COMMERCE.
To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions
of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice
with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted
tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an
affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material
was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular
peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial
Relations annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers.
It grieved me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen,
should occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my
beloved Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that
I used to post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater
than all the rest of the world’s together. I sometimes desperately eked
out the material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber
of Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and
its cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender
mining interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these
displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her
Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the
high place Venice held in my reverence.
Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever
mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation
from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and
magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring
foundations were laid in the earliest Christian times. For the new
cities formed by the fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land,
during the fifth century, had hardly settled around a common democratic
government on the islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop
maritime energies and resources; and long before this government was
finally established at Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or
Venice had become the capital of the young Republic, the Veneti had
thriftily begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to account,
to traffic with them, and to make treaties of commerce with their
rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths, had fixed his capital at
Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have been glad to introduce
Italian civilization among his people; but this warlike race were not
prepared to practice the useful arts, and although they inhabited one of
the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, they were
neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians supplied them
(at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and
with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with especial amazement
their skill in the management of their river-craft, by means of which
the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate the
main-land, “running on the grass of the meadows, and between the stalks
of the harvest field,”--just as in this day our own western steamers are
known to run in a heavy dew.
The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those
helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative
trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year
570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the
Greek Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in
return the barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or
fairs on the shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from
every part of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons,
grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.
The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches
of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals
of that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this
infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it
may be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the
most deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously,
and they relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their
commerce, and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves
for the infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own
government, they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and
purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to
the Saracens. Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest
penny over and over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens,
and then for certain sums ransomed them and restored them to their
countries; they sold Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the
infidels in similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not
easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but
slavery continued in Venice as late as the fifteenth century, and in
earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or
three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, _Del Costume Veneziano_. The present
sketch of the history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts
chiefly drawn from Mutinelli’s delightful treatise, _Del Commercio dei
Veneziani_.] The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly
attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli
goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent
traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest
labor, by degrading labor and making it the office of bondmen.
While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up,
the Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and
legitimate forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp
that whole trade of the East with Europe which passed through their
hands for so many ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established
in Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more
luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry,
and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the
imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of
the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried
back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent
armor of Lombardy.
From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks,
the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of
the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people
so long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The
privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the
Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the
western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy,
had already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the
Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their
commerce free throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had
attacked and beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now
recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic
every port on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided
the Greeks to repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, their
commerce was declared free in all the ports of the empire, and they were
allowed to trade without restriction in all the cities, and to build
warehouses and dépôts throughout the dominions of the Greeks, wherever
they chose. The harvest they reaped from the vast field thus opened to
their enterprise, must have more than compensated them for their losses
in the barbarization of the Italian continent by the incessant civil
wars which followed the disruption of the Lombard League, when trade and
industry languished throughout Italy. When the Crusaders had taken the
Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return
for important services against the infidel, the same privileges conceded
them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally, Constantinople fell into
the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted from the
reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the Greek metropolis,) nearly
all the Greek islands fell to the share of Venice; and the Latin
emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such privileges
as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the Levant.
From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic
turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest
Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the
Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of
the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea;
and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting
her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial
colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through
this entrepôt, thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor,
directed the entire commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly
enriched the Republic. The vastness and importance of such a trade, even
at that day, when the wants of men were far simpler and fewer than now,
could hardly be over-stated; and one nation then monopolized the traffic
which is now free to the whole world. The Venetians bought their wares
at the great marts of Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary
in caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they set sail and
voyaged to the River Volga, which they ascended to the point of its
closest proximity to the Don. Their goods were then transported overland
to the Don, and were again carried by water down to their mercantile
colony at its mouth. Their ships, having free access to the Black Sea,
could, after receiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The
products of every country of Asia were carried into Europe by these
dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by the travels and
discoveries of Matteo, Nicolò, and Marco Polo, penetrated the remotest
regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent fears and
superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from seeking,
even if they had possessed the means of access to them.
The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its
climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that
best able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the
ignorant and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber
counts and barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into
knights, spent splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble
ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned
the Crusades to their own account and made money out of the Holy Land,
and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur
of chivalry, were very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the
gorgeous stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and
they now also began to establish manufactories, and to practice the
industrial arts at home. Their jewelers and workers in precious metals
soon became famous throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose
into celebrity and importance which they have never since lost (for they
still supply the world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of
gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier
or dame of perfect fashion was content with any other. Besides this they
gilded leather for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of
ornament in wax,--a material that modern taste is apt to disdain,--while
Venetian candles in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces
of the whole civilized world.
The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and
encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and
just profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to
and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing
annually,--one for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for
Trebizond, a fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain,
France, the Low Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each
squadron of traders was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs
and other enemies, by a certain number of the state galleys, let
severally to the highest bidders for the voyage, at a price never less
than about five hundred dollars of our money. The galleys were all
manned and armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted to three
hundred persons; including a captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots,
two carpenters, two calkers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen,
three drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also appointed a
commandant of the whole squadron, with absolute authority to hear
complaints, decide controversies, and punish offences.
While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of
its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for
their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent
of Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the
merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry
device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons,
dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from
robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore,
were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians,
Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to
come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in
different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple
purpose was thus served,--the Venetian merchants were protected in their
lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many an
honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and
entertained the customers of the merchants.
Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being
at Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by
the servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed
for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the
so-called Mercantile Consuls (_Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti_), whose
special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received
no hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish
offenses of this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They
measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the
lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected
poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts
sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with
this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by
the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property
abroad, demanded justice of the government of the country in which the
offense was committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the
Republic; if still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with
the nation from which the offense came, seized any citizen of that
country whom it could find, and, through its College of Reprisals,
spoiled him of sufficient property to pay the damage done to its
citizen. Finally, besides several other magistracies resident in Venice,
the Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and some foreign ports,
to superintend the traffic of its citizens, and to compose their
controversies. The Consuls were paid out of duties levied on the
merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with the advice and
consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.
