72 THE STONES OF VENICE

§ 4. But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally removed to Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the present one stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it,* gave a very different character to the Square of St. Mark; and fifteen years later, the acquisition of the body of the Saint, and its deposition in the Ducal Chapel, perhaps not yet completed, occasioned the investiture of that Chapel with all possible splendour. St. Theodore was deposed from his patronship, and his church destroyed, to make room for the aggrandizement of the one attached to the Ducal Palace, and thenceforward known as “St. Mark’s.”†

§ 5. This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the Ducal Palace was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976.¹ It was partly rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo,

* My authorities for this statement are given below, in the chapter on the Ducal Palace [ pp. 336-337].

† In the Chronicles, “Sancti Marci Ducalis Cappella.”

of Diocletian he retired from the city of Corice in Phrygia into the wilderness to prepare for martyrdom, and that after five years, returning in the midst of some public games, he went into the amphitheatre in the dress of a hermit, and proclaimed himself a Christian aloud, using the words of Isaiah [lxv. 1], ‘I was found of them that sought me not, I was manifest to them that asked not after me,’ and that he then and there suffered, martyrdom under grievous torments. The ‘Padre dell’ Oratorio di Venezia,’ from whose work [see note* on p. 71] I abridge this account, does indeed fix the date of the martyrdom in 269; and as the persecution of Diocletian did not begin till 303, some slight suspicion may attach at least to the chronology of the relation, if not to its circumstances. In the accounts of St. Geminian some difficulties of this kind have been recognised by the pious writers themselves. Finding some of the actions of the saint authoritatively described as having taken place in the reign of the Emperor-[word indecipherable], and others in the time of Attila, they have dexterously reconciled the accounts by a postulate of two St. Geminians, both bishops of Modena.”

For the more generally accepted legend of St. Geminian, the subject of many pictures in, or painted for, churches of Modena, see Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, ed. 1850, p. 417. On the dates of various parts of St. Mark’s, see Vol. IX. p. 6.]

¹ [Pietro Candiano IV. (959-976), who commenced his public career by rebellion against his father, ended it by the suspicion he engendered that he was aiming at absolute sovereignty. He was surrounded by the populace, and the palace was fired: see H. F. Brown’s Venice, 1895, p. 59. The reign of his successor, Pietro Orseolo I. (976-978), was mainly concerned with repairing the ravages of the fire, which had destroyed the palace, the church, and many private houses. He summoned workmen from Constantinople, and devoted the bulk of his private fortune to the new Basilica of St. Mark. He then abdicated in order to enter a monastery: see St. Mark’s Rest, ch. ix. “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” (by A. Wedderburn), § 145, where the mosaic of him in the Baptistery is described; see also below, ch. viii. § 10 and n.]

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