democratic Broletto, no Hall of
the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediaeval sense of
the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard
barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the
strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The
shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to
independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government
of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from
disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only
because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians
Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were
houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but
bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
masonry.

Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one
place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth
century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles.
Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was
strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities,
as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The
Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had
always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant
still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes
described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger
commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade
which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What
the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at
Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.
The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and
rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the
mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be
more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing
was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had
grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not
restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately
patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
through ages when the mushroom houses of England w