Venice: A New History

I have fallen in love with ancient Venice thanks to this book. It was the oldest republic in the world, for 1300 years its people opposed a strong central government. The author destroys old myths about its “all-powerful” doges who were nothing of the sort. Doges were chosen by a process so complex no one of power could possibly influence it “other than God,” and were replaced easily. Not until Napoleon—who “forced” liberty on it (another myth because according to the author they were the most free people through antiquity)—did one man force the Venetians to erect a statue to one man in St Mark’s Square. Napoleon. It didn’t last long. Venice was formed when Romans escaped to its islands fleeing Attila the Hun. show more Because land was scarce, there was no landed gentry, and thus no nobility, unlike everywhere else in the ancient world. And yet the people were and are noble. An excellent book!!

By the way, the narrator was fantastic as well. I just don’t have enough praise for this book. While I’m not as enamored with Venice’s modern history (no fault of the author’s of course), I now cannot wait to see it in a few weeks!! show less

First of all this history book is a great supplement or even replacement for many highschool text books. Since it covers a tremendous amount of history and events, beyond just the city of Venice, it can be used as a good overview of power struggles and economic development in Europe from medieval days right up to our time.

This book's greatest strength is to provide context for events we're kind of familiar with but didn't really know how they are all connected. We typically see Venice as a place with a great flair for the theatrical, but how did that come to be? We also know Venice as an important sea port, but how did it fit in with all the other famous harbours?

Although I think this particular book does a better job of teaching show more history than other history books, I do believe it suffers from the same ailment many other such books suffer from. That defect is not keeping the reader informed as to where we are in time. Certainly times and dates are mentioned but the author will easily take a long diversion into a previous era without explaining how things are connected or even where the current discussion is situated.

The overarching feeling reading this book is that as a reader you're constantly wondering: "ok so where are we right now?" A side effect of this back-and-forth jumping is that you can't decide how to look at the time period currently being discussed. If I need to understand how an event in the 18th century relates to something that happened in the 17th century, then you would at a minimum expect sentences that start with: "Unlike in the 18th century, in the 17th century there were ...". Any linking text or dialog is completely missing here, which is the main reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. show less

A very well written narrative history, from the formation of the first lagoon communities in the fifth century right up to today (well, up to 2012, the year of publication). The Late Medieval period (11th to 15th centuries) takes up over half the book - the lesser focus on the early centuries is inevitable given the sparser historical record, but I might have liked if early modern Venice (up to Napoleon's abolition of the republic in 1797) had been given more attention.

Something I found a bit disturbing is the strength of Madden's sympathy for the Venetian Republic's politcal model. Now, it obviously had significant strengths - in particular, among Italian city-states, Venice was a beacon of internal stability. But while Madden may be show more right that making membership of the Great Council hereditary in the 13th century was necessary for domestic tranquility, it's hard to see how he construes it as a victory for representative government.

Madden clearly thinks represenative government is both morally desirable and pragmatically efficient, and sees Venice as having exemplified it to a degree that his actual narrative makes it difficult to entirely agree with. Historical judgement aside, one just wishes one got a stronger sense he cared whether anyone but the rich gets represented.

But as said, it's well written, and evaluations of political systems is of course a small part of the book. show less

Thomas Madden’s Venice: A New History is an ideal history of this unique city providing a solid framework of the city’s history in a very readable format. The author’s love for the city is infectious and the reader is left with a new appreciation of this ancient city. Parts of the book I valued the most include:
• The early Venetians were driven to settle on the islands and sandbars of the lagoon as a way to escape the attackers that swept through Europe during the 9th century.
• The Venetians exploited the characteristics of the lagoon (e.g. shallow waters with narrow channels) to successfully defend their city against attackers for many centuries.
• Venice needed to balance its relationships with Constantinople and with Rome. show more Although it was located in Italy, it showed a greater affiliation to Constantinople for much of its history.
• Venice was an entrepreneurial city devoted exclusively to trade. Because it had no agricultural basis for much of its history, it never developed the landed nobility class like the rest of Europe. Considerable complications ensued when Venice began to extend itself onto the mainland including conflicts with other Italian cities.
• Venice had extensive trading relations with the Ottoman empire. The author provides a fascinating analysis of the delicate dance needed to maintain these relations despite support for crusaders.
• Venice was a Republic for most of its history in contrast to the monarchies throughout Europe at the time. Because many writers have painted a different and darker picture of the city’s government, the author spends a considerable amount of time explaining how the city’s government really worked.
• Napoleon claimed to have liberated Venice during his Italian campaigns but most Venetians felt that they had considerably less freedom after he appeared.
• Finally, the author provides a good overview of the environmental challenges facing the city as well as their challenges in dealing with floods of tourists.
The book also provides a nice review of European and Mediterranean history from the perspective of Venice. The book also provides a concise story of Venice’s influence on art and music.
What makes this book so successful is that it is a Goldilocks book: not too many details and not too few details. As a result, it is easy to follow the thread of the city’s history. The reader is left with both a true understanding of the history and with a hunger to learn more. show less

Venice is a city that I would love to visit someday. However, before I get around to doing that (if ever), I want to take some time and really study the history of it. We see Venice all the time in movies and occasionally in video games like Assassin’s Creed II, but why did it come to be built on a lagoon? Why does it have no cars? What sort of people live in a city where canals are the streets? And finally, what role did it play in the history of the Mediterranean for over a thousand years and how does it define itself today? Thomas Madden attempts to answer all of these questions and more in under 500 pages.

