Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

THE TIEPOLO PALACE

vast movement, and the third may be described as that of Marino Bocconio, whose history is not yet known in all its bearings. Bocconio, in lack of trustworthy details, has been crowned the martyr of the aristocracy; Tiepolo has been exalted as one who nobly and generously sacrificed the interests of his caste for the general good; as for Faliero, he is almost universally looked upon simply as the jealous husband of a young and beautiful wife. Thanks to the efforts of innumerable novelists and playwrights, these three figures represent to the average reader of history a synthetic picture of the whole century, and stand out gigantic, dark, and blood-stained against a gloomy background of barbarism, imploring pity or crying out for vengeance to all future ages.

The most striking pictures are not always the best portraits, as we all know, though we are often inclined to forget it. Most of us at one time or another have stood before a painting by Caravaggio or Gherardo delle Notti, in which men are seen in the act to move, half lighted by a flaring torch, and we have felt a strange and strong desire to know where they are supposed to be and whither they are supposed to be going. Our eyes search the black depths of the picture as if we were peering out into the darkness of a starless night, with an instinctive wish to distinguish some detail that may explain the figures in the foreground; and, failing to find anything, we turn away as from a vision seen in a bad dream. We shall not forget the strong features, the tremendous muscles, the mysterious anxious eyes, and when we think of them we shall still wonder where those men were, in a cavern or out of doors, in the crypt of a church or in the forest, and whether they were alone or were followed by a crowd in the darkness. Who saw them pass? Who heard their low and anxious voices? Upon what nameless errand were they bound?

I have often thought that impressions much like these are produced on most minds by the names Bocconio, Tiepolo, Faliero. Yet each of them, in true history, had his companions, his friends, his enemies; and if each stood alone as a type, yet all were the result of their own times, and every one of the three was in himself the cause of a separate train of events.

Hitherto the story of Venice has been that of her growth; she has risen from the waves in the clear breath of the northern Adriatic, at once gentle and full of life; she has grown up into the light, full of a sweetness of her own, but burning with youthful courage, and suddenly, in the period of which we now have to treat, she has changed from a child to a full-grown woman. Pursuing, or pursued by, the impression of her strong personality as a living creature rather than as the capital city of a great power and the scene of action in the lives of great men, we may compare her to a woman of divine beauty, yet almost tragically jealous of her own freedom, fierce to her enemies, dangerous to those who trust her, a loving mother to her children so long as they are obedient, but a ruthless and cruel queen towards her rebellious subjects. A woman, in short, possessing a sort of dual nature, aspiring to the dignity of being feared, yet moved by the desire of love; so unwilling to submit to the slightest influence of another that she would willingly despoil herself of all her riches and of every possession, and shed even the last drop of her blood, rather than forego the smallest shred of her proud independence.

It is true that the figures of the great conspirators are very prominent in the picture we evoke of those times; yet beside them stand great captains, law-givers, and artists, and the background is filled with a most interesting population devoted in turn to labour and pleasure, to commerce and to war, and full of the pride of a life of its own. The germs of corruption are already manifest, but they will not develop until a later time, when the beautiful lady, Venice, less young indeed, but imbued with a charm more subtle, descends to the slow enjoyment of the fruits of her victories, and loses herself in the intoxication of a perpetual carnival.

Historically speaking, the fourteenth century in Venice begins two or three years before 1300, since the year 1297 is separated from those which preceded it by a far greater distance than it is from the beginning of the fifteenth century, owing to the profound changes brought about in the government and life of the city by the closure of the Great Council.

The history of the century in which the Republic reached the culminating point of her strength and development begins quite naturally with a glance at this memorable law and its consequence. The famous measure which, officially at least, changed the already ancient commonwealth of Venice into a government which, though aristocratic, still proposed to be republican, was not the work of a day any more than it was the creation of any one doge. It was not a revolution, but rather the result of a slow, inevitable evolution, peaceful in character, of which the first beginnings can barely be traced, far back in history, in the struggles of rival factions of the aristocracy.

So far as factions are concerned, none but those of the nobles ever had any influence on Venetian history, for the parties that existed amongst the people never engaged in politics, and while they bore one another many a traditional grudge that had its origin in the early jealousies of the settlers, we never find them mixing in conspiracies against the government or breaking out in sedition and rioting. Even the mutual hatred of Niccolotti and Castellani disappeared completely as soon as the need of public defence called out the genuine patriotism of both.

In brief, the following is the story of the ‘Serrata,’ the closing of the Great Council for the exclusion of the people, a measure without parallel, except, perhaps, in the legislation of Rome.