The Complete Travel Books of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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and they yearly suffered death in these animals, which were slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San Marco amid a great concourse of the people, in the presence of the Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had distinguished themselves in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild was allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and swine. Great art was shown in striking off the bull’s head at one blow, without suffering the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal’s neck; the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which I think most people will discern only a natural wish to discontinue in more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin himself finds no evidence of “state pride” in the abolition of the slaughter of the swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a long time, though I believe not till the fall of the Republic.
Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of Treviso made an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of the surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood exquisitely decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the fairest Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits, bonbons, and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of attack were much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in tender prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Venice sent their gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to take part in this famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle of Love, as it was called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak point. These young men were better skilled in the arts of war than their allies; they were richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils of the recent sack of Constantinople, and at the moment they neared the castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged by throwing handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the conduct of the Venetians in some manner roused the Paduans to insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an instant the standard of St. Mark was thrown down and trampled under the feet of the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the combatants out of their city. The spark of war spreading to the rival cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and three hundred of their number were made prisoners. These they would willingly have ransomed at any price, but their enemies would not release them except on the payment of two white pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was paid in the Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of the Venetians, who, never wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should, like the patriarch, repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge Ziani judged the single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly celebration of the feast.
One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from his seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark’s Church, in front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given in the Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for equestrian feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet’s account of these in a city where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a dog. But in the age of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and rode up and down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great campos.
Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed a chief part of a show of which he “does not know if in the whole world there has been seen the equal,” Petrarch says: “It was a gentle sight to see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with the rein and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground.” And it must have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before the “golden façade of the temple,” in a place so packed with spectators “that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great piazza, the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the windows, all were—I will not say full, but running over, walled and paved with people.” At the right of the church was built a great platform, on which sat “four hundred honestest gentlewomen, chosen from the flower of the nobility, and distinguished in their dress and bearing, who, amid the continual homage offered them morning, noon, and night, presented the image of a celestial congress.” Some noblemen, come hither by chance, “from the part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of their King, were present,” and attracted the notice of the poet. The feasts lasted many days, but on the third day Petrarch excused himself to the Doge, pleading, he says, his “ordinary occupations, already known to all.”
Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day of the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons and beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host with the fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually assisted at mass in St. Mark’s in honor of the victory, but not long afterward the celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely similar defeat of the Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into Europe. In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of Treviso to her.
Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that held for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most remarkable feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria, all the way from St. Mark’s to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded with golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers imagined it. The pictures of the famous painters of that day, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the end near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the Turks at the Dardanelles were celebrated by a regatta, in 1658; and Morosini’s brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other magnificent shows.
The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to Mutinelli, 35 originated among the lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the military discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow and cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles and plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each other in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy early in the fourteenth century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to account, and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably, however, to the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy, the patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where horse and donkey races were the favorite amusement, the riders were of both sexes; and now at Venice women also entered into the rivalry of the regatta. But in gallant deference to their weakness, they were permitted to begin the course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna di Mare, while the men were obliged to start from the Public Gardens. They followed the Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the present railway station, and there doubling a pole planted in the water near the Ponte della Croce, returned to the common goal before the Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding to which the different prizes were attached. The first boat carried off a red banner;