Venice Stares Down the Barrel of its Past
In the end, everything that was interesting enough turns into a tourist attraction. In rare cases, an entire city will be given over to the tourism industry. However, it takes remarkable, exceptional circumstances for a city that possessed the sheer power and longevity of Venice to transform into the travelers’ playground we know today. It’s not to say that Venice is the only city that gets choked with tourists, much less the only such city in Italy. However, cities like Rome or Florence still have lots of hustle and bustle, lasting characters, and sizable populations that still need to go to work, or the store, or the gym. In other cities with huge amounts of visitors, such as New York or Paris, it’s really the locals that make the city. This is decidedly not the case in Venice, but it’s hard to argue that this isn’t an appropriate conclusion for the city.
Almost everything that made Venice noteworthy, and perhaps the greatest maritime city in history, have also combined to make it a perfect tourist trap. Ironically, many of the economic forces that drive the continuing extraction of Venice’s soul were pioneered by Venice itself. The real question is: would Venetians of the past be ashamed to see the state of the city today, or would they be proud that the city is continuing its 1500 year-old legacy of raking in money no matter the cost?
To be clear, when referring to “Venice”, I refer to the islands we all picture. Mestre, the mainland, still does have plenty of locals and isn’t flooded with tourists. There are locals in Venice, just not very many of them. The place isn’t meant for them anymore and their numbers continue to dwindle. You see the occasional complaint about tourism and loss of character from full-time residents of Venice, but it comes off like they know it’s a lost cause. Countless publications make the same “Venice is dying” article annually, in which quotes from locals describe the old populace and community as a relic of the past. Everything about Venice is a relic of the past, and the future is uncertain. Today, anyone who moves to the islands full-time knows what they’re signing up for. That’s why not many people do. The main island’s population dropped below 50,000 last year. In the 1950s, it was 175,000.
And in centuries before, Venice ruled the seas.
Venice was never an expansive territorial empire. What made the Venetians the masters of the Mediterranean for so long was their centuries-before-its-time understanding of soft power. Soft power is the ability to gain influence through non-coercive, non-military means. Venice understood it couldn’t be the Roman Empire. What it could be, if it played its cards right, was the economic center of Europe. Venice was the first example of a state that consciously and effectively applied the economic power it held.
Venice’s strategy wasn’t to conquer powerful areas, it was to be their market, their supplier, and their banker. The city’s ships sailed far and wide, bringing goods to cities that people had never seen before, and eventually, couldn’t imagine living without. Its trade routes were unrivaled, its merchants were embedded in every relevant market in the Mediterranean, and its diplomats’ words could strike fear into the most powerful of kings. The unsaid message was clear: move against Venice and you will suffer. Your city may not get sacked, but you may lose everything else. Venice could ruin an enemy’s trade, economy, and finances in days.
Or, if Venice feels like it, maybe your city will get sacked. The only way to keep your soft power is to back it up with hard power. A trading empire needs warships to protect, expand, and enforce its dominion. Venice’s warships protected their trade routes, called in debts, and crushed countless rivals. Yet, what made the Venetians so incredible was how much they didn’t use them. The implicit threat was typically enough. When they had to, they went toe-to-toe with powerhouses like the Byzantines, the Ottomans, and their eternal rival the Genoans. They won more often than not. Even when they lost, they still carried on. The Venetians took losses that would have ended less adept nations. Still, they always managed to come out of them having given up reasonable concessions, their trade routes and monopolies largely in place. Even their enemies understood that there were far more riches to be gained by trading with Venice than by warring with it.
As the centuries have passed, geopolitical power has largely shifted to being soft. We don’t fight frequent wars to determine global or regional hegemony anymore. The US is the most powerful country on Earth almost entirely through soft power. In Venice’s heyday, this was unheard of. Venice pioneered having hegemony through soft instead of hard power, and no one knew how to react to it. Suddenly, empires had to be economic instead of just territorial. It became a different world from that point on.
The Venetians didn’t invent soft power, what set them apart was the skill with which they wielded it. China, for example, had and still has tons of soft power. However, China was the most populous place on earth, massive in territory, had fantastic geography, and had a sizable amount of extremely fertile land. Venice had to walk a much, much thinner line. The only thing Venice had going for it originally was a good location. The city is a group of islands, and for a while it didn’t have a reliable source of freshwater. The Venetians had to entirely create their own destiny. They had to build their own economy and make others participate in it. To become the massive force they were, they had to take with both hands. And that they did.
