
The Republic of Venice was a major naval, mercantile and colonial power which ruled over a marine empire for centuries throughout the medieval and early modern eras from the city of Venice in north-eastern Italy. Venice emerged as a minor power in the lagoons of the Veneto in the Early Middle Ages. Beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries its power began to increase based on its extensive trade, particularly with the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. Eventually it began to take direct control over extensive territory. Venice's Domini da Mar (‘Domains of the Sea’) would eventually include large parts of the coastal regions of Istria and Dalmatia in modern-day Croatia, the island of Corfu off the coast of north-western Greece and many Greek islands of the Aegean Sea, Cyprus and other Mediterranean ports, as well as the Veneto region of mainland Italy. The Venetian empire peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its activities led to the migration of large communities of Italian traders and settlers around the Eastern Mediterranean from Venice and the Veneto.[1]
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Republic of Venice chronology of events
The Republic of Venice was the most enduring of Italian city states. Its origins are understood to lie in the seventh century CE when groups of Italians who had preserved elements of Roman culture through the Early Middle Ages fled into the lagoons of the Veneto region in an effort to escape the invasions of northern Italy by the Lombards, a Germanic people who at that time conquered the Plain that is now named after them. Thereafter Venice gradually grew as a trading town on the small islands that make up the ancient city today, one which focused on developing an extensive trade with the Byzantine Empire and the other powers of the Eastern Mediterranean.[2]

A key episode in Venice’s history was the launching of the First Crusade to the Holy Land in 1095. Two centuries of holy war would follow in the Levant, Egypt and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, during the course of which the Venetians would benefit greatly from the wealth generated by supplying the Crusader ports like Acre and Jaffa from Italy and transporting reinforcements periodically to the Holy Land from Western and Central Europe. As this occurred, its merchants not only became wealthy. Venice also began to acquire a considerable maritime empire. In particular, the Venetians convinced their fellow Crusaders during the Fourth Crusade of 1204 to attack the Byzantine Empire instead of heading to the Levant. This led to the creation of the Latin Empire of Constantinople whereby the Byzantine Empire was effectively conquered by the Roman Catholic powers of Western Europe and held by powers like Venice for half a century between 1204 and 1261.[3]

As the primary instigators of the attack on their Greek Orthodox brethren in Constantinople, the Venetians benefited considerably by acquiring control of Adrianople near Constantinople, many of the Greek islands of the Aegean, some toeholds on the Peloponnese in Greece, the large island of Euboea to the east of Athens, Crete and the Ionian Islands such as Corfu and Cythera. Thought Byzantium would regain control over Adrianople when it resumed its independence in 1261, the Venetians retained control over many of the other lands going forward. They added new territories as well. A near continuous strip of land along the eastern end of the Adriatic Sea running from the Istria in the north along the Dalmatian coast through Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) south to Venetian Albania was added in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while Cyprus was also conquered 1489.[4]
By the time Cyprus was annexed in 1489, the Venetians were under attack all over the Eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered the Byzantines in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. As they expanded, the Ottomans acquired extensive territory from the Venetians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite paying to extensively fortify the city of Nicosia on Cyprus, the island fell to the Turks in 1571. Euboea had fallen in 1470. The Greek islands in the Aegean fell sporadically over the years. Still, Venice managed to retain control of numerous parts of its empire into the eighteenth century, most notably Corfu, Istria and the Dalmatian coast, while it also compensated for these other losses by acquiring new territory on the Italian mainland in the Veneto region. In the end, it was not until the conquest of much of northern Italy for the French Republic by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 during the French Revolutionary Wars that the Republic of Venice finally came to an end. Its remaining territories switched ruler several times before becoming a constituent part of the newly united Kingdom of Italy during the Risorgimento in the middle of the nineteenth century.[5]
Extent of Venetian colonial migration

