Republic of Venice

A city built on mud in a lagoon that governed a maritime empire for a thousand years and was never once sacked. Refugees from mainland Italy settled the lagoon during the Lombard invasions, and the impossibility of farming it forced Venice into trade and shipbuilding from the start. It grew as a Byzantine dependency, then as the carrier of the eastern trade in spices, silk and slaves, and in 1204 it diverted the Fourth Crusade into sacking Constantinople and took the harbours and islands it wanted from the wreckage. The republic was governed by an elected doge constrained by councils, with a selection procedure of such deliberate complexity - alternating lot and ballot through ten rounds - that no faction could fix it. The Arsenal built ships on a production line and could reportedly launch one a day. Venetian diplomacy invented the resident ambassador and the systematic diplomatic report. Portugal's sea route to India from 1498 began the long decline, and Napoleon ended the republic in 1797 without a fight. Marco Polo was Venetian. The city's archives are among the most complete in Europe. The republic lasted from 697 to 1797, the longest-lived in European history. Its territory included Crete, Cyprus, Corfu and much of the Dalmatian coast. The city and its lagoon are a World Heritage site. Venetian was the trade language of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The ghetto, from which the word comes, was established in 1516. Glassmaking was moved to Murano in 1291 to keep furnaces away from the city.

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