Constructing Ionian identities: the Ionian Islands in British official ...

have been enhanced because it failed to secure the support of an entire social class,
as Venice had done.
Although the Venetians collected high taxes, they spent little on public works
in the Islands. Fear of the plague that had devastated medieval Europe motivated
Venetian authorities to regulate quarantine and to establish local hospitals,
orphanages and charitable institutions, supervising the health of the populari.
However, no educational system was established in the Septinsula. The sons of the
nobility were tutored privately at home and then sent to Italian universities, mainly
in Padua and Pisa, where they were exposed to western knowledge and progress.
They returned to the Islands with western practices, reflected in their language,
manner and dress. As a result, music, theatre, literature, poetry and scholarship
flourished in the Islands by the end of the eighteenth century, forming an Ionian
Enlightenment.
Venetian colonisation lasted for approximately four hundred years before it
ended in 1797, when Venice fell to Napoleon’s armies. After several centuries of
political stability, the Islands underwent three successive military occupations: the
French (1797-1799), the Russian-Turkish (1800-1807), followed again by the French
(1807-1809). 154 These occupations in a twenty year period were an indication of the
Islands’ geo-political importance during this period of political instability in Europe.
This instability also saw political and social changes in the Islands that, while not
154 Verykios S., I Istoria ton Inomenon Kraton ton Ionion Nison, [The History of the United States of
the Ionian Islands], p. 33.
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