Update the first:

I have a book coming out with PM PRESS!

Click here to read more (and see yet more wonderful art that NO BONZO and Kevin Matthews have worked on for it! And because I particularly like this work, I'm posting it here apropos of it being relevant daily advice.)

Optimistically, my book is due to be released in June of 2023. It is meant to be an approachable text for general audiences on the life of Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist, revolutionary and writer.

(I did a very, very, rough prototype of the text in the form of a blog/video series in 2020, though of course, I go into far more greater detail in the book and discovered many new interesting things there).

Update number the second:

I've been doing some freelance writing for PM PRESS on various topics. Here's my author page at PM! Such writing includes:

A blog about the People's Townhomes in West Philadelphia

A blog about the many (alleged) deaths of Nestor Makhno

A blog about the July Days in Barcelona, 1936, drawing heavily from the wonderful work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote a beautiful biography of Buenaventura Durruti.

I heartily recommend checking them out if these things interest you. I am in the middle of over-hauling/updating this website (and getting back into the habit of posting on a semi-regular basis on this website).

Now, to the Undead:

Now, since Halloween is closing in, I hope to leave you with some of the more interesting interpretations of vampires in fiction--it's the time of year to write about the undead, afterall. Nothing to do with the fact that, according to at least one study, a sharp uptick in vampire media tend to preface severe economic recessions.

To quote John Edgar Browning in a 2011 interview, a mere three years after the 2008 financial crash: "Vampires, in many ways, have always been in vogue, whether mythically or artistically; however, the recent, popular “resurgence” seems to have occurred in tangent with the economic recession, which wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing has happened."

So that's comforting!

I've written about the undead before on this website, but in a second-hand way. I wrote about the historical Vlad III and his more unnerving legacy of helping to create and maintain a state by secret police, terror and nationalism last year (and a cheeky story about Bram Stoker writing a decidedly different version of Dracula after a bad dream--this version of Dracula focuses a lot of crabs, for example, which is supported by some of Stoker's diary entries early in his creative process).

There are a bunch of disputing factions about how prominent or important the historical Vlad III was to Stoker's conception of Count Dracula. Most, as far as we can tell from Stoker's own notes, conclude that the life of Vlad III was largely irrelevant to the fictional vampire.

Stoker only had one volume that referred to Vlad III (as Dracula) and immediately seized the name (previous drafts had the antagonist as 'Count Wampyr' which...may have needed some workshopping).

History Podcaster Historical AF has an excellent line of inquiry about Irish folklore influencing Stoker's conception of vampirism and the Count, which is well worth a listen and I won't spoil for you.

I think I'm just going to tick off a few examples of vampires that are less discussed and hopefully that will be enlivening.

1.Vampire as a metaphor for capitalism:

“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” -Karl Marx, Capital

According to Dr. Strielkowski and Dr. Lisin, Marx refers to vampires in Capital at least three times, and never in a fun 'gee aren't vampires great as a power fantasy' kind of way. Engels also uses the vampire metaphor as well. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this small tangent is a nugget tucked away at the end of the blog, which I will quote in full:

In one particular case, when describing Wallachian peasants performing forced labour for their boyars, Marx refers to one specific “boyar” who was “drunk with victory” and who might have been no one but Wallachian prince Vlad (called “The Impaler”) – or Count Dracula himself!

 Engels died in 1895 (two years before the publication of Stoker's work) and Marx well before that (1883) so it is impossible that either of them got this specific point of comparison from Stoker's work. 19th Century vampire fiction (and anti-capitalist messaging using the vampire as a metaphor for the moneyed classes/the cops/robber barons) was a whole sub-genre in any case.

This summary hints at a reference by Marx to Vlad III as a vampire from an economic standpoint before Stoker took his name and made it a worldwide sensation. Again, this is simply speculation (the word 'might' in the above quote is doing a lot of heavy lifting) but it speaks volumes about the presence of the vampire as an image in 19th century political and economic thinking. I just wish I could find a handy quote by Marx's best frenemy (and anarchist theorist) Bakunin on vampires, but we're on a tight schedule.

To summarize: Capitalism doesn't create wealth, it extracts it. Like a vampire.

2. Vampire as a time-traveler: The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

The Vampire Tapestry is a series of interconnected novellas that examine the seemingly timeless vampire (called Weyland, though it's not his real name) as he moves through the worlds of academia, imprisonment, therapy and flight. So there is a lot going on.

Weyland the vampire is an odd creature--there is no magic about him. Everything about him is mundane. He isn't a re-animated corpse. He's entirely organic--he doesn't even have fangs. Weyland does have, under his tongue, a retractile barb that comes up when blood is near and creates a neat little hole, like a needle, in the victim's skin.

Like Peter S. Beagle's unicorn in The Last Unicorn, Weyland is a singular creature. There is only one vampire in the world, as so far as anyone in canon knows, and that's Weyland, who is old enough to faintly remember knapping stone tools into spearheads (at one point, a fellow anthropology professor asks Weyland to help demonstrate the technique to his class. Weyland declines, because he recalls exactly how to do it and fears that his ease with the pre-historic tools will raise suspicions and questions about him that will lead to him having to flee his cushy academic post).

Weyland is mundane--and hardly immortal--the longevity he seems to demonstrate comes solely from hibernating. Said hibernation is 'blind'--he can't set his biological clock for say, a decade, or a hundred years or a thousand years. He wakes up whenever he does, without a name or any particular memories save for learned skills (how to make a fire, languages, knapping etc.). He is a time-traveler who has to rely on his wits to survive--and the price of that survival is the blood of others. He finds satisfaction in working in the cut-throat world of academia, viewing it as a variant of 'hunting'.

“The vampire as time traveler, you ought to be writing science fiction, Weyland.”  -A wag in the text who doesn't realize what sort of novel they are in.

Weyland is a pared down person. A minimalist's minimalist outside of concealment (academia) and hunting (survival).

Everything that isn't involved with concealing himself from inquisitive strangers or procuring blood has been stripped away from Weyland, he insists, from grim necessity. He's as spare and lean as a leopard.

His therapist in the third novella (part of his life in academia can only be reclaimed if he seeks counseling--the book opens with him getting shot by a prospective victim) reflects that while under gestalt therapy, Weyland had become so upset that he'd damaged the chair he sat in with his hands.

“She thought of the broken chair, of Weyland’s big hands crushing the wood. Old wood and dried out glue, of course, or he could never have done that. He was a man, after all, not a leopard.”

