The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage

"It’s a beautiful book and a very important complement. In a way, it’s in the tradition of Marino Sanuto, who I mentioned earlier. It’s basically a eulogy. Sanuto’s account is really a defence of the Venetian empire, a praise of the Venetian land-based empire, the Terraferma, but he structures this cleverly as a travelogue, as reporting. Morris does a similar thing with the maritime empire, also slightly eulogical or panegyrical. She clearly loves Venice. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided we read it critically. It’s a beautiful read, precisely because she is a journalist, and can maybe take these liberties that historians can’t. She can bring together different elements, the personal and the factual. It’s very well-researched and she can present it in a different way. She takes an iterative approach to the Venetian Empire, following the routes of the galleys. It’s structured almost like a travelogue. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In many ways Jan Morris is bang on. Historians in their nit-picking, hypercritical way might insist that this isn’t all accurate, that this or that might be problematic, and so on. But in their own work, those historians might miss out on constructing the broad strokes of something. Their construction might be a complete misconstruction, although the pointillist details might be correct. There is an idea of the Venetian empire which is very much informed by a somewhat anachronistic historians’ definition of empire, which is the British Empire. That is then projected back to Venice. Morris doesn’t do that, but takes an experience-based approach, her experience of travelling, to the Venetian empire. It maybe comes closer to how many Venetians experienced the Venetian empire, as a series of stations that you hit which all have to do with Venice but in many different ways. You might encounter certain elements that remind you of Venice, and you might perceive this as more or less Venetian, but ultimately it’s a fluid thing. It depends very much on your perception of what you’re looking at. And, in any case, your final destination is almost always outside the Venetian empire, according to the standard definition of historians—in Istanbul, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Bruges, London. But there you still have a Venetian diaspora that make it Venice, who create a little Venice. Jan Morris brings this really crucial fluidity in what is Venetian back in, which is a great thing. For anyone who doesn’t have the time and the stamina to read Lane, this book is a great entry point. It was really a Festschrift for Benny Arbel, who worked a lot on the Venetians of the maritime empire, mainly in the early modern period. I wrote an introduction with my former PhD student, Franz Julius Morche, reviewing the current state of research on the Venetian Empire, challenging the very notion of a Venetian empire, but also trying to make sense of the debate that is going on between mainly Italian versus English speaking and writing scholarship. The former is critical of the notion of the Venetian empire, maybe also because of the bad associations with empire, especially in continental Europe. That scholarship suggests that Venice was a commonwealth. Anglo-American scholarship took a very different route, be it with a positive or negative connotation of the Venetian empire, yet in both cases constructing it as a predecessor of and akin to the British Empire. Our intro tried to make sense of this debate in a rigorous, academic way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It starts with what the terminology means. What does ‘imperium’ mean and how has it been used since the Roman period and especially in the Middle Ages and early modern period? How did the Venetians use it? How did they use it very carefully to distinguish between the universal empire of a Byzantine emperor, or the Roman emperor, or the Pope for that matter, versus the other Latin meaning, which is to have limited control, typically for a limited period, over a very clearly distinct area? Of course the Venetians do make use of empire in that latter sense of having de facto power over certain things. But they’re not making a claim—in terms of political taxonomy or rank—to be an imperial player, because that makes no sense for them: they need to connect with other empires. Making such a claim would present problems with regard to diplomatic interactions with the Papacy, the Mamluk Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. It’s even true with regard to the Byzantine Empire, although there it’s a more complicated story because Venice does eventually almost frontally challenge the Byzantine Empire. Even in that case, they still shy away from the temptation to say, after 1204, that they have defeated the Emperor and that it is therefore they who are the new imperial power in the region. They might have thought about it, but they very consciously did not do it. They inserted themselves into the pre-existing imperial framework—in a very powerful position, but not as emperors."