The Republic of Venice - History and Government

forward to that but tonight we're talking about the Republic of Venice I put in the first time originally we call it a republic in Venice I've stuck at subtitle a history cuz I was trying to think of how we're how we're gonna organize this thing is kind of we're gonna do history but we're also gonna talk a little bit about kind of its constitutional background and how its system operated so Venice has a interesting and unique history as a republic and so we're gonna talk a lot about how how that came to be and how that worked so I mentioned I have my pictures from Venice to show you and so it was beautiful I mean we were just we were amazed by it because even though I had never been so I had read several books of history on Venice but hadn't had been and we of course know that Venice is like the original tourist trap so really in the in the 18th century when 17th and 18th century when people started being tourists Venice's like the first place they started going to and they are still all there there's a Donald Duck oh yeah well oh yeah they're so yeah well they do have a McDonald's in Venice now so yes you'd imagine so we went around every corners like this but one of the more interesting things that we weren't thinking about is that's the extent to which it is still nevertheless it like a modern city that is almost like living in a and an alternate timeline because it is primarily the canals or the way you can actually get around with anything in bulk and so for example when you hear all the police cars but those are boats and the same thing that we went to the fire house the fire station the fire station is a big port thing that you know like where the boats come out you know there's all the boats and then every morning there's all the garbage truck boats it's boats right and that are all and so and everything like that like the the DHL guy is on the way it's you know everything like that so the boats are it's it's interesting how that's all and this is static but when you just even see how all the things are all moving around against it it's really kind of an amazing front way to have a anyway city in the 21st century yeah Grand Canal so yeah that's the you know map of how it is now and so there's the Grand Canal that goes all the way through why is all the way through but then all the way through there's all these are the little canals everywhere and st. Mark's famous is the famous square where the Doge's Palace and the Basilica of st. Mark's is and it was any way you could just wander all around through all these little corridors which we we tended to do the tourists do congregate and they fill the whole plaza and they get off at these giant you know there's all these cruise ships here that just dump people you know we're continuously but you can depending on how you do it we we got up at at dawn and went over to st. Mark's and there was nobody there except for all the street cleaners which was also kind of neat and there was also sunrise and it was really quite beautiful and so we got to experience it that way so anyway we had a really wonderful trip listen it's not about that my trip okay this is a really modern drawing of Venice and it was one of the first cities to be it's so distinctive and it is one of the first cities that people actually mapped in a kind of a realistic way and so there's lots of early depictions of Venice probably in part because you need a map to get around it you know and so I know one is very easy to get turned around in Venice but on the other hand because it's so distinctive and also because it was so wealthy and so by the end of the Middle Ages Venice which doesn't seem that big now to us because of how vast cities have gotten made Bend the second largest city in Western Europe in populations so after Paris Paris would have been bigger but number one and wealth because of how amazingly wealthy the Venetians were and and and even though we can also don't always think about it because we we tend to look at things in terms of area and when we do maps and we say well I know England is so big and England becomes so important and things like that but at a certain point in the height of the Venetian Republic even though it's only air owning this little bit of land in northern Italy and then let's say a bunch of islands all the way down to Crete and Cyprus and things like that and the Peloponnesus and so it doesn't seem like a lot of land but it has so many big cities in it that in point of fact it was actually there's maybe let's say two million people and the venetian republican may have only been three million people in the kingdom of england and and the economy of the venetian republic would have been so much bigger that venice you know was a capital then of a fairly important states in the middle ages even it doesn't it seems like how could it be a so tiny right so the most serene Republic of Venice this is this flag that dates to the Middle Ages early modern times with the winged lion essentially as a republic Venice was independent for over a thousand years that 697 date is kind of like one of those traditional dates you know it's kind of emerging as independent for the first hundred years or so there but then was independent until 1797 and so that's a very long and successful run kind of through the entire course of late int you know the that what we think of as even the Dark Age is about the early Late Antiquity the early modern I'm sorry the early medieval period Central Middle Ages late Middle Ages the Renaissance all the way up through the early modern times and that's an era when in fact we kind of associate that era anyway in Western Europe not so much with Republic's but with monarchies right and so this is a later picture but the Pope crowning Charlemagne but it's an era when there are our kings the kings of France in England and everything else there were other Republic's so republics was something that were associated with city-states and things like that and so another example would have been medieval and early modern Florence but as you may know if you know a little bit of Florentine history even though the medici family start out as essentially rich citizens are parts of the Republican apparatus and the city government of the Republic of Florence they later evolved into monarchs of both Florence and lived in the surrounding area of Tuscany and they become ultimately the grand dukes of Tuscany so a lot of cases these Republic's were not didn't have that kind of stability because they were often fell prey to one particular family and could be converted into monarchies or could get conquered by somebody else right so there's a quite long lasting run for the Venetians one thing that did happen to Venice is that it became more oligarchical over time and so we'll talk a little bit about this when we talk about you know we're talking of something about how constitutions work and constitutional theory but essentially you can have a republic doesn't have to be a democracy right and in fact democracy doesn't always last even in the most democratic Republic's right and so as we've done when we talked looked at the Athenian democracy how when the Athenians lost the war against the Spartans the Spartans imposed the reign of the of the tyrants and so essentially they made an oligarchy often a republic could just have one tyrant or it could have a group of oligarchs where essentially it's being run by a noble noble class who are they have more of the power or as we saw in the case of the Roman Republic it can be kind of a mixture where you have some involvement of different groups that have different levels of participation but it ultimately becomes kind of a mixed Constitution so there is a mixed Constitution in a way for Venice but it becomes like less mixed and really Oleg our Cocola over time so so the Doge is started out as very very powerful at the beginning but most of these powers are lost and ultimately the doges role becomes ceremonial in that sense since there is a Doge if we think of the dough just being a monarch it's kind of a it's away a constitutionally constitutional monarchy although it's it's always been named a republic so we've called don't call it a constitutional monarchy so a republic right so we've had recent lectures kind of on these topics and you don't have to have been there but we talked about for example as I've been mentioning the Roman Republic in one of our lectures and about Magna Carta and in both of those cases as you'll recall those also were quite mixed so even though Magna Carta we look back on that in our own tradition as this foundation of our kind of constitutional monarchy and specifically having a democrasy or a semi democracy in our republics that are descended from the British crown nevertheless at the time it really was only a compact between the king and the nobles the great Nobles who didn't trust the king and indeed it had essentially no immediate consequences at all and only became important in retrospect later okay so constitutions are tough and they're not easy to explain how it all works and they were kind of aware of that when I was a kid in the 1970s and so they made on Saturday morning cartoons an entire series called Schoolhouse Rock about the that included for example history and and everything like that American history but also the complexities of how constitutional government worked and so one of the most beloved of all of the little Kermit kind of their little tiny video shorts it's called I'm just a bill which is explaining