Mainstream historical narratives, with their focus on the rise and fall of nation-states, obscure a supranational power structure—ancient, centralized, and ruthlessly organized—that has shaped global affairs for centuries, if not millennia. This hidden force, far from the sanitized accounts of conventional history, finds a critical chapter in Venice, as Webster Tarpley, a subject matter expert, elucidates. The Venetians chronicles Venice’s ascent as a mercantile titan, its oligarchs amassing wealth through slavery and trade monopolies, while their diplomatic machinations redirected the Fourth Crusade to plunder Constantinople, pitting Franks against Byzantines. The Invisible Empire traces Venetian banking families, the Fondi, as architects of modern financial giants like the Bank for International Settlements, their usurious practices mirroring Venice’s 20% interest rates. Financial Vipers of Venice reveals how Venetian bankers, through currency manipulation and double-entry bookkeeping, forged the exploitative foundations of global banking. The Black Nobility and The Neo-British Empire further demonstrate Venice’s metastasis into London, Amsterdam, and the British East India Company by 1603, with Britain’s imperial strategies echoing Venetian divide-and-conquer tactics. Though not the entire story, Venice’s role, as these works collectively affirm, demands a reevaluation of history’s comforting fictions.
Tarpley’s The Venetian Conspiracy exposes Venice not as a quaint lagoon republic but as a parasitic entity, its Council of Ten wielding surveillance so pervasive that no citizen’s conversation escaped notice within a day, as The Venetians corroborates. Its calculated destruction of the Italian Renaissance—a humanist threat to oligarchical rule—unfolded through foreign invasions and agents like Ludovico il Moro, a process detailed in Financial Vipers of Venice. After Napoleon’s 1797 liquidation, The Black Nobility shows Venetian aristocrats relocating their influence to global financial hubs, while The Neo-British Empire portrays Britain’s empire as a Venetian construct, its methods honed by Venetian masters. The Invisible Empire links this legacy to the Club of Rome, whose zero-growth ideology Tarpley identifies as Venice’s modern heir, designed to undermine sovereign nations and human progress. This narrative, provocative yet grounded, invites curious readers to question mainstream history and recognize Venice as a cunning parasite, one that, as Tarpley warns, continues to erode civilization’s vitality.
With thanks to Webster Tarpley.
Analogy
The Venice Analogy: The Ancient Parasite That Never Dies
Imagine Venice as an ancient, intelligent parasite that has been feeding on human civilization for over 1,500 years—but unlike any ordinary parasite, this one has mastered the art of making its hosts destroy each other while it grows stronger.
Picture a cunning tapeworm that doesn’t just feed on one body, but has learned to jump between hosts, manipulating each host’s immune system to attack other healthy bodies instead of recognizing the real threat. When one host grows weak, the parasite smoothly transfers to a stronger one, bringing along all its accumulated knowledge and resources.
Venice started in the marshes like a parasite finding refuge in a hard-to-reach place, then developed an extraordinary ability: it could make giant, powerful hosts (empires like Byzantium, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire) fight each other to exhaustion while Venice fed on the chaos. When the Crusaders wanted to reach Jerusalem, Venice redirected them to attack Constantinople instead—like a parasite convincing the body’s white blood cells to attack the heart rather than fight the infection.
The most insidious part is how this parasite learned to control the host’s brain—the intellectual and cultural centers. When the Renaissance emerged as humanity’s immune system developing the tools to recognize and fight oligarchical infection, Venice systematically destroyed Florence, Milan, and other centers of human creativity. It’s like a virus that specifically targets the parts of the brain responsible for critical thinking.
Even when Napoleon “killed” the parasite in 1797 by destroying Venice politically, it had already reproduced itself in London, Amsterdam, Geneva, and other financial centers. Today’s Club of Rome, environmental movement, and zero-growth ideology are like the parasite’s modern offspring—different in appearance but carrying the same DNA, the same mission to weaken humanity’s immune system (sovereign nations, technological progress, population growth) so the parasite can continue feeding.
The terrifying genius of this parasite is that it makes the host believe its sickness is actually health. When Venice promotes “peace” movements, environmental protection, or population control, it’s like the parasite convincing the body that fever (economic growth), appetite (technological development), and reproduction (population growth) are diseases to be cured. The host weakens itself thinking it’s getting healthier, while the parasite grows stronger in the confusion.
This analogy captures why Tarpley calls eliminating Venice “the most urgent task of this generation”—because until humanity recognizes this ancient, shape-shifting parasite and develops immunity to its manipulation techniques, it will continue consuming human civilization from within, always adapting, always surviving, always feeding.
12-point summary
1. Venice as Historical Evil Incarnate: Venice operated for over 1,500 years (roughly 300-1797 AD) as the epitome of oligarchical despotism, serving as a “conveyor belt” that transported ancient Babylonian corruption into the modern world. Despite never exceeding a few hundred thousand in population, Venice maintained Great Power status from the 13th century until 1648 through the most sophisticated intelligence and embassy networks in history, making it a unique case study in how a small parasitic state can manipulate vastly larger empires.
2. Economic Foundation Built on Slavery and Parasitism: Unlike productive economies, Venice’s wealth came primarily from slavery (including the sale of Christians), piracy, and parasitic middleman activities in trade. Venetians operated slave markets that supplied the Ottoman Empire’s harems and Janissary armies, while their “merchants” functioned as profiteering middlemen who manipulated both buyers and sellers, backed by military force. This economic model of pure extraction without production became the template for later financial oligarchies.
3. Revolutionary Intelligence and Manipulation Methods: Venice pioneered modern intelligence techniques through institutions like the Council of Ten, which could order anyone’s death without trial or appeal. Their surveillance system was so pervasive that any conversation among citizens was known to authorities within 24 hours through networks of informers. More significantly, Venice perfected the art of manipulating larger powers into destroying each other while Venice profited, establishing the “divide and conquer” strategy and the “collapse of empires” scenario.
4. Systematic Destruction of Human Renaissance: Venice’s greatest crime was the deliberate destruction of the Italian Renaissance, which represented the most concentrated threat to oligarchical rule in history. Through decades of manipulation, Venice orchestrated foreign invasions of Italy, turned rulers like Ludovico il Moro into agents of influence, and systematically destroyed Florence, Milan, and other Renaissance centers. The oligarchy understood that their real enemy was not military power but epistemological development—societies that could think clearly enough to resist manipulation.
5. Creation and Control of Religious Schisms: Venice played both sides of the Reformation, using their publishing monopoly to spread Protestant writings while simultaneously founding the Jesuit order through Gasparo Contarini. This strategy of controlled opposition allowed Venice to profit from religious wars while preventing any genuine religious reform that might threaten oligarchical power. They similarly manipulated the Enlightenment through figures like Paolo Sarpi, creating seemingly opposing intellectual movements that actually served Venetian interests.
