Then, from aloft, a sail was sighted. It was the sail of a galley. Another, and another, and another, all galleys unmistakably, they hove in sight above the horizon, eighteen in all. Hostile, or friendly? That was the question. Zeno, or destruction and the end? Then the banner of Saint Mark broke out from the peak of the foremost, and floated fair on the morning breeze. It was Zeno indeed.

And not only had the famous leader himself come at the one moment of all others when he was most needed, perhaps in his whole life; he came as a victor, bringing prizes and spoil of inestimable value. He had laid waste the Genoese coast, almost to the city itself; he had intercepted Genoese convoys of grain off Apulia, he had harassed the enemy’s commerce in the East, and he had captured, off Rhodes, a huge vessel of theirs with five hundred thousand pieces of gold.

All this he told the Doge on board the latter’s galley. He had been twice wounded and was not yet recovered, but nothing could diminish his energy nor damp his ardour; at his own request he was stationed at the post of greatest danger, opposite Brondolo, and though the Genoese made a supreme effort to destroy the barriers and get their ships out during a gale, in which some of Zeno’s ships dragged their anchors, he drove them triumphantly back into their prison, and blockaded them more securely than ever. In this action he was nearly killed again. An arrow pierced his throat when the gale had driven him under one of the Genoese forts. Lest he should bleed to death he would not pluck out the missile, but remained on deck to save his ship; till, stumbling in the dusk, he fell down an open hatch. He was lifted up senseless, the arrow was withdrawn, and he was half suffocated by his own blood; but his senses revived, and he had himself turned upon his face, so that the blood might run freely out and allow him to breathe. To such a man it seemed as if nothing short of sudden death outright could be fatal; he refused to leave his ship, and in a marvellously short space of time he was about his duty again as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile Pisani pushed the siege and bombarded Chioggia. In his force there were numbers of German and English mercenaries, who came to blows and killed each other by the score; but an English captain named William Gold had authority enough to quell the disorder, and the regular fighting went on.

Pisani continued to bombard Brondolo. The beginnings of artillery were unwieldy in the extreme, it being thought that the main object should be to throw a missile of great size and weight, even at long intervals, rather than to discharge much smaller ammunition with precise aim. One of Pisani’s mortars is said to have thrown a marble ball weighing two hundred pounds, and the smallest siege mortars projected masses of one hundred and forty pounds. To clean, load, and once fire one of these clumsy howitzers was often the work of a whole day; but if by any chance the shot took effect, the result was formidable. A single ball from Pisani’s great bombard knocked down the church tower of Brondolo with a considerable piece of the ramparts close by, burying Pietro Doria and his nephew under the ruins.

The Venetians now held all the approaches to the lagoons from the sea; and by taking the port of Loredo at the mouth of the Adige, they cut off Brondolo and Chioggia from all communication with the Duke of Ferrara, who had hitherto sent supplies of provisions and reinforcements by that way. The time was not far distant when famine must begin to make itself felt among the besieged, and the Venetians redoubled their efforts.

Meanwhile, after the death of Doria, a bold man of original mind, Napoleone Grimaldi, took command of the Genoese. He soon saw that in the existing conditions Brondolo must fall, and that his fleet could never escape. It occurred to him that a canal could be dug straight through the island to the open sea, by which he could bring his ships out during the night, and immediately threaten Venice herself, before the Venetian fleet could return.

The work was begun, but the Venetians discovered it in time. Grimaldi had even then no less than thirteen thousand fighting men in Brondolo and Chioggia; the Venetians had barely eight thousand. They had appealed to the famous English condottiero John Hawkwood, whose engagement to fight for the Milanese had just expired; but he either thought the Venetians were playing a losing game, or else he found more lucrative employment elsewhere, for after promising his assistance he failed to come. Venice now called for volunteers, and all sorts and conditions of men appeared in answer to the call. Among them there was even a canon of Saint Mark’s, Giovanni Loredan, with four of his servants.

