Fallen giants still roar

Roman echoes in medieval Venice

Hello,

Welcome back and pour yourself a coffee. Last week I was in Venice but now I’m back in the UK and in need of regular hot drinks to ward off the winter blues!

Venice, though, is still very much on my mind.

One of the privileges of working with engaged, curious students is that they sometimes ask questions that lift the lid on something so big that you realise you’ve not looked as closely at it as you should have.

History is like everything else: you have to take some things for granted day-to-day to be able to get anything done at all, but should probably check those things from time to time, like making sure your floorboards and plumbing are in good order.

Ruled, rivals, refuge

One of my lectures for the John Hall Venice Course is about the long relationship between the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and Venice.¹ It is one of the many factors that make Venice not quite like anywhere else.

This is, honestly, a pretty gratuitous picture from Venice because it makes me happy. It also draws attention to that other thing that is a major factor in it not being like anywhere else: canals instead of streets. But that isn’t what I’m talking about this week!

In my lecture, I divided that relationship into three chunks of time and, because I like a bit of light alliteration, I called them Ruled, Rivals and Refuge:

• Ruled: Probably from the 5th century CE, when settlers first moved en masse into the lagoon, Venice was part of the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Early Venice’s Byzantine links are obvious in, for example, the oldest standing church in Venice - the cathedral of Torcello. Its domed design, huge mosaic-decorated apse and Greek inscriptions all look very ‘Byzantine’.²

• Rivals: From around the 8th century, Venice became more and more independent from Constantinople. It began to make its own decisions in church disputes, then to make its own laws, raise its own revenues and organise its own shipping. By the 12th century, Venice was negotiating lucrative trade concessions with Byzantium.

• Refuge: The biggest turning point in Venice’s relationship with Byzantium came in 1204, which wasn’t a very good year for Constantinople! Crusaders from what is now France, heading for Jerusalem, got to Venice and ran out of money.³ Instead of just going home, they cut a deal with the Venetians and a man called Alexios, who claimed to be the rightful emperor of the Romans. The deal was that 1) the Crusaders would help Venice to discipline its colony in Zadar (in modern Croatia), which had been getting a bit disobedient, 2) the Venetians would then sail the Crusaders (who didn’t have boats of their own) to Constantinople, where Alexios would reclaim his throne to the jubilation of his adoring subjects, 3) Alexios would then reward the Crusaders with huge amounts of money so they could 4) repay the Venetians for the use of their ships and 5) fund the rest of their trip to Jerusalem. If this sounds like a house of cards, well… it didn’t take long for the wind to blow. The people of Constantinople were less than delighted to see Alexios, especially at the head of a foreign army, and locked the city gates in his face. A standoff ensued and, cutting a long and confusing story short, the Venetians and Crusaders ended up taking Constantinople by force. The Crusaders never got to Jerusalem and the Venetians left with ships stuffed with ‘appropriated’ riches from the churches and palaces of the imperial capital. This may not sound like a promising start to ‘Venice, city of refuge’, from a Byzantine perspective, but over the coming centuries, weakened by the impact of 1204, the empire diminished and Venice became stronger. Resentments remained but centuries of shared history and trade also meant that Byzantines escaping from wars that the empire increasingly couldn’t win often found that Venice was where they had connections or felt a sense of familiarity. When Constantinople eventually fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, refugees poured into Venice, with one saying that it was ‘almost a second Byzantium’.

Any of these phases could be a series of posts or, indeed, a series of books, but the thread running through them was that, at each stage, Venice was changed by its connection to Roman power.

Venice took the symbols and practices of the Eastern Roman Empire and blended them with symbols and practices borrowed from elsewhere, as well as with its own unique political and cultural ideals. But the Romans, and especially the eastern Romans/Byzantines were a constant touchstone.

So far, so good. I’ve written here (and here) about how the world has been obsessed with the Roman Empire since… the Romans. Why should Venice be different?

