Republic of Venice

A city with no land

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)formation

Venice sits on mud. The lagoon is a shallow brackish basin behind a barrier of sandbars, with no stone, no timber, no arable ground and no fresh water beyond what falls on it. Every building in the city stands on piles driven into silt, and every one of those piles came from somewhere else.

That is the whole of the polity's economic constitution, and it is worth putting first because everything else follows from it. A city with no hinterland cannot tax agriculture, so it has to raise its revenue from things passing through. It cannot feed itself, so it must trade. And it cannot be taken by cavalry, which is the other half of the story.

Fish and salt

The first Venetian export was salt, and for four hundred years it was the largest item in the accounts.

Salt was made by evaporating lagoon water in pans, and the same conditions that made the site useless for farming made it excellent for that. What turned a commodity into a monopoly was policy: from the twelfth century Venice systematically bought out, undercut or destroyed rival production around the Adriatic, and then sold to a mainland with no alternative source and an absolute need. Cargoes coming into Venice were required to carry salt on the return leg, subsidised, which is a state using a monopoly to underwrite the freight rates of everything else.

It is the least romantic fact about the republic, and it paid for the beginning of everything else.

Byzantine, and then not

Venice was a Byzantine province. The lagoon settlements belonged to the exarchate of Ravenna; their dukes were imperial officials with Greek court titles, appointed and confirmed from Constantinople.

It stopped being one without anybody saying so. There is no declaration, no war and no year in which Venice announced anything. What happened is that the dukes started choosing themselves, then minting, then treating with the Franks directly, while continuing to accept Byzantine titles and to describe themselves as the emperor's servants for another two hundred years. The date usually given is 812, and it is the date of the Pax Nicephori — a treaty in which Byzantium and Charlemagne's empire settled whose the lagoon was. The independence of Venice is conventionally dated from an agreement between two other powers about it, to which Venice was not a party.

The habit stuck. Venice went on being formally deferential to Constantinople long after it had stopped obeying it, which was useful, and two and a half centuries later it was cashed in for the customs exemption that made the city rich.

Saint Mark

In 828 two Venetian merchants removed the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria and brought it home, and the standard account has them concealing it under a layer of pork in the expectation that Muslim inspectors would not search further.

The reason it mattered is political rather than devotional. A city with no Roman past, no imperial charter, no founding saint and no bishop of any antiquity had nothing to answer a claim with. An apostle changes that. The basilica was built to house him, the doge's chapel was the apostle's church rather than the cathedral, and the republic's name for itself in its own documents was often simply the commune of Saint Mark.

The lion is on every building Venice ever held, from Bergamo to Crete, which is the other reason to mention it: it is how you can still tell, on the ground, how far the republic got.

The fourth crusade

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)expansion

In 1201 the Venetian government contracted to build and crew a fleet to carry thirty-three thousand crusaders to Egypt, and suspended most other commercial activity for a year to do it. The crusaders raised about half the agreed sum and arrived in numbers far below the contract. Venice had a fleet, no payment, and a year's trade forgone.

What followed is the best-documented sequence of decisions in the republic's history. The crusade worked off part of the debt by taking Zara on the Dalmatian coast for Venice — a Christian city, which got the whole army excommunicated. It then accepted an offer from a Byzantine claimant who promised money and troops if restored. It restored him; he could not pay; the city rioted and killed him; and in April 1204 the army stormed Constantinople and sacked it for three days.

Enrico Dandolo

He was in his nineties and blind, and he is the least typical doge Venice ever had. He negotiated the transport contract, took the cross himself, led the assault on the sea walls from the bow of his own galley, and was the dominant figure in the partition afterwards. He is buried in Hagia Sophia, or was — the marker is there, and the remains were probably scattered in 1261.

Whether he engineered the diversion from the start is the oldest argument in Venetian historiography and Lane's position is that he did not: the sequence is better explained by a bankrupt crusade making one expedient decision after another, each of which suited Venice. The debate does not change the outcome, and there is no settling it from here.

