Here, again, dramatists and writers of fiction have invented an extraordinary tale. It is narrated that Jacopo, being unable to bear the loneliness of exile, deliberately wrote a letter, in which he appealed for help, to Francesco Sforza, then Duke of Milan, intending that the missive should fall into the hands of the Ten, in order that the Council might have him brought back to Venice to be tried; and we are asked to believe that he risked the agonies of torture for the sake of once more seeing his own people. What actually happened seems to be that Jacopo had become intimate in his exile with certain Genoese, through whom he attempted to establish a correspondence with Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, in the hope that the Sultan would send a galley on which he might escape from Crete. If he had succeeded, the Turkish vessel would certainly not have brought him to Venetian waters.

Venice had suffered much in her commerce by the Mohammedan conquest; a number of her citizens had fought in the last defence of Constantinople, and some had been afterwards murdered in cold blood by the Sultan’s orders. An agreement had subsequently been reached, it is true, but the Ten could hardly be expected to look with leniency on a secret correspondence between the son of her Doge and the despot of the Osmanlis.

Jacopo Foscari was brought back to Venice and tried again. He now confessed everything immediately, without compulsion. The story of his having been horribly tortured during this second trial appears to be a pure invention, for in the records of the Council of Ten the fact that the cord was used is invariably stated on each occasion, and in this case there is no mention of any such matter. I refer the incredulous reader to Romanin’s fourth volume, in which abundant proof of this will be found, with the most minute reference to existing documents. Smedley wrote at a time when those papers had not been found, and confessed, moreover, to having largely used Daru.

Jacopo was condemned to return to Crete and to be confined there in prison during one year; he was told, however, that if he again wrote letters to foreign princes, he should end his life under lock and key.

He was allowed to see his family and his father once more, before his departure, and the aged Doge took leave of his only son with tears and deep emotion; but to Jacopo’s entreaties that the Doge would endeavour to procure his return, the old man could only answer, ‘Go, Jacopo, obey and ask no more.’

None the less, after his final departure, the Doge made every effort to obtain his pardon, and was seconded by several of the great patricians; but Jacopo died in January 1457, long before his year of imprisonment was out.

The blow completely broke down the Doge, who was now about eighty-four years of age; he became unable to attend to any affairs of State, and the Council of Ten, not unwillingly perhaps, but with a full understanding of the importance of such a step, determined to depose him and elect another Doge. At its best, the Council of Ten was a fairly just court; at its worst, it was the most unscrupulous, sordid, despotic, and yet cowardly body of men that ever called themselves a tribunal, until the French Revolutionaries beat all records of infamy in the name of the ‘rights of man’; but at no time did the Council ever show the smallest inclination to be sentimental; and it was very rarely generous, for generosity is probably one of the noble forms of sentiment. Francesco Foscari had reigned too long, and was now useless, even as the figure-head which the chief of a thoroughly constitutional and non-imperial state should be. The Council of Ten deposed him, and the Great Council elected another Doge in his place, Pasquale Malipieri.

The proposition presented by the heads of the Ten is extant, and is a masterpiece of sanctimonious cant, in which the Venetian State is spoken of as having originated in the infinite clemency of the divine Creator, and immense stress is laid on the administrative importance of the Doge’s office. The fact was that the oligarchy hated Foscari, and felt that the conduct of his son had brought great scandal on the Republic. A committee of the Council waited on him twice, and requested him to resign on the score of old age, but he refused to do so; the third time, the request became an order, and he was told to leave the ducal palace within eight days. The ducal ring was taken from his finger and hammered to pieces, as was done when a doge died.

He did not wait longer than necessary, and on the following day he left the palace, walking with a stick, but otherwise unaided. His brother Marco went with him, and proposed that they should go to their boat by the private and covered entrance, but the old man refused. ‘I will go down,’ he said, ‘by that staircase up which I came to be Doge.’

