The Doge is slipping away

‘His Serenity [the Doge] remains the same: he is slipping away. The doctors have concluded that he may linger two or three days. There is a full moon tonight. It is believed that he will not live until morning.’ This is from the historically important diaries kept by the Venetian historian Marino Sanudo, born 560 years ago today.

Marino Sanudo - often called Marin Sanudo the Younger to distinguish him from his medieval ancestor Marino Sanudo Torsello - was born in Venice, on 22 May 1466, into a patrician family connected to the political life of the republic. His father, Leonardo Sanudo, was a senator and diplomat, but died while Marino was still young, leaving the boy financially insecure despite noble status.

Sanudo was educated within the humanist culture of Renaissance Venice and showed literary and antiquarian interests very early; as a teenager he was already compiling works on classical mythology and collecting inscriptions and manuscripts. In 1483 he travelled through Istria and the Venetian mainland territories accompanying an official inspection mission, afterwards producing a detailed account of the journey.

In 1484, Sanudo entered the Maggior Consiglio, the Great Council of Venice, unusually young for the office, and by 1498 had become a senator. He devoted himself to public affairs, historical writing and scholarship, attending councils, studying state archives and building an enormous private library. He was closely associated with the learned and printing circles around Aldus Manutius, and throughout his adult life produced histories, political works and chronicles concerning Venice and Italy. 

Although ambitious for official recognition, Sanudo repeatedly suffered disappointment, most notably when the republic passed him over for the prestigious post of official historian in favour first of Andrea Navagero and later Pietro Bembo. He married Cecilia Priuli in 1505; the marriage produced no legitimate male heirs, though he had two illegitimate daughters. Increasing illness forced him to stop writing in 1533; he died in Venice in 1536. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Luca’s Italy, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sanudo’s fame rests overwhelmingly on his monumental Diarii, a vast day-by-day chronicle of Venetian and European affairs covering the years 1496 to 1533. Written in Venetian vernacular rather than polished literary Italian, the diaries record almost everything that passed before him - senate debates, diplomatic gossip, shipping news, ceremonies, wars, plague outbreaks, executions, scandals, trade disputes and elections. Running to 58 printed volumes and around forty thousand manuscript pages, they have been described as one of the most detailed historical records ever compiled by a single individual. Because Venice sat at the centre of Mediterranean trade and diplomacy, the diaries became not merely a local chronicle but an extraordinary source for the political and social history of Renaissance Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

The diaries remained unpublished during Sanudo’s lifetime and, after his death, were effectively buried within Venetian archives for centuries. Their modern rediscovery transformed historians’ understanding of Renaissance Venice. Between 1879 and 1903 the full Italian text was finally published in 58 volumes under the editorship of Rinaldo Fulin and others, an edition still heavily used today. Only selections have appeared in English translation, notably Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo (Johns Hopkins University Press, c2008), which introduced modern English-speaking readers to Sanudo’s vivid eyewitness accounts of Venetian public life. The text can be sampled at Googlebooks, and digitally borrowed at Internet Archive.

19 June 1521

‘The news is that the Ducal Palace has begun to be vacated, and the doge’s children have rented the house of the primerio at San Filippo Giacomo and are sending their things there. Today they openly had the firewood loaded on barges and transported to the new house, and this went on all night. The only things that remain are the benches and what is in the [private] rooms, especially in the doge’s room, to protect him from contamination. His Serenity remains the same: he is slipping away. The doctors have concluded that he may linger two or three days. There is a full moon tonight. It is believed that he will not live until morning.’

22 June 1521

‘This morning at eight hours past sunset I heard for certain that our Most Serene Prince had died but that it is being kept secret. I was in the Ducal Palace, and his son ser Lorenzo Loredan, the procurator, was in the hall with many patricians, and they were saying the doge was doing better, and yet he was dead.

They sent word of the death to the Signoria, who decided to ring the death knell at sixteen hours in order that the doge’s son ser Alvise, who is ill, could move a note from the Ducal Palace to the house of the primerio that they have rented at San Filippo Giacomo.’

6 July 1521

‘And thus they [the new doge and a number of officials] went to sit in the Great Council, and then came the state attorneys and the heads of the Council of Ten, dressed in silk, and His Serenity’s son, ser Vincenzo Grimani, dressed in gray cloth because he has taken a vow and refused to wear a colored garment. The doge’s grandsons ser Marco and ser Vettor Grimani, the sons of his late son, ser Hieronimo, were there on the tribunal dressed in silk, and there were pages holding fans and bringing a cool breeze to His Serenity, and all of the kinsfolk of the Grimani house and others were there, dressed in silk and in scarlet cloth. And the whole city came to take his hand, and he welcomed them all. And I, Marin Sanudo, attended because I was related and well liked by His Serenity, and he greeted me warmly, kissing my cheek four times, and I kissed his hand, weeping with joy.

The whole city ran into Piazza San Marco. It was decided that at twenty-two hours the doge would be carried into the church and around the Piazza. Bells were rung at San Marco and in all the churches, and this evening there will be fireworks and bells, and it will go on like that for three days. The Signoria immediately sent word to the Mint to strike coins with the name Antonio Grimani Doge, coins worth 16, 8, and 4 soldi. Thus 300 ducats were struck.’