The Free Republic of Venice, 1849 - ?

May 1849.

The First Italian War of Independence is almost over, and the Italians have not won. Austria's General Radetzky has cleaned up northern Italy, kicked the Kingdom of Piedmont's collective ass twice, retaken Milan, and recaptured all of the Veneto. The flame of rebellion still burns in only one place: Venice. And if you're Austrian, that means it's payback time.

Venice has been a Free Republic for just over a year, and an amazingly well governed one. By a stroke of freakish luck, Venice had fallen under the reluctant but inspired guidance of Daniel Manin. Manin seems to have been that truly rare thing in history, a talented natural leader who really just wanted to go home. (He repeatedly refused to be King, Doge or Dictator, and only reluctantly served as part of a triumvirate.) Unlike the short-lived republics of Milan or Rome, Venice had managed to stabilize her currency, assure employment for the workingman, and even field a modest army.

Alas, Manin and his Venetians were up against another historical rarity: a highly competent Austrian commander. Radetzky, realizing that Venice would be the toughest nut to crack, saved it for last. He cleaned up the rest of Italy, pimp-slapped the Piedmontese, and then tried offering Venice terms. But the Venetians weren't interested. So at the end of April, Radetzky drew his army into siege lines around the fortress of Malghera, which guarded the long causeway across Venice's lagoon.

The siege of Malghera lasted for a month, and lives on in the Italian memory to this day. But it's largely unknown outside Italy, which is a pity. It was both highly dramatic and tactically and technically interesting. To give just one example, on the night of May 24, Radetzky unleashed upon Malghera the largest artillery bombardment that the world had ever yet seen: 30,000 shells in a day, a record that would not be matched until the First World War.

The defenders fought with desperation and brilliance, but the end was never greatly in doubt; they were facing the armed might of an Empire, and an Empire that -- the Hungarian rebellion having failed, and Piedmont sulking in defeat -- was finally undistracted by other concerns. Eventually a handful of Venetian survivors spiked the guns, evacuated across the causeway, and left behind a booby-trap in the powder magazine that would kill several dozen excessively curious Austrians and level what little was left of the fortress.

When Venice still refused to surrender, Radetzky then proceeded to do something without precedent up until then: he mounted guns on the ruins of Malghera, and began to bombard Venice from across the lagoon.

This was, AFAIK, the first sustained bombardment of a civilian city in the modern era; but, again, it has been somewhat neglected by Anglophone historians.


Which is a pity, because the strategic planners of later generations might have learned a thing or two. Radetzky's shelling destroyed houses, started fires (he started using red-hot shot after a few weeks), and shattered any number of priceless works of art and architecture. It also killed a number of civilians. But it did not break Venice.

It took cholera to do that. The city had been growing increasingly hungry as the Austrian blockade tightened; the Austrian Navy had closed the south end of the harbor, and anything larger than a rowboat could be shelled from Malghera. Still, morale was high... until cholera broke out in the middle of August. Weakened by hunger, the population was pathetically vulnerable. 1500 people died in a single day. One out of six Venetians would eventually contract the disease, and one third of those would die.

Ten days after the beginning of the outbreak, Venice had surrendered.

(Manin escaped, but his wife died of the cholera en route to England, and his daughter a bit later; shattered in body and spirit, he died in obscurity in 1857.)

Venice never really recovered from the siege. The Austrians removed her "free city" status, crippling Venetian trade. (The Austrians preferred to trade through Trieste anyhow.) The merchant classes were exiled or impoverished. Venice's population and economy remained stagnant for the rest of the century, industrialization was set back by a couple of generations, and the city remained a bystander through the Second War of Independence and beyond.

Okay, not such a great outcome. Is there a way to undo it?

Maybe.

Turn back sixteen months, to March 1848. Just before revolution breaks out, the Austrians order the Venetian Navy to steam out of the city to Pola, in Croatia. The Venetian sailors reluctantly comply, but they smell change in the air; they are eagerly awaiting news from Venice, and are ready to sail home at a moment's notice.

OTL, Manin sent a message to Pola... but he foolishly sent it on the British Lloyds boat, which ran from Venice to Trieste. Manin paid the British captain to make a detour to Pola to drop off the messengers before stopping at Trieste. But the Austrian passengers on the steamboat, realizing what was happening, appealed to the captain not to take the detour. When the captain dithered, they managed to convince the engineer to shut down the ship's engines if it went off the normal course. The boat went straight to Trieste, the messengers were arrested, and the Austrians captured the fleet at Pola before a second message could be sent.

Now, in 1848 Austria didn't have much of a fleet. In fact, the Venetian fleet composed the single largest piece of it: about a third of all Austria's warships, including several of the largest and most modern craft. Had the Venetianfleet escaped, control of the Adriatic would have been up for grabs. Since it didn't, though, Austria was able to blockade Venice by sea, as well as bombard it by land. And even then, the blockade was remarkably porous -- ships were slipping in and out right up to the last day of the siege.

So, POD: Manin gets the message through. The Venetian navy escapes to Venice. Further (we'll say), they manage to keep the Adriatic open; either the Austrian fleet comes out for battle and is defeated, or they somehow never get around to leaving port. (There's precedent.)

Otherwise, all proceeds as iOTL.

Okay, so come summer 1849, Venice is still besieged, still bombarded... but the sea lanes are open, and everyone is eating well.