the constitutional process whereby in the United States a bill can sometimes become a law and so the bill was reminding people that he's he may die yeah die in committee that's a quite a thing to be telling teaching seven-year-olds right so anyway so 7 year-olds are learning about Bill's dying and committing and things like that and so yeah the kind of lyrics or things like I'm just a bill yes I'm only a bill I got as far as Capitol Hill well now I'm stuck in committee and I'll sit here and wait while a few key congressmen discuss and debate whether they let me be a law how I hope and pray that they will but today I'm still just a bill he wants to be a lot okay I love the Simpsons version The Simpsons version is I'm an amendment to be I'm an amendment to be a minute to be I hoping that they'll ratify me there's a lot of like burners who have got too much freedom I want to make it legal for policemen to beat him anyway so why can't we just make a law against flag burning because that law would be unconstitutional but if we change the Constitution then we could make all sorts of crazy laws now you're getting on so anyway that's the Simpsons version of that and it's kind of a funny one as a as a in retrospect now you know because again we've said how how complicated apparently civics lessons are for people apparently at all levels of the US government they could have made a couple more of these like for example yes we could have had one that kind of glanced asking a president of a foreign country to interfere in your domestic election and then telling him I'll give you all unfreeze millions and millions of dollars in needed defense aid that could mean that's the very definition of quid pro quo which if we go to article 2 of the Constitution constitutes breaking your oath of office and a high crime so anyway they could've had one like that so what if we were did one for Venice so the Venetian Constitution the Venetian Constitution is in fact more complicated but I'll go into just a little bit but I'll do want to comb it go through it slightly so I made a chart essentially the at the basis for it all of the male citizens and not everybody gets to be a citizen but essentially property owning classes are in the Arango Arango which is essentially a legislature but it is only at the beginning does it actually have any kind of legislative power and after a while the idea of it is is that they all get together and they claim things and one of the things I think it's spelled G Oh and maybe it's the Phoenicians because it's a Phoenician word so Venetian is its own language and so a lot of the difference words like Doge are in their own special Venetian language it's just different from Italian modern Italian which is the Tuscan dialect as opposed to the that's that's a proper spelling okay yeah so anyway these guys then from them are strong and elected the Great Council and so at a certain point it was four hundred and eighty nobles of patrician noblemen and patrician families that eventually gets to weigh over two thousand and the idea of it is that they represent it's like how Parliament is sovereign in the in the Westminster system so in the British Parliament Parliament is sovereign in the same way the Great Council of Venice is essentially the the sovereign body of the Republic and so then everything is a kind of a subcommittee of then the Great Council and so there's a sub committee which is essentially a Senate which acts as kind of the legislators of sixty members of the Great Council are made senators and of which they are led by six savvy which is to say sages and so they're more or less involved in making all the laws there's a quant iya which is forty members of the Great Council who are acting essentially as the supreme court and they have three leaders of the Quran TIA there's the very famously the Doge who is the chief executive of the Republic who was elected for life the Doge is always operating by the and by a certain point anyway by the by the time this really gets developed with a group called the Minor Council there's a six do counselors that are constantly with the Doge and he can't do anything without them they all were acted together and indeed the the seven of them are almost always operating with what's called the full college which is these guys plus the three leaders these the six litres of these and then six other different sabe that have other responsibilities and so forgetting almost anything done all day long the Doge is working with those groups including then going in prison this this college is then presiding over the Senate and so that the Senate to do any legislation they're all together but at a certain point you can imagine that that's quite unwieldy already just even talking about it we know from any kind of when you're doing any kind of constitutional theory if you're trying to get anything through a legislature that has 3,000 to 2,000 people that's complicated and so sometimes when there was a crisis they for example they created a temporary committee was called the Council of of 10 that had all these executive powers again when working in concert with the Doge and the Minor Council so these seventeen people together that temporary committee ended up lasting 600 years because it was so effective and so anyway and among them they have a they appointed within themselves three secret inquisitors that were part of essentially the inner and kind of like the secret police kind of thing the inter inter er espionage and also exterior and so we'll talk about all that but essentially with with this Constitution then there are significant checks and balances on this guy for example becoming a tyrant yes Constitution is not a Venetian word unusual whatever time this was when did this ripen into moon ruff roughly by when the dis raping into all of this and also was it like unusual for let's say that general area like let's say compared to let's say the city-state like Genoa you know like was it was it unusual compared to other entities like that at that time yes this would be I would say this is like getting to this kind of full development by the kind of central Middle Ages so by like the 13th century and I would say it's more complicated than almost any of their contemporaries so even though they have rivals like Jenna that and that are also republics Florence as a Republican certain points lots of the different city-states of Republic's the actual governing apparatus of each one of them is just much less complicated and much less stable which is one of the reasons why more mostly none of them survived as republics usually or they would go through time periods when they would alternate between let's say having their the Republican features more or less working and then they would also have to invite in called a Podesta which is to say like a foreign tyrant who can actually bring peace to the city and rule over it even though it's like you invite somebody who's not even from your city because because you have so much blood animosity with all of your you know fellow Nobles and you hate them all so much you know that you can't get anyone of it you can't let any one of them be in charge so you get somebody you know from outside to be the Prince and so a lot of after usually a Venetian you know actually bringing one of these Venetians because they because one of the things we know about bringing in Venetian in is you know that the guy's not gonna want to stay he's only making like a name for himself as a ruler of your own normative City and then he's gonna want to go back to Venice because Venice is better you know so you can have a palace back there so he's just making money while he's kind of sorting out all your problems so yeah I would say it's a little different okay so the head of state the Doge so we talked last week if you're here about essentially the the last the fall of the Western Roman Empire the kingdom of the Ostrogoths and then how the Ostrogoths got destroyed by the East Roman Empire the Byzantines when the Byzantines retook Italy so after that happened the Byzantine control or the east rum and control of Italy was very weak and so when a new group of much more let's say barbaric barbarians you know the Ostrogoths had been quite romanized the lombards were only semi not pagans anymore so when the Lombards came in they were able to overrun all of the kind of East Roman control however they weren't able to unify the kingdom the the peninsula and so the kingdom of Lombardi didn't control everything and as a result of that ever since from from this moment from the lombard invasion up through the modern unification of the Italian state Italy was not again unified so refugees then from the area around Venice kind of made their way to the sea where their Lombards were less likely to get them and one of the places they went then is to the kind of the different islands that started to make up Venice and together they organized organized as what we would call anyway the Duchy of Venetia although this word we have a lot of more recent connotations of the Duchy right so this is a word in Latin Duke's so this is a Roman title which means Dukes just means leader and so it is organized essentially by the east Romans the Byzantines the people who wrote Constantinople so by acclamation one of the number of these guys one of the noblemen was elected at Duke and then they send away to Constantinople to get confirmation of that title so the emperor in Constantinople writes back and says oh yes you're a Duke and you have to be under me now I give you legitimacy