6. The Fourth Crusade as Master Class in Manipulation: Venice’s redirection of the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) from Jerusalem to Constantinople represents perhaps history’s greatest intelligence operation. Doge Enrico Dandolo manipulated financially desperate French crusaders into first attacking the Christian city of Zara, then conquering Constantinople itself, allowing Venice to loot Byzantium and establish a colonial empire. This operation demonstrated how a small power could manipulate religious fervor and financial desperation to destroy a major rival.
7. Metastasis into Modern Financial Centers: When Napoleon formally liquidated Venice in 1797, the oligarchy had already transferred their methods and capital to Geneva, Amsterdam, London, and other centers. This “metastasis” allowed Venetian financial techniques—including their traditional 20% interest rates and parasitic banking practices—to spread throughout the emerging global financial system. The Piacenza Fair served as a prototype for institutions like the Bank for International Settlements.
8. Literary Documentation by Shakespeare and Schiller: Major artists recognized Venice as a unique source of evil, with Shakespeare’s “Othello” providing a precise analysis of Venetian intelligence methods through the character of Iago, who represents the quintessential Venetian operative using psychological manipulation and staged incidents to destroy his target. Schiller’s “The Ghost Seer” similarly exposes how Venice created total environments of manipulation, using occult theatrics and financial entrapment to destroy promising leaders.
9. Fascist Incubation and Modern Cultural Influence: After 1797, Venice became the primary incubator for fascist movements, hosting figures like Wagner and Nietzsche who created the cultural foundations for 20th-century fascism. Count Volpi di Misurata exemplified continuing Venetian influence by sponsoring both Gabriele D’Annunzio and Mussolini, while Venice provided a significant portion of Mussolini’s cabinet members. Thomas Malthus plagiarized population theories from the 18th-century Venetian Giammaria Ortes.
10. Contemporary Manifestation Through Club of Rome: Modern Venice operates through institutions like the Cini Foundation and Club of Rome, promoting zero-growth ideology designed to prevent economic development and reduce global population by billions. The Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” spawned numerous social movements (environmental, peace, liberation movements) that appear independent but serve the common goal of undermining sovereign nation-states and technological progress.
11. Philosophical War Against Human Reason: Venice represented the deepest Aristotelian tradition in the West, establishing the first major Aristotelian school and using this philosophy to promote oligarchical thinking versus the humanist Platonism championed by figures like Petrarch, Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Renaissance thinkers. This epistemological warfare continues today through institutions that promote irrationalism, environmentalism, and anti-technological ideologies designed to prevent populations from developing the intellectual tools necessary to resist oligarchical manipulation.
12. Continuing Threat to Human Civilization: Venice represents an unbroken tradition of oligarchical rule that has successfully adapted to changing historical circumstances while maintaining its essential character and methods. The author argues that definitively eliminating “the horror that is Venice” represents the most urgent task for humanity, as modern institutions connected to this tradition (Federal Reserve policies, Tavistock Institute, various international organizations) continue to promote policies designed to reduce population, eliminate sovereign nations, and return humanity to a new dark age under oligarchical control.
Venice’s Connection to the British Empire
Based on Tarpley’s analysis, Venice played a foundational role in creating and shaping the British Empire through several key mechanisms:
Financial Takeover in 1603: Venice and Genoa “assumed direction of the finances of Stuart England” when James I took the throne in 1603, effectively ending England’s independence. Tarpley notes that Britain “has had no existence as a sovereign nation since the Venetian oligarchy’s installation of the Stuart James I on its throne in 1603.” This represents the moment when Venice captured the English state apparatus.
Creation of the British East India Company: Venice “imparted their characteristic method to the British East India Company,” transferring their parasitic trading model, intelligence techniques, and oligarchical structure to what became Britain’s primary instrument of imperial expansion. The East India Company essentially became a Venetian operation using British military power.
Venice as Britain’s Teacher in Oligarchical Methods: Tarpley describes how Venice pioneered the “stolid old British dividi et impera, ‘divide and conquer'” strategy. Britain didn’t invent these imperial techniques—they learned them from Venice, which had been perfecting them for over a millennium. Venice was “the past master of the more exotic permutations” of divide-and-conquer tactics.
Naval Personnel During American Revolution: During the American Revolution, “about 3,000 Venetian naval personnel, corresponding to about one third of the total available strength, were serving with the British Royal Navy.” This shows direct Venetian participation in British military operations against the American republic.
Intellectual and Cultural Control: Venice influenced British thinking through figures like Paolo Sarpi (Venice’s “contact man for Sir Francis Bacon”) and later through John Ruskin, “the leading ideologue of the British Dark Ages faction,” whose “The Stones of Venice” was used “systematically to discredit the Golden Renaissance.”
Modern Financial Control: Tarpley connects Venice to contemporary British financial institutions, noting the “putrid stench of a Venetian canal” in modern banks like “Chase Manhattan, the Bank for International Settlements and the rest,” suggesting Venice’s methods continue through the City of London’s financial networks.
Philosophical Corruption: Venice promoted the same Aristotelian scholasticism and anti-Platonic thinking that would later characterize British empiricism and utilitarianism. Thomas Malthus “was plagiarizing from the Venetian Giammaria Ortes” when he developed population theories that became central to British imperial ideology.
Essentially, Tarpley argues that what we call the “British Empire” was really a Venetian empire operating through British institutions and military power—Venice provided the brains, methods, and financial control while Britain provided the muscle and geographical base for global operations.
40 Questions and Answers
1. What was the Venetian Republic and how long did it maintain power?
Venice called itself the Serenissima Repubblica (Serene Republic), but it was no republic in any sense comprehensible to an American. It was a classic example of oligarchical despotism that provided an unmatched continuity of the most hideous oligarchical rule for fifteen centuries and more, from the years of the moribund Roman Empire in the West to the Napoleonic Wars. Venice can best be thought of as a kind of conveyor belt, transporting the Babylonian contagions of decadent antiquity smack dab into the world of modern states.
The more than one and one-half millennia of Venetian continuity is first of all that of the oligarchical families and the government that was their stooge, but it is even more the relentless application of a characteristic method of statecraft and political intelligence. Venice, never exceeding a few hundred thousand in population, rose to the status of Great Power in the thirteenth century, and kept that status until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, thanks to the most highly developed system of embassies, of domestic and foreign intelligence, and related operational potentials.
2. What were the geographic and strategic advantages of Venice’s location in the northern Adriatic?
Into the northern Adriatic flow the rivers from the southern side of the Alps from the Dolomites and Julian Alps, the greatest of which is the Po. These rivers, around 300 A.D., made the northern Adriatic a continuous belt of marshes and lagoons, about fifteen kilometers wide, from the city of Ravenna around to the base of the Istrian Peninsula. The islands of the lagoons provided an invulnerable refuge, comparable to Switzerland during World War II, for Roman aristocrats and others fleeing the paths of Goth, Hun, and Langobard armies.
