1618: Nicole Regnault and the brothers Bouleaux

On this date in 1618, Venice crushed a Spanish conspiracy with sudden violence.

The reality of this conspiracy has been argued for the four hundred years since it was exposed or “exposed” but there is no questioning the security panic experienced by Venice at this moment.

Spain’s viceroy to Naples, the Duke of Ossuna, was massing a fleet that the Serene Republic suspected was meant for her; meanwhile, contradictory rumors of possible conspiracies within the city dogged the Doge.

At last, a Frenchman named Juven informed on confederates and countrymen whom he claimed had taken him into their confidence with the intent to destroy Ven

The Government now determined to act. On the 12th May 1618 [Nicole] Regnault and the brothers Bouleaux were arrested, just when the former had been writing to his sister in Paris, to say that he had a piece of business in hand which would save him the trouble of earning his livelihood for the future, which was true enough. The two Bouleaux, it appeared at their examination, had been engaged at the Spanish embassy in the manufacture of petards and fireworks in connection with a general plan of incendiarism; and they were forced into the admission that the embassy was a perfect storehouse of arms and ammunition, and that the order of the arrangements had been drawn up by Regnault and Pierre … On the person of Charles Bouleaux were found several damning papers; two letters of Lorenzo Nolot, a Burgundian (Pierre’s messenger to Ossuna), directed to a Signor Pireu, and in his stocking two others written to the Duke of Ossuna … The capture of Regnault and the others produced a scare, and there was a sudden exodus from the city, unhindered by the Executive, and emptying the lodging-houses of their motley and disreputable occupants. All who fell into the hands of the Government confessed that everything on their side was ready, and that if Ossuna had been able to support them, Venice must have been overpowered … On the same day which witnessed the arrests of Regnault and the two Brouleaux, orders were transmitted to the proveditor-general at sea to dispatch [naval officers already detained under suspicion -ed.] Pierre, Langlad, and their secretary Rossetti, in such a manner as he might judge fit; in reporting their executions, Veniero stated that the fireworks fabricated by Langlad for the use of the fleet had been in reality destined to burn it. On the 18th Regnault and his confederates were strangled in prison, and their bodies afterward suspended head downward between the Columns. Other summary measures followed, and about 300 persons paid with their lives for their participation in the foolish and flagitious project; but no particulars have been preserved of the exact number or of the mode of disposing them … What sad shocks must have befallen households where a father, or a son, or a brother, whose guilt was unsuspected perhaps by the rest, was seized by the sbirro to be seen no more! What a spectacle the lower Dungeons must have offered during days and days!

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1505: The Val Camonica witches

On this date in 1505, seven women and a man were burned in the town of Cemmo in Lombardy’s Val Camonica — the first victims of that region’s outbreak of witch-hunting that would claim over 100 lives all told.

This alpine valley fell in the hinterlands remit of the city of Brescia, which meant that (since the 1420s) it answered ultimately to the Most Serene Republic of Venice.

Remotenesses like Val Camonica are among the focal points for the fancy or hope that pockets of paganism held on from antiquity even in the heart of Christendom. Brescia lay in the belt spawning doctrinal and political challenges to the medieval church — the very zone that gave rise to the Inquisition.

During two distinct periods — 1505 to 1510, and again from 1518 to 1521 — that Inquisition fastened on folk in this region who constituted “a most pernicious kind of people … utterly damned by the stain of heresy, which was causing them to renounce the sacrament of the baptism they had received, denying their Lord and giving their bodies and souls to Satan whose advice was leading them astray.” (1521 communique of Pope Leo X, quoted here)

The circumstances for these purges can only be guessed at, as most of the primary documentation, particularly of the earlier episode, is lost. But the context of Papal-Venetian rivalry all but insists upon itself. Indeed, Venice’s ruling oligarchy is known during the 1518-1521 Inquisition to have interceded to prevent the Pope’s delegate from putting torch to flesh, provoking one of the innumerable jurisdictional imbroglios between the rival city-states.

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1432: Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, scheming condottiero

Italian mercenary Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola was beheaded on this date in 1432.

A successful condottiero was defined by a mixture of battlefield success and cutthroat scheming, and it was his clumsiness with the latter that did in Carmagnola.

