Greed, Gold, Gore, and Glory
Written: Jul 27 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Spare, elegant narrative history
Cons: An overview of such proportions necessarily skimps the occasional detail
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: John Julius Norwich - A History of Venice |
To paraphrase the old crack about the Holy Roman Empire, the Most Serene Republic of Venice was neither serene nor a republic. Just how it got that way is Lord Norwich's theme.
John Julius, second earl of Norwich, is the son of Churchill's old comrade in arms, Duff Cooper, and of course of one of the great wits and beauties of her day, Lady Diana Cooper, neι Manners, daughter of the duke of Rutland.
In other words, his lordship grew up with every advantage, educationally and otherwise, in an atmosphere of high politics, high fashion, and high society. Being a clever lad with a talent for writing history, he became, instead of a Drones Club member, an historian of the more rarified sort. Norwich's own background, in other words, makes him eminently suited to chronicle the Normans in Sicily, the Byzantine Empire, and that cuckoo in the Byzantine nest, the Venetian oligarchy.
The story he has to tell stretches from the fall of the Western Empire to the rise of Bonaparte; and it is not, really, a pleasant one. His father's great chief, Winston, once said that the rich are the glittering scum on the deep river of production; and the Venetians were rich, glittering, and ... well, not the nicest people in the world, let's face it.
This is one of my three (don't ask) entries in my pal caconti's 27 July Venice Write-Off. Chris and I do these every Thursday (except he's taking August off, the wimp); on special occasions (such as the Fave Authors Write-Off back on my birthday, and now Conti's farewell at gunpoint, I imagine to his summer in Venezia), we are fortunate enough to be joined by others. Please use the Books Category Members Write-Off page, or their respective member pages, to access the contributions of caconti, ed_grover, erik_kosberg, frazzledspice, lovdbygod7, penguinlady, and vollman and possibly others who like myself are not yet linked.
For all the long period of Italian fragmentation, the days of condottiere and city-state, Venice was a sort of capitalist Sparta, and capitalist in the old, robber-baron sense at that. Perpetually at war with one or another trade rival, inevitably conspiring against friend and foe alike, never missing a chance to stab Genoa, Byzantium, or the Papal States in the back, run with a lightly gloved iron fist and relying on remarkably modern tactics of terror, espionage, and totalitarian oligarchy, Venice had little time to contribute, and still less interest in contributing to, the culture of the Western world.
Titian and Tiepolo notwithstanding, Norwich's history necessarily dwells mostly on trade, treachery, and terror.
He does it well. He is not a Low Prot, Whig historian with an animus against his subject, though he has an admitted fondness for Byzantium over Venice. On the whole, in fact, his work here is superior to his Byzantine works, precisely because his sympathies are not so engaged. It is nearly as good as his first work, on the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which remains (as so many writers' first books do remain) his best to date.
And that of course means it is very good indeed. His lordship brings to play upon the subject an evident special insight into the power politics that were, after all, the very atmosphere of Venice in her glory. He neither exaggerates nor burks the fact that grabbing and getting and goldbugging was always more important than glory or God to its ruling class. And he writes with a strong sense of pace, balance, spare elegance, and the useful epigram: his pen portraits of such figures as Marco Polo and the appalling Old Blind Doge Dandolo, who managed to turn the Crusade to save Christendom into the Sack of Byzantium, are unsurpassed.
I cannot recommend this work highly enough for those who would know more of Venice than its present sleepy role as a romantic backdrop and tourist trap.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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