So Giovanni Soranzo reigned in success and plenty and honour to the very end of his long life. Yet in all those seventeen years he cannot have counted one day truly happy, and many must have been profoundly saddened by the knowledge of his own daughter’s sufferings in her captivity at the convent of the Vergini. Time and again she poured out her heart to him, in letters which he was not even allowed to answer without permission of his counsellors, and probably of the recently elected Council of Ten; and the old captain, whose commanding voice had been heard above many storms at sea, and many a fight on land, had to humble himself before the Power, and humbly beg a little sunshine, an hour’s liberty, for the daughter he adored.
They saw each other rarely enough for a long time. It was not till the great old man’s strength was breaking down beneath the weight of nearly ninety years that his daughter was allowed to leave her prison more frequently that she might tend him and cheer his declining days. He died in her arms in the end, on the last day of December in the year 1328, eighty-eight years old; and the unhappy woman must have found some small comfort in the universal grief that rose to meet her own. She went back to her cell; but the body of the great Doge was laid out in a hall of the palace, dressed in the mantle of state and the ducal cap. He was borne thence to Saint Mark’s, whither the Dogess had gone before with her ladies, and when the last requiem had been sung Giovanni Soranzo was laid in the chapel of the baptistery. His simple tomb bears the arms of his family and little else that tells of his glory, as all may see to this day.
The great bell had scarcely ceased to toll for him, when it rang out the summons to elect his successor, and the Council met to this end. But Soranzo’s reign had made changes, which, as they came gradually, were not noticed, but which were plain enough now that a new Doge was to be chosen. Prosperity had increased vastly, and with it luxury, and the magnificence of all that represented the Republic’s power. Soranzo had been very rich, but his successor might be poor. Soranzo had filled the ducal palace with his own plate, his own array of servants and footmen, and all his rich belongings. Ambassadors had come and gone, and had seen how the Doge lived; it might not be that they should come again, and find a poor man living under the same roof, dining off earthenware dishes and served by a few threadbare retainers. Venice had many faults, and Venice, as a city, loved money, but Venice, the Republic, was never sordid, nor miserly, nor mean. Before the Council elected the next Doge, a large provision was settled upon his office for ever; his salary was increased from four thousand ducats to five thousand two hundred, which is far more, considering the value of money, than the President of the United States receives to-day; the ducal palace was amply furnished with vessels of gold and silver; it was made a rule that the Doge was henceforth to keep five-and-twenty servants, neither more nor less, and that each should have two new liveries every year. In case the new sovereign should not have ready means at hand to defray the expenses of his coronation and of his change of domicile, it was decreed that a loan (for business was business) of three thousand lire should be placed at his disposal out of State funds; and, finally, a jeweller was ordered to make a very rich crown, which the Doge was to wear on great occasions, and which was to be in the keeping of the procurators of Saint Mark.
When Soranzo had been elected, an ancient custom still prevailed by which the population was allowed to joyously plunder the house of the new Doge of all it contained that was movable, precisely as the populace of Rome plundered the house of the cardinal who was elected Pope, until a much later date. This half-civilised practice was now forbidden in Venice under heavy penalties.
All this was agreed upon, set down and made law, before beginning the process of balloting by which the forty-one electors of the Doge were chosen.
Their choice fell upon Francesco Dandolo, the skilful diplomatist by whose efforts Clement V. had been induced to remove the excommunication of Venice, and the enthusiasm of the people on learning the result was in proportion to what they had suffered during the period of the interdict, not yet forgotten. The multitude moved with one will towards his dwelling, and were for carrying him in triumph to the ducal palace; but he strongly protested against any such show, though the throng pressed upon him on his way to Saint Mark’s. There he knelt before the high altar and received the investiture of his high dignity, and took the oath of fidelity before the headmen of the districts as representatives of the people of the city and of all the Venetian territory. Himself bearing the standard of Saint Mark in his right hand, he entered the ducal palace, ascended the great staircase—not yet the ‘Giants’ Staircase’ of our time—and on the highest step took oath to observe all the obligations contained in the ‘Ducal Promise.’ The senior member of his own Council made a solemn acknowledgment of this oath, and the people listened in breathless silence to Dandolo’s short but brilliant speech, breaking out in
THE PULPIT, ST. MARK’S
renewed and yet more enthusiastic applause when he had finished.