His name denotes his origin, from a town in the Piedmont where despite his low birth, his talents raised him to a command for Filippo Maria Visconti‘s brutally successful campaign* to reunite his father’s divided patrimony and make the Duchy of Milan a peninsular power.

So you might think that Carmagnola stood to reap ample rewards for fastening himself to a rising star. But Visconti, perhaps fearing the prospect of a subordinate accumulating enough power to mount a coup d’etat, used a niggardly hand with the emoluments that his general was anticipating — and this led Carmagnola to ditch the Duchy and make an arrangement with its rival, Venice.

The turncoat had the satisfaction of smashing his former Milanese mates at the 1427 Battle of Maclodio, a battle that helped to achieve for Serene Republic its largest-ever Italian territorial expanse.

But his failure to follow up the victory aggressively soon tested the patience of his new patrons. After a short interval of peace, Venice resumed war with Milan in 1431, and here Carmagnola dilated unacceptably (Italian link), failing to advance on Cremona and instead proposing to winter his army — in August.

The Venetian Council of Ten also caught wind that Carmagnola was maintaining a secret correspondence with Milan and exploring the prospect of changing teams yet again.

Determined to have done with the snake, it summoned him back to Venice under the pretense of convening a war council for the 1432 campaign season. He arrived to find that it was too late in the day to meet the Doge, but as he started for his gondola to retire one of the Venetian gentlemen who had been sent to meet him instead directed his steps away.

“That is not my way,” Carmagnola objected.

“Yes, yes, this is your right path,” the man insisted — and Bussone, beholding him gesturing to the yawning gate of the Piombi dungeon, could only exclaim, “I am lost!”


The arrest of Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola

He was beheaded as a traitor between the scenic columns of San Marco and San Todaro. His widow returned to Milan and eventually repatriated the late commander’s remains to his native soil.

* Carmagnola left a nasty legacy to the world’s architectural heritage during this time by collapsing the Trezzo sull’Adda Bridge, the widest-spanning single-arch bridge ever built before the industrial age.

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1355: Filippo Calendario and Bertuccio Isarello, Doge stooges

This date in 1355 was the morning after the failed coup of Venetian Doge Marino Faliero. And it was the first date that vengeance began to fall upon the plotters.

Faliero, voted power by the fellow-noblemen who bossed the Serene Republic, intended to displace the patrician class with commoner support. The scheme called for Faliero’s supporters secretly to mobilize hundreds of men who on April 15 would gather at the Piazza San Marco and mount their surprise takeover. But the plot sank like a stone on the big day, with anticipated adherents turning out sparsely or flatly declining and word soon reaching aristocratic ears of trouble afoot. The would-be masters of Venice were soon rounded up without resistance by the real masters of Venice.

In this misfired drama, Faliero’s henchmen — the men upon whom fell the task of orchestrating the cells who would summon the traitor militia — were Filippo Calendario and Bertuccio Isarello. And on this, the following day, they were tried, sentenced, and by evening hung from upper windows of the Ducal Palace. Both men were gagged: one last precaution against the sort of popular exhortation that they had not managed when it counted.

“The earth was set in motion,” one chronicler recorded of the Venetian establishment’s reaction to the menace. (Source) Faliero would die the next day; in all, eleven gibbeted corpses festooned the palace as a warning against the next aspirant.

Isarello was the captain of a Venetian galley who had been appointed by Faliero — controversially bypassing the usual noble prerogatives — and had rewarded his prince by expertly harrying Genoese merchantmen.

Calendario (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed German), Isarello’s father-in-law, was a stonemason, sculptor and architect who actually worked on the very palace he was hanged from.


Column capital of Drunken Noah dating from the period of Calendario’s work on the Venetian Ducal Palace. (cc) image from Honza Beran.

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1204: Alexios V, precipitated Byzantine emperor

Around this time in the year 1205, the fleeting Byzantine emperor Alexios V Doukas was put to a dramatic death in Constantinople’s Forum of Theodosius by being hurled from the top of the ancient Column of Theodosius.

Nicknamed “Mourtzouphlos” for his prominent brow, Alexios obtained his Pyrrhic purple by being the only elite with wit and courage in Constantinople during the horror of the its sack by a Venetian Crusader army.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity! Hands in mailed gauntlets and silk gloves grasping after glory and treasure were our Emperor Eyebrow’s rise and his fall.

