scious of the whole of it. The sequence of Venetian history from this point, down to the establishment of Rialto as the capital, is governed by a series of actions and reactions rapidly initiated and as rapidly exhausted, by a process of attraction and repulsion, now towards Byzantium, now away from it. It is the people who move; throwing their weight now into this scale, now into that, as they saw that the dreaded danger of absorption threatened from Italy or from the East. Always with the passion for independence alight in them, they were not Roman or Frankish with their bishops, nor Byzantine with their doges, but Venetian, with a strong resolution to make themselves recognized as such. They stretched ever forward to the object of their desire, and rejected all that might prove inimical to their hopes of attaining it.

But this very desire for self-realization, while it wrought in the core of the state as a whole, quickened a similar appetite in each individual member. If Venice craved to stand sole and independent in Italy, each tribune also craved to rule sole and alone in Venice. Jealousy between Malamocco and Heraclea, rivalry for the leadership inside Venice, summed itself up in feuds and quarrels between the tribunes of the principal towns, until the federation seemed in danger of falling to pieces through the intensity of its own passion. Only one solution offered itself to waive individual claims and to create a personal head of the state, to concentrate the functions of government in his hands. The Venetians elected their first doge, Luccio Paolo Anafesto, in the year 697.* Internal * Dandolo, loc. cit.

discord necessitated this change in the constitution; the antagonism of minute particles inside Venice had brought about the revolution. It followed, therefore, that the colour first given to the dukedom would depend upon the character of the city which chanced to be in the ascendant at the moment, of the sympathies of that tribunate which succeeded in imposing itself upon its federate brothers. Anafesto was a Heraclean, and his election proclaimed the leadership of Heraclea. That city had always been aristocratic in sympathy, with a strong leaning towards Byzantium. This quality in Heraclea was determined in part by opposition to its rival Malamocco, the very kernel of the democratic factor. And so the doges first emerged tinctured with aristocratic. proclivities, leaning towards autocracy and ready to court Byzantium and the emperor.

Though the creation of a doge had been a voluntary act and clearly necessary for the salvation of the state, yet it concentrated and intensified the internal oppositions it was designed to allay. For the doges and Heraclea stood there now as the embodiment of the danger from Byzantium, and drew upon themselves all that popular jealousy which was only appeased by the ruin of the reigning city. The solution that Venice had chosen placed her in the same difficulty as that which the action of the popes imposed upon the whole independent movement in Italy. Like the popes, the doges might either lean too much upon one or other of the external forces which were threatening to absorb their state, or, by a skilful manipulation of internal discords, they might

succeed in making themselves sovereign. The people desired their doge to be a bulwark against any encroachment by the Church upon civil liberty; prince of themselves, but not agent for Byzantium. The least swerving from the prescribed line, the slightest suspicion of an ambitious policy, the first note of a servile submission to any dominant power, sufficed to rouse the people, who deposed, blinded, tonsured, or even slew their dukes. In the same light the people regarded their bishops. They desired them to be the safeguards of their faith against heretical Byzantium; but they would not tolerate that their spiritual pastors should act as political agents for the Church or for the Church's allies. In fact, the people submitted to their doges and their bishops solely with a view to their one engrossing object, the evolution of their own independence. The attempt of either bishop or doge to impose his will upon the state was sufficient to insure his ruin.

Resuming the course of Venetian history, we find it obeying the impulses just noticed. In the year 728 the pope, for his own purpose of aggrandizement, had united with Luitprand against Leo the Isaurian. But the results of this policy, the capture of Ravenna by the Lombards, proved so alarming to Venice, that when the pope discovered his mistake and desired to undo his work, he had little difficulty in persuading Orso, the doge, to restore the exarch Paul to his capital. For the moment Venice, obeying the impulse given by her doge, held with Byzantium. In reward the Venetian merchants obtained from Constantinople

* Dandolo, op. cit., lib. vii. cap. iii. pp. 2, 3, 4.

large commercial privileges in the Pentapolis; while Orso himself received the honorary title of "hypatos or consul. The sympathies of Venice set towards the East, in alarm at the danger from the Lombards. But, while the state was in process of formation, any movement implied a counter movement. The stronger the action showed itself the more rapid and positive the reaction was sure to be. To the people it seemed that they had gone far enough with their doge. He had achieved one object of his desire; he might reckon himself a noble of the empire, within a measurable distance of the Augustan majesty. The people whom he governed, however, were intensely sensitive. These dignities bore too much the character of a pledge committing the duke and Venice to dependence on Byzantium. A doge of Venice should not wear that title as a lesser one, nor think it honourable to hold a subordinate office of the Eastern court. The knowledge of their own weakness forced the Venetians into violence. They murdered Orso, and abolished the dukedom in favour of a yearly magistracy, called the "mastership of the soldiery."* They revolted fiercely from Byzantium, whither their doge seemed to be leading them.

The reaction had, of necessity, been excessive; part of its effect required to be undone. Experience proved that the dukedom was essential to the coherence of the state. The mastership of the soldiery recalled the evils of the tribunate. Another current of feeling, opposed to the violence which had abolished the dukedom, set in, and Heraclea profited

* Dandolo, op. cit., p. 13; cap. iv. p. 1.

by it. She desired to resume the prestige she had lost through the suspension of the dukedom. In the year 742 a Heraclean victory over its democratic neighbour Jesolo brought back the doges, in the person of Deodato, a noble of the victorious city. But the permanent result of the whole revolution made itself felt in the removal of the government from Heraclea to Malamocco, the democratic centre. This was a step towards the thorough compromise of Rialto. A Heraclean, an aristocrat, a Byzantine in sympathy, still reigns, but reigns at Malamocco, democratic and antiByzantine. Both the factors of the future Rialto were modified towards the point where union became possible. The restoration of the dukedom, however, in spite of this modification, was the work of Heraclea -a proof of its ascendency regained, and therefore a sign that the state had taken a swing towards Byzantium again.

And the course of Italian politics generally determined Venice, for a while, in her present direction. For the reciprocal attraction between the Church and the Franks had just begun. The two powers hostile to Constantinople, and standing together for the attainment of their respective objects, the mastery of Italy and a temporal sovereignty, were becoming solid. The results of this union were felt at once by Venice. The Venetians had saved the exarchate from the Lombards; Charles now desired to see these protectors of Byzantium expelled from the Pentapolis, in order to pave the way for his own occupation of that district. Accordingly, Dandolo, op. cit., cap. ix. p. 1.

*