I

THE ARISTOCRATIC MAGISTRACIES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Like other aristocracies, the Venetian government rarely destroyed or altogether abolished any office or regulation which had existed a long time. When a change was needed the duties or powers of one or more of the Councils were extended, or a committee of the Council of Ten was appointed and presently turned into a separate tribunal, as when the Inquisitors of State were created.

In one sense the government of Venice had now existed in a rigid and unchangeably aristocratic form during two centuries, and that form never changed to the very end. But in another sense no government in the world ever showed itself more flexible under the pressure of events, or better able to provide a new legislative weapon with which to combat each new danger that presented itself. This double character of an administration which inspired awe by its apparent immutability and terror by its ubiquity and energy, no doubt had much to do with its extraordinarily long life; for I believe that no civilised form of government ever endured so long as that of Venice.

It is therefore either frivolous or hypocritical to seek the causes of its ultimate collapse. It died of old age, when the race that had made it was worn out. It would be much more to the point to inquire why the most unscrupulous, sceptical, suspicious, and thoroughly immoral organisation that ever was devised by man should have outlasted a number of other organisations supposed to be founded on something like principles of liberty and justice. Such an inquiry would involve an examination into the nature of freedom, equity, and truth generally; but no one has ever satisfactorily defined even one of those terms, for the simple reason that the things the words are supposed to mean do not anywhere exist; and the study of that which has no real existence, and no such potential mathematical existence as an ultimate ratio, is absolutely futile.

The facts we know about the Venetian government are all interesting, however. It had its origin, like all really successful governments, in the necessities of a small people which held together in the face of great dangers. It was moulded and developed by the strongest and most intelligent portion of that people, and the party that modelled it guessed that each member of the party would destroy it and make himself the master if he could, wherefore the main thing was to render it impossible for any individual to succeed in that. The individual most likely to succeed was the Doge himself, and he was therefore turned into a mere doll, a puppet that could not call his soul his own. The next most probable aspirant to the tyranny would be the successful native-born general or admiral. A machinery was invented whereby the victorious leader was almost certain to be imprisoned, fined, and exiled as soon as his work was done and idleness made him dangerous. Pisani, Zeno, Da Lezze are merely examples of what happened almost invariably. If a Venetian was a hero, any excuse would serve for locking him up.

Next after the generals came the nobles who held office, and lastly those who were merely rich and influential. They were so thoroughly hemmed in by a hedge of apparently petty rules and laws as to their relations with foreigners, with the people, and with each other, that they were practically paralysed, as individuals, while remaining active and useful as parts of the whole. No one ever cared what the people thought or did, for they were peaceable, contented, and patriotic. Every measure passed by the nobles was directed against an enemy that might at any moment arise amongst themselves, or against the machinations of enemies abroad. Of all Italians the Venetians alone were not the victims of that simplicity of which I have already spoken. They believed in nothing and nobody, and they were not deceived. They were not drawn into traps by the wiles of the Visconti as Genoa was, and as many of the principalities were; they were not cheated out of their money by royal English borrowers as the Florentines were; they were not led away out of sentiment to ruin themselves in the Crusades as so many were; on the contrary, their connection with the Crusades was very profitable. For a long time they could be heroes when driven to extremities, but they never liked heroics; they were good fighters at sea, because they were admirable merchant sailors, but on land they much preferred to hire other men to fight for them, whom they could pay off and get rid of when the work was done.

Like other nations, their history is that of their rise, their culmination, and their decline. Like other nations, Venice also resembled the living body of a human being, of which it is not possible to define with absolute accuracy the periods of youth, prime, and old age. But we can say with certainty that each of those stages lasted longer in the life of Venice than in the life of any other European state, perhaps because no one of the three periods was hastened or interrupted by an internal revolution or by the temporary presence of a foreign conqueror.

