CHAPTER 8
In 1289 Doge Giovanni Dandolo, a kinsman of the conqueror of Constantinople, died and was buried with modest ceremonies in the courtyard of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. At once the complex wheels of the Venetian election system began to turn. However, for reasons that are still not clear, a large mob of Venetians assembled in the Piazza San Marco and demanded that a certain Giacomo Tiepolo be crowned as the new doge. Tiepolo was certainly a reasonable choice. His family was well respected. His grandfather and namesake was the famous Doge Giacomo Tiepolo, who had so eagerly welcomed the Franciscans and Dominicans to Venice. His father, Lorenzo Tiepolo, had also served Venice as doge and now rested with his father in the richly decorated tomb before the church of the friars. Giacomo the younger had repeatedly distinguished himself by victoriously commanding Venetian war fleets at home and abroad.
The problem was not the man, but the method. The people who assembled at San Marco were invoking a means of electing doges that had not been used in more than a century. It was supposed to have been abandoned, replaced by the new, complex election process in the Great Council. Suddenly the political reforms painstakingly enacted to free the government from the caprices of the mob seemed dangerously fragile.
This reborn arengo of citizens seemed likely to prevail. The Great Council immediately suspended its own election to see what would happen next. Had the arengo wrested back the right to elect Venice’s doge, it is difficult to see how the Great Council could have held on to other powers that it had also assumed in the people’s name. And had that happened, the history of Venice might well have progressed very much like that of other Italian city-states, where powerful families acquired despotic control through violence, riots, and intimidation.
But that did not happen. Out of patriotism, fear, or perhaps a little of both, the beloved Giacomo Tiepolo declined the people’s honor and quickly retired to his home on the terra firma. His departure instantly deflated the movement. The Great Council, therefore, continued its deliberations and in the end elected Pietro Gradenigo (1289–1311), a distinguished public servant from one of Venice’s oldest families. Although the people dutifully approved the choice, there was no mistaking the grumbling in all parts of the city.
The election of 1289 exposed a clear flaw in the Venetian republican system—but it was not in the electoral process; rather, it was in the constitution of the Great Council itself. The increasing growth of Venice’s population and wealth had placed a strain on the council. As more families rose to economic prominence, they naturally sought election to the Great Council for their own members. However, the council, which already numbered some five hundred seats in 1289, was jammed full of important men from important families. Some of those families were revered for their antiquity, although no longer for their wealth. The current members of the Great Council were not, in any case, willing to make room for nouveaux riches who clamored to join the most exclusive club in Venice.
And there was also the problem of foreigners. The cosmopolitan population of the merchant city had long consisted of many foreigners, some of whom married into affluent Venetian families and thereby sought access to political power. Recent events in the East had further complicated matters by forcing thousands of Venetian citizens who had lived abroad most or all of their lives to relocate to the mother country. This was especially true after 1291, when a Muslim army conquered the city of Acre, the last remnant of the crusader states in Syria and a major port city for Venice. These returning expatriates were legally Venetian, but culturally foreign. Were they really the sort that should take a place in the Great Council?
Since the Great Council’s primary job was electing people to high government positions, and since membership in the Great Council was necessary to attain those positions, the body had become the gatekeeper for power and prestige in Venice. The problem was that it also elected itself, and so its members were naturally unwilling to welcome new groups that they thought beneath them, preferring instead to defend the exclusiveness of their own positions. Tensions in Venice between those who were in and those who wanted in became palpable, and had already led to several unsuccessful proposals for reform. It seems likely that the sudden appearance of the arengo in 1289 was itself a manifestation of those tensions. Those who could not gain entry into the Great Council were sufficiently frustrated that they had decided to strip the body of one of its most important functions. That their attempt ultimately failed hardly lessened their frustration with the concentration of power.
