Most travellers, arriving at Marco Polo airport and crossing the causeway, see a city. They are looking at the wrong thing. They are looking at the surviving capital of a country.
The Republic of Venice was not a city-state in the casual modern sense, the way one might call a tax-haven micronation a city-state. It was a fully sovereign and continuously self-governing republic of eleven hundred and one years' duration — longer than the United States has currently existed, longer than the Roman Republic, longer than every modern European state except San Marino. It had a constitution, a head of state who served for life, two great elected councils, a permanent intelligence apparatus, a navy of more than a hundred galleys at its peak, a state-owned arsenal that pioneered the assembly line three hundred years before Henry Ford, and an empire that included Crete, Cyprus, the Dalmatian coast, the Ionian islands, the Aegean of the duchy of Naxos, and at various times most of the mainland of north-eastern Italy.
It also had a unique problem, which it solved with a uniqueness of approach that ought to have been the model for every republic that followed it: how do you prevent a wealthy elected republic from collapsing into hereditary monarchy, the way Florence did under the Medici, the way Rome did under Augustus, the way every other long-lived republic before or after has tended to do? The Venetian answer was procedural: a doge elected by an absurd cascade of lots and ballots and counter-ballots designed to defeat every imaginable form of family politicking. The procedure took eleven separate rounds of selection. It looked ridiculous on paper. It worked for five hundred years.
This volume is an attempt to take Venice out of its tourist-postcard register and put it back inside its real one, which is the register of a country. We will visit the lagoon villages where the first Venetians took refuge from Attila in 452. We will sit in the chamber of the Maggior Consiglio. We will sail to Crete and Cyprus, which were Venetian for centuries. We will be in the room when Napoleon's emissaries enter the doge's chamber for the last time. And at the end we will go and walk through what remains.
