At the outset I shall inform my readers that I have preferred the account given by Romanin to that of the more romantic Daru; for the latter evidently followed the older historian Sabellico, even into the regions of the fabulous, whereas Romanin writes largely upon the authority of Caroldo and of Stella, the latter a Genoese whose account of his countrymen’s disaster is above suspicion.
1345. Rom. iii. 152.
In the year 1345, a powerful Tartar chief named Zani Beg barbarously murdered certain Venetian and Genoese merchants established in the Crimea. For a short time this outrage united the two republics in a common desire for revenge, and they signed a treaty by which they mutually agreed to suspend all commercial relations with the Crimea—to ‘boycott’ the peninsula, as we should say. This was perhaps their only possible means of punishing Zani Beg for his wanton cruelty, since it is idle to suppose that two maritime nations could or would have carried war against a barbarian horde into the interior of such a country as the Crimea.
But the agreement had not been made with any sincere purpose, and before long the merchants of the two countries secretly resumed the trade, each trying to outwit the other. The result could not be doubtful; in 1350 the Genoese seized several Venetian ships with rich cargoes on the coast of Syria, and war broke out between the republics.
Rom. iii. 169.
The first two engagements, off Negroponte and on the Bosphorus, were disastrous to the Venetians, but the third, which took place off Lojera on the coast of Sardinia, resulted in an important victory for them; and the honour of the standard of Saint Mark would have been redeemed if Niccolò Pisani, the Venetian admiral, had not caused nearly five thousand prisoners of war to be drowned, a barbarity which accords ill with the man’s real courage, and would be incredible if it were not proved beyond the possibility of contradiction.
It was after this defeat that the Genoese Republic placed itself in the hands of Giovanni Visconti, Archbishop of Milan, the strongest of the Lombard princes. This extraordinary act was prompted solely by the desire of immediate revenge upon the Venetians, and Visconti was not slow to lend the required means for continuing the war, though he was cautious with regard to actual hostilities, and attempted a reconciliation by sending Petrarch as ambassador to Venice. The negotiations failed, however, and each republic sent out a new fleet; with extraordinary daring, Doria, the Genoese admiral, sailed up the Adriatic and ravaged Istria and Parenzo, threatening Venice itself, but retiring after inspiring something very like a panic. It was at this moment that the Doge Andrea Dandolo died, and that Marino Faliero was elected to succeed him.
On his side, Pisani, the Venetian commander, attempted no such undertaking. Deceived, doubtless, by Doria’s clever manœuvres, he sought him in the Archipelago, and thither Doria sailed, after his exploits in the Adriatic. The hostile fleets met off Modon, opposite Sapienza, and the engagement resulted in the
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