if you recognize my authority that's been considerable scheme this entire time that's how they were able as you remember to essentially overwhelm the Ostrogoths - they always you know if they can't if they don't have the strength they at least can give you the legitimation this solves a problem I've the question I've had for a long time about the word Doge Doge a it's obviously a variant of Duke J yeah yeah dude like yeah an Italian duche is like the same words picture he's familiar yeah I took a bunch of portraits of different doges and I just they they all kind of any way they dress distinctively right so the doshas have this hat that is possibly based on a Phrygian cap and so which is like a smurf hat and so the I don't know why this Murph's have Phrygian caps but anyway the idea of a Phrygian cap all the way back to antiquity is that that's a sign of of civic Liberty and so maybe the Doge is wearing that hat because he's saying okay this is a republic you know and and it's he's expressing their freedoms although who knows it's not entirely it's a tradition so it goes all the way back in there now I think people also say well it looks a lot like the Pharaohs crown as well and maybe the Phrygians got it from there so who knows so that's the Doge so we mentioned then that where we were at in kind of history and so this is like the Year 600 so we remember Justinian and the East Roman Empire had mortgaged everything took all the stripped all the gold off all the churches and everything like that in order to bring troops knock out the Ostrogoths knock out the Vandals and even get some of the Visigoths to submit here and essentially bring back the Roman Empire to its traditional western heartland but never profitably so that armies more or less destroyed Italy in doing it and so wiped out the economy and so when the Lombards who had been up here made their way down they then found their own States so the kingdom of Pavia here which is to say Lombardi and then the Lombard duchies of Tuscany Spoleto and Benevento so essentially the Lombard zone the lion's share but all of the areas around the periphery including that last capital of the Roman Empire Ravenna and also then the heartland I'm in Rome itself where the Pope is that is still essentially owned by Byzantium at this point but they can't defend it against law birds generally speaking so the wars go on and continue to destroy Italy's economy and that is when essentially the people that are just from all of this kind of territory who are still consider themselves Romans and Nobles they make their way you know into what becomes here this Duchy of Vanetta which had been this is what the Roman province had been called and that's what where the name Venice which becomes associated with the city comes from the fact that essentially it's the heir to all of these refugees from the previously whole big territory but increasingly lombards are just taking it off on them right and so then this area right here is able to maintain its independence because they have kind of a little bit of naval support from the Byzantines whose capital in Italy here is Ravana just right next to it so that's one of the reasons why they're there another just you know weird thing that has that had existed aquileia had been a big metropolis in the western roman empire and it had a high-ranking christian bishop so the only one of the bishops in the West that was called a patriarchy patriarchy of aquileia and so kind of slowly over time the patriarchs had to kind of flee to grotto and then but then when they did then of the people were back there still elected a new patriarch and so then there were multiple patriarchs then the Venetians went and grabbed the Gaia grotto and brought him here so that they could have that title patriarch anyway so then there started to be lots of different patriarchs but he essentially was a way for the Venetians anyway to claim that their bishop is this higher ranking guy the highest-ranking guy essentially in the West after the Pope and so the patreon still to this day the patriarch of venice is the second ranking Latin priest in Italy so after after the Pope the Roman Catholic Church they finally the Venetians were finally able to extinguish extinguish the patriarchate of aquileia in like 1800 or something it's a long time to get rid of those guys anyway so they're all kind of forming together as refugees they're not all immediately here but in where Venice is going to be specifically there they're more likely be on these islands at least at first okay this time is kind of going on there's a further the next century there's kind of further collapse of East Roman power the Byzantine as we're now calling them power I don't know if you can kind of even see this but essentially Slavs have come in and have overrun most of the Balkans and meanwhile after an exhaustive war that the east Romans were fighting with the Persians both the Persia the Persian Empire gets totally wiped out by this new force of Islam the Arabs who and creating a very vibrant and powerful state the Umayyad Caliphate here which continuously is trying to take Constantinople it can't so Constantinople is this amazing fortified city surrounded by water having fast amazing walls and so you have to have lots of naval power and land power in order to get it and they never have both the Byzantines one of the things they're able to have right up to the end is they've kind of like this technology called Greek fire where they can shoot fire at the opposing boats and even underwater or something and it lets them all on fire and it's like you can't do anything when your boats on fire so anyway so yeah we still don't have how to make it do it in Port Graham yeah we don't necessarily need it anyway so we can kind of see them at this point the Venetians are hardly getting anything from Constantinople Constantinople is if anything trying to get some help out of them if they can and so the Venetians at this point are just refugees that are kind of clinging to the coast and their initial economy is essentially they have they have two salt pans in the POE so they've got swamps and they've got water and salt and they established for themselves a monopoly on selling salt in the whole area and then they jealously guard that monopoly for a thousand years after that but it's not and initially it's their economy and that's what they can able to do okay and so one of the things you notice when you go to Venice is that a lot of things about it are there things that seem kind of Byzantine so if you go to st. Mark's just like in Ravenna when we were seeing all those mosaics and we were seeing these kind of domed churches that are built in what we think of like a Greek cross so more like a Byzantine Cathedral a Byzantine church with gold mosaics and things like that in this way it's in part because the Venetians initially are in fact although there are always latin speakers and then later their their language evolves into venetian they are always essentially looking to Constantinople as that's there maybe their Emperor was the in Constantinople and then later even when they're more independent they nevertheless have vast commercial ties with Constantinople as long as the Eastern Empire exists and so as a result of that they are constantly bringing back styles and fashions and art and everything like that from the Greek east even long after everybody else in the Latin West has stopped learnt knowing Greek and they don't you know so they're not all that white we always talk about how all that Greek learning isn't even available to anybody in the West because they don't you know they can't speak Greek etc but the Venetians are still in touch okay you get to the next century and we get to 800 the Year Charlemagne is crowned Emperor so now Charlemagne has knocked out the Lombards and so his Frankish Empire in alliance with the Pope has become quite powerful the Byzantine Empire meanwhile is at a quite a low ebb when that's happening but the Venetians are successfully able to negotiate a treaty between the two empires which more or less makes it autonomous so both empires kind of recognize that the Venetians are allowed to exist neutrally and not be owned by either either one at that and so that ends up being quite a good thing for the Venetians in terms of their overall capacity of being an independent republic so even though they date they date their independence from earlier now it's becoming recognized here in the 800s this is also a time period when there's starting to be Western shipping again so the Italians are getting back in boats and they are starting to participate in trade that had been kind of dominated by Arabs at p-- until now and so one of these early city-states to emerge is called a Malfi and although amalfi wasn't very famous until recently people now have also determined that i realized that i'm alfie is an amazing tourist trap to go do to and so amalfi is gorgeous little place that doesn't even have a proper harbor so it's almost hard to believe that anybody was able to make it a mercantile city-state and that's because they had such primitive boats back then but essentially the Alpha tonnes were able to get in these little boats and they had the right currents and they were able to get to Alexandria and that's where and participate in very lucrative trade everybody in the East had all of the things that everybody in the West wanted so they had spices and they had silk they had and if actually good for Pyrus this kind of thing that you can get from Egypt they did not have