The new doge Pietro Gradenigo and his advisers worked hard to find a solution to this problem, but it seemed that there was always a constituency that opposed any particular reform. At last, they hit upon an answer—a slow, gradual reform that would preserve the integrity of the Great Council while relieving the stresses caused by its inability to represent all the interests of the burgeoning city. The size limit of the legislative body would be instantly abolished. All Venetians currently in the Great Council or who had served in it during the four previous years could become full members for life with the approval of only twelve of the Forty—a body drawn from the Great Council that oversaw elections and the evaluation of members. In practice, these reforms meant that virtually every man who had made it into the Great Council in recent years was henceforth a permanent member. Furthermore, new members could be introduced by a simple nomination of three current members, confirmation by the doge and his court, and the approval of twelve of the Forty. The bar, in other words, was not only attainable, but even rather low. In 1297 the Great Council confirmed the entire package of reforms.
The result was a dramatic expansion of the Great Council. By 1300 it had more than 1,100 members. In other words, approximately 1 percent of the Venetian population were members of the Great Council—an extremely high rate for a representative government. (By contrast, representation in the U.S. government consists of 0.0002 percent of the population.) Violent dissatisfaction with the Venetian government withered as some two hundred new families entered the Great Council and, thereby, other high-ranking positions. New families with considerable economic clout had no problem finding their place in the reformed government. For their part, old families who had fallen on hard times were also guaranteed their positions, since they had been regularly present in the council for many years.
The genius of the new system, though, was in the number of votes from the Forty needed to confirm the admission of new members. After the first rush of applications, the pool of those who desired entry naturally subsided. The Great Council was able, therefore, to incrementally increase the number of votes in the Forty needed for admission. In short, once all those who had the means and position to serve in the Great Council had been admitted, the members were able to slowly close the door behind them. Finally, in 1323, after more than twenty-five years of expansion, the Great Council closed that door altogether, in what came to be called the Serrata, or closing. Henceforth, all new members of the Great Council had to have an ancestor who had served in a high government position. Since those positions were filled only by members of the Great Council, this had the effect of setting in stone which families made up the governmental body.
Long ago, historians used to see the Serrata as the death of the Venetian republican system and the birth of a closed oligarchy. In truth, it was neither. The reforms that led to the Serrata had dramatically increased participation in Venetian government, making it the most representative in the world. The Serrata did not create an oligarchy, since hundreds of families and well over a thousand members were included in the council. Instead, it gave certainty to those important (and even not-so-important) families that their position in government and society could not be taken from them. The Serrata, therefore, had the effect of dousing the most virulent forms of factionalism in the Great Council. And it was, in any case, never a complete closure. Venetians who distinguished themselves by extraordinary service to the state could still gain membership for themselves and their family—although this was appropriately rare.
The Serrata represented the final victory of the governmental model first proposed in the upheaval of 1172. The leading citizens, those who were called the “good men” or “wise men” in twelfth-century documents, had successfully placed themselves at the heart of the Venetian republic. From the people, whom they represented, they inherited the foundation of all political authority. From the doge, whom they checked, they claimed the right to execute that same power. As a result, the Great Council became the beating heart of the Venetian government.
By the fourteenth century, the basic components of Venetian government were in place. At the lowest level was the arengo, which included all male citizens. In practice, the arengo met only to confirm the election of doges. Above the arengo was the Great Council. Since the large size of the council made it ill-suited for rapid action, it elected a higher body known as the Forty, which served as a court of appeals and prepared some legislation for debate and voting in the Great Council. Another committee of sixty men of the Great Council, which came to be known as the Senate, was given the task of commanding fleets, naming captains, and sending embassies—all of which still required the approval of the council as a whole. In the fourteenth century the Forty was the most important committee of the Great Council, although the Senate would later supplant it in that respect. The Forty elected three heads (capi) as presiding officers. These three were also present whenever the doge’s council met. The latter consisted of six men, probably elected from each of the six sestieri, who formed the doge’s inner circle. They held their position for one year and could not be reelected for several years after. All ten men—the three capi, the six councillors, and the doge—were called the Signoria, the highest committee in the government, although completely at the command of the Great Council.