Venice today sits close to the line from Lubeck to Trieste, the demarcation between NATO and Warsaw Pact Europe, roughly corresponding to the boundary between free farm labor and serfdom around the sixteenth century. Earlier, this approximated the boundary between Turks in the East and Christians in the West, and still earlier between the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires. This strategic position allowed Venice to play off major empires against each other while maintaining its independence in the protective lagoons.
3. How did Venice’s alliance with Emperor Justinian shape its early development?
The most significant fact of Venice’s early period is that the whelp of what was later to become Venice survived and grew thanks to a close alliance with the evil Emperor Justinian in Constantinople, an alliance that was underlined in later years by intermarriage of doges and other leading Venetian oligarchs with the nobility of Byzantium. In Byzantium, a faction embodying the sinister traditions of the Roman Senate lived on for a thousand years after the fall of Rome in 476.
This alliance with Justinian established Venice’s fundamental orientation toward the East, toward the Levant, Asia Minor, central Asia, and the Far East, toward its allies among the Asian and especially Chinese oligarchies which were its partners in trade and war. This eastern orientation is reflected in a whole range of weird, semioriental features of Venetian life, most notably the secluded, oriental status of women, with doges like Mocenigo proudly exhibiting a personal harem well into modern times.
4. What was the significance of the winged lion of St. Mark as Venice’s symbol?
Closer to the essence of Venice is the city’s symbol, the winged lion of St. Mark, bearing the misleading inscription, Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus (“Peace be with you Mark, my evangelist”). The chimerical winged lion comes out of the East, either from Persia or from China. The symbol is thus blatantly pagan, with St. Mark being added as an afterthought because of his alleged visit to the Venetian lagoons.
To buttress the story, the Venetians stole St. Mark’s body from Alexandria in Egypt, and Tintoretto has a painting celebrating this feat. The point is that Venice looks East, toward the Levant, Asia Minor, central Asia, and the Far East, toward its allies among the Asian and especially Chinese oligarchies which were its partners in trade and war. The pagan nature of the symbol reveals Venice’s fundamental anti-Christian character beneath its superficial Christian veneer.
5. What were the longhi and curti, and how did they differ in Venetian society?
Venetian families are divided into two categories. First come the oldest families, or longhi, who can claim to prove their nobility substantially before the year 1000. The longhi include many names that are sadly familiar to the student of European history: Dandolo, Michiel, Morosini, Contarini, Giustinian, Zeno, Corner (or Cornaro), Gradenigo, Tiepolo, and Falier. These old families held a monopoly of the dogeship until 1382, at which time they were forced to admit the parvenu newcomers, or curti, to the highest honors of the state.
After 1382, new families like Mocenigo, Foscari, Malipiero, Vendramin, Loredano, Gritti, Dona, and Trevisan come into the ascendancy. The distinction between longhi and curti represented different waves of oligarchical families joining the Venetian power structure, but both groups were united in their commitment to the parasitic economic model and oligarchical rule that characterized the Serenissima throughout its existence.
6. How was slavery the primary basis of the Venetian economy?
The primary basis for Venetian opulence was slavery. This slavery was practiced as a matter of course against Saracens, Mongols, Turks, and other non-Christians. In addition, it is conclusively documented that it was a matter of standard Venetian practice to sell Christians into slavery. This included Italians and Greeks, who were most highly valued as galley slaves. It included Germans and Russians, the latter being shipped in from Tana, the Venetian outpost at the mouth of the Don, in the farthest corner of the Sea of Azov.
During the years of the Venetian overseas empire, islands like Crete, Cyprus, Corfu, Naxos, and smaller holdings in the Aegean were routinely worked by slave labor, either directly under the Venetian regime, or under the private administration of a Venetian oligarchical clan like the Corner, who owed their riches to such slavery. In later centuries, the harems of the entire Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to Morocco, were stocked by Venetian slaves. The shock troops of the Ottoman Turkish armies, the Janissaries, were also largely provided by Venetian merchants.
7. What role did piracy and buccaneering play in Venice’s economic model?
Indistinguishable from slave-gathering operations were piracy and buccaneering, the other staples of the Venetian economy. Wars with Genoa or with other powers were eagerly sought-after opportunities to loot the enemy’s shipping with clouds of corsairs, and victory or defeat usually depended more on the success of the privateering than on the direct combat of the galleys, cogs, and soldiers of the battle fleets. Piracy shades over imperceptibly into routine commerce.
Through decades of treachery and mayhem, the Venetians were able to establish themselves as the leading entrepot port of the Mediterranean world, where, as in London up to 1914, the vast bulk of the world’s strategic commodities were brought for sale, warehousing, and transshipment. The role of the Venetian merchant is that of the profiteering middleman who rooks both buyer and seller, backing up his monopolization of the distribution and transportation systems with the war galleys of the battle fleet.
8. How did Venice’s galley fleet system and the Arsenal function?
The Venetian approach to trade was ironically dirigistic. Venice asserted a monopoly of all trade and shipping in the northern Adriatic. The Serenissima’s own functionaries organized merchant galley fleets that were sent out one or two times a year to key ports. The galleys were built by the regime in its shipyards, known as the Arsenal, for many centuries the largest factory in the world. They were leased to oligarchs and consortia of oligarchs at a type of auction.
Every detail of the operation of these galley fleets, including the obligation to travel in convoy, was stipulated by peremptory state regulation. In the heyday of Venice, galley fleets were sent to Tana and to Trebizond in the Black Sea, to Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus on the way to Beirut in the Levant, to Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Oran, and Alexandria in North Africa, as well as to Spanish, French, and west coast Italian cities. Their profit margins had to be sufficient to cover a “traditional” twenty percent interest rate, the financing of frequent wars, and maritime insurance premiums, in which they were pioneers.
9. What was the structure of Venetian government, including the Gran Consiglio and the Doge?
All male members of the approximately one hundred-fifty noble families had the permanent right to a seat in the Gran Consiglio or Great Council, which grew to 2,000 members around 1500 and thereafter slowly declined. The Gran Consiglio elected the key governing bodies of the regime, including the one hundred-twenty members, or pregadi, of the Senate, the upper house which oversaw foreign affairs by choosing the Venetian ambassadors. The Senate also chose five war ministers, five naval ministers (all called savi) and six savii grandi, ministers of a still higher rank.
The Gran Consiglio also elected the doge himself, for life, through an incredibly Byzantine procedure designed to assure a representative choice. First, thirty members of the Gran Consiglio were chosen at random, using colored balls whose Venetian name is the origin of the American word ballot. These thirty drew lots to cut their numbers down to nine, who then nominated and elected a new group of forty electors. This procedure was repeated several times, terminating with a group of forty-one electors of whom twenty-five could nominate a doge for the approval of the Gran Consiglio.
