venice and its surroundings 29
was thus wrought: the Venetians ignored the land. The rupture between
the two worlds of the lagoon and the mainland is presumed to be onto-
logical and should always be maintained. These assertions, which them-
selves eventually become veritable stereotypes, explain the orientations of
a secular historiography and why these links of Venice to the terraferma
were ignored for so long. This invented history of Venice, in celebrating
the sanctuary of the lagoons, was obliged to deny the numerous exchanges
between the city on the water and the mainland, as well as the evolving
economic interpenetration which began several centuries before the ter-
ritorial conquest. By essentially amputating the areas surrounding Venice,
this historical construction provoked an amnesia about how quickly a con-
tado invisible7 had been formed through the acquisition of more Venetian
land about and how people, goods, and capital circulated. It became a
matter of course to twist the reality of the lagoon’s geography by never
mentioning the existence, at the outer edges of the basin near Torcello in
the north and in Brenta’s southern delta, of an amphibious world where
water, earth, and swamps met and where men came and went.8
From the moment when the Venetians decided to betray what had
been their destiny, when they renounced what would have been the wise
policy of their fathers and instead took an interest in the land, their his-
tory took a sharp turn. Tommaso Mocenigo’s 1421 speech declaring that
the fortunes of Venice were tied to trade clearly illustrates that certainty.9
Although the chroniclers did not wait for Mocenigo’s dogma to see, in
the expansion of commerce, the very principle of Venice’s existence, his
speech, like the one he allegedly made shortly before his death, has tra-
ditionally seemed to emphasize a turning point. After Mocenigo, with
Francesco Foscari, the Venetian Signoria would become engaged in the
affairs of Italy, which would in turn introduce them to the causes of their
eventual decadence and ruin. So say the enemies of Venice, starting with
the wars of Italy and the setbacks of the Dominante on the terraferma. So
say also some Venetians, such as Girolamo Priuli, during the disastrous
War of the League of Cambrai. Thus, it is in these terms that Venetian
7 S. Bortolami, “L’agricoltura,” in Gino Benzoni and Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Storia di
Venezia. Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 14 vols (Rome, 1992–2002), vol. 2 (1995):
L’età del comune, ed. Giorgio Cracco and Gherardo Ortalli, pp. 461–90.
8 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, La mort lente de Torcello, Histoire d’une cité disparue (Paris,
1992), pp. 216–49.
9 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venise triomphante. Les Horizons d’un mythe (Paris, 1999),
pp. 139 ff.