Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

But greater events were happening in the East, where the Byzantine Empire was at the last gasp of its existence. Even if Venice had thrown all her strength into opposing the Turks and protecting her Eastern commerce, instead of quarrelling with Milan, she

Smyrna taken by the Venetians, Paolo Veronese; Hall of the Great Council.

could not have retarded the fall of Constantinople by any long time. As it was, she sent but little help to the last of the emperors. The Byzantines had never been good fighters, and the tremendous fortifications of the city alone checked Mohammed’s army of one hundred and sixty thousand fanatics.

Constantinople was taken in 1453, and in the wild massacre of Christians that followed, many Venetians were butchered. The Republic is said to have lost property worth three hundred thousand ducats. Fifteen Venetian ships succeeded in escaping, with eight Genoese vessels. But the mere loss of money and valuables was nothing compared with that which must have followed if the commerce of Venice in the East had been altogether destroyed. There was much to overlook and forgive, it is true, if an agreement were to be reached with Mohammed the Conqueror. He had impaled a Venetian captain and beheaded thirty of his crew before the siege; he had decapitated the Venetian Bailo and his son in cold blood afterwards, a great number of Venetians had perished in the massacre, and twenty-nine nobles had been held for ransom; and in return for these injuries and insults, the Republic had not struck a blow. The exigencies of commerce were great.

Venice played a double part in what followed, making a show of rousing the Pope to preach a crusade on the one hand, and, on the other, quietly drawing up a treaty with the Sultan, by which the Republic was to pay tribute for her Eastern settlements, the slave-trade was to be allowed to continue in the

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Black Sea, provided that only Christians, and not Mussulmans, were bought and sold, and the Sultan was to force the Genoese of Pera to pay what they owed the Venetians. The latter clause was, no doubt, a good stroke of business, and the treaty contained many others which proved that its end was sordidly commercial.

Two hundred and fifty years had passed since blind Enrico Dandolo had led the Venetians to the conquest of Constantinople. What they did then cannot be justified, it is true, but no man who has fighting blood in his veins can help admiring the magnificent courage that performed such a feat of arms. In the same way, I suppose that no one in whom the true commercial spirit is alive will withhold his admiration from a people who could forgive insult and forget injury so completely as those later Venetians did in 1454, for the sake of making money. It avails not to reflect that it was probably too late to stem the westward movement of the Turks; the man of heart will always feel that the richest nation in Europe might have done something to save Constantinople from her fate.

Pope Nicholas V. thought so, and expressed his disgust to the Senate through his legate, but the Venetian government answered him in one of those sanctimonious speeches which it knew so well how to frame on occasion, and advised the Pope to turn his attention towards pacifying and uniting all Christian princes in a general league against the common enemy, well knowing that no such attempt could succeed.