10. What was the Council of Ten and how did it operate as Venice’s intelligence apparatus?
Most typical of the Venetian system is the Council of Ten, established in 1310 as the coordinating body for foreign and domestic political intelligence operations. Meeting in secret session together with the doge and his six advisers, the Ten had the power to issue a bill of capital attainder against any person inside Venetian jurisdiction, or abroad. If in Venice, that person was generally strangled the same night and the body thrown into the Canale degli Orfani.
The Ten had at their disposal a very extensive foreign intelligence network, but it was inside Venetian territory that their surveillance powers became pervasive: the contents of any discussion among oligarchs or citizens was routinely known to the Ten within twenty-four hours or less, thanks to the ubiquity of its informers and spies. Visitors to the Doge’s Palace today can see mail slots around the outside of the building in the shape of lion’s mouths marked Per Denontie Segrete (“For Secret Denunciations”) for those who wished to call to the attention of the Ten and their monstrous bureaucracy individuals stealing from the state or otherwise violating the law. Death sentences from the Ten were without appeal, and their proceedings were never made public.
11. How did Venice manipulate the Fourth Crusade to its advantage?
At a tournament in the Champagne in 1201, the Duke of Champagne and numerous feudal barons collectively vowed to make a fighting pilgrimage to the sepulcher of Our Lord in Jerusalem. The French knights sent Geoffrey of Villehardouin to Venice to negotiate a convoy of merchant galleys with an appropriate escort of warships. Geoffrey closed the deal with the Doge Enrico Dandolo, blind and over eighty years old. Dandolo drove a hard bargain: for the convoy with escort to Jerusalem and back, the French knights would have to fork over the sum of 85,000 silver marks, equal to 20,000 kilograms of silver, or about double the yearly income of the King of England or of France at that time.
When 10,000 French knights and infantry gathered on the Lido of Venice in the summer of 1202, it was found that the French, after pawning everything down to the family silver, still owed the Venetians 35,000 marks. The cunning Dandolo proposed that this debt could easily be canceled if the crusaders would join the Venetians in subjugating Zara, a Christian city in Dalmatia, across the Adriatic from Venice. At this point Dandolo made the crusaders a “geopolitical” proposal, pointing out that the emperor of Byzantium was suspected of being in alliance with the Saracens, and that an advance to the Holy Land would be foolhardy unless this problem were first dealt with. Thus, from 1203 to 1204, Constantinople was besieged by the joint Franco-Venetian expeditionary force, which finally succeeded in breaking through the fortifications along the Golden Horn.
12. What was Venice’s role in providing intelligence to the Mongol armies?
The Mongols did not sweep in wildly and suddenly, like reckless barbarians. No indeed, they advanced according to careful plan. At every stage, the Mongol generals informed themselves ahead of time about the state of European courts, and learned what feuds and disorders would be advantageous to their conquests. This valuable knowledge they obtained from Venetian merchants, men like Marco Polo’s father. It was thus not without reason that Polo himself was made welcome at the court of Kublai, and became for a time administrator of the Great Khan.
So the great Marco Polo, and the Venetian family from which he came, was responsible for directing the destruction of Ghengis Khan against Europe. The omnipresent Venetian intelligence was also a factor in the Mongol destruction of the Arab cultural center of Baghdad in 1258. The Venetians were the intelligencers for the Mongol army of Ghengis Khan and his heirs, and had a hand in guiding them to the sack of Baghdad and the obliteration of its renaissance in the thirteenth century.
13. How did Venice contribute to the destruction of the Italian Renaissance?
Since the Venetian oligarchy relied for its survival on the secret weapon of political intelligence manipulation, its primary strategic targets were first and foremost dictated by epistemological rather than military criteria. The real danger was a hostile power that developed epistemological defenses against manipulation and deceit. In the face of such a threat Venice did—and does—kill. The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps the greatest outpouring of human creativity in history, represented just such a threat to the Serene Republic, and in a more concentrated form than it had ever faced before.
Venice mobilized every resource at its disposal to destroy the Renaissance. After decades of sabotage, going so far as to arrange the ravaging of Italy by foreign armies, Venice succeeded. Machiavelli pointed out that the disintegration of Italy began when the Venetians succeeded in turning Lodovico il Moro, successor of Francesco as Duke of Milan, making him their agent of influence. Ludovico was responsible for the first major invasion of Italy in many years when he agreed to support the claims of Charles VIII of France to the Kingdom of Naples.
14. What was the Council of Florence and why did Venice oppose it?
The potential political and epistemological power of the Italian Renaissance are best identified in the ecumenical council of the Church convened in Florence in the year 1438. The council was moved to Florence at the urging of Cosimo de’ Medici, who held power from 1434 to 1464. Cosimo was the major financial and political sponsor of the proceedings and a self-declared enemy of Venice. The hope held out by the Council of Florence was to implement Nicholas of Cusa’s program of the Concordantia Catholica—a community of principle among humanist sovereign stages for cultural and economic development, against Venetians, Turks, and all enemies of natural law.
To Florence came the Emperor of Byzantium, John VIII Paleologue, accompanied by his adviser Gemisthos Plethon and Plethon’s student, Archbishop Bessarion of Nicea. The culmination of the council was an impassioned oration by Plethon on the antithesis between Plato and Aristotle, a speech which went far beyond anything ever heard in the West. Marsilio Ficino tells the story of how Cosimo de’ Medici, while listening to Plethon, made up his mind to create the Platonic Academy in Florence. Cosimo and his cothinkers came close several times to welding an alliance capable of dominating the world, and the first to pay the price of their success would have been the Venetians.
15. How did Venice manipulate the French invasions of Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries?
Machiavelli pointed out that the disintegration of Italy began when the Venetians succeeded in turning Lodovico il Moro, successor of Francesco as Duke of Milan, making him their agent of influence. Ludovico was responsible for the first major invasion of Italy in many years when he agreed to support the claims of Charles VIII of France to the Kingdom of Naples. This was the French king whom his father, the great Louis XI, considered a hopeless imbecile. In 1494 the French army crossed the Alps, accompanied by a Genoese adviser we will meet again later: Giuliano della Rovere.
Several years later, in 1498, the Venetians repeated this maneuver, with the variation that this time it was they who blatantly invited the French to cross the Alps. This time the pretext was the French claim to the Milanese dukedom, and the dupe was a new French king, Louis XII. The French army knocked out Milan in 1500, a fatal blow to the Renaissance cultural ferment associated there with Leonardo da Vinci. For Venice, so far so good: Florence, Naples, and Milan had been ruined. But ironically, the same dumb Valois and Hapsburg giants which had taken out three dangerous rivals were now to turn like Frankenstein’s monsters on the wily new Romans.