The joy of reading The Vampire Tapestry is from its terse, tight writing style and Charnas's deft character work.  Weyland's exposure to innocence (a boy who helps him escape captivity), intimacy of any kind (emotional or physical, in both cases with his therapist) and art (the ballet, opera, music in general) slowly make him less of an piece of flint or leopard and more into a person.

Weyland the vampire slots into that space that Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter would slide into years later--a lean, sharp monster with more to him than meets the eye and the power to ask unnerving questions.

3. Vampire as a transhumanist, existential threat (Blindsight by Peter Watts)

Like the protagonist in The Vampire Tapestry the vampires of the Watts-verse are not magical, but solely biological. Whereas Weyland is a singular being leaping blindly through time through hibernation, Watt's vampires are decidedly transhumanists, though not as a result of technical rejiggering. Like Weyland they are a variant of humanity, but Watt's creatures are a Neolithic predators brought back into the near future by the greed of pharmaceutical companies looking for 'outside the box solutions' through gene-re-sequencing.

Great plan, what could possibly go wrong? As we all know from the (checks watch) two years of worldwide pandemic, pharmaceutical companies would NEVER EVER do something mind-bendingly callous and stupid, just to enrich themselves, right?

In the Blindsight-universe, the vampires are an extinct sub-species of human that evolved to prey on other sub-species (araneophagic behaviors can be observed in the Portia genus of spiders--a fact that is nodded to in another of Watt's works--that almost exclusively hunt and consume other spider species).

As such they are faster, stronger and better coordinated that baseline humans and worse still, have savant-level intelligence and pattern-recognition. They have eyes that are adapted for low-light, are crepescular and are pretty much sociopaths from the word go. Our beliefs about vampires in this world are the result of both folklore and genetic memory.

Worse still at a remove--like most intelligence in this fictional universe--the vampires view self-awareness (and all it's attendants, like music, art, self-expression) as a flaw unique to human beings. Sentience, in this universe, is not required for intelligence or problem solving, and the vampires are only one of the humanity-ending threats present in Watt's work with this view point. It's a friendly, sunny sort of place.

Watts even made a slide-show about his version of vampires here to tie in with his books.

Fortunately, the vampires in the Watts-verse have a huge weakness, which is that they 'glitch out' whenever they see two intersecting right angles (you know, like a cross or a windowpane). This 'crucifix glitch' meant that pretty much the second that humans invented architecture, the vampires died out--and in the grim future, the reconstituted vampires can only survive by taking copious amounts of "anti-Euclidean" drugs to compensate.

4.Vampire as a (progressive?!) force: Dracula (2013)

John Rhys Myers as Dracula-taking-Nicola-Tesla’s-role-in-history to make a limitless energy source that would also coincidently allow him to daywalk sounds like a fever dream. There is also a revenge-plot against the historical Order of the Dragon (who did this iteration of Dracula wrong) and more than a few schlocky fight scenes (with the requisite tight leather suits, because of course, can't have a vampire franchise without catsuits).

A brief note on this briefest of entries--Nonso Anozie steals the show even from Rhys Myers in this show. His Renfield is worth the price of admission.

5.Vampirism as an intensifier of grief: The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphan Girls

In Katz's novel, the curse of unlife for Gideon means that his grieving process (and the trauma of becoming a vampire in the first place) is unnaturally extended past a mortal lifespan.

He withdraws from the world, largely, interacting with it most via a headset (making him the only vampire in fiction I'm aware of that has set up a suicide hotline). Gideon dispenses advice to desperate people who happen to call--de-escalating, yes, but also, outside of his occasional sips from criminals, his only form of social interaction at the novel's start, until he meets teen-runaway Margot.

Things get interesting from there. Katz's writing--particularly his sharp and witty dialogue--sparkles and carries the premise to the end.
Of all the vampires on this list, Gideon is the only one with a half-way functioning moral compass. Well worth a read, would heartily recommend!

That brings us to the end of this update. Cheers, and happy Saturnalia/Halloween/Samhain!

I'm really excited to announce that Sewer Rats Productions is putting on a play! The details are above in that glorious poster (and the link above)--and I hope to see you there!

I decided to add my two cents--a flier, if you like, to provide a little teaser for this play. With historical trivia, essentially.

First some background.

“The state was the original capitalist and it remains the greatest. It aspires to incorporate every inch, every corner of the society over which it presides into a vast wealth producing machine.” -Eric Larsen, The Operating System

In pursuit of wealth and hierarchal power, nation-states were centralizing powers in Europe from the 1400s onwards. This forced shift from community to individual, from "primitive communism" to "proto-capitalism" was not bloodless. It was not inevitable either, and it turned virtually ever aspect of rural and political life upside-down, as we shall soon see.

So when we come upon the original 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton (on which Edmonton is based--and elaborated upon) this struggle between capitalists and anti-capitalists (witches, farmers, peasants) had been raging a long time and would range a long time further still.Written near the beginning of the 30 Years War that would help birth the modern nation state on the continent, the original Witch of Edmonton was penned during fraught times.  A mere two decades or so later was one of the largest uprisings against the increased tyranny of the state and the church in the form of the Diggers in 1649 at St. George's hill.

The struggle against enclosure, the state and capitalism has not stopped even today, nor must it—and it is that struggle we see again in this adaptation of the popular play, Edmonton.

Lets ease into this with a quote from our favorite anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy:

"History shows that property in land did not arise from any wish to make the cultivator’s tenure more secure but resulted from the seizure of com- munal lands by conquerors and its distribution to those who served the conqueror....The fruit of their toil is unjustly and violently taken from the workers, and then the law steps in, and these very articles which have been taken from the workmen unjustly and by violence are declared to be the absolute property of those who have taken them."

Key terms to that may be useful to be aware of before going to see Edmonton:

-Enclosure—the act of turning common property or resources into privately owned property. In England in the 17th century, the play Edmonton  is set, this was done through destruction of the open-field systems, creation of landlords, brutal repression and dispossession of the peasantry along with their largely communal way of life.

Sylvia Federici puts it like this:

"Not only did cooperation in agricultural labor die when land was privatized and individual labor contracts replaced collective ones; economic differences among the rural population deepened, as numbers of poor squatters increased who had nothing but a cot and a cow, and no choice but to go with "bended knee and cap in hand" to beg for a job."

For a rough equivalent (or rather continuation of these trends) see also, in our present day, the idea of hostile architecture. Two of the more sympathetic characters, Tom of the Roads and Elizabeth, are functionally refugees in Edmonton due to the pressures and horrors of enclosure.

