Venice: A New History
Thomas F. Madden
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0147509807
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A spellbinding new portrait of one of the world’s most beloved cities
La Serenissima. Its breathtaking architecture, art, and opera ensure that Venice remains a perennially popular destination for tourists and armchair travelers alike. Yet most of the available books about this magical city are either facile travel guides or fusty academic tomes. In Venice, renowned historian Thomas F. Madden draws on new research to explore the city’s many astonishing achievements and to set 1,500 years of Venetian history and the endless Venetian-led Crusades in the context of the ever-shifting Eurasian world. Filled with compelling insights and famous figures, Venice is a monumental work of popular history that’s as opulent and entertaining as the great city itself.
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Venice, where commerce and trade were the lifeblood of the community, a sound currency was absolutely critical. Uncertain coin values meant uncertain markets—something no businessman wants. During much of the twelfth century Venetians who engaged in small domestic transactions used the Veronese penny and another small penny of their own, which weighed less than half a gram and had 25 percent silver content. For large commercial transactions they used the coins of the Byzantine Empire or the.
To modern municipality took all of three days. The crisis of Venetian identity would endure much longer. The extinction of the Venetian state had a profound and lasting effect on the Venetian people. Venice was no longer an actor on the world stage. Quite the contrary, it had become an object to be manipulated, observed, even defined by outsiders. Venice ceased to be the master of its own fate, but quickly became a curiosity or bauble in the hands of world powers. This is not to say that the.
Incorporated into the new kingdom of Italy, with its capital in Milan. The king of Italy was, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte. His viceroy was his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, later given the title Prince of Venice. Napoleon planned to use Venice as a naval base to support his Mediterranean operations. As for the city itself, he meant to treat it as his own property. Venice, Napoleon insisted, was “a country of conquest. How have I obtained it other than by victory? The right of victory.
The Austrians had not. Austrian military bands that played daily in the Piazza San Marco received only sneers from the Venetians in the coffee shops and never a trace of applause. And yet, although the city remained tense, there was little violence. Slowly the foreign visitors returned, now whisked across the causeway in a matter of minutes rather than the hours of a gondola trip. Among the first to arrive was the English art critic John Ruskin. He had visited the city when he was a young man and.
Were a well-established family in Venice who had made their fortune in overseas trade and had settled in various portions of the city. They were not adventurers, but they were good businessmen always seeking new markets. Marco’s father, Nicolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, had been doing business in Constantinople in 1260—just one year before it fell to Michael Palaeologus. There they had purchased a collection of jewels and sailed north into the Black Sea with plans to sell the precious stones to some.