the second day of February, which is the Feast of the Purification. ‘But what if it rains?’ asked the Doge, for that is the rainy season. ‘We will give you a hat to cover you,’ they answered. ‘And what if I am thirsty?’ the Doge asked, jesting. ‘We will give you drink,’ said the box-makers. So it was agreed, and so it was done, and the feast that was kept thereafter was called the Feast of the Maries, and it was one of the most graceful festivities of all the many that the Venetian imagination invented and kept. I shall describe elsewhere more fully how the Doge came to Santa Maria Formosa every year on the appointed day, and how, in memory of the bargain, the people of that quarter made him each year a present of straw hats and Malmsey wine. It was a sort of public homage to the women of Venice until the war of Chioggia, towards the end of the fourteenth century, and it is only fair to say that the lovely objects of such a splendid tribute did much to deserve it. But after that time many things were changed, and there remained of the beautiful Feast of the Maries nothing more than the Doge’s annual visit to the church, instituted by Pietro Candiano III.

The immediate result of the bold attempt and condign punishment of the Istrian pirates was a series of punitive expeditions against them which laid the foundation of Venice’s power on the mainland, and in this struggle, if in nothing else, the Doge was fortunate in his last years. But an evil destiny was upon him at home.

In his old age he associated one of his sons with him in the ducal authority, also called Pietro, ‘at the suggestion of the people,’ says Dandolo in his chronicle. As I have said, this was the usual plan followed by the families that sought to make the dogeship hereditary. The younger Pietro was wild, ambitious, turbulent, and wholly without scruple, and he at once took advantage of his position to plot against his father, in the hope of reigning alone. But he was found out and hindered by the people, who rose suddenly in stormy anger and laid violent hands upon him, to kill him without trial. Yet his father was generous and succeeded in saving him from death, and tried him for his deeds, and sent him into exile.

Then Pietro the younger turned pirate himself, and armed six fast vessels and harassed the Venetian traders all down the Adriatic. But meanwhile he still had a strong party of friends for him in Venice, and their influence grew quickly, even with the people, and many secret influences which we can no longer trace were brought to bear for him; until at last the Venetians themselves, who had tried to murder him, decreed him the ducal crown and the supreme power, and recalled him and deposed his aged father. The old man died within a few weeks, and all he could bequeath to his wife was ‘a vineyard surrounded by walls’ on the shore of San Pietro; and Pietro Candiano IV. ruled alone.

He did outrageous deeds to strengthen his power. To win the protection of the Emperor Otho he forced his wife to take the veil in the convent of Saint Zacharias, and obliged his only son by her, Vitale, to become a monk. Having thus disposed of them, he took to wife Gualdrada, the sister of the Marquis of Tuscany,

a princess of German origin, of great wealth, a subject and a relative of the Emperor himself.

Trusting in this great alliance, Pietro no longer concealed the designs he entertained for himself and his family, branches of which were established in Padua and Vicenza, where they enjoyed, and certainly exacted, the highest consideration. Indeed, most of the Candiano men seem to have married women allied to reigning princes.

The Doge, their head, now garrisoned with German soldiers a number of fortresses in the neighbourhood of Ferrara, which had come to him with his wife; lastly, he did what every tyrant has done since history began, he surrounded himself with a mercenary bodyguard of desperate men who had everything to gain by his success, and everything to lose if he fell. After this he showed plainly enough that he meant to emancipate himself altogether from those counsellors which the Republic imposed upon him in all the important affairs of state.

He might have succeeded in any other state, but in Venice his was not the only family that aspired to the supreme power. His deeds had been violent, high-handed, outrageous, such as would condemn the chief of any community that called itself free; the Orseolo watched him, lay in wait for him, trapped him, and compassed his end. Following their lead, the people formed themselves into a vast conspiracy, and at a signal the ducal palace was surrounded on all sides.

The Doge would have fled, but it was too late, for every door was watched and strongly guarded. In his despair he attempted to take sanctuary in Saint Mark’s church, which was connected with the palace by a dark and narrow entry. Thither he hastened, with his wife, their little child, and a few of his faithful bodyguard; but the conspirators had remembered

the secret corridor and were there, and they hewed him down, him and the child and every man of his attendants. The women they suffered to go unhurt.

