A NEW HISTORY OF VENICE.'

Tine is an age of series and manuals. Hardly a year passes but some enterprising publisher announces that he will issue a new collection of volumes bearing on some subject, historical or biographical, and the large and increasing body of readers, athirst for a little culture and stimulated thereto by Extension lectures, read the same and are eager for more. To some such body of readers the book before us is intended to appeal. A history of Venice compressed into four hundred pages is not likely to recount the story of that city in any greet fullness of detail, or with much original research. The readers for whom it is intended do not demand originality, and are satisfied if they are given a clear and picturesque narrative. And in this aim the writer of the book before us has succeeded. No Italian city is so replete with the picturesque as Venice; the beauty of her buildings and pictures, the unique character of her position, the secrecy and mystery of her dread Council of Ten, are known to every one, and naturally tend to divert the attention of the unscholarly reader from the true elements of her greatness. To this temptation Mrs. Wiel must have been strongly exposed in the writing of this book, and on the whole she has come through her difficulties very well.

With no other city of Italy can V enice be adequately com-

• Venice. By Aletbee, WieL, "The Story of the Nations" Series. London: T. Maher Merin. 1894.

pared. She has been called the Sparta of Italy in contradis- tinction to Florence, its Athens ; but such an analogy is in the last degree false and misleading. In fact, Mr. Horatio Brown has spoken the truth when he says that Venice was

successful just because she was unlike any other Italian city, because she was "unique." Whatever view we take of the origin of Venice, and whatever date we accept, certain it is that by the time of Belisarius and his destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom, Venice had become a place of import. ance. Her isolation and the surrounding waters forced on her inhabitants a spirit of energy and independence. In the struggles which continued during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries to distract the unhappy land of Italy, while the Pope was bickering with the Lombards and the Exarch of Ravenna intriguing against both, Venice assumed naturally the position she continued to hold till 1118, and only finally lost at the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Till then she must be looked on not as a part of the West, but as an outpost of the East. Not for a moment would she have admitted to the Exarch the semblance of jurisdiction or a scrap of land among her islands ; but in her professed

adhesion to the Emperor of the Byzantines she never wavered. "We have not come to these islands to live under a lord" were the words of the Venetians, and the same feeling which made them curb the power of their Doges, made them prefer the King Log at Byzantium whom they had not seen, to the King Stork—whether Luitprand, Pepin, or Otto II.—whom they had seen. From the East and the Byzantine Empire came their greatness, the begin- nings of their commerce and of their Eastern dominions ; and it was several centuries before they gradually changed this attitude or busied themselves in the troubled politics of the West. Now this fact is hardly stated with sufficient in- sistence by the writer under notice. We do not for a moment doubt that she is herself well aware of the fact ; but it is not stated with such clearness that the ordinary reader—for whom and not for the professed student is this book written —may immediately grasp it and apply it as a leading thread through the early diplomacy of Venice. Mrs. Wiel seems hardly to have perceived of what huge importance are the dates of 1095 and 1118 in the history of Venice, and this want of acumen leads her into a very serious misstatement of the Venetian aims when she comes to relate the share of that city in the Crusades.

Considering, then, the attitude of Venice towards the East and West, there can be no doubt of the vast influence exer- cised by the Crusades on her history. She had acquired a commanding position not less by her own enterprise and industry, than by her unique position. In her diplomatic relations, in culture, and in sympathies, she was still part of the Roman Empire in the East. With the politics of Italy and the West, she had hitherto had little concern. As we have seen, she had repelled the attempts of Frankish Pepin and Saxon Otto, and proclaimed her isolation from the revived

Roman Empire of the West. Now there entered a totally new force in the shape of the Crusades, and this new force was certain to act powerfully upon Venice. Nothing marks the statesmen and rulers of Venice more strongly than their just appreciation of the events going on around them. They seem at once to have perceived that the crusading spirit was, as we should now say, in the air, and that Venice would either gain or lose enormously by the altered conditions of Western Christendom. By forwarding the designs of the Crusaders, by helping them on their road to Palestine, Venice would constitute herself the meeting-place of East and West; of

this situation a city of traders could take full advantage, and thus Venice would gain. And, to the huge chagrin of the Byzantines, this was the policy adopted by Venice. The writer does not fully recognise the importance of this decision, and the words with which she opens her account of Venice and the Crusades are strangely wide of the mark (the italics are ours) :—

" The hour had now come when Venice was to make open con- fession, as it were, of her devotion to religion and. her love of sacred rights and traditions. The whole of the Christian world had been aroused by Pope, or conscience, or public opinion, to arm in defence of Christ's sepulchre, and fight for the rescue of the Holy Land Doge Vitale Michiel convoked a general assembly where he pointed out the claims of religion, and the advantages that would accrue to their commerce if they acceded to the proposal."

Is the last part of this sentence, far more than the first,

that explains the attitude of Venice at this crisis, and it requires to be placed in strong relief, for it contains the secret of this political voltelace. With abstract piety Venice had no sympathy ; it was the commercial instinct that lay nearest her heart. In 1118 Venice assisted the Crusaders in taking Tyre,— a step most repugnant to the Eastern Emperor. Henceforward she was committed to this policy, and the events of the twelfth century led naturally and easily to the Fourth Crusade and the occupation of Constantinople by the Latins. Mrs. Wiel does well to dwell on this episode in the history of Venice as something worse than a crime. For it was a blunder in that it weakened the resisting power of Eastern Christendom, and ultimately abandoned Venice to an unequal struggle with the Ottoman Turks. The account of the constitutional changes which went on from 1172 to 1297, is good and accurate ; not the less so because it is drawn almost entirely from Mr. Horatio Brown's essay on the same subject. When all has been said to explain the stability and success of the Venetian Government, its permanence must yet remain a matter of wonder, though not perhaps of mystery. Of all forms of government an oligarchy is the least lasting and the most open to enemies, internal and external. But anyway, the Oligarchy became established and fixed, until, in the fifteenth century, we find it looked up to by the other Italian cities, distracted by faction and civil war, as a model of all a government should be.

