Stones of Venice | Page 3

replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418; [Footnote: Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.] the visible
commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children,
the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of
Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large
acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in
Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the
battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In
1454, Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself
to the Turk in the same year was established the Inquisition of State,
[Footnote: Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the
discovery of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.]
and from this period her government takes the perfidious and
mysterious form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great

Turkish invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508
the league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the
commencement of the decline of the Venetian power; [Footnote:
Ominously signified by their humiliation to the Papal power (as before
to the Turkish) in 1509, and their abandonment of their right of
appointing the clergy of their territories.] the commercial prosperity of
Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to
the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.
SECTION VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence
between the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers,
and the diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very
question at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any
historian, or determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices.
It is a triple question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the
efforts of individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation,
of the Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the
oligarchy itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of
national enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of
Venice might not be written almost without reference to the
construction of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the
history of a people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman
race, long disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either
to live nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for
three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their
call was heard.
SECTION VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at
many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism;
and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her
king, sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to
her: the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with
what powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they
were made masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of
distress, impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the
change from the time when she could find saviours among those whom
she had cast into prison, to that when the voices of her own children
commanded her to sign covenant with Death. [Footnote: The senate
voted the abdication of their authority by a majority of 512 to 14.

(Alison, ch. xxiii.)]
SECTION VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader's mind to
be fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double
interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the
evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be
both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political
prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual
religion.
I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I
wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all
Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its
deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or
fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last,
like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only
aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial
interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or
enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor,
but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her
conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
The fame of success remains; when