CHAPTER 9
When one thinks of Venice today, the mind invariably conjures the striking facade it presents across the Bacino San Marco, the wide body of water that stretches from the Ducal Palace to San Giorgio Maggiore. The two columns of the Molo, each bearing the city’s spiritual protectors, reach skyward framing the long entryway of the Piazzetta and beyond to the majestic church of San Marco. Half of this scene, however, is the extraordinary Ducal Palace, perched almost on the water’s edge and stretching from the Piazzetta to the Rio del Palazzo, over which the famous Bridge of Sighs extends. Few buildings in the world are so often painted, photographed, or described as Venice’s Palazzo Ducale. The greatest artists and writers of the ages have strained to express its unique beauty and its timeless serenity.
All the more surprising, then, is the fact that no one actually designed this architectural triumph. It was, instead, the result of centuries of projects, restorations, and general improvements. It is not even one building, but many collected under one roof. Like the government that it housed, the palace grew slowly and in an ad hoc manner. It is the product of a conservative people who held tightly to their traditions, history, and institutions but were still willing to modify or extend them when circumstances warranted. Nothing is more Venetian than this magnificent structure.
Its origins lay in the flames of revolution. In 976 the previous wooden palace was burned to the ground, along with the doge and his family. St. Pietro I Orseolo funded the rebuilding of the palace after his election as doge. Like its predecessor, the new building was a smallish, fortified structure along the river and close to the church. It was made of stone, and as Venetian power and wealth grew over the years, builders used increasingly valuable materials for its beautification and enlargement. The palace expanded along with the Venetian state. By the twelfth century it was no longer simply a residence for the doge, but home to most of the main organs of government. To use an American example, it was the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court together under one roof. As time went on, newly created bureaucracies often found a home in the Ducal Palace.
As one might expect, this had the effect of giving the palace a disjointed look, not at all as it appears today. Doge Sebastiano Ziani expanded the building a bit farther toward the Piazzetta and the waterfront before the Peace of Venice in 1177, giving it a more attractive facade. Political reforms, however, put a major strain on the building, since it needed to accommodate an increasingly large number of people participating in Venetian government. When the Serrata more than doubled the size of the Great Council, Doge Pietro Gradenigo ordered the enlargement of a hall to hold them all. Yet by the time that construction was finished, the Venetians had won Treviso and the Council, which was approaching 1,300 members, had already outgrown the new room.
In 1340 the Great Council voted to extend the Ducal Palace toward the water of the Bacino, leaving only a fondamenta, or small section of earth along the waterfront. The primary purpose of the expansion was to build an entirely new chamber for the Great Council, which would stretch all along the water’s edge. The new room was placed on an upper story with an arched atrium below to allow easy foot traffic along the shore, perhaps as a concession to those who resented the government taking over prime land on the waterfront. Whatever the case, it produced the palace’s distinctive appearance. Although in style it is fourteenth-century Venetian Gothic, the palace’s archways and windows give an extraordinary impression of lightness. It almost seems upside down, with the heavier portions appearing to rest at the top and the open areas on the ground. The construction of the building would be delayed many times, only finally finished in 1423. As far as we know, the latest expansion was not the work of any single architect, but of many designers, builders, and politicians, each moving it toward completion.
When ground was broken on the expansion, spirits in Venice were soaring high. The bustling, crowded city continued to reap rich commercial profits abroad and had lately begun to exert its authority in Italy. The future seemed bright. Of course, plenty of dangers remained. The Turks continued to press westward, threatening the teetering Byzantine Empire and commercial shipping from Europe. The Genoese were a constant worry. But no one guessed the direction of the gravest danger, for it seemed like the smallest of all things.
Every ship in the Middle Ages had rats. Every city had them, too. They had been the constant companion of civilization since humans first began building settlements and storing away their food. The rodent problem led directly to the domestication of cats some ten thousand years earlier, but the problem, of course, persisted. The dirtier and more populous the city, the more the rats happily infested it. By luck of geography, Venice was much cleaner than most European cities in the Middle Ages. People in landlocked areas typically dumped chamber pots and other sewage and refuse into the streets, but in Venice the streets were canals that the tides flushed clean twice a day. That was one reason why Venice could house more than a hundred thousand people without any method of sewage removal. But the tightly packed city contained plenty of food and many places to hide, and that meant a vibrant population of rats.
