Of all that splendid show and pageant nothing remained but the Doge’s visit to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, and his largess of small coins to the street boys at the moment of loosing the line with which the rector of the church pretended to bar the way to the bridge. [Illustration: THE ABBAZZIA] X THE DOGES IN THE EARLY PART OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY Pietro Gradenigo reigned twenty-two years, during a very eventful period. In 1298 he had placed the aristocratic supremacy on a permanent basis, and a few months later he crushed the sedition of Marin Bocconio; eight years afterwards he put down the much more dangerous insurrection of Tiepolo and the Quirini; but he was less fortunate abroad than at home, and his foreign policy resulted in the wholesale excommunication of the Venetian people and government, as the direct consequence of the attempt to annex Ferrara, a step which had also led to the organisation of the Tiepolo conspiracy. When Gradenigo died the papal interdict was still in full force. The forty-one patricians who were to elect his successor were duly chosen and shut up in the ducal palace, though not yet with any great precautions to prevent them from communicating with their friends. They understood well enough that the interests of the State required a Doge whose genuine piety should move the Pope to forgiveness; such a man was found in the senator Stefano Giustiniani, and in a short time the majority of votes was in his favour. He was not only a man of irreproachable life, but also a first-rate statesman, and he was personally well known and liked in Rome, where he had once resided as Venetian ambassador. The choice was a good one, but the patrician was too virtuous, or too wise, or both, to accept the supreme office at such a moment, foreseeing clearly that his conscience and reputation would be simultaneously at stake, and in such a way that to save the one would probably have been to imperil the other. He had long nourished the hope of retiring from the world, and when he knew that he was elected he lost no time in carrying out his pious design. Instead of going from his house to the ducal palace, he disappeared within the doors of the monastery of Saint George, and on the same day put on the habit and took the obligations of a novice. The stupefaction and embarrassment of the electors may be imagined; it was perhaps within the powers of the all-powerful government to drag Giustiniani from the refuge of his cell, and to place him by force upon [Illustration: CAMPO S. MARIA]