Art. 5.-VENICE AND ENGLAND: AN HISTORICAL PARALLEL.

THOUGH history does not repeat itself and historical analogies will seldom bear too close a pressure, there is, nevertheless, some entertainment and possibly some profit in defining and analysing certain striking instances of parallelism, in tracing the apparent operation of similar causes producing similar effects. It may, therefore, be worth while to consider some points of resemblance and contrast between the ancient Republic of Venice and the kingdom of England in the earlier stages of its development. The points I shall endeavour to raise do not pretend to be exhaustive, nor would it be advisable to overstress them.

At the very outset there are two considerations which it is necessary to emphasise, if we are to keep due proportion and scale in dealing with this rather vague and discursive subject-matter. The first is a question of time: the Venetian Republic was born and lived its life long before England was heard of as a great power; indeed, the decline of the Republic and the rise of England are almost exactly contemporaneous, the date being, approximately, the middle of the 16th century; the second is a question of space, of scale: the Venetian Republic was chiefly concerned with the Mediterranean basin, the Levant and Eastern trade, was, in short, a medieval power; the rise and development of England, on the other hand, coincides with that wonderful expansion of the world brought about by those two great seaadventures—one longitudinal, the discovery and rounding of the Cape of Good Hope; the other latitudinal, Columbus' voyage to America. Bearing these two essential contrasts in mind, we may now proceed on our investigation.

In one of the very earliest school-books, a sort of mediæval 'Magnall's Questions,' drawn up by Alcuin, the Minister of Education-so to speak-of Charlemagne, which sought to impart knowledge by a process of question and answer, we find the following: 'Quid est What is the sea?' and then the amazing answer, Refugium in periculis,' A refuge in time of peril.' The paradox is true of Venice. Like so many other famous cities-Rome, Paris, London-Venice was,

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in origin, an asylum-city. It came into being as a refuge from the peril of ever-recurrent barbarian invasions of the mainland by the hordes of Alboin, Alaric, Totila, and Attila, who wasted the rich Roman cities of Aquileia, Concordia, and Padua. The inhabitants fled to the sea for refuge in their peril ; returning always, as the danger passed by, to their ruined homes. But after each wave of incursion they found less and less heart to rebuild their shattered hearths and rekindle their scattered fires; they ended by making the best of a bad job, finally settling, 'like a flock of water-fowl,' on the desolate mudbanks of the lagoon where at least they could find a 'refugium in periculis,' and on which they were destined to found one of the most remarkable and glorious cities of the world.

It is a noteworthy fact that the lagoons preserved the freedom of Venice all down history. Pipin, son of Charlemagne, failed to capture the city in the lagoon ; the Turk, though the smoke of his camp was visible from the tower of San Marco, never reached Rialto; after the first Caporetto, in 1809, the Austrians were unable to enter Venice; and after the second Caporetto, in the recent war, their army, though less than twelve miles away, never succeeded in crossing the lagoon. Any one who knows the lagoon will realise how difficult it would be for an enemy to capture Venice by force of arms if all the posts which mark the channels through that maze of mudbanks were removed.

The point of an asylum-city is, of course, inaccessibility in time of attack. But we can distinguish two types of inaccessible sites: the mound, or bill, or arx-type, like Athens, Corinth, Fiesole, Salzburg, Edinburgh, and the swamp-type, like Rome, London, Paris, and Venice. The mound or arx-type has this drawback, that it is equally and permanently inaccessible in time of war and in time of peace; it is as unfavourable to the merchant as it is to the soldier; whereas the swamp-type, which relies on water, not on steep declivity, presents a positive encouragement to commerce in times of peace, and, if we compare them for a moment, it is clear that the arx-type of asylum-city has seldom flourished commercially, and has usually produced a secondary city at its base, the Piræus, Florence, Leith; whereas the swamp-type has

given the world such splendid specimens of trading communities as Venice and London; for that is one of the most remarkable points of resemblance between the two states that both developed a great carrying trade and both became, at their respective dates, the emporium of world commerce.

But there is a further point of resemblance. Both Venice and England, each in its day, enjoyed the virtual monopoly of one primary necessity, salt in the case of Venice and coal in the case of England. As early as the sixth century, Cassiodorus, secretary to Theodoric the Great, remarks that mankind can live without gold, but it cannot live without salt; and he points out to the lagoon-dwellers that they had already established a virtual monopoly in this prime necessity by the development of their salt-pans, made easy for them by the conformation of the lagoons. So well aware of this natural advantage were the Venetians that the very first war waged by the Republic was against the neighbouring lagoon-township of Comacchio, which was endeavouring to establish rival salt-pans. Salt was an imperative necessity for the dwellers on the mainland of Italy, both for domestic and for agricultural purposes, and they had to come to Venice to get it; they did not come emptyhanded, but brought with them mainland produce, foodstuffs, silk, leather, wool, things which the lagoons could not furnish, and thus Venice gradually became an emporium and exchange mart. At a much later date, of course, coal played a similar part in the development of commercial England.