-Commons: lands or resources not owned by any one individual but able to be used by all without distinction (woods, farmland etc.) This was the standard state of affairs in the countryside before the growth of centralized government and capital powers in the period outline above, and what was largely destroyed in the centuries-long struggle against capitalism and hierarchy.

In order for capitalism to work, you need uncompensated or under-compensated labor.

To paraphrase the Marxist historian Sylvia Federici: “For capitalism to succeed women had to be viewed as property and their social status destroyed.”

The methods of this destruction was physical, economic and social. The new pool for exploited labor in the emerging capitalist system was women--and largely, still is, broadly speaking. They were forcibly robbed of social power, bodily autonomy, and dignity--even today, women are paid less than men for the exact same work, discriminated against and expected to provide free labor through home-making and child-rearing in the broader culture.  Sylvia Federici lays it out like this, going a bit ahead of the era covered by Edmonton:

"These historic changes--that peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife--redefined women's position in society and in relation to men. The sexual division of labor that emerged from it not only fixed women to reproductive  work, but increased their dependence on men, enabling the state and employers to use the male wage as a means to command women's labor. In this way, the separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor-power also made possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as a means for the accumulation of unpaid labor."

This destruction of women’s bodies, economic standing and social power was done through the devaluing of their labor and through witch-trials and hunts.

For more  reading of this, I recommend Sylvia Federici's excellent work Caliban and the Witch for a more thorough interrogation of the subject than I could give in a short blog post. Capitalism’s rise was not inevitable—and was violently fought against throughout the British isles and the world, with women being the leaders of many such resistance movements.

-Re-Commoning: the act of destroying barriers (that create private property) or expropriating wealth seized during the process of enclosure. This was the case at St. Georges Hill with the Diggers under Winstanley in 1649. The Diggers--and the Ranters and their distant cousins, the Quakers-all rebelled against enclosure. The leader of the Diggers at St. George's Hill was a man named Winstanley who wrote, among other things in The New Law of Righteousness:

"I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon the creation when one man endeavored to be a lord over another?...and whether this misery shall not remove...when all the branches of mankind shall look upon the earth as a common treasury for all."

They occupied St. George's hill, and were subject to harassment by the lord of the manor there, who sent hired gangs to attack the Diggers and attempted to burn their collective homes. Several tense months of back and forth proceeded, with the Diggers writing prolifically before being forced to abandoned what they'd reclaimed under physical duress and a show-trial.

The Diggers, by the way, were called that because they took the most obvious signs of enclosure--hedgerows, fences, walls--and, well, obviously, dug them up and destroyed them and restored the commons wherever able. Winstanley is an interesting figure--and not unambiguously sympathetic, as Peter Marshall points out in Demanding the Impossible that Winstanley "despised" the Ranters. To add salt in the wound, the lord of the manor mentioned above charged Winstanley and company as "Ranters", which they were not.

The Ranters were an equally militant sect that managed to be even more anti-authoritarian than the Diggers, and shared similar views towards enclosure and private property, read: it was bad and should be destroyed by force.
Another sticking point was that the Ranters advocated the abolishment of all governments (religious or otherwise, a major bone in the throat of a man fond of religious language and beliefs like Winstanley), were for free love, and according to a contemporary source, held that: "...no Christ but within, no Scripture to be a rule; no ordinances, no law but their lusts, no heaven or glory but here, no sin but what men fancied to be so."

-Subsistence living: creating or growing what you need to survive comfortably, rather than for exchange and profit. Self-explanatory, though capitalists then and now live in dread of the concept.

Private property: Things that are owned by one person or corporation—but can include existentially vital resources like say water, or land that others might need to survive with no penalty.  Thusly, profits and access to essential resources by private companies are placed over human happiness and life since it is completely legal, though obviously morally wrong, to allow such apportionment of resources.

This is the dominant feature of capitalism besides wage-labor, which is a whole different can of worms. 'Strong private property rights' is just another way of saying 'negligible care for human rights' in modern political parlance. Whole lot of syllables there.

With this larger view of the times around the play Edmonton is set in, I hope you can more thoroughly enjoy it knowing these bits of trivia.

A quick song to play us out, I think. See you in the theaters, hopefully.

Quite a bit has happened since my last post (a mere 6-month interregnum!).

I'll condense it into a few main points.

1. I've signed a contract with PM PRESS! It turns out they saw my work on Nestor Makhno and have asked me to adapt my video and blog series on the Ukrainian anarchist into a book. The plan is to make a generally accessible (even funny at times) text that a non-specialist in anarchist history can enjoy as a first step into the subject.

2. I'm about halfway through the Makhno Manuscript (10/20 chapters exist in rough draft form).

3. The book is going to be illustrated by the incomparable N.O. Bonzo, whose work can be found here.

4. Through a lot of help from a wide variety of people, Osugi Sakae's final essay on Nestor Makhno has now been translated into English and is freely available at the Kate Sharpley Library!

5. I am both very excited and very tired. As a result, I've kept my head down and largely stayed off the internet. I may post a few one shot blogs based on some historical storytelling I've done (I'm particularly excited to write about the Sabate brothers), but that's about the extent of my online presence for the foreseeable.

If you want to catch up on my scattershot history of Venice--from incidents of corpse theft to militant cat-dads, click here.

On with the show!

Some things I didn't get a change to discuss in detail:

1) Venetian neutrality as a humble-brag or (in the words of BRIAN BLESSED): MY DIPLOMACY TRIUMPHS

Oligarchs tend to be a conservative lot, on the whole, and this was absolutely true of the Venetian variety. This conservatism exists on a spectrum and is fundamentally based in the following proposition: "I must defend and maintain the exact system that allows me unfathomable wealth and influence first, above all."

When seen through that lens, Venice, despite being generally of the capitalist 'growth-mindset' for most of its history, it's devotion to maintaining an unbroken status quo begins to make a bit more sense. In fact, some historians have argued that surviving nearly a hundred years--and a TURBULENT hundred years of European/Adriatic history without committing to a major military campaign or being the victim of a disaster is an accomplishment of little skill and luck in and of itself. For example, in  JJ NORWHICH'S A History of Venice:

"That Venice somehow contrived to preserve her neutrality through all these upheavals, successfully withstanding the formidable pressures--diplomatic, economic and even military--which were brought to bear in efforts to persuade her to declare herself on one side or another, was an extraordinary achievement: every bit as remarkable as many more glorious aspects of her past which she looked back on with justifiable pride."

