There is a problem with the title of this chapter, which is that the first doge of Venice probably did not exist. Or, more precisely, the first doge to whom contemporary documents directly attest is not Paolo Lucio Anafesto, the figure traditionally named, but Orso Ipato, who held the office in 727. Anafesto is named only in chronicles written between two and four centuries later, and his existence has been argued about by historians since the seventeenth century. The traditional date 697 — the year of his alleged election at Heraclea — is therefore best understood as a foundation myth, in the manner of the 25th of March 421 for the city itself: a date that early-medieval Venetians settled on in retrospect, because they needed one. None of which makes 697 unimportant. It marks the first moment at which Venice began to describe its own past as a country.
The office, before there were doges
The Latin word dux — leader, commander, originally a Roman military rank below a general — had by the late seventh century come to mean a Byzantine governor of a particular kind. Doges, dukes and dogerati of various Byzantine peripheries appear in this period from Calabria to Sardinia to the Crimean shore. In all these cases the office was nominally appointed by the emperor, in practice selected by a local assembly, and confirmed in Constantinople by despatch. The Venetic lagoon's doge was no different. He was the senior military officer of a Byzantine maritime province, with the additional duties of representing it to outside powers, maintaining its salt monopoly, judging serious legal disputes, and convening the lagoon's free citizens — by tradition, the male heads of families with land — in general assembly on questions of moment.
For the first generation of the office, the men chosen for it died of natural causes in due time. After that, the office began to attract the attention of factions within the lagoon, and the natural-causes era ended. Between 717 and 802 there were eight doges. Two were murdered, two blinded — a Byzantine punishment intended to disqualify the victim from holding office without killing him — one driven into exile, and three abdicated under pressure. The eighth, Maurizio Galbaio, succeeded in passing the office to his son and grandson, which is to say, came uncomfortably close to converting it into a hereditary princedom. The Venetic free citizens, recognising what was happening, deposed the grandson, exiled the family, and installed a non-Galbaio successor. The lesson — that the office of doge would not be allowed to slip into a dynasty — would have to be relearned, in different forms, several times over the next six centuries. But the first lesson was learned in 802.
What the lagoon looked like in 750
It is worth pausing to describe the physical lagoon of the early eighth century, because almost nothing of it survives visually today. The Rialto cluster was inhabited but small — perhaps three thousand people in 750, spread across the islands of Olivolo, Luprio, Spinalonga, Mendigola, and the cluster that would later be the sestiere of San Polo. The doge's residence was on Olivolo, in the eastern lagoon. The most important religious centre was on Torcello, where the bishop of Altino — whose mainland see had been destroyed by Attila and then again by the Lombards — had transferred his cathedral in 639. Malamocco, on the long sand-spit of the Lido, was the largest population centre and the seat of government. The future site of the Piazza San Marco was an orchard, with a few churches at its edges.
The economy was almost entirely maritime. The settlers caught fish, gathered salt, and shipped both — along with cargo on commission, including agricultural produce from the mainland — up and down the Adriatic and into the Po, the Adige, the Brenta, the Piave and the Tagliamento. Their boats were small, mostly fishing barges and shallow lagoon punts, but a class of larger trading craft, the precursors of the medieval Venetian galley, was beginning to appear. They had no agricultural hinterland. They imported grain, oil and wine. The lagoon's population, in this period, did not rise above ten thousand, but it was already entirely dependent on continuous trade for its survival.
The first sustained engagements abroad
In 803 the doge Obelerio Antenoreo opened formal contact with the court of Charlemagne, who was at this point the most powerful ruler in western Europe. Obelerio's motive was political: he had taken office on a wave of pro-Frankish sentiment in the lagoon, against a rival pro-Byzantine faction. The wave receded. In 810 Charlemagne's son Pepin, king of Italy, attacked the lagoon, as described in the previous chapter. The siege failed at Malamocco's gates. The fallout transferred the seat of government to Rialto, abolished the pro-Frankish ducal line, and forced Charlemagne to negotiate.
The negotiation produced the Pax Nicephori of 812, a treaty between the Carolingian Empire and Byzantium that, among many other clauses, formally recognised Venice as belonging to the Byzantine sphere of influence — but acknowledged it as self-governing. The wording was characteristically late-Roman in its ambiguity. The lagoon was Byzantine, but the Byzantines could not appoint or remove its doge. It paid tribute, but the tribute was modest and largely symbolic. It supplied galleys to imperial campaigns when asked, but did not provide infantry. The most consequential clause was that Venice was to be free to trade with whomever it wished, including the Carolingian Empire and points further west. This single clause — the explicit grant of commercial freedom — is the foundation on which the entire later Venetian commercial empire rested.
The doge as not-quite-monarch
The early ninth-century doge, then, was: a Byzantine officer with a Byzantine title; elected, in practice, by an assembly of the lagoon's free male citizens; resident in a wooden palace on the Rialto cluster; militarily limited to defensive forces and supplied with a small naval squadron; commercially permitted by treaty to trade anywhere; and constitutionally bound — by the precedent of the Galbaio deposition — not to attempt to transmit his office to his children. He was, in short, the prototype of an extremely peculiar political form: the elected lifelong head of a sovereign maritime republic.
This combination — lifelong elected office without dynastic transmission — was not unique to Venice. Several Byzantine provinces had similar arrangements, and indeed the medieval German empire's electoral monarchy is a relative. But what made the Venetian variant distinctive was its longevity and the procedural ingenuity with which the lagoon defended the principle. Over the centuries that followed, the ducal election would become progressively more elaborate, more circumscribed, and harder to capture. By the thirteenth century the procedure would involve eleven separate rounds of ballot and lot. By the fourteenth it would be supplemented by a written oath, the promissione ducale, that constrained the doge in office to a degree no other European head of state was constrained. But all of this was a development out of the early-medieval recognition that the lagoon must elect its doges, and must not let those elections collapse into dynastic politics.
The next development — the event that would, more than any other, give the lagoon its name and its identity — was about to happen, several thousand kilometres away, in the city of Alexandria. Two Venetian merchants were about to steal the body of a saint.
End of Chapter II