16. What was the War of the League of Cambrai and how did Venice survive it?
This was the famous crisis of the War of the League of Cambrai, which was assembled in 1508-1509. The opposing coalition was made up of the pope (by then the Genoese Giuliano della Rovere, as Julius II), the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, France, Spain, Savoy, Mantua, and Ferrara. The announced purpose of this alliance was to expunge Venice from the face of the earth. It nearly worked. At Agnadello, near the Adda River, the Venetian mercenary army was crushed by an army composed predominantly of Frenchmen.
With nothing left but the lagoons, the Venetian position was desperate. The first Venetian ploy was to attempt to dismember the Cambrai coalition. They started with Pope Julius II. What probably accounted more directly for Julius II’s decision to reverse his alliances was a deal mediated with the Venetians by Agostino Chigi, the Siena Black Guelph banker. He proposed that the Venetians stop buying alum from the Turks, but contract for a large shipment at higher prices from the alum mines at Tolfa in the Papal States. To sweeten the pot, Chigi offered the Venetians tens of thousands of ducats in much-needed loans. Only the Chigi loan allowed them to hire enough Swiss mercenaries to hold out against the French and the Imperial Landsknechte.
17. How did Venice contribute to the creation and spread of the Protestant Reformation?
The more immediate controllers of Martin Luther have yet to be identified, but this is something of a secondary matter. Luther’s agitation in Wittenberg was merely one more example of protests against the papacy and the Curia that had been chronic and endemic for decades. What gave Luther and the rest of the Protestant reformers real clout was a publicity and diffusion of their ideas that owed much to the Venetian publishing establishment. The Venetian presses quickly turned out 40,000 copies of the writings of Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, and the heresiarch Juan Valdes, especially popular in Italy.
Pope Leo X publicly denounced the University of Padua as the hotbed of inspiration of the German disease of Lutheranism. Clearly, Venetian interest was well-served by a schismatic movement that would embroil Germany, France, and the rest of Europe in a series of easily profiled conflicts. In addition, a conflict between reformers and counter-reformers, all owing allegiance to Aristotle, would severely undercut the influence of Erasmus and others like him. Venice had reacted to the invention of moveable-type printing by Johannes Gutenberg in a way that foreshadowed the reaction of the British oligarchy in this century to radio, the movies, and television—they had immediately attempted to seize control of the new medium.
18. What was Gasparo Contarini’s role in founding the Jesuit order?
Gasparo Contarini was the scion of one of Venice’s most prestigious longhi families. The Contarinis had produced seven doges, and Gasparo had his sights set on being the eighth, before he was tapped to serve Venice as a member of the College of Cardinals. He served the Serene Republic as ambassador to the court of Charles V, and as ambassador to the Vatican, where he took a role in setting up the Medici Pope Clement VII for the 1527 Sack of Rome. What does this sublime Venetian patrician have to do with the founding of the Jesuit order by that itinerant and deranged mystic, Ignatius of Loyola? Ignatius was the creature of Venice, and of Contarini in particular.
Then Ignatius made his way to Rome. Here he became the protege of Gasparo Contarini, who had been appointed to the College of Cardinals by Pope Paul III Farnese. The cardinal took the Exercitationes Spirituales, and appointed Ignatius his personal confessor and spiritual adviser. By 1540, Contarini had personally interceded with the pope against Ignatius’s enemies within the Church hierarchy to ensure the founding of the Society of Jesus as a new Church order. In June 1539, Contarini personally traveled to the pope’s summer residence at Tivoli, and prevailed on the pontiff to let him read aloud the statutes of the new order composed by Ignatius.
19. How did Venice help create the Enlightenment through figures like Paolo Sarpi?
In the years around 1570, accordingly, Venice became the site of the first example in Europe of what the French later termed “salons” for socializing and literary discussion: the Ridotto Morosini, sponsored by the ancient family of the same name. Here the seeds were sown that would later produce free-thinking, l’esprit libertin and the philosophes—in a word, the Enlightenment. The Ridotto Morosini salon was in favor of tolerance and science, against everything doctrinaire and narrow. They sheltered Galileo against the Inquisition.
At the same time, the powerful Venetian propaganda apparatus swung into action, under the leadership of a think tanker named Paolo Sarpi, whose lack of noble birth kept him from bigger things. Sarpi was the Venetian contact man for Sir Francis Bacon. Sarpi had been in Rome, where he had been associated with Nicholas Bobadilla, one of St. Ignatius’s original hard core. He was also the author of an Arte di ben pensare which is curiously similar to the writings of John Locke. Sarpi admitted in private to being “a Protestant.” He engaged in a long pamphlet war with Bellarmino, and topped this off with a spurious History of the Council of Trent, which needless to say whitewashed the role of Venetian intelligence in the Counter-Reformation.
20. What was Francesco Petrarch’s conflict with Venetian Aristotelianism?
The inveterate Aristotelianism of Venice is the starting point for a major literary attack on that city by Francesco Petrarch, son of Dante’s personal secretary, who took up the responsibility of servicing Dante’s humanist networks during the disastrous years around the middle of the fourteenth century. Petrarch proposed that he be allowed to take up residence in Venice and locate his library there; the books would remain as a bequest to the city after his death, forming the nucleus of what would have been the first public library in Europe. Soon he began to receive the visits of four Venetian Aristotelians, whom he later referred to as “my four famous friends.”
After several discussions with Petrarch, these four began to circulate the slander that Petrarch was “a good man, but without any education.” Petrarch shortly abandoned the library project and soon thereafter left Venice permanently. His answer to his slanderers is contained in his treatise De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (1367), his most powerful piece of invective-polemical writing. Petrarch scored Aristotelian scholastic philosophy as “a prostitute who delights to worry about vain questions of words.” To the authority of Aristotle, Petrarch counterposed the Platonism of the New Testament, saying that Christ, not Aristotle, was for him the decisive guide. His “four friends,” he asserted, were not Christian, but preferred to follow their favorite philosopher in their sophistry, blasphemy, and impiety.
21. How does Shakespeare’s “Othello” analyze Venetian intelligence methods?
Shakespeare’s Othello was written and performed shortly after 1603, when the Venetians and Genoese had acquired vast powers in England through the accession of their puppet James I to the throne. Othello is a Moor, hired out to Venice as a mercenary, and at the apex of his power, having just won a victory over the Turkish fleet attacking Cyprus. He enjoys the full confidence of the senate, and has just married Desdemona, the daughter of a patrician. Othello the “erring barbarian” is however something of a dumb giant: his proficiency in the arts of war is unmatched, but his emotional makeup tends decidedly toward the naive and infantile.
All of these weaknesses are systematically exploited by “honest Iago,” a member of Othello’s staff who is determined to destroy him. Iago is the figure of the Venetian intelligence officer, an expert in what he calls “double knavery”—the art of manipulation. He sets out to destroy Othello using an accurate psychological profile of the Moor, and exploiting above all Othello’s naive willingness to trust his “honest Iago.” Iago uses his throwaway agent, the dupe Roderigo, for financing and services. He sets up scenes where he cons one participant with one story, briefs another participant with a different story, brings them together in a controlled environment, and exploits the resulting fireworks for his overall strategy.
