Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

It was time that some strong hand should grasp the reins and drive the car of state through the slough of chaos and blood in which it was stuck fast, out upon the broad highway of fame. The hand was ready, and the time had come; in the year 991 Pietro Orseolo II. mounted the ducal throne.

From the first he threw all his energy into a systematic campaign against the pirates of the Adriatic, whose fathers had carried off the Venetian brides. They had paid for their rashness with their lives, and their descendants had never again come so near the city, yet the affront was not forgotten, and an expedition which had their destruction for its object appealed to the men of Venice as few other incentives could.

With a strong fleet the Doge set sail, and visited the coast cities of Istria and Dalmatia one by one. They hailed him as a liberator, for they were especially exposed to the attacks of the corsairs, and in return for the protection of the Republic they placed their liberty in Pietro Orseolo’s hands. He wisely received them as federal allies rather than as subjects of Venice, though they, in their haste to be protected, would not have refused to submit themselves to him as conquered cities. He received them indeed under the shadow of the standard of Saint Mark, but he left to each one full and unhampered liberty to govern itself as it should see fit, requiring only a small yearly tribute in acknowledgment of what was to be a feudal supremacy. The town of Arbo was to pay ten pounds of silk, for instance, while Pola paid two thousand pounds’ weight of olive-oil yearly to feed the lamps of Saint Mark’s church, and so on, through a long list; and so, by token of a few skins of oil, of a handful of silk, Venice first got supremacy over the eastern Adriatic cities, with all the vast advantage to her commerce that lay in owning harbours and warehouses all along the coast almost as far as Greece. From that time Trieste, Capo d’ Istria, Rovigno, and all the sea-coast cities of Istria became Venetian, and Zara, long an ally, and Salone, and Spalatro and Ragusa; and the islands too, Coronota, Brazza, and many others, down to the islets of Corsola and Lazina, which stood firm for the pirates, guarding the approach to Narenta, their chief city. But there, as all the chronicles agree, the Doge put forth his strength, and he took those places in hard-fought battle and smote them, and utterly wasted them with fire and the sword, so that from that day their strength was gone, and the Adriatic was for many centuries freed from the terror of their deeds.

Then, turning homeward, Pietro Orseolo visited the vast provinces he had annexed to Venice, and because he had destroyed the corsairs the people everywhere received him with great joy, and acclaimed him Duke of Dalmatia by common consent; and the Doges who came after him bore the well-earned title during many hundreds of years.

998 A. D. Rom. i. 284. Zanetti.

Now it came to pass that when the young Emperor Otho III., mystic, fiery, enthusiastic, heard of all this success, he felt a very great longing to visit Pietro Orseolo and to see the wonderful water-city of which all the world was beginning to talk; and he secretly told his wishes to his privy councillors, but they would not hear of such a thing, and he, being very young, would not act openly against their advice. Yet he persisted in his intention, while he held his peace.

So at last, on a warm and moonlight night in the year 998, a boat manned by eight men silently approached the little island of San Servolo, not far from the city; and two men stepped out upon the shore and went up and knocked at the door of a half-ruined building, once a monastery of Benedictines. A man of imposing stature opened and let them in; but soon three fishermen came out by the same way and got into a skiff that lay waiting hard by, with two of their companions, for the larger boat had disappeared; and they pulled over to the city.

Then in the moonlight the skiff was quietly rowed all about the city, stopping here and there, wherever there was something worthy to be seen; and if any of the belated townsfolk noticed the little boat and its crew, no one guessed that it bore the young Emperor Otho himself, and the Doge, and the Secretary, Paul the Deacon, who himself tells the tale of the nocturnal visit. Having succeeded once, the Emperor came again, less secretly, and spent days in the Doge’s palace, but still he preferred not to be openly known, so that he might be the more free to go about the city. There was a romantic strain in his short life, in his intense enthusiasm, in his profound belief in a divine right to reign; there was a faint foreshadowing of a stronger Emperor who is come in our own day to claim what he claimed, and to do, perhaps, what he could not do. With the strenuous reaching out after higher things Otho felt youth’s longing to know, in an age when it was possible for one man to master all the knowledge of his time, and it was surely this desire that most of all brought him over to Venice that first time. Doubtless, too, because Venice was counted with the East, his advisers foresaw trouble in a too open friendship between him and the Doge. But his early death ended such danger, if it ever existed, and all that remains is the story of his wanderings by night, in fisherman’s dress, through the still and moonlit waterways of the young city.

Like the Partecipazio and the Candiano houses which had ruled before him, Pietro Orseolo now took measures to make the sovereignty hereditary in his family, by associating his own son Giovanni in the ducal honour, and further by marrying him to a Princess Mary, who was the daughter of one of the joint Emperors of the East and the niece of the other. The pair were united in Constantinople according to the Greek rite, and with the utmost pomp and magnificence, and Giovanni was given the rank of an imperial patrician. On their return to Venice, he and his beautiful bride were received by the people with demonstrations of enthusiastic joy, and, according to Sansovino, it was on this occasion, and at the express request of the Venetians themselves, that Giovanni was invited by his father to share in the power. It may well be, and it matters little.

Mol. Dogaressa.