4	Innocents and Empire-Builders
5	‘We are Venetians, then Christians’
6	Father and Son
7	Colleoni
8	The Venetian Queen of Cyprus
9	The End of the Queen
10	‘Lost in a day what had taken eight hundred years to gain’
11	Discoveries of the Mind
12	The Loss of Cyprus

Part Three: The Long Decline

13	The Battle of Lepanto
14	Women of Venice
15	The Jews of Venice
16	Deepening Decline
17	An Intellectual Revolution
18	‘The Seat of Music’

Part Four: Dissolution and Fall

19	The Last Days
20	The Very End

List of Illustrations

1.	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). Courtesy of AKG Images/the British Library
2.	A Venetian plague doctor in his protective mask (Jan van Grevenbroeck, early nineteenth century). Courtesy of Museo Correr, Venice/the Bridgeman Art Library
3.	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). Courtesy of the Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice/Giraudon/the Bridgeman Art Library
4.	Doge Loredan by Giovanni Bellini, capturing the austere majesty of the ruling doge in all his finery (1501). Courtesy of the National Gallery, London/the Bridgeman Art Library
5.	Gentile Bellini’s portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople (1480). Courtesy of the National Gallery, London/the Bridgeman Art Library
6.	Two Venetian Courtesans by Carpaccio ( c .1490). Some experts now suggest that this may depict two aristocratic wives waiting for their husbands to return from hunting. Courtesy of Museo Correr, Venice/the Bridgeman Art Library
7.	The painting by Titian of the young Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, dressed as St Catherine of Alexandria ( c .1542). Courtesy of the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/the Bridgeman Art Library
8.	The monument to the great Venetian condottiere Colleoni by Verrocchio (1490). At the time it was the greatest equestrian statue cast in bronze. Courtesy of Sarah Quill/the Bridgeman Art Library
9.	The Battle of Lepanto by Vicentino, which hangs in the Doge’s Palace (1603). Courtesy of Palazzo Ducale, Venice/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/ the Bridgeman Art Library
10.	Painting of the Doge’s Palace by Canaletto, with a view down the Riva dei Schiavoni (late 1730s). To the left are the two columns of the Piazatta. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London/the Bridgeman Art Library
11.	The Piazza San Marco by Guardi (after 1780). He ended up selling his paintings to passing tourists here. Courtesy of the National Gallery/ the Bridgeman Art Library
12.	Ismael Mengs’ engraving of Casanova (eighteenth century). Courtesy of a Private Collection/Archives Charmet/the Bridgeman Art Library

Prologue

I
N THE WORDS
of the renowned historian John Julius Norwich, ‘One of the most intractable problems with which the historian of Venice has to contend is that which stems from the instinctive horror, amounting at times to a phobia, shown by the Republic to the faintest suggestion of the cult of personality.’ Indeed, he goes on to say, ‘it is hard to find much human interest in the decrees and deliberations of the faceless Council of Ten’. My intention is not to write another history of Venice, but to show that – despite pursuing this policy – the city not only produced, and attracted to its shores, a succession of outstanding characters, but also that these characters (ranging from Marco Polo to Casanova) often embodied the spirit of Venice, which in its turn frequently took on a distinctly individual character of its own. They will be described against the background of events that over the centuries forged and finally destroyed the most powerful of all Mediterranean cities. Venice came to see itself as
La Serenissima
(‘the Most Serene Republic’), yet here its self-identification was as faulty as its attempt to suppress all individuality. Far from being so tranquil and clearly aloof from everyday concerns, its behaviour could be dark and obfuscating, proud and avaricious, efficient or incompetent, devious, vengeful, glorious even, and certainly, towards the end, eaten away by a self-destructive paranoia so embodied by that very Council of Ten, the committee of public safety, spies and secret police.

The Venetians, like the British, were a seagoing island race, who laid claim to an extensive empire out of all proportion to the size of their homeland, whose influence at times extended to the reaches of the known globe. Yet like America, Venice’s empire was more concerned with trade
domination than with actual territorial possession. And, like both empires, it was not afraid of isolationism: of turning its back on the large land mass that began just across the water, or of ignoring the larger continental worlds beyond – in the form of Europe, America and Asia.

Venice was ruled over by a doge, an elected position held for life, whose holder initially held great power, which was gradually diminished over the centuries until he became little more than a figurehead, his sovereignty similar to that of the British monarch today. Although nominally a democratic republic, Venice was in reality an oligarchy ruled by an extensive class of wealthy ‘noble’ families. Only members of these families could sit on the parliamentary-style Great Council and vote, a jealously guarded right handed down from generation to generation, and they alone could be elected to senior administrative positions, such as membership of the many interlocking councils that ensured the checks and balances of ordered daily governance, or become members of the supreme Council of Ten, or become doge.

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