Part 1

SALVE · VENETIA

GLEANINGS FROM VENETIAN HISTORY

BY

FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD

_WITH 225 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL_

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1906

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1905. Reprinted January, 1906.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE ARISTOCRATIC MAGISTRACIES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 1

II. GLEANING FROM VENETIAN CRIMINAL HISTORY 51

III. VENETIAN DIPLOMACY 77

IV. THE ARSENAL, THE GLASS-WORKS, AND THE LACE-MAKERS 95

V. CONCERNING SOME LADIES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 117

VI. A FEW PAINTERS, MEN OF LETTERS, AND SCHOLARS 132

VII. THE TRIUMPHANT CITY 168

VIII. THE HOSE CLUB--VENETIAN LEGENDS 189

IX. THE DECADENCE 207

X. THE LAST HOMES--THE LAST GREAT LADIES 232

XI. THE LAST CARNIVALS--THE LAST FAIRS--THE LAST FEASTS 266

XII. THE LAST MAGISTRATES 288

XIII. THE LAST SBIRRI 310

XIV. THE LAST DOGES 334

XV. THE LAST SOLDIERS 348

XVI. THE LAST DIPLOMATISTS 361

XVII. THE LAST HOUR 380

XVIII. CONCLUSION 412

THE DOGES OF VENICE 421

TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL DATES IN VENETIAN HISTORY 425

