Note (return) — SANUTO'S DOGES OF VENICE.

In the year 1420, the Florentines sent an embassy to the state of Venice, to solicit them to unite in a league against the ambitious progress of Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan; and the historian Daru, in his Histoire de Venise, 8vo., Paris, 1821, has fallen into more than one error in his account of the transaction. Marino Sanuto, who wrote the lives of the Doges of Venice in 1493 (Daru says, erroneously, some fifty years afterwards), has preserved the Orations made by the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, in opposition to the Florentine proposals; which he copied, according to his statement, from a manuscript that belonged to the Doge himself. Daru states, that the MS. was communicated to him by the Doge; but that could not be, since the Doge died in 1423, and Sanuto was not born till 1466. An abridged translation of these Orations is given in the Histoire de Venise, tom. ii, pp. 289-311.; and in the first of these, pronounced in January, 1420 (1421, Daru), he is made to say, in reference to an ambassador sent by the Florentines to the Duke of Milan, in 1414, as follows: "L'ambassadeur fut un Juif, nommé Valori, banquier de sa profession,", p. 291. As a commentary on this passage, Daru subjoins a note from the Abbé Laugier, who, in his Histoire de Venise, liv. 21., remarks, 1. That it appears strange the Florentines should have chose a Jew as an ambassador; 2. That his surname was Bartolomeo, which could not have been borne by a Jew; 3. That the Florentine historian Poggio speaks of Valori as having been one of the principal members of the Council of Florence. The Abbé thence justly concludes, that the ambassador could not have been a Jew; and it is extraordinary that Daru, after such a conclusive argument, should have admitted the term Jew into his text. But the truth is, that this writer (like many others of great reputation) preferred blindly following the text of Sanuto, as printed by Muratori2, to the trouble of consulting any early manuscripts. It happens, however, that in a manuscript copy of these Orations of Mocenigo, written certainly earlier than the period of Sanuto, and preserved in the British Museum, MS. Add. 12, 121., the true reading of the passage may be found thus:—"Fo mandato Bartolomio Valori, homo richo, el qual viveva de cambij." By later transcribers the epithet richo, so properly here bestowed on the Florentine noble, was changed into iudio (giudeo), and having been transferred in that shape into Sanuto, has formed the groundwork of a serious error, which has now existed for more than three centuries and a half.