Then they dragged out the dead bodies, even the child’s, and gave them over to the rage of the furious populace to be spurned and insulted, until one just man, Giovanni Gradenigo, stood forth and claimed them, by what right I know not except that of decency, and buried them in the convent of Saint Hilary. Meanwhile the rabble had fired the palace, and the flames devoured it and spread to the church of Saint Mark; and further, a great number of houses were burnt down on that day, whereby the chiefs of the conspiracy were brought into discredit with those whose property was destroyed. But Pietro Orseolo was chosen to be Doge.

Now the dogess Gualdrada, breathing vengeance on them that had murdered her husband and her little son, took refuge on the mainland and came to Piacenza, to the court of the Empress Adelaide, who was the widow of Otho I. and the mother of Otho II., then reigning. There Gualdrada cast herself at Adelaide’s feet and told her grief, imploring justice and righteous vengeance; and her cry was heard, for soon the young Emperor summoned Venice to account, not for the assassination of the Doge, but for violence done against Gualdrada and for the murder of her son.

Venice was in no state to face the Holy Roman Empire alone, and she obeyed the summons by sending the patrician Antonio Grimani to Piacenza, with orders to explain to the Empress that the Republic was not altogether responsible for the cruel deeds done by a handful of her citizens. The ambassador spoke long and well, setting forth the iniquities of the Doge Pietro Candiano, and promising to make full reparation to Gualdrada.

There they sat, in the hall of the castle of Piacenza, the old Empress in her robes, surrounded by the flower of her northern knights, and before them Antonio Grimani, the ambassador, representing the person of the Doge Orseolo; and Gualdrada was not there, but the envoy of her brother, the Marquis of Tuscany, came to speak for her, appealing to the just sense of the court.

At a gesture from the Empress this personage came forward, bearing a sealed letter as his brief, written with Gualdrada’s own hand, and he broke the seal, and presented to the ambassador of Venice the note of her demands. Then and there an inventory was made out of all the property, both personal and real estate, which had either composed her dowry, or which had been promised to her by her husband, or which should have been hers as the heiress of her murdered child; and Antonio Grimani did not hesitate, but promised for the Republic that everything should be restored.

On her side Gualdrada then declared that she gave up all thoughts of vengeance against the state of Venice, the reigning Doge or his successors, and she signed with her own hand the solemn act which the imperial notary drew up, and by which the mutual engagement was ratified. So the grim business ended; and Gualdrada took lands and gold for her child’s blood and her husband’s, as was the manner in the Middle Ages, and went back to her Tuscan home, and lived finely, and married, for aught I know, and was happy for ever afterwards.

Here, on the heels of tragedy, follows romance, in the same family of Candiano; or perhaps it is only legend, of the kind the old chroniclers loved so well.

Elena, the lovely daughter of a Pietro, we know not which, fell deep in love with Gherardo Guoro; and this love of hers was a great secret, for he was neither rich nor noble, and had small hope of being accepted as a son-in-law by a Doge who was always intriguing to make brilliant marriages for his family. But Elena had a nurse who loved her dearly and pitied the pair, and helped them to meet again and again, till at last they were married, and none but the old nurse knew it. Now, therefore, Gherardo sought fortune and set out on a voyage to the East; and while he was away, Pietro Candiano told his daughter that he would betroth her to Vittor Belegno. In her terror the girl’s heart stood still, and she fell into a trance so death-like that it was mistaken for death itself, and on the same day, according to the immemorial custom of Italy, she lay in her coffin in the cathedral. But within a few hours, as love and fate would have it, Gherardo Guoro came sailing back, only to learn of her sudden death. Wild with grief he rushed to the cathedral, and by prayers, entreaties, and bribes prevailed upon the sacristan to open the tomb, and help him to wrench off the lid of the coffin. When he saw her face his passionate tears broke out, and, lifting the beloved head, he kissed her again and again; and his kisses brought the colour to her cheek, for she was not dead, and he held her in his

arms, and she grew warm, and he took her alive out of the place of death, in a dream of wonder and joy. So when Pietro the Doge saw that his daughter was alive again, he was glad, and forgave them both and blessed them; and afterwards they lived happily.

