Chapter VII: Canto XVI

“The great Baron, he whose name and worth
The festival of Thomas still recalls.”

Ugo’s granddaughter was the famous Countess Matilda, the virile ruler of all Tuscany and the beneficent foundress of the liberties of Florence.

Countess Valdrada brought to her ducal husband as rich a dowry as any of the royal brides of Venice had brought. Estates at Trivigiano, Friuli, Ferrara, and Adria, with castles and well-trained retainers; a host of slaves, and money-bags well filled with gold, enriched and ennobled proud Pietro Candiano.

At her betrothal a custom entirely new to the Venetians was introduced, the so-called “Morgencap” or “Mundio” whereby the Doge conferred a fourth part of his private income upon his consort. Never stepped upon the Piazzetta a prouder Dogaressa. Had she been own daughter of the Emperor she could not have borne herself more haughtily, nor have treated both her husband and his suite more disdainfully. The acclamations of the populace she treated with ill-concealed contempt and turned to ridicule the decorations in her honour.

The Venetians were to a man noted for their self-esteem and high bearing and the keynote of their character was a spirit of proud and contemptuous isolation, but they regarded this display of feminine arrogance with annoyance and disgust. To add to the unfavourable impression Valdrada made, the armed Florentine guard, which accompanied her and stood sentry at her beck and call, called forth violent protests. Altogether the Doge’s marriage was not an unmixed blessing to himself or his people. Nevertheless Pietro and Valdrada seemed happy together: he humoured her petulance and she fanned his self-esteem. Two children were the fruits of this union, Pietro and Marina.

Two important questions were exercising men’s minds in Venice what time Dogaressa Valdrada mounted the ducal throne--the treatment of slaves and the expedition against the Saracens. With the first Valdrada was keenly interested, indeed it was the spectacle of her retinue of slaves, and their abject condition, that drew special attention to a very knotty question.

The Doge tried to persuade his wife to dismiss these unfortunate people, or at all events to reduce their number, but her ill-conditioned temper would brook no interference. She threw in his teeth the fact that she was the special _protégée_ of the Emperor, a descendant of a royal race, and the first Italian Dogaressa to share the honours of the dogado.

Valdrada was a virago in more senses than one--clever she was and talented, as well as strong-willed and hard-hearted. To her directly was due the introduction from Tuscany of the Roman bull-fight, and this took the quiet and undemonstrative Venetians by storm, and, incidentally, led to the division of the community into two camps--the Castellani and the Nicolotti.

Rings were formed at the Lido each Monday in September and October when the whole of Venice thronged the beach in gondolas. In November the rendezvous was moved to the gardens of Olivolo, by the church of San Pietro di Castello; and December saw the bull-baiting transferred to the site of the Piazza. The Dogaressa was accustomed to preside at these combats in person, assuming all the attributes of a sovereign. Popular enough were the sports, for very shrewdly, she added prizes for athletic contests of all kinds and for regattas on the canals; but the patricians looked on with anything but kindly eyes.

Doge Pietro IV. was, perhaps, the proudest of all the proud men who ever occupied the highest position in the Commonwealth, and his wife’s assumptions and pretensions added greatly to his self-importance. His name of derision in Rialto was “Superbossimo,” the “Vain-glorious!” His _entourage_ was largely composed of unscrupulous Tuscans, truculent Greeks and self-seeking Germans: he kept royal state and treated the nobles and the officials with coldness and disdain. At the same time he rallied all the different branches of his family, which were established in and about Padua and Vicenza, and formed a family league which threatened to overthrow the constitution of Venice.

Startled at last, by the imminence of the danger to their liberties, nobles and citizens took arms, in the autumn of 976, and marched to the Ducal palace. They were received by a deadly volley from the foreign mercenaries, and, maddened by this treachery, the people acted with a promptitude which admitted of no quarter. Fire was laid to the great portal of the palace, and logs of wood dipped in pitch were flung through the closed windows.

FROM A PRINT. 1560.

“Habiti Delle Donne.”--G. Franco.]

The flames spread rapidly, and eventually enveloped more than three hundred houses, and the splendid churches of San Marco, San Teodoro, and Santa Maria Zobenigo. The lust for vengeance and destruction swept over the calm, but, if once roused, impetuous, populace, and nobody and nothing was spared.

The Doge fled distractedly from room to room, holding in his arms his only boy--the infant Pietro. The Dogaressa with Marina rushed panic-stricken after him. Escape from the crumbling blazing ruins was only possible by a little wicket which gave upon the courtyard of San Marco. Here, progress was stayed by a posse of armed nobles and citizens, among whom the unhappy Doge recognised several of his personal friends. Of the latter he begged his life and the safety of his family.

“You, my friends,” he cried in anguish, “have chosen to join in my destruction. If I have transgressed in any way, either in words or actions, I crave my life, whilst I promise to satisfy every demand. Speak and let me pass.”

Words were of no avail, such justice as the popular will required was swift and drastic. Not one, but many swords clove through ducal bonnet and robe of state, and Doge Pietro Candiano IV. lay quivering, a livid mass upon that blood-dyed floor. Not content with this butchery brutal hands seized the unoffending princeling, and neither his innocence nor Valdrada’s pleas sufficed to save him. She was cast aside as a foul thing too hateful for any man to slay, and her child was impaled upon a spear, stuck into the body of his father!

At eventide a poor man, one who abhorred the foul deed, Giovanni Gradenigo, came with a company of pious friends and took away the mutilated bodies and laid them reverently in the crypt of Sant’ Ilario.