any of those things to trade with the Egyptians with the Arabs so what are they what did they trade Fisher everything you fish anywhere and they're heavy to carry around people yeah so people so this is this time period where the Balkans here have been overrun by this group that called themselves the Slavs and so one of the things that's happening is Italians are going and capturing them and this is where our word slave comes from and they're bringing slots to the Arabs and selling them but also is happening is they are raiding the Lombard territory as the Italians and they're also depopulating Italy and just selling Italians in the in Cairo and Alexandria and that's not actually they don't usually tell you that part of the story but that's actually where the early kind of commercial wealth is kind of coming from for these mercantile Republic's and so the the Pope and everybody we're saying don't do that stop that but they are not listening to that because they are making too much money by doing that kind of thing so so that's kind of the beginnings of mercantile Republic's so one of the things that happens then while the Venetians are down there in Alexandria which has become a Muslim country it had been a very important Egypt had been one of those centers of early Christianity and a big Christian nation especially Alexandria had been a center of one of the patriarchy it's and so that patriarchy --it the patriarch of Alexandria looked back to one of these early important Christians traditionally in the same way that the Pope's consider themselves to be heirs of st. Peter and st. Paul so st. mark is the founder according to tradition of the patriarch of Alexandria and so as far as the Alexandrians were concerned they had the tomb that had st. mark in it and there were still lots of Egyptians who are Christian who were been raiding that and everything like that but the Venetians are trading there all the time and they decide they st. mark would be better off in Venice you know then than in his homeland here of Alexandria so they go and steal the body and according to the legend they have some of the help of a couple of the Coptic or Egyptian Christian monks and then they put the body and all the relics at the bottom of a big basket of that had pork in it so then the Muslims would inspectors wouldn't be willing to go in there right and so that's I feel like that has to be just made up but because I mean if you would always know to hide things in pork the Muslim inspectors would tell anyway so whether that is true or not but anyway that's what they made in the mosaic and so they brought it back the the Egyptians the Coptic Christians don't agree that this happened and so ultimately the the compromise in the tradition is that they got the body but the head stayed and so that's kind of like the compromise so the height is still there as far as the cops are concerned and there still is a patriarch of Alexandria who is the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church okay so this then is where this symbol comes from so I showed you that flag that's the Venetian flag which has this wing it lion and so in early Christian iconography and actually all the way to this day there are four canonical Gospels mark Matthew Luke and John and they are represented by four beasts that are in the vision of John the Revelator in the Book of Revelations which are in fact just a rerun of a vision that Isaiah had but essentially they are a wing in bull a wing it eagle already having wings so I'm just a regular youghal thank you a winged lion and just a guy with wings he does so so anyway with those four the one with the lion with the wings is is mark and so since the Venetians you know at least say they have evangelist mark that's why that becomes then a symbol of this of the Republic in the city and why the Basilica is called st. Mark's because that's where the st. Mark's remains are okay so by the next century now the Frankish Empire has split and this is ultimately going to become a permanent split and so the West Frankish Kingdom is ultimately going to evolve it to France the East Frankish Kingdom is going to evolve into what we call Germany but is in fact actually the heirto Charlemagne's empire so at the time it's called the Roman Empire or the the West or the Western Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire we sometimes say which ultimately controls kind of all of this territory and now there's also a vast increase in population and goods manufacturing all kinds of things that are starting to happen in the West and so there's also a rise in additional competitors for trade amalfi which has this really bad port essentially goes into eclipse at a certain point and it becomes kind of a fight between have the Venetians and the p's ins and later Genoa eclipses the p's and so anyway venice and genoa that are the famous rivals right you can also see what's happened here is this Arab Caliphate has not stayed in one piece and so now it's split apart and is no longer able to be aggressively pushing forward anymore and so now that golden era of the height of Islam is going is down and now the West is researching right Sicily is green here for a while because the Muslims conquered it so yeah so so in terms of so this is not the final border right because we can still see here that the East Romans even though they had lost a lot of the Balkans is the book Ariane's are here they have maintained their control of all of anatolia what we now think of his turkey which was still then Christian and Greek speaking right but Spain for example this Muslim all the way up to here at this point and Sicily is Muslim so ultimately they win it and when the whole thing ends this is going to be Muslim and this is going to be Christian okay so let's fast forward a little bit otherwise we can't go through every map so 200 more years and just want to get to as that extends kind of one of the things that happens is another another problem that that the Muslim states will hear especially Egypt face is deforestation so at a certain point the Egyptian fleet is destroyed and they can't build anymore fleet there's no more there's no more wood for them to start building fleet whereas the Venetians always are trying to conquer essentially the crow the coast of Croatia Dalmatia here because there's all this timber and so they go over there to get the wood and there's all kinds of wood actually all around here so the Venetians aren't having too much problem with that and so now Venice and Genoa at this moment when the West is becoming very populous rich and militarily strong and you can see the Islamic states are especially divided this is this is now right at in the wake then of that first crusade where Knights from France and Germany trekked all the way along here through here all the way across and and created these Crusader States so there's Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem but part of the reason why they're able to do that is because there had been all of this collapse of central authority right okay so as the Crusades are going that's only making the Venetians of Genoese richer because they're able to now trade between Christian States Western Latin Christian States that are now helping them control all that trade to the getting that access to those spices and so all those Eastern goods and so but one of the things that happens as the crusading movement goes on between the 1st and 4th Crusades just warfare in general gets radically more expensive it's completely impossible at a certain point for Knights to simply traipse across all of Europe and try to forage the whole way and so as a result of that they have to when they want to launch the 4th crusade contract with either Genoa or Venice in order to get boats in order to get there and they do contract with the Venetians to get themselves and their horses all the way to the Holy Land but when they Kris insufficient number of Crusaders show up to pay for all of the four of the boats that they wanted and they also had not enough money even if they had had enough Crusaders so and the Venetians are not going to go and do this on their own dime but it happened to be at this particular moment there was about the kgs Doge ever-so and rego down below and he says well you know guys I got an idea you know you don't have the money and you're not liable to get the money but what if you know you are s you are sort of in the knight business and so what we have this we've been having this problem with this city-state in Croatia that has been kind of rebelling against us and in fact it considers itself to be an independent republic and all these things and we don't consider there to be any independent republics in the Adriatic because we own them so if you help us they do have big walls and we haven't had enough troops to be able to ever take them but if you help us take Zara then then we can we can consider part of your what you owe was paid and so the Crusaders think about it like okay we'll do that so they go and do a little mercenary work they go to saara the Crusaders are able to take the city where the Venetians couldn't so the Venetians accept the city as part of the payment when they get there though one of the things that happens is a an exiled deposed East Roman Emperor Byzantine Emperor shows up and says hey I need help getting my my throne back and if you come I know you guys were going on a crusade that's really important I love crusading if you if you put me back on my throne then I'll pay for a whole bunch of troops and give