Before the modern age, when a ship took harbor, people, goods, and rats moved freely on and off the vessel. The rats—usually foot-long black rats—sought the food stored in the cargo holds. When the food was depleted and the ship sailed into a new port, the rats would often disembark, searching for other hospitable locales. The old saying “rats deserting a sinking ship” has nothing to do with rodents leaping into the water to avoid drowning in a doomed vessel. It refers, instead, to a nautical superstition that if rats left a vessel in port it was a clear omen that the ship would sink. The rats, the most experienced travelers in the animal kingdom, knew a risky transport when they saw one. In an age in which sea travel was always dangerous, it did not pay to ignore omens.
Rats in Venice were nothing new, but what they brought with them in the fourteenth century was: the seed of pandemic. The black rats that scurried off Venetian merchant ships in 1348 carried fleas, which were themselves infected with Yersinia pestis—the bubonic plague. This bacterium originated in China, where it had spread quickly among rat fleas before moving westward with merchants. Like Marco Polo, the plague made its way along the Silk Road to the ports of the Crimea in the Black Sea. By tradition, the plague made its first western appearance at Caffa, which the Venetians had ruled until 1307 and which was currently under Genoese control. The Mongol general Janiberg is said to have catapulted the plague-ridden corpses of his men into the city in an attempt to infect his enemy. It seems unlikely, however, that the disease was so well confined. Caravans from the East stopped at many Black Sea ports to sell their wares. Catapults were not necessary—just willing buyers. The Venetians and Genoese did plenty of business in those ports, and it is not surprising, then, that both cities were hit by the deadly disease first and at almost exactly the same time.
The black rats that decamped from the vessels and darted down the narrow streets of Venice were already sick. As they died, the infected fleas jumped from their dead hosts onto the skins of new, live ones—in other words, people. Although rat fleas naturally prefer rats, in a pinch they will feed on humans. Since it was not at all uncommon for people in the Middle Ages to have fleas, one or two more were hardly noticed. (Only modern hygiene has banished the human fleas that faithfully accompanied us for thousands of years.) The rat flea then regurgitated the Yersinia pestisbacterium into its human host, where it spread quickly to the lymph nodes and from there throughout the body.
The first symptoms of bubonic plague resembled influenza—fever, chills, headache, muscle aches—but soon included the signature “bubo,” a painful swelling of lymph glands in the groin, armpits, or neck. Believing that the bubo itself was causing the disease, medieval doctors often lanced it, which, if the patient was fortunate, did no harm. It could, however, release the bacterium into the air, where it would find its way directly into the lungs. The disease could also infect the lungs anyway if it spread widely enough in the body.
Bubonic plague is a ruthless killer. Without modern antibiotics, more than half of those who contract it die within a week. If it infects the lungs, however, the plague is even deadlier. The pneumonic version causes the sufferer to cough up bloody sputum, which aspirates into the air where it can be inhaled by others. Pneumonic plague kills almost 100 percent of its victims within twenty-four hours. One can be healthy at breakfast and dead by dinner.
As a port city with an abundance of boats, rats, and people, Venice was the perfect host city for the Black Death (as it was soon called). Within a year of its arrival the plague had killed approximately half of the Venetian population—more than fifty thousand people. At least fifty patrician families were completely wiped out. The survivors were understandably filled with fear and bewilderment. With no concept of germs, medieval people were at an utter loss to explain what was happening to them. In Venice, many believed that the plague was caused by an earthquake that had damaged the city in January 1348. It was clear that the disease was contagious, but the why, how, or even what of the disease was beyond understanding. Not surprisingly, many reasoned that the plague was a punishment from God, and so they did all that they could to effect a spiritual cure. Piety movements, which were already widespread across western Europe, were supercharged by the Black Death. New confraternal organizations of prayer and charity sprang up in Venice and across Italy. Precious relics were brought out and paraded through the streets in an attempt to purify them. Patron saints and the Virgin Mary were invoked to save their people.
