Dame Michiel, ‘what curiosity there was about the destination of the
baskets, but the faithful gondoliers regarded mystery as a point of
honour, though the basket was of such
[Illustration: MARCO POLO’S COURT]
dimensions that it was impossible to take it anywhere unobserved; happy
were they who received these evidences of a regard which at once touched
their feelings and flattered their legitimate pride! The greatest
misfortune was to have to share the prize with another.’
The reign of Aloise Mocenigo was the one in which the question of
reforms was the most fully discussed, but many of the discussions turned
on theories, and though a few led to the passage of measures which
somewhat affected commerce and public instruction, no real result was
produced. The Republic, I repeat, was dying of old age, which is the
only ill that is universally admitted to be incurable.
At the death of Mocenigo, three candidates were proposed for the ducal
throne, namely, Andrea Tron, Girolamo Venier, and Paolo Renier. If the
people had been consulted, Venier would have been acclaimed, though I do
not pretend to say that his election would have retarded the end.
Nothing is easier than to speculate about what ‘the people’ might have
done at any given point in history; nothing is harder than to guess what
they are going to do; nothing, on the whole, is more certain than that
the voice of the people never yet turned the scale at a great moment in
a nation well out of its infancy. No one pretends nowadays that the
French revolution was made by ‘the people.’
The many in Venice were vastly surprised to hear of Paolo Renier’s
candidacy, for he had a very indifferent reputation; to be accurate, the
trouble was that it was not indifferent, but bad. He was, indeed, a man
of keen penetration, rarely eloquent, and a first-rate scholar. He knew
Homer by heart, and he had translated Plato’s _Dialogues_, which latter
piece of work might partly explain, without excusing,
[Sidenote: _R. viii. 240, 241; Mutinelli, Ult._]
his deplorable morals; but it was neither from Plato nor from Homer that
he had learned to plunder the government of his country. One of his
contemporaries, Gratarol, described him as possessing ‘the highest of
talents, the most arrogant of characters, and the most deceptive of
faces.’
It was commonly reported in Venice that when he had been Bailo at
Constantinople he had taken advantage of the war between Turkey and
Russia, under Catherine the Great, to enrich himself in a shameful
manner, and the ninety thousand sequins he made on that occasion
afterwards served him, according to popular report, for bribing the
Barnabotti in the Great Council in order that the forty-one electors
chosen might be favourable to him. He was certainly not the inventor of
this plan, but he is generally said to have just outdone his
predecessors in generosity, without overstepping the limits of strict
economy. The general belief is that he bought three hundred votes at
fifteen sequins each, which was certainly not an excessive price. It
appears, too, that he distributed money to the people in order to soothe
the irritation his candidacy caused. If all these accusations were not
clearly proved, they were at least the subject of contemporary satire.
A certain priest in particular wrote biting verses on him, in Venetian
dialect, describing the righteous anger of the late Marco Foscarini’s
ghost at the election of such a successor. The shade of the honourable
[Sidenote: _Malamani._]
man tears off the ducal insignia in disgust, and bitterly reproaches
Venice.
‘Ah, foolish Venice!’ it exclaims, ‘a Renier is Doge of our country, one
who with ribald heart and iniquitous words sought to undo that tribunal
which defends our country from all evil! Ah, mad Venice! Now indeed I do
repent me of having been Doge one year! Strike my name from the series
of the Doges, for I disdain to stand among traitors.’
After his election Paolo Renier had his first ‘osella’ coined with a
peculiarity in the superscription which irritated the public. The words
ran: ‘Paulus Reinerius principis munus,’ his name being in the
nominative case, a grammatical mistake which had always been regarded as
the special privilege of kings and emperors.
He made money of everything, by selling posts, franchises, and licenses
to beg at the door of the Basilica of Saint Mark. The Dogess was
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]
not a person likely to increase her husband’s popularity, for she had
been a rope-dancer, and never appeared at public ceremonies. As I have
explained elsewhere, it was the Doge’s niece who did the honours of the
palace, Dame Giustina, who was beloved and esteemed by all Venetians,
but ‘the Delmaz,’ as the Doge’s wife was called, interfered in a hundred
details of the administration.