you all the rest of the money you need to pay the Venetians because Byzantines are rich as you know and I will have press send a whole bunch more troops with you and so it'll be like you know like a you know win win win win win right and so they go then the crusade gets hijacked a second time the Pope keeps on writing no no no don't do that but anyway so the Venetians successfully then hijack the crusade again which goes to Constantinople it successfully puts the claimant after a little bit of fighting I'm quits the claim and I'm back on the throne whereupon he finds out that the Treasury is absolutely empty you can't pay them anything the Crusaders are not and the especially the Venetians they're the ones in charge of the boats are not willing to leave without being paid and so that has a couple bad incidents and ultimately it comes down to war and the crusade then lay siege to the capital of Eastern Christendom itself you know Constantine's Christian capital and the only time until the fall later to the Turks Constantinople Falls to Christian Crusaders and when that happens then it gets massively de spoiled so the city that had never fallen before and it's just filled had been the biggest city in Christendom just filled with gold and artifacts and relics if you thought getting Saint Mark was a big deal these guys got everything you know and so this is where these famous horses you know which had been set up in the Forum in Constantinople now they are are taken as spoil back to Venice and they're put on top of st. Mark's to show we've despoiled Constantinople and the Doge as part of the deal when he makes it before they do this thing makes a big contract with the Crusaders about who's going to get what out of this Empire when they conquer it and the Doge is able to get the deal that he gets a quarter and a half of a quarter senator it's three eighths of all of the Byzantine Empire when they Kirit and so after this the Doge calls himself that he's he's the Lord of a quarter and half quarter of the Roman Empire you know and of course he takes all the best parts right and so his quarter is all the islands and everywhere he can make a trading depot so that the Venetians now can trade all the way up into the Black Sea for free on their own basis okay and so there's a the the Latin Crusaders of their own kind of they one of them gets crowned Emperor one of them gets crowned king of Thessalonica one of them beats made Duke of Athens one of them's Prince of akia anyway so they they kind of divvy that up one of them is Duke of Archipelago anyway and so all of those guys each own something but they're all very it's very nothing compared to this all this green here right which is all the Venetian territory all the way through and ultimately then the Greeks who formed their own States the desperate to Epirus and the empire of Nicaea the Empire and I see it ultimately does conquer back the Latin Empire and so the Byzantine Empire is reformed but it never it never recovers to what it was before the Crusaders do it in and that of course is the death blow to the relationship between the Greek Church and the Latin Church they don't recover from that either but for the Venetians this ends up being just a wonderful time for them to be in charge of a trade route that takes them from Venice through Constantinople to the Black Sea because in the 13th and 14th century the Mongols come out of the steppes conquer China and all of Persia and Iraq and even Russia and creates this Empire where suddenly you can now because it's all under the control of a Khan you can go all the way across here without being raided by independent little tribes and so suddenly there's a direct overland Caravan route that is bringing you things from China and so this is obviously quite good for business as far as the Venetians are concerned so this becomes a very high time and this is also then as we see here in this route here this is not trigger this is the route of Marco Polo and so Marco Polo who is a Venetian who goes with his family and becomes actually official of the con not a very high official but anyway so that's a bunch of time there that makes his way back by the sea route to Venice where he also in the war gets made prisoner yes Venetians giving to the east of yeah okay the conspire gets to get isn't that yeah so now there's gonna start to be I mean there's definitely like so like different kinds of cloth so like wool and other kinds of textiles there's more there's manufacturing that is taking place in places like Florence and you know of different kinds of cloth and textiles there are I'm not sure I should know that better than I'm sorry to say I've to look it up but yeah they always feel like the the Westerners have a lot less to track Easterners the Chinese always feel that way too I'm never interested in the west house okay so that's kind of an overview of like some of the maps and some of how this Republic in as a mercantile Republic is kind of growing and taking advantage of its economic circumstances I want to look a little bit about then the development is development as a republic so in this whole kind of time period a lot of contemporary offices went from being elective to being hereditary so we very much tend to think of Kings as being you know hereditary that Prince William is going to become you know what Prince Charles is going to become King Charles when the Queen dies and then William is going to become king after him because that's just how it always goes because it's a hereditary monarchy here in Canada but in fact actually like the kings of France that always were elected initially by acclamation and so one of the reasons why this house the house of cafes you know the capetians whose symbol is now the symbol of France right so these lilies that's the symbol of the house of hyouka pay the Capetian royal family they the only reason why they got in was because they were would have elections against the last kind of Carolingians who tended to be you know like people like Charles the lame Charles the bald Charles the unwritten I mean all these Charles is that the Charles is simple so there is these are not you know grit the top of the barrel Charles is anymore and so then the capetians are able to get elected Kings until and so if that hue cap a is elected and then he is able to successfully get his son made king in his own lifetime and then even though they're very wimpy or unwritten and have hardly any territory the capetians are really good at having just one son and making that son be king in the Kings lifetime and that's what makes it hereditary monarchy and that's how hereditary monarchy evolved so the reality of this kind of thing is the way elections have been happening this kind of election by acclamation that continued to be a problem in the in the Roman Empire of the East and Constantinople until the end of the empire really because it had always been the case that you know Julius Caesar he essentially his emperor because his troops say they call him Imperator right and so it's always possible for the army to declare you by acclamation Emperor and then there's sometimes multiple Emperor's and they fight it out in a civil war right well so that same kind of thing then is in the inherited reality of election by acclamation you end up having disputes and so this is why initially that's how the papacy works so the Roman people acclaim whose Pope well sometimes they acclaim to people I hope you know depending some parts of him to claim one and the other and that's why we have a pope and an anti Pope right often well so the the Pope's over time they create an electoral system where the Cardinals elect popes and that's to stop this from happening if possible and hasn't happened a long time and it's likewise the Venetians come up with their own thing right so although there is this attempt early on from several the doges to have their sons or their sons to take over from their fathers and even to go a couple generations there's attempts to make a dynasty where one of the leading families is going to maybe take claim to the role of Doge in fact actually there's enough competition from wealthy noble families that the other one's all prevented each other from ever grabbing hold of it and so although that the Doge when is ends up staying Doge for life in almost every case a couple of them got deposed but that continues to the Republic's end so does the elective nature of it so they always elect a Doge as opposed to having it be inherited but you're from your father also initially just like anywhere you know based on this model of an imperial official based on the model of the Roman Emperor Duke of Vanetta the original doges would have had a lot of power but because of this rising power of the rest of the aristocracy of this oligarchy as they continuously check the authority of the Doge the Doge gets less and less and less power until by the end of the Republic we'll see it's essentially a ceremonial role entirely so ok we're gonna make a schoolhouse raka how do you be a Doge let's do that even its look can't possibly be as complicated as making a bill a law in the US Congress right so we have to start with that point of sovereignty so I said that essentially like Parliament that its sovereign so to the Great Council of Venice is sovereign and so at certain point is consisting of a 480 men they're elected annually from patrician families that are listed in what's called the Golden Book of Venice at a certain point it's fixed you can't add anybody to the Venetian nobility and so it becomes