About the time Charlemagne invaded the Laguna and Venice returned Frankish fire with bread

The myth of Charlemagne's invasion of the Venetian Lagoon provides insight into how Venetian historiographers manipulated the past for utilitarian purposes. From analyzing and contextualizing the oldest historiographical evidence, the article identifies the legend's success in the logic of opposition to an "enemy" through which a historical Venetian identity could be symbolically defined. Legendary archetypes were part of a historiographic-literary process that aimed to construct a "national" community and, at the same time, looked to a fantastic, glorious past for the prefiguration of a present of struggles for dominance and supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean.