28 elisabeth crouzet-pavan
to the Lombard invasion, which would have marked a radical change on
the terraferma.3 Rejecting barbarism and servitude, the inhabitants of the
terraferma, Giovanni Diacono recounts, moved to the lagoons with the
relics and treasures of their churches. They fled to maintain their freedom
in the lagoon waters, free from any dependency. They were pious and,
even when faced with the Arian Lombards, preserved their Christian faith.
This account of the original migration, foundational in that it endows the
Venetian community with a series of original virtues—Venice is ancient
due to its earlier existence on the terraferma, the Venetians are free and
pious—creates an image that lasts over the centuries and is as enduring
as the Venetian waters.4 The lagoon basin, never described in the hostil-
ity and poverty of its marshes, is the very shelter where begins, or rather
continues, a happy story. What does it matter, then, if successive versions
of the second set of narrative fragments that document the early centuries
of the duchy, the Origo civitatum, offer sometimes conflicting accounts of
the conditions of this genesis?5 All of these texts, in effect, dramatize the
march of the refugees into the lagoons, and all suggest the miraculous
nature of the creation of the first Venice in the midst of marshes where
heavenly signs and apparitions were already frequent.6
One rightly suspects that such imagery had serious implications for the
writing of history. First, once the refoundation of Venice had started, the
chronicles held as a fundamental truth that from within the asylum of
the lagoon a very particular history might have been initiated. The texts
maintain that the populations of Altino, Padua, Treviso, and Oderzo fled,
and with the terraferma cities razed by the new conquerors, all ties were
severed. The new society of the lagoon grew, freed from any dependence
or domination. In the waters of the lagoon, a mission was assigned, that
of keeping their people away from the vicissitudes of the mainland affairs.
Thanks to this border, presented as impervious, the destinies of the lagoon
and the mainland no longer interfered with one another. An assumption
3 La cronaca veneziana del diacono Giovanni, in Cronache veneziane antichissime, ed.
G. Monticolo (Rome, 1890).
4 A. Carile, “Le origini di Venezia nella tradizione storiografica,” in Arnaldi, Girolamo,
and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, eds., Storia della cultura veneta, 6 vols (Vicenza, 1976–86),
vol. 1 (1976): Dalle origini al Trecento, pp. 135–66; A. Carile-G. Fedalto, Le origini di Venezia
(Bologna, 1978).
5 G. Fasoli, “I fondamenti della storiografia veneziana,” in Agostino Pertusi, ed., La sto-
riografia veneziana fino al secolo XVI. Aspetti e problemi (Florence, 1970), pp. 11–44, repr. in
F. Bocchi, A. Carile, and A. I. Pini, Scritti di storia medievale (Bologna, 1974).
6 Roberto Cessi, Origo civitatum Italiae seu Venetiarum (Rome, 1933), pp. 30–35.