rew on the spot where his horse had trod. Yet the savage
destroyer undesignedly laid the foundation of a republic, which
revived, in the feudal state of Europe, the art and spirit of commercial
industry. The celebrated name of Venice, or Venetia, [54] was formerly
diffused over a large and fertile province of Italy, from the confines
of Pannonia to the River Addua, and from the Po to the Rhaetian and
Julian Alps. Before the irruption of the Barbarians, fifty Venetian
cities flourished in peace and prosperity: Aquileia was placed in the
most conspicuous station: but the ancient dignity of Padua was supported
by agriculture and manufactures; and the property of five hundred
citizens, who were entitled to the equestrian rank, must have amounted,
at the strictest computation, to one million seven hundred thousand
pounds. Many families of Aquileia, Padua, and the adjacent towns, who
fled from the sword of the Huns, found a safe, though obscure, refuge
in the neighboring islands. [55] At the extremity of the Gulf, where the
Adriatic feebly imitates the tides of the ocean, near a hundred small
islands are separated by shallow water from the continent, and protected
from the waves by several long slips of land, which admit the entrance
of vessels through some secret and narrow channels. [56] Till the
middle of the fifth century, these remote and sequestered spots remained
without cultivation, with few inhabitants, and almost without a
name. But the manners of the Venetian fugitives, their arts and their
government, were gradually formed by their new situation; and one of
the epistles of Cassiodorus, [57] which describes their condition about
seventy years afterwards, may be considered as the primitive monument
of the republic. [571] The minister of Theodoric compares them, in his
quaint declamatory style, to water-fowl, who had fixed their nests
on the bosom of the waves; and though he allows, that the Venetian
provinces had formerly contained many noble families, he insinuates,
that they were now reduced by misfortune to the same level of humble
poverty. Fish was the common, and almost the universal, food of every
rank: their only treasure consisted in the plenty of salt, which they
extracted from the sea: and the exchange of that commodity, so essential
to human life, was substituted in the neighboring markets to the
currency of gold and silver. A people, whose habitations might be
doubtfully assigned to the earth or water, soo