The last legend concerning him is that he died of a broken heart on hearing the great bell announce the election of his successor. He died three days later, on All Saints’ Day, and the new Doge was at mass when the news was brought to the church. Doubtless Foscari’s end was hastened by the painful emotions of the last few days, however, and there was a strong feeling in Venice against the Council of Ten for some time afterwards.

As usual, there was also an attempt to make amends by giving the dead man a magnificent funeral. This his widow proudly refused, saying that she was rich enough to give her husband a king’s funeral without aid from the State; nevertheless, his body was taken by order of the Signory and was laid out in state, arrayed in the ducal garments with all the insignia; and Malipieri, the new Doge, followed the bier to the Frari dressed as a simple senator, as if Foscari’s successor had not yet been elected.

Returning for a moment to the list of the condottieri who served Venice in the fifteenth century, it is time to say that Carmagnola was succeeded as general of the Venetian armies by the Duke of Mantua, who before long went over to the enemy with his men, his weapons, and his baggage. The next commander was one of his lieutenants, a certain Erasmo da Narni, famous under the nickname of ‘Gattamelata,’ or Honey-Cat.

Erasmo Gattamelata of Narni was the son of a baker in that town, and is said to have got his nickname from his soft and cat-like ways, ‘and for his speech, which was cautious and also sweet and suave as honey.’ As there are still families of the name in northern Italy who were never connected with his, I cannot see why we need assume that in his case it was a nickname at all. Such appellations are common in Italy, and it is probably only because he was such a distinguished condottiero that his has attracted so much attention. He began his fighting

career when he was young, and Braccio made him commander of his cavalry. He served many employers, amongst others Martin V., the Colonna Pope, and he

found himself opposed in the field ‘both to Casa Braccio and Piccinino, and also to Stella, his old friends and leaders.’ He was sixty years of age when he entered the service of the Venetian Republic. He had a sworn brother in arms, like many fighters of that day, a certain Count Brandolini who was included in the agreement with Venice, which is given in full in the Marchese Eroli’s book. It begins:—

It was customary for condottieri to pay a tribute called Saint Mark’s Fee, Onoranza di San Marco, to the Republic, which was a sort of income-tax on loot. War was a matter of business.

Lack of space prevents me from giving the agreement in full. It is very curious. Among other provisions is one forbidding the condottiero to present, for the roll call, the same charger or man ‘more than once or under more than one lance,’ a clause which gives an idea of the usual methods of cheating. All unimportant prisoners were their property as part of the booty; the important objects and persons, ‘cities, lands, fortresses and their munitions, ruling princes and their brothers or sons, and rebels and traitors,’ were to be handed over to Venice; but other condottieri and military commanders, if taken, were to be paid for by the Venetian government, if it chose to pay half their ransoms.

At the end of the campaign Gattamelata and his friend received in ‘noble and gentle fee’ the castle and lands of Valmarino, on condition that the population should continue to buy its salt from the Venetian Republic, and that the two feudal holders should pay the Republic a yearly tribute of ten pounds of wax at the feast of Saint Mark. Gattamelata bought out his friend’s share, and was inscribed in the Golden Book.

He and Sforza fought together against Piccinino and amongst other things took back Verona.

Gattamelata died of apoplexy not long after the end of that campaign, and was magnificently buried, in the presence of the Doge and the Signory. A picture representing his obsequies was painted by Mantegna, but his biographer, Marchese Eroli, writing in 1876, had not learned where it was, if it still existed, nor can I obtain any information on the subject.

The great Francesco Sforza was also during some time in the service of the Republic, but left it to marry Bianca Visconti with the prospect of succeeding to the Duchy, and he fought against Venice as bravely as he had lately fought under her standard. War was purely a matter of business with the condottieri, and so long as they fulfilled the conditions of each successive contract they undertook, no one ever blamed them for changing sides as often as was profitable. It was not even proper or customary to poison them for it, and in an age when political murder was as common as mere political calumny is now, the acts of Filippo-Maria Visconti were really looked on with disapproval by his fellow-scoundrels in power. It was considered that he went too far.

