Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/29

 CONSTANTINOPLE AND VENICE. H gone, that the rule in the capital itself had become not much unlike that which prevailed in Venice. The government was noniinall}^ absolute; actually in great part oligarchical. There was the lingering tradition of the divine right of the emperor still strong in the provinces, and not altogether for- gotten in the capital, but there was also a control exercised by the merchants throughout the empire, and especially in the capital, which seriously modified the absolutism of the imperial rule. The actual government was, therefore, some- thing between that which prevails in Russia now and that which prevailed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Venice. If, indeed, the comparison were restricted to Constantino- ple, the condition of thino^s in the New Rome dur- GovGrntncut tended to be- ino^ tlic later half of the twelfth century resembled come like that ^. , ., of Venice at far uiore closely that which existed m the most later periods. "^ . prosperous days of Venice than that which exists or has existed in Russia. If the latter empire is the suc- cessor and representative of the imperial rule of New Rome, Venice was in a still more striking manner the successor and representative of the greatness and also of the narrow- ness of the intellect and of the internal life of Constantino- ple. Each city was imperial in the sense that it domineered over the whole of the territory under its rule, and absorbed into itself the life, the intelligence, the wealth, the art, and the commerce of such territory. The palaces of the city of the Adriatic were built from the spoils of commerce and by merchant princes, as were most of those of the city on the Bosphorus. The Great Church of Venice was a small copy of the Great Church of the Divine Wisdom ; less beautiful, less shapely, less harmonious as to its interior, though with the advantage of having had its exterior finished, which the earlier and larger church never had. The domestic as well as the earliest ecclesiastical architecture of the city of the Adriatic were the development of that which the Venetians had seen in Constantinople. The joyous life of Venice and its love of art were the reproduction of Byzantine life. Like Constantinople, too, the source of all or nearly all its wealth