more and more aristocratic originally you could get to be a rich merchant and make you buy your way in eventually they close it off you have to be in the golden book and the way you get there is because you were you can get elected into the council because you already were on the council or because your paternal ancestors were very recently were and so essentially it's closed to anybody who's whose family line male family line is not already part of the oligarchy and so that's where the council comes les develops over time I'm trying to together in one one snapshot it's a thousand-year Republic okay so how do you elected Doge so from that counsel we remember there's all these subcommittees and one of those is called the Signoria which consists of that minor council those six duco counselors who follow the Doge around and then that koron Tia which was also working as a as a court system right so it's 40 electors so the Signoria together then from the Signoria you take the youngest member of the senior area so this is step one take the youngest guy out of the Signoria he goes to st. Mark's to pray and that step 1 step 2 he leaves the basilica finds the first boy he fights step 3 he brings that boy to the doges palace before the Great Council that boy now becomes the Ballad you know so the ballot boy so the ballot boy is in charge of anyway all the next steps has certainly is to tip to the picking so next all of the members of the Great Council who are 30 years old and older get their name written on a ballot all those are put into the urn and the ballot ino draws 30 names out of the urn that creates 30 electors now so the thirty electors write their names on a ballot they put it in the urn the boy drives nine names out of the bow out of the urn and now there's nine electors okay the nine electors now they contemplate the whole Grand Council of everybody thirty years old or an older and they say I'm we're gonna elect 40 of them 40 of those members but those guys in order to get elected into that 47 they gotta get seven out of nine votes so as you can imagine anybody who's unpopular isn't gonna get you know in depending on who the ballot Ino has gotten to this group of nine right anyway so this nine is going to elect then forty electors those forty electors have their names written on the ballots the ballot we know pulls 12 minutes out creating 12 electors the 12 electors contemplate the Grand Council they elect 25 electors each one of them which requires nine out of 12 of the votes now those 20 what are you gonna think we're gonna do with those 25 any guesses it's not the ballot and they put it in there the ballot Ino fries out nine the nine electors contemplates they wanted to elect forty-five electors now of which they need a seven to nine votes to get in the 4511 okay contemplate the Great Council they make 41 and they need a 9 out of 11 vote okay waha okay that's the preliminary now we're ready to start the election so now we have gotten the 41 electors whose job it is to choose the toes that's the system so here we go this four thousand years no but for like four hundred so I mean at first they don't have this system but at a certain point there's an electoral reform and I create the system yeah kidnap this little boy and somewhere some families wondering why he's gone for months I'm sure that everybody is plotting to have their boy you know right outside of st. Mark's because you know you can imagine that one of the reasons why they're doing this is there's some very famous so these are all very rich aristocrats they are all in competition with each other they all could be massively enriched potentially if they know somebody from they or somebody from their family become the Doge and if your blood enemy or whatever if you think of like the Romeo Juliet story so if the you know if you're them they're Monty Q's and there's gonna be this Capulet Doge you're like you know so you probably want to get a little Montague boy you know just in case he's like I mean he's not allowed to be doing that with the ballots right but you don't want to have any advantage you can have so anyway so yeah I agree that they'll never get their voice a long time so so now we have the this is step 13 and 14 so now we have the 41 electors they all have to go to Mass and st. Mark's and so in the middle of this kind of August religious thing where you're just thinking about God and the Republic they then swear an oath to act honestly upright Italy and for the good of the Republic in their job as electors step 15 they are now locked in the palace there's a special guard of sailors that is not allowing anybody in or out and also is not allowing any communication in or out as long as they are until they come up with their decision so that's actually kind of like what happens with the Pope electoral reform right so the Cardinals are not allowed to leave and actually at a certain point they like they stopped giving them food you know so what ends up happening with the Cardinals in the Middle Ages is they're like the food is reduced by half and the Cardinals so you know they have a lot of Cardinals like their food but anyway and a half again and so until until they and that's why they we have that ritual still where they depends on the smoke right as they as the ballots are being in the and you want to see what the smoke is because that's coming again out of the same kind of time period so the only way they're communicating potentially is you know like whatever the smoke is coming out because they're out all right okay so they're locked in there next the 41 guys they all right down now who they think should be the Doge so they nominate somebody they put that in the urn the ballot boys gone so don't worry about him anymore so now from that they draw a list up of everybody who's been nominated so somebody might have gotten 20 nominations out of the 40 right and so they just have a list one name only one ballot only for everybody nominated that goes back in the urn and then I think we're gonna sit baby anyway whatever step it is now a us what happens then is is that a single name is drawn out of the urn and so if that person happens to be there then they you know go away they're not they're not allowed to be part of the consideration anybody with their same surname isn't allowed to be there so so yeah if you're you know again with us Capulets or whatever you can't you can't all be there you have to leave so when that happens then everybody who is left in the room then can discuss whether they want to have that guy be and then the guys can come back and answer charges or answer questions whatever and then they if 25 out of those 41 electors say he's Doge then the guy gets elected Doge and that's how you elect a Doge but if if not you it doesn't get up to the needed 25 then you go back to that step step 17 and you pick the second name out of it ern right and so then they they try again so it's kind of amazing that anybody ever got elected Doge that was it's quite a constitutional system yeah and then so how long would it turn his term be I mean is it almost time to we like the next one until he dies so until you until you successfully poison him and so for that reason you know they do the same exact thing that they do with popes which is ok if you if you don't if you're like if looking like your faction doesn't have the strength to get your guy in as Doge that the compromise is always well we'll just name this really old guy you know from the kind of like a passive faction right so my factions strong your faction strong between the two of us will never get to 25 because we each have too many too in the amount of the electors so they find a compromise guy you know and then what always happens this always happens with the Pope - you get that Pope crown on his head and then suddenly he lives on another 20 years and he's also you know like a real reformer or anything is gonna happen so because once the crowns on your head who knows what's gonna happen right and so this is again is why actually that Pope who hijacks the crusade Don de l'eau he's really old and he's also blind and everything by the time when he's leading the crusade but he still lives on another 15 years or whatever and is able to do all these things right so a lot of times I don't that kind of thing will happen as a way cuz he he's got it until he dies okay so why did he ever quit again thank you so so you know we thought maybe that the Canadian system of government was complicated as we're in an election right now and we're trying to you know understand between the different parties and understand if we get you know - what percentage within each riding is that gonna cause you know a tsunami you know to overwhelm and have it you know sweep everybody out sweep everybody in or whatever is gonna happen but one of the reasons why maybe you know that we still have this kind of system and there's no way for example that even contemplate on having it you know not having the Queen New Zealand for example they went through this they just desperately need a new flag because they just have a Union Jack and their flag looks like the Australian flag you can't tell it apart and and why do you have the British flag on your country's flag at a certain point and they spent like 20 million dollars trying to get a new flag and they ultimately voted not to do anything anyway so it's very hard to make those kind of changes well likewise there's this is not an easy thing to unravel you know a inherited Constitution and it doesn't always necessarily a wise thing to do it