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During some time the influence of the Franks had been felt in the islands, and was beginning to counter-balance that of the Greeks. The great families now separated into two distinct parties, one of which favoured the rising Empire of the West, while the sympathies of the other remained firmly attached to the Court of Constantinople. These opposite leanings, however, were caused by questions of trade and money-making much more than by any political tendency, and neither side had any inclination to accept a master.

SHOPS NEAR THE RIALTO

Yet one man seems to have seriously meditated betraying the Republic to Pepin, the son of Charlemagne, who had received the Kingdom of Italy as his portion, and desired to extend his dominions by wresting Dalmatia and Istria from Nicephoros, the Emperor of the East. The traitor was the Doge Obelerio, who had spent a part of his youth at Pepin’s court, and is said to have married his daughter.

Rom. i. 140.

The army of the Franks appeared on the mainland, by a secret agreement with the Doge, and before preparations could be made for opposing it. But the common danger became at once a bond of union; the Venetians forgot their discords and their quarrels, and rose as one man to defend their liberty. Almost from the first the Doge was suspected of treachery; he was watched, he was convicted by his own acts, he was taken, and he paid for his treason with his life. His severed head was set up on a pike on the beach of Malamocco, where the enemy could watch how the carrion birds came daily and picked it to a skull.

Mol. Dogaressa, 29.

809 A.D.

Pepin at the siege of Rialto, A. Vicentino; Pepin’s defeat, by the same; Ducal Palace, Sala dello Scrutinio.

But the Franks took the nearer islands one by one, till at last the Venetians left Malamocco and sought refuge on the Rialto and Olivolo, which were the more easy to defend, as it was harder for the enemy to reach them. A legend says that one poor old woman stayed behind, resolved to save Venice or perish in the attempt, and we are told that she went to meet Pepin and counselled him to build a wooden bridge that should extend all the way from Malamocco to Rialto, and that Pepin followed her advice; but the horses of his army were scared by the dancing lights on the water, and by the swaying of the light bridge, and they plunged and reared and fell off into the lagoon, and they and their riders were drowned by thousands, like Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea.

A more likely story tells us that the Franks had no light boats of shallow draft, and that in pursuing the Venetians their heavier vessels got aground in the intricate channel, so that the Venetians surrounded them, ship by ship, and did them to death conveniently and at leisure.

Be that as it may, Pepin was defeated and forced to give up the attempt, and when he had burned everything on the islands he had taken, he went away, in anger and humiliation, towards Ravenna. Thereafter, when peace was made between him and the Eastern Empire, Venice was reckoned with the East.

Among those who most distinguished themselves during the short struggle was Agnello, or Angiolo Partecipazio, a member of one of the most renowned families of the former tribunes. Sismondi says, I cannot find with what authority, that this noble house changed its name to Badoer, in the tenth or eleventh century, under which name it still lives. It was this Angiolo who persuaded the people to retire to Rialto, by which measure Pepin was defeated, and when the war was over he was soon elected Doge.

His first step was to fortify Rialto, which from that day became the seat of government, and the small neighbouring islands were soon united to it. Upon them grew up what was the beginning of modern Venice, eleven hundred years ago, and the waste land was covered with dwellings, towers, churches and religious houses in a wonderfully short time.

The devout tendencies of the people had changed little since the first fugitives had placed the islands under the protection of those several tutelary saints whose relics they had saved, and the descendants of those early emigrants now cast about for a holy patron who should, as it were, guarantee to them the blessing of heaven. They then remembered the ancient legend: how Saint Mark the Evangelist was shipwrecked and cast upon the shores of Rialto, and how he heard a mysterious voice saying, ‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista meus’; that is, ‘Peace be with thee, O Mark, my Evangelist.’ And the words became the motto of the Republic.

GRAND CANAL, NEAR RIALTO

The devotion to Saint Mark grew at an amazing rate after the revival of this old tradition, and it became the dream of every Venetian to obtain relics of the Evangelist’s body. This precious treasure was at that time preserved in Alexandria, and was therefore in the power of the Musulmans; but a strict ordinance of the Emperor Leo, to which the Doge had been obliged to agree on behalf of the Venetians, forbade all intercourse with the unbelievers, even for purposes of commerce.

Rom. i. 168.