It is told, for instance, that the priest of the church of San Basso
used to have the bell rung for mass very early in the morning, and that
it had a peculiarly harsh and shrill tone which disturbed the Dogess’s
slumbers. She sent for
[Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘San Basso’; also Molmenti, Vecchie Storie._]
him and promised to make him a canon of Saint Mark’s if he would only
have the bell moved, or not rung. The good man promised and went away
delighted, but when, after a time, the canonry was not given to him, he
began ringing again, and doubtless enjoyed the thought that every stroke
set the faithless Dogess’s teeth on edge.
The people revenged themselves on the Renier family for its many
misdeeds in scathing epigrams, and when at last the Doge lay dying in
long agony, the
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]
gondoliers said that his soul refused to leave without being paid. The
truth is that as his death took place in Carnival week, on February
eighteenth, 1789, it was decided to keep his death a secret not only
over Ash Wednesday, but until the first Monday in Lent, in order not to
disturb the merrymaking,
[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 300._]
nor the reaction which was supposed to follow it; and he was buried
without much ceremony and with no display in the church of the
Tolentini.
The candidates proposed for election to succeed him were numerous, but
not of good quality. One of them, Sebastiano Mocenigo, was such a bad
[Sidenote: _Rom. viii, 301._]
character that when he had been in Vienna as Ambassador the Empress
Maria Teresa had asked the Republic to recall him. The truth was that
the few who were fit for the Dogeship would not accept it, or were
opposed by the whole body of the corruptible.
[Illustration: PONTE DELLA PIETÀ]
As a specimen of what went on during the election of the last Doge of
Venice, I subjoin an official list of what were considered the
legitimate expenses of the electors. The figures are from Mutinelli
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]
and may be trusted. They are given in Venetian ‘lire,’ one of which is
considered to have been equal to half a modern Italian ‘lira,’ or French
franc.
Ven. Lire.
Bread, wine, oil, and vinegar 29,421
Fish 24,410
Meat, poultry, game 20,370
Sausages, large and small 3,980
Preserved fruits and candles 47,670
Wines, liquors, coffee 63,845
Spices, herbs, fruit, flowers 6,314
Wood and charcoal 31,851
Utensils hired, worn, and lost 41,624
Small expenses 45,327
Given to footmen and to workmen of the guilds 63,583
Tobacco and snuff 4,931
Poem ‘La Scaramuccia’ (The Skirmish) 48
Almanacks 8
Game of Rocambole (said to have been a kind of Ombre) 550
Nightcaps 450
Felt caps 56
Socks 16
Black silk wig-bags 48
French, German, and Spanish snuff-boxes 3,077
Combs ‘à la royale,’ for wigs, and for caps 2,150
Essence of rose, carnation, lavender, and vanilla;
olive gum and gold powder 173
Rouge 9
One rosary 15
-------
Total 389,926
=======
Romanin, probably with another copy of the account which he does not
give in items, and writing earlier than Mutinelli, makes the sum a
little smaller. In any case it is certainly one of the most
extraordinary bills ever brought in by a Republic for electing its
chief.
In view of modern methods it will interest some
[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 302, note._]
of my readers to see how the expenses of Venetian elections increased
towards the end, according to Romanin:--
Ven. Lire.
Election of Carlo Ruzzini in 1732 68,946
“ Aloise Pisani “ 1734 70,629
“ Pietro Grimani “ 1741 70,667
“ Francesco Loredan “ 1752 134,290
“ Marco Foscarini “ 1762 120,868
“ Aloise Mocenigo “ 1763 125,234
“ Paolo Renier “ 1779 222,410
“ Ludovico Manin “ 1789 378,387
Greatly increased expenditure for successive elections during half a
century can only mean one of two things, the approach of a collapse, or
the imminence of a tyranny. The greater the proportionate increase from
one election to the next, the nearer is the catastrophe. The election of
the last Doge of Venice cost five and a half times as much as that of
Carlo Ruzzini. It would be interesting to know what proportion Julius
Cæsar’s enormous expenses, when he was elected Pontifex Maximus, bore to
those of a predecessor in the same office fifty years earlier.
The Venetian electors who managed to consume, or make away with, nearly
eight thousand pounds’ worth of food, drink, tobacco, and rose-water in
nineteen days, chose an honest man, though a very incompetent one, and
the public showed no enthusiasm for the new Doge, in spite of the great
festivities held for his coronation. The Venetian people, too, preserved
their artistocratic tendencies to the very last, and always preferred a
Doge of ancient lineage to one who, like Manin, came of the ‘New men.’
