Tiepolo’s code bears the stamp of a sort of generous but not foolish simplicity, which really survived in the Republic until dreams of foreign conquest brought her into danger, and she awoke to find that dangerous enemies had wormed their way even into the ducal palace. It was then that she began to multiply magistracies and to frame innumerable laws that interfered with and neutralised each other; and so she lost in strength what her system gained in details. There was far more wisdom in the five books of Jacopo Tiepolo’s ‘Statuto’ than in the innumerable volumes of laws that were put together from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. It may be asked whether Tiepolo’s code sufficed because the people in his time were virtuous and law-abiding, or whether virtue and the love of law declined as the number of laws increased. The latter hypothesis can certainly be defended. [Illustration: THE HOUSE OF FALIERO, PONTE DEI S. S. APOSTOLI] VII THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY IN VENICE To the majority of people the fourteenth century in the history of Venice is memorable only for the great conspiracies which took place in that period, and which, even in the minds of cultivated Italians, seem to fill it completely, though only two, or at most three, are recorded, and the action of each in turn was of short duration. These three great conspiracies were those of Marino Faliero, of Tiepolo, who was at the head of a [Illustration: THE TIEPOLO PALACE] vast movement, and the third may be described as that of Marino Bocconio, whose history is not yet known in all its bearings. Bocconio, in lack of trustworthy details, has been crowned the martyr of the aristocracy; Tiepolo has been exalted as one who nobly and generously sacrificed the interests of his caste for the general good; as for Faliero, he is almost universally looked upon simply as the jealous husband of a young and beautiful wife. Thanks to the efforts of innumerable novelists and playwrights, these three figures represent to the average reader of history a synthetic picture of the whole century, and stand out gigantic, dark, and blood-stained against a gloomy background of barbarism, imploring pity or crying out for vengeance to all future ages.