Page 19 - 1

'Crisis', ‘decline’ and 'fall' of the Serenissima: remembering Venice as... 545

tion of the city in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills as
«Ocean’s child, and then his Queen;/Now has come a darker day/And
thou must soon be his prey» was perhaps the most doom-laden de-
scription ; Byron’s judgement in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
7
is the most famous . Most savage of all was Thomas Moore (1779-
8
1852) in his Rhymes on the Road: «Mourn not for VENICE; though her
fall/Be awful, as if Ocean’s wave/Swept o’er her, she deserves it
all/And Justice triumphs o’er her grave» .
9

2. Anglophone historiography and the decline and fall of Venice

British views of Venice in the decade immediately after the fall of
Napoleon was one of a once-great city, grown corrupt and decadent, a
deserving prey for Bonaparte’s armies. If its old glories were mourned
by poets, even seen as a warning to Britain of the fallibility of a mer-
cantile and maritime, oligarchic and imperial commonwealth, then
British commentators after 1797 saw the collapse of the Republic as
essentially the fault of the Venetians themselves. The Whig historian
Henry Hallam (1777-1859) summarised this position in his View of the
state of Europe during the Middle Ages, first published in 1818. Hallam
believed the Venetian Republic was simply a corrupted hangover from
the Middle Ages: while there was no doubt that the Serenissima was
the victim of the Napoleonic treachery, the Venetians had only them-
selves to blame for their loss of independence:

[…] too blind to avert danger, too cowardly to withstand it, the most ancient
government of Europe made not an instant’s resistance; the peasants of the
Underwald died upon their mountains; the nobles of Venice clung only to their
lives 10 .

date of composition, see A.G. Hill, On the date and significance of Wordsworth’s sonnet
‘On the extinction of the Venetian Republic’, «The Review of English Studies«, vol. 30,
issue120 (1979), pp. 441-445.
7 K. Everest and G. Matthews, The poems of Shelley, vol. II, Routledge, Abindgon,
2014, p. 183.
8 G. Byron, The works of Lord Byron, vol. II, John Murray, London, 1821, pp. 87-9.
9 T. Brown, Rhymes on the road, fables, etc, Galignani, Paris, 1823, p. 17. On Moore’s
publishing under the nom de plume of Thomas Brown, see J. Moody, Thomas Brown
(alias Thomas Moore), censorship and Regency cryptography, «European Romantic Re-
view», vol. 18, issue 2 (2007), pp. 187-94.
10 H. Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2 nd edn, 3 vols,
John Murray, London, 1821, vol. I, p. 485.

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)