Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

Even before the commencement of the election there was talk of Marino Faliero for the office; and he was at that time Venetian ambassador to Pope Innocent VI. in Avignon, being there to treat for peace with Genoa and the Visconti, lords of Milan. On the eleventh of September his name was pronounced before another assembly of the people, and contemporary historians say that his election was extremely well received by all classes of Venetians. Until the Doge-elect should reach the capital, it was decreed that the government should remain in the hands of the ducal counsellors and the heads of the Forty; two counsellors and one of the heads of the Forty remaining by turn constantly in the ducal palace. Faliero had left Avignon before he received notice of his election, so that he was in the neighbourhood sooner than was expected. On the twenty-eighth of September twelve ambassadors, chosen for each of the offices of the city, went out to meet him. Each one of these was accompanied by a noble and three young gentlemen, who altogether received daily a salary of forty ducats of gold. The actual value in gold of a Venetian ducat is now usually estimated at about fifteen shillings English money, rather less than the equivalent of the French twenty-franc piece. The purchasing power of the coin was, however, very much larger than at the present day.

Rom. iii. 181.

The delegates met the Doge at Verona, and accompanied him thence to Padua, where the Carrara received them all with great honour. Taddeo Giustiniani, son of the podestà of Chioggia, met the whole company there with fifteen of the small barges called ‘ganzaruoli,’ splendidly decorated, in which the Doge embarked with all his company. On the fifth of October, at a small distance from Venice itself, he was met by the famous Bucentaur, which bore the ducal counsellors and a great number of nobles. A remarkable circumstance which accompanied this journey is narrated by Lorenzo dei Monaci, whom Lazzarini calls a grave and contemporary historian. The Doge, on reaching Venice, landed at the pier of Saint Mark’s, instead of going to the other side, to the Riva della Paglia, according to former custom; and in order to reach the ducal palace he passed between the two columns where malefactors were often executed. At the time no one paid any attention to this, but after his tragic death the incident was reputed to have been a presage of the evil future; so that Petrarch, writing from Milan on the twenty-fourth of April 1355, a few days after the Doge had been decapitated, alludes to the fact in these words: ‘Sinistro pede palatium ingressus,’ i.e. ‘Having entered the palace with ill-omened step.’

In the church of Saint Mark’s he was presented to the people, and received the usual threefold laudation and salutation. It is worth noticing that Faliero was the last doge who was saluted by the pompous title of ‘Lord of a quarter and an eighth of the Roman Empire.’ Then, according to the regular ceremonial, he was carried round the square amid the acclamations of the multitude, to whom he threw money, and at last he was crowned upon the landing of the staircase that descended into the courtyard of the palace. This staircase was of stone, and led down from the hall of the Great Council to the story where was the covered loggia, and thence continued downwards in the open air, entering the courtyard, and following the same direction as the modern ‘Giants’ Staircase,’ but at the opposite extremity. It was demolished in the fifteenth century. Upon the same landing of the staircase the Doge took the oath of allegiance, with the amendments of which we have already spoken, and we may well believe that the new restrictions contained in the ‘Ducal Promise’ were unwelcome to his despotic nature.

During the reign of Marino Faliero, Venice continued the struggle with Genoa, and remained on the side of the Lombard League against the Visconti. The defeat of the Venetian fleet at Porto Longo, November 4, 1354, almost caused a panic in Venice, where it was expected that at any moment the Genoese would appear again before the Lido. The Doge and the government, however, met the danger with energetic measures, obtained help from the neighbouring principalities, and vigilantly watched the more exposed outlying districts, such as Cape d’Istria and Zara; but the agitation in Venice was not wholly allayed, and the need of peace was felt more than ever. Charles IV., king of Bohemia and king of the Romans, who had recently descended into Italy in order to assume the imperial title, found it no easy matter to make terms between the parties. From Avignon also Pope Innocent VI. was using every means to pacify the divers Italian states; but neither the Emperor nor the Pope were

CAMPO S. MARIA NOVA

wholly successful, and in the winter of 1355 the condition of affairs in Venice was such as to favour a conspiracy. It was not long, in fact, before the plot of Marino Faliero was discovered, and it turned out to be the most important of those which darken the history of the fourteenth century.

Almost every one is acquainted with the legend of this conspiracy, and may compare it with the truth so far as a recent examination of the facts has made it known.

A grudge of long standing existed at that time between the houses of Faliero and Steno. In the summer of 1343 a certain Paolo Steno approached the house of Piero Faliero at San Maurizio late in the evening, and calling out a German serving-woman, called Elizabeth or Beta, with whom he seems to have been acquainted, he persuaded her with specious arguments, or with the promise of reward, to let him enter the room of Saray, who some say was the beautiful daughter of the master of the house, but who Romanin says was a slave, as her name would seem to indicate. A recent authority, Lazzarini, says that Romanin was mistaken; but however this may have been, Saray, who was taken by surprise, defended herself desperately, but could not escape the embraces of Paolo Steno. A regular action was brought against the latter, and a number of documents in the criminal archives of the Forty, dated in August and September 1343, prove that the culprit was condemned to be imprisoned a year in the lower dungeons called pozzi, and to pay a fine of three hundred lire. The German serving-woman, who had escaped beyond the frontier, was condemned in default to have her nose and her lips cut off, and was perpetually banished; an accomplice, a servant in the house of Faliero, was imprisoned six months in the lower dungeons, and then banished. Three years later the mother of Saray, on her death, named ‘Saray Steno’ among her children in her will, and it would appear from this that Steno had satisfied justice and repaired his fault by marrying the girl; but in this case it is certain that he did not long survive the date of the deed, for before the conditions of the will could be fulfilled we find that Saray was already the wife of a certain Niccoletto Callencerio of Oderzo. It is impossible to say how far this incident was the cause of the hatred between the families of Faliero and Steno, but we may be sure that when Michel Steno insulted the Doge eleven years later he was already influenced by the existence of the family grudge.