He was not fortunate in his choice of a motto for his first ‘osella.’
He, who was to dig the grave of Venetian liberty, chose the single word
‘Libertas’ for the superscription on his first coin; and on that which
appeared in the last year but one of the independence of Venice were the
words ‘Pax in virtute tua,’ which, as Mr. Horatio Brown has pointedly
observed, ‘reads like a mocking epitaph upon the dying Republic.’
Manin was a weak and vacillating man, though truthful, generous to a
fault, and not a coward. As Doge, he was bound hand and foot, and only a
man of great character could have broken through such bonds to strike
out an original plan that might have prolonged his country’s life. He
gave his fortune without stint, but the idea of giving anything else did
not occur to him. Before the tremendous storm of change that broke with
the French revolution and raged throughout Europe for years, he bowed
his head, and Venice went down. No man is to be blamed for not being
born a hero; nor is the mother of heroes in fault when she is old and
can bear them no more.
[Illustration: FROM THE PUBLIC GARDEN AT SUNSET]
XV
THE LAST SOLDIERS
During the eighteenth century Venetian diplomacy succeeded in preserving
the Republic’s neutral position in spite of the great wars that agitated
Europe. Her only war was with the Turks, and it was disastrous.
Early in the century the Turks attacked the Peloponnesus, and Venice
lost her richest colonies in rapid
[Sidenote: _1715._]
succession. Her navy was no longer a power, and she was almost without
allies, for the European powers were exhausted by the recent war of the
Spanish succession, and though Malta and the Pope befriended her, the
help they could give was insignificant. It was not until the Turks
attacked Hungary that she received any efficient assistance; by uniting
her forces with those of the Empire she obtained some success, and the
desperate courage of Marshal Count von Schulenburg, a Saxon general in
the Venetian service, saved Corfu. The Turks, beaten at sea by the
Venetians, and on the Danube by the Hungarians at Temesvar, made peace,
and the treaty of Passarowitz put an end to the war.
[Sidenote: _1718._]
But Venice had for ever lost the Peloponnesus, Crete, and other valuable
possessions.
After this disastrous struggle, it was impossible to preserve any
further illusions as to the future. Venice felt that she was in full
decadence, and only endeavoured to hide its outward signs. Instead of
trying to beat against the current, she allowed herself to drift; things
went from bad to worse, and before long the army, the navy, and the
Arsenal were completely disorganised, though their expenses had not in
the least diminished. A contemporary says that a regiment looked like a
company, and a
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 150 sqq._]
company like a corporal’s guard, whereas the Republic was paying for
regiments with their full complement of men.
The service of the hired troops was beneath contempt. In Padua the
students of the
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 176._]
University defied the garrison. On one occasion, in a hideous orgy, they
accidentally or intentionally did to death a pretty beggar girl; but
when a detachment of Croatian soldiers attempted to arrest the culprits,
the students treated them with such utter contempt that their commander
was terrified, fled with his men to the safety of the barracks, and
bolted and barred the doors.
If such things happened on Venetian territory one may fancy what the
state of things was in the colonies. Corfu was supposed to be defended
by a company of Venetian soldiers and two companies of Albanians. From
1724 to 1745 the latter were represented by two men, a major and a
captain, whose sole business was to draw the pay of the whole force. The
two officers embezzled the sums allowed for the men’s food and uniforms,
and the pay was sent to the soldiers, who lived in their own homes in
the mountains. No trouble was taken even to identify them, and when one
died it was customary for another to take his name and receive his pay.
The two companies thus literally earned immortality, and the names on
the rolls never changed. Several Albanians who drew their pay as
Venetian mercenaries enrolled themselves also in the so-called ‘Royal
Macedonian’ regiment, in the service of the King of Naples, and were
never found out by the Republic. In twenty-one years these imaginary
troops cost Venice 54,300 sequins, or over £40,000.
