The life of a Venetian noble could be filled to the full if he so desired. Politics, diplomacy, trade, arms were all open to him; and he frequently combined two or more of these professions. At the age of twenty-five he took his seat in the Great Council and became eligible for any of the numerous offices to which that Council elected. He might serve his apprenticeship in the department of trade, of finance, of health; passing thence to the Senate, he might represent his country in Constantinople, Rome, Prague, Paris, Madrid, London. On his return he would be made a Savio and member of the cabinet, or serve his turn of a year on the Council of Ten, ending his days perhaps as a Doge, at least as Procurator of St Mark. And throughout the whole of this official career he was probably directing with the help of his brothers and sons the movement of his private family business, trade, or banking. Nothing is commoner than to find an ambassador petitioning to be recalled, because his family business is suffering through his absence from Venice. There was, of course, another aspect of the patrician class. The vicious nobles became poor, the poor corrupt, and political and social life both suffered in consequence. The Council of Ten was frequently called upon to punish the betrayal of State secrets and the unbridled license of the nobility.
On the other hand, if the people were excluded from the direction of State affairs they found abundant scope for their energies in trade and industries and the guild-life which these created and fostered. Every art and craft and trade in Venice, down to the very sausage-makers, was erected into a guild. They were self-supporting, self-governing bodies, supervised, it is true, by a government office whose approval was necessary for the validity of the bye-laws. They were carefully fostered by the State, which saw in them an outlet for the political activities of the people. At his coronation each new Doge was expected to entertain the guilds, who displayed specimens of their handiwork in the ducal palace; on great State occasions, when Venice entertained distinguished guests, the guilds were called upon to furnish part of the pageant; but they never acquired, as in Florence, or other Italian cities, a voice in the government of the State. The guilds of most Italian towns represented and protected the people against a nobility of arms and of territory. In Venice such a nobility never existed; the patrician was himself a merchant and very probably a member of a trade guild.
And the decorative and cultured side of all this teeming life found expression in the arts. Murano produced the earliest masters of that school of painting which was to adorn the world by the hands of the Vivarini, Carpaccio, the Bellinis, Mantegna, Giorgione, Veronese, Titian, Palma, Cima da Conegliano, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. Dramatic in conception, gorgeous in colour, untrammelled by the effort to express philosophic ideas or religious emotion, the art of Venice was essentially decorative, and was dedicated to the adornment of public and private life in the city. The great colonnade at the Rialto, the very heart of Venetian traffic, was already covered with frescoes and possessed that famous planisphere, or Mapamondo, showing the routes followed by Venetian commerce throughout the world. The study of letters received a vital stimulus, thanks to the asylum which Venice offered to refugees from Constantinople. Cardinal Bessarion made St Mark’s Library the legatee of his inestimable treasures. The brilliant history of the Venetian printing press was inaugurated by John of Speyer and Windelin his brother (1469), by Nicolas Jenson, by Waldorfer and Erhardt Radolt, and carried on by Andrea Torresano to the glories of the Aldine Press. Coming third in chronological order, preceded by Subiaco and Rome, the press of Venice surpassed all its Italian contemporaries in splendour and abundance, in range of subjects, in service to scholarship.
Of literature in the sense of belles-lettres there was but little; but the Annali of Malipiero, the Diarii of Sanudo and the Diaries of Priuli afford us a full, vivid, and veracious narrative of Venetian history, of life in the city, of the wars and intrigues of the Republic during her splendour and the beginning of her decline (1457-1535). No other Italian State can show such a monumental record of its doings as this. Written by capable men of affairs, the first a soldier, the second an official, the third a great merchant-banker, all of whom took a large part in the deeds and events they recount; written, not for publication, but to the honour and glory of that beloved San Marco “whom” to use the phrase of a later Venetian ambassador “each of us has engraved upon his heart”; written in dialect racy of the soil and of the people,—we have here a story, vigorous, vivacious, humorous; direct and simple as a ballad; a monument to the city-State that produced it; an illustration of the central principle of Venetian life that the Republic was everything, while her individual sons were of no account.
But this appearance of prosperity, of splendour, of pomp, during the latter half of the fifteenth century, masked the germs of incipient decline: the corruption of the nobles, the suspicious tyranny of the Ten, the first signs of bank failures, the drop in the value of funds, the rise of the national debt from six to thirteen millions. Land wars continued to drain the treasury; the Turkish wars, conducted by Venice single-handed, curtailed’ her Levant trade and entailed a continual outlay; worst of all, in 1486 came the news that Diaz had discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1497 that Vasco da Gama had rounded it, thereby cutting the tap-root of Venetian wealth, its Mediterranean carrying-trade, and drawing the great trade-lines of the world out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. Venice could alter neither her geographical position nor her policy. She endeavoured to come to terms with the Turk, and she continued to expand on the mainland. This course of action brought down upon her the charge of infidelity on the one hand and of insatiable greed on the other, and ended in the disastrous combination of Cambray.
After the fall of Constantinople the Turkish advance was steadily continued both south and east. Athens surrendered to the Turks in 1457; so did Sinope and Trebizond; and the loss of the Morea in 1462 brought them into immediate collision with the Republic. Venice perfectly understood that a struggle for her possessions in the Levant was inevitable sooner or later; she therefore gladly embraced Pope Pius IPs proposals for a crusade. But the lamentable failure of the undertaking, and the Pope’s death at Ancona, left the Republic to carry on, single-handed, a war she had undertaken on the promise and in the expectation of European support. Antonio Michiel, a Venetian merchant resident in Constantinople, had warned his government, in 1466, that the Sultan was mustering large forces. “I take it the fleet will number two hundred sail,” he says, “and every one here thinks Negroponte its object.” He continues in a note of serious warning that matters must not be treated lightly to the deceiving of themselves. The Turk has a way of exaggerating the enemy’s strength and arming regardless of expense. Venice had better do the same. This was in 1466; three years later the blow was ready to fall, and again Venice received warning through another merchant, Piero Dolfin, resident in Chios. Let the government, he wrote, fortify its places in the Levant and lose no time about it; “on this depends the safety of the State, for Negroponte once lost the rest of the Levant is in peril.”
But Venice, exhausted by the drain of the land wars against Visconti, was unwilling to face another and more terrible campaign by sea unless she were forced to do so. She endeavoured to open negotiations at Constantinople on the pretext that she was acting in the name of Hungary. But in 1470 Negroponte fell. The War had already cost considerably over a million ducats, and the government was reduced to suspending either two-thirds or a half of all official salaries which were over twenty-five ducats per annum. In spite of this she rejected, as extravagant, terms of peace offered her in 1476; and faced the struggle once more. Scutari was attacked by the Sultan in person, who, in his determination to enter the town, blew besieged and besiegers alike to atoms before his siege guns. But the Republic could not hold out for ever unaided; Scutari was at the last extremity; a large army was rumoured to be on its way to attack Friuli. Venice was forced to recognise the facts, and in 1479 she proposed terms of peace. Scutari, and all Venetian possessions in the Morea were ceded to the Turk. Venice agreed to pay ten thousand ducats a year for the privileges of trading, and one hundred thousand in two years, as a war indemnity; and received permission to keep an Agent (Bailo) in Constantinople.
The Peace of 1479 marks an epoch in the history of Venetian relations with the East, and indicates a return to her original policy of peaceable dealings, whenever possible, with the Turk.
In truth, the Republic had every reason to complain of the conduct of Europe. After sixteen years