Who ruled Venice?

Venice is built on more than a hundred small islands in a shallow lagoon at the head of the Adriatic Sea, in north-eastern Italy. The lagoon was a refuge before it was a city: mainland people fled to its mudbanks to escape invaders, and the water that protected them later carried their ships across the eastern Mediterranean. For roughly a thousand years Venice was the capital of an independent republic, and few states anywhere have lasted so long under a single form of government.

Under Roman rule the lagoon held only fishing and salt-working settlements, while the important towns, such as Aquileia, Padua and Altinum, stood on the mainland. Invasions in the 5th century CE, and above all the Lombard conquest of northern Italy from 568, drove many of their inhabitants onto the islands. The lagoon communities remained under the Byzantine Empire, and Venetian tradition places the election of the first doge in 697; the first doge historians can firmly document is Orso Ipato, in 726. When the Franks under Charlemagne's son Pepin attacked in 810, the Venetians withdrew to the islands around Rialto, which became the city's heart. In 828 merchants smuggled the relics of Saint Mark from Alexandria, giving the young state its patron and emblem. The map's Carolingian colouring for the 9th century is too strong: the Franks never held the lagoon.

Venice grew rich as the middleman between Byzantium and western Europe. A charter of 1082 gave its merchants privileged access to Byzantine markets, and the city profited from the Crusades as a shipper and supplier. In 1204 the aged Doge Enrico Dandolo steered the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, and its sack brought Venice Crete, ports in Greece and a share of the Byzantine capital. The Republic of Venice was run by a closed hereditary nobility after the reform of 1297, with the doge as an elected figurehead. It survived the Black Death, which killed perhaps half the population in 1348, and defeated its rival Genoa in the War of Chioggia (1378 to 1381). In the 15th century it conquered a mainland empire reaching from Friuli to near Milan, including Padua and Verona.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire slowly eroded Venice's sea empire. It lost Negroponte in 1470, Cyprus in 1571 (the year of the allied victory at Lepanto) and Crete in 1669 after a siege of more than twenty years. The opening of Atlantic and Cape routes to Asia shifted trade away from the Mediterranean. Even so, the city of the 16th century, with Titian, Tintoretto, Palladio and the busiest printing presses in Europe, was at its most splendid. In 1516 the authorities confined the Jewish population to a walled quarter called the Ghetto, a word that spread from Venice to the rest of the world. Plagues in 1576 and 1630 each killed between a quarter and a third of the inhabitants.

On 12 May 1797, under pressure from Napoleon, the Great Council voted the republic out of existence. Within months Venice was handed to Austria, passed to Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy after Austria's defeat in 1805, and returned to the Habsburg crown in 1815. Venetians rose in 1848 and held out as the Republic of San Marco until August 1849. The city joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 after Austria's defeat by Prussia, a step in the unification of Italy.

A railway bridge linked Venice to the mainland in 1846 and a road bridge followed in 1933, while industry moved to Mestre and Porto Marghera. The great flood of 4 November 1966 exposed the city's vulnerability, and the MOSE tidal barriers first went into operation in 2020. The historic centre, listed by UNESCO in 1987, now has fewer than 50,000 residents, a fraction of its 17th-century population, within a municipality of about 250,000.