The earliest prisons in Venice were established in the very centre of government in the Grand Ducal Palace, where the doge, or chief magistrate, resided and ruled, supported by the Council of Ten, whose chief assistants were the Inquisitors of State, especially appointed to protect its interests by enforcing that policy of secretiveness and mystery so dear to Venetian administration. A decree dated 1321 records the order to construct certain prisons beneath the palace, and another, five years later, orders them enlarged. The old historians are much concerned in denying that these first prisons were underground, although the fact that they were called _pozzi_ or “wells” must be taken as clear proof that they were below ground. This description is borne out by the evidence of one who spoke from personal knowledge. Casanova was not himself an inmate of these lower dungeons, but he tells us that he knew them to be like damp tombs; further, he says that they were always two feet deep in the salt water which had penetrated from the canal outside. The occupant was perforce obliged to remain constantly upon a bench or platform raised above the level of the water and on which his bed was laid. He spent both day and night there and consumed his frugal allowance of thin soup and black ammunition bread with all possible speed to save it from the voracious water rats, great numbers of which infested the place. There was little hope for those who were thrown into the _pozzi_, and yet Casanova assures us that some reached a green old age in [Illustration: _Grand Ducal Palace, Venice_ The great entrance, the allegorical sculptures, and the Giant’s Staircase of the Palace of the Doges in Venice, are hardly more remarkable than the prison under the eaves or so-called “leads” of the palace or the Prison of the Piombi. Here many noted prisoners have been confined and from the “leads” Casanova made his famous escape after six years’ imprisonment decreed by the Council of Ten.] these horrible habitations. One criminal who died there when Casanova was in the Piombi had spent thirty-seven years in one of the wells. He was forty-four years old when first imprisoned. This was a Frenchman named Beguelin, who had been a captain in the service of the Venetian republic and had been employed as a spy in the war against the Turks in 1716. During the siege of Corfu he had sold information to both sides, and when caught by the Venetians he was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment.