420 APPENDIX, 5

extract from the letter of a friend, who will not at present permit me to give his name, but who is certainly better conversant with the records of the Venetian State than any other Englishman,¹ will be of great value to the general reader:-

“In the year 1410, or perhaps at the close of the thirteenth century, churchmen were excluded from the grand Council and declared ineligible to civil employments; and in this same year, 1410, the Council of Ten, with the Giunta, decreed that whenever in the state’s councils matters concerning ecclesiastical affairs were being treated, all the kinsfolk of Venetian beneficed clergymen were to be expelled; and, in the year 1434, the RELATIONS of churchmen were declared ineligible to the post of ambassador at Rome.

“The Venetians never gave possession of any see in their territories to bishops unless they had been proposed to the pope by the senate, which elected the patriarch, who was supposed, at the end of the sixteenth century, to be liable to examination by his Holiness, as an act of confirmation or installation; but, of course, everything depended on the relative power at any given time of Rome and Venice: for instance, a few days after the accession of Julius II., in 1503, he requests the Signory, cap in hand, to ALLOW him to confer the archbishopric of Zara on a dependent of his, one Cipico, the Bishop of Famagosta. Six years later, when Venice was overwhelmed by the leaguers of Cambrai, that furious pope would assuredly have conferred Zara on Cipico WITHOUT asking leave. In 1608, the rich Camaldolite Abbey of Vangadizza, in the Polesine, fell vacant through the death of Lionardo Loredano, in whose family it had been since some while. The Venetian ambassador at Rome received the news on the night of the 28th December; and, on the morrow, requested Paul IV. not to dispose of this preferment until he heard from the senate. The pope talked of ‘poor cardinals’ and of his nephew, but made no positive reply; and, as Francesco Contarini was withdrawing, said to him: ‘My Lord ambassador, with this opportunity we will inform you that, to our very great regret, we understand that the chiefs of the Ten mean to turn sacristans; for they order the parish priests to close the church doors at the Ave Maria, and not to ring the bells at certain hours. This is precisely the sacristan’s office; we don’t know why their lordships, by printed edicts, which we have seen, choose to interfere in this matter. This is pure and mere ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and even, in case of any inconvenience arising, is there not the patriarch, who is at any rate your own; why not apply to him, who could remedy these irregularities? These are matters which cause us very notable

¹ [Doubtless Rawdon Brown (1803-1883), who resided in Venice from 1833 until his death, occupied in researches among the Venetian archives. In 1862 he received an appointment to calendar those Venetian State papers which treated of English history. He used to say that he went to Venice to find the tomb of the Duke of Norfolk, who “there at Venice gave his body to that pleasant country’s earth” (Richard II., iv. 1, 98); that he became interested in the place, and stayed on for the rest of his life, eventually finding the tomb (see Introduction to next volume). He was an “old crony” of Robert Browning (see the Sonnet in the Century Magazine, February 1884) and a “very dear friend” of Ruskin: see Præterita, iii. ch. i. § 6, and a letter of May 10, 1862, printed in Letters upon Subjects of General Interest from John Ruskin to Various Correspondents, 1892, p. 42 (reprinted in a later volume of this edition). For references to Brown’s Venetian researches, see Relation of Michael Angelo and Tintoret, and Stones of Venice, vols. ii. and iii. passim (see General Index), and also Introduction to next volume.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]