The prime desideratum was the prime desideratum, Jerusalem. In a monument to bad management, a Crusader army of 12,000 was mustered to Venice in 1202 for a flotilla suitable to thrice its number. Venice had taken on an enormous contract to assemble this fleet and since the soldiers who showed up could in no way pay what the Serene Republic had been promised, Venice simply repossessed the army to make good its debt by means of pillage.

First, it sacked Venice’s Dalmatian rival Zadar. Then, having picked up the exiled nephew of the reigning Byzantine emperor — the uncle had overthrown the father to get the job — the Crusader-mercenaries made for Constantinople, become now shameless Praetorians by dint of young Alexios’s assurance of all the liberalities the East’s treasuries could bear.

Constantinople in 1202 was the jewel of Christendom. Its mighty walls had preserved the city inviolate since antiquity — a city of half a million souls reposing in the splendors of the Roman world, augmented by eight more centuries’ imperial surplus.

A morsel so ripe needs but one unguarded moment for some ruffian to pluck it. The Crusaders’ attack so happened to catch Constantinople, at long last, at such a moment. The city was lightly defended and unable to summon more aid — while under the direction of an emperor, Alexios III, who had been cruel and profligate in the enjoyment of his power but vacillated fatally when he was required to defend it.

In a matter of days in July of 1203, Alexios’s rule collapsed, and the emperor himself fled, when the Crusaders besieged Constantiople. These Crusaders of course installed their scheming moppet as Emperor Alexios IV, actually co-emperor with his father who despite having been brutally blinded by his brother was liberated and acclaimed by the populace.

The ensuing months make painful reading — and surely much worse than that to experience at first hand. The new emperors feuded with each other despite their kinship. They also had to squeeze every revenue they could for the Crusader army, which stubbornly refused to depart as its leader, the nonagenarian Doge of Venice, schemed to establish lasting Venetian authority in Byzantium. Irritated residents, enduring the continued presence of a Crusader army that thought it was supposed to be going to Jerusalem all along, rioted and fought with one another.

(For a ready summary of this situation and the entire buildup of the Fourth Crusade, grab episode 15 of Lars Brownworth’s outstanding 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast.)

The bottom line was that young Alexios was no more impressive in power than had been his predecessor and he had the added disability of having been installed by a foreign invader. He also discovered to his chagrin that the staggering sum of 200,000 he had so lightly promised the Venetians in exchange for his throne was double what he could actually find in the capital. When the situation unmanned him in January of 1204, he cowered in the imperial palace and sent his chamberlain to petition the Crusaders to back him in the latest exigency.

That chamberlain was our man, Alexios Mourtzouphlos.

Acting with an alacrity that might have spared Constantinople a horror had an earlier prince exercised it, Alexios instead arrested the co-emperors and spirited them off to a dungeon where they were quietly murdered.

The usurper then turned the city’s energies towards reinforcing its battered defenses and attempted to mount an attack against the Crusaders. This proved, however, much too late to spare the Second Rome its most awful tribulation.

In a matter of days in April 1204, the rude band of Latins who set out to win Jerusalem for Christ overran glorious Constantinople and put it to the sack. Tourists today who gawk at the bronze horses decorating Venice’s St. Mark’s Basilica are in fact enjoying the plunder of Byzantium. In time Constantinople would be retrieved from the Latins, but neither the city itself nor the Byzantine Empire ever fully recovered from the blow. This is also the event that made the schism between Eastern and Western confessions of Christianity permanently irretrievable.*

It was not given Alexios Mourtzouphlos to see what horrors ensued for Constantinople, never mind to get a start on finagling an imperial comeback of his own. Fleeing the sack of the city, he wound up in Thrace in the company of yet another deposed ex-emperor. But after first allowing Mourtzouphlos to marry his daughter, that old schemer had Alexios V blinded and in November 1204 abandoned him to an advancing Latin army — and its eventual death-by-precipitation — while his former in-laws fled to Corinth.

* One of Alexios IV’s promises to his Crusader buddies was to submit the Byzantine patriarchate to Papal authority — another pledge that could never have been realistically delivered.

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1310: Badoer Badoer, Venetian rebel

A Venetian rebel was beheaded on this date in 1310.

