44 THE STONES OF VENICE

as well as of the saint; the latter were put in a marble sarcophagus, and the former hung up over the high altar.

§ 11. But the clergy of St. Stefano were indomitable. At the very moment when their adversaries had received this formidable accession of strength, they had the audacity “ad onta de’ replicati giuramenti, e dell’ inveterata consuetudine,”* to refuse to continue in the obedience which they had vowed to their mother church. The matter was tried in a provincial council; the votaries of St. Stephen were condemned, and remained quiet for about twenty years, in wholesome dread of the authority conferred on the abbot of St. Donato, by the Pope’s legate, to suspend any of the clergy of the island from their office if they refused submission. In 1172, however, they appealed to Pope Alexander III., and were condemned again: and we find the struggle renewed at every promising opportunity, during the course of the 12th and 13th centuries; until at last, finding St. Donato and the dragon together too strong for him, the abbot of St. Stefano “discovered” in his church the bodies of two hundred martyrs at once!-a discovery, it is to be remembered, in some sort equivalent in those days to that of California in ours.¹ The inscription, however, on the façade of the church recorded it with quiet dignity:- “MCCCLXXIV. a dí XIV. di Aprile. Furono trovati nella presente chiesa del protomartire San Stefano, duecento e più corpi de’ Santi Martiri, dal Ven. Prete Matteo Fradello, piovano della chiesa.”† Corner, who gives this inscription, which no longer exists, goes on to explain with infinite

* Notizie Storiche delle Chiese di Venezia, illustrate da Flaminio Corner (Padua, 1758), p. 615. [“In spite of repeated oaths and long established usage.”]

† “On the 14th day of April, 1374, there were found, in the church of the first martyr St. Stefano, two hundred and more bodies of holy martyrs, by the venerable priest, Matthew Fradello, incumbent of the church.”

¹ [An allusion specially appropriate at the time this book was written; cf. Vol. IX. p. 290; for the “covetousness” of early Venice for other things besides money-for relics, chiefly, thus making the discovery of the bodies of two hundred martyrs as valuable to them as the gold discoveries in California to us-see St. Mark’s Rest, §§ 3, 4.]

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