In the absence of any famous condottiero to take the command, the Signory condescended to appoint Carlo Zeno to the command of the land troops. He saw that if Grimaldi’s project was to be frustrated, Brondolo must be taken at once, and the whole Genoese force must be driven into Chioggia. He was as good a soldier as he was a sailor, and he did not fail. His practice in all warfare was to take every possible precaution before fighting at all, and then to engage with the most reckless and furious energy.

Deceived by Zeno’s manœuvres, the whole garrison of Brondolo was drawn out in the direction of ‘Little’ Chioggia. Seizing the opportune moment, Zeno then succeeded in throwing himself between Brondolo itself and its small army, at the very moment when the latter was attacked by Zeno’s soldiers of fortune. The whole body of Genoese fled in a panic towards the bridge of Chioggia, trampling upon each other, pursued and cut to pieces by Zeno. Under the weight of the fugitives the bridge broke, and hundreds were drowned in the canal, while the Venetians literally slew thousands within a quarter of a mile of the bridge head. That night a perfect suit of armour could be bought for a ducat—just fifteen shillings.

Brondolo was lost that day. And worse followed, for though the Genoese commander threatened to hang every fighting man who left Chioggia—if he could catch him—the garrison deserted in great numbers during the night, many of them being Paduans and subjects of Carrara, who had not far to go in order to reach their homes.

It was clear to Grimaldi that since this last defeat he could expect no further help except from Genoa itself; and, in fact, a fleet of twenty galleys had left that city almost a month before Brondolo had fallen. When this was known the Venetian soldiers clamoured

to be allowed to attack Chioggia, and drive out the Genoese before succour could reach them. But neither Pisani nor Zeno would hear of this, and bravely assumed the whole responsibility of a protracted siege, well knowing that Chioggia was a most dangerous place to attack, but that it must inevitably yield to famine at last. So the winter wore on and still the besiegers and the besieged faced each other, each side wondering, perhaps, how long the other would persist.

For Venice herself, accustomed as she was to draw all her supplies from a distance, was beginning to lack corn, and it at last became necessary to send Taddeo Giustiniani with a convoy of ships to Southern Italy in order to bring back wheat. On his return he was overtaken by the new Genoese fleet, beaten and taken prisoner, and soon afterwards the enemy appeared before Venice. The corn had already arrived in safety and all danger of famine was relieved, for Giustiniani had sent the laden ships on before him, protected by half his squadron; but its safety had cost him the other half and his own liberty.

The enemy’s new fleet was commanded by Maruffo, a man of action, who now did his best to tempt Pisani to a naval engagement; but the Venetian admiral stubbornly refused to be drawn into a fight, and pursued the siege of Chioggia with obstinate determination. It is clear that as the Genoese fleet could not possibly get inside the lagoons, and could do no damage from without, Pisani’s refusal to fight was equivalent to paralysing the new fleet; it was as useless, for a time, as if it had not existed. On the other hand, Pisani successfully intercepted more than eighty barges laden with food supplies which Carrara attempted to send to the beleaguered town, and Chioggia was approaching the last extremity of famine.

The besieged then began to pull down some of the wooden houses of Chioggia in order to make rafts, with which they hoped to cross the shallow lagoon, and in some way to effect a junction with Maruffo’s fleet; but Pisani’s cannon sunk many of these rafts, or punts, and the remainder were either intercepted by Zeno or forced back to Chioggia.

Even the drinking water was now failing, and the besieged sent representatives to make terms with the Doge. For in spite of the murmurs of the elderly senators, who were obliged by mere decency to remain at the scene of action so long as the chief of the Republic refused to leave it, Contarini insisted upon abiding by his oath, to the very letter. He answered that there could be no terms at all: Chioggia must surrender unconditionally.

During two days longer the city held out, and in that short time secret agents attempted to sow sedition amongst the mercenaries in the service of Venice, and even tried to send letters to Carrara in order to concert a last desperate attempt for freedom; but the dissatisfaction of the condottieri was easily appeased by a promise of more money, and the messengers to Padua were caught. On the twenty-fourth of June Chioggia surrendered.

