Venice: A New History
Thomas F. Madden
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0147509807
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A spellbinding new portrait of one of the world’s most beloved cities
La Serenissima. Its breathtaking architecture, art, and opera ensure that Venice remains a perennially popular destination for tourists and armchair travelers alike. Yet most of the available books about this magical city are either facile travel guides or fusty academic tomes. In Venice, renowned historian Thomas F. Madden draws on new research to explore the city’s many astonishing achievements and to set 1,500 years of Venetian history and the endless Venetian-led Crusades in the context of the ever-shifting Eurasian world. Filled with compelling insights and famous figures, Venice is a monumental work of popular history that’s as opulent and entertaining as the great city itself.
The Politics of Left-Wing Violence in Italy, 1969–85
The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema
CRISIS OF IDENTITY: VENICE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 19. WAR, WATER, AND TOURISTS: VENICE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND FURTHER READING INDEX INTRODUCTION We will consider, attend to, and work for the honor and profit of the people of Venice in good faith and without fraud. —FROM THE DOGE OF VENICE’S OATH OF OFFICE, 1192 In the year 452 the world was ending. The Roman Empire, which for centuries had dispensed prosperity, power, and security to
Manuel did, however, send his own envoy, who held out hope for a negotiated settlement. On Chios the doge and his men listened to the optimistic words of the imperial messenger, who urged them to send another embassy to Constantinople. Of course, Manuel’s real game is clear enough. By dangling the possibility of peace before the doge, the emperor hoped to forestall further attacks on his territories while he prepared his own forces to meet the Venetians. The ruse worked. The doge sent a group of
used during the Feast of the Ascension. It was said that after Ziani’s naval victory against Otto, Alexander presented the doge with the ring, saying: Take this, O Ziani, which you and your successors will use each year to marry the sea, so that posterity knows that the lordship of the sea is yours, held by you as an ancient possession and by right of conquest, and that the sea was placed under your dominion, as a wife is to a husband. Thus was born one of the most unique and enduring
hold out against Attila and his powerful armies. According to the historian Jordanes, writing a century later, Attila launched his final attack when he noticed the storks that nested in the city picking up their young and flying away. Aquileia fell that day, and those citizens who could not escape were sold into slavery or put to the sword. The rest fled to the nearby island of Grado. Like Alaric before him, Attila was headed for Rome, but along the way the Scourge of God met the successor of St.
forces from following. Holed up in his palazzo, he surrendered only when Doge Gradenigo agreed to allow him to live in exile. As for the other leaders, Querini lay dead on the Piazza and Badoer would soon join him. After his confession under torture, Badoer was beheaded between the two columns of the Molo. The attempted coup shook Venice’s men of government, who feared another attempt, given the high emotions that still reigned in the city. Before the coup, the Great Council had ordered the