Three-eighths

The partition treaty assigned Venice three-eighths of the Byzantine empire and gave the doge the title lord of a quarter and half a quarter of the empire of Romania, which is three-eighths written the long way.

What Venice took was chosen with unusual clarity. Not the land: the French and Flemish knights got Thrace, Macedonia and Greece and had to hold them against Bulgarians and Greeks. Venice took the ports, the islands and the straits — Modon and Coron at the tip of the Peloponnese, Negroponte, the Aegean islands, the Adriatic coast, and Crete, which it bought from Boniface of Montferrat for a thousand marks because he had no way to use it.

That is the map of a trading empire rather than a territorial one. A chain of harbours a day's sail apart from the lagoon to the eastern Mediterranean, each with a castle, a Venetian governor and a lion over the gate, and almost no interior anywhere.

The other end of it

What Venice acquired in three days, Constantinople lost permanently. The city never regained its population. The treasury never recovered. The customs of the straits, which had been the empire's largest single revenue, passed to the Italian republics and did not come back. The Byzantine government went into exile at Nicaea and a second one set up at Trebizond, and when the Greeks retook the city fifty-seven years later they retook a ruin.

The same three days are the founding disaster of one polity and the founding acquisition of another, and the men who carried it out had set off to attack Egypt.

We consent

Drafted from Villehardouin, Memoirs of the Crusades (1908)expansion

In the spring of 1201 six envoys from the barons of France rode to Venice to ask for ships. One of them was Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, and he afterwards wrote the crusade up. He is the participant with the largest personal interest in the outcome looking defensible, and he is also the man who recorded the terms.

The contract

The doge took a week to consult and then gave them his figures. Transports for four thousand five hundred horses and nine thousand squires; ships for four thousand five hundred knights and twenty thousand sergeants of foot; food for all of them, men and horses, for nine months. Four marks a horse, two marks a man. The covenants to hold for a year from the day the fleet sailed.

Now the sum total of the expenses above named amounts to 85,000 marks.

Then the clause that decided everything afterwards. For the love of God, the doge added, Venice would put in fifty armed galleys as well — on condition that so long as the two parties acted in company, of all conquests in land or money, whether at sea or on dry ground, Venice should have the half.

The envoys consulted overnight and accepted.

How Venice agreed

Villehardouin's account of the ratification is the best description anybody wrote of the republic making up its mind, and it has nothing to do with the ten rounds of lot and ballot.

The doge went first to the great council, forty of the wisest men in the land, and brought them to agreement. Then a hundred. Then two hundred. Then a thousand. Then he assembled ten thousand of the people in St Mark's, had a mass of the Holy Ghost sung, and told them to pray for counsel.

After the mass the envoys were brought into the church, curiously looked upon by people who had not seen them before, and Villehardouin spoke for them. The barons of France had chosen Venice, he said, because they knew full well there was no other people having so great power on the seas; and they had commanded their envoys to fall at the Venetians' feet and not to rise until they consented.

Then the six envoys knelt at the feet of the people, weeping many tears. And the Doge and all the others burst into tears of pity and compassion, and cried with one voice, and lifted up their hands, saying: "We consent, we consent!" Then was there so great a noise and tumult that it seemed as if the earth itself were falling to pieces.

It is a staged scene and Villehardouin knows it. The doge had already secured the forty, the hundred, the two hundred and the thousand; the ten thousand in the basilica were being shown a decision, not asked for one. What the ceremony produced was not consent but commitment — a public, collective, witnessed one, which mattered because the republic was about to stop most of its other business for a year to build the fleet.

The old man on the reading-desk

A year and a half later, with the fleet built and the crusaders unable to pay, Enrico Dandolo went up into the same reading-desk on a Sunday before High Mass.

