which may be found in the election of the saintly hermit, Pietro da
Morrone, to be pope, by way of solving the difficulties which had
produced a long vacancy of the papal see. Pietro Orseolo was acclaimed
Doge without opposition.
But piety is not always energy, and virtue has little or nothing to do
with the greatness of princes. The holy man felt himself weak in the
face of the troubles caused by the hatred of his own family for that of
its predecessors in power, and when he saw what great responsibilities
were accumulating upon his shoulders, and what dangers menaced the
state, he quietly made up his mind to leave the world behind him and to
end his life in a Camaldolese monastery in Aquitaine. I find the best
account of this extraordinary vocation in Mr. Hazlitt’s recent work
(published in 1900); and incidentally I feel bound to say that this
writer, whose original book has now developed to very solid dimensions,
has searched the chronicles and later authorities upon Venetian history
with a care and a conscientious thoroughness quite unequalled by any
other historian who has treated of the same subject. We are free to
differ with Mr. Hazlitt as to some of his conclusions, and as to the
particular stories he has preferred to follow where the legends are many
and contradictory; but for thorough and detailed accounts, according to
the different chronicles, the English reader must go to him.
[Sidenote: _Rom. i. 256._]
In the late summer of the year 977 the good Doge Orseolo received the
visit of a learned and holy Frenchman, Warin, who was the Superior of
the Abbey of Saint Michel de Cuxac in Aquicaine, and who had come to
Venice to see for himself
[Sidenote: _Hazlitt, i. 90._]
the place where the Evangelist was laid. The Doge received him as became
his rank in the church, and the two good men were drawn to each other by
that profound though instantaneous sympathy which most of us have felt
at least once in life. Of the two, Warin had the stronger nature, and
recognising the true monk in the devout Doge, he bade him give up the
world, to which he had never really belonged, and follow his manifest
vocation.
Pietro Orseolo had been married at the age of eighteen to a maiden as
virtuous as himself, and when one son had been born to the pair they had
exchanged vows of chastity, and had afterwards given up their lives to
the care of the poor, and to visiting the hospices and hospitals.
And now, long after that, Warin argued with Pietro and urged him more
and more to renounce the world altogether; but Pietro was as wise as he
was good, and he knew that it was his duty to leave everything in order
for his successor, and he accordingly claimed a year in which to prepare
for his retirement.
The monk Warin had to admit that he was right, and they parted on the
first of September. On that same day, one year later, Warin returned and
waited for the Doge in the monastery of Sant’ Ilario. Pietro left his
house alone in the night and joined him, dressed as a pilgrim; at
midnight they mounted swift horses and set out upon their long journey
westwards, and the fugitive was not missed till late on the following
morning. Some accounts say that Orseolo’s wife had
[Illustration: HALL OF THE GLOBES, DUCAL PALACE]
already taken the veil in the nunnery of Saint Zacharias; others assure
us that she was dead. It matters little, for the one fact stands
undenied, that Pietro Orseolo fled from the dogeship of Venice to be a
novice in France, in one of the most rigid religious orders of that
time. There he lived in peace for nineteen years till he died in the
odour of sanctity; but over seven hundred years passed before he was
officially canonised and took his place in the calendar, after which the
French king returned his bones to Venice. There is a picture in the
Museo Civico representing him and his wife dressed as monk and nun, and
kneeling before a Madonna.
The policy of the Orseolo family in putting forward a saint to represent
them had not been very successful, for after Pietro’s flight they found
themselves deserted by the factions they had led against Pietro Candiano
IV.; and in the election which followed the holy man’s sudden
abdication, one more Candiano was chosen Doge in the person of Vitale,
of that name. At the same time two powerful alliances were formed, the
one between the Candiano and the Caloprini, of which the object seems to
have been to set up some sort of despotic government under the
protection of the Holy Roman Empire; the other between the Orseolo and
the Morosini, who held to the old alliance with Byzantium and the East.