Two Venetian merchants and navigators, Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, determined to risk their lives and fortunes in disobeying the imperial decree. They fitted out a very fast vessel and freighted her with merchandise for the Eastern market and set sail without declaring their real destination. Reaching Alexandria with a fair wind, they proceeded at once to the basilica in which the body of the saint was kept, and obtained possession of it by the simple process of bribing the men in charge of the church. Here the story says that they placed their treasure in the bottom of a cart, and heaped salt pork upon it, as much as the mules could draw, sure that no Musulman would touch the unclean meat; and so they passed through the city and got on board of their ship, and put to sea that very night.

About 828 A.D. Translation of the body of St. Mark, mosaic of the XIIIth century on the façade of the Basilica.

When they came near home, sailing with a fair wind and the blessing of heaven and Saint Mark, they sent a light boat into the lagoons to inform the Doge that they were bringing the Evangelist’s body; for they were sure that he and their fellow-citizens would gladly forgive them for having disobeyed the imperial decree. Then all the people gathered on the shore as the ship came in; and the noblest of Venice took the priceless burden upon their shoulders and bore it to the private chapel of the ducal palace, where it was to remain in state until a church could be built for it; and a great cry of ‘Viva San Marco’ rang from street to street, and from island to island, even up to Grado and down to Malamocco, and it was ever afterwards the war-cry of Venice. Thus was Saint Mark proclaimed protector of the Republic, and the words which he himself had heard became the nation’s motto; and Saint Theodore took the second rank, though he had been patron of the lagoons ever since the days of Narses and Justinian.

It was clear to those simple believers that Saint Mark had not come among them against his will. Had he been displeased with the change from Alexandria to Venice a storm would surely have arisen in the night, and the holy relics would have disappeared in thunder, lightning, and rain, to return to their former resting-place or to be miraculously transported to another; for such was the pleasure of the saints in the dark ages. But Saint Mark remained where he was, pleased, no doubt, with the homage of that glad young people, and rejoicing already in the glories they should attain under his patronage; and from this complaisance the Venetians naturally concluded that a divine blessing had descended upon them, and they became once more a single family, bonded as brothers to stand and win together.

But before pursuing the great story of what came afterwards, let us stand a while on the threshold of the tenth century and look at Venice as she was a few years after Saint Mark had taken her under his special protection.

In the first place, the alternate currents caused by the tide and the rivers were not yet completely controlled by stone-faced canals, and in many places the soil still consisted of long stretches of unstable mud, upon which the tide threw up masses of seaweed that lay rotting in the sun. The only means of obtaining a firm foundation for a stone building on such ground lay in laboriously driving piles, side by side, and so close that each one touched the next, and the whole formed a solid surface. It was a slow method, it was costly and required considerable skill; but the result was good, and has stood the test of a thousand years, for there are buildings standing to-day on piles driven in the year 900.

It follows that in the tenth century the majority of dwelling-houses were still only light constructions of wood, which could stand upon the mud without danger of sinking. There were many stone buildings already, however, but like their humbler neighbours they mostly had only one story above the ground floor, with small windows on the outside, and larger ones on the inner court, and all alike were roofed with thatch. It is hard to imagine Venice a thatched city, of all cities in the world; yet the reason of the peculiarity is plain enough. Neither brick nor tiles could be made from the soft mud of the lagoons, a wooden house cannot have a flat roof, and the construction of a vaulted roof upon a stone house requires a greater skill in building than the Venetians then possessed.

Sagredo.

In building ordinary dwellings, Sagredo tells us that the usual method was to lay down a floor of heavy planks, upon which a thick layer of mortar and small pebbles was spread out and beaten down to a hard surface; upon this again a second layer of cement mixed with pounded bricks was spread, and this was beaten with heavy wooden beaters till it was perfectly hard and even. Precisely the same method is employed to-day in southern Italy; and it was from this beginning that the so-called ‘Venetian pavement’ soon developed. For rich people caused small pieces of coloured marbles, and even of mother-of-pearl, to be set into the cement of the second layer, which was then no longer beaten, but rolled with a ponderous stone roller and then rubbed down with a smooth stone and sand and water, and at last polished to a brilliant surface. To this day the ‘Venetian pavement’ is made in this way in all parts of the world. The Venetians had probably inherited the art directly from the Romans, together with some knowledge of mosaic, which it roughly resembles. The polished floor of the main room was an especial object of pride in the eyes of good housekeepers.