After 1323 it was possible for the Venetians to make a definitive list of those families with a right to membership in the Great Council—and, of course, they did, calling it the Book of Gold. Venice, therefore, had legally defined the boundaries of a hereditary governing class. The members of this class were referred to as “patricians” or “nobles,” yet these terms can be misleading. Everywhere else in Europe, “nobility” referred to feudal landholders who exercised extraordinary powers and privileges over the people and institutions of their domain. Counts, barons, and dukes on the mainland commanded local military forces, raised taxes, and administered justice among their subjects. The Venetian nobility simply had seats in the Great Council. They were by no means above the law. No one in Venice was. Nonetheless, the position was one of great prestige. Non-noble fathers in Venice dreamed of marrying their daughters into noble families, for their grandchildren would thus be noble. Even clothing and jewelry in Venice were regulated based on class. No matter how much wealth one had, to dress really lavishly one needed to be a noble.
Because Venice’s livelihood was based on the marketplace, it stands to reason that over time some of the families in the Book of Gold would do well, while others would not. In general, the patricians tried to take care of each other. Members of distinguished families that fell on hard times were often voted government jobs that offered comfortable stipends. Outside of the nobility, new fortunes were, of course, made by new families in the years after the Serrata. Over time this could have led to the same sort of imbalance that preceded Doge Gradenigo’s reforms. To avoid this, the Venetians instituted a new class, known as the cittadini (citizens). Rather like the equestrian order in ancient Rome, the cittadini consisted of families who, by service or wealth, had lifted themselves higher than the popolo (common people), but who could not become noble because of theSerrata. New members of the cittadini had to be Venetian citizens resident in the city for the past twenty-five years and nominated by current members. The names of the thousands of cittadini families were inscribed in their own register known, appropriately enough, as the Book of Silver. The creation of the cittadini class provided a useful safety valve for political and factional tension. Unlike the nobility, the cittadini class was never closed, so all could aspire to it. Furthermore, as the government of the Venetian empire grew larger and more complex, new administrative positions were created that were reserved exclusively for the cittadini. They became crucial to the operation of the Venetian government and highly visible in Venetian society. And, of course, those few cittadini who reached the highest levels of wealth and service to the state could always hope for promotion to the nobility itself.
These reforms, which were carried out slowly and with great caution, saved Venice from the warfare and tyranny that beset all the other Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They were not perfect (as we shall see), but they did provide a broad avenue for political expression by all Venetians, regardless of social class. Just as importantly, they offered the possibility of upward mobility—something almost unimaginable for most Europeans of that age.
Many of these benefits, however, would be enjoyed by Gradenigo’s successors, not the reforming doge himself. Given the controversy that surrounded his own election, there would always be those waiting for him to misstep, and thereby prove their wisdom. Gradenigo had the misfortune to reign during tumultuous times. All of Europe mourned the loss of Acre to Muslim forces. The crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, founded by the First Crusade in 1099, had for almost two centuries safeguarded the holy sites. It can be difficult for us today to understand the depth of concern for the Holy Land that gripped Western Christians in the Middle Ages. Jerusalem was itself a relic, sanctified by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Crusade after Crusade had failed to restore the holy city to permanent Christian control, and Muslim power continued to grow, not just in the Middle East but across the world. Only in Spain were Christian forces able to win victories against Muslim empires. Acre was the last Christian city in the Middle East, and its conquest and destruction filled European hearts with bewilderment, anger, and fear.
For Venice, the fall of Acre was devastating, not just spiritually and emotionally, but economically as well. With their loss of dominance in Constantinople, the Venetians had come to rely heavily on Acre as a source for Eastern luxury goods. Their victory over Genoa in the War of St. Sabas had given Venetians the upper hand in this well-fortified coastal city. Now all of that was lost. Venetian merchant vessels began heading north up the Bosporus strait past Constantinople to the ports of the Black Sea in search of the same goods, but the Genoese had the advantage in those waters and recognized the opportunity to strangle the economic lifeline of their rival. After a truce expired in 1291, Genoese squadrons began openly attacking Venetian convoys in the eastern Mediterranean and raiding Venetian Crete. Even worse, they erected a naval blockade of the Bosporus, refusing Venetian vessels entry into the Black Sea. Then, in 1295, the Genoese attacked the Venetian Quarter in Constantinople, massacring many of the residents there. The Byzantine emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus (1282–1328) favored the Genoese and obligingly arrested most of the remaining Venetians. Venice declared war on both powers.