2. "It isn't stagnation, it is efficiency, probably!"

So you can see, over the hundred years or so where Venice functionally succeeded in avoiding catastrophe, a lot of rationalizations on behalf of the oligarchic government. Refusing to modernize or adapt to changing world events was not a drawback, but a virtue. To draw from Norwich again:

"Ship's cannon, she [Venice] told herself, was anyway of less value in the narrow waters of the Mediterranean; inaccurate at the best of time, it was no match for stable shore batteries. If the supply of heavy fire-power was limited it was to these batteries that  priority should be given...fortunately for her, the Turks felt much the same way; and for as long as she had no other serious adversary to fight at sea, there was little incentive for her to revolutionize the Arsenal, to throw out all the old machinery and equipment, the old skills and techniques, to embark on new and prodigiously expensive programs fraught with problems and difficulties of which she had no understanding or certainty of solution."

The old ways were valued because they worked then, the logic went, so they ought to work now. But there is a bit of a poisonous trap in this line of logic.

It assumes, for example, that the duties and responsibilities of the Venetian ruling class remained constant, which they most assuredly did not. The oligarchs managed to pare away their responsibilities to the citizenry of Venice year by year, a process accelerated by the serrata of 1297. Their financial support for what we would call community infrastructure, let alone the military--previously each noble was required to personally equip and keep war ready at least one galley, hardly inexpensive and therefor an informal check on the amount the oligarchic families could consolidate.

Well, suffice to say, these limitations were slowly discarded. The desire to keep Venice as an imperial time-capsule was very good for the upper parts of the pyramids. The famous Battle of Lepanto was fought with galleys--and not to diminish the horror and blood shed in that prolonged fight between a coalition of European powers and the Ottomans--but for so late in the historical period, it might as well have been fought with chariots.  That is to say, by the years 1700-1789, the Venetians were dependent on an outmoded ship-type as their primary military arm at sea.

While the Ottomans eventually upgraded their hardware (lasting til WWI), so to speak, the Venetians never did, and used this obtuseness as an implicit bragging point about the eternal nature of La Serenissima.

We'll discuss this more in our next episode, but I thought this was a worthwhile tangent to pursue, albeit briefly.

For more work on Venice and its strange history, click here!

This is necessarily a broad topic--with a lot of points of entry and angles of analysis--but mine is going to be focused on the later days of the Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire, along with the Mamluk Sultanate popping up here and there.
Lets get to it!

Some more things to get into before I forget them:

Venice as middleman:

As you may recall, Venice--using Venice to refer to the interests of the empire and city state rather than individual governments or doges--dearly loved being the middleman as a policy. There was a very good reason for this--when you're the middleman, you can dictate terms to your trading partners/customers--because you know the majority of them aren't going to make the journey to Asia for say, silk or tea or whatever valuable commodity you could care to mention--so they'll pay your price.

Or to put it even more simply: The Silk Road, which reached its height during the Mongol Khanates--and fragmented about the same time they did, was a major engine of Venetian trade and cultural exchange. Venice took as much advantage of this position--and their trading posts on the Caspian and Black Seas--as they could.

But, as we all know, good things don't last forever--and the splitting up of the Mongol Khanates--which began almost immediately from a historical perspective, starting with the Toluid Civil War (1260-1260) and escalating from there--is a fine example. Eventually, through a combination of central Asia not being safe for trade due to the remains of the Chaghatai--and later Temurid--khanates making trouble for their neighbors and that supply of Asian luxuries to Europe was functionally cut off.

Unless you were the Ottomans--or their later subjects, the Mamluks of Egypt, who controlled a short-cut to Asia by water. For a quick summary of this, I refer you to this video which lays out the position of the Ottoman empire re: new world.

Venice and the Ottomans:

The Venetians were an established power when the Ottomans finally finished off the Byzantine empire. The Venetians swiftly adapted to this regime change in typical fashion, by establishing a deep commercial relationship with their heavily armed neighbor. Many future doges had spent significant time in Constantinople as traders/spies--I'm thinking here of the most famous of this number, Doge Andrea Gritti.

Gritti, as we've discussed, was arrested for whacky spy antics in Constantinople in his youth--and avoided execution only through his close friendship with one of the senior Ottoman viziers. This can be taken as indicative of an unusually close relationship between high-level officials of both empires--they would fight savagely over the best places to plunder (both Ottomans and Venetians would spill swimming-pools worth of blood over Greece, to the great annoyance of the Greeks, who really wished both powers would get bent) but overall were on good terms for all that.

Certainly, as the world's political and economic axis shifted west to incorporate a whole new hemisphere, both Venice and Ottoman empires remained in close contact, each viewing their capital city as the center of the world. A poem from the Ottoman seventeenth century author Nabi springs to mind:

"The heavens may turn about the earth as they will
They will find no city like Istanbul

Drawing and painting, writing and gilding
Achieve beauty and grace in Istanbul

However many different arts there may be
All find brilliance and luster in Istanbul

Because its beauty is so rare a sight
the sea has clasped it in a tight embrace

All the arts and all the crafts
Find honor and glory in Istanbul."

Doubtless, a Venetian would have written the same about Venice, and there are simply too many poems and elegy's to Venice's unique glory and elegance to start naming them. I will quote Italo Calvino's character of Marco Polo in his classic work, Invisible Cities which while written in the twentieth century, has a similar feel to it. Marco Polo is entertaining Kublai Khan with stories of his travels, and eventually the Khan asks exasperatedly if the Venetian is just making up cities since some  of the cities are clearly impossible: cities of the dead, of the air, of water. Polo replies: "Every time I tell of a city, I am saying something about Venice."

Piri Reis:  Ottoman Admiral, scholar, cartographer

Ahmed Muhiddin Piri is the man responsible for the map of Venice that graces the top of this page. A Gallipolian by birth, his life was studded with accomplishments. The one he is best known for, of course, is the gazelle-skin map of the world including the new hemisphere--specifically, the coast of South America and the Caribbean.

Piri also did excellent maps of Otranto, along with north African coasts and the island of Corsica. The notable admiral had experience in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Straits of Gibraltar, making him exceptionally well travelled even by Ottoman standards. You could see the whole reach of the Ottoman empire in the admiral's log-books and maps--it was a formidable--and lucrative empire, one that Venice was well advised to remain close to.