The colonial garrisons economised their gunpowder by abolishing all
target practice, and consisted chiefly of utterly untrained old men who
were absent most of the time. The fortresses were not more serviceable
than the troops that were supposed to defend them. On the mainland, the
frontier fort of Peschiera was half dismantled, the drawbridges had
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. and Tassini, under ‘Bombardiere.’_]
long rusted in their positions and could, not be raised, and the
ramparts were so overgrown with trees and shrubs as to be impassable; at
one time the fort did not even possess a flag to show its nationality.
Ninety of its guns had no carriages; the gunners lived quietly at their
homes in Venice, and if they ever remembered that they were supposed to
be soldiers it was because the government dressed them up on great
occasions as a guard of honour for the ducal palace. Their number was
between four and five hundred.
As for the fort of Corfu, it was robbed by a common thief. In 1745, a
certain Vizzo Manducchiollo promised the Turks two good guns, one of
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 169._]
bronze and one of iron. With the help of his gang he scaled the wall of
the Raimondo Fort one night, carried off the cannon, and sold them to
the Turks for twenty-seven sequins.
The workmen of the Arsenal in Venice, who had formerly been the
best-organised body of men in the Republic, had completely come to grief
in the eighteenth century. The Arsenal was supposed to be governed by a
voluminous code of laws, most of which were now either altogether
disregarded, or were administered with culpable leniency. The disorder
was incredible. Every son of a workman in the Arsenal had an hereditary
right to be employed there, but the officials who were in command did
not take any means of checking the men’s attendance; they paid so much a
head for every workman on the payroll, according to his age, whether he
ever appeared except on pay-days or not. In this way the State paid out
vast sums to men who only entered the gates once a month to draw their
wages for doing nothing. Many of them had other occupations, at which
they worked regularly and industriously. Some were even actors, and one
of the cleverest ‘Pantaloons’ was officially known as one of the
best-paid Arsenal hands. The six hundred apprentices who were supposed
to attend the technical schools attached to the different departments of
the yard, only looked in now and then. When the time came for them to
pass for the certificate of master workman they paid the sum of
thirty-four Venetian lire, in consideration of which the Examiners
pronounced them competent. In this way, as Mutinelli
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 145, 153._]
truly says, ignorance became hereditary, as employment in the Arsenal
already was, and the yard became a mere monument of former generous
initiative, very expensive to maintain.
At the fall of the Republic, Bonaparte seized and sent to France a large
number of vessels. When the Arsenal was sacked in 1797 it was
[Sidenote: _Rom. x. 162, note 2, and 304._]
found to contain 5293 pieces of artillery, of which 2518 were of bronze,
and the rest of iron; and at the last there were brought from the docks
ten ships of seventy guns, eleven of seventy-six, one of fifty-five,
thirteen of forty-two, two of thirty-two, twenty-three galleys, one
floating howitzer battery, two ‘cutters,’ whatever the Italian writer
may have meant,
[Illustration: BOAT-BUILDERS]
twelve gunboats, three brigs of sixteen to eighteen guns, one
fore-and-aft schooner, seven galleons and as many ‘zambecchi,’ five
feluccas, many boats armed with grenade mortars, ten floats with two
guns, and one floating-battery of seven guns.
If these vessels were not all badly built, they were certainly badly
fitted out and badly sailed when they went to sea. The Provveditori and
Inquisitors Extraordinary, sent from time to time by the Senate to
inspect the fleet, complained that they found neither good carpenters
nor good sailors. One frigate, which had a nominal crew of one hundred
and fifty-seven men, the _Concordia_, was found to have barely thirty,
and not able seamen at that. As for the convicts who pulled the oars on
the war-galleys, they were kept half-clothed and shelterless when
ashore; but being only carelessly guarded they often ran away, and not
unfrequently succeeded in finding employment, under assumed names, in
the smaller ports of the Republic. Some are known to have become
house-servants. Nevertheless the overseer of each gang regularly
pocketed the money allowed for their food and clothing.
In 1784 it was proved that for a long time from sixty to seventy
thousand fagots of wood and an immense number of barrel staves had
disappeared yearly, no one knew how. The workmen of the Arsenal did not
think it necessary to buy firewood when it could be had for nothing.
In 1730, the Provveditor Erizzo was ordered to one of the Eastern
colonies on an important mission, with several large vessels. Almost at
the moment of starting, the officers of one of these galleys came and
begged him to give them a captain not belonging to the
[Illustration: THE VEGETABLE MARKET]
navy, as they should not otherwise feel safe to go to sea.