It can be said, however, that Venice was, on the whole, at the height of her glory about the year 1500, and it would have needed a gift of prophecy to foretell the probable date of the still distant end. At that time the Great Council was more than ever the incarnation of the State, that is, of the aristocracy; and every member of the great assembly had a sort of ‘cultus’ for his own dignity, and looked upon his family, from which he derived his personal privileges, with a veneration that bordered on worship. The safety and prosperity of the patrician houses were most intimately connected with the welfare of the country; a member of the Great Council would probably have considered that the latter was the immediate consequence of the former. As a matter of fact, under the government which the aristocrats had given themselves, it really was so; they were themselves the State.

It was therefore natural that they should guard their race against all plebeian contamination. From time to time it became necessary to open the Golden Book and the doors of the Great Council to certain families which had great claims upon the public gratitude, as happened after the war of Chioggia; but the book was opened unwillingly, and the door of the council-chamber was only set ajar; the newcomers were looked

upon as little better than intruders, and the ‘new men,’ while they were invested with the outward distinctions of rank before the law, were not received into anything like intimacy by their colleagues of the older nobility.

It is a law of the Catholic Church that baptism creates a relationship, and therefore a canonical impediment to marriage, between the baptized person or his parents on the one hand, and the godfathers and godmothers on the other, as well as between each of the godparents and all the rest. But it was the custom of Venice to have a great many godfathers and godmothers at baptisms, and the nobles were therefore obliged by law to choose them from the burgher and artisan classes. It was perfectly indifferent that a young patrician should contract a spiritual relationship with a hundred persons—there were sometimes as many godparents as that—if these persons were socially so far beneath him that he must lose caste if he married one of them; but it was of prime importance that the law should forbid the formation of any spiritual bond whereby a possible marriage between two members of the aristocracy might be prevented, or even retarded. Every parish priest was therefore required to ask in a loud voice, when he was baptizing a noble baby, whether there were any persons of the same social condition as the infant amongst the godparents. If he omitted to do this, or allowed himself to be deceived by those present, he was liable to a very heavy fine, and might even be imprisoned for several months.

The Avogadori now replaced their old-fashioned register by the one henceforth officially known as the Golden Book, in which were entered the marriages of the nobles and the births of their children. Every noble who omitted to have his marriage registered within one week, or the birth of his children within the same time, was liable to severe penalties. But the

names of women of inferior condition who married nobles were not entered in those sanctified pages, since the children of a burgher woman could not sit in the Great Council. Nevertheless, it happened now and then that a noble sacrificed the privileges

of his descendants for the present advantage of a rich dowry; and as this again constituted a source of anxiety for the State, the amount of a burgher girl’s marriage portion was limited by law to the sum of two thousand ducats.

The young aristocrats received a special education, to fit them for their future duties and offices. We have already seen that young men not yet old enough to sit in the Great Council were admitted to its meetings in considerable numbers, though without a

vote. The instruction and education of young nobles were conducted according to a programme of which the details were established by a series of decrees, and especially by one dating from 1443; and in the Senate very young noble boys were employed to carry the ballot-boxes, in which office they took turns, changing every three months. There were probably not enough noble children to perform the same duty for the Great Council, which employed for that purpose a number of boys from the Foundling Asylum.

The young nobles were brought up to feel that they and their time belonged exclusively to the State, and when they grew older it was a point of honour with them not to be absent from any meeting of the Councils to which they were appointed. Marcantonio Barbaro, the patrician whose life M. Yriarte has so carefully studied, missed only one meeting of the Great Council in thirty years, and then his absence was due to illness. When one considers that the Great Council met every Sunday, and on every feast day except the second of March and the thirty-first of January, which was Saint Mark’s day, such constant regularity is really wonderful.

During the summer the sittings were held from eight in the morning until noon, in winter from noon to sunset; this, at least, was the ordinary rule, but the Doge’s counsellors could multiply the meetings to any extent they thought necessary, and we know that when a doge was to be elected the Great Council sometimes sat fifty times consecutively.