Until the discovery of the route round the Cape of Good Hope, Venice enjoyed a geographical position singularly favourable for the creation of a vast carrying-trade. She was the port furthest into the heart of Europe; the great water-avenue of the Adriatic, leading away southeast, to and from her doors, seemed to invite and even to necessitate the discharge of all the riches of the Orient -accumulated at Beiruth, Aleppo, Smyrna, at the Levant end of the Eastern caravan-routes--into Venetian warehouses, whence they were shipped westward in the socalled Flanders galleys, or sent by road over the Brenner to feed the markets of Central Europe, or up the Valley of the Po to the rich cities of Lombardy.

The Adriatic thus became essential to Venetian commerce, and Italian feeling about it to this day has its roots in, and is governed by, the subconscious recollection of that fact. It is hardly too much to say that Venetian history centres around the effort to make the Adriatic a mare clausum. The Republic officially called it the Gulf, il Golfo, our Gulf, and went to war to clear out the Liburnian pirates who lurked in the landlocked bays and creeks of the Illyrian coast-line, round Fiume and Zeng; it also went to war with the Normans when they threatened to close the mouth of the Adriatic by crossing from Apulia-then in their possession-to Durazzo on the eastern shore, in the twelfth century, during the Norman threat to Constantinople. In fact, the policy of the Republic towards the Adriatic was very similar to the policy of England towards the 'Narrow seas,' the Channel and the Straits of Dover, and for the same reason. The possession of Calais was supposed to be as essential for the security of free commercial access to London, as was supremacy in the Adriatic for the freedom of access to Venice.

Exploiting the advantages of its geographical position, Venice early became the great carrier of world-commerce, just as England did later on; and, like England, it developed a wide-spread over-seas Empire, based on and centred in a comparatively small core or nucleus. I do not think that in the case of Venice the flag followed the trade quite so markedly as it did in England; the Venetian war galleys preceded the Venetian merchant; but they were distinctly employed with a view to subsequent commerce, and therefore their chief object was to seize islands in the Levant and coastal towns such as Tyre, Jaffa, Sidon, where Venetian factories could be opened.

In the history of Venetian sea-power and carryingtrade we get the following steps: first the establishment of supremacy in the Adriatic by the suppression of the Liburnian pirates; then the ousting of the rival trading republics like Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi, at Constantinople; then the immense impulse given by the Crusades. The Crusaders found the City of Venice not only the great port nearest to the Holy Land but the supreme maritime power in the Levant. Then came the Fourth Crusade Vol. 241.-No. 478.

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in 1204, with the hard bargain driven by the Venetians, the siege and subjugation of Zara, the sack of Constantinople, the establishment of Venetian factories and Venetian Consuls in every isle and every port of the Levant, ready to shepherd the wealth of the Orient into the warehouses of Venice. And England was soon brought within the sweep of this commercial current. In order to distribute westward from Venetian warehouses the gold, spices, sugar, drugs, carpets, silks of the East, the sweet wines and currants of the Greek islands, the famous fleet of the so-called Flanders galleys was gradually developed by the Venetian State. The earliest record of a voyage to England is in 1317. The fleet sailed once a year and in convoy. It passed down the Adriatic, touching at Corfu, Otranto, Syracuse, Messina, Naples, Majorca, the Spanish and Portuguese harbours, and made for the Channel. The ships destined for England then parted company with the Sluys, Middelburg, Bruges, and Antwerp squadron, and put into Southampton, Sandwich, and London. At North Stoneham near Southampton the mausoleum belonging to the Guild of Venetian seamen may still be seen. London they had a guild-hall and factory of their own. On the return journey, the Netherlands and the English squadrons assembled at Sandwich, or Southampton, and sailed for Venice with their return cargoes, chiefly consisting of woollens, hides, lead, and tin.

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The English Government was willing enough to foster Eastern trade by means of the Flanders galleys, but quarrels between individual Venetians and Englishmen soon occurred. As early as 1319—that is, only two years after the first voyage-a Venetian supercargo who had sold his sugar in London and was going to Boston for wool was attacked and killed by English sailors off the Wash. In 1488 Malipiero, Captain of the galleys, complains that he had been assaulted with the loss of two of his crew, by three English ships whose captains claimed the salute. The Bishop of Winchester was sent to inquire into the affair, and seems to have been able to settle it over a bottle of wine. Henry VII, however, took sterner measures, and hanged-in sight of the Venetian fleet at Southampton-some footpads who had murdered and robbed a Venetian merchant. In 1506 the same sovereign