INDEX 433

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

The Angels of the Salute _Frontispiece_

The Last Rays, St. Mark’s _To face page_ 35

Palazzo Ressonico ” 72

Steamers coming in ” 96

Afterglow, the Grand Canal ” 134

Venice from the Garden ” 140

Entrance to the Sacristy, Frari ” 149

Campiello delle Ancore ” 208

The Salute from the Riva ” 246

Fondamente Nuove ” 313

From San Georgio to the Salute ” 326

Ponte Canonica ” 356

Out in the Lagoon ” 382

IN TEXT

PAGE

S. Maria degli Scalzi, Grand Canal 1

Hall of the Great Clocks, Ducal Palace 7

Hall of the Pictures, Ducal Palace 9

The Stair of Gold, Ducal Palace 13

Rio S. Atanasio 20

S. Samuele 30

On the Zattere 39

Rio del Rimedio 41

Mouth of the Grand Canal 51

The Rialto at Night 53

From the Balcony of the Ducal Palace 54

The Columns, Piazzetta 55

The Salute from the Giudecca 61

A Garden Wall 69

Palazzo Dario 83

Calle Beccheria 85

Ponte del Cristo 95

S. Michele 99

Venice from Murano 100

The Duomo Campanile, Murano 101

Murano, looking towards Venice 103

Murano 104

The House of Beroviero, Murano 105

The Palaces 109

The Rialto Steps 112

Noon on the Rialto 113

At the Rialto 115

Evening off S. Georgio 117

Casa Weidermann 125

The Grand Canal in Summer 132

Euganean Hills from the Lagoon, Low Tide 135

House of Tintoretto 145

House of Aldus 147

S. Giacomo in Orio 157

Doorway of the Sacristy, S. Giacomo in Orio 159

Fondamenta Sanudo 161

A Holiday on the Riva 168

Door of the Carmine 174

Interior of the Carmine 177

Campo behind S. Giacomo in Orio 181

The Piazza 185

Pigeons in the Piazza 187

Sotto Portico della Guerra 189

Ponte S. Antonio 193

S. Zobenigo 197

Ponte dell’ Angelo, Giudecca, Old Wooden Bridge 202

Rio S. Sofia, Night 207

Santa Maria Formosa 211

Grand Canal looking towards Mocenigo Palace 217

The Fondamenta S. Giorgio, Redentore in Distance 222

Steps of the Redentore 224

The Nave of S. Stefano 229

The Riva from the Dogana 232

Campo S. Bartolomeo, Statue of Goldoni 233

SS. Giovanni e Paolo 243

Night on the Riva 244

Rio della Toresela 253

A Narrow Street, near the Academy 259

Grand Canal 266

Church of the Miracle 271

The Procession of the Redentore 276

Near the Fenice 286

Grand Canal from the Fish Market 288

S. Barnabò 289

Instituto Bon, Grand Canal 293

When the Alps show Themselves, Fondamenta Nuove 300

Café on the Zattere 301

The Dogana 303

Rio della 310

Rio S. Stin 313

Rio della Guerra 318

Via Garibaldi 325

The Pesaro Palace, Grand Canal 334

Marco Polo’s Court 339

Ponte della Pietà 344

From the Public Garden at Sunset 348

Boat-Builders 353

The Vegetable Market 355

Fondamenta Weidermann 357

The Salute from S. Giorgio 361

From the Ponte della Pietà 365

On the Way to Fusina, from the Mouth of the Brenta 369

A Lonely Canal 374

Evening 380

The Salute from the Lagoon 385

From the Ponte S. Rocco 397

Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo 403

So-called House of Desdemona 407

Sails 412

A Gateway 413

SALVE · VENETIA

I

THE ARISTOCRATIC MAGISTRACIES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Like other aristocracies, the Venetian government rarely destroyed or altogether abolished any office or regulation which had existed a long time. When a change was needed the duties or powers of one or more of the Councils were extended, or a committee of the Council of Ten was appointed and presently turned into a separate tribunal, as when the Inquisitors of State were created.

In one sense the government of Venice had now existed in a rigid and unchangeably aristocratic form during two centuries, and that form never changed to the very end. But in another sense no government in the world ever showed itself more flexible under the pressure of events, or better able to provide a new legislative weapon with which to combat each new danger that presented itself. This double character of an administration which inspired awe by its apparent immutability and terror by its ubiquity and energy, no doubt had much to do with its extraordinarily long life; for I believe that no civilised form of government ever endured so long as that of Venice.

It is therefore either frivolous or hypocritical to seek the causes of its ultimate collapse. It died of old age, when the race that had made it was worn out. It would be much more to the point to inquire why the most unscrupulous, sceptical, suspicious, and thoroughly immoral organisation that ever was devised by man should have outlasted a number of other organisations supposed to be founded on something like principles of liberty and justice. Such an inquiry would involve an examination into the nature of freedom, equity, and truth generally; but no one has ever satisfactorily defined even one of those terms, for the simple reason that the things the words are supposed to mean do not anywhere exist; and the study of that which has no real existence, and no such potential mathematical existence as an ultimate ratio, is absolutely futile.

The facts we know about the Venetian government are all interesting, however. It had its origin, like all really successful governments, in the necessities of a small people which held together in the face of great dangers. It was moulded and developed by the strongest and most intelligent portion of that people, and the party that modelled it guessed that each member of the party would destroy it and make himself the master if he could, wherefore the main thing was to render it impossible for any individual to succeed in that. The individual most likely to succeed was the Doge himself, and he was therefore turned into a mere doll, a puppet that could not call his soul his own. The next most probable aspirant to the tyranny would be the successful native-born general or admiral. A machinery was invented whereby the victorious leader was almost certain to be imprisoned, fined, and exiled as soon as his work was done and idleness made him dangerous. Pisani, Zeno, Da Lezze are merely examples of what happened almost invariably. If a Venetian was a hero, any excuse would serve for locking him up.

