Venetian Republic #3 Pula & Istria

Venetian Republic #3 Pula & Istria

Okay so last two episodes we start off with ventian cre partly because that’s where our story with all this began partly I think it just makes a good case as to why to get excited about all of this but now we had to figure out in

What order to do the rest now let me save you the trouble if you wanted to try and do it chronologically by the order that Venice controlled its territories I mean not only do you need a pint of espresso to go near that it’s just one of the least useful lenses

To understand the Venetian Republic they would control a place or region lose it get it back again lose it again and even defining what control means there’s this whole mix of soft power hard power different approaches and systems of government in fact their whole thing was

Having a mertile Empire and if it was advantageous to control a region they would but also they were fairly happy in a lot of cases just to have a friendly quarter of a port town where they could stay and do business you know above all personally my chief

Gripe when it comes to the history of the Venetian Republic everyone wants to write pages and pages on the city of Venice lots of shots of Carnaval masks yes yes all fine but the rest of the Republic’s Holdings are mostly shunted off to the footnotes why don’t you want to see

What’s happening in all these places I mean look at all of this I mean Venice the city is great but Venice had a huge influence on the history of Croatia Montenegro Greece and Cypress on the coastlines of all of these you can scarcely get away from everything they

Left behind and of course not forgetting parts of Albania Slovenia and of course Italy I mean heavens forend we try and spend some time in these gorgeous sundrenched coastlines and find out about the culture that shaped history here for 500 plus years ah come on guys nothing to see here I wouldn’t bother

Well if all of you won’t then we will but before we can jump into that last episode served as a good teaser for the sort of things we’re going to come across this season and we’ve promised you all a good few long form episodes specifically as an add on to this series

So that all of you who are interested can dig into the historical details a little bit more so all well and good but it’s the standard thing I’m in two deep with this and I forget that a lot of the things we’re discussing or casually name-checking are completely unknown to

A lot of people most people probably that’s how it was for us when we first Saw Creek we had no idea about the Venetian Republic you know in the UK we have a fairly Anglo Centric perspective on history prioritizing what is close and most directly affects us and things

A little further away like the Persian Empire or maybe the Byzantine Empire or even just the kingdom of Hungary these don’t get picked up in our school system and the odds of finding anyone who isn’t a history Enthusiast having much knowledge of these are slim it’s been a

Challenge of this series to pick a map to go with I I know that might seem strange I mean how much difference can there be in a map of Europe well Venetian control varied considerably over time take for example the pelones if you make a map that highlights

Venetian dominions that stands out as one of the most noticeable chunks but in fact this is quite specific to a 30-year period between around 1686 and 1715 previous to that they’d had some control around the coasts for example coroni and methon on the southwestern extremity just down here but for most of the

Republic’s history this was a largely Byzantine domain fought over by Frankish Lords post Fourth Crusade and then eaten up by the Ottomans not long after 1453 with of course a flood of asterisks and yes yes yes yes yes not getting into details right here so it’s one thing to

Show all the places the venetians ever controlled but you have to caveat it with dates uh some of these were in Venetian hands for less than a generation some like thla Niki were under Venetian control barely long enough to boil the kettle but Counterpoint for a while

There they had hoovered up the greater percentage of the Eastern Mediterranean coasts and Islands I mean admit it this is worth knowing about not least as it’s largely unknown to many and there is an embarrassment of riches of lovely Venetian architecture running all the way through so with all of that in mind

We really can’t go any further without giving you a short history of the Venetian Republic I hate having to do these anytime there’s a short summary you have to oversimplify editorialize and just leave a bunch of stuff unsa but it’s just not going to work if people

Aren’t caught up on the rough story of how all of this came about so deep breath start the clock Venice gets founded essentially by Roman refugees uh citizens fleeing what was becoming a familiar pattern of Destruction and sacking in Northern Italy places like acalia home to 100,000 people at its

Height were repeatedly attacked and burnt by various armies including that of Atilla the Hun and eventually left in Ruins this was happening all through the flats of Northern Italy and the po valley hard to believe even Rome was practically emptied of people Parts like the Forum ended up used for simple

Farming and even later reverting to a malarial swamp the lagoons that form at the northernmost extent of the Adriatic Sea were hard places to try and scratch a living but the water would prove a sufficient deterrence against the armies that came past in late Antiquity so yes by comparison Venice was doing pretty

Great for itself and its amphibious Origins created a seafaring and fishing culture which was Keen to be trading further a field and with the blessing of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire who are only too happy to have a strong subject in an area where they’d lost effective control