Within a matter of weeks a fleet of forty war galleys left the lagoon under the command of Roger Morosini, known as Malabranca (Evil Claw). He sailed to Constantinople, where he attacked the Genoese Quarter at Galata. He then targeted all Genoese and Greek shipping moving up and down the Bosporus. Having gained control of Constantinople’s inner harbor (the Golden Horn), Malabranca prepared to attack the emperor’s Blachernae Palace in the far northwest corner of Constantinople. Fearing he would lose his city, his crown, or both, Andronicus agreed to make peace with Venice, releasing all prisoners and returning all goods and monies that he had confiscated.
Another Venetian fleet, under the command of Giovanni Soranzo, managed to break the Genoese blockade of the northern Bosporus, sailing into the Black Sea and seizing the port city of Caffa (modern Feodosiya) on the Crimea. The Genoese, however, were not so easily defeated. They continued to hold their position in the Aegean and even began launching major offensives against Venice in the Adriatic Sea. In 1298 a large-scale battle took place off the Dalmatian coast near the city of Curzola (modern Korčula). There the Genoese decisively defeated the Venetians, sinking sixty-five of their ninety-five vessels, killing some nine thousand Venetians, and capturing another five thousand. Among those captured was Marco Polo. Posterity was well served by his subsequent imprisonment, for it was then that he dictated his Travels, which remains a priceless treasure trove of information. In 1299 the long war with Genoa finally ended, yet the subsequent peace remained uneasy.
As Venice and Genoa warred over ports and shipping lanes, Muslim powers in the Middle East continued to grow in strength. In 1302 the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Osman I, defeated a Byzantine army near Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey) and proceeded to conquer much of Asia Minor. Desperate for aid, Emperor Andronicus II hired any and all mercenaries from the West, including the Grand Catalan Company, a mercenary army drawn largely from Spain that eventually became more dangerous to the Byzantines than the Turks. To pay these bills in a rapidly diminishing empire, Andronicus had for some time been debasing the Byzantine currency with which Venetians continued to conduct a great deal of overseas business. The response in Venice was the minting of the republic’s first gold coin, the Venetian ducat, which would remain a rock-solid currency for Europeans for centuries.
The decline of the Byzantine Empire in the east was mirrored by a rise of prosperity in western Europe. The German empire and Italy remained fractured and turbulent, but the kingdoms of England and France were unifying under increasingly powerful monarchs. Culture and learning were blossoming in Europe, while the Christian East, once so mighty, was consigned to Muslim occupation or life among the ruins of antiquity. The Venetians, who had always lived between these two worlds, were naturally drawn to the literature, song, and pageantry of French chivalry spreading across the courts of Europe. They could also hardly fail to notice that the riches of the East, while still vast, were now largely in Muslim hands. Within the Christian world, the balance had shifted decidedly westward. This led some forward-thinking Venetians to reevaluate their age-old aversion to projecting power on the mainland. Perhaps it was time, they suggested, for Venice to acquire an empire in the West as a safeguard against the uncertainties of the East.
This strategy was tested in 1308 when war broke out between three brothers claiming control over the city of Ferrara on the Po River. One of the claimants, Fresco, sought and received Venetian military support. For the Venetians, this seemed a golden opportunity to gain substantial control over the commercially important Po. However, with the entry of their garrison into Castel Tedaldo, which commanded the city’s bridge over the river, the Venetians had inserted themselves into a factional war that stretched far beyond Ferrara. In medieval Italy, political factions usually aligned themselves with one of two parties: the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. These groups dated back to the eleventh century and the disputes between the popes and the German emperors in Italy. Since those same disputes regularly resurfaced and were often mixed liberally with Italian city-state independence, German wealth, and the freedom of the Church, the parties themselves endured. Broadly speaking, the Guelfs were pro-papal, while the Ghibellines were pro-imperial (that is, German). Yet by the fourteenth century factional struggles in the various Italian cities rarely touched on those matters, so the Guelfs and the Ghibellines were usually just the accepted names for opposing parties. They could be found in every northern Italian city—except, of course, Venice.
