is the place of Marino Falieri, beheaded
for his crimes," is all the record left of the Doge disgraced.

Was it a crime? The question is one which it is difficult to discuss
with any certainty. That Falieri desired to establish--as so many had
done in other cities--an independent despotism in Venice, seems entirely
unproved. It was the prevailing fear; the one suggestion which alarmed
everybody and made sentiment unanimous. But one of the special points
which are recorded by the chroniclers as working in him to madness, was
that he was _senza parentado_--without any backing of relationship or
allies--_i.e._, sonless, with no one to come after him. How little
likely then was an old man to embark on such a desperate venture for
self-aggrandizement merely. He had, indeed, a nephew who was involved in
his fate, but apparently not so deeply as to expose him to the last
penalty of the law.

The incident altogether points more to a sudden outbreak of the rage and
disappointment of an old public servant coming back from his weary
labors for the state in triumph and satisfaction to what seemed the
supreme reward; and finding himself no more than a puppet in the hands
of remorseless masters, subject to the scoffs of the younger generation,
with his eyes opened by his own suffering, perceiving for the first time
what justice there was in the oft-repeated protest of the people, and
how they and he alike were crushed under the iron heel of that oligarchy
to which the power of the people and that of the Prince were equally
obnoxious. The chroniclers of his time were so much at a loss to find
any reason for such an attempt on the part of a man, _non abbiando alcum
propinquo_, that they agree in attributing it to diabolical inspiration.

It was more probably that fury which springs from a sense of wrong,
which the sight of the wrongs of others raised to frenzy, and that
intolerable impatience of the impotent which is more harsh in its
hopelessness than the greatest hardihood. He could not but die for it,
but there seems no more reason to characterize this impossible attempt
as deliberate treason than to give the same name to many an alliance
formed between prince and people in other regions--the king and commons
of the early Stuarts, for example--against the intolerable exactions and
cruelty of an aristocracy too powerful to be faced alone by either.

CHARLES IV OF GERMANY PUBLISHES
HIS GOLDEN BULL

A.D. 1356

SIR ROBERT C