Part 17

What shall I tell you? After these words they leave the church and go to their own houses, and after they have eaten, the people, men and women, go into the districts that have made these processions, and they find in twelve houses the twelve Maries, so beautifully arrayed as is a wonder to see. Each one has a crown of gold with precious stones upon her head, and they are dressed in cloth of gold, and on their robes there are precious stones and pearls without number. The ladies and maidens sit around them, very richly dressed, and the men present their friends with confectionery to eat and with wine to drink. And on the following day they make other feasts in their twelve houses. And our Lord the Doge wears the crown of gold on the eve of our Lady, as he wears it at Pentecost, and after vespers he returns to the palace in the same manner in which he came. On our Lady’s day, the second of February, each of the two districts which give the beautiful and rich festival, as I have narrated, prepare six great barges, and have them rowed to the head of the city, exactly where the Bishop of Venice lives; these six barges are very richly draped with cloth of gold and carpets. And then ladies and maidens are taken on board four of them, very richly habited, and they put the Maries in the midst, and in another barge go forty men well armed, with their drawn swords in their hands; and in another go the clerks arrayed with the richest treasures of the Church. Then comes the Bishop, and gives his benediction, and when he has blessed them they all return into their barges, and the Bishop goes with them, with two abbots in their great barges, so richly dressed, and they are all arrayed in copes of cloth of gold. The Lord Bishop has his canons in his company, and the two abbots have their monks. Then the barges set forth from the palace of the Lord Bishop, adorned as I told you, and they meet upon their way two magnificent barges, which are to be for the same festival next year. They all go thus before the church of our Lord St. Mark, and there they drop anchor, and lie to wait for the coming of our Lord the Doge. When the Bishop and the two abbots have come to the shore they go out upon dry land with all their company, and go together into the church of our Lord St. Mark, and find our Lord the Doge at mass; and after mass they come back to the barges. The Lord Doge comes under the umbrella, with the Bishop by him on one side and the senior canon on his other side, and both the abbots before them. The Doge is crowned with gold, and the Bishop wears his mitre, and the abbots, the chaplains, and the canons go singing in procession; the trumpets and the cymbals go before every one, and the crosses afterwards. In this manner the Lord Doge goes as far as his great barge, and enters it with the nobility of Venice, and his Judge is beside him, and behind him is placed in the ship he who carries the Doge’s sword. When our Lord Doge has entered the great ship in company with the nobility of Venice, and of many honourable men, he sits down between the senior canon and his Judge, and they sit down upon the barge; and the Bishop and the two abbots enter their barges; then the men of the barges weigh anchor, and they go to the other end of the city, and you must know that the city is very long, a league and a half, or more. But if you were there, sirs, you might well see the water covered with boats, full of men and women who follow, of whom you must know that you could never tell the number. And in the windows of the palaces and on the banks there is a throng of ladies and maidens, as many as there are in all the city, and so richly dressed that you could see none finer. With such joy and festivity they go to the other end of the city, and then return to their own districts, and the Lord Doge with all his company returns to his palace, and finds the tables set, and he eats with all those who have been with him.

It is worth noting that in the fourteenth century the Doge’s vessel was no longer called the principal barge, but the Bucentaur, the name being probably, as some say, derived from ‘Buzeus aureus,’ and so called in some documents. It was a rich vessel, adorned with carvings, stuffs, carpets, and paintings. Up to 1311 it was not rowed, but was towed by another boat, which was draped and rowed by men of Murano; but after that year it had its own rowers.

[Sidenote: _G. R. Michiel, Origini._]

It is easy to understand that such a festival as Martin da Canal describes might be the ruin of more than one great house, and it cost even the State enormous sums, which is one reason why it was not always celebrated with equal magnificence. In 1350, when the plague had greatly reduced the budget, it was decided to substitute painted wooden statues for the twelve young girls, but the public strongly opposed this innovation. The recollection of these wooden dolls has never been wholly effaced; it is still common in Venice to call a woman who is thin, cold, stupid, and pretentious, ‘a wooden Mary.’

The feast was given up at the end of the fourteenth century, at the time of the final struggle with Genoa. The treasury was empty, and excessive anxiety kept the public spirits in a state of nervous tension; moreover, the age of the ideal Venetian woman was past, and she no longer inspired profound and chivalrous devotion as in the old days when she had been more modest, more retiring, and more gentle.

Of all that splendid show and pageant nothing remained but the Doge’s visit to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, and his largess of small coins to the street boys at the moment of loosing the line with which the rector of the church pretended to bar the way to the bridge.

