Venice by James Morris. 1960

[scholarsOrAcademics]

James Morris was an Englishman who moved his family to Venice. He has a section of The Lagoon which was my primary interest in the book. Specifically: "The Venetians first filtered into the lagoon because it offered an obvious place of refuge, safe from landlubber barbarians and demoralizing heresies. They fortified it from the start, building tall watch-towers, throwing defensive chains across its waterways, erecting high protective walls along its quays. As early as the sixth century the people of Padua were complaining that the Venetians had militarized the mouth of the Brenta, to prevent alien shipping entering the lagoon. Nine centuries later the traveler Pero Tafur vividly described the war-readiness of the Venetian Navy. As soon as the alarm sounded, he records, the first warship emerged from the gate of the Arsenal, under tow: and from a succession of windows its supplies were handed out--cordage from one window, food from another, small arms from a third, mortars from a fourth, oars from a fifth--until at the end of the canal the crew leapt on board, and the galley sailed away, fully armed and ready for action, into the Canale San Marco. For many centuries the lagoon served the Venetians admirably in the office of a moat, and it stands there still, in the nuclear age, as a wide watery redoubtr, studed with antique forts and gun-sites." page 260.
If one has an interest in the Aristotle and Plato religious conflict and ramifications for the different ways of organizing society, the book has some value.