Our grim tale actually tacks back to an altogether different death: the sudden January 31, 1308 demise of Azzo VIII d’Este, lord of Venice’s neighbor Ferrara.*

The resulting power vacuum saw Venice under the Doge Pietro Gradenigo tangle for influence in Ferrara with the Papal States of Pope Clement V.

This controversial intervention briefly put a Venetian puppet ruler in charge of Ferrara, but it also led Clement to excommunicate Gradenigo and place La Serenissima under a papal interdict.

The moral force which the condition of society lent to such a measure was immense … It paralyzed trade; it dried up the sources of industrial wealth; it laid a country under every civil and religiou disability; it shed over society an atmosphere of gloom; it affected every relation of life … At home it fomented agitation, gave colour and pretext to the worst motives, and evoked all the latent distempers of the public mind. Abroad, it legitimized rebellion, imparted to moribund antipathies a new vitality, and transformed wavering allies into open enemies. (From History of the Venetian Republic, vol. II, whose detailed narrative of the events relevant to this post continues in Volume III)

Clement also had more temporal weapons to fight with, and he used them to ruthless effect.

In August 1309, papal troops overran the Venetian garrison at the Ferrara fortress of Tedaldo and handled the prisoners like they had the Dolcinians, choking the Po with Venetian corpses.

Conditions were ripe for some disturbances in La Serenissima. The Ferrara thing was a complete debacle, and not only was the same guy still in charge, but his previous foreign policy resume basically consisted of being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Genoa.

Hotheads of three leading families of the Venetian opposition who had vainly counseled neutrality in the Ferrara affair, the Quirini, the Badoer, and the Tieopolo, embarked an audacious plot to mount a coup d’etat toppling the Doge and the whole Ground Council of noblemen by whom he ruled. The conspirators were to act on the morning of June 15 — but hours before that, a vacillating confederate had betrayed them. As a result, when the ferocious Marco Quirini arrived at the Piazza San Marco that morning with his men-at-arms, the Doge had a surprise force waiting to rout him under a furious downpour.

Quirini at least had the honor of dying in hopeless battle for his cause. His son-in-law and co-conspirator Bajamonte Tiepolo, who was to arrive at the same square via the Mercerie, dithered and showed up only when Quirini was already defeated and dead. Legend has it that a woman named Giustina Rosso killed Tiepolo’s standard-bearer dead by hurling (or just accidentally dropping) a mortar upon the rebels as they advanced up the street. (Present-day tourists traversing this upscale shopping street can catch a small bas-relief commemorating this character near the clock tower where the Mercerie opens onto St. Mark’s.)

Tiepolo belatedly charged the square, and was like Quirini repulsed; however, he was able to fall back across the Grand Canal, cutting the bridge against his pursuers, and holed up in a makeshift fortress hoping for reinforcements from the last-arriving of their fellows, Badoer Badoer.

The latter, however, was intercepted on his way to reinforcing the revolutionaries’ position and taken prisoner, which defeat of his hopes led Tiepolo and Doge alike to prefer a negotiated surrender to the charnel house that would have resulted from storming the redoubt. His followers were amnestied and Tiepolo himself sent into exile.

But Badoer Badoer was not covered by this deal. The Council he had proposed to overturn instead tried him for treason, and voted his condemnation on June 22 — a sentence put into immediate effect.

The exiled Tiepolo’s home was razed to the ground and replaced with a column eternally damning his memory:

This land belonged to Bajamonte
And now, for his iniquitous betrayal,
This has been placed to frighten others
And to show these words to everyone forever.

That column today has been removed to a museum — evidently one needs special permission to find it — but a worn stone outside a souvenir shop labeled “Loc. Col. Bai. The. MCCCX” marks the spot where it stood for four centuries.

The plot’s other legacy to Venice was the Council of Ten, a sort of inner secretariat of the Grand Council. Introduced in July 1310 as an emergency measure, the Ten soon became a permanent feature of the state, and an increasingly powerful one into the 17th century. The “temporary” council ended up lasting until the Napoleon finally toppled a by-then tottering Venetian Republic in 1797.

* In the Inferno, Dante accuses Azzo of assassinating his father.

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1413: Francesco Baldovino, to enjoy the emoluments of office

From History of the Venetian Republic: Her Rise, Her Greatness, and Her Civilization:


Francesco Baldovino was a gentleman in affluent circumstances, of a handsome person, and of engaging manners. His domestic establishment was princely. He had a large sum in the Funds. In short, every adventitious advantage, which fortune brings, was within his reach, excepting one; Baldovino was not a noble.