The public were admitted to the ordinary sittings of the Great Council, and in later times one could even be present wearing a mask, as may be seen in certain old engravings. But no outsiders were admitted when an important subject was to be discussed, and on those occasions a number of members were themselves excluded. If, for instance, the question concerned the Papal Court, all those who had ever avowed their sympathy for the Holy See, or who had any direct relations with the reigning Pope, or who owed him any debt of gratitude, were ordered to leave the hall. Such persons were called ‘papalisti,’ and were frequently shut out of the Great Council in the sixteenth century, a period during which the Republic had many differences with Rome.

In 1526, for instance, the Patriarch of Venice laid before the Great Council a complaint against the Signors of the Night, who refused to set at liberty a certain priest arrested by them, or even to inform the ecclesiastical authorities of the nature of his misdemeanour. That would have been one of the occasions for excluding the ‘papalisti.’ The Patriarch seems to have been a hot-tempered person, for on finding that he could get no satisfaction from the Great Council, he excommunicated the Venetian government and everybody connected with it, and posted the notice of the interdict on the columns of the ducal palace. The matter was patched up in some way, however, for on the morrow the notice disappeared.

The Senate met twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I find among their regulations a singular rule by which the beginning of every speech had to be delivered in the Tuscan language, after which the speaker was at liberty to go on in his own Venetian dialect.

I have already spoken at some length of the Council of Ten; it is now necessary to say something of the Inquisitors of State, to whom the Ten ceded a part of their authority in the sixteenth century.

In the first place, the Inquisitors of State never had anything to do with the ‘Inquisition,’ nor with the ‘Inquisitors of the Holy Office,’ a tribunal, oddly enough, which was much more secular than ecclesiastic, and which belongs to a later period.

Secondly, the so-called ‘Statutes of the Inquisitors of State,’ published by the French historian Daru, in good faith, and translated by Smedley, were

afterwards discovered to be nothing but an impudent forgery, containing several laughable anachronisms, and a number of mistakes about the nature of the magistracies which prove that the forger was not even a Venetian.

Thirdly, the genuine Statutes have been discovered since, and are given at length by Romanin. They do not bear the least resemblance to the nonsense published by Daru. No one except Romanin would have attempted to whitewash the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten, and even he is obliged to admit that for ‘weighty reasons of state’ they did not hesitate to order secret assassinations; but they were not fools, as the ‘Statutes’ of Daru make them appear.

The proof that the Statutes published by Romanin are genuine consists in the fact that two independent copies of them have been found; the one, written out by Angelo Nicolosi, secretary to the Inquisitors, with a dedication to them dated the twenty-fifth of September 1669; the other, a pocket copy, written out in 1612, with his own hand, by the Inquisitor Niccolò Donà, nephew of the Doge Leonardo Donà. The Statutes in these two copies are identical; the earlier one, which belonged to Donà, contains also a number of interesting memoranda concerning the doings of the tribunal in that year.

Lastly, it is conjectured by Romanin that the author of the forgery that imposed on Daru and others was no less a personage than Count Francesco della Torre, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire. He died in Venice in 1695.

These facts being clearly stated, we can pass on to inquire how and why the court of the Inquisitors of State was evoked, it being well understood that although they were not the malignant fiends described by Daru, who seems to have had in his mind the German tales of the ‘Wehmgericht,’ yet, in the picturesque language of their native Italy, ‘they were not shinbones of saints’ either.

Most historians consider that ‘Inquisitors of the Council of Ten’ were first appointed by that Council

in 1314, and it is generally conceded that they did not take the title ‘Inquisitors of State’ and begin to be regarded unofficially as a separate tribunal till 1539. The mass of evidence goes to show that these two dates are, at least, not far wrong, and during more than two hundred years between the two, the members of the committee were called indifferently either the ‘Inquisitors,’ or the ‘Executives’ of the Ten.