With their arrival at Castel Tedaldo in 1308, the Venetians had allied themselves with the Ghibellines, or at least a group of them, in Ferrara. Pope Clement V (1305–14) opposed Fresco’s claims, supporting instead his Guelf brothers. The Venetians pointed out that Fresco had the better claim, yet the papal legate simply countered—correctly—that Ferrara was a papal fief and therefore, as its overlord, it was Clement, not the Venetians, who had the right to decide the dispute between the brothers. Papal troops were accordingly sent to Ferrara. Although skirmishes broke out, all agreed that the matter should be resolved peacefully. Papal legates traveled to Venice, where they offered to let the Venetians govern Ferrara as papal vassals provided they paid an annual rent of twenty thousand ducats to the Holy See. The Great Council refused. When the legates returned to Ferrara, they issued a formal bull of excommunication against Doge Gradenigo and placed Venice itself under interdict.
In the turbulent world of late medieval Europe it was not unusual to find one’s self or one’s state at odds with Rome. As a result, the papal arsenal of excommunication and interdict was sufficiently familiar in most places not to cause too much of a stir. This was not the case in Venice. The Venetians remained an intensely pious people with a strong devotion to the Catholic religion and their spiritual father, the pope. The Peace of Venice, in which the Venetians in 1177 had helped Pope Alexander III achieve victory over Emperor Frederick I, remained a defining moment in their own history and civic identity. The excommunication of the doge, therefore, was nothing to be dismissed. The interdict, which embargoed all sacraments in Venice, was even more serious. This was only the third time that such spiritual weapons had been used against Venice—and the Venetians did not like it.
The Great Council met at once to consider the emergency. Giacomo Querini spoke for many when he insisted that Venice withdraw from Ferrara. This whole mainland venture was not only un-Venetian, he argued, but physically and spiritually dangerous. The first duty of all states was obedience to God and his vicar on earth, the pope. In any case, the wounds of the war with Genoa were still fresh. This was no time to take on another, potentially even larger, war. Doge Gradenigo spoke for the other side of the question. Venetians, he said, needed to safeguard their future in a dangerous world. An opportunity like this to acquire firm control over shipping on the Po would not likely present itself again. The papal legates in Ferrara could easily be overruled by the pope, who was currently in Avignon. If Venice could establish itself in Ferrara, Clement would accept Venetian control of the city. After all, the Venetians had been obedient sons of the Church for centuries. The majority of the Great Council agreed with the doge, but tensions in the chamber and in the streets of Venice remained high.
A few months later word reached Venice that Gradenigo had been wrong about Clement—the pope was not at all happy about the Venetian bid to claim Ferrara. To forestall the worst, the Signoria sent an embassy to Avignon to plead their case. But events moved too quickly. On March 27, 1309, Clement issued a devastating bull against the people of Venice. It excommunicated not only the doge but the Signoria and all citizens of the Republic of St. Mark. It declared all Venetian property anywhere in the world forfeit, forbade Christians to supply food or merchandise to any Venetian, and stripped the Venetians of all legal rights. In addition, it ordered all clergy to leave Venice and its territories. The pope’s attack was total and devastating. Venetians had enormous wealth invested in foreign ventures and banks as well as merchandise stored in foreign warehouses, all of which could now be confiscated. Throughout their history, a large portion of the Venetian population had lived outside Venice. Those who were in the Byzantine Empire, Crete, or other Venetian ports in the East were safe from the pope’s decree. But the wealth, property, and lives of Venetians doing business in the West now faced serious danger.
And that danger had only just begun. When the doge and his councillors still refused to withdraw from Ferrara, Pope Clement declared a Crusade. Across northern Italy, soldiers began to take up the cross to wage holy war against Venice, the state that had itself crusaded more than any other in Christendom. The new crusaders joined out of piety and a desire for salvation, but also because the defeat of Venice at Ferrara would force the maritime power off the Italian mainland. As it turned out, however, the war did not last long. Disease struck the Venetian garrison at Ferrara and it was quickly defeated by the crusader and papal forces. Most of the garrison was then put to the sword, although some were blinded and released. The Venetian commander, Marco Querini, managed to escape unharmed. He returned to Venice, claiming that he was insufficiently supported by the doge and his councillors.
