But another theory, hostile to the despotism of the Church over the State, had been developed through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance;—it had been strengthened mainly by the utterances of such men as Dante, aegidio Colonna, John of Paris, Ockham, Marsilio of Padua, and Laurentius Valla. Sarpi ranged himself with the latter of these forces. Though deeply religious, he recognized the God-given right of earthly governments to discharge their duties independent of church control.
Among the many centres of this struggle was Venice. She was splendidly religious—as religion was then understood. She was made so by her whole environment. From the beginning she had been a seafaring power, and seafaring men, from their constant wrestle with dangers ill understood, are prone to seek and find supernatural forces. Nor was this all. Later, when she had become rich, powerful, luxurious, licentious, and refractory to the priesthood, her most powerful citizens felt a need of atoning for their many sins by splendid religious foundations. So her people came to live in an atmosphere of religious observance, and the bloom and fruitage of their religious hopes and fears are seen in the whole history of Venetian art,—from the rude sculptures of Torcello and the naive mosaics of San Marco to the glowing altarpieces and ceilings of John Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto and the illuminations of the Grimani Psalter. No class in Venice rose above this environment. Doges and Senators were as susceptible to it as were the humblest fishermen on the Lido. In every one of those glorious frescoes in the corridors and halls of the Ducal Palace which commemorate the victories of the Republic, the triumphant Doge or Admiral or General is seen on his knees making acknowledgment of the divine assistance. On every Venetian sequin, from the days when Venice was a power throughout the earth to that fatal year when the young Bonaparte tossed the Republic over to the House of Austria, the Doge, crowned and robed, kneels humbly before the Saviour, the Virgin, or St. Mark. In that vast Hall of the Five Hundred, the most sumptuous room in the world, there is spread above the heads of the Doge and Senators and Councilors, as an incentive to the discharge of their duties on earth, a representation of the blessed in Heaven.
From highest to lowest, the Venetians lived, moved, and had their being in this religious environment, and, had their Republic been loosely governed, its external policy would have been largely swayed by this all-pervading religious feeling, and would have become the plaything of the Roman Court. But a democracy has never been maintained save by the delegation of great powers to its chosen leaders. It was the remark of one of the foremost American Democrats of the nineteenth century, a man who received the highest honors which his party could bestow, that the Constitution of the United States was made, not to promote Democracy, but to check it. This statement is true, and it is as true of the Venetian Constitution as of the American.[1]
[1] See Horatio Seymour's noted article in the North American Review.
But while both the republics recognized the necessity of curbing Democracy, the difference between the means employed was world-wide. The founders of the American Republic gave vast powers and responsibilities to a president and unheard-of authority to a supreme court; in the Venetian Republic the Doge was gradually stripped of power, but there was evolved the mysterious and unlimited authority of the Senate and Council of Ten.
In these sat the foremost Venetians, thoroughly imbued with the religious spirit of their time; but, religious as they were, they were men of the world, trained in the polities of all Europe and especially of Italy.
In a striking passage, Guizot has shown how the Crusaders who went to the Orient by way of Italy and saw the papacy near at hand came back skeptics. This same influence shaped the statesmen of Venice. The Venetian Ambassadors were the foremost in Europe. Their Relations are still studied as the clearest, shrewdest, and wisest statements regarding the men and events in Europe at their time. All were noted for skill; but the most skillful were kept on duty at Rome. There was the source of danger. The Doges, Senators, and controlling Councilors had, as a rule, served in these embassies, and they had formed lucid judgments as to Italian courts in general and as to the Roman Court in particular. No men had known the Popes and the Curia more thoroughly. They had seen Innocent VIII. buy the papacy for money. They had been at the Vatican when Alexander VI. had won renown as a secret murderer. They had seen, close at hand, the merciless cruelty of Julius II. They had carefully noted the crimes of Sixtus IV., which culminated in the assassination of Julian de' Medici beneath the dome of Florence at the moment the Host was uplifted. They had sat near Leo X. while he enjoyed the obscenities of the Calandria and the Mandragora,—plays which, in the most corrupt of modern cities, would, in our day, be stopped by the police. No wonder that, in one of their dispatches, they speak of Rome as "the cloaca of the world."[1]
[1] For Sixtus IV. and his career, with the tragedy in the Cathedral of Florence see Villari's Life of Machiavelli, English Edition, vol. ii. pp. 341, 342. For the passages in the dispatches referred to, vide ibid. vol. i. p. 198.
Naturally, then, while their religion showed itself in wonderful monuments of every sort, their practical sense was shown by a steady opposition to papal encroachments.
Of this combination of zeal for religion with hostility to ecclesiasticism we have striking examples throughout the history of the Republic. While, in every other European state, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks were given leading parts in civil administration and, in some states, a monopoly of civil honors, the Republic of Venice not only excluded all ecclesiastics from such posts, but, in cases which touched church interests, she excluded even the relatives of ecclesiastics. When church authority decreed that commerce should not be maintained with infidels and heretics, the Venetian merchants continued to deal with Turks, Pagans, Germans, Englishmen, and Dutchmen as before. When the Church decreed that the taking of interest for money was sin, and great theologians published in Venice some of their mightiest treatises demonstrating this view from Holy Scripture and the Fathers, the Venetians continued borrowing and lending money on usance. When efforts were made to enforce that tremendous instrument for the consolidation of papal power, the bull In Coena Domini, Venice evaded and even defied it. When the Church frowned upon anatomical dissections, the Venetians allowed Andreas Vesalius to make such dissections at their University of Padua. When Sixtus V., the strongest of all the Popes, had brought all his powers, temporal and spiritual, to bear against Henry IV. of France as an excommunicated heretic, and seemed ready to hurl the thunderbolts of the Church against any power which should recognize him, the Venetian Republic not only recognized him, but treated his Ambassador with especial courtesy. When the other Catholic powers, save France, yielded to papal mandates and sent no representatives to the coronation of James I. of England, Venice was there represented. When Pope after Pope issued endless diatribes against the horrors of toleration, the Venetians steadily tolerated in their several sorts of worship Jews and Greeks, Mohammedans and Armenians, with Protestants of every sort who came to them on business. When the Roman Index forbade the publication of most important works of leading authors, Venice demanded and obtained for her printers rights which were elsewhere denied.