They were at first either two, or three; later they were always three, and they were commissioned to furnish proofs against accused persons, and occasionally to make the necessary arrangements for secretly assassinating traitors who had fled the country and were living abroad. At first their commission was a temporary one, which was not renewed unless the gravity of the case required it. Later, when they became a permanent tribunal of three, two of their number were always regular members of the Council of Ten, and were called the ‘Black Inquisitors,’ because the Ten wore black mantles; the third was one of the Doge’s counsellors, who, as will be remembered, were among the persons always present at the meetings of the Ten, and he was called the ‘Red Inquisitor’ from the colour of his counsellor’s cloak.

The fourteenth century was memorable on account of the great conspiracies, and it is at least probable that after 1320 the secret committee of the Ten became tolerably permanent as to its existence, though its members were often changed. Signor Fulin has discovered that during a part of the fifteenth century they were chosen only for thirty days, and that the utmost exactness was enforced on those who vacated the office. A long discussion took place at that time as to whether the month began at the midnight preceding the day of the Inquisitor’s election, or only on the morning of that day; since, in the latter case, an Inquisitor at the end of his term would have the right to act until sunrise on the thirty-first day, whereas, in the other, he would have to resign his seat at the first stroke of midnight. The incident is a good instance of the Venetian manner of interpreting the letter of the law.

So long as the tribunal was merely a committee depending on the Ten it had no archives of its own, and whatever it did appeared officially as the act of the Council, of which the Inquisitors were merely executive agents. They were dismissed at the end of their month of service with a regular formula:—

‘The Inquisitors will come to the Council with what they have found, and the Council will decide what it thinks best with regard to them.’

In those times they received no general authorisation or power to act on their own account, and their office must have been excessively irksome, since a heavy fine was exacted from any one who refused to serve on the committee when he had been chosen. Though they were not, as a rule, men of over-sensitive conscience, they felt their position keenly and served with ill-disguised repugnance, well knowing that they were hated as a body even more than they were feared, and that their lives were not always safe.

In early times their actual permanent power was very limited, though the Ten could greatly extend it for any special purpose. For instance, they could not, of their own will, proceed even to a simple arrest; they could not order the residence of a citizen to be searched; and they could not use torture in examining a witness, without a special authorisation from the Ten on each occasion.

Their work then lay almost wholly in secretly spying upon suspected persons; and it often happened that when such an one was at last arrested the whole mass of evidence against him was already written out and in the hands of the Ten. It also certainly happened now and then that a person was proved innocent by the Inquisitors who had been suspected by the Ten, and who had never had the least idea that he was in danger.

The machinery did not always work quickly, it is true, especially after the accused was arrested and locked up. Trials often dragged on for months, so that when the culprit was at last sentenced to a term of prison, it appeared that he had already served more than the time to which he was condemned. This abuse, however, led to a vigorous reform by a series of stringent decrees, the time of inquiry was limited, for ordinary cases, to three days, and for graver matters to a month, and ruinous fines were imposed on Councillors and Inquisitors who were not present at every sitting of the Court.

It was towards the close of the sixteenth century that the Inquisitors, being then elected for the term of a year, were given much greater power than theretofore. Though they were still closely associated with the Ten, they now had a sort of official independence, including the right to a method of procedure of their own, with secret archives quite separate from those of the Ten. The year 1596 is generally given as the date at which the separate tribunal was definitely created, with permanent instructions to watch over the public safety, and to detect all plots and conspiracies that might threaten the ‘ancient laws and government of Venice.’

It cannot be said that the procedure of the Ten, or of the Inquisitors, was arbitrary, and the supreme Venetian tribunals have not deserved all the obloquy that has been heaped upon them; but at a time when the most inhuman methods were used to obtain evidence, they certainly did not give an example of gentleness.

