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'Crisis', ‘decline’ and 'fall' of the Serenissima: remembering Venice as... 553

Questa mia Storia civile e politica del commercio de’ Veneziani egli è molto
tempo dacchè l’ho ideata, necessario quasi vedendo, e per istruzione, e per
nazionale decoro, che vi fosse almeno un saggio storico del nostro commercio.
E riuscir doveva ben sorprendente [sic] sì a’ nostri che a forestieri, che una
nazione, qual altra Fenicia o Cartagìnese, nata col commercio, da quello nu-
trita, accresciuta, ed ingrandita, e sempre ragguardevole mantenuta per quasi
quattordici secoli, d’esso non avesse una qualche estesa e regolata memoria 42 .

Marin, as with all the authors I discuss here, continued to see Ven-
ice as a nation, even after Campoformido. For Marin it was a nation
born of trade, nourished by trade, and that expanded as an imperial
power because of trade. But all eight of Marin’s volumes were pub-
lished when Venice had no chance of regaining its past status as an
imperial capital or its commerce. His work, however, is more than a
melancholic valediction. It is also an attempt to understand how Ven-
ice, after so glorious and prosperous a past, could have fallen from
great estate.
Like Tentori, Marin saw the collapse of Venice principally as a fail-
ure of will power and want of virtue. The key problem was that the
strength of the Ottomans meant that the Republic feared them to such
a degree that it avoided involvement in continental conflict: the signif-
icance of losing Cyprus, Crete, and ultimately Morea, was to reinforce
Venetian determination to adopt a neutral position towards the major
European powers. It was the Mediterranean identity, the desire to
hang on to the remnants of Mediterranean power that drove Venice’s
neutrality. Marin argued that it was the very success of this policy that
lay – paradoxically – at the root of internal political problem . Without
43
international conflict, the Republic’s political and administrative clas-
ses turned upon one another:

[…] dietro alle mormorazioni si riducevano ad aperta guerra; nella quale non
si adoperavano armi di fuoco, da punta, da raglio, od altra arma micidiale; ma
adoperandosi in essa i voti negativi nella dispensa degli onori, degli uffizj, si
veniva a togliere a più d’uno la vita civile 44 .

Meanwhile, Venetians lost any sort of martial spirit. Marin re-
counted, for example, how in 1740 the British had offered «di pagar a
sue spese le truppe della Repubblica» in exchange for a military alli-
ance; the Senate had rejected such overtures:

42 C. A. Marin, Storia civile e politica del commercio de’ Veneziani cit. vol. I, p.III.
43 Ibidem.
44 Ibidem.

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