The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (52 page)

Up until now Venetian policy had been characterised by weakness. Caught between two major powers, it had dithered, seeking to appease one side and then the other. The Republic was devoid of leadership. It was as if more than seventy years of inglorious neutrality, combined with the increasingly repressive internal policy maintained by the Council of Ten and its network of informants, had crushed all trace of individuality. Da Ponte and Casanova were far from being the only free spirits to seek their fortune in Europe and the New World. With the administration characterised by the spirit of the committee, the enterprise that had once been the glory of the city had now all but vanished. Just a few years earlier one of the Republic’s few successful businessmen had lamented that the city’s life-blood – trade – ‘is falling into final collapse. The ancient and long-held maxims and laws which created and could still create a nation’s greatness have been forgotten’. As in trade, so in all other matters. Even the Council of Ten’s efforts to maintain a police state were beginning to falter. Many Venetian citizens had been stirred by the French Revolution and ideas of liberty. There was even muttered talk of the overthrow of the oligarchy and the establishment of a truly democratic republic.

Doge Lodovico Manin had by this time been in office for some seven years and was in his seventies. In failing health and partially deaf, he was more inclined to spend his time in religious devotions than the affairs of the Republic, his negligence allowing the once-great Venetian fleet to dwindle to a mere 390 merchantmen. Less than three months after Manin’s
election, the news of the French Revolution had reached Venice, causing consternation amongst the Council of Ten – and now French revolutionary troops were camped at the Republic’s borders, fewer than fifty miles from the lagoon itself. Where previously the Council of Ten and the Senate had dithered in their foreign policy, from this point on their jittery indecisiveness would lead to catastrophic blunders.

By now Bonaparte himself had marched north, pursuing the Austrians across the Alps. The Venetians were thus astonished when in the autumn of 1796 he offered them an alliance. In fact the Venetians should not have been surprised: Bonaparte was desperate to protect his overstretched army. But when his reassuring offer was put to the Senate, they voted to turn it down. It is all but impossible to think of a rational explanation for this self-destructive decision. Under the circumstances, continuing neutrality was out of the question. It has been suggested that the senators were afraid that an alliance with France would mean the spread of subversive ideas. Either way, Bonaparte immediately ordered his troops to march into Verona, in order to protect his supply lines, and there was nothing that Venice could do about it.

Six months later, two incidents would put the Venetians in a yet more precarious position. The citizens of Verona rose up against the French, and were savagely put down – again with no attempt at Venetian intervention. Shortly afterwards three French ships attempted to sail into the lagoon. As Venice remained technically neutral, strictly speaking this did not constitute an act of aggression. Indeed, it seems the French intended none. On the other hand, the French appeared to be unaware that the Council of Ten had issued an order barring all foreign ships from entering Venetian waters. As the French warships entered the lagoon, they were fired upon by Venetian defence batteries at the Sant’Andrea fort. Two of the French ships managed to turn and sail for the open sea, but the third received direct hits from the Venetian cannon fire. Its captain and a number of French sailors were killed and the ship immobilised. This was undeniably an act of war, and the French were not slow to brand it as such.

As if matters were not bad enough, Venice’s ally Francis II had now entered into peace negotiations with Bonaparte. Venice found itself standing alone against the might of the French revolutionary army. Panic swept
through the city as the news came in that French troops were overrunning the mainland territories, and by the end of April 1797 the revolutionary army was lining the shores of the lagoon. The island city, wall-less and defenceless, now stood within range of the French artillery.

The end was swift in coming. On 9 May, Bonaparte issued an ultimatum that boiled down to two alternatives: either Venice surrendered or it would be destroyed. The city appeared to have little option. On 12 May, the tearful seventy-two-year-old Doge Manin appeared before the Great Council and asked them to vote. By now most of its members had already disappeared from the city. The remaining 537 voted by 512 to twenty to surrender, with five abstaining, and then fled the chamber in disarray, casting off their robes so that they could slip away undetected through the crowd gathered outside in the Piazza San Marco. They had effectively voted themselves out of existence. Three days later French soldiers sailed across the lagoon and took possession of the city. They encountered no resistance. When the city and the nearby islands had been secured, 4,000 soldiers of the revolutionary army staged a parade, accompanied by brass bands, in the Piazza San Marco. The watching citizens well understood the significance of the event: this was the first time in Venice’s long history that foreign troops had set foot in their city. Further humiliations marking the end of the independent Republic soon followed. Bonaparte ordered that a ‘Tree of Liberty’ be planted in the Piazza San Marco, beneath which the doge’s
corno
, and other insignia of office, were ceremonially burned, along with a copy of the Golden Book listing all the noble families. The deposed doge and the former members of the Grand Council who had not fled the city were then made to dance around the flames, while the watching citizens were encouraged by the French soldiers to jeer at their former masters. Next it was the turn of the city itself to be dismantled. The French army began taking down the bronze horses of San Marco and removing other treasures, in preparation for their transshipment to France. The city’s destruction, both political and symbolic, was now complete. The 1,000-year-old Republic of Venice was no more.

*
Originally written in French as
L’Histone de ma vie
(History of My Life), this entertaining if somewhat repetitive description of Casanova’s life and multifarious seductions (real and imagined) stretches to a dozen volumes.

*
Casanova’s description appears in his short work
Escape from The Leads
, as well as in Volume Four, Chapters 14 and 15, in the more readily available Everyman translation of his
History of My Life
.

Image Gallery

Illuminated manuscript of Marco Polo’s first voyage, showing Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople bidding Marco Polo and his father farewell, a blessing by the Patriarch, and the explorers entering the Black Sea (1333).

A Venetian plague doctor in his protective mask (Jan van Grevenbroeck, early nineteenth century).

Detail of
The Miracle at Rialto Bridge
by Carpaccio, showing the old wooden structure with its drawbridges which could be raised to allow tall-masted ships to pass through to the Rialto landing stage (1494).

Doge Loredan
by Giovanni Bellini, capturing the austere majesty of the ruling doge in all his finery (1501).

Gentile Bellini’s portrait of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople (1480).