was forthcoming and legal means and authorities were ready. The moral
torture which for years the Doge Francesco Foscari (d. 1457) suffered
before the eyes of all Venice is a frightful example of a vengeance
possible only in an aristocracy. The Council of Ten, which had a hand
in everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of S
financial affairs and military appointments, which included the
Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had
overthrown so many powerful men before this Council was yearly chosen
afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consiglio, and was
consequently the most direct expression of its will. It is not probable
that serious intrigues occurred at these elections, as the short
duration of the office and the accountability which followed rendered
it an object of no great desire. But violent and mysterious as the
proceedings of this and other authorities might be, the genuine
Venetian courted rather than fled their sentence, not only because the
Republic had long arms, and if it could not catch him might punish his
family, but because in most cases it acted from rational motives and
not from a thirst for blood. No State, indeed, has ever exercised a
greater moral influence over its subjects, whether abroad or at home.
If traitors were to be found among the Pregadi, there was ample
compensation for this in the fact that every Venetian away from home
was a born spy for his government. It was a matter of course that the
Venetian cardinals at Rome sent home news of the transactions of the
secret papal consistories. The Cardinal Domenico Grimani had the
dispatches intercepted in the neighbourhood of Rome (1500) which
Ascanio Sforza was sending to his brother Lodovico il Moro, and
forwarded them to Venice; his father, then exposed to a serious
accusation, claimed public credit for this service of his son before
the Gran Consiglio, in other words, before all the world.