Pietro II Orseolo
Pietro II Orseolo was the doge under whom Venice stopped being a lagoon town that paid off pirates and became a sea power: in eighteen years he got the Golden Bull of 992 from Basil II that cut Venetian customs duties in Constantinople to a fraction of anyone else's, sailed in the year 1000 with a fleet down the Dalmatian coast and took the submission of its towns from Zara to Ragusa, put down the Narentine pirates who had taken tribute from the lagoon for a century, and added Duke of Dalmatia to the doge's title; the ceremony of the marriage of the sea on Ascension Day is the memory of that voyage. He was the son of the doge Pietro I Orseolo, who had abdicated in 978 to become a hermit in the Pyrenees and was made a saint, and he was elected in 991 at thirty after a decade in which two families had fought over the dogeship in the streets. His first act was to send to both emperors at once. Basil II and Constantine VIII gave him the chrysobull of March 992 that fixed the Venetians' duty at two solidi a ship in return for carrying Byzantine troops to Italy, and Otto III confirmed the old privileges in the West and stood godfather to a son. Otto came secretly to Venice in 1001, the only Western emperor to visit the city before the nineteenth century, and the two planned the marriage of Pietro's son to a Byzantine princess, which happened in 1004. The Dalmatian expedition of 1000 left on Ascension Day and was a progress rather than a war: Zara, Trogir, Split and the islands swore to the doge, Curzola and Lagosta had to be stormed, and the Narentines gave up their tribute. In 1002 he relieved Bari from a Saracen siege with the Venetian fleet, the first time it fought in the open sea beyond the Adriatic. He rebuilt the ducal palace and the islands' defences. The plague of 1005 or 1006 killed the son who had married the Byzantine bride, and the doge, John Deacon says, never recovered; he died in 1009 and another son, Otto, named for his godfather, succeeded. The chronicler John the Deacon, who was his chaplain and his ambassador to Otto III, wrote the first history of Venice around his reign.
- Lived: 961 CE – 1009 CE
- Nationality: Venetian
- Roles: doge, ruler
