Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

He raided the Genoese coast in such a fashion that his name was a terror to the city of Genoa for a hundred years afterwards, and, by closing the Mediterranean to his enemies, he struck a vital blow at their prosperity. By keeping continuously on the move and darting from point to point with his light ships, he contrived to keep a considerable part of the Genoese fleet constantly employed, and a good part of the Genoese troops on the coast; but his peripatetic methods were not always to the advantage of Venice, for they made it extremely difficult to reach him, either with news or orders, so that, although the Senate despatched boat after boat and messenger after messenger to acquaint him with the defeat of Vittor Pisani at Pola, by the Genoese Admiral Luciano Doria, with instructions to return, it was by accident that the story reached him, six months after the battle, as he was standing out of Candia, where the Doge’s messenger arrived soon afterwards.

He left Candia on the 2d of December, 1379, and sailed for Paranzo, where he arrived upon the 14th. Although he knew of the defeat at Pola, he had not as yet any real idea of the desperate condition of Venice until he arrived at the Lido, where a government agent gave him a view of the condition of affairs and begged him to hasten to Chioggia, then closely blockaded by Vittor Pisani.

Chioggia had fallen to the Genoese on the 6th of August, but on the 21st of December, Pisani, who had only been released from the prison, where he was incarcerated after Pola, because the people flatly refused to follow or serve under any one else, had succeeded in bottling up the Genoese fleet, much as the Japanese bottled up the Russians at Port Arthur, with the difference that his operation was successful and theirs was not. To bottle up a strong enemy is sensible; to pay a broken one the distinguished compliment of sinking good ships, and sacrificing life to prevent him from getting at you, is something else.

Unfortunately, his troops were amateur soldiers, and, though their patriotism, helped by their acquired and inherited hatred of the Genoese, had held them to their task for a while, yet a winter campaign uses up the reserves of such passing enthusiasms quickly, and poor Pisani found himself, as have others who have attempted to carry out long and arduous operations with irregular troops, between the devil of abandoning his enterprise altogether and the deep sea of the revenge that the well-armed, well-disciplined, and half-starved enemy would exact by land, the instant that the necessity for guarding the harbour was over.

His men clamoured ceaselessly to be allowed to return home and attend to their affairs, disregarding the probability that, if they did relax their grip upon Doria’s throat, they would have no affairs to attend to, save that of paying the heaviest indemnity that he could exact. But the reasoning powers of human beings in the mass are not great, and, at last, Pisani was compelled to promise that, should Carlo Zeno not arrive within two days, he would sail for the Lido.

Heavy days they must have been for Pisani, with the very existence of the Republic depending upon whether or no a person who had not been heard from for many months past would, accidentally, arrive in time to redeem the promise and save it.

As it has been already suggested, Carlo’s popularity was due in a very large measure to his astounding luck; nor did it desert him now. For forty-eight hours was Pisani compelled to endure his agony, in order that Carlo might arrive exactly at the right moment—not an hour too soon to spoil the splendid effect of his seemingly miraculous appearance upon the scene, not an hour too late to save Pisani and Venice.

It was at daybreak that Pisani, despair in his heart, climbed out of his cabin and mechanically swept the horizon with his eyes. For some minutes he staid there, unwilling to turn away from the clean, open sea to the sight of the prize which he was being forced to give up when it was already in his grasp. How his heart must have ached, as he recalled the gathering of the citizens, the prayers, the shouting and boasting, the speeches of the Doge, the “do or die” ranting of the weak-backed people, who, having seen war (for they had, up till then, been a highly respectable community and had hired their fighting men by the month or year, as they needed them), were, of course, perfectly ready to plunge in it, and still more ready, once they began to feel the weight of it, to crawl out again.

His dreary meditations were suddenly disturbed by a cry from aloft, and he came to himself with a start as the cry was repeated.

It was a sail, and, in answer to his furiously anxious questions, the lookout presently reported that it was that of a fighting-vessel, and that there were more of them coming up behind her.