IIGLEANINGS FROM VENETIAN CRIMINAL HISTORY

THE LAST RAYS, ST. MARK’S

The length of women’s trains, the size and fulness of people’s sleeves, the adornment of boots and shoes, and all similar matters, had been most minutely studied by these wise gentlemen, and the avogadors had their hands full to make the regulations properly respected. One day a lady was walking in the square of Saint Mark’s, evidently very proud of the new white silk

Molmenti, vita Priv.

gown she wore. She was stopped by two avogadors who gravely proceeded to measure the amount of stuff used in making her sleeves. It was far more than the law judged necessary. The lady and her tailor—there were only male dressmakers in Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—were both made to pay a fine heavy enough to make them regret the extravagance of their fancy. I quote this story from Signor Molmenti. Marin Sanudo tells of another similar regulation in his journal under the month of December 1491: ‘All those who hold any office from the State, and those who are finishing their term of service, are forbidden to give more than two dinner-parties to their relations, and each of these dinners shall not consist of more than ten covers.’

At weddings it was forbidden to give banquets to more than forty guests. Some years later another regulation was issued on the same subject. It was decreed ‘that at these wedding dinners there shall not be served more than one dish of roast meats and one of boiled meats, and in each of these courses there shall not be more than three kinds of meat. Chicken and pigeons are allowed.’

For days of abstinence, the magistrates take the trouble to inform people what they may eat, namely, two dishes of roast fish, two dishes of boiled fish, an almond cake, and the ordinary jams. Of fish, sturgeon and the fish of the lake of Garda are forbidden on such days, and no sweets are allowed that do not come under one of the two heads mentioned. Oysters were not allowed at dinners of more than twenty covers. The pastry-cooks who made jumbles and the like, and the cooks who were to prepare a dinner, were obliged to give notice to the provveditors, accompanied by a note of the dishes to be served. The inspectors of the tribunal had a right to inspect the dining-room, kitchen, and pantry, in order to verify all matters that came under their jurisdiction.

As if all this were not enough, considerable fines were imposed on those who should adorn the doors and outer windows of their houses with festoons, or who should give concerts in which drums and trumpets were used. In noting this regulation in his journal, Sanudo observes that the Council of Ten had only succeeded in framing it after meeting on three consecutive days in sittings of unusual length. One is apt to connect the Council of Ten with matters more tragic than these; and one fancies that the Decemvirs may have sometimes exclaimed with Dante—

Le leggi son, ma chi pon mano ad esse?

(‘There are laws indeed, but who enforces them?’)

The Council judged that there was only one way ofaccomplishing this, namely, to create a new magistracy, whose exclusive business it should be to make and promulgate sumptuary laws. For this purpose three nobles were chosen who received the title of Provveditori delle Pompe.

M. Armand Baschet, whose profound learning in matters of Venetian law is beyond dispute, is of opinion that the new tribunal helped Venice to be great, and hindered her from being extravagant. I shall not venture to impugn the judgment of so learned a writer, yet we can hardly forbear to smile at the thought of those three grave nobles, of ripe age and austere life, who sat down day after day to decide upon the cut of women’s gowns, the articles necessary to a bride’s outfit, and the dishes permissible at a dinner-party.

‘Women,’ said their regulations, ‘shall wear clothes of only one colour, that is to say, velvet, satin, damask, of Persian silk woven of one tint; but exception is made from this rule for Persian silk of changing sheen and for brocades, but such gowns must have no trimming.’

Shifts were to be embroidered only round the neck, and it was not allowed to embroider handkerchiefs with gold or silver thread. No woman was

Mutinelli, Less.

allowed to carry a fan made of feathers worth more than four ducats. No gloves were allowed embroidered with gold or silver; no earrings; no jewellery in the hair. Plain gold bracelets were allowed but must not be worth more than three ducats; gold chains might be worth ten. No low-neck gowns allowed!

Jewellers and tailors and dealers in luxuries did their best to elude all such laws, but during a considerable time they were not successful, and it is probable that the temper of the Venetian ladies was severely tried by the prying and paternal ‘Provveditori.’ The only

Molmenti, vita Privata.

women for whom exceptions were made were the Dogess and the other ladies of the Doge’s immediate family who lived with him in the ducal palace. His daughters and grand-daughters were called ‘dozete,’ which means ‘little dogesses’ in Venetian dialect, and they were authorised to wear what they liked; but the Doge’s more distant female relations had not the same privilege.