Sismondi and others seriously derive the names of these two families
from Greek words signifying, for Morosini, the ‘Friends of Fools,’ and
for Caloprini, the ‘People who bow themselves skilfully’--in other
words, perhaps, the dupes and their flatterers. Of the two it was the
flatterers that came to grief, however, whereas the Morosini have
continued to flourish even to our own time. I know not whether these
derivations have any value. Victor Hugo, who did not know Greek, once
suggested that the French word ‘ironie’ might be derived from the
English word ‘iron.’
Many bloody encounters took place, in which the nobles of Venice took
sides with one party or the other, as their personal interests
suggested, and at last the Caloprini, who were hated by the people, were
forced to leave Venice. Yet trusting to the support of the Empress
Adelheid, or Adelaide, in an evil hour they ventured to come back a few
years later; but the Morosini, who had grown stronger in the meantime,
fell upon them and put them all cruelly to death, so that of that great
house only three widowed women remained alive to mourn the dead.
It was time that some strong hand should grasp the reins and drive the
car of state through the slough of chaos and blood in which it was stuck
fast, out upon the broad highway of fame. The hand was ready, and the
time had come; in the year 991 Pietro Orseolo II. mounted the ducal
throne.
From the first he threw all his energy into a systematic campaign
against the pirates of the Adriatic, whose fathers had carried off the
Venetian brides. They had paid for their rashness with their lives, and
their descendants had never again come so near the city, yet the
affront was not forgotten, and an expedition which had their destruction
for its object appealed to the men of Venice as few other incentives
could.
With a strong fleet the Doge set sail, and visited the coast cities of
Istria and Dalmatia one by one. They hailed him as a liberator, for they
were especially exposed to the attacks of the corsairs, and in return
for the protection of the Republic they placed their liberty in Pietro
Orseolo’s hands. He wisely received them as federal allies rather than
as subjects of Venice, though they, in their haste to be protected,
would not have refused to submit themselves to him as conquered cities.
He received them indeed under the shadow of the standard of Saint Mark,
but he left to each one full and unhampered liberty to govern itself as
it should see fit, requiring only a small yearly tribute in
acknowledgment of what was to be a feudal supremacy. The town of Arbo
was to pay ten pounds of silk, for instance, while Pola paid two
thousand pounds’ weight of olive-oil yearly to feed the lamps of Saint
Mark’s church, and so on, through a long list; and so, by token of a few
skins of oil, of a handful of silk, Venice first got supremacy over the
eastern Adriatic cities, with all the vast advantage to her commerce
that lay in owning harbours and warehouses all along the coast almost as
far as Greece. From that time Trieste, Capo d’ Istria, Rovigno, and all
the sea-coast cities of Istria became Venetian, and Zara, long an ally,
and Salone, and Spalatro and Ragusa; and the islands too, Coronota,
Brazza, and many others, down to the islets of Corsola and Lazina,
which stood firm for the pirates, guarding the approach to Narenta,
their chief city. But there, as all the chronicles agree, the Doge put
forth his strength, and he took those places in hard-fought battle and
smote them, and utterly wasted them with fire and the sword, so that
from that day their strength was gone, and the Adriatic was for many
centuries freed from the terror of their deeds.
Then, turning homeward, Pietro Orseolo visited the vast provinces he had
annexed to Venice, and because he had destroyed the corsairs the people
everywhere received him with great joy, and acclaimed him Duke of
Dalmatia by common consent; and the Doges who came after him bore the
well-earned title during many hundreds of years.
[Sidenote: _998 A. D. Rom. i. 284. Zanetti._]
Now it came to pass that when the young Emperor Otho III., mystic,
fiery, enthusiastic, heard of all this success, he felt a very great
longing to visit Pietro Orseolo and to see the wonderful water-city of
which all the world was beginning to talk; and he secretly told his
wishes to his privy councillors, but they would not hear of such a
thing, and he, being very young, would not act openly against their
advice. Yet he persisted in his intention, while he held his peace.
So at last, on a warm and moonlight night in the year 998, a boat manned
by eight men silently approached the little island of San Servolo, not
far from the city; and two men stepped out upon the shore and went up
and knocked at the door of a half-ruined building, once a monastery of
Benedictines. A man of imposing stature opened and let them in; but soon
three fishermen came out by the same way and got into a skiff that lay
waiting hard by, with two of their companions, for the larger boat had
disappeared; and they pulled over to the city.