22. What insights does Schiller’s “The Ghost Seer” provide about Venetian manipulation?
Schiller’s direct treatment of Venice is a fragment of a novel titled Der Geisterseher (“The Ghost Seer”). Its central character is a Sicilian charlatan, expert in bringing the spirits of the departed back into the world for the thrill-seeking nobility at seances. This Sicilian charlatan is a figure for a whole class of Venetian intelligence operatives, like Count Cagliostro, the mountebank who claimed to be the reincarnation of the leading Mason of ancient Egypt. In Schiller’s tale, a young German prince in Venice for the grand tour is subjected to a series of manipulations by a sinister, masked Armenian, who informs him, before the fact, of the death of a close relative hundreds of miles away.
He begins to frequent a semisecret free-thinking club, called the Bucentoro after the golden ship used by the doge on occasions of state. At least one cardinal is also a member of the Bucentoro. He takes to gambling, loses heavily, and contracts immense debts. In the meantime, rumors are spread at his Protestant court that he has become a Catholic, which leads to his repudiation by his entire family. At the end of the fragment, his life has been ruined, and his death is imminent. The prince is introduced to a series of happenings ostensibly intended to convince him that he is in the grip of occult forces, destabilizing his religious convictions while making him overconfident of his mental capacities after he pierces through part of the operation.
23. How did Venice’s partnership with Genoa evolve over time?
During the first half of the fifteenth century, much Venetian energy was devoted to a rapid expansion up the Po Valley toward Milan, but Venice and Genoa had engaged in a series of highly destructive wars up till about the end of the fourteenth century. After that, Genoa slowly gravitated toward the status of junior partner and close associate of the Venetians. The Venetians had bested the Genoese by virtue of superior connections in the East, but otherwise there was a broad area of agreement. The symbol of Genoa was St. George the dragon-slayer, in reality no saint at all but a thinly disguised version of Perseus saving Andromeda by slaying the sea monster.
The Venetians had their own Marduk cult, although subordinated to St. Mark, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, home of a Dominican monastery and today of the Cini Foundation, one of the highest level think tanks in the world. What probably accounted more directly for Julius II’s decision to reverse his alliances during the Cambrai crisis was a deal mediated with the Venetians by Agostino Chigi, the Siena Black Guelph banker. Several years later the Venetians tried the same tactic in reverse, and after having set up the Holy League of Cognac alliance, designed to play the French against Charles V once again, the Venetians retired into defensive positions to await the outcome. To make Charles V’s triumph complete, the Genoese Admiral Andrea Doria, commanding the French fleet, defected to the imperial side.
24. What was Venice’s “metastasis” into other European financial centers?
The policies of the giovani, propagandized by Sarpi and Doge Leonardo Dona during the struggle around the Interdict, corresponded to a metastasis of Venice’s power and influence through the world. The Venetians and their Genoese Doria-faction associates were busily shifting their family fortunes into more profitable locations, not tied to the fate of what was rapidly becoming a third-rate naval power. Venice was extremely liquid at this time, with about 14 million ducats in coins in reserve around 1600. At about the same time, incredibly, the Venetian regime had completed the process of paying off its entire public debt, leaving the state with no outstanding obligations of any type.
This overall highly liquid situation is a sure sign that flights of capital are underway, in the direction of the countries singled out by the giovani as future partners or victims: France, England, and the Netherlands. The Genoese around the St. George’s Bank received virtually the entire world’s circulating gold stocks. The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year. This fair was a precursor of the post-Versailles Bank for International Settlements.
25. How did Venice influence the British East India Company and Dutch East India Company?
In 1603, Venice and Genoa assumed direction of the finances of Stuart England, and imparted their characteristic method to the British East India Company. It is also this tandem that was present at the creation of the great Amsterdam Bank, the financial hinge of the seventeenth century, and of the Dutch East India Company. The Venetians, in cooperation with the restored—that is, degenerated—Medici interests, began a major move into maritime and other types of insurance. These ventures live on today in the biggest business enterprise associated with Venice, the Assicurazioni Generali Venezia, one of the biggest if not the biggest insurance and real-estate holdings in the world.
Venice was also the past master of the more exotic permutations of the stolid old British divide et impera, “divide and conquer.” In the sixteenth century, Venetian strategic doctrine was to play the Ottoman Turks against the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs, and then to correct any residual strategic imbalance by playing the Hapsburgs off in their turn against the French. Sometimes Venice attempted to play the Portuguese rival power off against the Dutch. Later this was expanded to include playing the Dutch against the English, and the English against the French.
26. What was Venice’s role in financing and manipulating the Spanish Empire?
The Venice-Genoa partnership is in evidence first of all in the banking side of the Spanish looting of the New World. Venice got control of the silver coming from the Americas, shifting to a silver standard from the previous gold standard in the middle of the sixteenth century. This silver was used to pay for the spices and other products from the East. The Genoese around the St. George’s Bank received virtually the entire world’s circulating gold stocks. The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year.
Venetian capacities to manipulate Charles V were formidable indeed. The emperor’s bankers and intelligencers were the Fuggers of Augsburg, a banking house and a city that must be regarded as Venetian satellites, within a context of very heavy Venetian control of the cities of the Danube valley. Virtually every young male member of the Fugger family, and of their colleagues the Welsers as well, was sent to Venice for a period of apprenticeship at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. This was the case with Jacob Fugger the Rich. Venice was the pivot for Fugger metals trading, especially toward the East.
27. How did Venice contribute to the development of maritime insurance and banking?
The Venetians, in cooperation with the restored—that is, degenerated—Medici interests, began a major move into maritime and other types of insurance. These ventures live on today in the biggest business enterprise associated with Venice, the Assicurazioni Generali Venezia, one of the biggest if not the biggest insurance and real-estate holdings in the world. Their profit margins had to be sufficient to cover a “traditional” twenty percent interest rate, the financing of frequent wars, and maritime insurance premiums, in which they were pioneers.
Venice was also the midwife for the great financial power growing up in Geneva, which specialized in controlling the French public debt and in fostering the delphic spirits of the Enlightenment. The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year. This fair was a precursor of the post-Versailles Bank for International Settlements. The Venetian regime had completed the process of paying off its entire public debt, leaving the state with no outstanding obligations of any type, while maintaining extremely liquid reserves for capital flight operations.