Then, from the lost town, came forth all that remained of the strong garrison, four thousand one hundred and seventy Genoese and two hundred Paduans, ghastly and emaciated, and more like moving corpses than living beings. At the same time, seventeen galleys were handed over to the Venetians, the war-worn remains of the great armada.

With the fall of Chioggia the war was over, and the Doge’s vow was fulfilled. He returned in triumph to Venice, and was met at San Clemente by the Bucentaur with his counsellors and the heads of the Quarantie, with a vast number of boats in which the population came out to greet their chief, and to gaze upon the captive Genoese galleys, which were towed in with their banners at half-mast. The promised largesses were distributed to the mercenary troops, and the English captain, William Gold, who had rendered services of great value, received for his share five hundred ducats, the equivalent in actual modern coin of three hundred and seventy-five pounds sterling, a very large sum in those days.

Maruffo continued to cruise in the Adriatic with an efficient fleet several months after the surrender of Chioggia, and Pisani was sent out against him. After recapturing Capodistria and ravaging the coasts of Dalmatia, the Venetian admiral came upon the enemy off Apulia. In the engagement that followed the Genoese were finally put to flight, but Pisani himself was mortally wounded. He was taken ashore at Manfredonia, and there ended his heroic life.

His body was brought back to Venice, where the news of his death had been received with universal grief; the Doge, the Senate, and the whole city attended his magnificent funeral, and he was buried in the church of Sant’ Antonio, where a statue was put up to him, which has since been removed to the principal hall of the Arsenal.

Pisani’s place was filled by Carlo Zeno, to whom belongs the honour of having finally ended the war by driving the enemy into the very harbour of Genoa. The struggle between the two republics had lasted for centuries, the war which ended it had been protracted through six and a half years, and there was much difficulty in agreeing upon articles of peace between Venice on the one hand, and on the other Genoa, King Louis of Hungary, and Francesco Carrara. At first sight, on reviewing this treaty, one might be tempted to suppose that Venice obtained no advantages actually equivalent to the immense sacrifices she had made during the war; but in reality this would be very far from the truth. Genoa had given even more, and had been altogether defeated in the end; her power was broken for ever, and her long rivalry with Venice was at an end, whereas the political importance of Venice continued to increase, and no one would have thought of questioning her right to be considered one of the great European powers.

As an example of what a devoted and patriotic people can and will do in defence of their liberties, the war of Chioggia stands high in the annals of the world; as a feat of generalship Pisani’s blockade of the Genoese fleet is perhaps unrivalled, and the military operation by which Carlo Zeno tempted the whole garrison of Brondolo out of that town in the morning, and drove it like a flock of sheep into Chioggia before sunset, is a feat of arms the like of which is not recorded of many captains.

Venice kept all her promises, though they had been made under the pressure of extreme necessity. Thirty families of burghers were chosen from amongst those that had made the greatest sacrifices for the public safety, and on the fifth of September the heads of the houses were solemnly invested with the right to sit in the Great Council, and with all the other privileges of nobility for themselves and their descendants for ever. They presented themselves before the Doge in the church of Saint Mark’s, each carrying a lighted torch of pure wax; when they had heard mass they went to the Doge’s palace to assist, from the windows, at a series of festivities and games. It is sad to record that a certain Leonardo dall’ Agnello, a merchant of grain and forage, who had literally given all he possessed for the war, died of grief because his name did not appear in the list of the newly enrolled.

The aged Doge Contarini survived exactly two years after his triumph, and went down to his grave in the full blaze of his final success, and of the country’s growing glory. Amongst those proposed as candidates to succeed him, Carlo Zeno was mentioned; but such a choice would have been contrary to all precedent and tradition, for it was thought that the election of the bravest captain of his day might be dangerous to the Republic; and, moreover, most of the patricians, whose advice during the war he had consistently declined to follow, were jealous of him, and predisposed against him. But the war with the Carrara was not yet really at an end, in spite of the treaty of peace, and there was still much for Zeno to do. The electors chose Michele Morosini to fill the ducal throne.