Signors, you are associated with the most worthy people in the world, and for the highest enterprise ever undertaken; and I am a man old and feeble, who should have need of rest, and I am sick in body; but I see that no one could command and lead you like myself, who am your lord. If you will consent that I take the sign of the cross to guard and direct you, and that my son remain in my place to guard the land, then shall I go to live or die with you and with the pilgrims.

Villehardouin explains the detail that makes the offer extraordinary: although the doge's eyes were unclouded, he saw nothing, having lost his sight through a wound in the head. He came down from the desk, knelt weeping before the altar, and had the cross sewn onto the front of a great cotton hat he wore, because he wished that all men should see it. Up to that day very few Venetians had taken the cross. After it they took it in great numbers.

A blind man in his nineties put a badge where it could be seen and the recruitment problem solved itself. Whatever else Dandolo was, he understood what a crowd in a basilica was for.

What the contract did

The rest follows from the arithmetic. The crusaders who arrived were far fewer than the contract named and could raise about half the money; Venice had spent a year building ships for an army that did not come. The debt was worked off first against Zara, a Christian city on the Dalmatian coast, and then against Constantinople.

Villehardouin was there for all of it and the chronicle never quite says that anybody chose. It presents each step as the only thing that could have been done next, and treats the men who left rather than attack Christians as deserters. He is arguing a case. But the case rests on the numbers, and it was Villehardouin himself who knelt on the floor of St Mark's to get them agreed.

The constitution

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)peak

Every other Italian city republic lost its constitution to a family. Milan to the Visconti, Florence to the Medici, Verona to the Scaligeri, Ferrara to the Este, Rimini to the Malatesta, and so on across the peninsula, usually within two or three generations of the commune's founding. Venice did not, for five hundred years, and the machinery that prevented it was a method of choosing a head of state that nobody has ever imitated.

How a doge was chosen

The Great Council assembled. Thirty members were chosen by lot. Those thirty were reduced by lot to nine. The nine elected forty. The forty were reduced by lot to twelve. The twelve elected twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine. The nine elected forty-five. The forty-five were reduced by lot to eleven. The eleven elected forty-one. The forty-one elected the doge, with a twenty-five-vote threshold.

Ten rounds, alternating lot and ballot. Nobody could know in advance who would be voting at the stage that mattered, which is the entire design: a faction can buy a council and cannot buy a lottery.

It reads like a parody and it was not one. It was written by people who had watched neighbouring cities lose their liberty to a family in two generations, and who had concluded that the danger was not a bad election but a predictable one. Anything a faction can plan for, it can capture. So they made the electorate unknowable in advance and accepted the absurdity as the price.

And what he was allowed to do

Very little, and it was written down and got shorter.

The promissione ducale was an oath of limitations drafted afresh for each new doge, read aloud at his coronation, and revised by a committee appointed to find the previous holder's abuses. Over centuries it accumulated: the doge could not meet a foreign ambassador alone, could not open his own official correspondence, could not leave the city without permission, could not hold other office, could not have his family in trade with the state, could not accept gifts beyond a listed few. His sons were barred from certain offices.

He was elected for life and could not resign without consent, which made the office a splendid captivity. One doge who overreached — Marino Faliero, in 1355, who conspired to make himself prince — was beheaded on the palace stairs, and his portrait in the council chamber is a painted black cloth with an inscription saying this is the place of Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes.

The Serrata

The other half of the design is the part that is hard to admire.

In 1297 the Great Council closed. Membership was restricted to men whose families had already sat in it, and the qualifying families were registered in a book. The patriciate became a hereditary caste of a few thousand people governing a city of a hundred thousand and an empire of considerably more, and it stayed that way until 1797.

It worked, in the narrow sense that it answered permanently the question that destroyed every other Italian republic — who is allowed in — by answering it once. It is also the reason the constitution is a curiosity rather than an ancestor. Venice invented no doctrine of consent, extended nothing to anybody, and closed rather than opened. What it built was a machine for preventing a tyrant, run by an oligarchy that had made itself permanent.

