At this critical time, when the position of Venice was by slow and sure degrees becoming one of great danger, the Doge died, and the great Andrea Dandolo was elected in his stead. Under the leadership of a less gifted and brave man, the ship of the Republic might well have foundered in the storm that broke over her. The King of Hungary disputed with Venice for Zara and the territory that belonged to it; the Genoese were exasperated in the highest degree by the commercial success of the Venetians in the East; the
RIO S. STIN
Pope was angry with the Republic because its government would not make obligatory the payment of tithes to the bishops. These were but a few of the half-grown troubles that were rapidly growing to maturity when the plague broke out in 1348 and devastated Italy from Genoa in the north, where forty thousand persons died, to Sicilian Trapani, where not one soul survived the universal death. In six months Venice lost more than half her population.
Boccaccio has left a description of the pest in Florence which is the greatest masterpiece of the kind ever produced by a great writer’s pen; for his story fills us with horrow, with pity, with sadness, but never arouses our disgust. The sufferings of Venice in those same six months have found neither poet nor novelist to describe them, but her careful chroniclers have left us the details of the defence she made against the ravages of the sickness, and of the medicines used in the attempt to save life.
Rom. iii. 156.
As soon as the first cases of the plague had proved beyond doubt that it had crossed the lagoons and reached the city, the Council appointed three nobles, designated as ‘Wise Men of the Plague,’ with power to take all possible measures to stop the spreading of the contagion. Their first decree forbade the poor to expose the bodies of their dead in the street in order to obtain alms. A separate burial-place was marked out and consecrated for the free burial of the victims of the disease. The port was closed, and sentinels were placed all along the outer shore of the islands to hinder all outsiders from landing or from introducing suspicious merchandise.
A RAINY NIGHT, THE RIALTO