XV

VENICE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

As an epoch, if not precisely as a period of a hundred years, the fourteenth century in Venetian history closes with the war of Chioggia, as it began also before the year 1300 with the Closure of the Great Council. For the final defeat and ruin of the Genoese, Venice made the supreme heroic effort necessary to establish her greatness; thenceforth none questioned it, and with the attainment of her highest national aim ended the noblest page in her history.

The Venetians of the first period were at once brave and prudent; they were at times needlessly harsh in judging those whom they believed dangerous to the Republic, but they were sincere, and they found means to make other nations respect their country as they respected it and loved it themselves.

After Chioggia, Venice was both feared and admired, but it is not possible to feel much sympathy with her sumptuous social life, nor with a government that seems to have been for ever preoccupied with its search for secret enemies; nor, indeed, with its too docile working people, or its soldiers who so willingly obeyed the commands of the foreign condottieri under whom they were too often led to battle.

We look on her history and judge her by imaginary standards, which were never hers. We feel that at the end of the fourteenth century she entered upon a mistaken course in which she obstinately persevered to the end; we are sure that she should have been above any mere petty jealousy of her neighbours, and that she should have used all her strength in defence of her maritime trade and her colonies; we would have had her abide by the old law of 1274, which forbade a Venetian to own estates on the mainland of Italy; we consider that she was blinded to her true interests by all sorts of intrigues, and that she neglected her trade in order to put herself on the same war-footing as her adversaries, though she had not their natural aptitude for warfare; that she drained her treasury to pay grasping condottieri, and spent on futile campaigns the resources which had hitherto fed her commerce. All this we are to some extent justified in concluding, and upon those points we judge her, as we should strongly object to being judged.

Nevertheless, all this is but the criticism of speculative moralists and philosophers, a class of well-meaning persons whose influence in the world has never been large. Unhappily for philosophy and morality, they are but too easily answered by the sledge-hammer argument of success. In plain fact, Venice survived, and grew great, and was a power during four hundred years after she adopted her ultimate formula of existence, and in the end she died, not by the hand of the enemies at home or abroad whom she had successfully baffled for centuries, but of sheer old age and marasmal decline after a life of eleven hundred years, during which she was never at any time subject to a foreign power, or a foreign prince, was never once occupied by a foreign army—and was never bankrupt! Unfortunately for sentiment, no European nation, not ancient Rome herself, can point to such a past, and the suggestion that Venice might have done much better by acting much more sentimentally is utterly futile. It is a good deal as if, when the ‘oldest inhabitant’ of a village has just died after utterly beating all other records of longevity, some well-meaning old woman should say: ‘Ah, but he would have lived much longer if he had taken my advice.’

It is useless, I think, to inquire whether the complicated machinery of Venetian government would have worked with the same results, if any part of it had been altogether removed. No one of the many parts had been made arbitrarily, still less had any then been called into existence to afford lucrative posts for favourites, as has happened hundreds of times in the existence of other nations. The machinery had grown constantly, as more and more was required of it, but it had never stopped, nor had it ever been taken to pieces for repairs, like the British Constitution, for instance. It was a government of suspicion and precaution, which took it for granted that every man, from the Doge down, would do his worst, and provided against the worst that any man could do. This is true; but has any government ever thriven which reckoned on man’s virtues? The plain reason why all the many artificial communities founded by good men, from Buddha to Fourrier, or even Thomas Hughes, have been failures is that they have all reckoned on good motives in men, rather than on bad ones. Venice systematically expected the worst, and when she was disappointed it was to her own advantage. Christianity begins by telling us with energetic emphasis that we are all miserable sinners, and threatens us with torments which, if they could be brought before our eyes, would turn the hair of young men grey. Venice followed very much the same principle. Venice had the Pozzi; Christianity has Hell.

As for the manner in which Venice conducted her wars, by the aid of condottieri of reputation, she only followed the example of most of her neighbours. The practice had many advantages, one of which undoubtedly was that the prince, or the republic, was not bound to support an idle, restless, and ambitious general and his force of trained soldiers in times of peace. The professional fighter was sent for when needed, as one sends for the doctor. He made his bargain, beat the enemy if he could, was paid for the work, and went his way with his army in search of occupation elsewhere.