The empire of ports

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)peak

The state built the ships. The Arsenal, walled, guarded and enlarged repeatedly from the twelfth century, was at its height employing something in the order of sixteen thousand people and holding a reserve of galley hulls that could be fitted out at short notice; the standing account, from a visiting Spanish envoy in 1436, is of a hull being towed past successive windows and receiving its cordage, arms, ballistas, oars and provisions from each in turn, and emerging complete in an hour.

The state also ran the shipping. The muda were convoys of state-built merchant galleys, auctioned annually to private operators, sailing on fixed routes to Alexandria, Beirut, Constantinople, the Black Sea, Flanders and England, on dates the Senate set, in company, armed. A merchant did not need a fleet; he needed a share in a voyage, and the auction and the convoy made that available to anybody with capital.

What Venice exported

Not a religion, not an alphabet, and not a claim on anybody's throne. Venice converted nobody, founded no successor state that invoked it, and left no script. What it exported was technique, and the technique is still in use. Double-entry bookkeeping is not a Venetian invention but the Venetian version is the one Luca Pacioli printed in 1494 and the one Europe learned from. Marine insurance as a contract distinct from a loan. The colleganza, a partnership form separating capital from labour on a single voyage with the risk shared, which let a man with no money and a man with no inclination to sail both take a position. A funded public debt with tradable shares — Venetian government bonds were being bought and sold as investments in the thirteenth century, which is the first securities market in Europe. Quarantine, the forty days a ship from a plague port waited at the Lazzaretto, and the word.

A city that never ruled more than a few hundred thousand people wrote the accounting, the insurance, the partnership form, the government bond and the quarantine that the rest of Europe then used. It is a strange kind of legacy, because none of it looks like a monument and all of it is still running.

The subject empire

It is worth being specific about what governing an empire of ports meant, because the romance obscures it.

Crete was held for four hundred and sixty-five years and revolted at least fourteen times. The Venetian settlement there was a colonial one — Venetian feudatories on granted estates, a Latin church established over an Orthodox population, and the Cretan Orthodox hierarchy suppressed — and the largest revolt, in 1363, was led by the Venetian colonists themselves, who raised the flag of Saint Titus rather than Saint Mark and had to be put down by an army from Italy.

The sugar of Cyprus and Crete was grown by slaves, and the Italian republics were among the largest slave traders in the medieval Mediterranean, moving people out of the Black Sea to Egypt and to Italy. The Genoese share of that traffic ran through Caffa in the Crimea, and its cargo included the Kipchak boys sold into Egypt who grew up to be the Mamluk sultans — who then signed commercial treaties with the republics that had shipped them.

The slave trade of the Black Sea supplied the manpower of a Muslim state in Cairo and the sugar of a Christian one in Crete, and the same Italian hulls carried both ends of it.

By the sack and the canthar

Drafted from Casola, Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (1907)peak

In the spring of 1494 a Milanese canon in his sixties came to Venice to catch a pilgrim galley to Jerusalem, and was kept waiting five weeks. He filled the time by looking at things and writing them down. Pietro Casola was not interested in politics, had no opinion about the constitution, and mentions no doge; he was interested in how much of everything there was, and in whether it was better than at Milan.

That makes him the most useful witness the city has, because the year is 1494. Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape four years later, and the sea route to the spices that Venice existed to distribute was open within a decade. Casola is describing the top.

The warehouses

He begins by admitting he cannot do it.

Indeed it seems as if all the world flocks there, and that human beings have concentrated there all their force for trading.

He was taken round the warehouses, starting with the German one, which he thought would suffice by itself to supply all Italy with the goods that came and went; and then so many others that he calls them innumerable. Then the sentence that does the work:

I see that the special products for which other cities are famous are all to be found there, and that what is sold elsewhere by the pound and the ounce is sold there by canthar and sacks of a moggio each.

