A few years later, the Doge Domenico Flabianico,
or Flobenigo, sustained by an assembly of the clergy and the people, introduced a law by which the chief of the Republic was forbidden to associate any one with himself in the power, and by which he was constrained to accept the ‘assistance’ of two counsellors. The nomination of these was the first step towards the creation of those many offices by which the Doge’s action was limited little by little, till he became the mere figure-head, if not the scapegoat, of the Republic he was supposed to govern.
[Illustration: FISHING BOATS AT THE RIVA]
[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE CA D’ ORO]
It is not my intention to attempt in these pages an unbroken narrative of early Venetian history. Such attempts have been made by men of great and thorough learning, but they have failed in part or altogether because it is quite impossible to trust the only sources of information which have come down to us. These agree, indeed, more or less; that is, they agree just nearly enough to make it sure that something like the event they narrate in such widely different ways actually took place, in some year to be chosen at will from the several dates they give. But that is all, until nearly the end of the Middle Ages.
One thing must not be forgotten: Venice was not the only maritime republic in Italy, even in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were at least three others, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa, which at that time were as prosperous, and seemed likely to be as long-lived, and of which the commerce in the eastern Mediterranean was already much more important than that of Venice. In the end Venice outdid them because she was isolated from Italy; literally ‘isolated,’ since she was built on islands in the sea.
England owes her independence, and the British Empire therefore owes its existence, to twenty-one miles of salt water. A much less formidable water barrier gave Venice a thousand years of self-government. The vast advantage of protection by water was perhaps not evident to the Venetians more than two or three times in their history, any more than the same advantage has been actually felt by Englishmen more than twice or thrice, but those few occasions were most critical; it has been present all the time, and the enemies of Venice, as of England, have always realized with dismay the difficulty of attacking a nation to whose country men cannot walk dry-shod.