In the year 828 two Venetian merchants named Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello arrived at the port of Alexandria, in Abbasid Egypt, on a routine commercial trip. According to the chronicle written about a century later by a Venetian deacon named John, the men paid a visit to the Coptic monks who tended the shrine of St Mark the Evangelist, located in the city since (the tradition held) the second century. They learned that the new Muslim governor of Alexandria, al-Mu'tasim's deputy, had been ordering the demolition of Christian churches and the reuse of their marble for the construction of a new palace, and that the monks of St Mark's were afraid for their relic. The merchants offered to take the body to a Christian country, where it would be safe.
The negotiation went well. The two Venetians, with the help of a Greek monk named Stauracius who served as the relic's custodian, removed the body of the saint from its sarcophagus, replaced it with the body of St Claudia (a less prominent local saint who would not be missed), wrapped the bones in cabbage leaves and salted pork to deter Muslim customs officials from inspecting them too closely, and smuggled them aboard their ship. The voyage home took six weeks. On the 31st of January 828, the body of St Mark arrived in the lagoon.
What the theft accomplished
It is hard to overstate what this event meant for ninth-century Venice. Until 828 the lagoon had no patron saint of the first rank. Its principal cathedral, at Torcello, was dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta; the smaller churches of the Rialto cluster were dedicated to local figures. By acquiring St Mark — one of the four evangelists, founder of the Coptic church, traditional author of the second Gospel — Venice acquired, in the relic-economy of the early medieval Christian world, an asset of the first magnitude. Only Rome, with St Peter and St Paul, and Constantinople, with several apostolic relics, could plausibly outrank her. Venice now had a patron of evangelical seniority. The doge, Giustiniano Particiaco, ordered a basilica built to house him next to the ducal palace at Rialto, paid for from his own private fortune in a will dated 829. That building — the first St Mark's — was completed in 832, burnt in 976 during a popular revolt against the doge Pietro Candiano IV, and rebuilt three more times before assuming its current form between 1063 and 1094.
It also changed the lagoon's self-conception. Before 828 the Venetic settlements thought of themselves as a Byzantine maritime province with a salt monopoly. After 828 they thought of themselves as the lagoon of St Mark — a country with a patron, a basilica, and a religious identity not entirely subordinate to either Rome or Constantinople. The basilica's later mosaics, the Pala d'Oro, the four bronze horses brought back from Constantinople in 1204 and mounted above the entrance, are all later additions to a programme that begins with this theft, and continues — without serious interruption — for the next nine hundred and sixty-nine years.
The ninth and tenth centuries — consolidation
The doges of the post-Particiaco period spent the ninth century consolidating the lagoon's commercial position. The treaty of 840 — the so-called Pactum Lotharii, between Venice and the Carolingian emperor Lothair I — formally recognised Venetian commercial rights in the Carolingian Empire and committed the empire to assist Venice against pirates. The treaty of 992 — the Pactum Veneticum with the Byzantine emperor Basil II — granted Venetian merchants reduced customs duties in Constantinople, in return for naval assistance against the Normans and Saracens. Between these two documents lies the entire diplomatic strategy of Venice for the next four hundred years: small, well-targeted naval contributions to whichever continental empire was most useful at the moment, in exchange for commercial privileges that compounded over time.
The Adriatic itself was, in this period, a dangerous sea. The Narentine pirates from the Croatian coast preyed on Venetian shipping for most of the ninth century. The Saracens from Sicily and Crete launched periodic raids as far north as Grado and Comacchio. The Hungarians, after their crossing of the Carpathians in 895, reached the lagoon in 900 and burnt the wooden suburbs of Heraclea before being defeated at sea by the doge Pietro Tribuno. The Venetians responded by building, beginning in the 820s, the great series of defensive walls and towers along the lidi that protected the lagoon entrances; by negotiating the suppression of the Narentine pirates (completed in 1000 by the doge Pietro II Orseolo, who is conventionally credited with the title Dux Dalmatiae); and by maintaining a permanent fleet of war-galleys at Olivolo.
Pietro II Orseolo and the Adriatic
The Orseolo doges — Pietro I (976–978), Orso (1009–1026), and most importantly Pietro II (991–1009) — converted Venice from a regional power into a thalassocracy of the Adriatic. Pietro II's campaign of 1000, the so-called Ascension Day expedition, sailed up and down the Dalmatian coast, accepting the submission of Zara, Trogir, Split, Dubrovnik (then called Ragusa) and several smaller ports. It is the symbolic origin of Venetian sovereignty in Dalmatia — though the actual annexation of these cities to the Venetian state was a piecemeal process that took the next three hundred years.
It is also the origin of the most famous Venetian state ritual, the Sposalizio del Mare, the "Marriage of the Sea". From 1000 onwards, the doge would each year, on the feast of the Ascension, sail out from San Marco in the gilded ceremonial state-ship called the Bucintoro, and throw a gold ring into the Adriatic at the Lido entrance with the words "Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii" — "We wed thee, O sea, in token of true and perpetual dominion". The ceremony was performed every year, without interruption, from approximately 1000 to 1797 — seven hundred and ninety-seven consecutive years. There is no other state ritual in European history that comes close.
What the lagoon looked like at 1100
By 1100 the lagoon was a country in everything but name. Population perhaps sixty thousand. A doge with an established and increasingly formalised electoral procedure. A naval establishment of perhaps eighty galleys, supported by a state arsenal at the eastern edge of the city. A merchant fleet trading from the mouth of the Don to Alexandria and Cádiz. Commercial privileges in both empires — Carolingian successors and Byzantine — and a tacit but absolute commercial monopoly in the Adriatic. A patron saint of evangelical seniority installed in a Byzantine-style basilica next to the ducal palace. And a self-image that, for the first time, regarded the Venetians as a sovereign people, not a Byzantine province with delusions.
That self-image was about to be tested. The First Crusade had left Constantinople in 1097; Jerusalem fell in 1099; the crusader states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem were being established in the Levant; and the Levantine trade, on which Venetian fortunes substantially depended, was now in motion in a way no Adriatic state had ever experienced. The next chapter follows the Venetian decision to commit to the crusading economy — and, in 1204, to its most spectacular and most disgraceful single act of state.
End of Chapter III