Next after the generals came the nobles who held office, and lastly those who were merely rich and influential. They were so thoroughly hemmed in by a hedge of apparently petty rules and laws as to their relations with foreigners, with the people, and with each other, that they were practically paralysed, as individuals, while remaining active and useful as parts of the whole. No one ever cared what the people thought or did, for they were peaceable, contented, and patriotic. Every measure passed by the nobles was directed against an enemy that might at any moment arise amongst themselves, or against the machinations of enemies abroad. Of all Italians the Venetians alone were not the victims of that simplicity of which I have already spoken. They believed in nothing and nobody, and they were not deceived. They were not drawn into traps by the wiles of the Visconti as Genoa was, and as many of the principalities were; they were not cheated out of their money by royal English borrowers as the Florentines were; they were not led away out of sentiment to ruin themselves in the Crusades as so many were; on the contrary, their connection with the Crusades was very profitable. For a long time they could be heroes when driven to extremities, but they never liked heroics; they were good fighters at sea, because they were admirable merchant sailors, but on land they much preferred to hire other men to fight for them, whom they could pay off and get rid of when the work was done.

Like other nations, their history is that of their rise, their culmination, and their decline. Like other nations, Venice also resembled the living body of a human being, of which it is not possible to define with absolute accuracy the periods of youth, prime, and old age. But we can say with certainty that each of those stages lasted longer in the life of Venice than in the life of any other European state, perhaps because no one of the three periods was hastened or interrupted by an internal revolution or by the temporary presence of a foreign conqueror.

It can be said, however, that Venice was, on the whole, at the height of her glory about the year 1500, and it would have needed a gift of prophecy to foretell the probable date of the still distant end. At that time the Great Council was more than ever the incarnation of the State, that is, of the aristocracy; and every member of the great assembly had a sort of ‘cultus’ for his own dignity, and looked upon his family, from which he derived his personal privileges, with a veneration that bordered on worship. The safety and prosperity of the patrician houses were most intimately connected with the welfare of the country; a member of the Great Council would probably have considered that the latter was the immediate consequence of the former. As a matter of fact, under the government which the aristocrats had given themselves, it really was so; they were themselves the State.

It was therefore natural that they should guard their race against all plebeian contamination. From time to time it became necessary to open the Golden Book and the doors of the Great Council to certain families which had great claims upon the public gratitude, as happened after the war of Chioggia; but the book was opened unwillingly, and the door of the council-chamber was only set ajar; the newcomers were looked

[Sidenote: _Rom. iv. 469._]

upon as little better than intruders, and the ‘new men,’ while they were invested with the outward distinctions of rank before the law, were not received into anything like intimacy by their colleagues of the older nobility.

It is a law of the Catholic Church that baptism creates a relationship, and therefore a canonical impediment to marriage, between the baptized person or his parents on the one hand, and the godfathers and godmothers on the other, as well as between each of the godparents and all the rest. But it was the custom of Venice to have a great many godfathers and godmothers at baptisms, and the nobles were therefore obliged by law to choose them from the burgher and artisan classes. It was perfectly indifferent that a young patrician should contract a spiritual relationship with a hundred persons--there were sometimes as many godparents as that--if these persons were socially so far beneath him that he must lose caste if he married one of them; but it was of prime importance that the law should forbid the formation of any spiritual bond whereby a possible marriage between two members of the aristocracy might be prevented, or even retarded. Every parish priest was therefore required to ask in a loud voice, when he was baptizing a noble baby, whether there were any persons of the same social condition as the infant amongst the godparents. If he omitted to do this, or allowed himself to be deceived by those present, he was liable to a very heavy fine, and might even be imprisoned for several months.

The Avogadori now replaced their old-fashioned register by the one henceforth officially known as the Golden Book, in which were entered the marriages of the nobles and the births of their children. Every noble who omitted to have his marriage registered within one week, or the birth of his children within the same time, was liable to severe penalties. But the

names of women of inferior condition who married nobles were not entered in those sanctified pages, since the children of a burgher woman could not sit in the Great Council. Nevertheless, it happened now and then that a noble sacrificed the privileges

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Dog._]

of his descendants for the present advantage of a rich dowry; and as this again constituted a source of anxiety for the State, the amount of a burgher girl’s marriage portion was limited by law to the sum of two thousand ducats.