Shops so well furnished that they looked like warehouses themselves — tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and beautiful white wax. These things stupefy the beholder. He notes, with a canon's honesty, that although he wanted to see everything he saw only a part, and that by forcing himself.

The vegetable boats

The passage that stays with a reader is not about spices.

Having nothing else to do, Casola went several times very early in the morning to St Mark's and to the Rialto to watch the boats being unloaded. There were so many full of big beans, peas and cherries — not, he concedes, of every kind as at Milan, but every day in such quantity that it seemed as if all the gardens of the world must be there.

The number was so great that I declare that after seeing them, when I turned my back I hardly believed my eyes.

Vegetables of every kind, cheaper than anywhere he had ever been, brought from twenty-five miles away and looking as if they had just been picked. He adds that he knows how this sounds, because he used not to believe it himself when people told him.

That is the thing the trading empire was actually for. A city on mud with no arable ground fed a hundred thousand people better and more cheaply than the agricultural capital of Lombardy, by boat, every morning, from a lagoon shore twenty-five miles off.

He is not uncritical. The fish, he says, was never good the whole time he was there, although his hosts took great trouble; the wines were abundant beyond belief but not so perfect as Lombard wine, and dear because of the duties.

The churches

On St Mark's he is careful. At first sight it seems a small thing, he says, but a man who examines everything about it carefully will find it a grand church, and he thinks it has no equal for its size, adorned within and without with so many beautiful and subtle mosaics — beginning with the four horses in metal over the great door. The treasure in relics and the altarpiece he cannot value: it seems to me infinite.

On the parish churches he gets cross, and the crossness is the point. He is afraid to describe them in detail, he says, because he could not do it without offending somebody, especially at Milan. Then he says it anyway: the poorest parish church of Venice is more ornate than the finest at Milan.

He does not connect the horses over the door to anything. They had been carried off from Constantinople by the fleet Venice built for the Fourth Crusade, and by 1494 they had been over that door for nearly three centuries and were simply part of the church. The money that gilded the parish churches came through the warehouses he had just walked round.

Why there was so much of it

Newett's note explains the warehouses, and the explanation is a statute. Venetian merchant galleys were not allowed to sail directly from the port where goods were bought to the port where they were sold. Every voyage had to begin and end at Venice. The city was therefore the compulsory place of deposit for everything, until at least the next year's sailings, and foreign merchants crowded there to buy. What stupefied Casola was the physical consequence of a shipping regulation.

The same note carries the other half of it. A few years after his visit the news came that Portuguese ships had rounded Africa, reached India, and returned with spices that were being sold cheaply at Lisbon. A Venetian diarist of the time wrote it down:

All the city of Venice was greatly impressed and alarmed, and the wisest men held that this was the worst news that could ever come to the city … Because the spices which came to Venice, passed through the whole of Syria and the countries subject to the Sultan, paying exorbitant duties in every place, so that when they arrived in Venice the value of an article which, in the beginning, was worth a ducat, was raised as high as sixty and even a hundred ducats.

Casola walked through the warehouses at their fullest, wrote that the quantity was beyond description, and sailed for Jerusalem. Nothing in the diary suggests that anybody in the city thought the arrangement had an end.

The long decline

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)contraction

Venice was at its wealthiest in the fifteenth century and spent the following three hundred years getting smaller, which is a long time to be declining and is one of the reasons the word is unhelpful.

Three things happened, in this order.

The mainland. From 1405 Venice took Padua, Verona, Vicenza, Brescia and Bergamo, and became a territorial power in northern Italy for the first time. The reasons were good — control of the food supply, the trade routes over the Alps, and the rivers — and the consequence was that a republic whose whole strategic position had been that it could not be reached by an army acquired a long land frontier and enemies with cavalry. In 1509 a coalition of most of Europe beat the Venetian army at Agnadello and the entire mainland was lost in weeks. It was recovered, and the lesson taken was not the one the fifteenth century had suggested.