Let's say for argument's sake that better nutrition, plus maybe some wine to mix with the water, blunts the edge of the cholera epidemic. It's bad, but it kills hundreds instead of thousands. Venice fights on... and a week later, Radetzky's army has the cholera, too. (Which happened iOTL, but not until after the city had surrendered.)

That alone won't stop the siege; but I'm not sure how it can be ended, either. The Austrians can bombard Venice forever, but they can't reach it.

Given Radetzky's political intelligence, I think a negotiated settlement of some sort is at least possible. And that means a de facto independent Venice, like a bit of the Renaissance improbably come back to life. (Or like a boil in the Empire's armpit, if you're Austrian.)

But Radetzky's not going to give back any of the Veneto; so the new Republic will be, once more, purely a marine city-state of fishermen and traders.

Could this go in some interesting directions? Or will it all just get wiped away when Italy unifies much as in OTL?

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 

corourke

Donor
I feel that a free Venice would be hard-pressed to stay competitive without the Veneto and other possessions as a captive market. With its entire hinterland remaining Austrian, it would have nowhere to export these trade goods except Austria.

I think that unless its success inspires Italians to rise up again, Venice will still be somewhat of a backwater in this TL, as it became in OTL. An independent backwater, but still a backwater.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Foreign aid might be slightly better way.... or better yet, an incompetent Austrian general?

Still, its your POD, so.... foreign pressure might be the way to go with giving Venice some mainland territories. Also, with the Venetian fleet at large, dominant on the Adriatic, and capble of blockading Austria to some extent......the Austrians might let them gain parts of Vneto in return for establsihing a Conservative government and returning the Austrian fleet. Or perhaps not. They might also take some Adriatic islands with said fleet.
 
I agree that they wouldn't keep any of the Veneto.

I think the Venetian Republic would become an autonomous but not sovereign state, nominally still under the Emperor of Austria but distinct from his other possessions -- not part of Austria! -- and with the Emperor purely as a figurehead. There was precedent nearby; the Second Serb Rebellion left the Serbs de facto independent, but de jure still just an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire.

The economic evolution would be interesting; from 1815 to the Revolution, Venice was Austria's main seaport.


Doug M.
 
The cynic in me suspects that if Venice is a rebellious, autonomous province, that its role as Austria's port will not, ah, last.
 
That's the default assumption, yes.

Which doesn't mean that Venice would wither and die, necessarily.


Doug M.
 
Some thoughts.

1) If Venice keeps a fleet in being, and the Austrians fail to destroy it in battle (or don't try), I wonder if there will even be a siege. Radetzky is nothing if not a realist, and he won't see much point to sitting his army on the beach to look at an island three miles offshore.

True, he could try bombarding the city as iOTL. But given the technological limitations of 1848 artillery -- Venice was at the bleeding edge of the guns' range -- I wonder if he'll fall into the trap of thinking he can bombard them into submission. (Any historical precedent one way or another?) Radetzky was no dummy, so I suspect he'd realize this was a no-go and recommend a negotiated peace.

2) Actually, I think a Free Venice might have interesting knock-on effects across Europe.

Consider: the defining characteristive of the 1848 uprisings was that, with the single exception of France's February Revolution, they all lost. And even the post-February Second Republic pretty quickly turned reactive, gunning down the workers and then letting itself be hijacked by Napoleon III.

But in Venice, you'd have a no-kidding liberal republic, and one created by armed uprising against foreign oppression. I think Free Venice would have huge symbolic importance for both liberals and nationalists across the continent.

3) To give one very specific example, there'd surely be some interesting effects on Marx. Marx's thought and writing was to a great extent shaped by the bitter experience of 1848-9. If Venice is a Great Exception, this has to be explained away somehow.

(Note that class relations in OTL's Venetian Republic of 1848-9, throughout its short life, were unusually excellent. Granted, this was probably because the VR was under constant threat of reconquest from the moment it came into existence; but still.)

4) A living VR would have a major effect on the unification of Italy. And not necessarily for the better! By holding up a successful republican model, it makes unification under Sardinia/Piedmont less attractive. OTL, a lot of republicans (and a very few socialists) needed the lash of defeat in order to turn to the Kings of Piedmont, and even then they did so with heavy hearts.

An Italy in which the republicans aren't reconciled to Victor Emmanuel and his kingdom might be an Italy that loses the Second War of Unification. It was a fairly close-run thing as it was.

Note that holding on to Lombardy and Venetia would have made Austria significantly stronger than iOTL; those provinces were rich, and produced a disproportionate amount of the Empire's income.

5) Without the Veneto, Venice is a modest city-state of about 125,000 people, supported entirely by trade. I'd expect good relations with England and complicated ones with France. Relations with Austria would of course be frosty at first, but might quickly turn deferential (see below).

6) Within a decade or so, gun technology will have advanced to the point where a bombardment of Venice from the shore starts to look more plausible. If Austria still holds the mainland shore after 1860, the Venetians will feel more and more compelled to defer to Vienna accordingly.

What else?


Doug M.
 
I imagine they'd get swept up in the Reunification at some point. But the when and the how get really gnarly.


Doug M.
 
Could Venice end up as a small Switzerland instead of a large Monaco? Any way to establish a tradition of neutrality and enough of an economic / military presence to convince Italy / Austria / any others to permit it?
 
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