X

THE DOGES IN THE EARLY PART OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Pietro Gradenigo reigned twenty-two years, during a very eventful period. In 1298 he had placed the aristocratic supremacy on a permanent basis, and a few months later he crushed the sedition of Marin Bocconio; eight years afterwards he put down the much more dangerous insurrection of Tiepolo and the Quirini; but he was less fortunate abroad than at home, and his foreign policy resulted in the wholesale excommunication of the Venetian people and government, as the direct consequence of the attempt to annex Ferrara, a step which had also led to the organisation of the Tiepolo conspiracy. When Gradenigo died the papal interdict was still in full force.

The forty-one patricians who were to elect his successor were duly chosen and shut up in the ducal palace, though not yet with any great precautions to prevent them from communicating with their friends. They understood well enough that the interests of the State required a Doge whose genuine piety should move the Pope to forgiveness; such a man was found in the senator Stefano Giustiniani, and in a short time the majority of votes was in his favour. He was not only a man of irreproachable life, but also a first-rate statesman, and he was personally well known and liked in Rome, where he had once resided as Venetian ambassador. The choice was a good one, but the patrician was too virtuous, or too wise, or both, to accept the supreme office at such a moment, foreseeing clearly that his conscience and reputation would be simultaneously at stake, and in such a way that to save the one would probably have been to imperil the other.

He had long nourished the hope of retiring from the world, and when he knew that he was elected he lost no time in carrying out his pious design. Instead of going from his house to the ducal palace, he disappeared within the doors of the monastery of Saint George, and on the same day put on the habit and took the obligations of a novice.

The stupefaction and embarrassment of the electors may be imagined; it was perhaps within the powers of the all-powerful government to drag Giustiniani from the refuge of his cell, and to place him by force upon

the ducal throne, but such a course would certainly not have improved the relations of the Republic with the Pope, a result which had been the sole object of the election. On the other hand, it seemed impossible even to agree upon the names of candidates, in order to proceed to an election. The electors fell into a state of apathy of which there is probably no example in history; they moved about in an objectless way, talking listlessly of anything that occurred to them; they even lingered at the open windows of the palace, to watch the people passing in the street.

[Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 83._]

As they looked down, they saw an aged nobleman slowly walking toward the postern gate of the prisons, followed by a servant who carried a big sack of bread, so full that the loaves protruded from the open mouth. It was Marin Zorzi, a charitable and devout person, on his way to distribute food to the poor prisoners. He was the very man. Before he had left the prisons, he was elected Doge.

Unhappily this hasty choice did not improve matters. An old chronicler sums up in a few words the short reign that followed: Zorzi lived ten months, during which he never saw the sea calm nor the sun without clouds. All that remained to mark his reign was an asylum for poor children, the earliest foundation of the kind in the world.

In less than a year, therefore, another election took place, and as the experiment of looking out of the palace windows in the hope of seeing the right man pass in the street had been a failure, the electors were shut up, windows and balcony doors were closely sealed, and the forty-one were driven to look at each other. In a short time they elected Giovanni Soranzo by a considerable majority.

[Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 89, 103, and notes._]

So far as I can ascertain, he was born in 1240, and was therefore about seventy-one years old in 1311; but the longevity of the Venetian nobles was always remarkable, and he was destined to reign seventeen years. He had rendered the Republic very eminent service on more than one occasion, and was a man of astounding activity. To mention only a few incidents of his busy life, in its later years, he had commanded a fleet of twenty-five galleys against the Genoese when already fifty-six years old, had taken possession of the port of Caffa and had defended it during a whole winter against the combined attacks of the Genoese and the Tartars, and had captured a goodly number of richly laden Genoese vessels. On his return to Venice he had been received with honours resembling those of a triumph, and had soon found himself in arms again, but on land this time, against Padua first, and then against Ferrara, which he had already governed as Podestà. When at last recalled to Venice he had occupied the important position of a procurator of Saint Mark, from which post he was elected Doge to succeed Marin Zorzi.

Soranzo was undeniably one of the most illustrious men elected to the Dogeship in the course of its existence of exactly eleven hundred years. It is enough to say that he reconciled the Republic with the Pope, and reconquered Dalmatia; and that, in spite of the vast sums of money which both these undertakings cost, he protected and developed Venetian manufacture and commerce so diligently as to increase the public wealth instead of diminishing it. It was during his reign that the weaving of silk stuffs in Venice reached a perfection hitherto undreamt of, surpassing, according to the taste of the day, the fabrics of the Levant and driving them out of the market. Under Soranzo the glass-works of Murano produced mirrors that outdid the very best that could be made in Germany, for clearness and brilliancy. At the same time, the Arsenal of Venice was greatly extended by the addition of new basins, windmills were set up all over the islands, many like improvements, then modern, were introduced, a general condition of ease and well-being extended through all classes, and the population increased more quickly than ever before. The State could count forty thousand men between the ages of twenty and sixty years who were able to bear arms. For a silver ducat a man could buy enough meat and flour to support him for a week, with as much wine as he needed, and wood to cook with and to warm him.