The Venetian houses resembled those of the Romans in many respects. A covered portico, surrounding a closed court, gave access to the ‘hall of the fireplace,’ as the principal place of gathering for the family was named, and to the kitchens and offices. The upper story consisted entirely of bedrooms, and had a wide balcony called the ‘liago’—a word corrupted from the Greek heliacon, ‘a place of sunshine.’ Here in warm weather the family spent the evening. Higher still, a rustic wooden platform was built over a part of the gabled and thatched roof, and was called the ‘altana.’ It was here that the linen was dried after washing, and later, in Titian’s day, it was here that the Venetian ladies exposed their hair to the sun after moistening it with the fashionable dye.

Mut. Costumi.

The ‘hall of the fireplace’ was more than any other part of the house a special feature of Venetian dwellings, and was as necessary to them as the balcony that ran round the inner court. To this day the Venetians boast that their ancestors invented the modern chimney flue, and that while King Egbert still warmed himself like a savage before a fire of which the smoke escaped through a hole in the roof, the poorest Venetian fisherman had a civilised fireplace before which he could warm his toes as comfortably, and with as little annoyance from smoke, as any fine lady of the twentieth century.

Another peculiarity of the early Venetian house which has come down to our day was that it almost always had two entrances, the one opening upon the water, and the other, at the back, upon land. In those days this back door almost always gave access to a bit of garden, in which flowers and a few kitchen vegetables were carefully cultivated, but these gardens were soon crowded out of existence by the necessity for larger and more numerous houses.

A WATER DOOR NEAR ST. BENEDETTO

The palace of the Doge differed from other Venetian dwellings chiefly by its size and its battlemented walls, and was very far from resembling what we see to-day in its place. It was destroyed by fire again and again, and only here and there some fragment of the original walls was incorporated in the new buildings which the doges were so often obliged to construct for themselves. A high battlemented wall joined the island of Olivolo with Rialto and enclosed the ducal palace.

The churches were out of all proportion richer and better cared for than the private dwellings, and were generally built after the model of the Roman basilica, with an apse and a portico for worshippers, which frequently served as a shelter for all sorts of little shops and money-changers’ booths, very much like the temple in Jerusalem. These churches have been rebuilt and repaired again and again till there is little left of the originals; but many fragments of them have been used again, here a light column, there a bit of mosaic, a carved capital, a piece of early sculpture or a delicate marble tracery—all of them, more often than not, of better workmanship and in purer taste than the later buildings they now help to adorn.

Monumenti artistici ecc. 1859.

The centre and focus of Venetian life was Saint Mark’s Square, but it was altogether a different place in those days. It was, indeed, nothing but an irregular open space, a field of mud in winter, a field of dust in summer, divided throughout its length by a small dyked canal called the Rivo Battario. On opposite sides of the latter, and opposite to each other, there were then still standing the chapels dedicated by Narses to Saint Theodore and to the holy martyrs Geminianus and Menus.

Furthermore, the foundations of the Campanile, which fell in 1902, were already laid, but the work was not advancing quickly, and the surrounding space was obstructed by the heaps of materials which had been prepared for the construction. As for the church of Saint Mark, the one that was then standing must have strongly resembled the next, which was built on its ruins by the Doge Pietro Orseolo after it had been burnt down in 975. It was in the shape of a Greek cross, and was approached by a portico like almost all churches of that time. We know also that it was roofed with thatch.

There were as yet no bridges across the canals, though we may perhaps suppose that there was a single one, built of wood, between Rialto and Olivolo, and at that time there was no great number of boats, and there were none that resembled the gondola for its lightness and speed. Many of the smaller canals were afterwards dug for the convenience of getting about by water, where in the tenth century there were narrow lanes, dark and muddy, and the receptacles of whatever people chose to throw out of their windows. Then, and long afterwards, men went about on foot if they were poor, or on horses and mules if they were rich. When water had to be crossed there were flat-bottomed ferry-boats for man and beast. The word ‘gondola’ seems to have been applied indiscriminately to several kinds of boats, at least by writers, and even included the heavy barges, manned by many oars, which towed sea-going vessels in and out of the harbour, through the intricate channels of the lagoons.

NARROW WATER LANE

Mut. Costumi.

There were trees in Venice in those days, both scattered here and there, and also growing in little groves, where young people gathered in the fine season to pass an hour in singing and dancing and story-telling, and in making music on stringed instruments of fashions and shapes now long forgotten. The most common trees were the oak, the cypress, and the ‘umbrella’ pine, which latter is believed to be indigenous in Italy; but there were cork-trees, too, and one of them afterwards played a part in the tragedy of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the great conspirator.