Astonishing things were done by the soldiers of that age. In the war with Milan, for instance, Venice at one time judged it necessary to get a small fleet into the Lake of Garda; and as the approaches by water were guarded by the Milanese, it was actually found possible to haul six galleys and twenty-five long-boats by means of oxen and capstans from the river Adige up the steep slope of the Monte Baldo and down to Torbole, where the vessels were launched into the lake—and promptly blockaded by the enemy.

In the same war Brescia successfully withstood a siege of no less than three years. It would take long to give even a slight idea of the feats of arms performed on both sides by hired troops, at a time when all Italy was on fire, and war was more or less continuous because the condottieri, who lived by it, were obliged to make it so or starve. The country was in a bad state; if the strong anywhere protected the weak, it was in order to enslave them more effectually, and the weak often revolted against the enforced protection they received.

Visconti died in 1447, leaving four wills, on the third of which Sforza founded those pretensions to the dukedom which he soon succeeded in establishing, though the Milanese declared that they would be a Republic, like Venice and Genoa. We smile at the futility of such a simple popular aspiration, in an age when soldiers were rulers and rulers were tyrants. The Milanese were obliged to employ Sforza to fight for them; he did so, routed the Venetians, forced them to a peace, and then entered into an alliance with them which gave them all the Cremasco, with Bergamo and Brescia, but landed him safely on the throne of Milan.

He had in him the stuff of a good prince, and he is said to have indulged dreams of uniting all Italy in a sort of federation to defend the country from foreign invasion.

But greater events were happening in the East, where the Byzantine Empire was at the last gasp of its existence. Even if Venice had thrown all her strength into opposing the Turks and protecting her Eastern commerce, instead of quarrelling with Milan, she

could not have retarded the fall of Constantinople by any long time. As it was, she sent but little help to the last of the emperors. The Byzantines had never been good fighters, and the tremendous fortifications of the city alone checked Mohammed’s army of one hundred and sixty thousand fanatics.

Constantinople was taken in 1453, and in the wild massacre of Christians that followed, many Venetians were butchered. The Republic is said to have lost property worth three hundred thousand ducats. Fifteen Venetian ships succeeded in escaping, with eight Genoese vessels. But the mere loss of money and valuables was nothing compared with that which must have followed if the commerce of Venice in the East had been altogether destroyed. There was much to overlook and forgive, it is true, if an agreement were to be reached with Mohammed the Conqueror. He had impaled a Venetian captain and beheaded thirty of his crew before the siege; he had decapitated the Venetian Bailo and his son in cold blood afterwards, a great number of Venetians had perished in the massacre, and twenty-nine nobles had been held for ransom; and in return for these injuries and insults, the Republic had not struck a blow. The exigencies of commerce were great.

Venice played a double part in what followed, making a show of rousing the Pope to preach a crusade on the one hand, and, on the other, quietly drawing up a treaty with the Sultan, by which the Republic was to pay tribute for her Eastern settlements, the slave-trade was to be allowed to continue in the

Black Sea, provided that only Christians, and not Mussulmans, were bought and sold, and the Sultan was to force the Genoese of Pera to pay what they owed the Venetians. The latter clause was, no doubt, a good stroke of business, and the treaty contained many others which proved that its end was sordidly commercial.

Two hundred and fifty years had passed since blind Enrico Dandolo had led the Venetians to the conquest of Constantinople. What they did then cannot be justified, it is true, but no man who has fighting blood in his veins can help admiring the magnificent courage that performed such a feat of arms. In the same way, I suppose that no one in whom the true commercial spirit is alive will withhold his admiration from a people who could forgive insult and forget injury so completely as those later Venetians did in 1454, for the sake of making money. It avails not to reflect that it was probably too late to stem the westward movement of the Turks; the man of heart will always feel that the richest nation in Europe might have done something to save Constantinople from her fate.