And eventually all those things worked. After a few years of carnage, the plague invariably faltered, unable to make headway among those who had developed antibodies against it. But new victims lived just down the road. Just as it had followed the merchants from China to Italy, the Black Death moved along the trade routes in Europe from Venice, Genoa, and Marseille to every point northward, even as far away as Iceland. Everywhere the death toll was horrendous. Millions perished—probably 50 percent of the total population of Europe died in the first decade of the disease. And this blow came only a few years after some of Europe’s worst famines, brought on by a sustained period of global cooling. It seemed that God truly was smiting his people.
The survivors continued to look for explanations. Many Europeans initially suspected that Jews were poisoning the wells, though this quickly subsided when local Jews were expelled or killed with no effect on the plague’s spread. Their focus then turned to the sins of Christendom—particularly the Catholic Church. For decades the popes had been based in Avignon, which, while extraordinarily pleasant, was not Rome, the Holy See of Peter. The Avignon popes were good at raising funds, so the Church’s wealth had grown. This was the age of the rich satin vestments and distinctive hats of the cardinals, who were truly “princes of the Church” in wealth and power. Clerical abuses such as absenteeism and pluralism were rampant, leading many Christians to wonder what the rich prelates, priests, and monks had to do with the simple message of Christ. The Black Death was widely seen as God’s retribution for the sins and excesses of his Church, leading to new calls for reform from every quarter.
Venetians were not as quick to blame the Church or to seek celestial reasons for the Black Death. Perhaps it was the fact that, unlike most Europeans, Venetians traveled to distant lands, where they saw that the plague had devastated the Mongols and the Muslims just as thoroughly as it had the European Christians. Instead, Venetian responses to the plague were much more pragmatic. They prayed, of course, but from a medieval perspective that was the height of pragmatism. They also worked hard to lessen the effects of the plague. After they discovered that the dead could themselves transmit the disease, death ships were ordered to patrol the city’s canals daily, calling out for corpi morti (dead bodies). They drafted into service large roundships and barges for the removal of corpses, which were taken to various uninhabited islands in the lagoon and dumped into mass graves.
When the Black Death subsided in 1350, the surviving Venetians faced a problem of manpower—a crucial consideration for a maritime state that depended on the sailors and oarsmen of the war galleys. The government opened wide the doors to Venetian citizenship, offering financial incentives such as streamlined guild memberships for craftsmen in order to entice immigrants. As new people moved into Venice and children were born, the possibility of a return of the plague remained a constant danger. Trading vessels sailed into the city from all parts of the world—any one of them could be carrying the disease. Venetians did their best to find ways to combat the problem. One of the more common sights during later Carnevale festivals in Venice was the hooded reveler wearing a bizarre mask sporting a long, curved nose. This mask was originally devised to protect doctors from the plague by placing medicinal herbs thought to combat the disease into the mask’s nose cavity. In later centuries foreigners saw the doctors’ attire and assumed it was part of the costumes that filled the city in the months before Lent. Although the herbs were of no use, the mask itself could at least shield its wearer from airborne bacteria. A simple cloth over the nose and mouth would have been just as effective, of course, but hardly as picturesque.
When plague took the life of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo (1478–85), the government enacted even more proactive measures. A new hospital was built at state expense on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small island just off the Lido that had previously been owned by the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore. The Great Council passed a new law requiring those exhibiting symptoms of plague to be held at Lazzaretto Vecchio for a period of forty days, on the assumption that if they were still alive at the end of the waiting period they either did not have the plague or had survived it. In practice, though, very few ever returned from the heartbreaking misery of the plague island. If a patient did not have the disease before arriving at Lazzaretto Vecchio, it was certain that he or she would contract it before leaving. The dead were stacked like cordwood in mass graves all over the island. An excavation in 2004 uncovered more than 1,500 skeletons—and those are only a tiny sample of the bodies that still lie beneath the green grasses of that quiet island. The gruesome process birthed the word “quarantine”—from quarantia, the forty days that the sick were required to spend at Lazzaretto Vecchio.
