6 - Renovatio as Commemoration: Civic Loyalty and the Latin Empire of Constantinople in Venetian Historiography

Summary

We have just been looking at the difficulty of discerning truth and the problem that this poses for the location of renewal in the West, and have seen that the journey to Constantinople may provide a potential solution to this problem. Here we look at how venetian historiography commemorated recent events concerning venice, and especially its relationship with Byzantium. The texts' celebration of civic loyalty as a model for imitation contributes to their elaboration of the theme of Western renewal.

The association between venice and Byzantium stretches back for centuries before the thirteenth, when the earliest text with which I will be dealing was produced. Originally a Byzantine province, and then under Byzantine jurisdiction, in the tenth century venice rose to be an independent sovereign state that continued to maintain close ties with the Byzantine empire. Over the years between 992 and 1198 venice obtained from Byzantium a number of trading privileges, in the form of chrysobulls or imperial diplomas acting as commercial treaties, which regulated trade and the traffic of Venetian merchant ships. In 1082 the venetians gained their own quarter in Constantinople, and established a permanent colony of traders there, with certain buildings, a church and three landing stages officially designated as Venetian property. The doge received the hereditary title of protosebastos with an attached pension. Other italian city-republics, including Genoa, entered into trading agreements with Byzantium in the course of the twelfth century.