Then, as we were queuing to get into the basilica of San Marco - the central church of Venice, decorated to look like a bigger, louder, goldier-looking-chain version of Constantinople’s great church of Holy Wisdom and dripping with treasures taken from Constantinople in 1204 - a student asked me,

‘But why did the Venetians want to copy the Romans? I mean,’ [I am paraphrasing here on account of not having a photographic memory, so if this was you and you don’t remember asking it exactly like this, forgive me!], ‘if the Romans had been in charge but then Venice had beaten them, what was value in looking Roman?’

I hope I gave something like a credible answer, talking about how people have always used earlier ideas to express new ones and how the Roman Empire was the most powerful empire that the Mediterranean had ever seen.

But it wasn’t a great answer. It was an okay answer.

It was a slightly-caught-off-guard-by-realisng-you-haven’t-checked-the-floorboards-and-plumbing-lately answer.

It made me realise that, I, too, like most everybody else since the Romans, had taken for granted that imitating earlier, larger powers is how you project importance.⁴

I can talk at great length about second-, third- and fourth-order developments from this fact: exactly which bits of Romanness get re-used, why specific Roman images change in later centuries, how imitating Romanness might clash or mesh with other models of power. Still, perhaps because I know the fact of imitating the Romans to be so totally true and so truly everywhere, I had not thought hard enough about why to have a really good answer when somebody asked.

And it’s a fair question: if you have been part of an empire, but perhaps a very peripheral, unimportant part, as Venice undoubtedly was to begin with, and then you have grown to be a rival and, eventually, more powerful than that empire, why would you want to look like it? Wouldn’t it be more of a power play to look unlike it? After all, now you can go your own way!

But that isn’t what people do.

Pretty much ever.

Tale as old as time

Even when societies make loud, sincere and completely understandable declarations that they are doing something totally new, they still often end up expressing that newness in terms of what went before. They might loudly reject specific bits but keep lots of others, or they may turn old structures on their head, but in ways that only really make sense if you can see clearly what has been turned upside down: rejecting the old can frequently look like enshrining it forever.

It is an easy and obvious example: when the United States of America declared its independence and desire for a radical new departure from the monarchies and empires of Europe, it did so by referencing, among other things… ancient Athens and the Roman Empire. The Capitol Building today is a combination of architectural motifs from Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and what was then cutting edge architecture in Europe as well as the US. And many of the rules and rituals around the presidency were originally designed to be not-royal. They made sense as performances of ‘not like those other people in our past’.

Mostly, though, we aren’t that antagonistic. We (humans) willingly and eagerly absorb, digest and reproduce earlier motifs, signs and symbols.

Why?

It remains a very good question.

And I’m certainly not the first person to try to answer it. Large parts of Art History could loosely be grouped together as ‘attempts to answer to this question’. I’ve had various reasons to be interested in the work of Aby Warburg, a German art historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, who spent his life trying to work out how and why specific figures, images and design elements recur and repeat through the ages.

A particular obsession of Warburg’s was the so-called ‘nymph’, here depicted in one of his sketches. Warburg noticed that this distinctive figure of a young woman, walking sideways, often facing outwards, carrying something in her hands or on her head, and with her robes billowing behind her, began in Ancient Greek and Roman art, often as a goddess or nymph or even a representation of Victory, but then reappeared more than a thousand years later in Renaissance paintings in Italy and the Low Countries, often as a servant or side figure in scenes. It was one of the images he sued to track how specific forms, but also ideas, for example, about gender, power and motion, might travel through time in pictures. (You can find out more about his idea and this drawing here.)

Likewise Politics (as a subject rather than an activity) includes a lot of examining why, when and how people repackage the past.

What follows, therefore, is not so much me trying to say something terribly new as trying to piece together something as old as history itself, because every now and again it is worth looking again at the things we take for granted and working through why (and if) they still makes sense.

‘As old as history itself’ isn’t a bad place to start.

‘What is History?’ is a tangly question: there have been lots of different ideas about how and why it is helpful to preserve and pass on knowledge about the past, as well as what to forget or even suppress.

Not all ways of talking about the past are ‘History’ in the modern sense of the subject that we learn in school, but between myth, legend, memory, song, monuments, rituals… all cultures have developed methods for recording and passing on a collective understanding of happened before.