In point of age I think this is the oldest existing version of the story of Romeo and Juliet, and the one from which all the other forms of the legend were afterwards derived. It would be interesting to pursue the inquiry further, to find out how many different shapes the tale has assumed in the course of ages, and in how many instances it has been founded on fact; for that some of the stories are more than half-true I have not the slightest doubt.

The power of the Candiano family was broken when Pietro IV. and his little son were murdered, and the strong race of the Orseolo now seized the ducal throne, and tried to make it hereditary with themselves. They had cleared the way by violence, and they pursued their way to power without scruple. It was Pietro Orseolo who had been the soul of the revolution against the last Candiano, and it might have been expected that his supporters would set him up as Doge; but it seemed wiser to proceed more cautiously, and with singular foresight they put forward another member of the family, also called Pietro, a man of the most profound religious convictions, and who had led such a holy life that he was regarded as a saint on earth.

The family were not mistaken in proposing his candidacy, a parallel to which may be found in the election of the saintly hermit, Pietro da Morrone, to be pope, by way of solving the difficulties which had produced a long vacancy of the papal see. Pietro Orseolo was acclaimed Doge without opposition.

But piety is not always energy, and virtue has little or nothing to do with the greatness of princes. The holy man felt himself weak in the face of the troubles caused by the hatred of his own family for that of its predecessors in power, and when he saw what great responsibilities were accumulating upon his shoulders, and what dangers menaced the state, he quietly made up his mind to leave the world behind him and to end his life in a Camaldolese monastery in Aquitaine. I find the best account of this extraordinary vocation in Mr. Hazlitt’s recent work (published in 1900); and incidentally I feel bound to say that this writer, whose original book has now developed to very solid dimensions, has searched the chronicles and later authorities upon Venetian history with a care and a conscientious thoroughness quite unequalled by any other historian who has treated of the same subject. We are free to differ with Mr. Hazlitt as to some of his conclusions, and as to the particular stories he has preferred to follow where the legends are many and contradictory; but for thorough and detailed accounts, according to the different chronicles, the English reader must go to him.

In the late summer of the year 977 the good Doge Orseolo received the visit of a learned and holy Frenchman, Warin, who was the Superior of the Abbey of Saint Michel de Cuxac in Aquicaine, and who had come to Venice to see for himself

the place where the Evangelist was laid. The Doge received him as became his rank in the church, and the two good men were drawn to each other by that profound though instantaneous sympathy which most of us have felt at least once in life. Of the two, Warin had the stronger nature, and recognising the true monk in the devout Doge, he bade him give up the world, to which he had never really belonged, and follow his manifest vocation.

Pietro Orseolo had been married at the age of eighteen to a maiden as virtuous as himself, and when one son had been born to the pair they had exchanged vows of chastity, and had afterwards given up their lives to the care of the poor, and to visiting the hospices and hospitals.

And now, long after that, Warin argued with Pietro and urged him more and more to renounce the world altogether; but Pietro was as wise as he was good, and he knew that it was his duty to leave everything in order for his successor, and he accordingly claimed a year in which to prepare for his retirement.

The monk Warin had to admit that he was right, and they parted on the first of September. On that same day, one year later, Warin returned and waited for the Doge in the monastery of Sant’ Ilario. Pietro left his house alone in the night and joined him, dressed as a pilgrim; at midnight they mounted swift horses and set out upon their long journey westwards, and the fugitive was not missed till late on the following morning. Some accounts say that Orseolo’s wife had

already taken the veil in the nunnery of Saint Zacharias; others assure us that she was dead. It matters little, for the one fact stands undenied, that Pietro Orseolo fled from the dogeship of Venice to be a novice in France, in one of the most rigid religious orders of that time. There he lived in peace for nineteen years till he died in the odour of sanctity; but over seven hundred years passed before he was officially canonised and took his place in the calendar, after which the French king returned his bones to Venice. There is a picture in the Museo Civico representing him and his wife dressed as monk and nun, and kneeling before a Madonna.