The venetians grew in wealth and influence skipping over a lot the trend over the thousand years was that the byzantines were a long slow decline spoiler alerts spoilers from history but come on it’s practically Tail as old as time at this stage and the Byzantine loss would often turn into venice’s gain

Although it would take a while in the early middle ages one of the most pressing needs in the Adriatic Sea was the ability to counter piracy in the region and Venice with mixed success at first ended up taking on the role of policing the Seas that they were

Dependent on for so much of their profit these demonstrations of strength over time morphed into something resembling a protection racket at least as far as the cities of the eastern coast of the Adriatic were concerned these scattered coastal towns amongst the Myriad of islands and mountainous coasts on what

Is now Croatia rather chafed under this increasing Venetian hegemony and so Venetian control wavered back and forth I mean at one point a lot later with the Treaty of Zara in 1358 Venice had to seed all of its Dalmatian Holdings to Hungary though they clawed them back over time meanwhile through the Middle

Ages Venice itself was going from strength to strength helped by both its role in the First Crusade supporting Western Powers but also subsequent trade with Islamic Powers something the other Christian states were noticeably squeamish in doing they had a lengthy rivalry going with Genoa pretty much their opposite from the other side of

The Italian boot Venice would come out on top and Genoa diminish but not before a couple of very close calls where Venice was on the brink of Destruction meanwhile Fourth Crusade the venetians are the chief Architects behind a spectacularly bloody and destructive sacking of Constantinople hobbling The byzantines Who despite making a quite

Remarkable comeback over the following 100 years never fully recovered and with increasing influence in Anatolia the Ottomans started gobbling up chunks of former Byzantine territories in the Balkans at a rapid Pace Venice was also getting more of a property portfolio more permanently than before with control of cre but not without massive

Numbers of local uprisings um Corfu and the ionian islands and the cides but again not without a fair amount of chaos and Corruption from the local Lords that had possession of them and finally almost all of the Eastern side of the Adriatic pretty soon de brnik was

Amongst a handful of the coastal areas along this stretch of which Venice could claim no control though as you got further down most of Albania would end up Ottoman and likewise epas and the Western Mainland coast of Greece the Ottomans would ensure that this upward trajectory of Venetian expansion would

Not continue and soon the two sides would come to blows over and over again for different parts of the Mediterranean though perhaps surprisingly often retaining trade relations throughout these conflicts or at the very least returning to the status quo of business shortly after yeah trade and business

Meant that much to Venice that baffling though it may seem time and time again they could be in opposition even all out war with someone whilst also continuing to trade with them as if nothing were a Miss now despite the Ottomans gradually eating away at Venetian Holdings there

Was still more to come the Venetian control of Cypress was a huge step although full control was for just a little over 80 years on the Italian Mainland Venice had been gradually increasing its territory but this would culminate in a series of conflicts with the other Italian city states and

European powers the details of which are so twisting and complex they make Honus Bosch look like a minimalist in the 1600s the eventual loss of creit to the Ottomans after the 21-year siege of Candia was a huge blow the end of the 1600s began to look like a reversal of

Fortunes with Venice controlling the entire pelones but 30 years later this was all undone and by the 1700s while the Ottomans weren’t the explosive Dynamic Force they had been before Venice was also not the power it had once been its possessions largely limited to the Adriatic from the ionian

Islands up the dalmatian coast and to the Lagoon itself the status quo remained pretty much unchanged for the rest of the century until in a spectacular anticlimax in 1797 with little standing army to defend itself over land Venice was in the crosshairs of Napoleon who had torn through Northern Italy with seeming ease

Venice tried to torque it it way out the problem but in an extremely disappointing season finale and if we can just have the biggest spoiler alert from history Napoleon declared the Republic dissolved that was the end of it no more Venetian Republic after 1797 definitely a case of the writers losing

Interest before the finale but final score a republic that stood for a thousand years with startling stability when compared to the historyonics that racked politics in almost every other province of Italy a devastatingly effective economy with Innovations like production line ship building that was centuries ahead of the rest of Europe

And a culture that was a byword of class and good taste okay stop the clock so if none of that serves as a justification I honestly don’t know what to tell you but with that I think we should get back on trail as you already know from the title

And thumbnail we are starting at the top of the Adriatic Venice itself we will Circle back to last but to begin the third Venetian town we ever visited all the way back in 2018 Pula and the istrian peninsula we already have ample amounts to say about Pula and we have

Done in our travel episode Link in the top right Pula is justifiably best known for having this are you kidding me Amphitheater it’s just exquisitely pretty and yes pul wears its Roman influence on its sleeve all around the town with temples and arches and all sorts this makes it all the more