The more common, less pretentious characterization of the Venetians in historical memory is as ruthless capitalists. I struggle to call what the Venetians engaged in capitalism, but they certainly set the foundations for it. The Venetians were hustlers to an extent never seen before and arguably since. The Venetians woke up, traded, and then went to bed thinking about trading. They were absolutely everywhere, and they made their city the market for everyone else. They established their city as the financial and banking capital of Europe. They loved free trade as long as it went through them. Above all, they would do anything to make a quick buck, which is where we get into the moral qualms of the capitalism they helped to create.
The Venetians did not hesitate to trade slaves, create monopolies, or utterly eliminate economic rivals, whatever the cost. Venice would take over sections of cities to house its merchants, and those cities’ rulers would rarely raise their voice. Venice would blow other merchants’ ships out of the water. Venice destroyed the Parthenon. Venice sacked the greatest and most revered city in the world in 1204 because they couldn’t pay a debt on time. Venice was extractive and tyrannical in the territories it conquered. Venice employed methods that would make turn-of-the-century robber barons blush. Yet without Venice, the world would be unrecognizable. We would have nowhere near the access we have today to goods and products from around the world. Our banking and financial systems would be less developed. You could argue our standard of living would be far lower. However, without Venice’s precedent, the Dutch probably don’t slaughter thousands to control the spice trade. The British might not have looted India. Maybe we don’t see as many trade wars, or sharecroppers, or massacres of striking workers. I’m not here to argue the merits or drawbacks of capitalism. Whether it’s your angel or your devil, Venice raised it until it was mature enough to leave home.
To us today Venice’s brand of proto-capitalism seems soulless and harsh, but in many ways we live in it. Venice lives in it too. Venice fell to Napoleon in 1797 and forever lost its independence. Though now a part of Italy, it’s hard to call Venice Italian territory. It has irreversibly been conquered by tourists. Despite holding none of the traditional power it once had, Venice retains many of its hallmarks under the new tourist regime. Once a center for the richest Europeans to shop for dyes, spices, and silks, Venice remains one of the primary shopping centers on earth for the elite. One can imagine Bulgari, Gucci, Prada, all the interchangeable luxury stores that line the streets, as stalls that merchants from around the world hawked their trade in just a short half a millennium ago. Now, Venice is even open to the masses, who pour into St. Mark’s square to see the sites, pay entrance fees, and buy souvenirs. It is masterfully curated. Enough of the city’s former glory and history shines through to truly entrance someone. Painting after painting that the Venetians accrued through their enormous riches cover every wall of the Doge’s Palace. Constantinople’s horses remain in St. Mark’s cathedral. The entire city is a historian’s dream. Even with its soul gone, Venice can take your breath away. It continues to be a money-making machine, accruing wealth beyond what we can fathom.
Only now, it isn’t the Genoese, or Dalmatian cities, or Crimean slaves that suffer for Venice’s gold. It’s Venice’s own residents.
The chickens have come home to roost. There isn’t a ton to explain about why Venice’s residents are leaving. The crowds choke the streets, the commodities are expensive, and services for locals are rapidly disappearing. The merchant ships that sailed into Venice’s harbor from all over the world have been replaced by cruise ships. These massive vessels have drawn the particular ire of the city’s residents; hordes of tourists spill out of them like a plundering army, and Venetians are used to being the ones who ransacked others. Would it improve Venetians’ lives, help the environment, and stem the tide of people leaving if Venice limited tourism? Yes. Would Venice make less money if they did that? Yes. What do you think Venice picked? The city’s way of doing things, established more than a thousand years ago, lives on. Venice has removed its own people with the same ruthless, surgical precision as it used to strangle cities in the Mediterranean that dared to trade with Genoa.
As if that isn’t metaphorical enough, Venice is also sinking. The very seas Venice mastered are threatening to destroy it. This has been an issue for a while, but rising sea levels made the threat existential. The city floods often and each year seems to be worse than the last. The future for Venice doesn’t look pretty. It may prove to be a major casualty of climate change. Climate change has been caused by the very attitude that the Venetians pioneered, to make money no matter the consequences. However, again, the consequences used to not be the Venetians’ responsibility. Now, the Venetians bear the consequences of others’ actions. If Venice sinks beneath the waves, it would be the last step in being destroyed by their own creation. Tourism took Venice’s soul, and now the rising sea may take its body. Either way, it’s much, much too late to hold a funeral. Venice ceased to belong to the Venetians years ago.
If you took a doge (ruler) of Venice from its height and told him what he was creating, detailing how it would lead to his city’s destruction and its residents’ flight, would he have sacrificed some of his gold to prevent future Venetians’ suffering?
I think we all know the answer.