The Mamluks of Egypt eventually denied European powers access to the shortcut around the now-disintegrated Silk Road (a move that prompted the European powers to 'discover' the new hemisphere as a result, ironically) but Venice stayed in the good graces of the Ottoman empire.

Piri Reis's travel records and reach can be seen as a good embodiment of the logic that led  Venice to stick closer to home. The Venetians were conservative in this regard:  why  be eager to extend la Serenissima to the new world--why would it take that risk when it could just trade with the Ottomans, which the other European powers now largely refused to do?

In Conclusion:

So much of Venice's trade, political leverage and culture came from their proximity to thriving and vibrant Islamic powers. While Venice  was and is a unique polity, it unquestionably benefitted culturally and materially  from its Islamic neighbors than it lost for them, and made it a truly cosmopolitan place compared even to other Italian city states at the time.

If you want to catch up on the (limited) Venetian history I've covered so far, feel free to go here!

Well, lets get into the wild and crazy life of Francesco Morosini, shall we?

Seems Familiar

This is going to be a shorter blog than normal (by a significant margin) for the simple reason that I did one last year--with a bit more details of Francesco Morosini's life here.

Things Francesco Morosini would like you to forget:  

• He was a real butterfingers. In 1687 during his sack of Athens (the same expedition that had him blowing the roof off the Parthenon and taking the Piraeus lion riddled with Varangian runes back to Venice) Morosini had a grander ambition. To take the horses and chariot statues of Athens back to Venice. Historian JJ Norwich describes the scene:"Morosini, doubtless remembering the carrying off of the four bronze horses from the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 1205--tried to remove the horses and chariot of Athena that formed part of the western pediment of the temple. In the process the whole group fell to the ground and smashed to pieces."
• On the return trip back to Venice after sacking Athens, he made detour after detour, convinced that if he came back after winning a victory, he would be met with a heroes welcome. He settled on the fortress of Malvasia on an island in southern Greece. Unfortunately, it was impregnable and not able to be sieged--Norwich records the only approach to it on foot being less than a yard across, meaning that the only way the Venetians could get at it would be to blow it all to hell with artillery. Fine, after what they'd done to Athens and the Parthenon, that didn't seem like a bad idea. Morosini ordered the construction of two large gun emplacements to be constructed. Fortunately for the Greeks and unfortunately for Francesco Morosini, he took grievously ill and had to pass off command to his liutenant. He was rushed back to Venice where he got his enthusiastic welcome--but was too sick to enjoy it.

-Francesco Morosini had a taste for the spotlight and personal glory--earned or not--that he carried with him to the dogeship. More than anything else, it would seem from examining his life and tendencies--he feared a decisive defeat like his experience at Candia. As a result, he was always seeking fresh battles--victories--in his mind--to get the stain out, as it were. This left him weirdly sensitive to Venetian public opinion--at least where it came to things military--and had him spend the last years of his life figuratively chasing dragons in the hope of having people see him as a great hero of Venice.
He got halfway there--certainly, several boats have been named after him.

We'll talk more, I think, about the Siege of Candia that shaped Morosini next week, as part of our context episode on Venetian politics.

Playing Catchup

If you want to catch up on the talkback or get your questions answered that popped into your mind during the show, click below, and all shall be revealed.

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Lets open with historian JJ Norwich's description of Doge Andrea Gritti in his History of Venice:

"...Andrea Gritti was considerably more impressive a figure. Tall and outstandingly handsome, he carried his sixty-eight years lightly and boasted that he had never suffered a day's illness in all his life. As a young man he had accompanied his grandfather on diplomatic missions to England, France and Spain, whose languages he spoke fluently, together with Latin, Greek and Turkish.
This last accomplishment was the fruit of a prolonged stay in Constantinople during which he was arrested on a well-founded charge of espionage  and imprisoned, escaping impalement only through the good offices of the vizir Ahmed, a personal friend. He is said, nonetheless, to be unusually popular with the Turks as well as with the European colony, several members of which were seen standing in tearful vigil by the prison gates as he entered them.

Later he had served with distinction both as a diplomat and--in a civil capacity--in the war of the League of Cambrai, and he was indeed proveditor of the army when, on May 20th 1523  he was elected Doge.

Perhaps surprisingly in view of his record, he never managed to endear himself to the people as a whole, who had hoped fro the election of his principal rival...neither then nor later, however, did his lack of popular appeal occasion him the slightest concern."

A Brief Discussion of the League of Cambrai and Pope Julius II's Eternal Temper:

To talk about Doge Andrea Gritti’s military policy, we’ll need to take a brief digression into the life of another angry, authoritarian elderly Italian man: Pope Julius II.

Pope Julius II (born Giuliano Della Rovere and hailing from Liguria) was a piece of work. I’ll make no bones about it, he’s one of my favorite historical characters simply because of how outrageously stubborn he was.

The man powered through multiple illnesses and sieges simply on the power of spite. A source I don’t particularly trust claims that he carried a stick with him at all times, so that he could use it to hit people who disagreed with him. That seems far-fetched in the super-touchy politics of Renaissance Italy, but all sources on Julius II (I’m leaning most on Christine Shaw’s biography of him and very much recommend it) agree that he had a truly volcanic temper. Nobody wanted to deliver bad news to the Pope because he would throw any and anything at the messenger, upend tables and smash whatever came to hand.

A short list of things that Pope Julius II absolutely loathed:

1) Venice (as a Ligurian—part of greater Genoa, this is only to be expected).

2) Spain. All of it. Everyone from there. Made complicated by the fact that Spain was currently occupying Naples at the time of his ascension (1503), which was pretty much the entire bottom half of Italy.
3) The Borgia family, partly because they were from Spain and partly because they kept getting in the way of his ambitions. Julius II’s outfoxing of Cesare Borgia upon Rodrigo Borgia’s death was a work of art and subtlety, or at least, more subtlety than one might have expected from such an angry man. In short order Julius II deprived his greatest rival of liberty, funds and political power, leaving him to die a painful death in Spain.

4)Julius II also hated the French, despite (or perhaps because of) the large amount of time he’d spent as an envoy to France during his time as a cardinal. He thought they were untrustworthy, and he should know.

5) He also hated that the Venetians had taken some towns in the Romagnol during the late Borgia papacy and his early days as pope, when he was short of funds and political leverage. He wanted those towns back, and now that he’d gotten the necessary funds to pay troops, he meant to do something about it.

6) I’m also certain that he hated having to join the League of Cambrai—think of it as a huge anti-Venice league made of every major player in the area—but noticeably France. France had the best standing army at this time, with Spain close behind and Julius knew he couldn't win a fight against the Republic with his own forces alone.

