At any rate, the honour and the lives of honourable women were not more carefully protected than their material interests. Every husband was obliged to render an account to his wife of the dowry she had brought him, and she could dispose of it by will as she pleased. A widow enjoyed the whole income left by her husband during a year and a day from his death, and during that time no one could by any means drive her from his house. If she declared her intention of not marrying again she preserved her right of residence all her life. Nevertheless, an unfaithful wife, if proved guilty, forfeited her dowry to her husband, and he could turn her out of his home.
Tiepolo’s civil code provided also for a case which seems to have been not uncommon—namely, that in which a married couple, like the Doge Pietro Orseolo and his wife, agreed to take vows and part, each entering a religious order. The law here introduced the form of a separation of goods, leaving each party free thereafter to administer his or her fortune at will.
In addition to the immense labour connected with his body of laws, Tiepolo also occupied himself with the nautical regulations which had obtained authority by long use. I have no doubt that in so doing he used the Amalfi marine code, as in his laws he made use of the Pandects of Justinian, discovered in Amalfi about a hundred years earlier.
Some of the clauses are curious. Captains and owners of ships are forbidden, for instance, to delegate their authority ‘to a pilgrim, a soldier, or a servant.’ In case of shipwreck, the whole crew was bound to work fifteen full days, but no more, at saving the cargo, of which they could then claim three per cent. Every ordinary vessel was to carry two trumpets, presumably as foghorns. Very large ships were to carry a sort of orchestra, consisting of two bass drums, one drum and one trumpet. The marine code has some interest also, as indicating the general nature of the merchandise carried by Venetian vessels: woven stuffs, pepper, incense, indigo, sugar in the loaf, myrrh, gum arabic, aloes, camphor, rice, almonds, apples, wine and oil are to be found mentioned, with many more articles of commerce.
Tiepolo’s code bears the stamp of a sort of generous but not foolish simplicity, which really survived in the Republic until dreams of foreign conquest brought her into danger, and she awoke to find that dangerous enemies had wormed their way even into the ducal palace. It was then that she began to multiply magistracies and to frame innumerable laws that interfered with and neutralised each other; and so she lost in strength what her system gained in details. There was far more wisdom in the five books of Jacopo Tiepolo’s ‘Statuto’ than in the innumerable volumes of laws that were put together from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. It may be asked whether Tiepolo’s code sufficed because the people in his time were virtuous and law-abiding, or whether virtue and the love of law declined as the number of laws increased. The latter hypothesis can certainly be defended.
THE HOUSE OF FALIERO, PONTE DEI S. S. APOSTOLI
VII
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY IN VENICE
To the majority of people the fourteenth century in the history of Venice is memorable only for the great conspiracies which took place in that period, and which, even in the minds of cultivated Italians, seem to fill it completely, though only two, or at most three, are recorded, and the action of each in turn was of short duration. These three great conspiracies were those of Marino Faliero, of Tiepolo, who was at the head of a