Of course, he might turn traitor at any moment, if it were to his advantage, and he was never inclined to annihilate an enemy to-day who might be his patron and employer to-morrow. The Italian noun ‘condottiero’ is derived from the word ‘condotta,’ which is not easily translatable into another language, but means a kind of articled engagement for a stipulated purpose. In modern times the municipal physician of each small commune is termed the ‘medico condotto,’ as it were the articled doctor who is bound to render certain services without charge, because he is paid by the town.

The rise of the condottieri was the result of the change in the manner of fighting which took place early in the Middle Ages, upon the introduction and development of armour. The first professional fighters were the aristocracy, who spent their time almost entirely in the daily practice of arms, and kept themselves in perfect training by constant exercise. To do this successfully they worked much harder than the peasants in the fields, who were their natural enemies, and who would have destroyed them altogether if they had not maintained their physical superiority by every means in their power. And this superiority they

gradually supplemented by means of armour which by degrees reached such completeness as to make the man and his horse practically invulnerable, before the invention of gunpowder. A score of well-equipped and well-trained knights could cut to pieces ten times their number of men armed only with swords and shields. Moreover, the nobles did not hesitate to hang any rich plebeian who dared to wear steel.

The first soldiers of fortune were penniless nobles who owned nothing but their armour and horses, and often won wealth by fighting for any one who would employ them; and they insisted upon being treated with the deference due to their station. But little by little, as more fighters were thus employed, young men of unusual physical strength regularly went to work to train themselves for the profession, because it was a lucrative one, and was not at first very dangerous; for I repeat that before gunpowder men-at-arms were not easily hurt, and as for noble lineage, the employer cared nothing for that provided that the fighter knew his business. These fighters very naturally attached themselves by scores and by hundreds to any leader who had the reputation of gaining much booty, and of being generous in distributing it. I believe that there was very little good faith, and no trust at all, between the condottiero and his own band; on the contrary, I think the relation must have been very like that which exists on almost every merchant-vessel between the captain and his crew, and every man who has been to sea knows what that is. The best crew in the world have a way of regarding the captain as their natural enemy which is very surprising to a landsman; yet if they have confidence in his seamanship and navigation, and if he does not starve them, they will obey him with a zeal which to the uninitiated greenhorn looks like devotion, and they will even run great risks for him beyond what the law could require of them. He, on his side, has been before the mast himself and knows exactly what they think about him, and that if he allows them the slightest liberty or indulgence beyond what he and they know to be just, he will lose all control over them. In the study of the mediæval fighting bands and their relations to their leaders, an historian might learn a vast deal in the course of a six weeks’ voyage on a big modern sailing vessel.

It happened sometimes that after a very great victory the condottiero received extensive lands besides a large sum of money, and that he was formally adopted into the aristocracy of the country for which he had fought. In that case, he either disbanded his men and retired from the profession, or, if he was still ambitious, he entered upon a career of warfare and conquest on his own account. Francesco Sforza’s father began life as a peasant, and he himself ended as Duke of Milan, and left a great name which has descended to modern times.

The fifteenth century, as being the principal period of transition throughout Europe from ancient to modern warfare, was essentially the age of the condottieri, and many famous mercenary captains were employed by Venice; so many, indeed, that a review of their services would be almost a consecutive history of Venice’s relations with her neighbours during that time. There was Carmagnola and Gattamelata, and Francesco Sforza; there was Bartolommeo Colleoni, and Roberto Sanseverino, and there was even a Duke of Mantua. As Daru says, the Republic grew accustomed to keeping princes in her pay.

Even after the war of Chioggia was over, Venice was still involved in the long struggle with the Carrara of Padua which was to end with the almost total extermination of that family. Francesco Carrara had, indeed, signed the peace, like the Genoese and the King of Hungary. The Genoese power was broken for ever, and King Louis was far away and not anxious to renew a fruitless war now that his strongest allies were crippled; but Carrara had emerged from the contest practically unweakened, and Venice was not likely to forget that he had done everything in his power to further and abet the aims of Genoa.

