The Serpent of Venice is set around 1299, when Venice’s dominance of trade in the Mediterranean was still being established, and the city-state had, indeed, been at war with Genoa for most of the last part of the century, a war over maritime superiority that would continue through most of the fourteenth century as well. I moved the action taken from Othello, from the island of Cyprus, which was strategically valuable to the Turks in the 1500s, to the island of Corsica, which is almost literally in Genoa’s backyard, in order to facilitate the travel to Genoa and back in a time frame that would fit the story. Here the story was driven by history, as much as by the influence of plays or stories. The Cask of Amontillado specifies no particular time, but one infers that it takes place sometime in the eighteenth century, easy enough to reconcile, since Carnival time in Venice seems to have remained constant for hundreds of years.

Venice had been established on an archipelago of islands in a salt marsh in the Adriatic Sea by refugees from Tuscany who were fleeing the invading forces of the Lombards and later Attila the Hun. Protected by a natural moat on the land side, and barrier islands, called the Lido, on the sea side, Venice grew into a powerful trading city with a representative republic as its government. The senators were elected by the neighborhoods, and a doge, or duke, was elected by the senators, and was advised by a council of six senators who ascended by seniority and election of their peers. (Different sources I found said the number of the council varied from six to twelve at different times, so I chose six for the story to give the position more power.) This representative republic was maintained in various forms until 1287, when Doge Giovanni Dandalo proposed that eligibility for the council be limited only to those whose fathers had been on the council. By 1299 it had become law and the republic became more of an inheritable oligarchy. This is the law that Iago and Antonio attempt to exploit by trying to arrange the marriage of Bassanio to Portia and eliminate Othello, who, by the circumstances I have created in the story, has been awarded Brabantio’s seat on the council. Venice, despite the attempt in the thirteenth century to turn it into an oligarchy, did remain, in some form, an independent city-state until it was overthrown by Napoleon in 1797.