It is said that, at the period of the War of Chioggia, he desired to become, among the rest, a candidate for the honours of the peerage. But, his paternal ancestor having been implicated in some manner in the Bocconio conspiracy of 1300, the family laboured under a certain obloquy, and Baldovino was a disappointed man.

Among his numerous acquaintance was one Bartolomeo D’Anselmo, also a cittadino of great wealth, and also an unsatisfied expectant of nobility. It happened on Friday, the 4th March, 1413, that Baldovino and D’Anselmo met at the Minorites, and began to discuss their common grievance. “We,” cried Baldovino, at once launching into diatribe, “pay taxes enough forsooth; yet those of the Council enjoy the emoluments of office.”

“True,” returned his companion, “and indeed we ought to make it our business to see if we cannot get for ourselves a share in the administration. Devise some plan in which I may co-operate.”

“The way would be,” whispered Baldovino, “to collect a company of our following, and to massacre them as they are leaving the Council, particularly the College, the Decemvirs, and the Avogadors.”

D’Anselmo said, “That is an excellent plan. How then do you purpose to find your men?”

“I intend,” the other continued, “to seek a good many trusty fellows, who will be at my elbow to compass this matter for us on Sunday that is coming.”

“I, too,” rejoined D’Anselmo, “will bring some.”

So they parted.

Bartolomeo D’Anselmo was not a bad man; but he was a man of no steady principle, and of an exceedingly nervous temperament. He had hardly bidden farewell to Baldovino, when the treasonable dialogue which had passed between them began to haunt his imagination. He found himself a prey to a variety of unwholesome and chimerical fancies. The echoes of his own words grated on his ears. The sound of his own voice threw him into a cold sweat.

He conceived it more than possible that they might have been overheard, and that they were betrayed. He pictured himself arrested, dragged before the Ten and into the chamber of torture, put to the question, condemned to an infamous and horrid punishment. If there had been eavesdroppers, he was pretty sure that this would be his destiny; and he knew that there was only one method of escaping from the danger.

He was base enough to pursue that method; D’Anselmo turned evidence, on the same day, against his friend.

The informer was pardoned and ennobled.

The man, whom with such vile and pitiful cowardice he had denounced, was taken into custody, examined under the cord, and on Saturday morning the 5th, at eight o’clock, was executed between the Red Columns, where he was left hanging three days, as a warning to traitors.

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1355: Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice

On this date in 1355, Marino Faliero* was escorted to the spot where he had been crowned Doge of Venice scant months before. There, he was ceremoniously relieved of his robes of state … and then his head.


The Execution of Marino Faliero, by Eugene Delacroix (1827).

Some fog surrounds the day’s proceedings, product not only of time but of the Doge’s executioners’ damnatio memoriae upon their victim. What was written was circumspect; even Faliero‘s portrait in the great hall of the Doge’s Palace was veiled.

What is known — or at any rate, was admitted by the elderly first citizen — is that the ruler attempted a coup against the overweening power of Venice’s great families.

The putsch was supposed to occur on April 15, with the bell of St. Mark’s Cathedral tolling on a fabricated hue and cry. In the tumult, the Doge’s supporters meant to cut down the nobles who flexed the real political muscle in the maritime republic and consolidate ducal power.

Why?

The salacious version has the old goat in a tiff with a noble, who made fun of his May-December marriage —

Marino Faliero of the beautiful wife,
Others enjoy her while he maintains her

A tribunal of fellow-nobles let the rascal off with a slap on the wrist.

Power being what it is, and princes and nobilities being born for conflict with one another across the centuries in Europe, one may as well discern a straightforward political intent — heightened, perhaps, by the then-dire state of Venice’s naval contest with Genoa.

Downright Byronic under either scenario … and Byron wrote a play about Faliero. The doomed ruler gives throat to quite a magnificent curse upon his city, with all the foresight of Byron’s half-millennium of hindsight:

I perish, but not unavenged; far ages
Float up from the abyss of time to be,
And show these eyes, before they close, the doom
Of this proud city, and I leave my curse
On her and hers for ever! —

          — She shall be bought
And sold, and be an appanage to those
Who shall despise her! — She shall stoop to be
A province for an empire, petty town
In lieu of capital, with slaves for senates,
Beggars for nobles, panders for a people!

