Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/875

 Ki-etsclwiayr : Gcschiclite von ]'encdig 865 assent. So difficult a thing it is to mate the passion for facts with the artistic temper. We get an immediate taste of the thoroughness and originaHty of the author's scholarship on taking up his treatment of the difficult question of Venetian origins. In this particular investigation he found himself confronted with a body of tradition, arbitrarily invented by the early chroniclers and elaborated with patriotic intent by the official historiographers of the Renaissance. Fortunately the minute analysis to which the Venetian chronicles have recently been subjected by Simonsfeld and Monticolo and the illuminating labors of Hegel, Hart- mann, and others on the period of the Germanic settlements in Italy have cleared the way for a new presentation. This we get in an ad- mirably secure and connected narrative of the beginnings of govern- ment and civilization within the lagoons. The author's general tend- ency is to restrict considerably the scope of the boasted Venetian inde- pendence, and to reduce the growth of the city to the ordinary terms of Italian life in the Lombard and Carolingian epochs. Venice be- comes in consequence a very small and insignificant settlement, subject to the Emperor of the East long after the fabled election by popular acclaim of an independent duke in 697, and saved from the Emperor of the West only by the ever precarious position of that potentate. If the city loses some of the veneer of a republican dignity of immemorial antiquity it gains much more than it surrenders by taking a credible place in the organic development of the peninsula. Students of the Italian communes will be particularly interested in the development of the doge and in the beginnings of those institutions which, during the general instability of political affairs in the period of the Renaissance, aroused the envy of all the wayward neighbors of the Republic. In this field, too, the author is inclined to make con- siderable subtraction from the vaunted democracy which, according to the current account, was the birth-right of the free folk of the lagoons. The dogate has two periods : until the twelfth century it is an absolutism, tempered, in the manner of absolutisms, by assassination ; beginning approximately with 1 172, it is converted into a constitutional monarchy. In the matter of this conversion the author maintains a very interesting point of view. The traditional presentation of the reduction of the doge's power predicates a revolution covering the period 1172-1179, during which a league of the great families took the helm and created a series of checks upon the doge by setting up all those institutions — the great council, the small council, the quaraiita, etc., by which the gov- ernment acquired its definitive form. Following the conclusions of Lenel the author scouts the opinion that the oligarchical regime received its final shape in a sudden upheaval of the twelfth century, and makes out a very plausible case for the gradual development of the Venetian constitution along the general lines of the neighboring communes of northern Italy. Here again 'enice loses something of that uniqueness