There is no history more complicated and hard to bear in mind than that of the republics and principalities of northern Italy in the Middle Ages, as the crimes by which the despots kept their power were more tortuous than any committed before or since. In the events which led to the annexation of Padua by Venice two other states played a part, namely, the principality of Verona, held by an illegitimate descendant of the Scala family, who had incidentally murdered his own brother, the latter’s mistress and all their children; and the great dukedom of Milan, then ruled by Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who had, in the ordinary course of events, got rid of his brother Bernabò by poison, and kept a couple of nephews locked up in a dungeon.

Antonio della Scala was jealous of Carrara’s influence, and made a secret treaty with Venice, under which, and

for a consideration of twenty-five thousand florins monthly, he undertook the conquest of Padua, and the return of Treviso to the Republic. But he was badly beaten by Carrara, who succeeded in bribing two high officials in Venice, an avogador and a member of the Forty. These were, of course, discovered by the government and duly executed.

Carrara, now fearing a regular war with Venice, sought the alliance of Milan, ostensibly against Verona, and Galeazzo at once saw a chance of profit for himself in granting the request. He had always hoped to make mischief between Padua and Verona, and it is said that after Scala’s defeat he had secretly offered help to both sides at the same time. He now agreed with Carrara to divide and share Scala’s principality of Verona. But when Scala was beaten and ruined, Galeazzo naturally refused to let Carrara have any part of the promised spoil.

Scala took refuge in Venice, where he received a pension, but it was not long before Galeazzo succeeded in having him poisoned; and almost at the same time Galeazzo made a secret treaty with Venice to rob Carrara of his principality. Venice introduced a clause into the agreement, which really showed genius. Lest Galeazzo Visconti should serve her as he had served Carrara, the Republic required that he should leave his dukedom in charge of Carlo Zeno while he prosecuted the war in person.

Carrara now turned to Venice for help against Visconti, pretending to know nothing of the secret alliance, and begging that the Republic would use her influence to make Galeazzo keep to the terms of his public treaty. This appeal was received with stony indifference. Carrara, who believed that both Venice and Visconti were actuated by motives of personal hatred against himself, resigned in favour of his son, Francesco the Younger, and retired to Treviso.

But his departure did not improve matters, and his son was soon obliged to surrender Padua to the allies, on condition of receiving a safe conduct for himself and his retinue to visit Pavia and return. This was given, and oath was taken on the Blessed Sacrament that it should be respected. He went to Milan, and was well received, and it appears that he acted the part of a man delighted with his treatment, and only anxious to be pleased and amused. It is almost needless to say that before long he was plotting against Visconti’s life, and that Visconti discovered the plan, and gave orders for his assassination. He fled to France with his young wife Taddea, but was pursued by Visconti’s emissaries, and embarked only just in time to save himself and her. She was soon to become a mother, and she suffered terribly from the rough sea. Carrara and she landed; she was placed upon an ass and he walked by her side, while the small vessel kept in sight of the shore. And so they proceeded, embarking again, and once more going ashore as a fresh gale began to blow. They came along the Riviera, well knowing that they were tracked by Visconti; once, at Torbio, they were warned by a friendly person not to enter the town, and they slept in a half-ruined church by the sea-shore. At Ventimiglia the little party excited the suspicions of the Podestà and Carrara was arrested, after having succeeded in placing his wife in safety on board the vessel, but was released again, because by good fortune the officer who arrested him had once served his father. So they went on, through countless adventures, sometimes disguised as German pilgrims, sometimes barely eluding Visconti’s search by hiding in bushes by the roadside; they even slept in a stable. They sought refuge in Florence and stayed there a while, went on to Bologna and were refused all assistance; and at last the fallen prince received offers to join the fighting band of John Hawkwood, the English condottiero. He almost reached Venice, and was within a stone’s throw of Padua, then went back to Florence, and was suddenly elevated to the dignity of Ambassador from the Florentines to the Duke of Bavaria, whose sister had been the wife of the murdered Bernabò Visconti, and the mother of the rightful but imprisoned heir to the dukedom of Milan.

