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| 3. The Rise of Venice |
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| Fugitives from the Huns found refuge among the fishing villages of the lagoons; the permanent establishment of Venice seems to date from the Lombard invasion (568). Venetian aid to Belisarius began the formal connection between Venice and Constantinople and a (largely) theoretical connection with the Eastern Roman Empire. The tribuni maiores (a central governing committee of the islands) dated from c. 568. | 1 |
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| 687 |
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| Election of the first doge. A salt monopoly and salt-fish trade were the sources of the first prosperity of Venice. Two great parties: pro-Byzantine aristocrats favoring a hereditary doge; democrats friendly to the Roman Church and (later) the Franks. Venice offered asylum to the exarch of Ravenna fleeing from Liutprand, and gained trading rights with Ravenna. When Charlemagne ordered the pope to expel the Venetians from the Pentapolis and threatened the settlement in the lagoons, Venice turned again to Constantinople. | 2 |
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| 810 |
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| In a treaty, Charlemagne and the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus recognized Venice as Byzantine territory and acknowledged her mainland trading rights. This agreement marks the start of Venice's rise to commercial preponderance, initially as a Byzantine province, later as a Byzantine ally protecting sea lanes. | 3 |
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| 1000 |
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| After a 200-year expansion in the Adriatic, Venice completely reduced the Dalmatian pirates, and the doge took the title of duke of Dalmatia. Venice was mistress of the sea route to the Holy Land (commemorated in the wedding of the doge and the sea). | 4 |
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| 1032 |
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| Establishment of a council and senate. | 5 |
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| 1043 |
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| The construction of the church of St. Mark begun; one of the most notable and influential examples of Byzantine architecture in the West. | 6 |
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| 1095 |
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| The first three crusades established Venetian trading rights in a number of Levantine ports (e.g., Sidon, 1102; Tyre, 1123) and founded the power of a wealthy ruling class. A war with the Eastern Empire (financed by the first known government bonds) was unsuccessful, and led to the institution of a deliberative assembly of 480 members (the germ of the great council). | 7 |
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| 1171 |
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| Appointment of the doge was transferred to this council, a complete triumph for the commercial aristocracy. | 8 |
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| 1198 |
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| A coronation oath (in varying terms) began to be exacted of the doge. | 9 |
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| 1204 |
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| The Frankish capture of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade proved a tremendous economic bonanza for Venice (See 1202, Summer), which gained the Cyclades, Sporades, Propontis, the Black Sea coasts, Thessalian littoral, and control of the Morea. Venice administered this vast empire on a kind of feudal tenure, portioning it out to families charged with defense of the seaways. Venice had also gained a further foothold in Syrian ports. | 10 |
| From this period dates a great epoch of building and increasing oligarchic pressure, as the government began to become a closed corporation of leading families. | 11 |
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| 1253–99 |
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| The struggle with Genoa for the Black Sea and Levantine trade. The feud of Genoa and Venice was ancient, and trouble began at Acre (1253). The first war with Genoa ended in the complete defeat (1258) of the Genoese. By the later 12th century, Venice served as an international entrepôt for world trade, selling silk brought from China across central Asia via the Silk Road (See The Silk Roads). | 12 |
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| 1255–66 |
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| Venetian traders in the Black Sea region, Nicolo and Maffeo Polo traveled to central Asia and China (See 1315). | 13 |
| The pursuit of trading possibilities had always stimulated Venetian enterprise. Since before the 1st century C.E., Asian merchants had traded on the Silk Road in central Asia (westward through Mongolia, south or north around the Takla Makan Desert to Songdiana, then westward to Transoxiana, from which this regular long-distance trade entered the Roman Empire). These merchants exchanged Chinese silks and lacquerware for Western woolen and linen textiles, glass, coral, and precious stones. With the rise of Islam, Persians came to control the western parts of the trade, traveling northward from Baghdad to the Black Sea coast, from which Jewish merchants carried trade west to Europe. | 14 |
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