At the coronation of Andrea Gritti, one of his nieces appeared at the palace arrayed in a magnificent gown of gold brocade; the Doge himself sent her home to put on a dress which conformed with the sumptuary laws. Those regulations extended to intimate details of private life, and even affected the furnishing of a noble’s private apartments. There were clauses which forbade that the sheets made for weddings and baptisms should be too richly embroidered or edged with too costly lace, or that the beds themselves should be inlaid with gold, mother-of-pearl, or precious stones.

Then the gondola came into fashion as a means of getting about and at once became a cause of great extravagance, for the rich vied with each other in adorning their skiffs with the most precious stuffs and tapestries, and inlaid stanchions, and the most marvellous allegorical figures.

In the thirteenth century the gondola had been merely an ordinary boat, probably like the modern ‘barca’ of the lagoons, over which an awning was rigged as a protection against sun and rain. The gondola was not a development of the old-fashioned

ON THE ZATTERE

boat, any more than the modern racing yacht has developed out of a Dutch galleon or a ‘trabacolo’ of the Adriatic. It had another pedigree; and I have no hesitation in saying, as one well acquainted with both, and not ignorant of boats in general, that the Venetian gondola is the caïque of the Bosphorus, as to the hull,though the former is rowed in the Italian fashion, by men who stand and swing a sweep in a crutch, whereas the Turkish oarsman sits and pulls a pair of sculls of peculiar shape which slide in and out through greased leathern strops. The gondola, too, has the steel ornament on her stem, figuring the beak of a Roman galley, which I suspect was in use in Constantinople before the Turkish conquest, and which must have been abolished then, for the very reason that it was Roman. The ‘felse,’ the hood, is a Venetian invention, I think, for there is no trace of it in Turkey. But the similarity of the two boats when out of water is too close to be a matter of chance, and it may safely be said that the first gondola was a caïque, then doubtless called by another name, brought from Constantinople by some Greek merchant on his vessel.

In early times people went about on horses and mules in Venice, and a vast number of the small canals were narrow and muddy streets; but as the superior facilities of water over mud as a means of transportation became evident, the lanes were dug out and the islands were cut up into an immense number of islets, until the footways became so circuitous that the horse disappeared altogether.

In the sixteenth century there were about ten thousand gondolas in Venice, and they soon became a regular bugbear to the unhappy Provveditori delle

Mutinelli, Less.

Pompe, who were forced to occupy themselves with their shape, their hangings, the stuff of which the ‘felse’ was made, the cushions, the carpets, and thenumber of rowers. The latter were soon limited to two, and it was unlawful to have more, even for a

RIO DEL RIMEDIO

wedding. The gondola did not assume its present simplicity and its black colour till the end of the seventeenth century, but it began to resemble what we now see after the edict of 1562.

As usual, a few persons were exempted from the sumptuary law. The Doge went about in a gondola decorated with gold and covered with scarlet cloth, and the foreign ambassadors adorned their skiffs with the richest materials, the representatives of France and Spain, especially, vying with each other in magnificence. To some extent the youths belonging to the Compagnia della Calza—the Hose Club before mentioned—were either exempted from the law, or succeeded in evading it. Naturally enough, the sight of such display was odious to the rich noblemen who were condemned by law to the use of plain black; and on the whole, the study of all accounts of festivities held in Venice, down to the end of the Republic, goes to show that the Provveditori aimed at a most despotic control of dress, habits, and manners, but that the results generally fell far short of their good intentions. They must have led harassed lives, those much-vexed gentlemen, not much better than the existence of ‘Jimmy-Legs’ on an American man-of-war.

Now and then, too, the government temporarily removed all restrictions on luxury, as, for instance, when a foreign sovereign visited Venice; and then the whole city plunged into a sort of orgy of extravagance. This happened when Henry III. of France was the guest of the Republic. Such occasions being known and foreseen, and the nobles being forced by the Provveditori to save their money, they spent it all the morerecklessly when they were allowed a taste of liberty—like a child that breaks its little earthenware savings-box when it is full of pennies.

One naturally returns to the Doge after rapidly reviewing such a legion of officials, each of whom was himself a part of the supreme power. What was the Doge doing while these hundreds of noble Venetians were doing everything for themselves, from directing foreign politics to spying upon the wardrobes of each other’s wives and auditing the accounts of one another’s cooks?

