while he made advantageous treaties, and increased the commercial relations and importance of Venice, his conduct was marked by a rude, barbaric fierceness. He repudiated his wife, and forced both her and his son to embrace a monastic life. He then married the granddaughter of the King of Lombardy, introduced a guard into his palace, which no previous doge had done, and prepared to wage war with states which the citizens regarded as their friends and allies. No remedy appears to have been thought of by the Venetians but that of opposing violence to tyranny. Rising in a mass, they proceeded towards the palace, but finding it too strongly defended for their force, they set fire to the buildings which surrounded it. Three hundred houses, it is said, together with the church of St. Mark, and other public buildings, were soon in flames. Thus enveloped in the midst of a burning city, the palace could not long escape, and the populace waited at every little avenue which the conflagration offered, to seize their prey. At length the palace was in flames, and the doge was seen hurrying from one side to the other with an infant son in his arms, vainly seeking an unguarded opening. No other chance was left him but that of moving the people to pity. As the flames, therefore, pressed fast upon him, he threw himself, with his child, at the feet of the foremost, and both were instantly torn limb from limb by the unrelenting multitude. This is but a single specimen of the scenes amid which Venetian commerce effected its early triumphs; nor does its later history present a less tumultuous aspect. Through every age we see the same strange contrast in the cha racter of the people, as they were merchants and citizens; the one exhibiting, as we have before observed, all the marks of the coldest and most calculating disposition; the other, a fury and turbulence which have not been surpassed by the most licentious republics. The trade of Venice flourished in its greatest vigour during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Navigation had, to the end of that period, made none of those vast discoveries by which human courage itself became endowed with new and mightier attributes. The advantageous situation of the city, and the experience. which its inhabitants had acquired on the neighbouring seas, thus secured them a natural pre-eminence in the commercial transactions of Europe. The most necessary, as well as the most useful, productions of Asia necessarily passed through their hands. By the admirable political skill which they employed through the whole course of the crusades, they not only rendered their alliance necessary to the proudest monarchs of Europe, but filled their treasury with riches, and their ports with vessels and seamen unequalled in the world. When the empire of the East fell under its numerous enemies, Venice was the first in the field to secure and demand the richest portion of the spoil; and on that occasion the actions of her people, under the blind old Dandolo, were not surpassed in splendour or heroism by the proudest knights of England or France. But the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and the successive improvements in navigation, deprived her of the superiority she enjoyed over F other maritime states. Her commerce from that period gradually declined, and with the loss of wealth and the spring of popular activity and enterprise, she lost the only power which had enabled her to grow into grandeur, and continue great amid domestic broils, and under a government essentially tyrannical. Connected with views of the Dogano da Mare: I love," says an old traveller, "to contemplate, as I float along, that multitude of palaces and churches, which are congregated and pressed as on a vast raft." "But who can forget his walk through the Merceria, where the nightingales give you their melody from shop to shop, so that, shutting your eyes, you would think yourself in some forest glade, when, indeed, you are all the while in the middle of the sea. Who can forget his prospect from the grand tower, which once, when gilt, and when the sun struck upon it, was to be descried by ships afar off or his visit to St. Mark's church, where you see nothing, tread on nothing, but what is precious? Yet all this will presently pass away; the waters will close over it; and they that come row about in vain to ascertain exactly where it stood." |