SECTION V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the
most eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo
Zeno, 8th May, 1418; [Footnote: Daru, liv. xii. ch. xii.] the _visible_
commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the
Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari
followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large
acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in
Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the
battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454,
Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the
Turk in the same year was established the Inquisition of State,
[Footnote: Daru, liv. xvi. cap. xx. We owe to this historian the
discovery of the statutes of the tribunal and date of its establishment.]
and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious
form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish
invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the
league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement
of the decline of the Venetian power; [Footnote: Ominously signified by
their humiliation to the Papal power (as before to the Turkish) in 1509,
and their abandonment of their right of appointing the clergy of their
territories.] the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the
fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the