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Summary: A Pageant of the Thousand-Year Republic
Review: Quick, name one famous leader or military hero associated with the thousand-year history of the Republic of Venice. (Sorry: writers and painters don't count.) Now imagine that you are writing a 600+ page history of Venice. How do you make it a page-turner without recourse to biography? Can it be done?It seems that John Julius Norwich has done it, and with flying colors. I had originally planned to read the history in small driblets, a chapter at a time to keep my interest from flagging. I was delighted to find that my interest was engaged from the very first and remained so until Napoleon Bonaparte demonstrated to the world during his Italian campaign that the Republic could be had. Before the young emperor-to-be doused the lights, Venice had had a glorious run. Here was a country that began as a naval and mercantile power. Turning its back on the Italian mainland, Venice looked to the east. Its merchants spread out through the Eastern Mediterranean and as far as the Black Sea -- and sometimes, as in the case of Marco Polo -- much farther. While mainland Italy was mired in an endless struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Venice strived to live at peace with its neighbors. For several hundred years, it even lived at peace with the Turk -- to the extent of scuttling a Crusade or two when it felt its interests were better served elsewhere. Only when the resurgent Ottomans under Mehmet II and his descendants became an effective sea power in the 15th century did Venice have to look across its moat to the Italian mainland. When the Turk cut off its colonies in the East, Venice engaged in a brief career of conquest in Northern Italy with mixed results. Much more successful was its strength at diplomacy, for which it became famous. Curiously, reading this book puts the confusing history of Italy as a whole into sharper perspective if only because seen from a stable point of view. While the papacy and the city states were pulled apart or compacted like silly putty, based on the personalities and issues du jour, Venice stood serenely above the fray. What it lost on the battlefield, it won by sharp dealing. It seemed invincible ... until Napoleon entered the scene. Norwich shows us all the pomp and pageantry, the masks and mummery, the octogenarian Doges and the Councils of 10, the Zontas, and all the intricate paraphernalia of Venetian governance. Instead of palling, the book could have gone on for another 600 pages before I ceased to be mesmerized. This is a great book, and Norwich is a great historian.
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Summary: Lively account of the history of this Mediterranean jewel
Review: Readers of Lord Norwich's Byzantium will appreciate this look at the history of Venice, and at the events and personalities which contributed to creating this jewel of the Mediterranean. Norwich navigates successfully through his detailed treatment of frequently repetitious events such as Venice's senseless struggle with Genoa for supremacy with his usual humour and knack for lively detail. Like his history of Byzantium, with its recurring theme of usurping emperors' physical mutilation of predecessors, this history too has a recurring theme: the attempt by the Venetian oligarchy, through a complex electoral process, to limit the power of the Doge by perpetuating a gerontocracy whose selection alternates among several prominent families. Readers of Byzantium should know that the chapter on the Fourth Crusade was recycled nearly verbatim from the present work, but this fact does not diminish the integrity of either volume
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Summary: The best--also the only--comprehensive history of Venice
Review: The book, exceptionally well-written as histories go, provides a wonderful introduction to a subject that is woefully neglected. It is one in onlyu a handful of popular histories on Venice that I was able to find after I visited that city and came away wondering how such a magnificent city and seat of the world's first democratic republic managed to escape the notice of Western historians. The book does not answer how but it fills the gap beautifully.
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Summary: Exceptional.
Review: The tale of the Most Serene Republic is itself a tale of the exceptional. To do justice to the richness of Venetian history, to more than a thousand years of representative government, requires a special talent. Blending a scholarly grasp of primary sources with a writer's sense of narrative, Lord Norwich succeeds in distilling a draught that goes down easily, yet enlivens, informs and leaves one wanting more.
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Summary: An incredible book!
Review: This amazing book is a MUST for anyone who is traveling to Venice. The author does more to give you a sense of who the Venitians are, and why the are the way they are, than you could ever get anywhere else, even if you lived there. Norwich does a masterful job of placing Venice's history in the context of all of Europe and the Middle East surrounding it. American will find the decidely British form of writing a bit much at first. But once you've gotten into the swing of it, you'll be swept up in the mastery of the story-telling and the majesty of Venice.
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Summary: a particularly dull read
Review: this history of a most fascinating city-state is chock a block with information, but is just not well-written.norwich is a good student of history, but a dull writer. unfortunately it remains the most commonly available comprehensive history of venice in english.
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Summary: Venice in black and white
Review: This is a dull read - one doge, pope and sea battle after another. It's missing the life and romance of one of the world's most beautiful and unique places. Very little content about music, art, or the daily life of the averge citizen. I give it thumbs up for covering the span of history from swamp land to Napoleon. But Ruskin's Stones of Venice would be more interesting for the traveler.
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Summary: A Tedious History
Review: This is a tedious, plodding, Doge by Doge history of Venice, with barely a mention of how it came to be created by it's merchants, bankers, traders, craftsmen et.al. The glory of Venice derives from it's business men (yes!) who eventually created an astonishing city to live and work in. They also created a method of government to keep it that way. Norwich emphasizes political history at the expense of cultural, economic, intellectual and social history. It's a dull book that stops in 1807 - as if Venice ever stopped.
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