Power is a recurring theme in all of these understandings: how did we get power over the world, over ourselves and over others? Legends from all over the world explain how people came to have power over fire or domestic crops or the power to shape metals. Lots of histories, legends, myths and monuments are about why some people have power over other people or over specific places.

Insider, outsider

Thinking about this another way, stories about the past are often ways to explain what you can and cannot do in the present. Politically, they can be used to explain why people should put up with how things are now because a) it could be so much worse and b) it took so much work to get here that it’s probably impossible to change anyway (without risking making things so much worse). Alternatively, stories about the past can encourage people to try to change things by telling them that something was different (and better) before.

But these stories are also about creating in-groups and out-groups. For whom is a story a tale of victory or defeat? Even more significantly, who just doesn’t get it? Who is so far outside the story that the characters are all unfamiliar, the places foreign, the issues alien and confusing?

Before I was a historian, I was a linguist. Theories about language are still central to how I think so maybe it isn’t surprising that, deep down, Venice and the legacy of Byzantium feels to me like a language question.

Language is also a way of making in-groups and out-groups: speaking a particular language is one of the oldest recorded ways that people have put each other into categories: us (who speak our language) and them (who don’t speak our language); these people (who speak this language) and those other people (who speak that language).

But what does understanding a language mean? In everyday terms, it means when somebody says (or writes) some words, you know what they mean. In linguistic terms, though, things get a lot fuzzier.

Think about a chair… Any chair. Just a random, everyday, any-old chair.

If you’re reading this post, you either understand English or you’re using a translator app to put it into another language which has now chosen whatever it thinks is the most appropriate word for ‘chair’. That probably isn’t hard. ‘Chair’ is pretty basic, right?

It isn’t a complicated word like ‘freedom’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘sesquicentennial’.

A chair is an object with four legs. It has a flat surface around knee-high and backside-wide, a vertical back and rests for your arms on either side, and you sit on it. Simples.

Or did you find yourself disagreeing with some of that? Does a chair have to have a back? Or arm rests? Can it be higher or lower than knee height?

Is it the same as a stool, a throne, a couch?

If I put it into a sentence, things get even more complicated:

Ooh… what kind of chair? And what kind of person? Your brain is building a picture right now, but it is either a very vague picture - a person with no specific features sitting on a chair with no specific features, floating in empty space -, or, alternatively, it is a picture full of details that I didn’t give you and that might change if I just add a few more words.

‘The person was sitting on a chair with a possum in their arms and an albatross in their lap’

See - bet that wasn’t part of your picture!

Even leaving aside the wildlife, what we imagine when we hear words is culturally and personally specific. The chair you imagine without any other information will depend on things like your age and where you live and grew up.

Anthropologically, it is possible to talk about ‘chair cultures’ and ‘mat cultures’: when you picture, say, a family meal, do you naturally picture sitting down on raised seats or on the floor? Which one you imagine might change how you picture lots of other things. In ‘chair’ cultures, for example, sitting on the floor is often associated with childhood. In ‘mat’ cultures, sitting on a chair is often associated with old age. That might all shape how you imagine this person on a chair.

If we can get this complicated, this quickly, about chairs, how does language work at all? Why don’t we spend our entire lives going around asking people exactly what they mean by everything?

Actually, sometimes I find it hard to resist.

But mostly, it doesn’t matter. We’re back to where I started: in life you have to take a lot of things for granted to get anything done at all. If I tell you I saw somebody sitting in a chair, you have to take for granted that I’m telling you what you need to know for the next thing I say to make sense. You don’t think that I’m giving you a picture-perfect vision of what I actually saw.

Of course, if I wanted to do that, I could just show you a picture. Especially now, in the age of the smartphone, nothing could be easier.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and you would definitely get more information out of that picture than out of my sentence, but the picture, without words, also won’t be telling you a whole bunch of other things: did I know the person? Was it hot or cold? What could I hear or smell? Where had I come from and where was I going and how did that affect how surprised I was to see a person sitting in a chair holding a possum and an albatross?

Words are how we make sense of the world but without the world, words have no point of reference. At its simplest, it’s hard to explain ‘chair’ to somebody who has never seen one, or sat down, and it would be harder to ask somebody to bring you something to sit on if you didn’t have a word for chair.

