Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

arms, and she grew warm, and he took her alive out of the place of death, in a dream of wonder and joy. So when Pietro the Doge saw that his daughter was alive again, he was glad, and forgave them both and blessed them; and afterwards they lived happily.

In point of age I think this is the oldest existing version of the story of Romeo and Juliet, and the one from which all the other forms of the legend were afterwards derived. It would be interesting to pursue the inquiry further, to find out how many different shapes the tale has assumed in the course of ages, and in how many instances it has been founded on fact; for that some of the stories are more than half-true I have not the slightest doubt.

976 A.D.

The power of the Candiano family was broken when Pietro IV. and his little son were murdered, and the strong race of the Orseolo now seized the ducal throne, and tried to make it hereditary with themselves. They had cleared the way by violence, and they pursued their way to power without scruple. It was Pietro Orseolo who had been the soul of the revolution against the last Candiano, and it might have been expected that his supporters would set him up as Doge; but it seemed wiser to proceed more cautiously, and with singular foresight they put forward another member of the family, also called Pietro, a man of the most profound religious convictions, and who had led such a holy life that he was regarded as a saint on earth.

The family were not mistaken in proposing his candidacy, a parallel to which may be found in the election of the saintly hermit, Pietro da Morrone, to be pope, by way of solving the difficulties which had produced a long vacancy of the papal see. Pietro Orseolo was acclaimed Doge without opposition.

But piety is not always energy, and virtue has little or nothing to do with the greatness of princes. The holy man felt himself weak in the face of the troubles caused by the hatred of his own family for that of its predecessors in power, and when he saw what great responsibilities were accumulating upon his shoulders, and what dangers menaced the state, he quietly made up his mind to leave the world behind him and to end his life in a Camaldolese monastery in Aquitaine. I find the best account of this extraordinary vocation in Mr. Hazlitt’s recent work (published in 1900); and incidentally I feel bound to say that this writer, whose original book has now developed to very solid dimensions, has searched the chronicles and later authorities upon Venetian history with a care and a conscientious thoroughness quite unequalled by any other historian who has treated of the same subject. We are free to differ with Mr. Hazlitt as to some of his conclusions, and as to the particular stories he has preferred to follow where the legends are many and contradictory; but for thorough and detailed accounts, according to the different chronicles, the English reader must go to him.

Rom. i. 256.

In the late summer of the year 977 the good Doge Orseolo received the visit of a learned and holy Frenchman, Warin, who was the Superior of the Abbey of Saint Michel de Cuxac in Aquicaine, and who had come to Venice to see for himself

Hazlitt, i. 90.

the place where the Evangelist was laid. The Doge received him as became his rank in the church, and the two good men were drawn to each other by that profound though instantaneous sympathy which most of us have felt at least once in life. Of the two, Warin had the stronger nature, and recognising the true monk in the devout Doge, he bade him give up the world, to which he had never really belonged, and follow his manifest vocation.