Orseolo was much preoccupied by the still smouldering hatred of the Candiano family, and he sought to satisfy their ambition by marrying his second son, Domenico, to Imelda, grand-daughter of Pietro Candiano IV. and Richelda. His third son, Ottone, when still very young, he married to Geiza, sister of Saint Stephen, King of Hungary; and his daughter Hicela was given to the King of Croatia. Strong in these alliances, still young in years, and richly endowed with the health and beauty that were hereditary in his family, Orseolo II. might well have looked forward to a long and happy career, and to the certainty of leaving the sovereignty to his descendants throughout centuries to come. Then, about the year 1009, a comet suddenly appeared in the sky, and famine and plague ravaged Venice and the world. Amongst the very first victims were Giovanni and his young wife, and Orseolo himself did not long survive them. The mortality was such, according to old Dandolo, that there was not time to dig graves for all who died, and such tombs as were not full were opened and crammed with dead. Ottone Orseolo succeeded his father, when the power of the name seemed at its height; but under him came the fall and exile of his family, and the end of the period during which the dogeship was more or less hereditary in the houses of Partecipazio, Candiano, and Orseolo. That period is a labyrinth of uncertainties and a maze of conflicting anachronisms. Scarcely two chroniclers place the same events in the same year, and they are rarely agreed as to matters even more important. Unmistakable history does not make its appearance in Venice till the eleventh century, and not till the descendants of Pietro Orseolo II., the greatest Doge who had yet reigned, were exiled from Venice, and excluded for ever, by a special law, from holding office under the Republic. They may have found some consolation in the fact that one of their house inherited the throne of Saint Stephen. A few years later, the Doge Domenico Flabianico, [Sidenote: _About 1032._] or Flobenigo, sustained by an assembly of the clergy and the people, introduced a law by which the chief of the Republic was forbidden to associate any one with himself in the power, and by which he was constrained to accept the ‘assistance’ of two counsellors. The nomination of these was the first step towards the creation of those many offices by which the Doge’s action was limited little by little, till he became the mere figure-head, if not the scapegoat, of the Republic he was supposed to govern. [Illustration: FISHING BOATS AT THE RIVA] [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL FROM THE CA D’ ORO] V VENICE AND THE FIRST CRUSADES