The Venetians had lost Ferrara, lost their garrison, and feared they were losing their souls. And this, they believed, was all because of the headstrong desire of Doge Gradenigo to expand Venetian power onto the terra firma. Those who had taken part in the arengo of 1289 that had called for the election of Giacomo Tiepolo now crowed that their candidate would never have led Venice into such ruin. Others, like Giacomo Querini, who had argued for a peaceful withdrawal from Ferrara lamented the folly of the doge’s plan. Both groups pointed out that if their advice had been taken, all would now be well.
Emotions ran so high that violence erupted not only in the streets and alleyways of the city, but also in the Great Council itself. Revolution, it seemed, was in the air. Seizing the moment, a group of disaffected nobles, including Marco Querini and a number of Tiepolo family members, organized a meeting at the Querini palazzo near Rialto, where they planned an elaborate coup d’état: They would sweep away the doge and the Signoria and place in their stead the son of Giacomo Tiepolo, a swashbuckling leader known as Bajamonte. As governor of the Venetian colony in Modon, Greece, Bajamonte Tiepolo had misused state funds and oppressed his subjects in order to live like a Byzantine potentate. When he was later prosecuted for his crimes, he fled the city to sulk on the mainland. He now strongly supported the plan to free Venice from the tyranny of Gradenigo and replace it with a tyranny of his own. There was nothing special about Bajamonte Tiepolo; indeed, there were dozens just like him all across late medieval Italy—well-connected strongmen seeking to build a kingdom on the ashes of failed communes. Now, Bajamonte believed, it was his turn to do the same in Venice.
The coup was set for June 15, 1309. The armed conspirators and their supporters would assemble at the Querini palazzo before sunrise. From there they would march over the Rialto Bridge (a wooden structure) in two columns. One group, led by Marco Querini, would head down the Calle de’ Fabbri. The other, led by Bajamonte Tiepolo, would make its way through the Merceria, a busy street that then, as now, was filled with rich shops. Another conspirator, Badoero Badoer, agreed to gather men in Padua and make a simultaneous attack by sea. The three groups would then converge on the Piazza San Marco at daybreak and capture the Ducal Palace.
The plan went badly from the start. A conspirator with second thoughts about overturning the Republic of Venice informed Doge Gradenigo about the coup. Gradenigo instantly summoned the Arsenale workers, who served as a makeshift bodyguard for the doge when necessary. Members of the Forty and the Signoria armed themselves and their servants and were therefore ready for the attack with superior numbers. The weather also did not cooperate with the conspirators. Storms and winds kept Badoer’s vessels from leaving the mainland, and when they finally did set sail, they were quickly captured by loyalists from Chioggia. Marco Querini and his men stormed into the Piazza only to find it filled with well-armed defenders. They were quickly dispatched, with Marco himself killed in the melee. The boisterous Bajamonte Tiepolo continued to lead his men to the Piazza, unaware of what awaited him. At the head of his group a man carried a standard that read simply “Freedom.” When the standard-bearer passed into the Piazza (probably through the arch that is today below the clock tower), a woman dropped a stone mortar on his head, killing him instantly. (A carved relief dating to 1861 still depicts the heroic woman. Walking under the clock tower from the Piazza, look up and to the left to see it.) That was enough for Tiepolo. He ordered the retreat and fled back across the Rialto Bridge, which his men destroyed to prevent loyalist forces from following. Holed up in his palazzo, he surrendered only when Doge Gradenigo agreed to allow him to live in exile. As for the other leaders, Querini lay dead on the Piazza and Badoer would soon join him. After his confession under torture, Badoer was beheaded between the two columns of the Molo.