Mostly, we work effortlessly at a much greater level of complexity than this. Language, like history, is awe-inspiringly cool and a reminder that we (humans) are pretty incredible, as well as often frustrating.

We build visions in our head out of words that we hear, read and say. We change the picture seamlessly as we get new information. We leap from images into words: questions, guesses, stories.

Why is that person holding a possum and an albatross?

Well, maybe they found them on their way to… [Go on! give me your best possum-and-albatross story.]

And finally, we come back to Venice and the Roman/Byzantine Empire.

The Roman/Byzantine Empire: they are just words but their reality was written across the world, and across centuries, by men and women who made and felt Roman power. The Roman Empire meant things people could and couldn’t do, on a scale that had never been seen before. It meant roads, aqueducts, armies and triumphal processions. It was created in poetry, letters, sculpture and drains, the togas of emperors and the shackles of a vast slave system.

The Roman Empire: it was a reality but it also wrote itself across the world. It came with new words and, to many places, new ideas: city (and civilisation and civility and civilian and urban and urbane and urbanity), senate (and senator), crucifixion (and crucifix). The empire spread symbols that carried ideas and authority. Eagles, laurel wreaths, fasces (a bundle of sticks bound together to represent the strength of many united, and the origin of the modern term ‘fascism’). These symbols were stamped on coins and uniforms and public buildings so that they became emblems of all of those things that the Roman/Byzantine Empire did or controlled: the power of the army, and government and tax and trade.

Some of these pictures were powerful because they were already full of meaning. Athletes and generals in the Mediterranean had worn laurel crowns for centuries as a sign of victory.

Christianity, when the empire officially adopted it in the 4th century, brought a new set of pictures and words into the mix. The cross, the faces of Jesus and his disciples (and, therefore, the number 12), but also the fish (Jesus was a fisher of souls), the lamb (Jesus was the Good Shepherd and the lamb of God), and images of stories from the Old Testament all became tied up with Roman/Byzantine identity, too.

Looking at a building like San Marco is like falling into an endless kaleidoscope of words and images. A picture sparks a thousand words. The words tell a story and the story triggers a thousand pictures.

‘Was Venice showing greatness by having beaten something that used to be powerful?’ So speculated my questioner.

Yes, I said. And no.

As a Byzantinist, I look at the facade of San Marco and I get that message loud and clear and so did visitors from the Byzantine Empire, who at times complained bitterly about it.

John Wharleton Bunney’s painting of the facade of San Marco, made between 1877 and 1882 captures this better than most modern photographs. Most of the columns, a lot of the small inset pieces between the arches and the bronze horses over the main entrance were all loot. Find out more about the painting here.

Treasures from the imperial palace in Constantinople are like chewing gum stuck on a wall. In many cases, it isn’t clear they have been put there to look particularly beautiful: they aren’t necessarily arranged symmetrically, they are damaged or were just not very lovely pieces in the first place. Of course, tastes change. Maybe they looked fabulous to a medieval Venetian eye, but I suspect that was never the point. They look, and looked then… displaced, controlled, dominated and domesticated. They were a reminder that Venice had entered the most impregnable city of the most powerful empire in western Eurasian history and taken what it wanted.

But as a Byzantinist, I walk into San Marco and the message changes, as it did for many visitors from Byzantium who felt a sense of comfort and familiarity there in centuries to come.

Inside, the shape of the building, its decoration and its symbols are not just loot or plagiarism. They are a painstaking effort to do what the Roman Empire had done first. Here, a visitor wasn’t supposed to see Rome/Byzantium humbled and beaten or Venice as its conqueror. It was meant to see the Christian Empire, commanding the whole Mediterranean Sea, and to see Venice as its equal and its continuation.

The interior of San Marco, with its high dome, surrounded by windows, gold mosaics and marble lower decoration, all modelled on the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople.

Perhaps it helped that the Roman Empire had not been a vast, continent-spanning superpower for centuries. Constantinople could still make its claims, at least until 1453, but a glance at the outside of San Marco showed that the world had changed. It was possible to claim to be as powerful as Rome/Byzantium once was because it wasn’t anymore. It wasn’t going to object!