Then in the moonlight the skiff was quietly rowed all about the city,
stopping here and there, wherever there was something worthy to be seen;
and if any of the belated townsfolk noticed the little boat and its
crew, no one guessed that it bore the young Emperor Otho himself, and
the Doge, and the Secretary, Paul the Deacon, who himself tells the tale
of the nocturnal visit. Having succeeded once, the Emperor came again,
less secretly, and spent days in the Doge’s palace, but still he
preferred not to be openly known, so that he might be the more free to
go about the city. There was a romantic strain in his short life, in his
intense enthusiasm, in his profound belief in a divine right to reign;
there was a faint foreshadowing of a stronger Emperor who is come in our
own day to claim what he claimed, and to do, perhaps, what he could not
do. With the strenuous reaching out after higher things Otho felt
youth’s longing to know, in an age when it was possible for one man to
master all the knowledge of his time, and it was surely this desire that
most of all brought him over to Venice that first time. Doubtless, too,
because Venice was counted with the East, his advisers foresaw trouble
in a too open friendship between him and the Doge. But his early death
ended such danger, if it ever existed, and all that remains is the
story of his wanderings by night, in fisherman’s dress, through the
still and moonlit waterways of the young city.
Like the Partecipazio and the Candiano houses which had ruled before
him, Pietro Orseolo now took measures to make the sovereignty hereditary
in his family, by associating his own son Giovanni in the ducal honour,
and further by marrying him to a Princess Mary, who was the daughter of
one of the joint Emperors of the East and the niece of the other. The
pair were united in Constantinople according to the Greek rite, and with
the utmost pomp and magnificence, and Giovanni was given the rank of an
imperial patrician. On their return to Venice, he and his beautiful
bride were received by the people with demonstrations of enthusiastic
joy, and, according to Sansovino, it was on this occasion, and at the
express request of the Venetians themselves, that Giovanni was invited
by his father to share in the power. It may well be, and it matters
little.
[Sidenote: _Mol. Dogaressa._]
Orseolo was much preoccupied by the still smouldering hatred of the
Candiano family, and he sought to satisfy their ambition by marrying his
second son, Domenico, to Imelda, grand-daughter of Pietro Candiano IV.
and Richelda. His third son, Ottone, when still very young, he married
to Geiza, sister of Saint Stephen, King of Hungary; and his daughter
Hicela was given to the King of Croatia.
Strong in these alliances, still young in years, and richly endowed with
the health and beauty that were hereditary in his family, Orseolo II.
might well have looked forward to a long and happy career, and to the
certainty of leaving the sovereignty to his descendants throughout
centuries to come. Then, about the year 1009, a comet suddenly appeared
in the sky, and famine and plague ravaged Venice and the world. Amongst
the very first victims were Giovanni and his young wife, and Orseolo
himself did not long survive them. The mortality was such, according to
old Dandolo, that there was not time to dig graves for all who died, and
such tombs as were not full were opened and crammed with dead.
Ottone Orseolo succeeded his father, when the power of the name seemed
at its height; but under him came the fall and exile of his family, and
the end of the period during which the dogeship was more or less
hereditary in the houses of Partecipazio, Candiano, and Orseolo. That
period is a labyrinth of uncertainties and a maze of conflicting
anachronisms. Scarcely two chroniclers place the same events in the same
year, and they are rarely agreed as to matters even more important.
Unmistakable history does not make its appearance in Venice till the
eleventh century, and not till the descendants of Pietro Orseolo II.,
the greatest Doge who had yet reigned, were exiled from Venice, and
excluded for ever, by a special law, from holding office under the
Republic. They may have found some consolation in the fact that one of
their house inherited the throne of Saint Stephen.
A few years later, the Doge Domenico Flabianico,
[Sidenote: _About 1032._]
or Flobenigo, sustained by an assembly of the clergy and the people,
introduced a law by which the chief of the Republic was forbidden to
associate any one with himself in the power, and by which he was
constrained to accept the ‘assistance’ of two counsellors. The
nomination of these was the first step towards the creation of those
many offices by which the Doge’s action was limited little by little,
till he became the mere figure-head, if not the scapegoat, of the
Republic he was supposed to govern.
