Part 10

The position it occupied in the Republic has, I think, no example elsewhere. In one shape or another it had always existed, and there was an aristocracy amongst the first fugitives from the mainland; from that time on, the nobles and the people, the tribunes and the artisans, had fought like comrades against the barbarians, as well as against the elements of nature. Like shipwrecked men of one country, speaking one language, they had been as brothers; the noble families had been the chief defenders of the new home, and its earliest law-givers, and they transmitted to their descendants a traditional influence which was rarely misused in earlier times. The people did not hate them, as the populace has always hated the aristocracy in agricultural countries; for agriculture, where the poor work on the estates of the rich, seems to degrade both alike, or at least to brutalise them, whereas men who till their own lands almost always grow in character and independence. In Venice, while the people looked up to the nobles as their intellectual and social betters, they did not cease for a long time to regard them as their allies and helpers.

The nobles, therefore, had taken the lead from the beginning, and they kept it without difficulty and almost without opposition; in politics the people effaced themselves, trusting to the ruling class to maintain the liberties of the maritime state abroad, both in the east and the west, and confident that the commerce and art of Venice would continue to develop under its influence. The nobles were ambitious, it is true, but they had nothing to gain by oppressing the people, for they were themselves the principal creators of the public wealth. They dominated the people,

which is quite another matter; until the fifteenth century they cannot fairly be said to have abused their power, and the privileges they kept for themselves involved the heaviest responsibilities. If they held control of the tribunals, yet were these as ready to try the nobles, and even the Doge himself, as to judge the poorest fishermen of the lagoons; and though the Doge could only be a noble, his head might fall under the axe of the common executioner, the lowest of the

low. Unlike the aristocracies of other countries, that of Venice never claimed for itself exemption from justice.

These facts, which cannot be denied with truth, seem to me to show that the closure of the Great Council was not such a violation of the rights of man as it has often been represented to be. Soon after the middle of the thirteenth century, the nobles seem to have judged the times ripe for the great change, and a sort of preliminary weeding of the Council began.

[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 342._]

In 1277, apparently in order to lend dignity to an assembly performing such high duties, a measure was passed which rigidly excluded from the Council all persons who were not of legitimate birth. In 1286 the Council of Forty, in order to assure to the nobles a constant and legal supremacy, proposed to limit eligibility for their own number to the members of the Grand Council, and to those only whose fathers and paternal grandfathers had already sat there. This attempt failed, and the bill was rejected, principally owing to the opposition of the Doge, Giovanni Dandolo, who was an honest man, free from the prejudices and passions of caste, and who wished the aristocracy to maintain its position by sheer superiority of intelligence and judgment without any legalised privileges.

[Sidenote: _Mol. Dogaressa._]

At that time, as has been shown in a separate chapter, the families of Partecipazio, Candiano, and Orseolo, and most of all the Tiepolo, had assumed the position of princes in the Republic. Each of them could boast of several doges, and all hoped to make the dignity hereditary for themselves. The Tiepolo cherished the most ambitious designs, and were always doing their best to win over the people. In 1289, on the death of Dandolo, the electors within the palace heard the populace under the windows acclaiming Jacopo Tiepolo. To have submitted to the people’s dictation would then have meant a step towards an hereditary monarchy, and the electors paid no attention to the cries from the street. Amongst the candidates was Pietro Gradenigo, a man who, though ambitious, was highly gifted and sincerely devoted to his country, and had always endeavoured to guide the Great Council towards an ideal aristocratic form of government which alone, in his judgment, could save the State from a selfish monarchy on the one hand and a feeble democracy on the other. The electors chose Pietro Gradenigo.

[Sidenote: _Rom. i. 344._]

In 1296 he brought forward a measure which, it must be admitted, would have been an act of vengeance upon the people for attempting to proclaim Jacopo Tiepolo as Doge, and for receiving the announcement of Gradenigo’s regular election in silence and ill-concealed discontent. The Doge now proposed to reform the process of election, as had been contemplated by the bill of 1286, but at the first attempt the measure failed, owing to the determined opposition of the Tiepolo family and their friends, who formed themselves into a party, which they called conservative. It was brought forward again in the following year, however, and passed by a majority of votes. It restricted the right of eligibility at each annual election to those who had sat in the Great Council during one of the four preceding years, and it required that they should receive at least twelve votes from the Council of Forty which elected them. This was a successful stroke, for the Council of Forty consisted wholly of nobles, who would use their elective power altogether in accordance with Gradenigo’s intention.