Yet at this very time Goldoni wrote that every one sang in Venice:
‘They sing in the squares, in the streets, on the canals; the
shopkeepers
[Sidenote: _Goldoni, i. chap. xxxv._]
sing as they sell their wares; the workmen sing as they leave their
work; the gondolier sings while he waits for his master. The
characteristic of the nation is its gaiety.’
In the midst of this laughing decadence, in the very depth of this gay
and careless disintegration of a country’s body and soul, we come across
one devoted, energetic character, a fighting man of the better days, who
reminds us of what Venice was in her greatness.
Angelo Emo was great, considering the littleness of Venice in his time.
If we compare him with Vittor Pisani, Carlo Zeno, or Sebastian Venier,
he seems small as a leader; but as a plain, brave man, he is not dwarfed
by comparison with men who were colossal in an age of giants.
He was born in 1731, and was brought up by his father to dream of older
and greater times, and to know more of his country’s history than most
[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 289._]
youths of his day. He travelled early and far, often employed on
business of the State, and he was able to compare the condition of
Venice with that of other European countries, especially England and
France, in regard to military and naval matters.
He was not yet thirty years old when the government sent him to Portugal
to study the means of reviving the commercial relations between that
kingdom and Venice. Sailing down the Adriatic, he put into Corfu,
probably for fresh provisions; but on learning
[Illustration: PONTE CANONICA]
that many intrigues were already on foot to deprive
[Illustration: FONDAMENTA WEIDERMANN]
him of his mission, he set sail again at once for the Mediterranean in
order to be beyond reach of recall. He passed the Straits of Gibraltar,
but fell in with a gale of wind in the ocean which nearly put an end to
his sailing for ever. The Venetian vessels were not remarkable for their
seaworthiness at best, and ocean weather was almost too much for Emo’s
ship. He himself describes the frightful confusion in the storm, and the
difficulty he had in managing his men. To make matters worse, the
freshwater tanks were sprung and most of the supply was lost, so that
water was served out in rations, while the food consisted principally of
what the British sailor terms ‘salt horse.’ Then the vessel lost her
rudder, and things looked badly; but the gale moderated and died out at
last, and the ship brought to near a wooded coast, whence Emo was able
before long to get a tree, which was rough hewn to serve as a rudder,
and he got his vessel into port at last, ‘with the admiration and
applause of every one,’ says Romanin, after describing the affair of the
jury-rudder as only a landsman can describe an accident at sea.
His mission to Portugal was successful, and Emo returned to Venice; but
when he tried to direct the attention of the government to reforms of
which the army and navy stood in urgent need, he could obtain no
practical result, so that when he was
[Sidenote: _1784._]
placed in command of a fleet, with orders to punish the Bey of Tunis and
the Algerian pirates, he was well aware that his force was by no means
what it appeared to be to the inexperienced public. In the course of the
campaign his largest ship, _La Forza_, ill-equipped and worse
officered, sank before his eyes off Trapani, and none of the other
vessels could be relied on to do any better. Yet with such material and
such men he sustained a conflict that lasted three years, and if he was
unable to destroy the Bey of Tunis, he at least humbled him, brought
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 150, and Rom. viii. 294._]
him to terms, and obtained from him a formal treaty engaging to put down
piracy on the African coast. France profited much by the result of this
expedition, and one of the last documents signed by Louis XVI. before he
fell was a letter to the Doge Manin, in which Angelo Emo was praised to
the skies for the good work he had done.
The Admiral was rewarded with the title of Cavaliere, the only one the
Republic ever conferred, and with the office of Procurator of Saint
Mark’s, but I cannot find that his advice as to reforms was ever
listened to. A few years later, the Bey of Tunis broke his promise in
regard to piracy, and Emo was again sent with a fleet to chastise him,
but was suddenly taken ill in Malta, and died in a few days. He was
poisoned, it is said, by Condulmer, his principal lieutenant, who at
once succeeded him as admiral.
The last Venetian fighting man was of average height and lean, and
stooped a little; he
[Sidenote: _Statue of Emo, Canova; Arsenal._]
was pale, his forehead was broad, and he had blue eyes and black
eyebrows, particularly thick and bushy. His mouth was strong, but the
lips were thick and coarse.