either so there's a reason why even though they're you know this this what seems like almost insane and certainly funny you know complexity of the venetian system and yet their constitution as opposed to the Genoese or anybody else you know the this actually cost stability right so it's just I don't think you remember the adoption of the you of the maple leaf flag I don't remember it personally no flag debate there was it was hell to pay all sorts of people shouting at each other and of course once it was adopted everybody loved it yeah but there's a wonderful story I don't know who the hero of this story was but one of the premier stand-up comics from the States was in Toronto during the great flag debate and the press asked him what he thought of a country that didn't even have its own flag he said it's a start that's great okay so like I say this arcane system then is actually kind of a story since anyway it's quite resilient to all of this pop and having to having done all this it made the system work for them okay so for example there emerged by this time as the power of the West Roman Emperor also collapsed as the people who are essentially kings of Germany are ceasing to be able to control or make their control felt across the Alps ultimately all of the kind of Imperial territories emerge as semi-free city-states into the 14th century and into the emergence of the Renaissance later and so one of the things one of the reasons why there is a renaissance is because we are having all of this kind of frenetic competition among all of these but the other thing that is accompanied by it it's not just art you know it's you can see here with all the little battles right there's also just unending warfare between city-states because that's kind of one of the things that also happens so you know we've noted this before that there's something about city-states so the Italian Renaissance being an example in terms of having art at all kinds of ideas and things coming out of it similarly the city-states of ancient Greece with all of the kind of ideas coming out of there the Mayans also had this amazing cultural flourishing and never had an impact but they were also all at war at all times so they were not that's not a stable system and one of the things that happens almost always is big landed empires end up knocking them out as the bigger powers are able to field much stronger militaries and in the end than a city-state can so you know Venice is definitely taking part in all of that flourishing of Italian culture that involved one of the reasons why it's just this magnificent thing so the doges palace here it's generally considered to be the premier example of secular Gothic architecture so the cathedrals and things like that we know are the main examples we think of but here's a civic building that is gothic yeah and so anyway so all the Venice's is is beautiful like that right and the same thing all the art and and music and everything that is coming out of it it's a major center ultimately for for publishing so and as the centuries wear on you know you get to hear closing now into the modern era Venice you know goes from just owning the clinging to the coast to owning more and more and the you know some of the city-states are are bigger like Milan and Florence that are able to emerge as kind of rivals and competitors you know as things go on but ultimately everybody you know is having to deal with Austria Hungary France southern Italy which is owned by by Spain you know and so in other words there's too many great powers running around for anybody to to be too strong against that although the Venetians are the ones that are the strongest of any of them in part because of and part because of their system but just also because everything that they control okay so we're not quite done getting this guy guy Doge so after they've already everybody's elected in the grand councils had their say with him that's when now they would send him out and show him to that in this in Renault you know in other words all of the people so now we're gonna have that particular part of the history or the heritage form where everybody claims the doge and so when he's presented he was traditionally presented by with the phrase you know the Great Council gift says this is your doge if it please you and so that's giving them kind of the option you know to a claim or not to a claim but as we've talked about then it's becoming increasingly closed the aristocracy is not letting new aristocratic families in and the oligarchy is just turning the screws on on the control of it so as the economy and other things are drying up and the other thing is calcifying a lot more even this form goes away and they start saying after 14 23 your doge you know so not if it please you right okay so how were they able then how are the Oleg arcs able to continually check the power of the doshas and so to be then crowned owes early on one of the things that you have to do is swear an oath of office and this is still done with presidents and prime ministers and this is also was frequently done for example when the British monarchs were crowned and so one of the reasons why we as we saw the British monarchy evolved into a constitutional monarchy was they started having to issue reissue Magna Carta each time so they get crowned and they issue Magna Carta and then they have to issue a bunch of other stuff on top of that until at a certain point they no longer are in charge of anything and they only have a ceremonial role likewise then the doges have promises that they make and then the promises get longer and longer until at a certain point they're making a hundred and sixty-eight page promises or something like that in order to have limits on their constitutional powers so initially start with things like that they're going to govern fairly they'll judge and partially they're not going to tell anybody all the state secrets that should be part of the oath of presidency don't tell the Russians anyway no anyways they execute the will of the grant council in other words they're going to listen to the legislature the judiciary they're not going to just rule as a tyrant the very earliest promoción a that we have is actually the same Doge Enrico Dandolo and so one of his promises that he makes is that he will not have any private correspondence with any foreign prince and so if he actually receives a letter you know from a prince in you the Ukraine for example he would have to have other members of those six other guys you know in the small council open it up right and this is kind of weird but well they didn't have people listening in right but anyway so this is the same thing though so you're also not allowed to for example own property in that country like buying a hotel there or a golf course because the idea of it is that if he did have those things then he could be pressured you know to put his own personal interests as to above the is interested in the office as Doge and the interest of the Republic right and so that's already into it worked into the constitutional system in the 12th century in Venice okay so even so it is going in this kind of opposite direction of what other monarchies are doing for example in the Middle Ages in early modern time so the French monarchy as we saw is becoming more and more hereditary and it actually becomes more and more absolutist so that by the time you get to someone like louis xiv and the later french kings they actually have so much more authority than their medieval predecessors had the opposite trend is happening in do't the Doge things and so the monarchy becomes more and more constitutional through that same time period so to just kind of give the rest of the story that is because we can't do everything in this kind of detail that we've already done at a certain point the like I say the East Roman Empire never really fully recovers and ultimately there's a little bit of a contest whether a resurgent Bulgarian Empire or whether the Turkish Sultanate's are going to be able to win and conquer it but at a certain point it's definitely the Turks and in 1453 that falls meanwhile the Venetians have have continued to maintain this entire all these colonies and everything like that that they inherited from you know or stole from the Byzantines and have helped with you know where the Crusaders helped with and that kind of thing there's our estos and they and they may work their way more inland as they are lessened let mean they're still heavily involved in trading but at a certain point the trading becomes less important and they're more becoming less they landed overlords and all of them are let's say Lords of landed estates that they have on the mainland and things like that so as we mentioned then as that's happening one of the ways that the doges are kept from seizing power is they are how they themselves are under continual surveillance so at a certain point those people in the small Council are more or less always with them so you can't they're not getting the correspondence at a certain point their families are also being being watched most of those actions that the Doge can ever take has to be in concert with the council and then those guys themselves are also having to operate in concert with as we mentioned that full college which is all those other 15 leaders or when they needed to turn something around really fast with that Council of 10 that becomes so kind of infamous right and so those are these kind of two sections of the executive so the Doge is still there and it's still acting