In order not to rouse the opposition of the people by giving the law an absolute form, it was declared to be only provisional, and to be in force from one Saint Michael’s Day to the next, that being the date of the election.

A year passed. So great was the prestige of the aristocracy and its power, and so completely accustomed were the people to be guided by it and to be despoiled by it of their rights, that the resentment aroused by this so-called provisional law was not enough to prevent its becoming a lasting one, though its general form was still subject to possible variations.

[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, i. 330._]

Grave dissensions, however, appeared in the caste of patricians. Gradenigo found himself opposed on the one hand by the Tiepolo faction, on the other by certain families which, although descended from the ancient tribunes of the island, and consequently of most ancient and respected race, were excluded from the Great Council, merely because they had not been represented in it during the last four years. It became necessary, therefore, to modify the law in the following manner:--

It was decreed that all who had sat in the Council themselves, and all who, though they had not had a place there themselves, could prove at least one ancestor a member of the Council since 1172, should be eligible for the Council, by the vote of the Forty. It is a remarkable fact that the word ‘nobles’ is not to be found in any of these decrees; but it was clearly useless to insist upon a mere word when the whole aristocracy, which had proposed and passed the law, was to profit by it. The nobles never lost sight of a possible danger to themselves in the resentment of the people.

Last of all, it was decreed that those who had never themselves sat in the Council, nor had any ancestors who had been members, should be considered as ‘eligible by grace.’ This was done in order to leave a shadow of hope to ambitious men of other classes, an idea that they might some day be admitted as ‘new men’ into an assembly which was shutting its gates for ever. As a matter of fact, in the beginning a limited number of councillors ‘by grace’ were created, and some were chosen for their own personal merits, or to quiet the ambition of certain turbulent citizens. In order to be admitted in this manner, it was necessary in the first place to receive twenty-five votes from the Forty, and the votes of five out of six of the Doge’s counsellors. A few years later, admission was made still more difficult by requiring thirty votes from the Forty, and it is likely that under this law very few ‘new men’ were ever elected. Venice was still far from the days when the first comer would be able to buy a seat in the Great Council at auction, in order that the proceeds might help to pay the interest on the public debt. The exclusion of illegitimate sons, which was already in force, was maintained, and it was further ordained that no one under twenty-five years of age should enter the Council. The latter measure, however, was soon followed by a palliative one. Each year, on the fourth of December, the feast of Saint Barbara, the Doge placed in an urn the names of all young nobles twenty years of age, who at twenty-five would have the right to a place in the Council, and thirty of these were drawn by lot, and received permission to be present at the assemblies of the Council from that day, but without the right of voting; this constituted a sort of novitiate in those duties to which, at the regular established age, the young men would be called. The process of admission was called ‘coming to the Barbarella.’

It appears to me that the last word contains a play on words; for it may mean ‘the little Barbara,’ the saint on whose feast the lots were drawn, or it may mean the down on the chin of a youth of twenty, ‘the little beard,’ for though an improperly formed diminutive, it is quite a possible one in dialect.

As may be imagined, the nobles showed the utmost haste and anxiety to prove their rights before the ‘avogadori,’ or counsel to the commonwealth, whose duty it was to decide upon them. In some cases there was evidence that an ancestor had sat in the Council at the end of the twelfth century, but it might be that there were no documents to prove it, and the most

[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, i. 331._]

extraordinary means were resorted to, to persuade the judges of the truth of the assertion. Some families, in order to prove that they were nobles, which of course was the real object of the inquiry, adduced the fact that they possessed great quantities of arms in their houses. The number of persons who, without the slightest chance of proving their rights, inscribed their names on the books of the avogadori, beginning in 1315, was so great that it was found necessary to impose a fine upon those who had done so without any chance of establishing their claim, and all titles whatsoever were carefully examined before being allowed. It is almost needless to say that the families about whose right there was no doubt possible did their very best to exclude all the rest.

As soon as the first list of members by right, and members who were eligible, was made out, it was decreed that they required to be elected, if they had attained the age of twenty-five years, in order to sit at the Council. It appears that no matter what the precise number of the members under this category might be, a certain number were always elected from among the ‘eligibles,’ a fact which explains the changing number of councillors in each year. There is reason to believe that the assembly had never consisted of more than five hundred members before 1297, but that after the law passed in that year it reached (1340) the number of twelve hundred.

It is clear from all this that the measure known as the Closure of the Great Council did not consist so much in any regular elections yearly as in a close limitation of the class of candidates, and the fact that it was necessary that they should be elected by the Council of Forty; whereas in former times they were elected by the people, represented in their turn by one or two electors in each of the six regions of the city, or else by two electors from the regions on one side of the canal, and two from the regions on the other.

