The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (20 page)

This was too much for Doge Foscari. His enemies had at last triumphed and he withdrew into his chambers at the Doge’s Palace, where he took no further part in ‘the governance of the Republic’. His absence at the various committee meetings over which the doge was required to preside left the Republic leaderless. Faced with a dangerous power vacuum, the Loredan faction decided to act, and when Jacopo Loredan was once again elected a leader of the Council of Ten in October 1457, they voted for the creation of a
zonta
, with twenty-five selected members added to their number to form an emergency committee. Without informing the
zonta
of the reason why it had been called, Loredan had its members sworn to secrecy, on pain of a 1,000-ducat fine and exclusion from public office for life. On 21 October, Loredan then proposed a resolution requiring the now-ineffective doge to resign, which after three votes eventually secured the requisite majority.

Despite Foscari’s frailty and near-despair, he refused to obey this
resolution, pointing out that according to the statutes of the Republic only a vote by the Great Council, supported by the members of the Signoria, could demand such action. This proved a setback, but by nightfall of the following day Loredan had managed to persuade the
zonta
of the necessity to go ahead, regardless of such legal niceties. Speed was of the essence if they were to succeed in ousting Foscari. However, when the delegation from the
zonta
arrived at the doge’s apartments to inform him of these developments, they were told that he had already retired to bed, so no further action could be taken that day.

Consequently, on the morning of Sunday 23 October, a delegation from the
zonta
demanded an audience with the doge, at which he was issued with an ultimatum: either he resigned and vacated the Doge’s Palace within eight days or he would be removed by force, stripped of his possessions and all his family properties would be confiscated. Faced with the prospect of eking out his last days abandoned as a disgraced pauper, Foscari caved in. There followed a humiliating ceremony in which he was stripped of his symbols of office. This too was witnessed by Dolfin, who saw the doge’s ring pulled from Foscari’s finger and ritually destroyed; then the
corno
was lifted from his head, its horn and gold braid symbolically cut off. The following day Francesco Foscari was escorted from the Doge’s Palace, insisting upon using his walking stick as his sole support to descend the main stairway. He still retained his pride: when it was suggested that he turn off and descend by the smaller stairway leading to the side entrance, he replied, ‘I shall descend by the same stairway as that which I ascended to take up my office.’ When he stepped onto the boat waiting at the quayside, he is said to have remarked, ‘The malice of my enemies has driven me from the office to which I was raised by my own talents.’ He was then rowed down the Grand Canal to take up residence in the Ca’ Foscari, the palace that he had built some years previously in the hope that his son Jacopo would one day be permitted to take up residence again in Venice. After Jacopo’s death the building had remained incomplete, in a state of some disrepair, devoid of furnishings, without even any glass in the windows. And it was here that Foscari was to live out the last days of his life.

When news that Foscari had been deposed spread through Venice it
caused a sensation. The people, the artisans, the merchants and many of the nobles from all factions were shocked. Foscari’s previous misdemeanours were now overlooked; he was venerated as a result of his years in office, and many empathised with the hapless father of a son gone to the bad. According to Dolfin: ‘the grumblings amongst the citizens rose as if from amongst the very stones of the city’s foundations.’ But just as Loredan and his accomplices had intended, Venice had been confronted with a fait accompli: it was too late for anything to be done now, given the state of Foscari’s health. Any attempt to reinstate him would probably have killed him. And with crude haste the victors were soon making sure that history, and their part in it, was being rewritten. When the Great Council was summoned for the election of a new doge, the official proclamation declared that Foscari had merely been ‘absolved’ from office on account of his ‘inability to exercise his powers because of his old age’.