It would be hard to ask a question more embarrassing to answer. It would be as unjust to say that he did nothing as it would be untrue to say that he had much to do. Yet the Venetians themselves looked upon him as a very important personage in the Republic. In a republic he was a sovereign, and therefore idle; but he was apparently necessary.

I am not aware that any other republic ever called its citizens subjects, or supported a personage who received royal honours, before whom the insignia of something like royalty were carried in public, and who addressed foreign governments by his own name and title as if he were a king. But then, how could Venice, which was governed by an oligarchy chosen from an aristocracy, which was the centre of a plutocracy, call herself a republic? It all looks like a mass of contradictions, yet the machinery worked without breaking down, during five hundred years at a stretch, after it had assumed its ultimate form. If a modern sociologist had to definethe government of Venice, he would perhaps call it a semi-constitutional aristocratic monarchy, in which the sovereign was elected for life—unless it pleased the electors to depose him.

What is quite certain is that when the Doge was a man of average intelligence, he must have been the least happy man in Venice; for of all Venetian nobles, there was none whose personal liberty was so restricted, whose smallest actions were so closely watched, whose lightest word was subject to such a terrible censorship.

Francesco Foscari was not allowed to resign when he wished to do so, nor was he allowed to remain on the throne after the Council had decided to get rid of him. Even after his death, his unhappy widow was not allowed to bury his body as she pleased. Yet his was only an extreme case, because circumstances combined to bring the existing laws into play and to let them work to their logical result.

From the moment when a noble was chosen to fill the ducal throne, he was bound to sacrifice himself to the public service, altogether and till he died, without regret, or possible return to private life, or any compensation beyond what might flatter the vanity of a vulgar and second-rate nature. Yet the Doges were very rarely men of poor intelligence or weak character.

At each election, fresh restrictions were imposed by ‘corrections’ of the ducal oath. M. Yriarte says very justly that the tone of these ‘corrections’ is often so dry and hard that it looks as if the Great Council hadbeen taking measures against an enemy rather than editing rules for the life of the chief of the State. He goes on to say, however, that the principle which dictated those decrees protected both the Doge and the nobility, and that the object at which each aimed was the interest of the State. He asks, then, whether those binding restrictions ever prevented a strong personality from making itself felt, and whether the long succession of Doges is nothing but a list of inglorious names.

It may be answered, I think, with justice, that the Doges of illustrious memory, during the latter centuries of the Republic’s existence, had become famous as individual officers before their elevation to the throne. The last great fighting Doge was Enrico Dandolo, the conqueror of Constantinople, who died almost a hundred years before the closure of the Great Council. In the war of Chioggia, Andrea Contarini’s oath not to return into the city till the enemy was beaten had the force of a fine example, but the man himself contributed nothing else to the most splendid page in Venetian history.

There were Doges who were good historians and writers, others who have been brave generals, others like Giovanni Mocenigo who were good financiers; but the fact of their having been Doges has nothing to do with the reputation they left afterwards. The sovereignty, when it was given to them, was a chain, not a sceptre, and from the day they went up the grand staircase as masters, their personal liberty of thought and actionwas more completely left behind than if they had entered by another door to spend the remainder of life in the prisons by the Ponte della Paglia, beyond the Bridge of Sighs.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Doge Michel Steno was told in open Council to sit down and hold his peace. No change in the manners of the counsellors had taken place sixty years later when

Tassini, under ‘Moro.’ Rom. iv. 319.

the Doge Cristoforo Moro objected to accompanying Pius the Second’s projected crusade in person, and was told by Vittor Cappello that if he would not go of his own accord he should be taken by force.

It is hard to imagine a more unpleasant position than that of the chief of the State. Suppose, for instance, that by the choice of the Council some post or dignity was to be conferred on one of his relatives, or even on one of his friends; he was literally and categorically forbidden to exhibit the least satisfaction, or to thank the Council, even by a nod of the head.

Yriarte, Vie d’un Patricien, 359, and Marin Sanudo.

He was to preside at this, and at many other ceremonies, as a superbly-dressed lay figure, as a sort of allegorical representative of that power with which every member of the government except himself was invested. And as time went on this part he had to play, of the living allegory, was more and more defined. He was even deprived of the title ‘My Lord,’ and was to be addressed merely as ‘Messer Doge,’ ‘Sir Doge.’ From 1501 onward he was forbidden to go out of the city, even for an hour in hisgondola, without the consent of the Council, and if he disobeyed he had to pay a fine of one hundred ducats; he was not allowed to write a letter, even to his wife or his children, without showing it to at least one of his six counsellors, and if he disobeyed he was to pay a fine of two hundred ducats, and the person, his wife or his own child, to whom the letter was addressed, was liable to be exiled for five years.