Little attention has been paid to the law of 1298, which at the time appeared to be of secondary importance, but which had close connection with the others that had been framed by the aristocracy. The law of 1298 established that no one should belong to the Forty who had not already sat in the Grand Council, or whose father or grandfather had not sat there. By this law each assembly was strictly dependent on the other, and the right to sit in the one, like the possibility of sitting in the other, became a privilege of noble birth.

The aristocracy had now completely got the upper hand, almost without a struggle, by skill, persuasion, and tact. Henceforth the history of Venice is that of the nobility, who had monopolised the power, and, with it, all responsibility. If Venice was great, healthy, and vigorous in the fourteenth century, she owed it to the nobles, who still treated the people generously and kindly. And later on, when the people allowed themselves to be intoxicated with the amusements provided them while their last rights were trodden under foot, the nobles were to blame. So they were, too, in the end, when the Lion of Saint Mark was torn down from its column in the Piazzetta and broken upon a soil no longer free. The people were not oppressed at any time, but they suffered what was morally worse, for they were systematically hypnotised into a state of utter indifference to real liberty.

The assemblage of so many nobles in the hall of the Great Council must have presented a splendid spectacle. It was rigidly required that all should wear the cloak, or toga, of violet cloth, with its wide sleeves and hood lined with warm fur in winter and with ermine in the milder seasons. Here and there a few red mantles made points of colour, those of the High Chancellor and of the avogadori of the commonwealth, though the latter appear to have worn only a red stole over the cloak of violet. There were black cloaks, too, and they marked the ecclesiastics who belonged to the Council, for until 1498 priests who proved that they were nobles were eligible like the other members of their family.

[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 263._]

When the Council was to meet, an official called the ‘comandatore,’ a sort of public crier, proclaimed the summons from a fragment of a porphyry column, which stood upside down on its capital at the corner of the Piazza of Saint Mark towards the ducal palace, and another issued the proclamation from the steps of the Rialto, these being the two most frequented points of the city; at the same time full notice was given of the offices which were to be distributed at the coming Council by the High Chancellor. At the appointed hour the cavaliers appeared in the neighbourhood of Saint Mark’s, spurring their comely mules; but it was forbidden to cross the Piazza itself, except on foot, because it was paved, so that the riders left their mules tied up to the elderbushes

which formed a thick growth, exactly on the spot where now stands the Clock Tower at the entrance to the Merceria.

About 1356 the public crier’s office was abolished, his place being supplied by the ringing of a bell in the tower of Saint Mark, in the evening after vespers, when the Council was to meet on the following morning, and

[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, i. 245._]

at the hour of tierce (half-way between dawn and noon), if it was to meet in the afternoon. At the time of assembling in council this bell was rung again, and the people nicknamed it the ‘trotter,’ because councillors who came late always

reached the entrance to the Piazza at a sharp trot before the last strokes had rung.

By this time the appearance of the Piazza and the Piazzetta had been considerably modified. The ‘Rivo Battario,’ which formerly ran through the length of the square, had been filled up; the little church of Saint Gemignano had been demolished, and the great

[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 361._]

Campanile had been built. The nobles used to meet before the Council upon the old platform, which was turned into a convenient place for walking, and here also there was built a covered loggia, as a protection in bad weather. The first time that a young patrician came to the Council, either on his election by lot after the manner of the ‘Barbarella,’ or because he had reached his twenty-fifth birthday, a little ceremony took place on the platform or under the loggia, in which he was presented to his older colleagues, and a sort of civil bond began here between the man who was introduced and the person or persons who introduced him, which lasted through life, and received the general name of ‘sponsorship.’ I may remind the reader here that all bonds of sponsorship, called generally ‘comparatico’ throughout Italy, are under the special protection of Saint John the Baptist, and even now have an importance which foreigners find it hard to understand.

Before the meeting of the Council the throng on the platform was swelled by those who came to solicit the councillors on private matters of their own, or were seeking offices or dignities which it lay with the Great Council to bestow, such as judgeships and magistracies. The ‘private matters’ might include anything connected with taxation, money loans, laws in general, pardons, and even the public peace and national alliances.

A curious custom was connected with such interviews. Those who had favours to ask of the Great

[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, i. 355._]

[Sidenote: _Mut. Costumi._]

Council were accustomed to show their respect by taking the strip of cloth that hung down from their shoulder to the ground on the right side, and tying it or rolling it upon the arm, and this action was called ‘calar stola,’ and appears to have been the equivalent of the later custom by which the inferior takes off his hat to speak with his superior.

