The policy of the Orseolo family in putting forward a saint to represent them had not been very successful, for after Pietro’s flight they found themselves deserted by the factions they had led against Pietro Candiano IV.; and in the election which followed the holy man’s sudden abdication, one more Candiano was chosen Doge in the person of Vitale, of that name. At the same time two powerful alliances were formed, the one between the Candiano and the Caloprini, of which the object seems to have been to set up some sort of despotic government under the protection of the Holy Roman Empire; the other between the Orseolo and the Morosini, who held to the old alliance with Byzantium and the East. Sismondi and others seriously derive the names of these two families from Greek words signifying, for Morosini, the ‘Friends of Fools,’ and for Caloprini, the ‘People who bow themselves skilfully’--in other words, perhaps, the dupes and their flatterers. Of the two it was the flatterers that came to grief, however, whereas the Morosini have continued to flourish even to our own time. I know not whether these derivations have any value. Victor Hugo, who did not know Greek, once suggested that the French word ‘ironie’ might be derived from the English word ‘iron.’ Many bloody encounters took place, in which the nobles of Venice took sides with one party or the other, as their personal interests suggested, and at last the Caloprini, who were hated by the people, were forced to leave Venice. Yet trusting to the support of the Empress Adelheid, or Adelaide, in an evil hour they ventured to come back a few years later; but the Morosini, who had grown stronger in the meantime, fell upon them and put them all cruelly to death, so that of that great house only three widowed women remained alive to mourn the dead. It was time that some strong hand should grasp the reins and drive the car of state through the slough of chaos and blood in which it was stuck fast, out upon the broad highway of fame. The hand was ready, and the time had come; in the year 991 Pietro Orseolo II. mounted the ducal throne. From the first he threw all his energy into a systematic campaign against the pirates of the Adriatic, whose fathers had carried off the Venetian brides. They had paid for their rashness with their lives, and their descendants had never again come so near the city, yet the affront was not forgotten, and an expedition which had their destruction for its object appealed to the men of Venice as few other incentives could.