The policy of the Orseolo family in putting forward a saint to represent them had not been very successful, for after Pietro’s flight they found themselves deserted by the factions they had led against Pietro Candiano IV.; and in the election which followed the holy man’s sudden abdication, one more Candiano was chosen Doge in the person of Vitale, of that name. At the same time two powerful alliances were formed, the one between the Candiano and the Caloprini, of which the object seems to have been to set up some sort of despotic government under the protection of the Holy Roman Empire; the other between the Orseolo and the Morosini, who held to the old alliance with Byzantium and the East. Sismondi and others seriously derive the names of these two families from Greek words signifying, for Morosini, the ‘Friends of Fools,’ and for Caloprini, the ‘People who bow themselves skilfully’—in other words, perhaps, the dupes and their flatterers. Of the two it was the flatterers that came to grief, however, whereas the Morosini have continued to flourish even to our own time. I know not whether these derivations have any value. Victor Hugo, who did not know Greek, once suggested that the French word ‘ironie’ might be derived from the English word ‘iron.’

Many bloody encounters took place, in which the nobles of Venice took sides with one party or the other, as their personal interests suggested, and at last the Caloprini, who were hated by the people, were forced to leave Venice. Yet trusting to the support of the Empress Adelheid, or Adelaide, in an evil hour they ventured to come back a few years later; but the Morosini, who had grown stronger in the meantime, fell upon them and put them all cruelly to death, so that of that great house only three widowed women remained alive to mourn the dead.

It was time that some strong hand should grasp the reins and drive the car of state through the slough of chaos and blood in which it was stuck fast, out upon the broad highway of fame. The hand was ready, and the time had come; in the year 991 Pietro Orseolo II. mounted the ducal throne.

From the first he threw all his energy into a systematic campaign against the pirates of the Adriatic, whose fathers had carried off the Venetian brides. They had paid for their rashness with their lives, and their descendants had never again come so near the city, yet the affront was not forgotten, and an expedition which had their destruction for its object appealed to the men of Venice as few other incentives could.

With a strong fleet the Doge set sail, and visited the coast cities of Istria and Dalmatia one by one. They hailed him as a liberator, for they were especially exposed to the attacks of the corsairs, and in return for the protection of the Republic they placed their liberty in Pietro Orseolo’s hands. He wisely received them as federal allies rather than as subjects of Venice, though they, in their haste to be protected, would not have refused to submit themselves to him as conquered cities. He received them indeed under the shadow of the standard of Saint Mark, but he left to each one full and unhampered liberty to govern itself as it should see fit, requiring only a small yearly tribute in acknowledgment of what was to be a feudal supremacy. The town of Arbo was to pay ten pounds of silk, for instance, while Pola paid two thousand pounds’ weight of olive-oil yearly to feed the lamps of Saint Mark’s church, and so on, through a long list; and so, by token of a few skins of oil, of a handful of silk, Venice first got supremacy over the eastern Adriatic cities, with all the vast advantage to her commerce that lay in owning harbours and warehouses all along the coast almost as far as Greece. From that time Trieste, Capo d’ Istria, Rovigno, and all the sea-coast cities of Istria became Venetian, and Zara, long an ally, and Salone, and Spalatro and Ragusa; and the islands too, Coronota, Brazza, and many others, down to the islets of Corsola and Lazina, which stood firm for the pirates, guarding the approach to Narenta, their chief city. But there, as all the chronicles agree, the Doge put forth his strength, and he took those places in hard-fought battle and smote them, and utterly wasted them with fire and the sword, so that from that day their strength was gone, and the Adriatic was for many centuries freed from the terror of their deeds.

Then, turning homeward, Pietro Orseolo visited the vast provinces he had annexed to Venice, and because he had destroyed the corsairs the people everywhere received him with great joy, and acclaimed him Duke of Dalmatia by common consent; and the Doges who came after him bore the well-earned title during many hundreds of years.

Now it came to pass that when the young Emperor Otho III., mystic, fiery, enthusiastic, heard of all this success, he felt a very great longing to visit Pietro Orseolo and to see the wonderful water-city of which all the world was beginning to talk; and he secretly told his wishes to his privy councillors, but they would not hear of such a thing, and he, being very young, would not act openly against their advice. Yet he persisted in his intention, while he held his peace.