Signor Fulin, to whose recent researches all students of Venetian history are much indebted, says, with perfect truthfulness, that torture was by no means used with moderation. He cites a document signed by the Ten and the Inquisitors, dated the twenty-fifth of April 1445:—

‘We have received a humble petition from Luigi Cristoforo Spiaciario, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and ten years of exile for unnatural crimes. The said convict has passed two years in prison according to his sentence, and five years more in the corridors of the prisons, because his feet having been burnt and his arms dislocated by torture, he could not leave Venice. The said convict petitions that, out of regard for so much suffering, he may be pardoned the last five years of his condemnation.’

The same writer also tells us that in spite of the precautions which were supposed to be taken, torture often ended in death; and in the archives of the Ten there are instances of horrible mutilations besides public decapitations, secret stranglings, and hangings and poisonings; there are also some cases of death inflicted by drowning, though these were less frequent than has been supposed; and lastly, the quiet waters of the canals have more than once reflected the blaze of faggots burning round the stake.

Romanin’s industry has left us an exact list of the official drownings that took place between 1551 and 1604, a period of fifty-three years. As it is not long, I append it in full. The list is made out from the register of deaths which is preserved in the church of Saint Mark’s.

The last person who suffered death by drowning was a glass-blower of Murano in the eighteenth century.

Before going on to say a word about the prisons in the sixteenth century it is as well to call attention to the fact that the Inquisitors of State twice found themselves in direct relations with the English government; once, in 1587, when they called the attention of England to a conspiracy which was brewing in Spain; and again, a few years later, in connection with the tragedy of Antonio Foscarini in which they played such a deplorable part. Is it not possible that there may be some documents in the English Record Office bearing upon those circumstances, and likely to throw more light upon the tribunal of the Inquisitors?

In connection with the prisons, I take the following details, among many similar ones, from documents found by Signor Fulin in the archives of the Inquisitors of State. He says, in connection with them, that they are by no means exaggerated. One of the most characteristic is a case dated towards the end of the fifteenth century, and it will serve as an example, since it is known that no great changes were made in the management of the prisons until much later.

‘There has been found in the prisons a youth named Menegidio Scutellario, whom the Council of Ten had sentenced to twenty-five blows of the stick, which he received, and to a year’s imprisonment. He was transferred from the new prisons to the one called Muzina, where he contracted an extremely painful inflammatory disease which has produced running sores. He has several on his head, and his face is much

swollen. Moreover, this boy is shut up in the prison with twenty-five men of all ages, which is very dangerous for him from a moral point of view. A widow, who says she is his mother, comes every day to the Palace begging and imploring that her son may not be left in this abominable prison, lest he die there, or at least learn all manner of wickedness in the company of so many criminals. We consequently order that in view of the justice of these complaints the boy be kept in the corridor of the prisons till the end of his year.’

As in the Tower of London, so also in the gloomy dens of the Pozzi, former prisoners have left short records of themselves. For instance:

‘1576, 22 March. I am Mandricardo Matiazzo de Marostega’; ‘Galeazze Avogadro and his friends 1584’; and lower down the following misspelt Latin words, ‘Odie mihi, chras tibi (sic)’—‘My turn to-day, to-morrow yours.’

Occasionally some daring convict succeeded in escaping from those deep and secure prisons. In his journal, under the fifth of August 1497, Marin Sanudo writes:—

In Marco Corner’s case the love of liberty must have been strong, for in the same journal of Sanudo we find that in little more than a year after their unsuccessful attempt at flight, he and some companions actually succeeded in getting out and made their exit through the hall of the Piovego, that is to say, through the Doge’s palace. Their numbers were considerable, and six of them were sentenced to imprisonment for life. During the night they reached the monastery of Saint George, and at dawn they were already beyond the confines of Venetian territory.

Having disposed of the Inquisitors of State, I shall now endeavour to explain the position and duties of the Inquisitors of the Holy Office, with whom the ordinary reader is very apt to confound them.