It is not within the province of this work to narrate these wild adventures in detail. It is enough to say that the struggle between the several parties was carried on for years, with no scruple and little humanity. The policy of the different governments shifted continually; after allying herself with Visconti, Venice soon began to plot against him, judging that a ruined neighbour like Carrara would be safer than one too powerful, as Giovanni Galeazzo was growing to be; and so the fugitive couple was taken into favour again by the Republic. Although Visconti’s military governor in Padua, when Carrara came to take his own again, sent him word that a man must be a fool who, having left the house by the door, expected to return by the window, yet Carrara soon got the better of him by the help of Venice and the Duke of Bavaria.

What is most amazing in the history of the Italian principalities and republics is that any one of them should ever, under any circumstances, have believed in the promises made by any other. An open treaty was almost always supplemented by a secret one of a precisely contrary nature; oaths ratified upon the faith of the Blessed Sacrament were broken as lightly as lovers’ vows; the safe conduct given by a prince or a republic was generally the prelude to an assassination; and governments had not even that temporary regard for their obligations which is vulgarly described as honour among thieves. Writers of history have accustomed us too long to consider that these vices of mediæval Italian diplomacy were manifestations of the deepest craft and of the most profound subtlety, and we have been taught to look upon Macchiavelli as a master in the art of political dissimulation. Men of northern extraction who, by the accidents of birth, education, and long acquaintance, are thoroughly acquainted with the Latin character, cannot but smile at such a judgment. In all ages, Latins, and especially Italians, have deceived each other, but have rarely succeeded in deceiving us. The wiles of Cæsar Borgia would not have imposed upon an average English schoolboy. In her diplomatic relations with northern Europe, Italy has almost invariably been the victim of that profound duplicity which rests upon a carefully cultivated reputation for respecting the truth. It is the man whose word can generally be trusted who possesses the greatest power of deception when he chooses to perjure himself. It was not the complication of the Italian nature which produced the complicated state of Italian politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but its extreme simplicity, which made Italian princes the easy victims of the most transparent deceptions.

On the other hand, after a long lapse of time, and in the presence of documents proceeding from opposite sources, it is now so hard to ascertain the simple truth, that the story of the younger Carrara is told in two quite opposite ways. The version I have given seems to be the more reasonable one; the other tells us that it was not Visconti, but Venice, that persecuted the young couple, and that it was not Venice, but Visconti, who in the end recalled them to Padua. Be that as it may, Carrara was once more in possession of his principality in 1392. It seems to me thoroughly in accordance with the policy of Venice to have thus installed him again at her very gates and under her protection, in order to crush him and his family the more effectually, as she soon afterwards did. Fourteen years later Venice had literally forced him to declare war against her, and had sent the invincible Carlo Zeno to command her armies; the inevitable result had followed, and Carrara himself with two of his sons were prisoners in the ducal palace. The three were condemned to death, and were strangled in prison.

The private execution of the noble prisoners of war was not acknowledged by the government, and the city was gravely informed that they had, all three, died of colds or coughs, vaguely described as catarrh. But the people were not deceived, and were certainly not displeased; and within twenty-four hours a triumphant song was bawled through the streets of Venice, of which the burden was ‘A dead man makes no war.’ The words have remained a proverb in Italy.

The elder Carrara, long a state prisoner in Milan, had been duly poisoned with ‘magical liquors’ by the five court physicians of Visconti in 1393. One of the younger Carrara’s younger sons died in Florence very soon after his father, but the fourth survived to be murdered in his turn nearly thirty years later.

I find in Smedley’s Sketches from Venetian History a very curious and interesting note with regard to him and to the disappearance of his race.

