Salve Venetia, gleanings from Venetian history; vol. I

by F. Marion Crawford

My chronicler remarks that the money was well

RIO S. AGOSTIN

invested, as the Duke was made a firm friend of the Republic, and himself proposed a treaty by which he abandoned his claims to Trieste for seventy-five thousand ducats—about fifty-six thousand pounds.

In the latter part of the fourteenth century Petrarch was received with a hospitality as open-handed, and much less interested. The great poet and famous ambassador was treated like a king; the palace of the Quattro Torri on the Grand Canal was fitted up for him and placed at his disposal for as long a time as he would stay in Venice, and at every public function or festivity he appeared on the right hand of the Doge.

Touched by such consideration, Petrarch bequeathed a part of his priceless library to the Republic, and Venice, on her side, refusing to be outdone in generosity, presented him as a gift with the palace in which he had been living.

The palace had originally belonged to the Molina family, and ultimately became a religious house under the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the poet’s books, they came to a melancholy end. They are sometimes said to have been the beginning of the library of Saint Mark. The authority from which I quote says that amongst them were a manuscript of Homer, given to Petrarch by Nicolas Sigeros, ambassador of the Emperor of the East, a beautiful copy of Sophocles, a translation of the whole of the Iliad and of a part of the Odyssey, copied by Boccaccio himself, he having learned Greek from the translator, Leontio Pilato, an imperfect Quinctilian, and most of the works of Cicero transcribed by Petrarch himself. Such treasures would make even a modern millionaire look grave; yet it is said that when the celebrated Tomasini asked to be allowed to see the books towards the end of the seventeenth century, he found them stowed away in an attic under the roof of Saint Mark’s, ‘partly reduced to dust, partly petrified’—‘in saxa mutatos’—a phenomenon of which I never heard, and which I am at a loss to explain.

The tendency of Anglo-Saxons to extol and help conspiracy against every government but their own has led Englishmen to waste sympathy on Bocconio and Tiepolo, of whom it is now time to speak. The system of laws and government which became defined after the closure of the Great Council, though it already existed in great part so far as practice was concerned, was designed to check every impulse of personal political ambition in all classes of Venetians, beginning with the Doge himself. Indeed his life, both public and private, was so hampered and hedged in that his position at ordinary times seems to us far from enviable. Yet in spite of this, and it is a singular reflection, it was quite possible for a great man like Enrico Dandolo or Andrea Contarini to exercise tremendous personal influence at decisive moments and to perform acts of the highest heroism. Is there anything more heroic in all romantic history than the aged Dandolo kneeling to receive the cross of the crusader, and then leading a great allied host to one of the most astounding conquests ever recorded? Was ever a man more of a hero than old Contarini, swearing on his sword, when all seemed lost at Chioggia, that he would never go back to Venice till the enemy was beaten—and gloriously keeping his word? It seems to me that the heroism of both those men grows when one considers that if either of them had been even suspected of any personal interest or ambitious design he would have been ruthlessly put out of the way by the men who had elected him.

The whole system was created to make anything like self-aggrandisement impossible, and it worked so infallibly that during something near six hundred years not one attempt to break it down was successful; and when at last it fell, in its extreme old age, of weakness and corruption, it was not finally destroyed by any inherent defect except old age, when it was attacked by the greatest conqueror since Charlemagne.

It may not be possible to bring it under any philosophical theory, and it bore but a small resemblance to Plato’s ideal State; but it had the merit of being the most practical plan ever tested for maintaining the balance between public and private forces, public welfare and private wealth, national dignity and individual social importance. Of the three great conspiracies only one was the work of an ambitious aristocrat; another was a disappointed rich burgher’s ineffectual effort at revenge; the third was headed by the Doge himself, partly out of private resentment. None of them had any great chance of success, yet so great was the apprehension they created that they were the source and origin of all that terrible machinery of secret tribunals, spies, anonymous accusations, and private executions which darken the later history of Venice; a machinery which was almost always at work against the very nobles who had constructed it, who feared it, but who never even thought of doing away with it, though they could have voted it out of existence at any meeting of their council; a machinery which hardly affected the masses of the people at all, and which powerfully protected the merchant burghers, but at the mere mention of which the greatest noble became silent and looked grave.