short, angry and well-argued polemic on depopulation and the cruise ships.

Society

Ravid, Benjamin. Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. The standard collection on the ghetto and the legal position that created it.
Calabi, Donatella. Venice and its Jews: 500 Years since the Founding of the Ghetto. Milan: Officina Libraria, 2016.
Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State. Oxford: Blackwell, 1971. The scuole, the hospitals and the poor law. The book that made the confraternities visible.
Chojnacki, Stanley. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Built from the criminal records, and the least romantic book about Venice ever written.
Davis, Robert C. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The arsenalotti as a labour aristocracy, and how the state bought their loyalty.

Contemporary sources

Sanudo, Marin. I Diarii. 58 vols. Venice, 1879–1903. Selections in Venice, Cità Excelentissima, ed. Patricia Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Fifty-eight volumes of daily record, 1496–1533, by a patrician who wrote down everything. The greatest diary of the Renaissance and barely read.
Polo, Marco. The Travels. Trans. Nigel Cliff. London: Penguin, 2015. Dictated to a romance writer in a Genoese prison in 1298, and the qualification matters.
Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Trans. Lewes Lewkenor. London, 1599. The classic statement of the myth of Venice, by a Venetian, written to be admired abroad. It was, hugely — including by the English republicans of the 1650s.
Sarpi, Paolo. History of the Council of Trent. London, 1619. By the state theologian who defended Venice against the interdict of 1606 and was stabbed in the street for it.
Casanova, Giacomo. History of My Life. Trans. Willard Trask. 12 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. For the eighteenth-century city, and for the only successful escape from the Leads.
Coryat, Thomas. Coryat's Crudities. London, 1611. An English traveller's account of Venice in 1608, including the first description of a table fork by an Englishman.