[Illustration: FISHING BOATS AT THE RIVA]
[Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE CA D’ ORO]
V
VENICE AND THE FIRST CRUSADES
It is not my intention to attempt in these pages an unbroken narrative
of early Venetian history. Such attempts have been made by men of great
and thorough learning, but they have failed in part or altogether
because it is quite impossible to trust the only sources of information
which have come down to us. These agree, indeed, more or less; that is,
they agree just nearly enough to make it sure that something like the
event they narrate in such widely different ways actually took place, in
some year to be chosen at will from the several dates they give. But
that is all, until nearly the end of the Middle Ages.
One thing must not be forgotten: Venice was not the only maritime
republic in Italy, even in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were at
least three others, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa, which at that time were as
prosperous, and seemed likely to be as long-lived, and of which the
commerce in the eastern Mediterranean was already much more important
than that of Venice. In the end Venice outdid them because she was
isolated from Italy; literally ‘isolated,’ since she was built on
islands in the sea.
England owes her independence, and the British Empire therefore owes its
existence, to twenty-one miles of salt water. A much less formidable
water barrier gave Venice a thousand years of self-government. The vast
advantage of protection by water was perhaps not evident to the
Venetians more than two or three times in their history, any more than
the same advantage has been actually felt by Englishmen more than twice
or thrice, but those few occasions were most critical; it has been
present all the time, and the enemies of Venice, as of England, have
always realized with dismay the difficulty of attacking a nation to
whose country men cannot walk dry-shod.
The other three great maritime republics did not possess this prime
permanent advantage of isolation by water. Amalfi was taken and retaken
by land powers; Pisa was ultimately subjugated by the Florentines, the
landsmen who lived nearest to her; and Genoa, with a surviving semblance
of freedom, became tributary to the House of Savoy in the eighteenth
century. Venice alone of the four held her own till the days of
Napoleon, protected to some extent, perhaps, by a sort of tacit but
general European agreement to consider her a city of pleasure, but also,
and always, by that water barrier, which multiplies the strength of a
city’s defenders tenfold, and divides to dangerously small fractions the
powers of those that assail her.
It may seem fruitless to try to recall in a few words how Pisa and Genoa
rose to maritime power; but it is not possible to pass over in silence
the period during which Genoa, Venice’s great rival, was growing up on
the opposite side of the peninsula, nor the time in which Amalfi and
Pisa were becoming powers in the Mediterranean.
Amalfi, most strange to say, though she was the first to disappear, left
to the civilised world at large the greatest legacy. To one of her
citizens, Flavio Gioia, we owe the mariner’s compass; to her we owe the
manuscript of the Pandects of Justinian, by which, as Sismondi justly
says, all western Europe came back to the study and practice of Roman
law; to Amalfi we owe those laws regulating maritime traffic, which are
the foundation of the modern sea-law of civilised nations. And as if
this were not enough for her glory, it is to Amalfi that the order of
Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem owes its existence, the
oldest order of knighthood that still survives, now known as the
Sovereign Order of Malta.
At its greatest, the Republic of Amalfi embraced not more than fifteen
or sixteen villages besides the little capital itself, scattered along
the southern side of the Sorrentine peninsula, some perched on the
inaccessible flanks and spurs of a mountain that rises out of the sea to
a height of nearly five thousand feet, some built where wild gorges
widen at the water’s edge. That breakwaters were built out into the sea
before Amalfi and Positano against the terrific south-westerly gales, we
partly know and partly guess; that the capital and the dependent
villages were strongly fortified may easily be proved. But what is left,
though beautiful beyond description, is so little, and that little is so
exiguous, that the thoughtful traveller asks with a sort of unbelieving
wonder how the Amalfitans can ever have disputed the lordship of the sea
with the greatest, and possessed their own rich quarter in every
thriving harbour of the East; and how they can have given the maritime
world its first rules of the road, or sent out rich and splendid trains
of knights to one crusade after another. Yet they did all these things
before they sank from power and disappeared and were lost in the turmoil
of South Italian history.