So at last, on a warm and moonlight night in the year 998, a boat manned by eight men silently approached the little island of San Servolo, not far from the city; and two men stepped out upon the shore and went up and knocked at the door of a half-ruined building, once a monastery of Benedictines. A man of imposing stature opened and let them in; but soon three fishermen came out by the same way and got into a skiff that lay waiting hard by, with two of their companions, for the larger boat had disappeared; and they pulled over to the city.

Then in the moonlight the skiff was quietly rowed all about the city, stopping here and there, wherever there was something worthy to be seen; and if any of the belated townsfolk noticed the little boat and its crew, no one guessed that it bore the young Emperor Otho himself, and the Doge, and the Secretary, Paul the Deacon, who himself tells the tale of the nocturnal visit. Having succeeded once, the Emperor came again, less secretly, and spent days in the Doge’s palace, but still he preferred not to be openly known, so that he might be the more free to go about the city. There was a romantic strain in his short life, in his intense enthusiasm, in his profound belief in a divine right to reign; there was a faint foreshadowing of a stronger Emperor who is come in our own day to claim what he claimed, and to do, perhaps, what he could not do. With the strenuous reaching out after higher things Otho felt youth’s longing to know, in an age when it was possible for one man to master all the knowledge of his time, and it was surely this desire that most of all brought him over to Venice that first time. Doubtless, too, because Venice was counted with the East, his advisers foresaw trouble in a too open friendship between him and the Doge. But his early death ended such danger, if it ever existed, and all that remains is the story of his wanderings by night, in fisherman’s dress, through the still and moonlit waterways of the young city.

Like the Partecipazio and the Candiano houses which had ruled before him, Pietro Orseolo now took measures to make the sovereignty hereditary in his family, by associating his own son Giovanni in the ducal honour, and further by marrying him to a Princess Mary, who was the daughter of one of the joint Emperors of the East and the niece of the other. The pair were united in Constantinople according to the Greek rite, and with the utmost pomp and magnificence, and Giovanni was given the rank of an imperial patrician. On their return to Venice, he and his beautiful bride were received by the people with demonstrations of enthusiastic joy, and, according to Sansovino, it was on this occasion, and at the express request of the Venetians themselves, that Giovanni was invited by his father to share in the power. It may well be, and it matters little.

Orseolo was much preoccupied by the still smouldering hatred of the Candiano family, and he sought to satisfy their ambition by marrying his second son, Domenico, to Imelda, grand-daughter of Pietro Candiano IV. and Richelda. His third son, Ottone, when still very young, he married to Geiza, sister of Saint Stephen, King of Hungary; and his daughter Hicela was given to the King of Croatia.

Strong in these alliances, still young in years, and richly endowed with the health and beauty that were hereditary in his family, Orseolo II. might well have looked forward to a long and happy career, and to the certainty of leaving the sovereignty to his descendants throughout centuries to come. Then, about the year 1009, a comet suddenly appeared in the sky, and famine and plague ravaged Venice and the world. Amongst the very first victims were Giovanni and his young wife, and Orseolo himself did not long survive them. The mortality was such, according to old Dandolo, that there was not time to dig graves for all who died, and such tombs as were not full were opened and crammed with dead.

Ottone Orseolo succeeded his father, when the power of the name seemed at its height; but under him came the fall and exile of his family, and the end of the period during which the dogeship was more or less hereditary in the houses of Partecipazio, Candiano, and Orseolo. That period is a labyrinth of uncertainties and a maze of conflicting anachronisms. Scarcely two chroniclers place the same events in the same year, and they are rarely agreed as to matters even more important. Unmistakable history does not make its appearance in Venice till the eleventh century, and not till the descendants of Pietro Orseolo II., the greatest Doge who had yet reigned, were exiled from Venice, and excluded for ever, by a special law, from holding office under the Republic. They may have found some consolation in the fact that one of their house inherited the throne of Saint Stephen.