Pope Nicholas V. thought so, and expressed his disgust to the Senate through his legate, but the Venetian government answered him in one of those sanctimonious speeches which it knew so well how to frame on occasion, and advised the Pope to turn his attention towards pacifying and uniting all Christian princes in a general league against the common enemy, well knowing that no such attempt could succeed.

In spite of the treaty, however, the Venetians never did well in the East after that, and their old enemies the Genoese got the better of them in the trade of the Black Sea, for the Turks were by no means satisfied yet with what they had taken, and Venice was more or less engaged during the next twenty years in trying to protect her Mediterranean colonies.

She had suffered considerably in her fortunes, though her credit appeared inexhaustible. Romanin has unearthed some curious figures. He estimates the loss of property by the fall of Constantinople at three hundred thousand ducats, and says that there were a number of bad commercial failures in Venice in consequence, notably that of Andrea Priuli, for twenty-four thousand ducats. The aggregate estimated value of the houses in Venice diminished between 1425 and 1445 by thirteen thousand ducats, which does not seem very disastrous where the whole reached three hundred and sixty thousand; but the war with Milan alone cost seven million ducats in ten years, in 1428 the Venetian Chamber of Commerce owed nine millions, and Romanin adds that in 1440 the bonds of the public debt were only worth eighteen and a half per cent of their nominal value, a statement in which there seems to be some mistake, unless that extreme depression was merely momentary. There can be no doubt but that the acquisition of extensive territory by warfare, and the reckless extravagance which became only too common in Foscari’s brilliant reign, had led to a serious diminution of wealth and population, and had burdened the Republic with a debt from which she was never to free herself again.

An attempt was made by Pope Pius II. to send a crusade against the Turks, and as such an expedition, if it had resulted in the expulsion of the Turks, would have been much to the advantage of Venice, she lent her support readily. The Pope, however, died suddenly when he was about to bless the united fleet on its departure from Ancona, and the result was that the whole alliance broke up at once, and those who had composed it departed for their homes without delay.

In Italy itself there was constant war, useless to those who paid for it, and profitable only to the soldiers they employed. The command of the Venetian troops had now passed to the great condottiero Bartolommeo Colleoni, a man quite as brave and devoted to the Republic as Gattamelata had been, and for employing whom the other Italian states envied her. When his contract with Venice had been executed, the Florentines succeeded in engaging him; but the incredible rivalry amongst the divers Italian states to obtain his services at last led to a treaty by which it was agreed that he should be sent against the Turks at the joint expense of them all. Of course this was not carried out, and perhaps no one ever expected that it could be. Moreover, Colleoni did not live long, and dying at a comparatively early age, he left all his fortune to the Republic on condition that it should be used for a campaign against the Turks, and that a statue should be set up to himself in the Square of Saint Mark’s.

With amazing dishonesty and admirable indifference to his wishes, Venice used his money for a war against the Duke of Ferrara; and the monument, which must indeed be admitted to be one of the finest equestrian statues in existence, was placed m the little square of San Giovanni e Paolo.

In spite of the treaty with the Sultan, Venice was obliged to spend no less than twelve hundred thousand ducats in defending her possessions against the Turks during five years; and the Mussulmans crossed Dalmatia and appeared in Friuli, to the general consternation of Europe. It is said that at this time the only ally upon which Venice could count was the King of Persia, whose interest it was to check the progress of Turanian invasion. Every one knows that although the Persians are Mohammedans, they belong to a sect which entertains a profound aversion for that of the Turks.

