The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04

by Unknown

Jealousy and intolerance of the pretensions of Heraclia to a paramount voice in the policy of the community may be securely assigned as the principal and permanent source of friction and disagreement; but the predominance of that township seems to have resisted every effort of the others to supplant its central authority and wide sphere of influence; and during centuries it preserved its power, through its ostensible choice as the residence of the most capable and influential citizens.

The scandalous and destructive outrages attendant on the rule of the tribunes had become a vast constitutional evil. They sapped the general prosperity; they obstructed trade and industries; they made havoc on public and private property; they banished safety and repose, and they impoverished and scandalized the Church.

The depredations of the Lombards, which grew in the course of time bolder and more systematic in their character, certainly indicated great weakness on the part of the government. Yet it was equally certain that the weakness proceeded less from the want than from the division of strength.

The sacrilegious inroads were not without their beneficial result; for they afforded those who might be disposed to institute reforms an admirable ground not only for bringing the matter more closely and immediately under the public observation, but they enlisted in the cause the foremost ecclesiastics, who might recognize in this internal disunion a danger of interminable attacks and depredations from without, if not an eventual loss of political independence; and, accordingly, in the course of the spring of 697-698, the patriarch of Grado himself submitted to the arrengo at Heraclia a scheme, which had been devised by him and his friends, for changing the government. The proposal of the metropolitan was to divest the tribunes of the sovereignty, and to have once more a magistrate (capo dei tribuni), in whom all power might be concentrated. His title was to be duke. His office was to be for life. With him was to rest the whole executive machinery. He was to preside over the synod as well as the arrengo, either of which it was competent for him to convoke or dissolve at pleasure; merely spiritual matters of a minor nature were alone, in future, to be intrusted to the clergy; and all acts of convocations, the ordination of a priest or deacon, the election of a patriarch or bishop, were to be subject to the final sanction of the ducal throne. In fact, the latter became virtually, and in all material respects, autocrat of Venice, not merely the tribunes, but even the hierarchy, which was so directly instrumental in creating the dignity, having now no higher function than that of advisers and administrators under his direction; and it was in matters of general or momentous concern only that the republic expected her First Magistrate to seek the concurrence or advice of the national convention.

In a newly formed society, placed in the difficult situation in which the republic found herself at the close of the seventh century, and where also a superstitious reverence for the pontiff might at present exist, apart from considerations of interest, it ought to create no surprise that the patriarch and his supporters should have formed a unanimous determination, and have taken immediate steps to procure the adhesion of the Holy See, before the resolutions of the popular assembly were definitively carried into effect.

This measure simply indicates the character of the opinions which were received at the time in Europe, as well as the strong consciousness on the part of the patriarch, and those who acted with him, of the expediency of throwing the voice and countenance of the Church into the scale alike against the tribunitial oligarchy and against local jealousies and prejudices. There was perhaps in this case the additional inducement that the proposal to invest the doge with supreme power and jurisdiction over the Church, as well as over the state, might seem to involve an indirect surrender, either now or hereafter, on the part of the Holy See of some of its power, as a high-priest or grand pontiff, who was also a secular prince, might prove less pliant than an ordinary liegeman of the Church. But the men of 697 acted, as we must allow, sagaciously enough, when they presented their young country to the consideration of the papacy as possessing a party of order, into which the Church entered, and from which it now stood conspicuously and courageously out to take this very momentous initiative.

The creation of an ecclesiastical system had been one of the foremost aims of the first founders, who discerned in the transplantation of the churches of the terra firma, and their familiar pastors to the islands the most persuasive reconcilement of the fugitives to a hard and precarious lot; and after all the intervening years it was the elders of the Church who once more stepped forward and delivered their views on the best plan for healing discord, and making life in the lagoons tolerable for all. They sought some system of rule, after trying several, which would enable them to live in peace at home, and to gain strength to protect themselves from enemies. They would have been the most far-seeing of human beings if they had formed a suspicion of what kind of superstructure they were laying on the foundation. The nearest model for their adoption or imitation was the Lombard type of government almost under their very eyes; and so far as the difference of local postulates suffered, it was that to which they had recourse, when they vested in their new chieftain undivided jurisdiction, but primarily military attributes and a title then recognized as having, above all, a military significance.

On the receipt of the desired reply, the patriarch lost no time in calling on the national assembly to follow up their late vote to its legitimate consequences; and the choice of the people fell on Pauluccio Anafesto, a native of Heraclia, whose name occurs here for the first time, but who may be supposed to have had some prominent share in promoting the late revolution. Anafesto was conducted to a chair which had been prepared for him in his parish church, and solemnly invested by the metropolitan with the insignia of authority, one of which is said to have been an ivory sceptre—a symbol and a material borrowed from the Romans.

It is not an unusual misconception that this organic change in the government involved the simultaneous extinction of the tribunitial office and title. But the truth is that the tribunes continued to exercise municipal and subordinate functions many generations after the revolution of 697; each island of importance, such as Malamocco and Equilo, had its own tribune, while of the smaller islands several contributed to form a tribunate or governorship; and office, though neither strictly nor properly hereditary, still preserved its tendency to perpetuate itself in a limited number of families. It is only subsequently to the twelfth century that less is heard of the tribunes; and the progress of administrative reform led to the gradual disappearance of this old feudal element in the constitution.

In the time of Anafesto, the larger islands of the dogado formed the seats of powerful factions; the disproportion in point of influence between the Crown and the tribune of Malamocco or the tribune of Equilo was but slightly marked; and the abolition of that magistracy was a much more sweeping measure than the first makers of a doge would have dared to propose.