but is also you know acting only in the concert with the full college or with the Council of 10 and the my council minor so the ground council's itself becomes less and less important as there's more and more members of it and I mentioned then this to just talk a little bit about this council 10 born as a temporary measure because it was a plot against the Republic in 1310 it nevertheless got renewed continuously until a century was just declared okay it's permanent you know and it lasted until the end and it had power for example of reviewing for example all of the intelligence that is being gathered including domestic surveillance international intelligence and conducting you could also conduct trials and it could also mean up punishments up tune including banishment or even execution of nobles so it was fairly powerful and able to act quickly as opposed to the bigger councils the Venetians ended up being very early innovators in espionage so they created some of these again domestic you know it's very clear that the you watched Game of Thrones they have what's called the small Council as opposed to the Minor Council here and the small council included the eunuch that had all the little spies you know and they were having spies that were in the other foreign realm where they were gonna try to assassinate the the foreign you know the rival queen and they also have the domestic spies they're spying everybody so well in the same kind of a way this is what inspired that story and indeed the Venetians are the people who pioneered the idea of sending permanent embassies and creating extra territorial in embassies and and that kind of a thing always having a permanent envoy at a rival court and they've also pioneered spying using the in best embassy as a spy I mean as you know from like James Bond everything that's where all the spies all are and then a certain point that that's still all happening but one of the great things for historians is because the Venetian spies we're doing such a good job of writing that all down and sending it back to the Council of 10 is that we have a lot of interesting information about what's going on for example at like Henry the eighth's courts because the Venetians are writing stuff down and and we have kind of like their kind of notes of what they were saying anyway or at least their understanding of the politics anyway so they're doing those kind of things so the ultimately the the end for the Venetians on the one hand the the state becomes much more brittle as it's less and less able to act or doing in it do anything it's becoming more they're not able to bring any new people into the nobility the nobility itself is becoming less commercial and more about just owning land and stuff like that so again less dynamic but when the big thing happens that the Portuguese are able to get around Africa and get to the spices then suddenly and then the Spanish likewise get here and find all the gold that they ever want and then they are able to get sugar and everything else like this so when that kind of thing all starts happening all of the trade that had been freely flowing against the Mongol Empire which breaks apart and now suddenly the Turks are here the these trade is still coming through but anyway it's not anywhere near what you can do by getting a big ocean-going ships and going all the way around and so they're commercially outmatched and even in their own in their own place in the adriatic the austrians who end up being the heirs to the holy roman empire they build a port just across from venice a Trieste and so they can bring the their own they can't ship it these aren't trading to the germans anymore and likewise they aren't trading to the italian eret to areas because the pope also have their own port at this point in Ancona and so so it becomes commercially it's no longer the commercial center that it had been for the preceding a thousand years and so all of that shifts in venice is now increasingly it by the end there's a place that is living on its old wealth and laurels and not a place that's actively you know the center of trade and everything anymore and so as with so many things that we'll say we're archaic holdovers by the time the french revolution happens which ends all of the ancient regimes and Napoleon and all of his troops pour over Europe there's a fairly early campaign into Italy and everything just collapses for the Venetians and they ultimately when they get the last time they bring the Grand Council together most everybody's run away so they couldn't even have a quorum but the Doge nevertheless you know they all vote to just surrender and so and that the public ends you know with the with quite a whimper as Napoleon well he probably makes a big declaration the the the Republic had had been able to hold out against Attila the Hun you know as the refugees have gotten away and Napoleon says you know there's not gonna be anymore Senate there's not gonna be any more of this you know these inquisitors that are doing all of these these secrets according to essentially the and torture and things like that that is the kind of the reputation of the nation's half I will be an Attila to the Venetians and so he brings it to and and you can kind of see all of the Republic and flags there on the boats that are taking Venice Mike and then the other from the other side of that equation there's the famous quote that the last Doge after that vote gives takes his cap off and gives it to his secretary and says here take this I shan't be needing it anymore oh and that's the end of the Republic yeah that's great thank you so after the Venetians are left with Venice most of the air defects the French take a lot of stuff and whenever you conquer somebody you grab a bunch of things and they bring it all back to the Louvre but anyway and then the Nazis grabbed a lot of that but hey hey you know this kind of a thing that happens but anyway you then the Venice is left with this amazing artifacts and just this built structure that is incomparable to anything else there's nothing else in the world that's like it and so they also are heir to the tourists as the as the boats and the big cruise line was just poor people out on to the to the st. Mark's Square and indeed it was the original tourists so as we mentioned when when people first started doing tourism that British wealthy Nobles and upper middle-class people would go to Italy and do their holidays and Venice is one of the first places they would go Florence and Venice Elizabeth now if you were bit about the economy Jane Jacobs I'm quoting from memory at this point but she writes about how Venice got its start they had one substance one resource to trade and that was salt right and they sold it mostly out east kansas constantinople but then and and with what they've made they bought stuff from constantinople right then they started copying what they had bought and they sold their copies in Europe to other cities and other places and their copies probably weren't as good as the originals but they were a hell of a lot better than what their customers had which was nothing and so on it went and they invented something like a joint stock corporation called a commenda it was set up for like one voyage and you have a rich guy who provided the money and a guy with the guts and the ship and he traveled with the ship and then they would split the profits assuming the ship made it there and made it back yeah and this allowed young men who saw men of course of no particular family to get rich right and to join the merchant aristocracy right and then we shut it down in 1286 they had the sirata the closure right no more newcomers into this and into the aristocracy right and the outlawed the commenda and today fishing a little bit of fishing and lots of tourism right they screwed themselves yeah so we could have even done I mostly I mean it doesn't lend so much you could do it no lecture but mostly was trying to do a little bit of the the kind of political context but then also kind of a constitutional and how history and contrasting it to the through the time period but we could just as easily have done an artistic history a cultural history and especially a commercial one because what the even if the Venetians didn't stick with it what the Venetians and also the Genoese also and I think the Genoese as the ones that invented what's it called accounting the the the double-entry accounting so like they so the Venetians I mean the Genoese invented like that and then they also invented different types of like you say companies you know joint stock companies and also being and also different kinds of investment and ultimately banking and so as a result of that there's in so many ways as we in the West are largely descended that have essentially the bourgeois Zi taking over thing over these early merchants who are creating all those things are in so many ways more our forbearers than let's say the King of England you know that you know that's also an important thing that could be for a future lecture that kind of commercial and economic revolution that is also taking place in Europe but we did what we did and so that's the Republic of Venice history tonight [Applause]

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 85,961

Keywords: venice, italy, history, republic, political science, medieval, medieval history, lecture, history lecture, crusades, history of italy, renaissance, middle ages, venice lecture

Id: 1rMa7wuRNog

Length: 84min 51sec (5091 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019