Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

But his departure did not improve matters, and his son was soon obliged to surrender Padua to the allies, on condition of receiving a safe conduct for himself and his retinue to visit Pavia and return. This was given, and oath was taken on the Blessed Sacrament that it should be respected. He went to Milan, and was well received, and it appears that he acted the part of a man delighted with his treatment, and only anxious to be pleased and amused. It is almost needless to say that before long he was plotting against Visconti’s life, and that Visconti discovered the plan, and gave orders for his assassination. He fled to France with his young wife Taddea, but was pursued by Visconti’s emissaries, and embarked only just in time to save himself and her. She was soon to become a mother, and she suffered terribly from the rough sea. Carrara and she landed; she was placed upon an ass and he walked by her side, while the small vessel kept in sight of the shore. And so they proceeded, embarking again, and once more going ashore as a fresh gale began to blow. They came along the Riviera, well knowing that they were tracked by Visconti; once, at Torbio, they were warned by a friendly person not to enter the town, and they slept in a half-ruined church by the sea-shore. At Ventimiglia the little party excited the suspicions of the Podestà and Carrara was arrested, after having succeeded in placing his wife in safety on board the vessel, but was released again, because by good fortune the officer who arrested him had once served his father. So they went on, through countless adventures, sometimes disguised as German pilgrims, sometimes barely eluding Visconti’s search by hiding in bushes by the roadside; they even slept in a stable. They sought refuge in Florence and stayed there a while, went on to Bologna and were refused all assistance; and at last the fallen prince received offers to join the fighting band of John Hawkwood, the English condottiero. He almost reached Venice, and was within a stone’s throw of Padua, then went back to Florence, and was suddenly elevated to the dignity of Ambassador from the Florentines to the Duke of Bavaria, whose sister had been the wife of the murdered Bernabò Visconti, and the mother of the rightful but imprisoned heir to the dukedom of Milan.

It is not within the province of this work to narrate these wild adventures in detail. It is enough to say that the struggle between the several parties was carried on for years, with no scruple and little humanity. The policy of the different governments shifted continually; after allying herself with Visconti, Venice soon began to plot against him, judging that a ruined neighbour like Carrara would be safer than one too powerful, as Giovanni Galeazzo was growing to be; and so the fugitive couple was taken into favour again by the Republic. Although Visconti’s military governor in Padua, when Carrara came to take his own again, sent him word that a man must be a fool who, having left the house by the door, expected to return by the window, yet Carrara soon got the better of him by the help of Venice and the Duke of Bavaria.

What is most amazing in the history of the Italian principalities and republics is that any one of them should ever, under any circumstances, have believed in the promises made by any other. An open treaty was almost always supplemented by a secret one of a precisely contrary nature; oaths ratified upon the faith of the Blessed Sacrament were broken as lightly as lovers’ vows; the safe conduct given by a prince or a republic was generally the prelude to an assassination; and governments had not even that temporary regard for their obligations which is vulgarly described as honour among thieves. Writers of history have accustomed us too long to consider that these vices of mediæval Italian diplomacy were manifestations of the deepest craft and of the most profound subtlety, and we have been taught to look upon Macchiavelli as a master in the art of political dissimulation. Men of northern extraction who, by the accidents of birth, education, and long acquaintance, are thoroughly acquainted with the Latin character, cannot but smile at such a judgment. In all ages, Latins, and especially Italians, have deceived each other, but have rarely succeeded in deceiving us. The wiles of Cæsar Borgia would not have imposed upon an average English schoolboy. In her diplomatic relations with northern Europe, Italy has almost invariably been the victim of that profound duplicity which rests upon a carefully cultivated reputation for respecting the truth. It is the man whose word can generally be trusted who possesses the greatest power of deception when he chooses to perjure himself. It was not the complication of the Italian nature which produced the complicated state of Italian politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but its extreme simplicity, which made Italian princes the easy victims of the most transparent deceptions.

1405. Padua taken from Carrara by the Venetians, Francesco Bassano; Ceiling of Sala dello Scrutinio.

1406. Rom. iv. 40.

On the other hand, after a long lapse of time, and in the presence of documents proceeding from opposite sources, it is now so hard to ascertain the simple truth, that the story of the younger Carrara is told in two quite opposite ways. The version I have given seems to be the more reasonable one; the other tells us that it was not Visconti, but Venice, that persecuted the young couple, and that it was not Venice, but Visconti, who in the end recalled them to Padua. Be that as it may, Carrara was once more in possession of his principality in 1392. It seems to me thoroughly in accordance with the policy of Venice to have thus installed him again at her very gates and under her protection, in order to crush him and his family the more effectually, as she soon afterwards did. Fourteen years later Venice had literally forced him to declare war against her, and had sent the invincible Carlo Zeno to command her armies; the inevitable result had followed, and Carrara himself with two of his sons were prisoners in the ducal palace. The three were condemned to death, and were strangled in prison.

The private execution of the noble prisoners of war was not acknowledged by the government, and the city was gravely informed that they had, all three, died of colds or coughs, vaguely described as catarrh. But the people were not deceived, and were certainly not displeased; and within twenty-four hours a triumphant song was bawled through the streets of Venice, of which the burden was ‘A dead man makes no war.’ The words have remained a proverb in Italy.

The elder Carrara, long a state prisoner in Milan, had been duly poisoned with ‘magical liquors’ by the five court physicians of Visconti in 1393. One of the younger Carrara’s younger sons died in Florence very soon after his father, but the fourth survived to be murdered in his turn nearly thirty years later.

I find in Smedley’s Sketches from Venetian History a very curious and interesting note with regard to him and to the disappearance of his race.

Smedley, I. chap. x. note.