One of the principal episodes in this somewhat desultory warfare was the siege of Scutari in Albania, to possess which the Conqueror was willing to sacrifice any number of men. The place itself was very strong, but contained only about two thousand and five hundred persons, between mercenaries, citizens, and women. The Sultan brought eighty thousand men against them, whom he divided into four watches, each of twenty thousand, and each under orders to fight during six hours out of the twenty-four. The assault upon the breach, which was soon made, was therefore continuous; yet the heroic Antonio da Lezze, by dividing his little force in a similar manner, succeeded in resisting the enemy during thirty-six hours, and the slaughter was so terrific that Mohammed determined to give up the attempt and to starve the town till it surrendered. He had lost over twenty-five thousand men.

Smedley, quoting Sabellico, says that the continued storm of arrows discharged by the assailants during two days and a night was something almost indescribable; a wretched cat that tried to steal across an exposed roof was shot through by eleven arrows at once; in many places three and four arrows had struck in precisely the same spot, splitting one another in succession, and during several months after the Turks had withdrawn, the shafts they had shot supplied kitchens, baths, and ovens with firewood.

The heroic little city held out against famine and artillery during eleven months, and when at last Venice had made peace with the Sultan on condition that the garrison should be allowed to leave the town with its arms and baggage, Antonio da Lezze marched out with four hundred and fifty men and one hundred and fifty women, all that was left of the little force which had successfully resisted the greatest conqueror of the age during the greater part of a year.

It is almost needless to say that the Republic treated the hero with her usual vile ingratitude, and that Da Lezze was imprisoned for a year and banished for ten because certain of the surviving inhabitants of Scutari accused him of having written to Venice that the town

was short of provisions when there was still a considerable store.

The impulse of conquest which had led the Turks so far was now almost exhausted, and when Mohammed the Conqueror died, the moment would have been favourable for driving the Turks out of the Archipelago, especially as the throne of the

Osmanlis was disputed by a number of claimants. But Venice was exhausted by her many struggles, and the sovereigns of other European states were only too ready to sacrifice the interests of Christianity at large to

their private ends. The result was that the Republic, finding herself alone, made another ignominious peace with the Turks. But even now she had no rest, for she was at war with the Duke of Ferrara, who enjoyed the protection of the Pope. The latter exhausted every diplomatic means to induce Venice to withdraw; but the only result was that the Republic recalled its ambassador from Rome. Sixtus IV. now excommunicated Venice, and attempted to send notice of

the excommunication by the political agent whom the Venetian ambassador had left in Rome. That official, however, declined to take the message, and the pope sent a special envoy, who was to present himself at the palace of the Patriarch. But the prelate succeeded in avoiding him by feigning illness, so that official notice

of the interdict never reached the Signory, a result which delighted the Venetians and proportionally scandalised all other Catholics. Venice gave formal notice to the Emperor, the King of France, the King of England, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke of Austria, that she appealed against the excommunication to a future council, and meanwhile no further attention was paid to the interdict. It was, in fact, removed by the next Pope, Innocent VIII., who had no especial reason for maintaining it.

The Republic had to deal at this time with internal troubles as well as external difficulties. It happened that two men of the same name and family were successively elected to be doges, and that the house in question was one of those known as ‘the new.’ For the aristocracy divided itself into two classes, of which ‘the old’ included only the families of tribunitian descent, who considered themselves vastly superior to all the rest. Nevertheless, the younger houses succeeded in keeping the ducal honour to themselves for more than two hundred years. In 1450 sixteen of these families had solemnly sworn never to allow the election of any doge from amongst the elder houses, and sixty-eight years had already passed since one of the latter had been chosen. On the death of Marco Barbarigo it was noised abroad that the old houses were about to make a determined effort to recover the desired dignity. Agostino Barbarigo was elected with some difficulty, and it was quite clear that there were now two hostile factions in the Venetian government which were more occupied with their party spites than with what concerned the welfare of the Republic.

It was a period of contradictions in Venetian history, for while the State seemed to be often gaining territory it was frequently losing influence and undermining the sources of its own wealth; and, on the whole, the loss during the fifteenth century considerably exceeded the profit.

It was at this time that Venice accomplished that remarkable piece of juggling which ended in the annexation of Cyprus.

