The Venetian Company

In San Pietro Church, 1524

In San Pietro

     Perhaps twice a week I attended Orthodox mass in San Pietro church in the eastern quadrant of Venice.  I was not particularly religious, but it reminded me that we were a group presence in this strange city.  One was not alone.  It was a Catholic church, but we were permitted to use it.  In our Orthodox services there are no benches and mostly you are standing, so several times a week a few hundred exiles were standing there, cold enough to see our breath in the wintertime.

     I had never seen nor met a Jew before arriving in Venice, but now I felt I understood them quite well.  We were all flotsam, floating in this world.  In a way, I still felt our situation was more fortunate than that of the Jews:  we had a homeland to return to, I wasn’t sure that was true for the Jews.  And no one was accusing us of having killed Christ (though of course I viewed that kind of talk as irrational – if anyone killed Christ, it was us; yes friends, the Romans).

     The mood in the church was usually somber, if not funereal.

     “Lord, why have you forsaken us?”  Muttered one lady, echoing Christ’s words on the cross.

     Some might have thought she was talking about some family matter, but I knew differently.  She meant, O Lord, why have you forsaken our people, the Greek people?  Or if one had asked her, she might even have said, ‘the Romans’ – for we had been the eastern Roman empire, or if you like, the later Roman empire.  This was how we looked at it.  But I thought her plea was putting it too strongly.  I saw it differently: no people is guaranteed supremacy forever; that is not the way of this world.  We had had a great age in antiquity, and another flowering in Constantinople.  The eastern empire had lasted 1100 years.  Did anyone think it would last another thousand?  When you sat with the emigres, you could hear such arguments as, if Giuliani had held St. Romanos Gate a little longer, if the reinforcements from the west had arrived, if the Hungarians had not cast the giant cannon, perhaps Constantinople might have survived one more siege.  If you put all the “if”s from end to end, they could stretch to the moon and back.  The truth was we had frittered the empire away and made the lazy choices dozens of times, relying on mercenaries, scuttling the navy, fighting useless civil wars.  It wasn’t the Turks who had vanquished us, it was vanity, indolence, and intellectual lassitude…  But more generally, no polity can stay strong forever.  We were now in a dark period, and would remain there for some hundreds of years, as my father had said years ago.  Any reasonable person could see this.

     I knew all of the above intellectually, but it didn’t make our status any easier to bear.

     I sighed as the priest droned on, standing in front of the iconostasis.

     In truth, if you looked around at the fellow-worshippers in the church, the Hellenes in Venice weren’t doing badly.  There were perhaps eight thousand of us now in Venice.  No one was in rags.  Some scholars had obtained posts in Italian universities.  Some men in the strength of youth were in military uniforms.  There was smattering of the well-to-do in furs and finely-tailored capes – the family of Anna Notaras, for example; although I wouldn’t know them by sight, arrived in the west with substantial assets.  Greek craftsmen and technicians, such as the proof-readers and binders employed in Manutius’ bookshop, were appreciated and found work easily.

     We had one other advantage over the Jews, which was that with our Mediterranean complexions and dark hair, we didn’t look different from your generic northern Italian.  We could blend in.  Of course, when we spoke Italian – if we spoke it at all -- that was another matter.

     Since our state was no more, I reflected, the only thing left now was to help one’s family, and perhaps from time to time strike a blow against the foe, as might be feasible.  The sights had to be lowered.  One had to live in this day to day world.  What could realistically be achieved?  One had to understand this and try to make progress.

     I looked down at my shoes and saw I needed to buy a new pair; a toe was peeking through on my left foot.  At least I had the funds to buy a new pair -- a modest pair.  One could be thankful for progress even in small matters.