If any member of the Great Council had recently been bereaved of a near relation, it was upon the platform or under the loggia that he received the condolences of his peers, being himself wrapped in a black mantle with a train, of which the length diminished little by little as his time of mourning came to an end, until at last it was only a short black cloak; this in its turn was replaced by a simple leathern belt worn over the ordinary clothes instead of the usual girdle, which was made of velvet.

This meeting of the nobles in the Square was naturally the occasion for carrying on all sorts of intrigues; and in Venice, as in the early days of ancient Rome, the relations of client and patron played a large part in public affairs, and were productive of no small evil, especially in the creation of great numbers of minor offices merely for the purpose of satisfying the claims of dependents.

So the nobles loitered and talked between the Campanile and the two columns, one of red and the other of grey stone, which stand near the Grand Canal. These two columns, which had been brought

[Sidenote: _Lazzari, Guida._]

[Sidenote: _Gall. i. 271._]

to Venice from the archipelago in 1127, under the Doge Domenico Michiel, had been set up about fifty years later by the skill of a certain Lombard named Nicola Barattiere. A chronicler tells in Venetian dialect that this engineer went to the Signoria, asked for ropes, timber, and beams, and then set to work with eight men, and no more. He drove down piles for the foundations, and having completed these in seven days he set up the columns on the eighth by means of ropes and capstans. When he was asked what reward he wished for his work, he only requested that so long as Venice should exist his descendants should be enfranchised and be free to keep gaming-tables between the two columns he had set up--contrary to the law which forbade all games of chance in Venice--and he asked for a decent lodging for himself and a small stipend. It may be noted that his name, ‘Barattiere,’ means at once a money-changer and a dishonest gambler, and it may have been given to him as a nickname after the fact. At all events, his requests were granted, and he set up gaming establishments, with tables, between the columns for his own profit. At a later time this privilege became a monopoly of other speculators, and it only ceased to exist in 1529, nearly three hundred and fifty years later, when the destruction of all gaming-tables and booths, which marred the beauty of the Square, was commanded by the government.

This story recalls the action of Charles II., who, in order to reward certain Cavaliers who had sacrificed their fortunes in his interest, and finding himself insufficiently

supplied with funds, conceded to a number of them the right to keep gambling-tables between the columns and under the arches of Covent Garden. These persons were known as ‘lottery Cavaliers.’

[Sidenote: _Dalmedico._]

At the end of the thirteenth century the Lion of Saint Mark had been placed upon one of the two columns in the Piazzetta, while upon the other was set up the statue of Saint Theodore, the co-patron of the city; so that the common people of Venice, by way of expressing that a man was driven to the last extremity, used to say, ‘He is between Mark and Theodore.’ In connection with the column of Saint Mark it is worth while to quote the answer given not many years ago by a gondolier to a lady in regard to the emblem of Saint Mark. All the other winged lions visible in Venice hold an open book under their paw, and the book is placed in such a way that one may read the usual motto--‘Pax tibi, Marce.’ But though the book of the lion on the column is really open, it lies down, so that from below it appears to be shut; and the lady in question inquired of her gondolier what the cause of this difference might be. ‘It is because,’ replied the gondolier, ‘when a man got between these columns his account was closed’! The story shows how vividly the people still remember that the gallows were sometimes erected there. It seems strange, however, that the young patricians, while waiting for the first hour of the Council, should have patronised gaming-tables set up so close to the place of public execution, and it is now generally considered that executions originally took place between the red columns in the high first story of the ducal palace, overlooking the Square, and that the object of transferring them to the spot between the columns of the Piazzetta was to drive people away from gambling there.

After this brief glance at the development of the aristocracy and its legal institution as the ruling caste, it is necessary to consider the nature of that body which lay between it and the working people, and which included all well-to-do Venetian citizens in general.

[Sidenote: _Daru, i. 314._]

For in Venice, as in most countries where the social equilibrium of large numbers of mankind is natural and not artificial, the population had long separated spontaneously into three classes. As long as the work of organising the new republic was going on the three fraternised, for the law granted no privilege to any one, and the men who imposed their opinions and their will upon the rest, without any sort of violence, were without doubt the most gifted members of the community. Nothing, as Daru justly observes, assured to the nobles, up to the end of the thirteenth century, any right not possessed by all the other citizens. Nevertheless, as he adds, the important office of High Chancellor had been especially reserved for non-nobles several years before the closing of the Great Council, which shows that custom, if not law, accorded other privileges to the descendants of the early tribunes.