Puzzling that the history of the Town reads like a series of gut punches for a city with an Amphitheater surviving so well it sure has been wrecked a bunch of times including getting sacked by the venetians themselves in 1243 as a retribution for their brief alliance

With Pisa I mean just look at this list of Destruction events somehow between all of them they were at least polite enough not to tear down the amphitheater or the Temple of Augustus or the arch of the sergy it’s frankly a near Miracle but that’s not to say the city itself

Was doing great I mean by the 1700s the city had declined to fewer than 3,000 occupants and it really only exploded to its current size and prominence under the austr hungarians for whom it was a major port and Naval Base but we are getting ahead of ourselves beginning at

The high point of the town this is the Venetian Fort it’s been used as a handy Acropolis since way back in Antiquity I mean ATT testing to this on the Eastern slopes there’s a small Roman Theater when I first saw this it was uh well some modest

Now it’s been augmented in some less than beautiful ways the for itself is a mildly unusual one it has some austr Hungarian upgrades such as the lighthouse okay sure it might not look that different at first to a lot of the other fors we’re going to be looking at

With various protrusions and to use a technical term pointy bits however if you look at a floor plan this is quite a different profile to what we’re used to this was thanks to its designed by French military engineer Anton devil Construction beginning in 1630 it’s quite Compact and this level

Of symmetry in almost all directions is unusual Venetian forts are often highly irregular a round Bastion here some angular bastions there often just catering to whatever the terrain requires very much function over form now in trying to frame out a lot of the modern bits it actually gives you

Comparatively few angles to shoot the fort um short Supercut yeah let’s have a short super cut then descending down into the town the next and most prominent Venetian structure is the loia and the Town Square this is a gorgeous place to spend time it’s hard to resist sitting with an

Espresso and a book when the view is this now I love this I really do but it hurts just a little that it occupies the footprint print of a former Roman Temple not that one there used to be a trio of temples here and considering how well

The temple of Augustus has survived the thought that the larger Temple of Diana could have made it too yeah the original Temple had been used as the town hall but then towards the end of the 1200s it was decided that a new town hall was needed partial credit to the builders

They did incorporate elements of the old building into the new for example these elements on the western side are from the original Temple current structure is a mixture of the work completed in 1296 an upgrade in the 1400s and then another in the 1600s the square itself what was

Formerly the Roman Forum also has some beautiful Venetian traces scattered around though in all likelihood restored also to my discredit I didn’t give the cathedral a proper go over I had wrongly inferred from its architecture this was much more recent than it actually is I mean the campan a is from 1707 hence

Pretty recent but the church had to be largely rebuilt in the 1400s you can see some traces of earlier structures recycled into the wall I constantly bump up against my past self who was nowhere near as picky about details or church crawling in general so when I Circle

Back to cut these episodes together I rarely have all of the details I’d like to show in fact other than flashing up some brief shots of other churches I don’t have much to show of all the church crawling stuff around Pula it’s not helped that several of these are

Continually locked or rarely open to public for the most part Pula either needs crediting to later when the austr hungarians added just a flurry of fors in varying sizes or earlier with Byzantine or medieval layers from somewhat before the phenicians got established here so while this feels

Incomplete a lot of Venetian Pula was built around the traces of the past so the Roman wall which they propped up and augmented sure but that’s in pretty similar form to Antiquity or older buildings like this the Church of St Mary Formosa surviving from the 500s onward so that’s about all we’ve got

Time to move along nearby the Bion Islands have similarly retained some Treasures from the biz team/ X Arc of Rena era and some 20th century Yugoslav stuff but while it might not leap out right by the main Harbor is a fortified Tower from the Venetian period though

It’s been so neatly restored it’s not surprising that disagreements abound on its construction date ranging anywhere from the 12 to the 1500s and opposite that the Church of St Germain again noticeably updated with much more recent work there’s some nice gladio inscriptions on display inside okay heading further north we don’t have to

Go far at all before arriving at a treasure Trove of Venetian structures now considering the town is quite small and not perched on the coast like most of the other major towns vodan is quite a surprise standout um to cut in a moment we have an unusual resource for

All of this um years ago I discovered this website run to the istrian tourism board now where websites like this are often very surface level and poorly sourced like a couple of sentences on a historic site and you the page mainly existing for ad space and promoting a few sponsored

Accommodations whoever put this together has put so much more love and detail into it than they needed to I mean they comeb out all the small obscure sites from Tiny churches to Venetian palaces and for a change it means we actually have some detail on these individual