So well did the quarantine seem to work that the Venetian government later expanded on the concept. On another, larger island the state built extensive dormitories, warehouses, and wharves. Henceforth, all vessels entering the lagoon were required to stop at this island, called Lazzaretto Nuovo. The vessels were docked, the cargo stored, and the crew and passengers assigned quarters. Like its older cousin, Lazzaretto Nuovo was a quarantine island, but for the healthy as well as the sick. The administrators separated the residents into those who were obviously sick, those who were obviously well, and those whose condition was not obvious. It was a massive undertaking. The buildings, which still remain, could house four thousand people, two hundred horses, and vast amounts of cargo. Modern visitors to Lazzaretto Nuovo can still see the copious graffiti of the frustrated, the bored, and the frightened. When forty days had expired, the survivors and their belongings were released and allowed to enter Venice.
The doge of Venice during the first outbreak of the Black Death was one of Venice’s most extraordinary leaders. Andrea Dandolo (1343–54) had demonstrated amazing intelligence and wisdom from an early age. He became a Procurator of San Marco, a position of great legal and financial importance, when only twenty-five, and was one of the first members of the Venetian patriciate to take up studies at the still relatively new University of Padua. Not only did he complete his work, but he probably earned a doctorate in law as well. In 1343 he was elected doge at the age of only thirty-seven—the first young man to hold the office in centuries. Dandolo numbered among the ranks of a new breed in fourteenth-century Italy, the beneficiaries of growing capitalist economies that placed a high value on individualism. Well educated in languages and classical literature, these men increasingly directed their attention to matters of this world. They were the first of the Italian humanists, from whom the Renaissance would flow. Dandolo’s close friend Petrarch described the young doge as “a just man, incorruptible, full of ardor and love for his country, erudite, eloquent, wise, affable, and human.” Although a doge, Dandolo remained a scholar. He worked tirelessly on a new history of Venice, based on his humanist desire for accuracy in science and observation. His book, the Chronica per extensum descripta, drew from a variety of earlier chronicles and archival materials that have since perished. It is an extraordinary work that scrupulously avoids the hyperbole, puffery, and patriotic fabrications that so often infected Venetian chronicles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It remains one of the most important sources for historians of medieval Venice.
Dandolo’s artistic interests profoundly improved the church of San Marco. Few doges have taken so keen an interest in the beautification of the “ducal chapel.” Indeed, he firmly asserted that “the church was and is ours” and that it was solely up to the doge “however many burials within the church” there could be. This mattered, because he fully intended to be buried there himself. He added a new Chapel of San Isidoro to hold the relics of that Byzantine warrior saint. He oversaw the reworking of the Pala d’Oro, a magnificent golden altarpiece crafted by Byzantine masters at the opening of the twelfth century. He also expanded and beautified the baptistery, and there he was laid to rest when he died, still a young man, in 1354. He was the last doge ever to be buried in San Marco. What was the ducal chapel had become the people’s church. Subsequent doges were content to be buried elsewhere.
Dandolo’s reign was beset by challenges. The Venetians had once again crusaded against the Turks, wresting the city of Smyrna (modern Izmir) from them. A revolt in always troublesome Zara in 1345 led to a difficult siege and an attack from Hungary. Much of the Venetian government’s attention was also consumed by another long war with Genoa, waged in the Aegean and on the Italian mainland. Both powers scored victories and costly defeats, although the Genoese had the upper hand. The real winners were the Turks, who took advantage of the strife between the merchant republics to expand their power in the region. Foreign mercenaries also did well, as the Venetian government spent freely to defeat the Genoese. Petrarch wrote several letters and even traveled to Venice urging peace, but his friend would not hear of it.
The war with Genoa did not last much beyond the death of the doge. Weeks later the Venetians suffered a devastating loss at Porto Longo, near Modon. Genoese galleys under the command of Paganino Doria skillfully entered the port and destroyed the unprepared Venetian fleet there. Thousands of Venetians, including their commander, Nicolò Pisani, were captured and many more were killed. The Genoese now gazed with pleasure on a severely weakened Venice, but they could not deliver the deathblow. Back home the Viscontis, the ruling family in Milan, had acquired control over Genoa, and they had no interest in expensive wars with Venice over foreign ports and shipping lanes. They brought the war to a close in 1355 with Venice shaken by its close call.
