ships of war, and that the vessels themselves had been allowed to rot
in the Bosphorus till even the hulks were unfit for sea. It is easy to
understand why the magnificently-equipped fleet of the Venetians could
proceed from one imperial harbour to another without meeting even a show
of opposition. Moreover, wherever the crusaders went they found the
cities they visited well disposed towards the younger Alexis. In this
way they touched at Durazzo, Corfu, Cape Malea, Negroponte, Andros and
Abydos, and came at last, on the eve of Saint John’s day (twenty-third
of June) to the town and abbey of San Stefano, famous in many a later
war, to our own times, and well within sight of the city. Here, says
Geoffrey de Villehardouin, the Marshal of Champagne, and the eyewitness
and chronicler of the whole expedition, the masters of the ships,
galleys, and transports took harbour and anchored their vessels: ‘Now
you may know that long they looked upon Constantinople who had never
seen it yet, and they could not believe that so rich a city could be in
all the world. When they saw those lofty walls and those rich towers
which close it in all round about, and those rich palaces and tall
churches of which there were so many as no one could have believed if he
had not seen them with his eyes, through all the length and breadth of
that city, which among all others was sovereign; know ye well that then
there was none so brave but that his heart trembled, and this was no
wonder, for never was so great a matter undertaken ... then each looked
to his arms, considering that in them soldiers must trust when they
shall soon have need of them.’
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 170._]
[Sidenote: _Attack on Constantinople, Palma, Giovane, Hall of the Great
Council._]
I shall not attempt to describe the memorable events which followed.
Here, as in many passages of his history, it may be said of Gibbon, as
of Titian by Taine, that ‘he absorbed his forerunners and ruined his
successors.’ It is enough to say that the city was fortified with double
walls and four hundred towers, and that the garrison was estimated by
Villehardouin at no less than four hundred thousand men. The resistance
was obstinate, but the attack was irresistible. The French, judging at
first that they could fight better on land, concentrated their strength
against the northern wall; the Venetians, from their ships, scaled the
fortifications that rose from the edge of the sea. The aged Dandolo led
the general assault himself, twenty-five of the towers were captured,
and the fall of Constantinople was a foregone conclusion. But the whole
siege, with intermissions, lasted from June until the following April.
During that time the deposed and imprisoned Emperor Isaac, surnamed
Angelos, succeeded through his friends in organising a revolution in his
favour, in regaining the throne, which he divided with his son Alexis,
and finally in quarrelling with his liberators, the Venetians and the
French crusaders, after considerable demonstrations of friendship,
because he could not carry out the clause in the agreement relative to
the subjection of the Greek Church to the popes. He, and even his son,
the younger Alexis, though not to blame for this, seem to have been very
little better than his brother, the elder Alexis, who had fled for
safety, and the student is not sorry to learn that they were put to
death by such patriots as remained in the corrupt capital before the
final assault.
The besiegers, on their side, had made a treaty among themselves for the
division of the spoil, with the following conditions:--
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 177. Quadri, 122._]
First, after the taking of Constantinople, a new emperor was to be
elected from among the crusaders by a body consisting of six Venetians
and six of the French barons.
Secondly, whichever nation should be the one from which the emperor was
chosen was to leave to the other the church of Saint Sophia, with the
right of designating the patriarch.
Thirdly, the other churches of the city were to be equally divided
between Venice and the French.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 182._]
Fourthly, all future conquests, including the city itself, were to be so
divided that the elected emperor should receive one-quarter of the
whole, while the remaining three-quarters were to be divided equally
between the French and the Venetians. It was, however, provided that
Venice was to receive the balance of the sum due for transporting the
crusaders before any division of the spoil took place.
The city was finally taken on the twelfth of April 1204, the final
assault having lasted three days, but as it was late in the day when the
allies got possession of the fortifications they did not venture into
the interior of the city until the following morning. It has been
estimated that nearly one-half of the city
[Sidenote: _1204. Storming of Constantinople, Domenico Tintoretto; Hall
of the Great Council._]
with all the treasures it contained had been destroyed by the three
great fires which had taken place during the preceding months, yet the
spoil that remained far exceeded anything recorded in history, and it is
not to be denied that both the French and the Venetians committed
frightful excesses in the first intoxication of their immense triumph.