7) This means that Venice gets utterly stomped on by the League of Cambrai—their empire of the terrafirma gets rolled up like a carpet. What had taken a hundred years for the Republic of Venice to gain, to paraphrase Christine Shaw, it lost in three weeks.

8) Julius got his Romagnol towns back, Venice has been checked, so naturally you’d think he would be happy. He wasn’t. He feared that France was too strong and so of course, he made a separate deal with Venice and switched sides, forming an ANTI-FRANCE league to diminish their influence in northern Italy.

9) It goes on like this for quite some time with betrayal and counter-betrayal until Julius II’s death in 1513.

Back to Gritti.

The reason why I get so into the League of Cambrai is that Andrea Gritti was on the front-lines of that Papal push (on the Venetian side) and it deeply influenced his behavior when he was installed as doge in 1523.

He’d seen first hand how tenuous Venice’s hold over cities in the terrafirma like Padua were—if Venice was to have any sort of hope of maintaining this buffer against the major powers of the day, they would need to completely rethink their approach to empire on land.

The Venetians would need to stop thinking about acquiring more cities in this part of the world—cities that were swiftly taken would be swiftly lost—and focus more on stability and avoiding conflicts with other Italian and European powers as much as possible. Robert Findlay calls the defeats and reverses suffered in the League of Cambrai a kind of trauma for the Venetians, who had long considered themselves superior to their neighbors in all significant respects.

Gritti knew if Venice was to have any sort of hope of maintaining this buffer against the major powers of the day, they would need to completely rethink their approach to empire on land.

Gritti’s priorities upon becoming doge were clear. End Venice’s involvement in the Italian Wars without giving up too much territory and do in such a way that wouldn’t endanger the Republic’s stability. To the shock of the oligarchy, Gritti managed this with relative ease three months after taking power, signing a treaty at Worms to this effect.

Not that Gritti was universally beloved or anything like that.  He was Julius II's equal in pugnacity, caprice and volatility. He wanted to get more power for himself, and frequently feuded with the various committees that made up the Venetian government. What he had that the (by now dead) pope didn't, was a coherent and consistent plan. Under Gritti, Venice engaged a truly intimidating army and spent lavishly on defense, but with the object being to avoid war, rather than provoke it. This counter-intuitive position was reminiscent of the Roman general Fabius during the second Punic war, who refused to fight the superior army of Hannibal Barca in the field and sought to wear out his opponent through feints and delaying tactics, a comparison that was not lost on Gritti during his lifetime.

The high point of this policy was the 1527 sack of Rome which occurred with Venetian connivance despite being the nominal ally of Rome. The giant Venetian army mentioned above (ironically, under the command of Julius II's thoroughly unlikeable nephew, Francesco Maria Della Rovere I) simply dawdled outside Rome instead of responding to the increasingly panicked message from Pope Clement as the city was plundered around him.

There was some pretext or other about not wanting to move the army out of position in case someone attacked Venice, which was just that, a pretext.

Gritti's cynical foreign policy towards his one-time ally was realized at last--Venice was safe, largely because Rome was richer, vulnerable to attack, and easier to reach than Venice. It would be impressive if it hadn't come at a staggering cost in human lives and a shit ton of stolen art (something of a theme in this series).

Gritti's final years had him turning away from the Italian peninsula and worrying more about the Ottoman empire--which meant ramping up Venice's already formidable fleet. He shuffled off the mortal coil in 1537, in the middle of the Third Cretan war--but this is not the last we will hear from the Ottomans, not by a long shot.

Link to the Talkback:

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Welcome to the half-way point of our series! If you want to catch up on what came before in Venetian history to this point (in a limited way) click here!

Well, we all knew it was coming to this.

The end of a long tug of war

The serrata was a cementing of trends that had been dogging the republic of Venice for some time. Since she first broke away from the Carolingians (maybe even before). The tension lay between a more populist (and directly democratic) system of government more similar to other Italian communes of the era. Kropotkin's own observations on Italian commune structures noted that they weren't immune to hierarchies, and excluded many of the poor, the participation of women and other faults. Still, they were more democratic than a straight up monarchy. The communes were built more on a guild-style structure, something that Venice incorporated into its own republic in the fullness of time.

But in the first half of Venetian history, another major tension came from the office of the doge itself. As we saw with the Antenori brothers and their whacky power grab, the early doges were a major source of instability. The Antenori swept into power, not through an election, but by one of the few popular revolts in Venice that succeeded in toppling a doge. Such coups and threatened power grabs--that is, making one family paramount and the doge a hereditary monarch--were a constant source of mistrust and social tensions in early Venetian history. There were of course other families that tried to consolidate power in a similar manner to the Antenori or Orseoli, but by the time of the serrata the attempts to hold onto power in the dogeship in such obvious ways had petered out.

The Venetian government's suspicion and mistrust of the doge, however, if anything, had only intensified and the restrictions on his power only tightened.

Class and The Lock-In

Historian Gary Wills summarizes the perils of making broad statements about Venetian class structures in his book on the subject:

“The third caste in Venice made up ninety percent of the populace….there were wealthy popolani just as there were poor Nobili and cittadini…yet oddly enough, this inner division of single groups helped them cohere with other groups up and down the social ladder. Each was a kind of Venice in miniature, with overlapping structures.”

This segmentization of Venice was actually a strength. The oligarchs of Venice did not, as a rule, wall themselves up in fortresses with imposing drawbridges or spikes. For one thing, there wasn't room for such things, and for another, while they were oligarchs, this cramped condition meant that they mingled far more with non-oligarchs than one might expect, walking in the same streets, boats and even living in the same neighborhoods. This meant that, for a time, anyway, they had a far better understanding of the daily lives of their fellow citizens than say, the nobles of Milan or Naples, for example.

So, let us go to one of our sources on the serrata. JJ Norwich in his History of Venice summarizes the lead up to the lock in, and the continuing process of consolidating oligarchic power:

“At the base of the same pyramid the Venetian populace had as we have already seen lost virtually all its influence, and as recently as 1289, had signally failed to reassert it…for those without the advantages of wealth or family connections, membership was not easy to obtain. From the start the Council had been self-selecting, thus, inevitably over the years, it had grown more and more into a closed society.”

