The Venetians used to say that whenever the Golden Horses were moved, an empire fell

There they are now, out of the sun at last. Through the door of their last resting-place you may see their forms, proud as ever, silhouetted against the half-light from the windows. Their hoofs are raised, as always, in a noble gesture of greeting, companionship or compassion. Their heads are turned still, fraternally towards each other. But the life has gone out of them at last, as the power and purpose have left Venice. The Venetians used to say that whenever the Golden Horses were moved, an empire fell – the Byzantine Empire in 1204, the Venetian Empire in 1797, the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, the Kaiser’s Empire in 1918,Hitler’s Empire in 1945. This their last move, though, is no more than an obituary gesture, a long farewell, a recognition that the glory of Venice has gone, and only the forms remain.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 187

Their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek

The Venetians left the Ionians peacefully if in obloquy, pushed out by Napoleon, and their place was presently taken by the British, whose manners were not dissimilar and whose intentions towards the islands were much the same. When, in their turn, the British voluntarily left in 1864, the islands became the most cultivated and progressive parts of the new Greece, and for this the Venetians could properly claim credit. They had ruled the Ionians for four centuries, and their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 152

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima

Certainly the arrogance of the Venetians has never been forgotten by the Greeks – who, established here in Homeric times long before Venice existed, have out-stayed all successive rulers to remain as Greek as ever. Until the land reforms in Greece after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away.


J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 49

For old he was, but rascally

For old he was, but rascally. Enrico Dandolo’s part in the Fourth Crusade has been debated ever since, but we may assume that, however moved his people were by the cause, he himself did nothing out of pure religious impulse. It is very unlikely that he ever intended to lead his ships to an assault on Egypt, as the Crusaders thought. Venetian trade with Egypt was extremely valuable to Venice, and some scholars suggest indeed that Dandolo told the Sultan of Egypt all about the Crusaders’ plans.

The chances are that even as that great white hat was placed upon his head, Dandolo was planning to lead the Crusade to a very different destination: not an Islamic objective at all, but the greatest city of Christendom itself, Constantinople. The time had come to humble the arrogant emperors, and ensure once and for all Venetian commercial primacy in the east.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 21

Ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine

Certainly by the fourth millenium BCE: remains found in a northern Kazakh burial site from that period contained ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine. Many of the jaws and teeth show the sort of wear you would see on a horse fitted with a bit, which suggests that steppe people were riding horses about 5,000 years ago at a time when the first pharoah was unifying the upper and lower lands of Egypt, when Gilgamesh built the incomparable walls of Uruk, Aborigines were engraving rocks around what is now Sydney, settlements began to appear in Central America and the Cycladic civilisation emerged in Greece.  

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 48-9

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers. The first to stop hunting and gathering did so no more than 12,000 years ago, which is but a dot on the human timeline. This was when food was abundant and there were few of us to eat it. The Bible's Old Testament and the Quran's Sura 2, al-Baqarah, the Cow, present this as time spent in a garden, a time of great happiness and perfect innocent in the Garden of Eden.

There are many translations of the word Eden, but all of them point in the same direction, from the Sumerian edin, meaning a plain or steppe, to the Aramaic word for well-watered and the Hebrew for pleasure.

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 15

The youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century

The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century. And all have one thing in common: they are all designed to streamline the reading process, to bring a new efficiency to the way we use books.

D. Duncan, Index, a history of the (2021), 56