Nine days after taking up residence in his derelict mansion Francesco Foscari died at the age of eighty-four, on 1 November 1457. The hurriedly elected new doge, Pasquale Malipiero, and his Signoria, were informed of Foscari’s death while they were attending the All Saints’ Day service in San Marco, and according to the ever-present Dolfin they were visibly stricken with guilt, exchanging cowed glances with one another, ‘for they were fully aware that they were the ones who had brought his life to an end’. To allay their conscience, Doge Malipiero ordered that Foscari’s body should be laid out in the Doge’s Palace dressed in his doge’s robes, with his restored
corno
placed on his head, ‘so that he could lie in state and the burial rites could be carried out as if he had died in office’. The hypocrisy that had characterised Venice’s imperial foreign policy had now spread to the very heart of the Republic.

*
This temporary bridge was some 300 yards north of the present Accademia bridge and crossed almost a hundred yards of open water. The palazzo of Leonardo Contarini was just one of several contemporary Contarini residences, of which the superb Ca’ d’Oro on the east side of the Grand Canal remains the best known.

7

Colleoni

D
URING
F
OSCARI
’
S
LONG
reign Venice had been almost continuously at war with Milan for nearly thirty years. Despite the difficulties encountered with Carmagnola, the Republic had continued to hire
condottieri
to conduct this war. The last of these was Bartolomeo Colleoni, who was born the son of local squire Paolo Colleoni in around 1400 in Bergamo, the foothills of the Alps some twenty miles east of Milan.

During the chaotic years following the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan in 1402, when his sons fought for the duchy, Paolo took the opportunity to seize the large nearby castle of Trezzo, inviting four of his exiled cousins to come and help him defend this newly acquired family possession. Not long after this, whilst Paolo was playing draughts, his cousins burst in and murdered him. The young Bartolomeo managed to escape to the mountains, and after spending a brief period in prison he entered service as a pageboy at the fortified palazzo of Arcelli, lord of Piacenza, just south of Milan – until once more disaster struck. By now Filippo Maria Visconti and his
condottiere
Carmagnola had begun reuniting Milanese territory, and Piacenza soon fell to their forces, with Arcelli forced to witness his sons and brothers being impaled on the battlements by the vengeful Visconti. Once again Batolomeo Colleoni was forced to flee for his life.

By now around sixteen, Colleoni decided to journey south to Naples, where he sought employment as a mercenary soldier with the
condottiere
Jacopo Caldora. During these years the kingdom of Naples was in even greater disarray than the duchy of Milan. The titular ruler, the forty-three-year-old Queen Johanna II, had named her heir as the Spanish king, Alfonso of Aragon, but this was disputed by the French king Louis III of
Anjou, who had the backing of Pope Martin V. Later, she would switch her allegiance to Louis III, further complicating matters as the French and Spanish attempted to establish their hold on Naples. This all made for rich pickings for the
condottieri
leading the various armies, who were themselves liable to switch sides if offered sufficient inducement in terms of money or some minor title with its own territory.

Colleoni’s commander, Caldora, remained for the most part in the service of Queen Johanna II, and over the next decade or so Colleoni served with such distinction that he was given charge of twenty cavalry, and later of another dozen. His daring exploits also seem to have brought him to the attention of Johanna II herself, who may well have been attracted to more than his military prowess, for she awarded him a badge bearing her personal insignia, which he would continue to wear into battle for the rest of his life.

Finally, at the age of twenty-four Colleoni was given effective charge of the army that Caldora had entrusted to his young son, so that he could seize territory for himself in the north-eastern province of the Romagna. For five years Colleoni campaigned in northern Italy, but in 1429 decided against returning to Naples. Instead, leading a squadron of forty cavalry, he enlisted with Carmagnola, who was by now established as the commander of the Venetian forces fighting against Milan.

Once again Colleoni soon came to prominence. In October 1431, when Carmagnola was camped outside Cremona, Colleoni was one of the young officers who – together with Ugolino Cavalcabo, son of the murdered lord of Cremona – took the initiative and attempted under cover of darkness to seize the tower of San Luca, the key to the city’s defences. According to Colleoni’s near-contemporary biographer Pietro Spino, Colleoni ‘showed conspicuous heroism in this assault. After being the first to climb the battlements, he then killed the soldiers and the commander guarding the tower.’ Colleoni and his intrepid fellow raiders not only took the tower, but managed to hold on to it for two days, facing the full brunt of the Cremonese defenders. Only then did it become evident to them that Carmagnola had no intention of taking the city, and they were forced to withdraw at further risk to their lives.