[Sidenote: _Election of Baldwin, A. Vicentino; same Hall._]
The articles of the treaty the victors had made among themselves were
strictly observed. The spoil was divided in the manner and proportions
stipulated, electors were chosen, and they proceeded to the choice of an
emperor. It was but natural that the majority should agree at once upon
the Doge Enrico Dandolo, to whose judgment, determination, and personal
courage the success of an apparently impossible enterprise was largely
due. A force of between thirty and forty thousand men, coming in ships
from a distant country and facing every possible strategic disadvantage,
had destroyed the Eastern Empire in a few months, and had captured the
most strongly fortified city in the world against odds of more than ten
to one. From first to last they had been counselled, directed, and led
by the aged Doge; assuredly no one was more worthy than he to receive
the highest reward and the greatest share of honour. One Frenchman and
one Venetian, however, dissented, and it was the Venetian who argued
convincingly against Dandolo’s election. He pointed out clearly that the
chief magistrate of a free republic
[Sidenote: _Dandolo crowns Baldwin, Aliense; same Hall._]
could not in conscience be at the same time the despot of an empire, and
he advised that Baldwin of Flanders should be chosen instead. The
Venetians themselves were easily persuaded of the justice and good
[Illustration: VENICE FROM THE LAGOON]
sense of this view, and it was forthwith unanimously adopted.
The conquerors proceeded next without delay to the dismemberment of the
Empire, dividing amongst themselves provinces and cities of which they
barely knew, and could not correctly write the names, and omitting many
of the very existence of which they were
[Sidenote: _Quadri, 127._]
in ignorance. Amongst the lands and strongholds which fell to the share
of the Venetians may be mentioned Lacedaemon, Durazzo, the Islands of
the Cyclades and Sporades, and the Island of Crete, or Candia, taken
over in a friendly exchange from the Marquis of Montferrat, and all the
eastern coast of the Adriatic. The Doge of Venice added to his titles
the one of ‘Lord and Master of a quarter and a half-quarter of the Roman
Empire,’ and in official acts the new Emperor was to address him as
‘Carissimus Socius nostri Imperii.’
This vast and sudden extension of territory, while it at once placed the
Republic on an equal footing with the greatest European powers, had many
disadvantages, and was fraught with dangers. Venice consisted properly
of nothing more than the city and the duchy, with a population which
Sismondi estimates at two hundred thousand souls; the partition of the
Empire conferred upon Venice, by a stroke of the pen, many thousand
square miles of land and seven or eight millions of subjects, and
Venice, as the author I am quoting very pithily says, though not able to
annex Padua, only twenty miles from the lagoons, was now undertaking to
subdue what constituted a powerful kingdom, and to defend it against
Turks, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and possibly even against the Latins of
Constantinople.
It was clear that though the commerce of the Republic might gain
immensely by this extension of her dominions, the responsibility assumed
by the Republic was far beyond that which so limited a population could
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 183._]
bear, and that the expenses of administering and defending the distant
provinces would be enormous. Nor could the Venetians afford to overlook
the fact that their great rivals, Genoa and Pisa, would spare no effort
to drive them from their new possessions by fair means or foul. Before
the taking of Constantinople the rich citizens either lived at home
altogether or returned after each voyage to fit their ships for another;
but so soon as the Republic became the possessor of important colonies
in the East, it was manifestly necessary that a considerable number of
the most experienced and bravest Venetians should remain constantly
abroad to administer and defend those new possessions.
The position of Venice at this time may be not inaptly compared with
that of Rome when, after the annexation of Sicily, she found herself
obliged to inaugurate that system of provincial government which she
ever afterwards followed. But Venice was not Rome, and even if the
Venetians had possessed the qualities of the Romans in addition to their
own, they could not have succeeded as the Romans did, since in Genoa and
Pisa they had competitors as civilised and as wealthy as themselves and
far more numerous. Rome went on and conquered the world; Venice drew
back in the face of a manifest impossibility, retiring, with much common
sense and not a little dignity, from a career of successful conquest to
the less brilliant but more stable condition of a commercial people.
The Venetian senate after due deliberation gave up all idea of retaining
possession of the new conquests, and in the year 1207 issued an edict
authorising all Venetian citizens to fit out at their own expense armed
expeditions to seize anything they could in the Greek archipelago or on
the Greek coast; the Republic bound itself to leave each individual
adventurer the lands or cities he was able to take, as his property in
perpetual fee, reserving itself only the right of sovereign protection.
It is true that the coast and the islands named in this edict formed a
part of Venice’s share in the division of the Eastern Empire, yet I
doubt whether at any time in the history of nations any government has
ventured to issue such a wholesale charter to piracy, and none was ever
more literally interpreted.
As for the short-lived Empire of the Latins in Constantinople, it was
brought to an end by the family of the Paleologi with the assistance of
the Genoese, whose principal object was to procure the expulsion of the
Venetians from the East. But Michael Paleologos had the good sense to
understand that the ruin of Venetian commerce would entail serious
damage to his own, and he did his utmost to maintain good relations
between the two Italian Republics. In this he did not altogether
succeed, as he found himself under the necessity of irritating Genoa by
confirming many of the ancient privileges of Venice. On these conditions
the Venetians consented to turn a deaf ear to the complaints and
entreaties of Baldwin II., the dethroned Latin emperor, who wandered
about Europe in the vain hope of obtaining help.
