amount of unity and self-government. From his famous epistle of A.D. 523,* we gather the impression of a community simple, industrious, republican, and we obtain our earliest view of the Venetian villages; the houses rising on the shoals, saved from destruction in the ever-shifting waters by the frail palisade twisted from withes of osier. There is a breath of the salt, free air in the secretary's phrase, "Hic vobis, aquatilium avium more, domus est." But no eye noted the first low huts, built of mud bricks, nor measured those light and shallow boats which stood, stabled like horses, at the door of every house; no historian traced the internal growth of these fishing stations; and we have been left to suppose what has often been stated, that the refugees from the mainland, flying before the frequent foreign occupations, found the islands, where they sought shelter, deserted mudbanks out at sea. This could not have been the case. Venice was not peopled solely by exiles from Aquileia, Oderzo, Concordia, or Padua. Through the obscurity of the records which have reached us, we can trace a long-continued struggle raging inside Venice,† before a thorough fusion of the original and the immigrant populations could be brought about. There were years of quarrelling between Malamocco, where the older race predominated, and Heraclea,

* See Hazlitt, "Hist. of Venetian Republic" (London : 1860), vol. iv. doc. i.: "Viminibus enim flexilibus illigatis, terrena illis soliditas aggregatur . . . proinde naves quas, more animalium, vestris parietis illigastis, diligenti cura reficite."

+ Throughout this essay I shall use the name "Venice" for the whole lagoon district, reserving "Rialto" for the city we now call Venice.

peopled chiefly by refugees from Feltre and Oderzo. The union was not effected until the city of Rialto, the city we now call Venice, rose to pre-eminence on the ruins of Heraclea and of Malamocco, as the monument of Pipin's attack and defeat. The choice of Rialto as the seat of the government is the startingpoint of sequent Venetian history. Around Rialto we gather all those memories which are chiefly associated with the name of Venice-the wealth, the splendour, the pride of the Adriatic's Queen; Rialto floating on the water, a city that is "always just putting out to sea." A discussion, therefore, of the causes which led to the final selection of Rialto as the capital of Venice will form a fit prelude to any studies in the history of the Venetian republic.

Rialto was the city of compromise and of survival, -of compromise between those internal and discordant elements which constituted the population of the fishing villages; of survival between two great external and antagonistic powers, the East and the West. On one side of Venice lay the mythic splendour, the dim grandeur, the august name of "the Golden Emperor;" on the other the barbaric power, the juvenile force, the mighty hand and outstretched arm of the Frankish king. Constantinople displayed the civilization of the world, the long-inherited lordship of the Cæsars; while the court of Charles the Great seemed instinct with the might of some unmeasured natural force, eruptive and volcanic. The Eastern Empire was old and mythical through

* “ τὴν γραῦν τὴν βασιλείαν, ὡς κόρην χρυσοσπάταλον, ὡς μαργαροφοpoûσav." Manasses in Constant., vii.

age; but it still retained some of its pristine vigour, though the hand of sovereignty began to fall, here and there, from the government. The Frankish power, on the contrary, bounded forward with the impetuosity of youth; yet destiny reserved for it too, although so young, only a brief life in Italy. It fell to pieces on the death of its creator; and "Charlemagne, with all his peerage," faded away into the shadowy region of poetical myth-the only region where their mark remained as conquerors. Between these two forces Italy, and with her Venice, pursued their task of developing themselves as states. The action and reaction of East and West determined the evolution of Venice; and Rialto emerged as the result of their operation on that portion of the Roman world.

The Eastern Empire, though surely settling towards dissolution, still presented the greatest power in existence. Its longevity, its centuries of vigorous old age, were continually proving how massively the structure of the Roman constitution had been framed. The repeated recovery of vital force, the re-organization of the whole system, the new leases of life effected by Constantine, by Heraclius, by Leo the Isaurian, by Nicephorus, and by Basil, demonstrated the solid ribwork of the Roman body politic. Under the protection of the law we may believe that the subjects of the Eastern Empire were well governed. Its chroniclers have chosen to dwell upon the exceptions, recording, chiefly, instances of imperial caprice; but the enormous wealth of the merchants would rather prove that property was secure, commerce active, and justice strictly administered. Ni

cephorus I. could never have incurred such a torrent of obloquy for his alleged extortions, nor could Theodora have bequeathed so vast a treasury to her son Michael the Drunkard, had the people been impoverished, or the country ruined, by years of fiscal oppression. The gigantic scale of the imperial operations for the encouragement of agriculture shows at once the power of the emperors and their earnestness in good government. We have only to call to mind the colony of two hundred thousand Sclavs transferred by Constantine V. to Bithynia, and the corresponding establishment of Asiatic agriculturists on the borders of Sclavonia, to perceive that the Roman emperor was both the successor of the Great King and the ruler bred in the political principles of the early Cæsars. And the same profundity of resource appeared in the military, no less than in the financial administration. Constantine Copronymus found no difficulty, after the loss of an army and fleet numbering two thousand transports, in taking the field against the Bulgarians the following year with a new army of eighty thousand men and two thousand vessels.*

During the eighth and ninth centuries the Eastern Empire was, on the whole, prosperous. Nor could the continual dynastic changes upset, or even seriously shake, the solid strength of the constitution. The emergence of successful soldiers like Leo, of feeble princes like the Amorian family, of pure adventurers like Basil I., left the general lines of government

* See Finlay's "History of Greece" (Oxford: 1877), vol. ii. p. 230.

unchanged. That policy of careful finance and vigorous military administration, initiated by Augustus, and laid down by him as the basis of imperial authority, was maintained, for the most part, by those who subsequently bore the title of emperor. The maxims of Cæsarship were held by them as something hardly dependent upon their personal character. The prince was not to be confounded with the administration; that was hereditary and traditional, the expression of the Roman idea. No doubt the vigour and efficiency of the government varied with the qualities of the Augustus, but the substantial principles never altered. And so, distinct from the national life, severed from the interests of the people and almost unobserved by them, there existed the life of the Great Palace, the private economy of Cæsar as sovereign of a court, not as minister of finance or emperor of the Roman armies. We know more of this palace life than we know of the imperial executive, for the chroniclers have busied themselves over the details of it. We see it sumptuous and fantastic under Theophilus, the emperor who played the Paris to the virgins assembled in his stepmother's house, and chose his wife by the gift of a golden apple.* He is the Augustus whose chief glory lay in building the Palace of Bryas,† an imitation of the caliph's home in Bagdad. The

*

Symeon Mag., Ann. Corpus Script. Hist. Byz. (Bonn: 1838), tom. 46, p. 415.

Sym. Mag, op. cit., p. 421; Theophanes, "Contin." Corp. Hist. Byz. (Bonn), tom. 46, pp. 86-91; Leo, Gram. Script. Hist. Byz. (Venetiis: 1729), tom. vi. p. 362; Gibbon, "Dec. and Fall," capp. 52, 53.