The young Andrea Dandolo was succeeded as doge by an old man, Marino Falier (1354–55). In his more than seventy years of life, Falier had served Venice across a broad range of activities. He was a member of the Ten when Bajamonte Tiepolo was tried for treason. He later served on numerous diplomatic missions to Italian powers and crowned heads of Europe. In 1353 he was even knighted in Vienna by Emperor Charles IV—a distinction of great importance in an age when chivalry was glorified across Europe and had its admirers even in Venice. Falier had commanded Venetian vessels in the Black Sea and acquitted himself well in the wars against Genoa. In short, he was a perfect choice to serve as the new leader of Venice.
And that is what makes what happened next so difficult to understand. Many of the documents that would shed light on Falier’s activities have not survived, so the story must be pieced together from chronicles, proceedings, and hearsay. Even Venetians at the time did not quite understand why things went so badly, as evidenced by the collections of stories they told to explain it. It was rumored that after his election Falier returned to Venice in a boat that landed in a fog at the Molo. Not sure of his exact location, the doge-elect walked between the two columns, a place where criminals were executed and that wise Venetians avoided. This omen, it was said, doomed his reign. Other writers claimed that the elderly doge had recently married a beautiful young woman, which led to a good deal of snickering and bawdy humor among the young patricians of the Great Council. One story has it that graffiti was found in the palace claiming (in graphic language) that the young wife was rather energetically unfaithful to her new husband. The offending scribblers stood trial, but received little more than wrist slaps. This leniency (according to various writers) greatly irritated the doge, who soon came to believe that the Venetian nobility was spoiled, arrogant, and no longer good for Venice.
Historians today tend to dismiss the cuckold explanation for Falier’s actions, emphasizing instead his experiences as a diplomat, which made clear to him how differently politics unfolded outside the lagoon. Venice’s republican government was not just rare, it was unique. The world was ruled by powerful autocrats who acted decisively, while Venice was governed by an increasingly complex constitutional system and its ever-growing bureaucracies. No other city-state in Italy still maintained a republic. They were all ruled by signori, powerful men and their families who acquired despotic control while paying lip service to republican ideals. Venice’s recent losses to Genoa may have convinced Falier that to survive his country must conform to the times and embrace a dictatorship.
All of this, of course, is pure speculation. What is known for sure is that discontent simmered in Venice over the debacle of Porto Longo and that many of the popolo blamed their noble leaders. Morale worsened when, as an emergency measure, the government mobilized four war galleys commanded by experienced captains who were not members of the patriciate. Unlike the fleet at Porto Longo, these commoner vessels went on to successfully attack Genoese shipping. Common sailors and marines, as well as the skilled dockworkers in the Arsenale, took more than a little pride in these successes, and there was plenty of grumbling at the failures of the spoiled patricians.
The spark that set off the extraordinary events of 1355 occurred on the ground floor of the Ducal Palace in the naval office, which faced out toward the Bacino. Giovanni Dandolo, a nobleman and the paymaster of the naval secretary, assigned a particular man to a particular galley. There was nothing unusual about this. However, the commoner galley officer, Bertuccio Isarello, refused to accept this man, which led to a heated argument with Dandolo. Finally, Dandolo struck Isarello, who departed in a rage.
The paymaster had struck the wrong commoner. Isarello’s popularity ran high among the sailors and dockworkers. He raced along the waterline (what is today the crowded Molo and the Riva degli Schiavoni) telling all who would listen of Dandolo’s arrogance and suggesting that the nobleman be brought to account for his action. A large and rough group of men quickly assembled and began marching up and down the Piazzetta waiting for the hapless Dandolo to emerge. As for Dandolo, he peered nervously out the window, wondering how he would get home without being mauled. Finally, he appealed to Doge Falier, who summoned Isarello into the palace and ordered him to disband his gang and to quit threatening his betters. Isarello grudgingly obeyed.