By the end of the thirteenth century the political influence of Venice
in the Greek Empire had dwindled to insignificance compared with her
great commercial importance. As the latter increased, the jealousy of
Genoa grew more and more dangerous, and the colonies held by Venetian
vassals were in constant peril.
It was the misfortune of Venice that her last development had been too
sudden. The slightest matter might compromise the safety of her
colonies, and through them her own.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 186._]
Yet her position was brilliant, and her strength was not fictitious. The
terms of the treaty concluded with Michael Paleologos were such as might
well flatter even the pride and vanity of a Venetian, and the Doge
continued to call himself Lord and Master of a quarter and a
half-quarter of the Roman Empire, while the permanent ambassador of
Venice at Constantinople continued to be treated by the Paleologi as an
ally and a friend.
Before leaving the thirteenth century I shall say a few words about the
early laws and those who made them, as an appropriate introduction to
the story of the great conspirators who attempted to grasp the supreme
power in spite of them.
From what has gone before, it must be clear that the Venetian Republic,
as it was when it first took its place among the European powers, was
the result of circumstances rather than of the growth of a race; and it
is much easier to trace a result to its cause than a growth to its
primitive type. Having got so far, the student will naturally be curious
as to the internal mechanism of a government which began so early,
lasted so long, and worked, on the whole, with such wonderful precision
and certainty.
[Illustration: CAMPIELLO S. GIOVANNI]
It will not be necessary to recapitulate the attempts and experiments of
the first fugitives after they reached the islands. I need only recall
to my reader the ‘University of the Tribunes,’ by which the different
tribes were represented and were respectively governed, the first doges,
the short return to the system of tribunes, and the second and final
establishment of a doge as head of the Republic. At this point in
history two main facts stand out at once: on the one hand, the unlimited
power of the doges, whose authority was not restrained by any positive
law, still less by any body of men in the shape of senate or council,
whose chief aim was generally to make their dignity hereditary, and who
were to all intents and purposes the absolute masters of their country’s
destiny while they lived; on the other hand, we find an assembly of the
clergy and people, generally very far from exacting as to the doge’s
conduct, but ready and able to wrest the sovereignty from him if he
pushed his absolutism too far for their taste. In those days a great
simplicity prevailed. The chosen chief used his position unhesitatingly
for his own advantage; the clergy were simple-minded; the people were
very busy with their own affairs.
When these reactions led to bloodshed, it was usually because one or
more of the great families had interests at stake and aimed at the
supreme power; and one of the most common causes of discord was removed
when the Doge Domenico Flabianico caused the popular assembly to pass a
law forbidding the doges to associate any one with them in the
sovereignty. This reform checked the tendency of the government to turn
into an hereditary monarchy, and another law passed at the same time
gave the Doge two permanent counsellors, with power to add to their
numbers others, chosen from the prominent citizens, when any very
important matter presented itself. The latter measures had no practical
result, for the Doge was left free to call in these ‘notabili pregadi,’
or ‘invited notables,’ or not to do so at his pleasure, and he
invariably forgot their existence. As for the two counsellors, they
might as well not have existed for any mention of them that is to be
found in the documents of the twelfth century.
It gradually became clear that the rights and powers of the Doge must be
more exactly defined, and that some means must be found for subjecting
him to the will of the people without constantly calling together a
general assembly, which was not a slight matter. This need seems to have
found expression for the first time about the year 1172.
Six months were spent in deliberations before an institution was agreed
upon which should represent the nation. The general assembly then
determined upon the election of a certain number of councillors, who
were to serve only for one year, and were to have the management of all
affairs of state. They were to be eighty in number for each of the six
‘sestieri’ of the city, and therefore in all four hundred and eighty.
[Sidenote: _1172._]
This was the origin of the ‘Great Council,’ of which the duties were to
distribute the offices of government amongst those who were best able to
fill them honourably and to the advantage of the state; to frame laws,
which were submitted to the approval of the General Assembly; and to
examine all proposals that came from the Pregadi, with the consent and
collaboration of the Doge and the six counsellors whose assistance, or
guidance, was now imposed upon him without consulting his wishes.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 137._]
In order to lighten the labours of the Great Council, another assembly
of forty citizens was created, whose business it was to prepare the
material for the Council’s sessions. Little by little this assembly
acquired more and more importance, till it shared with the Pregadi an
authority which weighed perceptibly upon the decisions of the Great
Council. The Pregadi, who became the Senate, and the Quarantine, or
Council of Forty, were two similar and parallel powers, which it might
have been to the advantage of the Republic to turn into one.