A few years later, the Doge Domenico Flabianico,

or Flobenigo, sustained by an assembly of the clergy and the people, introduced a law by which the chief of the Republic was forbidden to associate any one with himself in the power, and by which he was constrained to accept the ‘assistance’ of two counsellors. The nomination of these was the first step towards the creation of those many offices by which the Doge’s action was limited little by little, till he became the mere figure-head, if not the scapegoat, of the Republic he was supposed to govern.

V

VENICE AND THE FIRST CRUSADES

It is not my intention to attempt in these pages an unbroken narrative of early Venetian history. Such attempts have been made by men of great and thorough learning, but they have failed in part or altogether because it is quite impossible to trust the only sources of information which have come down to us. These agree, indeed, more or less; that is, they agree just nearly enough to make it sure that something like the event they narrate in such widely different ways actually took place, in some year to be chosen at will from the several dates they give. But that is all, until nearly the end of the Middle Ages.

One thing must not be forgotten: Venice was not the only maritime republic in Italy, even in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were at least three others, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa, which at that time were as prosperous, and seemed likely to be as long-lived, and of which the commerce in the eastern Mediterranean was already much more important than that of Venice. In the end Venice outdid them because she was isolated from Italy; literally ‘isolated,’ since she was built on islands in the sea.

England owes her independence, and the British Empire therefore owes its existence, to twenty-one miles of salt water. A much less formidable water barrier gave Venice a thousand years of self-government. The vast advantage of protection by water was perhaps not evident to the Venetians more than two or three times in their history, any more than the same advantage has been actually felt by Englishmen more than twice or thrice, but those few occasions were most critical; it has been present all the time, and the enemies of Venice, as of England, have always realized with dismay the difficulty of attacking a nation to whose country men cannot walk dry-shod.

The other three great maritime republics did not possess this prime permanent advantage of isolation by water. Amalfi was taken and retaken by land powers; Pisa was ultimately subjugated by the Florentines, the landsmen who lived nearest to her; and Genoa, with a surviving semblance of freedom, became tributary to the House of Savoy in the eighteenth century. Venice alone of the four held her own till the days of Napoleon, protected to some extent, perhaps, by a sort of tacit but general European agreement to consider her a city of pleasure, but also, and always, by that water barrier, which multiplies the strength of a city’s defenders tenfold, and divides to dangerously small fractions the powers of those that assail her.

It may seem fruitless to try to recall in a few words how Pisa and Genoa rose to maritime power; but it is not possible to pass over in silence the period during which Genoa, Venice’s great rival, was growing up on the opposite side of the peninsula, nor the time in which Amalfi and Pisa were becoming powers in the Mediterranean.

Amalfi, most strange to say, though she was the first to disappear, left to the civilised world at large the greatest legacy. To one of her citizens, Flavio Gioia, we owe the mariner’s compass; to her we owe the manuscript of the Pandects of Justinian, by which, as Sismondi justly says, all western Europe came back to the study and practice of Roman law; to Amalfi we owe those laws regulating maritime traffic, which are the foundation of the modern sea-law of civilised nations. And as if this were not enough for her glory, it is to Amalfi that the order of Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem owes its existence, the oldest order of knighthood that still survives, now known as the Sovereign Order of Malta.

At its greatest, the Republic of Amalfi embraced not more than fifteen or sixteen villages besides the little capital itself, scattered along the southern side of the Sorrentine peninsula, some perched on the inaccessible flanks and spurs of a mountain that rises out of the sea to a height of nearly five thousand feet, some built where wild gorges widen at the water’s edge. That breakwaters were built out into the sea before Amalfi and Positano against the terrific south-westerly gales, we partly know and partly guess; that the capital and the dependent villages were strongly fortified may easily be proved. But what is left, though beautiful beyond description, is so little, and that little is so exiguous, that the thoughtful traveller asks with a sort of unbelieving wonder how the Amalfitans can ever have disputed the lordship of the sea with the greatest, and possessed their own rich quarter in every thriving harbour of the East; and how they can have given the maritime world its first rules of the road, or sent out rich and splendid trains of knights to one crusade after another. Yet they did all these things before they sank from power and disappeared and were lost in the turmoil of South Italian history.

