Paul IV discovered at length that Spain had no serious resolution to support him by arms, and that, without the application of a force which he could not command, it was vain to expect submission from so inflexible a body as the Venetian oligarchy. He was therefore reduced to the most humiliating compromise of his boasted dignity. Without obtaining a single concession on the point in dispute, he was obliged to revoke his spiritual sentences. The doge and senate could not even receive an absolution; they refused to alter their decree against the alienation of property in favour of the church; and though they consigned the two imprisoned ecclesiastics to the disposal of Henry IV, they accompanied this act with a formal declaration, that was intended only as a voluntary mark of their respect for that monarch their ally, and to be in no degree construed into an abandonment of their right and practice of subjecting their clergy to secular jurisdiction. Even their deference for Henry IV could not prevail over their resentment and suspicion of the banished Jesuits: they peremptorily refused to reinstate that order in its possessions; and it was not until after the middle of the century that the Jesuits obtained admission again into the states of the republic. Thus, with the signal triumph of Venice, terminated a struggle, happily a bloodless one, which was not less remarkable for the firmness of the republic than important for its general effects in crushing the pretensions of papal tyranny. For its issue may assuredly be regarded as having relieved all Roman Catholic states from future dread of excommunication and interdict—and therefore from the danger of spiritual engines, impotent in themselves, and formidable only when unresisted.
With the same unyielding spirit which characterised their resistance to papal and ecclesiastical usurpation, the Venetian senate resolved to tolerate no infringement upon the tyrannical pretension of their own republic to the despotic sovereignty of the Adriatic. Before the contest with Paul V, their state had already been seriously incommoded by the piracies of the Uscochi. This community, originally formed of Christian inhabitants of Dalmatia and Croatia, had been driven, in the sixteenth century, by the perpetual Turkish invasions of their provinces, to the fastness of Clissa, whence they successfully retaliated upon their infidel foes by incursions into the Ottoman territories. At length, overpowered by the Turks, and dispersed from their stronghold, these Uscochi, or refugees, as their name implies in the Dalmatian tongue, were collected by Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (afterwards emperor), and established in the maritime town of Segna to guard that post against the Turks. In their new station, which, on the land side, was protected from access by mountains and forests, while numerous inlets and intricate shallows rendered it difficult of approach from the sea, the Uscochi betook themselves to piracy; and, for above seventy years, their light and swift barks boldly infested the Adriatic with impunity. Their first attacks were directed against the infidels; but irritated by the interference of the Venetians, who, as sovereigns of the Adriatic, found themselves compelled by the complaints and threats of the Porte to punish their freebooting enterprises, they began to extend their depredations to the commerce of the republic.
[1615-1617 A.D.]
It was to little purpose that the senate called upon the Austrian government to restrain its lawless subjects; their representations were either eluded altogether, or failed in obtaining any effectual satisfaction. The Uscochi, a fearless and desperate band, recruited by outlaws and men of abandoned lives, became more audacious by the connivance of Austria; and the republic was obliged to maintain a small squadron constantly at sea to protect her commerce against them. At length, after having recourse alternately, for above half a century, to fruitless negotiations with Austria, and insufficient attempts to chastise the pirates, the republic seriously determined to put an end to their vexatious hostilities and increasing insolence. The capture of a Venetian galley and the massacre of its crew in 1615, and an irruption of the Uscochi into Istria, brought affairs to a crisis. The Austrian government, then directed by the archduke Ferdinand of Styria, instead of giving satisfaction for these outrages, demanded the free navigation of the Adriatic for its vessels; and the senate found an appeal to arms the only mode of preserving its efficient sovereignty over the gulf. The Venetian troops made reprisals on the Austrian territory; and an open war commenced between the archduke and the republic.
The contest was soon associated, by the interference of Spain, with the hostilities then carried on between that monarchy and the duke of Savoy in northern Italy respecting Montferrat. For protection against the enmity of the two branches of the house of Austria, Venice united herself with Savoy, and largely subsidised that state. She even sought more distant allies, and a league, offensive and defensive, was signed between her and the seven united provinces. Notwithstanding the difference of religious faith, which, in that age constituted in itself a principle of political hostility, the two republics found a bond of union, stronger than this repulsion, in their common reasons for opposing the Spanish power. They engaged to afford each other a reciprocal assistance in money, vessels, or men, whenever menaced with attack; and in fulfilment of this treaty, a strong body of Dutch troops arrived in the Adriatic. Before the disembarkation of this force, the Venetians had already gained some advantages in the Austrian provinces on the coasts of that sea; and the archduke was induced by the appearance of the Dutch, and his projects in Germany, to open negotiations for a general peace in northern Italy.
Lion, supporting the pillar of the Pulpit, St. Mark’s
The same treaty terminated the wars of the house of Austria respecting Montferrat and the Uscochi. Ferdinand of Austria gave security for the dispersion of the pirates, whom he had protected; and thus the Venetian republic was finally delivered from the vexatious and lawless depredations of those freebooters, who had so long annoyed her commerce and harassed her subjects (1617). It does not appear that the force of this singular race of pirates, who had thus risen into historical notice, ever exceeded a thousand men; but their extraordinary hardihood and ferocity, their incessant enterprise and activity, their inaccessible position, and the connivance of Austria, had rendered them formidable enemies. Their depredations, and the constant expense of petty armaments against them, were estimated to have cost the Venetians in thirty years a loss of more than 20,000,000 gold ducats; and no less a question than the security of the dominion of the republic over the Adriatic was decided by the war against them.
[1617-1618 A.D.]
Although Spain and Venice had not been regularly at war, the tyrannical ascendency exercised by the Spanish court over the affairs of Italy, occasioned the Venetians to regard that power with particular apprehension and enmity; and the spirit shown by the senate in the late contest had filled the Spanish government with implacable hatred towards the republic. By her alliances and her whole procedure, Venice had declared against the house of Austria, and betrayed her disposition to curb the alarming and overspreading authority of both its branches in the peninsula. The haughty ministers of Philip III secretly nourished projects of vengeance against the state, which had dared to manifest a systematic hostility to the Spanish dominion; and they are accused, even in apparent peace, of having regarded the republic as an enemy whom it behoved them to destroy. At the epoch of the conclusion of the war relative to Montferrat and the Uscochi, the duke of Osuna was viceroy of Naples, Don Pedro de Toledo, governor of Milan, and the marquis of Bedmar, ambassador at Venice from the court of Madrid. To the hostility entertained against the republic by these three ministers, the two former of whom governed the Italian possessions of Spain with almost regal independence, has usually been attributed the formation, with the connivance of the court of Madrid, of one of the most atrocious and deep-laid conspiracies on record. The real character of this mysterious transaction must ever remain among the unsolved problems of history; for even the circumstances which were partially suffered by the Council of Ten to transpire were so imperfectly explained, and so liable to suspicion from the habitual iniquity of their policy, as to have given rise to a thousand various and contradictory versions of the same events. Of these we shall attempt to collect only such as are scarcely open to doubt.