The Body of Saint Mark, and a Chapel That Ran a State

Venetian tradition holds that in 828 two merchants removed the body of Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria and got it past the customs inspection by packing pork around it, which no Muslim official would search. A legend developed afterwards that an angel had once told Mark his rest would be in the lagoon, which conveniently made the theft a homecoming.

The consequences were constitutional. The basilica built for the relic stands beside the doge's palace and was, until 1807, the private chapel of the doge rather than the cathedral of the city; the patriarch sat elsewhere. That arrangement kept the republic's central religious institution under the government's control rather than the church's, which is one reason Venice could take an independent line with Rome, most spectacularly during the interdict of 1606, when the city ordered its clergy to keep celebrating and expelled those who obeyed the pope.

The building itself is a Byzantine church in the west, domed and encrusted with gold ground mosaics, and much of what covers it was taken from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, including the four bronze horses. The Pala d'Oro behind the altar is a screen of enamels and jewels assembled over four centuries. The whole is a statement that Venice was heir to the eastern empire and answerable to nobody, and the winged lion of Mark became the emblem of every territory it ruled.