receiving tenders for assassination, and contracting for the removal of their foes. Among the tenders received and discussed by the Council, two are remarkable for their frankness, and will serve us as specimens of this kind of proposal. One is the offer made by Biagio Catena, styled by the Council Archbishop of Trebizond; the other is the tariff presented by Fra John of Ragusa, both of the candidates for employment being clerics. The document relating to the offer of Catena runs thus:

1419, 13 September.-Ser Johannes Diedo, Ser Rugerius Rugini, Presidents of the Ten, moving. On the 17th of June last the Council passed a resolution that the Archbishop of Trebizond, who offers to place in our hands, absolutely and under no safe conduct, John Brendola of Este, and John Barberius of Padua, accused of having set fire to our church of Saint Mark, should, upon the actual fulfilment of his offer, be freed from the outlawry under which he now lies. The said archbishop came to Venice in person, and stated and promised again that he would shortly bring the said criminals to Venetian territory, but added that he required letters patent to enable him to arrest those men, for otherwise none of our rectors or officials would give him credence. Be it now moved that such letters patent be granted to the said archbishop.'

The letters were granted, requiring all officials to give every assistance to the archbishop in the execution of his police duties. On the same day all three Presidents of the Ten moved that

inasmuch as the said archbishop offers to poison Marsilio de Carrara by means of Francesco Pierlamberti of Lucca, and wishes to travel in person with the said Francesco, that he may assure himself of the actual execution of the deed; but for this purpose he requires a poison, which he charges himself to have made by a capable poison master if the money be supplied him; and, further, inasmuch as the said archbishop, from Easter last to the present time, has, out of his own pocket, been paying the inn charges of the said John of Este, John Barberio, and Baldassare de Odoni, who is now in prison in Ferrara, following them all over the place in order to carry out his intent, in the course of which he says he has spent one hundred and eighty ducats of his own money: Be it resolved, that for making the poison, for necessary expenses, and for buying a horse for the said archbishop-for his own is dead-the sum of fifty ducats out of our treasury be given to the archbishop and his companion Francesco Pierlamberti. Ayes, 10; noes, 5; doubtful, 1.'

The tariff of Brother John of Ragusa is a document even more ingenious than the tender of the Archbishop of Trebizond. It runs thus :

'On the 14th December, 1513, the said Brother John of Ragusa

VOL. CLXVI. NO. CCCXXXIX.

E

presented himself to the presidents of the Ten, and declared that he would work wonders in killing anyone they chose by certain means of his own invention, and therefore begs: First, that on the success of his experiment he shall receive one thousand five hundred ducats a year for life; secondly, that if the noble lords wish him to operate on anyone else, the annuity shall be raised in a sum to be agreed

upon.

The Council accepted Brother John's offer, and enjoined him to go and make his first experiment upon the person of the Emperor.' Emboldened by this first successful appeal, Brother John then presented the following scale of prices :

'For the Grand Turk, 500 ducats; for the King of Spain (exclusive of travelling expenses), 150 ducats; for the Duke of Milan, 60 ducats; for the Marquis of Mantua, 50 ducats; for his Holiness, only 100 ducats. As a rule,' he concludes, the longer the journey and the more valuable the life, the higher would be the price.'

The quality and the number of these men who were found to offer themselves to the Council of Ten upon such wild and shameful ventures call for our attention. They were, as a rule, the very scum of society; criminals who swarmed in the narrow streets of Venice, and earned a livelihood by all disgraceful means. Their number was constantly augmented by the pernicious action of the bando,' or outlawry, combined with the weakness of the Venetian police. To prove how weak the police were, we have only to remember how difficult they found it to put a stop to the riotous sport of the young nobles, whose delight it was to fasten a chain to the collar of a large dog and run with him full speed down the narrow calles; the dog, of course, kept to one side, and his master to the other, and most of the passengers were laid in the mud. Or we may cite that curious story of Francesco Concha, chief inspector of the police magistrates, known as the Signori di Notte. Concha had under his charge two brothers condemned to be hanged for theft. For one of these brothers Concha conceived a strong friendship. On the day of their execution in the Piazzetta, after the first brother had been hanged, and when the noose was round the neck of the other, Concha, head of the guards whose duty it was to see the sentence carried out, walked up the steps of the scaffold, took the noose off his friend's neck, and saying, 'Tu vedrai adesso se te voglio "ben,' led him down into the crowd, and both disappeared. Though the Council offered large rewards for their arrest, they were never captured. The police, then, being so weak,

and criminals being able to escape so easily, the only mode of punishing them was by outlawry, with a price on their heads. The result was that the frontiers of Venetian territory swarmed with criminals, all ready to purchase their rehabilitation by some service to the State. They naturally offered that kind of service to which they were already accustomed, assassination, or some other equally dubious undertaking.