The attempted coup shook Venice’s men of government, who feared another attempt, given the high emotions that still reigned in the city. Before the coup, the Great Council had ordered the city guards, known as the Signori di Notte, to make certain that no one in the city was armed. Now they reversed that decision. The Great Council was to be surrounded by armed guards at all times, and all members were themselves allowed to bear arms. Each of the sestieri was charged with providing well-trained armed guards to keep peace in its district and to come to San Marco at a moment’s notice in case of emergency. To oversee these security matters, the Great Council elected an ad hoc committee known as the Ten. As with many organs of state designed to deal with emergencies, the Venetians soon found the Ten indispensable, and so it became a permanent body. Its primary functions were intelligence gathering and diplomatic missions (often much the same thing) as well as the investigation and prosecution of treason. In times of emergency, though, it could serve as a substitute Great Council, thus allowing the Signoria to act quickly to deal with matters. In later years the Ten became so powerful that members were elected for only one year and could never be reelected. The three capi of the Ten served for a month at a time and, to avoid any opportunity for bribery, were forbidden to leave the Ducal Palace during their tenure of office.
As time went on, the Ten became expert at detecting enemies of the state. Spies worked the inns and taverns, listening above all for foreign agents, but also for internal plots against the government. Perhaps the most visible face of the Ten was the famous bocche dei leoni (lions’ mouths) scattered around the city. Modern visitors to the Ducal Palace are invariably shown the bocca next to the entrance of the Sala della Bussola, yet that is only the most famous one. The purpose of the lion’s mouth was to provide a means for Venetian citizens to report illegal activities to the proper authorities. These written reports, signed or anonymous, were fed to the vigilant lions and later examined by the Ten and the Signoria. In later centuries, foreigners often condemned the bocche as evidence of the dark, secretive, and oppressive nature of the government of Venice. Mark Twain, for example, who visited the Ducal Palace in 1867, reported in his book Innocents Abroad that “these were the terrible Lions’ Mouths! . . . These were the throats, down which went the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an enemy, that doomed many an innocent man.” Much the same description still dominates most modern guidebooks.
In truth, the Ten had an extraordinarily complex system of evaluating all reports received through the bocche, especially those that were unsigned. The procedure, which took up many pages of precise instructions, was designed to reject almost all anonymous reports, investigating only those for which there was strong reason to believe they might be accurate. And this was only an investigation. Arrest and conviction required real evidence given in a court of law. The truth is that the bocche dei leoni worked so well that other government agencies began using them. One can, for example, still see various bocche around Venice that were used to report a variety of criminal activities. On the wall of the church of Santa Maria della Visitazione on the Zattere is one with an inscription “Denunciations [for activities] against the general health of the sestiere of Dorsoduro”—an important matter during times of plague. The church of San Martino, near the Arsenale, has a similar bocca for reporting heresy and impiety.
The new security measures worked so well that there was no repeat of the problems that beset the last doge’s election. When Pietro Gradenigo died in 1311, the constitutional process ran smoothly, electing the aged and saintly Marino Zorzi (1311–12). Perhaps the electors hoped that the pious man could make peace with the pope, but he lived only ten months after his coronation. His successor, Giovanni Soranzo (1312–28), was the hero of Caffa during the last war with Genoa. Although he was in his seventies, he had a bit more life in him than Zorzi. His first task, of course, was to settle matters with Clement V. After promising to pay the enormous sum of ninety thousand florins, the Venetians at last received their absolution and the lifting of the interdict. The sum was so great that the Great Council had to impose a forced loan on the citizens to raise it. They considered it well worth the cost. Peace with the pope allowed the Venetians to again enter into binding agreements with their fellow Christians in Europe, and soon the damage of the ecclesiastical censure began to heal. Venice once again prospered. Of particular importance was the increase in the number of Germans who came to Venice to trade or work. So many came, in fact, that they were given their own fondaco, a building for lodging, storage, and conducting business. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi was built on the San Marco side of the Rialto Bridge. The original building was a wooden structure, yet in the sixteenth century it was replaced with the current stone building. Today it serves as the main post office of Venice.
