‘Magistrato del Proprio,’ which dealt with civil questions. The quarrels
of the common people were judged by five ‘wise men’--‘savii.’ Orio
Mastropiero succeeded in passing a law for the institution of a court to
deal with differences arising between Venetians and foreigners, or
amongst the latter, and this was named ‘Magistrato del Forestiero,’ the
‘foreigners’ court,’ so to say. In addition to these courts, which were
subject to the authority of the Great Council, there were the ‘Avogadori
del Comun,’ the municipal advocates, as we should probably say, who had
authority in fiscal questions, and the list is complete. The state of
Venice was directed and judged by the bodies I have enumerated.
In matters of commerce all Europe recognised the superiority of Venice
at that time, and long afterwards. A single illustration of the
practical sense of Venetian merchants will suffice: they invented
percentage, and the word that expresses it. Before them, the world had
always said, ‘so many pence in the pound,’ or ‘four-fifths,’ or
‘seven-eighths.’ The Venetians first conceived the idea, and introduced
the practice, of reducing all commercial fractions to the common
denominator, one hundred.
Orio Mastropiero further enriched the state with a permanent source of
income by giving it a regular monopoly of salt and the salt trade.
Jacopo Tiepolo, elected Doge in 1229, was undoubtedly one of the most
enlightened and intellectually well-balanced men of his age, and he
seems to have embraced at a glance all those questions which his
predecessors had examined one by one, and often only from a single side.
He conceived the idea of compiling a complete code which should be a
sort of permanent charter for the Republic, and he entrusted the
execution of his plan to four ‘learned, noble, and discreet persons,’
for that is all that is to be learned of them, through the note that
precedes the original text of their work. That text consisted of five
books destined to become famous in the history of European legislation.
This is no place to discuss a legal code, but no one who glances at
Tiepolo’s body of laws can fail to be struck by the many provisions it
contains for the protection of women and their property. I do not know
whether we ought to think that this speaks well or ill for the condition
of Venetian ethics at a time when the slave trade was already thriving,
and when there were a great number of Eastern female slaves in the
capital. On the whole, the laws may have been made with a view to
protecting honest matrons from being plundered, directly or indirectly,
by their handsome and perfectly unscrupulous rivals, whose influence was
already becoming great, and was destined to be portentous.
At any rate, the honour and the lives of honourable women were not more
carefully protected than their material interests. Every husband was
obliged to render an account to his wife of the dowry she had brought
him, and she could dispose of it by will as she pleased. A widow enjoyed
the whole income left by her husband during a year and a day from his
death, and during that time no one could by any means drive her from his
house. If she declared her intention of not marrying again she preserved
her right of residence all her life. Nevertheless, an unfaithful wife,
if proved guilty, forfeited her dowry to her husband, and he could turn
her out of his home.
Tiepolo’s civil code provided also for a case which seems to have been
not uncommon--namely, that in which a married couple, like the Doge
Pietro Orseolo and his wife, agreed to take vows and part, each entering
a religious order. The law here introduced the form of a separation of
goods, leaving each party free thereafter to administer his or her
fortune at will.
In addition to the immense labour connected with his body of laws,
Tiepolo also occupied himself with the nautical regulations which had
obtained authority by long use. I have no doubt that in so doing he used
the Amalfi marine code, as in his laws he made use of the Pandects of
Justinian, discovered in Amalfi about a hundred years earlier.
Some of the clauses are curious. Captains and owners of ships are
forbidden, for instance, to delegate their authority ‘to a pilgrim, a
soldier, or a servant.’ In case of shipwreck, the whole crew was bound
to work fifteen full days, but no more, at saving the cargo, of which
they could then claim three per cent. Every ordinary vessel was to carry
two trumpets, presumably as foghorns. Very large ships were to carry a
sort of orchestra, consisting of two bass drums, one drum and one
trumpet. The marine code has some interest also, as indicating the
general nature of the merchandise carried by Venetian vessels: woven
stuffs, pepper, incense, indigo, sugar in the loaf, myrrh, gum arabic,
aloes, camphor, rice, almonds, apples, wine and oil are to be found
mentioned, with many more articles of commerce.
Tiepolo’s code bears the stamp of a sort of generous but not foolish
simplicity, which really survived in the Republic until dreams of
foreign conquest brought her into danger, and she awoke to find that
dangerous enemies had wormed their way even into the ducal palace. It
was then that she began to multiply magistracies and to frame
innumerable laws that interfered with and neutralised each other; and so
she lost in strength what her system gained in details. There was far
more wisdom in the five books of Jacopo Tiepolo’s ‘Statuto’ than in the
innumerable volumes of laws that were put together from the fifteenth
century to the eighteenth. It may be asked whether Tiepolo’s code
sufficed because the people in his time were virtuous and law-abiding,
or whether virtue and the love of law declined as the number of laws
increased. The latter hypothesis can certainly be defended.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF FALIERO, PONTE DEI S. S. APOSTOLI]
VII
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY IN VENICE
To the majority of people the fourteenth century in the history of
Venice is memorable only for the great conspiracies which took place in
that period, and which, even in the minds of cultivated Italians, seem
to fill it completely, though only two, or at most three, are recorded,
and the action of each in turn was of short duration. These three great
conspiracies were those of Marino Faliero, of Tiepolo, who was at the
head of a
[Illustration: THE TIEPOLO PALACE]
vast movement, and the third may be described as that of Marino
Bocconio, whose history is not yet known in all its bearings. Bocconio,
in lack of trustworthy details, has been crowned the martyr of the
aristocracy; Tiepolo has been exalted as one who nobly and generously
sacrificed the interests of his caste for the general good; as for
Faliero, he is almost universally looked upon simply as the jealous
husband of a young and beautiful wife. Thanks to the efforts of
innumerable novelists and playwrights, these three figures represent to
the average reader of history a synthetic picture of the whole century,
and stand out gigantic, dark, and blood-stained against a gloomy
background of barbarism, imploring pity or crying out for vengeance to
all future ages.