We come now to the case of one of the most famous of these desperadoes whose services the Council of Ten accepted. It is a typical case; and though there are many others, one will be enough. Michelotto Mudazzo, a Cretan, first appears upon the scene in the year 1414, when he was condemned to a year's imprisonment for theft. Three years later he was able to rehabilitate himself, and to acquire a considerable fortune by a stroke of luck. The Council of Ten were anxious to have in their hands a certain noble, Giorgio Bragadin, accused of treason and of having made and given away a plan of Venice. The Ten offered four thousand ducats for the person of Bragadin, dead or alive. Mudazzo presented himself to the Council, and declared that he would be content with two thousand ducats on condition that that sum should be secured to his children in case he perished in the venture. The Ten agreed; Mudazzo succeeded in capturing Bragadin, who was hanged between the columns in the Piazzetta. Mudazzo received his reward, but he did not enjoy it long; he had embarked on the dangerous business of agent for the Council of Ten, depositary of some of their secrets, and therefore liable to be either imprisoned or made away with the moment the Ten believed that they could have no further use for him. The next we hear of Mudazzo is that he is in disgrace; condemned to four months' imprisonment and a fine of two hundred lire for striking his adversary in open court, and a year's imprisonment, a fine of two hundred lire, and perpetual banishment for suborning witnesses. The affair of Bragadin had taught Mudazzo how money might be drawn from the State; and now in his banishment he began casting about for similar means of ingratiating himself with the Ten, and of earning the revocation of his outlawry. In the year 1419 the Council of Ten resolved to adopt the method of assassination against the Emperor Sigismund, cum non solum ' nostro dominio et toti mundo sit clarissima et manifesta 'mala voluntas et dispositio domini Regis Hungarie.' Mudazzo offered at his own cost to find and to murder the

Emperor. His reward was to be as much land in Crete as would give him a yearly income of one thousand ducats. He also received a safe-conduct to come to Venice, and to stay there till a poison could be prepared for the emperor. The Ten wrote to the governor of Verona, instructing him to find out certain people known as 'those of the poisons,' 'qui 'mirifice conficiunt venenum,' who lived at Puvignago, a small village belonging to Pandolfo Malatesta, near Salò on the Lago di Garda; and to procure from them a jar of their mixture. They also sent to Padua to a druggist known as Peter Paul, a famous poison brewer, requiring him to furnish 'a drinkable and an eatable poison.' Peter Paul was absent from Padua, and the governor, seeking about for some one else to carry out his commission, applied to Master John, doctor in Vicenza; another famous poison maker, Nichele del Nievo, received a similar order. In February, 1420, the powder and the liquid, the eatable and the drinkable poison, arrived from Vicenza, and were deposited in the chamber of the Council. The presidents of the Ten sent for Mudazzo, and desired him to experiment with the powder and the liquid in their presence. Mudazzo refused to touch the poisons unless their concocter were present. Thereupon the Ten, in dread lest the affair had been hanging on too long and would take wind, dismissed Mudazzo, and reinforced his 'bando' against him. But Mudazzo did not despair; he waited his time, and ten years later he reappears before the Ten with a proposal to murder Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. The Vicenza poisons had been lying all this time in the cupboard of the Ten. Their efficacy had never been assured, and the Council now ordered an experiment to be made with them upon two pigs. The pigs did not die. The Ten sent for Mudazzo and ordered him to procure fresh and better poisons. He declined, and the Presidents of the Council took steps to have a new supply sent from Vicenza. But in the meanwhile Mudazzo could not keep his secret from his friends. He told his compare, Matteo Bevilaqua, of the commission he had received, and of the fortune it would bring him; Bevilaqua told his son-in-law Pegolotto, and Pegolotto told his friend John de Casanis, who wrote an account of the whole to the Duke of Milan. Mudazzo, instead of going to Milan, was sent off a quasi prisoner to Corfu, and we do not know that he ever saw Venice again. The last we hear of him is a wild offer which he makes to sell to the Ten a poison which will work in three ways, in food, in drink, or by touch; an offer which the Council

rejected by a large majority. They were weary of Mudazzo and his futile promises.

In this story of Mudazzo the Ten explain their own procedure with perfect frankness-a frankness engendered by their reliance on the absolute secrecy of their archives. It was necessary to state exactly how they had acted in the matter, in order to put future councillors in full possession of the facts. We gain by this frankness, and have before us a complete and typical case. The attitude of the Ten is perfectly clear; they were under great pressure, and adopted the proposals to assassinate as a possible, though not as the sole or even probable, means of freeing themselves from their difficulties. To reject such means would have seemed to them culpable folly and neglect. The futility and ineffectiveness of the plans are characteristic of the majority of the proposals made to the Ten and sanctioned by them.

The next case we shall take is that of a wholesale attempt to destroy the Turkish army. The attempt was impotent, like most of its predecessors; but the details are so strange and picturesque, and throw so much light on the more famous case of the Untori of Milan, that we venture to give the history of it at some length. In the year 1649, Lunardo Foscolo, Proveditore Generale di Dalmazia, writes from Zara to the Inquisitors of State, as follows:

To the most illustrious and most honoured lords, my masters. 'My incessant occupation in the discharge of this most laborious service never makes me forget my intent and desire to procure advantage to my country. I then, considering the perilous state of the kingdom of Candia, first treacherously invaded, and now openly occupied by the Turks, the pre-eminence of their forces, the copiousness of their soldiery, the opulence of the Turkish treasury, which will enable them to maintain the war for many years, and also being well aware that, although the public spirit of Venice yields to none in courage and magnanimity, the republic has neither forces, men, nor money, wherewith to resist much longer the attacks of its foes, and reflecting on the impossibility to meet such a heavy expenditure, have applied myself to a study of the methods whereby the Turkish power might be overcome without risk of men or burden to the exchequer, and how the kingdom of Candia might be recovered; for, after God, our hope to reacquire it is small indeed.

Now there is here a good subject of Venice, lately appointed doctor, who besides his skill in healing is also a famous distiller. His name is Michiel Angelo Salamon. He is desirous to prove himself, what he is in fact, a faithful servant of your excellencies. I explained my wishes to him, and he availed himself of the presence here of the Plague to distil a liquid expressed from the spleen, the buboes, and carbuncles of the plague-stricken; and this, when mixed with other ingredients,