Probably it helped that no political structure in western Eurasia had ever before expanded as far or dug its political and cultural roots so deep as the Roman/Byzantine Empire. As a result, it could become a symbol not just of ‘Roman power’ but simply of ‘power’ - the thing that everybody was reacting to.

And certainly it helped that the vastness, longevity and aggressive brand awareness of the Roman/Byzantine Empire made it a symbol that a lot of in- and out-groups recognised. If language and history are about creating insiders and outsiders - people who get it and people who don’t - Rome/Byzantium could express a double meaning, the once-great power defeated and the greatest-ever power equalled. And it could express it to a much wider audience than symbols specific to Venice and its lagoon could ever achieve.

The Roman/Byzantine Empire was a vast resource that lots of medieval societies drew on to make claims about their power and authority but, for a city like Venice that depended so heavily on relationships beyond its own territories, the Roman Empire was an invaluable lingua franca.

The power of words and images lies in this constant dialogue. One way of thinking about communication is bandwidth. In computing terms, it is how much data you can transmit down a communication channel in a set period of time. The more you can compress your data, the more of it you can fit down a channel in that set period of time. Imitation, echoing, cross-referencing: in human communication they are all ways of compressing data.

At one end of the communication channel a Venetian artist depicts an eagle carrying a laurel wreath. At the other end of the communication channel, the viewer sees an eagle and laurel wreath but understands that it means victory, empire, a claim to be like another ancient, enormous empire that claimed the eagle for itself.

Perhaps the viewer also sees the eagle as the symbol of St John the Evangelist and the laurel wreath as an echo of the crown of thorns placed on the head of Jesus when he was crucified by the Romans. They understand the victory of life over death, of Christianity over the Roman Empire, of light over darkness, which the Venetian artist also expected them to see. All the artist needed to fit down the channel was an eagle and a wreath. Shared history, education and familiarity could act as a huge, continent-spanning data compressor.

But perhaps the viewer just sees an eagle and a laurel wreath.

For a Venetian artist, the symbols of the Roman/Byzantine Empire were also a way of marking ‘insider’ status as part of a wider Christian world, separate from the the Muslim southern Mediterranean or even further afield, where the symbols and the languages were different. You can find some of those symbols around Venice, too, carefully deployed to show that the lagoon was open to business in many languages but without Rome/Byzantium, some crucial grammar of the city is missing.

Rome/Byzantium in Venice was always about the new city being greater than the ancient empire. But it was always simultaneously about the idea that nothing had been or ever could be greater than the ancient empire and, therefore, than its new expression: Venice.

1. For those of you newish here, I’ve talked about Byzantium here, but a tl/dr summary would be roughly: Byzantium/the Byzantine Empire is a term often used to describe the Roman Empire after around the 4th century CE, and mostly based in the Eastern Mediterranean. Characteristics of this later phase of Roman history were the prominence of Greek language, Christianity as the dominant imperial religion and the imperial capital having moved (in 330) from Rome to Constantinople (modern Istanbul). Historians often use this label but, although it is helpful for marking some pretty big changes, it is also important that the people of the empire never really did. They called themselves and saw themselves as Romans. Here, I’m mostly talking about the Roman Empire after about the 4th century CE, and mostly its eastern parts, so I use Roman/Byzantine together, like this, or Eastern Roman and Byzantine interchangeably.

2. The church of San Giacomo di Rialto lays claim to being the oldest church in Venice, with a foundation date of 421, but since almost none of that original church survives, and in fact most of what stands today is 16th- or 17th-century, it doesn’t help much with drawing those Byzantine links!

3. You can find my potted history of the Crusades here.

4. This is a pattern that repeats in other parts of the world. In East Asia, the empire of reference was often that of the Xin or Han dynasty. In Mesoamerica, the Olmecs seem to have played the role of great ancient power, while in South Asia it was the Mauryan Empire. They all had in common having expanded quite rapidly to become the largest and most powerful political entity that their wider region had ever seen (and in most cases, one of the largest it would ever see).