In the first place, the Holy Office in Venice was a much milder and more insignificant affair than it was at that time in other European states. In Venice it seems to have corresponded vaguely to the modern European Ministry of Public Worship. There are some amusing stories connected with it, but no very terrible ones so far as I can ascertain.

The Republic had long resisted the desire of the Popes to establish a branch of the Holy Inquisition in Venice, but by way of showing a conciliatory spirit, while maintaining complete independence, the government had created a magistracy which was responsible for three matters, namely, the condition of the canals, the regulation of usury, and—of all things—cases of heresy. It is perfectly impossible to say why three classes of affairs so different were placed under the control of one body of men. Considering the gravity of the Venetian government we can hardly suppose that it was intended as a piece of ironical wit at the expense of the Holy See. It may, at all events, be considered certain that the Savi all’ Eresia, literally the Wise Men on Heresy, of the thirteenth century, had not accomplished what was expected of them, since in 1289 the government recognised the necessity of establishing a special court to deal with affairs of religion, presided over, at least in appearance, by a person delegated for that purpose from the Vatican. The Holy Office was thereby accepted in Venice, but with restrictions that paralysed it.

The tribunal was, in principle, composed of three persons, the Apostolic Nuncio, the Patriarch, and the Father Inquisitor, all three of whom had to be approved by the Republic. As a first step towards hindering them from acting rashly, they were strictly forbidden to discuss or decide anything whatsoever, except in the presence of three Venetian nobles, who were appointed year by year, and preserved their ancient title of Wise Men on Heresy. Next,

the Holy Office was not allowed to busy itself about any religious matter except heresy, in the strictest sense; it could not interfere in connection with any violation of the laws of the Church, not even in cases of sorcery or blasphemy, for magicians fell under the authority of the Signors of the Night, and blasphemers were answerable to the Executives against Blasphemy.

These laws had not changed in the sixteenth century, and the Holy Office had less to do than most of the contemporary tribunals. An examination of the documents preserved in its archives shows that from the year 1541 to the fall of the Republic there were three thousand six hundred and twenty trials, of which fifteen hundred and sixty-five fell in the sixteenth century, fourteen hundred and ninety-seven in the seventeenth, and only five hundred and sixty-one in the eighteenth. In the majority of cases the testimony was declared insufficient; in others, the accused hastened to abjure their errors. Sometimes, however, we find long trials in the course of which torture was used as by the other tribunals, and in these cases the end was frequently a sentence of death or a condemnation to the galleys.

No heretic was ever burned alive in Venice; death was inflicted by strangling, beheading, or hanging. Each Doge promised, indeed, on his election, to burn all heretics, but it is amply proved that only their dead bodies or their effigies were really given to the flames.

The tribunal of the Holy Office sat in a very low vaulted room in the buildings of Saint Mark’s, which was reached by a narrow staircase after passing through the Sacristy. The Court had no prisons of its own. Persons who were arrested by it, or sentenced by it to terms of imprisonment, were confined in the prisons of the State, probably in those of the Ponte della Paglia. It is likely that the Court had at its disposal two or three cells near its place of sitting, for the detention of the accused during the trials. Signor Molmenti has ascertained precisely how the members of the tribunal were placed, and has published a diagram which I here reproduce for the benefit of those who like such curious details.

As will be seen by the diagram, one half of the personages used one entrance, and the rest came in by the other. Until the year 1560, the Inquisitor himself was a Franciscan monk, but afterwards he was always a Dominican.

The hall was gloomy and ill-lighted, the furniture poor; it did not please the Republic to spend money for the delectation of a court which it did not like.

It was here that two famous trials took place in the sixteenth century, namely, that of Giordano Bruno, the renegade monk, dear to Englishmen who have never read the very scarce volume of his insane and filthy writings, and that of the celebrated painter Paolo Veronese. The contrast between these two documents is very striking, but both go to prove that the Holy Office in Venice was seldom more than a hollow sham, and that its proceedings occasionally degenerated towards low comedy.