Norwhich continues:

“And yet, for all that, there can be no denying that what has gone down in Venetian history as the serrata—literally, the locking—del Maggior Consiglio created, at a stroke, a closed caste in the society of the Republic; a caste with its own inner elite of those who had sat in the Great Council during those four critical years between 1293 and 1297, but which also embraced those whose parentage or whose own past record, gave them a past title to membership…in 1315 a list was compiled of all Venetian citizens eligible for election; and from this, in view of the rigid exclusion of all those born out of wedlock or of a non-patrician mother, it was a short step to that great register of noble marriages and births that was later to become famous as the libro d’oro—the Golden Book.”

This new social arrangement consolidated power in the hands of the oligarchs. The republic of Venice had hardened its caste lines so as to prevent almost all social mobility on the basis of class--though not, interestingly, on the lines of wealth. For all the Venetian fanaticism for the state and loyalty to Venice above all, they had a very hands-free attitude towards the day-to-day life of the city, trusting people to largely organize themselves along neighborhood lines.

War of Chioggia (1378-1381)

This was the last of four major wars that Venice fought against Genoa, and undoubtedly the one it was in existential danger during.

In The Venetians   author Colin Thubron notes the last desperate struggle of the Venetians against the Genoans in the very mouth of the lagoon:

“Never in the history of the republic had Venice been in graver danger. With part of the fleet under Admiral Carlo Zeno, away in the East, and the rest of the navy decimated in a recent battle against the Genoese, the Venetians had only six war galleys at their disposal.

Doge Andrea Contarini dispatched three ambassadors to Chioggia seeking a compromise. But the Genoese admiral rejected the offer. “You shall never have peace wit the lord of Pauda or our republic until we have bridled the bronze horses that stand in your square of St. Mark,” he said. “When we have the reins in our hands, we shall know how to keep them quiet.”

Venice, at this point, had eclipsed Constantinople as an art-hub--largely from plundering Byzantium, as we discussed in our episode of the Fourth Crusade. The Genoan commander is making a sly reference to the horse-statues the Venetians stole from the Byzantines--not so subtly stating that Venice would be sacked in much the sack way the Venetians had ravaged Byzantium.

The Venetians were so desperate to rally what citizens they had to fight the invading Genoans with any carrots and sticks they had available. This prompted the Venetians to make the only large-scale opening to the serrata in their history--people who performed valorous service in aid of the Republic in her moment of crisis could be lifted to the rank of oligarchic power.

This promise, along with the very real threat of starvation and the sword proved enough of a motivator that, combined with the return of Zeno's fleet, the Genoans were driven from the lagoon.

And so on forever and ever
Girolamo Priuli ( a 16th century Venetian writer) once quipped:

“Time does much for republics, because they never die.”

Historian Gary Wills picks up where Priuli left off, saying:

“The Venetians had a sense of time different from that observable Italian cities where regimes came and went, of longer or shorter duration, marked off from each other by violent wrenches, by sharp changes in personnel, constitutions, and character. The life of the lagoon republic, seemed by contrast, a seamless continuity.”

In the same way that nation-state would like to project that they are eternal, changeless entities, so did Venice take steps to portray herself as deathless. The Most Serene Republic could never be destroyed in the same way a monarchial power could, for its people and institution(al knowledge) would persist beyond the death of individuals.

In the modern day, we see this corporate, deterministic ethos in too big to fail banks or corporations, who are as interested in pruning the imagination away from a world without them as Venice was.

Declaring perpetuity, in short, is not a statement of strength, but of insecurity.

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For those of you who want to start at the beginning of the series, click here.

Today we're gonna be talking about the world's most terrifying blind man, the 34th Rule of Acquisition, and the high price of founding an empire that doge Enrico Dandalo paid to take Venice to the next level. That price was human life, and a literal ton of art-theft.

Zooming Out: The Fourth Crusade

For the big picture of the fourth crusade in 100 words or less, it's hard to do better than HG Wells in his OUTLINE OF HISTORY:

“The bulk of the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land at all. It started from Venice (1202), captured Zara, encamped at Constantinople (1203) and finally in 1204 stormed the city. It was frankly a combined attack on the Byzantine Empire. Venice took much of the coast and islands of the empire, and a Latin, Baldwin of Flanders, was set up as emperor in Constantinople. The Latin and Greek Churches were declared to be reunited and the Latin emperors ruled as conquerors in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261.”

This is all the treatment that Wells gives the fourth crusade. But there are some things I'd like to mention--things that lend weight to the story of Venice's ascension to empire. This is not going to be an exhaustive list or account of the crusade--there are an embarrassing amount of sources on this event, and any history of Venice will spend a good deal of time on it. Still there were things I couldn't into the video I think are worth mentioning.

Venice is Always Looking Out For Her Own Interests

When accepting the contract to build a fleet for the Franks, the Venetians very likely were playing a double game. The crusade they had just agreed to provide with ships and men would be invading Egypt--a lucrative trading partner of Venice, particularly in cotton.

It would be insane to jeopardize such a rich trade route over a silly thing like a pope-sponsored holy war--the route with Egypt was also a hedge against the economic pain of excommunications, which prohibited Christian cities from trading with Venice (Venice has a long history of being excommunicated and being let back into the fold. They might as well have had a punch card.) From the get-go, the Venetians were playing a very different game from the Franks.

To summarize the situation, I turn to JJ Norwich's History of Venice:

“Geoffrey [the Frankish emissary] notes in passing that the agreement withheld all mention of Egypt as the immediate objective. He gives no explanation; he and his colleagues were probably afraid—and with good reason, as it turned out—that the news would be unpopular with the rank and file., for whom Jerusalem was the only legitimate goal for a Crusade and who would see no reason to wast time anywhere else…the Venetians, for their part, would have been only too happy to cooperate in the deception, for they had another secret of their own; at the very moment that the  were being concluded, their own ambassadors were in Cairo discussing a highly profitable trade agreement with the Sultan’s Viceroy, to whom, shortly afterwards they almost certainly gave a categorical assurance that Venice had no intention of being party to any attack on Egyptian territory…this allegation cannot be conclusively proved. There is no treaty extant, and though evidence for one is strong there is also a problem of its accurate dating. But most modern historians are convinced and there would be nothing uncharacteristic in such double-dealing by Venetians at this time.”

Venice, in short, was moved by profits, not prophets--no matter what religious theatrics Enrico Dandalo might have skillfully used to convince the Franks he truly intended to deliver them in Egypt.

The brutal sacking of Zara--and then Constantinople--take on a different cast once one considers that they were conducted for profit, but  also likely  to defend an existing source of Venetian revenue.

