There is no good reason to live where Venice is. The lagoon is shallow and brackish, the sandbars between it and the open Adriatic shift in storms, the rivers feeding it silt the channels constantly, the malarial mosquitoes are appalling in summer, there is almost no fresh water without dug cisterns, almost no soil for grain, and the wood for the piles on which everything is built had to be imported from Istria and the foothills of the Carnic Alps. In any list of plausible sites for a European capital, the Venetian lagoon ranks somewhere near a Dutch peat bog. And yet by the year 1000 there was a city there of perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, a navy, a Byzantine duchy in everything but name, and the embryonic constitution of a state that would last another seven hundred and ninety-seven years. The explanation, as with so much else in late-antique Italy, is that for the first century or so nobody chose to live there. They simply had nowhere else to go.
Refuge from the mainland
The conventional founding date of Venice is the 25th of March, 421 — the feast of the Annunciation, the day a small group of Roman citizens from the mainland is said to have founded the church of San Giacometto at Rialto. Like most foundation dates of late-antique Italian cities, it is almost certainly invented: there is no contemporary source for it, the church it commemorates is medieval, and the tradition first appears in eleventh-century chronicles writing back into legend. But the underlying claim — that people from the Roman cities of the Po valley took refuge in the lagoon during the barbarian incursions of the fifth century — is supported by archaeology. Pottery from the period appears, faintly but unmistakably, on the islands of Torcello, Burano, Mazzorbo, and Murano, in a pattern that says: this used to be empty, and now it isn't.
The incursions were severe. In 452, Attila's Huns burnt Aquileia, then one of the great cities of the Roman world, to the ground. The city never recovered. In 568 the Lombards crossed the Julian Alps and overran most of north-eastern Italy, dismantling whatever Roman administrative apparatus was left in the cities of Padua, Concordia, Altino, Treviso and Oderzo. To a Roman citizen of one of those cities, the lagoon was the nearest large area into which the Lombards' essentially land-based armies could not easily project force. There was no shame in retreating there for a season. The shame, possibly, came later, when the season did not end and the children did not come back.
Cassiodorus describes them
The earliest detailed description we have of the lagoon people is a letter written in 537 by Cassiodorus, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric's secretary, to the citizens of the Venetiae maritimae, asking them to ship provisions of wine and oil from Istria to Ravenna along the lagoon coast. The letter is famous — it is, among other things, the first written description of what would become Venice — and it is worth quoting at length, because almost every theme of the eleven-hundred-year history that follows is already audible in it. Cassiodorus addresses the lagoon dwellers as a known and competent people, organised, sea-going, and useful. He acknowledges that they live in a kind of country he cannot quite categorise.
"You possess many ships in your country, which are not in need of an ocean-pilot, since you are the very pilots of the seas. Your houses, like those of the seabirds, are sometimes on the water and sometimes on the land. You wander everywhere over your endless watery domain. Salt is the substance of all your wealth — for what man does not want salt, when he wants everything else he can do without?" — Cassiodorus, Variae, XII.24, AD 537
The letter is to be read carefully, because Cassiodorus had a flair for elegant overstatement. But the salt is exact. From the sixth century onward, the lagoon's primary economic export was salt, extracted from evaporated seawater in shallow rectangular pans called saline, traded up the rivers of north-east Italy to the inland cities that could not produce it themselves. The Venetian salt monopoly, which by the fourteenth century would be one of the most ruthless and lucrative in Europe, has its origin here, in the late Roman period, before there is anything anyone would yet call Venice.
From Byzantine duchy to local self-rule
The political affiliation of the lagoon during the seventh and eighth centuries was, formally, Byzantine. The Eastern Roman Empire still considered the Venetic settlements part of the Exarchate of Ravenna, the imperial dependency that controlled what remained of Roman Italy north of Rome. A military governor — initially called magister militum, later dux, in the Venetian dialect doge — was appointed from Constantinople, or in practice elected locally and confirmed there. But the distance from Constantinople was great, the imperial revenues were small, and the local capacity for self-government was rising in proportion as Byzantine capacity declined.
The traditional date for the first locally elected doge is 697, when, according to the chronicler John the Deacon writing three centuries later, a man named Paolo Lucio Anafesto was elected at Heraclea by acclamation of the lagoon's free citizens. Modern historians regard Paolo Anafesto as semi-legendary — the first doge for whom we have firm independent evidence is Orso Ipato in 727 — but the surrounding shift is real. By the early eighth century the lagoon was effectively governing itself, in the name of an emperor whose officials rarely arrived and whose tax-collectors were politely ignored.
The doge was, in theory, a Byzantine governor. In practice, by 730, he was the elected head of a self-governing maritime community. He held office for life, was elected by the assembled freemen of the lagoon, and ruled from a wooden palace on the island of Olivolo, near what is now the Arsenal. For the next two hundred years there would be considerable confusion about whether the Venetic settlements were a province, a duchy, a republic, or something else entirely. The settlers, characteristically, made no effort to clarify.
Where to put a capital
The lagoon at this period had several competing population centres. Torcello, in the north, was for three centuries probably the largest and richest — its cathedral was founded in 639 and contains, in the apse, a mosaic Madonna that is one of the masterworks of Byzantine art on Italian soil. Heraclea, on the lagoon's northern edge near the mouth of the Piave, was the first seat of the doge. Malamocco, on the long sandbar of the Lido, was the second. The Rialto islands — the cluster around what is now Piazza San Marco — were inhabited but secondary, a fishing settlement.
This would change in 810, when a Frankish army under Pepin, the son of Charlemagne, attacked the lagoon with the intention of bringing it formally under Carolingian rule. He took Malamocco. The doge of the time, Agnello Particiaco, retreated with most of the population to the Rialto islands, which were further into the lagoon and harder to reach by ship-borne troops. Pepin laid siege for six months. He could not cross the shallow water; his deeper-draft galleys ran aground, and his attempts to wade across were defeated by the rising tides and a population that knew every channel. The Franks withdrew. Within two years the seat of the duchy had been formally transferred to Rialto. The accident of one defensible siege had given a city its location.
The lagoon was now, for the first time, a place that had chosen to be where it was rather than fled to it. Within a generation it would acquire the body of an evangelist, build a basilica to house him, and start calling itself by his name. But that is the next chapter.
End of Chapter I