Amidst thy many murders, think of mine!
Thou den of drunkards with the blood of princes!
Gehenna of the waters! thou sea Sodom!
Thus I devote thee to the infernal gods!
Thee and thy serpent seed!
[Here the Doge turns, and addresses the executioner.]
          Slave, do thine office!
Strike as I struck the foe! Strike as I would
Have struck those tyrants! Strike deep as my curse!
Strike — and but once!

This sort of thing knocking about among litterateurs in the 19th century practically guarantees an opera.

* Or simply “Marin Falier”, in the Venetian dialect.

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1571: Marco Antonio Bragadin, flayed Venetian

On this date in 1571, the commander of a Venetian garrison was flayed by the Turks.

Marco Antonio Bragadin (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) — or Marcantonio Bragadin — was the captain of Famagusta as an Ottoman Empire near the peak of its power began to wrest Cyprus from eight decades of Venetian control.

The Turks sacked the wealthy Cypriot capital Nicosia in September 1570, slaughtering or enslaving the inhabitants. Bragadin thereupon received an inducement from the invaders to surrender the last Venetian outpost still remaining in Cyprus: the severed head of Nicosia’s general.

Bragadin was having none of it.

Milord pasha of Carmania,

I have seen your letter. I have also received the head of the lord lieutenant of Nicosia, and I tell you herewith that even if you have so easily taken the city of Nicosia, with your own blood you will have to purchase this city, which with God’s help will give you so much to do that you will always regret having encamped here.

The Famagustans didn’t get quite that much help from God, but they forced a dear purchase in blood. For nearly a year, they repelled the siege; starving and exhausted, they at last accepted a merciful surrender only to have the entire garrison slain (the link is in Italian) at the beginning of this month.

The entire garrison, save Bragadin.

Special torments were reserved for the general who had given them such trouble. Executed Today friend Melisende’s Historic Biography post on Bragadin recounts the nauseating Calvary of the Venetian: mutilated, dragged around his fallen fortress, then exposed on the docks for flaying alive. The skin was stuffed with straw and sailed back to Istanbul as a war trophy for the Sultan Selim II.

One can see here, of course, the narrative of East vs. West in a war for civilization itself, although one should observe that the overthrow of Catholic hegemony on Cyprus restored the privileges of the Orthodox church. But the fall of Cyprus was itself the backstory for one of the pivotal naval battles of the age two months later, the Battle of Lepanto, at which a league of Mediterranean powers including Venice decisively checked Ottoman influence at sea, pre-empting a likely invasion of Italy.

Bragadin, for his part, became a potent symbol blending civic and religious martyrdom in what turns out to be (post-Lepanto) a victorious cause. One might say that he fulfilled a need.

Cultures which have drawn nourishment from their legendary martyrs feel a need to prolong the spectacle of their suffering. They hark back to the desire to keep the dying man with them; and the memory of this desire strengthens their tales of holy victimhood, dramatizes them, keeps them alive. Bragadin’s torture was long-drawn-out, and it must be constantly remembered as such.

… Christians’ preoccupation with relics has been complex, enduring and, at times, feverishly obsessive. It has reached high points in moments when Catholic doctrines and practices have felt most dramatically threatened. During Marcantonio Bragadin’s lifetime, and during the period immediately following, Christendom trembled before the encroaching Muslims. In this context, the story of Bragadin’s martyrdom acquired particular potency: not because the Church proclaimed him a saint, but because by analogy, he seemed to bring the ancient Christian matrydoms up to the present. He seemed to make those sufferings real and explicit, lifting them out of their legendary fogginess. Step-by-step, piece-by-piece, he “demonstrates” the martyr’s ordeal, almost as in a manual of suffering.

Nor was the fulfillment merely conceptual. According to this page on Rome tourist destinations, the painting of St. Bartholomew‘s flaying executed for the ancient basilica of Santi Nereo e Achilleo in the 1600 Jubilee alludes directly to the more contemporary event — notice the dark, turban-clad figure on the left.

In 1596, one of the few survivors of Cyprus nicked Bragadin’s hide from Istanbul and returned it to Venice, where it remains today entombed as a relic at the Basilica di San Zanipolo.

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