The position of the Doge was now clearly defined. Under no circumstances
could he any longer exercise absolute authority; and if he desired any
reform, or had any law to propose, he was constrained to obtain, before
acting, the approbation of his counsellors and of the Pregadi in the
first place, and afterwards to get his measure accepted by the Forty,
which then had to obtain the sanction of the Great Council, which, in
its turn, if the matter were important, was bound to bring the bill
before the General Assembly, to be voted on by the clergy and the
people.
In time the custom was introduced according to which the Doge took an
oath before the people on
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 244._]
the day of his coronation, called the ‘promission ducale,’ the ‘ducal
promise.’ At first this oath was simply a promise to obey scrupulously
the laws of the Republic, but little by little clauses were added to it
which went so far as to deprive the Doge even of certain rights common
to all other citizens of Venice. In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries the ‘ducal promise’ reached a stage of development at which it
destroyed the liberty of the chief of the state, and became almost an
insult to his dignity. During the interregnum between the death of each
doge and the coronation of his successor, three grave magistrates were
chosen by the Great Council, called the ‘Inquisitors upon the deceased
Doge,’ who held a solemn trial of the dead man’s actions and of his
whole life; at the same time five other personages studied the wording
of the next ‘ducal promise,’ of which they were termed the ‘Correctors,’
their business being to examine the situation, and to ascertain how it
might be possible for the future sovereign to advance his own fortunes
at the expense of the public interests; to judge, or merely guess, what
matters he might be able to influence too much, and thereby to decide in
what way his actions and powers could be still further restrained and
limited by introducing new clauses into the promise.
The first law which was elaborated and passed by the Great Council was
one which reformed the election of the doges. The Council wished to
reserve the electoral right to eleven of its own members, but the
people protested against this encroachment on ancient traditions. The
legislators then went to work to prove, with all the eloquence at their
command, that the law they wished to pass did not in any way infringe
the rights of the national assembly, but that it was simply a wise and
paternal effort on the part of the Council to help the people in their
choice; for the law provided that eleven electors were to appear before
the assembly and present their candidate with the words, ‘Here is your
Doge, if this choice pleases you.’
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 95._]
Incredible as it seems, the people were prevailed upon to accept this
proposal, not seeing that in so doing they were forfeiting their most
valuable privilege. They even acclaimed with enthusiasm the first Doge
who was elected under the new law in 1172. He was Sebastian Ziano. ‘Long
life to the Doge,’ the people cried, ‘and may he bring us peace!’
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 123._]
On this occasion, it is true, the popular enthusiasm was justified, for
the rule of Ziano was just and honourable. But, in spite of the success
of the experiment, the Great Council introduced a further change in the
law, and at the next election the number of electors was increased to
forty, and later still to forty-one, in order to prevent a tie.
Looking back on the labours of the Great Council in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, one cannot help being struck by the unchangeable
purpose which runs through all the laws it passed, from the time it came
into existence till it shut its doors in the face of the people, never
to open them during the five hundred years of history which then lay
before the Republic. One cannot but acquire the conviction that the
aristocracy set to work very early to get possession of the supreme
power, to the exclusion even of the Doge himself, and that they worked
out their plan in the course of a hundred and fifty years--say, five
generations--without ever hesitating or turning aside after new ideas;
and, moreover, that during that time the eyes of the people were never
once really open to what was going on.
As soon as the relations between the Doge and the government were
established, the Great Council, always paternally ‘guiding’ the popular
assembly, set to work upon laws affecting the administration, and the
conditions and relations of commerce. And here it must be said that
several of the doges who reigned in the thirteenth century exhibited
remarkable talents for legislation; the names of Orio Mastropiero,
Enrico Dandolo, and Jacopo Tiepolo mark so many stages in Venetian
progress and civilisation.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 241._]
The first of these, Orio Mastropiero, the successor of Sebastian Ziano,
occupied himself actively in drawing up a criminal code, which should
render less arbitrary the sentences of judges who were often incompetent
and were always elected provisionally. This code received the name of
‘Promission del Maleficio,’ the ‘promise to, or with regard to, crime,’
and it was frequently improved upon during the years that followed its
promulgation. It provided for almost all possible crimes, and
established for each one a punishment which seemed just according to the
spirit of the times. These penalties in many cases seem barbarous to us,
though it was
[Illustration: CAMPO, SANTA TERNITA]
not the Venetians who invented strangulation, or the cutting off of the
hand, or torture by red-hot iron, or the tearing out of the eyes and the
tongue. The tribunals of all nations had long ago adopted these
punishments, and it is certain that there was no country where fuller
proofs were required than in Venice before any severe penalties could be
inflicted on a citizen. One of the chief merits of the Venetian code of
that period, as compared with the codes of other countries, is that it
points out to the judge the causes of crime, and the small misdeeds
which may lead to great ones, as distinguished from those which are not
likely to leave any results. Thus, for instance, the smallest act of
disrespect to a respectable woman was punished almost as severely as an
assault upon her.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 137._]