Having escaped from Rome, Giordano Bruno left the ecclesiastical career which he had dishonoured in

every possible way, and wandered about in search of money and glory. In the course of time he came to London, where his coarseness and his loose life made him many enemies. Thence he went on to Oxford, where, by means of some potent protection, he succeeded in obtaining the privilege of lecturing on philosophy; but the university authorities were soon scandalised by his behaviour and frightened by the extravagance of his doctrines; in three months he was obliged to leave. He revenged himself by writing a libel called ‘La Cena delle Ceneri,’ in which he described England as a land of dark streets in which one stuck in the mud knee-deep, and of houses that lacked every necessary; the boats on the Thames were rowed by men more hideous than Charon, the workmen and shop-keepers were vulgar and untaught rustics, always ready to laugh at a stranger, and to call him by such names as traitor, or dog. In this pleasing pamphlet the Englishwoman alone escapes the writer’s foul-mouthed hatred, to be insulted by his still more foul-mouthed praise. One may imagine the sort of eulogy that would run from the pen of a man capable of describing woman in general as a creature with neither faith nor constancy, neither merit nor talent, but full of more pride, arrogance, hatred, falseness, lust, avarice, ingratitude and, generally, of more vices than there were evils in Pandora’s box; one might quote many amenities of language more or less senseless, as, for instance, that woman is a hammer, a foul sepulchre, and a quartan fever; and there are a hundred other expressions which cannot be quoted at all.

Towards 1591, the patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, an enthusiastic collector of books, found in the shop of a Dutch bookseller a little volume, entitled Eroici Furori, which contains some astrological calculations and some hints on mnemonics. The purchaser asked who the author might be, learned from the bookseller that it was Giordano Bruno, entered into correspondence with him, and at last invited him to Venice.

Bruno, it is needless to say, accepted the invitation eagerly, as he accepted every thing that was offered to him, but it was not long before Mocenigo regretted his haste to be hospitable. He had begun by calling his visitor his dear master; before long he discovered the man to be a debauchee and a blasphemer. Now it chanced that Mocenigo had sat in the tribunal of the Holy Office as one of the three senators whose business it was to oversee the acts of the Father Inquisitor, and he was not only a devout man, but had a taste for theology. He began by remonstrating with Bruno, but when the latter became insolent, he quietly turned the key on him and denounced him to the Holy Office. A few hours later the renegade monk was arrested and conveyed to prison. He was examined several times by the tribunal, but was never tortured, and as the judges thought they detected signs of coming repentance they granted him a limit of time within which to abjure his errors. But the trial did not end in Venice, for the Republic made an exception in this case and soon yielded to a request from the Pope that the accused should be sent to Rome. He was ultimately burnt there, the only heretic, according to the most recent and learned authorities, who ever died at the stake in Italy. He was in reality a degenerate and a lunatic, who should have ended his days in an asylum.

M. Yriarte has published in the appendix to his study of the Venetian noble in the sixteenth century the verbatim report of the proceedings of the Holy Office on the eighteenth of July 1573. The prisoner at the bar was Paolo Veronese. I quote the following from M. Yriarte’s translation:—

The existing picture proves that Veronese paid no attention to the recommendations of the Court, for I find that it contains every figure referred to.

After this brief review of the more serious offices of the Republic, I pass on to speak of a tribunal which, though in reality much less serious, gave itself airs of great solemnity, and promulgated a great number of laws. This was the Court of the ‘Provveditori delle Pompe,’ established in the sixteenth century to deal with matters of dress and fashion. As far back as the end of the thirteenth century, the ‘Savi,’ the wise men of the government, had feebly deplored the increase of luxury. Their plaintive remarks were repeated at short intervals, and on each occasion produced some new decree against foolish and unreasonable expenditure.