Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of Ferrara--had no
right to make. The father of the banished prince had displeased him by
marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good man should be turned on
other things, and the son compassed the sire's death. For this the
Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take him back to reign
over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his rights in favor of
the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the city to its
territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his protection, and
Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent claim to Ferrara on
the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians to surrender the city,
and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All Christian peoples were
commanded "to arm against the Venetians, to spoil them of their goods, as
separated from the union of Christians, and as enemies of the Roman
Church." They were driven out of Ferrara, but their troubles did not end
with their loss of the city. Giustina Renier-Michiel says the nations,
under the shelter of the pope's permission and command, "exercised against
them every species of cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which
they were not victims. All the rich merchandise which they had in France,
in Flanders, and in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were
arrested, maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens
had been baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed."
Such was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day
it is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, "_He looks as
if he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara_."

No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict of
the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not
survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision of
the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an interference of
the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice upon certain