ON THE NIGHTSTAND
A History of Venice, by John Julius Norwich (639pp., Vintage 1989). This was the book that first made John Norwich famous (or in some circles, infamous), though he has written a number of others similarly themed. In number of ways, it is his most personal, for he virtually grew up there, as the son of a academic who himself had planned on writing a history of the city, but died before getting beyond initial note-taking.
But the book is not simply a guide-book to the city's history, although one could be excused for thinking that based on the sometimes gratuitous references to such-and-such buildings still standing, or as is often the case, not. The book attempts, at base, to be the most comprehensive and the most illustrious account of, shall we say, the
soul of Venice. As such, it points up all the features of Venice that distinguish Venice both from the mainland of Italy and from the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean: its disposition towards empire, its mercantile spirit, its sybarites and voluptuaries, its pragmatism and most of all its republican constitution that barely changed over a thousand years. Norwich pays special attention to this last feature, and rightly so, for although there were other cities in Italy and Europe that made use of some form of popular government, in few if any other cities was this tradition as strongly rooted or as iconic of its people's identity. Though the
Doge may have formally ruled for life upon election, so bound was he by senators, assemblies, the civilian bureaucracy and, of course, tradition, that his role came to be purely symbolic. Real power lay in the early centuries with the people's assembly, for major decisions, and elected Senators for day-to-day affairs, and though slowly the ruling elite ossified into a kind of corporate oligarchy, never did autocracy like that of the Visconti of Milan take hold even briefly, until the end came, the city was occupied by Napoleon's troops and the traditional Republic abolished.
Indeed, so smoothly did the machinery of government run for such a long period that it sometimes seems incredible that Venetians could live quiet, peaceful and unusually long lives in their lagoon city-state while everyone from Attila the Hun to Suleyman the Magnificent (and, of course, Napoleon) threatened them from without. One almost gets the impression from Norwich the city's title of conceit,
La Serenissima Repubblica, was not just a piece of governmental propaganda. This is a problem: in Norwich's history because so little attention is paid to political upheavals on the mainland of Italy or in Illyria unless they touch directly on Venice, you can hardly get a feeling for how events abroad might have affected the internal dynamics of the Venetian polity. At the same time, the very uniqueness of Venice's constitution proved too enticing for Norwich to resist. Because of the politicocentric layout, we learn about the rise and fall of powerful families, but not why they were able to rise or fall in a broad sense of the word. Vast demographic changes in the city's composition, which surely altered the internal balance of power and the composition of political factions, sometimes receiving shockingly little attention: it is noted that the Black Death (p. 216) killed more than three-fifths of the city's population and had wiped out more than 50 leading families, and yet this event receives scarcely a page of description and discussion. In his defense, one might say that in a Republic that lasted 1071 years one simply cannot address all major events in detail and the book is 639 pages as it is, but that does not excuse effectively not trying. (Indeed, he spent well over a thousand pages in writing his three volume history of the Byzantine Empire, for a similar length of time.)
These criticisms having been said, it's hard to say what exactly I liked about this book the most. Norwich has an amazing ability to capture the pageantry and drama of historical events even if, as is often the case with his forays into Byzantinism, one gets more drama rather than piercing analysis. But Norwich admits as much that that was not his intention. This book will probably remain for a long time yet the standard one-volume history of the city, and, with all its flaws, it probably deserves that status.
So, it's been a while. I've not had as much time on my hands to make regular entries here, having been laid low by a back injury, but I plan on remedying that problem forthwith. Hopefully, some reviews to look for: Akira Kurosawa's
Hidden Fortress, David Aikman's
Jesus in Beijing (an account of the spread of Christianity in present-day China), and John Julius Norwich's
A History of Venice.