Later that night, though, Falier summoned Isarello back to the palace for a closed-door meeting. The two were joined by Filippo Calendario, a stonemason and builder who was overseeing the current expansion work on the Ducal Palace. Like Isarello, Calendario had no love for the arrogance of the Venetian nobility. The two men were reasonably wealthy, so they naturally resented the patricians who looked down upon them. Whether the doge was animated by a similar resentment caused by comments about his wife or rather by a belief that Venice needed a single ruler (or by both), he suggested that the three of them join forces in a plot to overthrow the republic.
They crafted a methodical plan, although not a very wise one. Calendario and Isarello would assemble twenty trusted men and charge each of them with raising another forty. All eight hundred men—primarily laborers and sailors—would then secretly assemble in the Ducal Palace on the evening of April 15, 1355. The doge would summon the Great Council and the conspirators would then storm the room, killing all the hated nobles. They would then acclaim Doge Falier as “Lord and Master” of Venice. One gets the feeling that the satisfying murder of the haughty nobles was the real purpose of this plan, since the rest of it was not well thought out. Killing the Great Council, after all, was not the same as murdering the nobility. A great many noblemen were on assignments or doing business overseas—and, of course, there were always the women and children, who were forbidden to attend the council. Yet the plan’s greatest problem was that it required eight hundred mouths to keep absolutely silent about it—something unknown in human events.
As the leaders fanned out across the city recruiting conspirators, word quickly spread of something afoot. The doge claimed that it was only a minor problem and even arrested some of those who gathered in the Piazza San Marco to air grievances against the nobles. But the bocche dei leoni of the Council of Ten filled up with reports of treason, either as conspirators had second thoughts or nobles were warned by commoner friends to stay home on April 15. The specific nature of the evidence does not survive, but the Ten were quickly convinced that the doge himself might be involved in the plot. On the night of April 14, invoking emergency powers, the Ten called the doge’s councillors, the criminal judges, the Signori di Notte, and the leaders of the six sestieri. This group ordered the arrest of Calendario and Isarello, who when questioned quickly implicated the doge. The leaders then told all nobles in the city to arm themselves and ordered the sestieri to send guards to San Marco. The parishes posted guards, too, while others patrolled for any signs of insurrection. The great coup had collapsed before it had ever really begun.
As a matter of history, when a state’s leader is accused of treason, the usual result is chaos and upheaval. One thinks of the execution of Charles I in England or Louis XIV in France, but one could just as easily point to the factional violence in most Italian states in the fourteenth century. Venice’s complex constitutional system, however, did not even tremble at the strain. Everything worked in a cool, rational, and calm manner. And because the state remained firmly stable, even with the betrayal of its executive, the people, too, remained calm. There was no street violence, no riots, no lynchings—only the Venetian republic and the justice it dispensed. The Council of Ten formed a tribunal consisting of nine of them (excluding one, because he was a Falier), twenty of the most respected nobles in the city, the six ducal councillors, and one state attorney. This body then heard the cases of Calendario and Isarello and the other ringleaders, finding them all guilty. They were immediately hanged from the upper story of the Ducal Palace facing the Piazzetta. Because of their popularity, Calendario and Isarello had bits placed into their mouths to keep them from inciting the crowds below.
The trial of the doge was a simple, albeit anguishing, affair. The aged Marino Falier immediately confessed to everything, asserting that he deserved to die for his crimes. The tears and sorrow that he demonstrated makes his part in this saga all that much harder to comprehend. He had nothing to gain by overthrowing a government that had lifted him to its highest position. He had no children, so founding a dynasty was clearly not his plan. It may be, as some historians have argued, that he believed that Venice would be better served by autocracy. But if so, it is odd that he offered no defense based on this reasoned position. Instead, his reaction before the court was one of pitiful repentance for a foolish crime. It is just what one might expect from a man who had been so enraged by arrogant mockery against himself and his wife that he rashly set forces in motion that he could not control.