After 1521 the Doge was never allowed to speak without witnesses with any ambassador, neither with the foreign representatives who came to Venice, nor with Venetian ambassadors at home on business or leave; and when he spoke with any of them in public, he was warned only to make commonplace remarks.

The Dogess never had any official position in Venice, but during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries she was made use of as an ornamental personage at public festivals. After that time she returned to the retirement in which the wives of the early Doges had lived. An outcry was raised against the custom of crowning her when she entered the ducal palace, and from that time forth she never appeared beside her husband on state occasions; and if any foreign ambassador, supposing that he was acting according to the rules of ordinary court etiquette, asked to be presented to her, she was bound to refuse his visit.

Everything in the life of the Doge was regulated by the Great Council. That august assembly once even remonstrated with the so-called sovereign because the Dogess bore him too many children. If any one hesitatesto believe these amazing statements he may consult Signor Molmenti’s recent historical work,La Dogaressa, which is beyond criticism in point of accuracy.

At certain fixed times the Doge was allowed the relaxation of shooting, but with so many restrictions and injunctions that the sport must have been intolerably irksome. He was allowed or, more strictly speaking, was ordered to proceed for this purpose, and about Christmas time, to certain islets in the lagoons, where wild ducks bred in great numbers. On his return he was obliged to present each member of the Great Council with five ducks. This was called the gift of the ‘Oselle,’ that being the name given by the people to the birds in question. In 1521, about five thousand brace of birds had to be killed or snared in order to fulfil this requirement; and if the unhappy Doge was not fortunate enough, with his attendants, to secure the required number, he was obliged to provide them by buying them elsewhere and at any price, for the claims of the Great Council had to be satisfied in any case. This was often an expensive affair.

There was also another personage who could not have derived much enjoyment from the Christmas shooting. This was the Doge’s chamberlain, whose duty it was to see to the just distribution of the game, so that each bunch of two-and-a-half brace should contain a fair average of fat and thin birds, lest it should be said that the Doge showed favour to some members of the Council more than to others.

By and by a means was sought of commuting thisannual tribute of ducks. The Doge Antonio Grimani

Portrait of Antonio Grimani kneeling before Religion, Titian; Sala delle Quattro Porte.

requested and obtained permission to coin a medal or the value or a quarter or a ducat, equal to about four shillings or one dollar, and to call it ‘a Duck,’ ‘Osella,’ whereby it was signified that it took the place of the traditional bird. He engraved upon his medal figures of Peace and Justice, with the motto ‘Justitia et Pax osculatae sunt,’ ‘Justice and Peace have kissed one another,’ in recollection of the sentence he had undergone nineteen years previously as Admiral of the fleet defeated at Parenzo. In 1575 the Doge Luigi Mocenigo engraved upon his Osella the following inscription referring to the victory of Lepanto: ‘Magnae navalis victoriae Dei gratia contra Turcos’; the reverse bears the arms of the Mocenigo family, a rose with five petals. Later, in 1632, the Doge Francesco Erizzo was the first to replace his own effigy kneeling before Saint Mark by a lion. In 1688 Francesco Morosini coined an Osella bearing on the obverse a sword, with the motto ‘Non abstinet ictu,’ and on the reverse a hand bearing weapons, with the motto ‘Quem non exercuit arcus.’ In 1684 Marcantonio Giustiniani issued an Osella showing a winged lion rampant, bearing in the one paw a single palm, and in the other a bunch of palms, with the motto ‘Et solus et simul,’ meaning that Venice would be victorious either alone or joined with allies.

The successor of Antonio Grimani, Andrea Gritti,chose for his Osella to have himself represented as kneeling

Andrea Gritti, praying, Tintoretto; Sala del Collegio.

before Saint Mark; the reverse bore his name with the date.

But fresh trouble now arose. It came to pass that some nobles sold their medals or used them for money, and disputes even took place as to the true value of the ducal present. The Council of Ten was obliged to examine seriously into the affair. As it appeared certain that it would be impossible to avoid the use of medals as money, it was decided to replace them definitely by a coin having regular currency.