After Carmagnola was put to death, Colleoni continued to serve as a senior commander of the Venetian forces, distinguishing himself on a
number of occasions. One of these involved his birthplace Bergamo. Although at the time Bergamo remained unarmed and quasi-independent, the celebrated Milanese
condottiere
Niccolò Piccinino had decided to seize the city and use it as his winter quarters. In preparation for this, Piccinino unleashed thousands of his mercenaries over the surrounding countryside, ordering them to raze any threatening fortresses, as well as to seize all the grain, wine and supplies they could find to provide victuals for their long winter months holed up in Bergamo. ‘All that could not be carried away was destroyed, the villages robbed and burned, the castles pillaged, so that the valleys were emptied and the entire land reduced to a hideous desolation.’ Hearing of this, Colleoni decided on a daring plan to thwart Piccinino, whom he knew had not yet taken Bergamo. Although Colleoni only had 300 infantry at his disposal, he marched quickly under cover of darkness through the burning and ravaged countryside, aware that at any moment he might be overwhelmed by a superior force of Piccinino’s mercenaries. On reaching Bergamo, he slammed closed the gates and mounted the battlement, his small force supported by eager volunteers from amongst the local citizens. By the time Piccinino arrived, the weather had broken, with rain and snow rendering any possibility of a siege out of the question. Piccinino was forced to order his men on an ignominious retreat to Milan, where Duke Filippo Maria Visconti was not pleased at the prospect of having to provide for an unruly mercenary army that was expected to fend for itself.

However, perhaps the greatest of Colleoni’s accomplishments was not, strictly speaking, a military victory at all, but more an engineering feat – namely, the relief of Brescia by launching the Venetian fleet on Lake Garda. This has often been ascribed to the Venetian military engineer Sorbolo of Candia, but was in fact Colleoni’s idea, just as it was his urging that convinced the Council of Ten to go ahead with it. He also closely oversaw the project, in much the same way that Hannibal organised the passage of the Carthaginian army and its elephants across the Alps. Indeed, in its own minor way Colleoni’s feat stands some comparison with that of Hannibal.

In the autumn of 1438, Piccinino launched the Milanese forces in a surprise advance east of Venetian-held Brescia, cutting off the city’s supply lines around the southern shore of Lake Garda from Venice. This meant
that the strategic city of Brescia faced the prospect of an entire winter under siege, which it was unlikely to survive. The only way for Venice to have attempted to relieve the siege would have been to march an army around the mountainous northern tip of the lake, but this was soon found to be out of the question now that the autumn rains had flooded the rivers, turning them into raging torrents, and the snow had begun falling in the mountains. In no time the city of Brescia was starving, its people reduced to eating the cats and dogs, even grazing on weeds. The population of 30,000 would soon be halved, and at night the wolves began coming down from the mountains to scavenge the dead.

It was now that Colleoni proposed his daring plan. Venice should sail a fleet of ships up the River Adige north as far as Rovereto. Here they could be lifted ashore, dragged over the mountain and relaunched from the northern shore of Lake Garda, from where provisions could be shipped across the lake, whence they could be transported to Brescia. Although Rovereto lay less than ten miles from the northern end of Lake Garda, the mountains in between the river and the lake rose to around 6,000 feet. Despite such difficulties, Colleoni’s engineer, Sabalo, was soon persuaded that this plan was feasible and, even more surprisingly, Colleoni managed to persuade the Council of Ten to finance the undertaking. Despite the administration’s malaise, it was still on occasion capable of that same bold and adventurous spirit that had characterised the age of Marco Polo and the Zeno brothers.