Overall, I would say that the book is a well-written treatment on the city of Venice, Italy. Admittedly, it must be difficult show more choosing what to write about on a city that is so uniquely geographically positioned, built, and with such a massive history. Madden’s writing is accessible to the layperson and does not bog down too much in stuffy scholarship. He offers a sweeping narrative of the city taking care to highlight key figures and emphasizing its growth in the Middle Ages, the expansion of its maritime empire, and its close economic connections with the Byzantine Empire and Constantinople. In short, Madden succeeds in writing a reasonably detailed history that goes far broader and deeper than your Lonely Planet travel guide to Venice.

Speaking of travel guides, the final chapter is a somewhat depressing look at the effects of tourism on the city since the mid-20th Century. Venice has since been derided as Disneyland for adults; a place that is overcrowded with obnoxious foreigners who only show up for a day to snap photos of its architectural beauty but have little understanding of its true history. Indeed, during the peak tourism season in the summer, the tourists outnumber the Venetians of which only about 60,000 remain while the rest have moved to the mainland to escape the astronomical housing prices and tons of trash left behind by the daytrippers. Since the 1980s, tourism has become the main economic reason that Venice hasn’t completely sunk into the Adriatic. Thankfully, Madden’s book gives you a better appreciation of the city’s history.

In terms of criticisms of the book, there are no footnotes or endnotes and only a bibliography. This makes it very difficult for other historians or the detail-oriented reader to track down specific pieces of evidence. This is understandable because Madden’s book is very broad in focus and seems to be written for a more popular (read: casual) audience and not academics or professional historians. Another criticism is that the narrative is very pro-Venetian in a sense that Madden largely paints Venice and its people as the victim. For example, he seems to downplay the role that Venice had in the Fourth Crusade, and particularly in the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Finally, the majority of the book’s content is on Venice during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Once the narrative gets into the 19th Century and beyond, it seems to lose focus much in the way that Venice itself, lacking a maritime empire, struggled to redefine its raison d’etre.

While I still want to see the famous City of Canals on top of a lagoon in Italy, after speaking with some of my friends who have been there and reading this book, I am left with a somewhat melancholy impression. Much like some of my students who have no appreciation for history, Venice seems to be a city that has succumbed to the pressures of tourism and only maintain the pretty buildings in order to stay afloat. Still, there are historians and the historically-minded out there who find their way across the Piazza San Marco from the Doge’s Palace and into the Biblioteca Marciana to study the manuscripts and archives of Venice. Perhaps I will someday, too. show less

An excellent single volume history of Venice (not that I have any others to compare it to), it goes from the foundation of Venice by a bunch of refugees from Attila the Hun and the Fall of the Roman Empire to the hordes of cruise ships and tourists that descend on Venice today. In the course of the narrative it tells an amazing story I had never known about how the Venetian Republic lasted for roughly a millennium, essentially a continuation of the Roman Empire, up until it was dissolved by Napoleon Bonaparte. And he tells an interesting history that it exploits being at the intersection first of the Eastern and Western Roman empires, then of Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire and then of the Ottomans and Great Western European powers. show more Venice would alternate between various alliances, neutralities, and trading relationships. to prosper and expand without ever being absorbed into one of the sides. But then it ended up caught between Napoleon and the Hapsburgs--which it could not survive.

Madden also tells an interesting story about how as essentially a landless city-state Venice could never develop the same type of feudalism that dominated in much of Europe, so instead based its economy and society on merchants--which were inherently somewhat less stable and more changeable/meritocratic overtime (although one presumably would not want to overstate the point). But that the discovery of the New World, the improved navigation around the Cape of Africa, shifted the locus of trade to the Atlantic powers like Spain, England and France--and away from Venice's strategic trading position at the intersection of East and West.

The book also does a good job of covering everything from the crusades to the renaissance in Venice to Venice's role in the Grand Tour to literature about Venice. And it does it all in an enjoyable, readable way.

But the downside of the enjoyable, readable manner is a painful awareness of how it sometimes transforms the story into something overly crude, generalizing about the Venetian people and character (without drawing distinctions within Venice) and being overly defensive of Venice (it is invariably the barbarians/French/Turks/Napoleon or whoever else that is being tyrannical, inhumane and imperialistic while the Venetians are more justified and civilized in everything they do). But that is a minor flaw and it is hard to imagine a better comprehensive history of Venice. show less

A very readable history of the Republic of Venice, with many amusing anecdotes about the sailors, grave robbers, merchants, bankers, noblemen, crusaders and looters (and many people who belonged to several of these categories) that shaped the course of Venetian history.