The Ottomans. Venice and the Ottomans fought seven wars between 1463 and 1718. Negroponte went in 1470, Modon and Coron in 1500, Cyprus in 1571 — the war in which the Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, five months too late to save the island — and Crete in 1669, after a siege of the capital that lasted twenty-one years and is among the longest in recorded history.

The route. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. The traditional account has the Portuguese route round Africa destroying the Venetian spice trade immediately, and the traditional account is wrong: the Levant trade recovered within a generation and the sixteenth century was not a disaster for it. What the Atlantic did was slower and worse. The centre of European commerce moved to Antwerp, then Amsterdam and London, and a Mediterranean republic found itself on a periphery.

What a state does when it is no longer the centre

It goes on functioning, which is the part the reputation leaves out.

Venice in the eighteenth century had a working constitution, an intact legal system, a functioning bureaucracy, a large manufacturing sector, a network of resident ambassadors whose reports are among the best diplomatic sources in Europe, and the best-organised tourist industry on the continent. It was neutral in almost every war after 1718 and prosperous in a diminished way. It was not misgoverned and it was not collapsing.

A long ending of that kind leaves very little behind for a chronology to hold on to. There are no dated hinges in the last century and a bit, because a state that is stable and shrinking does not generate events; what it generates is another good year, and then another one, on a slowly narrowing base. The eighteenth century was the most agreeable period in the republic's history to be alive in and the least consequential, and it ended in a fortnight.

The twelfth of May

Drafted from Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973)end

Napoleon came into northern Italy in 1796 and fought the Austrians across territory Venice had held for four hundred years. Venice tried to stay neutral, which meant supplying both sides and being trusted by neither.

In the spring of 1797 he received the Venetian envoys and told them what he wanted: no more Inquisition, no more Senate, no more oligarchy. He said he would be an Attila to the Venetian state.

The vote

On 12 May the Great Council met.

It did not have a quorum. Under its own rules it could not lawfully transact business, and it transacted the last business it would ever have. By five hundred and twelve votes to twenty it abolished itself and handed power to a provisional municipality, on the reasoning that a French army was on the mainland, no ally was coming, and a city built on mud had never had a way of resisting one.

Ludovico Manin took off the ducal cap, handed it to his servant, and said it would not be needed again. French troops entered four days later.

There was no siege. There was no battle. The eleven-hundred-year-old republic that had survived Genoa at the mouth of its own lagoon, a coalition of most of Europe on its landward side, and seven Ottoman wars, ended in an afternoon by a show of hands that its own constitution did not authorise.

And then he sold it

The last indignity was not the vote.

In October, at Campo Formio, Napoleon handed Venice to Austria in exchange for territory he wanted elsewhere. The city that had been talked into dissolving itself in the name of liberty was traded five months later as a diplomatic counter, to a monarchy, by the general who had demanded the dissolution.

Eleven hundred years, and the last sovereign act was taken by a body that did not have enough members present to take one.

The wooden lion

Drafted from Trevelyan, Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (1923)afterlife

Venice was fought over for the next seventy years by everyone except the Venetians.

Austria took the city in January 1798 and held it to 1805. The French took it back after Austerlitz and held it to 1814. Austria took it again and held it to 1866. Under the first Austrian occupation the population was pleased to see them arrive, because the democrats installed by the French had spent the interim arresting people and sequestrating property, and because the French had carried off everything in the city they took a fancy to, including the bronze horses over the door of St Mark's.

Trevelyan is unkind about the switching and it is hard to argue: a people, he says, as fickle as a mob in Shakespeare, throwing themselves at Napoleon's feet in 1806 and forgetting that the same man had pillaged, outraged and sold their city eight years before.

The French period left the deeper mark, for an unromantic reason. It trained people. Italian officers commanded Napoleon's Italian regiments; native lawyers and administrators filled the highest places on the bench and in the bureaucracy. A city whose government had been the private property of a few thousand registered families for five hundred years acquired, under a foreign occupier, a professional class with experience of running things.