Buildings the likes of which are usually hard to turn up in English at least um I don’t know if the designers were from vodan but proportional to its size it gets way more play than other locations on the site as I walked into the town from East there’s a long straight Main

Street which to my UK eyes is both picturesque and shabby at the same time you know shuted Windows showing corrosion somewhat battered doors but also lot cement um eventually you get to this rather beautiful though very quiet square with Gorgeous buildings there’s the the batika palace um just a heads up

The word Palace is going to get an increasing amount of play which is just a little confusing these aren’t palaces like you might be picturing they’re basically above average nice houses I’m afraid I don’t have views from inside these but yes it’s nice we’ve got a fair amount of Venetian domestic architecture

Surviving so yes the batika palace uh the structure dating from as early as the 1300s but coming into the hands of the wealthy batika family in the 1500s definitely some nice Venetian Gothic on display here and opposite that the vusi house while this isn’t visible now when

It was renovated in the 1800s an inscription was discovered in the istrian dialect that reads thank you for asking I am fine um which is cute the humor might carry better in its original language and not to gloss over this yes there is a native istrian language distinct from the Venetian Italian of

Course croat though it’s only spoken in a clutch of specific towns including Ravine canar and three others I don’t don’t have footage for here and in vodan it apparently still has around 400 speakers which while not really enough to ensure its survival still more than you might

Expect a short way around the corner and at the heart of the town this is the Church of St blae BL it’s late in the game as far as the Phoenician Republic is concerned built in 1760 and not fully finished till around 1800 while it apparently has the relics of St blaze

Blaz a quick search reveals that enough churches around the world claim to have those to reconstruct pretty much an entire ice hockey team out of all the bones and paraphernalia heading back the porol palace has been restored though it’s believed it was originally a Venetian era building and after all that

Perhaps the single most noticeable building in the town I actually have struggled to pull up any information other than it’s the Town Council building other than being rather attractive and certainly not short on striking color it also appears to be more of a modern fact simile of the rest

Of the town’s ventian architecture so so yeah that’s probably more detail than you’d expect from a pretty small town now next we’re heading to Ravine and we’ve got further to see up the coast but I’m trying to get into the discipline of not overloading these episodes and since we needed the front

Half of this to give you an overview of the Republic will break off the next few istrian towns into another episode but not done just yet it’s lion watch the part of the episode where we gawk at the bafflingly lowquality attempts the venetians made to draw their own logo

And oh embarrassingly while we’ve got a whole clutch coming next episode there’s a shortage this time looks like the austr hungarians de lion the poola fort uh if there was one in this space that’s the normal place for them by the way inside the Roman Temple of Augustus

There’s a sculpture of a lion from the 100s ad proving that while Lions might not be easy to carve they’re still definitely doable and this is a good 1,200 years before the Venetian examples we’re seeing I did have one which I found and this is a bit embarrassing

I’ve lost where in Pula it’s from it’s got the look of a spaniel in a Halloween costume and it’s tucked on a door lentil but while I normally can just recall the layout of where things are in a town this one Escapes Me And while I took the

Closeup I didn’t get a wide so it maybe near this church I’m not sure okay well this keeps happening after recording the voiceover weeks ago and scrubbing through Clips we had to insert here with one more we found this is displayed inside the church of St Germain on bioni

It’s from the 1400s and my goodness does it have some strong Primary School energy An Early Edition on a list that will have many entries that appear to have been outsourced to sculptors that have not yet reached the age of 10 right additional addition no really we are

Actually doing this just got done editing the next episode and it’s not only too long but also overflowing with a great many lines so we’re going to go ahead and put some more here in Ravine which we not made it to yet there are two prominent examples in the Square

Rather than magisterial there’s something rather vampiric about this one on the kify palace and maybe from corrosion but got a bit of a pig snout going on there the Balby gate by contrast uh the top jaw and face is actually not a bad attempt if a little

Stylized which is why I am calling restoration that portion is just too neat and clean and not at all weathered I’m saying probably the last 40 years tops there’s also this small one on the council Hall with pores too small for its body let alone handling a book and

Derping rather hard only managed to spot one in poret it’s high up on the pentagonal Tower and yes okay a attempts have been made as is pretty much always the case the body is not too bad it’s the face where it falls apart with oversized eyes and a glum drooping mouth

It kind of has the appearance not dissimilar to a trout anyway that’s it we really are done this time more and better Lions next time and by better I mean far worse if you’ve been enjoying the music in the background it’s ours we create all the music for these episodes

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The third in our series on the Venetian Republic, heading up to the top of the Adriatic and beginning at Istria in Croatia, as well as a quick summary of the history of Venice to help get everyone up to speed

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