When one reviews a life like that of Marino Sanudo, and is impressed with the fact that he lived and breathed in exactly the atmosphere that suited him,—that from his earliest years he was inexpressibly busy in doing just that for which he was best fitted by nature, that which of all the world he would have chosen,—it naturally seems that he must have been a very happy man. But he had his trials,—some of them very heavy to him. Again and again he is excluded from public office. At first he congratulates himself on having more time, but later it becomes evident that he feels his unpopularity keenly, as one may see when he says:—
"In the past year [1522] I have been dismissed from the Giunta [Zonta], of which two years ago I was made a member; but while I sat in that Senate I always in my speeches did my best for my country, with full honor from the senators for my opinions and judgment, even when against those of my colleagues. And this is the thing that has injured me; for had I been mute, applauding individuals as is the present fashion, letting things pass that are against the interest of my dearest country, acting contrary to the law, as those who have the guidance of the city permit to be done, even had I not been made Avvogadore, I should have been otherwise treated.... I confess that this repulse has caused me no small grief, and has been the occasion of my illness; and if again I was rejected in the ballot for the past year, it was little wonder seeing that many thought me dead, or so infirm that I was no longer good for anything, not having stirred from my house for many months before. But the Divine bounty has still preserved me, and, as I have said, enabled me to complete the diary for this year; for however suffering I was I never failed to record the news of every day which was brought to me by my friends, so that another volume is finished."
But the signal grief of his life must have come from the appointment of the young and inexperienced Navagero as the historian of the Republic. He speaks of this Messer Andrea Navagero, who was paid for writing history, with gentle contempt; but the speedy death of Andrea, and the fact that he left nothing behind to be placed in comparison with the work of Sanudo, disposes of this matter with comparatively few words.
But when Pietro Bembo was appointed to succeed Navagero, what must have been Sanudo's indignation,—a man who had lived out of Venice, who did not even remove to that city to write its history, who had done nothing to prove his fitness for the office, and who hesitated not to ask Sanudo to lend him the precious diaries from which to extract materials for his own writing!
Well did Sanudo answer that he would "give the sweat of his brow to no one." And then Bembo wrote from Padua, asking the Doge to compel Sanudo to open his collections to him. But at last the poor, slighted man did give his "sweat" to his unconscionable rival; and the result is much to his credit, for beside his animated and entertaining narrative Bembo's writing is as dry as desert sands.
Very late in his life the Ten gave him one hundred and fifty ducats a year as a recognition of his books,—"which I vow to God is nothing to the great labor they have cost me," as he remarks. Until within two and a half years of his death he continued his diaries; and as soon as he ceased to write them he made a will, in which he gave them bound and enclosed in a book-case to the Signoria, to be placed where they should think best. And now comes the most astounding fact. These treasures, which we should naturally think would have been placed with care and pride where they could be seen and consulted, were put no one knows where, and in 1805 were found in the Royal Library at Vienna, having got there nobody knows how!
Sanudo's library and his collections of pictures and curiosities, from the celebrated mappamondo to matters of slight importance and value, had become famous; and we are told that "the illustrious strangers who visited Venice in these days went away dissatisfied unless they had seen the Arsenal, the jewels of S. Marco, and the library of Sanudo." Sometimes they were forced to be "dissatisfied;" for the old historian grew weary of "illustrious persons," and said them nay with a will, when asked to display his collections.
To him personally, while he had been greatly interested in all his roba, the books were the most precious, and at one time he had intended to make a gift of them to the library of S. Marco; but although long promised, this library was not begun. Sanudo was poor. He could not even reward Anna of Padua, who had served him faithfully for twenty years, and had not been paid. He also felt himself compelled to relinquish the marble sarcophagus in San Zaccaria, for which a previous will had provided; and so at last, he directed his executors to sell his collections, to pay the worthy Anna, to bury him "where he falls," preserving only the epitaph which he had written to his great comfort. No one knows where he was laid; and not a word to his honor and remembrance existed in Venice until Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has rescued the name and works of Sanudo from oblivion, placed an inscription on his house, still standing, with the Sanudo arms upon it, behind the Fondaco dei Turchi (Museo Civico), in the parish of S. Giacomo dell' Orio. Mrs. Oliphant says:—
"Would it have damped his zeal, we wonder, could he have foreseen that his unexampled work should drop into oblivion, after historians, such as the best informed of Doges, Marco Foscarini, knowing next to nothing of him—till suddenly a lucky and delighted student fell upon those volumes in the Austrian Library; and all at once, after three centuries and more, old Venice sprang to light under the hand of her old chronicler, and Marino Sanudo with all his pictures, his knick-knacks, his brown rolls of manuscript and dusty volumes round him, regained, as was his right, the first place among Venetian historians,—one of the most notable figures of the mediæval world."