At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative
monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and
forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete
with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly
discouraged by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example,
in Croatia; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying
the King of Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold.
The exact income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or
from the various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now
difficult to know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value
or extent of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of
its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to
1423. There were then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the
mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three thousand seamen,
and netting to their owners a profit of forty per cent, on the capital
invested. How great has been the decline of this trade may be understood
from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to the careful
statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, to only $60,229,740, and that the
number of vessels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. As the
total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may be inferred that they are
small craft, and in fact they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no
longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of Samarcand, or
carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of western Europe; but they
sail to and from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, and
hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now visit the old queen,
who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic; and the
shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy exceeds hers by ninety
sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce
has not only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, but it has
also almost entirely lost its distinctive character. Glass of Murano is
still exported to a value of about two millions of dollars annually; but
in this industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there is
an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from one to three
millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests of the
province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is
concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the
disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and
oil are at present articles of import solely,--the former because of a
malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the
olive.
A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture
of objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they
yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city
can have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in
the shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is
wrought of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it
may be folded and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great
quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of
their ready money), [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were
one day astonished to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of
this chain, and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance.
“Signori,” she explained paradoxically, “if I keep my money, I spend
it; if I buy this chain, it is always money (_è sempre soldi_).”] and
old-fashioned people of the city, who display the finer sort in
skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have seen a babe at its
christening in church literally manacled and shackled with Venetian
chain; and the little girl who came to us one day, to show us the
splendors in which she had appeared at a _disputa_ (examination of
children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in the luxurious
days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as
sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician
dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture,
after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was
the work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the
Ruga Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much
coarser. I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the
links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos,--an
oval being welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being
linked loosely into the next.
An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a
thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati,
an enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand
Canal, not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace
quite unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its
breast. “A. Salviati, Avvocato,” is the legend of the bell-pull, and you
do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a
neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and
“smalts,” as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance,
with which the wonders of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace
are some two hundred artisans at work,--cutting the smalts and glass
into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding
and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and
reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows
of the pictures to be copied.
You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and
long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original
life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder
mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems
of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments
as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive
his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable
work of the painter.
In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of
_marqueterie_,--table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins
and the like,--and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into
strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room, where
the finished mosaic-works--of course not the pictorial mosaics--are
polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded
shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of
color. By far the greater number of these colors are discoveries or
improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found
again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste,
aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural
stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice
for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship than
those of the Byzantine artists.
In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition
of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the
establishment produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are
cunningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony
mounted in silver, and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is
covered with a mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There
are here, moreover, to be seen the designs furnished by the Crown
Princess of Prussia for the mosaics of the Queen’s Chapel at Windsor.
These, like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are completed
in the establishment on the Grand Canal, and are afterward put up as
wholes in the places intended for them.
In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her
in her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly
preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated
her prime only with the glories of its decline;--for Kugler ascribes the
completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to
the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark’s to the tenth or
eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic
hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its
motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would
look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in
the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly
of the most lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already
seen,--upon her exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the
enlightened zeal of her government, and upon men’s imperfect knowledge
of geography, and the barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon
the indefatigable industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens.
America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only
one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty
serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world’s ignorance,
pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions
of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest
and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to
the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances,
pilgrimages, and relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the
devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims
to and from the Holy Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and
the whole Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints; and her
merchants sold the precious relics throughout Europe at an immense
advance upon first cost.
But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide
of wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her
citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched
Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud
corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless
here to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time
when the hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to
prosperity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of
ages, relinquished their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped
back into luxury and indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese
began, and though they signally defeated the rival Republic in battle,
Genoa finally excelled in commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute
the sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped
to place upon the Byzantine throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable
fortunes of the Greek, threw the influence of their arms and intrigues
in his favor, and the Latins were expelled from Constantinople in 1271.
The new Greek Emperor had promised to give the sole navigation of the
Black Sea to his allies, together with the church and palaces possessed
by the Venetians in his capital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese
the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled literally all his
promises, for the Venetians still continued to sail to and from their
colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is certain
that they had no longer the sovereignty of those waters; and the Genoese
now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three large and important
colonies to serve as entrepôts for the trade taken from their rivals.
The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained through Tana, however,
for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol Tartars,
under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took, sacked, burnt,
and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow to the
most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which had
endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana’s fall, terrible
portents of woe were seen at Venice,--that meteors appeared, that demons
rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses and
swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the
calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the
national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their
ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of
Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic
in the Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the
Greeks having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce
unknown to them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians
were finally, on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in
which they had latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy
tribute to the Turks.
In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore
excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and
the English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the
latter still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established
and rose daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and
Novogorod banks were opened under the protection and special favor of
the Hanseatic League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the
tide of commerce setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted
the foreigners who would have traded in their ports. On the
west, Barcelona began to dispute the preëminence of Venice in the
Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold
by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed Venetian commerce
everywhere; and in that day, as in our own, private English enterprise
was employed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a friendly
power.
The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important,
and catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea
in search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart
which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San
Michele, had put together from the stories of travelers, and his own
guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade
of India with Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land
traffic perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been
gone; had its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to
the declining prosperity of the Republic.
It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which
had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery
of America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice.
While all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas
had been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power
had been everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her
possessions, one after one, had been lopped away; and at the time
Columbus was on his way to America half Europe, united in the League of
Cambray, was attempting to crush the Republic of Venice.
The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune
smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of
her commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her
political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the
sternest of lessons.