The lawyer named after the last doge

Daniele Manin was born in Venice in 1804, seven years after the republic dissolved itself.

He was not descended from the doge whose name he bore. His father came of a Venetian Jewish family called Fonseca which had turned Christian in the eighteenth century, and had been given the name Pietro Manin at the font after his sponsor — the brother of the last doge. The name came from a godparent, not from blood.

Pietro Manin passed his son one thing above all others, which was rage. He could not bear being saddled with the surname of the man who had surrendered the heritage of a thousand years without a blow, and he raised the boy to be a Venetian patriot. It worked. Trevelyan, turning over hundreds of pages of praise and abuse of Manin, could not find a single instance of anyone taunting him with being a Jew, or even discussing it: he seemed to everybody entirely Venetian.

Manin trained as a lawyer, agitated against Austria, and was in prison in the early months of 1848. It was there, he said afterwards, that he first had the idea of proclaiming the republic.

The Arsenal, again

The revolution of March 1848 turned on the same building the republic had been built around.

The Arsenal under Austria was a naval dockyard with a resentful hereditary workforce. The arsenalotti were a caste: employment had gone from father to son since the early republic, and they had just petitioned to be admitted to the Civic Guard on the ground that under the old constitution they had crewed the state barge and formed the doge's bodyguard. Under Austria they were dockhands, ill-treated, in permanent dispute with a superintendent who saw his job as driving a hard bargain against them and who was hand in glove with the police. They were convinced he was preparing to bombard the city, and on 22 March they killed him.

Manin took the Arsenal that day, and with it the fleet, and the ships in the port outside ran up the Italian tricolour. He came out by the Lion steps and raised, for the first time, the cry of Viva San Marco. He was calculating on what that phrase would do in that city, and the roar that answered him told him he had calculated right.

By the time he reached the Piazza the Austrian governor's authority was already being negotiated away. Standing on a table with a banner in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, he proclaimed the republic:

We are free, and we have a double right to boast of it because we have become free without shedding a drop of blood, either our own or our brothers', for I call all men brothers.

He went home at five o'clock and fell asleep exhausted. At half past six the Austrian commander signed the capitulation.

Fifty-one years

That evening the crowd carried the proclamation through the city, over the Rialto and into the western parishes, and men ran down the alleys shouting that the republic was restored. Gondoliers raced to the outer islands with the news until Malamocco and Chioggia and Burano and long-abandoned Torcello were repeating the old name across the water.

In the Campo San Polo, after the proclamation had been read, a very old man — one of the poorest people there — stood bare-headed through the ceremony, then took a battered wooden carving of the lion of St Mark out of his shirt and showed it to the people standing round him.

I knew well that Venice would rise again. For fifty-one years I have lived in that faith and preserved this lion, to bring it out when the Republic came back. To-day I have nothing else to ask God and can die content.

The republic he was waiting for lasted about seventeen months. Manin held it together for twelve of them after Italy's hopes elsewhere had already been destroyed, in constant physical pain, refusing throughout to flatter the city's worse instincts or give way to its less sensible demands; Trevelyan calls the period his dictatorship and also his martyrdom, and means both. Austria took the city back, and he went into exile.

He died in Paris on 22 September 1857, having lost his wife and his daughter there. On his deathbed he signed the articles of the Italian National Society, having already published a declaration that the republican party would give way: Make Italy, and I am with you. If not — no.

Venice was freed in 1866, nine years after his death, and joined a kingdom rather than resuming a republic. His son Giorgio, wounded at Calatafimi fighting beside Garibaldi among the Thousand, lived to see it and then lived withdrawn from the politics of the liberated city, treated by everyone as something apart.

The old man in the Campo San Polo had been wrong about the form and right about the fact. He had kept a wooden lion inside his shirt for fifty-one years on the chance, and he got to take it out.