MOUTH OF THE GRAND CANAL

Therecords of the different tribunals of Venice are a mine of interesting information, and it is to be wondered that no student has devoted a separate volume to the subject. I shall only attempt to offer the reader a few gleanings which have come under my hand, and which may help to give an impression of the later days of the Republic.

There were two distinct classes of criminals in Venice, as elsewhere—namely, professional criminals, who helped each other and often escaped justice; and, on the other hand, those who committed isolated crimes under the influence of strong passions, and who generally expiated their misdeeds in prison or on the scaffold.

Though the professionals were infinitely more dangerous than the others, it is a remarkable fact that they enjoyed the same sort of popularity which was bestowed upon daring highwaymen in England in the coaching days. They were called the ‘Bravi,’ they were very rarely Venetians by birth, and they had the singular audacity to wear a costume of their own, which was something between a military uniform and a mediæval hunting-dress. One might almost call them condottieri in miniature. They sold their services to cautious persons who wished to satisfy a grudge without getting into trouble with the police, and they drew round them all the good-for-nothings in the country. ‘Bandits’—that is, in the true interpretation of the word, those persons whom the Republic had banished from Venetian territory—frequently returned, and remained unmolested during some time under the protection of one of these bravi. The most terrible and extravagant crimes were committed in broad day, and the popular fancy surrounded its nefarious heroes with a whole cycle of legends calculated to inspire terror.

The government cast about for some means of checking the evil, and hit upon one worthy of the Inquisitors of State. The simple plan consisted ingiving a free pardon for all his crimes to any bravo who would kill another. We even find that a patrician of the great house of Quirini, who had been exiled for killing one of Titian’s servants, obtained leave to come back and live peacefully in Venice by assassinating a

THE RIALTO AT NIGHT

bravo. It is easy to imagine what crimes could be committed under this law, and the government soon recognised the mistake and repealed it in

Pinelli, Raccolta di Leggi Crim.

1549, in order to protect ‘the dignity of the Republic, and the goods and lives of its subjects.’

Thereafter the bravi and the bandits led more quiet lives, and returned to their former occupations.

There existed at that time a statue of a hunchback modelled by the sculptor Pietro di Salò, which had been used to support a ladder, or short staircase, by which the public criers ascended the column of the Rialto, in order to proclaim banns of marriage and other matters

FROM THE BALCONY OF THE DUCAL PALACE

which were to be made public. From 1541 to 1545 thieves were usually sentenced to be flogged through the city from Saint Mark’s to the Rialto, where the ceremony ended by their being obliged to kiss the statue of the hunchback. In order to get rid of this degrading absurdity a small column was set up near by, surmounted by a cross, in order that‘sinners might undergo their sentence in a Christian spirit.’

On the sixteenth of December 1560, the Council of Ten met to discuss the question of the bravi. It was now admitted that the government no longer had isolated criminals to deal with, but regular bands of ruffians continually

THE COLUMNS, PIAZZETTA

on the look-out for adventures. The Ten published an edict by which all bandits were formally warned that any one who exercised the profession of a bravo, whether a subject of the Republic or not, would be taken and led in irons to the place between the columns of the Piazzetta, where his nose and ears would be carved off. He would then be further sentenced to five years at the oar on board one of the State galleys, unless some physicaldefect made this impossible for him, in which case he was to have one hand chopped off and to be imprisoned for ten years. In passing, I call

Horatio Brown, Venetian Studies.

attention to the fact that life between decks on a State galley cannot have been pleasant, since five years of it were considered equivalent to the loss of a hand and ten years of imprisonment.

These terrific penalties inspired little or no fear, for the bravi were infinitely quicker and cleverer than the sbirri of the government, and were very rarely caught. Besides, they had powerful supporters and secure refuges from which they could defy justice, for they were sheltered and protected in the foreign embassies, where they knew how to make themselves useful as spies, and occasionally as professional assassins, and it was not an uncommon thing to see a sbirro standing before the French or the Spanish embassy and looking up at a window whence some well-known bravo smiled down on him, waved his hat, and addressed him with ironical politeness. The picture vividly recalls visions of a cat on top of a garden wall, calmly grinning at the frantic terrier below.

Then, too, the bravi were patronised by the ‘signorotti’ of the mainland, a set of rich, turbulent, and licentious land-owners, who could not call themselves Venetian nobles and would not submit to be burghers, but set themselves up as knights, and lived in more or less fortified manors from which they could set the police at defiance. They employed the bravi in all sorts of nefarious adventures,which chiefly tended to the satisfaction of their brutal tastes.

