ose centuries of exile and
buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of
Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the
mosaics of St. Mark.

Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which
it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For
thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western
Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate,
its people, its government were not what government or people or
patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The
difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed,
or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had
invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the
better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the
birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the
settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those
of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English
colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the
wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely
Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply
the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the
shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens
of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens
or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside
the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before
whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the
islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new
houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum
served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and
inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across
the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.

Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out
for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed
were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less
citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or
Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still
due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaff