Alexandria, Egypt: 828 AD
The Sassanid Persians had little use for the rich cultural history of Alexandria, which was founded by Alexander the Great and was his burial place. They obliterated what remained of its famous library shortly after conquering the city in 642 AD. As adherents of the rapidly spreading religion of Islam, they had an equal contempt for Alexandria’s Christian tradition, inaugurated by Mark the Evangelist, who was martyred there in the first century. As far as the Persians were concerned, Alexandria was an asset to be milked for resources that would fuel additional conquests.
One day in January 828, the customs officials paid little attention to the two Venetian merchants asking permission to load a large basket onto their galley and sail out of Alexandria’s spectacular natural harbor. The merchants stank and whatever they were carrying smelled even worse. When they uncovered the basket to reveal layers of rotting pork, the Muslim officials drew back in disgust, murmuring “Kanzir, kanzir,” their term for the unholy meat. They were not about to contaminate themselves over these infidels.
The Venetians heaved a sigh of relief as their trireme set sail north into the Mediterranean. Stowed in the barrel under the layers of pork was a religious treasure beyond price.
The veneration of relics – physical remains of Christ, his followers and the many faithful who were martyred under Roman persecution – dated to the time of Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena. She had traveled to the Holy Land and, according to legend, discovered there the True Cross and the veil that Saint Veronica used to wipe the Savior’s face while he was carrying the cross to Gethsemane (both of which are still preserved at St. Peter’s Basilica). Pilgrims by the millions braved arduous travel in the dangerous conditions of early medieval Europe to visit holy relics in Rome. Indeed, as the city was drained of political power and shrank to little more than a village, tourism became its main industry.
While Rome and Constantinople abounded in sacred relics, Venice had almost none. The city had been founded well after the time of the early Christian martyrs, and the first settlers had more pressing things to worry about. But the situation was changing by the ninth century; what had started as a refugee encampment was growing in stature and significance. Previously busy ports, notably the one at Ravenna (which had briefly replaced Rome as the capital of the beleaguered Western Roman Empire), silted up and became unusable. Venice was the obvious alternative, and so it prospered.
The city caught the attention of both Charlemagne, who was reviving a Western “Roman” empire at the beginning of the ninth century, and the emperor Nicephorus I in Constantinople, who considered himself the sole legitimate heir to any territories of the old Roman Empire. In the course of their wrangling, diplomatic and otherwise, Venice was not devastated by either imperial army as had seemed likely. Instead, a treaty between Charlemagne and Nicephorus in 811 established the independence of the Venetian territories between the Western and Eastern powers, a unique status that shaped its identity from that time on. For centuries, the “Holy Roman Emperor” in the West would coexist uneasily with the Byzantine emperor in the East, sparring over everything from religious dogma to dominion over old Roman imperial lands. Meanwhile, Venice was able to develop as an autonomous polity with ties to both East and West.
When Agnello Participazio was elected doge in 811 after valiantly defending Venice from a siege by Charlemagne’s son Pepin, he found both an opportunity and a challenge. The city was becoming a significant power, but one that was limited by its physical plant – a series of small, scraggly islands that flooded regularly and had no level surface on which to build large structures. Fortunately, Participazio was a man of vision who had the trained engineers on staff to carry out his plans. Wood was plentiful on the mainland, and a program was devised to harvest trees and drive the trunks into the soft subsoil of the lagoon so close together that their level tops made a solid surface. Slowly, thousands and then millions of tree trunks were driven into the lagoon, and Venice took form.
Map of Venice, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572.
If the terrain was a handicap, Venice’s situation as a nexus between East and West was a great advantage, and the Venetians capitalized on it in trade agreements not only with Constantinople but also with Damascus and Alexandria. Venetians had to be excellent sailors to survive, so merchant vessels quickly multiplied and fanned out across the Mediterranean Sea. Goods of all sorts began to flow through the city – first salt and fish, then textiles and dyes, and finally spices, arms and slaves. Muslims from the East and Russian heathens from the north were packed into ships and brought to market on the Rialto; Christians were technically off-limits. Advances in galley design resulted in ships that could sail year-round, not just in the summer, and the volume of trade increased accordingly.
The Venetians who sailed out of Alexandria with their precious basket filled with human remains were under the orders of Agnello Participazio’s son Giustiniano, who had forcibly ousted his father, then his brother, to become the doge himself in 827. As ambitious as he was ruthless, Giustiniano was determined to make Venice into the dominant city in Italy – in short, the new Rome.
Rome was not then in much of a position to contest the rise of Venice. The Eternal City, repeatedly sacked by invading tribes, was almost derelict. But as the seat of the pope, Saint Peter’s heir, Rome was still the center of Western Christendom. In this respect at least, Venice was a very poor cousin. Agnello Participazio had made a start in elevating the city’s religious profile by renovating the old convent of San Zaccaria, and in honor of this project the Byzantine emperor Leo V had sent relics – some said the whole body – of Saint Zacharias to Venice from Constantinople.55
Saint Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, was martyred during the Massacre of the Innocents when he refused to reveal the hiding place of his young son. His remains are also rumored to be in Istanbul, Jerusalem and Azerbaijan.
Giustiniano set his sights higher. According to local legend, the Evangelist Mark, after serving Peter in Rome, had come to establish the church in Aquileia. During this period he translated his Gospel from Hebrew into Greek, and it was widely distributed – marking the first time the story of Jesus was available in what was the international language of the time. In the course of his travels, Mark paused at the uninhabited islands that would one day become Venice. There he had a dream that an angel appeared to him and said, “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista meus. Hic requiescat corpus tuum.” (Peace be with you, Mark, my Evangelist. Your body will rest here.)66
Andrea Dandolo, Chronica per extensum descripta, cited in John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (Knopf, 1982), 28.
This experience does not seem to have encouraged the Evangelist to linger. He went on to Rome, and then to Alexandria, where he was martyred and interred for some centuries. But the legend persisted connecting Saint Mark with Venice – or at least with the general region – and the plot was hatched to bring his physical remains back from Alexandria.
Giustiniano was delighted when the galley returned with its precious cargo intact. During the voyage, the very presence of the relics had reportedly healed one sailor from demonic possession and brought joy to all the faithful on board. The ship pulled up to the new quay that had been built at the head of the canal that was becoming the main waterway through Venice. Here, Giustiniano had been modifying the palace that accommodated the doges and the increasingly complex functions of Venetian governance. Behind the palace was an open plot of ground, a pretty if marshy space with a few fruit trees. What solid ground existed there was being supplemented by ever more tree trunks hammered into the mud of the lagoon. As Giustiniano pondered where to house the body of the Evangelist, he considered the older shrines on the outlying islands – Torcello, Castello, and Murano. But more and more of Venice’s activity was taking place on the new ground. He would build a home for the relics there, right by the Doge’s Palace.
Giustiniano had visited Constantinople five hundred years after Constantine’s transformation of the city and had seen the great Orthodox churches: Hagia Sophia as well as the Apostoleion (Church of the Holy Apostles).77