Although their first venture on the mainland had proved disastrous, the Venetians found themselves increasingly drawn into matters in the West. The simple fact was that events in Italy had grown too important to ignore. The Renaissance was beginning in Florence and spreading across northern Italy. Italian cities were becoming wealthier and more powerful. In the fourteenth century most of them were controlled by the signori, tyrants who waged war against their neighbors and spent freely on mercenary companies led by condottieri—generals for hire. The Venetian republic safeguarded its citizens from tyrants at home, but it could not ignore their wars on the mainland.
The most troublesome of these signori for the Venetians were the Della Scala brothers. Some years earlier the Della Scala family had taken control of the thriving city of Verona, some sixty miles west of Venice. Through violence, threats, and invasions the brothers had managed to claim an impressive chunk of northern Italy—their rule extended over Vicenza, Feltre, Belluno, Brescia, Parma, and Lucca. By 1329 the Della Scalas had expanded almost up to the Venetian lagoon itself with their conquest of Padua and Treviso. This represented a severe threat to the Venetians, for the Della Scalas now controlled access to the Po as well as other mainland markets. Mastino della Scala imposed stiff tolls on all Venetian goods moving on the Po or other rivers, as well as export duties on foodstuffs headed for Venice. With well over a hundred thousand mouths to feed, Venice was heavily reliant on the flow of produce from the mainland. The new taxes not only increased food prices for the average citizen, but greatly harmed Venice’s religious houses, which relied on estates on the terra firma for their income and maintenance. Mastino also threatened Venice’s salt industry by creating his own saltworks not far from Chioggia and defending it with a powerful fortress.
Doge Francesco Dandolo (1328–39) was an accomplished diplomat who favored negotiation over warfare. Indeed, it had been he who had successfully negotiated peace with Pope Clement V in 1313 after the mainland debacle. He hoped to do the same with Mastino della Scala. Dandolo strongly opposed entangling Venice in the problems of the mainland. Venetians were sailors, not soldiers. They were businessmen, not farmers. Waging war against the Della Scalas would mean hiring mercenaries, with all the attendant problems. But this position put the doge in the minority, both in the Great Council and among the populace. The Venetians wanted to fight this nearby threat. Word went out that Venice was hiring mercenaries, and a collection of English, French, German, and Italian bands arrived in Ravenna and were transported to the Lido. The Della Scalas had plenty of enemies willing to help shatter their grip on power. The Florentines, who had lost Lucca to the Della Scalas, sent money for the war. The Carrara family, which had lost its position in Padua, was also willing to do whatever it took to defeat the Della Scalas. And so on July 14, 1336, Venice declared war. By December, Venetian forces were nearing Padua and Treviso. Success brought more allies. The ruling families of other major Italian city-states—the Viscontis of Milan, the Estes of Ferrara, and the Gonzagas of Mantua—formed a league with Venice to crush the Della Scalas. By August 1337 the war had ended. The threat to Venice was neutralized.
Now they had to decide what to do with the spoils. In the peace treaty the Della Scalas ceded Padua, Treviso, and all their surrounding territories to Venice. The Venetians immediately gave Padua to the Carraras, who had faithfully helped win the war. Other lands were also parceled out to allies. But Treviso and its territories fell directly into Venice’s hands. For the first time, the Venetians had direct control of a state in the West, causing some to worry that this in itself meant the loss of something distinctively Venetian. They governed Treviso with a collection of administrative techniques that they had learned in their eastern provinces and quarters. By a suitably complex and indirect vote, the city would elect a podestà, who would govern along with a large council (similar to the Great Council) and a small council (similar to the Six). In general, the government had wide latitude in matters of local administration and justice. A Venetian rector, who was appointed by and answerable to the Ten in Venice, remained in Treviso to advise and, if need be, overrule the provincial government. The system worked well, blending just the right amount of local control with colonial oversight. With some modification, this model would be reused when Venice later expanded further on the mainland.
The annexation of Treviso was Venice’s first direct venture into the turbulent world of northern Italy. More would follow. Despite their long-standing reluctance to project power on the terra firma, the Venetians had come to believe that to preserve their position and extraordinary prosperity it was essential to do so. The maritime empire was becoming a traditional empire. The refugees of the lagoon were at last returning to their ancestral homes, yet no longer as victims, but as masters.