22 THE STONES OF VENICE

State,* and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it is usually conceived.† In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons;¹ and in 1508 the league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power;‡ the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.

§ 6. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of

* Daru, liv. [book] xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the discovery of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.

† It has been indeed conceived under this form; and was assuredly in many respects “mysterious,” and in some acts “perfidious.” I believe it merits the title, in the essential spirit of its government, as much as “perfide Albion.” [1879.]

‡ Ominously signified by their humiliation to the Papal power (as before to the Turkish) in 1509, and their abandonment of their right of appointing the clergy of their territories.

¹ [The Treaty referred to in the preceding note provided but a short truce. The Turks pursued their career of conquest throughout the Levant, and the Republic was left by Europe to resist the invasion single-handed. At last Venice wearied of the conflict, and after a period of negotiation, 1476-1478, made an inglorious peace in 1479. Thereupon Europe combining against the surrender of Venice to the Turk on the one side, and her constant aggressions on the other, formed the League of Cambrai, by which France, the Emperor, the King of Spain, the Pope, the King of Hungary, and the Dukes of Savoy and France, united to deprive the Republic of her possessions on the mainland.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]