The young aristocrats received a special education, to fit them for their future duties and offices. We have already seen that young men not yet old enough to sit in the Great Council were admitted to its meetings in considerable numbers, though without a

[Sidenote: _Yriarte, Vie d’un Patricien de Venise, 67._]

vote. The instruction and education of young nobles were conducted according to a programme of which the details were established by a series of decrees, and especially by one dating from 1443; and in the Senate very young noble boys were employed to carry the ballot-boxes, in which office they took turns, changing every three months. There were probably not enough noble children to perform the same duty for the Great Council, which employed for that purpose a number of boys from the Foundling Asylum.

The young nobles were brought up to feel that they and their time belonged exclusively to the State, and when they grew older it was a point of honour with them not to be absent from any meeting of the Councils to which they were appointed. Marcantonio Barbaro, the patrician whose life M. Yriarte has so carefully studied, missed only one meeting of the Great Council in thirty years, and then his absence was due to illness. When one considers that the Great Council met every Sunday, and on every feast day except the second of March and the thirty-first of January, which was Saint Mark’s day, such constant regularity is really wonderful.

During the summer the sittings were held from eight in the morning until noon, in winter from noon to sunset; this, at least, was the ordinary rule, but the Doge’s counsellors could multiply the meetings to any extent they thought necessary, and we know that when a doge was to be elected the Great Council sometimes sat fifty times consecutively.

The public were admitted to the ordinary sittings of the Great Council, and in later times one could even be present wearing a mask, as may be seen in certain old engravings. But no outsiders were admitted when an important subject was to be discussed, and on those occasions a number of members were themselves excluded. If, for instance, the question concerned the Papal Court, all those who had ever avowed their sympathy for the Holy See, or who had any direct relations with the reigning Pope, or who owed him any debt of gratitude, were ordered to leave the hall. Such persons were called ‘papalisti,’ and were frequently shut out of the Great Council in the sixteenth century, a period during which the Republic had many differences with Rome.

In 1526, for instance, the Patriarch of Venice laid before the Great Council a complaint against the Signors of the Night, who refused to set at liberty a certain priest arrested by them, or even to inform the ecclesiastical authorities of the nature of his misdemeanour. That would have been one of the occasions for excluding the ‘papalisti.’ The Patriarch seems to have been a hot-tempered person, for on finding that he could get no satisfaction from the Great Council, he excommunicated the Venetian government and everybody connected with it, and posted the notice of the interdict on the columns of the ducal palace. The matter was patched up in some way, however, for on the morrow the notice disappeared.

The Senate met twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I find among their regulations a singular rule by which the beginning of every speech had to be delivered in the Tuscan language, after which the speaker was at liberty to go on in his own Venetian dialect.

[Sidenote: _Fulin, Studii, Arch. Ven. I. 1871 (unfinished)._]

I have already spoken at some length of the Council of Ten; it is now necessary to say something of the Inquisitors of State, to whom the Ten ceded a part of their authority in the sixteenth century.

In the first place, the Inquisitors of State never had anything to do with the ‘Inquisition,’ nor with the ‘Inquisitors of the Holy Office,’ a tribunal, oddly enough, which was much more secular than ecclesiastic, and which belongs to a later period.

Secondly, the so-called ‘Statutes of the Inquisitors of State,’ published by the French historian Daru, in good faith, and translated by Smedley, were

[Sidenote: _Rom. vi._]

afterwards discovered to be nothing but an impudent forgery, containing several laughable anachronisms, and a number of mistakes about the nature of the magistracies which prove that the forger was not even a Venetian.

Thirdly, the genuine Statutes have been discovered since, and are given at length by Romanin. They do not bear the least resemblance to the nonsense published by Daru. No one except Romanin would have attempted to whitewash the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten, and even he is obliged to admit that for ‘weighty reasons of state’ they did not hesitate to order secret assassinations; but they were not fools, as the ‘Statutes’ of Daru make them appear.