history of unusual splendour. The Veneti cultivated
fertile lands on the Po, and built several towns, of which Padua was the
chief. They appear from the earliest note of them in history to have
been both an agricultural and trading people; and they offered a rich
prey to the barbarian hordes when these broke through every barrier into
the plains of Italy. Thirty years before Attila razed the neighbouring
city of Aquileia, the consuls and senate of Padua, oppressed and
terrified by the prior ravages of Alaric, passed a decree for erecting
Rialto, the largest of the numerous islets at the mouth of the Po, into
a chief town and port, not more as a convenience to the islanders than
as a security for themselves and their goods. But every fresh incursion,
every new act of spoliation by the dreaded enemies, increased the flight
of the rich and the industrious to the islands, and thus gradually arose
the second Venice, whose glory was so greatly to exceed that of the
first. Approachable from the mainland only by boats, through river
passes easily defended by practised sailors against barbarians who had
never plied an oar, the Venetian refugees could look in peace on the
desolation which swept over Italy; their warehouses, their markets,
their treasures were safe from plunder; and stretching their hands over
the sea, they found in it fish and salt, and in the rich possessions of
trade and territory which it opened to them more than compensation for
the fat lands and inland towns which had long been their home. The
Venetians traded with Constantinople, Greece, Syria and Egypt. They
became lords of the Morea, and of Candia, Cyprus and other islands of
the Levant. The trade of Venice with India, though spoken of, was
probably never great. But the crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries
against the Saracens in Palestine extended her repute more widely east
and west, and increased both her naval and her commercial resources. It
is enough, indeed, to account for the grandeur of Venice that in course
of centuries, from the security of her position, the growth and energy
of her population, and the regularity of her government at a period when
these sources of prosperity were rare, she became the great emporium of
the Mediterranean--all that Carthage, Corinth and Athens had been in a
former age on a scene the most remarkable in the world for its fertility
and facilities of traffic,--and that as Italy and other parts of the
Western empire