John Julius Norwich - A History of Venice

PENGUIN BOOKS

A HISTORY OF VENICE

John Julius Norwich was born in 1939. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and, after a spell of National Service in the Navy, at New College, Oxford, where he took a degree in French and Russian. In 1953 he joined the Foreign Service, where he remained for twelve years, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and with the British delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva. In 1964 he resigned from the service in order to write.

His many and varied publications include two books on the medieval Norman Kingdom in Sicily, The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the Sun, which are published by Penguin in one volume entitled The Normans in Sicily; two travel books, Mount Athos (with Reresby Sitwell) and Sahara; The Architecture of Southern England; Clyndeboume; two anthologies of poetry and prose, Christmas Crackers and More Christmas Crackers; A History of Venice, originally published in two volumes; his three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Byzantium: The Apogee, and Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. A Short History of Byzantium was published in 1997. Many of his books are published in Penguin. In addition he has written and presented some thirty historical documents for television, and is a regular lecturer on Venice and numerous other subjects.

For nearly thirty years Lord Norwich was chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund. He is now chairman of the World Monuments Fund in Britain. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Geographical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, a Companion of the Royal Victorian Order and a Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He was made a CVO in 1993.

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press in two volumes: Venice, the Rise to Empire

1977 and Venice, the Greatness and the Fall 1981

Published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press in one volume: A History of Venice 1982

Published in Penguin Books 1983

Reissued in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright John Julius Norwich, 1977, 1981, 1982, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to use photographs: B. B. C. Hulton Picture Library for the frontispiece and nos. 50, 51; Bodleian Library, Oxford, for nos. 14, 28; Osvaldo Bohm, Venice, for nos. 1,3,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,15,16,17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26; the Trustees of the British Museum for nos. 12,41,48,49, 53, 59; Courtauld Institute of Art for nos. 4, 5, 24,27, 29, 30; the Italian Tourist Office for no. 2; Mansell Collection for nos. 18, 19, 21,31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45,46,47, 54, 55, 56, 58; the National Gallery, London, for no. 57; The Trustees of the National Maritime Museum for nos. 40,52.

Except in the United Sates of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193678-9

For Jason

and in memory of the grandfather

he never knew who loved Venice

and should have written this book