The Sacking(s) of Constantinople

“Probably no other city in history ever offered plunder like that found by the crusaders when they sacked the capital of Byzantium in 1204. According to the estimate of the Byzantines themselves, Constantinople held fully two thirds of the world’s wealth. And it was the Venetians who shrewdly garnered the lion’s share.”

Colin Thubron summarizes just how rich Constantinople was in the above quote. The capital of the Byzantine empire was simultaneously that era's equivalent to Fort Knox, the Louvre and the Vatican all rolled up into one city.

Constantinople was sacked twice by the Venetians and Franks. Sacked of course being the polite term for 'rape, pillage and burn' that was historically a major motivator for going on any sort of military venture.

Choniates a primary source and eye-witness to the slaughter, writes in his Histories, on the Frankish and Venetian sacking of Constantinople:

“I do not know how to put any order into my account, nor where to begin, continue or end the story of what those monsters committed. They broke the holy images, beloved of the faithful. They hurled the sacred relics of the martyrs into unmentionable places. They scattered the body and blood of the Savior. These precursors of Antichrist seized the chalices and patens, tore out their precious stones and ornaments, and drank from them.”

Thubron goes onto summarize Choniate's account in describing the common crimes committed in the sack of Constantinople:

“The soldier burst into the convents, raped the nuns and stabbed those who resisted. They rifled even the tombs of the Emperors. In the magnificent 6th century church of Hagia Sophia, the Vatican of Eastern Christendom, they slashed to bits the great silver altar screen and stripped the precious metals from the furniture and doors.

Trains of mules and horses were led into the church to carry away its treasure, and when some of the beasts slipped under their plundered burdens, they were slaughtered where they lay, covering the marble floors with blood and excrement. On the throne of the Patriarch—head of all Eastern Christendom—lolled a drunken prostitute who sang bawdy songs; she then danced obscenely around the church."

However, even in committing crimes, the Venetians stood apart from the Franks. Colin Thubron goes on to make extensive notes on what the Venetians chose to take as opposed to the more indiscriminate pillaging of the Franks:

“The Venetians, more sophisticated than their allies, concentrated on items of artistic merit. Their greatest prize was four bronze horses—among the few pieces of classical statuary not smashed by the mob or melted down for the price of the metal—that were taken from Constantinople’s Hippodrome and placed atop the facade of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Anything else that could conceivably be used to embellish the basilica was also looted columns, capitals and slabs of marble, enamels, icons, plates and chalices. And a host of reliquaries, ivories, mosaics and illuminated manuscripts found their way back to St. Mark’s.”

There were, of course, some moments of truly dark comedy in the sack. This is the last Thubron quote, I swear:

“Two heads of John the Baptist were produced (Venice got a tooth) and the Bishop of Soissons returned home with the finger that Doubting Thomas was said to have thrust into the side of Christ. Others divided the corpses of the Apostles, splinters of the true Cross, vials of holy blood and portions of anatomies of most of the lesser saints.”

All this stolen art--and religious relics--has a growth effect on Venetian claims towards legitimacy. Not to mention the fact that the Venetians had managed the remarkable feat of managing to backstab and acquire a significant fraction of the Byzantine Empire.

The Venetians could now claim legitimacy from the Roman Empire itself--they'd conquered them, afterall, and taken its greatest treasures. Which brings me to my next point.

Dandalo as a Leader

Enrico (anglicized to Henry, which is rather less intimidating) Dandalo was a formidable and shrewd leader. On this, even the sources that loath him, agree. In contrast to the last doge(s) we discussed, the Antenori brothers, Dandalo kept the main values and profit of the growing Venetian republic firmly in view at all times. While this sounds good and noble--the rise of the Venetian empire was bought with broken promises, a sea of blood and the fall of the Byzantine empire. The human cost alone is staggering.

The old doge avoided many traps and snares that came in the conquest of Constantinople--too many to name at each turn. The two big ones were not the physical danger he routinely placed himself in (even, in one case, shaming his men by sending his ship first into battle), but of a political nature.

After seeing the disaster that Alexius had been as emperor and defeating Mourtzouphlos, the Venetians realized that they couldn't leave Constantinople in the hands of the Byzantines. So they decided that it would be better to have the Franks--confusingly changed to the term 'Latins' take over the shop instead. So, in a show of fairness--read, tilting things their way--the Venetians proposed that the Franks vote on the new emperor of the Latin empire from among their number.

Just one problem. The head of the Franks, Boniface, while in every other respect completely unobjectionable to Venetian interests, was favored by the Genoans. Those damn shifty competitive Genoans.
Clearly, it would be catastrophic for Venice if a friend of Genoa was put in charge of some of the most profitable trade routes in their newly acquired empire.

Doge Enrico Dandalo didn't make threats or bluster, though he was fond of doing both. Instead, he showed tact--offering to host the deliberations from his quarters in Constantinople and thereby acting as a neutral arbiter while doing all he could behind the scenes to get someone other than Boniface elected emperor.

Spoiler alert: He succeeded. Baldwin of Flanders, friend of Venice, was elected the first emperor of the Latins.

I'll let JJ Norwich summarize the second trap the Dandolo avoided in the fourth crusade:

"...his diplomatic skill had shaped a treaty which gave Venice more than she had dared to hope and laid the foundations for her commercial Empire. Refusing the Byzantine crown for himself--to accept it would have created insuperable constitutional problems at home and might well have destroyed the Republic...finally, while encouraging the Franks to feudalize the empire--a step which could not fail to create fragmentation and disunity and would prevent its ever becoming strong enough to obstruct Venetian expansion--he had kept Venice outside the feudal framework, holding her new dominions not as an imperial fief but by her own right of conquest."

The Antenori, in Dandalo's place, wouldn't have even waited for the blood to dry on the walls before declaring themselves emperors. But the idea of loyalty to the letter and emerging (limited, oligarchic) spirit of the Venetian republic clearly was gaining a serious hold in the position of the doge. Doge Enrico Dandalo had avoided the temptations of dictatorship and acted in the (financial and geopolitical) best interests of the Venetian Republic over personal enrichment and aggrandizement. Better yet, he had done all this in such a way that the Latins took all the risk of establishing an empire in a hostile foreign land, while Venice rose to empire herself and gained a tremendous boost in financial power and political clout.

That brings us to the end of this particular part of Venetian history. Join us next week!

For a discussion on bats, plagues, the second  Jewish ghetto in Europe and Venetian inferiority complexes, go to the talk back link here:

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