Venice had charm even then, in spite of her narrow and unsavoury lanes, her winter’s mud, and the dust of her summer heat. The pretty little thatched houses, side by side along the water’s edge; the handsome churches gleaming with mosaic fronts; the dark cypress-trees and stone pines, and the vividly green oaks; the battlemented towers reared here and there against the clear blue sky; the rippling waters of the lagoon; the vessels great and small, with sails pure white or dyed a rich madder brown—there was colour everywhere, then as now, there was air, there was sunshine; and there was then, what now there is no more, the movement, the elastic youth, the gladness of a people’s life just ready to bloom for the first time.

They led easy lives, those early Venetians, compared with the existence of the Italians on the peninsula, easy and even luxurious, and their constant intercourse had given them the love of jewels and silk and all rich and rare things. Even in the days of Charlemagne, the dames of Venice wore robes and mantles and veils which an empress would not have disdained.

ON THE GIUDECCA

Mut. Costumi.

Charlemagne himself, on his way to Friuli, once halted at Pavia just when the great fair was held which best of all others displayed the wealth and industry of all Italy; and the Venetians had brought thither the rich merchandise with which they had loaded their ships in the East, and had spread out their splendid stuffs, their soft Persian carpets, and their costly furs.

Then the rough Franks were ashamed of their coarse garments, and began to buy all manner of fine woven materials to take the place of their woollen tunics and their leathern coats. But not long afterwards, when they were all hunting in the deep forest, a great storm came up and broke upon them, and the rain beat through their silks and the thorns tore their finery to shreds, and they were in a sad plight. Then the giant Emperor laughed aloud at their mishap, and asked them whether the goatskin jerkin he wore was not worth ten of their soft Venetian dresses when the rain was pelting down and the winter wind was howling through the wild-boar’s lair.

The old paintings leave us in no doubt as to the Venetian fashions of the tenth century. The nobles wore a long tunic tightened to the waist by a belt or girdle, and over this they threw a mantle of rich material which in winter was lined with fur, and which was fastened on one shoulder with a golden pin, like the fibula of the Romans or the brooch of the Highlander. On his head the noble wore a cap oddly adorned with two ribbands which made a Saint Andrew’s cross in front.

The dress of the matrons was not very different, but the cloak was pinned together on the breast instead of on one shoulder, and was cut with a train. The ladies, moreover, wore tunics cut low at the neck, even in winter and out of doors, which seems strange enough, though it accounts for the quantities of rich fur they used. Their splendid hair fell loose upon their shoulders from beneath a little gold-embroidered cap, instead of which young girls often wore a very fine gauze veil.

The labouring people seem to have confined their taste for variety to the selection of colours suitable to the occupations they followed, and therefore least likely to show wear and tear and stain.

Mut. Costumi.

Every one worked hard in those young days, from the Doge downwards, at the administration of the Republic, at beautifying the city, at commerce and the development of navigation; and as for play, they were passionate lovers of the chase and of grebe-shooting. The latter sport was the delight of rich and poor alike, apparently without much regard to the time of year, but its strict rules hindered any wholesale slaughter. The sportsman dressed himself in green in order that his figure might not scare the grebes, as he poled his narrow punt—the ‘fisolara’—amongst the sedge and reeds at the mouths of the rivers. If he had boatmen to help him, they wore green too. Now it seems to have been the rule that no weapon should be used in this sort of shooting but the cross-bow, charged with clay bullets or with small bolts, and it would have been thought as unsportsmanlike to snare the birds as it is nowadays to catch trout with worms; and as the grebe is a great diver, when in danger, and is by no means easy to hit with a good shot-gun, it must have required remarkable skill to shoot him with such a poor weapon as the cross-bow of the tenth century. The Venetians used to fasten the heads of the birds they killed upon doors and windows as trophies, just as a Bavarian gentleman or a Black Forester of our own time mounts the horns of every roebuck he shoots and hangs them in his hall.

If I have dwelt too long upon these details it is because I am inclined to think that a sportsmanlike spirit has characterised all young nations; and the spirit of the true sportsman is not to kill wantonly, but to measure himself in strength, or skill, or speed, against his fellow-man, and against wild things, and often against nature herself, with fairplay on both sides; and the true delight of his sport lies in doing for pleasure what his ancestors were forced to do in the original struggle for life.

THE STEPS OF THE SALUTE

And so after this brief glance at early Venice, I go on to speak of the circumstances and the men that presently directed the young state to a form of development which was without example in the past history of nations, and was destined to have no imitators in the future.

THE RIVA AT NIGHT