It was a second period of transition, as Molmenti very justly says, and in the beginning of the decadence the knight had already ceased to be knightly. Those rough lordlings were neither without fear nor without reproach, says the learned Italian writer, but were altogether without remorse, and if they were ever bold it was only in breaking the law. From time

Tassini, Condanne Capitali.

to time one of them was caught perpetrating some outrageous crime, and was dragged barefooted, in a long black shirt and black cap, to the scaffold, as an awful example, there to be flogged, hanged, and quartered. Such horrors had long ceased to have any effect in an age that saw blood run in rivers. By way of increasing the disgrace of a shameful death, a gibbet was set up which was so high that the victim had to mount thirty-two steps, and it was painted scarlet. The first miscreant who adorned it was one of the chiefs of the sbirri himself, who had used his position to protect a whole gang of thieves with whom he divided the plunder.

I abridge from Signor Molmenti’s work the following story, in which more than one type of

Molmenti, Banditi e Bravi.

the sixteenth-century criminal makes his appearance.

The village of Illasi is situated in a rich valley in the territory of Verona. At the end of the sixteenth century its castle was inhabited by a certain Count Geronimo and his beautiful lady, Ginevra. From time to time the couple introduced a little variety into theirsolitude by receiving Virginio Orsini who, though a Roman noble, was in the service of Venice as Governor of Verona. He was, I believe, a first cousin of that Paolo Giordano Orsini who murdered his wife Isabella de’ Medici in order to marry Vittoria Accoramboni. I have told the story at length in another work.

Virginio, the Governor, fell in love with the Countess Ginevra before long; but she, though strongly attracted to him, tried hard to resist him, would not read his letters, and turned a deaf ear to his pleadings.

On a certain Saturday night, when Count Geronimo was away from home and Ginevra sat by the fire in her own chamber, having already supped and said her prayers, the curtain of the door was raised and two men came in. The one was Grifo, the man-at-arms whom the Count trusted and had left to guard her; the other was Orsini. Ginevra sprang to her feet, asking how the Governor dared to cross her threshold.

‘Madam,’ he said, coming near, ‘as you would not answer my letters, I determined to tell you face to face that if you will not hear me you will be my ruin.’

‘Sir,’ answered the Countess, ‘that is not the way to address a lady of my condition. You are basely betraying my noble husband, who entertains for you both friendship and esteem.’

Here Grifo joined in the conversation and began to persuade the Countess that every noble lady of the time had her ‘confederate knight.’ No doubt heknew that she loved Orsini in spite of herself, and when he had done speaking he went away, and the two were alone together in the night.

An hour later Virginio took his leave of her, and now he told her with words of comfort that he would presently send her poison by the hand of Grifo, that she might do away with her husband; for otherwise he must soon learn the truth and avenge himself on them all three. But Ginevra was already stung by remorse.

‘I have dishonoured my husband for you,’ she answered. ‘But I will not do the deed you ask of me. It is better that I should myself die than that I should do murder.’

‘In that case,’ answered Orsini, ‘I myself must put him beyond the possibility of harming you.’

Thereupon he left her; but she was tormented by remorse, until at last she went to her husband and told him all, and entreated him to kill her. He would not believe her, but thought she had gone mad, though she repeated her story again and again; and at last he rose and went and found Grifo, the traitor, and dragged him to her room.

‘Is it true,’ she asked, ‘that you brought the Governor here to my chamber unawares?’

The man denied it with an oath. Then Ginevra snatched up a dagger and set the point at Grifo’s breast. He saw that he was lost, and told the truth, and then and there the woman whose ruin he had wrought did justice on him and was avenged, and stabbed him again and again, that he died.

There ends the story, for that is all we know. After that the chronicle is silent, ominously silent; and when the castle of Illasi was dismantled a walled niche was found in one of the towers, and within the niche there was a woman’s skeleton. That is known, surely; but that the bones were those of the Countess Ginevra there is no proof to show.

I should say that Grifo belonged to the type of the bravi, so that the crimes of passion which his betrayal

Molmenti, Vecchie Storie.

caused were connected, through him, with those of the professional type. But others were committed, then as now, in passion, quick or slow. As an example of them, here is a story from another of Signor Molmenti’s exhaustive works.

