THE RISE OF DESPOTS 179 each community led to the same issue as that to which tended the endless contentions and divisions of the Greek cities in ancient times. Their democratic institutions were overthrown, internecine war and strife having resulted in anarchy, and anarchy having led, as always, to tyranny. By the end of the thirteenth century almost all the republics of Northern and Central Italy down to the papal states, save Venice, Genoa, and the cities of Tuscany, had fallen into the hands of domestic tyrants, many of whom by their crimes and their intolerable tyranny rendered themselves as odious as the worst of the tyrants who usurped supreme power in the free cities of ancient Hellas. They possessed, many of them, a remarkable "energy for crime." Their strenuous wickedness filled the land with violence and terror. One thing which enabled these usurpers to seize the supreme power in the cities was the decay of the military spirit in their inhabitants. The burghers became immersed in business and delegated the defense of their cities to mercenaries. The captains of these hirelings were known as condottieri. Some of them were foreign adventurers; all were soldiers of fortune. They found it easy to overthrow the liberties of the cities which they had been hired to defend. We shall now relate some circumstances, for the most part of a commercial or social character, which concern some of the most renowned of the Italian city-states. 191. Venice. Venice, the most famous of the Italian cities, had its beginnings in the fifth century in the rude huts of some refugees who fled out into the marshes of the Adriatic to escape the fury of the Huns of Attila. Here, secure from the pursuit of the barbarians, who were unprovided with boats, they gradually built up, on some low islets, a number of little villages, which finally, towards the close of the seventh century, coalesced to form a single city, at whose head was placed a ruler bearing the title of Duke, or Doge, a name destined to acquire a wide renown. Conquests and negotiations gradually extended century after century the possessions of the island republic, until she finally came to control the coast and waters of the Eastern Mediterranean in much the same way that Carthage had mastery of the Western Mediterranean at the time of the First Punic War. Even before the Crusades her trade with the East was very extensive, and by those expeditions was expanded into enormous dimensions. The sea between Italy and the ports of Egypt and Syria was whitened with the sails of her transports and war galleys. It will be recalled that she took part in the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the capture of Constantinople by the Latin Christians (sec. 148). As her share of the divided lands of the Eastern Empire she received the Peloponnesus, most of the Greek islands, and the shore lands of the Hellespont, a goodly empire of the sea. Venice was at the height of her power during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Her supremacy on the Mediterranean Sea, which was as complete as is England's on the ocean to-day, was celebrated each year by the unique ceremony of "Wedding the Adriatic" by the dropping of a ring into the sea. The origin of this custom was as follows. In the year 1177 Pope Alexander III, out of gratitude to the Venetians for services rendered him in his quarrel with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, gave a ring to the Doge with these words: "Take this as a token of dominion over the sea, and wed her every year, you and your successors forever, in order that all may know that the sea belongs to Venice and is subject to her as a bride is subject to her husband." This annual celebration of the ceremony was one of the most brilliant spectacles of the Middle Ages. The maritime power and ascendancy of Venice was embodied in her famous Arsenal. This consisted of a series of wharves, VENICE AND GENOA 181 dockyards, and vast magazines filled with marine war-engines and military stores of every kind. In the city's palmiest day sixteen thousand shipbuilders, workmen, and guards were employed here. The Arsenal was one of the sights of Europe and is still an object of interest to the curious traveler. Dante introduced in his Inferno a celebrated description of the place, doubtless from personal knowledge of it. The decline of Venice dates from the fifteenth century. The conquests of the Ottoman Turks during this century deprived her of much of the territory she held east of the Adriatic, and finally the discovery of the New World by Columbus and of an unbroken water route to India by Vasco da Gama gave a deathblow to her commerce. From FIG. 33.A CANAL IN VENICE. (From a photograph) this time on the trade with the East was to be conducted from the Atlantic ports instead of from those in the Mediterranean. 192. Genoa. - Genoa, on the old Ligurian coast, was after Venice the most powerful of the Italian maritime cities. She early crushed her near competitor Pisa,' and then entered into a fierce competition with Venice for the control of the trade of the Orient. The period of Genoa's greatest prosperity dates from the recapture of Constantinople from the Latins by the Greeks in 6 Canto xxi, 7-19. 7 Pisa is located a little to the south of Genoa, on the same coast. The first battle between the navies of the two republics was fought in 1070. Thenceforward for two centuries the rival cities were engaged in an almost continuous war, which finally resulted in the complete destruction of the power of Pisa. 1261. Through jealousy of the Venetians, the Genoese assisted the Greeks in the recovery of Constantinople and in return were given various commercial privileges in places along the Bosporus. Very soon they established stations upon the shores of the Euxine and began to carry on a lucrative trade with Eastern Asia by way of the Black Sea and the Caspian. The jealousy with which the Venetians regarded the prosperity of the Genoese led to oft-renewed war between the two rival republics. For nearly two centuries their hostile fleets contended, as did the navies of Rome and Carthage, for the supremacy of the sea. In the year 1380 Venice inflicted upon her rival a terrible naval defeat which crippled her permanently. The final blow to Genoa's prosperity, however, was given by the irruption into Europe of the Mongols and the Ottoman Turks, and the capture of Constantinople by the latter in 1453 (sec. 179). The Genoese traders were now driven from the Black Sea, and their traffic with Eastern Asia was completely broken up; for the Venetians had control of the ports of Egypt and Syria and the southern routes to India and the countries beyond, that is, the routes by way of the Euphrates and the Red Sea. 193. Florence. - Florence," the most illustrious and fortunate of Italian republics," although from her inland location upon the Arno shut out from engaging in those naval enterprises that conferred wealth and importance upon the coast cities of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, became, notwithstanding, through the skill, industry, enterprise, and genius of her citizens, the great manufacturing, financial, literary, and art center of the later mediaval centuries. The list of her illustrious citizens, of her poets, statesmen, historians, architects, sculptors, and painters is more extended than that of any other city of medieval times; and indeed, as respects the number of her great men, Florence is perhaps unrivaled by any city of the ancient or modern world save Athens. In her long roll of fame we find the names of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci, and the Medici. |