Pietro Orseolo had been married at the age of eighteen to a maiden as virtuous as himself, and when one son had been born to the pair they had exchanged vows of chastity, and had afterwards given up their lives to the care of the poor, and to visiting the hospices and hospitals.
And now, long after that, Warin argued with Pietro and urged him more and more to renounce the world altogether; but Pietro was as wise as he was good, and he knew that it was his duty to leave everything in order for his successor, and he accordingly claimed a year in which to prepare for his retirement.
The monk Warin had to admit that he was right, and they parted on the first of September. On that same day, one year later, Warin returned and waited for the Doge in the monastery of Sant’ Ilario. Pietro left his house alone in the night and joined him, dressed as a pilgrim; at midnight they mounted swift horses and set out upon their long journey westwards, and the fugitive was not missed till late on the following morning. Some accounts say that Orseolo’s wife had
HALL OF THE GLOBES, DUCAL PALACE
HALL OF THE GLOBES, DUCAL PALACE
already taken the veil in the nunnery of Saint Zacharias; others assure us that she was dead. It matters little, for the one fact stands undenied, that Pietro Orseolo fled from the dogeship of Venice to be a novice in France, in one of the most rigid religious orders of that time. There he lived in peace for nineteen years till he died in the odour of sanctity; but over seven hundred years passed before he was officially canonised and took his place in the calendar, after which the French king returned his bones to Venice. There is a picture in the Museo Civico representing him and his wife dressed as monk and nun, and kneeling before a Madonna.
The policy of the Orseolo family in putting forward a saint to represent them had not been very successful, for after Pietro’s flight they found themselves deserted by the factions they had led against Pietro Candiano IV.; and in the election which followed the holy man’s sudden abdication, one more Candiano was chosen Doge in the person of Vitale, of that name. At the same time two powerful alliances were formed, the one between the Candiano and the Caloprini, of which the object seems to have been to set up some sort of despotic government under the protection of the Holy Roman Empire; the other between the Orseolo and the Morosini, who held to the old alliance with Byzantium and the East. Sismondi and others seriously derive the names of these two families from Greek words signifying, for Morosini, the ‘Friends of Fools,’ and for Caloprini, the ‘People who bow themselves skilfully’—in other words, perhaps, the dupes and their flatterers. Of the two it was the flatterers that came to grief, however, whereas the Morosini have continued to flourish even to our own time. I know not whether these derivations have any value. Victor Hugo, who did not know Greek, once suggested that the French word ‘ironie’ might be derived from the English word ‘iron.’
Many bloody encounters took place, in which the nobles of Venice took sides with one party or the other, as their personal interests suggested, and at last the Caloprini, who were hated by the people, were forced to leave Venice. Yet trusting to the support of the Empress Adelheid, or Adelaide, in an evil hour they ventured to come back a few years later; but the Morosini, who had grown stronger in the meantime, fell upon them and put them all cruelly to death, so that of that great house only three widowed women remained alive to mourn the dead.