The threefold murder of the Carrara, for it was nothing else, must be regarded as the first result of the continental development of Venice after the war of Chioggia, a development which brought her into closer contact with a number of thoroughly unscrupulous princes and governments. If her misdeeds can be condoned at all, it must be upon that ground; but I find it impossible to agree with Mr. Hazlitt, the author of a recent valuable history entitled The Venetian Republic, in considering that, on the whole, Carrara had something like a fair trial, and deserved his fate. The whole body of evidence goes to show that, for his times, he was an exceptionally frank and courageous prince, and much of the so-called proof that was used against him in the end was obtained by the merciless application of torture. Mr. Hazlitt’s real love of Venice has, I think, prejudiced him too much in her favour in this instance, and his affectionate industry has discovered everything that can be said in her defence, without bestowing the same care on a fair statement of the other side. In a similar way, a little farther on, he speaks of the outrageous condemnation of Carlo Zeno to a year’s imprisonment as an act not unjustifiable, because it was proved that Zeno had actually received a small sum of money from Carrara; but Mr. Hazlitt passes over Zeno’s defence in silence. The invincible warrior admitted, indeed, that he had received the money, but his explanation was perfectly simple and honourable. He had lent the little sum to the prince when the latter had been an outcast, wandering through Italy with his young wife, and Carrara had repaid the money when he had regained Padua. Zeno was over seventy years of age at the time when he was condemned to a year’s imprisonment in a dungeon for this act of charity and its consequences; he was the bravest and truest Venetian of his times; he had saved his country from destruction, and had served her with the most perfect integrity under the most trying circumstances, and more than once in the face of her basest ingratitude; he reaped the reward which fell to the share of almost every distinguished Venetian, for he was feared by the government, hated by the fellow-nobles whom he had outstripped in honour, and condemned by men who were not worthy to loose the latchet of his shoes. And he was convicted on account of a paltry sum of three hundred ducats, lent to a wanderer in distress and duly returned—he, who had given thousands from his own resources to satisfy the demands of the sordid mercenaries whom Venice had employed in the war of Chioggia! In trying to make out that he was treated with justice, Mr. Hazlitt attempts to prove too much. Before quitting a point to which I shall not return, let me, however, testify to the value of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and to the great and useful industry with which he has consulted and accurately quoted a number of authorities not only inaccessible to the ordinary reader, but rarely mentioned, and in some cases not at all, by such historians as Daru, Romanin, and even Sismondi.

The stern justice of former days degenerated into cold cruelty in the fifteenth century. When the Republic set a price on the heads of Carrara’s two youngest sons, after vainly attempting to get possession of their persons by diplomatic means, they were mere boys.

When Zeno was called before the Council of Ten on the night of the twentieth of January 1406, the warrant for his examination authorised the use of torture, if it should seem necessary. But even the Ten hesitated at that. He admitted and explained the matter of the money lent and repaid; his explanations of his reasons for having received and talked with an envoy from Padua were as honourable as they were clear, and the Ten being mercifully inclined that night, did not proceed to stretch Venice’s greatest hero on the rack, but only condemned him to the Pozzi for a year, and to the perpetual loss of all offices he held.

He accepted the sentence without a murmur, and his frame of steel did not permanently suffer from the confinement, for he lived twelve years longer in perfect

health, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was once more in command of the troops of the Republic, defeated the Cypriotes, and died at last in the full possession of his faculties, leaving his name to undying glory, and the memory of his judges to eternal shame.

The Venetians had buried the elder and the younger Carrara with great magnificence, dressed in rich velvet, with their golden spurs on their heels and their swords by their sides. When Zeno died at last, it was necessary that his funeral should outshine at least the obsequies accorded to the murdered foes of the Republic. The Doge and the Senate attended, and the citizens followed him to his grave in their thousands; but it is good to read that what was left of him was borne to its last rest on the shoulders of brave seamen who had served with him, fought under him, and shed their blood with him. He lies in the church of Santa Maria della Celestia, where you may see his tomb to this day.

An age of transition is sure to be an age of contrasts. One may compare, for instance, the Doge Michel Steno with his successor, Tomaso Mocenigo, the extreme of extravagance with the extreme of economy, the increasing indebtedness of each department of the State with the excessive severity of the magistrates whose duty it was to watch suspected persons; and from the officials who ‘defended the faith’ one may turn to the wild band of noble youths who called themselves the ‘Compagnia della Calza,’ the ‘Hose Club,’ and whose chief occupation was to amuse and be amused.

The laws were full of contrasts, too. The Doge Michel Steno, the first of the fifteenth century, kept