It is first mentioned by the Bishop Pietro Bollani in a letter addressed to his noble friend Vincenzo Dandolo, in the month of July 1602:—

‘A certain Sanudo, who lives in the Rio della Croce, in the Giudecca, made his wife go to confession day before yesterday evening; and she was a Cappello by birth. During the following night, at about the fifth hour (one o’clock in the morning at that season according to the old Italian sun-time), he killed her with a dagger-thrust in the throat. He says that she was unfaithful, but every one believes that she was a saint.’

We learn that the poor woman was thirty-six, and that Giovanni Sanudo had been married to her eighteen years. The Council of Ten ordered his arrest, but he had already escaped beyond the frontier, and he wascondemned to death in default and a prize of two thousand ducats was offered for his head.

THE SALUTE FROM THE GIUDECCA

He had left five children in Venice, three boys and two girls; and the oldest, a daughter christenedSanuda, addressed a petition to the Ten which is worth translating:—

Most Serene Prince (the Doge), Most Illustrious Sirs (the Ten), and most merciful my Masters (the Counsellors, the High Chancellor, and the Avogadors):Never did unfortunate petitioners come to the feet of your Serenity and of your most excellent and most clement Council, more worthy of pity than we, Sanuda, Livio, Aloïse, Franceschino and Livio second, the children of Messer Giovanni Sanudo; misfortune has fallen upon our house because our father having been accused of taking our mother’s life, the justice of your Serenity and of your most excellent Council has condemned him to death; wherefore we, poor innocent children, have lost at once our father and our mother, and all our possessions; and we assure you with tears that we should have to beg our bread unless certain charitable souls helped us. Therefore I, the unhappy Sanuda, who have reached the age of eighteen years, and my brothers and sisters who are younger than I, shall all be given over to the most abject poverty and exposed to the greatest dangers unless your Serenity and your most excellent Council will consent to help us for the love of religion and justice. And so, in order to prevent five poor and honest children of noble blood from perishing thus miserably, we prostrate ourselves at the feet of your Serenity and of your most Illustrious Lordships, imploring you, by the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, to allow our unhappy father to come back to Venice for two years, that he may provide for the safety of his family and especially of his daughters, whose honour is exposed to such grave peril in that state of neglect in which they are now living. We pray that the good God may grant your Serenity and your Lordships long and happy life.

Most Serene Prince (the Doge), Most Illustrious Sirs (the Ten), and most merciful my Masters (the Counsellors, the High Chancellor, and the Avogadors):

Never did unfortunate petitioners come to the feet of your Serenity and of your most excellent and most clement Council, more worthy of pity than we, Sanuda, Livio, Aloïse, Franceschino and Livio second, the children of Messer Giovanni Sanudo; misfortune has fallen upon our house because our father having been accused of taking our mother’s life, the justice of your Serenity and of your most excellent Council has condemned him to death; wherefore we, poor innocent children, have lost at once our father and our mother, and all our possessions; and we assure you with tears that we should have to beg our bread unless certain charitable souls helped us. Therefore I, the unhappy Sanuda, who have reached the age of eighteen years, and my brothers and sisters who are younger than I, shall all be given over to the most abject poverty and exposed to the greatest dangers unless your Serenity and your most excellent Council will consent to help us for the love of religion and justice. And so, in order to prevent five poor and honest children of noble blood from perishing thus miserably, we prostrate ourselves at the feet of your Serenity and of your most Illustrious Lordships, imploring you, by the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, to allow our unhappy father to come back to Venice for two years, that he may provide for the safety of his family and especially of his daughters, whose honour is exposed to such grave peril in that state of neglect in which they are now living. We pray that the good God may grant your Serenity and your Lordships long and happy life.

The Council of Ten was apparently moved by theappeal. It answered the petition by the following resolution:—

‘The case of Sanuda, Livio, Aloïse, Franceschino, and Livio second, brothers and sisters, the children of Giovanni Sanudo, condemned to death by this Council on July twenty-ninth, is so serious; the petition of these poor children is so humble, so honest and so reasonable, that it behooves the piety and clemency of our Council to grant the said Giovanni Sanudo a safe-conduct, good for two years, in order that during this period he may provide for the future of his family.’

Sanudo came back, and before the two years had expired he obtained a prolongation of the grace for two years more, at the end of which time he presented another petition worded in the same manner, which was also granted; and so on from two years to two years until 1621, nineteen years after the crime, he being still technically under sentence of death.