The Dogaressa, with her young daughter Marina, succeeded in escaping,--perhaps she was allowed to do so to avoid difficulties with the Imperial Court and the arrogant Marquis of Tuscany. She fled to Verona and threw herself at the feet of the Empress Adelheid the Emperor’s mother, who resided there.

To be avenged of the Venetians was now her one and only purpose. Her imperious temperament yielded to a violence of hatred almost diabolical in its intensity. She appealed to Otto to set fire to Venice, to take the nobles captive, to cast the citizens into prison, and to make slaves of the women and children! She demanded the repayment of the gold she had carried with her to Venice, the restitution by the Candiani of the estates with which she had dowered her husband, and demanded a huge tribute by way of compensation for her wrongs.

Pietro Orseolo, who had been elected Doge, after the assassination of Pietro Candiano, by the tumultuous voice of the people, despatched Domenigo Grimani to Piacenza where the Emperor was in residence to discuss the claims of the widowed Dogaressa. By a rare display of urbanity and tact Valdrada’s vehemence was soothed, her claims modified, and an agreement was come to agreeable to all parties.

She acknowledged her love for her husband and exclaimed before the full Court:--“A wife is not given by nature to be her husband’s judge but as his companion.” She refused however to enter a convent, as became a widowed Dogaressa, but returned to her brother’s Court in Tuscany, and apparently ended her days at the castle of Pisa at the end of 997. By her will, dated 24th November of that year, she bequeathed a castle and an estate situated in the Adige to her brother, who gave them to the abbey of Vangadizza.

The web of human life, strained at times and knotted, is never long spun out before romance and tragedy cross it in the woof. Each man and woman’s work in the tapestry of fate is run with needles sharp and blunt. None need look to fiction for inspiration whilst fact is so devious and so amazing. Cupid and Mars ever were inveterate enemies; but “Love’s Labour” is _never_ “Lost”--for Love is stronger, after all, than death!

The love-story of Gerardo Guoro and Elena Candiano is as touching as any in the gentle annals of romance. She was the daughter of Doge Pietro Candiano III.,--a girl in whose veins coursed the bluest of noble Venetian blood, whilst her lover was base-born, though of a respectable family. He was probably as the Venetian proverb has it “_Erser in Candia_,”--“Without a farthing in his pocket!” Such unequal affairs of the heart, as the world has always called them, are just where the romance of love runs riot!

It was so when Gerardo and Elena, the originals of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” plighted their troth secretly, and told nobody but Elena’s doting old nurse Marta, who contrived the interviews, bore the messages, and shielded the secret from the Doge and Dogaressa.

Perhaps matters might have gone differently “had not Cupid,” as the Bard of Avon says, in his “Much Ado About Nothing,” “spent all his arrows in Venice!” With the very first bud of their rosetree of happiness, alas, gallant Gerardo was summoned to join his company and to embark for the Orient. Elena’s mother, noting the girl’s tearful pallor, decided that matrimony was the only remedy.

“A maiden fretting
Is cured by wedding.”

A very eligible partner appeared duly on the scene, one Messir Vettor Belegno, a patrician of ripe age and wealthy, whose widowed home looked for a new mistress. Broken-hearted Elena refused her rich paramour, but a daughter of the Doge has no will of her own, and the marriage contract was duly signed, and she, more dead than alive, ever fretting for her absent Gerardo, was led to her nuptials in San Pietro di Castello.

The fatal knot was tied, but it had nearly compassed a fatality, for, no sooner had the ring of the wedded wife been slipped upon her finger, than poor Elena, clad in her bridal garb of purity, swooned in Belegno’s arms. A speechless awe pervaded the brilliant wedding party, for when the beauteous bride came not back again to consciousness, the Bishop pronounced her dead! The joyous notes of the nuptial ceremony were abruptly changed to the dirge of burial, and, there, wrapped in her bridal dress, she lay crowned with fresh spring flowers until a place was prepared for her cold body in the crypt.

As fate would have it the morrow of her funeral, when the fair alabaster-like form of the lovely girl lay alone in that dark place, saw brave Gerardo’s troop of gallant warriors landed at the Lido. News of the tragedy was swiftly conveyed to the fleet, and the disconsolate young husband hastened fearfully to the old church on Olivolo. Slipping aside the heavy marble cover of Elena’s tomb, he kneeled upon his knees imploring Heaven’s pardon and Heaven’s favour.

Then, in a paroxysm of grief he stretched his body along the silent form of his beloved one, and, looking into her eyes, he pressed his breast to hers, and there they lay. Presently he is conscious of a pulse and a movement in the bridal shrouded corpse, and, joy of joys, her eyes open, and she knows that her Gerardo has come home to claim her!

Beside himself with transports of love and sorrow he carries the unresisting girl to his mother, by whose care and Gerardo’s kisses, she is nursed back to life and happiness. But who shall break the news to the Doge and Dogaressa? Gerardo answers the query manfully. He has gained laurels in the East, and his grateful city has honours to bestow. Kneeling before the Doge to receive his guerdon he bravely recounts the story he has to tell. The Doge is incredulous, but confirmation is ready to hand, when his daughter, running to Gerardo, takes his hand in hers, and craves her father’s benediction.

The bridegroom of the tragedy gracefully stepping aside renounces, quite nobly, the marriage dowry, and joins the Doge and Dogaressa in sanctioning Elena’s secret wedding with Gerardo. As story-books relate--they lived ever after in perfect happiness and great content.