On April 17, 1355, guards stripped Marino Falier of his regalia and led him into the courtyard of the Ducal Palace. He climbed the great staircase, probably the same as the current Scala dei Giganti (Stairway of the Giants), to stand where all doges stood when they took their oath of office. The executioner, with his glistening longsword, stood directly behind him. This was not a public execution, but a somber private affair in which the government dealt with a distasteful, yet necessary matter. With one swing the executioner severed Falier’s head. Both body and head tumbled to the base of the stairs. The chief of the Ten then carried the bloody sword to the balcony of the palace and showed it to the crowds below. “Behold,” he shouted, “justice has been done to a traitor.”
One might expect that the execution of the doge would lead to some measure of instability in Venice. Indeed, members of the government thought so, too, allowing all patricians to arm themselves for some time afterward. But life soon returned to normal and the matter was quickly put behind them. Marino Falier was buried in his family tomb, in the Chapel of the Madonna of Peace in the Scuola Grande di San Marco, near so many other doges in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. (When the tomb was opened in the nineteenth century the severed head was found to have been placed between the traitor’s knees.) Petrarch traveled to Venice the following month and heard of the startling events, but even he could not understand why the doge had taken part in such a plan. As a man who enjoyed the favor of Italian despots, Petrarch was not quick to condemn Falier. Indeed, he showed great empathy for him, suggesting that the Venetians should have extended more mercy toward the old man. Nonetheless, Petrarch understood the essential lesson of Falier’s punishment. “Those who are for a time doges,” he wrote, “I would warn to study the image this sets before their eyes, that they may see as in a mirror that they are leaders not lords, nay not even leaders, but honored servants of the State.” With but a little blood, Venice had defiantly remained a republic.
Ten years later the heart of that republic, the Great Council, at last convened in its new grand chamber. This massive space, which today seems like an ornate ballroom, was filled with the desks and benches of hundreds of council members. Plague had reduced the patrician population so severely that it would take more than a century to fill the room completely. Beautiful frescoes (now lost), depicting some of the most important events in Venetian history, decorated the walls of the chamber. The north wall bore scenes of the Peace of Venice, while the south wall likely displayed the victories of the Fourth Crusade. At the head of the room, the great artist Guariento di Arpo produced a monumental fresco, Coronation of the Virgin. (Portions of it have been recovered and can be seen in the nearby Sala dell’Armamento.) Along the top of the walls were placed individual portraits of every doge, with plenty of room for more. In 1366, only a few months after moving into the chamber, the council decreed that the portrait of Marino Falier should be covered over. It seems likely that this was accomplished by simply hanging a dark curtain over the portrait. So important was the memory of this treason to the Venetians, though, that when fire destroyed the doges’ portraits in 1577, the restorers painted an image not of Doge Falier, but of the curtain that had previously covered his portrait. On it can be found the words “Hic est locus Marini Faledri decapitate pro criminibus” (Here is the place of Marino Falier, decapitated for his crimes). It remains one of the most remarked-upon features of the Great Council Chamber.
Although Venice remained extremely prosperous, the decades after the execution of Marino Falier produced significant setbacks for the republic. King Louis of Hungary allied with lesser powers to force Venice out of Dalmatia, a land that it had ruled since the eleventh century. The once-lengthy title of the doges was reduced to “By the Grace of God, Doge of the Venetians et cetera.” Still, Venetian fleets continued to maintain unquestioned mastery of the Adriatic Sea, so the trade convoys were unaffected. Business, in fact, remained quite good in the 1360s and 1370s. Although the Genoese had seized the city of Famagusta on Cyprus, the Venetians simply shifted their trade markets to the southern part of the island. More importantly, armed with a papal dispensation to trade with Muslims in nonstrategic goods, the Venetians established themselves in Syria and Egypt. To avoid problems in the Mongol Empire, much of the spice trade from India began making its way through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, making the markets of Alexandria a source of rich profit for Venetians.
As they had done for generations, the Venetians and the Genoese continued to compete for advantage in the Aegean, Constantinople, and the Black Sea. There was, nonetheless, a feeling of unfinished business between the two powers. The Genoese resented the peace that had been forced on them in 1355, sure that they could have won their struggle with Venice once and for all. As the Genoese government convulsed between factions and interests, the Venetians were able to avoid war, but only for a time.