Next greater in strength to survive came Pisa, a contrast to Amalfi in
almost every condition, and a power which, when at its height, was of
more importance in history because history was then less chaotic. Not
backed against steep mountains like Amalfi and Genoa, but built in the
rich alluvial soil of the delta of the Arno, where the widening stream
afforded a safe harbour for ships; not isolated in a natural fortress of
rocks, but easy of access by land as well as by sea, and therefore easy
to quarrel with and often in danger, Pisa possessed the natural
advantages of a modern capital like London or Paris rather than the
natural defences of a strong city of the Middle Ages. But the times were
not ripe, and Florence was too near, jealous, turbulent, commercial and
usurious, a dangerous enemy in war, and a terrible competitor in peace.
No country has produced simultaneously so many cities as Italy, any of
which might have become the capital of a nation. I can only compare the
tremendous vigour of her growth at many points at once to that of a
strong oak-tree broken off near the ground by a tornado, and sending up
shoots from the stump, so tall, so straight, so vital that each one, if
the others were cut away, would grow in a few years to be a tree as tall
and robust as the parent. Venice, Palermo, Naples, Pisa, Genoa,
Florence, Milan--might not any one of these have grown to be a nation’s
capital? And can any other nation of Europe show as much?
The tenth century was not far advanced when Pisa possessed an immense
fleet and was already governing herself as a republic. A proof of her
importance lies in the fact that when Otho the Second was at war with
the South and meditated annexing to his Empire what remained of the old
Greek colonies, he applied to Pisa to lend him ships wherewith to
transport his troops to Calabria. His sudden death, however, put an end
to the negotiations, and the seven nobles whom he had
[Illustration: THE POST OFFICE]
sent to Pisa to represent him were so much delighted with all they saw,
as well as with their reception, that they asked to be made citizens
themselves, were granted the privilege, and became the founders of that
great Ghibelline party by which the destinies of the Pisan Republic were
guided so long as she maintained her independence.
Amalfi sent out traders to the East and knights to fight for the holy
sepulchre; but her knights did not fight to win land for her, nor did
her traders ever become colonists. Pisa, like Venice, sought to extend
her territory. At that time the daring Saracen chief named
Mousa--Moses--settled himself on the eastern and southern coast of
Sardinia, and carried his depredations far and wide on the Italian shore
and through the Tuscan archipelago. Seizing his opportunity when the
Pisan fleet had sailed southwards to help the Calabrian Greeks against
the Saracens of Sicily, Mousa and his pirates entered the mouth of the
Arno by night and landed in the suburbs of Pisa. The terrified citizens
were waked by the yells of their assailants amidst the flames of their
own dwellings, and if the corsairs had possessed any local knowledge of
the city its history might have gone no further than that night. But in
their ignorance they had landed on the wrong bank of the river, and had
fired the suburb instead of the city itself; a woman, and some say that
she was a noble lady, made her way through the confusion across the
bridge to the Consul’s dwelling, the church bells were rung backwards
and roused the sleeping garrison to arms, and the Saracens, surprised by
the prospect of energetic resistance, withdrew hastily to their ships
and dropped down the river. The peril was past.
But when the fleet came back from the South vengeance was sworn upon
Mousa and his pirates, and the conquest of Sardinia was a foregone
conclusion. So Pisa rose to power, and Genoa envied her and Florence
too, and those long wars began which ended in her destruction and her
absorption. While Venice had been distracted by internal factions, by
the feuds of Candiano and Orseolo, Morosini and Caloprini, the ‘Dupes
and the Flatterers,’ Pisa had at least enjoyed the honour of fighting
and vanquishing a horde of unbelievers. And meanwhile Genoa had risen
also to much the same degree of prosperity and strength, so that when
Peter the Hermit’s cry rang through the Christian world, rousing the
faithful to win back the Holy Land, the four great Italian maritime
republics were almost equals in wealth and influence, and in the fleets
of which they could dispose.