The next important passage in the history of Venice is the growth of her empire on the mainland of Italy. From many points of view this was a deplorable change in her position. But the writer does not quite realise that there is a real chain of development in the desire of Venice for dominions on terra firma it was no new desire born in a night or suggested by the defenceless position of the Visconti lands in 1402; it was but one link in a long series. Venice, as we have aeon, had decided in the twelfth century to become the meeting-place of East and West, and the exploiter of both. She had succeeded admirably. Her trade increased, and as the East became ever more and more feeble, she obtained a considerable Empire in Greece and the Levant. Moreover, the exigencies of her position forced her to maintain some east of hold on the Illyrian coast-line. Then in the fourteenth century comes her fight to the death with Genoa. The crushing ruin at Chioggia destroyed the hopes of the Ligurian Republic at once and for ever. Venice remained mistress of the inland sea; and if at this juncture she looked round for fresh worlds to conquer, who can wonder, even if they blame P More- over, about this time she was losing her Dalmatian posses- sions to the Angevin Kings of Hungary ; there was present the smarting sense of loss. Consequently, when in 1402 Gian Galeazzo Visconti suddenly died and left his ill-gotten realm in disarray, it was a temptation hardly to be resisted by any State, however prudent. The result is well known ; by 1430, the Republic had got to the Adda, and had her face, as Commines shrewdly notices, like a Janus, facing both ways. Even 'before this date the Turks were becoming a menace to Venice, and it may well have been that she thought to in- crease her strength for the coming struggle by acquiring lands in the valley of the Po. How delnsive such specula- tions were to prove was soon apparent. Whatever she gained in the West, Venice lost in the East. She had sacrificed her position as the greatest Power in Eastern Europe to become one of the duodecimo States of Italy, to intrigue with Cosimo of Florence, or match herself against the craft of the &ern,.

In relating the various events that led tip to the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France, Mrs. -Mel has supported an opinion generally considered heretical, but which we can- not but regard as sound. She traces that fatal expedition to Venice and her counsels. Most modern writers lay the blame on Lodovico Sforza, Innocent VIII., or Peron de Basche (whom she quaintly calls "de Baschi," as if he were an Italian) ; on any one, in short, save the real offender. But the responsi- bility of the matter really rests with Venice ; she it was who advised the baffled Neapolitan barons to apply to the King of France, never dreaming he would come ; and as proof that Mrs. Wiel has in this case been guided by a sound critical instinct, we need only cite the early chapters of the seventh book of Commines, who propounds the same view with his usual clearness and acumen. But all these successes on the part of Venice, her seizure of Cyprus, of Ravenna, and finally of Rimini and Cervia on the fall of Cesare Borgia, only brought upon her the vengeance of the robbers of the League of Cambrai ; from that war and its con- sequences she never really recovered. She had made herself by her acquisitions in Lombardy the most compact and cohesive power in Italy ; rightly or wrongly, they felt her a menace to their freedom, and she was doomed to feel the displeasure of Europe in arms, The further history, of Venice, though of great interest, has little bearing on European politics at large. She was isolated and deserted. by her selfish and preoccupied neighbours, and condemned to fight a heroic but on the whole a losing battle with the Turks. By the middle of the seventeenth century she had• become merely the most pleasant and depraved capital of Europe. To pleasure-seekers, she was a paradise of every-. thing desirable and forbidden, where amusements, frivolity, and vice, held perpetual carnival; her real mission was ended,. and the fiat of Napoleon, her second Attila, was almost, inevitable.

There are a good many things in this excellent little book., that we should be glad to see revised. The story of the meet- ing of Alexander III. and Barbarossa, of how the Pope put his foot on the neck of the baffled Emperor, is related as if it., were historically true, and not the fiction of later chroniclers. Such a scene of papal triumph may well have occurred at. Canossa a century before, but Mrs. Wiel must surely know that the Venetian version of this episode is quite unfounded ;. more mention might have been made of Cosimo del Medici and his alliance with Francesco Sforza, for there is little doubt that but for Florentine support the Sforzeschi would have been destroyed, and Venice become mistress of Lombardy from the Lido to the passes of Savoy. The visit of Commines to Venice is mentioned as if it took place before the expedition of Charles VIII., whereas it really occurred at the end of 1494 and the beginning of 1495, when Charles was well on his road to Naples. The Apulian towns are said to have been ceded to Spain. at the Peace of Cambrai in 1529, whereas they were really taken by Spain at the beginning of the war of Cambrai, twenty years before ; and though the Peace of 1529 may have been the first recognition by Venice of this fact, it is surely misleading to assign their loss to this year. But these are only a few blots on an otherwise clear and well-constructed. work. Mrs. Wiel's Venice is a book that should be read with, much pleasure and profit.

The illustrations are mostly taken from the recently pub- lished Galli o Canali di Venezia and from M. Yriarte's Venise, nor have they lost much in the transmission. Finally, we must not forget to mention that the map of the Lagoons, facing p. 5, is "lifted," without the slightest acknowledgment,. from Mr. Horatio Brown's Venice, and as the scale given in that book is here omitted, the map is rendered quite useless