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

renewed and yet more enthusiastic applause when he had finished.

[Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 109._]

During the following days festivities were organised for the coronation of the Dogess, much more various and of longer duration than those which greeted her husband’s elevation to the throne. In older times, when the head of the Republic still possessed real power, his wife played no official part in State ceremonies. She lived as before, and the Doge could retire to her apartments and be in his home as if he were a private person, much as the modern Turk takes refuge in his harem. At most, the Dogess, as the first matron of the city, might outdo other patrician women in assisting public and private charities; but when the Doge’s personal authority was almost gone, and he was required, in a degree, to compensate its loss by a certain amount of display and ceremony, intended to please the people and impose upon the representatives of foreign powers, the presence and influence of a woman became temporarily necessary. The Dogess then received a court of her own, and was required to wear a special dress, and for her a complete ceremonial was devised, from which she could not withdraw herself without incurring the displeasure of her husband and of the State itself.

From the moment when the joyful multitude pressed to the doors of Dandolo’s palace, his wife remained within, according to the new laws of conduct laid down for her. Then came the High Chancellor, as representative of the people, and the Doge’s six counsellors, to present their congratulations and to ‘request’--or require--her strict observance of such clauses in the Ducal Promise as directly concerned herself. When these personages withdrew, she presented each with a magnificent gold-embroidered purse.

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Dogaressa, 123._]

[Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 109 sqq._]

A few days later, when all was ready for the ceremony, they came to fetch her with the Bucentaur, and in her honour was renewed the spectacle which had been given half a century earlier for the wife of Lorenzo Tiepolo. The vast and splendid barge had but a few times its own length to move from Dandolo’s palace to the landing of the Piazzetta. An immense crowd was gathered there, from the borders of the canal to the door of the Basilica, a sufficient space being kept open in its midst for the display of the Dogess’s pageant.

The guilds of the arts and trades had been privileged to escort the wife of Lorenzo Tiepolo to the church: first the blacksmiths with flying banner; then the merchants of fur, dressed in their richest garments and most priceless sables, and wearing ermines fit for an emperor; the weavers next, singing at the top of their voices to the music of trumpets and cymbals, and bearing both silver cups and flagons full of wine. After the weavers the tailors came in the dress of their trade guild, white robes embroidered with red stars; and the wool-merchants bore olive branches in their hands and had crowns of olive leaves on their heads; also the makers of quilts and coverlets were crowned with gold beads, and wore on their shoulders white cloaks embroidered with fleur-de-lis; and there

were the sellers of cloth of gold, and the shoemakers, the mercers, the pork-butchers, the glass-blowers, the jewellers and the barbers, all displaying the rich and fantastic costumes of their guilds in the great procession, a very splendid sight.

Thus escorted the Dogess entered Saint Mark’s, and knelt at the high altar, and before she went away she deposited thereon an offering of ten ducats. Then she was led to the throne-room of the palace and took her seat beneath a canopy beside her husband the Doge. The ceremony ended with a huge and sumptuous banquet, to which were invited all the heads of the guilds who had appeared in the procession.

Francesco Dandolo was a man of wit and of many resources. It is related, though without serious proof, that he had moved Clement V. to pity by appearing, as ambassador, in a penitent’s dress, and wearing an iron collar, weeping and moaning, and remaining prostrate at the pontiff’s feet. It has even been said that one or more of the cardinals kicked him as he lay there, called him a dog, and otherwise insulted him; but that he bore all patiently for his country’s sake. One authority explains, however, that the nickname of ‘dog,’ or ‘watch-dog,’ had been bestowed upon his family long before that time, as ‘Cane,’ dog, and ‘Mastino,’ mastiff, were actually used as baptismal names in the great family of Scala.

He reigned ten years, with fortune good and evil, but chiefly good. More than once, in his time, the safety of the State was gravely menaced, but all ended well, and the sum of his administration was a gain to Venice.

Since the beginning of the fourteenth century the

[Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 115_]

city of Padua had been a prey to faction and internal strife. The aristocratic party fought for the family of the Scala, while the citizens and people were devoted to the house of Carrara. By turns the two families got the advantage and held the power, but the Carrara were really the stronger, for the Venetians helped them, on the ground that one of them, Jacopo, had married a daughter of the Doge Pietro Gradenigo.