VENETIAN STUDIES.

THE CITY OF RIALTO.

'Quid est mare? refugium in periculis."-ALCUIN. THE origin of Venice is one of the most obscure points in Italian history. Tradition marks the incursion of Attila as the birth-moment of that republic, which was destined to grow in silence, fed from the East, during the Middle Ages; to embark upon the troubled waters of Renaissance politics; to put forth the blossom of a glorious art; to stand as a bulwark for Europe against the Ottoman power; to flame in sinister splendour down the road of corruption, and to be extinguished at last, the oldest state in Europe, by the convulsions of the French Revolution. But long before Attila came with his Huns, before the Goths or the Lombards or the Franks seized on the plains of Northern Italy, those mud islands of the lagoon must have had their population-a race of fishermen, poor, hardy, independent, sea-bred and sea-nurtured. Cassiodorius, secretary of Theodoric the Great, writes to the Venetians of the Lagoons as to a people who had already achieved a certain

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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

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