While there is no doubting that the Venetian state’s expansion around the Eastern Mediterranean led to the creation of a maritime empire of sorts, this was not an empire based on settler colonialism in the same way that, for instance, Spain developed its empire in the Americas in the sixteenth century. Large numbers of Venetian colonists did not head out to establish towns of Venetians in places like Corfu, Cyprus or the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea. Instead the migration associated with the Republic of Venice would primarily have been in the shape of merchants and administrators forming trading communities in the Venetian colonies and other major places of Venetian interest such as Constantinople and Alexandria. Yet the scale of this is very hard to measure precisely, as it was occurring many hundreds of years ago in places and times for which accurate demographic records in the shape of censuses, immigration lists and the like are simply not available. The best that can be said is that tens of thousands of Venetians would have migrated to the republic’s colonies and main trading hubs between the seventh and eighteenth centuries, though the exact scale of this is impossible to precisely reconstruct today.[6]
Finally, the Veneto region of mainland Italy, centered on cities like Venice, Verona and Padua, had become intensely populated during the centuries of Venetian rule here, a process accelerated on account of the riches of the Republic of Venice and the dense urbanization which its mercantilism and proto-industrial activity fostered. What this meant was that when mass-migration from Italy began following unification in the early 1860s, the Veneto region was actually the epicenter of the Italian diaspora in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Nearly four million people migrated from the Veneto, Venezia and Friuli regions during the period between 1861 and 1914. Many of these headed not for New York, Boston or Buenos Aires, but instead to Eastern Europe, to places like Bulgaria, the Crimea and Ukraine in migration that was indicative of the longstanding ties of Venetians to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.[7]
Demographic impact of the Republic of Venice

The migration associated with the Republic of Venice’s long history would have been quite considerable. For instance, there was a substantial community of Venetian merchants in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine and then Ottoman empires, over many centuries. There was even a ‘Venetian quarter’ in the city. Some of the individuals who lived here would have married and raised families here and some of their children might have married locals, particularly during the Byzantine era prior to 1453. As such, a small number of inhabitants of Istanbul today will have an ancestor who was a Venetian merchant that arrived to the city centuries ago. Similar processes would have occurred in Corfu, Cyprus and other parts of the Domini da Mar. It is understood that a substantial proportion of Greek people today have some level of Italian heritage.[8]
Perhaps the most substantial impact would have been felt in the Istria and along the Dalmatian coastline south from the Veneto towards modern-day Slovenia and Croatia. This region lies geographically close enough to Venice itself that it was a center of more than just the settlement of mercantile communities, with land here being acquired be wealthy Venetian families as estates near to the republic itself. A sign of how Italianate the region became was that in the aftermath of the First World War, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was being dismantled, control of the region became a point of contention between the Kingdom of Italy and the emerging Yugoslav state. Hence Venetian migration was perhaps most tangible here.[9]
See also
Explore more about the Republic of Venice
- Researching Your Italian Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- From Venezia to Catania: The Basics of Italian Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Long Distance Italian Genealogy Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Italian Catholic Parish Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (London, 2012).
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/republic-of-venice-history/
- ↑ Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London, 2004).
- ↑ Lucian Pezzolo, ‘The Venetian Empire’, in Peter Fibiger Bang (ed.), The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume Two: The History of Empires (Oxford, 2021), pp. 621–647.
- ↑ Siriol Davies and Jack L. Davis, ‘Greeks, Venice and the Ottoman Empire’, in Hesperia Supplements, Vol. 40 (2007), pp. 25–31.
- ↑ Francisco Apellániz, ‘Venetian Trading Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean’, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Autumn, 2013), pp. 157–179.
- ↑ https://www.humaneuropecapital.com/societa/the-two-italian-diasporas.html
- ↑ Horatio F. Brown, ‘The Venetians and the Venetian Quarter in Constantinople’, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 40 (1920), pp. 68–88.
- ↑ Marina Cattaruzza, ‘The Making and Remaking of a Boundary: The Redrafting of the Eastern Border of Italy After the Two World Wars’, in Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2011), pp. 66–86.