Now, however, he obtained a formal pardon from his wife’s family, the Cappello. This curious document reads as follows:—

In the name of God and of the Holy Trinity, March thirtieth, 1621.I, Carlo Cappello, son of the late Pietro Cappello, considering the weakness and the lamentable vicissitudes to which humanity is subject, and desirous of forgiving the shortcomings and misdeeds of others, in order that the Lord our God may protect me also, and desiring, too, the full pardon of every sin: do forgive my brother-in-law, Giovanni Sanudo, the offenceshe may have committed against me, promising henceforth to bear him neither hatred nor malice, and I pray God to grant us both a good Easter and the pardon of every sin.(Signed)Carlo Cappello.Pietro Cappello.Livio Cappello.

In the name of God and of the Holy Trinity, March thirtieth, 1621.

I, Carlo Cappello, son of the late Pietro Cappello, considering the weakness and the lamentable vicissitudes to which humanity is subject, and desirous of forgiving the shortcomings and misdeeds of others, in order that the Lord our God may protect me also, and desiring, too, the full pardon of every sin: do forgive my brother-in-law, Giovanni Sanudo, the offenceshe may have committed against me, promising henceforth to bear him neither hatred nor malice, and I pray God to grant us both a good Easter and the pardon of every sin.

(Signed)Carlo Cappello.Pietro Cappello.Livio Cappello.

Having obtained forgiveness of his wife’s family, Giovanni Sanudo now looked about for a means of extorting a final pardon from the Council of Ten. There existed in the Venetian states a small town, called Sant’ Omobono, which had received, as the reward of some ancient service rendered to the Republic, the privilege of setting at liberty every year two outlaws or two bravi. Sanudo succeeded in winning the good graces of the municipality, and was then presented by the mayor and aldermen to the Signory as one of the yearly candidates for a free pardon. The Council of Ten then permanently ratified its decree of immunity, and Giovanni Sanudo was once more a free man. Considering the usual character of the Council, it is hard not to surmise that it had found some cause for regretting the sentence it had passed. The poor murdered woman had confessed and received absolution before death: may we not reasonably suppose that, after all, there had been something to confess?

There is ground for believing it possible that Shakespeare may have used the original murder as part of the groundwork of hisOthello. If we compare the dates and glance at the history of Italian literature, wemay reasonably conclude that Shakespeare, after perhaps planning his tragedy on a tale of Giraldi’s, was much struck by the details of Sanudo’s crime, and especially by the murderer’s wish that his wife should confess before dying.

Mr. Rawdon Brown supposed the poet to have used another incident, related by Marin Sanudo in his voluminous journal, but the hypothesis involves an anachronism.Othellois thought by good authorities to have been first played in London in the autumn of 1602, only a few months after the crime in the Giudecca; whereas Mr. Rawdon Brown’s heroine was not murdered until thirteen years later.

The legend of the Fornaretto belongs to the beginning of the sixteenth century, a hundred years earlier. Travellers will remember being told by their guides how a poor little baker’s boy, who was carrying bread to a customer on a January morning in 1507, stumbled over the body of a noble who had been stabbed by an unknown hand. The sheath of the dagger lay on the pavement, and the boy was imprudent enough to pick it up and put it into his pocket, for it was richly damascened and very handsome. The police found it upon him, it was considered to be conducive circumstantial evidence, the poor boy confessed under torture that he had committed the crime, and he was hanged on his own confession.

A few days later the real murderer was arrested and convicted; and thereafter, in recollection of the tragic injustice that had been done, whenever themagistrates were about to pass a sentence of death, they were admonished to remember the poor Fornaretto.

By way of making the story more complete, the guide usually adds that the little lamp which always burns before an image of the Blessed Virgin on one side of the Basilica was lighted as an offering in expiation of the judicial murder, and that it is for the same reason that a bell is rung during twenty minutes on the anniversary of the baker boy’s execution.

Strangely enough, there is hardly a word of truth in this story. The only record in the archives of the Ten which faintly suggests it is the trial and execution of a baker named Pietro Fusiol, who had murdered a man of the people in January 1507, and there is no reference to any mistake on the part of the court. The ringing of the bell and the little lamp which burns day and night before the image, are a sort ofex votoofferings left by certain seamen in recollection of a terrible storm from which they escaped.

I pass on to speak of the political prisoners of the Republic, who were not by any means all treated alike, since some of them were confined in places of tolerable comfort, whereas others were treated little better than common criminals.

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