28. What happened when Napoleon liquidated Venice in 1797?
On May 12, 1797, the Gran Consiglio obeyed Napoleon’s ultimatum and voted itself out of existence. Four thousand French infantrymen paraded on St. Mark’s Square, where foreign troops had never before in history been seen. The golden Bucentoro was burned and the gold carted off. The Venetian “Republic” was finished, but it continued most emphatically to exist in less visible but highly effective forms. One particular of the last years of Venice is of special interest: during the American Revolution about 3,000 Venetian naval personnel, corresponding to about one third of the total available strength, were serving with the British Royal Navy.
Although Napoleon Bonaparte had the merit of forcing the formal liquidation of this loathsome organism during his Italian campaign of 1797, his action did not have the effect we would have desired. The cancer, so to speak, had already had ample time for metastasis—into Geneva, Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere. Thus, although the sovereign political power of Venice had been extinguished, its characteristic method lived on, serving as the incubator of what the twentieth century knows as fascism. Commenting on the liquidation of Venice, the great Neapolitan Neoplatonic Giuseppe Cuoco wrote that the fulfillment of Machiavelli’s prophecy in the destruction of the old, imbecilic Venetian oligarchy would be a great boon for Italy always.
29. How did Venice influence 19th-century fascist cultural movements?
Unfortunately, all the obituaries were premature: Venice has continued to be very much alive. During the nineteenth century and up to our own time it has been the most important single incubator for fascist movements. With its military and financial power largely emigrated elsewhere, Venice’s importance for political culture is now greater than ever. Richard Wagner wrote part of Tristan und Isolde while living in the Palazzo Giustinian on the Grand Canal. At the end of his life Wagner moved to Palazzo Vendramin Callergi, where he died. This building, presently a gambling casino, was also the home of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European Union.
Friedrich Nietzsche loved Venice, returned there incessantly, and dedicated certain poems to the city which can today still be used in lieu of a powerful emetic. Venice was an inspiration for Lord Byron, for Thomas Mann, and so on. When British East India Company retainer Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population he was plagiarizing from the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, who produced, around 1750, a fully developed version of the argument that geometric population growth outstrips the much slower arithmetic progress of food production. John Ruskin, the leading ideologue of the British Dark Ages faction, began his career with a raving treatise on architecture, The Stones of Venice (1851).
30. What was Count Volpi di Misurata’s role in sponsoring Mussolini and D’Annunzio?
A turn-of-the-century new Roman Empire faction led by Venetian Count Volpi di Misurata, who was known as the doge of his era, sponsored the fascist Mussolini supporter Gabriele D’Annunzio to drum up enthusiasm for a new crusade into the Balkans and the East. Volpi became finance minister in Mussolini’s cabinet, along with a very large number of other Venetians. D’Annunzio incited the Italians to take back Trieste, the rest of Italia irredenta, and the Dardanelles, bringing on to center stage the so-called Parvus Plan for dismemberment of the Ottoman and Russian empires, which is generally recognized as the detonator of World War I.
It is possible that the turn-of-the-century super spook Alexander Parvus was ultimately employed by Venice. The Venetians ran a large chunk of the action associated with the Parvus Plan to dismember Russia, and may well have been the ones who surprised everyone, including London, by unleashing World War I in the Balkans. Thus, although the sovereign political power of Venice had been extinguished, its characteristic method lived on, serving as the incubator of what the twentieth century knows as fascism, first in its role as a breeding ground for the protofascist cultural productions of Wagner and Nietzsche, later in the sponsorships of fascist politicians like Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini.
31. How does the Cini Foundation continue Venetian influence today?
Most important, Venice is today through its Cini Foundation and Societe Europeenne de Culture the think tank and staging area for the Club of Rome and related deployments. Venice is the supranational homeland of the New Dark Ages gang, the unifying symbol for the most extreme Utopian lunatic fringe in the international intelligence community today. The Venetians had their own Marduk cult, although subordinated to St. Mark, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, home of a Dominican monastery and today of the Cini Foundation, one of the highest level think tanks in the world.
Get to know Venice. Then look back to the monetarist imbecility of Paul Volcker, at the ideological fanaticism that radiates forth from the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, the Bank for International Settlements and the rest. You will recognize the unmistakable putrid stench of a Venetian canal, where the rotting marble palaces of generations of parasites are corroded by the greatest cynicism and cruelty the world has ever known. The cancer, so to speak, had already had ample time for metastasis—into Geneva, Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere. Thus, although the sovereign political power of Venice had been extinguished, its characteristic method lived on.
32. What is the Club of Rome and how does it represent modern Venetian methods?
Today, the Club of Rome is the institution that represents the most concentrated essence of Venetian influence and the Venetian method. The Club of Rome wants to convince the great powers and peoples of the world to commit collective suicide by accepting the genocidal doctrine of zero growth. It also hopes to abolish the sovereign nation as a vehicle for economic growth and scientific progress. Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei has just written a new book titled One Hundred Pages for the Future, a global review of the impact of the Club of Rome, and particularly since its 1972 release of the zero-growth model Limits to Growth.
Peccei reports that in the ten years since Limits to Growth was published, a series of social movements has sprung up under the sponsorship of the ideas in the book. These—the women’s movement, the peace movement, Third World national liberation movements, gay rights, civil liberties, ecologists, consumer and minority rights, etc.—must now be welded together into one movement for a single strategic goal: the implementation of a zero-growth international order. Most important, Venice is today through its Cini Foundation and Societe Europeenne de Culture the think tank and staging area for the Club of Rome and related deployments.
33. How did Venice influence Thomas Malthus’s population theories?
When British East India Company retainer Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population he was plagiarizing from the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, who produced, around 1750, a fully developed version of the argument that geometric population growth outstrips the much slower arithmetic progress of food production. Venice beat Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham to the punch in inflicting British political economy and philosophical radicalism on the world. After the Council of Trent, Venice was also the matrix for the philosophe-libertin ferment of the delphic, anti-Leibniz Enlightenment.
The examples of Venice’s continuing influence are inexhaustible. Venice was thereafter the “mother” for the unsavory, itinerant Ignatius of Loyola and his Jesuit order, and later became the incubator for various theosophical movements. After Schiller’s time, this category swelled considerably with theosophists like Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Henry Steel Olcott, and with that arch-apparitionist, Rudolph Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophy movement and the Waldorf schools. The Venetian influence on population theory represents a continuation of their ancient commitment to reducing human populations to manageable levels for oligarchical control.
34. What connections exist between Venice and modern institutions like the Bank for International Settlements?
The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year. This fair was a precursor of the post-Versailles Bank for International Settlements. Get to know Venice. Then look back to the monetarist imbecility of Paul Volcker, at the ideological fanaticism that radiates forth from the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, the Bank for International Settlements and the rest. You will recognize the unmistakable putrid stench of a Venetian canal, where the rotting marble palaces of generations of parasites are corroded by the greatest cynicism and cruelty the world has ever known.