Next greater in strength to survive came Pisa, a contrast to Amalfi in almost every condition, and a power which, when at its height, was of more importance in history because history was then less chaotic. Not backed against steep mountains like Amalfi and Genoa, but built in the rich alluvial soil of the delta of the Arno, where the widening stream afforded a safe harbour for ships; not isolated in a natural fortress of rocks, but easy of access by land as well as by sea, and therefore easy to quarrel with and often in danger, Pisa possessed the natural advantages of a modern capital like London or Paris rather than the natural defences of a strong city of the Middle Ages. But the times were not ripe, and Florence was too near, jealous, turbulent, commercial and usurious, a dangerous enemy in war, and a terrible competitor in peace. No country has produced simultaneously so many cities as Italy, any of which might have become the capital of a nation. I can only compare the tremendous vigour of her growth at many points at once to that of a strong oak-tree broken off near the ground by a tornado, and sending up shoots from the stump, so tall, so straight, so vital that each one, if the others were cut away, would grow in a few years to be a tree as tall and robust as the parent. Venice, Palermo, Naples, Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Milan—might not any one of these have grown to be a nation’s capital? And can any other nation of Europe show as much?

The tenth century was not far advanced when Pisa possessed an immense fleet and was already governing herself as a republic. A proof of her importance lies in the fact that when Otho the Second was at war with the South and meditated annexing to his Empire what remained of the old Greek colonies, he applied to Pisa to lend him ships wherewith to transport his troops to Calabria. His sudden death, however, put an end to the negotiations, and the seven nobles whom he had

sent to Pisa to represent him were so much delighted with all they saw, as well as with their reception, that they asked to be made citizens themselves, were granted the privilege, and became the founders of that great Ghibelline party by which the destinies of the Pisan Republic were guided so long as she maintained her independence.

Amalfi sent out traders to the East and knights to fight for the holy sepulchre; but her knights did not fight to win land for her, nor did her traders ever become colonists. Pisa, like Venice, sought to extend her territory. At that time the daring Saracen chief named Mousa—Moses—settled himself on the eastern and southern coast of Sardinia, and carried his depredations far and wide on the Italian shore and through the Tuscan archipelago. Seizing his opportunity when the Pisan fleet had sailed southwards to help the Calabrian Greeks against the Saracens of Sicily, Mousa and his pirates entered the mouth of the Arno by night and landed in the suburbs of Pisa. The terrified citizens were waked by the yells of their assailants amidst the flames of their own dwellings, and if the corsairs had possessed any local knowledge of the city its history might have gone no further than that night. But in their ignorance they had landed on the wrong bank of the river, and had fired the suburb instead of the city itself; a woman, and some say that she was a noble lady, made her way through the confusion across the bridge to the Consul’s dwelling, the church bells were rung backwards and roused the sleeping garrison to arms, and the Saracens, surprised by the prospect of energetic resistance, withdrew hastily to their ships and dropped down the river. The peril was past.

But when the fleet came back from the South vengeance was sworn upon Mousa and his pirates, and the conquest of Sardinia was a foregone conclusion. So Pisa rose to power, and Genoa envied her and Florence too, and those long wars began which ended in her destruction and her absorption. While Venice had been distracted by internal factions, by the feuds of Candiano and Orseolo, Morosini and Caloprini, the ‘Dupes and the Flatterers,’ Pisa had at least enjoyed the honour of fighting and vanquishing a horde of unbelievers. And meanwhile Genoa had risen also to much the same degree of prosperity and strength, so that when Peter the Hermit’s cry rang through the Christian world, rousing the faithful to win back the Holy Land, the four great Italian maritime republics were almost equals in wealth and influence, and in the fleets of which they could dispose.

In what is by no means to be considered a complete history of Venice, my readers will be grateful if I spare them the too untrustworthy details with which the chroniclers fill up their accounts of the eleventh century. In addition to what I have said about the growth of the rival republics, however, it may be mentioned that before the great movement of the first crusade, the Venetians had more than once measured themselves with the Normans in the Levant, and perfectly well understood the position of affairs in the south of Italy and Sicily, where the sons of Tancred of Hauteville had carried everything before them.

