the general’s arrest may be excused for its lack of dignity by the necessities of the situation. The man was most undoubtedly a traitor and a villain, but it would have been impossible to seize him in the midst of his own men-at-arms, and the most prudent manner of getting possession of his person was to draw him into an ambush. The wise and merciful fathers of the Republic would assuredly not have hesitated at much worse things; only a few days earlier they had offered twenty-five thousand ducats to a man called Muazzo, employed in Visconti’s household, to poison the Duke. The Republic had already fully adopted the progressive methods of its day.
Carmagnola’s trial occupied some time, and was conducted on the whole in a regular and legal manner. It began on the ninth of April, and on the eleventh the once all-powerful captain, to whom those who were now his judges had offered the dukedom of Milan, was put to the torture like any other criminal. On the fifth of May the Council of Ten gave its verdict as follows:—
Rom. iv. 160.
‘That this Count Francesco Carmagnola, a public traitor to our dominion, be led to-day, after nones, at the usual hour, with a gag in his mouth and with his hands tied behind his back, according to custom, between the two columns of the Square of Saint Mark’s, to the usual place of execution, and that his head be there struck off his shoulders, so that he die.’
The sentence goes on to direct that the Count’s widow should enjoy the interest of ten thousand ducats of the bonded debt, on condition that she should live in Treviso. Provision was also made for his unmarried daughters. As for the one who was affianced to
THE FRARI
Sigismondo Malatesta, since there was no divorce law by which he could sever an alliance which was odious, he adopted the simple expedient of murdering her as soon as he had married her and secured her dowry.
Rom. iv. 162, note 2.
Carmagnola’s body was dressed in crimson velvet, and on his severed head was placed the cap which still bears his name. The corpse was borne to the church of San Francesco della Vigna with twenty-four torches, but as it was about to be buried there, the capuchin monk who had received his last confession appeared in haste and said that the dead man had wished to be buried in the church of the Frari, and he was accordingly laid there, in the cloister. In Venice it was the custom that the clothes of executed persons should be given to the gaoler, not to the headsman; but in this case the Council of Ten decreed that the dress worn by Carmagnola should be handed over with his body to the monks of the church where he was buried, the gaoler receiving ten ducats as compensation.