Caterina Corner, or Catharine Cornaro, as we are accustomed to call her, was the niece of a Venetian noble who lived in Cyprus, and she had married Jacques de Lusignan, an illegitimate son of the last king of the island. Less than two years after her marriage, when she was about to become a mother, her husband suddenly died, bequeathing his kingdom to the child that should be born. The infant that came into the world was a son indeed, but only lived a few months, and as Catharine’s husband had grasped the throne by driving out his half-sister, who was legitimate, his widow now had great difficulty in maintaining her position against the rightful heir, whose name was Charlotte, and who was married to the powerful Duke of Savoy. Catharine had no choice but to place herself under the protection of Venice, and the Republic, as usual when it undertook to help a friend in distress, began by hoisting its own flag on the citadel. With great skill the queen was gradually forced, in the course of fifteen years, into the position of resigning her little kingdom altogether into the hands of the Republic. In exchange she was to receive a considerable income and an estate at Asolo, where she could keep up the forms of a small court, still retaining her royal title. She was brought to Venice, and was received with the utmost pomp and display, and she retired quietly to Asolo, to spend the rest of her life in the society of the most distinguished philosophers and men of letters of the century.

Venice laid hands on all possible aspirants to the throne of Cyprus, men and boys, women and girls; the latter were consigned to convents, from which they were only allowed to go out occasionally with an escort. The young men were closely watched and their expenses defrayed by the Republic, and the boys were educated to be good Venetians.

So Venice got Cyprus, and for the sake of that little possession the Republic appears to have sacrificed the opportunity of helping Columbus to discover America. The fact has been denied, discussed, and asserted again by historians, but a document has been discovered by M. Urbain de Gheltof which, if genuine, puts an end to all doubt. That scholar has found in a private archive in Venice the copy of a letter to a Venetian noble written by Christopher Columbus from Palos, just before sailing to discover America. I translate the short document, in which the simple character of the Genoese explorer finds full expression:—

The Venetians may not have very deeply regretted their refusal to help the Genoese navigator, but they were made to suffer acutely by the Portuguese discovery of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope. For Portugal now imported by sea direct to Lisbon the rich merchandise of the East, of which the Venetians had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly, but for the passage of which they paid heavy duties to the Sultan. The supremacy of Venetian navigation was over, and a more daring race of seamen ventured voyages in distant and unknown oceans whither they were not followed by the old-fashioned mariners of the Mediterranean. It was in vain that the Republic proposed to the Sultan Bajazet a commercial alliance by which both powers might have profited; the Turk could not understand that the ruin of Venetian trade must impoverish the whole Archipelago and Constantinople itself. Instead of an alliance, a renewal of hostilities ensued, in the course of which Lepanto fell into the hands of the Turks, either because the garrison was insufficient or because the Venetian admiral,

Grimani, was not equal to the service required of him.

He shared the fate of almost all native-born Venetian commanders, and was brought home laden with chains so heavy that he could not have walked across the Piazzetta from the landing-place to his prison if he had not been held up by his son, who was a Cardinal. He was confined in one of the worst cells, surnamed ‘Forte,’ the Strong, and his sufferings were such, according to Sanudo, who kept his journal at the time, that the Cardinal appeared before the Signory one day to beg, as a favour, that his father might be executed rather than made to die by inches in his dungeon.

The people, as often happened, were quite of the opinion of their masters, that to be beaten in fight was a shameful crime, and a savage song about the unlucky Grimani was bawled in the streets—

But it was of small use to torment the poor man and to make songs upon him. Venice was forced to make a commercial treaty with the Portuguese, to save herself from ruin.

Then came Charles VIII. of France and descended into Italy with fire and the sword, and Venice was drawn into new and disastrous Italian wars. So ended the fifteenth century.

THE DOGES OF VENICE

TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL DATES IN VENETIAN HISTORY

BOOKS CONSULTED