Venice, Genoa, and Pisa played almost equal parts in the general European movement that followed, and the Venetians need not be greatly blamed if they derived profit from a source that should have yielded only honour to those who sought it. The Venetians

combined glory with business, it is true, but, on the other hand, no one expected them to transport men and horses to the East for nothing; and, since they were the best provided with vessels suitable for that purpose, it was a foregone conclusion that a large part of the transportation should be done by them. Moreover, when all is told, there were few indeed amongst all those hundreds of thousands who wore the cross who had the right to reproach their fellows and companions for hoping to combine the salvation of their souls with some improvement in their earthly fortunes.

It was, of course, natural that the Italians, who are the least sentimental people in Europe, should understand the worldly advantages which were sure to follow in the wake of that great tidal wave of sentiment which rose from the depths of Europe at Peter the Hermit’s cry, advanced, tremendous and irresistible, over land and sea to the most eastern limits of Christian civilisation, to topple and break at last upon Jerusalem itself in a thunderous chaos of disaster and success.

The confused history of the wars in which Venice was engaged during the twelfth century is intimately connected with that of the first and second crusades, though it cannot be said that the Venetians played a very great part in either as fighting crusaders. It is hard to follow exactly what took place when the whole world that surrounded the Mediterranean was in a state of ferment and wild confusion; but it cannot be denied that the Venetians made the most of the new opportunities presented to them, and they never neglected a chance of enriching themselves at a time when a vast amount of money was brought into circulation to pay for the transportation and victualling of armed hosts. The Republic, even at the outset, was in possession of a fleet that elicited the admiration of Europe. No other nation owned ships of such varied types well suited to different purposes. They had vessels called ‘hippogogi,’ intended, as the name indicates, for the transportation of horses, of which each was able to carry a considerable number. They had fast vessels called also by a Greek name, ‘dromi,’ some of which are stated to have been a hundred and seventy-five feet over all; and though of light draught, such ships can hardly have been of less than three hundred tons register and over. They had a main deck and an upper deck, which the chronicler, who was totally ignorant of nautical matters, presumes to have been assigned respectively to the fighting men and the seamen who worked the ship. Several of these vessels carried timber, so fitted as to be rapidly built up into a turret, reaching to the battlements of sea-girt fortresses and towns, and they were provided with engines for throwing stones, heavy wooden bolts with iron heads, and boiling pitch.

It was undoubtedly at this time that the great rivalry rose between Venice and Genoa, when both were supposed to be helping the Christian cause in the East. It happened more than once that a convenient pretext for these quarrels presented itself in the shape of sacred relics of saints, coveted alike by Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians; and to obtain such precious spoil they slew each other without hesitation or remorse. They not only trusted that the saint, when bodily in their possession, would bestow his richest blessings upon those who had fought for him, but they were also well aware that

his shrine would without doubt attract numerous pilgrims to their city, and thereby prove a permanent source of gain. It was in this way that the Venetians succeeded in carrying off from the island of Rhodes the body of Saint Nicholas, in order to exhibit it to the veneration of the faithful in the church they had already built to him on the Lido; not many years passed before they succeeded in stealing from Constantinople the body of Saint Stephen the martyr, and in the course of the century they possessed themselves of numerous treasures of the same kind.

It must not be supposed, however, that they confined themselves to the discovery and seizure of such pious plunder. The end they pursued was of a more practical nature, and the whole result of their activity during their first wars in the East is found in the establishment of flourishing colonies throughout the Levant, and in the gradual, but in the end surprising subjection of the Byzantine Empire to their commercial interests. They made enormous sacrifices, they shed blood like water and spent money without stint, in order to establish themselves as the masters of the Ionian islands.

Though they hardly fought at all as crusaders, they derived immense advantages from the conquest of the Holy Land. In the kingdom of Jerusalem they acquired the right to own a street, a square, a bakery, and a public bath in every city; in the cities of Sidon and Acre, the ancient Ptolemais, they

obtained even more ample privileges; finally, in the year 1123, they had made themselves masters of one-third of the city of Tyre, while leaving the other two-thirds in the possession of the king. They immediately established there an ambassador to represent the Republic, with the title of Bailo, and a consul to protect their financial interests.