Venice was also the midwife for the great financial power growing up in Geneva, which specialized in controlling the French public debt and in fostering the delphic spirits of the Enlightenment. The metastasis of Venetian methods into modern financial institutions represents the continuation of their traditional usurious practices, including their “traditional” twenty percent interest rate, and their role as profiteering middlemen who manipulate both buyer and seller. The Bank for International Settlements serves as a modern incarnation of the Venetian model of supranational financial control operating above and beyond sovereign governments.
35. How does the Societe Europeenne de Culture advance Venetian objectives?
The Societe Europeenne de Culture, a think tank created in 1950 through the efforts of Venetian intelligence operative Umberto Campagnolo, has for the past three decades pulled intellectuals from both East and West into organizing for an “international culture,” based on rejecting the existence of sovereign nations. The SEC counted among its members the cream of the postwar intelligentsia: Adam Schaff of Poland, Bertolt Brecht of East Germany, Georg Lukas of Hungary, and Boris Pasternak of the Soviet Union, as well as Stephen Spender and Arnold Toynbee, Benedetto Croce and Norberto Bobbio, Julian Huxley and Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac, and Jean Cocteau.
Later, the SEC launched the Third World national liberation ideology. Most important, Venice is today through its Cini Foundation and Societe Europeenne de Culture the think tank and staging area for the Club of Rome and related deployments. Venice is the supranational homeland of the New Dark Ages gang, the unifying symbol for the most extreme Utopian lunatic fringe in the international intelligence community today. The SEC represents a modern application of the Venetian method of creating controlled opposition movements and manipulating intellectuals from both sides of political divides to advance oligarchical objectives.
36. What is the “collapse of empires” strategy and how has Venice employed it?
But the essence of their strategic doctrine was something more abstruse, something sometimes described as the “collapse of empires” scenario. Venice parasitized the decline of much larger states, a decline that Venice itself strove to organize, sometimes in a long and gradual descending curve, but sometimes in a quick bonanza of looting. Venice was repeatedly confronted with the problem posed by a triumphant enemy, at the height of his power, who would be perfectly capable of crushing the Serenissima in short order. This enemy had to be manipulated into self-destruction, not in any old way, but in the precise and specific way that served the Venetian interest.
Does this sound impossible? What is astounding is how often it has succeeded. In fact, it is succeeding in a very real sense in the world today. The most spectacular example of Venetian manipulations of the dumb giants of this world has gone down in history as the Fourth Crusade. The classical Venetian predicament is that of the weaker power attempting to play off two or more major empires. Venice was the past master of the more exotic permutations of the stolid old British divide et impera, “divide and conquer.” The Venetians also goaded forces out of the East to attack Christendom, and got along with the slave-trading factions in each of these groups about as well as a power like Venice could get along with anybody.
37. How did Venice use the “divide and conquer” method throughout history?
The classical Venetian predicament is that of the weaker power attempting to play off two or more major empires. This was the case when the Venetian power was in its very infancy, and survival depended on playing off the Langobard Kingdom of Italy against the Byzantines. This ploy was later replaced by the attempt to play the Byzantines off against the Carolingian Empire in the West. In the eleventh century, the Venetians successfully incited the Norman barons operating out of Sicily under Robert Guiscard to attack Byzantium, and then moved in to offer the desperate Byzantines protection.
In the sixteenth century, Venetian strategic doctrine was to play the Ottoman Turks against the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs, and then to correct any residual strategic imbalance by playing the Hapsburgs off in their turn against the French. Sometimes Venice attempted to play the Portuguese rival power off against the Dutch. Later this was expanded to include playing the Dutch against the English, and the English against the French. The Venetians also goaded forces out of the East to attack Christendom. Venice was the manipulator of Saracens, Mongols, and Turks, and got along with the slave-trading factions in each of these groups about as well as a power like Venice could get along with anybody.
38. What role did Venice play in manipulating both Reformation and Counter-Reformation?
Venetian influence on both Reformation and Counter-Reformation can be seen most clearly in the remarkable career of Gasparo Contarini, who did not let the fact that he was a Protestant in theology well before Luther prevent him from founding the Society of Jesus. What gave Luther and the rest of the Protestant reformers real clout was a publicity and diffusion of their ideas that owed much to the Venetian publishing establishment. The Venetian presses quickly turned out 40,000 copies of the writings of Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, and the heresiarch Juan Valdes, especially popular in Italy.
Clearly, Venetian interest was well-served by a schismatic movement that would embroil Germany, France, and the rest of Europe in a series of easily profiled conflicts. In addition, a conflict between reformers and counter-reformers, all owing allegiance to Aristotle, would severely undercut the influence of Erasmus and others like him. Venice had reacted to the invention of moveable-type printing by Johannes Gutenberg in a way that foreshadowed the reaction of the British oligarchy in this century to radio, the movies, and television. They had immediately attempted to seize control of the new medium, bringing dozens of Gutenberg’s apprentices to Venice where book production frequently exceeded the rest of the world combined.
39. How does modern environmental and zero-growth ideology connect to Venetian methods?
Today, the Club of Rome is the institution that represents the most concentrated essence of Venetian influence and the Venetian method. The Club of Rome wants to convince the great powers and peoples of the world to commit collective suicide by accepting the genocidal doctrine of zero growth. It also hopes to abolish the sovereign nation as a vehicle for economic growth and scientific progress. Peccei reports that in the ten years since Limits to Growth was published, a series of social movements has sprung up under the sponsorship of the ideas in the book.
These—the women’s movement, the peace movement, Third World national liberation movements, gay rights, civil liberties, ecologists, consumer and minority rights, etc.—must now be welded together into one movement for a single strategic goal: the implementation of a zero-growth international order. The Venetian problem remains with us today. Venice beat Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham to the punch in inflicting British political economy and philosophical radicalism on the world. When British East India Company retainer Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population he was plagiarizing from the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, who produced, around 1750, a fully developed version of the argument that geometric population growth outstrips food production.
40. What makes Venice a continuing threat to sovereign nation-states and human progress?
Truly, the most urgent task of this generation of mankind is to definitively liquidate the horror that is Venice. Venice is the supranational homeland of the New Dark Ages gang, the unifying symbol for the most extreme Utopian lunatic fringe in the international intelligence community today. The Club of Rome wants to convince the great powers and peoples of the world to commit collective suicide by accepting the genocidal doctrine of zero growth. It also hopes to abolish the sovereign nation as a vehicle for economic growth and scientific progress.
Since the Venetian oligarchy relied for its survival on the secret weapon of political intelligence manipulation, its primary strategic targets were first and foremost dictated by epistemological rather than military criteria. The real danger was a hostile power that developed epistemological defenses against manipulation and deceit. In the face of such a threat Venice did—and does—kill. The Venetians were the mortal enemies of the humanist Paleologue dynasty in Byzantium. They were the implacable foes of Gemisthos Plethon, Cosimo de’ Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and the entirety of the Florentine Golden Renaissance, which they conspired—successfully—to destroy.
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