The most striking pictures are not always the best portraits, as we all
know, though we are often inclined to forget it. Most of us at one time
or another have stood before a painting by Caravaggio or Gherardo delle
Notti, in which men are seen in the act to move, half lighted by a
flaring torch, and we have felt a strange and strong desire to know
where they are supposed to be and whither they are supposed to be going.
Our eyes search the black depths of the picture as if we were peering
out into the darkness of a starless night, with an instinctive wish to
distinguish some detail that may explain the figures in the foreground;
and, failing to find anything, we turn away as from a vision seen in a
bad dream. We shall not forget the strong features, the tremendous
muscles, the mysterious anxious eyes, and when we think of them we shall
still wonder where those men were, in a cavern or out of doors, in the
crypt of a church or in the forest, and whether they were alone or were
followed by a crowd in the darkness. Who saw them pass? Who heard their
low and anxious voices? Upon what nameless errand were they bound?
I have often thought that impressions much like these are produced on
most minds by the names Bocconio, Tiepolo, Faliero. Yet each of them, in
true history, had his companions, his friends, his enemies; and if each
stood alone as a type, yet all were the result of their own times, and
every one of the three was in himself the cause of a separate train of
events.
Hitherto the story of Venice has been that of her growth; she has risen
from the waves in the clear breath of the northern Adriatic, at once
gentle and full of life; she has grown up into the light, full of a
sweetness of her own, but burning with youthful courage, and suddenly,
in the period of which we now have to treat, she has changed from a
child to a full-grown woman. Pursuing, or pursued by, the impression of
her strong personality as a living creature rather than as the capital
city of a great power and the scene of action in the lives of great men,
we may compare her to a woman of divine beauty, yet almost tragically
jealous of her own freedom, fierce to her enemies, dangerous to those
who trust her, a loving mother to her children so long as they are
obedient, but a ruthless and cruel queen towards her rebellious
subjects. A woman, in short, possessing a sort of dual nature, aspiring
to the dignity of being feared, yet moved by the desire of love; so
unwilling to submit to the slightest influence of another that she would
willingly despoil herself of all her riches and of every possession, and
shed even the last drop of her blood, rather than forego the smallest
shred of her proud independence.
It is true that the figures of the great conspirators are very prominent
in the picture we evoke of those times; yet beside them stand great
captains, law-givers, and artists, and the background is filled with a
most interesting population devoted in turn to labour and pleasure, to
commerce and to war, and full of the pride of a life of its own. The
germs of corruption are already manifest, but they will not develop
until a later time, when the beautiful lady, Venice, less young indeed,
but imbued with a charm more subtle, descends to the slow enjoyment of
the fruits of her victories, and loses herself in the intoxication of a
perpetual carnival.
Historically speaking, the fourteenth century in Venice begins two or
three years before 1300, since the year 1297 is separated from those
which preceded it by a far greater distance than it is from the
beginning of the fifteenth century, owing to the profound changes
brought about in the government and life of the city by the closure of
the Great Council.
The history of the century in which the Republic reached the culminating
point of her strength and development begins quite naturally with a
glance at this memorable law and its consequence. The famous measure
which, officially at least, changed the already ancient commonwealth of
Venice into a government which, though aristocratic, still proposed to
be republican, was not the work of a day any more than it was the
creation of any one doge. It was not a revolution, but rather the result
of a slow, inevitable evolution, peaceful in character, of which the
first beginnings can barely be traced, far back in history, in the
struggles of rival factions of the aristocracy.
So far as factions are concerned, none but those of the nobles ever had
any influence on Venetian history, for the parties that existed amongst
the people never engaged in politics, and while they bore one another
many a traditional grudge that had its origin in the early jealousies of
the settlers, we never find them mixing in conspiracies against the
government or breaking out in sedition and rioting. Even the mutual
hatred of Niccolotti and Castellani disappeared completely as soon as
the need of public defence called out the genuine patriotism of both.
In brief, the following is the story of the ‘Serrata,’ the closing of
the Great Council for the exclusion of the people, a measure without
parallel, except, perhaps, in the legislation of Rome.
[Sidenote: _Rom. ii. 90, 341._]
According to a statute which regulated the election and the offices of
the Great Council in 1172, and which was perhaps instituted in that
year, the Council was composed of a variable number of members,
originally four hundred and eighty, and never more than five hundred,
who were elected every year without any distinction of class from the
principal citizens, and undoubtedly, in the great majority, from the
aristocracy.
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,
[Illustration: BOATS OFF THE PUBLIC GARDEN]
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
[Illustration: COURT OF APPEALS, GRAND CANAL]
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.