Free The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova by Paul Strathern Page B

When the messengers came ashore, we soon learned what had happened … a great victory had been won in Crete, the enemy slain or captured, the loyal citizens of the republic rescued, the cities captured, and the island once more belonged to Venice!
    For years now there had been little to celebrate in Venice and, despite the somewhat premature nature of this news, the city launched into three days of enthusiastic celebration, with jousting, displays of horsemanship and mock-battles staged in the Piazza San Marco before the doge on his throne, with Petrarch sitting at his right hand.
    The sixty-year-old Petrarch was a guest in the city, having fled there two years earlier to escape from an outbreak of plague in nearby Padua. He had arrived with his extensive library, in the form of bales of manuscripts strapped to the backs of a lengthy string of packhorses. The city was honoured to receive such a celebrated guest, and Petrarch was offered the free use of the Ca’ Molina delle due Torri (Palazzo of the Two Towers) overlooking themain harbour, in return for which he promised that on his death he would donate to the city his library, which is known to have contained some 200 codices of priceless manuscripts and books that he had collected during the long years of his travels through Europe. * His fervent wish was that his collection should form the core of a great library used by visiting scholars, in conscious echo of the ancient Library of Alexandria, which had been used by the likes of Euclid, Archimedes and Plutarch.
    Petrarch enjoyed the company of many friends in high places in Venice, most notably Benintendi dei Ravignani, the Grand Chancellor of the city, † ‘who would arrive on his gondola at dusk, after his fatiguing day’s work, and we would relax together in scholarly conversation as we were rowed across the night-bound lagoon’. We know from Petrarch’s many letters to his friends elsewhere that he admired Venice for its just government and its citizens’ sense of adventure; he is also known to have enjoyed its ‘foaming wine’ and to have passed many happy hours gazing down at the busy port below his window, where:
    even amidst the gloom of winter and the violent springtime storms the water was crammed with ships, one turning its prow to the east, the other to the west; some carrying off our wine to foam in British cups, our fruits to flatter the palates of the Scythians … others to the Aegean and the Achaian isles, some to Syria, others to Armenia, some to the Arabs, others to the Persians, carrying oil and linen and saffron, and bringing back all their many wonderful goods.
    Yet the Florentine-born poet’s relationship with the city remained essentially ambivalent. He admired Venice for being ‘strong in power, and even stronger in virtue’, but paradoxically found its ‘foul language and excessivelicence’ offensive. Similarly he admired its cosmopolitanism, but was repelled by ‘encountering in the alleyways filthy slaves with Scythian features’. Likewise it seems that the ‘father of humanism’, for all his great learning, was not fully appreciated by the more advanced local intellectuals, who tended to favour scientific knowledge over humanist studies. And apart from these, most of the local thinkers clung to the rigid medieval authority of Aristotle, which Petrarch’s humanism sought to overcome. When sometime during 1367 he heard that behind his back ‘four friends … had called him ignorant and illiterate’ because he did not read Aristotle, he decided this was the last straw and determined to leave Venice. The following year he crossed to the mainland, taking his library with him, regardless of his promise, and settled once more in the territory of Padua, whose ruler Francesco da Carrara was no friend of Venice. Deep in the countryside by the village of Arquà, * on a hillside above the distant Venice lagoon, he built himself a house beside a vineyard and an olive grove and here he